 It is a maxim, fondly dispensed by the commissars of the perfectus, that loyalty is its own reward. History, canny as ever, will often reveal this as the cold comfort it is. Loyalty is no reward, loyalty provides only what one draws from it. It's meaning subjective and idiosyncratic. Loyalty is no reward, it comes often at an extreme and punishing cost. One feels nothing but admiration, however, for those that can make this their credo. It is, in many ways, the truest honour imaginable. The one that comes at personal cost yet is freely given. Selfless sublimation of oneself to one's cause. Before your humble servant waxes too poetic upon the subject, one must remind one's colleagues that this maxim was sorely tested so often throughout the Horus heresy. Rarely, however, as in those early days in the benighted age of darkness. It forms the crux of the subject of this record. For the conflict one is about to relate, forced upon its participants the ultimate choice. Is their loyalty truly worth the cost? No then, this is a record of a grand perfidy. Of the face of the retribution fleet of the imperial fists. A record of the battle of fall. Often relegated in historiography as a footnote to the admittedly far greater Istvan disaster, the battle of fall suffers in remembrances. It is in some ways understandable. Its chronological proximity to the dropside massacre, indeed the retribution fleet's intended role in the dropside massacre, often sees fall form an appendix of sorts to greater works upon Horus' greater atrocity. Likewise, it is in many ways another plan, one amongst many sprung across the galaxy by the forces of the Warmaster against the unsuspecting Imperium, another link in a long, bloody chain of perfidy held by the renegade Horus. With greater attention, however, the significance of fall can be discerned. For one, it is an example of sterling heroism on the part of the loyalist ambushes, rallying, as they did, in the face of a completely unprecedented onslaught by those they had once, albeit begrudgingly, called kin. In more prosaic terms, fall is crucial for its impact upon two of the largest battle fleets controlled by the legionia's Astartes. The losses of the battle impacted both so heavily that several scholars have pointed to it being one of the reasons the Horus' heresy became a conflict that lasted years instead of months. We shall explore these and more, but it is not for nothing that fall, after its passing, earned a dark honor throughout the loyal Imperium as a byword for sacrifice. Unto Rogaldorn, Primarch of the Seventh Legion Imperial Fists, the Praetorian of Terra, fell the dubious honor of being first amongst his loyal brothers to learn of the betrayal of Horus. The Deathguard, heavy frigate Eisenstein, under the command of Captain Nathaniel Garrow and bearing members of Horus' own legion as well as several Imperial Remembrancers, had managed to escape the Calamity at East Van Three, bearing word of the heresy to the Imperium at great cost. By purist chance, Rogaldorn's flagship, the mighty Starfortress Phalanx, had intercepted the becalmed Eisenstein. The rage of the Praetorian was said to have been towering. In some chronicles it is claimed he came within inches of killing those who had brought him the terrible news. So, insulting and unbelievable was the concept of his perfect brother's betrayal. Dorn's response was immediate. The Imperial Fists could not relinquish their role as wardens of the throne world, not entirely, but messives were sent to every single Astartes legion within reasonable distance of the Istvan system to muster and make all possible speed for the warmaster's citadel under the command of 10th legion Primarch Ferus Manus. While the events of this vengeful Armada are covered in one's other works, Dorn too committed to the effort almost a third of his legion's strength in both warriors and starships. Fleetmaster Yonad, appointed by the Primarch to command this detachment, was additionally reinforced by further warships from the Navus Imperialis Wings placed in the Sol system and reserves from the fleets of the Saturnine Ordos. In total, the fleet numbered over 500 ships of various classes and tonnage, a sector conquering battle fleet in comportment, designed by Dorn to ensure that the Imperial retribution that would befall the traitorous warmaster would not be bereft of his own personal desire for vengeance. The retribution fleet, as it came to be known, never made it to Istvan. Almost immediately after its departure from the Sol system, the ships of the fleet were overwhelmed by a deeply unstable immaterium, the tides of the warp denying their passage. Navigators aboard could discern no rout through the storms. It appeared to their warp sites that the immaterium had simply consumed them whole, with not even the warp corridors of their proverbial rear open for passage. Just as ancient mariners, storm-tossed upon rage-filled seas, sought whatever relief they could in a tempest, the retribution fleet scryed for a port in the storm, as more and more of their vessels succumbed to the roiling tumults. Torrents of immaterial energy tore ships asunder, swallowing them from sight and augury, as if the warp itself was simply eating them, like a grotesque, all-consuming monster. Torturously, more and more ships perished. Casualties mounted, supplies dwindled, until, finally, the retribution fleet found its haven, the fall system. Barely 66% of the ships that had departed Terra had survived. Nearly 270 had simply been lost to the warp's capricious tides. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the largest vessels had borne the storm best, if only comparatively. Of these, the heaviest armored behemoths of the legionnesus dartids had suffered little damage, but not a single vessel had been spared the immaterium's ravages, nor had escaped without casualties. Fall itself was a system of cold, dark silence. The storms continued unabated. No astropathic signal could be either sent or received. The retribution fleet was completely isolated from both the ongoing muster of invasion fleets and the Imperium at large, with no way to tell how progress was faring in the efforts to bring Horus to justice. What messages were hurled into the immaterium's fury simply rebounded upon the astropath that sent it, but twisted and vile, the psychic imagery warped into horrific mockeries of their original forms. Even local chronometry was difficult to ascertain. As with so many fleets caught in warped storms, the time heases aboard different ships read different dates, forcing the command echelon to split the difference to establish a common time frame and calendar from whence to judge progress, or indeed lack thereof. Passage out of the become was utterly impossible, but the fleet's navigators were not in recovery from the torment of simply arriving back in real space. They were unable to glimpse anything beyond but death upon the empiric tides. To make matters utterly worse, Fleetmaster Yonad, a veteran of the Seventh Legion, nigh without peer, had been one of those who had perished in the dreadful passage. Solid command hierarchy was not something the imperial fists ever lacked. The Legion's chain of command was explicit and rigid. Yonad had been inspected in life to have an elected successor, and in this he had not failed the Seventh. Alexis Pollux now assumed the mantle of leadership. A relative newcomer to the ranks of the captaincy in the imperial fists, Pollux was a native of the Legion's homeworld of Inuit, noted in chronicles for his great stature and impassive visage, as if hewn from the cold rock of his birth planet. Pragmatic, calculating, and unfailingly direct in his temperament, Pollux was in many ways a model officer, yet one whose career had yet to be defined by the heroism and victory tallies of contemporaries like Scalice, Tyr, or Pyrtonax. Nevertheless, Fleetmaster Yonad, in emissive to the Primarch justifying Pollux's voted appointment as successor, stated that within the young captain was the spark of great deeds to come, that in time and with nurturing, Pollux would rise to become a titan of his Legion. The heresy oft forced men and women into actions long before their time or calling would have allowed for it. Alexis Pollux is most assuredly one of those men, to whom the ancient Terran Maxim of Comet the Hour, Comet the Man, is incredibly apt. Accepting command of the fleet, Pollux's first order were for the ships to bring themselves to full combat readiness and preparedness. Practical to a fault, the young captain reasoned that, without any means of establishing the course of Horace's rebellion or even its participants, the Becombed Fleet could ill afford any lack of preparedness. The task was monumental, full repairs on all battleships without any docking facilities. Pollux himself led the organization efforts, deploying the fleet in a sphere formation that rotated vessels between line duties and repair shifts, changing fortress in the void that ensured defenses would not be sacrificed for repair efforts and vice versa. Days transformed slowly, but surely into months. The readiness of the Imperial Fists did not shirk one iota. Relentless combat drills were tirelessly undertaken, with training regiments extended to naval armsmen and mortal soldiery too, lest the unaugmented humanity of the fleet lapse in their capabilities. As more vessels reached effective combat worthiness, Pollux ordered surveys of the system they remained trapped in, reasoning that, should it become a battlefield, the Imperial Fists would know every inch of the volume they would be fighting in, down to the last gravitational tide or stray asteroid. Maneuvers were conducted by ship squadrons, while inside firing crews were drilled in their weaponry. Throughout all this, Pollux pressed the navigators to breach the storms, and made repeated attempts, despite their protests, all of which ended in failure. The active defensive position undertaken by Pollux was completely in line with the teachings of his Primarch, oft quoted as saying, If one waits for the enemy to declare their intent to attack, then a gift is made to them of victory before the battle has begun. Whereas other legions would have either conserved ammunition reserves by eschewing live-fire gunnery drills, or simply attempted to breach the storm regardless of any risk, Pollux's decision-making was not only based in his legions traditions, but evidence uncovered soon after the fleet had found itself stranded in the system. Records of the Great Crusade brought from his ship's archives noted to Pollux that Fall's entry to the Imperium had occurred centuries before. The system had two inhabited planets, Fall I and Fall II, both of which were classified as Agri Worlds. They possessed populations that, though far from numerous, were peaceful, cooperative, and in regular contact with the Imperium. The stable worlds had paid their tithes without complaint, and were considered such model Imperial citizens that they required little in the way of any notation further than that. These populations were entirely absent from the day the fleet had arrived. Fall I and II were utterly devoid of not only human life, but human remains. There was no evidence of a sudden calamity, natural or otherwise, nor any evidence of Xenos activity. This mystery formed the crux of Pollux's reasoning. Two entire worlds, no matter how relatively minor they were in galactic terms, do not simply depopulate, essentially overnight, without any sign of the reason why. Pollux's training and the Seventh Legion's fortress mentality was a natural conclusion on which to base decision-making with this evidence in mind. For all the captain knew, the absence of the planetary populations was yet more work undertaken by the perfidious Horus. It is lucky, so terribly lucky, that this was the case. While it is common knowledge in our benighted epoch that the tides of the warp can be maliciously and calculatingly manipulated so as to become and trap ships of the true and good, such a thing was utterly inconceivable at this time in history. Pollux did not know what was coming for him. Such immaterial entrapment was of course tragically conceivable and far more imminent than the imperial fists could have possibly realized. The first indication of the onrushing calamity was a sudden and massive psychic assault. Visions of horror and torment assaulted the minds of every member of the retribution fleet, with those psychically sensitive amongst them suffering the most. Disarray ruled for the duration of the attack, but as order was restored and furious demands of all specs updates were issued, no single source of the wave could be detected. Initially thought to have been an attack in and of itself, it was a psychic phenomenon that in historical retrospect simply served as a precursor. For all the astropaths whose brains turned to slurry under its assault, the psychic wave was powerful enough to pierce the tides of the warp, but to where it was directed, none of the survivors could say. In the immediate aftermath, these psychers were crucial in discovering the wave's cause. Scattered throughout the entire star system, secreted away from scrying sensors, were hundreds of bespoke machines unlike anything the Mechanicum adepts aboard the fleet had ever seen. Appearing for all the world to be psychic amplifying devices, albeit of an utterly unknown provenance, they each contained a mutilated astropath, almost all amputated to their mere torsos and heads. These wretches had been placed in stasis until some apparently predetermined time, at which point they were violently awoken. Mines tortured to the point of near insanity by their pain, they naturally reached out in agony to the void, scouring their immediate immaterial proximity in a desperate attempt to realize what had been done to them. Their lives, such as they were, were short-lived, but their purpose had been served. The combined torrent had created a psychic bow wave strong enough to reach beyond the system, a message of sorts, in a supremely twisted fashion. But to whom it was directed, none could say. So utterly bizarre was the arrangement of the machines, the people utilized, and the phenomenon it caused, that it was only in historical retrospect that it can be seen for what it so clearly was. A sign of a trap, long, planned, and very cunningly devised. The clearing of the warped storms that allowed the fleet to find its repast in the foul volume, the scouring of the system's uninhabited worlds, the psychic beacon devices. Perhaps the greatest authority in the traitor's early use of immaterial phenomena during the Age of Darkness is Arcanite Lycian Haldane of the Navus nobilite. Their treaties noticed that foul is the earliest example of a deliberate and precisely planned use of the warp as a logistical weapon to divert loyalists to battlefields of the traitor's choosing, stating that the imperialists waited and prepared for a battle they did not know would come. While all around them, the warp laughed, and the playing pieces of catastrophe were moved into place to seal their ending. Said pieces, now finally made their move. A vanguard force of over 100 ships of the 4th Legion iron warriors breached the warp at the closest Mandeville Point to the system's core and immediately made full wake for the closest picket detachment of Imperial Fist vessels. Firing began at maximal range. The sons of Pertor Abo wasted no time in engaging the retribution fleet with all possible firepower. The first ship to fall was the Hammer of Terra, a vessel long held as a sterling veteran of the Great Crusade, bringing with it the first Imperial Fist casualties of the Horus Heresy. Its escorts were similarly overwhelmed, the lighter vessels faring even worse under the fury of the 4th Legion's guns. There had been no warning, no missives and no hails. The iron warriors had simply descended upon their supposed cousins in fire and death. More and more ships poured from the warp in such numbers and in such close proximity that the real space volume of their re-entry began to fray and collapse into the immaterium. That it was the iron warriors who had set themselves against the Fists was no doubt of a deep and profound shock to the warriors of the 7th. But perhaps also unlimbered them from the stunned horror that had claimed so many of the betrayed at Istivan. The bitter blood between the two legions and their Primarchs was legendary and ran deep than any other inter-legion enmity. Though quite alike in many ways, the Primarchs, Rogaldorn and Pertor Abo had ever been at odds and this rivalry extended to their sons. Such brawls had been resolved in court marshals and medicaid facilities. They had never risen to the degree of bloodshed. That now had changed. Murder beat within the hearts of the iron 4th. The Fists knew not of the dreadful work of Istvan 5. Cut off from the galaxy, all beyondfall was an abyssal unknown and hell had unleashed treachery upon them from it. They did not know that three legions had already perished. All they knew is who was firing upon them now. The 4th Legion's fleet had burst from its translation point in a rough wedge formation the tip of which was being applied, as per Iron Warrior's doctrine, to a single point in the enemy's defences. Conversely, the Imperial Fists, it should be remembered, had dispersed their fleet in a wide, constantly shifting sphere deployment throughout the system so as to deny any potential attacker an actual concrete target location. This was to be the saving grace of the Praetorians of Terra, perhaps the most crucial aspect in the Retribution Fleet's ultimate survival of the Battle of Fowl. The Iron Warrior's wedge was led by Pertor Abo himself, helming the Iron Blood, the Legion's Gloriana-class flagship, 15 kilometers of fleet killer lethality, supporting it with the heaviest battleships and battlecruisers of the 4th Legion, and trailing these were hundreds of frigates, destroyers, torpedo barks, and heavy gunboats, an unstoppable sledgehammer of a fleet designed to simply annihilate whatever came within range of its guns. Had Alexis Pollux concentrated the Retribution Fleet into a fixed, tight formation, the loyalist ships would have been dust and wreckage in the void within hours. Even the most conventional, Navus Imperialis tactical responses would have similarly met with failure. The fleet arrayed against the Imperial Fists had timed their vectors and speed perfectly, which, combined with surprise and sheer momentum, would have made mincemeat of even a well-ordered Expeditionary Fleet, albeit with a higher price paid. Thankfully for the Imperial Fists and history, this was not the case. Even as ship transponders winked out on all specs' grids, silent indicators of the screaming, fiery deaths of thousands aboard these destroyed vessels, the discipline of the 7th Legion held, and the months of forward planning took hold. Squadrons within the sphere fled before Pertorabo's onslaught, even as some held firm, taking punishing weapons fire from the Iron Warriors in the process. Dozens of loyalist ships perished to allow their brethren the room to maneuver, but inexorably, the momentum of the Iron Fourth carried their fleet deeper and deeper into the wide sphere of Imperial Fist vessels. As the full might of the traitor Armada finally made translation, as their spear thrust had plunged deep into the heart of the formation, the trailing elements of the Retribution Fleet now began encirclement. Beyond the range of the trailing Iron Warriors' guns, high-thrust turns banked the fleeing ships around in as tight a series of maneuvers as their hulls could bear. The experience earned in relentless drills and ceaseless cataloging of every inch of the system bore fruit. The toil of practice allowed coherency of formation impossible in almost any other fleet formation in the Imperium. The Imperial Fists fell upon the flanks of the Iron Warriors with a speed and ferocity the Fourth Legion perhaps could not have believed possible, specifically targeting lighter, slower and more vulnerable ships left trailing by the juggernaut of the Iron Blood and the attacking fleet's lead elements. Had the Lord of Iron cared for the losses of gunboats, assault carriers, and escort brigs, he did not show it. The Iron Warriors pressed on without a hint of mercy, heedless of any of their ships left trailing in fiery wrecks. Losses on both sides consequently mounted and mounted fast. Ammunition reserves meant to last hours were spent within minutes. No ship in either fleet lacked for targets. Even by the vast distances typical of void warfare, veterans of fall remarked that firing solutions would have ultimately been unnecessary for the Loyalists, so concentrated and relentless were the Iron Warriors' ships. As terminal range was reached for many vessels, boarding actions began. The weapons fire streaking through the cold of space was now joined by swarms of interceptors and bombers, boarding torpedoes and legionnaires Astarti's fliers as they spilled out of hangar bays, tearing through the void towards enemy targets. In some cases, these were not even necessary. Mauler claws and void bridges were strung between ships caught in terminal embraces. Every weapon of space combat was deployed without a hint of restraint. Neither side had any possibility of reinforcement, forcing total commitment of all reserves, both of manpower and weaponry. Negafosfex webs, vortex missiles, Volkite implosion spheres, the dreaded lightning phage, prescribed and regulated weapons of the great crusade were now loosed with abandon. The storm of battle was apocalyptic, rare in the annals of imperial history, even to this day, is it the two fleets can meet with such fury? Millions died in nightmare fire, their ships torn to pieces by the untremeled hatred of loyalist and traitor. The dead on both sides multiplied at horrific rates, but it was to the Iron Warriors that the greater tally was being counted. The attacks of the Imperial Fists were responsive to situational exigencies. They shifted, withdrew, pressed forward a changeable tide of restrained, yet potent wrath. Perturabo's legion, meanwhile, simply continued its sledgehammer approach, crushing, battering, obliterating, heedless of attritional rates. The momentum, however, was bleeding away. The Iron Fort's fleet was now fracturing. Damaged capital ships, wounds torn into their hulls by following the battering ram prow of the Iron Blood fell out of formation, dragging their escorts with them, only to be set upon by the still-coherent Imperial Fist squadrons opportunistically. This, compounded by the fiery deaths of their supporting battleships, or simply such sustained damage to their mechanisms that they ran out of control, saw the emergence of dozens of sub-fleets within the Iron Warriors pray now for the vengeful sons of Dorne. Through this all, Alexis Pollux displayed an almost preternatural ability to parse and direct the torrent of battle data demanding his attention. His comportment can only be described even in the hyperbole-averse terms of a historian's writing as superlative. He was facing a primark, no less, and a fleet that had been estimated in tonnage to outclass his own by nearly two to one. Pollux was leveraging every iota of his training, his doctrines, and his natural talent, and thus far it had not only spared the Fists from annihilation, but had granted them, against most all odds, a possible path to victory. Through the constantly updating hurricane of information, Pollux had now aspired a possible vulnerability. As the Iron Warriors fleet fractured and splintered, fragmenting a way into a hundred different duels with the retribution fleet, a gap in the fire control volumes of the Iron Blood's escorts had emerged. The tides of battle had shifted just enough to grant onto Pollux a mad, but hitherto impossible, gambit. A chance to kill Pertorabo himself. He immediately ordered the formation of an attack wing under Captain Armando's tear to mount an immediate, pointed attack on the flagship of the Iron Lord. Such a formation could not kill the Iron Blood itself. That task would have taken an entire fleet in and of itself, for the Fourth Legion's flagship was the most heavily armoured of all its glorianatlass kin. An impregnable fortress cast amongst the stars. Instead, Tyr's objective was to deliver an Imperial Fists boarding party aboard the flagship to establish beach heads that could then be reinforced by ships rushing to their aid. Such an endeavour would obviously come at grievous expense. But none questioned Pollux's orders. Retribution was in the name of the fleet. Their duty would be done no matter the cost. History will only ever be able to speculate about what tides time would have rode had those Imperial Fists succeeded in their aim. Pleasant idle fictions, spun out of the threads of what ifs, are all that can be made of it, for fate writ a different future from that moment. As the attack on the Iron Blood was mounted, a message from Terra itself shattered the sky, and with it the mind of most any astropath that beheld it. Through bloody mouths and broken teeth the Psyker spat the order, returned to the throne world immediately, by order of Rogaldorn, Praetorian of Terra Primarch Seventh Legion. The Lord of the Imperial Fists had been attempting to make contact with his lost sons since their disappearance, and with all the more urgency since the dark news of the Dropsite Massacre had reached the heart of the Imperium. He now faced not four traitor legions, but nine. Half the legion as a start is turned turncoat. Three loyal legions lay in utter ruin, and yet others were beyond the bounds of communication. Mars was now caught in the chaos of open rebellion, and random traitor attacks exploded across the Sol system and its nearby volumes as Horus's agents made themselves known. All certainty had been lost. It was all the Primarch could do to collect and concentrate what forces he had at hand upon the Sol region he knew was both defensible and the ultimate target of the Warmaster, Terra itself. The astropathic choirs of the homeworld had been bent towards sending missives to muster, to whatever Imperial forces Dorn could confirm were still active, bellowing messages into the depths of the Roiling Warp. Such, of course, is the nature of astro telepathy, that its ultimate recipients lay beyond the bounds of linear chronology. The Imitarium is a realm of capricious whim, and at this point in history rarely had it ever been so true. The Warp swallowed all missives bade for the retribution fleet specifically, yet these were not lost, merely delayed. Whether through the Iron Warrior's own breaching of the Fall system or darker twists of fate besides, the word of the Praetorian was now with his sons, and the Imperial Fists knew the explicit will of their Genesire. Rarely has the ignorant fog of war been so vicious. Strategy, tactics, decisions all must be based on available data. The retribution fleet had little of that resource. They knew Horus, and four legions had betrayed the Imperium. That number was now five, with the Iron Warriors two joining this rebellion. They had a very real and present enemy facing off against them at this very instant. They had the Iron Lord himself within their grasp. Their father had finally made contact, but the message was clearly aged. For all the Imperial Fists at Fall knew, terror was already burning, and all loyal legions scattered or destroyed. This uncertainty could have paralyzed even the staunchest of commanders, or led one of a different character to disregard the astrophatic order in favor of seizing the opportunity that presented itself before them. The Imperial Fists, however, reacted as they only ever could have. With unbroken obedience to hierarchy, they followed Rogaldorn's order to the letter. Pollux gave the word, and the retribution fleet began the process of disengaging from the battle. Their retreats were staggered. The fastest ships, those with the most chance of outrunning the ponderous Iron Warriors vessels, broke away to join those whom the tides of battle had left temporarily unengaged. The heavier ships staggered, harried and shielded the flight of their fellows as best they could before themselves maneuvering for escape vectors, leaving behind those too heavily damaged to attempt warp translation to hurl themselves at the teeth of the Fourth Legion's guns, selling their lives that the rest of the fleet may make good on their withdrawal. Naturally, it did not take long for the Iron Warriors to discern what was occurring. Their fleet fell upon the withdrawing loyalists with no mercy, in some cases seeming to fall to base bloodlust, all formations disregarded, tenuous as they were even at this point in the battle, now disintegrating utterly. Capital ships abandoned their escorts and vice versa in a mad rush to claim ship kills. As more and more Seventh Legion craft burned outward to the Mandeville points, only the oldest and heaviest battle cruisers of the retribution fleet remained engaged, forming an as yet indomitable bulwark against the Iron Warriors. Many were craft whose service history stretched back to the dawn of the Great Crusade, or even before, drawn from the ancient fleets of Inwitt and Old Earth. They sold their last hours of existence dearly, firing even as they burned silently in the void. The loyalist losses of fall comprise a grim tally indeed. Barely a third of the retribution fleet survived the harrowing disengagement and subsequent flight to the Imitarium. Any that remained died under the bitter guns of the Fourth Legion, or had their ships gutted by boarding actions and claimed as prizes for the Iron Lord's wounded fleet. Those loyalists that escaped returned to a throne world not in flames, but gripped by paranoia and disquiet, and a primark girding himself for a long and bloody conflict. Had any imperial fists retained a bitterness at the cost their obedience had drawn in blood, that is a matter for another time. Yet others were scattered by the warped currents, drawn by the whims of fate to ports and wars far afield across the galaxy. Of the desperate assault of Armanda's tear, history of course attests to the commander's ultimate failure to achieve his objective. Such a task was an outrageous gamble to begin with, but deprived of any hope of reinforcements the boarding action became utterly impossible to carry. Nevertheless, we have evidence that tear persisted, fighting his way to the heart of the Iron Blood and breaching Pertorabo's inner sanctum itself, only to meet his ultimate end at the hand of the Lord of Iron. Tear's Cataphractii Terminator armor was taken as a trophy by the Iron Warriors, and by the whims of fortune survived the heresy in the vaults of their fortress on Bryson Guard. Millennia after the conclusion of the heresy, members of the fourth company of the modern Imperial Fists chapter captured the citadel in a bloody assault, reclaiming the armor and restoring it over pains taking centuries to full use. Alexis Pollux survived the Battle of Val, losing his victory-class flagship, the Tribune, in the process, but gaining the vessel Contrador from the fourth legion captain Erasmus Golg. Pollux, one barely needs say, is a name that entered into the annals of the heresy far beyond his actions during this battle, a figure of both glory and stern vengeance, even into the days of the scouring. The Battle of Val is remembered in both history and military records as a defeat. The retribution fleet quit the battle volume and lost significant amounts of ships and estartes in the process, ceding the day to the Iron Warriors. To one's mind, this denigrates the true victory of the day, survival. In the early days of the Warmaster's perfidy, the elements of total surprise were used to devastating genocidal effect. That Alexis Pollux, an appointed commander with moderate experience, utilised the best of his legions' teachings and abilities in engaging a Primarch, the vanguard of a fleet that outnumbered him, is a superlative success that should not go unacknowledged. Of the fleets at fall, there has been significant historical discussion of their dispositions and capabilities that further complicate the simple ambush and defeat narrative. They were equal in nature only in the most basic terms, in that they were comprised of Estartes commanders and elements with baseline human crews, and that they were fundamentally based on similar ship designs and basic naval engagement principles. The Iron Warriors, however, held a numerical advantage, which some scholars estimate at being almost three to one. Even despite this, any chronicler worth their starch rations must acknowledge the basic fact that at this point in history, significant idiosyncrasies had developed amongst the fleets of the legion as Estartes that produced potentially seismic disparities in battlefield efficacy. After 200 years of crusade, the characters, aspects, access to resources and combat predilections of the various legions were as pronounced upon their battleships as they were upon their Estartes. In the case of the Iron Warriors, for example, this manifested as a market need for their ships to be heavily armoured at the expense of maneuverability and acceleration due to this increased mass causing shearing tension on their frames. This allowed them to complete their combat predilection for planetary assault in grand formations quite readily. For ship-to-ship combat, it allowed for significant momentum to be accrued but not transferred, something evident in the opening sledgehammer assault of the retribution fleet, but equally in the subsequent fracturing of the fourth legion's formation under Pollux's unorthodox ship deployments. This being said, fall is but one example of this serving the Iron Warriors ill. The exact same process and tactics would see a great many victories earned by them during the course of the heresy. Concerning the Imperial Fists, their fleet was known throughout the Imperium as the most diverse in terms of vessel classes and patterns, maintained and resupplied at the heart of the Imperium, thus possessing the most cutting-edge weaponry and ammunition the Mechanicum could provide. Indeed, the retribution fleet had been specifically armed with prescribed weaponry unsealed by the rate of Malkador the Sigillite to prosecute Imperial vengeance upon the traitorous Warmaster. The complement of the fleet at fall had been essentially over-equipped for long-term deployments and their stockpiles granting them a flexibility in terms of tactical operations. The overall disposition comprised of some of the finest vessels in the Imperial Fists' Armada, a significant number of which were battle-cruisers specifically designed for void superiority, close to the mixed, space-born planetary assault vessels common throughout the other legions. Consequently, the retribution fleet was, in blunt terms, better equipped, faster and more specialized for void warfare than their ambushers, all factors that, combined with the discipline, training and practice of the Imperial Fists, proved to be potent force multipliers at level to the playing field to a proverbial knife edge. It was, truly, the word of Dorne that broke the course of the battle. While some of one's colleagues have sought to escape to fantasy and dream of a world where Pollux had ignored his primarch's warning, one must rebuke any who do so in the strongest possible terms. There is no such thing as alternative history, only fiction. The Seventh Legion would simply have never disobeyed a direct order, and they did not. Fall is remembered as a defeat for the losses incurred, but those losses were also endured by the Iron Warriors, depriving the traitors of significant fleet elements at a critical early stage in the war. Fall was survival, made possible by loyalty and tenacity. Imperial Fists would never have conducted themselves any differently, which raises one final and terrifyingly plausible thought. That the arrival of Dorne's message at the battle's absolute apogee was no mere chance, but a bolt loosed from the warp at the behest of the Warmaster's dark, eldritch allies, a scheme of the blasphemous intelligences of the Immaterium to bleed the Imperium of yet more of its finest defenders, and all by the blade of their own Resolute Loyalty. Ponder that, if you will. Ave Imperator, Gloria and Excelsis Terra. For more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter, at Oculus Imperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.