Event · M30

Horus discovered on Cthonia

The discovery of Horus on Cthonia was the finding, in the late thirtieth millennium, of the primarch Horus upon the mined-out gang world of Cthonia, a settlement founded during humanity’s earliest expansion from Terra and long since stripped of its mineral wealth. By the era of the Great Crusade its people survived amid exhausted workings and decaying hive-structures, organised into warring tech-barbarian kill-gangs that fought one another for scrap, territory and status. It was into this world that the infant Horus’s gestation capsule fell, one of twenty such craft scattered across the galaxy when the primarchs, newly created by the Emperor on Terra, were lost to the warp. Accounts of what followed diverge. A later and fuller tradition holds that the child was found by Khageddon, overlord of a Cthonian gang, who raised him within the gang under the “no-name” Nergüi, so that he grew to adolescence amid the perpetual underground warfare of the hives. When Mechanicum adepts were discovered excavating his original landing pod, Nergüi fought them, killed one and claimed its weapon, an act for which Khageddon rebuked him and withheld the kill-name he had not yet earned. The adepts subsequently dug down into the gang’s hold; in the collapse that followed, which killed most of the gang, Khageddon bade Nergüi slay him so that he might at last win his name. Upon doing so, it is said, long-buried memories of the wider galaxy, of forgotten technology and of his own nature stirred within him, and his body grew; when the tech-priests broke through to the chamber, they found standing before them a primarch, who named himself Horus. By Horus’s own later account, he was thereafter brought from Cthonia to Terra together with several of his elderly gang comrades, and there knelt before the Emperor and swore his service. Other traditions differ sharply, holding instead that he was raised from infancy at the Emperor’s own side on Terra, or recording only that the Emperor found him without specifying where. He is nonetheless traditionally remembered as the first of the primarchs to be recovered, and for some thirty years afterwards remained the Emperor’s only son restored to him. Imperial contact with Cthonia itself is separately recorded as having been made by a Star Hunters pioneer company under Captain Kornelius Dure, early in the Great Crusade; Dure is said to have described the world as a nest of serpents coiling in the dark, better destroyed than spared, a judgement overturned only once Cthonia’s connection to Horus became known. The world subsequently furnished many of the earliest recruits to the Sixteenth Legion, the Luna Wolves, later the Sons of Horus, and Horus himself was known to speak Cthonic fluently and with the rough accent of a Western Hemispheric ganger. Cthonia’s later history was bound irrevocably to its son: during the Horus Heresy the world endured a prolonged blockade and siege by the Imperial Fists, before its final destruction at the hands of the Dark Angels in 014.M31.

See where Horus discovered on Cthonia occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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