Event · M30

Ghenna Massacre

The Ghenna Massacre, also called the Second Compliance of Ghenna, was a Great Crusade campaign fought on the world Ghenna in the 30th millennium; no narrower year, segmentum, system, or coordinates are recorded. Ghenna had accepted Imperial compliance, and contact with it then ceased. The World Eaters, under the primarch Angron, were sent to reassert control. The Ghennans had altered their own bodies and made use of what the Imperium classed as abominable intelligence, its name for forbidden machine-minds. Angron demanded that the world be taken within thirty-one hours, a Nucerian day, on pain of decimation for his own Legion. Centurion Mago led the first landing, which met synthetic simulacra rather than ordinary soldiers, and the deadline expired before the world was taken. The Legion returned to the ship Conqueror, where Mago refused the decimation Angron had ordered. Apothecary Gahlan Surlak, working from captured Ghennan technology, devised a method of implanting the Butcher’s Nails, and Khârn became the first World Eater to survive the implantation. He and roughly a thousand other newly implanted World Eaters landed on Ghenna again with Angron and killed the population. A little over a thousand true Ghennans, each of whom had been controlling many simulacra from life-pods, were killed after asking to be spared; Khârn told them that the galaxy belonged to the Imperium. Mago and other rebel World Eaters confronted them, and Khârn killed Mago in a duel. The surviving rebels submitted. The Legion then destroyed every structure on Ghenna in a single night, and the psychic screams of the dying were heard by astropaths across half the sector. The Ghenna Massacre is recorded as the point at which the Butcher’s Nails began to spread through the World Eaters Legion.

See where Ghenna Massacre occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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