"The Heresy threatened to destroy Our Lord's great work.
Brother against brother. Father against son. Blood, destruction, chaos. But a day came when it all ended. The Imperium prevailed, praised be Our Lord and Savior.
And then the question arose: what to do with those who claimed loyalty to the Emperor but came from the traitor legions?
Some could even prove it, though that didn't matter much, because doubt would always outweigh it. What to do with them?
Well, I'll tell you what we did with a handful of them:
We placed them under the command of an Ultramarines Captain, also under suspicion, but brilliant in his own strange way, and sent them to the farthest reaches of the Galaxy. To the southwestern finge, the region known as the Nemean Gates, where the light of the Astronomican is barely perceptible. We sent them to a place from which no one returns, because we didn't want to hear from them again. But we needed some to guard the Gates, some we wouldn't miss elsewhere. The most expendables of the expendables. The despised, the execrated.
And so we named them, Tertium Exsecratorum.
The Tercio of Execrated."
Lord Rickhelm, High Lord of Terra.
