Imperial Institutum
The Tanith First-and-Only
Gaunt's Ghosts · The First-and-Only · Men of Tanith
ASTRA MILITARUM · IMPERIUM
The World That Burned First
The Astra Militarum is the Imperium's mortal army — billions of human soldiers raised from a hundred thousand worlds, each planet tithing regiments to the God-Emperor's wars. Tanith was one such world: a quiet forest planet of the Sabbat sector, its people foresters and trappers who could walk its dark nalwood groves without snapping a twig. On the night Tanith mustered its first three regiments for the Imperial Guard, a Chaos warfleet fell upon it. The forests burned. The cities burned. Tanith died in a single night, before its soldiers had ever fired a shot in the Emperor's name.
From that inferno, one man led roughly two thousand survivors to the waiting troop-ships and ordered them off-world while their homes were still aflame. They would be the first and last regiment Tanith ever raised — the First-and-Only. Soldiers, now, of a world that no longer existed.
We are Tanith. There is nowhere left to send us home to, so we will make our home in victory.
— Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt, to the survivors
Ghosts of the Nalwood
What Tanith bred, war could not unmake. Its foresters had grown up moving unseen through the nalwood, and that instinct made them the finest scouts and stealth troops in the crusade. The Ghosts excel at infiltration, reconnaissance, and the silent killing of sentries — slipping behind enemy lines, marking targets, and vanishing before the alarm sounds. Each man carries a straight silver warknife, a Tanith blade as much sacred relic as weapon, and many bear blue tattoos in the old island style of their drowned homeworld.
They earned their nickname the hard way. On the fortress world of Voltemand and in the trench-mazes beyond, enemy troops swore the Tanith were not men at all but phantoms — death that arrived without sound and left without trace. The name stuck. They became the Ghosts: a regiment of the dead, fighting for the living.
You did not hear the Ghosts. That was how you knew they had already come.
— Sabbat Worlds field-cant
A Hard and Honest Sword
A Commissar is the Imperium's political officer — the cold enforcer of discipline who executes cowards and shores up morale at gunpoint. Ibram Gaunt is rarer still: a Colonel-Commissar, holding both the commissar's pistol and full command of the regiment. Most of his caste rule through fear alone. Gaunt rules through fear and something the Imperium seldom rewards — a stubborn, dangerous decency.
He spends men sparingly, listens to his sergeants, and shields his Ghosts from the casual cruelties of higher command and the schemes of rival officers who covet his troops. The men call him "the Boy" behind his back and would die for him to his face. In a galaxy that treats soldiers as ammunition, Gaunt's insistence that his people matter is itself a quiet act of defiance.
A good soldier obeys orders. A good officer earns them.
— Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt
The Saint's Long War
The Ghosts fight in the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, the vast reconquest of a sector lost to Chaos and named for Saint Sabbat — a warrior-martyr whose ancient liberation of these stars the present crusade strives to repeat. It is a war measured in decades and worlds, and the First-and-Only have bled across its length: holding the line at Voltemand, storming forge-cities, and grinding through campaigns where whole regiments are spent like coin.
They can never be reinforced from home, for home is ash. Every Ghost lost is lost forever, and still they march. Theirs is the purest expression of the Guardsman's lot — ordinary men, no home behind them, no certainty before them, holding the dark with a silver knife and a dead world's name on their lips. Tanith is gone. The First-and-Only endure.
Men of Tanith — do you want to live forever?
— battle-cry of the First-and-Only
See also
Sources
⚜ Enter the Interactive Codex →Languages: Türkçe
Unofficial fan project · Not affiliated with Games Workshop · Non-commercial editorial reference under fair use.