 It has been said, by your most humble servant, within Chronicles not all may have security and piety clearances to parse, that our galaxy, our universe, is one enamored with stories. Spend long enough buried within forgotten archives reading the accounts of ages almost as forgotten, and one cannot help but be drawn to the almost narrative quality of the defining events of epochs now dead. But then again, are we to be surprised at this, when the very arch enemy of humanity, of reality itself is a collection of howling malignant self-aware ideas that claw and scratch at the veil between worlds, hungry to get in? Stories have power, as do the players within them, though they may neither realize it nor comprehend the ends to which their decisions will lead them. The Primarchs, the gene breed of the Emperor of Mankind, have of course been outsized players upon the historical stage, beings of such incredible power that they have acted as dynamos for both progress and destruction. Such has been made about their inherent deeply flawed humanity, and there are few tales that illustrate this more than the one your humble servant must now dedicate himself to recounting. Pride, as the maxim spoken in almost every human tongue will recount, cometh before the fall, and there were few beings as prideful as the Primarchs of this tale. Not even the greatest dramaturgies of the past could concoct a story of such breathtakingly human disasters colliding in painfully irrevocably permanent catastrophe. No then, that this is the prelude of, well, the prelude, the opening act of the great heresy, the stage setting for the greatest tragedy to ever befall humanity. It is oft said that within hindsight lies the truths we were blind to, and it is certain that with the long years since the passing of the Horus heresy, that which we could not see is all too readily revealed in patterns once occluded. The Warmaster's rule over the Imperium at Arms was brief within the oval span of the Great Crusade. His tenure marked by victory is a plenty, but also, should one be afforded a glimpse at the totality, quite curious happenings. Everything from bonds of kinship being forged with parties and factions disparate, to the stockpiling of arms and armaments in holdfasts unexpected, to the preferential treatment of commanders and expeditions surprising, all were taken at the time to simply be new leadership under a new leader. Horus, for all being the favored son of the Emperor of Mankind, was not his progenitor, and had a style of command that was quite different from that of the Lord of Lightning. Not only this, but it is verifiable by accounts of sundry biographers of the Primarch, including Petronella Vivar's unpublished work and the treatises of Loic Gerentius, collected in the seminal Lamentations upon the Age of Darkness. That Horus felt a certain need to prove himself to both his father and his brothers, following his ascension to this newest and most important of offices. It is not difficult to surmise that the Warmaster could have made decisions explicitly because they were different from how the Emperor would have made them. Speculation has long gone back and forth amongst his staratours regarding the point as to which these decisions shifted from innocence to knowing willful treachery, and one is inclined to state that such a date is impossible to discern. The malign powers that held sway over the Warmaster during his rebellion work in mysterious and eldritch ways, and the degree to which they held influence over his decisions, or even the emotions driving those decisions, will ever be impossible to ascertain. Mehap Horus' hand was being guided by them for far longer than we have believed, further back along his damnable path than even the Daven Incident or the Interex debacle. That hindsight one spoke of earlier allows us now to see these corrupted seeds for what they were. Preparation planted far, far in advance of the Warmaster's ultimate rebellion. All such orders were issued under his lawful authority. Horus was, of course, supreme commander of the Imperium's armed forces, and though they ruled in the stead of the Emperor, the Council of Terra had no ability to gain say anything that could be considered under martial jurisdiction. Which is, of course, even if they had wanted to. While Horus and the Council had butted heads on the subject of the Imperial tithe, relations between the two bodies were reasonably cordial, despite being strained, with the civilians and the Sigilite knowing when to leave best alone when it came to the Primarchs. The independence and indeed unquestioned loyalty of Horus Lupercal allowed him to make decisions that none would question even if they had either the authority or the gumption to do so. He issued warrants of Imperial immediacy to recently contacted night households of dubious reliability. He diverted expeditionary fleets, altering the course of conquests and steering forces loyal to him into advantageous positions. He sent numerous Imperial army regiments into theatres best suited for the Ligione's startes, enduring several of the proudest forces of the Exertus Imperialis were humbled to the point of combat inefficacy. Perhaps most immediately and tellingly of all, but again, only so with hindsight, his final assignments given to a startes legions of his brothers saw that those that had the strength to oppose him were rendered isolated or in dire peril, most notably the first legion dark angels, ninth legion blood angels, and thirteenth legion ultramarines. In the prelude to her work, Principia logisticae Exertus, optimization of supply, communication and munition lines within static defences, an analysis of the development of Imperial palace logistical support systems prior to the Siege of Terra, analyticae scholar Melanie Trath-Presantium noted that the work of Lupercal during this particular period spoke to the profound genius of the Primarch as the architect of grand strategy. Such moves took into account what others would not, operating in broad strokes with full awareness that there was no particular linchpin to anything here, merely a collecting of power, an optimization of dispositions, a secret but forceful push to have the most upper of hands once his time would arrive. There was no honor in this, of course, but such is the true face of warfare. Backing the deck in one's favor, so to speak, is a brilliantly expedient option. It was, of course, not by the sole hand of Horus Lupercal that the destruction of Prospero was wrought. One opens this chronicle with his involvement merely to grant to one's acolytes the context of what was happening in the background across the Imperium as the dread events of the burning were unfolding. Old death was not the war master's doing in any true sense, merely an event he saw opportunity in and would reap great benefits from. Though, naturally, Horus bears plenty of it, the blame is impossible to apportion accurately. As many scholars consistently debate whose sins ring louder than whose, inspiring many a tedious treatise as to who did what wrong. Suffice it to say, many are the guilty here, but it would, of course, be remiss of one to not place the lion's share upon the scions of Prospero themselves, the 15th Legion Thousand Sons, who, in the curious and hateful circumstances of the times, found themselves both as initiators and ultimate victims of their own private Armageddon. Nations of the Cyclops were a legion apart from their cousins, unique in many ways and having been so from their creation. They had not taken part in the Unification Wars, being held from frontline combat status by the Emperor himself for reasons unknown. Adding to this, the bequeathing of the Legion with its moniker, the Thousand Sons, rankled the other legions as a mark of favour unearned by Astartes who had neither bled nor died during the Unification Wars or the Solar Reclamation. The ill will born towards the 15th only deepened as rumours of their arcane practices and willful battlefield use of psychana emerged, something the Sons themselves did little to either justify, explain, or hide. While there were some within the 15th that sought to educate their cousins in other legions, engaging in exchanges or debates upon the practices of the occult, many more within the 15th wore their separation as a badge of honour, seeing the ignorance they were treated with as little more than confirmation of their superiority over regular Astartes. They were, by their reckoning, enlightened scholars, crafted to be so by the hand of the Emperor, and the barbarians that bathed for their censure were merely obstacles on the road to a greater human future. The fear of psychana, with which the Imperium was riddled with, was not precisely unjustified. The Age of Strife had been an epoch where a cult phenomena of all sorts had run amok across the material plane, wrecking untold devastation and claiming uncountable lives. Sorcerer kings mad with the powers of the warp were plentiful and terrible in equal measure, their genocides and apocalypses surviving if not in record, then within folk memory, a blight upon the history of mankind, however you cut it. The Psycher was, of course, not unknown to humanity before the terrible fall from Grace millennia before the revelation of the Emperor. Psychers had begun to emerge upon human worlds during the Age of Technology, and it has been supposed by many, not least amongst those of whom have hidden knowledge of the Emperor's own supposed origins, that they have always been amongst us, merely in miniscule quantities until relatively recently. During the millennia of the first great human interstellar empires, however, they had been met with intense curiosity and study on many worlds, whereas upon others they met with only superstition and death. The long piece of the Age of Technology gave way to the carnage and slaughter of the machine wars, and with the warp intermoil and its denizens more alive and hungry than they had been in eons, the sudden emergence of a glut of human psychers proved catastrophic beyond imagination. On millions of human worlds, psychers fell victims to their powers, creatures from a plain worse than all the hells of human fancy pupating within their flesh and emerging in gory apotheosis to slaughter and maim. Whole worlds were consumed by these incursions, and elsewhere were the tides of the Empyrean merely corrupted instead of possessing, mad psycher despots rampaged throughout the fires of their once great civilizations, ruling, ruining, ravaging. This era would last for five thousand years, an Age of Death and Destruction never before seen, and above all, the specter of the insane human psycher, crackling with barely contained eldritch energies, eyes alight, with unstoppable malignancy. The emergence of the Empyrean as a regime came in tandem with the outright refutation of the uncontrolled and unrestricted use of psychers that had defined the Age of Strife. The worst of the foes of the early unity regime upon Terra had been sorcerer warlords mad with unchecked mutations or in possession of arcane and corruptive lore from the deepest reaches of history. While the Emperor himself was indeed a psycher, his strength in that art and his willpower besides were so inordinately separated from the human scale as to render him seemingly immune from the corruption those weaker of his kind perennially faced. When the Empyrean had been formally founded, bodies within it had been also formally incepted, specifically to account for and deal with the psycher. The Divisio-Telepathica's existence was not merely born of the necessity for efficient interstellar communication in the form of astro-telepathy. No, but to regulate the entire sum of humanity's psychic human resources. Psychers rendered unto the Divisia found their lives committed to draconian study and training brutally hammering their abilities into forms useful to the Empyrean and, moreover, limiting and controlling them. The distrust of the Empyrean for the Psycher is one born of millennia of pain and trauma, yes, but additionally one of utmost necessity. Humanity had not changed by the hand of the Age of Strife, only been traumatized by it. The human genome was not fundamentally different in M30 than it had been in M25, so the control of psychers was placed at the apex of Imperial Doctrine. The astropaths, the navigators, even battle-psychers, they were all grim necessities of the Empyrean and its great crusade. Resources wielded, yes, but rigidly controlled and structured, bound by the strongest and most inviolate decrees of the Lex Imperialis. Then, of course, there were the Legionnaires of Stardes, the Librarians, and the Council of Nikia. One has elaborated upon Nikia at length in a previous record, which, if you have not parsed it, I would encourage you to cease playback of this particular chronicle and append it for later consumption only after you have concluded studies upon that earlier work. In brief, the Council was a conclave gathered by the Emperor himself, consisting of the great and good and the influential of the Empyrean, to resolve what had become known as the Psyche Question. The Empyrean, and most particularly the Legionnaires of Stardes, could no longer operate within uncertain policy. For the entirety of the great crusade, the Astardes and their Primarchs had enjoyed independence of jurisdiction over their own internal affairs. But to have such a stark contrast between them and the remainder of the Empyrean, over the issue of Psykers in particular, was appearing to be no longer tenable. Some legions, foremost amongst them the 14th Legion Deathguard and their Primarch Mortarian, shunned Psykers utterly, while others, not least the Thousand Sons, but also the Blood Angels and 5th Legion White Scars, were openly calling for regulation, training, and acceptance of battle Psykers amongst the Astardes. Others, such as 6th Legion Primarch Leman Russ and 1st Legion Primarch Lyon L. Johnson, called for the formal censure of the Thousand Sons specifically, while still being more than willing to employ Psykers within their own legions, exclusively by their own idiosyncratic patterns. The latter highlights a crucial aspect of the debate surrounding Nekia. By virtue of their willful and blatant use of Psycona during the crusade, the Thousand Sons and Magnus the Red had placed themselves firmly at the heart of the issue and bound them inextricably to how their fellow legions and Magnus' brothers felt towards them on levels that went beyond professional and strategic and fully into the realms of the personal. It is perhaps why the question had been delayed for so long in the first place, why the Emperor, beloved by all, had demurred from addressing so fundamental an issue in the Imperium's utilisation of a new front of human evolutionary biology. A trifecta of Primarchs, Magnus, Sanguinius and Jagatai Khan, had developed a structure within which they adamantly stated Astarty's Psykers could receive the training they needed to properly utilise their extraordinary gifts for the future of the Great Crusade, which they called the Librarius. Much has been made of the testimony of Magnus and the representatives of the Blood Angels and the White Scars. The Crimson King's speech I have included in the record previously mentioned, but suffice to say, he rose to counter the bellicose fear-mongering of his brother Mortarion with a plong. Privately, we know from the journals of First Librarian Azek Ariman of the 15th that Magnus raged at his treatment before the Council. He had, admittedly naively, assumed that the conclave would be won meeting upon scholarly terms of true and good intent, whereas what he found was a coalition raid not against just psykers, but him specifically, a witch-hunt of old, as he is noted to have said. The reactionary wing present at the Council had powerful allies, and while Magnus counted on the support of his brothers Sanguinius and Fulgrim, present there to back him up, he was fighting against the deeply ingrained fear of an entire regime. Mortarion, meanwhile, could count on the support of Russ and Corvus Korax of the 19th Legion Ravenguard, as well as the tacit support of Rogald Dorne of the Imperial Fists, present less as a proponent against the use of psykers and more for the censure of Magnus alone. Crimson King supporters amongst the Brotherhood, such as the Khan, Giliman, Alfarious, Vulcan, Conrad Curse and Lorgar, simply could not be present due to the exigencies of the Great Crusade. The Cyclops of Prospero was penned in, fighting seemingly an uphill battle, but even had his brothers been present. It is unknown if the ultimate outcome could possibly have been changed. Ultimately, the judgement would come from only one being, no matter how many minds were swayed by either Deathlord or Crimson King, by those against or for. A supreme authority of the Council, and of course, the Imperium, the decision rested at the hand of the Emperor himself. Historitories have debated the ruling throughout the ages, even some so far as decrying the Emperor for his judgement, given the events that would ultimately unfold directly because of it. Others supported entirely, given that, by their own reckoning, what followed was entirely the fault of others. All throughout this weaves the tricksome hand of hindsight. One cannot help but bind the burning of Prospero to the deliverance of the Emperor's writ upon that fateful day. Whatever debate surrounds this only serves to obscure what transpired, muddying the facts with wild conjecture and ideological positioning. Yes, it is the role of the Historator to interpret as much as it is chronicle, but when dealing with such a monumentous event, there is temptation enough to moralise without the necessity of picking a side, weighing it down even further. The core truth is that, of course, the Emperor chose to ban the continued use of psychic powers by the legionaries of Stardes, ordering the disbandment of all librarians divisions currently operating within legions that had adopted them. The Stardes with psychic talents or potential could return to their previously held ranks and roles, never again to use their powers, without any exception, under pain of such destruction that he shall rue the day he turned from my light. The ruling was unequivocable, delivered with the force of a hammer from heaven, sondering the future of psychers within the Stardes legions by an imperial decree that brooked simply no subtlety. The thousand sons left the world, humbled a few other legions had ever been, returning to the great crusade with a numb resignation to the new world they had now to inhabit. All, save Magnus, who retreated to Prospero, consigning himself to seclusion and study in his personal librarian upon works known to none, not even his closest sons. The thousand sons would go on to spend three years prosecuting the great crusade as of old, with bolter and the blade, or at least would do so publicly. While they were perennially careful in what campaigns they would engage in and with whom, and added a commendable number of worlds and victories to the imperial fold, rumors yet persisted as to their continued use of their powers. None of these were ever confirmed, naturally, and many within the Imperium saw the resurgent 15th Legion as a sign that the Emperor's edict was bearing commendably changed fruit for the good of all humanity. But there were others who insisted that the Legion had never truthfully abandoned the use of their powers, that their employment was utilised at every opportunity, and when none of the suspicious eyes of others within the Imperium were upon them. The true case of this is, however, rendered moot, simply, by what would happen next. It began with the shifting of troop movements across the fronts of the crusade that the thousand sons were stationed upon. Suddenly, and perfunctorily, 15th Legion forces quit the campaigns they were assigned to, the greater part of an entire Legion stating merely that they were returning to muster upon Prospero at the behest of their master. The forces withdrawn appeared to include those commanded by the most senior captains of the Legion, and of the divisions that were once possessed of a deep specialisation in one form of arcana or another. Once upon Prospero, it was clear that whomsoever Magnus had summoned was required by the Primarch for what the most learned of the citizenry who kept records there, presumed was some form of grand scheme within the deeps of the Legion's Prosperine Templums. The picture of what happened subsequently is only possible to construct from sources both disparate and incomplete, many of whom are potentially even apocryphal, for it has been an event that has been loaded with so much conjecture, disinformation and outright superstition as to have been muddied to the point of near insanity. Nevertheless, one will of course try. In one's previous record upon the Daven Incident, with the Warmaster Horus fell to the corrupted blade of a sinister conspiracy. My elaborated upon how, according to sources, Magnus the Red appeared within the visions that befell Luprachal in his internment within the Serpent Temple. The Crimson King brought to his Primarch brother dire warnings of the path he was taking, and to where it would ultimately lead. But if these protestations had any impact upon Horus at all, history has proven them negligible. It is possible that this visitation of Magnus into the dreamscape of one of his brothers required the presence of senior Thousand Sons, for it was undoubtedly a product of supreme psychic power and control, possibly even beyond that of a mind such as Magnus's. That being said, the 15th Legion would undoubtedly aid their Primarch in what followed. History will record otherwise, but within the secret knowledges, those few archives untrammeled by the wrath of the siege, or the Inquisition, or the sheer relentless march of time, it is recorded that, despairing at what he saw as Horus is lost to the light of the Imperium, Magnus the Red sought to warn his father. A feared of treachery everywhere. Magnus claimed he would be unable to trust standard means of astral communication with information of such terrible import. Whether this is true or not remains up for debate. Certainly astro telepathy is an inexact medium at best, and certainly Magnus was not exactly incorrect in suspecting agents of treachery had their tendrils into the Imperium to a degree none yet knew, but it must be clearly understood that, for a character such as he, the option he was about to take represented more than expediency and safety. Magnus set about devising a grand ritual to reach his father, the Emperor, personally upon Terra. Such a work had quite literally never been accomplished or even attempted, nay even dreamed. For the Imperial Palace lay behind psychic defences unrivaled by any other location in the entire galaxy. Shielded from paranormal and immaterial attack by devices from the dark age of technology and those wrought by the Emperor's own hand, it was functionally impregnable to any Psyche alive. It would appear that, for his sins, Magnus took this as a challenge, brapping the act of monstrous defiance with the bans of necessity, claiming to his senior officers to be doing so for the good of the Imperium, even while those, such as Ariaman, worried that this was being used merely as a means to demonstrate to his father the error of Nikia. Surely, if Magnus' psychana can deliver the future of the Imperium by warning the Emperor of Horus' perfidy, then the Emperor's thoughts upon it would be changed. The value of psychic power, untrammeled by regulation, would be proven without doubt. Magnus' true intentions upon the matter can only be speculated upon, just as we can only ever speculate on what was going on within the Emperor's mind when he banned his son's talents so publicly at Nikia. All that remains is what happened. It is a matter of record that, in 004 M31, the Imperial Palace was recorded as having been the epicenter of a calamity, unlike anything that had ever occurred on the planet's side. Massive ground shocks and earthquakes spread out across the subcontinent from the Imperial Palace's heights in the Himalasia, wreaking devastation upon the Hive cities and infrastructure across the pan-Isiatric reaches. Power grids that fed the Palace were completely overwhelmed, depriving Hive's continents away of power, plunging large parts of the throne world into absolute anarchy and stretching the imperialist arbiters to breaking point in vain efforts to maintain social order. The latter was likewise assailed by strange phenomena and manifestations congruent with aetherical incursions from the Immaterium, resulting in a massive and sudden upsurge of inexplicable and horrific violence. To those with the ken to see the pattern, what happened was clearly the result of a massive psychic event of a force never seen on a scale that the throne world could possibly record, but noted within the deep annals of the Age of Strife by scholars long since dead of madness. The true damage, however, was rocked to the Emperor's own personal fief, his laboratories, the sprawling deeply subterranean series of complexes under the Imperial Palace collectively referred to as the Imperial Dungeon. By the records of none other than the Ten Thousand, the vaunted Ligio Custodes, Magnus the Red manifested upon Terra. Before his father, at the epicenter of a work the Master of Mankind had been conducting in absolute secrecy since the end of the Ullinor campaign. His manifestation cost the Emperor, the Imperium and the human species a prize beyond imagination. It is said in that moment Magnus the Red recognized the totality of his ignorance and his hubris. What the Emperor said to his son we will never know. The destruction wrought by the psychic force unleashed by Magnus to maintain that one moment of incarnation had destroyed utterly technology of an epoch unremembered. Sundering work that had been conducted for centuries, if not millennia. The Imperial Dungeon was almost ruined beyond repair by the actions of the Crimson King while elsewhere on Terra the estimated death toll caused by everything from psychic emanations to infrastructural failure would reach the hundreds of thousands. There was never an official statement upon the matter, not to the broader Imperium. The Arbitas eventually restored civil order upon the throne world, yet the destruction wrought by the inexplicable attack would necessitate repairs so extensive they would ultimately be folded into Rogald Dorn's fortification of the Imperial Palace years later. Behind the palace walls however in the depths of the sanctum, censure had already been issued. It had taken near hours. The Emperor, it would seem, had taken only the time required to ensure the worst of his son's collateral damage had been accounted for or mitigated before issuing a proclamation of formal censure for Magnus the Red and by extension the Thousand Sons. It was not the first time in Imperial history a Primarch had been censured. Magnus's brother Lorgar had suffered similarly from the transgressions against their Imperial Father decades before in the ashes of Monarchia, but this case was altogether far more severe. Whereas Lorgar had been summoned in Bade Neal, Magnus was to be brought bodily before the throne to answer for his actions and to account for his ignoring of the Emperor's own proclamation upon Nikia. Lorgar was disappointed and disobeyed. Magnus's crimes were in orders of magnitude greater. Many even quietly wondered whether or not the fifteenth son would now suffer the same fate as the second or the eleventh, forgotten and the purged. Certainly this fear was not allayed by the naming of just who was tasked to bring the Crimson King to Terra. The Emperor appointed none other than Leman Russ, Primarch of the Sixth Legion Space Wolves, Magnus's staunchest critic, the Imperial Executioner himself, as the one Bade to deliver the Cyclops before him, by any and all means necessary. The summons were dispatched through the astropathic choirs of Terra be they an utter disarray to Fenris, home of the Sixth Legion and the court of Horace Lupercal, for the Warmaster must of course be appraised of such a grave matter of Imperial internal affairs. Much, of course, was made by the highest echelons of the Terran regime about the choice of the Vilca Fenrica for this assignment. The bellicose and isolated Legion had a dark and a blood stained history, their unswerving loyalty considered not that of noble paragons of Imperial virtue, but that of an attack dog desperate to slip the leash and savage itself upon the foes of its master. This too was even before one considered the well-known enmity that existed between Russ and Magnus, the Wolf King having been the Cyclops's most vocal critic for decades. The coming confrontation with Russ granted the highest of approvals to bring his brother to task by seemingly any means he desired, would be one unlike any the Imperium had ever seen. The burning of Prospero, despite the verb that denotes it, was not one act. Few things are in the grand sweep of history, but this event is once so wrapped up in narratives, personalities, agendas, ideologies and the sheer weight of time itself that it forms a mass that appears to pull in everything around it, bending the fabric of the past by its sheer influence alone. Threads weave into this tale from unexpected corners with each new examination of what fragments of chronicles past remain, new possibilities emerge. What one has compiled is one's own truest account of what occurred, but even then the dread weight of the past itself will inevitably reopen wounds of conjecture and supposition, for as with so much of the past, what was is clouded by ignorance, redaction and vested interest. What you shall find in this tale is telling, dearest Acolyte, is as much of the truth as can be managed, but as any good Historator knows, truth is a fickle bell dam, coyly luring away the unworthy with promises and trapping them inside prisons of their own biases. Alas, one has not the time to lecture upon the means of ethical and legitimate scholarship of times gone by, but simply put, possess within yourselves an inquiring spirit and a mind open to doubt. Far from the maxims of the Inquisition, a mind too small for it is an ill thing indeed. Contrary to the wild imaginations of some, the process for mustering the force that would bring the displeasure of the master of mankind to the planet of Magnus the Red was not a rapid affair, even with the superlative abilities of those who would lead it. Terra's astrophatic communication networks had been thrown into absolute chaos by the Crimson King's works. The choirs rushing to replace those who had been driven mad or simply killed outright by the psychic maelstrom unleashed upon the assault of the Homeworld's Aetheric defences. It was not for several solar weeks that word of what happened and word of what would now happen in response would reach the two offworld points that mattered most. The vengeful spirit, flagship of the Warmaster, Horace Lupercal and Fenris. Icebound Fife of the Sixth Legion Astartes, the Vilca Fenrica. Commonly, if always informally, known as the Space Wolves. Unsurprisingly, the records of just what transpired in this time period are fragmentary, both due to the infrastructural devastation wrecked upon Terra, the whims of warp chrono dilation, and of course the loss of archival records during the Great Heresy. But it appears that, at least initially, the muster was spearheaded by the Captain General of the Ligio Custodes, Constantine Valdor. The Emperor, absent from public and military life for years at this point, did not emerge from the palace at any time during or following the chaos. Authority from within the Imperial household flowed from the font of Valdor, first of the Ten Thousand, and Malkador the Sigilite, from his position as Head of the Council of Terra, both now furiously occupied in bringing stability back to the tumultuous throne world. To the Captain General was delegated the responsibility of mustering the force of arms to be known as the censure host. Although it was always understood, the eventual command would be granted to Lehmann Russ, Primarch of the Sixth Legion, as under the Imperial junta government, the Primarchs shared equal authority, second only to the Emperor. In terms of both judicial and practical, Valdor was likely perfectly fine with this arrangement. Had his personal feelings upon the matter, or indeed any matter, ever been a consideration to his comportment of his duties, anyone who states thus clearly does not know the Custodes. The Captain General was a leader and a warrior considered second only to the Primarchs. Indeed, many have long speculated that in terms of sheer combat prowess, he would have been the equal or better of many of them, although one finds such petty power, dynamic bickering, trivial, and ultimately pointless. It was Valdor's stated and consistent position to remain as perfectly neutral from all aspects of Imperial politics, be they martial or temporal, as he and by extension the Legio Custodes could possibly be. Intervention was only ever undertaken under the explicit direction of the Emperor himself, or when Valdor's own judgment concluded that either these orders or the Emperor's personage was at risk. Valdor's appointment to this position within the censor host was both the natural result of his position at the highest military authority on the throne world, and as well a considered choice, as the importance of the host's mission could under no circumstances fall prey to the Imperium's oft-device of politics. The Council of Nikia was still fresh upon the minds of many, even years later, and many of these would damn Magnus a traitor for the actions he had taken, disrupting the state admission of the host, which was to bring Magnus before his father, the Emperor, in person. Additionally, the legendary composure of Valdor was likely considered vital in reigning in the more bellicose character of Leman Russ, known as one of the most willful Primarchs amongst the Brotherhood. Finally, as the bearer of the Magisterium Maxima, the Emperor's own judicial seal, Valdor had supreme legal authority under the Lex Imperialis, possessing the full legitimacy of the military regime's government. In the immediate term, the Captain General had no difficulty in securing the core of the censor host from the local volume. Although it had been 200 years since unification and the Solar Reclamation, the Sol system, and Terra specifically, was the greatest fortress humanity had ever possessed, and was manned accordingly. Diverse armed forces from both humanity's core worlds and its recently conquered regions were present in both ceremonial and specifically defensive roles. These included Astartes from all legions, the so-called Crusader Host, as well as the Solar Auxilia, the Exertus Imperialis, soldiers in their millions, as well as thousands of Mechanicum Tagmata, both Martian and otherwise, and hundreds of god-engines of the Caligia Titanica. Valdor's choices from these formed a cocktail of the powerful, the exotic, the arcane, and the influential. After all, the host's primary purpose was as escort for Magnus the Red. However, imprisoned the Crimson King was to be during the voyage. Such an event was both punishment for the Primarch's crimes and a message to the Imperium, a demonstration of the fate that would be suffered if any others chose to defy the Emperor's writ, no matter their station. Fittingly, the forefront would represent the Emperor's Orric Judgment, a vanguard of the Ligio Custodis itself, 982 warriors of the Ten Thousand, representing 91 individual sodalities of the Ligio. Supplementing them in unaugmented manpower were the regiments of the Exertus, with the bulk being 5,000 troopers from the Third Tyrannic, the Ironside regiments of old Albia. Alongside them were 4,000 Hoplites from the Ninth Solar Auxiliary cohort, one of the renowned Saturnine Rams regiments that had founded this wing of the Imperial Auxilia during the Solar Reclamation. The Tenth and Forty-Second Sacrosanx Valteguers provided 3,000 Light and Reconnaissance Infantry for service, while eight Tyrion Exoguard regiments offered up 600 Void Armoured Heavy Infantry, and 100 or so of their Helots. Finally, the Caranid Sentinels were levied of 2,000 of their Men at Arms, all of which were amongst the most augmented baseline human troops within Sol's Light. Bearing weaponry and equipment allowed to no other Exertus regiment, as befitted their stations, as wardens of the vast volumes between the planets and stations of humanity's home system. Despite the presence of so many Tagama within the system at the time, it curiously does not appear that the Mechanic of Mars were contacted to provide these military elements for the host. Indeed, that they were included at all appears to have been a direct result of a late and highly pointed request made to Valdor by the fabricator general Kelbor Hall himself, subsequent to the time that word of the host's formation had reached Warmaster Horus. If the Captain General had desired to make the censure a completely imperial affair, keeping Mars the fabricator general and the Synod out of the proverbial loop, it appears he either underestimated their desire to play a role in such a pivotal event, or was outmaneuvered politically for means either mundane or in dreadful hindsight ominous. Consequently, the Sidonian Tagmata was attached to the host, formed of Tagma drawn from Ekris, Norn and Ifrem, as well as Mars herself, with the stated purpose of the inspection, assessment, and if necessary impounding and disassemblage of any technology found upon Prospero that Mechanicum Dogma prohibited. These were the most visible elements of the censure host. Valdor, of course, was not content in merely utilizing the mundane forces at his disposal. Indeed, considering the legion he was tasked with standing before, far more exotic formations were called for. To the somnus citadel upon Luna, Terra's sole natural satellite, a missive was dispatched, and it was one that was answered immediately. Three thousand sisters militant of the Divisio Telepathica's Investigatti's wing, commonly known by those aware of their existence as the silent sisterhood, answered Valdor summons, constituting three full vigils and associated Charon pattern acquisitor grav tanks. Additionally, far to the west of the imperial palace upon Terra, a black clad representative made his presence noted to Valdor and the host's command cadre. Notifying the captain general, it should be noted history is unclear if this figure had been requested or not, that the chamber Ocidentalis of the Ordo Sinister was at full combat readiness. Five warlord Sinister-class Cytitans, the most horrific and terrible weapons ever constructed by the emperor's own hand, were embarked upon their ebon transport barks and awaiting deployment, along with 100,000 Secutarii Sinister, the Ordo's bespoke Secutarii Titan Guard. Between the sisterhood and the Ordo, the censure host would boast what was possibly the most potent anti-psychor military force ever assembled in one place by the Imperium. Certainly, while the Ordo is known to have engaged in several psycho-archane purgation engagements throughout the Great Crusade, records are, of course, significantly redacted, it is unlikely to impossible that five of their Cytitans had ever been deployed simultaneously or against any one foe, even in operations undertaken against, say, Asuriani craft worlds or crave infestations. Certainly, this was reflected in the command cadre that formed the core of authority within the host. Constantine Valdor was naturally the apex, but at his right hand stood Genesha Kroll, the vigil commander of the Sisters of Silence herself. Below them, authority for the unaugmented troops lay with High Marshal Marcus Roan of the Third Terranic Auxilia, while at his side, outside the chain of command, Dominus Zalatcus, Thrain Esmark, prefect of the chamber Osedentalis, commanded the Cytitans. The Mechanicum, as you may see, had no say in command authority. Their tagmata was expected to defer to Valdor, Kroll, and Esmark depending on situational demands. The Costodes and the Exertus were the public face of the censure host. Such a rapid collection of military might in the near space of Terra could not escape the notice of many, no matter the supreme authority of those that were directing it. The emperor's writ of censure had been made explicitly public. All present upon the throne world, with half a lick of sense, knew that the Costodes were forming an expedition to capture the Cyclops of Prospero. Few, of course, knew the identity of the beaconless, black-hulled craft that lurked within the flotilla, for few, if any, knew of the existence of the Silent Sisterhood beyond rumour, and fewer still, the existence of the Ordo Sinister. Neither of these formations were for the eyes of the masses. Let the Costodes march along parade grounds, as the emperor's justice manifests. Within the hulls of these ships lay his ultimate weapons against the Aetheric. Their presence there, and our ability to confirm this in history, he testament to the totality of intent behind the order to bring a Magnus to task by any means necessary. Clearly, there was hope that the Crimson King would simply surrender himself to his father's judgement. Just as clearly, the unthinkable other outcome that he may resist, and by force, was clearly being considered, and without any mercy. Was a display of power a demand for contrition, even the use of dread ever the truly stated aim? More on that to come. Regardless of the urgency of the task, and the superlative abilities of those commanding it, it would nevertheless take several months to properly assemble and arm the censure host within Terran space. This was as much to do with the simple processes of logistical demands any such assemblage would require, as it was to do with the sheer chaos Magnus's actions had wrecked upon the administrative infrastructure of the Sol system. Additionally, the import of the action was lost upon none, with the senior staff of all wings of the host sequestering themselves in the most secretive chambers of the Divisio Militaris headquarters. To study in detail the intelligence that existed about the Prosperine system, its locales, and its potential defences. Valdor personally demanded the presence of Atharva, a single Astartes representative of the Thousand Sons present within Sol's light at the time of Magnus's folly. Through debriefings likely intense, Atharva was interrogated about his homeworld, his legion, and his primarch, willingly surrendering what information he could to the host. It appears that at this point the idea that Magnus would somehow resist was not actively in consideration, at least not in the minds of Valdor and Malkador. Both believed the sisterhood and the Ordo Sinister to be weapons of absolute last resort. One such as Valdor would never be given over to emotional considerations, being a man of deep, faultless practicality. The possibility that Magnus would be an open rebellion before him was scant, not a total impossibility, however, so he would be equipped accordingly. That being said, there were within the host those who, in no uncertain terms, were eager to believe the worst of Magnus and his legion, so whatever the feelings of the captain general, they were preparing for the worst, or even perhaps relishing the possibility. Strictly speaking, this forward military planning, the assessment of defences, this was a contingency, nothing more, a necessity in the event of a worst-case scenario. Strictly speaking, that is. Under these assumptions, did the censor host slip anchor over Terra, bound outwards from the solar reaches for the onward muster at Beta Garmin? There, it was hoped, the host would rendezvous with the forces of the Sixth Legion and the Primarch Limanrus. The astrophatic choirs, messages of grave import long since delivered, now turned their attentions to making the writ of censor known as far and wide across the galaxy as possible. As the censor host left the system, the memetic dream code of deepest gravity leapt from the minds of Terra's astropaths across all Memno communication hubs. The emperor was broadcasting his word. This was the fate of those who had breached his trust, and there would be none spared from the might of his legs. At the time of the declaration of censor, the Sixth Legion, the Vilca Fenrica, were believed to have been engaged in at least six major crusade campaigns, with Limanrus, as was his want, at the forefront of the most deadly of these, engaged in the xenocide of the Scarec in the volume of Sipramundi. Due to the particular idiosyncrasies of the Sixth Legion, the wolves that stalked the stars kept few to little written records. All we know of Russ' reception of the news comes from the sagas as related by their rune priests, as well as divisio militaris, logistical and transit logs. The former tells tales of the Wolf King's towering rage at the perfidy of his brother, cursing him to any who would bear to stand against the fury as a sorcerer enthralled to darkest maleficarum. The latter shows that Russ quit the field of battle at Sipramundi and made for the Legion's homeworld of Fenris with a haste that was almost unseemly, speaking to his zeal that he possessed for the task he had been assigned, or perhaps fury at the actions of his brother. Certainly, the enounced departure of Russ and the wolves from the Scarec Purgation drew outraged protestations from the commanders of the Imperial army, as it threw the entirety of the campaign planning into disarray. Not content to leave a battle mid-fight, Russ instead opted to disregard the previous Imperial strategy of methodical but consistent extermination, instead massing the entirety of his Estartes forces into a single strike upon the Xenos core world, ignoring outlying systems. The victory was, of course, won, and in short order, but at no small cost. While the world warren had been reduced to a phosphax choked ash wasteland, several thousand space wolves had died in the process. And although the source of the Scarec infestation had been removed from play, there yet lay many more worlds under the thrall of the Xenos. Nevertheless, judging his contribution and honor satisfied, Russ and his fleet made full wake out system, leaving the Imperial army to finish the work that remained. It is known that these regiments fared very poorly without Estartes support, spending many more years than had been initially planned finishing this Xenoside, at the cost of several hundred thousand soldiers. Russ brought with him a complement of wolves that had, prior to the assault upon the Scarec core world, numbered some twenty thousand Estartes, the entirety of On and SEP, the first and seventh of the Legion's great companies. The former consisted of the Wolf King's Husqa Retinue, as well as the Legion's foremost companies and the vast majority of its terminator, Estartes. The latter, known within the Legion as the Black Cull, formed the bulk of the Vilca's destroyer core, as well as those afflicted with rage-inducing Gino deficiencies that marked them out for inclusion in the Legion's death sworn divisions. As the pack travelled to Fenris, Russ made all possible attempts to contact the remainder of his Legion, redoubling his efforts once enshrined within the cold halls of the Fang, the holdfast upon the Iceworld itself. Again, we must trust to the Sagas and interpret what Divisio Militaris records remain, but it does not appear that Russ spent any more time on Fenris than a month-terren standard, allowing only such time, as was absolutely needed for On and SEP, to repair critical arms and armaments, and to count their dead. There would be no time for the depleted first and seventh companies to reinforce themselves, nor indeed would there be any time for those Wolves furthest from the Legion to make it to their homeworld, or to beat a Garmin, in the time that Russ demanded they do. This issue of replenishment of the ranks was in fact a substantial one for the Legion as a whole during this period. The Wolves habitually engaged with foes, and in a manner that, to be blunt, courted a higher body count than was strictly speaking necessary. All of their campaigns were entered into under the assumption, and indeed perhaps resignation, or desire, that they would be bloody and painful. Despite their legendary self-alliance, second only perhaps to the fifth Legion White Scars, many of the Wolves' great companies that answered the summons of their Yarl of Yarls were in dire need of replenishment. Those included Four, Fortwa, and Tov, the fourth, eighth, and twelfth great companies. Russ would and could not spare them the time required to bring them to standard, even sixth Legion standard, and the Sagas claimed that his blood was up to almost Bersharkhar levels. The Cyclops awaited him on that far-off world, and he would not be denied. Russ departed Fenris as soon as he was able, at the head of 50,000 Estartes, and, by the quirks of the warp, arrived at Beta Garmin, ahead of Constantine Valdor. Thanks to both the sixth Legion's Saga of Prospero, Remembrances of senior Exertus officers amongst the Terran Contingent, and the superlative work conducted by the chronicler Julius Heraclastes Binsuldam in His Eye Diminished, the Burning of Prospero, the demise of the 15th Legion, and the breaking of the Cyclops, with further observations upon the calamity of the sorcerers. We have a surprisingly accurate record of the force that Valdor found waiting once the Terran Wing of the Sensor Host broke from the warp. The Space Wolves, naturally, made up the bulk of the Contingent, and, indeed, comprised the vast majority of the Legion that was contemporary available in active service, some 73,000 Estartes. On, the first great company, the Breakers of Rings, were 3,000 strong, most of these being senior commanders, as well as the Legion's Varragir Terminator elite. Tois, the second great company, the Threadcutters, were only 800 in number, being primarily engaged elsewhere, but a large number of these were veteran infantry, as well as Dreadnought's sarcophagi. Tra, the third company, the Eagles Keepers, were almost entirely recently initiated Estartes, assigned to close infantry assault duties, and were one of the largest, at 9,800 Estartes. Four, the fourth great company, the Blood Worms Masters, were heavy infantry and self-propelled artillery, 8,600 strong. Fife, the fifth great company, the Blood Ice Storm, had been present on Fenris for inductee training and replenishment, and thus comprised of a combined arms force of 10,000 Estartes. Cep, the seventh, the Black Cull, as noted earlier, had been with Russ at Tsipramundi, now boasting 5,200 Estartes, almost all destroyers or deaths worn. Four, Tois, the eighth great company, the Slaughter Fire Heralds, were 9,500 strong, dedicated primarily to reconnaissance and forward infiltration. Tra, the ninth great company, the Serpents of the Battle Moon, were infantry support, special weapons teams, and rapier heavy battery platforms, at 7,800 Estartes. Eleve, the eleventh great company, the Sea Bearers Flame, were another combined arms force, but notable for having a substantial number of Terrans within their ranks, some 9,200 Marines in total. Tolve, the twelfth great company, the Shield Norres, supplemented the third with close infantry support formations, but bolstered by heavy armor divisions, and consisted of 8,700 Estartes in total. Finally, Dek Tra, the thirteenth great company, the Corpse Renders, were 600 strong, the smallest of the company elements committed, and consisted of light assault and pursuit infantry squads. Cep, the sixth, and Dek, the tenth, were absent in their entirety from the muster, unable to either disengage from their campaigns or make it to beat a Garmin in time. With the Wolves massing, and waiting the arrival of Valdor, the censure host was joined, by a surprising but not exactly unexpected contingent, 5,000 Estartes in the sea green of the newly renamed 16th Legion, the Sons of Horus. The Warmaster had not elected to sit idle as the censure host committed to its duty, and had committed a full battalion of his Legion, conspicuously arrayed as a line of battle unit, and not as a ceremonial detachment. The Sons of Horus were not alone, either, as with Valdor's oncoming contingent were accompanied by Exertus, imperialist troops. 9,000 soldiers of the 19th Cthonian headhunters, 4,000 of the third Idranian seekers, and 8,000 soldiers from the 73rd and 75th Echelons of the Host of Brass. Notably, all three of these divisions had either combat history against, notable hatred of, or specialized equipment for, the Psyker. Not only men, Horus also bade the Legio Mortis, his most favored Titan Legion, to provide 12 God Engines for the host, two full Manipals, and one Demi-Manipal, headed by the Warlord Class, Eterna Vertus, under the command of Princeps Maldus Drain. The head of the Warmaster's detachment was Overseer Boros Kern, commander of the 16th Independent Assault Battalion. His rank was a relatively newly created one, following the 16th Legion's Daven Incident. Kern was purportedly an intense and driven figure who requested, as emissary of the supreme military authority outside the imperial household, to meet with the Wolf King at the earliest opportunity. He had, so he claimed, special instructions from the Warmaster himself, based upon the latest information Horus had in his possession. What Kern bore precisely, what Ross was told what Horus said, none of this has ever been revealed to any scholar, and is likely that the only persons who ever knew just what was in that communique are Ross and Horus, and perhaps those they held closest counsel with. But it goes without saying that we mortals will never be parley to it. All that is known, for Ross was vocal about the new resolve that lay within his heart, is that this was no longer a mission of capture. This was a death sentence. He intended to execute Magnus the Red. Much has been made over the millennia, of this turn of judgment at so late a date. It had been months since the declaration of the writ of censure by the Emperor, even adjusting for warped dilation. Ross was widely known as the Emperor's Executioner, a dog held at his side until the moment the leash was slipped, and the jaws were sank into the throat of those his master made him murder make. The loyalty of Ross was as famous as his bloodthirsty reputation. He was no insane butcher like his brother Angron. His was a fury fully contained until the moment he chose to release it. Many chroniclers have thus tended to paint Ross as a victim of circumstance, corrupted to the purpose of the war master against his will, tricked by the perfidious looper-cowl and his cloying words. Lowek Gerentius, in his seminal lamentations upon the Age of Darkness, falls prey to this, a notable flaw within his work being a tendency that many others have shared, to lionise those primarchs that said fast to the throne while damning the insidious wretches that portrayed it. If one is to remain true to scholarly rigours, we must discount this and admit to ourselves the extant possibility. Ross wanted Magnus dead. Horus merely provided an excuse. It is historical fact that there was no love lost between kings, both wolf and crimson. There was outright hostility. Aside from being as unalike in character as any of the siblings had been, Ross firmly believed his learned brother's meddling in warpcraft was a dire and fundamental threat to the Imperium, believing none but their father capable of such study. As an example, the tension is best explored in the events surrounding the battle of Heliosa, where both legions had been tasked with the conquest of a unity-resistant world of ancient human provenance. In typical Thousand Sons doctrine, Magnus had prioritised the capture and codification of the planet's records, considering the millennia-old culture worth saving in whatever aspects remained. Ross, by contrast, was committing what the Cyclops called senseless genocide. What resulted was a standoff between both Primarchs and their legion echelons at the city's central library, culminating in Ross and his wolves charging the 15th legion only to be disabled by the sons' psychic powers. This, however, resulted in one of the 15th, a warrior named Hastar, succumbing to the flesh change for the first time since the legion had been cured of it by their Primarch. Thrown into panic at the re-emergence of a curse they had long thought lost, the 15th were helpless to prevent Ross from executing Hastar on the spot. Magnus and the Wolf King almost came to blows until the intervention of their brother Lorgar, who was assisting in the operation. This is only one example. The most recent and damning was Ross' own testimony at the Council of Nikia, where, flanked by his own rune priest-psychers, he had been the most vocal and passionate of Magnus' critics. The wolves were, and are to this day, a starties of contradictions. Ross, no exception. He damned his brother a sorcerer while accompanied by his legions own openly practicing psychers, all of whom continued their shamanistic Fenrisian rites after the passing of the Nikian Edict, in open violation of both it and the Imperial truth both. Ross was ever willing to clad himself in the rough appearance of a barbarian king, but it has been noted by Chronicles both contemporary and subsequent that this was a carefully constructed façade, that of the drunken Ophish lout to disguise the calculating viciousness that lay beneath. The Wolf King would of course never deny this. He had no need to. The views of others mattered not one iota to him, and his legion followed his example. Neither courted kinship with any of their cousins nor Ross with his siblings. Those who could stand or enjoy their company did so. Those who did not, they paid no heed. Loyalty to the Emperor was the only thing that mattered to him and to the wolves. The sixth legion did not build nor inspire nor uplift. They existed to destroy, built for that purpose alone. In many ways it was a role they shared with the first legion Dark Angels, and their detached mysterious Primarch, the Lion, that of a weapon and one unconcerned with being anything other than that. This all being said, the wolves clearly relished their role far more than the Angels did, savouring the fearful glances and tense exchanges with those of the Imperium that they made uncomfortable. It is uncertain where content detachment ends and egotistical image projection begins with them, and their Primarch. We know so little of both, due to their own partialities and the passages of time, to do anything but infer. This all must be considered in precisely why the wolves and Ross were selected for the role of primary Astartes cohort within the censure host. It is not as if other legions were not available at the time. The seventh legion Imperial Fists and their Primarch, Rogaldorn, were serving on Terra as Praetorians to the throne world in their near entirety, and outnumbered the wolves in sheer numerical disposition to boot. The fourth legion Iron Warriors had thousands of Astartes to spare, and a Primarch unconcerned with the arithmetic of spending his warriors lives as coin to achieve this. The 20th legion Alpha legion could appear as if from nowhere with precisely the right amount of warriors a task demanded. Even the first legion Dark Angels could serve as the ultimate weapon of the Emperor's writ with ease. It was essentially the entire purpose of their existence. Without a full picture of the entirety of all Astartes deployments across the entirety of the Great Crusade, we must fall to one conclusion. The Emperor wanted Leman Russ, Magnus' most furious critic, to lead this. It is historical fact that numerous assignments the wolves undertook during their existence have been utterly redacted from record, and it was an open secret in the Divisio Militaris and amongst the Primarchs that the title of Emperor's Executioner was one Russ had earned well, being his father's favoured instrument of annihilation, especially to traitors to the Imperium. Was his selection merely just a prudent one? To include on so dangerous a mission, a Primarch that would not balk at taking the life of another, should it fall to that? To one's mind, no. There were others who could have done so, and without blinking, the lion for one, Alphaeus Omega for another. Perhaps even Horus himself, although we need not explore that one further, Russ was not the only candidate for this mission, but he was the most eager. Perhaps this was a tacit approval, not said for it could never be said, but approval by proxy, an acknowledgement that the Emperor did not believe Magnus would surrender and that his life must be ended by any means necessary, means by which the Emperor could maintain the appearance of justice and benevolence while in his mind being resolved to the most brutal and bloody outcome of the situation. It is, if I may say, not exactly out of character for him to do so, and even less out of character for a regime such as his. That is, of course, all I can say upon the matter. We have the exacting strictures of the Magi of the Beated Garmin Forges to thank for more evidence of the Wolf King's change of heart. Per their meticulous record keeping, we know that the Warmaster had ordered the Forges to open their arsenals to the Wolves, ordering their access to even the most dangerous and otherwise prohibited weaponry. While the Wolf King naturally used the opportunity to resupply the great companies that had otherwise not had the chance to replenish their stocks, he and his legion eagerly availed themselves of the forbidden technologies previously denied to them, or to which their access had been strictly limited. According to logs, this included a quantity of phosphics, the corrosive and unstoppable flammable compound that was nearly impossible to extinguish, that would normally be considered too much even for a system-wide purgation campaign, as well as numerous exterminatus-grade munitions delivered to the Legion's capital ships. Several of these were bioalchemic phage saturation warheads of a lethality that had seen their usage within established imperial borders completely outlawed, having been utilized only for the most thorough and dire of alien purges, such as the ranked Anzenocides. The Legion's deaths sworn were recorded to have placed exorbitant demands for personal ammunition that far outstripped the requirements of even the most dangerous of Crusade operations. By the time the Terran contingent under Constantine Valdor arrived a month after the Wolves, the Custodians found a Legion armed to the fangs with war gear suitable for the most horrific of campaigns. Indeed, it was noted that the Legion of Russ appeared to be gearing up for yet another ranked Anzenocide rather than an escort for a wayward son of the Emperor. Remembrancers embedded into the Terran wing recorded quite vividly a series of intense and fractious strategic planning meetings held between Russ and Valdor and their senior staffs. Ironically, for two beings of unshakable loyalty to the Emperor, they had arrived at entirely separate conclusions of what his writ of censure bade them do. While Russ was not exactly open in the saying of it, he had clearly decided to that point that Magnus must die, whereas Valdor would not deviate one Iota from the orders of the Emperor to bring the Crimson King to Terra alive. Senior command staff were routinely dismissed from these meetings for the two to talk alone. Both were warriors known to have a deep respect for each other's abilities and characters, but it was obvious to any that what relationship they had previously had was fracturing under the differing goals of their combined mission. While Valdor, bearer of the Imperial Magisterium Ultima, was nominally the most senior legal official of the expedition, Russ as son of the Emperor himself, and operating under hidden orders from the Warmaster, was for all intents and purposes the Emperor's proxy in the censure host, forcing the Captain General to accede to his authority. Valdor's role and loyalty forced him into this position. If there had ever been personal feelings about this, he would have never let them be known. We of course know little of the content of these meetings beyond their historical outcomes. Russ additionally ordered the dismissal of all civilian Remembrancers from the censure host prior to their departure from Beta Garmin, never a Primarch that had supported the initiative in the first place, the Wolf King would not even consider their inclusion, deeming whatever he intended to occur upon Prospero was not for the eyes of any but the highest of the Imperium, and definitely not fit for public historical record. What we know of what followed is only the result of a careful preservation of material that was redacted at the highest level, and yours truly has had viewership of, only thanks to the rate of authorities yet higher. The revisions Russ demanded to the overall plan of action held secret from all but the senior staff took very little time. The Wolf King was deeply eager to be underway. Terra had rendered for the host's service its finest navigators, allowing the fleet to utilize warp corridors not typically plied by military starships. This was both to prevent the fleet from being waylaid by any unforeseen warp experiences, but given the prevailing immaterial currents at the time the route selected was considered far faster than approaching Prospero by any conventional means. Crucially too, it would also outmaneuver worlds known to have 15th Legion elements stationed upon them. The censor host was not intended necessarily to be a surprise for the Thousand Sons, the writ of censor having been broadcast throughout the entirety of the Imperium. That Russ sought to disguise its approach, it speaks to the degree with which he was now treating the Cyclops as an enemy, not a brother, denying him the ability to muster or even prepare in advance. Thus the Doom of Magnus made full wake, barreling towards the unsuspecting Thousand Sons with the fury of a wolf pack unleashed. Its coming was the result of many moving parts, both personal and situational, a tragedy of unspeakable sorrow that would soon break upon the shores of the Imperium and of history. As the censor host of the emperor cleaved a path through the tides of the Imitarium, powering at full wake towards the planet of Prospero, homeworld of the 15th Legion, Magnus the Red sat ensconced within his sanctum. Around him, throughout the capital of Tizca, were gathered the overwhelming majority of his Thousand Sons. Yet the potent and of course condemned collection of Astartes were not, as the ships of Russ and Valdor powered ever closer, fortifying their home against invasion. They were, instead, obliviously tending to their studies and initiatives, training their bodies and minds for whatever expedition they anticipated their primarch was surely preparing to lead them upon. Should any Acolytes wonder as to how a legion possessed of literal prescience have been able to be caught by surprise, let alone remain unalerted by entirely mundane communication apparatuses, know that it is simply because they were all of them deceived. Magnus the Red appears to have been fully aware that his judgment was nigh, approaching now with slavering jaws, and he made every effort possible to conceal this from his sons, and indeed, almost ease the approach of the fleet. What scanned records of the legion, as captured and archived by the Ligio Custodes, dictate that the primarch issued no defensive preparation orders. Instead, he withdrew honor guard and watch garrisons from the world that lay in the path of the censor host, shuttering all holdfasts of the legion that could potentially deliver any advance warning. Similarly, the fleet of the Thousand Sons was broken into dozens of separate squadrons and dispatched to far more distant legion outposts, or on unclear patrol routes that would take them into the deep void and as far from the orbit of their homeworld as possible. The astrophatic choirs of Prospero were removed from their chambers, records of their recent communiques redacted, and in some cases the minds and memories of the telepaths themselves altered to remove information deemed sensitive. All of these measures were made explicitly by the Order of Magnus. Indeed, the informational aspect appears to be crucial, as by throttling all incoming offworld missives, Magnus managed to prevent his sons from not only discovering that their doom approached, but that the Emperor had even censured him in the first place. None saved the members of the Rahati, his inner circle, even knew of the ritual Magnus had attempted, and it is unclear if any were even aware of the results, or what had transpired as the spirit form of the Primarch had flown to Terra. Magnus clearly went through great lengths to disguise his failure from the Thousand Sons, even going so far as to alter the memories of those he deemed a threat to its revelation. The motivations of the Crimson King for this are, of course, only open to supposition. Some will claim that it was his means of surrendering to the oncoming judgment, while others will state it was guilt and shame that drove his hand, a mad rush to conceal the truth from his sons until the last possible moment, as he sought martyrdom as penance for his crimes. Official Terran Chronicles, compiled in the aftermath of the Great Heresy, stated categorically that it was by the will of the Emperor alone that his traitorous son and his brood had their sight stripped from them, and while one may admire the fervour behind such a statement, it is unlikely that it was anything other than propaganda. Yet, for all their obliviousness, a legion homeworld was to never be considered an easy target, and Prospero was now host to the majority of the legion it had borne, as well as auxiliaries of the Prosperite Inspire Guard Regiments and the Subterranean Mechanicum Entlave from the local Forge World of Xauarch had. All of these were contained within the mighty capital of Tizca, with the exception of the Mechanicum Forge Fane, for without lay the wastes of a world overrun with predatory Xenos megafauna, the most lethal amongst them being the deadly Psykh Noyan. The ancient cities of pre-fall Prospero were nothing more than time-worn ruins, occasionally occupied by training outposts of the legion, or heavily defended scientific endeavors. Nothing more. It was not outside the central metropolis for an enemy to capture or destroy. The Xenos infestations made such a possibility of establishing any forward operating base for a traditional siege completely impractical. Even if a foundation for such a holdfast could have been in place, constant predation would have drained vital resources of the sense you're host, now apparently set in its aim of a full-scale military invasion. Such losses would be ill-afforded. The capital itself presented no easy task for any that wished to attack it, as it had been specifically constructed within a geographically isolated location. To the north of it lay the White Mountains, impassable to most any army and strung through with defense batteries and fortified bunkers providing overlapping fire cover on any potential approach. To the west was the Valparine Sea, its tides naturally preventing any assault from that vector. The only conventional land approach to the city had long ago been clad behind hundred meter tall walls, embedded with void shield generators to ward off the Psyknoen. Tisca had always been a fortress by sheer necessity, the last bastion of humanity upon a hostile world. The coming of the legion had only refined and upgraded this, and, given the Thousand Sons' proclivities, this went far, far beyond void shield and turbo laser batteries. Its skyward vector was protected by a giant telekinetic barrier, designed to channel the power of raptora cult astartes and enhance it by orders of magnitude. It formed what was essentially a biologically and a theoretically generated void battleship equivalent barrier, one that required no power beyond the mental fortitude of those who were delegated to maintain it. While technically the usage of such powers was banned under the edict of Nikia, the commanders of the censor host were under no doubt that the legion would immediately utilize it if placed under threat, and had included it in their assault planning. These commanders were painfully aware that this was merely one of the potentially dozens of esoteric and paranormal defenses that the Thousand Sons could mount at any moment. The cult arcologies of the city were gigantic and could form perfect loci for defensive efforts, and, as to what lay within the warren of buildings that formed the old quarter and other parts of the conurbation, no terror official could warrant any suppositions. These issues with forming a planetary assault would have under normal circumstances necessitated a far longer period of planning or a different configuration of the attackers, or sundry other applications of military logistics and strategizing. But we must remember one crucial aspect above all else when it comes to considering how the censor host began its opening gambits. It had been formed originally to be an honor guard under arms, not explicitly at least, as a hostile military expedition in any real sense. Perpetrating an invasion in force was a last resort, and eventuality Ligio-Castode's genetic programming forced them to consider in every situation they engaged with. Horus Lupercal, and to an extent Liman Russ, had manipulated the events to transform an escort fleet into an assault flotilla, and while the former had swelled its offensive capabilities with the addition of Sons of Horus Astartes, Warmaster pledged exertus imperialis regiments and the god engines of Ligio Mortis, they were still ranged against an entire Astartes, Ligio. While no efforts had been made since they were not necessary to conceal prosperous capabilities, there was a significant difference in being able to ascertain the serving number of Prospera Inspire Guard to, say, accurately plotting out just what technologies the Mechanicum of Shao Arkad held in their underground fain, or just how effective the psychic might of the Thousand Sons would be should they decide to unleash it. In short, even supplemented by the Warmaster's forces, even with the auric might of the Ligio-Castode's, the anti-psychur specialities of the Silent Sisterhood, and the terrifying power of the Titans of the Ordo Sinister, the equation that was the balance of power was far too close to parity for any commander to be comfortable with. Typically, orbital invasions predicated themselves around numerical superiority as the absolute base element, all the better to eliminate the home field advantage possessed by entrenched defenders. This, the censure host completely lacked, and that is before anything else was taken into consideration, such as the psychic powers of the Thousand Sons or that of their Primark. While the censure host was making unimpeded progress towards Prospero, sustaining nothing in the way of delays, let alone losses, and was thus able to count on their arrival in full force, they nevertheless expected the enemy to quickly adapt to any outbreak of hostilities, counting not on the fact that they were seemingly arriving with total surprise on their side. And it was best they did, for the defences ranged against them were formidable indeed, even for all their lack of preparation. At the pinnacle, figuratively and literally, was Magnus the Red, withdrawn in seclusion, but remaining the supreme authority over all that transpired under Prospero's guise. Outside of the Legion, but still beholden to Magnus, were Majus Prime Tacitus Proctor of the Arcadian Mechanicum Fane, whose heresy Technologica had been declared by Mars at the same time the censure of Magnus had been announced, Lucretia Eleunarai, Senesha Prime of the Prosperine Spearguard Regiments, and Calvlar Ibraenum, Princeps Warden of the Vigil of the Ligio Zestobiax Titans stationed planet side. While these latter were present in force, and were served as potent exhilaries, the bulk of Prospero's might was absolutely maintained within the 15th Legion, there in its vast majority, some 62,000 Astartes out of an estimated 80 to 90,000. The first fellowship indeed were present in its entirety, 9,000 Astartes including the whole of the Legion's Terminator elite. The remaining eight fellowships varied in disposition, with only the fourth being severely underrepresented, a mere 200 Astartes with the rest off-world abroad across the galaxy. Outside the bounds of the fellowships, the Order of Ruin possessed 1,800 Astartes and nearly 800 Battle Automata of the psychically sensitive Castilex Achia pattern. The Order of the Blind were a round 888 Astartes withdrawn from their secretive operations galaxy-wide, and the Order of the Jackal supplemented their Legion with 604 Astartes that could be withdrawn from their ceremonial and practical Legion management duties. Of the exhilaries, strength therein was nothing to be sniffed at, regardless of the transhuman fury they were about to face. The Spire Guard counted 85,000 soldiers under arms. The combined arms force arraigned along standard Exertus Imperialis lines, but considered within its upper echelons in terms of training, quality of equipment, and discipline. The Arcadian Mechanicum counted a typically diverse and fractious set of Tagma amongst its present planet side, but could, if required, form a Tagmata consisting of 8,000 soldiers and automata, as well as attached esoteric war machines. Finally, a full vigil of the Ligio Zestobiacs was also present. Twelve Titans of various configurations contained within the Geller and Void Shielded Mechanicum Fane just outside the city limits. These were the considerations as a censure host slipped anchor at Beta Garmin and made the months-long journey from the coreward reaches towards Prospero. However, what they found, both along the route and as they drew closer, surprised them. As mentioned earlier, not only were the outposts of the Thousand Sons vacated, but not a single picket craft, Defense Monitor or Lone Roving Frigate was even encountered. Ironically, this only increased the combat readiness of the host, translating in-system at each necessary staging point in staggered formations that would allow for rapid retreat through the Mandeville point. No explanation could be offered for the dearth of 15th Legion vessels, and when the time had finally come to breach the bounds of Prospero's own system, the host did so as tentatively as possible, sending a formation of Silent Sisterhood, Anethematlas Pinochet and a flotilla of 6th Legion interdiction destroyers far ahead of the main fleet. Surely, most host commanders believed, Thousand Sons had gathered the full might of their fleet in orbit around their homeworld. But no. Within the light of Prospero's son was found the same situation as every other leg of the censor host's journey. Not a single ship under the 15th Legion flag was detectable on any all-spec sweeps. Indeed, the only craft in-system were the typical merchant vessels common in all Imperial space, and approximately two dozen monitor vessels aligned to the Mechanicom Forge of Shawar Khad, none of which were even warp capable. Without a trace of any Legion vessels, the censor host delayed its arrival in force, fearing an ambush of some kind. Nearby systems were scouted for the 15th fleet, and all merchant shipping was rapidly seized, with their crews turned over to the Silent Sisterhood interrogatrixes for debriefing. The idea that the fleet was simply dismissed by Magnus did not even enter into the considerations of Russ and Valdor at the time. For what possible reason could there be for such a decision? One wonders what these August figures would make of it to know that even 10,000 years later, the reason for this is still a mystery that weighs heavy upon those who chronicle it. All due caution was paid to the possibility that, through means either mundane or arcane, Magnus had disguised his fleet's presence. The Mechanicom ships, whose commanders were all Prosperine natives, were rapidly seized by 6th Legion boarding actions, the wolves moving professionally and fairly bloodlessly to capture their crews intact. While no match for the battleships of the host, these craft were deemed both a threat of note enough, due to their macro cannon batteries, that they could disrupt landing operations, but also for the potentially sensitive information their crews could be aware of. One such capture, that of the monitor-sloop Tempest, is often highlighted by those who seek to criticize prevailing opinions of the wolves' rather bloodthirsty nature. Only 64 members of the ship's crew were killed in her capture, and only one Astartes was lost on the Imperial side. Ironically enough, the first casualty of war for the entire Burning of Prospero, on those who went under the Emperor's flag. A single wolf was slain by the ship's captain, who, themselves, was dispatched along with the entirety of the bridge crew subsequently. The remaining personnel on board were informed by the attackers that they were to surrender, or all life support, would be immediately turned off. The pattern was repeated system-wide, with all non-sensor hosts aligned ships being immediately seized. Unfortunately for the commanders, the Mechanicom appeared to be just as in the dark as they were. None of the surviving Magi were capable of offering any explanation as to the disappearance of the Thousand Sun's fleet, never mind their surprise at seeing themselves being captured by those who were apparently on the same side as them. With no choice but to act, Russ gave the order for full fleet translation. First came the heavy cruisers and the battleships, spreading out across the Prosperine orbital reaches and neutralizing its satellite communications network and weapons platform arrays. Although the latter proved to be far less of an issue than anticipated, not a single shot was fired in return as the platformed were sundered from the skies. The transport barks and Titan macro conveyors translated in shortly thereafter, directly into high anchor. Prosperine space had been seized in the matter of a few hours. The sensor host was in complete and uncontested control of the orbital volume. That an imperial planet and a legion homeworld no less had fallen in such time was unthinkable, a travesty and a tragedy in kind, all that defensive artifice of imperial genius, that it could be stripped aside so easily even by those who had made it, that they had, surely speaks volumes to the degree that Magnus the Red had sought to pave the path forward for this sensor host. Since their departure from Beta Garmin to their complete mastery of Prospero skies, not a single shot had been fired at their approach, not in warning nor in anger. Upon the surface, the host's sudden arrival was now becoming known, but not in anything approaching a coherent fashion. The destruction of the communication grid had wrought havoc on the planet's civilian government, and the rain of satellite debris that was now plummeting from the atmosphere only added to this. Several regiments of the Smire Guard, lacking direct command and with their Vox networks in chaos, began to mobilize, their commanders assuming that an invasion was somehow already underway. Elsewhere, Tizca's emergency responders were deploying, assuming an entirely different scenario, that there had been some form of orbital catastrophe, and their services would soon be needed. The Thousand Sons were utterly silent in their cult arcologies. Not a single member of the legion's senior staff could be raised on the Vox, and what contact existed between civilians and the starties of the line only proved that the lower ranks would absolutely not budge without direct orders to do so. It has been suspected, based on writings recovered, that the legion was now beginning to realize something was afoot, although if they were, they made no show of this. In orbit, Leman Russ took one final step to avoid the end he had by some estimates already concluded would occur. He offered clemency for the world, in exchange for the Primarch. From the flagship of the Ligio Castodes, the appointed Vox Imperiosa, voted voice of the Sisters of Silence, proclaimed again the writ of censure, that the Emperor himself had declared months previously. The Crimson King was to surrender himself for transportation to Terra. The communique was delivered on all bands, civilian, military, and astro-pathic. There was no response. Russ' ire began to build. He is recorded to have spent a standard hour pacing the bridge of his flagship, fury kindling, requesting updates from his master of Vox repeatedly, only to be told the same each time. There was no response. Valdor raised the Primarch, cautioning him against rash action and requesting that Magnus be given more time, as the censure proclamation was obviously one of great import. There was not. There was no word of resign surrender. There were no pleas of forgiveness. There was no staunch resistance or hot-headed hostility. There was not even acknowledgement that the fleet was even there. Russ had had enough, and Prospero began to burn. To any who may believe that the Appalachian burning is a poetic one, let me disperse any notions thus forthwith. The literal burning of Prospero began as soon as Russ gave his command. From the bowels of the Sixth Legion fleet came a barrage of the world killer weapons of Beter Garmin. Viral cascades emulsified all biological life upon the planet, while land strikes ignited gaseous aftermaths, creating firestorm deluges that incinerated whole continents. The verdant wilderness of Prospero vanished in fire and ash, a biosphere so redolent of old earth now lost to the punitive fury of Leeman Russ and his wolves. It only took an hour. Yet when augury suites scryed the burning world one thing was incontrovertible. Tizca had survived, unblemished, the sole area unscathed in a world of flame, and doing so under a shimmering aegis of psychokinetic force. Clearly at the last instance the rage of the Sixth Legion had been detected by the Thousand Sons whose adepts had rushed to raise their unique shield above the capital. In doing so, almost ironically, they had damned themselves even further. Whatever their desire to protect their city, their home, their civilians, they had done so through clearly arcane means. Not even a glorian or class battleship's shields could have withstood the bombardment that had rained down on Prospero. Here then was evidence incontrovertible, but the Fifteenth Legion shared their father's crimes that the Emperor's edict of Nikia had been truly violated and before the watching eyes of those who bore the Magisteriae Imperator too. It seems so petty a thing at this juncture to have guilt pronounced upon those who were literally enduring an orbital bombardment for crimes they had not even known they were accused of, but such are the curious twists of history. It is true, however, that up until the survival of the Metropole of Tizca, it had not been proven that the Thousand Sons yet continued to utilize their powers. Observing the shield from orbit, Russ and Valdor had been handed evidence entirely to the contrary. It had, of course, always been assumed that no orbital attack would scour the planet completely of the Legion. Exterminatus can be, oddly enough, an imprecise tool within the Imperium's arsenal, especially when the Legionnaires of Stardes are concerned. Russ and Valdor managed to correctly assume what Horus Lupercal did not years later at Istvan III, although both would be stunned by just how many of those they had subjected to the punitive bombardments had managed to weather them. The censor host now faced not a punished Legion reeling from an attack unexpected, but a resolved and dug-in opponent whose numbers were almost exactly one-to-one with their own. The bombardment had only served to set the defenders home ablaze. It had not reduced their capabilities, one iota, something the censors of the fleet were now clearly detecting as a prosperous Spire Guard rushed to their fortifications around the Acropolis of Tizca, unfurling defense lasers and establishing barricades and readouts. Of the Thousand Sons themselves, however, still nothing was seen. The orbital strikes had, of course, not accomplished nothing. In the mountains surrounding the city, lance strikes had disabled many of the orbital and air defense batteries, unprotected by the shield as they were, and had set avalanches of snow and rock plummeting into the civilian quarters of Tizca. The Valparine Sea had likewise endured punishment that had sent tsunamis to pound the coastal quarters of the capital, as well as clouds of scalding mists from superheated water boiled by lance beams. As the Spire Guard were rushing to defend against what was now, clearly, an invasion, they had to battle their way through crowds of panicked, fleeing civilians, as well as aid the overwhelmed civil defense units in coordinating evacuations and crowd control. The Legion was still nowhere in sight, and though they were clearly aware of an invasion owing to the raising of the Kinney Shield, their silence and that of Magnus only worsened matters, as civilian government order completely broke down, bereft of the leadership they had come to rely on from the Astartes. Chaos was reigning, and while the Spire Guard were engaging in admirable efforts to mitigate it, the situation was only growing worse. No word, likewise, could be raised from the Mechanicum. Their Forge Fane was a Subterranean one, but it was located outside of Reach of the Shield. What surface facilities it had once born had simply vanished, scoured from the earth by the guns of the host. All Stratagoy officers aboard the fleet advocated an immediate drop on mass to Tezka itself. The destruction wrecked by the bombardment rendered all landing zones outside of the city useless, not to mention that any army would then have to contend with the walls of the Metropolis and the still very much active Kinney Shield. Russ, however, gainsaid part of this order. He had, by all accounts, sworn a form of oath that he and his wolves would be the first boots on the ground. Despite the protests of all other host command officers, including Valdor, Russ ordered that all non Astartes combatants of the censure host remain in orbit until he and his legion had established a beachhead, and immediately set about gathering the might of On, his legion's first company, and the most bellicose of his assault cadres for an immediate landing in force. This consisting of warriors of the 2nd, 3rd, 8th, and 12th companies. At 0758 Local Tezkan time, on 743004 M31, the first six legion aircraft broke the atmospheric boundaries of Prospero. In a fashion perfected by the wolves for aerial assault of dug in enemies, their approach dive was taken at such a speed and descent angle that it would have literally killed on augmented humans. The aircraft levelling out of the dive over the still boiling Valparine Sea, mere meters above the angrily tempestuous waves, slamming ramjets to their limits as they burned towards the Tezkan shoreline. Such an approach mitigated the vast majority of potential anti-aircraft fire volumes, something which the wolves, unaware of the Spire Guard's hastily established batteries, had not realized was ultimately unnecessary. The response that came from the Prosperine was in the form of scrambled air interdiction fighters, Arcadian patterned lightning and thunderbolt aircraft from the fields that had been protected by the Tezkan-Kinney shield. The pilots, brave as they were, had of course never been called upon to face the Legionnaires' startes, and followed standard engagement protocol with presumed enemy dropships, namely that they presumed them to be ill-equipped to defend themselves. They were of course quite the opposite. Prosperine aircraft on approach vectors found their planes shredded by deluges of heavy bolt fire, or plucked from the sky by pinpoint las cannon shots. One lightning suffered a head-on collision with the Legion Stormbird, obliterating it in its entirety as the Astartes' craft continued on completely unscathed. The Prosperine only got to make one pass. As the Air Guard banked around for a second potential run, they were set upon immediately by the Xiphon interceptors of the wolves, supported by a small number of Ligio Custodis equinox fighters running aerial support and reconnaissance, cognizant of the oath Russ was insisting on maintaining. The introduction was so one-sided it would have been laughable had it not been tragic. Astartes and Custodis aircraft isolated individual Prosperine fighters from their squadrons with ruthless efficiency, completely occupying the Air Guard in what had become nothing less than a fight for survival as the baseline humans of the defenders pitted their piloting against the transhuman mastery of the invaders. The landercraft continued on towards the city, freed from what little interference the Air Guard had been even able to run, grounding themselves at pre-selected landing zones along the immediate coastline. The Stormbirds formed a concentric ring, a tactic pioneered by the wolves of Russ for orbital landings, as it allowed the massive aircraft to merge their voyage shields in a manner not entirely dissimilar from the hunting packs of warhound scout titans. The protective bubble was immediately useful, as ranging artillery strikes from the Smire Guard began to almost immediately fall. Just as he had so sworn in orbit, the first warrior of the censure host to disembark was Leeman Russ himself. Doing so with no words of rousing wisdom or assured conviction, but with a bestial howl that tore through the terrified streets of the capital. Following the pounding of Russ's armored tread came 30,000 wolves, equipped with the most brutal of short-range equipment for urban firefights. From the Terran bolters of the line, to the Volkites and plasma guns of Mars, and her forges, to the simple blades of Fenris. Acting upon standard Legion practices, the force immediately fragmented into hunting packs, authority delegated through the Legion's fluid and personality-driven command structure. There would be little in the way of a hierarchy for the enemy to disrupt, or to gain access to. The wolves were as fiercely independent upon the battlefield, as they were in temperament, answering only to the word of their direct superiors and that of their king. Initial landing zones were rapidly secured and delivered to Legion hands, allowing for the straggler transports to make hard landings. The area of Tizca in question was its oldest, predating both the arrival of Magnus and the Imperium both. It lacked the palatial squares and impeccable urban planning of the newer Reachers of the Metropolis, instead being a dense winding warren of relatively primitive housing arrayed in no coherent fashion. Tide streets, overhanging roofs, dead-end alleys, scores of potential ways for any defender to bleed and trap an unwitting or unprepared attacker. It was also densely packed with civilians, many of whom had not yet heeded the evacuation orders, and were even now stirring in terror as Grey Armoured Astartes in furs and blood began to swarm through their once peaceful district. The local Spire Guard commander, Caton Afea, commanded the elite regiments of the Northern Palatine Guard Division, and was rapidly digging in where possible to brace his soldiers for the tide he knew would soon arrive. The knowledge of the locale was being land upon heavily, with chokepoints and ambush locations prepared and fallback corridors mapped out. Overall, Afea was confident that a sufficient delay could be affected against the invaders to allow the bulk of the Spire Guard in the Central Districts to mobilize and fortify. Yet the maze-like patterns of the Old City would help his soldiers retreat in safety if they needed to. They were broken in two minutes. Simply put, the tactics employed by the Spire Guard would have been superlative against almost any conventional foe. But the foe was anything but. The Legion as Astartes are, thanks to a combination of equipment and biological enhancement, effectively proof against all small arms fire in anything but the most concentrated quantity. Atop this, the Sixth Legion specifically had been fighting for two centuries as a shock infantry assault force, conducted, as one remember answer has noted, at a tempo that is literally more than human. The carefully laid out ambushes the Spire Guard hoped to trap the invaders in instead became desperate fights for survival as the wolves simply crashed into each one with near impunity. Striding into deluges of small arms fire and butchering those who had moments before believed them surprised. Against any other army these tactics would have been incisive and demoralizing affairs. Bloody traps sprung to bleed the enemy, but against the wolves they were no impediment at all. The Spire Guard were some of the best trained and equipped Auxilia in the Imperium, but the Sixth Legion that stalked the stars themselves for two centuries to fight and kill the most lethal abominations of the galaxy destroyed them. Against such a thing a baseline human with a las gun or light support weapon offered no resistance. The violence meted out against the Spire Guard was monstrous butchery. The regiments of the Palatine Guard found that it was now they not the invaders who were trapped in the Old City. They were routed literally within minutes all resistance crumbling against the sheer ferocity of the Astartes but the slaughter that ensued went on for more than 15 with the wolves offering absolutely no mercy to those before them. This too extended to the civilians of Prospero who seeing the horrors of what was happening around them fled in catatonic terror alongside the broken soldiery a tide of humanity streaming out of the Old City towards the central district. The alabaster housing of the ancient quarter once known for shining so brightly in the sun was drenched in arterial red as the men of Russ spared none. The estimated military casualties for this initial engagement have been placed at around 10,000 based on the records of Palatine Guard membership with the civilian toll at least equal to that. All of it taking place in a quarter of an hour none of it having slowed the wolves one bit. From a coldly strategic point of view the sheer speed of the assault made sound military sense. The Thousand Sons were still entirely uncommitted and without anything approaching the numerical superiority typically demanded of a planetary assault operation the wolves could ill afford to become mired in the type of building to building fighting the typified urban conflicts. Speed was of the essence and if the fury of the assault happened to create a flow of panic and terror that would go on to sow chaos in areas of the city they had not occupied well that was a mark in its favor all the same. Innocent casualties be damned. It was in some ways a gamble though as it risked the beach head the wolves had established being attacked in the absence of a proper rearguard. Initially it paid off but that was until the Sixth Legion reached the Lesma River. Stretching from the coastal areas where the Sixth Legion had made planetfall all the way to the fringes of the central district the Lemsa River was the demarcation line municipally and geographically for the old city of Tizca. It was a perfect defense cordon both for anyone seeking to halt the advance of an invading army and for the invading army themselves to resist what they were assured would be an inevitable counterattack. Ironically enough considering the almost contemptuous ease by which the wolves had thus far dispatched the soldiery of the Spire Guard the resistance would come from other baseline humans members of a regiment of imperial auxilia known as the Magdan Freakor. Upon it was later discovered orders of agents of the war master the Magdan had been rerouted to Prospero for a resupply and were encamped in the Palatinate Mansions an ancient relic of a time when Tizca was ruled by hereditary dynasts. The Freakor hailed from one of the first worlds brought into compliance following the great crusades initial pushes from the Sol system. They were famed for their unimpeachable loyalty to the throne and the Imperium. As with all upon Prospero the Freakor were utterly unaware of the unfolding catastrophe and their place within it but unlike the Spire Guard they had plenty of combat experience alongside the forces of the Ligionnesus startes. Neither did the commanders of the censure host know of the presence of the Freakor having been uninformed of their quartering upon Prospero by the intelligence provided by again the forces of the war master. Acolytes will perhaps expect another auxilia route as baseline human is pitted against the genhanced power of the wolves. On the contrary the boon of serving alongside the great crusade for two centuries was that the Freakor had seen precisely how forces equipped similarly to they themselves fared against startes. Instead of attempting to futilely meet them in open combat, human versus transhuman, the Magdan instead sought to leverage what weaponry they had at their disposal that they knew would stand some chance against power armor. As the wolves slaughtered their way through the remaining Spire Guard infantry on the banks of the Lemsa, Magdan Malkador battle tanks took positions in the ornamental gardens of the Palatenate churning priceless flora under fast moving trends. A concentrated barrage of high explosive cells tore into the wolves across the water. The Sixth Ligion's advance was, here, halted. As the wolves of Russ sought cover from the firepower the Magdan were displaying, having roved far ahead of any of their support armor or heavier weaponry as they glutted their bloodlust on the fleeing Spire Guard. Elsewhere in the city, however, the Sixth were still pressing forward at a terrifying pace. Before the Acropolis Magna, the sagas of Fenris first record Russ as engaging in combat against the masses of terrified civilians and broken auxilia that were attempting to gain access to the relative safety of that old fortress. And so did the king of wolves come upon the servants of his warp-touched brother, finding them sealed within the iron hearth that served as their lair, where the raven's friends could not reach with their bright sea flames. The ringbreaker of the Sixth took hold of the hearth's maw, his mighty fuse straining at the effort, and it pried asunder, breaking the jaws apart. Across the smashed gullet of the fortress, the steed of midnight the sons of Fenris came howling for the blood of the foe, and within the span of heartbeats there was left only food for the crows. Looking upon the work of his children, the broken corpses of the foe, the wolf king judged it well and good. The poem rather floridly describes is the massacre of the Acropolis Magna. Such was the press of civilians outside, that the guns of the fort were unable to be turned by its defenders upon the wolves rampaging through the citizenry of Tizca, and once the Primarch had breached the gates, apparently bodily, this hesitation devolved into panic. The Spireguard pummeled the crowds with high velocity rounds in a vain effort to stymie the advance of the Astartes. While some, including the Spireguard's Seneshal Prime, were successful in leading a group of several thousand civilians out into the White Mountains, the interior of the Acropolis Magna became, in no time at all, an abattoir. The first, second, and twelfth companies of the wolves, and Russ himself, made absolutely no distinction between civilian and servicemen, massacring any that were within reach with a lack of remorse that was simply inhuman. Several bitter last stands occurred, where what units of the Spireguard that had not succumbed to sheer terror sold their lives as best they could against the invaders. The Armory Vault was barricaded by some two hundred soldiers, all of whom managed an impressive ten-minute stand against Cataphractii Armored Terminators of the first Six Legion Company, before detonating the ammunition dump therein in a final act of defiance, when all had become lost. The surprising restraint that the Six Legion had shown in its capture and interrogation of orbital vessels had been utterly discarded. These were predators loose amongst helpless livestock. Beyond the Magdan Free Corps they had faced no opposition worth noting, nor had taken any casualties worth mentioning, and yet they were inflicting onto Imperial citizenry, innocent ones to boot, atrocities reserved previously for those who had knowingly defied the Emperor's writ. Death came for all who stood before them, inexorable, violent, and pitiless. The Sixth Legion were unopposed in the City of Light. The Air Guard had by now been utterly demolished. No Spireguard resistance worth noting yet remained. Heavy ordnance, now finally being landed by the Legion's other companies, took up an artillery refrain, shelling sites of cultural importance as they waited, along with now all of their consolidating brethren, for the emergence of their true foes, the Thousand Suns. With the fall of the Acropolis Magna, the Sixth Legion now controlled Old Tisga in its entirety. The Spireguard remained only as pockets of isolated units yet to be overrun by Legion forces, and in the Mansions Palatinate, Sixth Legion armor, Predator and Sikaran battle tanks, engaged the Magdan Free Corps in punishment for its earlier resistance, turning the forests and gardens of the Mansions into an all-out armored engagement, and depriving the Corps of any ability to link up with the Thousand Suns, if and when they emerged. The Magdan fought where they could, pleading with the wolves over all Vox channels for a ceasefire and talks, but these were, predictably, completely ignored. Likewise ignored were calls from the remainder of the censure host still in orbit. Constantine Valdor repeatedly hailed the Wolf King with requests to land the rest of Imperial forces, only to have these rebuffed by the Truculent Primark. The wolf still yet hunted for any sign of his brother and his Legion. Whether or not this was done to satisfy Russ' initial oath, fulfilled now by his being the first boots upon the ground, or yet pride or tactical prudence, all is unclear. Certainly there is a lot to be said for an invader not showing their full hand, so to speak, but it is also not unheard of for the ego of the Wolf King to dictate how he comported his campaigning. Regardless, what is certain is that the drawing out of the Thousand Suns was clearly Russ' primary objective at this point in the conflict. Scholars have posited that the butchering of the civilian population was simply a part of this, although one considers it gauche not to acknowledge the heinous barbarism inherent in such wanton, feckless brutality. Certainly the Wolf King did not wish to force entrance into the fortified cult arcologies if he could help it, much better to draw the 15th out into the open and away from their arcane edifices, for who could say what esoterica lay within, waiting to be unleashed upon a hapless intruder. The Wolves, however, had no alternative at this point but to continue their relentless forward advance towards these arcologies, as no enemy was yet presenting itself. What resistance remained was scant in the extreme, taking the form of a family attempting to defend their property with ancient heirloom firearms. None, of course, lived beyond their initial defiance. Any prosperine who defied the wolves in any capacity was immediately and mercilessly executed. Often they did not even need to defy, they simply needed to be there. The tempo of the Wolves' advance was however such that by the time they had reached the foothills of the White Mountains, and their forward units were a mere few kilometers from the Argent Bastion, they were becoming dangerously stretched out. While attempting to run down a retreating Palatine Guard division, a roving pack of gray slayers masked for a final charge on their hapless prey. Yet, as the great lad Astartes plunged into what they thought was a route, they were met with a punishing salvo of not last rounds or auto-rifle rounds, but boater shells. They found their bodies lashed with tendrils of fire that moved as if alive, and their advance blunted by invisible forces they could not understand. Finally, the Thousand Sons had joined in the defense of Tizca. It has been a topic of frequent and oft impassioned debate, at least for those of us parlayed the mysteries of the past, as to the inaction of the Sons of Magnus during the early period of the Battle of Tizca. Some will claim that the losses they were able to inflict upon the invaders at the time of their emergence would not have been possible unless the wolves had been allowed to run rampant and overextend themselves. This, of course, does not account for the sheer devastation the Sixth Legion wrought upon the city and its populace. The Thousand Sons were rarely noted throughout their loyal history as being callous towards civilians, quite the opposite in fact, so the idea that they would use the population of their only city on their only homeworld as human shields sits ill. This misdirection theory does also not account for the absence of the 15th Senior Staff during the earliest Legion against Legion engagements, what Vox records that remained recoverable in the aftermath of the burning, pointed to a council of the Legion's senior most figures that was convened even as the bombardment started and the wolves' first landers smashed onto Prospero's soil, only through access to the deepest levels of security in one's archives does the truth emerge. Such a council did in fact take place, convened by Magnus himself, wherein he ordered his Legion not to engage the censor host at all. Such reasoning, as with all reasoning displayed by the Cyclops during this entire affair, can only be guessed at, but his council appears to have stayed the wrath of his sons during the period here to fore discussed, although not without fractiousness. The captains of the 15th were sharply divided upon the matter, one made all the more pressing as visions and reports of massive civilian losses reached them within the depths of Magnus' great library. The desire to defend their homeworld warred with their loyalty to their Primarch in a way such bonds had never before been tested, locking the leadership into an intense and emotional debate. Ultimately, the cabal of captains led by First Librarian Azek Ariman revolted against the Primarch's decree, ordering a full mobilization of the Legion, cults and fellowships both against the censor host, and abandoning the dissenters within the Great Library to await the coming of the wolves. The scope of the power wielded by the 15th Legion would become immediately and severely apparent. Their emergence was one from all angles, circumventing the lines the wolves had drawn by powers unknown to the censor host, but of course, aetheric in nature. Crushing ambushes were now inflicted all across Tizca as the Thousand Sons appeared essentially from thin air to hit the wolves precisely where maximum damage could be inflicted. The invaders, previously almost casualty-less, suffered staggering losses in this initial wave. In the Central Districts, the Third Company of the Sixth lost some 200 Astartes when the Thousand Sons used telekinetic powers to demolish a building they were clearing of retreating Spire Guard. Assault squads of the Eighth Company elsewhere found themselves under constant hit and run attacks by Red Armoured Astartes who literally vanished the second they were engaged, only to reappear elsewhere seconds later to wreck yet more havoc. Even the fortified circle of the Vilca Fenrica Stormbirds that served as the initial beachhead came under attack by Thousand Sons from the Order of Blindness, inflicting heavy casualties on the command echelon of the wolves before retreating after a counterattack led by grim near-black blood and members of Russell's Huskulls. Elsewhere in the Metropolis, the Thousand Sons were striking at will. There was no pattern to their assaults save for the devastating effectiveness they were having. No heed whatsoever was paid towards the Nikian Edict. The Thousand Sons, as expected, had shocked all pretense of obeying the Emperor's orders in light of the invasion. If, indeed, they had paid any heed. Untrammeled sorcery was at their fingertips, and they clearly saw no reason to hold back. For the most powerful, they became conduits for unimaginably destructive aetheric powers, living artillery batteries that hurled fire or lightning or earth or simple kinetic force at the wolves, in furious barrages wrought of purest rage. Others obfuscated their presence, or clouded the minds of the foe, or even turned him against his brother, telepathica sowing confusion and disorder amongst the wolves and giving their fellow legionaries critical tactical advantages in ambushes. Those less bluntly powerful than their fellows utilised the network of portal gates around Tizca, an ancient network revived and refined by Magnus the Red that allowed a Psyker instantaneous travel between any two points in the Metropolis. Many were housed within buildings or underground, and almost all could even accommodate small armoured vehicles. All of it granting the Thousand Sun's unparalleled mobility to circumvent any lines the wolves were attempting to hold or draw. These lines, of course, were dissolving under the Ferocious Assault. Everywhere the Sixth Legion was under assault from seemingly all directions at once, with both falling back or advancing presenting seemingly equal peril. Their vox lines were flooded with electronic and psychic interference. A technology the Thousand Suns did not even need thanks to the expertise of the Athaneans, the Legion's telepaths, who are now relaying orders in perfect clarity to any and all who needed them. Had the wolves been a legion that relied upon a tightly controlled chain of command, this would have likely been an even more disastrous reversal of fortune than it already was. Luckily for the Fenrisborn, however, theirs was a legion used to autonomy, both at the level of the Great Company and that of the individual squad within it. The Thousand Suns were bleeding them, it was true, but the disruption to communications and coordination would not alone be enough to defeat the Sixth. Russ certainly ordered no retreat. Quite the opposite, he reaffirmed with what commanders he could raise on vox networks, that their positions must hold and that the momentum of the invasion could not falter or be handed to the Thousand Suns. What could at least be established, though, was that the Wolf King had succeeded in one of his primary objectives. He had in fact drawn out the 15th Legion, and despite the continued absence of their Primarch, this was, in its own way, progress. Despite the toll it was taking on his wolves. His frontline was, however, in imminent danger of collapse. The reserves, or what had passed for them in a Legion as aggressive as the Sixth, were summoned for a push by Russ himself that would lead towards the central districts of the city, targeting the temple arcologies of the Pyre and Corvide cults. If these could be captured, it would allow the wolves to claim a perfect forward operating base for an assault on the Great Pyramid of Photep in Oculum Square, within which Russ was convinced his brother yet dwelled. Arcologies, however, would be no mean feat. Nine in total, five of which housed the cults themselves, they were in effect proto-hives, mountainous city structures that were, for the Thousand Suns, barracks, librarians, archives, training facilities, armories, and defensive fortifications, all in one. The majority of the city's population was housed within eight of them, and should an emergency strike, their cavernous lower levels could shelter many, many more. While the Corvide were amongst the less martial of the fivefold cults, the Pyre were another matter entirely, insisting of the most bellicose of the Legion's psychers and a great many of those that were inducted into the Order of Ruin. The hammer that fell on central Tizca was led by Russ's Varragir Terminator Elite from the sixth First Great Company, supported by the pale hunter bands and armoured columns of the second and third Great Companies. Reports of the Thousand Suns engaging the wolves elsewhere in the city, and forward scouts reporting minimal to no ground presence of the Legion in the path of this offensive, gave Russ some confidence that resistance may be minimal. He was mistaken. The opposition was dug in, prepared, and furious. Elite divisions of the Prosperine Spireguard, fresh from defensive positions within the Temple Archaeologies, had fortified all approaches, learning from the blood spilled in the Old Quarter to throw only their heaviest weaponry at the attacking Astartes, from the safest and most defensible positions available. The real game-changer for the Auxilia were, of course, the presence of the Thousand Suns. Many of the units encountered by the wolves bore the same markings as those the scattered Voxlogs had placed in other further reaches of the city, causing confusion and angst amongst the wolves as to how such a thing was even possible, the sixth being utterly unaware of the nature of how the 15th Legion was traversing their home turf. The Thousand Suns were supported in their efforts by the battle Automata yet unencountered by the invaders, but spoke Castellax Achaia marks constructed for the Legion by the Mechanicum of Shao Akkad. Augmented by psychically sensitive crystalline cortex matrices, these Castellax were controllable by almost any cycle within range, and possessed a certain amount of free will themselves, becoming in effect far more responsive and lethal than the cruder marks employed by those bound by strict Martian dogma. This would no doubt have raised ranker amongst Imperial elements if such a thing was not eclipsed by the far greater crimes of psychic utilisation the Thousand Suns were already wantonly displaying. Regardless, the Automata were reaping a fearsome tally of kills amongst the attackers with their mauler bolt cannons. This new front was now seeing the most vicious fighting of the battle emerge yet. Massive concentrations of Legionnaires Astartes and their supporting elements were clashing across a huge theatre. Such a conflict between Astartes had never before been recorded in Imperial history. Even the ferocity that the wolves have evinced during the redacted confrontation between them and the 12th Legion world eaters was a skirmish compared to the destruction that both legions were unleashing upon each other. Russ committed over 20,000 of his Astartes to the push, and the Thousand Suns more than met him in numbers, even before the force multiplying effects of their Psyker talents were accounted for. Tizca was being torn asunder as Earth's twile brother met Earth's twile brother, and both sides tore into each other with all the hatred and pain of transhumans betrayed. The intent of the wolves since Planetfall had been to tear down the great works of Magnus, to burn his libraries, demolish his theatres, crush the culture of his world under Ceramite boots, and now the sons of the Crimson King turned what had been spared from the fury of the wolves into shot and fire blasted ruins in their desire for revenge. In the northern reaches, the wolves of the 8th and 12th great companies came under renewed assault by the Order of Blindness, freed now from their abortive assaults on the 6th Legion's beachhead. A bloody gambit of ambush and counter-ambush emerged, all of it in the favour of the psychic infiltrators of the Thousand Suns. Using perceptual psychana to mask their movements and misdirect the invaders, the several hundred Thousand Suns tied down almost 10,000 wolves from linking up with their comrades, bleeding the great companies in every engagement and taking next to no casualties in return. The battle for the manners yet continued, too, with the Magdan Free Corps continuing to resist the invaders through the now devastated ornamental gardens. Their proverbial backs against the Wall, all restrained that may once have been the pride of the Thousand Suns, was completely discarded. Knowing redemption was forever beyond their grasp, psychana, unlike anything the Imperium had ever seen, was now being released across Tizca to brutal effect. Lightning, the colour of pain itself, speared from the now churning sky. The earth erupted in deluges of rock and metal. Iridescent flames wormed through Tizcan streets, hunting wolves like a predator. Attackers meeting defenders found themselves pummeled by invisible force, or saw their brothers sliced by invisible blades, unseen forces shearing through power armor as if it was paper. The bodies of the wolves rebelled against them, locking bone and sinew in place, or causing their flesh to run like wax and their organs to boil inside their chest cavities. The deluge of psychic energy now coalescing around the city was forming a vortex, and the veil between Prospero and the Immaterium was wearing thin. This was not immediately apparent, but as the battle progressed, the sky only darkened further, and the ground began to quake seemingly of its own volition. Cracks rent buildings, and a dread unlike anything the Astartes fighting had ever experienced fell upon them. Unmistakable, unignorable, eating away at their humours and driving their fury and hatred to new heights. The battle did not abate, if anything it just built, the intensity climbing. The Thousand Suns deployed more and more units through their portal network, now seeking to press the flanks of the wolves offensive and cut the first company off from its beach head. And what little reserves the wolves still possessed. This course of action was broad, and as such could not go unnoticed by any who were watching. In orbit, eyes were scrying the unfolding situation, as aboard the flagship of the Ligio Costodes, the mighty Oryk Oryflame. Constantine Valdor was demanding updated reports from whatever sensorium suites were still functioning. The aetheric squall building over Tizca was rendering intelligence less verifiable by the minute. Russ was completely uncontactable, both due to the interference on the comms and his preoccupation essentially fighting for his life. Neither two was the Ligio Mortis raiseable, the demi-manipule of titans sent to attack the Mechanicom Forge Fane on the city's outskirts, having disappeared entirely from sensor screens. It was clear that should the Ligio Costodes and the Sisters of Silence delay intervention further, the wolves would suffer, and the invasion would be put at dire risk. Yet doing so would of course countermand a direct order to remain in orbit from the censor host's supreme commander. Judging discretion to be the better part of Valor, the Captain General ordered a drop in force, not to reinforce the wolves on any particular front, but to open up another, directing the Ligio Costodes and Silent Sisterhood to open combat operations at Tizca's orbital transfer docklands. This would, Valdor cruelly reasoned, spare the Wolf King any wounded pride, and spare the Captain General any wasted time for having to placate the Primarch's ego, neither of which the censor host could afford at this critical moment. Three dozen sodalities were deployed, alongside the Ninth Solar Auxilia Regiments, and an unnumbered series of Silent Sisterhood hunter cadres, all dropping from orbit conventionally, as fears of the city's kine shield interfering with teleportation were well-reasoned. The drop was not uncontested. The remaining Thousand Sun's air defense units, now primarily made up of lightning interceptors, attempted runs on the sleek Costodes gunships and ponderous Auxilia landers, claiming several of each before Equinox fighters disintegrated them in return. Over one thousand solar Auxilia and several custodians perished in the planetfall, but those that survived moved swiftly to consolidate their gains. Reports before communications had collapsed spoke of the speed of Thousand Sun's redeployment, and the Costodes' sodalities were fully aware that a new front opening up on their flanks would elicit a rapid response. Assignments for the capture of the starport were direct. The sodalities of the Emperor's own life wards made a direct line for the control tower in Coronas transports, supported by palace grav tanks that tore into Spireguard armored squadrons with utter impunity. The Solar cohorts, meanwhile, focused on seizing the starport's defensive fortifications, devoid Hoplitev's sections clearing interiors that their rapier laser-track batteries had broken open. The professionalism displayed by the Saturnine Auxilia was impressive, but it stood as nothing compared to that of the Costodes when they reached their target. The command tower fell in minutes. Other military bodies trained squads for coherent, supportive work. The Costodes simply do not need to. Each warrior, an artifice of the Emperor himself, is an army unto his own. They move and fight as individuals, trusting training and genhance senses to respond to the needs of their comrades should they arise. Where the Spireguard had engaged the wolves, the result was butchery. Where they met the Emperor's Oryk warriors, it was a similar route, but one conducted with a clean, detached professionalism that was monstrous in a completely different fashion. The Costodes were simply unstoppable. Not a single warrior fell in the capture of the Spaceport, until, that is, they faced Astartes defenders. At the Spire of the Command Tower, the sodalities under Valdor encountered the warriors of the Sekhmet. These Cataphractii armored warriors were the terminator elite of the Thousand Sons, the warders of Magnus the Red, and formidable psykers all, forming an almost gestalt consciousness when deployed together. The clash was on a scale only possible through the transhumanity of all involved. The first custodians to fall upon Prospero did so here, in the Bloody Confine, and the man in question took three of the Sekhmet to bring him down. This pattern was repeated at the combat intensified. For all the elite experience and psychic craft of the Thousand Sons terminators, those they faced, were elevated above them even higher on the artificial human evolutionary path envisaged and wrought by the Emperor. Each golden warrior that fell exacted four times that number in Sekhmet casualties. Their psyker talents were a potent force to reckon with, yet as the battle for the tower reached its pinnacle, the terminators suddenly found themselves robbed of it. Summoned by the custodians, the null maidens of the Silent Sisterhood, pariah blanks that stole the power of the warp from all around them, had arrived, and with this arrival the fate of the Sekhmet was sealed. The remaining terminators were overwhelmed by the custodians, suffering a defeat like nothing the formation had ever endured, and at the hands of a foe that would not even note such a victory is worthy of comment. Merely a dispassionate acknowledgement that an objective had been secured. With the docks incense your host hands, Valdor delayed the orbital reserves not a moment longer. The remainder of the host's soldiery was ordered to land immediately and at full combat readiness, be they Silent Sisters, Ligio Costodes, Imperial Auxilia, or Mechanicum. The Astartes' elements, however, largely elected to remain for the Wolf King summons. This extended to not only the majority of the wolves still in prosperous skies, but the contingent of sons of Horus Astartes that had joined the host at Beta Garmin. That being said, the 13th great company, Blood Thirsty for the Enemy, and the 11th, those of the so-called Black Kull that had fallen to psychotic battle hunger, elected to join the captain general on this new front, leaving the 4th, 5th, 7th, and 9th companies in reserve, alongside the sons of Horus, and the ebony titan barks of the Ordo Sinister. Valdor highlighted what he deemed to be the most important of immediate concerns. Two objectives. The first to push Northward through the Palatinate Mansions, destroying the remainder of the Magdan Free Corps in the process, and linking up with the embattled Lehman Russ and his first wave. Second objective was an advanced eastwards to seize the great Sosostrian Canal. This latter move would allow forward passage onto the pyramids of the Domus Tenebri and the Preferium Aeternus at the city centre. What resistance barred this path as it currently stood was scattered and half mad with losses sustained. The Spire Guard had ceased to function in any coherent capacity, but had, thanks to their mauling at the hands of the wolves, begun to refuse any imperial demands of surrender, knowing that to do so was death anyway. Pickets of Tizcan units were thus strung out along the path Valdor was electing to take, but none would bar the path of the rapidly deploying censure host, be they Solar Auxilia or Ligio Castodes. Valdor knew that the Thousand Sons would intervene, that as their psychana gave them unparalleled mobility, their actions could not be planned for beyond reactionary retaliations if and when they emerged. Regardless, Captain General had laid out a course that would see another Imperial Offensive drive straight into the city's heart, and it was his hope that this would bring about a swift and decisive end to the Battle of Prospero. Of course, would that it were so simple. The Battle of Prospero was now several hours old. Local chronometers read 1209, Prosperite noontime, as Constantine Valdor's advance from the spaceport first began in earnest. It was, however, difficult to tell, as across the city it appeared for all the world that night was beginning to fall. The opening orbital bombardment that had torched Prospero's biome had thrown clouds of ash and smoke into the atmosphere. But beyond that, the unnatural pal of a building aetheric tempest was forming above the metropolis of the 15th Legion. The Thousand Sons had no intention of letting the censure host gain the upper hand in the battle, and in their fury turned to arts darker than any they had previously wielded. Grimoire's research journals and experiments buried by prudence or morality were thrown open again in a mad rush to capitalize on anything that might kill more wolves. Forbidden practices were now indulged in. The means being justified by the end they would hopefully accomplish. Costs be damned. In the Templums of the Corvide, ritual sacrifices of Legion thralls and Prosperine civilians were undertaken so that the adepts of the cult might be lent enough power to scry the immediate future, discerning Sixth Legion movements from the threads of potential realities spinning out of the Tisken Conflagration. In the Arcology of the Atheneans, similarly brutal arts were invoked, but this time, uncaptured enemies. The telepaths of the Thousand Sons tore at the minds of captives to extract any remotely useful intelligence they could. No potential route was closed to the Legion. Magnus remained silent within the Pyramid of Photep, and the leadership under First Librarian Ariman was actively encouraging the usage of techniques, arts, and skills previously denied to their subordinates, or even themselves. And it was working. Both the Corvide and the Atheneans were able to supply the fellowships and circles of their Legion currently engaged with detailed strategic information, which, in combination with Tizka's portal network, was allowing the Fifteenth to run rings around the embattled censure host. The Third Tyrannic Auxilia, fresh from their landings at the Starport, were, for example, completely surrounded by the Ninth Fellowship, and almost entirely obliterated in a single engagement. Alegio Castore's force of some 500 companions under Valdor himself was similarly ambushed, this time by a massive detachment of Thousand Sons terminators and Legion dreadnoughts of the Order of Ruin. While faring much better against a sudden attack than the Auxilia had, the conflict was nevertheless exceptionally brutal, and affected a significant blunting of the Captain General's advance against the Magdan Freakor at the Palatinate Mansions. Elsewhere across the city, the Eleventh Great Company of the Vilca Fenrica were tied down by waves of Thousand Sons ambushes, but also the sudden appearance of what appeared to be a civilian militia. Whether these were volunteers, or simply mind-throws, sleeved to the Thousand Sons' psychers in desperation, it is unclear, but the waves that crashed into the death-kin of the Morkai served their purpose, depleting the ammunition reserves of the Great Company at the cost of thousands of lives every minute. Sixth Legion Units had no effective counter against the Sikana of the Thousand Sons. The famous Tenacity and Blood Thirstyness was the only edge they yet retained in a fight that was now thoroughly even, even if approaching overwhelming odds. Ivan Ross, primarch that he was, could only be in one fight at once. The Ruin Priests of the Legion, their own psychers whose craft had continued, despite the Emperor's Nikean edict, under some form of ill-defined Fenrician cultural exemption, proved thoroughly outmatched by the majestic savants of the Thousand Sons. What limited counters the shamans employed were brief respits, inevitably overwhelmed in short order by the defenders of Prospero, who, once they had identified enemy psychers, redoubled their efforts to dispatch them. The Fifteenth Legion had drawn a defensive cordon around their Templar Markologies that no amount of pressure from the censor host seemed to be able to crack at this time. Managing to force a rough transmission through the squalls of interference, using a Legion Mastodon's communication array, Liman Russ almost begrudgingly ordered those wolves that remained in orbit to make planetfall with immediate effect. The Wolf King was clearly set on hurling what every last astartes he possessed at the Prosperine. Throwing off whatever restraint had remained in the censor host's operation in favour of a full and total engagement with all Imperial assets on hand. The resistance of the Thousand Sons and the powers they were unleashing rendered them to Russ' eyes not even wayward scions of the throne, but maleficarum, wretches all corrupted and lost to the sorcerous powers they were now wielding with utter abandon. Purgation was all that Russ could countenance now, and he would offer no mercy to those who opposed it. Prospero was to be scoured clean of all life, be it astartes or mortal. By the word of the Wolf King, the Seventh Great Company, the Black Kull, the destroyers of the Sixth Legion were ordered to deploy their most lethal and proscribed ammunition and weaponry and employ whatever dark technology they had drawn from the magi of Beta Garmin. No stone was to be left standing, and no human to be left alive. Interestingly, an operation of similar mien, but altogether more obfuscated visibility, was currently underway at the behest of 16th Legion overseer Boros Kern. The appearance of the Sons of Horus contingent at the Beta Garmin Master had made for a surprising addition, and one that was unknown previously to both the Terran and Fenrisian forces of the censure host. Launching with the Vilca Fenrica reinforcements from orbit, the Sons of Horus deployed not to the front lines of the fight against the Thousand Sons, but to nominally pacified regions of Tisca, alongside their Cthonian auxiliaries. Boros Kern, his intent questioned by some within the host, stated that the course of the operation was to employ the Sons of Horus' famed adaptability to hunt 15th Legion ambushers that had been plaguing the advance of the Wolves, and given the casualties these ambushers had already reaped, few expressed anything beyond mild annoyance that such a large force of 16th Legion Astartes, some 5,000 in number, were required for such a task. Rather than seek out the order of blindness, as he had stated he would, Kern and the Sons of Horus instead began rounding up any and all civilian refugees they could lay their hands upon. Herded into massive, improvised pens, any who resisted were immediately and bloodily executed, or mutilated and left in prominently visible locations as a warning against other potential dissidents. Within these holding zones, Sons of Horus' overseers, with a tendent mage eye of the Mechanicum, began moving through the terrified prisoners, scrying them with strange devices and medical apparatus, even as a battle for the city raged around them. Those few that were selected by the Sons of Horus were shoved or hoisted bodily by Astartes into waiting sea-green ships bearing the eye of the Warmaster, and transferred rapidly off-planet to the orbiting cruiser that accompanied the 16th Legion Expedition. Once this had been completed, the remaining refugees learned of their fate as artillery shells started falling in their midst, detonating bodies and buildings with equal abandon, as the Sons of Horus sought to expunge all trace of their curious operation. That we even know of this is due only to the most fragmentary of records, as well as operatives from the Sigilites' later night-errant investigative division. This latter body formed during the heresy years that would vast approach hypothesize that since prospering humans had a startlingly high level of psychic genomics, some 10% of the population at early imperial estimate, the Warmaster was, through the chaos of the burning, extracting psychically sensitive humans for reasons known only to himself. Certainly this theory holds merit, as during the heresy, the Sons of Horus, as well as the 17th Legion word-bearers, made widespread use of mongrel cult divisions amongst whose ranks dwelt a high number of frankly insane rogue psychers. Should these poor, prosperous civilians have been quietly exfiltrated to be part of some hideous traitor breeding program whose works would only bear fruit years later, well it speaks volumes to the degree that the Warmaster was already orchestrating assets for a conflict still gestating within his cankerous soul. As Russ was ordering the wholesale extermination of Tizca due to the apparent descent of the Thousand Sons into sorcerous madness, Valdor II sought to unleash his most potent forces, albeit with a far greater degree of logical clarity to his decision-making. However, by a twist of fate, some had been deprived from him. Upon managing to establish communications with the Custodes flagship, the Captain General discovered that the Ordo Sinister, the Psy Titans of the Emperor's secret Titan legio, had already deployed, without any apparent orders, by their own merit to investigate the complete disappearance of the god-engines of the legio Mortis, who had themselves been deployed to investigate the Mechanicum Forge Fane of Shao Arkhad that existed without the city limits. It appeared for all the world that this demimaniple of the legio, the Warmaster's most favored Titan legion, had simply disappeared in the process, whether or not this was due to some sort of sorcerous ploy, or that they had met their fates fighting against the iron vigil of the legio Prasagius was completely unknown, but it appeared that the Ordo Sinister favored the latter. Without the Psy Titans at his disposal, Valdor was forced to turn to the one remaining specialized force he possessed, the Silent Sisterhood. Two options immediately presented themselves. The Captain General could spread the null maidens of the sisters across the entire city, granting localized pariah anti-psychic protection to the most censor host assets possible. Or he could form all their hunter-seeker codras, not currently engaged, into a spearhead to drive into the lines of the Thousand Sons in one incredibly potent thrust. He opted for the latter, reasoning that the former, while a decent option, left the precious pariah sisters open to fragmentary destruction. They were far too precious a resource to see winnowed away in any such fashion. He did, however, place a select number in nominal command of the spaceport, to ensure it remained defended from the infiltrators of the Order of Blindness and to prevent such an important logistical transfer point from being denied to the host for potential withdrawal maneuvers. Valdor's primary purpose was, after all, bodyguard and life ward. It would never allow himself or any he commanded to be cut off entirely from the need of escape should that need arise. This did, of course, deprive many units of the wolves yet engaged of sisterhood support. They were now fully forced to rely on their bloody mindedness to continue the fight against the seemingly ever more dangerous Thousand Sons. The battles this created were predictably bloody and destructive in the extreme. The 11th and 13th great companies of the wolves, combined to force almost 10,000 strong, were led into the southern districts of Tizca by the so-called Uplander Yarl, Torm Gdarec, believed to be the last surviving Terran of that rank remaining within the Legion. A raid against them was the great Vulparain Bastion, a fortress outpost that commanded the great Cessostrian Canal. Should that arterial fall, an ideal assault route to the central districts of the city would be opened up for the censor host, and both sides knew this. Supplemented by siege engineers from the Caranid Sentinel's Imperial Army Detachment, the wolves flung themselves at the Thousand Sons defenders of the Fifth Fellowship, unleashing Phosphax Munitions specifically tailored to burn and melt Imperial Pharoocreat. The living fire was battled in turn by Thousand Sons sorcery, the Magisters of the 15th Legion using Kinney shields to contain the almost unstoppable substance or redirect it to their foes. Despite being outnumbered almost three to one, the defenders held fast, that desperation turning to resolve and spite as they laced the besiegers positions with psychokinetic mines and aetheric lightning arcs, reaping a fearsome tally of wolves and Caranids alike. This pattern was now one repeated throughout the city, as largely deprived of anti-psychome measures owing to Valdor's maneuvering of the Silent Sisterhood, the attackers ground to a bloody stalemate against the fury of the Thousand Sons' defiance. In the Argent Bastion to the north, the second and third great companies had similarly encircled Thousand Sons detachment, but were held at Bloody Bay. While atop the sanctuary mount, another force of Magisters were pulverizing the waves of Imperial Auxilia that menaced them, the censor host attackers only holding due to the presence of Ligio Custode's sodalities amongst them. Even the most forward elements of the wolves, under Russ himself having torn great wounds in the flanks of the temple arcologies of the Corvide and the Raptora, were bogged down and unable to make any progress. The Thousand Sons knew none amongst them were a match for the Wolf King, their common sense easily overcoming any pretensions of pride. So instead of engaging the Primarch and his Varigair directly, they opted for a blizzard of hit and run engagements through the Warportal Network, in tandem with telepathic adepts assailing the forward censor host forces with illusions and phantasmic terrors. The Wolf King, despite his Emperor wrought senses, was caught in lures, directed to and fro from illusory engagement to actual ambush, with each of the latter claiming enough wolves to be bleeding the forward companies of vital manpower. It was, however, not so much succeeding as simply proving adequate. The Primarch was still a Primarch and his most experienced wolves still amongst the deadliest killers in the galaxy. These actions were holding them, yes, but could only do so for so long, and the Thousand Sons knew it. As the Wolf King tore through each diversionary skirmish, the fellowships and circles of the 15th Legion hit the dogs at his heels with all they could muster, knowing time was ill on their side. Truly, the only real success made by either side during this stage of the invasion occurred on the grounds of the Manners. The Magdan Free Corps yet held, largely thanks to reinforcements from the Thousand Sons, but the renewed assault they now fell under combined the forces of almost all silent sisterhood divisions present upon Prospero, where the Magisters had previously been able to tear even Ligio Custode's vehicles apart with raw mental aggression. Their powers now failed them, psychic fire sputtering to nothing, telekinetic barriers cracking, telepathic wards sundered. Such a concentration of sisters had never before been seen abroad across the galaxy, and here the sheer intensity of the combined null effects, augmented by a dozen of their most potent oblivion knights, stole the power of the warp from all within a significant distance. The warp portals relied upon for maneuvering were similarly disabled as a barrier between worlds was closed tight by the presence of the sisters. The Thousand Sons were, however, still a starties. Their genhanced capabilities and martial training could still allow a small number to conquer a world in years past, and in the burning gardens of the Palatenate Manners, there were gathered nearly six thousand of their ilk, including a force of Scarobacult terminators and armored columns from the Order of Ruin, now arrayed against 500 Custodians and two full vigils of silent sisters. Within moments of their initial charge, it was apparent to the Thousand Sons that they stood no chance of victory. Dozens of 15th Legionist artis were lost to inflict even a single casualty upon the peerless Custodians. The action became instead a stand of defiance and of potential opportunity. If Valdor, if the Captain General himself could be wounded, or the very least as many of the sisterhood's null maidens dispatched as possible, then the Prosperine could at the very least claw some recompense from the inevitability of their deaths. The spearhead, straight towards Valdor, was bought at savage cost. The blade scions of the Thousand Sons, Amitara occult, over 100 strong at the beginning of their fatal advance, numbered a mere 30 by the time they reached the Captain General. But reach him, they had in fact accomplished, even deprived of their psychic talents. The blades they held so used to feeling etheric energy were still capable of slicing through Oromite armor. These 30th Artis bore down on Valdor with pure desperation, knowing only their brotherhood stood a chance against such an individual. The Captain General slew them all, in their totality. But not without cost. As a sole Astartes managed to wound the first of the Ten Thousand. It had been a conflict conducted at truly transhuman speed. Mere minutes had seen the Six Thousand Astartes that had charged the Lidio Custodes force annihilated. But the Oric Champions of the Emperor had paid for their victory. Scores of Custodians had died. Even their biology unable to overcome the wounds inflicted upon them by the rage mad Thousand Sons. Valdor himself was wounded. Perhaps, even more seriously for the Sensei host, some 500 of the sisterhood had perished. Despite all this, the Custodians continued to press forward, now turning their attention to what remained of the Magdan Freakor, who, despite hours of resistance against the Wolves, were completely wiped out by this new assailant. A route was now secured to the heart of Old Tizca. Valdor, assigning hunter-codres of sisters to immediately move upon the District to rob the Thousand Sons infiltrators of their abilities that had allowed them to tie down the Wolves of the Black Cull as well as the newly engaged Sons of Horus. What remained of the Fifteenth Legion within this region was quickly dealt with. Finally caught by retributive Sensei host elements, now releasing the Wolves and the Sixteenth Legion both for movements towards the Central District, and Russ' ongoing push towards the Temple of Magnus. At this point in the burning of Prospero, Imperial estimates declare that the Thousand Sons had, despite their powers, lost some 30,000 to starties. Either to wounds too great to overcome, to combat death, or to capture, which, considering the Sensei host summarily executed all prisoners, was death. While the invasion force had taken a similar number of casualties, theirs was a reinforcement pool much deeper to draw upon, and within territory nominally under their control had been established numerous field medicaid outposts for the wounded to be transported to. While the Thousand Sons had their own facilities, such was the desperation of their defense that few of the Order of the Jackal, the Legion's apothecary and cultural division, remained within their Templums to receive those who needed their ministrations. The Sensei host could, in short, absorb far more losses than the Thousand Sons could afford to, as with each sign of Magnus that fell, the Legion's ability to hold ground diminished, pushing them further and further into Tezka. Valdor's deployment of the Silent Sisterhood, as almost one force was a gamble that had paid dividends. Limanroth now counted at his side a wing of the Oblivion Knights, those sisters whose pariah effect waxed the strongest, and whose abilities with it were more honed. With their arrival, no longer could the Thousand Sons maintain their illusory misdirections, no longer could they hide from the Wolf King's sight, and his impact upon their now revealed front lines was nothing short of catatlysmic. Upon the Second and Eighth Fellowships, hurriedly fortified within the precinct surrounding the Raptora Arcology, the twin hammers of Valdor and Russ would fall. Some 10,000 Astartes were ranged against the commanders of the Sensei host, yet through them was carved a trail of purest slaughter. The Varigir and the Black Cull both followed in their wake with annihilation in their hearts, turning the center of Tezka into a sea of blood and fire, death, and misery. Should any Thousand Son have lived to bear witness to this renewed offensive, one must have wondered if they had any capacity yet to believe their legion would triumph over such rampaging gods of battle. That is, of course, until one of their own awoke. Canis Vertex was a warlord-class battle-type, formerly of the Ligio Astorum. It had been enshrined in a position of great reverence by the adepts of the Pyrrhe cult atop their arcology. Having fallen in combat with the Komenka Troika during the Great Crusade, the warlord had been declared a loss by the legion, but the Pyrrhe, unwilling to see such a paragon of destruction be rendered to scrap, requested its retention as a combined museum piece and honorary statue. It had not moved since its destruction. Its machine spirit had long departed, as had its connection to the motive force. It possessed no crew. It possessed no power. And, at 1523, 734-00-M31, it stirred. Balefire lopped and played across its now-motile limbs, while a pulsating eldritch light appeared to glow within its core. Its incarnation heralded a renewed fury from the Prosperine's guise. The aetheric storm now vent its fury in thunder and wind that tore since your host aircraft from the air, like the playthings of children. Canis Vertex howled. Not the blast of a titan's warhorn, but something far more ancient and primal. The fire, now surrounding its limbs, moving like liquid across its entire form. Its resurrection was, of course, no feat of the Mechanicum. But a blasphemic transgression of the machine god's doctrines wrought by the captain of the Sixth Fellowship, Calophis, who also held the rank of Archmageus of the Pyre cult. Within the temple arcology, the profane warlord had just torn itself free from. The Thousand Sons of the cult had torn open a portal to the immaterium and siphoned the energy of the warp itself to fuel the god's engine's wrath. Should recovered records be believed, Calophis was in fact literally incarnated within the machine spirit of the titan, his body lying recumbent within a crystalline throne at the heart of the Pyre's temple. His pyrokinetic abilities, however, were now the font from which the power of Canis Vertex could be directed. Though its guns lived once more, its reactor flushed with power to fuel them, Calophis instead opted to channel the fury of the living flame through his new body of metal. The sheer influx of immaterial energy appeared to reinvigorate the powers of those Thousand Sons yet engaged with the forces of the censor host, and should any of them have bothered to question its source, they appeared to care not. The wrath of the warlord reborn smashed through the null defenses of the sisterhood, who even now were hard-pressed to contain the resurgent legion elements. Where the censor host had been poised to deliver killing blows in multiple theaters across Tizca, they were now suddenly upon the defensive, the anti-psychic capabilities they had wielded, overwhelmed by this unexpected blasphemic reversal that even now strode towards their lines with purest annihilation kindled in its baleful heart. Had this managed to swayed Russ or Valdor from their advance, none have ever seen evidence. The spear of the Emperor and the Wolf King still remained upon the offensive, pushing now into the depths of the Temple Archaeology of the Raptora, both that they may bring the Magisters that remained there within to destruction, and to move them out of the punishment of Calophys' incendiary wrath. The Archaeology was currently being defended by 15th Legionist Artes under the command of captains of the Second and Eighth Fellowships, Phosus T'Kar and Aura Magma. The former was the Magister of the Raptora Cult, most powerful telekin within the Legion, while the latter was Calophys' second in the Pyre. Both set upon their attackers with fury and power unbridled, Aura Magma's fire melting the armor of Varragir Terminators to liquid, as Phosus T'Kar bodily charged both Valdor and Russ, his Kinnyshield completely turning aside all munitions that spat at him as he charged. As the Second and Eighth Captains both engaged the Lords of the Emperor's censure. Elsewhere in Tisga, Seventh Fellowship Captain Fael Tauron found himself and his Astartes hopelessly pinned between the advancing Wolves of the Black Cull and the Warriors of the Ligio Custodes. Of the seven thousand Astartes under his command mere hours beforehand, only three thousand remained alive, and even then the survivors were not concentrated under their captain but scattered throughout the city after the collapse of the portal network. Magister Tauron counted a mere few hundred at his side, and even these loyal, dogged few were perishing despite the powers bestowed upon them by Calophys' bestriding idol. Surrounded by the baying of the Wolves and the clinical precision of the Custodes, soaked in the blood and viscera of his own brothers. What had once been Fael Tauron? Broke. It is perhaps surprising that the trauma and insanity of Prospero had not done so to any member of the Legion until that point. Perhaps it had, and it was only the intensity of the aetheric conflagration that was different in this instance. Perhaps it was a testament to the willpower of the Thousand Sons up to this moment, but for whatever reason, Fael Tauron simply surrendered himself to the warp in its totality. All mental barriers were dropped, the tight mind hold through which all psychers must channel the immaterium was released. As a living conduit for the aether force of the warp, Tauron became a force of total destruction, annihilating those Imperials around him with corescating lightning that flowed through him in a torrent until his body simply dispersed, atom by atom, into nothingness. After action reports around this Chronomark record a significant number of Psi abnormalities amongst the Thousand Sons, and while Fael Tauron was included in these, subsequent examination reveals that it was at this moment that the Thousand Sons as a Legion, perhaps even as humans, ended. The flesh change was a curse born of the Thousand Sons almost since their inception. It had, they had believed, been cured by the work of Magnus the Red, who had cast the full might of his peerless mind against the condition. He had succeeded, or so all who knew of it had thought, until the death of Fael Tauron. From the epicenter of the Seventh Captain's disintegrated body there now emerged a wave invisible, moving ever outwards, a malignancy cast against the genetic coding of the Thousand Sons, and setting it alight. The return of the flesh change was as spectacular as it was horrifying. All across Tizca, the startys of the 15th Legion felt their flesh rebel, and watched in abject shock as their brothers succumbed to grand mal mutations at astonishing speed. Reforming into shapes unspeakable, the bodies of those changed still convulsed with the torrential power of the Immaterium, becoming psychic tumor things that lashed out in blind idiot pain at all around them. In the raptoran arcology, the change tied Hitora Magma first, turning the captain into a revolting amalgam of fire and liquid meat, sending him running through the halls of the temple, screaming as his flesh and soul burned with a fire that would not let him die. Phosas Tukar, furiously battling Constantine Valdor, swelled with monstrous potency, his body erupting in form until it had become a towering abomination who threw itself at the Captain General with unnatural fury. It is said that, before the killing blow could be struck, the former Phosas Tukar was made aware of his aspect, and in revulsion of what he and his Legion had become, willingly dropped his defences, allowing Valdor to plunge the Apollyon spear into what passed for his chest. All across Tizca, it is estimated that at least 10% of all thousand sons succumbed to the flesh change within a minute of failed Toron's apotheosis. But, and I note this despite advice that it should not be committed to official record, there remains evidence that the change was not restricted to the 15th Legion alone. Information contained within the archival stacks of the Silent Sisterhood noted that, as the thousand sons succumbed to mutation untrammeled, so too did changes make themselves apparent upon the bodies of the wolves. Translated from Sisterhood Thoughtmark, the records speak of ogroid things in the shape of lupine creatures that warred with flesh changed and imperials alike in the grounds of the raptoran pyramid. More berserk wolf than man, these beasts heeded no words, and may have been mistaken for some of the thousand sons afflicted had not their aspects been so eerily similar to each other, and some of their limbs had not still been clad in the dull gray of the Vilca Fenrica. The wolves have throughout these last ten thousand years furiously and violently denied that any such occurrence took place, or has ever taken place. They have worked with not insignificant diligence to ensure that official accounts do not refer to even the possibility that what genetic atrocities emerged on that night could have afflicted those of the 6th Legion, but I, for one, am reminded once more of the saying, there are no wolves on Fenris. Further elucidation on this point will remain for another day, but for now I will trust the word of the silent sisters over a legion whose vested interests remains to this day in presenting themselves as the justicars during so fell a day in history. As a change wrought its hideous work upon central Tisca, Canis Vertex was plough in northwards. Seeking to crush the wolves' beech head, Calophus steered the god Enjun towards the concentric ring of storm birds in the portlands, which, despite a total communications blackout, was still serving as a demarcation point for ammunition reserves ferried from orbit. No enemy stood against the warlord. The titans of the censure hosts had met their fates elsewhere. Its advance was heedless, each stride demolishing whole swathes of the city more totally than even the work of the Black Kull. The tanks of the wolves that ranged their firepower against us were just targets to the lashing flames that spun off its limbs. The censure hosts airpower that continued to mount attack runs on its hull were not even worthy of consideration. It was no external enemy that felt the thing Canis Vertex had become. What failed Toron had unleashed would lay it low. The power required by Calophus to maintain his control over so vast a thing as a warlord titan, torn and rent by devastation emerging from the central districts. Without the mind of the Magister to effectively wield it, the aether fire that had replaced the beating reactor of Canis Vertex flew wildly out of control, blooming into an explosion like nothing anyone present had ever witnessed. Buildings across the city that had withstood the apocalypse of ours now fell under the pressure wave. The titan's corpse crashed into the temple arcology of the Corvide, sundering that ancient structure under its calamitous fall. While at the summit of the Pyre Arcology, Calophus himself was granted one final instant of awareness before arcane feedback turned his body into a fiery conduit. The resulting detonation destroyed the Pyre's pyramid from within and caused untold devastation to the areas surrounding it. Local reality, or what had passed for it upon Prospero for hours now, ceased to function. What can only be described as a localized warp storm emerged over central Tizca for all to behold. The sky became the color of heartbreak, lightning the shade of trauma and captured loss tore across it. Spacetime ceased to be in any true sense. It is at this point that all chronometric marks entirely fail. For what was to come and how long it took little is certain. All we have are accounts, fragmentary video logs, and tales that were it not for the sheer horror of what was unfolding would be discarded as dreams of madmen. Local reality in Tizca was now an open wound, a rent in spacetime 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 censure 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 colour 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 separate. 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 censure, for 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 aspect interference. There, 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 censure 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 arcology of the raptor occult, 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 their 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, 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 censor-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 Ligio Custodes. Worse 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 nulocortical interrogations of captured prisoners or volunteers from the sensor 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. In summation, 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 imiterium. 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, Colophus, had swallowed the core of the censor host, containing the primarch, Lehman Russ, at the head of some 12,000 of his wolves, Constantine Valdor and around 400 custodians, and approximately 1500 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 Azek Ariman, all of whom had fallen back to a new defence cordon set between the arcologies of the Athenean and Pavani cult. 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 Warp Squall blew out. Others were yet engaged with disparate units of Thousand Suns, forced to fight vicious, unrecorded miniature wars as creation was cracking around them. As 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, of debased creatures roamed the ruins of Warp Choked Tizca, horrifying amalgams of tumourous flesh or feral beasts in the shapes of wolves. Their origins unknown, no longer mattering. The one aspect that slowed the censor host advance was the weariness of what psychic assaults they may face once they threw themselves at the Thousand Suns 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 manoeuvring, under total lack of communications, was laborous in the extreme, granting the 15th Legion even more time to shore up what defences they could around the pyramid of Photep. 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 Suns, 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 transworts 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 Suns 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 Suns, and three times were such attacks repelled. Yet the numbers of the 15th Legion thinned with each assault. Seven thousand dwindling to five thousand, the bodies of their fallen mixing with grey armoured wolven 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 a 15th Legion line astartes, both covered by a spire guard human with a heavy weapon. 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 can find 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 Solas 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 purest rage from the heart of Leman Russ. 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. Golden Axe met Silver Blade with a fury that shattered sky and air. The cold rage of the Lord of the Russ meeting the psychokinetic 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 Russ's martial skills were being leveled directly against every iota of Magnus's 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 Leman Russ. It is a general hypothesis that the Primarchs were built to fulfill a specific role that the Emperor had in mind. While Magnus's may only have been known to his father, Russ, perhaps more so than any of his brothers save the lion and angron, was clearly a weapon designed for destruction. In 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 Russ that the final blow fell. Some related it as the plunging of his sword into Magnus's 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 armor 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 centered 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 naïves. 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. Constantine Valdor immediately ordered a full sweep of the ruined pyramid of Photep with all available resources, imperial and mechanical 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 spy or 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 trans humans 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, scraps of clothes or armour. Nothing. Even weaponry capable of disintegrating a body in an instant, such as thermite armaments, would leave scorch marks. Rad phages and viral cascades typically left an organic residue or slurry in their wake. Adepts of the attended mechanical matter, well versed as they are in the arts of annihilation, as well as those of the Six Legion's Black Cull, 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. Such 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. But 1917 at local time, on 734-004-M31, the censor host's ground forces succeeded in making contact with their ships in orbit. Vox networks were re-establishing in the wake of the warped 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 Tisca. Not every thousand son had vanished. Isolated bands yet persisted, fighting hopeless retreats to some indeterminable, perhaps even imaginary, fallback location. Roving bands of mutates continued to attack all they encountered. While Rust 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 to the gibbering horror things that flung themselves at anything that moved. As many as 2,000 of the 15th Legion still remained within the Argent Bastion at the eastern end of Tisca's walls. All that remained of the Eighth Fellowship, as well as a significant number of Psi Automata of the Castellax 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. The fighting was only ended when a blank-eyed Lehman 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, and 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, the Division of Thousand Suns 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 exit. While some were taken down by Ligio Custode's equinox interceptors, great many disappeared from imperial aspectes entirely. The 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 Sensor Host were put to an unceremonious death. Their corpses left to 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 Malonax, encountered survivors of the Spire Guard, and a significant quantity of civilians under the leadership of Seneshal Prime Lucretia Eluniri, who had been attempting to affect rescue operations as best she could manage as her world fell around her. Believing her rank would grant her some means of parlay, she voxed a demand to the commanders, Boros Kern of the Sons of Horus, and Anrach 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 pitidus 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 sons' 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 Prospero's only city, nothing yet lived within its ruins. No plant, no animal, no human, no astartes, no mutant. Valdor at this point ordered the evacuation of censor 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. Loyalist 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 censor 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. Leman 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 censor would not live to celebrate their already, completely hollow victory. As the ships of the censor 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. Thus 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 estimates, the cost of bringing the Emperor's writ of censor to Prospero was 30 million lives, of which the overwhelming majority were Imperial civilians simply present on the planet at the moment of the censor 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 censor of their Primarch, or indeed his fall, had even reached them. In one prominent example, 2000 astartes of the 9th Fellowship under Centaur Rami were gunned down by the Ultramarines they served alongside. Similar justice was conducted by the Imperial Fists and the Salamanders, 2000 Sun's 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 1000 Sun's 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 Sun's of Magnus stationed on Prospero's client-forge world of Shauak had, similarly fled. Of the fates of these 1000 Sun's, 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 Sensor 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 Vilca 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. Those 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 festered, particularly around the ease and apparent experience by which the Oric champions of the Emperor had dispatched astartes 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. So seismic an event in 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 perfunctorly upon the censure host's return to Terra, one which Russ declined to attend, leading his wolves elsewhere. Valdor's own journal notes that, according to the Wolf King, a king does not invite his blood-stained 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 ones 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. Michel Arcade, the Forge world long considered bound to Prospero and its Legion, had long been on the boundaries of both Imperial and Mechanic and 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, Horace Lupercow, 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 Horace, despite 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 you as truly merely for consideration with the benefit of hindsight of the events that were already in motion. Horace's fall was the cause of Magnus's actions that led to his censure. The Warmaster, made aware of this by his new allies, sought to capitalize. The mind of Lupercow's 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 precedented. Any one 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 startys, and 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 startys legion. This was, of course, a direct and plain thread to the legion as a startys 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 legionnaires. Many shored up inter legion treatise 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 startys. 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 Warmaster'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. What, 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, Spireguard, and Prosperine civilians in the Pyramid of Photep, to another planet entirely. Sortiarius, the so-called planet of the sorcerers. A damned world located deep in the festering reaches of the Ocularis Tereblis, 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 Imitarium. 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 the changer of the ways, as Magnus himself has recently renewed in aspect and apparently vigor as he is in this darkest of millennia. The boons of such a patron would go a 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 thus our humanity alongside him. Istvan 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. You can contact me or follow me on twitter at oculus imperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.