 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? 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. Much 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. So then, this is the prelude of the opening act of the great heresy, the stage setting for the greatest tragedy to ever befall humanity, the burning of Prospero. 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 secluded. The Warmaster's rule over the Imperium at Arms was brief within the overall span of the Great Crusade. His tenure marked by victories aplenty, 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 favoured 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. Mayhap 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 Inter-X 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 Lupacal 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 Astartes. During 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 Astartes 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 lynchpin 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, stacking 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. World 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 atidious 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. Sons 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. For context, 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. Sauceror 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 Psyker was of course not unknown to humanity before the terrible fall from grace millennia before the revelation of the Emperor. Psykers 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 knowledges 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 in turmoil and its denizens more alive and hungry than they had been in eons, the sudden emergence of a glut of human Psykers proved catastrophic beyond imagination. On millions of human worlds, Psykers fell victims to their powers, creatures from a plane worse than all the hells of human fancy, pupating within their flesh an emerging in gory apotheosis to slaughter and meme. Whole worlds were consumed by these incursions, and elsewhere were the tides of the Empyrean merely corrupted instead of possessing, mad Psyker 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 Psyker, crackling with barely contained eldritch energies, eyes alight, with unstoppable malignancy. The emergence of the Imperium as a regime came in tandem with the outright refutation of the uncontrolled and unrestricted use of Psykers 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 Psyker, 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 Imperium had been formally founded, bodies within it had been also formally incepted, specifically to account for and deal with the Psyker. The Devisio-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. Psykers rendered unto the Devisia found their lives committed to draconian study and training, brutally hammering their abilities into forms useful to the Imperium and, moreover, limiting and controlling them. The distrust of the Imperium for the Psyker 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 Psykers was placed at the apex of Imperial Doctrine. The Astropaths, the Navigators, even Battle Psykers, they were all grim necessities of the Imperium 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 Librarius, 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, insisting of the great and good and the influential of the Imperium to resolve what had become known as the Psyker Question. The Imperium, 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 Imperium, 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-psychers 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. But 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 utilization 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 Astartes Psykers could receive the training they needed to properly utilize 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 aplomb. 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 one meeting upon scholarly terms of true and good intent, whereas what he found was a coalition arrayed 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 Corax of the 19th Legion Ravenguard, as well as the tacit support of Rogaldorn of the Imperial Fists, present less as a proponent against the use of Psykers and more for the censure of Magnus alone. The Crimson King supporters amongst the Brotherhood, such as the Khan, Giliman, Alfarious, Vulcan, Conrad Kurs, 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 judgment 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 judgment, 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 tricks and hand of hindsight. One cannot help but bind the burning of Prospero to the deliverance of the Emperor's writ upon that faithful 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 to chronicle, but when dealing with such a monument as event, there is temptation enough to moralize without the necessity of picking aside, 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 legionnaires of startes, ordering the disbandment of all librarians divisions currently operating within legions that had adopted them. The startes 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 life. The ruling was unequivocable, delivered with the force of a hammer from heaven, sundering the future of psychers within the startes 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 worlds 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 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 utilized 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 specialization 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, where the Warmaster Horus fell to the corrupted blade of a sinister conspiracy, I elaborated upon how, according to sources, Magnus the Red appeared within the visions that befell Lupercal 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 has lost the light of the Imperium, Magnus the Red sought to warn his father. A fear 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 exact 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 defenses 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, wrapping the act of monstrous defiance with the bands of necessity, claiming to his senior officers to be doing so for the good of the Imperium, even while those, such as Arriman, worried that this was being used merely as a means to demonstrate to his father the error of Nikia. Surely, if Magnus's Saikana 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 rotched 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 10,000, the vaunted Ligio Custodis, 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. Sondering 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 arbiters 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' 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' 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 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 Lehman Russ, Primarch of the Sixth Legion Space Wolves, Magnus' 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 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' 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 manner of its unfolding, well, for that, dearest Acolytes, we may require more context in the histories of the legions involved, until those records can be committed to this archive. Aave, Imperator. Gloria, in Excelsis, Terra. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.