Event · M32

Battle of the Fang

The Battle of the Fang was a Thousand Sons invasion of Fenris, homeworld of the Space Wolves, during the 32nd Millennium. Led in person by the daemon primarch Magnus the Red, the Thousand Sons struck at the Fang, the Space Wolves’ fortress-monastery in the Fenris system, seeking to end their enmity with the Chapter and to forestall a Space Wolves initiative to found new successor Chapters. The invasion is dated to the thirty-second millennium, some nine thousand years before the later, separate ordeal of Fenris known as the Wrath of Magnus. The rivalry between Magnus and his brother primarch Leman Russ dated to the Burning of Prospero during the Horus Heresy, when Russ’s Legion had razed the Thousand Sons’ home world at the Emperor’s order. By the time of the Battle of the Fang, Russ himself had long since departed on the Great Hunt, a quest from which he never returned, leaving the Chapter under a succession of Great Wolves. Harek Ironhelm, Great Wolf in this era, grew obsessed with bringing Magnus to battle after the Thousand Sons raided worlds neighbouring Fenris and withdrew before reinforcements could arrive; Magnus is recorded as appearing to Ironhelm in visions amid the wreckage, taunting him. Ironhelm eventually traced what he took to be the Thousand Sons’ base to the world of Gangava and committed almost the entire Chapter to a planetary assault there. The Gangava expedition was a deception: Magnus’s true target was Fenris itself, left defended by only the Twelfth Great Company under Jarl Vaer Greyloc. Accounts hold that Magnus’s deeper purpose was to prevent the Space Wolves from completing the work of the Wolf Priest Thar Hraldir, who had come close to unlocking the Canis Helix, the Chapter’s gene-seed, and with it the means to found a host of successor Chapters to be called the Sons of Russ. The Thousand Sons fleet emerged from the warp close to Fenris and struck its orbital defences while Magnus launched a psychic attack that annihilated the Fang’s astropathic choir, and the Space Wolves’ warships were destroyed or scattered as the Thousand Sons secured an orbital blockade. Two Planet Scourer vessels then bombarded the Fang without breaching its void shielding, while Ahmuz Temekh and Herume Aphael landed the Thousand Sons’ Spireguard and Rubric Marines, the soulless remnants of Legionaries transformed a millennium earlier by the ritual of the sorcerer Ahzek Ahriman. After a siege of several days, daemon-engines known as Gate-Breakers breached the Fang’s gate and the defenders fell back within the walls, where the awakening of the Chapter’s Revered Fallen, among them the ancient Dreadnought Bjorn the Fell-Handed, renewed the resistance. The defenders split between Borek’s Seal, under Greyloc, Bjorn and Rune Priest Odain Sturmhjart, and the Fangthane under Hraldir. When the Fang’s anti-sorcerous wards had been sufficiently destroyed, Magnus manifested within the fortress, using Aphael as his host, fought through the Fangthane, destroyed Hraldir’s Apothecarion and research, and killed Hraldir himself. Greyloc, Sturmhjart, Bjorn and two Wolf Guard then engaged Magnus near the peak; most of that party were slain before Harek Ironhelm’s drop-pod struck the summit. Ironhelm met Magnus in single combat on the slopes of the Fang; the Great Wolf was slain, after which Magnus vanished and the Thousand Sons’ sorcerers withdrew with their Rubricae, abandoning the mortal Spireguard to the returning Vlka Fenryka. The Thousand Sons withdrew to the Planet of the Sorcerers within the Eye of Terror, their invasion repulsed at heavy cost, including the deaths of Rune Priest Odain Sturmhjart and Jarl Vaer Greyloc alongside Ironhelm and Hraldir. Only twenty-two Astartes of the Twelfth Great Company are recorded as having survived. Hraldir’s successor gene-seed work was wholly destroyed, and the Sons of Russ project never rose again. The Fang endured, and Ironhelm was interred in a tomb on its slopes that later became a pilgrimage site for the Chapter’s Rune Priests. As with other clashes exposing the Imperium to the existence of Chaos, knowledge of its true nature was closely guarded, a matter that fell within the purview of the Inquisition. The Battle of the Fang is to be distinguished from the later, more grievous trial of Fenris fought in the 41st and 42nd Millennia, when Magnus the Red returned at the head of the Thousand Sons during the Wrath of Magnus; that later siege, in which Njal Stormcaller stood among the Fang’s defenders, is recorded separately as a further chapter in the enduring enmity between the Space Wolves and the Thousand Sons, a rivalry still traceable to the Burning of Prospero. Within the history of the Fenris system, the thirty-second-millennium battle stands as the first great test of the Fang after the Horus Heresy, a measure against which its later ordeals continue to be judged.

See where Battle of the Fang occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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