Pre-Heresy badge of the Emperor's Children Legion
The Cleansing of Laeran was the name given to the Imperial campaign of the Great Crusade in which the Emperor's Children Legion's 28th Expeditionary Fleet under the command of Primarch Fulgrim exterminated the serpentine xenos species known as the Laer.
When the III Legion assaulted the Laer's homeworld of Laeran, they discovered unwittingly that the reptiloids were worshippers of Slaanesh, the Chaos God of pleasure and pain.
Many of the Emperor's Children Astartes who served on Laeran were touched by the corruption of Chaos, and its was there that Fulgrim claimed the Daemon-possessed Blade of the Laer. The weapon, found at the heart of the Laer's great temple to the Prince of Chaos, was a Daemonblade inhabited by a Greater Daemon of Slaanesh that would soon lay claim to the soul of the Emperor's Children primarch.
History[]
During the later days of the Great Crusade, scouts from the Emperor's Children's 28th Expeditionary Fleet encountered a hitherto-unknown reptilian xenos species, the Laer. Analysis of captured scouts and envoys showed the Laer to be concentrated in a single star system of the Ultima Segmentum, dubbed, like its primary inhabited world, Laeran.
Laeran itself was a remarkable Ocean World in which the serpentine Laer had used anti-gravity technology to float massive coral platforms above their planet's global ocean. It was on these platforms that they had chosen to live after global warming had sunk all of Laer's continental masses beneath encroaching waves.
Like the Emperor's Children themselves, the Laer prized perfection in all aspects of civilisation; through the use of chemical and genetic manipulation from birth, individual Laer were adapted to their societal roles, whether they be workers, soldiers, or even artists. Observers from the Imperial administration accompanying the III Legion's expeditionary fleet wondered if perhaps the Laer might be made a protectorate of the Imperium as conquering such an efficient species could prove to be a long and costly endeavour.
Fulgrim was disgusted by any notion of co-operation or alliance with a xenos species. Only Humanity was perfect, he insisted. For an alien species to hold its own ideals to be comparable to those of Mankind was unthinkable, and deserved only annihilation. He ordered his Lord Commanders to attack immediately, and initiated a war that the Council of Terra had predicted would last for several solar decades.
Fulgrim heard this prediction, and shook his head. In one solar month's time, he promised, the Imperium would rule Laeran. The Emperor's Children, in concert with Lord Commander Fayle's Archite Palatine regiments of the Imperial Army, attacked the Laer in space, on the surface of their homeworld, beneath their oceans and over the hulls of their orbital platforms.
Everywhere the Astartes faced enemies adapted to their conditions by genetic and chemical enhancement -- warships connected directly to their serpentine crews' minds using cybernetic technology, amphibious warriors who could breathe underwater through gills, scouts capable of moving as fast as a Land Speeder, gunners possessed of eyesight so acute that it allowed them to target individual Space Marines who were kilometres distant. The casualties on both sides were horrendous -- it is estimated that, if not for the excellence of the III Legion's Apothecaries, more than half of its warriors would have died from their wounds.
The Laer never surrendered -- their last warriors died fighting in the ruins of their capital city to protect their central temple dedicated to the worship of the Chaos God Slaanesh. One solar month after he had begun the attack, Fulgrim planted a standard displaying the Imperial Palatine Aquila over the last of the Laer's corpses, leaving it the only thing standing unblemished on Laeran.
Over seven hundred of his warriors were dead, six times that number injured, but Fulgrim believed that he had kept his promise to the Council of Terra. Against the most finely-honed alien warriors ever encountered, Humanity had proven itself more powerful.
Of course, the conquest of the Laer represented the beginning of Fulgrim and the entire III Legion's damnation and their turn away from the service of the Emperor, as many members of the Legion, including Fulgrim and several of the civilian Remembrancers who entered the Laer's temple, were unwittingly exposed to Slaanesh's foul touch. Only the strongest-willed among them would prove able to resist the temptations of the Prince of Chaos.
Yet the Laeran System, for ten thousand standard years now, has been home to three Imperial cities and a dozen mining colonies, and all traces of its former xenos rulers and their Chaos corruption are long gone.
Sources[]
- Fulgrim (Novel) by Graham McNeill, Chs. 1-2
- Index Astartes I, "Children of the Emperor - The Emperor's Children Space Marine Legion"
- White Dwarf 255 (UK), "Index Astartes First Founding: Children of the Emperor"