Battle
The Gothic War
The Twelfth Black Crusade · War of the Blackstone Fortresses · The Despoiler's Reach
TIME OF ENDING · M41
The Despoiler Comes for the Talismans of Vaul
Of the thirteen Black Crusades Abaddon the Despoiler has hurled out of the Eye of Terror, the twelfth was no blunt thrust at a single world but a sector-wide war of conquest, and its true prize was hidden in plain sight. Drifting in the void of the Gothic Sector lay six colossal artefacts the Imperium had long since pressed into service as void-fortresses: the Blackstone Fortresses, ancient star-forts the Aeldari name the Talismans of Vaul. Abaddon understood what the Adeptus Mechanicus never had. A single Blackstone could shatter a planet; three, working in concert, could murder a star. To seize them was to gain a weapon against which no Imperial fleet could stand.
The Warp Storms Fall and the Bases Burn
Abaddon's preparation was patient and total. As warp storms boiled up to isolate the Gothic Sector from Imperial relief, his fleets struck in 143.M41 against the Imperial Navy bases scattered through the sector, catching squadrons at anchor and reducing dockyards to slag. By 144.M41 the whole Gothic Sector was aflame, its battlefleets fighting a desperate rearguard across a hundred contested systems. By 147.M41 the entire Lysades sub-sector had fallen under Chaos dominion, and Abaddon's grip closed one by one upon the Blackstone Fortresses, turning the Imperium's own god-weapons against the worlds they had been raised to defend.
Ravensburg Holds the Sector Together
That the Gothic Sector did not simply collapse is owed to Lord Admiral Cornelius Ravensburg, commander of Battlefleet Gothic, who fought a grinding war of attrition with whatever hulls he could keep void-worthy. Where Abaddon sought decisive, sector-cracking blows, Ravensburg denied him the climactic battle, trading space for time, husbanding his capital ships, and bleeding the Chaos fleets at every crossing. It was a war measured in years and warships rather than days, and Ravensburg's refusal to be broken or baited held the line long enough for the storms to begin, at last, to thin. The Despoiler had the fortresses; he did not yet have the sector.
The Aeldari Strike at Gethsemane
The turning came in 151.M41 at the Battle of Gethsemane. Ravensburg pursued a retreating Chaos fleet into the Gethsemane region with seventeen capital ships and twenty escorts, expecting a hard and even fight. Instead, Craftworld Aeldari warships materialised as if from nowhere directly across the enemy line of retreat. Caught between Ravensburg's guns and the Aeldari, the Chaos fleet was annihilated, though a dozen more Imperial vessels were crippled in the slaughter. Why the Aeldari intervened was never learned, but the Imperium's savants believe they had grasped the danger of Abaddon wielding the Talismans of Vaul and judged even an alliance with the Mon-keigh the lesser doom.
Four Fortresses Die, the Despoiler Slips Away
As the isolating warp storms abated in the late months of 151.M41, reinforcements from neighbouring battlefleets reached Ravensburg's bloodied command, and the strategic balance tipped at last. In the fighting that followed, four of the six Blackstone Fortresses were destroyed rather than surrendered, the Imperium accepting the loss of the god-weapons over the horror of their capture. Yet Abaddon was not destroyed. The Despoiler withdrew into the Eye of Terror with two of the surviving fortresses, his hardest-won prize intact, leaving the Gothic Sector a graveyard of hulls but unconquered. As ever, he had escaped to scheme again.
A Rehearsal for the Thirteenth
The Gothic War is reckoned a strategic Imperial victory, but a costly and hollow one. Whole sub-sectors had been depopulated, hundreds of warships lost, and four irreplaceable Blackstone Fortresses reduced to drifting rubble. Worse, Abaddon had carried two away. In the Imperium's grim hindsight the twelfth Black Crusade was no failure for the Despoiler but a rehearsal, a proving of fleets, doctrines and warp-craft that would feed directly into the Thirteenth Black Crusade and the assault on Cadia. The void-graveyards of the Gothic Sector stand as a warning that Abaddon does not seek territory for its own sake, but weapons with which to break the galaxy.
See also
Sources
- Lexicanum: 12th Black Crusade
- Warhammer 40k Wiki: Gothic War
- Warhammer 40k Wiki: Blackstone Fortress
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