The Crusader Host was a body of Space Marines drawn from every Legion and stationed upon Terra, serving as envoys of their primarchs at the heart of the Imperium. Conceived in the confident years of the Great Crusade, it was meant as a living emblem of unity — a gathering under one roof of warriors from all twenty gene-lines, ambassadors of their fathers to the Emperor's court.
When the war erupted, the Host's meaning curdled. Warriors whose Legions had turned traitor found themselves suddenly suspect, marooned on the Throneworld amid a people who no longer knew whether to see them as brothers or enemies. Loyalty could not be assumed from gene-seed, and legionaries who had done no wrong were confined and mistrusted for the crimes of primarchs they had not seen in years.
The tragedy of the Crusader Host is bound to the fate of the Outcast Dead, a group of its members caught up in the paranoia and violence that gripped Terra as news of the treachery spread. What had been founded as a symbol of a united mankind became, in the Age of Darkness, another casualty of a war that turned every certainty to ash.