Event · M41

Siege of Badab Primaris

The Siege of Badab Primaris was the concluding action of the Badab War, in which loyalist forces took the Astral Claws’ capital world. It was fought on Badab Primaris, the capital hive world of the Badab Sector, close to the Maelstrom in the Ultima Segmentum. The world was the seat of Lufgt Huron, styled Huron Blackheart and the Tyrant of Badab, and the centre of power of his Chapter, the Astral Claws. The siege is the point at which the Badab War, a conflict of roughly a decade in the early forty-first millennium, was decided. The war arose from the Astral Claws’ break with Imperial authority under Huron, whose rule in the Badab Sector was contested by other Space Marine Chapters and by the Imperial authorities. Accounts differ on the balance of grievance and ambition behind the secession, and on which Chapters stood with the Tyrant at different stages. The Astral Claws held Badab Primaris while fighting for the right to keep it, and the conflict drew in a number of Chapters on both sides. The loyalist force that finally advanced on Huron’s seat is recorded as including Carab Culln’s Red Scorpions, who formed the siege line, together with Tyberos of the Carcharodons, Asterion Moloc’s Minotaurs, Malakim Phoros of the Lamenters and Bray’arth Ashmantle. The Lamenters’ place in the war is one of the points on which accounts differ, since the Chapter is associated with both sides at different times. Huron’s fortress on the hive world, remembered as the Palace of Thorns, was the objective of the loyalist assault. The Red Scorpions’ siege line was the principal instrument of the investment, and the fall of the palace ended organised resistance by the Astral Claws on Badab Primaris. The siege closed the war, and the world passed out of the Astral Claws’ hands. Huron himself is recorded as surviving; the Chapter’s remnants later re-emerged in the Maelstrom region as the Red Corsairs, so the loyalist victory ended the Badab War without ending Huron’s influence in the wider sector. The Star Phantoms now hold the ruins of Badab Primaris, and the name Palace of Thorns continues to identify the site of the loyalist victory. On the Orrery map the siege is anchored at Badab, and on the timeline it sits at the close of the Badab War in the forty-first millennium. Its graph neighbours are the Astral Claws and Huron Blackheart on the defeated side, the Red Scorpions, Carcharodons, Minotaurs and Lamenters among the participants, and the Red Corsairs and the Maelstrom as the region in which the war’s consequences persisted. Huron commanded the defence in person. Seven companies of the Star Phantoms descended on the world through the smoke of the bombardment, and the 9th Company under Captain Zhrukal Androcles, called the Siegebreaker, led the assault on the Palace of Thorns. Androcles’s force met Huron and his entourage and was wiped out to a man, but the dying captain wounded the Tyrant grievously with a melta blast. A cadre of veterans carried Huron from the field, and a few hundred Astral Claws broke through the Exorcists’ blockade into the Maelstrom, where he was rebuilt and refounded his followers as the Red Corsairs. The Lamenters themselves had been removed from the war before the final investment. Their surviving battle-brothers surrendered to the Minotaurs after the Battle of Optera in 908.M41 and were held in a prison orbiting Sagan II, and their Chapter Master, Malakim Phoros, was then listed as missing, believed killed; he is not named among the commanders present at the Palace of Thorns.

See where Siege of Badab Primaris occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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