| abstract | - At the end of the Horus Heresy and further on into the Great Scouring, the Kharybdis saw extensive use on both sides of the conflict. As the Loyalist Legions hounded their traitorous brothers from warzone to warzone, entire fleets burned in void battles in which the lives of countless thousands more Astartes lost their lives. At the end of the Great Scouring, hundreds, possibly even thousands of Kharybdis served the Astartes faithfully, and in so doing began to develop certain characteristics for which it too would become infamous in the ranks of Loyalist and Traitor alike. The Ordo Malleus of the Imperial Inquisition is in possession of several sealed accounts that pertain to the Kharybdis Assault Claw, and while they are mostly contradictory, it is likely that they all contain at least a fragment of truth. There are some that suggest that the Kharybdis' Machine Spirit developed the same near Abominable Intelligence that plagued the Dreadclaw, but of a very different demeanour. Rather than the many malign incidents suffered by the Loyalist Legions at the hands of their Dreadclaws, the Kharybdis seemed to became attached to individual masters, and grew to be highly unpredictable when they were not close to hand. Should the master the machine was attached to leave the area for too long, Tech-priests and Servitors that were tending the machine would fall prey to grizzly accidents. If the machine's chosen master died or was otherwise unable to tend to the machine it would tolerate no others to be within its armoured hold. This fact became revealed during the worst possible time -- during atmospheric entry the great iris hatch would spontaneously open, incinerating those inside to ashes. During the Great Scouring, the Loyalists would eventually stop using the Kharybdis altogether, instead turning to Thunderhawk gunships or Caestus Assault Rams for their ship-to-ship assaults, but they lacked the brute effectiveness of the Kharybdis. However, the assault craft remained in use amongst the Traitor Legions, and as such shared their fate when they fled to the Eye of Terror. Over the millennia, the tides of the Warp changed the Kharybdis as it changed the Traitors, creating a thing of dark sentience and wholly malefic intent.
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