Corvus Corax

Corvus Corax, called also the Ravenlord and, by those he freed, the Liberator, was primarch of the Raven Guard, the Nineteenth Legion. As an infant he was separated from the Emperor and cast across the void, coming to rest on Lycaeus, the mining moon of the forge world Kiavahr. There he was found by a slave girl, Nasturi Ephrenia, and the prisoners of the moon concealed the child, naming him Corax, ‘the Deliverer’, and teaching him urban warfare, demolitions, close combat and politics, skills that shaped the Legion he would command.

These skills he turned, while still a youth, against the overseers of Lycaeus and Kiavahr, organising the smuggling of weapon caches, coordinating strikes and riots, and seizing key security points across the moon, ambushing and breaking the counter-attack sent against him. When the uprising reached its climax, five atomic mining charges were dropped upon Kiavahr’s largest cities; the ruling Tech-Guilds collapsed, and Lycaeus was afterwards renamed Deliverance. The Emperor came to the moon soon afterwards and, after a day and a night in his son’s company, gave him command of the Nineteenth Legion; Corax accepted on condition that the Emperor help bring peace to Kiavahr. The tower that had housed the moon’s guards became, from that time, the Ravenspire.

In the Great Crusade, Corax and his Legion specialised in covert operations and lightning strikes, often under Horus’s command. At the Battle of Gate Forty-Two, in the Akum-Sothos Cluster, Horus ordered a frontal assault; when Corax argued for feints instead, Perturabo named him a coward, and Leman Russ intervened between them. Corax then led the assault that took the Gate, at grievous cost to his Terran-born legionaries, and withdrew his Legion from Horus’s command thereafter. He had long mistrusted the Legion’s Terran-born warriors, whose terror tactics he despised. He was often compared with Konrad Curze, and during the Carinae Retribution nearly came to blows with him over a Night Lords massacre until Sevatar persuaded Curze to withdraw. Corax also attended the Council of Nikaea, standing among those opposed to the Librarius.

At the Drop Site Massacre on Isstvan V, Corax fought and impaled Lorgar, breaking off only when Curze intervened; grievously wounded, he then led some three thousand survivors in a guerrilla struggle until rescue came with Branne Nev aboard the Avenger. Reaching Terra he was refused audience, but a psychic vision from the Emperor led him to open the Labyrinth beneath the Palace and recover the Primarch Project gene-stock; he also joined the Perditum Incursion on Mars, surviving an ambush by Lukas Chrom. On Deliverance and at Ravendelve on Kiavahr he then drove a Raptor programme producing new legionaries at unprecedented speed, until Alpha Legion infiltrators corrupted the gene-stock and Omegon seized the technology at the Battle of Ravendelve.

There followed a war of raids and uprisings: the Breaking of the Perfect Fortress on Narsis, where he killed Hasten Luthris Armanitan; the fighting on Constanix II, where Magos Delvere died; and actions on Scarato and Carandiru. At Yarant, the Wolf Cull, he broke Abaddon’s blockade to reach the comatose Leman Russ, began a last stand alongside Bjorn, then chose evacuation. Russ was brought to Deliverance, where Corax also met Lion El’Jonson, to whose campaign he lent only a small force.

Corax took no part in the Siege of Terra, and for a time the Imperium did not know whether he lived; he was the only surviving loyal primarch absent from the Grand Council of Reconstruction. After the Codex Astartes he divided his Legion, granted the Emperor’s peace to the mutants remaining among his people, and shut himself within the Ravenspire for a year before leaving Deliverance for the Eye of Terror, his last recorded words being ‘Never more.’ His fate remains unknown. Later accounts tell of a being of shadow, said to be Corax transformed, hunting the Traitor primarchs still, recorded as having defeated Lorgar in a duel upon an unnamed Word Bearers daemon world. In battle he was known for the Korvidine Pinions jump pack, twin lightning claws and the whip Talionis, and for a ‘wraith-slip’ gift that let him vanish into shadow.