40k Orrery

Event · M41

Battle of Dragos

The Battle of Dragos formed the climactic engagement of what Space Wolves chroniclers term the Hunt for the Wulfen, a campaign mounted by Ragnar’s Blackmanes to recover brothers of the Chapter’s own Wulfen — Space Wolves overtaken by the feral mutation that Fenrisian gene-seed carries as the price of its gifts — who had been lost amid the daemon-tainted jungles of Dragos during an earlier, unrelated engagement against a Chaos incursion. Imperial authority had all but written the missing Wulfen off, the jungles having since been consumed by warp-touched growth that rendered orbital augury useless and ground reconnaissance a slow, costly affair measured in packs rather than scouts. Ragnar committed the Blackmanes to Dragos over the objections of several of his own Wolf Guard, who argued that Wulfen already lost to the feral change for as long as these brothers had been were unlikely to be recoverable in any meaningful sense, and that the jungle’s corruption made the search a greater risk than the brothers it might save. Ragnar held that Fenrisian custom owed every brother, however changed, the chance of recovery rather than abandonment, and led the hunt personally, tracking signs of the Wulfen packs through jungle canopy that had begun to exhibit the unmistakable signs of warp-corruption bleeding from a buried Chaos shrine at the jungle’s heart. The search uncovered, alongside the Wulfen themselves, a stranded Adeptus Mechanicus expedition that had entered the jungles months earlier in pursuit of xenos ruins rumoured to predate human settlement of Dragos, and which the same corruption had cut off from extraction, its forces reduced to a handful of tech-priests and skitarii sheltering behind failing void shields. Ragnar divided his company, committing part of the Blackmanes to breaking the siege around the Mechanicus survivors while leading the remainder deeper into the jungle in search of the Wulfen, a division of force that several Wolf Guard again counselled against and that Ragnar again overruled. Both objectives were achieved: the Mechanicus expedition was relieved and its survivors extracted, and the lost Wulfen packs, drawn by the commotion and by whatever vestige of pack-instinct the feral change had not erased, were recovered largely intact and returned to Fenris for the Chapter’s own attempts at rehabilitation. The Battle of Dragos is cited within the Blackmanes’ sagas as proof of Ragnar’s conviction that no brother, however far the mutation had carried him, stood beyond the reach of the pack, a principle that shaped the company’s conduct toward its own Wulfen kin for the remainder of his tenure as Wolf Lord.

See where Battle of Dragos occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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Locations

Involved characters

  • Ragnar Blackmane (During the Hunt for the Wulfen he fought through daemon-haunted jungles to recover 13th Company Wulfen and stranded Mechanicus personnel.)