Tanith

Tanith was a forest world in the Sabbat Worlds, its landscape dominated by nalwood, a species of tree capable of slow migration across the forest floor. The world’s name survives in Imperial record chiefly through the regiment it gave to the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, since Tanith itself no longer exists in any form its inhabitants would have recognised.

In the early stages of the Crusade, Warmaster Slaydo ordered Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt to Tanith to raise three regiments of Guardsmen from its forest-dwelling population. On the same night the founding was completed, a Chaos splinter fleet fell upon the world and burned its forests to ash, an event recorded as the Fall of Tanith. Of the regiments intended, only the Tanith First was able to depart before the world’s destruction, leaving it thereafter without a homeworld to garrison or return to.

The survivors, styled the Tanith First-and-Only, carried forward habits shaped by generations spent moving unseen through nalwood stands: quiet approach, effective camouflage, and an unfailing sense of direction in terrain that offered no fixed landmarks. Colm Corbec and Major Rawne were counted among the regiment’s senior survivors, and the unit later absorbed volunteers from Vervunhive on the world of Verghast after that world’s own ordeal, broadening a formation that had begun as Tanith alone.

Tanith itself remains uninhabited and unreclaimed, its forests gone and its name preserved mainly through the regiment that still fights under it within the Sabbat Worlds Crusade theatre. For the Ghosts, the world functions less as a place to which they might return than as an origin point that explains why they fight, and move, as they do.