Abaddon - 13th Black Crusade: The last and greatest of Abaddon's thirteen Black Crusades has plunged the crucial Cadian System into a war of unsurpassed intensity. The ninth planet in the system, St. Josmane's Hope, has already been utterly destroyed, and war raged across every district and kasr of Cadia itself. The uninitiated questioned the Despoiler's motives, for he had ploughed the broad-bladed spear of his invading forces right into the heart of Fortress Cadia and her many-layered defences.Those who knew of the daemonic bargains Abaddon struck in the depths of the Eye of Terror realised the true scale of his ambitions. Within the toxic swamps of the Plague Planet, Abaddon bartered the Chaos relic known as the Hand of Darkness for the aid of the gaunt monstrosity Mortarion, Daemon Primarch of the Death Guard, and earned the blessings of Nurgle.Within the surreal, spawn-infested planescapes warped by the power of Tzeentch, Abaddon gained the use of the Rubricae of the cursed Thousand Sons.Within the red bowels of the Goreswirl, the Despoiler duelled the finest of Angron's champions, cutting off their heads one after another with the Daemon Sword Drach'nyen before gifting the Hellfire Stone to the Daemon Primarch of the World Eaters and earning his respect in the process.Upon the flesh-world of Oliensis, the serpentine Daemon Prince Fulgrim swore his aid in exchange for a Pythonian psyker-innocent and the promise of a third-share of those civilians caught in the path of the Black Crusade to come. All that remained was to pave the way for the Daemon Primarchs and their hordes to breach realspace.Abaddon managed to unite all the forces of Chaos that exist within the Eye of Terror under his leadership as the Warmaster of Chaos in 999.M41, after many solar decades of preparation to unleash the greatest Chaos assault upon the Imperium of Man since the Horus Heresy, more than 10,000 standard years ago. This great campaign, Abaddon's 13th Black Crusade against the realms of the Emperor of Mankind, focused its assaults upon the sectors of the Segmentum Obscurus surrounding the Fortress World of Cadia and the Cadian Gate it protected.The Cadian Gate is the only known free passage through the roiling Warp Storms of the Eye of Terror into Imperial space, and the capture of Cadia would allow the forces of Chaos their first uninterrupted chance to assault the heart of Imperial space in millennia. In the end, after solar months of truly titanic fighting that spread across hundreds of worlds and tested the resources of the Imperial military as never before, the campaign proved successful for the servants of the Ruinous Powers despite the heroic resistance of the Cadian defenders led by the Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed.Cadia fell when Abaddon sent the damaged wreckage of the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity hurtling to the planet's surface like an artificial meteor. The massive impact exterminated most of the defenders and caused the Necrontyr-built Cadian Pylons which had held the expansion of the Eye of Terror at bay for millennia to fail, allowing the great Warp rift to envelop the Fortress World at long last.Though Cadia itself has fallen, possession of the Cadian Gate -- the only stable path from the Eye of Terror -- still hangs in the balance. Should Abaddon triumph, the dark tide of Chaos will pour from the Eye of Terror along the length of the Crimson Path to strike at the most prized world of all -- Holy Terra itself.With several hundred thousand Chaos Space Marines falling upon Cadia in his name, Abaddon spilt enough blood that the walls of reality thinned to the point of total collapse, giving birth to the Great Rift that cut the Imperium in half. The gates of hell are yawning wide. Abaddon intends to drive the speartip of his Traitor Legions deeper and deeper into the Segmentum Solar, numberless daemon hordes sowing utter destruction in his wake.His ultimate goal is to capsize realspace itself in a localised swathe of ever-escalating battles that allow the poisonous half-realm of the Eye of Terror to bleed outward all the way to Terra. Once he completes his evil pilgrimage, the Despoiler will dash the "Corpse-Emperor" from His throne of lies and forge an empire of madness in the name of the Dark Gods.As the various Tyranid Hive Fleets are also inexorably moving towards the shining Astronomican beacon of the Emperor's mind that shines out like a light in the darkness from Terra, and the Adeptus Mechanicus reports that the Golden Throne is finally failing, it may well be that the current era of the Age of the Imperium, the Time of Ending, is well-named. In the face of the terrible threat presented by Abaddon the Despoiler and the other enemies of the Imperium, only one true hope may remain for the salvation of Mankind, drawn from the most ancient litany of the Imperial Creed: the Emperor protects...