Event · M30

Discovery of Corvus Corax

When the twenty infant primarchs were scattered across the galaxy by the intervention of the Chaos gods, one capsule came to rest upon Lycaeus, the airless mining moon of the forge world Kiavahr. Lycaeus was worked by slaves, criminals, political prisoners and labourers who had fallen short of their quotas, all confined within force-domed settlements and held under heavily armed guard, while Kiavahr’s Tech-Guilds drew off the moon’s minerals to feed factories the size of cities. It was within one such settlement, amid the pits and the domes, that a slave girl named Nasturi Ephrenia came upon the pale-skinned infant. The prisoners who took the child in concealed him from their gaolers and gave him a name in their own tongue, Corax, meaning ‘the Deliverer’. In the years that followed, they taught him what they themselves knew best: urban warfare, close combat and demolitions, together with political and philosophical instruction drawn from among their own number. His growth was abnormally rapid, and this, together with the strange manner of his coming among them, persuaded the prisoners that he was the saviour long awaited. He grew to adulthood as leader of the rebels of Lycaeus, and the rising he led against the moon’s guards is known as the Liberation of Lycaeus. After the moon was freed and renamed Deliverance in recognition of what Corax had done for its people, the Emperor is said to have travelled there in person to meet him. He spent a day and a night in his son’s company; what passed between them in conversation during that time was not recorded. At the end of it he named Corax primarch of the XIX Legion, the Raven Guard, though Corax set as his condition that the Emperor lend his aid in bringing peace to Kiavahr, whose people had suffered long under the Tech-Guilds. The Mechanicum duly intervened and rebuilt Kiavahr for the Imperium. The black tower that had once housed the moon’s guards, and from which the prisoners of Lycaeus had for so long been watched, was thereafter made over as the Raven Guard’s fortress, taking the name Ravenspire. Accounts of these events are not uniform. Most hold that Corax passed the whole of his upbringing among the prisoners of Lycaeus, growing from infancy to manhood and to leadership among them before the moon’s liberation. An older account instead describes him reaching the moon only after a period of captivity spent elsewhere, and being found there later by agents of the Emperor rather than by the slaves and prisoners themselves.

See where Discovery of Corvus Corax occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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