Horus Heresy Book 8 Pdf

[Vernie Montagna]

It was treachery at first. To turn against brothers, to kill for personal advancement and power. But we have seen them, how their minds and bodies have been corrupted. Their very belief systems have been warped. This is no longer Horus's treachery. It is his heresy."

"Of all the conflicts that have beset this Imperium of Mankind, it is the rebellion of the Warmaster Horus, the Horus Heresy, which has left the greatest scars upon its fabric. Even now, centuries after its end, when few save ancient and shrivelled creatures such as myself remember the horror of those dark years, men speak of it with awe. For those were the last days of legend, when the Emperor and His sons, the mighty Primarchs, strode forth to war, when the dominion of Mankind spread across the galaxy and none could challenge our might, the last days of a golden age long since consigned to dust by the actions of one man. It is the curse of history that few care to remember other than those fragments that exalt them, to relive those glory days endlessly while the present crumbles about them."

The Horus Heresy, sometimes referred to poetically as the "Age of Darkness" and originally known in its immediate aftermath as the Great Heresy War, was a galaxy-spanning civil war that consumed the worlds of Mankind for 9 Terran years. Its outbreak marked the end of the Emperor of Mankind's Great Crusade to reunite the scattered colony worlds of Humanity in the Milky Way Galaxy under a single government and the beginning of the current Age of the Imperium. The Horus Heresy is in many ways the founding event of the Imperium of Man as it now exists.

The civil war began following the corruption by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos of the Imperial Warmaster Horus Lupercal, the primarch of the Sons of Horus Legion and the most beloved genetic son of the Emperor. The Chaos Gods fed Horus' innate ambition and sense of betrayal by the Emperor until he turned upon his father and sought to claim the Imperium for his own.

Horus convinced half of the other primarchs and Space Marine Legions, as well as large swathes of the Imperial Army and the forces of the ancient Mechanicum, to turn Traitor alongside him and unleash a cataclysmic attempt to conquer the galaxy in his name.

Over 9 Terran years the war raged, 7 of them consumed by Horus' drive on the Throneworld, until coming to a final cataclysm on Terra itself where Horus was slain and the Emperor mortally wounded, His dreams of creating a brighter future for Mankind forever broken.

The conflict was fought across the Milky Way Galaxy early in the first century of the 31st Millennium and resulted in more than 2.3 trillion dead, 4.6 trillion if one includes the planetary populations purged by the Imperium after the Heresy due to the taint of Chaos corruption.

The Heresy concluded with the death of the traitorous Warmaster Horus, the internment of the Emperor in the Golden Throne and the exile into the Eye of Terror of the Heretic Astartes Traitor Legions.

The Heresy was directly responsible for the birth of the present-day structure of the Space Marine Chapters following the Second Founding and the reorganisation of the Imperium by the Ultramarines' Primarch Roboute Guilliman as lord commander of the Imperium and Imperial Regent during the Time of Rebirth in the 31st Millennium.

The Horus Heresy occurred over ten thousand Terran years ago, a nearly unimaginable span of time; as a result, it has become nothing more than a collection of often distorted or misunderstood legends and mythology to the average Imperial citizen.

When the effects of the deification of the Emperor, the theological needs of the Adeptus Ministorum and the outright deletions and fabrications of Imperial history carried out by the Inquisition are added into the equation, the truth of the events surrounding the Horus Heresy could prove very shocking indeed to the people of the Imperium.

Over twenty-eight thousand standard years before the start of the Horus Heresy, during the Age of Terra, Mankind first left the polluted, used-up carcass of Old Earth for the unknown bounties and perils beyond the skies of our birth world. In those forgotten early years, it is unknown what enemies and trials Humanity overcame in our uncaring universe to not only survive, but thrive and forge a domain amongst the stars. Colonies spread across our galaxy so that Humanity was scattered across a million worlds and found treasures and horrors uncounted. Mankind's technological mastery ascended to an almost unimaginable zenith, and at its heart lay a resurgent Earth.

The promised wonders of our species' earliest ambitions were made manifest, and our application and control of the sciences was unparalleled. Humanity reached its pinnacle, raised up by the miracles of technology which it wrought, re-shaping uncounted new colony worlds in the vision of distant Old Earth. The legends which remain of that lost realm of ancient Human empires speak of a galaxy of plenty, filled with opportunity, culture, technological progress and wonder.

In the heights of those times, lost to all but supposition and myth, Humanity made itself as unto gods; able to harness the power of the stars, and fashion servants from clay and iron and give them counterfeit-life to do their bidding. Unfortunately, this era of advancement was not to last, for Mankind fell prey to its own sciences.

Mankind's Golden Age failed; wherein the promised wisdom of science and technology did not elevate Mankind to the divine, but rather smote it for the consequences of its reckless excesses and ambitions untempered by reason. Martian-Terran wars of terrible destruction ensued, and the beautiful, animate, thinking tools which Mankind had created and so coveted were corrupted and turned upon all Humanity in what was called the Cybernetic Revolt.

Horrors were perpetrated to possess meagre resources all but depleted from the earlier age of prosperity, and greed and hubris saw fearsome, ancient weapons unleashed that risked our species' very annihilation. Such were the terrors of this time that death could cross vast distances of space, coming unexpected and uninvited to consume entire worlds. This was what is now remembered as the Dark Age of Technology, and for many Terran millennia it reigned.

Mankind's first interstellar empire would fall into bloody ruin, isolation and ignorance. The terrible period of history that followed is officially named the Age of Strife by Imperial historitoes, although it has another name, whispered only fearfully: "Old Night." During the darkness of Old Night, Humanity experienced naught but nightmare and predation for over five thousand standard years. During this time, the worlds of Mankind were isolated by searing Warp Storms that made interstellar travel and communication virtually impossible, and Old Earth was totally cut off from its colonies and allies.

Across the galaxy Human worlds, bereft of central authority or protection, and with the web of support and supply that had maintained the threads of civilisation cut, fell into anarchy and war. Human civilisation was torn apart as local factions and new empires fought for control in the shattered realm while others, utterly cut off from aid, succumbed to the horrors of planet-wide famine, insanityand worse -- the perils of the Warp.

The existence of Warp entities and the dangers they posed to the Human mind were then barely understood. On worlds with large concentrations of emergent Human psykers, the entities from beyond were able to breach the barrier between the Immaterium and corporeal reality, and it cannot be known or guessed how many worlds were ravaged or swallowed whole by their incursions. As Human civilisation fragmented, hundreds of xenos species and enemies unknown seized their chance for revenge on Humanity for its past conquests, or to plunder unprotected worlds and enslave their populations. Hundreds more Human-inhabited star systems were sacked and ravaged, their peoples slaughtered, mutilated or abducted. Those that survived the alien onslaught rapidly reverted to barbarism, stripped of civilisation, knowledge and culture in the raw battle to endure.

Humanity stood on the brink of total extinction and endless night gathered round its children. Alone and beset by internal strife, famine and plague, under incessant attack by aliens and facing the horrors of Warp incursions, the Human worlds that survived were pitiable shadows of what they once had been. It was to become an age when Mankind's dead far outnumbered its living.

Shorn of its galactic empire, Ancient Terra could not sustain itself. Protracted internecine wars emptied Old Earth's terrible arsenals of radiological weaponry, killing untold billions, destroying its ancient power structures and boiling off the last of its oceans. In their aftermath, the planet became a lawless battleground, little more than a blasted desert dotted with ruins, its people reduced to the level of brute savages fighting over the scarce water and untainted land which remained. Old Earth expired entirely, all of its ancient knowledge lost and its cities torn down, and where it once stood, instead reigned a world of savagery and horror, the equal of any brought to ruin in the Age of Strife.

Long before left parlous and polluted, generations of constant warfare made Terra a wasteland punctuated by fortified holdfasts built amid the wreckage of lost civilisations, and its inhabitants a mass of degenerate, feral nomads. Insane prophets, cybernetically-augmented butcher-kings, vivisector-warlords and religious demagogues led the warring techno-barbarian tribes of Old Earth, and the world was wracked by incessant conflict as one tyrant displaced another.

Petty empires rose and disintegrated; techno-barbarian tribes formed, were destroyed and re-formed as diminishing, brutalised shadows of lost glories and forgotten triumphs. Uncounted billions died unknown and unremembered, while whispered names such as the "Unspeakable King" and the "Seven Neverborn" left legends to terrify generations to come. Anarchy and bloodshed was lord over all.

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