The child that would eventually become Agent Haxtes Guilliman was born in 973.M41 (i.e. 23 years ago) on the Imperial World of Protasia/Malfian Sub-sector/Calixis Sector/Segmentum Obscurus. Protasia was a prosperous and well-governed world, well able to provide for its 2.5 billion inhabitants while meeting the Imperial Tithe. Alas it would not last, for the people-elected Senate of Protasia decided that they would no longer be considered part of the Malfian Sub-sector, citing rampant corruption and gross negligence of part of the Malfian Adepta. And so it came to pass that they petitioned Terra for the creation of new sub-sector, with Protasia at its heart. Perhaps there was some merit to the petition, for Malfi really is a cesspool of vice and corruption, but if so any justification was wiped away by the heresy that is disobedience. The envoy was arrested and turned over the the Holy Ordos and the petition routinely turned down. Protasia was ordered to surrender and its leaders turn themselves in for processing and public execution. They failed to comply, taking this rebuttal as a sign that the greater Imperium was just as bad as the Malfians...

Haxtes breathed the air of his homeworld for the first time even as the plasma-bombs and kinetic penetrators started falling from orbit. As he was lain at his mother's breast Imperial Landers deposited the first Stormtroopers at key landing sites across his homeworld, preceded by a torrent of suppressive fire from hundred squadrons of fighter-bombers. When sleep came to him it was to a lullaby of a thousand heavy tanks churning across the plains. The Imperium had arrived to wage righteous war on the rebel world, to punish its wayward people and to brink them all back into the Emperor's light.

But victory did not come easily or cheaply. Indeed, victory failed to come at all. The Protasian fleet failed to prevent the Imperial navy from achieving orbital control, but inflicted severe damage on the task force before being forced to retreat. The loss of the battleship Heart of Fury and the heavy damage sustained by six battle-cruisers would force the theater commander to petition Sector headquarters for additional forces, a grave loss of face that eventually drove Admiral Nakemi to suicide and prematurely ended the career of Lord-Marshal Maxim Maximus.

Yet the Navy had accomplished it mission; the gargantuan Guard transports were largely intact and in low orbit, and immediately started to drop sixty Division-equivalents onto the surface, opening up three key theaters and securing key sites planet-wide. Losses to enemy naval assets, orbital defense grids, planetary defense batteries and anti-landing assets were four times higher than expected, averaging out at 20% or 120.000 dead and injured. Despite the stiff resistance the Imperial Guard reached its initial objectives within a fortnight, but then the advance ground to a halt as dwindling troop troop densities made further advances impractical.

Over the next few years the envisioned swift campaign of liberation became one of endless war instead. The Protasian defenders proved both capable, extremely well-equipped, and quite willing to continue the fight. The Protasian Navy would also return time and again to harass the Imperial Navy, even managing to break the blockade on several occasions, and causing havoc throughout the sub-sector by staging raids on other Imperial holdings. Compliance was clearly not something that would be soon in coming.

Battlefleet Calixis was eventually forced to send two full battle-groups to reinforce the Protasian Theater, and finally manged to destroy or drive away remaining enemy naval assets. Two-hundred-forty new divisions were eventually levied over the next decade and shipped piecemeal to the war-zone. Even then compliance was deemed impossible without resorting the a more thorough approach; the entire planet of Protasia was declared a war-zone and the rules of engagement revised accordingly. By 982.M41 eighty percent of the planet's inhabited areas not already seized by Imperial forces were reduced by strategic bombardment in an effort to crush the Protasian will to fight.