Achilus Crusade - The Death of Achilus: Lord Militant Tiber Achilus was a war-forged veteran of many campaigns before the Aquila, primarily against Orks and other alien threats such as the Khrave and the Ylarian Collective in the Formorian Sector wars where he had earned his fame. He was also stubborn, blunt, and somewhat cautious in nature, favouring a tried and tested strategy of 'attack, pacify and fortify' over great sweeping advances.Acting on the best intelligence he possessed, he had also badly underestimated just how entrenched or dangerous "native" resistance to the crusade was as a whole.His core belief was that the crusade had been launched primarily to open a new front against the alien T'au, and laid his plans to this long term goal, perhaps to the detriment of the crusade as a whole. Whether or not he was correct in his assumptions, he would not live long enough to know, as Achilus did not survive to see the end of the first solar decade of his crusade.While travelling to review the progress of the primary forward battlegroups aboard the grand cruiser Proclamation of Wrath in 786.M41, the ship suffered a catastrophic Gellar Field failure and was lost with all hands. The Lord Militant and his command staff were among those drowned in the raw energies of the Warp.Until his death, Achilus had pursued a strategy that focused on securing a stable, fortified base of operations near the Warp Gate; a careful campaign to bring the Reach under his heel, followed by a drive by the crusade directly against the T'au expansion and perhaps beyond.His hope was to swiftly secure the coreward swathe of the Reach and continue to press mercilessly on, but aside from an initial string of successes, the Crusade forces (often parcelled out piecemeal) met with repeated delays and, in some theatres, outright defeat at the hands of the vile and heretical inhabitants of the Reach's core worlds.Meanwhile, the T'au appeared to press the matter by their incursions into the region. The crusade had begun to stall dangerously, its forces slowly declining from hundreds of minor engagements, while Achilus' intransigence caused discontent with his Space Marine and Mechanicus allies who pressed for more decisive action.His successor to the mantle of Lord Militant was a very different man. Solomon Tetrarchus was also an Astra Militarum veteran, but one with a reputation for bold strategy, charismatic leadership and a practice of delegating many strategic decisions to the commanders beneath him.Within a Terran year of his ascension to the Lord Militancy, Tetrarchus had replaced or sidelined most of the "old guard" generals who had served Achilus. In their stead, he brought up new officers who possessed the independent dynamism he valued.He then commanded that the crusade forces be split into three army groups, committed most of the reserves his predecessor had hoarded to the front, and pressed the attack, predicting the fall of the Reach within a solar decade.The largest of these newly created crusade forces would drive towards the core of the Jericho Reach and crush the native resistance, while the other two would move swiftly through the sparsely inhabited rimward worlds, encircling the former Imperial sector's core.The existing slow drive towards the worlds disputed by the T'au expansion would become but one barb of the trident that would drive through the corrupted flesh of the Jericho Reach and make it once more the dominion of the God-Emperor of Mankind.The three salients were designated Canis, Acheros and Orpheus respectively, and regardless of the relative wisdom of his strategy, the war still continues three solar decades later in the early decades of the ninth century of the 41st Millennium. The Jericho Reach and the fate of the crusade now hang in the balance.