Editing Underworld War (section)

==Outcome==

The outcome of the war was never really in doubt, since the Word Bearers who'd been sent to Calth in the first place had been deemed expendable by Lorgar, meaning that they were never going to receive reinforcements or extraction. The Ultramarines, meanwhile, could rely on the promise Guilliman had made to send help as soon as he could. A relief force arrived around 009.M31, led by Sergeant Aeonid Thiel, and provided a much-needed shot in the arm to the loyalist forces. Thiel himself saved the life of Captain Steloc Aethon by preventing Dark Apostle Kurtha Sedd from sacrificing him to the Chaos gods, after which they killed Sedd. After seven long years of war, the last of the Word Bearers were sponged, purged, and blasted from the caverns and tunnels, but it wasn't much of a victory. Calth had still been trashed beyond repair and hundreds of thousands of civilians and thousands of Ultramarines had been killed, along with the entirety of the loyalist Mechanicum forces. Thousands more were mentally scarred or broken by the unremitting stress and horror of the battle, including the Nemesis Chapter, who had borne the brunt of some of the worst fighting.

That said, there proved to be a few silver linings. Calth proved to be salvageable; though its surface would never again support life, the arcologies had proven their worth, and over the succeeding millennia they would be expanded into grand underground cities that rivaled the grandeur of [[Macragge]] itself. Likewise, [[Aeonid Thiel]] acquired a great deal of practical wisdom on fighting Word Bearers and their daemonic allies, which would later be incorporated into Guilliman's [[Codex Astartes|Big Book of Space Marine War]]. Last of all, a few of the Word Bearers had come to realize that they had been abandoned by their primarch and legion and began to question the bargains that Lorgar had made. [[The Anchorite|One of them]] actually surrendered to the Ultramarines and was later imprisoned on Terra. While confined, he returned to the worship of the Emperor and quietly helped promulgate the notion of his divinity through the ''Lectitio Divinitatus'', making him an instrumental, if unsung, founder of the modern [[Imperial Cult]].

{{40k-Timeline}}

[[Category: Warhammer 40,000 Battles]]