Event · M31
Raid on Luna
The Raid on Luna was a Traitor assault on Terra’s moon during the Solar War, the Horus Heresy’s final campaign in the Sol system. It belongs to the thirty-first millennium, in the period when the forces of the Warmaster Horus closed on Terra and the Imperial Palace prepared for siege. Luna is the nearest large body to Terra and lies directly on the approaches to it, so its installations, anchorages and garrisons formed part of the outer defensive screen of the Throneworld. The moon also carries a symbolic association with the Sons of Horus, whose early identity as the Luna Wolves derived from it. The raid is recorded as an offensive strike against Imperial positions on Luna rather than as an attempt to hold the moon permanently. Its purpose is generally understood in strategic terms: to test, disrupt or strip away the defences that guarded the approaches to Terra before the main assault on the Palace began. The forces involved were Traitor formations under Horus’s command, opposed by the Loyalist defenders of the Sol system, and accounts differ on the composition of the attackers and the scale of the Imperial response. Where the surviving record is uncertain, this entry does not attribute particular Legions, commanders or casualty figures to the action. The raid did not change the outcome of the wider war. The decisive fighting of the Solar War took place on and above Terra, culminating in the Siege of Terra and the confrontation aboard Horus’s flagship, and Luna remained part of the Imperial holdings in the Sol system in the centuries that followed. Its main value for the timeline is as an early point of contact between Traitor and Loyalist forces in the inner system, and as a link between the moon, the Solar War and the Heresy’s final phase on Terra. Readers following the map and timeline together can connect it to Luna, Terra, the Imperial Palace and the Siege of Terra.
See where Raid on Luna occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.