Event · M41

Battle of Garm

The Battle of Garm was fought on the shrine world of the same name after a Chaos uprising, orchestrated from within by agents of the Thousand Sons, overran the custodians charged with its upkeep. The uprising’s purpose became clear only once the attackers breached the deepest vaults of the shrine world: concealed there was the Spear of Russ, a relic of the Space Wolves’ primarch, and the Thousand Sons sorcerer Madox intended to use it as the focus of a ritual to summon Magnus the Red, the Daemon Primarch of the Thousand Sons, back into material form on Garm’s surface. Word of the uprising reached Fenris, and companies of the Space Wolves were despatched to retake the shrine world and recover the relic before Madox could complete his ritual. Among the Blood Claws who made planetfall was Ragnar, serving in the company of Berek Thunderfist. Fighting through cultist levies and the sorcerer’s own retinue, Ragnar’s pack drove toward the heart of the uprising, where Madox had already begun the working intended to call Magnus across the warp. Ragnar reached the ritual chamber as the summoning neared completion, confronting Madox directly while the Spear of Russ lay at the centre of the sorcerer’s working. With the ritual too far advanced to be halted by force of arms alone, and a warp portal already tearing open before him, Ragnar made the decision to cast the Spear of Russ into the opening breach rather than allow it to serve as the anchor for Magnus’s return. The portal collapsed, the summoning failed, and Madox’s working was broken, but the relic itself was lost into the warp, its location and fate unknown in the engagement’s immediate aftermath. The loss of so significant a relic was not received calmly within the Chapter. Many among the Space Wolves, both on Garm and afterward on Fenris, held Ragnar responsible for surrendering an irreplaceable symbol of Leman Russ’s legacy, regardless of the alternative having been the return of a Daemon Primarch to the material realm. Berek Thunderfist’s company bore the weight of the controversy, and Ragnar himself was marked within the Chapter as the Blood Claw who had let the Spear slip from Imperial hands. Logan Grimnar, Great Wolf of the Space Wolves, took the view that the action had been necessary and that no blame attached to the choice Ragnar had made under the circumstances, but he recognised that the controversy surrounding the loss could not simply be dismissed within the Chapter’s ranks. Rather than subject Ragnar to formal censure, Grimnar ordered him despatched to Terra as a Wolfblade, bound to the service of a noble household of the Imperium in the manner traditional to the Space Wolves’ dealings with Terran nobility. The posting carried the outward appearance of honour, but within the Chapter it was understood as a form of exile, removing Ragnar from Fenris and from the company that had borne the controversy of Garm until the matter of the Spear of Russ could be resolved.

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

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