The story of Marshal Agrarius is a tragic one, even by the morose standards of the Adeptus Astartes, fraught with shame, personal loss, humiliation, and worst of all, outright defeat. He who had once been construed by his peers within the Order of Marshals as a rising star, as the light that would lead on in the inevitable death of High Marshal Kordhel, was in a single moment cast down from atop his pedestal and dashed against the floor of those that had once called him “brother.” He was cast out for his folly, and in departing from the company of his betters, would learn a hard lesson that few others amongst his kind would ever experience.

Agrarius was born Cato, Son of Jolyn, Clan Jolynius, on the small feral world of Agaros, ca. 700.M40. As a youth in a warrior-clan, Cato was trained in the ways of war, and upon discovering his inborn talent for violence, rose quickly through the ranks to command at his father’s side before his 20th sidereal year. As a feral death-world, Agraros’ chief export was warriors for the Emperor’s Armies; so long as each of the myriad fiefdoms and clan-lands contributed a tithe of their best warriors each year to the Northmen, as they called the Imperial Guard garrisoned there, they would keep their iron horses and great metal dragons within their realm, allowing the feral-worlders to carry on with their existence. In Clan Jolynius, joining the Northmen’s sky armies was the ultimate honor; in doing so, a man might see the face of their god in the firmament above, the land from whence the Northmen had come.

In the year Cato would first have been allowed to complete the Trial of the Tithe, an orkish calamity arrived on Agraros. Shattered remnants of a Waaagh!, the few Roks and Killkroozers from which the greenskins made planetfall would have proven little of a challenge to anything but a backwater world such as this. Fleeing the vengeful wrath of a joint Astartes-Imperial Navy fleet, the vessels had translated in-system in hopes of finding a small trade hub to pillage and loot before making off with any needed supplies. Instead, the bloodlust of the Ork overwhelmed their better judgement in the face of a defenseless Imperial world, and war was brought to the surface almost immediately. Though technologically outmatched and horrifically outnumbered, the greenskin hordes of this ragtag soon discovered what the Imperium meant when they classified a planet as a “death world.”

The fighting was swift and bloody. Imperial Guard forces were the initial target of an overwhelming assault; the vast majority of their garrisons were either overrun or bombarded into a smoking crater in the first day. From there, the orkish massing of ground troops, scraptanks, and their hideous mechanized effigies to their gods, spilled south into the middle lands. Cato’s father passed into the Hynterlife in the first battles, leaving his youth of a son at the head of a shattered host and surrounded by what he and his warriors viewed as damned men, grotesque and so twisted from the corruption of the otherworld that their bones were contorted and their flesh was green. Cato quickly learned to exemplify a wisdom and battlefield acumen of one beyond his years, fighting a continually losing battle against the Ork while rallying his neighbors to a common cause. United in the face of a tremendous external threat, Cato was able to do in one year what no clansmen or lord had done before him in the fifty centuries his people had lived on Agraros. But it was still not enough.

Another two years passed while the feudal warriors of Agraros continued to meet the Ork on the field; another two years of incalculable slaughter, while their unknown saviors in the Astartes-Imperial fleet battled the warp-storms that surrounded the subsector. A journey that should have taken mere days had become a desperate struggle to escape the Empyrean as ship after ship was claimed or forced to turn back. All the while, Cato’s legions continued their fighting retreat into the southern mountains as the noose around their neck tightened. From the obsidian peaks, atop the turrets and walls of the Black Fortress, a redoubt of such ancient and seemingly alien construction that no man alive on Agraros knew of its origins, Cato made his final stand, and for another year, the few thousand remaining humans alive on the entire world eked out a wintery existence, surviving on the melted snows and the few animals that stalked the lands. As spring broke, so did the sky, and with it, the hopes of every man and woman still alive.

The battle was calamitous; a thousand-thousand Orks smashing into the great walls of the Fortress, breaking like waves against a rocky shore. To the rear of the horde, the wall defenders could see great black tears falling from the sky; tears of a furious and wrathful god so fearsome that the heavens shook and boomed as great streaks of fire trailed behind his metal tears. Each exploded into the earth below, and from within, great knights of black emerged screaming their god’s rage and hatred, spitting fire and death as they painted themselves in the blood of the fallen. The arrival of these angels of death seemed only to spur the damned men to further madness, their green bulks crashing again and again into the Black Fortress’ gate. Some men cowered in terror while others fell upon their blades, as women smothered children and all despaired their deaths as part of the Endtyme, as it was written. Verily, as the angels of darkness and death prepared to complete their slaughter, so too did the damned men of green and gore finally breach the Black Fortress walls.

When the carnage was done, the black angels stalked about in silence, replete in chains, back-braziers, incense, and terrifying weapons of war. Of the feral worlders, those few that had survived the initial siege had been wheat before the chaff, the halls and chambers within a charnel-house and grave. A mere handful yet lived, including a young man, whose eyes were fever-bright with rage and whose mutilated hands still clutched uselessly at the ruined greatsword before him. One of the angels found him, a giant of metal as black as pitch, who stank of blood and death; and as he crouched down and peered into young Cato’s eyes, he saw the righteous embodiment of his brotherhood. Here, an Angel of Death, a man so transformed by forgotten science, wielding transhuman weapons of such terrible and destructive power, with eyes the color of blood from behind a death mask of his calling, a creature trained to kill without effort and instill a fear so insidious and righteous that no blade could match such sundry, boring now into the soul of a small, damaged being. Yet despite this, the ruined man before him was unafraid. His rage was pure; his hate, unsullied. Here, Voldorion thought, was a mortal with which he would gladly go to war.

Cato departed with a handful of others fortunate enough to be accepted into the Black Templars’ service. In a solemn gesture to the world they left behind, a world that had been so thoroughly destroyed that no effort would be made to repopulate it, the survivors cast aside their “ser” names, and purged the now deleterious memories of loved ones lost. In the final years of their world, they had all bled for clan Agrarius.

Cato Agrarius’ subsequent rise through the ranks of Crusade 743 was predictably swift. After the challenges the few-score Aspirants had faced during the death of their home world, the greatest hurdle proved only to be the surgeries. Cato, like many of the others, was older than the typical Aspirant, still in the prime of his human years, yet old enough that the chemical augmentations and implants only took for him and a half-dozen others. Undaunted, Neophyte Agrarius became Knight-Initiate Agrarius after only a few short decades, and Knight Agrarius ended his first century of service as a Brother of the Sword, in direct service to his Castellan. It was in this capacity that Agrarius gained the honor of serving alongside Chaplain Voldorion.

Another half-century and the Fighting Company Agrarius had served in was his to command. So rapid was his ascent, that by the end of his two-hundredth sidereal year, Agrarius had attained the rank of Marshal, and reigned supreme over the forces of Crusade 743, over Crusade Agrarius. It was to be the apex of his service, his glory.

For the next four decades, Agarius’ successes on campaign became the stuff of legend. Reclusiarch Voldorion, having himself risen to down the mantle of the Senior Custodian of the Ark Reclusiam, had taken a keen interest in his rise to greatness from his days as an Aspirant, rescued from the ruined surface of Agraros, and had served in a mentorship capacity for many of the years that followed. As one of the oldest members of the Crusade, near five centuries Terran standard, such wealth of experience and depth of knowledge that came with his counsel was welcomed by the Crusade’s newest Marshal. In this manner did their relationship change from mentor and pupil to that of equals, evolving soon thereafter into that of a staid, mutually equitable friendship, the effects of which would prove in both the short and long term to have a profound impact upon both them and the Astartes they led. Ever his Marshal’s side, Voldorion and Agrarius were seen at the head of more than two-score campaigns and warzones, their mutual zeal and righteous rage further agitating the great host of Knights and Sword Brethren that they led.

Voldorion’s storied past, veiled in ignorance even amongst most of his brothers due to his great age, nonetheless seemed the driving force behind his bottomless well of hatred for the alien and impure, and in many places throughout the scattered warzones of the Imperium are worlds that owe their continued existence to Voldorion’s emblazoning litany. So successful has this combination been, the Marshal’s relentlessly effective wartime leadership and the Reclusiarch’s burning soul-brazier of zealous aggression in the face of the enemy, it seemed for a time that no foe was too great a threat to be unconquerable by the black-clad Knights of Crusade 743. It is therefore unfortunate that in their great success were these redoubtable warriors were sowing the seeds of their own destruction. After all, hubris has never been a weakness of anyone but the great.

The campaign that was to be the catalyst of this downfall is mired in conflict, with some sources indicating a series of raiding actions as a periphery to the Second Armageddon War were the site of Agrarius and Voldorion’s humiliation, while others point toward a more focused attack on a Renegade Astartes-held orbital shipyard near the Praeses watch-zone along the Occularis Terribus’ coreward boundary. Corroboration from the Excoriators Chapter, the Astartes Praeses responsible for the subsector in which the shipyard assault is said to have taken place, has been less than forthcoming. Despite direct inquests made by representatives of both Inquisitorial Ordos Obsoletus and Hereticus, to whom the internal affairs of such pointedly independent chapters as the Black Templars is of particular interest, it is likely that such details will ever truly surface.

Trivialities aside, what is most assuredly known is that late in 953.M41, Marshal Agrarius ordered the attack upon an enemy position that should have been very obviously unassailable, even to one lacking his gifted transhuman mind. Identifying what he believed were critical weaknesses in the enemy defense, Agrarius and Voldorion agreed that seemingly invincible fortifications were precisely the kind of defenses warriors such as they were created to destroy, and proceeded to attack.

What followed can only be described as catastrophic. In a matter of hours, nearly half of the Crusade’s combat forces were obliterated as they crashed again and again into their adversary. Again, records are imprecise, but based upon astropathic echoes of long-past transmissions and improperly purged records within vox-log datastacks, it is estimated that some 200 Black Templars and a further 11,000 Kataphrakt Auxilia, as well as uncounted support vehicles and transport craft were slain in what began as a monstrous miscalculation of the enemy’s strength and ended in a stubborn refusal by both Agrarius and Voldorion to acknowledge the error and withdraw. Voldorion is purported to have gone so far as to execute the Hauptmann of the Auxilia upon hearing his pleas to prevent the seriously-botched attack from becoming a total rout.

Agrarius was forced to quit the field of battle upon suffering such severe injury at the frontlines as to threaten even his incredible durability. Voldorion, to whom the burden of overall command fell, finally issued the command for a complete withdrawal, but only at the behest of the Crusade’s two surviving Castellans and sole Reclusiam Chaplain, each of whom declared anything short of an immediate regrouping and consolidation of forces would cause their fighting force to cease to exist. The lightning assault fell apart into a disordered retreat, and for the next month, Agrarius was fed reports from his sonambulin bio-vat aboard the Victürsen of the carnage his Crusade continued to suffer as it fought running battle after running battle across what is estimated as between five and eight subsectors. Only upon entering the Bellis Corona subsector, where Imperial Navy craft were within reinforcement and aid distance, did the Crusade’s pursuers disengage, leaving their attacker-turned-quarry to wallow in the shame of his defeat.

The vagaries that preceded initial Navy contact ceased to be; such information remained within the closed ranks of the Black Templars, however. Shame of a subordinate or not, High Marshal Kordhell is not one to commune with the likes of the Imperium unless the need suits him.

The depths of despair truly became known to Agrarius in the wake of his failure. So horrified at his own hubris, the Marshal is said to have sunken into a period of despondence that was only accentuated by an astropathic summons from a council of his brothers to a Chapter fief-world to the Galactic South of Mordia. For the seven-month journey, the mortally wounded Agrarius brooded in silence, his darkness of heart and mind only matched by Voldorion’s rages. Effectively leaderless, the few-score Astartes that survived endured hardship as befits such warriors, and a brutal training and psychoindoctrination regimen was begun in earnest at the urging of Castellan Feynriel Octavian, Marshal Agrarius’ second-in-command after Voldorion’s place as a senior advisor.

Upon arrival in the Mordian subsector, the shattered remnants of Agrarius’ Crusade fleet were met with the assembled sight of no less than four full Crusades and none other than the Eternal Crusader herself, Battle Barge primaries of the Black Templars and personal flagship of the High Marshal himself. To Agrarius, judgment for his failure was now at hand. From behind the reinforced crysflex of his biovat, Marshal Agrarius faced his shame amidst the cold marble and granite of one of the Eternal Crusader’s Reclusiam Chapels. All around him, shrouded figures in coal-black armor, giants of superhuman ability whose immense statures seemed to all the more draw light into themselves, cast the already dim room into an even darker shade.

Atop an obsidian dais, upon which five thrones had been placed, each a simple, unadorned frame of plasteel, sat High Marshal Kordhel, flanked on each side by two Marshals. Each wore their full war regalia, bedecked in seals of piety and zeal and draped in lightly jangling chains of bronze, iron, and steel, all of which, atop cloaks of deep vermillion and grey and battle-plate the shade of the darkest, blackest night, served to only further highlight the nakedness, both literal and figurative, of the one they once called “brother”, who now languished pitifully before them in a vat of bio-embalming fluid. It was in this moment that his judgment was rendered:

Agrarius was prohibited from taking his own life. Instead, for his shame, he was to embark upon a Crusade of penitence, with additional instruction to be given at the pleasure of his liege-lord, High Marshal Kordhel and his eventual successors, lasting no less than 100 years. He was to contain his actions to Segmentum Obscuras, maintain regular contact with other Black Templars Crusades in their immediate vicinity, and report all activities to the High Marshal directly. In addition, an added cadre of four additional Chaplains, upon whom the burden of ensuring spiritual purity and regularized obeisance to the Emperor would fall, would be assigned to the Crusade. Lastly, and most importantly, Agrarius was to return the Crusade 743 to its original fighting strength, which, at the time of the massacre, had been nearly 350 Astartes warriors.

As castigation, Agarius was stripped of his privilege for consideration to rise to the rank of High Marshal, and prohibited from Crusading alongside any of his Black Templar brothers. He was furthermore disallowed from using standard Chapter channels of resupply and reinforcement, and was instead instructed to find means that would not strain the existing, already overstretched, logistical chain. So admonished, the High Marshal and his council took their leave, and thus began the darkest days of Crusade 743 since its inception.

For the next four decades, reports of Astartes interventions near and far were brought piecemeal to Segmentum Command’s attention. Black-clad angels, wrought in steel and stinking of blood, pervaded intelligence despatches to every beleaguered world within communications range, warning those who sought the aid of Humanity’s transhuman defenders of a force of eviscerating terrors that were described by survivors, men driven half-insane by the carnage they had borne witness to, as wrath incarnate.

Though such horrors as yet unrecorded exist throughout the Imperium, it is believed that the regularity and consistency of these descriptive events, which are also corroborated by the few published after-action reports released by High Marshal Kordhel in a token gesture of cooperation with the Adeptus Terra, are indeed firsthand accounts of engagements undertaken by the Black Templars of Crusade 743. Further questioning of most witnesses by Inquisitorial frontmen produced little of benefit, though it is of note that independent investigations of the worlds in question revealed little that was left untouched by the fighting, with strong evidence to suggest extreme levels of collateral damage, in all cases caused by arms consistent with those maintained in Astartes arsenals.

While macro-scale investigations often left those doing the querying with nothing more than hints and a dulled-imagination with which to fill in the blanks, it is known that far darker records were kept within the Crusade’s own organization. With each campaign, Agrarius continued initiating flesh-purging surgeries upon himself, irreverent to the opposing recommendations of his Apothecaries, while Voldorion and his Chaplains adopted the “donning of Dorn’s mantle,” in accordance with Excoriator teachings, which is perhaps further evidence of the Eye of Terror being the site of the Crusade’s fateful assault against Renegade Astartes. Self-mortification, along with the taking of fetishes and extremely irregular battle-plate modification and trophy-taking, all began running rampant within the ranks of Crusade 743, as embittered veterans and Sword Brethren alike perpetuated the behavior in the swelling ranks of Initiates and Neophytes that flooded the fighting companies. So bastardized were these warriors and their heraldry, many outsiders with whom they interacted considered them no better than Renegades or clanner-kin of the Vylka Fenrika.

Indeed, it is said that when Marshal Agrarius, whom Knights of other Crusades had cruelly adopted the title of “Lord Marshal” in mockery of his once-favored position as heir to Kordhel’s station, travelled to Cypra Mundi to directly petition for the honor of attendance at the recently anointed High Marshal Helbrecht’s induction, he was greeted by the horrified faces of those Marshals who continued to shun him. The great-statured Astartes he had once been was now replaced by a gargantuan, an inhuman beast of metal and flesh, so utterly disfigured by his personal acts of penitence as to cause his gene-brothers to abhor his very presence. In seeing Voldorion, whom had accompanied him, their revulsion grew even further; his acts of self-mutilation reaching levels that had several openly question their sanity. It seemed to some that the darkness within their hearts now threatened to envelop them, and it was with worrisome reluctance that Helbrecht, to whom Agrarius had been a respected brother and friend, turned him away. Without further argument, Agrarius left with his host, disappearing once again into the dark void.

The events that follow are a matter of some debate amongst Administratum officials whose duty it is to keep track of such roguish elements as Crusade 743. What is known for certain, is that in the decade following Helbrecht’s ascension to the station of High Marshal, a schism of viewpoints occurred within this outcast group of Astartes. Agrarius, to whom the duty of penitence and reparation had been put as a punitive measure, saw the task for what it was meant to be. This has been noted in what few reports continue to this day to be collated; that amidst the wrath and continued destruction wrought at the hands of these Templars, a cold sense of purpose now pervaded their movements, as though a guiding hand now directed their actions throughout the void. By all intents, it appeared that Agrarius had finally come to terms with his grief, and had finally embraced his act of penance with the conscious zeal expected of an Astartes.

Voldorion, however, seemed inclined to disagree. Between the continuous acts of brutal self-mutilation, and his teaching of mortification as an act of repentance to the Knights of the Crusade, the Reclusiarch’s mind had sunken into a dark pit of self-loathing and inner hatred, and Agrarius’ cognizance of the error of his own ways only served to fuel such behavior, believing that such an act of humility and acknowledgement of his own limitations were signs of extreme weakness; traits unworthy of the Marshal of a Crusade on a journey of battle-repentance. More than once, Voldorion’s vitriol at the nature of Agrarius’ psychological improvement turned violent, and only after being defeated in several consecutive trial-by-blade challenges did the manic Chaplain relent, though to say the rift between them has healed would be folly in the extreme. Instead, Voldorion directed his rage further into the effort of rebuilding the Crusade, working tirelessly in the role of spiritual leader of the force and indoctrinating new warriors at such a rate as to outstrip even the full Apothecarion’s ability to implant Neophytes. So focused, relative peace came over the Crusade as it grew in leaps and bounds, while its commander, who now embraced the derisive moniker “Lord Marshal” in the face of the adversity he now championed, and its spiritual leader, who in opposition sank ever downward into the depths of despair, remained distant from one another.

At the time of Crusade 743’s involvement in the Veritia Campaign in early 012.M42, Crusade 743 had reached an effective combat strength exceeding that of three Codex Astartes battle companies, with nearly 400 Knights and Sword Brethren of various rank and title organized loosely into two Fighting Companies and a single Terminator Cadre. The addition of a dedicated forge-vessel to the Crusade fleet, many dozens of Astartes and Imperial support and combat vehicles, and a tithed human Kataphrakt Auxilia that once again rivaled its former size and strength, led some calculus logi within the Inquisition’s ranks to caution that this “errant” Crusade was approaching Codex Chapter fighting strength, a concern made all the more serious by the fact that its two senior lords seemed perpetually at each others’ throats.

The events of the Veritia Campaign would define the Crusade, both for Agarius and Voldorion, and for the Knights and Brothers of the Sword which they led.