Sword of Sacrilege

The Sword of Sacrilege is a Despoiler-class battleship of the forces of Chaos. Imperial tradition holds that Rogal Dorn, primarch of the Imperial Fists, made his last recorded stand aboard the vessel during a Black Crusade, after which the Chapter recovered remains it holds to be his; a skeletal hand preserved in stasis became its holiest relic.

Accounts place the ship with a Chaos fleet that gathered to threaten the Cadian Gate, in one telling after the Imperial Navy had failed to detect the muster at the Pelenos Belt until it was too late. With much of the Imperial Fists Chapter drawn away to shadow Craftworld Ulthwé, Dorn is said to have mustered only a small force, rammed a ship under his command into the Sword of Sacrilege and boarded it. Later records also describe the vessel as devoted to Tzeentch and as a base for a cabal of sorcerers, and as having fought in Abaddon’s Twelfth Black Crusade.

Neither a fixed star system nor a segmentum berth is securely attested for the boarding action. Dates offered for Dorn’s disappearance range across several millennia, and accounts differ on whether a whole body, unstated remains or only a single fist were recovered. The ship itself remains a named Chaos capital vessel in Imperial naval memory rather than a charted world.