 In his Notes Towards Marshal Codification section 4.1.9, the Primarch of the Ultramarines, Rebut Gulliman, remarked that, Battle is not a state to be entered into lightly. Battle is always painful, and always comes at a price, so the astute commander never commits to battle unless no other options remain. Once that commitment is made, once the phase of execution or primary condition has begun, it must be done with the utmost efficacy, a rapid application of overwhelming force to obliterate your enemy as quickly as possible. Do not give him the time and space to react. Do not leave him with any material or opportunity that he can use in a rallying phase. Annihilate him physically and psychologically so that his threat is entirely removed. Kill him with your first shot. Utterly annihilate him with your first strike. This may be considered the application of attack in its purest form. The irony of such an understanding, given what was to unfold, is lost to none, certainly not even he, who committed it by stylus to record. Penned at a time when the Great Crusade was at its zenith, notes towards martial codification is a preparatory work for the Primarch, which is not to say it is not robust. Quite the opposite, it is one of the finest works of the era, entering easily into military theoretical canon, alongside surviving works by Antaxas, Makulius, and Von Kloswitz. It is in many ways a highly foundational step upon the 13th Primarch's road to his defining work, the post-heresy Codex Stardes. It is also an embodiment of Gillibans' detached clinical writing style, the treatment of the chaos, insanity, and sheer bloody horror of war, as a problem to be solved by the application of a stern mind and keen will, bereft of any of the emotion that actual warfare sets aflame within any human the moment they fire a gun or pick up a blade. It is redolent of Gilliman writing from a place of absolute surety, both in the theoretical practical mindset adopted by him and his legion, in the supremacy of his tactical mind, and in the security of the world he inhabited and his place within it. Codification is a relic of a time when the Primarch looked forward to days where such a document would be simple theory of a necessity long since past, of hopes of a galaxy without war, where a mind such as his could be bent to the building of a civilization, rather than its imperialistic military expansion. That Gilliman died, along with the ideals he once dreamed possible, in the fires of a great betrayal, alongside the sons he sought to uplift. That Gilliman, burned in the fires unleashed by he who he thought brethren, those who he thought kindred. That Gilliman, he who penned notes towards martial codification, is lost to us forever. The imperium he dreamed of, even more so. Know then, that this is a record of the vengeance of a legion, of a crusade cast in shadow, of the death of a dream, a record of the betrayal at Calth. The betrayal at Calth has nothing in the way of a single beginning. It was myriad of ways, products of decades of emnities and bitterness, plans and machinations, and detached strategic necessities. It was a confluence, a meeting of demands emotional, military, and arcane. This macro alignment, a pleasing thing indeed to those who planned the atrocity, and their dark patrons. Looking out the strands of these beginnings is necessary for as complete an understanding of the catastrophe as possible, but when doing so one faces a myriad of barriers. The complexities of the pieces in motion, the devastation wrought on history by the passage of this war, and the vested interests of those who catalog the records in its aftermath. The sources one draws upon for this chronicle were in large part saved due to the habitual diligence of the Ultramarines, 13th Legion Astartes, committed as they were and yet remain to learning all possible lessons even an atrocity of this magnitude could provide. From the battle itself, its aftermath, to the years of rebuilding and scouring that followed, the eventual cessation of hostilities in the volume, the 13th Legion extensively documented Calth and all combat actions that took place in and around the Veridia system, in the hopes that future generations of Imperial citizens may avoid such calamities as had been committed against them. One particular source, the foundational one for any discourse regarding this event, Funnilyaaf comes from a glorianatlas battleship named the Chronicle of Ash, bound to the 17th Legion word-bearers, captured by the Ultramarines in 017 M31, three years standard after the Siege of Terra. The ship, defended by a mere handful of support cruisers, had seemingly spent the entirety of the heresy and the years since, weaving its way through the eastern fringe. Her capture was a boon to the Imperium in many ways rather than simply ending the threat that she posed. Her massive internal halls were covered in their entirety with what appeared to be the sum total history of the word-bearers Legion and their accomplishments, penned in spidery runes of dead caulkists. For years, the earliest members of the Inquisition painstakingly catalogued the writings, parsing out secrets hitherto unknown to the Imperium and transcribing them into tomes that would later be sealed under maximal security protocols and inviolate memetic defences, lest the taint so profound amongst members of that damnable Legion be transmissible through their runic language. Few commented on the profound and twisted mirror the Chronicle of Ash represented. Just as the Ultramarines had endeavored to learn all they could from Calth, so too had the word-bearers sought to document and record their own history of the event for purposes altogether of more dread intent. For the word-bearers, the origins of Calth are twofold. First and most natural is the drop-side massacre at Istvan V, at which the Legion was present and, according to some apocrypha, the first to open fire upon the unsuspecting iron hands raven guard and salamander's loyalists they had been meant to reinforce. On that world's black sands had the opening salvos of the heresy truly been fired, the warmaster Horus Lupercal breaking the compact of brotherhood that had been the Legionia's astartes and plunging the galaxy into a civil war the likes of which had never stained the stars. Despite the breaking of three whole legions, despite the scattering of their shattered remnants far and wide across the Imperium, despite nine legions firmly at his beck and call, the warmaster yet held no decisive military advantage. The disaster of dealing with loyalist elements within the original four traitor legions during the betrayal at Istvan III and the defiance of the surprised yet furious loyalists at the drop-side massacre had stymied the warmaster's progress, just enough to deprive him of the total surprise he would have needed to seize core imperial systems and terror itself with minimal resistance. The delays coupled with those loyalists that had managed to flee the massacres, most notably those aboard the heavy frigate Eisenstein, meant that the Imperium and the Emperor would eventually come to learn of the treason, sooner than Horus could reach terror. There would be no quick victory, once roused the Imperium would raise mighty armies in retribution and shore up its defences against him. Potentially billions of loyal soldiery would stand between the warmaster and the walls of the Imperial Palace to make no mention of Horus' brother Primarks and their own legions. Of those that had fallen on Istvan, the 10th Legion Ironhands and their now dead Primark Ferris Manus was a grievous loss to the Imperium indeed, but for all their loyalty, they and the sundered 19th Legion Ravenguard and 18th Legion Salamanders were never the largest of the legionnaires astartes, the latter two in particular ranking as amongst the smallest in terms of numerical disposition. Posing Horus would now be the largest of the legions that were not pledged to him. The blood angels rivaled his brother Pertorabo's iron warriors in size, and Horus knew within his hearts that the warriors of Sanguinius would, in a straight fight, likely be worth more than the dour corpse grinders of the fourth. The lions first legion dark angels, despite still recovering decades after their mauling at the hands of the Xenos Rangda, were lethal beyond the capabilities of any other legion, and yet formidable in numbers besides. And then there were the Ultramarines, the noble thirteenth of Rebut Gulliman, vast beyond all others, some 250,000 astartes at least, and possessing an industrial and recruitment base that could be ramped up to astonishing capacities in scarcely any time at all. These were paramount threats. The Loyalists had lost one Primarch, missing two more, and were deprived of three entire legions, yet numerically, the remaining were more than enough to tip the scales against Horus if left unchecked. The Warmaster had, of course, foreseen this potential eventuality, and had bent his machinations to tempering the threat that Loyalists could pose to him. Knowing he, nor any of his traitor kin, would not possibly be able to sway the loyal brethren that yet remained to his camp, he sought instead to ensure their ability to reap vengeance against him was compromised in the fullest of ways. To the Dark Angels, he assigned Purgatian operations in the Thramas reaches, far to the Galactic East, at the very edge of the Emperor's light, seeking to simply remove the lion and his sons from the board for as long as possible, by placing them as far away as possible. The Space Wolves had already been maneuvered into the burning of Prospero, bleeding them horribly, and were currently licking their wounds, wandering into the coils of the traitor Alpha Legion, who were also attempting to pin down their mercurial 5th Legion white scars. The Blood Angels were dispatched to a grand trap in the Cygnus Cluster, arranged in concert with the Warmaster's never-born allies from beyond the Vale of Reality. The Ultramarines required a far more direct approach. The 13th Legion had, since their reunification with their Primarch expanded massively, creating for themselves an impressive empire within an empire, the 500 worlds of Ultramar. Despite its location in the further eastern Galactic volumes, the realm of Gilliman was perhaps the most successful of any within the Imperium beyond the core systems surrounding Terrae itself. The Primarch's peerless logistics, acumen, and vision had seen him play the statesman as much as a military leader, concerning himself with the work of building a society within his father's empire as much as winning worlds for it. Ultramar was a shining light in the dark, the proverbial city upon the hill. It brought colonists to the eastern fringes in astonishing numbers, buoyed by healthy land allotments promised to Imperial Army servicemen mustering out of their tours, as well as inviolate borders protected from Xenos Reavers by the unassailable might of the 13th Legion. It was in many ways the promise of the Imperium made manifest, a safe, stable, and prosperous realm where all worked for the betterment of the whole, delivering to those loyal a life free from the generational terrors of old night, albeit at the cost as with all Imperial worlds of bulldozing non-compliant populations with genocide and cultural obliteration. Because of all this, it provided a phenomenal base of operations for the Imperial military. The Ultramarines had a wider base for recruitment than any other Legion, not even speaking to the genetic stability of their gene seed and the subservient populations. The colonial might of the 500 worlds additionally supplied millions of troops to the Exertus Imperialis. Numerous night households were pledged to the realm, and several Titan legions, foremost amongst them the Honourable Legio Presagius, maintained close ties with the Forge worlds of the Volu, Conor, and Gantz. Horus was keenly aware that, once word of his rebellion spread, Ultramar would function as a loyalist fortress, within which potential billions of army troopers and tens of thousands of Astartes would be raised and set against him. The geographic location in the Galactic East placed it on his flank for any push towards terror from the Warmaster's holes in the northern reaches. Ultramar and its Legion must simply be broken. This was a task the 17th Primarch, Lorgar Aurelian, and his Legion, the Word Bearers, were only too ready to commit to. The enmity between legions 13 and 17 was decades old, born of the actions of the Word Bearers and the role of the Ultramarines in bringing them to task. Subsequent to their reunification with Lorgar, the 17th Legion, once the Imperial Heralds, had been rechristened the Word Bearers, transformed from the Iconoclasts burning with the fires of the Imperial Truth into the proselytizers of the worship of the Emperor as Divine. While this history will be elaborated on in greater detail in a subsequent record, suffice it to say that, at least initially, the annals of the Great Crusade record the Emperor as having offered no rebuke to Lorgar's behavior, even though it was in direct violation of his own writ, his own laws, and his plans for the human species. Or rather, that this was not done openly. Writings from Lorgar's brothers recovered from this time reveal that the Emperor had shared his disquiet with the 17th Activities with his son privately, yet to obviously no avail. The situation appeared at least tolerable until the pace of the Word Bearers across the Great Crusade began to slow, eventually grinding to a near standstill, as the Legion invested ever more time and effort into compliance operations that focused nearly entirely on converting the population of rediscovered human worlds to religious worship of the Emperor and his Imperium. By the time Word had spread amongst the Divisio Militaris of the 17th Legion's violation of both Imperial Law and their commitments to the Crusade, the Emperor was already moving. In 963 M-30, he dispatched the Ultramarines, with Gilliman at their head, to raise utterly the city of Menarchia on the planet Kerr, an icon for Lorgar and his Legion of all they had accomplished in the name of the Imperium and their god Emperor. The Legion, summoned to the ashes of their work, were forced as one by the Emperor to kneel before him in censure, the shame announced by their god and before the eyes of the Ultramarines who stood above them in judgment, a mirror held up to their weeping faces of the Astartes they should aspire to become. The censure became widely known following the raising of Menarchia. It was no doubt meant to be, publicly visible shaming in full view of all, a reminder that the Emperor's grace had its limits, even for those he counted as his sons. The Word-bearers were now cast as low as any of the Legion as the Astartes had ever been, save for the total purgation that had befallen the 10th and 11th legions, only thanks to the Emperor's mercy. Forever now they were the bearer not merely of his word, but also his reprimand. As far as history records the aftermath, Lorgar withdrew into contemplative seclusion, long enough that there were rumors that the Emperor would rebuke him yet again, but eventually emerged in possession of a fervor hitherto unseen in the 17th son's actions. Few thought anything of this, but we of the dark future know the truth. In that seclusion, and thanks to his subsequent pilgrimage, Lorgar Aurelian had turned to new gods, old and terrible, ones he deemed worthy of his worship. The primordial annihilator, Chaos, the dark gods of the dread Pantheon. The shame of Menarchia, the arrogance of the Ultramarines, those burned within the hearts of the Primarch and his sons, even those who had not yet knelt before the master of mankind. The raising had entered legion myth as the greatest crime committed against them, the resentment fueling their apotheosis into devotees of the greater intelligences of the warp. It is likely the plans drawn up for Calth and the 17th's advance into Ultramar in general were developed between Lorgar and Horus acting in concert. It was of course mutually beneficial. Lorgar knew well what drove his emotional tempestuous brother and sought to yoke his own plans to it, while Lorgar saw the perfect opportunity to advance the aims of his warmaster, his gods, and the reaping of vengeance against his hated brother in one singular swoop. Just as the 17th Primarch had been instrumental in the corruption of Horus and the eventual enactment of the dropside massacre, so too was the planning for the betrayal launched far ahead of Istvan 5's Black Sands. Orders for the grand muster of the 13th Legion were issued to Gilliman as early as 005 M31. Warp horologues record the Primarch as having departed Saturn, only scant months before the Eisenstein brought word of the warmaster's betrayal to that same system. Owing to the chronological vagaries of the warp and the fell influence of Horus's new patrons, word from the wider Imperium bled away as the Ultramarines forged a slow and winding path from the Imperial core back to Ultramar. Appearing for all the world as a markedly severe, but not entirely unprecedented upsurge in immaterial storms, Gilliman paid the disturbances little heed. Assured that the Imperium and his 500 worlds had many a contingency for the continuance of operations in times of raging, aetheric storms. Passage was slow, but manageable, and communication yet possible with the disparate elements of the 13th Legion, now ordered by their warmaster and Primarch both to gather at the planet Calth in the Viridian system in their near totality. The muster was, of course, purposeful. Intelligence had reached Horus, he claimed, of Xenos' threat, that of the gashlack Orc Warboss and his empire. Bordering that of Ultramar and the Viridian system within which lay Calth and her shipyards. Having suffered the predations of the Orc menace in decades past, this was a credible reason for concern. That Gilliman, the Ultramarines, and any of the Ultramarian military strategos had scryed little Xenos' activity on their realm's borders, was raised by few. The intelligence came from the warmaster, and the military leader of the Imperium would of course have access to more detailed reports. The Ultramarines would preemptively annihilate this Xenohold, and they would not do so alone. By Horus' order, the Purgatian expedition would be conducted in concert with the word-bearers. The reasons behind this were obvious to any who beheld the simple outline of the operation. This was a move by the newly minted warmaster to cement his authority, who else would have the goal to order the Ultramarines to gather in their entirety, the largest and nearly most successful of the Emperor's legions. And then there was the history of the legions concerned, well known, well established. The Primarks had little love lost for each other, and neither did their sons. But after all, was this not a new imperial era? The Eleanor campaign had marked the end of true existential threats to the Imperium. The Empire and its Estartes were looking forward now to the future, and to what form that future would take. Was it not time to bury past disagreements and forge new brotherhoods? The Warmaster was taking two legions at odds, and forcing them to work together despite their apparent wishes. It had all the hallmarks of the blunt, well-meaning, and at the same time keenly observant Horus Lupercal. Here was the perfect opportunity, no doubt, to bury the proverbial Gladius. Feelings amongst the Ultramarines at all levels were quite mixed. The more idealistic of the legion looked forward to an opportunity to move beyond the years of the past. Some openly delighting in what they may learn from the 17th Legion, a force that had appeared to have truly changed in the decades since the censure. Others were more caleric. This was pageantry, they opined, or worse, charity, granting the wordbearer as a chance to win some glory on the coattails of the 13th Legion, who would of course be doing the real work of the campaign. Yet others, of a more practical mien, decried the ludicrous overkill the upcoming pregation represented. There was simply no way the Xenohold of the Orcs required the material strength being committed. Not merely two legions, but their primarchs as well. Whatever the political considerations, surely this was simply too much. The politics of it all were obvious, and simply paved over. Gilliman saw this all for what it was, and nevertheless resolved to its commitment without protest. Seeing the value in renewed brotherhood, and ceding to the authority that his brother Horus was still clearly needing to project. Of course, the true intent behind the muster was only made obvious in dreadful hindsight. Indeed, the Gashlag Xenohold, as presented by Horus to the Divisio Militaris, has a massive threat to Ultramar Sanctity, is likely to simply have never existed at all. Investigations subsequent to the heresy revealed little in the way of evidence for any orc infestation in the volumes outlined by the Warmaster's Missives. At best, several Xenos raids on the fortress world of Galsoria can be verifiable across records at the time, but of the supposed Warboss Gashlag, nothing can be verified in documentation that did not have Horus' direct involvement in creating. Given what occurred, it is likely that the threat was entirely fictitious, serving to simply justify the removal of Gilliman and the bulk of the Thirteenth Legion from the Imperial Core Worlds, and placing them in the path of Lorgar and his own schemes. That the Imperium would be warned of the treachery of the Fallen Legions was an eventuality now assured. Despite his fury at being robbed of complete shock, Horus was well aware that this had been a possible outcome, and had taken such into account. The first terrible acts of the heresy at the Istvan system had been accomplished. The traitors yet possessed the element of surprise, and a phenomenal capacity to affect confusion and disinformation in order to prolong the early stage of advantage. Fragile communications infrastructure of astro telepathy was vulnerable to both capture, with traitor operatives ensuring the largest choirs in the surrounding volumes were silenced, and aetheric disturbances, which were brewing at frightening speed and intensity in the aftermath of the Istvan atrocities. This, given Horus' new gods, has been supposed as being a part of some dark compact. The greater intelligences roiling the currents of their realm to speed the passage of their minions and deny that of their foes. The disturbances spreading from Istvan's position in the galactic north reached further and further outwards, smothering the furbile dreams of Astro Pat's galaxy wide with a fugue state of nightmarish phantoms and malign portents. The surest word of treachery was carried, essentially alone, by loyalist craft fleeing the catastrophes that had befallen them, and these were ever dogged by ravenous traitor pursuers. Sometimes even in instances where they had managed to reach loyal worlds, too often did they find no means of passing their tales of betrayal to higher authorities, and that traitorous ships breached the warp impossibly soon after they themselves had only limped back into real space. By 006 M31, the hand of Horus began to emerge, stretching over systems in the galactic north in the first moves of building his dark empire. Even as the first steps of the warmaster on his long, bloody road to terror were being trod, a combined armada of the 17th legion wordbearers and 12th legion world eaters was making astonishingly good progress towards Ultramar. Under the command of Lorgar and the 12th Primarch Angron, they made a segmentum breaking force, even despite the wounds suffered by both at the Istvan atrocities. The world eaters, as partipitators of the ground war during Istvan III, had bled significant manpower, but those that remained were truly hardened killers, not to mention now twice blooded in combating fellow astartes. The wordbearers supplemented their cousins' material strength considerably, having utilized the years since Monarchia to vastly swell their numbers in an effort to match that of the hated Ultramarines. They had also ensured to amass one of the largest void fleets of any legion, possessing at this stage over a hundred capital ships, including nine Glorianatlas, several of which had only recently been captured as prizes from the now shattered legions, in titanic void clashes above the dropside massacre. To supplement this were three Abyss-class super battleships, the Tresagion, the Blessed Lady, and the Furious Abyss herself, considered to be amongst the most powerful void ships ever constructed by the hands of mankind. The fleet of the world eaters was somewhat lesser in terms of sheer tonnage, but had a storied reputation for aggression, and was outfitted accordingly, favouring viciously fast frigates and pursuit vessels armed with the vicious iconic Ursus Claws, designed to ensnare and deliver legionaries in bloody boarding actions. Created by the 17th Fidelitas Lex and the 12th Conqueror, the Armada carried some 300,000 Astartes and innumerable auxilia, both in the form of imperial army regiments and degenerate warp cults inducted by the word-bearers. Their route is... distressingly easy to trace. Their path was marked by a string of totally devastated systems, gruesome waypoint markers for the passage of the traitor brothers. There's little discernible reason for the choice of worlds the Armada was unleashed upon beyond simple proximity to their route. No capture or conquest was undertaken. No forces were left behind as garrisons. Populations were simply slaughtered. What slaves were taken appeared to be few. The fate of these poor worlds were marked either by butchery at the hands of the world-eaters or human sacrifice by those of the word-bearers. Death was either fast, a body broken in two by a chain axe, or slow, skin flayed and blood drained atop an altar to eldritch powers. A great number of profane ritual arrangements of corpses constructed by the 17th Legion served to mark precursors to the atrocities committed in Ultramar, and it is highly possible that these gruesome votive offerings were undertaken to speed the fleet on its way southwards. As history records this, the first Ultramarines to die at the hands of the 17th and 12th so-called Shadow Crusade were a garrison force on the world of Anorum. A military outpost initially seized by the 12th Expeditionary Fleet on its long march to Ultramar. The world had later been fortified and manned by the Ultramarines as a way station for the movement of Crusade fleets throughout the Galactic East. It was heavily manned. Its garrison consisting of a full company of Ultramarines, enough to capture an entire planetary system with ease, as well as several regiments of solar auxilia, recruited from the advanced industrial cities that dotted the world. A robust, flexible force, the envy of many a Crusade-era operation. They died in less than a day. Angron was recorded as having personally led the attack, demolishing all resistance before him and putting the world to the torch in under 24 hours. But the killing dragged on for weeks. Blood-mad world eaters hunted down survivors alongside the Galvorback, the so-called blessed sons of the word-bearers. Glutting themselves both in human lives and armament stock, the armada of the two primarks at this point disappears from recognizable imperial space. It is presumed that the route they took forward passed through the Forbidden Region of Galactic Space, known to the Cartagraphica Imperialis as the Dominion of Storms. Such a route would ordinarily only be undertaken by the mad or suicidal. The volume is riven with warp disturbances, currents, and anomalies of exceptional ferocity and unpredictability. That the fleet's passage was even possible at all is entirely due to paranormal interferences and patronage. Even still, the records of the Chronicle of Ash attest that the journey was fractious. Angron and his legion, growing weary of the lack of victims for their bloodthirst, wasted excessive time hunting for worlds to prey upon. Lorgar and his brother almost came to blows on more than one occasion as the Urizen sought to keep Angron on target, only to be saved by an attack mounted upon the Armada by Eldari ships in the depths of the Xersinia Prohibited Zone. In a stark and unexpected boon, the Chronicle of Ash penned it as a gift from the Dark Pantheon, for Lorgar was gifted with prophecy by an Eldari seer, albeit unwillingly, concerning the fate of Angron and Aurelian's own part within it. That, however, is a dark and terrible tale for another record altogether. By 007, M31, the borders of the Xersinia Prohibited Zone had been reached by the ships of the Shadow Crusade. The volume, the nominal border of the Dominion of Storms and Ultramarian Space, presided over by Calf herself, was an ideal staging ground. A quarantine zone enacted during the Great Crusade by the Titan Legio Tempestus, Xersinia was a plague region. An ancient and utterly lethal Xenos pathogen had been inflicted upon the Crusade fleet that had attempted to purge Eldari maiden worlds therein, capable, seemingly, of circumventing void shields and atmospheric locks. No ship was permitted access, under penalty of destruction by Ultramarian picket fleets that regularly patrolled the border. Lurking within, the traitor fleet avoided detection utterly, but simply absolutely no one was looking for them. Dates here are uncertain. It is quite likely that the fleet emerged fairly staggered, as even by a passage sped by patrons unnatural, no armada of this size could maintain coherency of formation for that long a journey, making a period of consolidation quite necessary. As a greater fleet reassembled, river flotillas were doubtless dispatched into Ultramar border regions. A sudden upsurge in missing ships at this point in history, logged as disappearances, chalked up to warp anomalies, have been revised historically as victims of the Shadow Crusade. Some recovered logs even attest to navigators being lured off course by false beacons, assumed now to have been Wordbearer's warp craft meant to usurp the etheric site of these mutants and trap imperial ships to their doom. Those captured were utilized for intelligence gathering. Their bridge crews, mined broken by Wordbearer diabolists, the traitors extracting as much as they could about the status of Ultramar's shipping patrols and Calt's defenses. Well aware that by now, even with Gilliman delayed, the muster would be well underway. The information was vital to shoring up the traitors' plans for the system. While the defenses of the world and of Ultramar itself were no secret to the legions, them still being counted as brothers in arms, no legion would ever fully divulge its entire strength, especially after the burning of Prospero. Calth, of course, was not the only target. With hundreds of captive captains shorn of all intelligence they could render, the Shadow Crusade began to subdivide. The two furious Abyss class ships, Trusagian and Blessed Lady, formed up with the Fidelitas Lex and the Conqueror to make the core of one of the main thrusts, set against the war world of Armature, the most fortified planet in the entirety of the 500 worlds after McCrag itself. The hub of the region's military might, Armature was the center of the Ultramarine and Exertus Imperialis mustering and training, making its destruction as central to the entire traitor agenda. Lorgar and Angron themselves would see to this. Calth was left in the hands of Erebus and Core Phaeron, first chaplain and first captain of the word bearers respectively, bleeding the majority of the word bearers fleet with all of its Gloriana class ships. A hundred small flotillas were dispatched across all compass points, formed of the pack hunters of the world eaters and what remaining destroyers and barks could be spared from the word bearers. All with the intent to winnow and bleed whatever Ultramarine or Navus Imperialis ships they encountered and inflict as much infrastructural and population destruction as they could. There would be in all cases absolutely no attempt made to capture territory, nor even any efforts to strike at strategic targets. Calth and Armature were the only ones of note and the only ones in play. The Shadow Crusade was unconcerned with worlds like Conor, Eax, Gantz or Espandor. Not when there were hundreds more agri-worlds industrial centers and fledgling colonies with nothing in the way of defenses for them to glut themselves upon. Its first and foremost aim was death, bloodshed and terror. Every cruelty, every crime, every ounce of malice must be committed upon the civilians of the 500 worlds with as much psychopathic creativity as could be mustered by those enacting it. The suffering of Ultramar's people was the aim. Fuel for Lorgar's sorcerous schemes and vengeance for a legion still holding in their hearts the shame of Menarchia. As a fleet separated to bring about their murderous rampages, Erebus aboard the Destiny's Hand and Corferon aboard his own capital ship still broadcasting her old ident tags of rapturous wrecks made wake for the muster at Calth. The betrayal would soon begin in earnest and it would do so with but a single ship. Before that tale can be committed to record, one feels that it is time that these legions involved will be explored in their totality. Until such a time as I may render those records to this archival stack, Ave Imperator. Gloria, Minix Celsus, Terra. Otherwise please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback and as ever thank you very much for watching.