Event · M41

Fall of Bromoch

The Fall of Bromoch was a battle fought by the Iron Hands in 765.M41 on the hive world of Bromoch against the Necrons, more than a century before the Imperium officially recognised and named that race. A vast mechanised tomb complex had awoken beneath the planet’s surface, draining trillions of gallons of water from its oceans within days and leaving half the world a stinking quagmire of salt mud and rotting biomatter, from which legions of mechanical warriors many hundreds of thousands strong marched on the hive cities. The Planetary Defence Force was overwhelmed, and by the time the ships of Clan Raukaan made orbit, accompanied by Kardan Stronos himself, only Hive Primus still held out. The clan was then led jointly by the Chief Librarian Lydriik, the Iron Chaplain Shulgaar, Iron Captain Grolvoch and the Master of the Forge Feirros, who judged from the bridge of the strike cruiser Solemn Silence that the planet was already lost. Mindful of the lessons of the Gaudinian Heresy, the Iron Hands sent Tactical Squad Taloch and Shulgaar by Stormraven to support the evacuation of Hive Primus, while the rest of the clan made a combat drop into one of the great oceanic rifts, eighty miles long, from which came energy signatures matching those of the machines the Chapter had seized centuries before on Dawnbreak. Some three thousand feet below the crust, among immense ziggurats of black glassy stone, Stronos led the charge at the head of Squad Kuurvan while Venerable Furnous and two other Dreadnoughts cut a path through the foe. Feirros set a device at the foot of the largest ziggurat, and when Grolvoch reported that the chance of recovering further refugees had fallen below the agreed threshold of twenty per cent, Stronos ordered the clan back to its aircraft. The device released swarms of insane machine spirits that devoured every mechanical system in their path, xenos and Imperial alike. Bromoch fell into a new dark age as its orbital silos detonated, while a flotilla of refugee ships watched from orbit. The Iron Hands afterwards denied the existence of any mechanical foe and discredited the refugees’ accounts, but millions of Imperial lives had been saved.

See where Fall of Bromoch occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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