Event · M31

Battle of Sixty-Three Nineteen

The Battle of Sixty-Three Nineteen was a Great Crusade campaign in which the 63rd Expedition subdued a world ruled by a false Emperor of Mankind. The world is recorded only by its campaign designation, Sixty-Three Nineteen, a number that was never replaced by a native or Imperial name. The expedition was led by the Warmaster Horus Lupercal and spearheaded by the Luna Wolves Legion. The action falls late in the thirtieth millennium, after the Ullanor Crusade had raised Horus to the Warmaster’s office. The campaign is remembered chiefly for the deaths of the captain Hastur Sejanus and his embassy, and for the promotion of Garviel Loken that followed. It was not fought on Terra; the world’s claim to be a second Terra, with its own Emperor, is the reason the campaign is recorded as it is. The expedition reached the system only after a warp storm diverted its fleet. It found a human civilisation that hailed the fleet in the name of an Emperor of Mankind and invited its commanders to swear fealty to him. Horus sent his favoured captain, Hastur Sejanus, with an embassy to the ruler. Talks broke down when Sejanus raised the possibility that another Emperor already reigned over mankind. The ruler’s elite guard, the Invisibles, killed the whole embassy. Horus sent a second embassy under his equerry Maloghurst, and it too was driven off. First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon then made one further appeal, which was answered only with gunfire. Horus, having exhausted diplomacy, gave the order for open war. The 63rd Expedition’s warships overcame the defenders in orbit. Four Luna Wolves companies, under Captains Abaddon, Tarik Torgaddon, Horus Aximand and Garviel Loken, then descended on the capital with the support of Titans of Legio Mortis. Loken’s Tenth Company was the first to break into the high palace. It fought through a further ambush by the Invisibles before reaching the throne room. The figure enthroned there is recorded as an impersonator. The true ruler, armed with a concealed gravitic weapon, attempted to spring a trap on the Imperial commanders, and Horus teleported directly into the chamber and killed him with a single shot. Organised resistance collapsed inside the capital, though scattered defenders fought on for some months. The last holdouts, in the Whisperhead Mountains, fell to Loken’s Tenth Company. The world then entered Imperial compliance under the governorship of General Rakris of the Byzant Janizars, so that the false Emperor’s realm passed into the ordinary administration of the Imperium. The main consequences of the campaign concern the Luna Wolves’ command circle. Loken filled the vacancy among Horus’s closest captains, the informal council known as the Mournival, left by Sejanus’s death; Abaddon, Torgaddon and Aximand were its other members. Later tradition holds that Horus’s grief for Sejanus was exploited by the Word Bearers Legion, in the events on Davin that drew him toward rebellion. Within the Great Crusade, the battle is best read alongside the Ullanor Crusade, as one of the campaigns that raised Horus’s standing before the Horus Heresy.

See where Battle of Sixty-Three Nineteen occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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