Control antihielo

It's finally done. Emperor be praised, it's over. The fall of the final stronghold on Hattin to the battered but victorious Battlegroup Orias came last night, on the eve of Candlemass, 119.M39, some three years after the Strategos Imperialis had originally expected it. The world itself is

shattered – the ancient shrine world's great cathedrals have been blasted to wrecks in over a year of siege fighting against Enemy forces dug into massive fortifications – and countless priceless relics of the Ecclesiarcy, some of them dating back to the founding of the Imperium itself, must be considered lost forever.

There can be no single excuse for our delay in taking Hattin – for no undertaking so vast and complex as an Imperial Crusade can ever stand or fall on a single event – but the bloodbath of the retaking of Chalons, a sudden enemy counter-offensive which overwhelmed a Guard army

desperately short of supplies and bought the Enemy precious time to raise fresh armies and fortify the worlds protecting Hattin from our advance, must surely be considered a major factor. Lord General Orias himself blames the disaster of Chalons on the disappearance of the Precept of Silence, a strike cruiser carrying a force of Astartes veterans that formed our Battlegroup's mobile reserve. Though they rejoined the Crusade later, the Disciples of Caliban, who had should have intervened to turn back any sudden Enemy advance, were mysteriously absent at the critical moment, and showed no interest in the Lord General's increasingly desperate petitions for support. It is a testament to the stubbornness of the Kalte Storm Regiments that they were able to hold the line at Hawthorne despite this and prevent the Hattin front collapsing completely.

Of all the minor battles fought on the fringes of the Tiberias crusade, the Amaymon suppression is perhaps the best known – despite its lack of scale and particular savagery (although the minions of the enemy were, as ever, brutal in the extreme in their attacks, the revolt was short-lived and swiftly crushed). Whilst some men become known for the decisive battles they fought in, so do the lesser battles fought by the great heroes of the Imperium become events of note. Lord Millitant Obscurus Lucretius Magnus is such a man – raised by the force of events, his skill as a leader of men and his own stubborn sense of duty and honour from the obscurity of a backwater Planetary Defence Force command to his eventual role, in 301.M39, as the segmentum's Lord Militant, the supreme

commander of the Imperial Guard in the Obscurus Segmentum and answerable only to the High Lord Militant on Holy Terra itself. In understanding the man who rallied the Guard to victory through the desperate times of the Eleventh Black Crusade, one should begin with the battle that set him on that path.

If the simultaneous assassinations of Planetary Governor Lord Iblis and Minister Klaus Otto of Internal Security came as a shock to the population of Amaymon, then the storming of the palace in Sanctity, the capital, must have been unthinkable – an armed mob of cultists, hundreds strong and following a well-laid battle-plan suddenly materialising out of Sanctity's population just as similar forces attacked Imperial holdings across the planet. Whilst there had been sporadic disturbances before this point, no-one had seriously believed the cultist forces capable of fielding an army that could topple the planetary government.

With the planet's civil authorities paralysed, the PDF's central command and communications facility in enemy hands and cult cells attacking all across the planet, it would have been no surprise had Amaymon collapsed into anarchy before any effective response could be organised by the decapitated command structure of the PDF. Instead, taking the initiative, Colonel Lucretius – a man who for all his sense of duty had never commanded more than an infantry company in action – bypassed the compromised command facility in the palace and illegally sent out a plea for the local units of the Amaymon PDF to protect the people and the critical infrastructure of the planet. It has been said that Lucretius, who never realised the respect his men held the man they called 'Old Lucky' in, was stunned when his message was somehow instantly relayed around the planet's entire vox-network and the Planetary Defence Force, to a man, formed up and rolled out into the streets. The battle to retake the Sanctity Palace lasted a day and a half of fierce fighting, by which time the cult's forces in the capital had been utterly crushed. Colonel Lucretius, by unspoken consent, took command of the PDF and the small Arbites force to survive the bombing of the Sanctity courthouse and tirelessly led them over the following weeks to oust cult forces from the rest of the planet. The cult, although it fought desperately to survive, was no match for the vengeful Imperial forces - in no small part due to the disappearance of its leader, the mysterious Semyaza. This heretic's fate is unknown but it has been hypothesized that he was killed whilst attempting to flee the planet; persistent rumours remain of a battle occurring in high planetary orbit around the time of the revolt. With the situation stabilized, Lucretius was named Governor-Militant and swiftly returned

Amaymon's promethium refining industries to operation. He was praised for his actions by Lord General Orias, and after witnessing a new Lord Governor swear the Amalathian Oath in the palace's High Chapel, he accepted the Lord General's offer of a commission as General in the Imperial Guard. His promotion to Orias' second in command, and the events of the siege of Hattin itself, of course, are the stuff of legend and need little description...”