Event · M41

Exterminatus of Cyrene

The Exterminatus of Cyrene was the destruction of Cyrene, a Blood Ravens recruiting world in Subsector Aurelia, after Gabriel Angelos halted its Blood Trials. The Exterminatus consisted of a week of cyclonic fire and left nothing alive on the planet’s surface. Cyrene was a green world, loyal to the Imperium, with a large mutant population, and it was also of use to the Imperial Guard. Angelos was born there. The Blood Trials were the process by which the Blood Ravens Chapter selected recruits on the planet. Angelos halted them and called in the Inquisition, after which the Exterminatus followed. The Blood Ravens still wear fragments of the planet’s crust as penance armour, the only surviving material trace of Cyrene. The world lay in the same subsector as Typhon Primaris and Calderis, where the Chapter under Davian Thule also maintained a presence. Cyrene is recorded chiefly as Angelos’s birth-world and as the site of the Blood Trials he halted. Fuller accounts describe the purge as more than bombardment. A Brotherhood of Grey Knights accompanied the Ordo Malleus and, with the Blood Ravens and a detachment of Storm Troopers, carried the cleansing to the surface, where they found not a single cult but a population ready to embrace change: democracy, unregistered psykers and free trade with xenos had spread widely. Angelos kept one squad under Sergeant Ulray apart from the fighting to search for his father, Esmond Angelos, a retired Imperial Guard soldier whom he hoped to bring back to the Chapter. Esmond proved to be one of the rebellion’s political leaders and cursed his son as an Imperial butcher; Angelos spoke a last prayer for Cyrene and executed him, and afterwards declared that the world’s secrets would die with him.

See where Exterminatus of Cyrene occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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