Emperor's Children - Post-Heresy: The history of the Emperor's Children in the period that followed the defeat of the Traitor Legions at the Siege of Terra is largely obscured from Imperial scholars, for obvious reasons. When Horus was finally defeated by the Emperor aboard his Battle Barge the Vengeful Spirit, the Emperor's Children left a trail of depopulated worlds in their wake as they fled alongside the other Traitor Legions into the Eye of Terror.As their supply of slaves and playthings was exhausted by their constant abuse, the remains of the IIIrd Legion resorted to raiding the other Traitor Legions for fresh meat to feed their endless perversions, and in the end were crushed by their angry brethren in a series of bloody wars known as the Slave Wars that tore the Traitor Legions apart as they lost the guiding and unifying hand of Horus.Among the schemes hatched during this time was one by the Apothecary Fabius Bile to steal the corpse of Horus from the Sons of Horus' fortress on the Daemon World of Maeleum and clone the lost leader to resurrect the Warmaster and revive the Traitor Legions' fortunes. While Bile's Emperor's Children warbands succeeded in assaulting the fortress and reclaiming the body, their action roused Ezekyle Abaddon to reassert control over the Sons of Horus and to launch a counter-assault that ultimately shattered what remaining unity the Emperor's Children had possessed.The newly formed Black Legion unleashed an audacious attack on Harmony, the new throneworld of the Emperor's Children. Despite being severely outnumbered, Abaddon's cunning plan would carry the day, as the Vengeful Spirit had been dragging behind them a derelict Thousand Sons vessel which was almost two kilometres long and weighed eight megatonnes. The Thousand Sons' sorcerer Iskandar Khayon had telekinetically dragged its empty corpse across the Eye of Terror, just as Abaddon had asked of him. And then he hurled it right into the heart of the IIIrd Legion's fortress.Less than a solar minute passed from the moment the derelict vessel entered Harmony's atmosphere to the second it struck the ground. It proved just long enough to let the population of the world see death falling towards them, but not long enough to do anything about it. The Vengeful Spirit 's sensors recorded tectonic unrest grave enough to send tremors rippling across the other side of the world. Harmony itself heaved with torment.In the aftermath of the devastating attack, Canticle City was no more. Abaddon and his allies later assaulted Bile's fleeing vessel, cutting down the Clone Lord's vile creations as they fought their way into the heart of the IIIrd Legion vessel. When they came upon Bile's fleshworks, Abaddon was confronted by the clone known as Horus Reborn. The two fought a brutal duel, which culminated in the death of the cloned Warmaster.Utilising the reclaimed Talon of Horus, Abaddon rammed its five claws deeply into the cloned Horus' chest and out his back. As the cloned demigod's blood rained down on the filthy laboratory floor, the Storm Bolter on the Talon's back kicked three times, burying six bolts inside Horus' exposed chest and neck. The bolts exploded, blasting the clone apart from within.Abaddon proclaimed himself Horus' rightful successor as the Warmaster of Chaos and reestablished the Sons of Horus as the Black Legion, the mightiest of the Traitor Legions in service to the Ruinous Powers. In the course of the following conflicts, the Emperor's Childrens' unity as an Astartes Legion was shattered and they devolved into a series of small, competing warbands.Because of the losses they suffered on Terra and in the Slave Wars, warbands of the Emperor's Children are rare today in the galaxy of the late 41st Millennium. This is certainly a boon for the galaxy as the Emperor's Children love to take prisoners. There is perhaps no worse way to die than at the hands of these superhuman Slaaneshi fanatics -- save for perhaps facing the tender mercies of the Drukhari.Perhaps the greatest mystery surrounds the fate of the Primarch Fulgrim himself, for it appears that he disappeared entirely. Some say that the Dark Prince of Chaos granted him apotheosis, and he assumed the mantle of a Daemon Primarch -- his mortal shape transformed into a serpentine form with four arms very similar to the appearance of the Laer xenos that Fulgrim and his Legion had exterminated when he began his fall to Chaos.There are those that claim that Fulgrim has retreated to some Daemon World of his own creation, and rules there still, overseeing such debased extremes of sensation and experience as no mortal can imagine. Some of those who revere Slaanesh regard this mythical place as the holy of holies, and spend entire lifetimes obsessively questing after it.To this day, many of the scattered surviving warbands of the Emperor's Children and the agents of the Inquisition's Ordo Malleus seek the location of this world, but none have yet returned with that information. Following the Horus Heresy, Fulgrim was last seen in realspace fighting Roboute Guilliman, the Primarch of the Ultramarines Chapter and its Successors during the Battle of Thessala in 121.M31.During their great duel, Fulgrim proved too crafty and guileful, slitting Guilliman's throat with the toxic Anathame that had nearly slain Horus himself without the intervention of the Chaos Gods to heal him. Guilliman was placed within a stasis field and returned to the Ultramarines' homeworld of Macragge where his body became a focus for the devotion of countless generations of Imperial pilgrims, while Fulgrim retreated for a final time into the Warp.Since the opening of the Great Rift and the resurrection of Guilliman in its wake, there have been rumours of Fulgrim fighting alongside his Emperor's Children and other Slaaneshi forces. Whether the Phoenician has really returned to fight the forces of the Corpse Emperor remains to be seen...