Event · M41–M42
Legion Wars
The Legion Wars were internecine conflicts between Chaos Legions within the Eye of Terror, fought across the 41st and 42nd millennia. They are not a single campaign but a standing condition of the Eye’s warp-wracked domains, where Traitor Legion fleets, warbands, and daemon-worshipping cults contest fortress-worlds, forges, slave stock, and the favour of the Ruinous Powers. The term gathers together the countless local wars fought between successors of the Nine Traitor Legions and the innumerable renegade chapters that have since made the Eye their home, rather than describing one bounded conflict with a fixed beginning or end. The wars arise from the fractured nature of Chaos itself: Legions such as the Night Lords, Iron Warriors, World Eaters, Emperor’s Children, Word Bearers, Death Guard, and Thousand Sons pursue divergent patron gods, doctrines, and grudges inherited from the Horus Heresy, and the Eye’s daemon worlds offer no central authority to restrain them. Alliances form and dissolve according to the shifting tides of the immaterium, and warlords raid rival warbands as readily as Imperial shipping. Periods of relative order have coincided with the Black Crusades of Abaddon the Despoiler, who is recorded as compelling rival Legions into temporary common cause under the Black Legion’s banner before returning them to the Eye once a crusade against the Imperium concludes; accounts differ on how completely such truces hold once the fleets disperse. No single victor has emerged from the Legion Wars, and the pattern of conflict continues into the present era alongside the wider war between Chaos and the Imperium. The fighting remains a defining feature of life within the Eye of Terror, shaping which warbands are strong enough to answer Abaddon’s call in each new Black Crusade and which are left diminished or extinguished in the interim. As a contemporary backdrop to the Eye’s better-documented crusades against Cadia and the wider Imperium Nihilus, the Legion Wars illustrate that the Eye of Terror is as much a battleground between its own inhabitants as it is a staging ground against the Emperor’s realm.
See where Legion Wars occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.