Hey, bud, it's okay. When Abaddon finally runs out of steam, we have Huron Blackheart to rally behind.

On the plus side, the incongruity between Abaddon the Grand Champion of Chaos and his apparent inability to achieve anything with the Black Crusades is something that the GW writers have recognised.

Abaddon and the Black Legion are (finally) starting to get their stories told, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden no less, with a suitable level of dark heroism and rebirth. And with the Black Crusades being shown from the viewpoint of Chaos as well as just the Imperium, the waters have muddied. It turns out most of the crusades weren't actually intending to get to Terra, Abaddon had something more specific and small-scale in mind with each push...and he pretty much achieved everything he set out to do.

Rather than present it as 12-13 failed Black Crusades with everyone wondering why on earth the Traitor Marines are still listening to anything he says, the newer angle suggests it as 13 opening engagements in a war which Abaddon always expected to span many millenia, and which he knew would be tough as all hell at first.

The goal he's presented to the Black Legion is that the Imperium will fall, if they all continue their efforts to undermine it. It may not fall today, or tomorrow, or even in the next thousand years. But what does time matter to us? We and our daemonic allies are functionally immortal, and a decade in the galaxy beyond might pass in a day for those inside the warp.

Of course, there's always a fly in the ointment. Since Chaos was arbitrarily granted a victory in Warhammer* so that the game rules could be shredded and the Emperor reborn to raise his new Medieval Space Marines Stormcast Eternals, some prize fethwipe** decided to balance this out across the franchises by retconning the Iron Cage as a glorious victory by the Imperial Fists over the Iron Warriors, airbrushing a few more Ultramarine flaws and introducing some of the most poorly written Chaos villains known to mankind.

*May it rest in peace.
*Matt Ward, curse his name, and may he never be allowed anywhere near the lore again.

I thought all the damage done by Ward had been reversed, and I also believed he had nothing to do with Chaos lore? When did the Iron Cage become a victory for the Fists? From what I recalled, they were slaughtered for the most part, and had to retreat.

The Iron Cage is Space Marine as well as Chaos lore, and the retconning appeared from the Space Marine end (which Ward had an awful lot to do with), during the most recent Space Marine codexes and supplements.

The 'new lore' presents the Iron Cage as an outright stalemate between the Iron Warriors and Imperial Fists, which would have led to the destruction of both Primarchs and both legions had it continued, with the Iron Warriors retreating to the Eye when they eventually faced the prospect of fighting two loyalist legions at once.

The Iron Cage lore has been tweaked in the retelling several times over the years - generally the direction of travel is away from that of a Chaos victory and Imperial failure and towards a stalemate where both sides achieved what they intended.

It originally began as a colossal cock-up by the Imperial Fists - Peturabo set the trap and goaded Dorn into facing him. Dorn, already half-mad from grief, went off the deep end and ordered that the Iron Warriors be annihilated from the galaxy. Down the Fists dropped, and the jaws of the trap clanged shut. Dorn refused to retreat, even when his legion was being torn apart, and only by herculean efforts did the Fists prevent the Iron Warriors from wiping them out. Guilliman then finally intervened, rescued the Fists from Dorn's madness and forced Perturabo to retreat with his 400 Fists captives and ticket to daemonhood assured. Dorn passed out of the madness, and what he and the Fists learned from failure in the Cage helped reshape and redefine the Imperial Fists and their successor chapters.

In Index Astartes, the same writer picked up both the Imperial Fists and Iron Warriors codexes and set out to create a story which would have the players of both sides at each others throats, with intentional differences in storytelling from both sides giving each side something to hold up in their favour. The battle became a bit more nuanced, as after the initial costly blunders, the surviving Fists managed to wear down the Iron Warriors and prevent annihilation. The Fists lore suggests that both sides would need to risk everything to destroy the other, which Dorn was reluctant to do as it would almost certainly result in the end of the Imperial Fists. The Iron Warriors suggested Perturabo was primarily looking to humiliate Dorn rather than kill him - but either way, unlike the Fists, they did not perceive it as a stalemate. The Iron Warriors lore indicates the Fists had little credible chance of victory, and although it recognises the tenacity and success of their last-ditch defences, it was merely prolonging their inevitable destruction. As both sides ran low on ammunition and the battle fell increasingly into hand-to-hand fighting, Guilliman and the Space Smurfs showed up to reinforce Dorn. Perturabo went ballistic, realising Dorn was going to escape complete destruction, and his final assault punched the Fists right back into the landing craft of the Ultramarines and off the planet. Not bad for a 'stalemate', eh? The Iron Warriors withdrew triumphantly with their 400 captives before the Imperials had the chance to regroup and counterattack in force.

The latest lore tweak has Dorn go into the Cage not out of madness or lust for revenge, but as a conscious act of purging his legion in the crucible of war ahead of the split into chapters. The Fists get the worst of it initially, but ultimately stalemate the Iron Warriors with their heroism and force Perturabo to withdraw when Guilliman arrives, albeit having to reluctantly leave a large number of Fists casualties to be dragged off with him.

I accept I exaggerated a little by referring to it as a "glorious victory for the Fists", but the Space Marine lore no longer portrays the Iron Cage as a defeat, which is a huge change from where it began.


To be honest, I feel its a shame for the Fists - the Cage was a defining point in their history, having them stare deeply into the mirror as they had to confront how their arrogance and lust for revenge had led them into madness and right to the brink of annihilation. This spawned the 'pain is purity' doctrine, and their introspectiveness led them to rebuild into something less flawed than many of the other scarred loyalist legions. And it fuelled hatred of the Iron Warriors for the years to come.

Now? Dorn knew what he was doing all along, they never had to question themselves, they weren't defeated, and they took Dorn's teachings on overcoming madness with pain with them into the brave new world of the successor chapters. They hate the Iron Warriors because Warsmith Shon'tu*, has been dicking around with them for a few thousand years, including managing to invade Terra directly**. Each time he fights the Imperial Fists to a standstill which could go either way, before he's then defeated by heroism, plot armour and/or the intervention of another Imperial force. Which appears to be a recurring theme.

As yet, Shon'tu is not recognised in Chaos lore***.

*Ward's creation, purely for the Codex. Not to be confused with the phoenetically similar Warsmith Honsou created by Graham McNeill.
**Not to be confused with the 13 times Abaddon and the majority of the entire Chaos fleet has attempted this unsuccessfully.
***Which appears to be the Chaos writers' way of telling Ward to go f-ck himself and get sacked already****.
****Which he now has.

This couldn't have spoken for my own thoughts better if I'd written it myself.

Indeed, although some seeds were sown in the Sentinels of Terra supplement from a couple of years ago, such as the egregious Warsmith Shon'tu.

My favorite parts about Chaos have always been the ones that aren't violently psychotic just for the sake of it.

For the most part, it's boring. Sometimes all you want is a good bloodbath, and I enjoy the MAIM KILL BURN as much as the next guy, but I think it's a major disservice to the entire faction to use that as it's most prominent quality. It's just as bland as the Ultramarines but on the opposite end of the spectrum. There's gotta be some kind of purpose to the livers and intestines flying everywhere or it's all wasted.