Event · M41–M42

Devastation of Baal

The Devastation of Baal was Hive Fleet Leviathan’s assault on Baal, homeworld of the Blood Angels. One account dates the battle to about 999.M41; the campaign summary dates it to the early 42nd millennium. The attack formed part of the Third Tyrannic War. In the period preceding it, the fortified worlds of the Cryptus System, long relied upon to shield Baal from the Great Devourer, fell before the leading edge of Leviathan’s advance. Commander Dante, Chapter Master of the Blood Angels, used the respite to strengthen the defences of Baal and its two moons, Baal Secundus and Baal Primus, while launching pre-emptive strikes against splinter fleets to delay and weaken the approaching tendril. He summoned the Chapter’s successor Chapters, among them the Flesh Tearers under Gabriel Seth, in what became the largest gathering of Sanguinius’ bloodline since the Horus Heresy. When Leviathan arrived in force, a Blood Angels battlefleet met it in the void above Baal but was overwhelmed by the sheer number of bio-ships. Tyranid landings followed on Baal, Baal Secundus and Baal Primus, where Imperial forces held a layered defence anchored on the Chapter’s fortress-monastery and its void shields. The shield generator was disabled after genestealers infiltrated the fortress depths, and the line collapsed; Commander Dante, badly wounded, slew the Swarmlord amid the fighting on Baal Secundus, while Chief Librarian Mephiston, who had gone with the Librarians Gaius Rhacelus and Lucius Antros to the Cruor Mountains on Baal to open a portal into Khorne’s realm and kill Ka’Bandha, did not fight in the siege after the failed ritual left them trapped by a cave-in for the rest of the battle. A separate listing of commanders names Mephiston among them, and the two accounts do not agree. As Baal Primus stood on the point of falling, the Great Rift tore open across the galaxy, and the Bloodthirster Ka’Bandha, ancient foe of Sanguinius, led hosts of Khorne’s daemons against the Tyranids themselves. The excommunicated Knights of Blood, fighting alongside Dante and Seth as allies, gave themselves to cover the retreat of the survivors as Baal Primus was overrun. Baal was relieved during the Indomitus Crusade, when the fleet of the resurrected Primarch Roboute Guilliman reached the system and, together with the surviving defenders, broke the Tyranid presence there. Hive Fleet Leviathan’s ultimate fate remains uncertain, its passing marked only by a mound of Tyranid skulls left on Baal Primus in the shape of Ka’Bandha’s sigil. Guilliman oversaw the reconstruction of Baal and named Dante Lord Regent of the Imperium Nihilus, the portion of the Imperium cut off from the Astronomican beyond the Great Rift. The battle, among the costliest in the Blood Angels’ history, with several successor Chapters destroyed outright, stands alongside the wider Indomitus Crusade as a defining event of the era that followed the Rift’s opening. Chapter Master Gabriel Seth of the Flesh Tearers was among the successor Masters Dante summoned, and before the Tyranids arrived Dante entrusted him with the Reliquary of Amit. The Flesh Tearers deployed to Baal Primus and fought beside the Knights of Blood. When the Great Rift opened and Ka’Bandha’s daemons manifested on Baal Primus, Seth evacuated his remaining forces while the Knights of Blood covered the withdrawal in a suicidal counter-attack. After Dante was wounded by the Swarmlord, Seth led the retreat to the Blood Angels’ fortress-monastery on Baal and held the defence until the Indomitus Crusade arrived. He accepted the later influx of Primaris reinforcements with open scepticism, fearing that Roboute Guilliman would turn the Chapters of Sanguinius’s bloodline into undifferentiated copies of Ultramarines in red armour. Captain Cato Sicarius of the Ultramarines was among the Indomitus Crusade forces that reached Baal, and he briefly saw Commander Dante there before Dante’s meeting with Guilliman.

See where Devastation of Baal occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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