Khârn gazed out at Nuceria from the bridge, his eyes filled with bone-deep hatred and loathing for this planet, this nightmarish world.
After that Warp storm had carried his father away from the Emperor's laboratory, Angron's gestation pod had landed on Nuceria. The newly arrived primarch had immediately suffered an ambush by those Dark Eldar.
Those despicable, vile Eldar had learned from prophecy of the destruction Angron would one day bring, and had intended to strangle him in the cradle while he was still an infant.
Yet even as an infant, the primarch had slaughtered that band of Dark Eldar with his bare hands, though only at the cost of grievous wounds.
But because of that, the infant Angron was discovered by a slave-taking party that arrived afterward. After marveling at the xenos corpses surrounding the primarch, they immediately realized that this child was no ordinary being.
They brought the primarch back to Desh'ea, Nuceria's capital, and carefully tended to him until he recovered. Yet unlike Angron's brothers, his life had veered here into another abyss.
What awaited Angron was a colossal gladiatorial arena in the capital of Desh'ea, a battlefield where gladiators slaughtered one another. Their enemies might be other gladiators, monstrous beasts captured from the wilderness, or xenos that had fallen upon Nuceria.
Angron's destined fate was to fight in that arena until death, using the blood and deaths of slaves to entertain the spectators cheering from the stands.
Nuceria was ruled by a class known as the High-Riders. These rulers, descended from the Dark Age, possessed extraordinary technology; even an infant primarch had fallen to their specialized anesthetics.
Forced to fight in the arena, the primarch matured rapidly. After surviving a gladiatorial contest in which only one person could live, he climbed to the top of the