Editing Corvus Corax (section)

==The Horus Heresy==
[[File:GoldenDemonCorax.jpg|300px|thumb|left|A model of Corax. This one won a [[Golden Daemon]].]]
When the Horus Heresy occurred, the Raven Guard, [[Iron Hands]], and [[Salamanders]] were all on the front lines on [[Horus Heresy|Istvaan V]]. The Raven Guard took up the right flank of the battlefield; a morass of rocky crevices, gorges and caves where they ran smack into the Sons of Horus and the World Eaters. Then, Angron and Abaddon showed up and started tearing bloody chunks out of the Raven Guard. While Corax and his boys, backed up by a massive amount of Iron Hands artillery, managed to give as good as they got. However the fighting saw them take extremely heavy casualties and as concerningly, they used up nearly all of their ammunition stock by about 2.5 hours into the battle. As such, they engaged in a series of regrouping actions with the heavily mauled Salamanders on order to consolidate and resupply with what they could. Then, four other ostensibly loyal legions arrived and started spreading out amongst their cousins. Corax and Vulkan chose to withdraw and allow the reinforcements to relieve them, while Ferrus and the Iron Hands pressed onward. However, [[Horus Heresy|the four newly arrived Legions were traitors]]. As the Raven Guard approached the drop sites of the new arrivals, they were opened up upon at point blank range by the Word Bearers with hundreds of Bolters. The first few rows of Raven Guard dropped dead without knowing what had hit them. Corax and Vulkan, quickly realizing how comprehensively screwed they were, argued briefly about how to go about extracting their legions. Corax wanted to immediately withdraw into the surrounding mountains, while Vulkan wanted to engage in a fighting retreat to the dropships and make for orbit. Corax was not able to convince Vulkan to follow him, and so left him and his sons to their fates. Wanting to give his sons a chance to fall back, Corax engaged [[Lorgar]] in personal combat after shredding the Gal Vorbak. Kind of like the huntsman scene in an ultra-gritty reboot of Bambi. Corvus easily overwhelmed Lorgar, demanding answers to why he betrayed them. Lorgar tried to tell Corax of the [[Chaos|"truth"]] he had discovered, but Corax's responses amounted to "heresy is bad and you should feel bad", and he said it with lightning claws. Corax was just about to behead Lorgar when [[Konrad Curze]] intervened. At this point, Corax's resolve broke, for he looked into the eyes of the Night Haunter and finally knew fear: not the fear of death, but fear that but for chance he could have turned into something as twisted as Curze (particularly when you think of the repressive origins of his legion). Retreating, Corax's forces, primarily [[Dark Eldar|designed for quick insertion and covert-ops duty and ''not'' sticking around in a meat-grinder]] suffered [[grimdark|the heaviest casualties]] - and though they fought desperately alongside the Salamanders and Iron Hands, killing countless traitor marines in turn, the loyalists were still slaughtered wholesale, forcing all three legions to withdraw, and leaving them largely unable to stop Horus' advance.

Ferrus Manus was dead, Vulkan was presumed dead, and the Loyalists had been utterly shattered. Having managed to evade the Traitors, Corax managed to gather up a measly 3000 Raven Guard, all that was left of his 80,000 strong Legion, and played a game of cat and [[meme|birb]] with the Traitor forces. He learned after a few days of reconnaissance that Angron and the World Eaters were not leaving the planet with the rest of the Traitors, and would be staying to hunt down any remaining Loyalists. Shortly thereafter, the back-and-forth began when numerous Raven Guard, for no apparent reason, suddenly and violently turned on their brothers. At first nobody could figure out what was going on, and chalked it up to Astartes level PTSD. Corax quickly realized that this was not the case, and his own reconnoitering led him to discover that the World Eaters had built numerous pyramids of Astartes skulls in the Urgal Depression. These pyramids were having some sort of Khorne based influence on the Raven Guard, and Corax had them destroyed in short order. Whether he knew for sure what was going on is uncertain, but the fact that he would risk sending men into the Urgal Depression to blow up grotesque, but innocuous, skull pyramids suggests that he did. He then led his men in scavenging what they could from the site of battle; weapons and ammunition primarily. Once they were as resupplied as they reasonably could be, Corax led attacks on three small Iron Warriors armored columns and destroyed them. About forty days after the initial massacre, Corax was able to destroy a small Word Bearers contingent and capture one of them. The Traitor was brutally tortured for information, and Corax learned that Angron knew he had survived, and was hunting him personally. After leading a series of hit and run battles against the World Eaters for nearly 100 days, Corax and his men were eventually driven to open battle after literally running out of mountainous terrain. Corax prepared himself for death, but as the final battle was set to begin, a number of Raven Guard drop ships appeared in the sky and started blasting the bejesus out of the World Eaters. Corax and the remaining Raven Guard troopers were gathered up, and the drop ships broke for orbit as quickly as they could. While it was small recompense for being betrayed and nearly annihilated, Corax and the remaining Raven Guard had managed to keep Angron and the World Eaters tied up for more than a quarter of a year, and had destroyed numerous Traitor supply convoys, Astartes, and armored columns with virtually no men or equipment.

Corax realized how dire the situation was, and returned to Terra to give the Emperor his report. [[DOOM: Repercussions of Evil|His warnings to Cernel Joson were not listened to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway]]. The Imperium was collapsing, with the loyalists outnumbered and Guilliman [[Alpha Legion|chasing Alpharius halfway across the galaxy]] and/or [[Imperium Secundus|building his own empire]]. The Emperor needed warriors, and Deliverance had none to spare. Searching for a solution, Corax, knowing his Sons lacked the manpower and expertise to be of much use in the coming [[Siege of Terra]], and seeking absolution for running from Curze and Lorgar, beseeched the Emperor (who was already spending all his time and most of his psychic strength on the [[Golden Throne]] to prevent a [[Warp]] gate from opening at the bottom of the Imperial Palace) to spend Corax and his Legion in a suicide-or-glory plan: to send the Raven Guard out to disrupt traitor supply lines, buying [[Rogal Dorn]] time to fortify Terra and the Emperor time to regain control of the [[Webway]]. Agreeing that the Raven Guard should continue their lightning-strike and covert-ops tactics, but unwilling to send one of his last loyal Legions to almost-certain death, the Emperor decided to give Corax a dangerous, but potentially game-changing, gift: access to the Emperor's memories on the creation of the Primarchs, and the location of the original complex where they were made, including the knowledge of how to use the long-dormant equipment there. Using the ancient books of research notes the Emperor had left behind when making the first batches of Space Marines and the original genetic sample that the genomes of all Primarchs were derived from, Corax began essentially cloning marines at an alarming rate.

He did not heed the book's warnings however, feeling that the urgency of his mission was of more import. After a fair amount of fuck ups, a solution was found and Corax had discovered a way to make stronger, faster, and more quickly-maturing (physically) Astartes out of toddlers. The marines grew to full size in the matter of ''days'' thanks to the fast growing trait derived from the aforementioned Primarch genetic materials. There were those that opposed this amongst the legion, stating that if it were right to give a five-year-old that much power and produce them that quickly, then the Emperor would have done so, but Corax maintained that they were in dire straits, which called for an exception. Then the [[Alpha Legion]] laid the FUCK down on that entire plan, and corrupted the gene-seed that the entire project was and ever would be using. While the earlier products were basically functional (if not exactly well-adjusted) Space Marines, the final batch were a horrible mess of mutants. Corax made the best of a bad situation, assembling a [[Raptors (Chapter)|Raptor]] contingent out of all surviving Marines, giving arms to whomever could use them and improvised, custom armour to the most heavily mutated, and sending them off to attack [[Anal circumference|the Traitors' vulnerable rear supply lines]]. It worked out remarkably well; all of the Raptors possessed enhanced senses and reflexes (which may have led to the camouflage-and-marksmanship obsession of modern Raptors), allowing them to sneak around and fight even better than other members of the Legion, and the "rough" mutants among them were thought of as unlucky battle-brothers, equal in all respects to the "smooth", non-disfigured Marines, rather than monsters to be shunned. Ironically, when they encountered a small [[Space Wolf]] force sent to watch Corax, and, it is heavily implied, to try and kill him if he turned traitor, those who suffered from the [[Wulfen|Curse of the Wulfen]] turned out to be far less tolerant of such overt mutation. Unfortunately, it turned out that in the long run this gene-seed corruption led to a slow degradation of consciousness and eventually total, bestial madness. Fighting non-stop behind the enemy's line, the Raven Guard managed to reap a tally even higher than what they had lost on Istvaan V, freeing many worlds as well as denying the traitors much needed supplies, footholds and reinforcements.

Initially Corax was prepared to die alongside the Space Wolves at Yarrant III, after being unnerved at seeing one of his [[Leman Russ|strongest brothers]] cast so low. Later whilst fighting back to back alongside Bjorn who was leading the remnants of the VI in place of Russ, he decided it was a pretty stupid and vainglorious decision to let two Primarchs and their legions perish, and ordered an evacuation of the combined force like what happened on Istva.