Event · M31

Raven Guard reconstitution

Corax’s reconstitution of the Raven Guard was the Legion’s attempt, in the years following the Drop Site Massacre on Isstvan V (c. 007–008.M31), to rebuild itself from near-annihilation. Of a Legion that had numbered in the tens of thousands, Corax brought away only some three thousand survivors, and in the massacre’s immediate aftermath he travelled to Terra, where, according to tradition, a psychic vision granted by the Emperor directed him to the gene-stock of the Primarch Project; this he recovered and carried back to the Raven Guard’s fortress-world of Deliverance. At Deliverance, Corax set the Legion’s Chief Apothecary, Vincente Sixx, to the task of turning the recovered genome into fighting strength, assisted by the loyalist Mechanicum genetor Nexin Orlandriaz. Working out of the gene-laboratories of Ravendelve on the neighbouring world of Kiavahr, the two implanted the gene-seed directly into recruits drawn from Deliverance and Kiavahr alike, bypassing much of the customary sequence of development. The process came close to dispensing with progenoid glands altogether, leaving only the synthetic Black Carapace still to be grafted into each aspirant. By this accelerated method several hundred, by most accounts around five hundred, war-ready legionaries were produced within a matter of weeks. These newly made warriors were nicknamed the Raptors, and were first committed to battle in an assault on a Word Bearers station on Cruciax, where they fought effectively, if with an aggression that some judged ill-disciplined. The programme was then compromised from within. Alpha Legion infiltrators, having grafted onto themselves the faces of Raven Guard dead recovered from Isstvan V, passed undetected among Corax’s warriors and, with the aid of the renegade Magos Unithrax on Kiavahr, introduced a daemon-blood mutagen into the gene-stock. Legionaries drawn from later, tainted batches began to manifest grotesque mutations, among them scales, horns, fangs, tails and grossly overdeveloped musculature, though the infiltrators’ further attempt to destroy the Legion’s gene-seed outright did not succeed. Once the mutations had emerged and the infiltrators been unmasked, Corax ended the reconstitution programme. Accounts describe him thereafter leading his depleted forces, including those mutated Raptors still capable of battle, in small, fast-moving strike actions aimed at the weaker points of Horus’s lines rather than open engagement. After the Heresy’s end, Corax, burdened by guilt over what had been done to his sons, is said to have granted the Emperor’s peace to those mutants among his warriors for whom no remedy could be found.

See where Raven Guard reconstitution occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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