White Scars - Battle of Chogoris: It was during the dread time immediately preceding the emergence of the Great Rift in ca. 999.M41 that the Yasan Sector came under renewed attack by Huron Blackheart, Chaos Space Marine warlord and pirate king.With Jubal Khan leading the fighting in War Zone Armageddon, it fell to Barutai Khan, Captain of the 2nd Brotherhood, to marshal the defence of Chogoris.Huron Blackheart's fleet of Red Corsairs burst from the Maelstrom in a three-pronged formation. It was a barbed trident aimed at the heart of the Yasan Sector, and it drove home with speed and ferocity.Desolator and Repulsive-class capital ships thundered through scattered Imperial defence frigates with all guns blazing.Wave upon wave of Heretic fighter craft and flocks of Heldrakes spiralled through the void, while Space Hulks bore down upon defence platforms like malevolent moons.The worlds of Gartuli and Thaxis fell to the invading Chaos forces, their defenders butchered in bloody campaigns and their frantic refugees streaming through the void towards Chogoris.Precious few ships made it into Chogoris' orbit, for the Warp roiled and churned. The fickle tides of the empyrean pitched Imperial voidcraft into fanged whirlpools of madness even as they hastened the Traitor warships on their way; by the time out-system Servitor probes warned of Traitor forces translating into Chogoris' local space, Barutai Khan already knew that this conflict would not be won in space.He stood upon the ramparts of Quan Zhou and watched as fire lit the skies, and pronounced that this conflict would be settled blade-to-blade upon the soil of Chogoris itself.Much of the White Scars Chapter was abroad amongst the stars when Huron Blackheart attacked. At the first dark omens of danger, Astropaths had hurled distress cries into the Warp commanding that all sons of the Warhawk be recalled to defend the Chapter planet.Yet Barutai Khan could not count on such reinforcements arriving in time, or indeed at all; his forces were vastly outnumbered by the heretical drop-ships now descending on the world, and would have to fight with all their hunters' cunning if they were to prevail.The White Scars had two advantages. Firstly, they knew their home intimately, and could read its ferocious weather patterns and navigate its every hidden canyon.Where the enemy foundered amidst salt marshes or fell foul of devastating storm fronts, the White Scars used these to their advantage. Many were the Heretic Astartes warbands ambushed from within raging tempests, caught by swift-striking White Scars bikers while navigating treacherous defiles or mauled by super-predators lured into their midst by squads of Infiltrators.Secondly, the White Scars fought as a unified force, while their foes broke into dozens of raiding parties whose Chaos Champions vied for the favour of the Dark Gods. The invaders wasted precious solar weeks hunting the steppe tribes of the Empty Quarter, who themselves fought back with every weapon at their disposal.Yet for all this, the battle was a desperate one. The White Scars harried and harassed, hit-and-ran time and again, but still the vastly superior Chaos forces pushed onwards. One nomad camp after another burned. White Scars fortifications toppled in blazing ruin. Strike forces were whittled down in battle with the Traitor forces, and wherever Huron Blackheart bestrode the battlefield, the invaders were unstoppable.Even when Jubal Khan returned from Armageddon with the survivors of his strike force, their onslaught did little but slow the Heretic tide. Worse followed when the skies darkened then tore, and a wave of madness and terror swept the planet; the Cicatrix Maledictum yawned wide and the Maelstrom expanded to consume the fringes of the Yasan Sector whole. Upon Chogoris, legions of foul daemons spilled forth to march at Blackheart's side.The Chogorian tribes fled these new assailants in terror, hundreds of thousands of the planet's populace exterminated in a matter of solar days. Seeing that the tribes from which the White Scars recruited were at risk of wholesale annihilation, Jubal Khan had his warriors strike recklessly at the Chaos forces, goading as many as possible into following them back to the fortress-monastery of Quan Zhou itself.So it was that, solar months after the first Heretic forces made planetfall, the final fate of the White Scars was decided in a bloody siege of the Khum Karta mountain range, and of the White Scars fortress-monastery in its midst.It was at this desperate hour that Kor'sarro Khan, the Master of the Hunt, and his 3rd Brotherhood finally reached Chogoris. They had braved storms of insanity and the terrifying darkness of the Noctis Aeterna to reach their homeworld, and the journey had cost them dearly.Still they wasted no time in marshalling White Scars forces scattered throughout the Empty Quarter, along with a great militia of all those tribes still possessed of the will to fight. At the head of this mighty hunting party, Kor'sarro Khan launched a spear-thrust into the rear lines of the besieging Chaos forces.His Stormseers harnessed a great Chogorian tempest to veil the attack, and by the time Huron Blackheart realised his peril, his forces were assailed from the front and from behind. After three solar days of bloody battle, Kor'sarro's warriors broke through to Quan Zhou and forced Blackheart into a calculated withdrawal.Still the Traitor forces might have carried the day, for their reserves poured in from all across Chogoris in answer to this fresh challenge. Yet it was in this darkest hour that the Noctis Aeterna lifted over Chogoris, and with it the energies of the Warp temporarily receded. Many of Blackheart's daemonic allies flickered and faded and, seeing that he faced a far less certain battle than he had expected, the Tyrant of Badab elected to withdraw.Leaving Renegade warbands rampaging across Chogoris, Blackheart and his elite Red Corsairs fell back to conquered strongholds elsewhere in the Yasan Sector; the galaxy was rent, the age of Chaos was nigh, and Huron Blackheart knew he had ample time to draw out the conquest of the Great Khan's homeworld. The White Scars, meanwhile, were left to win back their burned and bloodied world, and to gather themselves for whatever horrors were sure to follow.However, they would do so buoyed by reinforcements. Not long after the Red Corsairs' retreat, Battle Group Delphi II of the Indomitus Crusade's Fleet Tertius managed to navigate the Warp Storms tearing at the galaxy to arrive in the Chogoris System, delivering the White Scars' Primaris Marine brethren to join the fight.With the Chapter's brotherhoods reinforced, the fightback began in earnest, while recruitment started from Chogoris' surviving vengeful tribes for new Neophytes to be transformed into Primaris Astartes.