Breaking of the Perfect Fortress
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The Breaking of the Perfect Fortress was a battle of the Horus Heresy.[1]
Contents
Background
After the Drop Site Massacre, Fulgrim, Primarch of the Emperor's Children, constructed the Perfect Fortress on the world of Narsis. The Fortress would be used to secure the riches of several Forge Worlds and threaten the Imperial strongholds of Agrapha, Chopix and Spartus. It would also serve as a key part of the Imperium’s defences, until the Horus Heresy began and the Emperor's Children seized Narsis for Warmaster Horus. Once it fell into Traitor hands, the Perfect Fortress became a lynchpin for their presence in the southern Imperium. It would remain so until sometime after the Dropsite Massacre, when the vengeful Primarch Corax led his Raven Guard and their Therion Cohort allies in attacking the Fortress.[1]
Battle
Though it was heavily fortified, Corax ordered the Cohort into the Fortress, to make the Emperor's Children overconfident and to draw them out, so the Raven Guard could strike them down. Even as the Cohort then began to suffer horrific casualties, the Primarch prepared his forces, except the ill-favored Deliverers, to infiltrate the Fortress, while the Emperor's Children were distracted. Just as they were prepared to do so, the Scout Cruiser Fane of Shadow discovered an array of Flak Batteries, scattered across the Fortress, which had not been revealed by the Cohort's attack. They were all slaved to a control room, deep beneath one of the Fortress' central towers in Hab-block Delta-19. When the Batteries activated, the weapons would be able to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting Space Marine Legion. With Corax having ordered them to maintain Vox-silence before they attacked, no one on the Fane could warn him about this new threat.[1]
Acting quickly, the Centurion Beyar Kedron, who was aboard the cruiser, decided to lead his detachment of Deliverers in invading Hab-block Delta-19. Kedron would succeed in destroying the Flak Batteries' control room, at a heavy cost, allowing the Raven Guard succeeded in launching an ambush on the Emperor's Children from within the Fortress itself.[1] The moment for this attack arrived once the Therion Cohort began to retreat, causing the overconfident Emperor's Children led by the Perfect Fortress' commander, Hasten Luthris Armanitan, to pursue them. Now vulnerable, the Traitors were butchered by the Raven Guard's surprise assault, with Hasten being killed by Corax himself.[2]
Aftermath
When the battle was over, the Raven Guard had suffered little losses overall,[1] though the Therion Cohort had suffered terribly with at least 10,000 soldiers killed.[2]
Either way, Narsis once again belonged to the Imperium. Kedron's slain Deliverers were later placed in a mausoleum within the Fortress, as the Raven Guard left Narsis behind them. However, Corax was not known to have offered a word of praise or criticism for their actions, nor would the Deliverers' Legion honor them in anyway. In the wake of the battle, Kedron and a number of the Therion Cohort's commanders began to criticize the Primarch's plan, which had caused them to suffer such severe losses. This would reach Corax and in the months that followed the Fortress' fall, they would all be gathered into a separate battlegroup and ordered to seize the isolated world of Galaspar.[1]
See also
Sources
- 1: Exemplary Battles of the Age of Darkness: The Breaking of the Perfect Fortress, pgs. 2-5
- 2: Deliverance Lost (Novel), Chapter Eighteen
- 3: Ravenlord (Novella), VI
