Event · M30

Battle of Keylek

The Battle of Keylek was a Great Crusade campaign fought by the Luna Wolves, the XVI Legion of Space Marines, under their primarch Horus about 123 years into the Crusade, in the late thirtieth millennium. It was waged on Keylek, homeworld of the keylekid, a reptilian species whose warriors were large and strong in comparison with Space Marines and are said to have needed three or four bolt rounds to kill. Horus expected a prolonged struggle, but after first contact the keylekid assembled in pre-existing staging grounds across their domain, open-walled roofed structures several kilometres across, to await the Luna Wolves, because their philosophy of war required them to fight only within such spaces. At the suggestion of Maloghurst, Horus’s equerry, the Luna Wolves declined to meet them on those terms and destroyed them from range, and came to call the battle halls ‘slaughterhouses’. The keylekid are presumed extinct, and a keylekid cadaver was preserved in the Museum of Conquest aboard Horus’s flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. Garviel Loken, later captain of the Tenth Company, took part in the campaign some eighty years before the Horus Heresy and is recorded as recalling it with some sadness, because the enemy had fought in a manner contrary to that of the Space Marines.

See where Battle of Keylek occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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