Event · M41

Hyades Incident

The Hyades Incident describes the chain of covert engagements fought across the Hyades system after the Space Wolf Ragnar, then newly raised to the Wolf Guard, was dispatched there in the company of the Imperial envoy Gabriela Belisarius to investigate reports of a Fallen Dark Angel sheltering among the system’s outer settlements. What began as a discreet recovery operation, the sort the Dark Angels Chapter customarily conducted without outside witnesses, grew considerably more dangerous when it emerged that the Fallen in question had already been approached by agents of the Thousand Sons, who sought to extract him before the Dark Angels could silence him. Ragnar’s presence on Hyades, nominally unconnected to the search, placed him and Belisarius directly in the path of both factions. A Dark Angels strike force under Interrogator-Chaplain Jeremiah Gieyus arrived to reclaim its errant brother and, finding Space Wolves and an Imperial envoy already embroiled in the matter, moved first to isolate and then to confront Ragnar’s small command, suspecting — not unreasonably, given the Dark Angels’ habitual secrecy — that the Wolves intended to expose the Chapter’s oldest shame. Open fighting broke out in the tunnels beneath Hyades’s principal settlement before either side fully grasped that a third party, cloaked in sorcery, was manipulating both toward a common destruction. Recognising the Thousand Sons’ hand in the unfolding carnage, Ragnar forced a parley with Gieyus, trading what little he knew of the sorcerous presence for a cessation of hostilities between their two commands. The alliance that followed was uneasy and never formally acknowledged by either Chapter, but it proved sufficient: the combined force ran the Thousand Sons cell to ground in the settlement’s lower reaches and destroyed it before the Fallen could be extracted, at which point Gieyus’s command completed its own interrupted business and withdrew from the system without further comment. The Hyades Incident left no official record in Dark Angels archives, and the Space Wolves’ own account survives chiefly through the testimony Ragnar later gave to his own Chapter, including his conviction that Gabriela Belisarius’s intervention with Gieyus had prevented a battle that neither Chapter could have afterwards explained to the Inquisition. The episode is cited within Space Wolves lore as an early demonstration of Ragnar’s willingness to treat with notoriously insular brother Chapters when doing so served the wider war against the Ruinous Powers, a trait that marked much of his later career as Wolf Lord.

See where Hyades Incident occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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