Warmaster Macaroth

The Inheritance

Macaroth was, at the moment of Slaydo's death at Balhaut, a Lord General of approximately thirty-eight Terran years' age — young by the standards of the Imperial Lord-General officer corps, where senior commanders typically reach the rank in their fifth or sixth decade. Slaydo had identified him early as the most promising junior commander in the Crusade staff and had been positioning him for the eventual Warmastership for the better part of a decade. The Imperial High Command was not, by surviving correspondence, in agreement with this assessment. Several senior Lord Militants — Bulledin and Lugo prominent among them — had expected the office to come to them by seniority.

Macaroth's elevation on the Balhaut field, secured by Slaydo's final written order, was therefore politically contentious. Macaroth's first Crusade-staff council as Warmaster was, by the contemporary commissarial record, a sequence of nearly-tabled motions to reverse the elevation that did not, in the end, advance. Macaroth's working assumption, expressed in private to his most-trusted staff officers, was that he had perhaps a year to demonstrate that Slaydo had chosen correctly. He had less than a year. He chose to use the time differently than his rivals expected.

The Long Crusade

What Macaroth did with his Warmastership was extend Slaydo's vow into a campaign of attritional discipline. Slaydo had pushed the Crusade forward at a pace the surviving staff officers considered unsustainable. Macaroth slowed the tempo. He spent more time on supply consolidation than on front-line advance. He invested in logistics architecture — supply depots, regimental rotation rotation cycles, the Astra Militarum's first standardised promotion procedures across multiple regiments — that would let the Crusade fight for a generation rather than a decade.

The slowdown was, in the first three years, politically costly. The Imperial High Command was accustomed to Slaydo's tempo of liberation announcements and read Macaroth's slower pace as either incompetence or a Macaroth attempt to consolidate his position rather than fight. Macaroth declined to defend his approach in public. He continued the slowdown. By the eighth year of his Warmastership the rate of consolidated worlds-per-decade had exceeded Slaydo's, the supply depots had begun providing reliable forward bases for the Crusade's continued advance, and the rivalrous Lord Militants had been reassigned, retired, or killed in their respective theatre assignments. Macaroth had outlasted them.

The Anarch

The Anarch Sek — the Chaos warlord who had succeeded Nadzybar as the senior figure of the Sabbat-region heretic forces — was Macaroth's primary opponent for the bulk of his Warmastership. Sek was, by Imperial intelligence assessment, more politically sophisticated than Nadzybar had been. Where Nadzybar had been a unifying warlord who held disparate warbands together by personal charisma, Sek was an institutional figure who had constructed a hierarchical Chaos military bureaucracy modelled, by deliberate inversion, on the Imperial Crusade's own administrative practices.

Macaroth's pursuit of Sek was the centrepiece of his Warmastership. The pursuit ran for nearly fifty Terran years. Macaroth aged visibly during it — the Crusade's chapter artists who maintained portraits of the senior staff for institutional record produced portraits of Macaroth at five-year intervals, and the progression from his elevation at thirty-eight to his current gaunt and grey-haired late-M41 portrait is a documentary of what the Crusade had taken from him. He continued. He had said, in the first year of his Warmastership, that the Crusade would be finished by him or by his successor and that he intended to be the one. He has not yet been wrong.

Slaydo did not finish the Crusade. I will not finish the Crusade. Whoever finishes the Crusade will be the third name.

— Macaroth, attributed M41 staff council

M42 Status

Macaroth remains the active Warmaster of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade at the time of this codex's compilation. The Crusade has been running for approximately two centuries by the most recent dating; Macaroth has been Warmaster for approximately one hundred and ninety of those years. He is, by every Imperial juvenat measure, older than any active Lord-General-equivalent in the Imperium's recorded administration, exceeding even the second-longest-tenured Lord Militant by a wide margin.

The Anarch Sek's fate is, by the most recent Crusade dispatches available, unresolved. The recent engagements have brought Sek's main force into a constricted region of the Sabbat sector where, by Macaroth's expressed intent, the final engagement of the Crusade will take place. Whether Macaroth will live to see the engagement is, by his own occasional admission, uncertain. He has named a designated successor — Lord General Van Voytz — and the Crusade's continuation arrangements are in place. The Crusade does not depend on him personally any longer. The work he has done has institutionalised the Crusade into something that can finish itself if he cannot. He prefers to finish it himself. The work continues.