 Not until the darkest days of the Siege of Terra did a planetary invasion of a sole geographic region rival the force that plummeted towards Istvan 5. Its passage tore the atmosphere of the planet like a skin. Over a dozen battleships and heavy cruisers spoke with the fury of drop pods and gunships, and as landing craft powered downwards, the batteries of the fleet spoke. No sustained orbital bombardment, this, the concept having already been dismissed by Ferris Manus as unnecessary and wasteful of time. This punishing fuselage was designed to tear through as much of the traitors as it could in the time it took for a drop pod to fall from orbit to ground. The Urgal Depression became a sea of light and fire, as the screaming air spoke of a lance beam scouring the ash wastes. The fortresses of the traitors were partially void shielded, barely enduring the sky-spoken cannonade. But beyond them, mobile orbital defense batteries, those that had previously thrown an impotent bombardment of their own at the arriving fleet were annihilated, their macro munitions torching off and sending mushroom clouds pluming into the tortured air. The orbital strike's true purpose succeeded impeccably. It covered the planetfall of the Loyalists. Occupied in seeking cover from the punishment of the retribution fleet, the traitors were capable of mounting nothing in the way of air defenses as thousands of drop pods smashed into the black sands of Istvan 5. In the center of this steel rain, cold fury marking his every movement, was Ferris Manus himself. Apocryphally, his were the first Loyalist boots on the black volcanic soil, thundering out of an iron hands drop pod with the rage of an Imperium spurned. Petty fire now took up the tempo from traitor positions, the sheer power of the orbital strikes having blinded and shaken even Astartes physiology, but was now wearing off. Such was the deluge of Loyalist steel plunging planetside that their batteries could not possibly miss, but for each drop pod plucked in fire from the skies a dozen more threw up impact craters in the Ergal depression. The killing began immediately. There was no need for anything even approaching Parley. Loyalist Astartes came out of their drop pods firing. Traitor Astartes rose from their trenches, firing. The precision of the Gorgon's attack vectors had placed the bulk of the forward assault right at the edge of the fortress's shield overlays. It was little in the way of No Man's land for Loyalists to cover before they were blade to blade with their former kin. The battle began as it would continue, as savage and pitiless as anything the Great Crusade had ever accomplished. An Astartes is a weapon built for a lentless conquest and extermination. Whereas for 200 years they had been committing unspeakable atrocities on Xenos empires and deviant human polities, the raw, genhanced power was now, as it had been on East Van 3, pitted against each other. Bolters fired at point blank range shattered Ceramite armor. Lady I plunged into bodies with a force that would have turned an unaugmented human into pulp. Chain swords tore at limbs and armor joints, teeth splintering and flying like shrapnel. Esoteric weaponry reduced transhuman behemoths to ash and slag. Hundreds died in minutes, the hammer of the Loyalists upon the anvil of the traitors, but the shock assault had achieved what it had intended to. Behind the lines drawn up more and more drop pods arrived, heralding the arrival of the bulk of the Salamanders and Ravenguard legions, with the bulkier fliers bearing heavier armor and artillery pieces right behind them. Full engagement took less than an hour. The Loyalists were advancing on the fortification walls, weapons fire pouring down from battlements, dugouts, pill boxes and gun nests. Super heavy tanks dueled or devastated infantry formations, and on the traitor side the legions herded forward Imperial Army regiments loyal to the war master to serve as human shields, to almost negligible effect. On the left flank of the battle the Salamanders were forced into trench by trench combat with the 14th Legion Deathguard. The combat zone was turned into a sea of flames, the fire of the Salamanders weaponry being answered in kind by the alchemic conflagrations of the Sons of Mortarian. Upon the right flank Corvus Corax and his Ravenguard dueled with companies of the Sons of Horus. The area was a maze of rock scree ravines and maces, where the crumbling faces of the valley blended with the sands of the Depression itself. The 16th Legion had turned it into a killing field packed with razor wire and hastily assembled ambush dugouts, turning the battle with their cousins into a blizzard of hit-and-run attacks and counter maneuvers, almost anarchic in its fury and rapidity. Finally, the center was held by the rage of Ferris Manus and his Avernii clan, the Terminator armored elite of his 10th Legion. Over 1,000 of the clan were present from the outset, as well as six whole maniples of the Iron Hand's battle automata. The Primarch was a hurricane of violence. Traitors not crushed by his hammer were torn apart bodily by his liquid metal hands. The Emperor's children and Sons of Horus that faced him could only mount momentary resistance before perishing. The Gorgon simply swept them aside. The embodiment of the storm his 10th Legion had once been named for. It was, by what records could be obtained from Iron Hand survivors, upon this front line that Ferris Manus became the first loyalist in the invasion to witness the beginnings of the horrors wrought upon the legions that allied themselves to Horus. Amongst the Emperor's children ranks, it was suddenly palpable that significant changes had been wrought upon the sons of the Phoenician. Many of the Legion's elite now bedecked their armor with what appeared to be flayed human skin. Their once perfect Ceramite defaced with strange symbols or riotous colors not part of their typical panoply. Stranger and more horrid still were stardes whose unhelmed visages appeared swollen, augmented beyond anything remotely human. These twisted individuals howled in registers, impossible even for an astartes, and did so in apparent ecstasy even as they were shredded by bolt of fire or hacked apart by the weapons of the Iron Hands. Many of them bore esoteric sonic weaponry capable of penetrating even the tactical dreadnought armor worn by the Avernii. Manus crushed them as he did all others that stood before him. Even these debased once loyal unable to stay his wrath. The toll being reaped amongst the Iron Hands was becoming more apparent now as the sons of the Gorgon attempted to keep up with their nearly rage-blind Primarch. That being said, the lives that the Clan had sold were being well spent. The massive lie in the Iron Hands had pushed forward was being followed through by the Legion's formidable armor corps, and its mobile artillery was picking up their affrain previously handled by orbital weaponry. Legion whirlwinds and basilisks poured rocket and shell fire onto traitor lines, denying the astartes manning the battlements easy return fire as they were relentlessly pounded from afar. Super heavy tanks and support vehicles poured fire on the massive looming figures lurking behind the lines. The Imperator-class Titan, D.S. Irei, one of the most powerful god engines of the Legio Mortis. The Titan had reaped a heavy toll upon the Loyalists during the opening hour of the battle. Its void shield impregnable, its weapons capable of reaching even the armor drop zones behind Loyalist lines. Now, finally, the volume of fire it was taking was increasing rapidly, wavering its precious void bubble and claiming the life of one of its warhound Titan escorts. Such was the degree of punishment Loyalist armor placed upon it, but D.S. Irei was simply forced to retreat into the alien fortifications, cycling its void generators to permit them a sole recharge. The momentum the Loyalist forces had accrued demanded a response, coming in the form of a traitor counter assault led, finally, by the treacherous Primarchs of Horus's legions. At the fore, a cyclone of slaughter, Angron, twelfth Primarch, world eaters. Whereas before the Ironhands line had been resolutely implacable, the Red Angel hit it like a meteor sundering a planet. The wedge-driven forcing open a gulf between the Tenth Legion and the Ravenguard. Before the Primarch and his world eaters turned in upon the latter's flank in a slaughter that somehow managed to eclipse all that had yet taken place in the battle. Elsewhere, his brother Mortarion's arrival was heralded by the blanketing of salamander forward elements with a poisonous fog of stunning lethality, a noxious miasma that exploited even the tiniest crack in a legionary's power armor to scald the body within into a dissolving slurry. Only by the efforts of the 18th Legion's fire-drake terminators was the Deathlord's fury stalled, but at a terrible cost to their numbers. First Captain Abaddon of the Sons of Horus likewise now appeared, at the vanguard of the just-air and first company elites, plunging into the Loyalists with the savagery of the Cthonian mine gangs. The only response currently possible for the Loyalists was an increase in attack runs made by their Legion Flyers, freed now from the role of orbital transporters. These sallies were often nearly suicidal, plunging in under traitor air defense flak to target their super-heavy armor or heavy weaponry squads, even be it at the cost of their machines and the lives of the pilots. By 2.2 Terran hours sidereal time, the battle had devolved into a horrendously bloody stalemate. With the entirety of Astarty's forces committed, the Loyalists had now managed to land the bulk of their Imperial Army auxiliaries, although these troops were encountering severe difficulties in bringing what they could to bear upon the foe. The black sands before the drop site rechoked mass of power-armored corpses and the wreckage of Legion vehicles, constraining the movement of Imperial Armor across the already tight Orgal depression. Worth still for the unaugmented auxilia, terror squads from the traitor legions had infiltrated their landing zones, sowing discord and horror with near impunity. Whatever the experience and veterancy of the troops Manus had seconded to the execution fleet, they were mere baseline humans pitted against traitor Astarty's genetic ferocity. Wherever these terror troops encountered Imperial Army regiments, little existed but wanton butchery. Just over two hours beyond planetfall, an Istvan 5 had already seen the deaths of tens of thousands of Astartys, on both sides of the conflict, and yet tens of thousands more still fought on at a pace that had not slowed one Iota. Where ammunition had run dry and supplies rendered impossible, both sides fought with the weapons of the dead, scavenging what they could until they were resorting to ceramite clad fists and basic enhanced physiology. The last of the Loyalist reinforcements from Manus' fleet were finally permitted to land, a massive red bark bearing the cog symbols of the Mechanicum of Mars, and the flaming sword of the Firebrands. A battle-manable of the Ligio Artaris. In response, Imperial Ospexes detected massive heat blooms that had previously slumbered. Knowing their former kin would almost certainly be part of the Emperor's retribution, the Titans of the Ligio Mortis had waited until this moment to rise. It was immediately apparent to the Firebrands, and their attached Mechanicum Tagmata, that they were woefully outclassed by the dead's heads. The Loyalists possessed only two Reavers and three Warhounds, ranged against a Warlord, Twin Reavers, and a Nightcaught mainline Titans, with two Warhound Scouts. DS E. Ray was still cycling her reactors and shield generators, but even without the Imperator, Ataris was on the back foot, as soon as its Titans disembarked. Odds of survival were calculated at a mere 13% by Mechanicum adepts. These were transmitted to Ferris Manus who ordered the attack, regardless. Mortis was to be brought to Imperial Justice just as the traitor legions were, and Ataris would merely have to inflict what they could upon the dead's heads. This they needed little in the way of encouragement to do. The Firebrands had long borne a furious hatred for the Ligio Mortis, and plunged towards the traitor Titans, heedless of the cost to their own engines. The Suicidal Charge was catatlysmic to behold, and achieved in its heedlessness all that Ataris could have hoped for. The lead Reaver, Red Naga, closed the distance between herself and Mortis' Warlord Breath of Thunder, the Ataris engine's power fist shattering the Warlord's head cockpit and killing its entire crew. Punitive Fire from its Warder engines breached the Naga's reactor core, however, with the ensuing explosion claiming dozens of traitor tanks in recompense for its demise. Approximately 2.8 Terran hours. The sheer weight of death and destruction was finally having a toll upon the pace of the battle. As much as 40% of the dispositions of all combatants three hours ago had now perished or been destroyed. Loyalist heavy artillery and armor had kept up their punishing salvos on the traitor lines unremittingly, forcing the withdrawal of Mortarian and Angron. But the sheer tempo of the assault had drained the ammunition and weapon reserves of the Ravenguard and the Salamanders, enforcing a series of regrouping actions as Vulcan and Korak sought to take advantage of the relative lull in fighting. Ferris Manus, however, continued his wrathful advance, unwilling to surrender an inch of ground or a scintilla of pace to his enemies. Tactics were at this point meaningless. Orders of battle dissolved into Ersatz's reactions to impossible situational exigencies. How, though, could anything resembling strategy survive contact with the reality of what had been unleashed? Powers that had a mere centuries earlier been enough to conquer half a galaxy had been unleashed over a couple of hundred square kilometers in the space of three Terran hours. They had achieved nothing except slaughter undreamed and destruction untrammeled. Ground had been taken but the traitor's walls still held. Loyalists had been bloodied but were still unbowed. Titans had clashed but neither side had achieved anything of note. The demigod Primarchs had torn bloody chunks out of their brother's legions but had not clashed themselves. Horus and Fulgrim, indeed, had seemingly not even deigned to enter the Frey personally. Their absences as inexplicable as they were notable. The future of the battle was perched upon a precipice. Not had been truly won and neither side could claim to have the upper hand just yet. But as Ferris Manus and his iron hands continued inflicting the chill ferocity of Medusa upon their enemies, a cry went up amongst the Avernii clan. Dropships. Reinforcements. Salvation. Justice. Retribution. All in the form of the four promised legions. They had come at 3.4 hours post initial planet fall. Thousands more orbital landards streamed from the heavens towards the Orgal depression. Touching down at the initial drop site of the Retributory Vanguard and in several key locations surrounding the valley. The Alpha Legion streamed towards the left flank, while the word bearers took up the right. Divisions from the Night Lords reinforced both their cousins, as well as seeding squads and drop pods amongst forward iron hands positions. The Iron Warriors landed massive orbital craft amongst the rearmost echelons, per their standard tactics. The custom craft of the 4th Legion entrenching themselves and acting as loci for prefabricated fortifications and artillery emplacements. It was as if a mirror to the traitors own castellum was suddenly appearing, a citadel in opposition to Horace's own, but built with frightening speed. At the mouth of the valley, its armored cheats and walls were expanding ever outwards. More and more reinforcements poured from orbit, tertiary drop sites being created with every minute as four whole legions now joined the battle. Korax and Vulcan immediately hailed Ferris Manus on the Vox networks, suggesting immediate retreat from their respective front lines. Never the largest of the legions, the 18th and the 19th had suffered vicious casualties in the fighting, the Ravenguard at the hands of the world eaters and sons of Horace, the Salamanders to the weaponry of the Deathguard. The Gorgon would hear naught of the concept. Unthinkable to him was retreat, not now, not with renewed strength that was to be had from recently arrived allies, but the accounts of survivors. It is at this juncture that Fulgrim emerged before the lines of the Iron Hands, the Phoenician taunting the Lord of the 10th Legion, bating him attack and reap in vengeance what his honor demanded. The response was immediate. Ferris Manus broke from his own ranks, oblivious to all but the sight of his erstwhile brother, fury blind, blood mad, berserk from the pain of betrayal. The laughter of Fulgrim was said to have rung around the Urgal depression with the clarity impossible. The primarch of the third, artfully trading blows with the meteoric attacks of the Gorgon in a duel unlike anything the galaxy had ever beheld. As the first elements of the retreating Ravenguard and Salamanders approached the new drop sites of the reinforcing legions, hails were sounded over interleagent vox channels. Thanks were given for sorely needed reprieve. They were calls of welcome, of gratitude, of fraternal relief in a world turned upside down. They were ignorant. They did not know. They could not possibly have known. A flare brighter than the sun in the ash choked skies. Shot skyward from the warmasters lines. As red as blood spilled. And then treachery. It was the word bearers that opened fire first. The first traitors, although such a thing would only be revealed in the years of pain and death that were to follow. The legion of Lorgar had waited for this moment with a religious fervor. Their act of purest malignant betrayal, one of, they believed, cosmic significance. Worship upon the altar of duplicity and deceit. The Ravenguard who had approached their lines had barely a chance to register what was occurring before being scythed down by hundreds of legionary bolters. The remaining traitors did not waste any time. The guns of the iron warriors opened up, launching an artillery barrage that blanketed the entire Urgal depression in death. The Alpha Legion and the Night Lords unsheathed daggers and plunged them into loyalist necks. The bloodshed was immediate. It was total. It was abominable. The loyalists took fire at point blank range. There was no cover. There was no defense. None was believed needed. A startys that had survived three hours of the most hellish combat in the history of the Imperium simply dropped dead. Broken in body and in mind. Flesh detonated by the bolts of the traitor legions. The gunships of the Night Lords sowed phosphax munitions amongst those that had survived the initial salvos. Blanketing, retreating loyalists in the fire that would not die. The crawling death. In the rearward lines, the Alpha Legion struck apothecarian stations in overwhelming force, slaughtering the wounded and those that sought to tend them, before turning its coils towards the Imperial Army. Never being one to strike unless from a position of overwhelming superiority, the harrowing of the 20th Legion was slaughter at its most base. Nothing able to halt the Hydra's rampage. The world collapsed. All was betrayal. All was massacre. Apocalyptic, vicious, sadistic. Impossible, but so terribly real. Amidst this, Ferris Manus and Fulgrim yet fought. The Phoenician's laughter had risen to a hysterical torrent at the moment of treason. His taunts to his brother now carrying the poison of what was happening all across the battlefield. It is impossible to know if this could have deepened Manus's rage yet further. The propensity for fury had been with him all his life. The chilling collar present in his soul, only tempered by his equally frosty reason. He was at this point seemingly drowning in anger. The mental conditioning of his creation, broken utterly, are the pain of losing his most treasured brother to apparent madness. The blows traded by the Primarchs were thunderclaps, producing sonic waves that broke earth and shattered even Astarty's eardrums. Each scored the body of the other with a dozen wounds that would have killed any being lesser than they. Fulgrim with his sword, Fireblade, Manus with the hammer, Forge Breaker. The brothers were as unalike as any two within the Emperor's progeny, yet they had forged a kinship closer than almost any other pairing. Neither would yield, neither could yield. The world around them burned and broke. The iron hands desperately fighting to reach their Primarch were overwhelmed. Broken into tiny pockets of resistance by the Emperor's children, the Sons of Horus and the World Eaters freed as these legions now were by the arrival of the newly revealed traitor armies. Yet on the Primarchs fought, and from this point history is a blur of myth and legend. None of Manus's Avernii escorts survived to tell of what had occurred. Blasphemously, the only sources that we have upon the incident were torn from the minds of captured traitors, or whispered throughout the years in the way that all such tales of pivotal events inevitably evolve. The most common telling states that the Gorgon finally landed a near perfect blow upon his brother, casting the Fiannician to the Black Sands and tossing Fireblade from his grip. Laid low, Fulgrim was no longer possessed of laughter, but now with a toxic viciousness. He unsheathed a blade he had claimed once long ago from the Xenos Lair. Loyalist psychic sensitives reported towards the end of a battle a spike in etheric energy somewhere in the Orgolic Depression. Scholars have posited this weapon. This event was its source, although they are only capable of making this assertion, given all that had transpired. With the cursed sword, Fulgrim, third son of the Emperor, beheaded Ferris Manus, claiming the life of his brother. The first amongst Kinslayers, and far from the last, darker powers awakened now as the symphony of violence reached greater and greater heights. Amongst the word-bearers, the so-called Galvorback, the Blessed Sons, began to reveal themselves as blood sprayed and bodies were torn. These were the twins sold, the possessed, first of the traitor legions to sell their selves to the never-born creatures of the Dark Gods in exchange for worldly power. Revealed to their loyalist foes at last, the Galvorback were even more monstrous than the debased Emperor's children. Their bodies mutating visibly into bestial, warped war forms. Hidious jaws and protruding claws formed from the melding of ceramite and flesh through pure demonic power. Observing his sons, observing the slaughter, was Lorgar himself. The thrice-cursed arch-traitor was recorded at having wept at the bloodshed, whispering to himself that these were once his kin. If this was grief, if this was guilt, if this was religious rapture, it is impossible to know for the mind of so debased a being as the Yurizen is unknowable to any. His reverie was however broken, but the darkening of the skies with pinions of sable, arriving like a lightning bolt, a blur of gray black armor slammed into the 17th Primarch faster than even Astartes physiology could track. Korax, half mad with sorrow and fury, tore through the Galvorback, slaughtering the demon things and forcing Lorgar to act. Despite the supposed tumult in the Primarch's soul, despite his distinct lack of physical or combat prowess, Lorgar Aurelian hurled himself at Korax, swinging his crosious mace. Korax dodged every single attack with ease, screaming profanities at his brother, demanding to know the cause of this madness, swearing, death eternal upon the betrayers. His overpowering of Lorgar was a relatively simple affair for the Raven Lord. The Yurizen was no warrior, and Korax was one of the Imperium's finest. One of the Primarch's great talons speared into the 17th Sun's belly, just as its twin was about to reach for the beheading, Lorgar's salvation arrived from a wholly unexpected turn. Conrad Curse, the Night Haunter, Grimm Primarch of the Eighth Legion Night Lords, had intervened, had deigned to intervene. The Raven Lord, unwilling to fight a second of his brothers, having just overcome a first, retreated, his true objective having ever been to buy time for the evacuation of his sons. Curse is reported to have expressed his extreme disgust for Lorgar, before returning to reveling in slaughter. Ferris Manus lay dead. His head torn from his demigod body. Korax's face would slip from the pages of history for some time, following his confrontation with Lorgar. The remaining loyalist Primarch, Vulcan, was at this point last seen by his salamanders holding a desperate rear guard alone against an impossible number of traitors, until a volley of atomic fire consumed him. It is difficult to tell when the battle ended there, in the Urgal Depression. For once the revealed traitors had opened fire, it no longer deserved the name. It was now, as it would ever be known, the Dropsite Massacre. An act of breathtaking brutality unrivaled in its duplicity and inhumanity in the annals of history. Pockets of resistance were surrounded and eviscerated, winnowed, bled. Survivors fleeing a fighting retreat for what drop ships remained operational, reaped what tolls they could from their betrayers, before gunning engines for orbit. But this was no recompense. Nothing could come close. By all accounts, the Alpha Legion were the first to withdraw from active combat operations. Removing themselves from the valley so as not to spend any more lives in an already one battle. And to avoid frothing bans of world eaters that were as much a danger to friend as they were to foe. When the guns of the Iron Warriors stopped firing, the only truly active Astartes left belonged to the most sadistic and twisted of the Emperor's children, sons of Horus, and Night Lords, gleefully taking bloody trophies from the shattered remains of the fallen loyal. In orbit, the war lasted for several more hours than it did on the ground. The ships of the Loyalists had been fully shielded at the moment of the trail, and were thus far less easy prey for the traitors than the Astartes' planet side. Many remained stubbornly in geosynchronicity with the drop site, receiving in their holds any and all gunships and landers that made it to safety, forced to retreat only when they had sustained damage that threatened their warp engines, or when the outer system all speck sweeps detected the immaterial wakes of the approaching fleets of the original traitor legions. Of these ships and their sundry fates, history had yet to dictate. Many made it out system, but with conveyance bays painfully, dreadfully empty. The drop site massacre thus concluded, not with a howl of victory, but with the type of silence that can only fall when those that had filled it have simply perished. Punctuated only by the screaming of baseline humans being flayed alive by the Night Lords, the odd explosion of burning ammunition reserves, the rage-filled impotency of mortally wounded with still alive Loyalists. The Urgal Depression was a choked mass of wreckage and bodies. Initial death toll estimates, laterally revised by historians, placed the tally at nearly 200,000 Astartes alone, but numbers of unaugmented troops genuinely unaccountable. One Primarch lay dead, two more were missing and presumed so. While the losses of the Loyalist legions were not total, their efficacy as combat operative legions was essentially ended. None had gathered in their totality. Such a thing was impossible at this point in the Great Crusade, given the deployment of the legion as Astartes to all corners of the galaxy. But the iron hands, the salamanders and the Ravenguard, had been mortally wounded by the massacre. Bands of survivors, having fled out system or into the ravines and canyons surrounding the Urgal Depression, would of course go on to lead storied histories throughout the coming years. Many would reap fearsome tallies from the traitors in revenge, but it is not for nothing that these warbands are collectively known as the Shattered Legions. The iron hands in particular fared especially poorly. The first Astartes legion in recorded history to witness and suffer the death of their Primarch, they were, bluntly, mentally incapable of processing the trauma this loss inflicted. This would express itself in many forms, suicidal rage in some, complete detachment in others, rampant, endless nihilism in yet more. Shattered is the only word applicable to their Astartes-meaned psychology. They were weapons in the forms of men, retaining some of their programming, but unable to reconcile the reality they now occupied. The roles these loyalist legions would later play in the heresy. All of their tales will be discussed in later records. But it is without a doubt that their part in the greater conflict ended before it had even begun. The Dropsite Massacre is one of the darkest acts of the traitor Horace Lupacal, an enduring cancer upon the history of the galaxy. Yet it was, in so many ways, a mere prelude of what was to come. The great crusade was finished. Now had begun the age of darkness, Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. Very kind donations and support from my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to Patreon.com slash Oculus Imperial. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at Oculus Imperial. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.