White Scars - Terra's Forgotten Sons: As with much of the old lore regarding the Vth Legion, their earliest days and first campaigns are overlooked by many, obscured by time, blood and the reticence of the Legion itself. Yet in these beginnings can be seen the shadow of the Legion's future. Even from their inception, the Vth Legion were held apart from their brothers, rarely found in massed ranks among the assembled hosts of the Unification Wars, yet they were one of the first Legions to draw blood in the name of the Emperor.Taken first from the technomadic tribes of the Thulean Basin, whose hardy stock had traversed those icy wastes in vast mechanised crawlers throughout the long years of the Age of Strife, and later from the wider stock of Terran recruits drawn from all racial and geographic origins, these would account for the minority of members by the time of the Ullanor Crusade on the cusp of the 31st Millennium.The warriors of the Vth Legion were the Unification's eyes and ears. While some of the earliest Legions, such as the XVIth Legion, were committed to the frontlines of the initial conquest alongside the Emperor's Thunder Warriors, the Vth Legion was granted the solitary duty of seeking out the hidden fastnesses of the many gene-wrought demagogues and warlords that ruled the war-ravaged face of Old Earth.In those earliest days, the Legion numbered only a few hundred warriors, and often operated in small cadres of less than a dozen. The operations to which they were assigned put the posthuman physique of the Emperor's Space Marines to test in a way quite unlike the battlefield hell that awaited their fellows.Ever on the move, and far beyond the borders of the Emperor's ever-growing dominion, the Vth Legion endured the worst of the destruction wrought on Old Earth during the ravages of the Age of Strife, braving a landscape so twisted and broken by rad-phage, war and psy-plagues that mere humans could not have survived its touch.Roving far and wide, it was these warriors of the Vth Legion who charted the course of the Emperor's rise, surviving where few others could have, running ahead of the massed armies of Unification and seeking out the enemies in its path.Where they encountered mighty warlords and decadent empires that had stood against Old Night, they prowled the borders seeking the opportunity to strike, and where they encountered weakness, they left behind only corpses. By the time the main Legions of proto-Astartes and Thunder Warriors arrived, their foes were weakened and distracted by the work of the Vth Legion, made easy prey for the armies of Unification.It was a task to which its early recruits were well-suited. The clansmen of the Thulean Basin had survived in the frozen salt-wastes of the north for centuries, fiercely independent and stoic but with a deep well of inventive cunning. Passing through the terror of Old Night by cutting themselves off amid the sub-zero wastelands of Thule in the far north, they well-understood the cruel dictates of survival. These were far more than superb killers, as their heritage as machine-smiths and expert survivors was carried across to the earliest Legion cadres.Once bent to the Emperor's will, they proved fine stock for His pathfinders, though many noted their wilful nature, their commanders prone to ignoring any orders save those of the Emperor or another commander who had earned their respect. This is likely another example of the Emperor's grand plan in action, some element of His foresight identifying some need for that very trait, despite the protest it raised among certain of His generals and advisers.Despite the ire caused by their insular nature, few could doubt the ability of these warriors, who soon gathered a measure of acceptance within the grand armies of Unification for their fortitude and shrewd intelligence.Yet it was a task without glory. They operated for Terran years at a time far from the centre of the conflict. Once the Vth had finished their bloody work in drawing out the enemies of the Emperor, charting their strongholds and leaving them weak, the other Legions marched forth to bring them to battle and defeat while the Vth moved on.Few battle honours from the wars of Unification record the sacrifice of the Vth Legion, and few now living know of the "Star Hunters," as the first of these companies was known, and the daring raid they launched on the Albian fortress of Dubris, paving the way for the initial invasions of that land, or the 83-day battle in the black catacombs of Kadiru, a key fortress in the Yndonesic domain of Ursh.Such hidden heroics were forgotten in the face of the public conquests carried out by the other Legions. Few within the Vth Legion showed any sense of outrage at this subtle slight, even taking a quiet pride in the silent role they played, but it served to isolate them among the ranks of the Legiones Astartes. They became, by circumstance and by choice, outsiders among the Emperor's elite, more at home in the wilds, where they followed no dictate but their own than at the heart of battle, subject to the whims of generals for whom they felt little kinship.As the Emperor consolidated His hold on Terra and the surrounding worlds, the Vth Legion was among the first of His hosts to depart the Sol System, shattered into a hundred companies, each a tiny Legion of its own. These Pioneer Companies were each dispatched to follow those Warp currents that flowed strongly in the aether about Sol, seeking out the lost worlds of Mankind and charting the strongholds of alien empires.It was the Pioneer Company of Captain Kornelius Dure, following one of the few Warp currents known to the infrequent travellers that ventured out from Terra, that surveyed the Mining World of Cthonia, with his now infamous report that the world was "...a nest of serpents coiling in the dark that we would be better to destroy."Horus was known to have later remarked upon this report on his homeworld with some humour, and indeed favoured Captain Dure and his company, often requesting their assignment as pathfinders for his fleet. Indeed, as with a number of other orphaned Legions, Horus, alone among the great generals of that age, made a particular point of recognising the Pioneer Companies of the Vth Legion and in return the Terran veterans of the Vth Legion treated Horus with a respect that they granted few others.For over half a Terran century, the Vth Legion fought a lonely piecemeal crusade, each of its companies separated by such a distance that each fleet slowly began to lose any sense of unity with its brethren. Once again, their heroics beyond the borders of the Emperor's ever-expanding domain garnered little praise or attention amongst the lords of the Imperium.Here, in these largely forgotten years, was the basis of the White Scars' mastery of hit and run warfare established by the necessity of their mission. They were rarely more than one thousand against the dark empires beyond the edge of the maps, the brave few standing against the terrors of the outer dark far from aid and succour.They struck without warning, raiding and killing, drawing out the foe and testing its defences and tactics, always watching and learning -- broadcasting the knowledge won with the blood of their brothers so that the Expeditionary Fleets could bring the Emperor's wrath down upon the enemies of Mankind.In those early days, the Legion lived by one credo: each new day is a victory. Survival against impossible odds was the challenge they faced, one they defeated with a cold pragmatism and willingness to sacrifice everything in the name of victory. Each battle cost them a little more, one more brother dead or one more war machine damaged beyond repair, and as they fought further into the outer reaches of the galaxy, they found fewer and fewer chances to recoup theirlosses.Slowly and surely the Vth Legion was being eroded by the pressures of war and their own stubborn dedication to prosecuting it in their own way. To the warriors of the Vth, who had always been forced to struggle in the shadow of their brother Legions, the idea of asking for aid tasted worse than the ashes of their own demise.To live and die in a manner of their own choosing seemed the better choice. Were it not for the sudden discovery of the lost Primarch of the Vth Legion, an event unlooked for after fifty Terran years of searching, the Legion might have fought on to extinction. Instead, they were transformed.