Burning of Idylitar
The Burning of Idylitar was a battle of the Pale Stars campaign, waged between the Salamanders and the Emperor's Children in 012.M31, during the Horus Heresy.[1]
History
Following their flight from Chemos after its destruction at the hands of the Dark Angels, fragmentary bands of Emperor’s Children dispersed into the region known as the Pale Stars where they regrouped and established a new domain. This expansion attracted the attention of the Salamanders garrisoned on Nocturne who mobilised to counter the building Traitor forces. The XVIIIth Legion waged a systematic campaign of purification, cleansing each system planet by planet, leaving no trace of Fulgrim’s debased Legion. Their aggressive campaign reached the Idylitar system, whose primary planet had been selected by the IIIrd Legion as the centre of a new kingdom to serve as a keystone around which they would assert control of the sub-sector.[1]
All across the barren land masses of Idyl-I, the Emperor’s Children had raised great defences and fortified the orbital sphere with an interlinked network of satellite stations, controlled by an artificial sentience of ancient origin. Unable to bring effective orbital strikes to bear due to the sophisticated defence network that protected the Traitor world, the Salamanders launched boarding actions in an effort to disable the enemy guns and bring their ships into effective range. Over the course of weeks, temporary control of the relay-nodes within the defence network was wrested from the hands of the Emperor’s Children before the automated systems rerouted and rebuilt the network.[1]
These actions afforded the Salamanders only brief windows of opportunity to bring their formidable weapons to bear upon sectors of the planet and drop additional reinforcements into the intensifying war zones on the surface. The IIIrd Legion defenders took advantage of the Salamanders’ inability to bring any superior forces to bear and only after several months of vicious, running battles were they finally dislodged from their stronghold, allowing the XVIIIth Legion forces to join their brethren in their purgation of the remainder of the region.[1]
See also
Sources
- 1: Campaigns of the Age of Darkness: The Siege of Cthonia, pg. 9 — The Burning of Idylitar
