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Dark, far future military space opera
- The Horus Heresy is a dark, far future military space opera concerning a galactic civil war within the nascent Imperium of Man, and which constitutes a cornerstone event of the dystopian science fantasy Warhammer 40,000 universe.
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The Horus Heresy is a series of science fantasy novels set in the fictional Warhammer 40,000 setting of tabletop miniatures wargame company Games Workshop. Penned by several authors, the series takes place during the Horus Heresy, a fictional galaxy-spanning civil war occurring in the 31st millenium, 10,000 years before the main setting of ...
- Overview
- Old Earth
- Dark Age of Technology
- Age of Strife
- Unification Wars
- Council of War
- Great Crusade
- Corruption of the Space Marine Legions
- Isstvan Massacres
The Horus Heresy, sometimes referred to poetically as the "Age of Darkness" and originally known in its immediate aftermath as the Great Heresy War, was a galaxy-spanning civil war that consumed the worlds of Mankind for 9 Terran years. Its outbreak marked the end of the Emperor of Mankind's Great Crusade to reunite the scattered colony worlds of Humanity in the Milky Way Galaxy under a single government and the beginning of the current Age of the Imperium. The Horus Heresy is in many ways the founding event of the Imperium of Man as it now exists.
The civil war began following the corruption by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos of the Imperial Warmaster Horus Lupercal, the primarch of the Sons of Horus Legion and the most beloved genetic son of the Emperor. The Chaos Gods fed Horus' innate ambition and sense of betrayal by the Emperor until he turned upon his father and sought to claim the Imperium for his own.
Horus convinced half of the other primarchs and Space Marine Legions, as well as large swathes of the Imperial Army and the forces of the ancient Mechanicum, to turn Traitor alongside him and unleash a cataclysmic attempt to conquer the galaxy in his name.
Over 9 Terran years the war raged, 7 of them consumed by Horus' drive on the Throneworld, until coming to a final cataclysm on Terra itself where Horus was slain and the Emperor mortally wounded, His dreams of creating a brighter future for Mankind forever broken.
The conflict was fought across the Milky Way Galaxy early in the first century of the 31st Millennium and resulted in more than 2.3 trillion dead, 4.6 trillion if one includes the planetary populations purged by the Imperium after the Heresy due to the taint of Chaos corruption.
The Heresy concluded with the death of the traitorous Warmaster Horus, the internment of the Emperor in the Golden Throne and the exile into the Eye of Terror of the Heretic Astartes Traitor Legions.
Over twenty-eight thousand standard years before the start of the Horus Heresy, during the Age of Terra, Mankind first left the polluted, used-up carcass of Old Earth for the unknown bounties and perils beyond the skies of our birth world. In those forgotten early years, it is unknown what enemies and trials Humanity overcame in our uncaring universe to not only survive, but thrive and forge a domain amongst the stars. Colonies spread across our galaxy so that Humanity was scattered across a million worlds and found treasures and horrors uncounted. Mankind's technological mastery ascended to an almost unimaginable zenith, and at its heart lay a resurgent Earth.
The promised wonders of our species' earliest ambitions were made manifest, and our application and control of the sciences was unparalleled. Humanity reached its pinnacle, raised up by the miracles of technology which it wrought, re-shaping uncounted new colony worlds in the vision of distant Old Earth. The legends which remain of that lost realm of ancient Human empires speak of a galaxy of plenty, filled with opportunity, culture, technological progress and wonder.
In the heights of those times, lost to all but supposition and myth, Humanity made itself as unto gods; able to harness the power of the stars, and fashion servants from clay and iron and give them counterfeit-life to do their bidding. Unfortunately, this era of advancement was not to last, for Mankind fell prey to its own sciences.
Mankind's Golden Age failed; wherein the promised wisdom of science and technology did not elevate Mankind to the divine, but rather smote it for the consequences of its reckless excesses and ambitions untempered by reason. Martian-Terran wars of terrible destruction ensued, and the beautiful, animate, thinking tools which Mankind had created and so coveted were corrupted and turned upon all Humanity in what was called the Cybernetic Revolt.
Mankind's first interstellar empire would fall into bloody ruin, isolation and ignorance. The terrible period of history that followed is officially named the Age of Strife by Imperial historitoes, although it has another name, whispered only fearfully: "Old Night." During the darkness of Old Night, Humanity experienced naught but nightmare and predation for over five thousand standard years. During this time, the worlds of Mankind were isolated by searing Warp Storms that made interstellar travel and communication virtually impossible, and Old Earth was totally cut off from its colonies and allies.
Across the galaxy Human worlds, bereft of central authority or protection, and with the web of support and supply that had maintained the threads of civilisation cut, fell into anarchy and war. Human civilisation was torn apart as local factions and new empires fought for control in the shattered realm while others, utterly cut off from aid, succumbed to the horrors of planet-wide famine, insanity and worse -- the perils of the Warp.
The existence of Warp entities and the dangers they posed to the Human mind were then barely understood. On worlds with large concentrations of emergent Human psykers, the entities from beyond were able to breach the barrier between the Immaterium and corporeal reality, and it cannot be known or guessed how many worlds were ravaged or swallowed whole by their incursions. As Human civilisation fragmented, hundreds of xenos species and enemies unknown seized their chance for revenge on Humanity for its past conquests, or to plunder unprotected worlds and enslave their populations. Hundreds more Human-inhabited star systems were sacked and ravaged, their peoples slaughtered, mutilated or abducted. Those that survived the alien onslaught rapidly reverted to barbarism, stripped of civilisation, knowledge and culture in the raw battle to endure.
Humanity stood on the brink of total extinction and endless night gathered round its children. Alone and beset by internal strife, famine and plague, under incessant attack by aliens and facing the horrors of Warp incursions, the Human worlds that survived were pitiable shadows of what they once had been. It was to become an age when Mankind's dead far outnumbered its living.
Shorn of its galactic empire, Ancient Terra could not sustain itself. Protracted internecine wars emptied Old Earth's terrible arsenals of radiological weaponry, killing untold billions, destroying its ancient power structures and boiling off the last of its oceans. In their aftermath, the planet became a lawless battleground, little more than a blasted desert dotted with ruins, its people reduced to the level of brute savages fighting over the scarce water and untainted land which remained. Old Earth expired entirely, all of its ancient knowledge lost and its cities torn down, and where it once stood, instead reigned a world of savagery and horror, the equal of any brought to ruin in the Age of Strife.
Long before left parlous and polluted, generations of constant warfare made Terra a wasteland punctuated by fortified holdfasts built amid the wreckage of lost civilisations, and its inhabitants a mass of degenerate, feral nomads. Insane prophets, cybernetically-augmented butcher-kings, vivisector-warlords and religious demagogues led the warring techno-barbarian tribes of Old Earth, and the world was wracked by incessant conflict as one tyrant displaced another.
During the turbulent era known as the Age of Strife or "Old Night," the Sol System and the nearby star systems that had been colonised by Humanity during the Age of Technology were effectively cut off from interstellar travel or communication with each other. This was due to the massive Warp Storms that swept the galaxy as the Immaterium was roiled by the millennia-long gestation of the Chaos God Slaanesh and the turbulence that marked the decay of the Aeldari Empire before the Fall.
During this dark time, Terra sometimes held sway over the Sol System, while at other times the rulers of Mars or Luna were dominant. The different worlds found themselves constantly at war. During this 5,000 standard-year-long period of anarchy, fear and violence, Old Earth's once unified planetary government had completely broken down and been divided into dozens of warring states of so-called "techno-barbarians."
Continuous warfare raged across the surface of Terra for 2,500 standard years, beginning in the late 27th Millennium. Little remained of the once sophisticated civilisation of Old Earth's glorious past as the centre of a growing human interstellar commonwealth marked by advanced science, high culture and wondrous technologies. Techno-barbarian warlords and their warrior hordes continuously fought over the planet, which had become little more than a massive battleground for their wars of attrition. They made use of chemical, biological and even thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction, and slowly transformed the cradle of Mankind into a battered, post-apocalyptic wasteland across most of its scarred surface.
This was a dark period for the people of Old Earth, when they were dominated by brutal rulers and despotic tyrants. It was against this backdrop of oppression, violence and casual brutality that the Emperor of Mankind first revealed Himself openly to the people of Terra. In secret, He had been planning for this moment in history for millennia, ever since the Age of Strife had fractured what remained of the ancient Human interstellar civilisation.
With His massive army of genetically-enhanced warriors who comprised the first units of the Imperial Army and would serve as the prototypes for the later development of the Space Marines, the Emperor began His conquest of Terra. His intent was to reunite the warring nations of the world into a unified planetary government and then use Terra as the springboard from which to begin His reconquest of the galaxy under the aegis of an Imperium of Man dedicated to the atheistic Imperial Truth of progress and reason.
Brutal rulers such as the warlord Kalagann of Ursh, Cardinal Tang of the Yndonesic Bloc, and the most infamous of all, the half-mad, half-genius Nathaniel Dume, the tyrant of the Pan-Pacific Empire, would all fall by the wayside. Once unleashed, the genetically-enhanced armies of the Emperor swept all before them like wheat before the harvester's scythe until all the techno-barbarian warlords had either been conquered outright or had agreed through diplomacy to become subservient to the Emperor's will.
Following the successful conclusion of the Unification Wars, the Emperor convened the ruling body known as the War Council to manage the execution of the Great Crusade intended to reunite the entire human-settled galaxy under a single government. The War Council effectively became the true ruling body of the Imperium during the early and middle years of the Great Crusade.
The Emperor Himself sat at the head of the council; at his left hand was Malcador the Sigillite, perhaps the Emperor's greatest ally during the Wars of Unity and a human psyker whose powers were matched only by those of the Emperor.
The rest of the Council was composed of talented administrators drawn from the great ruling aristocratic dynasties of Terra and the Segmentum Solar, and when the Emperor forged His alliance with the Mechanicum of Mars, the Fabricator-General of the Mechanicum also claimed his seat. The War Council was also attended by the Paternova of the Navigator Houses.
As the Emperor departed the homeworld of Mankind to lead the Great Crusade into the stars starting around ca. 798.M30, he left the legendary Malcador to act as the Regent of Terra and the head of the War Council in his stead.
When the great Warp Storms that had cut off Terra since the end of the Dark Age of Technology subsided, and the Age of Strife came to an end at the dawn of the 31st Millennium, the Emperor of Mankind deemed it time to begin his Great Crusade, a massive campaign to conquer the galaxy by which he and his armies would free all human-settled colony worlds from alien oppression or primitive ignorance and reunite the human race across the galaxy under the single banner of the new Imperium of Man. To execute this plan, the Emperor created the primarchs, his god-like, genetically-engineered superhuman offspring.
The primarchs were still in their infancy, growing to hyper-accelerated maturity in their special gestation tanks, when they were snatched away from the genetic laboratory deep beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains on Terra where they had been created and gestated by the Emperor using His own DNA. The cause of this disappearance was the Chaos Gods, who were fearful that with the primarchs, the Emperor would be able to impose His new order across the galaxy and weaken their own firm grip on the collective unconsciousness of the minds of Humanity, which was the source of both their existence and the growth in their power within the Immaterium.
Uniting their powers under the leadership of Tzeentch, the Dark Gods opened a portal from the Warp and broke into the laboratory where the primarchs were gestating through the potent psychic wards the Emperor had erected. Unable to destroy the primarchs outright because of the protections the Emperor had laid upon them, the Chaos Gods instead chose to scatter them across the galaxy through the Warp.
The superhuman infants eventually came to rest on diverse, human-inhabited worlds. It was at this time that the Ruinous Powers first touched the souls of those primarchs who would eventually turn to the worship of Chaos, infecting them with a shard of corruption.
Certainly the fact that each of the primarchs was ultimately cast ashore on an inhabited human world was no accident; the Chaos Gods may have hoped that by having the primarchs raised among Humanity without the direct guidance of the Emperor as they grew they would display more of the human weaknesses that would make them easier to corrupt when the time came.
During the course of the Great Crusade, the Emperor encountered each of the primarchs on their scattered homeworlds in turn. To fill the gap in His military plans for the Great Crusade wrought by the primarchs' absence after they had been stolen away, the Emperor had instead created 20 Space Marine Legions, several of which, such as the [[Ist Legion]], had been raised even as the Unifications Wars still raged.
Long before the tragic events that would unfold on Isstvan III and initiate the conflict of the Horus Heresy, the Primarch Lorgar of the Word Bearers Legion had already committed himself and his Astartes to the service of the Ruinous Powers.
Lorgar was a puritanical religious zealot who was said to have experienced visions that foresaw the coming of the Emperor, who he believed to be a living god. This belief resulted in a series of bitter religious wars as Lorgar fought to impose his new religious doctrine worshipping the Emperor on his homeworld of Colchis.
When the Emperor finally arrived to reclaim his lost son, the entire world was already enthralled to Lorgar and his cult of the Emperor. The people of Colchis united behind their new God-Emperor. The elaborate celebrations and displays of piety lasted for solar months, although it was said that the Emperor did not approve of this, wishing to rejoin the Great Crusade as soon as possible and being greatly dismissive of organised religion in general as a vioilation of the Imperial Truth.
The Emperor had not begun the Great Crusade to reshackle Humanity within the chains of superstition and ignorance but to spread the light of reason and science. At the conclusion of the celebrations, Lorgar was made master of the XVIIth Space Marine Legion, the Imperial Heralds, who were renamed the Word Bearers after they embraced their primarch and his religious beliefs.
Kor Phaeron, Lorgar's adoptive father and religious advisor, survived the augmentation process to join the Word Bearers as a rare adult Space Marine, though he would never be a true Astartes. Kor Phaeron became Lorgar's chief adviser, lieutenant and the commander of the Word Bearers' elite 1st Company as the XVIIth Legion's first captain.
Lorgar led his Legion throughout the Great Crusade, as the Word Bearers sought to eliminate all blasphemy and heresy within the new Imperium of Man. Ancient texts and icons of other faiths were burned. The construction of vast monuments and cathedrals venerating the Emperor as the God of Mankind were supervised by Lorgar and the Word Bearers on many of the worlds they brought into Imperial Compliance.
Note: Published materials are inconsistent on their spelling of "Isstvan"; the more recently published material uses "Isstvan", while other (generally older) materials use "Isstvan". No explanation for this difference has been provided. For the sake of expediency, this article will use the spelling Isstvan.
Explore the epic conflict of Warhammer: The Horus Heresy, and fight tabletop battles with miniature soldiers, tanks, and war machines.
May 21, 2024 · The Horus Heresy, also known as the Age of Darkness, was the first and most devastating galaxy-spanning civil war in Imperial history. Occurring in early M31 and lasting several years, it divided and nearly destroyed the fledgling Imperium of Man.
- Dalen
May 16, 2024 · The Horus Heresy is a series of novels, anthologies and audiobooks based on the historic events known as the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy, about 10,000 standard years before the present 41st millennium. The novels are written by different authors, but follow the same storyline - the fall of Warmaster Horus and his campaign of treachery to ...
Mar 24, 2022 · 24 Mar 22. The Horus Heresy’s New Edition Revealed in this Jaw-Dropping Cinematic Trailer. A new edition of Warhammer: The Horus Heresy has just been revealed at AdeptiCon, and there’s a spectacular cinematic trailer to go with it!
Oct 30, 2023 · The Horus Heresy is the most significant event in the history of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. In the 31st millennium, just as the Emperor’s Great Crusade to unite the scattered worlds of humanity into the Imperium of Man neared completion, Warmaster Horus turned upon the Emperor and plunged the galaxy into civil war.
