 Local reality in Tizca was now an open wound, a rent in space-time from whence the powers of the warp spewed and festered, worming their eldritch tendrils into the fabric of creation to pervert and corrupt. Linear chronology ceased to function in any meaningful capacity. All chronometric marks from this point on are useless, as two timepieces held side-by-side would record completely conflicting time streams. From the ships of the Sancir host still in orbit, it appeared for all the world that the city of light had been swallowed by a roiling contusion on the face of the planet, a sickly haze of clouds the color of things that simply should not be. All within this pocket of nightmares appeared from without to be hazy, incoherent, almost dreamlike in aspect, and any who entered were either not seen from again or emerged with hours or seemingly days having passed in the minutes since they departed. No reports can be trusted entirely, if any could have even been made. All communication, be it mundane or arcane, from within or without had been completely severed. Logisticans and stratagoi positioned above in the void were helpless, sundered from all contact with the senior commanders of the host and unable to even assess the progress that was being made. Their astro-pats were all screaming, or at least those from whom the shock of the Wharf rifts emergence had not proved to be their doom. Many officers assumed that this was some sort of doomsday weapon unleashed by the 15th Legion, the final spite of Magnus the Red in the face of Imperial Sancir, however they had all watched from afar the sheer fury with which the Thousand Sons had met the wolves and the talons of the Emperor with. All that could be done, however, was to log timestamps and await any word from the Wolf King or the Captain General. None would countenance their deaths. For the Lord of the Custodes to fall was unthinkable enough, but that a Primarch should die. Such a thing was surely impossible, although it seemed that the impossible was becoming ever more dreadfully possible upon the damned world of Prospero. A large part of Tizca was, albeit difficult to ascertain from orbit, not affected by the Warp Storm, only obscured from the void by its visual and awe-specs interference. What Imperial elements remained in infrequent contact with the vessels above were issued perfunctory orders to continue with their previously assigned missions, and were assured, albeit with little confidence, that the Sancir host was still very much in control of the situation. Whether these instructions were followed or not depended entirely on the ears of those they reached. The Black Cull, for instance, did not precisely heed the words of the orbiting stratagoi, but followed their previous mission out of sheer, bloody-minded battle lust, continuing the sack of the temple-archology of the Raptora Cult, bathing the Pyramid and its surrounding areas in torrents of phosphics. The Twelfth Great Company, however, seemingly disregarded their orders and immediately plunged into the storm to seek their Primarch. The Sons of Horus continued with their purgation operation completely unopposed, either by the forces of the host or the Thousand Sons. At the Valparine Bastion, the resistance of the Thousand Sons had collapsed after the change wave triggered by failed Toron had hit. The Magisters within the Bastion were now having to fight there once brethren, those changed in flesh, as much as any Imperial elements without. The Carinid Sentinels and the Wolves both, seeing their opening, renewed their barrages, now unmitigated by the Kinney Shields of the Thousand Sons. They reduced what remained of the Bastion to dust in short order, burying the raging Fifteenth Legion Astartes beneath hundreds of tons of ferrocrete-reinforced marble. As resistance from the Thousand Sons' pockets yet without from the storm crumbled, the Sixth Legion elements within mechanized transports, as well as the swift-moving Custodes grav tanks and jet bikes, sought to run down whatever Magisters they could find, to free up all possible censure-host forces that they may surround the Warp Rift, or even enter it, and lend aid to their Captain General and the Wolf King. Before one relates what will no doubt be the climax of this most terrible of Chronicles, one must elaborate on the means of tracking precisely what occurred within the storm. In point of fact, I cannot use the word precisely. For such a thing simply cannot apply to such an event. All that we are able to establish has been reconstituted from as many sources as are available, but all are fallible in the extreme, especially when faced with the sheer power of the Immaterium in the manner seen upon Prospero. One need not remind Acolytes of the unreliability of personal accounts, either from those who had vested interests in representing a certain perspective, such as the Wolves, or those for whom certain concepts simply do not enter into the framework of their constructed thoughts, such as the Legio Custodes. Just yet, there are translation errors, such as the inherent difficulty in rendering silent sisterhood thought-mark into high or low Gothic. Beyond that, Vox's screeds are almost incomprehensible, even those logged in high-gain field apparatuses carried by certain legionaries. What has been recovered often contains cascades of static, fragmentary orders, in some cases orders that were only issued hours after their transmission had been recorded, and in a lot of cases, screaming. Screaming that is disturbing the human, and at the same time, not. Orbital tracking of the battle, as mentioned, was either conducted visually or by all specs pings of ident tags, but was completely futile. All sensorium data, where it could even be logged, made utterly no sense at any given time. Even neurocortical interrogations of captured prisoners, or volunteers from the censure host itself, only ever revealed glimpses, and often ones that directly contradicted all other information I have previously mentioned, or even each other. There are independently verifiable accounts from many sources that speak of heroic battlefield actions performed by warriors that had previously perished earlier in the conflict, or accounts that assure that certain individuals had perished, despite it being beyond doubt that they survived this final stage of the battle. Insummation. All is confusion. This truly was the impossible battle. All the facts surrounding it defy all attempts at logic, for such is the nature of the immaterium. It undermines the means by which reality itself functions. What hope do we have of sanely structuring accounts of anything that is involved with it? What threads I, your humblest servant, have managed to weave together here is merely because I stand upon the shoulders of greater individuals who have come before me and are now past. What work you will hear may contradict what you have previously known. I can only say that this work is done with the best of scholarly attention and ability, and represents all a humble chronicler may do in the face of the terror of this lunatic universe. At best estimates, the vortex caused by the death of the warlord Canis Vertex and its erstwhile master, Calophis, had swallowed the core of the censor host, containing the Primarch Leman Rus at the head of some 12,000 of his wolves, Constantine Valdor and around 400 custodians, and approximately 1,500 null maidens of the Silent Sisterhood, as well as two cohorts of the Tyrion Exo Guard Auxilia Regiment. Ranged against them were some 7,000 of the Thousand Sons, as well as Spire Guard divisions of disparate size. The 15th Legion was now commanded in its near entirety by 3rd Fellowship Captain Hathor Mott and 1st Librarian Azhik Ariman, all of whom had fallen back to a new defence cordon set between the archaeologies of the Athenean and Pavani cults. The greatest concentration of these forces was around the Pyramid of Photep, to which thousands of civilians and routed Spire Guard still sought to retreat as the final bastion available to them. The establishment of this cordon had largely been aided in the chaos that was caused by the emergence of the Vortex, as well as the appearance of seemingly thousands of mutates within the reaches of the city. All of this, however, merely slowed the advance of the censor host. It did not stymie it. The 6th Legion had faced down the worst horrors of the galaxy in their two centuries of campaigning, and the Geno-engineered Ligio Custodes were literally constructed to pay such things no heed. Russ and Valdor knew that momentum could not be spent. Both constituted whatever forces they could under their direct command, in the face of total communications blackouts, knowing that all other elements were moving to the same objective they were. Naturally, many censor host units were simply unable to link up with the main bodies of Russ and Valdor. Some were lost to the unnatural eddies of reality that the Vortex tossed around like churning water, cursed to wander aimlessly through fractally repeating ruins until the warped squall blew out. Others were yet engaged with disparate units of thousand sons, forced to fight vicious, unrecorded miniature wars as creation was cracking around them. Some records noted, larger bodies of troops caught in the eddies were often forced to fight the remnants of these petty wars, for such was the fury of some engagements that those who survived it found it impossible to ward off the coming of the flesh change. Many hundreds, indeed likely thousands, were debased creatures roamed the ruins of Warpachote Tizca, horrifying amalgams of tumourous flesh or feral beasts in the shapes of wolves. Their origins are known, no longer mattering. The one aspect that slowed the censor host advance was the wariness of what psychic assaults they may face once they threw themselves at the thousand sons once more. Consequently, Russ and Valdor attempted where possible to organize their forces into columns, at the core of which stood cadres of silent sisters. Such maneuvering, under total lack of communications, was laborious in the extreme, granting the 15th Legion even more time to shore up what defenses they could around the Pyramid of Photeb. Such precision care was, for the host ultimately unnecessary. When the battle was joined, when the fury of the censor host was brought to the lines of the thousand sons, they were answered with entirely mundane bolter fire, as opposed to the eldritch howling of warp fire and arcane lightning. The 15th Legion seemed to be eschewing their powers, and one must only assume that the terror of the flesh change stayed their hands in that regard. Initially, it appeared that this final battle would be fought as of old, with bolter and a blade and raw transhuman rage, but as the heavy transports of the wolves crashed through their lines as the siege artillery of the host annihilated their readouts, many of the magistres of Prospero abandoned their restraint and their lives. Loosing the power of the warp through their bodies, their powers heightened now to undreamed of levels. They vent their hate upon the wolves, who, in perhaps predictable fashion, had abandoned their silent sisterhood protectors in a bloodthirsty rush to engage the foe. The thousand sons that did died, hacked to ruin by their once brothers, once their sentience had fled and their minds became as broken and corrupted as their bodies. Yet in these sacrifices time was bought and vengeance was reaped. Three times did the censor host throw itself at the lines of the thousand sons, and three times were such attacks repelled. Yet the numbers of the 15th Legion thinned with each assault, 7000 dwindling to 5000, the bodies of their fallen mixing with grey armoured woolen dead to form barricades of ceramite encased flesh, behind which the defenders prepared for yet another offensive. Cohesion was lost, units scattered, circles and fellowships mingling with no heed to any sort of formation. A scarab occult terminator would stand shoulder to shoulder with the 15th Legion line astarties, both covered by a spire-guard human with a heavy weapon, a grim equanimity found at the edge of oblivion. It was then, as the silence had fallen, as a breath was drawn before the plunge, that he came at last. The crimson king, Magnus the Red, had any words been exchanged between the brothers. One confined no accurate record of it. Genesha Kroll, knight-commander of the silent sisterhood, who witnessed the eventual conflict between primarchs, stated that Russ and Magnus did indeed speak, briefly, but as to what was said she knew not. Others who beheld the arrival of the crimson king disagreed with the soulless queen's account, stating that the two primarchs immediately flew into combat, with nothing but the wolf king's howl to announce it. This is just the beginning of the disparity between accounts of this confrontation. All appear to have been warped in some manner, both through the mythic aspect such a fight between demigod sons of the emperor will seemingly inevitably take on, and through the reality-shredding tempest that surrounded the pyramid of Photep. One focal point of agreement, however, is that the clash began with a howl of the purest rage from the heart of Liman-Rus. Beyond that we once again return to incoherency, although this is partly due to the sheer unparalleled speed at which primarchs are capable of engaging each other at. Of those present, it is likely only the Ligio Custodis, perhaps even only Constantine Valdor, who possessed any biological capacity to follow and process the sheer speed of their bodily movements. Liman-Ax met Silverblade with a fury that shattered sky and air. The cold rage of the lord of the rusts meeting the psycho-kinetic mastery of the crimson king. Nothing survived contact with their combat, not the architecture of Tizca, not the hulls of tanks, not the plate armor of Astartes. Any of the latter that somehow sought to intervene to aid their gene-father to protect them were simply annihilated before the combatants were even aware that an attempt had been made. The full force of Rus' martial skills were being levelled directly against every iota of Magnus' psychic might. Neither gave a hint of quarter, but even given all that was being brought to bear, to bring him low, even given the titanic capacity for etheric destruction made possible by two centuries of his brother's arcane learning. It is unlikely if there could ever have been any victor other than Liman-Rus. It is a general hypothesis that the Primarchs were built to fulfill a specific role that the Emperor had in mind. While Magnus' may only have been known to his father, Rus, perhaps more so than any of his brothers saved the lion and angron, was clearly a weapon designed for destruction. And the hell that had come to Prospero, in the etheric tempest that was tearing at the roots of all things, perhaps none but him could have so thrived. Though the Crimson King tore at his brother, wounding him on planes material and immaterial both, it was to Rus' that the final blow fell. Some related it as the plunging of his sword into Magnus' torso, but the prevailing account holds that the Wolf King bodily heaved his brother aloft and cast him down across a brutally armoured knee, sundering the back of Magnus the Red and defeating the Cyclops of Prospero utterly. At this moment, this instant played across a billion instances. It is related that a light suffused the entire pyramid of Photep, bringing illumination to an area that had until that moment appeared perched upon the precipice of a night eternal. It had no source, seemingly filling the air itself with an incandescence that was indescribable. Many presumed it a final trick of Magnus, but the sorcerer King appeared utterly unconscious, maybe even dead, and was in no state to be casting some form of esoteric incantation. If it could be said to emanate from anywhere, the sanctum of the Crimson King appeared the origin, but such identification proved impossible as the light reached a blinding intensity that forced all who beheld it to turn their eyes away, to dull armour auto-senses lest it burn their retinas in its brilliance. The storm, however, did not simply end, but now appeared to have a new locus. Howling winds began to form a vortex centred on the pyramid of Photep, tearing gales shearing away rubble and masonry and even toppling armoured tanks. Many relate that it was at this moment their Vox networks, previously silent or static, were invaded by a cacophonous choir of whispers, while others claim they heard not but booming wicked laughter. Yet others say that upon the winds was born the death howl of the world itself, the pain of a planet condemned to oblivion, and that cracks in the sky of creation began to rend themselves apart, ghostly fingers of things abominable intruding upon reality from the unknowable beyond. Shards of existence splintered, dimensions fracturing and inverting, slicing at minds and flesh as knives. To many it must have no doubt seemed that the Crimson King in his passing had broken the rules of all that was and is Chaos, but it would not last. The light snapped out of being, the storm bereft now of its locus faded, as if a flame had been put out, local reality reasserted itself. The bleeding of physical laws staunched. The Vox now exploded with frantic activity, ships in orbit and censor host formations across the city hailing their commanders with urgent requests for information. Those commanders, and those of the host yet alive within the former eye of the storm, surveyed the ruination around them. Of Magnus the Red, of his thousand sons, there was not a single sign. In the aftermath of this clash titanic, little was clear. Constantin Valdor immediately ordered a full sweep of the ruined Pyramid of Photep with all available resources, Imperial and Mechanicum both, to attempt to determine what had occurred. The area of the city had contained over 3,000 surviving thousand sons, and an approximate number of elite and veterans by our guard, Auxilia. There had also been as many as 10,000 civilians cowering in subterranean fiends and catacombs. In total, some 20,000 humans and transhumans had at one moment been present, and now simply were not. This was not merely that they were dead, there was literally no trace that they had existed in the first place. There were no bodies, no scraps of clothes or armor, nothing. Even weaponry capable of disintegrating a body in an instant, such as thermite armaments, could leave scorch marks. Radfages and viral cascades typically left an organic residue or slurry in their wake. Adepts of the attended Mechanicum Tagmata, well versed as they are in the arts of annihilation, as well as those of the Sixth Legion's Black Kull, were completely baffled, able to draw no conclusions as to what weapon or device the thousand sons or their Primarch had employed at the end of all things. Most conclusions that could be drawn at the time were only able to posit that the arcane was at play here, as it had been throughout those catatlysmic final hours. But as to how, nothing could be said with anything even remotely resembling confidence. At 1917, at local time, on the 734004M31, the censor host's ground forces succeeded in making contact with their ships in orbit. The ships' networks were re-establishing in the wake of the Warp Storm's passing, the ugly wound upon reality having disappeared along with the sorcerer king and his legion. Conflict, however, still continued in the devastation of Tizca. Not every thousand son had vanished. Isolated bands yet persisted, fighting hopeless retreats to some indeterminable, perhaps even imaginary, fallback location. Bands of mutates continued to attack all they encountered. While Russ gathered his wolves into hunter-seeker units, fresh reinforcements in the form of knights from House Malanax took to the field, the powerful war suits proving more than a match for the gibbering horror things that flung themselves at anything that moved. As many as 2,000 of the 15th legions still remained within the Argent Bastion at the eastern end of Tizca's walls, all that remained of the Eighth Fellowship, as well as a significant number of Psi Automata of the Castellex Achaomarch. The resistance lasted for maybe an hour after the fall of Magnus the Red, before they withdrew to the Bastion's lower reaches, affecting a hit-and-run retreat in face of a punitive offensive of Varragir Terminators and Ligio Custode's sodalities. Everything was only ended when a blank-eyed Leman Russ, operating it seemed on more rote than actual drive, took to the tunnels, butchering every single astartes he could find, with the dispassionate ease that would have been contemptuous if it had any emotion behind it whatsoever. From the records of some of the Custodians present, had the Wolf King been any other than a son of the Emperor, his behavior may have pointed to severe trauma. But of course, such a thing was not possible. Elsewhere, in the ruins of the Valparine Bastion, a division of Thousand Sons had emerged, having protected themselves from the Citadel's collapse through a superlative series of overlapping kinetic shields. Instead of bothering to engage any wolves or Custodes within the area, these astartes, now under the command of the line officer named Sul Contep, took to the Citadel's airfields to make flight-worthy whatever aircraft they could. When their presence was eventually discovered, and since your host forces dispatched to their location, the Magisters had managed to evacuate in their totality, packing what ships they could with civilians that remained alive within the area. Departing out over the Valparine Sea, they utilized the ash and steam clouds present to mask their exits. While some were taken down by Ligio Custode's equinox interceptors, great many disappeared from Imperial Aspects entirely. Sons of Horus Division of the host, having been entirely absent from the Vortex in Central Tizca, had now turned their operations to total purgation. Any who were not of the censor host were put to an unceremonious death. Their corpses left rot where they fell as green-armored astartes spread out through what remained of the city. In the Northern District, in the ruins of the Prosperine Air Guard's base of operations, the 16th Legion, and several knights of House Malinax, encountered survivors of the Spire Guard, and a significant quantity of civilians under the leadership of Seneshal Prime Lucretia Illuniri, who had been attempting to affect rescue operations as best she could manage as her world fell around her. During her rank would grant her some means of parlay, she voxed a demand to the commanders, Boros Kern of the Sons of Horus, and Anrak Hadratha of the Space Wolves' Black Cull. She demanded the proper treatment of civilians and non-combatants under the Lex Imperialis, and for the surrender of her soldiers once they had thrown down their arms. Boros Kern executed her personally, a single bolt around detonating the woman's skull like a ripe fruit, while Hadratha bathed the entire complex in phosphics, combining all within soldier-civilian-child to death by the fire that lives. The pitiless slaughter of every single civilian that remained within Tizca would continue for three days local time, including in its scope operations dispatched to investigate any potential thousand son's presence elsewhere upon the planet. What pockets at this point remained, usually handfuls of individuals, were treated to the same immediate butchery. At the time the sun sank along the smoke and ash choked skies of prosperous only city. Wolf King yet lived within its ruins, no plant, no animal, no human, no astartes, no mutant. Valdor at this point ordered the evacuation of sensor host forces, seeing no reason to remain, although Russ in typical fashion did not heed them. The Wolf King had resolved that his men would be the last to leave the planet. It was at this point, at the tail end of the evacuation, that the thousand sons that had fled across the Valparine Sea reemerged, making directly for the final Imperial transport arcs. Easily overwhelming the auxiliary present, and completely unbeknownst at this point to the wolves, the arcs made orbit, slipping past the Imperial ships in the prosperous skies, most of which had been dispersed into a second bombardment formation. Most destroyers dispatched to intercept annihilated one of the barks, but not before the remaining two killed all drive and power functions. Their signals now becoming lost in the orbital debris that had spread out from the remains of Prospero's wrecked, near-planetary void infrastructure. While sensor sweeps persisted for hours, no trace of the vessels could be found. It was eventually ruled that, as they lacked warp capabilities, those aboard would be rendered too helpless to affect anything of note, so they were simply presumed dead. Lehman Russ was the final set of boots to leave the ground. He storm-birded, dusting off from a shattered and ruined hellscape. As a final punitive act, a second orbital bombardment was conducted, incinerating anything remaining that could burn, ensuring that any of those who had somehow managed to escape the Emperor's censure would not live to celebrate their already completely hollow victory. As the ships of the censure host slipped anchor, Vox Beacons were ceded throughout Prosperine approaches, broadcasting the unmistakable Perditus Maximus single. The Lex Imperialis had ruled this planet utterly forbidden, and may approach under pain of death. This was Prospero abandoned, a world corpse, a planet of ash and departed pain, a choked orb hanging dead in the void where no sound ruled saved for the wind through burned bones. At best historical estimate, the cost of bringing the Emperor's writ of censure to Prospero was 30 million lives, of which the overwhelming majority were Imperial civilians simply present on the planet at the moment of the censure host's arrival. Data logged within the Administratum placed the number of civilian survivors at a net zero. The official line would forever be that the Prosperine branch of humanity, which had survived the turning of millennia, the terrors of old night and the renewal of the Great Crusade, had been annihilated in its totality thanks to the follies of Magnus the Red. The same was said for the 15th Legion, Thousand Sons. From 004 until a decade later, upon terror, as the walls fell in 014 M31, the Legion was officially declared extinct. The truth, of course, is that neither the humans of Prospero, nor its Astartes were all wiped out in one fell stroke. Notwithstanding the Astartes and civilians that had disappeared with Magnus the Red, there remained many thousands of both who had, through the vagaries of fate, been abroad across the galaxy when the Doom of Tisca was wrought. Many were simply put to death by Imperial forces they were serving alongside, usually before news of the censure of their Primarch, or indeed his fall, had even reached them. In one prominent example, 2000 Astartes of the 9th Fellowship under Centaur Rame were gunned down by the Ultramarines they served alongside. Similar justice was conducted by the Imperial Fists and the Salamanders, 2000 Sons forces they had previously counted as allies, but had been explicitly instructed to slaughter. It is perhaps noteworthy that at no point did any of the Astartes committing this fratricide attempt to aid the doomed and unaware thousand sons in question. Some naturally escaped by their own devices, the prognosticators amongst them becoming aware of their doom before it struck, and for these few, awaited a life, at best, of fleeing from the jaws of Imperial retribution. The largest of these contingents, independently verifiable to history, were 5000 Astartes of the 4th Fellowship, constituting its majority, who immediately ceased their great crusade assignment and fled to the stars upon news of Prospero's demise reaching its expeditionary fleet. Elsewhere, several thousand sons of Magnus stationed on Prospero's client forgeworld of Shauak had, similarly fled. Of the fates of these thousand sons, nothing can currently be said. In the chaos of the years to come, the threads of their stories are utterly lost. It is quite possible they may have reunited with their Primarch and their Legion before the siege had even begun, but it is equally likely many simply turned to a life of the renegade during the conflagration of the Horus Heresy. Perhaps siding with neither traitor nor loyalist. Perhaps they became black shields, or perhaps they simply chose to survive as best they could in a world consumed by madness. In total, the censor host had suffered significant losses in its prosecution of the battle. Some 49,000 in total and a massive quantity of armaments either lost or abandoned in necessity in the tomb of Prospero. This included several Titan god machines, much to the fury of the Mechanicum. Naturally, the majority of these losses were incurred by the Vilka Fenrica, some 25,000 confirmed killed in combat, as well as the entirety of its 13th grade company simply declared lost in the collapse of the Warp Vortex. This was a significant amount of the Sixth Legion's strength at a crucial time. The heresy would rupture into dreadful reality mere months later, offering the Legion no time to recover in any meaningful capacity from these losses. The casualties for the Talons of the Emperor, the Silent Sisterhood and the Ligio Custodes, were relatively small and somewhat unverifiable, but when we consider the scale of their commitment to the host, and their rarity and specialities, their losses can still be considered severe by any measurable metric. Some historians have even waxed lyrical on the loss for the latter formations, altogether less mundane, the status of custodian invincibility. Never before had such a large quantity of the Emperor's own life wards been committed to a single action, and even in instances where they had taken to the battlefield alongside the Master of Mankind, rarely had more than a few fallen in pursuit of their goals. Studies that had observed them in action, be they Thousand Son, Wolf of Russ, or Son of Horus, learned many a lesson from that day about just how the Custodes prosecuted their war-making, and notes were taken about precisely how they had fallen and when they did. On the loyalist side, darker rumors fastered, particularly around the ease and apparent experience by which the Oric champions of the Emperor had dispatched astarties so contemptuously. Some indeed wondered aloud if this had been a purpose they had been crafted for, although such opinions, when expressed, were rarely done so to ears untrusted. The ripples of the destruction of Prospero spread outwards from it, some discernable, others less so. Though seismic an event, an Imperial history could not simply go unnoted by the many, even if the Imperium's military regime did much to downplay its significance. A triumphant parade was held perfunctorily upon the censure host's return to Terra, one which Russ declined to attend, leading his wolves elsewhere. Val'dor's own journal notes that, according to the Wolf King, a king does not invite his blood-steamed headsman to a victory feast, although to call it the latter was quite a misnomer. The Emperor was deeply concerned with the loss of Magnus, it is supposedly said, and what it represented for his unknowable goals, declining in his personage to attend any victory celebrations such as they were. The triumph ended on a muted note, with the courts of the Imperium moving rapidly to declare the Thousand Sons as Perdicia, all records of them to be expunged, all their property seized, all treaties they were privy to, rendered defunct. Many worlds brought into compliance by the Legion, especially one's Magnus had sought to shape into visions of his ideal future, made strident objections in court to the Legion's destruction and subsequent expurgation. The representatives of these worlds made little headway, and, returning home, found that there were significant increases in Imperial auxilia presences that was the only response they were ever to receive. Michaud Arcad, the Forge world long considered bound to Prospero and its Legion, had long been on the boundaries of both Imperial and Mechanicum politics, conducting relations cordially but rarely with both. In the wake of the censure, the world ceased all communication with both empires, bringing it within what most would consider to be a fraction of actual secession. Accusations flew between the Imperium and the Mechanicum of what exactly should be done with the Recalcitrant Forge world, and it is likely only that the outbreak of the heresy prevented a full military expedition from being mounted to bring them once more into full compliance. Of the Warmaster, Horus Lupacal, little could be said about his reaction had he made any form of response. Prosperine Fair had ultimately been one organized at the behest of the Emperor himself, despite the Warmaster's later opportune intervention. Raising of the censure host and its goals were done without any consultation with Horus, but the Primarch being, supposedly, the ultimate military authority within the Imperium. Some academics have declared that Prospero and the Emperor's bullish ignoring of his son in its devastation was a contributing factor to the Warmaster's resentment and ultimate rebellion. Such accusations honestly seemed facetious to yours truly, merely for consideration with the benefit of hindsight of the events that were already in motion. Horus' fall was the cause of Magnus' actions that led to his censure. The Warmaster, made aware of this by his new allies, sought to capitalize. The mind of Lupacal, his die that they had already been cast when the Cyclops fell. Perhaps the most profound impact of the destruction of Prospero, besides those already recounted, was that the impossible had been rendered hideously possible. The starties had killed the starties. While two legions had already been struck from Imperial record, their loss is altogether another topic, and the circumstances by which they occurred are clouded with mysteries impenetrable. Prospero, however, was seemingly impossible to hide, a catatlysm in full view of those who had the power to see it. For all the detractors of Magnus claimed his was a circumstance unprecedented, what remained was the simple fact that, in later cases, the circumstance would be entirely precedentant. Anyone of the remaining 17 loyal legions could suffer the same fate, an existential shock that brought no small amount of disunity to an already fractious brotherhood. The wolves, for their part, drew the anger of many, as shatterers of this covenant of brotherhood, and unrepentant ones at that, they only succeeded in forcing themselves into further isolation. A pariah status they infuriatingly seemed to revel in, wallowing in a bleak reputation that seemed to grant them some measure of comfort as they processed their blackest of deeds. No matter that it had apparently been on the orders of the emperor himself, the wolves of Russ were now the only legion who had direct combat experience fighting the legion as a starties. The wolf king was the only primarch to have ever fought one of his brothers to the death. Some would dub him kinslayer. Had he cared, he gave no hint. The wolves, however, went one step further than merely garnering their experience. They actually codified it. Rendered from sagas and first-hand accounts, legion serfs compiled the Codex Omega, a treatise designed to be the tactical and strategic reference should the emperor decree the destruction in force of another starties legion. This was, of course, a direct and plain thread to the legion as a starties by the sixth legion, and one whose contents were shared only with Horus Lupacal and his own legion as warmaster. An error so unspeakably grave that Russ was later said to admit it was one of his greatest regrets. Almost every legion released immediate missives to the emperor, calling for the destruction of the Codex Omega, save for three. The Iron Hands, the Night Lords, and the Alpha legion, all called instead for every legion to be given a copy. Certainly, the awareness of such a work caused significant discord among the legiones. Many shored up inter-legion treaties with those they were closer to. Many worked to stockpile arms and armaments, or shifted around garrison forces in what could have been almost nervous agitation were they not a starties. The victor in this, as with almost all things concerning the Prosperine Incident, was Horus Lupacal. The legions distrustful of each other, the executioners of the emperor maimed and isolated, an unpredictable sorcerer king betrayed, wounded, and cast into oblivion, seeds of doubt in the emperor's motives sewn into the galaxy, all of this played into the war master's hands. A Prospero meant to stand as a noble upholding of the law of the Imperium, it instead was now forever to be remembered as a triumph of the traitor Horus, his first act, his first victory, even before blood had been spilled on the soils of Istvan. But finally, of the fate of Magnus the Red, and his thousand sons, all at the time believed him either to be dead, or in a self-imposed exile of sorts. As his body was never recovered, nor any trace of his death identified, this was all that could be surmised. That was of course until the Siege of Terra, when his sundering of the outer walls and his gambit within the imperial dungeon played out in all its dramatic tragedy. Magnus had survived Prospero, and yet persists to this day, even now, in corrupted damnation. How he accomplished such a feat is known only thanks to later, darker revelations about the fifteenth son's fall. His final sorcery on his homeworld was a wholesale transportation of himself, his library, and all of the surviving thousand sons, Spiregard and Prosperine civilians in the Pyramid of Photep to another planet entirely, Sorterius, the so-called planet of the Sorcerers, a damned world located deep in the festering reaches of the Ocularis Teriblus, the Eye of Terror. Had such an act been possible for Magnus himself, it would have represented a feat of psychic mastery that surpassed anything any human, baseline, Astartes, Primarch, or even the Emperor himself, had ever accomplished, or could ever have accomplished. Divisio Telepathica Investigations, commissioned in the aftermath of the Tatlism in secret, projected that, even if Magnus had sacrificed to some total of every Psyker at his beck and call, the resulting psychometric energy would only have been sufficient to transport a handful of individuals, not thousands. Early studies into this were curtailed by post-scouring imperial suppression. No one was apparently concerned with how Magnus had survived, and it is only thanks to inquisitive minds of later millennia that one has any body of scholarship upon which to build. Those long thousands of years taught humanity the pain of the primordial annihilator, the so-called gods of chaos, those eldritch intelligences that dwell in the deepest reaches of the Immaterium. Many now believe that, as Magnus could not have accomplished his feat alone, at the moment of his death he opened his hearts to the presence of a force altogether beyond. That in that darkest of moments, he embraced damnation that he might save his sons, and himself from certain death. Should this indeed be the case? That power responded in kind, spiriting the Primarch and his Legion away, to remain until this day under its thrall. Certainly the Thousand Sons have over ten thousand years been under the many, many eyes of the Changer of the Ways, as Magnus himself has, recently renewed in aspect and apparently vigour as he is in this darkest of millennia. The boons of such a patron would go long ways to explaining how, a mere ten years later, three thousand Thousand Son survivors became the approximately ten thousand accounted for upon Terra during the siege, although one author posits an altogether different theoretical. According to the theory of the first of the fifteenth, the power offered by the shifting many at the moment was one whose price was unforeseen. Magnus may have desired himself and his son saved, but the Changer did so by means rather different. It selected one amongst his Legion, saving this individual, consuming all others, including maybe even Magnus, as fuel for this act. The Thousand Sons thus seen upon Terra, and laterally throughout the millennia, are merely duplicates, pale copies of those devoured by the shifting many in the final moments of Prospero, aether stuff becoming part of its great games to be played out for unknown abominably Machiavellian ends. There is of course but one who could possibly have been saved, and given all this individual has wrought over the years since, one cannot help but consider that this potentially insane-sounding theory may hold some merit. That individual, of course, is Azek, Ariman. Maybe I consider this fancy only because the reality is so horrifying, that one of the greater intelligences intervened on the express wish of so far fallen a son of the Emperor himself. Magnus was a shining beacon of progress in a universe that so despised a concept. Consumed by his ego, consumed by his follies, consumed by his arrogance, the price he paid would see the soul his father had forged for him consigned to a damnation eternal, and us, our humanity, alongside him. This van was the birth of the heresy, yes, but upon Prospero, it can truly said to have been begun, Emperor preserve us all that we have lived to see its aftermath. Mave imperator, Gloria in excelsis terra. This video and this channel were made possible thanks to the very kind donations and support from my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com. 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 oculusimperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.