Event · M31–M32

Forgotten Wars

The Forgotten Wars are the Dark Angels’ name for a hidden campaign fought from 580.M31 to 632.M32, at the edge of the Eye of Terror. It drew in the Dark Angels and allied Unforgiven chapters, the Angels of Vengeance, the Angels of Redemption and the Lions Sable. The Inner Circle later suppressed the full record, so the campaign survives mainly in fragments; the precise dates of its battles, and the segmentum in which its worlds lie, are not recorded. The campaign began when the Angels of Vengeance, pursuing an Ork fleet into the Gothic Sector, paused to hunt the Fallen, renegade former Dark Angels the Unforgiven are bound to pursue. Scanning the sector, they intercepted a signal, in an old Dark Angels battle code, from a mining world recorded as Lemnos, describing a civil war among rival nobles over mining rights and one mercenary leader, in an old mark of power armour, turning the battle almost single-handed. Unforgiven Librarians can sense the Lion El’Jonson’s gene-seed in a suspected Fallen at close range, though warp flux or gene-seed from Order members inducted on Caliban can defeat the test. Suspicion fell on Brigia, a densely populated Gothic Sector world whose defence force was commanded by Grand Captain Tylius, judged probably Fallen and in contact with Cypher. Purson summoned nearby Unforgiven forces; the Angels of Absolution sent none, but the Angels of Redemption and the Lions Sable joined the Dark Angels. Drop pods, Dreadnoughts and Land Speeder lances broke the outer defences, and Terminators were teleported in when Cypher appeared in the trenches, halting the advance. Tylius, part of an Alpha Legion scheme, released Chaos Terminators and cultists before escaping with Cypher into the tunnels below; the Unforgiven destroyed the Terminators, but both men escaped. Librarians traced them to Cocytus I and II, twin worlds at the edge of the Sentinel Sector and the Eye of Terror. The Lions Sable cruiser Fury of Caliban carried companies of all four chapters to Cocytus I, where cultist, mutant and renegade dens were razed. Cypher escaped twice more, warning of a trap each time. As warp storms closed in, Purson ordered a retreat; the Lions Sable refused, and Purson returned to join them, sending six ships out of the Eye. Purson and the Lions Sable were never seen again, and the frigate Vendetta was lost in the warp. The surviving ships slipped past the Cadian Gate undetected, having spent only a few years amid the storms while more than a thousand years passed in realspace outside. The cost was half the Dark Angels’ and half the Angels of Redemption’s strength, three companies of the Angels of Vengeance, and the whole of the Lions Sable; no trace later remained of either Cocytus world. The Dark Angels remember the Forgotten Wars, where acknowledged at all, as their first confirmed encounter with Cypher, though much survives only in uncertain form.

See where Forgotten Wars occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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