Event · M31

Battle of Sheol IX

The Battle of Sheol IX was the climactic engagement of the Thramas Crusade, fought around 009.M31 in the Thramas Sector on the Eastern Fringe between the Dark Angels Legion under Lion El’Jonson and the Night Lords under Konrad Curze. One account referred to the world simply as Sheol. The battle brought the protracted campaign to an effective close in favour of the loyalists. Having recovered the warp engine Tuchulcha at Perditus, the Lion used it to lure the Night Lords into a trap. He passed the forge world Gulgorahd’s lords the location of the traitor remnant Legio Victorum, provoking a hasty Gulgorahd assault that tore a gap in the loyalist line. The Night Lords fleet surged through it, only for some three hundred Dark Angels capital ships and six hundred lesser vessels to emerge suddenly among roughly two hundred Night Lords capital ships and six hundred escorts, many of them still at anchor over Sheol IX. Long-range fire from Dark Angels relic vessels destroyed those that could not flee; of more than a hundred traitor capital ships that charged the line, only about fifty broke through, and the remainder withdrew from the system. The Dark Angels then closed on the ships left over Sheol IX, including the Night Lords flagship, the Nightfall. Curze himself commanded from a fortress on the surface, which the Dark Angels assaulted and the Night Lords held for two hours, at a cost estimated between a fifth and a quarter of the Legion’s total strength, among them three captains of the Kyroptera. The Lion again fought Curze in single combat and wounded him so severely that he lapsed into a coma; one account numbered the wounds at eleven, each said to be instantly fatal to an ordinary Space Marine. The Night Lords sacrificed an entire company to bring Curze from the field. Meanwhile the Firewing boarded the Nightfall, but the Night Lords vessel Feral Heart detonated its own reactors, tearing a gap in the loyalist cordon through which the Nightfall and a handful of other ships escaped into the warp. In the aftermath, Sevatar assumed temporary command of the shattered Legion, dividing it into separate fleets and purging rivals for leadership, until Curze, recovered from his wounds, reappeared at Qetesh, boarded the Lion’s flagship Invincible Reason with the Atramentar and, when the assault failed, hid in its lower decks.

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

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