The wearing of pelts of such augmented canid predators increasingly marked out the field commanders and officers of the Luna Wolves. The XVI th would not be the only Space Marine Legion to bear such a title and embrace this imagery as their own, but they were the first.

The walls between the physical world and the Immaterium were unusually thin in that region of Sixty-Three-Nineteen where the remaining hold-outs to the Imperial conquest were holed up, though the Imperial forces during the Great Crusade had been kept deliberately unaware of the existence of Chaos or the terrible daemonic dangers of the Immaterium by the Emperor and his Primarchs. The voice only identified itself as "Samus" and warned against the oncoming invasion by the Luna Wolves. Death's Child (Capital vessel, Unknown Class) - The Death's Child was an old and proud vessel, built in the famous ship-forges of Mars at the very beginning of the Great Crusade. This vessel's name was given to her by the Emperor himself. The Death's Child was also lost during the hunt for the Ignarak. Garviel Loken was originally the Captain of the Luna Wolves (later Sons of Horus) Space Marine Legion's 10 th Company during the last days of the Great Crusade and up until the Istvaan III Atrocity that initiated the Horus Heresy. As if to mark a break from the wars of the past, the armour that the first warriors of the Space Marine Legions went to war in was cast in storm cloud grey, and bore only the thunderbolt and lightning marks of Imperial Unity. Over time the different Legions gained their own marks of distinction and character, as well as iconic names. Later, Loken was discovered as a half-crazed berserker Astartes who now called himself "Cerberus." Surviving his ordeal on Istvaan III, he was recruited from the undead-haunted ruins of the Choral City by his fellow Loyalist Space Marine Captain Nathaniel Garro, formerly of the Death Guard Legion, and the Agentia Primus of Malcador the Sigillite's Knights-Errant, to serve as one of the Knights-Errant.He took up the Emperor's old offer and renamed the XVI th Legion the Sons of Horus after being convinced to do so by his brother Primarch Sanguinius of the Blood Angels Legion just before his experiences on Davin. Horus was now allied body and soul to the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, and he had a new vision for the Imperium with himself rather than the Emperor at its head. Many of these titles betrayed the culture of Cthonian gang honours and the tradition of reputation and internecine warfare from which they had sprung. This culture had grown steadily stronger over the years within the rank and file of the XVI th Legion's intake of Neophytes. Horus personally faced off with the Nurglite mutant that had been Temba aboard the grounded ruins of his Imperial Cruiser. In the course of that battle, the potent living metal of the Chaos blade wielded by that plague-infused monstrosity left Horus with a bleeding, toxic wound in his shoulder that his Legion's Apothecaries could not heal despite all the advanced technology available to them. Despoiler Squads - The Tactical Squads known as Despoiler Squads were designed to be held in reserve and unleashed once a weakness in an enemy line had been identified. Trained in fire saturation techniques and carrying additional close combat weaponry for use in overrunning enemy positions, the so-called Despoiler Squads showed the dominance of the Tactical Squad in Horus' tactical thinking. Such was the effectiveness of this tactic that its use was copied in several different Legions.

As the Imperial Warmaster, Horus took over command of the Great Crusade, and accepted his new duties with earnest dedication. However, there was much dissension in the ranks of the primarchs and other parties in the Imperium over the Emperor's decision to withdraw from the campaign and return to Terra as well as to reorganise the political administration of the Imperium under the control of a Council of Terra headed by His regent, Malcador the Sigillite. Only a handful of the primarchs, amongst them a scheming Lorgar, remained steadfast beside the Warmaster during this period of conflict. Garviel Loken - Loken was the Captain of the 10 th Company and was made a member of the Mournival after the death of Hastur Sejanus. Loken possessed one of the most analytical and perceptive minds amongst the Astartes of the XVI th Legion. Loken remained firmly loyal to the Emperor and his vision of a new Golden Age for Mankind and was one of the first amongst the Sons of Horus to realize that the Warmaster had changed after his miraculous healing in the Temple of the Serpent Lodge on Davin and that he was subsequently leading the XVI th Legion down a dark and dangerous path. Loken, along with his friends Captain Tarik Torgaddon and Sergeant Nero Vipus, were selected by Horus to lead the Sons of Horus' participation in the campaign on the world of Isstvan III, which had recently rebelled against the Emperor and declared itself an independent principality. However, shortly after the liberation of the planet's capital, Choral City, from the Slaaneshi rebels, Horus betrayed the Loyalist Astartes he had deliberately sent to the planet below, and bombarded its surface from orbit with Life-Eater virus bombs. However, because of the heroic actions of Captain Saul Tarvitz of the Emperor's Children, many of the Loyalists manage to survive the initial bombardment. Captains Loken, Torgaddon, and Tarvitz take command of the Loyalist elements that remained and fought a three-month-long holding campaign against the Traitors that delayed their plans to move on Terra. Finally, when Horus had had enough, he sent Loken and Torgaddon's traitorous former Mournival brothers, Ezekyle Abaddon and Horus Aximand, to the planet's surface to kill Loken and Torgaddon while he prepared to wipe out the remaining Loyalists with an orbital bombardment. In the ensuing fight, Torgaddon was beheaded by Aximand, but before Loken could be similarly slain by Abaddon, the ruins they had been fighting in were crushed by the Imperator-class Titan Dies Irae. Loken somehow managed to survive the collapse of the ruins upon him but was left badly wounded in both body and spirit, having been driven partially insane by his Legion's betrayal. He was presumed killed by the XVI th Legion following the final bombardment of the Choral City, but survived and took to wandering the ruins of the Choral City, slaying the groups of wandering Plague Zombies who were raised from the corpses scattered across the dead world by the taint of Nurgle whose influence had grown on the world as a result of the use of the Life-Eater virus to kill its population. Several standard years later, Loken was found alive and partially insane in the ruins of the Choral City on Isstvan III by the former Death Guard Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro, who has been sent to find Loken so that he can become one of the first Astartes to join the Knights-Errant, the special agents of Malcador the Sigillite during the Horus Heresy. Garro engaged Loken in a duel and managed to restore his sanity by reminding him of who he was and that he possessed a duty to fight the Emperor's enemies for so long as he still drew breath. The XVI th Legion's homeworld, the ancient Mining World of Cthonia, no longer exists, having apparently lost geo-structural integrity and broken apart into asteroids and debris during the centuries following the Horus Heresy. Certainly the once ore-rich planet was riddled with mine workings right through to its dead core as the numerous gangers that formed the majority of the world's population may originally have been imported as work teams to maintain the crumbling tunnels. Horus at first refused, fearing that to so set himself above his primarch brothers would lead to factional strife. Eventually he did institute this change, at his bother Sanguinius' urging, just prior to the events culminating in his conversion to the service of the Dark Gods of Chaos on the world of Davin. The XVI th Legion's Great Crusade fleet was accorded to be among the greatest under any single commander's flag, with in excess of one hundred capital ships and perhaps three times that figure in smaller Cruisers and Escorts under Horus' direct command.In eschewing formality and fixed structure above the basic level of the company, Horus demonstrated his pragmatism and his preference for waging war with careful precision. Within the Luna Wolves and the later Sons of Horus, squads also commonly had their own honorific or epithetic titles rather than simple numerations: the Illuminators Prime, Death Makers, Jerrok's Reavers, the First Sons, and similar appellations, while some were named for the Sergeant or Chieftain that led them if their leader's own reputation was strong enough alone. Sixty solar years earlier, when the Luna Wolves had brought about the successful Imperial Compliance of Davin, they had entrusted a detachment of the Word Bearers, under the command of its First Captain Kor Phaeron, to shepherd the people of Davin into the light of the Imperial Truth. At the suggestion of First Chaplain Erebus, the XVI th Legion had adopted the native Davinite institution of " Warrior Lodges." Though these lodges had begun as simple fraternities of warriors, their secretive nature handed Lorgar and Erebus the tool they needed to manipulate Horus. Lorgar and his Word Bearers originally came from Colchis, a world defined by religious fanaticism. They had long worshiped the Emperor as a god. The Word Bearers had sought to spread their Cult of the Emperor to every world they added to the Imperium. But the Emperor deeply disliked and mistrusted organised human religion, blaming it for much of the darkness that had plagued humanity's history. The XVI th Legion's badge was a wolf's head imposed over an inverted crescent moon when they were known as the Luna Wolves. The Legion badge changed to become a stylised eye over a cross -- the so-called Eye of Terra, which would later be known as the infamous "Eye of Horus" in the Imperium after the XVI th Legion was renamed the Sons of Horus by the corrupted Warmaster. Serghar Targost - Captain of the 7 th Company and the Lodge Master of the Sons of Horus' warrior lodge, the heart of the Legion's growing allegiance to the Chaos Gods.

Kloros Endall - Lieutenant Endall was a Terran-born veteran of the XVI th Legion. He was a part of the first wave of Loyalists during the assault on Isstvan III's Choral City, and was presumably slain during the subsequent betrayal.

As a member of the Mournival, Loken was to be the Warmaster's "naysmith", offering a counter-argument to those plans of Horus he found fault with and was intended to provide an advisor for Horus who possessed a calm and imperturbable nature. During this time Loken enjoyed a privileged position within the Warmaster's inner circle. Hastur Sejanus (Deceased) - Sejanus had been the Captain of the 4 th Company and a member of the Mournival during the Great Crusade. Sejanus was sent as an ambassador of the Luna Wolves to greet the leader of the world of 63-19 who styled himself the "Emperor of Mankind" and whose planet had not yet been brought into Imperial Compliance, and was brutally murdered. Horus had loved Sejanus like a son and felt towards him the way he believed that his own father, the Emperor, loved him. Garviel Loken replaced Sejanus on the Mournival following the Imperial Compliance of the world designated 63-19, and which would become known as Heletine. Tarik Torgaddon (Deceased) - Tarik Torgaddon was the captain of the 2 nd Company and a member of the Mournival who remained loyal to the Emperor when the Sons of Horus turned to Chaos. Torgaddon was killed during the Battle of Isstvan III when he was beheaded by his fellow Mournival member Horus Aximand. His headless body was often used as an imaginary interlocutor in the mad ravings of Garviel Loken, the only survivor of the battle on Isstvan III who would later be recovered by the former Death Guard Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro to serve in the secret organisation known as the Knights-Errant. Dawnstar (Strike Cruiser, Unknown Class) - Part of a triumvirate of vessels commissioned by Roboute Guilliman to the shipwrights of Armatura as a gift for his brother Horus, the Dawnstar and her sister-ships, the Spear Strike and the Wolf of Cthonia, were sleek and swift hunters. They were charged to hunt down the Iron Hands survivor-group known as the Ignarak. The Dawnstar would later be destroyed by the Oathbound, an Imperial Fists vessel, which fired her torpedoes and breached the Dawnstar's plasma reactors. The Dark Gods portrayed themselves as victims of the Emperor's psychic might, and claimed falsely that they had no real interest in the happenings of the material world. Magnus the Red, the sorcerous primarch of the Thousand Sons Legion, had also travelled into the Warp via sorcery to try and stop Horus from turning to Chaos. Magnus explained that the Warmaster's vision was only one among many possible futures, but one that Horus alone could prevent.

Now falling firmly into the grip of Chaos, Horus chose the world of Istvaan III to dispose of those members of the four openly declared Traitor Legions -- the Sons of Horus, the Emperor's Children, the World Eaters and the Death Guard -- that he could not trust to follow him or serve the Chaos Gods in his new quest to dethrone the Emperor and rule the galaxy himself. Captain Loken's courage and strength made him an officer on the rise in the Luna Wolves from the start. Loken's close friend Captain Tarik Torgaddon mentored Loken in several aspects of his martial life and eventually was responsible for his induction into the Mournival, the group of informal advisers from the Luna Wolves Legion who served Horus as his closest companions. The changing icon of the Luna Wolves and Sons of Horus Legions, from the Great Crusade to the 41st Millennium.

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When the Warmaster was mortally wounded in battle there by the Nurglite former Planetary Governor of Davin, Eugen Temba, who used a Chaos-infused relic blade known as the Kinebrach Anathame to poison Horus with a Nurgle-spawned toxin that not even his superhuman immune system could defeat, it was Loken who vocally and absolutely opposed the idea of taking Horus to a Chaos temple known as the Temple of the Serpent Lodge on the world of Davin to be healed by shamans who were essentially Chaos Sorcerers. The origins of the Mournival are uncertain as the tradition either began soon after Horus was installed as the leader of the Luna Wolves Legion when the Great Crusade reached his homeworld of Cthonia or was an outgrowth of the informal warrior lodges that began within the Legion after their conquest of the world of Davin only 60 years before the start of the Horus Heresy. The Luna Wolves were the first Space Marine Legion to begin recruiting from another world beyond Terra. In this case, the new pool of Aspirants was found amongst the adolescent human males drawn from the violent hive city gangs inhabiting an ancient former Mining World that had devolved into a Feral World called Cthonia. Cthonia was located in one of Terra's closest neighbouring star systems in the Segmentum Solar and was within reach of spacecraft that could travel at only sublight velocities before the invention of the Warp-Drive. One avatar of the increasing influence of the Legion's Cthonian brothers was the late reemergence of Cthonian gang-sigils graven into a given Space Marine's armour that recorded his notable kills and deeds, as well as to which company of the Legion they belonged. This was a practice which accelerated rapidly after the XVI th Legion had transitioned into its new identity as the Sons of Horus following the elevation of Horus to the rank of Warmaster. Like most of the embryonic Space Marine Legions, the XVI th Legion drew all of its first recruits from the Terran population. Though it is difficult to be certain based on the existing Imperial records from this lost time, there are indications that many of the XVI th Legion's early intake came from the hunter clans of the Jutigran Bowl and the Samsatian sub-plate slums. Perpetual conflict and the harshness of life on the desolate margins of Terran society had given these people the hard edge of ruthlessness and independence that would serve a Space Marine well.