Event · M31

Thramas Crusade on Tsagualsa

The Thramas Crusade on Tsagualsa was the contest fought on the Night Lords’ quarry world, where Lion El’Jonson battled Konrad Curze. Tsagualsa, known as the Carrion World, lay in the Thramas Sector of the Eastern Fringe and had served since the sack of Nostramo as the seat of Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter and primarch of the Night Lords Legion. Records place Curze’s exile court there, with Jago Sevatarion, First Captain of the VIII Legion, numbered among those who attended him. Following the Drop Site Massacre on Isstvan V, the Warmaster Horus despatched Curze and his Legion against the Imperial strongholds of the Thramas Sector, a campaign intended to guard Horus’s flank and to draw the Dark Angels Legion into a prolonged pursuit that would keep it from reinforcing Terra. The wider Thramas Crusade is dated to the opening years of the Horus Heresy, in the region of 007–009.M31, and it was on Tsagualsa that one of its decisive confrontations was played out. Curze invited the Lion to a meeting on the Carrion World and there spoke a prophecy concerning the Dark Angels’ future; the talks collapsed into violence. Lion El’Jonson, accompanied in the wider strike by Corswain and Master Alajos, engaged the Night Haunter directly. Each is recorded as having come close to killing the other before the duel was broken off: the Lion left with a slashed throat, Curze with a blade in his back. The Lion afterward secured the warp engine Tuchulcha and used it to coordinate fleet jumps against the Night Lords, ambushing them so severely that Curze was left comatose and the VIII Legion reeled. A further ambush saw Curze awaken and board the Invincible Reason with a kill-team; Sevatarion and other Night Lords were taken prisoner, while Curze himself escaped into the flagship’s lower decks and eluded search parties for many weeks. The crusade shattered the Night Lords as a unified fighting force and placed Curze, for a time, under the Lion’s power as a captive, yet it also delayed the Dark Angels so long in the Eastern Fringe that they reached Terra only after the Siege’s climax. Curze did not die in the Heresy duel on Tsagualsa. A later assassination in the palace on that world, carried out by a Callidus Temple agent, ended the Night Haunter’s life in a subsequent age and is recorded as a separate event. In the aftermath of that later killing, successor chapters of the Ultramarines drove remaining Night Lords warbands from the planet. Tsagualsa thus connects Curze’s exile court after Nostramo, the Lion’s Thramas duel and pursuit, and the much later palace assassination that finished the Night Haunter’s mortal span.

See where Thramas Crusade on Tsagualsa occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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