Event · M32

War of the Beast

The War of the Beast was an Ork Waaagh! of 544–546.M32 that swept from the Ullanor sector to the edge of the Sol System, threatening Terra itself. It took its name from the Beast, an Ork warlord of disputed origin who achieved a rare cohesion among the ordinarily fractious greenskin clans, uniting rival hosts into a single sustained campaign rather than allowing the Waaagh! to dissipate once its initial fury was spent. The conflict is recorded as the gravest Ork threat to face the Imperium since the Great Crusade, and it is not to be confused with a later, unrelated war against Ork forces fought around Vigilus some ten millennia afterward, a coincidence of naming rather than of cause. The war arose during a period later remembered as an interval of relative peace and stability, when the Traitor Legions remained confined beyond the Eye of Terror and the Orks were widely judged to have been broken as a threat since the Ullanor Crusade, the campaign fought a millennium earlier in the same sector, which had earned Horus the title of Warmaster. Confidence in this judgement left the Imperial Fleet dispersed to the Imperium’s borders under Lord High Admiral Lansung, far from the Throneworld. The disaster began at Ardamantua, in the Segmentum Solar, where the Imperial Fists Chapter, sent to exterminate the insectoid Chromes, instead found itself caught amid gravitational storms and the materialisation of an enormous Ork Attack Moon. Chapter Master Cassus Mirhen was killed and the Chapter all but destroyed, and it soon became apparent that the Beast commanded not one such planetoid but many, each capable of devastating entire systems. As the Attack Moons and their escorting hosts advanced, whole sectors of the Segmentum Solar fell in succession and billions of Imperial subjects perished. The High Lords of Terra, divided and slow to act, failed to mount a coordinated response: Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum, moved covertly against colleagues he judged unfit for the crisis, while Koorland, the last surviving officer of the Imperial Fists, invoked the Last Wall protocol to draw the Chapter’s scattered successors — among them the Black Templars, Crimson Fists, and Excoriators — into a single defence of the Throneworld. Ork forces nonetheless fought their way to Luna, bringing Terra within range of bombardment and exposing the Imperium to a peril recorded as graver than any since the Horus Heresy. The Beast himself proved resistant to conventional destruction, surviving reversals that would have ended any ordinary commander and forcing the Imperium into a campaign of attrition rather than a single decisive engagement. The war was finally decided in 546.M32 with an Imperial invasion of Ullanor, the Ork stronghold in the sector from which the Beast’s campaign had first drawn strength, where his forces were broken and the warlord himself killed. The victory was won at extreme cost: several Space Marine Chapters were left shattered, and the wider Adeptus Astartes suffered losses without precedent since the Heresy. The war’s aftermath reordered the Senatorum Imperialis and, by tradition, contributed to the later founding of the Ordo Xenos within the Inquisition and of the Deathwatch, bodies tasked with ensuring that no xenos threat could again grow to such magnitude unchecked. Bracketed by the crisis at Ardamantua and the Attack Moons that opened it and by the final reckoning at Ullanor that closed it, the War of the Beast stands in Imperial memory as the clearest demonstration, between the Great Crusade and later ages, of how close a single, sustained Waaagh! could bring the Imperium to ruin. The primarch Vulkan reappeared during the war after some 1,500 years of absence, defending the world of Caldera almost alone against an Ork invasion until Koorland’s task force joined him and destroyed the Orks’ gravitic generator and infant Attack Moon there. Vulkan returned with Koorland to Terra, rebuked the High Lords without purging them, and led the first Imperial invasion of Ullanor, though he left the direction of the campaign largely to Koorland and Magos Dominus Gerg Zhokuv while he worked on his hammer Doomtremor aboard the Fists Exemplar battle-barge Alcazar Remembered. In the assault on the Ork capital of Gorkogrod he led the last 3,000 Space Marines in an airborne attack on the Beast’s temple-gargant and fought the warboss alone after Koorland ordered a withdrawal; Vulkan carried the Beast into the gargant’s power generator and detonated it, seemingly destroying both, and the Imperium presumed him dead. During a later Imperial invasion of Ullanor, Koorland recognised among the Ork leaders the creature that had fought Vulkan.

See where War of the Beast occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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