Nuceria

Nuceria was the gladiator world that shaped Angron, later primarch of the World Eaters, and whose ruin in the Horus Heresy fixed his fate as a daemon prince. Its arenas produced a culture built around the Games, in which enslaved fighters were driven with cortical implants known as the Butcher’s Nails to guarantee ceaseless violence for their masters. It was here that the Emperor of Mankind found Angron already grown to adulthood among the slave-gladiators, rather than as an infant primarch raised among the stars.

Angron’s time on Nuceria ended in betrayal. He led a slave uprising against the planet’s ruling caste, and as the revolt was being crushed the Emperor teleported him alone from the field, leaving his comrades to die and the Nails still bound to his mind. Angron never forgave this rescue, and Nuceria became, for him, not a homeworld remembered with affection but the site of an abandonment that hardened into lifelong resentment of his father and of the Legion he was given to command.

During the Horus Heresy, Angron returned to Nuceria in the company of Lorgar Aurelian and the Word Bearers, ostensibly to reckon with his origin world once more. In the course of the Word Bearers’ rites there, Angron’s long communion with slaughter and the Nails’ influence were turned toward Khorne, and he ascended as a daemon prince as his mortal body was consumed. Roboute Guilliman’s Ultramarines moved to intercept the World Eaters and prevent the ritual’s completion, but arrived too late to stop Angron’s transformation or the devastation inflicted on the planet.

What remained of Nuceria was later destroyed outright when Lion El’Jonson ordered its bombardment from orbit, denying the ashen world to the Word Bearers and to any further use by the Ruinous Powers. Angron, already ascended and fighting far away on Terra during the Siege, is recorded as perceiving the world’s final destruction from across that distance, a moment binding his presence at the Emperor’s Palace to the erasure of the world that made him. Nuceria endures in the wider chronicle chiefly through this double association: the origin of Angron’s rage and the Nails, and the setting of both his daemonic ascension and his homeworld’s annihilation.