Event · M41

Gaudinian Heresy

The Gaudinian Heresy was a disaster suffered by the Iron Hands in 460.M41 on Gaudinia Prime, in the Gaudinia System, where an expedition against the Emperor’s Children ended in the corruption of an Iron Father and the loss of a third of the Iron Council. The aged Iron Father Kristos, whose conduct at Columnus had been under examination by the Chapter for two centuries in the Kristosian Conclave, vowed to destroy the warband of the Sapphire King when it was reported in the system, and assembled a fleet carrying some eight hundred battle-brothers, the greatest deployment of the Chapter for centuries, accompanied by much of the Iron Council. All eight worlds of the system were found overrun by mutants and heretics, but the Emperor’s Children were present only on Gaudinia Prime, and after the fleet had fought its way through Imperial Navy frigates corrupted by the Sapphire King, the whole of Clans Raukaan and Sorrgol, nearly three hundred Space Marines, was committed to the planet. No life was detected on the world except within a single factory-complex in its southern hemisphere. Kristos ignored the counsel of caution from the Iron Fathers Kardan Stronos and Verrox and attacked at once. Within the sealed iron dome of its central processing hub, almost two thousand feet high and ten miles across, billions of Imperial citizens had been fused with the machinery. Kristos, overcome by what he took for the perfection of the machine, joined himself to it and was transformed into a monstrous spawn of flesh and metal; his followers, the Kristosians, succumbed in turn, and daemons of Slaanesh burst from their bodies as the Emperor’s Children closed the trap and the Sapphire King revealed itself. Stronos rallied the surviving Iron Hands, gunned down battle-brothers who had fallen to the taint and led a fighting withdrawal from the dome. By one account he ordered his warriors to disengage their inhibitor protocols and release their anger, breaking the spell through which the Daemon had fed on their repressed emotions. Outside, the tanks of Clan Raukaan covered the retreat, and the Epistolary Lydriik charged the Sapphire King’s retinue and beheaded the Daemon with the Mindforge Stave, after which its hordes faded and the remaining Emperor’s Children were destroyed. The Iron Hands burned Gaudinia Prime from orbit. A third of the Iron Council had been killed or corrupted, and in the emergency council that followed at the Eye of Medusa, Stronos addressed his brothers in his natural voice, telling them that “with steel we are stronger, but without a soul we are nothing”. He was elected war leader of the Chapter that day and has been re-elected at every opportunity since, while command of Clan Raukaan passed to Arven Rauth. Some accounts date the battle to 461.M41.

See where Gaudinian Heresy occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

Open in universe