The Outcast Dead was the name given to a doomed band of Space Marines caught in the paranoia that seized Terra as news of Horus's treachery arrived. Members of the Crusader Host — legionaries stationed on the Throneworld as envoys of their primarchs — they hailed from Legions now branded traitor, and in the fear of those days their innocence counted for nothing.
Imprisoned for crimes they had not committed, they broke free into a Terra convulsed by dread, hunted by the very institutions meant to protect the Emperor's realm. Whether renegade or wronged, they became fugitives in the heart of the Imperium, their flight bound up with secrets that powerful forces would kill to keep buried. Their story unfolded against the backdrop of a Throneworld bracing for a war it could scarcely believe had come.
The Outcast Dead came to embody the cruelty of the Age of Darkness, in which loyalty was assumed from gene-seed and warriors were condemned for the sins of fathers they had not chosen. In their fate lay a small mirror of the whole catastrophe: trust dissolved, brotherhood betrayed, and good men destroyed by a suspicion that the Horus Heresy made inevitable.