Event · M41
Doom of Iyanden
The Doom of Iyanden was the assault of Hive Fleet Kraken on the Asuryani craftworld of Iyanden in around 991–992.M41. The onslaught is remembered as the gravest calamity in Iyanden’s recorded history, one that reduced its living population to a fraction of its former number and left the craftworld dependent on its wraith constructs for generations afterward. The catastrophe followed closely upon the Ichar IV campaign, in which Iyanden committed the greater part of its warhost, under the corsair prince Yriel, against the advance of Hive Fleet Kraken. That campaign inflicted heavy losses on Iyanden’s Aspect Warriors and war machines, and accounts hold that it left the craftworld’s home defences dangerously depleted just as further tendrils of Kraken turned from Ichar IV toward Iyanden itself. Kraken’s swarms breached Iyanden’s outer defences and fell upon its habitation domes, threatening the craftworld’s few remaining warriors and civilians with annihilation. In response the Spiritseer Iyanna Arienal undertook a working without precedent, drawing the souls of the dying and the dead into the wraithbone of the Infinity Circuit and binding them into Wraithguard and Wraithlord constructs rather than let them be lost. Prince Yriel took up command of what remained of Iyanden’s military, and the newly swelled wraith host, far outnumbering the craftworld’s living defenders, eventually drove the surviving tyranid organisms from Iyanden’s structure. Iyanden survived the doom, but at lasting cost: its population of living Asuryani was reduced to a remnant, and the craftworld came to depend on wraith constructs, animated by the bound dead, for the greater part of its defence. Yriel, whose reputation had suffered after Ichar IV, continued to serve as Iyanden’s foremost war leader in the campaigns that followed. The craftworld’s diminished and wraith-reliant condition shaped its later history, including its exposure to further assaults such as the Nurgle-worshippers’ attack on Iyanden in the era of the Great Rift.
See where Doom of Iyanden occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.