WAAAGH! Blakskull

WAAAGH! Blakskull was an aborted incursion by Orks originating on what is now known to be the outskirts of the Ork Empire of Charendon into the Mandavi Sector in 822.M39. The WAAAGH! was an utter failure, as it was turned back short of Imperial Space in an, arguably, humiliating fashion. However, it is significant to Imperial records, due to the larger events it would trigger.

Background
The Mandavi Sector is bordered to galactic north by the fierce and persistent Warp storm designated 4E696E65; but known to locals simply as “The Night”. The wave of Imperial colonization which settled the Mandavi Sector in M37 petered out upon finding the storm impassable; although further investigations did find a single circuitous route through the storm. At the center of this route, which would come to be known as the Throat, was a single Death World, seemingly unaffected by the shoals of empyreal energy. This world would come to be referred to as Craw.

Preliminary surveys of the systems beyond the Throat found nothing of immediate interest. Plans were drawn up for a full Explorotor expedition, however these plans never had sufficient priority to be implemented. Instead, once every fifty years Battlefleet Mandavi would dispatch a single ship through the Throat to ensure that passage was still possible. The forty-fifth such expedition, in 822.M39, came racing back to Imperial space like an entire cabal of Dark Eldar were nipping at its heels. What they had to report instead was much worse.

What had previously been barren and uninhabited worlds were now teeming with unnumbered Orks. Clearly, the largest Waaagh in a century was coming to a boil on the far side of the Throat. The Levan Sub-Sector, closest to the passage, would be the first consumed by the green tide, but not the last. Imperial tacticians estimated that the Mandavi Sector would be wiped away, and that nearby Sectors would be badly mauled before the Xenos could be contained.

The Council of Mandavi
Toha Niheiticus, whose troops had affectionately called him “Ol’ Killy” during his service in the Guard, was Imperial Sector Governor of the Madavi Sector. He called a grand council upon Mandavi Prime, summoning the lords of his Sector to discuss what, if anything, could be saved. After much debate, and many arguments from planetary Governors as to why their system should be protected at the expense of their neighbors, the Chapter Master of the Blue Hand Space Marines stepped forward.

Azulite Manibus said that any attempt to turn back the Waaagh once it entered Imperial space would be a failure, by definition. He declared that the there was only one place to halt the Orks, upon Craw itself. He pledged to bring his entire Chapter to that world and give the Xenos the war they desired.

Lord Inquisitor Bartholomew Geisel, representing the Holy Ordos, rose to reply. He commended the Astartes for his brave words, but said that not even an entire Chapter of the Emperor's Angels could defeat this Waaagh.

Manibus replied that in that case, he would bring the Imperial Guard, the Navy, he would even pick bare the Planetary Defense Forces of the Mandavi Sector’s worlds. Manibus reasoned that if those soldiers would be ultimately be unable to defend their worlds through the act of dying for the Emperor upon them, they might as well die for the Emperor on Craw where they might yet hold back the night. A single Planetary Governor objected, and at a gesture from Geisel, Inquisitor Bruce Von Kurtzberg struck the potentate down; like a common Guardsman shot for cowardice. The silence which followed was broken by applause, as all turned they saw that Sector Governor Niheiticus had turned to the Chapter Master and begun to clap. Quickly, the assembled grandees joined in and the proposal was agreed to by thunderous acclamation.

The First Battle of Craw
Every existing Regiment of the Astra Militarum in the Sector was brought to Craw. They dug hundreds of kilometers of trenches and built bunkers and fire bases. Millions of men from various PDFs were raised into the Imperial Guard and delivered to that world. The cruisers of Battlefleet Mandavi harried and destroyed the first Ork craft to breach the system, before falling back to provide fire support to forces on the world. They did not have to worry about preventing the greenskins from bypassing the world, no Ork ever born would pass up such a war. Above it all, the Space Marines of the Blue Hand watched and waited to deploy from orbit wherever the fighting was thickest.

For eight days, the Orks rained from the skys of Craw. On the ninth day, the Waaagh Boss, a lumbering abomination named Grimtooth Blakskull led an Assault upon the center of the Imperial lines. Azulite Manibus and the Blue Hand 9th Company sallied forth to meet him. While the order of the events that happened next are unclear, we know that they resulted in the Orks fleeing in terror, the Imperial leadership decimated, and the Blue Hand damned for all time.

As Manibus dueled with the fiend Blakskull, he somehow came in contact with a Tzeentchian relic. It appears an artillery shell excavated the highest level of an ancient Xenos’ temple complex in no man's land. How the two warriors came to fight over this particular patch of rubble, and how the Chapter Master came to trigger an unknown alien artifact, shall never be known.

Conclusion
Main article: Blue Hand Heresy

The Xenos relic would cause a psychic shockwave which blanketed, not only the entire world of Craw, but orbital space above the world for more than an Astronomical Unit. This would lead the Blue Hand Space Marines to damnation and to the worship of Chaos God of Change. It would also lead to the largest war in the history of the Mandavi Sector, The Blue Hand Heresy.

What is more, in a turn of events many would call impossible, the psychic phenomenon caused the Orks to turn and flee. Imperial scholars have speculated that the burst of Chaos energy may simply have been so great as to overwhelm the Orks own gestalt psychic Waaagh Field. Some even suggest that the force may have been exactly calculated to cancel out the energy of this particular Waaagh. However, whether or not even Tzeentch could so accurately predict the precise nature of a psychic phenomena so many millennia before hand is a matter whose contemplation is best left to heretical theologians to consider while they await the Emperor’s judgement.

Regardless of the reason, Grimtooth Blakskull’s WAAAGH! was broken and the Ordo Xenos believes he was dead within a year, killed by one of his Nobs who sensed weakness, the one thing a Warboss can never show.