Event · M31

Cheraut Campaign

The Cheraut Campaign was a protracted military operation of the Great Crusade fought to bring the human world of Cheraut, in the Cheraut System, into Imperial compliance. The planet’s population resisted with uncommon ferocity, and the Imperium committed warriors from five Space Marine Legions, including the Imperial Fists, the Night Lords and the Emperor’s Children, alongside millions of Imperial Army soldiers, to a siege that dragged on for months before the world finally fell. The Night Lords, under Konrad Curze, carried out numerous atrocities against the population during the fighting, conduct that would later colour judgement of the campaign more than its strategic outcome. The war’s true significance lay in what followed its end. Curze, already confronted by Rogal Dorn over his conduct of war at the earlier compliance of Osmium, learned at Cheraut that crime and anarchy had returned to his homeworld of Nostramo and sought to confide his distress in Dorn and Fulgrim. Fulgrim instead disclosed to Dorn the visions of civil war that tormented Curze, and Dorn confronted him over both the massacres at Cheraut and these revelations. Curze responded with violence, beating Dorn severely before Sigismund intervened; one account holds that he also slaughtered Imperial Fists set to guard Dorn. Curze was afterwards confined aboard a voidship within the Cheraut System, but he killed his guards, variously named as Phoenix Guard of the Emperor’s Children and Templars of the Imperial Fists, though another account places the killings on Cheraut itself and names the dead as his own Night Lords. He then led his fleet to Nostramo, destroyed it for its relapse into corruption, and evaded those sent after him. The episode was regarded as the point at which Curze’s service to the Imperium irrevocably broke.

See where Cheraut Campaign occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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