Maleum Datum : 594.M34
For centuries, the Raven Guard had been invisible.
In the carnage of Isstvan V, the Nineteenth Legion had been all but annihilated. By the time of the Scouring, barely a few hundreds sons of Corax had yet drawn breath across the entire galaxy. The Ravenlord's attempts to rebuild his Legion's numbers using genetic technology gifted by the Emperor had failed catastrophically, sabotage by the Alpha Legion causing the new Raven Guards to be transformed into difformed monsters, the Weregeld, who had fought and bled against Horus' traitors despite their affliction.
After the Traitors had escaped within the Eye of Terror and their taint burned from the galaxy, Corax had returned to his Legion's homeworld of Deliverance. There, the Primarch of the Raven Guard had considered the state of the galaxy and the Imperium. He knew that Horus still lived, and would one day return. The Arch-Traitor had proven his cunning when his plans had nearly destroyed the Imperium, and with all the time to plot in the Eye, there was no telling what new and terrible schemes he would weave.
Humanity needed a secret weapon of its own, realized Corax. All of the Space Marine Legions had their own talents, their own specialties, but the needs of the Great Crusade had forced them all to behave and fight in certain ways. This could no longer be the case, for in order to survive they must all become their greatest selves. And so, Corvus Corax decided that he and his sons would forsake glory, forsake recognition for their deeds, and become the shadows they had long walked amidst.
The Nineteenth Legion was forgotten. The will of Corax spread across the Warp, and though the Raven Guard's existence did not vanish from records, people simply stopped thinking about it. Only those possessed of the strongest of wills were immune to this, and even then not always. Even the Traitors in the Eye of Terror forgot about the Raven Guard, thinking them broken by the Heresy when they thought of them at all.
This was all exactly as Corax had wanted it. Slowly, he rebuilt his Legion, moving in the shadows of the Imperium and recruiting young men in whose heart beat the desire to punish evil and protect the weak. New generations of Raven Guards rose from the Ravenlord's blood, unaffected by the mutations that had doomed the surviving Weregeld to such a painful existence that Corax had granted them mercy with his own hands at the Scouring's end. The Raven Guards became the unseen watchers and protectors of Segmentum Tempestus, kept in armor and ammunition by the forges of Kiavahr, over which Corax's rule was total, the pretense of independence the tech-lords had once enjoyed ruthlessly erased and all protests of the local Mechanicus silenced.
For thousands of years, the Raven Guard watched and fought, battling xenos raiders and cults of Chaos, their deeds unrecorded save for their own archives on Deliverance. The Raven Guards cultivated their mastery of stealth and assassination strikes to unprecedented levels, with their Librarians developing entire new psychic disciplines based on supporting these tactics.
Now, however, the time had come for Corvus Corax to step into the light. The Ravenlord had received a vision from his brother Sanguinius, who was fighting against a race of monstrous, Chaos-corrupted xenos in Segmentum Obscurus. The Great Angel had learned of the Horusian plot to destroy the First Legion, and had begged his brother to intervene before the Dark Angels were undone. Only a Primarch had the strength and authority to prevent the distrust seeded by the Arch-Traitor's agents from resulting in civil war, and with Guilliman fallen and Dorn needed on Cadia last the hordes of the damned seize the opening his absence would provide, only Corax remained.
For a moment, Corax had hesitated. Was it worth sacrificing his Legion's veil of forgetfulness – for there was no way it would endure through such a direct intervention – in order to save the First Legion from an end largely brought about by its own actions ? Corax had heard the reports of what was happening as the Unforgiven War dawned, and the behavior of the Lion's sons hadn't impressed him. In the end, however, the prospect of another Legion falling to Chaos (for such was the inevitable doom of all who abandoned the Emperor's light, should they survive long enough) was impossible to accept. The consequences should Horus gain control of another Legion, even one as broken as the First would surely be by the unfolding scheme, were too dire.
And so the Ravenlord had come to Caliban, focusing his power to shroud his presence from the denizens of the Warp, lest they warn his brother's slaves of his coming. Corax's mastery of the great psychic power innate to all of the Emperor's sons had grown leaps and bounds since the Heresy, to the point that the Dark Gods themselves had begun to forget the existence of his Legion. But when the Shadow of the Emperor emerged in the Caliban system, that shroud was torn to pieces.
All the way to Maeleum, Horus sensed the change and sat straight on his throne, suddenly struck by the realization that he had forgotten to take one of his brothers into account in all of his plans for the last three and a half thousand years.
The Imperials gathered to bring the Dark Angels to account were similarly struck dumb by the reveal of Corax. Seizing the initiative, the Ravenlord declared himself in command of all loyal Imperial forces in the system, making it clear that any who refused his orders for the duration of the crisis would be branded as traitors and hunted down by the full force of his Legion, regardless of their motives or justifications. By that point, the Dark Angels commanders were so overwhelmed that they gratefully accepted the authority of a Primarch not their own.
The arrival of the Primarch threw the plans of Horus into disarray, and Vortigern was forced to improvise. At his call, the pirate flotillas of the Night Lords that had harassed the Dark Angels emerged from the Warp, while the ships of the Imperial retribution armada which had been sent by Horusian infiltrators turned on their brethren. The sorcerous veil which had kept the Fallen flagship With Blade Drawn from detection fell, revealing the battleship hidden amidst the ruins of Caliban, its engines powering up as it set course for the Rock.
The second battle of Caliban was a confused mess, where the loyalty of individual elements was put in question by faked transmissions and acts of sabotage on loyalist ships. As the void battle raged, the Night Lords abandoned their slaves and boarded the Rock, striking for the holding cells where the captured Fallen were kept prisoner. Daemons that had survived the purges of the Dark Angels and hidden in forgotten corridors emerged to join the fight, and the fortress-monastery of the First Legion once again echoed with the sounds of war.
Aboard the Shadow of the Emperor, Corax sensed great energies gathering in the ruins of Caliban, even as the Horusian vessel cut through the disorganized Imperial ships in its way. Making a quick decision, the Ravenlord sent a strike force of his Legion's most elite warriors, sailing the void aboard gunships fitted with stealth systems from the Dark Age of Technology. He trusted them to deal with whatever was happening amidst the ruins of Caliban : his own mission was to keep the Imperial forces from killing each other, and to strike at the head of the Horusian presence in the system.
The asteroid field that Caliban had become had been kept from dispersing by the lingering psychic energy of the calamity that had destroyed the planet. By decree of the First Legion, the entire system was forbidden to all Imperial citizens, regardless of their rank and power, with only the Dark Angels sending patrols there every decade to ensure nothing had changed. The last such inspection had taken place eight years before Horus' plot had unfolded on Pandora, and as the Raven Guard transports neared the corpse of a world they saw that things had changed.
Covens of witches in void-suits led by Chaos Sorcerers stood on the larger asteroids, performing rituals of unknown purpose. Later, it would be understood that they were attempting to call upon the echoes of the Ouroboros' power, that antediluvian Warp abomination that had been imprisoned at the heart of Caliban for untold aeons. Their goal was to call back the Fallen who had been scattered across space and time by the uncontrolled Warp energies, in order to reunite all the thousands of Luther's followers who had yet to return to reality.
The Raven Guard descended upon the ritual sites at full speed. They targeted the Sorcerers first, recognizing the heraldry of the Thousand Sons along with that of the Dark Angels and Sons of Horus. The rituals were not defenceless, of course : Legionnaires of the First and Sixteenth Legion stood guard over the psykers, sent by Horus to assist Vortigern in doing the Warmaster's bidding. The ensuing fight disrupted the precariously balanced energies of the ritual, and with a sound like the cracking of reality's underpinning mechanisms, all of Caliban's asteroid field vanished, swallowed by the Empyrean along with all those who had been fighting among it.
Corax felt the sudden disappearance of his sons before their last vox-transmission reached him, and though he mourned their losses he would not let it distract him from his duty. By this time, the Shadow of the Emperor was engaging the ad hoc Horusian fleet that had assembled around the Rock. The Ravenlord led the attack on the With Blade Drawn, striking straight for the bridge.
None of the Fallen or their servants could stand against the might of the Nineteenth Primarch, not when he had drawn the fullness of his power back to himself for the first time in millennia. Daemonhosts, Possessed and Sorcerers, all fell before him, and soon the shadow of the Ravenlord stretched over Vortigern, promising death for all the sins the Fallen Lord had committed against the Imperium he had once sworn to protect.
"Your brother will win."
Last words of the Chaos Lord Vortigern to the Primarch Corvus Corax (allegedly).
Though Vortigern fought well, there was only one way such a confrontation could end. The Horusian lord was slain, and the With Blade Drawn was seized, its complement of dark magi not quite managing to completely purge its databanks before they were killed by the Astartes Corax had brought with him. The knowledge within the cogitators would be put to good use by the Raven Guard in the coming years, despite the Inquisition's insistence that it be given unto them and them alone.
With the Horusian flagship captured, the rest of the Traitor fleet broke off, retrieving their parties on the Rock when possible before fleeing. In the confusion of the battle, many of the renegades managed to escape. The dungeons of the First Legion had been breached during the fighting on the Rock, and some of the Fallen held captive there had been released, before either being left behind as distractions or brought along as the sons of Curze made their escape.
Though it took time, Corax eventually managed to force the Inquisition and the Dark Angels to make peace, though the First Legion would face the consequences, not of the initial treachery of the Fallen, but of their concealment of their existence and the crimes they had committed in order to cover it up. For the first time since the end of the Great Crusade, a Space Marine Legion changed its name. No longer would the warriors of the First Legion be called the Dark Angels : instead, they would be the Angels Penitent, until such a time as they had expunged the stain on their honor brought about by their actions regarding the Fallen.
The independence of the Angels Penitent was also severely curtailed, with the entire Legion bound to a century-long oath of service to the Ordo Hereticus. The prisons of the Rock were emptied of the remaining Fallen, who were given to the Inquisition for interrogation, followed by execution in most cases, though it would later be whispered that some of the Fallen had been spared and turned into agents of the Holy Ordos, serving as special forces for the Inquisition and wearing gear without any trace of their former – or any – allegiance.
Corax believed that, while they had come perilously close to disaster, calamity had been averted in the end. But as the Shadow of the Emperor prepared to depart Caliban, the Ravenlord was visited by diminutive figures in hooded robes, who revealed to him one more secret of the First Legion, which had been known only to their Supreme Grand Master before his assassination. And with that secret, Corax realized that he had been too hasty in declaring victory.
Cypher and Moriana stood side by side, watching over the stasis coffin. Within, Luther slept in his armor, laid to rest like some king of Antiquity.
They had rescued the Lord of the Fallen from the Rock, working together to deny him to the agents of Horus who had sought to 'rescue' him and turn him into a puppet of the Warmaster. Their reasons for doing so were very different, of course. Moriana believed Luther had the potential to replace Horus in her plans to bring about the union between the Dark Gods and Humanity, and didn't want to risk him being slain by the Prince of the Eye as a rival.
And Cypher … well. His motives were, and would remain, his own. It was enough that Luther was sealed away once more, in a more tranquil stasis than the pain-filled one the Dark Angels had forced upon him.
The two arch-heretics left, sealing doors that could only be open should the two of them return here together, as they had agreed when they had sealed their alliance.
AN : And so the Dark Angels' arc ends, and what the Raven Guard have been up to since the Heresy is revealed. For all of Horus' influence, there are other players in the shadows, and the Prince of the Eye is far from infallible.
I am still working on the next arc for A Blade Recast, but health issues mean that I haven't been able to write as much as I want recently. Hopefully Nurgle relents soon so that I can finish this story and can focus on my other works.
Zahariel out.