Kor’sarro Khan

Kor’sarro Khan is the Captain of the 3rd Company, or Brotherhood, of the White Scars Space Marine Chapter and the Chapter’s fifty-first Master of the Hunt. A native of Chogoris, the White Scars’ home world, he succeeded Khantak Khan. Every twenty-five years, at the height of the Rites of Howling, the Master of the Hunt is sent to seek out an enemy who has survived a confrontation with the Chapter; he often takes a small band of warriors from his own company, and a hunt may last months or years but is never abandoned. When he returns with his quarry’s head, the Voice of the Storm burns out its eyes, the quarry’s name is struck from the roster of the hunt, and the head, masked in silver, is set on a lance beside the road to the Chapter’s fortress-monastery. Kor’sarro has completed almost twenty such hunts. He rides the bike Moondrakkan and carries a bolt pistol and the ancient power sword Moonfang.

His first Great Hunt ended on the third moon of the gas giant Mai Nine. During the Siege of Mysibis he killed a Tyranid Hive Tyrant in single combat. Sent to raid the T’au world of Cano’var, in 813.M41 by one account and 831.M41 by another, he found it held by the Necrons of the Overlord Zahndrekh; his Thunderhawk was shot down and he was taken prisoner, and after a breakout with the Aeldari Ranger Illic Nightspear, in which both were defeated by Zahndrekh’s bodyguard Obyron, Zahndrekh released them out of admiration. His sixteenth Great Hunt, ordered by the Great Khan Kyublai and dated to 861–871.M41, pursued the Alpha Legion Daemon Prince Kernax Voldorius for about a decade. Voldorius eluded him at Zoran, where Kor’sarro reinforced the Blood Angels of Captain Metraen, and at Modanna and Kavell, and drew him into a trap on Cernis IV. In the course of the hunt he fought Voldorius’s lieutenant Nullus several times, in the Lost Hope Incident, below the glass seas of Sagrifarri and in the Third Siege of Ex Bellum among other actions. On Quintus he allied with the Raven Guard under Kayvaan Shrike; after their companies broke an Alpha Legion counterattack on an orbital defence complex, he killed Nullus with the Champion Kergis, and in the final assault Shrike pinned Voldorius to a fallen statue of the Emperor and Kor’sarro beheaded him, at the Cathedral of the Emperor’s Wisdom by one account and in the streets of Mankarra by another.

His other recorded quarries include the Aeldari pirate lord Varaliel, whom he killed; the Ork Warboss Da Fist, a hunt from which only three of his fifty warriors returned; and the Archon Kirareq of the Drukhari Kabal of the Bloodied Talon, whose head he brought back to Chogoris in 945.M41, with those of a thousand of its warriors, after the Great Khan Kyublai disappeared fighting the Kabal in 943.M41. He tracked the Slaaneshi Daemon Prince Doomrider, who had escaped him four times, to Shaka VI and tore off his head, returning to Chogoris with the head still alive. On the agri-world of Gehöft he pursued the Nurgle Plague Lord Paramyx of the Blighted Claw alongside Sammael’s Ravenwing, but when the Dark Angels left the pursuit his squadron was destroyed, he alone survived, and Paramyx escaped before the world was destroyed by Exterminatus. He was also among the Imperial forces that retook Ultra Maximus from the T’au.

During the T’au Empire’s Third Sphere of Expansion in 999.M41, Kor’sarro led White Scars in the defence of Agrellan at the Battle of Mu’gulath Bay, where he swore a blood oath to take the head of Commander Shadowsun and inflicted heavy losses on her command staff. He met her in person several times, including at Blackshale Ridge, but she survived. He helped plan the ambush at Voltoris, from which she escaped, pursued her again in the Prefectia Campaign, where she collapsed her own Tidewall fortifications on him and his Terminators, and returned to Agrellan in the Second Agrellan Campaign, leading a drop pod assault on Agrellan Prime with Shrike before his company was recalled to Chogoris, then besieged by Huron Blackheart’s Red Corsairs. Arriving during the War for Chogoris as the Chaos forces besieged the fortress-monastery of Quan Zhou, he gathered scattered White Scars and tribal militia, struck the besiegers from the rear and broke through to the fortress after three days; an earlier account credits the relief of Chogoris to Roboute Guilliman and the Indomitus Crusade. Seeking revenge against the Red Corsairs, he then underwent the Rubicon Primaris to become a Primaris Space Marine. The Great Khan Jubal, crippled by torture at the hands of the Red Corsairs, forgave him for undergoing the procedure and granted him the ancient psyber-berkut Anzuq, a cybernetic hawk able to record all that it sees, and some among the White Scars believe that Jubal uses it to keep watch on him. He later fought with his Reivers against the Drukhari in the Battle for Mor-Dhastrum City.

The Purging of Modanna in 865.M41, in which Kor’sarro drove Voldorius from his foremost stronghold on that hive world, was among the earlier actions of the hunt; the Daemon Prince again escaped. The hunt was carried out by Task Force Nomad, formed around the 3rd Company and embarked on the strike cruiser Lord of Heavens, with Kor’sarro and his command squad carried to battle in the Thunderhawk Hunter One. On Cernis IV the company’s Champion, Jhogai, was killed by Nullus after challenging him so that Kor’sarro could seek the Daemon Prince he believed to be present, and Kergis succeeded him as Champion. On Gehöft the attack bike squadron with which Kor’sarro searched for Paramyx was ambushed by Plague Drones, and his battle-brother Khemru, who had first sighted the Plague Lord, was among the dead.

The ambush at Voltoris was planned aboard the Raven Guard battle barge Wings of Deliverance, at a council attended by Kor’sarro and the White Scars, the Raven Guard Chapter Master Corvin Severax, Kayvaan Shrike, Colonel Straken of the Catachan II and Patriarch Tybalt of House Terryn. Some accounts also place Kor’sarro in personal combat with Shadowsun at Acacia Hive, and record that in the trap laid around House Terryn’s ancestral fortress on Voltoris he wounded her grievously and came within a hand’s breadth of beheading her. His conversion to a Primaris Space Marine, which he demanded after witnessing the strength of the new warriors, was carried out by the Chapter’s Chief Apothecary, Ogholei, although no such operation was known to have been attempted before. With Jubal Khan unable to lead in the field, Kor’sarro is described as having become in effect the Chapter’s war leader.