Event · M31

The Corruption of Horus

The Corruption of Horus was the near-fatal wounding of Warmaster Horus on Davin’s moon and his subsequent turn to the Chaos Gods. It took place in the closing years of the Great Crusade, traditionally dated to around 005.M31, during the suppression of a Chaos-corrupted uprising on Davin’s moon and in the treatment that followed on Davin itself and aboard Horus’s flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. The episode is regarded as the decisive turning point that carried Horus, commander of the Luna Wolves Legion, into rebellion against the Emperor and the opening of the Horus Heresy. The ground for the Warmaster’s fall had been prepared well before the wounding itself. Some six decades earlier, the Luna Wolves and the Word Bearers, then still known as the Imperial Heralds, had brought the feral world of Davin to Imperial Compliance and, through contact with its warrior culture, adopted the native custom of warrior lodges: informal fraternities that met in secret, contrary to the Emperor’s prohibition on cult-like institutions. Erebus, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers, fostered these lodges within the Luna Wolves as a means of infiltration, and during a disastrous first contact with the human civilisation of the Interex, on Xenobia, he had taken a warp-tainted xenos dagger of Kinebrach make known as the Anathame. While putting down a rebellion led by Eugen Temba, the Chaos-corrupted planetary governor of Davin’s moon, Horus was struck by the Anathame and left with a wound that would not close. Carried back to the Vengeful Spirit, he could not be healed even by his Legion’s Apothecaries, and was taken down to Davin, to the temple of the Serpent Lodge, where he was placed in the care of the Davinite priesthood, in reality a Chaos cult devoted to the Ruinous Powers undivided. Through forbidden sorcery, the priests restored Horus to health while working upon his pride, his ambition, and his resentment at the Emperor’s withdrawal from the Crusade to Terra. Magnus the Red, primarch of the Thousand Sons, is recorded as having attempted to warn Horus of the deception, but the Warmaster’s corruption could not be undone. Once restored, a tainted Horus conspired with Erebus and the Luna Wolves’ Warrior Lodge, whose existence Captain Garviel Loken had only recently uncovered, to move against Loyalist elements of his Legion and against the Emperor himself. The Corruption of Horus is accordingly understood as the hinge between the earlier Imperial Compliance of Davin and the later destruction of the Davin system during the Ruinstorm, the point at which the Warmaster’s household and Legion were set upon the path to civil war.

See where The Corruption of Horus occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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