Even before the outset of the Horus Heresy, the Night Lords were using methods most others would have denounced as brutally unnecessary, inhumane and cruel. The Night Lords conquered utterly those who did not welcome the coming of the Great Crusade, crushing all opposition to Imperial rule in such an overwhelming and brutal fashion that no others would dare resist.

The VIIIth Legion was soaked in blood from its birth. The Legion's first recruits came from the linked prison sinks of ancient Terra. In vast caverns filled with the half-crushed ruins of millennia there lived men and women who had transgressed against the laws of their masters. Condemned never to see the light again or breathe free air, they lived out their lives in fear and blind darkness.

There was no law in these lightless lands, and survival existed only by a blade's edge. Only the strongest and the most ruthless survived in the subterranean prison warrens, and those who did grew in cruelty and cunning. Fed by a constant influx from the Terran hive cities above, the prison sinks were an ever hungering gate to madness and murder.

But of the millions who lived and died in the prison sinks, not all had been punished by the world above. Amongst the bloodshed and fear, children were born. Cradled in the dark, and raised amongst death, those who lived over a solar decade were pale, silent creatures who moved without a sound. "The night's children" the prisoners called them, and even the most savage killers would not seek them out by choice.

It was from these pale children that the Emperor of Mankind would create the first warriors of the VIIIth Legion. Dour, with skin so pale it resembled ash or powdered bone, they were far from their brother Legionaries in manner and appearance. The gene-seed of the VIIIth Legion had been well-paired with the Human stock of its first Terran recruits, and if anything it seemed as if one had been made with the other in mind.

Besides accentuating their paleness of skin, the gene-seed of their primarch gave the sons of the Terran underworld the ability to see through darkness to a degree that far exceeded that of the Astartes of other Legions. This gift was also a curse, forcing them to see the light of suns and stars through filters and flare buffers; even though they now walked in the light of the world above, the warriors of the VIIIth Legion already walked in eternal night.

The first use that the Emperor found for His VIIIth Legion was to bring to heel those who believed that the sins of the past could live on in the newborn Imperium of Man. Several of those who had bent their knee to the Emperor had done so because they believed that it was the only choice. Others, having seen the empires of other techno-barbarian warlords rise and fall during Old Night, believed that they were simply part of yet another temporary arrangement.

Crimes against the new order took many faces: from the Saragorn Enclave whose gene atrocities continued in secret, to the psy-breeding of the Court of Antius, and the March of Ten Million, all showed that even in the face of all of the Emperor's might, some would fall back into the forbidden ways of Old Night. When crimes required not simply crushing but retribution so that an example might be made, the Emperor deployed the nascent VIIIth Legion.

Such actions seemed well-suited to the early VIIIth Legion. Whether as a consequence of their genetic inheritance, or the combination of their origins among the Terran prison sinks and Imperial indoctrination, the warriors of the VIIIth Legion seem to have tended towards moral absolution and a drive to enact retribution. There were no shades of grey in the VIIIth Legion's moral universe, no degrees of guilt or innocence.

Truth and falsehood was as day is to night, indivisible and unqualified. The dark was the realm of guilt, lies and monsters, and those who dwelt in the dark knew only the language of blood, the message of swift and merciless retribution for their actions. Justice brought the light to darkness, and justice was neither warm nor caring, but as indifferent and cold as the edge of a knife.