Event · M31

Breaking of the Perfect Fortress

The Breaking of the Perfect Fortress was a Horus Heresy battle of 008.M31 in which the Raven Guard retook the Emperor’s Children stronghold on Narsis, a fortress world in the sector surrounding Deliverance. There Fulgrim’s Legion had raised the Perfect Fortress, a stronghold built to guard the riches of neighbouring forge worlds and to threaten the Imperial bastions of Agrapha, Chopix and Spartus. When the Horus Heresy broke out, the Emperor’s Children seized Narsis for Horus, and the fortress became a linchpin of the Traitor presence in the southern Imperium, its guns and garrison securing the sector against reprisal. Following the Ravendelve episode, Corax led the Raven Guard against the Perfect Fortress, joined by the Therion Cohort under Marcus Valerius; Imperial Fists under Captain Noriz and a contingent of Custodes are also recorded among the attackers. Corax sent the Therions into the fortress first, intending that their assault should draw the defenders into overconfidence. The Cohort suffered terribly for this role, losing at least ten thousand dead before the main stroke was delivered. One account records that the scout cruiser Fane of Shadow detected hidden flak batteries slaved to a control room beneath Hab-block Delta-19. With Corax maintaining vox-silence, Centurion Beyar Kedron led his Deliverers, an ill-favoured contingent, in an assault that destroyed the batteries at heavy cost to his own men. As the Therions fell back, the Emperor’s Children under Captain Hasten Luthris Armanitan pursued them and were ambushed from within the fortress; Corax killed Armanitan in person, and Narsis was returned to the Imperium. Raven Guard losses in the battle were light. Kedron’s dead were laid in a mausoleum within the captured fortress, and Corax offered neither praise nor blame for the action. Kedron and other Therion officers were critical of the plan that had cost the Cohort so dearly, and some months afterwards they were formed into a separate battlegroup and despatched to seize Galaspar, a venture Corax himself did not accompany.

See where Breaking of the Perfect Fortress occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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