Angron



"You kept that mule Kor Phaeron. Russ kept his kin-friends. The Lion kept Luther. Humans - brothers and foster fathers - saved and raised into Legion ranks. But not me. Not Angron, no. Did the Emperor teleport his gold-wrapped Custodians down to help me and my army? No. Did he free the War Hounds and order them to battle, fight alongside me? No. Did he save my brothers and sisters the way he spared and honoured the Lion's closest kin? The way he honoured Kor Phaeron? No, no and no. No mercy for Angron. Angron the Oathbreaker. Angron the Betrayer."

- Primarch Angron explaining his anger towards the Emperor to his brother Lorgar, Primarch of the Word Bearers

Angron, sometimes called the "Red Angel," is the Primarch of the World Eaters Traitor Legion. He was the most bloody-handed and savage of the Primarchs. When Horus began his rebellion against the Emperor, Angron was quick to join in his treachery, but his only true master was the rage and bloodlust within him.

He fell to Chaos during the Horus Heresy and was transformed into a Daemon Prince of the Blood God Khorne before that conflict had ended during the Shadow Crusade.

He was most recently banished to the Warp after he unleashed the First War of Armageddon upon the Imperium of Man in 474.M41, though since the opening of the Great Rift, rumours have swirled that he is active once more in realspace.

Descent of the Red Angel
Kept within the deepest dungeon of the Library Sanctus on Terra is a tome known as the Liber Malum, whose bloodstained pages record the fate of those who have trod the path to damnation. To even mention its name is to risk madness. Many are the blasphemous Heretics and tyrants whose names sully the pages with their treacheries, but foremost amongst these damned souls is Angron, the Primarch of the traitorous World Eaters Space Marine Legion. Much of the legend of Angron is incomplete, and there is much that is not known or remains so shrouded in dark legend that the true facts are impossible to discern.

A very great deal about the life story of the Daemon Primarch Angron remains unknown to the wider Imperial record. During the scattering of the Primarchs' gestation capsules from the Emperor of Mankind's gene-laboratories deep beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains, Angron was cast through the Warp to a "civilised" human world far from Terra. How Angron came to be separated from the Emperor so soon after his creation and the name of the planet he eventually came to call home was removed from the Imperial record. Indeed where this planet was or even if it still exists is uncertain to the Imperial savants of the present time. There is in fact evidence that this information, including the true name of the world he was found upon was known but was kept deliberately secret by command of the Emperor and those close to Him. That which is known is a dark tale of the Primarch's brutal upbringing, murderous violence, and Angron's revolt against his cruel masters.

After Angron came to be separated from the Emperor and Terra by the mysterious machinations of the Ruinous Powers he was deposited through the Warp on the world of Nuceria. Where this planet is located in the galaxy or if it even still exists is uncertain, though most signs seem to point to somewhere in the Ultima Segmentum. Carpinus' Speculum Historiale speaks of Angron's world as technologically advanced and ruled over by a wealthy elite who lived in decadent opulence while the populace of their cities lived in abject poverty in the slums that surrounded their walled palaces and villas. To distract the populace from their poverty, the oligarchic rulers of Nuceria held regular gladiatorial deathmatches in massive arenas, using cybernetically-enhanced gladiators who battled to satisfy the endless bloodlust of the oppressed people. It was on this world that the Primarch Angron was eventually discovered, though little else about the circumstances of how he came to be there remains known. What is known is that Angron was discovered by a slaver who chanced upon the battered and bleeding figure of the young Primarch surrounded by scores of alien corpses, high in the northern Desh'elika Mountains. History does not record what species these aliens belonged to, but many Imperial scholars believe them to have been Aeldari who attempted to kill the Primarch, due to some psychic foreknowledge of the plague upon the galaxy he would one day become. Angron had been badly wounded in the combat, but remained alive. Taken as a slave by the planet's ruling masters, known as the 'High-Riders', the young boy was brought to the Palace Praxica, the seat of the Reksium Throne of the powerful Nucerian city-state of Desh'ea, where he was sold to the ruling clan, House Thal'kr. The youth's obvious potential as a gladiator was soon made apparent and he was bought by the largest and most popular arena in the capital. The young Primarch was given a name, Angron Thal'kyr, which meant 'Child of the Mountain', and was nursed back to health.

The young Primarch quickly grow to formidable size, and was forced to take part in the gladiatorial games of Nuceria. After only a few months, Angron Thal'kyr had become a proud warrior of fearsme skill and an even stronger sense of honour, known to the crowds as "the Lord of the Red Sands". He killed hundreds of other gladiators, but those who fought well he always spared. Reaping many victories, Angron soon became a fan-favorite of Desh'ea and came to be known as 'The Unbeaten'. Although he seemed to enjoy the life of a gladiator and the adulation of the Desh'ean crowds, Angron secretly resented his slavery, and was always plotting to escape. He proved to be a troublesome champion, prone to escape attempts whenever he saw an occasion, but such efforts always failed.

During this time, Angron was mentored by an older gladiator named Oenomaus, who formed a deep bond with the younger gladiator and became somewhat of a father-figure to the impressionable warrior. Together, the two formidable warriors a deadly tally in the gladiatorial arenas of Nuceria, which culminated in an astounding victory against a pair of berserk Ogryns that were surgically equipped with the deadly bio-neural cybernetic implants known as the Butcher's Nails. Their momentous victory, however, was short-lived as the High-Riders demanded that the two gladiators fight one another in a dual to the death. The fiery Angron refused and openly insulted his Nucerian masters. This resulted in Angron having the Butcher's Nails implanted as a form of punishment. These crude neural implants were hammered into the Primarch's skull and surgically grafted to his cerebral cortex.

Relic devices from the Dark Age of Technology, these cortical implants would boost a warrior's adrenaline, resulting in greater strength and aggression in battle. However, they bleached a warrior's mind of all reason, all caution, all the instincts of mortality. The Nails rewarded rage with spurts of electrochemical pleasure, tingling synapses and deadening enjoyment of everything else. No better machine had ever been contrived. The cells below the massive arena were home to several thousand gladiators, all implanted with the Butcher's Nails, and Angron would soon take his place amongst them. Following the successful surgery, Angron was loosed upon Oenomaus and tore apart his friend in a blind, berserk frenzy. Upon regaining his senses, Angron realised the horrible transgression he had committed against his mentor, and was driven to such depths of despair that it was said that he unleashed a bestial howl that lasted for several days. The death of Oenomaus proved to be too much for Angron to bear, and he swore that one day, he would make good his escape and make all the High-Riders pay dearly.

Rebellion
Within a few standard years Angron's fame had spread to every corner of his homeworld. Under his training, the gladiators of his arena soon became the greatest their world had ever seen and none could stand against them. Yet Angron also learned, following a final failed escape attempt, that he would never succeed alone. His unbending warrior's code and sheer combat skill had made him a well-respected leader amongst the other Desh'ean gladiators and when the largest death games ever held on Nuceria were announced, Angron planned his most daring escape attempt.

For these new games, Angron was allowed to stage a vast combat that would involve every gladiator of his arena. As the Desh'ean crowd drowned out the sounds of battle, Angron's gladiators turned on their armed guards, butchering them and fighting their way to freedom. Against the guards armed with firearms, the gladiators' casualties were grievous, but nearly 2,000 survived to escape into the streets of Desh'ea, stealing what weapons and supplies they could before fleeing into the northern mountains where Angron had first been discovered. Over the next few years, the rulers of the world dispatched many armed forces to kill or recapture the rebel slaves, who soon named themselves the "Eaters of Cities," but all were destroyed in turn by Angron's leadership, martial skill and the cybernetically-enhanced fury of the gladiators. But attrition and hunger slowly took their toll on the slaves and eventually only 1,000 men and women remained, half the size of the original force of escapees.

On a mountain named Fedan Mhor, on a bleak spit of land known as Desh'elika Ridge, Angron and his forces were finally surrounded by no less than seven large Nucerian armies. Not even the Primarch could stand against such sheer numbers, yet it was at this time that the Emperor of Mankind came to this world, drawn by the psychic emanations of his gene-son the Primarch. The Emperor had observed Angron secretly from orbit for many months and had watched with pride as he had led his freed slaves in battle against the forces of tyranny. The Emperor and a small cadre of Legio Custodes descended to the world's surface, and after the shock of the august meeting had worn off on the Primarch, the Emperor offered Angron the leadership of the XIIth Space Marine Legion, the War Hounds, which had been created from Angron's own genetic material, and a place at his side in the Great Crusade. To the Emperor's disbelief, Angron refused, claiming that his place remained with his fellow slaves amongst the Eaters of Cities and he would die before deserting them. Reluctantly, the Emperor teleported back to His flagship, shocked at His son's refusal.

Appraising the situation, the Emperor saw that for all of Angron's might as a Primarch and a leader, he would die in the coming battle. Losing one of His irreplaceable sons to the assault of rabble on a backwater planet soon to be brought into Imperial Compliance was simply unacceptable. Bringing His flagship into low orbit over the world, the Emperor teleported Angron against his will, away from the mountain of Fedan Mhor and the Battle of Desh'elika Ridge. Without their leader, the morale of the gladiators was destroyed and the next day they were slaughtered to the last man by the armies of Nuceria's rulers. Angron helplessly watched from orbit, as his brothers and sisters were quickly annihilated. Sensing his anger, the Custodians surrounded the enraged Primarch, their Guardian Spears pointed menacingly at the Primarch. In a fit of rage Angron killed one of the Custodians, however, the Primarch was forced into a state of submission by the Emperor's powerful psychic powers. Angron angrily asked his father why he had not intervened to save the lives of his comrades on the planet below, but the Emperor dismissed the question as lacking vision. He was the Emperor of Mankind, and He had much grandeur visions like conquering the galaxy on behalf of Mankind, not worrying with a single, petty tyrant battling a mere slave revolt. The Emperor expressed His hope that in time, Angron would come to understand His actions and why he had done what He did. Angron replied that he was meant to die alongside his comrades on Nuceria, and now only a ghost remained. The Emperor replied that a ghost would suffice for what he had planned for his son. This was a deed for which Angron would never forgive the Emperor, and a stain upon the Primarch's honour that would never fade but fester into a soul-deep wound.

The exact records of the Emperor's intervention and Angron's acceptance of his new situation is a matter of shadowed rumour and conjecture, but what can be said with certainty is that Angron's first reaction to his new situation was rage. It was said with certainty that for some time any War Hound who came before him was met with a grisly death for their efforts. It is certain that at this time the Legion Master of the War Hounds, Ibram Ghreer, a respected general who had commanded the XIIth Legion for nearly three decades, disappeared without explanation from any record of the time and no explanation was given by his taciturn Legion for his absence. Only after murdering at least seven high-ranking officers within the Legion, including the War Hounds Legion's former commander, Captain Khârn of the 8th Assault Company voluntarily went forth to Angron's private quarters to confront the enraged Primarch. Nearly beaten to death for his efforts, Khârn's unwillingness to accept defeat even at the hands of a much superior foe finally convinced Angron of his Legion's worthiness as fellow warriors, and his place as the rightful general and commander of the XIIth Legion.

Angron swiftly took charge of the XIIth Legion. The Primarch renamed the War Hounds the World Eaters after he assumed command. Angron did this in part to honour the gladiator force he had led in rebellion on his homeworld whose warriors had been known as the "Eaters of Cities" for their wrath and violence. He chose the new name for his Legion when Dreagher, a Terran-born War Hounds Legionary who served as Captain of the Legion's 9th Company, promised Angron after meeting his Primarch for the first time that under his leadership the War Hounds would become, "...the eaters of worlds."

Soon after, the newly renamed World Eaters would be influenced by Angron's thirst for battle, amplified by the use of the cortical Butcher's Nails implants that were reverse-engineered from the cerebral modifications of the same name that Angron had received during his Nucerian gladiator training. During the course of the Great Crusade, Angron and the World Eaters reaped many victories, although some criticised the extreme and bloodthirsty tactics the Red Angel used to ensure the destruction of his opponents.

Angron's Secret
When Angron was teleported away by the Emperor from Nuceria he was examined aboard the Adamant Resolve's Apothecarion by Vel-Kheredar, the Archmagos Veneratus of the XIIth Legion and a representative of Kelbor-Hal, the Fabricator-General of the Mechanicum of Mars. After ordering the XIIth Legion's Techmarines and Apothecaries away, the Primarch was rendered somnolent by the psychic touch of Malcador the Sigillite. Vel-Kheredar examined the neural implants hammered into the Primarch's skull over the course of seven hours, all under the Sigillite's watchful eyes. The Archmagos discovered that the Butcher's Nails had remapped Angron's brain. When the Nails activated, they reduced the production of the neurotransmitter known as serotonin in the subject's brain to encourage instinctive aggression, just as they deadened emotional response and electrical activity to any other portion of the brain save for that which regulated the flow of adrenaline. Unfortunately, the malignant archeotech device had not been designed for the biological complexity of a Primarch's brain, as it eroded mental stability and slowly damaged the subjects' capacity to reason. The implants also impinged on higher brain function by rewriting emotional responses. To make matters worse, removing the Butcher's Nails would only result in the death of the Primarch.

Over time the Butcher's Nails would cause rapid cortical degeneration and eventually kill the Primarch. This was a certainty, though Angron's superhuman physiology would continue to try to heal the damage as the Nails bit deeper. Vel-Kheredar did not know how long it would take the Nails to kill the Primarch based on the little data available but he could make an educated estimate. The Archmagos reported his findings to the Emperor, and soon received a marked and sealed scroll with the Palatine Aquila upon it, handed to him by the Sigillite himself. It was a message from the Emperor's own hand. He ordered the Archmagos to sequester his findings and to remain silent. At the time, the XIIth Legion was broken, as they were one of the last of the Legiones Astartes to find their gene-sire. Morale was low. It was bad enough that they were burdened with the only Primarch to fail in conquering his homeworld. If they had discovered he was doomed to die before the Great Crusade's end, it would have annihilated what little morale amongst the Legion remained.

Lord of the Red Sands
"Monuments are dust, tales merely words, soon forgotten, but blood — blood is forever."

- Angron, Primarch of the Legio Astartes World Eaters

Angron took charge of his Legion at the mustering grounds on the War Hounds' garrison world of Bodt and swiftly worked many changes on his forces. He was given a surprisingly free hand for a newly invested Primarch, for he was not required to undergo a period in which he shadowed one of his Primarch brothers while he grew into command, or even spend time in his new-found father's company. Instead he was given license to simply take charge of his host. With bellicose energy Angron prepared it for war. The regime of discipline and training the XIIth Legion had abided by in the past would prove to be but a shadow of what came to pass under Angron's direction and reform. Conflict became the only measure and the only judge, and training beyond its most basic elements was as real as any war or battle a World Eaters Astartes would find themselves in. Blood, live rounds and bared blades, fighting pits and gladiatorial combat; these were the methods now used to test the mettle of the Primarch's sons, to make them more brutal and efficient killers, in the image of their genetic father. Each warrior soon bore scars by which to count the lessons learned amid heat and the bitter volcanic sands, and those that failed did not live long enough to try again.

The Butcher's Nails
Knowing how successful his own cortical implants could be at boosting a warrior's prowess in battle, Angron ordered his Apothecarion to insert the Butcher's Nails implants within every Astartes of the World Eaters Legion to enhance aggression and pain tolerance far beyond that which even the gene-engineered flesh of a member of the Space Marine Legions was capable. But the drawbacks were that such surgical procedures left the individual devoid of joy or peace save for that found in battle. In this dark endeavour, Angron ordered the study of the implants he had been given by his Nucerian slave masters, the infamous Butcher's Nails, to serve as a template. The Techmarines of the World Eaters attempted to duplicate the process using the Primarch's own implants as templates to reverse-engineer the devices. However, this proved difficult, for Angron's implants were a relic of a long-lost human technology, little understood by its makers, while removing them from Angron for close study would have proved fatal to the Primarch. Early attempts to duplicate these implants by the combined efforts of the Legion's Techmarines and Apothecaries were far from successful. Under the supervision of Apothecary Gahlan Surlak, the implantation of the Butcher's Nails resulted in a 100% mortality rate, but Angron persisted in his demands that all his warriors be implanted with the same crude device.

Great Crusade
In the early days of Angron's leadership of the XIIth Legion, the Primarch still refused to acknowledge most of his sons who could not survive the implantation of the Butcher's Nails. At one point, Angron simply abandoned his Legion, hijacking a frigate, and disappearing without a trace. It took two years of searching, but eventually, the World Eaters' missing Primarch was tracked down by Kharn, the Primarch's Equerry, who discovered him upon a backwater Feral World. Here, Angron lived like a savage, seeking a foe that would put him out of his misery. Shocked by this revelation, Kharn chastised Angron, reminding him of his Nucerian comrades, and how they would hate see him in such a pitiful state. This finally convinced Angron to re-join his Legion with the promise that he would try to lead the World Eaters to shed their weakness.

The Liber Malus speaks of whole star systems surrendering wholesale when the World Eaters' fleet was detected entering the system rather than face the wrath of Angron's Space Marines, so potent had their bloody legend grown. With this legend came dark tales of atrocity and wanton destruction that froze the blood of even hardened Imperial Commanders and caused concern even at the level of the Imperial War Council and the other Primarchs. Not least of the XIIth Legion's detractors was Roboute Guilliman, the Primarch of the Ultramarines, who fought beside Angron and his Legion during the Cleansing of Arigatta and saw at first hand the bloodbath they had left in the wake of their attack on the Basalt Citadel, where the last defenders of this non-Compliant human world had made their stand.

Guilliman had seen the ramp of World Eaters corpses that had been used to finally mount a breach in the mighty fortress and the vengeful horror the Space Marines had wrought within and been sickened. Angron soon earned the nickname the "Red Angel" for the bloody atrocities committed across the width and breadth of the galaxy. Of all his titles, given in glory or earned in infamy, Angron most despised being named the 'Red Angel'. The Imperium already had an Angel in Sanguinius, and Angron had no desire to ape the fey mutant that commanded the IXth Legion. For all his flaws, he was his own man, and took pride in that above all else. Though Angron loathed this epithet, it proved among his most fitting titles.

Decimation
Despite the tally of victories garnered by this brutal Space Marine Legion, it came at a dire cost. Most infamously, Angron would order his warriors to conquer a targeted world within 31 hours - the length of a single Nucerian day - and the time in which it took Angron to score his greatest victory upon his former home world. Despite their best efforts, the World Eaters consistently failed to subjugate worlds within this set time limit. Each time they failed, they were ordered by their gene-sire to undergo the barbaric punishment known as decimation, forcing 1 out of every 10 World Eaters to be killed by his other 9 battle-brothers. This brutal punishment would prove to be too much to bear for one World Eaters officer, and matters would quickly come to a head during the Ghenna Campaign.

Ghenna Massacre
Ghenna was an isolated world that had endured the horrors of Old Night. Their society was fairly advanced, but unfortunately, they were overcome with genetic diseases. By the time of the Great Crusade, there were less than a thousand Ghennans that remained, kept alive in life-pods. When this world, classified as Ninety-Three Fifteen, was re-discovered by the Imperium, they initially accepted Imperial rule peacefully. But shorty after, they rebelled. The World Eaters were tasked with the forceful subjugation of the Ghenna. Following unsuccessful negotiations with Ghennan emissaries, and their subsequent slaughter, upon the World Eaters' discovery of their artificial nature, Angron ordered a hasty invasion of the planet. However, due to poor planning and inadequate orbital, heavy armour and artillery support, the World Eaters faced massive resistance from billions of artificial Ghennan "Simulacrum", which overwhelmed the World Eaters Legionaries through sheer weight of numbers. Just as the World Eaters forced a breach and broke their way inside the confines of the main Ghenna city, they once again failed to meet their Primarch's allotted time-frame of 31 hours to subjugate the planet.

Forced to withdraw their forces, the warriors of the XIIth Legion withdrew and were forced to journey back aboard their Primarch's flagship, the Conqueror to face their draconian punishment. Angron ordered yet another round of decimation to be carried out, however, one of his officers, Centurion Mago, commander of the 18th Company, refused his gene-sire's orders. The Centurion's refusal initially amused the Primarch, who then callously ordered Mago to personally carry out the decimation and murder his longtime comrade, Salicar. When Mago refused the Primarch a second time, this sent Angron into a blind rage, who then proceeded to murder a large swathe of his own sons. The World Eaters Librarians, under Lectio Primus Vorias, subdued the enraged Primarch utilising their combined psychic abilities, putting Angron into an unconscious state, though several died in the attempt. However, Angron would not wake from his slumber, and soon, a crisis erupted within the World Eaters over what actions should be taken. During this time of instability, Apothecary Gahlan Surlak announced that he had created a stable method of implanting the Butcher's Nails implants by reverse-engineering Ghennan technology. They could now implant these archaeotech devices into the warriors throughout the Legion, per their Primarch's orders. Centurion Mago was horrified by the prospect of being a part of a Legion of murderers enraged by these diabolical implants, and began to plot with other original Terran War Hounds veterans to halt Surlak's plans.

Mago would subsequently make an appeal to Kharn, pleading with him to reverse the direction their Legions was taking, however, his call for change fell on deaf ears. This forced Mago to take more drastic measures, and soon, he gathered disenchanted World Eaters that were loyal to him aboard the Frigate, Hound's Tooth. Together, they plotted to destroy Apothecary Surlak's equipment before he could fully perfect the Butcher's Nails implants for mass production and implantation. However, this attempt failed, and shortly thereafter, Kharn became the first World Eaters Legionary to be successfully imbued with the Butcher's Nails. With this initial success, Surlak then proceeded a mass induction of 1,000 more fellow World Eaters with the Butcher's Nails. Around this time, Angron awoke from his slumber, and with the Primarch leading these newly enhanced Legionaries, immediately launched a counter-attack against the upstart Ghennans. The World Eaters, enhanced by the deadly Butcher's Nails, slaughtered all those they came across, despite the massive numbers of Simulacrum arrayed against them. Thanks to Surlak's efforts, through his reverse-engineering of Ghennan technology, he was able to localise and pinpoint the command signal's origins of the last living Ghennans in their life-pods. The Ghennans pleaded with the blood-maddened World Eaters to be spared and left alone, but Kharn replied disdainfully that the galaxy belonged to the Imperium and proceeded to massacre them all.

Meanwhile, Mago and his Loyalist conspirators had felt they had no other options left and planned to subdue Angron, Kharn and those World Eaters that had been imbued with the Butcher's Nails, and bring them before the Emperor Himself for judgement. After the massacre of the Ghennans was carried out, the World Eaters on the surface were confronted by Centurion Mago and his Loyalist supporters. They pleaded with their Primarch and Kharn to halt their madness, but once again, their pleas were ignored, and soon, a battle broke out between both factions. During the subsequent fighting Mago was confronted by, and bested, by his former friend Kharn, and before he was beheaded, made a final declaration -- the XIIth Legion would be damned by their actions and the direction Angron was taking it. The Centurion's final words would later prove to be prophetic. With the death of their commander, the remaining Loyalists halted in mid-battle and submitted themselves to Angron's judgement. With the Legion once again unified, the World Eaters proceeded to scour the surface of Ghenna clean of life, leaving no structure intact and no Ghennan left alive in a single night of monumental bloodshed. It was said that the psychic death screams of the dying were audible to Imperial Astropaths across half the sector.

In the aftermath of this massacre, calls for censure against the World Eaters resounded within the Terran Council. Soon after, Primarch Leman Russ and his Space Wolves Legion were dispatched to Ghenna to confront Angron and his World Eaters and to halt the implantation of the deadly cortical implants.

The Night of the Wolf
Following the infamous events of the Ghenna Massacre, the World Eaters were publicly censured by the Emperor and commanded to stop using the cortical implants. Imperial records state that two Primarchs came to Angron, both claiming to have been sent by the Emperor, intending to convince him to stop the dangerous practice. The first arrived soon after Angron joined his Legion after being unwillingly rescued from Nuceria. The second would not come until almost a century later. But by then, it would be too late to stop the tragedy that had already begun to unfold.

The Night of the Wolf is a little known incident that occurred shortly after the massacre of the entire planetary population of Ghenna. The Primarch Leman Russ had been charged by the Emperor to take his Space Wolves Legion to Ghenna to bring the World Eaters to heel. The two Legions met at Malkoya, on the fields beyond the dead Ghennan city of that same name. The World Eaters, battered and bleeding from Ghenna's Imperial Compliance campaign, formed ragged lines before the assembled Space Wolves Legion.

The Primarchs stood before their hosts, armed and armoured -- Angron awash with blood and carved up by fresh wounds; Leman Russ in resplendent battle-plate the colour of the storms on his tempestuous homeworld of Fenris. In these early years of the Great Crusade, Angron still carried his first axe, the precursor to all others. He called it Widowmaker. It would break this very day, never to be used again. Russ carried Krakenmaw, his immense Chainblade, toothed by some Fenrisian sea-devil from that blighted world's many myths. Angron refused to recognise his brother's authority, and warned the Wolf King to depart before the situation became something that he would regret. But Russ refused to be cowed by the warlike Primarch. He informed Angron that the implantation surgeries must end, for the Emperor Himself had deemed it so. The massacres of newly discovered human worlds were to end with the fall of Ghenna. The World Eaters were to submit to the Space Wolves as their escorts for their Legion's return to Terra. Once they reached the Imperial Palace, everything would be done to remove the parasitic Butcher's Nails implants from the World Eaters' minds. Angron was not amused by Russ' implied threats.

No one ever saw who fired the first shot. In the decades after, the World Eaters claimed it came from the Space Wolves' lines, and the Space Wolves claimed the same of the XIIth Legion. Without either Primarch giving an order, the two Space Marine Legions fought. The Night of the Wolf, it was later called. Imperial archives referred to it as the Ghenna Scouring, omitting the moment the World Eaters and Space Wolves drew blood. A source of pride for both Legions, and a source of secret shame. Both claimed victory. But both feared they had actually lost, and in truth, the battle proved bloody but inconclusive. But the World Eaters did not return to Terra, and Angron refused to stop the implantation of his Astartes.

Paying no heed to the Emperor's command, Angron ordered his Techmarines to continue to use the Butcher's Nails implant technology until nearly every World Eater Space Marine had undergone the surgery. Blood rites like blood-drinking and vicious gladiatorial combats became an increasingly important part of the World Eaters' Legionary rituals and customs as they continued to slaughter their way across a broad swathe of the galaxy. It soon became common practice for World Eaters to compete in the number of skulls that they could take in battle. For some World Eaters Space Marines, the result was an uncontrollable thirst for slaughter even away from the battlefield. However, the results produced by the World Eaters on the frontlines were so effective that the Imperium --and its Emperor -- proved willing to turn a blind eye to the World Eaters’ savage practices for quite some time during the course of the Great Crusade.

Istvaan III Atrocity
By the dawn of the 31st Millennium, as the World Eaters' vicious savagery only worsened, many of Angron's brother Primarchs voiced their concerns to the Emperor, yet the Master of Mankind proceeded to make a terrible error. He dispatched the Warmaster Horus, the Primarch He trusted over all others, to confront Angron and bring him back into the Imperial fold. Yet Horus was a master manipulator, and unknown to the Emperor, had already himself been corrupted by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. In Angron, Horus saw a warrior consumed by bitterness and resentment towards the Emperor and it was simple for Horus to feed that bitterness and emphasise the Emperor's betrayal of him at Nuceria, feeding Angron's perception that the Emperor was a weakling in need of replacement by a stronger ruler -- a ruler like Horus. Horus had told Angron exactly what he wanted to hear and when the Horus Heresy began, plunging the galaxy into civil war, Angron's World Eaters joyfully marched beside the Sons of Horus into treachery. Thus, the World Eaters became one of Horus’ original four Traitor Legions, along with the Death Guard, the Word Bearers and Horus’ own Sons of Horus.

During the first battle of the Horus Heresy, also known as the Istvaan III Atrocity, the Warmaster Horus at last declared his traitorous hand and openly defied the Emperor. Angron led the World Eaters personally in the first surface assault on Istvaan III to destroy the remaining Loyalist Astartes of the four original Traitor Legions, including their own Loyalist World Eaters, who had survived the traitorous virus-bombing of Istvaan III's capital of Choral City by Horus' orbiting fleet. Horus had deceitfully launched this treacherous saturation bombardment of the planet after the four Traitor Legions' known Loyalists were already engaged against the Slaaneshi rebels who held the world. The deadly cargo which contained the deadly life-eater virus killed billions of innocents, whose psychic death scream was said to be louder than the holy beacon of the Astronomican. Much to the Traitors' surprise, nearly two-thirds of the Loyalists from the first wave survived the orbital bombardment, thanks in no small part to the timely warning of the Loyalist Emperor's Children Captain Saul Tarvitz.

Taking matters into his own hands, Angron defied Horus' plans and spearheaded a second Drop Pod wave after the bombardment failed to eliminate all of the Loyalists. The Warmaster and his allies could only look on in outrage as the Red Angel made planetfall at the head of a full 50 companies of his bloodthirsty Astartes, landing in the plaza areas to the west of the Precentor's Palace, hunting for their own kin with fratricide in their hearts. The World Eaters bloodily massacred most of their Loyalist Battle-Brothers, plunging into their former comrades' ranks like a white hot dagger. Incensed at his brother's disobedience, the Warmaster saw no choice but to support his ill-tempered and impulsive ally since the after effects of the global conflagration unleashed by the virus bombs made it impossible to carry out an immediate, accurate orbital bombardment. Horus ordered all of the Traitor forces to commence a ground attack to salvage victory from disorder. Nearly two full solar months passed on the Dead World of Istvaan III as the Loyalist survivors stalled the Warmaster's plans by tenaciously holding out against the Traitor forces. But their numbers quickly waned against the Traitors reinforcements and steady supply of munitions. Eventually, once the world's atmosphere had cleared enough to make accurate orbital fire once again possible, the Traitors leveraged their superiority of arms at last, and soon the slaughter swung decisively in the Warmaster's favour following another orbital bombardment of the Loyalist positions. The gauntlet had been thrown down and the Horus Heresy had begun.

Shadow Crusade and the Return to Nuceria
"Let history mark my words well, for I care nothing about who sits proud on the Throne of Terra when the last day dawns. Horus is a fine commander, but that’s the limit of my admiration for that arrogant, preening bastard. I joined his rebellion because I can tolerate him easier than I can endure the abomination that names himself Master of Mankind. You want the truth of my life and death? I am Angron, the Eater of Worlds, and I am already dead. I died over a hundred years ago, in the mountains north of the city that enslaved me. I died after Desh'elika."

- Primarch Angron talking to his brother Lorgar

During the opening days of the Horus Heresy, Lorgar had ordered his two most trusted advisors, First Chaplain Erebus and the Dark Apostle Kor Phaeron, to unleash their wrath against the Realm of Ultramar. This was done in retaliation for the humiliation the XVIIth Legion had been forced to endure by being forced to kneel in disgrace before the Emperor and Roboute Guilliman and his Ultramarines on the world of Khur by the XIIIth Legion at the Emperor's orders during the Great Crusade. The Word Bearers proceeded to achieve a monumental victory at the Battle of Calth which ensued. The Ultramarines Legion was badly crippled and no longer presented a viable threat to Horus' plan to drive on Terra. Erebus had managed to complete his blasphemous ritual on Calth's surface, which summoned the beginnings of the sorcerous Ruinstorm to the galaxy's Eastern Fringe -- a monstrous Warp Storm larger and more destructive than anything space-faring humanity had witnessed since the days of the Age of Strife.

Simultaneous with the Word Bearers' assault on Calth, Lorgar and the more reliable Word Bearers under his command launched a second offensive, a joint Shadow Crusade with his brother Angron's World Eaters Legion into the rest of the Realm of Ultramar, laying waste to the Five Hundred Worlds with reckless abandon, slaughtering twenty-six worlds in rapid succession. This was to ensure the success of the sorcerous Ruinstorm, which would ultimately split the void asunder, dividing the galaxy in two and rendering vast tracts of the Imperium impassable for centuries, effectively cutting Ultramar off from the rest of the Imperium. This prodigious Warp Storm would deny needed reinforcements to the Loyalists as Horus drove on Terra in an attempt to overthrow the Emperor of Mankind. Nothing from Terra would get in and nothing would get out. Not even an astropathic whisper would be able to pierce this storm of Warp energy bleeding into realspace.

At some point during the Horus Heresy while taking part in the Traitor Legions' Shadow Crusade against the Realm of Ultramar, fighting alongside the Word Bearers Legion, the World Eaters fought in a direct confrontation against the Ultramarines Legion upon the War World of Armatura. During the brutal assault, the Ultramarines managed to lure the enraged World Eaters into a trap as they assaulted the main quarter of the ruined capital city, collapsing buildings and burying many of the World Eaters and their Primarch Angron under tons of rubble. The Primarch's twin Chainaxes were ruined, as they had lost their teeth during the brutal fighting. After Angron managed to crawl from the strewn rubble, he threw his axe Gorechild away, for it would never function again. In the aftermath of the battle, Angron's Equerry Khârn found the discarded weapon and picked it up. He knew he risked his Primarch's wrath by violating Angron's superstition of inherited weapons bringing ill luck, a gladiatorial conceit taken from Nuceria, but still had Gorechild repaired, and used the mighty weapon ever since that day.

During this campaign of destruction, Lorgar had come to realise that over the course of their Shadow Crusade, Angron's temperament and mental stability had steadily grown worse. His cybernetic neural-implants known as the Butcher's Nails were killing him faster than Lorgar had originally imagined, faster than anyone realised. The rate of degeneration had accelerated very quickly in the months after the Battle of Calth. The implants had never been designed for the peculiar genetics of a Primarch's brain. Angron's physiology was trying to heal the damage produced by the implants as the Nails bit deeper. To save his life, Lorgar convinced the Lord of the World Eaters to go back to his homeworld of Nuceria. The overlords of the gladiatorial games on that world who had first hammered the foul device into Angron's skull would know more of the implant's function than the Traitor Legion's savants and the Dark Mechanicum. The two Primarchs would learn all that was known about the Nucerians' insidious cortical implant technology, and then they would burn that loathsome world until its surface was nothing but glass. Angron would finally take the vengeance he pretended to no longer desire. Whether Angron fought him, hated him or trusted him, mattered little to Lorgar, who intended to drag Angron into the immortality that he deserved before the Dark Gods whether he wanted it or not.



Once on Nuceria, Angron paid his respects to his fallen brothers and sisters amongst the Nucerian gladiators he had once fought beside, whose bones now lay exposed to the elements on the Desh'elika Ridge where they had died. The painful memories of that day, long ago, were too much for the Primarch to bear. After paying a visit to the city-state of Desh'ea to see who ruled the Nucerian city-state that had once claimed to own him, he became enraged when he was told the tale of how he had fled at the Battle of Desh'elika Ridge, and the subsequent massacre of the rebel army in the mountains. The rebels had died to a man in his absence. Enraged by the lies that had been told about him over the last century, Angron ordered his Legion to kill everyone in the city. Then they were to kill everyone on the planet.

Guilliman's retribution fleet, which had been tracking the rest of the Word Bearers Legion in the wake of the Battle of Calth, finally caught up to the Traitors upon Angron's homeworld of Nuceria, which the World Eaters Legion were preoccupied with wiping clean of all life in vengeance for the treatment the Nucerians had merited out a century before to Angron. The XIIIth Legion warship Courage Above All, Guilliman's temporary flagship, broke Warp at the system’s edge, at the head of a large void armada consisting of 41 vessels. The Ultramarines armada looked wounded, cobbled together from separate fleets. It was not a dedicated interdiction war-fleet, but clearly a ragtag strike force, a lance thrust to the enemy’s heart. Guilliman himself had done the best he could with limited resources. The XIIIth Legion's Cruisers and Battleships ran abeam of the enemy fleet for repeated exchange of broadsides, offering targets too big and powerful to ignore, while the rest of the Ultramarines fleet used calculated Lance strikes from safer range. The armada then divided its assault potential, doing its utmost to destroy Lorgar's flagship Fidelitas Lex, and attempted to take the World Eaters' flagship Conqueror in a boarding action.

But the Ultramarines' warships not only fought a void war, they also attempted to take the fight to the surface of Nuceria, for this attack was personal. The Ultramarines had come for revenge against Lorgar and the Word Bearers, just as they had pursued Kor Phaeron all the way to the Maelstrom on the other side of Ultramar. Several Ultramarines warships attempted to make a run on Nuceria, hemorrhaging Drop Pods, landers and gunships, forcing planetfall by any means necessary. The Ultramarines fleet swept over and against the Traitors like an insect horde. But the tenacious commander of the Conqueror, Lotara Sarrin, put up a difficult fight and destroyed a number of Ultramarines vessels that attempted to make a run for the surface. Though the World Eaters' flagship transformed a number of the smaller vessels into flaming wreckage, the Ultramarines eventually punched through her tenacious defence and managed to land troops on the surface of Nuceria.

As was their way, the Ultramarines established footholds at defensible positions, clearing room for their reinforcements to land. For every position they held, another was overrun by the World Eaters in a storm of roaring axes, or lost to the Word Bearers' chanting, implacable advance. The XIIth Legion crashed against the XIIIth in rabid packs, showing why Imperial forces had feared to fight alongside them for decades. Uncontrolled, unbound, unrestrained, they butchered their way through Ultramarines strongpoints, enslaved to the joy of battle because of the Butcher's Nails cortical implants sandwiched within the meat of their minds. The XVIIth Legion also met their Loyalist cousins, replacing ferocity with spite and hate. The Ultramarines returned it in kind, hungry for vengeance against the vile Traitors who had defiled Calth and damaged its star. Word Bearers units marched, droning black hymns and chanting sermons from the Book of Lorgar, bearing corpse-strewn icons of befouled metal and bleached bones above their regiments.

Meanwhile, the Fidelitas Lex was already a ruin, its armour pitted and cracked, its shields a memory. The cathedrals and spinal fortresses barnacling along its back were gone, laid waste by the Ultramarines’ incendiary rage. The XIIIth Legion's armada attacked in strafing runs and protracted exchanges of broadsides, trading fire with the superior warship and accepting their own casualties as the cost of bleeding the bigger vessel dry. Each assault left the Lex weaker, firing fewer turrets and cannons, taking punishment on its increasingly fragile armour. But she fought on. Crawling with smaller ships, the Lex lashed back with its remaining Macrocannons, rolling in the light of its own burning hull. Guilliman guided the battle from the command deck of Courage Above All, and had decided that the Lex would die first, killed in the death of a thousand cuts and swept from the game board, while the Conqueror would be boarded and killed from within. In the course of the battle in Nucerian orbit, the Conqueror could not rise to its sister-ship’s defence. Both Traitor Legion flagships fought alone, starved of support and suffering the endless attacks of the XIIIth Legion’s ragged armada. Salvation Pods streamed from the Lex's sides and underbelly, along with heavier Mechanicum craft and bulk landers. With the Legionaries of the Word Bearers already on the surface, the ship’s human population fled in the vessel’s final minutes. And still the great vessel fought -- rolling, turning, raging. The Ultramarines Cruisers that drifted past burned as badly as the warship they were killing. This void battle was a form of dirty fighting between warships, too close for the neat calculations of ranged battery fire. Instead, it was an up close and personal slugfest.

The Ultramarines Battle Barge Armsman intercepted the Conqueror and came abeam, launching Assault Carriers and Boarding Torpedoes. While the World Eaters flagship was busy repelling boarders, a number of smaller XIIIth Legion vessels slipped past her defences and launched Drop Pods, gunships and troop carriers. The first Drop Pods hammered home on the planet's surface. Sealed doors unlocked and the first Ultramarines poured forth, Bolters raised, moving in perfect and well-trained unity. But the World Eaters were waiting for them. Those not lost to the Butcher's Nails at once had the presence of mind to note that these Ultramarines were not the pristine cobalt-blue warriors they had previously faced on the War World of Armatura. These Legionaries of the XIIIth wore cracked Power Armour, still scarred and burnwashed from some horrendous battle weeks or months before. These were hardened veterans of the Calth Atrocity. They burned with a cold intensity to carry out the vengeance in their hearts, and were intent on getting to grips with the Word Bearers.

As the fighting raged, the burning shell of the Fidelitas Lex cut through the clouds into the planet's atmosphere, shuddering on its way east, rolling ever downwards, achingly slow for something of such scale. The weight of the Lex's massive plasma engines dragged the stern down first, colliding with the Nucerian ocean's surface far from shore. In the meantime, the demigod in gold and blue had finally found the object of his obsession amidst the clamour of war. Guilliman confronted Lorgar, possessing the advantage of two weapons, but Lorgar's Crozius gave him a reach his brother lacked. When they first met, there was no furious trading of frantic blows, nor were there any melodramatic speeches of vengeance avowed. The two Primarchs came together once, Power Fists against War Maul, and backed away from the resulting flare of repelling energy fields. Their warriors killed each other around them both, and neither Primarch spared their sons a glance. Lorgar flicked the clinging lightning from the head of his Crozius, shaking his head in slow denial.



At the height of the final battle against the last city on Nuceria, Lorgar was confronted by his wrathful brother Roboute Guilliman, who had been chasing him and the XIIth Legion since the destruction of Calth. Both Primarchs fought without heeding their warriors, their godlike movements an inconceivable blur to the Space Marines fighting around them. None had ever imagined the heroes of this new age would take the field against each other, nor could they have predicted the wellsprings of spite between them. Guilliman confronted Lorgar for what his Legion had done across the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar. In his righteous anger the Ultramarines Primarch struck Lorgar with one of his fists, battering the Word Bearers Primarch's sternum. Lorgar repulsed him with a projected burst of telekinesis, weak and wavering, but enough to send his brother staggering. The Crozius followed, its power field trailing lightning as Lorgar hammered it into the side of Guilliman's head with the force of a cannonball. Both Primarchs faced each other beneath the grey sky, one bleeding internally, the other with half of his face lost to blood sheeting from a fractured skull. As the two Primarchs were locked in their furious life-and-death struggle, they were oblivious to the destruction being wrought around them.

Suddenly, Angron burst forth from the Ultramarines ranks, his armour a shattered wreck, and both of his Chainswords spat gobbets of ceramite armour plating and scarlet gore. Angron was plastered with the blood of the slain after hours in the crush of the front lines of intense combat. On his chest hung a bandolier of skulls taken from the mass grave at Desh'elika Ridge. Blood painted them as surely as it marked Angron. Even through the constant pain generated by the Butcher's Nails, that pleased him. He wanted his deceased brothers and sisters to taste blood once more. He had carried them with him across Nuceria, letting their empty eyes witness the razing of his former, hated homeworld. The World Eater launched himself at Guilliman with murderous hatred. The two Primarchs fell into a seamless, roaring duel where Lorgar and Guilliman had abandoned theirs. Guilliman found himself forced back by the storm of Angron's blows.



As the two Primarchs fought, Guilliman landed a glancing blow, his fist pounding across Angron's breastplate. One of the skulls of Angron's fallen kinsman, his fellow former gladiators, that hung from the chain worn across his breastplate was partially shattered and scattered across the ground. Guilliman stepped back, his boot crushing a skull's remnants to powder. Angron saw the desecration, and threw himself at his brother, his howl of wrath defying mortal origins, impossibly ripe in its anguish.

Lorgar saw it, too. The moment Guilliman's boot broke the skull, he felt the Warp boil behind the veil. The Bearer of the Word started chanting in a language never before spoken by any living being, his words in faultless harmony with Angron's cry of torment. Lorgar enacted his dark plan to save his brother's life, summoning the Ruinstorm to the world of Nuceria, tearing the sky open and unleashing a crimson torrent, formed from the ghosts of a hundred murdered worlds, raining blood. Lorgar focused his concentration on the triumphant form of his mutilated brother, calling for the Neverborn, the entities men called daemons, to answer in kind. He locked Angron’s muscles, setting fire to the synapses in his brain. The first spasms wracked their way through Angron’s sinews, turning his blood to quicksilver, then to lava and at last to holy fire. His cries of thwarted rage were tainted by an agony beyond comprehension. His body started tearing itself apart, growing, rising. Perfecting, after a lifetime of broken torture. This was the moment of Angron's apotheosis into daemonhood.



The World Eaters Librarians, those few who had never received the deadly Butcher's Nails implants which were inimicable to psykers, sensed the fey powers summoned by Lorgar from the Warp. In an attempt to halt the Urizen's dark plans, the 19 remaining Librarians harnessed their collective psychic powers to manifest a psychic entity known as the Communion, the gestalt consciousness of 19 psychic minds. In the midst of Lorgar's incantations, the Communion pulled the soul of the Primarch from his body. The two psychic entities confronted one another within the Warp, locked in a deadly contest of wills, each convinced that they were the one responsible for saving Angron. But ultimately, the Communion failed, for Lorgar was just as powerful in the Warp as he was in the material universe. After Angron's completed metamorphosis into a new Daemon Prince, the Daemon Primarch turned his attention to the Librarians. The creatures that had pained him for decades. The warriors that had made the Butcher's Nails sing and his brain bleed just for the sin of standing near them. Now they moved against his brother, hurling their foulness at Lorgar, who crouched one-handed and wounded, down on his knees.

The Daemon Primarch's rage killed the remaining Librarians, each of them tasting a different doom. Angron killed the last of the Librarian, expunging his Legion of the weakness that had plagued his gene-sons since his reunification with them a century earlier. The Librarius of the World Eaters, the last fragment of the War Hounds within the XII Legion, was no more, a fact which greatly pleased the Blood God Khorne, who would not brook the existence of any psykers amongst his chosen servants. Lorgar had offered up the XIIth Legion to the whims of the Blood God as his loyal servants. Now there would only be blood, an ocean of blood carried on a tide of eternal slaughter.

The gravely wounded Guilliman escaped from Nuceria, unable to face or even fully comprehend what both of his brothers had become through their corruption by the Ruinous Powers. The World Eaters completed their purge of Nuceria until not one human life remained on the benighted world. Angron, now the very embodiment of the Blood God's Eight-Fold Path, shook the dust of the world from his feet and did not think of it again. Lorgar believed that he had "saved" his brother. In his mind it was the only way, for he alone had sought to save Angron from the implants that were killing him by degrees. Only Lorgar had found a way to free Angron from an existence of unrivalled agony, and he alone had acted to save his tormented brother. Now the Shadow Crusade could move on from Ultramar and rejoin Horus. The next target for the Traitors would be Terra itself.

Post-Heresy
"A million worlds, a billion battlefields, a trillion foes..."

- Angron, Daemon-Primarch of the World Eaters

Angron's sighting in the Materium have been mercifully rare in the millennia after the Horus Heresy, since it appears that the Daemon Primarch is busy either prosecuting his patron's wars with the other Forces of Chaos or ruling his personal Daemon World within the Eye of Terror. There are, however, two well-documented occasions after the end of the Horus Heresy where Angron himself led the Blood God's forces against the Imperium.

Dominion of Fire
In the mid-38th Millennium, Angron and 50,000 Chaos Space Marines and troops drawn from the other Forces of Chaos slaughtered their way through a large swathe of Imperial space for over two standard centuries. They took control of over 70 Sectors. In response, a combined force of four Space Marine Chapters, 2 Titan Legions and more than 30 Imperial Guard regiments participated as part of a massive Imperial Crusade to retake what the Imperium had lost to the Red Angel's assault. Ninety percent of the territory that had been lost to Angron's forces was eventually recovered by the Imperium's defenders. This protracted campaign is known in Imperial archives as the Dominion of Fire.

First War for Armageddon
The conflict later known as the First War for Armageddon began within the great Warp rift known as the Eye of Terror. The forces within, being devoted to the service of Chaos and the Ruinous Powers, usually fought against each other as was their fractious nature, but occasionally and inexplicably they put aside their rivalries to launch an assault on their common enemy, the Imperium of Man. In this case, the unity of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos was triggered by the arrival of the Space Hulk Devourer of Stars around a Daemon World within the Eye of Terror that was controlled by the Daemon Prince Angron and his World Eaters Traitor Legion. Angron had spent much of the 10 millennia following the Horus Heresy attempting to restore some level of unity amongst the divided warbands of what had once been his XIIth Legion of Space Marines. The World Eaters' dedication to the Blood God Khorne during the Horus Heresy had reduced them for much of that time into a fractious force of Khornate Berserkers just as likely to kill each other as their true foes. The emergence of the Devourer of Stars into orbit around Angron's Daemon World provided just the opportunity he had been looking for to recreate some semblance of common purpose for his scattered Legion. The Space Hulk proved sufficiently large enough to carry large numbers of Chaotic troops but only on an erratic course into realspace. This is how the Forces of Chaos unexpectedly emerged from the Warp aboard the Space Hulk in the Armageddon System in 444.M41. The arrival of Angron at Armageddon probably had nothing to do with Angron's own desires, rather the location was determined by the chaotic currents of the Warp which sent his Space Hulk to Armageddon, possibly at the whim of one of the Gods of Chaos, probably Khorne, if there was any intent behind the Devourer of Stars '  course at all.

Meanwhile, on Armageddon, a series of strange events culminated in an armed rebellion breaking out in half a dozen of the world's large hive cities against the Imperium's authority at the same time that massive Warp Storms cut off the world from Imperial communications and commerce. The revolts, largely initiated by Chaos Cultists taking advantage of food shortages caused by the Warp Storms to stir up trouble, were quickly put down in the eastern region of the world's southern continent of Armageddon Secundus, but amongst the more widely scattered hives of the western region of the northern continent of Armageddon Prime the rebels proved more difficult to eradicate. As Armageddon's Planetary Defence Forces (PDF) and the few regiments of the Imperial Guard's Armageddon Steel Legion present on the world seemed capable of dealing with the revolt, no additional units were sent by the Imperium to handle the problem once the Warp Storms cleared. Armageddon was a very long way from the Eye of Terror in the galaxy's Segmentum Obscurus, and no one in the Imperium suspected any more sinister cause for the revolts than simple civil unrest.

Busy containing the rebellion, the Imperial forces were caught by surprise when the Space Hulk Devourer of Stars suddenly emerged from the Warp in the Armageddon System. On board the Devourer of Stars was an enormous Chaos army led by the Daemon Primarch Angron, including millions of Chaos Cultists known as the Children of Sanguinary Unholiness and the Twelve -- the Cruor Praetoria, the twelve strongest daemons of Khorne whose lives and deeds most pleased their wretched Blood God. Chaos Space Marines from the World Eaters Legion and hordes of other daemonic creatures dedicated to the Blood God also poured from the Space Hulk onto the surface of Armageddon and swept across the land.

The insidious effects of Chaos were quickly felt as nearly half the Planetary Defence Force of Armageddon unexpectedly went over to the invaders, declaring their loyalty to the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. The few remaining Loyalist defenders were quickly routed from the continent of Armageddon Prime. Falling back through the equatorial jungles in the south, the survivors joined up with the Imperial PDF units that had been left on the continent of Armageddon Secundus and prepared to make a last ditch defence along the banks of the Rivers Styx and Chaeron.

But the expected attack did not manifest itself. The Warp Storm that had carried the Devourer of Stars to Armageddon had started dying out, cutting off the vital supply of Warp energy that allowed Angron and the other daemons to remain in the Materium. Angron then reluctantly stopped his advance on Armageddon Secundus and ordered his forces to build monuments to the Blood God in the equatorial jungles separating both continents. The Chaotic army then spent the following weeks erecting colossal piles out of the skulls of the fallen defenders, anointing them with the blood of sacrificed prisoners and slaves, as well as their own.

The Imperial defenders gained valuable time while Angron raised bloody monuments to the Blood God from the wreckage of the dead instead of pressing his advantage. Many wondered why the monstrous Primarch halted with victory in his grasp, but in truth, Angron had no choice: without the supply of raw Warp energy generated by the construction of the monuments, the daemonic components of his army would soon start to dissolve back into the Warp, unable to maintain their presence in the Materium. When his "supply lines" were finally secured, and his army emerged from the equatorial jungles that separated Armageddon Prime from Armageddon Secundus, Angron found the Imperial defenders ready and waiting -- and reinforced by the Space Wolves. Unknown to the Forces of Chaos, the Great Company of Space Wolves Astartes led by the Chapter's Great Wolf (Chapter Master) Logan Grimnar had been assigned to the defence of this sector of the Imperium, and they moved quickly to provide aid to the beleaguered defenders as soon as they received the astropathic distress messages from Armageddon describing the Chaotic invasion of the Hive World.

Huge battles erupted along the entire front. In the east, along the Chaeron River, the Imperial forces held, but towards the west on the Styx River Angron led the way himself. He smashed through the Imperial lines and led his forces towards Hive Infernus and Hive Helsreach. But there Logan Grimnar unleashed his secret weapon. He had called for the assistance of the Grey Knights, the psychic Space Marine Chapter that served the Ordo Malleus of the Inquisition as its Chamber Militant, as soon as he had heard of the daemonic nature of the attacking forces. Only the Grey Knights had the ability to truly defeat a daemonic entity of such malevolent power as Angron. As the very existence of Chaos was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Imperium of Man, few amongst even the Space Marines knew of the existence of the Grey Knights, the most elite Chapter of Astartes ever formed who were tasked specifically with combat against daemons. But Grimnar had seen them in action on more than one occasion and as the lord of an Astartes Chapter he had never been forced to submit to the Inquisitorial mind-wipe that was required of nearly all witnesses to the Grey Knights in action.

Amongst the Grey Knights units deployed for action on Armageddon was Squad Castian, which joined an ad hoc "Ragged Brotherhood" of Grey Knights under the command of Taremar Aurellian, the Brother-Captain of the 3rd Brotherhood. When the call came, the Grey Knights teleported directly into the midst of the advancing Chaos horde, surrounding the gigantic Daemon Primarch. Taking heavy losses from Angron's battle prowess, the Grey Knights inflicted their own punishment, and eventually Squad Castian engaged in melee with the Daemon Primarch. After Angron mangled the squad, the only Grey Knight left standing was the Pyrokine (master of psychic flame) Hyperion. Trying to protect a still-surviving squad mate, in a tremendous display of faith, power, and effort, Hyperion used his psyker abilities to shatter the Primarch's daemonic sword, the hideous Khornate relic known as the Black Blade -- while he collapsed into unconsciousness from the sheer effort. Captain Aurellian then confronted the bladeless Daemon Prince of Khorne and managed to banish him back to the Warp, though at the cost of his own life.

Hyperion was one of only 13 Grey Knights to survive the battle, out of the 109 Astartes of the 3rd Brotherhood who had been deployed for the campaign. Found alive but in terrible shape by the Space Wolves on the hellish field after the battle, Hyperion soon acquired the honorific "Bladebreaker" for his feat. He had to be put in temporary stasis in order to survive, and underwent surgery that replaced half his face and skull with augmetics. He eventually reported back to duty more than 4 months later.

The Grey Knights had defeated the Daemon Prince, hurling his spirit back into the Warp from where he could not return for over one hundred Terran years. At the same time as the Grey Knights were teleporting directly into the centre of the daemonic force to launch their attack on the Daemon Primarch, the Space Wolves launched their own massive counter-offensive all along the Imperial lines. The Forces of Chaos were routed after they watched their leader defeated and only the World Eaters managed to retreat back to the Space Hulk and escape into the safety of the Warp. The Imperial victory was complete and overwhelming -- though it had come at a great and terrible cost.

Wargear

 * Armour of Mars - Angron wears Artificer Armour that was crafted by the Artificers of the XIIth Legion from the gladiatorial armour in which he fought as a Nucerian slave.
 * Black Blade of Angron - Primarch Angron's personal Daemon Sword, this gigantic black blade could cleave anything in two. This weapon was destroyed by the powerful psychic defence of the Grey Knights Space Marine Chapter during the First War for Armageddon.
 * Widowmaker - Widowmaker was the precursor to all of the other Chainaxes that Angron would use throughout his life. This formidable weapon was destroyed when he was confronted and fought his brother Primarch Leman Russ on the world of Ghenna, who had challenged him on behalf of the Emperor for allowing his World Eaters to be implanted with the Butcher's Nails and the continuing atrocities of his Legion.
 * Brazentooth - Brazentooth was the massive two-handed Chainaxe that the Primarch Angron used before taking up Gorefather and Gorechild. Brazentooth was so large only a Primarch could wield it with any result. It was forged of obsidian and brass, its haft wrapped in the skin of some monstrous lizard.  Angron had wielded it to take the head of the queen of the Scandrane xenos, as well as to cleave through a horde of Greenskins serving the Warboss known as the Arch-Vandal of Pasiphae. A Feral World teeming with tribal psychopaths had rebelled against the Imperial Truth, and at the mere sight of Brazentooth in Angron’s hand they had given up their revolt and kneeled to the World Eaters. Brazentooth had been as much a symbol of Angron’s relentlessness and independence as it was a mere weapon. Brazentooth was later presented by Angron to Lorgar of the Word Bearers to cement the alliance between their two Legions at the time of the Horus Heresy. Brazentooth was apparently destroyed or lost in the vacuum of space after the destruction of the Word Bearers' Battleship Furious Abyss in the early days of the Heresy before the Battle of Calth.
 * Gorefather and Gorechild - During the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy these archaic Chainaxes were amongst the most potent weapons known amongst the relics of the Primarchs, made all the more deadly by Angron's consummate skill as a fighter. During the Heresy Angron discarded both Chainaxes after they became irrevocably damaged upon the world of Armatura. Angron's Equerry Khârn retrieved the discarded Gorechild, had it repaired, and has used it ever since.
 * The Spite Furnace - Angron also carried a master-crafted Plasma Pistol known as the Spite Furnace.
 * The Butcher's Nails - The Butcher's Nails were bio-neural cybernetic implants which were surgically grafted directly into Angron's cerebral cortex. An archeotech relic device from the Dark Age of Technology, these implants could massively boost a warrior's ferocity, courage and production of adrenaline, resulting in greater strength and aggression in battle, transforming him into a nigh unstoppable berserker -- at the cost of the slow deterioration of all of his mental faculties and capacity for reasoned thought.