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Long ago, in the dark days before the Great Crusade, when the armies of the Emperor still fought to free Holy Terra from the dominion of petty warlords, our Father was possessed by a terrible vision.
He dreamed of a future where strange and hostile breeds of xenos crossed the gulf between galaxies. Fleets of living ships descended upon the worlds of the galaxy and consumed them in entirety. All life would be consigned to their ravenous hunger. This threat he named the Great Devourer and ever it haunted his nightmares until that day, centuries later, when his crusading forces found us upon a human world, among the first of the Primarchs to be found.
Father confided his dreams in us and asked that we take on the burden of turning this fate aside. Of slaying this monstrous threat before it could end us all. How could we refuse his vision, his charge of so high a duty?
And thus, while he led my brothers out across the sea of stars to establish his great Imperium, I, my brother, and our followers remained on those worlds around Terra, consulting the Adeptus Mechanicus and laying the groundwork for our strategem. Building the weapons, the seeds of a great army of the light that would turn this fate aside. That would slay the Great Devourer in it's cradle, that distant and alien galaxy that had given it birth.
After centuries of conquests, the Emperor returned at last to Terra. The burden of continuing the crusade he handed to our brother Horus, appointing him Warmaster. And that of guarding the holy homeworld of humanity he took upon himself, freeing us to depart upon my great mission: from which I might never return, from which even the most triumphant return could follow only after long aeons.
Then we boarded my flagships, and hundreds of other ships formed around us as we turned our backs upon Terra and set out into the warp, following the great tides that swept out from the heart of the galaxy to the rim, and then leaving even them behind as we ventured into the uncharted darkness beyond, guided by the wisdom of my immortal Father.
Our scions formed the heart of the great host of warriors travelling with us. Following them, regiment after regiment, squadron after squadron of the finest soldiers that more than a century of preparation could ready, armed with the finest masterpieces from Mars' forges. And behind this army, the seeds of every corner of the great society of the Imperium, seeds to be planted in fertile soil for the first daughter realm of humanity to be planted upon a new galaxy.
An aeon of travel, observing the signs foreseen by the Emperor for our navigators, carried us to the great currents that marked our destination. On the fringes of the galaxy, under the light of stars who knew nothing of humanity, under a sky where the light reflected from Terra itself was than cast before even our Father had been born, we established our fortresses, strongholds from which we could venture out to do our duty. Generations born and raised aboard the ships, sleepers carried across the gulf in stasis, we carved out homes upon this new frontier.
And then, as new children grew up, knowing nothing but what we told them of the galaxy that we had left behind, we led out the first armies in our campaigns against the Devourers. To root them out, world by world.
We carved a line of fire across the galaxy, laying waste to a thousand worlds and destroying every fleet, every spore of that vile breed that we encountered. We brought war upon them. After four years, we had barely begun. World by world we would need to seek them out, campaigning on a scale unseen even in the Great Crusade, for not one trace could be allowed to continue to create new branches of their loathsome species.
And so great fleets surged out, year after year, century after century, to destroy the swarming waves of Tyranid hive fleets that responded to the threat we posed them. Entire planets burned under our weapons, newer and deadlier tools developed to fight an ever-evolving foe. Armies descended upon shattered continents to root out the remains and establish secure bases across the spiral arms of our new home.
The originals died in those battles, passing their holy geneseeds to new warrors recruited from the children of the settlers who had come with us. A handful, struggling against mortal wounds, would live long enough to be taken from what remained of their superhuman bodies and implanted at the hearts of our scientist's greatest triumphs: the Neural Prime Knights. Each a unique creation, a warship of awesome might, capable of fighting not only upon the ether but also to descend to the worlds beneath them and fight as the mightiest tanks ever conceived, none with any crew beyond the sarcophagi of my near-dead children, the greatest heroes humanity has ever known. Three hundred, survive in this way.
They are with us now.
The long war is at last concluded in this galaxy. The Tyranid menace is broken forever. The thousand nations splintered from those we brought with me have been forged into one great diversity. In all of this galaxy, no trace may be found of the foul xenos that once befouled it.
But our mission is not quite complete. Some, at least, have survived. A few thousand hive fleets have fled the wrath of humanity and now seek mortal revenge against our home. They have set course for our home galaxy, for my Father and for Terra: a ragged fleet of perhaps a few hundred trillion ships
It is laughable to imagine that they could threaten the perfection that our Father will have forged in our absence. Doubtless our brothers will make sport of them.
But still. It is my duty to pursue them there. I and my loyal Neural Prime Knights. Escorted, just as I was so long ago, by strong Chapters of our legions and by armies of our followers. Our weapons honed by the advances of the long war we will hunt these last ragtag Tyranids and then, before my Father's throne on Terra, we shall give honor to all those who have fought for his cause, so far away that no word has reached us of his will for eleven thousand years.
We merely pray I am not blinded by the wonders and magnifience of his Imperium.
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The idea that the missing primarchs themselves are responsible for the Tyranids (Who they themselves named after the work of the brilliant xenobiologist Christine Zerg) leaving that galaxy (let's call it Andromeda) and invading the milky way is unusual, but opens up many points of contention for their interaction with the Milky Way Imperium. How would they react when they don't see the noble, bright future they were promised, but the grim, dark future where there is only war?
The fact they left during the Great Crusade means many pieces of their technology hasn't been lost, not to mention greatly improved over what many outside of the Grey Knights and/or Custodes have access to. Even the Apostate baseline humans are equipped with gear on par with elite formations, approaching close to the Milky Way Adeptus Astartes. On the other hand, they're fighting at the end of a very very long supply chain, which has been reduced to merely 500 years from the 1000 it took them to reach Andromeda, and their mining and manufacturing ships are suddenly very, very valuable. Plus, their non-experience with fighting anything besides the Tyranids and perhaps Orks, means that they are not as experienced as fighting Chaos, Necrons, Eldar, Orks, or Tau. Furthermore, there are those who are reluctant to fight the humans, seeing them as misguided.
There is a split between the fleet between the Wardens, who wish to continue to fight all of the external threats to humanity, and the Crusaders, who believe they should conquer the Imperium and remake it in the Emperor's true image. It's mirrored on the Imperium's side with the Radicals espousing cooperation, and puritans believing them to be heretics of the highest order. the scary fact is that there are a handful of defections every year, which is statistically insignificant, but psychologically disturbing.
Unlike the Tau, the Apostate Imperium provides a genuine human alternative of doing things, a workable, livable model of how things could be otherwise and the firepower to back it up. The irony that this new form of Order promises to create so much chaos is delightful to the Chaos Gods. One side is far more powerful than the other but forced to fight a limited and conservative war due to political divisions and murky objectives, while the much less powerful but more ideologically convinced side is simply trying to hold its own and ultimately push the other side out by costing them enough blood.The ultimate irony is that neither Imperium can survive as they currently are, and they need to reach peace and incorporate the best elements of the other in order to avoid the crippling weaknesses of both. Not that it could be accomplished by any easy method.
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