The Burning of Prospero

The Burning of Prospero was one of the great tragedies of the Horus Heresy: a punitive war unleashed against a Legion whose only true crime was to have been deceived. When the sorcerer-primarch Magnus the Red breached the psychic wards of the Imperial Palace to warn the Emperor of Horus's coming treachery, his desperate message shattered a sacred labour and was twisted by his enemies into proof of his own damnation.

Leman Russ and his Space Wolves were unleashed upon Prospero, reinforced by the gold-clad Legio Custodes and the anti-psyker Sisters of Silence. What the Emperor had intended as an arrest to bring Magnus to account became instead a war of annihilation, for Horus had ensured through intermediaries that the order was changed from capture to destruction. The crystal city of Tizca, greatest library and seat of learning in the age, was drowned in fire and falling glass.

The Thousand Sons turned terrible sorcery upon the invaders, and for all their outrage the Space Wolves paid in blood for every street they took. Ahriman and the sorcerers of the cult bent their formidable powers against the invaders, yet raw fury and sheer weight of numbers slowly told against them. At the height of the ruin Russ and Magnus met in single combat amid the burning towers, and the primarch of the Wolves broke his brother's back. Rather than watch his sons perish to the last, Magnus struck a final and fateful bargain with the powers of the warp, spiriting the survivors and their shattered city away to sanctuary within the Eye of Terror.

Prospero was left a silent graveyard of shattered crystal, its accumulated wisdom lost to mankind forever, and the Thousand Sons were driven irrevocably into the arms of Chaos. The full account is told in the chronicle of the Burning of Prospero.