Event · M31

Horus on Molech

Horus on Molech was the Warmaster’s 008–009.M31 invasion of the Knight world of Molech that precipitated his fall to Chaos. Molech was a frontier world of the Segmentum Solar, held since the Great Crusade by House Devine from the capital of Lupercalia, and beneath that city lay a warp gate through which, tradition held, the Emperor himself had once communed with powers beyond mortal reckoning. [Horus](/characters/horus-lupercal), Warmaster of the Imperium and once foremost of the primarchs (the Emperor’s gene-forged sons), led an Imperial expedition to Molech under the sanction of a compliance action, ostensibly to secure the ancient gateway against unspecified threats. In truth the campaign served a hidden design. Horus intended to draw upon the gate’s power toward ends he shared with none but his closest confederates among the [Sons of Horus](/faction/sons-of-horus), his primarch Legion. Molech, long defended by its proud Knight households and bound by ancient oaths to the Throne, was drawn into the opening moves of a rebellion its garrison could scarcely have anticipated. The Emperor, apparently aware of some danger attached to the world, had already sent warriors of his own to reinforce it, and Molech’s defenders mustered in strength: nearly a dozen Knight houses owing fealty to Devine, among them House Mamaragon, alongside [Imperial Army](/faction/imperial-army) regiments and the Titan crews of the Legio Gryphonicus, Legio Crucius, and Legio Fortidus. Against them Horus brought the Sons of Horus, allied Imperial Army formations, and a Traitor Titan strength of four Legios, the Legio Vulpa, Legio Interfector, Legio Vulcanum I, and the Warmaster’s own Legio Mortis. The battle turned when the plasma reactor of the Imperator-class Titan Paragon of Terra was destroyed, immolating thousands of loyalists in an instant and tearing a gap through which the Traitor Titans advanced. At the height of the fighting House Devine revealed its true allegiance, turning upon the very world it had ruled and shattering the loyalist line from within. Horus himself was grievously wounded in the course of the campaign, a wound that the machinations of the Ruinous Powers turned to his damnation rather than his death, and by the battle’s end barely one in a hundred of the Imperial Army’s soldiers survived. The defence, though fought with valour, could not deny the Warmaster his hidden purpose, and Horus passed through the gate to receive the full blessing of the Ruinous Powers as their chosen champion. The struggle for Molech is counted among the opening chapters of the Horus Heresy, the civil war that would engulf the Imperium for years thereafter, and it marked the point beyond which reconciliation between Horus and the Emperor became impossible. Molech itself was not wholly claimed as many other worlds fell to the Warmaster’s forces, and its liberation was not completed until years later, during the Great Scouring, an event later recorded as the [Liberation of Molech](/events/liberation-of-molech-in-the-scouring). During the Battle of Molech, Mortarion landed at Ophir and advanced on Lupercalia, and he sacrificed several of his Deathshroud, the bodyguard who attended him, so that Ignatius Grulgor could be resurrected. In the course of the campaign a team of Knights-Errant, agents recruited by Malcador the Sigillite from many Legions, infiltrated the Vengeful Spirit under the command of Garviel Loken, formerly of the Luna Wolves. Assembled by Malcador and Leman Russ and carried by the stealth-ship Tarnhelm, the team marked the flagship’s lower decks with runes intended to guide a later Space Wolves assault. After a fight with the daemon Samus they were captured by Grael Noctua and Tormageddon and brought before Horus in Lupercal’s Court, where Loken refused the Warmaster’s offer to return to the Legion. In the fighting that followed Horus killed Iacton Qruze, and the Tarnhelm’s pilot, Banu Rassuah, shot out the court’s window, drawing the surviving Knights-Errant into space, from which the ship recovered them.

See where Horus on Molech occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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