Event · M42

Arks of Omen

The Arks of Omen were a Chaos offensive of the early 42nd millennium, launched by Ezekyle Abaddon with the daemon Vashtorr. The offensive’s purpose was to assemble scattered fragments of an artefact that Vashtorr called the Key, a device intended to open a lock and so grant access to a weapon of great power held behind it. The alliance began while the Vengeful Spirit lay under repair following the Vigilus campaign, when Vashtorr manifested aboard the flagship and offered Abaddon a pact between Chaos Space Marine and daemon engine-smith. Abaddon was not at first persuaded to commit the Black Legion to the alliance. His position changed only after the two struck together at Magdalor, home world of the Iron Angels Chapter. There Abaddon teleported into the Iron Angels’ fortress-monastery, the Angels’ Crown, together with Falkus Kibre and the Bringers of Despair, and struck down the Chapter Master, Nymarn, in the fighting that followed. The prize taken from Magdalor was a pillar the Iron Angels had long called the Oathing Stone, which proved on examination to be a fragment of Vashtorr’s Key. In the months that followed, the Black Legion turned to clearing space hulks drifting within reach of its fleets, vast drifting wrecks that had until then been left largely alone, and Vashtorr reshaped these hulks into vessels he named the Arks of Omen. Each Ark was placed under the command of a Chaos champion, and the fleet of Arks was sent out across many systems to raid Imperial worlds in search of further fragments of the Key. Abaddon did not confine himself to directing this effort from afar: he took at least one fragment in person, on the world of Chyron Tertius. Among the campaign’s most significant actions was the assault on the Rock, the mobile fortress-monastery of the Dark Angels and a surviving fragment of their lost home world of Caliban, carried by them across the galaxy since the Heresy. This assault was led not by Abaddon but by Vashtorr himself, who sought an ancient engine housed within the fortress for his own purposes. The attempt to take the Rock failed: Vashtorr withdrew when Imperial reinforcements arrived to relieve the Dark Angels in their own stronghold, and he did not obtain the engine he had sought there. The Rock itself remained in Unforgiven hands, its defenders having denied Vashtorr the prize he came for. The offensive was fought chiefly in the Imperium Nihilus. The Rock that Vashtorr assaulted is the Dark Angels’ mobile fortress-monastery, a fragment of Caliban. It is not a fortress of the Imperial Fists, and it is not a fragment of Luna. He did not obtain the engine during that assault. At Idolatros the engine sought aboard the Rock was among those joined to the Key. The military result there favoured the Imperial forces present: Lion El’Jonson returned, and Angron was banished. The strategic result favoured Chaos, because the Key was finished. Both results are recorded. The campaign’s last great battle was fought at Idolatros, in the Somnium Stars, where Vashtorr had rebuilt the gathered wreckage of Caliban into a mechanical daemon world he named Wyrmwood. Abaddon brought the Black Legion fleet, including the Vengeful Spirit, out of a warp sub-dimension to engage the Dark Angels and other Chapters of the Unforgiven at Idolatros. The primarch Lion El’Jonson returned to the battle with a Blood Angels fleet under Chapter Master Dante, and on the surface of Wyrmwood the Lion banished the daemon primarch Angron from the materium. Despite this setback to the Chaos forces on the ground, Vashtorr succeeded in completing the Key before the battle’s end, achieving the campaign’s underlying purpose regardless of the fighting above and below Wyrmwood. The fighting at Idolatros is recorded as a military success for the Imperial forces present, while the wider Arks of Omen campaign is recorded as a strategic success for Chaos, because the Key was completed. Both results are stated, and neither is set aside.

See where Arks of Omen occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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