The Celestial Lions
While staunchly loyal to the Imperium, the Celestial Lions abhor the needless waste of life and resources that can occur, as is evidenced by their complaints regarding the Inquisition’s destruction of Khattar, which is rumoured to have eventually led to the demise of the Celestial Lions.
The Lions fight with the strength, ferocity and ruthlessness attributed to any marine, but also fight with honour and pride. Often they will plan assaults with other aspects of the Imperial military machine to maximise the damage inflicted during operations with minimal casualties and when needs be, valiantly holding out against all odds to complete their stated goal, even if the situation becomes near untenable.
The Celestial Lions homeworld of Elysium IX is an arid world. Despite it’s dry climate, it’s nowhere close to the desert planet of Tallarn. In fact, Elysium IX is probably closer to the savannas that the creatures of Terra the Celestial Lions based their iconography off of lived in many millennia ago.
Elysium IX is used primarily as a livestock production planet. Many grox are raised out in the open plains. This is not without danger though, as there are large feline creatures out there that are believed to be descended from the Lion of ages past. These creatures, known as donnerkatze, are at least almost five times the size of a man when fully grown. They also play an important part in the Celestial Lions recruitment.
In order to be accepted into the chapter as an initiate, a candidate must defeat a Donnerkatze in single combat. The chapter breeds Donnerkatzes specifically for this purpose, but it’s not unknown for a candidate to be inducted into the chapter after fighting off a Donnerkatze that was attacking the herd of grox they were guarding.
Once inducted each initiate is given a new name. The Celestial Lions draw their new names mainly from an ancient dialect that is barely known by even the most knowledgeable of the Imperium’s scholars.