Event · M41–M42
Months of Shame
The Months of Shame is the name given to a period of open hostility between the Space Wolves and the Inquisition that followed the First War for Armageddon. That war, recorded in 444.M41, saw the Space Wolves of Great Wolf Logan Grimnar fight beside a Grey Knights brotherhood and the Armageddon defence forces against the World Eaters and the Daemon Primarch Angron. Imperial records of the campaign were expunged or quarantined by the Adeptus Administratum and the Inquisition, and the same secrecy has left the sequel sparsely documented; its precise dates and duration are not firmly established. The dispute is recorded as one of Inquisitorial scrutiny turning into armed confrontation, with Fenris, the Space Wolves’ homeworld, as the Chapter’s anchor in the affair and the Inquisition’s authority, exercised from Terra, as its counterpart. The forces set against the Space Wolves included Grey Knights, the Inquisitorial Red Hunters and other Inquisition warbands. Grey Knights tradition states that the Space Wolves destroyed elements of all three, and that the Chapter learned of the Grey Knights’ existence through this encounter, a Chapter whose presence the Inquisition otherwise keeps concealed from the wider Adeptus Astartes. Accounts differ on the immediate cause, the order of events, and the number of casualties, and none of these should be treated as settled. The episode had no recorded effect on the Space Wolves’ standing as a loyal Chapter, but it left lasting distrust. Grimnar’s wariness of the Ordos is attributed to it, and he is portrayed as having never forgiven the affront, although he still answers Imperial calls to war beyond Fenris when the need is judged great enough. In the wider timeline the Months of Shame is best read as an aftershock of the First War for Armageddon, and it sets the Space Wolves’ relations with the Inquisition apart from those of most Chapters. It connects Logan Grimnar, the Grey Knights, Armageddon and Fenris on the Orrery map, and precedes the later Second and Third Wars for Armageddon.
See where Months of Shame occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.