Event · M41–M42

War for Chogoris

The War for Chogoris was the invasion of Chogoris, home world of the White Scars, by the Red Corsairs under Huron Blackheart, begun in the last year of the forty-first millennium as part of Blackheart’s campaign to subjugate the Yasan Sector. When the attack came, most of the White Scars’ Brotherhoods were campaigning elsewhere and the Great Khan Jubal was commanding their forces on Armageddon. Barutai Khan led the defence while the Chapter’s astropaths called the absent forces home, and under his leadership the Chapter was not overwhelmed. Some Brotherhoods returned, and Jubal Khan later arrived with his strike force, but the White Scars could do little more than slow the Red Corsairs’ advance. The opening of the Great Rift and the Noctis Aeterna, the period in which the light of the Astronomican was lost to much of the Imperium, allowed daemons to materialise on Chogoris and fight beside the Red Corsairs. Within days they killed hundreds of thousands of the planet’s tribal population. To save the survivors, Jubal Khan struck at the Chaos forces in order to draw as many as possible after the White Scars to their fortress-monastery, Quan Zhou, in the Khum Karta Mountains, and months after the first landings the war came down to a siege of the fortress. At that point Kor’sarro Khan, Master of the Hunt, arrived with the 3rd Brotherhood, recalled from the Second Agrellan Campaign. He gathered scattered White Scars forces and a militia drawn from the tribes still willing to fight, and struck the rear of the besieging army while Jubal Khan attacked from the fortress. After three days of fighting Kor’sarro’s warriors broke through to Quan Zhou and Blackheart made a calculated withdrawal. When the Noctis Aeterna lifted over Chogoris, many of his daemon allies faded back into the warp, and Blackheart withdrew with his elite Red Corsairs to strongholds elsewhere in the Yasan Sector, leaving renegade warbands, cultists and daemon engines on the surface. An earlier account credits the salvation of Chogoris to Roboute Guilliman and the Indomitus Crusade; a later account has the Crusade’s forces arriving after the planet had been secured, bringing reinforcements and the means to produce Primaris Space Marines, a larger and more heavily augmented form of Space Marine. The White Scars reclaimed their home world at heavy cost. Seglei Khan was killed, Jurga Khan was so badly wounded that he was interred in a Dreadnought, and Chogoris was left scarred and subject to outbreaks of warp-born phenomena and mutated beasts, while the Red Corsairs continued to hold worlds throughout the Yasan Sector. Seeking revenge against the Red Corsairs, Kor’sarro afterwards underwent the Rubicon Primaris, the procedure by which an existing Space Marine is remade as a Primaris Space Marine. Huron led the invasion in person. While it was under way he refused his lieutenant Verngar command of a fleet for the campaign and sent him instead against Ogrys, the former home world of the Invaders, where Verngar turned the Ebon Talon on the warband’s own ships and was maimed by Huron, who took the relic from him. After the Red Corsairs had been driven from the surface of Chogoris, the Great Khan Jubal led a boarding assault on the Seethnar, a void station that Huron had seized as the main dockyard for his fleets in the Yasan Sector. Jubal wrecked its plasma reactors but was trapped by collapsing corridors and captured, and he was tortured for weeks before the White Scars rescued him, his body broken beyond the Imperium’s power to heal.

See where War for Chogoris occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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