Event · M31

Destruction of Davin during the Ruinstorm

The destruction of Davin during the Ruinstorm was the cyclonic bombardment of the feral world by the primarchs Sanguinius, Guilliman and the Lion. It followed their discovery, deep within the warp tempest known as the Ruinstorm, of the Serpent Lodge — the temple in which Horus had been altered years before. The attack left the world lifeless and is recorded chiefly for its place in the chronology of Horus’s corruption and the Imperium’s response to it. Davin had been catalogued by the 63rd Expedition under the provisional designation Sixty-Three Eight, one of many feral worlds surveyed during the Great Crusade. Its moon was the site at which Horus, then serving as Warmaster, received a wound whose consequences proved lasting; he was afterwards taken to the Serpent Lodge, a hidden temple on Davin itself, and there underwent the change that later accounts treat as a turning point toward his rebellion. For a time the world and its moon were remembered chiefly as the place where the Warmaster’s fall began. Years later, amid the Horus Heresy, the warp storm known as the Ruinstorm engulfed Davin and the surrounding region, cutting it off from the wider Imperium. Sanguinius, Guilliman and the Lion, then operating within Imperium Secundus, traced the storm’s knot to the same Serpent Lodge in which Horus had been changed, and located it once more upon Davin. Judging the site, and the world itself, beyond redemption, the three primarchs ordered its destruction, and cyclonic torpedoes were used to scour Davin of life. The captive Konrad Curze was present on the world. Sanguinius, guided by a vision that his destiny lay at Davin, overpowered Dark Angels guards without lethal force and took the chained Night Haunter from the Invincible Reason, hoping both to use his foresight and to show him that destiny could be altered; the Lion, enraged, came close to destroying the world with cyclonic torpedoes before he and Guilliman followed the pair to the surface. The four primarchs stood together in the temple where Horus had been changed, and the world revealed itself as the realm of the daemon Madail. When Sanguinius was drawn into Madail’s portal, Curze, who had foreseen none of it, fell into evident despair, and as daemons erupted across Davin he was dragged back aboard the Invincible Reason. Accounts of the end differ: one presents the cyclonic bombardment as a judgement ordered on the Serpent Lodge, another as the primarchs’ parting stroke after a battle fought above and on the world. No life remains on Davin. The world endures in the record chiefly as the setting of two connected events: the change worked upon Horus within the Serpent Lodge, and, later, the annihilation ordered by three of his brothers in response to it. It stands as one of the few worlds whose destruction is attributed directly to primarchs acting in concert, and as a fixed point linking the origins of the Heresy to the wider chaos of the Ruinstorm.

See where Destruction of Davin during the Ruinstorm occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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