House Harkon

**House Harkon** is a Knight House famed for their valour and staunch loyalty to the Imperium.

## History

Stern and honourable guardians, the Knights of House Harkon stood by their oaths to the Emperor and fought with honour against the Insurrectionists, where many other forces reneged or were undone. Having weathered trial after trial first in defence of their world and then in the Imperial service, House Harkon are to this day a byword for heroism and endurance.

### The Knights of Winter

House Harkon descends from one of several Knight Houses founded on the world of Norodmar in the Vraccarian Rift, in the waning centuries of the Dark Age of Technology. It was then a verdant world of towering mountains and brooding, mist-draped forests, home to mammoth, furred troll and sabre-cat. Here a civilisation grew up which was remarkably advanced and equitable for a Knight World, though much of the wilderness went untouched. United in their duty, the Houses patrolled the world and the space beyond as they and their people weathered the assaults of xenos and lingering machine-threats. According to the chronicles that remain, the various rulers of the Vraccarian Rift began to dream of reaching out beyond their borders.

  But then the Age of Darkness stretched out its shadow to ensnare the Rift, and the madness fell upon Norodmar in turn. In one House - its name forever erased - sorcery took root, and madness flowed like bile from a sore. A cataclysmic war ensued, with cities Houses destroyed and such devastation wrought that the Knights of Norodmar lost the ability to travel beyond their world. But the witches were ultimately broken, their holdfasts thrown down and the ruins left barren by the victors.

   The vigil over Norodmar was resumed, its guardians diminished but rebuilding their might. Fresh armours were built, the materials hewn from the crust of the planet. Over the decades new Houses arose from the remnants of those lost, or branched off from their predecessors. Its people began to look to the stars once again, thinking the storm had passed.

  Only then did they realise that the taint of their defeated foes lingered. As the resettling of the old territories began in earnest, the climate of Norodmar began to shift. Summers shortened, winters grew more severe, and the Knights were confronted with a new foe. For out in the polar mountains, the last sorcerers and their followers had taken refuge. Abandoning their broken armours, they pursued mastery of their powers into the perversion of living matter. Unlike their forebears, they gained a name that is accursed to this day on Norodmar: the Turjuksei, the corruptors.

  Flesh and bone they took, from man and woman, and the beasts of land and sea. This they then unravelled with the owners still screaming and spun it back together into new, loathsome shapes which matched their old Knight armours in size. They took stone and metal to clad and arm their monsters, and gave them the minds of feral beasts or the violently insane. So the Mjurdek were born.

  After that, Norodmar knew no true peace. Wars raged across its surface that far outstripped those which had come before. The Knights combated the Mjurdek in battle after battle, sometimes fighting in the frozen wastes, at times in the deep and misty forests that carpeted swathes of the landscape, and even beneath the walls of their towering holdfasts. Twice a great host was arraigned to crush the Turjuksei in their icy fortress, only to be turned back with hideous losses by the power of their enemies.

  In those dark and bloody centuries, entire Houses were swallowed up and broken apart in the fighting, and new armies rose from their ashes. House Harkon were one such, born from the remnants of House Skorsa in the midst of one of the most terrible campaigns of the age. By dint of valour and skill its Scions renewed their strength, and as the House grew it became a refuge for Freeblades whose own Houses had been lost.

  But there was no end to the fighting, and with each defeat the Turjuksei had taken captives and corpses to feed their war machine. Increasingly the Norodmar were hemmed in, the calculus of war shifting remorselessly against them. Houses were destroyed with nothing left to replace them. Winter bit deeper and held sway longer, and Turjuksei fortresses began to rise on the borders of the great forests, where the sorcerers now hunted for people and beasts to twist into fresh Mjurdek.

  But as the seemingly inevitable end loomed before House Harkon, a power in the wider Galaxy took an interest. The tale of these events is incomplete and even in the House’s own chronicles, are couched in dense layers of allegory. Indeed, this would continue throughout the following decades, with long stretches of history occluded and only half-remembered.

  What is known is that a Legiones Astartes fleet moved into the void above Norodmar, seeking the Knight World spoken of elsewhere in the Vraccarian Rift. What they found was a world much diminished and wracked by the tumult of a war which threatened to see the Knights of Harkon wiped out, and Norodmar fall completely under the sway of their foes. Even at that moment, the ancient fortress of Coldstone was under attack, the High King of House Harkon fighting desperately to hold back the abominations.

  So the Primarch reached his decision quickly and swept down to Norodmar. There was no attempt at contact with the Knights; instead they set upon the Mjurdek in a cyclone of fire. When the last of the Mjurdek fell, the Knights watched their deliverers emerge from the smoke. On that field they received the Imperial overture, and with the prospect of delivering their world from the Turjuksei. What followed is named the “Red Winter” in the annals of House Harkon, “when wolf and aurochs ranged forth and pulled down the towers of bone, putting witch to steel and fire.” At the end of this bloody season, nothing remained of the Turjuksei or their despicable creations.

### Guardians of the Imperium

  A process of renewal would follow for Norodmar and House Harkon, as trade links were reestablished with neighbouring systems and the wider Imperium. Within the Vraccarian Rift, the Forge World of Helmijak had been similarly restored. An alliance was established in short order between it and House Harkon, and their stock of sacred armours grew closer to what they had been before Old Night. In time, cadet branches of the House would establish holdings on other worlds, establishing Harkon is a powerful and far-reaching influence in the Rift.

  At the same time, however, new wars beckoned beyond Harkon’s homeworld as they gladly pledged their blades to the Imperium. While most of the House’s extant battle honours from this period attest to prestigious victories, many others languish under lock and seal. For the House’s part, the younger scions attest that they know nothing of these wars, and those few ancient veterans who remain will not be drawn on the subject.

  What is known is that the House’s resurgent power enabled them to operate with relative independence within the Great Crusade. So the records which remain find them lending their strength to several campaigns, fighting alongside the Iron Bears, Crimson Lions and several famed Army and Solar Auxilia units, notably the Crown Breakers cohort at Hetaskel. They also took a part in the Siege of Tricendia, facing down the macabre power of the Rangdan beside their allies.

  The House cemented a reputation as deliverers, ready to venture into the fray wherever Imperial worlds were threatened by the depredations of the alien or hostile human powers. So it was when the Nerska March came under attack by the Manglar Horde, an Ork Waaagh! of massive size and technological power. In 892. M30 these entered the region as a fleet surrounding the space hulk Stone Maw, beginning a year of carnage which reached every corner of the March.

  Quickly they struck at Imperial forces and worlds, and made it all too clear how they had earned their name. While other hordes had been noted to deploy massive tanks and walkers analogous to Knights and Titans, the Manglar Horde favoured machines which appeared to have begun life as mining vehicles. These hell-engines, linked by a few theorists to the little-known Wheel of Fire campaign, would simply grind across a battlefield, pulverising anything in their way with drills or hauling it into crushing maws.

  While the forces of the March set all their strength against the Orks, several outlying systems were overrun and the Backbone Worlds at the heart of the subsector came under assault, culminating in a system-siege against Kyvel itself. While it was ultimately the intervention of the Scions Hospitalier and Fire Keepers which broke the power of the Manglar Horde, House Harkon played a key role in stopping the Orks from securing their hold on the March and paved the way for the decisive blow.

  Joining the muster at Katorz, Thane Jorina and her warriors volunteered to spearhead the relief effort at Gyep. Here the Orks had begun to dig in, throwing up an encampment around the planetary capital which threatened to become a city in its own right. Worse still, over the weeks it took the Imperials to reach the system, Ork hell-engines broke the walls and greenskins poured into the outer districts of the city. With all Titan units destined for other battlefields, Harkon’s were the most powerful war machines that could be spared for Gyep.

  Jorina would countenance no delay. Instead she made planetfall immediately and formed her warriors into three spearheads. The largest of these led a charge with the massed armoured echelons of the Chelica Scorpions and Holothurn Chasseurs. A hurricane of fire from the Ork ranks met their advance, but the speartip comprised some thirty Knights and under the fury of their assault, the Ork line collapsed. The walkers spread out, reducing their enemies’ already ramshackle tanks to scrap and launching coordinated strikes against the towering siege engines. Behind them came squadrons of flamer-armed tanks which set whole clusters of greenskins ablaze, and super-heavy detachments which made for the enormous hell-engines which had been brought about to obliterate the new attackers.

  Amid all the seething clamour of the battlefield, House Harkon formed into engaged the hulking machines. Deftly navigating the chaotic battlefield, they closed with the hell-engines and launched dozens of pinpoint strikes against them. To fight at such close range was dangerous in the extreme, and indeed more than one Knight was lost in the mechanical jaws of their foes, but one by one the enemy machines were destroyed or immobilised, leaving them prey for the Baneblades, Malcadors and Shadowswords which rained fire down upon them. With this done, Thane Jorina and her warriors turned their weapons on the Orks themselves, and the vengeful Imperial soldiers followed them in storming the encampment.

  Over a day and a night, the scrapheap city was razed and the siege lifted. The Manglar Horde would make a fresh assault shortly afterwards, but it was beaten off by the Imperials. Thus the relief of Gyep aided the efforts of other forces to hold back the enemy and turn the tide decisively. House Harkon would take the field on another two worlds as the Orks were first fended off and then exterminated, earning still more honours for their valour on Ajnaz.

### The Looming Blizzard

  As conflict began to brew within the Mechanicum, House Harkon fell in line with their allies on Helmijak, as well as their allies further afield in Tricendia. In any case, their over-arching loyalty was to the Emperor. Thus they remained apart from forces which would go over to the Stormlord’s cause, to the extent that Insurrectionist plans began to count the Vraccarian Rift as barely distinct from Tricendia. Ironically, however, the first warning of outright conflict came with a Ist Legion ship - a small group of Lightning Bearers who had refused the turn and fled from their erstwhile brothers.

  A pursuing force of Harbingers followed the escapees to Norodmar, where they barged into orbit and demanded that the “seditionists” be handed over. High King Gunnar Harkonson, despite his own bewilderment, was unwilling to give up those who sought sanctuary within his worlds. So the Knights met their landing party with uncompromising force and the Harbingers were driven offworld in a hail of gunfire. A day later, Icarion’s proclamation would reach the Vraccarian Rift.

  With the Lightning Bearers’ claims substantiated once and for all, High King Harkonson set his warriors on a war footing, and the other Vraccarian armies followed suit. With drawn swords, the Knights of Winter awaited the coming foe, and a war that would eclipse even the trials of their own past.

## Material Strength

  Norodmar’s burgeoning industry, coupled with House Harkon’s favour in the eyes of numerous Primarchs and generals, meant that its long experience was matched with considerable material strength. At the Insurrection’s beginning they were classed as a House of the Primus rank, having lately replaced losses sustained in the Qarith Crusade, with considerable support and logistical assets at their disposal. These are well-documented, both in Imperial assays and campaign records belonging to the House and forces which fought beside it.

  Similarly to some other Knightly domains, the House maintained a cadre of “bannermen” whose role and skill was similar to that of a Legion Astartes’ serf-forces. Their strength extended to a respectable reserve of tanks and other vehicles, although the power of these did not rival the regiments of the Imperial Army. Similarly, the industry of Helmjiak and other worlds saw to it that the House gained its own small but potent fleet to ferry its armours, which helped preserve its autonomy within the Crusade.

  With regard to the Knights themselves, House Harkon entered the 31st Millenium at a strength of 580 walkers. The balance of these were Questoris patterns, but across all the types of Knight that Harkon possessed there was a notable bias towards close-combat. The Paladin outnumbered any other models fielded by the House, while Errant and Warden walkers were also deployed in large numbers. Older and more senior scions also displayed a preference for Dominus and Cerastus armours according to taste. Notably, alliance with Tricendia brought the House limited numbers of the mighty Justiciar pattern, whose fearsome aspect and immense power made it a favoured choice. King Harkonson took one for his own mount, Dainsleif, upon rising to lead the House.