Huron Blackheart

Huron Blackheart, formerly Lufgt Huron of the Astral Claws, leads the Red Corsairs as Tyrant of the Maelstrom from the ruins of Badab. He commands not a single Chapter but a fleet-based confederation of renegade Space Marines, one that keeps the ranks, rites and discipline of its Chapter origins while answering to no Imperial authority. His base of operations lies in the Maelstrom, the same warp-wracked region that swallowed his former domain, and he remains, in the present era, an active and recognised threat along its shipping lanes.

Huron rose to command the Astral Claws on Badab and expanded the Chapter’s reach across the Badab Sector, levying tithes and manpower from client worlds beyond what Terra sanctioned. Lord Sector Ohthere Wyrmwood’s complaints, and the Astral Claws’ refusal to yield ground, drew a coalition of Loyalist Chapters into what became known as the Badab War. Carab Culln, Chapter Master of the Fire Hawks, met Huron in single combat during the siege of the Palace of Thorns and left him maimed, an eye and an arm lost. Badab fell to the coalition; Huron and the Astral Claws who followed him fled into the Maelstrom rather than submit, and it was there that he took the name Blackheart, replaced his ruined arm with the augmetic Tyrant’s Claw, and refounded his survivors as the Red Corsairs.

The clearest record of the Red Corsairs at war beyond the Maelstrom is the Gildar Rift campaign against the Silver Skulls, whose recruiting grounds the Red Corsairs contested. Huron approached the system aboard a captured Space Wolves strike cruiser, the Wolf of Fenris, to mask his fleet’s advance, then fought across Gildar Primus, Secundus and Quintus. He poisoned Quintus’s hydroponics to starve out its garrison and killed Captain Arrun during the fighting on Secundus, but the Silver Skulls destroyed several of his Executor-class grand cruisers before he withdrew, drawing off with enough of his force intact to keep the Red Corsairs a going concern. Raids attributed to the Red Corsairs have been recorded as far afield as Chogoris, though the record there is thinner than at Gildar.

New Badab, raised in the Maelstrom alongside the staging anchorage of Tyrant’s Gate, stands in for the homeworld Huron lost; it is less a settled world than a fortified statement that the Red Corsairs still answer to a Chapter Master, however far they have fallen from Chapter law. From there Huron continues to levy a corsair’s toll on shipping that strays near his territory, treating extortion as a debased inheritance of the tithes he once raised as a Loyalist commander. His enmity with the Silver Skulls over Gildar, and the older grievance against Carab Culln and the Badab War coalition, remain the clearest fixed points in an otherwise fluid and predatory career.

Huron first came to prominence as a Scout novitiate in the later stages of the Ribos Crusade, when, during the campaign on the Exodite world of Lylogir, he fought through a psychic assault and killed an Aeldari Warlock with his bare hands to save his squad. He served in the Chapter’s Devastator reserve, the 3rd Company and the Veterans of the 1st Company before taking command of the 4th Company, where his handling of firepower won battles against far larger armies, and he was raised to Chapter Master after his predecessor, Rovik Blake, was killed by the Ork Warboss Vorg Manburna; the same account dates his elevation to both 697.M41 and 715.M41. While the Astral Claws held senior command of the Maelstrom Warders he led them with distinction, and in the Defence of Khirab he led the combined Warder Chapters against Ork pirates from the Maelstrom and personally slew the Warboss Rakka, becoming a hero to the people of the Endymion Cluster. On Badab Primaris he styled himself the Tyrant of Badab and raised the Palace of Thorns to his own design. His first open act of rebellion came in 901.M41, when he destroyed an Imperial investigation fleet sent to Badab.

The wounds that ended his reign are most often attributed to the melta blast of the dying Star Phantoms captain Zhrukal Androcles, whose company was destroyed by Huron and his entourage in the last battle for the Palace of Thorns; the blast destroyed the right side of his body. Carried into the Maelstrom by his surviving warriors, he was rebuilt by Lord Apothecary Garreon and Forge Master Armanneus Valthex, and he is held to have survived only through a bargain struck with the powers of the warp, which left him with a daemonic familiar, the Hamadrya, that lends him psychic power and is said to warn him of assassins. Although no fervent follower of Chaos, he pays homage to the Ruinous Powers to further his own ends. He and some three hundred Astral Claws took New Badab from its mutant inhabitants and made it the seat of the Red Corsairs, and from there he presides over the Skull Harvest, the tournament of warlords won in or around 999.M41 by the Iron Warriors Warsmith Honsou. His flagship is the battle barge Spectre of Ruin, and the star fort Hell’s Iris is second only to New Badab among his strongholds.

As the Blood Reaver, Huron has led a number of attacks on the Imperium in person. Above Parenxes he boarded the Space Wolves strike cruiser Wolf of Fenris at the head of the third assault wave and killed its captain, Gnyrll Bluetooth, before handing the ship to the Space Wolves who defected to him; in 980.M41 he personally led a major raid on Bakka, the naval base of Segmentum Tempestus; and above Oldarian he destroyed Battlefleet Aquinas as it mustered, leading the boarding party that quenched the reactors of the battleship Chosen of Thor. Shortly before the 13th Black Crusade, Abaddon the Despoiler gave him the Blackstone Fortress later called Corsair’s Keep to seal an alliance, and it was there, without Huron’s knowledge, that his lieutenant Verngar held the captured Roboute Guilliman during the Terran Crusade until the primarch escaped. Huron rebuked Verngar when he returned to New Badab with Macragge’s Honour, followed him to the crystal daemon world of Kyren in search of the Ebon Talon, and, during the raid on Ogrys, maimed him when he tried to use the relic to seize command. Huron led the invasion of Chogoris in person in the last year of the forty-first millennium, withdrawing from the planet when Kor’sarro Khan broke the siege of Quan Zhou and the Noctis Aeterna lifted, though his Red Corsairs went on to hold worlds across the Yasan Sector and captured and tortured the Great Khan Jubal after his raid on the Seethnar. Some time after the opening of the Great Rift, as the warp storm Fomori engulfed the world of Danasar, he fought Typhus of the Death Guard atop the ruins of the Endless Spire, and was defeated but left alive.