Event · M31

Night of the Wolf

Night of the Wolf is the name given to a volatile clash between the primarchs Leman Russ and Angron during the Great Crusade. Fenrisian saga-tradition sets the encounter on Fenris, home world of Russ’s Space Wolves, the VI Legion, in the decades before the Horus Heresy; other, more detailed accounts instead place the confrontation on the newly compliant world of Ghenna, at the ruined city of Malkoya, following a campaign by Angron’s World Eaters, the XII Legion. No single location is firmly established in canon, and the tale’s binding to Fenris is best treated as approximate rather than certain. Angron was among the last primarchs reunited with the Emperor, and in these early years of the Crusade he still carried Widowmaker, the axe that preceded all his later weapons, while Russ bore Krakenmaw, a blade named for a sea-monster of Fenrisian myth. Accounts differ on what drew the two Legions together. Fenrisian tellings link the meeting to Russ’s reputation as the primarch best able to match Angron’s fury, and to a wider Crusade-era custom of primarchs testing one another’s mettle; other traditions instead hold that Russ was sent, on the Emperor’s own charge, to bring Angron to account for the wholesale killing of a world’s population and for his continuing implantation of Legionaries with the Butcher’s Nails, a mind-altering cortical device that fed his warriors’ rage. What followed is remembered differently according to the tradition. In the saga version, a night of drinking, boasting, and mounting provocation in the Aett’s great hall drew out old grievances — 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 — until weapons were drawn and violence broke out, checked only by the intervention of Russ’s huscarls and, in some tellings, the World Eaters at Angron’s side. In the Ghenna version, the two Legions instead met in open ranks beyond Malkoya, and neither primarch afterwards could say who struck first; Krakenmaw and Widowmaker were both broken in the ensuing duel, and the wider battle between Space Wolves and World Eaters proved bloody but inconclusive. Whether blood was shed at all, and by whose hand the quarrel began, remains disputed in the tradition; what is consistently recorded is that neither primarch yielded and that the two parted without reconciliation. Angron did not halt the implantation of the Butcher’s Nails, and the World Eaters continued their pursuit of skulls and slaughter largely unchecked for the remainder of the Crusade. Fenrisian skalds and Imperial chroniclers alike preserved the Night of the Wolf as a warning against primarchal fury left unchecked.

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

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