Event · M32

Assault on Apollonia

The Assault on Apollonia was fought in the thirty-second millennium of the Imperium, upon Apollonia, also spelled Appollonia, a sunless moon held by the Inquisition that housed the Athenaeum of Kallimakus. Mahavastu Kallimakus, remembrancer to Magnus the Red, had fled Prospero carrying notes of what Magnus had dictated to him, and the Inquisition lodged him upon the moon. Before his death he composed the Athenaeum from those notes and his own memory, a work described as a copy of the Book of Magnus, and after he died scholars added their commentaries to the library he had left behind. One account holds that Ahriman’s search for this work had already lasted some sixteen hundred years since the Horus Heresy by the time he came to Apollonia. No narrower year within that millennium is recorded. According to one account, Ahriman learned of the Athenaeum’s location from the mind of Inquisitor Iobel and led a force of Rubric Marines to the moon, where they besieged the library for a month before looting it and setting it ablaze. According to the other account, Ahriman fought a skirmish against the Inquisition at Vohal, captured an inquisitor, and learned the location from him, afterwards travelling to Apollonia with Rubric Marines and Sanakht, also rendered Sanakt. Disloyal ships within his own fleet turned upon the rest and concentrated their fire upon the flagship Sycorax, and an Inquisition fleet arrived during the engagement. At the library the warp receded, the Rubric Marines fell inactive, and Sanakht turned against Ahriman, a betrayal he had already anticipated; he forced the entrance, overcame the blanks stationed there together with an Inquisition squad, and made Sanakht’s body the vessel of the Athenaeum. Space Wolves arrived, could not distinguish the factions from one another, and attacked an Inquisition ship, whose crew fought them as though they were creatures of the warp. Ahriman departed with the Athenaeum, the moon collapsed, and the remaining ships fought one another. The engagement is summarised as a Chaos victory, with Apollonia destroyed, the Athenaeum in Ahriman’s possession, and the disloyal portion of his warband destroyed, but the two accounts do not agree on how that result was reached.

See where Assault on Apollonia occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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