The Imperial worlds across the Damocles Gulf stopped paying their tithes. By the time the news reached Terra, some of their governors had also accepted the T’au Empire. That is where Codex Supplement: Farsight Enclaves, in its account of the Silken Conquests, begins the trouble. The supplement places the report with the High Lords of Terra.
The Damocles Gulf Crusade sent a fleet. It drove the T’au from recently acquired worlds, crossed the gulf and attacked Dal’yth, an established T’au sept. Then the Imperium withdrew. I used to remember that last part as a simple T’au victory, mostly because I had compressed several different Damocles wars into one story. At Dal’yth, the crusade’s advance slowed while fighting continued across the planet.
The Gulf Was Crossed With Merchants First
The gulf had long obstructed T’au expansion. Warzone Damocles: The Lore, in The Damocles Crusade, 742.M41, says the Air caste finally found a safe way across toward the end of the Second Sphere Expansion. The T’au moved into the worlds beyond it and met the Imperium there. Their Water caste emissaries offered trade and the Greater Good to human populations on the Imperial fringe; some worlds openly declared for the T’au.
The Silken Conquests version spends more time on the method. It credits a new ZFR drive and describes a patient campaign directed by Aun’Va in the Timbra Subsector. Diplomacy and commerce gradually brought human worlds into the T’au sphere, until the missing tithes alerted the Imperium. Those accounts put different emphasis on the machinery of expansion, but both make the frontier’s human inhabitants part of the cause of the war. In the Timbra Subsector, the tithes stopped.
I like that uncomfortable detail. A governor’s decision to trade with an alien power could be opportunism, genuine relief, or a bargain made under pressure. The sources don’t give us a census of motives planet by planet. They do show why the Imperium saw the situation as rebellion, and how the Greater Good entered human politics through diplomacy.
I’ve spent plenty of games trying to make my Thousand Sons’ plans look deliberate after the dice have made them ridiculous. The trade phase of this war is the bit I used to skip because there were no battlesuits in it. I skipped the tax story when I first read the supplement.
The Crusade Gets to Dal’yth
The Imperial response took time to assemble. Once launched, it was severe. Warzone Damocles: The Lore describes Space Marines from a dozen Chapters leading an advance that routed T’au forces and pushed them back across the gulf. The Farsight Enclaves supplement names the outlying colonies Hydass, Sy’l’kell and Viss’el as falling on the approach to Dal’yth. Imperial warships followed the retreating defenders into sept space.
That crossing was a shock in the T’au account. The supplement describes their commanders watching vast Imperial ships appear through a means of travel they didn’t understand. T’au craft evaded much of the fleet’s fire as the largest Imperial warships continued toward the planet. The Imperial force pressed through the orbital defences and reached Dal’yth itself.
Dal’yth was a developed sept, with people and infrastructure the defenders couldn’t abandon casually. Warhammer Community’s sept profile describes it as a trade hub known for Water caste diplomacy. The old crusade accounts show what happened when that prosperous world became the battlefield. An invasion here meant fighting through the T’au’s own cities and transport network, with reinforcements coming from neighbouring septs.
The fighting spread across many engagements. In Farsight Strikes, the supplement has Commander Farsight equip Crisis suits with paired plasma rifles after studying the armour on Imperial Space Marines. When Marines arrive in drop pods near Gel’bryn, his teams rotate damaged suits out of the line and destroy the insertion force. The passage even pauses on Farsight’s respect for the wounded Marines who keep fighting and the Apothecaries tending them.
This was still early in the careers of Farsight and Shadowsun. Both fought in Dal’yth’s defence, before the break that later produced the Farsight Enclaves. The supplement makes their cooperation part of the battle. Its account of Dal’yth Aflame has Shadowsun lure Space Marines into exposed positions while Farsight strikes them at speed.
I’d have been tempted to treat those attacks as the whole explanation for the withdrawal. That’s partly my preference for a satisfying tabletop answer: bring the right guns, make the right move, win the mission. The source gives a messier picture. Half of Dal’yth had been abandoned or reduced to rubble by its account. T’au reinforcements and supplies improved. The crusade’s forces were spread thin, and the Imperium had a much larger emergency developing elsewhere.
Behemoth Changes the Orders
Warzone Damocles: The Lore gives the decisive outside pressure plainly: Imperial forces disengaged and returned across the gulf to fight the approaching Tyranid Hive Fleet Behemoth. In Dal’yth Aflame, the news arrives as astropathic messages about a new alien threat. The withdrawal then happens regiment by regiment and company by company. That suggests a decision carried out over time, while the fighting on Dal’yth was still costly.
Behemoth’s arrival matters because the Imperium has only so many fleets and soldiers it can commit to this edge of space. The Tyranids threatened Imperial territory on a scale the crusade’s commanders couldn’t ignore. For the T’au on Dal’yth, that strategic emergency gave their defenders room to survive. For the Imperium, it left an enemy Empire intact after Imperial troops had fought all the way to one of its established worlds.
There’s an argument over who had the stronger position when the ships left. The Farsight Enclaves account says T’au reinforcements were gaining the upper hand and Imperial supply lines were strained. Another T’au account, The Battle for Dal’yth, describes an encirclement nearing completion when the Ethereals ordered a truce. Those are T’au-centred descriptions. The shorter Warzone Damocles account agrees on the bloody stalemate and the recall to face Behemoth, without asking us to calculate who would have won another month of fighting. I don’t actually know, and the books don’t give a neutral campaign ledger that settles it.
The names are easy to muddle. Taros and the later War Zone Damocles campaigns also put Imperial and T’au armies in this region, with Farsight and other familiar commanders appearing across the wider history. This article is about the first crusade, dated 742.M41 in Warzone Damocles: The Lore: the push across the gulf to Dal’yth and the withdrawal that followed. The later wars took place after this withdrawal.
Dal’yth was left damaged, with the T’au still holding it. Imperial forces sailed back toward Behemoth. The supplement leaves large areas of Dal’yth abandoned or in ruins.
