Astra Militarum - Millennia of Service: Individual regiments and their worlds of origin -- should they ever hear of their soldiers' deeds at all-- glorify the noble victories of their warriors. Famous last stands, tales of slefless sacirfice and epic crusades across the stars are embrodiered and aggrandised, held up as the ideal that the common soldier should aspire to, in histories sometimes dating back standard millennia.Dust-covered tapestries in the deepest of the Departmento Munitorum's archives hit at the Astra Militarum's founding. During the brutal reorganisation that swept the Imperium in the aftermath of the Horus Heresy, what had been the Imperial Army had ceased to exist. By a great treatise -- the Tactica Imperium -- the link between Humanity's fleets of the Armada Imperialis and its armies was severed as was the power the transhuman Legiones Astartes had held over their immense, allied mortal armies. No longer, it was hoped, would individuals be able to muster the combined forces required to strike at entire sectors without permission from Terra.Though huge portions of the Imperial Army turned Traitor during the Horus Heresy, faded frescoes proclaim that countless more stayed loyal to the Emperor, and a handful of regiments continue to claim descent from those ancient formations. Though no connection can ever be proved to such distant times, many guardsmen of the Era Indomitus feel an intense amount of pride that, like their forebears of ages past, they fight in the name of the Emperor.Fragmentary legends and disassociated names from that time echo through the Imperial Guard's myths to the present. Stories of selfless Ollanius Pius, the almost certainly fictitious Brezhvet Companions and the final sally of Dharro Alpha Brigade have been repeated and altered the galaxy over.In the centuries after the Horus Heresy, with the spread of belief in the Imperial Creed, priests of the growing Adeptus Ministorum, the Imperium's state church, accompanied Imperial armies. These zealots found eager new adherents amongst the regiments of the Astra Militarum and used the Imperium's growing religion to unify armies raised from clashing cultures. So too did tech-adepts of the Machine God reaffirm their loyalty to the Omnissiah by maintaining their Enginseer agents amongst Humanity's armies. They aided the Imperial Guard's conquests by soothing the weapons of war required to crush Heretics and xenos.The triumphs and tragedies of a single segmentum's armies during the Age of the Imperium would occupy several hundred lifetimes of an army of scribes and historitors to collate. To present a cogent history of the Astra Militarum's exploits, then, is impossible. Yet there are noteworthy conflicts in which its massed rans played a pivotal role. After the Horus Heresy, Astra Militarum armies waged retributive campaigns as part of the Great Scouring against the fleeing Heretics that had assailed Terra, driving many into the depths of the Eye of Terror. The Cadian System, and its Fortress World of Cadia, became a bastion against heretical and Warp-spawned invasions of Imperial space out of the Eye.The growing power of the Ecclesiarchy came to a head during the infamous Reign of Blood, which marked the Age of Apostasy of the 36th Millennium. Master of the Administratum Goge Vandire, the civil bureaucracy of the Imperium and the Departmento Munitorum already under his control, seized yet greater power by becoming the ecclesiarch simultaneously. At his command, Astra Militarum regiments enforced his increasingly unstable tyranny on countless worlds. Loyalist regiments rallying to the banner of the itinerant preacher Sebastian Thor joined with other Imperial forces such as the Adeptus Astartes, Adeptus Custodes and the Sisters of Battle that eventually ensured the despot's defeat and the reform of the Imperial church.The Black Crusades of Abaddon the Despoiler and growing numbers of xenos wore at the Imperium in the ten standard millennia that followed the Horus Heresy, though hope flared all-too-briefly even in the darkest of solar decades. In the 41st Millennium, Lord Commander Solar Macharius led an epic Imperial Crusade, the aptly-named Macharian Crusade, into the Segmentum Pacificus, conquered a thousand new worlds for the Imperium, but war zones beyond count called for ever greater tithes of soldiers.The twin Ork invasions of the Hive World of Armageddon eclipsed rumours of an First War for Armageddon|even earlier war]] fought there. The Damocles Gulf Crusade against the burgeoning T'au Empire and the defence of Ultramar during the First Tyrannic War consumed dozens if not hundreds of regiments, while the forces that worshipped the Dark Gods only multiplied. Some pointed to these events as omens, yet none amongst the wise claim to have foreseen the opening of the Great Rift in the wake of the Fall of Cadia.