Event · M32–M37

Boarding of the Sword of Sacrilege

The Boarding of the Sword of Sacrilege was the final recorded action of Rogal Dorn, primarch of the Imperial Fists, fought aboard the Chaos Despoiler-class battleship Sword of Sacrilege during a Black Crusade. Imperial tradition holds that a Chaos fleet gathered to strike at the Cadian Gate and that the Imperial Navy did not discover the muster, placed in some accounts at the Pelenos Belt, until it was too late. Most of the Imperial Fists Chapter was then engaged in shadowing Craftworld Ulthwé; Dorn could raise only three companies and led them in person against the enemy fleet. He is said to have rammed a ship under his command into the Sword of Sacrilege and boarded the battleship, where he made his last stand. Only after his disappearance did Ulthwé seem to withdraw, freeing the remainder of the Chapter; the Phalanx and the Imperial Fists then defeated the Chaos fleet and boarded the Sword of Sacrilege before it could flee. What they recovered of their primarch is differently reported: some accounts speak of a single fist of bone, others of unstated remains, and an older novelistic tradition of an entire skeleton later kept aboard the Phalanx. All agree that a skeletal hand, engraved by successive Chapter Masters, is preserved in stasis as the Imperial Fists’ holiest icon. The date of the action is disputed. One body of evidence places it in M32, not long after the First Black Crusade; another, relying on the Despoiler class’s reported construction in M36, implies a later Black Crusade. Konrad Curze is recorded as having foreseen Dorn dragged down by many killers in a dark tunnel, a vision often read as matching a boarding fight in a ship’s corridors. The Sword of Sacrilege afterwards appears as a Tzeentchian sorcerers’ base and among Abaddon’s fleet in the Twelfth Black Crusade, but the boarding that removed Dorn from Imperial history remains tied to this vessel rather than to any securely charted world.

See where Boarding of the Sword of Sacrilege occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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