The Hykanatoi

The Hykanatoi were the backbone of the Legio, the massed shield-companies from which the Emperor drew His everyday guardians and to which the greater number of the Ten Thousand belonged. Theirs was the unglamorous vigil: the endless watch over gateways, reliquaries and the sealed districts of the Palace that few in the Imperium ever knew existed. A Custodian of the Hykanatoi might stand a century's watch and never draw his spear in anger, and count that a duty well kept, for the Legio measured success not in slaughter but in threats that never came to pass.

Yet when the fighting came, the Hykanatoi were no garrison of ceremonial ornaments. Organised into shield-companies under trusted Shield-Captains, they fought as a loose brotherhood of individual masters, each trusting the others absolutely, their lines tightening and loosening with an intuition born of long ages side by side. During the Siege of Terra it was the Hykanatoi above all who held the inner ramparts, thinning by the hour and never yielding, their golden dead heaped upon thresholds they had sworn a lifetime before never to surrender.