The War of the Beast

The War of the Beast was the greenskin cataclysm that struck the Imperium barely a century after the Horus Heresy, when its wounds were still raw and its defences still desperately thin. From the world of Ullanor, once the site of the Emperor's single greatest triumph, there rose an Ork warlord remembered in horror only as the Beast: a creature of such colossal size and cunning that even his own savage kind had never before known its like.

The Beast's WAAAGH! was unlike any ork tide that had come before it. His armadas fell upon the Imperium from every direction at once, his warriors deploying weapons, machines and stratagems that made a mockery of established Imperial doctrine. Attack moons the size of small planets appeared in orbit above core worlds, and even the Space Marines found themselves outfought and hopelessly outnumbered on a scale that threatened total and final collapse.

Terra itself came under direct threat, and the Imperium was driven to ever more desperate measures (reckless gene-craft, doomed frontal assaults and bitter alliances of last resort) as it hurled the whole of its strength against the greenskin flood. The war devoured heroes, fleets and venerable institutions alike, and its sheer horror forced changes upon the very structure of the Imperium that would echo down the long millennia to come.

At terrible last the Beast was slain and his monstrous empire broken apart, but the victory tasted only of ash. The Imperium that crawled from the wreckage was more fearful, more rigid and more haunted than the one that had entered the war, its confidence forever shaken. The full history is told in the account of the War of the Beast.