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Carinae Retribution

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The Carinage Retribution was a battle fought by the Raven Guard and Night Lords[2] during the Great Crusade.[1]


Overview

The Raven Guard task force arrived in the Carinae System with a force of almost 30,000 Legionaries and twice that number of soldiers of the Imperial Army, and made swift progress with the conquest of the "Thousand Moons of Carinae", immense void-cities that circled the otherwise planet-less primary, remnants of a power long lost to Mankind whose isolationist inhabitants were unwilling to submit to the Emperor. The Raven Guard were joined by the Night Lords under their Primarch, Konrad Curze.[2] Directed by Corax, the Raven Guard turned the Carinae's greatest strength into a fatal weakness, for though the void-cities were many and their defences strong, each fought a solitary war, separate from aid and unable to support the defence of their fellows. Rather than attempt a grand campaign, besieging the entire star system at once or challenging the combined fleets of the Carinae Sodality for supremacy in the system, the Raven Guard used mobility and stealth to strike a single moon at a time.[1]

It was on one such moon, designated Zenith-312, that the combined taskforce assaulted in good order. All was well, until the cities' Arch-Comptroller unleashed a terrible weapon from the Age of Strife, long held in stasis in the depths of the city: an anima-phage of terrible potency that rendered men into creatures of rage and hunger, free of all reason and memory. The Raven Guard suffered little ill-effect, but the ordinary citizens of Zenith-312 and the mortal soldiers of the Imperial Army were reduced to a frothing, mindless horde that numbered in the tens of thousands. Immediately the Raven Guard found themselves beset on all sides, and were forced to put down those who they once called allies, granting them the mercy of death as the XIX Legion swept the void-city clean.[1]

In the aftermath of the fighting, it was discovered that the Arch-Comptroller Agarth had used the massacre of his own people to make good his escape aboard his personal shuttle. The Raven Lord was incensed, and vowed that the Arch-Comptroller would be forced to account for his actions. The taskforce abandoned the prosecution of Carinae's conquest, and instead focused all of its efforts into locating the escaped Arch-Comptroller. Discovering the object of their wrath, Argath was tracked to a remote outpost drifting in the outer reaches of a star's corona. The Raven Guard turned to its Moritat kill cadres to bring their murderous vengeance to the Arch-Comptroller. Once aboard, the Moritat quickly went on the offensive and methodically began to leave a bloody trail of corpses in their wake. Making no attempt to reach the Arch-Comptroller, the surviving Moritat made their way to the lone hangar and destroyed all of the station's transports, save one, to make good their escape. The void station took over four solar hours to fully break up as the sun's fiery embrace blistered and seared the station's hull plating. Corvus Corax stood and listened for all four hours as the Arch-Comptroller raged, blustered and finally pleaded over open Vox channels, only leaving when the station's molten collapse cut off his final screams.[1]

The Raven Guard had avenged those sacrificed on Zenith-312, but in doing so had granted the remainder of Carinae's defenders time to consolidate their defences, and without their support the Imperial Army and Crusade fleet assets had suffered badly as they had attempted to hold the line. The Carinae Campaign, which should have been swift and painless for the expanding Imperium, would rumble on for almost another seven solar months and would cost many thousands of lives as the price for the XIX Legion's need for retribution.[1]

The Crow and the Raven

During the later stages of the campaign, it was discovered by Konrad Curze that several of his newer recruits were murdering and mutilating civilians not for the purpose of creating compliance through terror, but rather sheer sport. Enraged, Curze tracked down and personally massacred his sons and ordered an orbital bombardment on the city to erase evidence of their crimes from the other Legion's. This attracted Corax's attention, and in the ruins of the city Curze and his retinue led by Sevatar nearly came to blows with a Raven Guard force under the Ravenlord himself. Corax was disgusted by Curze's behavior and the two sides nearly came to blows. However in the end, Curze agreed with Sevatar's request to back down and withdraw.[2]

See also

Sources