Event · M30

Compliance of Melchior

The Compliance of Melchior was a Great Crusade joint operation in which the Blood Angels under Sanguinius and the Luna Wolves under Horus Lupercal defeated the Nephilim, a xenos species that had enslaved and consumed human populations through worship and psychic manipulation. Melchior was among the worlds the Nephilim had stripped; by the time the Legions struck, the aliens’ praise-chapels and copper towers stood over a people already far gone into thralldom. The two primarchs fought side by side against Nephilim hosts whose glass spines cast barrages of noise, and Imperial victory ended the Melchior campaign against that species in that theatre. In the battle’s aftermath First Captain Raldoron drew Sanguinius from Horus’s side to a deserted cathedral where a Blood Angel—named Alotros in some accounts and Alatros in others—had fallen to the Red Thirst and become a mindless, feral beast. Sanguinius tried to call his son back and, failing, killed him. Horus, having slipped past the Sanguinary Guard, witnessed the act. Sanguinius confessed the genetic Flaw that had surfaced throughout the Legion’s history and that his foresight suggested would worsen; Horus swore to keep the secret from the Emperor and to aid any search for a cure. The compliance thus joins a Crusade victory over the Nephilim to the first fully attested moment at which another primarch learned of the Blood Angels’ hidden affliction—an affliction Horus later exploited when he sent Sanguinius into the Signus Cluster on the false claim that the Nephilim had returned.

See where Compliance of Melchior occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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