Event · M31

Battle of Gate Forty-Two

The Battle of Gate Forty-Two was fought in 000.M31 during the Great Crusade, the decisive engagement in the Imperium’s reconquest of the Akum-Sothos Cluster, a region first brought to compliance by the Luna Wolves early in the Crusade. The cluster’s renewed uprising arose not from political defiance but from a xenos parasite maturing within the eye sockets of its hosts, inducing a mass psychosis across the population and binding its most afflicted carriers into a gestalt intelligence known as the Unsighted Kings. Horus, newly raised to Warmaster, vowed to retake the cluster personally, ordering a converging strike by the Luna Wolves, Space Wolves, Iron Warriors and Raven Guard. The outer worlds fell within weeks, but the stronghold guarding Gate Forty-Two proved far costlier. Horus ordered the Raven Guard to storm the gate’s guns in a frontal assault; Corax argued instead for feints suited to his Legion’s methods. The dispute grew heated, and Perturabo is recorded as calling Corax a coward, bringing the two primarchs near to blows before Leman Russ intervened, urging Corax to defer to the Warmaster. Corax conceded, committing chiefly his Terran-raised companies, whose captains had argued most strongly for accepting Horus’s plan; Corax himself had long distrusted such officers for their reliance on terror tactics. He led the assault in person, and the fighting that followed was ruinous, with whole assault companies annihilated storming the gate’s defences. It was Horus and the Luna Wolves who went on to slay the Unsighted Kings and claim the glory of the victory. By the battle’s end the Raven Guard had been reduced to some eighty thousand warriors. Corax withdrew his Legion from Horus’s command, vowing never again to serve at his side, though the loss of so many Terran-born officers left him freer than before to consolidate his hold over the Legion.

See where Battle of Gate Forty-Two occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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