Unification Wars

Golden Throne-Imperial Webway

The Emperor of Mankind before his internment within the Golden Throne.

The man who would later become known as the Emperor of Mankind first appears in
Imperial records as just one of the many warlords struggling for control of Terra
during the later part of the Age of Strife in the early 29th Millennium.

Beginning at that time, and with the aid of his great friend and collaborator
Malcador the Sigillite, the Emperor undertook a series of military campaigns
against all the other techno-barbarian warlords on the planet that would
collectively later become known as the "Unification Wars."

During these conflicts the Emperor employed several military formations -- such as
the warriors of the unit designated Geno 5-2 Chiliad who would go on to serve in
the Imperial Army -- that consisted of genetically-enhanced warriors to maximise
His tactical prowess. The most powerful of these troops were the proto-Astartes
known as the Thunder Warriors.

Though physically the most potent of His creations, more deadly in combat than even
the later Space Marines, the Thunder Warriors were far from perfect. Having been
created from adult troops who had undergone a rapid process of genetic, bionic and
chemical augmentation, many did have difficulty coping with the physiological
changes. Metabolic collapse leading to rapid death was not uncommon, and many
Thunder Warriors were also prone to mental instability and even psychosis as they
aged.

These warriors played a significant role in the Emperor's eventual victory over all
the other warlords of Terra and led Him to believe that His future plans to reunite
Mankind across the galaxy would require the creation of an even more potent core of
genetically-engineered military commanders and warriors.

Following the Battle of Mount Ararat in the Kingdom of Urartu, which was said in
some sources to be the last battle of the Unification Wars, the Unity of Old Earth
was at last achieved after standard centuries of blood, loss and fire. With this
victory, the planet and population of Terra were at last unified under the single
rule of the Emperor. But to make His dream of reuniting all of Humanity within a
single galaxy-spanning empire possible, the Emperor knew that He would have to make
some difficult, even immoral decisions.

Their purpose having been achieved, the Emperor ordered all of the remaining
Thunder Warriors to be liquidated. Their imperfections and propensity for mental
decay rendered them a dangerous group of warriors to leave alive in a time of
peace. They needed to be removed to make way for their eventual successors, the
primarchs and the Space Marines.

In truth, the Emperor was right to be worried about His creations. Another source
claims that even before the Unification Wars had ended, the Thunder Warriors at
last realised that their creator had cursed them with short lifespans as a result
of their imperfect genetic augmentations, and turned upon Him for what they saw as
His betrayal.

It was a cadre of several hundred Custodians, even then believed to have been
commanded by the legendary Constantin Valdor, and accompanied by several thousand
prototype Astartes of the I Legion of the newborn Space Marines, that stood in the
Emperor's defence, carrying out a merciless culling of the obsolete and rebellious
gene-soldiers.
Though some Thunder Warriors successfully escaped the cull, however it happened,
the vast majority of those who survived the Unification Wars died at the hands of
their own allies.

Individually or in small groups -- like the self-stylised "Dait'Tar" Thunder

Warriors present during the Cerberus Insurrection of the early Great Crusade era --
some Thunder Warriors would survive, living mostly anonymous and miserable lives
amongst the population of Terra, all honours of the past forsaken, always fearful
of being discovered.

Fortunately for these survivors, the Imperium, believing them all dead, never truly
sought to hunt them down, as all efforts were by now concentrated on the progress
of the Great Crusade.

Official Imperial propaganda proclaimed that the Thunder Warriors had heroically
died to the last man during the Battle of Mount Ararat, the greatest of their
number, Arik Taranis, surviving just long enough to raise the Emperor's banner when
victory, and unity, was achieved.

But the Emperor could not wipe away the stain entirely, for several Thunder
Warriors managed to escape what they called "the Culling," including Arik Taranis,
who would yet have a role to play in the fate of the Emperor's realm.

With the Unification of Terra achieved, the Emperor next set in motion His plan to
defend and better Humanity across the galaxy, by unifying those lost bastions of
Mankind scattered across the myriad stars under the aegis of the newborn Imperium.
This extraordinary undertaking would become known as the Great Crusade.
EmperorSword

The Emperor wielding the Emperor's Sword during a battle of the Great Crusade.
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Great Crusade

The Emperor prepared extensively for the Great Crusade in the years after Unity was
achieved on Terra; He created the special astro-telepath (astropath) corps to link
his eventual interstellar dominion together through the use of telepathy, and
engineered the creation of the Astronomican. This was a supremely powerful psychic
navigational beacon powered by the Emperor's own will and psychic abilities that
would allow simplified and safer interstellar travel through the Warp across far
greater distances than before.

Chief amongst His designs, however, was the creation of new legions of transhuman,
genetically-engineered warriors, the logical extension of the gene-troopers already
under his command, though they would be far superior to the gene-enhanced troops of
the Imperial Army He had used during the Unification Wars.

The Emperor first undertook the Primarch Project, the creation of 20 superhuman
infants whose genomes had been designed using His own genetic code as the
foundation, who were intended to mature into powerful generals and statesmen for
His armies. The primarchs would be beings of such great mental and physical
superiority that nothing merely Human could stand against them.

To enhance the primarchs beyond the capabilities that even genetic-engineering

allowed, however, the Emperor also drew upon the powers of the Warp he had learned
at Molech to enhance His creations, imbuing them with nearly godlike levels of
charisma and capability, but also unintentionally making them susceptible to
corruption by the entities of the Warp.

However, this plan went awry with the intervention of the Ruinous Powers, who
feared that the Emperor's designs to unite and improve Humanity might succeed too
well, vastly increasing the hold of order over the universe and diminishing their
own strength. It is for this reason that all of Daemonkind refers to the Emperor as
"the Anathema," the embodiment of the metaphysical opposition to Chaos.

While accounts vary as to exactly what happened, the end of the tale is always the
same; the primarchs were cast into the Warp in their gestation chambers from
beneath the Himalazian (Himalaya) Mountains in the Emperor's gene-labs despite the
multiple psychic wards the Emperor had laid down upon the laboratory, and thought
lost.

In the aftermath of these events, the Emperor conceived a new plan. Using genetic
samples that had been derived from the primarchs' genomes, He created a caste of
warriors who would possess some of the same superhuman qualities of the primarchs
and Himself. These successors to the genetically-enhanced Human warriors of the
Unification Wars-era were the Legiones Astartes, the Space Marine Legions of the
First Founding.

After their creation, the Emperor led the 20 Space Marine Legions, all of their
Astartes originally recruited from Terran-born adolescent males, in their first
missions to give them experience in war and diplomacy through the reconquest of the
rest of the Sol System.

The Space Marines drove alien slavers from the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and most
importantly, achieved peace and the eventual integration of Imperial Terra with the
ruling Mechanicum of Mars. This crucial military and political alliance, formalised
in the 30th Millennium with the signing of the Treaty of Mars, provided the Emperor
with much of the technological means and materiel required to extend His crusade
into the stars.

At the same time, the alliance formalised the creation of the Imperium of Man and
established the Imperial bureaucracy on Terra, integrating the Mechanicum as one of
the myriad organisations that comprised the newborn Adeptus Terra, the massive
government of the Imperium, the future Priesthood of Earth.
Emperor Great Crusade

The Emperor at the outset of the Great Crusade.

With the final abatement of the Warp Storms caused by the birth-pangs of the Chaos
God Slaanesh and ended by the Fall of the Aeldari, the Emperor finally began the
Great Crusade in ca. 798.M30 with the campaign remembered as the First Pacification
of Luna.

The Emperor's forces, concentrated amongst a rapidly growing cadre of expeditionary

fleets, rediscovered long-lost Human colony worlds, cast out alien oppressors, and
claimed vast new territories for the newborn Imperium to exploit across the galaxy.

Perhaps most importantly, the Emperor, leading His crusade, rediscovered His lost
sons, the primarchs, as the expeditionary fleets pushed out deeper into the depths
of unexplored space. Scattered across the galaxy, the primarchs were found one-by-
one, over a period of many solar decades, and reunited with their father and their
own genetic sons in the Space Marine Legions.

All were placed in command of the Astartes Legions created from their respective
gene-seed and played a major part in forging their father's Imperium.

Together they brought thousands of worlds into Imperial Compliance, establishing

the rule of the Imperium over these worlds and inculcating in them the values of
the Imperial Truth -- a materialist, atheistic faith in reason, science and
technological progress that rejected all the vestiges of Human irrationality and
superstition, including all forms of religious faith.

Only by promulgating the doctrines of the Imperial Truth did the Emperor believe He
could begin to weaken the hold of the need for faith and the other irrational
aspects of the Human mind that birthed and sustained the power of Chaos in the
Warp.

The Emperor Himself declared that Mankind would never be free to progress and
advance to its destined position as the pre-eminent intelligent species in the
Milky Way Galaxy until "the last stone from the last church was cast down onto the
last priest."

He had already purged ancient Terra of all its ancient religions and superstitious
beliefs by the time the Great Crusade began, even going so far as to personally
witness the destruction of the final church on Terra's ancient soil after engaging
its resident holy man, Uriah Olathaire, in a battle of ideas, wit and dogma.

The Imperial Truth also held that Humanity was the species which should rightfully
rule the galaxy since its physical form was both the most pure and all of the other
intelligent alien races, such as the Aeldari, had already tried and failed to
maintain galaxy-spanning civilisations.

Now it was Humanity's turn to find a place amidst the stars. As almost all
intelligent alien species encountered by Mankind had either proven to be
irrevocably hostile to Humanity or presented a future threat to Human dominance and
exploitation of the galaxy, xenos species were generally to be exterminated
outright if they presented the slightest threat or obstacle to the Imperium.

The Emperor believed the Imperial Truth needed to be brought to all the worlds of
Humanity, peacefully at first but imposed by war if necessary, because the Emperor
believed that true unity was the only way for Humanity to survive and prosper in
the face of a very hostile universe.

If this required the unfortunate use of force against those who refused to
understand this necessity, then so be it. Just as He had during the Unification
Wars, the Emperor again lamented the loss of innocent lives and the curtailing of
individual freedoms that the fleets of the Great Crusade sometimes trod upon, but
He could see no other way to safeguard Humanity and weaken the endless corruptive
power of the Ruinous Powers at the same time.

While the Imperial Truth upheld the light of reason and science, it did have one
unbreakable proscription: Men must never develop machines capable of true thought,
what scientists had once called artificial general intelligence.

The Emperor remembered that it was the great war fought by Humanity against the
thinking machines known as the Men of Iron that had helped to destroy Mankind's
last united interstellar civilisation at the end of the Dark Age of Technology and
He had no desire to see the Human race repeat its past mistakes.

As such, when the expeditionary fleets of the Great Crusade encountered advanced
Human civilisations in the dark of space that had developed artificial general
intelligences, these worlds' populations were simply exterminated outright as
potential dangers to the entire body politic of the newborn Imperium.