Event · M41–M42
Third Tyrannic War
The Third Tyrannic War is the Imperium’s name for its third great Tyranid offensive, waged chiefly by Hive Fleet Leviathan and culminating at Baal. Following the earlier reckonings of Hive Fleets Behemoth and Kraken, Leviathan split upon reaching the eastern and southern Imperium, its swarms consuming worlds along the Baal system’s approaches before converging on the Blood Angels’ home system in strength. The war is remembered chiefly for its final phase, the Devastation of Baal, fought in the last years of the forty-first millennium and the opening of the forty-second. At Baal, the Blood Angels under Chief Chapter Master Dante met Leviathan’s bio-ships with a garrison already thinned by the losses of a century’s campaigning and by the Chapter’s own inherited afflictions of the Red Thirst and the Black Rage. Orbital defences fell in stages as tyranid organisms descended upon Baal Secundus and Baal itself, and the Chapter’s remaining companies, together with allied Blood Angels successor chapters, withdrew to make their stand upon the home world’s ash wastes and fortress-monastery. Dante was gravely wounded in the fighting, and the Chapter’s survival hung in the balance until a relief fleet, diverted from Roboute Guilliman’s Indomitus Crusade in the wake of the Great Rift’s opening, arrived to break the siege. Leviathan’s bio-ships were destroyed or driven from the system, but Baal emerged scarred, its Secundus moon rendered all but uninhabitable and the Blood Angels’ numbers reduced to a fraction of their former strength, a loss partly offset by the arrival of newly gifted Primaris reinforcements. The Third Tyrannic War is reckoned within the wider upheavals of the Great Rift era, and it stands alongside the First and Second Tyrannic Wars as one of the Imperium’s principal reckonings with the Tyranid threat, with Baal itself remaining the war’s fixed point on the galactic map and its clearest timeline anchor to Hive Fleet Leviathan’s advance.
See where Third Tyrannic War occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.