Agapito Nev

Agapito Nev was a Raven Guard captain born on Deliverance who commanded the Hawks, an assault remnant of the Legion, after the Isstvan V massacre. He is recorded as one of the original fighters of Corax’s rebellion, and his service predates the Legion’s formal establishment, which places him among the oldest veterans of the Raven Guard rather than among the officers promoted during the Great Crusade. His birthplace ties him to Deliverance, the moon that Corax’s followers made their base and that the Legion returned to once its surviving companies had withdrawn from the Isstvan system.

The Isstvan V drop, in the first year of the Horus Heresy, cost the Raven Guard the greater part of its strength, alongside the losses suffered by the Iron Hands and the Salamanders, who were committed to the same landing. Afterwards Nev took command of those assault survivors who wished to retaliate rather than withdraw. He is recorded as unforgiving toward the traitors who had turned on the loyalist landing, and as holding the Terran officers who committed the Legion to the drop largely responsible for its casualties. The Hawks accepted no new gene-rites, the procedures by which recruits are made into Legionaries; they consisted instead of the men who had survived the fighting on the black sand and who sought a further engagement with those who had inflicted it. In that respect the formation was a body of veterans bound by a shared experience of the massacre, not a company replenished in the usual manner.

Nev’s role complemented that of his brother Branne, who held the moon and the Legion’s prospects of recovery. Corax relied on both: Branne to rebuild the Raven Guard, and Nev to carry out reprisals against the forces of Warmaster Horus. The two commanders therefore mark the divided character of the Legion’s response after Isstvan, between preservation and retribution, with the Primarch standing between them. Records of the Hawks and of Nev himself become sparse after the Horus Heresy’s opening phase, and no later account of his fate is given, so his status is best regarded as missing and not confirmed as dead. On the Orrery map his place is Deliverance; on the timeline he is anchored to the Raven Guard’s survival after Isstvan V, alongside contemporaries such as Corax and Branne Nev.