Hechtor Dravere

Hechtor Dravere was a Lord General of the Astra Militarum and a senior commander of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, remembered chiefly as a rival to Ibram Gaunt.

Dravere held high command under Warmaster Slaydo during the crusade’s opening campaigns against the Archenemy’s hold on the Sabbat Worlds sector, and expected to inherit Slaydo’s authority after the Warmaster’s death following the victory at Balhaut. Slaydo instead passed his baton, and the symbolic weight of succession, to the newly raised Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt, a slight Dravere never accepted. When troopers of Gaunt’s own Tanith First and Only were killed during the destruction of a compromised troop transport at Menazoid Epsilon, Dravere used the incident to bring Gaunt before a court martial, prosecuting the case through his aide, Colonel Flense, in an attempt to have Gaunt removed from command and, ultimately, executed.

The prosecution unravelled when Dravere himself was exposed as having conspired against the crusade’s own command structure in pursuit of personal advancement, a betrayal that cost him his command and, by most accounts, his life. His fall is bound to the early Sabbat Worlds Crusade under Warmasters Slaydo and Macaroth, alongside contemporaries such as Lord General Barthol Van Voytz, and to the Menazoid Epsilon affair as the episode through which his rivalry with Gaunt was finally resolved.