The Battle of Beta-Garmon, remembered with dread as the Great Slaughter, was the last great campaign before the Warmaster reached Sol. The cluster sat astride the strategic gateway to the Segmentum Solar, and both sides understood that whoever held it commanded the road to Terra itself.
Here the war of the god-machines reached its terrible apex. Titan Legions marched to war in numbers never seen before or since, whole maniples of Warlords and Reavers striding through burning cities while Space Marines and mortal soldiery died in their shadow. The Astra Militarum forbears committed millions of lives to the defence, and still the traitor host ground forward, world by ruined world.
The fighting consumed the cluster in a holocaust of attrition. Cities became battlefields, moons became tombs, and the void ran thick with wreckage. Though the loyalists exacted a fearful toll, the sheer weight of the Warmaster's forces told in the end, and Beta-Garmon fell. Its loss stripped away the last strategic barrier before Sol. For all that it broke the traitors' strength, the Great Slaughter had only cleared the path to the greater slaughter waiting upon Terra.
The chronicle continues
