Warmaster Slaydo

The Vow

Slaydo was a senior Lord Militant of the Astra Militarum when the Imperium's High Command resolved, in 754.M41, to launch a sector-scale reconquest of the Sabbat Worlds — the cluster of approximately one hundred Imperial systems that had fallen to Chaos warlord forces during the Age of Apostasy and the centuries following. The reconquest's scale was unprecedented for the era: a Crusade in everything but the name, requiring the Warmastership office to be revived for the first time since the Macharian campaigns.

Slaydo was the High Command's designated Warmaster. He accepted the office at the Pilgrimage of Saint Sabbat — the Imperial Cult's preparatory ceremony for the Crusade — and swore, in personal vow before the High Lords' representatives and the Saint's relics on Hagia, that he would not return to Terra until the Sabbat Worlds were once again Imperial space. The vow was witnessed by his senior staff, including the then-young Lord General Macaroth, whom Slaydo had already identified as his most promising junior commander.

The First Years

The Crusade's opening campaigns were Slaydo's. He commanded the reconquest of Hagia itself — Saint Sabbat's pilgrim world, the Crusade's symbolic centre — within the first three years of the campaign. He liberated five additional Sabbat worlds in the subsequent decade. He pushed the Imperial line forward at a tempo that the post-Crusade military histories would describe as unsustainable in retrospect and unmatched in execution at the time.

What Slaydo did particularly well, by surviving staff officer testimony, was the political work of holding a multi-Chapter, multi-regiment, multi-Mechanicus-forge-world Crusade together under a single command authority. He spent more time in tent-tribunals adjudicating regimental disputes than he spent on the front line. He was photographed, at the height of the Crusade's opening years, more often in administrative robes than in battle armour. He preferred it that way. He believed the Crusade would be won by the work that prevented Crusade officers from killing each other.

Balhaut

The Balhaut engagement in 765.M41 was the Crusade's first major set-piece battle against a unified Chaos command. The opposing force was led by Archon Nadzybar — the senior Chaos warlord of the Sabbat region, the figure who had personally consolidated several previously-feuding warband leaders under a single command for the purpose of meeting Slaydo's advance. The Imperial intelligence prior to the engagement was that Nadzybar's force was approximately twice Imperial estimates and that the engagement would be costly.

The engagement was costly. Slaydo's Crusade fleet broke Nadzybar's blockade at Balhaut's orbit and landed forces on the planet. The ground engagement ran for three weeks. At the engagement's culmination, Slaydo personally led the strike on Nadzybar's command-bastion — a strike his staff had advised him against — and engaged Nadzybar in close combat. The duel was, by the surviving Commissariat record, brief. Nadzybar killed Slaydo. Slaydo killed Nadzybar in the same exchange. Both were dead within the same minute. The Imperial line broke through the bastion's defenses and the engagement was won.

I will not return to Terra. The Sabbat Worlds will return to Terra in my place.

— Slaydo, attributed pre-Balhaut

The Last Order

Slaydo's final order, written in his own hand and delivered to his staff before the strike on Nadzybar, designated Lord General Macaroth as his successor to the Warmastership. The designation was, by Imperial Crusade convention, normally subject to High Command ratification. Slaydo had anticipated the convention and worded the order specifically to bypass it: the order designated Macaroth as Acting Warmaster effective immediately upon Slaydo's death or incapacitation, and committed the Crusade's continuation under Macaroth's command until the High Lords' explicit countermand.

The High Lords' countermand never came. Macaroth assumed the Warmastership on the field at Balhaut, was confirmed by the Crusade's surviving senior staff, and continued the campaign Slaydo had begun. The two-thousand-year-distant view of post-Crusade historiography is that Slaydo's last order was the single decisive administrative act of the Sabbat Worlds reconquest — that without the smooth succession, the Crusade would have collapsed into a leadership-vacuum dispute within months of Balhaut, and that the worlds Slaydo had committed his life to recovering would have been lost again. Macaroth continued the work. The work continued.