In 007.M31 a fleet calling itself the Ashen Claws took Tenebor, the fortress-moon orbiting what was left of Nostramo. They killed the Night Lords garrison, emptied the armouries, and cut the progenoid glands out of the corpses before they left.
That last part is what I keep going back to. Killing Night Lords during the Age of Darkness is a Tuesday. Harvesting their gene-seed is a logistics decision. Somebody on that fleet was doing forward planning about implant stocks while the bodies were still warm, because they had no Apothecarion resupply, no Legion behind them, and four thousand marines to keep topped up.
Games Workshop put the Nostramo dispatches up on Warhammer Community on Wednesday, pulled from The Horus Heresy: Book Six – Retribution, as the latest entry in the Pages from the Black Books series that’s been running all year. The week before it was the Pale Stars and the Blackshields who bled the Alpha Legion dry out there. Same book, same corner of the archive. GW frames this one as a mystery. The extract contains the answer about four paragraphs in.
The Ashen Claws were the Raven Guard’s 18th Chapter
Before Corax was found, the XIX Legion spent time under Horus. He developed a stratagem for them and named it the Ashen Claw: you feed a unit into the enemy, the enemy commits to eating it, and the rest of the force comes in on the exposed flank. Shade Captain Nerat Kirine of the 18th built the version of it used at Hell’s Anvil, where the Legions shelled the fortifications, let the Imperial Army soak the casualties, and ran hit-and-run raids on the Overseers while that was happening.
It worked. It also made assignment alongside the XIXth a known death sentence in the Imperial Army, and that reputation followed the 18th around for the rest of the Great Crusade.
So when Corvus Corax eventually took command of his Legion, he inherited a Terran veteran cadre with a slaver-warlord heritage and an established habit of spending other people’s soldiers. He didn’t like them. I don’t think anyone would argue he was wrong to not like them. In 002.M31 the Battle of Gate Forty-Two killed most of the remaining Terran legionaries, and in the aftermath Corax gathered up the survivors, plus the freed Deliverance prisoners who didn’t fit what he wanted the Legion to be, and posted them out. Four thousand of the 18th went into the Ghoul Stars under a Praetor named Calvus with thirteen capital ships and about twenty frigates.
The official term for the arrangement was nomad-predation fleet, which is a lot of syllables for exile. They dropped the 18th from their title, kept the nickname, and stopped responding to hails.
Corax never called them back
Isstvan came and went. The Heresy went galactic, the Loyalists started counting hulls, and the 18th stayed off the roster. Book Six is explicit that no attempt was ever made to recall them.
They came back anyway, on their own schedule, and not for him. Through the late M31 they worked the Nostramo Sector, stripping munitions, STC templates and construction matrices out of everything they boarded, and making no claim on any of it in the name of the Emperor or the Warmaster. They held nothing they took, and moved on as soon as the holds were full.
Nostramo itself was already gone by then. Konrad Curze had shot his own homeworld to pieces decades earlier, so what the Ashen Claws were raiding was the wreckage economy around a dead planet: the fortress-moon, the hive worlds still limping along, the garrisons the VIII Legion had left behind. At Cairn they killed the Night Lords stationed there and then collapsed the hive spires on top of the civilian population, sealing them in. Which is worth sitting with for a second, given that the Ashen Claws generally get written up as the sympathetic party in this period.
Kalleth is the one they lost
In 011.M31 Kheron Ophion brought nine thousand Night Lords into the sector. He’d escaped the Thramas Crusade with them, he was Kyroptera, and his plan was to use Nostramo as a rally point and gather up every scattered VIII Legion warband still drifting around the segmentum. Ophion is a genuinely odd figure, by the way. His own Legion called him the Coward, which was a joke at his expense: he had a habit of standing his ground, and the Night Lords found that embarrassing. His first command was destroyed holding off a Fra’al conclave so his fleet could withdraw, and his Praetor had the wreckage forged into a shield for him as a running gag he then had to carry into battle for seventy years.
The Ashen Claws hit an advance squadron of his fleet over Kalleth and lost. They were driven off. But the Shroud of Eventide took enough damage in the exchange that it came down on the planet, and Ophion went down with it.
Nine thousand Night Lords with no one to rally to. The Khrave were pushing into the region at the same time and the whole sector slid into anarchy over the following years, which is the sort of outcome that looks like a plan in hindsight and almost certainly wasn’t one.
Six years later the Great Scouring reached Nostramo. Blood Angels and Ultramarines elements went in expecting up to thirty thousand entrenched Night Lords, which is a real fleet action, the kind you write a book about. The Angels Vermillion found ruined fortresses and void wrecks. The dispatches in Book Six are Imperial officers filing reports about a victory nobody in the fleet could account for, and the best they manage is speculation that somebody else had been here first.
Nobody in the chain of command could name them, because the fleet responsible had been struck off the XIX Legion’s rolls in 002.M31 and nobody had updated the file since.
The Ashen Claws had already told the Imperium exactly what they were, for what it’s worth. At the Battle of Desperation, also 011.M31, Kirine was hailed by an Ultramarines Chapter Master called Arceas Odinathus and answered by disavowing the Emperor and the Warmaster in the same breath. Book Six suggests he did it believing Corax was dead, which I’m not sure changes much. They took the munitions they’d come for and left. Over the following years they raided east of Beta-Garmon and hit Loyalist and Traitor shipping without much distinction, including a scrap with the White Scars on Dellar IX that cost them a Contemptor called Artal Heloc.
By the late Heresy an Imperial star map has them holding a substantial empire out in the Ghoul Stars, and astropathic fragments from 062.M31 have them still expanding it, bringing worlds into compliance under edicts of something they were calling their Second Crusade. Nobody sent anyone to check.
I painted twelve of them in the wrong armour
Right, so. Betrayal at Calth. 2015. Everybody bought one. I bought one, stripped the Word Bearers half off eBay for cheap, and decided I was going to do a renegade warband out of the MkIV bodies, all matt black, no insignia, trophy bits from the spares box. Got twelve done. They were fine. Pete reckoned the trophies looked like keyrings, which, yeah, a bit.
They’ve been in a drawer since. Ten years, which is a longer stretch than I’ve been a dad and about twice as long as my Cadians have been waiting for their tank. Then the Warhammer Community piece signs off by telling you that if you want to build an Ashen Claws force, they wore MkII Crusade plate. Mine are MkIV. I’d painted the wrong mark a decade early for a warband I hadn’t heard of yet.
I did have a look at what it would cost to strip the twelve back and redo them properly in MkII…
There is a whole argument about which armour mark went to which Legion and when that I’m not going to relitigate here, except to say that MkII on an exile fleet in 011.M31 makes complete sense, since nobody was resupplying them and MkII is what was on the racks in 002. A bloke at my local store had a squad of the Crusade-armour marines built up on the painting table back in the spring, unpainted, and I remember thinking the ribbed plate looked far more like a fleet that had been out too long than my MkIV ever did.
What the Ghoul Stars did to them
The thing that got the Ashen Claws exiled was contempt for ordinary humans. Slaver-warlord culture, mortals as expendable stock, the Hell’s Anvil habit of feeding the Imperial Army into a grinder to open a flank. Corax threw them out for it and sent them somewhere with almost nobody in it.
The Ghoul Stars are thin. Low population, hostile, nothing like the manpower of the Imperium proper. So the Ashen Claws had to recruit from the handful of human populations out there, and rely on them for crew, for shipwrights, for everything a fleet needs that a Space Marine can’t be spared to do. Over ten thousand years that arithmetic changed them. By M41 they rule a pocket empire from Atargatis Prime, the tribes there are aligned with internal factions of the Chapter and can actually influence its politics, and Chapter Master Nehat Nev shares the rule of the world with a human woman.
They’re still raiders. They still keep slaves. Nev is on record forcing a Carcharodons commander into a gladiatorial bout with a captured World Eater over a wargear dispute, so I’d hold off on the redemption arc. But the specific charge Corax exiled them on, that mortal lives were something you spend, doesn’t show up in the M41 material anywhere.
They trade with the Carcharodons for clean Raven Guard gene-seed, because theirs has been degrading for a hundred centuries with nobody to fix it. They despise Chaos Space Marines, and the line one of them gives a captured Imperial captain is the whole Chapter in four sentences: there are far darker things out there, ones enslaved to powers beyond your reckoning, we are not them, we’ll just kill you.
Two bits of bookkeeping that I find funnier than they probably are. They were exiled in 002.M31 and the Codex Astartes wasn’t adopted until 021.M31, so the Ashen Claws never received it, were never asked about it, and as far as anyone can tell still run a Great Crusade Legion structure in the forty-first millennium. And a lot of them still wear the Raptor Imperialis on their plate. That’s the Unification Wars badge, older than the Imperium they walked out of, and Book Six records it without comment.
Next week’s entry in the series is billed as lore from the unpublished tenth Black Book, which has never seen print in any form.
