Port Maw - Under the Lash: Leaderless and hard-pressed, the Loyalist fleet broke apart. Many were the vessels that surrendered, cutting their engines and shutting down their targeting arrays, willfully submitting to the Warmaster's mercy.Others did not heed the words of the Arch-traitor and valiantly fought on, now vastly overwhelmed but defiant to their last breath.Only a few would try to escape the star system and continue the fight, the Kurga amongst them, as was the Telemachus, the sole survivor of the Agathean cruiser squadron.The blood-bedecked Triumph of Reason, most of its crew slaughtered, would now become the base of operation for Horus' chosen regent, a Sons of Horus line captain known by the name of Taloc Thorne.In orbit above Port Maw, its high-performing communication and transmission systems now needing a replacement for the loss of the Mechanicum's Panopticon, the Triumph of Reason would be shed of its name to become The Lash, the seat of governance of the Tyrant of Port Maw, Taloc Thorne.Horus did not stay long, departing soon after to receive the capitulation of the Manachean Commonwealth following the destruction of Hive Illum. Taloc Thorne would reign with customary violence over his new domain, using the troops allotted to him -- one company of Sons of Horus Astartes and six cohorts of Cthonian Jackals -- Solar Auxilia recruited from the Sons of Horus' homeworld of Cthonia that were judged too old or unsuitable for Legiones Astartes conversion (but superior to average troops) -- were installed as Port Maw's garrison.Beneath his shadow, the hives of Manachea became little more than vast slave-camps run by those natives who had pledged themselves wholly to Horus and who now competed with each other to prove their loyalty by enforcing the brutal quotas demanded by their distant and merciless overlord.Quickly operating again thanks to the expertise of the Cyclothrathine Dark Mechanicum, Port Maw would now toil for the Warmaster's benefit. His fleet reinforced by those who had willingly allied themselves to him or had been culled into submission after the Treachery at Port Maw would, however, soon depart the system, fighting on new fronts in Horus' long march to Terra.The installations and supplies located at Port Maw soon turned the planetoid into a lynchpin of the Traitors' war-effort, the centre of a huge war machine gearing up for the conquest of the Imperium.Nearly every warfleet bearing the Arch-Traitor's banner would come to Port Maw to be refitted, supplied and repaired, gorging themselves on the resources originally intended to supply the vast fleets of the Great Crusade.While still nominally the seat of power within the Coronid Deeps, Port Maw's influence was severely limited due to its lack of ships. While Port Maw itself and the Manachean Commonwealth remained firmly in control of the Traitors, this lack of mobility meant that the Cyclops Cluster and the Grail Abyss were largely left unguarded, becoming the target of ever more frequent Loyalist raids such as the famous Gethsamaine Raid conducted by splinter-elements of the Iron Hands Legion commanded by the grim Autek Mor.Left largely unchecked, Traitor-allied factions such as the Knight House Ærthegn and the Mechanicum of Forge World Cyclothrathe openly pursued their own agendas rather than following the orders of Thorne, who had to deploy even more of his finite resources to try to hunt down isolated Loyalist ships and the need to blockade those Loyalist star systems that had proven too powerful to conquer outright such as the Forge World of Mezoa.Eventually, in the years after the Horus Heresy during the Great Scouring, Port Maw was reclaimed for the Imperium as the surviving forces of the Traitors fled into the Eye of Terror.