Bodt - Assault on Tredecimmia: In the middle of 008.M31, the Traitor Legion fief world of Bodt fell under the baleful gaze of an orphaned subject of the betrayed and slain Primarch Ferrus Manus, albeit one whose heritage perhaps bore more in common with the masters of the World Eaters fief world than that of his own sire. That warrior was Autek Mor, Iron Father of the Morragul Clan of the Iron Hands Legion.It was Autek Mor and his flagship, the Red Talon, that was one of the first Iron Hands vessels that arrived in the Istvaan System amid the titanic void battle that had erupted between the Loyalist and Traitor fleets. Mor ordered his vessel to attack in a desperate attempt to reach the planet's surface and was only driven off after sustaining massive damage, fleeing the system dogged by murderous pursuit.Even as the Imperium reeled, Autek Mor would begin his own war, one fought beyond the sight and the staying hand of the War Council on Terra. As the war ground on, Autek Mor's force was swelled by other Loyalist factions, including remnants of the Imperial Fists Legion and the Agathon Solar Auxilia who had opposed the Warmaster Horus during the Manachean War.But it was not just allies that Mor amassed as he fought on, but enemies too, for he made a point of taking prisoner key Traitor officers and administrators from each world he struck at.It was from these captives that Mor learned of the status of the nearby World Eaters fief world of Bodt, and his suspicions were confirmed when the Imperial Fists communicated that they had encountered and engaged a number of Traitor Dark Mechanicum conveyance vessels plying the Warp-lanes linking Sarum and Bodt.Mor surmised that the World Eaters' subject world was not only intact, but building towards some role in the war that had yet to be fully revealed or realised. This made the fief a high value target indeed, and one which Mor now had a force strong enough to engage. Doing so would be an escalation beyond Mor's existing strategy of allowing a world to fall to a Traitor assault before launching a massive counter-attack, but for several reasons the operation was judged worth undertaking.Primarily, it was known to the Loyalists that the muster world had once hosted a sizable stockpile of Legiones Astartes war materiel, which, if it was still present, should be denied to the Traitor cause at all costs. Secondly, the records indicated that the planet served as a recruiting world for the XIIth Legion and so might still be host to a large and as yet uncommitted Legion reserve whose neutralisation would serve the Loyalists' war effort well.Autek Mor's first deed in the assault on Tredecimmia was as symbolic as it was practical. As the Red Talon fleet speared towards Bodt it came upon its lone moon, a body possessed of a far-ranging and sharply elliptical orbit. At that point in its transit, the satellite was closing on Bodt, affording Mor a singular opportunity. The Iron Father ordered that the moon be violently shunted but a fraction of a degree from its course using what remained of the Red Talon 's stocks of high-yield void ordnance.As a result, instead of passing Bodt at half a million kilometres, the satellite was set upon a course that would strike the planet within hours with apocalyptic force far in excess of any weapon of mass destruction in the Red Talon 's arsenal. While the World Eaters and their allies would no doubt be thrown into a state of some disarray by the spectacle of the flaming moon, Mor knew that it would take a far greater effort to render them incapable of standing against the next phase of his assault.The Iron Father ordered the launch of a massive orbital drop. Halting such a drop was almost certainly impossible, but the sheer weight of fire sent up by the surviving defence batteries took a fearsome toll. Even if a dozen Drop Pods crashed and burned, two dozen more set down in their immediate wake, and by the end of the fourth solar hour of the assault, Iron Hands and Imperial Fists Legionaries were pressing outwards from the burning drop zones, bringing overwhelming fire to bear upon the defenders.The fury of Mor's ground assault was magnified by a simultaneous sub-orbital strike of staggering proportions. To the south of the inner sea, Tredecimmia star port, as well as a number of unidentified Mechanicum facilities further east, came under simultaneous Drop Pod assault.The star port was attacked by a large Iron Hands force, which drew upon itself a large force of World Eaters whose reported ferocity, even for this most notoriously savage of Legions, was the first evidence of the unsanctioned implantation protocols the Worlds Eaters had subjected themselves to.The wastes surrounding the unidentified Mechanicum facility were the scene of the largest single drop conducted during the assault on Tredecimmia, where elements of the 1522nd Cohort of the Agathon Solar Auxilia established a blocking line so that whatever machine horrors the Traitor Mechanicum might have spawned there would be interdicted if they attempted to deploy.The assault on the silos is known to have begun in the fifth solar hour of the operation and represented the greatest moment of risk for the attackers. With the bulk of the defenders of the macro silos swarming eastwards to give battle to the Iron Hands heavy units deployed there, Autek Mor was then able to commit to the true objective of the entire operation.This phase is known to have been led by the Iron Father himself, attended by the iron-hard core of the Morragul Clan Company -- spearheaded by Autek Mor's elite Gorgon Terminator units, a technology he had personally been able to replicate, even as an exile of war. At last, Autek Mor stood upon the cusp of his objective. The burning moon looming in the tortured skies, Autek Mor ordered his warriors to form a ring of impenetrable steel about the entrance.With a curt order, he utterly forbade any of his warriors to follow in his wake, no matter what occurred either above or below. With that, he is said to have passed through the breached armoured portal and descended the steps into the stygian vaults below.In the final solar hours of the assault, the World Eaters fief world is known to have entered a new and still more savage phase, heralded by the burning moon as it drew so close that the entire upper atmosphere appeared to have been set alight. In the sixth solar hour the fighting reached a climax. During this period both sides suffered and inflicted a fearsome death toll. Though the entire world was evidently doomed, the invaders' objective in launching their attack, which had yet to be revealed, might now have failed.The exact nature of Autek Mor's ultimate objective is still debated amongst Imperial Strategio-savants, but whatever it was, the Iron Father had determined that it was worth the cost in blood and treasure the invaders were paying across Tredecimmia while the Iron Father was apart from his force in the vaults beneath the macro silos.Whatever Autek Mor was seeking in the subterranean vaults, his mission was clearly taking too long. As the burning moon waxed so large it now consumed the entire sky, the warriors fighting one another across the surface resigned themselves to their fate and redoubled their efforts to exact what vengeance they could before the end.As the doom of Bodt grew ever closer to hand, and the balance of death threatened to turn entirely against the Loyalists, Autek Mor finally emerged from the macro silos. In one hand he bore his ancient paragon blade, its edge jagged from scores of nicks, and in the other his Volkite Charger, its induction coils aglow like red hot coals.It was the object that Autek Mor held in the grip of his back-mounted servo-arm that gave witness to his true mission however -- a stasis casket, its flanks etched with the arcane sigils of the inner order of the Emperor's Terran gene-wrights, who under the guidance of the Master of Mankind had brought into being the primarchs and the entire Legiones Astartes.Autek Mor is known to have looked upon the destruction unleashed across Tredecimmia and spoken a single word of command. It was the order to withdraw and within moments it was enacted. Iron Hands and Imperial Fists units that had deployed by Drop Pod only solar hours before fell back to pre-arranged zones where the Storm Eagles and Thunderhawks of the orbital strike wings set down to carry them clear, the Fire Raptors and other gunships circling overhead and unleashing a storm of suppressive fire on the hordes of Traitors attempting to pursue.To the south, the Solar Auxilia forces are known to have fought a disciplined and bold withdrawal back to their own heavy landers, and while in places the frenzied enemy forces overtook them, the greater number were soon being ferried to their vessels in orbit.In the aftermath of the Loyalists' sudden withdrawal, the Traitors were bereft of foes, with the exception of those few who had been unable to depart and who resolved themselves to a bitterly fought last stand. In moments, the hordes turned their wrath upon their own and the battle lines were redrawn anew. At the last, the gun-clanners and the World Eaters fell upon one another, locked together in the mutual berserker fury of their final moments. Finally, the burning moon struck.The apocalypse was witnessed by thousands of Loyalists as their vessels sped clear, and etched into the data-stacks of countless logic engines. The moon impacted the surface and a tsunami of flaming matter rapidly rushed outwards to encircle the entire globe. The surface buckled as the moon impacted, the greater planetary mass literally swallowing the smaller satellite with horrifyingly slow grace.In moments, the atmosphere was aflame and the already unstable crust of Bodt was rent open by a thousand fractures, and volcanic eruptions exploded across the entire surface as the mantle below was swelled by the additional mass.By the time the moon was finally consumed, not a single living being survived on the surface, the entire population, Traitor Astartes, Sarum Mechanicum, Legio Titanicus and gun clan alike burned to ashes and cast to the fiery winds.