Event · M31

Signus Campaign

The Signus Campaign, also called the Battle of Signus Prime, was a Blood Angels action in the Signus Cluster in 006.M31, during the opening of the Horus Heresy. Led into the cluster by the primarch Sanguinius, the Legion found itself besieged by a daemonic host commanded by the Bloodthirster Ka’Bandha and the Keeper of Secrets Kyriss the Perverse. It was not a Great Crusade compliance of the cluster, but a Heresy-era ambush sprung after the Warmaster’s treachery had begun. The Warmaster Horus, newly turned to the Ruinous Powers, ordered Sanguinius to cleanse the cluster of xenos overlords said to hold its human population in thrall—claiming, in some tellings, that the Nephilim had returned and that their arts might cure the Blood Angels’ Flaw. Sanguinius, unaware of his brother’s betrayal, obeyed. The summons was a trap intended to exploit the Legion’s hidden genetic afflictions, the Red Thirst and the Black Rage, and to turn the IX toward the worship of Khorne. A Word Bearers detachment under the Dark Apostle Tanus Kreed accompanied the muster. Signus Tertiary and other worlds of the cluster were already emptied or damned when the fleet arrived, serving as waypoints on the approach to Signus Prime, the principal world where the barrier between realspace and the warp was to be torn open. At Signus Prime the trap was sprung: the fleet was sealed within the cluster and Ka’Bandha’s host poured forth alongside Kyriss’s daemons. At the peak of the fighting Sanguinius confronted Ka’Bandha in the air; the Bloodthirster broke the primarch’s legs. A psychic backlash created by the Ragefire and amplified by the deaths of his sons left Sanguinius comatose and, for a time, believed lost. The Red Thirst erupted across the Legion. Blood Angels led by Nassir Amit slaughtered friend and foe alike in a berserk fury, including Space Wolves attached to the expedition and remaining human cultists and Word Bearers. First Captain Raldoron and Azkaellon’s Sanguinary Guard struggled to hold what cohesion remained. A group of former Librarians under Mkani Kano, using methods forbidden by the Council of Nikaea, restored the primarch to consciousness. Sanguinius met Ka’Bandha a second time and, despite his injuries, banished the daemon back to the warp. He then led his forces into Kyriss’s stronghold, the Cathedral of the Mark. The Keeper of Secrets offered him a choice: sacrifice himself to the Ragefire and have the Red Thirst forever lifted from his sons, or allow the Flaw to destroy the Legion in time. Deciding to sacrifice himself, Sanguinius was about to step into the fire when Apothecary Meros took his place and was transformed into the entity later called the Red Angel. Mourning Meros, Sanguinius slew Kyriss and swore vengeance on Horus. In the campaign’s wake Signus Tertiary and the wider cluster passed into quarantine and were left dark. By holding the Blood Angels at Signus, Horus kept them from the slaughter he inflicted on loyalist forces at Isstvan, sparing the Legion that massacre while leaving it depleted and scarred. Blood Angels tradition remembers Signus as the theatre in which the Red Thirst first broke in full among the Legion and from which the Black Rage’s later inheritance is often traced—an affliction that passed thereafter to successor Chapters including the Flesh Tearers. The Angel’s recovery, the banishing of Ka’Bandha, and Meros’s sacrifice remain the campaign’s fixed points in later Chapter memory.

See where Signus Campaign occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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