Achilus Crusade - Victory and Disaster: The Orpheus Salient was launched a Terran year after Solomon Tetrarchus ascended to the position of Lord Militant commanding the crusade into the Jericho Reach. At that time, intelligence possessed by the crusade's high command strongly suggested that the systems running to the rimward of the Reach weremade up of sparsely populated Frontier Worlds and a few formally Imperial worlds.These planets, while much regressed, had kept faith with the Imperial Creed and carried on in much the same way as they had before the loss of the Jericho Reach to its millennia old era its people called the "Age of Shadow." Some had even maintained very haphazard contact with the Imperium and provided the crusade's scouting forces with aid and intelligence.It was felt that if these and other nearby worlds could be quickly brought back into Imperial control, they could both provide valuable resources to the crusade and act as the staging point to open a second front against the forces of the Archenemy that were already exacting a heavy toll on the forces of the Acheros Salient.Command of the Orpheus Salient was given to General Mikal Curas, the youngest and most dynamic of Tetrarchus' senior command, seen by many as his favoured protegee. Some privately doubted that the young Curas had the experience to drive the swift advance demanded by his commander.Their doubts proved to be in error, however, as the Orpheus Salient swiftly went forward, destroying the petty empires of secessionists and bringing loyal worlds back into the light of the Emperor.As Curas' forces progressed, they maintained a steady stream of intelligence and assistance to the allied Space Marine and Deathwatch forces, identifying suitable targets for attack. In a solar decade and a half, the lead elements of the Orpheus Salient had penetrated further into the Jericho Reach than any of the crusade's other forces.The progress of the Orpheus Salient was so successful that Lord Militant Tetrarchus began to peel elements away from it, increasing the stream of reinforcements to the cauldron of death around the Cellebos Warzone.Then on 999.812.M41, astropathic communications between the various worlds and battlegroups of the Orpheus Salient began to blink out, and what limited messages did get through were sporadic, sinister, and barely intelligible.Astropaths and other Sanctioned Psykers across the length of the Salient awoke screaming from dreams filled with an endless darkness and a thousand rustling whispers. Some took their own lives and many others were reduced to babbling phrases about "the rising tide," the "hungering depths," or similarly doom-laden ravings.Thanks to the communications blackout, no one in the high command knew the disposition or activity of forces along the salient, nor could they exert any cohesive control over them, while the Adeptus Astartes grew withdrawn, keeping their own grim counsel on the matter.Snatches of information that emerged over the coming solar months seemed to indicate that some elements of the salient's forces had been lost, and that previously secure worlds had come under siege. It was as if a creeping shadow had enveloped the salient, within which terrible events had begun to unfold.The doom of the Orpheus Salient -- and perhaps the entire Achilus Crusade -- was given a name only from a rare open communication from the mysterious Deathwatch. The Tyranids of Hive Fleet Dagon had come to the Jericho Reach.Since that time, the crusade forces along the Orpheus Salient have been brutally hammered and now are estimated to muster at less than fifty percent of their prior effective combat strength.Their leadership is fractured and their morale severely, perhaps fatally, compromised, while the vital Fortress World of Hethgard has now come under siege from a massive Tyranid assault.The Deathwatch estimates that at least nine formerly inhabited worlds have already been completely overrun by the Tyranids of Hive Fleet Dagon. Six more are under immediate threat or are already engaged in fighting, while the fate of at least twenty other systems, lost under the umbra of the Great Devourer's Shadow in the Warp, remains unknown.