Shards of Three Legions

The Gorgon is dead. The Iron Hands do not know how to grieve except through work and hatred of the III. Shadrak Meduson gathers mixed forces of the shards and for years strikes the traitors’ logistics — this is not the restoration of a Legion, it is guerrilla industry.

On the map look for small flares, not their native Medusa as a capital. A comparison with the IV is useful: both are “iron”, but the IV closed the ring, while the X remained inside.

Vulkan is a Perpetual: like the Emperor, he returns from death time after time. This is established in Nick Kyme’s “Vulkan Lives”, where Curze spends months testing the property in practice — cuts off the head, disembowels, throws him into the void — and breaks himself, unable to kill his brother.

The Salamanders at war are companies looking for their father. Nocturne will flare again (012.M31), but this is not “the Legion has returned to the Siege”. On the walls of Terra the XVIII is the presence of a symbol, not of a mass. The atlas keeps only key events and does not illustrate torture.

Corax leads out a handful, goes to Terra for help, gains access to the gene laboratories and produces monsters: Omegon’s sabotage poisons the project. “Deliverance Lost” is both the title of the novel and its verdict: what is lost is not a planet but the very possibility of restoring the Legion. Deliverance stands where it was; the design collapsed.

How many exactly came out of the pit is disputed. For the drop site Lexicanum gives three thousand surviving XIX out of about eighty thousand, the audio drama “Raven’s Flight” (per Fandom) “less than three thousand”, a calculation from Journal Tactica (by the loss percentages of the first wave) 4,724; “Deliverance Lost”, with the companies of Branne, the garrison of Deliverance, brings the count to almost four thousand. The figure “two thousand” is not confirmed by either of these sources. After this the XIX does not recover to the scale of the Great Crusade, and the primarch withdraws into the shadows.

After the drop site the X, XVIII and XIX have only rare flares. Do not expect density: the shards fight where no one looks for them.

If you need one exercise: compare the dossiers of Corax and Sigismund — both are “first among”, one builds a wall, the other cannot assemble a company without a nightmare in the genes. Books: “Deliverance Lost”, “Vulkan Lives”, “The Seventh Serpent”. Spoilers: high.