Thramas: A Hunt in the Night

On the galactic map Thramas looks like an edge — and that is the point. Horus sent Curze to the Eastern Fringe precisely in order to bleed the Dark Angels and keep the Lion from reaching Terra. The campaign of terror across the worlds of Geldar and Thramas drags on for almost three years and along the way splinters the Night Lords themselves as a single force. Distance here is the weapon: the Lion cannot abandon the sector, and he certainly cannot finish it quickly.

On Thramas itself he is taken prisoner by the Dark Angels during negotiations; the place and circumstances of his death are not directly named in the primary sources, and wordings such as “died at the Siege of Terra” are the guesses of compilers, not the testimony of the novels.

Curze summoned the Lion to talks; the conversation broke down, and the primarchs came to blows in single combat until their warriors dragged them apart, both gravely wounded. At that same hour the Dark Angels smashed the Night Lords’ fleet in a carefully planned ambush — this is the culmination of the Crusade. But the war does not end “the Isstvan way”: there is no one to land a second wave and finish the job. Curze withdraws, to be tried later on Macragge, while the I Legion’s years have already been spent.

A closing of the circle with the investigation of the absent. Thramas explains the most galling line of 014: the Lion is not at Terra. But ten thousand Dark Angels of Captain-Paladin Corswain land at the Astronomican during the Siege and fight Typhus’s Death Guard to relight the beacon for Guilliman’s navigation. The Legion is present on Terra; what is absent is the primarch, and the Legion in its entirety. The name of the Lion’s Gate has nothing to do with Lion El’Jonson — a coincidence of the map, not etymology, though it reads as irony.