Darnath Lysander - The Imperial Fists Come to Taladorn: Taladorn had been under occupation for a little over two months when the Space Marines at last arrived. This was not a coordinated counter-strike, but a piecemeal response to Taladorn's garbled distress calls. Thus, when the Imperial Fists arrived, they found the world’s orbit lit with lance flares and torpedo trails, and an impressive fleet of crimson Azkaellon-class frigates engaging the Iron Warriors fleet.The Blood Angels vessels attacked with their customary bravado, ignoring the disparity in size and numbers. Already one of the Chaos battleships was afire along its length, puffs of atmosphere venting as escape pods hurtled out into the void.As Lysander watched from the bridge of the Battle Barge Storm of Wrath, a cluster of boarding torpedoes struck home against the aft section of a second Iron Warriors ship, and the First Captain knew them to contain Blood Angels boarding parties – a brave but reckless strategy. Deeming that the momentum of the Blood Angels’ assault would soon dwindle, Lysander ordered the Storm of Wrath and its support fleet to join the battle.The Iron Warriors admiral was quick to respond. Like Lysander, he knew that the Storm of Wrath was the single mightiest vessel so far engaged – its survival or destruction would determine where victory lay. At an unseen command, three Chaos heavy cruisers came about on an interception heading, swarms of Heldrakes boiling out of their fighter bays. Ignoring the Blood Angels frigates, they bore down on the Storm of Wrath with violent determination.As the Storm of Wrath's guns fired their first salvo, another force entered the growing battle, as the Ultramarines Strike Cruiser Valin's Revenge burst into realspace off the Battle Barge's port flank. The newcomer fired its prow guns in brief salute, then drove in hard beneath the Storm of Wrath, its dorsal weapon batteries roaring as they obliterated a vanguard wave of Heldrakes.The prudent action for Lysander to have taken at that point would have been to obliterate or repel the Chaos fleet before initiating planetstrike. However, he quickly decided otherwise. When later recounting the battle to the Chapter Council, Lysander would cite his concern that every moment of delay was another moment in which the Forgeheart's defence systems could have been brought online, but the truth of the matter was that he had little patience for duelling amongst the stars whilst the Iron Warriors' grip lay tight about an Imperial world.Ordering the Storm of Wrath into a slow belly roll to bring its deployment chutes into alignment, Lysander left command of the Battle Barge with its commodore and ordered his assault force to their Drop Pods. As the heavy cruisers reached weapons-range and the Battle Barge’s hull began to shudder under shell impacts, the Imperial Fists launched their assault on Taladorn.The first wave of the Imperial Fists' planetstrike came as a storm of barrage bombs and lance strikes. They slammed into the Forgeheart like bolts of divine fury, collapsing sections of the dome to crush the smokestacks and Daemon forges below. Mecharoots flailed like wounded animals, the ends thrashing madly through the bombardment’s dust clouds.A few defence batteries returned sporadic fire, but a second bombardment followed hard on the heels of the first, silencing these emplacements. Scores of Iron Warriors, and many hundreds of their bond-slaves, perished in those opening salvoes, blown apart by shockwaves or crushed flat by falling rubble.