Tanith First-and-Only

The Tanith First-and-Only is an Astra Militarum (the Imperium’s regular human armies. Better known as Gaunt’s Ghosts, after its commanding officer, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt, it fought throughout the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, the Imperial campaign to reclaim a sector of worlds named for the warrior-saint Sabbat, and is remembered as one of the crusade’s more distinctive formations, in large part because its native world no longer exists.

The regiment’s founding is recorded as taking place in 765.M41, when Tanith was called upon for the first time in its history to raise troops for the Astra Militarum. Three regiments were planned, numbering some six thousand men under Gaunt’s overall command, but on the night of the founding ceremony a Chaos splinter fleet, slipped past the Imperial Navy’s blockade, fell upon the system. Judging the world indefensible, Gaunt ordered as many troops and as much equipment evacuated as could be managed before Tanith and most of its people were destroyed from orbit. The roughly 3,500 survivors were combined into the single Tanith First-and-Only, with Colm Corbec and Elim Rawne, members of a delegation sent to confront Gaunt over the evacuation, promoted to colonel and major respectively. Gaunt separately held a Right of Settlement, granted by Warmaster Slaydo, entitling him to claim the first world he helped liberate as a new home for the Tanith survivors, a prospect some in the regiment came to call New Tanith.

Lacking a homeworld from which to draw replacements, the regiment suffered heavy attrition in its earliest campaigns, including losses to a friendly-fire incident at Voltis Watergate on Voltemand and during the recapture of the forge world Fortis Binary, and by its deployment on Monthax it had been reduced to some 1,500 men. It nonetheless became noted for exceptional stealth, marksmanship and scouting ability under camo-cloaks, each guardsman also carrying a war-knife known as “straight silver”; it was on Blackshard that sniper Hlaine Larkin is credited with coining the name Gaunt’s Ghosts. Its irregular bearing and lack of an enforced uniform drew the scorn of more conventionally decorated formations, notably the Jantine Patricians and Volpone Bluebloods.

After the siege of Vervunhive the regiment absorbed recruits from the destroyed hive city of Verghast under Warmaster Macaroth’s Act of Consolation, a change accompanied by cultural friction between Tanith and Verghastite elements that was only gradually resolved through shared combat and the promotion of Verghastites into the regiment’s command and scouting cadres; by the fighting on Aexe Cardinal the two elements are recorded as operating as a cohesive whole. The regiment went on to serve on the shrine world Hagia, defending the remains of Saint Sabbat, on Phantine, where its infiltration skills won official recognition in the capture of the cities of Cirenholm and Ouranberg, on Menazoid Epsilon, where it uncovered a conspiracy against the crusade’s command, and on Herodor, where it served as honour guard to a reincarnated Saint Sabbat. It later incorporated survivors of the Belladon 81st Reconnaissance Regiment, and the Tanith, Verghastite and Belladon elements together are recorded as fighting as one regiment by the crusade’s later stages.

Command rested throughout with Ibram Gaunt, supported by officers including Colm Corbec and Elim Rawne, though Gaunt was for a period separated from direct command after leading an infiltration mission to Gereon to eliminate the traitor general Noches Sturm; in his absence the regiment fought under Colonel Lucien Wilder of the Belladon 81st, reclaiming the Tanith name and Gaunt’s command only after Wilder’s death in a rearguard action on Ancreon Sextus. The Ghosts later helped liberate Gereon, suffered further losses defending the fortress Hinzerhaus on Jago, where Gaunt was captured and lost his sight, and were rotated to garrison duty on Balhaut, where the regiment took custody of the defector Mabbon Etogaur before deploying to the research station Salvation’s Reach on intelligence he supplied. Repeatedly rebuilt through successive intakes of Verghastite and Belladon recruits, the Tanith First-and-Only endures as the record of a destroyed world carried forward in the service of its last soldiers.