Leader of the apocalyptic Black Crusades and destroyer of worlds, Abaddon the Despoiler has caused the death of untold billions throughout the Gothic Sector and beyond. Here is uncovered the dark history of this evil Lord of Chaos.

It is said that the name of the Despoiler is a curse that blights the lips of those who speak it, bringing ill fortune and misery upon the poor unfortunate who gave voice to that damned name. It is not for nothing that Abaddon's name carries such power, for he was once a favoured servant of the Emperor before being cast down into the depths of madness and hatred. Once, Abaddon carried the Emperor's light to the darkest corners of the galaxy, bringing fire and steel to those who would not accept the manifest destiny of Mankind to rule the stars. Many thousands of years ago, Abaddon was a captain in the Luna Wolves, one of the greatest Legions of the Emperor's armies, but who treacherously betrayed their master and plunged Mankind into one of the most destructive wars ever to tear at the galaxy. Now that once-proud champion has sunk into an inescapable morass of bitterness, hatred and obsession.

The Luna Wolves fell under the command of the Primarch Horus, first among the Emperor's sons, and Abaddon commanded the First Company of the legion. Abaddon was a mighty hero and a warrior almost without peer. He marched at the forefront of the Emperor's Great Crusade, liberating world after world from alien oppression or the corruption of Chaos, and records of his feats of bravery and heroism filled entire halls of the legion's Librarius. He revered Horus as a god, venerating him above all others, and Horus, in turn, treated Abaddon as a favoured son, bestowing upon him all manner of honours and plaudits. It was even rumoured by some, perhaps jealous of Horus' favour, that Abaddon was in fact his clone-son, the result of the earliest primogenitor experiments. The truth of these rumours was never proven and whether even Abaddon himself knows is a secret kept only by him.

As the Great Crusade continued, it seemed as though nothing could halt the expansion of the Emperor's realm and after the Luna Wolves' successes in the Ullanor Campaign, the Emperor declared it to be the greatest victory yet achieved by any of his Primarchs. He bestowed the title Warmaster upon Horus and renamed the legion the Sons of Horus, in honour of its Primarch. He then bade him return to Terra to receive his battle honours. What happened next has been so clouded by myth and outright falsehood that the truth of the matter is unlikely ever to be known. For unknown reasons, the Warmaster Horus turned to Chaos and rebelled against the Emperor's rule while en route to Terra, beginning what historians have chosen to call the Horus Heresy. Whole swathes of the Imperial armed forces sided with Horus, from the Navy, divisions of the Collegia Titanica, factions of the Adeptus Mechanicus and entire regiments of the Imperial Guard. Even worse, a full nine Legions of Space Marines joined the Heresy, pitting brother against brother in a galaxy-wide civil war.

Abaddon was instrumental in the rebellion, tearing down what he had helped to build in the Great Crusade, smashing down the statues of the Emperor and defiling his temples in the name of his new masters, the gods of Chaos. The name of Abaddon became a byword for betrayal, second only to that of his Primarch, as the Sons of Horus advanced relentlessly towards Terra, defeating every foe that stood before them.

The fall of Horus is one of the greatest legends of the Imperium of Mankind and its telling would take many volumes of greater size than this. Suffice to say that the rebellion faltered at the cusp of victory when the Emperor took the fight to Horus on his own battle barge and, in a battle of such titanic proportions that only the most gifted storytellers may attempt its retelling, bested his once-favourite son. Fighting on another part of the mighty vessel, it is said that Abaddon felt the psychic backlash of his master's death and that the trauma of this calamitous event pushed Abaddon deeper into the pits of grief and madness than any mortal being should ever sink. Enraged with a deathly fury, Abaddon hacked and slaughtered his way to the bridge of the Warmaster's flagship, cutting down those Imperial warriors who yet remained on the vessel. He reclaimed the body of the fallen Horus, tearing the Warmaster's lightning claw from his wrist and taking it for his own as a symbol of Horus' legacy. His howl of anguish echoed through the Immaterium, and the forces fighting below on Terra suddenly knew that their cause was lost.

As the Chaos forces withdrew from Terra and their fleets fled into the depths of space, Abaddon took command of the Warmaster's battle barge and escaped to the Eye of Terror in the galactic northwest. The scale of Abaddon's fury knew no bounds and entire systems were ravaged in his bitter flight from Imperial forces. Before he could be stopped, Abaddon's ship vanished into the Eye of Terror and disappeared from Imperial space, and many hoped that this would be the last of him. But the powers of Chaos are mindful of those pawns that may yet serve them and Abaddon was to return, many years later, more powerful than ever, at the head of his first 'Black Crusade'.

Abaddon returned at the head of a vast army, laying waste to entire regions of space around the Eye of Terror in a devastating crusade that almost managed to break through into Imperial space. The noble champion of Humanity that Abaddon had once been had vanished forever, swallowed by the dark powers of Chaos, and he destroyed without mercy, killing every living thing before him. Where Horus had failed, he vowed that he would one day succeed. He would see the galaxy burn. And but for the combined might of the Imperial Titan Legions and several Chapters of Space Marines, he would have succeeded. Abaddon was driven back to the Eye of Terror, bringing to an end the first of his Black Crusades, but it would not be long until he returned. Each time Abaddon brought death and destruction on a massive scale to the Imperium, he made unnumbered pacts with the diabolic entities of the warp in return for power beyond imagining. Led by a monstrous, golden messenger, Abaddon discovered the daemon weapon Drach'nyen beneath the Tower of Silence on Uralan and became nigh unstoppable.

The Chaos gods lavished unspeakable and inhuman strength upon their champion, investing him with powers beyond mortal ken, and he repaid them in blood. At El'Phanor, his forces assaulted the Citadel of the Kromarch; a fastness built with all the cunning its designers could muster. It was pierced with but a single portal, a mighty gate of adamantium, fully three metres thick, but Abaddon cared not. He boasted that he would feast on the Kromarch's kin and led the charge of the gate himself. The Citadel was a masterpiece of military engineering and barely one in ten of Abaddon's warriors survived to reach the gate. To either side, enemy weapons prevented their retreat, but Abaddon laughed, raising his sword wreathed in black flames high above his head and smote the gate a blow that smashed it to splinters and shook the very foundations of the citadel. As Abaddon had promised, he and his warriors feasted upon the Kromarch.

On the bloody fields of Mackan, Abaddon sought out the Blood Angels and repaid them for the part they played in the downfall of Horus. Leading a charge of berserk warriors towards the dug-in positions of the Sons of Sanguinius's heavy weapon squads, Abaddon and his warriors charged through a storm of gunfire that should surely have seen them all slain. But Abaddon clawed his way across the Blood Angels' barricades unharmed and he and his few surviving berserkers tore the beating hearts from their enemies' chests. When the inevitable counter-attack struck, the victorious Abaddon fought with such tenacity and ferocity that the Blood Angels were unable to reclaim the fallen bodies of their battle brothers. Abaddon had special reason to hate the Blood Angels - now they had one to hate him.

To date, Abaddon has led twelve Black Crusades into the Imperium, vast sector-wide campaigns and countless seemingly random raids, and though every one has thus far been defeated, the cost of holding them at bay has proved almost too much to bear. The one stable route through warp space that leads from the Eye of Terror is known as the Cadian Gate and the entire Cadian sector has become a military camp, its every resource dedicated to martial industry and holding the forces of Chaos at bay. Its manufactoria churn out millions of tons of ordnance every day, thousands of armoured fighting vehicles rumble from the assembly lines of its hangar forges and every man and woman is trained from birth as a soldier. The wars fought in this sector are without number, but perhaps the most destructive incursion which Abaddon has made into Imperial space occurred in the early years of the second century of the Forty-First Millennium, and has since been dubbed the Gothic War.

The seeds of this devastating war had been sown some years earlier, in a series of seemingly unconnected raids on Imperial outposts across the Segmentum Obscurus. Warp storms built across the sector with growing fury, and zealots preached that the Emperor was displeased with his subjects' wickedness and was sending these storms as a sign of his displeasure. Despite all attempts by planetary officials, fanatic cults formed, hordes of flagellating doomsayers engulfing the Gothic Sector in violent upheavals. Secret cults and covens used the cover of these upheavals to insinuate their depraved members into positions of power and authority. After several naval vessels were lost to explosions in dock, widespread reports of suspected sabotage did nothing to calm an already volatile situation. With sightings of Chaos vessels in the sector increasing all the time, it was soon clear to even the most blinkered official that the forces of Chaos were planning a major incursion into the Gothic Sector.

Abaddon's fleet struck as the building warp storms swirling around the Gothic Sector surged into terrible life, cutting off the Imperial defenders from any help. Dozens of Imperial outposts were attacked simultaneously throughout the Gothic Sector, naval vessels were ambushed and orbital docks were bombed by saboteurs. Though taken by surprise, Imperial forces were able to hold on and prevent themselves from being totally overwhelmed. Of the seventeen naval bases in the Gothic Sector, six were based on what were known as the Blackstone Fortresses, ancient star citadels of unknown origin. Who had created them or what their original purpose had been was a mystery, but they made perfect bases of operation for the Imperial Navy. After extensive refitting by the Adeptus Mechanicus with primary power and weapons systems centuries before, each was the equal of Naval Command at Port Maw. The Navy prided itself that none of the Blackstones had ever fallen in battle, but after the battle of Blackstone IV, this was all to change.

As the Chaos fleet moved in to attack, Blackstone IV's power grid suddenly and inexplicably shut down, rendering the guns useless and the personnel on board defenceless. The battle was short and bloody and, after a hurried astropathic plea for aid, there were no more communications with Blackstone IV. But there was worse to come. Abaddon had not been idle in his time within the Eye of Terror, using millions of slaves, sorcerers and polluted magicks to create a gargantuan vessel, simply dubbed the Planet Killer. The cardinal world of Savaven was the first to feel its wrath and was destroyed in a single night as the Planet Killer's unholy weapon split the planet's core apart. An impenetrable asteroid field is all that remains to even prove it existed at all and Imperial morale was hit catastrophically by this colossal act of destruction.

Sub-sector after sub-sector fell to the legions of Chaos, worlds surrendering wholesale rather than face the awesome power of the Planet Killer. Another Blackstone Fortress fell to Abaddon at Brinaga when it appeared that his minions had some way of activating the long-dormant weapon and power systems of the mighty fortress. With the power of two Blackstone Fortresses at his disposal, Abaddon attacked the defenders of Blackstone I at Fularis II, utilising the unknown power of the Blackstones to combine their energies in an unholy blast of warp-spawned power to annihilate the Imperial forces and capture the Fortress.

The war dragged on for many years, with Abaddon's fleets continuing to ravage the sector until the warp storms that had isolated the Gothic Sector for so long began, finally, to abate. At Tarantis, Abaddon demonstrated the fearsome power of the Blackstones once more. With the combined might of the three now at his disposal, he unleashed their energies into the core of the star at the heart of the Tarantis system before making a fighting withdrawal. The star seethed and boiled for many weeks, and those that could flee the system did so until, four weeks after the attack, Tarantis' star went nova, destroying everything for many thousands of billions of miles in all directions and rendering the system uninhabitable.

The climactic battle in the Gothic war was to take place at Shindlegeist, where Blackstone V orbited in the depths of space. Eldar forces that had chosen to ally with the Imperial forces, led by Lord Admiral Ravensburg, had discovered Abaddon's intent to attack Blackstone V and allowed the Imperial fleet to utilise their ancient warp portals in order that they might spring a trap on the Despoiler. As Abaddon began his attack, the allied forces fell upon him with all their might and there was little the traitorous captains could do except to die fighting. The battle was one of the most destructive and bloody of the war, lasting for fully three days. At the battle's climax, Abaddon ordered the three Blackstones under his command to drive for the system's star and inflict upon it the fate that had befallen Tarantis. But Captain Abridal aboard the Flame of Purity flew his ship into the path of the Blackstones and managed to disrupt their powerful beams. His ship was torn apart by the lethal energies, but his heroic sacrifice saved the star from destruction. The Blackstones had expended their power and Abaddon had run out of time.

Abaddon fled into the warp with two of the Blackstone Fortresses, the third hotly pursued by the vengeful Imperial fleet. The Imperial ships hammered it with their weapons, to little effect, until Strike Cruisers from the Angels of Redemption and assault boats from the Divine Right were able to close and board the Fortress. They found the interior of the Blackstone Fortress changed beyond all recognition, the modifications made by the Adeptus Mechanicus vanished and the walls pulsing with a dark, internal light. No sooner had they boarded than the fortress began to break up around them, slowly cracking apart into thousands of fragments. And with Abaddon's defeat at Shindlegeist, the Gothic War was over.

Throughout the Gothic Sector, the remaining Blackstone Fortresses destroyed themselves in a similar fashion, though whether the two still under Abaddon's control also broke apart is not known as there have been reported sightings of the Despoiler, both with and without them in the years since the Gothic War. And as for the Planet Killer, unverifiable reports claim that it was destroyed by Omega Squadron at Kharlos II, but when Adeptus Mechanicus salvage teams led by Inquisitor Horst journeyed to the site of the battle, they could find no trace of the vessel.

Abaddon has been a constant threat to the Imperium ever since the end of the Gothic War, but thus far, has yet to raise as vast a force as he did during those dark days. The High Lords of Terra live in fear of the day that Abaddon is able to unite the various armies of the Eye of Terror, but the very fractious nature of its inhabitants may be the High Lords' greatest ally in preventing such an occurrence. There are a multitude of ruthless warlords within its anarchic depths and it is hoped that many would be unwilling to unite under a single banner, lest their own monstrous ambition be outshone by Abaddon's dark glory.

However, many who are given to know such things speak of dark portents and dreadful omens that point to the rise of a great uniter within the depths of the Eye of Terror. The identity of this mysterious figure remains elusive but, knowing the force of Abaddon's leadership, it is difficult to see who else it could be. Currently there are the usual scattered reports of Chaos vessels probing Imperial picket lines, though perhaps on a more regular basis. A dire warning from the Eldar Farseer, Eldrad Ulthran, telling of Abaddon's return has caused alarm in some circles, but the words of such a manipulative xenos obviously cannot be trusted and his lies have been discounted.