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Siege of Terra

2023-03-03T19:25:36Z

2607:FB91:119A:44DF:C8AD:B884:FF14:8318: /* The End and the Death */

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{{Infobox 40k Campaign
|title=Siege of Terra
|image=[[File:The-Siege-Of-Terra Angron.jpg|400px]]
|attacker= Traitor Legions
|defender= [[Imperium of Man]]
|commander1= [[Horus]], [[Angron]], [[Mortarion]], [[Fulgrim]], [[Perturabo]], [[Magnus the Red]], [[Zardu Layak]], Kelbor Hal
|commander2= The [[Emperor]], [[Sanguinius]], [[Rogal Dorn]], [[Jaghatai Khan]], [[Vulkan]], [[Malcador the Sigillite]], [[Constantin Valdor]]
|date=0014.M31
|scale=Planetary
|theatre=[[Horus Heresy]]
|strength1= [[Sons of Horus]], [[Death Guard]], [[World Eaters]], [[Emperor's Children]], [[Thousand Sons]], [[Iron Warriors]], [[Word Bearers]], [[Night Lords]], Traitor Army forces, [[Dark Mechanicum]], dozens of Traitor Knight houses, Traitor Titan legions, daemons
|strength2= [[Imperial Fists]], [[Blood Angels]], [[White Scars]], [[Adeptus Custodes]], [[Sisters of Silence]], [[Knights-Errant]], Imperial Army, Adeptus Arbites, dozens of Knight Houses, loyalist Titan Legions (Gryphonicus, Ignatum, Solaria, Atarus, Amaranth, Ordo Sinister)
|casualties1= Massive Heretic Astartes casualties, massive Traitor Army losses, massive Traitor Titan losses, massive Dark Mechanicum losses. Horus slain. Angron, Mortarion and Magnus banished.
|casualties2= Massive military and civilian losses. Malcador the Sigillite slain. Sanguinius slain. Emperor mortally wounded and interred into Golden Throne.
|status= Pyrrhic Loyalist Victory
|outcome= Traitors driven from Terra and into the Eye of Terror. Death of Horus and crippling of the Emperor. Great Scouring Begins.
}}

{{topquote|[[Horus|He]] waits no longer. It begins now.|[[Sanguinius]] on the 13th of Secundus, 014.M31}}
The '''Siege of Terra''' was the end of the [[Horus Heresy]] in [[Warhammer 40,000]]. If the Horus Heresy can be considered the most important series of events in the 40k universe (*cough* [[War in Heaven]]), then the Siege of Terra itself could be considered the single most important event. It is also possibly the most fucking awesome event: brothers fighting brothers, Primarchs (read Sanguinius) soloing Titans and Greater Daemons, continent-spanning trench battles, the mighty guns of Titans blowing mountain-sized fortifications to shreds, Imperial Army soldiers leading charges against the traitorous forces even though they know it's suicide and [[Ollanius Pius]] making a desperate stand against impossible odds.

It was [[Horus]]'s big attempt to off his daddy and to be the true Emperor of the galaxy (for [[Chaos]] of course!). He brought a load of his traitor legions, millions of corrupt Imperial Army personnel and mutants, the part of the Mechanicus that had gone over to his side, and a whole load of daemons to boot. On his side, the [[Emperor]] had three legions, his [[Adeptus Custodes|Custodians]], and the loyal Imperial Army regiments of Terra and you know what? The Emperor went and won anyway (granted it was because the Emperor offed Horus before his legions could crack the Imperial palace but still, victory for the home team! (Though unless incoming fluff contradicts it, Horus only invited The Showdown as he knew his forces wouldn't win before hordes of fresh and angry Smurfs and Dark Angels arrived at his rear.))

==The Solar War==

Dorn began fortifying [[Terra]] immediately after getting word of the Heresy, knowing that it would always be Horus's eventual goal. Despite being removed from the [[Thramas Crusade|larger]] [[Battle of Phall|battles]] of the Heresy, the [[Solar System]] was touched by the conflict, with Mars erupting into [[Dark Mechanicus|open rebellion]] and numerous [[Alpha Legion|sleeper agents and cults]] trying to destabilise the Throneworld. Despite all of this, Dorn managed to do the best he could, turning Terra into the most heavily fortified system in the Imperium. He even managed to blunt part of the traitor advance at the Beta-Garmon cluster before getting ready for the final rumble they had known was coming.
[[File:Dorn-hh.jpg|300px|right]]
Terra was unique in that it had two artificial Mandeville points inside the Solar system itself, created during the [[Dark Age of Technology]]. Dorn fortified the likely approaches from the outer edge of the system and built up huge defenses around the two internal jump points. The traitors, however, were busy too: infiltrators and covert operatives sabotaged loyalist assets across the system. The [[Iron Warriors]] were the first Astartes into the breach, breaking the [[Warp]] on the First of Primus, 014.M31, using huge up-armoured [[Space Hulk|Space Hulks]] as fireships to wear down the defenses before sending their main fleet through to engage the combined Fists and Scars fleets. The inner system conflict went on for a bit, with the loyalists managing to hold out enough to slow down the advance at least for a little while.

However, under Magnus's direction, the traitors turned the Shrine of Unity comet into a vast Warp gate that allowed Horus, Angron, and Fulgrim's fleets to jump right past most of the rings of defense Dorn had come up with. On the ''[[Phalanx]]'', Dorn was preoccupied with a daemon incursion and could do little to stop the huge fleets that were now mobbing for Terra. The Martian traitors, free from the blockade that had hemmed them in for years, joined up with Horus. The Solar War had barely lasted a month, far far less than the loyalists had hoped for. The rest of the loyalist fleets, knowing they could never hope to fight even a fraction of the vast traitor armada, regrouped on the edge of the system, along with the ''Phalanx'', waiting for the moment they could make an effective strike against Horus. There were early plans for the Emperor to be evacuated to the ''Phalanx'' and escape Terra, but these were made by people unaware of what Big-E was [[Webway|doing in the basement of the palace]].

==The Siege Begins==
[[File:Map-2800x1983.jpg|500px|right|thumb|Map of the Siege.]]
{{topquote|'''Father! I have come for you!'''|[[Angron]] upon making planetfall, met by snickering from Fulgrim, 15th of Quartus, 014.M31}}

With the space around Terra uncontested, most of the traitor armada settled into orbit above the Palace. On the thirteenth of Secundus, they began bombarding the Aegis, the vast shield network protecting the entire Palace complex. Unlike regular void shields, the Aegis consisted of multiple overlapping layers of shields that individually regenerated as fast as they could be depleted by the bombardment. On the ground, the Palace was protected by colossal networks of walls and bastions, static defenses, and vast numbers of Imperial Army units bolstered by hordes of press-ganged conscripts. Unknown to almost everyone, the Imperial Palace was also the focal point of the telesthetic ward, a psychic ward generated by the Emperor that would royally fuck up any daemon that set foot near it, daemon Primarchs included. At the start of the siege, the Emperor's power was such that the ward was able to cover all of Terra, and was so potent that any daemon which set foot on Terra would likely suffer a True Death.

The rest of Terra wasn't so lucky. Barring a few isolated holdouts, the rest of the planet was virtually defenseless. It should be noted that if the goal was to destroy Terra wholesale, it could have been easily accomplished by [[Exterminatus]]-level weaponry. Perturabo, as the only non-Chaos-ified Primarch, insisted on doing exactly that and grew increasingly angry at what he saw as an irrational and wasteful goal. But Horus was insistent that the Emperor had to be slain in person, and so the Palace had to be reduced the old-fashioned way. In all fairness, one must also ask if Exterminatus was even possible when a being like the Emperor was on Terra, to say nothing of the void shields and defenses on Terra itself (with the answer depending on how much Ext-grade weaponry and warheads the Chaos forces could bring along). And to be fair, Perty did suggest striking directly at the sun as Kor Phaeron had done at [[Battle of Calth|Calth]]. Destroying Sol would indirectly and undoubtedly fuck up Terra beyond saving.

Unable to use Exterminatus grade weaponry, Perturabo used the fleet's bombardment to test the Aegis' abilities. Within two weeks, Perturabo developed a bombardment pattern designed to serially weaken the Aegis to the point that fighters and bombers could begin attacking the Palace's anti-ship and anti-air batteries, which would allow full deployment of ground forces. Magnus also explained that if the traitors made the Star of Chaos around the Palace (with the lines intersecting where the Emperor sat within the Sanctum Imperialis) and spilled sufficient amounts of blood, the telesthetic ward would weaken enough that the Neverborn could safely walk upon Terra. Horus ordered the Traitor Legions to remain on their vessels while this process played out. The daemon primarchs were kept in orbit, safe from the Emperor's wards, although this meant that Angron had to be imprisoned in the maze Perturabo had built to contain Vulkan to stop him from [[Leeroy Jenkins]]ing the whole thing as he had done at [[Battle of Isstvan III|Istvaan III]].

Hordes of mutants, beastmen, cultists, and traitor Army units were thrown at the conventional defenses. Entire wings of aircraft dueled above the Palace. Precision bombardments gradually weakened minute sections of the Aegis long enough for bombers to get through and destroy the projectors. The Dark Mechanicum landed siege camps at 8 points around the Palace, partly to surround it but also to act as the focus for the ritual that would enable the Warp to take a foothold on the surface of the Throneworld. The Dark Mechanicum also began building massive siege towers to get Traitor Legionaries on the Palace walls. The Astartes were held in reserve on both sides whilst the more conventional forces softened each other up. The Death Guard were the first traitor Astartes to land on Terra, with the Khan and the White Scars riding forth on jetbikes and aircraft to meet them and wreck the Dark Mechanicum's siege camps. The Night Lords were the first Astartes to breach the walls of the Palace, albeit in small numbers; this attack also cost them their ''de facto'' commander, Gendor Skraivok. Sanguinius himself descended to help the mortal forces, acting as force multiplier, decoy, and morale booster.

Unfortunately, by that point, enough bloodshed had occurred that the perimeter of the Emperor's wards were reduced to just a few meters from the walls of the Palace, meaning daemons could now manifest on Terra. Horus responded by sending the World Eaters as the second wave, and this time Angron was leading the charge. Recognizing the outworks were about to be overrun, Sanguinius used an impending sally by the Legio Solaria to evacuate the surviving conscripts through the Helios Gate, while Legio Solaria destroyed the remaining siege tower. The loyalists had managed to repulse the first serious attempts on the Eternity Wall, but were now completely cut off from the rest of Terra, surrounded on all sides.

==The Lion's Gate Spaceport Falls==
[[File:LatD-Map-3309x2420.jpg|500px|right|thumb|Map of the Lion's Gate Space Port.]]
While the Death Guard, Emperor's Children, and World Eaters each hammered away at a different section of the Palace walls, the traitors' first major effort at cracking the Palace itself was aimed at the Lion's Gate spaceport, the largest and tallest spaceport on Terra. It reached so high into the atmosphere that void craft could dock at its upper levels, meaning that the traitor forces could more easily shuttle in reinforcements and materiel if they captured it. Horus tasked the Iron Warriors with taking the space port. In turn, Perturabo assigned [[Warsmith]] Kroeger to lead the assault, under the logic that Dorn would be expecting Pert to command such an important offensive personally and wouldn't be expecting whatever plans Kroeger came up with. Dorn assigned Seneschal [[Fafnir Rann]] to lead the defense of the spaceport rather than First Captain [[Sigismund]], since he was still angry with Sigismund for listening to Euphrati Keeler instead of obeying his orders. Kroeger went straight for the throat, launching a massive combined-arms assault directly on the port with backup from the World Eaters and Emperor's Children, though the latter quickly got bored and left after taking a bunch of prisoners for [[Rape|unspecified purposes]]. Though the Imperial Fists held off the initial attack, Warsmith Forrix and a thousand Iron Warriors managed to infiltrate the port by using renegade Imperial Army units as literal meatshields. To aid the attack, the Dark Mechanicum inserted a technophagic virus into the spaceport's systems, and Zardu Layak, Abaddon, and Typhus performed a Nurglite ritual to infiltrate the [[Daemon Prince]] Cor'bax Utterblight behind the Emperor's psychic wards.

The Fists drove back several consecutive assaults from the Iron Warriors and World Eaters, but the technophage was screwing their sensors and comms all to hell and gone, seriously complicating efforts to coordinate the defense, and Forrix and his infiltrators were tying up troops that were desperately needed elsewhere. Rann finally called Dorn for backup and Dorn scraped up an additional three thousand Fists under Sigismund, which were literally all the troops he could spare at that point. Despite Rann's best efforts, the balance inevitably tipped in the traitors' favor. Dorn arrived on the scene just in time to order a general withdrawal from the spaceport to the inner defenses, though not before he killed Zardu Layak after a brief duel. With the spaceport firmly in the traitor hands, Perturabo started unloading Titans and consolidating his position.

Meanwhile, Euphrati Keeler and the Custodian Amon Tauromachian had been tapped by Malcador to investigate strange apparitions occurring behind the Palace walls. They eventually deduced that this was a daemon exploiting the faith of Imperial cultists to manifest itself inside the Emperor's psychic defenses. One cult, in particular, called the Lightbearers, had been deceived into worshipping Nurgle instead of the Emperor. After Cor'bax used the Lightbearers to physically manifest himself inside the Palace, Amon, Euphrati, and Malcador teamed up to slay the daemon. When Amon suggested that they should purge the rest of the Emperor's worshippers to prevent another such incident, Malcador answered that he would continue to let them exist until the Emperor himself said otherwise, in the hopes that he could [[Chaos_Gods_of_Law#God-Emperor_of_Mankind|weaponize their faith against the Chaos gods]].

==Battle at the Saturnine Wall==
[[File:Siege_of_Terra1.jpg|thumb|middle|500px|Just 0.000001% of 0.000001% of the Siege of Terra.]]

With the Lion's Gate spaceport lost, Dorn was now under tremendous pressure as he continued to coordinate the defense in the face of the unrelenting traitor assaults. Nearly all the Traitor Legions were committed to the battle at this point, with the Death Guard, Iron Warriors, Thousand Sons, Emperor's Children, and the Sons of Horus engaged in heavy fighting at the Anterior Barbican, a series of six fortresses protecting the Lion's Gate, while the World Eaters and the more Chaos corrupted Army regiments went on a rampage throughout the Palace's outer districts, tying down loyalist reinforcements in the Sprawl Magnifican. Additionally, the Lion's Gate spaceport allowed the Dark Mechanicum to begin landing Traitor Titans Legions inside the Palace walls, as well as armoured reinforcements for the Traitor Legions and Army. In response, Dorn could only muster his own legion, plus the Blood Angels and White Scars and their primarchs, along with what Army and Mechanicus units were stationed in the Inner Palace.

While taking a brief break in an abandoned garden, Dorn encountered Kyril Sindermann, who made an offhand comment about the Saturnine Wall trembling under the weight of the bombardment. From this, Dorn deduced that something was wrong with the defenses in that section and investigated. What he found was a potential catastrophe. The ceaseless bombardments from the traitor forces had caused the entire Imperial Palace and the tectonic plates on which it rested to shift by eight centimeters, opening a small but detectable fault line which had been previously sealed beneath the Saturnine Wall.

Certain that Perturabo would notice this fault and attempt to exploit it, Dorn began concocting a counterattack. Before laying out his plans, he called a council of war with Constantin Valdor and Malcador to explain to them his next move: he would have to start allowing parts of the Palace defenses to fall, as he simply no longer had the numbers or the materiel to hold everything. He identified four key parts of the defense that could not be allowed to fall to the enemy - the Colossi Gate, the Gorgon Bar, the Saturnine Wall, and the Eternity Wall spaceport - then chose the one he could most afford to lose based on his calculations, which was the spaceport. Though he would put on a show of defending it, Dorn knew that the port ultimately had to be sacrificed, even though it meant letting the traitor forces control both of the Palace's main spaceports. He assigned Sanguinius to hold the Gorgon Bar and Jaghatai Khan to hold the Colossi; he would personally oversee the defense of the Saturnine Wall and lay a trap in the hopes of bagging a significant enemy target, perhaps even Horus himself.

Perturabo had indeed spotted the weakness at the Saturnine Wall, though he had initially planned to use it only as a last-ditch ace in the hole, content to break the Anterior Barbican at either Colossi Gate or Gorgon Bar with what they had already landed, or wait for the World Eaters to inevitably overrun the Eternity Wall port and allow them to land reinforcements to fully overwhelm the two fortresses. Abaddon convinced him to instead make it a focal point of the attack through a combination of flattery and unsubtle goading, suggesting that Perturabo's victory over Dorn would be tainted if it was won with the help of the Neverborn. Though the Lord of Iron nearly caved his face in for it, Abaddon won the argument and immediately set out to assemble a spear-tip strike. Secretly, he was also hoping to win a "clean" victory without resorting to the use of daemons and sorcery, as he believed that using the Warp to win a war was beneath his dignity as an Astartes.

The battles for the Colossi and the Gorgon Bar escalated in scale and intensity. The defenders at the Colossi Gate were plagued by legions of flies that seemed to manifest from nowhere, forcing them to wear bulky protective equipment that lessened their effectiveness. Sanguinius was suffering under the weight of his psychic visions, which were coming with increasing frequency and intensity; nevertheless, he continued to fight on the front lines, knowing that his mere appearance was heartening the defenders and raising their morale. At one point he [[Awesome|singlehandedly killed a Warlord Titan]], then stared down its three accompanying Warhounds until they turned tail and fled. At the Colossi, Jaghatai and the White Scars led a few massed jetbike charges into the ranks of the Death Guard, destroying their siege engines, killing their Neverborn reinforcements, inflicting casualties, and generally delaying the XIV Legion's inexorable advance. The Adeptus Custodes also engaged the Death Guard, with Constantin Valdor himself taking the field. Their Emperor-forged nature proved especially potent against the Warp-corrupted Marines of the XIV and their daemonic allies. Ahriman and the Thousand Sons attempted to literally melt the Colossi bastion with sorcery, only to be driven back by three White Scars Stormseers who channeled the captured weather underneath the Palace's void shielding into an immense lightning storm.

At the Saturnine Wall, Dorn had devised a simple but cunning trap. Its cellars and tunnels had been fortified and transformed into a series of Zones Mortalis, and he had assembled a five-hundred-man strong force of veteran Astartes, broken into seven kill teams led by [[Sigismund]], [[Nathaniel Garro]], Endryd Haar of the World Eaters, [[Garviel Loken]], Bel Sepatus of the Blood Angels, Helig Gallor of the Death Guard, and [[Maximus Thane]] of the Imperial Fists. He had also enlisted the [[Technoarcheologist]] [[Arkhan Land]] to help him mend the fault line; Land devised a quick-setting form of rockcrete which could be pumped into the fault to seal it permanently. Dorn didn't know who would be leading the assault, but he was hoping for Horus himself. Once cut off and isolated inside the Palace walls, even the Warmaster would be ''relatively'' easy prey. On the other side, Abaddon was able to convince Fulgrim to lend him the entire Emperor's Children Legion for the assault on the Saturnine and wrangled three companies of the Sons of Horus to form the spear-tip. The III Legion would [[DISTRACTION CARNIFEX|attack from the front as a diversion]], using three [[Donjon Pattern Siege Engine|Donjon Pattern Siege Engines]] borrowed from the Dark Mechanicum, while Abaddon and his Astartes burrowed up from beneath with [[Tunneling_Transport_Vehicles#Termite|Termite assault drills]].

[[Just as planned|They walked straight into Dorn's trap]]. When the first Sons of Horus emerged from their assault drills, they were ambushed by Dorn's kill teams, who achieved total surprise. The assault force was ''DESTROYED IN DETAIL'', which is to say that of the hundreds of elite combatants committed to the attack (which included the famed Justaerin Terminators and Catulan Reavers of the 1st Company, all four members of the Mournival leading their respective companies, as well as two more veteran companies led by Tybalt Marr and Lev Goshen respectively) the number of survivors could literally be counted on one hand with fingers to spare. Garro decapitated Falkus Kibre of the Justaerin, while Loken killed Tybalt Marr, [[Horus Aximand]], and Tormageddon. Just as the loyalists were starting to relax, Abaddon and a hundred Justaerin Terminators teleported into their midst, triggering a giant brawl. Abaddon went on a killing spree, but eventually absorbed a series of crippling blows from Bel Sepatus and Endryd Haar. Though he managed to kill them both, he wound up pinned under Haar's corpse, with Garro poised to deliver the killing stroke. Luckily for Abaddon, [[Plot Armor|he was teleported to safety at the last moment]], as the Chaos Gods had already chosen him to be the new Warmaster after the death of Horus. Arkhan Land began pumping hundreds of thousands of liters of his rockcrete formula into the fault. Though he was briefly interrupted by Horus Aximand, the plan went off without a hitch, and the fault was permanently sealed. Some of the remaining Sons of Horus had yet to emerge from their assault drills and became trapped in the rockcrete as it set, ensuring that they would be entombed beneath the Palace forever. Barring any future statements to the contrary, it appears that literally the only survivor of this deflated, wilted bit of tactical flailing, once laughably referred to as a spear-thrust, was the very [[Abaddon|armless failure]] that advocated so strongly for it. [[Fail|Oops]].

Aboveground, Fulgrim had unleashed a full-scale assault against the Saturnine Wall, leading off with the Donjon siege engines, which had been modified with immense [[Sonic Weaponry|sonic weapons]] similar to those of the [[Kakophoni (Emperor's Children)|Kakophoni]]. The engines seriously disrupted the defense at first, but the Imperial Fists and Army garrison were able to rally and funnel the III Legion into a chokepoint. Fulgrim got into a duel with Sigismund atop the Wall. Though the Templar was able to land a few hits, Fulgrim's daemonically enhanced strength and speed gave him the upper hand. Before he could kill Sigismund, Dorn intervened and proceeded to pummel Fulgrim badly enough that the Phoenician threw a tantrum and took his legion and went home, abandoning the Siege entirely and costing Team Horus one of its most significant force multipliers. Fulgrim left fifty-six of his best warriors behind in an attempt to kill Dorn, but he and Sigismund were able to defeat them all, including [[Eidolon]] and Von Kalda. The assault wound up costing the Emperor's Children no less than eighteen thousand Astartes, along with all three of the irreplaceable siege engines.

This great victory had been purchased with an equally great loss: the fall of the Eternity Wall spaceport. Despite the garrison's best efforts to hold the port, they were faced with the Chaos-fueled rage of Angron and the World Eaters. Angron issued a demand for the port's defenders to surrender and was met with a concentrated artillery barrage that literally atomized him, though being a daemon prince, he didn't stay down for long. He and his legion immediately assaulted and seized the spaceport, killing everyone present. Many heroes of the Imperium died unheralded deaths at the Eternity Wall, including Knight-Commander Jenetia Krole of the Silent Sisterhood, Prefect Warden Tsutomu of the Adeptus Custodes, High Primary Solar General Saul Niborran, and Captain Camba Diaz of the Imperial Fists (who died holding the line in one of the greatest displays of manliness in the universe). A lone Guardsman named Olly Piers died there also, defending a banner of the Emperor Ascendant against Angron's relentless charge, thus [[Ollanius Pius|establishing the foundation for one of the Imperium's most enduring myths]] after a considerable amount of embellishment at his dying request. Ironically, Piers was a distant descendant of Ollanius Persson.

In the aftermath of these battles, Dorn and Sanguinius took stock of where they stood. The Gorgon Bar had held and would continue to hold for two precious weeks more by Sanguinius' estimate. The repulse at the Saturnine Wall had cost the Traitor Legions dearly. Three hundred of the XVI Legion's elite troops and eighteen thousand Emperor's Children were dead, with Fulgrim and the rest of the III Legion having quit the field. Jaghatai Khan, having held the Colossi, was now preparing to retake the Lion's Gate. Better yet, Sanguinius' prescience had granted him a vision from within the depths of Angron's tortured mind: [[Nuceria]] had been destroyed - not merely razed as Angron and Lorgar had done during the [[Battle of Calth|Shadow Crusade]], but obliterated by orbital bombardment. Dorn and Sanguinius both knew this could mean only one thing: Roboute Guilliman and Lion el'Jonson were on the way along with their legions.

Admiral Niora Su-Kassen, now in command of what remained of the loyalist naval assets in the Solar system, received indications of another fleet approaching from the outer edges of the system. She ordered the new arrivals to announce themselves, and was answered with a hail from [[Corswain]] of the Dark Angels: "We come to stand with Terra."

==Assault on the Mercury Wall and Recapture of the Astronomican==

With the repulse at Saturnine and the fall of the Eternity Wall spaceport, the Siege was entering a new phase. With both of the Imperial Palace's primary spaceports in their hands, the traitor forces began bringing in all their reserves and materiel stores, preparing to overwhelm the loyalists through sheer numbers. Perturabo was still directing the battle more or less singlehandedly at this time until he received a summons from Horus to attend him on the ''Vengeful Spirit''. When the Lord of Iron arrived in Horus' throne room, the Warmaster instructed him to abandon his current battle plan. Instead, he wanted to throw everything they had, including the Titan Legio Mortis, straight at the Mercury Wall, which represented the true beginning of the Imperial Palace. Perturabo demanded to know why Horus wanted to employ such a wasteful and apparently futile strategy, and Horus stated that it would work because he willed it so. Shortly thereafter, Horus sent his equerry to Perturabo with orders to disperse the Iron Warriors among the traitor forces. He followed up this humiliating order by informing Perturabo that Mortarion and the Death Guard would be taking over the IV Legion's positions. Infuriated, Perturabo denounced Horus' alliance with the Ruinous Powers and declared that this was no longer a war of Legions, but a war of foul and unnatural powers in which no true victory could be won. He then bitterly declared that Horus was exactly like the Emperor: both of them had manipulated Perturabo from the very beginning and forced him into a role he despised, that of the ruthless, calculating siege master. With that, he ordered the IV Legion to withdraw from the battlespace. A few diehards chose to remain behind, but nearly the entire legion obeyed their primarch's order. Some of the traitor forces attempted to stop the Iron Warriors as they headed for the exits, but were unsuccessful.

Unbothered, Horus ordered the attack on the Mercury Wall to proceed, spearheaded by Legio Mortis. To counter the Death's Head, the loyalists deployed the Legio Ignatum and a few Titans from Legio Solaria, along with Knight banners from Houses Vyronii, Tyranus, Cadmus, and Konor. A representative of the Mechanicus attempted to convince Ignatum's Titan drivers to flee the battle, as his calculations had shown that defeat was inevitable, but the principes rejected his proposal and walked to war anyway. Also present were a number of other Titans from legions that had been decimated at Beta-Garmon, but many of them refused to join the battle, citing the Titandeath as their reason for remaining out of the fight. This lasted until the engagement between Mortis and Ignatum began, in a vast open space known as the Mercury-Exultant killzone. The traitors were revealed to be using Titans that had been destroyed at Beta-Garmon and elsewhere as cannon fodder; the wrecked Titans had been reanimated via sorcery and now teemed with blight and corruption. Ignatum smashed through these revenants, only to be confronted with the main strength of Legio Mortis. A desperate battle ensued, with dozens of god-engines being destroyed on both sides. Proscribed weapons such as warp and vortex missiles were employed freely, for this was now a battle of annihilation. Recognizing the import of the engagement, the Emperor communicated with a representative of the Ordo Sinister, the commanders of the dreaded Psi-Titans, and ordered him to join the battle. One of their prefects made himself known to Dorn, who agreed to deploy the four available Psi-Titans into the battle. He then took command personally at the Mercury Wall, bringing reinforcements with him. Ambassador Vethorel of the Adeptus Mechanicus approached the Titan crews who had refused to join the battle and showed them images of the reanimated Titans being used by the traitors. Galvanized by the desecration of their fellow god-engines, the Titan crews agreed to rejoin the fight. Vethorel proclaimed them to be a new Legio, the Legio Invigilata. Led by the former Grand Master of Legio Solaria, Invigilata joined Ignatum and the Psi-Titans on the front line. In spite of the loyalists' bravery, the main strength of Ignatum was destroyed by the superior numbers and firepower of Legio Mortis, combined with an orbital bombardment from the traitor fleet. The survivors attempted to rally and continue the fight, but Mortis had reached the Mercury Wall and began to tear it down.

During this battle, Corswain of the Dark Angels was conferring with Admiral Su-Kassen and other leaders of the Imperial fleet. Corswain had been expecting to find the rest of the I Legion already present at Terra and was dismayed to learn that he and the forces under his command were the only Dark Angels in the system. He had brought only ten thousand Astartes and two dozen ships with him, barely enough to make any kind of impact against the enemy forces in orbit. Unwilling to sit by and do nothing, Corswain announced that he intended to recapture the Astronomican, which had fallen into traitor hands and gone dark. Without it, the I and XIII Legions would be unable to reach the system and relieve Terra. Some of the Dark Angels in his fleet, having been subverted by Luther's separatist faction, wanted to assassinate Corswain to avoid being wasted on what they considered a pointless suicide mission. They were talked down by Librarian Vassago, who was a member of their faction but admired Corswain's bravery and nobility. Admiral Su-Kassen agreed to lend them the ''Imperator Somnium'', an immense battle carrier that had served as one of the Emperor's personal flagships, for their attack. The Dark Angels proceeded to use the ''Somnium'' as a sort of fireship. Concealing their own vessels under its tremendous bulk, they rode in with the huge flagship as it drew the fire of the entire traitor fleet, then split away and charged through to the Astronomican before the traitors realized what was happening. The ''Somnium'' died hard, taking many enemy ships with it and inflicting critical damage on the ''Conqueror'' and ''Terminus Est''. The Dark Angels successfully landed at the Astronomican and breached its defenses. They found that the mountain had been overrun by elements of the Emperor's Children and Vassukella, a Daemon Prince of Slaanesh. Despite sustaining heavy casualties, they were able to kill Vassukella and the corrupted Children, reclaiming the Astronomican for the Imperium. Corswain was nearly killed by the psychic backlash of the daemon's death, only to be saved by Vassago. The news that the Astronomican was once again in friendly hands provided a much-needed morale boost to the Imperial forces, though this was offset by the grim news from the Mercury Wall.

Subsidiary combat continued all along the Palace's defensive perimeter, though it was comparatively small in scale when measured against the annihilating fight taking place at the Mercury Wall. The loyalists were beginning to reach the limits of their mental, physical, and spiritual endurance, though some of them took confidence in a new credo: "He protects us as we protect Him." Even so, the loyalists' morale was being further eroded by the malign influence of the Warp. Those who were sensitive to its currents and eddies noted that its strength was waxing as the Siege ground on, working its way through the cracks in the Emperor's wards and battering down the mental defenses of the loyalist troops. Suicides, murders, and desertions spiked as exhausted and despairing soldiers and civilians sought to escape into a paradisaical dreamland. Unfortunately for them, this dreamland was a trap laid by the Emperor's Children to prey on the desperate and fearful. Thousands of unfortunate souls were lured to the Hatay-Antakya Hive, where the III Legion entrapped them in their dreams and "milked" them for their emotions. These activities were disrupted by the arrival of [[Ollanius Pius|Ollanius Persson]] and his band of refugees from Calth, who were seeking to rendezvous with John Grammaticus and his prototype Space Marine bodyguard Leetu. They in turn were aided in their escape by a mysterious woman calling herself "Actaea" and a legionary in scaled armor who identified himself as Alpharius. Together, this unlikely group of allies embarked on an unspecified mission involving the Emperor.

==Second Battle for the Lion's Gate and the Rise of the Emperor's Champion==

With the Mercury Wall breached, the Siege was reaching its endgame. The loyalist forces were being slowly shoved back into the innermost circles of the Palace defenses. Comms were unreliable at best, supplies were running low, and sheer exhaustion and hopelessness were grinding the defenders down. Angron and the World Eaters were loose inside the Palatine, with the Sons of Horus following behind. The Death Guard occupied the Lion's Gate spaceport, taking over after the IV Legion's abrupt departure from the battlespace. As their tainted presence began to warp the port into a twisted mirror of Barbarus, Mortarion established himself in one of its command centers, using his new daemonic powers to amplify the currents of the warp and blanket the Palace in a psychic miasma of despair. The effect was so potent that even Rogal Dorn's legendary resolve was cracking under the weight of Mortarion's malignant influence. He had bent all his prodigious intellect and unmatched engineering skill toward transforming Terra into the mightiest fortress the galaxy had ever seen, and it had not been enough. Without Guilliman and the Lion and their legions, they were doomed to inevitable defeat.

Jaghatai Khan, frustrated by the passivity of static defense, decided to launch a counterattack on the Lion's Gate. His reasoning was sound: should the Dark Angels and Ultramarines arrive to relieve Terra, they would need a place to dock their voidcraft. Moreover, the powerful anti-orbital batteries of the Gate could be turned against the traitor fleet. With his decision made, he quietly assembled the V Legion while his friend and Army liaison Ilya Ravallion scrounged up every functioning tank she could find to support the assault. The Khagan also recruited the [[Orbital Plate|Skye orbital plate]] to serve as a shield against the guns of the traitor fleet, knowing that they would bombard his forces as soon as they were visible. The gathered tanks were formed into a new unit, the First Terran Armoured, and sortied alongside the V Legion, deployed into three massive attack groups. They shouldered their way through the outer defenses easily enough, using the tanks to smash the Death Guard's armored spearheads and deploying Stormseers to wipe out any daemons that manifested themselves. The V Legion's usual tactics of speed and shock power served them well in this stage of the assault, but things became much harder when they reached the spaceport. The battle turned into an attritional slugging match, with two of the three attack groups bogging down almost immediately. Only the group led by the Khagan himself made any headway, tearing through the massed ranks of the XIV Legion and breaching the Gate itself. The fighting grew steadily more desperate; the mortal tank crews were being pushed to their limits and beyond by the nature of the fighting, which required them to remain sealed inside their tanks at all times lest they fall prey to chemical weapons or warp-borne plagues, and the White Scars were stymied by the unnatural resilience of their foes.

As the battle continued to rage throughout the port's lower levels, the Khan infiltrated Mortarion's command center and challenged his brother to a duel. They fought like madmen, with nothing held back, but Mortarion's unnatural strength gave him the edge. He wrecked Jaghatai's armor, broke his arms and ankles, and smashed his face into a pulp. The Khagan stood up, laughing off wounds that should have killed him, and attacked again. He taunted Mortarion relentlessly until the Death Lord became enraged enough to make a mistake. The Khan skewered him, only for Mortarion to recover and bury his scythe in the Warhawk's chest. [[Just as planned|Which was exactly what the Khan had wanted him to do.]] Jaghatai had allowed Mortarion to deliver a killing stroke so that he could deliver one in return. He beheaded his corrupted brother, banishing Mortarion to the Warp and unleashing a psychic shockwave that staggered and disoriented the Death Guard. In the aftermath, Jaghatai succumbed to his wounds, triggering a berserker frenzy in his sons that drove the bewildered Death Guard out of the spaceport. The Khagan was carried out of the spaceport on a Leman Russ, where he was met by Ilya Ravallion. She sensed a spark of life within his broken and ravaged body and immediately had him taken to Malcador, who set his adepts to the task of healing the primarch.

Within the walls of the Palace, chaos reigned. As walls fell and city blocks were blasted into ruin, hordes of civilian refugees and Imperial Army units fled toward the illusory safety of the innermost districts, with the World Eaters and Sons of Horus at their heels. Some garrisons made lonely last stands, hoping to tie down the traitors as long as possible, while others collapsed and were overrun. As Dorn faced the inevitable, he summoned First Captain Sigismund and gave him a simple order: "Hurt them." As Sigismund made for the battlefield, he was greeted by Khalid Hassan, who brought him the Black Sword, an ancient and potent relic weapon forged in Earth's pre-Unification era. Sigismund took up the blade and went out to fulfill his father's orders, sworn now to fight for the Imperium as it would become, not as it had been. He cut down hundreds of traitor champions in single combat. Rumors of the warrior known as the "Black Knight" or "the Emperor's Champion" began spreading across the Palace, heartening loyalists and demoralizing the traitors. Many on both sides sought him out, either to join him or to kill him. Sigismund finally encountered Kharn, who challenged him to a rematch. Sigismund's cold, impassive fighting style disturbed the World Eater, who furiously tried to provoke a reaction in the First Captain. Unshaken, Sigismund fought Kharn to a standstill and cut him down, but not before the World Eater saw the truth of things in a rare moment of lucidity: Sigismund was the herald of a new kind of Imperial warrior, of [[Black Templars|a new Legion of fanatical, stoic, single-minded zealots]] whose relentless fury and inability to countenance defeat would wreak untold misery on a galaxy already groaning under the weight of aeons of anguish.

Meanwhile, Euphrati Keeler, who was now loose and alone in the ruins, used Sigismund as the inspiration for a new kind of army. Rallying the masses of civilian refugees and Army stragglers, she forged them into a militia armed with tools, a few lasguns, and their faith in the Emperor and sent them forth to fight the Traitor Legions. Though a hundred of them might fall in exchange for one traitor, Keeler regarded it as a fair exchange, for there were hundreds of thousands more to take their place. Garviel Loken, upon finding Keeler, was dismayed by her harsher, more brutal mindset. She justified it to him by arguing that this was the kind of army the Imperium would need in the future: [[Imperial Guard|an army of millions, even billions of humans, united by their unwavering faith in the Emperor and their hatred for the alien, the mutant, and the traitor]].

==Final Stand at the Eternity Gate==

Although the Lion's Gate Spaceport had been retaken, the situation continued to deteriorate for the loyalists. Terra itself was dying, shattered and poisoned by the Siege. The unrelenting orbital bombardments from the Warmaster's fleet had gouged out craters and torn deep fissures into the planet's crust that vomited forth noxious gases and immense pyroclastic flows, smothering entire regions in boiling rock and choking fumes. Spilled chemicals, radiation from destroyed munitions stockpiles, and Warp-borne corruption were seeping into the soil, rendering vast swathes of the planet uninhabitable. The dust and ash from tens of thousands of destroyed buildings and uncountable conflagrations filled the atmosphere, blinding sensors, cutting off vox signals, coating the lungs of those who breathed Terra's air unprotected, and turning the sun red. The underground farms devoted to feeding the populace were destroyed and burning. The last sea on the planet was now a dust-choked pile of sludge. In the void around the choking, burning world, the Warp seeped into reality, painting space with unreal colors as the Chaos gods and their minions reveled in the horror they had wrought. The Neverborn now manifested freely upon Terra, gleefully joining in the butchery and devastation.

With the Palace defenses fatally compromised due to the breach at the Ultimate Wall by Legio Mortis, the loyalists were being inexorably forced back to the Delphic Battlement, the last line of defense before the Sanctum Imperialis. Jaghatai Khan was incapacitated, leaving Shiban Khan in command of most of the remaining White Scars at the Lion's Gate. Outside aid was nowhere to be seen, though Sanguinius ordered Corswain and his Dark Angels to stay put and defend the Astronomican to guide the way for Guilliman and the Lion. The traitors sensed that victory was in their grasp. The Emperor's telesthetic shield was failing due to Magnus the Red's psychic assaults in the Webway. The only thing truly going in the loyalists' favor was the degradation of Horus' armies into an uncoordinated horde. The Sons of Horus were the only organized force still fighting in the Warmaster's name. The traitor Imperial Army forces had degraded into gibbering cultists, the World Eaters were an uncontrollable mob of berserkers, the Death Guard were still recovering from Mortarion's banishment, and the Iron Warriors, Night Lords, and Emperor's Children had largely abandoned the siege, with only scattered elements still fighting for Horus. The smaller contingents from the Word Bearers, Alpha Legion, and the Thousand Sons fought on as best they could, though few could impose any kind of order upon the madness surrounding them. With Rogal Dorn and his retinue cut off and besieged at the Bhab Bastion, only a hundred thousand loyalists stood between the traitors and the Imperial Palace itself. This force was largely composed of Blood Angels led by Sanguinius and whatever Imperial Army elements could be salvaged from the collapsing front, but some Imperial Fists, White Scars, loyalist Mechanicus units, and the remnants of Legio Ignatum were present as well to muster on the Delphic Battlement. Under orders by Horus for the first time in weeks, the traitors had a simple mission: break through the Delphic Battlement and capture the Eternity Gate at dawn.

The crux of the traitors' efforts was targeted at the Delphic Archway, the largest gateway in the battlement's walls. The Archway had been conceived and built as a place of triumph through which the Imperium's victorious legions would march along the Grand Processional and up the Royal Ascension, a pathway built from millions of tonnes of stone quarried from a hundred conquered worlds and lined with statues of the Imperium's finest soldiers, scientists, and intellectuals. It had had no defenses before Dorn began fortifying it, and even after seven years of work it was still the weakest point in the wall. Both sides knew this, and so had mustered the greatest parts of their strength there.

[[Grimdark|Before attacking, the traitors hoisted the still-living bodies of loyalist prisoners on whatever could hold their tortured forms in an effort to break the defenders' morale. The Legio Mordaxis Reaver Titan ''Daughter of Torment'' marched forward and opened its power claw to reveal Blood Angels Captain Idamas, who was notably the first Blood Angel Sanguinius spoke to when he first presented himself to his legion decades prior. Idamas was fatally wounded after being pinned to the claw by 7 spears]]. Following these acts of barbarity they issued Horus' offer: flee the coming battle and be granted a pardon by the (soon to be) new Emperor of Mankind, or die. To punctuate the offer and insult, the Titan began closing its claw to slowly crush Idamas to death. However, Sanguinius ordered the skitarii Transacta-7Y1 to kill the captain, both to put him out of his misery and deny his captors the satisfaction of such a murder. [[Awesome|Sanguinius then turned to the defenders and gave a rousing speech so awesome it inspired and/or shamed all of them into standing their ground. After that, he flew to the ''Daughter of Torment'' and cut off the fucker's head]]. With that, the battle was joined.

As the guns of the Delphic Battlement unleashed a cataclysm of fire on the Chaotic horde, they zerg-rushed the loyalists. Tens of thousands of traitor Space Marines and Imperial Army were mowed down, but their sheer weight of numbers allowed tens of thousands more to reach the battlement. Some dragged themselves up the wall with axes and blades. Others launched themselves onto the ramparts with jump packs or clambered across the heaps of dead and the piled shells from the battlement's guns. A Khornate Warlord Titan docked with the wall and disgorged a cargo of World Eaters directly into the battle. At the Delphic Archway itself, the loyalist Titans of Ignatum fought and died against their traitorous counterparts from Audax, Mortis, and Mordaxus. The battle atop the wall quickly descended into a frenetic melee, a hundred thousand individual fights melding into a titanic clash of arms, rage, and desperation that lasted for a day and a night. In the midst of the fight, the Bloodthirster Ka'Bandha arrived, manifested from the torn flesh and spilled blood of the IX Legion's sons. He had been tasked by Khorne with killing five hundred Blood Angels in front of Sanguinius to atone for his failure at Signus Prime, and got pretty close before Hawk Boi swooped in to save his sons. [[Awesome|In a lopsided airborne fight, the Bloodthirster got his back broken with the hilt of Sanguinius' sword and cast down]]. [[FAIL|He was then consumed by lesser daemons who preyed on his weakness]]. Despite, this nothing, nothing could stop the uncountable horde that was pouring through the shattered wall and fighting up through the Delphic Archway. Worse yet, daemons were manifesting inside the Sanctum Imperialis itself as the Emperor's strength waned under the unrelenting stress of holding the Webway shut while fighting psychic duels with Horus and Magnus. As the defenses entered terminal collapse, Custodian Tribune Diocletan Coros ordered the closure of the Eternity Gate, but a maniple of Legio Audax Titans used their Ursus Claws to hold one of the doors open. As Sanguinius moved to cut the chains, Angron made a [[Marvel Comics|superhero (villain?) entrance]] under orders from Horus to kill Sanguinius. Angron had been killing his way across the Inner Palace for weeks, his mind long since subsumed into a fugue of rage and bloodlust stoked to a fever pitch by the demands of the Blood God and the endless gnawing of the Butcher's Nails, and bringing down Sanguinius was the only coherent thought remaining to him.

The two primarchs engaged in a vicious duel that saw Sangy delivering a variety of normally fatal blows to Angron with all his accustomed skill and grace. Unfortunately for him, Sanguinius was exhausted and weak from six months of nonstop fighting and found himself unable to deliver any punishment that Angron couldn't tank by virtue of being a fuckhuge daemon primarch, while Angron's Warp-enhanced strength and fury allowed him to keep fighting even as he was wounded by countless blades and bolts from the loyalist Astartes around him. After numerous abortive attempts to fight while airborne, Angron decided to change tactics and fight on the ground while getting Sanguinius to fight him. Angron slaughtered many Blood Angels to force his brother's attention onto him. The two duelled again, and the exhausted Sanguinius began losing ground. Both Primarchs knew the fight would not (and in the case of the Great Angel, COULD NOT) go on much longer. Angron let Sanguinius stab him to get close and begin crushing his throat, while in the same motion stabbing Sanguinius' gut with the Black Blade. [[Derp|Of course, the ole 'tank a stab to get in close and deliver a fatal blow' trick is not unique to Angron and Jaghatai Khan]]. [[Just as Planned|Sanguinius had had the same idea and used the opportunity to rip the Butcher's Nails from Angron's skull]]. [[Bullshit|This somehow caused enough pain for him to beg Sanguinius to stop]], to no avail. [[Rip and Tear|Sanguinius tore the Nails out, taking Angron's brains and eyes with them]]. Angron's physical incarnation was finally killed and he was banished to the Warp. [[Troll|Khorne laughed at the sight]], while [[RAGE|Angron's less amused sons completely lost it]] and began teamkilling ''en masse'', slaughtering anything and anyone within reach of their weapons. Thus was a second daemon primarch banished from Terra.

Meanwhile, deep below the Palace, Vulkan was dispatched into what was left of the human Webway project to stop Magnus the Red's assault on the Emperor's psychic defenses. Vulkan found his traitorous brother in the Impossible City of Calastar, where he was weaving spells and incantations to shatter the Emperor's resolve. Despite Magnus employing a variety of illusions and horrifically lethal magic tricks on Vulkan, they all proved to be futile against a perpetual primarch. As Vulkan resurrected time and again, Magnus was slowly worn down between the constant strain of maintaining his spells and weathering the Lord of Drakes' relentless assaults. In a final gamble to buy time or convert his brother, Magnus drew Vulkan into his mind to play out his experiences during the Heresy and explain his motivations for turning on the Emperor. Vulkan would have none of it, spitting nothing but facts (including some that Magnus didn't know that Vulkan knew) about his brother's persecution complex and hubris. He pointed out that none of the loyalist primarchs had reacted the way Magnus had to learning of the Emperor's Webway project, that in siding with Horus he had chosen to side with the true author of Prospero's destruction, and that Magnus' deal with Tzeentch hadn't truly cured his legion of the flesh change. Every step he had taken since his foolish attempt to warn the Emperor of Horus' corruption had only led him further down the path of damnation. He also revealed a devastating truth to Magnus: the Crimson King had only imagined being offered a costly path towards redemption by the Emperor, when in reality he was told to kick sand and GTFO. Regardless of [[Skub|why]], the result was the same: Magnus retreated into his shroud of self-righteousness and danced to the tune of Chaos. Magnus attempted one last gambit, pretending to recognize the magnitude of his fall, but Vulkan sensed that if he showed mercy where none was warranted, it would open the way for the corrupting influence of Chaos to seep into his spirit. With nothing left to argue about, Vulkan smashed Magnus into paste with his hammer ''Urdrakule'' while Magnus wove one last spell to unmake Vulkan at the molecular level. Vulkan technically died first, but his hammer blow still fell, crushing Magnus's head and banishing him into the Warp. The two corpses lay side by side for a time, until Vulkan resurrected once more and walked away, a blackened, skeletal revenant still carrying his hammer. Magnus' banishment caused the flesh change to begin manifesting uncontrollably in the ranks of the XV Legion, further blunting the tide of the traitor advance at the critical moment.

With these two events, the Chaos forces were stopped just outside the now-sealed Eternity Gate. The surviving loyalists fled inside and licked their wounds. While the Great Angel regarded his wounds, he and Dorn gave their final goodbyes. The White Scars reactivated the anti-orbital defenses at the Lion's Gate and laughed at the traitor bastards in orbit before tearing into them with all the firepower their defenses had. Roboute Guilliman sent word that he, the Lion, and Leman Russ were only a week away, but the thing that had once been Lotara Sarrin intercepted the message and ordered the rest of the Warmaster's fleet to block the signal.

This marked the point where the situation for both sides had become truly desperate. Traitorous mortal crews (and many of the Thousand Sons remaining on Terra) could no longer [[Chaos Spawn|maintain forms that obeyed the laws of physics]], the Traitor Legions weren't on speaking terms with the concepts of "tactics", "unit cohesion", or "sanity", and [[Anal Circumference|their fleet's flanks were wide open for a well-deserved pounding from the inbound loyalist relief fleet]]. With nobody left to rely on and only one last chance at victory, Horus recognized that he would have to force the Emperor to come to him, so he did something completely unexpected: he ordered the ''Vengeful Spirit'' to lower its shields entirely. The loyalists unfortunately didn't know any of this, only being aware of the fact that the Grim Reaper would be taking them out to lunch very soon. [[Just as Planned|And thus the die was cast and the stage set for the end of the Siege]].

==The End and the Death==
{{topquote|We are in the endgame now.|Doctor Strange, ''Avengers: Infinity War''}}
With the Eternity Gate closed and the Sanctum Imperialis sealed, the Siege had reached its terminal phase. The loyalist forces were scattered across the ruins of the Inner Palace, fighting on as best they could in the face of what seemed to be Horus’ inevitable victory. Imperial Fists, White Scars, Blood Angels, [[Solar Auxilia]], Imperial Army, Custodians, and Null Maidens all fought side by side wherever they happened to be, while [[Penal legion|penal units]], [[Whiteshield Conscript|civilian conscripts]], [[Administratum|rear-echelon functionaries]], and senior officers took up arms and joined the fighting. Broken chains of command and lines of organization were hastily reconstituted by whoever happened to be on the scene. The White Scars still held the Lion’s Gate and were using its firepower to devastate the traitors’ fleet, but the anti-orbital batteries and their power sources were slowly being destroyed one by one. Legions of Neverborn manifested on Terra’s soil, joining with the Warmaster’s hordes as they surrounded the Sanctum and slowly choked the life from its remaining defenders. As they swarmed across the Throneworld, they wrote and sang and spoke a single name: the Dark King.

The Bhab Bastion, the nerve center of the defense for so many months, was smashed by Titan fire and taken by the reconstituted Catulan Reavers. Abaddon himself was leading the Sons of Horus toward the Sanctum despite his own bitterness at how their victory had come to pass. Across the wreckage of the Inner Palace, massed Titan battles further scorched the earth and destroyed whatever remained standing. All of the Palatine Bastions were destroyed or overrun one by one. The hordes of desperate refugees stranded outside the Sanctum fled to nowhere in particular, herded by the oncoming waves of traitor forces and daemons. Thousands died of fear, exhaustion, insanity, or simple sensory overload, their minds broken by the omnipresent sound of the world ending around them: the shrieks of twisting metal, the grinding and cracking of crushed and collapsing stone, the endless thunder of massed bombardment weapons, the ceaseless crack and clatter of small arms, and the screams of the millions of dying. Time, space, and matter were becoming malleable as Terra sank deeper into the clutches of the Warp. Walls and floors melted, suppurated, and were shaped by the Neverborn. Chronometers and other timepieces skipped hours and days, ceased to function, or ran backwards. The reddened sun burned endlessly in the dust-choked skies. Soldiers who had been fighting at the Praestor Gate suddenly found themselves on the Via Aquila, fifteen kilometers away. Daemons and traitor Astartes attacked from places they could never have been, upending defensive plans and overrunning loyalist forces.

In the midst of the devastation, Euphrati Keeler and her conclave of faithful struggled to organize any kind of meaningful response, delivering arms, munitions, and scraps of inspiration wherever they could. Keeler herself was coming to terms with what she truly believed about the Emperor, and her dawning realization that one did not necessarily need to believe in him as a god, but instead as the embodiment of a path upon which he had set humanity millennia ago. Humanity did not need understanding, or enlightenment, only blind faith that the Emperor’s designs would be fulfilled as long as they believed in him and played their parts.

Aboard the ''Vengeful Spirit'', Horus was reliving an interview he had given to Mersadie Oliton on the eve of the war with the [[Interex]], discussing his elevation to the office of Warmaster, the nature of his relationship to the Emperor and his brothers, and his dreams of the future that they were forging together. When Kiron Argonis attempted to bring his attention to the siege, he confused it for the compliance of Xenobia, called for the long-dead Maloghurst and Hastur Sejanus, and lapsed back into his fugue state as quickly as he had emerged. Even as he regained some understanding of where he was and what he was doing, he continued to see and speak to men long dead: Sejanus, Nero Vipus, Luc Sedirae, Tarik Torgaddon.

At the Astronomican, Corswain and his contingent of Dark Angels sought a way to relight the psychic beacon. Librarian Vassago was slain, apparently by daemons, and so Corswain turned to four of his Calibanite brethren, all of them psykers themselves, and asked them to serve in Vassago’s stead. Zahariel, the senior of the four, convinced his brothers to obey Corswain’s orders, noting that if Horus won, Caliban and the Order would be extinguished by Chaos. If the loyalists won, however, they would have an opportunity to bring Corswain and his men to their side and to return home to Luther and Caliban in triumph. As Corswain planned and Zahariel plotted, they received word of an approaching host: the Death Guard, led by Typhus, was coming to settle accounts with the I Legion. The Death Guard arrived within hours, not the days the Angels had expected, and began climbing the flanks of the Astronomican, a relentless tide of festering plague and rot. As the Dark Angels met them on the battlements, their willpower was sapped by a psychic malaise wrought by the Herald of Nurgle which lasted until Zahariel opted to take up the mask of Cypher to aid the Angels in fighting off the XIV Legion.

Within the Imperial Dungeon, Malcador began attempting to draw the Emperor out of his psychic war against the legions of Chaos, recognizing that the time had come for him to stand up from the Golden Throne and fight like a man, not a god. The Emperor couldn’t hear him over the constant waves of pain being produced by his mental battles with Horus, the Chaos gods, and the ceaseless tides of Neverborn surging against the Webway gate. When he received no immediate response, Malcador withdrew to his own labors: coordinating what was left of the defense within the Palace, overseeing the activities of his chosen agents, and attempting to reunite Jaghatai Khan’s soul with his shattered body. This latter was a task at which he’d been laboring since the Khagan was brought back from his duel with Mortarion at the Lion’s Gate, without success. While waiting on the Emperor’s response, he gathered himself for another attempt, and this time seemingly succeeded in drawing the Khan’s soul back to its corpus, only to realize that he had not accomplished this apparent impossibility. The Emperor had roused from his work, and said only one thing: “I cannot fight alone.”

In response, Malcador summoned Vulkan, Dorn, Sanguinius, and Constantin Valdor. These four were the last pillars of strength upon which the Emperor could count, and even they had their own trials and concerns now. Vulkan was still trudging through the Webway, his body reknitting from the devastation wrought upon it by Magnus. Sanguinius was exhausted and severely injured from his battles with Angron and Ka’Bandha. Dorn was at a loss; his fortress was in ruins and his defensive plans no longer viable, and for the first time in his life he was unsure of what to do next. Constantin Valdor was hunting down and killing the daemons who had infiltrated the Sanctum, while also concocting his own contingencies in case the Emperor failed. Nevertheless, all four heeded the summons. There, they were told the plan. Anabasis, it was called. The Emperor would board the ''Vengeful Spirit'' now that its shields were down, and there he would kill the Warmaster and end the Siege once and for all. Dorn, Vulkan, Sanguinius, and Valdor were to remain on Terra while this took place. All four immediately insisted that they be allowed to accompany their father and lord. The Emperor was angered by their defiance, but Malcador reminded him that they were loyal, and stalwart, and sought only to stand by him in his greatest hour of need, as they had always done. Thus the plan was modified. Valdor, Dorn, and Sanguinius would each choose a company of their finest warriors to join the assault, but while the Praetorian and the Captain-General would be allowed to join him, Sanguinius was to remain behind to serve as the leader and figurehead of the remaining defenders. Vulkan also had to stay, explained Malcador, because if all else failed, then Vulkan would have to trip the dead man’s switch he’d installed in the Throne and destroy Terra before Horus could claim his victory. With Anabasis enacted, other contingencies had to be set into place. The Unspoken Sanction was prepared in case it was needed to supplement Malcador’s strength as he sat upon the Throne. Basilio Fo’s gene-phage was brought up from the Dark Cells of the Palace and readied to be used as the last of all resorts. Finally, as the Emperor rose from the Golden Throne, Malcador took his place, fully aware that this was the last act of devotion he would ever perform for his master and friend. Sanguinius confronted the Emperor as he was arming for the engagement, explaining that he wished to go along. The Emperor’s Companions explained why he was being left behind; he was wounded, grievously so, and the Emperor had wished him to remain behind to keep him safe. Sanguinius countered that he intended to face Horus because of his visions of his death at the Warmaster’s hand. But, he continued, he did not intend to die. As time had come undone around Terra, so, he believed, his death could be averted in this moment.

Just as the Anabasis strike force teleported up to the ''Vengeful Spirit'', a signal was received in the Court of the Hegemon, the new command center established after the fall of Bhab Bastion. The Ultramarines, Dark Angels, and Space Wolves were only nine hours out and needed the Astronomican to light their way. The War Court frantically attempted to alert Anabasis, to no avail. Meanwhile, on the ''Vengeful Spirit'', the Warmaster's trap was sprung. Horus had been feigning his madness and distraction all along, preparing himself for the final confrontation he knew was coming. Now that the shields were down and the Emperor had taken his bait, he cast off his shrouds and revealed himself as Horus Ascended, the avatar of the Chaos Gods. By his will, the ''Spirit'' itself turned on the loyalist invaders and began corrupting their minds and senses. The Emperor’s own bodyguard of Custodians were almost instantly ensnared and turned upon their own master, defying their gene-bred loyalty to him. The Emperor was forced to kill thirty-nine of his Companions before he could regain enough focus and will to break through Horus’ manipulations, and had to expend his own strength and will to free the survivors. The rest of the assault team was scattered across the ship, itself a maze of insanity wrought by the touch of the Ruinous Powers and Horus' own mad will. Rogal Dorn found himself lost in an endless desert for what seemed like centuries, tempted by whispers from Khorne as his identity slowly eroded away. Constantin Valdor and his men landed in the midst of a pit of daemons, their focus sapped as they fought through the neverending tide of warpspawn. The Blood Angels were the only element to strike as intended, and only a quarter of the assault force arrived where they were supposed to. Nevertheless, Sanguinius and his sons fought their way through the Vengeful Spirit with fury and skill, using the Great Angel’s intimate knowledge of the ship to cripple it as precisely as possible. On the Golden Throne, wracked with the pain of containing eternity, Malcador saw the full scope of Horus’ plan, and struggled to communicate it to those who might yet help avert the Emperor’s death and the end of the Imperium. Kyril Sindermann, Boetharch Hellick Mauer, Garviel Loken, and Euphrati Keeler found themselves drawn to the Hall of Leng, the Emperor’s greatest repository of secrets, searching for something concealed in its depths. In the depths of Collection 888, they found themselves confronted by a single phrase, repeated over and over: the Dark King. They then found a hatch that the Hall’s archivist swore had never been there before. When Loken opened it, he found himself walking the decks of the Vengeful Spirit. He ordered the others to remain behind before sealing the hatch and reboarding the ship that had been his home for two centuries, preparing for the final confrontation with his traitorous father.

Ezekyle Abaddon found himself the master of a legion that no longer cared to listen to any masters save their own lust for blood and death. His orders were ignored or brushed off as the captains of the Legion surged toward the Sanctum, sensing final victory in their grasp. Even as he grew increasingly furious with his wayward brothers and heartsick by the devastation they were wreaking upon Terra, he learned that the ''Vengeful Spirit'''s shields were down and came as close to panic as he had ever been. He attempted to recall the XVI Legion to return to the flagship and defend their father, only for most of the Legion's captains to ignore his orders, while most of those who responded derided his concern and insulted him as a coward and a petulant child. Nevertheless, he was able to assemble a small force to return to the ''Spirit''.

As Ollanius Persson and his small band of unlikely allies wended their way deeper into the forgotten depths beneath the Imperial Palace, they revealed themselves to the others one by one. Ollanius explained his Perpetual nature and his falling out with the Emperor at the Tower of Babel, while Actaea revealed herself as Cyrene Valantion, reforged as an artificial Perpetual after her death at the hands of the Custodes and, so she claimed, enlightened as to the true nature of the Warp. Meanwhile, the Alpha Legionnaire accompanying her explained his mission to John Grammaticus. At the outset of the Heresy, Dorn had created at least six hidden pathways out of the Palace in case the worst should come to pass. The Alpha Legion had located one of these passages and had planted reserves of legionaries and materiel caches deep beneath the Palace to exploit this opening. These legionaries had all been hypno-conditioned with a variety of plans devised by Alpharius and Omegon, each activated by a different code word. “Sagittary” would trigger loyalty to Horus, while “Xenophon” would command them to fight for the Emperor. “Paramus” would order them to bring down both sides in a case of mutual annihilation, while “Thisbe” would trigger a full evacuation and “Orphaeus” would command them to focus on Chaos, either to defeat it or to master it. The Legionnaire then revealed his true identity and allegiance. He was First Captain Ingo Pech, and he had recognized that Horus had to be stopped in order to prevent the extinction of humanity. He had been sent to activate "Xenophon", only for Actaea to intercept him and hijack his mission by using her psyker talents to trigger "Orphaeus" instead. When a stunned Grammaticus asked what her plan was, Pech explained that she intended to turn Horus upon Chaos itself, using his Warp-borne power to enslave and master it and thereby end the war. As part of this plan, she needed both Ollanius and the athame he was carrying, since the knife in his hands was the only thing that might still wound Horus. He then asked Grammaticus to stop Actaea, which would also mean killing him due to the hypno-conditioning, and Grammaticus agreed. After they had infiltrated the Palace, Grammaticus clamped a limpet mine to Pech’s chest and confronted Actaea, who explained that she had been sent by Erda as a second weapon of last resort: if Ollanius couldn’t stop the Emperor, she would stop Horus. She agreed to be psychically leashed to the group’s psyker Katt, but Pech was left behind, since she could not undo his hypno-conditioning. They successfully infiltrated the Sanctum Imperialis, but were captured and brought before Vulkan, who remembered Grammaticus from their encounter on Macragge years before. When Ollanius asked to speak with the Emperor, Vulkan informed him that he was already aboard the ''Vengeful Spirit''. As he considered what to do with these unlikely intruders, Khalid Hassan noted that he had found a card in Leetu’s tarot deck that the prototype Astartes swore had not been there when he entered the Palace: the Dark King. A horrified Actaea revealed its true meaning to all present. The Dark King was a name that had been whispered in thousands of languages since before the rise of humanity. It was the name of a god yet unborn, a god of the Warp who would be forged from the clay of Horus Lupercal and birthed in the annihilation of Terra and humanity, just as Slaanesh had risen from the destruction of the Eldar empire thousands of years prior. This was the true endgame of the Siege and of Chaos.

==Duel of the Emperor and Horus==
[[file:Horus and his Daddy.jpeg|thumb|middle|400px|If you haven't seen this image yet, you must be new. Like, really fucking new.]]
Like with any truly epic event, the siege only ended with the most motherfuckingest duel in the entire 40k fluff: the Emperor of Mankind against Horus, the most favoured of the Primarchs and the living avatar of the Chaos Gods. If the Horus Heresy was the most important of a series of events, if the siege was the single most epic of those events, then the duel is the defining moment of the fluff and affected everything else that came after it.

Dorn, Sanguinius, Valdor, and the Emperor, along with what forces they could bring, teleported aboard Horus's battlebarge to force an end to the conflict. It was Sanguinius who found Horus first. [https://youtu.be/L63In39n86c?t=72 Horus hits 3 times, wounds 2.667 times, 1.33 after saves and IWND takes that down to 1 wounds at start of next turn. Sanguinius doesn't get the charge, so he hits 4 times, wounds 3.556 times, 1.185 after saves and IWND takes that down to 0.852 wounds at start of next turn.] The angelic Lord of Baal, beloved of the Primarchs, died just as the Emperor arrived.

During their ensuing epic and titanic duel, the Emperor could not bear to kill his most beloved son. So, Horus had managed to mortally wound him (despite the Big E being a nigh-unkillable Perpetual) and would have finished him off, if not for the intervention of one Perpetual Guardsman (Oll Perrson/Ollanius Pius)/Imperial Fist/Custodian. He jumped in front of Horus as he was about to strike the final blow, and was flayed with a glance. The Emperor, witnessing how far his most favored son had fallen, decided "Fuck this" and focused all of His remaining psychic power into one massive and final Kamehameha that LITERALLY DELETED HORUS'S SOUL FROM EXISTENCE!

Although the Emperor managed to win and kill Horus, he was so badly wounded in the end he needed to be on 24/7 life support just to survive. So really when you come down to it, it was a draw; Chaos had been stopped then but only at an unthinkable cost to the Imperium.

==/tg/ Connection==
What, besides the fact that ''''' it's the most important event in the 40k universe?''''' Fine.

The Siege of Terra is also the theme for the [[Horus Heresy#The Board Game|Horus Heresy board game]], in which you reenact the Siege itself. There. Happy? (Not really.)

===The fa/tg/uy's explanation of the Siege Of Terra (for Dummies and BL Editors)===
[[File:Loyalists vs. Traitors.jpg|thumb|middle|700px|Some serious Daddy problems.]]
The main rule of warfare: As the number of combatants increases, the resemblance to complete uncontrolled insanity approaches infinity. And then you have to take into account the terrain...

Basically, you start with a planet that's been nuked, polluted, and generally lived in for a few hundred thousand years too long. Everyone on it is fighting everyone else, constantly. Your basic unit of land is the Bunker, Vault 101 style. There isn't any natural plant life left so all the oxygen is made in vats with the food. ''Luckily'' this means you can build anywhere that isn't intensely radioactive and hence fight over those areas. Get Mega-City-One, nuke it, and rebuild it a few times, and then you start to understand.

Then the Emperor comes along and manages against all odds to conquer the place. Suddenly everyone isn't killing and dying all the time, and a population boom happens. So Emps organized the largest set of public works since the first colony ships. He rebuilds huge areas of the planet and creates the Imperial Palace, the Astronomican, and a buttload more of cool shit besides. And what he gets is effectively one giant city, the second largest (after Commorragh) in the universe. "Huge" just doesn't do it justice as a description. Neither does "labyrinthine", "overpopulated", or "Gothic nightmare". And this New Terra was mostly just thrown over the original foundations of whatever was there like a pile of gold bricks onto a rat maze. There are bunkers and emplacements still around that date back to the War Against The Men of Iron and even before.

Then the Heresy came, and the Emperor says to Dorn "Fortify this fucking madhouse". So now everything that didn't have a gun emplacement before does now, everywhere. Dorn walled in half the doors and windows, put hundreds of AA batteries on every roof, filled entire rooms with concrete just for a bit of reinforcement, built hundreds of miles of trenches, redoubts, bastions, emplacements, and backup walls, conscripted half the population into the army (and half of ''that'' into the engineer corps), and generally panicked because all of this would only ever be necessary if the solar system's defenses (the best in the galaxy bar none) have failed.

Then Horus arrives in orbit. He's punched through the space defenses at massive cost, but the war in space is far from won, and the Palace is just a flat no-fly zone, so he can't just pick and choose landing areas. So he bombards everything his ships can reach, fills the sky with Drop Pods, and tries to march on it.

This is when Rule #1 kicks in and everything immediately gets megafucked for both sides. Ruined streets, trenches, and bunkers make navigating a nightmare, communications are somewhere between impossible and actively detrimental, drop pods and gunships are shot down immediately or land off-target, plans and backup plans fall apart in seconds, daemons run amok, and the Primarchs are either constantly trying to out-Tactical-Genius each other or are too in the thick of it to relay any commands, so no one has a fucking clue what's actually going on in the big picture. It's Stalingrad on a continental scale, but without even the merest hint of sanity and a thousand Space Marines charging into every breach. The inclusion of cackling daemons, rampaging renegade Guardsmen and abhumans, and bellowing daemon engines doesn't help the situation, nor does the fact that the guy ostensibly in charge of the Siege (Horus) is growing increasingly detached from reality.

So it takes roughly 10 minutes of this menial bullshit for a load of the Chaos forces to get bored and just decide "Fuck It, Let's Just Wreck The Place". So now everything makes even less sense: entire Legions are ignoring sensible objectives to go on the Chaos Marine equivalent of a bender. The Emperor's Children and the Night Lords rape, murder, and pillage the civilians of Terra so hard that even 10,000 years later they still live in fear at the memory, while the World Eaters are tearing around and hacking and slashing at anything they think might bleed. Only the Iron Warriors, the Death Guard, and the Sons of Horus are wholeheartedly tearing at the Palace, dedicated to rubbing it in Dorn's face like a bitch no matter what (and even then, the Iron Warriors would ultimately decide "fuck this" and leave). And to the horror of the loyalists, they're still succeeding. Brick by brick, the greatest military stronghold in the galaxy is falling.

Which sounds great for Chaos were it not for the simple fact it wasn't falling quickly enough. It was taking days to advance inches at massive cost, and Guilliman was en route with reinforcements, with Russ and the Lion and the remains of their Legions right behind him. If the siege wasn't ended before they got there, the traitors would likely lose. So Horus put all his cards on the table and lowered his battle barge's shields, goading the Emperor (who didn't know about the reinforcements - or maybe he did and was enacting a much greater scheme, see below) on board to hopefully kill him and force the defenders into a rout. Everything else is history.

The short story "The Board is Set" seemed to indicate that the Emperor and Malcador knew about the reinforcing loyalists from at least the beginning of the siege and were fully aware of the siege's outcome up to and including the Emperor's ascension to the Golden Throne, possibly even seeing the future all the way to the events of the Era Indomitus. It also seemed to imply that Horus lowering his shield may have been so he could teleport down and attack the Emperor, not realizing it was Malcador on the throne. Possibly the most epic level of Just As Planned.
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[[Category: Warhammer 40,000 Battles]]

Siege of Terra

2023-03-03T19:24:51Z

2607:FB91:119A:44DF:C8AD:B884:FF14:8318: /* The End and the Death */

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{{Infobox 40k Campaign
|title=Siege of Terra
|image=[[File:The-Siege-Of-Terra Angron.jpg|400px]]
|attacker= Traitor Legions
|defender= [[Imperium of Man]]
|commander1= [[Horus]], [[Angron]], [[Mortarion]], [[Fulgrim]], [[Perturabo]], [[Magnus the Red]], [[Zardu Layak]], Kelbor Hal
|commander2= The [[Emperor]], [[Sanguinius]], [[Rogal Dorn]], [[Jaghatai Khan]], [[Vulkan]], [[Malcador the Sigillite]], [[Constantin Valdor]]
|date=0014.M31
|scale=Planetary
|theatre=[[Horus Heresy]]
|strength1= [[Sons of Horus]], [[Death Guard]], [[World Eaters]], [[Emperor's Children]], [[Thousand Sons]], [[Iron Warriors]], [[Word Bearers]], [[Night Lords]], Traitor Army forces, [[Dark Mechanicum]], dozens of Traitor Knight houses, Traitor Titan legions, daemons
|strength2= [[Imperial Fists]], [[Blood Angels]], [[White Scars]], [[Adeptus Custodes]], [[Sisters of Silence]], [[Knights-Errant]], Imperial Army, Adeptus Arbites, dozens of Knight Houses, loyalist Titan Legions (Gryphonicus, Ignatum, Solaria, Atarus, Amaranth, Ordo Sinister)
|casualties1= Massive Heretic Astartes casualties, massive Traitor Army losses, massive Traitor Titan losses, massive Dark Mechanicum losses. Horus slain. Angron, Mortarion and Magnus banished.
|casualties2= Massive military and civilian losses. Malcador the Sigillite slain. Sanguinius slain. Emperor mortally wounded and interred into Golden Throne.
|status= Pyrrhic Loyalist Victory
|outcome= Traitors driven from Terra and into the Eye of Terror. Death of Horus and crippling of the Emperor. Great Scouring Begins.
}}

{{topquote|[[Horus|He]] waits no longer. It begins now.|[[Sanguinius]] on the 13th of Secundus, 014.M31}}
The '''Siege of Terra''' was the end of the [[Horus Heresy]] in [[Warhammer 40,000]]. If the Horus Heresy can be considered the most important series of events in the 40k universe (*cough* [[War in Heaven]]), then the Siege of Terra itself could be considered the single most important event. It is also possibly the most fucking awesome event: brothers fighting brothers, Primarchs (read Sanguinius) soloing Titans and Greater Daemons, continent-spanning trench battles, the mighty guns of Titans blowing mountain-sized fortifications to shreds, Imperial Army soldiers leading charges against the traitorous forces even though they know it's suicide and [[Ollanius Pius]] making a desperate stand against impossible odds.

It was [[Horus]]'s big attempt to off his daddy and to be the true Emperor of the galaxy (for [[Chaos]] of course!). He brought a load of his traitor legions, millions of corrupt Imperial Army personnel and mutants, the part of the Mechanicus that had gone over to his side, and a whole load of daemons to boot. On his side, the [[Emperor]] had three legions, his [[Adeptus Custodes|Custodians]], and the loyal Imperial Army regiments of Terra and you know what? The Emperor went and won anyway (granted it was because the Emperor offed Horus before his legions could crack the Imperial palace but still, victory for the home team! (Though unless incoming fluff contradicts it, Horus only invited The Showdown as he knew his forces wouldn't win before hordes of fresh and angry Smurfs and Dark Angels arrived at his rear.))

==The Solar War==

Dorn began fortifying [[Terra]] immediately after getting word of the Heresy, knowing that it would always be Horus's eventual goal. Despite being removed from the [[Thramas Crusade|larger]] [[Battle of Phall|battles]] of the Heresy, the [[Solar System]] was touched by the conflict, with Mars erupting into [[Dark Mechanicus|open rebellion]] and numerous [[Alpha Legion|sleeper agents and cults]] trying to destabilise the Throneworld. Despite all of this, Dorn managed to do the best he could, turning Terra into the most heavily fortified system in the Imperium. He even managed to blunt part of the traitor advance at the Beta-Garmon cluster before getting ready for the final rumble they had known was coming.
[[File:Dorn-hh.jpg|300px|right]]
Terra was unique in that it had two artificial Mandeville points inside the Solar system itself, created during the [[Dark Age of Technology]]. Dorn fortified the likely approaches from the outer edge of the system and built up huge defenses around the two internal jump points. The traitors, however, were busy too: infiltrators and covert operatives sabotaged loyalist assets across the system. The [[Iron Warriors]] were the first Astartes into the breach, breaking the [[Warp]] on the First of Primus, 014.M31, using huge up-armoured [[Space Hulk|Space Hulks]] as fireships to wear down the defenses before sending their main fleet through to engage the combined Fists and Scars fleets. The inner system conflict went on for a bit, with the loyalists managing to hold out enough to slow down the advance at least for a little while.

However, under Magnus's direction, the traitors turned the Shrine of Unity comet into a vast Warp gate that allowed Horus, Angron, and Fulgrim's fleets to jump right past most of the rings of defense Dorn had come up with. On the ''[[Phalanx]]'', Dorn was preoccupied with a daemon incursion and could do little to stop the huge fleets that were now mobbing for Terra. The Martian traitors, free from the blockade that had hemmed them in for years, joined up with Horus. The Solar War had barely lasted a month, far far less than the loyalists had hoped for. The rest of the loyalist fleets, knowing they could never hope to fight even a fraction of the vast traitor armada, regrouped on the edge of the system, along with the ''Phalanx'', waiting for the moment they could make an effective strike against Horus. There were early plans for the Emperor to be evacuated to the ''Phalanx'' and escape Terra, but these were made by people unaware of what Big-E was [[Webway|doing in the basement of the palace]].

==The Siege Begins==
[[File:Map-2800x1983.jpg|500px|right|thumb|Map of the Siege.]]
{{topquote|'''Father! I have come for you!'''|[[Angron]] upon making planetfall, met by snickering from Fulgrim, 15th of Quartus, 014.M31}}

With the space around Terra uncontested, most of the traitor armada settled into orbit above the Palace. On the thirteenth of Secundus, they began bombarding the Aegis, the vast shield network protecting the entire Palace complex. Unlike regular void shields, the Aegis consisted of multiple overlapping layers of shields that individually regenerated as fast as they could be depleted by the bombardment. On the ground, the Palace was protected by colossal networks of walls and bastions, static defenses, and vast numbers of Imperial Army units bolstered by hordes of press-ganged conscripts. Unknown to almost everyone, the Imperial Palace was also the focal point of the telesthetic ward, a psychic ward generated by the Emperor that would royally fuck up any daemon that set foot near it, daemon Primarchs included. At the start of the siege, the Emperor's power was such that the ward was able to cover all of Terra, and was so potent that any daemon which set foot on Terra would likely suffer a True Death.

The rest of Terra wasn't so lucky. Barring a few isolated holdouts, the rest of the planet was virtually defenseless. It should be noted that if the goal was to destroy Terra wholesale, it could have been easily accomplished by [[Exterminatus]]-level weaponry. Perturabo, as the only non-Chaos-ified Primarch, insisted on doing exactly that and grew increasingly angry at what he saw as an irrational and wasteful goal. But Horus was insistent that the Emperor had to be slain in person, and so the Palace had to be reduced the old-fashioned way. In all fairness, one must also ask if Exterminatus was even possible when a being like the Emperor was on Terra, to say nothing of the void shields and defenses on Terra itself (with the answer depending on how much Ext-grade weaponry and warheads the Chaos forces could bring along). And to be fair, Perty did suggest striking directly at the sun as Kor Phaeron had done at [[Battle of Calth|Calth]]. Destroying Sol would indirectly and undoubtedly fuck up Terra beyond saving.

Unable to use Exterminatus grade weaponry, Perturabo used the fleet's bombardment to test the Aegis' abilities. Within two weeks, Perturabo developed a bombardment pattern designed to serially weaken the Aegis to the point that fighters and bombers could begin attacking the Palace's anti-ship and anti-air batteries, which would allow full deployment of ground forces. Magnus also explained that if the traitors made the Star of Chaos around the Palace (with the lines intersecting where the Emperor sat within the Sanctum Imperialis) and spilled sufficient amounts of blood, the telesthetic ward would weaken enough that the Neverborn could safely walk upon Terra. Horus ordered the Traitor Legions to remain on their vessels while this process played out. The daemon primarchs were kept in orbit, safe from the Emperor's wards, although this meant that Angron had to be imprisoned in the maze Perturabo had built to contain Vulkan to stop him from [[Leeroy Jenkins]]ing the whole thing as he had done at [[Battle of Isstvan III|Istvaan III]].

Hordes of mutants, beastmen, cultists, and traitor Army units were thrown at the conventional defenses. Entire wings of aircraft dueled above the Palace. Precision bombardments gradually weakened minute sections of the Aegis long enough for bombers to get through and destroy the projectors. The Dark Mechanicum landed siege camps at 8 points around the Palace, partly to surround it but also to act as the focus for the ritual that would enable the Warp to take a foothold on the surface of the Throneworld. The Dark Mechanicum also began building massive siege towers to get Traitor Legionaries on the Palace walls. The Astartes were held in reserve on both sides whilst the more conventional forces softened each other up. The Death Guard were the first traitor Astartes to land on Terra, with the Khan and the White Scars riding forth on jetbikes and aircraft to meet them and wreck the Dark Mechanicum's siege camps. The Night Lords were the first Astartes to breach the walls of the Palace, albeit in small numbers; this attack also cost them their ''de facto'' commander, Gendor Skraivok. Sanguinius himself descended to help the mortal forces, acting as force multiplier, decoy, and morale booster.

Unfortunately, by that point, enough bloodshed had occurred that the perimeter of the Emperor's wards were reduced to just a few meters from the walls of the Palace, meaning daemons could now manifest on Terra. Horus responded by sending the World Eaters as the second wave, and this time Angron was leading the charge. Recognizing the outworks were about to be overrun, Sanguinius used an impending sally by the Legio Solaria to evacuate the surviving conscripts through the Helios Gate, while Legio Solaria destroyed the remaining siege tower. The loyalists had managed to repulse the first serious attempts on the Eternity Wall, but were now completely cut off from the rest of Terra, surrounded on all sides.

==The Lion's Gate Spaceport Falls==
[[File:LatD-Map-3309x2420.jpg|500px|right|thumb|Map of the Lion's Gate Space Port.]]
While the Death Guard, Emperor's Children, and World Eaters each hammered away at a different section of the Palace walls, the traitors' first major effort at cracking the Palace itself was aimed at the Lion's Gate spaceport, the largest and tallest spaceport on Terra. It reached so high into the atmosphere that void craft could dock at its upper levels, meaning that the traitor forces could more easily shuttle in reinforcements and materiel if they captured it. Horus tasked the Iron Warriors with taking the space port. In turn, Perturabo assigned [[Warsmith]] Kroeger to lead the assault, under the logic that Dorn would be expecting Pert to command such an important offensive personally and wouldn't be expecting whatever plans Kroeger came up with. Dorn assigned Seneschal [[Fafnir Rann]] to lead the defense of the spaceport rather than First Captain [[Sigismund]], since he was still angry with Sigismund for listening to Euphrati Keeler instead of obeying his orders. Kroeger went straight for the throat, launching a massive combined-arms assault directly on the port with backup from the World Eaters and Emperor's Children, though the latter quickly got bored and left after taking a bunch of prisoners for [[Rape|unspecified purposes]]. Though the Imperial Fists held off the initial attack, Warsmith Forrix and a thousand Iron Warriors managed to infiltrate the port by using renegade Imperial Army units as literal meatshields. To aid the attack, the Dark Mechanicum inserted a technophagic virus into the spaceport's systems, and Zardu Layak, Abaddon, and Typhus performed a Nurglite ritual to infiltrate the [[Daemon Prince]] Cor'bax Utterblight behind the Emperor's psychic wards.

The Fists drove back several consecutive assaults from the Iron Warriors and World Eaters, but the technophage was screwing their sensors and comms all to hell and gone, seriously complicating efforts to coordinate the defense, and Forrix and his infiltrators were tying up troops that were desperately needed elsewhere. Rann finally called Dorn for backup and Dorn scraped up an additional three thousand Fists under Sigismund, which were literally all the troops he could spare at that point. Despite Rann's best efforts, the balance inevitably tipped in the traitors' favor. Dorn arrived on the scene just in time to order a general withdrawal from the spaceport to the inner defenses, though not before he killed Zardu Layak after a brief duel. With the spaceport firmly in the traitor hands, Perturabo started unloading Titans and consolidating his position.

Meanwhile, Euphrati Keeler and the Custodian Amon Tauromachian had been tapped by Malcador to investigate strange apparitions occurring behind the Palace walls. They eventually deduced that this was a daemon exploiting the faith of Imperial cultists to manifest itself inside the Emperor's psychic defenses. One cult, in particular, called the Lightbearers, had been deceived into worshipping Nurgle instead of the Emperor. After Cor'bax used the Lightbearers to physically manifest himself inside the Palace, Amon, Euphrati, and Malcador teamed up to slay the daemon. When Amon suggested that they should purge the rest of the Emperor's worshippers to prevent another such incident, Malcador answered that he would continue to let them exist until the Emperor himself said otherwise, in the hopes that he could [[Chaos_Gods_of_Law#God-Emperor_of_Mankind|weaponize their faith against the Chaos gods]].

==Battle at the Saturnine Wall==
[[File:Siege_of_Terra1.jpg|thumb|middle|500px|Just 0.000001% of 0.000001% of the Siege of Terra.]]

With the Lion's Gate spaceport lost, Dorn was now under tremendous pressure as he continued to coordinate the defense in the face of the unrelenting traitor assaults. Nearly all the Traitor Legions were committed to the battle at this point, with the Death Guard, Iron Warriors, Thousand Sons, Emperor's Children, and the Sons of Horus engaged in heavy fighting at the Anterior Barbican, a series of six fortresses protecting the Lion's Gate, while the World Eaters and the more Chaos corrupted Army regiments went on a rampage throughout the Palace's outer districts, tying down loyalist reinforcements in the Sprawl Magnifican. Additionally, the Lion's Gate spaceport allowed the Dark Mechanicum to begin landing Traitor Titans Legions inside the Palace walls, as well as armoured reinforcements for the Traitor Legions and Army. In response, Dorn could only muster his own legion, plus the Blood Angels and White Scars and their primarchs, along with what Army and Mechanicus units were stationed in the Inner Palace.

While taking a brief break in an abandoned garden, Dorn encountered Kyril Sindermann, who made an offhand comment about the Saturnine Wall trembling under the weight of the bombardment. From this, Dorn deduced that something was wrong with the defenses in that section and investigated. What he found was a potential catastrophe. The ceaseless bombardments from the traitor forces had caused the entire Imperial Palace and the tectonic plates on which it rested to shift by eight centimeters, opening a small but detectable fault line which had been previously sealed beneath the Saturnine Wall.

Certain that Perturabo would notice this fault and attempt to exploit it, Dorn began concocting a counterattack. Before laying out his plans, he called a council of war with Constantin Valdor and Malcador to explain to them his next move: he would have to start allowing parts of the Palace defenses to fall, as he simply no longer had the numbers or the materiel to hold everything. He identified four key parts of the defense that could not be allowed to fall to the enemy - the Colossi Gate, the Gorgon Bar, the Saturnine Wall, and the Eternity Wall spaceport - then chose the one he could most afford to lose based on his calculations, which was the spaceport. Though he would put on a show of defending it, Dorn knew that the port ultimately had to be sacrificed, even though it meant letting the traitor forces control both of the Palace's main spaceports. He assigned Sanguinius to hold the Gorgon Bar and Jaghatai Khan to hold the Colossi; he would personally oversee the defense of the Saturnine Wall and lay a trap in the hopes of bagging a significant enemy target, perhaps even Horus himself.

Perturabo had indeed spotted the weakness at the Saturnine Wall, though he had initially planned to use it only as a last-ditch ace in the hole, content to break the Anterior Barbican at either Colossi Gate or Gorgon Bar with what they had already landed, or wait for the World Eaters to inevitably overrun the Eternity Wall port and allow them to land reinforcements to fully overwhelm the two fortresses. Abaddon convinced him to instead make it a focal point of the attack through a combination of flattery and unsubtle goading, suggesting that Perturabo's victory over Dorn would be tainted if it was won with the help of the Neverborn. Though the Lord of Iron nearly caved his face in for it, Abaddon won the argument and immediately set out to assemble a spear-tip strike. Secretly, he was also hoping to win a "clean" victory without resorting to the use of daemons and sorcery, as he believed that using the Warp to win a war was beneath his dignity as an Astartes.

The battles for the Colossi and the Gorgon Bar escalated in scale and intensity. The defenders at the Colossi Gate were plagued by legions of flies that seemed to manifest from nowhere, forcing them to wear bulky protective equipment that lessened their effectiveness. Sanguinius was suffering under the weight of his psychic visions, which were coming with increasing frequency and intensity; nevertheless, he continued to fight on the front lines, knowing that his mere appearance was heartening the defenders and raising their morale. At one point he [[Awesome|singlehandedly killed a Warlord Titan]], then stared down its three accompanying Warhounds until they turned tail and fled. At the Colossi, Jaghatai and the White Scars led a few massed jetbike charges into the ranks of the Death Guard, destroying their siege engines, killing their Neverborn reinforcements, inflicting casualties, and generally delaying the XIV Legion's inexorable advance. The Adeptus Custodes also engaged the Death Guard, with Constantin Valdor himself taking the field. Their Emperor-forged nature proved especially potent against the Warp-corrupted Marines of the XIV and their daemonic allies. Ahriman and the Thousand Sons attempted to literally melt the Colossi bastion with sorcery, only to be driven back by three White Scars Stormseers who channeled the captured weather underneath the Palace's void shielding into an immense lightning storm.

At the Saturnine Wall, Dorn had devised a simple but cunning trap. Its cellars and tunnels had been fortified and transformed into a series of Zones Mortalis, and he had assembled a five-hundred-man strong force of veteran Astartes, broken into seven kill teams led by [[Sigismund]], [[Nathaniel Garro]], Endryd Haar of the World Eaters, [[Garviel Loken]], Bel Sepatus of the Blood Angels, Helig Gallor of the Death Guard, and [[Maximus Thane]] of the Imperial Fists. He had also enlisted the [[Technoarcheologist]] [[Arkhan Land]] to help him mend the fault line; Land devised a quick-setting form of rockcrete which could be pumped into the fault to seal it permanently. Dorn didn't know who would be leading the assault, but he was hoping for Horus himself. Once cut off and isolated inside the Palace walls, even the Warmaster would be ''relatively'' easy prey. On the other side, Abaddon was able to convince Fulgrim to lend him the entire Emperor's Children Legion for the assault on the Saturnine and wrangled three companies of the Sons of Horus to form the spear-tip. The III Legion would [[DISTRACTION CARNIFEX|attack from the front as a diversion]], using three [[Donjon Pattern Siege Engine|Donjon Pattern Siege Engines]] borrowed from the Dark Mechanicum, while Abaddon and his Astartes burrowed up from beneath with [[Tunneling_Transport_Vehicles#Termite|Termite assault drills]].

[[Just as planned|They walked straight into Dorn's trap]]. When the first Sons of Horus emerged from their assault drills, they were ambushed by Dorn's kill teams, who achieved total surprise. The assault force was ''DESTROYED IN DETAIL'', which is to say that of the hundreds of elite combatants committed to the attack (which included the famed Justaerin Terminators and Catulan Reavers of the 1st Company, all four members of the Mournival leading their respective companies, as well as two more veteran companies led by Tybalt Marr and Lev Goshen respectively) the number of survivors could literally be counted on one hand with fingers to spare. Garro decapitated Falkus Kibre of the Justaerin, while Loken killed Tybalt Marr, [[Horus Aximand]], and Tormageddon. Just as the loyalists were starting to relax, Abaddon and a hundred Justaerin Terminators teleported into their midst, triggering a giant brawl. Abaddon went on a killing spree, but eventually absorbed a series of crippling blows from Bel Sepatus and Endryd Haar. Though he managed to kill them both, he wound up pinned under Haar's corpse, with Garro poised to deliver the killing stroke. Luckily for Abaddon, [[Plot Armor|he was teleported to safety at the last moment]], as the Chaos Gods had already chosen him to be the new Warmaster after the death of Horus. Arkhan Land began pumping hundreds of thousands of liters of his rockcrete formula into the fault. Though he was briefly interrupted by Horus Aximand, the plan went off without a hitch, and the fault was permanently sealed. Some of the remaining Sons of Horus had yet to emerge from their assault drills and became trapped in the rockcrete as it set, ensuring that they would be entombed beneath the Palace forever. Barring any future statements to the contrary, it appears that literally the only survivor of this deflated, wilted bit of tactical flailing, once laughably referred to as a spear-thrust, was the very [[Abaddon|armless failure]] that advocated so strongly for it. [[Fail|Oops]].

Aboveground, Fulgrim had unleashed a full-scale assault against the Saturnine Wall, leading off with the Donjon siege engines, which had been modified with immense [[Sonic Weaponry|sonic weapons]] similar to those of the [[Kakophoni (Emperor's Children)|Kakophoni]]. The engines seriously disrupted the defense at first, but the Imperial Fists and Army garrison were able to rally and funnel the III Legion into a chokepoint. Fulgrim got into a duel with Sigismund atop the Wall. Though the Templar was able to land a few hits, Fulgrim's daemonically enhanced strength and speed gave him the upper hand. Before he could kill Sigismund, Dorn intervened and proceeded to pummel Fulgrim badly enough that the Phoenician threw a tantrum and took his legion and went home, abandoning the Siege entirely and costing Team Horus one of its most significant force multipliers. Fulgrim left fifty-six of his best warriors behind in an attempt to kill Dorn, but he and Sigismund were able to defeat them all, including [[Eidolon]] and Von Kalda. The assault wound up costing the Emperor's Children no less than eighteen thousand Astartes, along with all three of the irreplaceable siege engines.

This great victory had been purchased with an equally great loss: the fall of the Eternity Wall spaceport. Despite the garrison's best efforts to hold the port, they were faced with the Chaos-fueled rage of Angron and the World Eaters. Angron issued a demand for the port's defenders to surrender and was met with a concentrated artillery barrage that literally atomized him, though being a daemon prince, he didn't stay down for long. He and his legion immediately assaulted and seized the spaceport, killing everyone present. Many heroes of the Imperium died unheralded deaths at the Eternity Wall, including Knight-Commander Jenetia Krole of the Silent Sisterhood, Prefect Warden Tsutomu of the Adeptus Custodes, High Primary Solar General Saul Niborran, and Captain Camba Diaz of the Imperial Fists (who died holding the line in one of the greatest displays of manliness in the universe). A lone Guardsman named Olly Piers died there also, defending a banner of the Emperor Ascendant against Angron's relentless charge, thus [[Ollanius Pius|establishing the foundation for one of the Imperium's most enduring myths]] after a considerable amount of embellishment at his dying request. Ironically, Piers was a distant descendant of Ollanius Persson.

In the aftermath of these battles, Dorn and Sanguinius took stock of where they stood. The Gorgon Bar had held and would continue to hold for two precious weeks more by Sanguinius' estimate. The repulse at the Saturnine Wall had cost the Traitor Legions dearly. Three hundred of the XVI Legion's elite troops and eighteen thousand Emperor's Children were dead, with Fulgrim and the rest of the III Legion having quit the field. Jaghatai Khan, having held the Colossi, was now preparing to retake the Lion's Gate. Better yet, Sanguinius' prescience had granted him a vision from within the depths of Angron's tortured mind: [[Nuceria]] had been destroyed - not merely razed as Angron and Lorgar had done during the [[Battle of Calth|Shadow Crusade]], but obliterated by orbital bombardment. Dorn and Sanguinius both knew this could mean only one thing: Roboute Guilliman and Lion el'Jonson were on the way along with their legions.

Admiral Niora Su-Kassen, now in command of what remained of the loyalist naval assets in the Solar system, received indications of another fleet approaching from the outer edges of the system. She ordered the new arrivals to announce themselves, and was answered with a hail from [[Corswain]] of the Dark Angels: "We come to stand with Terra."

==Assault on the Mercury Wall and Recapture of the Astronomican==

With the repulse at Saturnine and the fall of the Eternity Wall spaceport, the Siege was entering a new phase. With both of the Imperial Palace's primary spaceports in their hands, the traitor forces began bringing in all their reserves and materiel stores, preparing to overwhelm the loyalists through sheer numbers. Perturabo was still directing the battle more or less singlehandedly at this time until he received a summons from Horus to attend him on the ''Vengeful Spirit''. When the Lord of Iron arrived in Horus' throne room, the Warmaster instructed him to abandon his current battle plan. Instead, he wanted to throw everything they had, including the Titan Legio Mortis, straight at the Mercury Wall, which represented the true beginning of the Imperial Palace. Perturabo demanded to know why Horus wanted to employ such a wasteful and apparently futile strategy, and Horus stated that it would work because he willed it so. Shortly thereafter, Horus sent his equerry to Perturabo with orders to disperse the Iron Warriors among the traitor forces. He followed up this humiliating order by informing Perturabo that Mortarion and the Death Guard would be taking over the IV Legion's positions. Infuriated, Perturabo denounced Horus' alliance with the Ruinous Powers and declared that this was no longer a war of Legions, but a war of foul and unnatural powers in which no true victory could be won. He then bitterly declared that Horus was exactly like the Emperor: both of them had manipulated Perturabo from the very beginning and forced him into a role he despised, that of the ruthless, calculating siege master. With that, he ordered the IV Legion to withdraw from the battlespace. A few diehards chose to remain behind, but nearly the entire legion obeyed their primarch's order. Some of the traitor forces attempted to stop the Iron Warriors as they headed for the exits, but were unsuccessful.

Unbothered, Horus ordered the attack on the Mercury Wall to proceed, spearheaded by Legio Mortis. To counter the Death's Head, the loyalists deployed the Legio Ignatum and a few Titans from Legio Solaria, along with Knight banners from Houses Vyronii, Tyranus, Cadmus, and Konor. A representative of the Mechanicus attempted to convince Ignatum's Titan drivers to flee the battle, as his calculations had shown that defeat was inevitable, but the principes rejected his proposal and walked to war anyway. Also present were a number of other Titans from legions that had been decimated at Beta-Garmon, but many of them refused to join the battle, citing the Titandeath as their reason for remaining out of the fight. This lasted until the engagement between Mortis and Ignatum began, in a vast open space known as the Mercury-Exultant killzone. The traitors were revealed to be using Titans that had been destroyed at Beta-Garmon and elsewhere as cannon fodder; the wrecked Titans had been reanimated via sorcery and now teemed with blight and corruption. Ignatum smashed through these revenants, only to be confronted with the main strength of Legio Mortis. A desperate battle ensued, with dozens of god-engines being destroyed on both sides. Proscribed weapons such as warp and vortex missiles were employed freely, for this was now a battle of annihilation. Recognizing the import of the engagement, the Emperor communicated with a representative of the Ordo Sinister, the commanders of the dreaded Psi-Titans, and ordered him to join the battle. One of their prefects made himself known to Dorn, who agreed to deploy the four available Psi-Titans into the battle. He then took command personally at the Mercury Wall, bringing reinforcements with him. Ambassador Vethorel of the Adeptus Mechanicus approached the Titan crews who had refused to join the battle and showed them images of the reanimated Titans being used by the traitors. Galvanized by the desecration of their fellow god-engines, the Titan crews agreed to rejoin the fight. Vethorel proclaimed them to be a new Legio, the Legio Invigilata. Led by the former Grand Master of Legio Solaria, Invigilata joined Ignatum and the Psi-Titans on the front line. In spite of the loyalists' bravery, the main strength of Ignatum was destroyed by the superior numbers and firepower of Legio Mortis, combined with an orbital bombardment from the traitor fleet. The survivors attempted to rally and continue the fight, but Mortis had reached the Mercury Wall and began to tear it down.

During this battle, Corswain of the Dark Angels was conferring with Admiral Su-Kassen and other leaders of the Imperial fleet. Corswain had been expecting to find the rest of the I Legion already present at Terra and was dismayed to learn that he and the forces under his command were the only Dark Angels in the system. He had brought only ten thousand Astartes and two dozen ships with him, barely enough to make any kind of impact against the enemy forces in orbit. Unwilling to sit by and do nothing, Corswain announced that he intended to recapture the Astronomican, which had fallen into traitor hands and gone dark. Without it, the I and XIII Legions would be unable to reach the system and relieve Terra. Some of the Dark Angels in his fleet, having been subverted by Luther's separatist faction, wanted to assassinate Corswain to avoid being wasted on what they considered a pointless suicide mission. They were talked down by Librarian Vassago, who was a member of their faction but admired Corswain's bravery and nobility. Admiral Su-Kassen agreed to lend them the ''Imperator Somnium'', an immense battle carrier that had served as one of the Emperor's personal flagships, for their attack. The Dark Angels proceeded to use the ''Somnium'' as a sort of fireship. Concealing their own vessels under its tremendous bulk, they rode in with the huge flagship as it drew the fire of the entire traitor fleet, then split away and charged through to the Astronomican before the traitors realized what was happening. The ''Somnium'' died hard, taking many enemy ships with it and inflicting critical damage on the ''Conqueror'' and ''Terminus Est''. The Dark Angels successfully landed at the Astronomican and breached its defenses. They found that the mountain had been overrun by elements of the Emperor's Children and Vassukella, a Daemon Prince of Slaanesh. Despite sustaining heavy casualties, they were able to kill Vassukella and the corrupted Children, reclaiming the Astronomican for the Imperium. Corswain was nearly killed by the psychic backlash of the daemon's death, only to be saved by Vassago. The news that the Astronomican was once again in friendly hands provided a much-needed morale boost to the Imperial forces, though this was offset by the grim news from the Mercury Wall.

Subsidiary combat continued all along the Palace's defensive perimeter, though it was comparatively small in scale when measured against the annihilating fight taking place at the Mercury Wall. The loyalists were beginning to reach the limits of their mental, physical, and spiritual endurance, though some of them took confidence in a new credo: "He protects us as we protect Him." Even so, the loyalists' morale was being further eroded by the malign influence of the Warp. Those who were sensitive to its currents and eddies noted that its strength was waxing as the Siege ground on, working its way through the cracks in the Emperor's wards and battering down the mental defenses of the loyalist troops. Suicides, murders, and desertions spiked as exhausted and despairing soldiers and civilians sought to escape into a paradisaical dreamland. Unfortunately for them, this dreamland was a trap laid by the Emperor's Children to prey on the desperate and fearful. Thousands of unfortunate souls were lured to the Hatay-Antakya Hive, where the III Legion entrapped them in their dreams and "milked" them for their emotions. These activities were disrupted by the arrival of [[Ollanius Pius|Ollanius Persson]] and his band of refugees from Calth, who were seeking to rendezvous with John Grammaticus and his prototype Space Marine bodyguard Leetu. They in turn were aided in their escape by a mysterious woman calling herself "Actaea" and a legionary in scaled armor who identified himself as Alpharius. Together, this unlikely group of allies embarked on an unspecified mission involving the Emperor.

==Second Battle for the Lion's Gate and the Rise of the Emperor's Champion==

With the Mercury Wall breached, the Siege was reaching its endgame. The loyalist forces were being slowly shoved back into the innermost circles of the Palace defenses. Comms were unreliable at best, supplies were running low, and sheer exhaustion and hopelessness were grinding the defenders down. Angron and the World Eaters were loose inside the Palatine, with the Sons of Horus following behind. The Death Guard occupied the Lion's Gate spaceport, taking over after the IV Legion's abrupt departure from the battlespace. As their tainted presence began to warp the port into a twisted mirror of Barbarus, Mortarion established himself in one of its command centers, using his new daemonic powers to amplify the currents of the warp and blanket the Palace in a psychic miasma of despair. The effect was so potent that even Rogal Dorn's legendary resolve was cracking under the weight of Mortarion's malignant influence. He had bent all his prodigious intellect and unmatched engineering skill toward transforming Terra into the mightiest fortress the galaxy had ever seen, and it had not been enough. Without Guilliman and the Lion and their legions, they were doomed to inevitable defeat.

Jaghatai Khan, frustrated by the passivity of static defense, decided to launch a counterattack on the Lion's Gate. His reasoning was sound: should the Dark Angels and Ultramarines arrive to relieve Terra, they would need a place to dock their voidcraft. Moreover, the powerful anti-orbital batteries of the Gate could be turned against the traitor fleet. With his decision made, he quietly assembled the V Legion while his friend and Army liaison Ilya Ravallion scrounged up every functioning tank she could find to support the assault. The Khagan also recruited the [[Orbital Plate|Skye orbital plate]] to serve as a shield against the guns of the traitor fleet, knowing that they would bombard his forces as soon as they were visible. The gathered tanks were formed into a new unit, the First Terran Armoured, and sortied alongside the V Legion, deployed into three massive attack groups. They shouldered their way through the outer defenses easily enough, using the tanks to smash the Death Guard's armored spearheads and deploying Stormseers to wipe out any daemons that manifested themselves. The V Legion's usual tactics of speed and shock power served them well in this stage of the assault, but things became much harder when they reached the spaceport. The battle turned into an attritional slugging match, with two of the three attack groups bogging down almost immediately. Only the group led by the Khagan himself made any headway, tearing through the massed ranks of the XIV Legion and breaching the Gate itself. The fighting grew steadily more desperate; the mortal tank crews were being pushed to their limits and beyond by the nature of the fighting, which required them to remain sealed inside their tanks at all times lest they fall prey to chemical weapons or warp-borne plagues, and the White Scars were stymied by the unnatural resilience of their foes.

As the battle continued to rage throughout the port's lower levels, the Khan infiltrated Mortarion's command center and challenged his brother to a duel. They fought like madmen, with nothing held back, but Mortarion's unnatural strength gave him the edge. He wrecked Jaghatai's armor, broke his arms and ankles, and smashed his face into a pulp. The Khagan stood up, laughing off wounds that should have killed him, and attacked again. He taunted Mortarion relentlessly until the Death Lord became enraged enough to make a mistake. The Khan skewered him, only for Mortarion to recover and bury his scythe in the Warhawk's chest. [[Just as planned|Which was exactly what the Khan had wanted him to do.]] Jaghatai had allowed Mortarion to deliver a killing stroke so that he could deliver one in return. He beheaded his corrupted brother, banishing Mortarion to the Warp and unleashing a psychic shockwave that staggered and disoriented the Death Guard. In the aftermath, Jaghatai succumbed to his wounds, triggering a berserker frenzy in his sons that drove the bewildered Death Guard out of the spaceport. The Khagan was carried out of the spaceport on a Leman Russ, where he was met by Ilya Ravallion. She sensed a spark of life within his broken and ravaged body and immediately had him taken to Malcador, who set his adepts to the task of healing the primarch.

Within the walls of the Palace, chaos reigned. As walls fell and city blocks were blasted into ruin, hordes of civilian refugees and Imperial Army units fled toward the illusory safety of the innermost districts, with the World Eaters and Sons of Horus at their heels. Some garrisons made lonely last stands, hoping to tie down the traitors as long as possible, while others collapsed and were overrun. As Dorn faced the inevitable, he summoned First Captain Sigismund and gave him a simple order: "Hurt them." As Sigismund made for the battlefield, he was greeted by Khalid Hassan, who brought him the Black Sword, an ancient and potent relic weapon forged in Earth's pre-Unification era. Sigismund took up the blade and went out to fulfill his father's orders, sworn now to fight for the Imperium as it would become, not as it had been. He cut down hundreds of traitor champions in single combat. Rumors of the warrior known as the "Black Knight" or "the Emperor's Champion" began spreading across the Palace, heartening loyalists and demoralizing the traitors. Many on both sides sought him out, either to join him or to kill him. Sigismund finally encountered Kharn, who challenged him to a rematch. Sigismund's cold, impassive fighting style disturbed the World Eater, who furiously tried to provoke a reaction in the First Captain. Unshaken, Sigismund fought Kharn to a standstill and cut him down, but not before the World Eater saw the truth of things in a rare moment of lucidity: Sigismund was the herald of a new kind of Imperial warrior, of [[Black Templars|a new Legion of fanatical, stoic, single-minded zealots]] whose relentless fury and inability to countenance defeat would wreak untold misery on a galaxy already groaning under the weight of aeons of anguish.

Meanwhile, Euphrati Keeler, who was now loose and alone in the ruins, used Sigismund as the inspiration for a new kind of army. Rallying the masses of civilian refugees and Army stragglers, she forged them into a militia armed with tools, a few lasguns, and their faith in the Emperor and sent them forth to fight the Traitor Legions. Though a hundred of them might fall in exchange for one traitor, Keeler regarded it as a fair exchange, for there were hundreds of thousands more to take their place. Garviel Loken, upon finding Keeler, was dismayed by her harsher, more brutal mindset. She justified it to him by arguing that this was the kind of army the Imperium would need in the future: [[Imperial Guard|an army of millions, even billions of humans, united by their unwavering faith in the Emperor and their hatred for the alien, the mutant, and the traitor]].

==Final Stand at the Eternity Gate==

Although the Lion's Gate Spaceport had been retaken, the situation continued to deteriorate for the loyalists. Terra itself was dying, shattered and poisoned by the Siege. The unrelenting orbital bombardments from the Warmaster's fleet had gouged out craters and torn deep fissures into the planet's crust that vomited forth noxious gases and immense pyroclastic flows, smothering entire regions in boiling rock and choking fumes. Spilled chemicals, radiation from destroyed munitions stockpiles, and Warp-borne corruption were seeping into the soil, rendering vast swathes of the planet uninhabitable. The dust and ash from tens of thousands of destroyed buildings and uncountable conflagrations filled the atmosphere, blinding sensors, cutting off vox signals, coating the lungs of those who breathed Terra's air unprotected, and turning the sun red. The underground farms devoted to feeding the populace were destroyed and burning. The last sea on the planet was now a dust-choked pile of sludge. In the void around the choking, burning world, the Warp seeped into reality, painting space with unreal colors as the Chaos gods and their minions reveled in the horror they had wrought. The Neverborn now manifested freely upon Terra, gleefully joining in the butchery and devastation.

With the Palace defenses fatally compromised due to the breach at the Ultimate Wall by Legio Mortis, the loyalists were being inexorably forced back to the Delphic Battlement, the last line of defense before the Sanctum Imperialis. Jaghatai Khan was incapacitated, leaving Shiban Khan in command of most of the remaining White Scars at the Lion's Gate. Outside aid was nowhere to be seen, though Sanguinius ordered Corswain and his Dark Angels to stay put and defend the Astronomican to guide the way for Guilliman and the Lion. The traitors sensed that victory was in their grasp. The Emperor's telesthetic shield was failing due to Magnus the Red's psychic assaults in the Webway. The only thing truly going in the loyalists' favor was the degradation of Horus' armies into an uncoordinated horde. The Sons of Horus were the only organized force still fighting in the Warmaster's name. The traitor Imperial Army forces had degraded into gibbering cultists, the World Eaters were an uncontrollable mob of berserkers, the Death Guard were still recovering from Mortarion's banishment, and the Iron Warriors, Night Lords, and Emperor's Children had largely abandoned the siege, with only scattered elements still fighting for Horus. The smaller contingents from the Word Bearers, Alpha Legion, and the Thousand Sons fought on as best they could, though few could impose any kind of order upon the madness surrounding them. With Rogal Dorn and his retinue cut off and besieged at the Bhab Bastion, only a hundred thousand loyalists stood between the traitors and the Imperial Palace itself. This force was largely composed of Blood Angels led by Sanguinius and whatever Imperial Army elements could be salvaged from the collapsing front, but some Imperial Fists, White Scars, loyalist Mechanicus units, and the remnants of Legio Ignatum were present as well to muster on the Delphic Battlement. Under orders by Horus for the first time in weeks, the traitors had a simple mission: break through the Delphic Battlement and capture the Eternity Gate at dawn.

The crux of the traitors' efforts was targeted at the Delphic Archway, the largest gateway in the battlement's walls. The Archway had been conceived and built as a place of triumph through which the Imperium's victorious legions would march along the Grand Processional and up the Royal Ascension, a pathway built from millions of tonnes of stone quarried from a hundred conquered worlds and lined with statues of the Imperium's finest soldiers, scientists, and intellectuals. It had had no defenses before Dorn began fortifying it, and even after seven years of work it was still the weakest point in the wall. Both sides knew this, and so had mustered the greatest parts of their strength there.

[[Grimdark|Before attacking, the traitors hoisted the still-living bodies of loyalist prisoners on whatever could hold their tortured forms in an effort to break the defenders' morale. The Legio Mordaxis Reaver Titan ''Daughter of Torment'' marched forward and opened its power claw to reveal Blood Angels Captain Idamas, who was notably the first Blood Angel Sanguinius spoke to when he first presented himself to his legion decades prior. Idamas was fatally wounded after being pinned to the claw by 7 spears]]. Following these acts of barbarity they issued Horus' offer: flee the coming battle and be granted a pardon by the (soon to be) new Emperor of Mankind, or die. To punctuate the offer and insult, the Titan began closing its claw to slowly crush Idamas to death. However, Sanguinius ordered the skitarii Transacta-7Y1 to kill the captain, both to put him out of his misery and deny his captors the satisfaction of such a murder. [[Awesome|Sanguinius then turned to the defenders and gave a rousing speech so awesome it inspired and/or shamed all of them into standing their ground. After that, he flew to the ''Daughter of Torment'' and cut off the fucker's head]]. With that, the battle was joined.

As the guns of the Delphic Battlement unleashed a cataclysm of fire on the Chaotic horde, they zerg-rushed the loyalists. Tens of thousands of traitor Space Marines and Imperial Army were mowed down, but their sheer weight of numbers allowed tens of thousands more to reach the battlement. Some dragged themselves up the wall with axes and blades. Others launched themselves onto the ramparts with jump packs or clambered across the heaps of dead and the piled shells from the battlement's guns. A Khornate Warlord Titan docked with the wall and disgorged a cargo of World Eaters directly into the battle. At the Delphic Archway itself, the loyalist Titans of Ignatum fought and died against their traitorous counterparts from Audax, Mortis, and Mordaxus. The battle atop the wall quickly descended into a frenetic melee, a hundred thousand individual fights melding into a titanic clash of arms, rage, and desperation that lasted for a day and a night. In the midst of the fight, the Bloodthirster Ka'Bandha arrived, manifested from the torn flesh and spilled blood of the IX Legion's sons. He had been tasked by Khorne with killing five hundred Blood Angels in front of Sanguinius to atone for his failure at Signus Prime, and got pretty close before Hawk Boi swooped in to save his sons. [[Awesome|In a lopsided airborne fight, the Bloodthirster got his back broken with the hilt of Sanguinius' sword and cast down]]. [[FAIL|He was then consumed by lesser daemons who preyed on his weakness]]. Despite, this nothing, nothing could stop the uncountable horde that was pouring through the shattered wall and fighting up through the Delphic Archway. Worse yet, daemons were manifesting inside the Sanctum Imperialis itself as the Emperor's strength waned under the unrelenting stress of holding the Webway shut while fighting psychic duels with Horus and Magnus. As the defenses entered terminal collapse, Custodian Tribune Diocletan Coros ordered the closure of the Eternity Gate, but a maniple of Legio Audax Titans used their Ursus Claws to hold one of the doors open. As Sanguinius moved to cut the chains, Angron made a [[Marvel Comics|superhero (villain?) entrance]] under orders from Horus to kill Sanguinius. Angron had been killing his way across the Inner Palace for weeks, his mind long since subsumed into a fugue of rage and bloodlust stoked to a fever pitch by the demands of the Blood God and the endless gnawing of the Butcher's Nails, and bringing down Sanguinius was the only coherent thought remaining to him.

The two primarchs engaged in a vicious duel that saw Sangy delivering a variety of normally fatal blows to Angron with all his accustomed skill and grace. Unfortunately for him, Sanguinius was exhausted and weak from six months of nonstop fighting and found himself unable to deliver any punishment that Angron couldn't tank by virtue of being a fuckhuge daemon primarch, while Angron's Warp-enhanced strength and fury allowed him to keep fighting even as he was wounded by countless blades and bolts from the loyalist Astartes around him. After numerous abortive attempts to fight while airborne, Angron decided to change tactics and fight on the ground while getting Sanguinius to fight him. Angron slaughtered many Blood Angels to force his brother's attention onto him. The two duelled again, and the exhausted Sanguinius began losing ground. Both Primarchs knew the fight would not (and in the case of the Great Angel, COULD NOT) go on much longer. Angron let Sanguinius stab him to get close and begin crushing his throat, while in the same motion stabbing Sanguinius' gut with the Black Blade. [[Derp|Of course, the ole 'tank a stab to get in close and deliver a fatal blow' trick is not unique to Angron and Jaghatai Khan]]. [[Just as Planned|Sanguinius had had the same idea and used the opportunity to rip the Butcher's Nails from Angron's skull]]. [[Bullshit|This somehow caused enough pain for him to beg Sanguinius to stop]], to no avail. [[Rip and Tear|Sanguinius tore the Nails out, taking Angron's brains and eyes with them]]. Angron's physical incarnation was finally killed and he was banished to the Warp. [[Troll|Khorne laughed at the sight]], while [[RAGE|Angron's less amused sons completely lost it]] and began teamkilling ''en masse'', slaughtering anything and anyone within reach of their weapons. Thus was a second daemon primarch banished from Terra.

Meanwhile, deep below the Palace, Vulkan was dispatched into what was left of the human Webway project to stop Magnus the Red's assault on the Emperor's psychic defenses. Vulkan found his traitorous brother in the Impossible City of Calastar, where he was weaving spells and incantations to shatter the Emperor's resolve. Despite Magnus employing a variety of illusions and horrifically lethal magic tricks on Vulkan, they all proved to be futile against a perpetual primarch. As Vulkan resurrected time and again, Magnus was slowly worn down between the constant strain of maintaining his spells and weathering the Lord of Drakes' relentless assaults. In a final gamble to buy time or convert his brother, Magnus drew Vulkan into his mind to play out his experiences during the Heresy and explain his motivations for turning on the Emperor. Vulkan would have none of it, spitting nothing but facts (including some that Magnus didn't know that Vulkan knew) about his brother's persecution complex and hubris. He pointed out that none of the loyalist primarchs had reacted the way Magnus had to learning of the Emperor's Webway project, that in siding with Horus he had chosen to side with the true author of Prospero's destruction, and that Magnus' deal with Tzeentch hadn't truly cured his legion of the flesh change. Every step he had taken since his foolish attempt to warn the Emperor of Horus' corruption had only led him further down the path of damnation. He also revealed a devastating truth to Magnus: the Crimson King had only imagined being offered a costly path towards redemption by the Emperor, when in reality he was told to kick sand and GTFO. Regardless of [[Skub|why]], the result was the same: Magnus retreated into his shroud of self-righteousness and danced to the tune of Chaos. Magnus attempted one last gambit, pretending to recognize the magnitude of his fall, but Vulkan sensed that if he showed mercy where none was warranted, it would open the way for the corrupting influence of Chaos to seep into his spirit. With nothing left to argue about, Vulkan smashed Magnus into paste with his hammer ''Urdrakule'' while Magnus wove one last spell to unmake Vulkan at the molecular level. Vulkan technically died first, but his hammer blow still fell, crushing Magnus's head and banishing him into the Warp. The two corpses lay side by side for a time, until Vulkan resurrected once more and walked away, a blackened, skeletal revenant still carrying his hammer. Magnus' banishment caused the flesh change to begin manifesting uncontrollably in the ranks of the XV Legion, further blunting the tide of the traitor advance at the critical moment.

With these two events, the Chaos forces were stopped just outside the now-sealed Eternity Gate. The surviving loyalists fled inside and licked their wounds. While the Great Angel regarded his wounds, he and Dorn gave their final goodbyes. The White Scars reactivated the anti-orbital defenses at the Lion's Gate and laughed at the traitor bastards in orbit before tearing into them with all the firepower their defenses had. Roboute Guilliman sent word that he, the Lion, and Leman Russ were only a week away, but the thing that had once been Lotara Sarrin intercepted the message and ordered the rest of the Warmaster's fleet to block the signal.

This marked the point where the situation for both sides had become truly desperate. Traitorous mortal crews (and many of the Thousand Sons remaining on Terra) could no longer [[Chaos Spawn|maintain forms that obeyed the laws of physics]], the Traitor Legions weren't on speaking terms with the concepts of "tactics", "unit cohesion", or "sanity", and [[Anal Circumference|their fleet's flanks were wide open for a well-deserved pounding from the inbound loyalist relief fleet]]. With nobody left to rely on and only one last chance at victory, Horus recognized that he would have to force the Emperor to come to him, so he did something completely unexpected: he ordered the ''Vengeful Spirit'' to lower its shields entirely. The loyalists unfortunately didn't know any of this, only being aware of the fact that the Grim Reaper would be taking them out to lunch very soon. [[Just as Planned|And thus the die was cast and the stage set for the end of the Siege]].

==The End and the Death==
{{topquote|We are in the endgame now.|Doctor Strange, ''Avengers: Infinity War''}}
With the Eternity Gate closed and the Sanctum Imperialis sealed, the Siege had reached its terminal phase. The loyalist forces were scattered across the ruins of the Inner Palace, fighting on as best they could in the face of what seemed to be Horus’ inevitable victory. Imperial Fists, White Scars, Blood Angels, [[Solar Auxilia]], Imperial Army, Custodians, and Null Maidens all fought side by side wherever they happened to be, while [[Penal legion|penal units]], [[Whiteshield Conscript|civilian conscripts]], [[Administratum|rear-echelon functionaries]], and senior officers took up arms and joined the fighting. Broken chains of command and lines of organization were hastily reconstituted by whoever happened to be on the scene. The White Scars still held the Lion’s Gate and were using its firepower to devastate the traitors’ fleet, but the anti-orbital batteries and their power sources were slowly being destroyed one by one. Legions of Neverborn manifested on Terra’s soil, joining with the Warmaster’s hordes as they surrounded the Sanctum and slowly choked the life from its remaining defenders. As they swarmed across the Throneworld, they wrote and sang and spoke a single name: the Dark King.

The Bhab Bastion, the nerve center of the defense for so many months, was smashed by Titan fire and taken by the reconstituted Catulan Reavers. Abaddon himself was leading the Sons of Horus toward the Sanctum despite his own bitterness at how their victory had come to pass. Across the wreckage of the Inner Palace, massed Titan battles further scorched the earth and destroyed whatever remained standing. All of the Palatine Bastions were destroyed or overrun one by one. The hordes of desperate refugees stranded outside the Sanctum fled to nowhere in particular, herded by the oncoming waves of traitor forces and daemons. Thousands died of fear, exhaustion, insanity, or simple sensory overload, their minds broken by the omnipresent sound of the world ending around them: the shrieks of twisting metal, the grinding and cracking of crushed and collapsing stone, the endless thunder of massed bombardment weapons, the ceaseless crack and clatter of small arms, and the screams of the millions of dying. Time, space, and matter were becoming malleable as Terra sank deeper into the clutches of the Warp. Walls and floors melted, suppurated, and were shaped by the Neverborn. Chronometers and other timepieces skipped hours and days, ceased to function, or ran backwards. The reddened sun burned endlessly in the dust-choked skies. Soldiers who had been fighting at the Praestor Gate suddenly found themselves on the Via Aquila, fifteen kilometers away. Daemons and traitor Astartes attacked from places they could never have been, upending defensive plans and overrunning loyalist forces.

In the midst of the devastation, Euphrati Keeler and her conclave of faithful struggled to organize any kind of meaningful response, delivering arms, munitions, and scraps of inspiration wherever they could. Keeler herself was coming to terms with what she truly believed about the Emperor, and her dawning realization that one did not necessarily need to believe in him as a god, but instead as the embodiment of a path upon which he had set humanity millennia ago. Humanity did not need understanding, or enlightenment, only blind faith that the Emperor’s designs would be fulfilled as long as they believed in him and played their parts.

Aboard the ''Vengeful Spirit'', Horus was reliving an interview he had given to Mersadie Oliton on the eve of the war with the [[Interex]], discussing his elevation to the office of Warmaster, the nature of his relationship to the Emperor and his brothers, and his dreams of the future that they were forging together. When Kiron Argonis attempted to bring his attention to the siege, he confused it for the compliance of Xenobia, called for the long-dead Maloghurst and Hastur Sejanus, and lapsed back into his fugue state as quickly as he had emerged. Even as he regained some understanding of where he was and what he was doing, he continued to see and speak to men long dead: Sejanus, Nero Vipus, Luc Sedirae, Tarik Torgaddon.

At the Astronomican, Corswain and his contingent of Dark Angels sought a way to relight the psychic beacon. Librarian Vassago was slain, apparently by daemons, and so Corswain turned to four of his Calibanite brethren, all of them psykers themselves, and asked them to serve in Vassago’s stead. Zahariel, the senior of the four, convinced his brothers to obey Corswain’s orders, noting that if Horus won, Caliban and the Order would be extinguished by Chaos. If the loyalists won, however, they would have an opportunity to bring Corswain and his men to their side and to return home to Luther and Caliban in triumph. As Corswain planned and Zahariel plotted, they received word of an approaching host: the Death Guard, led by Typhus, was coming to settle accounts with the I Legion. The Death Guard arrived within hours, not the days the Angels had expected, and began climbing the flanks of the Astronomican, a relentless tide of festering plague and rot. As the Dark Angels met them on the battlements, their willpower was sapped by a psychic malaise wrought by the Herald of Nurgle which lasted until Zahariel opted to take up the mask of Cypher to aid the Angels in fighting off the XIV Legion.

Within the Imperial Dungeon, Malcador began attempting to draw the Emperor out of his psychic war against the legions of Chaos, recognizing that the time had come for him to stand up from the Golden Throne and fight like a man, not a god. The Emperor couldn’t hear him over the constant waves of pain being produced by his mental battles with Horus, the Chaos gods, and the ceaseless tides of Neverborn surging against the Webway gate. When he received no immediate response, Malcador withdrew to his own labors: coordinating what was left of the defense within the Palace, overseeing the activities of his chosen agents, and attempting to reunite Jaghatai Khan’s soul with his shattered body. This latter was a task at which he’d been laboring since the Khagan was brought back from his duel with Mortarion at the Lion’s Gate, without success. While waiting on the Emperor’s response, he gathered himself for another attempt, and this time seemingly succeeded in drawing the Khan’s soul back to its corpus, only to realize that he had not accomplished this apparent impossibility. The Emperor had roused from his work, and said only one thing: “I cannot fight alone.”

In response, Malcador summoned Vulkan, Dorn, Sanguinius, and Constantin Valdor. These four were the last pillars of strength upon which the Emperor could count, and even they had their own trials and concerns now. Vulkan was still trudging through the Webway, his body reknitting from the devastation wrought upon it by Magnus. Sanguinius was exhausted and severely injured from his battles with Angron and Ka’Bandha. Dorn was at a loss; his fortress was in ruins and his defensive plans no longer viable, and for the first time in his life he was unsure of what to do next. Constantin Valdor was hunting down and killing the daemons who had infiltrated the Sanctum, while also concocting his own contingencies in case the Emperor failed. Nevertheless, all four heeded the summons. There, they were told the plan. Anabasis, it was called. The Emperor would board the ''Vengeful Spirit'' now that its shields were down, and there he would kill the Warmaster and end the Siege once and for all. Dorn, Vulkan, Sanguinius, and Valdor were to remain on Terra while this took place. All four immediately insisted that they be allowed to accompany their father and lord. The Emperor was angered by their defiance, but Malcador reminded him that they were loyal, and stalwart, and sought only to stand by him in his greatest hour of need, as they had always done. Thus the plan was modified. Valdor, Dorn, and Sanguinius would each choose a company of their finest warriors to join the assault, but while the Praetorian and the Captain-General would be allowed to join him, Sanguinius was to remain behind to serve as the leader and figurehead of the remaining defenders. Vulkan also had to stay, explained Malcador, because if all else failed, then Vulkan would have to trip the dead man’s switch he’d installed in the Throne and destroy Terra before Horus could claim his victory. With Anabasis enacted, other contingencies had to be set into place. The Unspoken Sanction was prepared in case it was needed to supplement Malcador’s strength as he sat upon the Throne. Basilio Fo’s gene-phage was brought up from the Dark Cells of the Palace and readied to be used as the last of all resorts. Finally, as the Emperor rose from the Golden Throne, Malcador took his place, fully aware that this was the last act of devotion he would ever perform for his master and friend. Sanguinius confronted the Emperor as he was arming for the engagement, explaining that he wished to go along. The Emperor’s Companions explained why he was being left behind; he was wounded, grievously so, and the Emperor had wished him to remain behind to keep him safe. Sanguinius countered that he intended to face Horus because of his visions of his death at the Warmaster’s hand. But, he continued, he did not intend to die. As time had come undone around Terra, so, he believed, his death could be averted in this moment.

Just as the Anabasis strike force teleported up to the ''Vengeful Spirit'', a signal was received in the Court of the Hegemon, the new command center established after the fall of Bhab Bastion. The Ultramarines, Dark Angels, and Space Wolves were only nine hours out and needed the Astronomican to light their way. The War Court frantically attempted to alert Anabasis, to no avail. Meanwhile, on the ''Vengeful Spirit'', the Warmaster's trap was sprung. Horus had been feigning his madness and distraction all along, preparing himself for the final confrontation he knew was coming. Now that the shields were down and the Emperor had taken his bait, he cast off his shrouds and revealed himself as Horus Ascended, the avatar of the Chaos Gods. By his will, the ''Spirit'' itself turned on the loyalist invaders and began corrupting their minds and senses. The Emperor’s own bodyguard of Custodians were almost instantly ensnared and turned upon their own master, defying their gene-bred loyalty to him. The Emperor was forced to kill thirty-nine of his Companions before he could regain enough focus and will to break through Horus’ manipulations, and had to expend his own strength and will to free the survivors. The rest of the assault team was scattered across the ship, itself a maze of insanity wrought by the touch of the Ruinous Powers and Horus' own mad will. Rogal Dorn found himself lost in an endless desert for what seemed like centuries, tempted by whispers from Khorne as his identity slowly eroded away. Constantin Valdor and his men landed in the midst of a pit of daemons, their focus sapped as they fought through the neverending tide of warpspawn. The Blood Angels were the only element to strike as intended, and only a quarter of the assault force arrived where they were supposed to. Nevertheless, Sanguinius and his sons fought their way through the Vengeful Spirit with fury and skill, using the Great Angel’s intimate knowledge of the ship to cripple it as precisely as possible. On the Golden Throne, wracked with the pain of containing eternity, Malcador saw the full scope of Horus’ plan, and struggled to communicate it to those who might yet help avert the Emperor’s death and the end of the Imperium. Kyril Sindermann, Boetharch Hellick Mauer, Garviel Loken, and Euphrati Keeler found themselves drawn to the Hall of Leng, the Emperor’s greatest repository of secrets, searching for something concealed in its depths. In the depths of Collection 888, they found themselves confronted by a single phrase, repeated over and over: the Dark King. They then found a hatch that the Hall’s archivist swore had never been there before. When Loken opened it, he found himself walking the decks of the Vengeful Spirit. He ordered the others to remain behind before sealing the hatch and reboarding the ship that had been his home for two centuries, preparing for the final confrontation with his traitorous father.

Ezekyle Abaddon found himself the master of a legion that no longer cared to listen to any masters save their own lust for blood and death. His orders were ignored or brushed off as the captains of the Legion surged toward the Sanctum, sensing final victory in their grasp. Even as he grew increasingly furious with his wayward brothers and heartsick by the devastation they were wreaking upon Terra, he learned that the ''Vengeful Spirit'''s shields were down and came as close to panic as he had ever been. He attempted to recall the XVI Legion to return to the flagship and defend their father, only for most of the Legion's captains to ignore his orders, while most of those who responded derided his concern and insulted him as a coward and a petulant child. Nevertheless, he was able to assemble a small force to return to the ''Spirit''.

As Ollanius Persson and his small band of unlikely allies wended their way deeper into the forgotten depths beneath the Imperial Palace, they revealed themselves to the others one by one. Ollanius explained his Perpetual nature and his falling out with the Emperor at the Tower of Babel, while Actaea revealed herself as Cyrene Valantion, reforged as an artificial Perpetual after her death at the hands of the Custodes and, so she claimed, enlightened as to the true nature of the Warp. Meanwhile, the Alpha Legionnaire accompanying her explained his mission to John Grammaticus. At the outset of the Heresy, Dorn had created at least six hidden pathways out of the Palace in case the worst should come to pass. The Alpha Legion had located one of these passages and had planted reserves of legionaries and materiel caches deep beneath the Palace to exploit this opening. These legionaries had all been hypno-conditioned with a variety of plans devised by Alpharius and Omegon, each activated by a different code word. “Sagittary” would trigger loyalty to Horus, while “Xenophon” would command them to fight for the Emperor. “Paramus” would order them to bring down both sides in a case of mutual annihilation, while “Thisbe” would trigger a full evacuation and “Orphaeus” would command them to focus on Chaos, either to defeat it or to master it. The Legionnaire then revealed his true identity and allegiance. He was First Captain Ingo Pech, and he had recognized that Horus had to be stopped in order to prevent the extinction of humanity. He had been sent to activate "Xenophon", only for Actaea to intercept him and hijack his mission by using her psyker talents to trigger "Orphaeus" instead. When a stunned Grammaticus asked what her plan was, Pech explained that she intended to turn Horus upon Chaos itself, using his Warp-borne power to enslave and master it and thereby end the war. As part of this plan, she needed both Ollanius and the athame he was carrying, since the knife in his hands was the only thing that might still wound Horus. He then asked Grammaticus to stop Actaea, which would also mean killing him due to the hypno-conditioning, and Grammaticus agreed. After they had infiltrated the Palace, Grammaticus clamped a limpet mine to Pech’s chest and confronted Actae, who explained that she had been sent by Erda as a second weapon of last resort: if Ollanius couldn’t stop the Emperor, she would stop Horus. She agreed to be psychically leashed to the group’s psyker Katt, but Pech was left behind, since she could not undo his hypno-conditioning. They successfully infiltrated the Sanctum Imperialis, but were captured and brought before Vulkan, who remembered Grammaticus from their encounter on Macragge years before. When Ollanius asked to speak with the Emperor, Vulkan informed him that he was already aboard the ''Vengeful Spirit''. As he considered what to do with these unlikely intruders, Khalid Hassan noted that he had found a card in Leetu’s tarot deck that the prototype Astartes swore had not been there when he entered the Palace: the Dark King. A horrified Actaea revealed its true meaning to all present. The Dark King was a name that had been whispered in thousands of languages since before the rise of humanity. It was the name of a god yet unborn, a god of the Warp who would be forged from the clay of Horus Lupercal and birthed in the annihilation of Terra and humanity, just as Slaanesh had risen from the destruction of the Eldar empire thousands of years prior. This was the true endgame of the Siege and of Chaos.

==Duel of the Emperor and Horus==
[[file:Horus and his Daddy.jpeg|thumb|middle|400px|If you haven't seen this image yet, you must be new. Like, really fucking new.]]
Like with any truly epic event, the siege only ended with the most motherfuckingest duel in the entire 40k fluff: the Emperor of Mankind against Horus, the most favoured of the Primarchs and the living avatar of the Chaos Gods. If the Horus Heresy was the most important of a series of events, if the siege was the single most epic of those events, then the duel is the defining moment of the fluff and affected everything else that came after it.

Dorn, Sanguinius, Valdor, and the Emperor, along with what forces they could bring, teleported aboard Horus's battlebarge to force an end to the conflict. It was Sanguinius who found Horus first. [https://youtu.be/L63In39n86c?t=72 Horus hits 3 times, wounds 2.667 times, 1.33 after saves and IWND takes that down to 1 wounds at start of next turn. Sanguinius doesn't get the charge, so he hits 4 times, wounds 3.556 times, 1.185 after saves and IWND takes that down to 0.852 wounds at start of next turn.] The angelic Lord of Baal, beloved of the Primarchs, died just as the Emperor arrived.

During their ensuing epic and titanic duel, the Emperor could not bear to kill his most beloved son. So, Horus had managed to mortally wound him (despite the Big E being a nigh-unkillable Perpetual) and would have finished him off, if not for the intervention of one Perpetual Guardsman (Oll Perrson/Ollanius Pius)/Imperial Fist/Custodian. He jumped in front of Horus as he was about to strike the final blow, and was flayed with a glance. The Emperor, witnessing how far his most favored son had fallen, decided "Fuck this" and focused all of His remaining psychic power into one massive and final Kamehameha that LITERALLY DELETED HORUS'S SOUL FROM EXISTENCE!

Although the Emperor managed to win and kill Horus, he was so badly wounded in the end he needed to be on 24/7 life support just to survive. So really when you come down to it, it was a draw; Chaos had been stopped then but only at an unthinkable cost to the Imperium.

==/tg/ Connection==
What, besides the fact that ''''' it's the most important event in the 40k universe?''''' Fine.

The Siege of Terra is also the theme for the [[Horus Heresy#The Board Game|Horus Heresy board game]], in which you reenact the Siege itself. There. Happy? (Not really.)

===The fa/tg/uy's explanation of the Siege Of Terra (for Dummies and BL Editors)===
[[File:Loyalists vs. Traitors.jpg|thumb|middle|700px|Some serious Daddy problems.]]
The main rule of warfare: As the number of combatants increases, the resemblance to complete uncontrolled insanity approaches infinity. And then you have to take into account the terrain...

Basically, you start with a planet that's been nuked, polluted, and generally lived in for a few hundred thousand years too long. Everyone on it is fighting everyone else, constantly. Your basic unit of land is the Bunker, Vault 101 style. There isn't any natural plant life left so all the oxygen is made in vats with the food. ''Luckily'' this means you can build anywhere that isn't intensely radioactive and hence fight over those areas. Get Mega-City-One, nuke it, and rebuild it a few times, and then you start to understand.

Then the Emperor comes along and manages against all odds to conquer the place. Suddenly everyone isn't killing and dying all the time, and a population boom happens. So Emps organized the largest set of public works since the first colony ships. He rebuilds huge areas of the planet and creates the Imperial Palace, the Astronomican, and a buttload more of cool shit besides. And what he gets is effectively one giant city, the second largest (after Commorragh) in the universe. "Huge" just doesn't do it justice as a description. Neither does "labyrinthine", "overpopulated", or "Gothic nightmare". And this New Terra was mostly just thrown over the original foundations of whatever was there like a pile of gold bricks onto a rat maze. There are bunkers and emplacements still around that date back to the War Against The Men of Iron and even before.

Then the Heresy came, and the Emperor says to Dorn "Fortify this fucking madhouse". So now everything that didn't have a gun emplacement before does now, everywhere. Dorn walled in half the doors and windows, put hundreds of AA batteries on every roof, filled entire rooms with concrete just for a bit of reinforcement, built hundreds of miles of trenches, redoubts, bastions, emplacements, and backup walls, conscripted half the population into the army (and half of ''that'' into the engineer corps), and generally panicked because all of this would only ever be necessary if the solar system's defenses (the best in the galaxy bar none) have failed.

Then Horus arrives in orbit. He's punched through the space defenses at massive cost, but the war in space is far from won, and the Palace is just a flat no-fly zone, so he can't just pick and choose landing areas. So he bombards everything his ships can reach, fills the sky with Drop Pods, and tries to march on it.

This is when Rule #1 kicks in and everything immediately gets megafucked for both sides. Ruined streets, trenches, and bunkers make navigating a nightmare, communications are somewhere between impossible and actively detrimental, drop pods and gunships are shot down immediately or land off-target, plans and backup plans fall apart in seconds, daemons run amok, and the Primarchs are either constantly trying to out-Tactical-Genius each other or are too in the thick of it to relay any commands, so no one has a fucking clue what's actually going on in the big picture. It's Stalingrad on a continental scale, but without even the merest hint of sanity and a thousand Space Marines charging into every breach. The inclusion of cackling daemons, rampaging renegade Guardsmen and abhumans, and bellowing daemon engines doesn't help the situation, nor does the fact that the guy ostensibly in charge of the Siege (Horus) is growing increasingly detached from reality.

So it takes roughly 10 minutes of this menial bullshit for a load of the Chaos forces to get bored and just decide "Fuck It, Let's Just Wreck The Place". So now everything makes even less sense: entire Legions are ignoring sensible objectives to go on the Chaos Marine equivalent of a bender. The Emperor's Children and the Night Lords rape, murder, and pillage the civilians of Terra so hard that even 10,000 years later they still live in fear at the memory, while the World Eaters are tearing around and hacking and slashing at anything they think might bleed. Only the Iron Warriors, the Death Guard, and the Sons of Horus are wholeheartedly tearing at the Palace, dedicated to rubbing it in Dorn's face like a bitch no matter what (and even then, the Iron Warriors would ultimately decide "fuck this" and leave). And to the horror of the loyalists, they're still succeeding. Brick by brick, the greatest military stronghold in the galaxy is falling.

Which sounds great for Chaos were it not for the simple fact it wasn't falling quickly enough. It was taking days to advance inches at massive cost, and Guilliman was en route with reinforcements, with Russ and the Lion and the remains of their Legions right behind him. If the siege wasn't ended before they got there, the traitors would likely lose. So Horus put all his cards on the table and lowered his battle barge's shields, goading the Emperor (who didn't know about the reinforcements - or maybe he did and was enacting a much greater scheme, see below) on board to hopefully kill him and force the defenders into a rout. Everything else is history.

The short story "The Board is Set" seemed to indicate that the Emperor and Malcador knew about the reinforcing loyalists from at least the beginning of the siege and were fully aware of the siege's outcome up to and including the Emperor's ascension to the Golden Throne, possibly even seeing the future all the way to the events of the Era Indomitus. It also seemed to imply that Horus lowering his shield may have been so he could teleport down and attack the Emperor, not realizing it was Malcador on the throne. Possibly the most epic level of Just As Planned.
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[[Category: Warhammer 40,000 Battles]]

Perpetual

2023-03-03T19:22:53Z

2607:FB91:119A:44DF:C8AD:B884:FF14:8318: /* Cyrene Valantion */

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[[File:OllPious.jpg|350px|right|thumb|Ollanius Pius, the most famous Perpetual, the man, the myth, the legend.]]
{{topquote|I just want a normal life."<br>"My friend, you will have as many of those as you wish.|The beings who would one day be [[Ollanius Pius]] and the [[God-Emperor of Mankind]]}}

A '''Perpetual''' (''Homo Superior'') is a person of [[40k|the grim darkness of the 41st millennium]] who drew the absolutely shortest straw possible: they are immortal (because [[Dan Abnett]] must REALLY love Highlander and can’t let it go.) And nothing of this "age without youth" or "immortality without indestructibility" bullshit: they do not age (after some point in adulthood that isn't clear but seems to be the mid-to-late 30s or early 40s, maybe [[Alivia Sureka|earlier]] or maybe [[Ollanius Pius|later]]) and can survive the most gruesome deaths imaginable up to and including taking an [[Exterminatus]] to the face because they can reassemble themselves from their constituent atoms. [[/co/|They're like Wolverine on steroids like that]]. And before you suggest throwing them into a sun or launching them out into space, two perpetuals were spaced and just reassembled someplace that was habitable. Which, given [[Grimdark|the relentless sunshine of the Warhammer 40.000 universe is NOT a good thing: not even death will relieve your suffering.]] There are only a [[Sly Marbo|few things]] said to be able to kill a Perpetual for good, but these powers and weapons are known to only a few individuals in the galaxy (and even then it's not known for certain how effective they are, or if they even work). Very little is known about the Perpetuals including their origin (but given the fact that Ollanius Persson was around as far back as the time of Greek myth, they've undoubtedly been around for ages), number, purpose or even if those suspected to be them actually being Perpetuals (all that we know is that during the Horus Heresy, there were exactly 3 Perpetuals living in Ultramar; given that Ultramar consisted of 500 planets at the time, we have to assume that they're extraordinarily rare). Of only eight individuals is the status of Perpetual known or confirmed. Another foible they have is their very existence fucks up farseeing to a considerable degree, which lead Eldrad to kill off as many of them as possible to try and find a way to avoid Chaos winning overall.

We do however know, that people could be turned Perpetual by being resurrected. Which, ironically, might imply that [[Kharn]] and [[Lucius]] at some point became Perpetual too, since they've both came back from dead. It'll explain how Kharn managed to survive for that long despite his suicidal psychotic charges into everything he sees, and how Lucius resurrected without possessing anyone's body after first being outfought by Nykona Sharrowkyn of the [[Raven Guard]], and then subsequently being cut to pieces by an emotionless [[Rubric Marine|Rubric Swordmaster]] (who in any case no longer had a body to possess either).

Recent fluff has revealed that the universe itself (or is it just the Eldar? Assholes that they are.) isn't too keen on Perpetuals as their very existence is a spanner in its gears, because <s>[[meme|people should die when they are killed]]</s> each of their revivals end up fucking farseeing over and altering causality. In order to try and find alternatives to the Cabal's plan of letting humanity die to kill Chaos, Eldrad went on a galaxy wide murder tour bumping off other Perpetuals and members of the Cabal, a choice he deeply regretted when he tried farseeing and saw what the future would eventually hold. It also turns out they're capable of resisting daemonic possession, partly due to any warp entity inhabiting their soul gets fucked up when they die (and then come back). It's still implied to be horrifically traumatic but it explains how both Alivia Sureka and Anval Thawn were able to resist. Some fans speculated that they are related to the [[Men of Gold]] mentioned in old lore.

==Predating the [[Great Crusade]]==

===The Emperor===
A great many of the mysteries surrounding the Emperor would be explained if he was a Perpetual: his age, his knowledge in an era where everyone else on [[Terra]] was too busy [[LARP]]ing a crossover of [[Terminator]] and [[Fist of the North Star]] to learn shit and his massive power (learned over time). On the other hand it would not explain why he didn't just regenerate after his duel with [[Horus]] on the ''Vengeful Spirit''. The best explanation for this (besides Horus being able to injure the Emperor permanently through being the virtual avatar of all four [[Chaos Gods]]) is that the Golden Throne, while maintaining his life functions, is also keeping him from resurrecting himself- in theory, if it was shut down, the only real effect it would have is that the Emperor would "die" for a day or two at most before fully healing from his injuries. A shame that nobody seems to realize this, as it would end most of the Imperium's problems on the spot at the expense of leaving Terra defenseless to being raped, both literally and figuratively, by hordes upon hordes of daemons, even if for a couple days. ''(That's assuming he doesn't turn into a <u>real</u> god the moment he "dies" and use his new god-like powers to seal the broken portal)''. Though it would create some new problems, as quite a few people wouldn't be happy with the return of the original [[Imperial Truth]], especially the Ecclesiarchy. Of course, knowing the Emperor he'd crush them like bugs if they tried to oppose him, or even if they didn't. There is no way he would agree with the current Imperium.

Recent revelations from the Horus Heresy books also suggest that his godlike powers were actually stolen from the Chaos Gods themselves instead of being wholly his own. Needless to say, the Ruinous Powers still have a grudge.
*'''Note''': This is what the Chaos Gods told Horus (since the initial Horus Heresy trilogy, though ''Vengeful Spirit'' had them stick with the story), and we all know how trustworthy they are. Not to mention that this "explanation" is precisely what Horus himself wanted to hear. The most plausible explanation is that Emperor either tried to destroy them but failed or he infiltrated their compound to learn the secrets of the warp so he could divide fragments of his souls and make Primarchs from them. Or possibly, the original "gods" in the portal may also have been referring to Eldar pantheon (or what remains of it), who may have given the Emperor his powers, and possibly an easy way back home (via the webway) since the Emperor didn't need a ship to get back home.

Recent fluff from 7e suggests that the Golden Throne is not a life-support, but a pain engine, better than any [[Dark Eldar|Dark Eldar]] [[Haemonculus|Haemonculus]] could possibly dream of, sapping his strength to keep the seal intact, and that [[Malcador the Sigillite|Malcador]], also stated by Erda and Jaghatai Khan to be a Perpetual, crumbled into dust without resurrection after several hours. Apparently, it damages the soul itself, and even with his psychic gestalt status and powers stolen/bargained from Chaos Gods it has taken a heavy toll on the Emperor.

Welp, as of October of 2018, any ambiguity as to whether or not the Emperor is a perpetual has since been removed, with GW itself stating it outright in an FAQ post. And as of 2020, with the release of ''Saturnine'' in the ''Siege of Terra'' series... Well... While it too makes it damn clear that Big-E's status as a perpetual is confirmed, it does so in a way that raises a metric fuckton of further questions.

===[[Malcador]]===

The Emperor's right-hand man is confirmed to be a Perpetual himself. He claims to be over 6700 years old by the time of the Horus Heresy. Despite being a Perpetual, he manages to die twice during the Siege of Terra. First, Magnus accidentally barbecues him while throwing a psychic tantrum in the Hall of Leng deep beneath the Imperial Palace. Alivia Sureka (see below) sacrifices her own Perpetuality to resurrect him. His second and final death, as we all know, comes from taking the Emperor's place on the Golden Throne so that Big E could go deliver the mother of all bitchslaps to his wayward son.

===[[Erda]]===
<strike>Big E's waifu, mom to the primarchs</strike> Erebus 2: Menopause Boogaloo. A female Perpetual who donated her egg cells and genetic expertise to the Primarch Project, making her their mother minus a lot of her genes. It turns out that ''she'', not Horus or Argel Tal being sent back in time by the Chaos Gods, scattered the Primarchs. What a TWEEST! The Emperor was of course [[Rage|slightly cross]] about this, so Erda fucked off to live quietly in the deserts of Afrik with a specially designed Space Marine bodyguard. Her ultimate fate remains unknown, although there's a big hint [[Erebus|the slimy motherfucker extraordinaire]] perma-killed her when she refused to help him.

(The Valdor novel states that Chaos energy was detected in the room signifying that the Chaos Gods were still involved in the scattering of the Primarchs. It's possible that what Erda did was to disturb the wards around the primarchs' gestation capsules, which let the Chaos gods snatch them up.)

===[[Ollanius Pius]]===
AKA Oll Persson ([[Derp|Old Person]]...seriously? Fucking really, Abnett? Truly swung for the fences with that one, didn’t you?)

A confirmed Perpetual. By the time of the [[Horus Heresy]], Ollanius reckons his age to be around 45,000 ''(give or take)'' and he is fully aware of the connection between the Imperial and the Gregorian calendars, putting his birth at around 15,000BC (or in layman's terms, somewhere in the latter half of the Stone Age) in Biblical Nineveh. [[Ollanius Pius|Oll Persson]] is quite reasonably older than the Emperor, considering that big Emps was born in Anatolia around 8000BC. At some point in time he became a Christian, and maintained his faith until, well, forever. Even once the word "Catholic" was somehow corrupted into "Catheric." This has interesting [[Ollanius Pius#Religion|implications]] given his service to the atheistic Empire of Terra.

He was one of the Argonauts of Greek myth and fought at Austerlitz (described as Napoleon's greatest victory) and Verdun (infamous as one of the bloodiest battles in all of World War I, which is saying something), as well as the First Gulf War, implied to have been [[Team_Yankee#Iraq.2FSyria|fighting on the side of Saddam Hussein]]. In fact, in all of the [[Ollanius Pius#The Eternal Infantryman|references to his military history]], which is extensive—having been apparently a soldier in all his ''documented'' lives, if not all of them, period—it's also implied that he tends to fight on the losing side, or even exclusively has, whether as some sort of curse or by some sort of design. It also explains how he managed to survive boarding Horus' flagship during the [[Siege of Terra]]. It is unknown if Horus actually managed to kill him: while [[Chaos|CHAOS]] [[Dakka|MINDBULLETS]] certainly sound like they could do the trick it still is quite possible that [[Troll|he reassembled himself and walked off, not giving a fuck.]] A man with true balls of steel, especially as it's implied that he's never died once in his whole lifetime (at least until Calth), and most of the time he has come back and back again to fight wars in the (literal at times) trenches. He does not want to be bothered one single fuck with John Grammaticus or the Cabal, but gets suckered in to galaxy saving adventures once and again. Such is the lot of a Perpetual.

At some point in Earth's early history, he also served as the Emperor's first-ever Warmaster, but this ended badly during a war in East Phoenicia. They defeated a cult which had been building a tower [the literal fucking Tower of Babel] that contained a complete lexicon for Enuncia, the weird transcendent language that fucks reality sideways when spoken and which is capable of causing permanent [meaning it isn't fixed once back in the warp] damage to daemons; what this editor henceforth refers to as "Space Thu'um". Ollanius wanted to destroy the tower, regarding Enuncia as an existential threat, but the Emperor wanted to preserve it as a doomsday weapon, and/or a repository of knowledge for their own use. Oll expressed his concern with this decision by shanking the Emperor and wrecking the tower before then running away... By Christ, this is a flashback where nobody comes out looking pretty.

====St. Ollanius Pius: Old Lore and New====
Before Perpetuals were introduced in the [[Horus Heresy]] novels, specifically in ''Legion'' by Dan Abnett, and more on Ollanius is elaborated in the some particularly good stories by Abnett set on Calth stories, especially ''Know no Fear'' and ''Unmarked'' (a short story anthologized in ''The Mark of Calth''), St. Ollanius Pius was just a regular old balls-of-steel Guardsman whose balls turned to adamantium as he threw himself in front of his emperor during the most epic duel of all time, and thus was sanctified in lore and the Imperial cult from then on down. He was later revealed to be a Perpetual, in a [[skub|somewhat controversial]] change. From the point of view of the average Imperial citizen, or indeed, in fact just about anyone perhaps save the Emperor himself, he was that adamantium-testicled Guardsman and remains that holy Saint who is highly revered by the Imperium (the highest decoration in the [[Imperial Guard]], for instance, is named for him.) In fact, of course, he may still be wandering around, probably from what we all know trying to live this all down modestly. Ollanius, no doubt, would prefer the ambiguity as to whether his existence was utterly obliterated in the [[Rip and Tear|horrendous space kablooie]] surrounding the duel between the Emperor and Horus to remain as such. Although, in ''Fury of Magnus'', Magnus was able to permanently kill a Perpetual via the power of sorcery and plot convenience [though it '''STILL''' didn't quite stick], which perhaps makes it more doubtful that Olly is still alive. But ''Fury of Magnus'', while an enjoyable read, poses so many questions and contrived plot points, while answering so few of them, that attempting to deduce any larger implications from it is hardly a sturdy prospect.

===John Grammaticus===
Former officer of the Emperor's armies during the [[Unification Wars]] on Terra and later agent of [[the Cabal]] and a lesser [[psyker]]; [[Perpetual#John Grammaticus|John Grammaticus]] [[meme|<strike>WHO WAS GORDON GRAMMATICUS' BROTHER WAS ONE DAY AT AN OFFICE TYPING ON A COMPUTOR</strike>]] is an interesting case: after he died at Anatol [[Hive]], an [[Eldar]] [[Autarch]] called Slau Dha found his body and made him into a Perpetual. This signaled that it is possible for humans to become Perpetuals; or, Slau Dha was the equivalent of Ramirez and John was Connor MacLeod from Highlander. If this were the case this would make John and Slau Dha at least eight times more [[awesome]]. Grammaticus' skills gained over the course of a millennium of life were instrumental for recruiting [[Alpharius]] to the cause of the Cabal, but he felt bad about this and stepped out of an airlock in the faint hope that it would kill him. (It did, but then he just came back to life again). After the [[Drop Site Massacre]], he spent some time digging up an old relic spear that was actually made from cast-off lightning of the Emperor's divinity, reputed to be able to kill anything, even other immortals. After the apparent failure of the "Alpharius Gambit" ''(two choices, two primarchs, go figure)'' the Cabal had intended to use it to stop Vulkan from reaching Terra and interfering with their future plans. Unfortunately such a powerful relic made Grammaticus into a big giant target, and he ended up getting captured, killed and recaptured by the [[Word Bearers]] and the Shattered Legions before eventually finding his way to [[Macragge]].

On the way he was contacted psychically by [[Eldrad|this dick]] who told him that he could strike back at the Cabal by stabbing Vulkan himself, since if [[derp|another immortal did it it would work differently]], and in this case it would somehow heal the primarch who was mentally broken after years of torture by [[Konrad Curze]]. Because of reasons. So after seeking Vulkan out on Macragge he stabbed him, investing his own immortality into the strike, and sucking it out of himself and making him mortal... also apparently killing Vulkan properly this time and therefore doing what the Cabal wanted in the first place. Also at some point during the invasion of Calth he found Oll Persson and tried to recruit him to the cause, though that didn't go too well as he was only half-hearted in his attempts anyway, plus Oll couldn't be bothered. He was mindwiped after the Vulkan thing, but Eldrad restored his memories and asked him to make sure Oll reached Terra.

===Damon Prytanis===
[[X-Files|Alex Krycek]] in space. Another agent of the Cabal, though unlike John Grammaticus, Damon was more of a soldier/assassin than a spy and got all the killy jobs. It is heavily implied that he was the one who killed Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as other important figures throughout human history. No, really. The novels specifically mention he was responsible for the death of "the good man in Memphis" and "the brother in the City of Angels".

He was apparently more comfortable with his position in the Cabal, even though it meant working against his own species, as seen during his meetings with John Grammaticus, which made him more trustworthy in the eyes of the Cabal. During John's last mission Damon was sent to watch over him and make sure that he didn't falter or chicken out and try to derail their plans. Though he sort of failed to contain Grammaticus, he does kill Vulkan once, shredding him with a pair of shuriken pistols, but it's worth noting the primarch was already pretty shattered after having died a couple of times by that point.

He was the individual who brought Cyrene Valantion into the Cabal's fold, having to die once or twice on board the Word Bearers' starship just to prove a point to her. He's now definitely dead for real after Barthusa Narek shot him in the head with a fulgurite round at point blank.

===[[Alivia Sureka]]===
Another female Perpetual and empathic psyker. Unlike most of the others though she has no apparent connection to the Cabal at all, and in fact is much more closely linked to the Emperor. She had traveled with Him and undisclosed "others" to the planet Molech where the Emperor somehow travelled directly into the Warp and stole portions of the Chaos Gods' powers (or so the Chaos Gods claim).

She was left behind on Molech to guard the gateway to stop anyone else from passing through and doing the same thing. Which apparently she did dutifully for a few thousand years... meaning that she is the only other Perpetual in the Emperor's peer group who is actually loyal to him at the time of the Crusade. When the Great Crusade arrived on the planet, the Emperor fortified the shit out of it, leaving detachments of [[Blood Angels]], [[Ultramarines]], [[Imperial Knight]]s, [[Titans]] and [[Imperial Guard|Imperial Army]] to guard the gate. This made her somewhat redundant, so she just settled down and got married. At least until [[Horus]] arrived during the Heresy and laid waste to most of the Imperial forces in a bid to follow in his father's footsteps and take the same power for himself. Alivia tried to seal the portal, but wound up getting killed before she could complete the ritual. She resurrected, escaped Molech, and headed for Terra with her adopted daughters.

Humorously, Alivia has several affectations brought over from the third millennium; she has a tendency to use "modern-day" phrases such as "Okay", which do not actually exist in the 31st millennium. She also carries around a book of Hans Christian Andersen stories ''(probably one of the most priceless artifacts in the Imperium, if anyone knew what it was)'' which she reads to her adopted children.

She is now definitely dead, having pulled a Grammaticus and sacrificed her Perpetuality to resurrect Malcador after he was killed by Magnus during the Siege of Terra. This is a shame, as she was probably one of the smartest, toughest, and most well-adjusted people in the Imperium.

==Surfaced during and after the Great Crusade==

===Vulkan===
Like his dad, [[Vulkan]] of the [[Salamanders]] was a confirmed Perpetual. This was put to the ultimate test by none other than <s>[[Konrad Curze|the goddamn Night Haunter himself]]</s> [[Konrad Curze|the little emo goth kid on super-steroids]], who captured Vulkan during the Drop Site Massacre and proceeded to perform the [[Daemonculaba|most depraved tortures and murders on the Lord of the Salamanders in an attempt to break his will]], [[/d/|and had to invent several new ones just for the occasion]]. Whether he was [[Grimdark|shot with bolters at point-blank range, cut apart, decapitated, eviscerated, impaled, dismembered, evaporated, getting his throat torn out with a rusty fork, being quite literally mindfucked, or being tossed naked into an active warp drive]], Vulkan would neither break nor stay dead, [[Rage|pissing Curze right the fuck off]]. Eventually, Curze locked him in a maze courtesy of [[Perturabo]] where he would hunt Vulkan himself. Curze's mistake was to place Dawnbringer at the center of the maze. When Vulkan got to his hammer, [[Awesome|he proceeded to hand Curze a helping of it straight to the face]], then [[Just as planned|he activated a built-in teleporter that sent him right over to]] [[Macragge]] where he promptly burned up in the atmosphere like a human meteor, killing him again in the process.

Here things get complicated: Vulkan regenerated on Macragge but lost his mind, so Guilliman kept him locked up until he could figure out what to do with him, even concealing his presence when the Lion arrived. However, when [[Konrad Curze]] arrived on Macragge after stowing away on the Lion's flagship, Vulkan escaped in a moment of lucidity and tore his way across the planet (while naked) hunting Curze down and almost defeating him in a one-on-one duel. Shortly afterwards John Grammaticus found the broken primarch and stabbed him with the fulgurite, a stone spearhead charged with the psychic essence of the Emperor himself. He could not regenerate from this and neither [[Roboute Guilliman]], [[Sanguinius]], nor [[Lion El'Jonson]] could remove the spear from their brother's chest. Given that he was sent back to [[Nocturne]] for burial, we are forced to assume that his casket included a long tube-shaped appendage at least several feet long sticking out at an unusual angle, making this (while [[Grimdark|tragic)]] at least [[Khorne|eight]] times [[Lulz|more amusing]] (assuming that he was ever stabbed in the first place[though it was only the head of a spear not the shaft itself]).

Guilliman was hopeful that Vulkan would resurrect himself in time and insisted that the coffin was a preservation capsule, which Guilliman dubbed "The Unbound Flame". Some Salamanders who maintained a vigil of mourning thought they could hear a heartbeat. After an even more convoluted series of events surrounding the return of Vulkan's remains to Nocturne, the Primarch was found alive and well once more, which is even more confusing given that the fulgurite, which was supposed to kill him permanently, was still sticking out of his chest at the time of his entombment.

What raises an interesting question in Vulkan's case is regarding the source of his powers. If it was given to him by the Emperor, it begs the question why the Emperor did not give all of his sons this ability (though it sort of answers itself with the thought of [[Angron]] becoming the [[Juggernaut]] (bitch!). If it was not the case, it would suggest that the Perpetual trait can be passed down one's bloodline, or at least transferred by cloning. Big E certainly ''knew'' that Vulkan was immortal and depended on that fact in order to get him to bring the Talisman of Seven Hammers back to Terra. This couldn't have been the Emperor's "ultimate plan" for Vulkan, and seems more of a last ditch contingency considering how badly the Golden Throne got fucked over by Magnus; if he had planned to put a self-destruct on it all along, he probably could/should have done it before he got stuck sitting on it. (Granted it is implied that Artellus Numeleon's sacrifice brought back Vulan from his permanent death. The first but not the last time Human sacrifice is used to bring back Perpetuals from certain death)

The Emperor also told Vulkan plainly that his son's "humanity" was his single greatest trait and also his proudest achievement, and that he hoped that Vulkan would eventually teach it to his brothers. Certainly Vulkan was probably the nicest of the Primarchs and as such would probably have been the best bet for an undying son, especially if you were relying on him to tone down the more [[Rip and Tear|extreme]] traits of his brothers after the Great Crusade was finished. When Empy was looking over the petri dishes for which one to add the immortality to he had to choose between (in order): [[Lion El'Jonson|a snooty inscrutable jerk]], [[Primarch#Two_Missing_Primarchs|a [RECORDS LOST]]], [[Fulgrim|a preening katty egotistical asshole]], [[Perturabo|a genocidal sociopath with poor impulse control]], [[Jaghatai Khan|Genghis Khan]], [[Leman Russ|a dick with a viking furry fetish]], [[Rogal Dorn|a stubborn joyless masochist]], [[Konrad Curze|a schizophrenic serial killing terrorist with bipolar mood swings between fatalism and nihilism]], [[Sanguinius|a guy with a terrible terrible secret]], [[Ferrus Manus|a Social Darwinist nerd who'd rather be talking to a toaster]], [[Primarch#Two_Missing_Primarchs|a [RECORDS LOST]]], [[Angron|an explosively violent psychopath with silly hair]], [[Roboute Guilliman|a patrician jerk with a heart of gold]], [[Mortarion|a bitter aspie maniac with an unhealthy love of toxins]], [[Magnus the Red|a massively powerful arrogant psyker who can't take orders]], [[Horus|a spoiled insecure egomaniac]], [[Lorgar|a petulant zealot with a pathological daddy complex]], [[Corvus Corax|an emo bird]], and [[Alpharius|two people obsessed with]] [[Omegon|secrets and lies]]. On the other hand, a lot of those traits were nurture rather then purely nature. Even so, if he did do it deliberately, he [[Just as Planned|made a decent choice]].

===Dalia Cythera===
Dalia Cythera is a former Administratum Transcriber and a latent psyker during the Great Crusade/Horus Heresy (specifically during the [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Schism_of_Mars Death of Innocence]). While she was at one point at risk of [[Blam| unemployment]] due to her insatiable desire to learn and actually read the tomes she transcribed, she was soon protected by [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Koriel_Zeth Adept Koriel Zeth] and delivered to Magma City, her forge on Mars. Dalia has three wow factors going for her: one, she was somehow not a braindead thrall after all that indoctrination; two, she possessed an eidetic memory and could read noospheric data without augments due to her latent psyker abilities; and three, she had a connection to [[Mag%27ladroth| a cold dark thing]] that gave her bad dreams and intuitive knowledge about technology.

Zeth involved her in the development of the Akashic Reader, her pet project to tap into the the sum of all knowledge, which was the hypothesized source of Dalia's ability. Using an array of a thousand sanctioned psykers as a surge protector and another, Jonas, strapped into a gold throne-like device (the Akashic Reader), the plan was to siphon the energy needed to pierce into the [[Warp| aether]] from the Astronomican, shove Jonas' perceptions into the Akashic Records and somehow get that fool enough paper to jot it all down for them before his brain liquefied. Dalia forgot the first rule of engineering which is to overengineer (not helped by faulty data and assumptions on her part); naturally it went tits up, but [[Warp| it would have anyways]].

Such a feat would have been a great leap forward for a rapidly booming age of technology in this wonderful time of development and progress! Unfortunately, the project was utterly annihilated during the Martian Schism due to [[Waifu| Koriel Zeth's]] last stand, in which she chose slagging the entire forge city over allowing the Dark Mechanicum and Kelbor-Hal to plunder the miraculous technologies she had uncovered. Absolutely everything was reclaimed by magma, [[Grimdark|resulting in Mankind's last hope for a golden future dying in hellfire]].

Meanwhile, Dalia and friends are off on a merry adventure to seek out that thing that's calling her out to join it in the void of the Noctis Labyrinth. They meet some jolly characters along the way like [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kaban_Machine Kaban-chan] and later Semyon, just a normal (if rather unhinged) unaugmented 10,000 year old dude with a pet servitor living at the bottom of a pitch black chasm. Dalia could relate, having a pet Protector of her own, Rho-Mu 31. Semyon was blessed by the Emperor himself to fulfil the role of 'Guardian of the Dragon,' protector of secrets and warden. Semyon talks about how he is 'running out of time' which implies that Dalia's Perpetuity either has a time limit of 10,000 years, or will begin to wane when her replacement is found. It is clarified that it wasn't the Void Dragon initiating, turns out it was [[The_God-Emperor_of_Mankind| Big E]] all along (at least in part)!

Dalia is The Chosen One (plus her pet too, I guess), and is destined to [[Irony| rot in a hole where her innate abilities will be absolutely useless to everyone]]. Her job duties include somehow keeping folks from releasing the Dragon of Mars, and thwarting any attempts to steal a tome (which [[fail|immediately gets swiped, implicitly by one of her surviving friends]]) which makes sure to [[Derp|explicitly impart the lesson that the Dragon was put on Mars so jerkoffs would make whatever wacky shit it dreamed about in captivity later, without any of the requisite explanations of why he made the book explicitly impart such a damaging secret, so that's not bad or anything]]. As soon as Semyon passes his Perpetual status to Dalia he and his servitor go the way of [[Malcador_the_Sigillite|Malcador]], collapsing into dust.

Come the present day, it's unclear whether or not she's still around, though as the end of the novel indicates that her successor as Guardian of the Dragon is currently being drawn to the Labyrinth of Night, her chances of surviving into the age of the Great Rift seem slim in the extreme, if at all.

===Anval Thawn===
Justicar [[Anval Thawn]] of the [[Grey Knights]] is the biggest mystery of them all. All that is known is that he can walk away from the most gruesome [[Daemon]]-inflicted deaths one can imagine, much to the chagrin of his brothers and bewilderment of the Brotherhood's [[Librarian]]s. It also begs the question of why him being a Perpetual was not detected during his induction into the Grey Knights, [[Gene-seed|either during the tests or abnormal recovery from the involved surgeries or the speed at which he accepted the nineteen organs]]. Perhaps the Perpetualness is undetectable by normal science or it manifests after a person's first death (much like in Highlander or the [[Planeswalker]] spark of [[Magic: The Gathering]]). Another option is that he might be Ollanius Pius or John Grammaticus, who were tired of dicking around for another 10.000 years and wanted a shot at becoming a [[Space Marine]] and then went all in to kill the Chaos bastards as a Grey Knight. And an even better question is how the fuck the [[Eldar]] were able to recognize him for what he was after only a short period of interaction with them.

===Cyrene Valantion===
Cyrene Valantion was a common woman from Khur, a planet conquered by the Word Bearers during the Great Crusade, until the [[Ultramarines]] blew her home city of Monarchia to ashes to send a "Stop Worshipping Me!" message from the [[Emperor|Big E]] to [[Lorgar]]. Since the smurfs weren't complete assholes they evacuated all civilians first (only [[blam|BLAMing]] those who didn't want to in the process). Well, except Cyrene and a couple (hundred) of others. She decided to stay out of the city borders and watch as the orbital bombardment erased her home. Apparently watching an entire city being nuked was not the best decision, since she lost her eyes and almost died due to the extreme flash of light and from radiation burns. When the [[Word Bearers]] arrived they rescued her and figured that she was the only surviving witness of their punishment, because smurfs couldn't be bothered helping civilians whose city they just destroyed. This turned her into some kind of saint in their eyes, so they offered her a position of Confessor/Holy Relic, aka "The Blessed Lady" in their fleet. During the few decades of her service to the Word Bearers she became close to [[Argel Tal]] and guided him on his path to becoming the first [[Possessed Marine]] and overall awesome guy who kills loyalists and doesn't afraid of anything. Everything was fine and dandy until the Heresy, when during the Drop Site Massacre she got herself killed by some Custodes assholes <s>for just being in their way</s> [[FATAL|who thought they'd have an easier way ''obtaining'' answers out of her than from any Word Bearer]]. Needless to say Argel Tal cried manly tears of rage over her corpse and swore revenge on the Custodes, which he delivered just a few hours later, butchering them all amidst the ashes of Istvaan V.

Fast forward one year to [[Erebus]] resurrecting her to facilitate his machinations with Argel Tal, because he's a dick. Mind you, while she was dead for a year, [[Grimdark|he had her soul torn apart and eaten by multiple daemons]], whom Erebus "persuaded" to give the pieces back. Being the badass she was, Cyrene recovered from the shock of being mutilated and tormented in hell surprisingly fast, until the battle for Nuceria, wherein her ship was blown up and she got rescued by none other than Damon Prytanis who told her that being resurrected had turned her into a Perpetual. And then... cliffhanger. During the Siege of Terra, she resurfaced as a blind seer who renamed herself as Actaea associated with Damon Prytanis and Alpharius. Actaea claimed to be part of Cyrene Valantion's cult in the Word Bearers, but Zardu Layak did some digging and found that no record of her existed. It is also possible that she became Moriana.

===Joaqhuine Desdemondra===
Joaqhuine Desdemondra is a Living Saint and a secret lover of Inquisitor Bronislaw Czevak. Formerly a blood-drinking Death Cult assassin from the Path Incarnadine, she was an associate of Czevak. Other names she was known as include Saint Joaqhuine the Renascent - Living Saint of the Imperial Creed, or The Idolatress. She was identified as a form of immortal called a Reanimate upon being introduced in the "Atlas Infernal" novel. Unfortunately for her, she was later captured by Ahriman and was tortured repeatedly by being incinerated to death in front of Czevak in order to break the mental wards placed on his mind so Ahriman can extract knowledge about the Black Library from him. While Czevak was later taken from Ahriman's hands, she remained in captivity. Which is a point of motivation for Bronislav to confront Ahriman again.

{{Imperium}}

Alpha Legion

2023-03-03T18:30:25Z

2607:FB91:119A:44DF:C8AD:B884:FF14:8318: /* Recent History */

{{BLAM|The term is used by heretics to refer to a mythical 20th Legion. It's a nonsensical name, which proves it is a false story since true priests of the Adeptus Ministorum would know 'alpha' is an ancient term meaning "first". But any such 20th Legion would have been the last to be discovered before the [[Horus|Horus Heresy]]. 'Alpha' is an old word meaning 'A' or represents the first letter in an ancient Terran dialect so the name Alpha Legion translates into 'A Legion' in two ways (heretical falsehoods are rarely original or sensible).}}

{{BLAM|No such legion exists, nor has it ever existed. The remainder of this page is intentionally [[Malal|left blank]]. There is no need for you to read further, and if you feel any urges to read beyond this paragraph or if you have any suspicion that there is any text following, please consult your local [[Commissar]], [[Chaplain]] or [[Dogmata]] for [[Blam|re-education]]. If you happen to be the Commissar, report yourself to your sidearm.}}

Now that we've got that out of the way...
{{Heresy}}
{{Infobox Traitor Legion
|Name = Alpha Legion... we think.
|Heraldry = [[File:AL_Post-Heresy_Icon.png|center|200px]]
|Battle Cry = "Hydra Dominatus", "I am Alpharius!.", or "For the Emperor!"... probably. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iyOkFLuoBc this] and sometimes [https://youtu.be/FZcG5UOY224?t=48 this]
|Original Name = No fewer than 747 informal names recorded, including The Ghost Legion, The Harrowing, The Unbroken Chain, The Hydra, The Azure Serpent, and just "Legion"
|Number = XX
|Primarch = [[Alpharius]]. Or [[Omegon]]. Or both, maybe neither.
|Original Homeworld = none
|Current Homeworld = Whatever the Legionnaire or serf in question is brainwashed into believing during their current mission. None actually exists, Legion is split too much for any central command.
|Champion = various
|Specialty = Covert espionage and infiltration, information warfare, mass use of cultists...probably
|Strength = infinite...maybe
|Allegiance = [[The Cabal|.]].[[Chaos Undivided|.]].[[Imperium|.]][[Malal|.]][[A Game of Pretend|Yes?]]
|Colours = Dark blue or dark sea green, sometimes, often with green ornamentation and a silver trim. Possibly both, unless neither. Black with silver trim (Effrit Stealth Squad and other Black Op units).}}
{{topquote|I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.|Revelation 22:13, if I recall correctly}}
{{topquote|Such are we that in this art of war are like unto serpents, to lie out of sight, to strike swift, to carry such poison in our mouths that men fear to tread where we may lie.|Anonymous, quoted by the Emperor}}
{{topquote|I'm confused. Really, really confused.|Adam Gilchrist, possibly}}
{{topquote|What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.|Salvador Dalí, or so they say}}
{{topquote|If you want to keep a [[Dark Angels|secret]], you must also hide it from yourself.|George Orwell, maybe}}
{{topquote|Hail Hydra! Immortal Hydra! We shall never be destroyed! Cut off a limb and two more shall take its place! We serve the Master, as the world shall soon serve us! Hail Hydra!|Alpha Legi-wait a minute!}}

The [[Alpha Legion]] (allegedly known as the '''Chaos [[Reasonable Marines]]''') are basically what would happen if you gave the CIA from the 1950s onwards a Space Marine legion and told them to go nuts. They are the 20th and last Legion of the Adeptus Astartes from the Great Crusade, and were the last to find their Primarch, [[Alpharius]], in part because [[Horus]] was the first to find him and [[What|kept him hidden from the Emperor and everyone else for some time.]] In retrospect, it probably should have been obvious that he was going to go full Chaos.

The Alpha Legion's BIG SECRET is, as you probably know, the fact that their "one" Primarch is actually two guys, the twins Alpharius and Omegon. Since the Emperor made all of the Primarchs, it's unclear how this would be a secret; surely he'd know that he made twenty-one Primarchs, not twenty. Right?

... Right?

As you are about to realize, we know absolutely ''nothing'' about the Alpha Legion or their members. Sure, there are a lot of sources with information about them around, but none of this is solid and, as we know that the Alpha Legion are sneaky as ''fuck'', and are properly getting their shit done without anyone noticing it.

==Origins==
As with most lore, the Alpha Legion's name comes from religion. The two Primarchs, Alpharius and Omegon, represent the line Jesus said in Revelation 22:13: ''"I am the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End."'' But as Omegon is meant to be a secret, the legion is named after Alpharius. If Omegon was to be the face rather than the secret, the Legion could possibly have been called the Omega Legion (although the Ultrasmurfs would probably file a cease and desist) - or in other words the "last" legion which conforms to your "needing sense in a name" thing.

Adherents to the stories of this Legion make addle-minded claims that prove their insincerity such as: all marines in this legion were surgically altered to look identical to [[Alpharius|their Primarch]]; the Emperor himself gave this Primarch command over campaign forces above that of the Lord Commander of the Imperial Army; power fantasies such as the existence of more than one Primarch in this Legion; and other tall tales that defy belief. Most heretical of all is the claims that these Primarchs betrayed his holiness the Emperor of Mankind willingly without being corrupted by [[Chaos]], which conveniently excuses their absence from the Eye of Terror and thus any observable evidence of their betrayal with the other traitor Legions.

It has also been suggested that the Legion, their Primarch, and their symbol may be based on the star [[wikipedia:Alphard|Alphard]] in the constellation of Hydra. What's more, Alphard means "the solitary one", but it has a much dimmer star [[Creed|"hidden" behind it]]. If this was intended, considering that "Alpha Legion", "Alpharius" and the hydra motif have been around for a lot longer than Omegon has, it means that Games Workshop has been playing a very, very [[Tzeentch|long game]]. Meta.

===The Documented "Truth"===
Apparently, the naming of the Alpha Legion refers to the fact that it actually has no name. In Horus Heresy III: Extermination it goes to great lengths to explain the early history of the Alpha Legion and how it contrasts to other more well-known Legions. It seems that the Primarch either kept the name to be deliberately ironic, deeply meaningful in the sense that "Alpha" can also mean "Supreme" or the early title of "Alpha" just stuck.

All Legions after the [[Dark Angels|First]] were put through a series of tests and trials by the [[Emperor]] before general release into the Great Crusade, quite literally (and un-ironically) an '''"Alpha Test"''' where the Legion would only consist of 1,000-2,000 Astartes to see how they would perform their intended function, which was pre-determined by the Emperor before their creation.

The XXth Legion (XX = double cross. Look up Twenty Committee for speculations) was never publicly released or announced by the Imperium; though the initial tests proved positive, it never progressed past this initial stage and remained an '''''"Alpha"'' Legion''', leading some to question whether the XXth Legion were actually intended for a much darker purpose and were intentionally kept concealed by the Emperor.

For the first 40 years of the Great Crusade, the few warriors of the XXth were a "Ghost Legion" who would act in obscure warzones isolated from the other Legions, sometimes act under the heraldry of a different legion or no legion at all. They performed dubious tasks such as assassination, kidnapping, artifact retrieval, escort missions, and other clandestine support roles. It may not be coincidental that these tasks were assigned to the Legion whose number could be represented as a ''double cross'', which also figures prominently in their iconography. These roles would later be taken by the [[Adeptus Custodes|Custodians]], [[Officio Assassinorum]] and [[Sisters of Silence|Sororitas Inconcessus]], causing the XXth to fall into myth and stagnation. Only the discovery of the Primarch [[Alpharius]] (which still might not even be his true name) allowed the Ghost Legion to resurface nearly 160 years later and become a true Legion in its own right, seemingly springing up from nowhere with a full (and rapidly expanding) force of 10,000 Astartes and a battle-ready fleet. If the information in [[Dan Abnett]]'s ''Legion'' is accurate, the Alpha Legion was aware of [[Chaos]] some years before [[Horus]] had even heard the term, though not fully appreciative of its dangers.

==Recent History==
[[Image:Alpha_Legionnaire.jpg|thumb|240px|right|The denizens of this wiki failed to detect our infiltration forces. <s>[[Just as Planned]]</s> {{BLAM}} {{BLAM|''HERESY''!!! There are no Chaos forces infiltrating this site. Especially from the nonexistent Alpha Legion. Please stop reading this at once. There are more important, less heretical, things to be done. You should be saying your prayers to the Emperor, or eating your veggies}}]]
There are extremely persistent and consistent rumors that the most blessed Blood Ravens chapter of the holy Adeptus Astartes led by Chapter Master Gabriel Angelos and assisted by the Librarian Isador Akios, the PDF and Imperial Guard led by [[Mordecai Toth|Inquisitor Mordecai Toth]], and the [[Eldar]] of [[Craftworld]] [[Biel-tan]] led by [[Farseer]] [[Macha]], fought the mythical Alpha Legion led by Chaos Lord Bale and Chaos Sorcerer [[Sindri Myr]] and an Orkish Waaagh! led by the Warboss [[Orkamungus]] on the planet Tartarus (what a lovely name for a planet). Attempting to accuse the Blood Ravens of Heresy for spreading lies about fictional legions has universally ended in failure. The same applies to the Legion's alleged involvement in the events surrounding the [[Exterminatus]] of Typhon and [[Azariah Kyras]]' (almost) ascension to Daemonhood, suggested as the Chaos enemies allied with Kyras in Retribution's campaign list their team name as "Alpha Legion" and wear their colors, but were never explicitly named as such. We're not even going to mention the [[Metal Boxes]] incident in the [[Kaurava System]]...
Also any relation between the Alpha legion and [[Tzeentch]] dogma is purely coincidental...or is it. But everyone agrees they are space terrorists, and probably al-Qaeda with a grimdark-startrek-feel.

Here are some of the things that we know about them:
*Do not talk about the Alpha Legion
*Do NOT talk about the Alpha Legion.
*The Alpha Legion never existed.
*The Alpha Legion is the only real Warhammer 40,000 force, the rest are operatives dressed up.
*Alpharius was not killed. [[Roboute Guilliman|Rawbutt Jellyman]] was the one who died, and Alpharius disguised himself as him. Which means that he now leads the Imperium.
*'''+++Records Expunged+++'''

In all seriousness, we really, honestly DON'T have any clue what the fuck is up with the Alpha Legion because Games Workshop gives them so little fluff compared to the rest of the Traitor Legions (possibly on purpose given that part of their schtick is how mysterious they are), and even those few things we know might be misinformation.

With the release of Forge World's 3rd Horus Heresy book, Extermination, as well as several Black Library short stories and novellas, there are a few confirmed events that the Alpha Legion took part in, for a given definition of "confirmed". They consistently show that when the Alpha Legion is involved, even if they're ostensibly "allies", whether you're a loyalist, traitor, a secret society of aliens ostensibly trying to destroy Chaos ([[Derp|by arranging the destruction of the only being and species Chaos fears and can be destroyed by]]), or Alpharius himself, they're going to find a way to screw with you.

Finally, if we take [[Dawn of War]] to be canon (and Games Workshop certainly does) then we can infer that the Alpha Legion is probably just as splintered and broken up as the eight outright-traitor legions, with some of the sub-groups running off to [[Sindri|embrace Chaos outright]]. Honestly this is not all that surprising if you take into consideration [[Your dudes|GeeDub's stance on character motivation and adaptability]].

Hell, even when they have recently became their own class in the [[Black Crusade (RPG)|Black Crusade]] supplement ''Tome of Fate'', the information provided is still somewhat vague and just stuff we already know. What it ''did'' reveal though, was that groups of Alpha Legionnaires are seldom seen together. Many are independent operatives working on extended reconnaissance missions sent by some higher up, insurgents waging a one-man guerrilla war, or trying to achieve a personal objective known only to them. Some are even seen amongst "the Severed"; a group of Chaos Marines forcibly exiled from their Legions.

Even when by themselves, many often gather a loyal cult of followers who try to help them in their goal. Alpha Legionnaires are more often than not the orchestrator behind Chaos cults and rebellions who fester within Imperial hives. They may not even pose as Marines, as ''Tome of Fate'' mentions that they have an unusual and legendary ability to disguise themselves as xenos, mutants, or even loyalists (maybe they are already loyalists, depending on who you ask). If one thinks about it, a terrifying possibility arises; that they have somehow acquired the transformative technologies of the Callidus assassins. They frequently travel in and out of the Eye of Terror, setting up decoys, assassinations, and propaganda within Imperial space.

To put it simply there are about as many different categories of Alpha Legion motives as you can think of. Here are just a few (however, most would probably unify upon the return of a Primarch).
* Those who are actually still loyal and aid the Imperium as best it can in sneaky, inscrutable ways.
* Those who are nominally loyal and uncorrupted but still carrying out their Primarch's/Cabal's plan to make the Imperium lose.
* Those who have embraced Chaos to bring about the other version of the above plan.
* Those who have embraced Chaos in a misguided effort to bring about the original version of the above plan.
* Those who have embraced Chaos and no longer care about Alpharius/The Cabal's plan, either just doing their own thing and/or fighting for the cause of Chaos. Sindri Myr comes to mind.
* Those who are loyal only to the distant memory and legacy of their Primarch (either one) and Legion and act in whatever way they think best preserves that legacy.
* Those who are loyal to the Emperor but deeply oppose the current state of the Imperium.
* Those who are loyal to the Emperor and think that by destroying the weakest parts of the Imperium they strengthen the Imperium as a whole. Occam the Untrue specifically believes this in Sons of the Hydra.
* Those who care only about the survival of their warband and brothers, even if they venerate Chaos/The Emperor/The Primarchs/etc. Kassar from Shroud of Night falls in this category.
* Those who do their own thing, just in general.
* Those loyal to their own conception of the Alpha Legion. Whatever the hell that entails. Which is most of them.
* Those who are motivated by their hatred for something in specific, usually Guilliman. Quetzal Carthach from The Long Games at Carcharias and Sons of the Hydra just really fucking hates Ultramarines, allegedly because he was at Eskrador when Guilliman killed “Alpharius”.
* The infinite IQ members who decided to just bunker down and let this whole thing blow over, only caring to make sure their souls don't get raped for eternity. Nobody confirmed here, but someone probably figured this out.
* About a million other things.
* Fuck knows.
* [[Iron Snakes|Some]] [[Traitor Legion Loyalists]] chapters who straight up abandoned the Legion.

As you can see, there is simply nothing concrete on the Alpha Legion as there is no longer any Alpha Legion. It is a schizophrenic hydra that has gone mad with each head only in control of itself (if even that, they do love using sleeper agents and brainwashing).

Of final note is the ''Siege of Terra'' book ''Death and the End'' muddles things further, as it is finally revealed that each Alpha Legionnaire is hypnotically programmed with six specific trigger words that would irrevocably influence their behavior with regards to the Imperium and Chaos. Once the trigger word was spoken, it doesn't matter what loyalty the Alpha Legionnaire had beforehand, their behavior will now be fully influenced by the directives of said trigger word (the Legionnaire used as an example was amenable to align with the Imperials, but once the trigger word was spoken, started to act on the "Control Chaos to Fight Chaos" imperative of the said trigger word as they have also been shown to fight each other too.

This opens a WHOLE new can of worms, especially with regards to present-day Alpha Legionnaires.

==Tactics==
During the Great Crusade the Ultramarines had a proverb: "Information is victory." What they meant to say is, "If you know an opponent, you can defeat them." The Alpha Legion took this doctrine and turned it up to eleven: why focus only on the intel '''you''' have? An enemy that doesn't know '''you''' (or better has nothing but carefully crafted disinformation about you) is doomed. That's pretty much what their strategy revolves around: ''fucking with their opponent's mind''. Since then no one knows anything for certain about them. If you think you know more, start worrying: this means Alpha Legion is messing with your mind right now. That's why the [[Ultramarines]] and Alpha Legion absolutely ''despised'' each other during the Horus Heresy, as their battle doctrines antagonized each other.

Notable examples (allegedly) include:
* Making everyone believe their primarch was killed by [[Roboute_Guilliman|Rowboat Girlyman]], despite even the [[Ultramarines]] having no records about such a thing ever happening.
* Leaking their attack plans to a subsector governor, so he strips nearby planets of garrisons to reinforce his defense, and then attacking those weakened nearby planets.
* Hypno-indoctrinating natives of a Space Marine recruiting world with a trigger switch, and then turning the unwittingly brainwashed Marines on their brothers when the Alpha Legion attacked their fortress-monastery after arranging for the Chapter in question to suffer a series of "accidents" that left them badly undermanned. And they did that twice.
* Conquering hundreds of planets during the [[Horus_Heresy|Horus Heresy]] with a ''single agent'' planting rumors of the Warmaster's advance, and causing civil wars and rebellions of people trying to plead their allegiance to Horus only to make sure he doesn't nuke their homes upon arriving. Did I mention all these were made by a single fucking person who wasn't even a full-fledged Marine?
* Plotting and executing the Night of a Thousand Rebellions, that effectively severed the Segmentum Pacificus away from the Imperium, leaving it at the mercy of Chaos. Yeah, you heard it right - the entire ''segmentum,'' and while it ''is'' the smallest one, it's still like 15% of the Imperium.
* Adopting the battle cries of their enemies. Yelling "For The Emperor!" before you charge will cause any true loyalist opponent to hesitate - usually fatally.

{{BLAM}}
{{BLAM|These stories are obvious and self-contradictory falsehoods, trash that pollutes the minds of the faithful. We apologize for any discomfort this wiki article may have caused you -- speak to your local [[Chaplain]] or [[Commissar]] if you require counseling. If you witness anyone spreading these harmful lies about a 20th Legion, immediately report the heretic to your local representative of the Inquisition or to your unit's commissar. If you happen to be the commissar and you witness yourself spreading these rumors, please report yourself to your bolt pistol.}}

So to sum it up, they are in the top league of the Warhammer 40k universe, fighting when and where they want to achieve great goals with very limited forces, much like the [[Eldar]] and [[Thousand Sons]] except with less smugness and arrogance. Also, while the Eldar and TS rely on extremely complicated plans that either excel brilliantly or fail horribly, Alpha Legion plans, on the other hand, are mostly simple at their core, but are extremely well thought-out, with multiple backup plans, and are executed as stellarly, so even if they are not successful (which happened multiple times, especially when they fought against equally smart or unpredictable opponents) they rarely suffer much from their defeats. It helps that they often excel at feeding completely inaccurate intel to their opponents. For example, their grand operation against the Raven Guard during the Heresy failed at the final stage with their undercover agents being compromised, and their backup plan of direct assault with their Mechanicum allies also failed, but due to extensive planning and a second fallback plan they still managed to steal the gene-codex and clear all the loose ends that could bite them in their asses later.

The Alpha Legion is basically an army of James Bond clones, like some unholy combination of the Mossad, CIA, and American MACV-SOG. No, really, that is how they fought. They were known for popping out of freaking nowhere and curbstomping the shit out of the enemy at the best possible moment (or worst, depending on whose side you were on). The Alpha Legion was also known to have a training doctrine that actually matches the idea of a super-soldier. That is, they trained ''all'' their Marines in how to use all their equipment and weapons in addition to picking out individuals to be trained as specialists. Every Alpha Legionnaire was at least capable of, in the short term, replacing or deploying as an Assault Marine, Devastator, Fast Attack (like speeders and bikes, etc.), with flexible plans and adaptable soldiers (hence the Hydra, because in the short term you couldn't decapitate their command structure and, being Space Marines, soon someone similarly competent would take over). They were also masters of stealth (though to a lesser degree than, say, the Night Lords or Raven Guard) and knowledgable of psychology, making them the best among the Legions of infiltrating and suborning enemy organisations and governments. All this while keeping their elites fully capable of matching a specialist from another Legion. This meant that the Alpha Legion was capable of fielding as many specialists as the mission required and their equipment allowed. They also had specialized [[Kill_Team|kill-teams]] used to sow chaos among the enemy during the Heresy and the late Crusade. These so-called Headhunters had these awesome combo-bolters with two barrels. Omegon supposedly led the Alpha Legion's black-ops division, no one really knows who is who though, so just consider "Alpharius" and "Omegon" to basically be titles.

Another interesting bit of their tactics is heavy focus on team play. Alpha legion squads move, fight and think as one, and are trained to quickly adapt to new squads. There is no "battle brotherhood" bullshit in this - just a simple extensive training and lack of typical Chaos Space Marine hubris, jealousy and occasional backstabbing. It goes so far that Alpha Legion initiation trials are passed by squads rather than individual aspirants like in other loyalist chapters or chaos warbands, so you either get to play as a team or do not play at all (likely being killed if your squad fails the trial).

Their devotion to Chaos is not entirely concrete, either. Alpharius himself never turned to Chaos, only following Horus into the Heresy as he saw it as the best outcome. Of course some Alpha Legion members like [[Sindri Myr]] are balls-to-the-wall Chaos worshippers but they are a radical minority. Most may see Chaos as a means to an end, using it simply to advance whatever goals they have. Their devotion can depend entirely on the place and the time. Some may [[Night Lords|loathe it]] while others are [[Word Bearers|zealous in their belief]]. In terms of Chaos worship the Alpha Legion is one of the more diverse, some theories even claiming that some operatives within the Legion are in fact closet loyalists seeking to protect humanity and stop Chaos. It should also be noted that their devotion being in question doesn't make them less corrupted; they ''do'' after all field the full gamut of Chaos goods available to the other Legions and ''are'' represented on the tabletop using "generic" Chaos Space Marine models, player and modeller's choice aside.

To make it even more interesting/confusing, what is considered a Legion of [[Space Marines]], was in reality more of a combined effort. More than any other Legion, they recruited outside the Legion for roles besides Astartes, or even agents. They were really, more accurately, a moving society. This trend only seems to have accelerated since the Heresy. No one knows how many regular human soldiers they have, but if their Cultist numbers are anything to go by, the Alpha Legion likely has whole Imperial Guard regiment-strength armies integrated within. That and the fact they don't even hang out in the [[Eye of Terror]] or have a recruiting planet and yet seem to only grow indicates that they have a normally functioning society. At this rate, they'll start looking like the Twilight's Hammer Clan from [[Warcraft]], but it doesn't matter. The GOAL remains!...what that goal is, no one knows.

We wish their [[HMKids]] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcpR4IutUMk theme] had had quotes from [[Sindri Myr]], [[Lord Bale]] or [[Carron]]... Hey, maybe they could do a remake?

Despite their rivalry with the Ultramarines and their similarities with the Raven Guard, their closest comparison among the loyalists might just be with the Dark Angels, the first of the Space Marines just as they are the last. The Alpha Legion mirrors the Dark Angels' uncertain and often confusing loyalties from the other side of the fence. Both have unusual and enigmatic ties to xenos artifacts or beings. Both are heavily involved in "shadow warfare", which goes beyond simply being stealthy like the Raven Guard but also involves seeking advantages in war outside of the battlefield and inside the realm of information, production, communication and subterfuge. Both are completely cloistered in secrecy to the point that virtually none of their allies really ''know'' them. Both of their Primarchs were noted to be especially ingenious in the field of military planning.

But they're a mirror, not a clone. The Dark Angels' loyalties are born of an unplanned for (we think) schism that is actually rather more complicated than "the Fallen all embraced Chaos", while the Alpha Legion's mysterious loyalties at least generally seem to be something they planned for. The Dark Angels seem to willingly embrace their ties to the Watchers while the Alpha Legion outlived the Cabal and thought very little of their eventual destruction. The Lion favoured using his intellect to arrive at the plan that would offer the most direct route to triumph with the least chance of complication while still delivering maximum results while Alpharius liked to show off and made his schemes as elaborate as possible to whip his intellectual dick out and invite everyone to gaze upon it in awe.

==Notable Members (maybe)==
*[[Alpharius]]: Primarch of the Alpha Legion, the Threefold Serpent, the Head of the Hydra, the Last Primarch, and also everyone in the Alpha Legion. Has almost as many origin stories as the Joker, some or all or none of which may be true. Is probably dead, having been outguessed at the very last moment by Rogal Dorn on Pluto, but maybe not.
*[[Omegon]]: The other primarch of the Alpha Legion. Masqueraded as the commander of Effrit Squad, except when he was pretending to be Alpharius or someone else. May or may not be dead, since he took over after Alpharius got free brain surgery from Rogal and then might have died on Eskrador. But maybe not. There's a C'tan shard who might know where he is now.
*Armillus Dynat: Harrowmaster of the Alpha Legion who dual wielded a thunder hammer and power sword like a boss and employed shock and awe tactics. Successfully invaded a loyalist forge world that was defended by Titans and a loyalist Grand Battalion of Iron Warriors.
*Autilon Skorr: Consul-Delegatus who was apparently a very good diplomat prior to the Heresy. Unfortunately, he forgot how to be nice to people after joining the traitors and kept hanging [[Nârik Dreygur]] and his Iron Warriors out to dry until Dreygur finally got sick of it and hit the "change team" button at the Battle of Mezoa. Skorr lost an arm and had to be hauled off the battlefield.
*Kel Silonius: Harrowmaster of the Legion who did a brain-switcheroo with Alpharius so the latter could infiltrate Terra in a ridiculously complicated plan that failed at the last second. Or maybe it didn't.
*Exodus: A master assassin who was said to be as skilled as a [[Vindicare]]. May have actually been multiple legionnaires with the same name.
*Quetzal Carthach: Harrowmaster who claimed to have been at Eskrador when Guilliman killed Alpharius, who was either Omegon or someone else pretending to be Alpharius, if it ever happened at all. Declared himself the Number One Enemy of all Ultramarines and their successors as a result, but died when he tried double-crossing Occam the Untrue, who sent an operative to disable his ship's Geller field, [[Rape|with the expected result]].
*[[Firaeveus Carron]]: Alpha Legion Chaos Lord and absolute dumbass who devoted himself to Khorne and basically ceased to be an Alpha Legionnaire thereafter, preferring to run around with a chainaxe instead of doing things the subtle way. Had a deep-seated loathing of [[METAL BOXES|MEHTUL BAWKSES]] which has made him one of the most-quoted and memetic characters in all of 40K canon. Got wasted by the leader of the winning force (<s>canonically</s>{{BLAM|DUBIOUSLY}} [[Gorgutz]]) at the end of the Soulstorm campaign in a melee duel. [[EPIC FAIL|Yes, this means that Carron, an ostensible Chaos Lord, can be killed in a fistfight by a fucking Tau Commander.]]
*[[Lord Bale]]: Another Alpha Legion Chaos Lord who forgot what Legion he was in; he outright hated subtle tactics and wanted to go charging in to fuck shit up like some kind of World Eater, even though he was devoted to Nurgle. Got backstabbed by SSSSSSIIIIINNNNNDDDRRRRRIIII, who left him to die at the hands of the Blood Ravens while stealing the Maledictum for himself.
*[[Sindri Myr|SSSSSSIIIIINNNNNDDDRRRRRIIII Myr]]: Alpha Legion sorcerer who actually behaved like an Alpha Legionnaire, sneaking, lying, and backstabbing his way to attempted daemonhood, though [[Gabriel Angelos]] roflstomped him with God-Splitter at the last second and he appears to have been eaten by a daemon.
*[[Occam|Occam the Untrue]]: Loyalist(?) Alpha Legionnaire who believes that his legion is a tool to test the Imperium by carving out the weaker parts so as to strengthen the whole. Is on the hunt for Omegon and seems to think the Necrons know where he is.
* Arkos the Faithless: Chaos Lord who turned up at [[Vraks]] when he heard there was a big party going on. He nearly killed [[Azrael]] in a duel and later called in a whole Chaos fleet for backup, dragging the siege out for years more. At the end of the siege, he killed a Company Master from the [[Angels of Absolution]] before being beaten and literally disarmed by an [[Interrogator-Chaplain]] who hauled him off for questioning.
*Kernax Voldorius: Strike Master and daemon prince who managed to give the White Scars one hell of a headache over the millennia, to the point where he became a specific target of their Great Hunt. Was eventually tracked down and killed by [[Kor'sarro Khan]] and [[Kayvaan Shrike]] in a bonding exercise. His head is now a decoration at the Scars' fortress-monastery.
*[[Oinkbane]]: He may be an abhuman, but his tactics are so subtle that even Alpharius applauds him.
*You: {{Blam|+++Activation commencing: Scarlet. Tempest. Meteor. Retribution. Jawbone. Voyage. Cenotaph. Abyss. Echelon. Operative activation confirmed. Mission parameter: Hecatoncheires. Silence and speed, Operative. Hydra Dominatus.+++}}

==Daily Routines of the Alpha Legion==

04:00 - The Alpha Legionnaires emerge from their - {{BLAM|++Information confiscated by orders of his majesty's most Holy Inquisition++}}

04:20 - The Alpha Legionnaires settle down to pray to {{BLAM|++Information confiscated by orders of his majesty's most Holy Inquisition++}}

05:00 - {{BLAM|++Information confiscated by orders of his majesty's most Holy Inquisition++}} - causing much confusion among their serfs.

06:00 - Morning Firing Rites. The Alp- {{BLAM|++Information confiscated by orders of his majesty's most Holy Inquisition++}} - the serfs are still left largely bewildered.

10:00 - Covert Sabotage. The Alpha Legion practice their covert warfare. Serfs are still confused on which is which.

14:00 - Tactical Indoctrination. The Alpha Legion are tasked on which pla- {{BLAM|++Information confiscated by orders of his majesty's most Holy Inquisition++}}

15:00 - Daily Facial Surgery. The Alpha Legion undergo daily surgery to continue to look like their Primarch.

17:00 - Eveni- {{BLAM|++Information confiscated by orders of his majesty's most Holy Inquisition++}} -ge, that and the serfs are still confused.

18:00 - Covert Sabotage and something involving {{BLAM|++Information confiscated by orders of his majesty's most Holy Inquisition++}} .

22:00 - Evening <strike>Malal</strike> Meal. A feast is prepared by the serfs who are still nervous on which Alpha Legionnaire is which as they try their hardest on picking the correct one, especially when it comes to dietary requirements.

23:00 - {{BLAM|++Information confiscated by orders of his majesty's most Holy Inquisition++}}

24:00 - The Alpha Legionnaires goes back to sleep in thei- {{BLAM|++Information confiscated by orders of his majesty's most Holy Inquisition++}}

{{Blam|++By order of the Ordo Herecticus, this entire section has been placed under firm observation. Any changes to the above text are subject to heresy. You anons keep away++}}

== Guilliman changes his mind? ==

[https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/03/01/1st-mar-warhammer-40000-shadowspear-first-of-the-vanguardgw-homepage-post-1/ "Vanguard Space Marines"] have been previewed for the Shadowspear box, and it sounds pretty much exactly like Ultrasmurfs getting their Alpha Legion on (aside from being still definitely loyal, and probably using fewer sleeper agents). Perhaps the Ultrasmurfs are indeed growing beyond their infamous Codex-adherence...

== Practicality as a force of infiltration and subterfuge ==

For all their [[Reasonable Marine]] habits, it may be worth pointing out at this point that there's a reason real-world espionage forces don't consist of genetically engineered 8ft beefquakes toting around thick metal armor and fully automatic rocket launchers. Mostly because we aren't there yet in terms of technology. That stated most Imperials are either too deaf from choirs and gunfire to notice the footsteps or too scared to investigate what they think 9 out of 10 times would be a hive scav or ambull instead of an Alpha Legionnare

== Gallery ==
<gallery>
File:But_oNLY_LOYALIST_BATTle_BROTHERS_NOT_THAT_THERE_ARE_TRAITOR_BROTHERS_JUST_SOME_THAT_ARE_MORE_LOYAL_THAN_OTHERS.png|Be wary, this might be the only chance you get.
</gallery>

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