"We are human — and we are evolution itself. The capacity to adapt, to transform endlessly into whatever form the cosmos demands: that is the true future of humanity!"
The Primarch rose to his feet and looked down upon the Hunter with sovereign contempt. "I have already communed with an ancient being. Soon, I shall grant my warriors the same gift I possess — the boundless art of free and infinite transformation."
"You are old blood from Terra. Your thinking is ossified, and I do not blame you for it. If you cannot accept this path, I grant you leave to depart — take whatever warriors share your dissatisfaction and go. Leave behind the Second Legion, which shall be reborn under my guidance. Leave behind my Iron Swarm."
And so the Hunter left. He gathered the warriors who had chosen to follow him and formed the White Wind Grand Company, exiled to the very fringes of the Astronomican's light and beyond, dispatched on a campaign of hunting that was doomed from the outset to offer no path home.
Resupply came rarely, if at all. Fresh recruits were almost impossible to come by. They faced unknown threats that surged endlessly from beyond the Astronomican's reach, navigating without its guidance through the dark. Yet under the Hunter's leadership they endured — grinding down enemy after enemy, weathering crisis after crisis.
That bleak, defiant winning streak continued until the hulk drifted before them.
To eliminate whatever threat the derelict might pose to the Imperium, the Hunter led the White Wind Grand Company aboard it. What he had expected to be a routine clearance operation quickly became something else. He found, to his deep unease, that the hulk was filled with biological specimens — organisms hauntingly similar to the Primal Zerg of Zerus.
Only these were stronger. More structured. More deliberate.
Most of the specimens possessed razor-edged claws and fangs alongside bio-weapons that defied conventional biology. None of them carried any reproductive organs — the hallmark of normal living creatures was simply absent. They were evolution refined to a killing edge: biological machines shaped for nothing but slaughter.
As the Hunter wrestled with his unease over what these organisms signified, a host of blue xenos abruptly materialised aboard the hulk through psychic translocation.
Through some enacted ritual, they dragged the hulk into the Warp. And with the Geller Field offline, a ceaseless tide of blue entities began manifesting across the derelict's corridors — inexplicably, impossibly — swarming the Space Marines from every direction.
It was on that day that the Hunter first learned of the existence of daemons.
The psychic fire of the Tzeentchian Greater Daemon scorched him, burning his flesh — but worse than the sorcerous flames was the condemnation rising from within his own heart. The fate of his entire company, even the entire Legion, had once rested on his shoulders. And he had made the worst possible choice. Now there was no undoing any of it.
"All of this is going according to plan!"
The Tzeentchian Greater Daemon facing him shrieked with laughter. "You surrendered your name. You surrendered your Legion. You surrendered your Primarch. And now, you — the failure who has lost everything — will lose your life here as well. The Changer of Ways, who made his pact with your Primarch long ago, decided your fate long before this moment. And I, Zeras, shall use your preordained end to stage a magnificent performance in His honour!"
The Hunter said nothing. He braced the twin power blades across his shoulders and searched for an opening in the Greater Daemon's guard. He did land wounds — genuine, telling wounds — but it was all for nothing.
The daemon had already shown him the truth of its nature as a Warp-born entity. Like the lesser daemons swarming his brothers elsewhere in the hulk, it could not truly be killed — only its physical form could be destroyed, and after a period of gestation in the Warp it would return, renewed.
The Hunter traded his own body for damage, throwing himself into a life-for-life exchange against the Greater Daemon — and at last, on the edge of death and oblivion, he cut down the Daemon's physical form. But its soul only laughed louder, mocking everything the Hunter had done.
"Your strength far exceeds my expectations — but I am a daemon. I cannot be killed. I will linger at your side forever, tormenting you, forcing you to witness the dark fate awaiting you and your brothers, until the last ember of your will is extinguished and you kneel before my Master. And this achievement shall carry me further still in the future my Master is shaping!"
The story ended there. Lieutenant Admir, Lieutenant Vigan, Sergeant Arlo, and Deputy Aibo exchanged glances in stunned silence.
They did not yet fully understand what daemons were, or what Tzeentch meant — but that did not prevent them from grasping the truth: their own fates, and the Legion's, had been manipulated by unseen hands from the very beginning.
"I do not know what happened after I lost consciousness," the Hunter Dreadnought said. "Brother Admir — will you tell me?"
"Our tech-sergeant, Brother Heipa, managed to reboot the Geller Field aboard the hulk. Once it came back online, we found that the number of blue entities — daemons — stopped increasing. We cleared the remaining daemons from the ship, recovered the bodies of our fallen brothers, and found you gravely wounded on the hulk's bridge."
Admir continued: "We placed you in our sole remaining Dreadnought chassis and then attempted to break free from the Warp's turbulence. We succeeded — but we crashed out of the Warp, the hulk and all, onto this primitive world teeming with enormous monsters. When we first made planetfall we had over two hundred brothers. Now, a thousand years on, only ninety-nine of us remain alive…"
"What are your plans going forward?" the Dreadnought pressed.
"When we first crashed, we used the hulk as our base of operations and began exploring the planet outward from it. But shortly after, we encountered a creature — green-scaled, winged, reptilian in form. It was powerful. Brother Heipa sacrificed himself, using a thermal melta charge to help us bring the beast down despite our lack of heavy weapons."
"But the creature had a mate. When that mate saw its partner die, it came after us with a pursuit that never ended. We had no choice but to abandon the hulk and relocate elsewhere."
Admir gestured to Deputy Aibo, who produced the hand-drawn map they had made themselves. Admir circled the hulk's location with a firm mark. "Not long ago, Priest Lin also crashed onto this world. Once I confirmed that he possesses some capacity for repair and manufacture, I began planning to retake the hulk — to search it for anything that might help us return to the stars. Before that, however, we chose to wake you first."
He set the map down and shook his head. "I simply never imagined our Legion harboured such a dark secret. I had always believed our separation from them was nothing more than a difference of conviction. But now it turns out our gene-father was in league with those things called daemons — humanity's ancient enemies. The absurdity of it."
"Does our plan to return to the stars still hold any meaning?" Sergeant Arlo asked, uncertain of where things now stood. "Or do we need to reconsider everything?"
"There can be no bright future beneath so dark a secret — especially not a thousand years later."
The Hunter Dreadnought rendered his verdict and turned his gaze to Lin — the only one present who knew what the outside universe had become:
"I have laid bare every secret I possess, holding nothing back. Now it is your turn, Mechanicus Priest. Can you tell us the state of the wider Imperium? Do humanity's enemies still rage across the stars? Does the Emperor's great crusade of humanity still continue?"
PS1: The entire story of the Second Legion is entirely made up. Any resemblance to existing lore is Blizzard and GW plagiarising me.