Changes

After Alpharius' disagreements with [[Roboute Guilliman]], the Alpha Legion threw themselves even further into their preferred method of operations, largely cutting themselves off from standard [[Imperial]] practices and orchestrating greater and greater victorious examples of their approach to the Crusade, even when more conventional attacks would have been more efficient. The most notorious example of this took place on the world of Tesstra Prime, where the Alpha Legion, instead of taking the opportunity to capture the planetary capital and force the world's surrender, allowed the enemy to dig in and defend it so that they could then expertly take the defending forces apart in a number of different ways. After a week of suffering seemingly random mishaps as well as brutal ambushes, the defenders were forced to capitulate, having taken 90% casualties. When asked why the Legion had not taken the simpler strategy, Alpharius is reported to have replied that they avoided it as "it would have been too easy." This campaign brought him censure from almost all of his brother Primarchs; only [[Horus]], always impressed by Alpharius and his work, praised the Alpha Legion's skill.¹

With such examples existing in the Imperial records, it is perhaps easy to see why the Alpha Legion sided with Horus when the [[Warmaster]] made his pact with [[Chaos]]; their martial pride and Alpharius' avoidance of all his brothers apart from Horus seemingly led to their downfall. However, another given reason is that, a scant two years before the [[Horus Heresy]] began, Alpharius Omegon was contacted by a [[Xenos]] organisation known as the [[Cabal]], which presented the primarch with visions of the Heresy to come and other predictions of the future as well as knowledge about the nature of Chaos. They were shown that the only outcomes of the Heresy were that, if the Emperor won, humanity's existence would be ensured for ten or twenty thousand years of decay before they and the galaxy were consumed by Chaos and that, if Horus won, humanity would perish inside two generations, taking the Chaos powers into oblivion with them, thus saving the rest of the galaxy. The Alpha Legion was asked to take on their greatest challenge; to defect to the side of Horus and ensure the final destruction of Chaos. Alpharius Omegon appeared to accede to this request.²