Signus Prime, Signus Tertiary, Scoltrum, Holst, Phaenon Prime, Talasa Prime, Kodiak Prime. Those are the worlds of the Signus Cluster that have names in the record, and if you’ve read Fear to Tread you probably only remember the first one. I did. The Blood Angels crash the Red Tear into Signus Prime, turn the wreck into a fortress, and fight across the Plains of the Damned to a cathedral built out of the cluster’s dead population. The rest of it is names on a chart the fleet moves through on the way in. Scoltrum gets a boarding action and a crashed ship. Holst I had to look up.
There’s a world called Kol now.
At the Big Autumn Preview GW announced the next Journal Tactica supplement for Warhammer: The Horus Heresy, and it’s The Battle for the Signus Cluster: Assault on Kol. The Legio Custodes fighting Kyriss the Perverse on a mining world, underground, against Word Bearers and daemons and the corrupted 606th Cohort of the Solar Auxilia. It’s the same cluster and the same daemon as the campaign everybody knows, running at roughly the same time.
Kyriss is a Keeper of Secrets, which makes this a Slaanesh story rather than a Khorne one, and that’s already a different flavour of Signus than the one in my head. The version I remember is red. Ka’Bandha breaking Sanguinius’s legs with a whip, five hundred Blood Angels dying in a single psychic hammer-blow, the whole Legion dropping into the Red Thirst at once. Kyriss is in that story too, and he loses the argument. He and Ka’Bandha spend the back half of the novel bickering over whether they’re supposed to be killing Sanguinius or turning him, Horus never settles it, and the plan comes apart between the two of them.
The trap took real work to build. A Davinite priest ran the summonings that turned the cluster over, and by the time the IX Legion arrived the whole system sat behind a veil that cut it off from the outside. The Blood Angels boarded drifting ships and found the crews reduced to empty skin. They pulled a few survivors off one of the inner worlds, one of whom, Tillyan Niobe, was a blank and didn’t know it. None of that reads like a single-planet operation, which is roughly the gap Kol slots into.
What a Custodes detachment was doing in the Signus Cluster
The Custodes were on the loyalist order of battle at Signus. It’s a line item, minor Custodes detachment, sitting under the IX Legion and the Space Wolves pack, the kind of entry you skim on your way to the numbers you care about.
A small Custodian force attached to a Legion during the Great Crusade wasn’t reinforcement. The oldest sources are blunt about it. Visions of Heresy, in The Custodian Guard, says small detachments of Custodians were frequently ordered to accompany the Legiones Astartes “to ensure that the Emperor’s will was followed,” and White Dwarf #287’s The Custodian Guard runs nearly the same line, adding that in a time of traitors their duties had extended past guarding the Emperor’s person. Those are a 2003 White Dwarf and a 2012 art book saying the same thing about a posting GW is now building a campaign supplement around.
Malcador had already slipped a Space Wolves pack into the fleet to watch the Blood Angels for signs of corruption, and Redknife admits it to Sanguinius’s face partway through the book. Tanus Kreed’s Word Bearers were embedded on the other side of the ledger doing the inverse job. Add a Custodes detachment and that’s three separate parties aboard with standing instructions about Sanguinius, two of which he didn’t know were there.
It’s the corporate version of a project that turns up with a compliance officer already attached to it. Perfectly routine, everyone’s friendly about it, and you quietly adjust what you say in meetings.
Underground is an odd posting for them, mind. Custodian kit is built for reach and open ground. Guardian spears, jetbikes, grav-tanks, Venatari coming in from height. A mining world puts all of that in tunnels. The supplement’s two new command options lean into that from both ends, with an Ephoroi Venatari-Proconsul to run the aerial element and a Hykanatoi Proconsul-Delegate for smaller forces, the Hykanatoi being the shield-companies that normally never leave the Palace precincts.
I owned the book and never read it
Around 2013 I bought Betrayal, the first of the Forge World Black Books, for something like sixty quid, which at the time felt like a sum of money I should probably mention to my partner.
I read the army lists. I read the colour plates twice. I read the Legion-specific rules until I could quote the Iron Warriors’ rites from memory despite never owning a single Iron Warrior. The narrative chapters, the actual history, the order-of-battle appendices at the back with every attached detachment written out? Skimmed once, shelved, never opened again. I’ve had that book about as long as I’ve had a mortgage and I couldn’t tell you what’s on page 200.
Two years ago I saw a copy of Inferno in a shop in Reading, shrink-wrapped, marked down, sitting on a bottom shelf under a Necron battleforce. Stood there for a solid minute. Walked out with three pots of paint and no book, which tells you the shelf at home has been consistent for over a decade.
So when Pete asked me a while back whether the Custodes had ever fought outside the Solar System before Terra, I told him no, with total confidence, in the tone of a man who owns the relevant books. I was wrong, and I was wrong because the answer was on my own shelf in something I’d bought for the pictures.
The 606th is the part I keep turning over
The Solar Auxilia were the Imperial Army’s good stuff. Segmentum Solar recruits, Saturnine void armour, trained for boarding actions and vacuum work and death world survival, reckoned second only to the Astartes on a good day. By the second century of the Crusade they made up somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the Imperial Army. Mostly loyal, though the Cthonian Headhunters went over to Horus on the strength of old ties, and a handful of cohorts turned on the garrison systems they were posted to.
The supplement gives the corrupted 606th rules under the name Exalted Sections, which I read as Slaanesh-touched human troops fighting in among the daemons. These are the Emperor’s professional soldiers, the ones who held compliance after the Legions moved on, and the 606th was presumably already stationed in the cluster when the Word Bearers started their work.
Although, and I’ve gone back and forth on this while writing it, I’m not sure the Custodes needed a campaign here at all. Part of what makes the Signus story work is that Sanguinius is alone with it. No Emperor, no brothers, nothing coming, a Legion going feral around him and nobody to appeal to. Bolting a second loyalist force into the same star system thins that out. Then again, a detachment sealed underground on a mining world for the duration is about as absent as you can be while technically being present. So it holds. Mostly.
Where this sits in the run of these books
Assault on Kol follows Prospero Burns: The Judgement of Valdor, which set the Custodes against Tzeentch and came with its own daemon rules. Two Journal Tacticas, two Chaos gods, the Ten Thousand in both. GW is using the series to hand the Custodes a lead role in campaigns where they’d previously been a footnote, which is a sensible way to give a faction with about eleven kits something to do in a game built around Legions.
There’s one Custodes-at-Signus story already in print and it’s a cracker. Debeeran Kalimakon took a daemonic dissolution venom, fought on for another eighteen hours while his flesh came away inside his own armour, then flew the final assault alongside Sanguinius, and what was left of him went into a Telemon. My favourite grim old man in the whole faction. Whether Kalimakon was part of the detachment that ended up on Kol or a separate posting entirely is exactly the sort of thing a supplement like this could clear up and probably won’t…
So yeah, Kol
So yeah. Kol. Mining world, nobody’s heard of it, Custodians underground, Slaanesh daemon with a name that sounds like a villain from a 1980s cartoon. Kyriss the Perverse. Say it out loud. That’s a 2012 Black Library name and I mean that with affection. Point is, GW drew a map of a star system fourteen years ago, left most of it blank, and is now filling a bit of it in.
The timing is what the book has to solve. Kyriss dies at the end of Fear to Tread. Sanguinius throws a sword through him, then takes his head off after Meros steps into the Ragefire in his place. If the Custodes are fighting Kyriss’s hordes on Kol, that campaign ends when Sanguinius reaches the cathedral, whether the Custodes have finished their own war or not.
Then there’s the dilation. When the Blood Angels break out of the cluster they find more time has passed outside it than within. Eight Legions gone over, three loyalist Legions dead, the galaxy at war for longer than the IX Legion actually experienced. If the veil did that to everything inside it, a Custodian force on Kol came out into the same problem, and a detachment whose whole purpose was reporting back to Terra spent the opening of the Heresy with nothing going out.
He got back up eventually, mind. Kyriss turned up in front of Dante and Mephiston ten thousand years later in Darkness in the Blood and offered to cure the Black Rage if Mephiston would take Slaanesh’s mark, which is the deal he offered Sanguinius with the names changed. Refused again. Sent back into the warp again.
Pre-orders haven’t been dated. The book covers the Signus Cluster background, a Daemons of Slaanesh army list with Fiends and Seekers and Daemonettes, the two new Custodes command options and an updated Gyrfalcon Jetbike Sodality profile, and GW hasn’t said where Kol actually sits in the system.
