Event · M30–M31

Night of the Wolf

Night of the Wolf is the name given in Fenrisian saga-tradition to a volatile encounter between the primarchs Leman Russ and Angron during the Great Crusade. The meeting is set on Fenris, home world of the VI Legion, the Space Wolves, in the decades before the Horus Heresy, when Angron of the World Eaters — the XII Legion — travelled among his brothers as one of the last primarchs to be reunited with the Emperor. Accounts differ on what drew Angron to Fenris, though later tellings link the visit to Russ’s reputation as the primarch best able to match Angron’s fury, and to the wider Crusade-era practice of primarchs testing one another’s mettle. The saga describes a night of drinking, boasting, and mounting provocation in the Aett’s great hall, in which old grievances surfaced: Angron’s unhealed resentment at his enslavement and the killing of his fellow gladiators on Nuceria, and Russ’s own untamed temper, feared even among his Rout. Weapons are said to have been drawn before the confrontation broke into open violence, checked only by the intervention of Russ’s huscarls and, in some tellings, by the World Eaters at Angron’s side. Whether blood was shed remains disputed in the tradition; what is consistently recorded is that neither primarch yielded, and that the two parted without reconciliation. Fenrisian skalds preserved the Night of the Wolf as a cautionary tale of primarchal fury left unchecked, a portent later read against the Horus Heresy that split the Legiones Astartes in the early thirty-first millennium, when Russ remained loyal to the Emperor while Angron followed Horus into rebellion alongside the World Eaters. On Fenris the tale is remembered less as settled history than as warning, bound to the wider memory of Russ’s Rout and to Angron’s fall from Nuceria’s arenas to the Warmaster’s side; later loremasters cite it as an early sign of the fracture that would divide two of the Emperor’s most volatile sons.

See where Night of the Wolf occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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