Event · M30–M31
Horus on Molech
Horus, Warmaster of the Imperium, led an Imperial expedition to Molech to seize the power of its warp gate, an act that precipitated his fall to Chaos. Officially sanctioned as a compliance action to secure the Knight world’s ancient gateway against unspecified threats, the campaign in truth served Horus’s design to draw upon the gate’s arcane power in pursuit of ends he shared with none but his closest confederates. Molech, long garrisoned by its proud Knight houses and bound by ancient oaths to the Throne, thus found itself drawn into the opening moves of a rebellion its defenders could scarcely have anticipated. The Warmaster’s forces, drawn from the Sons of Horus and allied Imperial Army regiments, met fierce resistance from Molech’s Knight pilots and the world’s loyalist garrison, reinforced by warriors sent directly by the Emperor. Fighting raged across the Knight world’s cities and battlefields, and Horus himself was grievously wounded in the course of the campaign, a wound that, worked upon by the machinations of the Ruinous Powers, hastened rather than checked his descent into damnation. The losses on both sides were severe, and Molech’s defence, though valiant, could not prevent the Warmaster from achieving his hidden purpose. The conflict on Molech is counted among the opening chapters of the Horus Heresy, the great civil war that would engulf the Imperium for years thereafter. Though the world’s ultimate fate diverged from that of many Loyalist holdings claimed outright by the Warmaster’s forces, the events there marked the point beyond which reconciliation between Horus and the Emperor became impossible. For the Imperium, Molech stood thereafter as a grim testament to how swiftly a trusted son of the Emperor could be turned to the service of the warp’s dark powers.
See where Horus on Molech occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.