Emperor's Children

No Legion fell so far because none had climbed so high. The III Legion, the Emperor's Children, held an honour no other could claim: the right to bear the Emperor's own aquila upon their breastplates, a mark of favour granted by the Master of Mankind himself. Nearly destroyed in their infancy by a genetic blight that reduced them to a mere handful of warriors, they were remade in the image of their recovered primarch, and they carried into the Great Crusade a hunger to be not merely good but perfect, flawless in war and in all things.

Fulgrim found his Legion upon Chemos, a dying world of eternal toil where survival demanded that every task be performed to its utmost, and he poured that ethic into his sons until perfection became their gospel. For a time the creed made them magnificent: an elite and balanced Legion equally skilled in every discipline of war, admired by their brothers and held up as the very ideal of what a Space Marine should be. Yet perfection is a road without end, and the Emperor's Children walked it until it led them somewhere terrible.

The Pursuit of Perfection

The Legion's obsession began as discipline and curdled, by slow degrees, into something darker. To be perfect in war was not enough; the Emperor's Children sought perfection in sensation, in art, in the very experience of existence, always straining toward a summit that receded with every step. This restless craving left them uniquely vulnerable, for a warrior who can never be satisfied will forever seek stronger sensations, and there are powers in the galaxy that offer exactly that in exchange for a soul.

The Serpent's Gift

Upon the world of the Laer, Fulgrim took up an ancient blade, and the daemon bound within it began a patient, honeyed campaign to unmake him. What the primarch believed to be his own ambition was in truth the whispering of Slaanesh, and one by one the Legion's virtues were inverted: discipline became indulgence, artistry became atrocity, and the pursuit of perfection became a plunge into excess without limit or shame. The Maraviglia, a grand performance staged to unveil the Legion's new devotions, tore the veil between rapture and horror and dragged the III Legion's soul across it.

The Betrayal of Isstvan

When Horus called, Fulgrim brought his Legion to the traitors' cause, and upon the black sands of Isstvan V the Emperor's Children revealed their corruption to the galaxy. There Fulgrim faced Ferrus Manus of the Iron Hands, a brother he had once called his closest friend, and struck him down amid the slaughter of the Drop Site Massacre. From that day the Legion abandoned all pretence of the ideal it had once embodied, giving itself wholly to sensation and cruelty, its warriors adorning themselves in the trophies of a perfection that had rotted into pure appetite. The most admired of Legions had become the most depraved, and there could be no returning from the road they had chosen.