Raven Guard

Of all the Legions the Emperor set loose upon the galaxy, none waged war so quietly as the XIX. The Raven Guard struck from shadow and silence, materialising out of darkness to sever a head from its body, a command post shattered, a supply line severed, a tyrant slain in his own stronghold, and were gone again before the enemy understood he had been attacked at all. They disdained the grinding frontal assault as a waste of lives both transhuman and mortal, preferring the surgical stroke, the lightning raid, and the patient campaign of attrition that bled a foe white without ever meeting him on ground of his choosing.

This doctrine was the inheritance of their primarch, Corvus Corax, who had been raised not as a conqueror but as a liberator. Cast down upon the moon-prison of Deliverance above the forge-world Kiavahr, Corax had risen from a life of bondage to lead a slave revolt that toppled the tyrant guilds and freed a world, and he never forgot the lesson of it. Under his command the XIX became the Great Crusade's foremost practitioners of insurgency and asymmetric war, warriors who saw in every oppressed population a potential army and in every fortress a structure waiting to be undermined from within. Where other Legions broke worlds, the Raven Guard freed them.

Sons of Deliverance

The soul of the XIX was forged in the memory of Deliverance, and its warriors carried the ethos of liberation into every theatre of the Great Crusade. Corax drilled his Legion in the arts of stealth, misdirection, and the swift withdrawal, valuing the warrior who could vanish over the warrior who could merely endure. Recruited in large part from the freed populations of Kiavahr and Deliverance, the Raven Guard understood the wars they fought from the perspective of the oppressed, and they took a fierce, principled pride in sparing the innocent where other Legions counted collateral loss as the acceptable price of victory. This made them beloved on many a liberated world and quietly resented by brother Legions who found Corax's methods, and his moral certainties, an implicit rebuke of their own.

Betrayal at Isstvan V

That principled Legion was very nearly erased in a single catastrophic day. On the black sands of Isstvan V, the Raven Guard made planetfall among the loyalist first wave alongside the Salamanders and Iron Hands, striking hard into the traitor lines, only for the second wave, Legions thought loyal, to turn their guns upon the loyalist rear. Caught between hammer and anvil, the XIX was slaughtered in droves, its companies annihilated where they stood. Corax survived, but the Legion that had numbered among the Emperor's finest was reduced to a shattered remnant, a few thousand grief-stricken survivors dragged from the killing ground by their primarch's own hand. The Drop Site Massacre broke the Raven Guard as an instrument of open war, and Corax carried the guilt of it for the rest of his days.

The Flawed Rebuilding

Desperate to rebuild what Isstvan had cost him, Corax returned to Terra and won from the Emperor a measure of forbidden gene-craft, a means of quickening new legionaries in a fraction of the ordained time. For a while it seemed salvation: fresh warriors, the Raptors, swelled the depleted ranks and fought with distinction. But the process had been tampered with, or was flawed from its conception, and in time it began to fail, bodies twisting into misshapen ruin, minds unravelling. Corax was forced to lead his own malformed sons into battle as a mercy, spending them against the traitors so that they might die with purpose rather than degenerate into horror. It was a bleak salvation, and the shame of it deepened the melancholy that would eventually drive the primarch into self-imposed exile.