Deliverance

Deliverance is an airless moon of Kiavahr and the fortress-world of the Raven Guard Legion, whose principal stronghold there is the Ravenspire. Having no breathable atmosphere, it is inhabited only in settlements enclosed beneath force domes, protective energy fields that make permanent habitation possible. It orbits Kiavahr, a world of heavy industry, and the moon’s fortunes have remained bound to that planet’s foundries.

The moon was formerly known as Lycaeus and was worked as a mining world by slave labour. Corvus Corax, later primarch of the Raven Guard (the XIX Legion), was among those held in bondage there, and he led the slaves in revolt and liberated the world. He renamed it Deliverance, and the name records the event: the world’s identity rests on the rising that freed it. When the Emperor’s Great Crusade later reunited Corax with his father, the Legion that bore his name adopted the moon as its base, and it was developed as a fortress-world with the Ravenspire at its centre.

The moon’s place in the timeline is closely tied to the Horus Heresy. The Raven Guard fought in the Great Crusade as a Legion suited to stealth, infiltration and lightning strikes, and Deliverance served as its home port. In the Isstvan campaign, the XIX Legion was committed to Isstvan V alongside the Iron Hands and Salamanders, where the traitor Legions’ betrayal cost it the greater part of its strength; Corax withdrew with a small remnant of survivors. Accounts of the Legion’s later fortunes place further fighting on and around Deliverance, in which the Ravenspire was contested by the Alpha Legion. Details of that struggle differ between accounts and are treated cautiously here.

The Ravenspire remains the emblematic Raven Guard fortress, and Deliverance is regarded as the Legion’s ancestral seat in the sense that it was the first world Corax freed. It links three episodes on Orrery’s map and timeline: the liberation of Lycaeus, the founding of the Ravenspire, and the XIX Legion’s course from this base to Isstvan V. Its neighbours in the graph are the Raven Guard, Corvus Corax, Kiavahr and the Isstvan V campaign. Its contemporaries in the same period include the Iron Hands and the Salamanders, who fought beside the Raven Guard at Isstvan V, and Horus and the traitor Legions who opposed them there.