Event · M41

Blood Ravens campaign on Tartarus

The Blood Ravens campaign on Tartarus was a war fought in 999.M41 by Gabriel Angelos for the Maledictum relic on the Imperial world of Tartarus. Tartarus lies in the Corribra Sector; its segmentum is recorded variously as Tempestus and Obscurus, and accounts do not agree on the point, a discrepancy later commentators attribute to the confused state of Imperial record-keeping in a sector repeatedly cut off by warp disturbance. The 3rd and 4th Companies of the Blood Ravens, under Angelos and Librarian Isador Akios, fought there against Ork invaders, the Aeldari of Craftworld Biel-Tan, and the Alpha Legion, each pursuing a different claim on the buried relic, so that the campaign unfolded as a four-sided contest for a single object rather than a conventional war of conquest. The Maledictum’s origins lay some ten thousand years earlier, when an early human colony on Tartarus fell to the worship of a Greater Daemon of Khorne that emerged cyclically from the warp to feed on the colonists’ violence. Farseer Macha of Biel-Tan led an Aeldari force that defeated the daemon at the cost of its Avatar of Khaine, a loss the craftworld reckoned gravely even in victory, then bound the daemon within a stone, the Maledictum, and buried it behind a sequence of riddles meant to keep it from any hand that had not proven itself worthy of the burden. Tartarus was recolonised some three hundred years later as though uninhabited, the earlier catastrophe effaced from Imperial memory, and by 999.M41 the daemon’s renewed influence was inspiring heresy among the planet’s Astra Militarum garrison and Planetary Defence Forces alike. The Alpha Legion, under the Sorcerer Sindri Myr and Chaos Lord Bale, exploited the reawakening, inciting an Ork Waaagh! as cover while they searched for the Maledictum, which Sindri intended to use as a shortcut to daemonhood rather than as a weapon in its own right. The Blood Ravens arrived as Orks threatened the planet’s sole spaceport, Magna Bonum, and drove them back before turning to the deeper conspiracy beneath the invasion. Inquisitor Mordecai Toth warned Angelos to withdraw before an approaching warp storm broke over the planet, judging the relic not worth the risk of losing an entire strike force to it, but Angelos stayed to root out the taint of Chaos he suspected lay beneath the orkish assault. The Blood Ravens clashed with Macha’s Aeldari, who sought to keep the Maledictum hidden from every claimant rather than surrender it to any one of them, before Sindri Myr seized the relic for the Alpha Legion. Angelos killed Bale in the fighting that followed, while Akios, turned to Chaos by Sindri’s influence, seized the Maledictum in turn, only for Sindri to reclaim it from him; Angelos then killed his old friend and fellow officer in a duel forced on him by Akios’s corruption. Aided by Toth and by Macha’s remaining warriors, who judged the Blood Ravens the lesser danger once the Alpha Legion held the stone, the Blood Ravens pushed back the Alpha Legion and killed Sindri as he attempted a truncated ascension to daemonhood, denying him the apotheosis he had sought through the relic. The Maledictum did not survive the campaign: its destruction triggered earthquakes across Tartarus, an episode later chronicled separately as the Maledictum’s shattering, and one that left the planet’s surface scarred long after the armies had departed. Toth, who had suspected Angelos rather than Akios of harbouring Chaos’s taint throughout the fighting, a suspicion coloured by Angelos’s earlier order of Exterminatus against his own homeworld, Cyrene, and by the readiness with which Blood Ravens officers were known to conceal one another’s failings, nonetheless entrusted Angelos with the daemonhammer Godsplitter, forged from the weapon once carried by Biel-Tan’s lost Avatar and recovered from the ruin of the campaign. The campaign remains the engagement with which the Blood Ravens are most closely associated, distinct from the Chapter’s later Dark Crusade on Kronus and from the unrelated worlds of Acheron and Kadaku, each a separate chapter in the Chapter’s wider chronicle rather than a continuation of the Tartarus fighting. Later Imperial briefings still cite Tartarus as a caution against relics that act upon those who hold them, and against commanders who reason, as Angelos did, that a world already forfeit to Chaos is worth the risk of further ruin to cleanse.

See where Blood Ravens campaign on Tartarus occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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