Event · M31
Destruction of Prospero
The Destruction of Prospero was the Space Wolves’ assault on the Thousand Sons’ homeworld in the early Horus Heresy, in the 31st Millennium. Its causes lay in the suppression of psychic practice after the Council of Nikaea and in a warning sent by Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons. Magnus is recorded as perceiving Horus’s corruption and attempting to alert the Emperor across the Warp; the transmission is held to have broken the wards of the Emperor’s Webway project beneath the Imperial Palace on Terra. The Emperor is recorded as reading this as defiance of the Nikaean edict and ordered Leman Russ, Primarch of the Space Wolves, to bring Magnus to account. Later tradition holds that Horus shaped Russ’s temper towards a harsher execution of that judgement than the Emperor may have intended. The Space Wolves reached Prospero, a world of libraries and observatories whose principal city, Tizca, was known as the City of Light, and attacked it in force. Accounts record that agents of the Emperor, including Adeptus Custodes and Sisters of Silence, accompanied the fleet. The Thousand Sons, whose Legion had come to rely on sorcery, resisted with psychic and Warp-derived arts, and among their officers Ahzek Ahriman is named as a leading sorcerer. Fighting spread through Tizca and its surroundings, and the city was burned. Accounts differ on the final duel between Russ and Magnus, though both agree that Magnus withdrew into the Warp and that the Space Wolves left the planet in ruins. Prospero’s fall ended the Thousand Sons’ standing as a loyal Legion. The survivors are recorded as turning to Horus and to Chaos, and Magnus is associated thereafter with Tzeentch and with the Planet of the Sorcerers in the Eye of Terror, the Legion’s later home. The event also removed the Space Wolves from the early phase of the Heresy, and it sits alongside the Isstvan campaigns and the approach to the Siege of Terra as one of the conflicts that defined the war’s shape. On the Orrery map it anchors to Prospero, and on the timeline it marks the early Heresy, shortly before the open war around the Isstvan system.
See where Destruction of Prospero occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.