Article · The Road to Terra · 011.M31 — 014.M31 · 8 minutes of reading
The Path of Heaven
How the V Legion cuts its way home, and why Khan stands at the walls while Russ does not.
Chondax: The Delay That Saved Them
The V Legion is bogged down in the campaign against the orks on Chondax: six years of hunting that ends in 007.M31, after Isstvan. The Alpha Legion jams communications and blinds scouting: the Phemus Massacre, where the White Scars were ambushed, and the Tenebrae station, whose destruction at last lets Khan catch scraps of astropathic news.
On the map Chondax carries two marks: the start of the campaign on the eve of the Heresy and its conclusion in 007.M31. To read Khan as “in time for the Siege” without Chondax is to forget that his absence from the drop site was a saving accident, unlike Signus, where the IX was deliberately led away.
Cutting Through the Storm at the Cost of a Legion
The Path of Heaven is the V against Mortarion’s XIV and Eidolon’s III, and, along the way, against the warp itself on the road to Sol. Khan does not go to Imperium Secundus as to a home: he goes home, to Terra, because his loyalty is to the wind and to the Father, not to an emergency throne.
The price is monstrous. Yet in 014 he is there: he retakes the Lion’s Gate and drives Mortarion out. Compare Russ: neither is a “wall”, but Khan arrives in the system like an army, while Russ arrives like a wounded hunter after Trisolian, where he crossed blades with Horus himself.
How to Look at the Wind on the Map
The V’s flares are rare, but its routes matter: the Legion’s arrows appear and fade on their own as time advances.
The dossiers of Khan and Mortarion; the duels on Prospero and at the Lion’s Gate spaceport are the same pair twice. The book The Path of Heaven (C. Wraight) is the best fleet-and-steppe text of the cycle.
What to remember
- Chondax spared the V from Isstvan.
- The Path of Heaven is the price of being present at Sol.
- Khan and Russ are both “hunters”; only one made it home.
How to look in the atlas
- The end of the Chondax campaign (007.M31) set against the massacre on Isstvan V (006.M31): that is the whole of the delay.
- “The Path of Heaven” (011.M31); follow the V’s arrows with the time slider.
- Siege mode: “Khan Retakes Lion’s Gate” (014.M31).
Disputed in the canon
- The extent of the Path of Heaven is disputed: the sources give no continuous chronology of the V Legion’s passage from Chondax (007.M31, “Scars”, C. Wraight) to Terra (014.M31, “Warhawk”, C. Wraight), and different compilations fill in the years between those points differently. The atlas dates the anchor points of the route and keeps the path itself as a window, assigning it no duration.
Sources
- The Path of Heaven (C. Wraight)
- Scars (C. Wraight)
- Warhawk (C. Wraight)
- Wolfsbane (G. Haley)
- Lexicanum: Chondax Campaign
Permalink: https://astart.es/en/articles/path-heaven/