Event · M41

Burning of Tanith

The Burning of Tanith was the destruction of Tanith by a Chaos fleet in the 41st millennium, the night its new regiment departed for war. Tanith was an Imperial world of dense nalwood forests, whose timber furnished the carven staves and long knives carried by its native soldiery, and whose culture of stealth and woodcraft distinguished the Tanith First‑and‑Only among the many Imperial Guard regiments then mustering for the Sabbat Worlds Crusade under Warmaster Slaydo. The regiment’s founding and its departure from Tanith were near‑simultaneous events: on the founding fields outside the capital, new troopers swore the oath of tempering over their freshly forged blades even as the muster prepared to embark, and as the newly formed First‑and‑Only lifted to orbit to join the crusade fleet, an unidentified Chaos force fell upon the world below, timing its assault to the hour of the levy’s departure. Popular report has sometimes named the raiders as the Infardi, but the fuller accounts of the burning describe an unnamed Chaos fleet, and the Infardi attribution is not well supported. Colonel‑Commissar Ibram Gaunt commanded the Tanith First‑and‑Only as it left the system, with officers including Colm Corbec and Major Rawne among those who watched their homeworld burn from the transports’ viewports as the crusade fleet cleared for the warp. Troopers such as Try Again Bragg, Larkin and Feygor stood among the ranks that night, and Gaunt is recorded as taking aboard Brin Milo, a Tanith boy left without kin on the ground, so that the regiment departed with what was by then its only living link to a civilian population already lost. No Imperial relief or counter‑strike reached Tanith in time; the assault proceeded unopposed, and the planet was left reduced to ash, its population and settlements destroyed within a single night before the regiment had even reached its first engagement of the crusade. The burning struck off Tanith from the roster of Imperial worlds and foreclosed any further levies from the planet, so that the First‑and‑Only became a regiment with no homeworld to reinforce or return to — a status without ready precedent elsewhere in Guard tradition. Its survivors took to calling themselves the Ghosts, a name recording both their status as the last remnant of a dead world and the reputation for silent, unseen movement that the Tanith woodcraft gave them in later campaigns. Rawne’s resentment of Gaunt in the crusade’s early battles is itself remembered as a legacy of that night, born of a command decision at the evacuation that Rawne believed had cost lives that need not have been lost, and the friction between the two officers coloured the regiment’s internal relationships for years afterward even as they fought side by side across the Sabbat Worlds. The event followed directly upon the regiment’s founding and stands as the defining loss behind its subsequent service alongside Slaydo’s Sabbat Worlds Crusade, framing every campaign that followed — from the crusade’s opening battles through the many Sabbat Worlds the Ghosts were committed to in the years after — as fought by soldiers who could lose no more than they already had. Later tradition within the regiment held the anniversary of the burning as a private day of remembrance rather than a public commemoration, one observed quietly by those who had watched the fires from orbit and by the few, like Milo, who had known the world only as a living place before that night.

See where Burning of Tanith occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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