Event · M31–M32

Legion Wars

The Legion Wars were internecine conflicts fought among the Traitor Legions within the Eye of Terror in the decades following the Horus Heresy. The fighting is dated to the early to mid-31st millennium, continuing into the 32nd, and drew in the Emperor’s Children, the Sons of Horus, the World Eaters, the Death Guard and other Legions that had followed Horus Lupercal into rebellion. The wars had their roots in the disintegration of Chaos’s wartime command. With the Heresy lost and Horus dead, the newly ascended Daemon Primarchs withdrew increasingly into the rivalries of the Great Game played out in the warp, leaving their Legions leaderless and prone to fracturing into independent warbands. The Emperor’s Children, whose devotion to Slaanesh had already made their conduct increasingly uncontrolled, exhausted the slaves taken from Terra and other Imperial worlds during the retreat into the Eye. Raids into Imperial space failed to replenish their needs, and the Legion turned instead on the slave stocks of its former comrades, striking at other Traitor Legions within the Eye. The Sons of Horus, blamed by many for having been the first Legion to abandon the siege of Terra, found themselves a particular target of this new predation. Under the guidance of their Chief Apothecary, Fabius Bile, the Emperor’s Children achieved early successes, destroying the Sons of Horus fortress on the daemon world of Maeleum and seizing the remains of Horus in a failed attempt to clone the dead Warmaster and provide the forces of Chaos with a new leader. Ezekyle Abaddon, First Captain of the Sons of Horus, answered by gathering his Legion’s shattered remnants and allied warbands into a new force, the Black Legion, repainting their armour black in mourning and vengeance. Abaddon’s forces destroyed the Emperor’s Children’s principal stronghold and the cloned Horus with it, after which Abaddon proclaimed himself the new Warmaster of Chaos. Elsewhere the fighting was equally destructive: at the Battle of Skalathrax the Emperor’s Children shattered the World Eaters as a unified Legion, and the other Traitor Legions later turned on the Emperor’s Children in retaliation, breaking them into the hundreds of independent warbands that persist in the Eye today. Accounts differ on the fate of the Emperor’s Children’s primarch Fulgrim: some hold that Abaddon and the Black Legion killed him, while the Legion’s own remnants maintain that Slaanesh instead raised him to lordship over a world of endless pleasure. The wars are recorded as drawing to a close only when Abaddon’s Black Legion defeated its most serious rival for leadership of the Eye, Thagus Daravek of the Death Guard, shattering the domain of Daravek’s lieutenant Xulgith Grawl and refashioning it into the shipyard-world of Basitar. This victory secured Abaddon’s position as Warmaster and set the Black Legion on the path that would later lead it to launch the Black Crusades against the Imperium. No other Legion emerged from the Legion Wars with its former strength intact, and the pattern the conflict established, of fractured warbands within the Eye contesting fortress-worlds, forges and the favour of the Ruinous Powers, continued as a standing condition of life there long after the Legion Wars proper had ended. One account holds that, after the Battle of Thessala, Fulgrim withdrew to the daemon world Callax, and that the most prominent rival factions of the Emperor’s Children were then led by Lucius, Eidolon and Fabius Bile. Lucius fought throughout the Legion Wars, including at the Battle of Skalathrax, though his influence subsequently declined until he commanded only a small warband known as the Cohors Nasicae.

See where Legion Wars occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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