At Ullanor, Horus drove his First Company speartip straight at the Ork warlord Urrlak. While Horus traded blows with the greenskin, Abaddon and the rest of the assault force went under Urrlak’s bodyguard. Horus killed the warlord, turned around, and found his First Captain was the only one of that force still upright, covered in gore, with the dead for company. Codex Supplement: Black Legion tells it that way in Horus’ Last Son.
Some time after that, on the swamp moon orbiting Davin, Horus took a cursed blade in a skirmish and started dying.
Abaddon, who by every account revered his Primarch the way you’d revere a father, did the obvious thing. He got him help. The nearest help was a warrior lodge and its ancient priestly order, and those priests were servants of the Dark Gods. They saved the body. While they were in there they fed the hatred already sitting in Horus’s chest, the sense that the Emperor had sidelined and abandoned him. His body came back. His soul stayed with them. Codex Supplement: Black Legion puts the consequence plainly in that same passage, that Abaddon’s efforts to save his Primarch laid the foundation for the Great Betrayal and everything that came after it.
Every version of the Heresy I’ve read since, I’ve read with that sitting in the background.
He killed his own father twice
The first time was on Terra, sort of. Abaddon didn’t swing the blow, but he was there when the Emperor finished Horus, and what he did next was haul the corpse out through a collapsing warship and get the Legion clear.
Then he walked off. That part gets skipped a lot. The most driven villain in the setting spent an unspecified stretch after the Heresy wandering alone in the Eye of Terror, having abandoned his brothers to sort themselves out, which they did not. The Legion Wars happened without him. The Emperor’s Children hit the fortress at Maeleum and made off with Horus’s body, and Fabius Bile started growing clones out of it, which is the most Fabius Bile sentence I will write today.
That’s what pulled him back. Not the Legion falling apart, not the loss of position. The clones. He went to Harmony, cut through the whole freakshow, broke Worldbreaker, and ran the clone through while it was calling him “my son.” Then he had every remaining copy destroyed, ordered every trace of Horus scrubbed from the Legion, told his warriors to repaint their armour black, and gave them a new name.
The rename is the part that stuck. Sons of Horus to Black Legion, one order, and the Imperium has used the new name ever since without much comment on where it came from or what it cost to issue.
The Imperium’s own file on him doesn’t know who he is
Vigilus Ablaze prints Abaddon’s entry as if it were an actual archive record, and it’s my favourite piece of Black Legion writing that isn’t a novel. He’s classified as a Warmaster-class Nemesis, Heretic Astartes Grade Alpha-Alpha-Onus, active across three segmentums. Then, under the name, there’s a Discrepancy Alert flagged at 53% causal, pointing the reader at a Cloneson Treatise and a Disparate Individual Hypothesis.
Which is the Administratum admitting, in its own filing language, that it cannot confirm the thing leading the Black Legion is Ezekyle Abaddon rather than one of Bile’s copies. The same card carries a warning that pulling his full war record has a 92% chance of fatally overloading a non-Terragrade system.
I spent an evening at my local store about two years ago being extremely confident that Abaddon was a joke. Thirteen crusades, twelve losses, the galaxy’s most reliable punchline, and I had all of this from having skimmed one codex. Kiran, who plays Death Guard and reads considerably more than I do, let me get all the way to the end of it before asking what I thought Abaddon had been doing at Uralan. I did not know what Uralan was. I have not fully recovered from this.
The sword nobody else can pick up
Uralan is where the First Black Crusade took him, and where he killed Sigismund after offering him a job first. It’s also where he went under the Tower of Silence and came back up with Drach’nyen.
The codex entry on the blade is a genuinely strange bit of writing. Its origins are unknown, possibly including to Abaddon. Daemons already in his service call it the Thorn in Reality and the Shard of Madness. It predates humanity and will outlast it. It has no real shape or size, nothing a realspace mind could hold, and it appears as a sword in Abaddon’s hand because that’s the form he chooses for it. Anyone else brave enough to try lifting it finds it weightless, and then it rends them body and soul on the way out of their grip.
Nobody knows why it let him take it. The codex doesn’t offer a theory, which I appreciate. I keep meaning to kitbash a counts-as Warmaster with a properly horrible Drach’nyen, something bone-coloured and wrong-angled, and I keep not getting round to it…
The crusade where he made a star go supernova
If you want one answer to “but he loses every time,” it’s the Twelfth. The Gothic War ran for over thirty years, consumed millions of lives, and dragged in Guard regiments and Space Marine Chapters from thousands of light years away. Codex Supplement: Black Legion says the naval engagements rivalled the Horus Heresy, and it was the first time the Imperium got a clear look at the size of the Black Legion fleet.
What he came for were the Blackstone Fortresses, six prehistoric star-forts of unknown origin sitting in the Gothic Sector. He took three.
The way he took the first one is worth having. His Legionaries boarded it, ground through the garrison, and by the time Abaddon walked into the control chamber, the Imperial commander was the last man alive in it. Abaddon stepped over the dead Guardsmen, impaled the officer on the Talon of Horus, and held the corpse up for his Legion to see.
Then he took the woken fortress to an Adeptus Mechanicus weapons testing moon in the Lukitar System and carved the moon open with a bolt of pure Warp energy from several million miles out, from a distance the Imperium considered well past effective weapons range. Brinaga went next, then Fularis. With three fortresses under his control he moved on Tarantis, a major Imperial marshalling station, fired a combined Warp bolt into the system’s star, and left. The worlds there had a few hours to watch their sun swell, swallow the inner planets, and go supernova. Tarantis isn’t a place any more.
He got caught going for the fifth one at Schindlegeist, boxed in between an Imperial armada and an Eldar warhost, and withdrew using his allied Legions’ ships as cover. He still came home with two Blackstone Fortresses, which is where the ones that turned up over Cadia came from.
The sorcery around all this is my favourite part. Before the crusade he had Zaraphiston’s Tzeentchian cabal comb the Warp for what he wanted, and they eventually dragged a broken daemon in front of him that gave up a name. That took him to a blood-seer called Moriana in the caves of Vorsia Secundus, and he came out of her cave with two world names. Afterwards Zaraphiston found he could no longer see the Warmaster’s future at all, only darkness, and told him so. Abaddon overruled the cabal and his own Chosen on the grounds that if his future was unreadable then so was the Imperium’s. The codex records the objection and the override without comment.
Thirteen crusades, and the one where he set a forest on fire for a skull
Late in M41, chasing artefacts ahead of the big one, Abaddon went to Ildanira. Maiden world, crystal glades, an alien skull called the Skull of Ker’ngar buried under it aeons earlier by a race that no longer exists. The Aeldari who’d terraformed the place had no idea it was there.
He landed with a small cadre, enslaved the local population, and put them to work digging. Alaitoc Rangers were waiting for him and ran a guerrilla campaign he couldn’t pin down, so he had the Vengeful Spirit burn the crystal forests off the surface with lance fire until the whole thing was a sea of molten glass. Then an Alaitoc fleet arrived in orbit, and the Warmaster of Chaos worked his own troops to death getting the skull loaded before running for it.
Losing the deposit and trashing the flat on the way out, basically.
The management style is consistent. Codex Supplement: Black Legion also records a Tournament of Blood where, displeased with his Chosen, he made them fight each other in the holds of the Vengeful Spirit for eight days, then impaled the survivor on his talon to seal a pact with Khorne for a Bloodthirster. But when Kranon of the Crimson Slaughter stood on the Planet Killer’s deck and attached a condition to his oath, which nobody does, Abaddon laughed and welcomed him in. The Crimson Slaughter book says what got him was that they were efficient, and efficiency still pulled at the part of him that had always been an old Legionnaire.
Ten thousand years. I’ve been in the hobby about ten of them and I still can’t keep a paint recipe consistent across one army, which is the sort of comparison that makes the numbers in this setting go slightly unreal on me.
Cadia was set up years in advance
The build-up to the Thirteenth reads like weather. Psykers across Segmentum Obscurus going into fits. Baleful lights over Belis Corona and Agripinaa. Typhus seeding a zombie plague through the systems around the Eye. Proscribed cults surfacing on scores of worlds at once. And at Tyrok Fields, the Volscani Cataphracts, an entire Guard formation, turning their guns on the Cadians standing next to them.
Then the fleet: hundreds of ships, many of them Heresy relics, the restored Planet Killer at the head, and at the centre two Blackstone Fortresses taken during the Gothic War and left to marinate in the Eye for centuries.
You know how it ends. Cadia broke, the pylons went, and the Great Rift opened across the galaxy.
The thing I’d flag for anyone who still files him under “loser” is what he refused. Four gods have been offering him apotheosis for ten thousand years. Mortarion took that deal and now belongs to Nurgle in a way he still won’t admit to himself. Abaddon keeps declining, because daemonhood is a promotion into the Warp and he wants to stay in realspace where the Imperium is. The gods have kept paying out regardless. He’s carrying marks from all four of them and still walking around in a body that can be shot, which is more than Huron Blackheart or anyone else in the Eye has managed to negotiate.
The 2022 Abaddon kit is still one of the best character sculpts GW has put out, all hunched shoulders and cloak weight, and if you’re building one, get the Talon arm on before you commit the cloak. I did it in the other order and spent twenty minutes with a scalpel fixing a gap that didn’t need to exist.
