| “ | This. World. Is. Murder. | „ |
| ~ The last transmission of Blood Angels captain Khitas Frome, before his company was overrun by Megarachnids |
Megarachnids are minor antagonists in the 2006 Warhammer 40,000 novel Horus Rising. They are an intelligent, inherently hostile xenos species of giant carnivorous anthropoids, and fought against Space Marines during the Great Crusade after a failed invasion of the Interex civilization.
Biology[]
Megarachnids were divided into several groups known as Clades, with each Clad being specialized for specific tasks. The Megarachnid Warrior Clad, where the species got its name from, resemble giant spiders 3 meters tall, with armored exoskeletons and bladed forelegs that were further augmented with an unknown form of biotech, making it impossible to tell where the limb ended and the weapon began. Warrior Clad Megarachnids were able to easily tear apart fully armored Space Marines, and Lucius discovered that merely holding their blades can cut through the ceramite of Space Marine gauntlets.
The Flying Clad of Megarachnids, in contrast, better resembled wasps and were capable of flight, armed with a hook on their heads that could also pierce armor. Other Megarachnid Clades included a Construction Clad consisting of two distinct Megarachnid strains, one massive form that would eat raw materials and process them into new materials useful for Megarachnid constructs, and a small, quick Clad that would collect the processed materials and assemble them. There was also a Megarachnid Clad that resembled war machines.
History[]
In the grim darkness of the far future, humanity's great stellar empire was shattered by the cataclysmic Age of Strife. Many human settlements were destroyed, or degraded in isolation. At least one of these scattered settlements decided to live among xenos, forming the Interex, a civilization of humans and aliens. At some point prior to the 31st millennium, the Interex were invaded by the Megarachnids, who had already infested eight star systems and killed all life they came across. After a fierce war, the Megarachnids were nearly exterminated, but rather than finish the job, the Interex chose to spare the species and had all surviving Megarachnids marooned on planet Urisarach. The planet also had several orbital warning beacons placed around it in case anyone else approached it.
In the late 30th millennium, the Emperor of Mankind created the Imperium of Man and set out in a Great Crusade across the stars to recreate humanity's lost golden age, reabsorbing the scattered human civilizations one way or another, and exterminating any aliens that stood in their way. The Imperial forces were led by the Legions of transhuman Astartes, better known as Space Marines, each Legion headed by a Primarch, a superhuman son of the Emperor. The Space Marines eventually found Urisarach during an expedition, dubbing the planet One-Forty-Twenty. Ignoring the Interex' warning beacons, the Imperial 140th Expedition Fleet deployed three Space Marine companies from the Blood Angels Legion, led by captain Khitas Frome, onto One-Forty-Twenty to exterminate the Megarachnids and claim the planet for the Imperium. However, the Blood Angels had their landing shuttles scattered by unusual atmospheric disturbances and found their communications disrupted, and found that the Megarachnids were far stronger than anticipated. The Blood Angels were all slaughtered, but not before Frome got a distress signal out to 63rd Expedition Fleet, who responded to the call alongside a detachment of Emperor's Children Space Marines and Blood Angels reinforcements. Additionally, with Frome's last breath, he renamed the planet "Murder".
When the reinforcements landed on Murder, they began a campaign of destroying the Megarachnids. However, the Emperor's Children detachment, which included Captain Saul Tarvitz and Lucius, fell victim to the same mistake of the 140th, scattering their landing parties due to trying to use shuttles to get through the storms. Now separated from each other, the Emperor's Children were picked off by waves of Megarachnids, taking heavy casualties, until Tarvitz discovered a tree-like structure where Megarachnids were impaling dead Space Marines on for the Flying Clad to eat. First believing the structures to be purely for feeding purposes, Tarvitz promptly blasted the tree apart, only to see the storms above the tree clear, discovering that the 'trees' were actually biotech constructs that controlled the weather and scrambled vox-comms.
The Megarachnid Construction Clad quickly rebuilt the tree structure, and then sent hundreds of Megarachnid warriors against the remaining Emperor's Children. However, the 63rd Expedition Fleet then came to the aid of Tarvitz and his remaining forces, deploying ten companies of the Luna Wolves Legion, the Legion of Warmaster Horus Lupercal, the most favored son of the Emperor. The Luna Wolves took advantage of the temporary breach in the atmosphere to land a cohesive fighting force, beginning a proper counterattack against the Megarachnids, slaughtering the incoming Megarachnid warriors and scattering their survivors. The remaining Emperor's Children and their Luna Wolves saviors then targeted Megarachnid tree structures, destroying as many as they could to clear up more of the atmosphere. This allowed Imperial Army soldiers and Titan war machines to land on Murder, leveling the planet's landscape as they advanced. The war against the Megarachnids began to stretch out over months, for no matter how hard the Imperial forces struck, seemingly endless hordes of thousands of Megarachnids would come from across forests and canyons, descending on the Imperials in endless waves. During the campaign, Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels, personally joined the xenocide in order to get vengeance on the Megarachnids for the Blood Angels they killed.
Over six months, the Megarachnid hordes never retreated, but were always pushed back. Soon, most of Murder had been cleansed of Megarachnids, with the species on the brink of extermination. However, before Horus could finish the campaign, he was interrupted by sudden contact by the Interex, who were trying to determine who was assaulting the reservation world. Horus found the Interex to be a more pressing threat and promptly withdrew all Imperial forces from Murder, once again sparing the species from extinction. The ultimate fate of the Megarachnids after the Horus Heresy is unknown, but it is likely that they were fully destroyed by a later Imperial campaign. Additionally, the half-dead body of a Blood Angel who fell in battle against the Megarachnids, Captain Tagas, was retrieved by Word Bearers Chaplain Erebus and used to fuel a psychic construct known as the Ragefire during the Horus Heresy, which he tried to use to corrupt the rest of the Blood Angels Legion. The distilled rage of Tagas, still festering from when the Megarachnids slew his battle-brothers, formed into the Red Angel.
