The Red Terror

The Red Terror is among the most infamous of all named Tyranid creatures, a monstrous Ravener that prowled the fringes of Hive Fleet Kraken's great incursion. It announced itself fully two years before the fleet's invasion was officially recognised, striking in 990.M41, and some Imperial scholars have come to believe it was no ordinary beast at all but the very first Ravener the Hive Mind ever grew, a prototype predator engineered to burst from the earth without warning and swallow its prey whole.

Those few who glimpsed the creature and lived spoke of a horror sheathed in blood-red chitin, its talons able to pierce rockcrete and its gaping maw wide enough to engulf a grown man in a single bite. Accounts of its size never agreed; some insisted it was merely a large Ravener, while others swore it rivalled the bulk of a Trygon or a Mawloc. What none disputed was its savagery, nor the awful speed with which it moved through the dark beneath the world.

Its one documented rampage came upon the Imperial mining world of Devlan Primus, out on the Eastern Fringe, where it hunted the defenders across twenty solar days. It tore its way into a starport compound and slaughtered two dozen souls before it could be driven back, and each time it returned it killed anew before withdrawing into the mine shaft from which it had come, dragging the carved remains of its victims down into the blackness to feed. In desperation a search-and-destroy team was sent into the tunnels to end it. They did not come out; they met their deaths upon its dripping scythes in the deep dark below.

What ultimately became of the Red Terror was never learned. In the aftermath, a great ore-hauler that had fled Devlan Primus laden with refugees drifted into the world of Adri's Hope, silent and unlit, answering no hails before it made a cold, automated landing far from any settlement. What waited within its holds was never officially recorded, but the implication has haunted those who study the incident ever since: that the beast may never have been left behind at all, and had merely found itself a new hunting ground.