Chronological list of horus heresy novels
They were the core of the Traitor armies, and brought ruin to the Loyalists wherever they fought. Their system of insidious warrior-lodges, worked into the heart of the Legions with the help of the Word Bearers, helped sway many loyalists to their cause and fuel the fires of betrayal. The Sons of Horus fought in all the major theatres of the Heresy – from the persecution of the Shattered Legions of Shadrak Meduson, to the taking of Molech. Horus’ fall took with it the hope of Humanity to ascend, and burned the dreams of the Emperor to cold ash. The Imperium of Man, the mightiest stellar empire seen since the Eldar, was broken asunder by the ambitions of one man. ‘Warmaster’ – that is what it means, my brother. “It does not matter how the galaxy burns, only that it does. At the apex of Imperial might on the triumph fields, Horus declared his Legion would be renamed – they would be the Sons of Horus, risen to the unrivalled heights of their father. And, it must be said, he was very good at it.įinally, at Ullanor, Horus became Warmaster, and the Emperor retired from leading His Great Crusade. Horus’ favoured approach to battle was the decapitation strike – a focused punch into the enemy command structure to cut the head off of the snake as a campaign began. This restraint would, of course, be removed entirely as the Heresy began.Īs the Heresy drew closer, the Luna Wolves became a terrifying fighting force, lightning-swift and deadly in war. In any event, the Luna Wolves recruited primarily from Cthonia going forward, leading to a Legion consisting of born killers and murderers, barely restrained by the Astartes training. This environment apparently is what the Warmaster grew up in, and perhaps it is no wonder as a result he was a born leader, forced to climb to the top of a heap of barbarian-kings and slaughter-clades. Its population were hard, brutal people, organised into kill-gangs and murder-clans who constantly fought for territory and supremacy in the lightless warrens of that benighted world. Some would even say it should have been destroyed long before Horus was found. He, if the stories are to be believed, ended up on Cthonia, a world of “hard rock, worm-bored with tunnels and underworld cities, orbiting a slowly dying, angry blue star.” Cthonia was a world of long-fled glory, stripped of its valuable resources and left to decay.
Horus’ founding, unusually amongst the Primarchs, is shrouded in mystery – it is not clear how and when he was discovered, only that he was the first of the Primarchs to reach the Emperor’s side. The XVI, for their part, embraced their cognomen with relish, using the wolfs-head motif extensively in their iconography and adopting the wearing of gene-modified pelts to mark out status within the Legion. In particular, the Luna Wolves made good diplomats and heralds, bringing the diplomacy of the Imperium in one hand, and its fury in the other. The Emperor made good use of his “wolves” as the Unification Wars ended, sending them to “begin and end wars their enemies did not know they were fighting”, and shatter intractable foes. Their first name came from, as might be guessed, the First Pacification of Luna in the Unification Wars, where they broke the Coriolis Enclaves so thoroughly that even to this day, the number “sixteen” is known as the “ counting of the wolf” in some parts of Terra. They acted like alpha predators, focused on ending fights before they became unnecessary wars of attrition. They loved a fight which was over almost as it began – swift and bloody, with a deadly strike to the core of the enemy to rip the heart from the foe. This Legion drew its recruits from Terra, reportedly from hunter-clans and ruthless tribal folk – whose traditions and culture fuelled an abrasive and aggressive fighting style in the early days of the XVI. The Sons of Horus were once the Luna Wolves. Sadly, like Icarus of old, they flew too close to the sun of their own pride and fell the furthest of all.
However, the Sons of Horus were not always a ruthless, broken rabble of traitors – once they were noble, loyal, effective and ambitious, a true beacon of Imperial might and light. Formerly the Luna Wolves, they were renamed in the image of their leader – Horus Lupercal, the arch-Traitor and instigator of the great Heresy. If you have any understanding of the Horus Heresy, you will know about the Sons of Horus.