Event · M31
Battle of Ravenspire
The Battle of Ravenspire was a Horus Heresy engagement fought at the Raven Guard’s fortress on Deliverance during the thirty-first millennium. It followed the Isstvan V massacre, in which the Raven Guard lost most of their strength alongside the Salamanders and the Iron Hands. The surviving Legionaries withdrew to Deliverance, a stronghold of the Legion, to rebuild under their Primarch, Corvus Corax. The Ravenspire is recorded as the principal fortress there, and its defence formed part of the Warmaster’s wider effort to prevent the loyalist Legions from reconstituting themselves. Accounts attribute the assault chiefly to Alpha Legion forces acting for Horus, who favoured infiltration and misdirection over a single open engagement. The defenders answered with the Raven Guard’s established doctrine of stealth, ambush and rapid withdrawal, which suited a Legion too reduced to hold ground in set-piece battle. The exact sequence of events, the size of the forces committed and the casualty figures are not firmly attested, and accounts differ on how far the fortress was compromised. The Raven Guard survived as a diminished but functioning Legion, and the action is remembered as a further blow to the loyalists in the early phase of the war. Later tradition holds that Corax and his surviving warriors went on to take part in the loyalist defence of the Sol System, although the link between Ravenspire and those later operations is not recorded in detail. On the Orrery map the battle is anchored to Deliverance, and on the timeline it sits shortly after Isstvan V, close to the Raven Guard’s Legion history and the wider Alpha Legion campaign against the loyalists.
See where Battle of Ravenspire occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.