Shrine of Unity

The Shrine of Unity was a monument to the completion of the Unification Wars in the Sol System in the years of the Great Crusade. It was situated a grandly-sized comet that observed an elliptical orbit around Sol - routinely swinging back into Terra's solar system. The comet had been seen in the heavens when the Emperor had won the Wars on Terra, and it was for his victory that the shrine was created on the solar object. In the year before 132006.M31, the Word Bearers' Captain, Sor Talgron, visited the Shrine. This was noted by the Primarch of the Imperial Fists, Rogal Dorn, who had been recently tasked with defending Terra in the wake of the news concerning his brother Horus Lupercal's betrayal at Istvaan III. Dorn questioned Talgron, and was told by the dour Word Bearer warrior that his own Primarch, Lorgar Aurelian, had asked the captain to remove "certain edifications" from the comet, before its return to the solar system several years hence. These supposed edifications dated from before the Word Bearer's censure at Monarchia forty years earlier -- meaning that they were a proclamation of the divinity of the Emperor as a God, which contravened the secular Imperial Truth. The removal of such objects made sense to Dorn, for he believed the truth of Talgron's words. In truth, Talgron was not in fact removing pre-Monarchia religious objects, but committing acts of sabotage ordered by Lorgar. Talgron's task was incomplete at the time of Dorn's return and his call to their meeting, as he later told his Chaplain-turned-Dark Apostle, Jarulek. Talgron left a contingent led by a Word Bearer called Ibarix to finish the job, which Jarulek noted that their fate was a death sentence. Talgron noted that Ibarix and his fellows would do the Legion proud, when their time came, a reference to the future assault on the Solar System and the epic final confrontation, the Battle of Terra.

Sources

• The Purge (Novella) by Anthony Reynolds