Maximus Thane

Maximus Thane was Second Captain of the Fists Exemplar, an Imperial Fists successor Chapter, and led its survivors through the War of the Beast. The Fists Exemplar were a loyalist Space Marine Chapter of the Imperium of Man, fleet-based and charged with watching the Rubicante Flux, a Warp storm in the Abra Sector near the Segmentum Solar. Their fortress-monastery, the star fort Alcazar Astra, stood on the world of Eidolica. Thane rose to command only when the Chapter’s senior leadership was lost, and he is chiefly remembered as the officer who kept its remnant together and later ended its public existence.

The War of the Beast is recorded as falling in the mid-32nd Millennium. When the Ork warlord known as the Beast sent an Attack Moon into orbit above Eidolica, Chapter Master Alameda and First Captain Garthas were killed in the opening fighting, and Thane took command of the surviving Battle-Brothers within the Alcazar Astra, intending to defend it to the last. Marshal Bohemond of the Black Templars arrived with a fleet and persuaded him that Eidolica could not be held, and the survivors were evacuated. The Chapter then attended a meeting of Imperial Fists successor Chapters in the Phall System, took part in the assault on the Ork Attack Moon over Terra, and served among the Last Wall forces under Koorland. Thane was afterwards sent to find the Soul Drinkers, while First Captain Zerberyn led a separate force that allied with Iron Warriors under Warsmith Kalkator against a large Ork fleet. By the second invasion of Ullanor, mounted to kill the Beast, the Chapter had been reduced from three companies to fewer than seventy-three Battle-Brothers.

After the war and the treachery of Zerberyn, Thane, acting as Lord Commander of the Imperium, ordered the Fists Exemplar erased from history. Its survivors were distributed among the Adeptus Astartes, some to found new Chapters, and their existence was kept secret; a new Chapter inherited Eidolica and the battle barge Alcazar Remembered. Thane’s significance therefore rests on two points: his command of the Chapter’s last campaign, which links Eidolica, Terra and Ullanor in a single sequence, and the decision that made the Fists Exemplar extinct as a distinct Chapter. His contemporaries in these events include Bohemond, Koorland, Zerberyn and Kalkator. Thane’s own fate after the war is not recorded here, and accounts of the war’s casualty lists differ on whether he survived it.