The Thramas Crusade

The Thramas Crusade was a long shadow-war fought at a strategic crossroads of the galaxy, where the loyalist Dark Angels hunted the traitor Night Lords through the contested Thramas Sector. Whoever controlled Thramas controlled a vital road toward Terra, and so Horus charged Konrad Curze with delaying the advance of the largest and best-equipped Legion of all.

It became a war of ambush and reprisal rather than open, honourable battle. Curze, the dreaded Night Haunter, waged a campaign of terror, dispersal and atrocity, striking from the void and vanishing into the dark before the First Legion could bring its overwhelming strength fully to bear. Lion El'Jonson answered patience with patience, methodically grinding the Night Lords down through relentless pursuit and the systematic destruction of their supply lines and safe harbours.

Over long and grinding months the tide turned against the traitors. The Dark Angels' superior numbers, discipline and matériel told at every turn, and the Night Lords were slowly bled white, their fleet battered into ruin and their warriors worn down to exhaustion and paranoia. Curze grew ever more erratic as the relentless pursuit tightened, tormented by dark visions of his own violent and seemingly inevitable end. At the campaign's climax the two primarchs met aboard the Night Haunter's flagship in a savage and personal duel that left both grievously wounded and neither able to claim a true victory.

Curze was at last driven from Thramas, his Legion crippled and scattered, while the Lion had secured the sector but been drawn away from the wider war for critical years his father could ill afford to lose. The crusade stands among the many terrible sub-wars of the age chronicled in the account of the Age of Darkness.