The Mark 9 suit pulls for your attention, eager to begin forging its legacy, but you are unsure about it. It is a new, untested (as far as you know) mark of Power Armor. It has no history, no soul. Some part of you wants to take a hand in creating that history, but your unease is enough to make you reconsider. A Space Marine and his Power Armor must be as one on the field of battle; any unsurety in the Space Marine’s mind will become fatal hesitations in his actions.

You look over the Mark 4 suit again, searching for the little details instead of the broad strokes. The tell-tale indicators of battles past that shed soft light on the machine-spirits within the plate.

The first thing that catches your eye is the oath-seals carved deep into the ceramite of the pauldrons. Normally made of wax and used to affix a scrap of parchment holding an oath of moment or purity seal, these are instead made a part of the suit itself; legacies of old oaths not forgotten.

Armor History: Spirit of a Hero? - unknown.

The left shin and sabaton have elegant slivers of shrapnel forged into the ceramite. You crouch down to take a closer look and spot the distinct patterns endemic to slamming your booted foot through the skull of an enemy. Why these particular pieces of shrapnel were forged into the sabaton and greave instead of being pulled out is beyond you, but their presence tells of a significant battle won in ages past.

Armor History: Trophies of Battle (Chaos Space Marines) - +5% to Ballistics Skill test vs CSMs.

Standing upright, you examine the gauntlets, noting the boosted actuators and reinforced servo-muscles common to close-quarter fighters. You didn’t have this common modification performed on your previous suit because it interferes somewhat with precision shooting. It is not a problem, just something that you will need to become accustomed to along with the armor itself.

Armor History: Thine arm be the Scourge of the Impure - +5% Weapon Skill, -5% Ballistics Skill.

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Taking a step back, you look over the mark 4 suit from head to toe, drinking in its fresh paint and elegant lines. At first glance some of the paint gleams as though wet. You frown in thought, noting the seemingly random dispersions of the ‘wet’ patches. Then you notice the high-velocity splatters and runs. The ‘wet’ sections are simply not the flat Deathwatch black, but rather a psychosomatic reflection of events past. The ‘wet’ sections are where the suit was so drenched in the blood of the foe that it has stained the creamite to the point where it will show through any paint.

Armor History: Blood of the Foe - Gain the Fear 1 Trait.

“The mark 4 suit. Does it bear a Name?”

“None that we have been able to recover Scout-Sergeant Marcellus.”

“Then It will be up to me to name it.”

“Indeed. Come, I will armor you once again.”

The full armoring process, will all of its ceremony, takes nearly half an hour. As your new helmet settles over your head and tactical icons blink to life you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. It feels good to be armored again, whole again. You have fought in everything from your bare skin to simple carapace armor, but you never feel complete without a suit of Power Armor.

You buckle Betrayer’s Bane to your waist and take up your bolter. You feel… complete. This is what you are, a Space Marine, the Emperor’s Bulwark against Terror, an Angel of Death.

As you make your way back to your quarters you encounter a slight difficulty.

You spot a Space Marine turing to enter a training chamber. You see only the olivewood color of his skin and the studded pauldrons of his Mk5 ‘Heresy’ Power Armor. Instead of the Chapter iconography, it is completely black, bordered by the blue of a Librarian and a oath-paper bearing the sunburst-halo’d skull of an Epistolary.

At the same time you overhear two men arguing from the opposite direction. Among the raised clamor of voices, you catch the words ‘Capitalis Congestus, ‘Destroyer Six’, and ‘Two-Stage Cyclonic.’

Both the black-pauldron Space Marine and the arguing men seem important, but you only have time to investigate one of them.