Event · M31

Death of Horus

The Death of Horus was the climactic single combat of the Horus Heresy, fought in 014.M31 aboard the battle-barge Vengeful Spirit in orbit above Terra, between Horus Lupercal, Warmaster of the Imperium turned arch-traitor and vessel of the Chaos gods, and the Emperor of Mankind. It came in the final days of the Siege of Terra, after Horus had driven his rebel forces against the walls of the Imperial Palace, and it is remembered as the encounter that decided the war’s outcome and, with it, the shape of the Imperium that followed. The duel followed directly upon the death of Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels, who had led an assault against the Vengeful Spirit in an attempt to end the war before the Emperor need be drawn into it himself. Sanguinius’s death is recorded as the immediate provocation that brought the Emperor aboard Horus’s flagship in person, forsaking for a time the defence of his own throne world, where Rogal Dorn and the remaining loyalist forces continued to hold the Imperial Palace against the Warmaster’s legions, foremost among them Horus’s own Sons of Horus. The Emperor boarded the Vengeful Spirit accompanied by a small retinue of the Adeptus Custodes, his own bodyguard. Older tradition holds that a common Terran soldier named Ollanius Pius delayed Horus’s guard for a crucial moment during the final approach, buying time for the Emperor to reach the Warmaster; later and more considered accounts of the battle omit this episode or recast it substantially, and Ollanius Pius’s presence and role in the duel remain disputed rather than settled. In single combat, Horus and the Emperor fought with blade and psychic power alike, each grievously wounding the other, before the Warmaster was struck down and killed. Accounts differ as to how much of his own strength the confrontation cost the Emperor, but his victory is consistently described as ruinous rather than clean. The Emperor, his mortal body failing, was borne back to Terra and interred within the life-sustaining mechanism later known as the Golden Throne, from which he has not since risen to act directly upon galactic events. With the Warmaster dead, his rebel fleet and armies fell into disarray; the surviving Traitor Legions withdrew from the Sol System toward the Eye of Terror, bringing the Horus Heresy to its end and opening the punitive campaigns later known as the Great Scouring. The Vengeful Spirit itself passed in time into the hands of the Black Legion, successor to Horus’s own Sons of Horus. The Emperor’s incapacitation left the ten-thousand-year Imperium under the regency of the High Lords of Terra, and the age that followed was defined as much by his absence from active rule as by the war’s conclusion. Rogal Dorn took part in the teleport assault on the Vengeful Spirit. On arrival he was separated from the Emperor’s party and trapped in an endless sweltering desert raised by Horus’s power, where for what seemed to him centuries he endured alone among the corpses of his sons, losing much of his memory while resisting the temptations of Khorne. He recovered himself when the Emperor cast aside the mantle of the Dark King, found Actae beneath rubble in the Inevitable City, and fought clear to Lupercal’s Court with Constantin Valdor. There, with the Warmaster already dead and the Emperor grievously wounded, Dorn sided with the reading that the Emperor must be returned to the Golden Throne; he, Valdor and the other survivors teleported back to the Palace and seated the Emperor for the ages that followed. Garviel Loken, a former Luna Wolves captain serving Malcador as a Knight-Errant, entered the Vengeful Spirit from the Hall of Leng, the Emperor’s library on Terra, through a door that had not previously been there. Aboard the flagship he destroyed the physical form of the daemon Samus; then, in the Inevitable City formed as Terra and the ship overlapped, he rescued Ollanius Persson (the Ollanius Pius of older tradition), John Grammaticus and Leetu from Word Bearers. With Persson he persuaded the Emperor to turn from becoming the Dark King, and he accompanied the Emperor, Leetu and the Custodian Caecaltus Dusk to confront Horus, who wept on seeing him before casting him aside. Guided by the dying flame of Malcador, Loken reached Lupercal’s Court as the Emperor slew Horus with the Athame, and watched over both bodies until Dorn and Constantin Valdor arrived. He refused to leave Horus’s body. When Ezekyle Abaddon and the surviving Sons of Horus officers found him, Abaddon forbade them to harm him, and Loken urged them to surrender, promising to seek amnesty from Dorn. Erebus, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers, then stabbed Loken in the back, declaring that the betrayal would echo in the warp and give rise to Samus.

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

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