Bayard

Bayard was an Emperor's Champion of the Black Templars, a warrior chosen by holy vision to bear the Armour of Faith and a sacred Black Sword as the living wrath of the Master of Mankind. He served through some of the Chapter's fiercest campaigns, and his name is bound forever to the terrible siege in which he met his end, fighting to the last amid the ruin of a burning hive.

His crusading service carried him from the distant war-torn reaches of the Ghoul Stars to the fire-wracked surface of Armageddon during its third great war. There, as the Black Templars fought to hold Hive Helsreach against a boundless tide of greenskins, Bayard stood among the defenders of the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant, wielding his Black Sword against the invaders in the shrine's final, desperate hours.

It was in that last stand that Bayard fell, cut down by the orks as the temple crumbled and the battle reached its bloody climax. An Emperor's Champion is meant to be the deadliest blade of the crusade, the slayer of enemy champions and monstrous overlords, and to see such a warrior struck down struck at the very heart of his brethren. He had crossed a hundred war zones as the Emperor's chosen blade, and to see him laid low made even hardened Templars falter for a heartbeat. Yet in the grim calculus of the Black Templars, a champion's death is never the end of his story.

Bayard's fall became a spur to fury rather than despair. His brothers took up his cause with redoubled hatred, and the memory of his sacrifice drove the Black Templars to exact a merciless vengeance upon the greenskins for the massacre of Helsreach. In this way Bayard endures in the Chapter's memory not as a defeat but as a summons, an emblem of the truth every Templar holds close: that no death in the Emperor's service goes unanswered, and that the crusade rolls ever onward over the graves of its heroes.