Event · M41

Mission to Cretacia

The Mission to Cretacia was undertaken by Ragnar and the Wolf Scout Nalfir at the request of the Flesh Tearers Chapter, whose Chaplaincy had traced the theft of Baryonyx — a creature of enormous ritual significance to the Chapter, captured generations earlier on Cretacia and kept since as a living totem of the primarch Sanguinius’s own ferocity — to raiders who had returned the beast to its feral homeworld rather than risk selling it openly. Cretacia’s primordial jungles, left deliberately unexploited by Imperial authority on account of the planet’s status as a controlled wilderness reserve, offered little in the way of augur cover or orbital support, and the Flesh Tearers judged the retrieval better suited to a small, self-sufficient party than to a Chapter assault. Ragnar and Nalfir made planetfall near the ruined waystation of Scarath, the only permanent Imperial presence on Cretacia and long since reclaimed by the jungle, and tracked Baryonyx’s captors inland across terrain that tested both Astartes to the limits of their training; Cretacia’s wilds were reckoned among the Imperium’s most dangerous uncatalogued biospheres, home to apex predators whose lineage predated even the earliest human settlement of the world. The pair crossed the Vorain river basin under near-constant harassment from the planet’s megafauna before running the raiders to ground at a makeshift holding pen, where Baryonyx was found caged but unharmed. The return journey proved costlier than the hunt itself. A pteranodon, one of Cretacia’s flying reptile predators, struck Nalfir from above as the party attempted to recross the Vorain with the recovered creature in tow, inflicting wounds that proved fatal despite Ragnar’s efforts to stabilise him before extraction could arrive. Nalfir’s death weighed heavily on Ragnar, who had argued for a route along the basin’s exposed sandbanks to save time, and the Wolf Scout’s name was afterwards added to the sagas sung at the Fang as one lost not to the enemies of Mankind but to the Imperium’s own untamed wilderness. Baryonyx was returned to the Flesh Tearers intact, and the Chapter’s gratitude toward Ragnar was recorded formally, if briefly, in correspondence between the two Chapters’ Wolf Lords and Chapter Masters — a rare instance of warm relations between the notoriously insular Flesh Tearers and an outside Chapter. Within the Space Wolves, the Mission to Cretacia is remembered less for its success than for the cost of achieving it, and Ragnar himself rarely spoke of Nalfir’s death except in the context of the duty owed to scouts who walked ahead of their brothers into ground no augur could map.

See where Mission to Cretacia occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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