Event · M41

13th Black Crusade / Fall of Cadia

The 13th Black Crusade was Abaddon the Despoiler’s offensive against the Cadian Gate, and the Fall of Cadia was its culminating event. The crusade is dated to around 999.M41 and was fought across the Cadia System and neighbouring sectors of the Segmentum Obscurus, pitting the Black Legion and allied Chaos warbands against the Cadian Shock Troops, the Astra Militarum, the Adeptus Mechanicus, and Necron forces drawn into the conflict by the fate of the Cadian Gate itself; the world’s destruction reshaped the strategic balance of the entire sector. Abaddon had spent the preceding Black Crusades gathering warbands, daemon engines and Chaos-bound relics from across the Eye of Terror; the thirteenth was recorded as the one aimed directly at breaking the Imperium’s oldest fortress line rather than merely raiding beyond it. For ten thousand years the Cadian Gate had been the only fleet-scale corridor by which large forces could pass between the Eye of Terror and the wider galaxy, held closed in the Imperium’s favour by a system of pylons of Necron origin, predating human settlement of Cadia, whose full mechanism the Imperium had never entirely understood. Later tradition holds that the Word Bearers had already walked Cadia’s soil in the age of the Horus Heresy, ten millennia before Abaddon’s assault, so the world’s significance to the Long War was not confined to the forty-first millennium. The defence of Cadia fell principally to Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed and the Cadian Shock Troops, reinforced by Astra Militarum formations, Adeptus Mechanicus skitarii, and Imperial Navy elements drawn to fortress-cities such as Kasr Sonnen and Kasr Kraf as the scale of Abaddon’s fleet became apparent. A first Chaos assault was driven back from the Cadia System by the combined action of the Imperial Navy and Necron forces under Trazyn, allowing Creed’s defenders to clear the warbands that had already made planetfall; Abaddon answered with a far larger second assault that loosed the Eye of Terror’s daemonic strength directly against an already-battered world. Unexpected Imperial reinforcements, among them Saint Celestine and forces marshalled through the efforts of the Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl, prevented Abaddon from crushing Cadia outright and destroyed his Blackstone Fortress, the Will of Eternity, in orbit. In response, Abaddon had the wrecked fortress’s fragments driven down onto the planet’s crust; the impact shattered the Necron pylon network that had constrained the Gate and set off a tectonic collapse from which Cadia could not recover. Earlier in the fighting on Cadia, Colour Sergeant Jarran Kell was killed buying Creed time to escape the Bringers of Despair. With Belisarius Cawl, Saint Celestine, Orven Highfell, Greyfax, and Marius Amalrich, Creed fought beneath the surface of Cadia to delay Abaddon until the pylons could be activated, and he lost an arm saving Celestine and Greyfax. After the impact, Creed and the Cadian 8th held back daemons while Imperial forces evacuated. The Cadian 8th’s personnel list records him as missing in action. Another account holds that, as Cadia fell, the Necron overlord Trazyn the Infinite removed him from the surface and placed him in a gallery on Solemnace labelled the Last Stand of Ursarkar Creed. Within hours of the impact, Cadia began to tear itself apart and to be consumed by the immaterium, an event the Imperium records as the Fall of Cadia. The destruction released energies that tore into the warp on a scale far beyond the local sector, and is dated to the same period as the revival of the Primarch Roboute Guilliman, engineered by Cawl, and the departure of the Indomitus Crusade to relieve worlds cut off by the ensuing disturbance. The rupture that followed is recorded as the Cicatrix Maledictum, the Great Rift, which split the Imperium into Imperium Sanctus and Imperium Nihilus; the Cadian Sector, sitting athwart the Gate, became one of the first territories to feel that division. Cadia itself survives only as a shattered ruin, held by traitor garrisons and subject to a daemonic presence, while Cadian regiments that escaped the fall were dispersed to other warzones, most notably the contested world of Vigilus, carrying the name of a homeworld that no longer existed; among their officers, Ursula Creed carries that name still. The Cadian Sector did not cease to exist with the loss of its anchor world; it remains the administrative division governing the approaches to the Gate, with Pervigilium, Raeddon and other surviving systems retained on the chart as the sector’s remaining wells against the Eye. Because the Cadian Gate is a geography rather than a single fortress world, the wider 13th Black Crusade continued beyond Cadia’s fall, with fighting recorded in the Agripinaa System and on Belial IV as Abaddon’s forces pressed the advantage opened by the Gate. The Fall of Cadia is remembered as the opening act of the Gathering Storm and the event that made possible the opening of the Great Rift, setting the stage for the Black Crusades that followed in the age of the Cicatrix Maledictum. Trazyn the Infinite, prompted by upheaval in his galleries on Solemnace, traced the crisis through the Celestial Orrery and travelled to Cadia in person. He revealed himself to Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl and worked with him to activate the Cadian pylons, whose amplified array briefly pushed back the Eye of Terror before Abaddon’s Blackstone Fortress, the Will of Eternity, was driven into the planet. In the final fighting Trazyn unleashed much of his collection against the Black Legion; when Cadia’s destruction became certain he teleported away. Saint Celestine appeared swathed in flame above the battlefields of Kasr Kraf, bringing with her some five companies of battle-sisters of the Order of Our Martyred Lady thought lost in the warp for about fourteen hundred years. She raised Genevieve and Eleanor, two canonesses slain by the Daemon Prince Urkanthos, as her champions the Geminae Superia, and with them killed Urkanthos and threw his body from the walls of Kasr Kraf. In the catacombs beneath the pylons of the Elysion Fields she and Creed led the defence against Abaddon; when Cawl’s activation of the pylons cut Cadia off from the warp her strength waned and Abaddon defeated her, until Inquisitor Katarinya Greyfax’s psychic assault forced him back. As Abaddon moved to kill the wounded Creed, Celestine stabbed him from behind with the Ardent Blade, and he withdrew. After the fall she helped lead the survivors, who took the name of the Celestinian Crusade, to the ice moon Klaisus on the strength of a vision. During the Thirteenth Black Crusade and the fall of Cadia at the close of the 41st millennium, Ragnar and the Blackmanes were committed to the defence of Kasr Belloc, one of the fortress-citadels ringing the planet against the onslaught of Abaddon the Despoiler’s forces. Amid the fighting for the kasr, Ragnar met the Dark Angels sergeant Sorael in a duel to the death that had been pledged years earlier after an honour contest aboard the Veregelt; Ragnar prevailed but spared Sorael’s life so that both Chapters might turn against their common enemy. Flesh Tearers under Captain Vorain, whose acquaintance with Ragnar dated to the Mission to Cretacia, fought beside the Blackmanes in the same defence, the two Chapters’ warriors standing together even as Cadia’s defences were finally overwhelmed and the fortress world was lost. During the same crusade Captain Tor Garadon brought the Imperial Fists fortress-monastery Phalanx to the Cadia System after defeating Warsmith Shon’tu and the Daemon Prince Be’lakor in the Battle of the Phalanx. He drove the vessel straight at the Black Fleet and the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity, held fire on a section of failing shields until the fortress’s core split, then withdrew the Phalanx to Cadia beyond the Equator. On the surface his 3rd Company fought on the southern lines of the Elysion Fields beside Black Templars under Amalrich, planting their banners in the path of the Black Legion. When Cadia’s fall became certain, Garadon took the lead of the retreating Imperial ships, took aboard what craft he could from stricken vessels such as the Pride of St Cerephos, and led the evacuation fleet into the warp toward Terra. Khârn the Betrayer also took part in the crusade. He and a few of the most frenzied Khorne Berzerkers were loosed against the Imperial warriors gathering to defend Cadia, though no landing by him on Cadia itself is recorded, and he was a principal Chaos commander in the Diamor Campaign, in which his Butcherhorde fought the Blood Angels, the Adeptus Mechanicus, and Imperial Titans on Amethal. Other accounts of the period record that Abaddon sought to bind Khârn to his service and sent Captain Talomar Locq and the Hounds of Abaddon after him; Khârn defeated a White Scars force on Haeleon and later led the invasion of the shrine world Salandraxis, where Abaddon descended to parley with him. Logan Grimnar, Great Wolf of the Space Wolves, came to the Cadian Gate with most of his surviving Chapter after the Siege of the Fenris System, seeking revenge for the losses suffered there, and was chosen as supreme commander of the defending Imperial forces. Many of the defenders’ key victories were won under his command, and it is recorded that without his leadership more of Cadia would have fallen to Chaos. On Kasr Sonnen, the third planet of the Cadian system, he and Azrael of the Dark Angels set aside the long enmity between their Chapters and together defeated a force many times their size.

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