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The Rangdan Xenocides were a series of three xenocidal campaigns of the Great Crusade carried out against the xenos threat known as the Rangda starting in ca. 839.M30 and ending in ca. 890.M30.

These wars were the most terrible of any fought by the expeditionary fleets of the burgeoning Imperium of Man before the Horus Heresy. The alien threat was only stymied after the intervention of the Emperor Himself and at least nine Space Marine Legions, over a dozen Legio Titanicus Titan Legions, several Imperial Knight houses, the military forces of the ancient Mechanicum and hundreds of thousands of troops of the Imperialis Auxilia.

Much about these campaigns remains little understood in Imperial records, largely because the Dark Angels Legion, which bore the brunt of much of the fighting, ordered that such records be sealed away or destroyed for the good of the Imperium. What little can be determined from often conflicting sources is presented below.

History

General History

The Imperium has always been a fragile sliver of sanity in the void, besieged upon all sides by forces of monstrous dread that are held at bay only by the blood and sacrifice of millions of forgotten heroes. For every Imperial Crusade trumpeted to the masses as a safe legacy of triumph and glory, like the much-lauded victory at Ullanor, there are a hundred dire tales of desperate stalemate with forces malignant beyond mortal ken. Were the populace of the Imperium to realise the dire peril in which they existed in the tenuous early days of the Great Crusade then it is likely that sheer terror would have kept them prisoner on Old Earth, never to reach out for the stars. Of all these hidden threats and dire wars against the unknown, the most infamous among scholars of the forbidden is that of the Rangdan Xenocides.

These campaigns have long been relegated to the footnotes of Imperial history, little understood by the common historitor save as an obscure reference to a forgotten evil. In reality the wars against the Rangda threatened the utter destruction of all the realms of Mankind, the destruction of the Emperor's dominion and the butchery of His subjects. More than 80,000 of the Legiones Astartes and uncounted millions of the Imperial Army gave their lives to hold back the hordes of the Rangda and their cohorts, over wars fought across multiple solar decades of the Great Crusade.

The Dark Angels stand prominent in the telling of this tale, and it is by their hand that so few details are known, for it was deemed by the Ist Legion that all knowledge of the Rangda and the wars fought against them should be purged for the good of the Imperium.

Much of the fact surrounding those battles has long since been obscured by rumour and invention, with even the true form of the alien Rangda forgotten. All that remains are a few blurred and indistinct picts of fallen Rangdan warriors and ancient horror stories speaking of towering xenos of monstrous appearance and terrifying intellect. They were conquerors and destroyers whose seat of power lay along the very edges of the galaxy in the Halo Stars, a race whose foul technology and cruel ambition were a match for that of the Imperium and whose determination to rule over all others threatened to drown the Emperor's dream of empire in blood.

When the Imperial expeditionary fleets of the Emperor's Great Crusade had at last breached the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy, they inadvertently attracted the attention of the Rangdan Cerabvores, an alien species of such macabre power and technological might it seemed, for a time at least, that the Imperium had met its doom. Facing waves of attack from the galactic east and north, and suffering losses that would not be exceeded until the dark days of the Horus Heresy, the wars of the Rangdan Xenocides were the most terrible of any yet fought.

It was then given to the Space Wolves of the VIth Legion and the Dark Angels of the Ist Legion -- the latter who had suffered themselves so very dreadfully against the horror -- to conduct these purges, as these two Legions were entrusted above all others to do what had to be done. The Titans of the Legio Gryphonicus as well as the Legio Vulturum, the Legio Kydianos and other Xanite Mechanicum forces of Xana II served alongside the vaunted Dark Angels Legion during this vital campaign. The Dark Angels hurled themselves at their enemies and broke their greater strength in countless battles against the vile xenos on the edge of the Halo Stars. The conflict culminated in the Third Rangdan Xenocide around 890.M30, which resulted in the loss of the lives of 50,000 Space Marines spent in preventing the destruction of perhaps the entire northern Imperium by the alien menace from the outer darkness.

Due to the extensive losses suffered by the Ist Legion, by 899.M30 the Ultramarines Legion was on the cusp of becoming the largest Space Marine Legion, with a strength of around 166,000 Astartes.

For the Imperial Knights of House Orhlacc, the greatest hour of valour came when they fought alongside the Ordo Reductor at the infamous last stand on the world of Bloch during the final Rangda xenocide. This terrifying xenocidal campaign would see House Orhlacc cement its martial reputation in the blood of its own people, as no less than forty-eight Imperial Knights of Orhlacc were lost in a desperate last-ditch defence to hold back a massive enemy counterattack. For this great sacrifice, the house was rewarded with the rare gift of a Memento Mori, a distinction bestowed upon it by the hands of the Emperor Himself.

Horus Lupercal and his Luna Wolves Legion, who had been otherwise occupied in the ongoing wars in the galactic west, were now firmly in the ascendance in the eyes of the Great Crusade following the xenocides. The future of the next few solar decades of Imperial conquest and expansion now rested with him and the other Astartes Legions that retained their strength.

First Rangdan Xenocide

The wars fought against the Rangda by the Imperium during the Great Crusade number three in total. The first of these campaigns, the assault and destruction of Advex-mors in 839.M31, is most probably the first encounter between the forces of the Emperor and the Rangda, in which the Ist Legion lost some 5,000 battle-brothers in only 4 solar months of combat. Advex-mors would later be discovered to be little more than a small outpost of the Rangdan empire, a minor station at the edge of their extensive interstellar domains.

In the aftermath of the Imperium's assault, the Rangda paused in their conquests elsewhere to turn their eye back upon Advex-mors and the surrounding star systems, now swarming with the Imperium's colonies and fleets. The victory at Advex-mors, despite the steep price paid to secure it, would prove to be little more than the prelude to the true alien assault.

Second Rangdan Xenocide

In 862.M30 the Rangda returned to Imperial space, marking the start of the Second Rangdan Xenocide. They came not with a single, small fleet, but with a vast armada comprising thousands of vessels as well as over a dozen war-moons, a force of might far exceeding that of the small garrisons and expeditionary fleets in the area. They struck the northern fringe of the Imperium like a thunderbolt, annihilating the fleets set in defence over the fledgling Human colonies and forcing their colonists into neural shackles. It was only by the efforts of expeditionary fleets under the banner of the Vth and XIXth Legions that the xenos tide was delayed long enough for Imperial forces to rally, and the price they would pay to buy this respite was staggering.

Making a stand at the isolated Forge World of Xana II, the combined forces of the Vth and XIXth Legions fought a bitter holding action for eight solar months at a cost of 3,000 of the Legiones Astartes and many hundreds of thousands of Mechanicum thralls. The siege of Xana would be broken by the furious onslaught of the Dark Angels and Death Guard, shattering the Rangdan blockade and cutting a path through the Rangdan slave cohorts on the surface to once again open up the Forge World as a beachhead for the Imperium's counter-attacks on the Rangda's domains.

What would follow was more than two solar decades of war out among the Halo Stars, millions upon millions of deaths, 19 inhabited star systems laid waste and a ban on further Imperial expeditions past the exclusion posts on the worlds of Endyris and Morox. Before the crisis was declared ended, contingents from nine separate Space Marine Legions would become embroiled in the fighting, with more than 300,000 Space Marines being deployed at the height of the conflict during the climactic Imperial assault by the Primarch Lion El'Jonson on Taxal.

Due to the widespread nature of the campaign, the battle honour goes to no single warlord, though three of the primarchs were known to have led their warriors into battle against the Rangda. Despite this, the primarch of the Dark Angels is widely held to be the foremost commander of the war.

The last known battle of the Second Rangdan Xenocide is thought to have occurred in 882.M30, a chance Imperial encounter with a battered Rangdan fleet, a broken remnant of the vast armada that had challenged the Imperium and lost. At the time the truth of the Rangdan campaign, of the slaughter endured and how the Imperium had teetered on the brink of ruin, was concealed. Those worlds tainted beyond recovery by the Rangda were abandoned and the surviving veterans of the war sworn to silence or eliminated, for it was deemed necessary that the Rangda must vanish if the Imperium was to rebuild. Much of its legend would come later, the invention of Remembrancers and ideologues eager to promote the glory of the Great Crusade, and was composed of as much fiction as fact. For most citizens of the Imperium this marked the end of the wars with the Rangda, an end to one threat among thousands. A simple, if bloody, way marker in the Great Crusade's inexorable path to galactic conquest.

Much of what happened during this abyssal conflict is still locked under seal, but what can be said is that with the breaking of the "Labyrinth of Night" by the Emperor Himself, the threat was at last stymied. What remained was for the Rangdan taint to be purged in a subsequent solar decade-long series of bio-pogroms that left entire Human-inhabited sectors lifeless to ensure what was hoped to be a final victory.

After this conflict, the Dark Angels Legion created the Order of Broken Claws to study the Rangda and prepare for the possible return of the horrific xenos species. With access to the detailed catalogue of anatomical data compiled by Firewing operators and Dreadwing cheirophages, the adepts of this order of the Dark Angels' Hekatonystika were trained to stand against the worst Rangdan bio-forms in combat and emerge victorious.

Third Rangdan Xenocide

The third and final Rangdan war, more commonly known simply as "the Rangdan Xenocide," is little known and in many Imperial histories completely absent. It was conducted sometime in the 890s.M30 under the orders of the Divisio Militaris by the combined forces of the Dark Angels and Space Wolves, the final and irrevocable xenocidal solution to the threat of the Rangda. That great and terrible xenos race had been sorely wounded by their losses in the second war with the Imperium, but not vanquished. They had returned to their ancient homeworlds, and there, nourished by hate and a dark hunger, they had grown strong once again.

By chance those nests were discovered by a roving company of White Scars after the lifting of the edict of exclusion from the borders of Rangdan space in 887.M30, news the sons of Jaghatai Khan brought to the courts of Lion El'Jonson and Leman Russ. Those two primarchs, often antagonistic, were warlords united by the same bleak purpose, for if the Rangda still lived, they must be swiftly and utterly destroyed lest they rise again and ignite another great war. Together they and their Legions visited hell upon the remaining Rangda, scouring their last worlds clean from orbit and then descending to verify the termination of every hive and fortress with blade and flame.

This last campaign was no war, but a brutal and one-sided extermination campaign. Neither Leman Russ nor Lion El'Jonson held any illusions of tawdry chivalry to stay their hands, and they took a savage and final satisfaction in the utter annihilation of every last warrior and worker of the Rangda. They were aided by the Mechanicum of Xana II, which contributed a large expeditionary force, including the Taghmata commanded by Magos Dominus Anacharis Scoria and House Malinax, which also took part in the carefully planned genocide of the homeworld of the Rangda.

In the space of a single Terran year the galaxy was wiped clean of the Rangda, their last formations torn down and all traces of their works brought to ruin. The world of Advex-mors, where the Rangdan conflicts had first begun, was left as little more than plains of fractured glass formed from atomic fire, and became the site of a chantry house of the Ist Legion, home of the Order of Broken Claws, the keepers of the last set of codices that detailed the Rangda and their weaknesses. Interestingly, Imperial reports that erroneously state that this chantry had been established on the Rangda's homeworld, not Advex-mors, make some historitors believe that the mistake was made on purpose to give more weight to the Imperial claim that the Rangda had been entirely exterminated.

This was the end of both the Rangda and the Imperial campaigns against them, a quiet and undignified slaughter undertaken with the stoic determination that was the hallmark of the two rival primarchs of Caliban and Fenris. If any of the xenos race known to the Imperium as the Rangda survived this final campaign, in some far-flung outpost beyond the edge of the galaxy, then they have not returned to seek their vengeance, but the sentinels placed by the Ist Legion still watched and waited, perhaps giving the lie to the Imperial certainty of the Rangda's demise.

The Third Rangdan Xenocide is a conflict that is particularly obtuse in Imperal records; there are some sources which entirely discount the outline of events given above. For instance, another account states that the third Rangdan war was an apocalyptic conflict during which 50,000 Dark Angels were killed as they fought off a massive Rangdan invasion which brought the entire northern Imperium to the brink of destruction. These horrific losses eventually contributed to the Dark Angels losing their status as the largest of the Space Marine Legions to the Ultramarines, as noted above.

A third source claims that the Third Rangdan Xenocide was a solar-decade-long series of catastrophic, xenocidal purges organised by the Dark Angels and Space Wolves to wipe out all life on Rangda-tainted worlds, including those still inhabited by Imperial Humans in a series of Exterminatus actions. The result was a campaign far greater in scope than other accounts claim, with countless battles fought "across vast swathes of the galactic north-west" during the third conflict.

Notable Events

  • Majind Torc Transgression (881.M30) - During the devastation of the Second Rangdan Xenocide, a Basemekanic Barq broke the cordon of the galactic northeast to make impact at Majind. The Death Guard Legion in pursuit were decimated as the Macrobeest within was activated by unknown means. Only the quick thinking and intervention of the VIth Legion prevented disaster.

Alpha Legion Participation

Official accounts found in both the arcanlooms of the Logistica Corpus and the more prosaic works of the Remembrancers place the Alpha Legion's appearance as an active Space Marine Legion in its own right to either the solar decade immediately preceding the commencement of the Farinatus Extermination in 972.M30 or as appearing as an unexpected reinforcing power during the darkest days of the Third Rangdan Xenocide. This represents a discrepancy of many solar decades.

What is known is that a self-proclaimed "Alpharius," the commander of XXth Legion forces before the official rediscovery of their primarch, arrived in the proscribed Rangdan extermination zone and offered help to the Dark Angels Primarch Lion El'Jonson, whose Legion was badly depleted by the war. This "Alpharius" offered aid to the primarch against the Rangda in hopes that the Dark Angels would maintain their prominence and thus one day the Lion would be made the Imperial Warmaster.

El'Jonson at this time did not even know what the title of "warmaster" portended, but still secretly believed that such a title, if it meant being raised as the first among equals among the primarchs, might one day be bestowed upon him by the Emperor. "Alpharius" stated that the XXth Legion would prefer that the Lion serve as the future Warmaster over another primarch like Roboute Guilliman, as he was not so different from the Alpha Legion in his use of secrecy as a potent tool of war. El'Johnson ultimately rejected this offer, explaining that, "the offers change. The answer never does," in reference to those who sought to turn him from his path as the hunter of beasts.

According to a typically unsubstantiated tale later recounted by Alpharius himself, he was in fact the "Alpharius" that was present at this meeting with Lion El'Jonson. The Alpha Legion primarch offered his aid to the Dark Angels as he had an interest in moving into the Rangdan warzone to follow rumors of his long-lost twin brother, Omegon, who he believed was on the world of Bar'Savor. Once he arrived at Bar'Savor, Alpharius and Omegon were reunited and an Alpha Legion fleet including its flagship Beta purged the planet of the Slaugth xenos that had followed in the wake of the Rangda during the wars.

It is not known whether these events took place during the Second or Third Rangdan Xenocides.

Participation of the II and XI Legions

A rare record accidentally placed into copies of the Astra Militarum's Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer in the 41st Millennium recently revealed that the long-lost II and XI Legions of the ancient Space Marines participated in the campaigns of the Rangdan Xenocides, though the scope and nature of their involvement remains unrecorded.

Notable Participants

  • Juljak Nul, "The Storm Walker" - Nul had the dual distinctions of being the first Master of Ordnance of the XII Legion, later known as the War Hounds, and serving as one of the first of that Legion's officers interned within a Dreadnought frame after being horrifically mutilated by Slaugth murder-minds at Rangda. The fact that Nul was horrifically wounded by the Slaugth is perhaps a clue to the true nature of the mysterious "Rangdan Cerabvores" faced by the Imperium's military forces.
  • Crysos Morturg - Crysos Morturg was an Astartes of the Death Guard Legion, who was neither of Terra nor Barbarus by birth, but instead taken in with an emergency influx of recruits from the induction pool of the 18th Expeditionary Fleet after the Death Guard suffered near-catastrophic losses in the Rangdan Xenocide campaign. Years after his induction, he would manifest latent psychic abilities and was banished to the Legion Destroyer Corps, whose units were tasked to the brunt of the worst fighting the Death Guard endured. He was marked for death on Isstvan III, but would not die, and went on to become one of the most deadly commanders of the Loyalist resistance. Morturg miraculously survived the slaughter of the Istvaan III Atrocity and later became a Blackshield in a quest for revenge upon his former brothers.
  • The Nemean Reaver - This unknown Blackshield Reaver Lord fought throughout the middle years of the Horus Heresy, leading the Blackshield band known as the Dark Brotherhood against numerous foes as he sought to carve out a haven within the Eridayn Cataract. He garnered a reputation throughout the Pale Stars and was often referred to simply as the Nemean. It is generally believed that he was once an officer of the I Legion -- the Dark Angels -- though even this was far from certain. Unconfirmed rumours circulated that he was a survivor of the Rangdan Xenocides, the apocalyptic conflict that saw the nascent Imperium threatened with destruction, and he had already entered into the legends of the Legiones Astartes long before the Horus Heresy. At the Conclave of Optera, he renounced his position and departed with Nathaniel Garro, Knight-Errant of Malcador the Sigillite, for Terra, leaving his lieutenants to take command of the Dark Brotherhood and lead it as they saw fit. It is believed his duty to the Sigillite culminated at the Siege of Terra upon the walls of the Imperial Palace during the very climax of the Horus Heresy.

See Also

  • Treachery at Advex-mors

Sources

  • Alpharius: Head of the Hydra (Novel) by Mike Brooks, "Hydra Dominatus"
  • The Horus Heresy Book One: Betrayal (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 99, 266
  • The Horus Heresy Book Two: Massacre (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pg. 19
  • The Horus Heresy Book Three: Exterminatus, (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 82, 162
  • The Horus Heresy Book Four: Conquest, (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pg. 124
  • The Horus Heresy Book Five: Tempest (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 96, 221
  • The Horus Heresy Book Six: Retribution (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 57, 61, 67, 79, 84, 95, 226-227, 266
  • The Horus Heresy Book Seven: Inferno (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 81, 133
  • The Horus Heresy Book Eight: Malevolence (Forge World Series) by Neil Wylie and Anuj Malhotra, pg. 12
  • The Horus Heresy Book Nine: Crusade (Forge World Series), pp. 89-91, 107, 120-122, 125-126
  • Scions of the Emperor (Anthology), "First Legion" by Chris Wraight
  • The Regimental Standard 2018/03/28 - Field Dressing a Lasgun Wound
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