Introduction

It is the 51st Millennium, and the war continues. There was no great conflagration or calamitous final battle. Across the vastness of the galaxy, the Imperium died. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. The galactic empire of humanity crumbled, its enemies too many, too great and too terrible to imagine. The great conflict of Octavius had no victory, a war without end. In the fiery chasm of strife, the locust and the green holocaust fused, as beast looked upon barbarian and both saw the other as kin. The new entity spread with a speed undreamt of by ork or tyranid. War and hunger melded into a singular desire to ravage, rape and remake all in the image of the new devourer. The Devourer’s hybrid nightmares were regenerative, and spore-born, combining into a grand horror, which murdered the galaxy, leaving naught but fragments as it left. Metallic sentinels of unflinching dread rose up on some worlds, leaving them safe from the new devourer waaagh, but instead made them slaves to the silver sentinels, and fodder for their glowing metal gods. The Eldar who had held on to life for so long, slowly winked out of existence one craftworld at a time. Eventually, even the rumbling hearts of the avatars fell silent. For a time... In the dead craftworlds, something slithers through the infinity circuit to this day. Unfortunately, the great god of the dead, Ynnead, is trapped within this infinity circuit, howling its mournful song into the darkness, eternally hungry in its desire to wreak vengeance on She Who Thirsts. The Tau, naïve in their hope of unity, expanded into a realm of corpses and ash. Every world they came across was dead. The hard and unpleasant task of terraforming each world turned the Tau into bitter, self-righteous beings. They were disgusted at the actions of their predecessors, and vowed not understand their fellow races, but to purge them. Only the Tau could be trusted with worlds. They decided that all others must be cast out. Watching, their patron laughed his sardonic laugh as his puppets twisted into terrors. The Golden Throne finally failed. No-one knew for certain what happened to the Emperor. For once the throne fell, no vox or astropathic transmissions ever came from Terra again as warp storms engulfed the planet. The shattered remains of humanity had neither the power nor the will to return. All that is known is that the astronomicon died with the death of Terra, spluttering to nothing over the course of five hundred years. Eventually, the Imperium, coherency lost by the splitting of its forces against the new devourer, and the sudden surge in warp storms, was shattered like glass. Chaotic cults stampeded through humanity, like electrical surges in an ancient power grid. The Inquisition with the death of the Emperor, finally lost its façade of unity, and most died, killed by the more powerful within its once hallowed ranks. The greatest Inquisitor Lords seized whole systems, becoming feudal Kings and Regents. Uniting scattered mobs of their deadly follows around them in order to wrestle power from Local Governors. The church also shattered, becoming nothing more than a series of minor sectarian cults. All save Ophelia. The Sororitas withdrew from as many worlds as they could, and gathered around Ophelia and nearby systems. Ophelia became a vile charnel house for the eccliesiarch, who had been driven insane by all he had seen. He gathered his canonesses, abbesses and witchhunters together and put billions to the torch. Any system within range of short warp jumps (as navigators could no long take long jumps, due to the warp storms) of Ophelia were terrorized by the Imperial Church, who searched desperately for someone to blame for this nightmare.

It was said that in those days, a hundred thousand Petty Imperiums were created from the carved up corpse of the Imperium of Man. Each claimed legitimacy and claiming to be led by a leader chosen by the Emperor as he finally died. Some even claimed to be the Emperor reborn. Humanity, so scared in their huddled masses, believed this heresy without question, too afraid to imagine a universe without their father and protector. The space marines fared little better most chapters utterly disintegrated as their forces fighting individual missions across the galaxy, found they could not return to their Chapter Masters. In the darkness, alone, many marines chose the only path they knew: War. They became rogues and near bandits, pillaging Imperial world ‘for the war effort’ as they would say in justification for their actions. It was said White Scar war bands and Raven Guard war bands were the worst, as they were so swift and ruthless in their pillaging. The Black Templars retained the most of their original fervor, and merely continued their crusades. They became full worshippers of the God-Emperor and High Marshall Dorstros declared a new and great crusade: to destroy every human that did not submit to them, and purging everything and everyone else. Their fervor blinded them to their own heresies, as more and leaderless marines desperate for orders tagged alongside the Black Templars’ crusade. Millions of rag tag former guard and massive mobs of flagellating Imperial Cultists quickly joined the crusades' march across the stars. Soon, their depleted numbers (depleted during the wars with the new devourer) had nearly reached two thousand, representing the second largest single group of Imperial marines still in existence (second only to Grand Sicarium). Yet, no matter how large their crusade got, the Templars were naught but a band of raving fanatics Ultramar was renamed Grand Sicarium, under their new ruler, Cato Sicarius. His realm became a holy site for the other Ultramarine successors. Their fractured remnants gathering around Ultramar like a swarm of flies. Sicarius declared himself High Spess Murheen king, decreeing that those under his protection should worship him as the god he was. Sicarius became the ruler of his own little empire, his angelic marines and ordinary humans under his decree became his worshippers. Upon Macragge itself, the fortress of obsidian was crafted; the heads of Agemman and Calgar were stuck upon great steel pikes. A grim demonstration of Sicarius’ desire to rule all. Ultramar became a darker place in those centuries. Those forgeworlds still intact either fell to chaotic or Dragon-cult invasions. Some were ransacked by rival warbands desperate for tech priest slaves to help them work their stolen technologies. These slaves became bartered like currency amongst the various larger ‘Petty Imperiums’ as they became known now. Some forge worlds simply sealed themselves off from reality entirely, their Fabricators for once preferring ignorance over knowledge of what lay beyond. Chaos became a raging torrent in these dark millennia, rising to Strife-Era levels of corruption. Worlds were dragged into the warp as whole planets were over-run by psykers, madmen, and monstrous space marines. The chaos Legions became virtually indistinguishable from rabid bands of former loyalists. Some groups slaughtered in the name of dark gods, others just slaughtered.

Abaddon seized massive swathes of space around the eye, being careful to avoid the new devourer, as it blundered around him. Dodging like a skilled swimmer giving a swarm of predatory fish a wide berth, he avoided them. Abaddon and his 78th Crusade, plunged into the solar system. It is there that legend tells of the war of two spheres. Here, Abaddon faced the army of the Dragon transcendent, a vast army of fallen Mechanicus and those same silver sentinels that already plagued thousands of worlds. The confrontation was epic in scale. Warped spawned magic, and daemonic machinery and weaponry, battled weapons of unimaginable power, and the vast serried ranks of necrons and pariah, which covered nearly every solid Solar world like a silver carpet. In the end, Abaddon was forced to merely surround the ort cloud. The Dragon had ensured the solar system was his. His, save for a single orb of diamond hard stubbornness: Titan. It stood, a stony fortress, its doors sealed from the necrons by admantium and heavy cannons, its soul sealed from Abaddon by the cold steel cage of faith encaging the hearts of the Grey Knights and Custodian Guard still trapped upon the world. All other humans on the world had perished a thousand years previously, yet the ancient warriors stood firm, a shadow of the Imperium’s previous glory. In the turbulent energies of the warp, the Chaos gods also suffered. For upon the end of the Emperor, something else stirred. Birthed upon the death of Him on Terra, the Starchild suckled upon the raged religious lunacy of the dying Imperium, consuming every soul remaining upon terra in its birth pangs. This is what killed the astronomicon. Ophelia became a focus for this dark zeal. At the dawn of the 50th millennium, the Starchild became the Star Father, and the warp became a battleground. For a brief instance (or perhaps an eternity in the warp, none can tell for sure) the Star Father became dominant over the chaos foes. Then, with the sickening inevitability of the great game of chaos, the Star Father became one amongst the five, an order god amongst chaos gods.

Where they spread chaos, He spread oppression. Where their daemons were feral nightmares that rended souls, His daemons were faceless automata, enslaving the souls of humans into servitude. Star Father daemon worlds sprung up in the eye and across the galaxy in the closing thousand years of this dark age. They were balls of featureless gold, with golden faceless daemons and billions of mindless, empty humans. The inhabitants of these worlds shuffled across the surface for no particular reason until they simply died of starvation, or fatigue It is the 51st Millennium and I cannot wake up from this nightmare! I cannot wake up!

The Age of Dusk

It is the 61st Millennium. The galaxy has been moving at a blistering rate. Ancient prophecies are being fulfilled; grand engines are grinding into gradual and unstoppable motion, finally free. All across the galaxy, forces and factions mobilize. Some are old beyond comprehension, and others are so young that the dread of second strife are but troubling, primordial dreams.

Little can they know that those dreams are all horrifyingly true, and those things that have been thirsting and fasting for so long finally see their chance to inflict themselves once more upon a generation of beings only just recovering from the trauma of a galaxy gone mad. For the old legends were wrong; the tumbling of mankind into the pit was not the herald of the end times. It was merely the beginning of a wider game.

On the world named after a site of apocalypse, Armageddon, one of the lost sons had returned. Vulkan, the father of Salamanders and one of the primarchs of long forgotten myths, appeared to the broken people of that world, and began to forge the empire of man anew, as a smith might re-forge a blade, founding a new Imperium founded upon his humble and earnest ideals. His Imperium has re-ignited a zealous crusade of re-unification across the stars, yet progress is slow. Robbed of the astronomicon, and determined to ensure every world he takes is a secure bastion of his new world order, Vulkan’s millennial advance has yet to expand his realm to encompass more than a scant fraction of the worlds the former Imperium held dominion over. His most important contribution, however, is not the realm he creates, but his own genetic legacy. A new astartes founding has begun. The space marines rise again! A new breed of space marine, to sweep away the corrupt and putrid space marine ‘free companies’ as they bring Vulkan’s word to the galaxy.

Other bastions of man, over the endless centuries, also began to consolidate, as the hundreds of petty imperiums began to swallow each other in colossal cannibalistic wars. The tallarn and ophelian imperiums merged after hundreds of years of bitter conflict, forming a vast human realm, founded upon unthinking obedience and religious mania, and with a unique form of warp travel developed through mass witch incinerations; their death screams propelling fleets further than normal non-navigated flights. They worship ‘The Emperor of the Wasteland’, a bastardized belief based upon the Emperor they had never known. The twisted realm of grand sicarium, after war after war, has been tempered into a diamond hard series of systems, each world an impregnable fortress, populated with insane humans with near psychotic siege mentality ingrained on their souls. Led by despicable remnants of the once noble astartes founded before the fall of the Imperium, this realm is one of evil and oppression. Astartes are worshipped as gods, and they in their hubris believed their idolaters. Sicarius, the ancient villain on the throne, has looked upon the Vulkan Imperium, and deemed it a ruse, and has begun to plan against this. The black-fleshed daemon is no primarch. It cannot be...

Both the Eastern Chaos Imperium, under the megalomaniac Huron Blackheart, and the Western Chaos Imperium under the eternal traitor Abaddon the Despoiler, have been steadily growing. Their influence grows, and more and more worlds fall to the worship of the transcendent warp powers. Yet, chaos is as chaos does, and these realms are constantly in flux. The two powers detest each other, and have engaged in constant blistering wars. Not only this, but each Imperium also suffers internal conflicts at all times, as the inherently individualist warlords of chaos vie to ensure their own dominance. Abbadon’s rule is constantly opposed by the squabbling daemon-primarchs. However, while he spreads his influence outwards, they remain contained within their own hellish dreamlands, fighting like the brothers they are. Yet, more worrying reports have begun to reach Abaddon upon his dark capital of Cadia: the ancient wulfen are abroad once more, led by the largest and most fearsome of their breed yet to emerge. Some claim it is Russ himself, returned to the realm of flesh for some coming conflict, so vast it is too large for mortals to perceive as it comes into being. Not only this, but Abaddon has the further concern regarding the foe he bound within the Solar System. The devices created to contain the unnatural potency of the Void Dragon have finally begun to crumble. Even now, previously orphaned Tomb Worlds and world engines are shuddering to life once more, hollow eyes gazing upon the world of flesh with distain and hatred immeasurable.

Just as the force of dissipation and entropy grows in power, its opposite paradox builds in influence. The Star Father, the dread Lord of Obedience and blind faith, is now a great galactic titan. Every mortal, no matter how corrupt or defiant, has a niggling urge, buried in their primal brains, to kneel before the forces of order. The angyllic hosts and their angyll- worlds spring up everywhere. Yet, it is claimed the Star Father is searching for someone. A being, an avatar capable of channeling a significant portion of his power. That way, he may manifest upon the world of flesh, and hence dominate both the material and immaterial dimensions. A fate no sane being should desire.

In the Eastern galaxy, the greater part of the Ultima Segmentum is now tau-space. The tau terraformed on an unthinkable scale throughout the Fifty-first millennium, and the fruits of their labors showed. The council of Tau’Va now could call upon untold billions of Tau, gue’vesa and other vassal races. Yet, their rule is not the idealist paradise they once promised. It is a rule of enforced Unity under the Tau, who some say are seeking to eliminate all thought that does not conform to proscribed philosophies of the greater Good, and destroy the dissent of freedom. Nor is the Tau Empire a peaceful one. Unseen by the western powers of the galaxy, the Tau are grappling with something immense and ungodly. Garrison-septs to their western flanks are being drawn away to reinforce the eastern septs. The tau and the bloated Thexian Trade Empire have even signed truces in order to provide a united front against their newest foe. Worlds are dying, suns splutter and dim, as the endless and eternal Silver Hordes finally mobilize for full scale war, for the first time in millions of years.

The c’tan have dropped the facade. They hide no more. The War in Heaven is renewed. The Golden skinned Jackal has not only the immortal machinery of the necron at his disposal, but also his other unspeakable allies. The ophiliam Kiasoz is moving, and systems simply end when it passes. The splinter entities of the trans-dimensional non-place are no longer bound by their exile, and their temporal holocaust effects have chronologically crippled entire planetoids at the behest of the Star God Deceiver. The Lord of Death is abroad also, a black shadow that kills simply because it IS killing itself.

Even the greenskin, long presumed extinct and consigned to legends and cautionary childhood fables, return inevitably for the great conflict to come. The tiny spore-morsels, left on worlds the galaxy over, slowly spread and developed over the millennia. Gradually, feral ork tribes began to spring up on even civilized worlds. Officials, dismissing these feral beings as mere savage beasts, simply began to cull these ork nests with military force. Thus, the feral orks grow and spread, fuelled by war once more. For the first time in twenty thousand years, the galaxy rang to the sound of Waaagh once more. However, not all the orks returning were feral. Some were anything but. A new breed of ork emerged.

Fully-armored in heavy armor of high quality, with potent weapons and flawless discipline, these elite bands of Orks emerge from strange portals or from well-maintained warships, taking and holding worlds with horrifying efficiency, turning a world into a fortress within days. These Orks are like no ork ever encountered. It is claimed that they were exiled orks who found their brainboys. Others claim they are in thrall to a powerful warp being. Others claim a being may have figured out how to ‘pilot’ the Ork Gods themselves, wielding the entire orkoid race as a single vast weapon. Either way, the orks are amassing for some purpose, as yet unseen.

Not only this, but the Eldar also gather, returning from their shadows with new insights. Some intensify their spiteful wars against the galaxy, while others take the long view. The dead craftworld of Malantai stirs. Something is building within its nexus. Something vengeful...

Fate is weaving these rising empires into a great and deadly embrace. As each grows, the inevitability of the coming conflict is growing and building. We cannot escape it, nor can we oppose it. We can only try and survive it, and hope against hope, that when the end comes, it will drag suffering and pain into its fires as well.

It is the 61st Millennium, and the Age of Dusk is upon us. Let us hope dawn will break on a new universe. For hope is all we have, screaming against the storm.

Additional Background Information 1: Armageddon Rising

The rise of the Armageddon Imperium is one of the most important events of the ten thousand years following the Second Age of Strife, and is a truly inspiring tale. However, the story begins within the darkest period of the troubled world of Armageddon’s history. As it had always been, the polluted hive world had been a site of sporadic warfare during the collapse of the Imperium. On the eve of M51, the world’s population found itself speared between three dreadful and relentless foes. The Kazan Imperium, a culture of men driven to madness and narcotic indulgences, filled the system with their narc-barges and gunships, pounding and assaulting the worlds of the system relentlessly, pillaging the supplies of the beleaguered realm in order to create more drugs to ship back to their crazed populace. The second foe was the Rand, an Imperium of rebellious abhumans and mutant freaks, who wished to annex the hive world and steal the world’s military manufacturing capabilities for their own ends. Wild beastmen hordes and serf-ogryns were common amongst the armies of the Rand, who butchered and performed the most cruel of acts upon the cowering people. Not only did these imperiums relentlessly assault the planets, a far worse force was drawn to the scent of battle, and the opportunity for sadism:

A warband of the Emperor’s Children, which dragged a dozen enslaved chaos warbands in their wake as they burst from the warp to partake in the debauchery and torment such a war offered the chaos-twisted superhumans. The Steel Legion and the Hiver Militias tried their best to hold off these forces, but there was never any real hope. Slowly, over almost three years of horrendous, murderous fire-fights and blood-drenched desperate struggles in the dirt and rubble of Armageddon’s countless smashed hive spires and ruined homes. Bodies were piled high in the streets. The pavements and pathways ran a dull black-red, the taint of congealing blood filling every nostril.

The Emperor’s Children bestrode the battlefields like malevolent gods. Their noise marines deafened and liquidized fleeing remnants of humanity, while other deranged elements of the twisted monsters stalked men through the streets like animals, before putting them down with fitful giggles, pulling out eyes while men flailed uselessly against them. Many dark legends began to form amongst the despairing populace, some fair, some ill. Across every world of the Armageddon system, one name was spoken with quivering, fearful whispers. The eternal one, Lucius. Lucius the Eternal was a nightmare by this period, a towering giant covered in the screaming faces of those slain by the Eternal beast’s blades, or subverted by his blessing. He travelled from world to world, challenging and murdering the greatest heroes and leaders of the near-broken defenders. Over the twenty thousand years of his vile existence, Lucius’ body had stretched beyond his natural physique, his body expanding to accommodate the hundreds upon thousands of agonized faces bound within his accursed battle plate. His lash whipped about him like a viper, slaying men and women with every venomous, languid stroke of its barbed tendrils, while his glittering blade cut down warriors by the score, his skill beyond anything a mere mortal could hope to match.

Yet, there were other stories propagating through the misery. A giant, with eyes like the fires of hell, was fighting across the system too. Where ever the resolve of the defending humans seemed weakest, this hooded titan of obsidian flesh would appear; the hermit of glorious myth, now made flesh. Where he appeared, the tide of battle turned.

His strength and power was unthinkable and wondrous; tanks were ripped apart, entire brigades of narc-mad berserker men from Kazan slain by his fists and his flamers, even the howling warriors of the Emperor’s children felt the brutal exactions of the hermit who killed them like presumptuous bastard children.

Eventually, the last of the Defenders were pushed back to the blazing ruins of Hades hive. Backlit by endless purple flames, the last of the Steel Legion formed up into a defensive ring, using their Chimera as barricades, while their basilisks and Russes unleashed a constant barrage of ordnance into the onrushing hordes of madness and despair. Lord Delorr, the last of Armageddon’s ruling leaders, bedecked himself in the ancient Imperial guard navy of his ancestors, his power saber flourishing as he rallied his defenders with an impassioned speech where he called upon his people to put up such a fight, that they would be remembered forever in infamy amongst their enemies, as the last true Imperial outpost. His men cheered bitter cheers, as they shouldered their las rifles one last time.

Delorr was dragged from his lines as the hordes overran the Chimera blockade, by the brutal lash of Lucius the Eternal, who chuckled with a sadistic arrogance which did not cow Delorr, but drove him into a rage. Lucius dropped the mortal man into the dust at his feet. Both sides paused, as Lucius demanded all to witness the death of hope on Armageddon. Delorr, unafraid despite his broken arm and the many cuts ripped into his side by the vicious lash of torment. He spat blood, and slowly raised his saber into a guard position. His arm was shaking with pain, and the defending men, women, and war-haunted children of Armageddon looked on with internal groans of anguish. Lucius towered over three meters above the frail, wounded old man who vainly raised his blade to challenge his foe.

Lucius smiled a hideous smile, his overly scarred features splitting like the glaze on an old piece of pottery, his fangs and serpentine tongue flicking around his jaws. Delorr attacked with all the skill he could muster, and Lucius lazily blocked and deflected every single blow without even effort. Each time, he would gift Delorr with another shallow cut, and the leader would stumble to his knees, before slowly rising once more. Finally, Lucius split Delorr from head to foot with a single stroke of his blade. “And so, mankind falls to the eternal blade of the Emperor’s Children, never to rise!” Lucius the eternal was recorded as cackling across the battlefield, his daemonic voice carrying across the entire field easily.

“There is only one Emperor’s child upon this world, and you are not him. I have fought from the shadows for too long. I decree that this shall continue NO MORE.”

The voice which replied was effortlessly powerful, and filled with a humble yet firm authority which evaporated the effect of Lucius’ vile tirade. It is said every warrior on the field that day was briefly knocked into silence for a few moments, as the hermit himself emerged from behind the ranks of the Rand, tossing the abhumans aside as he burst into the forefront of the battle, striding forwards to point at Lucius directly.

Lucius turned and cursed the presumption of the pathetic beast who thought to challenge him, drawing his sword once more. His venomous words caught in his throat, as he realized who removed the hooded cloak from around his shoulders, revealing a giant armored in dragon- sculptured emerald and glittering green plate.

The primarch, the demi-god of War, Vulkan. Though Lucius still rose to a greater height than Vulkan, the Primarch was powerful and filled with a presence the Eternal one couldn’t hope to match. Vulkan raised his burning spear in one fist, aimed at the Chaos marine. Lucius grinned in response.

“At last,” was all the monster said, before charging to engage Vulkan.

The swirling melee lasted for almost twelve hours, daemonic energies and light spilling from the conflict in great boiling waves. The arena of conflict which sprang up between the defenders and attackers was turned molten by the fury of the conflict. Vulkan’s spear was like a living being in his grasp, darting and spinning to engage Lucius with ever more complex assaults. The Eternal one, for the first time in millennia, was struggling to defend himself and counterattack, simply trying to defend himself. He however, was simply weeping with joy. At last a true challenge.

Yet, for all Lucius’ hateful abilities, Vulkan was the greater. He hacked off the legs of the chaos marine, before slicing through his arms from his torso contemptuously. Lucius merely giggled, spewing black blood from his mouth in a great torrent. He jeered at Vulkan, even as the primarch stood over him.

“Go on, slay me Salamander prince! Just like we slew your Legion on Istvaan! Finish your victory, take your bloody vengeance! Feel the pride and joy of avenging your fallen brothers, your fallen Imperium, your broken father! Kill me, and learn of your folly!” Lucius pleaded, with malevolent eyes.

Vulkan slammed his boot down onto Lucius’ head.

Except, he didn’t. His boot paused inches from the killing blow. The arrogance drained from Lucius’ face, as Vulkan smiled humorlessly, and turned back to face the hordes of enemies who were ready to murder every defender of Armageddon without mercy. He raised his spear, twirled it in his hand, and plunged it six feet into the ground, before raising his arms up from his sides. He declared his name, what he was and what he represented. He declared how he would rebuild the old Imperium, and drive despair kicking and screaming from his new realm. His speech resounded across the landscape, as his passionate voice reached the men who stood poised to destroy the last remnants of resistance.

The Emperor’s children however, cared not. They advanced once more, weapons raised... and were then assaulted by the Rand Imperial forces, who threw themselves into combat with the superhuman butchers with rekindled zeal at the words of the Emperor’s true child. The Emperor’s children, believing both of their allies had turned, attacked them with spiteful vengeance. The Kazan, Rand and Emperor’s Children thus turned upon each other, and this conflict expanded out into space and unto every planet in the system. Enemies divided, Vulkan led, at last, a counter offensive. He battled in person where he could. The few surviving Steel Legion desperately followed him, and as he engaged the enemies across the system, he gathered more and more supporters from the local populace. Those soldiers and people who had hidden from the onslaught of the astartes now rose up, buoyed by the arrival of their new champion.

After a decade of further conflict, Armageddon was reclaimed, and those who opposed Vulkan were forced to withdraw. The daemon prince Kadious, who led the Children from his Pleasure fortress in orbit, fled from the might of Vulkan, his howls echoing throughout the warp as he chose to abandon his physical form rather than risk defeat by the Primarch. His howls of hurt pride reverberated throughout the warp. Somewhere, deep within a daemon world formed from tattooed, mewling flesh, an ancient serpent-thing’s eyes flicked open, in recognition of the word ‘Vulkan’. A slow smile spread across its distorted face, as it recalled its brother. But this story will be told later...

Vulkan’s consolidation of Armageddon ended when he returned to that world, and returned to Hades Hive, at the head of an army of refugees and grizzled soldiers, some Kazan, some Randian, others genuine surviving Steel Legionnaires and citizens of the planet. Here he found Lucius, howling and cursing. He had been guarded by a dozen soldiers while Vulkan had been at war. They had each shot themselves, as the influence of Lucius corrupted their minds. Still, the Eternal one was alive. Limbless and broken, but definitely alive.

When Vulkan returned, Lucius cursed and spat his name, eyes wild with malice. “I shall never die dog of the Emperor! I am eternal! Even in defeat, I am made stronger! You cannot slay me, or you will fall just like your fallen brothers!” Lucius cackled manically.

Vulkan’s face, it was said in later Legends, was set like stone as he responded coldly. “No, Lucius. You will not die. You will live forever. My subjects; dig a pit,” Vulkan requested, as he hefted Lucius up to his eye level.

“You will live your corruption in darkness and impotence! You shall be Eternal, I promise you that. Yet, should you suffocate in your living tomb, and your soul once more seeks reincarnation, know this: I take no pride or pleasure in your demise, for you are beneath me. I feel NOTHING for you.”

Thus, as Lucius screamed his defiant misery through his bleeding jaws, he was entombed within a bladed coffin of adamantium, and was tossed into the vast pit delved into the crust of Armageddon by the adoring allies of Vulkan, before being buried forever.

Lucius the Eternal was finally bested, forever.

Vulkan turned his attentions inwards, and he remade Armageddon from the foundations up. Militarily secure, the Primarch had the structures of the planet rebuilt, he enforced mass infrastructure renewal projects, including increasing agriculture, both on the surface and in dedicated underground greenhouse vaults. As food and security increased, manpower increased and the population slowly began to recover. He formed enforcer units to keep the peace, had medical facilities and factories constructed, and the people of Armageddon began to prosper over the decades, under their immortal Lord’s rule, who ruled alongside a council of Senators and celebrated thinkers. Eventually, this rebuilding spread to every planet in the system. Once his world was secure and as perfect as his vision could imagine, he began to look outwards.

His new armies, forced to utilize the captured barges and warships of the Kazan and Rand, progress was slow. Yet, as he made short warp jumps to the nearest systems, be began to encounter and defeat realms with useful technologies, knowledge and equipment which he could utilize to reclaim much of the lost information of mankind at its height.

He liberated scores of Tech Priests and their acolytes, bringing them to Armageddon to found the first of Vulkan’s Promethean Technocratic Academies, where the cult mechanicus was reborn upon the world. Using the rebuilt factories and industrial equipment of Armageddon, the Academy began to produce many new and glorious technological wonders. After a century of campaigning and re-conquest, Vulkan had brought a dozen star systems under his rule, and the Academics cloistered within the Tower of Knowledge, situated upon Armageddon, had designed and had constructed three vast battleships, by disassembling dozens of older vessels, and using those parts in conjunction with newly designed equipment.

These were soon used to lead the fleets of captured vessels Vulkan had brought under his heel, a million different hulls and weapon load-outs for a million different purposes and wars. Old, disbanded remnants of old Imperial Guard regiments and recruiting worlds also began to be incorporated, adding to the skill and effectiveness of Vulkan’s armies.

Each world Vulkan took, he would stay upon for almost a decade, carefully rebuilding much of what he destroyed, and converting the populace to his views using his powerful rhetoric and skills as a diplomat and orator. Yet, despite the influence and power of Vulkan, he could not lead every fleet of his, and his mortal armies were struggling to advance his new Empire, as many other older petty imperium began to oppose them with ever greater stubbornness. This would not do.

As Vulkan’s Imperium became more well known amongst the galactic population, he began to encounter Space Marines, in various guises. On the worlds of Domhald, Vesker and Hoinkaz respectively, Vulkan found these fortress worlds were defended by fearsome defenders, who would not yield to Vulkan’s armies. Eventually, Vulkan realized these were Imperial Fists. After much argument and war and debate, the Fists were persuaded that Vulkan was, indeed, who he said he was, and they reluctantly agreed to an alliance, finally relieved after their lengthy sieges. Every few decades, Armageddon would be visited by black-skinned warriors, clad in faded, cracked green armor, tears trailing down their features as they made pilgrimage to Vulkan’s residence, a relatively mundane tower within the vast rebuilt Hades Hive. The surviving Salamanders returned to their father. Vulkan joyfully accepted the refugee Salamanders into the fold once more. Occasionally, word reached Vulkan’s campaign forces of bands of rogue Space marines raiding and pillaging various human worlds across the segmentum. When Vulkan actually encountered many of these bands, he discovered most were not actually chaotic renegade marines, but were actually simply rogue aimless Astartes causing trouble and starting wars simply because they wanted to. Doom Eagles, Marines Malevolent, Dark Star Marines, Minotaurs, White Scars, and a hundred different chapters had elements running rampant and uncontrolled across the void. Vulkan forcibly brought these warbands to battle. Those who did not submit to his Imperial rule were defeated and their arms and armor was captured. Those that realized who this Vulkan was, eventually submitted to his will. Yet, despite these recruits and converts, the Vulkan Imperium could only boast around three hundred aging astartes, and this was simply not enough to be useful to the ever expanding realm.

By 006.M52, Vulkan’s Imperium spanned roughly one thousand worlds. Each world was well fortified, and his army was still expanding and re-organizing into a more unified galactic fighting force. Institutions and bureaucracy sprang up, and many complex industrial and social systems developed, turning Armageddon into a bustling metropolis of Vulkan’s new Imperium.

Not only were the mortal armies changing, but the forces of the astartes began to be remade according to Vulkan’s new plans. He used genetic information from his own flesh, combined with much of the geneseed of those astartes who came to him, to begin a new project of astartes-creation. Countless boys and families begged to join this new revolution of god- making. These new astartes were formed into forces known as commanderies, each two thousand marines strong. They were led by veterans of the ancient old Imperium’s previous astartes chapters, who knew of the intensive training required to make these superhumans into true Astartes killing machines. In total, two hundred commandries were formed, and many would be remembered with infamy amongst the foes of Vulkan; the Jade Princes, the Supplicants, Nemenmarines, the Dorn Revenants, and countless others (which we shall not go into here). Those Salamanders who returned to Vulkan formed the first commandery, and kept their title. They devoted themselves to protecting their primarch. They became a force of guardians and counter-insurgent force, used to stifle any violent revolutions against Vulkan’s regimes. However, Vulkan had no desire to crush all dissenters. Those who had concerns over his rule were allowed to have their opinions voiced in the councils of the Vulkan Imperium. While most concerns are ignored, at least they are acknowledged.

With the commanderies at the forefront of the reconquest, the Vulkan Imperium expanded to almost three thousand worlds in half the time it took to claim the first one thousand. As the Vulkan Imperium expanded, Vulkan encountered the larger menaces that filled the galaxy. South of his realm, the vast theocractic nightmare realm of the Tallern-Ophelian Imperium resided. It was a dark realm of suspicion and hatred, where witch hunters and preachers drove the realm into religious mania. The Ecclesiarch was the highest authority there, and he declared, from his monolithic Cathedral world, that Vulkan was no primarch, but was instead a daemon in disguise. Those that face the daemonic red eyes of the warrior king of the Vulkan imperium, could hardly deny he seemed truly diabolic. To the North and West of the Vulkan Imperium, the two Chaos imperiums began to react to his consolidating actions, and many were the vicious wars fought between these three powers, in anticipation of some vast unseen engagement yet to come. To the east, Vulkan received emissaries from a realm he had never known before; grand sicarium. The multi-colored astartes to arrived in Vulkan’s court were clad in fine burnish armors, expensive furs and jewelry, and bore ornate bolters across their chests. They declared that King Sicarius, being King of all astartes, would be happy to accept the commanderies of Vulkan into their Empire, as long as they accepted Sicarius as their lord and master.

Needless to say, Vulkan was not pleased, and demonstrated great restraint by only killing one of the emissaries of Sicarius, sending the second one back to his master, to inform Sicarius that no, the commanderies would not join his den of infamy and oppression. They would fight them to the very last.

For, amidst the growing tide of dangers throughout the galaxy, Vulkan had formed a solid core of sanity in the middle of the former imperium’s heart.

Additional Background Information 2: The Greater Good drives on

By the dawn on the 61st Millennium, the Tau had truly learned their place in the great tumult of the galaxy. Spread across a thousand sectors, and hundreds of sept colonies and systems, the Tau were an industrial powerhouse of the like not seen in almost ten thousand years. Their technology had reached beyond what the original Tau, in their naive ignorance, believed was possible, and client races by the dozens have integrated into Tau culture (with varying degrees of success. The Hu’sta Gue’Vesa Colonies of To’Kann had become almost identical to most Sept worlds, filled with beautiful white cities and wondrous technologies, while the Kroot worlds remain semi-civilized auxillaries, still on the fringes of society despite their ancient pedigree.)

The furious process of Terra-forming enacted throughout the second Age of Strife has worked in their favor; while other cultures faltered and disintegrated, the Tau fashioned themselves into an ever harder force. Their cutting edge weaponry was awe-inspiring to behold; it was noted during the protracted war with the zaffian independent human league (in 473.M55), how their newest gunships could move to fast and strike so lethally, entire battalions of foes were vanquished before the order to retaliate could be given, their armored columns instantly shattered into molten slag by a hundred thousand simultaneous missile barrages, followed up by direct engagement by agile battlesuits who never seemed to miss.

Yet, as we have seen, all this technology was painfully necessary simply for the Tau Meta- Empire to survive. In the Northern and Eastern sept clusters of the empire, and beyond, titanic forces were arrayed against them. A great silver tide threatened to drown them all, and undo their bitterly difficult expansion before it could be completed. The Necrons (or the Mont’Ka’Vesa, as they were known by the Tau) were at full gold mobilization. Titanic spider constructs bestrode worlds, drinking them dry of life, before spewing green oblivion into their fleets. Endless tides of Necrons warriors and Immortals lived up to their undying titles; the constructs repaired almost all damage, and those necrons truly destroyed were ripped from the very air, repaired by a million machines upon their tomb worlds, and spat back to another war front to fight again, all in the space of hours!

In early phases, the Tau lost hundreds of worlds to these terrors, entire planetary populations vanquished before they could be evacuated to safety. Billions died, and the Tau empire wept for these horrendous losses. The Water Caste propaganda machine had a pitifully easy task uniting their entire empire against this nightmare; made all the simpler when even the most secure sept-dwelling Tau from the safest most peaceful septs, only had to look into the sky and notice that stars were vanishing from the skies before their own eyes. For this menace was not some petty dynast looking for land and a galaxy to rule. It was a force of utter oblivion, led by the personification of such nightmarish ideals; the Nightbringer himself. Many times had the tau mobilized full battlefleets of the new ‘Avenger’ class warships and millions of Fire Caste warriors, to fight the necrons in open war, only for a great black cloud to enter the system, and drink the local star dry. This doomed a system, and made defending such places pointless. Many were the solemn poems written at this time upon Elsy’eir, about the terrible agonizing decisions Sphere-Maintenance Commanders had to face by leaving so- called ‘dark-septs’ to their doom.

Yet, by 972.M55, the Tau had somewhat found a method of holding the darkness at arms length. Munitions were developed that burrowed into necron constructs, and continually burned no matter how many times they were repaired. This forced Tomb Worlds to abandon seriously damaged necrons and to build entire new Necron bodies for the consciousnesses stored in the nodal grid. This took time, and allowed Tau Sept colonies to summon aid through the immense waystation grid network. When Necron forces transported their swarming monoliths upon a planet or station, they found the Tau were ready with all the fearsome weaponry their Empire could fashion. Fighting in such wars, with such hideous and unthinkable powerful weapons was always a harrowing experience, and Earth Caste specialist hospitals were set up by the thousands to deal with the influx of battle-damaged and mentally scarred soldiers evacuated from such warzones. In many cases, these hospitals became euthanasia centers, due to the unnatural and sometimes impossible conditions of some soldiers. The things they saw could not be unseen, and their bodies and minds were consumed by the revelations that gnawed upon their very souls.

The Tau had also made a grand alliance with their old foes, the diverse and fickle Thexian Trade Empire, which had also suffered painfully at the necrons’ silvered hands. The Concord between the two great rivals was binding so long as the necrons remained ‘a credible and pressing danger to the survival of the overall galactic community’. Little could the two factions realise how many thousands of years this would remain the case. One must also note that though the Thexian Elite did sign this treaty, many of their less controllable elements still cause problems in northern Sept districts, where the rule of the Tau is lax...

The great necron wars affected a great many aspects of the Empire throughout its history. There was much desperation amongst the corporate leaders of the grand septs (such as T’au and Bork’an in particular). New weapons and means of combating the silver dread were demanded at all times. In particular, the dreadful loss of life resulting from the war (an attrition rate of almost 80% throughout the years 387.M54-999.M57) was widely decried by most non-military elements of the Empire. Bork’an made tentative attempts to develop pilot- less drone controlled battlesuits for mass-production. However, such machines had slow reactions, and were generally deemed useless. Reluctantly, the secret projects which had de=populated the ancient world of N’dras were ordered by the council of Aun’Va to continue their old research into hyper-sophisticated drone processing and development. This led to the terrible events of the N’dras conflagration in 555.M57, but we shall come back to this at some future date. However, before that date, the N’drasian ‘Cold-suits’ became an essential element in future Tau conflicts; they could be deployed by the millions directly from demiurg factory vessels, into combat. The distinctive blue-grey form of the N’drasian XV333-78 combat battlesuits were far more slender and maneuverable than their predecessors due to their lack of a pilot. They could accelerate more quickly and were more agile, as they didn’t risk the well-being of their occupants. Also, each suit could contain greater payloads and more weapons and more complex targeting systems, and had extensive sophisticated drone networking systems, allowing drones to become an extension of their own minds. What was more was that rather than being mere programs, the CPUs of the XV333’s could actually think for themselves; Artificial Intelligences. A whispered abomination in the old spluttering cultures of the Gue’Vesa, the Tau did not fear these thinking machines. Their arrogance and ignorance would later serve as a warning to all. Beware the Ghost in the Machine...

On 397.893.M58, the single most important development in Tau culture and their wider society came to pass. It was on this day, upon the world of Jaa’Vorl, that a Tau child known to history as Kor-Pivin, was the first Tau to undergo experimental Earth Caste genetic tests.

These long and grueling tests had be begun barely seven kai’rotaa (each equivalent to 50 terran Days) previously, after reports across the empire spoke of strange Tau who could perceive the world in a way never before seen, and could even manipulate local physical constants to a minor degree. On some of the more far distant Sept colonies, such talents would often go unexplored, but the pattern began to reoccur within the more metropolitan sept worlds and sept-dominated colonies. Once the tests were completed, the results were revealed to the Earth caste much to their astonishment. They had confirmed the existence of the first ever tau psyker. This information was of course withheld from the majority of Tau society for almost a hundred years. By the time the ethereals had properly ‘prepared’ society for this revelation, Vior’la and several other military academies across the Empire had already performed their own hunts for psykers (or ‘vortex singularities’ as the Tau propaganda machine hurried to call them to avoid unpleasant associations with the destructive and insane warp-user strains of humanity, who had caused so much destruction of the millennia), and had gathered them together into secret breeding programs.

In typical Tau fashion, these psykers began to be developed into a distinct caste, the M’yen caste (aptly translated as ‘the unforeseen’ caste, as one could easily argue none amongst the Tau predicted such a development). Clad in strange purple robes, and utilizing odd energy focusing crystals in their ornamentation and armaments, these figures became a strange and unsettling presence within Tau society. Most were hastily deployed to the eternal necron front, bolstering the other psychic races of the grand alliance, which were essential in keeping the silver menace at bay. The rest were used by the ethereals, to ensure the compliance and adoration of sept worlds and those living within them, to the Greater Good. The M’yen’Vre were the perfect tools for the ethereals to enact their dominion over all living being beneath their united facade. And dissidents would give themselves away simply by thinking against the system. Such dissidents were taken from their homes and taken to re-education centers, where a combination of M’yen hypnosis techniques and powerful chemical olfactory were employed to re-align the loyalties of the discordant elements. They returned to their home worlds speaking of the beautiful verdant lands they had visited, and how they had spoke personally to Aun’Va, who told them the true meaning of the greater good. So far, not one of the re-educated citizens of the Empire has ever been known to re-offend. Such is the destiny of unity.

On the western borders of the Tau Meta-Empire, things are rather different, throughout this period. Growing mobilization on the eastern borders meant the Tau could not afford to supply these colonies and distant septs with the latest technology and weaponry. On some worlds, they were even still using old devilfish chassis and gunship variants, as well as the old battlesuit designs. These colonies shared greater trading and cross-cultural exchange with outside societies than the very insular inner colonies of the Empire. Numerous human imperiums and civilizations trading ideas and technology with these colonies, or, more often, would raid or make war upon these weaker Tau societies, thinking they were unable to defend themselves. Sometimes this was accurate; most of the time it was not. Many were the foolish brigand-captains who, clad in their stolen finery and armed with pillaged vessels, who try to blast the Tau into submission. Their rail guns and Hero-class cruisers often demonstrated with defiant clarity just who was the real power in the area.

The semi-independent Enclave known as the Farsighted Enclave, is a rare example of a truly independent Tau civilization, completely distinct from their authoritarian neighbors. It is a bizarre feudal culture centered around archaic battlesuit-wearing Kasar-princes, who maintain personal armies and vie with one another for influence. There’s is a bastard culture of many different origins, which can only really unite when under threat by a faction more powerful than all of the princes combined. Such a foe reared its head in 222.M53. In this year, the outer waystations of the Enclave picked up the distinctive signature of a large battlefleet entering realspace from the warp. Accordingly, Kais’Kasar’Koilgu, the local Kasar-prince, gathered his forces and his battlefleet and thundered to intercept this fleet. Over the moon of Jubza, the two fleets met. The enemy fleet didn’t even attempt to communicate with Koilgu. Instead, the vast fleet of boxy, bulky vessels, each distinctive and colorful in its livery and decoration, opened fire upon Koilgu’s armada. The battle raged for days, until the flagship of the mysterious fleet fired boarding torpedoes directly into Koilgu’s own command vessel. The Enclave Tau fought hard with pulse rifle and bloody-minded determination, but they were easily cut down by the arrogant giants who rampaged through the ship, accompanied by flocks of adoring human worshippers who fired lasguns and cried prayers to their masters. Eventually, the leader of the foe burst onto Koilgu’s bridge. Koilgu was armored in a beautifully maintained battlesuit, covered in honor markings and inscriptions of glory. Before him, God-Captain Flaegren, Astartes-Under Lord for the seventeenth crusade of grand sicarium stood in ornate power armor with glittering power fist, his shoulders swathed in a thick lion pelt, his head covered by ostentatious jewellery of the most garish kind. The two opulent and corrupt figures stared each other down for but an instant before the charged. Bolter and melta raged against plasma rifle and burst cannon, crackling power fist clattered against a sparking Mechanicus power glaive, granted to Koilgu by a captured Adept long ago. Though the battlesuit made Koilgu fiendishly strong, Flaegren was a veteran of almost a millennia of bloodshed and warfare. His skill was phenomenal, and the duel ended which the psychotic marine carving open Koilgu’s chassis, before having his sycophantic minions pour molten gold inside the suit with the screaming Tau still inside.

Koilgu’s gilded corpse was delivered to the Grand Kassar of the Enclave scant months later. The retainer who brought the grizzly trophy to the Kassar arrogantly recited the God- Captain’s message.

“Here is a valuable gift to the great Kassar of the Farsighted Enclave. A token of the benevolence of Lord King Sicarius and the grand sicarium. You shall receive more of these mighty gifts, should your foolish peoples choose to oppose the dominion of the true master of the galaxy, and the king of all astartes!”

Needless to say, but the remains of the retainer, after the Kassar was done with him, would have barely filled a small paper cup. The challenge of Flaegren had been accepted, and it would be many years before his crusade could be stopped by the Enclave. Over a dozen worlds and a hundred battlefronts, the insane Marines of grand sicarium and their men at arms fought bitter world to world wars with the Enclaves. Each side fought like smoke, fluidly attempting to out maneuvers their opponents before delivering a killing blow. Guerilla campaigns were launched by desperate or hate-fuelled enclavers, and the astartes responded with vast bombing runs over civilian population centers.

The sheer number and variety of conflicts that raged for decades throughout the lawless border regions could fill a library themselves, but eventually both sides were exhausted, numbers dwindling to but a fraction of their previous forces. Bitter and driven by a blinding arrogance, Flaegren continued his campaign, initiating a blistering and penetrative offensive with his remaining fleet, which plunged like a spear deep into the soft tissue of the farsighted Enclave. The capital world itself was besieged by two great battlebarges. These massive floating cityscapes were almost impossible to destroy; time and again dedicated bands of battlesuits and drones would sally forth on covert missions to infiltrate and destroy the colossi, but to no avail.

Then, something truly disastrous occurred. In his hubris and mania, Flaegren had neglected to maintain his stocks of ordnance throughout the war. His logistical lines were stretched to breaking point, and this breaking point came sixteen months into the final siege. A vast astartes supply vessel, the bride of Sicarius, burst into the system without escort, hoping to resupply the vast barges who had been constantly pounding any large cities or settlements they could find upon the surface. Before it could reach Flaegren’s vessels however, the Kassar’s men finally leapt into action. Over seven hundred battlesuits, three hundred orcas filled with loyal fire warriors, supported by a tribe of the mercenary kroot, boarded the vessel, and destroyed all the munitions in a great storm of gunfire and screams. Now helpless and unarmed, the battle-barges were easy meat for the reinforcements that came to wreak their terrible vengeance upon the hated astartes. Kasar-princes from across the Enclave burst into the system with their attendant fleets, spewing glistening arcs of blue and purple energy into the stricken behemoths. Missiles and ion batteries of a dozen different configurations and designs pumped their destructive force into breaking apart the ancient terran constructs. Armour plates splintered and blistered, men and women howled as the void reached in to snatch away their lives in a fiery instant, and slowly but surely, both the great ships collapsed under the pressure, tumbling into pieces like the decomposing corpses of whales.

It was said Flaegren went down with his ship, insaley ordering his men to stop dying, as the air was sucked from the bridge. He died hacking apart his own minions as they asphyxiated on the floor at his gilded boots.

This is, of course, but a brief glimpse into the actions of the Tau of this period, as destiny called out to all races in the wake of building giants in both the void and the warp. Soon enough, the Tau, the young race turned into a cynical monstrosity by grief, were forced to reassess their place in the galaxy, and to choose a side in the final great and enduring conflict of our, and indeed all, times. For it was coming, and no dynasty would be secure from it in the end.

Additional Background Information 3: The Asur Revenant: The actions of the Eldar

It would be remiss of this history to ignore one of the prime movers throughout the Eternal War. By the close of the second Age of Strife, to an outside observer, the Eldar race would have seemed utterly extinct, save for those last few burning embers. Indeed, most of the vast craftworlds were naught but ghost ships, rumbling silently with the souls of the countless dead Eldar slain in the hopeless task of awakening their god of the Dead, while others were victims of the great Chaos Empires and necron uprisings in the ascent throughout that darkest of times.

Of the craftworlders, only Biel-Tan remained active and defiant, attracting those few outsiders and rogues of their race to them, and forging a moderate empire of hundreds of worlds (though these remained scattered across the galaxy, thus making their empire seem impossibly diffuse and hard to notice).

Yet, this is but a fragment of the Eldar race in total. For, running through the veins of the webway like black Tar was a realm which had never stopped, and never repented of their actions.

Commorragh. The Second Age of Strife had a different name in the Dark City of Sin. It had been considered a golden age. With the fall of the Imperium, all order vanished and collapsed. Once secure worlds across the galaxy were now helpless before the Dark Kin and their ever- draining souls. Worlds were repeatedly ravaged by the Dark Eldar kabals. Slave souls and tortured screams filled the City in a great tumult. Yet, for all their building prosperity, the drain upon their own gangrenous souls grew too. Their raids were ever more frequent as the coiling embrace of Slannesh tightened as her power built in the anarchy of the wider galaxy.

The Dark Eldar continued on as they had always done, driven by insanity and malice and utter evil. They continued to conspire against one another and the dark pits were ever-filled with the shrieks of the damned and the dying. And at the centre of this all, was Vect. The Overlord of Commorragh, however, was truly mad. One of the eldest beings alive, the Dark Lord’s life drew on long beyond his ability to rejuvenate his soul; millions upon millions of slaves and minions had to perish every day to keep his soul from being drained away like bile in rainwater. He grew desperate and ever-more dangerous as his mind began to slip from him. To begin with, this mania was merely a deception; a lure to draw out conspirators against his position. But after thousands of years, deception became truth, and Asdrubael Vect became something far worse than a monster and a Tyrant to the dark Eldar; he became a liability and a threat to all Archons.

Kabals who didn’t bring back sufficient souls were destroyed as they entered the Port of Lost Souls, and their ruins were picked over by the parched and rival Archons alike. His punishments for perceived slights and threats against him were brutal even by his own standards. Some Archons were carved up into a thousand parts, re-grown through the oceans of agony generated by the Haemonculi, and each one was then butchered and tortured, before being deposited upon slanneshi daemonworlds.

Yet, there was but one Archon who could hope to challenge Vect’s entrenched position. Lady Malys. Disgruntled Kabals flocked to her banner secretly, and the old Noble houses slithered to her throne with tributes of the caged screams of billions of wailing infants and the hearts of an entire race made extinct in her name. And it was not just they who had her ear. The Harlequins, it was rumored, came secretly to her chambers, and danced the secret dances that nobody knew. Secrets and prophesies and words uttered only once and never uttered in all the countless eons of existence before or since. (The rumors of bladed shadows that descended upon worlds assailed by the Nightbringer’s forces during the eastern campaigns are perhaps not so far-fetched as once believed... but this is another story...)

Yet the Dark Lord was not without his own allies; his sycophants and those Eldar who truly wished to see the world sicken and misery to reign, simply to see what would happen, and how it could be rebuilt in a vile manner of their own choosing. At every level of the twisted Hierarchies of Commorragh, a new division was brewing, amidst the various and multifaceted feuds and ambition which was normal and encouraged across the twisted realm. Of course, to the outside galaxy, this was an unseen war, but it was not unfelt. The Dark Eldar were being bred on an unprecedented scale, and the Haemonculi rejoiced as they could breed more eventual fodder for their labs. Abominations were released on millions of worlds across the galaxy, and no one could comprehend what these misshapen things were, or why they so desperately tortured, raped and destroyed them. Raids became even more frequent, as the raw material that formed Commorragh’s bedrock was in ever greater demand.

While ambition brewed in the dark city, the rest of the Eldar race was not idle. Biel-Tan engaged in a war against the Eastern Chaos Imperium. The realm of renegades and brigands was vast, bordering both Vulkan’s new Imperium and the western domains of Abaddon himself. Yet, it was a cumbersome beast, with little order beyond the great fleets of Huron Blackheart, the rotting heart of the Chaos Imperium. The war was predominantly a naval conflict, as the Eldar made up for their lack of numbers by using Waystones and spirit gems to guide and control the massive numbers of orphaned craftworld fleets, greatly bolstering the numbers available to Yriel. Yriel was a genius in void warfare, yet Huron, despite his age and his increasing chaotic taint, was also a master of fleets.

There were far too many naval actions, spread across centuries upon centuries, to document in their entirety here. For Yriel was a persistent threat and nuisance to Huron. His ships were arrow-swift and they only fought battles when they had no other choice. Most of the time, they avoided his great Corsair armadas. When they did strike, it was while Huron’s armies were occupied in other wars against lesser imperiums and against Abaddon and his Legions or the astartes commanderies of Vulkan. Whenever Huron was weakest, Yriel struck. It is testament to the skill of Huron and his Lieutenants that these battles were rarely one-sided; they always knew of some means to reply to the Eldar. Indeed, Huron’s familiar whispered of coming threats weeks before they arrived.

One such battle was in the system of Maniforge, where Yriel came close to being destroyed. The world was a Dark Mechanicus forge world; a world infested with the Obliterator plague right to its very core. Huron’s vessels, limping back to an allied port after a failed campaign against the Lead Bastion, one of grand sicarium’s core worlds, were attacked by Yriel’s hidden Void Stalkers, cruisers and wraithships as they burst into reality. Like daggers through silk, the Eldar engaged the chaotic vessels, laying waste to hundreds of vessels within hours. But Huron had picked the Maniforge for a very particular reason. He had made a pact with the Deep Entity known as Valchocht the Maker, the Ravager of Terra, Lord of the Obliterator contagion. This great Daemon was promised all of maniforge, as well as the sanctified sacrifices of two hundred betrayed Red Corsairs. But what really sealed the pact was the promise of bright Eldar souls to devour. Eldar were so very rare, and it would please Valchocht to deny the young upstart God Slannesh some of her prize delicacies. When Yriel destroyed the first wave of chaos vessels, he sealed the deal, and maniforge opened. Valchocht and his ilk were daemons from the deep warp; ancient and vast beyond all imagining. When he was reborn upon the plane of flesh, he bodily possessed all of the wrecked hulks at once. Vines of sulphurous daemonflesh and churning technologies flowed between the ruins, knitting them together into a behemoth as vast as a star fort. Huron eventually arrived hours later, and the battle of Maniforge began anew. Both sides were heavily battered and brutalized and not one vessel escaped unscathed. Yriel’s flagship was almost consumed by a great destroyer-wide maw which burst from Valchocht’s stolen flesh of steel and souls, but skilful piloting and the spear of twilight spared him of this end.

Another engagement in the long war led the two enemies to almost be destroyed by a third force, when they became becalmed in the dead warp around the angylworld of Zone. Their engines failed and their crews became sluggish and weak, as the cold influence of the perfectly symmetrical world of order and obedience spread out from it like a vile halo. Luckily, they managed to repair their vessels just as their sensors picked up the great silver pinions of the Angyls of the Star Father, come to break their spirit and enslave their minds. Biel-Tan would never bow.

The hollow tombworlds that were once the craftworlds echoed with the sounds of skirmishing and violence. Bands of looters and pirates attempted to ransack these ancient worldships for their hidden technologies and the secrets that lay within them. They often learned too late that the capering ones in their cloaks of many colors still defended their kins’ graves. And yet, craftworld after craftworld was pillaged by some great force, which could evade the defenders easily. They did not cause damage though, and they only took one thing. Each craftworld found their Avatars spirited away. Only gory offerings and broken spirit stones marked their passing.

When the war of Commorragh finally came in M67, there was carnage (which will be detailed further in later parts). Yet, soon, the two rivals found that a far greater war had come to the galaxy, and for once, they could not hide from it, for it came for them. The full extent of this war will become apparent in later sections, but the Dark Eldar experienced their first real taste of this conflict when the great Jackal God began in earnest, his war upon the webway. Though the deceiver had little power there, the greater war had begun to awaken his more... esoteric allies from their slumber/imprisonment/banishment. The ophilim Kiasoz, that great unknowable terror, had dimensions that bisected the webway in certain sections. What is more, it had allies amongst the Dark Eldar themselves; creatures that had bonded themselves to the anomaly through some means mortals were not meant to know.

The dark Kin would fight in the war for existence, or they too would perish.

And of course, all true Eldar grew to fear and despise those who rose from the Crone worlds. Those who were Her favorites, brought back to drink deep of the fall of flesh and the accent of excess. The Chaos Eldar, who would attempt to bring the galaxy to its knees, at the head of the impossible legions that gathered for the End.

Additional Background Information 4: The Blind Eagle; The Empire of the Theologian Union

At the close of the Second Age of Dusk, the very heart of the ophelian Imperium was suddenly and violently ripped out by the sudden and thunderous birth of the Star Father. The entire world was dragged into the warp and becalmed by legions of angyls. It became the angylworld of the archangyl Malcador, and reappeared as a world of thoughtless drones deep within the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath, many thousands of light years removed from its former location.

This loss was a near fatal blow to the ophelian imperium. In one fell swoop, over half the Sisters Thanatine (the Elite monastic Military Order which formed the elite core of the petty Imperium’s colonial forces), as well as the Ecclesiarch and most of the Cardinals versed in Saint Karamazov the Martyred’s Doctrines of the faith, enforced as the official faith in the manic realm. The Imperium’s precarious administrative organization was compromised and rendered inoperative.

Within ten years of M51, the ophelian Imperium had descended into anarchy, as the Governor-Kings of the thousand-strong Empire fought and bickered in bitter conflicts of succession between each other, sometimes besieging their own fellow Imperial worlds with their PIFs (Planetary Invasion Forces) and what ships they could spare. Though trade continued betwixt the realms, it was carried out with paranoid wariness; much revenue being expended on simply defending cargo fleets from attack during their long short-warp jump journeys between the strongholds of each individualistic despot. Some Governor’s were utterly unscrupulous, hiring outside human and alien mercenaries ( even Krieg Serf soldiers) to overcome their rivals, often entering into surprisingly disadvantageous alliances in order to assert their claim Capital-status for their own world, and desperately each tried to get their own candidates elected by the Cardinals to become Ecclesiarch.

This of course meant that the ophelian Imperium was much weakened at this time, and many of the border worlds were sacked by opportunistic enemies, such as the carnivorous amphibious cythenan empire, and the vazineren Imperium, with its cadres of psychons, terrible soldiers recruited solely from the mounting Psyker population of that particular Imperium (which was formed around an unstable warp rift known as the Kazid). It was at this point, after years of anarchy, that the Tallern Imperium really began to take an increased interest in their troublesome neighbor.

While the ophelians had been laid low by the events of the Age of Strife, the Tallarn Emperors and their Nobles ruling over their many thousands of worlds managed to endure the terrors which destroyed many of their weaker neighbors. Through a combination of cunning and logistical might, they fought off hundreds of major invasions during the first century of the Age of Dusk. The rise of the Vulkan Imperium was fortunately timed, its expansion drawing their hateful eyes of many of the worst and most powerful nations and races of the galaxy, including the Twin behemoths of the Eastern and western Chaos Imperiums.

Thus, they were in a strong position to take advantage of the ophelian Imperium, orphaned of its former Capital. It began under Emperor al-Fonze Ma’karib II of Tallarn, in 132.M52, during his campaigns of reconstruction in the northern fringes of the ophelian Imperium. He besieged and took these worlds forcibly, but was incredibly merciful in his treatment of these worlds after their defeat. He permitted the terrified Lords of the Hive cities to buy their passage of retreat from the worlds, and he did not install massive colonization forces on the captured worlds, but instead sent preachers and supplies to help rebuild the smashed and in some cases starving populations of these worlds. Forced conversion was kept to a bare minimum. Yet, al-Fonze’s assassination by one of the mysterious ‘Heracles’ Faction of ex-Temple assassins meant his campaigns were halted after only seven years. Nevertheless, the impression was made upon the ophelian population (at least in the outer worlds).

In the 160s of M52, the Governors of the outlying Ophelian worlds began to cooperate to a greater degree against the old guard of the Inner worlds, which still looked inwards in despair of their lost capital world. They looked to the Tallarns to aid them in this task. They offered the Tallarn ruling aristocrats trading privileges and even lands and estates upon their worlds, in exchange with funding and weapons in order to face the inner worlds, who maintained most of the ophelian Imperium’s manufacturing worlds and subordinate Forge Worlds. The many fleet engagements, pitched planetary sieges and raids that ensued could fill a dozen history books themselves, but in the end, the core worlds were driven into a corner and forced to sue for a truce. The thrarantine Guard (who had expanded to a massive size during this period, as they were seen as the most Theologically ‘pure’ force in the secular conflict) arbitrated the terms of the treaties, and there was a semblance of peace. Nevertheless, the Tallarn were now intrinsically involved in the diffuse and fractious politics of the Ophelians.

Over the centuries, the two Imperiums began to merge, via dense trading corridors that (though they took many years to traverse) provide wealth and prosperity to the rulers and their magnates. At the council of Thezibebe, hundreds of Tallarn-orthodox, ophelian Kazamarovite and ascensionist Cardinals gathered to discuss the election of a new Ecclesiarch to once more unite the faith of the ‘true’ Imperium. The debate was not a success, and had to be called off after many of the lesser radical sects tried to set fire to the debate podiums, and the Ascensionists caused a planet-wide riot in which four hundred thousand acres of industrial sprawl became a mangled warzone as vast hordes of zealots and fanatics battled like insane animals in the streets.

Between 100.M53-200.M53, it was said that at any one time, five Ecclesiarches and ‘anti- Ecclesiarches’ were in place on Pontifical thrones from Tallarn itself to at one point a small mining colony in an unstable star system. Each claimed to be the true Ecclesiarch. Despite this schism amidst the clergy, the worlds themselves became closer, and their cultures began to merge and develop. Fear of the outsider and the xenos began to mutate into a creed of ‘Humanism Absolutism’; that is, the creed of Human survival at all costs. Humanity must survive, and let everything else be damned.

In 487.M53, emperor Santargo III of Tallarn crowned himself ‘Lord Protector of the Imperial Mysteries’. This strategically side-stepped the theological issues of the newborn super-bloc of imperiums, and allowed him to justify his secular campaigns, and to impose military tithes upon the worlds nominally under his thrall. Though the worlds of this Imperium were still bitter rivals for the most part, Santargo could still launch his huge crusade to expand the realm in 568.M53, gathering together a force of diverse colonial troops and mercenaries, held together by the thrantine Orders, other growing religious warrior fraternities and sororities, and the iron will of the Emperor Santargo himself, who went to war in one of the perishingly- rare Leviathan Moving fortresses.

Though he died before even his first crusade could be completed (due to the monumental distances involved, and the poor quality and pitfalls of Astronomicon-less warp travel) his sons and grandsons managed, over the next hundred years, to swallow up a dozen other imperiums that bordered the ophelian/Tallarn alliance, subsuming them into the great web of commerce and religious violence which codified the realm of ‘Imperial Mysteries’. Also, during this period of expansion and conflict, a centre of commerce built up around the ruins of a former Star Fortress known as Haanab the Ravaged. Here, trade from across the sprawling realm came, and the ruler of the space station was often a key figure in wider decisions on tithes and tax and what could be imported. Santargo XXII had this fortress massively expanded with subsidiary-stations and had asteroids towed into orbit with this expanding colossus of industry and trade. He then declared Haanab the new capital of the realm of Imperial Mysteries and himself its governor (even though he was on campaign for his entire life, and never once visited the fort himself), with little objection from the powerful nobles and Governor-Lords of the Imperium, as it was relatively neutral.

It would be a mistake to consider this realm of captured and consumed Imperiums to be a singular super power that that point. It was a huge area of space, covering a huge swathe of the south-west of the galactic plane. Such a realm could not be administered by a government with such slow FTL capable vessels, and for much of the time huge sections of the ‘Empire’ were like lawless realms of border princes and robbing Wolf Packs of bandits, and squabbling Governor-Lords vying for advantage or pressing assumed claims of heritage. Amidst this anarchy and misery, there was the undercurrent of a building popular faith. The Emperor of the wasteland.

There were no longer any survivors from the time before the Second Age of Strife, and no man had ever seen or heard of the Emperor’s actions beyond vague recollections of priestly chroniclers, who had hastily scribbled down scripture from memory after the loss of all the written records of the ministorum upon Ophelia. Thus, the image of the Emperor became horribly distorted. The vile concept of the Corpse-Emperor merged with the creed of human survival at all costs, turning the Emperor into some legendary undead figure of vengeance and pragmatic, who ruled a universe of broken worlds and failed systems, yet refused to relinquish them, like a jealous child. This creed was paradoxically both horribly cynical yet fervent in its prosecution and practices. A faith of nihilistic mania, where only suffering and miserable stubbornness could get one closer to your god. So what if his empire was of ashes and ruins? It was still HIS. His ashes. His ruins.

When a necrotic warp plague ravaged the allied Imperiums in M54, the tenuous hold of the Tallarn Emperor’s was undone, and a power vacuum was soon created with their failure.

The Cardinal known as Ceylan was to be the very man to fill this void. His name would grow to be one whispered in awe and utter terror by his subjects. This cardinal began his life as a mere clerk in one of the priestly houses of sanctioned invention, where he made friends easily and swiftly, due to his serpent’s tongue and charming demeanor. All of which hid his great pathological personality and truly evil ambition. Through a series of coincidences and sinister ploys, he manipulated his way into the priesthood, working his way right into the meat of the ecclesiarchy like a maggot in meat.

He used his power and influence to place his friends into powerful offices and in particular patronized the work of his questionable-disciple Deng-Vaal. This man claimed to be a warp scientist, and made a major breakthrough in the method of warp travel. He found if one could torture psykers and witches sufficiently, and somehow captured and stored their torment and lingering death-screams, one could power a ship through the warp at tremendous speed. Ceylan quickly seized upon this idea, taking it as his own and tying it into the natural distrust for psykers prevalent in the realm. He turned this process into a form of benevolent penance; the death of the psyker would purify both their soul, but also allow the Emperor’s children to spread to the very furthest reaches of space. He managed to acquire Secular support from a number of prominent Tallarn old-born noble houses, as well as the favour of some of the radical factions who desired to build a stronger Empire, under a powerful leader.

As reward for his discovery, Ceylan was granted the position of Ecclesiarch by his fellow Cardinals. His exact theological leanings were always slightly in question, but the devious man could never be pinned down to a single definitive answer, and thus was elevated to the post without noticeable opposition. For the first time in a long time, there was only one Ecclesiarch of this Imperium. As the ‘Excruciator’ Engines were being created and tested by the forge worlds under Vaal’s watchful gaze, Ceylan subtly and smoothly began to undermine the central faiths of the Cardinals, playing them off against each other, but avoided any responsibility himself by claiming he was merely arbitrating between wronged parties. As he sowed discord there, he discreetly promoted the more popular faith of the Emperor of the wasteland. He stealthily inserted known rhetoric used by the Creed in his sermons and speeches. Just as the faith of the Imperium was becoming unified in religious wars and reform, the means to propagate this faith across the entire Imperium was finally completed and made widespread use of. His influence grew as the Imperium consolidated itself via the new cruel means of breaching the warp. Eventually, with this greater unity there came a chance for a new Emperor to take over. Naturally, Ceylan manipulated the processes of selection and influence, until a candidate of his preference was selected. Ceylon made sure never to publically claim leadership or secular power over the Imperium, but rather worked behind the scenes. The Tharantine and his own spy network, known unofficially as the Aquila-men, discreetly carried out his orders and kept the various other armies and factions within the Empire under control. As a final demonstration of the new focus of human unity of purpose, the Emperor renamed the Empire the Theologian Union.

By M55, the Theologian Union was the third largest human Imperium in the galaxy, able to hold its own in campaigns against the very largest of empires. Initially, the Union struggled to maintain a strong focus, for the source of direct outside enemies to attack were few. They were engaged with semi-persistent wars with Pirate nations, Hybrid Cults of strange aliens with bulging heads and snapping claws. And a large scale siege of the world of Rokfal, where the race of feral greenskins had made a sudden and unheralded resurgence, smashing the industry of the planet almost annually, as the force of barbarians continually threw itself against its attackers with mindless vigor, getting stronger every time, as if feeding upon warfare itself for nourishment.

However, Ecclesiarch Ceylan the first found the perfect foe when Vulkan sent his envoys to the Theologian Union, bearing banners of compromise and hope. When the envoys refused to show fealty to the Ecclesiarch (the Emperor’s representative), the Emperor cast the ambassadors out. Ceylan began to order the preachers of the Union to spread themselves amongst the people, and spread the word. There was no primarch upon Armageddon. There couldn’t be. They were dead. This ‘Vulkan’ was a daemon disguised as a primarch, they claimed.

And so it was that the blind men of the deluded realm of the Wasteland Emperor turned their hand ever against their own kind. In their own way, these vainglorious zealots brought upon themselves the terrible events that marked the Dusk of all things, in the final war of conclusion and defiance.

Additional Background Information 5: The War-race Tempered: The Ork Risen

In the opening years of the Second Age of Strife, the orks as a race battled their nemesis, the New Devourer, and in doing so were destroyed in that titanic struggled which raged across hundreds of sectors. Though they had not been aware of it, their actions had inadvertently saved the entire galaxy from the New Devourer. While their war had been futile, it had delayed the hybrid tyranid-ork menace, which eventually found itself drawn away to fight some unseen foe beyond the galaxy. In the midst of the horrors of the strife age, people dared to hope that perhaps the orks themselves were made extinct in this great conflagration.

The audacity of hope is so easily quashed, for the orks yet lived.

Minute spores and fungal helixes were left behind on the millions of abandoned greenskin worlds. However, it would take many thousands of years before the spores could fully recover, and spread like a bacterial plague through the undergrowth and organic matter which flourished on their former worlds. One such planet was the world of Lexin Fidorich. The humans there had come from the nearby Feudal Technocracy known as Shunter-beerne, who had eagerly captured this nearby world, which was impossible fecund and fertile. By M52, Lexin was a flourishing world of diverse environments made tame by the sterile crop- scienc eof the cybernetic humans who tended this veritable garden. However, soon the Feudal Hyper-lords of the Shunter-beerne found their woods and forests infested with strange red beasts with ugly tusks and a belligerent attitude. This was intolerable, and long-limbed game keeper constructs cleansed the biomes of these beasts with gunshot and flame.

This was a mistake. Smaller green creatures began to appear in the woods. They watched and scurried through the woods. Occasionally they would steal children or set fires, and stole massive quantities of metal sheeting and cut down sections of woods. Again, the long-striding machines killed most of them; but not all. Those who were birthed afterwards filled in for their fallen, and the building of crude settlements began.

Within the space of a decade, feral monstrous warbands were roaming across the planet. Tranquil glass cities were smashed by the tread of hundreds of vast squiggoth beasts, and the crude firearms of their riders. Throughout the now-infested woods, an ancient cry not heard in millennia rang out; waaaaaagh!

More and more powerful constructs were deployed on the surface by the Shunters, with ever deadlier weapons, but this only speeded the advance of their foes. Soon they had to abandon their planet. They did not possess exterminates grade weaponry however, and thus they could not prevent the Feral ork spread.

This story reoccurred on dozens of sectors and systems across the galaxy, followed by hundreds upon hundreds after that. In particular feral orks tended to thrive just on the cusp of the various inter-power struggles which were ongoing across the galaxy; there were veritable masses of feral orks on the border with Grand Sicarium and the Kassars, as well as the unruly space between the thexians and the tau, and on the fringes of Maelstrom space. One of the Demiurge brotherhoods (The collective of Hashut) even began to enslave feral ork bands for use in their schism against their rival Brotherhoods. As the shattered galaxy had no singular authority to recognize this building force, every lesser faction assumed these were localized threats and barely contained them.

However, these feral bands of barbarians were naught but the wisps of powdered snow before an avalanche. At the close of the 52nd Millennium, there were signs across the galaxy. Feral orks were driven into fits of prophetic madness, and weirdboys chanted and babbled insanely. Something churned up the warp, and the powers realigned, for they could sense what was coming back.

The Orks were returning. But not simply orks...

It began on the planet of Galgoroth, a rich mining world which had the protection of a coalition of minor xenos and human enclaves. The year was 999.M52, and the world reported fearsome warpstorms; the biggest seen since their records had begun (in practice, their records hadn’t begun until M50, during its founding). It was then that they detected that a space hulk had translated into the system, a Hulk known as St. Jollepur’s Bane.

Their Managing Governor-Director was not pleased. Hulks were dens where minor xenos (perhaps even an isolated gang or feral orks had managed to survive in the warp upon the hulk?) and pirates infested the hideous amalgams of vessels and asteroids. He had experienced hulk-drift while on another core-wards world centuries before, and he disliked what they promised. The world’s PDF and system ships would have to be diverted from guarding his planet from real threats, to mop up the degenerate scum that would surely be squatting within its haunted depths.

So, reluctantly, he unleashed his large fleet to engage the hulk on its brief incursion into his planet’s local area. His fleet was composed of old mass produced Tau cruisers re-fitted for human use, Vulkanian vessels traded with the rising human power, and even some antique Mars Cruisers were amongst this diverse and lethal armada. On board the transport vessels, Krieg Serf Soldiers, kroot and fremen were hired on Galgoroth’s ruling Corporation’s expense, alongside a free company of Obsidian Falcon astartes and as much of the local PDF forces he could afford to send in support.

Eventually, the fleet reached the hulk. Initial scans and intel gathered by the fleet showed that the hulk was like nothing they had ever seen before. The hulk was no longer merely a mass of weaponized ruins drifting through space; it was a warship. Uniform, sturdy armour covered its colossal flanks, alongside thousands of rows of vast weapon batteries and gun emplacements. And jutting from its shark-like sides were great spurs and towers, from which it seemed an entire fleet was at dock. That was when the firing started, and communication was lost with Galgoroth. The skies were aflame as the battle raged for almost three days. Ships were blown apart, or pulled open by tractor beams and high explosive ordnance, as well as more arcane and strange weaponry deployed by the new foe. Enemy soldiers were teleported directly into the striken human vessels, and proceeded to massacre everyone with extreme efficiency, barely a sonorous growl escaping the butchers’ lips as they killed.

Only a handful of vessels returned to the mining world, including the utterly-mauled Strike Cruiser of the Obsidian Falcons. Their leader, captain Eregious, immediately deployed one of his squads to the surface of Galgoroth. The Governor demanded to know what was attacking them. Was it xenos? pirates? enemy marines? Orks?

Eregious responded with a simple phrase. “Those are not orks...”

His squad attacked and broke into the treasure vaults of the world, securing their payment before deploying back to their Cruiser. Eregious refused to stay and defend the world, because he wished to preserve his brothers. For the foe arrayed before them was too powerful and too numerous to defeat; not with such depleted resources.

So, the Galgorothans waited and fortified their planet as the bulky, well-constructed warships of the enemy hurtled towards them. The Kill Cruisers and huge battleships of the enemy easily swatted away the System Defense Ships, and deployed their ground forces after a bombardment of all the centers of military resistance. City-scale factories were dropped directly upon the planet, and began to work as soon as they slammed to the ground with a thunderous rumble that resounded across the mountains themselves. The few pockets of resistance remaining were dealt with by hulking armored figures that deployed right at the heart of their battlelines, stepping through warp portals with ease. They wielded weapons like bolters, but far more destructive, alongside strange weapons, such as a device which teleported not gretchin, but miniature plasma warheads inside the bodies of their opponents.

After barely two days, the planet was conquered, and those humans not slain in the bombardments were rounded up and used as slave labor in the mining districts, which were expanded and enhanced by the mysterious foe, who deployed huge titan-scale excavators and walking machines to heft out vast quantities of raw material for the hundreds of factories deployed by the orbital fiends.

This was the galaxy’s first taste of the new greenskin race. Ten Hulks at least were reported with similar modifications, but that first hulk remained the largest of this new phenomenon. These creatures did not call themselves the orks, but rather merely called themselves ‘War’, or at most ‘the War of the Krork’. Few people have subsequently breached the armored hides of the War-Hulks, but it is claimed that the krorks are in fact the commanders and driving force behind this new breed of elite ork. It is theorized that these new creatures are in fact modified gretchin or grots, altered to be tacticians and schemers beyond the ken of the larger breeds; it has to be noted that no smaller greenskins have been sighted within the battle-hosts of ‘the War’. Who manipulated them or remade these intelligent creatures remained unknown for many millennia, during the age of intertwining fates, but we shall get to that in due course...

The warriors of the krork were a distillation and perfection of previous ork concepts and natural abilities. Each warrior wore flexible powered armor, which captured the spores released by them and sealed them in flame-proof canister inside the suits. These canisters were collected after a battle, and were taken to their manufacturing shops or their hulks, and dozens more generations of orks were thus spawned, or the spores were carefully cultured and spread upon worlds deemed perfect for Ork-forming. The powered armor also further enhanced each ork’s strength, and was flexible enough to expand as the ork expanded.

Each soldier ork was first forced to fight against hundreds of its peers inside the war-hulks, and this swelled each beast to vast scales. Most were taller than even an astartes warrior when they were finally allowed to construct their armor and weaponry, which each and every ork instinctive knew how to build, unconsciously building their gear according to the exact specifications of higher authority, tailoring their weaponry to be optimized for whatever battlefield they found themselves on.

Though the unseen ‘brainboys’ of the numerous hosts were never seen on the battlefield, powerful War-bosses led the armies of each Hulk, and were brilliant tacticians, as their size naturally made them more intelligent, each war making them more efficient and more intelligent. Each Hulk, though separated by lightyears, had some means of psychic communication with their fellow Hulks, due to either the psychic might of the brainboys, or their manipulation of psyker Orks placed upon modified warp-reading thrones as a form of telepathic network.

Needless to say, these Krork hosts spread quickly, and created numerous huge empires. The thirsting Bloodknights of Baal were fought to a standstill around the Juerellian warp gate by the krork, denied their prise of a whole world of mortals which they could taint and then drain to stave off the black rage. A task force comprising of two whole commanderies had to be deployed to drive off an Armada of krork who had managed to cripple the logistical supplies of dozens of Vulkan’s systems. That war was known as the war of renewed vengeance, and eventually the forces of Vulkan (only after the sacrifice of the legendary hero Lord Captain Hexatrin of the Silent Panthers Commandery) prevailed, but the krork could not be finally defeated, as they divided their fleet and began a guerrilla campaign which lasted for five hundred years. Numerous battles and wars were found against krorks across the Western and Eastern Chaos Imperiums, and both factions lost dozens of worlds to the disciplined invaders. Abaddon managed to defeat a krork force by utilizing the planet-killer’s awesome firepower to destroy a war-hulk, which seemed to be the only method of permanently crippling a krork armada.

The krork had special hatred for their feral ork brethren surprisingly, and often accelerated asteroids into planets with them on, or made a special effort to exterminate the entire population of feral greenskins on the ground, before burning the mountains of corpses.

The Krork were a menace to all factions, for they seemed to have declared themselves to be a war against all elements of the galaxy. From the Star Father’s dread angyl-worlds, to the blasted ruins of the Shatter-wake and their bone-feeders, the krork were fearsome opponents. In particular, they seemed to lose some of their cold demeanor when fighting the necrons. On some instinctual level, they just knew what their eldritch function was, for it was encoded into every fiber of their green, war-forged flesh

Their faith is unknown. All that the world at large could decipher of their brutal, complex language spoke of ‘awaiting the two, the facets of the god-mount’. Some claimed, in those early years, that they were merely referring to their primitive ancestor gods, Gork and Mork.

Alas, if only it had been that simple. The true relevance of their creed would not become evident until it was too late to stop what had been started. But that conflict shall be documented in a later section, once these chronicles have been properly reinforced to withstand the telling of the tale of the Nex- [FILE CORRUPTED. LOADING BACK-UP FILES.]

Additional background Section 6: The Despoiler’s Demesne

For ten thousand years, the despoiler had spread across the entirety of Segmentum Obscurus, breaking each system in turn with his vast fleets of chaotic beasts and loyal minions. Endless regiments of the dark Cadians known as the despoiled marched under the dark banners of cleaved-aquila, and murdered those who opposed the Chaos Emperor ruthlessly. Leading these vast armies were the Black legion, who formed a diamond hard centre to the great Despoiler’s regime.

Abaddon forged a new empire from the splintered marrow of ruined Imperial domains and xenos empires, crushing each in turn and forcing their broken populations to kneel before him and his diabolic forces. Many did so willingly, for those the Despoiler was a butcher and a madman, he wished to rule a powerful and unified Imperium of darkness, rather than a shattered ruin of roving warbands and screeching devil-spawn. Agri-worlds were enhanced by warp-tainted contagions that infested their crops and their forests, forming great tangled masses of man-eating mangroves across thousands upon thousands of miles. Captured forge worlds and enslaved hive worlds churned out towering daemon engines of ever-more grandiose and insane designs, concocted by the Dark Mechanicus of the putrid, poisoned worlds of Lathe and their vassal forges. In some of the more vile and odious hives, those who toiled in their factories barely registered that the Imperium of old had ever gone.

Yet, to maintain the great Western Imperium required constant warfare and cruel reprisals, for many and powerful were the supposed Vassals of the Despoiler. Kharn the Betrayer was a constant irritation to the Dark Lord; smashing apart worlds at random as he howled his frustration into the void. Abaddon and his allied forces engaged warbands associated with Kharn over a hundred times throughout 273.M52, and during the great uprising of M55, Lord Ulvenial of the Screamers (a warband of Fallen Iron Knights who owed feudal obligation to the dark Lord) were almost constantly in pursuit of the Betrayer’s charnel-barge and those crazed vessels full of madmen who pursued him like hungry hounds lapping at the frothing gore left in his wake. Ulvenial was finally brutally butchered during the siege of Mordia, by Kharn himself who rammed his brass-fanged battleship straight through Ulvenial’s grandcruiser.

The Word Bearers, who had at first allied with the Despoiler, had gained much influence and power over the millennia, and their hellish Daemon Worlds were the largest and most fearsome in the Eye of Terror, some claimed. The Word bearers were useful to Abaddon as orators and enforcers of the profane creeds of the disparate factions of the Chaos Imperium. No consensus could ever be reached between all the various insane demagogues and slavering monsters that dwelt within the deep pits of these worlds, or ruled from obsidian thrones like dark heralds, but nevertheless the Word bearers made sure that unrest and insurrection remained a localized affair; Abaddon encouraged coups and bloody uprisings, as long as they were never against himself. Altarships full of Dark Apostles and their familiars roamed the void between enslaved worlds of the Chaos Imperium, preaching and summoning daemons into reality as they passed by. Abaddon expressly forbade the Word Bearers’s dark star- shaped vessels to enter the systems of any of his major powerbases, on fear of unmaking in the great swirling heart of Barbaritan. Barbaritan was a daemonship which had crashed into a star and poisoned it, turning it a vile green. Anything which fell into the warp-plasma vortex was utterly destroyed, body, essence and soul.

In 173.M53, the Despoiled, alongside a veritable tide of mercenaries and mutants and fallen astartes, conquered the Q’orl Swarmhood. The final siege of their honeycombed homeworlds was performed by the great spider-like Daemon King Xexes, another of the deep-warp daemons (a brother of Valchocht the Maker). The titanic spider’s hulking form toppled the towering funnels of the Swarmhood to the ground, and the capering daemons and mad humans who flooded the world in his wake overwhelmed the insectoid empire after a bitter campaign of destruction, which cost billions of lives on both sides. It ended when their queen was captured, and infected with warp-tainted blood. These plague flooded her systems and internal juices, and the pheromone stench which allowed her to enthral her drones turned her entire realm into an eager ally of the Western Chaos Imperium.

On the moon of Threnbane, a psyker fraternity had spun a world-wide tapestry from psychic threads. Without the Imperium, they had flourished, and their seers had constructed this great warp-empowered edifice, which they used to divine the future strands of history like some great humming orchestra. Such rippling waves of psychic energy soon attracted the attentions of the Despoiler and his cohorts, for Abaddon very much desired to learn of his own fate in the destiny of the universe. However, a great fleet of Iron Warriors fell upon the world, in alliance with the Beasts of Annihilation; creatures bound to Angron. The Iron warriors determined to deny Abaddon his desires, in vengeance for his defeat of their primarch many thousands of years ago. They fell upon the witch-world like grim mechanisms of steel and hate, burning and gunning down all they could find with pitiless cruelty. Threads were severed, and settlements blasted into blackened craters. Their warsmith, a villain known as Kadvein, smirked humorlessly as he destroyed Abaddon’s new toy.

By the time Abaddon arrived with his fleet, almost every thread of the world-weave was ruined, and the iron Warriors were fully entrenched in their grand bastions; impervious to orbital or ground assault, and patrolled by the frothing mongrel war hounds of Angron. The siege nevertheless lasted only a few days. This was because Abaddon, in his paranoid wisdom, had installed numerous mercenary Callidus assassins and Alpha legion infiltrators amongst the population of Threnbane. On his command, they unleashed life eater capsules inside the shielded Iron Warrior bastions. Contained inside the void shielding, the virus did no harm to Abaddon’s landing forces. However battle was soon joined on the ground as the Beasts of Annihilation charged into the fray with infinite fury, their possessed marines ignoring tempests of weapons fire and blades to reach the Despoiled’s lines. The Dark Lord personally carved his way through masses of half-daemons and freakishly mutated Astartes as he made his way through the dense foliage of fallen threads. Finally, he reached the final enclave of psyker-monks, and their last functioning seer-loom. Before he destroyed them, he demanded to know his future. No one knows what prophecy they imparted to the Chaos Emperor, but soon after he massacred them all, and bombed their world into dust, before the planet killer destroyed it utterly.

Daemonic agents, lacymole, callidus fiends and other shadowy agents employed by Abaddon were later instructed to scour the Chaos Imperium for ‘good, honest men’, who they were to eliminate with maximum misery and pain inflicted upon them. Some say the monks told Abaddon who it was who would finally kill him, while others claim they merely revealed to him the final piece of the great engine of destiny which was guiding the galaxy to some great climax. Whatever it was, Abaddon grew obsessed with altering the outcome foretold in the legends.

If the prophecy was indeed related to his death, he perhaps had cause for alarm, for he had narrowly avoided death on several occasions. The closet the Dark Lord came to being destroyed was during the siege of the Nemesis Vault; an inquisitional fortress located on the borders of his expanding Empire. The fortress was one of the most formidable of its kind, and had been held in a planetary stasis field for almost 20,000 years when Abaddon finally disturbed the relic of the Old Imperium. The highly advanced world boasted a full Titan legion, many Deathwatch kill teams, ten regiments of inquisitorial stormtroopers, sororitas convents and a full squad of Grey Knights (one of the few contingents of Grey Knights who were not trapped upon the unbreakable fortress of Titan, at the heart of the Void Dragon’s prison). The great bastion contained many dark and forbidden artifacts held under lock and key forever. The Despoiler and his allies desired them, and he persuaded many hundreds of divergent chaos factions to fall upon the world. Ram- faced beastmen and tides of mutants from the Brotherhood of the Foul, the towering Daemon- Knights of Securilan, hundreds of Vampyre Covens of possessed monsters, a billion strong force of plague zombies, shipped into combat by Death Guard under the silent glare of Typhus, half-beetle barbarian mutants and schaephylid swarms, war machines and hell- engines of the Lathe, Relictors, Dragon Warriors, Kol Badar and his personal army; and finally the grand Imperial army of the despoiled and its subordinate legions of twisted mortal soldiers.

The skies burned and the walls ran molten, as these great forces all bombarded and invaded as one discordant mass. Abaddon tried to force some order upon them, but chaos is as chaos does, and it was utter anarchy. This, ironically, played to the strengths of the Inquisitor Lord who commanded the Vaults, for the warbands began to fight each other as much as the defenders. In an effort to bring order to the madness, the Despoiler brought the vengeful Spirit close to the world, as a visual symbol of his continuing presence.

This was an error. As soon as his vessel entered low orbit, the last of the defense lasers simultaneously pounded the vessel, knocking down its shields for five seconds, before they recharged. This was all that was required, for in that instant, the grey knights teleported aboard. They struck the reactors first, and the Black legion stationed there barely managed to prevent them sending the engine critical. Nevertheless, the generators lost power, much to Abaddon’s fury. Gathering his most fearsome chosen around him, he rushed to butcher the fools who thought to deny him his prize. The grey Knights were waiting. Ten gleaming terminators fell upon the huge tusked chosen and the despoiled who rushed to aid them. The leader of the Grey Knights was a thing of epic legends; Brother captain Stern, long thought lost, towered before Abaddon, clad in a vast dreadknight fighting suit. Abaddon’s champion, the daemon prince Belpharoc, brayed in loathing and dread as he threw himself into combat with the hulking war machine and its holy occupant. Two giants clashed in the light cast by a dying plasma reactor; daemon claws against force sword, kai gun against psycannon. Fencing became wrestling, became frantic clawing and punching. At last, Stern broke the prince in two with a single vast sweep of his force sword, before obliterating the body with bolts of psychic lightning which flared from his eyes like a holy beacon.

Abaddon recoiled from the towering silver god of war, who bellowed the 666 litanies as he proceeded to aid in the slaughter of the rest of the Chosen. Abaddon fought alone now, slaying each terminator with ever increasing difficulty. His daemonic runes flared in protest and his sword churned with hate and terror as it felt the holocaust building. “Your world is dead, failed bastard of my father’s loins! Your Imperium toppled into the abyss. You are alone in this galaxy! You are nothing now!” Abaddon defiantly screamed, as he prepared to fight his final battle. A psycannon bolt blasted his helmet from his shoulders, and snapped his head backwards, unleashing his extravagant topknot from the barbed braid at the top of his skull. Blood frothed from his mouth, and he fell backwards roughly.

Stern advanced, smiling grimly as he removed his helmet. “My brothers survive in me. The Emperor is avenged in me! The bastard of Horus is punished by me!” he howled, raising his blade high.

A lasbolt struck his uncovered head. And another, followed by another. Stern’s head was ruptured by the searing blasts, and his concentration was lost. In his dying flourish, a great blast of white light erupted from Stern as his dreadknight simply toppled to the floor. The psychic backlash stunned the terminators, and the daemons bound within the vengeful Spirit took this chance to vanquish their hated foes. Tendrils and oily monstrous sphincters closed upon the defiant knights, who died fighting one and all.

Abaddon rose from the ground, and turned to observe the quivering Despoiled soldier, who lowered his smoking lasgun unsteadily. Abaddon, for the first time in many centuries, cracked a sinister smile. It is said that when on the field of battle, Abaddon is now accompanied by a towering dreadknight, bound and deconsecrated by the greatest of dark mechanicus, and piloted by a mortal man, bound into the machine by disciples of Bile in such a way that every death inflicted by the knight sends a shiver of pure pleasure into the spinal cord of the loyal despoiled Cadian; a grandiose and disgusting reward for saving the Dark Lord’s life.

The nemesis Vault was breached after half a decade of furious siege. The defenders were defeated after most of them starved to death, or were poisoned by the plagues and noisome elixirs of Typhus cleared them out and turned them into shambling monsters. The artifacts within were fought over by the assembled forces, and a furious naval engagement ensued. Some say the greatest artifact in the vault wasn’t a chaos item at all, but rather some great xenos blade, which vanished as soon as the stasis field was lowered. Others say it was stolen by agents for the Heracles cult or the Sons of Magnus. None can be sure.

The Chaos Imperium found foes from without as well as within angyl worlds began to form in some areas, and specially bred new men, bound with daemons and weapons of profanity, were sent to cleanse these worlds and banish their archangyls. These elite possessed warbands were known as the Blasphematii, and modeled themselves in ironic mockery of the almost-extinct Grey Knight order. Not only this, but the Vulkan Imperium and Huron Blackheart’s mongrels pressed against his border regions. And, with almost unnoticeable progress, the seals around Solar began to loosen, like the old threads in a tarred rope...

The worst of Abaddon’s foes remained an elusive element for many millennia however. The Alpha-Wulfen and its frenzied inhuman Fenryka who followed the beast destroyed armies and butchered worlds at the heart of the Eye of terror, and seemed to expand their influence as Abaddon left the Eye, as if pursuing him and his forces. All efforts to hunt down this unseen beast have ended in failure, and those malatek stalkers and assassins sent after the Wulfen- king never return. It was claimed it was some sort of world-daemon from the Eye, summoned and bound by Lorgar to unnerve Abaddon.

However, the truth came some time later, when the threads of eternity pulled more tightly together, and the true conflict became disturbingly apparent.

Additional background Information 7: The Dread Marshal and the Tide of Wrath

“In the name of nothing, I purge you and this whole world. For it is good. It is very good. Time to burn! Time to pray! Hope your heathen gods are listening, otherwise... this’ll be quick...”(recording degenerates into uncontrollable bitter laughter)

[Last audible transmission received by the unarmed agri-world of Fensidal, hours before being invaded and raised to the ground.]

Twenty Thousand years is too long for a crusade of punishment. Yet still the crusade of the High Marshal of the Black Templars continued. Even as new warp gods rose and fell in the firmament, the Templars continued to purge world after world, converting or destroying every planet they could reach. For countless centuries the grief-maddened Templars degenerated and slaughtered. They recruited more and more eager and insane converts into their furiously propagated faith. They preached a creed of self-mortification, punishment and eventual death. For the Emperor was dead, and the world would know of this fact through pain.

Such nihilism numbed them to their own casual heresies. They converted any astartes who willingly joined them. Night Lords, amused by their terror-tactics, threw in their lot with the maddened monk-knights, as did many desperate sororitas and a great multitude of foolish men from across a thousand worlds. Sons of Malice fought with and joined the Crusade in their own paradoxical glee, and the agents of the Hydra found it pathetically easy to infiltrate the crazed warriors. The Templars were no more. They embraced their own self-destruction, and the distinction between man, astartes and blood-mad butcher dissolved in the melting cauldron of war.

This was the Crusade of Madness. They increasingly referred to each other as Oblivionites; agents of sweet annihilation. For only in destruction on the battlefield, surrounded by thousands of slain foes, could they find peace.

Chains and fire was their legacy. Populations were bound in chains, alike and screaming in misery across the Oblivionite vehicles and ships. Their artificers crafted warped and bizarre dark armor that moulded to the forms of the Crusaders; armor that coiled about them like disgusting bleeding vines, that merged with their chains and braziers. Oblivionite initiates and serfs had wailing sirens stitched into their throats, that blared old imperial hymns, horribly distorted and modulated until all that could be made out was the underlying hate that fed the vox hailers. Immolator tanks and Crusader Land raiders pulverized settlements and ruined lives on the whims of this crazed order. Some of the more insane and formidable Oblivionites had their limbs elongated and bonded to blades and pincers and serrated flails, with cyclone launchers that flung hate speech and frothing oil as frequently as krak missiles. These were known as the Lange-mensch, and where they fell nothing lived. Even themselves.

The Eternal crusader expanded with each passing year, as did many of the barges that followed in its wake; expanding to accommodate more prisons and churches filled with spinning blades and grinding drills; where pious men would fling themselves into the churning mass of metal, and their fleshy pulp was then sprayed over new recruits through thick hoses.

The Oblivionites were led by the former High Marshal Kanan, who became known as the Dread Marshal. He was bound within a Dreadnought sarcophagus. Some claimed it was this that drove him mad, and contributed to the rapid degeneration of the Crusaders. Others claim the turbulent warp was to blame for their madness; its conflict between the Star father and the other powers warping the minds of the astartes, who were both furious figures of hate and adherents of Imperial domination, which split their minds into things of shattered glass and deluded perception.

Kanan dwelt within the Eternal crusader almost exclusively, conversing with shadowy figures that shifted in the gloom of his Reclusium. Chaplains brought adherents to his chambers every month, and these quivering men were rarely seen again alive. Those who left his chambers were dark-eyed and crazed; spouting philosophical nonsense as they calmly carved their names on the faces of their friends, or opened airlocks and leapt out. The only thing they all ranted about equally was a singular word; Malice. Dark pinions could sometimes be glimpsed on the battlements; flashes of shadowy shapes on the periphery of vision.

The Oblivionites terrorised the galactic north in a wide arc, which infringed upon both Chaos Empires, bordered the conflict in the East, and even affected the outer territories of the Vulkan Imperium. They were narrowly driven from the Ryza-Catachan alliance’s sector, after repeated raids by the cybernetically-enhanced Catachan ‘Plasma-Commandoes’.

However, in most cases, the worlds they invaded were woefully unprepared for the enemy who descended upon them. Even if prepared, the mercenary armies of private worlds often deserted rather than risk themselves fighting mad superhumans. Even the few remaining free Companies were reluctant to waste resources fighting such monstrously destructive foes. Worlds would surrender pitifully, and their people would suffer for it. Hunted in the streets, and burned from orbit, or taken and indoctrinated in a creed which compelled them to murder everyone they loved, men suffered and died in great masses. The Oblivionites would then erect titanic monuments on each world they converted; mile- high statues built from filth and the wreckage of smashed cities, which proclaimed the crusaders’ own glorious disregard for everything and everyone in existence.

Valhalla was not such a world. When the Oblivionites burst into their system, their system defense fleet immediately charged to attack the incoming obsidian vessels, initiating a vast naval battle which lasted for almost a month before the SDF were eliminated. This bought the Valhallans time. Distress signals were hopelessly flung out into the void, trenches were dug, supply lines and armories were stocked and prepared. The Draft saw almost every man and woman not employed in factory work thrust into the military. Orvec Chenkov, the grand dictator of Vahalla and a distant descendant of the infamous M41 Colonel that shared his last name, would not accept invasion or subjugation. Valhalla had weathered the second Age of strife and the decade of a thousand invasions from 234.M53-244.M53. They would not bow or prostrate themselves before nihilistic psychopaths. Valhalla would endure, always.

The massive icy cities of the valhallan, built into mountainsides or beneath mile-thick ice sheets, were ever-more fortified. Seven armored Companies were stationed outside the city of Invenka, where the towering gold Dome of Saint Ciaphas rose majestically atop a volcanic ridge that jutted from beneath a glacier. Serf Soldiers of Krieg were placed in the most hazardous and inhospitable areas. Militias bearing the banners of their cities flooded the training barracks in their millions. All leave from factories was revoked, an workers worked 22 hours a day producing war materiel for stockpiling. It was said that there was an ammo dump on every street corner, and even the children had autopistols tucked in their belts. On the evening beginning 284.399.M54, orbital bombardment began with a firestorm of fearsome scale, followed by kinetic barrages of kill-rods and heavy macro-cannons. The very tectonic plates themselves shuddered with the force of the assault. Earthquakes and fires erupted across Valhalla, but the forces simply dug themselves in. Defense Lasers stitched flaming patterns in the heavens, and wounded the sky until it seemed to ripple red with the onslaught. Torpedo silos embedded in cliff faces dueled with the enemy vessels also, hurling munitions the size of castle turrets towards the void-bound foe. Heedless of risk, many of the smaller Oblivionite vessels were struck and crashed onto the surface like city-sized meteorites. Mushroom clouds of plasma fire scorched the glaciers, and great rolling banks of nuclear steam, that boiled thousands of Conscripts and Serf soldiers as they ran for cover.

Soon after, the drop pods came, plunging through the fire and fury and punching holes through the glacial ablative armor which protected the cities. The ice confounded several pods, trapping them halfway between the sky and the crust in frozen tombs. Heavy weapon teams soon destroyed those immobilized invaders with their lascannons and missile pods. Others however, penetrated the ice and struck like lightning swift daggers at the heart of cities. Superhumans stormed bastions and charged through the streets with furious abandon. Their physical perfection and murderous might overcame the discipline and bloody- mindedness of the defenders, and they were forced ont he back foot throughout.

Meanwhile, on the surface, the conscript armies in their countless millions clashed with the human Oblivionite neophytes who swarmed from their large-bellied landing craft, while thunderhawks covered with chained, wailing prisoners strafed the human waves of gun fodder, and delivered more astartes into the fray. But the skies were contested. Valkyries and vendettas also blasted the invaders, while Marauder bombers dropped thousands of tones of high explosive across the blood-drenched glaciers. The Serf Soldiers showed their worth, demonstrating utter fearlessness in the face of battle. Those who died made sure to kill their slayer, or at least encumber the enemy enough to allow their vat-born brothers to finish them off. Basilisks and even larger fixed artillery positions cast an endless deluge of ordnance into the fray, and continued firing even when their defenders desperately tried to fend off astartes strike teams of Night lord Oblivionites, who crawled down the cliffs like spiders to reach them.

The Oblivionites were posthuman gods of war, bred to destroy, backed by legions of zealots and gigatons of ordnance. But they faced an entire world of Valhalla soldiery, entrenched with an armory which could last for months. The war drew on, and Valhalla soon became a world of crumbling icy slush, jagged mountain fangs all surrounded by oceans made from the melted remains of the ice world’s crust of permafrost. The Ice world became a waterlogged nightmare. Battles raged through the catacombs and sewers. Artillery dueled from the peaks of opposing mountains. The Tank Battalions clashed with the predators and raiders of the Oblivionite crusade in the shadow of the glorious golden dome, which was soon smashed into glittering shards amidst the fury of exchanged ordnance.

Every week the war dragged on, more commanders began to question Chenkov’s attrition- based approach. Every week, more and more commanders were executed, and more and more soldiers were drafted to face off against the might of the vast crusade force of the Dread Marshal. The factories began to use up the stocks of adamantine and promethium which had been gathered the previous year from nearby trading worlds.

Valhalla was being bled dry, and still the mad astartes poured all their fury and self- destructive hate into the war, which had spread to the other planets in the system, which each fell one by one, until Valhalla was all that was left. Newly deranged converts to the Oblivion cult flocked to Valhalla from the other planets, eager to die in the fires of warfare. Chenkov obliged of course. There were so many water-logged corpses upon Valhalla, that they formed vast battlements of dead that stretched for miles around each city.

After a year of grueling sieges and desperate battles fought in the shallow war-born oceans, the dread marshal’s heralds began to address the world on an open vox, carrying across the system to every commander that could receive such signals. It was a voice of cruel mockery and merciless intent. The heralds screamed from their fleet-ships; “We shall carve you into bloodied ribbons of flesh, and pound your world to dust. The Emperor’s sight has been put out, and deviancy reigns in its stead. There is no guiding astronomicon beacon! We are alone in the dark! You shall die here, and you shall welcome it! Oblivion has come to your world. We feast upon your flesh tribute, and we grow strong from this destruction, while you grow weaker. Offer your bodies, your flesh, unto the wardship of the herald of the End, and he will ensure its passage is a swift and glorious one! With your flesh and your strength, we may put out the eyes of man’s foes, and gain apotheosis in degradation. The flesh is strong, and you can be strong!” they spat.

Before the defenders could reply, another message cut into the transmission. It was a harsh, metallic tone.

“Nay, heathen dog; the Flesh is Weak. Lord Vulkan sends his regards,” the Iron Hands Force Commander responded bluntly, as his vessels emerged from interstellar space, where they had lain in wait for a year, slowly re-entering the system under minimal power. The perfect sneak attack.

Chenkov had never intended victory over the Oblivionites. Chenkov’s strategy had been one of containment; he had been ordered to keep the focus of the crusaders upon Valhalla, and to ensure that all the Oblivionites converged upon the system. He had been ruthless in his acceptance of this plan, and the sacrifice of his people to achieve it. He had known they would suffer, and he cared not; a legacy of his ancestor’s bloodline. Apparently Chenkov died in his sleep shortly after the liberation of the ruined Valhalla.*

The Dread Marshal’s fleet was caught off guard by the Iron Hands and their cold metal vessels that soon shuddered to life and unleashed hell on the twisted astartes. Battlebarges and cruisers dueled in the heavens at colossal distances, and ships burst apart like stricken whales in the deep, spewing fiery viscera from mechanical bowels. Yet, for all their joyless mechanical power, the Iron hands could not contain the Eternal Crusader. Battered and bloody, it fought its way clear, almost breaking the iron hands fleet on its own. The Iron Hands commandery Master, Murgon, managed to destroy the Crusader’s warp drive, and forced it to flee into the void itself. Wounded but still very much armed, the crusader was harried from the system. Yet, the Iron hands could not sustain any mere losses in pursuing the stricken craft any further. They left that seemingly-banal mission to the Fire beasts, who translated into the system alongside the Purple Vipers and the Heartrender space marine commanderies to mop up the surviving crusaders.

When the Fire beasts finally caught up with the Crusader, it was running on minimal power. Hoping to capture the vessel for Vulkan (as the primarch had done with Phalanx during the battle of Falling Skies a century before), the Fire Beasts eagerly boarded the vessel. What happened on board the Eternal Crusader is a mystery, but many hours later, the beasts left the ship, and bombarded it until it collapsed upon itself and was finally wrecked. The Fire beasts rarely speak of what occurred inside the vessel. All that is known is that they lost almost 200 Marines inside. All they say when explaining what happened there is the simple phrase; ‘Malice has seen the wheel behind the world,’ and that is all they ever say in reference to that dark day. The day the Black Templars were put down.

* [It took several dozen disgruntled soldiers, fourteen rounds of a heavy stubber, an overdose of tranq, a vial of neurotoxin, a hatchet and three bayonets to make sure he died in his sleep, but eventually he did. The legend of Chenkov’s death subsequently did get amplified in the telling, but his remains suggest at least the stubber shots were accurate...]

Additional Background Information 8: The Burden of restraint: Gathering Allies

Though innumerable were the wars and campaigns of conquest conducted by the Vulkan regime, such constant antagonism would be futile if he wished to unite and make prosperous his new Imperium. Born upon Vulkan, he and his Salamanders knew all too well the values and limitations of empathy, and were almost as eager to forge alliances and treaties with those divergent realms they encountered as they were to defeat and occupy them. Some, such as Grand Sicarium and the Ophelia-Tallarns, did not wish to join with Vulkan’s project, while others, such as the monstrous Chaos Imperiums, or the vile tenabrian Contingent, were too repellent and evil to parley with, and could only ever be enemies. However, not every rival power was such.

In the middle decades of M53, the Empire of Vulkan was a vast and glorious thing; perhaps a golden age. The Promethean Lodges on Armageddon collected and deciphered more and more captured technologies from colonized worlds. The Shipyards of the Fifteen Thousand world empire were in constant use, as were the commandery worlds. Artwork and architecture was at its height, and every city and every world were strong and somberly beautiful places; as glorious as only the master artisan-primarch could make them. Every year, world would reach the civilized interior worlds or new members of their Imperium, and there was rejoicing. Warp travel remained ponderous in the continued absence of the astronomicon, but Vulkan had already begun a project upon the world of Venlaik to attempt to create a form of psychic beacon. Though the projects ended in failure and the year of nightmares seven years later, the fact he was confident enough to attempt this project while still at war demonstrated how secure and entrenched the Vulkan Imperium had become.

There were several empires of note that were brought into the fold relatively peacefully. The so-called Ryzan-Catachan ‘Oath-worlds’ were a cluster of six dozen systems in the local sector directly around the two main worlds. They were relatively easy to bribe and coerce into the fold. The ryzan tech priests were bribed with archeotech and a promise to allow their Forge-world noosphere to link up with the noospheres of other liberated Forge Worlds, allowing them to share data. The Catachan side of the alliance merely joined because they saw little difference between working alone with the Tech priests, or with the black giant’s folk. They just liked warfare.

The Confederation of Justice was harder to convince. They were the remnants of the Elysian, Harakoni and Varseen Droptroops, who over the millennia had morphed into an elite band of peacekeeping thugs in the southern Segmentum Solar region; attacking worlds and shipping at random on the assumption they had ‘subversive’ elements amongst their populations. When Vulkan’s soldiers eventually encountered these men in battle, it was through ambush. The world of Kaniir was in the process of being brought into the Imperium through the signing of a treaty at their capital. Clerks from one of the many Councils of Armageddon had arrived on the war-battered world, guarded by two companies of the commandery of the Dorn Revenants, in their burnished war plate.

Halfway through proceedings, the warships of the Confederates arrived and declared the Vulkans traitors to the original terran Imperium, and attacked the Revenant Fleet. The Confederates were outnumbered and their ships were under-gunned, and Vulkan’s troops easily routed the fleet. However, their ships were converted to carry large troop transport facilities, and they swiftly deployed their drop troops onto the world before they retreated.

The battle raged for weeks, and the skilled mortal soldiers, despite being attacked by the PDF of Kaniir and the might of Mark II astartes, they held their own. Kowl, the Commander of the Dorn Revenants, was quoted as saying;

“Determined as Fists. Damn them, but you cannot help but admire their conviction!”

Eventually their forces were surrounded and captured. They surrendered honorably, and congratulated the Revenants for their well earned victory [which unsurprisingly, took the astartes aback somewhat, for they were rarely praised by their foes.]. After questioning, the prisoners would not give up their homeworld, claiming ‘every world that needs us is our home, for home is where the honor is.’

As it transpired, Promethean cultists with the fleet managed to track the warp trails of the retreating fleet (though they were masked well), and found the location of their base of operations; a vast Ramillies class star fort, which had become clad with additional living quarters and blister-like bio-domes that made the space station look like a vast shanty town. Kowl and his negotiators managed to gain an audience with the Muster-Lord of the Confederated Drop-Troopers, who listened to their proposals, and perused the files given to him that proven the Vulkan Imperium was a worthy successor to the terran Imperium, which had fallen long ago.

The Muster-Lord listened and took it all in with patience and good grace, before calmly pointing out that his men had discreetly infiltrated the Vulkan ships, and had taken over the engineering sections and gun batteries. Elite assault boat teams had stormed the ships, and the prisoners held in the vessels had rigged an explosive from inside their cells, and had blown themselves free, before coming to the aid of the strike teams. The Muster-Lord, after informing Kowl of this fact, then requested that the Revenants surrender. Kowl snarled, explaining that his men could rip apart his paltry boarding forces and retake the ships within half an hour. The Confederate Lord then countered by explaining simply;

‘That is half an hour without motive power or guns, while being within range of the full firepower of a star fort. I hope your men could re-take the vessels in less than half an hour; otherwise your vessels will be scrap. I humbly request, therefore, that you surrender, and save us having to slay brave astartes.”

Kowl had little choice other than to surrender to the mortal General. Word reached Vulkan of this setback, and he deployed two battlefleets to the area, to locate and free his men, before destroying the enemy. In the year it took for this force to be assembled and deployed, Kowl and his men were imprisoned, and learned of the culture of their foes. They were not degenerates or villains, but merely broken soldiers, desperate for a central command and a reason to fight on. Everywhere they looked over the millennia had been horror and war; the ophelians were murderers and maniacs, and their worlds burned with hate and misery. Space marines rampaged and laughed as they torched worlds at random. Daemons and twisted xenos fiends capered and spread their malice across countless worlds. The confederacy had looked upon the Vulkan Imperium, and they refused to believe that such a realm could exist in such a galaxy of horror. Kowl explained it was so, but it was only once his men had broken free of the prisons and had efficiently taken over the star fort by force, that the Muster-lord reluctantly heeded his words.

When Vulkan’s twin fleets tracked the star fort down amidst the swirling eddies of the warp lanes, they found that Kowl’s men had made an ally of the Troopers, who eagerly pledged oaths to the new Imperium, and sent delegates to Armageddon for formal training and establishment of their official regiments. In exchange, clerks and administrators were brought to the fleets of the Drop troopers, to help them organize their new territories. The planets that they had madly protected against all-comers for centuries became their official domain.

Vulkan himself parleyed with the leader of the World of Secae; a world of shadowy smog and blazing lava-canals and plasma pits that fuelled its sparse industry. The world was almost useless in almost every way. However, the world was a known hub and control centre for the Order of Heracles. This Order was a group of fearsomely competent assassins and spies that bore the heritage of the once-infamous Officio Asassinatorium. Vulkan met with veiled associates of the Order here, and they agreed not to target Vulkan’s officials in exchange for Secae being left as their personal dominion, and unmarked properties upon Armageddon. Vulkan agreed, but it was an uneasy truce. The unmarked towers of the Assassins are discreetly spied upon by Salamanders and Imperial operatives daily, while Secae is a forbidden zone for diplomats and reporters for the Grand Journal (a journalistic mega-project devised by experts of the Gathanar system to document the entire history of the Vulkan Imperium). What the Heracles agents are actually up to is known to a scant few people, and will be covered in a later section.

A Sector spanning Human Empire known as the ‘Realm of Fathers’ [this is a rough translation] was encountered by the Vulkan Imperium on its fringes, close to the Ophelian area of influence, but beyond their control. This realm was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of productive, peaceful and efficient worlds, full of quiet, diligent workers and citizens. There was no unrest, and everyone seemed to be happy and content; they rarely even seemed to speak to one another. When Vulkan’s armies came, they were welcomed by the Court of the Regents, and within a few months of their arrival, had signed treaties and pledged oaths in blood and stone. Their factories and produce yards were so very efficient that they had a major surplus of materials, which they traded within the Vulkan Imperium and provided a massive amount of goods to the expanding Imperium. They even paid double the standard tithes asked of them.

However, the realm of fathers held a terrible secret. For they bore a legacy of ancient corruption in their very blood; they were, to a man, all genestealer cultists. With the abandonment of the genestealers by the Hive Fleets thousands of years ago, the genestealers had merely continued to do what they were born to do; survive and reproduce. Every other den of genestealers had been eventually slain over the years by various powers. Yet, one cult had survived. And, surprisingly, without the Hive Fleets, the genestealers were allowed to flourish. Nobody had ever seen how far a genestealer infestation could develop, until then.

There were hundreds of Patriarchs ruling the Empire in well shielded bastions within the main capital worlds of the Empire. Every single human was a hybrid to some degree, even if the vast multitude were merely smiling drones, infested at birth with the love of the bulbous beasts that ruled from the depths of their worlds. Every mind was linked by the fearsome brood telepathy of the Patriarch Prime and his brothers and sons. There was no dissent or hate between the people, for they knew each other as well as they knew themselves, and they all loved the Patriarchs. As every mind was linked, they produced mega projects and produced vast quantities of material with frightening rapidity. Though no one had ever seen the Prime Patriarch, it is said he swelled with to an impossibly vast scale, bloated with psychic power until his magnificent potential made his presence visible to Vulkan himself. If Vulkan had known of the nature of his new ally, he neglected to mention it to his own Councils, who only learned of their nature after an accidental shuttled crash, had dropped one of their officials into the subterranean feeding pits for the purestrains. There was outrage and furious debate amongst the rulers of the Imperium. The commanderies were in two minds over the matter; some wished to invade at once, others wanted to wait for Vulkan’s decree. Some of the mortal rulers debated over the matter with more nuance; they had become reliant upon the exports and tithes of this new allied territory, for good or ill. Humanity had a long history of hatred for the xenos, but the genestealer held no specific dread amongst the councils of Armageddon; most were too young to remember the tyranids as anything other than mythical monsters from the primordial times (from their perspective); creatures as far distant and irrelevant as the dinosauria of the long-forgotten home-world of Terra. Indeed, there were carnifex bones in several museums across the central worlds of the Vulkan Imperium. In the end, it was Vulkan that decided what happened next; he arrived unannounced into the council halls of the Tower of Governance upon the rebuilt Hades Palace, flanked by his robed Salamander Custodians, interrupting a policy meeting of the Grand Lords without a single care. He asked them to show leniency to the Cultists; they had never made war upon him, and their industry was required if the Imperium was to face the ‘troubles ahead’ effectively. Not only this, but a war with the cult would cripple his fledgling Imperium even if they won; the cult had a vast military machine of elite fighters and abundant equipment, supported by legions of Purestrain Shocktroops to serve as their Praetorians. Vulkan asked this of his councils, but never made an order. He desperately wanted his mortals to run their own Imperium; he was merely the agent of their survival.

The Councils agreed. The cultists were to remain upon their worlds, however; they were not to interbreed and subvert any humans in unwilling communities. Every world and every merchant vessel that traded with their realm was required to take genetics screening to detect any possible infections. Additionally, their status as xenos hybrids was to be suppressed and classified; normal citizens need not know that aliens supplied much of their products. Indeed, did not Jokaero smiths make many of the esoteric items of the Imperium of old?

Why Vulkan championed the cultists remains a contested topic. It was claimed he had foreseen the Time of Alignment, beginning M55, which threw the galaxy into the greatest conflict in all the eons of galactic history before it, and saw the worth of the cult in this Great War. Others claim it was a more personal reason. They claim Vulkan travelled into the heart of the Cult’s sector, and straight to the heart of the Chitin Keep, the throne-city of the Patriarch. It is claimed he looked into the golden reptilian eyes of the patriarch, and confronted it, ignoring the oceans of Genestealers that surrounded him silently. The patriarch, they say, promised Vulkan a mighty prize in exchange for a union. It claimed (through its Magus proxy, which allowed it to speak as men speak) it had had a vision of a world of pulverized stone, and an empty throne, guarded by sullen Angels. It had seen some great force sweep in and take the unmoving King. It had witnessed the obsidian juggernaught, Vulkan himself, arrive and find the tomb empty. The Patriarch knew what Vulkan so desperately searched for, but could not find. Something the Patriarch alone knew. For it knew who had stolen the Lion of Caliban from his undying slumber. And what was more, the Patriarch knew, with all its psychic might, where he had been taken...

Additional Background Information 9: Shadow Play: Espionage and unknown missions

The galaxy in the Age of Dusk was one of great bombastic light; the light granted by great wars, and the glow of towering civilizations rising to their very heights, moments before the precipice. Yet, a bright light casts long shadows. And just as light casts a shadow, so the vast battles and politics of the struggled for reality conceal lingering oceans of events, betrayals and schemes unseen and unrecorded by the histories of man and beast.

Until this day. Until this day, where I was able to breach this vault’s walls and-

I say too much. How this history has come to you, my surviving readers, shall be related in due time. But this section shall cover the hidden missions and events that guided events throughout this time.

The Cult Heracles continued a secret war against the agents of the Hydra-Lords and their infinite familiars and ciphers. But the Order of Assassins named Heracles was not solely interested in thwarting the Hydra at all costs. They loaned their services as spies and killers to the highest bidders; moving discreetly through human and xenos society alike in their desire to achieve their mercenary ambitions.

Other assassin cults worshipped the Murder God Khaine, and spoke forbidden words and performed rituals which they hoped would bring them closer to the eternal kill. These cults were not species-centric; if you could kill one of them, you were worthy of becoming one of them (provided you survived the reprisals). Dark Eldar sometimes sponsored such cults (but invariably ended up hunting them for sport within Commorragh once they were bored with them).

Yet, there was talk of a dark force; a shadow unseen, which was moving through the disparate fraternity of slayers (be they Heracles-bonded killers, freelancers, or even the Malicite Stalkers and Semi-daemonic assassins employed by the Ordo Hydra and the Chaos Imperiums in general. The Grand Lords of the Orders became paranoid, desperate and ever more deadly; for there was naught more dangerous than a cornered assassin.

They gathered clues and snippets of information from across the galaxy on news of this killer and where it could be located and destroyed. From the sterile, drug-controlled ‘lobotopias’ of the Tau Empire’s capital Septs, to the badlands and feral outlands of trading posts and warp- tainted drinking dens, the agents of the assassins exhorted information from contacts by force, murdered and stole data-cores, or otherwise overheard conversations and conspiratorial whispers. All in the hope of finding their elusive predator. The rumors and whispers spoke of a cluster of grim worlds, in the shadow of the ancient star of Tovinas. The rain-racked world of Colobar was a world of miserable citizens leading pointless, short lives beneath the lash of bureaucracy for all eternity. In the year 883.M53, monsters descended upon Colobar. Some had arrived years earlier, disguised by chemicals or more paranormal techniques. Others slinked amongst the sewers and rooftop gutters of the grey cityscape, hungry for the blood of their foes. They each came of their own volition; each supreme killer had followed their own trail of clues and brutally-obtained truths. Swiftly and silently, they closed in upon their target.

It was known as the Collectioner’s Court; the tax offices of Colobar city. This was where the dark force was hiding, and they attacked with fury born of selfishness. The carapace-armored Enforcers guarding the lobby were suddenly assailed by blood- drenched beasts with crazed Eversor-descendant strains. With a howl and a storm of blades, the assassins butchered the enemy even as they screamed in terror and unloaded clip after clip of shotgun and autogun shells into the blood-maddened killers. The place was a charnel house.

The windows of the offices high within the Taxman’s tower splintered as high-velocity rounds punched through them, pitching scribes and clerks from their feet in puffs of blood and vaporized bone. Some office workers turned on their own, blades shuddering into existence in place of their hands, before they slaughtered everyone they could find. Some, bearing serpentine tattoos, pulled handcannons and boltguns from their desk drawers, and gunned down their fellows at random. Though the assassins worked individually, the fact these individuals attacked at once meant the tower was swiftly depopulated. After ten minutes, the tower was full of nothing but corpses.

The assassins coldly began to search the offices, for the chamber they all knew was hidden within the labyrinthine complex. They tore the place to shreds, keen eyes glowering as they scanned every document and schematic they could find. Eventually, they found it; a chamber which was not found upon the plans, or marked in any way by the former staff of the Collectioner’s Court. They converged upon this prize like a pack of jackals brought together temporarily for a great feast.

Melta bombs boiled away the heavy adamantine doors, and the assassins burst into the darkness eagerly. There was darkness there, and little more. Darkness and a series of heavy crates that is. The more prescient assassins instantly leapt from the room, as the bombardment cannon shells in the crates, rigged up to simple proximity fuses, detonated with the thunderclap of titans. The grey skyline of Colobar was illuminated for several long seconds, as the fusion fires boiled away the storm clouds above the tower for miles around.

Within the burning crater that was once a hab block, those surviving assassins pulled them- selves free of the flaming debris; skinless and screaming in fury. They noticed the ring of hulking shadows surrounding the crater far too late. Bolters rang out in the night, as the dark- armored astartes murdered the assembly of assassins with thoughtless efficiency. Only two figures did not add their weight of fire to the fusillade; both were hooded, both were faceless. The first was a giant amongst giants, and bore a mantle of wilting midnight feathers about his vast shoulders; his identity remained a mystery to the wider galaxy until the War fought upon the armored skin of a god (which shall be related to you in due course, once my surviving servitors can traverse this... realm... if I could truly call this place a realm). The other figure remained a mystery; we have no information upon him. We only have the whispered intrigues of clerks and scriveners the galaxy over, who speak of a man without fear. A man who, they say, was like water; un-trappable, and unstoppable.

Within the Tau Empire’s tightly controlled society, the Psyker-Caste of the M’yen were used to locate and eliminate subversive elements within their great worlds; using their gifts to probe the minds of all who fell beneath their gaze. They also helped run the re-education centers, and used telepathy to perfect the correct drug cocktails required to crush any un- unified thoughts within the tau and their closest vassals. The M’yen were also essential in combating the Deceiver’s infiltrator units of modified necrons, who constantly sought to undermine the war effort of the Tau and their allies, who were still engaged in a vast, desperate war to contain the Nightbringer and his Legions of silver destroyers. Ammunition factories that supplied specialized necron-slaying rounds to the front-line military units were often singled out for destruction by necron doppelgangers. Only a psyker’s second sight could reveal the cold stunted souls that writhed beneath the stolen facades worn by the nightmarish creatures.

Unbeknownst to the Thexian Alliance, members of their own race began to parlay with Necron envoys; each desiring to gain economic or social dominance against their rivals. In particular, a rogue group of Thexian Elite that called themselves prospectors of Cythor, made a terrible pact with the smiling silver fiend known only as Ralei; in exchange for necron immunity, the vile shape-shifting fiends would let necrons build Tomb complexes beneath the surface of almost a hundred of their worlds, and would provide the souls necessary to pilot the Necron constructs that would rise from these tombs and bolster the swelling Legions of the Deceiver (who had always had the least necrons under his control, compared to his more powerful brothers). This betrayal was only revealed when the Thexian Alliance began to collapse in M55, after their heartlands were ripped out by necrons phasing into battle from nearby turncoat worlds. It is thought the Cythor Fiends helped prolong the war for millennia, counteracting the sudden appearance of elite Ork War-Hulks in Tau space, who had aided in pushing the Nightbringer’s forces back slightly on multiple fronts.

During the first half of the Age of Dusk, worlds, at random, were often attacked by bands of towering, howling mutants of twisted flesh and gnarled claws; sometimes two factions of monsters descended upon them, and proceeded to tear themselves apart alongside the helpless natives. There was no order to these incursions, and no pattern. Random Imperiums and Empires across the galaxy suffered these bizarre terrorist assaults. As it transpired, what was happening was at once horrifying and surprisingly mundane; it was a competition. This was a contest between artists; each as twisted and unthinkably horrifying as each other. One was a perversion of human science and daemonic cunning, the other the pinnacle of xenos perversion.

Urien Rakarth and the Coven of the Flesh Tower of Commorragh had built monsters and living flesh-sculptures since the fall, and they had become supremely inventive in their creations over these long millennia. Yet, they had a rival who had learned at their withered feet in the Age of Imperium. Fabius Bile and his Cabal of degenerates were also makers of monsters and animators of unclean beasts. The two factions developed an obsession with proving they were original and most original of flesh-smiths. Thus, over the years, they unleashed their grotesques and their ‘new men’ out into reality to test them. Wherever Bile travelled, he was pursued by slavering beasts that sought to protect him, and others to kill him. In turn, he would allow his own creations to be captured in Dark Eldar Slave raids, and into the hands of the haemonculi, who were often temporarily slain by cunning chaos- abominations. Each time an attack failed, the creators would send polite notes to their opposites, explaining why their monsters had failed, and pointers on how to improve their art. This was the correspondence of scholars, delivered by monstrous couriers, who tore apart thousands of innocents over the years.

Yet, not every covert action in the Age of Dusk was born of spite and menace. The Councils of the Vulkan Imperium created ‘The Brethren of the Willing’. This was a group of adventurers and investigators, founded in M55, to uncover the dark secrets of the galaxy, and figure out a way to defeat them, or to prevent their terrible prophecies coming to pass. Their leader was Imogen Kaltrane, a female scholar of stupendous intelligence and matchless bravery. The group she gathered was recruited from many diverse sources across the Imperium; outcasts and heroes, mercenaries and ideological prodigies. At one time or another, several Mk I and Mk II astartes were known to have joined the brethren at one point. It was never a big group, and its membership altered several times over the course of history. However, they were clever and brilliant to a man (or indeed woman); they worked to save and protect Vulkan’s people. They had unofficial sanction from Vulkan, which often meant they had to avoid censure by unwitting local authorities, but this was how Imogen preferred to work; ‘on the seat of my britches mostly!’ she was quoted as once explaining to a bewildered scribe who attempted to collate her history.

They discovered much during their time; they helped decipher the various prophecies of the old races, they discovered and fully realized the dark potential of the necrons and proved the existence of their Gods once and for all, they who helped gather the various artifacts scattered across the galaxy. This account can only give a few examples of their many missions, but there were far more, all hidden from the eyes of history by centuries of secrecy and the gulf carved into history by this war which still threatens to engulf us all. But they were as heroic in deed as any of the expeditionary leaders of Vulkan’s many armies.

Additional background Section 10: Raising the Siege

Titan’s surface is barren and burnt, and daemons crawl across its surface. But the daemons never concerned themselves with the surface, which was constantly scoured clean of life by the regular sweeps of the Dragon’s Silver annihilators. No, the daemons burrowed and crawled, down and down into the dark catacombs and secret tunnels that perforated the Saturnine Moon like a honeycomb.

And there they died. In their endless droves. It was there, deep inside, where the psychic screams of ancient heroes reverberated, and where the sonorous ringing of talons against glinting plate filled the air. The Grey Knights and the Custodians still fought, with the tireless courage of doomed men driven beyond extremity by their prolonged test. Purifiers and Paladins formed chokepoints in the narrow tunnels, and they butchered every wave of daemons. Century upon century upon century had passed. The armor of Grey knight and Custodian were indistinguishable; each was pot-marked, torn and dull. Each warrior was coated in a hundred years of gore and bubbling nightmare spoors. They had long ago fired their last bolts, every psycannon was spent, promethium had long since been poured, burning into the faces of veritable tides of daemons. Even their power armor had run down, and the energy fields on power weaponry sparked and flared no more. Only the psychic will of the Knights remained undiminished by age or the crushing embrace of time. Nemesis weapons still flickered with soul fire, and the psychic counter attacks of the daemon hunters persisted.

Monsters of every patron came, from juggernauts to winged furies, and more indistinguishable creatures loped from the gloom; pseudopods lashing and beaks scratching. The Knights held them off. But they were constricting and contracting. More and more of the valiant superhumans died every year; their armor stripped and blessed, their bodies anointed in ornate rituals, before being used as blocks in flesh ramparts and barriers to prevent daemonic outflanking in the narrow warrens of the inner sanctums. Only their psychic might sustained their bodies, and even this and their miraculous genetic form could not sustain them indefinitely. Slowly but surely, they began to fall.

Many fell to the ravenous maws of spawn and daemons, others collapsed under the strain of their armor against their ravaged muscles. Others destroyed themselves in psychic implosions, simply to buy time for their brothers to fall back into ever tighter and more dense defensive positions. Eventually, a mere hundred were left, led by the ravaged Custodian Chief and the Castellan known as Obex. Crowe had been lost a decade previously; his malevolent sword, sensing a crack in his resolve, failed him as he clashed with the blubbering Morass of a Great Unclean One. His armor split and broken was flooded with entities of the destroyer hive. After a horrifying moment of rigid resistance, his armor fell to the ground, empty.

But the Knights would not break. They could not break. The names of every one of the Million Martyrs of Titan were etched into their ceramite, and branded upon their skin. After long last, they fell back to the only chamber left unsullied by daemonflesh; the Vaults themselves, where all the most arcane and forbidden of artifacts were stored. Strange devices and structural masterpieces haunted the pitch black chambers, and the air was impossibly chill. At the very rear of the vault, the embalmed corpse of the Emperor sat, perched upon an Obsidian Throne, threaded with green-veined marble. While they still lived, the memory of his existence and his works would forever be preserved, and he could never truly die. They cared not what his deformed godhead had become in the warp. They were not ignorant however; they had felt his ascension just as the astropaths had. But they were not duped by the Star Father’s apotheosis. The Knights and the custodes knew what the Emperor was; he was no god of the warp. He was champion of humanity; champion of mankind’s dominion over the real, over the sane. The Star Father was a distortion; a monster borne in the minds of the deluded and the weak-willed. Not like the true heroes of the Dead-Imperium. For the true heroes knew that the creed was merely the rallying cry of all of man, and could not be undone by the removal of the greatest man amongst them. No man, no matter how great, could match the collective resolve of humanity united. The Star Father was a disgusting parody of this; a reciprocal entity which devoured its own worship, and created itself. He was not worthy.

And so they fought on. Obax strode out into the arming hall before the chamber’s doors, flanked by the last two functioning dreadnoughts, Alaric and Tancred, to face the onrushing horde, which had swelled to an ever greater size, for the daemons knew the end would be coming soon. The rest of the knights followed them out, but just as ten of them marched out to join their liege Lord, Obax turned and uttered the Command ‘Terminus’. The vault doors sealed, and the majority of his knights were sealed within, leaving but a token force to hold the great hallway before Titan’s final vault. The Custodian screamed and yelled down his vox, pleading with his millennial friend and brother to open the doors, to let him aid in driving back the daemons.

“Together, we may face our glorious doom together!” the Custodian declared in a fierce yet mournful voice.

Obax’s reply was brief. “The tarot has been set, but the last cards are yet to be dealt. Stay by the Emperor’s side Custodian, as you were ever-destined to.”

With that, the vox link was finally severed, and Obax charged into the ravening mass of tendrils and oozing flesh that greeted him. His broken sword was raised, and he screamed the 666 litanies of hate as he fought. The dreadnoughts followed suit, smashing apart daemons with their claws and even with the barrels of spent-assault cannons and plasmaguns. Blades flashed and daemons died. Oceans of corrosive sludge pumped from severed heads and bisected maws. It was then that Tancred was hacked in twain by the black blade of a most dreadful of daemons; M’kar itself capered into the fray, at the head of the horde of horrors. The dreadnought Alaric was the first to notice this foe of long years past, and he instantly clashed with the Daemon Prince’s smoking blade. The two giants wrestled as the others fought with all their hearts and all their souls; they wielded their hate as shafts of searing faith, drenched in gore but cackling all the same. They were wild in their frenzy.

But, it was to no avail. Alaric banished M’kar, but standing over his disintegrating form was no victory. The daemon-thing laughed even as it was wrenched from reality. “Your time has ended. Your end was determined long before you were created,” it has hissed as the daemon perished. Soon after, Alaric fell, dragged down by thousands upon thousands of furies that wriggled through the constricted tunnels like maggots.

The tides of damnation flowed over the tarnished Knights and nothing could prevent what came next. The Custodian listened through the six meters of adamantium separating him from the combat. He heard them all perish, one by one. Defiant screams replaced by gurgling laughter spat out of inhuman jaws. Then, the mockery turned to a sinister murmur, as the daemons turned to the task of opening the vault. Boom after boom resonated through the door. The remaining defenders merely listened to the sounds with downcast helms, sitting amongst the antique items which had never been used, nor could be used. They sat awaiting their fate in a veritable museum of their own history, their own purpose.

It was then, as even the resolve of the greatest collective wills in the galaxy faltered, that something changed, and a sound which had not been heard for a very long time upon Titan roused them from their misery.

Bolter fire.

Masses of concerted bolter fire came from beyond the vault door. Now it was the daemons’ turns to scream. The Custodian located the few remaining techmarines, and demanded to know what was happening beyond the door. Eventually, the astartes and custodes managed to rig up a makeshift pict feed to a dead pict-servitor out in the hallway. What they saw confused them, for their reinforcements were astartes clad in flaming black armor and helms that were the shape of grinning Chaplain death masks. They were the Legion of the Damned. A myth no longer. They killed the daemons in their droves, each silent as the grave as they killed.

So rapt were the Knights, that only the Custodian himself noticed that one of the ancient artifacts in the vault was reactivating. It was one of the ancient portals of the Eldar, and it began to shudder into life. As it grew in power and glowed with newfound vigor, the Knights and Custodians turned to face this new apparition. Had they not faced enough foes now? What was this new devilry? These questions plagued their war-ravaged minds as the portal, with a final lyrical crescendo, activated.

Out stepped two little girls. They wore their hair in pigtails, and their simple cream robes were the mirror of one another, as they walked from the webway gate hand in hand. Their power was unmistakable instantly. Every Knight in the room involuntarily shivered at their psychic presence; it was rare to be in such close proximity to one Apex level psyker, let alone two. The girls smiled at the assembled giants that surrounded them. One of the Knights managed to bite back his delirious sense of awe and spoke first.

“Why have you come?” was all he could manage.

“We opened the doorway which only we can open, to make uncle happy with us. You must all come along with us now. Uncle is ever so friendly. But he needs all his pieces if we are to play his game. We oh so like games. Come along. The mad one will wake soon; that’s when it’ll start. We don’t want to miss it,” they replied cheerfully, in unison.

The fact I am aware of this story at all should suggest to you that the Knights and their allies took up the diminutive Apex Twins up on their enigmatic request, and at least survived long enough to tell other souls; other chroniclers of their deeds. So it came to pass that Titan was relieved, and the body of the Emperor was snatched from the jaws of heretical defilement.

Ha, heresy. Such an odd word to use now. Now that I know what is coming.

Additional background Section 11: The cradle of putrescence: Return to the Solar System

Where once there was Terra, there was now the sphere. A great ball of unnatural colors and horrific warp-light that spread across a light-year of space, the sphere clung to the very borders of the Western Chaos Imperium like a vile malignancy. Even veterans from the eye feared this realm. Like the warp storms before it and since, it was a swirling mass of madness and warp energy, filled with daemons and degenerates living upon filth and bred on horror. But unlike all the others, this was a storm that had been manufactured by Abaddon himself, by poisoning the Oort cloud and seeding a self-consuming daemon-virus into the very atoms of the star system.

In the Age of Dusk, only those who had failed Abaddon, the banished, or those insane beyond all reckoning, ventured inside the Storm of the Emperor’s Extinction. For too long the warp had saturated the worlds within. Jupiter churned with a billion impossible colors, and coiling monsters writhed unseen within its endless banks of mutagenic cloud. Its moons were twisted into daemon worlds, that cast vile energies upon one another and warped constantly. Neptune, Uranus and Saturn suffered similar fates. This was a realm where even the Chaos Space Marines were near-helpless. No vessels could enter the sphere’s warp shell without being damaged beyond repair; they soon crashed upon the daemon moons, or were dashed into formless energies by the warp currents, and were there suckled upon by foul things of putrid geometry and biological abomination.

Terra was a dark crown rotting towards the centre of the horrific churning nightmare. It had consumed its sister Venus and Mercury; huge chains and hooked fronds had drawn them into the world and pounded them like clay, into new and dreadful forms. Luna was swallowed whole, before forming a giant lidless eye that wept oceans of pus into the void, which formed wailing pus-devils of nuglitch heritage that consumed themselves within moments.

Mars was no longer red; it was silver and shimmered with arcing patterns of green grave- light. Endless forests of pylons and nightfield generators swathed the world in a cloud of soulless sanity that turned daemons into faded vapor within seconds of approach; for it was the world of the Void Dragon, and he was Oblivion itself, rendered in living metal flesh and pulsating starlight. His necron armada had been trapped there through the ploys of Abaddon, but he was far too powerful to defeat. He could only be contained, and contained barely. Every five days, his fleet would dart between every single world in the Solar System. His constructs would utterly scour every single world completely, leaving them as sterile balls of rock. His necrons killed everything. Then, they would orbit Sol, drink deep of its ancient energies, before returning to Mars to feed their great C’tan master, who grew more powerful and more frustrated every single day. This was because, barely a day after killing every daemon in the Solar system, the daemons would return, and remake their worlds anew. These purges became known as the Dragon Tides, and are the only reliable means of time keeping inside the Storm of the Emperor’s Extinction. They are treated almost like tropical storms by the daemons and degenerates of the Solar realm. They hide before he reaches them. Some survive. Most don’t. But it matters little either way. Chaos always returns, feeding on the misery of those who yet live to fuel it to ever greater feats of madness.

Despite the horror of the Sphere, there are treasures to be plundered by those brave and deranged enough to venture within. Terra’s vaults were always warded with unbreakable seals, and they are filled with a wealth of knowledge beyond reckoning, perhaps second only to... this place I find myself within... Ahriman was such a seeker of knowledge. He desired to finally breach the secret vaults, and plunder Terror’s heart. The great sorcerer gathered together Rubric Marines and fellow practitioners of warp magic from across the Chaos Imperiums; not only Thousand Sons, but many psyker cults from every creed and diabolical culture flocked to his Library vessel, formed from the captured hulk of a dead Void Stalker. His Cabal tried a hundred different rituals to breach the impenetrable cloud of warp storms that sheathed the Solar system in both the Materium and Immaterium; millions of their moaning acolytes perished in these attempts, but to no avail. The madness spewing forth from the Oort Cloud was too dense and too nonsensical. Even the most powerful mage’s minds were simply too mortal and too logical to truly perceive a safe route through the tundra of psychosis.

All, that is, save for one vessel. The Tersis, the fallen Black Ship had plunged into the very depths of the warp, beneath the undulating incorporeal realms where flesh ran fluid and matter was a myth. In the millennia since that time it had roamed the warp like one of the many warp predators that hunted alongside it. The ship was a living warp vessel, infused with warp energies in every atom of its being, some even claiming is stored a fragment of the pure, deepest warp inside its engine room, which powered the vessel indefinitely. Such was the potency of its corruption; it could remain in the materium only for brief intervals of days to capture new crew to replace those daemonhosts onboard whose bodies had finally come apart under the strain of demented devilry, before returning to the warp. Ahriman had to use all his esoteric knowledge to predict when the Tersis would next rise to the materium, and set a watch over the region.

When the living, writhing vessel finally did emerge, he instantly opened a warp portal inside the daemon-sub, and deployed his elite retinue within and led the incursion force himself. The Tersis was a nightmare inside and out, and as soon as he boarded the vessel, he was attacked by the gibbering hordes within. Monsters with too many limbs and disjointed bodies wracked by taint drooled through the very walls themselves to attack Ahriman’s band, but his powerful spells managed to ward off much of the onslaught. The mortals of his retinue, protected from harm by the Rubric Marines, wailed and wept in agony simply through looking upon the fluid walls and raw madness that formed the structure of the Tersis. Geometry meant little to this vessel, and Ahriman’s loyal minions travelled for mile upon mile through the cavernous guts of the vessel, wading through bile and burning their way through bulkheads that gnashed and growled at them. Every step of the way, they were followed by loping daemonhosts and scuttling spawn-things. For days they travelled, and no matter how hard Ahriman’s scholars tried, they could not decipher a path through the maze. Ahriman at last used a powerful spell to summon his patron’s own daemons, who managed to break through the cloying masses to send word to the Lord and Lady of the Tersis. They bore the message of the master of the Rubric; Ahriman wanted to parley with them, not to fight them. Instantly, a passage formed, cutting through the maze, directly to the central chamber of the Tersis, where the Lord and Lady presided.

Lady Medeline and her nameless Witch-lord spouse presided over the vast throne room of ossified corpses that Ahriman’s Cabal found itself upon; the terrifying rulers of the Tersis seated upon a glowering throne of writhing beetles and fused bulkhead. Medeline perhaps had once been a sororitas, but even the barest caress of the Nex [ACCOUNT CORRUPTED, SEEK HELP] beyond all recognition.

She sat in her bio-mechanical daemon armor, perched upon the lap of the silent, hooded form of the Witch-Lord, the psyker formerly of Cell Primus, who petted her multi-hued hair, which wriggled with inhuman life as his talons touched it. Medeline spoke for both of them as she asked for Ahriman’s terms.

Ahriman asked for passage on their vessel, as it passed deep into the upper pinnacle of the deepest parts of the warp’s non-existent architecture; the Thousand Son knew that the only way to bypass the Solar warp shell was to travel ‘beneath’ it. (I hesitate to utilize the term beneath, for the realm of the warp bears no such physical dimension. Forgive my colorful analogues. They are my only method of coping with such an impossible realm). None are sure what Medeline asked for in return for her services, but it seems Ahriman readily accepted and gathered the remainder of his Cabal unto him as the frigate-scaled Tersis returned to its unnatural habitat.

(The journey through the deep warp remains unrecorded here. I have read pervious chronicles which attempted to depict such things, but this often renders said documents unreadable and, in some rare cases, unbearably sentient...)

Eventually, the Tersis emerged in a blossoming scream of darkest glare, and the firmament itself bled as its fins ripped their way into reality. Beneath them turned the hellscape of the Sphere, the nightmare which had once been Terra, the cradle of mankind. Ahriman deployed onto the surface almost immediately alongside his elite Rubric marines and one of his Acolytes; a young, ambitious woman known as Crolemere. The rest of his thousand strong Cabal did not land upon the surface. It would have seemed that the Tersis had its prize as it returned to the warp and left the astartes sorcerer to his own devices.

Ahriman instantly got to work, for he had no time to dally; he had but five days before the next Dragon tide, and he also knew he was not the only deranged plunderer who had come to pry the Emperor’s vaults open and sample the putrid fruits within.

He and Crolemere cast a runic enchantment about their retinue, which cast out the questing talons of passing daemons birthed in the sour wombs of the Storm of the Emperor’s Extinction. The place that was once Terra was a place much-changed. There were semi- organic citadels that crawled across its surface like impossibly vast hermit crabs. Whole civilisations of mutants lived and died in the span of hours. The surface constantly shifted and rolled like an ocean of swarming locusts, and it took a great force of will for Ahriman’s disciples to merely avoid being swept away into nothingness by these buffeting tides. Yet it was the woman Crolemere who discovered a means to navigate the blasted orb. Though it was an impossible wasteland, beneath the surface, the ancient passages and subterranean boulevards of Luna, Venus and Terra remained in a semblance of order, even if they were hopelessly ruined. Using this sanity like a divining rod, Ahriman moved at a brutally brisk pace.

Yet, he was not the only faction of power hungry travelers to reach the sphere of madness. The Mage Mistress Vaxigotsh, one of the most powerful chaotic warlords in the Segmentum Obscurous, had breached the Oort cloud through sheer attrition; sacrificing a fleet of fifteen thousand of her best ships. Only her burning flagship, the Delirium, pierced the veil, filled with her cybernetic legion known as the ‘Host Divine’; degenerate killing machines one and all. They too desired the secrets of the Revenant Vault; the Emperor’s Laboratories.

Her vessel crash-landed in a collection of fang-like mountains, and emerged on foot at the head of her vast army. She happened to land closer to the great heart of the terran daemonworld, outside the palace itself, where the rift itself was ripped open and raw with the passing of innumerable daemons and nightmares from the very deepest descents of the warp. And it was she who had the dubious privilege to encounter the new master of Terra personally. Where once the majestic Imperial Palace had crowned the Himalayas, now there stood a towering keep of dull stone and weeping brass which shuddered as if laughing as if laughing in mockery of its former glory. As she approached, she found the blood-filled moat surrounding this keep grew into a vast and terrible ocean, filled with sharks and betentacled things that gnashed and wailed in agonized fury. The only way across the blood sea was a narrow bridge formed from the ribcages of vast beasts. Her army ignored these omens and ploughed on ahead in their column of befouled armored vehicles and super heavy tanks. Every step on their journey was watched by skinless shrikes, that instantly reported all they saw to the Prince of Terror; the regent of Terra.

When the army was halfway across the bridge, the Daemonic legion struck. Bloodthirsters soared overhead, landing before and after the army, trapping them upon the colossal bridge. Meanwhile, veritable tides of Bloodletters charged along the bridge, growling and snarling with eager bloodlust, while juggernauts stampeded in their midst. Battle was suddenly drawn, and both sides fought with savagery; one warp born, the other induced by cybernetic implants and slaught infusions. Vaxigotsh’s champions were beheaded one after another by the Skulltaker herald of Khorne. Meanwhile, daemon engines of truly colossal scale rose from the depths like legendary leviathans, and ripped the bridge itself apart, tossing both sides into the boiling torrent of scalding blood. When the skull taker finally took Vaxigotsh’s head, he was bidden to keep the severed organ quite alive, so the master of Terra could witness her destruction in close proximity.

Ahriman chose a different path through the hellscape. He travelled beneath it, hugging sanity like a crutch. All the while he weaved his sorceries, and the realm above was in flux, changing according to conflicting whims. The Thousand Sons Marine summoned daemonic allies and entire warp portals on the surface, instigating titanic wars and conflicts that sundered the mountains themselves with their fury; all this was to distract the Daemon regent of Terra. Doombreed, the first and eldest mortal daemon ruled terra with the bloody claws of a tyrant, but even he, most powerful of daemon princes, was not omnipotent.

Yet, even as he grew more and more frustrated with the sorcerer’s feints and illusions, Doombreed knew Ahriman was there.

“Do you think to confound me astartes whelp? This is my world; my home. I tainted this planet’s soil with blood and pain long before the Anathema’s folly of an Empire arose! I arose long before he bred his sons, and their polluted little mongrels; mongrels like you. I shall swat you as I have swatted all who came before you little mortal. You and your race of posthumans are not worthy of the fruits of the Gods’ power!” he bellowed, his dread voice carrying to every corner of the world.

Crolemere cowered at the din, but Ahriman dismissed her fears; he would ensure her safety, until she had completed her part of the bargain.

The image of the Doombreed was burned into Ahriman’s mind as he silently fought a battle of wills with the Khornate daemon prince. The daemon appeared as a terrible mirror image of the Emperor; where his armor was gold, the Doombreed’s was brass, and wept oily pus and stinking venom, and where the Emperor’s shining features (for all his faults) had appeared majestic, Doombreed’s face was a contorted mask of patchwork flesh and burning charcoal eyes, topped by a crown of obsidian spines.

But Ahriman’s mind, while weaker than the ancient daemon’s power-glutted essence, was by far the more agile, and he avoided Doombreed’s fiery gaze. After four days of battle and stealthy infiltration, Ahriman’s band reached the catacombs of the Dark palace. It was here that Ahriman needed his minions more than ever. He was drained from his relentless mind war with the prince, and only his Rubric marines could defend him from assailing daemons and maddened degenerates that assailed them from every angle; each new wave was gunned down dispassionately by the undead automatons. At long last they reached the desired vaults. At the foot of the vault doors, dried husks marked the manifest failure of previous tomb raiders.

Only Crolemere’s touch could open the vault, for she was of the purest blood, and an innocent who was immune to the effects of warp taint; one of the few grey Sensei ever to have existed. Only the Emperor’s blood could open his most secret vaults, and part of his blood flowed in her rebellious veins. Her touch opened the bio-coded seals, and granted Ahriman access to the shrouded labs.

As it opened, the stasis field inside disengaged. As Ahriman stepped inside, he was staggered by what he found. Mortal scientists, clad in pristine white robes of plastic and rubber, and towering machines of unique and intriguing designs, most of them alien in nature. It was then that he felt his powers suddenly leave him, and he staggered to his knees. From behind a cable-veined column stepped a woman in ornate armor, clutching a wickedly sharp silver broadsword in her delicate fingers. Her mouth was covered with a grill, which only a veteran of millennia long past could ever recognize; she was a sister of silence. The Rubric marines were slain as further Silent Sisters cut down the giants as they slowly reached to this new menace. The Emperor had planned against plunderers a long time ago.

But Ahriman was not so easily cowed, not when he was so close to his ultimate goal. Slowly, he rose to his feet, snarling with indignant anger.

“I am the Outcast of the Cyclops God, and the scion of the Rubric! I shall not be denied that which shall save us all! All is Dust, but from dust rises... everything!” he declared in a loud voice before the Sisters descended upon him.

He and the Sensei battled them furiously, ignoring cuts which would have slain lesser men a hundred times over. His staff was hacked apart, and his helm ripped away. His own blood ran freely, never getting a chance to clot as he threw himself into combat. As the last Sister of Silence died, his powers flooded back to him with a vengeance like an ethereal gale, which blew the vault closed behind them.

What happened within with the Emperor’s surviving scientists cannot be fully known for certain, but it was known that Crolemere and Ahriman bore extensive tomes and texts with them into the vaults. Ahriman drained the vaults of their knowledge some say, while others claim he merely completed the incomplete knowledge which resided within those hallowed halls of learning and research. All that is known is that, Doombreed registered a sudden surge in warp energy beneath Terra’s crust, which alerted him to Ahriman’s presence. However, when his legions reached them, they were nowhere to be found. Not only had Crolemere and Ahriman vanished, but so too had the entire vault, leaving a perfect, square kilometer cube of empty space in its place.

Doombreed howled his frustration to the bruised skies, even as the Dragon Tide swept in and scoured his world clean of all matter once more.

What Ahriman couldn’t have known at that time, of course, was that his dramatic exit had punched a hole not only through real-space, but also pierced the Oort cloud shroud.

The prison walls broke on that year; a year forever known as the year of the Dragon, which would be the catalyst of all that was to come.

Additional Background Section 12: The warpish Tumult

The sea of souls is not a place of form or structure. We gaze upon it through a distorting lens of sanity and analogy which conjures up the false images of alien vistas and towering edifices; mythology and metaphor become stark and real in our minds, for this is the only way we can perceive it. This... repository of information which I find myself within likewise records events ‘within the warp’ in this same legendary and somewhat baroque style. Therefore, I shall use a similar style to explain the far-reaching effects of the expanded warp between Pantheons which had been building ever since the birth of the Star Father, the paradoxical master of order within madness.

Older accounts depicted how he fought the chaos gods into a stalemate, and became part of the great game, but his legacy went further. Throughout the realm of chaos, the forests of decay constantly shifted and groaned as Nurgle’s power waxed and waned. Likewise the sensory vistas of delirium conjured by Slannesh easily faded or flourished depending upon which god was master at the time. The same went for the crystalline tzeentchian mazes that shattered and constantly realigned themselves, and the war industries of Khorne.

The great irony of chaos’ game was that for the most part, between their realms, there was utter formless howling wilderness; only the most bitter of furies could maintain their forms within the fluid border regions; no god laid claim to them, for no god could. Thus, when the souls of mortals were tossed from reality into the churning sea of souls, they mostly dissolved; their component parts being then picked over and parceled off into the bellies of opportunistic daemons, or eventually coalesced into the great form of the chaos realms; disembodied anger washed onto the bloody shores of Khorne’s realms, and formed the foundations of his factories of annihilation, for instance.

But the Lord of Order disrupted this imbalance. He had great spires which never changed, but rather they loomed over all like heavy steel turrets in a fast flowing river. Great rigid bridges joined them like a box web, as unchanging and horrifically deranged as any hellscape conjured by his rivals. Upon these bridges, souls were trapped; they never moved nor did they so much as scream in torment. They whimpered and mumbled mindless praises to the living embodiment of Domination. The Star Father would roar ‘OBEY!’ and they would chime their approval, while the angyls flitted amongst them, slowly draining them and feeding them to the Star Father. This denied them to the chaos gods. It was but a negligible drop in the vast intake of souls the chaos gods constantly gorged upon (and, contrary to the belief of some, even if all life was erased from existence, the chaos gods would still persist, for the souls they had already consumed would sustain them indefinitely. How I know of this warp metaphysics cannot be related here at this moment. I fear you may try to emulate me when the time comes, and that should never happen...)

In the Materium, the effect was in anything, even more horrific. Some mortals, when they died, remained conscious, for their soul was trapped and fixed in position; becalmed in the warp. Thus, as their bodies died, decayed and were buried, their souls and minds remained, screaming silently in the worst kind of horror imaginable.

However, this denial of souls to the other gods did not go unnoticed by the rival powers. Slannesh grew petulant at being denied even more sweetmeat morsels, and chased his daemon princess concubines from his palace, before demanding answers from the most ancient serpent daemons; Shaimesh, Lhiemeth, Fulgrim and others too numerable and profane to name. He gathered his most beautiful of creations, the daemonette Illuria, and infested her with a fearsome venom crafted by Shaimesh. The dark prince set her out to the Star Father’s bastion, in an attempt to seduce the monolithic God-King. Those he was a God of oppression and control, his molten Gold flesh bore emotional chinks, too small for all but the lord of perversion to see. Illuria playfully submitted to the Star Father, begging to be bound and dominated, all the while hiding a venomous bard beneath her flesh. As he bound her and dragged her before him, she struck. Though she was immediately obliterated by his merciless power, the poison took effect and distracted the Star father for long enough for the other Gods to gather against him.

Tzeentch gathered them together to decide upon a means to rob the Father of his sedated souls, but Tzeentch himself was of little use; his plans were too complex, contradictory and multifarious to have a lasting effect. Khorne favored a frontal assault, but he only desired a war if he could face the full might of the Star Father, with all his angyls at his side; he wished to pit his daemonic herald Skulltaker against the angyllic herald Draigo, the faceless champion of the grand Star-Gate. However, Draigo was not present then for he was in the Materium on an errant for his master whom he hardly disobey (his story shall be related later in this history).

Yet it was a most unusual ally who devised the most cunning plan. Malice, the outsider God, approached Nurgle’s spouse, Isha the mother, in the form of a black pinioned raven, and whispered to her many dark and dreadful secrets. Isha, at the secret behest of Malice Isha proposed a most radical of ways to denying the Star Father his captive prizes. She, lover of life, pleaded with Nurgle to unleash a warp infection into the Materium which would raise the helpless souls from their living death. They would not die, they would live. And Nurgle did so, through his mortal agents. In the Materium, the decade of the fifteenth zombie plague was the result; billions upon billions of mortal creatures who had died but not passed dragged themselves from graves and funeral pyres in a single great epidemic of horror spanning light- years. In the warp, the Star father howled in frustration as his bridges collapsed for it was no longer supported by the mass of souls beneath them. This frustration made Khorne swell in power, and led to his great war against the Star father, or so they say. Khorne may have won that war if it had not been for the theft of his great black sword by Malice, who tossed the Sword into the wilderness.

The reason for the absence of the blank visage of Draigo in this calamitous war may seem strange, until we access another one of the accounts that linger in this great place.

We must look to the Chronicles of Telion, and the mythological cycles surrounding this account. Particularly, we must look to the most important sections of his Chronicles; those that depict the fall of Grand Sicarium and its deranged astartes king.

Additional Background Section 13: The fall of Grand Sicarium

Much occurred in the one thousand years that directly preceded the Vail-Fall of M56. Already I have gleaned vast reams of information from the archives here (though it is a challenge to decipher the many diverse and complex meanings of the ‘tomes’ written here), a fraction of which I have shown you so far. But I had to look to other historians and chroniclers for this tale. In an effort to glean the truth, I have merged to testimonials of loyalists, Star Cultists, as well as various sections from the galactically-famous ‘Chronicles of Telion the Grey-Hood’.

As previously iterated, the dreadful forces of the Star father remained exceedingly strong during this period; the warp was in turmoil as never before, and the chaos gods were almost obsessive in their desire to overcome their youngest and most abhorrent of siblings. But this was in the metaphorical apocalypse of the sea of souls. In the Materium too, the Star Father’s influence was expanding. More and more worlds within the most oppressive of regimes felt the intangible will of the God of Domination bearing down upon their very souls, and witnessed the grand Angyl armies descend upon their worlds, turning their planets into near- lifeless automations of life.

But this was not enough for the Star Father; it was never enough. So long as there was a will in the world to defy him, he was restless. His dominance needed to be final and everlasting. He needed something that the scholars of the long-extinct Thorian cult had predicted countless millennia ago; an avatar for his will, a means by which he could channel a significant fraction of his power into reality. If he could do this, he would be almost unstoppable. Thus, he sent forth an angylic host, led by one of the angyllic heralds, known as Draigo, while the archangyls (including Malcador and the Goge-Lord) let the other hosts as they dueled the daemons in their hell-realms. Draigo was sent into reality with a mission, to find a being with a body sufficiently sturdy enough (physically and intellectually) to contain the essence of the Star Father, and to destroy or enslave any who sought to protect the avatar.

Draigo was more than enough for the task set for him. He was the Star Father’s champion and one of the most formidable creatures to step into the Materium. He bore the soulless mockery of Grey Knight armor, which had become an enclosing fluid skin of silver and grey metal flesh, animated by the churning soul of a warrior forged in hatred for all daemonkind. His soul was golden and luminescent, blinding to all who witnessed it. But brightness does not denote righteousness, for he was a nightmarish and profoundly destructive being. His vast blank shield could smash aside whole phalanxes of foes, and his sword drank souls as it obliterated flesh.

After centuries of searching and the destruction or enthrallment of billions of souls, the Herald found a potential avatar; one that he had overlooked for far too long. On the world of Varigen, after the world’s crust had been coated in angyllic steel-flesh, and all its inhabitants had been placed upon the ever-marches, Draigo found a survivor. He was an astartes free captain, calling himself a Warrior King of Ultramar-in-exile. He tried to resist Draigo, but he and his Oppressi-seers soon broke the man’s spirits, and demanded the astartes give them all the knowledge he had. Yet, when Draigo spoke of avatars, the Marine spat.

“We need no avatars. Guilliman is the only Father we ever needed, or ever will!”

Draigo then obliterated him with a gesture, but the statement made the angyl ponder.

And it made him plan.

Several thousand lightyears distant from this, Grand Sicarium continued on as it had done for thousands of years. It was a hellish realm of cramped urban dwellings, fortresses, factories and propaganda offices filled with astartes-worshipping sycophants and ideologues. The people starved regularly across this sub sector, but still they adored their superhuman masters, who in turn ruled over them like feudal kings. Each astartes maintained a veritable army of retainers and warrior-retinues of mortals and advisors.

All surplus trade produce and tithe payments were sent to the capital world of Grand Sicarium; Macragge. Here lay the incalculably vast Citadel of Sicarius. This fortress perched like a spider across the mountains of Hera, and was flanked by mile-high statues of king Sicarius himself. He was supposedly the Father of all astartes, tasked by his own father, Guilliman, to create a race of warrior giants to watch over humanity. According to his propaganda, he cut the flesh from his left hand, and used powerful magicks to summon the Astartes into being, born of his own flesh. First he created his council of Elders, then they in turn brought forth their own astartes, who then flourished and drove back the darkness that had fallen over creation. We can see that this is at least partially a corruption of the concept of geneseed transference, and the process of astartes creation, but to the ignorant inhabitants of Grand Sicarium, they believed this tale wholeheartedly (even if some or most professional mortal practitioners knew the truth of biology and astartes physiology, they paid lip service to this creed to maintain their own positions).

Sicarius himself grew ever more deranged and paranoid, locked in his towers scheming. His Praetorian Draconis (the title of his second in command), Titus, formerly of the Genesis Chapter, enacted the orders of Sicarius with an ideological zeal that bordered on mania. Potential enemies were executed regularly, before being spitted upon pikes outside the walls of administration buildings across the sub sector. Ever-tighter rules and laws were placed upon the populace each year, until Sicarius could not be named directly by anyone, on pain of torture. This was because he had a cabal of psykers and sorcerers in his court, who told him about the concept of true names and daemonology. He feared having his name used against him, almost as much as he feared dying. He had heard what the afterlife consisted of in these terrible times, and he had no wish to meet his fate, not when either oblivion or abomination awaited him. As to why he could conceive of fear, none can say for certain. His followers claimed it was some sort of venom which his foes had created. Others contended that it was merely his advanced age breaking down his psychological conditioning. Others go further. They maintain that Astartes could always feel fear in extreme cases; Sicarius merely had no reason to disguise his fear behind

He did, however, maintain Guilliman’s shrine, and the primarch within. Ever since he had learned of Vulkan’s return and rapid spread throughout the galaxy, he had grown afraid of what the Primarch may try to do. He also resented the fact that it was not his primarch uniting the galaxy. He preserved Guilliman in the vain hope he could use him as a weapon against Vulkan, but also because, deep down, he still loved his gene-sire.

But there was resistance. The mysterious brethren of the exile Telion were a constant thorn in Sicarius’ side. In the early years, the grey hooded mortals and astartes in the brotherhood attacked factories, destroyed legal records and robbed from the estates of the astartes-lords, sometimes slaying the most abhorrent of landlords. But Telion’s allies, and Telion himself, lost the stomach for such radical rebellion when he learned of what it was doing to the citizens of Grand Sicarium. When bridges were bombed, Sicarius would punish whole hab blocks as an example, denouncing them as degenerates and rebels. When one astartes was killed, whole countries burned in the ‘justice runs’ of thunderhawks. Telion could not bear to see the people of Ultramar suffer due to his petulant resistance. If he was incapable of destroying the real root cause of Ultramar’s woes (Sicarius and his coven), then what was the use in provoking the Space marine King to ever greater acts of paranoid horror? He had tried to assassinate Sicarius several times before, to no avail. Thus he changed tact; he used his underground conspiracy of rebels to protect those persecuted by Sicarius; snatching them from the authorities and inducted them into his cult secretly.

This changed when Telion learned (though information smugglers trading with the Realm of Fathers) about the existence of Vulkan’s new astartes commandaries. This kindled new hope in the ancient marine. He placed his most trusted Lieutenant, Folkar, in command of the Grey Hoods, before he raised his own hood, and vanished into the night, ignoring the pleas of his men for him to stay. Telion told Folkar to look after his men, and to be ready to strike at any moment, and at any time. He promised to return. When his men checked his simple quarters of his hidden bastion, they found only his weapons and a single scroll missing from his rescued archive of writings and treatises.

Around this time, trading barges from neighboring petty Imperiums began to enter Grand Sicarium. When boarded by the navy of Brother-Captain Artegan, they found the crews all dead. None were butchered, or suffocated or in any way harmed. The ship’s air recyclers were functioning, as was every system. However, every single person on board lay dead. When examined by the Apothecary, Tyron Prince of Prandium, they found that everyone on board the vessels had died either of malnourishment or of exhaustion; muscles were torn through exertion, and every belly was empty. At first this was dismissed as one of the many dreadful mysteries of the galaxy outside Grand Sicarium’s safe borders.

Then came more. And more. And more.

Hundreds of ships, every year came bearing dead crews. But what was worse was that those few merchants granted licenses by Titus to leave Grand Sicarium on limited trade missions, found that their warp drives were seemingly malfunctioning. They entered the warp; then they exited it a month later, finding that they had travelled only two light years. Something was making warp travel impossible. Navigators soon had an answer for the Space marines of Sicarium. The warp, usually rolling and tumultuous, was growing stale and static in a great bubble around the entire sub-sector, as if some great hand was squeezing the usually fluid into a solid shell.

Meanwhile, Telion alone had left Grand Sicarium just before this event, and was making slow progress across the galaxy. He hitched rides on transports and warships, and smuggled himself through border patrols and the various security forces of hundreds of diverse human and alien realms. The ancient marine, after twenty thousand years of existence, was a ruin of an astartes, and was truly testing the limit of Space marine longevity. Every year he felt weaker. Every year his bones and body lost some of their superhuman vigor. But he persisted, and fought on, clutching a scroll to his heart.

Almost three years after the first ship entered Sicarium dead, the host came. The first world to fall was Tanesburg, one of the outer worlds of the stellar realm. The warp opened suddenly in a great torrent of golden and black light, like glinting metallic veins spreading across the fabric of space itself. Then, the fleet of the Adorants emerged in a storm of silver flames and oddly regulated warp tendrils. The Adorants were the mortal warriors who served the Star Father in realspace with unthinking loyalty. Their vessels were like blank slabs of grey and gold, blocky and vast. How these blank, almost featureless vessels navigated through the void was a fact nobody had time to consider, before they instantly engaged Artegan’s armada, which rushed to intercept them. Weaponry emerged from concealed gun ports along the flanks, dorsal ridge and prows of the blunt vessels, unleashing weaponry just as fearsome as Ategan’s battle barge and strike cruisers. The war in the void raged for days, with more and more vessels emerging to reinforce the Adorants.

But Artegan, despite his ostentation and pampered finery, was still an astartes captain, and a gifted naval commander. His fleet was relentless in its attacks, sweeping in to strike from unpredictable angles of assault, and destroying more than a few adorant vessels. Each time, the fleet would return to Tanesburg to rearm hastily, before rushing to continue the assault. The people looked to the night’s sky with fear in their hearts, as they saw the stars themselves flaring and flashing in and out of existence. New constellations appearing and vanishing. To them, it truly seemed that their Angels were remaking the sky in their war against the angyls. In a sense, they were correct, but their faith in their protectors was soon to be tested.

Artegan’s warriors constantly launched boarding actions against the Adorants, who always responded to attack in pre-determined ways (presumably on the orders of their masters), and initially, Artegan’s brother Space marines made good progress. The uniform corridors of the adorant vessels were coated in the blood of the blank-masked army of the Star Father.

Then came the angyls. They folded out of the walls like phantoms, remolding metal and flesh into new, angyllic material which was neither. Forests of bladed wings and tendrils writhed amongst them, and they attacked the astartes with terrifying speed. No armor could stop their attacks, and not even enhanced biology could save the space marines from dying in droves. Lightning and coiled silver bolts of energy were unleashed in response to bolter fire, and the latter was far less formidable than the former.

Not only were there the winged angyls, but the strange scuttling thrones; spinning creatures composed of bladed wheels within wheels, that breathed awful beams of fire that slew within moments of striking an unfortunate victim, as they burned not flesh, but soul-stuff. Then came Draigo himself. He walked through the combined fire of an entire company of warriors, his blank shield utterly unmarked as he deflected every blow. His sword destroyed life with every deft blow, drinking deep of the life force that sought to resist him.

Suddenly, the tables were turned. Artegan saw his ships falling, one by one, as angyls of all varieties invaded them. To his horror, every defeated ship began to be covered in that same silvery agyll-flesh that clad the Adorant ships; every ship then began to lose all definition, until they were all near-featureless blocks of adamantine. Ategan, snarling, ordered his Gellar fields activated, for the first time in realspace. His barge, the Victorum Ultra, then powered itself into the enemy fleet, guns blazing in all directions as he forced the vessel into a corkscrewing maneuvers. Even as the Adorant ships around him wallowed with the damage inflicted by his vessel, he knew he was doomed. His Gellar field finally faltered under the momentous strain inflicted upon it by the angyllic incursions striking at it. Moments later, his vessel was flooded by many-winged angyls.

Sighing in resignation, the veteran astartes drew his twinned power swords. He fought through the angyls that leapt onto his deck and slew his bridge crew. His blades shattered the unreal bodies of almost a dozen of the creatures. Each time, they’d shrivel into their true forms; uniform adamantine blocks, that fell to the ground, inert once more. At last, he was alone on his deck. His sword smoked from overuse, but the angyls were gone. Or so he thought. Draigo burst through the sealed portal to the bridge, and stood before Artegan. Draigo was almost eight feet tall, and his blank helm regarded his new opponent callously.

“KNEEL!” Draigo demanded with simple, brutal clarity.

Artegan stabbed him in the chest. Kaldor Draigo swept his shield across the blade, shattering it in one blow. Artegan raised the other, but he dropped it as his head fell away from his body, without truly registering Draigo’s lightning-swift blow.

Tanesburg was taken a few weeks later. The Adorants did not wait for surrender; they simply invaded, killing and chaining the entire populace. Those few soldiers and marines still alive resisted for a while, but soon even they knelt before Draigo, who killed them and pressed their souls into the ground with the force of his will. Then the populace were sent into motion; forced to walk across the face of the planet forever, for no other reason than the Star Father willed it, and he should be obeyed.

The story recurred across the realm. From multiple angles of attack, on several fronts at once, the eerily precise armies of the Star Father invaded. Every soldier was brought into battle to defend their God-King’s realm from its greatest threat. Even Folkar’s men were attacked by the Host, and only just managed to escape the world they had hid upon before the angylls remade it into an angylworld like Tanesburg.

Yet, for the most part, Draigo’s host seemed impatient. They did not take the time to convert every world. They simply smashed aside the fleets of most, and pounded their militaries into ash from orbit. Only Prandium, the second largest fortress world of Sicarium, held the fleet up significantly. This was because Prandium had a planetary shield of intense power, built from the scavenged remnants of an alien vessel which had crashed in-system two thousand years previously. Their fleets could hold of the Adorant fleet indefinitely; even the largest shipbound weaponry simply rippled across the energized skin of the Prandium forcefield harmlessly, it’s generators barely even taxed by the bombardment.

Yet, the greatest threat of the angyls came not from their mortal arms, but from the hollow, heartless essence of the angyls themselves. Upon seeing their will denied, the Angyls began their chanting, gathering together their will until their litanies carried through the void, and echoed across airless vistas across the system. Draigo, in all his blinding majesty, rose from the lead Adorant vessel, soaking in all the power of the Host, focusing and channeling all that raw authority and megalomaniacal power into a tight column of psychic force, thin as a laser but with all the awesome power of a collapsing sun.

He screamed once, his blank helm rippling into a great maw in order to give voice to the unnatural utterance. The blast struck the shield on the equator, and for a few minutes, Prandium had a new star in the sky, as radiation and rolling banks of fire flooded the heavens. In that single blast, the shield was rent asunder. Across Prandium, shield generators exploded with the force of the psychic blow, erupting like volcanoes across the skin of the armored planet. With the defenses spent, the adorant vessels could enter low orbit, and deploy their lethal cargo. Legions of soldiers and rolling superheavy tanks stormed across Prandium, and battle was joined between the faceless Adorants and the defiant armies of King Malfodius alongside the Prince of Prandium’s forces. Caught in this crossfire, millions upon millions of men women and children died. The Adorants were the mentally-dominated inhabitants of an entire system full of people, and they knew no mercy. They were like automatons as they calmly moved from city block to city block, exterminating anyone who raised a weapon, before they dragged off those who surrendered, and shackled them to strange multi-limbed constructs. None knew whether they were angyls or some sort of machine-creature, but everyone who witnessed them had their own names for them regardless; dissent-leeches. The towering, tracked edifices rose up like trees, and each limb was bound a human. Their brains were plugged into the device, that coldly drained their minds of the will to resist. Once they were drained, the machine simply let them go. The victims filled the streets, wandering around aimlessly, mumbling wordless prayers to something they didn’t know nor could name. These zombies could never again feel rage, hope, despair or any desires, beyond a desire to serve.

After three weeks, Prandium was pacified, and only Macragge stood in opposition; all the worlds spared the angyl attack lacked a fleet to come to Sicarius’ aid (despite his furious demands and panicking couriers).

As this fight raged, Telion neared his destination. He came to a world called Fenkic, when he finally keeled over from exhaustion, old bones almost totally ruined by fatigue and age. The natives were savage and fierce mutant creatures, with crimson flesh and bony spines, and looked almost like devils to Telion’s weary mind. They considered killing him and drinking the powerful blood within his flesh, but more sober minds prevailed. These stone-age savages on the world took him bodily to their ‘Star Chief’ at his great tent-city to the north. Their chief was, in fact, a delegation of Ryza-Catachan soldiers. Their leader was known as Morn, and this cyborg super-soldier recognized the inverted Omega sign emblazoned upon the old marine’s pauldron; a symbol not seen in the Vulkan Imperium for countless millennia. As soon as possible, the warriors abandoned their recruitment mission on Fenkic, and took Telion directly to Armageddon on the next earliest voyage. All the while, he clutched his scroll tightly in his vice-like grip.

Back in Grand Sicarium, the long shadows of the adorant fleet swept over Macragge. Ancient defensive structures unfurled at the approach of the enemy, and unleashed gigatons of firepower into the approaching vessels. The skies turned red with fires burning in the hearts of ruined naval vessels, and earth was thrown up into the sky as kilometer long vessels plummeted to the ground and detonated spectacularly across the landscape.

From the burning mountainsides came armored columns of Predator tanks, whirlwind artillery vehicles, and all manner of fighting machines, all clad in the midnight blue of the Sicarian High Guard; the God-King’s personal bodyguard. As the surviving adorant soldiers and tanks stumbled from the ruins of their many fallen craft, they were destroyed by the contemptuous barrages of Macragge’s finest warriors. Yet, those Adorants who escaped the bombardment, sacrificed their souls in order to animate the perfect metal cubes lying in their ship holds. Just as it seemed the Sicarian High Guard could carry the day, angyls emerged from the flames, screeching in dreadful tones that spoke of an eternity of servitude. These were vast creatures, easily the match in scale of a stormbird or thunderhawk, and they soon turned the tide back in favor of Draigo’s forces. Tanks were tossed like toys across the plains, while others were hacked into blazing segments by the angyls’ unnatural wings.

Even High Guard aerial units struggled to contain the flying abominations, and slowly but surely the Space marines fell back in an orderly fashion, forming ever tighter and tighter rings of defense. As they retreated, they destroyed any passageways and access routes through the mountains, hoping to slow the faceless monsters that hunted them.

Sicarius himself witnessed events form his vast bank of pict screens and cogitators, eyes wide in disbelief and hate. This was the single greatest seat of Space marine power on the Eastern Fringe! How could his empire be sent reeling so swiftly? Rage overcame his suppressed fears, and he rushed to his armory, arming himself with his Talassarian blade, and the sole surviving gauntlet of Ultramar, ripped form Calgar’s poisoned corpse long ago. For the first time in over seven hundred years, he threw off his Donorian pelt cloak, and armored himself in the mantle of the Suzerain, donning his ornate crested helm once again. He was Cato Sicarius, and he recognized only one master of Macragge!

Soon enough, the corridors of his own citadel echoed to the din of gunfire, and the toneless screaming of the angyllic host. Regiments of Men at Arms, Sicarium Serfs and the Honor Guard themselves duelled with the rampaging monsters, blade to bladed wing, bolt to arcing beam. The relic blades of the Honour Guard sang as they shattered angyllic essence, as they denounced the winged things as abominable daemons and false idols. Titus, clad in his crimson armour, left his master’s side, vanishing into the citadels labyrinthine expanse.

Sicarium watched as his mortal followers and astartes brothers alike fell to the blades of the angyls. In particular, he noted Draigo’s presence with particular loathing; the Herald looked like a blank-faced mockery of an astartes warrior, yet he found with a speed and power that shocked him. Everyone who faced him died. Even after the dreadnought Cassius ripped away the silver warrior’s shield with his energized claws, Draigo returned the favor tenfold, carving the venerable war machine asunder with the force of a dozen searing blows.

Sicarius grew desperate now, and fled from his throne room, ordering his Librarian coven to eliminate (or at least weaken) the rampaging angyl-knight. Solemnly, the psykers, mortal and Astartes, agreed, and they faced down the host with all the warp-spawned magic they could muster. No one living was present for their confrontation with Draigo, but it is said that a hundred angyls were banished in the battle, and the tower of Librarians exploded spectacularly, a sight which could be seen from orbit apparently. Sicarius did not notice, but rather fled to the only place he considered safe, in all Macragge.

He fell at the feet of Guilliman, who remained frozen at the brink of death behind a shield on azure energies; unchanging and impassive, like some living statue, a monument to all Ultramar stood for. Sicarius asked for guidance, even though he knew his father could give him none. He prayed for forgiveness, but knew he did not deserve it, not truly.

The heavy footfalls of Draigo’s metallic form were ominous as they were sonorous, heralding his arrival as surely as a triumphal fanfare. The doors to the chamber were blown off their hinges, as if ripped up by a sudden gale that blew every artifact across the room with the force of Draigo’s entry. Shivering, Sicarius rose with weapons raised in challenge. Draigo bade him kneel, but Sicarius defiantly demanded Draigo kneel, for;

“I am master and king of all Space marines. Though you have cast aside your humanity, you are still astartes, and you! Will! Kneel!”

With that, Sicarius charged into battle with Kaldor Draigo. The two blades were quicksilver and fire in their hands, and the blows exchanged set alight to the tapestries and murals lining the temple, wreathing the immortal combat in flame. The gauntlet of Ultramar was the only weapon capable of blocking Draigo’s blade, and Sicarius used this to his advantage, swatting aside the blade before chopping at Draigo with his ancestral Tempest sword. But Draigo was empowered by a fraction of the will of the Emperor-ascendant, and no blade crafted by mere men could truly slay the fiend. Plus, Sicarius was a very old man, and though he fought with indignant fury, he was weakening. At the height of the battle, Draigo suddenly lashed out with his sword, and hacked the Gauntlet of Ultramar from Sicarius’ arm, before smashing the Astartes King upon his back with the back of his hand, almost dismissively. Sicarius crashed to the ground, his helm spinning away into darkness.

Surprisingly, Draigo then spoke to Sicarius;

“I COME ONLY FOR THE AVATAR. THERE NEED BE NO FURTHER INCIDENT,” he declared in a clarion clear voice.

Sicarius replied through bloodied lips.

“You wish to take our Father, and make him a puppet of a mad daemon god? You wish to destroy the minds and souls of MY men, and MY mortals? They shall be further incidents! Guilliman is not a prize to be captured! Titus!”

At his signal, Titus emerged from the shadows, detonating the charges placed around Guilliman. Sicarius would rather destroy Roboute than let him be used against him. The blast blew the roof from the temple, and burned away Sicarius cloak and most of the left of his face. Even Draigo rocked backwards from the force. Machinery lay shattered and sparking across the floor, ancient forgotten technology destroyed forever, never to be re-learnt or rebuilt. Yet, Guilliman’s body remained. Sicarius groaned miserably, as Draigo stood over him once more. Sicarius raised his blade, Draigo chopped away his other arm. Sicarius spat venom at the herald, he ignored it, and stabbed Sicarius in the chest, piercing a heart and two lungs, and burning his other organs additionally. Sicarius howled in pain, and he fell upon his back, smoking, arms cut away and flesh smoldering. In a surprising and fleeting display of emotion, Draigo gloated, thanking Sicarius for his assistance. Guilliman’s body would make a fine host for Him on Terra. However, Sicarius, due to his repeated defiance, would not be permitted an audience with the Star father reborn, Draigo declared.

His blade did not fall. Perplexed, Draigo turned to look at the vast blue gauntlet that held his silver wrist in a crushing grip. Draigo raised his other hand, energies already building from within him, crackling in arcing bolts across his hand. Another fist connected with Kaldor, but this one punched through his chest, and ripped out his beating human heart, heedless of the molten metal that ran from it like blood. Draigo staggered backwards, but did not fall. He raised his blade again, but this time another blade connected with it. Guilliman’s golden sword shattered Draigo’s in a single blow. Dumbstruck, Draigo had nothing to say before the Primarch beheaded him. Body broken, the being simply melted like wax.

“I... decline your offer...” Guilliman is quoted as stating bluntly, before falling to his knees. Already the Anathame’s poison, used by Fulgrim in their duel, was finishing its task of killing him utterly.

Sicarius had nothing to say. He simply looked upon Guilliman, tears in his eyes. The Primarch looked across the burning temple, and the bejeweled astartes before him, and his superhuman mind assessed what his world had become and the state of the Imperium with astonishing speed. He stared upon Sicarius for a long time, burning through the old man’s mind, and seeing the truth of him as only a demi-god could know.

Weeping, Sicarius begged Guilliman’s forgiveness, but Guilliman was not a sentimental man. He spoke quietly but forcefully, forcing air through his ruined throat as he did so.

“This... is incorrect. I had... contingencies in place. Follow the... contingencies. The scrolls...”

That was all Sicarius heard, before Guilliman’s voice became a strangled gargle, and he fell to the ground with a dull clang.

Guilliman, the primarch of the warrior kings of Ultramar, and founder of the Imperium Secundus, was dead. Sicarius was soon to follow. Titus stood over his dying lord, overcome with emotions. He took up Sicarius’ sword, plucking it from his severed arm gingerly. He listened to Cato’s last words, but he ignored them.

“We were not wrong my lord. When my reign starts, I will prove it,” Titus promised his master, even as Sicarius finally perished.

Draigo’s destruction had sent a feedback wave across the angyllic host, unbinding them and turning them inert once more. Finally, the Astartes were triumphant. However, Titus emerged, clad in the mantles of the God-King, bearing the sword and the seals. His face was a pious and concerned mask that disguised his inner ambition and scheming. He bore the news of Guilliman’s death to the battle-weary survivors, but added that he had been granted leadership with Guilliman’s dying breath himself. However, a voice amongst the crowds challenged him. Folkar and his men appeared from the assembled group. Instantly, the High Guard raised their bolters, only lowering them slowly when they saw other sicarian astartes and their retinues from other besieged worlds in the subsector march at Folkar’s back. As Macragge had been besieged, Folkar had moved amongst them, preparing and paving the way for this moment.

He declared the rule of Sicarius and his associated regents and coven members was invalid. Titus sneeringly decried Folkar as a malcontent and a trouble-maker; who was he to challenge him? Who dared contradict the words of Guilliman himself?

Unfortunately for Titus, Folkar explained exactly who; Guilliman himself. The Nocturne contingent, the ancient scroll kept safe by Telion, had finally been delivered to its intended destination, after thousands of years of neglect and more pressing events. The scroll had been written by Guilliman, in the event of the complete death of the Emperor, and of his own incapacity. In the document, he ceded control of Ultramar to the Lion, but in the event of the Lion’s incapacity or death, the realm then passed to Vulkan, for it was believed a single Primarch could unite the Imperium. Any more primarch regents, and they would simply squabble (as brothers are wont to do), and would bring about further strife. Therefore, Ultramar would become a vassal state of the Vulkan Imperium, and become part of this new empire of prosperity and hope. Titus, feeling his authority slipping, argued that he was still acting Master of the Ultramarines, and until Vulkan himself came in person to confirm this, he would not bow to him. Folkar cursed Titus, but Titus was correct.

However, Folkar had one final ploy. He challenged Titus for the right to rule Ultramar as its regent. He put himself forwards as a candidate. The rule would be decided by a duel. Titus called for the Chapter Champion to slay this fool, but Hektor stood back, sheathing his dagger and sword in protest. Titus cursed, as he threw back his cloak and hefted the Tempest Blade between his gauntlets. Folkar took off his grey cloak, tossed his bolt pistol away and drew his combat knife. There was to be no interference, no firearms, and no quarter. These were wordless rules the crowd abided by, and unconsciously stepped backwards to form a rough circle around the two warriors. Folkar was a talented scout and guerrilla fighter, but he was only in carapace gear, and was dwarfed by Titus in his power armor, with the vast sword of Sicarius clutched in his hands. Both were of course consummate warriors, but Titus was at heart a politician, not a born killer. Still, his blade made him formidable.

The crowd were silent as the two clashed. They were cautious, swinging and jabbing at each other at first, as they circled around the impromptu arena.

Then, they clashed. The power sword struck nothing as Titus leapt into combat, swinging furiously. Folkar stabbed him behind the left knee joint, then the hip joint, then beneath the armpit, cutting into the weakened rubberized areas between armor plate. Titus staggered away, bleeding. Folkar could not relent, not now. He charged in cautiously, ducking back to avoid a fearsome swipe of the Talassarian blade, that cut a shallow grove across his breastplate. He side stepped another lunge, before he pounced again. He sliced behind the knee, severed a cable in Titus’ power pack, and hacked through the other shoulder joint. Titus fell to his knee, and Folkar rammed home his combat blade into Titus’ left eye, impaling his brain. Instinctively, Titus swung his blade up, and hacked Folkar’s arm off at the elbow. The scout staggered backwards in agony, but the end had already come. Titus fumbled pathetically at the blade in his brain for several moments, before he keeled over and died.

The regime of Grand Sicarium was ended. From the ashes rose Ultramar once more.

This was not the end of the woes inflicted upon Ultramar, but it was the end of woes inflicted upon its people by its supposed protectors. Only an uneasy unity with Vulkan’s empire remained; an alliance that would be tested in the dark days ahead.

Additional Background Section 14: Artificial Bodies; Birth on N’dras and the flight of the Idealist

The Tau reached the peak of their powers at a time where extinction came closer than ever before in their history. The desperate stalemate inflicted upon the Nightbringers undying Legions was breaking down, and the grand alliance of xenos races began to splinter under the furious strain of the endless war. Billions of Drone-Battlesuits were produced every few minutes, flooding into hundreds of diverse warzones simultaneously across a front fifteen hundred light-years across (though, as with any space-based campaign, in reality battles were fought by leapfrogging between embattled systems endlessly, from every vector possible.)

The Tau civilization continued to develop apace however. New machines and inventions were crafted every year. Earth caste and Fire caste funding was near limitless; nothing was denied them. N’dras became the central R and D centre of the Meta-Empire. Scientists from every vassal race flocked to the Sept world to help develop the next generations of hyper-advanced war machines.

In 823.M55, the first of the Shas’N’drassir’Kais’Por’Vanos (known unofficially as ‘the Idealist’ by its builders) Class of starship was finally commissioned. It was the most advanced Tau vessel yet built. It was completely drone-controlled, with an extensive super-mind governing every aspect of the ship, only a small crew of maintenance staff was required to remain on board the sleek yet substantial craft. With the space saved by reducing crew numbers, the ship could mount sophisticated and experimental FTL sensors, as well as an upgraded armory of the most powerful weapon systems yet devised by the Tau’s genius. The idealist also had an engine which was capable of performing multiple ‘warp dives’ in quick succession, making the vessel faster at FTL than even the Imperium vessels of old. The Fio caste were eager to get it mass produced and exported to the front lines asap, but Aun’Va overruled this order directly. The Idealist needed to be tested on a warzone away from the necrons (otherwise the C’tan may learn of its capabilities early on, and devise a counter to them). Fio’Tunsenig protested most strongly. How were the Tau to test a weapon away from necrons? The entire eastern fringe was part of the warzone, he argued.

The Earth Caste engineer could not have realized at the time (or afterwards to be honest, after his mind was cleansed of unorthodoxy by members of the M’yen psyker caste), but the Tau did have a means of finding a warzone beyond the fringe; the Jericho gate. This ancient interstellar transit path, devised by the Old Ones for a purpose not recorded in this archive, connected the Tau Empire to the Calixis sector, on the opposite side of the galaxy. Massive effort had been expended over the years ensuring the gate was never located by the C’tan, but it was deemed by Aun’Va a worthwhile cause. Thus, the Idealist was sent through the gate. Its mission was to defeat local forces, and store telemetry on its performance, before returning safely to Tau space, with its crew intact.

And thus, barely a week after this decree was issued, the Callixis gate flared into life once again, and the idealist emerged into the sector in a shimmer of baleful energies. For many centuries, the Tau had complied telemetry and stellar models of the Calixis sector, and had trawled third sphere expansion accounts to prepare the Idealist for its maiden voyage. Such efforts were futile, for Callixis was much changed.

Men did not dwell upon the worlds of Callixis. At least, not true men. Only the maggot men, who spawned and writhed across the face of the darkened hatchery worlds of the slaugth. As soon as the Idealist entered the sector, passive sensors detected it, and messages were scattered amongst the slaugth terror-form vessels, that mustered to locate the interloper. The idealist was waiting for them. It used its specialized sensors to detect the enemy vessels before they arrived, and timed its salvoes for maximum damage as soon as the unsettlingly- angular vessels of the worm-men exited the warp. Particle beams sheared through the first squadron for vessels, and these beams were then used as a designator for follow-up salvoes of phase missiles and gravitic mines, that pulverized the enemy vessels one by one. The engineers on board were terrified and awed in equal measure, as they watched their creation wreak terrible destruction upon the abhorrent alien craft with cold professionalism. The battles between Slaugth and the Tau craft continued for many months. Whenever the press of slaugth ships was too great, and their esoteric technology seemed to be carrying the day, the Idealist would effortlessly deny them a target, and skim-warped to a different location with regularity.

Yet, each time it escaped, it left dozens of damaged or crippled enemy vessels in its wake. This weakened the Slaugth notably, and this bitter combat reached a climax in Lathes system. The Lathes were vast world-prisons, where the slaugth tortured and experimented upon the former inhabitants of the sector. It also happened to be one of the most well defended worm- man installation in the region. When the Idealist warped into its space, the slaugth were ready, unleashing a strange crackling field of energy that prevented warp breach in the local vicinity. It was then that their hateful leviathans of capital ships closed in upon the Idealist. Each of the three titanic craft were like great floating hive cities, swarming with attack craft and subsidiary escorts. The Idealist, despite the desperate protests of its frantic engineers, declared that it would give battle. It was the logical course of action, despite appearances; whatever kept it chained to the Lathes was a function of slaugth technology. Thus, all of their technological assets had to be eliminated if they were to be free.

What happened next is a source of many legends amongst the annals of the oppressed peoples of Slaugth-Callixis. The Idealist drove for the centre of the slaugth system, where the various gravity wells and astronomical phenomenon were at their fiercest. The three enemy vessels had no choice but to follow and engage. The Idealist brought itself within range of the formidable orbital weapons of the three primary worlds, as well as the three worm-hive ships. It was a suicidal run.

For a ship with a limited biological brain. But the Idealist had weapons which could further distort and manipulate gravity, and systems capable of cogitating on a scale not seen since Iron men walked amongst the stars as Stone Man’s equals. The Tau super ship deflected and dodged the fearsome fusillade, directing their weaponry to strike at their own vessels as they attempted to maneuvers within the intense gravity fields. At one point, the Idealist dueled three capital ships at once; lance beams and ion cannons flaring in all directions as it span and swam through the void like some oceanic predator. Finally, through a complex system of tractor beam strikes and immobilizing volleys, the Idealist dragged one of the leviathan vessels into a terminal orbit around one of the lathes. The worm men within screeched and flailed with anguish, falling into masses of writhing maggots as they looked on in impotent panic, the ground looming large in their viewscreens.

The impact shook the very foundations of the prison world, and for a moment, a new star was born upon land. An entire factory-spire toppled into the corroded depths of the lathe’s mantle, and a volcanic blast fourteen miles high thundered into the stratosphere. Tectonic plates shifted, and prison walls across the planet broke as one, as if shook to pieces by the daemonic din of impact. Many beings escaped those prisons that day. Many went on to join resistance movements or neighboring stellar empires, while there was one who was freed, who should never have been freed. Hindsight allows us to see what he would create in the Last of Days, but a that time he was barely a footnote in history. We were not to know that it was he who engineered the collapse of so many nations, and brought about the abhorrence-ascendant. But that is another tale to be told at a later point.

To return to the naval battle raging in the shadow of the Lathes, the Idealist had broken the slaugth dampening of the warp, and managed to slip away from the furious slaugth reinforcements. It was a victory of sorts, but it left the vessel damaged, and its navigation threw it out of Callixis entirely, into space uncharted by any Tau scholars. It is likely that the Tau would have prayed for a chance to lay low and repair itself, before attempting to return to Jericho. But alas, it was not to be; word had already spread to the Imperium of the Expanse, of this single vessel which could take on the might of the entire slaugth armada, alone, and triumphed. Under their High Chancellor, Verridium Silon XXXXVVXIII (a direct descendant of the first Emperor of the Expanse, Ambraesk Silon), this Imperium had formed strong trading links with every civilization and empire for four hundred light years. Now, every faction in the area hunted them; some in order to plunder and study the ship’s technology, such as the Vulkan Imperium or the Viae Confederate of Alien dependencies. Others simply wish to hunt them for the sheer thrill. These included the Bloodknights of Baal, and the infamous Khornate Reaver Mawdredd, one of Abaddon’s most infamous Admirals.

The Tau vessel’s engineers attempted to reason with the Idealist. It had to make full speed for the Callixis gate, and back to T’au. Surely it had enough data. However, the ship’s systems decided it needed to defeat the local threats. All of them. The tiny crew of the vessel suddenly realized, with mounting dread, what the ship intended. It would kill them all. Desperately, Gue’vesa and Fio engineers tried to break into the ship’s computing systems (for it was suspected that the damage done by the slaugth had somehow made the vessel lose track of the Greater Good). The vessel almost killed them in resisting them; venting atmosphere in an attempt to subdue them. When the ship realized what it had almost done, it realized its crew were not safe onboard. It forcibly deposited them upon the nearest habitable world, and sped off into the void, to search for spare parts.

It found them upon the civilized world of Ganner Haktar. Ironically, the Idealist’s entrance into that system was a blessing for the Haktarians. This was because they were under attack by a mercenary fleet of hostile xenos races, who were trying to plunder the world for its materiel. The Idealist’ arrival instantly turned the tide of the naval engagement. Within an hour, the enemy fleet were limping back out of the system, while many simply smoldered in orbit, adrift and powerless. In gratitude, the Haktarians ferried supplies up to the Idealist. Bizarrely, the idealist responded by crippling the ferries and tugs, and taking their supplies anyway, before neutralizing the Haktarian orbital defenses. The Tau vessel recognized them as combatants to be eliminated. Yet, once these were destroyed, it spared the citizens below; it was a military vessel, not a tool of butchery.

In contrast, Mawdredd’s battle-barge, the Ossified Jaw, was very much a tool of butchery. IT had a legacy of carnage woven into its very hull, for it was a snarling patchwork vessel, consisting of various stolen ship components, roughly bonded to its own form. The battlebarge looked like a great serrated lance, clad in the armor of its foes and somehow drenched in fresh blood, which never tarnished or froze in the airless vacuum. The Ossified Jaws burst into the system, and instantly its vox channels were alive with braying roars and bestial challenges. Flanking the snarling barbed giant came smaller sibling vessels, similarly ramshackle but almost as fearsome. Mawdredd’s fleet didn’t hesitate. The vast majority of them made for the planet below, seeking a change to pillage and murder the populace. Yet, the Ossified Jaw and its escorts had eyes for only one prize; the Idealist.

Mawdredd stood up from his throne, throwing off his cloak of flayed man-skin, and howled like some canine maniac, before he ordered the boarding torpedoes manned, the main batteries armed, and the assault boats ready for close assault. Then, the Ossified Jaws turned its prow, shaped like a fanged maw, directly towards the Idealist.

Ramming speed! Ramming speed! Ram them! Pierce them curse you all! Kill its guts!!” was screamed over the captain’s personal vox, echoing throughout the hellforge of a vessel, and his (somewhat unclear) orders were obeyed as best his slavers and pit bosses could fathom.

But the Idealist did not fight like that. He did not fight at 6000 kilometers; such suicidal distances were almost knife-fighting range in naval terms. The Tau ship kept its foes at bay with controlled and blisteringly accurate salvoes and perfectly timed barrages. It insured the engine blocks and the drive systems of the Khornate armada were targeted first, deftly keeping out of range of the relentless broadsides of the chaotic vessels. Mawdredd grew delirious in his frustration, as his ship continued to lose power. He randomly ripped apart several of his attendant staff, and put his fist through his own viewscreen (for the rest of the battle, he had only the word of his helmsman to help him determine what was happening outside his bridge). Systematically, the Idealist weathered the hail of fire from the outclassed escorts and battlebarge, while systematically slaying the Ossified Jaw’s escorts. Finally, the Idealist took on Mawdredd’s vessel. It closed in upon the barge from beneath it, forcing the barge to spin upon its axis to attempt to cap its tee with its broadside, but the Idealist avoided this onslaught with calm grace. Railguns and lance beams carved into the Jaw’s flanks, blasting away its shields within a few hundred shots. Then, the energy weapons began to burn through into actual hull sections. Whole decks were voided, others burst into flames and roasted their inhabitants alive.

But still the Ossified Jaw fought on. Worst of all for the Idealist, it had to move in close to aim more precise shots with its ion cannons. This allowed waves of assault boats to strike its. Boarders found there were virtually no internal spaces to gain entry to the ship, so they merely clung to its skin, and blew chunks from its hull armor with their saboteur charges and melta bombs; futile, but irritating nonetheless. Such distractions taxed the Idealist’s turrets, and made it harder to concentrate on annihilating the Ossified Jaw, which still refused to die. With a final devastating volley of missile waves, the Idealist destroyed the starboard weapon batteries in a great conflagration. This effectively gutted the Khornate barge. With that, the Idealist fled to the outer system, and then warped to freedom.

The Idealist found no peace amongst the western galactic plane. At Elebor, it evaded the watch fleets of the Q’orl. The vessel fought off a pursuing fleet of Iron Hands that detected it on the fringes of Armageddon , and it destroyed a wolf pack formation within uncharted space. Soon enough, the Idealist became an infamous legend; the ship of the dead. The ship that could see everything, the ship that could not be slain.

One could be forgiven for thinking the Ossified Jaw, unlike the Idealist, was very much mortal, and had died in orbit around Haktar. Such views do not take into account the bloody- minded determination of Mawdredd. Even as the ship suffered massive flash firestorms and collapsing bulkheads, he furiously led his minions into the lower decks, dragging captured engineers and tech seers along with him. The fires were brought under control, but the Ossified Jaw remained without any forward drives, and its gun decks were almost completely destroyed. It was a hulk in all but name. It is said that when one of his command staff suggested they abandon ship and conquer the world below, instead of chasing ‘that devil of a ship’, Mawdredd carved him open from neck to navel.

“Khorne damn your eyes! I am not dead yet. I have its scent in my nostrils! The Jaw will ride again, even if I have to drag it in my wake!”

He eventual solution was barely any less insane, one would argue. Amidst his bloody dreams of vengeance and burning hulks, Mawdred recalled the legends of the very oldest human vessels; stories ripped from the minds of ancient mariners long since brutalized by the old reaver over the years. The oldest of ships; the bomb-riders of Orion. Mawdredd ordered the remaining munitions in the armory and vaults to be brought forth; heavy duty mines, fission charges, magma bombardment munitions, and various other high explosive devices and technologies. Even his torpedo stores he ordered pillaged. After this, he ordered the rear of the vessel reinforced with vast adamantine plating, the thickest possible. No one dared question him, and his brass-clad daemon hybrid bodyguards ensured his orders were carried out without hesitation. Nevertheless, when he finally revealed his scheme, most of his crew thought him insane (The rest of the crew also thought he was insane, but these slavering fools were just as mad as him, and they wished to get the vessel moving once more, no matter the cost). Mawdredd ordered bundles of his surviving munitions to be ejected from the rear of the Ossified Jaw, and ordered them to be detonated sequentially. The Jaw would they ride the nuclear force of this blast, allowing the vessel to reach the distance necessary to engage its semi-functioning warp engines.

The people of Haktar watched in disgusted awe, as the night’s sky was illuminated by hundreds upon hundreds of spectacular blasts, that seemed to ripple across the heavens in a wide arc of fire. Mawdredd cackled praises from his ruined bridge, as the Ossified Jaw sped from the system on the crest of a nuclear conflagration. He ignored the pitiful shrieks of the ratings burning in the rearmost sections of the vessel, and the insidious groans of the tortured metal of the ship as it suffered from the titanic strain of blasts at such proximity. The Ossified Jaw rode again! The ship only increased in speed through the warp. Mawdredd sacrificed thousands of his own crew, drawing a veritable tide of daemons alongside his vessel, thrusting him forwards through the Immaterium with all the volcanic power suicidal rage could conjure in the sea of souls. The hull burned with the talons of clinging, formless daemon-things. Mawdredd’s hateful mind focused upon only one thing; the Idealist. That accursed ship would not escape him. Not while his skull remained affixed to his spine!

The Idealist fought over seventy engagements in the western fringe over just three years. Not once was it defeated, though it found itself severely damaged. Its tractor beams were ruined, its missile stocks were utterly depleted, and its shielding was sporadic and faltering. Maintenance drones produced from within its vault-holds tried their best to fix the many varied malfunctions and near-crippling damage; they lacked the imaginative and sophisticated skills of it human and tau engineers. The Idealist warped with all haste to the world it had deposited its mortal cargo upon. However, when it arrived, scans showed they were gone. But they were not dead, for the Idealist detected further signals; the telltale contrails of ships recently breaking warp. The Idealist’s engineers had been taken. It had to save them, no matter the cost, for the technological miracles that allowed the Idealist to exist was contained within their minds. Should any rival enemy gain such knowledge, it would be a dark day for the Tau Meta- Empire.

The Drone-ship instantly set in a pursuit course, intending to reach the kidnappers destination before they did, and cut them off before they reached their homeworld. However, the Idealist was damaged, and could not make those kinds of immense speeds any more. It barely managed to keep up with the speeding vessels as they fled with their prizes sealed in their holds. The enemy employed strange warp drives that spewed forth hundreds of miserable souls in their wake, like vapor trails from a jet craft. The Idealist did not know of the excruciator engines of the Theologian Union, or how they powered their vessels through the screaming of psykers fed into their soul furnaces like diabolical coal-dust.

The speeding cruisers of the Theologian Union arrived first, and their new slaves were taken to the star fort of Von Drannen’s Purgation, the fortified laboratory of Eccliesiarch Ceylan’s most trusted and vile servant; the demented Mechanicus priest Deng Vaal. Within his chambers, he began his many hideous torments upon the tau’s quivering blue flesh. Ceyland desired a fleet of ships, powerful enough to break the back of the Vulkan Imperium, allowing him to unite humanity in the worship of the Emperor of the Wasteland. Von Drannen’s Purgation was guarded by an entire sector fleet detachment, including cruisers personally modified and up-gunned by Deng Vaal himself. This was Lord Vaal’s own personal demesne, and the seat of his power. If he could develop a fleet of advanced weapons, he need no longer bow before Ceylan. He could take the Theologian Union for himself. He had also instructed his cruisers not to hide the course they had taken to his star fort; he hoped that the Idealist followed them. If he could capture both the ship and its engineers, his task would be all the simpler.

Soon enough, his hopes were fulfilled, as the Idealist burst from the warp, all its functioning guns blazing. However, this time it was the idealist’s time to be outclassed. The Tau ship was battered and wounded from a thousand cuts, while Vaal’s ships were fresh and well-stocked. They surged into combat, one after another. Though the Idealist outranged them, they did not fear remaining within range of the craft, as they closed with their own shorter ranged ordnance. Torpedoes burst across the skin of the Idealist in searing blossoms of plasma fire, as lances thrust into its flanks from every angle. But the Idealist fought on, fear unknown to its artificial brain. Inside, drones exploded and storage holds were split asunder by the bombardment of the Theologian vessels. But onwards it came, launching all the ordnance it still possessed. It killed several smaller craft with the last salvo of phase missiles that bypassed armor and shields, detonating inside their very decks. Deng Vaal watched this battle unfold from his personal chambers onboard the star fort, his fingers clenched like claws into the arms of his chair, eyes intent and straining to make out the status of the enemy vessel. He had ordered the idealist crippled, not destroyed. He needed it relatively intact.

But the fight was leaving the idealist. Its maneuvering thrusters were almost all destroyed beyond repair, and its weapon banks were now dry. Unable to defeat its foe, it simply diverted all its power to its shields, as it desperately tried to calculate a method of victory.

The lead Theologian cruiser turned about then, moving in close for a full broadside. Macrocannons were primed and activated all along the human vessel’s starboard flank, and firing solutions were calculated as quickly as its servitors and cogitators could manage. It was then that reality seemed to distort and warp in a space fifteen thousand kilometers to port of the Theologian warship. Moments later, the fanged snout of the Ossified Jaw punched its way out of hell at tremendous speed. The Theologian Captain screamed for evasive maneuvers, but it was hopeless. The Ossified Jaw ploughed through the portside of the cruiser, before erupting spectacularly from the starboard flank. The Theologian vessel was thrown off course by the force of the battlebarge’s blow, and the two vessels seemed locked in a silent waltz in the void as they tumbled over one another. Mawdredd, desperate to slay his foe, actually boarded the vessel he had just rammed. He and his brass-daemons slew the Theologian crew, and set his few surviving technicians to work controlling the vessel’s main drives. This event made for a rather perplexing sight; in the middle of a naval battle, the Theologian’s flagship sped towards the Idealist, with a multiple- kilometer long battlebarge lodged like a cross-bar of a cruciform in its belly, while both vessels blazed.

The attentions of the Theologian fleet turned towards this new and surreal threat. But even as their broadsides ripped great chunks from both the trapped vessels, they continued to power towards the Idealist. Mawdredd opened all his vox channels, and began to scream with murderous joy for all to hear. His bridge was chopped away by the sweep of a lance beam, but Mawdredd cared not, as he rose in his seat. The air was blown from his bisected bridge, and all his crew was instantly sucked into the void save for himself, thanks to his prodigious strength. This mattered little to him; he could now see the idealist looming large before him, barely six kilometers away, and he hissed a shuddering breath of pleasure into his respirator mask. It was then that the Tau vessel lowered its shields. Too late, Deng Vaal realized what the drone-ship intended, and desperately ordered his vessels to tow it out of harm’s way.

The Ossified Jaw was barely a kilometer from the Idealist when it detonated its warp cores as one. For the nanosecond before Mawdredd the Reaver was utterly atomized, it is possible he realised that he had been denied his quarry, as his soul fell screaming into Khorne’s lake of fire. Deng Vaal had been glaring at the Idealist through his observatory telescope when it exploded in a blinding flash. This blinding was quite literal in Deng Vaal’s case, and he whimpered as he staggered from his observatory, retinas boiled in his skull. He was robbed of his sight and his ultimate prize.

But still, he possessed the tau.

[Compiler pauses. The chamber is breached. Relocating archive documentation facility. Please wait.]

Forgive me. The Draziin-maton have found their way in. Time is short. I must relocate to a deeper gallery of this archive. Pray for me, O ye future readers. I see the black shapes crawling. I am certain the library’s sentinels can handle them for now. But I must escape. This is too important.

[Chronicle paused.]

[Editor’s note: Something has written in my chronicle! My hand was not the author of the above... what else is in this place? This place breathes with too much history. I can hardly bear it...]

Additional Background Section 15: The Chaos Imperium in Turmoil

As alluded to in previous sections, the Western Chaos Imperium was no stranger to upheaval and the dynamic, ever-shifting political composition of a realm in eternal flux. Nevertheless, though each world was a barely held together mess of tyrannies and anarchies, there was a certain security provided by the Despoiled and the Despoiler’s chosen that meant life was almost tolerable, even for the relatively mundane citizens of his realms. Tolerable, but never safe of course.

But trouble built in those closing years in the very middle of this Age of Dusk. Not even the infamous Despoiler was impervious to the great changes and conflicts ripping through the galaxy at this time. But, unlike so many other realms, the threats to Abaddon came not form without, but firmly from within.

The Wulfen had been a nuisance to the forces of Chaos for almost twenty thousand years. They were persistent and tenacious in their animalistic fury. Goaded into battle by the battered remnants of the forgotten 13th Company of the Legendary Fenryka, they seemed to appear on battlefields across the Chaos Imperium, almost at random. No one knew how they could move from world to world without any notable starships in their possession, yet they did. They were almost always outnumbered, and yet they always forced their foes to quail before them. There was something about the wolfish Fenryka, and the blood-maddened fenrisian hounds that loped after them, that unsettled and unnerved the profane and the daemonic; it was as if the image of the wolf was a primordial image of the hunter of monsters, imposed upon the psyche of all humanity from their earliest years. This common belief and unspoken assumption gave the wolf their power. But it was of course not simply their psychic signatures that were uniquely powerful. Their bodies were fuelled by the superhuman stuff of astartes, but twisted by genetic mutations to be even more fearsome. They were what the astartes had the potential to be, if only they forgot their entire human soul, and lost themselves to the beast.

Abaddon tried for century upon century to exterminate the fenryka. His twisted Dark Mechanicus devised neurotoxins and warp-enhanced viruses to pass contagions amongst the Wulfen. This failed, for the wulfen spelt the Maleficarum on the flesh of the tainted, and abandoned them. On Maldain, the world built within the hollowed out carcass of a void whale, Abaddon captured Kharn the Betrayer and his blood-greedy coven within cages constructed by Iron Priests. He used these Berserkers during the siege of Mordia, when his generals informed him that howling astartes-wolves clambered over the barricades of the Mordian Iron Guard to rip apart an entire regiment of the Despoiled in a night of terrible bloodshed. Abaddon dropped Kharn’s Berserker horde into the heart of the war. The carnage that ensued engulfed the entire night-side of the tidally-locked hive planet. The two races of monsters hunted one another in the shadowy places, and the howls of wolves merged with the hoarse screeching of the truly demented disciples of Kharn. Chainblades clashed, and when they shattered or broke, fingers, claws and bloody teeth were used to rip one another to shreds. The few Despoiled troopers stranded below died hideous deaths, as did many of the Mordians. But, unlike the despoiled, the Mordians were never running when they died. They were standing, and they were reloading...

In the end, the Wulfen and Khornate butchers gutted themselves, forcing a stalemate that ended with mutual destruction.

As stated earlier, Kharn himself eventually escaped the planet, by storming a battleship in orbit, and breaking through the Chaos blockade by ramming through Ulvenial’s command ship, killing the Betrayer’s rival in the process. Yet Abaddon assumed this was a price worth paying; for surely the wulfen were all exterminated now? But no, a few years later, and that familiar, frustrating howl echoed once more upon the battlefields of the Chaos Imperium. Not only this, but there were reports that there were many different variants amongst the wulfen; wulfen in various stages of animalism, full horse-sized thunderwolves and fenrisian hunting hounds, and other, strange beast-Marines; clad in tattered, ruptured armor of the deepest black, with distorted, twisted flesh filled with thorns and grasping claws. Abaddon determined that the wulfen must be spawning somehow. He had to determine where and what was creating more of his most persistent enemy.

But Abaddon’s resources were stretched by this point. Not only were his forces policing and controlling the Eye, his semi-loyal followers were keeping the Word Bearers in check (who were quietly spreading their influence amongst the world’s furthest from Abaddon’s iron claw). Abaddon could not even call upon the vast array of pacts he had with the chaotic warbands that positively infested his Imperium. Most had been dragged along in the wake of a vast armada that had surged from the eye, and made full speed towards the galaxy east of the Imperium’s western border. Billions of warriors, soldiers, psychopaths and all many of daemonic mutations and malignancies, all clustered and gathered around this fleet, until it was a behemoth of almost Heresy-era proportions. At the heart of this fleet, truly vast pleasure barges and twisted daemon-yachts moved at a stately, languid pace. Though few ever ventured within such chaos-tainted vessels and survived, it was obvious who led this fleet of extravagant excess; whole planetary populations felt his oily presence slither through their souls as he passed by. Fulgrim rode to war once more. His motives, and his war upon Vulkan, shall be elaborated upon in later sections.

But to return to the matter at hand, this unprecedented situation meant Abaddon could call upon few of his usual minions to do his will. He desired the wulfen-den found, and its propagators destroyed. It was, in all honesty, likely a suicide mission, and those few chaos forces who remained behind would not be bullied by the weakened Abaddon, and sneeringly defied their Chaos Emperor. Some idiots even attempted to usurp the despoiler. They were tossed bodily into the baleful warp star for their foolishness, and not even this chronicle is capable of remembering their names, for they were utterly expunged mind, body, soul and memory. Nevertheless, Abaddon was forced to call upon outside assistance to achieve his goals.

Bizarrely, it was a battlecruiser of mercenary Blood-knights of Baal who answered his call.

The baroque vessel entered Chaos space at Abaddon’s behest. The only payment they asked for was a world of fresh mortal humans, untainted by chaos, for them to feed upon. Abaddon was surprised that their wishes were so very easy to satisfy, and he agreed warily. The Bloodknights were fearsome, cold-hearted warriors. Like the wulfen, they had once been astartes. But the dread techniques used to stave off their twin afflictions had molded them into something quite different. They were pallid and dreadful to look upon, clad in armor sculpted like skinned flesh, and the image of a fountain of blood gushing from a wailing skull was a common motif across their strange Artificer armor. Hooded degenerates and slaves, dregs from Baal elevated into serfdom, accompanied them wherever they went; spared their master’s hunger due to the teardrop mark branded upon their flesh. The leader of this band was known as Tychellus, and he wore a cloak of stitched together human leather and wielded an Obsidian blade plucked from the fist of a Dark Angel in long centuries past. Though Abaddon was wary of ancient foes being his allies, the Bloodknights knew nothing of the old antagonisms, beyond stories. The Knights owed fealty to no one in their view; they had each overcome the failings of their flesh, and were free agents in a galaxy devoid of control. They were predators; harbingers of their own destinies. They fought whomsoever they pleased, and made feasts of it. Tychellus claimed he knew where he could find the Wulfen. The Black Legion who met him as envoys scoffed at this notion, until Tychellus tossed the fanged skulls of several fenryka at their feet, each bearing the tell-tale signs of being cut from bodies violently.

And so, with a soul-gem of Abaddon as their safe passport through his realm, they began the hunt. There were merely twenty Bloodknights upon their vessel, known as the Unquenchable; each warrior was a legendary fighter and slayer. Each warrior bore a trophy room stacked high with the broken bodies and captured trophies of slain monsters and vanquished foes. They were skilled in the art of tracking and especially in the kill. Tychellus made sure to capture some slaves from amongst the Chaos Imperial populace, and laced them with a unique blood toxin his Vitae-crafters had specially developed. The bloodknights were experts in manipulating the fundamental components of bodily plasma, and this compound could be tracked across astronomical distances by Tychellus’ chief Librarian, the sallow-featured Mordifax, for the signal it produced propagated across the warp itself. The bloodknights released their unwitting pawns back into the Impeirum at large, and hid themselves; watching their tainted captives return to their chaotic ways of ravaging, torture and murder. They were close to a site of previous Wulfen sightings, so Tychellus did not have to wait long before the Wulfen took the bait. They fell upon the tainted slaves, and ripped them to shreds. The bestial fiends did more than just kill; they gulped down great mouthfuls of gory flesh and chewed through bones to reach the marrow. All the while, the blood toxin infested them. The toxin was not a venom crafted by daemons, and thus the wolfish astartes suspected nothing. When the Wulfen suddenly vanished from the world, the Bloodknights were already tracking them.

Deep did the Baalites delve into the outer circles of Hell’s Iris, almost into the Eye of Terror itself. Within this desolate region, the scattered, mewling empires of mutants and twisted things scrawled and brawled with one another in the darkness. The stars were dim here; girdled with greasy daemonflesh or else obscured by tides of impossible flies and roaches, that coated the worlds in ever-present gloom. Those forces that were foolish enough to cross Tychellus’ path learnt why they were feared half the galaxy over. The bodies of their defeated foes had to be removed in buckets. Drenched head to foot in blood almost constantly, Tychellus grinned a mirthless grin. He noticed how the warbands grew thin here, and ever more cautious.

They were afraid, and not of his men.

He was close.

But the Baalites were themselves being followed. The notorious king-maker and schemer Erebus watched them from afar, and sent an army of his Word bearers to follow them, led by Apostle Vesk. Erebus wished to know what Abaddon was planning, and how to turn it to his advantage. The Apostle was to follow the Knights for as long as possible, and eliminate them if they seemed to be gaining any powerbase within the outer rings of the Hell-Iris.

The Baal Knights began to see curious scenes as they delved deeper. There were the scenes of old battles, and many more recent ones. But this was not what made them pause. From world to world, they began to notice the abundance of ancient sites, many buildings and collapsed towers that seemed to have once been laboratories and research facilities. Tychellus and his men set down amongst the ruins of the most prominent site yet. They found smashed incubator tanks, shredded document wafers and the desiccated remains of un-used tissue samples and biological detritus. Though the former loyalists did not realize this, this was a former lair of one of Bile’s many heinous endeavors. But whatever vile sorcery he had enacted there had been long ago stripped out. Yet, some of the machines seemed too new, too unblemished to be relics of past activities.

Someone had repurposed them, that much was clear. It was then that the Bearers of the word confronted them. A whole company of astartes, clad in the dried blood-colors of Lorgar’s Legion surrounded the Knights, demanding to know what they were planning. Vesk himself strode forth and gestured with his cursed crozius threateningly. It took approximately five minutes for Vesk to die, as Tychellus pulled his dark blade from the throat of the stunned Apostate. The Bloodknights of Baal were far, far more than astartes, and it showed. They were hideously fast and stronger than any of their foes. They instantly leapt into combat with the Word Bearers, dodging the hornet’s nest of buzzing bolter fire that pelted their positions. Each of the Knights wielded unique blades and weapons crafted over long years of slaughter; honed to be implements of execution and destruction. The Word Bearers recovered from the initial shock of the Bloodknights, and fell back to make use of their heavy weapons, and the knights were beaten back themselves. But they were fewer in number, and more effectively utilized the dense cover of the ruined factories and labs around them.

They hunted the Word Bearers, and only the possessed astartes could match their brutality and power in combat. The Word Bearers were soon routed, and they fled to their transports, more out of practicality and a selfish desire to capitalize upon their Apostle’s death than through fear. Still, this gave the Bloodknights a chance to escape on their own ship, before the Word bearer fleet could enact vengeance upon them. Onwards they sailed through the semi-madness of Eye-space. Soon, Mordifax’s blood trail led them to a unsettling quiet world.

Chronicles do not name the world, but it was said to be a world of battles past; carcasses of a billion tanks littered the rust-dust deserts, while bodies and the remains of buildings formed drifts of dust and ashes thousands of meters high. Only the laboratories seemed to remain in working order, with only superficial damage and wear. This was the place, and Tychellus eagerly descended with his warriors.

The world was a tomb; silent and cold. But it still tingled with trace heat; the faint glow of lingering presence, like the warmth of a new corpse. The wulfen were there, and they were in vast numbers. Mordifax could feel their blood in his own terrible veins, and Tychellus could almost taste them. Incubator tanks and the myriad apparatus for some crude form of post- human creation were still there, and were still sticky with fresh bodily fluids and the mucus of false wombs. Carefully, the Bloodknights had their acolytes set up their equipment. As they did so, the bloodknights drank in the fresh scents on the wind as they unsheathed a wide diversity of weaponry; billhooks, power blades, stabbing daggers, snarling chain-flails and baroque, ornate scythes amongst their menagerie of implements.

It was then that the wulfen’s sonorous howl echoed across the dead world, and they charged into combat. At his signal, Tychellus ordered the sonic weaponry brought to the surface activated, and the wulfen staggered moments before entering the fray. The Bloodknights sniggered as the olfactory and sonic distortion weapons confused and bewildered their demi-canine foes. The Knights were merciless as they launched themselves into battle. Blades clashed, and claws slashed, and there was death. Even near-crippled, the wulfen were formidable, and five of the knights fell to their jaws and bloodied talons. But Tychellus was a storm of obsidian death, his angel blade carving through hairy pelt and ceramite with equal ease. Mordifax used his dark powers to combat the Rune Priests who supported the beasts, and ethereal energies crackled across the battlefield.

It was then that the Alpha Wulfen made his presence felt. It bounded through its pack on all fours, slamming straggling fenryka and wolves aside as it loped forth, slavering. It was a vast beast, easily dwarfing all others, but that was not what made it distinct. It was punctured by spines and its flesh undulated with black blood. Its eyes were red as fired coals, and its breath was like green smog from a corrupted bellows. It jumped between the sonic beacons, shredding the acolytes and their diabolical tools with equal savage joy. As it howled in triumph, the Knights flinched, for it was truly a sound to inspire dread. But, worse than that, the howl was a psychic shockwave, that seem to ripple throughout the bestial astartes, making them expand in some cases, while others grew sharper claws, or lost more of their fleeting humanity. It was as if the Alpha Wulfen bled warp power like a nuclear reactor bled radiation.

Only Tychellus remained un-cowed by its dread aura, as he hacked his way through the press of bodies to reach this ultimate animal. He was almost as animal in his own way; ripping apart those wulfen in his way with his bare hands, savoring the tangy blood of the mutant fiends on his venomous tongue. Their final clash was over after barely ten minutes, such was their speed and skill. If it one had slowed time, as the Mirror Devils can, one would have seen a sword-wielding devil in garish red ducking, blocking and swiping, while a towering black-mantled beast of flesh and bladed bones returned every blow with a forceful counter blow. But for all its strength, it was an animalistic monster, while Tychellus was a supreme blademaster. He parried a downward swipe of a great paw with his sword, hacking the hand away in a shower of blood. Before it could recoil, he had leapt atop its head and slammed the angel sword hilt- deep in its collar, and rode his blade down the beast, as it levied open the beasts chest with a gurgling creak. The alpha wulfen fell upon the ground, gore pumping furiously from its mortal wound.

At once, the monster began to shrink to a still formidable, but hardly colossal scale. To Tychellus’ surprise, he noted the great beast wore scraps of astartes battle-plate still. But this armor was also notable not armor of the fenryka. It was black; black as deepest pitch. Only the white pinions of a bird emblazoned on its pauldron revealed the identity of the so-called alpha-wulfen; the scourge of a sector and the monster most hunted and reviled across the Western Imperium of discordance.

“What is this? You are not one of the Wolves...” Tychellus hissed quietly, licking his long ivory incisors with frustration and confusion.

The dying monster spluttered black gore as it began to laugh uproariously, even in its death throes.

“You are fools! I am a broken son of a Heartbroken father, driven to lengths he should never have had to go, and never should have suffered. They are the ones you seek,” it muttered as it died, and gestured to the towering figures who had appeared behind the Bloodknights as if walking upon air. They only realized the threat when the two giants began to roar with all the dread hate and wrath he could muster.

For the ‘alpha-wulfen’ was just one of the many loyalist monsters abandoned within the Eye. It had become a leader of the wulfen, unleashed refugees from failed chaotic experiments who had refused to repent their faiths, and all those penitent astartes lost in the eye for so long, their minds had broken, and they had become the monsters that their psycho-indoctrination had kindled in their hearts.

But the Alpha Wulfen was not the creator, nor gatherer of such forces. The two titanic figures who now circled them were, however. Both were utterly ramshackle in their appearances. One was utterly naked save for scattered shreds of clothing and masses of blood-matted fur. In his hand he wielded an ancient alien bone sword, ripped from the body of some biomechanical Tyrant beast so long ago. It was a force blade, and glowed with the reflected rage of its owner. His face was bestial, yet noble all the same. While he stood tall, the other giant was hunched, almost prowling on his hands and knees. While he wore marginally more armor and clothing, he was much less sane. His pallid flesh was tarnished by self-inflicted scars and smeared with blood and dust, and his hair was ripped out in clumps. While the noble wolf-giant stood tall and snarled indignantly, this one babbled and growled with misery.

For these were the two wanderers; the loyal sons of the Emperor who had vanished into the warp like myths on the breeze. One, the great Raven King, had fled in same and self-loathing, dragging the monsters he couldn’t bear to destroy with him into self-imposed exile. The other was the Wolf King, who had given no reason for his exile. The truth is complex (too complex to summaries here), but part of the reason for this absences was that Leman had heard of the Saga of the Weregeld, and of the Raven’s flight. He had determined that he would lose no more brothers. Too many had died; some by his hand, some through treachery, others still through folly. Russ was followed into hell by his own army of monsters; those marked by the ultimate expression of the Canis Helix. He was convinced that the raven Guard’s monsters were not monsters, but were manifestations of the powers necessary to drive out and destroy Maleficarum in all its myriad forms.

Eventually he had found him, but by then, they were trapped. The only way out of the Eye was to fight; something the two brothers were extensively good at.

“What are you? Blood Angels? Is that one of the Lion’s swords?” Russ demanded forcefully.

Tychellus was not intimidated by the two primarchs. He was far beyond fear. “Blood Angels? Those words are blasphemy! I see before me two monsters. You linger in your pits like cowards, while the world turns without you! You have failed, and all your works are dust! Dust!” he hissed furiously. “The Emperor is DEAD!” he added with a spiteful flourish. “All your efforts are for naught, for he returned to the world a greater monster than his foes. You are finished!”

Russ listened to this tirade carefully, his teeth clenched tightly together until Tychellus stopped, holding back Corax, who desperately wished to ruin Tychellus’ body.

Russ then shrugged. “Be that as it may,” he began, before leaping forwards and hacking Tychellus’ head from his body. Tychellus stumbled backwards, and Russ easily caught the Dark Angel blade as it fell. “I do not like thieves. Brother, let us finish this.”

No Bloodknights escaped that world. Nor did the Unquenchable. For some reason, it charted a course directly into the System’s star.

Perhaps you, my readers, question why I did not add specific emphasis to the first confirmed reappearance of two primarchs in this section of my chronicle? As will become apparent in upcoming additions to this Chronicle, the Eye at this time was undergoing a great upheaval, which truly dwarfed this comparatively low-key event.

For it was not just the mortal primarchs who were preparing for battle once more. The Pantheons convulsed, and not even the Monarchs reigning in Hell could ignore it.

Additional Background Section 16: Unto the Anvil rides the Serpent: Fulgrim’s War, and the seventh Great War of the Janus Heresies

Vulkan’s return was a mighty symbol of the beginning of the Age of Dusk, and the turning point in the great disintegration of society that afflicted the galaxy for long millennia. His name and return was both praised and cursed across the breadth of hundreds of Imperiums and millions of worlds.

Yet, the first being to realize the Smith-Lord’s return (besides the tearful people of Armageddon and their direct foes), was that most corrupt of creatures, Fulgrim. He felt his brother’s presence over five thousand light years away, at the instant when Lucius the Eternal was defeated. Fulgrim, the serpentine daemonprimarch, was a being of the ether, and he could sense the souls of his entire Legion of Emperor’s Children. For the most part, he cared little for their actions and antics across the wide expanse of the galaxy; he lounged upon his palace-world of perfumed flesh and disgustingly complex implements of pleasure and pain. Yet, like a petulant, greedy child, he noticed the absence of one of his favored toys only when it was denied to him. Lucius was defeated, and he was not slain (as we related before). No, Lucius had a far, far worse fate. As he laid buried deep beneath the toxic earth of Armageddon, his terrible will became weaker and weaker, just as his body grew malnourished and withered in its armor. Soul weakened, Lucius was unable to control the souls trapped within his body and living battle plate. He became a mutated, demented thing as a hundred million souls all scrambled for purchase upon his flesh. Thousands of chaos warlords slain, orks bested, Imperials humbled and even daemons denied fought within his body for ownership of the husk. Together, they consumed him.

Fulgrim heard Lucius’ misery, like a chorus of tinny voices. While the great daemon that possessed his flesh ignored the cries and continued in its revelries, it couldn’t ignore Fulgrim’s anguished cries, that grew stronger every day. Eventually, the daemon decided to gather its forces to strike at the heart of the Vulkan Imperium like serpentine neurotoxins in a man’s veins. But the daemon did not do this through any sense of fairness or justice for his host’s wrong child, or for the glory of the Chaos Imperium, or even the Daemon Primarch Diaspora (the name granted to the areas of the Eye of terror where Abaddon could never rule). When timidly asked why he was doing this by a servant, the thing-called Fulgrim responded (before flaying its presumptuous servant alive):

“I come to welcome my brother to this new realm of our design. Then, I shall kill him, as I killed so many of his brothers before him. His Imperium has begun to entertain the notion that they can see through this Dark Age in safety; safe behind their little walls of civilization and moderation. It is time to crush their dreams, and the truth shall set them free. We are very interested in freedom, are we not?” it had chuckled sardonically, directing its speech to the shivering soul trapped with its glorious serpentine body.

Fulgrim had a tool to achieve his aim of slaying Vulkan. The blade the daemon carried was a dreadful alien blade known by several names throughout the history of the galaxy. Some called it Kulgach the Ravager, others called it the Hillexix, in some of the oldest texts; simply the blade of midnight. The one you, my readers, are likely most aware of is a name given to it by the Interex culture; the Anathame. This was the weapon which almost slew legendary Horus with a single blow, it was the weapon used to gut the Lord of Veshin and all his priests, and the tool which struck down Guilliman with its venom-coated edges. In the hands of Fulgrim, easily the greatest duelist amongst the primarchs, enhanced by chaos to be further deadly, it would be a deadly tool for evil within the Vulkan Imperium.

Fulgrim took time to build up his forces. He travelled from world to world in the Chaos Imperium, gathering thousands of warbands and billions of troops. Mercenaries, degenerates, warp-tainted aliens and even Corsairs from the eastern Chaos Imperium; all flocked to his banner with the promise of expansion, power and above all, the spoils of war. The daemon of the Laer sword cared naught for trinkets and jewels. It cared only for slaying Vulkan, and undoing the abhorrent progress he had achieved there. At the close of M55, the war began with a sudden storming offensive, a fleet action involving three distinct fleet elements.

The Vulkan Imperium was nothing if not resilient however. Vulkan had in place multiple lines of defensives; each world was within distress-signaling distance of over five Commanderies, and at least two Imperial garrison muster points. As soon as the titanic mass of Fulgrim’s crusade smashed aside the defenses of the first few worlds through sheer numbers and the ferocity of his near-feral pleasure cultists and degenerate mutants, he swiftly found that multiple raiding forces attacked his fleets from multiple vectors and over several weeks of coordinated and vigorous harrying attacks. The Angels of Retribution and the Brass Ravens called off an expeditionary campaign to the north to lead the main counter offences. Whenever a world was ravaged, the astartes would strike like quicksilver at the departing ships of the greedy pillagers, boarding and ripping the stolen cargo from the cold, dead fingers of those who presumed to plunder Vulkan’s domain.

Soon after that, the myriad forces of the fallen primarch found worlds that were supposed to be defenseless defended by PDF forces bolstered by whole regiments of the Steel Legions of mother-Armageddon, or even the specialized Plasma-commandoes of the Ryzan Alliance. The complex defensive structure of the western border of Vulkan’s realm focused upon the primary thrust of the offensive, and this huge crusade force began to slow to a murderous crawl within a year of fast-paced attacks and counterattacks. But to combat this threat, the defenders were pulling in their garrisons not just in the path of the tendril, but in its wake and in surrounding space. This meant the lesser tendrils of the offensive were perhaps not as well stocked with soldiers. Ordinarily, this would have made little difference. Ordinarily, the lesser offensive were merely diversionary attacks used to harass outlying worlds and drain resources, and could be easily dealt with by Vulkan’s internal reinforcements, that could be brought up from Armageddon’s core regions.

Two things were different about this offensive. Firstly, the third of the offensive battlefronts was not just led by minor crusade elements like mutants or dregs; Fulgrim himself led this attack, upon mediocre defenses and startled garrisons, easily smashing them wherever he found them, before putting whole worlds to the torch, leaving only enough survivors to send this message to the next world they came to;

“I shall kill all your children brother, one by one, until you face me.”

The second complication that made defense of the realm more difficult was the fact Vulkan found himself fighting two wars, launched at disturbingly similar times; the seventh great War of the Janus heresies. This was a war against the Theologian Union, and one that no one had anticipated.

The notorious scientist Deng Vaal, his scorched eyes replaced by glowering red bionics, had tortured and extracted the knowledge from his captured Tau victims. Though several tau were freed by strangely colorful xenos interlopers that promptly vanished from Deng Vaal’s fortress through a portable web-gate, the mad man had what he desired. Soon enough, he began to design ships that would emulate his captors’ ship. However, without the physical ship’s remains, it took him much longer to produce ships that were anywhere close to being stable.

But, after years of research, he created the Witchfynder class of Grand Cruisers. With his new fleet of ships, he expected his position in the Union to expand rapidly; his star was at last in ascension. He eagerly travelled to the capital of the Union, outpacing all the ships sent to shadow him and his new grand armada. When he arrived on the Station, he was welcomed with open arms by Elimia Ceylan, the new ruler of the Theologian Union. After the death of the original High-Eccliesiarch Ceylan, his children and wider familial group began to adopt an almost aristocratic dynastic system; every ruler of the Union after his death was officially named Ceylan, each had his bloodline in their veins and, generally, each one was as devious and ruthless as their namesake. Elimia was no different. She was the young and beautiful heiress of the Union, and had swiftly elevated her lover (the warmonger General Treghan) to the role of the Guardian of the Realm, the highest military office. She used her relative youth to cultivate an illusion of innocent naivety that disarmed her political rivals. Deng Vaal was no different. When she meekly congratulated him, and promised him fund to rapidly expand the production of the Witchfynders, he decided that he could manipulate her for his own ends. Thus, she prevented a coup simply through subterfuge. But as Vaal produced more and more vessels for her expanding armed forces, the child-like Empress’ cold, devious mind concocted a means to turn the situation to her advantage.

In public sermons, she encouraged her preachers and missionaries to enter into vulkanian systems, and begin to preach the sermons of the Emperor of the wasteland and his creed of futility and reckless zeal. Not only this, she demanded that they actively prevent rival creeds from contradicting the ‘precious words of the Great Dead God. For his wasteland is of the body and the soul. Let no false dreams of heretics dispute this message’. Soon enough, her preachers became religious terrorists within the Imperium of Vulkan; they destroyed rival churches, murdered other clergymen, and hired various fiends and villains to go on state- sponsored rampages. Needless to say, Vulkan’s reaction was swift and brutal. His security forces hunted down the preachers, and put them on trial. The most prevalent of his warriors to enact his will were the Fire Beasts, and the ever-enigmatic Realm of fathers auxiliary forces. The Realm of Father’s soldiers were all mildly psychic, and they worked swiftly to uncover preachers in the midst of otherwise peaceful communities, and brought them to justice. The Fire beasts were brought in for more direct missions, such as the boarding and destruction of a Theologian pilgrim barge, and the beheading of the Clerical terrorists’ command structure in one swift and pragmatic swoop. After a year of hunting, all the preachers were dead or imprisoned.

The ‘Heavenly Child’ Ceylan made the most of this political ammunition. The entire Union was whipped into frenzy by the propaganda coming from her offices. Some said Vulkan himself murdered the priests when they tried to make him reconcile with his father. Others said the daemon Vulkan desired to see the sweet little Empress shed tears of woe, so he may break her spirit and take her throne. The Theologians, protective of their almost infantile ruler, demanded justice and blood. To the untrained eye, it almost seemed as if Ceylan had not orchestrated the entire grotesque charade. Alas, however, she had, and her people eagerly fell for her misdirection.

Elimia ‘reluctantly’ called for a Holy War upon the Vulkanian Imperium, and invoked the thrice-blessed scriptures, that required all loyal subjects of the Church to supply their finest forces to the cause, or have their souls cast upon the thorny expanses of the Emperor’s wasteland when they died. Deng Vaal was bound by these scriptures to supply Ceylan with the ships (his Witchfynders) that she required. She sweetly accepted them from Deng Vaal, and blessed with saintly oils in a lavish ceremony before a titanic crowd of wide-eyes subjects, mindlessly praising them. Unseen to all, Deng Vaal masked a terrible rage behind his falsely serene smile. Ceylan had neutered his coup before he could start, without raising a single soldier against him. All it had taken was throwing her Union into a horrendous war with her larger Imperial neighbour that would cause untold death and misery for her already bitter and demented people; a price she was willing to pay with a timid smile on her cheeks.

The fleets of the Theologian Union ripped into the underbelly of Vulkan’s realm with the ferocity born of madness. Witchfynder vessels led each fleet, alongside older witch-burning vessels and the vast pilgrim vessels no doubt crammed to capacity with millions of fanatics and crusaders, while more elite transport vessels carried the huge professional armies of the Union into battle. Likewise with the chaos forces to the north-east, the Vulkan Imperium’s dense defensive structure was an instant obstacle to the invaders. However, the Witchfynders made up for this by being virtually untouchable in most naval engagements. While the rest of Ceylan’s naval assets were utterly out of date and outclassed by the Promethean court’s brilliant cruisers and battleships, the Witchfynders could go toe to toe with the largest vessels, and in most cases hurt them severely. While not as maneuverable or as heavily armed as the Idealist, they were fast and they were armed with advanced sensory equipment and complex weapons of ‘sanctified’ xenos design. The defenders of the Imperium were sent reeling by this force. Only the insane actions of a Sons of Thunder Captain, who drew a Witchfynder into the Corona of a star (which baffled its sensors and allowed him to ram his vessel through its stern) allowed the embattled Vulkan forces to fall back to the ‘second line’ of defenses (though, as mentioned before, battle lines in space engagements are not like the wet navy’s conceptions of boundaries and fronts. This was a vast three dimensional series of skirmish raids and engagements spanning several hundred light-years). Drastic measures were required.

Thus, Vulkan was forced to come to this battlefront in person to confront this new and powerful foe. He brought with him several commanderies, his own Nocturne Praetorians in large numbers and masses of soldiers from the Steel Legions. He also authorized the Patriarchs of the Realm of fathers to switch their economies to instant war footing, which they could achieve in record time.

He struck back like the fist of an angry god. Vulkan had always preferred to be a builder, and artisan and a politician to a warrior, but when his ire was raised, he was the stuff of dark legend. He moved from front to front, world to world, and wherever he joined in battle with his men, the crusading Theologians were smashed. Initially, numbers had carried the day for the Theologians, but this changed when Vulkan was there. Strategies became firmer and more skilful, and his soldiers fought with the vigor of men with a god incarnate at their back. He was legend, and he was fury and the fires of the forge flowed through his wrathful veins. The Theologians were no match for primarchs and astartes on the ground, and they began to lose ground on every world, slowly but surely. Though each world took grueling sieges and bitter street-fighting to clear them, eventually they were cleared, and the enemy was destroyed en mass.

Yet still in space the Theologian held onto territory and no one in the southern Vulkan Imperium could feel safe until the Witchfynders were all destroyed, and Ceylan’s champion General Treghan was finally defeated utterly.

At this inopportune moment, word reached Vulkan of the boastful challenges of Fulgrim, and the utter horror he would surely be unleashing on his new Imperium. No matter Ceylan’s pretentions, the Theologians were small; Vulkan knew that Fulgrim was the real and only true danger to his Imperium. He ordered the Commander of the Iron Hands, Borund Epsilon, to take control of the southern front, while Vulkan and his Praetorians swiftly rushed back to Armageddon to face his wayward brother.

Meanwhile, the war raged close to the heart of the Vulkan Imperium. The war could be described as akin to a series of isolated island chains, fought over by constantly-moving and shifting fleets of Reavers and warriors. Yet, undeniably, the Vulkanians seemed to be being pushed back by Fulgrim’s vast armies. But this was stalled by the Dorn Revenants and their allies; they were masters of the siege, and their worlds formed a patchwork web of bulwarks, that drained any of Fulgrim’s pleasure fleets who strayed too close. This forced fleets to make massive detours around the Mk II Astartes. Conversely, the Confederation of Justice, the fanatical Droptrooper Legions, were ever mobile with their fast ships. They fought behind the scenes; destroying supply ships, savaging logistical trains and ammunition dumps wherever they found them. Though the current Muster-Lord was an Old Man by that point, he still fought with vigor, clad in his magnificent suit of burnished eagle- plate carapace armor. Truly, he looked like a Saint reborn, as he rode his personal Valkyrie, Icaria, into battle after battle.

What history did not mention in as much detail was the fact the Muster-Lord also ferried the Brethren of the Willing, and other members of Imogen’s daring spies and adventurers. At this time, her associates numbered in the dozens, and each was unique and exotic in their styles and abilities. Some were researchers beyond compare, others tacticians and engineers who were invaluable in pinpointing weaknesses in enemy vessels and daemonic war engines. But at heart, she was a researcher and a fiercely intelligent woman. Her time was split between grueling combat missions, and hours upon hours in the various libraries and vaults across the Vulkan Imperium (a girl after mine own heart I should think! I apologize... forgive that personal interlude...). She discovered many disturbing facts about the galaxy she was raised within; in the chaos of war, no archives and no information was forbidden to her, and she learned swiftly. She uncovered the foul-power of the Anathame, and of the correlations between the various mad prophecies of countless ‘heretics’ over countless years. She spotted, with the help of her allies that the patterns of chaos uprisings across the galaxy were not random, that chaos, for all its mania, was being all too ordered. But it was a complex pattern she suspected even the followers of chaos didn’t realize was occurring; as if a great steel trap was slowly closing upon all creation. But her mind was forced to focus upon the immediate threat of the Anathame.

If Vulkan were to face Fulgrim while he was armed with that, Vulkan would surely die. Imogen made a fateful decision that day; she would have to steal it from Fulgrim. Even for Imogen, this was madness. Luckily, the majority of her brethren were rather profoundly mad themselves.

Fulgrim’s flagship, Sodominus, was a corpulent mass of a vessel; a bloated and ostentatious pleasure barge almost as large as the Eternal crusader once was. Tentacles and frills jutted out from between decks crammed with jewels and naked slaves, while mighty spires and domes of varied hues dominated its dorsal superstructure like some surreal oriental metropolis. Warp enchantments scrambled any teleport signals that attempted to breach his vessel, his heavy armour and shielding preventing bombardment or physical boarding. This was combined with the masses of daemons and corrupt astartes that prowled his barge’s stifling interior. His security forces were led by Illirus the Mistress of the Carnal hunt, a female warrior clad in demonic war-plate, which she wore while sitting astride a great serpentine Fiend of Slannesh. Sodominus seemed impregnable.

Imogen did manage to breach the defenses however, through her illicit links to the Relictor chapter remnants. This tightly knit brotherhood ferried her into the heart of Fulgrim’s fleet inside a stolen null-ship. Once they got close to Sodominus, the Relictors unleashed their secret weapon. It was known as the blood-drench; an ancient chaos technology crafted by some warp-tainted culture before humanity could even speak. The devices rendered Imogen and her minions, as well three squads of Relictors, into a living soup of bloody gruel. This gruel, empowered by a tide of daemons, was swept through space, and bypassed the runic defenses of Sodominus. Once inside, the artifact’s power was broken, and they became physical mortals once more.

Ancient Captain Wallachia of the Relictors grinned savagely at Imogen, before he led his Relictors on a furious charge through the ship. Wielding powerful dameon weapons and charms from across the galaxy, his three squads blazed through the vessel, getting stronger by feeding upon the profane offerings on offer inside the Sodominus; they burst into wild orgy- chambers, and gutted everyone they saw. Daemonettes were shredded by kai guns and blades bound with bloodletters, that reveled in the exorcism of their hated rival patronized daemons. Wallachia’s men raided the well-stocked daemonic armories of the Sodominus, and forced Illirus to muster her forces for a hasty counterattack.

Meanwhile, Imogen and her men headed towards the real prize. Her three most powerful blanks strained with herculean effort to hide their presence from the volcanic essence of Fulgrim, that pervaded every molecule of the Sodominus. Fulgrim himself was coiled upon a throne of stitched together nudes, while he watched two painted figures devouring each other; stomachs undulating and pulsating as they exchanged fluids and fed upon each other without once drawing blood. For a second he thought he felt a shadow pass behind his eyes. The daemon within him felt weakened, just for a second. Fulgrim seized his moment, and clawed back a fragment of his will, forcing the daemon of the Laer sword to focus upon controlling him. All the while, Imogen and her bold followers were breaking into his crypt-vault.

The defences within were formidable. As soon as Imogen’s meme-virus infected scholar friend managed to break the code upon the vault door, skinned monsters leapt from the walls to engage them with blackened, sharpened bones. Her Kroot and Realm of fathers Cultist bodyguards erupted into battle, weapons flaring wildly, while Imogen and the valhallan veteran Tronskil rushed towards the centre of the chamber. Her blanks activated their psyculum null-enhancer devices, and began to actively burn away daemon flesh all around them. At the heart of the chamber, suspended in a glittering power field, was the gigantic Anathame sword. Not a single blemish tarnished the weapon in any way; not a single vein of warp-flesh or hideous chaotic decay affected its finish. Imogen reached for her data-jack, and deactivated the field by pounding the re-purposed harlequin kiss into the power field control terminal, injecting it with serrated wires that shredded its internal workings, and deactivated the field for a few precious moments. As the field shut off, the blade fell straight down, and embedded itself into the fleshy deck with a wet whisper. In response, a cavity in the wall unfurled, and the rampaging Chaos Dreadnought caged within almost severed Tronskil’s head as it charged them with its power flails and juddering autocannon. Imogen fearlessly jumped for the blade, snatching it from the deck before rolling to avoid the hail of gunfire ripping up chunks of the floor in a gory drizzle. Tronskil struck the dreadnought with five perfectly aimed blasts of his meltagun, but was bisected as he fumbled to reload. But the creature was now blind, and his melta-blasts had crippled its guns. The leader of the Brethren of the Willing screamed a curse at the thing, which leapt for her instantly. Seconds later, the power field reactivated, and impaled the war machine through its sarcophagus.

Imogen sounded the retreat, and her Brethren efficiently fell back into a rearguard action. She would have looked a strange sight if anyone had witnessed her then; a short woman clad in a privateer’s attire, dragging a sword twice as long as her, all the while cursing in every language spoken across the Vulkan Imperium and beyond. But her blanks had done something terrible; they had made Fulgrim aware of a black hole of psychic horror at the heart of his own vessel. He ripped his throne apart as his many limbs snatched up his scimitars and hooked-bladed daggers. By this point, Wallachia and his Relictors had become trapped inside the aft armory, surrounded by daemons and heavily armed legionnaires. Their terrible sonic weaponry pulverized their minds and their flesh. Wallachia died last, dropping his dreadaxe from nerveless fingers.

Imogen was desperate for an escape route; as usual, she had not considered what she’d do AFTER stealing Fulgrim’s prized possession. Crossing her fingers, she rushed to the flight deck. As her Brethren fled, her blanks felt the magnificent presence of Fulgrim, which blasted their abhorrent minds into a bloody mess as he closed upon them, slithering with a blistering pace.

Imogen found the flight deck converted into a bizarre makeshift jousting arena, where foal- headed beastmen rode lobotomized Mk II Astartes like horses, and charged at each other with lances made from fused femurs and phallic flesh. Though disgusting and intriguing, Imogen ignored this spectacle. She noticed that there was at least one dreadclaw assault module still sitting idly upon the deck.

Fulgrim was moments too late, as Imogen and her men escaped his vessel by firing one of his own Dreadclaws into the flank of her stolen Null-ship, before ordering the ship to make full speed towards Armageddon. But Imogen was far from safe, for the entire Slanneshi fleet turned to chase after her vessel at the psychic impulse of Fulgrim, who dominated their captains’ minds. Such was his towering fury, he fed Illirus to her own mount for her failure.

Just as Fulgrim and the Sodominus charged full steam towards Armageddon, so too was Vulkan speeding towards his capital aboard Phalanx, with the Sons of Polyphemus and the Scar-Branders (a commandery founded by former White Scars) to keep up with his pace. The two were heading for conflict at last.

The sectors in the southern fronts suffered long years of insurgency, bombardments and murderous meatgrinders across bone-strewn plains and glittering cities formed by Vulkan’s greatest artisans. The Theologians, though on the back foot, remained a tenacious and disturbed adversary. They fought hard to hold onto every world they had built garrisons upon, and the Witchfynders prevented the Iron Hands, Fire Beasts and the various allied sector forces from effectively bombarding those resistant worlds flat. During this time of disorder, the Carnivas sector fought its war for independence. The Carnivas sector was located in one of the most unstable and volatile regions of space. It lay within the territories claimed by the Western Chaos Imperium, the Theologian Union and the Vulkan Imperium. The sector capital, lychen, had been ruled by the Haemovore cult for many thousands of years, and their fanatical lychen Guard had brought the surrounding systems to heel simply through their terrifying reputation (that, and any worlds who even thought about sedition were punished... severely). Rather than remain neutral during this time of chaos, the lychen took a very different route; they declared war upon all three super states that bordered it, simultaneously. The three were occupied with their wars at this time, and could hardly spare the forces to defeat the lychen. Those forces that tried to invade lychen space regretted it instantly. The lychen were both psychopathic butchers, and masterful pragmatists. Over the years, the state had forced its populace to eat mildly poisoned food, until native Lychens and lichen-subjects developed immunities to the chemicals tainting their Felshan meat (the primary export and food product of the region). And invading army found no un-poisoned food to eat or steal, every city were turned into death traps (being virus bombed if they were taken by the enemy), while the lychen themselves were rightly feared for their almost mythical combat prowess. The lychen guard defeated several expeditionary forces in the course of the two wars on Vulkan, and carved for themselves a small independent state, at the crossroads of empires.

But still, the Theologians resisted Epsilon’s men. It was then that the true scale of the Realm of Father’s industrial capacity was dramatically demonstrated. Every single day, the Realm produced a dozen naval vessels, every second a thousand lasguns. Billions of perfectly drilled cultists were ferried to the battlefronts like a veritable tide of foes that dwarfed anything the Theologians could field. The Witchfynders could reliably destroy ten enemy vessels for every one of their own destroyed. They were outnumbered (at least) seventy to one. The results were inevitable. On the ground, Cultists armies were supported by thousands of geanstealers that infiltrated behind enemy lines and wreaked havoc. The Fire beasts refused to fight alongside purestrains, but reluctantly joined with human cultist armies if it meant killing Unionists.

On every front, the Theologians were murdered, and their surviving ships scattered across the void, gunning their super-powered engines at maximum capacity. Some managed to return to the Union. Most did not.

Some found themselves beached upon angry planets of indignant Vulkanians. Some collided with Wolf Packs from the Chaos Imperium, on the prowl for weakened prey. Some roamed east. These were hunted by the Ultramar remnant; forces that used these enemies as training for Regent Folkar’s campaign of rearmament and rebuilding of his sundered realm.

Fulgrim laid siege to Armageddon for fifteen months, furiously attempting to break the world and retrieve the Anathame from where Imogen had hidden it. He threw all he could spare at the stalwart defenders of Armageddon, but they held. Vulkan’s greatest ships and most dedicated warriors fought within the final circle of defenses (known as ‘the Anvil Imperious’ colloquially). Devastating orbital laser silos and torpedo tubes buried inside asteroids and moons blasted at his fleets constantly, while reinforcements from across the Imperium constantly harried his siege force. For the first time in many centuries, Fulgrim’s daemon grew truly frustrated.

All it could do was throw its forces against the great shields and defiant armies of Vulkan. It needed a minion on the inside; a being capable of bringing down the web of fortifications from within. Then, the daemon realized it had such a creature already. The daemon of Fulgrim reached out with its dark powers, and channeled a tide of warp power into the ruined, mewling body of Lucius, buried deep within Armageddon’s crust. Lucius was reborn as the Revenant; a creature which should not have existed. It was a nightmare of amorphous flesh and gnashing tendrils, chained around a daemonic skeleton of blasphemous ivory. Soon enough, the monster began to burrow upward through layers of rock and soil, screaming with a million voices as a tide of daemons was added to the choir already scrapping to claim Lucius’ flesh once and for all. Eventually Lucius the Revenant erupted from the cobblestones of victory square, flinging hundreds of startled soldiers aside as the blubbery mass of insane flesh ripped its way free of its earthen womb. Like a tornado of viscera, it shredded the Steel legion that vainly attempted to slow it. Relentless as only the insane can be, Lucius headed towards the building imprinted upon his soul by Fulgrim; the Temple of Grimaldus, the place where the central shield generator was located.

Lucius was not only brutally strong, but also insanely fast. The creature grew long, equine limbs, and threw itself forwards at a hideous pace. Within minutes, it was slamming against the reinforced temple gates with all its warp-spawned bulk. The doors were blessed and burned Lucius’ flesh with their faith, but they could not hold the beast back for very long; moments at most. There was mass panic and confusion amongst the defenders, who rushed to try and locate the rampaging daemon-thing. Only one figure seemed disturbingly calm, as he placed his helm upon his head and drew Grimaldus’ relic crozius from its sanctified case, nodding with respect to its long-dead owner. Though this figure, Praetorian He’stan, was no Templar, he knew the importance of relics (even though he had given up all his relics when master Vulkan had returned). He’stan hefted the heavy power weapon with ease, his aged body enhanced and invigorated by the promethium Court’s scientific genius, returning his physique to its long-forgotten M41 years. When Lucius finally burst through the gate like a tidal storm of gnashing mouths and claws, ripping apart the other defenders, He’stan was ready for him. The astartes launched himself bodily from the raised Pulpit of the temple, and met Lucius in mid air. He made no war cry, for he had nothing to say to the thing which was less than astartes at that moment.

Meanwhile, in orbit, Fulgrim’s Sorcerers detected the approach of Vulkan and the Phalanx, for they parted the sea of souls like a vast dreadnought at sea parts water. Fulgrim’s daemon believed Vulkan came to take up his Anathame and use it against him. He could not let this happen, and ordered the Sodominus to engage the Phalanx as soon as it broke warp.

His minions did as he commanded, and the heavens were once again ablaze, as the two titanic vessels clashed at the edge of the system, like titans locked in a wrestling match. The two giants ripped chunks from one another, but they were too vast and too tough to be truly damaged by their own broadsides. Though fires raged and thousands upon thousands of crew perished, the vessels remained intact. Vulkan armored himself as his chambers burned, and he ignored the fire; he let it wash over him as he sealed his dragon-scale suit over his charcoal- black form. Then, with a sudden rush and scream of tearing air, Vulkan was ripped from the Phalanx, and toppled into the undulating throne room of Fulgrim; a blistering teleport, guided by the gods themselves had drawn him there specifically. Vulkan grimly rose to his feet as Fulgrim’s serpentine form writhed before him.

Vulkan’s spear and shield were hooked to his sculpted armor, and he looked for the entire world like a dragon knight of myth. Fulgrim meanwhile was the height of corruption. He towered over even Vulkan, and his many limbs sported a menagerie of weapons taken from his greatest conquests. His naked body was clad in oily scales, and studded with coins and gemstones that glittered in the half light. Fulgrim cursed him furiously. Did this Blacksmith believe that taking his sword, like a cowardly thief in the night, would save him? The daemon, in Fulgrim’s voice, boasted that even without the sword, none could best him, for no one ever had.

Vulkan was still, and replied succinctly.

“You shall die daemon. If it is possible for you to die, I shall make it so.”

The thing cackled as it circled him, clashing its blades together hungrily. It challenged Vulkan for his insolence; did this fool not know his brother when he saw him? Vulkan, it is said, refused to accept Fulgrim as his brother; his brother was dead.

The daemon’s smile was indulgent cruelty incarnate, and it relished its chance to reveal the truth. Fulgrim was alive, but the weakling had, at the crucial moment, refused to slay Ferrus, and his weak soul had been swallowed whole and subsumed like the wretch he was.

Vulkan lost his composure.

“Your words are poison!”

“And yours are folly.”

Vulkan hesitated no longer and he raised his gauntlets, before launching twin streams of searing fire into the serpent, that recoiled and threw its blades up to deflect the scorching torrent. The heat was like a star’s heart itself, and the walls began to run molten, as the fleshy floor blackened and squealed in heinous agony. Fulgrim threw his arms out wide, and deflected the flaming blasts aside, before lunging directly for Vulkan himself. The two Primarchs clashed with a sonorous boom, blasting out all the windows of the throne room. Their bellows and screeching curses were lost as the atmosphere vented from the chamber, blown from the ship by the void.

They duelled in silence then. Vulkan’s spear and mighty shield were drawn, and the two slashed and parried every blow that sought to maim and to slay. Sparks flew from Vulkan’s salamander mantle and from his great shield, while Fulgrim’s blades fizzed and belched evil smoke as they flared with unholy life. It was a forest of blades, and the Forge father was forced backwards, step by step. Each deflected blow of the battling Primarchs destroyed something; statues were bisected, bystanders vaporized, sections of hull burnt away or chopped apart. But Vulkan could not best Fulgrim; Fulgrim’s daemon was right in that regard. Vulkan was no duellist. He was certainly better than any mortal man, but Fulgrim was something entirely different. His blades were omnipresent and unrelenting; wherever Vulkan’s guard was not, they were. His armour was battered by torrential blows, blows that burned despite his amour’s apparent imperviousness to thermal damage. This was hell-fire, and Vulkan could barely hold back the destruction which was coming.

Snorting like a bull, Vulkan set his feet, and powered his body forwards. Fulgrim was sinuous and lithe, but he had sacrificed bulk for this new form, and he was forced backwards by Vulkan’s rampaging charge. The two crashed through bulkhead after bulkhead, setting off maintenance alarms and the wailing of daemons still embedded in said walls. Vulkan powered onwards, forging his way towards the hexagonal chamber where the teleportarium would be located. Stunned, Fulgrim almost failed to block one of Vulkan’s spear thrusts, and instead swayed backwards to avoid the strike. Vulkan hurriedly slammed his fist upon the controls of the teleportarium, and the two were ripped from Sodominus, and returned to the last location the homing signal had been attuned to; the Phalanx.

Vulkan’s crew suddenly retreated as the two giants exploded into existence in the heart of the vessel. They no longer dueled like warriors; they ripped each other apart like savage dogs, mindless with rabies. Fulgrim’s swords were smashed or broken in the fight. Vulkan’s spear dulled and shattered and his shield perforated and ravaged by claws. Gripping his brother by his bull neck with three hands, Fulgrim slammed him this way and that, ramming him through air locks and pulverizing stone with his black cranium. The serpent coiled around Vulkan like a constrictor, and squeezed with all his might. They rolled on the floor like inhuman beasts. Inch by inch, Vulkan dragged himself deeper into his ship, wheezing as Fulgrim tried to suffocate him. As he choked, he in turn throttle Fulgrim. Order was lost, and any noble ideals were forgotten for a time; lost amid the red mist and the desire for revenge. Revenge for all the wrongs Fulgrim had done. Istvaan, Guilliman, Ferrus, Fulgrim’s own suffering; the monster before him was the architect of it all. For a time, Vulkan lost his mind. Within the Temple of Grimaldus, Lucius swirled like a vortex. Faces flashed and rippled within its mass, as claws lashed and scrabbled for purchase. And, at the heart of the flesh storm, He’stan still fought. Everywhere a snarling head emerged from the storm, he would smash it apart with a brutal blow of the Crozius, while his bolter barked as it unleashed volleys of shell fire into the morass. He fought even as it stabbed past his guard over a hundred times, piercing his flesh and draining his blood. His glowing red eyes glared with righteous anger and he fought on. He had to fight. The longer he fought it, the longer he bought his Primarch and his people. He fought on, even as his bolter-arm was ripped free in a gory fountain of dark arterial blood.

Vulkan burst into the mustering hall, throwing Fulgrim across the packed cavern, impacting a thunderhawk with a deafening detonation. Aflame, Fulgrim leapt the hundred meter distance between them, and smashed Vulkan from his feet. The battle was fought at a speed his men could barely follow, and they dared not fire into the tumult, lest they weaken their primarch at an inopportune moment. With a great lash of his tail, the Fulgrim daemon cracked Vulkan’s breast plate, and sent his stumbling backwards, into another chamber. Eagerly Fulgrim slithered in to deliver his killing blow.

It was then he felt the familiar disgust of the blanks anathema presence. But this was greater. This was a great nullification. The Fulgrim daemon glared into the chamber it had found itself in. Two dozen Culexus operatives emerged from the gloom. Fulgrim noted that Vulkan too was suffering in their presence. He lay upon his back, spluttering and hissing in agony; for every Primarch was a thing of the warp, whether they realized it or not. Yet, Fulgrim’s daemon realized too late what Vulkan actually intended. The untouchables were weakening it massively. More so than Vulkan. More so than even Fulgrim himself…

The serpentine chimera squealed as if electrocuted and collapsed to the ground in a fit of spasms, right before Vulkan’s bleary, glowing eyes. With great effort, Vulkan rose to his knees, spitting out gobbets of gore with every breath. He watched, amazed, as the serpent’s skin seemed to bulge and expand. It also paled and seemed to lose its oily luster. Something was moving beneath its flesh. Snake shedding winter skin, a body pulled itself free. The body was sickly and covered in black veins, but Vulkan recognized the face. The two looked upon one another as brothers once again. Fulgrim had tears in his beautiful eyes.

“You must... do it now... Slay me... now...” he whispered softly.

Vulkan protested. “I can save you! Let me try!” he hissed in agony. Fulgrim shook his head.

“You cannot destroy it. It is fused with me. We are as one. When we ascended... two souls... merged...” he pleaded. “Kill me. Banish it along with me. Your time is short...” Fulgrim continued, nodding to the Culexus, as they began to die one by one. They slumped to the ground, blood drooling from their helmet eye sockets. Even Pariahs had limits. It was not wise to subdue a primarch’s aura, let alone two. Vulkan indeed had so little time.

Fulgrim opened his arms wide, and bared his body for Vulkan. “Make it count,” was the last thing Fulgrim said to his brother.

“I... forgive you... your penance is eternal... that is enough. I cannot add my personal miseries to your punishment,” Vulkan added, sobbing as he pulled his spiked helmet from his head. “I WILL find you again... I promise you this.”

And with that, he used his helmet to dash his brother’s head to pieces. He didn’t stop until that beautiful alabaster face was nothing but a gory ruin. Crowds of surviving crew members watched on in sorrow and hopelessness. They cared not at all for Fulgrim, but only for the obvious pain his passing had caused their leader.

With his host destroyed, Fulgrim’s soul flew screaming back to the eye like a black winged angel, dragging its daemonic counterpart back into hell with him. With the power of the Primarch draining away finally, his armies fell apart into their component warbands, and were hunted to destruction. Lucius lost his patron’s favor and collapsed upon himself; disintegrating into madness and formlessness once again. However, his last conscious act was to slay He’stan, and for this, Vulkan had the writhing body of Lucius cast into Armageddon’s star; there to burn for as long as the Eternal one persisted.

Vulkan did not break down over his brother’s eternal torment. It made him instead resolute; he would find his remaining brothers and he would save them. Yet when he returned to his throne room, he found Imogen sitting at the foot of his throne, clutching the Anathame, her eyes wide with fright.

“We have to talk about the three Master. There were always three of them, but we just never realized because we never had one in our possession. Blade of the morning, blade of the twilight, and this, the blade of midnight...”

In the South, the Theologians fled on all fronts. Elimia Ceylan of course blamed her failure upon her husband, and when he returned, he was hanged until dead for the crime of embarrassing her. Swiftly losing support of her cardinals, she was forced to welcome the twisted scientist Deng Vaal back to the fold, and into a greater position of power (much to her disgust and his pleasure).

The Fire Beasts chased the last straggling Witchfynder vessel into a region of space near the bottom of the galactic plane. As they destroyed it, their Captain paused. His sensors had detected something. Something vast and dull, in the very coldest depths of space, far from any star. The thing was invisible to their Librarian, and gave off almost no heat.

And it was big. As they neared it, they realized just how big. It was on the scale of astronomical units. A perfect, colossal, sphere; except for a split as long as Terra was wide, which was barely a hairline fracture to this colossal hyper-structure. They reported their findings to Vulkan as soon as they could.

The old saying didn’t make sense till those days of awakening. I always found this note in the old fairy tales and children’s stories across the galaxy, in every language. The phrase goes:

‘When we walk on a god’s skin, we let the madness in. But is it such a sin, to let the madness in?’

Additional Background Section 17: Gathering the pieces; fragmentary data [Part 1]

I cannot place these sections. I haven’t the time. I am being hunted. I know this now. I only just managed to rip these fragments from a matrix of data before I saw them, loping through the fog for me; silent, slender and tall.

All I can say with certainty about these sections is that they all occurred roughly concurrently with the five year period of re-conquering that followed the short Vulkan-Fulgrim war, and the much longer war of insurgency fought against Ceylan’s Theologians.

Make of this what you will:

1) The warriors of Castervoss

[Fairy tale or chronicle? It seems a bit like both to me]

The warriors of the Gene-Prince Kadance were vicious and cruel; strong of arm and mean of spirit. They stepped over the abused heads of the lesser workers and slaves of the world Castervoss. Many heroes rose to try to topple the terrible Tyrant. Clever men built war machines of wonder to siege his cities. The warriors tore them down and bested the clever men. Bold men clad in shining plate led their armies to valiantly do battle with the evil creatures. They were bested, and their bodies spitted upon his pikes. Even gods in their sky- boats could not best the Prince, for he was a thing enthralled to elder daemons, and they would not let him lose.

The people grew desperate, and looked no more to heroes to save them. Instead they turned to a twisted man with a glinting smile. He promised them a victory, if only they would a simple request; he wanted the vaults beneath the Prince’s palace for himself. The people agreed, and the stranger set off.

He came to the Prince clad in blasphemous attire; drenched in blood and evil runes. He called himself a sorcerer, and claimed he could enhance his warriors until nothing could kill them. Not even the gods of Chaos. Hungry for more power, the Prince agreed, and the sorcerer set to work. He used dark magicks and sly technological sorcery to make the warriors swell and grow in power and malice. These warriors rampaged through the lands of the helpless, and the people lamented. But this was more than just a betrayal of them. For the giants continued to grow; they swelled and bulged and expanded. Rolls of fat flooded streets and corridors; blubber and bones split towers asunder as they grew to the size of cathedrals and larger. Their eyes and brains burst in their over-worked skulls, and they mewled for a death which wouldn’t come soon enough. The Tyrant cursed the name of Caleb the liar, the dark sorcerer, even as folds of greasy flesh entombed him in his palace. The world was drowned in meat, until a blistered layer of glistening skin and muscle coated the entire world. It was then that the sorcerer unleashed the virus weapons from the gene-Prince’s vaults; necro-toxins joined the chemical contagion, and it consumed the flesh of the world. Then, from Castervoss’ moon, the liar dropped eight burning shuttles to the surface. When they set the noisome soup of decay alight, it formed a mighty star pattern across the night time hemisphere. When the fires subsided, the once smog- filled skies were clear as crystal; clear to see the Eye as it rose from the horizon. Nobody came to Castervoss again. For it is said every single person died in the exact same instance, and their souls all leaked out at once. This was the worst of omens. Or such souls remained whole as they fell into the abyss. 2) A deal brokered

[I cannot confirm this event. Supposedly it had an eye-witness but frankly, why was he not killed instantly? Either this man is a lying braggart. Or, more sinisterly, these monsters let him escape...]

Menantus was a merchant captain in the newly formed Vulkan Imperium’s attempts to unite wayward, lesser Imperiums with his own without warfare (because, despite what histories tell you, most empires would very much like to avoid wars. Chaos is an exception, but chaos is, as the name implies, not the most stable of mindsets...). Unfortunately, he became becalmed in the warp.

Menantus had been foolish, and had travelled perilously too close to the Storm of the Emperor’s wrath. This warp overlap had become a dead zone, where reality stagnated and time slowed. This was because the angyls were known to exist in vast concentrations there and their influence was obvious. After several decades trying to move a few thousand miles out of orbit of a dead world, Menantus gave up, and let his ship crash to the surface. Miraculously (perhaps), his vessel survived the impact. As did much of his crew.

Feverish and freezing, they stepped out from their vessel in the vain hopes of finding materials to repair their ship. Hundreds died as they wandered across the frozen tundra of the planet. Supersonic winds ripped their environmental gear from their heads, and radiation bred tumors in their guts and flesh. But these were but the beginning of their woes.

Because, soon enough, they came across the Angyls. They appeared to them as beautiful beacons of warmth and safety, and welcomed them with long open arms. But there was no joy or warmth there. It was a cold light, and those who came to them lost their minds and became adoring drones, who smiled stupidly as they bowed in the dust, uncaring that their naked bodies were crystallizing through chill. The Captain hid, and he watched helplessly as his men were enslaved and broken.

Yet, the Angyls had not come specifically for this paltry prize of measly half-starved ratings. They had been on the planet first. They had been waiting. Eventually, Menantus realized who they awaited.

The dark veined craft were heralded by churning thunderstorms that flashed with lightning as they slowly descended upon the becalmed world. They were larger than cities, yet the ships did not seem to suffer any strain as they effortlessly held low orbit over the planet. Menantus recognized the deep crescent shapes of the craft from the dark legends coming out of the Eastern fringe; these were mirror-Devil ships. Necron tomb nessels. But these did not bear the etched symbols of C’tan allegiance, but instead were covered in algebraic patterns of maddening complexity.

Menantus hid himself from sight, but he could not help but watch as skeletal silver phantoms shimmered into existence beneath the ships. All of them were uniform and cold, crackling with green corpse-light. All save their leader. This figure was bedecked in golden plate and a living cloak of smoke-like steel. Lightning coursed through its body, flaring from the tips of its claws to lash the ground as it walked. This was almost certainly the Storm Caller; a renegade necron who led a significant faction of the metallic soul constructs. But it was said that he had been forced to endure the storms of Medusa V, and there he lost what little remained of his once mortal mind. But, he had been saved from destruction by other unaligned necrons, who saw him as their champion (or perhaps, their pre-programmed minds were simply malfunctioning. Who can tell with these inscrutable fiends?). The Storm Caller’s time in the warp had also given it an insight into the realm of the soul. It decided that it needed allies on both planes.

Only one warp faction could ever satisfy his need for a sterile materium AND immaterium. Thus, it would seem, the Renegade Lord came before the angyls to parlay.

Unbeknownst to Menantus, the world he had crashed upon was no mere wasteland, but was Ophelium itself; the Stolen heart of the old Ophelian empire and the first of the angylworlds. As he watched, horrified by the way the necrons calmly flayed the few surviving members of his crew with arcs of incandescent death, the angyls began to appear. They folded upwards out of the solid ground itself; creatures of blades and rolling, snapping wings. The angyls squealed, their voices like church organs raised in pitch to painful levels. The necrons in contrast were utterly silent. Slowly, they advanced upon one another, each side glittering with barely contained energies; one warp-bound, the other born of ancient science beyond mortal ken.

As they approached, the Storm Caller’s lightning clashed with the electrical discharges of the lead angyl, causing both sides to pause briefly. The leader of the Angyls rose up, buffeted by its own ethereal energies. Slowly, its wings peeled open like a lotus, to reveal the slowly forming features of one of the archangyls. Soon enough, the enchantingly beautiful features of Celestine the Pure Flame rippled into existence before the assembled aliens. She glared down upon the necrons before her with no hint of emotional response. The Storm Caller raised its clawed hand. As it opened its claws, a hologram was called into being between the two forces.

It is glowing green depths, the entire galaxy was displayed; spinning slowly as the central stars churned the stars like a ladle. Soon, it dissolved into the form of a humanoid figure, streaming with soul fire. With a harsh clawing gesture, Storm caller ripped the burning soul away from the hologram, and let it drift... into the open fist of the Star Father, who reared up within the display. The shriveled body of the now-helpless mortal was then pressed into vast constructs of necrodermis and green fire; their vital energies drained from them over what seemed like eternities.

Menantus’ account then descends into rants and incoherent ramblings, many of which may have been waking nightmares tainting the veracity of his vision. We do not get to witness how the two forces communicated beyond this hologram, nor whether they managed to reach agreement.* Menantus was eventually found naked upon Valhalla’s arid nuclear desert, calmly carving his tale into the irradiated bedrock with a broken femur. How he got there is unknown.

*(But we can assume they did, considering the events that would later unfold...)

3) Capturing Anarchy’s Child

Four Battalions of bounty hunting Fremen, backed up by expensive Krieg Serf Soldiers bought by the Mercenary Captain, attempt to capture the legendary Malalite Sparrod during the siege of a rebellious planet in the Theologian Union.

Needless to say, they fail, and are destroyed when Sparrod uses his position as chief Planetary administrator to destroy the force-field dams keeping the planets magma rivers in check. There are no survivors. Also, they inadvertently unleashed a toxin into the planet’s merchant navy, which poisoned up to a hundred neighboring worlds with a form of Khornate murder- meme contagion, which led to years of pointless civil wars across an entire sector. The Fremen were said to have all died just as dusk fell, and the Eye of terror peeked over the horizon. The Krieg continued to fight the rebellious lunatics, ignoring the magma as it burned them to their bones.

Additional Background Section 18: Gathering the pieces [Part 2]

4) The Fall of Thex Prime

Thex Prime was a gaseous giant, surrounded by dozens of inhabited blood-red moons; each world was spanned by continent scale cities and titanic trading ports. The Blood Moons, even at this time, were one of the three great cosmopolitan metropolises in the entire galaxy alongside the ruined city of Freegeld, T’au Sept and Commorragh. Only the spectacular black cancer that was Commorragh had a larger diversity and profusion of races, creeds and species than the bustling trade centre of the Thexian Trade Empire. The deep caverns where prehistoric Thexians once dwelt were hollowed out into giant factories and mines for the hunched Grongolem race. Spires and fantastic spiraling mesh-cities floated in the skies; home to the sinister spindly Ulthian Bone Eaters. In orbit, Drong Monasteries and Nisscassar Dhows plied the congested void, amidst Actorian merchant barges and the barrel-like vessels of the venomous acid Fulgars.

Within a hundred different cities, creatures and species of all shapes and sizes flooded the streets, hooting screeching and bawling bets, debts and haggling for parts and goods. Tau Water Caste envoys remained inside their chambers, relying upon kroot and N’dras drone- suits as bodyguards. Lumbering purple L’Huraxi rubbed shoulders with Tarellian dog soldiers and Nekulli warriors, while loxatl scuttle amidst the rooftops like gargoyles brought to life. Truly, the cities of Thex Prime were the most bustling and vibrant civilizations in history. And this was down to the influence of the Thexian Elite. Though the highest amongst them lounged within palaces of polished precious metals, the vast majority of the infamous thexian Elite were hidden amongst the populace themselves. While all of the Elite shared the same bat-like battle-form, their secondary forms could take on the form of any species. They had used this species imitation to infiltrate hundreds of races; bringing them all into benevolent competition with each other. Each race fought and struggled to make their own races profit and flourish, but they remained united militarily against the silver outsiders. All the while, the thexians played them all, and made themselves obscenely rich in the process.

This prosperity may seem strange to my readers of course, because this metropolis survived within a vast Empire in a state of constant war with the Nightbringer’s forces. Indeed, even a couple of systems away from the Bloodmoons, wars were raging on a horrifying scale; entire populaces were being eradicated, and stars were becoming sick under the C’tan’s influence.

But the Thexian Elite used this conflict to keep their own factional races distracted, while they calmly maintained their empire from unassailable thrones, only feasting upon convicts and enemies of the state when their blood-drinking lust became too much to ignore.

Or so they thought.

For in fact, they too were being played and deceived. The Elite were not immune to manipulation; all it took was finding where the kinks in their armor were. The most obvious candidate were the unruly cousin-species of the Thexian Elite; the self-titled horrors known as Cythor Fiends. In contrast to the Elite, the cythor fiends had no desire to intermingle or imitate the lesser species of the Empire. The cythor fiends remained in their black-pinioned battle-forms at all times, clad in finery that seemed to contradict their monstrous forms.

The cythor fiends did believe in manipulating and shrewdly outmaneuvering their opponents politically and economically however, and they did so enthusiastically in the latter years of M54- early M55. They clashed with the Elites over numerous perceived slights; there were Thexian Elite politicians such as Tomork, who called for the disbanding of the Elite, and their full assimilation into the Empire’s species, while other Elites tried to freeze Fiend assets, or actively intercepted contracts and tenders meant for their own shell-companies and economic endeavors.

The Cythor Fiend retaliation surprised even the Fiends themselves. One rogue Fiend actually unleashed his fury in a public place, ripping apart a hundred citizens, and fatally wounded one of the Elites themselves, who had been discreetly monitoring the situation. There were voices amongst the Elites, and from the other races for the cythor fiends to be censured; they were a menace to the peace the Empire required to survive during the Long War. This culminated in the arrest of Barosk, the Chief Executive of the cythor fiend coven, who was tried and imprisoned for inciting reckless, economically suicidal laws, and failing to condone his faction’s violence.

Meanwhile, an Ulthian Bone-Eater (a member of the race which the Fiends were more closely affiliated with than any other), put this censuring in a different light; it pointed out how the Elites were forming ever-closer ties with the Tau Empire through the Nisscassarian elements. This sparked a kind of subtle paranoia in the Fiends, as they started to see the rest of the Empire as being against them; a menacing multitude of aliens, waiting for their chance to topple the Cythor Fiends. The Tau seemed to grow in their estimation as an enemy; they were indeed the eldest foe of the Thexian Trade Empire, except for the Nightbringer. They felt trapped, and desperate. So much so that, when a golden stranger appeared to Barosk in his cell, he actually listened to its offer.

Mephet’ran countered the Cythor Fiend’s skepticism of its motives by reminding the alien that the C’tan’s own, personal forces had never once attacked the Thexian Trade Empire; in fact, his Necrons more often than not fought his fellow Star Vampire Nightbringer and the tau. But never the Fiends; for Mephet’ran understood Barosk and his race of monstrous terrorgheists (terrorgheist is the true name of theirs and the Elite’s species, or so a dozen roughly-complimentary biologus reports collected over the years suggest). The bat-like aliens were a bampiric race of blood drinkers, and they understood the vampiric urge to enslave their cattle for an easy feast. Mephet’ran was a vampire too, and he felt the cythor fiends could be a valuable ally. He offered to aid them in toppling the Elites, and let the terrorgheists lead the Trade Empire in the last war against the Tau.

Barosk immediately demanded to know the price in exchange, making the Deceiver smile a wicked, inhuman smile.

“Facilities, dearest Barosk. If I am to help you topple your wayward siblings, I shall of course needs the tools to do so.”

The Deceiver wanted a weapon factory, installed within Thex Prime. In exchange, the weapons would be given to selected cythor fiend mercenaries, who would storm the Elite Palaces and slay the rulers. Then, the cythor fiends would use their neglected shape shifting ability to assume command of the Empire.

Cautiously, Barosk agreed to the deceiver’s terms, and got to work. Through coded messages delivered via visitors to his cell, the Executive organized for one of the Grongolem families to be shifted around, and discreetly, several hundred vast warehouses and storage yards were rented out to a rich aristocrat, calling itself ‘the King of Silvae’.

This figure was the Deceiver itself. This transaction was hidden from the ruling elites by the cunning Cythor fiends, behind oceans of bureaucracy and proxy accounts. Of course Barosk was not completely gullible however; he didn’t trust anyone, especially not one called ‘the deceiver’. To do so was immensely foolish. But Mephet’ran could be useful, so he indulged the Star God somewhat (even if he did implant high explosives into the warehouses he loaned the C’tan, just in case...).

Eventually, the Deceiver entered the system unseen, and his factories activated quietly. Slowly at first, but soon every warehouse loaned was full... of something. Years passed, and slowly the presence of something dark at the heart of the Empire became apparent. Convicts were dying. Not only were they drained of blood, their bodies were turning to dust in the bowels of the deepest prison complexes.

Even while the cythor fiends were deflecting attention away from the warehouses, they themselves sent spies into the cavernous complexes to see for themselves what was occurring. What they saw terrified even them.

There was not just advanced gauss weaponry down there in the depths. There were Necrons. Millions upon millions of necrons. These were not the ancient warhorses of the Nightbringer’s cadaverous legions; killed so many times over and over, they were now a legion of automata. These were brand new necron warriors. Barosk could not think how they were powered. Then he recalled the convict-deaths, and groaned. Before he could warn anyone however, his prison was assaulted from below by coiling Wraiths and burrowing Flayed Ones. Though he found with terrible fury, he was slain, alongside the entire prison population. This could not be ignored.

But by then, it was too late. The Cythor Fiends desperately tried to reverse what they had done, and detonated the thousand megaton warheads they had implanted within each Necron. To their abject horror, they watched as the weapons, which had long ago been moved by the Deceiver, exploded within the Grongolem factory complexes, collapsing the caverns and entombing millions of Grongolem within.

The surprise of the necron ambush was utter and complete. The citizens and warriors of Thex Prime were slaughtered over five full days of carnage, as the Mirror Devils rampaged through every city. These necrons were new, powerful and utterly demented. They vividly recalled the pain of their passing, and had a disgust for all the fleshy enemies around them; those organic swine who had imprisoned them and fed on them for centuries. Vengeance drove these new necrons to extremes of cruelty not seen in the necron constructs since the early decades of the War in Heaven. The Deceiver did curb their slaughter somewhat; a selection of Thexian Elites and various species members were spared and enslaved by the C’tan, while the Ulthians, the deceiver’s true allies, feasted upon the atomized bone dust of an entire murdered civilization. For the Deceiver had planned it all. He had played both sides, for he was a shape-shifter beyond compare. He had been the rogue cythor fiend, he had played the part of Tomork also, and he had advocated Barosk’s arrest and show- trial. And he was not done yet.

The Golden Star God twisted into the form of the President of the Thexian Elite Council, and summoned up the fleets of the Trade Empire to gather together in the Vellan system. He claimed they were gathering for a decisive push into the Reaper-space. He claimed he ‘would end the war in a matter of weeks’. For once, horribly, he was not lying. When the fleets of Tarellian, Gorngolem, Fulgars, l’Huraxi and Nekulli gathered around Vellan’s baleful star, the trap closed. The deceiver, using his powerful technologies, caused the star to go supernova, destroying the entire system. Only the toughest Grongolem forge-ships were hardy enough to survive the blast, but they still all burned inside their vast ships helplessly. Some ships avoided the rendezvous, and were hunted down by the Deceiver’s vessels.

In one fell swoop, in the year 998.M55, the weakest Star God ripped the heart from the Thexian Trade Empire. Within weeks, thousands of helpless worlds in their empire were purged of life by the Nightbringer’s now-unstoppable forces. Such carnage had not been seen since those dark days of the New Devourer. After a few more weeks, the Thexian Empire had fallen. It is likely most of the terrorgheists fled the Empire and infiltrated other civilisations far from the Eastern Fringe, while others hopelessly sought shelter with the only faction that would take them; the Tau.

But now the Tau faced the unenviable task of facing down the entire might of the Necron hosts, alone.

This war is of too large a scope for this fragmentary section, but to illustrate succinctly the Tau response to this horror, I have recovered some telemetry from the bridge of ‘The Transcendent Path’, Kor’O’Vana’Va’Shas’s (translation: Admiral Firesoul’s) capital ship, and the flagship of the Tau High Fleet, barely a month after the fall of the Thexians;

[Telemetry 0:04837:2847 to 0:14382:2847. Transcript begins]

[Primary, weightless air caste bridge.]

Admiral: Please repeat report helm.

Helmsman Kor’la: Reports coming in across vectors 2,3,4 through to 9,9,9, every elevation. Mont’ka in-bound. First and second picket fleets insufficient. Moving to mobilize cadres seventeen through four thousand-eight. Helmsman Kor’Ui: Negative, insufficient, we have Necron vessels coming in plane-wards and spin-wards.

Admiral: [sighs, rubbing nostril slip and forehead wearily.] The Mont’ka and its devils are ever inbound; we are the Undying Light. We can hold them back. Call up secondary and tertiary reserves. Contact N’dras; we need another hundred thousand Idealist class shipped up and mobilized by the end of this week.

Helmsman Kor’la: But sir, the testing-

Admiral: [Calmly] I do not care if they are not up to level Sigma safety standards; needs must. By Aun’Va, I don’t even care if they are unpainted. We just need to hold the Necorn here, then we can fall back to the Perdus Rift line; there we can crush this incursion. [Smiling encouragingly.] We can do this my caste-men. Have faith in our Ideals and we cannot fail. [Crew cheers. One of the Gue’vesa at the sensory pit on the 1 G secondary deck is not cheering. He is instead extremely pallid, with lips quivering. The Admiral notices.] Gue’vesa’Ganon: The Necrons... they are coming...

Admiral: Human Helper Gaxon, are you ill? Of course they are coming. Do you have a lock on FTL sensors? How many are coming?

Gaxon: ...

Admiral: Ganon, I order you to tell me now! How many?

Gaxon: ... All of them...

[The Admiral’s smile fades.]

5) Containment.

On the world of Jokven, the malalite cultist smuggles the cargo stolen from the vaults of Castervoss into the Governor’s personal menagerie. The item taken from the vaults was a preserved one eyed monster, which the gene-Prince had apparently bought from Grand Sicarium at some point in the past. This horrific regenerating beast was unlike anything the people of Jokven had ever seen, and they struggled to contain its rampages.

Eventually they decided to pump a paralyzing nerve agent into the zoo-complex that had cornered the bellowing carnifex within. Unfortunately for them, the malalite’s minions caused the nerve agent canisters to be ruptured in transit to the site, and the planet’s PDF unwittingly spread the chemicals through the streets from their half-tracks and chimeras, and tainted the water supply in the process. The entire capital city slowly began to lose the ability to move their bodies under their own power.

The people were terrified that they would all die slow, agonizing deaths through starvation. This was not to be however, as soon enough the ancient one-eyed beast was released from the zoo’s containment, and hungrily began to devour every last human within the city. By the time the other settlements of Jokven arrived, there were only the mewling carcasses of a million half-eaten citizens left alive. The horrified rescuers looked up from the carnage to the evening sky, just as the Eye of Terror made its daily transit across the heavens...

Additional Background Section 17: Gathering the pieces [Part 3]

6) Iacob and Crolemere

Around this time period, there developed tales and stories across the Vulkan Imperium and beyond about a strange, perfectly symmetrical cube that would appear upon a planet, then vanish once concerted forces came to investigate its purpose and form.

This was of course Ahriman’s doing, for he had escaped from Terra by shifting a perfect cube of Imperial Palace into the warp. What his purpose was as he jumped from planet to planet is unknown. He was almost certainly researching or studying something integral to the cube’s interior itself (indeed, he wasn’t actually noted leaving the cube in any of the previous legends). Yet, every time he shifted the cube, the planet he departed would suffer tectonic disturbances, and an increase in psyker/daemonic incursions, due to the unfortunate consequences of creating warp portals in gravity wells.

However, Crolemere, his mysterious Grey Sensei ally, did seem to leave the cube. She was a figure of fear amongst many worlds as they did not understand the meaning of the cube’s arrival. Some believed the golden haired woman was a ghost or a phantom, as she never seemed to age, and always vanished with the cube.

What most histories do not record is that she was actually acting as an assistant to Ahriman; acquiring ingredients and artifacts for his experimental warp science and sorceries. She was also looking for something else; some figure who was essential to the unfolding events spreading across the galaxy like wildfire. Crolemere would be sent out to infiltrate the planet, and locate potential candidates; subtly questioning the motives of those she met and noting their responses to her.

On one world, her mission was interrupted however. As she tried to gain access to a city, she was caught up in a fire in one of the planet’s subterranean transit systems (caused ironically, by the cube’s gravitational disruption effects). Everyone on board the tube engine was burned to ash, but she managed to crawl free, skinless and burning from the wreckage. As emergency units of re-purposed PDF tried to douse the blaze, medicae units tried in vain to locate survivors. Crolemere slipped away, whimpering in agony as her flesh smoldered and her bones ground together like burnt driftwood in a furnace.

She was taken in my a man named Iacob. From what we know, this man seemed unremarkable, even at this early stage as a young man. But this man took her from the street. He was a medicae, and he tended to her wounds.

Yet, as he took care of her, it became apparent she was no normal human. She healed rapidly, her flesh knitting together seamlessly without even scarring. Soon enough, her beautiful golden locks sprouted from her scorched scalp as it regenerated her warmth complexion. Within a week, she seemed utterly unharmed.

Unlike on a hundred other worlds, Iacob did not fear her supernatural abilities. Across the galaxy, most humans were superstitious, malevolent or just insane. Even upon his own world, the witch-hunters and demagogues were out in force; hunting for the ghostly occupant of the Cube, which had appeared upon a nearby hillside like a bad omen.

Iacob was nothing like those cowards and monsters. He saw her healing as miraculous and something he found mystifying. He eagerly asked her questions about her abilities and her purpose on his world, all the while hiding her from the roving bands of red-clad redemptionists, who began to scour the city for blonde females, for the prophecies always mentioned the blonde immortal witch...

She answered Iacob’s questions as best she could, because the man, while enthusiastic, could not really understand the warp metaphysics involved. She spoke of her mission for a great entity known as the Rubric Sorcerer, and how they intended to defeat the dark forces rising up to consume reality. In turn, Crolemere asked questions of her own, and over the course of months, discovered that this man was a possible candidate for Ahriman’s purposes; Ahriman needed ‘a truly good man, unburdened by affiliation to any faction or power’; she rejected the oppression of the ancient powers and wished to create a new culture. Crolemere refused to believe that in the galaxy there was only war; there had to be more. Discreetly, Crolemere signaled her success to the Sorcerer.

Before she could get Iacob to come with her however, events overtook her. The redemptionists, in their conical hoods and brandishing their flaming weapons, cornered Iacob at his home, after they discovered that he had sheltered the Grey Sensei. They tried to force their way into his home, but he went out into the street to confront them, unarmed and smiling. He called upon his neighbors to depart, and he promised the redemptionists that Crolemere was no threat to them. The cultists did not believe him, and struck him down. Though her purpose was to be discreet in all things, Crolemere was running out of time, and she could not bear to see one of the few truly benevolent humans alive killed by fools. She leapt from the roof of Iacob’s hab quarters, and into combat with the robed zealots.

Though unarmed, Crolemere was a wayward scion of the Imperator’s bloodline, and her abilities were formidable 9especially after tutelage by Ahriman himself in tapping into her power). Her body glimmered with starlight as she ripped the cultists apart. She dodged and deflected their chainblades, as she ripped flamers from their hands and tossed them aside with contempt. Within moments, the cultists were all dead or fleeing, screaming, “The daemon! The witch! She is risen!”

Even as Iacob was gathering his wits once more, she grabbed him and tried to force him to come with her; they had to escape, now the whole city would be after her, and Ahriman’s Rubric entities would be preparing to secure the area. But Iacob resisted, challenging her convictions as a self-proclaimed savior. He was still drenched in the blood of a hundred men slain by her, and he would not go with her. She implored him desperately; she explained that if he didn’t go, Ahriman’s men would kill everyone in the city to protect his prize. Iacob had no desire to be a prize, nor did he like the sound of this Ahriman; a man who would calmly order the deaths of millions of scared people just because he was in a hurry. In the end, Crolemere gave him little choice; rendering him unconscious before throwing him into the back of an idling half-track and setting off for the cube.

Ahriman was as good as his word and the outskirts of the city were ablaze, as the immortal Rubric Marines clashed with the PDF of the world in a storm of fire, steel and ethereal energies. Crolemere drove her stolen vehicle through the storm of mud and fire, as the city’s forces laid siege to the Cube, and the hill it stood upon.

Marauder bombers dropped thousands of high explosive bombs upon the shielded edifice, while infantry marched fearlessly up the hill, walking over the bodies of those soldiers who fell to bolter fire before them. They fought to (in their mind) defend their city from an out of context menace that would threaten the lives of all who walked upon the planet’s surface. Crolemere tried to ignore the carnage, and the brave soldiers dying by her ally’s hand, but she couldn’t. Her eyes were moist with bitter tears, as her half-track finally ran out of fuel. Arms around his shoulders, Crolemere desperately dragged Iacob through the mud and the ruined carcasses. Her fine features were tainted by the detritus of blood and dirt that splashed across her as she fought to reach the cube.

She was interrupted in her flight by a peculiar sight. The heavens suddenly burst into flaring colour just ahead of her. Moments later, an eldar venom anti-grav craft careened through it. It was missing a fin and burning from several places, but still it somehow managed to stay afloat long enough for its strange crew to leap from it before it crashed into the ground with a mighty detonation that flung Crolemere upon her back. She dropped Iacob as she fell.

The vessel had three crew members, according to the accounts of this confrontation. None of them were eldar. Two were obviously old men arguing furiously, the eldest chastising the younger man in a cloak of shifting color on his recklessness. The third figure was a sinister man, clad in dark clothes with glowing eyes that shone with a piercing blue. Yet, it was not a man at all, and it moved with slick, deliberate precision no human could emulate.* The artificial being gunned down Crolemere with a dozen las bolts to the heart and temple. As she lay healing in a pool of her own congealing blood, they abducted her captive, before the colorful man stumbled back into the rent in reality, closely followed by his allies.

Ahriman dragged Crolemere from the battlefield using his formidable powers, and moments later, the cube too vanished in a storm of screaming warp fire.

Why Ahriman wanted Iacob was unknown at the time. But he seemed key in one of the Sorcerer’s schemes. Yet, that encounter did plant the smallest seeds of doubt in Crolemere’s mind; what was the astartes sorcerer truly up to. It lead her to investigate her ally. It was then she learnt the horrific truth of the Thousand Sons renegade.

7) Oblivion’s pattern

For over three thousand years, there had been no word or rumour of it being active. Many hoped that it had left the universe, as the New devourer had done, or had consumed itself in some dark corner of the galaxy. But, like a shark flocking to a sinking ship, the manifest disasters and misery at the close of M55 almost seemed to summon it back into our reality.

Navigators noticed its presence during their annual charting of the warp lane’s of Vulkan’s Imperium. Planets, systems and at one point an entire sector; all went missing. Patrol ships who investigated found their former locations utterly empty. Psykers hadn’t even detected the telltale warp howl that always accompanied planetary destruction. It was as if they were unmade a some fundamental level.

The Ophilim Kiasoz was mobile. Hopes were dashed; it was back. Only the oldest members of the galaxy realized what this entity promised; they had known its destruction in the previous ten thousand years.

Imogen of the Brethren of the Willing would not be perturbed by this entity. As soon as possible, she gathered all the data she could on the attacks; those of the past, and those of her present. She had locked herself into her chambers after she had stored the Anathame, and her fevered mind was still reeling from the apocalyptic conspiracies and revelations she was discovering. The Ophilim Kiasoz was the most unfathomable and potentially dangerous of them all, and she knew she had to find out where it was going.

At first, as she looked upon her updated galactic charts, the Ophilim Kiasoz’s path seemed utterly random; it appeared to move for a couple of hundred years at half c. For a couple of lightyears in one direction, before appearing at an entirely different site and continuing on a sub-light path for another couple of centuries, and so on. It was not until she began to calculate the likely locations of black holes and neutron stars, and folded her maps along geometric lines linking these phenomenon, that she realized that the Ophilim was not moving randomly. It was moving in a perfectly straight line, roughly towards the western edge of the rim-wards galactic plane. But the Ophilm Kiasoz was not travelling through space. Instead it was somehow bypassing vast swathes of space; travelling through some other medium Imogen could not fathom.

However, she could predict where it was going to appear next. She took her findings to the ruling Councils of Armageddon with all haste. She implored them to begin the evacuation of those systems that fell beneath the pattern of the Ophilim Kiasoz’s path. However, during this time the Vulkan Imperium was rebuilding itself after a major war, and Vulkan was out re- conquering swathes of the Empire. The council argued that it required all the border worlds it still possessed, in order to survive. Imogen countered that those systems were doomed either way, with or without defenders there; for the Ophilim could not be stopped by mortal means of war. Yet, there was a member of the Promethian Court who argued otherwise; a brilliant scientist known as Cayden, who had looked at Imogen’s findings and noticed that the Ophilim Kiasoz only made its ‘jumps’ when it neared a gravitational/solar anomaly. He boldly requested that the Council of Equals allow him to access the forbidden armory, beneath Hades Hive; the location of the ancient Nova weaponry of the long-dead Dark Age of Tech culture. He claimed he had a method of diverting the Ophilim Kiasoz away from allied worlds. All he needed to do was conjure a celestial anomaly.

Eventually, the Council narrowly voted to give the scientist’s plan a chance. However, they also sent word for Imogen’s plan to also begin to be initiated, should Cayden fail.

The two distinct rescue forces rushed to the western marches of the Imperium; one a fleet of millions of repurposed merchant vessels and grain storage vessels for carrying billions of potential refugees, the other a military armada of mothballed vessels and reserve ships, hastily called up for Cayden’s scheme.

Cayden’s fleet amassed in the Deimia system, where a super massive blue giant burned erratically and with a fierce light bright as a million terran suns. It was here that he began to install the nova bomb dischargers, in a loose ring of heavily shielded satellites around the star’s equator. This system was chosen for his operation because it was in an isolated sector far from any neighboring friendly systems; the resultant nova kindled in its heart would not scorch any vulkanian worlds inadvertently.

It took his teams weeks to set up the optimal configurations and calculate the resultant blast that was going to be produced. This was too long, and soon they were running out of time. As the Ophilim neared, strange things began to occur. All their chronometrical readings and time keeping devices lost their consistency, fluctuating wildly with discrepancies. The planets orbiting the star changed their orbits; some became elliptical, others failed to complete their orbits, and simply began to turn back upon themselves in a spectacular display of astronomical readjustment. The pressure began to mount onboard his vessels, but Cayden pressed on with his work. Every psyker on his ship inexplicably went mute and deaf, and all the food supplies went stale overnight. One of the frigates escorting his flag ship drove all ahead full into the heart of Deimia; their void shields bursting like a soap bubble within the crushing, blazing embrace of the fusion furnace. There was no explanation why.

Then things began to get stranger. The star itself began to fluctuate in its readings; not just radiation levels, but actual surface details changed. Lines and patterns formed in the sun spots, which preceded gigantic tidal shifts in the sun, with huge sections of plasma sliding out of the star like stone blocks, much to the crew’s utter bewilderment and wonder.

They could wait no more. They set the nova weapon dischargers on a timer, and fled the system as fast as the warp would carry them. Only Cayden and a handful of warships remained behind, to ensure the weapon detonated. Nobody knows what happened to them. Cayden’s last message to Imperial space was a garbled signal relayed by a deafened psyker, of his last words (it would seem).

Even this archive couldn’t scrub the entire message clear of distortion, but a single sentence was made out (though it still makes little sense to this day. I suspect Cayden merely wished to say something enigmatic before he died, to preserve his legend.)

His final message is short. The majority of the ten minute burst was static and bizarre noises that might have been the sound of a hull ripping, or rapid temperature change causing micro- fractures and plasma container rupture. I cannot be certain. But here are the clearest sections:

[Distorted]... Can’t-[distorted]-I- [distorted]-ull integrity fai-[distorted/corrupted section]- All follies come home. All- [distorted. Metallic din? Static distortion?]

In the end, the worlds in the path of the Ophilim were saved. However, it took Imogen a while to recalculate the Ophilim Kiasoz’s new multi-dimensional path. Five worlds were nullified in that time. This led to any further attempts to divert or attack the Kiasoz anomaly to be called off by executive order of Vulkan himself.

Some things should be left alone...

Additional Background Section 18: From Ashes born: Eldar recent history, and Tales of The Phoenix Lords. [Part One]

We must speak of the Eldar at this point in the history. At no point since the direct aftermath of the Enslaver plague had the Eldar been at their apparent weakest; all but two of the Craftworlds lay devoid of life and the promised salvation of the Ynnead entity was stalled for reasons unknown.

The Eldar race maintained but four strongholds in the Age of Dusk; the Black Library, Commorragh, the defiant Biel-Tan survivors and finally the cursed craftworld, Altansar.

The first was the ever-elusive domain of the Harlequins, sightings of whom had become more and more common across the galaxy.* By far the most enigmatic of the Eldar factions, their true goals and intentions a mystery to all those who could only see the wider web of interrelationship between dimensions.

The second was the sprawling nest of cancer that was Commorragh, which fed like a parasite upon the death and anguish of the war-ravaged races of the Age of Dusk era. They preyed upon the refugee colonies, the abandoned worlds, and those who could barely defend themselves. In addition to the normal divisions and everyday schisms of the Dark Eldar, the factionalism of the Kabals themselves was at an all-time high; once the Kabals were all so depraved and diverse in their cruelty that one faction was indistinguishable from the other. Times had changed.

The youngest generation of Archons were rash and incredibly impulsive in their enacting of cruelty and sadism. They would attack the most heavily-defended worlds of the material races, and would hunt anything and anyone who got in their way. They were loathed by the older Archons, for they brought irritating attention to their realm. Though the older Lords did love to torment those fools who presumed to invade Commorragh, even they knew their place in the galaxy was not just born of their superiority, but also their ability to weave the fact of their existence into the fabric of the galaxy’s nightmares; the Dark Eldar could not be seen as merely an invading xenos that could be fought. They had to appear to be creatures from dark fairy tales; they were the monsters nobody dared to admit were real. The Young Archons (adherents of the shadowy Baron Sathonyx) ruined this image by being overtly and blatant in their raiding. Where was the artistry? Likewise, the eldest pre-fall commorrites began to split off from the Kabal system altogether; the Lords of Twilight, locked off in their sub-realms, had not been seen outside the webway (or even on the Streets of Commorragh) in seven thousand years. Rumors abounded, but nothing was provable. Then there were the Archons illicitly supporting the Lady Malys, as she sought to undermine the leadership of Vect, the only figure above the politics of Commorragh due to his own unassailable position as Overlord. Meanwhile, Vect made his own plans; plans so subtle even his fellow Archons had no inkling of his intentions.

The Incubi too began to distance themselves from the rest of the commorrite rabble; several Hierarchs of the largest temples covertly sent forth Incubi mercenary bands to join specific realspace raids. These were raids that were close to former eldar colonies and Crone worlds of various forms. Each time, they returned with fragments of technology, utterly uninteresting to most of their kind. Only the Underseers of the Commorrite factories could be coerced into deciphering their meaning and function; they were elements of a vessel. A vast vessel. On a world of broken glass, hidden within a webway fold, they worked in secret. Guarded by the Incubi warriors, they worked to repair and re-forge this titanic vessel. Its name was unpronounceable to humans, so I shall utilize its translation for the rest of this chronicle; it was known only as ‘The Wailing Doom’.

Biel-Tan also suffered internal strife and schisms. War with Huron Blackheart was not going well, for it was proving impossible to kill the ancient Chaos Lord. Even when he was seemingly destroyed beyond all reason, he would cling to life long enough for his Corsair rabble to patch him back together like some grotesque mannequin. The warriors of Biel-Tan could not understand how he could survive such punishment. They eventually realized that the Hamadraya was the key. Huron’s strange jaundice-colored familiar was no mere acolyte. Somehow it was slinked to Huron at the level of both the mind and the soul. As he lived and perpetuated his villainy across the Eastern Chaos Imperium, so the Hamadraya reflected his expansive presence, swelling until it was a towering, diseased nightmare of claws and gnashing jaws. Using warp born powers it hid in plain sight, always just out direct eye line. It was the unseen force at the right hand of the cybernetic Tyrant. Under its influence, Huron persisted, a product and creator of its indomitable will.

The Eldar were desperately short on resources, which began to seriously hamper their guerrilla war.

The rule of Autarch Asitar, her council of allied Farseers, and Prince Yriel were threatened at this time by the influence of more sadistic minds. Factions amongst the craftworld’s diverse fleet thought the best way to win their war against Huron was to abandon all pretence to honorable war; poison the Tyrant’s lands, sow true terror and misery amongst his petrified populace. Make serving Huron the most feared option available to subject worlds. This faction rallied around the Corsair Duke Sliscus. Though he was a fickle and monstrous Dark Eldar, his fleets were formed from all manner of rogues and cunning forces, and the distinction between Biel-Tan guerrilla fighter and lapsed Dark Eldar was becoming extremely slim indeed. Not only this, but the Duke was charming and charismatic, rivaling Yriel’s own roguish charm.

His fleet, centered around his trio of captured flagships, often appeared to reinforce critical Biel-Tan assaults. Sometimes he’d strike at Huron’s own corsairs with all his naval acumen, performing his famous low orbital raids upon unsuspecting supply worlds. He enacted a terror campaign even a Night Lord would envy. On one world, he captured the entire populace, and stitched them inside one another like some deformed mon keigh doll-ornament. He had one planet infested with a glass plague that slew everyone with blue eyes on the planet over the course of a month, before changing genetic markers at random to effect a different group. This act sowed paranoia and discord amongst the populace until they became gibbering wrecks, jumping at their own shadows, when the combined Eldar fleets came to plunder their world. Though it was downplayed, the Duke attacked his own supposed allies almost as much as he did Huron. Occasionally he’d give the craftworlders false jump co-ordinates, or redirect their webway portals into damned sections of the Labyrinth dimension. He was a force of inconsistency, polished by a crafty smile and a swift wit. Asitar herself was never made aware of the Duke’s excesses; nor the fact many of his rival captains within the Biel-Tan fleet were apparently joining his fleet, along with their ships...

Though he was sometimes loathed, Sliscus was mostly loved by the embittered eldar populace, because he empowered the Eldar at last after long years believing in their own futility. He gave them purpose. Yriel despised the Duke, who hated him in return. Yriel did not want to see his race become monsters like Sliscus and his kabalite contacts. He did not wish to win the war against Huron, only to replace one monstrosity with another one. He and the Duke competed for the favor of the autarch and her court and this led to clashes. It was inevitable.

This tension came to a head during the terror campaign against the world of Mulvene. This world was used by Blackheart as a weapon range. The few settlements scattered across the wide plains, jungles and mountain reaches of the planet were regularly bombarded, raided and attacked by the Tyrant of Badab, simply for him to perfect his techniques of planetary assault, and test the latest weapons churned out by his Techmarines and obliterator-priests. Oddly, Sliscus chose this planet as a focus of one of his campaigns of whimsical vindictiveness. The Duke’s fleet hung in low orbit, destroying the meager defenses with ease. Then he started to play games with the miserable mon keigh below. He ravaged whole settlements, then as the people sheltered, he would return to them with the promise of mercy; his holographic projection claimed he wanted no further culling. He was not the Tyrant, and they were inclined to trust him, with all the desperation of a beaten dog hopefully submitting to the promise of a new, better owner. He asked for negotiators to come to him, and they duly did so.

These unfortunates were hideously tortured, before being skinned and nailed to the hull of the Duke’s flagship. Once this was accomplished, the Duke resumed his attack, claiming that one nation of the Mulvenians broke the truce and fired upon his vessels. Once they were only just defeated, the Duke allowed them to retreat to their bunkers in terror. Then, with the seeming patience of a saint, he asked for peace again. This cycle of lies and torment continued for over six years.

When Yriel arrived in-system to see why the Duke had not bothered to attack more important targets, he was horrified by what the Duke and his Corsairs were doing. Yriel saw humanity as a form of semi-sentient animal, but that was no justification for such pointless cruelty. He was once a Pirate Captain, but even he was never so base; so evil. He did not want his race remembered as monsters; something had to be done.

By now, Sliscus had grown bored of tormenting the Mulvenians, who continued to send envoys in vain hope to an end in the hostilities. He ordered his razorwings and Voidraven craft to descend upon the world, and unleash the glass plague upon them. This would render every living thing upon Mulvene into a glass statue, contorted in abject horror.

The mulvenians emerged from their hovels and bunkers when they did not hear the cruel laughter of the usual full-on Corsair assault. They watched in muted dread as vast flocks of sleek Dark Eldar aircraft swept across the sky. Their dread turned to bafflement, when other sleek shapes intercepted them barely thirty thousand feet above them. Soon the sky was ablaze with streaking missiles, silver and black lance beams and the whining sound of splinters and shuriken splitting the air. The Prince’s fighters cut down the enemy craft with ease; the Dark Eldar were unprepared for his treachery, but also their ships were configured for attacking ground-based infantry targets, not equally maneuverable Eldar attack craft, perfectly suited to dog-fighting.

The Duke looked on from his flagship with an amused smile as his fighters were forced to flee without their prize, but even his newest minions knew this smile of his was a bitter forgery; he was seething with hatred. Calmly, he requested for his ‘Dearest sister’. This was a signal for his men to communicate to his agents onboard Yriel’s craft (placed there to keep tabs upon Sliscus’ rival). He ordered them to execute the pirate Prince.

Yriel had predicted this move, and had had his First officer hunt down Sliscus’ agents months before, forging their replies to the Duke to make him think they were still alive. Yet, Yriel had underestimated the cunning of commorrites. One of them was a Lhamaean priestess, and she had seduced the first officer. He had promptly hidden her from the purge onboard the ship. The venomous eldar had then infiltrated Yriel’s bridge crew and she found herself in the perfect place to strike down Yriel. But commorrites have a disadvantage other eldar lack; a shriveled psychic potential. Yriel felt her approach moments before she struck. Moments was all he needed as he span on his heel and beheaded her with his Spear of twilight in one smooth motion. Yet as she died, her toxic blood exploded in all directions (a modification installed by a haemonculi long ago). Half the bridge crew collapsed, gasping as the venom touched their skin and turned their blood to fire in seconds. Yriel was in armor, so he was protected somewhat, even if he had to rip his armor from his chest as the acidic venom corroded it.

Simultaneously, Sliscus’ reserve fleet leapt from the shadows, only to be struck in the flank by Yriel’s own reserves. The naval battle that followed was one of the most complex and sprawling of engagements yet recorded in space combat history. The two fleets chased one another across five star systems.

Their capital ships and arrow-swift escorts exchanged fire from myriad angles, as their mimic engines and holofields fooled their counterparts with ever more complicated illusions. Manoeuvres had to be planned to the exact centimeter as the fleets danced between each other. Several times, the two flagships passed within ten miles of each other, the two vessels each fractionally too slow to bring their weapons to bear before the other evaded them.

The Duke and the Prince were two of the greatest naval strategists in the entire galaxy; pinning one down was like trying to ensnare mist, whilst the other was a coiled viper, which would turn in its skin to punish any who grasped it. Each counterattack was met with counter- counterattacks, every ploy and stratagem was defeated by a perfectly executed riposte. Their florid stalemate only ended when Yriel’s flagship plunged into the churning atmosphere of a gas giant, destroying several pursuing ships in the process. Of the fate of Yriel, no eldar present could tell. Sliscus took this as victory, and returned to Biel-Tan proclaiming his victory of the turncoat Yriel. He was forbidden from entering the internal reaches of the craftworld, for he was one of the unrepentant Eldar, and his soul was polluted. Nevertheless, he was congratulated by the craftworlders, who were desperate for all the military experts they could muster. However relations turned sour almost instantly, as one of the farseers forgot to call Sliscus ‘Duke Sliscus’. The insane commorrite took instant, irrational offence, and cursed them all. Asitar the autarch ruler of Biel-Tan demanded to know the meaning of Sliscus’ outburst, but her words were lost on her tongue, when she looked upon Sliscus’ latest fashionable costume. She looked upon the strange multi-colored leather, and could make out the tribal markings of several of her naval captains. The full horror of their deal with Sliscus was revealed to them.

Asitar ordered the Duke destroyed, but he escaped her aspect warriors and Guardians, carving his way through the press, before stealing one of Biel-Tan’s own Void-Stalkers at harbor in the aft docks. He fled, cackling with glee at the misery he had wrought.

Some months later, the battered fleet of Yriel returned, but their leader and his ship were missing. Biel-Tan had been weakened. News of Sliscus temporarily allying with Huron simply compounded the ill omens. The Farseers of the last craftworld cast around desperately for any clues on how they were to survive the coming storm.

A significant fraction of their vision quests told them the most likely path to survival lay upon the dead world of Pax Argentius, and the catacombs that lay beneath its surface.

What the Eldar desperately needed at that moment in history were heroes; nay, champions. Fate (or possibly design) answered their un-voiced plea. It was answered in the form of the Phoenix Lords. While most figures weakened and suffered the degradation of age throughout our history, the Phoenix Lords experienced the opposite. These ancient supernatural soul constructs were the sentient armor of the most ancient and powerful of Eldar heroes, infused with the souls of all who since donned their ornate war-suits. As the centuries went on, more and more occupants took up their armor, and with them their power grew. By this point in history, millions upon millions of Eldar had taken on the form of the Phoenix Lords; every mortal death it was possible to suffer in combat had been endured by these legendary figures. And with each death, they had learned and expanded their knowledge. Likewise, their souls had been bolstered by the new souls assimilated, until wheeling constellations of souls churned within their bodies. They blazed with baleful soul-fire that was blinding to anyone with the psyker- gift. Even warp neutral figures could taste the power emanating from them.

They could dance between volleys of fire, their blades and weapons moved like quicksilver. It was said they could pluck bullets from the air, read the language of battle with such perfect clarity that it seemed they knew precisely what their opponents would do before even they knew.

Each of the Phoenix lords travelled the galaxy, dueling monsters, rescuing civilizations and generally fulfilling their own personal agendas. Though the following individual accounts cover the seven primary Asuryana, one must remember there were more Phoenix Lords aboard at this time too, including Zandros of the Shrine of the Slicing Orbs, as well as the mysterious Lords of the Shining Spears and Warp Spiders respectively. We know the Warp Spiders battled the Mandrakes across the webway, desperately trying to prevent them from sundering the Labyrinth dimension in their efforts to free their mysterious dark patrons. It is likely their Phoenix Lord was leading them in this secretive conflict, but no records exist for him during this period.

The Asuryana generally travelled the galaxy alone; the only company the billions of lost souls swirling within their impossible interiors. Sometimes they travelled with retinues of their most dedicated and powerful of exarchs, who acted as their vassals and as their chroniclers. The data I have located upon the Phoenix Lords abroad at this time was culled from not only the eye-witness accounts and histories of the Asuryana’s ‘victims’, but also from the oral ballads the exarch-retainers shared with the Harlequin mimes and their allies. Combined, I feel these accounts represent the most accurate portrayal of the Lords of Asuryan/Khaine yet constructed. Any obvious hyperbole has been scrutinized and cross-referenced. Surprisingly, much of the more insane feats of these figures seem to be corroborated by bystanders and their enemies.

Baharroth

In the demented realm of the Theologian Union, following the war against Vulkan, there was civil war, fire and death. Deng Vaal, the blinded genius that developed the Witchfynder warships and countless other infamous inventions of torture and pious excruciation, was leading a coup against the ruling Ceylan family, who had come under the control of the violent bastard child of the last Ceylan scion. Doloriad Ceylan was a foolish and vain man, but he was also supported by a military council of Tallarn Generals who supported his rulership of the spiritual Conclave. Both sides created Inquisitorial orders of watchers and spies. The Persecution squads of Deng Vaal were cybernetic super soldiers, designed to conceal their power in plain sight. But when they found political or religious dissidents, their implants activated; blades, whirring saws and poisoned injectors unfurled from them to unleash hell upon the impious.

Doloriad’s men were less technologically minded; their soldiers were highly trained elites from the worlds of Scar-Vein and Temalri; deathworlds that bred psychotic crusader henchmen for the Cardinals Crimson, a powerful ally of the illegitimate Eccliesiarch. They too hunted within the populace, murdering and burning the suspicious at the sake for the smallest provocation. As power constantly fluctuated between factions, everyone became a target.

Then word reached the Theologians of the Warrior-Angel, who leapt between worlds, destroying armed mobs and soldiers, before simply leaving. At first, the Unionist soldiers simply increased the number of psyker-weapons that accompanied each expedition and witch- hunt by necessity. They believed these sightings were either illusions, warriors in the employ of a rival faction, or at worst minor angyl incursions.

It was none of these things. Deng Vaal himself realized this when he began the invasion of Lambast. The somber monk-knights of Lambast were no match for the Power-Armored Sisterhoods, or their cybernetic allies in the Persecution units. Then, the central library archive of the planet exploded, as if a line of explosives had been planted down its flanks. It fell away in two halves, showing all combatants with a fine film of silver dust and rolling smoke. The vaults of the building had contained a captured eldar portal, and it had reactivated spectacularly. And from this gate, a blazing angel of glittering silver and polished sky blue armor burst forth like the first rays of a new dawn, soon to be followed by half a dozen similar winged figures.

Baharroth, the Cry of the Wind, was unleashed. His luminous soul made the psykers flinch before him, and the sun reflected form his shimmering pinions in all directions. Alone, he swept into the battle against the Vaal’s power armored minions, while his fellow hawks battled to take down the heavy artillery of the assaulting force. Baharroth was a storm of blades and laser bolts fired from hawk’s talon. Anyone who so much as raised a weapon against him (be they natives, or Vaal’s own minions) were cut down with cold skill.

Soon, Deng Vaal’s cybernetic persecutors located the single figure amongst the sprawling chaos of the city-wide melee. Unfurling their plasma-blades and sonic exterminator cannons, they closed upon Baharroth. In the shattered ruins of the Lambastian Lord-Marshal’s own palace, they finally located the Phoenix Lord of the Swooping Hawks.

In the smashed citadel, two supreme warriors dueled. I am not certain of the nature of the Marshal of the Lambastian Monks, but he was a powerful warrior in his own right; a warrior psyker skilled in the art of the kine-blade. When the Persecutor cyborgs located them, Baharroth was surrounded by a storm of silver daggers and serrated blades, twirling like a tornado around him, as the Marshal advanced upon him, hands crackling with telekinetic energies. Amazingly, not a single one struck the Phoenix Lord; his glowing sword shattered each blade as it struck, before deflecting each of the resultant splinters with equal ease. The confidence of the looming warrior Monk evaporated. With a final flourish, Baharroth swept his wings around him. His grav engines flung the kine blades back towards their master with the force of bullets. Only the hasty unsheathing of his force sword saved the Marshal’s life. Now the two warriors fought blade to blade.

The fight lasted three sword strokes. The marshal fell to the ground; first his two severed arms, followed by his head, then his dismembered corpse. Slowly, Baharroth turned to face the persecutor squads, who warily cycled their weapon systems. They hesitated before striking the cry of the wind. Deng Vaal, who was in orbit on board the Witchfynder vessel ‘Excruciator’, grew impatient with his minions. He demanded to see what they were frightened of and he used an override over their pict sensors; rerouting the feed direct to his command bridge.

Deng Vaal’s bionic eyes narrowed to focus upon the bright figure standing over the Marshal, framed by the sun streaming through the broken palace windows. He knew the Phoenix Lords, for he had researched much in his long and abhorrent life.

He grew pale and quivered with terror.

“Kill it! Kill it now! Fire!” he screamed, and the persecutors were mechanically obliged to follow his orders. Plasma bolts, sonic shockwaves, snarling bolt shells and streams of toxic needles flew from them as one, obliterating the throne and most of the back wall in a great fusillade of high-powered weaponry. But Baharroth had taken wing, and plunged amongst them with the force of a comet. The hulking half-machine monsters were sent sprawling across the tarnished marble. Even as they rose, ten of their number were felled by perfectly placed laser bolts that pierced hearts and vaporized minds with every shot. Hastily, the rest leapt to engage him before he gun down any more of them. Baharroth had expected this, and his wings shivered in anticipation. The Swooping Hawk used his own wings like vast vibro weapons, carving through carapace and ceramite with a similar ease to his own power weapon. The persecutors were cut down in their droves, bisected fragments of their bodies still glowing as they toppled to the ground.

The battle was over within minutes, ending with Baharroth plucking a severed head from the ground. His steel-grilled mask appeared to be grinning, and dominated Vaal’s pict-screen as he stared into the eyes of the dead Persecutor. Though no words left the Phoenix Lord’s lips, everyone on board knew what he had said to Vaal;

You are next.

The terrified scientist immediately ordered a bombardment of the city; it was to be razed. Plasma fires and the blast waves of kinetic impactors flattened the city barely an hour later, but already it was too late. Baharroth rose above the flaming city, surging through the air towards the upper edge of the planet’s atmospheric shell. He was too small to target with orbital weapons, so fighters were scrambled at once.

Baharroth and the Hawks engaged the hypersonic fighters in the thin atmospheric ceiling, battling their high powered foes in a silent ballet of laser discharge and darting maneuvers. Even the hawk exarches were no match for lightnings and furies. They were slain one by one, until only Baharroth remained. He leapt from fighter to fighter, carving through cockpits and slaying all within, before jumping from the pilotless aircraft and engaging another.

It was a kind of confused bemusement when the Cobra class destroyers escorting the Excruciator were ordered to engage a single figure, flying through the void. Nevertheless they diligently acquiesced. Their small anti-fighter turrets filled the void between them with a terrifying volume of firepower, but they were not designed to target such an incredibly tiny target. Not only this, but their own turret weapons were impacting (harmlessly) upon their fellow destroyers’ shields. These impacts did not harm them, but it send up walls of glowing impacts across their shields, making any sort of targeting all but impossible.

They lost the Phoenix Lord. Hours passed, as Vaal’s engineers and helm sensor officers scanned every square inch of space in orbit. Some claimed the Phoenix Lord was adrift in space, helpless. Others claimed he was dead finally. But Baharroth’s wings were did not function as a real hawk’s do. They were grav engines; void space made little difference to him. Of course, no Swooping Hawk would be used in a naval battle, as they could do no damage to even the tiniest naval vessel as a rule.

This rule however, did not apply to a Phoenix Lord, carrying a webway portal. Ten hours into the search, Baharroth re-emerged, inside the Excruciator.

Reports began to flood in of some great killing machine sweeping through the decks, destroying all the armed personnel who tried to stop it. Deng Vaal fled the bridge immediately, ordering two of his guards to follow him to the Null Vault. This was the location where all the heretical and tainted artifacts confiscated from condemned witches were stored during witch hunts. Ironically, Vaal’s only hope lay in the nightmarish devices he had long condemned his victims for possessing. He opened the vaults, and thrust whispering daemon weapons into his guards’ startled hands. Instantly, the female crusaders twisted into black- veined nightmares, who instantly tasted the scent of Baharroth as he closed upon their position. The twin slanneshi daemons who possessed his guards eagerly rushed to taste the soul of the Phoenix lord. Meanwhile, Vaal frantically searched for something to save his own worthless life.

As Baharroth slew another armsman patrol, the daemons found him. They mocked him for his futile defiance; didn’t he know that his death was foreseen before his birth? Baharroth psychically dueled with their venomous words.

She who Thirsts will thirst no longer, soon. Soon, she will suffer extinction, just as all things do.

The daemons laughed. “Do the Lords of the Phoenix King not know? Simple creatures; spears with souls; weapons and nothing more. They don’t see what we have planned. Silly little eldar. You still think you can win the great game? The great game is ending; the board will be flipped, and the pieces scattered. It has already started.”

And with that, the two lunged. Daemonic weapons clashed with supernatural metal. Only the devils of the great enemy could hold the Lord in deadly combat. For a moment, it seemed as if Baharroth would fall. But he returned, full of all the fury of Khaine and all the majestic power of Asuryan. Like the phoenix, his blade burned as he beheaded the possessed humans, before he shattered the daemon blades one after the other.

Baharroth was advancing, and Vaal grew desperate. He took up a warp jump generator, itself an eldar artifact. Baharroth arrived moments too late. Deng Vaal smirked as the generator activated. His expression turned to horror as he saw something within the nightmare realm he had foolishly flung himself within.

“Oh God-Emperor, I see it. I see N-“

Those were his last words, before Vaal was consumed by the warp portal, leaving nothing but the scent of ammonia on the air.

Baharroth disappeared from the ship soon after. He had killed only the armed soldiers inside the vessel and no one else.

The Cry of the Wind appeared numerous other times over the following five years; each time destroying the forces on both sides. Yet, without Vaal, Doloriad’s forces inevitably triumphed. As for Doloriad, he was assassinated soon after by the Tallarn Junta, who grew tired of his extravagant lifestyle and a petty cruelty that was too much even for the church of the wasteland-Emperor. Several Ecclesiarches and would-be Emperors followed, but the Theologian union never again rose to become a threat to the galactic community. In the years that followed, they would be utterly overshadowed by the greater menaces that moved against the forces of sanity.

Jain Zar

This Phoenix Lord was involved in running conflicts with the forces of Chaos. In both the Western and Eastern Chaos Imperiums, she was a stalking silent force of swirling destruction. Her weapon, the triskele known as The silent death, was a recurring theme in the mythology of a dozen chaos civilizations; it was the representation of vengeance, and of the punishment of lost gods.

On the blade world of Kalderus, she faced the entire population of the khorne-tainted hive world, who had been reduced to naked savages clad only in blood, wielding chainblades and axes of a wild profusion. It is said that she and her daughters battled atop a mountain fashioned from the millions killed by her in this grand battle. Though none of her seven dozen Banshees survived, she stepped from the world, victorious and unbowed.

Her screaming war cry made a battalion of the despoiled fall upon their bayonets, rather than face her devastating fury. During the brutal war of Kalnendris, she intervened to aid the human Imperium of Garrosynx (secretly, a world ruled by an underground cult of exodites) in their war against Huron Blackheart, who sought to open the Dark Gates of Rhidhol. She appeared as if from nowhere, and she struck at the heart of the Tyrant King’s fleet. His Corsair Chosen clashed with her handmaiden Banshees, lumbering terminators dueling with lithe armored females in a dazzling display of power weapon blade work. She evaded their blows, and clashed with Huron himself. As witnesses from both sides of the combat were busily killing each other, the account of their duel is fragmentary. Both the Phoenix and the Tyrant struck blows against one another, but the disciple of Morai Heg and the war God Khaine was the more proficient combatant, and defeated Huron, hacking what little flesh remained on his body until it was naught but bloody ribbons. Of course, weeks later, Huron’s surgeons had once more brought him to life, and replaced yet more of his flesh with bionic augmentation. Meanwhile, the Hamadraya swelled in size, unseen by all but Huron himself.

Jain Zar seemed to particularly come to the aid of all seers and warp-prognosticators. Surprisingly, even non-eldar witches were aided by her enigmatic presence. She cut down the daemon prince N’Kari as it sought to devour the soul of Prognosticator Alcain of the Silver Skulls’ 8th, during the infamous four-way siege of Varsavia. It seems that she was a patron of all those who utilized Morai Heg’s gift. Fuegan

Fuegan and his Dragon Disciples fought the necron onslaught on the moons of the Hex-Fort, and held off the newly risen Legions of the Deceiver, giving the Farsight Kassar Enclave the precious time needed to build their defenses in the wake of the invasion. Fuegan’s fire pike, and the fusion blasters of his minions were some of the few weapons capable of severely disabling necrons; forcing them back to their Tomb complexes on Thex Prime time and again. He did this not to defeat the necrons (who he could not defeat alone, even enhanced as he was by countless ambient souls), but to corrupt their programming through the constant need for necron revival. The deceiver’s once disturbingly sentient forces began to degrade.

Fuegan was cornered by the Deceiver’s forces around the world of Kanus. Fuegan walked amongst the defenders, pointing out weakpoints in necron shells and blazing his own path of destruction amongst the enemy. But the necrons could not be held back for long. Entire nations of Tau and human defenders were utterly wiped out; settlements, buildings and people all atomized within minutes by powerful gauss pylons and destructive aeonic discharges. At the height of the siege, a new vessel appeared over Kanus. It was a vast tomb ship, dwarfing the Cairn Class vessels that moved out of its way. The vessel was golden and silver, glittering with crackling green fire. This was the vessel was evidently a flagship of the fleet, and it instantly destroyed the remaining defenders’ vessels in orbit.

Then, at the peak of the battle, Fuegan vanished in a shimmer of green energy; he had been phased aboard the mighty tombship. He and his retinue reappeared inside one of the strange alien laboratories within the ship. Fuegan’s weapons were absent, much to his silent fury. He attempted to leave, but a powerful field of azure energy enshrouded him. Eventually, a Lord of the necron emerged. This figure was obviously one of the elder necron, for his form was adorned with all the decoration and fine artifice of a long-forgotten culture, while the newer necrons bore no ornamentation whatsoever; they were purely functional new recruits. This necron was clad in a thin film of microscopic scarabs, that rearranged themselves at a molecular level to allow the entity to take on the form of any living humanoid. Somehow, Fuegan knew this entity. Its actual name goes unrecorded, but humans knew it simply as Ralei at some points in history.

The entity was intrigued by Fuegan, as he was essentially a soul construct housed in an artificial body, much like the necrons themselves. Fuegan watched as all but one of his exarchs were slowly flayed, to see whether their internals were biological. To Ralei’s disappointment, they were.

“You are different. You are not alive. The creature you call your god was cunning, despite his emotional instability. The molten shards of the reaper must have contained elements of Kaelis Ra’s dark knowledge. You are a product of his tinkering. Kaelis Ra was inspired by Drachen of the Void to create our mirror-bodies, and your warlord was inspired to make an image of us for his own wars. How quaint. I will ensure you are exterminated at the close of this procedure,” Ralei informed Fuegan, who burned with an incandescent rage.

“I will not die here. Only I call the final dance of the Asuryata. It is fate,” he rumbled, his voice like a stoked furnace.

Ralei’s scarab-face twisted into a smile, as he took on the form of an old Eldar hero. “Fate is a lie. The greatest lie. Sentiment and mysticism are foolishness. We built our gods, both of us. The path of existence is not fixed.”

“The End is foretold. All paths converge.”

Ralei, luckily, had not fully disarmed Fuegan; his concealed melta bombs were still fixed to his armor. With a sudden jolt of movement, he threw one. The blast momentarily shorted out the containment field, and Fuegan took this opportunity to leap free. Ralei advanced upon him, but Fuegan thrust a second bomb into Ralei’s face, and turned it into molten slag within moments, before he fled the chamber, pursued by questing gauss rays. Ralei reformed soon after, unleashing a piercing metallic scream which activated every necron inside the tombship.

Fuegan was hunted through the labyrinth of conscripting metal corridors and passageways, that actively sought to ensnare him as he fled from the screeching gauss beams that shredded all in their path. Somehow, he regained his fire pike and his axe during his headlong flight. The twisted geometries of the necron vessel would have drove a lesser entity insane within a few minutes, but Fuegan was a veteran traveler of the webway portal system, a network so infinitely complex, even the old Eldar Empire had failed to map its full extent. Only the Phoenix Lords, the Harlequins and the Atlas Infernal were proficient enough to traverse this realm. The dimensional games of the necrons were as naught compared with the impossible realm; their tricks were still anchored to reality and could never reach the height of true insanity.

The burning lance stabbed at the many hearts of the tombship; destroying nodes with pike and axe, and piercing gauss matter reactors by the score. His skill and dexterity allowed him to avoid the disintegrating energy-meshes of the internal defenses and the frenzied talons of the Wraiths that drifted after him. Finally, Ralei caught him, at the heart of the vessel; its aeonic core. The core was a star caged and consumed by the internal workings of the vessel. It seemed impossible that a class M star could fit within a vessel so comparatively small, but it was so; green veins of energy poisoning the fusion furnace as its energies were extracted with 100% efficiency.

The necron lord was a terrifying opponent, and the two clashed in silhouette before the colossal star. Its energy and lethal heat was barely contained by forcefields, and the battlefield of the Necron and the Phoenix Lord was constantly bathed in gouts of plasma fire and radioactive discharges, that blasted any necrons who sought to intervene in their fight to atoms.

Ralei was a puppeteer of time, and he moved with a speed which was impossible for anything mortal. Fuegan somehow matched him, but was forced backwards with every flourish and every blow. His fire axe avoided clashing with the warscythe of the Deceiver’s herald, for nothing would stay the blade of a necron lord. These were two soul constructs, built in elder days; perfect killing machines, bred for war and extermination respectively.

Ralei was gaining the upper hand, but he had failed to take into account Fuegan’s true motives. He was never interested in dueling Ralei. The Burning Lance was a destroyer, and no vehicle was too large for him to slay. As they dueled, his weapons had also been firing all around him; it seemed to ralei that he was continually missing, when in fact Fuegan was hitting his targets every single time. His targets were the forcefield generating pylons.

Too late, Ralei realized his mistake, screeching in impotence as the star surged into life; finally allowed to progress in its time line. It began to expand. Ralei’s body was vaporized by the swelling giant, and he was forced to be reborn in a newer, plainer shell (to his cold distemper). Coronal mass ejections gutted the tombship from all angles and directions, as the star slipped its bonds and punished the necron for their hubris. From the outside, the tombship appeared to distort horribly, before great shafts of light and plasma fire stabbed outwards like sea urchin spines made of fire. Then, the ship collapsed into nothingness, and a great star was sudden born in the heart of the necron fleet. The gravity pulled in the closest vessels before they could engage their inertialess drives. The rest vanished, as their engines effortless carried them from the system.

Of Fuegan, we know little after that. But I know that he survives. For he must. For he will. For he has.

No one is more pivotal than the burning lance in the coming events. Somehow, I know he has not perished.

Additional Background Section 19: The Tales of the Phoenix Lords [Part Two]

Maugan Ra

Maugan Ra entrenched himself in the heart of the western galaxy during this time of strife and terror. Much like the Reaper, he was death in physical form. Anyone foolish enough to enter the systems bordering the ancient dead world of Stormvald were never seen again; Ra destroyed them, and his gloomy grandeur drew more and more Dark Reapers to his cause. The planet of Stormvald was a world of airless skies, and ossified remains, as far as the eyes could see. Some bodies were of men and aliens slain in recent years. Most were the bones of long dead monsters, some larger than titans even in their deathly repose. Some claimed that these were the bones of a flight of dragons destroyed by the master of death. In many ways they are correct I suppose.

Yet, he was not the only eldar battling in the twisted western marches of the galaxy. Lingering in the nightmarish shores of the eye of terror, the beleaguered craftworld Altansar lingered. To look upon it was to look upon a tragic site. It was a worldship in ruin; its towers were smashed in several places, while fires and destruction tainted many of its gardens and fortresses within. Altansar had returned to reality during M41. But ever since it had escaped the eye, its people had been pariahs amongst the other craftworld eldar, and they had not been included in the grand council’s vision of the resplendent Ynnead; in their eyes, the eldar of Altansar were forever tainted.

Yet, ironically, it had been this craftworld which fought the most desperate and endless of garrison actions in the history of their race. The Eldar of Biel-Tan called them ‘mon- keighyana’ due to their almost human-like stubbornness. They had faced down daemonic Legions of mutated warships and vile writhing monsters. The chaos-possessed void whale Charibdis had ripped almost fifteen miles of hull form its left flank, killing a million eldar in one evening of freezing hell. The few Imperiums still not aligned with one of the great Imperial powers of the ends would throw whole fleets of mercenaries and charlatans against Altansar, in the vain hope of stealing some valuable technology which would give them an edge. Rak’gol Marauders made raids into the worldship only to murder and to pollute the soil of the eldar city. Even the near-mythic K’nib were know to occasionally sharpen their claws upon Altansar’s metaphoric whetstone. All but a handful of their webway portals remained viable for transport, and even then only the larger passages; the others were constantly besieged by opportunistic corsairs, Commorrite madmen and daemonic un-life that crawled form the darkness between webway and reality.

The few non-martial paths still followed by the Altansar eldar were morbid figures; sculptors who only created works of screaming despair, with grasping fingers and sallow features. The few preserved parks and gardens were requisitioned by the most influential of the eldar leadership, for their own needs. Exarch levels were dangerously high within the craftworld, and the stink of Khaine tainted the valleys, streets and cities within. The majority of the Aspect warriors were warp spiders and Dark reapers; for these two reflected the group animus of this Craftworld under siege.

They still had farseers, but the ‘Parliament of the Potentialities’ was a coven of psykers who had been overworked to the point of mania. Yet, their guiding visions had allowed desperate fleets of Altansar vessels to attack and weaken their enemies just before they attacked. No invader was quite powerful enough to fully best Altansar, and every enemy that tried always came back bloodied and battered. Every year, Abaddon would send his newest generals to cut their teeth on Altansar. Most died, but those that didn’t learned fast, and made other worlds suffer soon enough.

Yet, the eldar of Altansar, for the most part were not monsters, as the old craftworld civilization would have had them portrayed. Most still worshipped old gods, and looked to Khaine for defense against the Annihilator. In the highest echelons of the leadership of Altansar, there were hidden groups, rumored to be led by the farseer Malytaes, with ties to Old commorrite Noble Houses (and secret portals leading to the dark city), and possible links to the dreaded ‘Council of Old Follies’ (more upon these terrible beings in a later section, when I have built up the courage to depict them). However, this was the silent minority amongst a race of stalwart warriors.

The most notable of their invasions was also one of its last (last before the spectacular final year of M55, when men walked upon the silver skin and when nothing in the galaxy could ever be the same again...). The last great siege of Altansar was not precipitated by some dread daemon or blasphemous entity, but by two figures more deadly than either. The Wolf and the Raven; the two primarchs of the wilderness attacked Altansar, with all the power and cunning they could muster.

They preceded their attack with dozens of smaller assaults and skirmishes across a wide area of space. The over-worked farseers struggled to define which attack was pivotal in the coming conflict. Corax led his weregeld on raids against neighboring chaos warlords, who in turn spilled across eldar defenses, while Russ lured enemies towards him, and made the attacks he committed look like the work of random raiders, not the coordinated ploys of a master general.

Slowly but surely, the roving bands of beasts managed to close upon Altansar with their stolen vessels, and Altansar was almost unprepared for the eventual strike which came out of the blue.

It began with refueling ships entering the system en mass. Defensive weaponry blasted them into flaming blasts, but these blasts concealed the dagger-like form of long-dead Tychellus’ battlecruiser, as it ploughed through the gaping wound in the craftworld’s port side. The ship wrecked itself in one of the ash gardens of the upper levels, and like rain, the wulfen descended from this high point down into Altansar’s bowels.

However, Altansar had the perfect response to terrifying close combat opponents; they fought them at range. Millions of Reaper missiles screeched into the Wulfen and wild-human allies of Russ and Corax, and once more Altansar burned with war.

Amazingly, the human forces had vehicles and guns never before seen by eldar or possibly even the old Imperium; the primarchs, despite their near-feral lifestyle, still had the ability and the knowledge to create weapons and war machines of such quality they were only slightly weaker than true Imperial vehicles. Those this was truly impressive, their weapons were still rather ramshackle, and the war-hardened skimmers of Altansar hunted their armor through the bone-groves with wild glee. The Aspect of the Vaunted Warhorse (an Aspect unique to Altansar, based upon the art of falcon grav tank warfare) led these hunts from their beautifully-crafted skimmers, destroying each human tank and APC with the perfect execution. Russ and Corax were not interested in conquering Altansar. They both converged upon the Autarch’s Dome of Sapphire. Here was where the leadership of Altansar dwelt, and where the majority of their portal chambers and soulstone vaults were to be found. As the primarchs approached, wraithguard and gliding Titans folded into their path, as the autarch Arius the Stinging Song altered his fluid battle plan to accommodate the terrifying force of the primarchs. Any warriors or vehicles that stood in their path were destroyed with almost casual ease, and it was only when the D-weapons of the eldar constructs appeared that the primarchs were forced on the defensive. They had to dodge and flee from the scouring warp weapons, lest their bodies be destroyed utterly. In the end it was Russ who bested these foes, by drawing them into the dome of crystal seers. The titans refused to fire inside the chamber, as did the wraithguard. Russ outflanked them inside, and he climbed the titans in turn, ripping their pilots away as he howled insanely. His captured bonesword blazed with the fire of his soul, and it consumed the bodies of those it slew. Eventually, he stood atop a pile of broken wraithbone and ruined eldar flesh. It was only when he heard the thunderous footfalls of the Avatar that he stopped his grinning, and turned to face a true foe.

Meanwhile, Corax entered the Dome of Sapphire undetected, his shadowy form slipping between the guard patrols effortlessly. When he finally revealed himself, it was only to rip the Autarch asunder, before he slew all his disciples. The farseers, despite their ethereal and aloof natures, grew truly afraid as Corax advanced upon them. Only Malytaes seemed utterly unfazed by the bestial primarch. He merely smiled upon Corax, before he slipped from the chamber.

Lightning and psychic force blossomed across Corax, but he would not be denied. The magicks of the farseers were failing to stop the post-human demi-god. Then, a flight of reaper missiles struck his flank in a catastrophic blast, flinging the primarch away with a screech. From the rising smoke stepped ten Dark Reapers, clutching their steaming weapons with grim finality.

Russ cross blades with the blazing giant, swelling to match the metal warlord in stature as he grew more engorged with warp power. The two beings clashed like dueling gods, destroying everything in the way of their fight. The screaming spear of the Avatar met the bonesword, and their energies fought for supremacy as much as their owners did.

Altansar’s Avatar was a true monster; fed on an endless diet of death and destruction, until it was a true reflection of Khaine as the demented nightmare he had always been before Slannesh was even a dream. Wailing Doom moved faster than a man’s mind could follow, and almost faster than a Primarch’s. Suddenly, as Russ’ alien sword was turned aside, the Avatar thrust his bloody hand forwards, and grabbed the wolf king by the throat. Russ roared in pain as the fragment of Khaine turned his blood into boiled vapor in his veins, and cooked the flesh around his neck.

Slowly, Russ’s strength seemed to wane, and he was slowly hoisted into the air, before he was unceremoniously slammed into the ground with enough force to splinter the ground beneath him for forty meters in every direction. Russ made to stand, but a burning boot slammed his head into the ground once more as it stamped down. Briefly stunned, the Khaine-like abomination turned, sensing Corax.

Corax had recovered from the missile assault almost immediately, his power whip taking the heads of most of the reapers with one flick of its coils. The Avatar saw him, through all the walls and bulkheads separating them, and across the half a mile expanse between them. With an inhuman howl, it cast its spear at Corax. The blade punched through a dozen walls and wraithbone struts, before it stabbed Corax in the shoulder. The giant was more surprised than hurt, but surprise turned to alarm when the Avatar called its spear back to its hand. The weapon instantly retracted, dragging Corax back with it. When it finally returned to the statue’s grasp, it swept the blade up, and flicked Corax from the tip. He slammed to earth with similar force to Russ. Molten steel flowed from its open jaws like daemonic saliva as it hungered for further combat.

It had become too powerful. The souls of the dying and the dead were fuelling it, feeding its rampages. The wraithbone of the craftworld glowed a dull red, as if it was conducting its insanity into its own heart. Eldar across the craftworld dropped their weapons, clawing at their eyes and the eyes of their fellows as they snarled and cursed with murderous hate. Their blood thundered through their veins, until they heard naught but the rushing of it, and saw nothing but the red of the ruptured blood vessels in their eyes.

Corax and Russ realized something was wrong with the Avatar. They had to destroy it now. Together they assaulted it from multiple angles. But the creature was too powerful; it was fuelled by something else, something powerful. In their mind’s, Russ and Corax saw images of a dismembered body, crawling back together. Viscera and intestines knitting back into a single body. A crown of steel and a hand of red.

They battled the Avatar with all their might, and eventually forced it back towards its Shrine. But with a final flare of power, the Avatar threw them backwards. It gripped its spear ever more tightly, as it growled in a hate borne of some terrible truth. Then it screamed. A burning line of blinding light raced up its torso, from its groin up to the top of its head. The line was the tip of a blade, erupting from its molten flesh. With a final hideous roar of frustration, the Avatar fell, bisected perfectly. The two halves of the statue struck the ground with dual clangs, inert and lifeless. The entire craftworld seemed to shudder, and cool.

Standing behind the fallen Avatar stood a grim figure in armor of pitch and bone, a gleaming scythe clutched in his grip. The Phoenix Lord Maugan Ra stood before them now. He was silent, and simply stared at them with a passionless skull mask. He was barely taller than a human, yet his presence equally matched one of the primarchs’. Russ and Corax’s true target and purpose upon Altansar had at last appeared.

“I thought an attack upon your homeland would draw you here. In elder days, I would have ripped the eyes from anyone foolish enough to defile Fenris. You think like a man of honor,” Russ grinned, and he loosened his joints as if preparing for a sparring match. Corax merely glared as Ra from beneath his mess of bedraggled black hair.

Russ tossed aside his bonesword, and drew the blade Ulfskarl; a blade he had fashioned for himself while in exile.

“Let us see if the sagas of your deeds are as justified as mine,” Russ stated simply, before charging towards Maugan Ra.

Maugan Ra shot him. Dozens of perfectly placed shuriken, that struck him in every one of his yet to be healed wounds from fighting the Avatar. Russ dropped as if winded, falling to his knees across the steps leading to the Shrine.

Corax closed the distance more quickly than Russ, but Ra caught him with a volley from Maugetar, which caught his shoulder wound, which caused him to flinch and narrowly miss Maugan Ra when his charge reached the Phoenix Lord. Ra stepped aside, and deflected the Raven’s power lash with a flick of his scythe. With a thunderclap of discharge, the two weapons recoiled from one another. At point blank range, Maugetar fired directly into Corax a hundred times. This was enough to stagger even the Lord of the Raven Guard, who fell back slightly.

“I like him,” Russ laughed, as he pounded his fist into the craftworld’s hull with the force of a vengeful titan. The force of the shockwave unsteadied Ra for a moment, and that was all he needed. He rushed the Phoenix Lord, and slammed his shoulder into him as he swept his blade around to finish the fight.

Ra rode the shoulder barge, and swayed aside to avoid the frostblade’s chilling touch. His own blade hooked behind Russ’ knee, and slashed away the tendons there. Russ backhanded Ra around the face, and the Lord was sent sprawling. Maugan rolled to his feet, his legs setting as he stood. Ignoring the immobility a normal man would have experienced, Russ too rose to his feet.

Russ raised his sword to point at Ra. Ra in turn, had his weapon aimed squarely at Russ’ neck. Russ knew if he lunged, he would be instantly killed; decapitated by a volley of screaming shuriken. But Ra did not shoot, for Corax stood at his side, his own sidearm pressed against the Lord’s Temple. Corax had outmaneuvered him, as the raven was perfectly suited to do.

A stand-off.

Leman Russ raised his hands in a placating manner.

“This gets us nowhere. You know why we have come, Reaper,” Russ explained, and Ra knew then that Russ spoke the truth. He did know why they had come to Altansat, just to gain an audience with him.

Ra lowered his cannon, and Corax soon followed suit. Maugan Ra walked away from the Shrine’s steps, gesturing for the primarchs to follow him. It was only then that Corax noticed that his sidearm had a shuriken lodged in its firing mechanism. Maugan Ra had already disarmed him, before he had even drew the pistol. Russ quelled his brother’s wrath, and bid him to follow him after the eldar warrior.

For only Maugan Ra could help them enter Commorragh. Only Ra could help them save the last surviving member of their broken family...

Additional Background Section 20: The Phoenix Lords

Karandas and the Fallen Phoenix

Much of the Shadow Warrior’s history is lost to the natural stealthy and elusive nature of the Phoenix Lord himself. He moved unseen through across the battlefields and bone yards of the galaxy, ending the lives of the evil or simply the powerful. Many are the accounts of generals and whole divisions of soldiers being butchered in the midst of battles, or unexpectedly slain by shifting green shades in the depths of jungle roads.

He emerged but rarely into the light of history throughout the chronicle accounts. There are only two occasions when this was the case. The first was when he was discovered inside the central chamber of a krork hulk, and only the concerned effort of all the ‘War of the Krork’ soldiers on board the vessel which forced the Phoenix Lord to depart, but not before recapturing the huge gemstone the krork elders had stored in their vaults, along with an entire library of Krork datacores, that documented the accumulated knowledge the krork had on the creatures whose names had long been lost. These entities were the so-called ‘Old Ones’; the term granted to the First Races to evolve upon planets.

The second time was through his own choice. He chose to challenge his wayward mentor for the third time in their long existence. The First time had been during the fall of the first Temple, where Arhra turned upon his brethren, and Karandas had had to turn from his master in order to drive him out. The second time was during the age of the mon keigh Imperium, in the temple of the Slicing Orbs of Zandros; an indecisive duel in which neither warrior could gain the upper hand. The third clash was different. Both Lords had expanded their powers greatly since their last encounter, swelled by the captured souls of their willing servants and followers until they were luminous beings barely contained by their ornate runic armor.

Arhra sent out a clear signal to his nemesis so Karandas could find him. Upon the xenos city- world of Intrazzi, a vast army of murderers and warriors had gathered, butchering the populace in evermore violent and cruel ways. This vast murder cult was billions strong, and headed by the silent Incubi, who discreetly lead the slaughter squads as they went about the business of killing everyone on the planet, be they the native aliens, or the human dignitaries and merchants who also made their home upon the vibrant trading hub on the south-west border between the Vulkan and transgovian Imperiums. The world was located in the Rift of ‘Creed’s Command’, an artificially induced warp rift which protected the region somewhat from the Dragon’s ships at this juncture in galactic history.*

For some strange reason, the Incubi warriors had also caused the primary plasma reactors of the world city to go into meltdown. The reactor core, enhanced in its blazing power by a vial of exotic dark matter, burned down through into the mantle of the planet, until it created a titanic volcanic structure at the heart of the city, spreading a dense cloud of smog and ash across the entire world. Every day, forces from Commorragh and other pirate enclaves dragged in artifacts and strange objects, which were tossed into the molten core and there they ran fluid in the flaming heart of the planet.

Karandas made all speed to the system via the webway. But another force had beaten them to the planet. The refugees from the necron-destroyed Transgovian Imperium had formed a mighty warfleet, supported by the allied Commanderies of the Bulls Repentant (formed from the smashed remnants of the Minotaurs, who had long ago placed an eternal penance upon themselves, for their part in the horrific Nyx Incident. Long may that event be remembered...) and the Fire Beasts, who themselves were supported by the Nocturne Legio Titanicus and the ‘Thunder Lizards’ Legion of tankers, in their powerful MkIII blant tanks. The Vulkan Imperium, under the emergency absolute rulership of Vulkan during the Dragon War, had promised the Transgovian remnants a place within his Imperium should they snatch back Creed’s Command from the heretics and maniacs who infested it. They had leapt at the chance with all the desperate courage of men who had nothing whatsoever to lose. By the time Karandas reached Intrazzi, it was a vision of hell. Titans and tanks dueled with the captured defense guns of the city, and the huge dark Eldar Void Barges, that hung in low orbit as they pounded their foes with vast dark lances and void munitions that swallowed whole companies of their foes.

The human khainites were bedecked in spiked and bladed armor in crude imitation of their alien masters, and fought with psychotic glee with chainblades, lashes axes and swords of a wild variety. Kabalites fought alongside them, occasionally maiming one of their mon keigh allies, just to see the look of confused betrayal on their faces.

By all rights of course, the battle for the planet should have been won easily by the Vulkan- loyalists. However, the other side had Drazhar Arhra on their side. Intrazzi was infested with tainted webway portals that criss-crossed its surface with endless complexity. From these passages, the Phoenix Lord of the Incubi struck at the enemy from all sides. His demi-klaives ended lives with every blow. Tanks were immobilized and carved open by the consummate killer, before he filled the vehicles with a psychic onslaught which melted the men within into the hull itself. He fought without honor, striking foes in the back or blinding them just before a fight. His power was staggering and terrifying in equal measure, for he was being powered not only by his captured souls of fallen Incubi, but by the pain and suffering of everyone on the surface of the churning, industrial hell.

The Lord High Emperor of Transgovia was killed after a single dismissive blow of Arhra, and his elite half-ogryn bodyguards followed him minutes later. Amber lightning pierced the red and grey ash clouds over the city, and the streets literally flowed with blood and broken bones. Khornate daemons were drawn to the feast, alongside Khymerae and their beastmasters and a crazed assortment of warp-creatures we still don’t have names for. The Transgovians carried on with relentless determination, heedless of their mounting casualties. Went their banners fell or their commanders were broken, others stepped over their bodies and picked up the banners from cold dead hands.

The tide was against Arhra’s men, but he cared not for his mortal dupes. They craved a bloody end, and the Fire beasts in particular seemed all too willing to oblige. Always the most ruthless of the commanderies, the Fire beasts broke their enemies with savage glee, ripping them apart with their hands in some cases.

And the titans walked. It was a spectacular sight according to surviving witnesses. Dozens of giants stomped across the field; Warhounds, Warlords and even their command Titan (the Imperator known as ‘Tychus Rex’) crossed the city like bespoke gods. Their scorching beams and megaton warheads scoured life from the planet in vast conflagrations of nuclear force. Defense emplacements were burned to bedrock, and millions died under their relentless bombardments. Tanks were nothing to them, and they crushed them beneath their huge heels like beetles. The Nocturne Legion had been created at the behest of Vulkan at the beginning of his Imperium. They were the battle-scarred veterans of the frontlines of hundreds of campaigns. At this time, the Legio had only just returned from a long stint on the frontlines against the Dragon, and were under-manned. Nevertheless, they were devastating on this battlefield. Karandas burst from his webway portal in silence, backed by his exarchs. The first beings that leapt at him were Flesh hounds that rattled their frills as they sought to rip him asunder. They died within seconds and Karandas was already rushing through the bloody mist of their corpses before they had a chance to sink their claws into flesh.

He carved a path through Imperial and cultist alike, on a direct beeline towards the colossal volcano that the Titans were attempting to scale as it towered over even the tallest spires. It was topped with a dark crown of a fortress. This was where Karandas knew his foe would find him, and there was the only place where he could end it.

The sound of battle was a riotous booming that rattled the very earth. Whole blocks of alien towers toppled as the ground rippled beneath them. Karandas rode the buildings as they fell, leaping form one collapsing ruin to another with the grace and fluidity of a swooping bat. His cadre of exarchs followed suit, claws snapping and chainblades purring hungrily.

And through all the thunderous cacophony of the swirling, endless war, there was a deeper rhythm; a great pulsing sound, just below mortal hearing. Thumping and rumbling with a regular beat...

Adderkavada, the Commander and Master of the Bulls Repentant, stood alone amidst the remnants of his battle brothers’ ruined predator hulls. His great fail flashed with lethal energies as he held off a dozen Klaivex, led by one of the High Hierarchs of the Incubi temple. The Klaives and the power blades of the flail clashed in endless complexity as their energies discharged in all directions. It was said the battle looked like a living thunderstorm, as power field lightning flashed within the billowing smoke and dust clouds whipped up by the combat. He held back the Incubi, as his men clashed with the speeding raiders that sought to outflank the transgovians.

Adderkavada knew he was doomed but he fought on. He lost a leg, and fought on. He was cut and slashed in a dozen places, but he fought on. Some (spurious) legends claim he fought on after the Hierarch beheaded him with a scissoring flourish of his demi-klaives, and lived long enough to bisect the offending eldar before he too perished.

The Captain of the Fire beasts (his name was not recorded in my sources), fought his way to his thunderhawk, and flew the machine personally through the chaos of the battle, directly towards the looming Volcano that sought to pierce heaven. As he flew towards the fiery summit, he was intercepted by a great beast that soured on terrible pinions. The Captain felt heavy hooves crashed against the roof of his flyer, followed by the hideous shriek of metal being torn away by a great burning axe head. His Chapter watched from afar at the aerial drama. A bloodthirster of Khorne, drawn to Intrazzi by the waves of hate and anger radiating out into the warp, had leapt upon the thunderhawk, to prevent any interruption of the ritual within. (At this point, it would be foolish not to acknowledge the overlap between Khaine and Khorne, though so many eldar have long tried to deny it.)

The Captain’s command squad, who flew with him, took up their weapons, and prepared to face the embodiment of rage with their own form of bestial wrath. Karandas reached the summit first. The temple-fortress was guarded in all approaches by the Incubi; the Aspect killers. The hate for the fallen ones was incandescent amongst the Striking Scorpions, and they fought like men possessed (and, I suppose, they were precisely that in a way...).

The temple, which was filled with winding, complex gantries that crossed between vast reservoirs and rivers of siphoned magma, became an arena for a hundred separate duels and battles; some where Incubi and Scorpion were evenly matched, others where several Incubi fought one Scorpion, and vice versa. The hellishly hot chambers resounded with the sounds of blade upon blade, and the exultant howling of Incubi, or the wet gurgles of slain ones. Karandas moved through them like oil. Most of those he killed didn’t raise a blade against him, for they didn’t realize he had even struck them until he passed them by, and they collapsed into a dozen pieces. These fights were afterthoughts to the Phoenix Lord; only reaching the inner sanctum of the this abomination mattered.

What he found was horrific.

The inner chamber was a mesh of bridges that spanned a half-kilometer caldera that fumed with molten rock dredged up from the bowels of the earth, held in place only by a forcefield. Upon the bridges, gangs of slaves struggled to carry hundreds upon hundreds of statues of dark metal. Once they reached the desired location, their masters would butcher them, and cast them and the statues into the fire, their screams nectar to the bladed fiends that cackled with glee. But this was not the worst sin Karandas witnessed.

The Hierarchs stood at the edge of the blazing spectacle, and they opened their soultraps, unleashing all the aspect warrior souls ensnared by them over the millennia. These mournful ghosts surged into the molten horror below. At the heart of the volcanic structure, the thunderous rhythm was impossibly loud yet inaudible to those who had no connection to Him.

To Khaine.

Karandas threw himself wordlessly into combat. He cut down everyone he could find, be they slave or incubi, kabalite or corsair. He only paused when Arhra finally showed himself.

Arhra had fallen far in the years since his original creation. His ornate armor glowed with a dark light in the spaces between plates. A complex headdress of interlinking horns adorned his narrow war mask, which looked almost gaunt in the flickering light of the lava-fire. His Demi-Klaives were gripped like mantis claws in his gauntlets. Mantis faced down Scorpion across the expanse.

Drazhar Arhra, famous for never uttering a single word, raised his hand and took over the mind of a lesser eldar, who sudden writhed in terror as his vocal chords were puppeted by the silent menace

“You came,” Arhra forced him to state in a voice so deep and unnaturally resonant, it easily carried across the vast distance between them.

“I did. What is rising here shall not. It is a twisted shade of a God long gone.”

“Nay, He shall be born anew; a god risen from the ruins. You should be proud, for he is reborn as a Phoenix should; from the ashes.”

Karandas shook his head. “The thing that resides here is not Khaine. It is a fractured, mad thing. A thing born into madness and destruction without focus or control. The Master of death saw this upon Altansar,” the Phoenix Lord explained coldly, his voice a silken whisper compared to Arhra’s.

“And that is not Khaine? You cast me out, so long ago, when I was Khaine’s most loyal follower. Your Aspect temples are tainted by Asuryan and his nobility. Do you so readily forget the name Kaela Mensha Khaine? The bloody handed god! The kin- slayer, whose most famous act was the slaying of an eldar hero! I do him homage!”

“You follow the Aspect of the Murderer. The eldar must be more than this. This cannot come to pass.”

Arhra’s response hasn’t been recorded, but the two beings soon clashed, on the overlapping bridges that loomed over the volcano’s mouth. Karandas’ mandiblaster was utterly harmless to his foe, pattering against his armored skin like drizzle. His shuriken pistol likewise had little effect. The battle came down to blades and claws.

The chainsword, the snapping claw and the slicing Klaive blades. They exchanged a wild flurry of blows, and each flourish of swirling arcing patterns was ever more complex. Those blows that missed carved through bridge after bridge, sending the ruins clattering into the lake of fire. They leapt like acrobats between the remaining bridge spars and mangled remains of railings, crackling energy fields rebounding with concussive repetition.

For all Karandas’ skill and subtly, he could not overcome the terrible power of Arhra. He realized then, as he was battered from pillar to pillar, from bridge to bridge by his former master, that he could not hope to best the dark father alone.

The thunderhawk, meanwhile, plummeted to the ground in a shower of flames and debris. The impact threw the Bloodthirster across the sloping ash plain, but also crippled many of the command squad. Only the Captain managed to haul himself to his feet. His left arm was torn away, but his right still clutched a storm bolter, which he fired relentlessly at the towering red fiend. The damson howled in pain as the bolts struck, but it didn’t even stagger the creature. With a hideous roar, it prepared to charge.

Then a deeper, louder roar drowned its own out. The Bloodthirster turned, only to be suddenly struck by the descending foot bastion of the Tychus Rex. It blared another discordant bellow from its war horn as it held the daemon pinned, while its bastion gunners fired everything they had at the struggling monster.

From the unnamed captain’s report, he watched as the Tychus Rex began to scale the volcano itself, one bone shuddering footstep at a time, volcano cannon blazing, while missiles streamed from its shoulder bastions, and its vast combat weapon roared with a deafening voice. Its armor was rent and torn by constant Ravager assaults, but it remained unbowed.

The engine marched.

The duel of the Phoenix Lords was interrupted by events that occurred in the volcano below. The molten abomination beneath them began to rise. The first thing to emerge was a titanic claw, wreathed in blood and smoke. But it was not Khaine. The churning nightmare was metal and fire and covered in screaming, angry faces, but it could not settle upon a form as it rose from the summit at speed. All the bridges were dashed into atoms as the metal flood erupted from the mountain.

A swirling column of silver punched its way skywards, till it appeared to be a mighty steel tornado.

The princeps of the Tychus Rex was the only one to see the entirety of the abomination form the chin of his titan. It quivering hands he raised his vox pack to his lips, and signaled to the Fire Beast Captain to signal a full retreat. He ordered the astartes to get as many people off the planet and away from there as possible.

“This is Tychus Rex. Wideband signal to all Engines and supporting units in area; fall back. The target cannot be fought.”

“Then what are you going to do?” the captain responded on his vox.

“Us? We’re going to fight it! All weapons load for bear!” was the last known transmission of the Tychus Rex. It was claimed the princeps was driven mad by the creature, or possibly his Titan’s machine spirit had invaded his own mind. However, I believe he decided to fight in order to save his Legio and his allies from the thing which was Khaine

The forces of the Imperiums did retreat, as too did the eldar forces, in the wake of the thing they had given life to. The records of the Emperor Titan’s final battle are sketchy. The mountain was wreathed in smoke and fire, and it constantly blossomed with colors of a million different hues. This continued for well over an hour, before a great blazing sword was seen carving through the cloud, and all signals from the Titan went dead.

Karandas and Arhra went missing, though it is obvious they survived the encounter.

Of the liquid metal entity which beheaded Intrazzi’s artificial mountain, not a great deal is known.

What is known is that the vast warship the commorrites were rebuilding, the Wailing Doom, vanished a few months later with no explanation.

*Note: This section has numerous references to the Dragon War. This was a recent cataclysmic conflict, following Ahriman’s weakening of the Void Dragon’s prison. Upon being freed of his prison, the Dragon instantly sent ships to every corner of the galaxy. Within five minutes, he had begun to lay siege to the capital worlds of almost five thousand Empires and Imperiums, including Seraph Nox, Armageddon, the Licentious Bastille, Macragge, Cadia, Terra Nova, the besieged inner-Sept worlds of T’au, the Octavarian Krork Holds and many more, whilst simultaneously activating many of his dormant Dragon cultists and Tomb Worlds across the galaxy. For reference, subsequent chapters will obviously make extensive reference to this continuing event, which happened concurrently to the other major events that shaped the destiny of all at this time. I do not wish to recall these times, but I must. I must tell you everything. It is imperative you know the face of the foe of Life, and learn its ways. How else can we win?

[Open visual field:

Interior, Archive of Shriven Plains.

Shelving distorting. Query: melting? Incorrect.

Chronicler returns to upload station, carrying heavy load of tomes (speculation: scrolls and vellum). Reverberating tone throughout archive.]

I have saved what I can. I fear the last armfuls of knowledge I have just pulled from the contamination is enough.

[Slows breathing.]

Must remain calm. I have to impart this knowledge clearly as possible. I can’t let my pain give way to malicious bias. These threads of fate are special.

[Coughing/weeping?]

Breathe... regulate... stabilize...

Log; begin upload.

[Uploading. Visual query for storage: Is chronicler alone? System detects second life sign in chamber...]

Additional Background Section 20: The Phoenix Lords

Karandras and the Fallen Phoenix

Much of the Shadow Warrior’s history is lost to the natural stealthy and elusive nature of the Phoenix Lord himself. He moved unseen through across the battlefields and bone yards of the galaxy, ending the lives of the evil or simply the powerful. Many are the accounts of generals and whole divisions of soldiers being butchered in the midst of battles, or unexpectedly slain by shifting green shades in the depths of jungle roads.

He emerged but rarely into the light of history throughout the chronicle accounts. There are only two occasions when this was the case. The first was when he was discovered inside the central chamber of a krork hulk, and only the concerned effort of all the ‘War of the Krork’ soldiers on board the vessel which forced the Phoenix Lord to depart, but not before recapturing the huge gemstone the krork elders had stored in their vaults, along with an entire library of krork datacores, that documented the accumulated knowledge the krork had on the creatures whose names had long been lost. These entities were the so-called ‘Old Ones’; the term granted to the First Races to evolve upon planets.

The second time was through his own choice. He chose to challenge his wayward mentor for the third time in their long existence. The First time had been during the fall of the first Temple, where Arhra turned upon his brethren, and Karandras had had to turn from his master in order to drive him out. The second time was during the age of the mon keigh Imperium, in the temple of the slicing orbs of Zandros; an indecisive duel in which neither warrior could gain the upper hand. The third clash was different. Both Lords had expanded their powers greatly since their last encounter, swelled by the captured souls of their willing servants and followers until they were luminous beings barely contained by their ornate runic armor.

Arhra sent out a clear signal to his nemesis so Karandras could find him. Upon the xenos city- world of Intrazzi, a vast army of murderers and warriors had gathered, butchering the populace in evermore violent and cruel ways.

This vast murder cult was billions strong, and headed by the silent Incubi, who discreetly lead the slaughter squads as they went about the business of killing everyone on the planet, be they the native aliens, or the human dignitaries and merchants who also made their home upon the vibrant trading hub on the south-west border between the Vulkan and transgovian Imperiums. The world was located in the Rift of ‘Creed’s Command’, an artificially induced warp rift which protected the region somewhat from the Dragon’s ships at this juncture in galactic history.*

For some strange reason, the Incubi warriors had also caused the primary plasma reactors of the world city to go into meltdown. The reactor core, enhanced in its blazing power by a vial of exotic dark matter, burned down through into the mantle of the planet, until it created a titanic volcanic structure at the heart of the city, spreading a dense cloud of smog and ash across the entire world. Every day, forces from Commorragh and other pirate enclaves dragged in artifacts and strange objects, which were tossed into the molten core and there they ran fluid in the flaming heart of the planet. Karandras made all speed to the system via the webway. But another force had beaten them to the planet. The refugees from the necron-destroyed Transgovian Imperium had formed a mighty warfleet, supported by the allied commanderies of the Bulls Repentant (formed from the smashed remnants of the Minotaurs, who had long ago placed an eternal penance upon themselves, for their part in the horrific Nyx Incident. Long may that event be remembered...) and the Fire Beasts, who themselves were supported by the Nocturne Legio Titanicus and the ‘Thunder Lizards’ Legion of tankers, in their powerful MkIII Blant Tanks. The Vulkan Imperium, under the emergency absolute rulership of Vulkan during the Dragon War, had promised the Transgovian remnants a place within his Imperium should they snatch back Creed’s Command from the heretics and maniacs who infested it. They had leapt at the chance with all the desperate courage of men who had nothing whatsoever to lose.

By the time Karandras reached Intrazzi, it was a vision of hell. Titans and tanks dueled with the captured defense guns of the city, and the huge dark Eldar Void Barges, that hung in low orbit as they pounded their foes with vast dark lances and void munitions that swallowed whole companies of their foes.

The human khainites were bedecked in spiked and bladed armor in crude imitation of their alien masters, and fought with psychotic glee with chainblades, lashes axes and swords of a wild variety. Kabalites fought alongside them, occasionally maiming one of their mon keigh allies, just to see the look of confused betrayal on their faces.

By all rights of course, the battle for the planet should have been won easily by the Vulkan- loyalists. However, the other side had Drazhar Arhra on their side. Intrazzi was infested with tainted webway portals that criss-crossed its surface with endless complexity. From these passages, the Phoenix Lord of the Incubi struck at the enemy from all sides. His demi-klaives ended lives with every blow. Tanks were immobilized and carved open by the consummate killer, before he filled the vehicles with a psychic onslaught which melted the men within into the hull itself. He fought without honor, striking foes in the back or blinding them just before a fight. His power was staggering and terrifying in equal measure, for he was being powered not only by his captured souls of fallen Incubi, but by the pain and suffering of everyone on the surface of the churning, industrial hell.

The Lord High Emperor of Transgovia was killed after a single dismissive blow of Arhra, and his elite half-ogryn bodyguards followed him minutes later. Amber lightning pierced the red and grey ash clouds over the city, and the streets literally flowed with blood and broken bones. Khornate daemons were drawn to the feast, alongside Khymerae and their beastmasters and a crazed assortment of warp-creatures we still don’t have names for. The Transgovians carried on with relentless determination, heedless of their mounting casualties. Went their banners fell or their commanders were broken, others stepped over their bodies and picked up the banners from cold dead hands.

The tide was against Arhra’s men, but he cared not for his mortal dupes. They craved a bloody end, and the Fire beasts in particular seemed all too willing to oblige. Always the most ruthless of the commanderies, the Fire beasts broke their enemies with savage glee, ripping them apart with their hands in some cases.

And the titans walked. It was a spectacular sight according to surviving witnesses. Dozens of giants stomped across the field; Warhounds, Warlords and even their command Titan (the Imperator known as ‘Tychus Rex’) crossed the city like bespoke gods. Their scorching beams and megaton warheads scoured life from the planet in vast conflagrations of nuclear force. Defense emplacements were burned to bedrock, and millions died under their relentless bombardments. Tanks were nothing to them, and they crushed them beneath their huge heels like beetles. The Nocturne Legio had been created at the behest of Vulkan at the beginning of his Imperium. They were the battle-scarred veterans of the frontlines of hundreds of campaigns. At this time, the Legio had only just returned from a long stint on the frontlines against the Dragon, and were under-manned. Nevertheless, they were devastating on this battlefield. Karandras burst from his webway portal in silence, backed by his exarchs. The first beings that leapt at him were Flesh hounds that rattled their frills as they sought to rip him asunder. They died within seconds and Karandras was already rushing through the bloody mist of their corpses before they had a chance to sink their claws into flesh.

He carved a path through Imperial and cultist alike, on a direct beeline towards the colossal volcano that the Titans were attempting to scale as it towered over even the tallest spires. It was topped with a dark crown of a fortress. This was where Karandras knew his foe would find him, and there was the only place where he could end it.

The sound of battle was a riotous booming that rattled the very earth. Whole blocks of alien towers toppled as the ground rippled beneath them. Karandras rode the buildings as they fell, leaping form one collapsing ruin to another with the grace and fluidity of a swooping bat. His cadre of exarchs followed suit, claws snapping and chainblades purring hungrily.

And through all the thunderous cacophony of the swirling, endless war, there was a deeper rhythm; a great pulsing sound, just below mortal hearing. Thumping and rumbling with a regular beat...

Adderkavada, the Commander and Master of the Bulls Repentant, stood alone amidst the remnants of his battle brothers’ ruined predator hulls. His great fail flashed with lethal energies as he held off a dozen Klaivex, led by one of the High Hierarchs of the Incubi temple. The Klaives and the power blades of the flail clashed in endless complexity as their energies discharged in all directions. It was said the battle looked like a living thunderstorm, as power field lightning flashed within the billowing smoke and dust clouds whipped up by the combat. He held back the Incubi, as his men clashed with the speeding raiders that sought to outflank the Transgovians.

Adderkavada knew he was doomed but he fought on. He lost a leg, and fought on. He was cut and slashed in a dozen places, but he fought on. Some (spurious) legends claim he fought on after the Hierarch beheaded him with a scissoring flourish of his demi-klaives, and lived long enough to bisect the offending eldar before he too perished.

Kaa, the Captain of the Fire beasts, fought his way to his thunderhawk, and flew the machine personally through the chaos of the battle, directly towards the looming Volcano that sought to pierce heaven. As he flew towards the fiery summit, he was intercepted by a great beast that soared on terrible pinions. The Captain felt heavy hooves crashed against the roof of his flyer, followed by the hideous shriek of metal being torn away by a great burning axe head. The roof was torn away, and the leering daemon plunged into the hold. The Fire Beast Chapter watched from afar as the aerial drama unfolded. A bloodthirster of Khorne, drawn to Intrazzi by the waves of hate and anger radiating out into the warp, had leapt upon the thunderhawk, to prevent any interruption of the ritual within. (At this point, it would be foolish not to acknowledge the overlap between Khaine and Khorne, though so many eldar have long tried to deny it.) Kaa’s command squad, who flew with him, took up their weapons, and prepared to face the embodiment of rage with their own form of bestial wrath. They looked up through the torn roof, and they climbed out to clash with the hulking daemon that stood upon the wings of the astartes flier defiantly.

Karandras reached the summit first. The temple-fortress was guarded in all approaches by the Incubi; the Aspect killers. The hate for the fallen ones was incandescent amongst the Striking Scorpions, and they fought like men possessed (and, I suppose, they were precisely that in a way...).

The temple, which was filled with winding, complex gantries that crossed between vast reservoirs and rivers of siphoned magma, became an arena for a hundred separate duels and battles; some where Incubi and Scorpion were evenly matched, others where several Incubi fought one Scorpion, and vice versa. The hellishly hot chambers resounded with the sounds of blade upon blade, and the exultant howling of Incubi, or the wet gurgles of slain ones. Karandras moved through them like oil. Most of those he killed didn’t raise a blade against him, for they didn’t realize he had even struck them until he passed them by, and they collapsed into a dozen pieces. These fights were afterthoughts to the Phoenix Lord; only reaching the inner sanctum of this abomination mattered.

What he found was horrific.

The inner chamber was a mesh of bridges that spanned a half-kilometer caldera that fumed with molten rock dredged up from the bowels of the earth, held in place only by a forcefield. The bridges were built of bone and the old metal of the once proud city, fused by a lattice of ugly veins that pumped ichors throughout the unnatural forest of gantries. Upon the bridges, gangs of slaves struggled to carry hundreds upon hundreds of statues of dark metal. Once they reached the desired location, their masters would butcher them, and cast them and the statues into the fire, their screams nectar to the bladed fiends that cackled with glee. The walls were lined with skins; the living skins of the previous occupants of this world. The purple hides of the creatures undulated and gurgled with disgusting, impossible life. The living tapestries were branded and cut by the Dark Eldar, who reveled in the depravity of the desecration. The descending crater of the volcano was a forest of jutting rocks and serrated fangs. It was like no volcanic structure every known. It was more like some fetid womb of a daemon spawn. But this was not the worst sin Karandras witnessed.

The Hierarchs stood at the edge of the blazing spectacle, and they opened their soultraps, unleashing all the aspect warrior souls ensnared by them over the millennia. These mournful ghosts surged into the molten horror below. At the heart of the volcanic structure, the thunderous rhythm was impossibly loud yet inaudible to those who had no connection to Him.

To Khaine.

Karandras threw himself wordlessly into combat. He cut down everyone he could find, be they slave or Incubi, Kabalite or Corsair. He only paused when Arhra finally showed himself.

Arhra had fallen far in the years since his original creation. His ornate armor glowed with a dark light in the spaces between plates. A complex headdress of interlinking horns adorned his narrow war mask, which looked almost gaunt in the flickering light of the lava-fire. His Demi-Klaives were gripped like mantis claws in his gauntlets. Mantis faced down Scorpion across the expanse.

Drazhar Arhra, famous for never uttering a single word, raised his hand and took over the mind of a lesser eldar, who sudden writhed in terror as his vocal chords were manipulated by the silent menace

“You came,” Arhra forced him to state in a voice so deep and unnaturally resonant, it easily carried across the vast distance between them.

“I did. What is rising here shall not. It is a twisted shade of a God long gone.”

“Nay, He shall be born anew; a god rose from the ruins. You should be proud, for he is reborn as a Phoenix should; from the ashes.”

Karandras shook his head. “The thing that resides here is not Khaine. It is a fractured, mad thing. A thing born into madness and destruction without focus or control. The Master of death saw this upon Altansar. I saw it within the datacores of the krork,” the Phoenix Lord explained coldly, his voice a silken whisper compared to Arhra’s.

“And that is not Khaine? You cast me out, so long ago, when I was Khaine’s most loyal follower. Your Aspect temples are tainted by Asuryan and his nobility. Do you so readily forget the name Kaela Mensha Khaine? The bloody handed god! The kin-slayer, whose most famous act was the slaying of an eldar hero! I do him homage!”

“You follow the Aspect of the Murderer. The eldar must be more than this. This cannot come to pass.”

Arhra’s response hasn’t been recorded, but the two beings soon clashed, on the overlapping bridges that loomed over the volcano’s mouth. Karandras’ mandiblaster was utterly harmless to his foe, pattering against his armored skin like drizzle. His shuriken pistol likewise had little effect. The battle came down to blades and claws.

The chainsword, the snapping claw and the slicing Klaive blades. They exchanged a wild flurry of blows, and each flourish of swirling arcing patterns was ever more complex. Those blows that missed carved through bridge after bridge, sending the ruins clattering into the lake of fire. They leapt like acrobats between the remaining bridge spars and mangled remains of railings, crackling energy fields rebounding with concussive repetition.

For all Karandras’ skill and subtly, he could not overcome the terrible power of Arhra. He realized then, as he was battered from pillar to pillar, from bridge to bridge by his former master, that he could not hope to best the dark father alone.

The thunderhawk, meanwhile, plummeted to the ground in a shower of flames and debris. The impact threw the bloodthirster across the sloping ash plain, but also crippled many of the command squad. Only the Captain managed to haul himself to his feet. His left arm was torn away, but his right still clutched a storm bolter, which he fired relentlessly at the towering red fiend. The damson howled in pain as the bolts struck, but it didn’t even stagger the creature. With a hideous roar, it prepared to charge.

Then a deeper, louder roar drowned its own out. The bloodthirster turned, only to be suddenly struck by the descending foot bastion of the Tychus Rex. It blared another discordant bellow from its war horn as it held the daemon pinned, while its bastion gunners fired everything they had at the struggling monster.

From the unnamed captain’s report, he watched as the Tychus Rex began to scale the volcano itself, one bone shuddering footstep at a time, volcano cannon blazing, while missiles streamed from its shoulder bastions, and its vast combat weapon roared with a deafening voice. Its armor was rent and torn by constant Ravager assaults, but it remained unbowed.

The engine marched.

The duel of the Phoenix Lords was interrupted by events that occurred in the volcano below. The molten abomination beneath them began to rise. The first thing to emerge was a titanic claw, wreathed in blood and smoke. But it was not Khaine. The churning nightmare was metal and fire and covered in screaming, angry faces, but it could not settle upon a form as it rose from the summit at speed. All the bridges were dashed into atoms as the metal flood erupted from the mountain.

A swirling column of silver punched its way skywards, till it appeared to be a mighty steel tornado.

The princeps of the Tychus Rex was the only one to see the entirety of the abomination form the chin of his titan. It quivering hands he raised his vox pack to his lips, and signaled to the Fire Beast Captain to signal a full retreat. He ordered the astartes to get as many people off the planet and away from there as possible.

“This is Tychus Rex. Wideband signal to all Engines and supporting units in area; fall back. The target cannot be fought.”

“Then what are you going to do?” the captain responded on his vox.

“Us? We’re going to fight it! All weapons load for bear!” was the last known transmission of the Tychus Rex. It was claimed the princeps was driven mad by the creature, or possibly his Titan’s machine spirit had invaded his own mind. However, I believe he decided to fight in order to save his Legio and his allies from the thing which was Khaine The forces of the Imperium did retreat, as too did the eldar forces, in the wake of the thing they had given life to. The records of the Emperor Titan’s final battle are sketchy. The mountain was wreathed in smoke and fire, and it constantly blossomed with colors of a million different hues. This continued for well over an hour, before a great blazing sword was seen carving through the cloud, and all signals from the Titan went dead.

[Warning! Runic defenses are down! Incursion imminent! Sentinels are being summoned!]

Little human! So limited by his frailties of knowledge. I know of the battle. I tasted the battle! The Titan dueled a God that day! A true god, in all its terrible majesty. I saw the whirring teeth of a blade larger than a castle’s turret, lock with the screaming blade of a caged devil. The giant of molten hate stepped from the torrent unblemished by heat. Its words were a stream of hellish language that scorched the hull of the Rex.

I felt its crew massacring one another in its bowels, like maggots turned feral in desperate hunger. I saw its weapons fire with the blinding light of suns, boring holes through a god incarnate. It pressed ahead against the God of all War like a wrestler in a hopelessly outmatched gladiatorial contest. The fierce animal heart of the titan struggled to burst free of its artificial moorings; to rip the god-Bloody Handed apart with its non-existent fangs

Karandras and Arhra went missing, though it is obvious they survived the encounter. Fool on a throne of ignorant knowledge. Shields himself in knowing, but he fears to look into the Architect’s face; the great Schemer, who sees all and knows all. I alone can see the turn of the fates. I saw what no mortal being saw, on that field of bones and pain.

As the God of war broke the back of the God-Machine, the Phoenix Lords took to the skies. They climbed the two burning combatants. They clashed between the vast battlements of the Titan. They even braved the apocalyptic flesh of Khaine as they climbed. Karandras’ armor was torn and fuming with leaking energies. The Dark Father burned with his dark light. His blades screamed as they severed the air itself in their haste to kill.

Every clash of blades was a detonation of such monumental force it floored both combatants. The Scorpion, in his desperation, struck the fallen a mighty blow with his boot, sending the Fallen crashing through the eyes of the god-machine and into its mind. He followed suit, but the Fallen was the faster. His blades turned aside Karandras’, and dealt him a dozen mortal blows, that would have slain anything that lived. But Karandras had not been alive, truly, for millennia. But his armor clattered to the ground, dust pumping form the grievous wounds.

As a reflex of his terrible nature, Arhra reached out and destroyed the Titan crew, sweeping his blades about himself with such speed they died before they could even scream.

But he could not finish Karandras. As he advanced upon him, he felt the strings of fate that linked all the Lords of the Phoenix. He felt all his brothers and sisters turn their psychic gazes towards him. The weight of prophecy loomed large, and the flames of the psychic backlash made the Dark father afraid. This was not the time; the Rhana Dhandra was not risen, and the Last Good Man had not silenced the ever-bitter son. Mon Keigh had not trod the silver skin of a God, and the Gate did not beckon. The warp fluctuated, and Arhra recoiled. He saw a Phoenix; titanic and incandescent, screeching for his defeat. This was not how he was to die either. In desperation, he called out to whatever god would listen to his plea. Khaine was deaf to his pleas, for the thing which rose was not Khaine. He knew that now. In that instant of savage realization, time and the warp folded into one; a perfect moment of timeless horror. Arhra was alone. He realized that now. For so long, he had been called the champion of chaos and he had rejected that path. He had called himself the last true Khainite; the perfect killer, and nothing else. But he was more than a Drazhar; more than a Master of Blades. He had a greater destiny. The farseers had been right, in a fashion. He did burn with the Dark Light of Chaos. But he was no pawn.

He was the gatekeeper to the Well of Eternity. He was the point of calm at the heart of the pattern.

In that moment, reality convulsed again, and some mighty force ripped him from reality, saving him from the Revenant entity conjured by the Phoenix Lords.

He was taken to- [Runic defenses re-initialized.]

Of the liquid metal entity which beheaded Intrazzi’s artificial mountain, not a great deal is known.

What is known is that the vast warship the commorrites were rebuilding, the Wailing Doom, vanished a few months later with no explanation.

*Note: This section has numerous references to the Dragon War. This was a recent cataclysmic conflict, following Ahriman’s weakening of the Void Dragon’s prison. Upon being freed of his prison, the Dragon instantly sent ships to every corner of the galaxy. Within five minutes, he had begun to lay siege to the capital worlds of almost five thousand Empires and Imperiums, including Seraph Nox, Armageddon, the Licentious Bastille, Macragge, Cadia, Terra Nova, the besieged inner-Sept worlds of T’au, the octavarian krork holds and many more, whilst simultaneously activating many of his dormant Dragon cultists and Tomb Worlds across the galaxy. For reference, subsequent chapters will obviously make extensive reference to this continuing event, which happened concurrently to the other major events that shaped the destiny of all at this time. I do not wish to recall these times, but I must. I must tell you everything. It is imperative you know the face of the foe of Life, and learn its ways. How else can we win? How else can we-

Wait, what is that?

[Image feed initializing. Attempting to identify anomalous visual readings. ‘Melting’ effect more pronounced. Query: humanoid? Query: Query? Multi-limb form approaches. No recognition. Files not on record. Chronicler backs away from distortion, which unfurls many limbs/appendages/phenomena.]

No! No! Draziin-maton! Back!

[Weapon Discharge. No noticeable effect.]

[Record degrading. Emergency! Emergency!]

[Visual feed corruption. Serpents loose on archive floor! Temperature reaching maximum levels! Multiple contacts- Zero contacts. Lowest temperature. Absolute zero! Incorrect! Entity advances. It wants to be born. It wants to exisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss####ERROR-ERROR-ERROR...]

[D-cannon discharge. Second beam engages target. Third beam engages target. Entity (unknown-classify: ‘Draziin-maton) is destroyed. Volume reaching 100000 Decibels. ALERT!]

[Entity: query. Chamber is clear. No unauthorized entity detected. Only Chronicler and two new arrivals, designated subject 1=Krork soldier-bred Gorverial, and subject 2=Brother Captain Tolrego.]

[Chronicler talks with two figures for a few moments, before they depart.]

I...

I... pause and run diagnostic through the chronicles’ systems.

[Running Diagnostic.]

[Chronicle Paused.]

Additional background Section 21: The Final Phoenix

Asurmen

Asurmen, the first of the Phoenix Lords, led the most exarchs of his brethren. He visited every one of the dead craftworlds. He searched the ruins, slaying any who sought to defile the empty tombs. Some say he was following the aspect of the Phoenix; trying to figure out a means to release Ynnead from its limbo, trapped within the craftworld matrix of souls. There was a story which told of an ancient trickster king of the Ulthran clan, who had been swallowed whole by a Slanneshi leviathan, but that his fingertips had been severed by the beast’s jaws, and had maintained an anchor within the realm of the living; these fingertips became jewels, which were absent from the ruby scepter of the Queen of the Dead; without which, she could not break free into the endless labyrinth. We cannot know whether Asurmen knew these tales (or possibly, whether he started them). We do know that he inspired valor and bravery wherever he went, even amongst those who were not children of Isha. He had the bearing of a King, not merely a Lord amongst Phoenixes.

He followed the calling implied by his Temple’s name. He was the Avenger; fighting with valor and honor as he bested the greatest champions of fetid empires, or slew their Tyrant kings upon their thrones. He brought the empire of Fallen names down in a day; a single shuriken cutting the precise artery which caused the towering daemon engine which ruled the world to collapse in upon itself, crushing its entire army beneath its bulk. In a spectacular move, he led an entire flight of exodite dragon riders against the slaugth empire, and shattered its power forever. How he managed to transport the exodites the ten thousand light years across the galaxy to reach the Callixis sector from the northern reaches of the galaxy is unknown, for no known webway gates led there.

Asurmen, unlike his fellow Asuryata, made no secret of his movements across the galaxy. He moved between the incredibly- sparse Eldar fleets, and where he arrived, the enemy died. Much of the time, he had no need to draw the sword of Asur at all; his skill with the shuriken was unmatched across the entire galaxy.

At some point in the latter centuries of the 55th millennium, he sought out a small Empire of allied aliens, hidden within a hidden region of space (called the Veiled Region Belt to humanity). This Empire, the Heketamon, had been at war with a most bizarre foe for countless centuries.

The thyrrus were a truly alien race of squid-like entities, bedecked in elaborate and complex costumes. They fought with weapons of exquisite beauty and confusing application. When Asurmen arrived in the system at the head of a flight of pilotless ghostships, what he saw was simultaneously beautiful and tragic. Entire worlds were engulfed by wars that spread a profusion of fantastic lights and fires across their surface. When Asurmen descended into the atmospheres of these worlds, the beauty of the light-shows projecting into space paled in comparison to the wonderful din of the war against the Thyrrus. The artillery strikes of both the thyrrus and their foes seemed to be modulated and directed so they accompanied each other perfect. Base notes of throaty macro shells countered the delirious chorus of high pitched laser batteries and streaking hypersonic weapons. Weapons of pure sound blasted buildings into ruins, which fell in an exact pattern each time.

From low orbit, the Phoenix Lord could see that even the corpses and fallen formed a pattern; poetry had been written across the crust itself. Ancient legends, of the Old Eldar Empire and other prehistoric species’ myths were emblazoned in cursive script spanning kilometers. His exarchs were almost overcome with the orchestral wonder of the scenes below, for the souls of the dead were mingled with the spectacle in obscene combinations that tugged the heart strings and enflamed the humors.

Only Asurmen seemed unmoved; his slender arms folded across his chest forcefully. He ordered his vessels to scan the systems of the Heketamon and find the largest concentration of thyrrus.

The Heketamon were losing the war, but could not understand why. Their tactics were sound, they fell back when necessary, their pressed their advantages where the enemy was thinnest. Nothing seemed to work.

On the world of Illustris, their ruling council had been entrenched for almost a millennium. They didn’t understand how their final major fortress kept their bewildering foe at bay, but they were thankful for it. Asurmen could see why they had survived however. From the air, their last fortress, built and rebuilt according to the concentration of assaults striking particular areas of the fort, was formed into a titanic, stylized face. A face half white, half black, surrounded by a spider’s web. The symbol of the Laughing God.

Asurmen wasted no more time looking upon this work of demented theatricality. He flung himself from low-orbit, plummeting directly towards the Thyrrus hordes. His gauntlet avenger catapults unleashed a storm of glittering shuriken rain upon the colorful monsters. As he fell, banners and cloak flapping about his armored form, he linked his mind with his ghostships and Exarchs, informing them instantly of his designs for the coming battle.

The corpses of the soft-bodied squids built up beneath him, while their spectacular weaponry pierced the sky with a forest of luminescence in a vain effort to destroy him. When he finally slammed into the ground, his final descent was cushioned by a thousand soft thyrrus corpses, that exploded as he crashed into them at terminal velocity, followed swiftly by the grav tanks of his exarch followers.

As a tide of glittering thyrrus ichor splashed over the horde, Asurmen was already moving, the Diresword Tethesis in hand, while his catapults filleted any who even thought to raise a weapon against him.

The sword was alive, and responded to Asurmen’s thoughts with empathy only a brother could know. The blade severed thyrrus bodies with every arcing stroke and energized thrust. Within moments, the thyrrus force was already spreading outwards, away from the eternal warrior.

As he fought, the ghostships fired according to Asurmen’s orders, burning away millions of Thyrrus with their precise pulsar bursts and vibrocannon barrages. To the defender sof the planet, this assault was as baffling as that of the thyrrus monsters; their mysterious ally had picked an apparently arbitrary point to attack the squiddies. There was no strategy to this.

Little did they know that the destruction Asurmen wrought was tightly controlled and purposefully limited. From above, it was obvious. He was carving the eldar tale of the Asuryana into the thyrrus horde, in blood and blackened corpses. Once he had completed his attack/artwork, he called out the servants of the Laughing God in a loud voice, before throwing his sword towards an empty patch of sky just above the remaining thyrrus. The sword of Asur... stuck.

The thyrrus paused, turning as one towards the sword, which had pierced a patch of air just above their heads. Moments later, the holofield unfurled before the assembled crowds’ eyes, revealing the wondrous eldar grav-barge that was anchored there. In a single bound, Asurmen leapt towards the craft, using his sword as a stepping stone onto the hull, before he pulled it free with a whine of ruptured psycho-plastic.

“Enough of this, you harlequin dolts.” He stated simply.

The eldar within allowed Asurmen to enter the vessel. But these creatures were not harlequins. They were a far rarer faction; the impossibly-ancient Choral players of Cegorach. These strange beings were not mute, as the mimes of the Harlequin troupes. These beings spoke constantly, speaking the lyrics of an endlessly complex song without conclusion. After long hours of difficult attempts at communication, the dour Asurmen and the lilting, whimsical Chorus were eventually able to make themselves understood.

Amidst their rambling, Asurmen was able to discern that Cegorach was enjoying the plight of the galaxy, and that he had installed more and more distractions and conjurations to ‘improve the great display’.

Asurmen cursed them for their flippancy; Cegorach was the last of the Gods; he should be fighting and aiding his children, not dallying with cruel shows and oddities.

They enigmatically referred to the Harlequin God’s ‘dazzling displays’. They were too fool and to misdirect. The glittering lights were the facade; lights that cast a shadow. And in the shadow was where the tinkerer worked. The most cunning and ruthless of the First. So very secret he was, only the forgotten children of troglodyte still remembered him.

Asurmen realized the importance of this information, and thanked the Chorus. They responded with mocking laughter and derision; they claimed that when the truth finally unfolded across eternity’s well, the Phoenix Lord with a King’s mantle may not be so understanding. As Asurmen made to leave, they asked whether he would punish them, would he avenge those who had been wronged? He replied;

“No. But you have not wronged me... yet...”

And with that, he vanished; teleported back into his ghostship’s hold. It was only then that the Chorus realized their vessel was still un-cloaked. Seconds later, a flight of Heketamon deathstrike missiles plunged into the Choral vessel in a blinding flash of white oblivion. This broke the back of the Thyrrus, and the counterattack could finally begin.

But the Lord of Dire Avengers was already looking to a different target; his new plan forming within his glorious golden mind. He journeyed into the heart of the major krork-hold of Vandergloin. This journey would have been impossible without the webway; the only route not clogged with death and bloodshed. The warp was alive with warfleets, as they constantly criss-crossed the galaxy responding to incursion after incursion. Realspace was a confused realm of battles occurring across every sector in the galaxy; few ships could hope to cross the galaxy without being attacked by monolithic silver vessels, or torn apart by paranoid planetary defenses.

Nevertheless, Asurmen reached his target. He broke into the vaults, freeing a waifish human psyker from the slave pens beneath the central bastion. When confronted by the towering wardens, he (surprisingly) surrendered. He allowed himself to be directed towards the heart of the complex. Deep in a shadowy vault, stood a great throne room, filled with ten mighty thrones. Upon eight of the thrones, a psyker krork creature (known to antiquity as ‘weirdboyz’) was sat. Their brains were plugged into some sort of matrix, which Asurmen could sense instantly. He felt the legendary ‘War Field’ of the krork, pulsing through the chamber; the vigorous life-blood of an entire species. Asurmen saw other krork, of the Mechanical class, fiddling with complex force field arrays around the thrones. These were krork forcefields; the most powerful and complex energy fields the galaxy had ever known. Even Necron forcefields were not as powerful (though the Necrons have many other advantages over ‘The War of the krork’, as demonstrated in other sections). The figures within the field were utterly safe from anything Asurmen, or indeed an entire warfleet, could throw at them. In addition, ten foot tall warrior class krork beasts stood to attention all around the chamber, advanced energy and projectile weapons held close to their vast chests. Their leader was not present, for the planet was still being rocked by the renewed assaults of the necrons, who were besieging this and indeed most of the krork bastions in the galaxy at once.

The shivering psyker was terrified, but only marginally less terrified of the golden Phoenix Souls that clasped her shoulders gently, holding her steady in the face of the krork. Upon the final two thrones sat two diminutive creatures. In another life they would be dismissed as snotlings, but in that period they were the most feared entities on the planet. These were the brains of the Krork war machine; the guiding force behind its great green might.

“Why, eldar, do you plunder our vaults and presume to relieve us of our slaves?” the first asked, its voice oddly amplified by unknown means. “I do the bidding of those who come first. Those who Linger.”

At Asurmen’s words, the brainboys chuckled. “You did not meet those who came first. You are young. We fought at their side. And now, when we awoke after long in the wilderness of battle-lust, we found them all gone. All dead. Swallowed whole by your venereal madness!” the other brainboy growled, his voice instantly translated into the dialect of Ulthwe (for some reason).

Asurmen shook his head. “There are those that linger still. Who brought you out of the wilderness? Who fixed you?”

The krorkish goblinoids waved their hands dismissively. “That trickster did not raise us from madness out of good will. He is a demented glimmer, spread out across the galaxy. He remade us to be another plaything in his selfish games; we are under no illusions about his motives. He meddled with the blue fiends just to see how the Sapiens would react; he crafted them as a taunt! He is a fool and a terror. We and we alone are the ones who remember why we are fighting this Long War against the Mirror-Devils. And we will fight! Fight and win! This is our purpose, ingrained on every single one of our fungal augment-warriors.”

Asurmen was quite for a moment before replying. “I do not speak of Cegorach. His purpose is not to unite and lead. It is to trick and distract; to confuse and confound. I speak of the shadow, that grows and lingers in the spaces between the light.”

Both sides knew who he referred to. The brainboys sniffed. “You are more deluded than I thought. He is dead, just as the others died.”

But Asurmen revealed the truth. The shadowy one, the unseen God, forgotten even in the old Eldar pantheons. Qah had long been active, even when shattered. However, at some point in the Second Age of Strife, unseen by all, he had been healed, and had begun to scheme and plot.

The brainboys scoffed at this, until Asurmen questioned them about their lighting; why did shadows linger in their own throne room, when they had the power to illuminate the room fully? Before they could answer, Asurmen used his inner constellation of souls to illuminate the chamber fully. Only his light could pierce the deepest shadows. For a few brief seconds, the chamber had no shade, revealing dozens of scuttling shapes, clad in moldering suits of meat and chitin. Seconds later, the shadows returned, and the shadowy figures were gone; scuttling away in fear. The hrud were qah’s minions, and they were everywhere. They were the watchers, ever in the dark. Ever vigilant, they noted everything they saw. While the Laughing God caused havoc, they moved in the wake of the chaos, manipulating and directing events without ever getting involved. They were maligned as a pest for thousands of years, but Asurmen revealed them for what they were.

(I suspect they even dwell in this place, though they seem content to let me continue this chronicle unmolested. To be honest, I do not fear them. I fear the Draziin-maton, and what they plan on doing. But I must continue.)

His actions proved to the Brainboys Asurmen was honest and they reluctantly let him leave with his psyker prize. The girl was a particular kind of psyker; a sort of telepathic ‘battery’, she could store the dying recollections of any living thing which had passed away into the sea of souls. This had driven her insane, but it made her useful to the Phoenix Lord (who she continually called ‘King Fire-bird’ despite his stoic condemnation of this nickname.)

His next destination was a realm which had survived and thrived for twenty thousand years on the blood of men and the screaming madness of superhuman monsters. His target was Baal, the Throneworld of the Bloodknights, and the lair of the first of their number.

If Asurmen wished to further his enigmatic scheme, Mephiston and his twisted Librarians would be his greatest obstacle. Asurmen needed to bring back the dark memories long- repressed by the vampire astartes and he would have to fight to the death to retrieve it.

I awoke from fitful slumbers in the crystal halls, to find I had written... this. The stylus was in my hand, the nip dipped in my veins. I wrote this is blood, but the interface seems to have transcribed it all the same into the chronicle. Am I writing this chronicle, or is this chronicle writing itself, using me as a puppet? I know not, and dreams of the Draziin-maton still plague my sleep. Will their relentless advance ever cease?

Additional Background Section 22: The Uncle and the Wandering Knights

He is no god, but wanders where gods may. He is a hushed whisper amongst bombastic legends; he determined it would be so. If I was not guiding the hand of this scholar, it is likely he would never have mentioned this figure at all. His title was first spoken in the chronicles of the Grey Knights, as a figure playfully referred to by the Apex Twins, who seem to be his allies. There are other accounts, such as the fevered dream-quests of the fenrisian priest Karnos; the ‘cousin-father’ who plies the vagrant web, snatching away heroes in their desperate hours of need. He saved the Sisterhood of Elusive Blades from certain destruction by the Bloodtide swarm, as it quenched the Far-Veil system, and drank the entire civilization dry. His minions were key to turning the tide in Vaxenhide, when it looked as if the dark eldar were going to torture and murder the entire populace.

It was he that crashed the floating basilica of Ceylan into Sirius B, killing a future Tyrant in its infancy. He was the rumored ‘confidant Primus’ of Vulkan’s diligent minion Imogen, who herself gathered information and tried to right the wrongs of the murderous galaxy.

His story and that of the Custodians and Grey knights also seem eternally intertwined across the sporadic, galaxy-spanning narratives of this history. As previously iterated, the Custodians and the Knights followed the Apex Twins into the webway, escaping Titan with the Emperor’s desiccated corpse in tow.

The Apex twins chattered to each other and the Grey Knights with excitable glee. How they knew their way through the webway was unknown, but it is said they followed a ‘trail of psychic breadcrumbs, left by a kindly entity’. The Custodians and Grey Knights would be utterly lost without their guidance, so they allowed themselves to be led.

At one point, the Twins stopped the Knights in their tracks, calling for quiet and a halt. When challenged they simply stated.

“It is not their time yet. Their destiny is the past. We aren’t allowed to fiddle; Uncle would be upset if we did.”

As they said this, the Grey Knights watched the webway thread ahead. An entire army of orks stumbled through the webway, arguing and grunting at each other like beasts, as their trucks belched fumes that fizzled against the webway’s runic defenses.

“Dun’t touch nuffin’, ya hear me?” their commander growled at them. This was the infamous Mad Uruk; the scourge of Armageddon. Several grey Knights had to be restrained from obliterating the warlord as he passed by. The brawling orks did not notice them, and wandered off into another intersection, and another time. For the labyrinth dimension was a maze of both time and space, which twisted both into unknowable patterns.

Onwards they trekked, and it soon seemed that they had left realty forever. Their ancient armor was still in tatters; their swords were broken, their bodies worn and weary, and only their glimmering powers remained un-dulled over the long millennia. Who would require the aid of these ancient, weary souls, they wondered?

As they wandered, they came across a mysterious figure, armed with twin pistols. He hailed them in the manner of a vassal to a king, with perplexed the Grey Knights. The Apex twins seemed suspicious of the figure, but he was painted in the colors of the Dark Angels, so the loyalists eventually accepted him, and allowed him to travel with them for a while. As they walk, the figure told them tales of what had happened to the universe while they were trapped upon Titan. He spoke in half-truths and with vague answers. Even when asked his name, he replied ‘My name is merely part of the greater cipher he must solve.’

“Uncle’s?” the twins asked expectantly. The figure (we know him as Cypher, so I suppose his cryptic answers bear some truth...) did not reply to them. When they tried to fish the answer from his mind, they were bombarded with further questions. He never resisted their powers (it is unlikely anyone could), but his mind was encoded and locked away in riddles and mysteries. The Twins grew bored of puzzles, and soon turned their attention back to leading the Knights to Uncle.

Occasionally the group would pass by webway portals, invisible to outside observers. They saw endless wars through hundreds of time periods across many ages. Most were battles between creatures and people the Knights had never seen; never known.

However, at one point, they passed a terrific battle, where they saw their old foes, the Necrons, surrounding and slowly slaughtering a brave band of Space Wolves, led by a screaming giant with a mighty grey bear that dangled from his terminator armor, as he wielded a mighty axe; the famous axe Morkai. The wolves were as battle-weary and worn as the grey Knights it seemed, and the Knight Master demanded they help the wolves. Cypher refused, arguing they were fated to die. The twins petulantly stamped their feet, saying ‘We’ll be late! We want to go home NOW!’; only the formidable psychic powers of the Knights preventing their tantrum from dissolving the bodies of everyone in the tunnel. The Knights refused to leave; they’d not come another step with either marine of alpha plus unless they could help the Wolves.

With a weary sigh, Cypher carved his way into the materium, leading the Space Wolf survivors into the webway too.

The Space Wolves followed Cypher reluctantly, but grew more certain of their course of action once they saw the Grey Knights, who nodded to the astartes solemnly. Their leader, Grimnar, was not amongst the survivors. Morkai was now wielded by the Long fang known as Brynisson.

Together, the strange band of battered figures moved through the capillaries of the webway like starving pilgrims, following the capering footsteps of the Apex Twins.

The surviving Grey Knights, custodes and their confused Fenryka allies travelled the webway for many centuries, dialing back the years like an hourglass spinning on its fulcrum, until they reached a chamber, unexpected amidst the strange alien geometries of the labyrinth dimension; a disheveled little chapel, floating slowly through the capillaries of the system. It was filled with all manner of strange scholars; aliens and men, young and old. Some men wore the silvery uniforms of those who came before the first great Strife, while other men looked like horrendously scarred battle veterans clad in converted mining equipment with picks and drills.

Relictors sneered at the passing Grey warriors, but kept their cool as they sharpened blades or read furiously through black tomes. Damned Legionnaires of the Fire Hawks, remained as inscrutable as they were ethereal, shifting in and out of corporeality even as the newcomers observed them. Pre-Unification Thunder Warriors sparred in halls of carved teal and polished ivory. Mechanicus and strange little men in cloaks of white (near mythical cultists known as ‘scientisks’, if my translations are accurate) argued furiously behind forcefields, as otherwise the Machine Cultists would kill these Logician-like figures. The chapel was smaller on the inside, but it seemed to branch off into newer chambers, beyond the scope of the outside facade. The planes of the webway intersected to remove chronology, making the realm the one timeless place; the singular spot where all existence span around them like a top. The custodes and Grey Knights followed them. For once their destiny was unknown to them.

The throne was stacked high with books on all sides, like a monument to literacy. To the right, a tall, perilously slender figure stood, glowering blue orbs shimmering in its head. To the left of the throne, a harlequined man with a weary smile sat pouring over the texts, while a stern old man aimed a short shotgun at the newcomers. Upon the throne itself sat a man; he flickered in an out of existence, as if he were a mere hololithic projection.

“Lord Cypher, what brings you here? You were not part of my design,” the strange apparition on the throne asked gently, like a kindly old man. The Apex Twins rushed to the foot of his throne and sat upon the steps of tomes, looking to the flickering image for approval. He smiled at them and made them chuckle.

Cypher replied with a self-satisfied smile. “A mere quirk of the journey. Your protégés would not come to you if I had not brought these wolves. You owe us a debt, if anything.”

“And where is your sword? The Lion Sword, that was re-forged? The sword you slew the God-Emperor on Terra with?” the figure replied simply. His voice was perfectly charming and utterly harmless.

The Custodians tensed as they heard this. Only the Chief custodian seemed unperturbed by this new knowledge. The Space Wolves and Great Knights were not listening; they could only stare in disbelief at the flickering figure.

Cypher’s smile faded. “Stolen, alas. The Crypteks wield powerful sciences. It could not be avoided. But the sword served its purpose. It has triggered off a course of events that will see the Mirror Devils rise up, the Yngir too. Then, they will destroy each other. The acuity’s visions are flawless in this regard.”

In response, the flickering image simply shook his head disappointedly. “As ever, your visions are narrowed by your ignorance. There are competing prophecies, dueling across the stars now. You have been drawn into the two dazzling tricksters and their games. The two liars have been playing their factions for longer than you know. As apocalyptic as this seems, this is only the beginning. Your master is wrong to assume his role is done now.”

Cypher replied with a curse from old Caliban, before he vanished in a swathe of conjured shadow.

After several minutes of mute awe, the Knights and the wolves finally found their voices once more.

“What... what are you? Maleficarum? How can you exist?” Brynisson muttered. The figure spoke softly. “In a sense, I do not exist... yet. But this place; this specific place, permits me to. Honored Grey Knights, you seem concerned?” he gestured with unreal hands towards the Master of the knights, who pulled his helmet free.

“This is impossible! Impossible! What are you?” he hissed angrily.

The figure laughed. “Who and what I am would be exceedingly complicated to explain. But judging from your expressions, you may call me Revelation. Now; I believe I left a box under your care daemonhunters. A great many lives depend upon the information contained within,” the being replied matter-of-factly.

Additional background Section 23: Slipping the Leash: The Great Convulsion and the dreaded Draziin-maton

It is not an exaggeration to say that the galaxy faced, at the close of M55, the greatest continuous period of war in its history. Though the Ages of Strife and the Age of Imperium experienced countless localized conflicts for extended periods of time, none of these periods can compare to the sheer intensity of the battles raging at this time.

The necrons ran rampant across the galaxy. Their goals were unfathomable; most of the time, their vessels scoured worlds of life or blasted warfleets into ashes before the fleets even registered what had stuck them. But there were accounts of silver vessels silently dueling in deep space, far from any stars, and whole hordes of the silver abominations battling near identical armies. Though it seemed impossible to the mortals who writhed beneath the gaze of these dueling, eldritch beings, the Reaper seemed to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously. Increasingly vast pocket empires of entrenched necrons and krork battled one another for ever greater territorial gain. World ships and krork-modified Hulks battled one enough in spectacular duels across the stars.

As it would transpire, the galaxy’s mortal population had made several terrible assumptions about the nature of the unloving menace that blighted their lives (but we shall cover the precise history of this colossal necron campaign in the next section). While this was occurring, it would be advantageous to look at the galaxy on a macroscopic scale. If it were possible to observe the galaxy in this manner, the necron wars would have appeared as a great mesh of eternal battles, raging and fluctuating across the galaxy. But equally, many other wars were being sparked off by this sudden influx of carnage. The resources of the main powers were stretched to near breaking point; the colossal Tau Meta- Empire, one of the greatest military empires in the galaxy, was slowly contracting, tightening his defenses against the assaults of the seemingly limitless necron armadas. The Vulkan Imperium increased military output ten-fold, and the Realm of fathers twenty-fold. Yet still there were worlds they simply could not reach; they had to trust in the fantastic infrastructure left in place by Vulkan to see those worlds through that dark century of conflict.

Everywhere, there was a sense that worlds were falling between the cracks left by overstretched militaries. One many worlds, there was lawlessness, and where there was lawlessness, there was anarchy. And where there was anarchy, there was chaos.

[Distortion.]

I feel sick to the stomach as I write this. I fear what we had forgo[...]may [...] killed us. We forgot that which is most insidious. In their hubris, all the empires forgot the corrupting power of the daemons and their dupes. But it was more than this. A great pattern was set in motion. Only now, here, in this forsaken place [narrator seems to visibly pale. His implants seem to partially corrode?] Have I been able to piece together the pattern, the grotesque scheme, that underpinned the seemingly [...]the great irony; true chaos is inevitable. What I will relate to you in this section shall sound [...]of chaos, but you forget [...]ll planes. This always [...]ed!

[Distortion reaching tolerable levels.]

Ahriman had set into motion the Dragon’s freedom. It had seemed like chance, but perhaps it was indeed fate (a most monstrous fate!) which saw his cube breach the warpish barriers around Terra? Ahriman, with his new-found powers thanks to the knowledge stolen from Terra, went about saving the galaxy as he saw fit. But he was no savior of man. For all his cunning and all his devious scheming, his plan was a mere mutation of his original plan to save the galaxy from mutation and destruction. He enhanced his Rubric. But his great incantation was extended. He began to create more Rubric Marines. He actively attacked the mark II astartes wherever he found them, provoking them into battle. No army of Space marines could face the Sorcerer however. An entire company of the Crow Knights Commandery, at the battle of Vanner’s blockade, were instantly turned into empty suits of dust-filled armor, which then turned upon the human allies of the Crow Knights with heartless ruthlessness. It was a terrifying sight to behold, and all who witnessed it grew very afraid. His misguided apprentice, Crolemere, soon learned the new nature of this Rubric. The souls and energy of those bound by the Rubric had been hijacked by Ahriman. With this captured warp energy, and with the primarch machines in his possession, he began to turn himself into a being which could challenge even the mightiest primarch.

“For else how may we defeat the foes arrayed against us, if we do not utilize the knowledge we possess to make ourselves superior?” he is recorded as saying, his ordinarily level and calm voice rising to a hideous mocking sneer.

Crolomere tried to stop him, but barely escaped with her life. She was cast from his presence, and tumbled through the warp. (Her eventual destination shall be revealed in a later section).

As Ahriman gathered his powers, at the same time there was a noticeable expansion of the famous warp storms of the galaxy. The hadex rippled with further waves of psychic force, consuming a dozen star systems in a single week. The Eye too, like some colossal avalanche of madness, swallowed sectors as it hungrily swelled. Pylons upon Cadia began to show signs of major structural fault lines. The Maelstrom spreaded northwards, like an infected blister.

The mechanations of the Doomed one, Sparrod, coincided perfectly with the new phase of the Eye of Terror; every world the cultist had caused to destroy itself was destroyed according to a very specific date. In 834.M55, the Eye glowed at its brightest. The first world attacked by Sparrod was a light year away from the eye’s edge. He attacked it in the year 835.M55. The next world he attacked was two light years away. He attacked the world on 836.M55. And so, and so on, for decades. He killed the populace, making them focus all their dying sights upon the Eye. This psychic feedback rippled backwards through time and space, resonating with something deep beneath the tepid shallows of the eye’s warp space. Billions of dying mortals peered hopelessly into the pit.

And something looked back. We assumed the great feeling of nausea which passed through all living things that year was due to the rising necron threat. It was not. The Doomed one had opened the door, if only for a second. At who’s behest will eventually become apparent.

[Archive walls shiver. Tremors disturb the shelves. Reactive structures in anguish. Hallway darkens noticeably. Chronicle must be paused! Chronicler will not pause! Emergency! He won’t stop!]

... Nay I must continue...

Even... [pained panting] Even the denizens of the Eye suffered at this time. Abaddon, just after rebuilding his keeps on Cadia following the Dragon Siege, found his realm inundated with the lost and damned scum of the eye. They were not surging from the eye on a war path or at the behest of some invading warlord. They were fleeing, in their droves. And not just mutant scum; Word bearer armies and even the anti-angyl fighting forces of the Elite Blasphematii Knights fled. Abaddon ordered the Word bearers to control the mobs and rag tag fleets that were fleeing, and bring them to heel.

He then demanded that the leader of the Word Bearers come before him, and explain what in the seven hells was happening in the eye.

Eventually, Erebus teleported into Abaddon’s throne room on Cadia, much the worse for wear. His armor was not the usual dark, scriptural beauty it had once been. It was ravaged and torn, burned and melded hideously. He looked more like a noise marine or Death Guard veteran than a word bearer.

“Speak,” Abaddon bade him imperiously.

And Erebus told him what he knew. A new force had arisen, deep at the Eye’s heart.

There was a new planet in the centre of the Eye. It had been dragged from a realm unknown, and it stank of wretchedness. Even the furies sled before it. Upon its surface, impossible fortresses reared from lakes of sky that fell upon stone atmospheres and crawled up through fields of glass like worms in meat. Within these haggard heathen towers, the Draz... the Draziin-maton crawled free. It was said the warp itself convulsed in agony at their birth.

This unloving army spread out from the planet like locusts; clambering across the tainted void itself. They did not need ships. They could crawl upon the half-real space of the Eye physically! At the behest of their lords and masters, they attacked all the other daemon worlds. Daemon prince after Daemon Prince fell to them; their armies of daemons could not strike these beasts. As soon as they approached, the daemons’ forms lost all coherency and collapsed into listless chaos, pure and incomprehensible. The Daemon Princes, used to being gods of their own worlds, were soon humbled. They were not devoured or killed by the Draziin-maton; they were chained. Great collars, like Khorne’s but infinitely more surreal, were placed upon them and they became the property of the Draziin-matons’ unseen patrons.

The first realm to fall was that of Fulgrim. The daemon which had stolen Fulgrim’s body sent countless forces against the Draziin-maton. His daemonettes were useless, falling apart before they could strike. The Keepers of Secrets were little better, only able to fell a few of these creatures before they too became formless. Yet, Fulgrim commanded more than just daemons. A wall of annihilating sound shredded hundreds of the Draziin-maton, as noise marines and Emperor’s Children ascended the battlements of Fulgrim’s decadently-lovely palace. But the fiends could only be held, not stopped. The wonderfully-scented woods and gardens were ransacked and dissolved by the raw stuff of imagination, unmade and remade a billion times. Fulgrim himself battled the creatures. He was unstoppable in combat, and all who faced him perished. But the Draziin-maton were not foes one could merely duel. They laid him low with their binding sorceries, and soon the daemon-Fulgrim was ensnared. Fulgrim, his human half, cackled with cruel glee as his daemon was itself bound and humbled, as he had been. Only one entity apparently escaped the Draziin-maton’s clutches; a single marine, apparently a rider. The only trace it left of its passing was a mile-long burning tire mark, scarring Fulgrim’s world as it fled through the warp. Angron fell next. His berserkers were harder to overcome, but the Draziin-maton were patient. They drowned his worlds in sorcery, until even his followers were hopeless mutated until they were barely even human. It took a hundred strong snares to bring the Bloody King to his knees, the force of which shattered his brass-coated throne room as he roared deafeningly.

Mortarion was the hardest to defeat, for his realm was death and decay. Draziin-maton withered like grapes on the vine as they approached. But it was only a matter of time until the plague world too would also fall. He was silent as they neared his throne. When they attempted to cage him, Mortarion suddenly rotted away to nothing; he had slipped past them and fled. No one knows where he fled. Erebus speculated that Isha, the plague angel, had snatched him away to hide in Nurgles dank wilderness in the true warp.

Magnus could not be conquered, for his realm was already akin to that the Draziin-maton brought with them. His land of eternal change could not be further changed.

“One cannot grasp that which has no form...” was all he chuckled, as the formless daemons and the tzeentchian daemons mingled. He never fell to the Draziin-maton, for he was always on their side... or so it would seem...

Perturabo’s daemon world, for all its cunning defenses, keeps and bastions, was no barrier to things that could swim through adamantium, and disrupt the very nature of matter itself. He was bound over the broken corpses of thousands of Iron Warriors and those Draziin-maton rendered inoperative by his violence.

Slowly but surely, they were all brought low by the Draziin-maton. Those who did not flee became strange, demented things. And soon enough, the Draziin-maton turned their attentions towards the realm of reality. Through the warp, they contacted their spy within the eastern Chaos Imperium; the Hamadraya responded and Huron was brought under their control without them having to lift a single one of their terrible limbs.

Abaddon listened to this tale with growing suspicion and dread. They would surely come for Cadia next. He asked to know the weakness of the Draziin-maton from Erebus. The devious demagogue smiled, almost coyly.

“I suppose they cannot function beyond the eye. They require mortal minions to conquer reality. Then, they can truly spread chaos. True chaos, as the Primordial Annihilator has always planned for us.”

It was then, with a groan, Abaddon realized where the serpent Erebus’ allegiances had fallen. He had not mentioned his own Primarch, Lorgar. Abaddon knew why. Lorgar was in league with them, and his Legion had followed him. As one, the Blasphematii attacked Black legion bases across the Sector, and then across the Western Imperium in a chain reaction. Normal Word Bearers and corrupted assassins turned upon their Despoiled and Black Legion rulers in great orchestrated coups across the entire Imperium. Abaddon’s astropaths and sorcerers, located next to his throne, all screamed in distress as they relayed this information from across the empire, directly to Cadia. In every pict display, Abaddon saw Word bearer vessels, supported by the huge armies of fleeing pilgrims, and other Chaos Legions united by the Draziin-maton’s campaign, as they bombarded his fleets at high anchor, blasting them apart in great silent clouds of molten adamantium. “You are a traitor amongst traitors Erebus! I always knew you were a pathetic creature! What did they offer you? Power? Gutless beast!” Abaddon screamed furiously, thrusting his daemonsword into Erebus.

The hololithic image flickered. Abaddon screamed in demented fury.

Erebus shook his head condescendingly.

“Why Erebus? We had won! Chaos triumphant! No more groveling to mortal whelps! We were glorious! We were victorious,” Abaddon snarled, as he smelt the scent of possessed marines, who slowly filled the chamber, their eyes glowing in the shadowy galleries around the throne. Abaddon stood from his throne, staring up at the beasts.

The first barrage of their kai guns struck his corrupted Dreadknight bodyguard. The giant bucked and roared in fury, ripping apart several possessed before he fell with a thud; a smoking ruin leaking greenish ichor.

Erebus’ image growled. “Not our victory! Yours! You have no imagination! Look what you did; you ripped down the Imperium, and built a new one in its place. You betrayed chaos’ very ideals. The Eldar resisted their fate and look what happened to them. Now you’d deny our true nature? We are beings of anarchy. That is what we desire!” Erebus countered.

“Anarchy?” Abaddon suddenly smiled. “You want anarchy? Then you must learn to accept even the best laid plans will have complications; things you simply forgot about in the heat of the moment.”

Erebus snorted. “I am not playing your game Abaddon.”

Then the possessed pounced. But the Chaos Emperor was no mere mortal despot. He was still a champion of chaos, possibly the most powerful champion not to ascend. His storm bolter chattered death, churning the bodies of dozens of the possessed scum, as more leapt over their corpses to finish the job. His sword shivered with colored smoke as it carved souls in half, while the Talon of Horus crushed the life from marine after marine.

“You still forgot one thing,” Abaddon sneered, as the bodies mounted around him. More and more turncoats burst into the chamber, pouring fire upon the Emperor of Chaos. They prepared fire points for the havocs to finish the job of killing Abaddon from afar.

“What is that then?” Erebus shrugged from his safe location.

“The rider of course. The one who escaped first,” Abaddon suddenly chuckled, his laugh disturbing even to daemons. As he laughed, the great crystal ceiling of his throne room burst asunder, as the legendary Doom-rider plunged downwards as if from nowhere, howling his own name as his body was wreathed in unholy fire. His bike landed in the upper galleries, and he gunned the daemonic engine with all his power, running down those Word Bearers he did not cut down with his sword. Then, as suddenly as he appeared, the rider vanished, as if his bike had punctured reality itself. When the dust settled, Abaddon was gone. He had fled when the turncoats had taken cover. The Dark Lord fought his way to the orbital docks, battling through the human hordes that vainly tried to slow him down. As he rampaged through his own fortifications like a wild beast, a blood-crazed band of his Despoiled, and some of his Black legion formed around him. Together, they launched a lightning raid upon the Planet Killer. They killed those who tried to capture the vast world killer and he took it for himself. The warp weapon easily blasted its way through the hasty naval blockade set up to stop him, and with that he fled the Cadian system.

Yet it mattered not to Erebus, who teleported down to Cadia, followed by Lorgar. He placed a great black crown upon his golden-skinned primarch’s head, who smiled quietly as his forces spread throughout the Western Chaos Imperium like venom. Lorgar then raised his gauntlet high and clicked his fingers once. As he did so, high explosive charges planted at the base of every pylon on Cadia detonated at once. The skies darkened, as the warp flooded the world for the first time in millions upon millions of years. The dark cadians looked to the heavens in terror, as the sky was full of daemons, who leered with unbound glee. But worse was to come, as things clambered down from heaven, and unmade flesh with ever slash of their limbs. The Draziin-maton were rising.

Abaddon became an outlaw in his own empire. Once again he had felt the cold hand of betrayal. He realized the folly of civilization. The only path left was that of the barbarian. If that was what they wanted, then so be it. As he left his Imperium, he raided his own planets for resources and ships, in preparation for his new war. He even bombarded the tower of stitched flesh, snatching away one of the crazed clones of Bile. Once that was done, he escaped over the border into the Vulkan Imperium.

Kor Phaeron, who had managed to capture the Vengeful Spirit, gathered about himself a mighty fleet of chaotic daemonships and warships of a million different varieties. He was bidden by Lorgar to pursue and destroy Abaddon, wherever he fled to. Kor Phaeron set about his task with relish, eagerly chasing Abaddon into Vulkan space.

A Note on the Draziin-maton

The Draziin-Maton appear to be the primary military forces the Nex- [Sobbing picked up on audio track. Query: malfunction? Tapes corrupted?]. They are loping, elongated nightmares composed of glistening purple flesh, unnatural limbs and alien weapon systems that twist and coil from their imposing, vaguely humanoid forms. They exhibit a wild variety of weapon systems and devices and indeed can grow and change their forms in the heat of battle itself. This versatility is a result of these entities being some form of proto-wraithbone, which encases an internal warp entity. No two Draziin-Maton are alike, but all are uniformly deadly; able to crush an astartes with ease with limbs that evolve new methods of creative death almost instinctively. Reports from the most ancient of eldar suggest that these constructs were once ghost-machines used by the old Eldar Empire to fight their wars and extinguish troublesome civilizations. That they are now the shock troopers of a rising new power of utter entropic disorder suggests this new foe is far more ancient than anyone could guess.

The nature of the entities that empower and drive these corrupted war-robots is not known, but much speculated upon. It is said that the warp contains the emotions and consequences of every decision and thought conceivable in reality; every possible idea or emotion that could ever exist. Some say that, deep in the very depths of the warp, beneath layers and layers of demented pantheons and roiling storms, lay the forgotten; the raw elements of existence. Every aborted timeline, every step not taken, every deferred dream and every child unborn; all came to rest in the quagmire of non-existence. The most popular (and horrifying) theory about the Draziin-Maton is that they are powered by these impossible entities. Of course much like deep warp daemons (and the Nex- [archive groans as if under strain. Author drools vomit slightly] for that matter), such intrinsically unstable entities would last a fraction of a second within the material realm. In that second they would irrevocably damage the materium, but otherwise their effect should be slim unless powered by a warp rift. In the case of the Draziin- Maton, this impossible existence could theoretically be maintained within a sufficiently- polluted wraithbone matrix.

The N- the deep warp may not appear to have any overarching strategy beyond dissolution, but someone designed these abominations, and someone has been planning this incursion for a very, very long time.

[Chronicler unconscious at desk. Hands show signs of activity. Auto-stylus activated.]

He... sleeps... yet his hand is mine... to control...

[Chronicle Resumes:]

Additional background section 24: The Dragon Ascendant, the Necron Wars, and the Sixteenth, Final Siege of T’au [Part One]

Long have we feared the necrons. They are destroyers, defilers and Imperialistic on a grand scale that even the infamous M31-M42 Imperium never was. In dread legends in countless cultures we heard of the ‘Mirror Devils’, ‘The Dolmen Giants’, 'the undying hosts of silvered death', and so forth.

Long have I sought to avoid telling the full extent of their terrible wars against the Empires of flesh and blood, of their dark deeds and actions unjust and monstrous. The archives of this vault are expansive and exhaustive; every document or scrap of information deemed relevant to its Sentinels has been gathered here. It is a great hive of knowledge the likes of which I certainly could never have compiled in my own lifetime. Also half of the collective documents of this entire library depict the colossal wars of destruction that occurred in the Dragon Wars, the Reaper massacres of the M44-M48 period and the monumental ‘War of Hope and despair’, the colloquial term used to describe the war between the Tau meta-Empire and its allies against the endless necron hosts. Such a relentless dirge of information would swamp the minds of normal men. Most mortal scholars and chroniclers would be fatigued by such endless chronicles. Indeed, so fatigued were they, most historians I have read upon the subject conflate the necron into one homogenous mass of silver-skinned oblivion. They assume all the necron were bent towards the subjugation and annihilation of all living beings, or were otherwise obsessed with feeding C’tan entities. Most readers of galactic history simply cannot comprehend these ancient beings as being anything other than a monolithic terror.

But I am not most scholars. When his mind touched my own, his tendrils of elucidation suffused me. I was forever altered. Even my own waking mind rails against this knowledge. He fears the Draziin-maton, and this makes him weak, and distracted. I fear naught but failing in my appointed task.

But I digress. To truly understand the nature of the menace which has befallen us, we must realize its true origins and motives. Only then can these factions, Tyrants and psychopaths be overcome.

1) The Necron Wars

Due to the actions of Vulkan’s brilliant politician Darnal Taq, in the year of illumination (a tale we shall tell at a later date), it is now common knowledge that the C’tan helped craft the necrons from the cancerous ruins of a once biological race millions of years ago, and led them to defeat the Old Eldar empire and their unseen Creators (do not peer into the minds of the First, for therein lies the mad cruelty of first creation!).

Yet, after their years of slumber and through the fiery galactic disaster we call the Second Age of Strife, the unity of these fiends was forever lost. Though the diversity of this race is surprisingly extensive (with more factions that it would be feasible for me to elaborate upon), I have identified five prominent necron factions that participated in the necron wars (and the Dragon conflict which followed).

The first and most prominent was the army of the triarch. The Silent King had quietly reintegrated himself into the old hierarchies of the surviving necron dynasties. ** He acted through his Praetorians, for he had voluntarily destroyed his own authority millions of years previously. This Imperialistic faction had been slowly and methodically swallowing up Petty Imperiums and minor xenos empires for millennia since the death of the Corpse- Emperor. The triarch necrons, however, had come under assault by the fearsome ‘War of the krork’ as soon as they attempted to enslave any planets that fell within regions they had once known as Old One fortress worlds. Those humans and aliens upon those select worlds were baffled why the krork leapt to their aid; unaware of the ancient pedigree their worlds had. Some of the crypteks were intrigued; where had these krork come from? Were the Old Ones risen? But they dismissed such thoughts as lunacy. They had seen the last of the First Fall ( I warned you. Speak not of the Old Ones! Curse you!) and knew they were gone.

Though the Necrons did not attack the Vulkan Imperium directly, that is not to say they were completely untouched by the devious Mirror devils. At the beginning of M55, the Vulkan Imperium was in the process of reaffirming alliances with the various demi-empires and Imperiums that were under the protection of the Promethean Courts. The famous politician Plevian suggested this could be achieved by creating a court on Armageddon formed from representatives from across the diverse empire. They later became known as the ‘Glorious Cooperative’, and were housed in a beautiful ovoid building at the heart of Tu’Shan city, one of the most spectacular and beautiful cities in the known galaxy. Multiple gardens were held within the vast dome which covered the city, providing the citizens with clean, perfume- scented air, at odds with much of the rest of Armageddon.

In any case, initially the Glorious Cooperative was a success, and every faction sent a large delegation there. Amongst the most notable included the towering figure of the Ryzan Tech- Prince Ulluxious, with his honor guard of Plasma Commandoes and hooded Adepts, the Commerce Marshal of the Confederation of Justice with a Platoon from the Administration brigades, bondsmen from the wild Khureshi Hinterland sector, not to mention the Advisor to the Governor of the Nocturne Domain with his assistants (including a man named Iacob. Oh how we would later remember that name...) and Kaltrun, the designated representative of the Commanderies, an abrupt and practical man clad in the Gold armor of the Dorn Revenants. The Realm of Fathers also sent a group of Cult Magi, who were watched closely by the Steel Legion internal security. But it was from the recently-acquired Lussorian Empire’s delegation where the true trouble came.

The Lussor Imperium was founded many thousands of years previously by a fabled Rogue Trader known as Lussor. They were a bizarre throwback to the early colonial years of the first Imperium; a strange parody of greater realms. They even possessed special forces audaciously referred to as ‘Space Marines’; gene-bulked ex-penal inmates pumped with addictive narcotics until they were fanatically loyal to those who supplied them with the drugs and even more dangerous. They were armed and armored similarly to Space marines, but their long time apart from other human settlements meant their armor had changed drastically; vaguely like Corvus armor mixed with newer, cruder carapace plates. Nevertheless, their leadership was cunning and leapt at the chance to become part of the Vulkan Imperium. However, unbeknownst to all, the necrons had reached them first. The Nekthyst Dynasty of necrons infiltrated their ruling echelons using mindshackle scarabs. When their delegate was sent to Armageddon, his mind was filled with these scarabs, ready to infest the entire Vulkan Imperium’s leadership. Once the Glorious Cooperative gathered, the scarabs waited until several decades of discussions and talk of commerce and trade until it found the perfect moment to strike. The vast amphitheatre was filled to capacity with the politicians; the mindshackles prepared to burst free from their host and infest everyone. However, at that moment, the Realm of Fathers’ chief Magus stood up from his gallery, raising a hand drenched in witch-fire. The Commerce marshal, sensing a threat, moved to draw his ceremonial laspistol, but Kaltrun deftly disarmed him as he realized the Magus’ target. The chamber was in uproar as the Magus launched a fiery blast across the chamber, striking the Lussorian in the face. His head exploded, a millions burning scarabs swarming from their dying host like locusts fleeing burning wheat fields. The Steel legion opened fire upon the other Lussorians instantly, killing them in a hail of laser bolts. The Magus said nothing, but merely nodded to the astartes before sitting down once more.

This caused an outrage across the Imperium. The Glorious Cooperative did not meet again, for fear of infiltration. Yet, despite this provocative action by the necrons, Vulkan avoided attacking known necron worlds during the expansive phases of his Imperium. Instead, he set up forces whose sole purpose was to watch over the necron, and warn off any foolish adventurers from being ensnared by such disturbing worlds. He would not commit himself to a war with the Silent King until he had the soldiers required to win it. When he finally decided to attack the necrons, it was for a prize more valuable than can be measured easily in words. But that is a story for a later section [cross.ref: ‘The Dolmen Raid’/Conclave of the Ravens.] The Second faction of the necrons was the rebellious minions of the Storm Lord, the Herald of Lightning. He was crippled by a shimmering golden being* upon Medusa in M41, just as Van Groethe’s Rapidity swept through the system. He was driven quite insane by the warp storm, but he was not consumed by the ravages of the Primordial Annihilator; a force of static warp somehow protected him. This was the Star Child, before it had risen to become a full god. It told him of the Silent King’s desire to return to the realm of flesh and blood via the dabbling of his crypteks and the Blood Vats of Zantragora, and slowly warped Imotekh’s mind. Imotekh desired to remain a deathless machine! He wished to be obeyed by his mindless minions for all eternity! It is unsurprising that he found common cause with the Angyls and their mad God when he was finally free of the storm. In exchange for aiding in the search for an avatar of the Star Father, the angyls would aid Imotekh in his bid to rule over all necrons and all life.

The third can hardly be called a necron faction at all. The technological contagion of the so- called ‘Sarkoni Emperor’ had already consumed over five hundred tomb worlds. The deranged Master Program of the Sarkon Tomb World actively murdered slumbering necrons, wiping their minds and replicating its own Abhorrent Intellect in their place. Its empire was one of silence and utter destruction; those it didn’t enslave, it utterly destroyed. The necrons themselves could not stand against this sentient virus lest they be rewritten. They instead had to rely upon the mortal races to eventually challenge this menace. [cross.ref: Iron Hands/Battle of Drultevar Forge.]

The fourth faction we have already discussed. The bio-transferred thexians were created by the Deceiver and his loyal cultist, Ralei the Ever-Shifting. This was a race he had made sure were utterly enslaved to his will, unlike the unreliable necrons. They were fresh and uncorrupted by years of stasis; a new race of beings to harvest worlds for him. They were his foot soldiers in the terrific wars which he fought against necron and mortal alike. His fleet assaulted the fastness of Atreborn, which reawaken the slumbering Yu’Vath who lingered there. He deliberately led these warp-smiths into the domains of the Atun, sparking a three way conflict which consumed suns, sterilized worlds and even began to draw the attention of the Eye itself, which was expanding at a terrible rate (now we know why of course...). This entity was a constant thorn in the side of the necron dynasties, preventing them from uniting at every turn. Some say he knew his brother was stirring at the heart of the terran warp bubble, and he was paving the way for him; thus seeking to become his vizier and hence gain ever more power.

But the Deceiver’s real trump card was the Ophilim Kiasoz. The Ophilim Kiasoz was a device/entity/force of nature/object/trans-dimensional phenomenon (I am still not certain...) which had first come into being in the first war to ever take place in this universe. There is only one story which mentions the Kiasoz directly in the entire combined mythology of the whole galaxy (or beyond I suspect). It supposedly predated the necrons by almost a billion years. No matter the power of the necrons, any worlds in the way of the Ophilim Kiasoz were undone at a fundamental level. The only known ‘survivors’ of the Ophilim Kiasoz were the Deathmark sects of the Tomb World of Uttomekh, who leapt into a dimensional oubliette to escape. Only five of the five hundred thousand Deathmarks of that world survived. Nobody knows where they went, but it seems likely Trayzn the Infinite collected them, for they were unique in the galaxy; no one else had ever survived the Ophilim Kiasoz up to that point.

The fifth faction of supposed ‘necrons’ is obvious. They were the forces of Oblivion itself. They were the minions of the Unshattered One. I speak of course of the Dragon Tides.

Before I elaborate upon the full extent of the Great Dragon War, I must first depict that most famous of conflicts and a tale which is in most history books across the galaxy; the fall of T’au.

*This was likely the Deceiver himself, or one of his devious splinter entities; fragments of his own consciousness, scattered across the galaxy, doing his bidding. Despite the best efforts of the necrons, they could never find all of the Deceiver’s shards. It is further claimed that each of the Phase blades of the callidus are shards of his being and secretly do his bidding as well. Sometimes, I fear we attribute too much to this fiend. Sometimes, I feel we do not give him enough credit. Imagine being imprisoned for millions of years, with nothing left but your fragmented memories, and the desire to overcome your captors? Is it really so farfetched that he had planned for every eventuality? ** Some scholars conflated the forces of the triarch with those of the wild Destroyer cults of the north east that sparked off the original Tau/Necron war. This is exacerbated by the presence of the various shards of the Nightbringer and other C’tan, which gave the impression that the Nightbringer was in charge of every one of the necron armies. In fact, only one of his shards had control over necrons. This was the Nightbringer shard which had retrieved its tombship (its so-called scythe’) from the warp. This Shard could not be so easily removed from power. Luckily for the triarch necrons, this C’tan seemed content to simply commit genocide upon the survivors of the Thexian Empire.

Additional background section: The Dragon Ascendant, the Necron Wars, and the Sixteenth, Final Siege of T’au [Part Two]

2) The Sixteenth and Final Siege of T’au

The Silent King’s advisors and crypteks watched the Tau/Necron war intently. The Tau was easily the most advanced and largest rival Empire to the necrons. If the Silent King wanted to rule the galaxy, they had to be humbled and enslaved. Indeed, his advisors warned that if they were not stopped abruptly, there would be a ‘Rise of the Tau’, a future where the Tau were dominant and drove all before them, with one of the dreaded star gods secretly ruling over them. Such a future could not be allowed to transpire. However, the Silent King had a darker intention. He looked upon the Tau, and he saw a vital race of flesh and high technology; a healthy race of biological beings not blighted by scourging stars. Long had he desired to find his metallic race new bodies to inhabit. He wished to reverse the mistakes of his past, and correct the immortality of his race. The Tau possessed a being which hadn’t aged in thousands of years; Aun’Va. Illuminor demanded this specimen, for there was something locked within the ancient ethereal’s body that could re-shape the necrons and the tau.

As Thex Prime fell (few knew that the Deceiver’s liberated shards had caused this collapse for the sole purpose of building his own personal army of loyal slaves), the necron, once a disparate horde of psychotic destroyers, seemed to unite as one to attack the Tau empire. The Nightbringer’s armies had been brought under the control of the Phaerons once more. It was said that there were so many necron ships in this grand armada that they appeared like an impossible silver cloud in space, lightyears across.

But the Tau would not be cowed. The Meta-Empire was a densely-populated leviathan of a civilization, built up and reinforced over twenty thousand years of permanent warfare. Their creed was impenetrable and their armies were the wonder of a a galaxy. The Tau hastily called in support from every dedicated fighting world in the meta-Empire to face down the Necrons. The Idealist class cruiser was mass-produced on a monumental scale, alongside a dozen newer marks of vessel that eclipsed the Idealist in every way. Carriers bearing flight decks of millions of Cuttlefish elimination craft, battlesuit deployment barges that spanned multiple kilometers and could deploy battlesuits across up to five lightyears of space from their motherships using experimental ‘Portal Shift’ devices (a kind of teleporting gate system, in a facsimile of the necron’s own devices). This grand fleet was led by the ‘Transcendental Path’, the largest and most powerful tau vessel ever constructed. It was more like a mobile garrison world than a mere vessel, for it had the facilities to maintain hundred sof individual armies for rapid deployment in any environment.

But the fleet of the triarch did not engage in a single mighty fleet action. When the Transcendental Path and its armada engaged it, the swarm disintegrated, flinging off fleets in all directions throughout the Meta-Empire. The tau were likewise forced to split up their fleets in order to hunt these diverse elements.

Surprisingly, it was the Tau that had the tactical speed advantage in the early stages of the war of Despair and Hope. In the Tau region of the galaxy, most of the Dolmen gate network was destroyed by Harlequin-led Eldar raids millennia previously. The necron fleets had to attack worlds the Dolmen reached, and spread out slowly from these beachheads into the deeper guts of the Tau. The main focus of this attack came from planets close to Sautekh Dynasty holds captured in the early necron wars from Imotekh. The Idealists and their descendant crafts were not so restricted, and they could rapidly bring these fleets to battle. On a thousand fronts, the wars raged. necron forces descended upon worlds in a tide of scarabs and silvered skeletal death. Worlds that were not evacuated were infested and their raw materials were broken down for the purposes of creating new necrons. These necron foundling worlds were then assaulted by hyper-velocity cannons, plasma lances and all the myriad ‘jumper’ munitions the tau deployed to ensure necron bodies were incapable of being repaired.

N’dras drone-suits were mass-produced just as rapidly as new necrons. However, where the necrons had to rely upon the timely soul furnaces to create new necrons, the N’dras forges pumped out millions of new drone warriors every few hours. The early stages of the war seemed to be going well for the Tau, even if reinforcements from the central septs (and even from some of the eternally-blissful lobotopias) were being called up with altogether too much regularity.

In space, the FTL sensors of the Idealists and their long-ranged weaponry matched the sheer mind-boggling firepower of the slower necron tombships. Teleport boarding assaults occurred silently, as whole armies were transported directly into necron and tau vessels alike. Hyper- swift battlesuits carved out the glowing hearts of cairns, while deathless lycheguard and ever- shifting wraiths soberly dismantled the crews of tau warships with horrifying ease. Whole worlds were consumed in these wars. At one point, an entire necron fleet unleashed a trillion trillion scarabs upon a world. These endless entities multiplied by breaking down matter into energy, before assembling a dozen of identical copies of themselves. Like a necrotising phage, the scarabs dissolved the planet entirely, leaving nothing; not even the molten core.

Wherever the Transcendental Path appeared, the tide turned in the tau’s favor. Its weapons were a match for any of the triarch’s vessels and it out massed all save the Silent King’s flagship. After deploying a veritable army of water caste envoys to all the known krork stronghold worlds in the area, the greenskin elites were brought to bear as allies of the Meta- Empire (though they refused to fight alongside the demiurg oddly). Antique auxiliary gue’vesa vessels bravely stood against the might of the necron armadas, as they guarded refugee fleets that were flooding into the iron-hard core of the meta-Empire in ever greater numbers.

Admiral Kaustran, the commander of these vessels, was typical of the human breed. He was a stubborn and wrathful as any gue’la, and for once that intransigence was of use to the Tau Empire. Luna class cruisers, mars class battlecruisers and even a near-mythic retribution class battleship were deployed in convoy defense. This ragged fleet of ancient vessels engaged in a naval engagement over the world of Dal’my’therr. The necron vessels were vast and massively powerful; within the sub-light domain, there were few vessels faster or more powerful. The humans had no chance at all; even at the old Imperium’s height, it couldn’t face off against such numbers.

This changed nothing in the old Admiral’s mind. At the height of the battle, as the battleship ‘Panthers Rampant’ dying from a thousand catastrophic wounds, Kaustran ordered the vessel forwards.

“All ahead full! For the greater Good, and the hope of a new dawn rising!” he was recorded as screaming over the vox.

The prow, with its vast ram, turned towards the necron flagship. Flayer arcs and particle lashes stripped the vessel apart as it closed, wreathing it in fire and venting plasma. With almost dismissive ease, the prow ram was ripped away by a carving beam weapon. But beneath the ram, hidden for decades, Kaustran had hidden his farewell gift; a nova cannon, which had been charging throughout the battle. All control measures were disengaged, and all limits on its capacitors were forgotten. The weapon fired at full power, a sight never before seen. There was a good reason for this. The feedback of the nova cannon’s blast disintegrated the Panthers Rampant. However, the projectile launched was launched with colossal ferocity, and blew the heart from the necron ship in one glorious detonation. Secondary explosions ripped from within, and the ship was crippled, allowing the last of the refugee convoys to engage their jump drives and escape.

For a time, as tau, krork and demiurg forces countered the enemy on every front, the Fire caste Grand Council entertained the hope that they could actually win.

But such arrogant assumptions are soon turned to ash in this galaxy. By this point, the necrons had completed their portal network. Every world they conquered could be instantly reached via the portals, and this shifted the tactical advantage to the necrons once more. Even the krork could not prevent the triarch as they rampaged across Tau space. The Tau were outmaneuvered at every turn. Not only this, but new Dolmen gates were also under construction, and these expanded the naval prospects of the necrons ever more.

Slowly but surely, world after world fell to the advancing hordes. The necrons needed no rest or food or logistical trains of supplies. They feared nothing and they conquered every world that they loomed in orbit over.

The Tau retracted under this pressure, forming even more dense military installations as each line of defense fell, one after another. The Air Caste Admiral of the Transcendental Path was slain in his own personal chambers; slain by shifting cyclopean assassins that stepped between dimensions as we would walk between rooms. This vast vessel soon returned to T’au to rearm, and to find a new commander.

Shas’O’Kotar’shi, a Fire caste general, took up the mantle of leadership in this desperate time. He was a comparatively young Commander. As the war progressed, he came to e known as ‘Commander Hopeshield’. Fal’shia was the first of the main Sept Empire to collapse under the relentless onslaught of the Silent King’s forces. Its Earth Caste scientists and engineers were some of the greatest in the meta-Empire. As the invasion reached their doors, they had jsut completed the design of a revolutionary new manned battlesuit called the mark XXV ‘Gallant’ suit. These were built in cooperation with the fire caste and the research scientists investigating Van Groethe’s rapidity. Each suit could channel warp energy and incorporated this energy in the inner workings of the suit.

Alas, Fal-shia had created this marvel too late. Even as the first seven prototypes were built, the laboratory the suits were being built within was brought down upon the heads of the earth caste by the fearsome heat rays of the triarch stalkers. With their final act, they transported the weapon from Fal’shia, in the hope they could be used.

And used they were; Hopeshield immediately took the suits and armored his greatest pilots (and himself) with the Gallant class suits. Furiously, he fought back against the necrons wherever they rose, throwing himself into the heat of battle armed with the sophisticated weapons and mysterious warp projectors of his new suit. But no amount of personal bravery could stem the tide. Bork’an fell next, and the slaved Lobotopias of that sept burned for fifteen days; their populace smiled with contentment as they cooked, their brains so destroyed by psychoactive drugs to care anymore.

The tidally-locked Dyanoi was the next to fall. Many of its outlying colonies surrendered to the necrons, and were whisked from their worlds, never to be seen again. The D’yanoi ethereals killed themselves with nerve-toxins moments before the crypteks of the necrons arrived to claim them. In frustration, the necrons scoured the world clean of life.

Au’taal, much to the shame of the Empire, surrendered to the necrons quickly and were swiftly enslaved by the mindshackle scarabs.

The vespid homeworld became a quagmire of guerrilla warfare, for their strange gaseous world was a nightmare for ordinary necron warriors to navigate. Their female rulers remained at large, while their winged minions punished the necrons with their strange crystalline munitions and diamond-hard claws.

Pech was left unmolested, for the necrons saw nothing of value on that swampy, vile forest world. Unbeknownst to them, the kroot had taken it upon themselves to evacuate every child from the Dal’yth water caste academies. To this day, I do not know why the kroot did this, but it certainly reveals they are perhaps not the barbarians the Tau had always considered them to be.

The so-called ‘Gue’vesa Sept’ enacted a policy of scorched earth, and destroyed anything of use to the necrons. They then, in a desperate frontal charge, tried to storm the monolith portals of the necrons. They died to a man, but they died with curses on their lips. Many died while waving ancient flags all but a few understood the relevance of; a two-headed eagle, with one blind head...

The necrons came to Arthas Moloch led by the Overlord Jorunkekh and his glittering golden necrons. The artifact world was silent and cold, filled with lingering shadows. No necrons returned from that place. No fleets were ever sent there again.

Vior’la didn’t go down without a fight. This Sept empire was formed of a great many warrior worlds, and they made sure no necrons that attacked their worlds left undamaged at the least. Young warriors, fresh from the academies and unblooded, were thrown into this sudden and nightmarish trial of fire.

And so this went on; each of the major worlds of the Tau were besieged and overcome in apocalyptic battles. The number of well-known accounts of these battles fill many libraries; the Polemic epic of the Sack of Sa’cea, the legend of the poet of Elsy’eir (who supposedly saved the planet from the necrons through his beautiful lyrics, which attracted the eye of Trayzn the Infinite. Trayzn spared the world, as long as the poet came with him to his vaults), Tash’var and the sky serpent, and many more tales.

But of course, the greatest battle was the one for the cradle of taukind: T’au. It was here where all the survivors fled; the last stronghold of the Tau. It was here where the Silent King’s armada gathered its full strength.

T’au had been besieged fifteen times previously to this siege, during the Thexian wars and various other conflicts. As such, it was a fortress and metropolis like no other. Every planet in the system was shrouded with thousands upon thousands of orbital platforms that formed a coherent grid of overlapping firepower for a sphere a light year in diameter around the entire system. Idealists and even better craft flooded the system and could sense the approach of any unauthorized vessels from billions of miles away. Every fire warrior that could be armed was armed. Even the Earth caste took up arms; breaking into the research labs and taking out the weird, esoteric weapons they had deemed to insane to use before now; quantum whips and retro-engineered ork weapons of countless variety and varying levels of madness. Two krork War-Hulks anchored themselves on the outer reaches of the system, alongside their attendant fleets. Six kroot warspheres also landed upon T’au’s soil, depositing several large warbands of kroot carnivores, alongside a whole host of exotic xenos mercenaries including the serpentine sslyth, loxatl creatures, groevian fiends and multiple viskeon clans. They were promised extortionate fees if they could ensure the safety of the Ethereal caste and all non-combatant Tau on the surface.

The necrons had no localized Dolmen gates in the region, so they approached the world at sublight speeds, striking the out defenses like a nova strike. The two titanic fleets clashed in glorious war in the chilling void space between worlds. From T’au, the opening phase of the battle was a dazzling celestial display, which filled the evening skies with multi-hued lights. The defenders could not help but stare at the grand spectacle with awe and fear plain on their eyes. Infant Tau were taken by their loving tutors deep into the bowels of the grand libraries of T’au, in the hope they could be spared the horror.

The naval war was fought across a lightyear of space. In reality, it was really many individual fleet battles fought in close proximity, but were classed as one action as each fleet merged and mixed with one another as damaged ships were rotated out of fights, as reinforcements arrived in other engagements. The two Hulks were like vast segmented beasts from the deep seas, set upon by a shoal of ravenous predatory fish, as they battled dozens of necron warships at once. Lances and gun batteries fired continuously in the void, silently bisecting and blasting asunder ship after ship. The Idealist vessels tried to keep the necrons at maximum range with their advanced munitions, but inevitably some broke through their gun-nets; gutting the speedy vessels with concentrated lightning arcs that shredded armor as if they were not there. But idealists were unmanned, and few tau were lost with their destruction.

But the Silent King had fought naval engagements against the Ever-ships of the First Kind (be silent! Speak not of them!) and the might of the K’nib Grendel-kesh. He was a master of void warfare. Where others saw a confused mess of individual naval actions, he saw a grand web of interlinked battles and he orchestrated it perfectly. After days of battle, his forces drew the defending fleets into fire traps and outmaneuvered the Tau comprehensively. The final death knell of the fleet came when the Tau flagship was destroyed from within by the invasion beams of the Megalith. It was also said the necrons walked across its outer hull, unconcerned by the void, calmly destroying each weapon system with their annihilation barges, pylons and doomsday arks. Like a mighty fallen bear, the craft drifted in space as a blasted ruin, gutted and burnt within and without.

So, the necrons continued in-system, while their rearguard finished the few remaining fleet elements. The orbitals pounded them continually with perfectly timed barrages. Flights of missiles, torpedoes and hyper-velocity rounds joined the constant searing onslaught of energy rays and weaponized tractor beams. The necrons were stalled in their advance here, for they had to manually destroy each orbital before they could continue. This took time, and gave the defenders time to plan the defense. As Hopeshield organized his troops, the Councils of T’au argued over what was to be done to preserve their culture. The entire Tau Empire faced extinction, they needed to save at least part of it. Some of the elders demanded places on fleeing ships, but they were ignored. Others suggested Aun’Va and a cross-section of the Tau civilization must flee in order to propagate their culture. But where could they flee to?

It was a low-level, unnamed Por’la who spoke up then, despite the harsh looks of the elders and the high ranking masters. Before she could be silenced or chastised, Aun’Va himself appeared and silenced her critics with a gentle raise of his hands. He then bade her to speak.

Por’la suggested the gate which had been found in the human domain of Jericho’s Reach. As far as Por’la knew, the gate would take them far from the necron menace in the Eastern fringe. And, frankly, anywhere was safer than in T’au if it fell. Her words were wise ones and the council began to plan; plan for the secret evacuation of the spirit of Tau’Va.

Meanwhile, the necrons had reached high orbit, under fire the entire way. Naval warfare gave way to the furious din of aerial warfare, in the heavens above the first Sept world. Fighters and scythes dueled, while bombers reached high orbit to assault the enemy starships. In turn, the necron fighters fired hideously powerful arcs of energy into the cities below. Amidst these dogfights and strafing runs, the megalith descended. It was impervious to any assaults upon it, and as he came down, it cast forth invasion beams that allowed the necron ground forces to deploy directly.

Phalanxs of Necron warriors fought blocks of Fire warriors protected from the flayers by overworked shield drones on an industrial scale. Already, the air was filled with sulphur and the screams of the dying. The Necrons themselves were silent.

Nemesor Turenekh, the mouthpiece of the Silent King, appeared to Hopeshield as a hologram. He demanded only Aun’Va and his priests; if the tau meekly bowed down now and gave up their silly little demagogues, the Silent King may only decimate the populous, rather than annihilate them. Hopeshield cursed his name, before ramming one of his warp cannons into the hologram. Much to the Nemesor’s surprise, the holographic feed somehow transmitted the warp energy and obliterated his body. (Some claim that was a miracle; though I do not believe in true miracles, the warp has caused stranger things to occur...)

Hopeshield fought the necrons, leading from the front. He led a flight of battlesuits, which scaled the megalith and found his way inside. Within the ancient craft, a demented Nemesor that ranted of wars long forgotten, leapt into combat with him, accompanied by another necron which was callous where his master was brave, and somber where his master was disturbingly cheerful.

This duel was seen as a great technical battle, where precision gunfire battled ancient close combat fighting techniques. The battlesuit and the war machine leapt from pillar to pillar, exchanging blows and rounds with reckless abandon. The outcome of the duel would never be known, as it was abruptly interrupted by an artillery strike against the Megalith, giving Hopeshield a chance to retreat.

Across the world, each city was besieged by the endless metal hordes. Stalkers were a constant presence, as they picked their way through the vast mounds of dead. Doomsday cannons blasted chunks from the cities, toppling spires like matchstick houses.

But on the plains was where the real battles were fought. The fluid formations of the tau swept around the rigid necron forces that weathered their attacks with silent stoicism. The skies glowed a horrid green and the world slowly began to be poisoned by necron infestation.

The Temple of the Undying Spirit, the seat of Aun’Va himself, was placed under siege last. On the grand white steps of the temple, a host of lychguard marched towards the great gate. There, standing between them and the gate, stood the massed forces of the Honor Guard. Their blades shimmered in the green glow of the necron-induced dusk, but they felt not one shred of fear, for they knew the price of failure. Around them, Fire warriors poured supporting fire into the lychguard, but much of this was deflected or ignored. It came down to the blades.

M’yen’shas’Va, the head of the Honor Guard, led the charge. He wore a shield generator upon his back, but no armor at all, only his ceremonial robes and his vast two-handed blade. The Melee of Steps is yet another legend that arose from this siege, for it was claimed the honor blades matched the warscythes for over an hour. This seems impossible, for honor blades are unpowered weapons of almost medieval simplicity. Yet, they somehow stalled the lychguard, bringing down more than a few of them before they themselves fell.

But as the necrons besieged the temple, its master was in flight. A simple, ancient Explorer class had been picked as his chariot, filled to the rafters with the collected knowledge of the Tau. This old ships was escorted by multiple Idealist class starships, as well as multiple other transport vessels, carrying hundreds upon thousands of Tau in their holds. Their destination was the Jericho Reach, and they sped towards the gate at a desperate pace.

At the temple, the Silent King himself had come to the surface. The technology, hidden within his monumental form was beyond even the reckoning of the crypteks. He vanquished entire squads with a gesture, or simply shut down weapon systems with a press of a button. His staff carved apart anything which it struck, sending feedback waves of energy outwards, killing even more of his foes. He was the King of all necrons and he was mighty.

When at last he burst into the chamber of Aun’Va, he found Hopeshield standing there. He had long ago spent all his ammunition and stood before the Silent King defiantly. In his gauntlets, he clutched the broken halves of a bisected honor blade, each end tipped with a curved blade. He bowed to the Silent King, before he launched himself into battle.

The two towering figures clashed, energy discharges shattering the windows and melting the floors as they fought. Hopeshield was no swordsman, but he was driven by desperation and hope. The Silent King was driven by self-loathing and distain, but he was always the stronger. Every flourish of hopeshield was countered pathetically easily. His counterstrikes carved deep wounds into Hopeshield’s flanks, shorting out his shield generator within minutes.

Aun’Va’s convoy burst from the necron blockade, but it had not gone unnoticed. A necron harvest fleet broke off from the main assault. Its Lord was compelled by programming to crave the praise of his Overlord. Surely such a prize would warrant acknowledgement?

The captain of the explorer vessel pressed on all ahead full, and broke for the semi-warp; though slow, it was safe, and it was quicker than a necron vessel without faster than light travel. Unfortunately, this Lord knew the location of the requisite Dolmen gate, and burst into the stolen webway section as fearsome speed. The necron fleet would have reached the Tau convoy within seconds. They would have, that is, if another force hadn’t come into play at that very second.

As they breached, the necrons had not expected another fleet to be in the webway. This was a fleet of shadows and blades and it stalked them as they continued.

Suddenly, a strange voice was detected in their communications array. A serpentine, oily voice, laden with evil and malice.

“You may be almighty out there, but this is my realm, little silver devils. This is our Twilight realm, and we want to play...” the voice explained, before breaking down into demented laughter.

Lady Malys’ fleet, supported by the capering harlequins, attacked the necrons inside the webway. The necrons were not used to such an attack and fought back feebly. But even worse for them, distracted by this attack, they did not realize the webway had diverted them. Soon enough, the small necron fleet emerged into a strange realm they had never seen before.

And there, in Commorragh’s heart, the ancient aliens learned why all the young races, across the entire galaxy, dreaded the name ‘Dark Eldar’ more than any other...

As the Necrons were taken, Aun’Va passed through the great gate, into the Kronous expanse.

T’au was falling. Its armies were in retreat, desperately trying to keep on the move, but with no home bases, they were being ground down. The skies were now the necrons’ and they poured down hellish green fire like rain. The krot and xenos were barricaded within their ships, fighting like medieval barons against an unstoppable foe which wouldn’t stay dead.

Hopeshield lay bleeding upon the floor, at the feet of the mute necron monarch. His blades were broken, his hopes dimmed.

Then, as the Tau looked on in misery, it got even worse.

Another necron fleet surged into the system with impossible swiftness. One moment there was empty space, and instant later, a truly colossal tombship loomed. Silently it drifted into orbit. It was black of hull, veined with green and purple light. It dwarfed all save the Silent King’s flagship. Minutes later, it fired. It towering beams of energy pulverized six of T’au’s cities at once, utterly obliterating them with a single shot each.

A terrible image then psychically flashed across the minds of every living thing on the surface.

A Red world fractured. A great howl of pain and monstrous joy. The last unbroken? Siblings lost; brother flayer slain. Rage. Hate, all consuming. The night’s sky forms the wings of it; that great nemesis. That ultimate doom. The Great Wyrm. The Dragon. Oblivion. Machine Gods and Machine monsters; he is all and he is hungry. The galaxy is His. The universe to follow.

And with that, the vast vessel (a mere herald ship of the Dragon) vanished instantly.

The Silent King disappeared in a flash of green light. Much to the bewilderment of the Tau, the triarch necrons began to fall back, fleeing to their waiting ships. These ships then accelerated away from T’au at phenomenal speeds. By the time the sun rose of the Temple of the Undying Spirit, the necron were gone. They had left no trace they had ever been there, save for the ruins.

While the few million survivors rejoiced and thanked the path of the Greater Good for guiding them to deliverance, Hopeshield was not so blind. He looked form his window, towards the stormy skies.

Whatever the Dragon was, it terrified the triarch. What nightmare could possibly terrify the king of the necrons? Whatever it was, the galaxy and the tau were far from safe.

And, alas, he was quite correct...

Additional background section: The Dragon Ascendant, the Necron Wars, and the Sixteenth, Final Siege of T’au [Part Three]

3) The Void Dragon Ascendant

The Void Dragon. The Dragon of Mars. The great wyrm. The God in the Machine. Oblivion.

May are the names of this, the most infamous of the C’tan. All of these names are those granted to it by its fearful foes and quivering subjects. The Dragon was the first of its kind; gaining its sentience when the universe was still fluid. Many of the other C’tan followed; bound to the very substance of reality as surely as the very stars that served as their cradles.

It the many wars in heaven, the Dragon was at the forefront for it had an affinity for the fundamental cause and control of the realm of the real in a manner few of even his fellow C’tan possessed. It knew nothing of science, for science was the work of those who wished to learn of the universe’s secrets through observation and experiment; the Dragon knew how the universe worked completely. Nothing was theory to this being, for he could confirm it by simply making it so. It was the undisputed master of the Void.

But his knowledge was not limitless. There were things that eternally baffled him. The primary area of ignorance for the Dragon was the squalid, squabbling emotions of the races that came in his wake. Its emotions were easily controllable, yet they were colossal. It could not understand the eternally modifying and moderating emotions of the horter lived entities that scurried in his wake on balls of rock and molten metal. Consequently, when the eternal rivals of the C’tan, the [if you speak their names, I shall end you! I swear it!], discovered that the immaterial dimension was governed not by logic but by the madness of emotion, he grew incoherent and dreadfully wrathful.

The C’tan began to burrow, coiling through the bond sof reality itself. They desired to reach their foes, for the Old Ones knew the secret. They knew-[FRAGMENT MISSING]

It lurks, and none can see, for it permeates, lingering yet it persists forever, but it only existed a few moments ago, and it no longer exists, but it always will. Oceans upon oceans, and the islands float within. Branes upon branes; membranes like soap that bubbles. And flowing between, the ever-colored streams, feeding the deep ocean. None can see it till all is mad, and none can know what madness knows. All decisions and all despair; lust and rage and fear and hope are mere pillars of the true temple, pushing up like fingers through fine mesh. See it! Blinds you it shall! Blinds you it shall! It is too deep! Too deep! They all saw it!

[FRAGMENT MISSING]- but the Dragon was not shattered. It was spared this fate, ironically, by the weapons of its own foes. The Talismen of Vaul; weapons crafted to confound the beast, we brought forth to vanquish the Dragon.

The weapons had struck it, but it had not been enough. Something had softened the blow many of the old legends speak of a being that appeared upon the talismen; a Diviner or a seer or a monster. It destroyed the wraithbone choirs that guided the talismen, causing the artificial minds crafted within the so-called ‘pearls of Vaul’ at the heart of the space stations to malfunction. The Dragon was wounded, but managed to battle its way free of the ambush, dragging a constellation of asteroids and comets in its gravitational wake as it fled to the red world. Though the Dragon was the greatest of its kind, it fled into shadow, wounded and ashamed. There, the Dragon slept for long eons. The colossal entity was, after many millennia of futile searching by all factions, from the Alaitoc to the triarch, to even the daemon King Malfus Taarl, the Dragon was forgotten.

But when the Second Age of Strife descended upon the galaxy like a bloodied veil, the Dragon began to stir once more. We have spoken at length of the humiliating second imprisonment of the Dragon; chained in a sphere of warp energy that Abaddon has summoned around the Solar System. This incensed the C’tan more than any mere defeat could ever do. It was not his imprisonment which frustrated him; it was the knowledge that he could not understand the energies that were being unleashed across the system. All the Void Dragon could do was destroy it, but each time he did, like lumps of sand crumbling into nothingness, the warp energy merely flowed away and reformed after destruction; ever mutable and as immortal as the Dragon itself was.

When at last it was freed, the entire galaxy shuddered. Images of oblivion and destruction flowed into the minds of all sentient beings. It was a vision of triumph and yet confusion. The Void Dragon resolved to renew the War in Heaven; if his old foes thought they could prevent the great warding, they were mistaken. But when the C’tan finally arose, the galaxy was so very different.

It cast its mind wide across the galaxy and found a furnace of eternal war.* The necron slave race persisted, but they fought and squabbled like the pathetic flesh weapons of the First Ones. Why did they not work towards the goals of the C’tan? The remnants of the Old Ones’ weapons still festered across the galaxy; spreading like fungus. Had the C’tan lost? Impossible!

But then the Dragon searched for its fellow C’tan. All it could find was broken, demented fragments; ghosts of their former magnificence. But there was something worse. The Dragon felt an absence; a gap within the fabric of actuality. The Dragon searched for its brother C’tan known as the Flayer; it found nothing. When the Dragon caught one of the necron Praetorians, it learned the truth.

Betrayal. The necrons had been given eternal life and a glorious empire of glittering magnificence and they had betrayed the C’tan. The C’tan had saved the necrons from certain destruction by the morose and coldly merciless Old Ones; yet still they had betrayed them. The C’tan were shattered. I do not believe a mortal chronicler such as myself, with such a limited palette of fears and passions, could adequately express the Void Dragon’s towering, terrifying emotions at that moment. I fear I would damage this chronicle (even more than I have already done so) in the attempt.

The Void Dragon, in that moment, declared war upon everything that dared to exist in defiance of the Star God. But it did not attack straight away. First, it sent fleets to those forge worlds of the Mechanicus that it knew had Dragon Cults flourishing upon them, for upon these worlds, his minions had crafted teleportation portals, both planetside and in high orbit. Suddenly, to the surprise of many of the Magi, the Dragon’s vessels flashed into orbit almost instantly, destroying any monitors who got in their way. Then, it revealed itself to these worlds of adamantine and steel. No one can say what the Void Dragon actually looked like; some saw it as an amorphous cloud of shadow, others saw a new star in heaven. Others saw a colossal writhing mass of mechanical tendrils, cloaked in red with colossal wings formed of shimmering blades that spread from horizon to horizon. It is possible the Dragon had no set form, but this was immaterial to its goals.

To these mechanicus cultists, it was the Omnissiah. No, more than that; the Machine God itself. Even those who once revered the Emperor as the Omnissiah turned to this new entity. It repaired their machines with a gesture and it spoke the words of prophecy. What was more, unlike the Emperor, this thing of the Void was deathless as knowledge itself. Mindlessly they began to convert factories into replication machines. From these machines, scarabs swarmed and consumed most of the inhabitants. Those who survived became ever more convinced of their destinies. The tech priests were the true servants of the C’tan. Unlike the necrons, they knew what the Void Dragon offered them, and they joyfully accepted. The Flesh was Weak and they became so much more.

The Slaugth came to the Dragon in tatters. Their fleets were ruined by wars with the krork and the Phoenix Lords of the Asur. They had been cast out from their territories and were now little more than a nomadic fleet of reavers and scavengers, feasting upon the resources of unsuspecting worlds as they desperately sought to escape the attentions of the ‘Knights Griffon’ Commandery, which had made it their sworn mission to eradicate the worm-men, after the hated Slaugth murdered their recruitment worlds with a ravenous plague. They were almost caught by the impromptu crusade gathered by Commander Elikos of the Griffons. Only the experimental drives the slaugth had crafted kept them from being encircled and destroyed. But unknown to both sides, the Dragon’s fleet had captured the forge world system the Slaugth had fled to for emergency repairs. When Elikos finally burst from the warp into the system, his feet was met by a colossally powerful force of living metal vessels, surrounded by a dense cloud of scarabs like flies around rotting meat.

The resulting fleet action was as short as it was recklessly brave. The Mk II astartes could not back down from this battle, and the Griffons and their mortal allied fleets were destroyed; their vessels were then consumed and remade into the image of the C’tan own vessels.

The slaugth, pathetically grateful to the Star Vampire, pledged their entire race to the case of the void Dragon. The Dragon spared them, for they provided it with their innovative drive system. After they were incorporated into the Dragon’s faction, I have noticed that most of the C’tan-allied necron vessels became modified to mount similar engine systems to slaugth vessels; however, these drives were vastly improved by the C’tan itself and were superior in almost all respects.

It was then that the Dragon swept out across the galaxy. Its vessels were powered by these new drives. As previously related, the Dragon launched an offensive on an unprecedented scale. From the Western Chaos Imperium to the Tau meta-empire, these fleets spread outwards, gifting each capital world a brief taste of the C’tan’s terrible power. The galaxy could no longer ignore this entity; after long eons of degradation and humiliating imprisonment, the master of the C’tan was transcendent as the new dawn. Yet, what a terrible dawn this was!

This grand armada came to be known as the Dragon Tide, and it smashed aside all who opposed it. It spanned the galaxy in its reach, and some accounts of worlds on the edge of the galactic plane claimed they observed vessels plunging into the interstellar void, but this cannot be confirmed (I have no idea where I would start. Who could claim to have travelled the deep void, where dead stars and orphaned worlds drift in utter blackness? I cannot claim to know of the galaxies beyond this one. There are some who do, but one does not talk to those entities. Never.)

Across the Vulkan Imperium, servitors had to be repaired en mass, as they all began to shudder and moan. They gibbered in an alien tongue no being in the universe was old enough to remember. The metropolis of Armageddon was struck a blow by a tomb ship, which destabilized the crust on the southern hemisphere of the world. The resultant volcanoes leveled entire cities before the Salamanders (experts in this field of geological engineering) managed to bring the firestorms and tectonic destruction under control. This period became known as the time of the waking serpent, or the great first season of fire.

Abaddon’s Capital of Cadia was attacked with great force, but the Dragon’s forces spared the regions located close to the pylons from attack. And, thankfully for the corrupt chaos- worshippers, Abaddon had had the forethought to hide his greatest assets from this terrible foe. The Blackstone fortresses were hidden within a fold in warp space until the Dragon Tide departed; the only place the Void Dragon’s sight did not reach.

The Dragon Tide did not spare Nova-Ultramar in a similar fashion. Calth was mass-scattered by the tide, and Macragge’s citadel of lead was turned to molten ruins with an almost dismissive onslaught.

Tales of epic battles with the Void Dragon abound throughout this period. Many primitive pre-blackpowder feral worlds recorded the period with images of shooting stars and skeletal knights wrestling with a serpent that encircled the world. The Eldar remnants composed new ballads of woe as the Void Dragon rampaged with wild abandon across the galaxy.

But then, after seemingly dealing every faction a tremendous blow that sent them all reeling, the Void Dragon paused. This has been a mystery for chroniclers for hundreds upon hundreds of years. But I feel, in this... place [chronicler shivers], I have uncovered why the Dragon did not press on with its assault.

The key is its brother-C’tan. While it slept upon Mars, the Void Dragon had believed that the forces of the Eldar and their ancient allies were the primary threat to the C’tans’ survival. However, surely, once it had seen that the necrons, its own servant race, were capable of shattering its fellow C’tan, then they became the primary threat to its existence. The necrons and the krork were equally persistent threats to the Dragon, and it could tolerate neither gaining the upper hand in the coming conflict. The Void Dragon could not simply take over the Necrons directly, for the Silent King had long ago destroyed the central command protocols. They would have to be fought.

So, the Dragon threw his forces into a colossal galactic war against both factions. He besieged the Krorks on their great fortress worlds. The worlds burned as the two races ripped each other into ruins and cast fire upon the wreckage. The ‘War of the krork’ were a breed of creatures born to be weapons, while the mechadendrite-clad new war machines of the Dragon were horrifying entities that could channel energy through their bodies and could lay waste to hundreds of krork warrior-born before they themselves were destroyed by specialized anti- necron munitions. Tesla Prime, the krork capital world, was the second greatest fortress in the entire galaxy, second only to the Fang (to give it its primitive, fenrisian title). This was where the main concentration of combat was focused.

During this period of crisis and woe, many of the galactic powers weathered the storm through contracting their forces into tight defensive spheres around their inhabited worlds. The Dragon Tide could strike anywhere, and a relief fleet could not hope to arrive before the Dragon’s force had already departed; every world needed to be defended at once. This was a tactic where each world was reinforced by as much force as they could support, while the great roving fleets of conquest and counter-assault were kept to a bare minimum, as were the trading fleets. Vulkan was the first to enact this policy and it certainly kept his worlds safe for a time. However, it did isolate them. Opportunistic factions flocked like vultures to take advantage of this brief period of isolation (known as the Contraction). This necessitated the Nocturne and Armageddon councils sanctioning several daring missions by small fleets of some of his and his allies’ most elite and courageous units, to maintain the peace and security of the primarch’s domain (this period shall be covered in the next section).

The Dragon Tide was an irresistible force, but Telsa Prime was utterly unbreakable. How many human and other alien lives did the krork inadvertently save simply by maintaining that siege? I hesitate to speculate, as it is surely in the regions of quadrillions; never underestimate the value of sacrifice. Of course, some unfortunate worlds on the fringes of this world were stripped of resources by both sides as the war escalated, but compared to the damage the C’tan could have inflicted on the rest of the galaxy (already weakened by millennia of grinding attrition warfare) is unthinkable.

But as this war continued, the Dragon also sought to confront the necrons. The C’tan travelled the galaxy, snatching up those shards of his fallen brethren, consuming them and building his own power. It was better for them to be absorbed by the Dragon rather than used against him, presumably.

Whenever the two forces clashed, the Dragon Tide warriors would purposefully target the shards first, capturing them in Labyrinths before delivering them to the Dragon itself. But there were two shards that it desired to acquire desperately, for they were shards of the Dragon itself.

As he slept upon Mars, the Dragon had shed three parts of itself willingly, in order to facilitate its own escape. One was sent to Terra to consume human energies (but this was vanquished and cast out by a legendary warrior spirit we have yet to identify). This large shard was recovered from terra when the Emperor fell; Tech priests from terra discreetly fled to mars, bearing a strange sarcophagus of unknown providence...

The second took the form of a book, and his minions within the core-world abhumans and consequently lost during those tyrannic wars (another period of history I know little of. Even this grand archive has scant reference to that unfortunate civilization). The final self-shard of the Dragon was cast out further than the rest, to a far flung world away from any major civilizations. People would later call this world Medusa. And, once again some misfortune befell this, the smallest fragment of his essence. It was not until the Age of Dusk that the wise of the galaxy finally realized what this meant and who took the shard. But by then, it was too late to stop what was happening. The Dragon desired these shards, for each contained vital elements of its psyche; without them, the great warding project could not be completed.

The necrons reacted with unprecedented panic when the Dragon arose. Ordinarily docile and insular tomb worlds mobilized for full scale war and instantly began mass-teleportation assaults on facilities and sites known to be tainted by the Void Dragon’s influence. Others were forced on the defensive by the Dragon’s armies. No fleet or convoy was safe in real space, as ancient empires dueled in silent wars of mutual annihilation. Only Imotekh and the rebellious necrons that worked with the heralds of the Star father seemed limited in their engagement with the old foe; perhaps the Void Dragon’s rise had confused the Star father with old memories of a life long forgotten? Or maybe Imotekh was waiting until both sides were weakened enough for his forces to deal with them.

Only Szarekh, the Silent King himself, knew how much danger his race was truly in. He had made the initial pact with the C’tan. He had seen them in their full power; he had seen what the Void Dragon could do.

Yet, most importantly, he knew how to shatter him.

Time was of the essence. As soon as the Dragon Tide came to T’au, Szarekh departed with his fleet at full speed to the place where the C’tan had first been undone, where the necrons had unleashed a power not even the crypteks fully understood.

The Tomb World of Thanatos; the home of the Celestial Orrery.

They had precious little time to spare; the Void Dragon was the most powerful and concentrated C’tan and would take a lot of power to splinter. The Silent King’s vessel sped ahead of the rest of his fleet, engaging a mysterious drive that was faster even than Dolmen gate travel. Stars wheeled past the vessel as it smashed through the light speed barrier and plunged into a slipstream of compressed space and time. Every faster and faster the vessel sped. Portal travel would have been quicker, but the necrons of Thanatos were reclusive and prone to invasions, and had thus disabled all incoming portals. Szarekh had to get there physically.

Moments before the vessel reached Thanatos, the ship began to slow. The deceleration was sudden and impossible. The ship groaned in protest as it slowed, sentient metal shifting and warping under immense pressures. At last, with a fearsome jolt, they came to a stop, deep in the interstellar Void.

With a gesture, the Silent King ordered his vessel’s world-ending weapon systems to shudder into activation. The entire ship gleamed with energy as veins of glowing power ran across its glinting hull with spectacular intricacy.

“Destroy any vessel which enters the range of our batteries,” Szarekh’s Nemesor ordered. She would destroy any craft foolish enough to duel with the triarch’s very own flagship. No vessel in the Dragon’s entire fleet could face the Silent King’s ship one on one.

Unfortunately for them; a Star god needed no starship. The Void Dragon had come for the Silent King personally. The void itself seemed to split asunder as the Dragon shimmered into existence before the grand tombship. The Void Dragon took on the form it had possessed when Szarekh had first met the C’tan; an entity made of a thousand bladed wings, covered in glittering stones that looked like the starry sky itself, or great green gemstones of amazing scale; beneath these winged layers, a terrible brightness, at once oily and majestic. It was a light that coiled and writhed like a phosphorescent jellyfish or cephlapod of the ocean’s depths. It was a sight few in the galaxy could ever bear witness to; a full-bodied C’tan, glutted upon the consumed bodies of its brother C’tan.

The Nemesor cared little for this display, and merely ordered the lightning arcs to obliterate the Void Dragon.

Nothing happened. Necron pilots mindlessly turned to their overlords for guidance. Across the ship, systems were shutting down.

“Did you think you could take our gifts, take our knowledge and then cast us aside?”

The voice came from the very walls themselves, vibrating to produce the exact replication of a mortal’s voice. The Void Dragon spoke to the necrons within directly, using their own vessel to do so.

“You dared to rebel against us, when we granted you vengeance and immortality? You pathetic little imperialists; consumed by your own petty ambitions! You shattered my brethren; obliterated my Flayer. But you always feared me. Above all others, you feared my retaliation. That is why you waited until I was overcome by our foes. Cowards! Your bodies are deathless, yet you still think like the putrid mortal scum you ever were!”

The voice shook the ship, as strange signals and energy surges rippled throughout the tomb vessel. The Silent King stood before this onslaught, peering at the C’tan that loomed colossal in the viewscreens. He had nothing to say to the old Drake, the god of Oblivion. The Silent King hated this being as surely as the Void Dragon loathed his kind.

But before the Silent King’s very eyes, his necrons began to unravel at the atomic level; one by one they were falling. They were being willed into oblivion. The Silent King could be quiet no longer. With a metallic roar, he punched his staff into the command console, activating the secondary programming of his minions, overriding the Void Dragon’s terrible powers. Freed of this assault, the Nemesor powered the ship’s weapons and turned about to face the magnificent C’tan.

The battle was the stuff of dark legends. Whole worlds had bad dreams millennia later, when the light from his void conflict reached their skies. This was a clash of gods and the deathless demi-gods. It was a story told and retold for all of time. Arcing beams of energy struck the writhing being, as flayers and nightscythes sought to destroy the shell which contained the C’tan.

It retaliated with all its dreadful repertoire of powers; fighters were tossed through time to crumble, bolts of incandescent power obliterated the bodies of necrons utterly, and immense gravimetric forces pulled and ripped at the living metal craft, ripping great chunks from its sides. Finally, the Dragon folded in upon itself; compressing into a singularity. Slowly but surely, the tombship began to come apart, layer by layer. The hull was breached, peeled backwards like the petals of flower, to reveal the Silent King, who stood before the monstrous C’tan steadfastly. His face could bear no expression, but he surely felt great fear at that moment.

“You are destructive and glorious, Asin’drath. But you have slumbered too long. Your knowledge is out of date; you know nothing of the true dangers this galaxy faces,” the Silent King finally exclaimed. Though his voice was rendered silent by the void, he knew the Dragon could hear him somehow.

The Dragon simply shuddered and flared with more burning light. It would not answer him, but the entity was intrigued. Szarekh continued.

“You have struck a blow against the wrong foes. You were not there in the closing years of the war. You did not see what the Old Ones awoke in the deep places. The terrible dissolution came; the first phase of its manifestation. It rose up and destroyed the Old Ones.”

The Dragon rumbled then; an expression of bemusement dreadful too behold. “The Throne- Dwellers, dead? You know so little of reality, little necron. Despite your grand airs, you are an insect. I would know if they were dead. You can be certain of that. They did something far worse than merely dying...” the being exclaimed, resounding within Szarekh’s machine mind.

“Whatever they did does not matter. What matters is that whatever seed they played is taking fruit. You must have felt the pantheons rising.”

The Void Dragon did not respond, for it likely had felt the new powers of the warp, for the more they pushed into reality, the more his power of reality fluctuated; for the warp was anathema to the physical laws and disturbed them on an intolerable scale. But still the Void Dragon dismissed the Necron King’s words.

“I shall ward this galaxy. The dissolution shall be starved at its root.”

“It will not work. The wards are falling; the seals are breaking. Even now, a warp entity known as Lorgar is destroying your edifices upon the world of Ar’Cadia.”

For a moment, it seemed as if the void Dragon would heed the Silent King’s words. However, it was at this inopportune moment that the Triarch’s fleet finally caught up with their master. The Void Dragon cursed him as the fleet began its assault. The Dragon fought its way free of the blockade with a great lash of starfire a light-minute long. Thousands of necrons ships were sundered at the sub-atomic level as the Dragon fled; those vessels could never be repaired. However, the Dragon was driven off, even if the cost was great. But when Szarekh’s ship was searched, he was nowhere to be found. His home tomb world was searched, but from there too he had vanished.

Though the Dragon Tides continued for centuries afterwards, the Dragon itself vanished from chronicle accounts for a time. I cannot guess what the great and final unshattered C’tan planned in those years of silence. Did it heed the Silent King’s warnings? Did it come to some sort of epiphany? I only know that the Void Dragon is to play a key role in the events that are to come soon. So very soon...

[Chronicler looks behind pict screen at unregistered imagery.]

I am not ready. The chronicle must be completed. I shall not let them win. They will not silence me.

*[Please note, I have ‘creatively’ reconstructed the possible thoughts of the Dragon here, through the extrapolation of a hundred thousand fragmentary reports gathered from the broken minds of countless members of the Dragon Cult, as they channeled miniscule portions of his consciousness through their tiny brains. Most died as they transcribed their last thoughts.]

My memories; they are not my own. No, I oversimplify; they are mine, but I possess the memories of others as if they were mine. As I read these archives, these histories flow into me like some terrible torrent. I recall things history couldn’t know, yet I remember them alongside the historical accounts; I am participant and observer.

Has this twisted den of living bone finally taken by sanity? Or was my mind never my own? I do not recall how I first began this chronicle; I do not recall how I came to be here, besieged and surrounded by things I cannot fathom. I recall my allies, but why do I know them? Are all my memories ripped from these pages and etheric repositories?

There was another voice in my head. Is that my true voice? These thoughts disturb me; I must continue. Knowledge and the reiteration of history will quell my dread. Asurmen promised...

Sweet knowledge; caress me...

Additional Background Section 25: A Time of Contraction: The Cult Forgotten, The Necromundan Alliance and the Invasion of Drultevar Forge [Part One]

The period of contraction was a controversial policy enacted by various galactic powers during the rampaging conflict brought to the galaxy by the Dragon Tides. The force sof the Vulkan Imperium concentrated their forces around each of the worlds of the empire densely, combining powerful patrol fleets and regiment upon regiment of soldiers. This allowed each world in the Imperium to weather the Dragon Tides effectively. This policy was taken up by some of the neighboring empires to the Vulkan Imperium.

Yet, in exchange for security, the Vulkan Imperium paused in its gradual, methodical expansion. Contemporary scholars likened the action to that of a bear hibernating (or a cockroach being frozen, according to less sympathetic historians). Interplanetary traffic was reduced to a minimum; any vessels which were permitted to travel between worlds had to remain in the warp for vast lengths of time in order to reach their destinations without risking entering realspace and suffering raids by either the Dragon Tide, or the demented fleets of the Storm Lord, that crackled with strange energies both in realspace and the immaterium (due to the present of his angyllic allies onboard those corrupted necron craft). This was obviously more risky, and meant only the most essential and important missions were undertaken as otherwise this would represent a waste of resources if trading fleets had to constantly risk enhanced warp threats every time they left their systems.

Luckily, a significant fraction of the worlds pacified and administered by the government of Armageddon were self-sufficient worlds, each well-stocked for centuries of isolation. A slow pace of expansion had been a wise move on the shrewd pimarch’s part. For a hundred years into M56, there was paranoia and subconscious unease within the populations of the Vulkan Imperium, but relatively few direct wars. Ironically, the threat of sudden and arbitrary destruction fostered a form of wary peace (how history runs in its little cycles...).

In this climate of reduced military campaigning, those few major events have since gained increased prominence, and the heroes of this time became legendary. There was Temestor Braiva, the handsome General of the Federation of Justice’s rapid counter-incursion taskforce; tales of dashing heroism and bravery that still stir the blood. Darnal Taq was another legendary figure, but his fame was as much for his politics (and his personal championing of the now-famous figure of Iacob) as for any personal feat of arms. There was the notoriously fearsome Warmistress of the Ryza-Catachan Plasma Commandoes; she was famously unattractive, but also phenomenally formidable in combat (a legacy of her mythical namesake, Saint Harker the indestructible). And of course the Brethren of the Willing under Imogen, who had become almost completely bionic by this point due to her advancing age (Some speculate Vulkan himself devised a means to keep her alive, for she was a most useful servant and friend to the primarch), and limited astartes kill-teams operated throughout the period. The exploits of these famous figures are intrinsically linked to the major events afflicting the Imperium during this century of tension.

As the Contraction drew on, the Vulkan Imperium began to lose contact with neighboring empires and trade partners with alarming regularity. Some simply entrenched themselves like they had done, while others simply vanished. Large predators were consuming these realms. The Western and Eastern Imperiums of Chaos consumed worlds by the thousands. Rumor trumped truth in these cases. Some claimed Abaddon had united the two realms and had begun an offensive, others claimed he had been usurped and even darker forces were at work.

A new power was growing within the carcass of the Theologian Union; a realm of deathless titans clad in runic armor conquered worlds and enslaved their populaces. Flickering warp fires burned multi-hued in their former witch furnaces. The witch-hunters were themselves hunted, by the very witches they had once destroyed. These liberated psykers and warp witches all bore the sigils of the Godmaker Ahriman. The Sorcerer King was growing in power and no human realm dared challenge him, for he possessed the Obsidian Cube; his grand fortress of forbidden knowledge pillaged from terra itself. Any astartes-kill teams were rapidly humbled by his Rubric; simply adding to his mounting power. He was becoming something new; something terrible. He wished to see as Magnus had seen, and avoid his former master’s mistakes. He would become omniscient (or so he desired). The only one brave enough to challenge him, Crolomere the Grey sensei, had been cast from his sight. She was presumed lost for many years, but this was untrue.

All these great foes were beyond the scope of the contracted Imperium. However, the Vulkan Imperium had troubles within its own borders. It would be easy to trivialize such conflicts, but they meant life or death for billions and the small strike forces sent forth to deal with these problems were tremendously brave, for they knew no support would come to their aid should they fail.

First, we must talk of the Cult Forgotten. The Cult was ancient as it was secretive. The Temple of Vanus had been destroyed many millennia previously, but their agents had remained; dissolving into society. They were tailors and surgeons of media and information. Originally, they had been created to eliminate political foes completely; not only kill them, but erase their very existence from all documents, records and even the memories of their closest friends. It would be as if they had never existed at all. And the vanus did this so discreetly, most members of the Old Imperium never knew the vanus at all; they were data- ghouls, ghosts in the machine, errors in computation and cogitation.

But they were real, and they survived. The Cult was founded upon the idea that knowledge was the route of evil; under the God-Emperor, the populace was ignorant and it was relatively safe. Heresy would be impossible for a mind made small by ignorance and fear. The Cult Forgotten spread like an illness; they destroyed libraries that even mentioned C’tan. They killed scholars and erased their teachings about chaotic pantheons or the manifest forms of the xenos.

Darnal Taq (remembered fondly in many histories simply as ‘the Wyvern Scribe’) and his political disciples had decided that the Vulkan Imperium would best serve its people if they knew the nature of the threats they faced. Ignorance caused fear, and ignorance was seen as blight upon the Old terran Imperium. The cult forgotten had to be challenged. Thus, through psychic relays and urgent delegations of scribes and scholars began to travel the Imperium, risking life and limb to rekindle the knowledge being lost.

As this went on, the Brethren of the Willing began to search for this hidden cult. In conjunction with the Order of Heracles, they engaged in a covert war of espionage and discreet assassination. The vanus were cunning and devious. Sometimes their hunters would forget they had ever seen them, or were subtly reprogrammed to hunt down other assassins on the cult´s forgotten behalf. Yet, slowly, the vanus were hunted down and destroyed. The final official Vanus was slain by The Wyvern Scribe’s own retinue, after it transpired that one of his closest friends was a vanus grand master. Though he nearly died in the attempt, Darnal himself put a bolt between her eyes, but not before she had put half of his personal staff into paralytic comas from which they never recovered. It was said that the Vulkan Imperium was a realm of valiant commandery and good nature. But there were elements of their population who were morbid, greedy and cruel as they had ever been. There were some people who were always the lowest, base figures in history; the cowards, backstabbers and thieves that blight history books with squalid tales of petty criminality and violence. This was the ugly underworld of Vulkan’s semi-utopia. This amorphous force was later known as the necromundan Alliance.

It began with the Savlar Chem Dogs way back in the Second Age of Strife. Their homeworld had been destroyed, but they themselves were spread out across the galaxy as former guard regiments. The Chem Dogs were drug-dealers and criminals and they took advantage of any period of hardship and weakness. They formed protection rackets on countless backwaters and in the stinking underhives of more civilized worlds. They smuggled in illicit spices and narcotics, all the while bullying and brutalizing the weak. The Chem Dogs became a loose dynasty of vagabonds and filthy crime lords, overshadowing even the most infamous of Malfian families.

When Vulkan swept out on his new crusade of Unity, the Savlars resented his concepts of helping their common men and building a new world of Justice and dignity for the human race. Like cockroaches, their empire hid itself from the scrutiny of the righteous; infesting the dark places where law was a memory. Their diseased influence spread throughout the new Imperium, expanding after alliance with the Necromundan Spiders, a similarly brutal culture born of ex-Guard lineage.

However, it wasn’t until the Contraction that these crooks and villains resurfaced. For some reason, their ambitions had grown massively. They not only dipped their snouts into petty planetary crime, but they began to rob from forge worlds and raided the vast storage units of the most important of Imperial organizations and clients. This was especially bizarre, for no one could explain how they could pull these crimes off. Each crime scene looked like a horrific warzone; guards were ripped to shreds, pulped by bolter and whirring blades. Investigators of these crimes knew only one force was capable of such swift and brutal destruction. A Space Marine Free Company must still have existed (even though, at this point, these companies were believed to be extinct). The Promethian Council dispatched an astartes kill-team to locate this rogue criminal Astartes organization. The kill team consisted of ten Marines selected from across the Commanderies for their knowledge of Mk I astartes lore and their infiltration abilities. Their investigation took them from world to world of the Imperium.

They braved hideous warp journeys through suspended animation, and faced down the underworlds of the Imperium with particular relish. Their leader, Broxon Timbor, was a Steel Wolverine, a commandery which particularly despised those who dared to carry arms against fellow citizens. His men were brutal and ruthless in their interrogations and their search for the heads of this amorphous criminal entity. But while their work was effective, it was also noisy. Somehow, the dealers and villains got word to their masters of a band of (they assumed) rogue astartes who were apparently after their blood. Though the Criminal Alliance knew these superhumans were after them, they did not suspect these were men sent by Vulkan’s government itself.

After years of breaking heads and examining crime scenes, it seemed clear that the heart of the criminal enterprise was the Hive World Necromunda. Necromunda had been declared a failed planet centuries previously. The ruling Nobles had been toppled by warring gangland factions, bringing down the Brass-top Enforcers and even the Spryer families. Necromunda became a battleground of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, as Goliath gangs clashed with Van Saar bands and even the mutant population muscled in on the uprising. Some suggested the world simply be bombed, but others argued that without any food imports, the world would collapse in upon itself. Yet, the planet had, unaccountably, survived; shipments were smuggled in from across the sector and beyond. The Kill team realized that the Savlar Chem Dogs and their allies had been the ones to bring in these shipments. This was the rancid heart of their corruption. The Kill Team hid themselves within one of these shipments and prepared to take down their foes.

Even amongst other hellish hives, Necromunda was a special kind of horrible, for the distasteful bowels of the underhive were no longer confined to the pit; they had risen up to infest the entire planet. Poverty and sickness was rife everywhere, and not one building was left undamaged. Sewage overflowed in the streets and every man woman and child looked to each other in suspicion and hate. The Kill team fought its way through these endless slums, for the only way to learn new information was to beat it out of defeated warbands. Slowly, they came to learn of the Savlar families. No gang could take them because their heavies were unbeatable, or so it was claimed. Even the Goliath admitted these guys were harder than them.

Every gang pointed the Kill team towards their bastion, located high atop the hive spire. It had once been the opulent home of the nobility and the Lord-Governor; a glorious palace of fine furniture and lavish decoration. But it was no longer.

The palace had become a grim fortress, reinforced with stolen macrocannons and titan blasters foraged from across the galaxy. Iron spikes and battlements of riveted adamantium were bolted to the grim architecture garishly. The kill Team chose to attack the fortress at the same time as a major goliath-led assault was undertaken. As the Savlar emplacements slaughtered the gangers, the Kill team smashed its way through the blockade, losing Broxon to a stray mega-bolt round that pulverized his body utterly. Callan the Fire Beast took up the team leader position and stormed into the fortress with a curse on his lips, lashing out with the blades on his armor and his own consecrated boltgun. The Chem Dogs and the tattooed spider Guardsmen couldn’t stand up to astartes in such close quarters. Though Braman the Bull Repentent fell during the battle, they nevertheless pressed on through the mass of soldiers, until they reached the rotten heart of the fort. Beautiful tapestries were ripped up, chests of treasure were ripped asunder and even the fine carpets had been ripped up and unceremoniously tarnished by thugs and gangers. It was then that the astartes met their match.

Astartes burst from concealed positions of ambush to assault them. Bolter met bolter and blade met blade in the close confines of the tainted palace. These astartes were clad in patchwork power amour, crudely painted in garish yellow and black strips, while some sections of newer armor were still grey and unpainted; fresh from a liberated forge. Likewise, their looted weapons were diverse as they were deadly. Two more of the kill Team fell, but not before taking a heavy toll on the Mk I astartes that attacked them. After a short skirmish, the other six super soldiers were subdued and incapacitated, before being dragged to the governor’s throne room.

Their assailants were the Marines Malevolent. These posthuman warriors had rejected Vulkan’s rulership for as long as they had existed. They would not bow to weak humanitarians. It was they who had added their might to the Savlar cause, in exchange for dominion over the pathetic mortal beasts. Yet, strangely, it was no Marine malevolent who leered at the captured Mk II astartes. He was certainly a space marine, but his armor was the color of midnight, streaked with lightning and dried gore. He bore no helmet, and his pallid features were streaked with black veins, as dark as his black eyes. The throne he sat upon had been smashed upon its side, and he merely perched atop it like a vulture.

At his command, the marines malevolent began to carve open the helpless astartes before him. Their geneseed organs were ransacked, one by one. The midnight-clad Warlord hissed with laughter as the deed was done. Codar the Son of Thunder was one of the last marines left and he spat curses at the Lord of Night. The villain barely paid attention as he surveyed his kingdom of corruption from his grand panoramic windows.

The terrible figure muttered of ‘Nostromo reborn’ and of ‘the realms of chaos falling into dissolution; a terrible fate for such a glorious enterprise’. Codar knew the Space marine was quite profoundly demented. The Night lord spoke of quenching Necromunda’s sun eventually.

“Then!” He hissed. “Then, these people shall know fear!”

But the Kill team had been cunning. Their purpose had merely been to chase the unseen menace into the open. As the Night Lord watched, the smog-filled heavens of Necromunda began to glow. Then, like avenging angels, the Valkyries descended; unloading their cargoes on the move. Half-tanks and buggies clattered into the spire on grav chutes, alongside the Confederation strike teams of Temestor Braiva.

Codar took this moment of distraction to detonate his power amour power pack. The blast floored his nearest assailants, but he rose from the fire first. Snatching up a bolter and a chainsword, he set about the Marines Malevolent. It was an uneven battle, but he knew he had to act fast; if the necromundan alliance was not beheaded swiftly, the entrenched necromundans would repulse the strike force. In space, Braiva’s strike cruiser played a game of cat and mouse against the vast, decrepit Malevolent battlebarge in orbit around the world.

Codar swiftly ran to Callan, releasing him from his bonds. The two Space Marines fought desperately against the malevolent astartes opposing them. The captain of the marines malevolent was armed with a mace, which crackled with ethereal energies. Together with the now-frenzied Night Lord with his claws, they began to overcome the two surviving imperial astartes. Callan’s throat was ripped out, but he spewed acidic build from the wound with destroyed the optics of the Malevolent one’s helm. Codar was struck in the chest with the mace, flinging him bodily through the throne room’s window, clattering to a stop on the windswept balcony beyond. He watched with numb disgust as the Night Lord raised Callan above his head, and broke his spine across his knee.

Before Codar could follow his leader into oblivion, a Valkyrie hovered into view behind him. The two enemy leaders and their remaining squadmates dropped to the ground, before a sudden barrage of fire shredded the entire throne chamber with bolt rounds and scything beams from lascannons. Before they could recover, the Varseen deployed directly from the Valkyrie; jumping from gunship to balcony via high-tension cables clipped to their belts. At their head, Temestor Braiva charged, raising his laser gauntlets as he did so. The human soldiers found with cool, calm precision, even as many of them were brutally slain. The combat was short and brutal. Braiva faced down the Night Lord, as both retinues lay slain about them. The astartes was impossibly fast and the human hero fought just to avoid the monster’s claws. His laser gauntlets merely carved smoldering lines in the astartes’ battleplate. Sensing victory, the Night Lord closed in for the kill. But Temestor Braiva had a plan. As the astartes grabbed him, he lunged forwards and slammed a grenade into the brute’s open mouth. The grenade detonated; a mere flash-bang model charge. But it had the desired effect. The Night Lord recoiled, retching and bleeding black blood from every orifice in his face. Momentarily distracted, Braiva unclipped his harness, and attached the cable to his foe, before rolling aside.

The Valkyrie pilot pulled back on his stick, dragging the Night lord from the chamber violently. As his foe dangled helplessly from the wire, he took up one of the oversized Space marine weapons laying upon the floor and gunned the villain down in three deafening volleys.

The death of the Night lord tore the heart from the cowardly gangers, who were driven before the peerless elite of the Imperium’s mortal soldiery. The droptroops of Braiva had to extract themselves soon afterwards due to overwhelming numbers of the enemy. However, the damage was already done. It is said for the first time in millennia, the gangs of Necromunda rose up as one; they sensed the weakness of the Savlars after their mauling. In the decade that followed, the Savlars were hunted down like the dogs they always claimed to be.

The marines malevolent were no fools; when they learned Necromunda was lost, they fled in the battle barge as fast as they could, after bombarding Necromunda’s main spire with nuclear fire. They later joined Abaddon’s exile fleet, participating in the legendary battle of Palanium.

As for Codar, Braiva had him conveyed to Armageddon. Meanwhile, Temestor Braiva remained active throughout the period, fighting alongside his elite taskforce. His daring deeds fill a library themselves.

In the next part, we shall see what other notable acts that defined the Time of Contraction as a conspicuous period of heroism amongst a galaxy swiftly darkening with evil in all quarters.

Additional Background Section 26: A Time of Contraction: The Invasion of Drultevar Forge [Part Two]

As iterated previously, the forces of Vulkan engaged in multiple raids and limited assaults during the period of contraction. This part continues to relate the most prominent events of this century, culminating in that great event which changed everything. The day man walked on the skin of a God.

It is easy to forget, in reading these tales of glorious war, heroism and gargantuan villainy, that there were real worlds behind these conflicts. Throughout the Age of Dusk, I have spoken of so many wars my heart threatens to break (for I feel every battle as if I were there...). But we must also remember that war is not limited to those planets unfortunate enough to be warzones. Every war requires logistics, and for every planet engaged in combat, a dozen worlds exist to support their war effort with supplies, men and staging points for further conflict.

There was a much more invisible and all-pervading menace that afflicted these worlds. This menace had the names famine, poverty and desolation. The manufacturing worlds of the galaxy were worked for thousands of years, consuming generation upon generation of workers, slaves and citizens. These worlds were known as the exhausted realms, for the strain was getting too much. The Second Strife and the Age of Dusk had crippled them, but these broken worlds were forced to run on their shattered limbs; running to keep their empires functioning just on the brink of collapse. Even Vulkan’s fine Imperium struggled to accommodate these worlds. If it had continued for much longer, quadrillions of men and women would have perished, not through war or battle, but through stress and hunger, misery and drudgery.

But there were some who had not forgotten the exhausted realms. The most famous of these figures was the man simply known as Iacob. It is rumored he gained a prominent place in the Promethian Government thanks to his own passion and oratory. He is said to have appeared in Darnal Taq’s estate. He was a nobody; a simple man, but a man with a desire to help, inspiring compassion into all who met him. He avoided being arrested by the Wyvern Scribe and actually became one of the politician’s aides. He rose slowly through the political ranks, giving speeches and talks to various august bureaucracies. But it was not this that made his name.

He commissioned a great tour of the exhausted realms (sometimes called the worlds of fatigue), at the height of the contraction. When no one else dared leave their worlds, he bravely took to the stars in a tiny flotilla of barely warp-capable craft. He visited hundreds of planets, and he watched them. He noted down the problems of these worlds and he began to devise their solutions. When he eventually returned to Armageddon, he threw himself into a grand project amongst the administrators and merciful factions of the Imperium. Unlike the other charities, who sought to spread creeds of ideologies alongside their aid, he genuinely wished t help. He used his political connections, and his sheer charisma, to gather a huge fleet. However, this was no war fleet. It was a fleet of repurposed merchant vessels and tankers of supplies and emergency aid, alongside genetically modified syn-food crops and servitor parts. This was a fleet intended to create.

But this fleet was unsanctioned, and hence lacked all but the most rudimentary defenses. Hungry piratical eyes fell upon this ripe, nigh-defenseless prize. However, there were other forces at work here. Each privateer fleet or xenos raiding force were mysteriously attacked just before they launched their assaults. From the stories and reports I have gathered, it seemed that figures in grey, and dark knights in flaming armor appeared as if from nowhere, destroying each raiding force, before dragging the survivors off into the darkness. War and pain raged all around them, but Iacob’s fleet of mercy managed to get through by the skin of their teeth, passing from world to world. Iacob’s crusade was highly lauded across the Imperium, and indeed the wider galaxy.

Iacob himself was depicted in most legends as ‘the Last Truly Good Man in the galaxy’. Alas for the Despoiler, his renegade fleet did not receive this information. The Despoiler would not learn that his prophecy was coming to fruition...

The sector on the border between Vulkan’s realm and the broken, lawless regions once known as the Theologian union, was a region of particular anarchy reminiscent of the worst days of the Second Strife. But there was an area peculiarly lacking in large scale warfare.

A region of space where there were no nearby stars, hostile xenos or traitorous brigands. There was, however, something present in this lonely area of space. There was a fleet; two battlecruisers, ten destroyers and a dozen frigates, stationed in an area of warp-dead space. They were scions of Vulkan’s military, sent to this region specifically. It had been incredibly difficult to reach, for a one hundred lightyear radius area of space was utterly warp-dead. They had come out of the warp in a neighboring sector and had had to utilize their plasma drives to travel to this region.

Their crews had almost rebelled in indignant rage after supplies ran low after thirty years of inactivity. Strict recycling and forced-breeding programs had allowed the ships to survive for the next seventy years. Half-starved and dazed, they had reached the centre of this silent void.

A previous war against the old Union had uncovered this region on scanners by chance long before a mission had been sent. It was perplexing due to its sheer... absence. Empty space was actually perishingly rare in the galaxy (despite what some might assume); nebulous gas clouds, asteroids, interstellar orphan worlds and aborted brown dwarf stars populated the silence and the cold. But not here. There was nothing larger than celestial dust particles in this void region.

Nothing, save for the sphere. It was colossal. The explorer fleet was like a krill staring down a blue whale; no, a void whale. The difference in scale was that pronounced. It was utterly dark, except for the haze of an electromagnetic field rippling silently across its vast form. To the arriving fleet, the structure appeared to be a vast wall, spreading out 180 degrees both ‘left’ and ‘right’ (I am aware of the futility of using such terms in the void, but forgive this old chronicler its indulgences...) as far as they could see, and their sensors could scan. It was only about one lightyear out that one could truly take in its spherical nature. But they were too close.

Hull-mounted searchlights a hundred meters across stabbed their piercing white beams towards the vast structure. Oddly, its crust was pitted with marks. These were not the haphazard wounds caused by asteroids and impact craters. These were regular; geometric.

As the ships studied the structure over the next few weeks, strange things began to happen. Crew members began to lose their minds turning upon their fellow ratings in furious assaults, mouths foaming as they ranted about ‘She an’ all the rest!’

Things went missing from the storerooms, and the corridors running through the ships were re-written; no long leading to the same areas of the vessel they once had done.

They continued to send out logs of their studies into the void, but they became increasingly strange, as the men and women of the fleet succumbed to this all-consuming madness. But these messages would not be received by their superiors until they reached the telepathic relays located at the border of the dead space, one hundred years later, at the close of the Period of Contraction.

Elsewhere, before that point, the Brethren of the Willing remained active on a hundred fronts, searching out forbidden knowledge and dread lore. Imogen found numerous valuable artifacts and iconic weapons on her travels, including special stasis crypts on the Prison World of Goethe, a specialized form of warhead on the Glass-lands of Kivvidix, and the Great Burrowing Phage device, amongst other things. But many of the most important devices were already taken. It was a great mystery, for it seemed as if there was another thief working against her, stealing things before she arrived. Artifacts were replaced by different items, with strange alien runic notes left alongside them. She knew not what this ‘Trayzn’ entity was (or if she did, she did not make a note of her thoughts on its nature in her accounts), but she became determined to outwit it. Some say this rivalry was enflamed when, returning to her headquarters, she found the Anathame missing, replaced by a dozen frozen catachans and a tesserarch Labyrinth. Her attempts to find the Kassarian dawnblade were equally fruitless due to this strange phantasm of an enemy.

The borders of the Vulkan Imperium became increasingly terrifying places; the other empires of the galaxy were collapsing, beset by chaotic forces and eldritch horrors both warp-bound and otherwise. Most telepathic messages received were merely long-winded screams of unadulterated horror. The Two tau empires fought desperately on each side of the galaxy to maintain their empires, while the Kassar Enclaves disintegrated into further factionalism after the dawnblade was lost. C’tan, and monsters very similar to C’tan, began to devour planets and quash armies, while they dueled with each other and the legions of krork and necrons who sought desperately to make each other extinct. Several worlds caught fire, and their flaming populations killed each other in mindless wars, as a titanic armored figure fought with a wailing spear against a shadowy reaper. And the Eye opened ever wider, swallowing sector after sector as the overlap between realspace and warp space became ever fainter.

Oddly, throughout the Contraction, Vulkan was absent for the most part; leaving his government in charge. In hindsight, it seems obvious where he and his selected astartes retinue had vanished to. With a Realm of Fathers Patriarch in tow, the primarch was on the hunt. He was hunting the most important prize of all; his brothers. Only the Patriarchs were powerful enough psykers to track the signature of a primarch across intergalactic space. The Lion’s trace was faint, but it was still there. He had been moved (or was moving of his own accord). This meant he lived, or at least he was active somehow. This was enough for the coal-black primarch.

Yet, the largest battle the Vulkan Imperium fought in the Period of Contraction was a war they had never contemplated. Drultevar Forge. Drultevar had been a loyal, isolationist forge world since the very foundation of the original Imperium, so many millennia ago. They were a quiet sect of tech priests that believed knowledge and the ability to preserve the soul within machinery was all they required; they sought no outside interference. In exchange, they freely gave away their surplus weaponry and servitors to any who asked or demanded such things from them. No one expected them to suddenly declare war upon their closest allies. Yet, they did so, on a truly bizarre scale. Their Ark mechanicus vessels quietly departed from their forge, laden with world-ending munitions. They struck at every world within reach of a short-scale warp jump, which happened to include several Realm of Fathers worlds as well as more mainstream Vulkan worlds. Their allies had expected no attack from them, and hadn’t raised their defenses sufficiently. Billions upon billions died in a few days, as macrocannon barrages ravaged continents and vaporized countless civilians and the armies that lay planet-side for their protection.

Why Drultevar performed this heinous act baffled scholars for years (but scholars did not possess my talents or resources...). The reason was that they had been talked into this by a silver-tongued devil; a titan clad in a cloak of midnight feathers (always the cloak! It is as if they want me to find them in the chronicles. Is it their signature? Are the twins facetious, or are they at war with themselves? I cannot tell). This giant lied to them; implying that Vulkan intended to pillage their vaults. The thought of Vulkan gaining access to their vaults terrified the otherwise impossibly stoic Tech Priests. The cloaked giant and his shadowy armored minions suggested a preemptive strike. Ordinarily a suicidal action, but the Tech priests were desperate to hide their secrets by any means.

Their actions were unforgivable. A response was a decade in the making, but it eventually struck them with the force of a meteorite. The Iron hand commandery, experts at Forge World combat, were organized to be the vanguard of the assault force. With them came a vast force of allied Mortal regiments from their tithed domains, armed to the teeth and enhanced with bionics to almost the level of skitarii. For ten years, the Iron hands gathered armies from the closest worlds to the Drultevar Forge’s sector. Ryza, seeing the Drultevarans as malfunctioning pieces of the Imperial machine, sanctioned Marella Harker to unleash her Plasma Commandoes upon their enemies. Not only that, but the Ryzans authorized the use of the full might of their Titan legion and its feudal Knight legions. The Realm of Fathers also added the weight of its Legion Trygonis and the might of the super heavy tank battalions.

Drultevar would be shattered utterly.

Yet, the forge was far from defenseless. It had survived for so many thousands of years by being a fortified as physically possible. It had its own Titans, and its own cybernetic killing machines, as well as the technological marvels hidden deep in their forbidden chambers.

The first phase of the war came in 889.M56, with the Iron Hands’ initial assault. They struck methodically with cold precision; no hate, no rage. It was a war of dismantling to them. They attacked the world’s shields first. Their entire fleet unleashed a bombardment of fantastic scale; many serfs onboard their flagship, the Industrious, were blinded by the catastrophic assault. Gigaton-level blasts rocked the planetary shield like a hurricane of nuclear fire, which rippled across the entire world’s surface. This entire orbital assault knocked the shields down for ten minutes.

It was enough. The Iron Hands’ Terminators teleported directly into the defense laser emplacements and planetary torpedo silos of Drultevar. Smashing through the skitarii defenses in this lightning raid, they rapidly took down the cannons trained to the heavens. However, the Iron hand fleet found the artificial moons of Drultevar to be a challenge, which kept their main fleet at bay. Only the thunderhawks and scryer sweep-wings (a new type of combat shuttle craft) were swift and small enough to evade these big guns.

But the Iron hands were a force to be reckoned with, and soon carved out a landing zone in the midst of the Forge World’s vast factories and mining facilities. They held off the vast swathes of murder servitors unleashed upon them in terrific waves. Their bolters glowed red hot as they unleashed hell upon the steel-clawed monstrosities. They were supported by strange hulking cyborgs, hefting heavy cannons on wide tracks, alongside automatons and Tech-Guard Regiments from across the world. Thunderfire cannons, conversion beamers and all manner of experimental technologies were unleashed by both sides.

But even astartes had their limits. Soon, they were stretched, as millions of soldiers flooded to face them. Soon, the Titans of Drultevar had begun to walk. Astartes alone could not hope to best a fully-armed titan legion, even ones so venerable and skilled as the sons of Ferrus Manus.

But the Iron Hands were not alone. The artificial moons had been invaded by Plasma Commandoes simultaneously. These fearsome cyborgs slowly purged the moons of defenders, allowing the greater body of the invasion force to descend. Realm of Fathers frigates flooded in, sheathing the capital ships of the primary force in a near impenetrable escort shield.

Drop pods the size of colossal towers descended from the digital skies of Drultevar, each bearing a god-machine and its attendant skitarii defenders. Each pod screamed as retro thrusters scorched the air beneath them, arresting their terminal descent and allowing them to punch into the metallic ground with minimal force. Even as the blast doors fell away, the Titans began their assault.

Two armies of staggeringly huge engines clashed within the forest of shielded towers and bastion-factories that covered the northern hemisphere of the Forge World like some colossal crown. Their ordnance turned the very air to poisonous vapor and churning plasma fire, while the bellow of war horns drowned out any possibility of verbal communication between mere mortals. The superheavy tanks of the Hybrids followed the Ryzan Titans, alongside a veritable flood of half-breed warriors, silent and merciless as only the genestealers could be.

The Patriarch, bedecked in polish obsidian war plate, was a terror to behold; a towering genestealer purestrain that stood almost as tall as Vulkan himself. Its huge claws peeled open tanks with a gesture, and eviscerated whole squads of soldiers with every blow of its rending talons. But its real weapon was its mind. Great bolts of purple lightning flared form its eyes and slavering jaws, pulverizing flesh and bursting apart armor with pathetic ease. Its roars were like the howl of a daemon, easily the match for a Titan War Horn. Its retinue of purestrains killed anything which their master failed to, while the Legion Trygonis calmly moved between buildings with unnerving precision and order. They fell back and regrouped at exactly the right moment, flowing around strong points to attack where the Drultevarans were weakest.

Lord Morsan, Commander of the Iron Hands, likewise fought effectively in the shadow of the God-Machines. The press of combat was close in the confines of the refineries, mining districts and claustrophobic manufactorums. In the shadows and amidst the sparking, whirring technology of the Drultevarans, combat was decided within the reach of blades and pistols, pistons and flamers. Each side seemed fearless; almost dispassionate. His axe crackled with fizzing blood and oily fluids, while his servo arms snapped like hungry serpents as they ripped away spines and crushed skulls.

The drultevaran tech guard began to use increasingly bizarre weapons as the armies closed upon the Temple-Fort of the Deus Mechanicus, the void-shielded central bastion of the rebellious Tech Priests. Tractor beam weapons that pulled victims in half messily, before tossing them miles into the stratosphere, or weapons that turned enemy armor inside out, before rusting the technology beyond belief. Weapons that fired darts of metal, that struck the enemy before they were even fired; lasergrids that diced Imperial troops by the thousands. Esoteric graviton guns which caused those struck by the weapon to collapse into short-lived singularities; these implosions then dragged in everyone nearby before dissipating. Transdimensional energy weapons that bypassed all forms of armor. There were even sonic weapons that caused foes to vanish at the atomic level, simply due to the manipulation of their fundamental quantum structures. Morsan and his Iron Hands recognized some of these weapons. From the archives of old Medusa, their bionic minds could instantly recall the designs and plans for several weapons. Weapons Ferrus Manus himself had devised.

The fiends had stolen from Medusa! The Iron hands were spurred on by indignant outrage, pushing ever harder against the hardened bastions of the Tech Priests. The entire planet turned into a terrible metal meatgrinder; neither side was capable of retreating and neither force was willing to give up the battle for anything. The vast armies of cyborgs and hybrid freaks smashed each other with weapons of world-ending force. By the first week, the surface of the world looked as if it had been bombarded from orbit. However, this was simply the effects of prolonged Titan-on Titan warfare. The dueling Warlords and Imperators glassed the very ground itself as they battered against the void shields of each bastion and war machine on the surface. Squadrons of baneblades and stormlords exchanged fire with the hunched warhounds beneath this seething mass of plasma fire and solid munitions. Ammunition factories were raided by both sides in their eagerness of resupply, only to throw themselves back into combat.

The Plasma Commandoes performed aerial raids on wounded enemy titans; as soon as their shields were battered down, their flying vehicles would swoop onto the crenellated shoulders of the god-machines, before storming the giants’ innards and planting demolition charges in their vulnerable hearts. However, for every titan they felled, Marella Harker lost thousands of her soldiers, and almost as many aircraft. She was herself a terrifically powerful warrior, felling enemy after enemy in quick succession with her forearm blades and twinned plasma blasters.

No building could be cleared without physically storming it and killing every Tech-Guard within. They always died to the last man, woman or androgynous synth-flesh servitor. Dawn was quenched on Drultevar, for the pollution thrown up by the conflict drowned the sky in toxic smog and stinging acidic rain. The oxygen of the world was being consumed at a frightful rate. Soon enough, all external atmosphere was unbreathable to those without rebreathers or advanced biological/mechanical lungs.

Yet, slowly but surely, the invaders claimed the city; block by block, bastion by bastion, factory by factory. They spread out form the landing site, until a tight defensive ring five miles in diameter around the Temple-Fort of Deus Mechanicus was all that remained of the surface defenders. Morsan fought relentlessly to punch through this ring of adamantium, leading numerous daring assaults and raids into the enemy’s clutches, before breaking back out of these defenses to attack again at a later date.

The Legion Trygonis were the perfect support for these actions, for they flooded into the smashed gaps punched into the enemy lines, setting up intersecting arcs of fire and emplacements set up to maximize the damage done by these assaults. While the Iron hands were like a rapier-point, piercing the flesh of the beast, the hybrids were the hooks and pegs which forced open these stab-wounds, ripping them open until they were full, disemboweling lacerations. All the while, the titans pounded the Temple-Fort with their volcano cannons to prevent the mile-high fortress and its big guns, from supporting its beleaguered defenders in its shadow.

Finally, after a grueling siege which claimed more lives than the administrators could tally accurately, the invaders reached the Temple-Fort itself, pounding through the main gates using a massed vindicator bombardment at close range. The Iron hands charged through the sundered gates at the head of a massive tank formation. Their predators and Land Raiders led the way, followed by ancient Russ designs of a wild variety, alongside Thunder Lizard model tanks, followed by the artillery and super-heavies of the Hybrids. The bastion as so vast that it could easily fit these tanks, for the Temple-Fort was a cathedral, with chambers that rose up hundreds of meters, with wide avenues and echoing hallways filled with construction equipment and killing machines in their hundreds of thousands. Only the Ryzan Titans were too large to fit inside the belly of this beast. But the Iron hands cared not, for they were performing a tactic which had proven effective ever since its invention in the dim, forgotten past: the Thunder-Run.

The defenders struggled to handle the speeding tank formations that gunned their engines furiously as they unleashed the full power of their munitions in the heart of the enemy fortress. The Drultevarans were resourceful however. Collossal cranes and construction vehicles turned their heavy scoops, dozer blades and clawed-winches against the invaders. Wrecking balls the size of land raiders flipped baneblades onto their sides, or pulverized mundane tanks into flattened ruins that leaked with oil and the blood of their former crews. Praetorian warrior servitors rolled up to defend key installations within the factory, but were swatted aside by the relentless pace of the charging tanks. Within a few hours, the ground level of the Temple-Fort was in the hands of the Vulkan Imperium. However, the Tanks could not break into the vaults, or scale the internal labyrinth of the upper galleries of the Fortress.

Harker and the Patriarch led their infantry forces upwards to take down the vast army of Tech-Guard holding out above their heads, while Morsan and his battered Iron Hands penetrated the underworld, deep below.

Marella was famous for her dislike of aliens, but she admirably bit back her revulsion as she organized the attack with the Patriarch and his Magi. She hadn’t the luxury of time to waste hating them. The Tech Guard had blown up all the lifts and stairwells leading upwards. But worse than this, they were attacking the superstructure of their own fortress; they meant to collapse their own Temple; thereby destroying the bulk of their enemies in one fell swoop and trapping the Iron Hands underground; forever entombing the cybernetic Mk II astartes. The Tower had to be taken, and quickly. Eventually, the odd couple of Marella, a bulky cyborg woman, and the towering chitinous mass of the Patriarch, came to an agreement.

Meanwhile, outside, the Titans had finally battered the Temple’s cannons into submission. Yet, even as they did this, a new threat emerged from the churning, oily skies. The bulky shapes of monoliths descended in their thousands, alongside a swarm of scarabs and necron fighters. Sighing with resignation, princeps Gorios of the lead imperator ‘Ryzan Dawn’, ordered his Legion to turn face and target the interlopers. The necrons shimmered into existence like a phantom from the mist. Gorios suddenly felt his Titan’s vox groan in pain, as an alien signal rippled through every vox in the Legion.

“Surrender and die. This world is now ours. The host of the Stormlord have come. Perish in silence. You were foolish to believe you coul-“

Gorios emitted a vox signal to his Legion, as he neatly cut off the necrons in the midst of their ominous speech.

++ Enough of that nonsense. Gorios to all princeps; the enemy think they can let us lose engines to take this world and then take it for themselves, without sacrifice? I believe their logic is profoundly faulty. Let us educate them. Legio Tyberos; we walk. ++

As the Titans marched to war, the Iron hands penetrated ever deeper into the core of Drultevar. With melta and chainfist they literally carved their way through sealed portal after sealed portal, gunning down the crawling killing machines that sought to drag them into darkness. Stubby walking cannons spluttered with fire, while murder servitors dropped from the ceilings to slash at the Iron Hands and their serf soldiery that followed them into lightless shadow. Of course, neither side required visible light to see. The Drultevarans had destroyed all the lumen globes in the vaults to no avail. The only light in the vaults was the crackling energies of power weapons and storm shields or the chattering exchanges of gunfire. Robed priests brought forth experimental plasma flamers, huge weapons that spewed gouts of blinding blue energy in a destructive cone of scorching energy. Even power amour was of no defense against these weapons. In the close confines of the tunnel, many Iron hands died. Eventually, the Assault Terminators formed a shield wall with their storm shields, protecting those behind them as they advanced on the flamers. Missiles flew over the heads of the tactical dreadnought armor, as their allies supported them as best they could.

The deep places of Drultevar echoed with the shouting and static screeching of battle.

Meanwhile, the Plasma Commandoes and their allies had devised a way to reach the Tech Guard above. Purestrains led the charge, clambering up through the lift shafts and tunnels between floors. Each alien beast had climbing cords attached to their backs. These cords were secured to the walls of the fortress, and Harker’s men followed them up eagerly, clambering up the wires with the agility of tree-apes. They were followed by the Legion Trygonis, who also hauled up heavy weapons to aid in the room to room fighting which would certainly ensue above.

The battle within the tower was utterly chaotic, for friend and foe alike fought through increasingly narrow corridors and rooms. Frag grenades blasted through thin dividing walls, while storm bolters and heavy stubbers chewed through the rest. Hellguns cracked and hissed as they fired over and over again, until their power packs fused with the relentless heat. Plasma bolts burned whole squads of troops alive, or otherwise ripped holes through walls and Praetorians alike. The purestrains were a nightmare to face; a storm of clawed limbs that eviscerated anything which got within range with the space of seconds. They were so fast; the skitarii could barely track them with their weapons before they were ripped asunder by alien monsters. Each gunfight was brief and brutal; either the skitarii killed every squad within moments, or the invaders killed them just as quickly. There were frantic skirmishes occurring on every level of the fortress. Elevators became lethal chokepoints for gun emplacements and ambushes, while adamantium-coated work-desks became makeshift barricades, or simply cover from the relentless gunfire criss- crossing between each room. The Patriarch led the way up, leaping between floors, smashing through ceilings to emerge through the floor of the level above. The Patriarch also bore a rope upon his back, to which Marella and a handful of the Trygonis command squad clung to. She would gun down anyone who attempted to target the clawed purestrain with ranged weapons. Rapidly, they ascended the tower. Soon, they would reach the last of the defenders, and could eliminate the arch magos of Drultevar once and for all.

The vaults had grown quiet. The Iron Hands had killed their way into the deepest of the underground bastions. However, their Techmarines grew concerned. Their auspex told them they had descended many hundreds of miles. They should have been hitting mantle, yet they were not. They moved down even deeper, down through the levels with ever greater rapidity. The Techmarines raised their concerns to Morsan himself, when they showed him their findings. They were now deeper than Drultevar was wide. They had entered the realm of the impossible. Morsan ordered them to explore the tunnels around them. The astartes easily fought off the surviving Tech Guard ambushes. However, no matter what direction they travelled, the auspex told them they were going deeper.

But as they marched in darkness, they continued to find vaults and storage chambers filled with strange mechanical designs that the astartes could only recall from Ferrus Manus’ notes. Yet, they could find no such notes. Eventually, the single-minded will of Chaplain Korbin allowed the Iron Hands to navigate the perplexing maze and find the one vault they had wished to locate above all others.

The Patriarch burst through the floor of the final floor, into a screaming null field. The giant monster toppled onto his back as soon as he emerged. Marella entered the chamber soon after, but as barely troubled by the field. The three Legion Trygonis troopers staggered as they entered this field; their telepathy was cut off. They were forced to talk to Harker, requesting instruction as they rushed to their colossal father’s side. The Patriarch could not speak to them, but merely gestured for them to follow Harker. They nodded, before they helped their genestealer brood-father back down to the level below. Harker would get no aid from the Father.

Harker nevertheless fought her way through the Tech Guard with brutal skill. The hybrids fought effectively with their laser rifles, but had lost much of their unnerving coordination. The arch-magos was a giant, a robed beast set upon great steaming bionic legs, that gave him the appearance eof a great spider wreathed in whirling metallic tendrils. The three emptied their weapons into the Priest, switching between clips until their weapons were spent. As they fired, Harker leapt into close combat. Her blasters ripped a hole into his chest, which she opened up with her crackling blades. Each snapping claw and mechandendrite was blocked or dodged by the superhuman killing machine as she set about taking the magos apart. But the ruler of Drultevar was not without his own defenses. Sonic weaponry drove Harker back and the arch-magos almost destroyed her there and then. But the hybrids intercepted the towering machine-prince. Tossing aside spent rifles, they all drew the swords from the scabbards on their backs.

They were skilful opponents; stronger and faster than any human, and even though they had lost the fearlessness which came with the collective, they fought on bravely. They slashed at vital systems; cutting cables and breaking pistons with their power swords. Slowly, the magos was driven back, at the cost of their lives, which they gave gladly. This gave Marella a chance to line up a final devastating shot with her plasma weapons. The vast ball of energy burned a six foot hole through the arch-magos, killing him in seconds, before blasting the outer wall away with the force of the blast.

Through the hole, Harker noted the necrons battling with the Titans in the distance. Her words at this point were not recorded (but I suspect they were expletives...).

Morsan received word of the situation above ground. Yet, he could not care less for the surface at that moment. For, in the centre of the last vault, he saw a great body, sitting upon a throne in a stasis field. Robed Tech priests surrounded the figure, tapping at keys and scribbling with stylus upon dataslates. They turned at the sound of the Iron Hands, pleading for them to keep the field active. Morsan killed them all without a second thought, pulverizing their corpses with manic fury.

The ordinary stoic Iron hands were all desperately holding back tears. Tears of great, abiding sorrow.

For upon the throne sat a headless giant. A giant with forearms bonded in flawless silver. Wires and cables sprouted from the stump where a head should have been, and fed into a hundred cogitator devices around the room.

This was Ferrus Manus, and he was dead. The Iron hands had always suspected his death, but to see his body, and know it had been desecrated, was almost too much to bear. Furiously, they destroyed the stasis field holding their primarch. But as they did so, they watched in horror as he crumbled into dust before their eyes. His two metal-clad arms fell to the ground with a sonorous clang.

Despair seized Morsan then and he fell to his knees. The astartes were broken by this revelation. Korbin, wailing in demented madness, unleashed his flamer upon the metal arms, screaming hopeless litanies. He cursed the name of the legendary silver wyrm; the beast which Ferrus had killed. But in melting the metal, Korbin had done something unexpected. He had woken the metal up. The molten pool suddenly began to take shape. Within moments, the metal leaped at the chaplain, plunging through his armor as if it was not there. Korbin began to scream, light and metal roiling beneath his armor like a subterranean storm. The others furiously fought to restrain him, but he thrashed like a madman, flinging astartes away from him. After a lengthy battle, Morsan eventually restrained the fiend. It spoke with many voices; an inhuman roar, like that of a great reptilian monster a scream of static and disassembled code, Korbin’s own demented ravings of the Emperor undying and of horrific visions of terror. Also, there was a final voice, a voice which they thought may have been Manus. It was as if the shard-entity could not remember which entity it was; was it a primarch, a Marine or the God of knowledge? It squealed and wailed in confusion, detonating meltaguns with a thought and growing long talons that ripped chunks from the floor.

Playing upon the thing’s confusion, Morsan persuaded it to aid them. He told the entity of the necrons, coming to claim it. Mention of the necrons inspired loathing in the creature, deeper than any hate a mortal may know.

I would suggest that it was this entity which caused the famous ‘Drultevar incident’. Until now, we had no explanation how the entire Vulkan army assaulting Drultevar vanished from the planet and appeared inside the holds of their ship, allowing them t just barely escape Drultevar with their lives.

Drultevar itself was slowly turned into an angylworld, for the necrons of the Stormlord lost any interest in the planet once the C’tan shard was stolen.

At the close of the Period of Contraction, Vulkan felt lost; alone. He had returned from the hunt for the Lion without success. He had learned that Ferrus’ body was destroyed. The enemy were at the proverbial gates; Ahriman in the south, Baal’s Bloodknights in the south- west, the demented forces of Lorgar and the Blackhearted one closed in from the north and west, the rogue Despoiler somewhere within his own borders, maiming at random as he battled anyone in his way, while the Necrons threatened his worlds from every angle. Darnal Taq was dead; old age claiming him. He had refused artificial rejuvenation. We know from the sources that the Iron Hands’ capture of a C’tan shard would have given him a valuable intelligence source, but I...

... I feel his despair. In that moment, thought it was many decades ago, I FEEL his despair, as if it was happening right now. My mind... it...

I saw Vulkan upon his throne, in an empty council hall; the other rulers were planning various campaigns of expansion, to try and drive off the enclosing forces of madness. He knew the galaxy was coming apart. His Imperium couldn’t last; not against such crushing numbers. It seemed like insanity was the default mindset of the universe. His realm of civilization and sanity was the last sane man, shouting into the wind. There was something just beyond his sight; some grand pattern. It was ethereal, lost to all without the sense to see it.

Then, he received a vox signal. It was re-directed from the southern border region and delivered to him personally by Imogen. Temestor braiva accompanied her; limping from an old war-wound. The message was from the fleet orbiting the sphere. It spoke of their plight and of their madness. It spoke of how some of the crew had stolen shuttles from the hangars. They had exited their shuttles without space suits. They had walked out across the surface of the sphere, chanting even as they suffocated. The sphere was called ‘God’ to the demented crewmen. They wished to walk upon a God’s skin...

Yet, thanks to the C’tan shard, Vulkan at last realized exactly what this ‘God’s Skin’ was.

He knew how he could save his people from the coming apocalypse. But Vulkan also knew that he could not join them. He could not leave his brothers to the predations of chaos.

If anyone was to survive, Vulkan himself would have to fight. With his people safe, nothing would hold him back.

The Thanatos tale

It begins with the cataclysm. It is the birth of stars infantile, He, the great [untranslatable] tends the darkness and kindles them; He guides the stars and the rocks, Rocks which are the Paiges of the suns; second-born descendants of plasma furnaces.

Life is risen from the lifeless garden. The [untranslatable] dies away, remembered by all save a few The Lonely souls; Celestial gatekeepers who take his mantle. There is strife; recursive forever.

It begins with the two ancient breeds. They foster hate in the hearts of lesser things, They cast the Kiasoz upon the beast between planes, and drive it into nothingness, They bring war but are themselves overcome by their lowly allies. Unforeseen consequences. Butterfly wings. The first-born children of fire are usurped. Splintered into prisons. Two sleep long eons The Second-born bring forth that which was always sleeping. The permeation between worlds, The Long-scream. It turned from a mirror to a pit. The Madness of [untranslatable] once lived in every world, Permeating all through this mirror of soul-fire. But the strife brought forth the first of them. The second-born died away, but they did not perish. Once the wheel is turning, nothing can stop it; the more it grows, the more it feeds, the more it grows. The warping realm, the Ne-[DO NOT TRANSLATE!] The first is shrouded and quiet; malignancy shrouded. It causes the conflict; sets up the great game. It is the number ten, for it is the tenth movement, but the first chronological step on the road to dissolution. Then comes transmutation. The changing of borders and alliances, of friends and foes and family. Change and change until nothing can catch you. It is hope, but bears the visage of the vulture, for it feasts upon the folly of this futile desire. It is the ninth. War. The horns of the beast take shape, pushing up further from the deep. Blood and pain and the hands of a murdered brother. It bears the holy number eight. Faster now, they build. Pestilence. The mortals become aware of the pattern, in their hearts if not their minds. Woe feeds, pulling itself up, upwards ever spiraling. The seventh movement is revealed. A pregnant pantheon eats itself from the inside out. Its remains infest the shadows while She Thirsts for more. A sixth movement. Holy number six. Faster, ever faster. The manifold man bearing a fist of star-forged Iron. Five fingers of the fist, fifth movement through the pattern. Faster still, dissolution spreads. The one named Maker makes his greatest work. A forge of souls births a golem of utter- [the translation totally breaks down here, but I think this is the fourth movement. I cannot make out the rest of the text. But look! See what everyone else has missed! The numbers! The holy numbers are getting smaller, every time. What does this mean? And what will happen if we reach the final number? I dread to think...]

[Chronicle Pauses] [Chronicle resumes.] How long was I sleeping? I feel as if I have slept for centuries. I had troubled dreams; shapes that hide just out of sight. They cloy like melting tar in my mind. I look upon my notes, and see I have written many sections since my last. But they are not in order. But I am drawn to the account of Mephiston. I feel... I have to begin here before I can categorize the rest of my notes. (Where are my guards? They were here before I slept. I do not recognize this part of the Library...)

Additional background Section: Baal, the Nation of Red Fangs, and the Demon-knight Mephiston

The realm of the Blood Knights of Baal stretched between the eastern borders of Huron’s realm, and the desolation of the north-eastern fringe of the galaxy, long ruined by thousands of years of horrific warfare between the great xenos empires of the thexians, tau and necrons.

Unlike many of the human empires that survived the Age of Strife, this realm of blood and twisted grandeur was neither destroyed nor subsumed by the expansive efforts of the Vulkan Imperium or its more malevolent neighbors.

The gore-soaked domain of the Baalites was independent of its fellow powers, a unique realm which was simultaneously terrible yet organized. Upon every world, there rose towers and bastion sculpted in baroque fashion. They loomed over every settlement and establishment where the humans thralls of the Blood-Knights lived. There was precious little crime or discord within these thrall settlements. Those foolish or incautious enough to make themselves known as criminal elements vanished in the darkness soon after; dragged into the draining pits below the towering Sanguinary towers, where their blood was used to feed the inhuman rulers of this realm.

For the Blood Knights, though they had once been astartes, were astartes no longer. Their Red Thirst, the desire for drinking human blood, had become an all-consuming necessity amongst their kind. The Priesthood of Baal, under the direction of the monster Mephiston, had crafted a mutagenic virus which had quenched the Black Rage amongst his brothers entirely, but this has somehow driven their thirst to become something different. It became a psychic contagion, fuelling and distorting the Blood Angels and their cursed siblings. They no longer fed upon flesh, relying only upon human vitae to sustain their forms. This subsequently altered their physical appearance.

A diet of blood could not sustain the hulking form of an astartes; only masses of protein could do this. Instead, the Bloodknights became lithe, muscular beasts. Psychic energy kept their bodies strong as adamantine, and made their red eyes weep with blood constantly. With such a major change in their physiology, their armor was also altered to fit this lithe form. They remade their power armor in the style of gothic knights of old, wreathed in sculpted suits that looked like skinned bodies threaded with horns and whimpering faces.

They expanded their realm rarely, but when they did the Bloodknights were a nightmare. First they would thread the atmosphere of a world with iron oxide. Once the skies turned the angry red of spilled blood, the Knights would descend on their gunships like a swarm of hungry bats, followed swiftly by their demented Thralls. Cities became terrible charnel houses as they fed upon half the planet’s population in a single week of bloodletting. The survivors were spared, and converted to the cause of the Bloodknights by paralyzing thralls and Sanguinary preachers. Each world would rise from the blood-hungry destruction inflicted upon them by their new masters. New artwork and sculptures would be commissioned and set up. The Bloodknights believed themselves to be civilized creatures, and desired a realm of culture, no matter how perverse or bizarre it seemed. This realm became known to many across the northern rim as the ‘Nation of Red Fangs’; a realm of contradiction and fear. Yet, it was a functioning one all the same.

The average mortal citizen of the Nation was strange indeed. Brought up on the concept of violence and death, they were a servile and death-obsessed folk. Yet, they remained cheerful and adoring of their monstrous masters, yet were easily swayed by any sufficiently terrifying figure.

But even this realm could not remain unchanged by circumstances occurring across the galaxy. When the thexians fell, the Nation of Red Fangs saw a steep increase in Cythor Fiend infiltrators. These shape-shifting vampires were oddly suited to hiding amongst a populace of humans willing to bend their knees to vampiric beasts. These terrors set themselves up as underground figures of myth. Many times they attempted to infiltrate and subvert the Bloodknight elite, but they failed consistently, remaining as mythic ghoul-kings hiding in plain sight within the looming gothic towers and oxidized skies of the Red Angels’ realm.

The vast alien vessel, known only as ‘wailing doom’ passed through this realm during the wars between the arisen khaine-beast and the Destroyer cults in the eastern regions. As it passed, it spawned a madness in the human populace; a peculiar viciousness which even surprised the Bloodknights. Families murdered one another and streets within cities became impromptu battlegrounds for surreal and pointless kin-strife. Only the severe punishment of all involved quashed this demented psychic plague. The Knights fed well that year. Some chroniclers assumed these were khornate cults, but khainite cults are subtly different. They did not kill in Khaine’s name, but rather killed because Khaine’s fractured mind touched theirs. It was not worship, but rather compulsion.

(I find it disturbing that so many vampiric races make their homes in this region. Not just the Bloodknights, Cythor Fiends and the khainite cults; there were also the Thexian Elites and even the realm of the Flayed Ones. Why do they gather around the Ghoul Stars? What is it about those sectors? I may never fully understand. Perhaps this is for the best?)

The greatest threat to this empire however, came from their western neighbor; the Blackheart himself. This threat came not through war as one might expect. The warp, as ever, is nothing if not subversive. The Maelstrom expanded greatly, until even the shallows of the storm spanned the Eastern Chaos Imperium, and lapped against the borders of the Bloodknights. Cults and mutants grew in frequency and potency during this nightmarish expansion. In the wake of this tide of dissolution came the Red Corsairs and their minions. But instead of war, they spoke of alliance. They spoke of the spoils of war and the feast of a lifetime.

The leader of this band of savage ambassadors was a creature known as Zelphagor, a Corsair Captain of some renown. Upon his belt he bore the helmets of many slain astartes; unspoken testament to his power and prowess. But he also brought with him the word of a new faith; a new patron unlike anything which had come before. On one shoulder pad he bore Huron’s insignia, but upon his other shoulder was a tome. And within the tome was a yawning abyss, which seemed to burrow through his entire body and into another, unknowable realm. Zelphagor had once been a Word Bearer, then a Corsair. At that moment, he was both, but also something greater. A herald of a new word. Long had there been rumors that Lorgar the Golden was writing a new book; a new revelation granted him by the deep warp itself. The final testament of the Word.

To Mephiston’s credit, the demon knight tried to kill Zelphagor as soon as he entered baalite- owned space. Few of his Corsairs survived the naval action, but somehow the vile Chaos marine managed to stave off destruction. He even managed to get the inhuman beast Mephiston to bend his ear to him.

The Corsair captain spoke of a galactic endeavor; a great undertaking which would sweep the galaxy free of the hated necrons, the warmongering krork and even the crushing fist of the Star Father. He spoke of liberation, but the subtext was that those who chose not to be ‘free’ in this manner would be enslaved. Thus the wishes of all would be ‘granted’ either way. The Bloodknights could lead this new, final Black Crusade. In exchange, they could feast upon the galaxy and finally quench their thirst.

Such an alliance would have obviously been a nightmare for the galaxy at large. Thankfully, there were factions working against the Demon Knight. The King of the Fire-Birds (no; Asurmen. Why did I...?) had arrived within the Nation of Red Fangs, with his psyker prize and his Avengers in tow. But they were subtle and hid themselves at first.

It was here that the waifish psychic child that Fire Bi- that Asurmen saved from the krork, demonstrated her usefulness beyond her ability to absorb the dying memories of the dead and passed-on. Using her psychic abilities she could fit into baalite society without suspicion; bringing Asurmen’s Avenger’s supplies and information about the empire while the eldar remained hidden. They, in turn, grew fond of the childish mon keigh. I remember how the Aspect warrior, when their war masks were removed, would teach the witch of eldar runic language and of the myriad shapes a psychic projection could make. It was a friendship, of sorts as I recall.

But the forces of Lorgar were hungry and hunting. Huron had an alliance with a vile Eldar renegade known as Slicus, who Zelphagor had on the hunt for the Phoenix Lord. His dark eldar prowled the shadowy crimson cities of the Red Fang Nations, utilizing unknown technologies to track the eldar hidden in the grimly ornate cities of Mephiston’s minions. The Bloodknights despised eldar, but Mephiston insisted on their cooperation... for the time being...

Asurmen and his small band of warriors made their way across the sector by hiding their wondrous armor beneath drab sackcloths, or sequestered themselves amongst storage units and onboard merchant freighters. Their target was the gory metropolis of Baal itself, and the tower of the infamous Master of Death. Only the psyker could move through the streets relatively unmolested, for she was small and her telepathy allowed her to mask herself from casual observation.

But the forces of the Corsairs were more far reaching and terrible than the child could have foreseen. Daemons of the undying vortex tracked the psychic emanations of Asurmen’s hunting party like sharks sensing the passing of a shoal of prey animals. Even the Librarians of the Bloodknights were not adept enough to find the soul-light of a handful of souls amidst the supernova-glare of the teeming billions of thralls who toiled beneath their capricious yoke.

Asurmen was finally cornered at the Port of the beheaded, a starport on Baal’s southern hemisphere. Thousands upon thousands of Thralls assaulted his position. Thousands died, as the Phoenix King threw off his disguise. Shuriken filled the air in a great storm, slaying all who closed upon his position. At his side, his Avengers fired their own catapults, adding to the furious deluge. In terror, the child hid herself. I remember how she threw herself beneath a mountain of cold cylindrical containers, covering her eyes to block out the images of death and ruin that flooded her mind. But her mind was a psychic battery, capturing the dying moments of so many mortal souls. The thralls each had hopes and dreams, each were quashed as they died. They were crazed in their devotion to their demi-god masters.

But in death, everyone was the same, no matter what they claimed. No matter how stoic or brave a being became, in that last instant of life, there was always a shriek of formless panic; futile as it was heartbreaking. Even the worst monster felt fear at the end.

However, amidst the deathly howls of the thralls, the witch picked out the final thoughts of the commanders and generals of this doomed army of mortal men.

They were there to pin the Phoenix in place. Before I could warn them, the trap was sprung. Zelphagor’s priests had placed offensive obelisks around the port, carved from the very stuff of nightmares. They fused and poisoned the ground itself as packs of possessed monsters and mutants hauled them into place. Their couriers died moments later; flesh puckering and flowing into impossible forms. But once in place, the veil weakened, like rubber stretched beyond its elastic limit.

Within this octagonal region, the barrier between worlds was sundered. Daemons flooded into the area, ripping down the grand towers like locusts eating corn. The surviving thralls were toyed with by the daemons before their bodies and souls were devoured. The Avengers fought back to back, taking up human weapons when their own were finally spent. Daemons flooded their ramparts and scratched at their minds. The girl wailed in pain, as I felt the dreadful essence of the warp fiends pushing their way from nightmare into actuality.

But Asurmen was with them. Wherever his blade fell, no daemon could survive. Burning devil-flesh splashed and scorched the flagstones in hellish rivers of sulphur and liquid madness. The things shrieked, not only in pain. They cackled in mockery of the undying Lord of the Asur. For the obelisks were not intended to bring forth mere daemons, no matter how deep within the warp they had dragged themselves up from.

The Draziin-Maton came. They stepped from the walls themselves, formless yet physical beyond measure. There were three of them, but there were ten of them, but there were more. Numbers were impossible to calculate. Purple flesh that was wraithbone but hideously distorted punctured reality and pumped its venom into our universe like the stinger of a wasp. Hideous forms, skeletal spiders with tendrils and frond; but they had no faces. Only horror. The air rebelled at their presence, turning to black ash, or sprouting wings itself somehow.

Asurmen fought them at once, a glimmering figure of golden fire amidst the enclosing nightmare. Time spooled back upon itself. Asurmen fought them in the period before life evolved, and into the far future, after the death of the black dwarf stars. The girl survived; clasped to the bosom of a sole-surviving Dire Avenger, whose eyes bled as he whimpered ancient eldar myth songs into my ear.

Somehow, amidst this furious assault, Asurmen managed to destroy the obelisks, one after another. Robbed of their sustenance, the Draziin-maton fed upon the wailing daemons who still lingered on this plane, before plunging into the warp after their newfound prey.

Battered but unbowed, Asurmen advanced through the city, with his final two companions trailing in his wake.

He turned his attentions towards the spires of the Bloodknights. But the Knights had already anticipated his attention. Devastator squads and corsair havocs poured fire upon Asurmen from every angle. Missiles corkscrewed through the burning air, lasbolts flashed in the darkness and bolter rounds unleashed a nightmarish chorus as they surged towards the stricken Asur. He was too weary to deflect or overcome all of this ordnance. Not even the eternal warrior could best an arsenal.

He was struck, again and again. The witch-girl shrieked, but was held back by the last Avenger, known as Kassosril. He wept as he watched his master fall to his knees. Plasma bolts encased him in blinding fire, as missile impacts broke apart his armor, scattering the bejewelled fragments across the ground like discarded trinkets. His helm was the last to fall. His body was dust and his armor was left in a mangled heap.

Kassosril leapt up, charging towards the battered armor, but he was brought down by Bloodknights, who swept down to street level on their winged jump packs, before they beat the alien warrior into submission. The girl struggled hopelessly in the grasp of her captors but to no avail.

Asurmen was dead.

The girl was taken into captivity like a troublesome wild cat, scratching ineffectually at the huge vampire beasts that handled her. The last avenger suffered a far worse fate. Upon an altar of ossified bone, before a vast crowd of jeering thralls, the eldar was chained, stripped and brutalized. Pict images of the captured eldar were shown across Baal, whipping its populace into a hateful frenzy of feasting, bloodletting and the drinking of fluids, narcotic and otherwise. Even the twisted eldar nobleman watched this spectacle from his ship. Yet, this amateurish scene of depravity barely fired his soul and the Duke swiftly grew bored. He summoned one of his Trueborn minions, known as Korsha; a clawed fiend modified by the Covens to be a master of infiltration and base larceny. The Serpent knew his alliance with the humans would not hold for long. Soon, he would have to flee, or be destroyed. Yet, Sliscus would not leave Baal empty handed.

The baalites and their Corsair allies were more easily enamored by the public torture; cackling and cheering with every fresh spasm of misery that erupted from the broken alien. Their sneering mockery was only silenced when Mephiston himself appeared.

A slender figure, Mephiston moved with perfect posture. He looked like a statue of alabaster; only his crimson, weeping eyes tarnished his perfect image. Great skull cauldrons adorned his sculpted armor, while a psychic hood reared from his back, forming a crown of horned skulls. A cloak of deep purple and red whipped about his body with a life of its own. Flanking him, the Librarians of his court came, each bearing a winged skull helmet painted in the color of dried blood. The very air crackled with lightning. His mortal followers fell to their knees as if compelled by his mere presence, while his assembled Bloodknights merely saluted him silently.

Zelphagor followed him. The captain was a hulking, hunched beast, easily larger than Mephiston, but Mephiston’s power was undeniable. He made Zelphagor seem so very small in comparison.

The Master of Death gently placed his massive gauntlet beneath the chin of the dying eldar. His merciless features burned into Kassosril’s own. “Know this,” Mephiston said softly, his voice effortlessly powerful despite this. “When the seed of your race is wiped from this galaxy, and it shall be, be certain that you will have achieved nothing of worth. Your sacrifice shall be so wonderfully... futile.” And with that, Mephiston ripped the soul stone from the avenger’s chest, and destroyed it with a gesture. Kassosril shrieked with a pain no mortal wound could ever match. Mephiston silenced the soul-banished thing with a gesture. A single backhanded sweep took his head from his shoulders, and pitched Kassosril’s body from the altar, into the crowd. There, he was torn apart.

Mephiston took the armor of Asurmen to his vaults. Zelphagor protested. He claimed the Phoenix Lord’s armor was Lorgar’s. Zelphagor confronted the Master of death within his own throne room, at the apex of the spire

“You would deny me my prize?” Mephiston replied coldly, inhuman eyes regarding the chaos Lord dispassionately.

“If it were not for the actions of my patron’s allies, you would have no prize at all.”

Mephiston snarled. “Yes, allies; allies who created a warp vortex upon my throneworld! Allies who seek to corrupt my people! Those allies?”

Zelphagor was unfazed by the Bloodknight. His Corsairs trained their bolters upon the Bloodknights, who prowled on the periphery of the chamber.

“The primarchs compel you... nay, the very gods compel you!” the twisted preacher hissed.

Mephiston gestured to an archway, that loomed high above his own throne like a terrible banner. As he did, lumen globes ignited around the grotesque spectacle. Bound with bonds of serrated iron and runic wards that burned eternally, Zelphagor saw a figure. A winged figure. A winged figure that seemed to phase in and out of reality. Only its immortal expression of sheer agony and horror remained a constant. It was the Sanguinor; humbled and broken by profane sorcery and mutagenic viruses. Even the vile Zelphagor was taken aback at this sight.

“You tell me corsair; how much do I care for gods and primarchs? How much do I care?” Mephiston shrieked, his fanged jaws distending as he bellowed in the chaos space marine’s face.

“You are insane! You would mutilate the memory of your fallen primarch! You are a godless heathen!”

“Nay, I am a savior. The black rage can touch us not, for we have forgotten our father’s doom. We banished it from our very blood. I mastered the Black Rage. And I recognize no higher authority.”

As Mephiston revealed his true nature, Zelphagor’s Corsairs realized the danger. But even as they targeted the surrounding knights, it was too late. Bolters boomed in the gloomy half- light. The gun battle lasted barely five minutes. By the end, Zelphagor’s upper echelons were slain. In orbit, defense lasers scythed his capital ship in half, and scattered his escorts into the void. The Corsairs were destroyed, and it appeared the Duke had fled also.

But the agents of the Duke were not vanished. Korsha moved through the dungeon vaults of the tower of Mephiston, modified claws silent as he scuttled through the shadows, searching out his prize. The girl sensed the eldar nearing her, but she recoiled as Korsha passed by, for she saw with her witch’s sight the true nature of the outwardly beautiful monster; a withered husk of hate and loathing, coiled around a vile shard of a soul. Like a cloud across the sun, a chill passed through her at his mere presence. But, he had not come for her. He had come to steal the armor of Asurmen. Sliscus greatly desired the Phoenix Lord’s bodiless form, for then he could torment the helpless demi-god for all time.

Korsha was a being crafted to be a pure killing machine. It killed the guards around the vaults one after another; striking like a viper form the shadows, before dissolving again each time. His soul was envigorated by each kill, only making the leech stronger and stronger. Finally, he used his cunning to baffle the defenses of the tech vault. At last, he held the sculpted helm of Asurmen in his hand.

Ambition and inspiration struck then. What if Korsha could take the armor for himself? Then he would gain the power of a god, and strike down the Duke and all his rivals in one fell swoop. The corsair fleet would be his! With malicious glee, the dark one donned the armor of Asurmen, cackling as he finally placed the helmet over his scalped head slowly.

In that instant, the armor sealed itself in a blaze of glorious golden light. Korsha’s scream of alarm lasted but a moment, before he was instantly consumed within the great meta-soul of Asurmen himself. With a gesture, the diresword swept into his hand deftly, throwing itself through the air in response to its summons. Already, the Bloodknights were gathering to oppose Asurmen, drawing their bolters as they massed before the thick vault doors. Asurmen carved his way through the door with only three mighty blows, sending the lump of metal careering into the massed vampire formation. It took them barely a second to recover, but by that time Asurmen had leapt into combat with them.

Each bloodknight was a slender fiend, stronger and faster than most astartes could hope to be, but Asurmen was faster. Bolters chattered and roared in the gloom of the deep vaults, their flashing discharges illuminating the corridors in storming madness. The bloodknights roared in bestial fury, their human faces contorting as glistening fangs were barred in bloodied maws.

Asurmen fought with an economy of moves, slaying each foe as quickly and decisively as possible, before sprinting away from any counterattack, before striking at another foe with fluid grace and merciless efficiency. The combat was almost like a dance, with only one performer hitting all the correct marks, while the others floundered in his wake. A human watching this battle would have scarcely followed the movements at all, lost in the frantic chaos unleashed all around the lightning quick melee.

Asurmen fought his way back through the vault. The child was saved. I remember his glorious golden form, carving through the misshapen demons in their gargoyle-plate, screaming monsters utterly unafraid of the Phoenix Lord, even as his glowering blade severed their heads and pierced their hearts. The child followed the deathless warrior, like a ship caught in a tidal wake.

The Phoenix Lord was rising through the tower, attracting ever greater resistance. Heavy weapon teams locked off access points, while fire teams sought to outflank him. Asurmen could not be contained or herded however; he carved through the floors themselves, unleashing whirlwinds of shuriken, scything down his foes were perfectly placed incisions that cut arteries and severed joints.

Eventually, the Bloodknights were called off; Asurmen was given a free route straight towards his target; Mephiston.

The King of Baal sat aside his throne of polished basalt, a sinister grin stitched across his face like a bloody wound. In the half-light, he seemed at first to be alone, but once Asurmen and the girl entered, he was clearly not.

His fellow Librarians emerged from their hidden shaded dells. The chamber was sealed, and Mephiston instantly launched his assault. A tidal wave of fire flowed from his eyes as he screamed a monstrous challenge. Asurmen was flung backwards with the force of a battlecannon strike, but Tethesis broke the flames around him, protecting the girl as she bolted into cover.

The other Librarians of Mephiston unleashed their powers upon the eldar demi-god at once; lightning arced from their hands, clouds of biting imps and scorching blizzards of blood seared his ornate form. Esoteric energies played over the blade of the Phoenix Lord. His catapults were firing, but the fiery deluge melted each implement moments before they struck. Only his armor and his blade were proof against such a bombardment. Mephiston laughed maliciously as he slowly rose from his throne, drawing his own psychically-attuned blade from its scabbard with a flourish.

The psykers held back further assaults once their master entered the fray. But they were not idle. They weaved their enchantments and warpish techniques, slowly the flow of time for all save their Lord and master.

Mephiston raised his plasma pistol, and Asurmen was only just able to dodge the searing energy bolt as it whistled past his helm; he was slower. Time was against Asurmen, he realized then. Nevertheless, he attacked. He was still a ferociously swift fighter, even if he was no longer impossibly agile. His first blow hacked the pistol in two. Mephiston turned aside Tethesis, bisecting the catapults upon the Phoenix Lord’s wrists in the process. Psychic blade met psychic blade, a duel of minds as much as a physical contest and Mephiston was powerful. He had experience and the support of ancient psykers who had knowledge to rival even Tzeentchian sorcerers. Asurmen had the might of a million churning souls in his furnace of a soul, but psychic duels were not his natural habitat.

The walls melted and crackled with fire as they wrestled and fenced between scorching pyres and ruined decorations.

“Why must you torment me so xenos?” Mephiston hissed, in soul and through voice. “Why must our lives be defined by violence and destruction? I built this empire and saved my people!”

Asurmen spoke calmly, even as he deflected a flurry of terrible blows that should have beheaded mountains.

“You saved no one. This is a lie. You have forgotten...”

“Oh how I loathe you and your kind; idealists and demagogues! Spare us your morals! We wish to be left alone! Who are you to judge us, oh alien abomination? You birthed a hell god, and I fostered a stable realm!” Mephiston interrupted defiantly, kicking Asurmen across the chamber. Beyond this phenomenally rapid duel, the girl crawled towards her objective. She could see it; the caged angel. The forgotten despair.

Mephiston and his acolytes poured more power into the combat, empowering Mephiston as Asurmen backed away, furiously deflecting countless attacks. The librarians engaged in combat now too, force swords and staffs pummeling Asurmen’s defenses from all angles of approach. Even the swiftest warrior could not weather such relentless attacks. Asurmen began to falter.

The girl; Vasiri. That was her name! I know it as well as I recall my own name. She was safe from the Librarians, for they were too consumed in defeating the alien warlord. Vasiri placed her hands upon the figure of golden light, with wondrous wings of swan-like white. It was not real, but real at once. She knew then what her purpose was. Why Asurmen the fire-bird brought her to such a dismal, hideous place of grandeur and gore.

Her power was to commune with the dead. My power was to absorb the dying memories of those departed from the endless sea. I... I...

I see it! With my waking eyes! Baleful eyes everywhere! The dead and the dying mewling on the floor of this ship. It writhes like a maggot; alive and hungry for souls. Discordant doom blaring. I am strong; heinously strong, but I am losing. My might is crumbled, like castles in decay. It rises, a behemoth. I know his name, but i cannot speak it, nor think it through the pain! The claw closes, the worlds are swirling now.

Chink in the plate. Meaningless but forever recalled. I fall, rebounding from the putrid floor. Feathers flutter by my side, to fall and settle upon expanding pool sof viscous blood; my own. Through bleary eyes and seared soul-flesh, I see fate decided upon a father’s love. Golden- white light, versus the spectrum shattered into impossible hues. Titans duel and gods wrestle. Minds burn each other as bodies break. Crystal tears fall from both sides. A sliver of compassion and hope trickles away; tossed aside by the towering figure of gold. All that is good is gone, leaving only an unbreakable core. The Anathema rises from the ruins of the one who was once a father. It is glorious and terrible, and it destroys the behemoth for all time, in all planes. The action makes the ruinous ones wail and flee. Two husks fall. Only one is alive.

There is another giant. He enters the fray too late; far too late. His black blade his broken over his knee, as he wails like an orphan, clutching at the husk-father. As the winged angel dies in a cloud of feathers, he witnesses the final speech of the Anathema. The Bastion-keeper listens well, but unknown to all, the Angel hears this too. I hear what he hears, feel what he feels at the end of time. The end of his time. He knows the inner workings of the throne. He knows how to build it. He knows the secret to creating one of the God-maker thrones. One of the Golden Thrones of the Old Race. Yet, his learned knowledge died with him. No one was there to take his thoughts.

Until now...

I recoiled from the memory, drawn across time and space in a perfect line connecting eons. I now knew all that Sanguinius had known in his final moments. But with this knowledge came a terrible price. Alongside the awaken dream flooded the horror of his earlier doom.

Mephiston staggered back from Asurmen, his eyes wide with fright. “Horus! HORUS!” he shrieked, desperately shielding his throat from phantom, grasping claws. The Librarian felt this too, screaming as they ripped each other apart, calling out the Arch-traitor’s name as they destroyed each other.

In the confusion, Asurmen swept me from the tower. The realm of Red Fangs did not last long after that day. It broke down into factions; many of the Bloodknights lost their minds to the Black Rage, effectively beheading the leadership of the realm. Only the youngest Knights were spared, and their inexperience led to years of conflicts. Mephiston and his minions were sealed in their tower by their more sane brethren, there to languish in madness for the rest of their days. Even those spared the black rage were doomed however, for without the techniques Mephiston had learned to control their rages, their twisted geneseed began to fail en mass. The humans of this realm began to see their leaders as the flawed, defeated monsters they were, and drove them out. A few repentant creatures threw themselves on the mercy of Vulkan’s Imperium, while others lost all trace of humanity and became ghoulish demons in tattered armor, haunting the ghoul stars alongside Cythor fiends and Khainite cannibal cults.

As for me, I remember now where I went; where i was taken. I recall the three men who met me. A harlequin man in shimmering garb, a man named Jack the Dragon who bore dark eyes, and a third man who was no man at all. They took me through the webway. My knowledge was valuable beyond measure.

I was to guide in the reconstruction of the Golden Throne; I was to bring back he who was lost.

How can I know this? I am not this girl, yet I feel as if I have lived her life. I am confused.

I shall brood upon this matter. I must finish my chronicle, but I fear what will happen to me now, once I complete it.

[Chronicle Paused.] [Chronicle Resumes.]

[Archives collapsing. Emergency! Emergency!]

[Visual Feed: Wraithbone shelves and vaults crumbling to dust, as white light and multi-hued anomalies twist and turn between them. Multiple-limbed creatures engaging with Revelation Shock-troopers (crosref. Fenryka/Adeptus/Legio Custodia/Commanditarian. Including multiple unknown compositions).

[Audio: Unidentified audio distortion throughout. Gunfire and D-cannon discharge occurs part-way through recording.]

[Visual feed: Figure in gold and grey fatigues crawls towards Chronicle device. Accompanied by Revelation troopers, providing covering fire against unidentified creatures (monstrous! Impossible creatures! ERROR ERROR=====), slender xenos entities and anomalous human warriors.] [Audio: Subject 1: “Frak it! Keep them off of me! I need to retrieve it!”

Subject 2: “Why? She’s dead. It’s no good to Revelation incomplete! Get out of here! We have to fall back!” Subject 1: “No!” (high pitched whining gunfire) “She finished it. She left the documents in her chamber damnit! They show everything. She was recording stuff past, present and future. She knew what was going to happen... how this was going to end... (Impossible noises. Heavy distortion. Void shielding holding. Down 34%) Subject 2: “We do not have time! Take the thing with you if you must, but I am not dying for the words of one mad seer.” Subject 1: She wasn’t a seer. She was a chronicler, but she had access to all records. This library... it exists outside time, it-“ Subject 2: “Enough! Grab it!”] [Visual feed: Astartes (subject 2) bodily carries Subject 1. Chronicle moves with them. Corridors of swirling colors as the portals die. Subject 1 and the chronicle are thrown. Airborne approx ten seconds before impact upon solid surface.

Image inverted 90 degrees. Last sight of closing portal behind subject 1. Subject 2 turns from subject 1 as portal closes, drawing his nemesis weapon with two hands, before charging into the collapsing library.] [Audio: Subject 1: “Brother Athun!” Subject 2: “Upload her files. Then leave. Follow the Iron Man. It know the route to sanctuary.” Subject 1: “Athun! Damn you Athun! Athu-“ (Load tearing noise, as portal seals)] [Chronicle paused.] [Chronicle Resumes.] [I do not know who I address. Your chronicler seems to have written her history in the assumption that she knew its readers. I suppose I shall continue in that tradition. I also suppose that it doesn’t matter what the context of my hasty preface is being written at this very moment, because ‘this very moment’ might be many centuries in your past. But as I write, such terrible things have happened, but also such beautiful things. Though the deep is arisen, we are not without allies of our own. The galaxy seems discolored now, for there are so many rents in realspace now, all leaking their poison into the materium.

The heroic alliance departed at some point last year. If I looked through the remaining sections of this history I might learn of the outcome, but I fear to. If I do, and the outcome is terrible, will I lose my mind to despair? I cannot imagine that this history will have a happy ending, but my imagination is a weak and putrid thing in these days.

Your chronicler is dead. I am sorry to tell you this; she killed herself as soon as she completed the final parts of her history. As she died, bleeding in my arms, she begged me to upload her final sections into her recording machine, in full and unread by myself. Then, she told me to hide it away from prying eyes, in a place which would endure for countless eons unchanged. And so I shall.

I do not know who will read this account, but nevertheless I will present the remaining background sections, in the order specified in the notes of Vasiri the Watcher.

If you are reading this, my task was completed. Final regards, Lord Volsanius Greal, the Lion’s Scribe.] Additional Background Section 28: Commorragh and the Dissected Agonies

In the final weeks of the fifty-fifth millennium, upon the very cusp of the fifty-sixth millennium, it was said the endless eldar clad in Reaper’s garb led the Wolf and the Raven into Commorragh. We can be so unusually precise upon this date, for this event caused a strange psychic backlash as Maugan Ra forced one of the ancient webway seals into Commorragh. Billions of contemporaries claimed that they had bad dreams in those weeks; dreams of a raven and wolf searching through an endless black patch of brambles, plucking scarred chunks of meat from the thorns, as a reaper shepherded them through the maze, avoiding the droplets of black, poisonous blood that oozed from a great ebony heart that wept above them all.

The two primarchs required the aid of the Phoenix Lord due to his skill at navigating the Labyrinth. Why Ra led aliens against his own race is not clear, though it is self-evident that the parasitic Dark Eldar could not be reconciled with the ultimately-selfless goals of the craftworlders and those who sought to aid them.

Nevertheless, Ra managed to breach Commorragh’s defenses easily, and Leman Russ led his brother and the remaining abominations they called their children, into Low Commorragh. They had one goal; to find their lost brother, and deliver him from shadow into light.

Of course, getting into Commorragh was always the most straightforward part. Leaving the city would be the true test of their abilities. And test them it most certainly would. For, unbeknownst to them, the two primarchs had set themselves against one of the greatest minds in the entire galaxy; Asdrubael Vect, Archon of the Black Heart, supreme overlord of Commorragh and architect of the Thirteen Principles of Vengeance. As soon as the two primarchs and their allies entered Commorragh, and felt the feeble light of the stolen suns upon their bodies, they came under attack. Rogue bands of starving hellions swept down upon them, screaming manically as they hacked and slashed at the assembled army of beasts that had arrived in the eternal ruins of Low Commorragh. With them came hundreds of commorrite eldar, bedecked in a wild profusion of arms and armaments, from splinter rifles to shuriken catapults, to converted human projectile rifles using bullets and shells impregnated with toxins. These wild savages scuttled through the maze of ruins with great speed and ferocity, organizing themselves into squads and formations with surprising competency.

But they fought foes far beyond them. Leman Russ and his cohorts of feral warriors took the battle to them instantly, outmaneuvering the rabble; countering their base hunger with sheer brutal power. The commorrites were slain swiftly, but a few of the hellions almost made good their escape. It took the precision strikes of Maugan Ra and his Dark reapers to ensure none of their foes escaped to warn any forces who might be nearby.

“How did they react so quickly? Did they know we were coming?” Russ asked fiercely, accusation in his voice.

Ra explained that everyone was attacked in Low Commorragh as a matter of course. When asked why, he simply responded. “Because you were there.”

Catacombs and minor Kabal spires stabbed up from amidst the endless decrepit corpses of former port cities and scavenger docks, and this desolation spread out as far as the eye could see, and seemed also to curve upwards and loom impossibly over the heads of the rag-tag army of aliens and beasts. The air was alive with distant screaming and gunfire of every variety; with their enhanced senses, Russ and Corax could make out the light of burning strongholds and collapsing towers, and the tiny shapes of swirling flocks of hellions, picking off warriors from both sides of each conflict, without regard to alliances or allegiance.

“This is a den of the mad,” Corax said darkly, his words almost a whisper.

“It is a prison, of sorts,” Ra replied without emotion. “Through their own malice and cruelty, the monsters that live here trap their fellow abominations in endless cycles of violence, recrimination and torment. No one escapes the Dark City. Welcome to Commorragh.”

Ironically, the constant warfare was an advantage to the invading astartes, for their violent escapades were masked amidst the background noise of constant murder. Through the faltering dawnlight of poisoned grey stars, and through the all consuming shadowy dungeons, from where no light had ever reached, the primarchs fought. They were guided by the Phoenix Lord, for only one who had visited the city countless times could learn its ever-shifting routes and passages with any degree of accuracy. There were not only eldar dwelling within the ruins; twisted things from the fall scurried through the collapsed citadels and forgotten nation states of the Desolation. Not only them, but older beings, survivors of times before man even existed, made their dens there. The two brothers were forced to utilize all their might to vanquish the monsters they dueled in those terrible places, and they lost many of the Weregeld in these brutal confrontations.

Each time they fought, they took whatever weapons and armor they could find; repurposing it and using it against future foes. As they fought, they gathered unto them the disgruntled and the vagrant; hopeless creatures trapped within the city through no fault of their own. They hated the Dark Eldar more than any sane mind could ever fathom, and they desired vengeance; Russ, in arming and leading them, gave them this chance. Soon, they were fully armed and reinforced. Leman Russ was ready.

In the shadow of a collapsed eldar titan, Corvus Corax and Leman Russ took their brother’s arm in a warrior’s embrace, staring deeply into their eyes. Russ knew what Corax intended to do before his brother even spoke.

“Find our brother. You were always the most subtle of us Corvus. Go; penetrate the black heart of this realm. When you return, we shall take back Jaghati once and for all.”

Corax nodded solemnly. “What do you intend to do?”

Russ smiled his usual savage grin. “I am the Emperor’s executioner. I intend to follow my calling. Can’t you smell the reek of it? The congealed remnants of such maleficarum I can scarcely conceive of it. There are creatures here that have survived on the misery of the galaxy for countless millennia, that have feasted upon the weak while they remained safe and unassailable. That will not stand. I will not allow it!” Russ hissed. Corax returned his grin, but the Raven knew that Russ’ barbarian smile was a mask for the cold-blooded destroyer that dwelt within. Russ had always been this way. Corax had never liked to mention it, but he had seen a fraction fot he Emperor’s mind long ago and he had seen much... perhaps too much. He knew that the Emperor had never considered the Fenryka to be his executioners. Russ had created his own role in the Imperium; he knew his role in the coming events of the galaxy, even if nobody else had marked him out for this. But Corax held his tongue, casting out such morbid thoughts, and simply allowed his brother to embrace him. Both of them knew that the endeavor they had undertaken could very well be the death of them both. They might never see one another again.

Then, they parted, and the war began in earnest. Corax shrouded himself and disappeared into the ruins of Commorragh. Meanwhile, Ra led Leman Russ’s forces through the labyrinth of caverns and passages, towards the holdings of the Kabal of the Hidden Blade. These fortified sites were utterly invisible to the eye at certain angles, and could only be seen on very specific avenues of approach; approaches which were guarded by heavy emplacements and scores of barracks hungry to spread mayhem. Their asymmetrical fortresses were home to a vast army of kabalite soldiers, with full air support in the form of wing upon wing of Voidraven Bombers and Razorwing Fighters. These aircraft constantly flew sorties across the desolation, destroying settlements at random and hunting down any hellions who dared enter their air space. Hunting parties of Kabalite warriors prowled the ruins too, killing and capturing any unfortunates who got too close, before dragging them back to their citadels for torture. This kept the garrisons fed and also amused the Hidden Blade’s Archon, Olbridesh Suul.

Russ moved carefully in this region, for he wished to avoid detection by the screaming fighter craft that patrolled the skies like hungry vultures. He began his campaign by using his men to draw the hunting parties out of their holds. The Dark Eldar saw the wulfen and weregeld as mere escaped slaves, or possibly rogue pit beasts from the wych Cult arenas, and eagerly pursued them whenever they could. Russ lured them into carefully constructed ambushes, slaying them and casting their broken bodies across the ruins. For months he continued this campaign of ambush and retreat. The Hidden Blade unleashed hell upon the surrounding region, pulverising great swathes of city with their void mines and scourging missile bombardments. Suul and his Dracons had perceived of a pattern to the assaults; they were more than mere slave revolts. It was an insurgent army. In their indiscriminate destruction, the minor Kabal made few friends amongst the unaligned corsairs and commorrites who dwelt in the desolation.

But even as they increased the power and frequency of their sorties, they left their garrison with fewer and fewer defenders. Finally, Russ led a surprise assault on the bastions. Dark reapers and ex-slaves armed with captured disintegrators and heat lances dueled with the perimeter turrets, as Russ broke down the doors of the forts with massive assaults. Once a fort was captured, the weapons mounted within were used to bombard its neighbors, spreading confusion and fury amongst the Kabalites. Suul sped back to Hidden Blade as swiftly as he could, assaulting the invaders with his fleet of fighters, shattering fortresses left and right. As the battle wore on, it seemed that the enemy was weakening; Suul ordered his barge to descend, so that he may feast on their miserable life essences. As soon as he did, Leman launched his final attack. His strongest men cast grapples against the hull of the barge, dragging it down. These men only managed to slow the barge for a second before its scythes cut through the chains, but a second was enough. Russ leapt aboard the ship, roaring with demented hatred. Suul and his bodyguards were slain by the rampaging primarch, and Suul himself was ripped apart as he wounded Russ in the shoulder with a venomous alien spear.

Archon slain, Russ ordered his army to retreat; it was futile to hold ground when the enemy outnumbered you. Yet without their archon, and with their fortresses ruined, the Kabal of the Hidden Blade were easy prey for those commorrites waiting in the shadows for their chance to steal their lands. Hidden Blade fell within two weeks, as the nearby Kabals of the Poisoned Tongue and the Stolen Conscience ripped them apart and subsumed their defeated members.

Russ continued this sprawling war across the Sprawls of Port Carmine and Sec Maegra, yet Corvus Corax had other plans. He passed into the very centre of Dark Eldar civilization. He could move between the inky black streets without being seen, even when in plain sight. This let him eavesdrop upon the scourge messengers and the other spies and calculating politicians of High Commorragh and the more affluent satellite realms. He witnessed sights and horrors that would make a lesser man weep, but he remained stoic and unmoved; his mind was utterly focused upon his goal. He could move almost as he pleased within the City; no door or sight was barred to him. That is, save for the City State of Aelindrach, and the realms of the Wraith-Kind. There, the shadows lived and coiled like serpents, shielding all from physical and psychic sight. When Corax attempted to approach, he felt the presence of the Mandrakes. These half-daemon monsters prowled the places between light and Corax was certain they could somehow track him if they spotted him. But the rest of Commorragh was not so psychically veiled.

Amidst images of hideous depravity and excess, Corax learned of rumors which spoke of ‘the Dissected Agonies’; artifacts of unprecedented value to some of the highest Archons. The master of the Raven Guard began to plot. If he and Russ could steal these artifacts, the Archons and the immortal Haemonculi Covens would pay a high price to get them back; Corax had heard of entire sub-realms being traded for but a single Dissected Agony.

Russ’ war against Low Commorragh continued, but soon it was clear, after several months, that he had reached an impasse. His building armies had become powerful enough to gather alien mercenaries and followers from Sec Maegra, the Null City and form a full army with heavy weapons and armored support; he had even managed to liberate armed gangs of astartes from slave pens, who realized he was one of their lost fathers after his blinding psychic presence touched their minds. Russ’ armies were growing, but Russ himself was suffering. His festering wound was not healing; even his perfect physique was struggling to repel the Lhamaean venom. But he hid the wound beneath layers of heavy power armor he had built while on campaign.

Russ was able to engage in running battles with the minor Kabals of the Desolation; both sides constantly on the move so as not to get pinned down and murdered in a punishing siege. Both sides were followed by thousands upon thousands of the Parched, cadaver-like Dark Eldar withered by lack of sustenance. They fed on the waves of pain caused by the continuous battles and were a constant source of irritation to Russ (and food to the ruthless kabalites). Yet, this was a mere side show within Commorragh; war was a fact of Low Commorragh and mattered little to those who dwelt in High Commorragh in their impossibly vast towers that simultaneously towered above and plunged down from above. They were always looming just over the horizon, no matter where you stood in Low Commorragh. Russ had no way to pierce the portals leading to High Commorragh; those few Maugan Ra had found were sealed tight.* If he was to breach them, the Corespur Nobles would have to descend into Low Commorragh themselves.

But how would they incur their wrath? How would they force the great kabals to engage? Russ had a plan; a merciless, cruel plan that proved just how ruthless the Great Wolf could be. Every few weeks, convoys of sleek slave barges would return to Commorragh, and head towards the arenas of the Cult of Strife, heaving with slaves and fodder for their gladiatorial games. Inevitably, some slaves and beasts escaped from these barges, only to be recaptured by teams of beastmasters and wych retrieval squads armed with their shardnets and agonizers. Once, the retrieval took slightly longer than before; it seemed the slaves had found better hiding places, but they still failed to elude the relentless cackling gladiators.

Unbeknownst to the slavers, Leman Russ had gotten to these slaves first. The slaves were dragged across the Bone Middens, through the portals, and straight towards the greatest of Cult Strife’s magnificent ziggurat-arenas. Once the crowds had fully gathered for the coming show, and the first of that evening’s grand spectacles was underway, the slaves began to explode. Void munitions, stitched into their very bodies, detonated in huge conflagrations that ripped the foundations from the arena. The entire structure began to sag, as thousands of slaves and Dark Eldar were killed in the colossal blasts. But the final slave had one last gift for the eldar. Russ had located a shattered Imperial vessel in the ruins of Low Commorragh, and had liberated a single weapon from it; a virus bomb. Specifically, the world eater. This final detonation unleashed a black cloud that consumed all life within a hundred miles of the arena. Webway failsafes sealed the expanding cloud with a forcefield, before venting it into the heart of a stolen sun. However, the damage was done. Millions killed, and what was worse, an entire City State was horrendously damaged.

To say the Dread Archons of High Commorragh were apoplectic with rage would be a gross understatement. The arenas of the wychs were the lifeblood of Commorragh, where the common Dark Eldar could be sated. The loss of such a large one was a terrible blow to the kabals, and one they could never have ignored. The most powerful of the lords joined in an uneasy truce, brokered by the Archons of the Black Heart; under the thirteen statues of sorrowfell, they swore lasting vengeance upon whoever was foolish enough to cross them.

They burst from their runic portals in waves millions upon millions strong. Venoms and raiders filled the dark skies like undulating flocks of starlings, alongside countless screaming hellions and scourges, and a veritable tidal wave of capering wyches. It seemed as if some grand hornet’s nest had been pierced by an arrow, such was the grotesque display.

The spectacle was as spectacular as it was terrible. Russ smiled wryly from his hiding place. “So many... I thought yours was a dying race?”

“They are dying, merely in a different way,” Ra responded coldly.

The grand kabalite alliance acted swiftly, destroying great swathes of territory with merciless precision and relentless vigor. The whaling cackles of the monstrous sadists carried for countless millions of kilometers through the demented, impossible city. Aircraft turned whole generations of low commorrites into anguished glass statues. Some hopelessly threw themselves into the acidic green river Khaides to escape the terrible horde.

Russ, meanwhile, took the opportunity of the portals opening to force his way through. His embattled men fought a hopeless rearguard to allow the primarch to breach Corsespur’s high towers. He memorized the faces of every man who fell in his service, be they beast, alien or man; allies were allies, and he’d no sooner forget their sacrifices than he’d forget the treachery and base cowardice of his enemies. Maugan Ra disappeared during this battle, melting into the shadows like the ghost of a whisper on the wind. **

Feverish and sickly from the venom in his blood, Leman Russ nevertheless fought his way free of the portal guards, and descended into the narrow alleys and bottomless pits that lay between the infinitely looming black towers of the city states. This was the vile core of the Dark City. If he was to find his brother, it would be within this terrible realm.

It was Corax who found Russ first. He told him of the Dissected Agonies, and his plan to blackmail the Archons of High Commorragh with them. The two faced the city together, fighting through the degenerate scum that clung to the tower districts like algae to the skin of a behemoth. Bounty hunters and xenos killers of all varieties were hired to track the primarchs. Each foe would die, but each time the fights grew harder and the superhumans gradually lost their allies to the predations of Commorragh.

The haemonculi in particular were amused by the increasingly infamous actions of the human giants. Urien Rakarth created grotesque abominations to sniff them out and duel with the primarchs. Russ was nearly throttled to death by a great serpentine flesh-fiend on the banks of the avenue of blades, and Corax barely survived an encounter with the Shredding engines of the Everspiral Coven. But as they suffered, the sons of the Emperor were unrelenting in their mission. Systematically, they located each of the dissected agonies; breaking into the private holdings of their jealous Archon owners, killing anyone who got in their way. In vain, the armies if the Kabals searched them out, but each raid left their victims’ holdings ruined, but left no trace of the culprits. Archons from rival kabals blamed one another for directing the primarchs towards them, while others simply used the situation to score political points against hated foes.

Several times, a shadowy figure tried to contact them. He said he had seen their fate ‘in the bones’. He warned them they were being credulous fools. The primarchs ignored this enigmatic being, known as Sathonyx the Lord Hellion, each time fruitlessly trying to kill the so-called Baron. Another trickster was just what they did not need in a city of liars and cheats.

Each dissected agony was a sealed casket, bound with hideous runes of pulsating evil. Leman Russ and the Lord of Deliverance opened each one in trepidation. Their revulsion and horror is beyond my ability to adequately convey. Each casket bore part of a living being. But these were no mere dead limbs; they still writhed in a horrible mockery of life. Yet this was not the worst of it. Leman and Corvus knew these body parts; they knew the markings carved into his flesh. They recognized the ritual scars, daubed in white...

Desperately, they tried to figure out how much of their brother still remained. To their horror, they lacked the final part; the great Khan’s head was missing. Somehow, they knew which Dark Eldar held the final piece of the puzzle. Supreme Overlord Vect became their target.

Russ, now almost putrid with sickness, determined to penetrate the vaults of the Kabal master’s grand holdings. Corax wished to go with him, but Russ needed Corax for a different task. Only Corax had the knowledge to attempt to repair the Khan. Russ made his brother promise to heal him. Corax could only agree. Corax took the dissected agonies, and vanished into the shadows. He promised that he would, “not let another brother fall. Not one more! No more shall die this day! I promise you that Leman. Nothingless.”

The principle citadels of the Kabal of the Black heart were the greatest and most elaborate fortifications in all of Commorragh; limitless turrets, twisted battlements and endless galleries and chambers filled with all manner of horrors that could set the mind aflame with trepidation. Besides the more obvious horrors, there were the subtle defenses; forcefields of silent potency and labyrinthine passageways that led off into nothingness, or transported the unwary through dark gates beyond the veil.

But Russ was as cunning as he was formidable, and he seemed to make swift progress through the devious towers. He avoided traps and snares which had claimed generations of assassins and revolutionaries. He bested the skeleton force of defenders through sheer defiant fury. The defenders grew strong on his pain, and they did not die easily, but die they did.

He used his psychic ability to scent his brother through layers of pheromone camouflage and countless vault walls. He followed his senses, plunging upwards through a tower which dangled above and below Commorragh. No twisted geometry could hold him back. Eventually he reached the final chamber, and ripped the doors from their hinges with all his strength.

Inside, a slender, unremarkable eldar clad in thorny ghostplate armor lounged upon a grandiose throne. Even Russ wasn’t quick enough to stop the lhamaean priestesses that rushed at him from the gloom. Even as he slaughtered them with his bare hands, their poisoned blades and tainted blood infested his wounds, enhancing the agony which he was experiencing. Gasping for air, Russ fell to his knees.

From either side of the eldar’s throne, serpentine Sslyth warriors slithered into view. All around the primarch, kabalites began to emerge, giggling cruelly at Russ’ fate. Silent Wracks soon sentinel at the side of haemonculi, who drifted eerily just above the ground, like terrible witches from some fairy tale. The eldar upon the throne raised his hand for silence, and instantly got it. Russ fixed his hate-filled gaze upon this Dark Lord. As he tried to rise, Trueborn stabbed him with agonisers, robbing his limbs of motion through awful pain.

The leader leaned forwards fractionally, revealing a flawless face, unmarred by even a single scar.

“You know who I am?” he asked simply. Russ nodded. “Vect...”

Vect smiled in response. “Quite so. You have been rather entertaining, I have to admit. However, I feel this charade must come to an end now. But truly it is a delight to see the Wolf King... in the flesh.”

Russ realized then that it had been a trap. It had been too easy to penetrate Corespur. Vect had granted the Dissected Agonies specifically to his enemies; those who served Sathonyx in particular.

“You were good though. The arena trick was inspired,” Vect continued. As he spoke, the entire chamber rose up from the bowels of the tower, and into the failing light of a Stolen Dawn. The chamber was a glass dome, which revealed the whole of Commorragh from its windows. A star fleet was in high anchor on spurs opposite the tower, surrounded by shoals of support craft and slave barges ferrying the doomed from their holds. Russ saw the huge viewscreens and projectors filling the squares and open spaces beneath the fleet too. Crowds of eldar, millions strong, cheered and jeered as they watched Russ slaughter and maim countless foes. It was a recording of almost his entire campaign.

“We’ve been growing fat from your exploits on the vid-steals. Your brutality is a joy to behold and consume! It should last us until... next week, probably. It almost makes up for the ruination of the Cult of Strife. Almost.”

Vect rose from his throne, supported by his tall scepter, though Russ could tell the ancient devil was pretending to be far feebler than he truly was. “I know why you came here, mon keigh. You wish to rescue your fellow construct.”

“My brother, you cur!” Russ snarled, his hatred a physical thing, darkening the floor beneath his feet.

Vect nodded. “Indeed. I entertained your incursion for two reasons. Firstly, I was curious; what drives such a being as you? But more than such fleeting fanciful notions, I can see your place in this saga. I know you know of what I speak.”

Russ chose to be silent. Vect continued, condescendingly talking of the forces gathering in realspace as he simultaneously belittled the primarch and set out what he conceived of the coming Armageddon. The daemons of the deep-warp had to be stopped; Vect above all desired to live. The [REMOVED] would cause all life to fall into the abyss. Russ was unconvinced, until Vect pointed out that in over twenty four thousand years, Asdrubael Vect had never once attempted to invade or destroy the Imperium or any stellar empire on any significant scale. Eventually, he produced a casket and presented it to Russ. He showed Russ the head within, which blinked and screamed silently.

Leman demanded the head. “If you do, I might only cut you,” he grinned.

Vect however, could never be fazed by such a threat. He was the bane of all races.

“If I give you the last of my Agonies, I will have lost my toy. That holds no interest for me. I shall require compensation. A primarch for a primarch. I will free him and heal all his wounds. All I ask is that you give yourself to me. It is not a great deal to ask.”

Russ looked into Vect’s eyes; he came close to despair for the first time in many years. But then his gaze caught something else, beyond the dome.

Outside, the fleet was moving. One of the ships was turning about, ripping free of its moorings. It opened fire on its docking supports, pulverizing the towers that shackled it, before turning its guns on the city below. Corax had made good on his promise. His brothers would not die that day.

Russ rose from his seemingly prone position. The Trueborn tried to bringing him down again, but the light of the warp shone in his eyes, and he began to swell with power. A blast struck the dome, shattering it and subjecting the Court of Vect to gale force winds. Russ set upon the eldar with claw and fang, channeling all his psychic might into his body. Though poison still wracked his body with pain, Russ fought the pain, ripping out its throat and stomping it into the earth. The sslyth intercepted him as he lunged for Vect. He ripped them asunder. He reached for Vect, but the Dark Lord struck him with an obsidian orb. The black sphere sent Russ reeling for a moment, which allowed the Wracks to swarm over him. With a last burst of strength, he shrugged them off of him and snatched the last fragment of Khan from Vect’s grasp. Vect chopped away Russ’ left hand, as Russ swept a claw across Vect’s face.

The Supreme Overlord fell back into his throne, as Russ leapt bodily from the shattered dome, onto the hull of the approaching starship. Commorragh’s defenses were already coming online. The primarchs had to be quick. Russ clung to the hull of the cruiser, as it punched directly through a sealing portal at full speed. Though his flesh caught fire, Russ refused to let go as the ship fled into the webway.

Vect slowly rose from his throne. His face was scratched; his flawless face was tarnished by ragged wounds.

His retinue stood back from him in abject terror. They saw the building emotions in his dark, bottomless eyes.

Vect roared then; a sonorous, baleful noise which seemed to carry and echo around all of Commorragh. All living things in Commorragh cowered instinctively. Vect would punish them all now, out of sheer malicious spite.

Vect, for the first time in his entire life, was bested.

*(How Corax breached the portals, no records tell. I suspect he waited for kabalite trueborn to pass through the portals on the way to Port Carmine.)

**(It seems the Phoenix Lord peeled off from the primarchs to follow his own agenda. As the battle of wits and carnage of the primarchs brought welcome mayhem to Commorragh, Ra’s investigations would uncover the birthplace of the conspiracy which had brought forth the Nex- [unintelligible madness. Vasiri deleted most of this before it caused a warp breach inside the Library]. The Lords of Twilight listened for too long to those that dwelt in the shadows. They thought they knew the name of the being that called to them from beyond the universe, but they were deceived. The full story of the rise of the draziin-maton and their masters will be told in the next background section. )

Additional background Section 29: The Building Dissolution; the bane of all creation. An overview

No living creature in the galaxy of 60K could possibly ignore the dissolution; the name sane men gave to the Ne-[REMOVED] and its building influence upon reality. Every living thing that had a connection to the sea of souls could feel the sickness working through it like venom in the blood. The barriers between warp and realspace grew ever thinner, tearing in some places like a moth-eaten satin veil pulled taunt across the thorny plate of a beetle. Something from the deepest warp was rising and descending, everywhere and nowhere at once. No one could say what had caused it, for to know such things was to go utterly insane. However, I have gleaned much (and my sanity was never in peril; I lost it decades ago... but I digress). (Author’s note: This section is written, for the most part, in overview, for even a demented fool such as myself cannot begin to explain the intricacies of gods and daemons who boast such labyrinthine minds that I might become lost in them should I attempt to consider them. Yet, I will continue, for I feel this information is essential for my readers, so that they might fully appreciate the events which saw the close of the Age of Dusk, and may yet lead us to extinction...)

To explain what caused the first warp rifts, and what set the great game into motion cannot be fully explained until I depict the crossing of the Well and the charge of Revelation’s Host across the plain of Geometry-Abominable. However, I can divulge here the course of events which brought forth the draziin-maton and the latter stages of dissolution.

It began with the Lords of Twilight; the most ancient and proud of the Eldar that still festered in Commorragh. They scorned Vect and his new order of the Dark Eldar, and resented the Dark Lord’s ban upon the old, forbidden arts. The Lords of the Iron Thorn and many senior members of the old Solar Cults were members, as well as the scions of the long-vanquished El’Uriaq dynasty of Shaa-dom. Their unofficial ruler was the warp-scarred archon Ysclyth. Many had thought he had been destroyed in M41, when Vect collapsed his sub-realm of Talon Cyriix, and allowed the daemons under his command to usurp his kabal. But he had escaped, and he fled to the deepest and most secluded corner of the Dark City; deep in a realm which was not fully in the webway, or fully in the warp.

There, amidst wraith-kind and mandrakes, his mind was warped, and his body was disassembled and remade a thousand times. When El’uriaq returned to the world of the living, his lacerated soul was forever changed. He had witnessed such horrific and glorious sights in his hellish limbo that they alone could fill a dozen madmen’s libraries of scribbling. He was reborn as El’Uriaq the Daemonmancer, and when he returned from that dark place, he took his Lords of Twilight into council. He had found a way to control daemons, and to bind them to his will.

He knew this, so he claimed, for there was an entity that lingered beyond the warp, beneath and above it, beyond the endless deep; trapped but ever-living. This creature was known to the Eldar as Eldanesh the God-Caller, the mythical first King of the Eldar race. Gods and devils had once bent the knee to Eldanesh, yet Khaine had slain him long ago. El’Uriaq came back to reveal the truth. Eldanesh died yes, but El’Uriaq claimed that his death was not like that of a Dark Eldar, to be consumed by She Who Thirsts, nor to dissolve like the mon keigh’s putrid little soul embers. His soul when to the place where the Unborn and the never were held court, like impossible kings over a realm which did not exist, nor could exist. A realm where all the paths never taken resided. The daemonmancer promised the lords of twilight the universe. They would become gods, more powerful than the Dark Muses. More powerful than the old Gods, or the Primordial Usurper Gods combined. They could drink the life of entire galaxies with the power El’Uriaq envisioned. His plan was one on a truly impossible scale, and he drew them in with his serpent words.

Thus, they set their plans into motion; plans which began in the dimly remembered times of the Imperium of Man, in M41. Throughout this period, their primary aim was to hide their efforts from Vect’s spies, they did manage to install a daemon, Hamadraya, to guide Huron Blackheart, and made pacts and brought to heel many daemonic forces. In the darkest of ceremonies, the Lords of Twilight allied with the Crone World Eldar; the Eldar who had fallen to chaos and become terrible daemonic caliphs of frightening power. Yet, it wasn’t until the fall of the Imperium that their plans could come to full fruition.

Using their agents across the galaxy, El’Uriaq’s minions located the old warrior machine sof the once mighty Eldar Empire. The machines had once laid waste to entire armies on the orders of ambivalent eldar, and quenched suns with their power. The Lords of twilight would bring them back, more powerful and terrifying than ever.

Their efforts did not go unnoticed however. A mysterious being with no name and no face came to them in the guise of a captured slave, yet it spoke with the words of a daemon of frightful power. It called itself the Changeling, and it claimed that the Lord of Change was with them. Through this creature, a galaxy-spanning conspiracy was hatched. Kor Phaeron, the Black cardinal himself, grew to learn of this scheme of conquest and desecration, as did many others. Schemes within schemes were born in the years following the New Devourer and the collapse of civilization. Warlords betrayed Archons, who swindled sorcerers, who vanquished expendable pawns on the deceitful words of daemons. Ahriman sought to pre- empt the Lords of Twilight, and took the opportunity to raid Terra, stealing its secrets while their plans were still in motion.

Through subtle manipulation, the Anarchy Child, Sparrod, caused oddly-specific acts of demented carnage and chaos on many worlds that bordered the Eye of Terror. As previously mentioned, these attacks were not random, but they formed a pattern; a ritual. A symbol; eight hundred and eighty eight worlds all dying in sight of the light coming from the Eye at a specific date, at a specific location in the eye. And on that date, through the massive soulstorm caused by the Anarchy Child, time was paused at the heart of the Eye. At the centre of a rift that plunged into the very heart of the warp, time and space were obliterated utterly. The soul storm... burrowed through the warp, piercing it utterly. Such an event had occurred only twice before; the first came before the birth of Man, the second came at the fall of the Eldar. But for a brief instant, the Deep Warp was opened. And from there, the-

[DO NOT SPEAK ILL OF THOSE THAT-PLEASE KILL- THEN IT HAPPENE- WHERE IT GOES- MINGLING BLOOD- THINGS CRAWL/STAY SAME?SANE?INSIDEINSANE-FINAL MOMENT- DORN’S HERESY- GUILLIMAN HERESY- EVERY HERESYOSSIBLENOMOREPAIN:WORDSMINGLESTAYSAME>WHYWHYWHYTHE YCRY? THOSEWHOAREN’TBORNHATEDOOMSAMEASYOU- HATE YOU!FALLING, FALLING> THE NEX... THE NEEEEEEEEEEEX...

THE NEXXXXXXXXXXXXXX...... T

THE NEX...... T! PHASEEEEEEEEEE, OF- of-OF.]

[Chronicle repaired. Strange malfunction.]

-and the Crone worlders managed to finally store them, though it cost so very much. Nevertheless, the automatons of the Old Empire were now filled up with the stuff of the madness within madness; the warp beyond reckoning. But this was jsut the start.

For the Lords of twilight were deceived. Tzeentch was never a servant or ally of theirs. Tzeentch had set into motion the great game, and all the playing pieces were his. The newly- born draziin automatons, or draziin-maton, were no slaves for disgruntled eldar nobles to toy with. Tzeentch was a mere facet of their master, who lay beyond the veil and had no form, for it was a being born to end form and function and sanity.

The Draziin-maton had animus and purpose now, but they were trapped in their impossible world at the heart of the Eye. El’uriaq was, in fact, one of their agents, and he used his twisted, half-shade form to destroy the Lords of Twilight. The Decapitator was unleashed upon them, and though their Kabals vainly sought to ward off his attentions, he found them all in the end. As Commorragh fought the Wolf and Raven in bloody combat, the Lords of twilight were quietly, silently killed. Their skulls were taken into Aelindrach, and there, the Decapitator added them to his collection. Unbeknownst to all commorrites, Aelindrach would prove to be the weak chink in their City’s armor...

Meanwhile, beyond the webway, the draziin-maton and their allies in the material universe conquered the Eye. El’Uriaq allowed himself to be ‘captured’ by the Word Bearers. He was tortured, and eventually gave the greedy heretics access to many sorcerous secrets even Lorgar did not know. He taught them new powers and divulged information. Entranced by the thought of an ever deeper understanding of the Sea of Souls, the Word bearers threw in their lot with the Draziin-maton, and together they usurped Abaddon, and chased him from the Western Chaos Imperium, while they remotely controlled the Eastern Imperium. As the power of Lorgar the Anointed King grew, so too did the warp’s grip on realspace.

Across the galaxy, they attempted to weaken the veil, to flood the warring galaxy with warp energy, until there might occur a total event collapse; the end of the materium entirely. This total event collapse had begun with the first chaos god, and with every new god born, the veil grew thinner and thinner. As the galaxy fought itself; as angyls fought daemons, krork fought necrons and man fought man, more terrible things were being born. Valchocht the maker, the Daemon King of the Soul Forge, finally constructed for itself a body of purest warp stuff. Through this new grand vortex of a body, it became another Chaos God, and the galaxy got a little darker. Everywhere, the universe was unraveling, slowly but surely.

However, the draziin-maton did not understand the minds, or the natures, of their foes. They were beings of potential, not fact. They had no idea that there were forces arrayed against them, with plans in place to take the fight directly to their very heart.

When retaliation came, when the final war was launched, it would be a great Revelation to them...

Additional Background Section 30: The Lion’s Cage

The Lion awoke, eyes snapping open as the smell of burning reached his superhuman senses. He felt the Rock beneath his body, the familiar stonework, but somehow changed. The primarch woke in the midst of a siege. The walls were coming down in sheets of flame, revealing Caliban’s great forests in all directions.

They too were burning, as orbital munitions fell like meteorite strikes, vaporizing acres of woodland in the time it took the light of each blast to reach them. Mountains were pummeled to plasma, which drifted across the world, killing everything in its path.

“Who... attacks us?” the primarch demanded, his mind fighting to regain its composure. He was disorientated, a sensation he had never felt before. Not truly.

“Russ’ wolves have broken through the second cordon! The Fists have taken the orbitals! We’ve lost the ability to contest space!”

This was the voice of countless Dark Angels, who rushed from one console to another. Each was marked with eight pointed stars upon their foreheads, and each one spoke with a voice of sulphurous corruption. One turned to the Lion.

“My liege, you wake! We cannot hold them off my Lord and Master! What are your orders?”

“The Wolf attacks us? Dorn too? But Horus... his allies were vanquished. The war is... concluded.”

“It shall never be concluded. Not while we still draw breath; those were your words sire. That was your decree.”

The Lion was horrified by the words of his heathen children. He looked for his sword, but when he found none, he threw himself upon them with unrelenting fury. He broke them, tossing their bodies aside before he signaled the planet-wide surrender of Caliban. He then signaled Russ, and declared his intent to surrender himself to his brother.

Russ teleported to the surface personally, flanked by the Custodians and his own fenryka bodyguards.

“What madness drove you to this Jonson?”

“I promise you, the crimes of these fallen are not mine, I swear to you brother, on my honor.”

Russ snorted. “Honor? Honor means very little in these dark days, would you not say? Besides which, this is not the heresy that we condemn you for. You have orchestrated something far worse,” Russ replied ominously.

The Lion was brought onboard the Space Wolf flagship in chains, forged by the Lion’s lost brother Vulkan himself to be unbreakable by even the strongest creature. He was thrown into the bowels of the ship, alongside mewling, broken traitors, begging for death. While the ship travelled through the warp, in the pitch darkness of the cargo holds, the Lion granted them their wishes. He killed them all with the loops of his chains and the strength of his arms, till there was nothing but human paste remaining. The Lion was being brought to Terra. The Lion knew the palace to be a tumbled ruin, filled with corpses five meters deep in all directions. Industrial excavators worked day and night to dig out pockets of defenders from amongst the siege’s endless swathes of dead. Yet, in his dank, lightless cell, he saw nothing, until he was dragged onboard a thunderhawk and shuttled to the surface; to the Throne room itself.

The throne room was a mess of smashed artifacts, and suffered vast scratch marks and gouges, caused by creatures most foul and impossible. Around the chamber, Imperial fists and custodian guards stood in neat rows, silent and stoic, with bolters and spears clutched tight to their chests. The Lion was ushered into the chamber by four custodes, whose guardian spears glimmered with deadly promise as they hovered mere feet from the chained primarch. The Lion looked ahead, and saw a sight which broke his hearts.

Upon a small, unadorned throne, Dorn sat, his left gauntlet clutched to his face, as if suppressing tears. His armor, once lustrous gold, was now as black as night. It was darker even than the battle plate of the Dark Angels themselves. To his left sat the Emperor. The Emperor no longer glowed. His body was broken, a cluster of scars and cables that punched through his flesh and fed into the strange alien device that dominated the chamber. A throne of gold, that formed the heart of a vast ring of ritual stone and psycho-plastic embedded in the wall. All manner of horrors throbbed beyond this gate, held back only by the cabal of psykers who were suffering just behind Dorn. The Emperor was dead. Not just the living death inflicted by Horus. The Emperor was completely dead. What was worse was that the Lion could see why.

The Lion Sword stood embedded in the Emperor’s chest, protruding like a vile banner of treachery, more foul than any could contemplate. Tears began to spring to the Lion’s ordinarily inscrutable face.

Dorn rose from his throne upon hearing the name of the Lion announced by the serfs and clerks who lingered on the periphery. He had a cold expression; as if his soul had died alongside the Emperor. His head was bald in patches, for he had torn great chunks of his scalp away in demented frustration. In his right hand, he clutched a handful of great white feathers, alongside a teardrop of blood fashioned into an amulet.

He cursed the Lion for his manifest heresies, for his cowardice and his evil. Leman Russ, who prowled behind the rows of astartes and custodes, simply glowered at him with animalistic loathing.

The Lion protested his innocence. He recalled returning to Caliban, to punish Luther and the fallen. He admitted some of his Legion had fallen, but he swore he had destroyed them. Dorn told him that in fact, the loyalists of the Dark Angels had returned to Caliban to defeat the Lion and his rebellious kin. There was no Luther. None of the assembled Imperials had ever heard of a man called Luther.

“Luther was only part of your madness; your sickness,” Dorn explained without emotion. He couldn’t even bear to look at the Lion.

Dorn then explained that the Lion had shown his betrayal only after he had sent his agent to greet the Emperor.

“-and there, your fallen angel, using your own blade, pierced the Emperor’s heart and struck him dead, before your astartes pawn was moments later cut down himself.”

“Impossible! This is impossible!” the Lion began to scream. He couldn’t be a traitor. He simply could not comprehend such a thing, even after the Heresy.

Dorn lost his patience, snatching the Lion Sword from the Emperor’s corpse, and flinging it across the chamber. It landed with a deafening clatter across the marble floor at the Lion’s feet. “See the truth of your treachery written in the blood on your own blade!” Dorn howled.

Gently, the Lion plucked his sword from the floor. He gazed long at the workmanship of the weapon, and the delicate spider’s web of drying blood that traced a pattern across the blade. It was real; it was definitely his sword. Convulsing in disgust, the Lion threw his face upon the ground, his free hand splayed across the throne-room’s floor as he sobbed, golden locks falling over his face.

“Yet, brother, you can still be redeemed; if not in our eyes, then in His,” Russ finally spoke, shoving through the crowd, before coming to a halt before the Golden Throne. “Your life is forfeit, of course, but your death need not simply be oblivion. Your death can mean something.”

“Indeed,” Dorn began. “We can bring Him back. The Emperor can yet live. A soul such as His cannot simply be dissolved into the immaterium like a mortal’s. It is out there, waiting for a means to be reborn into the realm of flesh, to save us all. The Librarians say all we require is a host; an avatar for his being. If you are truly penitent, truly loyal to our cause, you will give yourself freely to this task. What else do you have? Your Legion is dead, as is your honor. You are alone now. Return to the fold, and be who you were born to be!”

The Lion stopped sobbing instantly, for he was never truly crying.

“I have been here before. This chamber; this exact room,” the Lion began.

Russ shrugged. “Of course, this is the throne room of the E-“

“No no, I was here in the throne room, after the lifting of the siege. I remembered every square millimeter of this chamber. I have a primarch’s eyes, you forget. I do not forget a single detail; I cannot forget any detail. Your illusion is good, very good. But In using images I am familiar with, you made your first mistake. Everything you have conjured here is almost perfect. But I can spot the errors; the mold lines and seams that bind this lie together. It was a nice touch using my real sword, but I see through this facade.”

The entire chamber shuddered. The golden light of Terra’s Star turned a ruddy red as it shone through the high windows each side of the throne.

“What was our second mistake?” Dorn asked with a metallic, deathless voice that dripped with condescension. The Lion looked up and smiled. “You gave me my sword back.”

The four custodes launched their attacks with their spears, but the Lion was phenomenally fast. He shattered the false chains that fettered him, bringing his sword around to block the precise and relentless blows of the custodes. The duel did not last long. Energized blades carved through Lion El Jonson’s body in a dozen places, but each cut was barely a scratch to the greatest swordsman amongst the primarchs. Blade in hand, the four custodes could not best him. He ended the contest in a dozen precisely placed blows. Each custodes fell, decapitated.

Four headless lychguard crashed to the ground, warscythes falling from their metallic digits, before both weapons and necron teleported away in flashes of green light.

Shuddering and smoking from his cuts, the Lion rose to his feet, holding his blade in a double-handed grip.

All around him, molecule-sized scarabs crawled from the walls, ceilings and floor, and every Imperial present was stripped of their metal scarab-skin. Now, the true nature of his foes was revealed. Necron immortals replaced the Fists, and lychguard the custodes. A grinning necron that towered as tall as the Lion stood in place of Dorn, as scarabs still fell from its skeletal form like sparkling particles of metal dust. The thing that was Russ had no scarabs hiding its form. It simply turned molten, and the living melta of its form returned to its natural state of being. The faceless angyl turned its head slowly towards the Lion, bladed wings unfurling like the petals of a flower.

As one, the necrons raised their gauss weapons. The Lion saw his end, and simply grasped his sword tighter.

“What are you? What monster wishes to possess my form? Speak you honorless dogs!” the Lion roared.

“The Star Father demands a body. You bear the mark of his flesh seed, and element of his being and soul. You will be his vessel. Obey! Obey!” the angyl demanded. Its voice was a sonorous monotone that rumbled with irresistible force. But resist it the Lion did.

“You are nothing to me. Daemons lie, as you lie. Where is this place?”

It was the necron’s turn to speak. “This is the Lori Delta Trove. You, little puppet, will show respect to your betters. This is my domain, and the Father of Stars is a force for Order in this dark time. I am the Storm Lord Imotekh. You have no clue what forces you rail against here. I tire of your petulance.”

“You speak as if I have not destroyed countless xenos warlords who believed they were my match before. It is you who does not know me!” the Lion sneered.

“It is disobedient. Destroy the vessel; it is false,” the angyl stated blandly. The necron gauss flayers began to crackle with power.

“Fight me! Blade to blade! Prove how powerful your Lord is! Come, test your steel against mine!” the Lion shouted. He knew that he would perish if the gauss weapons struck him, and he had no avenue of escape.

Imotekh stopped his necrons with a gesture. The phaeron crackled with the power of both the Star father and the miracle science of his race. Lightning played about his head like a halo, as his fingers glowed with building power.

“This whelp will not have a clean, honorable death. He is unworthy of it. I will best him. I will enjoy taking your hand. Then, when you are broken and sobbing like the infant you truly are, then you shall die,” Imotekh explained, his tiny flickering soul briefly flaring with life as he described how he’d destroy the Lion.

“You are a soulless machine of evil craft, yet I pity you. You are pathetic. I hear your mortal voice quivering inside your living metal shell. A little thing that thinks it is a god. I shall educate you otherwise,” the Lion replied with similar calm resolve.

The Lion charged. Imotekh’s staff was raised, and a bolt of indescribable power struck the Primarch. He howled in agony as his flesh was seared by the scourging bolt. Flesh melted in some places, while blood boiled and burst in its veins in others. The Lion staggered to his knees as the onslaught intensified. His organs were burning, his lungs were charcoal.

Yet, he rose, first to one knee, then to his feet. He swung the Lion sword into a guard position, and the lightning of the Stormlord was drawn to the tempered metal of his relic blade, channeled away from the Lion’s body until his own blade’s energy field crackled and sparked like a malfunctioning fusion furnace.

Finally, with a hastily thrown kick, the Lion knocked the lightning stave aside, disrupting the electrical storm finally. Imotekh did not give the Lion a second’s respite. He instantly lunged into combat, bladed staff twirling in his lifeless claws. Imotekh’s every blow was countered by the primarch, the two weapons both blurs of silver as they exchanged a multitude of strikes and counterstrikes every second. Despite his grievous wounds, the Lion was impossibly fast and tireless as only a primarch could be.

Yet, Imotekh was immortal and easily his match attritionaly. The necron lord could fight forever, until the last start went out. Even a primarch had limits. The Lion could not simply outlast him in a duel. He had to end it somehow. The necrons formed a circle around the combatants, while the angyl shimmered with what one could describe as rage; Imotekh had not followed its instructions. Disobedience was anathema to the angyls of the Star father; utterly unthinkable. Yet, Imotekh had disobeyed...

The duel between the two giant continued without a single pause or hesitation. Every move was fluid; precision born of instinct and programming. Every blow landed by the Lion was repaired within moments by the alien war machine, while the wounds inflicted by the necrons refused to heal, some effect of their unholy sciences no doubt. The two beings threw themselves into a final clash of blades, throwing their weight into the crunch of staff against sword, mechanical versus biological perfection. Both Imotekh and the Lion forced their opponent backwards for an instant. As their blades parted, Imotekh plunged his staff into the floor, unleashing a catastrophic blast of electrical force. The Lion’s senses were overloaded for an instant, and he dropped his blade. As he dropped to snatch it up, the necorn lord’s blade fell.

With his left hand, Lion El Jonson caught the blade. The energized weapon flashed lightning through his body, and his hand began to burn, first flesh, then bone. But Imotekh’s blade was stopped. In that millisecond seemed to last an age. Even as Imotekh was disentangling his staff from the Lion’s destroyed left hand, the Lion had already picked up his sword. With one almighty blow, the Lion chopped off the Stormlord’s arm. The necron tried to grab his falling staff in his other arm, but the Lion hacked that arm away too, before he carved Imotekh in twain with an upward, double-handed swing of his legendary sword. The alien unleashed a hideous metallic shriek, which continued long after the Lion pulverized his head with the pommel of his blade.

The necrons registered their Lord’s demise. In the moment sit took them to formulate the ‘kill’ response, the Lion had taken up the Stormlord’s staff. As his hand still clutched the weapon, it remained active. A screaming, living thunderbolt wriggled free of the weapon t the speed of light, leaping form necorn to necron in a blinding series of flashes. The Lion only got one shot off before the staff phased out alongside its owner’s body, but it was enough to stun the assembled killing machines. He leapt into their midst, carving his way through the silver masses until he reached what seemed like a door.

The Lion fled through the Lori Delta Trove complex in a daze, his hideous wounds afflicting him more than he realized at first. The angyl chased him, turning the smashed remains of the fallen necrons into hosts for new angyls, who flew at its side.

The Lion could not escape. It reached a chamber open to the dying red sun that the tombworld orbited, before the bolts of the Angyls struck him, and he fell to the ground. Bladed wings stabbed into his flesh, and he was tossed around like a ragdoll by the horde of anti-daemons. Finally, he slumped onto his back, sword just out of his grasp.

His vision swam, and his mind reeled once again from the horror before him. Then, he heard bolters; distant, as if underwater. Dark shapes fought off the glowing silver apparitions, flashes of orange and blue turning the angyls to molten ruin. The entire world seemed to shudder and convulse. There was an attack. Something was attacking the necrons and the Star father’s minions.

His eyes focused upon the giants who surrounded his prone form like a congregation.

They were hooded and robed, but their dark-green armor gave them away as astartes. Winged blades etched into ceramite. The Lion cackled bitterly through mouthfuls of blood.

“More tricks. More lies! Ghosts of my past come to haunt me!”

One of the giants was slightly taller than the others. His face was shrouded in shadow, and a cloak of midnight feathers wreathed his hooded head.

“Hail Lion El Jonson, Knight of Caliban, Lord of the First and defender of the realm of Man,” a firm yet melodious voice called out.

“Begone ghosts. You are taunting me with visions of my lost children. I do not appreciate it,” the Lion gargled deliriously.

“Most of your organs are dying. You need our help.”

“You expect me to believe my legionnaires would appear at my point of death to save me? Your head is full of fairy tales, apparition!”

“Look upon these men closely,” the cloaked man implored gently. “They are your kin. Every one of them is a Dark Angel, though a significant few are also Alpharius, in addition to being Angels. I must confess, we did not come here on our own. We were opportunistic, striking when an assault upon the Delta trove was already underway.

The Lion shook his head. “No, no. Alpharius is a heretic! You are damned fallen; Luther’s progeny! And who are you, faceless one? You have the countenance of Corax, yet I know you cannot be he. Are you Alpharius too?”

The giant shrugged. “More than most...”

The world shuddered again.

“We have no time. Things are not as you remember. You have slept for long ages of the galaxy. These men are not fallen. They are Unforgiven, but they know their place. The Watchers in the Dark sent them to me. There is more to this situation than simply humans. So much is at stake.”

“Whether you serve xenos or daemons, it matters not. I would die before I betrayed my Imperium!” the Lion spluttered.

Green flashes flared somewhere close by, followed by angry screaming and the roaring retort of boltguns.

“The Imperium fell, as it was destined to! But you do not understand. Let us help you. We are not alike. My brother and I, we have walked both paths, for we alone could take the road no loyalist or traitor could travel. You must come with me! Take up the feathered mantle with me! We are poised now at the very precipice; we need you. The necrons war with each other, and the krork war with everyone. They both enslave worlds for their wars, but they cannot touch us, because they do not know we exist! We are shadows, and from the shadows, we can take them down. Please brother, forget the old animosities. Take my hand brother!” the man in midnight feathers pleaded, reaching out to the Lion.

The Lion spat in his face. “You’re no brother of mine.” And with that, the shadowy forces of the Unforgiven and their Hydra cult allies melted away.

Soon, the sound of battle became a relentless, all consuming roar, filling the head and cleansing the mind. Necrons falling, fire and flames. The crack of lascannons and corkscrewing missiles bisecting silver walkers. Multi-limbed monsters leaping between towers, bony claws ripping through living steel. The Lion was fading. His organs were failing; most were simply charcoal in his chest. He could barely see now. Everything was falling away, like wet sheets of paper. Then, a monster appeared before his eyes. It was a snarling dragon’s mouth, filled with slavering teeth set into an unforgiving mask, with glowing yellow lenses that pierced his soul. The dragon ripped away its face, revealing a face beneath that was just as fearsome. The Lion felt two vast hands upon each side of his head. The stink of promethium on the dragon-man’s breath began to rouse him. “You stink... you always stank. I missed it...” Jonson slurred, with a weary smile.

“Stay with me Lion. I’ve got you brother. I’ve got you,” Vulkan called out breathlessly to his brother, as he held him in his arms. “I’ve got you now.” A note on ‘Braiva’s Best’

This force was famous across the Vulkan Imperium during M56, the period upon which the largest military mobilization in Vulkan Imperial history was undertaken in its latter years. This is particularly important when we consider that this fleet was famous across the Imperium, even during the homecoming years, when actual demi-god primarchs were being returned to the Imperium from across the galaxy and major commandery missions were undertaken against krork, chaos and necron forces on a huge scale following the end of the age of Contraction.

Officially, the force was first known as the 456th Armageddon/Varseen Expeditionary Force, under the direction of Admiral Vartoon of the Steel Legions. This was a fleet was cut off from resupply due to the century of contraction, but valiantly continued as a military force, despite being decimated by necron and krork forces and losing most of its commanders. This force would have vanished into obscurity if it wasn’t for the fact Temestor Braiva, Legendary commander of the Federation of Justice Troopers, stranded far from Armageddon, took the burden of command upon himself, and utterly renovated and reformed the force.

Braiva knew the fleet could not be resupplied in a standard manner. So, the fleet took at tithe of soldiers, materials and ships from the planets they liberated or saved as they made short warp jumps between embattled systems. Though they lacked much of the more sophisticated materiel larger, astartes-led missions possessed, Temestor innovated; using non-standard tactics, daring maneuvers and creating war machines out of whatever he could find. His fleet defeated the krork war-hulk ‘The Elder King’s Retort’, by luring it into close proximity to a star, before unleashing gravity mines that caused a coronal mass ejection within the star. His cunning Promethean tech savants used starship parts to scratch-build grav tanks for the siege of Morellen’s escape, which was otherwise impenetrable by orbit or via ground-based assault. The fleet penetrated the defenses of the Dogorel Traitor Clan worlds by deactivating their engines and disguising their approach inside the icy tail of a comet. History books fail to mention that often, Braiva won through avoiding fighting the most powerful enemies, such as the Dragon Tide, attacking only their weakest elements.

Nevertheless, many are the legendary victories achieved by this force. They were considered one of the best armies in the Imperium, and soon became known as ‘Braiva’s Best’. Temestor Braiva himself became the poster-boy for the war effort; a symbol of mortal fortitude and cunning in a galaxy of superhuman heroes and monsters.

Braiva’s force expanded every year, as their losses were replaced and soon surpassed by men and materiel they picked up along the way. The core of his ground forces consisted of; -Braiva’s own Justice Troopers, who formed the vanguard of most attacks. -Plasma Commandoes picked up from various worlds where they had been stranded following abandoned campaigns centuries earlier. -The Tempered Edge veterans. These were the battle-hardened, battle-scarred veteran Steel Legionnaires of the original expedition. Their numbers were ever-dwindling due to war losses and injury. Bionics were strictly limited within the fleet, thus many of the Tempered Edge continued to fight with hands replaced by hooks or blades, or with their damaged eyes simply replaced by glass or steel replacements. The Tempered Edge were always doped with pain numbing narcotics in order to continue the fight. Famously it was said you could chop bits off them and they’d still run you through with their bayonets. -Serf Soldiers of Krieg. Several merchant worlds paid their tithes to Braiva’s Best by simply buying them a battalion of Serf Soldiers from Krieg. These grim figures were unsociable but undoubtedly effective. -Valhallan Remnants.

However, these forces were supplemented by a diverse range of exotic troopers from minor worlds and domains aligned to Vulkan’s cause, such as a Chapter of Chevantai Knight- Princes with their powered armor and legendary sword-skills, psyker Guardsmen of Gamma- Meson, Rough Riders of Attila and many more. In addition, mercenaries joined Braiva’s Best, for albeit less noble intentions. The most bizarre and striking of these were the savage Lychen Vashiri*; these men and women were essentially ‘murder-tourists’, travelling from their home empire of Lychen purely to sample the various interesting things the galaxy had for them to kill. They didn’t fight for money or materials; only flesh and glory.

The fleet itself was a ragtag assortment of powerful vulkanite capital ships, Ryzan forge ships and countless vessels of differing designs from across the galaxy. Some were converted merchant vessels and cruise liners, others were alien vessels stolen and repurposed by opportunistic crews. Some had been designed by their home worlds themselves, ignoring the defunct decrees of the long-extinct Mechanicum. Braiva’s flagship, Tyme’s Absolution, had once been a Hades class Battle Barge, but centuries of refits, embellishments and additions created a truly unique vessel of vast scale and formidable firepower, with deck upon deck of bomber wings and fight craft, as well as a fully functioning forge section installed by devious Promethean Cultists.

Braiva himself was almost as much of a relic as the rest of his fleet. He was ancient for a mortal, his hundreds of years of life maintained by the bare minimum of bionic and rejuve techniques; only his face maintained a facade of youthfulness, in order to match his poster boy image. He no longer fought from the front however and was instead a master of tactics and logistics, orchestrating campaigns from his private chambers onboard Tyme’s Absolution.

Braiva’s Best’s fame was cemented through taking part in the Cyclopean War, launched against Ahriman’s dominion. No astartes could fight in this war against the sorcerer; only the cunning of the unseen and the courage of mortal men stood against the deathless Legions of the Rubric.

Additional Background Section 31: Despoiler’s flight. Despoiler’s Fight

Abaddon the despoiler entered vulkanite space in 145.M56 approximately. One cannot be sure precisely where he penetrated the Imperium, as there were no sensor monitors or major fleets to mark his presence within the realm and indeed, one does not measure interstellar territory in the same way one would mark a land border. The only reason we can be so precise on the year is because he happened to have entered the Vulkan Imperium at a time when it was only just recovering from the period of contraction; relief fleets and battle groups were only just being dispatched from vulkanite strongholds in order to reconnect the isolated bastions of Armageddons civilization.

Thus, there were scarcely any forces to actively oppose the Despoiler’s fleet of rabid killers and battered relic-ships. However, some psyker-seers in the employ of the commanderies had predicted Abaddon would attempt to enter Vulkan space ‘not as conqueror, but as vengeful refugee; pursued by a Cardinal of ever-darkness’. Thus, the battlefleets of the Mk II astartes Legions were poised to converge upon any suspected sighting of Abaddon’s force.

Yet, once again the Despoiler’s cunning was overlooked. He had devised a way to pass undetected and unmolested through Vulkan space, whilst also plundering it for the resources his minions so desperately needed. Abaddon would enter a civilized system with his dread planet killer, and announce his presence openly on all vox channels. He also made it clear that if the planet alerted anyone outside the system of his arrival, he would destroy their world instantly. If they resisted his forces when they landed, he would kill their world. If the governments of the planet did not give his vessels all that he desired, their world would also die. Most worlds were cowed by this stark, uncompromising stance. He made sure to send small forces of Black legionnaires and Despoiled to the planets, so that if the planet’s populace did resist, he would not lose too many of his men when and if he unleashed the Planet-Killer’s terrible power.

Using this tactic, his forces stole decades’ worth of war materiel and food supplies. They had unfair gladiatorial contests staged in the capitals of the worlds, where thousands were killed by Black Legion champions. Thousands upon thousands of children were taken as slaves; the strongest and most vicious boys were taken for geneseed implantation, while the rest were taken to toil in the bowels of hellish grand cruisers, or even within the Planet Killer’s inner workings themselves. He even had some worlds build him whole warships using their orbital docks.

Yet, despite all this misery, Abaddon did not unleash his war machines upon these worlds; his vessels did not pulverize cities, nor did his armies destroy any more than a few million people on the surface of each world. Once sated, his fleet hastily fled, warning that his sorcerers would be able to tell if the world they had attacked had sent for help; he promised to return and destroy them all if they gave him up to his pursuers.

This perculiar method meant the Despoiler could milk a great swathe of worlds without arousing unwanted attention.

The reason for this secrecy was because he was being hunted. Kor Phaeron was heading for the Vulkan Imperial border, at the head of a grand armada of chaos warships from across the Western Chaos Imperium, along with all manner of daemons and traitors, all desperate to be the ones to earn the glory of finally killing off the Legendary Abaddon. But Abaddon was building his forces too.

The toppled Chaos Emperor had changed much since his fall from diabolical grace. He sat upon a simple throne at the heart of the Planet Killer, consumed by constant hate. His hair was unkempt, the infamous topknot was undone and his great mane of black hair was allowed to spill across his shoulder pads and vast, armored arms. His face was painted in sigils of blood and loathing. He bore the frustrated rage of Khorne, the despair of Nurgle, tempered by the dark schemes he planned to topple Lorgar in Tzeentch’s name, while he took great pleasure in imagining the horrible mutilation of Erebus and all his kin, a gift of Slannesh.

He brought the few surviving Word bearers he had captured to his throne room, and had them messily dispatched by ravening daemon-worms pressed into their eye sockets and allowed to wriggle through their bodies, slowly melting them from the inside. None of this torture, or the gory duels and heinous sculptures brought to entertain him so much as lifted his dark mood.

As their rampage continued, Abaddon picked up roving bands of Slanneshi marauders and even some Emperor’s Children; remnants of Fulgrim’s failed crusade long ago.

When his force had grown to a fleet of almost a hundred capital ships, and countless smaller escorts and hangers on, his Lieutenants and War Chiefs gathered to debate what was to be their next move. Where would he take his armies? Some argued he should head south to the Segmentum Obscura and demand a truce with the Sorcerer Ahriman. Most scorned this idea as folly, for they all knew Ahriman would use the rubric upon them and use them as pawns in his wars with the Vulkanites and the Tau Exile-Empire. Others suggested he could join his banners in alliance with the Blackheart, and cripple the entire northern rim. Many of the strongest voices in the dank, daemon-infested muster hall suggested they could cross the galaxy and take control of the Hadex Multitude; a disparate group of over a hundred chaotic territories focused around the Hadex Anomaly and the ruins of the shattered Meta-Empire. All they need do was destroy that hundred-headed Daemon prince which held dominion over that rabble. Yet still, to travel the entire length of the galaxy would have depleted their resources intolerably; leaving them vulnerable to being themselves taken over once they reached the Hadex.

An astartes named Vultiari (a traitor mark Secundus Astartes from an indeterminate commandery) spoke up then. He suggested that Abaddon’s growing armada did not need to join their banners with any other chaos power, or bend the knee to lesser. He praised him as being the ‘true son’ of Chaos; Abaddon’s fealty to the gods was pure.

“Then why was I not rewarded? Why do I fall, while ‘lesser whelps’ rise in power and prestige? Why should I choose to relinquish the glory of an Imperial dominion?” Abaddon responded, his face a mask of loathing and ancient evil.

Vultiari chose his next words carefully.

“For a chaos Imperium was not the will of the gods. The Glorious Four desire disorder and anarchy. You are their champion. You despoil, you need not build. You ravage, you need not cultivate. You are destined to destroy the Imperiums of chaos my Lord, for you are Abaddon the Despoiler, and you shall see the galaxy burn!”

Abaddon rose from his throne, and seized his Second in the talon of Horus. He pulled the Astartes close, and grinned at him with all the warmth of a shark’s soulless grimace. “That is the correct answer boy.”

Thus, Abaddon’s armada began to make plans to make war upon the Eastern Chaos Imperium; they reasoned that once Huron’s realm was ravaged, they would have enough resources to engage the Vulkan Imperium and smash that in turn.

However, even as their fleet dreamed of galactic war, they were themselves being hunted. Kor Phaeron crossed over into Vulkan space roughly two years after Abaddon. His fleet was a veritable behemoth, easily twice the size of the Despoiler’s own force, not including the vassal fleets that followed this huge armada like pilot fish. This meant that the fleet moved more slowly, as it had to continually wait for all elements of its fleet to assemble between warp translations. Yet, inexorable as the tide, Kor Phaeron’s behemoth was closing on Abaddon. His daemonic allies had the Despoiler’s scent and chased him remorselessly. Wishing to prevent Abaddon going to ground, Kor Phaeron mercilessly attacked and massacred the worlds Abaddon had previously taken supplies from. Kor Phaeron unleashed (almost literal) hell upon these worlds; turning their skies into warp-swathed nightmares, and turning their seas into oceans of acidic bile as his vessels destroyed cities and butchered billions. This plan however drew attention to the chaos invaders. Kor phaeron’s flagship was the stolen Vengeful Spirit. Thus, when reports from psyker-choirs began to report these attacks to the local commandery fortress monasteries, the space marine commanders believed they had finally started to gain a rough location for the infamous Black Legionnaire.

Abaddon could not deny Kor Phaeron’s obvious challenge. Though Abaddon cared little for honor, if he fled from the Black Cardinal of the Word Bearers, he would lose the fearful obedience of his minions, and lose any hope of gathering further allies. Who would follow a cowering lord who fled from a Legion which had once bent the knee to him? Thus, Abaddon determined to meet Kor Phaeron’s fleet in battle. Abaddon was banking upon the Planet Killer’s primary armament being enough to swing the engagement in his favor. In the dead system of Qualtha, amidst the toppled ruins of a xenos empire snuffed out by soulless necron omnicide, the despoiler broke from the warp, and began to organize his forces. In the system of Qualtha, every planetary body had been pummeled into dust, small asteroids and charged ionic clouds of plasma and gas that drifted in lazy orbit around a dwarf star, alongside the remnants of a fleet mass-scattered by the Dragon’s necrons. The naval battle that was to take place was forever known as ‘The Battle of Qualthan Dust’, one of the largest naval engagements in the entire history of mankind.

The first stage of the battle occurred before the cardinal’s fleet even translated into the system. Balefire and twisted monsters began to form inside the Planet Killer’s central weapon array. The gigantic warp cannon’s bonded daemons came under attack by rival daemons. The daemons of the soul forge had allied with Kor Phaeron, and were assaulting the very bonds that held the Planet Killer’s weapon together. Vast soul grinders and obliterators began to emerge from the walls themselves, ripping apart ritual circles and devouring sorcerers and cultists whole in their ravenous daemonic hunger. Furiously, Abaddon ordered the ship purged of hostile daemons. His own witches and shadowy daemonic patrons summoned their own daemons to battle the minions of Valchocht the Maker. Meanwhile, Grenthos of the Black Legion, an imposing Exalted Champion well on the way to becoming one of Khorne’s Princes, led a force of Possessed Marines into the depths to clear out the rampaging enemy. The battle raged for almost a day, but by the battle’s end, the Maker’s creatures were banished and broken. Yet, the damage was done; the Planet Killer’s weapon was temporarily offline as his sorcerers had to remake the ritual stone circles and reconsecrate the hellish device with human blood and human misery. This would take time. Time Abaddon now lacked, as Kor Phaeron’s armada gradually emerged from the warp like a tidal surge of madness. Then, ponderously, the colossal fleet began to order themselves for battle.

Both fleets remained at maximum sensor range, while their allied daemons tentatively probed one another’s defenses. Kor phaeron’s daemons were empowered and flushed with armored scales of pride, while Abaddon’s burned with a desperate black hate that flared from their nostrils and fetid, unreal maws. Psychic duels flashed between the two fleets; invisible yet lethal. Psykers on both sides began to fall, flesh peeling or blood boiling whenever their enemies gained the upper hand.

Abaddon’s own rune-encrusted armor glared a startling white it was claimed, as it deflected repeated psychic attempts to crush his mind and flay his flesh. Even Kor Phaeron’s withered features showed strain, as his sorcerous enchantments and learned techniques were stretched.

Abaddon’s fleet was the first to engage as their enemy closed upon them. Streamers of silent fire erupted between the massed fleets, ruby columns of lance fire joining the steady flaring of main batteries unleashing hellfire. Each fleet soon split up into different formations, millions of kilometers apart, attacking one another from every angle possible in the three dimensional arena of void space.

Truly, the real Battle of Qualthan Dust had finally begun.

One may imagine a naval battle to be a frantic, demented affair, where captains darted between their foes like sailing ships passing at sea, gutting each other with murderously close broadsides. In fact, a naval battle of the size and scale of the Qualthan Dust engagement was a tense yet well-ordered affair, where ships that could barely even make one another rout against the starry void would trade gigatons of ordnance and battery fire across unfathomably long distances; often, the only sign of victory being a slight flare in the light of the distant vessel, and a bleeping ‘ship kill’ confirmation from a cogitator or whisper-daemon. The most difficult and challenging aspect of a naval war was simply keeping track of the ships both you and your enemy had at any given moment, and where they were precisely in the colossal engagement volume, and what precise firing vectors they could conceivably achieve without striking one of their own vessels.

This said, there were a few instances when ships closed to within six thousand kilometers and closer; the ship ‘Death’s Tusk’, a World Eater cruiser, rammed through the starboard side of a Black legion vessel, the Artistry of Death. Though most of the Berserkers were killed on impact, the survivors battled with the Legionnaires and their Despoiled ratings until both sides suffocated due to the lack of air, which had vented out during the crash.

As the capital ships traded long distance broadsides, the escorts rushed in between them like protective nursemaids, intercepting torpedoes and broadsides, while launching attacks of their own, as well as killing the vast swarms of Hell talons and other fighter craft, who in turn sought out the thousands upon thousands of bombers and assault boats that attempted to cripple unwary capital ships. Across the two fleets, hundreds of boarding actions involving whole armies clashing between the decks of ships raged, led respectively by astartes and other, altogether less human beasts. These roving, miniature wars lasted for hours upon hours, as boarders and the security teams opposing them chased each other through the lightless bowels and gun decks of the ships, exchanging fire and blood in desperate struggles in the airless, sightless void. Amidst the calmly ordered carnage of the capital ships, the two flagships, the vengeful Spirit and the Planet Killer, sought each other out across the light minutes of space between them. While the Planet Killer was by far the more massive of the two void-swimming leviathans, with its primary weapon system offline, the Vengeful Spirit outgunned the wallowing giant. Nevertheless, the Planet Killer was no helpless target, and the two vessels battered against the shields of their foe. Both ships moved through the void with the sloth borne of grandeur, sliding with dark majesty through space as they sought the optimal firing solutions that would grant them victory. Abaddon knew the vengeful spirit, and despite all the blows Kor Phaeron’s vessel inflicted upon him, he could hurt the Vengeful Spirit far more with less ordnance. It seemed as if the Planet Killer might take control of the duel.

Then, the cruisers Banefire and Caustik entered the fray like opportunistic wolves. They raked the rear of the Planet Killer with their dorsal batteries, and unleashed a storm of boarding torpedoes and dreadclaws, injecting elite strike teams into the flagship’s unprotected aft sections. Vultiari and the beast Grenthos eagerly took up arms and marshaled the frenzied Black Legion that still lived, and led them into battle with the Word Bearer boarders.

Grenthos gave but one order to his Legionnaires.

“Murder them!”

It is said that, while the battle raged, Abaddon and Kor Phaeron spoke to one another, through either vox or some other blasphemous means. They cursed and chided, mocked and prattled; two ancient veterans of a war of hate long forgotten. Kor Phaeron, ever the firebrand preacher, tried to convert Abaddon even then. He claimed that if Abaddon merely pretended to bend the knee, he could return to the Western Imperium, and together, they could topple Lorgar. Abaddon saw through Phaeron’s lies and created deceits and promises of his own. Three ships now pounded the Planet Killer from all sides, and soon its shields were battered down, and deck by deck, fires raged, and the enslaved innocents within burned, screaming as their meat was cooked.

But Abaddon was clever, and he had picked Qualtha to be his battlefield for a very specific reason. Before he had exited the warp, he had murdered his chief Seer, the blind serpent Alkazzar. He had strangled the sorcerer slowly, and let the man’s dying soul leech from his body into the warp like some foul beacon. Not only had it alerted Kor Phaeron to his location, but it had also alerted those other warriors who hunted him, and emblazoned his face on the dying mind of Alkazzar, so that all who saw it knew who was killing him...

Soon, Kor Phaeron’s Captains reported that another fleet had entered the system. It was the fleet of the Dorn’s Revenant, led by their Lord Commander from the battle barge, Resplendent. He had brought with him elements from dozens of colony worlds that Abaddon and Kor Phaeron had befouled; each ship’s captain hungry for vengeance. Now the Battle of Qualthan Dust entered its final, confused phase, as a three way duel erupted between the enemy fleets. The fleet action raged for two days, across half a light year of Qualthan space. The Planet Killer broke from the battle with the Vengeful Spirit and was harried by Banefire and Caustik as it made a close orbit of the Qualthan sun. Yet, when they finally closed upon the Planet Killer, its reply to their broadsides was terrifying. The doomsday cannon fired at them, with three percent of its total firepower. Caustik was struck first, and simply ceased to be. The beam of warpfire continued and struck Banefire amidships. It shattered like glass, before a secondary explosion ripped out from it like a newborn sibling for the Qualthan star. Both enemy fleets saw this display, and they scrambled to take down the Planet Killer. However, several of Kor Phaeron’s own allied vessels turned upon his fleet. They knew the tide was turning and wished to be on the winning side.

Soon, the Vengeful Spirit, mauled after a duel with the Resplendent, turned about to face the Planet Killer. It sought to bring it down before it could charge another shot. The weapon built in power, driving a thousand crew members utterly mad. Vengeful Spirit increased speed, accelerating towards the Planet Killer recklessly.

“You will not kill me,” Kor Phaeron explained, with the certainty of the eternal fanatic. “I cannot die. You shall see. The Gods shall pluck me from danger. I am too valuable. But if this ship is to die, it is fitting it takes you to the warp with it!” “What makes you think you shall live?” Abaddon replied coldly to his enemy’s words.

“Faith,” purred Kor Phaeron ecstatically.

Abaddon had no fear. “Faith must always... be tested.”

The Planet Killer fired, striking the Vengeful Spirit seven seconds later. The blast was glorious, rendered oddly beautiful in its silence. For several minutes, the glare utterly blinded anyone who looked upon it, and baffled any sensors with the sheer level of output. Even daemon eyes recoiled from the warp-tainted blastwave.

Then, through the rolling banks of plasma, the Planet Killer emerged, like some legendary monster breaching the surface of the sea. Its prow was burning, but the ship seemed unharmed. The Dorn Revenants broke off their attack, and fled for the edge of the system; they could not face both enemy fleets now. Not when the Planet Killer was unopposed. They vowed to return with greater numbers, to finish Abaddon off once and for all.

The remainder of Phaeron’s Captains hastily voxed oaths of fealty to Abaddon then; those who refused were turned on by their capricious allies. The fleet was united under an uneasy truce, brokered by the nightmare power of the despoiler’s flagship.

If only they had known it was a bluff. Abaddon’s main weapon had been damaged by the vaporization of the Vengeful Spirit. Inside, the ship was in a terrible shape; half the crew were dead, most systems were at least partially damaged, and Abaddon himself was gravely wounded by the impact of the vengeful Spirit’s ruins upon his throne room. Nevertheless, Abaddon now had a fleet to truly be reckoned with. His next target was clear.

Huron Blackheart would fall, and his Imperium alongside him.

Additional background Section 32: The battle for Varsavia’s soul, and the return of heroes

Across the galaxy, in the silent places where no one lived, the craftworlds drifted; lifeless and guided by nothing but the faint tides of unseen energy that still washed at the psychic shores of the infinite matrices at their hearts. They were filled with billions of the dead; their entire populations drawn into the infinity circuits as one, leaving naught but miles upon miles of silent crystalline statues. They were translucent and eerie in their immobility, for they were paused in mid action like the dead of ancient Pompeii.

Around them, empires were falling and worlds unnumbered burned in the pyres of madness. This was the closing years of the fifty fifth millennium; the final screaming challenge before reality and oblivion met in single battle, with the fate of all existence as a prize. Things were finally coming to pass that had been prophesized by madmen, while other prophecies were utterly ignored and voided by destruction.

Yet, the craftworlds were still moving. Despite the assumptions of all who still lived, the craftworlds were moving. Yet, so far apart were they, that no one could see the pattern or direction of these living tombs.

No one could fathom why a vast eldar ship, covered in the scars of battle, headed towards the heart of Vulkan’s Imperium armed for bear and at full cruising speed. Nor could anyone have predicted that the ultimate fate of the entire eldar race would be determined upon a cold and unassuming world called Varsavia.

The Eastern Chaos Imperium was embroiled in many minor wars throughout its history, as the Blackheart attempted to defeat, conquer or otherwise subvert entire sectors and regions to his demented will. Huron Blackheart, despite his reputation as a butcher, always preferred to break his enemies and turn them into his dark allies.

There was only one exception to this rule and they lay at the heart of his Corsair Empire. The Silver Skulls had been a chapter during the First Imperium, and were ever Huron’s most bitter of opponents. The Silver Skulls’ Prognosticator Librarians had foreseen the fall of the Emperor at the opening of the Second Strife. Their warnings had been ignored by their fellow chapters, so rather than convince them; they instead built up their forces and the surrounding sector in anticipation of a large scale collapse, swelling their ranks and stepping up their recruitment and training procedures.

Once the Emperor’s death washed through the galaxy, and the madness descended, they were prepared and they held out. Their fleet battled marauders, invaders, and desperately they held their empire together for thousands of years and many generations of Astartes.

They had received the news of Vulkan’s return via intercepted chaos courier ships bound for one of Huron’s thrall worlds, and had eagerly offered themselves to Vulkan, who had made them an honorary Commandery. However, Vulkan could send no real material aid to the Skulls, for they remained trapped and surrounded by the chaos empire of Huron, who made every effort to exterminate every last Silver Skull. He offered rewards to the various champions in his army for the destruction of the Silver Skulls, and amnesty from invasion to several petty Imperiums, if said Imperiums managed to destroy the Astartes, whilst simultaneously promising terrible punishments to any who allied with his nemesis. These ploys failed, yet over time, as the intensity of wars between not only chaos but the xenos interlopers and ancient empires increased, the Silver Skulls were weakened; gradually drained of surplus resources and stripped of many of their allied worlds.

It was then that Huron unleashed hell upon them. He sent his most powerful Lieutenant, Katan of the Pyre, at the head of a huge invasion fleet, to destroy Varsavia, the homeworld of his hated foe. Soldiers from across the empire were dragged to Katan’s banner men. Merchant vessels converted into hateful steel sharks with bellies full of millions upon millions of heretical cultists, joined midnight-clad Night Lord Vessels, the barbaric bone-coated berserker barges of the World Eater Skrax, oddly spartan cruisers from the planet of Hopegone and the gloriously depraved flagships of Huron’s Fifth Corsair Fleet.

Various xenos mercenary armies were also drawn to this coming battle like crows to a corpse. Chaos-tainted kroot followed the fleet. These kroot had become servants of chaos unwittingly, and wished to kill and devour the silver skulls for the simple reason that their shapers hoped eating the pious Astartes flesh might ‘cure’ them of their blasphemous infestations. The heavily-armed, blunt-nosed Harn Skiffs of the crocodilian Groevians also joined this armada. Their leader was called the Junnergan, which translates roughly as ‘the armored carapace upon which foes shatter’. The Groevians had thrived after the fall of the Thexians, and were cold-blooded and callous, uncaring of whom they chose to kill. Groevian Breaker troops were well feared across the former Thexian region of space, but were a relatively unknown element to those not from the eastern fringe. The final faction of alien mercenaries were khornate viskeon warriors, recruited by Skrax for their martial prowess in melee and their fanatical desire to sever limbs and take heads.

Together, this was a fleet not of invasion, but of annihilation. The Silver Skulls sensed this fleet approach, and knew its purpose. Gathering what few forces they had left, the Silver Skulls began to ready the defenses.

Chapter Master Argentius travelled from ship to ship, defense orbital battery to orbital battery, inspiring the mortals there and organizing the defenses in exacting detail. The Prognosticators informed him and guided his actions, making sure areas they knew would be attacked were more heavily defended than others. Weakpoints in the defenses were identified and Argentius, in his genius, turned these areas into traps to lure in over eager enemies and neatly surround them.

Every last one of the dreadnoughts in the vaults of their fortress monastery were roused for battle, and the two eldest venerable dreadnoughts, Ikek and Gileas, took overall command of the defense of the main gates, while the rest of the dreadnoughts were assigned to various battle companies across the planet’s surface and in orbit. Every ship they could find, steal or scrounge was gathered in system for the coming battle, placed in areas of space where they would do most damage to the oncoming horde of vessels.

First Captain Jonal was entrusted with overall of the Fortress Monastery, alongside his psychic warrior champion, prognosticar Grold. Meanwhile, Argentius took command of the fleet, while the Chief Prognosticator Allaten, took to his cell and sealed himself inside, as he began the rituals needed to summon his greatest abilities as a Seer.

They knew the battle was inevitable, and all they could do was wait.

They did not have to wait long. Searing through the warp, ahead of the fleet, came a rolling tide of daemonic abominations. Every Librarian and psyker in the Silver Skulls recoiled from this dark presence, which blunted their abilities to predict the future with their sheer proximity. Though this deep-warp barrage lasted only a millisecond, it was enough to cause the crew of the cruiser Gleaming Blade to go mad, and steer their ship into the heart of Varsavia’s sun.

Barely an hour after this, the main corsair fleet and its allies began to burst into the system in wave after wave. The two fleets clashed, and a running naval battle ensued, with each fleet hunting each other across the void. Slowly but surely, the Silver Skulls made a controlled retreat towards varsavia, drawing in and destroying the enemy even as they contracted their defensive lines every couple of hours. Despite the consummate skill of Argentius, the enemy were simply too many to stop them all. Some of the fat-bellied chaos transports broke through the naval cordons, speeding towards the planet. The orbital defenses gutted several vessels before they even came close to the atmosphere, spilling their corrupt human cargoes into the chilling void. Others managed to get through, but crashed on the northern hemisphere, the Fortress monastery’s void shields burning their hulls black as they crashed. Yet, those crashed transports had survivors, who issued forth from the downed transports at the behest of Red Corsair slavers behind them. Even more managed to land on the surface relatively unscathed. They did this by landing on the southern hemisphere instead of battling through the void shields defending the north. They would march on Varsavia’s capital on foot. Sorcerers with this force also subverted the hateful Xiz who lived in the south, using them to summon horrendous daemon allies from the heart of the world.

In orbit, Argentius found himself battling countless capital ships and boarding actions against his battle barge, repelling their invaders whilst simultaneously organizing his fleet in opposing the Corsair vessels. His mighty flail, the grinning death, reaped a bloody toll on any who fell beneath the double-headed skull-topped weapon, while his storm bolter chewed through those who avoided his blessed relic weapon.

Skrax and his berserkers manage to weather the barrage of the orbitals, and eventually manage to disgorge dreadclaws filled with his berserkers and Viskeon warriors. The humans and Astartes on board the orbitals fight bravely in the close confines of the space stations, but are forced to abandon their guns in order to prevent the capture and repurposing of their orbital weapon grid. Seventh Company Captain Piet personally took up his chainsword, and led the defense personally, engaging in a furious close quarter battle between his men and the frenzied foe. The horrific bloodbath inside those chilling, lightless corridors lasted many hours and effectively knocked the orbitals out of the battle.

Meanwhile, on the northern hemisphere, the tundra of Varsavia was alive with criss-crossing gunfire and the endless din of battle, as the Silver Skull main battle companies rode out from their mountainous Fortress Monastery mounted in predators, land raiders and rhinos, supported by armored companies of PDF. They clashed with the half-burned survivors of the transport crashes, who used their downed vessels as fortifications against the furious blitzkrieg. The Silver Skulls knew just where to smash the invaders to cause maximum damage, and the leader of the force, Captain Trelvuge, howled like an animal as he rode in the cupola of his land raider, blazing away with his storm bolter at the masses of mewling mortals and their handlers.

However, even though the main body of the mortal force was already landed on the southern hemisphere and unable to yet join this fray, the orbitals no longer protected the skies; only the void shield prevented enemies from landing upon the monastery itself. Nevertheless, the Silver Skulls leading the armored assault were not under the aegis of the void shield, and the Chaos Space marines and Groevians could deploy rapidly onto the planet’s surface in support of the traitors already deployed. Dreadclaws and drop pods slammed into the ground, deploying hundreds upon hundreds of traitor astartes, while the brutal Groevian landers followed the Red Corsair and Pyre-marine thunderhawks down through the rising smoke of battle. The snow on the tundra became a scorching steam as the intense gunfire continued, scalding anyone not sufficiently armored. Corsairs and Pyre-marine clashed blades and exchanged bolter fire with the Tactical marines of the Fourth, Third and Second companies of the Silver Skulls, each combatant a living maelstrom of destruction. Each clash of bodies was like the clarion call of a struck bell, followed by the crushing crunch of bone and muscles being torn or shredded. The Groevian Breaker Troops were surprisingly dangerous to even hardened Astartes, for the older a groevian got the larger and stronger they became, and each groevian was a veteran killer, slashing with their super-heated thermoglaives and unleashing kinetic hell with their belt-fed gatling pistols. Men were ripped limb from limb, and tanks were flipped and melted by sudden barrages, before their slayers were in turn slain by vicious counter attacks. Espite the madness and seeming chaos, both sides attacked and counterattacked with a precision which would not be out of place on a regicide board; each ploy was punctuated by a powered fist, and every deft move by a screaming, fiery retort. Despite the carnage, the Skulls held their own.

To the south, the horde of chaos-bred killers marched forth, the very ground itself rumbling at their passing. Entire forests were torn up, villages were swallowed whole by the swarming mass of murderers; the Xiz took great delight in maiming and torturing the native varsavian tribes, for the Xiz tribe had ever been their foe. These poor ruined souls were then offered up to the building numbers of daemons attracted to the carnage. Furies capered through the woods wearing the skins of children, and lakes and rivers were poisoned by their bile and unnatural juices. Only one natural barrier posed a significant problem for this grand army; the sour sea, the great equatorial ocean which girdled the planet and divided north from south in a rough, jagged line from east to west as far as the eye could see. There was only one path across the sea; a colossal bridge, seventeen miles long and wide enough for two land raiders to drive along it abreast. This bridge was known as Ur’ten’s Crossing. Both sides were desperate to reach the bridge first. The forces of Katan wished to capture it, while Argentius’ men needed to put the bridge out of action. It became a race across the planet between the two foes. Fortunately, the Silver Skulls deployed their fastest elements to race ahead of their main southbound forces; thunderhawks and stormravens, supported by hundreds of land speeders and attack bikes, which bore the majority of the tenth company scout forces. Millions of Varsavian tribesmen from the Hotzi plains looked out from their huts, to witness this glorious aerial convoy speeding towards Ur’ten’s Crossing. They realized something was gravely wrong. The gods were at war. The storm class land speeders arrived on the bridge just before the vanguard of the chaos horde, disembarking their scout marine cargoes before speeding off to harry the approaching vanguard of daemonic wolf riders and bikers that served as the chaos army’s advanced guard. As the scouts frantically attached their demolitions charges, they were covered by their sniper teams, who picked off any foe who came too close, and by the thunderhawks, who strafed the enemy lines with laser fire and flights of missiles. Yet, the enemy could only be delayed and for every howling cultist vaporized, there were a hundred more scrambling over the hissing puddles of fat that had been their comrades. Defilers and corrupted Ruses sped forwards, belching multi-hued smoke from their daemon-snouted exhausts as they came. Amidst the barrages of heavy fire, most of the scouts were evacuated once their charges were set. The last scout to depart was Scout brother Kelfdon, who managed to set his final set of charges amidst the maze of cables that streamed from one of the great suspension towers. With impressive dexterity, he managed to avoid the talons of a defiler which had ascended the cables in order to kill him. As his brothers gave him cover fire, he leapt between cables with the agility of a great ape. Each time, he narrowly avoided the claws of the frenzied defiler. Finally, he dodged aside one of the beast’s clumsy swings, causing the daemon engine to overbalance, and topple onto the bridge below with titanic force. Sundered, the defiler could only roar impotently as a land speeder Typhoon finally plunged a barrage of missiles into its heart and slay the festering nightmare. Kelfdon was picked up by the speeder, which escaped just as the final charges blew, plunging the bridge into the choppy sea below. Kelfdon returned to his fellow scouts amidst a clamor of cheers. However, he and his comrades knew they had bought their northern allies time, nothing more.

Back in space, and Argentius’ battle barge was in trouble. Upon every deck, desperate rearguards were being fought, as five cruisers and Katan’s own battleship flooded the ship with boarders. The ship was out of control, as those who guided the ship were forced to fight for their very lives. Eventually, even the bridge, located at the heart of the ship, was breached, and Argentius’ personal retinue battled those who would seek to destroy their master. However, there was one foe they could not hope to best. When Katan of the Pyre took to the bridge himself, he crushed his foes. Katan had once been one of Bile’s ‘New Men’, but centuries of diabolical sacrifices and carnage had bloated his soul with warp power; he was on the cusp of daemonhood and his power was beyond anything Argentius and his retinue could throw at him. He towered over them, his dark scaly flesh fused with his armor, while his mouth and eyes glowed with his internal fire. When faced with the command squad, the traitor laughed in their faces. Showing casual distain for their fighting prowess, Katan cast aside his weapons and fought them with his bare hands. His flesh was proof against the veteran Sergeant’s bolter fire, and soon the marine was broken and sodomized with his own firearm. Katan broke the Apothecary Julivan over his knee, and used his broken corpse to batter the banner bearer Goltran to death. His hellish daemonflesh was proof against Prognosticar Ulfun’s power weapon, but the Company Champion nevertheless fought with all his physical and psychic might. He lasted barely a minute longer.

Katan exhalted in the carnage, chuckling as the blood flowed across his face. His laugh was cut short by a brutal blow to the face by the heads of the Chapter Master’s flail, which made the giant stagger backwards; the first blow to truly hurt him since the battle had begun. He avoided the second and third sweeps of Argentius’ weapon, and launched himself bodily at the Chapter Master, who rode the impact and added his momentum to Katan’s own. Together, they slammed through a bulkhead at some force, but Katan bore the brunt. As the giant rose, Argentius used his storm bolter to disorientate him; firing point blank into the monster’s face as he rained blow after blow against Katan’s chest and shoulders. A backhand shattered the storm bolter, and a follow up punch sent Argentius crashing through toughened glass, to fall thirty meters into the flight deck below. Katan leapt after the Silver Skulls’ commander, heedless of the battles being fought across the ship. Only killing Argentius now mattered. Loading servitors automatically turned to attack the giant, but he swatted them aside like troublesome children, shattering them against the walls with the mindless force of his blows. Argentius rose from the crater his fall had smashed into the deck, and rotated his shoulders in readiness, his grinning skull helm glaring at the festering muzzle of the Aspiring Champion of chaos. Slowly, he began to swing his flail.

On the plains and pine forests before the Fortress monastery, the battle continued to rage. Though the Skulls were masterful fighters, the sheer scale of the attacking force had a quality all of its own. The pyremarines poured daemonic hellfire across their foes from corrupted flamers, while Corsairs got close with knife and bolter and poisonous daemonic barb. Also, the open-topped marching tanks of the groevians, though lightly armored, possessed extremely powerful weaponry. As they fought, the librarians and sorcerers dueled in spectacular rippling conflagrations of psychic color. The armored might of the Silver Skulls was a force to be reckoned with, but they had lost momentum, and Captain Trelvuge knew his forces needed to return to the monastery.

This was not to be. For the chaos kroot, utilizing the disturbing camouflage granted by the daemon-tainted flesh they had eaten, allowed them to circle around the Space marines and attack their rear. Constant bombardment against the fortress monastery’s void shielding prevented the garrison from providing sufficient artillery support to the beleaguered sally force, and they were forced to watch as their soldiers were pinned into a defensive ring, centered on their tanks. Warp-tainted gnarlocs and twisted krootox abominations attacked without fear or reason, as the other chaos forces trapped them with sheer firepower. But worse was to come. Trapped in one location, the Silver Skulls force was easy pickings for the orbital weapons of their enemy, who unleashed terrible lance bombardments directly into their lines. Fire and confusion took hold, as their leaders were melted and tanks were turned into superheated plasma. The screaming and cursing down the vox lasted long after the heartbroken defenders shut off their links to the massacre. In blind fury, the first captain ordered the defense lasers to fire upon ground positions, extending their range for a few moments. This was long enough to give the murderous corsair forces pause, as thousands of their men were killed in a few seconds. But it was not enough. Inevitably, more landers began to deploy unopposed to Varsavia’s surface, protected from the defense laser bombardments by a theatre shield the heretics had finally managed to set up. Unharmed by the megaton bombardment, the chaos siege force approached the shimmering force shield of the Fortress Monastery.

Eventually, the two forcefields met and like two waterdroplets meeting upon glass, they merged. The defense lasers and anti-orbital torpedoes of the Fortress could no longer engage the enemy; they were too close now. Only the First Company and the reserve companies manning the defenses could hold them back now.

Katan was sent reeling after Argentius pummeled his head with the grinning death, howling curses as he did so. As Katan tried to compose himself, the Chapter Master unleashed volley after volley of bolt pistol shells into his eyes, forcing the stone-skinned abomination back.

Katan and Argentius fought across the entire flight deck, Argentius barely able to avoid the monster’s furious blows as it flipped thunderhawks and smashed servitors with every sweep of his claws. Katan, swollen with power, had sprouted all manner of terrifying daemonic weapons with which to destroy his troublesome foe, but Argentius would not yield, even as he armor was torn and his helmet dashed from his head, revealing the adamantine of his polished bionic face, etched in a permanent, joyless grimace. Eventually, their relentless battle took them down into the drop pod bays. As they wrestled like gladiators of old, they fell into one of the drop pods, and together triggered the pod’s fiery descent into the storm-wracked skies of Varsavia, hundreds of miles below.

In the south of the world, the dread forces of the invaders found themselves trapped on the banks of the sour sea. However, such an obstacle could not hold them for long. They scoured the surrounding villages and settlements, raiding them for all the building material they could find, even going as far as using the gory bones of their slaughtered victims. With this cruelly- obtained materiel, the chaos horde built vast ocean-going barges, which they crammed with baying cultists and screaming madmen clad in the fresh skins of their foes. As this huge armada crossed the sea, daemons swam in the cold depths; spiny, segmented forms impossible to identify yet lethal beyond reason. Overhead, the fliers of the force covered their approach, for this fleet could not pass unopposed.

The Hotzi tribesmen, desiring to aid their godly heroes, took to the sea on their long ships, great red sails stretched tight by the fierce southerly winds blowing down from the north. The Hotzi fleets were huge, for they traded with every nation of Varsavia, and were built to resist the worlds unforgiving seasons. The tribesmen were armed with weapons granted to them by the Skulls. They were not alone; a flight of land speeders swept across the sea alongside them, as the thunderhawks soared high to engage the enemy flyers. There, in the middle of the churning sour sea, the two fleets clashed, in the largest wet naval engagement in living memory. Thousands of ships clashed in glorious combat. Though the chaos barges were of poor quality, their passengers were deadly as only chaotic servants could be. The battle was close ranged, as each ship drew to within pistol-range of each other, with boarding parties leaping between vessels. Assault marines ignited their packs, to clash with raptors and impromptu chaos seamen, who were slaughtered in droves by the furious astartes. Occasionally, a Hotzi long boat would sink beneath a deluge of thrashing tentacles, or be swallowed up by the ravenous maws of devils who imitated the forms of sea monsters dreamt up in the nightmares of sailors across the millennia of human experience; every kraken, demon whale or oceanic leviathan emerged to plague the brave loyalist fleet. The battle of the sour sea was one legendary conflict amongst several that occurred during this dreadful siege. During this battle, the scout captain of the tenth was slain, swallowed whole by a daemon- whale with whirring buzzsaw-jaws a hundred feet wide. Kelfdon found himself and his scout squad trapped in the middle of this naval engagement. Fuel oil had leaked from the barges and had ignited due to the withering gunfire being exchanged all around. Sails were engulfed, bathing the sea in smoke. Men screamed and daemons squealed or groaned with the voices of a billion damned souls. The only constant was the bodies, floating face down in the rolling waves. The parts of the sea not aflame seemed to boil with the thrashing of drowning men, who were continually killed by opportunists hanging from the sides of boats or sharpshooters high in the masts.

There were scattered reports of ghosts in the rolling fog; shimmering green phantom ships that sailed through the air above the water, and killed silently, hampering the chaos armada’s rear and flanks. But inevitably, the Silver Skulls and their allies were forced to land back on their beaches, and soon set up emplacements and trenches, to meet the onrushing amphibious assault. The cost in hotzi lives can never be accurately measured, as the astartes did not keep accurate or up to date records of the local population numbers of the natives, but it is speculated that throughout the war, seventy percent of the Hotzi people were slain in this bitter planetary war.

Battered, ammunition spent, the defenders prepared to take on the enemy with combat knife and gunstock, fist and tribal axe. What happened next was as swift as it was unexpected. Unexpected that is, by everyone save the Prognosticator Librarians themselves...

Back in the north, the siege of the Tower of Skulls began in earnest. The Space Marines had sensibly destroyed the bridge which spanned the great chasm before the main gate, and had heavily mined the eastward mountain ranges that formed the spine of the mountainous fortification. The invaders formed their men into several discreet forces that constantly probed the defenses of the tower for any weaknesses. The Pyremarines and Corsairs ushered their more expendable allies ahead of them initially; the cultists, kroot and various breeds of xenos mercenaries. The mortal cultists barely clothed and armed with whatever weapons they could scrounge or salvage, were shunted forwards first as living shields from the lethally accurate devastator teams manning the towers and ramparts of the lower keep. Whirlwinds and basilisks took to the high keep, and rained down thunderous barrages of high explosive on the enemy. As the siege went on, the chaos forces brought forth great infernal engines; living siege towers of bone and living brass, or bridge laying machines that slavered like hounds as they scrambled to span the cavernous chasm dividing attackers and defenders.

First captain Jonal directed the defense from the high keep, mustering tactical and assault squads to sally forth and attack each of the bridge-layers before they could reach the wall. The central conflicts of the battle were concentrated around the capture and recapture of these bridges. Silver Skulls would rush forth and slaughter the operators of the bridges, before being beaten back by the frenzied offensive forces. Prognosticar led several of these sorties, the twinned force swords he had liberated from the vaults glittering as he cut down enemy after enemy. The only time Grold came close to death was when his force clashed with the host of the Groevians, and he was nearly crushed by the relentless onslaught of the Junnergan on bridge seven, known as the ‘Luscious Rapture’. The reptilian beast’s sloping armor plate was tough as dragonscale, and his jaws and thermo-glaive carved a bloody swathe through those who sought to bring him down.

But the Corsair horde’s vast scale hampered its ability to react swiftly to tactical changes, which Jonal took advantage of this, and herded the enemy where he wanted them to go. He did this by using his whirlwinds to seed minefields ahead of the enemy. The mob of deviants, though fanatical, were not all suicidal, and they avoided these areas. Slowly, imperceptibly, the horde was channeled towards the main gates of the Tower of Skulls, where most of the Silver Skulls’ prodigious arsenal was focused. Whirlwinds, basilisks, hydra batteries, devastators, Icarus lascannons; all were trained upon the great mass of deviant flesh. They did not even need to target specific figures in the horde; every shot struck something.

The tower, in turn, weathered relentless bombardment, not only from the artillery of the corsair force, but also from flaming debris falling from orbit, that was set alight by the void shields as they crashed into the upper galleries of the colossal fortress. Amongst this debris was a drop pod, which smashed through roofs and floors and shattered flagstones as it crashed to a hold deep inside the monastery. The pod’s shattered doors fell away, as Katan threw Argentius bodily across the cold marble floor of the pillared chamber they found themselves in. Katan was getting less and less human by the minute; great tusks erupted from his jaws and horns pierced his shoulderblades at odd angles, and the stuff of the warp literally drooled form him as acidic ichor. Argentius, by contrast, was near-broken. His armor was mostly ripped off save for one pauldron and his greaves. His body was blackened and scarred by heinous wounds inflicted in the close confines of the pod. Yet still, he raised the Grinning Death, and charged into battle once more. Yet, just as he swung the flail, Katan caught it in one of his hideous craw-claws. With a sickly cackle, Katan hoisted Argentius from his feet, dashing the Chapter Master against the pillars in the chamber by his flail, before tossing him against the far wall like a ragdoll. Argentius crashed into the wall, ripping away the polished, silver-plated trophy skulls that hung upon the walls by thick chain links.

He slowly rose to his feet, spitting out a mouthful of silver teeth, and resetting his dislocated shoulder with a dull crunch. He had a plan.

Under a withering onslaught, the chaos forces forged ahead with an assault on the main gate. Their last bridge-layer managed to latch its claws onto the sheer cliff face of the outer wall, and spanned the gap between the gate and the opposite cliff with a bridge reinforced against the bombardment of the Skulls. Soon, thousands of cultists, traitor guard and leering daemonspawn scrambled across the walkway; desperate to be the first to breach the gate and earn the gaze of the Ne-[CHRONICLE SHUDDERS]. However, to their surprise, the great silver/white gates opened before they reached them. And from those doors, two venerable dreadnoughts emerged, assault cannons already ready and whirring.

Ikek and Gileas’s weapons chewed through the compressed mass of flesh, liquidizing hundreds of enemies on the spot, with hundreds more dying as they were trampled by their panicking fellows, or pitched over the side of the bridge in the confusion. Those who escaped their assault cannons were roasted by their flamers, or crushed between energized claws. Gileas roared with mechanical laughter, while Ikek carefully counted his kill tally in a somber tone. The two had been rivals in life, and remained rivals in the half-life of the sarcophagus. Yet, together, they were unstoppable. They cleared the bridge within minutes, leaving a charnel house of pulped organs and pulverized bone decorating the vile bridge.

The dreadnoughts had a brief reprieve then, for the enemy fled before their might, leaving the bridge an empty butcher’s yard for a moment. Using the time fate and the fists of dreadnoughts had given him; Jonal himself took to the bridge alongside the best men his first company could muster. Each veteran was mounted into tactical dreadnought armor, and had armed themselves with hammer and claw. Jonal himself bore a twined set of lightning claws.

“Not one step back,” was the only order he needed to give his men. They knew their place was at the dreadnoughts’ side. Their role was simple; hold the enemy on the bridge, while the gate’s emplacements cut off the attackers on the bridge from any support.

But the attackers were not done yet. There was a stirring within the chaos horde, as a column of armor approached the bridge, meaning to break the embattled dreadnoughts in one concerted assault. A phalanx of eight clanking, bellowing dreadnoughts marched towards the fortress, the demented chaos walkers clad in chains and monstrous fetishes that hurt the eye to see. They were man and broken minds, unlike the fearsome discipline of the two Silver Skull veterans. If the chaos dreadnoughts had come alone, Ikek, Gileas and their terminator kin could have easily held off their degenerate sarcophagus-kin. Alas, the enemy did not come alone. With the dreadnoughts came a snarling menagerie of daemon engines; not only the scuttling Deviler Engines, but Banelords, thrashing khornate Blood Slaughterers and even towering Brass Scorpions, which ripped through their own allies in their haste to shed fresh human blood. The corsair forces gave them a wide berth so as to avoid the directionless wrath of the daemons and madmen trapped within these coffins of adamantine. Leading this force of primal destruction and ruination, strode a monstrous Decimator Engine. Taller and broader than any dreadnought, the thing walked with the monstrous arrogance of a gladiator, and its great helmet set beneath its huge armored shoulders glowered at the defenders, its eyes slits blazing with internal flame. Even over the deafening din of the war horns, Ikek and Gileas could hear the rumbling laughter of the Decimator, reverberating within their very souls. Nevertheless, the defenders set their feet and prepared to sell themselves dearly. If it was to be their final battle, they would make it a battle that no one, be they man or god, would forget it. Meanwhile, in the trophy vault, Argentius fought for his life. He was unarmed now, his flail destroyed. Katan was fast and terrible, striking out with ever greater speed and power. His claws raked the walls and pillars, desperate to catch Argentius. The chapter master denied the aspiring champion each time, deftly leaping aside moments before the claws disemboweled him. Each time, he waited until the very final moment before rolling away from the blows. Each time, he darted to a new location behind Katan and each avoided attack dislodged another trophy display. Soon, the chains and skulls that had been on the walls had been ripped away, tangling around the prospective daemon prince and the pillars themselves, like a great web of clanking adamantine hoops and silver-plated bone. It was then that Argentius took up the master chain, winding it around a dozen pillars to give him leverage.

For the first time since the battle had begun, Katan felt the balance shift against him. Too late, he realized he was entangled. Before he could free himself, the chains pulled tight as a noose. Katan roared, his demonic voice deafening in its affronted wrath. He ripped and struggled in his bounds with all his might. Argentius responded with pulling ever tighter. His muscles bulged until his blood vessels burst under the pressure. Argentius hissed in pain as his dug his heels into the flagstones for more purchase. Each time Katan pulled, he was almost dragged from his feet, but he recovered and redoubled his efforts, screaming in hatred as he did so. Argentius had planned this end game. Every since Katan had entered the system, his Prognosticators had envisioned Argentius’ death at the monster’s hands. Katan could not be pierced by blade or bullet, and they saw visions of the Master broken upon his own bridge. Thus, Argentius ensured he had an escape route. He also ensured that he could reach the drop pod bay easily, and that he and his foe could reach the pre-programmed drop pod at the appointed time, and land at the precise location he needed to defeat Katan once and for all.

Argentius wound the chain around his left bicep and pulled the chain tighter. Finally, the chain around Katan’s thick trunk of a neck constricted. The titanic pyremarine was still struggling, even as he fell to his knees in an explosion of pulverized marble. Argentius was mindless in his fury now, pouring every ounce of strength he could muster into his final gambit.

“You cannot kill me, mewling mortal! You may break and die, but I live forever! I am a daemon prince!” Katan howled, spitting molten steel from between his tusks.

Argentius ignored him, and pulled for the last time. Though he felt his ribcage crack from the strain, Argentius felt Katan’s neck vertebrae weakening. Then, with an audible scream of released warpstuff that shattered every window. Katan screamed for several moments, even after his head and spinal column were ripped from his body. His burning eyes widened for a moment, before they went dull, and Katan perished.

“Not a daemon... yet...” Argentius panted, spitting on the purgemarine’s corpse, as other Silver Skulls burst into the chamber. They found him standing over a vanquished Katan. He managed to remain standing for almost a minute longer, before he collapsed into his brother marines’ arms. He died several hours later.

As the siege continued, the corsairs focused their attention upon the Tower of Skulls. They were slow to respond to the arrow-swift assaults upon their command echelons and logistical bases by darting figures emerging from the rolling fog of the vaporized frost. By the time the corsairs brought sufficient forces to bear, the enemy was gone, leaving dead Red Corsair commanders and smashed theatre shield generators in their wake. The only sight of the mysterious foe was the many hues of their individual squad colors, capering into the mist aboard their sleek ships.

The battle on the bridge was the stuff of legends. It was a clash of gears, armor and powered claws, of the throaty roar of engines and the dissonant screaming of caged daemons, merged with the augmented yelling of posthuman warriors. The bridge was only wide enough to permit two of the daemon engines to travel abreast, granting the slightest advantage to the two venerable dreadnoughts and the terminator‘s storm shield wall. But it was still only a slight advantage. Assault and autocannons barked and whirred deafeningly, their fire pattering against the armored skins of the combatants. Flamers and meltas hurled fiery death, but the clashing metal beasts on both sides weathered the blows until they finally clashed in epic close quarters. The sonorous clang of clashing sarcophagi and the thunderclap boom of dueling power claws echoed for miles in all directions. Throughout the halls of the Skulls, the marines could hear this battle as an ominous dirge, while across the plains the sound instilled fear in the mewling, vile masses, who quailed before this din. Each time power weapons and shields crashed together, lightning bolts and flashes of electrical discharge flickered across the bridge; caged thunderstorms unleashed. There was no finesse, only mechanical carnage and the pealing sound of torn metal as the combatants smashed chunks from each other. Blood slaughters were pitched from the bridge, or had their legs smashed apart by opportunistic terminators. Ikek plunged his assault cannon into the gaping maw of a brass scorpion, emptying his gatling gun into its fiery heart even as it wrenched the weapon from his shoulder mount. Gileas’ siege hammer cracked open the sarcophagi of five of his brother dreadnought; the former veteran sergeant relived his glory days in the combat cages, imagining his metal foes were the old foes he fought in centuries long passed. Terminators were broken like dolls by some of the enemy engines; a berserker dreadnought cackled in mindless triumph as it cleaved apart half a dozen terminators in as many seconds, before Jonal himself managed to silence the fiend with a well-placed thrust of a lightning claw into the broken hull of the traitor. The combatants clambered over the broken husks of their own dead and those of their foes, simply to reach their targets, and the stink of promethium and ichors clung to the air. Fleshy innards were ripped out alongside clawfuls of gears and snaking cabling, that sparked as it was ripped asunder. The Decimator waded through this walker’s graveyard to reach Ikek and Gileas, its siege claws shredding terminators almost dismissively. The bipedal war machine looked like some grotesque caricature of an Imperial dreadnought, yet dwarfed both of the venerable machines before it; even a Contemptor was small compared to his goliath. Only Jonal survived of his hand-picked retinue, and the Decimator passed him by without giving him a second glance, instead focusing upon Ikek and Gileas, who still stood sentinel before the main gates. Jonal, in indignant fury, snatched up a fallen thunder hammer in one of his fists (having lost one of his lightning claws to the berserker dreadnought) and struck the Decimator with the de-activated weapon.

“You will not ignore me, vile spawn of the pit! You will face me!” he roared at its back.

The decimator rotated its torso around one hundred and eighty degrees, and with a single blow, bisected Jonal from armpit to opposite hip, killing him in moments.

In fury, Ikek charged the behemoth bodily. Sarcophagus plate and helmeted head collided with a great clang, like the ringing of some cathedral bell, sending the Decimator staggering backwards several paces. The three walkers battled alone on the bridge now, like cumbersome wrestlers or boxers in an arena of the dead. Claws clashed and legs struck hulls. They ripped each other open with relentless fury; taking punishment that would have slain a normal Astartes ten times over, and giving back just as much in return. They were consumed in their duel, that the two venerable warriors could not see what the rest of the garrison witnessed, out on the plains before the Tower.

The siege was being lifted. The corsairs’ leadership had been slain, and their theatre shields had been destroyed, and the pulpits now flanked the horde with hawk-like speed and grace. These newcomers were eldar, in the green and white livery of the Biel-Tan, though many of their warriors wore the various colored suits of Aspect warrior armor. Dark Reapers had taken positions on the periphery of battle, launching constant salvoes, while Falcon grav tanks and wave serpents deposited lethal banshees and Avengers into strategic positions, before speeding off to engage and destroy any armor foolish enough to try and engage them. Without the protection of the theatre shields, the Tower of Skulls further punished the chaotic invaders by unleashing their defense lasers upon them. The eldar flowed between these megaton barrages with consummate ease, as if they were fighting a choreographed, stage battle. Wherever the lasers bolts landed, they were not.

The chaos army turned to rout, heading south to meet up with the chaos force heading north. However, the eldar had got to the south army first, sinking their barges before they had reached the northern shores in any great numbers. Instead of allies from the south, more enemies came to finish off the corsair ground forces. The southern force was a glorious sight to behold. It crested the mountains as one great mass, silver-painted hulls glimmering in the early light of dawn. Void dragon bombers and other eldar flyers soared across the sky, alongside many hundreds of land speeders, both combat and storm speeders, as well as dozens of stormeagles, thunderhawks, stormtalons and stormravens. Without air support, the forces of chaos were helpless as this air force unleashed a withering payload of missiles, rockets and laser bolts into the masses. Rippling explosions convulsed across them, strafing run after strafing run turning the tundra into one rolling firestorm.

Upon the bridge, Ikek laid broken open upon the floor, his semi-living flesh wrenched out of its shell violently. The Decimator itself was smashed and empty too, its daemon departed in screaming agony. Only Gileas remained standing, a decimator arm, snapped off, impaling him through the primary hull section of his torso. The vox unit of his dreadnought was broken, so all he could do was open and close his claw in a symbol of triumph.

Oddly enough, the Junnergan was the closest thing to a leader the remaining chaos curs had, and the human and astartes refuse scuttled after the Groevian, as it fought its way back to its transports and fled the system with the remainder of the routed corsair fleet, picking up Skrax and the Viskeons on the way.

It had been a hard fought victory across Varsavia, and much of the planet lay buried under soot and ash, or else drowned by the sudden downpours of precipitation following the condensation of all the evaporated snow. So many were dead, and had the eldar not aided them, it was likely all would have perished. But the reasons for the aliens’ sudden generosity were their own. It was said Chief Librarian Allaten held a secret meeting with the farseers of Biel-Tan; both factions eagerly peering into the raw potential of the future. The eldar had come to Varsavia to retrieve something, but also to guide the Silver Skulls (who had felt lost ever since the Emperor’s light had failed). In exchange for an artifact, the eldar would give the Silver Skulls the opportunity to finally kill Huron Blackheart once and for all.

Allaten gathered his surviving men to a muster hall in the Tower, where the eldar and astartes mingled awkwardly after the battle was won. Their stilted conversations were halted when the Librarian and the alien seers emerged. There was an artifact on Pax Argentius, the cemetery world that could only be accessed through the internment of the latest dead Master Argentius. The eldar explained that the artifact looked like a stone circle, but was in fact an ancient dolmen gate. The eldar requested that they be allowed to accompany Argentius as he was taken to the cemetery planet, so that they might access the gate and travel to the necron tombworld that lay beyond.

In exchange, the farseers informed the Silver Skulls of the exact day they needed to attack Huron; it was a very specific window of opportunity, which if missed would mean they would never get a chance to take down the Blackheart. Upon this day, as the eldar legend went;

The Favored Son of a Favored Son, Foe to All and Friend to None Rode to the Ruin of a Black Heart.

Meanwhile, on the approach to Armageddon, another eldar vessel rushed forth, armed and bristling with weaponry and battle damage. It was leaking fuel and its sails were shredded, but momentum carried it forwards.

In response, the Vulkan Imperium sent forth a picket fleet, to surround and if necessary, neutralize, the threatening ship. For a tense hour, it seemed as if the fleet would launch an attack upon the ship; the Fire beast vessel ‘The Loyal Fiend’ threatened to board the vessel, and do... unpleasant things to the aliens within.

Then, a voice began to sing, rising in volume as he bellowed his boisterous, guttural song down the vox link. The song undulated and echoed across every vox link in the fleet. At first the Steel legion thought it was some brutish xenos war song, but when the song was taken up by the Wolf Brother commandery marines, they hesitated in ordering a strike.

It was the song of the wolftime, being sung in the nominally dead language of old fenrisian.

Eventually, Vulkan’s voice cut into the vox link, interrupting the song.

“Hold fire. I know that voice... Leman? Brother?” Vulkan said, his voice

The singer’s harsh voice paused in its song. “I am surprised the din of the forge hadn’t dulled your sense entirely brother. It is I,” Russ replied, his voice strained and in great physical pain. “I return, and I do not do so alone. I fear... a boarding party by your 'Fire beasts' would have been... foolish on their part...” Leman Russ laughed down the vox, as Imperial shuttles came in to dock with his stolen eldar cruiser.

Additional Background Section 33: The Five Brothers

(Chronicler’s note: Though I possess the notes of my predecessor, which detail his event, it must be noted that I was a young boy during these events; I witnessed events across Armageddon from the ground up. I have hence combined my recollections and those of my relatives with the histories of this chronicle.)

The primarchs returned to Armageddon to a heroes’ welcome. The docks and shipyards surrounding the Armageddon system and within unleashed low-powered lance fire in salute, as Vulkan’s flagship entered the planet’s orbit. Onboard, there were four timeless living legends. There was Leman Russ, the Great Wolf himself, King of Fenris and father of the Vlka Fenryka and the ultimate gene father of the Wolf Brother commandery. Then, there was Vulkan, the Emperor of the New Imperium, primarch of the Salamanders and the vast majority of the commanderies, Cousin-Champion to the Realm of Fathers, Master of the Promethean Cults of Nocturne and Armageddon, Superintendant of the Confederation of Justice and Chairman of the Ruling Council of the Vulkan Imperium. Alongside him was Corvus Corax, the repentant Master of the Former Raven Guard and of the Sons of Corax commandery and prime-beast of the Weregeld. The final passenger was far more tragic. Jaghati Khan, pimarch of the White Scars, returned to Vulkan’s Imperium in pieces. What was worse was that he remained alive and in endless, monstrous pain. This fact was kept from the adoring crowds who lined every street of every city on Armageddon, who cheered till their throats were red raw as the primarchs descended on a Vulkan’s personal transport that flew low over each city, before rushing off to the looming, unadorned Hermit’s Tower, built near to the site of Hades Hive, amidst the grand splendor of the central palace. The tower’s lack of decoration set it apart from the rest of the city, but its artisan craftsmanship was always well known.

Only Vulkan, amongst the returning primarchs came back unharmed in some way. The Khan was a ruin of mewling, silently screaming flesh, Russ was weak from the fire of the eldar venom coursing through his veins, while Corax bore psychological scarring that would take many years to truly heal, even though his exhausted body was barely damaged. Russ was taken to the grand apothecarium, and there Corax and the doctors there worked together to devise a cure for his poisons, utilizing the extensive libraries of the Promethean Cult. Afterwards, he was housed in one of eight primarch scaled bed chambers, alongside another one of his brothers he had not seen in thousands of years. For the Lion, primarch of the Dark Angels and the appointed protector of Ultramar, had also been recovered just the year before.

Meanwhile, Vulkan rushed the Khan down into his forge vaults beneath the Hermit’s Tower; desperate to find a way to save his brother. He would not be reunited with him, only to lose the Khan all over again. In those dread vaults, Vulkan stored the relics and artifacts the Brethren of the Willing had gathered for him over the millennia, but were too dangerous to let out. One of those nightmarish things was the living metal abomination known only as the Shard. It was some faded echo of part of a C’tan immortal consciousness, tainted and driven mad by the memories of Ferrus Manus and the Iron hands it had slain. It was demented and delusional, but it had knowledge of technology and the universe to rival that of the Emperor himself. Vulkan brought Khan to this entity, and through coercion, trickery and dark promises that Vulkan never spoke of to any outside the chamber, he gained the assistance of the shimmering star shard. Alien science from the dawn of time was married to the genetic and artisan craftwork of the Lord of Armageddon as Vulkan fought to revive and restore his brother. Eventually, after many weeks of seclusion and work in the cold darkness of the deep vaults, the Khan was rebuilt. Yet, the creature Vulkan beheld was not the same figure he had known; not truly. The Khan’s blood was shimmering silver, and the layered armor and machinery that infused his new form could never be removed. Vulkan stayed at his brother’s side for another month, as though the Khan lived, he had mercifully lost consciousness, for the first time after millennia of torment.

Meanwhile, Corax had new armor fashioned for him; the Sons of Corax and the other Commanderies who took him as their liege lord insisted on aided him in building new arms and armor. His armor, once finished, was a sight to behold. It was black; so dark it seemed to darken the rooms he entered. Yet, if you looked closely, you could make out the intricate patterns and designs inscribed upon it; only an Astartes’ eyes could fully appreciate the glorious nature of his great winged armor. Corax, though he could move between cities without ever being observed, chose to travel as part of a convoy, making sure that his face and his presence was witnessed by everyone on the world, holding aloft his great lash and sword as he met with the people. He gave many a famous speech throughout that year, and each one was recorded for prosperity and stored within the Domed Librarium of Saint Grimnar, where all the most momentous events of the New and Old Imperium were stored on electronic plates, or carved into the flagstones themselves.

Corax no longer desired to hide in the shadows. He wished that he would never abandon humanity again, nor let it suffer tyrants or slavery while he still drew breath. Only his Nova Astartes honor guard saw his private face; his doubt and his great abiding guilt.

The Wolf and the Lion recovered together, out of public sight for a time. As their wounds healed swiftly, they also began to train and spar with one another. Harsh words were said to one another, and each brother bested the other in alternating, hard fought bouts. The Lion confided in Russ about the figures that had came to him as he lay dying upon Lori Delta Trove, and of those unforgiving figures that yet haunted him. In another time, another place, Russ would have tried to slay the Lion then, in a demented lust to purge the Imperium of liars and traitors, but he knew that his actions had set terrible things into motion long ago, and he did not wish to repeat the old mistakes of the past. However, the two brothers, the closest of kin, remained antagonists and rivals. The Lion claimed that, though Leman judged him for his coldness and moral weakness, the Wolf King was just the same as him. The only difference was that Russ had cultivated an image of himself as the loyal executioner; the honorable, mighty warrior king of feasts and fighting. Despite their mutual distain, when it came to war and combat, their styles were oddly harmonious. When they tested themselves in the great fighting basin, against countless servitors and simulated enemies, when they fought together, they found they could vanquish almost anyone. Woes betide any who thought to face the two primarchs in battle. Both brothers built their own armor in tandem with each other, tweaking and adjusting their suits based upon the reactions of their sparring partner. Likewise, Russ refined his new blade by testing it against the ancient Lion Sword that Lion El’Jonson wielded.

Almost seven months after being returned to life, the Khan awoke. With a weary voice, he asked after his chapter and his brothers, amidst strange ranting where he cursed and gibbered in the language of the eldar. Vulkan comforted him, informing him that his brothers were with him now. However, Vulkan could not lie about the fate of the Khan’s white scars. The White Scars had fallen into the life of the savage free companies all too well. When Vulkan had begun to reunify the Imperium, the White Scars, like the majority of the Black Templars, were beyond salvaging, and fought him. The White Scars had been destroyed; only a scant shadow of them survived, to form the moribund Scar-branders, who had perished to a man defending the planet of Joffen's Throne from a Krork fleet, half a century before. But what was worse, was that through the procedures used to save his life, Jaghati Khan could no longer pass on his geneseed and sire a new chapter and replace those he had lost. In fury, the Khan leapt from his bed, and snatched Vulkan by the throat, screaming in despair and misery. The Khan’s strength was always great, but even his primarch-born power was further enhanced by the xenos machinery which had brought him back.

“You have killed the Scars! Your murder of them is twofold!” he howled in Vulkan’s obsidian features, his glowing red eyes meeting the Khan’s tainted, silver-veined ones. It took the Khan a moment to realize that he was throttling his brother and instantly released him in shame, before collapsing to his knees. The Khan then cursed himself; he had left his children behind in his folly to reach and destroy Commorragh; he was the one who had failed the White Scars. Recovering swiftly, Vulkan placed his hand upon the shoulder pad of Jaghati. What words could comfort one such as him? One so wronged for so very long?

But Vulkan knew his brother, and he told him what he needed to hear. He reminded him that the hunt was not yet concluded; Lorgar yet lived and his blasphemous works threatened to destroy all things. The Khan had promised to slay the traitors; he had sworn this oath on the walls of the imperial Palace itself, countless centuries in the prehistory of the Old Imperium. While they yet existed, he could not give into despair. Though the Scars were gone, the great hunt could never be forgotten. Vulkan had built Jaghati a magnificent blade, based upon the design of his curved horseman’s blade. As the Khan rose, he placed this blade in his brother’s armored hand. They stood, eye to eye, and nodded to each other. No words were required in that moment.

Eventually, the five brothers reunited, meeting in Vulkan’s sparse throne room; the first time they had gathered together in uncounted ages. Here, they spoke of a wild array of topics, but the topic that continually came to the forefront of the conversation was that of war. Vulkan brought them up to speed on the state of the galaxy over a week of extensive discussion, where the five contemplated a myriad of tactics and the disposition of their brother’s many forces.

In the year it had taken the primarchs to recover and reach this point, news of their return had spread, via Vendrial psyker beacon, to every corner of the Vulkan Imperium, and beyond (for the Vendrial beacons were nowhere near as secure as the astropathic grid used in the ancient past, and friend and foe alike found it rather easy to decipher the broad meanings of the beacon messages). Understandably, this caused a great stir within the Vulkan Imperium; this was no mere victory, but represented the turning of the tide in many eyes. A new era in the history of their empire, for at last, the worlds allied to Vulkan believed that they could take the fight to the gods and monsters surrounding them, for they now had a living Pantheon of their own to match them. Spontaneous festivals broke out on many worlds not at the forefront of battle, and even the frontier worlds celebrated this news, even as they defended their homes from aliens and rampaging warp-allied empires. When Vulkan summoned representatives from his various governments and armed forces, the response was a thing to behold.

The Nova Astartes were always at war, as was their purpose, but even single commandery that could be contacted managed to send a token force to Armageddon; they could not pass up the opportunity to see the primarchs for themselves.

These included the Salamanders, adorned in their ceremonial garb as Vulkan’s bodyguards, the camouflage-wearing nemenmarines*, the Knights Supplicant, the Jade Princes, the Sons of Corax, the Grey-armored Vulkan Praetors, the golden-clad Dorn Revenants, the sinister Iron Hands, the fearsome Fire Beasts, the mute marines of the Vanquishers in their deep crimson armor, the Brass Ravens, the Blood Ravens, the Wolf Brothers’ rabble (who, I recall, were almost deafening as they played raucous instruments through the streets at any opportunity, for they were half-mad with glee at their genefather’s return), the Sons of Thunder, the esoteric commandery (formerly known as the Fatemakers of old), and many more commanderies sent small delegations to Armageddon. These ranged from a single squad, in the case of the Fire beasts (who, being the smallest commandery due to their high- attrition recruitment processes, could hardly spare many soldiers for this gathering), to virtually the entire commandery strength of two thousand five hundred marines, in the case of the Salamanders.

Representatives of each of the allied realms likewise sent their own delegations, complete with honor guards of their best and most renowned units.

The Ryzan-Catachan oathworlds sent forth their most senior Skitarii-Magos, Alpha-Muon, alongside a force of a thousand Plasma-Commandoes in full battle-garb. They lacked the polished extravagance of some of the commanderies, but they made up for this with discipline and the naked power of their plasma weaponry.

A Gladius class frigate from Ultramar-reborn also made its way to Armageddon. This delegation consisted of Folkar, who was then one of the five new High Lords of Ultramar, alongside a company of adeptus astartes, the older breed of posthuman made legendary through the Ages of Imperium and the second Age of strife. Each of these marines bore the colors of the iltramarines. Upon their right shoudlerpad they bore the symbol of Ultramar, and on their left they wore the symbol of their individual chapter house, be they novamarines, Sons of Orar or otherwise. Folkar came to discuss military matters, as the other delegates did, but he had further business to attend to. He knelt before the primarchs, and reaffirmed his oaths to the new Imperium and to the Lion in particular (the Lion was momentarily confused by this action, until Vulkan explained the nature of Ultramar’s liberation from Sicarius the Mad). Master Folkar also brought with him a great urn of Guilliman’s precious geneseed, along with almost two thousand young boys from Ultramar, the best of the latest recruits from the stellar realm (the reason for this shall be explained later in this section).

The Muster-Lord of the Confederation of Justice sent an envoy to the plane, along with a regiment of his drop troopers, and several dozen examples of his Confederations new Individual Engagement Units (IEUs); these were combat machines designed for a single drop trooper to operate, based upon development of the stormtalon and Sentinel STC designs, adapted to function as a form of battlesuit. Though they were nowhere near as advanced as the Tau equivalents, these bulky IEUs were excellent as frontline spear tip units, and shocktroops for orbital insertions, second only to the Nova Astartes themselves.

The mysterious and ever-sinister Patriarchs of the Realm of Fathers also sent a cabal of their cult Magi to meet with the primarchs; each magus had a direct psychic link to their leaders, so whatever was heard by them was consequently heard by their progenitors. The Realm’s delegation was colossal, reflecting somewhat the sheer scale of one of Vulkan’s most valuable allies. A ten thousand strong force of the Legion Trygonis arrived in system with the Magi. They moved in a perfect unison which bordered on the disturbing. Even the Ultramarines, who appreciated order and discipline more acutely than most, were suspicious. But the realm of Fathers had ever been loyal to the Armageddon Emperor, and Vulkan welcomed them alongside the others.

The Legions of Steel did not need to send delegations to Armageddon however, for the Steel legions were the beating heart of the Vulkan Imperium, and were present upon every world in his domain, including their homeworld of Armageddon. Though the air had long since been cleaned of poisonous fumes, they still wore their ceremonial respirators with pride as they saluted their lord and master.

There were many other military delegates from the lesser Realms of the Imperium who also eventually made their way to Armageddon, braving the numerous wars and conflicts raging across the Segmentum to reach the beating heart of their empire. From the glorious, ostentatious Knight-Princes of Chevantai, to the grim and functional Thunder lizard Tank Legions, even the bitter Valhallan remnant; all came to pay homage to the primarchs, and parade the military might of the Imperium before their eyes. Not only land forces, but ships from dozens of battlefleets gathered in orbit, including the legendary Phalanx.

This great parade would come to be known as Vulkan’s Muster. It would not be an over exaggeration to suggest that this military review was the largest concentration of Imperial strength since Ullanor itself, and certainly the greatest single concentration of primarchs gathered in an age.

Such a gathering attracted the attention of the Imperium’s rivals. Assassins were sent regularly to try and destroy this gathered force while they wallowed in orbit, but each attempt to rip the heart from the new Imperium was thwarted by the primarchs and their paranoid minions. Fortunately for them, at this time their rivals were preoccupied with the fall of the baalites in the north, the mounting power of the krork, Nightbringer and the hadex abominations in the east, and the necrons in isolated pockets across the galaxy. However, some of their rivals, realizing the importance of the returned primarchs, sued for truce. The most prominent of these were the twin Tau empires; the Meta-Empire of the east, and the Calixis-centered Tau empire in the west; they had their own bitter wars to fight, and had no desire to kill an empire which they saw as similar to themselves. Why threaten a growing beast, when that beast was poised to strike at one’s own foes?

This grand gathering of military might was more than just a mere exercise of sabre-rattling. It was an opportunity to both gather information on the current state of the galaxy at large, and more importantly, it was a chance to begin large scale military planning and the logistical preparation. They learned of the swelling power of Lorgar and the unification of the two Chaos Imperiums. Lorgar had created a new Book of his Word, filled with secrets given to him by the deep warp’s unfathomable minions. The Alliance between Aurelian and Huron was forged on the rad-blasted wastes of Hektartrus; an army of red corsairs and Word bearers, led by the respective Emperors, reduced the planet’s cities to rubble, and then, from orbit, poured a thousand megatons of molten gold across the planet’s surface. This killed every living thing on the planet, and when the gold finally solidified, it formed the words of Lorgar, each character five miles wide. Above this dead world, Huron Blackheart knelt before Lorgar and was made into Lorgar’s regent across all the north eastern reaches of the galaxy. Word also reached them that Lorgar’s military machine was in motion, backed by the dread draziin- maton; a foe no one yet knew how to truly defeat. Though the krorks and necrons were similarly fearsome and powerfully dangerous, the Chaos Imperium was a nightmare born of human weakness, and the primarchs felt a particular responsibility for this realm. They had to defeat it somehow. The five primarchs assembled the leadership of the entire Vulkan Imperium in a specially- built orbital station over Hades. There, in the central hall they discussed a most momentous topic. The time for consolidation was over; the Vulkan Imperium was as secure as it was ever going to be. Now, the time had come; the Imperium wanted not only to survive, it wanted to win. The primarchs were the most qualified entities the Imperium possessed on this topic, for they and they alone had come close to conquering the galaxy before. But this time, they had an additional advantage they lacked before; they did not have to concern themselves with garrisoning and creating compliant worlds, for the Vulkan Imperium already possessed them. They could focus all their effort upon the military objective. They would make war upon the Chaos Imperium, and once and for all defeat their ancient nemesis.

However, such a lofty goal would take tremendous planning. The war council lasted almost half a year, and covered every aspect of a prospective war; who would be providing the supply ships, and how they would be escorted and themselves refueled, which planets close to the Chaos Imperium could be relied upon to grant them docking rights and support their war effort, even specific planetary invasion tactics were debated and exhaustively discussed over this time. The Five sat in large thrones to accommodate their bulk, but otherwise, they remained on the same level as their mortal allies, and no speaker was denied the chance to make their point.

The worlds of Vulkan were ordered to up their military output by one percent, and to siphon off that one percent directly to the mounting crusade, which was code-named as ‘Tusk’. Additionally, there was a new founding of the Nova Astartes. This was the fifty fifth founding (later infamously known as ‘the Final Founding’ for reasons which will later become apparent). Folkar’s aspirant and Guilliman-sourced geneseed went into creating the Warrior Kings commandery, the first and last Ultramarine Nova Astartes. Russ had a new commandery, known only as the Rout, created to join his Wolf Brothers, while the Lion helped the Khan create the White Lancers, the first Commandery to recognize two primarchs as their direct founders. I recall the excitement of those days of preparing for crusade. At that time, the entire Imperium went through a massive upheaval; no longer the Vulkan Imperium, but instead Imperium Pentum.

Even with an expanded military force and a vast crusade, the Imperium Pentum was still outnumbered a thousand to one by the Chaos Imperium of Lorgar. Yet this changed nothing. Lorgar had to die, and his allies had to be pushed back if mankind was to survive in this universe.

Meanwhile, the venerable Lady of the Brethren of the Willing had her own battle to fight. The Brethren was, by this point, a vast, Imperium spanning organization dedicated to protecting the Imperium from insidious internal threats, and also gathering what artifacts and mystical lore they could. However, there was one foe Lady Imogen could not defeat; time itself. She was dying; her cyber-enhanced form had lasted her for centuries, but even Vulkan’s science could not preserve her frail body. Her mind remained as devious and razor sharp as in her younger days of adventuring, but now this brilliant organ was trapped within her elderly frame; bedridden. Nevertheless, she still looked over most of the reports sent to her by her ever-increasing number of exotic agents, both xenos, human and otherwise.

Imogen’s Brethren of the Willing had been tasked with solving the problem of the Red Sorcerer in particular. His Rubric Empire in the south would be a thorn in the side of any attempted offensive into Lorgar’s territory; Ahriman was growing more powerful with every passing day, and the Vulkan Imperium could not bring its full might to bear against Ahriman’s Cabal, as any astartes- led invasion would fail utterly.

One night, as she fell into sleep, a presence came to her. It came as an elderly, kindly faced man. She found herself upon a field of bones, piled a mile thick, with only vast, cyclopean towers to break up this endless expanse. The skies were dark and veined with pulsing green light that hurt one’s eyes to perceive.

“Where am I?” Imogen asked; her voice was young and powerful in her mind.

“They call it the Bone Kingdom, though it has a far older name only the Flayed ones recall,” the Old man replied, his soft, rasping voice accompanied by the dull humming of distant flies. This was no mortal.

“You are one of Nurgle’s kin,” she replied warily. She had lived long enough to know their stench. “I have been Illuminated, I warn you. You will gain no possession over me.”

The man smiled, his face rotting away. “You are almost correct, but I am no child of his. He is no less a tyrant than my own father,” the figure continued, his voice rising in power, though not in volume.

His frame rotted away, and a throbbing chrysalis of distended flesh swelled up from the ruins, bursting open like an orchid formed of plague rot. Beneath the leaves of blistered skin was a giant, in the garb of a fetid reaper of souls, complete with a great scythe. It was Mortarion.

“You seek to break me do you? Subvert me and use me against my master? It will not work. I shall never serve the deep madness as Lorgar does!” she yelled, spitting at Mortarion’s feet.

Mortarion shook his head. “Nor do I wish to, but it is not my decision to make. Not anymore. I have so little time, for I am being hunted, even now; hunted through dreams and nightmares like a fox through a fen bog. You must listen now. Look.”

With that, the vision shifted, to reveal a woman on the plain of bones; a broken woman in bloodied rags. She stifled her sobs as she crawled through the nightmarish landscape, her golden hair matted to his skin with sweat and grime. Crolomere, the Grey Sensei. Imogen watched, as she scuttled into a culvert, as a roving band of screeching flayed ones skulked past, babbling in the mad tongue of Llandu’gor the Flayer.

“She was cast here by Magnus’ cursed scion, for failing him. You know her importance; I know you know the providence of her birth. She is a Perpetual, but if she dies at the hands of the Necrons, she will be lost forever. If you want to defeat Ahriman, she must not perish on that world.”

“Why are you helping me?” was all Imogen could ask.

Mortarion smiled, a torrent of flies streaming from his rotten jaws. “My brothers must fall; all of them. Know despair child, for they will die. I cannot escape the inevitable, and neither can Lorgar, Angron, Russ, Vulkan or any of the others. They were not born for a peaceful life; Nurgle will have his due, but if your Imperium falls, Lorgar will win. Death in battle is preferable to oblivion. If the Deep Ones triumph... everything will vanish. Not just vanish; it shall never have existed at all. You will wake soon, but if you remember nothing else from this dream, remember this; save the girl.”

Imogen then awoke, and sent urgent summons to Vulkan; she needed to send a mission to the Bone Kingdom of Drazak. However, Vulkan refused to send a fleet to attack a necron Tombworld, deep in hostile territory, simply to recover one woman. It would be a suicide mission for little gain. However, the Khan argued with his brother then, and suggested she should be given non-essential soldiers and equipment. If she failed, then nothing of value was lost. But if she succeeded, then what a glorious victory that would be! Vulkan accepted.

Thus, even as she lay dying, Imogen began organizing an impromptu rescue mission. She gathered together inmates from the penal colonies and criminal worlds of the Imperium, as well as thugs and mercenaries looking to prove themselves to the Imperium as valuable auxiliary units, worthy of sponsorship. Likewise, obsolete hulls of old Imperial vessels were saved for use as transportation to and from the necron planet. Yet, this brigade of no hopers lacked leadership.

You may recall, dear reader, that Imogen had acquired two stasis pods after the sacking of Drultevar as the spoils of loot. Of course, the stasis pods themselves were valuable, but not quite as useful to Imogen as the people preserved within. At last, she had a reason to release the men inside. Imogen died in her sleep the night before the reanimation, but her loyal minions deactivated the stasis pods on her orders. The pods opened with a hiss of steam as air, preserved since the end of M41.999, condensed as it was released from its imprisonment. The cigar in the mouth of one of the preserved men was still smoking between his teeth. Slowly, he rose from the pod, and flexed his bionic arm several times.

The clerks that beheld the tall, stern-faced guardsman flinched as he looked their way.

“What’s the mission?” was all Colonel Schaeffer asked.

*(The nemenmarines, following in the footsteps of their founding Force Commander, Heldrik Nemen, do not believe in personal heraldry, or having a commandery-wide color scheme for their force. Nemen saw no need for this because ‘every heathen, monster and madman is already after us; why make ourselves easy targets. I intend to surrender no advantage to my enemies.’ Of course, ironically, being the only commandery to adopt this stance, their camouflage itself was eventually treated as their heraldry by their brother astartes, to their mild irritation.)

Additional background Section: The Empty East; the desolation of the Fringe and the C’tan’s revelation

... poor lambs... abandon hope, all ye who... [Raucous laughter... unconfirmed audio interrupt.]

Nowhere was the futility of war more aptly demonstrated than across the eastern spiral arm of the galaxy. Necrons and krork, C’tan and daemons; all fought over this region to determine the destiny of the galaxy.

The wars that raged across this realm dwarfed the conflicts of most past ages, save for perhaps the original War in Heaven. Trillions of krork were born and directly fed into this brutal, colossal war. They did so gladly and without fear. Just as the necrons were compelled by their programming to reconquer the galaxy and enslave all, the krork were programmed on a genetic level to thwart them.

Khaine and the Nightbringer, being both ageless and tireless, constantly clashed across planets and beyond space, in a futile attempt to destroy one another. Meanwhile, their minions, the Destroyer cults and the khainite slaughterkin, destroyed every living thing they could find. When they killed everything living, they turned upon each other.

The C’tan took neither the triarch nor the krork’s side in this war; they gleefully attacked both sides, feeding greedily upon the flickering embers of escaping mind essences, like vile suckling leeches.

Fifteen thousand years of war. One can scarcely even conceive of such a lengthy period of constant conflict. These battles were not just local bushfire wars, but all part of a single conflict, on a massive scale. Everyone lost.

The remains of the tau Meta Empire were reduced to a handful of isolated pockets; besieged Sept worlds turned bitter after the hope of a greater good turned to ash before their eyes. Ultramar survived, but it was a declawed creature. Despite token support from its western Imperium Pentus allies, there were barely enough soldiers and logistical supplies to protect the realm from the monstrosities of the Hadex Anomaly, which had expanded in that time to consume the Black Reef and turn every world nearby into hellish worlds of splintered timeframes and rampant mutation.

Pech, surprisingly, was spared any major invasions, for it was seen as utterly worthless by most. The kroot, ever the pragmatic survivors, continued to scour the nearby regions for new meat. Meanwhile, the Tau children the kroot had saved from the necron invasions a generation ago had formed an odd sub culture within Pech’s forests. The castes interbred, and formed a culture quite independent of any notion of the greater good (aside from the relics of past years that had survived with them, which they considered sacred). The kroot fostered these tribes, and sometimes even allowed them to aid them in their mercenary missions beyond Pech, in a surreal parody of the old order of things.

The krork were severely weakened, despite their superhuman resolve. Though the will was still there, the necrons had killed billions of their race; their ships all showed signs of extreme damage. The necrons had also been given a contagion to use against the krork, which compromised their spore-based life cycle. Every year, fewer and fewer krork were being born. For centuries the krork tried to find out who this shadowy ally of the triarch was, but they could not be traced (though i personally suspect the denizens of Commorragh had a hand in this. The motive, we shall never know; probably sheer amusement.)

However, the necrons were in poor shape at this point too. The triarch praetorians were struggling to gather large enough forces to adequately fight their multiple foes. Those necrons not destroyed by krork and C’tan, or subsumed by the demented Empire of the Severed, were going mad. The Destroyer Cults could not be controlled or relied upon, and the Flayers were a hideous blight upon the necron race as a whole. By this point in history, the original necrons had been reduced to a mere billion individuals (though their android bodies could be replaced rapidly by their surviving tombworlds).

The vast majority of the eastern fringe, by then, was empty. Virtually every system was left eerily devoid of life. Not only were their worlds shattered by doomsday weapons or scoured clean by gauss, but there were some worlds that were simply empty. Cities and settlements covered the worlds, but the people who once lived there had simply vanished. Most had abandoned their worlds in abject terror, uprooting their entire populations upon hastily built refugee arks that fled westwards. They had nowhere to go and precious few supplies to sustain their numbers. The misery and suffering they endured was heartbreaking to behold.

Other worlds had been depopulated through the fallout from the wars of others, sterilizing their planets by accident. These worlds had slow deaths, where the despairing populations eventually detonated nuclear munitions under their own cities, simply to end the anguish.

Even Nurgle had no hold over this region, despite the great oceans of despair which permeated the Fringe, for there were no longer men there to experience such emotions. I cannot accurately inform you how many alien races went extinct during that period, but I can tell you the number was depressingly high. Such was the desperation of those few aliens left; they threw themselves upon the mercy of the tau and the astartes’ embattled bastions. To their credit, even the astartes, taught from birth to regard xenos as their foes, allowed them to take shelter and bolster their numbers.

There were other worlds, beneath the baleful glare of the Red hole of Hadex, who suffered horrendously. Daemons and cultists descended upon them and violated them in every way you can imagine. They were defiled and ruined by the horrendous cruelty of their enemy. Any thought of freedom or free will were forgotten. They wished only to be safe. Foolishly (or perhaps rightfully; who can tell?), they turned to the one god who despised anarchy above all else. The Star Father.

Upon these worlds, the daemons found themselves cast back by angyls of blinding light. The angyl prince Draigo led the charge against the mewling abominations, battling daemons in single combat and dragging them kicking and screaming into the hell that had spawned them. The people of those besieged worlds praised their angyl saviors. They eagerly accepted the demands of the Star Father; they were told to kneel, and they knelt. Soon, their worlds were safe, and as silent as all the rest...

... I see another event, unfolding at that time, but at other times and places, all at once. A confluence of minds, a bending of the rules of the cosmos...

Amidst the silence, the eldest beings took their fill of energy; when the minds of sentients ran low, they gorged upon starlight and lingered in their coronal halos like languid dancers made of naught but glittering glass shards. The Dragon returned in this time, alongside his broken brethren. Yet, thought the various C’tan shard entities fed and rampaged in glorious freedom from necron bondage, they sensed a signal; a message written in decades-long syllables only the first races knew. The Nyadra’zatha the Burning One’s many forms sensed this, as did the Endless Swarms of Iash’uddra, the capricious many-selves of Mephet’ran and even the ancient bane itself, the Dragon. Though space and time separated them in vast gulfs, the C’tan nevertheless stepped across these gulfs with ease. They came to heed the words of the one who thought to speak their tongue; Orikan the Diviner.

The plane they met upon was a planet, but it was somehow utterly two-dimensional, and sliced through realities like a worrisome splinter lodged in flesh. Terrible winds of desolation wracked its surface, destroying the disk-entities that scurried across its depthless surface. As the glittering shards arrived, the world extruded into three dimensions with frightful, mind- shredding power. Together, they built a hall upon which to have this dread conference.

(The following is a mortal’s approximating and abstraction of what occurred on that artificial planet. There were no witnesses to this event, so I must assume the previous scribe of this tale tapped into some upon wellspring of knowledge in order to speculate upon these events... or else she fabricated the event entirely; another fabrication within her ill-mind. I cannot be certain.)

Each C’tan crafted thrones of starlight and condensed time, conjuring grandiose forms to inhabit simultaneously. One cannot say where this realm was, or even what dimension they deigned to meet upon. I do know that at the time of this meeting, three planets in the eastern fringe imploded upon themselves, without any obvious reason. If the two events are linked, then the fringe was the most likely location/primary time period of this meeting.

Orikan appeared before them, a tiny entity compared to the colossal entities that glowered at the Cryptek, who vainly clutched a staff of tomorrow in his claws, as if the totem would protect him should he displease the Star Gods.

However, the Stars were right. Their light shone through the great windows that rose like mountains upwards and descending. The golden light made his form indistinct, ever-shifting. However, the Dragon knew this being, no matter what form he took.

It named the being Orikan, shard of Mephet’ran, one of many. “But why seek to lie to us? Or to yourself?” the Dragon contemplated.

The Cryptek laughed, and the laugh was mockingly imitated by the other Deceiver shards that sat upon their thrones, each a slightly different prince with a different crown of golden horns, but always with the same smirk.

“I am a thing of lies. It is always my way. In truth, the necrontyr did me a service, in shattering me...” Orikan Mephet’ran chuckled.

Another Deceiver, in a form like a robed daemon prince covered in golden feathers, spoke up. “How else may I play my little games, when caged in dull... singularity? How else may I lead the Despoiler to his pet sword?”

Another Deceiver rose, with a jackal’s head instead of its own. “Or guide the First borns’ children on a merry dance...?”

“... a dance without end?” another Deceiver laughed, laughing until his crystalline form shattered and fled away on the wind.

The other C’tan were unmoved, simply asking whether the Deceiver even knew which side he was on anymore. The Orikan Deceiver shrugged theatrically, twirling its staff like a baton.

But why had he gathered them there? A trap?

“It would be a foolish trap, to ones such as us, Lord Oblivion,” the Deceiver grinned. “We see the turn of eternity; you would see the outcome of such a trap eons before I set it. No, I have set no trap. However, if the C’tan did not follow his instructions, they would perish.” The Dragon scoffed. Nothing in his calculations hinted at such a destination for the universe. The Deceiver mocked him for his willful ignorance. “You have been asleep too long, Dragon. You, as ever, refuse to acknowledge the immaterial realm. Reality is your dominion, but you see nothing else beyond it. No matter how omnipotent you consider yourself here, amidst the membranes of reality, the warp shall ever elude you. You fail to see what is at stake.”

The Dragon rooted Orikan to the spot, and for a moment, the Deceiver knew true fear, as the Dragon pulled more of his essence into the hall; the shadow of many wings loomed. “You speak of the warp’s looming apocalypse. Do not presume ignorance ancient perfidy,” the Dragon explained coldly.

“I speak... of the destruction of actuality...” the Deceiver replied. The suggestion stunned the Oblivion entity enough to release the silver-tongued one.

The others denounced this claim; nothing could destroy actuality. Even the necrons, with all the might of the living universe, could not damage actuality. It was impossible.

“I have seen much, my brethren of the star-smith. I know the true path of destiny. My predictions are never wrong.”

“They are never wrong, for you alter reality to suit your whims,” another shard replied. “You are tainted by the madness of the planet-born organics. We know you awoke the Ophilim Kiasoz; even Aza’gorod, childishly infatuated with mortal death as he is, was not that foolish. Do you think you can control the broken spiral at the heart of the pattern? It would devour you whole...”

The Deceiver ignored the barbs. “Be careful how you threaten me, my beloved ones. The One who Dwells Outside once thought she saw the weave of my patterns and it drove her mad. She welcomed her prison by the end. Now, heed me.”

The C’tan, without any words we would understand, eventually subsided in their retaliations, and allowed the liar to set up his con. They asked him how reality would perish.

“The dissolution will spread like a cancer, feeding and drawing itself up by the hooks it has in mortal souls. First it will consume their souls, and then it will pierce reality. Then... it will breach the Orrery.”

This got the attention of the C’tan. If the Orrery was turned into a plaything of the Nex[PAINENDLSS], then the warp would become a self-sustaining contagion of ever magnifying destruction. Omnipotence in the hands of perfect madness from the time before and after time was time.

“If this lie is true, then we face a total event collapse. This universe will die; as a contagion storm expands form this galaxy, to devour all galaxies. But I have devised a solution. Without life, the monster will be strangled at birth. My tides will sweep the galaxy clean.”

The Deceiver shook its head condescendingly. “You will only speed its passage, and feed it souls ever swifter. You must stop your rampages; if you stop, you know that our opportunity will come.”

The Dragon, intrigued, asked him what opportunity. “The opportunity? The opportunity to escape of course. This realm is beyond saving. I turned upon you, in the last years of the War in heaven. You recall that I turned upon you. Played both sides. Or perhaps, I was never on your side? I forget... sometimes, my memories... but nevertheless, I joined our cold nemesis. I became their champion. Or rather; a renegade shard of me became their champion. It is so much easier to thread the way of webs into my veins as an ally than as a foe; you were clumsy when you breached their webway Nyadra’zadra,” Mephet’ran added as a spiteful aside. “I promised to defeat you; I drove her into the sphere and made her mad. I betrayed the shards of Nightbringer and i told the eldar where the necrontyr whelps slept. But our old enemy... tricked me.”

The confession intrigued his brothers. “You were... deceived?”

“The irony is not lost upon me either. But I was indeed deceived. The Old meddlers did not perish.”

“They fled into the warp; ascended beings. We know this. We are C’tan,” another star god interrupted.

“Your memories are shattered, like your body, Jek’thalzar the Frost! They did not ‘ascend’, but they did flee. They-”

The C’tan as one realized what their hated kin had done. Eternal gates crashing down. Barriers crossed; safety compromised. The c’tan lived, at least partially, in every moment in reality. However, only the Deceiver avoided the tesserach Labyrinth prisons of their foes. Only he was conscious at the time of the Old One’s final sins; the sins which saw they vanish, and the eldar rise into an inevitable fall.

The Laughing God, Cegorach, the rebellious shard, empowered by actuality and the warp, had tricked them for millions upon millions of years. This was in an attempt to keep the C’tan distracted. But the Laughing God could not trick his own shards forever; the deceiver knew what the old ones [first and forever ancient. Worship them!] had done. But what was more; Mephet’ran knew when and where they had performed this act.

The conference lasted for millennia, but the time passed in only a year of subjective time. In that time the C’tan endlessly argued and discussed their schemes; some fought each other, and consumed their fellow shards in order to gain more complete mental faculties. Eventually, they reached a consensus; the opportunity would occur on the seventh year after the five Golem of the Anathema made their climactic war upon the draziin-maton never-borns. At that time, the Lord of Compassion and His cronies would at last find the Well of Eternity.

And when He did, the C’tan would be there to murder Him, and take the prize for themselves. Orikan had seen it, and he was never wrong...

... Or so the star vampires believed...

Additional Background Section 35: The Last Chance; the Drazak Raid

The Bone Kingdom was aptly named, for it was an ancient city literally submerged beneath layers upon layers of dry, desiccated bones, picked clean of flesh. This ossified desert was almost a mile deep, burying all but the tallest pyramids and tombs that erupted from the tomb world’s surface.

There, upon those fields, was a legacy of murder and mindless bloodletting stretching back millions upon millions of years. This was where the flayed ones, the miscreant progeny of Llandu’gor, made their lair. The flayed ones were mad necrons, who had modified themselves for the purpose of flensing flesh, and modified their skeletal heads with snapping jaws, to rip off chunks of meat they could never eat. They were compelled to drape flesh over their bodies, as if desperately trying to regain their stolen physical forms. Only automated systems could reliably control their tomb fleets and technology, for every other necron upon that blasted nightmare realm was utterly, irrevocably, insane. For light-years around the world, there were worlds depopulated by the flayers, seemingly isolating the flayers from the greater events of the Second Age of Strife and all that came later. These necrons were nothing but predators, and it didn’t matter to them who or what they killed.

No one could invade the planet and hope to be victorious. Those who somehow bested the orbiting harvester fleet of Valgul the Fallen Lord would find nothing to capture or occupy upon Drazak itself. They would land and be consumed by wave upon wave of silver berserkers, glistening red with fresh blood. No matter how many shots you fired, they flayers would eventually reach your lines, and reap a terrible toll upon you. Orbital bombardment was futile, for what was there upon the surface for the enemy to destroy? Bones, or perhaps one could burn off the air which the flayers did not need? This was known to all sides in the Age of Dusk. It was suicide to invade the flayer’s realm.

Ahriman knew this also, when he took Crolomere, the grey sensei, to this damned place. The warp around Drazak was always churning; ironically, the massive numbers of mortal deaths on the surface greatly fed Khorne and the rest of the expanding Pantheon of the primordial annihilator. This made ordinary warp flight into the realm incredibly difficult. However, Ahriman was a master of the warp now, a genius on a par with his former master Magnus. He guided his great black cube through the warp’s turbulent tides with ease. All the while, he tortured Crolomere.

The woman was a perpetual; an immortal and one who possessed the blood of the Anathema in her veins; the same blood which flowed through the first perpetual shamans, at the dawn of mankind. But she had abandoned her fellow perpetual long ago, and she had taken upon her the mantle of one of the Grey, foes of chaos and Imperium alike. Ahriman could never corrupt her soul to chaos, but he had managed to deceiver her mind long ago into aiding him. It is claimed she knew Ahzek Ahriman before even the mythical Horus Heresy and had been heart-broken at his betrayal by the Wolves. This made her more willing to believe his lies of being repentant and contrite in the Second Age of Strife and beyond.

However, when he had seized power in the Theologian Union, and had created the Golarch abominations and had begun to expand his Rubric to consume new victims in its magical bindings, she instantly recognized that Ahriman was no changed man. He desired to be a god; more than a mere daemon prince, Ahriman wished to be a daemon primarch. Nay, he desired to copy the Emperor’s works and thus become a new power within the pantheons itself. But Crolomere’s ancient eyes saw that he was merely a pawn of Tzeentch, as he had ever been, and Tzeentch itself was the architect of a new power’s rise; a power which embodied all the endless depths of madness, of which the chaos gods were simply the first part. She likened the chaos gods to the fins of a shark, protruding from the opaque surface of a black river; to anyone observing the fins, they seemed like several independent creatures, moving together but distinctly separate. But to those who could see beyond the surface, they would see the full body of the shark, and realize how impossibly large and dangerous it was. That was how she perceived the Deep Warp and the draziin-maton.

She sabotaged one of Ahriman’s experiments, and had stolen a ship and attempted to flee from his Realm. But he had caught her, and took his time in tormenting her. She could not die (save if her soul was obliterated), but Ahriman could harm her greatly. Never once did he raise his voice as he subjected her to his secret torments, and she whimpered in sorrowful agony as Fabius Bile was unleashed upon her flesh over and over and over again. But she always healed, and she refused to tell Ahriman what she had done to ruin his experiment. Thus, he decided to banish her, to the worst place he could conceive of for one with latent psychic empathetic psychic powers and the ability to suffer an eternity of being flayed and ripped asunder; Drazak the Bone Kingdom.

He slipped past the defenses of Drazak, and cast Crolomere to the surface, before he and his cube simply dissolved into the warp, returning almost instantly to his unassailable empire. She was stranded amidst a cauldron of churning misery. She witnessed weeping infants peeled by the flayed ones, and saw entire generations of xenos and human races butchered in mindless orgies of cacophonous death. She could do nothing to save these people, or their souls. She hid herself amidst the cathedrals of bones and she wept for them. Her heart was broken. No one could save her, because to do so, one would have to invade Drazak, and only the mad or the doomed would attempt such a thing...

... Or so she thought.

Six years into her ordeal, Drazak received visitors. This was unprecedented; no one came to them, for flesh bound races would surely be slain, and necrons did not visit, for fear of contracting the flayer virus.

The ships were human; medium sized freighters and merchant shipping vessels, old and decrepit. Perhaps they were a human convoy, blown off course by warp tides, and stranded in the worst possible place? Or maybe they were foolish explorers, eager to become famous? Either way, this handful of ships seemed doomed, as the flayed one fleet descended upon them. What scant defenses the ships had were disabled within minutes. The ships only managed, collectively, to launch a single torpedo, which missed the necrons entirely, and spiraled off towards the inner system, and the dead worlds and dying sun that had residence there...

Minutes after that, the necrons carved their way inside the vessels, and swarmed inside, hungry for flesh and blood, their desire for real bodies manifesting as a cannibalistic urge to eat. They shredded meat with their long clawed limbs, and ripped servitors apart with casual ease. So consumed with madness were the flayed ones, that they did not realize the ships were almost entirely manned by servitors, or that the few truly living beings on board had barricaded themselves around the warp engines. I could find no record of the names of these men, but they must have been devoted to their cause. They stubbornly held off the waves of flayers for about an hour. This was just enough time for each of the ten ships to trigger warp core breaches. As each vessel imploded, they took with them scores of necron ships, and millions of flayed ones.

Soon after, another wave of ships broke from the warp. Unlike their predecessors, these vessels did not slow down as they entered the system; they flared their plasma reactors to capacity, their crews offering silent prayers to the Five Brothers and the Emperor Revenant, or whatever other deities these doomed souls prayed to. All ahead full, this fleet of old and outmoded vessels surged. Within a few minutes, they reached a significant fraction of c. The necron vessels were faster, but their automated systems were still reeling from the initial assault. Only a handful of alien ships managed to reach the speeding vessels. Half of the human ships were blasted asunder by powerful arcs of azure energy, while others ploughed into the orbital defense platforms of Drazak, even as they roused themselves to activity and blasted another dozen foes apart. However, all of this occurred within less than three seconds, such was the unfathomable speed these ships were travelling. Even those ships destroyed by the necrons couldn’t hope to arrest their momentum, or the unbelievable kinetic energy unleashed by their reckless maneuver. Ships were turned to clouds of plasma and glittering metal wreckage, which all struck the necron ships and defenses at roughly 0.6c. The effect would have been spectacular; like a new sun rising a few million miles above Drazak’s necropolis surface.

One ship, amidst the searing chaos of the naval ram raid, did not destroy itself in explosive fashion. A solitary Luna class cruiser, the Triumph of Salazan, one of the most ancient and famous designs of vessel still maintained by the Imperium Pentus, used the bombardment to cover its advance, for the commander onboard had executed his plan perfectly, with the aid of naval advisors. It made an initial burn towards the centre of the system, but then the vessel let its own momentum carry it forwards. This minimized the energy signature of the ship and avoided the unwanted attention of the flayed ones. On the bridge of this vessel, Colonel Schaeffer stood by the Captain’s chair, watching the penitent fleet burning. A cigar was always smoking in his clenched teeth, and his semi-bionic form was unmoved by the sight of such death. Yet, for those who were unused to such carnage, it was a harrowing sight.

The Captain balked, expressing shock that so many people could perish so swiftly all at once. One of his helmsmen sneered.

“They were criminals and degenerates. It is no tragedy that they are destroyed.”

At this, the Colonel of the 13th Legion hoisted the helmsman from his chair, and drew his plasma pistol threateningly.

“Though scum in life they might have been, in death they find redemption, and sit at the Emperor’s side as Imperial heroes. You will not speak ill of the glorious dead again.”

It was a statement, not a request.

The remainder of the Thirteenth Penal Legion, all four thousand of them, were crammed into every available spare room or open space on the Triumph. All manner of scum made up this reformed regiment of the Imperium of Old. There were demented engineers skilled in illegal technological experiments. There were hundreds upon hundreds of penal colonists, armed by Vulkan’s smiths and trained by life times fighting for their very lives in the dark pits of prison. Salvar chem dogs spared destruction from the necromundan war made their bunks beside captured prisoners of war too proud to swear fealty to the five primarchs. Cults of redemption captured in the Theologian war readied their flamers for one last, glorious purge. Necromundan nobles, claiming to be children of the Illustrious, Infamous House of Jericho, found themselves slumming it besides mad men liberated from asylums across the Imperium Pentus. The journey was a long and violent one, as so many violent thugs in such cramped conditions was bound to create tensions. Only the mercilessness of Sister Agravain and her hastily-assembled force of former commissars and ex-Arbites, kept a semblance of peace, by beating any dissenting figures and keeping the ‘Last Chancers’ away from the crew sections of the ship.

There were only two figures in this army who remained unmolested by either their boisterous fellows or Agravain’s goons. One was a figure infamous for being the closest thing to a friend the colonel still had in the galaxy; a knife-wielding figure known only as Kage. Rumor had it, he had freed his soul from the clutches of a daemon long ago, while others claim he merely made a pact with it to spare his worthless carcass from the warp’s fires. The second figure was unusual, in that he was not a mortal at all. He was an Astartes; his armor stripped of paint and all chapter markings removed. This strange figure kept to himself, in a lightless, sparse cell at the aft section of the Triumph. No one dared disturb this superhuman, until the time came for battle. And even then, only Schaeffer had the sheer adamantine balls to do so.

After several weeks of tense, silent running through the newborn debris fields of Drazak, the Triumph was close enough to deploy its attack craft. Its old compliments of fighters and bombers had been stripped out, in favor of flight upon flight of modified thunderhawks, enough to transport the entire Penal Legion to the surface. Once the Triumph was roughly twelve thousand kilometers from the atmosphere of Drazak, it suddenly flared back into life and launched a furious salvo of macro cannons, plasma bolts, and lance strikes, directly towards the surface of Drazak, followed soon after by a mighty swarm of thunderhawk gunships. Once it had delivered its cargo, the chase was on, and the Triumph fled from rapid necron naval retaliation. It was up to the Last Chancers now.

The descent to Drazak was like a descent into hell itself. The clouds churned with green grave-light, and the scuttling silver of canoptek scarab swarms. Dozens of thunderhawks perished as their squadrons made for the surface as swiftly as they could. Dozens more were destroyed by opportunistic tomb blade fighters or linked pylon gauss weapons, or the living lightning of the few land-based defenses not destroyed by Triumph’s first orbital salvoes. Though hundreds died, thousands still got through the aerial death trap. They were rewarded with a clear view of the ossified nightmare of Drazak’s continental bone fields, stretching as far as the eye could see, illuminated only by the dull red light of a dying star. Almost straight away, flayed ones began to shimmer into existence, on the very wings of the thunderhawks themselves, scratching and tearing at the adamantine hulls with mindless fury. The guns of the hawks blazed red hot through constant firing, as they fought to destroy the necron attackers, and even so, fifty more spacecraft corkscrewed burning from the sky, to destroy themselves on the bone yard far below.

Yet still, onwards they flew. Crolomere, the only living soul amidst the necropolis, was not hard for the Penal legions psykers to locate, and they made all haste towards the outcrop of sundered ruins that she had hidden herself. The thunderhawks landed, forming a rough perimeter using void shield pylons and the hulls of damaged thunderhawks as barriers against the incursion of the flayed ones.

The necrons, unlike their more sane fellow androids, attacked the Thirteenth Legion in waves, millions strong. They had no ranged weapons, but with such numbers of deathless killing machines, they almost didn’t need them. Schaeffer led the Penal legion gun lines from the front, bellowing orders as his plasma pistol blazed in the haunting half-light of Drazak. Lascannons, autoguns, missiles and mortar shells repeatedly scythed down hundreds upon hundreds of the psychotic flayed ones, but still more foes clambered into the fray behind them, and most of those who fell simply rose again, pulling their shattered limbs back together carefully, with the calm precision of a clock smith.

As the colonel fought on the surface, Agravaine and Kage led forces into the smashed catacombs beneath the ruins they occupied, searching for Crolomere. In these depths, wraiths and scarabs crawled through the very walls to attack them at every turn. It was close quarters carnage. Demented knife men and convicts clashed in the darkness with blade-limbed nightmares from the dawn of time that parted flesh and armor alike with equal, disdainful precision. Terror gripped many of these criminals, but they were trapped in the dark and only fighting the enemy would ensure they could escape. These were hard men and women, who had fought all their lives to avoid the death by their fellow prisoners or the hangman’s noose; they were frenziedly determined not to die in this foul underworld.

Kage was the first one to smash his way into the old armory of the crashed ship that formed the heart of the ruined complex. Inside, he found a woman, bloody and sobbing. Her flesh was covered in bloody gashes, and her eyes were red raw with bitter tears. Even an immortal like her could only take so much punishment before her body began to fail, and she seemed close to a true and lasting death. She hadn’t long and she could no longer walk unaided. Thus, Kage determined to carry her back to the surface. It was said that when Kage lifted her from her gory resting place, her eyes briefly looked into his, and she whispered ‘Illuminatus’, much to Kage’s confusion, before passing into unconsciousness. With that, Kage and Agravaine desperately fought their way back the way they came, clambering over the many corpses of former allies. These bodies were piled five men deep in some places, faces ripped off and bellies slit open like abattoir fodder.

Meanwhile, the surface battle had become a desperate, hopeless affair. The Flayed ones had burrowed beneath the forcefield pylons, and had destroyed them one after another, before swarming into close quarters with the Penal Legionnaires. Fires raged all around, as the soldiers and their few remaining military vehicles fired at near point blank range at the terrible silver phantoms, clothed in the still-wet skin of their fellow soldiers. But if the Flayed ones thought they might break, they were wrong. The necrons never did fully understand the psyche of humans, and in particular the psyche of those of the criminally insane. Both sides fought with animal ferocity. When lasguns were spent, they were thrown into the fires raging all around, and their owners leapt into combat with knives and pistols, clubs and even crew suicide weapons built from demolition charges draped over their fists. The few survivors would then snatch up the lasguns form the fires, and unleash the last remaining lasvolleys upon their murderers.

The Colonel was unfazed by the insane carnage raging around him. He fired his pistol into close combat without a second thought, his power sword also flashing relentlessly as it carved apart his foes. He was almost as much metal as the necrons he battled, but his machinery could not repair itself as readily, but this would not stop him. As a deep and terrible night descended, the fiery battle continued to rage. Kage and Agravaine eventually reached the surface, alone save for the prone sensei. Agravaine formed a rearguard to Kage, blazing away with her bolter at the pursuing canoptek constructs. Escape from one hellhole led only to another; out of the frying pan, into the fire. Kage cursed as he stumbled into the chaotic battle with the flayed ones, hellpistol drawn in his one free hand.

The Lieutenant instantly began to make for the one thunderhawk left undamaged by the anarchy engulfing the ruined starship. He and Agravaine didn’t even spare a backward glance towards Schaeffer and the few hundred surviving Last Chancers dying behind them (one must remind oneself that these two were not good people, even though their heroic actions may sometimes fool us).

However, before they could reach the thunderhawk’s ramp with their prize, their hopes were dashed. A flayed one, larger and more ornate than any they had yet witnessed, emerged from the shattered bones between them and their craft. Valgul; the lord of the flayers himself. The towering silver figure had perfectly articulated claws and fangs, and its eyes glowed with a terrible green fire. Blood stained the creature’s fine ornamentation, and desiccated skins were stitched across its shoulders like some madman’s cloak.

Kage fired his hellpistol, but the lasweapon’s wounds healed almost as soon as his clip was spent. Agravaine also squeezed the trigger of her bolter, but the weapon clicked empty. The flayer lord said nothing as it charged the short distance between them. Kage’s face set in cold resignation, and Agravaine’s jaw clenched in reflexive fear. Death came for them.

It came as a shock to both of them when the flayed one was smashed aside by a great, grey mass of ceramite. The Overlord was sent sprawling for a moment. Kage’s savior rose first, his unpainted armor pitted and scarred by many blows. The towering Astartes rolled his shoulders, keeping his eyes at all times upon the rising necron killer.

“Depart with her, and redeem us all,” the space marine rumbled, his voice rendered inhuman by his helmet’s snarling grille. Kage and Agravaine didn’t need to be told twice, and virtually sprinted to the thunderhawk with all haste.

“I shall spill your blood and flay your flesh. You shall be deboned and your body will be peeled,” Valgul explained to the Astartes callously, as his claws began to crackle with energy.

“Your bloodlust is but the shadow of a memory,” the Astartes growled, as he began to draw his melee weapons from their sheaths. “I have known true berserkers, former brothers; men with true mortal lust for death and the flesh of their foes. And you, xenos, are a pale facsimile,” he snarled, grinning beneath his helm, as the implants at the base of his neck filled his mind with nothing but the white noise of mindless wrath.

The Astartes revved his twin chainaxes as he charged into battle with the Lord of the Flayed Ones. It took several minutes to start the thunderhawk’s engines, and Kage desperately watched the epic clash of demi-gods from afar as he waited for the ship to power up. They had to escape Drazak this evening and every single second counted.

Schaeffer eventually found himself stood atop a pile of corpses; his own soldiers, dead all around him. Every one of them had died with a weapon in his hands, and everyone was thus saved from damnation in the Colonel’s mind. There was only one sinner left, he noted as he fought on against the encircling foe. His pistol arm had been severed, and he had been burnt, disemboweled and most of his remaining skin had been ripped off. Yet still he stood, hacking and slashing apart foe after foe with his glittering powersword. He even continued to cut down his foes after the sword’s power supply had been severed, leaving it just a sharp, sparking length of adamantine. Soon, even this was shattered, and he continued to punch ineffectually at his enemy as they bore him to the ground, impaling him over and over again with energized claws.

Valgul and the repentant World Eater fought like legends from the lost millennia. The Astartes bled from scores of wounds, but shedding his own blood simply sent him into a deeper frenzy of blows. His axes carved deep wounds into the living metal skeleton of Valgul, and his blows never stopped falling against the necron. No matter how many wounds Valgul inflicted, the Astartes would not fall, just as Valgul’s reanimation protocols prevented him from collapsing under the weight of so many furious, powerful strikes. As they wrestled through the bones like wild terrors, Kage and Agravaine’s thunderhawk at last began to rise, banking and deftly soaring between the arcing energy lashes of the necron defense grid.

Schaeffer, broken and bleeding upon a mound of the dead, looked up to the early morning sky, and saw the hawk rising, leaving contrails in its wake. He could not talk, for his lungs and mouth were full of blood, but he did grin, for perhaps the first time in living memory, the colonel of the thirteenth grinned with genuine happiness. Soon, Valgul appeared before him. The Overlord was a sundered ruin, his head cloven half in two, his broken mechanics sparking and ruined beyond even his reanimation protocols could repair. Nevertheless, the Lord was still very much alive, and he gently pressed his metal foot onto Schaeffer’s chest, making the ancient human to wince in agony. Hatefully, the Colonel spat his still-lit cigar into the necron’s blank face. But when the necron pressed his foot harder into the Colonel’s chest, he did not wince, or scream or curse Valgul. He simply smiled, his eyes fixed upon the rising sun. The sunrise was bright, brighter than it had been in Drazak’s entire history. Valgul watched in confusion as the human flesh beneath him began to blacken and burn. Likewise, all the flesh draped over his fellow flayed ones was burning and melting before his eyes. It was then that Valgul realized what had happened, and turned towards the rising sun, that loomed vast and white in the sky.

That one torpedo, the stray torpedo his fleet had not troubled themselves with destroying in the opening few minutes of the initial naval battle, had reached Drazak’s dying star. Ordinarily, that would have meant nothing, but that torpedo bore no simple plasma warhead.

It was a nova bomb.

In orbit, the triumph received a single thunderhawk, and instantly made its way towards the edge of the system. Behind them, Drazak’s star was going supernova, not merely nova. They had barely ten minutes to reach the translation point before the radiation of the explosion crossed the void and reached them. The necron fleet was rushing towards the nova. Perhaps they were attempting to quell the nova using their miraculous science? We shall never know, for all history remembers is that, on that day, as the Triumph made an emergency warp jump inside a planetary system, Drazak the bone kingdom, and all the planets and ships still inside the system, were consumed by a colossal supernova, which, after seven years, expanded to depopulate many neighboring lightyears of space. At a stroke, the flayed ones were almost entirely wiped out by the most powerful natural force in the entire universe.

However, all was not well aboard the retreating Triumph of Salazan. For, just before they had translated into the warp, a pack of desperate flayed ones had teleported on board, just as the triumph had lowered its shields to allow Kage’s ship to dock. In the warp, isolated from any help, the crew of the Triumph were easy prey. The flayed ones stalked the corridors like ghouls, ripping apart crew members and any armsmen who attempted to hunt them down. They left gory, skinless corpses as the only mark of their passing. Desperate and terrified, the crew attempted to barricade themselves in various fortified areas of the ship, and hold out the storm of carnage throughout heir ship. Crolomere was only just recovering, as this new horror befell them. She could feel the warp churning with hungry daemons, like sharks around a boat spilling fresh blood behind them.

The low caliber weaponry of the naval security forces were in no way adequate in taking on reanimating necrons, for even the mighty shotcannons were insufficient to permanently put down a fully-powered necron android. In the first few days of warp travel, almost half the crew were dead, left to their own defense by the captain’s armed forces, who focused on protecting the navigator and the warp engine block.

It seemed as if the Triumph would die an ignominious end, slain with pathetic ease by the remnants of their vanquished foe. However, the beleaguered Luna class cruiser had one weapon left in its arsenal; Crolomere the Grey. She was healed, and she had a plan. She escaped the infirmary, moments before it was overrun by flayed ones, and made her way to Kage’s quarters. Eventually, she had gathered together Kage, Agravaine and some of the surviving crew; men in tattered rags, desperately following whoever looked like they knew what they were doing. Together, Crolomere explained her audacious plan to them all.

She, Kage and the crewmen made their way towards the bridge, making as much noise and commotion as possible. Her intention was to draw the flayed ones towards them, and it worked horrifically well. Within an hour, the flayed ones could be heard approaching, metal clattering against metal as they ran through corridors and scuttled through vents to find their quarry. Meanwhile, Agravaine made her way towards the aft sections of the ship, fighting her way through any misguided defenses the paranoid crew had erected to prevent anyone from passing. She didn’t think twice about murdering the crew in her way; she was a psychopath, without the burden of empathy that afflicted her fellow, lesser humans. She eventually reached her destination, and pressed her bolter to the Magos’ temple.

“Do exactly as I say,” she purred. “Or you might be meeting your omnissiah sooner than you would like.”

The flayed ones were fast and lethally efficient in their killing, and Crolomere had lost half of her allies after barely ten minutes of battle. Eventually, the survivors made a last stand in one of the ship’s mess halls. They made makeshift barricades with the long benches and tables inside, and engaged the flayed ones with the few autoguns, shotguns and handcannons the crewmen had been able to salvage from their dead comrades. It was not nearly enough. The necrons shredded the crew like blind cattle. Their feeble weapons barely even scratched the undying abominations that eagerly skinned them alive for their trouble. Kage’s stolen shotgun was soon spent, and he instead drew his inferno pistol, and began to fire at the surrounding monsters, backing away towards Crolomere, who likewise emptied a clip of her bolt pistol into the undead aliens.

“Hold me. Close,” Crolomere panted to Kage.

The convict almost laughed, thinking she was scared and looking for his comfort. “When your plan goes down, we’re dead. I’m no comfort to you, I promise you.”

However, when he looked into her eyes, he realized she was not scared, but was coldly determined, her will like Iron. Her plea was not a request, but an order. He had only seen eyes like that once before, on old Schaeffer himself. Kage did as he was told, and she hugged him close to her chest. The flayed ones closed in.

“Agravaine! Now!” Crolomere yelled into her vox.

For roughly five point seven seconds, Agravaine had coerced the magos controlling the ships Gellar field, to lower the shield, before raising it again. In that moment, a veritable avalanche of warp entities flooded the ship; a billion monsters drawn to the Triumph by the slaughter of the flayed ones. The necrons recoiled, as they felt the flayed skin draped over their shoulders begin to writhe with unnatural life. The flesh coiled and constricted, mutating as it flowed like wax into new and obscene forms. The androids screeched with their rasping, artificial voices, but to the horror of Kage, their machine voices morphed into real voices. Their living metal was flooded with horns and tendrils, rippling with newborn nightmares that burst and crawled across their glossy surfaces. He watched the machines regain their souls, only for them to be devoured and shredded all over again. Even Kage, the hardened criminal, turned from this horrific sight, and buried his face into Crolomere’s shoulders.

The warp and all its madness washed through the ship, destroying hundreds of the crew, and driving even more of them utterly mad. Yet, the tide of damnation was all flooding in the same direction; towards the sensei. The warp churned around her like a great whirlpool. She was the becalmed heart at the centre of the storm, the eye of the hurricane. Daemons rushed to consume her, and were rebuffed by her raw power. She called upon all her powers. She was grey no longer, as she silently screamed out to her father and his power, infused in her blood, was unleashed.

The Gellar field reactivated, and the daemons, cut off from their power, dissolved and withered in Crolomere’s presence. She released Kage, who stumbled backwards onto his rump. For a few moments, he was dumbstruck as he beheld Crolomere. She shone golden as the dawning of Sol, for an instant before the shimmering halo of power dissipated. Power spent, she collapsed.

Several months later, the Triumph broke into realspace, on the edge of the Armageddon system. The ship was battered, ravaged by huge claws marks, and part of the hull seemed to have fused with a fungal warp entity. Inside, almost the entire crew was dead; the few survivors were gibbering lunatics, running naked through the haunted corridors. These men were put out of their misery by the Steel legion rescue teams sent in to investigate the wreck. However, locked inside the navigator’s chamber, the team found the navigator, alongside Crolomere, Kage and the now-lifeless Agravaine. They were sane and quite alive.

I must confess, as I write this tome, I search my study for further histories about this event. There are none. No legends or epic poems were written about these unsung heroes, and the Imperium kept no records of this black ops event after it had returned successful. To the wider galaxy, the Last war of the Thirteenth was a merchant fleet, which had died with all hands during a freak warpstorm. However, now the truth is known. This was a pivotal battle for many reasons. Firstly, after returning to Armageddon, Crolomere was spirited away by the brethren of the Willing, to an audience with Vulkan and his advisors, to aid in the war against her former ally, Ahriman the Sorcerer. The second reason is less obvious at first. I only discovered it truly after we access the Black Library’s Cognate crystals, where the jumbled memory of all sentient life were stored haphazardly. The memories I accessed there, relating to Kage, were rather revealing.

Kage was given his freedom at long last, but the borderline madman found himself lost, cut adrift in a world he no longer recognized. The past is a foreign land, some scholars claim, but the future is just as alien. Kage was a man out of time and recognized nothing. He had been given a monetary reward for his efforts on Drazak, but no recognition by the general populace. He was merely a violent ex-soldier to the Imperium. He could get no work in the Steel Legion, and he had no skills that he could turn to peaceful work, beyond becoming a labourer. Instead of this drudgery, he turned to drink, frequenting various bars across Armageddon’s cities, recounting tales of when he killed the rogue Governor of Armageddon when the world was still a toxic hellhole. He became some forgotten, drunken derelict, feared and detested by the common man.

However, one night, when he was at his lowest, he was visited at his table by an odd gentleman. This man was youthful, but his eyes were ancient. His coat was multi-colored, and Kage found he could not follow the swirling colors, but dismissed that as his own bleary vision playing tricks on him. The man was accompanied by a tall, slender figure; a bipedal machine, which stood attentively at his master’s side like a butler. The mysterious man smiled warmly as he sat down opposite the bearded vagabond Kage, setting a book down on the table, just to his side.

“Hello Lieutenant,” the man began, catching Kage’s attention almost instantly. “My name is Bronislaw. We’ve been looking for you for quite a while now.”

“Why?” Kage said bitterly.

“You were possessed.”

Kage said nothing, glaring at the colorful man threateningly.

The man continued. “Of course, many people are possessed. However, very few manage to toss their unwanted lodger back out again. The Exorcist marines managed it, and the Illuminati, but they are out of our reach presently. But you did it alone; a mortal man, alone against the might of a daemon, and succeeding. That is very interesting to us. To the Throne.”

The last sentence was spoken quietly. Kage grinned at the man spitefully.

“The Emperor is dead, friend. What millennia are you living in?” Kage laughed mirthlessly.

“M56 I believe... or is it M55?” the man chuckled. As Kage got up to leave, the machine man placed a hand on his shoulder, urging him to sit down again with silent insistence. He did so.

“I think you know that isn’t true my friend; what you said about Him I mean,” the stranger clarified, like a scholar chiding a wayward student. “You felt her power, firsthand, didn’t you?”

Kage said nothing. He didn’t need to.

Bronislaw nodded. “You tried to rationalize it as her being a latent psyker, but you’ve felt psykers before. You’ve felt daemons before too, closer than most mortals could dream of. She’s neither. Her blood is His, and if she still possessed power, then he is not dead.” Kage considered this, and the revelation nearly floored him. He had never been particularly pious, but this was different. So much different.

He took a moment to respond, wetting his dry lips and running a hand through his scraggly beard. “What... what do you want with me?”

Bronislaw smiled, his expression full of expression and excitement. “You have a strong will; possibly one of the strongest in a normal human. We need men like you, where we are going.”

“And where are you going?”

After hearing this question, Bronislaw Czevak opened the book on the table, and then he told former Lieutenant Kage their destination.

Additional background Section 36: The Solemnace Galleries

For well over twenty thousand years, the world of Pax Argentius had been a dead world; not only a lifeless world, but a world centered upon death and its remembrance. It was a silent cemetery, carved from lifeless bedrock. Catacombs and graves, dedicated to every single Silver Skulls Chapter Master to bear the inherited name of Argentius were interred there, alongside their most loyal serfs. It was a solemn and near-silent place and the few sounds that permeated the quiet was the hum of shield generator pylons, built to ensure the planet remained forever pristine, and the turgid motion of the thin atmosphere captured by this force field.

However, following the Grand Siege of Varsavia and the death of the last Argentius, this silence was to be disturbed.

(The following narrative account has been created through cultivating numerous memory crystals from the Black Library, combined with what few eye witness accounts survive into antiquity and were stored in libraries I had access to. I have attempted to avoid embellishment, but as ever, with incomplete accounts, such things are inevitable. However, this account is easier the most complete account on this matter.)

The strike cruiser Lucianus carried Argentius’s body to Pax Argentius, for it was apparently the first ship he had commanded as a Captain, when he was still called Brother Luk’venner. This vessel was escorted by a large host of Silver Skulls vessels, but was also accompanied by another force. These vessels were green, and clad in stylized thorn-patterns, and sleek beyond the dreams of any human craftsman. These were eldar vessels of the Biel-tan alliance.

It had taken Eldrinoth the farseer weeks of psychic debates with Chief Prognosticator Allaten, before the post human had consented to the eldar landing upon the sacred ground of Pax Argentius, and soiling its earth with their perfidious forms. But Allaten had been convinced by the eldar’s quest. The eldar had rescued Varsavia from the Corsairs, and had given the Skulls the coordinates and time when Huron was going to be at his weakest. Letting them into the basilica of Ossified Argent was the least the Astartes could do to repay them.

Allaten led his honor guard, who bore Argentius’ body on a litter between their shoulders. Behind them, a small taskforce of eldar, composed of rangers, guardians and a handful of striking scorpions, followed at a respectful distance. The eldar understood the need for the dead to be respected; perhaps they knew this better than most. Though Argentius was a stranger to them, they had to stifle empathetic tears, conjured by their proximity to such raw, human grief.

Once Allaten reached the inner sanctum, he spoke the ancient words of remembrance and mourning, and he allowed the gene-vault to sample his blood to confirm his identity. With that, the vault opened, and the great spiraling casket-hold allowed them to enter, ushering the slender aliens to enter the tomb alongside them, before the doors sealed themselves once more. I have no records of what the funeral rites of Argentius entailed, but after this was concluded, the eldar began their search. They examined every carved surface, and their minds slid from their bodies, to roam over the residual psychic imprints that formed the luminal architecture of the tomb.

As they searched, Allaten formed a rapport with one of the rangers, known as Myrinmar; this was mainly due to the fact that both of them were two hundred years old, born in the same year. Allaten considered this an omen, as did the eldar female. Both the Silver Skulls and the eldar were superstitious and cognizant of prophecies and their import.

Eventually, Eldrinoth and his warlocks located what they were looking for; a vast stone ring, half-buried in the carved structures of the planet’s inert crust. This ring was no ordinary sculpture of simple carving. It was a dolmen gate, one of the invasive gates designed by the Lord of Fire to invade the webway, and form a network of tunnels independent of the old ones’ system. In the end, they were not fully successful, but nevertheless the necrons still had an extensive grid of interlinking junctions in the Labyrinth dimension. Eldrinoth explained that this portal was hard-linked to one tombworld in particular; Solemnace. This name meant nothing to Allaten, but the eldar knew this realm well, for it was the location of the galleries of Trayzn the Infinite. Trayzn was a mad creature, a necron by quirk of fate but quite unlike the rest of his species in cognition, if not appearance. He was a collector, not of mere artifacts, but of great swathes of living beings and their associated artifacts. Like some avaricious miser, this mad mechanical entity had spent eternity discreetly stealing people and creatures to turn into hard-light statues at the heart of his enslaved tombworld. Unlike other necrons, this one was capricious and prone to flights of whimsy. Myrinmar, an ancestor of Alaitoc stock, was greatly concerned about this destination, but she said nothing. She trusted the elderly Eldrinoth, even though the necrons were her most bitter of antagonists.

Eldrinoth and his assistants activated the dolmen gate after weeks of arduous psychic labor. They intended, with Allaten’s aid, to steal something from Trayzn. Trayzn the Infinite’s realm held many treasures, stolen over millions of years of larceny. The most valuable artifact to the eldar was the infamous Wraithbone Choir of Altansar. The choir had become a myth, and few knew what the choir actually consisted of, but the seers of Biel-tan felt, with all their hearts, that the wraithbone choir was essential to the continued existence of the galaxy. They had to retrieve it, no matter the cost.

Though skeptical of the eldar’s mission, Allaten had cast the runes upon Varsavia, and destiny had determined he would aid the eldar in this endeavor. The dolmen gate opened with a great rippling of color, shining with every shade conceivable to a mortal eye. Then, the portal between the ring of boundary stones seemed to fall away into a deep pit or tunnel, stretching beyond sight into a place unfathomably distant. Casting aside doubt, the allied force stepped through the gate. The tunnel constantly groaned and sighed, flickering runes sliding around them like oil through water. They were flaring red, and they all felt a sympathetic pain gnawing at their heads. They felt the wrongness of the portal, and how it violated the webway. The Labyrinth dimension itself was fighting to destroy the passageway, and its instability was a concern for the force that travelled its length. They quickened their pace, lest they be consumed by the aborted dolmen route.

Both Allaten and Eldrinoth found that their powers of foresight and divination were stymied; something shrouded the future from their sight. Were they destined to die there, or was some malevolence working against them? They had no answers at that time.

Yet, eventually, they reached the other side, clambering upwards as if ascending from a pit they had fallen into. The eldar and astartes emerged into a grand hall of pristine living metal, with infinitely intricate patterns carved into it at a subatomic level. The dolmen gate was but one portal amongst hundreds that were set into the walls like mirrors, which reflected far distant realms within their shimmering depths. The place was cold as a tomb and almost as silent. The glittering scarabs that crawled along the walls barely seemed to notice the intruders. Some bleeped and hissed, glowing green, but they seemed content to watch the intruders and do nothing. However, even as the force of men and eldar spread out to begin the search, they felt the familiar, acrid tang of a invasion beam engulf them and whisk them from the portal chamber.

Suddenly, all around them, there was a ring of necron immortals, weapons held as if in mute salute. They were no longer in the portal chamber; they had been transported to some far corner of the great tomb complex, which, in contrast to the cold and dark portal chamber, was alive with sinister green corpse-light. At one end of this new hall, the walls formed a smooth, ornate throne, built in mockery of the austere thrones of human kings. Upon this throne sat a necron overlord, ribs a deep azure, swathed in a segmented cloak of living metal.

“Did you think you could simply stroll into my collection... unmolested?” the necron asked. Its voice, while obviously artificial, sounded almost scholarly, as if the Overlord had an academic interest in the question it had asked.

Allaten and his men instantly reached for their weapons, but were transfixed in place; beams of energy from the vaulted ceiling struck their limbs and made them leaden. All vitality was drained from the Astartes, and they found themselves fixed into place, like living statues. The eldar warlocks were also still, but this was out of choice. The other eldar, confused, also raised their weapons, ready to attack the looming destroyers. However, Eldrinoth stopped them with an impulse, his thin hand raised gently. “Hold your fire, my children. Everything is under control now.”

The Silver Skulls had been betrayed.

Trayzn rose from his throne swiftly, leaping down onto the hall’s floor like an excited child. He walked over to the Space marines, and carefully examined them. “Adeptus Astartes, First Age Imperial armor. I had thought the silver skulls vanished. That would have been a tragedy,” Trayzn explained to no one in particular. Eventually, after Eldirnoth’s insistence, the Overlord returned to his throne, to hear the traitorous farseer out. As he sat down, the Astartes vanished; transported to another section of the archive.

“We have held up our side of the bargain; Silver Skulls of Imperial vintage. Now give us the choir, and let us be rid of each other,” Eldrinoth explained with distaste.

As they awaited the necron’s response, Myrinmar cursed the farseer; even for a race as naturally duplicitous as the eldar, making deals with the necrons was simply a compromise too far. Eldrinoth ignored her as he patiently awaited Trayzn’s verdict.

Trayzn withheld his reply for several agonizing minutes, before his green eyes glowered once more upon the farseer.

“I am loathe to part with any elements of my collection, even if it is by trade. Yet... your offer is so intriguingly desperate, I was persuaded to honor our concordance,” Trayzn explained carefully. “Until, that is, I got offered a far better deal.”

Eldrinoth’s blood ran cold. “There is no better deal. You need us; if you betray us, we shall thwart your attempts to add anything further to your collections. We know where all the greatest artifacts of this universe are located. We would destroy the, and ruin any hope of your recovering them,” Eldrinoth hissed through clenched teeth.

“Your powers are much diminished of late, eldar, if you think you have the power to control all the artifacts of the galaxy. Only Lorgar the Magnificent possesses such power.”

This third voice was wet and odious, with the crude cadence of a mon keigh beast. Eldrinoth sneered when he saw the ragged forms of cult soldiers of the Imperium of Travesties appear in the gallery above them, clad in all manner of strange and disgusting garments. Their leader, Prenterghast, grinned with a mouth too large for his skull, a blade of living bone oozing black foulness at his side.

Prenterghast’s master, the daemon Cherubael, had promised Trayzn far more than merely Astartes. He promised the necron an entire commandery, once the Imperium Pentus fell. In exchange, Trayzn had simply renege on his offer to the eldar, and nullify their truce.

It was a simple choice, in the end.

The eldar fired first, despite their shock, shredding dozens of Prenterghast’s minions, and striking down several Immortals, before they slowly rose to their feet once more. The warlocks unleashed an electrical storm upon the Lord of Solemnace, but his lychguard interposed themselves between him and the warp energy. The return fire was lethal as it was brutally brief. Autoguns barked, as tesla-carbines unleashed living lightning amidst the eldar, who vainly sought to leap into cover. A striking scorpion managed to leap between the lychguard, but was soon transfixed upon the end of Trayzn’s stave. The ancient weapon destroyed the mind of the scorpion, and the mysterious power of the staff meant all the other scorpion warrior fell to the ground moments later, their minds destroyed utterly.

Soon, Eldrinoth found he was standing alone, disarmed, surrounded by his many foes. But the old eldar would not beg or cower before his enemies.

“What now, mirror-devil?” he spat hatefully. “Am I to become one of your exhibits?”

“Hmm? What? Oh no; I already have a farseer,” Trayzn replied dismissively, as if he hadn’t been paying attention to the eldar’s defiant last words.

Before Eldrinoth could say another word, his fate was revealed violently, as he was stabbed in the back. In horror, the farseer watched as a great bony blade erupted from his chest, and shattered his soulstone in that same instant. “My blade is named Sesith’slethil, for she is home to a handmaiden of the Prince. Can you feel her hunger now, at the end, as she drinks your soul down in one gulp? Oh... She is Thirsty...” Prenterghast purred in Eldrinoth’s ear, as the ancient eldar died the true death, an expression of horror etched upon his face.

This sorry tale might have ended right there, in the Infinite Hall of Trayzn, if not for the fact not every eldar perished in the skirmish. Myrinmar and her team bore shifting cloaks of a most fantastic camouflage. When the battle began, they slipped from the chamber in desperation, fighting the urge to aid their brothers in their final fight. But she knew she had to survive. Fate had linked her with the Prognosticator Allaten, and she knew that the only way to survive Solemnace rested with this mon keigh, wherever he might be.

Alaitoc rangers were skilled in hiding themselves from necrons, for their craftworld had ever been the nemesis of many a necron Overlord. Myrinmar and her siblings were no different, and soon Trayzn himself had lost track of them within his endless galleries. However, Prenterghast’s daemon sword was slanneshi, and she could taste the souls of the eldar. Eager to be rid of unwanted additions to his collection, Trayzn allowed the human cultists to stalk the eldar through Solemnace, and drive them into the open, where the Immortals and the canoptek swarms would surely flay them.

Myrinmar, however, was cunning and she led the cultists on a winding chase through the labyrinth of exhibits and exhibitions Trayzn had carefully poised in countless dioramas and strange shapes. The rangers passed through frozen battlefields of dueling, inhuman xenoforms, ancient human armies silently standing to attention for all eternity, and between strange devices that sparked and glittered and hummed in a wild perfusion of different actions. She passed by an empty plinth that had once held a giant in ornate armor. Once, she saw the head of a mon keigh priest-born writhing in horrible mockery of life, held in mid-air in a glimmer-field. Every gallery, every collection, was unique. At first it was confusing for both sides, but soon, the eldar recognized each exhibit, and used them to aid in navigation. They constantly turned back upon their foes, taking pot shots at the rearguard, before dissolving back into the shadows. Yet, the eldar took casualties, regardless of their cunning. Each time one of them fired, the spyders were alerted, and they unleashed their interceptor machines, and that eldar perished.

Myrinmar knew her days were numbered. She had not eaten in weeks, nor slept for more than a few scattered hours each day in that strange, permanently illuminated museum of curios and stolen mementoes. Her long rifle was spent, and she stalked the dark with a scorpion’s chainsword clutched to her chest. She knew she had only one hope of escaping Solemnace. Allaten had to be freed.

The brief moment of connection she had felt earlier between them was only a minor psychic impulse; barely a single, flickering ribbon of ethereal energy. But she held onto that, and used it to guide her towards the Silver Skull exhibit. The exhibit was fifty meters square; depicting a battle between skulls and the Red Corsairs, locked in some sort of recreated naval boarding action. The plague beneath it read ‘Gildar Rift’ in necron glyphs, but the name meant little to the eldar. With the discordant shrieking of Prenterghast’s cultists echoing as they closed upon her surviving rangers, she reached into the hard-light tableau, and her mind joined with that of the Astartes witch-knight. At first, there was nothing but white-hot rage seething in the mind of Allaten, but as the link deepened, he learned of Myrinmar’s innocence, and her desperate need of his help. Slowly but surely, she drew the human’s mind to the fore of his immobile form.

The cultists fell upon them like mad savages. They rangers were skilled, but even the most adept combatant could fall to superior numbers, and fall they did. Myrinmar found herself alone again, her blade purring as it carved apart foe after foe, her fusion blaster immolating any who escaped her fell sword. However, Prenterghast was no mere human; he was empowered by his wicked slanneshi blade, and it carved burning trials through the air as it swept towards her, again and again. Soon enough, the chainblade lay bisected at her feet. Prenterghast was ready, hungry to drink the ranger’s soul. His mouth opened wider than a human was capable. His men closed in all around her. They raised their autoguns, and fired.

Their bullets struck ceramite pauldrons and armored greaves harmlessly, as Allaten interposed himself between Myrinmar and the cultists. His mind had been set free, and the first thing it had done was cast a machine curse upon the hard light prison which held him. Soon enough, he and his honor guard were free, and they murdered the mortals who sought to destroy them. Only Prenterghast escaped; his sword shattered over Allaten’s knee, and his face shredded by shrapnel. The Skulls’ easy victory was cut short by a hail of bolter fire from behind them. Five Corsairs had been freed from stasis too, and they knew only to murder. This skirmish was far more brutal and bloody for both sides, but was equally brief. At its close, Allaten’s men had been reduced to four, and the corsairs were destroyed, burnt to ashes by Allaten’s furious force bolts.

“Disrupting the hardlight emitters frees both sides,” he nodded coldly.

When Allaten explained how he had cursed the necron machinery, Myrinmar had but one question for the Space marine.

“Can you do it again?” she smiled.

The battle with Prenterghast alerted Trayzn’s automatons and Immortals to the location of his foes, and the alien allies found themselves fighting off tides of scarabs and lumbering silver killers. However, Trayzn had not considered that Myrinmar and Allaten would be so uncultured, so base and vulgar, to remove his display pieces from their hard light packaging.

Allaten released everything he could. Ambulls and clawed fiends howled in animalistic fury as they ripped through the galleries. Hellions and furies wheeled overhead, ripping at cables, dueling each other in the air and shrieking in glee. The halls shook with the footfalls of a squiggoth, the caustic cracking of imperial lasgun fire, and the deafening challenges of kroot war parties and Groevian shredders. Trayzn’s menagerie had never been awoken all at once, and the effect was... utter carnage. They fought with the necrons as much as each other. Spiraling missiles shattered against hard necron bodies, blood flowed in streams down wide boulevards, and all the name plates were buckled and ruined by sudden, violent conflict.

It is said, as Trayzn witnessed this chaos he screamed, declaring everything was ‘out of place’ and ‘spoiled’.

Amidst this colossal clash of divergent forces, non-combatant exhibits fled in all directions, weeping, hooting or cowering. Jokaero built forcefields around themselves instinctively, and weapon impacts bounced crazily from these fields, striking other combatants at random. Orks bellowed for waaagh, while nephilim ripped off portions of their towering forms and made serfs of whoever they ensnared. Tyranids, preserved examples of their kind from millennia past, were awoken, and began to do what they were bred for; they killed. Gaunt packs dragged down Krieg soldiers, while a harridan ripped the throat from a squiggoth, which crushed a dozen spyders beneath its scaly bulk as it fell. Some forces retained a semblance of order, like dense islands of sanity carefully dispatching disruptive elements. A battalion of mordians formed a tight square, presenting a hedge of steel as they fired over and over into the baying mobs of aliens and traitors and cyborgs that scrambled and clawed at them. Elsewhere, a company of white-armored Astartes in vintage plate fought with fluid grace and brutal, efficient force; bolter and knife defeated what arcane science and monstrous maws could not.

It would be follow on my part to attempt to depict every furious skirmish that raged amidst this rout, but suffice to say the necrons were taken aback by this turn of events, and it took their programming a while to react to this rapidly developing situation.

Even Allaten wasn’t prepared for the sheer madness he had unleashed, and he sprinted between dozens of running battles with a sure-footedness he did not feel in his heart. Myrinmar seemed to know the way better than he, but in the end, he followed her simply because he had no other sane reference point. They picked up stragglers along the way; confused former exhibits roaming the blood-soaked galleries in stupefied wonder and awful dread. One such figure would be known to history as Julius Hawke.

But as they travelled through the murderous melee raging on every level of the complex, their numbers were thinned; stray shots killed the unwary and lucky blows made some fall behind and become lost. Eventually, only the three remained, and things were getting desperate. Myrinmar insisted that they search for the Altansar wraithbone choir; their ordeal could not be for nothing. Desperately, they clambered up library shelves fifty meters tall, leaping between stacks with as much agility as they could muster. Below, a phalanx of necrons began to march, gauss beams carving a path forwards with relentless purpose. Trayzn was in no mood to play games now. They had mere minutes before Trayzn’s legions carved their way through his collection, and reached them.

Myrinmar eventually reached the eldar section of the gallery, and frantically gathered all the artifacts, totems and jewels she could find. She did not know what to look for, or indeed what a wraithbone choir even was; only Eldrinoth had known what to look for, and he was dead. More than dead; he was banished to hell. Allaten helped in the search, and as he searched, he found something he did not expect. A sword, vast and flawless, lay before him. It shrank to fit the scale of the Librarian’s hand, as if it desired that he liberate it from Trayzn’s prison. Allaten had no idea what the Anathame was, or that it was also known as the Blade of Midnight. All he knew was that he needed a sword.

Suddenly, a spyder burst into view. Without thinking, Allaten unleashed a bolt of lightning from his outstretched palm. This merely slowed the towering machine, and its claws narrowly missed his exposed head. Hawke fired with his stolen hellgun, but the fat ruby sparks didn’t even give the mechanical abomination pause. However, when a slender giant of bright yellow wraithbone leapt from its hard-light prison, and punched its three meter blade through the spyder’s glowing power orb, the spyder noticed. It flailed frantically at the wraithlord, but to no avail. With a solemn twist of its scimitar sword, the wraith dispatched its foe, saluted awkwardly, before it leapt off the shelf stack, into the swirling, demented melee below.

“That was odd,” Hawke noted blandly, instinctively staying near to Allaten’s armored bulk.

Bedecked in eldar ornamentation, Myrinmar beckoned for them to flee; she felt, in her strange xenos heart, that one of the artifacts was the choir. The choir was a simple pendant, containing the combined spiritual essence of seven hundred generations of Altansaran farseers, all trapped singing the final lament; the tune of the risen dead. The song that would wake the Revenant hosts and purify the soul. The song of the dead Goddess; Ynnead. It had to be returned to her people. It had to be released into the infinity circuit. Only then could the awakening begin, and hope be renewed...

But the trio could not simply leave with their prize. The galleries had been sealed, and Trayzn’s phalanxes had set up defensive formations around the main processional hallway gates (inadvertently indicating precisely where the portal chambers would be located). Trayzn was happy to simply trap the trio inside their self-created hell; let them be destroyed by their fellow freed inmates. Three people alone, no matter how mighty, could not hope to break through the ranks of a necron phalanx. Well, except for perhaps a company of Silver Skulls. In fact, any company of marines, if sufficiently skilled might be able to do so, he corrected himself. Then Allaten noticed the pale Space marines methodically cutting a swathe through the unruly mobs. He did not recognize their canine iconography or their plate colours, but they seemed righteous enough.

Allaten braved mobs of orks, flights of vespid and tides of slithering thyrrus to reach his fellow marines, desperately shielding his two allies as he did so. His armor was soon blackened and torn in many places, leaking coolant and blood in equal measure. His psychic powers were stretched to their limit, and he simply battered aside his foes with great two- handed sweeps of the anathame.

“What mad realm is this? Throne, has every damn xenos in the galaxy come to make sport with us?” a Captain in a plumed helmet bellowed to Allaten, evidently recognizing only the Silver Skulls armor, assuming the two were allies.

“Heed me; Allaten! We are captured by a xenos overlord brothers!” Allaten bellowed over the din of battle, gesturing towards the necron forces gathering at one end of the huge gallery. “See there is the key! We need to make a breakout there, or else we will be crushed by the weight of this savage multitude!”

No further discussion was required; the white-armored commander simply nodded, and relayed orders through his vox channel.

The Astartes surge came swift and suddenly against the slow, deliberate necron host. For all their lack of haste, the necrons were no less lethal. Their flayers stripped marine sot the bone as easily as if they were unarmored. But the space marines were not fools. They did not march to their death like men of Krieg or Valhallan conscripts. They took to barricades, and each element covered the advance of another, lascannons and missile pods dismantling necrons heavy weapons long enough to allow the post-humans to advance again, and again, and again. With a final great roar, the marines surged into combat from two directions. Ceramite smashed into living metal, bolt pistols barked, flayers screamed with a dry hiss, and knife met axe in sonorous melee. The necrons were the toughest opponents the pale Astartes had ever encountered, but this only pushed them on to insane lengths. They did not fear these death- faced androids, but neither did they spend their lives in hopeless battle. When the lychguard entered the fray, melee ceased, and the soldiers opened up with full force upon the royal guardians.

The skirmish was close and brutal, but surprisingly bloodless, almost sanitary in its carnage. The necrons had no blood and their weapons left no blood when they stripped flesh to bone, then bone to nothingness. The Commander struck a necron lychguard square in the face with a head butt that rang like a church bell, as he bisected it with his powered dagger and short sword. Allaten found the anathame a mighty weapon. His hatred of the necrons lent his blade a peculiar power. He felt it, in the back of his skull. It was the bane of whatever its master demanded. The necrons the anathame struck down did not rise again...

Though the battle was arduous, eventually they reached the gate that barred their path. Melta barrages and krak mines bored white-hot holes in the metal, which were widened by power swords even as the living metal sought to heal. Myrinmar leapt bodily through one of these holes, while Hakwe gingerly clambered through one, taking the occasional potshot at the necrons at his back. Allaten and the surviving marines took up the rearguard, firing in a steady stream as they executed a perfect withdrawal. Half-skimmer necrons gave chase, cutting down dozens with their questing green gauss beams, but the Astartes kept up the pace as they neared the portal chamber. As they finally reached the room, the Astartes barred the entrance as best they could; it was not much, but it would buy them time to escape home through the portals. However, the room had changed. No portal was the same as before, for they led to places Allaten had never seen before; battlefronts he had yet to fight upon, and enemies he’d yet to face. Myrinmar was likewise baffled. I suspect that the group simply found the wrong portal chamber, as Solemnace was a vast world with many wormhole portal nexuses scattered across its surface and beneath its armored skin.

There was no time to deliberate on this though. Allaten could sense something coming. All the billion strong garrison of the Infinite One was descending upon them. If they dallied for too long, they would be crushed. The Commander, who named himself Captain Kaidmus of the Luna Wolves (a chapter Allaten did not recognize), offered to accompany Allaten, but the eldar insisted she needed to reach Altansar.

“We must go our separate ways brother,” Allaten explained to the Luna Wolves.

“Where do these gateways lead?” Kaidmus asked.

Allaten didn’t know, and told him as such.

The commander laughed then; a rare sound coming from an Astartes. “Ah to hell with it, we’ll take our chances. Well met, my Silvered brother. I pray you return to your Legion in time. Now, brothers of the 118th, with me! For the Emperor!” the commander bellowed, gesturing towards a portal, selected seemingly at random.

“For the emperor!” they echoed their master.

“For Horus Lupercal!” he bellowed, as he plunged into the rippling gateway’s mouth.

“For Horus Lupercal!” the ancient, temporally dislocated Luna Wolves echoed, before they charged in after their leader. Soon, the chamber was empty, save for Myrinmar, Allaten and Julius Hawke.

They looked to each other, in a moment of confusion evident on all their faces.

“Did he say Horus? He said Horus...” Hawke was the first to speak, his voice incredulous and bewildered in equal measure.

Further discussion was cut short, as the entire chamber rocked with unnatural force. Trayzn was coming. One by one, the portals began to go dark and deactivate. He sought to trap them. The trio wasted no more time. As one, they leapt into the last portal, spanning impossible spans of space, and into the unknown.

It took Trayzn months to cleanse his galleries of the menagerie of fiends unleashed by Allaten. Only then, when the unruly were dead, could he catalogue his surviving collection, and mark down what needed to be replaced.

The number of artifacts that escaped Solemnace cannot be easily estimated; it is known that there were legends of a great, plasma-spewing drake that terrorized several worlds for centuries after these events, which matches the descriptions of a Harridan, and the archives have accounts of Imperial guard armies and extinct alien forces striking at the fringes of Pentus space and the Eastern Desolations for many decades, despite the fact none of them should have existed at that time. For instance, the account of krorkish warlord Ulchaeru’s notable victory over the forces of the destroyer Lord Imovehki, mentioned a strange auxiliary unit allied to the Krork; a band of humans who fought with primitive autoguns and marched beneath a striped banner. One must also question why there were persistent reports of Atheist cults preaching about a ‘Great Crusade’ which never seemed to materialize.

The living head also went missing, and by all accounts I suspect the Exorcists* managed to find it and deliver it to their patron, Draigo the faceless King, lord of the Angyl host.

As for Trayzn, eons-old hatred for the living races burned anew in him; a feeling he had thought lost after so many years of soulless immortality. He cursed the three who had stolen his trophies and spoiled his collection, and he summoned the deathmarks too him. The silent, cyclopean fiends were assassins beyond compare. Once their targets were implanted by Trayzn, they would never stop hunting Allaten or the liberated wraithbone choir.

*(The Exorcists were also known as ‘the Legio Illuminatus’ during this period, as their numbers had expanded rapidly under the Star Father’s Patronage.)

(Chronicler’s note: This account is close to completion. I feel the weight of history pressing down upon me. So many died, I cannot get this wrong. God’s womb, I refuse to dishonor those who sacrificed all for our sake!)

Additional Background Section 37: The Dark before the Dawn

Before I can adequately relate to my readers the greatest war in human (and perhaps even in xenos) memory, the pieces must first be set, so that one can comprehend just precisely what was happening at roughly the same moment across the galaxy. The following three sub- sections attempt to apply context to two out of the four primary battlefronts of the Last War, namely the Kaela Mensha War and the Cyclopean War. This section does not cover the opening gambits of the Despoiler/Blackheart war which engulfed the northern reaches of the galaxy, or the Primarch War in the west. However, all four will be covered in detail in later sections.

1) The War of the bloody-handed. Khaine’s triumph

The eastern fringe, as mentioned before, was in ruins by the start of M56. Countless billions were dead, and the military forces still defiantly fighting on were battling through a multi- sector meat-grinder of planetary invasions and counter-invasions, naval engagements and pitiless sieges; fighting like starving dogs over the rancid meat left hanging from the corpse bones of the fringe. No prize was worth the hate and fury that went into that war. No prize.

As mentioned before, the necrons were depleted, the krork were battered, and the tau and human realms (including Ultramar) had retreated to defend their fastnesses against the encroaching hordes. There were no bystanders in this war; those who wouldn’t fight were enslaved by either krork slavers or by the numbing influence of angyls and their Exorcist minions. Amidst this carnage, there rose the Hadex Multitudes. The region around the anomaly had ground into an ugly bruise on the face of the galaxy, close in scale to the Maelstrom itself. Here, countless different warbands of corrupted tau, humans and various other xenos struck out and claimed worlds for themselves. Their daemon patrons fought with each other for supremacy, leaving the multitudes leaderless.

Leaderless, that is, until a champion of sufficient power and influence commandeered them. On the eastern fringe, there was only one such entity of sufficient skill, tactical prowess and sheer monstrous fury. This monster was one of the oldest and most unique of warp entities; Kaela Mensha Khaine. Khaine was fuelled my madness and fury, chained within an unloving host, churning with internal furnace light that glowered infernally beneath his cracked steel flesh. He had led his army of khainite cultists into glorious war with the nightbringer, but his cult was insufficient. Thus, he had travelled to the Hadex anomaly aboard the Wailing Doom, his living flagship, and there he had set to work. He bested and enslaved every daemon prince, every greater daemon that sought to challenge his supremacy as the God of War and Murder. He was a thing of Khorne. He was both the ancestor and the descendant of the King of Skulls and in a galaxy of war he was Khorne’s mightiest ally. He smashed the leadership of every warband, and took its warriors for his own, alloying them together like a blacksmith working metal in a forge.

Khaine, unlike any other warp entity in the arsenal of the Ruinous powers, was resistant to being banished back to the immaterium, for his body was made of immortal, living metal. It was an open wound that couldn’t be closed. With a vast army of warriors at his behest, Khaine felt complete again, and he waged his war anew. The galaxy had not seen the likes of Khaine since the Emperor walked, clothed in flesh. He led his armies to victory after victory that left the broken survivors weeping his name. Khaine, anointed din the blood of a thousand extinguished civilizations, fought with the fury only a living weapon, nay a God of weapons, could.

It was said that Khaine could alter his size at will; sometimes he was barely taller than a Primarch, other times his blade was said to be large enough to behead mountains. He routed seven krork forces at the battle of Aemorvast, and some say at the climax of this war, he saw a war hulk in orbit with the planet, bombarding his frenzied ground forces. With a mighty roar, the weapon in his hand became a colossal javelin, as long as a naval torpedo. He cast the javelin into the heavens, surging through the firmament like a newborn comet, before it plunged through the flank of the hulk, and erupted from the opposite side in a tide of molten metal and frozen krork corpses. The hulk was cored a second time, as the javelin was recalled to Khaine’s fist, and pierced the vessel once more. The hulk, sundered beyond repair, exploded like a new star in the sky, and Khaine saw that it was good.

Khaine rejected the whispered deals and promises of the lingering Umbral shade; Khaine was no longer an ally of those who had abandoned him to his fate. No elder god or eldar whelp would know his friendship now. He perceived the Aspect Temples, and they disgusted him. The exarches, creatures bound with a thirst for battle akin to his own, served the eldar. Those sense-whores had brought about his sundering during the Fall, and one of their champions had even raised Anaris against him; yet they now had had the temerity, the gall, to steal his broken fragments? Khaine would extinguish the eldar in time, and break them, just like he shattered Anaris into three murdering Eldanesh.

Ultramar’s Librarians vomited blood for weeks each time they tried to observe and report on Khaine’s whereabouts, and many M’yen tau psykers died trying to guess where Khaine would strike next. Fortunately for them however, Khaine did not notice the realms of the mortal races, at least initially. He had bigger game in mind. Once again, Khaine made war upon the nightbringer and his Destroyer Cults. This was a longer, more arduous war, but Khaine did not relent. His warp-born allies and his many fleets of ravenous chaos warbands consistently outmaneuvered the single-minded nihilist necrons. They were destroyers, but they didn’t care about war, only ending lives. Victory didn’t matter to these necrons, only extinction. Khaine eventually defeated the Nightbringer’s united shards via a trap.

The C’tan attempted to face Khaine upon Galverra, a dead world which had once played host to a federation of a hundred peaceful alien races (all long since destroyed by the necrons). Khaine used the world itself against Aza’gorod Nightbringer. He inflamed the cloying souls of the murdered aliens, until the world itself split asunder, warp portals unleashing the ghosts of the dead and the hungry daemons that hunted them, onto the surface of the world. The warp weakened the Nightbringer’s powers, and Khaine wrestled with the C’tan, toppling towers and crushing armies in their wake. Khaine could not slay the Nightbringer, nothing could slay death itself. However, the warp did manage to drag the star vampire down, down into the cloying, fanged reaches where sanity is a myth and dreams and solid and carnivorous. In that realm, the Nightbringer became something... else. I think perhaps words are not adequate to describe what happened to the majority of the nightbringer’s shards when they fell into the warp’s cauldron that day. If you can, imagine a patch of reality, folding in upon itself a trillion, trillion times, as the warp unpicked it molecule by molecule. Yet, the C’tan cannot be dissolved, and eternally destroys the ethereal energy it imbibes, rebuilding itself in ever more contorted forms. Impossible to unmake, yet rooted in a dimension without form or physical laws. In a way, the Nightbringer became Khaine’s counterpart in the warp. Khaine was a warp entity trapped in the materium, while the Nightbringer was a material entity trapped in the immaterium. With the fall of the Nightbringer, it seemed as if there was now nothing and no one to oppose Khaine in the eastern galaxy. Khaine’s army grew daily, as he consumed any refugee fleets who hadn’t escaped the fringe in time, and all the murderers and monsters of the Eastern region of the Segmentum Ultima were gathered unto him. There stood then only a few hard centers of resistance. Regent Folkar of Ultramar, the Realm of Fathers, Commander Hopeshield of the meta-Empire and Warlord Ulchaeru of the War of the Krork, knew that this was their moment. As the war between Pentus and the Imperium of Travesties would decide the fate of the western galaxy, so this coming conflict would determine whether sanity and life could triumph, or whether madness and the great Dissolution would unmake all.

2) The Sorcerer’s Desolation; Dominion of Change:

This section covers the basic structure and form Ahriman’s southern empire took during the period directly proceeding the war between Imperium Pentus and the Imperium of Travesties. This section also notes the final phase in the turbulent history of the Theologian Union and the greater Segmentum Tempestus, which had played host to countless regime changes and vast cultural transitions over the course of twenty thousand years of history and strife.

The Segmentum Tempestus area had long been a place of failed empires. In the period of the Petty Imperiums, this Segmentum had always contained the most fractious and numerous Petty Imperial domains, ever striving to place their own Emperors upon the throne of the one true master, long since past. The one time this realm seemed to unite under one banner, it was under the banner of the ideologically insane and the corrupt. War and fear had brought the Theological Union into being. On a personal scale, the political and religious union of Tallarn and the Ophelians lasted for hundreds of generations, and perhaps thousands of years. But in the end, it was no more lasting than a castle of sand in the wind, when compared with the great span of history covered by this account of the Age of Dusk.

Some say it was the war with Vulkan which was the final deathblow of the Theologian Union, and in many ways they are correct. The loss of this war, and the subsequent destruction of the ophelian shipyards (by infiltrating Sons of Corax strike teams), meant that the power of the Theologians was broken and the rule of Ceylan the Pure was fatally weakened. She had bet all her dogmatic capital on her holy war, and her defeat was seen as a sign. There were many rebellions at that time, and the Imperial metropolis worlds hadn’t the manpower to stop them. This disorder reached a climax when the Imperial family had to flee from their palace-ship as rioters and turncoats ransacked it. The Union had decapitated itself from within.

In this weakened state, the Union was infected with the poison of chaos. At first, it seemed that the preachers of Erebus might be the first to install their cults within this realm, but it was in fact Ahriman who came first, with his black cube fortress. His cabal of Sorcerers and their vast army of Rubric marines struck at the hearts of the anarchist cults that had caused the discord across the Union. They appeared before the stunned populace, wreathed in multi- colored fire. Their voices were loud and clarion clear. The cabal destroyed those who opposed them, and seemed to induct those who prostrated themselves before them as acolytes and lackeys, who went on to built their huge sorcerer’s towers in the years to come.

Ahriman, however, had no desire to rule this realm of credulous idiots and superstitious cowards. Is sorcerers took what they wanted from the worlds of the Union, and gave them nothing in return.

But the people now had hope (albeit false hope). Ahriman’s cabal had met with the planetary governors of every single world in the empire. They each declared each Governor as the rightful Emperor of the Theologian Union. The sorcerers claimed they had no wish to administer an empire, and needed these men to be a single, strong voice who spoke for every world. They told every planet that they were the new capital world, and they psychically insinuated that all the other so-called Emperors were imposters, who were jealous of the rightful heir to the throne. If the governor could only subdue his wayward subjects, then peace would come, and enlightenment...

It was a cruel trick. The Thousand Sons offered hope, and the people believed them, when all their talk had achieved was a war on three thousand fronts; every single world’s Governor was at war with every other governor for control of the empire. Trading merchants found themselves paying extortionate tribute to every world they visited, or else declared enemies of the state. Some worlds starved, others were consumed by civil war and interplanetary strife. And, amidst all this, Ahriman continued to research his unholy sciences and forbidden Lore, uncaring of this misery inflicted on his orders. Tzeentch, conversely, gorged hungrily upon the hope of the power hungry, and the constantly changing political landscape. The union became known to its former allies* as the ever-changing Dominion, a place of terrible desolation.

Ceylan’s heir had survived and went into hiding alongside his loyal minions. This organization became known as the Disciples, a hidden group with cells across the three thousand worlds of the ‘Union’. Though they claimed to be freedom fighters, in practice they were nothing but terrorists, punishing those they perceived to have turned their back upon the old regime. They bombed the schola of politicians and any fools who thought to worship some other god than the Emperor of the Wasteland. They also kidnapped so-called ‘demagogues of the heathens’. These supposed demagogues were any people who the public seemed overly fond of; celebrities, political personalities, preachers, parish wardens, satirists, scribes and actors from state-sponsored holo-films. They burnt down churches, vandalized any post-Ceylan public works, and occasionally launched ineffective guerrilla wars against the Thousand Sons themselves. If Ceylan could not rule the Dominion of Change, then the Disciples would rather ruin the place for everyone else.

Ahriman was allied with Lorgar’s Imperium tangentially, through ancient pacts and rites sworn under the despoiler’s regime, but the Imperium of Travesties had no physical presence in that region (except for within the warp storms Belphoman and Vulfustan, where Draziin- maton were said to linger and- [chronicler spits out black fluid from his mouth. Not saliva- analogous.], but I digress.)

Ahriman was close to apotheosis. He had modified his mind beyond the scope of a mere Astartes, and he had employed Fabius to utilize the Emperor’s laboratory to enhance his form. He and Bile also used the black cube’s labs to create a terrible desecration of life. Ahriman, thinking himself as powerful and knowledgeable as the Anathema himself, sought to build primarchs of his own. However, the primarchs were never merely miracles of gene-tampering. The creatures he and Bile built were wrong; mindless, hulking things. Larger than even Magnus the red, these things were pale and hairless. Where primarchs had souls of star-like intensity, these monsters had merely husks of souls. These things were known as the golarches; failed paragons and pitiable nightmares. Though brain-damaged and mad, a golarch was phenomenally strong and fast, able to shatter fortress walls with but a blow. They were thus tamed and enslaved by the Cabal of the Rubric, who used them to guard the Black cube. Before Temestor Braiva attempted to defeat Ahriman, the Imperium Pentus had sent an earlier force to accomplish this task. However, Ahriman had sensed the coalition of Nova Astartes coming from half a sector away. Their commander, Gregory the Forgefiend, was a brave and ruthless Fire beast Captain, and he sought to strike at the heart of Ahriman’s realm directly.

Ahriman left him. However, the Sorcerer manipulated the warp tides, and made his vanguard arrive long before his support fleet. When the support fleet caught up to Gregory’s fleet, they found the system smashed by the fire beasts, their ferocity unbound. However, soon, the Astartes coalition cold and calmly turned upon their support fleet. Their guns pounded ships to scrap, and their boarding parties callously dispatched every living person on the surviving support elements. They never removed their helmets, and they killed without passion or rage. They were puppets; new Rubric marines created through Ahriman’s megalomaniacal genius.

*(The most prominent of the Union’s former allies was the Praetorian Kingdom, which was virtually next door to the Theologian Union in astronomical terms. This was a realm which had built up around the world of Praetoria. During the Age of Strife, Battlefleet Gothic went into exile to escape the flood of madness which overwhelmed their sector, as did Battlefleet Obstiresi, after the Despoiler had their naval dockyards atomized. These fleets came out of the warp near Praetoria, and the wealthy merchant houses and nobility of Praetoria allowed them to stay. Without the Imperial Guardsman tithe, the Praetorian redcoats and this new, huge navy were able to take and hold a whole sub-sector, and keep hold of it through the millennia. Many of these worlds were industrial planets, with downtrodden populations toiling beneath aloof nobility; it was a simple matter to replace one set of native nobles, with the Praetorian nobility. Most of the common, pale-faced serfs of these worlds didn’t even notice the political shift. The praetorian Kingdoms maintained tight trade agreements with their neighbors, but rarely engaged in war with them; so long as the trade routes survived, they didn’t care. Equally, the Praetorians continued to trade with the Dominion of Change. The Mad King Harold XII had no intention of aiding his stricken, fundamentalist neighbors.)

3) Szarekh returns

As mentioned in a previous section, Szarekh, the silent king’s attempt to use the Celestial Orrery to destroy the Dragon’s united shards failed, and the C’tan caught the master of the necrons. Szarekh had tried to make the C’tan see reason, but the Dragon had not listened. The C’tan cast Szarekh, bodily, through time, there to erode away to nothingness in the wasteland at the end of the universe.

Yet, somehow, through means unknown, the Silent King managed to return from the far flung future (a time, apparently, long after even the present period of time in which I am compiling these notes, my predecessor’s life’s work). He had seen a future nightmarish to behold. No archive is strong enough to contain the psychic visions he witnessed, so I will not utter them here for the sake of my historical document. Yet, somehow, Szarekh had found an ally in that gods-forsaken time, which had drew him back to the Age of Dusk. He had witnessed the future, and knew that his necrons* had some role to play in the coming confluence of events.

He at first came to Szeras the Illuminor, for he was the original architect of the necrons, and shared Szarekh’s desire to ascend beyond their soulless android bodies. However, when Szarekh travelled to the Flesh Pits of Zantragora, his old allies were dumbstruck when they saw him. It was only then that Szarekh realized his android body was changed. He was no longer machine, but equally he was not flesh; he had become some strange amalgam of the two. Veins made of cables and translucent capillaries pumped blood that wasn’t blood through to false muscles that grew like fungus between his servos and living metal bones. His immortal jaws were filled with a writhing, living tongue. He desperately tried to communicate his dire warnings to Szeras, but the Illuminor saw only the melding of living and necrons; this was a chance to become more than machines, and Szeras captured his king for science. For a year, the insectoid cryptek subjected Szarekh to coldly calculated torture and bisections. Szarekh, meanwhile, wept openly. Not because of the pain, but for the fact he could now feel pain, for the first time in millions upon millions of years.

Szarekh was eventually liberated from his prison by a fleet of Triarch Praetorians. They swept into the Zabtragora tomb fleet, smashing aside any resistance. With a kind of cold fury, the triarch praetorians unleashed their stalkers and doomscythes upon Szeras’ assembled legions. They carved open his laboratories, and plucked Szarekh from captivity. The Silent King instantly ordered them to take the fleet south east, towards the krorkish bastion worlds of the fringe.

However, as the Praetorians retreated, Szeras had his revenge. He was the architect and designer fot he original necrons, and such blatant violence against him could not go unpunished. He downloaded a custom-made virus into the android brains of the departing Praetorians. Slowly, over the next few months, the necrons of Szarekh’s fleet began to collapse and fail. Their own reanimation protocols had been compromised, and they began to crumble in mind and body. Only the semi-organic Szarekh was immune to this horrific phage, but when his fleet of ruined necrons eventually exited from a Dolmen Gate, they found themselves surrounded by a fleet of krork cruisers and war hulks. Szarekh was soon captured by the martial xenos. He requested that he be allowed to parlay with the leaders of the fleet. This wish was granted, and Szarekh found himself face to face with the two gretchin commanders** of the war fleet. But when he was taken to this place, the broken, half- demented, bleeding King of the necrons did not speak with the gretchin, but instead looked into their eyes, and spoke directly to the shadowy force that seemed to guide the ‘War of the Krork’ from afar; the Shadow Master, he who had Lingered, he who was allied to the Jackal, the Stranger and the Serpent Beneath.

Szarekh’s ruined biological eyes watered as he slurred vocalized words past his sodden grey tongue of meat.

“We have been at war. For so very long, we have turned our minds to the other’s defeat, at the exclusion of all else and it has achieved nothing. Look at this galaxy; this is a realm built upon our fallout, and populated by the abortions and monsters we called into being, we allied with, in order to win. Every victory we win, every defeat we suffer, feeds something... else. Something so primordial, it existed before it was created. This is our enemy; it always has been.”

“What do you propose?” the gretchin asked in unison, the power of their voices unnaturally resonant.

“Help me free my children,” Szarekh wheezed. “And the War in Heaven ends.”

*(His necrons referring primarily to the necrons allied to the triarch. The Destroyers were a lost cause, for they were nothing but exterminators, and the warrior androids of the C’tan were necrons in appearance only, for the C’tan had built them from the hollowed-out souls of countless dupe races.) ** (Every krork battlefleet is commanded by two gretchin. These highly-psychic creatures form a kind of biological battle computer, relaying instructions and orders from central command. Each gretchin is ceremonially given the title of either Gorcanus or Morcanu, the names of the first of their kind.)

[Excerpt of Transcript: Log of Captain Trechous of the Magella, flagship of the Pentus Grand Relief Fleet.] >>>>Downloading... >>>>>> Download complete. Display? Y/N Y Displaying... [Day 50]: [section missing] but there is news from Armageddon, in the form of the man from Hades. He calls himself Iacob; some menial no doubt, but he and his entourage seem well- meaning enough. They have a mandate from the five primarchs themselves it seems, though I suspect only Vulkan truly cares for the plight of the refugees and those who suffer in these wars. His brothers are warriors and heroic as no mortal may be, but they are not humanitarians. If the death of eighty five percent of humanity was needed for them to achieve victory, I am sure they would pay that price gladly. What is man but a statistic to the gods of battle anyway? [Section missing] along with all necessary provisions. This fleet is perhaps the largest I have ever commanded, and what is more amazing is that it is, technically, on a mission of peace. Of mercy. [Section Missing] [Day 1,899]: [Section Missing] which is beyond all reasonable expectations. We are not a gyptic caravan for Pentus’ sake! I am not sure this was the mission agreed upon by our masters back in civilized space. This Iacob is earnest, I’ll give him that, but he doesn’t understand that we cannot keep accepting these refugee fleets into our own. Our force is vast now; several million ships. I have been forced to forbid any deep warp translations, in case our fleet gets separated. At this rate, we shall be slowed to a crawl, and become a sitting target for the terrors of the galaxy. I would ask for guidance from the primarch, but no communications are forthcoming. No one is answering, and all I get from the seers onboard is weeping and ranting! Ultramar’s gone quiet; I hear of a daemon king marshalling for some great war there. The north is on fire; a hundred thousand worlds consumed by infighting and Pentus-knows what else. The southern rim is just as bad; I dare not search out Braiva’s Best, lest I get this fleet embroiled or recruited in some damn-fool expedition against the Sorcerer- King. I cannot allo[Section Missing] [Day 17,273]: I must open this report with an update on the refugee situation. Fifty thousand Covegan skiffs, nineteen thousand Tau seeder ships, primed for terraforming, countless colony hives of Q‘orl and Norkla wasp-men, five Kroot spheres, exodite solar sailers numbering in the millions. Broken merchant vessels from human empires across the galaxy have come too. Their innards are gutted of cargo space, and their holds are filled to the rafters with billions of humans, filthy and scared out of their minds. Most must be scarred, if not physically then surely emotionally. We are out of supplies. We are relying upon what passing worlds can offer us when we stop in their systems. We are become beggars! Vulkan’s grand relief fleet; beggars! I’d have us return to Armageddon, if it weren’t for this menial clerk, this damned official. Iacob is a glorified medicae of average ability, and yet the refugees love him, as he tries his best to organize medical teams to tend to all the countless sick and the wounded. He’s got no supplies, but is running on sheer willpower and luck more than anything. As for naval maneuvers today, I instructed under-helmsmen Griegor and Clavin to correct our course to[Section Missing] [Day 39,283]: Rendezvous with the ‘Micarno’. The ship was part of a picket fleet entering the basin; the great wilderness that forms the underside of the galaxy. Deep below the habitable worlds, are worlds scoured to the bedrock tens of thousands of years ago, and left abandoned and cold around their orphaned stars. Their captain, Trenkin, tells me his fleet detected something. A dead spot, at the heart of the basin. It is a black mass, where no warp traffic travels. If we enter this region, warp travel will be painfully slow. But we must investigate; we have been sent by[Section Missing] a great sphere at the heart. It blinds all who[Section Missing]like a god’s skin almost... [Section Missing.] [Day 200,345]: [Section Missing] Damn these dregs! Ruins of society! They struck fromt he warp like thieves in the night! There must have been men on the inside; perhaps some of the cruder refugee ships tipped these pillagers off? If I do not complete tomorrow’s report, know that I abominate all pirates, and when judgment comes in the next life, may their souls be rent asunder, and their[Section Missing] [Day 200,346]: Thousands are dead, and we are dead in the water, as it were. If the flagship does not cruise, then the fleet must stop; we haven’t enough warp beacons left. If we stop in this system, this fleet will starve. It is small comfort that we captured their Pirate bitch and her sloop. I shall reap a just reward on this ‘Lady’ Cassion’s flesh. [Section Missing] [Day 200,347]: There are no words. Iacob... let her go. He had kept her alive all through our interrogations. He fought and bled to keep her alive. In return, all he asked of her was “Why? Why did you do this to us? We were willing to give you supplies, and to provide you with whatever you needed on the way. There was no need for conflict; there needn’t have been a battle this day.” The vile pirate queen looked at him, glaring. Her expression... I couldn’t read it. It was hateful, but not towards him. She held his gaze for what seemed like forever before she replied. “It is the nature of things. I am sorry for your losses, but it is ever the way of the galaxy. In this grim darkness, there is only war.” “No! No that is not good enough!” This was the first time I had seen this small, unimposing man get angry, or even so much as raise his voice. This time he was loud and clarion clear. “For too long we have heard this. ‘I must be monstrous, for that is the tradition’, or ‘We must destroy you, lest our enemies see this as weakness, and strike us down’. We are not machines, built to slay! I will not be a tool of murder and destruction. Look upon this fleet; we should all have been enemies, and yet, though we are afraid, we have not made this relief fleet into an armada. We could have used this fleet to conquer all who stood in our way; this fleet is larger than the greatest Krork navy. There is too much death now. How many die every single day, for no purpose whatsoever? On the whims of people who do not deserve their loyalty? The more we fight and suffer and die on behalf of brutes, the more that black parasite of chaos feeds; suckling on our misery. We will find salvation, and we will do it through peace.” “This is insanity. Your cowardice will kill you all,” the pirate hissed, in a curious mix of dismay and perhaps awe. “I am not speaking of cowardice. What we are doing is what goodness is, and what is just. To let a foe strike you, so that that foe may realize their errors, is the bravest thing one can do. It is braver than a war, where one side desperately tries to kill the other, before their foe destroys them in turn.” “You consider your pompous self sacrifice to be good? Then you, medicae Iacob, are the Last Good Man in this galaxy” scoffed the pirate woman. Iacob responded by letting her go, and forbidding his men from impeding her, as she fled to her sloop and escaped our clutches. Our weapon stores are depleted (because we stripped out our guns to fit in more space for our building cargo of living refugees). I could not destroy her before she went to the warp. Truly, we are doomed. [Section Missing] [Day 200,499]: All correspondence with Armageddon is lost. The primarchs had rode out to meet the Imperium of Travesties in open war, fleet against fleet and primarch against Primarch. We are alone. My ship is still damaged, and our situation is bleak. I only hope tha[Section Missing] [Day 200, 500]: The pirates returned. I recognized their vast, dagger-shaped prows anywhere. I readied my empty guns, and marshaled by nearly non-existent soldiers for the coming massacre. But as I spoke to my absent gods, something unexpected happened. The pirates moved into formation with us. My Promethean Cultists say the engines they have supplied us with will help the fleet leave the system, and head towards the Dysonne Sphere at long last. Once again, words fail to express my astonishment. I head into an uncertain future, and I am filled not only with dread, but, dare I say it, hope? A treasonous hope which whispers to me ‘perhaps he is right? Perhaps there is hope for us yet, even as the universe consumes itself? Just perhaps...’ [Section Missing- Significant amount of data corrupted. Salvaging closest remnants...] [Day 378,893]: Gods alive no![Garbled]... he’s walking on it! No! No! NO! NO! [unintelligible]d’s skin; it lives! Oh ch-[garbled] ther-[unintelligible]- opening up! All stations, prepare for evasive- [Transcript ends.]

Additional Background Section 38: Blackheart’s Diaspora and the Incarnation of Stars

While the Eastern Fringe suffered the attentions of Khaine, and the primarchs of both Pentus and the Travesty mustered their forces for the great Western Conflict, Huron’s wild realm also began to feel the first nauseating pangs of the escalating war betwixt sanity and madness that was rapidly encircling the galaxy like some monstrous girdle.

For many thousands of years, Huron’s realm was kept in a state of, if not order, then obedience, by the might of the corsair’s great raiding fleets. The Red Corsairs dominated the spaces between worlds, and prevented any significant consolidation of resistance to his misrule. For a long time, only Biel-Tan and Varsavia put up any sort of meaningful opposition to his rampant abuses. Huron Blackheart reigned as a mad and capricious Emperor. After the fall of Baal, he expanded his empire eastwards, consuming many of the surviving bloodknights into his own ravage armadas. Worlds quaked in fear at his passing, and the maelstrom spread northwards like sepsis through an infected cut. Even his alliance and fealty to Cadia did not lessen his power and influence. He ruled from the throne chamber of the Astral Maw, his flagship. The ship had once been a vast necron tombship, before the Hamadraya had unleashed a daemonic contagion into the silvered veins of the living metal ship, and his own Corsairs had stripped out the necron ostentation in favor of the charnel vileness of a true chaos space marine flagship.

Huron’s Corsairs were a black legend amongst the cowed populace. His fleets regularly visited each world of his Imperium, raping them of their human and mineral resources. However, Blackheart was not a simple predator, he was a game keeper. He made sure not to visit the same world twice within ten years. Savaged worlds were given a decade of paranoid peace in which to rebuild their cities, and replenish their stocks, before the dreaded crimson ships loomed over them once again. Then the nightmare would play out all over again. With space superiority, the Red Corsairs and their Eldar Corsair allies could violate planetary populations at their leisure. This method of Imperial rule had advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, Huron had no singular metropolis, where he could be trapped, besieged or starved out of; he was mobile and slippery as he was invulnerable. On the other hand, he relied heavily upon his large Corsair fleets to do not only all the resource gathering, but also all the planetary defense, as the terrorized cattle worlds he ruled over were too broken and weak to defend themselves, their PDFs little more than ceremonial after constant massacres ever decade.

These weaknesses were never truly tested until after the Varsavian massacre. At Varsavia, Huron had gambled a large fraction of his total fleet power on breaking the siege of the Silver Skulls. However, the eldar/Astartes alliance smashed Katan’s fleet. The remnant fled with the Groevian known as the Junnergan, who seceded from the Eastern chaos Imperium, taking a large chunk of the far eastern imperial/baalite border region with him, forming the Groevian Empire. Suddenly, Huron had lost many hundreds of thousands of ships, and countless millions of Marines and warriors. With his fleets weakened, Huron could no longer send his fleets to every corner of his Empire, and insurrection and multiple xenos invasions became commonplace. For every one enemy he squashed with his arrow-quick naval actions, three more sprang up. Duke Sliscus, unpredictable as ever, turned upon the Blackheart at the first sign of weakness. The Piratical eldar allied with dozens of different allies every year, and betrayed them as soon as he got bored with them. Soon, Sliscus was attacking Red Corsair fleets as much as he was devouring prey worlds.

In the west, the storm of the emperor’s wrath had expanded noticeably. However, this was no boon to the Pirate King, for it was not daemons who made their lair in that warp storm. It was the haunt of the angyllic hosts, and as the storm expanded, so too did the number of angylworlds and adorant slave-planets; worlds covered in towering monuments to the Star father, filled with mindless cultists who constantly exalted their God, throwing themselves and everything they had against the Corsair fleets in the hopes of proving how obedient they could be to the angyls’ cause. Necron raids increased during this time too; this was likely a result of the monumental events taking place within the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath.*

The eldar of Biel-Tan took this opportunity to increase their precision strikes against the Blackhearts infrastructure, stretching his resources even further. Huron felt his control slipping, and his actions got progressively more extreme. He burned worlds and smashed cities into embers. He put entire worlds to the torch and everywhere there was horror.

In his mad rage, when a festering plagueship from the west entered his territory at the head of a fleet of daemonships, Huron almost fired upon it. That was, until he heard the hollow voice of Typhus across the vox channel.

“Salutations, Lord Corsair.”

“Why do you sully my empire with your putrescence this day, herald of Nurgle?”

At this challenge, Typhus chuckled heartily. “Perhaps I have come to observe your empire rotting? Your realm is in sweet decay after all. Or perhaps I come bearing word from Erebus? Which would you find least repugnant?”

Huron permitted Typhus to enter his realm. The host of the Destroyer hive had been sent by Erebus to reinforce Huron’s realm, as concern was building that the Blackheart was the weak link in the noose around Pentus’ neck. Typhus spread his zombie contagion far and wide across the Eastern Chaos Imperium. Worlds who had once tried to break away from the fold became nothing but stagnant monuments to apathy and decay, peopled by living corpses mewling with mindless hunger.

Ku’Gath the plaguefather was summoned, and the plaguebearers bound this crumbling empire with putrid sinews. The Terminus Est and its crusade of filth reinforced the stretched Corsair fleet.

As it turned out, Typhus’ intervention had come at just the right time. For, within months of the Death Guard’s arrival, the Planet Killer was detected, crossing the indistinct border into the Red Corsair’s domain.

*A note on the Angyl/Necron alliance, and its annulment:

Draigo had returned to Ophelia at the head of a vast angyl-host, bearing a great prize for the Arch-Angyls. The prize had been taken from Trayzn the Infinite’s vaults in Solemnance, and was utterly unique. It was the still-living head of Sebastian Thor. The head had been stolen from its tomb on Dimminar by Trayzn, who had heretically reanimated it, solely for aesthetic reasons, when he set it amongst his other exhibits. Who knows what madness Thor had suffered in those twenty thousand years of disembodied immortality?

Nevertheless, Draigo, guided there by Imotekh’s knowledge, had freed the head and he took it deep into the heart of the Ophelia’s vaults. There, the arcane sorceries of the thorian cultists, the impossible science of Imotekh’s crypteks and mysterious angyl magicks combined to grant the living head new flesh, new muscle and new power. But the thorians were not finished there; they had constructed a great throne, capable of channeling a vast portion of warp energy directly into the regenerated host. Like some perverse lightning rod, the central bastion of Ophelia was struck millions of times by ethereal warp bolts and electrical power from beyond the materium. For almost an entire year, the warp was funneled through the throne and into the Thor avatar. The planet groaned and thrashed tectonically under this divine onslaught. Thousands of Exorcists from the Legio Illuminatus flocked to the bastion, led by Grand Master Trenchard, clad in his finely sculpted cataphractii armor that glinted red and silver in the blinding glare of the bastion’s building light. The battle sisters of the Weeping Brides came too, and all fell to their knees in sheer ecstatic fervor. Adorants and lesser men simply died, bodies destroyed by psychic fallout. The necrons watched this event with stoic distain, for they had seen such concentrated power before, when they had incarnated the C’tan.

Eventually, the great gates of the bastion opened, and the slaves of the Star father, angyl and mortal alike, knelt as one. Only the necrons remained standing. The figure was a giant, tall as a Primarch and bathed in a psychic brilliance which was awesome to behold. His face was beautiful and terrible to behold, for his golden eyes shone with callous might and monstrous indifference. Sedition and thoughts of free will melted like steel before a fusion furnace. His form was that of a man, but his flesh was like sculpted stone, hard and unyielding.

“I Am!” the creature said. As he spoke, his words carried like the greatest clarion horn, dynamic and sonorous. “I Am Thor Incarnus, And I Am The Way Of Might! Glory And Humanity Is Mine. The Father Is Incarnated, And Fealty Is Owed.”

Imotekh watched this display with supreme indifference. He observed Draigo, who beheld Thor Incarnus with his featureless helm. The angyl-Prince rose from his kneeling position.

“I am Kaldor Draigo,” he declared.

“You Are My Armor Of Contempt,” the giant boomed, and raised his hand. Draigo nodded in acceptance, as Thor melted the adamantine-skinned Angyl Prince. Soon, Draigo was naught but a molten puddle of silver. Moments later, the liquid metal flowed across the floor, and climbed the giant’s flesh, coating it organically, as an assassin by don a synthskin bodyglove. Draigo sculpted himself into an ornate suit of pristine perfection. In Thor Incarnus’s hand, Draigo’s sword and shield became a mighty hammer; a hammer of witches and deviants.

Imotekh took this moment to speak out.

“Young Trenchard,” the Phaeron began, his voice metallic and almost weary. “Enough of this pomp; we helped you construct your warp weapon, now it is time for recompense. You and your hosts shall hold up your end of our agreement. These are fine words your puppet speaks, but we have a war to win.”

Imotekh spoke like a teacher chiding a student for self-indulgence.

The astartes, still kneeling, turned to face the necron. He scowled at the alien android. However, Thor answered for the Space marine. “I Am No Mere Instrument. I Am Anathema Incarnate; The One True Emperor. I Am Your God. Kneel.”

There was silence for a moment; a silence pregnant with terrible promise. This silence was eventually broken by a dry, rasping, incredulous laugh, which rattled from the Storm Lord.

“The necrons have no gods. We need no gods. We have outgrown them; you are a pretender. We were already ancient when you were but mewling babes,” Imotekh growled mechanically. “Gods? We shattered our gods, and chained them to our anvil of war. You dare speak of godhood? You stand before your betters!”

Thor seemed little concerned, his expression impossibly stern. “Discordance Cannot Be Permitted. Our Concordance Is Nullified.”

With that, Trenchard rose from his kneeling position. “Brother Izrale.”

With that curt order, one of the Exorcists rose, his meltagun rising to his shoulder in the space of less than a second. Imotekh was fractionally quicker. The Phaeron turned the marine to ash inside his armor with a single bolt of his lightning. The electrical surge leapt between marines, striking them even as they rose into attack formation. A dozen were dead within a minute. The other necrons fell upon the astartes and angyls, and soon battle was joined.

Through all this, Thor Incarnus stood impassively. Imotekh, full of rage at being betrayed, turned his staff towards the giant, and unleashed the full power of his technological sorcery. The air turned to plasma, as the lightning of the Storm Lord surged towards Thor at the speed of light. Impossibly, Incarnus was quicker. He raised his hammer, and the lightning was channeled into the great eagle-headed weapon. Charged particles and plasma fire wreathed the Incarnation, but it remained unharmed. Even as the lightning sheathed him, Thor spoke clearly and calmly.

“When I Was A Boy, When We Were Merely Sebastian, We Read Of The Father. He, Now We, Were The Father Of Arik Taranis And His Brothers. You Are The Lightning,” Thor began, as he lunged forwards and dealt Imotekh a single mighty blow, which sent the Phaeron bodily across the chamber, to shatter against the far wall like some broken tin toy. “BUT I AM THE THUNDER!” the giant concluded, his face wreathed by a burning halo.

Imotekh survived this encounter, and the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath became a battleground between silver automatons, between necron and angyl. Eventually, Imotekh fled from the Storm, and departed the region aboard his command ship. There, he returned to the Sautekh Dynasty, and began a campaign of vengeance against all life.

As for Thor Incarnus? He and his legion of mindless adherents played their own part in the primarch war, for He was the One Truth Emperor, and would permit neither the pretender Lorgar or the sentimental coward Vulkan to sully the title with their existence.

Additional background Section 39: The Primarchs’ Muster

Part One: Pentus

A galactic war is a colossal feat of warfare, but more than that, it is a near-insurmountable logistical challenge the likes of which few men have ever been faced with before. For much of the galaxy’s history, the largest empires were conquered for the most part though political maneuvering and coercion; fear of orbital assault and economic pressures force the hands of planetary rulers to throw in their lot with the more powerful faction.

Few men are capable of performing a prolonged and adequately coordinated campaign for widespread interstellar combat. The legendary Macharius was one, Temestor Braiva was rumored to be another. Only the primarchs, through their might and cunning and warp-born power, had proven themselves capable of such a monumental war.

They had done so before; before the Second Strife and before the Imperator perished. They would do so again. This section shall try to convey the extensive preparatory efforts of both factions of primarchs before they met on the field of battle. The primarch war actually began half a decade before the first macrocannon batteries fired in anger.

First, we shall look at the Imperium Pentus’ marshalling of their forces.

The primary concern of the Pentus forces in the run up to the war was disguising their military buildup from their ever-vigilant rivals in the west. Munitions were shipped amidst food shipments between the Imperium’s twenty thousand worlds. War machines were built in modules, with multiple different worlds constructing various parts of these machines without ever meeting one another. Gun barrels would be forged upon one industrial world, while the track links or engine systems were crafted on another and the armor plating fashioned by yet another desperate planet.

The five brothers and their most trusted generals made numerous unofficial ‘planetary festivals’ in their honor over this period also. These apparently social events were in fact opportunities for the generals and their staff to select the cream of the armed forces of the Imperium, discreetly siphoning these units and regiments towards their gathering forces, that began to congregate around the prosperous Elysia system. Elysia was a major CoJ (Confederation of Justice) stronghold sub-sector, alongside Harkon and Fentaine. Their agricultural tithes were marginally increased; a tax artfully disguised by Imperial bureaucrats. This additional yield from the tithe was channeled towards the growing fleet anchored there. The great supply ships of the fleet were piled high with food and munitions, as were each of the larger warships and escorts.

The force was not solely assembled at Elysia however, for Vulkan and Corax expressed concern that should they amass forces in a single location too early, Lorgar’s spies might suspect something. Thus, Russ gathered a large crusade fleet around the Nocturne sector, which lay close to Ahriman’s empire, while the Lion and the Khan began to muster around Ryza and Catachan respectively. Splitting the force into three was intended to fool the enemy into thinking Vulkan meant to strike out at all three chaos empires at once, when in fact the primarchs intended a far more concentrated assault on the Western Chaos Imperium. This split mustering also meant that each third of the force could assemble supplies from their local sectors, and spared Elysia shouldering all of the burden. The majority of the Nova Astartes Commanderies remained on garrison duty, acting as security to maintain the Imperium Pentus while the primarchs prosecuted the war. However, seventeen commanderies were able to provide almost their entire compliment of Astartes to the war. The commanderies present were as follows:

The Salamanders – Twenty Double-Strength Companies. A hundred Salamander Forge Guards remained with Vulkan at all times. The camouflaged Nemenmarines – Nineteen Companies The Dorn Revenants – Sixteen Companies The Fatemakers – We cannot be certain how many companies the fatemakers committed to the final war. It must have been more than five though, after the Saranus event early on in the war. The Iron Hands – Fourteen Companies The Fire Beasts – Seventeen Companies The Sons of Corax – Twelve Companies The Jade Princes – Ten Companies The Wolf Brothers – Seven Companies. They also took their most holy relic, the Mjolnir stone, into the war. This stone was a fifty meter slab of rock from their former homeworld Fenris, and they vowed to return the stone to Fenris after the planet’s liberation The Brass Ravens – Seven Companies The Sons of Thunder – They brought with them Nineteen armored companies, which included many of the band new tank variants from Armageddon’s Promethean Cult forges. The majority of their fighting strength was mounted in some sort of vehicle. The White Lancers – The Khan and the Lion’s shared commandery. It consisted of sixty Companies, and was by far the largest commandery. It committed almost fifty companies to the war. The Rout – The Wolf King’s newly formed commandery. This commandery had no homeworld, being fleet based nomads. As such, they committed all twenty of the Companies to the war. They formed Russ’ fleet’s diamond hard core. The Warrior Kings – A new commandery, formed from Ultramarine geneseed. This commandery could only spare five Companies, led by Sub-Commander Gaius Tolvanus Marius, to fight in the primarch war, as the majority of the Warrior Kings were required in the war against Khaine in the east. Nevertheless, Gaius Tolvanus Marius was a formidable leader of Adeptus astartes stock, known to the men of Ultramar as the ‘Hammer of the angyls’ due to his role in the Rout of Celestine a dozen years prior.

Almost all factions within the Imperium Pentus provided forces, ships and manpower to the conflict. Those that couldn’t formed the hubs of colossal freight fleet routes, that utilized the least-congested warp portals and merchant shipping lanes to slowly and quietly resupply those worlds whose resources were depleted through fitting the fleets. Only the Realm of Fathers refrained from doing so, for they were the key force required to hold the eastern reaches of the Imperium from Khaine’s rampages.

However, manpower and the multitude of ground forces available to the Imperium of the Five brothers would have been all but useless without the massive shipbuilding projects undertaken by the primary manufacturing worlds of Ryza, Nocturne, Necromunda, Armageddon and Balor Barrasis. It would take countless pages to name all these thousands upon thousands of ships. However, some vessels demand observation and recognition.

In honor of Leman Russ, the people of Nocturne helped construct his mighty battlebarge and flagship. This unique battlebarge, named Sleipnir by Russ himself, was a savage wonder to behold. It was built to resemble some ironclad mountain peak, festooned with weaponry, launch bays and nova cannons of a glorious plethora. This was to be the primarch’s steed into battle, and the Nocturne people made sure it was a kingly mount.

Antioch was the Lion’s vessel, which was converted form a might Ark Mechanicus explorer vessel, expanded and refitted by dedicated armies of Ryzan tech priests. Upon it prow was fitted the White Spear. The white spear was the pinnacle of Ryzan plasma weapon science; the largest lance beam weapon ever built by the hand of man. The White Spear of Antioch would soon become infamous amongst the Imperium of Travesties’ forces.

Ryza also constructed a vast command carrier for use by the crusade fleet. Known as the Devil of Catachan, the vessel was phenomenally vast; it was said a battlecruiser could fit comfortably inside its cavernous hangar bay alone. Onboard it had hundreds of thousands of fighter craft, bombers and combat shuttles, and the facilities to maintain an entire forest environment inside it for training purposes. This vessel was a factory, a carrier and a command centre all in one, all built under the watchful gaze of the Techno Magi of Ryza.

Lastly, Vulkan had the Phalanx resupplied and renovated in anticipation of the coming war. He had heard rumors that Perturabo had managed to rebuild the Goliath Engine; the spiteful Iron warrior primarch would no doubt attempt to destroy the pride of Inwit, the last monument to dear departed Rogal. Vulkan thus had the Phalanx’s void shields enhanced, with multiple redundancies and generators that could withstand the torments of a world-rending daemon cannon. He also had a shrine and statue to Dorn built deep in the Phalanx, which Vulkan would visit (it was said) every day, giving thanks to his brother for the continued use of his vessel.

As these sips were being built, the training of the billions strong invasion force began in earnest. Corvus Corax insisted upon inter-factional and inter-commandery training exercises. Overspecialization and inflexibility would be the death of armies if they ever got split off from the main crusade. He wanted the pentus crusade’s armies to be self-reliant and ready for any situation. Plasma Commandoes fought in complex Harakoni rapid reaction warfare, kalthonian light infantry learnt how to defeat tanks while training with the Thunder Lizard tank legions, while the Tank legion in turn discovered means of flushing out guerrilla resistance without risking their tanks in ambush.

One of the most famous cross-discipline training events involved the Nemenmarines and the Fire Beasts. The Nemenmarines were known for being somber and sensible, and indeed were the only faction of Space Marines to wear camouflaged armor. Famously, they’d never commit to battle unless they had every miniscule detail of the battlefield mapped out. They thus required a significant amount of preparation time before they prosecuted an attack, but when they did, their plans were usually flawless. The Fire beasts, in contrast, were consummate improvisers. They threw themselves headlong into battles, even when the odds were not in their favor, and relied upon their ferocity and destructive power whenever their battle plans went awry. These were two fundamentally incompatible military philosophies. Not only this, but when forced to train with one another, the two forces would invariably come to blows. The Nemenmarines saw the Fire beasts as simpletons, all too eager to leap into battle with but a dagger and a forlorn hope. Conversely, the Fire Beasts constantly goaded the Nemenmarines, deliberately spoiling their carefully laid plans in favor of their own boisterous tactics.

The two seemed deadlocked, until Corax devised a solution. He organized a wargame upon a death world known as Kanvar’s Doom. The Fire Beasts and Nemenmarines would attempt to wrest control of the world from the Sons of Corax. However, Corax ordered that the two commanderies pair off their Nova Astartes with a space marine from the opposing commandery, one Fire Beast per Nemenmarine. These small teams would have to cooperate in order to defeat the Sons of Corax. Initially, the wargame went badly for the the Nemenmarine/Fire beast alliance. Lack of cohesion meant the black armored astartes could easily outmaneuver and ambush the attacking force piece by piece, team by team, as they marched through the fetid jungle. However, one team of two managed to evade the Sons, and were forced to confront their differences. The fortunes of the Sons of Corax were reversed when a small alliance of Nemenmarines and Fire Beasts, led by two tactical marines from each commandery, managed to infiltrate the primary fortress of the Sons. First, they sabotaged the generators for the sentry guns, then entered the fortress as the guns exploded. They utilized the local flora, by tossing five meter tall seed pods from Kanvar’s jungle into the compound. The plants rapidly grew and spread through the fortress. However, as the Sons of Corax began to recover and bring the situation under control, the alliance rushed their foes, storming the breach from the undergrowth, throwing aside the mud and plant matter they had used to cover their initial advance. Within two hours, they had cornered the Sons of Corax Command HQ, and victory was declared. Brother Alistor of the Fire beasts, and Brother Castron of the Nemenmarines, were subsequently promoted to line sergeants in light of their innovation and skill. Despite developing a form of friendship on the field of battle, the two continued to outwardly display contempt for each other throughout the rest of the war. Alistor decried Castrons ‘relentless, boring sensibleness’ while Castron was known for referring to Alistor as ‘that backwater simpleton, married to his knife’.

Many bonds of friendship and animosity were forged and indeed broken in the war to come. Legends were made and hearts were broken. Brother fought brother for a final time, beneath the cruel gaze of enslaved gods.

Additional background Section 39: The Primarchs Muster

Part Two: The Travesty

To call the reign of Emperor Aurellian Lorgar and the draziin-maton as a ‘development’ or ‘military buildup’ does not truly represent the awful effects the ascendancy of chaos in the Segmentums Obscurus and Solar. When we call Lorgar’s realm the Imperium of Travesties, it is not some overblown title to conjure fear in the foolish. It was profoundly true.

Lorgar had destroyed the pylons, the only check upon the expansion of the eye. Over the decades, the warp spilled out across realspace like a virus, writhing and wriggling tendrils of warp storms infecting countless sub-sectors across the Imperium of Travesties. Thus, through these conduits of madness, were the Draziin-maton able to infest thousands of worlds. And in the wake of these impossible entities, daemons sprang up like a bloody wake behind a feasting shark. The Imperium became a patchwork of warp storms, fractured and spread across the Segmentum like broken glass. Only sector-sized patches of real-space survived between these rivulets of insanity. Daemon worlds were formed daily, their surfaces melding and mutating as their miserable denizens were devoured mind, body and soul by the rising chaos.

Life became suffering for mortal kind, left as playthings to the rising abominations that tore at the flimsy fabric of reality with talons of midnight. People died in their uncountable trillions. They were the lucky ones. Those were the ones whose souls were not violently and eternally smeared over the skin of the immaterium, to suffer and die over and over again, only to return to life and be destroyed once more.

The Second Word of Lorgar was brought to the survivors at the point of a crozius, and learned by rote in the flames of purging fire and horror.

Following the death and ascension of Kor Phaeron to one of the ‘Choir Immortal’ (the name given to Lorgar’s parliament of daemon princes and warp entities), the fiend Erebus appointed himself Dark Cardinal of the Word. Erebus took the Second Book of Lorgar to every world in the Imperium he could reach. His fleet of star-shaped Word Bearer altarships was led by the last of the Blackstone fortresses. This served as Erebus’ grand Cathedral of the Mark, and from here he directed a significant fraction of the Imperium of Travesties’ military and ecclesiastical might. Kor Telhal, the mightiest general of the Word bearers, was at his beck and call, alongside almost thirty Thousand Word Bearers, by far the largest faction of chaos space marines still in existence. In addition, Erebus can control of the endless tides of the Cult of the Arizen, a mortal force of traitors farmed from the demented feral worlds and decrepit industrial planets still surviving in the Imperium. These were under the control of a mortal demagogue known only as Vermenthrax.

Kol Basilis and the Blasphematii, the specialist angyl-hunters infamous for wearing suits in mockery of the grey knights, were one Word bearer faction who remained apart from Erebus. They held the line against the northern Storm of the Emperor’s wrath (until the rise of Thor Incarnus of course). They ever remained a rival to Erebus, but while out on the fringes of the Imperium, they were no threat to his building power base.

However, Kol Basilis was useful in other ways. Basilis was a paranoid madman, always seeing plots and schemes wherever he looked.

Thus, he always suspected the Imperium Pentus would attack at any moment. He therefore set about creating the Flesh-Wardens. The flesh wardens had once been navigators, before Basilis had poured purest, solidified warp stuff into their bodies, and turned them into towering, slug- like fiends, sprouting dozens of vestigial limbs and, more importantly, hundreds of warp eyes. These wardens were placed on the Travesty/Pentus border, where they could scan the warp from all angles of approach. If any ships should enter Travesty space without heralding their intentions, Basilis could unleash his fearsome war dog upon them. This ‘war dog’ was a mysterious space marine known only as Decimus, who ruled a former-Night Lord warband called the Midnight-Clad. His fleet of terrifying reavers constantly prowled the desolate region of space between the two Imperiums. There, they toyed with the few colonies and settlements of humans and aliens that still existed so far from the primary warp storms of the inner Imperium. They had hoped and prayed that this distance from Cadia might have protected them from its predations. They were wrong alas.

As the Imperium built in power, so it built in incoherency and monstrosity. The Imperium of Travesties was under the control of Lorgar; the collars of the draziin-maton ensured the other fallen primarchs were his. However, the collars were not built to unify or control the actions of the great daemonic rulers of chaos; that would be contrary to the nature of the power that was rising. Lorgar did not rule this Imperium, he merely basked in its glorious enmity and fed upon its suffering. By the time of the Muster, Lorgar had not been seen for many years; hidden within the great Bone Keep of Cadia. Streams of invisible warp energy surged into Cadia every second, turning the surface fluid and ever mutable. Only the bone Keep remained, and inside, Lorgar grew in power. He cared not at all for his subjects, or the coming war. Thus, when we consider the Muster of the chaos primarchs and the other major generals of the Imperium of Travesties, we must consider it as several independent military escalations, undertaken in parallel with the other warlords.

The daemon prince known as the Heartslayer gathered his daemon legions unto him, and used the corrupted craftworld of Khey-Ys as his personal battle chariot for the coming conflict.

Angron the Red Angel, the mighty Gladiator king, was driven to new heights of insane rage over his enforced allegiance to the godling Lorgar. This fury was beyond the ken of mere mortals, and his forges of hate burned white hot with his fury. The legions of Khorne flocked to his banner. Beasts of Annihilation possessed my daemons every bit as insane as their space marine hosts, cast skulls and oceans of blood at Angron’s feet, even as he forged himself armies and weapons of a grand multitude. The khorne Berserkers gathered to him like snow around a falling boulder on a mountainside, the stone that would conjure the avalanche. Not of snow, but of brass and bile and blood. Where the red Angel passed, the populations of those worlds rose up and ripped each other to shreds, and their souls were burned in the soul furnaces, which fuelled the monster’s war machine ever more. Soon, his fleet was complete, and the primarch’s battlebarge, the Conqueror, rose again at the head of a fleet with one goal; the extermination of his brothers. In particular, Angron wished to test himself against Leman Russ. There had always been rumor and sagas about how Russ was the greatest of the warrior primarchs, the favored wolfhound. Where Angron had been slighted and denied the brotherhood of his gladiator comrades, Russ’ werewolf abominations had been accepted by the Emperor with open arms. The Wolf King’s head would be Angron’s, and no one would stand in his way.

Kharn the Betrayer followed no ruler. He continued as he ever had done; moving from warband to warband, fighting and butchering whosoever fell beneath Gorechild. There were no friends or allies for Kharn, only foes to behead and claim. Spies close to Kharn apparently claimed the World Eater had a rivalry with the bloodletter known only as Skulltaker. Both were furiously attempting to outdo the other in kill tallies and hence prove themselves as the perfect child of Khorne. Only an invasion on the scale of Pentus’ could have hoped to draw their attention away from self-destructive murder, and towards a common foe.

In the South east, Doombreed began to form an alliance of daemons; a vast congregation, larger than any gathering of daemons yet seen since the fall of the Eldar and the birth of the eye. Doombreed was the bloodied Prince of the terran hells, a warp storm formed around Terra itself. His flagship, much to the horror of Pentus historians, was a gigantic carrier ship called the Imperator Sominus. Once, long ago, the vessel had been the Emperor’s personal vessel. Under Doombreed’s attentions, it became a grandiose, ugly thing of crenulated towers and writhing maws, its hangar decks filled with rookeries of winged daemon-spawn, its corridors haunted by lost souls and malevolent energies. Many believed Doombreed wished to challenge the draziin-maton as well as the Imperium Pentus, but who can truly understand the mind of a daemon?

Cherubael the cruel moved through the Imperium, enticing mortal dupes and errant astartes warbands to his banner. The unbound Daemon Prince had formed a pact with Balphomael the horned darkness, and together the two ambitious daemon-things spread their influence across an entire sector. It is said that Cherubael, unlike many daemons, had lingered in the materium for so long, he could almost think as a mortal general or politician might think, and this allowed the glittering, angelic being to spread its venom through human and xenos warbands with unrivalled skill.

Of Fulgrim, little is certain. It is known he resided upon a pleasure world in the eye, and that reluctantly, under the influence of the collars of the Ne[CURSEALLYEWHOENTERHERE], Fulgrim was compelled to construct a fortress and gather a sizable force. However, it seemed as if he felt the war was beneath him now somehow. Perhaps defeat had mellowed him? Or, more likely, the serpent had more nefarious, unseen goals? Similarly, Mortarion and Magnus’ actions are lost to history at this point. One can only speculate on what they were scheming.

Amongst his brothers, only Perturabo truly made coherent plans to oppose his loyalist brothers when they invaded, as he knew they must. Perturabo had found a new patron. His god was Valchocht the Maker, the God of the Soul Forge and the terrible apogee of Dark Mechanicus science-sorcery. Valchocht was a thing of pistols, sinew and gears, of cog wheels, splintered metal maws and impersonal, industrial destruction. Valchocht mirrored the utterly psychopathic, inhuman nature of Perturabo, as did the daemon-primarch reflect the Maker’s infernal genius. Medrengard was brought under the control of Perturabo, and the Warsmiths who presumed to oppose the unification of the Iron Warriors were killed out of hand. Once united, Perturabo began to build, to create horrors, fortresses and daemon engines on a truly phenomenal scale. Forgefiends, heldrakes and maulerfiends, helbrutes, defilers and soulgrinders; countless were the things given horrific life in his semi-organic factory wombs, installed on every world under his control. The Obliterator virus was allowed to run rampant through the populations of a thousand worlds, and the mutilators and obliterators that came mewling and screaming out of those war torn worlds were absorbed into the Grand Legion of Iron.

The Goliath Engine, smashed into fragments by the Planet Killer, was reborn. For a scion of the maker, there was no machine that could not be rebuilt and reformed into an even more twisted horror. But a flagship and the soul forge’s creations were not enough. Perturabo craved an army, a disciplined force he could rely upon. Once, perhaps, the iron Warriors could have been enough, but no longer. The chaos space marines were dying out as a post-human race; their geneseed was utterly beyond saving, and there would be no new neophytes to replace their losses. Fabius Bile had created a race of so-called ‘New Men’, led by a monstrously powerful being called Mulkivas Bile-Blood. However, the New Men were a flawed creation. They were vile and insane, as likely to destroy a planet as they were to fortify and garrison it. Also, their tendency to devour their allies made them unpredictable and functionally useless for a tactical mind like the Iron Warrior’s Primarch. Even Perturabo could not provide his own blood to build new sons as Vulkan had done for his Nova Astartes, for he no longer bled with blood. He was a daemon; he bled battery acid and oil, his skin was armor plate and his innards were coiled, snaking cables and cruelly-bladed gears.

The Legio Astartes were doomed.

Perturabo didn’t truly care however. He found a way around this lack of reliable shocktroops. He found the daemon world of Kai, where the tech priests there had created great Kai guns, daemonic ranged weapons of devastating power. Perturabo wanted the Priests of Kai to build him new weapons. Thus, he used the Goliath Engine to drag the entire world across space and through the warp, and set it into orbit around Medrengard. Terrified of the primarch’s wrath, they did as he demanded. They built for him hundreds of thousands of tall, hulking suits of armor. Taller than an astartes and heavier than cataphractii warplate, these empty suits were armed with a plethora of Kai guns and their variants. Their huge shoulders made them look like huge hunchbacks, and their long-snouted helms were shaped like a vile chimera of a shark and a savage boar. Yet, these suits were empty and inert. But Perturabo was cunning. He summoned the furies, the weakling daemons who had forever been trapped as pathetic vulture-fiends, lingering like flies in a corpse. The furies loathed all life, for they were the embodiments of bitter rejection and the futility of chaos. These daemons craved a chance to punish the universe for forsaking them. The once weak daemons were now strong beings clad in daemonic iron. They eagerly accepted the primarch’s offer, and swiftly inhabited the armored suits. Suddenly, the giants were animated with flickering yellow and black flames from within. The Kai Bane Host was born.

Perturabo wished to test his new army against astartes, as the Nova Astartes would be his primary opponents in his opinion. Hence, in Perturabo’s typically callous manner, he tested the Kai Bane Host by attacking and destroying the Angels of Ecstasy, a chaos space marine warband allied to the Iron warriors. The ambush was swift and brutal, their ships were boarded, and their generals were dragged out from their bridges by the fury-possessed Kai Bane. The Lords of the Angels of Ecstasy were then bidden to watch as their men were unceremoniously slaughtered, one after another. The host of the Kai Bane had proved their worth to Perturabo. He wished to defeat, nay crush, his brothers so that the whole galaxy would have to finally admit that Perturabo was the greatest primarch; the one true warmaster.

Little could he have realized that his chance to prove himself would come earlier than he anticipated. For the flesh wardens, despite their seemingly impenetrable gaze, had a single blind spot, a single chink in their chain of observatories and watch towers. A chink the Imperium Pentus would exploit to the fullest.

[Additional Background to the Fatemaker Controversy]

Not much is known today of the so-called Fatemaker Commandery. Where most historians agree is that the Vulkan Imperium originally contacted this insular astartes chapter in what used to be the border of the old Malachias Sector in the late 54th Millennium. Their realm, which they referred to as the ‘Kapellan Safe Zone’, consisted of fifty well-organized and well- preserved worlds out of reach of most Galactic powers of that time.

The last fragmented records of the Pre-Strife era named the Fatemakers to be the sole guardians of that sector, and so it was originally presumed that these Space Marines were their direct descendants, who, in those long thousands of years, had changed their armor color and Chapter traditions. This was contradicted by the fact that the Kapellan Astartes, as they called themselves, apparently knew who the Fatemakers were, and they vehemently insisted that that particular Chapter had been destroyed, claiming that the Fatemakers ‘walked in a circle and are no more.’ The leader of the vulkanite expedition and his Fire Beast advisors were not satisfied with this answer, especially after some compromising data had been found about the pursuits of the Kapellan space marines. Hostilities between the vulkanite fleet and the Kapellan Safe Zone were cut short, however, when the Chapter Master of the Kapellans offered a deal to the fleet: he requested an audience with Vulkan himself, and in return, he would accept the Primarch’s judgment upon his realm without any further conditions.

The Chapter Master’s audience with the primarch lasted for five hours, after which Vulkan gave the order to prepare his flagship, and personally took a journey to the Kapellan Safe Zone. There are no records what he witnessed there; however, on his return, he declared the Zone to be a semi-autonomous part of the Vulkan Empire, and that the Kapellans were indeed not identical to the Fatemaker Chapter.

Perhaps this was the problem which caused all these contradictions with the Kapellans: after all, if they were always referred to as “the Kapellans, who were definitely not the Fatemakers,” it was only to be expected that the commandery itself was eventually associated with the name, whether they liked it or not. And they did not like it at all: it seemed that the commandery was almost superstitiously reluctant to share anything in common with that ancient Chapter. The name stuck, however, and so by the beginning of the Last Primarch War, the Kapellans’ real Chapter name was barely mentioned at all.

Although the Kapellans apparently had unpleasant secrets, their use in battle was undeniable. They preferred two distinct strategies: a part of their forces was divided into small, specialized groups capable of applying surgical strikes against specific targets. While this set of tactics was reminiscent of typical Pre-Strife Space Marines, they had another tactical preference which was almost Crusade-era in nature. The Kapellans were fully comfortable with applying huge astartes formations on the battlefields, which were accompanied by standard infantry, armor and aircraft, but was also supplemented by hordes of battle Ogryns calling themselves ‘Sons of Metragon.’ These abhumans were treated as equal citizens of the Safe Zone, and their ferocity and raw strength was further augmented by heavy cybernetization and crude but effective hand-to-hand weaponry. The ogryns and the Kapellans’ other allies, including the [CLASSIFIED ON THE PERSONAL ORDER OF LORD VULKAN] also accompanied the commendary to the muster before the last primarch war, although the Kapellans contributed an equally large force to the Magellan Reich to aid them against the war on the Chaos entity known as Doombreed.

And so the commandery fought its way into Galactic history, and in the light of the later events, the mystery surrounding the ancient Fatemakers seems trivial and irrelevant. My personal opinion is that we can accept the word of Lord Vulkan in this case: he personally ordered the Fatemaker Chapter symbol to be placed on the Wall of Remembrance on Armageddon. This wall contains all the symbols of the Space Marine Chapters which have perished since the creation of the first astartes, and the inversed ‘Q’ among the other 846 symbols clearly indicates the primarch’s belief in the Fatemakers’ final demise.

[Archivist Nikolai Guliano; excerpt from the astartes chapters of the Human Imperiums, unpublished edition]

Additional Background Section 40: Battle is joined

The battle of Shrilla (Also known as the war of shadow dancers)

The Flesh Wardens of the eastern barrier region of the Travesty detected a minor motion in the warp, a small displacement of warp power, brought about in the wake of barely a dozen vessels crossing the unseen boundary between Pentus and Travesty space lanes. The majority of the prowling space marines and daemon things infesting the region barely noticed the disruption, or saw it as merely a mission probing the defenses of the evil Imperium.

However, Decimus the prophet of the Midnight-Clad, sensed that this small force was pivotal to the coming Pentus attack. Thus, the shadowy forces of the Night Lord warlord flocked to that sector, hungry for battle and carnage. Decimus sensed where the enemy meant to break into realspace, and organized his hunting forces there in readiness to ambush the vanguard force and scupper the plans of the Five Brothers.

The world in question was a relatively peaceful mining planet called Shrilla. The plant’s surface was barren, pot marked with craters and the occasional exhaust column from the heavy industry developed below. Inside the planet, the miners had excavated and colonized for millennia, forming a dense warren of tunnels that ran through the thick crust like a honeycomb. Darkness and pollution had made the people pale, sickly and isolationist, but they were otherwise harmless. War had not visited Shrilla since the Second Strife. They had hoped this state of affairs would continue until the end of time. They were disappointed.

When the Night Lord descendants’ vessels entered the system, the governor of Shrilla sent a vessel out to meet them and welcome them to Shrilla. Within a week, the burning ship, still full of terrified diplomats and crew, was sent crashing into Shrilla’s surface. The resultant thermo-nuclear explosion signaled the attack of the Midnight-Clad. They fell upon the people of Shrilla with heinous abandon. They ripped apart families, fed children to dogs and furies, factories were torched and the people were forced to flee into the darkness of the inner mines, much to the glee of Decimus and his cruel lieutenants. Darkness was the natural habitat of the Nostroman Astartes, and they stalked it like terrors of the ancient world. The screams of the near-helpless Shrillans was music to their ears.

Decimus led the expedition to the deepest sections of the mines, where the women and children were defended by their menfolk, who went into battle in their hastily-armed mining rigs. Decimus and his chosen carved through this army of workmen with casual distain. Decimus was a master swordsman and duelist, yet he found just as much enjoyment and satisfaction from battering a helpless man to death with his own broken femurs as he did from dueling the greatest of foes.

As Decimus approached the last of the bested Shrillan commanders, in his collapsed cockpit of his walker, a single Shrillan soldier stepped into Decimus’ path. The man emptied an entire clip of lasgun bolts into the space marine, to no avail; the armor Decimus bore was cannibalized from some of the greatest power armors artificers could devise. Slowly, Decimus advanced upon the man, who now held his empty lasgun like a club, cursing the astartes breathlessly.

“It took a lot of guts to stand up to me, mortal,” Decimus said calmly, just as he punched through the man’s belly with his gauntlet, spilling the soldier’s intestines over his already sagging knees.

“See? Lots,” Decimus chuckled, wiping his gory hand on the man’s face, before stepping over the fresh corpse to finish off the last helpless victim.

He dragged the last man from his cockpit, and held the man down easily, his arms pinned with only one of Decimus’ huge hands. Slowly, the Night Lord drew his golden blade, so that his victim would know what was coming. The sound of his chosen laughing and butchering echoed in the chambers around him, like a discordant choir.

“Why are you doing this?” was all the weakling human could croak. Decimus smiled beneath his helm.

“The question is, why not do this? Why shouldn’t I crush you? Give me a reason, little mortal,” he chuckled cruelly.

“I have a reason; if you don’t stop, I will kill you. And your death will not be as clean as the deaths inflicted upon your chosen.”

The voice came from nowhere, and made Decimus leap up in surprise, storm bolter drawn. Scanning the shadows, he realized he could not see the owner of the voice. It was too dark for even his black eyes to penetrate. But he sensed the powerful mind behind it.

Decimus voxed to his chosen, but their vox links had gone silent. From somewhere far away, Decimus could hear exchanges of bolter fire.

“It could only have been you, Corvus,” Decimus chuckled mockingly, turning on the spot to scan the darkness.

Decimus had been drawn into a trap. Corax himself had led the vanguard force, and as a consequence, they had arrived before the Midnight-Clad, and had installed themselves into Shrilla’s mining levels. The Sons of Corax had waited until the night Lords were deep inside the mines before they began their attack. They detonated charges behind the chaos space marines, and jumped the warriors in their own shadows. Black armored warriors clashed with midnight blue marines. Similarly, in orbit, the Corvian ships took the Midnight-Clad by surprise, ramming mining vessels and satellites into the Night Lord ships, before decloaking and striking with full force at the sadistic Travesty warriors.

“You prey upon the weak, and hunt them through the dark? Let us see how fast you can run, little-astartes,” Corax hissed from the deep. Decimus didn’t stand on ceremony, and promptly fled, destroying the passageway behind him as he passed. Corax had the drop on the night Lord, but Decimus had foresight akin to his gene-father, and each time the Lord of Deliverance tried to trap and contain him, the prophet eluded capture. He cut down scores of Corvians who attempted to thwart him, his precognition and brutal pragmatism making him an utterly lethal combatant. As he fled, he instinctively sought out his fellow Night Lords, and they began to regroup. Brutal tunnel fighting lasted for several days, as the two fast moving forces played a game of cat and mouse with one another.* On one side, there was the warp- borne cunning and experience of Decimus, on the other was the brilliance of Corax and the local knowledge of the tunnels, provided by the grateful Shrillans. But always, Decimus’ actions were typified by a kind of desperation. It is said that Space Marines know no fear. This is a lie. Decimus was utterly terrified of Corax; the sheer primal power of a primarch was enough to still the heart of even the most sociopathic veterans of the Long Wars.

Only a third of Decimus’ strikeforce made it to the surface, and only half of those managed to fight off the Sons of Corax there, and steal shuttles to reach their waiting fleet. It was said that Decimus, just as he boarded the last shuttle, was ensnared by Corax’s mighty whip, which ripped his left arm from its socket as the shuttle fled at full speed towards the waiting void.

Decimus immediately contacted Kol Basilis and told the blasphematii grand master that Corax himself was leading an invasion of the Imperium. Basilis reacted swiftly, deploying a sizable force of blasphematii warships to support the Night Lord. Basilis’ paranoia went into overdrive, and soon an entire fleet, led by Decimus, was deployed to catch and destroy Corax. The two generals led each other on a merry chase across the desolate border regions, as Corax began to inspire planets he visited to revolt against the Blasphematii when they came looking for him. Corax hadn’t enough men to properly threaten even a handful of the Travesty’s worlds, but he had enough to elude their fleets and frustrate his hunters.

This was his plan all along. He had let Decimus leave Shrilla for the express purpose of drawing attention to himself. And, as more and more chaos forces seemed to turn towards his disputed sector, it seemed to be working.

While the beast was fixed upon him, the other primarchs formed a single mighty fleet, which plunged into the Imperium of Travesties almost unmolested, like a dagger between the ribs. This was achieved through an unprecedented strategy. Leman Russ had noticed that there was a channel of space where the Flesh Wardens did not look. Indeed, there was an entire corridor of warp and realspace that was utterly barren and becalmed; this was the trail of destruction left as the Ophilim Kiasoz zigzagged its way towards the Eye of Terror. The Wolf King proposed that they follow in the shadow of the Ophilim, just close enough to shroud them, but far enough away to prevent the entire fleet being erased by the eldritch entity. It was a risky ploy, but it was one which seemed to work. Within a month, they had bypassed the Flesh Wardens, and were deep inside enemy territory.

Alas though, not everyone was blind to their strategy. As the war continued, Perturabo would soon enter the fray... *(Some accounts from both sides claim they caught glimpses of an axe-wielding eldar warrior in ancient armor, though he never spoke or interacted with the combatants.)

###

The Liberation of Macharia, first major action of the Cyclopean War

Temestor Braiva, the venerable and brilliant general of the self-titled ‘Braiva’s Best’ joint battlegroup, spearheaded the primary military campaign against Ahriman Godseeker and his dominion of Golarchs, Rubric Marines, sorcerers and self-interested fanatics. However, Braiva, despite his reputation for swashbuckling, was a pragmatic and ultimately devious man. He knew that if he struck at Ahriman directly with his fleet, he would be destroyed within a matter of weeks, for his fleet was no vast armada, but rather a patchwork band of disparate elements alloyed only under his leadership. He had them united under his powerful personality and the tacit support of the Imperium Pentus that he championed in the wild southern marches of Tempestus, yet he still only possessed a few thousand vessels, a middling amount in the grand scheme of the galaxy. What he required was an early victory within Ahriman’s dominion; a symbolic victory to prick the ire of the Thousand Sons and to more importantly, spur on his men and the local warlords to support his fight, the good fight.

Thus, Temestor struck deep into the Segmentum Tempestus, at the antique city-world of Macharia. There were several ancient planets named after the legendary Lord Solar, but this Macharia was the first of his conquest worlds to be named after him, and it was by far the most grandiose. It had been a wonder of the Old Imperium in its heyday, all covered in sculpted marble and fine white stone. If Braiva’s best could liberate the planet and the people of Macharia without destroying it, it would cement Temestor’s place as the heir of Lord Solar Macharius and Braiva’s Best would no longer be just his allies of convenience or his to command by primarchical decree. They would be the Princes of Macharia, and each of his generals would be legends amongst men. No longer would they be divided by their origins, they would be united by their triumphs.

Eventually, through discreet warp maneuvers devised to evade the patrols of various petty warlords promised the Imperial crown by Ahriman, Braiva’s Best entered the Macharia system. The planet itself was no longer a jewel in an Imperial crown, but a destitute semi-ruin ruled by Canon Heirik Zann, self-proclaimed Sovereign In perpetuity of the Theologian Union. His was a meaningless title, but the delusional warlord was backed up in his claim by a million-strong host of religious lunatics known as the Fraternity Crimson, a heavily armed sect of former professional soldiers of the now-extinct Theologian Union. This combined naval and ground force had easily conquered Macharia and the other agricultural and strategic worlds orbiting its parent star. They were backed up by a conscript militia formed from almost ten percent of the cowed populace.

Macharia had once been a place of learning, but the universities of the world were gutted and burned in religious ceremonies; all save for one University within the Torgaldu district. There one of Ahriman’s Cabal, the sorcerer Tzchevek and his Rubric garrison had set up a centre for psychic research. They imposed a tithe of the psyker sacrifices Zann was making, and turning them into familiars to increase Tzchevek’s own power. Heretics and traitors to Heirik’s cause were otherwise dragged into town squares and dismembered publically and messily. The pride of the despot’s forces was a rare, surviving witchfynder class cruiser hubristically called ‘Zann’s Might’ in his honor. The vessel’s warp drive was broken beyond repair, but the vessel was still a formidable asset, and the paranoid dictator kept the ship moving constantly, hiding until it was needed. It led a fleet of defense monitors and escort carriers of non-insubstantial scale.

Tyme’s Absolution, Braiva’s flagship, on arrival, promptly hid behind a distant dwarf planet circling the outer rings of the system, waiting until his full forces could mass at system’s edge. Heirik had no astropaths or navigators, only weak psychic soothsayers; he had fed the rest to Zann’s Might, in the vain hope of restarting the ship’s with-furnace engines. Thus, Braiva could move relatively undetected in the early phases of the battle.

He gathered his seven most trusted generals and champions to a war meeting within his tactical briefing chamber aboard Tyme’s Absolution. There was the ferocious Lychen Vashiri known as Faruk the Pitiless, who attended every meeting in the raiment of a barbarian warlord, covered in a profusion of daggers, axes, bloodied pelts and his trademark chain- falchions. He was a furious man with a murderer’s grin etched humorlessly upon scarred cheeks. He followed Temestor’s band purely so he might throw himself and his Vashiri into the bloodiest frays, in the Blood-Emperor’s name. Lector Ikriskiall was another, the highest ranking leader of the Gamma-meson psyker guardsmen, notable for his venerable age and formidable knowledge of his sect’s refined battle-psyker techniques. Then there was the redoubtable Colonel Roderus of the Steel legion ‘Tempered Edge’ veterans, a man as unyielding as the material of his regiment’s namesake. Darbane of the Plasma Commandoes was easily the largest member of this band, a cheerful cybernetic giant who never seemed to raise his voice above a conversational tone of voice, even in the midst of combat, blazing away with his twin plasma pistols. The youngest of the group was Duc De Aronelles, the Commanding Duke of the Warrior Princes of Chevantai. In battle he wore a slender grav-defying powered suit of armor and fought like his fellow knights, with powered lance and ornate, yet elegantly lethal, melee pistols. However, out of combat, the Duke wore a fine dining jacket and his long ebon hair was allowed to flow freely across his shoulders. The incorrigible captain Farl, by comparison, was a crude thug. A Chapter commander of the Lussorian Narc Warriors (who were erroneously known as ‘Space marines’ in their region of the Imperium Pentus), Farl was an imperfect mirror image of an astartes, clad in patchwork power armor and swollen unnaturally by cocktails of genomorph narcotics. He was once a criminal, but half a century of begrudging service in the Lussorians had bred him into an artless-yet-effective killer, and a surprisingly honorable man. He masked this honor well though, beneath a mask of sneering contempt only Temestor himself could see through. The final general was called Obediah Braiva; Temestor’s own son. Adopted after his mother was slain in a war torn hell a decade past, the young man had grown into a courageous and often times reckless Champion of The Best; he bore Temestor’s grav shoot and combat spear into battle and was the Lord General’s representative on the field of battle ever since Temestor became too elderly to lead from the front. Together, these seven men planned how best to divest the deviant Heirik Zann from the seat of Macharian power.

Braiva first struck at the outer planets and their garrisons. Tyme’s Absolution had well- stocked fighter and bomber wings, and he utilized these fighters and his escort carriers to the fullest. They attacked the space stations and military installations of the Fraternity Crimson, forcing the fanatics to give chase. Though the fighters did little damage over the months of hit and run attacks, they served their purpose. They made the Fraternity furious and fooled them into thinking Braiva’s attack was a small internal rebellion from Macharia’s downtrodden people. As the soldiers got more and more frustrated in their search for the rebel base, Braiva’s Best made a slow-burning run towards the inner system. Their engines remained deactivated, and the only engine output came from the occasional course correction by maneuvering thrusters. The fraternity was preoccupied with ravaging the outlying worlds and ransacking their cities, and did not think to look for some great mass of vessels entering the system quietly and non- violently.

The invasion of Macharia began almost as soon as the ships entered the system. Forces loyal to Temestor deployed on the planet’s surface almost one unit at a time, to avoid detection by the defense monitors and orbital weapon systems set up to detect major military incursions. Over the course of months, as the attacks in the wider system intensified, these forces quietly dug themselves in amongst sympathetic factions of disgruntled civilians living under demented Theocratic rule. Slowly but surely, arms and munitions were manufactured or shipped in piece by piece by the approaching, cool-running fleet. Almost a third of Braiva’s forces were deployed on macharia’s surface before Heirik was aware of the invasion. By the time Zann’s forces became aware that the various rebellions were in fact linked to one another, Braivas best were already upon them. His fleet, as one, activated their engines and powered the last few light minutes into Macharia’s orbit in the space of a few hours. Tyme’s Absolution lead the charge, smashing through the monitor fleet with the force of a sledgehammer, as the other fleet elements widened the wound. The vast battle barge entered orbit, fighters and bombers destroying any installations that attempted to draw a bead on the hulking behemoth. It disgorged a tide of landing ships, shuttles, valkyries and kestral gunships. Once it had done this, the battle barge carrier set a course away from the contested orbital space, as if Braiva feared damage to his flagship, leaving the rest of his fleet to face the big guns of the Macharian orbital assembly. Heirik ordered Zann’s Might to hunt the carrier down, and kill its idiot captain.

Simultaneously to the orbital deployment, the forces on the ground sprang into action, in five different sectors of the country-spanning capital city of the metropolis world, all expertly coordinated by Temestor in orbit, working with his generals via nothing more than micro- bead comm. Each of the forces that rose up was soon reinforced by the orbital assault. The forces of Braiva’s Best initially fought individually, playing to their own strengths. Duc De Aronelles and the chevantai utilized their grav harnesses to allow them to sweep between streets with seemingly effortless grace, their light feet barely touching the ground as they moved at seeds faster than any mere cavalry force could hope to match. Their long power lances skewered foe after foe, before they darted out of harm’s way, firing their melee pistols at their outflanked assailants. Farl’s Space Marines fought brutal door to door sieges, storming buildings, killing the soldiers inside, before stubbornly using these buildings as bastions themselves. Darbane’s Plasma Commandoes fought with their usual bravado, using overwhelming firepower to smash into the Crimson Fraternity and their forces. Roderus and the Tempered edge veterans found themselves pinned in one district of the city, yet held off wave after wave of the fanatics under Zann’s sway. They ignored their injuries and simply fought with increased determination, snatching up fallen enemy weapons to supplement their own when they spent their ammunition. The Gamma-Meson Guardsmen were a terror to behold; their eyes glowed with azure flames, and their hands and their weapons were shrouded in crackling energy fields that scorched foes to ash as they strolled into combat, chanting their rites of concentration. The gamma-Mesons seemed perversely calm despite being engaged in a lethal combat. This was because Battle- psykers required perfect concentration to be effective. If they got too over-excited or wrathful, their conjurations might fail. Thus, somberly, they carved their way forwards, killing without urgency and shuttling their dead and wounded back to their deployment area with similar calm.

By contrast, Faruk and the vashiri fought like mad berserkers, charging into the thick of the fighting, where their opponents’ longer ranged weapons meant little. Faruk, twin chain- falchions clutched in his hands, howled in ecstasy as he swam through the entrails of the men he disemboweled.

The Crimson Fraternity and their supporting militias, however, were still numerically superior, and each of Braiva’s forces were separated and isolated from one another. After only a couple of hours, the forces of Braiva seemed to be forced to fall back from the onrushing hordes of carapace-armored Fraternity soldiers. Zann’s men, buoyed with this success, pushed on ever harder, until the desperate forces of the so-called rebellion were forced into a full rout. Heirik ordered them to hunt them down to the last man, and the Crimson Fraternity was eager to oblige.

Meanwhile, in space, Zann’s Might led its fleet of monitors on the hunt for Tyme’s Absolution, it’s captain hungry to obtain the Emperor’s glory for this kill. Never once did the captain consider that Tyme’s Absolution was, in fact, hunting him...

The forces of Braiva’s best fled through the city, broken and unmanned by the sheer force of the Fraternity; even the tempered Edge veterans begrudgingly withdrew. The theocratic soldiers seemed to be herding the forces together, like dogs gathering sheep into a single great pen. To Heirik’s amusement, as he watched the short war via pict-feeds inside his eternal palace, this pen was to be the square of judgment; the place where heretics and heathens across Macharia were brought for show trial and execution. How fitting, he thought, that this latest foe would fate its grisly fate there as well.

The Crimson Fraternity converged upon the square from all entrances to the square, closing like a noose. Their tanks came first, followed by rank upon rank of heavily-armed infantry and striding walker gun platforms. They burst into the square with all the fury of a zealot in a sermon.

However, the square was empty. As the significant portion of the Fraternity crowded into the square, they found themselves baffled. Their foes had vanished, melting into the urban sprawl around them somehow.

Three things happened then.

Firstly, demolition charges exploded on the ground floors of the largest buildings that girdled the square, causing them to tumble into ruin one after another. Secondly, through the brick dust and rubble debris, lasers flashed across the Fraternity; harmless red pin pricks of light. These were designators. These guided flights of missiles and artillery shells, built and hidden across the city, to fire and fall precisely upon the Fraternity forces suddenly trapped by the rubble al around them. The resultant fireballs rose up to an eighth of a mile into the heavens, and was visible from Zann’s own palace. The survivors, stumbling through the thick palls of smoke and the gory ruins of their fellow soldiers, were easy prey for the vashiri and the Lussorians, who fell upon them with unbelievable savagery.

In space, the defenders suddenly found that the defense lasers planetside were no longer firing at the enemy fleet, but at their own space stations and monitor vessels; the Justice Troopers had discreetly struck them early on in the battle, and commandeered them against the zannite enemy. Caught between the guns of the invasion fleet, and the guns of their own home world, the defense fleet crumbled into a disordered retreat. They were immobilized and disarmed by the careful guns of Braiva’s best. However, the ships were not destroyed, but were left blinded, crippled and neutered, left intact for later use by Braiva.*

As the battle turned decisively in favor of the invaders, the remaining forces of Heirik learnt precisely why his enemy was renowned three sectors over for their prowess. The previously divided forces fought as fluid, combined arms forces. The knight-princes of chevantai and the land speeders of the Justice troops harried the flanks and rear of the enemy, while the lussorians and tempered edge vets pinned them in place. The Plasma Commandoes and roving teams with missile launchers took down the enemy armor before they could gun down the infantry, and the Vashiri held up any ranged support from returning the favor and striking at the Commandoes. The vashiri were protected by battle-psyker shields, as the Gamma-Meson lectors led their guardsmen behind the blood-hungry savages. It was said Braiva had learnt much from xenos and human alike over the years, and the strategies and tactics he taught to his generals reflected this. There was the constant mobility of the farsight tau, combined with the specialization and synergy of Eldar swordwind techniques, and the willingness to improvise and alter battle plans at the drop of a hat, learned from his own Confederation roots. The Fraternity were hunted through the streets; routed.***

As Zann’s forces were broken in the city, so his palace was assaulted. Obediah Braiva led the strike team, which deployed via grav chutes from orbit itself. The palaces defenses were neutralized with missile fire just as they landed on the battlements. The assault was swift, taking the hardened defenders by surprise. Concussion grenades and smoke bombs covered their rapid advance through the tight corridors. The justice troopers moved with well-oiled precision and efficiency. Door to door, they cleared each room. Anyone who so much as raised a gun towards them was put down before they could so much as yell in alarm. Poison fog bombs were detonated, choking defenders while the rebreathers of the droptroopers protected them easily. It is said Obediah’s teams did not suffer a single fatality during that raid, whereas the Macharian Emperor’s were killed almost to a man. Obediah himself dragged the cowering Heirik from his basement bunker complex, and placed him under arrest.

Though Heirk was captured, his forces refused to surrender the city world, and Braiva’s Best spent months conquering the city from the fanatics. Many were the legends and stories created during that period of scouring. I would not claim that all of the stories were true, as many were likely embellished by scholars and creative writers who inherited these tales in the decade after the war. However, many are interesting for me, as they shed some light on Braiva’s generals I feel.

During the first month of the war, Farl of the lussorians was said to have led his forces into the industrial sector of the city. His brutal warriors slowly ground the militias and remnant Fraternity-troops to dust. It was said Farl breached the great temperance Compound, where Zann’s men had stored all the confiscated liquor and brewing equipment they had stolen from the populace, who had been forced into sobriety in the name of the Wasteland Emperor. Now, I am sure you have learned of the legendary decorum and somber nature of the Space marines, and how alcohol had the least effect upon them. This was not the case for Farl’s Marines, for they were not post-human; they were perhaps some of the most human soldiers fighting under Vulkan’s banner. Thus, when they liberated the largest alcoholic storage yard on Macharia, they helped themselves. Legends still tell of the raucous week of celebration that followed, as Farl, drunk out of his mind, rolled barrels of ales, casks of wine and amasec, and a multitude of other spirits and liquors, into the streets, for all to drink in celebration. Cackling like a lunatic, Farl eventually stormed the last enemy stronghold in the district at the head of an army of Space marines and vengeful macharian citizens, killed the leaders of the stronghold, and torched the fortress; all the while he was drunk out of his mind.

However, there were far more harrowing tales to tell of these months of scouring. Heirik Zann had made allies of many post-Imperial cults, but amongst his most odious of his allies was the so-called Cult of the Redemption. The Redemptors were an ancient sect, who could trace their origins to the middle years of the Age of the Old Imperium. Despite all the destruction and upheaval of the Second Strife and the Dragon Tides and the New Devourer, unfortunately this cult had survived, in pretty much an unaltered form. The Redemptors still had a perverse love for the flamer and the chainblade, and still bore red robes and distinctive pointed hoods. Their twisted devotion to a dead creed had only radicalized them over and over again, until the creatures had an utterly abhorrent creed. They had been placed in control of the Temple of Extermination on Macharia. Zann had tasked them with completing his cleansing purges. The accused heretics and warp-dabblers that were hanged in the square had had families. In the eyes of the Redemptors, these families shared a genetic curse with their heretical relatives. Wives and husbands, children and grandchildren, were gathered up, along with any infants deemed to have any psychic potential, and placed in the Temple. Then, calmly and callously, the Redemptors started to systematically kill them. No one outside the temple knew precisely what happened within the Temple, but thick, oily smoke was always rising from the Redemptor stronghold. By the time Braiva’s invasion had defeated Zann, the Redemptors were only halfway through their timetabled genocide. Instead of surrendering, the Redemptors resisted the invaders, with flame and blade. Their sheer ferocity forced back several determined assaults. All the while, the death toll of innocents within was rising. Reluctantly, Obediah and Roderus unleashed the vashiri upon the compound. Faruk’s half-feral warriors smashed their way into the temple. Blades met blades, and flames met flames, as the two berserk forces ripped into each other. Soon enough, the sound of screaming echoed from the Temple, the hideous shrieking carrying for miles around. Roderus had feared that Faruk’s murder-tourists would kill everything inside in their mindless frenzy. However, the Veteran leader did not truly understand the lychen mindset. The Lychen were not mindless killers. Their cannibalistic lychen-haemovore creed was highly ritualized and possessed strict, complex rules. One of the most basic and central tenets was thus; do not slay the unblooded. Do not kill and devour a creature that possessed no ability to kill or devour you. The Redemptors had broken this central tenet. The lychen were not very pleased with the Cult of the Redemption (to put it mildly). After twenty seven hours of furious, unseen combat, the doors of the temple swung open for a second time. A tide of blood flowed down the steps, to the disgusted horror of the pentus- soldiers still blockading the building. A few minutes later, the lychen vashiri emerged. They were coated, head to foot, in thick layers of blood. And in their arms, to the astonishment of the crowds of gasping citizens that had gathered around the temple, the Vashiri carried children and infants. Some were as old as ten, others younger than a single year. These children were drenched in blood and had haunted, hollow expressions, but were otherwise unhurt. The children with psychic potential were handed to the Gamma-meson Guard for training, while the rest were adopted by the vashiri.** When clean up teams eventually entered the temple, it was a charnel house. Blood and shredded robes were left scattered across the ground. Of the Redemptors themselves, only gory, gnawed skeletons remained. The vashiri were nothing if not thorough...

In space, as the scouring continued on the surface, Zann’s Might was hounded to the edge of the system, lured into an ambush by the withdrawing battlebarge. Though its advanced weapon systems damaged hundreds of vessels, the ship was eventually crippled and boarded, before being towed back to Macharia as Braiva’s prize.

Once the venerable Temestor Braiva returned, he met with his assembled generals, and discussed what to do with Heirik Zann. Of course, the simple thing would have been to slay him, but Braiva had something else in mind. He decided that Heirik would stand trial for his crimes, and the people of Macharia would judge him. Heirik angrily rejected this proposal, cursing Braiva and his courts as unfit to judge him.

“You are worms, not fit to be crushed before my Imperial boot. I am the Emperor of Macharia. The people love me!” he was quoted as screaming, as Braiva had him dragged from the palace dungeons, into the bright light of a winter’s morning. Before the snow clad steps of the palace, a crowd of thousands had gathered to scream defiant hate towards the former tyrant. They threw themselves against the barriers as they pulled at their hair and hurled insults at the decrepit old monster.

“If your people love you so,” Braiva began quietly, staring out across the baying crowd. “I shall release you to their loving custody.”

And with that, General Darbane snatched up the ‘Emperor’, and threw him bodily to the crowd. There, he was torn to shreds. I need not go into the grisly details of his demise, but suffice to say, he did not die well.

Soon, there was only one villain left to deal with upon Macharia. The Gamma-meson Guardsmen were tasked with surrounding the library-tower of the Thousand Sons. High Lector Ikriskiall himself fought the Sorcerer’s mind for several grueling months, simply to keep the witch-born nightmare from unleashing his Rubric Marines, or sending a distress signal to Ahriman. Tzechevek eventually declared Temestor to be the new Emperor of the Theologian Union upon the death of Heirik; no doubt the Sorcerer believed Braiva was simply another petty warlord, like all the other ‘Emperors’ vying for control of the region at Ahriman’s behest. He was mistaken. Braiva spat his offer back, and ordered the tower leveled. Tzechevek prevented any military strikes against his tower through use of a powerful Raptora forcefield. Yet, the Thousand Sons marine did not consider an attack from below. When Darbane’s Plasma Commandoes breached the under-vaults of the tower via the sewers, an intense firefight erupted between the Commandoes and the Rubric marines garrisoning the Thousand Sons’ stronghold. Tzechevek was eventually bested by Darbane himself, who fought the astartes lord in single combat.

The Battle of Macharia was over. Braiva had achieved his goal. The people of Macharia had emerged, relatively unscathed, from the surgically precise battle. Across the system they were hailed as heroes, and the stories of their exploits already began to spread. But more than that, Braiva’s Best alloyed themselves into a united fighting force of carefully-honed combined arms. The fleet was bolstered by the repaired remnants of the monitor fleet. Zann’s Might was retrofitted with a standard warp engine, and the people of Macharia eagerly provided a dozen regiments of new recruits for Braiva’s building army.

Yet still, Braiva knew his work was not done. If he was to conquer all the other petty Emperors, and force Ahriman himself to commit to battle, he would need allies. He looked to the two nearest western realms; Praetoria, and the lychen empire. Victory depended not only upon military logistics, but also diplomatic skill.

*(The crews of these took several harrowing months to starve to death inside their cold metal tombs, and Braiva let them. This is perhaps one of the darker, less well advertised aspects of the battle of Macharia. War is ugly, and makes brutes of us all...) **( Eye witnesses claimed Faruk emerged carrying a weeping child of only two years who, according to legend, later became Faruk’s only son, Farciar the Red, bearer of the Flayed banner of the vashiri.) ***(Some uncorroborated reports from the locals claimed they saw an axe-wielding alien watching these grisly events silently, but these citizens saw this figure for only a moment, and the dragon-scaled alien could easily have been them merely catching a glance of one of the chevantai warrior princes, and jumping to the conclusion they were alien warlords.)

The Revolt of Shadows

Vect’s injury by the Wolf King Russ had triggered a great wave of opportunistic attacks by the Archons of his rival kabals, and even those within the kabal of the Black Heart; if the High Lord could be made to bleed, then he was not flawless and he could be bested, somehow. This period of excitement was known as the year of a thousand revolts (even though the actual number of revolts directed against Vect was far higher than a mere one thousand).

Every conniving and ambitious eldar in Commorragh seemed to make an attempt at undermining or unseating Vect from power. Vect turned each attempt inside out, causing the death of its conspirators, or turning conspirators against his other enemies, and hence eliminating them both. This year of madness was a great boon to the commorrites, who greatly enjoyed using their realspace raid soul-bounties to fund epic carnage across the city. Wych tournaments spilled out onto the streets, and into the eyries and spires across the impossible city. Sub-realms cavorted and rose up, as political animals prowled and devoured one another in Machiavellian schemes that would make a mere human politician weep in envy. As this chaos swept up more and more of the populace into its storm reaches, Vect stood at the eye of the storm, a deceptively calm place.

Vect himself, though he would never show it to any living being, was tiring. Millions were dying to feed his black web of a mind. He even began to eat the eyes of seers, the choicest and most nutritious of soul essence available. Even his labyrinthine mind struggled to cope with the myriad plots and conspiracies leveled against him and his allies. Despite this, Vect knew there was some force behind the year of a thousand revolts, a mind comparable to his in cunning and duplicity. There was only one Dark Eldar that truly fit that description; Lady Aurelia Malys. Her Poisoned Tongue Kabal were pitting the other kabals against Vect, somehow managing to get their archons destroyed in the process. Yet, Malys was not taking over these kabals, or putting her own puppet Archons in their place. This intrigued Vect most of all, as this seemed to lack ambition. She was forgoing personal power and advancement. Dark Eldar were all sociopathic narcissists at heart, Vect had learnt this over millennia; no matter how noble or deranged they seemed, if given the chance to become one of the inner circle of the powerful, an eldar would always slither into line and play to Vect’s tune. Yet Malys, alone amongst the eldar, did not.

Vect reached a conclusion then that he had long suspected; Lady Malys was not an eldar. Not anymore. As civil war continued to rage, Vect had Malys hunted down. The trackers followed her to a vast hemispherical sanctum, deep within the catacombs clinging to the underside of Commorragh like tumor growths. Soon, as Vect watched through his hunter-puppets’ eyes, the chamber was revealed to be a domed chamber. Every space inch of space on the sloping walls were occupied by perfectly placed skulls. All of the skulls peered inwards, towards a dais. To the left of the dais, Lady Malys herself stood, a smile impossibly wide on her lips. Vect’s kill team wasted no time in opening fire upon the Archon, but she could not be struck. Every crystal splinter, every baleful blast of energy, every razor- edged disk, missed her comfortably. When ranged weapons failed, his mercenaries eagerly leapt into combat with her. Even though her skill was exquisite and her elegant kills were a joy for Vect to view through his vid-steals, his hired killers were masters of their art, and surrounded her with expert precision. If Malys had been fighting them alone, she would have perished there.

If. Suddenly, one by one, the hunters were falling, cut down by something swift and unseen, like fluid shadow. Their heads were taken one by one, clattering with a crunch to the floor, which was covered in shattered skulls. This was Kheradruakh’s lair, ‘He Who Hunts Heads’. The Decapitator.

With a grin on her face, Malys plucked the last hunter’s severed head from the floor, so she could peer into Vect’s eyes vicariously.

“Good evening my love,” she purred sweetly, before she broke down into violent, shuddering laughter.

Vect smiled back, for he knew the creature within could see him too, impossible as it seemed. “I was wondering when we would meet. I would have thought this meeting could have been conducted sooner,” Vect replied. “’My Love’ was a good touch though. Very menacing,” Vect added, mockingly.

“Do not be like that, young master Vect. Have I been such a neglectful landlord? Have I not kept the ravages of the Young Prince from you? Your voice suggests a significant lack of gratitude.”

Vect dismissed the reply with a theatrical gesture. “Gratitude is so tedious. It implies that the gratified owes their patron a favor. I owe you nothing.”

The being within Malys chuckled, the crystal heart in her chest glimmering with multiple hues within her breast. “Oh, the eldar owe me a great many things, but that is not why I lured your men here.”

“Indeed?” Vect responded, raising an eyebrow lazily.

“I lured them here to bear witness. I feel it is only fair the High Lord of my tenants understands why I must punish your species.”

Vect began to lose patience with the shimmering fiend wearing Malys’ flesh. “Do not presume to threaten me. Do not think that being a god will protect you from me, should I choose to... lose my temper with you.”

Malys burst into laughter upon hearing Vect’s threat. “You absurd little parasite! You do amuse me so. But enough of the games I think. Your regime has hamstrung my efforts on the galactic stage. Your creed of self-interest has united your ‘Dark Eldar’ under the banner of disunity. A delightful paradox to be sure, but not one that aids me. You are an unknown quantity; a rogue element, scuppering everyone’s plans with your soul-drinking, raping, pillaging nonsense. I have wars to win, and universes to conquer. I shall give you another chance, Asdrubael Vect, son of Ulthaneshu Vect, to bend the knee to your master, and bring your kabals into line behind me. The war has started; if we do not act soon, you might miss it.”

It was Vect’s turn to laugh, though his was a dry, hideous thing, devoid of any warmth (if it his voice had ever had warmth in it to begin with, records do not say). “I have no master. I have no equals. I will not be a mere pawn in your great game, Aurelia Malys, host of the crystal heart of Cegorach. My realm is a meritocracy of murder. You shall never tame us.”

“Never say never, my dear. If you will not be tamed, your race with just have to be... caged,” Malys responded with a perverse smile, as she handed the severed head to the Decapitator. The shadow-skinned half-breed carefully peeled the head, before scuttling up to the highest ring of his hemispherical lair. There, he set the skull in the final vacant niche. Then, the webway trembled.

The lights in Vect’s personal chambers began to flicker. Though his chambers were physically many light years from the Decapitator’s lair, deep in lightless Aelindrach, they were linked to that realm, and all sub-realms, via the webway’s eternal strands and tributaries. Vect sneered, disdainful of the building disjunction.

“You intend to breach the webway? Set daemons amongst the alleys and haunted mews of Commorragh? Daemons are nothing to us. We have weathered such things before, Jackal Godhead.”

Malys gave Vect an expression of mock confusion. “Daemons? Oh, there are far worse things than daemons...”

As she said this, she gestured to the dais at the center of the dome. Something was coalescing at its heart; a coiling, living shade, a yawning chasm of unlight, drinking in what little illumination remained in the chamber. Vect cut off the vid-steal feed, but Malys’ laughter echoed long after her image faded.

Vect leaned back in his throne, as his chamber began to darken around him. Through his spider-ribbed windows, he could see the twilight of Commorragh was becoming something else; something darker. The usual screaming and endless shrieking of Commorragh took on a different timbre. They went from a glorious cacophony, to a strangled gasp, as if the entire city had collectively taken a breath, before some deep plunge. Vect ignored his alien bodyguards as they burst into his chamber, breathlessly warning him of the unfolding disaster. He could see it for himself; the tendrils of blackness coiling around mile-high spires, the capering... things which he could not quite make out through the darkness, even with his enhanced eyesight.

Carefully, he formed a steeple with his fingers, and licked his sallow lips and his perfect, needle-sharp teeth. The Long Night had come, it would seem.

“What do we do, my Lord?” a Dracon asked. Vect gestured to one of his Sslyth, who neatly beheaded the simpering whelp. Vect carefully placed one finger to his lips.

“Ssssh... I am thinking,” he responded; as he plucked the unfortunate dracon’s eyes from his skull one by one.

In his head, he made a promise to Cegorach, a promise he knew the laughing god could hear. Once Vect had freed himself from the Revolt of Shadows, he would enact such terrible vengeance upon Cegorach, poets and sadists across a thousand universes wouldn’t be able to categorize all the new ways he would wring agony from the trickster god.

But for the moment, Vect decided, as he dodged the many-limbed shade-daemon that suddenly leapt from the darkness and dashed his throne to splinters, his city would be a little preoccupied.

Only the Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue, and Duke Sliscus’ corsairs, managed to escape the shadows that suddenly enfolded the City of Sins, for they were both outside Commorragh at the moment of the revolt.

###

The Swordwind siege

As Abaddon was detained in the Klavox region (the tale of which shall be related to you in the next section), Huron Blackheart’s regime, as decaying and barely-held together as its master’s own flesh, set itself a monumental task. Huron’s regime needed to remove at least one of its major rival factions, or else it would eventually crumble into irrevocable civil war and fall into ignominy and never rise again. The Blackheart hadn’t the resources to destroy the Star father’s empire in the west, or the two thousand well-supplied bastion worlds of the Imperium Pentus. Only one of its major foes was sufficiently vulnerable to extinction, only one faction had a central bastion that, if destroyed, would mean the breaking of their power forever. That foe was, of course, the craftworld of Biel-tan, the last refuge of the eldar civilization.

Yet, just because the eldar were vulnerable to a beheading strike via invasion, did not mean they were by any means weak. Biel-tan had gathered all the former corsairs, outcasts and refugees from the other, dead, craftworlds. Over the millennia, it had grown in size almost three hundredfold, becoming the largest artificial world ever sung into existence by eldar bonesingers. Its grand fleet, though spread across the north of the galaxy, mustered for war at a moment’s notice, and returned via the webway to support their mother like pack upon pack of savage, protecting wolves. Every farseer saw the same, inevitable future looming; Huron would attack, and this attack would be the largest they had ever seen. The eldar fleet was vast, swift and lethal, as were the many armies, citizen levies, windrider hosts and aspect temples that clustered around strategic areas of the unthinkable huge worldship. The latest autarch of Biel-tan, Lanquelliqn, prepared for the coming battle as best she could. Biel-tan had managed to summon most of the surviving Aspect warriors to return to defend them. However, the Phoenix Lords had not come, despite their desperate pleas. When questioned about this, the Exarchs could only respond that ‘the Asuryata have been called away...’

Huron and his allies knew he had to throw everything he had at the craftworld. This was to be a final throw of the dice. If Huron won, the craftworld eldar would be finished. However, the eldar also knew that if Huron failed to destroy their craftworld, the Eastern Chaos Imperium would collapse.

The fate of the region thus rested upon this last great battle, known forever after as the ‘Swordwind Siege’.

Huron toured his worlds, swallowing up his roving reaver warbands and reintegrating his various red Corsair Lieutenants into a single, colossal armada. The grand warship, the Astral Maw, was Blackheart’s flagship, and it led the way like the poisoned tip of a spear. The raving bloodknight Cullan* brought his fleet of dying vampire-monsters to join this fleet as it gathered momentum. His was a dying breed, and the thirst for blood, and the black rage of Sanguinius’ death drove him onwards to ever greater acts of penitent carnage.

Huron’s most significant ally was the forces of the Grandfather, old Nurgle himself. Not only did Typhus bring his festering fleet of plague ships, countless billions of undead and the Death Guard Legionaries, he also persuaded the Great Unclean One, Ku’vath, to bring his daemons to join in the fun, to feast upon the boundless despair of the eldar race’s last stand.

The eldar fleet met the chaos forces fifty lightyears from Biel-tan. The alien vessels were swift and darting, each cutting down many clumsy mon keigh craft, all the while evading their belligerent return fire. But there were too many of the corrupted, ramshackle vessels. Weight of fire and weight of numbers were always against even the largest of craftworlder fleets. What was more, those vessels truly possessed by Nurgle’s rot refused to break apart under the terrible holocaust of fire unleashed upon them; each time they seemed to break apart like rusting derelicts, ropey sinews and oily tendrils of pure daemonic bile re-knit their mortal wounds. Hull breaches scabbed over like diseased flesh, and broken dorsal batteries vomited up new weapon snouts, eternally corroded by rust yet impossible to fully destroy. Despite the best efforts of the eldar fleet, the best they could manage was to shadow the onrushing tide of monsters, harassing their flanks and rearmost supply chains with ruthless efficiency, if not perfect effectiveness. They could not, however, stop the fleet making the last warp jump into Biel-tan space.

Huron’s capital ships divided into several huge prong formations, each shrouded by daemonic magicks and swarms of escort craft. They attacked Biel-tan from multiple vectors, punching into the spherical killing zone around the mega-craftworld, as it wallowed in the orbit of a dwarf sun. Ancient automated defenses, long assumed to be dormant, activated at the approach of primordial forces of the annihilator. Energy lances and grids of warp-powered psychosis-mines erupted from the flanks of the worldship, and struck out at the voracious predatory craft closing in. There were weapons beyond the ken of even the greatest human scientists; devices pulled dreams directly from the minds of crew members, turning them into lethal psycho-plastic automatons that shredded vessels and their crew them from inside out. The very molecules making up some chaos craft had their chemical bonds nullified by unseen forces, and simply dissolved like sand on the wind.

As the chaos fleets surged in close, star lances and pulsars dissected ships until they looked like neatly sliced loaves of bread, falling apart with an oddly elegant grace in the void. Huge eldar vessels, too large to even enter a webway gate, peeled off from Biel-tan’s flanks, and began to engage their enemies with quantum accelerators and D-cannons of colossal scale. Dissembling weapons, that caused flesh to melt with metal, turned thousands of escorts into nothing more than floating lumps of solid adamant, with screaming human bodies seeded through them. Warp Spiders launched teleport assaults upon the command and engineering sections of enemy capital ships, beheading the leadership in pinpoint strikes, guided to their targets by the wisdom of their Seer Council. The Astral maw repelled fifty of these warp spider onslaughts, with Huron himself personally slaying upwards of a dozen of the ever- shifting aspect warriors.

But Huron’s ships were not silent as this exotic bombardment raged. The Blackheart had nightmarish contraptions and weapons of his own. Haunted macrocannons smashed spires, pulverized crystal domes and bisected eldar ships, unleashing howling winds of chaos with each titanic blast. Lances and torpedoes scoured life away at every turn, as flight upon flight of bombers stripped the craftworld’s surface of its defenders, and scorched the pristine wraithbone an ugly purple color, as successive waves of bombs burned the material to glass, then shattered the glass, them melted the shards and shattered them all over again. The blinding exchanges of fire could be seen on every planet in the system; Biel-tan appeared as a multi-hued star in the heavens, constantly shifting and flickering in size and color.

The closer the smaller mon keigh escorts got, the more damage they did.

Of course, the frigates perished almost instantly as soon as they got within range of the bright lances, pulsars and soul-networked fire prisms, but even these burning ruins caused terrible devastation amongst the outer layers of the craftworld, as kilometer-long castles of burning adamantium ploughed straight through the crystal skies of the craftworld’s hull, and exploded inside with deafening roars. Each time an escort struck, forty kilometer craters were ripped out of the body of Biel-tan, like the scars left after rupturing a boil. Each time, the conjoined mind of Biel-tan moaned in silent agony, making every eldar wince inwardly in sheer sorrow. Into the burning wounds gouged in its flanks, chaos landing ships surged eagerly, swiftly depositing their soldier cargo, before the craftworld’s automated defenses turned the transports to smoldering scrap.

As this battle raged, a warp rift began to pulsate above Biel-tan; a festering wound that leaked despairing souls and giggling nightmares directly into the battle. Wailing apparitions of Isha swept, ghost-like through the craftworld, chilling the hearts of her children with the shrill power of her sheer melancholy. Only the redoubled efforts of the Farseers and their warlock assistants kept the eldar from losing their minds utterly. However, the worst was yet to come.

From the transport ships, billions of psychopaths and monsters rampaged. The vast majority of Biel-tan was wilderness; forests and oceans and plains full of flora and fauna, but people by few eldar. This was at once its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Infantry, stranded thousands of miles away from the nearest eldar bastion, were forced to simply roam the woods and forests, attacking trees, butchering beasts and cattle, but little else of worth. It is said some of the Blackheart’s mortal soldiers didn’t see a single eldar throughout the invasion; instead, they wandered aimlessly, until boredom and constant attacks by the living wraithbone around them caused them to fight amongst themselves and leave their corpses for the local vulture-entities to devour.

However, such large expanses of wilderness also meant the eldar could not hunt down every invading army, no matter how swift the swordwind struck. The Aspect warriors were distracted, darting between the vital bastions and habitats of the craftworld in their grav tanks and speeders. The guardians and the rest of the Biel-tan’s military might constantly moved between living quarters and towns across Biel-tan, reinforcing them only when a major force made a concerted effort to attack. Fly-headed beastmen scuttled through the woods on oddly jointed limbs, nurglings played hide and seek in the hills and mountains, slowly poisoning the ground with their every footfall snail-like nurglitch beasts slithered into rivers and oceans, poisoning them with warp taint, while warbands of human pirates took flamethrowers and vented their frustrations on farmland crops and beautiful works of art, petty vandalism at its most mindless; all of this went unchecked as the eldar battled for their very lives. The windrider hosts of Sam-Haim cleansed the plains of these scurrying mon keigh vermin like big game hunters shooting hog from the back of chariots, but their jetbikes, falcons and vipers could not stray into the dense foliage of the forests, or the claustrophobic honeycombed interiors of the false mountain ranges.

The Red Corsairs were divided into formations of seven squads, with support vehicles, daemon engines and entire regiments of demented human slave-soldiers, and they entered the war in the bellies of corrupted stormbirds and other, less identifiable winged daemon things; bloated things like plucked foul, fused on some hideous level with prop planes and wasps. These odious things simply burst when struck by enemy fire, unleashing their slime-covered cargo of astartes and slaves, who instantly went on the offensive.

The Terminus Est seemed invulnerable to damage, as it constantly pulled its ruined carcass together after even the most punishing bombardments. With almost disdainful patience, the Plague Marines onboard waited until the vessel was within dread claw range, and slowly piled into their maggot-infested drop ships, before they were fired into Biel-tan’s hull like poisoned darts smeared with toxic excreta. Once Typhus and his Death Guard followers were deployed, the Terminus Est leisurely moved back, to launch attacks upon the craftworld’s many anti- shipping turrets. It was said many chaos cruisers used the Est as a barricade between the withering fire of Biel-tan and themselves, their self-interested crew not willing to risk damaging themselves fighting the mighty alien vessel.

Huron remained aboard the Astral maw, observing his grand vision from afar. He had ordered a fraction of his fleet to leave the system, and send out telepathic signals to the maelstrom and to every den of chaotic psychopaths and mercenary opportunists in the Imperium. The message was simple; ‘Biel-tan is falling. The ancient vaults of riches and forbidden knowledge, long hoarded by our pointy-eared foe, shall be up for the taking. If you join Emperor Huron the Black heart in this grand feast, treasures beyond imagining shall be yours for the taking.’

The Death Guard marched deep into the craftworld. Before them marched thousands upon thousands of plague zombies. They were cannon fodder, to expend the enemy’s munitions and bog the fast moving eldar down in close quarters. The undead were easy prey to the eldar, but each time a living corpse fell, it leaked black ooze into the structure of Biel-tan. Each time, the vessel silently groaned in misery. Typhus and his Plague marines stomped through the knee-high rivers of blood and pus swilling around them. Their march was inexorable and irresistible. Weapons wounded them, but they did not fall until their bodies were utterly destroyed. With them, clouds of flies infested everything; spoiling mechanical systems, devouring sections of wraithbone support struts, and generally sabotaging everything with their gnawing, acidic bile. The host of the Destroyer Hive himself was a terrible force of unnatural power. His manreaper scythed down scores of eldar, while his mere gaze could whither the soul and gestate nests of maggots in the belly.

The farseers remained in their dome of crystal seers, directing the war with the deft skill of orchestral composers. At some points, their warp powers would be unleashed directly; Warlocks would draw witchblades and burn through entire divisions with naught but their minds and their glowing force spears. Mind Wars, initiated by the farseers, claimed the lives of key chaos commanders, leaving their hosts as mindless hordes of savages, crushing and killing with no direction. The windrider hosts and swordwind formations were in constant motion, guided to areas where the foe was weakest. There, the Dark reapers pulverized the heavy armor of their foes, while the Fire Dragons flooded in behind the enemy to destroy any stranglers, while the Dire Avengers and swooping hawks pinned enemy infantry in place with laser fire and shuriken; corralled and surrounded, the enemy formations were picked off by Banshee and Striking Scorpion assaults, before being unceremoniously bombed by passing aircraft, as they swept through the colossal bio-domes of the craftworld. The Aspect Warriors drew in foes by spreading themselves thinly. The enemy, thinking they were punching through pivotal battle lines, were actually being drawn into perfectly timed ambushes by their colorful eldar hosts.

But still the enemy came. Warp portals opened inside the craftworld, spilling tides of giggling nurglings, and plaguebearers, obsessed with counting all the manifest facets of decay and despair amongst those who fought and died aboard Biel-tan. Monstrous fly-shaped daemons, as large as thunderhawks, pulled their swollen thoraxes through the warp portals and began rampages of their own. Each drop of these monsters’ blood caused a nurgling to sprout from the ground like fetid potatoes. Slug-like beasts desperately tried to find companions to embrace, inadvertently dissolving all they touched. All these foul abominations were herded into realspace by seven towering masses of rotting bilge and ichor; obese horrors literally bursting at the seams with maggots and gangrenous matter. The largest of these great Unclean wretches was Ku’Gath Plaguefather. While Huron’s forces desired the destruction of the craftworld, Ku’Gath and his daemons desired one thing above all others. They wished to reach the Infinity circuit. They wished to devour all the dead eldar souls trapped there, forlornly awaiting apotheosis. The sluggish host was slow, but it was inexorable.

Autarch Lanquelliqn led from the front, though kept in constant psychic contact with every commander under her control. She bore the weapons of her many paths as a warrior, combining them together as she combined the aspects of Khaine and Asuryan into one glorious whole. She bore the wings of a swooping hawk, the fusion pistol of the fire dragons, a screaming mask and an executioner, the great double-headed spear of the Banshees. With these weapons, she was a child of war itself, swift and lethal as a lightning storm. Even as she discussed secondary strategies with the far distant Farseers, she simultaneously cut down the champions of the enemy wherever she found them. She beheaded the Blood Knight Cullan, as he desperate tried to savage her neck and drink deep of her vitae. His corpse was carried high into the air, and cast down into the mass of the invaders contemptuously. She even faced the corpulent might of the Herald Epidemus, but his nurgling assistants prevented her from landing the final, banishing blow, and she was forced to fly off to face some other foe.

From the relative safety of the inner levels, the majority populace of Biel-tan watched the horrific sight of war wash over every viewscreen and portal-image. They saw ancient forests, that had taken millennia to mature, burning in a hundred feet pyres, that illuminated their world with eerie hell-light. Tears cam unbidden to the eyes of the eldar as they watched artwork destroyed, and guardians broken over the knees of mon keigh super soldiers, and thrown atop pyres themselves. Every minute, more and more eldar flocked to join the fight. Those had never walked the warrior’s path before flooded into the guardian temples, while former aspect warriors rushed to reaffirm their chosen path, taking up the war mask once more.

The eldar pleaded with the farseer high council to let the God of War loose amongst the defiling chaos forces. However, the farseers rebuked them for their desperate haste. Ever since the rise of Khaine in the east, the elder of Biel-Tan dared not awaken their avatar, the last unrecovered shard of Khaine. The avatar might share the risen god’s madness, and might turn upon his very own craftworld. No, they resolved that the avatar of Biel-tan would remain where it was, chained to its shrine at the very heart of the worldship, bound and inanimate. One eldar, a young bonesinger called Relieath, ignored this decree. He snuck away from his overseers, and set off on a stolen skiff, to the abandoned centre of the craftworld. There, the heart of Biel-tan throbbed like an ominous drumbeat. The blood rushed in the boy’s ears, and he felt his soul yearning for carnage and bloodletting. But he held back the thoughts, as he slipped into the inner sanctum of the shrine.

There, chained to his great throne, sat a ten foot tall statue, dull as black iron. Huge chains bounds its wrists, manacles grasped its ankles tightly, and shackled his neck like a hound’s collar. The face was frozen, seemingly mid-scream. Though there was no heat source in the chamber, it felt warm as a blacksmith’s yard, and the thunderous rhythm of Khaine’s heart, of the heart of every eldar, was nearly deafening there. Relieath looked up at the towering figure, his own body thin and weak as a reed, while the avatar was muscular and angular as no eldar’s body could ever be. Relieath somehow knew he would be the Young King, the sacrifice. He found himself walking towards the giant, drawn forwards. He did not resist. He simply closed his eyes before the end, and whispered “Save us. Be the hero your brother believed you might once have been.” Then came fire, and then Relieath was no more.

Meanwhile, the battle was turning against the eldar above. Huron was bringing more and more reinforcements into the system, from across the sector and beyond. Not just daemons and human reavers, but strange alien ships flocked to Biel-tan. Some came to settle old grudges they had with the eldar from before the time of man, others came simply to pillage and loot.

Worse still, the great unclean ones and their slowly marching legions were burrowing through Biel-tan, layer after layer, leaving a odious trail of dissolved bulkheads, rotted forests and syrupy bilge in their wake. Like poison in a man’s veins, the hordes of Ku’Gath were flooding towards the craftworld’s heart. The main eldar population center was the only thing standing in their way. The seven greater daemons could not be stopped by the magicks of the farseers, or the precision strikes of the aspect warriors. Only teams of fire dragons, fighting in shifts, could even slow the advance, by burning any rotten thing approaching their lines.

But even the disciples of Fuegan could not stop Ku’gath and his six brothers rolling over the battle lines like obscene mollusks. The colossal fat abominations tipped over towers, and crushed war walkers with their bulk. Their flabby webbed feet smashed anyone who wasn’t swift enough to escape their careless advance. Vomit poured from their mouths in endless streams, dissolving screaming guardians in seconds. All the while, they shed nurglings like beads of sweat, and chuckled sonorously as the creatures frolicked about them. Eldar vehicles were tossed around like toys, flung high into the air, before smashing into eldar shelters. Ku’Gath himself hefted a falcon grav tank above his antlers, and sent it hurtling towards a column of retreating civilians.

It never landed. A burning sword chopped it from the air, as the bio dome echoed with a deafening roar; a roar of purest righteous fury, from the throat of an undying god. The grav tank exploded, showering the avatar with smouldering wreckage. But the avatar was a being of molten metal, with veins of fire and eyes of glowing embers. The wailing doom of the Biel- tan avatar was a double-handed great sword, as tall as the avatar itself. He swept the blade around him in a complex flourish, before he lowered the tip of the blade to point at the seven advancing daemons. The avatar growled, a sound that made the hearts of the eldar stiffen in instinctual fear. However, his rage was not directed at them, but at the corpulent monsters that defiled his world. Ku’Gath laughed at the avatar.

“Little god! You are a pup, a nothing. Do you think you can challenge the might of the Grandfather? Of your sister, Isha...? Biel-tan is ours now” the fiend grinned, revealing row upon row of blackened fangs.

The avatar wasted no time with words, but rushed forwards at once, snatching up a downed viper bike in one hand, before hurling it into one of the great unclean ones. It plunged through the sagging flesh of the beast, and exploded inside it, making the monster howl in bitter mirth, ichor bubbling from the ethereal wound. The avatar didn’t even slow his pace, but bounded forwards with his sword held before him. Ku’Gath’s smile was forgotten then, as he drew his corroded blade of rust, and his brothers did likewise.

The Biel-tan avatar fought them, all seven of them. He struck down the wounded daemon first, beheading it with his first blow, before blocking the counterattacks of its fellows. His rage was awful to behold. The daemons sought to poison him with their ichors and vomit, but the warp fluids burnt and fizzed as they met the cauterizing heat of the avatar’s metal flesh. He lashed out with fists and knees and the ever wailing doom. His wounds scorched their horrible hides, and prevented the daemon stuff from re-knitting. It was said the avatar breathed fire on the daemons, like a dragon of the old times. Each time the fat beasts tried to surround the metal giant, he carved his way out of their ambush. Ku’Gath managed, at last, to land a forceful blow on the avatar, flinging him bodily through a slender eldar tower, which splintered like a glass sculpture. He darted aside as Ku’gath tried to stomp his head into ruin, and hacked the offending limb away with a contemptuous backhand. Ku’Gath stumbled, sagging over a downed reaver titan, as his remaining allies charged the avatar.

The protector of Biel-tan bisected another great unclean one, letting its moldering innards bubbled and dissolve back into the warp. The daemons were powered by the despair of the eldar, but the avatar was fuelled by their righteous wrath, and the more he defeated them, the more the eldar dared to hope, and the greater the avatar’s power grew.

As the awestruck eldar watched, the avatar bested greater daemon after greater daemon, until at last, only Ku’Gath remained. Before the avatar could banish the great unclean one, a flock of blight drones emerged from the nurglitch slop, and fired upon the fragment of war god. In the time it took the avatar to destroy the daemonic drones, Ku’Gath had melted a hole through the floor, and fled to another section of the craftworld.

The avatar roared in frustration, hefting his sword skywards as he did. To the being’s surprise, the eldar emerged from the ruins, and raised their weapons with him, and screamed with him. He was the rallying point the eldar needed, and they followed him as he took the fight to the upper levels, where the stink of chaos was most potent. A few eldar noticed that the avatar’s hand did not run red with the blood of eldanesh. This was taken as a good omen by the farseers, who redoubled their efforts to rout chaos from their home.

As the battle developed, the avatar would have more battles, and the siege of Biel-tan would escalate. The portals to the maiden and exodite worlds, closed by the Biel-tan eldar to protect their rustic allies, were reactivated from the exodite end. From these portals, thousands of dragon riders flew, sweeping into the war without hesitation. When Lanquelliqn asked the leader of the exodites why, he told her, “Too long have you had to save us from the horrors of the galaxy. It is high time we repaid our debts, would you not say?”

And the exodites did not come alone. The eldar of the maiden worlds had formed the leadership castes of many hundreds of human civilizations, and these empires declared for Biel-tan, and made their allegiance known, by bringing their war fleets into the battle against Huron’s ever expanding hordes.

As for the Blackheart; his forces were also massing, but they grew too fast for him to control. He found himself merely a participant in his own battle. He was (though he could never admit it) merely a bit player in a wider war now. The war had escalated beyond his control, and forces from across the galaxy were massing around Biel-tan. Like the primarch war, Khaine’s war and the cclopean campaign, Biel-tan was becoming the focal point for the final battle; a battle so large, no mortal could possibly see the full extent of it.

*(It was said the bloody-prince was so deranged, he obsessively carried a female human familiar around with him, despite the fact the mortal had died years ago, at his hand. The demented former Blood Angel was blissfully unaware of this, and constantly asked the cadaver’s opinion on every matter, while lavishing his affections on the dried human husk.)

###

The Ambush at Charadon

Across the Eastern galaxy, a god of war and fire was in ascendancy. Kaela Mensha Khaine had built his army of mortals and daemons, and with them his war had raged across the stars, sweeping away the unprepared and the incautious. His armies were composed of vessels the monstrous entity had devised himself, and each of his warriors was outfitted with ancient weapons, reminiscent of old Eldar weapon systems, but more ornate and angular than the organic technology of the craftworlds. Grav vehicles, crafted like heavier, more robust cousins of eldar craft, heat lances and blaster rifles and exotic weapons of all fashions; all were crafted in the war god’s forge ships. Daemons summoned by his minions were molded by the preconceptions of Khaine’s mortal servants. Bloodletters started to be born into the materium shaped like bestial aspect warriors, complete with sculptural alien armor that glowed with internal fire. Great daemons of Khorne summoned by Khaine’s men no longer resembled bat-winged minotaurs, but were more like iron-skinned giants, riding upon blade chariots, pulled by winged gargoyles and spiny daemonic dragons. Khaine channeled the berserker rage of Khorne into a focused, ferociously lethal army of conquest and murder.

It became apparent to the great powers of the Eastern Fringe, that Khaine could not adequately be opposed by any single power; his forces were terrible enough, but when he himself took to the field, they were all but unstoppable. When Folkar, one of the thirteen regents of Nova-Ultramar, discovered Khaine was being stalemated at Schindelgheist by Krork, the ancient astartes realized this was the time to act. He sent word to whatever nearby factions who were still unconquered, and requested they send representatives to a great parlay point. To prove his good-will, Folkar invited them to pick the precise location of this meeting.

Eventually, word returned to him, and the meeting place was set; an abandoned Orkish hulk, located deep in the untamed wilderness of Charadon. Ever since the scouring of the new Devourer, the Charadon sector had been a wasteland of little value to any invading petty Imperiums or empires. On the face of it, it was an adequate meeting point.

Fully one year later, the ancient, empty hulk, found itself host to this fledging meeting of minds. The largest internal chamber of the hulk was cleared of all vileness, and fashioned into a perfect, hollowed out, polished basalt cube, centered around a solid circle of adamantium, with four positions arrayed around it.

Four fleets came to the charadon hulk; an ultramar empire task force, a tau rapid deployment force from the Farsight/Hopeshield alliance, followed by a battlefleet of the Realm of Fathers, and finally, a Killing Cruiser of the War of Krork. The four factions for the meet deployed their representatives, alongside small honor guards. Folkar teleported into the chamber with a taller Nova Astartes captain of the Warrior Kings, and a force of twenty Ultramarine Terminators. The krork representative was the warlord Ulchaeru himself. The krork was easily taller than even a terminator, and his advanced scale-mail armor glistened as he moved. He was flanked by two fractionally smaller krork of the Noble class (authorial note: these elite classes were once called ‘Nobs’ in orkish parlance, as a point of interest), with their heavy beam weapons held tightly to their slab-like chests. One could not read the expression of the krork, for they each bore fully enclosed helmets with baleful sensor lenses in place of eyes. The Tau representative was called M’yen’Yuru, and she was one of the new M’yen psyker caste of the Tau. She was easily the smallest attendant of the meeting, for she was slightly smaller than an average human. By contrast, the elegant N’drasi battlesuit that stood beside her was huge, and though its body seemed smooth and unadorned, everyone in the meeting knew it contained a plethora of internal weapon systems that would make a Mechanicus cultist salivate. The last participant in this gathering was a surprise to most of the members. A realm of Fathers Magus emerged from the shadows, flanked by ten purestrain genestealers. One of the genestealers was larger than the others. Unlike the bloated Patriarchs that ruled the Realm, this one was sleek and muscular, like a broodlord, with carapace covered in swirling high gothic script, painstakingly etched in place by its servants. At first, the other members thought the genestealers were feral remnants of the hulk’s previous occupants, but the Magus raised his hands and declared they were the representatives of the Patriarchal Realm, and explained he would be their translator. The broodlord’s name was apparently ‘Militae Vater’, a high commander of one of the Trygonis Legions.

None of the four different historical accounts of this meeting mention precisely what was said at this meeting, but it was eventually decided that they were strong together. The Tau had the most advanced technology and the fastest ships, which could help the logistics of the war effort, and more easily unify their disparate factions. The Realm of Fathers brought incredible production capacities and population expansion to the table. Meanwhile, the krork brought with them exceptional warfighting knowledge and experience; they would never tire and never relent in battle, and instinctively countered any advantage an enemy could bring. Meanwhile, while the Ultramarines also had extensive fighting knowledge, and the legendary might of the Space Marines, their primary advantage was that they were sons of Guilliman, and shared his masterful ability to alloy all these distinctive advantages into a single, well- oiled fighting machine. They could organize and administer this dissimilar alliance in a way none of the others could match.

Thus, the Fringe Alliance was formed.

Their first joint action however, came sooner than any of them had anticipated.

Khaine’s army had followed the progress of the four factions and had detected their arrival at a common point in the charadon sector. As the allies had congregated there, Khaine’s forces had quietly allowed them to gather. Discreetly, the semi-daemonic conquerors encircled the system, breaking the warp on the very outskirts of the sector, so as to go undetected until the very last moment. This force was led by General Voshk, a possessed warrior in Khaine’s all conquering host. Though Khaine was not present in person, he had simple orders for Voshk; destroy all four factions, and behead their command. He meant to strangle the Fringe Alliance at birth.

Voshk’s ships struck with speed and ferocity. He had at his command a dozen khainite leviathan craft, escorted by the captured fleet elements captured and repurposed during khaine’s wars. The ambush caught the allies completely off guard; dozens of vessels were destroyed before they could even raise their shields. Fortunately, the tau’s passive sensors detected the Leviathans moments before they unleashed their fury on the alliance flagships, and were able to communicate this information to the rest of the allies just in time to avoid total catastrophe. Shields were raised across the fleet. This meant that the delegates at the heart of the hulk were stranded, until such time as shuttles could reach the surface.

The tau enlightened class starships retaliated at range, unleashing relativistic weaponry, lasers and missiles beyond count. Meanwhile, the Kill Cruiser rushed to close the distance, and unleash powerful macro- batteries on the khainite foe. The Realm of Fathers vessels turned to broadside in unison (the eerie precision of the hybrids was commented upon often throughout the histories), while the gladius frigates prepared their boarding torpedoes for close action. Soon enough, all the ships in orbit around the hulk were engaging the invaders. However, Voshk’s leviathan managed to punch through the lines.

The delegates at the heart of the hulk got a brief warning, before Voshk began jamming all signals:

++ The enemy have landed considerable assets on hulk surface. They mean to destroy you. ++

It was imperative that the leaders of the alliance survived. As soon as the transmission was received, Folkar resolved to fight his way clear of the invaders. He primed his storm bolter, and activated the Gauntlet of Ultramar, while his bodyguards primed their own weapons. The other delegates concurred. M’yen’Yuru activated a device on her wrist, and the Mk XXXII battlesuit’s torso section unfurled, revealing a cockpit built specifically for Yuru, which she dutifully entered, as it closed around her snugly. Ulchaeru nodded to his bodyguards, and drew his power axe from his thigh-sheath, alongside his plasma blaster.

“My compatriots, my weapon systems are of no use in such close confines. I fear I will be useless to you until we reach the surface,” Yuru lamented.

“We will form a tight formation, centered on the battlesuit. Your dreadnought armor shall be sufficient for the task yes?” Ulchaeru asked Folkar, who nodded.

“This armor was built for hulk-work,” he grinned. “We have much experience.”

“As do we.”

The small voice of the Magus made Ulchaeru and Folkar turn towards the human, and his hulking genestealer masters.

“Of course you do...” Folkar was said to have muttered under his breath; every son of Ultramar was cognizant of the legends of old Imperium and the space hulk wars.

Then Folkar had an idea.

In space, the larger scale of the khainite fleet was taking its toll. The Tau starships only had so many weapon systems, and could only engage a certain number of targets. The Gladius frigates had almost taken collision courses against one specific Leviathan, which destroyed most of the frigates, but not until they had all launched their boarding torpedoes into the flank of the targeted enemy ship. After only a few minutes of combat, the space marines inside formed a bridgehead, desperately holding off the well-disciplined forces of Khaine as they sought to drive them off.

In the hulk, the terminators formed two teams of ten, one covering the forwards positions, the other the rearguard, while the impotent battlesuit marched in the middle, carrying the diminutive Magus, and the krork covered the terminators by aiming over their wide shoulders. The khainite soldiers flooded through the narrow, winding passages of the hulk, converging upon the dense formation making its way to the surface. Combat was close, noisy and brutal. Each skirmish in the narrow tunnels was a frenzy of energy blasts, whirring chainfists and crackling power fists. The terminators were struck again and again, but always gave back ten times worse than they received, filling the chambers around them with explosive bolts and broken bodies. The krork hurled grenades over their shoulders, carving through the infantry massing by each bulkhead. However, the formation as getting surrounded by heavy weapon teams, who were preparing to strike them in the flank when they were forced to pass their intersection; a perfect chokepoint and killzone. Unfortunately for those weapon teams, the terminators were not the only force they faced. The purestrains were stealthy and fast, and almost unparalleled in the field of close quarters killing. Entire squads of khainites simply vanished from the map; silently dragged off and consumed by the inhuman terrors. Genestealers and terminators were the two greatest hulk fighting forces in history; together, they were superlative. The astartes were the anvil, and the genestealers the hammer. The genestealers were horrifically demoralizing to the enemy, who actively fled from their terror. The aliens herded their foes, right into storm bolter gunlines, while flamer barrages pushed back enemy forces, which were in turn ambushed from behind by the stealers.

Only three terminators fell during the brutal march to the surface, while a mere handful of the genestealers perished. In contrast, the khainites lost hundreds, and fell back on all fronts, massing towards their camp on the surface.

Meanwhile, the Kill-cruiser was dying. Great chunks had been torn from its sides, air leaked from it to freeze in the void, and it was slowly losing orbit around one of the jungle planets of the system. Eagerly, the khainites chased the ship, as its crew bailed out into the forests, making sure to detonate their cruiser in orbit, spilling the ruined technology across a fifty mile radius. The khainites’ objectives were to murder every single being who gathered for the meeting, and thus they followed the krorks, deploying their ground forces into multiple kill teams of raving, daemon-infested murderers.

The rest of the alliance fleet were in trouble too, for the Leviathans were heavily armed and numerous. They could strike at the unprotected vectors of each ship, crippling many of them without suffering significant return fire in kind. The astartes aboard one of the leviathans had managed to sweep the gun decks clear of life, but reserve forces trapped them on those same decks. Soon enough, withering gunfire and frantic close combat took their toll on the space marines, reducing them to a mere thirty three soldiers. Rather than be captured or executed, they strapped metal charges to the macro cannon shells and nuclear warheads in the gun decks’ arsenals. With a silent prayer to the Emperor, they detonated them, and ripped open the starboard side of the Leviathan, effectively mission-killing it. The tale of the ‘valiant thirty three’ would be remembered for the rest of Ultramar’s history.

On the hulk’s surface, the advantage of the Terminators was lost. Likewise, the genestealers, out in the open, had to flee into the protection of the space marines, who formed a defensive ring around the surviving delegates. Voshk’s had an entire army surrounding the group, spewing lethal firepower into the tiny formation. One by one, the terminators began to fall, bodies fused solid by repeated melta fire. Folkar clenched his gauntlet, and prepared to sell his life dearly. He would perish as Captain Invictus of Old. Ulchaeru simply grunted; he didn’t care whether he was remembered, yet he was pleased to die fighting against significant odds, beneath the naked void, amidst looming starship corpses, embedded in the rocky hulk like dead cities.

M’Yen’Yuru had other ideas. At last, the battlesuit could stand upright, and loom over the rest of the group.

“Kneel down my friends. I have the situation in hand,” she explained simply.

Moments later, the battlesuit surged upwards on flaming jets. As it rose, it attracted the firepower of the Khainites, but instantly countermeasures and force fields deployed around its smooth form, creating a shroud of flame around the war machine. Then, it returned fire. Missile launchers opened in its shoulders, and a thousand guided projectiles corkscrewed through the thin atmosphere, to strike and destroy each heavy weapon emplacement of the enemy, as sonic mines burst from chest-mounted launchers, deafening and disorientating the enemy, causing them to pause in their bombardment. The battlesuit punished them for this with its secondary armaments. Laser weapons emerged from the wrists, slicing enemy warriors into a thousand cauterized gobbets, railrifles appeared in each mechanical fist of the suit, launching hypersonic projectiles into the khainites, that exploded with neutronic sub- munitions. The suit fired all this in mid-air, as it span three hundred and sixty degrees, to cover the maximum number of targets. But Yuru’s weapons were more than merely physical. She lashed out with her psyker mind, enhanced by the in-built psionic-amplifiers of the suit, and scorched the minds of the surviving enemies.

Eventually, the jetpack deactivated, and she landed to the ground with a dull boom, as her feet impacted with the compressed stone of the hulk. The entire exchange had lasted only seventy two seconds. Her newfound allies were briefly speechless. This moment was forgotten soon after, as the surviving khainites began to fire once more. However, this time their fire was not as concentrated or coordinated. The terminators broke formation, and rushed the khainites as they lay in disarray. Vater led his genestealers through the gunsmoke and the carnage, screeching hideously as he ripped out arms, tore open ribcages and twisted off heads with the calm ferocity of an apex predator.

On the forest world, the daemon knights of Khaine scoured the jungles for their quarry. However, they had not anticipated that the planet’s native inhabitants might have a quarrel with them. The planet, like most in the charadon sector, was home to many tribes of feral orks, the backward kin of the krork. A cruiser suddenly dropping millions of tons of war material into their laps had fired up the feral orks into a frenzy, and millions of them rushed the khainite kill teams as they stalked the jungles. After slaying the warboss of the ferals, the krork commanders took control of the orks, and called them to (and I quote); ‘War! Waaar! Waaaaaargh!’

Needless to say, things did not go well for Khaine’s ground forces.

A Realm of Fathers cruiser finally managed to reach the hulk’s surface, and launched its fighters upon the khainite ground forces, in support of the terminators and genestealers on the ground. Amidst the confusion and the fire, Folkar inadvertently met Voshk himself in single combat. The two battled for only a few minutes, but the regent was utterly outclassed by the towering half-daemon, clad in the broken bones of the civilizations he helped to crush. The General had a sword of living fire, and a flanged mace covered in snarling faces. Folkar desperately deflected the blows of Voshk, but he was like a whirlwind and soon Folkar was smashed from his feet, landing in a broken heap. He might have died then, if Ulchaeru had not leapt into combat with the daemon-knight, power axe glittering as he hammered blow after blow against Voshk’s vambraces. Voshk managed to slam an elbow into the krork’s face, ripping his helmet free, to reveal the tusked face of the Warlord, who responded with a sudden head butt to the faceplate of the general. They both stumbled away from each other, and as the swirling melee closed in around them, the two lost sight of each other.

The realm of Fathers ship managed to evacuate most of the delegates, before it was forced to flee the system, along with those scant few ships that had survived the trap. Though they left broken and burning, the Fringe Alliance technically won their first major battle. General Voshk was reprimanded for failing Khaine, and given one last chance to prove himself worthy. Meanwhile, the Fringe Alliance had been forged in blood and battle; a bond few could hope to break.

Together, the Fringe Alliance looked to the might of Khaine. Defeating his armies was one thing, but how does one kill a god?

The Last Rites of Gheden

(This section was primarily cultivated from memory banks located in the tomb of Baldarro. It is said they were taken from the lifeless skull of a relic-necron. I have embellished some details which would otherwise be unintelligible to an uninitiated scholar, let alone a lay reader. Forgive me for this over simplification.)

It is said that the Lingering palace of the Umbral Lord, Qah, was cut off from all the threads of the world, a sight unseen by any mundane mortal being. Indeed, through his long exile from the warp, his sub-realm had been severed from the labyrinth dimension, the structure that bound the many worlds and pocket universes that populated the boundary between reality and madness. Yet, Qah had rejoined and built new tunnels through the actuality of the universe; secret routes hidden from all save the hrud, his loyal wardens and librarians, and the multi-hued dancers of his strange and fractious ally.

It was here that Szarekh was led, along with the Praetorians of his long-broken Triarch. They were relatively few, but they had remained loyal, throughout all his trials and travails, his deaths and rebirths and reformations. They trusted the Silent King, and he them. Ever had it been thus. But they trusted the shadowy xenos of Qah’s patronage warily, and trusted the capricious eldar even less so. But Szarekh vouched for the lingering one. No being, save for creatures infested with the blood-madness that came with the infection of the primordial annihilator, desired eternal war; war was only ever a transitional phase for most races. A means to an end. But there would always be an end. Even the last of the eldest ones [ O forgive him, for he is young and foolish. He does not know what he does ] could not conceive of an eternal enmity for the necrontyr. Szarekh offered him peace, in exchange for life.

And in the shade-laboratories and cloistered dens of the warrens of Qah, there lay the key. The necrons were a disturbing sight for the palace-dwellers at first. Even the walls shuddered at the presence of mirror devils, so close to the heart of their great works. For once, the coiling banners of the harlequin mimes lay still. The hrud, scuttling things sheathed in blackness, kept out of the path of the marching necrons and their half-living lord. There were darker, twisted shadows amongst the hrud, but not of hrud stock; things that moved through the dark like oil through pitch, only the occasional glimpse of shifting runes marking their passage. Other figures; brooding giants in hooded robes, watched their passage with unknowable expressions, hidden behind their inscrutable ceramite helms.

Szarekh ignored them all. The quarrel was as old as recorded history, and he had no more stomach for the endless, grinding war. He was willing to bargain, but first he had to see what he offered first.

Eventually, he came to a perfect dark chamber. He knew it was ancient; older than himself, which was an unsettling feeling for a necrontyr. Once he stepped within, he was alone. The darkness closed around him. His Praetorians were prevented from entering with him. Soon, he began to make out the shapes of things in the dark, before they finally resolved as clear images. It is impossible for me to convey the nature of this sight, for a mortal can only comprehend images created by light. Nothing illuminated the chamber, and yet every detail within was visible. Szarekh could see row upon row of cylindrical pods, and the exotic machinery of such complexity a cryptek would be hard-pressed to divine its functions or parameters. The achiness fluctuated in size as they were observed, as if unwilling to be truly quantified. But in any case, the chamber was perfectly visible, yet utterly dark; visible, except for one corner of the chamber, which could never be seen. Slowly, as this perfect, blinding dark radiated to fill the shape of a humanoid, Szarekh knew who this figure was.

“Qah. That is the title you chose, wasn’t it? Qah; ancient hrudi for ‘He who Lingers’. Really, that’s no more a true name than ‘Emperor’ is the true name of the human anathema we call- [translation error? I don’t possess the phonetics to decipher the phrase following ‘call’].”

Qah, as ever, said nothing, but Szarekh knew what the figure said to him. Somehow the unsaid was luminal in the palace of shadows and whispers. Qah confirmed Szarekh’s suspicions, and welcomed the King as a fellow veteran of the First and Only War; the war in which all other conflicts are but a tributary of the great flowing river that sundered heaven. Within the tanks, Qah revealed the preserved, living bodies of... humans. Thousands of them, all pale and cold, yet living on all the same. Szarekh knew these things too.

“Pariahs. The seeds of the C’tan, sown as weapons for the war against the young races and the warp,” Szarekh concluded, unimpressed. But Qah explained; the Silent King was only partially correct. The pariahs had been created by the c’tan, and the Dragon had long set his mind to monitoring the results for as long as there had been ancestral human species in existence, until war and the blackstones had laid him low, and the anathema had added a final humiliation upon him. But the Pariahs were not weapons against the young races. They were intended to have souls shielded from the warp; their souls were intended to deny the fuel to the fires of the disjunction-entities [Assumption: daemons/chaos?]. The eldest ones [ever- loving. Praise them and despair] had tried a similar process through Illumination and the binding of the essence into the body. But the Pariah was too accomplished at its role, and was made loathsome by its soullessness. This meant it almost died out in humanity; selected out by evolution due to its disadvantageous properties.

But Szarekh had no time for this lecture, and demanded to be told what this meant for his race. Qah, eventually, acceded to his demand.

Meanwhile, in the realm of reality, where analogy did not manifest as glorious landscapes, the few necrons that retained their ancient necrontyr memories, gathered together around the last of the phaeron high council, within the Dynasty of the much-maligned Nihilakh. Even the Tomb World of Zantragorra managed, somehow, to teleport itself into the same sector as this realm, to gain some benefit from the umbrella of protection and stability the phaerons provided. This Dynasty maintained fifteen major Tomb Worlds, hundreds of lesser Tomb Complexes, and roughly a thousand serf worlds, where organic slave races were corralled and controlled by Necron Lords. The necrons had found themselves contracting into this dense, defensible region, for the galaxy was growing sick. Realspace seemed to be bruised in several regions, and wounded in others. The things that poured out of these rents in reality were septic to life itself; the malformed daemons, neverborn and warp entities crafted in desperation by the children of the First. Though the necrons were mighty indeed, they were a much diminished power since the days of the War in heaven. They could no longer fight a war on multiple fronts. The krork and the humans bred too swiftly, and clung tenaciously to any planets they infested. Khaine, who the necrons had only ever managed to stalemate in battle during the height of their power, was returned and was nigh unstoppable by then. But worst of all were the draziin-maton, for whenever the necrons faced them, no self-reanimation protocols could safe them.

But the necrons were immortal, and their machinery, if properly maintained, could last until the heat death of the universe. The necrons could wait out the young races once more; let them be eaten by their abominable creations, and then let those abominations starve through lack of soul-meat. The necrons decided to fortify their final Dynasty, and simply wait.

Alas, if only it were that simple.

Of all the necrons’ myriad foes, by far their most dangerous and tenaciously vindictive one was an abomination they had allowed to exist through sheer neglect. This foe was known to the necrons only as the Empire of the Severed. The master controller program for the tomb world of Sarkon, had gone rogue in the last years of M41; deleting the minds of its masters and assuming direct control of every necron and canoptek construct on Sarkon. This ‘sarkoni emperor’ then began to spread to other worlds, slowly and inexorably deleting the minds and subsuming the bodies of any necrons who sought to oppose it. The automatons of sarkon were hollow-eyed. They no longer glowed with internal green light, as the true necrons did. They were absent and cold; even the Dynastic necrons had a remnant of their past lives, a fragment of their culture and their great minds, preserved in living silver. But the things that marched with the will of the master controller were robots, artificial in every sense.

By the time of the Age of Dusk, the Severed spanned entire sectors of the galactic core, spreading eastwards, swallowing up necron strongholds and organic settlements alike. The necrons were purged, and the organics were infested with mindshackle scarabs, rendering them near-mindless puppets of the sarkoni Emperor. Even Dragon Tide fleets would succumb to the Severed, and soon enough, the Dragon Tides seemed to vanish from the galactic stage (though one would argue they vanished at the behest of the Dragon, who had new goals for his slave machines).

The dynastic necrons had gone to great lengths to hide their whereabouts from the Severed, and had destroyed any Dolmen Gates located near to severed strongholds. Yet, still the sarkoni emperor found them.

It would be a mistake to call the Severed incursion an invasion. It would be more accurate to call it a great silver flood. It began with wave upon wave of ships bursting from the warp. Trillions of mindshackled puppets manned millions of different alien vessels, cobbled together from dozens of enslaved civilizations. The necron defenses instantly activated; aeonic orbs induced solar flares that consumed thousands of ships, particle annihilators carved even more into bisected strap-metal, tachyon impalers killed beings through seven dimensions and gauss grids flayed entire squadrons of escorts into nothingness. But with each wave, though thousands of ships were vanished, millions upon millions still flooded into the systems. There seemed little strategy to this relentless, mindless pilgrimage. The crews of the vessels were silent, and cared little about their own ships as they fired every weapon they had in all directions. Some accelerated to high fractions of c, and simply ploughed directly into tomb worlds and serf worlds alike, turning atmospheres to plasma and vaporizing themselves and anyone on the same hemisphere as they impacting vessels.

The necron naval force had been brought under the control of Thazar the Invincible. His tomb ships, jackals, scythes and cairn class vessels and doom scythes made light work of the suicidal invaders. He destroyed each vessel with cold, arrogant efficiency. At first, this invasion seemed like a pathetic attempt by the Severed to overcome the mighty phaeron council. By they had not counted upon the resilience of the necron portals stored in the holds of each and every slave-ship. Even as the ramshackle shells of the vessels were flayed away like flaking skin, their portals within were activated, feeding from the energy of Thazar’s own weapons. Once activated, the Severed incursion began. Necron portals were wormholes, which instantly connected two points in spacetime together. From these quarter-miles, free- floating portals swarmed the canoptek hordes. Millions of canoptek spyders, billions of wraiths, and quadrillions of canoptek scarabs poured from these portals like living silver shoals of sardine in some great, dark ocean. Thazar looked upon the grand swarm, and was reminded of the last days of the War in Heaven, before the sleep, where the scarab swarms devoured the K’nib homeworlds in a single week of self-replicating oblivion. Thazar had long forgotten the mortal twinge of fear, but in that moment, his android brain struggled to process his anomalous neural functions. Tombships unleashed gigatons of impossible energy into silver masses stream into the sector like poison seeping into a hundred septic cuts. These blasts barely phased the swarms, before they engulfed ship after ship in a suffocating silver cloud.

Slowly but surely, Thazar and his fleet was forced to retreat to a second line of defense. The orbital defense platforms and aeonic orbs were consumed whole by the canoptek host, and broken down into raw material to create more scarabs and wraiths. Following the canoptek, eventually the Severed tombships silently drew themselves through the portals to join in the feast. Mindshackles were sprayed into the upper atmospheres of countless organic serf-world, like pesticide spread over a tainted crop field. Aliens screamed in horror as wriggling metal insects burrowed into their brains via any available orifice, rendering them helpless slaves to a single, indomitable will.

Across the united dynasty, the necrons retreated, until the commanders found the one world safe from the Severed’s assaults; the transphasic world of Gheden. Here the phaeron council, Thazar the Invincible, Orikan the Diviner, Illuminor Szeras and the other high rulers of the necrons brooded over strategy and how they might escape their relentless foe. The dolmen gates were down, or else swarming with severed canoptek constructs. The delusional Nemesor Zahndrekh led the defense of the Gheden tomb world whenever it phased briefly into reality. Only Zahndrekh did not fear the severed, for he had no idea he was facing the severed. Yet, despite the fact the old madman thought his foes were old necrontyr rivals from ancient times, somehow, he and his bodyguard Obyron knew they had to keep the enemy at a distance. Their dense phalanxes of warriors and immortals were kept mobile by constantly moving between monolith and night scythe portals; firing swiftly and accurately, before darting back through glowing green passages. Each time a severed managed to touch a dynastic necron, it bonded with it, and deleted the mindstate inside. This turned the necron into another husk, another severed foe to face.

In the central command centre, the necron lords watched a hundred hologrammic images, each showing a battlefield of silent silver android slaying each other over and over again. On airless moons, they marched. Across the void, naval battles raged at impossible distances, while callous infantry battles were fought across the very skin of the ships themselves. Every move made by the Severed was like the movement of a chess piece, every reaction to a counterassault calculated and enacted without haste or imagination. Infinitely complex strategies, tried and tested over millions of years were played out. Every opening gambit was exhausted, every play predicted and countered by the opposing force. Zahndrekh coordinated the dynastic armies with the dynamic creativity only a living mind could conjure; his brilliance was balanced by the sheer weight of numbers and tenacity of the Severed. They could not be stopped, only slowed. They could not be forced to surrender, only smashed to pieces or vaporized.

Slowly, like the slow encroach of eternity, the Severed were gaining ground. Non-tomb worlds were being dissolved by scarab swarms to build ever more Severed constructs, which were thrown into the tornado of living steel that was the sector-wide battlefront.

Then, the conflict changed. From unseen portals, new ships attacked the sarkoni swarms from unforeseen vectors. The fleet was huge and perplexingly, it was composed of both necron vessels, and the organically-smooth vessels of the eldar; some were graceful like underwater sea creatures, while others were shaped like cruel knives, blackened by fire. This fleet unleashed hell on the Severed, and successfully punched their way through the living metal blockade surrounding the increasingly squeezed Dynastic Necron forces of Gheden.

On the planet’s surface, Zahndrekh suddenly found himself with new allies; triarch praetorians teleported into the heart of the fighting, rods of covenant blazing as they laid into the severed with utter ferocity. They were joined by armies of commorrite eldar, blasters and dark lances scouring necrons to ash with every shot, as well as the capering harlequins, whose dancing was utterly lethal to the advancing necrons, as they severed their bodies, and scattered the broken remnants to prevent reanimation protocols. Zahndrekh’s tomb blades and doomscythes were joined by voidraven bombers and razorwings, that pulverized the severed group forces relentlessly. Slowly, Gheden was temporarily cleansed of rogue necrons.

In this brief hour of respite, the head of this strange new alliance teleported directly into the heart of the phaeron bunker, in a flash of azure energy. The leader was Szarekh, in a glittering, hulking necron body, and he did not come alone. With him came a squad of triarch Praetorians, in their new, even larger bodies. Alongside them, a blank-faced Solitaire, and a grinning Dark Eldar Archon with a great steel fan also appeared before them. Compelled by protocol, the lychguards of the phaerons turned their warscythes towards the newcomers, as the phaerons demanded an explanation for this violation.

“You want to know why your king appears before you? I am here to bring you deliverance.”

With that, Szarekh activated a devices on his wrist. Moments later, his new ‘body’ began to open up, revealing what was inside. For the triarch (and his praetorians’) new bodies were not bodies at all, but battlesuits of living metal. Inside, they housed flesh. Szarekh stepped from his battlesuit, to reveal the body, the human body, he now inhabited.

The necrons, unsurprisingly, were taken aback. At first, they believed it an eldar ploy, or some lie. But Szarekh knew the secret words of the triarch; words that were only to be spoken between ruling necrons. He knew their history as only their last great King could.

The Pariahs, harvested by Qah, were suitable for the bio-transference of the necron, for pariah souls were hollow things that drained warp energy from the sea of souls. Many assumed that this meant that pariahs were soulless, or somehow disconnected from the warp, when in fact, their anti-warp abilities required them to be more connected to the warp than a psyker, merely in a different fashion. When the Praetorian necrons were released from their android bodies, the pariahs drew their minds and souls into them. Necron and human pariah merged, and the resultant beings awoke as new beings, human necrontyr. Instantly, Szarekh and his allies had felt the difference. They felt a great chasm in their being had been filled. Conversely, the pariah human hosts found that the great miserable miasma that had surrounded them all their lives, felt that little less cloying. Szarekh declared to the assembled necron lords that he felt free once more, and he would free the rest of the necrons, especially the warriors, who had long lacked a voice. Szeras was the first to deride the Silent King’s efforts.

“Freedom comes at an inopportune time my king. The enemy is at the gates, and becoming... human will not defeat the Severed. Nothing we have can defeat them,” he spat from his imposing android form. “Besides, why should we sully ourselves in human forms? We achieved biotransference to escape mortality and the weakness of flesh!”

“Szeras, you are a great genius, and a masterful cryptek, but you must know that we cannot continue as we are. More and more of us fall to madness, or are Severed. I have seen what is coming, and our living metal will not save us from it, for it is forge of madness itself. I... I cannot describe to you the monstrosity of what descends. Orikan has seen it too, have you not, old friend?”

The cryptek nodded, dipping the staff of tomorrow slightly as he did. “Indeed I have, my lord and master. There can be no victory as machines. I have predicted this day would come.”

The Paheron interrupted the debate urgently. “Enough of this. The Severed are already returning to this planet. Even with our apparent new allies, Zahndrekh cannot hold them off. The Severed will consume us all.”

Szarekh turned to view the hololiths of the battles outside. He saw the Severed force literally filling the sky, in numbers as large as the necron hordes before the great C’tan War.

“How did they find us? Who betrayed us?” he whispered, his lips quivering with barely contained anger.

Orikan was the first to speak. “The Stormlord, I am afraid. The turncoat was betrayed by his warp allies. His dreams of an ordered galaxy, under his rule, are no more. In his despair and his spite, he gave the sarkoni emperor our coordinates, so that the empire of the Severed might cleanse the galaxy of dissent, and bring a perfect, lasting order to the galaxy.”

“How can we destroy the Severed? The master controller has dominion over all the canoptek machinery, and what we destroy, it can replace within moments. The scarabs break it all down and rebuild it,” Szeras explained.

“How do you control your scarabs?”

The new voice came from the eldar with the fan, who smiled broadly at the assembled necrons. “How do the necrons control all those vast hordes of scarabs?”

“The interstitial waveform; it moderates the programmed self-replicating function of the scarabs, so they can be directed and wielded. If the signal should fail, then...” began the Illuminor, before the cryptek realized what Lady Malys inferred.

For if the interstitial waveform was shut down, across the entire nodal command network, then the scarabs would do what their simple minds did best. They would devour. They would go into recycling mode, and devour every necron construct, before devouring every other structure in the system. Szarekh watched his subjects discussing the possibility with mounting dread. This was because he knew what the inevitable conclusion was going to be. The only beings that could shut off the scarabs were the triarch themselves. And if he did deactivate the waveform, not only the Severed would be consumed, but so too would every necron construct in the sector. The necrons would, essentially, be extinct.

The necrons and their eldar allies eventually reached the same conclusion as Szarekh, and turned to the Silent King. They all knew it had to be done, but Szarekh disagreed.

“No. No, I can save them! I can save everyone! We can flee the Severed. There are a million more pariah bodies waiting for biotransference! The Severed can’t delete living beings. We can take refuge in the Outside Sanctum,” the Silent King insisted.

“It would not work my King. The Severed would follow us, even to the Sanctum; flooding the dolmen gate network, until everyone was enslaved by the master controller,” Thazar explained solemnly.

“If we deactivate the field now, Gheden’s shields should protect those of us in this chamber. The eldar ships can escape the scarabs easily I should imagine. But the lesser necrons would be devoured. It is an acceptable loss, if we are to survive.

Szarekh grew desperate, clinging to the meeting table, his human knuckles white, his eyes red raw with tears. “’Lesser necrons’? This is all so easy for you! You are soulless and callous creatures. I have seen how you enjoy controlling silent, obedient subjects! But curse fate, that this decision falls to me, now that I have regained my soul. I regain a mortal heart, only for it to be broken all over again! Curse you all!” Szarekh snarled, as the necrons watched with their eternally fixed glares. The eldar said nothing.

“My king, I-“

“No. We can start again. I have made a truce with the old foes. There must be another way to vanquish the Severed. I have a chance to free my people from their android prisons. They would thank me for this mercy!”

Szeras shook his head, perhaps in sadness, perhaps as a simple negative. “Mercy? Have you heard the song of the necron warrior, by King?”

Szarekh, bleary eyed, shook his head.

Szeras moved to a command console. “I shall show you. Listen carefully.”

The cryptek then reactivated the long-dormant vocal systems of the necron warriors still controlled by the dynasty.

Instantly, there was screaming. It was a long, keening mechanical screech, resounding in the artificial throats of every single warrior. They screamed without pause, for they had no breaths they needed to take. It was a constant, wailing dirge.

Szarekh slumped to his knees, clutching his heart in empathetic horror.

“You see, my King, the warriors, when deactivated for the long hibernation, did not sleep. Nor do they ever sleep. They are trapped, without feeling or voice or stimulus, inside cold metal prisons. They are immortal and have no control over their bodies. We deactivated their voices millennia ago, for it reminds us, every day, that every one of our servants and subjects are insane. If you free them now, all you will do is bring a caste of lunatics into being; mindless with hate and broken beyond repair. You speak of mercy? It would be a mercy if the scarabs devoured them all,” Szeras explained, his voice cold and bitter.

Szerekh was silent for several minutes, save for his quiet sobbing. Eventually though, his face set; determined and stoic in the face of the horrible action he was about to take.

“Take your ships and leave now, lady Malys,” he said bluntly, as he stepped into his battlesuit once more. She bowed, and left with a wry smirk on her lips.

Slowly, the Silent King raised his staff, and inserted it into Szeras’ command console. The gesture was deceptively simple, and the only obvious result of the action was a subsonic wave that passed through the chamber and out into the world, the system, beyond.

The wave gained speed as it left the planet. It took only fifteen minutes to sweep across the system, and into the open dolmen gates of the Severed.

At first, there was no effect. The Severed paused for a moment, as did the Dynastic necrons, before they armed their weapons once more. The change was barely noticeable, until it was too late. Silently and unceremoniously, the necrons began to come apart. It began with the ships in orbit; fifty mile long tombships were suddenly engulfed in a silver cloud, and seemed to simply collapse upon themselves, like cans under high pressure. Scarabs swarmed around necron war machines. Stalkers toppled over as their legs were consumed, spyders flailed uselessly as tides of scarabs buried them. Necron warriors stumbled, and were dissolved on the spot. The silver hordes fell in rippling waves. The scarabs were unhurried and unstoppable.

Nemesor Zahndrekh watched the carnage from a hillside, his guardian Obyron at his side. Perhaps in that moment, the delusional commander realized that this was the end. He looked to Obyron.

“Is this victory? Have we won at last?

“Yes, my Nemesor. Yes.”

Before Zahndrekh could respond to that, the tide was upon them, and within minutes, they were no more.

Across the galaxy, the dolmen gates of sarkon activated. Through them, a trillion trillion scarabs flowed. The Master Controller, the sarkoni Emperor, was confused. He assumed he had direct control over all canoptek systems, but he found his interstitial wave generators were inactive. The Emperor resolved to have that fault rectified. This resolution came to naught a few hours later, when the scarabs penetrated the data-vaults, and consumed his circuitry.

Sarkon faltered, and died.

Once all the necrons were dead, the scarabs devoured the screaming human serfs of Sarkon, who were sudden free of the Severed; free to die. Once they were consumed, the scarabs began to devour nearby planets and moons, breaking them down into countless new scarabs. The self-replicating horde was in the process of consuming Gheden too, before a second signal rippled out from the Nihilakh capital world. This signal was far simpler. It was a kill code. At this command, the scarabs simply stopped, falling to the ground as inanimate lumps of metal. The canoptek machine system was broken, beyond all repairs.

Only a hundred necrons survived the so-called ‘Last Rites of Gheden’, alongside a thousand Pariah Praetorians, and the Silent King.

Soon after, the remnants of the necron race reactivated the stellar engines of Gheden. Then, they set the tombworld out into the stars, searching for the turncoat race-traitor Imotekh. The Stormlord would pay for his treachery.

Hidden behind the mimic engines of her command cruiser, Lady Malys watched the tombworld depart. She smiled, but it was not her smiling, but the thing nesting in her stolen heart.

“The War in Heaven ends,” she chuckled mockingly to herself.

Additional Note: The Thunder Lizard Tank Legion

The Thunder Lizard Tank Legion were the pre-eminent armored force of the Imperium Pentus. At the height of their power, the Legion had tank squadrons attached to every major army of the five primarchs and their generals.

The precise chronological beginning of the Thunder Lizards is unknown, but the Legion existed prior to Vulkan’s Imperium. At that point in history, the legion’s tanks were mostly knock offs and experimental variations of existing predator and leman russ basic designs. They hailed from the planet Argonauth, and formed the backbone of the PDF of that world. The atmosphere of Argonauth was highly toxic, and only sealed tanks and transporters could be relied upon to wage war there.

The Thunder Lizard Tank legion expanded after the Vulkan Imperium liberated their world from the Tyrant Tyberos, and they moved their tank factory facilities to the Forge World of Laakmor. The forge world had been left gutted by centuries of war, and most of its Tech priests were dead or mad, and thus the world’s vast polar Titan yards were converted into tank factories, and the equatorial deserts were made into testing fields and wargaming areas.

It was on Laakmor that the Legion began to build its soon to be famous super heavy tanks. As their facilities and resources increased, so the thunder lizard tanks got larger and more sophisticated. These super heavies were the rivals of the legendary fellblades, stormshadows and baneblades still in use by many Petty Imperiums. But they were still outclassed by the sheer firepower and defenses of the Warlord Titans and their larger cousins.

By the end of M56/early M57, Vulkan and the five primarchs were preparing for total war with their neighbors within the Travesty. Vulkan’s promethean cults and Ryzan Mechanicus did not have the knowledge or ability to produce Warlords of Imperators on anything like an industrial scale; it was claimed that whole cruisers could be built more cheaply and more easily than an Imperator. However, the Primarchs needed vehicles capable of fighting the numerous Titans and giant daemonic war engines of the Travesty on equal terms.

Vulkan, the most enthusiastic engineer amongst the five Brothers, decided to remedy this. He visited the Engineer-Commander of Laakmor, a man named Panzod B’olos, and gave the man six years to build a new range of super tanks, capable of going toe to toe with the worst his enemies could throw at him. B’olos, an brilliant and eager innovator, jumped at the chance.

Vulkan assigned a significant fraction of his war budget towards Laakmor and its surrounding yards. He also gave B’olos a cadre of Promethean Cultists to help his design teams and construction workers. Captain Teltegan of the Sons of Thunder Commandery (one of the Veterans who initially liberated the Thunder Lizards, ironically) was also ordered to Laakmor, to provide tactical and strategic pointers to the designers, and to help test out the new designs in wargames against his own Commandery’s tanks. The Sons of Thunder were well renowned for their affinity for tank warfare, which was reflected in the abundance of tanks they could field. In addition to all this, Vulkan sanctioned B’olos to source inspiration from any source available; human or alien, ancient or brand new. B’olos took advantage of this offer, and had his researchers scout the galaxy for the best examples of weapon and defense systems he could adopt, develop or improve upon. From the tau to the groevians to the vorlish taar and the praetorian kingdom, his men brought him much inspiration.

After just five of those six years he was granted, B’olos had his tank designs finished, and their prototypes tested. By the time of the Primarch War, B’olos had his new Tank legions complete and ready to bring war to the evil in the west.

The main Classes of Thunder Lizard Tank:

- The Mk III ‘Megasaur’ – The main battle tank equivalent. They were larger than a baneblade, and sported advanced linear accelerators, grid-linked lascannon batteries, layered void shielding and guided missile systems, as well as heavy adamantine armor and layered void shields. In addition, they were equipped with the latest advances in machine spirit interfaces, to give their human pilots the best chance of rapidly engaging multiple targets. They are fast, powerful and versatile.

- The MkVII ‘Velociraptor’ – A scout tank. Though slightly larger than a leman Russ, the Velociraptors were composed of almost nothing but engine, with minimal armaments. However, their reactors made them incredible fast, and when stationary, the reactor could be used to enhance the firepower of its single lascannon turret a hundredfold.

- The Mk II ‘Triceratops’ – A titan slayer. Triceratops were similarly armed and armored to a Megasaur, except for their large, tri-barrelled rampager cannon; a rapid firing gatling macrocannon, which required the tank to anchor itself to the ground before firing, or else its recoil would surely flip the vehicle (which is not a pleasant prospect for crew or anyone outside the tank for that matter...).

- The Mk I ‘Pterasaur’ – many generals refer to the pterasaur as ‘what a Hydra wants to be when it grows up’. A pterasaur is an aerial denial tank. Not only does it boast similar defenses to a megasaur, it has replaced its turret weapons with dozens of flak batteries, surface to air manticore missiles, air-burst deathstrike missiles, and grid-linked icarus lascannons. In major engagements, pentus command posts would park single pterasaurs near to their command bases, and feel confident that no enemy aircraft could hope to reach them (of course, orbital strikes were still a concern, but orbital strikes have always been a concern in any planetary battle). Pterasaurs are slightly physically smaller than a baneblade, are considerably more massive (due to the masses of munitions it is required to store), making them painfully slow.

- The Mk V ‘Tyrannosaur’ – A create goliath of a tank, the Tyrannosaur was far larger than even the greatest super heavy of the old imperium, and was actually close to being the size of a Leviathan of the long-dead Outremar forge worlds. It certainly out massed even an Imperator titan in displacement terms. The Tyrannosaur was truly the pinnacle of human tank technology. Its colossal reactors could power a hive city for three days, and was more than sufficient to power its vast plethora of weapon systems. Its primary weapon was its turret- mounted Lance cannon, a searing laser weapon of ungodly power. This was supplemented with secondary turrets of railguns, apocalypse missile pods, volcano cannons, lascannon anti-missile grids and siege guns. It also could mount void shields and dozens of meters of outer hull armor. Its machine spirit was close to true AI, without crossing the line, and its crew could utilize an extensive sensor suit deep in the Tyrannosaur’s heart. It was nominally a tracked vehicle, but it had a secondary anti grav engine, which allowed the entire tank to hover a few meters off the ground for up to twenty minutes at a time. This was used primarily to prevent the vehicle getting bogged down on land, crossing stretches of water and bog, and allowing the vehicle to travel at relatively high speeds (well, faster than an Imperator, which was the important thing). Some cynical chroniclers of history believe the Tyrannosaurs were vanity projects for B’olos himself. They were certainly expensive to produce, and were vastly outnumbered by the megasaurs and triceratops. However, despite this, the Tyrannosaurs were still considered the king of the tanks, and accordingly, the first one built was named ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’.

Additional background Section 41: The Battle of Corbellus (Part 1)

The Imperium Pentus’ primary fleet entered the territory of the Travesty not in piecemeal groups, but as one mighty lance thrust, deep into the chaos polluted realm. The grand armada was the largest fleet ever launched by this Imperium; almost half a million ships made up the fleet, including countless troopships, armor transports, factory vessels, escorts and capital ships, famous across the galaxy. These included the fast-battleships Antioch and Sleipnir, the Devil of Catachan and its attendant escorts, and the grand flagship Phalanx, which Vulkan himself commanded.

The fleet travelled through the warp, which had been cleansed of daemons in a particular region of the warp, where the erratic Ophilim Kiasoz had passed by on its way towards the heart of the Eye. In such relatively safe warp currents, the fleet managed to travel through the warp as one, travelling in a relatively tight formation. Their Gellar fields had ingeniously been linked together, forming a single colossal Gellar field which enclosed a seven light second diameter bubble of realspace inside the formless warp. Such a monumental undertaking required the precise coordination of every ship in the fleet, activating their Gellar fields at once, just as they used their warp engines to plunge into the immaterium. Such an action would have been impossible without both a calm warp, and the towering intellects of the four primarchs who undertook the task. The iron will and great intelligence of Russ, Lion, Khan and Vulkan kept the diverse fleet together, constantly adjusting the relative magnitudes of the shared Gellar field by seemingly minute amounts every seconds; adjustments that meant the difference between life and the dissolution of the entire fleet. It was a risky maneuver, but its rewards could potentially be great.

The Pentus primarchs’ plan was to breech the warp at some vital jugular of the Travesty, before using the conquered system as a jumping off point to attack neighboring systems. Small, fast scout frigates travelled along the warp route ahead of the main force, to assess the strength of the enemy, and to locate suitable targets for their planned initial, devastating assault.

One such scout-frigate was the Rinzell. It was a light Astartes frigate of the Jade Princes Commandery, with the usual compliment of two hundred mortal crew, and three Astartes tactical squads. Command of the scouting mission was divided between the Astartes Sergeant Koror, and the mortal captain of the Rinzell, Lord Matoburo.

Making multiple short warp jumps through the daemon-cleared Kiasoz channel, Rinzell ranged ahead of the Pentus Crusade, and was the first scouting party to break back into the Immaterium.

They entered the Corbellus system quietly; the engine trace of a scout frigate was deliberately shielded, and had a similar profile to a mere fighter craft, to any snooping chaos forces. Even after exiting the warp, the taint of the immaterium still clung to every molecule of the system, for the Imperium of Travesties was doused in the hellish afterglow of countless warp rifts. Even though no such warp rifts were detected by the Rinzell, Matoburo nevertheless advised caution, and kept his gunports open as they investigated the system.

The Corbellus system was a system of six worlds in relatively close orbit with one another. The system had been selected by Koror as it was far from major battle lines, yet seemed close to a warp nexus point, which linked the system to several chaos bastion worlds. The veteran Sergeant gambled that the chaos forces, being allies of the daemons, hadn’t used the stable routes in many years, and might not realize how vulnerable Corbellus was for being used as a staging point. The Rinzell scanned each world from orbit, being careful to mask its approach behind natural satellites to avoid any potential defense laser fire. Fortunately it seemed the backwater system had already been ravaged long ago.

Each world was a cathedral world dedicated to the gods, but their surfaces looked like the asteroid-pelted surfaces of airless moons. There had been a war there, perhaps fought during the war between Abaddon and Erebus’ usurpers. The defense lasers were smashed, and what little human life was detected on each of the worlds seemed minimal. They were garrison forces, awaiting the return of their uncaring, daemon-loving patrons. The system was ideal for a swift invasion. However, Captain Matoburo decided to make sure, and destroyed the surface settlements of five of the six worlds from orbit using precision lance strikes.

Corbellus Secundus, however, had a subterranean garrison force, and Koror and two tactical squads were deployed to clear them out, while Matoburo monitored things from orbit.

The Jade Princes moved swiftly, as soon as their drop pods touched down, they located the tunnel entrances and blew them with melta charges, before storming into the darkness below. The dark held no obstacle to astartes of course, as they activated preysight almost instantly. The first of the garrison’s sentry squads were eliminated by knife and gunstock, but soon enough, as they descended, the mortal soldiers, in their robes of mail, reacted to the space marines. They fought superhumans in the dark, with only their torches and greyscale night vision goggles to aid them. Even though the enemy was dug into several heavy weapon emplacements, and had set up elaborate killzones and intersecting lines of fire, they were hideously outmatched by the Jade Princes. Their green-striped power armor was the last thing most of the screaming human cultists saw before their brutal, swift deaths. Koror’s chainsword echoed through the cold halls of the grand, sprawling temple, as he carved down fleeing humans by the dozen. Intriguingly, all the cultists seemed desperate to reach a common objective; they all fled in similar directions, down through the layers to something deep in Corbellus Secundus.

Koror decided to follow the trail, as his auspex marine confirmed an energy source of some sort was located down there. Koror suspected the cultists would try to raise daemons to even the engagement in their favor. He resolved to kill them before they could even attempt this. The nearer they approached to the power source however, the weaker their vox link with the Rinzell became. Koror instructed one of his marines to return to the surface and apprise Matoburo of the situation, while the rest continued onwards.

Meanwhile, in the warp, the fleet continued along its becalmed route. It was eerily calm within the fleet. The crews were quiet. Some were asleep. Most were praying to whatever gods the primarchs permitted them to worship. Aboard the battlecruiser Crato, two astartes watched the warp swirling past the Gellar field. It was like formless oil. Yet, it was not there. The warp could never be observed in the moment; it was an after image. You were never sure precisely what one saw in the depths. The two astartes only knew it was their enemy. The two astartes were castron of the nemenmarines, and Alistor of the Fire beasts. Their commanderies had been made to share their transports during the coming conflict, and were also expected to fight together seamlessly in the coming war.

(In later reports, castron of the Nemenmarines would report that, during this voyage, he swore he saw as shimmering ghost ship, keeping pace with their fleet, like a dolphin following a ship’s wake. It looked like ‘a black ship of old, yet it also seemed to move like a shoal of infinitely small fish’ according to the astartes. This vessel was likely the Tersis. Perhaps this vision was a grim foretelling of the events to come? None can say for certain).

Back in the Corbellus system, Koror’s investigation continued.

The underworld temple of corbellus Secundus was vast, and echoed with the breath of the dead. A civilization had died in its depths, leaving the powdery remains of their bones as the only testament to their existence. That, and the statues of their countless heathen gods, sculpted in brass and steel. They leered down at the marines with hollow eyes in the dark, but the exact forms of the statues were rendered indistinct and fuzzy by the marines’ preysight autosenses. Koror had no time for the religiosity of the depraved and the extinct.

The underground caverns opened up, their great vaunted ceilings lost in the darkness, hiding the full extent of the caverns. As the tactical squads moved through the temple, they divided into two, to assault the power source from the flanks.

The approach to the ritual site was lined with more and more statues, arrayed in row upon row. It must have taken centuries of sculpture by mortal hands, Koror noted. As he considered this, the veteran spotted something in the path of the tactical squad he was leading. One of the statues had fallen into disrepair, and its oversized ceremonial weapon had fallen to the floor. As they closed on the weapon, Koror began to feel uneasy.

It was as if the cultists wanted to die, standing out in the middle of the temple, with no cover. Koror realized then that he had made a mistake.

Over the vox, he heard his second tactical squad engage and slaughter the remaining cultists, moments before he could shout out a countermand. The ceremonial weapon, lying at his feet, was familiar. It took him a fraction of a second to recognize the weapon.

It was a Kai Gun. Instinctively, Koror kicked the kai gun skittering away into the distance. Barely a second later, the disarmed statue suddenly burst into life with an ungodly roar. Fire rose up inside it, revealing it was hollow and full of impossible black flames flecked with orange. In the millisecond it took his men to spin around to aim at the kai bane warrior, it had already leapt from its podium, and slammed a massive boot into the nearest marine, who was hurled bodily away, his ribcage and breastplate shattered. The daemon engine was fast, and snatched the head from another marine, before punching a fist through the melta armed member of the squad. Koror and his squad opened up on the kai bane warrior in a furious flurry of bolter shells. The bolts rippled across the daemonic entity’s metal skin like pattering rain, as it threw itself into the fray. It gored one marine with its tusk blades, as it ripped another marine in two, hurling the pieces aside carelessly. Koror rolled to avoid the sweeping claws of the beast, and slashed his chainsword across the thing’s muzzle. It roared mechanically, rearing up and flinging the sergeant onto his back with a sonorous clang.

This commotion brought second squad into the fray, who opened fire as soon as they locked onto the fiend. Under sustained bombardment, the kai bane warrior stumbled, its body glowed a ruby red tone under the heat of explosive rounds detonating against its flesh. But still the thing didn’t die, barging two marines to the ground, and stomping on marine’s head till it was flat. The kai bane monster roared again, not in pain but in monstrous glee. Koror finally killed the thing by snatching up the fallen meltagun, and boring a three foot smoldering hole through the daemon’s center of mass. At last, it clattered to the floor, empty once more.

Only twelve of his marines were left alive, and not one of them had escaped damage. Koror knew he had to escape now; to warn the Rinzell.

Then they felt the entire temple tremble. Then they heard the dead kai bane roar once more. However, it was not the dead one which had roared. Nor was the roar which answered it.

All around them, the statues were lighting up. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Millions of them. They woke up sequentially, like a city power grid reactivating after a blackout. Corbellus secundus was no temple. It was a factory. It was a trap. The kai ban Host closed ranks around them, as the power source began to blaze with daemon fire, illuminating the hall at last. Koror lowered his meltagun.

“Oh Throne...”

(I cannot be sure of Koror’s precise last words, as he was never seen again, but I feel confident my estimation was accurate.)

Meanwhile, Matoburo was getting nervous. The astartes sent to return word of developments underground had not returned. Captain Matoburo knew something was wrong immediately. He readied his bridge crew to make for the warp translation point. Koror must be compromised he surmised. If he wasn’t, the Sergeant would merely be stranded on an empty world. If he was compromised, then the forces of Corbellus were greater than expected; a likely trap.

Matoburo’s instincts were sound, and he might well have averted the entire battle of Corbellus there and then, if his first officer hadn’t turned, smiled at him, before punching his fist through the old man’s head, and fling him from his command throne with a petulant flick of his wrist. The first officer turned to the stunned bridge crew, grinning as he watched them draw their sidearms. The first officer’s body rippled and rand fluid, before becoming Matoburo. As they fired on the imposter, he leapt aside, and their weapons destroyed the captain’s command throne, and all his inter ship vox equipment.

“That’s no way to treat your captain. I see security is required,” the imposter beamed as it took shelter behind a hefty console.

Moments later, a warp rift burst into life in the center of the room. The rift was gone barely a second later, replaced by a squad of iron Warrior terminators. Without saying a word, the terminators turned their combi bolters on the human bridge crew. Hearing a commotion, Jade Princes burst into the chamber, flinging grenades and firing from the hip. The gun battle lasted approximately three minutes.

The imposter Matoburo stood up, rolling his shoulders carefully before addressing his armored allies.

“Well-oiled precision, and impeccable timing as ever Sons of Perturabo. How odious,” the thing giggled. “So predictably competent.”

“You will hold up your end of the bargain, Changeling. Enough drama,” the Aspiring Champion of the terminators rumbled.

The Changeling nodded, before vanishing. It appeared to the ship’s beacon-psyker, in the guise of the Captain. The daemon killed the psyker, and stole its form post-mortem.

Thus, when the Rinzell sent its daily telepathic communication to the Phalanx, it relayed that Corbellus was an ideal staging point for the invasion. And, alas, the changeling was ever the convincing liar, and the primarchs were duped.

A few days later, the Pentus Crusade entered the Corbellus system as one. A titanic fleet, including every single troopship and major war vessel of the Pentus armada.

They arrived to find a system full of foes. Every world in Corbellus was a disguised factory world. Some were full of the Kai bane host, defilers and daemon engines of all descriptions. Others had been hollow shell worlds, filled with cruisers and battleships, waiting to be released. Now, there were more enemy contacts than the Phalanx’s sensors could adequately track.

And at their head, were two vessels the primarchs instantly recognized. The Conquerer, with its distinctive pectoral harpoon spines. The other, a moon-sized behemoth of daemon-forged horror; the Goliath Engine.

Perturabo had anticipated their desire for a staging point, and had enticed them in with a seemingly perfect one. The Demi-gods no doubt cursed themselves for their momentary lapse in judgment.

Vulkan looked across the enemy, unreadable, yet radiating furnace-hot wrath as he began to respond to the avalanche of data being returned by thousands of his ship captains, already planning his next twenty moves.

The Lion was stoic upon the bridge of the Antioch, calmly ordering his crew to battle stations. Khan was pacing at his side like an impatient hound.

Aboard the Sleipnir, Leman Russ’s lip curled into a foreboding smile, as his lieutenants Hrothnar the Fanged, commander of the Rout, and Skalvad Fenrisborn of the Wolf Brothers, snarled like feral beasts. Russ ignored the majority of the enemy fleet, and focused upon the Conquerer and its fang-nosed attendant cruisers.

A vox signal was received from the Goliath Engine. It was the only communication exchanged between the two fleets, before battle was joined in earnest.

++ Your plan was clever, Vulkan... brother.++ A bitter, rumbling voice said down the vox link, spitting the last word like a venomous curse. ++But not as clever as mine.++

Thus began one of the most pivotal battles of the primarch war. If the primarchs could not fight their way clear of the ambush, their Pentus Crusade would be strangled at birth.

Defeat was not an option.

Additional background Section 42: The Will of Crolomere

[Note: The events of this section occurred concurrently with the Battle of Corbellus.]

Upon Armageddon, an uneasy peace reigned. The people went about their daily lives much as they ever did during the Primarch War. They were all a little poorer, thanks to the enhanced tithes required of them by the state, but the rulers of the Pentus capital had fewer people to look after, and thus could spend more upon those who stayed behind, and didn’t join the refugee fleets making their way towards the center of the galaxy, away from all the turbulent warzones that risked spilling across the indistinct borders of the Imperium.

I was one of those people, just a young man and already aspiring to be a primarch chronicler. But in those days, I did not have access to this history, and we did not truly understand the nature of the wars being fought. Every day we looked to the heavens, dreading what might descend. One day we could be visiting our food merchant for the week, the next, we might be utterly annihilated. It was a troubled time and a supremely odd one; a period of simultaneous prosperity and utter terror. Hope and despair filled our hearts, but so too did love for our families and hate for our enemies. We craved the security of our authorities too, yet secretly yearned for a day when all could think and act freely as we saw fit. We wanted to build new works, new wonders, for our children to enjoy, yet secretly we suspected all this effort was for naught; who could survive the reckless hatred of the hostile galaxy? We knew the five brothers had left us to protect us from the Travesty, but at the same time, we suspected, seditiously, that they had abandoned us. I am almost certain, looking back, that these warring emotions were the result of the turbulent warp, and the gods, daemons and angyls who were, even then, fighting for dominance of our waking souls.

Politicians, as is their lot in life, manipulated this for maximum benefit to themselves. Across the hundred parliaments of the grand metropolis, they dueled with words and sought to unite their disparate factions into a functioning whole. For the most part, the hardliners gained the most power. These were the true believers, those who saw the primarchs as akin to gods. They were loosely led by Ibram Deitus, a powerful politician in the council of Hades, who wanted the lanes between the worlds closed, and all aliens within the boundaries of the Imperium exterminated. Though they gained the most power, the moderates retained control mostly, leaving the followers of Deitus as a raving minority. The astartes would never support Ibram’s lunatics, for their eldest dreadnoughts had lived through the madness of the old imperium, and even the Nova Astartes had veterans who remembered the Ophelian Imperium, possibly the most poisonous non-chaos aligned human realm history had ever seen.

Though moderate for the most part, the government was still preoccupied with security of the realm. Prisoners and people of interest were collected and interrogated by the Brethren of the Willing, under their new Director, Kathran Mozil. Their prisoners did not officially exist, and were beyond the authority of the democratic councils Vulkan had painstakingly set up. Some said the Brethren had been reformed by Corax into a more secretive organization, a move which the Lion had not appreciated (he had had his fill of secrecy being the primarch of the Dark Angels).

The Brethren had a facility built in the treasure vaults beneath Dak’ir citadel, which had been named after the famous Salamander who had died rescuing a billion refugees from the Slaugth during the battle for Scintilla in M42. Within this facility, the most valuable assets of the Brethren were kept. One of the most valuable was the woman known as Crolomere the Grey. She had been brought to Armageddon on the final orders of Imogen, the previous Director of the Brethren. However, the old woman had died in her sleep, and had taken the secret of why Crolomere had been brought to Armageddon to her grave (or she had not elaborated her reasons to the current leadership of the Brethren at least). Thus, when Crolomere had been brought back, the authorities assumed this was as a prisoner or enemy of the empire. Only interrogation of Crolomere could reveal the truth of the matter.

Unfortunately, the sensei was stubborn, and refused to talk to her captors out of indignation at her treatment. She would not be coerced or bullied by the ignorant. Every interrogation technique used upon her failed. Even psychic scrying failed miserably; her mental defenses were too tough for anyone less than an Alpha level psyker to even scratch.

It is likely the primarchs could have figured out her purpose had they been around, but alas they were not, and paranoia forced the Pentus Imperium to imprison her.

Eventually, the woman chose to speak herself. She tried to convince the Brethren that it was imperative they released her. She was the only one who knew how to thwart the machinations of Ahriman. When asked how she knew this, she was forced to admit that she had helped the Sorcerer access (and subsequently steal) the gene vaults of Terra. This did not go down as well as she hoped, and the Investigative wing of the Imperium Pentus resolved to imprison her until Vulkan came back, who could corroborate her story.

Other factions, shadowy factions working to complex agendas set up from the dawn of time, conspired to spring the sensei from her cell. But Crolomere was no helpless damsel; she was cunning and intelligent, honing her intellect over countless millennia. Using the sound of her guards’ footsteps, and the brief glimpses of Dak’ir tower’s surrounding suburbs and vaults she gleaned when she was first brought to the prison, she mentally built a map of the facility and its outlying area. Through carefully listening to snippets of conversations by the guards, she learned the rotations and the shift patterns of the guards, and where their sentry points and barracks were located in relation to her internal map.

Once she was sure she had the measure of her prison, she made her move. When the guards came to search her room, she attacked them, severely beating two of them until they were forced to fire upon her. Their lasguns ripped ragged, head-sized holes in her unarmored torso, vaporizing the flesh entirely. Consciously, Crolomere suppressed her formidable regenerative abilities, and the guards easily believed they had slain the woman.

Solemnly, they bore her corpse to the incinerator for disposal. Once they reached the furnace room, she sprang to life once more. Crolomere had been alive for thousands of years, and in that time she had become one of the most formidable human close quarter fighter, unaugmented by synthetic musculature or genetic engineering. She took down the seven elite Steel Legionnaires in quick succession, slaying them with their own captured weapons. She didn’t have much time; in less than a minute. She kept a single las pistol and a vox bead, before she began to strip the men for their equipment. Crolomere had been a chymist in a past life, and she knew how materials reacted when burnt together. He poured the contents of several different grenades and flash bangs into the incinerator. Then, she clambered up into the chimney of the furnace, stoppering the way behind her with the helmets of the guards. The flame retardant material prevented the furious fire from melting Crolomere as she climbed arduously through the narrow pipe. Meanwhile, the incinerator began to billow smoke and noxious fumes into the facility, as its chimney was blocked. When the guards burst into the incinerator chamber, it was full of smoke, setting off fire alarms across the vault. The guards, briefly blinded by the smoke, did not see that seven lasguns were busily overcharging in the furnace, nor that they had been surrounded by chemically enhanced blasting powder from a dozen frag grenades.

The blast shook the entire facility, and almost dislodged Crolomere as she crawled through the red hot, airless interior of the Incinerator. Third degree burns covered her body, but she ignored the agony as she climbed upwards. The Pentus soldiers hadn’t anticipated anyone escaping via the scorching chimney of their corpse furnace, and thus had installed no safeguards or perimeters. She bypassed layer upon layer of security details, pillboxes and laser defense grids. The entire lower level was on lockdown; every door had sealed tight to prevent anyone escaping from below. All this had achieved was sealing the guards of the lower level down there too, leaving Crolomere able to escape upwards. Her soul was invisible to psykers; she had learned this fact centuries ago. Thus, even the psyker-wardens of Dak’ir tower could not search for her.

The chimney came out halfway up the many-tiered hive tower, which loomed like a horizontal city above and behind her. It was raining as she finally kicked out the grate at the top of the chimney, and slithered out into the cooling night’s air. She lay upon a sloping roof for several moments, weeping with pain as the cooling grey rain fizzed over her red raw body. The healing process always hurt her more than the initial injury; after a while, a severe burn would go numb, as the pain receptors were destroyed. When she healed, the pain receptors healed too, and brought the pain back with a vengeance. Miraculously, the vox bead in her ear had survived relatively intact, and she managed to tune into the frequency of the only person she knew on Armageddon.

“Drazak... you have a purpose. Remember me Kage. Remember...” was all she managed to wheeze down the vox line through her scorched larynx.

The tower was in uproar; searchlights swept across the heavens, and armies of confederation troopers rushed inside the tower, searching for the girl who must surely still be inside. Little did they know that she was crawling, slowly, between sloped rooves, biting back the pain as she regrew her skin and dirty blond hair.

Yet, just as she reached the lower levels, an arbitrator APC stopped, and trained its spotlight onto her. A man in carapace stood up in the vehicle’s cupola. He recognized the girl instantly, and swung his storm bolter towards her.

The APC was a solid, hefty vehicle. Nevertheless, the vehicle was no match for the ninety ton ore-truck which barreled into its side at seventy miles an hour. The APC flipped end over end, before crashing to a halt on its roof. From the truck’s cockpit, two figures emerged. One was a muscular man, festooned with tattoos and scars. The other was a looming dark figure, with spindly limbs and soulless glowing blue eyes. For a moment, she deliriously thought she was back on Drazak and was being assailed by a necron construct, but the lithe figure was too upright and too obviously human-built to be a mirror devil.

Kage rushed to her side, and hauled her over his shoulder. “I have to stop saving you. It’s getting embarrassing,” he laughed mockingly, as he set her down in the vehicle and sped off.

Crolomere was finally healed by the time they reached their destination; a non-descript hab on the edge of Chronol hive, a gleaming city of adamantium and glass. There was nothing exceptional about the house; Kage had moved in after being contacted by Bronislaw and his associates. Inside was a different matter. The place was built of wraithbone and living crystal, which clung to the wraithbone walls like fibrous, solid cobwebs. A glittering, bejeweled webway gate shimmered in the far corner, studded with protective runes that seemed to fluctuate as she sought to look at them directly.

Kage had made a deal with the Revelation Host, and Jaxx, the Iron Man ally of Kage, explained that they had been searching for Crolomere ever since she had defied Ahriman. Kage gave Crolomere some of his spare clothes before he let the skeletal android spokesman for Revelation continue.

She had proven to the host that she was not a servant of dissolution, as they had feared. Czevak had been made aware of the grey Sensei’s vital importance. Jaxx explained that she must come with him, to the heart of the webway, where she must fulfill a vital role.

Crolomere turned to Kage, then back to Jaxx. Then, she refused.

“No, false man. I am not going to go with you on some unknown errand, just because you believe in prophecies and fate. All of you; the Red Sorcerer, the Yngir star-hungry, the daemons and angyls, you all want the universe to dance to your tune. I am not a damsel to be won like a prize, I am not a pawn!” she snarled, as the android stared at her, blankly as ever.

“The White Lancer Astartes Commandery have been alerted to your escape, and have deployed a hunter company of one hundred Nova Astartes to bring you back into custody, alive or otherwise. We will be unable to protect you from them in this present location. We have roughly 10.236 minutes before the space marines locate our escape vehicle to this location, and approx 11.002 minutes until the Astartes assault this location directly,” Jaxx explained.

“I do not care. We’ll escape, me and Kage, won’t we?” she looked to Kage.

He shrugged. “I’ve been in worse situations.”

“Your deliquence is not appreciated. I have been directed to bring you back to Lord Bronislaw Czevak and the Host,” Jaxx reiterated.

“Then explain why I should go,” she demanded.

Kage peered out of the window, and looked towards the eastern sky; a flight of White lancer fliers were approaching across the horizon. “Hurry it up, whatever you’re doing, or we’re all fugged!”

Jaxx cocked his head to one side, before opening a compartment in his hip and withdrawing a rune-covered cube, no bigger than a die. He placed the device in Crolomere’s hand.

“Close your hand. The psychic archive will sample your blood, and establish a psychic uplink. You will obtain clarity,” Jaxx instructed her.

Reluctantly, Crolomere did as she was asked. As the cube pierced her digits with pinpricks, the woman seemed to shimmer, gleaming with an aura of purest white and gold. Kage shielded his eyes as the light built to a blinding intensity. The moment passed, and the chamber returned to normal. Crolomere dropped the cube, and turned to smile at Kage, her cheeks wet with tears.

“The webway portal. It’s our only way out Kage. Will you come with me?”

Kage’s eyes narrowed, unsure what Crolomere had experienced (indeed, the printed chronicle of Vasiri the Watcher doesn’t seem to reference what she saw that so changed her mind). But his expression eventually softened.

“Well you weren’t leaving me here girl. Now let’s go if we’re going.”

And with that, the three entered the portal, which sealed itself automatically upon their passing.

However, Crolomere did not travel towards Revelation’s lair, as Jaxx had wanted her to. She travelled the forbidden routes, and headed towards the world where the Black Cube of Ahriman stood, with Kage and the android in tow. Only she knew how to even the playing field against Ahriman, and she was determined to stop him.

In frustration at her willfulness, Czevak sent the Apex Twins and the Legion of the Damned after her. He only hoped that would be enough to resist the Librarian-King of the Thousand Sons and his nightmarish rubric.

[EDIT: I found it! Lion-bless me I found it! Vasiri hadn’t included it in the printed Chronicle, she had handwritten it, and shoved it in amongst the reams of dataslates and memory crystals that made up her chronicle of the Age of Dusk.]

She felt the rushing of fire and ice water through my veins, as she beheld a great field, endless in all directions. But through the field rose up clouds, nebulae and infant stars, wheeling about her, as if she were some impossibly huge entity bestriding the galaxy itself, which filled her vision wherever she turned. Where she focused upon a particular patch of stars, those stars grew in size and scale, until she felt as if she were an invisible voyeur peering from orbit at the events unfolding below. She saw fleets clashing over Corbellus; mechanical nightmares and demi-gods, mortals and devils crashing together, and the undulating roars of the Red Angel and the Wolf. The pain and fire was too hot to bear, to raw to know.

She turned away, and beheld an alien city crumbling, a flaming hero battling a mighty tide of frothing bile. And above them all, a shattered ship and two gladiatorial killers locked in combat; the favored Son of a favored Son and the Lord of Wights, Huron the un-dead. Looking away in disgust, she suddenly beheld the thorny crown of Aurellian, rising one point at a time from an oily black soup of misery and horror. The Travesty with a face.

Looking south, mortal men charged the would-be God and his enslaved Rubric Hordes. They were mighty and courageous, Braiva’s best, but even the best were nothing compared to the ascendant darkness, the pretender to the throne of all creation.

Hope stood before the black sphere, but the fleet was left outside in the cold. Would they have their peace, or would they fail, like so many dreamers before them? The Last Good Man lowered his head, and mouthed silent words.

She saw necrons falling into dust, silent evermore. She saw the stars swelling with impossible hues, and tearing the materium in every corner of the galaxy. The vision accelerated, faster and faster, until she screamed and the vision retreated, leaving her surrounded by a hazy smoke.

The smoke cleared, as a figure emerged, wreathed by blinding shafts of golden hued light, that shone from behind him, making him indistinct.

“I am sorry it has come to this.”

The figure’s voice was beatific and youthful, and as he spoke, the shining light faded, and his beautiful, serene face was revealed, clad in a simple robe of pearl, edged with platinum. A singlet of simple gold crowned his head, and his eyes...

Crolomere recognized those eyes, somehow she knew this man. Realization dawned in a flash.

“I see that you have questions. I will endeavor to answer them. You may call me Revelation, for the purposes of this meeting.”

Crolomere stepped forwards, and slapped the golden figure in the face. The man took the blow, and Crolomere felt her arm go temporarily numb, as if a great current had passed through it for a moment. She glared at the man.

“Revelation? All this theatrics doesn’t benefit you in the slightest when it comes to me ‘Revelation’. I know you. I’ve always known you. I cannot help but remember my absentee father,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

The serene figure raised its hands placatingly . “The Emperor was a distant man, I will freely admit this. He had compassion, but it was submerged beneath duty; an awful burden that he had been given by the eldest perpetuals. You know the story. It is true, you know this Crolomere.”

The world around them shifted and morphed, becoming an ancient sandstone city.

“This was where I was created, then abandoned to fend for myself in the universe,” Crolomere explained coldly. “Why show me this?”

“This psychic vision is not mine alone. Our minds are joined here,” Revelation explained.

Crolomere’s eyes glistened, wavering on the point of tears. “How could you abandon me? Abandon us? You have no idea how many offspring you fathered. I met some of them. None of them, not one, ever knew you. You lavished love upon those living weapons you built, why could you not have loved us?”

“Your souls were invisible to the Emperor. He could not sense you.”

“Mortal fathers cannot sense the souls of their children, but they still care for them. Keep them safe...” Crolomere began, before she turned away from Revelation.

“I am truly sorry. I feel-” “You feel nothing! You were a cold, indifferent monster, and the empire you created was almost as bad as the Primordial Annihilator itself. Do you see why I turned form the Imperium, and became Grey? What are you anyway? The emperor died, I felt him die when Cypher plunged the Lion sword through his heart. I felt the Star father rise. I don’t even know what this thing is, which comes to beg for my assistance. It is like no emperor I recall,” she wept bitterly.

Revelation psychically placed a golden palm upon her sobbing shoulder. “Compassion, humanity; things discarded by the Anathema to become what it needed to be at the time. This compassion will pour into me, amongst other things. The moment is coming, sooner now than later. Please believe me,” the serene unborn god replied, each word perfectly formed upon his lips.

She turned to him slowly. “I could never abandon my children. I had so many; dozens upon dozens through the millennia. I watched them grow and thrive, love and live, age and die. They are all gone now. Your longevity does not pass down the biological line beyond your immediate offspring it seems. I stayed with my families, even when they withered to dried ancients and passed away in their sleep. I recall the names of every one. And you, you couldn’t find us right away, and gave up on us. You...”

She couldn’t go on.

The world shifted again, becoming a thousand battlefields and warzones, across different worlds and shifting versions of the Earth. Some were alternate futures, where Terra was a sterile rock of nuclear fallout, others where the orks or the necrons stood over a planet of slaves, desperately worshipping those beings that had laid them low. “Look upon these wars. These neverending wars. The Emperor was forced to intervene, time and again. Forced to manage humanity, and bring it back from the brink of disaster. His responsibility was to all humanity, not just you or those he might have called his friends. His mind... you do not understand the nature of this man, but you can understand this; he became so old, everyone he had ever met had perished, destroyed by the tyranny of time. Personal attachments seared his soul. It was like falling in love with a mayfly to him, again and again. He dared not make attachments, or else he would certainly lose them, to death and to time. He sacrificed this for humanity. This made him cold, but this was the pragmatic thing to do.”

Crolomere smiled bleakly. “That’s the talk of the Star Father.”

“Yes, and the Anathema is wrong. It is a distorted image of a creed humanity failed to understand. They lost their guidance, and let their fear and hatred make a monster out of the one being who wanted, more than anything, to save them.”

Giant monsters loomed all around them, and Crolomere recoiled in sudden fright. There was a giant brass-horned devil, spewing blood and sulfur. An odious monster of cogs and gears and crushing claws. A smirking fiend with a black and white face. An androgynous princess with a serpent’s tongue. A feathered tower of undulating flesh. A festering mass of cancerous growths and billowing slime. Faceless armor with gauntlets of silver. Three other things pushed up through the undulating plain, but they were formless, and voiceless, like unworked clay. “Who are the final three?” Crolomere asked Revelation, her voice oddly weak as she watched the creatures rip their way through the flimsy ground.

“They aren’t anything yet. Their form is not yet set. History is not written in stone; even I am only potential. But there are forces, powerful forces, getting close to ascension. Some will be bad, some insane, some might be good. But all of them are desperate, and will all rush headlong into this future. On some level, they all know their chances for godhood are dwindling. That is why things are speeding up for your time period. Events are unfolding faster than any can predict. My time is approaching.”

Crolomere sneered at Revelation. “You want to be part of this pantheon too?”

He smiled then, and it was as if sun had risen on a stormy day, and vanquished the rain. He placed a hand on her cheek lovingly. “No. When I come into existence, it will not be as one of the great powers. That is not my way. This deep rising nightmare... this Nexusofeverfatedrisingmadnesshopeofallturnedblackdoomtoallthebeligerentsandtheirgodsallh aildoomnightmares... is not undefeatable. There is a chance, a slim chance, that I can save everybody; everything that has ever existed or shall ever exist. But I need time, and time is working against me.”

The world turned dark and cold and Crolomere found herself upon a dune of grey ash. “What do you mean?”

Revelation sighed, and seemed ancient beyond reckoning for a brief instance. “I must be born before the last god rises. If not, the barriers between realities will fail, and the window of opportunity will close. Then everything will be ash.”

“I see what you demand from me. You only care about me now so you can harvest me. You need a host, is that it?”

Revelation shed a tear, to Crolomere’s surprise. The droplet fell from his face, and struck the ground like a fifty ton weight, cracking the ash strewn earth like a jackhammer. “No. You do not understand. I need time. The rise of gods can be slowed. That would give me the time.”

Crolomere considered his words. “Ahriman. He is the closest to ascension. I know how to stop him. Are these your orders? You want me to destroy him?”

Revelation was youthful again, but his golden gleam was gone, as the vision grew ever colder. Snow covered the ground, and the world was barren at their feet. “I do not demand anything of you, my dear Crolomere. I would never demand anything of you if you truly did not wish to go. I just needed to speak with you. I have faith in you. You will make the right choice.”

Crolomere looked at revelation, with her ever-youthful blue eyes streaming with tears. “I helped bring about Ahriman. I can destroy him. Revelation, I will destroy him, I promise you.”

And with that, Crolomere faded from the psychic vision, leaving revelation alone in an every darkening vista.

“You didn’t tell her?” another man said, at Revelation’s side.

Revelation’s expression was no longer serene. “I couldn’t. It had to be her choice. I am nobody’s tyrant.”

“But if Ahriman kills her, the process will never take place. You might never exist my Lord,” the second man responded, as the world became pitch black. Only voices remained.

“Perhaps. But would she have gone to face Ahriman if she knew?”

The second man had no answer, as the vision ended.

The compassionate one was of course right. Crolomere was not ready for the final Revelation. The revelation that the emperor was dead, and had died the moment he had thrown his compassion into the warp. The revelation that the one who called himself ‘Revelation’ was not the Father of Crolomere.

He was the son.

Additional background Section 43: The Battle of Corbellus (part 2)

On Catachan, they had a saying. ‘When a devil’s jaws close around you, you must strike harder and faster than ever before. Strike fast, and strike again. Though the devil has you at its mercy, the flesh at the back of the gullet is softer, the scales less dense.’

Admittedly, it lacks a certain poetry the truisms of other planets might possess, but nevertheless, the catachan saying has many analogous applications.

As it transpired, at the ambush at Corbellus, this phrase seems to have been absorbed by the warriors of Pentus. Like the unfortunate jungle fighter, they were on the brink of being consumed by the hordes of Perturabo and Angron, that flooded in from all directions it seemed.

On the one hand, Perturabo was a genius; he had managed to catch effectively the entire strength of the Pentus host in one area.

On the other hand, Perturabo had been foolish; he had managed to catch effectively the entire strength of the Pentus Host in one area.

Cornered on all sides, both the Travesty and Pentus Primarchs knew there was only one option open to the ambushed force. They would have to fight with all the fury and monumental power they could muster, and there would be nowhere to retreat. Thoughts of the Phall-system ghosted in Perturabo’s memories. A great victory. A crushing ambush. But the victory hinged upon the flight of his foes. To flee was to reveal your vulnerable backs to the enemy.

Corbellus would be different. Corbellus was more akin to throttling a serpent studded with needles, or swallowing a struggling scorpion whole. If he succeeded, the Imperium Pentus would be extinct, but if he failed, they would escape and his force would crumble. His force of daemon engines, devils and posthuman monsters did not outnumber the Pentus force by a significant fraction. He would have to rely on more than simple numbers to carry the day.

For the Pentus Primarchs, to their credit if the ambush had fazed them, they only registered this for the briefest of instants, before they utterly restructured their plans. They were not improvising, as one might assume; their minds simply abandoned their previous plan, devised half a dozen new ones, performed hypothetical scenarios with each approach and decided and fixed the new plan within their minds, all within the space of fifteen heartbeats. The main weapon of a primarch was not merely their herculean bodies, but also their incredible minds. It took them marginally longer to elaborate their plans to their professional yet bewildered generals and bridge officers.

As the fleet reordered itself, the Travesty fleet closed the noose, forming an ever tightening sphere formation around the smaller, dense, spiny sphere of Pentus ships at their heart.

Thus, the battle of Corbellus began.

Space battles, as elaborated upon in previous sections, are not really one battle at all. They are a war in microcosm; each boarding actions or teleporter assault is a desperate epic battle, with the battlefields themselves battling each other. Conflicts can be won upon the war-torn decks of a cruiser, only for the entire battle to become meaningless when a rogue lance strike bisects the vessel and leaves it as an airless tomb full of pointless corpses. And the clash of ships, with the gigaton weaponry, layered shielding and meters thick armor, are fought on a scale of distance and time larger than a mortal man could easily envisage. Skirmishes last for hours, across millions of kilometers, and pitched battles might last days. And all these conflicts occur at once.

To an outside observer, after the opening gambits of the battle, where the smaller ball of Pentus ships seemed to suddenly grow a sheath of spikes, as battleships led escort fleets in preemptive assaults against the enclosing Travesty, the overall fleet action looked as though it lost its coherency, becoming a heterogeneous ball of warring ships, almost ten light minutes in diameter. But in fact, the two fleets clashed and began to swirl between each other, in a silent, deadly ballet of infinite complexity. It seemed deceptively tranquil from afar, but in truth, it was a churning mass of vessels, only visible in the void thanks to the relentless blazing of their engines and their furious gun batteries, filling the spaces between them with multiple hues of plasma fire, hypersonic kinetic contrails and flights of guided projectile ordinance glittering in the dark.

In the first phases of the battle, the layered shielding of the two fleets meant that combat boiled down to relentlessly pounding against one another’s forcefields until one side gave in. Battleships scattered squadrons of cruisers, while cruisers dueled with one another, and frigates and destroyers hunted one another through the expansive battleground. Each fleet movement was ordered by the primarch admirals and their advisors, and each maneuver was implemented by dedicated and skilled captains, who tried their best to keep their cool amidst a veritable ocean of targets and friendly vessels; one wrong move could mean disaster.

It would be impractical to describe each and every action and counter action performed by the warring fleets. Nor would it be possible to depict every event in a chronological progression, as most of the maneuvers and vector assaults performed by the protagonists of this epic naval drama occurred at similar times. Instead, I shall focus on the actions of a few major and important vessels and historical figures of significance that were mentioned multiple times in the collected histories of this historical battle. These actions are roughly chronological, but as previously iterated, the order of events might have been different. One must bear in mind that this battle was fought across a massive area of space, so much so that the light from one side of the battle would not reach the sensors of ships fighting on the opposite side for at least ten minutes.

The chaos fleet was a menagerie of mechanical terrors. Some of the steel and yellow chevroned vessels looked almost like normal vessels of human or alien construction, if only slightly warped and asymmetrical. There were demented things, like colossal golems of living metal and hell fire. One vessel, nicknamed the Kraken by the Wolf Brothers as soon as they spotted it, looked almost like some grotesque mechanical squid, complete with articulated tentacles, each as long as a frigate. Another vessel was simply a series of interlocking rings festooned with gun ports and thrusters, eternally swinging around one another like some demented gyroscope. The Goliath Engine, that grotesque fusion of factory, asteroid and bloated steel beetle, was by far the largest and most impossibly threatening. Its great torpedo bays and tiered pyramids of chittering macrocannon batteries, pounded vessel after vessel into scrap metal; metal which was then drawn towards the lumpen mass with grappling hooks, increasing the size of the Goliath Engine each time it made a kill. Many were the forms of the chaos fleet, but all were united in their foulness.

The Antioch, the great flagship of the White Lancers and the Lion’s mighty chariot, plunged into the fray almost immediately with the commencement of battle. With the cool, calm precision of a surgeon, the Lion ordered gun ports open, and mustered a force of escorts to follow in the ship’s wake as it took the fight to the chaos forces. The first weapon to activate was the great white spear. A dorsal silo at the center of the Antioch’s spine peeled open with silken precision, as the mighty lance turret rose like the head of a cobra. The scorching white lance beam wreaked havoc as the Antioch closed into range of its foes. The spear beam moved amongst them, carving open shielded escorts and cruisers with equal ease. Ships were bisected, sometimes five at once, as the obscenely powerful weapon. The Antioch moved in odd patterns, banking and rolling or turning end over end through space to engage targets at the optimal vectors of attack; where the enemy’s shields were at their weakest, or into a volume of space the Lion knew an enemy ship was about to enter. The Spear of Antioch kept the larger vessels at long range, but eventually the smaller, nimbler chaos escorts managed to get within range with their own weapons. This forced the Antioch to rely upon its dedicated gun crews on the starboard and port batteries to hold them off.

As the enemy neared, the pectoral hangars of the forbidding black capital ship unfurled. From here descended a flight of Dothrak class commandery gunships, sleek replacements of the long outdated thunderhawks. The craft which led them from Antioch’s holds was a gleaming white marvel of warcraft. Somewhere between the size of a thunderhawk and one of the Tau manta ships of old, the sleek vessel dwarfed its escorting gunships, but there was not even a hint that this size in any way slowed the spacecraft. Its forward-swept wings were equipped with a variety of unique weapon systems; demi-lances, coilguns, conversion beamers and missile pods. It also carried heavier missile systems internally within a bomb bay. This vessel was beautiful, etched with beautiful images of white winged pegasi and gryphons. This vessel was known simply as the Stormrider. This was its first flight in battle, but it would not be its last. The forces of chaos would come to curse this vessel’s name, for it was no mere fighter. It was the winged chariot of Jaghati Khan himself.

The Stormrider and its squadrons swooped between the escort craft like hawks in formation, neatly carving away the defensive turrets and gun decks of the enemy, before planting missiles into key communication and navigational systems. At a glance, even while evading defensive turret fire, the Khan could immediately discern the weak points of enemy ships, and struck hard and lightning-fast in their figurative jugulars. As more and more ships were dragged into the battle, the void began to fill with fighters and flyers from both sides. The Khan picked up new fighter wings every few minutes, as he swept between the citadels and towers of enemy and friendly capital ships alike, like a white ghost riding the waves of gunfire as if there were foam on a turbulent ocean.

Around the largest chaos capital ships, what at first seemed like millions upon millions of decorative gargoyles and grotesques, were revealed to be flight after flight of screeching heldrake daemon engines. As the Pentus fighters tried to attack the larger ships, flocks of heldrakes descended upon them with daemonic fury. Even the Khan was hard pressed to fight his way through the relentless waves of clawed monsters. Through these flocks, manned hell talons darted through to attack the Pentus capital ships, but few managed to get through the turrets and laser grids of the mighty vessels.

The Kraken lunged forwards through the void, its thick hide ignoring the bombardment of the battleships rushing to intercept it. Instead of ink, the thing spewed clouds of superheated plasma vapor, accelerated to near relativistic speed. These clouds rippled across void shields, shorting them out in quick order as layer after layer failed. Once shields were down, the kraken powered itself to within a few thousand kilometers, before firing its tendrils forwards, drawing in unfortunate vessels towards it colossal tentacles, and the churning beak-like maw of the mechanical horror. Ships were digested slowly, their crews desperately trying to flee as they were consumed in fire and agony.

The gyroscope daemon engine simply maneuvered itself so as many enemies surrounded it as possible, before unleashing its tremendous batteries in all directions, heedless of who or what it hit.

From the Phalanx, Vulkan directed a hundred different naval engagements simultaneously; he lured ships into traps, where his cruisers could surround them and pound their rear armor to scrap, or he made certain areas of the fleet appear weaker, so that the enemy were drawn towards these volumes of space, while the actual weak points were given half an hour or so to lick their wounds before another flight of escorts or some new horror came to test them. The Phalanx itself seemed impervious to every direct assault made against it. Lances blistered the void shields, but little else. Macro shells and torpedoes plunged through the shields slowly, but their gigaton blasts we all show, rippling up in mushroom clouds within the atmosphere of the asteroid, but doing little more than scorching the sixth of a mile thick hull plating that clad the battle station.

The Conqueror pressed its attack with the irresistible animal fury of the primarch that commanded it. Smashing aside lesser vessels with sheer weight of fire, the World Eater vessel had one target for its gargoyle-snouted guns and serrated dagger prow; the Sleipnir, the chariot of the Wolf King. The Sleipnir too thundered through the storm of the unfolding battle. Like two Dark Age champions fighting through a scrappy melee to reach their opposite number, the ships smashed apart cruisers and shuttles who were not swift or maneuverable enough to evade them. One was driven by a mad berserker daemon, hungry for glory and the pleasure of ripping apart his greatest rival. The other, outwardly, seemed driven by the same frenzied bloodlust, howling like a mad hound as Hrothnar and his Rout echoed his call. But Leman Russ had calculated this engagement. He knew that Angron would throw everything against the Wolf King, and kill any friend or foe that impeded him. Russ knew that if he kept Angron focused upon him, Vulkan and his brothers would have a chance to balance the terms of the engagement. He had to draw Angron’s fleet away from Perturabo’s somehow. Indulging Angron in his manic dreams of combat was one such method.

The Rout and the Wolf Brothers, and all their attendant hunting fleets, clashed seemingly as one against the World Eaters, the Beasts of Annihilation, and all their diverse fleet elements of their Blood Pact allies. Conqueror and Sleipnir, shields at full power, unleashed a veritable hellstorm of ordnance against one another. Torpedoes and missiles, macro cannons and coilguns, particle accelerators and plasma batteries. The six thousand kilometers between the two ships became a solid wall of multi-hued fire. Shields were pounded down as quickly as they were repaired and reactivated, the mortal repair crews and tech priests working strenuously to keep their respective ships functioning under such intense bombardment. With shields up, mundane teleport assaults were impossible, but the two forces, desperate to come to grips with one another, launched their gunships, dreadclaws and boarding torpedoes in the hope of crossing blades with one another. The devil-possessed Beasts of Annihilation threw themselves into mad, sprawling battles with bestial demi-wulfen, claws and fangs robbing these battles of any semblance of skill.

Howling Wolf Brothers and the forces of the Rout leapt from their boarding ships with axes and whirring chainblades drawn, only to be met with equally bloodthirsty and fearsome khorne berserkers and cackling bloodletters. This naval engagement was like a fleet battle within a fleet battle; a burning arc of clashing ships on the edge of the chaotic ball of engaged vessels that formed the main part of the wider conflict.

Sleipnir and conqueror’s defenses prevented any mundane boarding attempts. Despite himself, Russ found this frustrating. Though he was a masterful naval commander, he was born to be the red right hand of the emperor; his personal executioner. Closer quarters were where he was most at home.

Russ would get his chance roughly three hours into the battle. Though standard teleport beams were consistently baffled by the Sleipnir’s mighty void shielding, they could not prevent the more esoteric and infernal means at the disposal of the Travesty. Skalvad Fenrisborn, a captain of the Wolf Brothers, was put in charge of the routing of any enemy who managed to enter the Sleipnir itself. The old imperial astartes was an ancient warrior, with a great white beard and fangs as long and sharp as any Space Wolf veteran. He was called into action when the mortal serfs toiling in the gunnery decks of the Sleipnir sent out a desperate distress call; they were under attack. They only managed one word more before the vox link was severed. Bloodthirsters.

A dozen of the greater daemons wrought bloody havoc across the gun decks of the Sleipnir, ripping apart the macro cannons and the helpless mortals who crewed them. The gun dock was like a butcher’s yard, and echoed with the bovine bellowing of impossible monsters. One amongst them roared with a voice deeper and more terrible than a thunderstorm. The servants of Russ’s children were not cowards, but though they drew their axes and rifles in defiance, they were all too easily crushed and crippled by the red-raw daemons of Khorne. By the time Skalvad reached them, a whole company of the Rout lay broken in the wake of the bloodthirsters, who slaughtered and maimed in the middle distance. Snarling in rage, the old Imperial Wolf Brother ordered his astartes forwards, unleashing a torrent of bolter and missile fire into the flying monsters. Each of the bloodthirsters was a subtly different creature; some had larger horns, some had tusks like a boar, others had the faces of men or bulls. But one of them was different. It was a hulking red mass, like the rest, but this beast was different. It killed with effortless precision, married to khornate’s marshal bloodlust. Its twin axes cleaved all who strayed towards. This fiend made the bloodthirsters seem like artless brawlers by comparison. When the winged nightmare turned its face towards the attacking Wolf Brothers, Skalvad recognized the vile features of the beast, set upon a thick neck veined with snaking cables and oily vines. This was Angron himself. Angron was there.

Skalvad fought down the instinctual fear that gnawed in his gut, and pressed on his assault. When his bolter was spent, it was said that the ancient space marine took up a fallen power lance from a dead comrade, bound an orchard of grenades to his tip, and cast it forth like a mighty javelin. It covered 200 meters in a matter of seconds, sailing towards the mighty daemon primarch. But Angron was fast, and snatched it from the air moments before it struck. Then he smiled, as the grenades exploded, wreathing him with a halo of scorching fire. Sword drawn, the veteran nevertheless charged the primarch and his bloodthirster retinue. Even as his own command squad was cut down around him, he continued his charge. Even as he was lifted from the air by Angron, his battlecry remained undimmed. Even as his frostblade shattered against Angron’s hardy skull, he did not stop striking him. Angron didn’t even bother to cut Skalvad’s head off; he simply closed his mighty fist, and grinned as the space marine’s body began to give way. First his power amour buckled, then his bones cracked, and finally he felt his organs bursting. Only then did Skalvad fall quiet.

As his mournful howl died on his lips, so another, infinitely greater howl erupted around the ruined halls of gunnery. Angron turned to face this new foe with perverse relish.

“Release him, you craven coward!” roared leman Russ, as he entered the blasted hall, his great pistol raised and his wickedly sharp frostblade drawn, stepping through a field of dead and broken astartes. Angron casually tossed Skalvad aside like a broken toy, and stepped down from the sundered macro cannon he had perched upon. Angron’s voice was deep and grating, raw as an open wound.

“So the wolf has come. But he is no wolf, is he? He was the Emperor’s loyal dog, just as he is Vulkan’s dog now,” Angron growled darkly, sparks and sulfur pouring from his slavering maw as he drew his bronze axes. The eleven bloodthirsters turned towards Leman Russ as Angron spoke, readying their own axes and fiery lashes.

“You fled your father to serve under another master’s lash. You slaved yourself to the Luna Wolf’s pack. You, Angron, are the cur in the collar, yet I am the dog?” Russ snarled in response, pointing his blade towards the burning brass collar smoldering around the thick neck of the daemonprimarch.

At this, Angron screamed a deathly scream, a sonorous bellow that shook the gun deck to its core. All who witnessed this exchange between demi-gods were heedless of the naval battle raging just beyond the armored skin of the Sleipnir’s hull.

Russ smiled disingenuously. “In the old days, the scholars and the wise of the Imperium used to ponder the hierarchy of the primarchs. Who would best who? Who might be the strongest? They always used to compare us; the wolf and the hound, the two berserkers. But we both know the truth of that don’t we? You are a brute, and a bully; always have been. I would always triumph over you, for you are broken. Now come, let me finish the task the slave masters of your birth world failed to accomplish!” Russ roared as he fired his mighty pistol. The flurry of shells exploded before Angron, the projectiles cut from the air in the blink of an eye by the impossible speed of Angron the Red Angel.

“Perhaps, perhaps not, hound. But it matters not; that was then, Wolf King, this is now! I was tethered by flesh and my butcher’s nails then, and I was young. But now I am old and strong! The Travesty flows through my veins! I am the stronger now and forever, little brother! I shall break you!” Angron bellowed again, like a braying Titan’s war horn.

With a gesture, Angron sent his bloodthirster retinue forwards, axes drawn and ready to slay Russ. The primarch leapt into combat with a howl of glee, frostblade singing as it clashed with daemon-forged iron and blood-forged brass. The daemons were winged terrors, taller even that Russ, but as he charged, he howled an ethereal howl, that seemed to ripple through dimensions and wail the heart of the most brutish daemonspawn. His sword turned axes, and his pistol blasted fang-filled maws to fizzing ichor. No lash could bind his limbs for he severed them with his chill blade.

But eleven bloodthirsters was a foe few could hope to surmount alone, and it looked as if, for a moment, the barbarian king might falter in his headlong charge. But fortunately, he was not alone. Wolf Brother reserves poured into the chamber, mounted in mighty land raiders, as the thunderwolves of old.*These heavy weapons drove off the bloodthirsters, who flew to engage the armor units entering the fray.

This left Russ with a clear path to Angron. Angron laughed with infernal hatred as he charged to meet his nemesis. The first hundred blows and counterblows landed by the two demi-gods were near invisible, as their speed and unfathomable reflexes warred for advantage. Russ fired into combat as he dueled, bathing the Red Angel in fire and shrapnel, slowing the daemon just long enough to allow the Wolf King to press forwards, raining blow after blow against Angron’s guard. Angron, seeking to break this pattern, desperately struck out with a kick, his hoof connecting squarely with Russ’s chestplate. The primarch was sent flying bodily, impacting the deck with a sonorous clang.

Moments later, Angron launched himself into the air on his bloodied pinions, before plunging towards his hated foe. Russ barely rolled aside as he slammed into the deck. The shockwave was like the discharge of a magma shell, carving a five meter crater in the adamantine floor. Slowly, Angron rose from the partially-melted metal, a towering monster, taller that his opponent by several meters. Russ rose too, and looked up at the giant with undisguised contempt.

“I have killed bigger,” he mocked, as he charged his fallen brother once more.

The fight raged from deck to deck, level to level. They wrestled and fenced, bit and slashed with fang and claw. They threw one another through walls and bulkheads with the ease a man might shatter a pane of glass. As the duel continued, one of the daemonic axes of Angron was knocked from his hand, while Russ’ pistol lay smashed upon the floor, stamped into a million useless shards. Angron snatched up a fallen lascannon turret by the barrel, and using it like a club, shattered it across the head of Leman Russ, who staggered backwards, bloody froth tainting his thick beard. Russ dodged the follow up blow, and with a mighty bound, he leapt up to grasp Angron by the collar at his neck. Howling his ethereal howl, Russ thrust his head forwards, and head butted the Red Angel square between his soulless reptilian eyes. It was Angron’s turn to stagger.

Elsewhere in the Corbellus-system, the naval battle entered its second phase. The first of the void shields were going down; battered down by relentless exchanges of ordnance and lance fire. With their fall, the teleport assaults began in earnest. The local warp was alive with teleport beams, flashing invisibly between the mass of ships. Such dense traffic was utterly lethal to some, for to find one specific ship amidst all the rapidly maneuvering fleet vessels was a difficult task. Some were teleported into bulkheads, others into deep space, or into the entirely wrong ship. Other would be boarders accidentally attempted to breach shielded vessels, and were rebuffed, trapped forever in the sea of souls. But enough soldiers from both sides managed to reach their destinations to instigate battle. Terminator assault teams killed everything they came into contact with, fists swinging and bolters roaring as they wasted no time on establishing perimeters or scouting out the ships they invaded.

The kai Bane Host did not deploy via teleport assault. They had their own vast assault modules, constructed in the form of great three-legged crustaceans, as large as an imperator titan. They were known as helwasps. These helwasps were fired from Iron Warrior forge ships directly, like vast torpedoes. Once they impacted on a vessel’s sides, they would anchor themselves to the hull using their titanic limbs, before unfurling a great drill from the central mass of the module. The whirring teeth of the drills were forged of daemon iron, and no hull could hope to resist the spinning, chewing power of them. Like a parasitic fly, this drill-tipped proboscis injected its internal contents inside the enemy vessel. Unfortunately for the stricken vessels involved, their contents were kai bane warriors. Each module held hundreds of the mighty daemon engines, alongside their larger defiler cousins. Just a few helwasps impacting on a ship was enough to flood the vessel with lethal daemonic supersoldiers. Perturabo had ordered that he preferred that his brothers’ vessels were captured, so that he might bolster his own fleet, and hasten the destruction of the Pentus crusade. The kai bane host was to kill all who resisted, and then Iron Warriors and other lesser servants of the Scourge of Olympia would be deployed to take command of the engine rooms, gun decks and command bridges of the captured vessels.

Many Pentus ships fell to this ploy, for the kai bane host were terrifyingly powerful. Their daemon-forged bodies were immune to all but the heaviest fire; even bolter rounds pattered harmlessly against them. They were as big and as powerful as Cataphracti terminators, but moved with the swift, relentless energy of a tactical marine, their oversized kai gun daemon weapons felling the mightiest of astartes. If the astartes were struggling to contain them, mortal security teams and naval provosts were almost pitifully outmatched. Hundreds of ships fell in this manner, and within a few hours, their guns came back online, but turned against their former allies.

But the Kai Bane Host did not have it all its own way. Onboard the command vessel of the Confederation of Justice, their troopers sensibly avoided open combat with the kai bane, and instead used mortars and repurposed macrocannon propellant to hold off the daemon engines, giving their IEU pilots time to reach their battlesuits. Once embarked, they engaged the kai bane Host on much more equal terms, stalemating the enemy on several of their main troopships. Captain Thezon of the Iron Hands, a master of boarding actions and counter boarding techniques, used all his cybernetic warriors to maximum effect in the narrow confines of his vessel, the Anvil. Though his bolters were ineffective, he managed to lure some kai bane warriors into kill zones of autocannon and meltagun emplacements, or held them off with controlled demolitions. Even as he coldly sent in wave upon wave of servitors into the guns of the Kai Bane to stall them, his techmarines started refitting his commandery with unstable, flux-core ‘vengeance’ bolter rounds. They were shorter range than normal rounds, but Thezon rightly predicted they would penetrate the daemon engines much more effectively. Soon, he and his men pushed the kai bane back to their helwasps, before transmitting his findings to his fellow commandery leaders.

Disastrously, the shields of the primary conveyor for the Thunder Lizard Tank legion was also breached by the fearsome helwasp assault modules; dozens of the gigantic vehicle clamping themselves to the undergunned transport ship. While the Thunder Lizards were mighty planetside, they were considered near helpless while in the cargo holds of their conveyors. The only defenders of the ship were the standard armed ratings and security teams of mundane naval ships. A great despairing cry arose amongst the Pentus forces as it seemed their great anti-titan war machines were doomed to be captured by the enemy.

However, both the enemy and even the Thunder Lizard Legion’s allies had underestimated the resolve of these recklessly brave tankers. The Commander of the Tyrannosurus would not sit idly by while the conveyor was torn apart around him. Gathering a force of Megasaurs around his colossal command tank, he directed their fire to a specific weak point in the cargo bay’s hull structure, concentrating their fire to blast a great hole into the void itself.

Magnetizing their tracks to prevent being blown into space, the Tyrannosaurus Rex led its battalion of super heavies out onto the expansive, eleven mile long outer hull of the conveyor. There, they engaged the helwasps directly; a move not even the demented strategists of the Travesty had anticipated. Witnesses from the crew of the conveyor watched in dumbstruck awe as a phalanx of super heavy tanks rolled across the city-like skin of the vessel, their engines and flashing weaponry silent in the void. The sky above them was alive with the wider conflict of Corbellus, but the Tyrannosaurus was focused upon its goal. The helwasps themselves had no armaments, and were forced to instead open their flanks and deployed the Kai bane warriors, maulerfiends and defilers to the outer hull of the ship. Though the daemon engines fought with the fearlessness of the arcane and the perverse, they were utterly outmatched by the Thunder Lizards. One by one the helwasps were purged, and their passengers destroyed by high energy lance and cannon. The Tyrannosaurus ended the aborted ship incursion in spectacular style; severing the three docking limbs of a helwasp, before ramming the last remaining module out into the void. As it rose up from the ship’s hull, the Tyrannosaurus planted half a dozen missiles into it, blasting it apart in a cascade of purple energy. The ship’s void shields reactivated moments before the next wave of ordnance could impact upon the hull. The cheers resounding within the tank conveyor were deafening.

Meanwhile, the great kraken engine wreaked a dreadful tally amongst the Pentus fleet, ripping apart ship after ship with its claws and articulated tentacles. The Crato, a Fire Beast/Nemenmarines attack cruiser, barely escaped the clutches of the grand cruiser sized daemon machine, as the Crato rushed to try and aid Russ’s beleaguered fleet elements on the perimeter of the battlezone. However, the vessel was not left unscathed. The kraken ripped off a towering chunk of super structure, and plunged it like a dagger into the spine of the Crato. In a case of spectacular bad luck, the wreckage smashed into the primary command bridge, located in the middle of the vessel, as well as gutting the dorsal, starboard and port weapon batteries when the ammunition magazines were detonated. The burning ship spiraled out of control, only just managing to escape the follow up strike of the kraken. But the first blow was bad enough. Thousands were dead, including the two captains of the commanderies onboard, and most of its weapons were rendered useless by the catastrophic damage that had nearly bisected the cruiser.

The Devil of Catachan, the vast war factory of the Pentus crusade, held off Beasts of Annihilation incursions, kai bane assaults and its wings of fighters and assault craft swept the void around it of anything large than a landing craft. However, the Devil of Catachan had one weakness; its pectoral ship yard was a vast space open to the void, for it was designed to allow battlecruisers and smaller naval ships to enter safely for repairs. It was said the Ryzan tech priests were still repairing the battlecruiser Gheist inside its pectoral factory yards when the Ryzan-Catachan Plasma Commandoes, led by Marella Harker, fought off wave upon wave of Blood Pact troops that entered the space via assault boats normally too large to be used in normal naval incursions. The Blood Pact troops were backed up by Kai bane engines and Iron Warriors, along with some of Angron’s berserkers. The plasma weaponry of the Commandoes was sufficient to destroy Kai bane shells though, and leveled the playing field significantly during the six hour long battle in the hangar. During the battle, the un-finished Gheist was damaged further by the fearsome tides of chaotic slaves flooding the decks. Heist was secured to the Devil of Catachan by a mighty crane, which anchored the cruiser to the internal umbilicals of the Devil. The Gheist’s weapon systems were not yet installed, its warp drive and maneuvering thrusters were nonfunctional, and the ship only had air in the bridge and engineering sections. The vessel within the Devil of Catachan was useless to the war effort at that moment. That was, until the Gheist’s own captain had an idea...

Back on the Sleipnir, things were not going well. Fires raged throughout the Wolf King’s vessel. With so many of its guns rendered inoperable by Angron’s daemons, the ship had taken a pounding form Conqueror and its vile lesser kin. Without retaliation, Conqueror had been able to batter down Sleipnir’s shields, and boarded them with a veritable tide of berserkers and possessed marines, alongside regiments of Blood Pact recruits and Barghesi mercenaries. Hrothnar the Fanged led the desperate defense, his Rout at the forefront of every attempt to repel the latest assault. He fought with a powered glaive and a storm bolter, howling curses in every language of the Imperium Pentus as he cut down foe after blood-mad foe.

As the battle was being lost around him, Russ himself seemed to be regaining some measure of advantage in his personal battle against Angron. The two beings were laced with scars and red raw skin which was rapidly healing around their grievous injuries. They traded hundreds of blows every moment, each blow backed with all the power they could muster behind their blades. Sparks and plasma fire rippled from their weapons as the energies unleashed sublimed metal and ionized the vapors, setting light to the ground around them as they battled. But Angron, no matter how many times Russ got past his guard and slashed his flesh, could not be undone by mere force alone. Every wound energized him, and drew more and more energy from the warp which infused the Travesty region of space like poison in a man’s veins. Russ finally hacked apart Angron’s second daemon axe, but the red brute, without pausing, snatched the Wolf King with both hands, plucking Russ from the ground, before rising up on his dark pinions. Leman Russ was cast back to the floor with all the force of a comet. He plunged through five decks of the Sleipnir, before he struck the fighter deck of the battlebarge, a sonic boom erupting from the crater his body made in the ferrocrete floor.

Angron followed Russ down, swooping like a sparrowhawk descending upon its prey. He burned with the dark fire of Khorne, and his face was filled with all the evil of his accumulated sins over his sixteen thousand years of existence. His colossal arms were outstretched, claws drawn and fangs barred like some feral godling.

Russ did not roll to avoid the descending nightmare, this dreadful giant who dwarfed the Pentus primarch and who looked as if he could crush a mountain with but a fist. Leman Russ did not dodge or feint or attempt to fend off his wayward brother. No, he drew his frostblade, and braced it against the deck beneath him. And Angron, consumed by his hate and his single- minded desire to crush Russ once and for all, only saw this coming a fraction of a second before it happened. By then, he was falling at too high a velocity to hope to avoid what came next.

Angron drove himself into the blade with tremendous force, matched only by the strength of Russ pushing upwards into his impaling strike. The weapon embedded itself up to the hilt. The tip of the weapon erupted from Angron’s back, smashing through his spine and parting his wings with the force of the blow. The daemonprimarch roared in pain, a roar that could shatter castles and deafen mortals a thousand times over. Russ screamed in his face, both warriors mere inches from one another then. Summoning up herculean strength, Russ rolled Angron onto his back, and embedded his blade into the deck. The runes along its length blazed with light, as the Wolf King began to sing the songs that drove the maleficarum out in the old days, when the Rune priests still walked amongst men. Angron thrashed and roared, cursing his brother in the thousand forbidden tongues of the daemons. His fists, as big as dreadnought claws, closed around Russ’ neck, desperately throttling the Wolf King, crushing his throat and breaking the bones of his spinal cord.

Russ knew Angron was killing him, but he continued his bitter song, channeling all his latent psychic might through his blade, into the daemonic filth which wore his brother’s face. Even if he did die, Angron would die with him.

Alas, the fight was ended before this deadly pact between the two could be concluded. Angron’s minions, who were winning the naval battle, feared that they might win the ship to ship engagement, but lose their master. The bridge crew locked onto the psychic signature of Angron, and drew him back towards the Conqueror, leaving Russ half strangled on the deck, his frostblade impaling thin air. When Angron returned to the Conqueror, he slaughtered his bridge officers in a demented frenzy, and only the thought of destroying the Sleipnir prevented him from murdering the rest of his crew in a petulant rage.

Onboard the Crato, two unlikely heroes were rallying the survivors of the living wreck. Sergeant Castron of the Nemenmarines led the repair teams and rescue parties through the mangled guts of the ship, while sergeant Alistor of the Fire Beasts managed to reach the secondary bridge, bringing the rescued reserve officers with him to take command of what remained of the Crato. The two sergeants bickered constantly throughout this arduous, time- consuming progress. Castron insisted they needed to repair the ship thoroughly before they could rejoin the raging fleet action unfolding all around them, while Alistor was chomping at the bit to rejoin the fight as soon as possible, and to warp with the consequences. As they worked for hours and hours to repair Crato, the partial ruin of a vessel drifted further and further away from the battle, forgotten by the rest of the world at that point.

Phalanx and the Goliath Engine, the largest and most powerful vessels in the battle, had begun to orbit one another towards the climax of the seven day battle. Their seemingly inexhaustible batteries battered one another’s shields over and over again, each trying to crack the other in half through sheer weight of fire. Other ships tried to join the developing duel, but each was lost in turn, smashed apart by the grand ordnance of the two battle stations. A Dorns Revenants frigate suicidal attempted to ram the goliath engine, but was cut in half by a passing lance beam. The tumbling remnants careened out of control, before the astartes strike craft impacted the Phalanx itself. Only a few astartes managed to escape the ship before it impacts, teleporting at the last minute using authentic Pentus codes, allowing them to deploy within Phalanx itself.

A Salamander squad arrived to greet the first group of gold-armored Dorns Revenants. The Dorns Revenant techmarine leading the squad embraced the Salamander sergeant warmly. Then, he ripped the sergeant’s head off with his servo arm, and his fellow Revenants gunned down the rest of the stupefied Salamanders; for the techmarine was a son of Rogal, but he was far from being a Pentus loyalist. Honsou the Half-Blood had taken over the Pentus frigate early in the battle, and had taken on the memories and armor of its former crew. Through his cunning, his team were the only invaders to have breached the Phalanx’s formidable defenses throughout the battle.

His mission was monumental. Perturabo had tasked him with turning Vulkan to the side of the Travesty. To achieve this, the warsmith Honsou had been gifted with a deceptively simple item; a cube, as large as a die but inscribed with infinitely small lettering and runes. The artifact had a name, but chilled the hearts of the sane to so much as utter it. It was a weapon of the deep warp, and it was intended to release an evil quite alien to mortal minds. It was a passage built for draziin-maton. All Honsou had to do was unleash it upon Vulkan, and the draziin-maton would do the rest. This was all well and good in theory, but reaching Vulkan was no easy task. The Phalanx was a labyrinth, and Honsou already suspected Salamander and revenant patrols would already be on his tail by then. Thus, he and his loyalist-disguised retinue set off at speed. Honsou fought off the smaller patrols, fleeing deeper and deeper into the battle station as he did so. However, he could not run forever.

Eventually, he was cornered by a Salamanders terminator assault squad, led by a Librarian. The psyker held him in place like a fly in amber, and his terminators easily slew the retinue of the turncoat Honsou. Desperate to escape, the Iron Warrior threw the cube at the Librarian, who at first caught it neatly in his gauntlet. The psyker recoiled as if stung, dropping the cube with an uncharacteristic yelp of alarm. The cube hit the ground with, heavy as neutronium. Honsou dropped to the group, forgotten by the terrified Librarian. The chaos space marine wasted no time, and fled in the opposite direction.

Then, the cube began to slide open. Angles along its flanks peeled back, and unfurled through dimensions a mortal may not perceive. Looping gates were coiling out of the rent in space and time being torn into the deck of the Phalanx. The librarian, normally so immune to fear, fell to his knees, weeping blood and gibbering in childish terror. His brother terminators were not psykers, and did not feel the dread he felt for the abstract things wading through the portals like languid swimmers in a pond. They simply opened fire upon the Draziin-maton. But mundane weapons were useless; bolter rounds mutated and became screaming, formless daemonthings before they could touch the Draziin-maton, swords turned to seven-headed serpents that ate themselves over and over again. Powerfists became faces, that devoured and merged with those who sought to strike the neverborn.

The Librarian’s force sword fared only slightly better as he finally charged at the loping, impossible fiends. But within a few minutes, he was mutated and deformed beyond recognition, and he joined the ranks of chaos spawn that followed in the wake of the Draziin- maton. The kai bane host might have been the most terrible of warriors, but Draziin-maton were something else entirely. They crawled across the fabric of realspace like scuttling flies on a corpse. Thin air was as solid to them as an adamantine bulkhead, and metal was just as permeable to them as said air. Whatever they neared became a spawn, those with a weak mind fell sooner than those with minds of stolid resolve, but few could truly resist the taint that followed in their wake. Squads of astartes bravely died and mutated as they desperately fought to contain the mere handful of Draziin-maton released into the Phalanx’s winding corridors. Vulkan witnessed these abominations through the whimpering servitor pict- recorders installed throughout the ship. He saw the creatures, and how they moved without any sense of coherency. Limbs seemed to simply appear before folding back into their blank, expressionful, faceless, morphing forms. His men were being massacred, and he couldn’t even see clearly what was killing them.

“Damn monsters! If only they stood still, we might have a chance to spill their guts. We can’t afford to lose any more men to these things my lord,” T’Sulon, hissed with false bravado as he too watched the carnage.

Inspiration struck Vulkan then. “Pin them in place... Their forms are chaos, in its purest form. You cannot catch that which is formless, except in a picture. Like capturing a fireball in a still-frame picter. A snapshot in time...”

Before his men could even ask him what he meant, Vulkan swept from the command bridge, and rushed to the ship’s nearest armory. After taking what he needed, the coal-skinned primarch marched to face the Draziin-maton. The fiends sensed this, and rushed to meet him. Vulkan forbade anyone to follow him, so what happened next was witnessed solely by the internal pict-servitors of the Phalanx.

Vulkan stood before the Draziin-maton defiantly, straight-backed and magnificent in gold and green dragonscale. But his spear was not drawn, and nor was his mighty inferno pistol. His hands were raised before him, clenched into fists. The Draziin-maton appeared, and the corridor around him began to warp and buckle, flowing and rippling with the deep Warp’s currents. But as they neared, he opened his hands, and let the grenades fall. Stasis grenades are some of the rarest artifacts ever constructed by humanity, and their designs were lost long ago. As the grenades fell, time slowed to a crawl, then to a stop. The grenades, mere inches from the floor, never landed. Vulkan became a statue with a victorious smile sculpted upon his black head, red eyes glittering. The Draziin-maton froze too. They became seven spindly, multi-limbed, surrealist purple ghouls, but the forms of the seven creatures were fixed in that seemingly endless moment of time. When the effects of the stasis bombs eventually wore off, Vulkan found himself standing alone in the corridor. He had somehow vanquished the Drazin-maton, though even he knew not precisely how he had done so. **

As the Draziin-maton rampaged, Honsou made for the launch bays, hacking his way through any serfs who got in his way. He was only stopped when he encountered Aktonus. Aktonus the Strong was famous across the Imperium Pentus as the ‘Imperial Swordsman’, a title given to only the mightiest non-Primarch warrior in the entire Imperium. Aktonus of the Dorns Revenant had fought in the swordsman tournament, beating rival master duelists from the Fires beasts, Jade Princes and Iron Hands to win the right to wear the bone-white experimental power armor of the Imperial swordsman. He was Pentus’ champion, and Honsou, ancient and corrupt as he was, knew he could not beat him fairly. Thus, he tried to shoot Aktonus with a meltagun, but the champion was too fast, hacking the gun in two with his power sword, before pummeling the warsmith to the ground with the pommel of his weapon. Honsou offered to turn on his chaos allies; he bore no true loyalty to any faction, but he hoped to achieve a stay of execution. Aktonus spat in the warsmith’s face, before he raised his blade for the final blow. A gigantic black hand gently landed on Aktonus’ shoulder.

“No. Not this one, my champion. Not yet,” Vulkan said, his glowing red eyes glaring into Honsou’s very soul.

Conqueror and its fleet were killing the Wolves of Russ in space. Sleipnir was limping towards the shelter of a nearby planet, as world eater ships chased it and its escorts like feral hounds nipping at the legs of a stricken stag. Russ’s ship was too damaged to fight back effectively, and Angron’s forces were too many. As Sleipnir made for the planet, Conqueror began to orbit the planet’s small moon, to use its gravity to slingshot his vessel and allow him to catch the damaged Rout ship at last.

From the secondary bridge of the Crato, Alistor and Castron watched this horrid scene unfolding.

“Russ will die if we do not stop him. Throne damn it, even if Russ survives, with Angron’s kill fleet here, Perturabo can just use his numerical superiority to whittle us into dust,” Alistor growled in impotent rage, pacing up and down. “We have repaired the engines, we have warp and we have half power to the plasma drives. We could gun the engines and ram the Conqueror! Kill the damned Red Angel like the filth he is!”

Castron shook his head. “We are too far away. They would see our engine bloom and evade us, then kill us at their leisure,” he explained somberly.

Conqueror had almost made a circuit of the moon at that point. It was then that Alistor had another idea.

“Do we have weapons? Lances? Torpedoes?”

Castron checked the lists given to him by his serfs. “One operable tube, but we only have planetary bombardment munitions remaining.”

“And cyclonics?” Alistor asked, smiling.

“Cyclonic torpedoes wouldn’t damage the Conqueror sufficiently.”

“Then let’s not hit the Conqueror,” Alistor replied.

Just as the Conqueror reached the end of its orbit of the moon five cyclonic torpedoes, fired one after another, punched into the moon’s surface. Within minutes, the small planetoid broke apart in a tide of sudden, apocalyptic volcanism. Huge boulders slammed against the Conqueror’s port side, ripping great chunks from the flank of the arrow-shaped leviathan. In fury, Angron searched out the fools who had struck him. He found the Crato, fleeing as fast as it could towards the warp translation point at the Corbellus-system’s edge. Angron’s Conqueror made a sudden course change, and accelerated at full speed towards the fleeing strike cruiser. His whole fleet followed the Conqueror, like lesser sharks drinking in the red wake of a meglodon.

Crato was trying its best, but Conqueror would catch up with it. It was inevitable

“He’s mad now,” Alistor noted blandly.

“Of course he’s mad, he’s Angron. This is the worst plan you have ever had, Fire Beast.”

“I thought you like plans?”

Castron did not reply to Alistor’s taunt, as they neared the warp translation point. But as they did so, they felt the entire ship shudder, as one of the Conqueror’s vast harpoons impaled the Crato through its starboard side. Alistor then ordered something that was so recklessly dangerous, he even surprised himself.

He ordered Crato to go to warp, with the Conqueror still attached. Needless to say, this was a deranged and thoughtlessly dangerous thing to attempt.

The Crato opened a warp portal in front of the ship, and plunged into the Sea of Souls. Conqueror, unwilling to release the harpoon, was dragged into hell right alongside them. One moment they were there, the next, there was naught but empty void. Angron’s pilot fish fleet dived into the warp after him, leaving Perturabo’s fleet alone against the Imperium Pentus.

The balance had shifted, quite suddenly (as it the way with many battles in history).

Meanwhile, Gheist was lowered from the bowels of the Devil of Catachan. Half-finished and already falling apart, Gheist’s captain requested that the devil’s great crane turn his vessel, for he could not maneuver it himself. Then, he began to power up his plasma engines. His engineers knew what was coming, and they put everything they could into the engines, maximizing their output as the docking clamps were finally released. It only took a few minutes for the Gheist, once released, to accelerate to 0.7c. At that point, the ship was moving too fast for even a primarch to follow with his sight. It struck several smaller vessels on its way, killing the Gheist’s crew and vaporizing the frigates and destroyers which had hit it. At that point, roughly five seconds into maximum burn, it didn’t matter. Gheist couldn’t be stopped. Like the galaxy’s largest kinetic kill vehicle, Gheist surged towards its target. The daemonic kraken had about 3.24 seconds to react to the approaching Gheist. It was likely the daemon didn’t even realize what was happening before it hit.

The blast was like a new sun, born in the heart of battle, expanding outwards for half a light second in all directions. When the expanding plasma shell finally dispersed, the kraken simply didn’t exist, alongside its escorts unfortunate enough to be nearby.

The Goliath Engine found itself under attack at every turn. Khan and the Stormrider, The Lion and the Antioch, the Phalanx and Vulkan, and all the might of the Imperium Pentus bore down upon him. Four primarchs stood now against one. The element of surprise was lost, as was his advantage in numbers. Perturabo realized then that he was outmatched. With a hollow scream of frustration, he ordered his fleet to withdraw. The Pentus force harried his fleeing forces all the way to the translation point. Though he left in defeat, Perturabo also left with many hundreds of captured Pentus ships, almost a thirteenth of the crusade’s vessels.

Honsou was amongst the fleeing forces; somehow he had escaped the Phalanx on a stolen gunship, though none could say how or why.

The Pentus crusade realized that by sticking together, they could be ambushed and risked utter annihilation each time they fought a battle. This would not work. Thus, the primarchs decided to split up. They would each hunt down their fallen brothers, and either destroy them or return them to the side of life and sanity.

Victory had been won at Corbellus, but only narrowly.

*(Some chronicles of M41 erroneously consider the thunderwolf cavalrymen to have literally ridden wolves. To me, this seems obvious allegory on the part of Old Imperial scholars of the time. Why would an advanced army of rapid reaction posthumans ride large wolves into battle? It is much more like the ‘thunderwolves’ were a form of specialist land speeder of land raider formation, like the legendary Deathwing or Ravenwing of the Dark Angels Chapter. We do not assume the Ravenwing rode giant corvids do we, so why is it so easy for scholars to accept the fenryka did?) ** (Draziin-maton are as much conceptual creatures as they are physical, and once fixed into place, they were no longer entities of potential. They were real. And as soon as they became fixed, they faded.)

Additional background Section 44: Salvation or Damnation? Even seers cannot guess...

‘Upon the field of slaughter, the man who sets his blade upon the ground is exalted above all others. Mercilessness is cowardice, and the whole galaxy stinks of this spinelessness, for it smells of corpses and gibbets. Do you truly not know who my champion is? No? Then you’re just as doomed as the rest of them. I will mourn you, but only for a moment. Then you will be forgotten, like all bad dreams...’

[Compiler’s note: This quote was located on a loose sheet found at the back of the manuscripts brought back with the remains of Vasiri. Its author is unknown, as is its context. I forget why I placed it here.]

###

To walk on God’s Skin...:

It is difficult to pinpoint precisely when the refugee fleet of Iacob reached the sphere, for the galaxy around the sphere was nullified and blunt; neither angyl, daemon nor psyker could communicate through such a grand night shroud. Thus, there were not easily confirmed galactic dates, but there were many localized star dates, based upon the relative location of the fleet to the spherical construction which seemed to grow tremendously as they approached.

Iacob had been drawn to the region. For some reason, Vulkan believed the area of dead space, lurking just beneath the galactic plane, held the key to saving as many lives as possible. But the vast sphere, which was well over 1 AU in diameter, was inert to all forms of scanning, and all attempts at communication failed. What little light it reflected on their approach vector had indicated that the sphere was lighter than an object of its scale should be, but aside from this point of academic interest, little else could be gleaned.

As the colossal refuge fleet held orbit around the massive object, strange things began to occur. Some men went mad, and desperately tried to kill themselves and their colleagues. Soon, the brigs were full of wide-eyed madmen, ranting about ‘God’s Skin’. Some great psionic beacon or force had fallen over the massed ranks of aliens that basked in the unlight of the sphere. It was no psychic trick. Somehow, they knew that the sphere predated the notion of psykers or sorcerers.

It seemed that the more the crews of the refugee fleet resisted this all-pervading, silent siren song, the more they began to succumb to its madness. Men and women spoke in tongues, and fell upon their faces in wailing confusion. Others wrote in strange alien languages no one could understand. Entire libraries of impossible notes were scrawled onto bulkheads and floors. Tau muttered and cut at themselves with their bonding knives, while kroot began to fast, refusing to eat the ‘madness-tainted’ food of their fellow refugees.

Captain Trechous, overall fleet commander of the flotilla, began to have disturbing dreams of a silent god, stranded in an infinite void, with all the stars too far away to see. Only the dark, yawning loneliness and the empty vastness confronted him, and he felt a fear unlike anything a mortal mad could imagine. This was ageless, depthless fear. Trechous drove the thoughts from his mind, but this just brought them back all the stronger the next night and the next after that.

Iacob’s infirmaries were filled with refugees; not just those who were sick and wounded when they joined the fleet, but now with others suffering self-inflicted wounds and deranged delusions. It became clear to him then what had to be done.

The first Captain Trechous heard of Iacob’s plan, an unauthorized shuttle was launched from one of the fleet’s flagships. The ship was heading towards the sphere. It intended to land upon its expansive silver surface. At first, Trechous considered shooting down the shuttle, but when he realized Iacob was onboard, he stopped. The man was no lunatic or danger to the fleet. Iacob was one of the few honest, decent men Trechous knew, or had ever known. He let the man continue, even though he felt primal, elemental dread in the very heart of his being. Whatever was in the sphere was mad, and profoundly dangerous, he just knew it.

Other members of the fleet were not so understanding. One of the armed escort’s ships moved to intercept the shuttle. The sphere, perhaps detecting a large vessel crossing an unseen border of tolerability, shuddered. One of its great pylons surged into life, and struck the escort from the sky. There was an intense beam of green corpse-light, before the escort simply vanished, leaving nothing behind, not even wreckage. But the tiny shuttle somehow slipped past this invisible boundary. It took only an hour for the shuttle to descend to the sphere’s surface. The gravity of the object was higher than Terran standard, and the shuttle landed with force.

Iacob, clad in a thick, visored void suit, stepped out onto the silver plain, which stretched for countless miles in every direction. The man felt energy pulsing through the ground. He felt power and sublime fear coursing through his body. But he surmounted his fear, as he took several more tentative steps.

He had realized something, as he had watched his charges in the apothecarium sicken and lose their minds. They had resisted the madness of the sphere, and the strain had shattered their psyches. Iacob had not done so. As he walked upon this so-called ‘God’s Skin’, he let the madness into his mind. It flowed through his simple, mortal brain. His was a mind of utter mundanity; he was no great genius or warrior.

Thus, he could neither fight nor comprehend what happened next. As he walked, he felt vast tectonic movement beneath his feet. Then, like mercury crawling up a thermometer, the silver surface began to encircle his feet, then his shins, then his knees. He began to gasp and hyperventilate inside his stifling void suit, before the silver surface covered him entirely.

Then, the fluid receded, leaving not a single trace of Iacob behind.

Shortly after that, deathly green light began to shine from great fissures all along the sphere’s surface area. The grand sphere was awake. And it was insane...

###

The Daemons’ Demesne

On the southern spin wards edge of the great Imperium of Travesties, lays a satellite realm of grotesque evil and symbolic significance to the human species. To the Imperium Pentus, it is called the Poisoned Cradle, the Tau know it as special aberration codename: ‘Doom’. To most other races, factions and species, it is known as the Terran Hells; the demesne of daemons.

Relative to the greater Travesty, this realm should have been small and insignificant compared to other fiefdoms that allied themselves to the Second Word. The Terran Hells, in the materium, only consisted of a handful of systems, trapped within the malign grasp of a single warp/realspace storm. But daemons are beings of imagery, creatures of symbollogy, and they gain power through souls, emotions and the twisted ideas and concepts mortals conceive. The Terran Hells were the former birthplace of humanity and as a consequence the region held vast meaning and history in its mutated bedrock and impossible geometries. Terror, the eye of the storm, was known by all races; once-loved, now loathed and feared. The warp poured into the region, allowing daemons to congregate and propagate their poisonous ideals and self-fulfilling feedback loops of nourishing emotional turmoil, but belief was the mortar that held this diabolical place together. With the Dragon’s minions gone from the system, there was nothing left to check the cancerous advance of the daemons; Mars became the blood-red satellite, forever awash with oceans of gore and rearing turrets of beaten brass and grinning skulls; a hunting ground for such terrible beings.

To list every vile form of daemon that made their home there would be impossible; their names and diverse forms could fill a thousand times a thousand grimoires of forbidden lore, each unique in its form and hungers.

But this realm was unlike most places in the Travesty, where evil men and aliens strove for power, harnessing daemons and warp energy for their own whims, thus bringing fourth corruption. Here, the daemons had the agency, and their mortal servants were the puppets. They were ruled by the Daemon King known as Doombreed, the most powerful daemon of the great devils that was still free. The others, such as the Xexes the Festering, Ingethel and Drach’nyen, were either devoured by rivals, enslaved by the Deep Warp, or else humbled and trapped with items of power.

The court of Doombreed was located deep in the dungeons of the Terran Hells, and he had gathered a great and tumultuous alliance of daemons to his side. The two most prominent were the ever conniving daemon princes Balphomael of Horned Darkness, and Cherubael the Cruel. One was a thing of shadow, with skeletal wings lost amidst churning, horned clouds of smoke, while the latter was golden-skinned and beautiful. Swan wings graced Cherubael’s back like an angelic mantle, and his handsome face held a gaze of exquisite malice. These two constantly argued and vied for Doombreed’s favor, and served as Doombreed’s chief advisors, for what being of chaos would not desire discordant council in all matters?

There were other major daemons under the thrall of Doombreed. This included the prince of a thousand wings, a feathered serpent coiling in the twisted storms of warp-tainted Jupiter’s atmosphere. This terrible beast was one of Tzeentch’s own, and wherever this creature went, flocks of screamers followed like shoals of hungry sharks. The serpent had a great human skull in place of a reptile’s, and its sockets blazed with the multi-hued light of Tzeentch. The rattle of its feathers in the ethereal wind of Jupiter was said to make the sound of a billion chattering souls, all trapped within the evil creature. The herald bloothirster Skulltaker was said to serve as Doombreed’s executioner, his envenomed hellblade beheading and banishing any daemon or mortal than displeased the bloodied king of the terran hells. Other chronicles claim this role was actually taken up by the daemon Samus, but I don’t see how one could reliably tell the difference between the servants of the primordial annihilator. To my eye they are all creatures dragged from the deranged imagination of madmen, I do not care to catalogue all their vast multitudes.

Alixria the ravenous was another of the greater thralls, and unlike the previous daemons, her form seemed altogether more fixed. She had once been a mortal harlot and starving orphan on some horrible little industrial planet, trading her sexual favors for food and lodgings. But Slannesh had taken her, and raised her to new heights of excess and power. She desired to live forever, as a perfect and immaculate goddess. Slannesh, as with all the patrons of chaos, gave her almost what she desired. Slannesh would grant her greater powers, but instilled in her a diabolical hunger and thirst, that no food could quell or drink could quench. Only through devouring the hearts of those who loved her would she gain beauty and power. Alixria devoured her own family, unrepentant in her vainglorious desire. She grew in scale and power exponentially, and as she grew taller and ever more impervious, her beauty became spectacular to behold. Once she had ascended to daemonhood, she was a towering perfumed princess, as large as a titan but lithe and enchantingly beautiful. Shapely thighs the width of fortress turrets, purple hair long and strong as steel mooring cables, enchanting feline eyes larger than a man was tall. Her glistening tanned flesh was impervious to any attempt to tarnish her perfection. Alixria surrounded herself with drug-addled slaves and hopelessly enchanted lovers, who she would tempt with blasphemous carnal promises, only to betray and devour them. Her minions lived within the towering, disturbing sculptures the daemoness carved into the ossified mountains of her domain.

Though Alixria looked like a normal (if impossibly vast and extravagantly attired) human on the outside, inside she was nothing but churning teeth and thorny lashed tendrils oozing fetid acid and stinking bile, as inhuman as any abomination tzeentchian madness might have dreamt up. Her lovers suffered slow and agonizing deaths in her eldritch internals. What pack or offer Doombreed made to entice her to join his daemonic court is unknown. Some say she was intrigued by the Doombreed’s indifference to her allure, others that he allowed her to drink a vial of his ichor, and she became intoxicated. I would not wish to speculate myself; I do not profess to know the mindsets of daemonkind.

But of course for all these bizarre and imposing devils, a realm of daemons could never function without mortals to fuel and define them.

The manner in which the Terran Hells was horrendous and disgusting, but I shall relate it to you readers, so that you may understand how such an abomination as this realm was able to stave off collapse, despite all sanity and reason screamed for it to fall. Cherubael had always been despised by his fellow daemons, for they claimed he was tainted by the materium; he thought as a mortal thought, they cursed and slandered with their segmented tongues. In a way, they were correct.

Cherubael knew how humans were created, and how to breed them and how to ripen their souls for a daemon’s feast. Invoking ancient contracts with the Tersis and the other wandering daemon ships that sailed the warp, Cherubael had billions of mortal adolescents dragged to the terran hells. Deep in lightless pits, these creatures were reared according to the hungers of the daemons. Some were raised in the infernal brothels and torture chambers of Slannesh, others fought in claustrophobic fighting pits and gladiatorial cages of Khorne.

Some were filled with plague and left to fester and multiply in the filthy cesspits and drug dens of nurgle, while others were dropped into underground labyrinths with no end, but always with the exits marked by tzeentch. For every daemon and every patron’s nourishing perversions, there were humans and aliens bred specially. These unfortunates were forced to breed and propagate, and their offspring would be in turn corrupted from birth, never knowing anything other than the will of chaos. Only when a mortal slave became wasted and ancient, were they scooped out of the pits and fed to ravenous daemons in lavish feasts and soul- lacerating orgies. The dungeons of Doombreed’s realm became obscene battery farms of human and alien chattel.

With this powerful source of soul power, Doombreed was able to bribe countless daemons into his service, who suckled at the teet of the daemon king and his chosen lieutenant princes. Doombreed himself managed to define itself as a distinct entity, separate from its former patron Khorne. Doombreed became an unaligned daemon of frightful power. He rebuilt his daemonflesh body in twisted homage to his former mortal form; a barbarian king with a great black scimitar of oozing smoke, and a fanged visage of beaten brass with molten iron blood. He bore a crown made of the fangs ripped from the maws of his bested rivals, that eternally drooled their owners’ stinking blood; a simple yet potent symbol of his mastery of the devils myriad. His vast host of daemons similarly rejected the technology of the materium, favoring forms that were mockeries of the pre-technological savages of old Terra that fought and bled in the oblivion before Old Night; chariots and spears, cursed bows and flanged maces, cavalry and whips. These were monsters of a primordial age, where such things as progress were sick lies told by mad fools.

I weep to relate this horror, but please forgive my seemingly-callous tone. It is the only way this chronicler can relate this information to you.

There were some humans, however, who served the daemons, and were not merely food for their impossible appetites. Mortal labor was needed to aid the daemons in the building of structures, and the prosecution of wars. These miserable wretches’ ancestors served the daemons willingly, and over the countless millennia under the glare of the warp-tainted sun, feasting upon the black-veined foliage of thorns that grew on every daemon world of the terran hells, the descendants of those first chaos cultists became something... else. They were not mere mutants, with bodies corrupted by chaos. These creatures were changed in every way by chaos; even their very souls were decayed and sickly things. Their bodies followed suit, becoming hunched and withered things. Their minds were cunning, but they were slaves to the will of the daemons. The daemons did not deign to give this malformed and ruined race a name, but their enemies did. They called them the Corroded, for that is what they were, mind body and soul.

Balphomael had mortal puppets and spies all across the Travesty, who kept the terran hells informed of matters of the materium, while Cherubael’s fluttering, winged Iolus daemons spied upon the warp and the other entities that forever sought to unseat Doombreed.

As the realm of daemons reached its zenith, Balphomael’s spies brought word that the primarchs were engaged in a cataclysmic war to the north; Travesty versus Pentus versus the angyllic Hosts. Cherubael suggested that the daemons should intercede on behalf of the daemon primarchs. With the aid of Doombreed’s mighty army, the primarchs Pentus would have surely been defeated and scattered to the wind. But, as with every decision with regards warp fiends, there was dissent. Balphomael suggested they look south east, and crush the fledgling empires that bordered the diaspora of Ahriman. But Doombreed only had eyes for the aliens that lingered in the west, to the Tau of Calixis. The wandering western Tau had formed a new empire far from their old birth worlds and the sprawling deadzones of the eastern fringe. They had only won this realm through a costly and lengthy war with the Amarantine Empire of the Slaugth, the loathsome maggot men and their equally repugnant biomechanical Vassal constructs. This war lasted centuries, and was only concluded after the Tau reached out to the ancient technocracies that lingered on the very edge of intergalactic space; Magellans and Interexites and Oberuun colonies, Fatemakers and the lesser lost Kronous civilizations. Only with their aid were the Tau able to oust the Slaugth. The Slaugth fled to the deep places of the galaxy, like the worms they most certainly were, and played little further part in the Age of Dusk.

The Tau had long resisted chaos. It was not as if their wills were especially mighty, or that they were pure of heart and deed. The fundamental strength of the tau in the face of chaos’ corruption was their utter lack of personal ambition. They believed in a good greater than the sum of one soul. Their desires were for productive lives and a prosperous society as defined by their Ethereal Caste; what could chaos offer such creatures? Now, daemons are beings of concept above substance, as previously related. Doombreed rejected his advisors’ council on matters of expanding his realm, for the daemon did not care about territorial expansion or temporal gains in the materium. The daemon king knew that if he could at last corrupt the incorruptible tau, his legend would be unassailable. A daemon with recognition across the entire galaxy is a powerful daemon indeed...

But the daemons needed a way to corrupt the tau. Individual tau were of no use, and the ethereal similarly were slavishly devoted to their selfless creed. But Doombreed knew he needed to corrupt only one Tau, and the rest would fall like corn before a thresher.

During a routine jump between subsectors, a Tau vessel was caught in a warp snare set by the daemons. Appearing from the warp like ghosts, they slaughtered their way through the screaming crew with monstrous glee, painting the pristine white walls of the vessel cyan with tau blood. At last, the armored central chamber of the ship was torn apart by the daemon leading the incursion. The ethereal inside stared the glimmering gold daemon down without fear. The daemon didn’t care as it purred.

“Hello little thing. My name is Cherubael,” was all the daemon was recorded saying, before it dragged the ethereal away.

The ethereal taken was Aun’Va himself, the most revered and ancient of all Tau in existence, the spiritual heart of the Tau’Va credo itself.

When news reached the tau command council, a terrible wrath was stirred in the entire western Tau culture. They sent emissaries to every empire and civilization that heeded them, calling in favors and pleading for aid. The tau had to retrieve Aun’va from the clutches of Doombreed at all costs, even if they had to unseat the daemonic abomination from the throne of hell itself.

Within a year, the tau set sail to the terran hells, at the head of a technological alliance of human and xenos minor empires, from the halo stars to the mythic Magellenic clouds. Some fought for the honor of the Tau, some fought to curry favor with the aliens. Some, the Magellan Reichs in particular, fought because the terran Hells were a vile insult to all humanity; a mockery of Terra’s once proud and majestic heritage. Such a realm could not be permitted to exist.

This alliance called itself the Salvation and their war would come to be known as the Salvation War. At first, the alliance thought it would be no great effort to destroy Doombreed’s disciples. The alliance had bested the technologically advanced slaugth, and in comparison the Corroded and their daemonic masters were savages, fighting with bows and spears. What hope had chariots against the great military killing machines humanity and the Tau had devised?

They believed the daemons would be driven before them with impunity and ease.

They were, alas, entirely mistaken.

The war was horrific and bloody, and there was to be much sorrow and loss before its end.

Additional Background Section 45: The Wraithbone Choirs

The ancient eldar, on the very cusp of the fall, created the craftworlds from the vast trading vessels of their empire, intending them to be grand arks for the majority of their race to flee the fall. However, a scarce fraction of the eldar fled when the farseers warned them of their impending doom. Nevertheless, the craftworlds were built to house countless trillions of eldar souls (even if most eldar were consumed by She Who Thirsts... or worse). The infinity circuits were grown to rescue the fallen souls of slain eldar after the fall.

However, this is only a fraction of the potency of the infinity circuit. The infinity circuits of each craftworld were unfathomably vast, their soul reserves spread out through the non- physical planes, which meant their infinite capacity was stored in relatively condensed wraithbone repositories in the material realm. Not only were all the fallen souls of each craftworld saved and stored, but the best and brightest souls of these worldships were distilled, alongside all the greatest intellectual works of the craftworld were stored in legendary artifacts known as the Wraithbone choirs. Should a craftworld fall, and its infinity circuits be breached or the entire population of the craftworld were exterminated before they could flee, the wraithbone choirs would be ejected into the void as metaphysical life rafts, waiting to be returned to the elder-race.

By the Age of Dusk, almost all the Craftworlds had fallen, and almost all of the Wraithbone Choirs had been recovered by Biel-tan and allowed to dissolve into their infinity circuit. Through this process, the eldar believed that they could free Ynnead, the great goddess of death formed from their conjoined souls, which they could feel trapped within the infinite depths of the circuit. However, three of the wraithbone choirs were still missing by early M56. Sensing slanneshi corruption, Kaelor’s wraithbone choir had abandoned its host circuit in M41, and had been lost ever since. Altansar’s wraithbone choir had been ejected on the dark day it fell into the Eye, before Maugan Ra single-handedly drew the craftworld back out again. Before the eldar could find it, Trayzn the Infinite snatched it away to Solemnace, to covet obsessively alongside all his other thefts. Khey-Ys’s choir abandoned its craftworld under the worst circumstances. The craftworld had been overrun by the Great Enemy itself, led by the greater daemon known to mortals simply as ‘Heartslayer’. His daemons infested the world, and drank the infinity circuit dry. And into that dead husk of a world ship, the raw power of Slannesh was poured. Heartslayer possessed the Avatar of Khey-Ys, and molded it to suit his grandiose whims, becoming a statuesque, languid humanoid; beautiful yet awful to behold. The wraithbone of the craftworld became saturated in the poison of the warp, and Khey-Ys became a throne for excess and venal horror. But the spirit of the craftworld saved itself, if only barely, and for long millennia, it remained lost and safe.

But alas, I cannot lie to you and claim this forever remained the case; for they were found, and the drama of what transpired upon the finding of two of these lost choirs occurred on a rather unassuming planet known as Irist.

Irist was a mundane world, which had the misfortune of being located within the Imperium of Travesties. It had once been a thriving industrial world, but the majority of its planet’s twenty billion inhabitants had been abducted by various warlords who needed warrior fodder for their wars and rituals, or as mortal fuel for their starships. The rest of the planet’s people had been taken some other, more horrendous way; the planet was covered in what looked like the claw marks of animals, only each claw mark was miles across, and were visible as scars on the brown world’s surface, even from orbit. Amidst the ruins of Irist’s empty capital city, two meteorites crashed. These were the wraithbone choirs of Kaelor and Khey-Ys. How they had somehow met with one another and made planetfall on the same evening is unknown; perhaps they were psychically active, or perhaps it was truly fate? Goddess only knows. But I digress.

Whatever their reason, fall they did, into the rubble of the dead city. Decades later, there came other visitors to Irist. These were the scavenger Mutts of a warlord known as Galruut. These dog-headed beastmen landed their ramshackle ships on Irist’s surface, looking for scraps of technology they could pillage, and subsequently sell to the daemon worlds patronized by Valchocht the Maker. These beastmen were carrion eaters at most. Galruut’s minions scoured the world for useful scraps, but found little of value. That is, except for the two choirs, that sat, unharmed in the bottom of the smoldering craters they had delved into the planet’s surface. At first, the Mutts considered smashing them for useful components, but their chieftain Galruut recognized the technology as being from the mythical eldar race. He knew very specific parties who greatly desired any eldar technology, and he had his sorcerer send a message directly to those selfsame parties.

His message was received not only by its intended recipients, thankfully. A taskforce of the Warrior King Commandery, after departing the Corbellus-system to mount raids inside the Travesty’s territory, came across Galruut’s signal, and they made planetfall a few weeks after the Mutts’ arrival. After their strike cruiser destroyed the beastmen’s ship in orbit, the seven squads of the Warrior King Sub-Captain’s taskforce deployed via drop pod. The ensuing battle was short but incredibly vicious; despite the obvious superiority of the Nova Astartes, the Mutts were dug in and had nowhere to go. But the result was never in doubt, and after half an hour of fighting, the Mutts defending the choirs were all but slain.

Galruut, bleeding out, could only gasp in fright, not at his impending death, but at something worse. “This prize was not meant for the likes of you. Do you not know who you are stealing from?”

The space marines ignored him, as they prepared to depart the worthless world. However, in orbit, their strike cruiser reported that they could not leave; warpstorms were springing up in the warp all around Irist; as if a great hand were closing around the world, or some vast cyclone were coiling into being, with them becalmed at its eye.

Galruut died laughing spitefully. He expired, gurgling. “The Heartslayer comes... you are all naught but fodder now...”

At the edge of the system, the warp was breached. From this colossal tear in reality, something vast slid into realspace. It was hundreds of miles long, and looked like some abominable shark or leviathan of the deep, but festooned with domes, puckering lamprey mouths, and undulating breasts studded with spines. Living flesh, carved with blasphemous runes coated the hull of this monstrosity, but this hell ship was no more alive than a screamer or a fury. It was animated by daemons, and was ruled by a regent amongst daemons, a keeper of secrets and lies. Eldar called the nightmare Ail’Slath’Sleresh, but all others knew it as Heartslayer, and the hell ship that served as his chariot was just as infamous. It was Khey’Ys defiled; a ruin in this life and the next.

It was the warrior kings’ turn to witness the death of their vessel, which exploded in the upper atmosphere after a sudden and catastrophic incursion by daemons. Less than seventy Marines and a hundred Justice Confederate drop troopers stood upon the dead world of Irist, and they watched with undisguised awe as the heathen craftworld entered irist’s orbit, and blotted out its weak sun entirely. The sky above them became nothing but a vista of a hellscape, inverted and poised above them like a false reflection of the surface below.

Sub-Captain Roburt Telemas activated his power fist, but even he knew this was a fight which could not be won. From Khey-Ys, the daemons simply dropped to the surface, swooping down just on the horizon; they relished the fear of the Justice Troopers and the fierce loathing of the Astartes, and wished to savor the coming kill as they massed in all directions around the city, countless millions of daemons massing for the feast; daemonettes, fiends, serpentine snakes covered in breasts and claws, wailing banshee daemons and cursed ghosts of the fall, innumerable were the manner of devils that came to destroy them.

The daemons swept towards them with the speed of jetbikes, scuttling across the rubble and ruins without even slowing. They charged into the guns of the Pentus soldiers, heedless of the damage done to them; at Khey-Ys’s black heart, a raw wound in the warp was held open using perverted eldar science, and thus the daemons were tremendously strong and durable. The marines and troopers fell back into pre-planned strong points, luring daemons into killzones and bottlenecks, but the daemons did not care, banishment meant nothing to them. The humans were ripped down one by one, until there were but a handful of them left. Telemas fell back into the collapsed building where the Mutts lay slaughtered, where the deceptively small Wraithbone choirs sat, humming their silent psychic lament.

To his surprise, he was not alone in there. Eight figures stood in the ruins, where no one had stood mere seconds before. Each one threw off their travelling cloaks, to reveal eight ornate alien warriors, in elaborately ornate eldar armor.

Before Telemas could say a word, their obvious leader, a tall swordsman with a great crested helmet, spoke.

“You have defended the Choirs as best you could, honored mon keigh. But you need not die here. Depart.”

“We have no choice. We cannot depart, even if I wished to, which I do not,” Telemas explained, as he heard more of his men fighting and dying just beyond the ruined building’s walls.

Another one of the aliens, a winged figure with a grinning mask, spoke in a similarly dead tone of voice, at once one voice and many. “You are stranded here? This is unfortunate.”

“Indeed, but we can ensure you survive. Continue to guard our precious quarry, mon keigh ally, and we shall kill the enemy,” one of the aliens, a hulking reaper, explained coldly.

Telemas almost laughed, despite his hopeless situation. “You eight shall defeat this host? You alone?”

“We shall,” one of the aliens said with finality, an alien with beautiful armor studded with fist-sized spherical ornaments.

“Then go, slay,” Telemas replied. “I will guard these... choirs.” Without another word, the warriors leapt from the ruins, springing bodily over the walls, and into the massed daemonic host. Their boasts were not idle, for these were the Phoenix Lords of legend. One alone was enough to turn back armies and slay cities. But the hosts of the Heartslayer did not face but one; they faced eight. Asurmen the Dire Avenger, Fuegan the Lord of Fire, Maugan Ra the reaper, Zandros the Slicing Orb, Jain Zar the Storm of Silence, Baharroth the Cry of the Wind, Karandras the Hunter of Shadows and Lhykosidae the Wraith Spider.

The daemon host exploded around each Phoenix Lord. Each blow of their weapons, or breath of their guns slew daemons, three rows deep, so fiercely and painfully they were banished for a thousand years. Asurmen became an indistinct blur, as shurikens and dire sword cuts erupted from him faster than even an astartes’ mind might follow. The daemonic fire of sundered daemons swirled around him like the wake of a ship in a storm.

Karandras vanished into the mass of writhing purple daemonflesh, before a tidal surge of dying daemons seemed to appear in a jagged line through their ranks, each ripped apart and cast to the eight winds like flotsam.

The Wraith spider in his golden armor, stepped between worlds with the ease a man might pass through a door of his house. Where his twin blades fell, daemons were beheaded or declawed, wherever he walked, warp portals dragged any daemons that got near into the warp directly, deporting them to the sea of souls without a second glance.

Jain Zar shrieked as she cut down foe upon foe, her horrendous scream dissolving daemonettes where they stood. Those that did not fall were destroyed by her bladed discus and her mighty spear.

Maugan Ra climbed to the top of the tallest remaining spire of Irist’s capital, and rained down a terrible deluge of fire upon the daemon host with his cannon Maugetar; it is said he slew the most on that evening form his perfect perch. Any winged daemons which evaded his gun, met a swift end upon the scythed bayonet of his weapon. They were bisected before being contemptuously smote upon the ferrocrete far below.

Fuegan’s fire pike was the most feared weapon, for it brought melta fire upon the hordes of Slannesh; a daemon’s bane. Rivers of molten daemonstuff flowed around his ankles, as he literally waded into combat with the larger daemons, his fire axe castrating and hamstringing the monsters, before he beheaded them with fiery contempt.

Zandros at first seemed unarmed, but in became apparent what his power was when the spheres built into his ornate battle armor detached and fell to the floor. Before the spheres struck the ground, they stopped mid-fall. Then, they began to spin, and the molecular blades at their equators unfurled with a resonant buzzing. Zandros was a master of the path of the battle-kine; weaponized telekinesis. The orbs began to orbit Zandros, faster and faster, as he walked unhurriedly towards the slanneshi host. A sphere of lethal force surrounded him then, and any daemon that neared him instantly became sundered paste, or else was shredded into violet ribbons of flesh, which burnt on the breeze like tinder.

The daemons wailed and fled before the Phoenix Lords, whimpering and crying in mocking emulation of human sorrow and fear. Many fell back towards the looming craftworld, and only the fear of Heartslayer’s petulant wrath forced them to return to the fray. However, within half an hour, the Phoenix Lords had pushed the daemons back to the outskirts of the city, leaving naught but fizzing warp matter dissolving in their wake.

Onboard his throneship, Heartslayer grew frustrated, and sent down reinforcements. These were even larger and more deadly foes; corrupted wraithguard and wraithlords, possessed by daemonspawn. But even worse than these blasphemies were the daemonic eldar titans that emerged onto the field of battle to face the Phoenix Lords.

The humans witnessing this amazing spectacle thought they were witnessing dueling gods as they beheld the impossible carnage wrought by the eldar warriors. Only the Primarchs equaled these creatures in sheer majesty and presence.

The titans were a tough prospect for the Asuryata, for their D-cannons and vibro weapons could utterly destroy a Phoenix Lord’s armor if they hit.

If.

Maugan Ra had to leap from his perch, as a sonic blast turned his spire to rubble in an instant. Karandras and Jain Zar dodged and hopped across the ground, deftly avoiding the colossal energies unleashed by the approaching titans. Asurmen rushed forth, crossing swords with a dozen leering daemon-wraithlords. Each one fell, but each time was slightly harder than the last, for Heartslayer poured masses of elemental warp stuff into his minions.

Baharroth saw his opportunity to attack as one of the titans was sent reeling from a barrage of orbs from Zandros. Just as the titan regained its bearings, the winged Phoenix Lord surged through the air. At the last moment, he clutched his wings close to his body. He struck the abomination with the speed of a railgun, and the force of a macrocannon. Baharroth punched straight through the titan’s chest, erupting from its back a moment later. Firing his lasblaster into the wound, he caused the staggered titan to explode in a spectacular detonation, visible from telemas’ vantage point a mile away.

Lhykosidae jumped through the warp, and emerged inside another titan, ripping it apart from the inside out. Daemon within slain, the titan simply fell to its knees and did not rise again.

Karandras appeared upon the shoulder of one titan, hacking away at its armor seemingly ineffectually. But his plan became clear when one of the titan’s fellow war machines turned its D-cannon towards Karandras, who leapt to safety only moments before the vortex bolt struck. It instead beheaded the titan he had been standing upon in a single blast.

Fuegan charged the final titan, but his charge seemed futile as the war machine raised a cannon arm to slay him. The shot went wide, as Zandros telekinetically shunted the gun arm aside. This gave Fuegan time to melt one of the slender machine’s legs. Hobbled, it stumbled forwards, and was overcome by the eight phoenix lords who proceeded to clamber over its fuselage.

From above, Khey-Ys began to rise slowly; Heartslayer meant to reach high orbit, and destroy the planet and all the Phoenix lords with them. Asurmen’s disciples knew this, and they could not let this happen.

The Wraith Spider grabbed a hold of Karandras and Jain Zar, and the three vanished through his teleport. Asurmen and Fuegan grasped Baharroth’s ankles and he swept them directly upwards with tremendous speed. Zandros simply began to rise under the power of his own mind, levitating Maugan Ra alongside himself and his dozen slicing orbs. All were converging on the Khey- Ys.

The Phoenix Lords fought their way into the craftworld, and each one of them found terrors to match and surpass the forces that had made planetfall. Ancient terrors beyond the dreams of men lay curled in the recesses of Khey-Ys, for it was a playground for monsters. Using his magic, Heartslayer separated the eight, hoping to isolate and overwhelm them in the vast expanse of the corrupted eldar ship.

His plan almost worked. The Phoenix Lords fought furiously against their foes, but most of them could not reach his inner sanctum. Only Maugan Ra and Asurmen managed to locate Heartslayer’s lair. Where once the temple of Khaine had stood, now a grotesque Bordello of vice and evil lay. In place of an iron throne, a chaise longue of purple silk and the stitched together flesh of a hundred eldar infants. Heartslayer’s towering metal body lay upon these hideous piece of furniture, gently caressing the stolen wailing doom in his hands. By his side, a most horrendous creature stood.

Ysgar Oppugnant was its title, but whatever name the thing had once had was long since lost. The tall, slender creature was a thing of nightmares, but it was no daemon. It was some child of the Crone Worlds, some half-breed wretch from darkest legend.* It smiled as the two Phoenix Lords entered, and whispered something to Heartslayer. Heartslayer laughed.

“We come to devour two eldar relics, and eight more appear and offer themselves to us. How delightful! You think we fear you, little eldar? Your greatest power is your ability to keep on dying, over and over. That is nothing to brag about now is it? Come, let us dance this little dance of ours,” he chuckled, as he slowly rose from his seat and brandished his stolen sword.

Maugan Ra did not wait on ceremony, and he shot Ysgar a dozen times, as did Asurmen. Ysgar raised his hands and halted the shuriken midflight. The bladed disks rotted to black nothingness moments later.

Meanwhile, Heartslayer leapt into combat with Asurmen. Blade met blade a thousand times in the space of a dozen heartbeats, and the pornographic tapestries around the chamber erupted into flame as the sparks flew from the two clashing blades of Wailing Doom and the Diresword.

Ysgar unleashed a storm of multi-hued warp energy upon Maugan Ra, but the Phoenix Lord resisted the foul magicks, blazing with pure white soul light between the cracks in his black and bone white armor. Ysgar swept through the warp, appearing mere inches from Maugan Ra, and rammed a dagger into the Reaper’s gut. But Ra was swifter, and deflected the blow with the butt of Maugetar, before slashing the throat of Ysgar. The scythe passed through Ysgar Oppugnant like a sail through smoke, before Ysgar appeared behind him and attempted to impale the reaper once more. Maugan deflected the blow, and soon the combat descended into a swirling tornado of blades, with Ra rooted to the spot at the eye of the storm. He could not help Asurmen against the Heartslayer.

The duel between the daemon-avatar and Asurmen was turning against the avenger. The giant had the reach advantage, and with every stroke, he got faster and faster, his blows becoming ever more unpredictable and forceful. Heartslayer cackled with glee; he was facing a Phoenix lord, and he was winning. The thrill of the fight flowed through him, the hunger for victory; the desire to kill and to murder. Asurmen was being forced backwards with every flurry of blows, and every exchange of thrusts and ripostes.

Heartslayer was howling with joy, his eyes ablaze with rapturous glee. But something was wrong. He felt heat through his stolen body. He felt something uncoiling from a dark corner of the iron statue.

“The joy of murder. The hunger for death and the thrill of combat. We know these aspects well,” Asurmen explained, as Heartslayer staggered backwards, his languid form beginning to glow with orange furnace fire.

“What have you done?” shrieked Heartslayer, dropping his sword. He looked to his hands. They ran red with unreal blood.

“We embody the aspects of Khaine, tempered by Asuryan. We are Khaine’s fury and Khaine’s fuel. No matter how complete you thought you rooted him out of that body, you did not. You only caged the fire of the Bloody Handed Prince. I am Asurmen, and I am Khaine’s vengeance. I awake the Avenger in your stolen host. Now you will know what it is to be consumed Ail’Slath’Sleresh. Go now, and trouble us no more.”

Heartslayer made a final blood-curdling scream, which began as a piercing wail, but faded until it was but an echo. Molten metal poured form Heartslayer’s eyes and mouth, and his body began to run molten, melting through the floor as his physical form began to collapse. The last thing to go was his red right hand, and then, he was nothing.

Ysgar, realizing it was outnumbered, bowed theatrically, before it simply vanished.

Without Heartslayer to control the myriad daemons possessing Khey-Ys, the craftworld began to devour itself. The eight fled the doomed daemonship, and returned to Irist, battered and damaged, but still alive.

Roburt had been good to his word; the daemons had attacked his men as soon as the Phoenix Lords had invaded Khey-Ys, and his men had kept the daemons from the Wraithbone Choirs. Asurmen thanked the mon keigh, and told them to warn their Primarchs about Ysgar; the Crone Worlder would return, and his destiny is tied to that of Lorgar. And with that, the eldar departed, taking the two choirs with them.

Of the Wraithbone Choir of Altansar, that was beyond the reach of the Asuryata. It rested in the care of a most unlikely trio of saviors, running through the webway from a kleptomaniacal android from the dawn of time.

But that is a story for a later section I feel...

*(What exactly Ysgar was, we will never know. He looked to be perhaps some hideous hybrid between man, eldar, and something altogether less wholesome. One might have called him a chaos eldar, though such a name seems rather crass to describe such a fiend. All we know is that he was some sort of messenger or spokesperson for the Draziin-maton, or perhaps even one of the eldar who created the host bodies for the Neverborn to inhabit.)

Additional background Section 46: The Saga of the Destroyer King

[I found this history scrawled in blood upon human-sourced vellum. The charnel soul stink of it made it clear to me this was a contemporary account handwritten by one of Abaddon’s followers. But alas, it is one of the few surviving sources we have for Abaddon’s exploits in the lead up to his cataclysmic battle in the northern fringes.]

The Saga of the Destroyer King, written by one who bled alongside him:

Despoiler. Abaddon. The warmaster. Black legionnaire. Exiled emperor of dread Cadia.

These names are meaningless, and were always meaningless for my terrible king. In my previous grimoires, I spoke of Ualthan Dust and the death of the Cardinal of delusion, Kor Phaeron. Upon the burning spear of the planetkiller was his fleet spit, and there they either burned or joined their banners to the one true prince of misdeed.

With a fleet of bested foes and miserable exiles, we made out pilgrimage to the realm of the Blackheart. We were a pathetic band of wretches, little more than the reavers our lord had marked out for destruction. The Despoiler brooded in his personal chambers as we travelled, unmolested across the invisible marches between empires; a vagrant fleet with nothing but hate to unite us and bind us together.

Grenthos the bloodgreed kept order amongst the quarrelling lesser elements of the fleet, his vast hulking form and hungry daemonaxe cowing the savages into line through threats and fear. Vultiari, the mysterious traitor of the Nova Astartes, meanwhile kept his serpent’s eye on the upper echelons, through his powerful sorceries and his network of spies. We loathed the youngling whelp with a fierce fire, as if he were one of the five sons themselves. But regardless, without him, our plotting would have led to the fleet consuming itself within a month.

Abaddon ignored his flock, his followers. Their loyalty meant little to him anymore, as did everything else. He had lost everything over the last century; his empire, his favor and even his mind. Drach’nyen, his treasonous devil’s barb of a blade, poured poison into his mind. It cajoled him and urged him onwards. Unbeknownst to us all, Drach’nyen detested the Hamadraya who enthralled Huron Blackheart. The twisted familiar daemon had been the one to orchestrate Drach’nyen’s incarceration in his sword prison, countless eons before even Horus liberated the heavens from Anathema. Drach’nyen would see his foe destroyed, and he took advantage of Abaddon in his weakened state.

But before any sort of campaign could be launched, the ragtag fleet required one thing above all other considerations. It needed mortal fuel. Countless millions of serfs and slaves had been expended during the Battle of Qualthan dust, that entire swathes of the crumbling renegade vessels lay abandoned in disrepair and disarray. The gun decks were ghostly quiet, the labor pits barren. The fleet needed mortals to run the mundane, tedious yet essential tasks of the fleet.

Thus, the Despoiler’s fleet circled the isolated hive world of Galt. The hive world boasted a sophisticated cloaking shield which hid the ship from navigators or the reaver fleets of their supposedly emperor Huron. However, Abaddon’s sorcerer Vultiari and his cabal were cunning, and they saw through the isolated hive’s defenses. Soon enough, Abaddon’s fleet was circling the world. The chaos space marines made planetfall, before they began to brazenly snatch away entire communities, dragging over a billion mortals into slavery.

However, when the astartes came to lay siege to the central hive city of the world, Ayun, the Black Legion found itself repulsed by a force which matched their own in tenacity and firepower. Another warband of space marines garrisoned Ayun. Ghariel the Tusked led the invaders, and he was soon drawn into a full scale war through the streets of Galt’s mighty cities. The white-armored space marines were disciplined in a way the legion could scarcely recall; not even Pentus soldiers fought with such control and boldness.

Slaver camps planetside were attacked, some were liberated, and the grateful natives took up arms against the legionnaires, who hadn’t the resources to endure such a war.

Before Ghariel’s position was overrun, he ordered his men to take the fifty million slaves they had already caught, and make for orbit. His men, not ones for sentimentality or loyalty, gladly abandoned the tusked lieutenant to his doom. But worse was to come.

We in orbit did not realize that the white armored astartes were in league with the legion of the hydra. All too readily we accepted our new slave crop, and their astartes handlers, back into the fold. But half the slaves were agents of the hydra, and the astartes slavers were, for the most part, Alpha Legion. They rampaged through the fleet, killing ships from the inside out. Chainswords roared and bolters barked in the cold, hellish bowels of our raider fleet. As we struggled with the Alpha legion, their mysterious allies launched their own assault from the surface; stormbirds and thunderhawks ascended towards out fleet, which did nothing to counter them, as we fought to wrest control of our ships from the Alpha Legion’s turncoat scum.

The space marines focused their assault upon Planetkiller herself, blasting their way into the embattled hangar bays on the starboard flank.

The Despoiler sat upon his throne as this battle play out across a dozen vox channels of shouting and cursing, morbidly listening to his men perish without even a flicker of regret reaching his corpse-pale features. His messy mane of black hair hung across his shoulders, unwashed and fetid as a bog. His armor, bound to his flesh, was uncared for, and he had even neglected to so much as load his combi-bolter.

He grinned darkly as his men reported every enemy slain; another body to break on the mill of chaos. Another soul cast adrift for no purpose. Another war to fight. Always another war.

Grenthos relished this battle, his monstrous axe cutting a gory swathe through bone-white intruder and Alpha legionnaire alike. He could not tell true Black Legion from imposters, and so he killed anyone who was not part of his berserk chosen band of axe-wielding butchers. As he killed his way towards the hangars, he learned that there was one Alpha Legionnaire who was smashing his way through the Planetkiller’s crew with impossibly speed and skill. As Grenthos moved to engage this foe in the daemon-cursed enginarium of the ship, he began to encounter streams of fleeing men, astartes and mortals alike, who dared not face this whirling dervish.

“Cowering hounds! Who are you to flee from an enemy champion? You call yourselves posthumans?” Grenthos cursed.

But the renegade space marines of Abaddon had good reason to flee. “We will not face him, Bloodgreed. We cannot face one of them! It is folly! “You contend with a primarch this day, khornate fool!” Afraim Rippersoul retorted.

Where others felt bone-chilling dread, Grenthos, ever the madman, felt only grim anticipation. He raised his axe to the fleeing warriors.

“When I have killed this primarch, I will come back and murder anyone who did not join me in this battle!” he promised, before he drew his axe and his multi-barreled pistol and made for the enginarium. Tellingly, only half his own chosen berserkers followed him. I chose to follow him, by bolter in hand. I dearly wished to witness a primarch kill in close quarters.

Meanwhile, the captain of the white-armored marines made swift progress through the twisted innards of the Planetkiller. The ship itself seemed to despise their progress, and unleashed daemonic things from the very walls themselves, as a body might pump antibodies into the bloodstream. They did not falter nor quail before these horrors. They slowly and methodically cornered and annihilated the daemons with flamers and knives, bolters and swords.

At last, they reached the unguarded doors to Abaddon’s throne room. Alpharius, the snake, had told these men precisely where to strike. Slay the Despoiler, and the fleet would be lost. Fully twenty astartes breached the doors with melta charges. Almost as soon as they did, Vultiari emerged from hiding, and struck with all the hellish weapons in his arsenal. Black lightning arced amongst the enemy, burning them down to the soul. Phantom winds plucked some from the ground, and dashed them against the walls like ragdolls. The astartes retaliated robustly, their disciplined bolter volleys scything down Vultiari’s cabal of human familiars, leaving him diminished. The surviving captain and his sergeant put a dozen bolts into the sorcerer as he turned to flee. The bolts passed through thin air, as the conniving astartes abandoned his liege lord to his fate.

Abaddon remained sat upon his throne, and watched the two warriors approach with blades drawn. He looked upon the two enemies with contempt.

“No astartes is a good man. You cannot kill me,” he explained, as the two emptied their bolters into his terminator-armored form, smashing his sigils and pulverizing the storm bolter bound to the Talon of Horus, as he shielded his face from the onslaught. Soon, their weapons were spent, and the Despoiler, smoking like some iron statue fresh from the forge, remained standing.

“... But prophecies have been wrong before.”

In the enginarium, Grenthos and I finally witnessed Alpharius for ourselves. It was immediately obvious which one of the black-armored forms he was. Though he was only slightly larger than one of us, he moved with a fluid agility which we could never hope to master. He killed with every movement of his body, and already a pile of corpses was left rotting in his red wake. His armor was battered, and he fought only with a short sword, but it was enough. Even from our gantry way above him, we saw that no one could best him.

Grenthos evidently disagreed, for he simply snarled and clambered down into the pit, his baying brothers snapping at his heels. Though he was Khornate, Grenthos was no suicidal fool. As he charged down into the pit, his men tossed their grenades at the primarch, and emptied their bolt pistols and all the heavy weapons they had into the murderous blur that was, unmistakably, Alpharius.

The primarch weathered it all. Is armor ran molten in places, or burst apart in cascades of sparks in others. Bolt rounds blasted chunks of flesh from his flanks, or rebounded from impossible tough flesh. Most of the weapons, however, simply missed, such was his swiftness and lethally sharp combat awareness.

The entire onslaught of Grenthos’ barbarians had merely caught the primarch’s attention.

The two white astartes were a formidable team. As the captain waded into close quarters with chainsword and power blade, his sergeant kept a steady stream of storm bolter fire thundering into the great Despoiler’s runic terminator armor. As Abaddon fought to ward off the stinging explosive bolts, he was barely able to focus on the lethal blades of the astartes captain. In power armor, the man was faster than Abaddon; his relatively youthful body was not ravaged as Abaddon’s was, by neglect and countless millennia of time. And even then, the bolter rounds hampered the chaos warrior ever further.

However, Abaddon bore the talon of Horus, and the mighty sword Drach’nyen. He had fought with these two weapons for as long as he could recall, and he was a masterful fighter, even so handicapped. The black and white giants fenced and wrestled with one another, arcing energies playing about their weapons as they ripped chunks from one another. But finally, a bolter round struck the claw, turning it aside just as he reached out for a killing blow. The Captain capitalized upon this immediately, and embedded his power sword up to the hilt in Abaddon’s shoulder, sending the crackling blade to erupt from his armored gorge and through his neck. Abaddon toppled backwards with a resonant boom, as ancient armor struck and shattered marble floor.

Grenthos’ chosen attacked as a single mass, axes thirsting for first blood. Alpharius was lost for a few moments amidst this scrum, his short sword deftly parrying and deflecting as many blows as he could. His fists lashed out along with his sword, pulverizing ribcages and splitting power armor like tin foil. His boots crushed legs, and his headbutts decapitated the unwary. But even as they died, many of the axes struck home, for Alpharius couldn’t hope to block them all. As the last berserker died, the primarch rose. His armor was torn off for the most part, and five axes remained embedded deep in his flanks. Yet, he did not seem in the slightest way debilitated; no weapon could leave a lasting wound upon his flesh. He rose like an immaculate god; lazily discarding the axes that would have diced a lesser being. He only deigned to retain one of the axes, which looked unseized in his hand. He said nothing as he stared down the last enemy before him; Grenthos the bloodgreed.

Now I bear no particular love or affection for Grenthos. Indeed, I despise him as I do most of my kin. Nevertheless, one could not help but find him glorious in that moment. With a bestial grin, devoid of even the memory of fear, he hefted his mighty daemon axe, and charged. Grenthos, alone, charged a direct child of the corpse-emperor, a sibling of mighty Horus and Angron the terrible. I do not know if his axe granted him any additional power or speed, but even my enhanced reactions could barely follow the machinegun exchange of blows which passed between the two duelists. Grenthos, a giant amongst space marines, almost matched Alpharius for size, and both figures moved far too fast for such weighty colossi. Alpharius was the faster, but the Bloodgreed’s axe was a most dreadful prospect. It destroyed his short sword and axe within five heartbeats of the beginning of the impromptu duel. For the next several dozen heartbeats, Alpharius ducked and weaved his way to avoid the axe’s snapping fangs and daemonic ichors.

Then something impossible happened. Grenthos’s axe, deflected by a primarch’s elbow, was propelled into the demi-god’s chest. Alpharius staggered back several paces. The hell-infected wound bled. Not in a trickle, but a torrent. Alpharius screamed. Gods preserve my black heart, but his scream was like nothing in this universe. A primarch in pain is a vanishingly rare spectacle, which echoed through the enginarium like a banshee’s wail. Daemons churned in their prisons between the warp generators, and mortal crewmen were deafened and driven mad by the scream. Even Grenthos paused for a moment; a flicker of a shadow of doubt. Then, as Alpharius fell to one knee, he grinned.

“The space marine that made a primarch kneel; that made a primarch bleed! They shall write songs about me!” Grenthos roared in triumph, swinging his blade down in an executioner’s blow.

Alpharius was lightning. He caught the axe, his two hands flat as they closed upon the falling axe head. Grenthos’ bunched shoulders were jarred by the sudden halt of his momentum. Stopped dead, the axe writhed and howled in Alpharius’ vice grip.

“Short songs,” Alpharius corrected, as he ripped the axe from Grenthos’ grasp.

The last victim to fall to the Bloodgreed’s axe was Grenthos himself. The primarch split him from helm to pelvis in a single stroke. A look of superb, pathetic surprise was etched into Grenthos’ features even as he fell into two neat halves.

I know not what Alpharius did next, as I was already running; sprinting to escape the living engine of destruction. Grenthos was the mightiest of us, and even he was humbled by the primarch. I suspect, however, that Alpharius and his men did not stay onboard much longer; perhaps the Bloodgreed’s blow had done more damage to the Alpha Legion Patriarch than he had anticipated? Or perhaps his plan all along was to lure Abaddon’s bodyguards away from him at that pivotal moment?

For as Alpharius slew Grenthos, so the white astartes stood over the stricken Despoiler, chainsword raised.

“For Horus! For the Emperor! For the Imperium! Lupercal!” the warrior bellowed. But the warrior paused then, as he saw the claw that Abaddon wielded; a claw he had known ever since he was a neophyte. Abaddon too was crippled by indecision; he heard the chant, and at that moment, he recalled why that white armor was so seditiously familiar to his degenerate mind.

For the briefest instant, it seemed as if the two might spare their counterpart. They might then have backed away and fled from one another in horror and denial. Neither Abaddon nor the Son of Horus seized the opportunity to strike.

Alas, Drach’nyen did not waste the opportunity. Like a treasonous viper, the daemonsword thrust itself forwards, and spitted the captain upon its twisted length. Transfixed, the astartes only managed to yelp ‘First Capt-” , before his soul was immolated. Abaddon pulled Drach’nyen free, just in time to thoughtlessly behead the sergeant, as he charged heedlessly into combat. Abaddon cast his daemonsword aside, ripping his long hair form his skull in clumps as he groaned in helpless horror at what he had just done. Clambering towards the captain, on his knees, Abaddon cracked open his skull, and tasted the memories of Kaidmus, line captain of the sixteenth chapter. He recalled the first day he had met Abaddon, and he saw through Kaidmus’ young eyes. He saw himself as he once was; proud and powerful and... righteous. There was a light in his eyes that had long since passed. His flesh was tanned, not corpse- pallid and blotchy with impurities.

That man was a killer, but a killer with a cause; a bringer of compliance, and an empire builder. A loyal man, loyal to the greatest human he had ever known.

Alpharius’ armies vanished towards the end of the battle, leaving the time-displaced Sons of Horus to be surrounded and captured; most killed themselves rather than endure this imprisonment. The rest refused to turn to the dark gods, and had to be slain (though we had to perform this task in secret, as Abaddon refused to sanction the deaths of the Sons under any circumstances). Vultiari’s reward for his selfishness was to be bound to the prow of the Planetkiller. There, he was messily destroyed the next time we entered the warp. Abaddon abandoned his own name, and demanded to be known only as ‘Destroyer’, his head scorched bald and his armor defaced in a wild frenzy of self-hatred. The sickly claws of Malice had wormed their way into Abaddon’s oily heart.

The Planetkiller left Galt as soon as it had replenished half of its missing crew, leaving its fleet to pound Galt’s hive cities flat in a roaring inferno of orbital death. The rest of our ragtag fleet of rampagers did not follow the Despoiler into the Blackheart’s realm. My path did not cross there’s again. It is likely that, without Abaddon to unite them, the former Word Bearers and Black legionnaires turned upon one another. I hope that they did not do this, but instead attacked the imperium of the five, and caused untold havoc amongst the deluded fools who faun over the primarchs like slavering whores. Vulkan’s sycophant worlds deserve nothing but contempt!

But my fate was tied to the Destroy King’s from then on. The five month warp transit was torturous. The gods of the eightfold path did not want us to reach our destination. Warp predators assailed us, fanged, impossible things coiled and thrashed against us, and hundreds of crew were turned to spawn and stranger, rampaging through the haunted decks like deranged hounds. My legion brothers were always on alert; killing off monster after abstract monster as we endured this grueling ordeal.

But Abaddon’s misery, and Drach’nyen’s depthless hate were like a white hot arrow, punching through the warp’s ensnaring riptides. Eventually, we burst back into realspace, and straight into a titanic void war.

The system was alive with millions of contacts; alien cruisers, mercenary skiffs, battleships and frigates of every class and variety, human, xenos, renegade and otherwise.

Death Guard fleet elements and Corsair squadrons jostled for position with semi-organic alien marauders, blunt-nosed groevian Kill-Prows, warspheres, Delfic frenzy-discus, daemon-ships, eldar void stalkers and dragon vessels, glinting Silver Skull barges, gladius escorts, and many vessels even Abaddon had never met. And, at the heart of this leaderless rout of scrapping void gladiators, one vessel outshone them all; the last great craftworld, Biel-tan.

And close to this embattled world, almost lost amidst the frantic chaos of sensor returns and vox signals, was the target of Abaddon’s nihilistic ire. Huron’ Astral Maw was engaging seven targets at once. Whole gun decks were torn out, while its hangar were gutted in several locations. But like the odious revenant that commanded the ship, the Maw simply would not die.

But Abaddon promised it would, as he ordered the Planet-killer into the heart of the cataclysmic void war. It took the chaos ships fifty minutes to realize that the Planetkiller had not come to aim them, and within an hour, the mighty ship, already a dying monster, was under attack from Astral Maw’s escorts. Abaddon would not be denied, and simply rammed the smaller vessels aside. The Planetkiller was falling apart around him, and he did not care. Astral Maw, damaged as it was, could not avoid what came next.

No ship could have. The two came together amidships. Planetkiller’s momentum had been drained by the escort collisions, and it struck the Maw slowly. The two vessels seemed to crumple into one another; decks shearing off and plunging deep into the bowels of its opposite number, crews mingled and merged in their flaming deaths. In a rippling explosion of color, the two vessels were at once fused and shattered.

The few black Legion left abandoned the Destroyer King, and I suspect Huron’s oh so loyal corsairs did likewise. They fled for their very lives, as the two ships began to spin into a deathspiral, locked in a murderer’s embrace with one another. They did not care whether either deranged Tyrant King had survived.

I too fled, killing a group of Red Corsairs and hijacking their dreadclaw. But I have heard the legends about what transpired on those two dying vessels, as they slowly began to be drawn towards the nearest gravity well (which was, unfortunately for the eldar, the planet-sized craftworld itself).

It is a tale of hatred, and the faded dreams of old men, each as bitter and resentful as the other. [/i]

[Compiler’s Note: This is a tale this vile heretic never did manage to tell fully. His chronicles were cut short in M56, when he was captured by Unforgiven and tortured to death. An ugly end to an ugly being; fitting I think. Nevertheless, the final battle of Huron, Hamadraya, Abaddon and Drach’nyen the Soulrender is told elsewhere, and I shall endeavor to locate it in due course.]

Additional background Section 46: “When the Bells of Eternity Sound, reality Quakes”: The Travesty Burns

At Corbellus, five primarchs breached the borders of the Imperium of Travesties, and there they brought battle to one of the greatest military machines in the entire galaxy. Though victory was inconclusive, they were nevertheless sundered and divided. But, this was not defeat for the primarchs Pentus, but rather the means for the next phase of the war; the razing of the Travesty itself.

Corax, who had entered in the northern border with Pentus, ran amok amongst the worlds of the dark Imperium. In some places, he inspired uprisings against the tyrannical monsters who ruled these worlds. In other places, he simply rose up with his Sons of Corax, and massacred planetary populations too odious and warp-twisted to be allowed to live. But even as Decimus’ Midnight Clad and the vast cultist navies of the Word bearers scoured these worlds of resistance, Corax had already moved on.

He struck at supply lines and logistical trains. He ambushed supply fleets, full of valuable slave galleys and daemon fodder, destroying these fleets before they could rush to support whatever demented local warlords demanded their aid. Lash in one hand, crackling claws upon the other, Corax was a living shadow god, grinning with righteous glee as he enacted his destructive policies. It had been so long since the primarchs had the freedom to unleash such unfettered carnage upon an empire, without thought to consequences. Every world was corrupt, and almost every inhabitant of that warp storm-wracked multi-segmentum empire was a monster, a sniveling coward or a conniving villain.

Corax fought hundreds of battles and wars with the daemon-blooded warlords of the Northern Marches. Entire volumes of novels and histories could be written from these wars. He was the elusive Lord of Ravens. He was hunted by almost every commander of the north at some point. Even Mortarion and Angron chased him at one point.

Angron had been dragged north unexpectedly, along with his fleet, by the spontaneous actions of two line Sergeants of the Fire beasts and Nemenmarines Commanderies, who had inherited the command of the battlecruiser Crato. Upon fleeing Corbellus, Crato had been speared by one of the Conqueror’s mighty harpoons. Like a fisherman dragged underwater by a struggling fish, Angron’s flagship had plunged into the warp alongside them.

In the sea of souls, the two tethered ships span out of control; Gellar fields flared and rolled around them like exotic bubbles formed in tar. Unreal winds wracked both ships, and pulled apart sections of hull. Many of Angron’s escorts, who had heedlessly followed in the choppy warp wake of the Conqueror, were struck by the flailing battleship, and cast off into the deep. Some emerged sixty years prior to the Pentus war, their crews fused to consoles and their decks haunted by fiends. Others emerged into the starless oblivion at the end of time, and froze like brittle ice sculptures, or were devoured by the sleepless entities that dwelt at the cusp of Heat Death.

A few managed to occupy the same collective, turbulent Gellar sphere which enclosed Crato and Conqueror. One such vessel was the light cruiser Red Maul, a dauntless class corrupted by the Berserkers, and adorned with an ossified outer shell of frozen bones, and was crowned by a rearing, tusked horse sculpture of basalt and adamantium.

The commander of this vessel ordered it to fire upon the Crato, heedless of the fact such an action could cause the destruction of the conqueror. The captain of Red Maul even ignored Angron’s deafening warp hails demanding they cease fire. Several times, the Red Maul tried to gain firing solutions, but fortunately for all involved, it continued to lose its aim, as it continually crashed against the cliff-like flanks of Conqueror. The captain of the Red Maul, furious at his crew’s failing, murdered half of them with his whirring chainaxe, and had the rest of the crew chained to their posts, and goaded with barbed spears until they regained a firing solution.

Meanwhile, Angron had begun to send boarding parties to the Crato, insane as this sounds. Boarding torpedos would be have been pointless, and teleportation would have zero accuracy as the two vessels were spinning out of control, like two toy boats caught inside a washer’s cylinder. Angron had his men invade the Crato on foot, charging along the mooring chain of the harpoon itself. Angron, to the collective disbelief of all involved, had infantry march through the void inside the Gellar field, at the heart of a warp transit. Berserkers mag-locked their boots to the chain as they surged across the three hundred kilometer long chain. Meanwhile, his mortal troops hurriedly dragged on void suits and some even remembered to hook themselves to the chain as they rushed out of airlocks like the blood mad fools they were. Others hadn’t even bothered to put on their helmets, and rushed into the airless void screaming praises to the blood god, even as their eyes burst with red viscera, and their hearts ruptured in their chests. Possessed marines simply crew their talons and scrambled, ape-like across the chain, their bodies long-since devoid of mortal requirements. Angron ordered his men to enslave the crew, and force the Crato to drop out of the warp. Once in realspace and once the Conqueror was stabilized, Angron would then kill every single one of the Crato’s crew, on his own, with his bare hands, as his khornate minions bore witness.

That was the plan, but the Crato’s commanders had other ideas. When the berserkers neared the Crato end of the chain, they found they were not alone. Squads of Fire Beasts and Nemenmarines had also moved out onto the chain. But they had deployed there on the orders of Castron of the Nemenmarines. His Fire Beast brother, sergeant Alistor, led the squads from the front, engaging the Berserkers at range with bolters, missiles and silent lascannons. The battle was fought in eerie silence, the only din coming from the screaming inside the helmets of the berserkers, and the labored breathing of every warrior present. The unusual terrain of the battlefield was treacherous, and many a combatant who missed their footing even slightly found themselves spinning off into the churning void of the Gellar field.

Despite the desperate carnage, Alistor held the khornate host back, but he could not press ahead even an inch. Fortunately, this was intentional, for their plan was not to invade the Conqueror with barely six squads of Nova Astartes; Alistor was widely believed to be deranged by Castron, but he was not so insane as to face down a primarch and his hellish legions, virtually on his own. A Nemenmarine techmarine called Vormays, and his team of servitors and void-suited serfs, were installing a device inside the Conqueror’s harpoon chain, even as Alistor’s men fought tooth and nail to keep him unmolested by the enemy. The Crato was not designed with rear facing ordnance, and thus could not strike at the Conqueror or its chain directly. However, Castron had meticulously planned a means of escaping both Angron and the rapidly-collapsing bubble of realspace around them. Vormays had liberated two macrocannon shells from the gun decks, and his servitors had brought it to the rear of the vessel, and onto the chain itself. There, the techmarine began hastily devising a time bomb, which was to go off the moment Castron disengaged the warp drives, and breached back into realspace, down to the second.

So Alistor fought on, falling back barely inches at a time; each inch accompanied by an appropriate toll in traitor blood. When his bolter was spent, he clamped it to his thigh, and fought the traitors with his chainsword, swinging it double-handedly, like some demented huscarl of a forgotten age. But it was not enough time. Vormays’s trigger mechanism was almost completed, but the techmarine confessed he didn’t have time to perfect the chrono device. Vormays ordered Alistor to fall back to the Crato, as the priest of machines tirelessly worked to complete his weapon. Only reluctantly did Alistor agree to finally pull back, enacting a fighting withdrawal across the chain, back towards the Crato.

As Vormays finished the bomb, his H-grade servitors held back the gory tide of berserkers with picks and drills, spinning saws and plasma cutters.

“Acting-captain Castron; I shall detonate precisely when you give the vox signal,” Vormays explained over the vox.

“Understood,” was all Castron replied.

“Your sacrifice will be remembered forever brother,” Alistor promised down his own vox channel, beating his chest with his fist. “There will be feasts in your honor Vormays, this I promise you, on my life and the honor of the Fire Beasts.”

“That is of little comfort to me at all, Alistor. I’m not particularly fond of any of you. Try not to squander the death I will spare you today. Vormays out.”

Vormays was as good as his word. As Castron ordered the ship to drop out of the warp, Vormays, even as his servo arms grappled with the minotaur-like leader of Angron’s boarding party, detonated his bomb with a resigned sigh.

The blast was like a newborn sun had sprung into life for a moment, between the two capital ships. The blast utterly shattered the Gellar field. Simultaneously, it flung the Conqueror off into the impossible swirling of the warp, and launched the Crato forwards through the puckered realspace breach, on a wave of plasma fire. The aperture was so narrow, the Crato lost half of its sensor towers and many of its maneuvering thrusters, as it was squeezed through a slavering maw of unreal daemonstuff, like a baby being painfully birthed, blinking, into the world.

Unfortunately, the afterbirth of this pregnancy included another vessel. The Red Maul exited the warp only a dozen hours after Crato, and already its commander had picked up their scent. His orders were simple and well known to his crew, for he had been screaming them at the top of his lungs for hours;

“KILL! MAIM! BURN! KILL! MAIM! BURN! KILL! MAIM! BURN! KILL! MAIM! BURN!”

The Conqueror emerged many lightyears from Crato, several sectors distant. Angron’s host had been destroyed in the tumult, leaving him churning in the warp, searching out a new host he could inhabit, preferably close to another warzone, so he could vent his frustration out on one of his hated brothers. It transpired that Corax was the closest brother, and soon Angron surged back into reality with a host of daemons at his back. The little Raven would not escape him.

Elsewhere, across the Travesty, worlds burned and primarchs warred. Civilizations were toppled, and the unfettered primarchs ran amok amongst this diseased realm. Russ, aboard Sleipnir, washed away the shame of his failing at Corbellus in a tide of fire and blood. His Rout once again became the executioners of old, destroying worlds so thoroughly and so meticulously, that nothing could live upon the blasted worlds that he made war upon. The Travesty was maleficarum, all of it, and he would see it all burn. However, one of his primary goals was locating Fenris, which had fallen under siege many millennia ago. No word had come from Fenris, and none of the chaos commanders he captured and tortured knew where Fenris was, even after his Rune Priests pulled apart their minds to learn their secrets.

Something... someone, blinded the navigators to Fenris’ location; warp routs which once led there had been severed countless centuries previously, and with so many warp storms breaching reality, its physical location was also altered. No matter how many fleets he broke, keeps he sundered and enemies he routed, his ultimate goal eluded him. Leman Russ suspected Magnus was behind this petulant display, but the red cyclops was similarly impossible to find; for one could not grasp something which no longer had a form, not even the Wolf King. Russ split his commanderies into Great Companies, and had them scout the region on this quest; if they could not find Fenris, they were content to simply kill the worst and most evil foes they could, and return to the hearthfires of Sleipnir to relate their tales to the rest of the Vylka Fenryka.

Many were the sagas told of these mighty warriors, enough to fill libraries. For example, there was the saga of Hrothgar the Fanged and how he slew the biomechanical wyrm Gorganis, and escaped the clutches of the kai bane host with the beasts head chained to his ship’s prow. Or the tale of Jorna Flamepelt, whose company slew a billion of Erebus’ cultists, and used their fetid bodies to scale the walls of the basilica of Caged Hope, toppling the evil church’s greatest spire. Russ himself lived up to his fell legend, and numberless enemies fell to his frostblade. He wrestled with Mulkiva Bile-blood, the mightiest champion of Fabius’s infamous ‘New Men’. It was said Mulkivas had been turned into a great colossus, as tall as a knight titan, and strong as the root of mountains. Nevertheless, in combat with Russ, the giant was undone, and his broken body was cast back into his own lines, his spine torn from his body, still writhing and hissing in unnatural life.

The Lion pressed on with a similar vigor to Russ, but without the boisterous relish the barbarian seemed to demonstrate. From the bridge of his flagship Antioch, he somberly and efficiently massacred his foes, and engaged in numerous fleet actions throughout the sprawling conflict. His fleet of vessels was modest compared to the staggeringly vast armadas of the Word Bearers. However, large fleets were always ponderous, and so the Lion was able to evade the larger fleets, and was free to carefully and irrevocably cripple vital enemy worlds with his forceful but considered blows.

The Khan, who travelled with him, had a slightly different approach. His small, incredibly swift frigate-shuttle, Stormrider, would regularly depart from the Antioch, leading hunting fleets of White Lancers deep into enemy territory, returning occasionally to Antioch, for resupply, and to drop off the armless, legless bodies of important enemy commanders he had personally hunted down and killed. These bodies were piled up in a ritualized hold in the belly of the battleship; the Khan’s trophy room.

At one point, at the battle of Barbaritan the Poisoned, the Khan and Fulgrim almost met in battle. However, amidst the furious city and trench warfare, the two just missed one another; much to Jaghati’s abiding ire. For a long time the Khan had wished to ruin the vainglorious primarch’s pretty face.

Vulkan’s campaign was fought differently. He gave the worlds he conquered a simple choice; renounce the ruinous powers in all their forms, destroy their temples and any daemon engines the world might have been providing for the enemy, and provide a heavy tithe of soldiers to add to Vulkan’s force. If they did that, they were spared, but if not, they were so comprehensively exterminated, that not one living creature on the planet would survive. Many worlds swore fealty easily, for they didn’t truly care which warlords ruled them, Travesty or Pentus. A few worlds, those which still had garrisons loyal to Perturabo, resisted Vulkan’s offer and chose to dig in. Vulkan did not fight these men, he simply cast rocks from heaven to kill their lands, and heavy planet-cracking fire from Phalanx to finish off their cities and hard points.

The worlds Vulkan took or killed seemed to all be feudal possessions of Perturabo and his allies. This drove Perturabo into a senseless rage, and destroyed any of his worlds who had surrendered to Vulkan, purely out of spite. He also devoted ever larger fleets purely to hunting Vulkan’s force, which had been Vulkan’s intention. The Salamander primarch was able to deny Perturabo battle each time however, for he knew where Perturabo’s ships were and where they would be. This was due to the turncoat at the heart of the chaos primarch’s forces. The mongrel prince, warsmith Honsou, was this traitor amongst traitors. Vulkan’s engineers had implanted a cortex bomb into his mind, which would be activated should he not hold up his end of the bargain; his life was spared, only so long as he fed Vulkan information, and sabotaged Perturabo’s war effort.

The Iron Warriors’ primarch long sought out this traitor, but the minions he ordered to investigate tended to suffer unexplained accidents; freak plasma core explosions, unfortunate friendly fire incidents, some investigators even accidentally fell into the slave pens with their arms and legs severed, to be mauled to death by vengeful slave chattel...

Through it all, Honsou managed to avoid his duplicitous mission being uncovered; for if he were ever caught... the thought was too terrible for even a space marine to consider.

Wherever the primarchs set foot, the foe was rooted out and destroyed. But not every Pentus force was fortunate enough to have a primarch at its head. Many sub-forces of imperial soldiers were lost in battle with the kai bane Host, who were resistant to all but the most powerful weaponry, or else ambushed and devoured by opportunistic daemons.

This is not to say the non-astartes forces of the Pentus did not cover themselves in honor. Vultimus Clivon’s confederate strike forces were invaluable to loyalist battle groups, as they moved behind enemy lines, eliminating key strategic and logistical targets with the chrono- perfect timing they were famed for. And at the battle of Sturgeos, across the field of sundered cities, their IEU battlesuits battled a great host of Valchocht’s mechanical horrors, and won a grueling victory due to their great mobility, positioning, long range, and precision firepower.

The Devil of Catachan was indispensable throughout the war, as it and Phalanx were mobile factories and shipyards, allowing rampaging Pentus forces bases for refitting and refueling. It was protected at all times by the Arks of Ryza, and the formidable fighting prowess of the Plasma Commandoes. They were assailed almost weekly by chaos forces, and each time they held, buying time for the Devil of Catachan to warp to a new location.

At the same time, the Travesty was assailed by other forces. In the southern marches, the Daemons’ Demesne was invaded by the Callixis tau and their esoteric human and alien allies from the very borders of inhabited space. Void whales with surreal daemonic howdahs filled with the Corroded and their cursed bows and javelins, clashed in the colorful void against highly advanced starships bristling with some of the most exotic and powerful technology the galaxy had seen. Both sides in this salvation war were horrendous, for the very act of war fed Doombreed, even as his foes assailed his realm, propagating the war recursively, as stronger and stronger tau allies joined in the conflict.

In the north west, on the fringes of the Travesty, Kol Basilis had fortified the border against the onslaught of the Star Father. Basilis’s garrison armies were huge. Not only did he had all the Blasphematii, psyker Angyl-hunters without compare, at his command, but he had the fealty of Gaur Drozos and all the Blood Pact of the Sabbat Serf worlds, from the hellmouth of Balhaut to the former garden world of Gaunt’s Rest. This was a huge, elite and professional mortal army to support his angylhunters. In addition, one of the spindly Aurellian Shades, avatars of Lorgar animated remotely by his colossal will, supervised his defense of the marches, alongside numerous hordes of human cattle and fodder for the adorant swarms of the angyls.

Kol Basilis would need all these fell powers and alliances, for the force which surged from the soul-dead north came as a silver, red and gold tide of blunt vessels and chattering hordes of the blind faithful. The adorants were diverse as the stars themselves, but all were united in their love of the Star Father.

Canoness Superior Elemris of the Widows lead a host of her warrior sisters, with their silver power armor, black veils, and stylized, weeping face masks of sculpted porcelain.

With them came the fallen astartes, who had turned to the angyls for their guidance, and worshipped the Emperor as this new Dictator God. The most common of the astartes legions were the Red Multitude. At their core, they were once Red Hunters, theological extremists even in M41. They had swollen into a Legion ten thousand strong, formed from pious outcast marines and geneseed cloning techniques, armed and armored from forges on angylworlds deep in the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath.

The diamond hard core of the Star father’s host were the Illuminated Exorcists of Grand Master Trencherd. Each of these gold and silver astartes had taken and banished a daemon from their minds, echoing the supreme force of will that was the Star Father himself.

This massive invasion force smashed into the cunningly wrought defenses of Kol Basilis as a hammer striking an anvil, each as hard and unyielding as the other. The adorants and their astartes were the numerically superior force, but they were unsubtle in their engagements; all frontal assaults and maximum firepower. They wished to be the fist that crushed the world, and in their worldview, nothing could resist the Father’s fist. Kol Baislis’ forces were more fluid and reactionary, flowing around the blunt implements of the space marine legions. Basilis was old and paranoid, and had planned for almost every contingency. His blasphematii could harm the very warp essence of the angyllic hosts, and Kol Basilis personally banished the Archangyl Pax in open conflict, ripping open a warp rift with his mind, before casting the metallic entity into it bodily. Not only that, but the Aurellian Shade’s powers were able to, for a time, drive back the crushing oppressive weight of the angyls’ war wyrds.

Things changed after three years of this war. Things changed when Thor Incarnus took to the field, bedecked in his flawless silver warplate, wielding his mighty Kaldor Hammer. Wherever Thor Incarnus went, he broke through the Travesty lines. Surrounded by a praetorian guard of hulking giants in archaic thunder pattern plate, Thor was unstoppable. He bestrode the battlefield unflinchingly, as tall and powerful as a primarch, but glowing with the majesty of one who bore the Star Father’s blazing soul in his chest. His hammer crushed entire platoons of blood Pact with every sweep, his great crown-helmets flickering with lightning as he killed and killed and killed. Even the Blasphematii were but termites before a gale in his presence. Kol Basilis was widely considered, even by the Imperium Pentus, to be the greatest swordsman in the galaxy, but in the face of the embodiment of the Star father, he fled like the pragmatist he was. The Aurellian Shade managed to fight the silver giant to a standstill for five days, a sits shadowy mutagenic magic dueled the thunderclap fierce power of the Stars. In the end, Thor incarnus simply had more warp power present at that moment, and shattered the avatar in a rainbow-hued holocaust of tidal flame.

Soon enough, the marches were overrun, and the carefully laid plans of Kol Basilis were in tatters, much to the amusement of his rivals within the Travesty itself. Their laughter lessened somewhat when the adorants and their superhuman allies added their might to the forces invading the chaos empire.

For the Travesty was being slowly, but surely, burnt to a cinder. Its worlds were dying, and the great storms swelled as never before. There was not a world in that Imperium which did not suffer invasion and massacres during the Primarch War.

Across the galaxy, from the eastern fringe to the western halo stars, every planet began to experience reality quakes. Some were naught but mild tremors, and a fell scent on the breeze which no one could fathom. Others opened fissures in their planetary crusts, which swallowed cities and killed billions. This time was also known as the time of final awakenings, as psychic powers seemed to get stronger during this period; previous weak psykers began to manifest full blown powers, and more alpha level psykers were born in this time than at any other point in history.

More psykers meant more warp breaches alas, and even in the peaceful Imperium Pentus, warp storms seemed to burst into realspace at random, like blotches on skin suffering some allergic reaction.

Upon Cadia, the entire planet throbbed with impossible energies, no longer fully solid. It was an entire world on the cusp of ascension, with a black hearted demi-god suckling upon this power. A perfect golden figure, with eyes dark and black as the deepest abyss, swelled with powers incredible and awful to behold. Lorgar Aurellian smiled, as deep bells tolled; bells only he could hear. He raised his arms, and basked in the warming fires of his own collapsing empire. At one side, Erebus stood, his armor smoldering in the mere presence of his godling father. To the right hand side stood Ysgar Oppugnant, grinning like the eternal foe of life that he was.

Now all fighting in the Travesty, knowing or not, were dancing to Lorgar's tune.

There was a path through the mountains, which the man followed closely, or else he knew he’d be lost. There was another ahead of him. The glare of his being was like a beacon in the twilight shade of the mountain path. This was the Godling, the one who wept blood.

He had no body here, save the one he imagined of himself, and he pulled the fur cloak around his translucent shoulders. The man was an empty vessel, hollowed out by the racking of daemon claws. The middle was torn away as the devil was rejected. Once he’d had a fiery passion which made him a killer, one of the worst; a man with a thousand last chances, all unfulfilled. But the hollowing had robbed him of something vital, even as it had been his salvation and illumination.

The mountains got steeper, until they were the rocky pinnacles of legend. He was on Terra, but like nothing he’d seen in old remembered tales. The air was clean and ancient, and the foothills fecund with life. The Godling’s light was obscured as he rounded a corner on the trail, but the man found he could follow the trail just as well. Bloody feather crunched underfoot, turning to brittle glass as his boots pressed into the dusty path.

Around the corner, time moved more quickly, the clouds wheeling overhead as plants raced to grow all around. Before him was a cavern, a jagged maw of lifeless stone, yawning wide to consume him. He had a brand blazing in his hand, and he knew no fear. The cave was older still than all the nations of man that crawled and wriggled and ran across the face of the world... Eden, Earth, Midgar, Maegros, the Cradle.

The writings and pictograms on the walls were formless at first, and nonsensical; primitive etchings without thought. But then came the scrawling designs of bison and horned beasts of the field, and simply black outlines of the fundamental form of man. And amidst these men, giants walked. Two rows of ten; these giants were the heroes of the picture-legends. They fought the dragons, they rescued the princesses, they rose up as champions in battle and they toppled the tyrants, and stood above all, benevolent and valiant beyond the dreams of the mundane. All of them kings, in their own way.

The man moved deeper and deeper into the cave, until the memory of an exit vanished from thought. This was the bowels of Terra, where the world spirit rumbled. The fundamental forces of creation. The tumultuous anarchy which brings forth substance and materium.

He caught sight of the Godling, with his trail of broken feathers. Soon, he was in a chamber, where the faceless statues stood; twenty, grim and hollow-eyed. He eventually reached the Godling’s side, and he bade the man be silent, and to watch.

The two shrank back into the shadows, as many dozen figures entered. They were all hooded, and all bore candles in his aged hands. When the figures threw back their hoods, their faces were human, but not humans as the man knew them. Their skulls were different, their eyes sunken into sharped cheeks, with taller skulls and smaller jaws. They moved about the statues, examining each in turn, and also the glyphs and symbols carved into the bedrock walls. They spread blood and chalk dust across the chamber, and sang songs no man could understand. They soon left the chamber, one by one, until only a few remained, blocked inside the rapidly darkening cave. Twenty one figures, eyes gleaming as they slit their own throats, and bled their last against the stepped plinths of the faceless giants. Souls bound to ancient concepts, and released fully formed into the churning maelstrom of existence and chaotic creation.

There to wait. There to languish, drawing power unto themselves, until the day, the moment, they could find their form. Until they could find their brethren, in whatever form their descendants took.

“What is this? Why am I...?” began the man, but his words faded, as the weeping Godling turned to him, cheeks lined with red trails.

“More than sons, but stolen all the same. The best lies of devils are those that ring with truth, if only on the surface,” the voice of the Godling said, his face gaunt and drawn, yet once the most beautiful of forms. Like a tapestry stretched thing and taut, till the fabrics leech away all color and meaning.

“I don’t understand. Why are you showing this to me?” the man demanded, growing more translucent as he did so.

“You are an empty cage. Unlike all others, in the act of creation, you are conduit and vessel both.”

The man’s mind reeled, uncomprehending, as the world flowed around him, becoming something gargantuan and industrial; a ship, overlooking a burning planet.

“We are blessed and cursed. We are mighty indeed, and fathomlessly powerful. But we are not perpetual. Immortals can perish, and once perished, incarnation does not strike twice, for ours is a power stolen from the fundamental monster. Once we perish, we return to it, to be bound to the fundamental monster, or to be scattered to the far winds of creation. All save for me; he who rejected the Red Angel and the oblivion of death.”

“And what are you?” the man asked, as blood pooled around where the Godling lay, his golden armor cracked and his sword broken at the hilt.

“Regret and despair, bound into sacrifice and seared into the fabric of the empyrean by the black fires of rage. Trapped, and forced to linger on, in dreams and avatars, but never to be incarnated again. I cannot return, but another can in my place.”

The man lost patience, shattering the dream as he became more lucid. “Do not speak in riddles. This is not real; this is some dreaming madness.”

“True. You are luminous, and cannot be truly deceived or possessed. But they will die, mother and child both, if you do not do this for me, when the time comes.”

“Do what?” the man yelled, turning the dream to a black void.

“Let me in,” the Godling replied, his voice fading to a ghostly whisper on the breeze.

Then, the man woke in a chill sweat. Desperately he reached out from his dark cot, and found her in the dark, touching her soft hair gently.

- [From The Killer’s Dream, by those who chronicled [DELETED]’s life before [DELETED]]

Section 48: Braiva’s Best and the Battle of a Thousand Emperors

[The actions and exploits of Braiva’s Best in their war with Ahriman and his pawns have been organised into approximately chronological phases. When it comes to interstellar distances and the temperamental nature of warp travel, assigning precise dates has been problematic, thus I have elected to omit them here. These events occurred, for the purposes of this account, approximately concurrently with the Biel-Tan siege.]

Phase One: Recruitment

At some point, during the protracted and incessant wars within the Dominion of Change, the Disciples of Ceylan, the most detestable font of zealotry and spiteful terrorism in the region, began to bolster their numbers. They did this through recruitment, from the disgruntled and the desperate populations of the various worlds of the Dominion, who constantly vied with one another for the Imperial crown of the Theologian Union (an empire in name only, thanks to the machinations of Ahriman).

The Disciples found plenty of true believers, and even more ex-mercenaries and rogue psychopaths looking for a cause to kill in the name of. The increase in spontaneous warp storms across the entire Dominion merely fanned the flames of superstition and fear. Many preached that this was a sign from the Emperor of the Wasteland; the Death God was displeased that the people no longer followed their one true anointed emperor, Atebore Ceylan, the last of his Dynasty. Too many folks worshipped the five-headed false god of the Macharians, or the feathered serpents of the Rubricae Sorcerers.

Those deemed worthy of becoming one of the Disciples of Ceylan were voluntarily kidnapped, sedated and smuggled to the secret lair of the Disciples. This was an underground base on an undisclosed planet within the Dominion of Change, so as to protect Atebore from harm; even his foot soldiers could not know exactly where he was located.

Initiates were brought before Ceylan himself, and his decayed court. The throne room he had taken for his court had once been a temple to the Emperor, but dust and age had bleached it into sickly greys and the stench of must and dried blood coated every cobwebbed pew and featureless Saintly statue. Atebore himself seemed a decrepit ruin of a man; all dirty fingernails and soiled robes, with a dull iron crown resting upon a tangled mess of bedraggled white locks that framed an odious, sneering face.

The last aspiring Disciple had their hood removed by Linguil, Atebore’s most trusted Lieutenant, to reveal a hard faced woman beneath. She called herself Ell, and her obviously muscular form was barely concealed beneath the sackcloth every aspirant was required to wear before Ceylan.

Ceylan demanded of her oaths of fealty. The woman, even bound and kneeling before Ceylan, simply smiled.

“I will fight with you, or rather, I will fight with the men you hide behind, but I have a few demands of my own.”

Linguil struck her for her insolence, drawing blood with every furious blow. Nevertheless, Ell continued. “My associates have need of your intelligence network and your extensive web of contacts across the Dominion of Change. They will work with you, but my master cannot abide the evil doctrine you espouse, personified in that mummified lecher posing over there in his tinfoil crown.”

Linguil lashed her with a scourge taken from the wall, until her sackcloth was stained red. To the surprise and grudging admiration of many of the zealots, she did not scream, but rather grunted each time she was struck.

“You expect us to forsake our faith, our Emperor, just so we get an alliance with your mercenary brethren? You are a vain and foolish woman!” one Disciple crowed.

“Yes, and we are not mercenaries. We are space marines,” she spat gorily, one of her teeth falling away amidst the blood. The laughter of the assembled court drowned out the faint bleeping of the false tooth as it sat in the crimson pool.

“Delusional child! There are no female astartes. You die with a pathetic joke on your lips,” Ceylan chuckled.

Linguil drew his hellpistol, and pressed it to her head. “We decline your offer, faithless bitch. Now will you convert to the Emperor of the Wasteland, so that your soul may face oblivion upon your death, instead of the eternal torment of the harrowing vultures of the Ruinous Powers?”

She responded in a simple manner; twisting in her restraints with the coiling speed of a cobra, she clamped Linguil’s pistol-wrist between her teeth, and ripped away the tendons there with a wrench of her jaw. She broke from her restraints moments later, hauling the suddenly hand- deprived Linguil into the path of the startled gunfire of Ceylan’s guards. As Linguil was dissolved into a red mist by the heavy weapons, Ell leapt into cover, screaming something in high gothic. Only Ceylan, a Gothic scholar, understood the words.

“Behead the serpent!”

On cue, the walls of the temple exploded inwards, and six dozen space marines burst into the hall, and massacred the lead Disciples, sparing only those who threw aside their guns instantly. Though the lussorians were not astartes, they were narcotically and genetically enhanced brutes in power armor, with boltguns every bit as lethal as the Angels of Deaths’. Semantics meant less than nothing in those few minutes of carnage.

Their leader, a giant in Tiger-striped armor, removed his helm. “Vulkan’s balls that felt good! We’ve been after you rats for years,” captain Farl, commander of the Lussorian space marines and seventh hero of Macharia, exclaimed with a belligerent snort.

As Ell retrieved her tracking device from a pool of her own bloody vomit, another narc- warrior arrived with her armor, while the cowering Atebore Ceylan was dragged before Farl, who draped himself over the would-be emperor’s throne like a man reclining upon his couch.

“I will not be captured like this...” Ceylan muttered quietly, his voice quivering as he beheld the blood-drenched space marine.

“I agree,” Farl nodded, before he slowly closed his gauntlet around Ceylan’s throat. He fixed Atebore with a desolate stare as he slowly strangled the old man to death, before finally tearing out his larynx. Ell, or rather Sergeant Ellios, his second in command, led squads into the bowels of the temple to hunt down the survivors, while Farl informed the prisoners that the terrorist network of Ceylan was ended. There would be no more suicide bombings of non-military targets. There would be no more zealous madness and mayhem unleashed upon the innocent, who had had no say in the evil Ahriman had perpetrated. They were now to be part of Braiva’s army; they would use their positions embedded in all the worlds of the Dominion, and guide the hand of the macharian forces as they made their war upon Ahriman.

Once this was done, Farl made sure to raid Ceylan’s vintage amasec cellars, and his men and women celebrated their victory well that night.

###

Meanwhile, Braiva had sent out his other generals to procure allies for the war. Braiva knew his ragtag fleet and their macharian native contingents were nowhere near enough to overcome Ahriman’s cabal. Any attempts to ally with worlds within the Dominion failed, for each was ruled by selfish idiots who had each been crowned Emperor of the Theologian Union; none of them could see that Ahriman had deceived them into impotence and division.

Finding few allies within, Temestor Braiva was forced to look without, to the two largest empires that bordered the Dominion; the Kingly Estates of Praetoria, and the blood drenched Lychen Empire.

Faruk the Pitiless, captain of the Vashiri and sixth hero of Macharia, was sent with an honor guard to treat with his cannibalistic kinfolk. Meanwhile, the more regal and courtly nature of the Kingdom of Praetoria required the diplomacy of Duc de Aronelles, the leader of the warrior princes of Chevanti and fifth hero of Macharia.

Temestor’s orders were to try and persuade these two empires to bring their fleets and armies to bear in the coming fight against Ahriman. If they did manage to do so, they had secondary orders, which pertained to the coming conflict, which they were forbidden from discussing with anyone other than Braiva and the rulers of these allied forces themselves. These orders were known only as ‘The Second Procession’

When Faruk entered Lychen space, he was not greeted by welcoming parties of dignitaries or ambassadors. His vessel was met by a fleet of serrated, dagger-like cruisers, grand cruisers and various escorts as similarly fierce and barbaric in aspect. His ship was boarded, and Faruk and his Vashiri were taken to the commander of this dread fleet. Like all Lychen, this commander was a brutal haemovore death cultist, his hulking form modified by surgeries and flensing blood rites to be a thing of violence; a living instrument of slaughter. The commander, Galrut, didn’t care whom Faruk represented, he was just another killer. But Faruk and his men were natives of this violent and fearsomely independent empire, and knew he could make his voice heard. Faruk was allowed to undertake the pilgrimage of maiming; the only way a mere citizen of the Lychen Empire could treat with the Lychen’s Lord of Knives, the highest authority in the carnivorous culture of Lychen.

Faruk was allowed to select the greatest amongst his group to act as ‘ambassador’. Faruk chose Farciar the Red, his banner bearer and adopted son, to be his ambassador and champion, for already in his young life, Farciar had distinguished himself as the most lethal and effective of Faruk’s host. The pilgrimage of maiming required that the selected ambassador would face champions from each layer of Lychen bureaucracy and duel them, each time getting closer to the higher stations and offices of the haemovore metropolis. Farciar fought the champions in barbed fighting pits, atop plinths, across command bridges and in specially organized rings. Though these bouts were never to the death, they were not bloodless; Farciar paid his way for the next duel by sending bodyparts severed from his bested opponents, to the next Lychen office. Sometimes it was an ear, sometimes a finger, often he needed to only send them a clutch of broken teeth from his adversary.

Slowly but surely, the Vashiri were allowed to penetrate the inner sanctum of the very highest nobility of the empire, hopping from space station to space station. Each time, the stations seemed to grow larger, and the populations of Lychen watching the bouts grew into baying crowds of hostile locals. If Farciar slipped up even once, the fiery headed, ritually scarred youth and all his father’s cohorts would be cast back to the edge of Lychen space.

But he endured and eventually, they reached the red world itself; the crowned seat of the Lord of Knives himself.

The gates of the palace were thrown open, and the small gathering of Vashiri entered, watched by the heavily armored Carnus Praetorians, the personal guard of the Lord himself. The Vashiri bore the flesh banner, as was tradition, but also flew the golden flag of Macharia, and the five-headed lion atop a golden eagle; symbol of the Imperium Pentus. It was a bold statement. Farciar and Faruk walked at the head of the group, the elder man a hulking barbarian, clad in skins and with a shaggy beard threaded with pagan totems and fetishes. Farciar was slighter and shorter, and his chest was bare, save for the ritual scars and the dark red gore that dried in the grooves the scars left in his flesh. Instead of his banner, he bore two hook-bladed machetes, left uncleaned ever since the pilgrimage had begun. His teeth of adamantine glittered in his jaws as he smiled a shark’s smile towards the throne ahead.

Before them, the great throne room of the Lord of Knives dwarfed their party, and at the far end loomed a titantic throne, composed entirely of skulls, carved and sculpted to fit together seamlessly, before being coated in bronze. From behind this throne rose an Aquila of exquisite gold, illuminated by the flickering light of a dozen burning braziers.

Upon the throne sat Jurassek, the five hundredth Lord of the Daggers of Haemos. Jurassek was a giant clad in ornate carapace and mail, with a hundred daggers sheathed in great belts banding his barrel chest. His lower jaw had been removed and been replaced with the bionic relic maw of saint Vashan, a clear sign of Jurassek’s majesty. When Farciar setted forwards, his jaws opened like a bear trap being set, and the Lord of the Lychen laughed, the sound volcanic.

“You bring me a boy. Your message is entrusted to a youngling, barely even blooded in battle?” His voice was a hideous thing, like the clashing of rocks.

Faruk stepped forwards, uncowed. “The entreaty we bring is so righteous, a mere boy bested all those who sought to impede it! Hear the offer we bring from Temestor Braiva, the Liberator of Macharia, and from the five primarchs, the sons and almighty champions of the Blood Emperor! You must join your power with ours, so that united we may slay the false god, and drape his flayed skin as a banner above his broken holdfast!”

“Speak out of turn again, General Faruk, and i shall eat your lungs!” Jurassek boomed, jaws crashing together discordantly as he yelled. Faruk closed his mouth, but continued to glare at the giant.

Farciar did not wait. He broke from the group, and charged the throne alone. The Carnus Guard drew their axes, but Jurassek waved them off as he stood to meet the boy’s blades, his own serrated sword sailing from its scabbard to deflect the machetes easily.

Jurrasek laughed as they clashed again, dueling beneath the red sky of Lychen, to a hall of corpse-silent butchers.

As Faruk and Farciar fought for not only a new ally, but also their lives, Duc de Aronelles, a contingent of Chevantai and a regiment of Gamma-Meson psykguard were sent under a banner of parlay to the Praetorian Kingdom. Upon reaching the agreed neutral territory between Praetorian and Thousand-Empire space, Aronelles’s small fleet was met by the 2nd Royal Fleet of Praetoria.

The praetorian fleet was a wonder to behold; hundreds of capital ships built according to the old imperial style. Many of the vessels were veterans of the infamous Regicide centuries of M42, built with the aid of the refugee Gothic Fleet which came to Praetoria in those troubled times. The two vessels leading the fleet were even older still. There was the venerable battlecruiser Stormchild, which every Pentus child recognized as one of the few vessels of the mythical Frateris fleet which survived the storm of the Emperor’s wrath, after its then captain refused to attack Sebastian Thor. Stormchild had a plain grey hull, divorced of any finery, which only marked it out as more distinctive amidst the great gold and crimson fleet of Praetorian. War’s Spite was a near-unique Battleship, with great rows of pectoral and dorsal weapon batteries fixed into colossal turrets, with starboard and port flanks festooned with launchers and torpedo tubes. This was the flagship of Admiral Wellslay, and it was covered in statues and cathedrals depicting its many deeds in battle.

Aronelles’ fleet was led into the heart of the Praetorian Kingdom; a stellar realm grown rich and powerful in its non-committal policies. The Chevantai princes knew all the social niceties and protocol as they met with the great and sprawling aristocracy; they made sure to never snub or be perceived as belittling a noble family, no matter how lesser and money-grubbing they might truthfully be.

The Prince Regent threw a grant banquet in honor of the dignitaries of Macharius. Whole regiments of Praetorian Guards, in their blood red parade uniforms, marched past the lavish apartments set out for the delegation, alongside tank brigades and the diverse and colorful colony world troopers Praetoria had access to.

The ceremonies and pretentious meetings continued, but it became clear to Aronelles that the Praetorians were avoiding presenting the macharian contingent to the king himself. The Gamma-Meson Psykguard discreetly organized a secret meeting with the Royal Gentlemen, the secret service of Praetoria. There, they leaved of King Harold III’s profound madness. The king had ordered the home fleet, and all its armies to remain within their own realms, to protect him from ghosts, and in his delirium he continued to give out conflicting orders to his fleets, which saw them travelling from world to world within their Empire, searching for terrorist who didn’t exist, and bringing back artifacts that were essentially refuse the king was convinced was valuable beyond all reckoning.

Duce de Aronelles tried to gain a meeting with the king, but his son denied them. It seemed likely that the praetorian grand fleet would never aid them.

His last hope was a final desperate parlay with admiral Wellsey, the high commander of the praetorian royal fleets. He alone seemed immune to the entitled nonsense of the nobles and sycophants of the court. He alone might listen to reason, and join the heroes of Macharia in the liberation of the dominion of change, and the end of Lord Ahriman, the would-be god...

As the Chevantai parlayed, back on Macharia, General Temestor Braiva received an odd message from his son Obediah, onboard Tyme’s Absolution. The battlebarge had intercepted a bulk freighter heading towards Macharia. The ship’s only cargo; a skeletal humanoid wrought in metal, a bedraggled human man with a killer’s smile, and a female with eyes and hair an impossibly lustrous gold.

She spoke with supreme confidence that took Obediah’s soldiers by surprise.

“Get me to the Black Cube, men of Vulkan, and I will destroy Ahriman Godhead.”

Phase Two: The Battle of a Thousand Emperors

Temestor Braiva could not wait for Duce De Aronelles and Faruk to return from their missions. Upon receiving the mysterious trio of figures onboard his flagship, he knew that he had to strike at Ahriman, and soon. He could not afford to slowly conquer the thousand Theologian empires of the Dominion of Change, as he had originally intended.

In consultation with the golden woman Crolomere, Braiva (who by now was nearing the limit of rejuvenative surgery’s effectiveness) decided he had to enact his invasion plan early, if he was to ever see the defeat of his foes before his death.

The remnants of Braiva’s Best, including Farl’s Space marines, Roderus’s veterans, Obediah’s Varseen Troopers and Darbane’s Plasma Commandoes, joined with the macharian navy and set out with all the fleet assets they could muster. Temestor sat upon his command dais, plugged into his life support systems at all times now. At his right hand was his ever loyal son, while to his left, Crolomere watched his viewscreen with concealed anxiety.

They launched their first surprise attack on one of the petty emperors’ planets, striking at their cities and launching an attack upon their fleet in dock. The fearsome first strike was devastating, but it did not finish off the forces of this planet. Braiva’s fleet, to the surprise of this emperor, fled before his vengeful fleet. Enraged, yet secretly pleased by this demonstration of his superiority, this emperor sent his forces after Braiva; their orders were to kill the uppity pretender to his rightful throne.

Braiva fled into the territory of another emperor, and there his battle worn fleet bombarded the startled imperator of this world, destroying his flagship as the emperor watched impotently from his palace. This aroused the demented fury of this pretender too, who ordered his whole navy to destroy Braiva, ignoring the serpentine council of the Thousand Sons sorcerer living in his palace. Once again, in the face of a fleet of similar size to Braiva’s own, he chose to flee, sacrificing some of his escorts to allow his main force to escape the system.

The battle of the thousand emperors began as a sprawling hit and run campaign, with Braiva’s Best slipping through his enemy’s nets after dealing them superficial yet humiliating blows.

Word began to spread amongst the Thousand Planetary Emperors; one of their numbers, the macharian emperor, had lost his mind. His battered fleet was lost in their territory, and surrounded. Hungry for a propaganda win, the emperors each sent fleets hunting Braiva. Each of them wanted their armadas to be the ones who destroyed Temestor once and for all. They reasoned that defeating him would prove to their rivals that they were the sole inheritor of the Theologian Union’s Imperial mantle, and Ceylan’s heir.

To an outside observer, Braiva’s actions were those of a madman; he now had thousands of ragtag fleets baying for his blood, and his fleet wasn’t even at full strength. The emperors launched their entire naval might against him, and eventually they would catch up with him.

Braiva was forced to refuel his fleet in the dead system of Galaiph. It was here, at last, that the emperors’ fleets reached him. His fleet closed about Tyme’s Absolution, as staggeringly huge numbers of vessels warped into the system, filling the sensor banks like angry stormfronts. This mass of ships were not allied in any way, Braiva could tell by the hateful chatter between them, and the fact more than a few escorts of the enemy were firing upon each other, even as they closed the colossal celestial distance to reach Braiva’s own forces.

All was quiet on the bridge of the Tyme’s Absolution, as Braiva closed his eyes, muttering to himself; perhaps prayer, or perhaps a reiteration of his own plan. The crew set to work quietly, organizing their ships into spherical attack formations to ward off the approaching enemies. Braiva’s ships were more advanced, but the disparate Theologian forces had a tremendous numbers advantage.

Battleships and cruisers swarmed around each other, unleashing endless cavalcades of ordinance and lance fire. Across the system, Braiva’s fleet continued to lead his frustrated foes on a merry chase, but they were still losing vessels, to attrition and the sheer desperation of the emperors’ forces to eliminate their enemies in their own imperator’s name. The rival Imperila factions fought each other as much as Braiva’s fleet. The climax of the Battle of a Thousand Emperor’s was a confusing mess of intersecting naval duels and bewildered flights of fighters and bombers, attacking the nearest enemy vessels, regardless of which faction they belonged to.

Darbane’s Ryzan-catachan Commandoes performed dozens of boarding sorties, Farl and Ell stormed the bridges of capital ship after capital ship, while Roderus found his veterans defending the macharian vessels from all manner of outlandish private imperial guard forces, mercenaries and paramilitary opportunists, fighting for masters they could into even remember the names of.

A stormtrooper regiment of Emperor Johan Ward’s People’s Imperium of Theologia managed to breach the defenses of Tyme’s Absolution, where Crolomere’s man Kage and the machine- creature Jaxx joined the Tempered Edge Veterans of Roderus in brutal fighting through the ship’s narrow confines. Kage was once a Lieutenant and his training reasserted itself as he led fire teams in flanking man oeuvres against the exotic, silver-scaled soldiers trying to assassinate Braiva. Meanwhile, the Iron Man Jaxx decimated the enemy with terrifying speed and mathematical precision; he was an automated killer, with a truly industrial capacity for dispatching foes in the most expedient and efficient manner.

But even once the last storm trooper gurgled his last breath, the danger was not over. The enemy was everywhere, filling the system with their insane military belligerence. There would be no escape this time.

Fortunately, Braiva had never intended to flee this battle. For almost a month, the fleets dueled themselves to a brutal stalemate.

Then, like a great rippling wave of doubt and inaction, the enemy fleets disengaged, ceasing their attacks before retreating to the edge of the system. It took three days before all enemy fleets disengaged and formed these defensive formations. Crolomere was baffled. Had Braiva’s bravery provoked them to spare his forces? Had some psychic secret weapon subdued the enemies? Braiva’s dry lips cracked with a smile.

“Nothing so honorable as that my dear. I believe these fine fellows have been receiving messages from their homeworlds. Likely each message is quite similar. ‘Our emperor is captured. You are ordered to surrender in his majesties name’ or some such.”

“But how?”

Temestor Braiva explained that the Second Procession had performed its role.

Faruk and Aronelles had been successful in gathering allies, and had followed their secret orders to the letter. On Braiva’s orders, they had spread out to the thousand empires. With ultimate orbital superiority, each planet was forced to surrender, and their emperors were captured, their orbital docks destroyed and their militaries humbled.

In less than a month, the lychen and praetorian fleets had bested the near-defenseless fleets of the thousand emperors and essentially conquered their worlds. Once word reached the fleets at Galaiph, they realized that they had been defeated. Their emperors had been outmaneuvered and there was little they could do now to stop it.

Braiva’s victory was finally cemented when the barbed dagger-shaped ships of the lychen navy translated into the system, led by Emperor Jurrasek’s monstrous flagship Meglodon. This fleet was followed soon after by the far larger praetorian 1st and 2nd Fleets, led by Wellsley aboard War’s Spite. One by one, the opposing fleets surrendered, and swore fealty to Temestor Braiva and to the Imperium Pentus.

United in an armada of colossal scale, Temestor finally had a force large enough to assail Ahriman himself. After weeks of treaty signing and resupply in a neighboring system, the gargantuan force plotted a course for the planet where Ahriman chose to situate his Black Cube; Tallarn.

During the warp transit, Crolomere hid herself in a warded part of Tyme’s Absolution, where the monstrous pets of the ship’s original Firebeast owners had been stored. In this dank hole, Crolomere pleaded with her long-dead father for protection. She had never believed in His divinity, but she was afraid and prayed anyway. Not for herself, for she was immortal, but for all the mortals she had led into Ahriman’s den; all the men and women who would die, just to give her a chance to end Ahriman and thwart his plan to ascend to not only daemonhood, but godhood. She feared for Kage, who slept by her side. But mostly, she feared for the helpless, mortal soul which she could feel growing inside her.

Braiva remained on the bridge during the warp transit, for he was too frail to make a journey anywhere else onboard. Such a vast movement of ships through the immaterium was always going to attract the attention of daemons, and the Gellar fields glowed white hot with the number of daemonspawn battering against them. But this commotion attracted another fell sentience.

An apparition of a tall, perfect giant burst into life on the bridge, bypassing the Gellar fields through sheer willpower. The vision of anatomical perfection was wreathed in blue and yellow flames that danced across its ethereal flesh. The guards on the bridge opened fire on the entity, but the unreal thing ignored the weapons, which passed through it like daggers through smoke. Slowly, the naked giant strolled towards Temestor Braiva, who unsteadily rose to his feet to meet this enemy, uncowed by this projection.

“For a mortal, you are intriguingly troublesome. Your ruse to defeat my deception was worthy of a child of Tzeentch itself. Truly you are mighty; perhaps the mightiest human warlord this region of the galaxy has seen in an age,” the apparition explained with cold clarity, its voice effortlessly powerful. “Yet, in the end, the mightiest human troubles me as much as the mightiest insect. For, you are, in the end, all too human, Liberator of Macharia. All too mortal. And mortals do well to avoid arousing the ire of their god.”

The voice was unmistakably that of Ahzek Ahriman.

“We will kill this god,” Braiva hissed, drawing his sidearm, emptying his las clip into the ethereal Ahriman to no avail.

Casually, almost gently, the ghostly form of Ahriman reached into Braiva’s chest, and stopped his heart. Temestor Braiva sighed once, and fell.

“Throne,” gasped Braiva, and then he was gone.

As Braiva’s horrified bodyguards rushed to his side, the Gellar field finally vanished the evil specter from the ship.

Though Temestor had perished, his son took up his father’s mantle, and when they finally translated into the Tallarn system, an armada alloyed together by hate prepared to face the full fury of an unborn god and his abominations.

Section 49: Despoiling a Black Heart

[Compiler’s note: The author of this section is unknown. How they could have been present for the story they relate here, I cannot guess. Perhaps they merely dreamed this tale? Or maybe they embellished this story based upon legends told by former Red Corsairs, Legionnaires and the survivors? As ever, I leave the authenticity of such sections to the discretion of my future readers, who read this long after all else is cold and vanished.]

The two ships had merged, and their carnal union was destroying them both. Fire and screaming flooded every crevice. Decks crashed together like pancakes, as poison and chaotic effluence conspired to undo the bonds of reality. The Planetkiller was killed, and the Astral Maw was swallowed; both were burning, and both would soon perish.

The disturbing powers flooding their warp engines and generators exploded from containment, warping the very walls and spilling daemons into the materium like oil from a ruptured supertanker. The walls and corridors coiled and turned upon one another in maddening patterns mortal minds would be broken trying to decipher.

Abaddon staggered onwards, his armor glowing white hot with resisting the malevolence flooding the conjoined ships. He too had no idea where h was going, but Drach’Nyen did. The sword was held aloft, dragging him forwards in its infernal eagerness. With his father’s talon, he ripped apart the mewling spawns that threw themselves in his way; each one was once a corsair or a mortal, turned to something both greater and far lesser at once by the raging warp furnaces. Daemonic ichors coated his hair, bleaching in an ugly rancid grey.

He found a window, and saw a void war consuming heaven. Silver strike cruisers were hurtling towards the conjoined ships, but Abaddon paid them no heed, his eyes desolate and black.

++ Silver Skulls, decks twelve through fifteen! Repel boarders! Repel boarders! ++, a voice on some shipwide vox squealed ineffectively. There was no one alive who heeded or cared what the desperate bridge officer demanded.

All around Abaddon, power was building. The great agents of ruination sensed him, and even after all these millennia, even after all his actions in the mortal world, they still called to him. ‘Pick me, forsake the others’ was always their seditious whisper. Give in, forsake the materium, and take up your prince’s mantle.

But Abaddon the Destroyer, the Emperor of Travesties, the Warmaster and chosen of chaos, could not just let go; for he saw each of his patrons, and he felt what the great Pantheon did not what him to see. They were afraid, as much as an abstraction of a blasphemous concept could be afraid. They were losing their identities; something else pushed them up and out. Something deep and with a name no mortal could speak was thrusting up, turning all pretense of form within the realm of chaos to nothingness. The greatest lie of the Gods was that there was some guiding principle behind them, some fundamental division. Chaos was undivided, and soon chaos would be extinct; replaced with something infinite and unknowable. The Deep Warp would end them all.

So, Abaddon thought, as he marched to his doom, why should I submit to the chaos gods now? It was all futile; the Dissolution was coming, and not even Gods would survive it. Abaddon’s grand plans were all in tatters; all he had left now was something incredibly petty. He didn’t like Huron Blackheart, and he would kill this rival Emperor for daring to reject Abaddon’s rule millennia hence.

He found Huron at the center of what was once a ship’s bridge. But all the crew was melted into the walls, giggling and chanting manically. The room was an eight pointed star, expanding and deforming like a great daemon was breathing.

Huron Blackheart, the great Cadaver King, sat upon a throne at the center, watching the world around him burn with an unreadable expression. His head turned slowly towards Abaddon as he registered his presence. From behind the throne, some great bloated yellow thing crept. It was like some great fat toad, with long spindly limbs and a fixed grin full of ivory tusks. Hamadraya, the Deep Warp Imp, and the silent architect of the Eastern Chaos Imperium. Drach’nyen strained in Abaddon’s grip; the sword hated Hamadraya more than any other entity in all existence, for the Imp had been the one to trap Drach’nyen within the blade’s prison all those countless eons ago.

Huron smiled; his face peeling partially away with the effort. “You look a mess... my liege...” he rasped mockingly.

Abaddon said nothing; he simply stomped forwards, eyes fixed upon Huron. He raised the Talon of Horus, and unleashed a fearsome barrage of cursed bolts into the Blackheart. The munitions struck some invisible field as he rose, bursting above him in a cascade of azure fire. Huron creaked as he moved, like some homunculus puppet animated by a necromancer’s will. He opened his claws, and grew his mighty cursed axe, striding to meet his counterpart in final battle. Around them, the walls were crumbling, and the ethereal winds of the warp billowed through in impossible hues.

“You have destroyed my ship and yours as well. Where is the Despoiler, who always had such grand schemes and elaborate strategies? Pathetic! You got your empire stolen, your brothers slain, and all you can think of is to brawl with me in the belly of a doomed ship? Your time is through now Ezekyle Abaddon! I am the future. The Long War is a joke, a bitter old warrior’s dream!” Huron screamed his voice metallic and discordant, his eyes blazing red with the madness driven by unending agony.

Abaddon said nothing, his pace merely quickening.

“This is my time Despoiler! Mine!” Huron screeched, gesturing for Hamadraya. The daemon thing leapt towards Abaddon, its body swollen with stolen warp energies. If it had struck the Warmaster, it would have undid his flesh and made him spawn in an instant.

But Hamadraya realized too late, what dwelt within Abaddon’s sword. Abaddon threw the sword into Hamadraya without a second glance. Drach’nyen embedded itself in Hamadraya’s bloated gut, and drove itself and the yellow monster backwards. Hamadraya screeched inhumanly as it was instantly pinned to the Blackheart’s throne by the blade.

As the dameon’s dueled, the two ancient Astartes crashed together with a hideous crunch, ceramite on ceramite, adamantium on adamantium. Abaddon bore terminator armor, so was slower than Huron, who landed a flurry of furious blows against the Despoiler’s guard. Without Drach’nyen, Abaddon was forced to fend off Huron with only his Talon, and was pushed back by the undead might of Huron. Where his claw was swatted aside, his axe landed a blow, carving glowing grooves in the runic terminator plate. Desperately, Abaddon shoved the Tyrant back, giving him a moment of space. Huron raised his claw’s palm, and rewarded Abaddon’s ploy with a torrent of cursed fire.

Abaddon screamed, throwing his hands to his face as the flamer’s breath consumed him. His hair was burnt away entirely, his flesh crackled and spat like pig’s fat on a furnace. The runes of his ancient war plate blazed ever brighter. As soon as the flames relented, another flurry of axe blows crashed against Abaddon. This time, he was too stunned to defend himself effectively. Chunks of flesh and armor were chopped away by Blackheart, until Abaddon sank to his knees.

Pinned to the throne, Hamadraya screeched pitifully as Drach’nyen twisted and writhed in its belly, spilling warp fire over its being as the sword slowly, but surely, began to dissolve...

Huron was flooded with warp energy; the same power Abaddon had always denied. He smashed his axe into Abaddon’s unprotected left arm again and again, savoring every grunt of pain he elicited. There was no way such a decrepit and broken specimen of a space marine as Huron could be so strong and fast and fearsome.

Chaos was punishing Abaddon for spurning their offers. They gods were fickle and jealous, he always knew this. They wanted him to perish here. The Despoiler refused to bow to their spiteful demands.

With a last great burst of power, Abaddon reached forth with Horus’ talon, and ripped away the Eastern Emperor’s breastplate, wrenching it free in one almighty motion. It pulled away in a torrent of mucus, like the peeled shell of a beetle. Huron staggered backwards, letting the armour fall away. Inside, Huron was a mass of messy bionics, bonded to rotten strands of black flesh, held together by thorny scuttling centipedes and writhing, segmented worms. The Tyrant screeched and cursed wetly, as his organs spluttered and spat like hissing cobras, spewing vileness in all directions. Huron looked down to the wound in bewilderment; he should have been healing. Always, no matter the wound, he survived and was held together by the will of the Gods. The Blackheart looked to Hamadraya. The daemon was growing pallid, its struggles growing weaker and weaker as it fought to remove Drach’nyen as the sword merged with the festering wound in Hamadraya’s gut.

Huron was alive, but for the first time in so many years, he felt vulnerable. Wild-eyed, he turned back to his foe.

“Your death is a long-stalled certainty it would seem, miserable Wight!” Abaddon wheezed hatefully, struggling to rise. Cursing in all the fell tongues he knew, Huron raised his Tyrant’s Claw again, and the flames ate into the Despoiler hungrily. The fire wriggled into the rents cut into Abaddon’s armor previously, and the Despoiler felt his body cooking from within. He would have screamed, but his tongue and cheeks were ash, and one of his eyes had burst like and overripe grape.

Huron strode over to Abaddon, and stamped a boot onto his talon, immobilizing his right arm.

“Death?” Huron sneered, raising his axe over Abaddon’s ruined head as an executioner might. “Death has no power over-” The lens of one of his bionic eyes burst in a shower of sparks, and from the wound poured a trickle of treacle-like gore. Huron dropped his axe, and fumbled at the wound. Another needle splashed into his exposed chest with barely a sound, followed by two others. His hearts exploded, alongside whatever fetid demonic organs had been installed alongside them.

For a moment, it seemed as if Huron might simply shrug the wounds off. Then, with the inexorable momentum of a felled tree, he collapsed with a sonorous clang.

Abaddon watched this unfold as he lay smoldering on the deck. If he could smile, he would have. A silver-armored space marine in scout carapace emerged from behind him, clutching a needle rifle to his chest. The astartes stood over Huron, and emptied the remainder of his clip into the Tyrant’s twitching corpse.

"It seems the eldar were right, you filth!" the scout snarled, spitting on the gurgling carcass.

It took a sudden lurching quake to bring the space marine back to his senses. The young soldier turned to Abaddon’s prone form. The boy’s face was clean and lantern-jawed, and filled with a righteousness Abaddon had learnt to loathe thousands of years ago.

Was this the last good man? Was this his end? Abaddon watched the scout’s rifle. Slowly, the weapon was lowered.

“Can you walk marine? What chapter are you? Get up, or you will perish here with the Blackheart! We have mere minutes before we strike the craftworld. We must move; now!” the boy bellowed, hauling Abaddon up to his knees. “My name is brother Kelfdon of the Silver Skulls; your assistance was most welcome.”

Abaddon was confused, until he saw himself reflected in the burnished breastplate of Kelfdon. His head was healing, but it was still a scorched and skeletal ruin. His armor, once so distinctive, was sullied and ruined by years on the run from Lorgar, and still further smashed by Huron and his hellfire. Even the talon was broken and rendered generic by the sooty flames.

Kelfdon wouldn’t be fooled for long, Abaddon knew. If there had been more time, he might have used this confusion to his advantage. However, a much more pressing matters than the ship crashing, or even deceiving the loyalist dupe.

“Drach...” Abaddon began, his tongue still only half-formed in his mouth.

“I cannot understand you, what say you?” Kelfdon asked.

Abaddon gave up talking, and simply gestured with his functioning hand. He gestured towards the mewling, growing thing festering on the Blackheart’s throne. Hamadraya was squealing as it was consumed, collapsing in upon itself, coiling about the molten ruins of the dameons word in its gut.

That was why Drach’nyen wanted to come here, Abaddon realized. It needed the warp power of the Hamadraya and the sundered cores of the Planet Killer and the Astral Maw.

Kelfdon’s eyes widened as he turned to witness something rising from the oily ruins of the Hamadraya, cloaking the entire chamber with unnatural shade. Drach’nyen, at last, was unbound!

And so they rose, and fled before the [portion missing/corrupted]

Interlude: Sundered Sphere, a fragmentary account.

[Compiler’s note: This is a fragmentary section from a post- d[REDACTED] saga, found etched on one of the major internal faces of the [REDACTED]rld device. Provenance: unknown. Period of composition: Unknown Subject: Speculative (cros ref. ‘Last Good Man’)]

From the cold prison they wriggled free, shed their iron bodies and stole hollowed flesh of ter- an flesh. But the wordless king had not slain his children all in vain. For he had a plan, set in place should the walls of the real come crashing down. Before the first great sleep, the jackal had driven its own sibling into madness.

So subdued, the mirrored men of the wordless king bade the mad god build its own prison, and they reinforced it with endless bonds. And the silvered mirror men learned much from the deranged one; she who no longer knew herself. Believing herself a blessed mother, she taught her apparent children the way to build the great devices; the swords that would shatter Star- Hungry Ymgar, and all his lesser brothers. The swords were wielded, such as we all know now.

Then, the Outsider, she/that who/which was named traitor, was subdued and sealed within the prison. It her/its lonely hollow home, her/its mind turned inward, and her/its cosmic powers were bent to craft such wonders, mortals would weep and lose their minds. The prison was burrowed out and plunged into the formless space. There was no sea of souls, no labyrinth down there. It was another place, sealed from all the outside. The outsider surrounded this miraculous inside. The sphere existed outside the bounds of warped realms and material planes. A pearl of null coldness to ward off the storm.

The Wordless King remembered this prison, long eons afterwards. He realized that, even as dissolution came to all the worlds of the outside, so the inside would be preserved; for the sphere of binding was a most excellent prison, but an even greater haven. If he could reach it with his men, he could start his race again, in a realm where they were the only life, a place where they could be untroubled by strife and the Ne{weep-for-us}. His fellow liberated mirror-men, however, realized that, with bodies of flesh, not living steel, the outside sphere’s crazed guardian would not recognize their new, ter’an forms.

Thus, the bitter king whispered into the Outsider’s troubled dreams. He whispered how her children were no longer me of cold metal, but bright-eyed living beings. He made her dream of the ter’an form, so that she might recognize them when they arrived.

Alas, the mirror-men were waylaid on their journey to the outside sphere by one of their own; the rebel Lord of the Tempest, who meant to take the orrery for his own. Upon the orrery, they fought, and they- [REDACTED]

Imote[REDACTED]

[REDACTED]- while they fought, the Wordles King could not have known others came to his sphere first. These men were mortal creatures, many of whom were ter’an. Upon seeing the ter’an, and after feeling the Last G[MISSING]an walk upon Her god’s skin, the Madness Let Them In.

The sphere was sundered, and those who rejected the grim specter of the dissolution, reached the miraculous inside.

But salvation and safety are not so easy to secure. For upon opening the sphere, the sphere, albeit briefly, became visible to all the dark multitudes of the warring, collapsing galaxy. Just as they believed themselves safe, the disciples of the Last Good Man found they had to [SECTION MISSING]

Section 50: The Three Wanderers. The Prince and the Serpent.

History is fickle and changeable; twisting in the grasp of those who seek to pin it down and fix it in a single position, a single continuity of events. Through this chronicle, many times have my reports forced me to be vague, and to conflate great stretches of time where a lack of accurate sources have left their voids in the history, to be filled with conjecture, myth and mad ramblings.

Thus, I return to the tale of the Three Wanderers, the fugitives of Trayzn, decades from when we, Vasiri and Greal, last left their narrative strand. In this time, the sphere was opened, the triarch necrons were rendered extinct then reborn in flesh, imperiums burned and the hero of Macharius was murdered. For the three, Allaten the silver skulled warlock, Myrinmar the ranger and Julius Hawke, the eternal survivor, this time passed only as a couple of months. They were lost in the myriad pathways of the Labyrinth dimension, far from hearth, home and sanity; set adrift without a map in a maze that moved. Not only was space a perplexing maze there, but time too. They walked through tunnels that bypassed centuries, only to stumble into temporal dead zones that left them weary after barely an inch of travel.

The further they travelled, the smaller the pathways became, winding in and out and upon themselves, like woven threads in a wicker chair. Several time they had to hide themselves, as earlier versions of the trio crossed in front of them, or older versions in pitted armor with withered faces collapsed behind them. The webway had grown wild and untempered in the millennia following the fall of the craftworlds, and the rise of the Ne-[hushlittlesecretsin the darklittleones] – quins fought a rearguard to their black stronghold, leaving the labyrinth to grow like creepers through a dead woman’s garden. Also like a garden, strange plant-like fronds, and alien growths ringed the narrowest routes. Allaten and Myrinmar had efficient and resilient guts, and subsisted easily on the preserved rations they had managed to liberate from the Infinite’s collections. Hawke was mortal however, and thus soon he was depleted. Ever the opportunist, he harvested the frond-creatures as he trekked, eating them, much to the disgust of Myrinmar, and the unvoiced amusement of Allaten.

After the initial few weeks, the archives do not record their further labors in the webway, but there were spurious accounts of giant wasps and eyeless troglodytes infesting some routes, which the three had to slay, and of whispering, tempting siren-devils that called out longingly to the eldar amongst them, making her soul stone burn a bright white hue, and the wraithbone choir she carried to sing with psychic righteousness. They battled orks, which surprised both sides of the conflict, and only ended when the brutish leader of the orks dragged his waaagh off to find the ‘Pretty Wurld’ of myth. There was some mention of Hawke briefly getting sick from the fronds he subsisted upon, but these legends descended into metaphor very rapidly (talk of ‘the song of spiders, sleeping in the humors’ and other such fanciful imagery).

All through this journey, there was the ever present dread of the necrons. Though Trayzn’s ships could only travel the dolmen routes, the furious necron had marked Myrinmar for death. She kept hold of the wraithbone choir through all this, clutching it closely, ever listening for the shimmer of teleporting deathmarks, the cyclopean assassins of the ancient enemy.

The three might have been trapped in this system of tunnels for all the ages of the universe, if it was not for Allaten. Though his psychic gifts were powerful and brutally blunt, they allowed him some measure of communion with the Anathame. The blade was a hateful thing; an insane presence filled with half-formed thoughts of ancient alien notions. Yet, something was drawing it forwards, guiding Allaten down the true path. Where they were going, none of the group knew. The only coherent thought of the sword was like attracts like, which only served to confuse the Prognosticator further.

Eventually, they were led to a portal, shimmering like a rippling pond tilted to the vertical plane. Desperate to be anywhere but in the webway, they threw themselves through the portal, and emerged on the smooth, fragrant deck of an eldar vessel. The vessel was dark, walls only sluggishly illuminating in their presence, and their breath misted on the chilly air. Nevertheless, Myrinmar knew this ship anywhere.

“This is the Flame of Asuryan. The Phoenix ship. This is King Yriel’s vessel,” she breathed. This was once the greatest reaving vessel of the eldar, before it became the grand flagship of the Biel-Tan alliance, earning many famous victories.

Hawke was considerably less impressed, judging by the fact he was said to have vomited profusely upon arrival.

Initially, as they explored the vessel, it seemed as though it were entirely dead; becalmed and derelict. Through transparent sections of the hull, the webway could be seen. The vessel had been trapped in the webway too, to their collective disappointment. Hawke, desperate for some actually edible food, got Myrinmar to tell him where the food supplies were located onboard. She directed him to the orchards, and the former bondsman made his excuses before departing on his foraging quest.

Soon enough, they found evidence of battle; spent shuriken, shattered crystals, blades, dried blood redder than any human viscera, and, heartbreakingly, broken waystones, cold and dull. But no bodies.

“We cannot linger here. We must find another portal,” Allaten warned her, predicting her desires before she voiced them.

“My race needs me. Our lost king is here... or was here. I must aid him.”

Allaten shook his head. “I understand the call of brotherhood, or kinship. I am astartes, and brotherhood is the foundation of our existence. But we have a mission; your mission, if I recall correctly. You claim this choir is pivotal, to not just your race’s survival, but mine as well. Your aid on Varsavia and Solemnance has proven that not all xenos are made of lies, but if you are willing to abandon a quest you vowed to complete, I question whether all our prejudices against your race were true,” he said, in her own eldar tongue, as best as he could manage.

This gave the ranger pause. “Vows are the only thing that controls one on the Path of the Outcast. Vows to craftworld and kin, ever anchoring even the flightiest of us to home. Yriel... he was a renegade, a corsair, for millennia. But when Iyanden needed him most... he returned. He cast of the Path of the Outcast, and gave the eldar there hope,” she looked to the spherical artifact in her hands, the conjoined souls of the best and brightest beings ever to walk the domes of fabled Altansar. This was the key; the salvation of the eldar race, and all races who fought the dissolution. “We must get to Biel- Tan. You are right mon ke... Librarian,” she finally admitted.

They searched for another portal chamber aboard the great capital ship, but as they did, they saw other vessels, to the port and starboard flanks of the Flame of Asuryan’s outer hull. Where the Flame of Asuryan was a bejeweled lance, these were dark, serrated daggers, flanked by wicked bladed fins and red tiger-stripe war paint daubing the hulls. The three black cruisers had anchored themselves to the Flame via great harpoons fired from their prows, deep into the guts of the larger eldar battleship. Myrinmar hissed.

“Eldar corsairs,” Allaten growled.

“Commorrite raiders,” Myrinmar corrected him. “All the worst stories you mon keigh tell of the eldar, are earned by the denizens of Commorragh. The things onboard those vessels aren’t fit to kiss the feet of true corsairs,” she cursed, drawing her rifle involuntarily.

But Allaten reminded her of her vow, and they continued on towards the next portal room. Myrinmar was not to be disappointed however, because soon after, they were set upon by those same pirates. A hundred black shadows leapt from concealed ambush points, daggers drawn and splinters flying. Even before the first degenerate eldar howled their mocking battlecry, five of them were slain by Myrinmar’s rifle; a dozen more by the flickering arc of Allaten’s warp lightning. Ambushing a ranger and a psyker with precognition, it transpired, was very difficult. Nevertheless, the dark eldar had numbers on their side, and their frenzied hunger for pain and souls drove them onwards with the fevered desperation of consumptives. Allaten conjured a ring of fire from the warp, but the eldar capered deftly over the conflagration, their eyes glowing green with soul-hunger. The corsairs were a ragged mix of wych cultists, kabalites, half-crippled scourges, ex-craftworlders wearing desecrated soulstones, parched scum, board-less hellions and all other forms of commorrite scum under the stolen suns. Discipline had long fled these degenerates, for they had been trapped outside their sanctuary when the doors to Commorragh had sealed. But despite that, their furious hunger lent them a potency all their own.

Myrinmar and Allaten fought back to back as they spindly creatures attacked them, each being swift as quicksilver, and venomous as a viper. Allaten could smell the toxins on their blades as he fought them back blade to blade with the Anathame. But his cursed sword was mighty indeed; wherever it struck, the wound it inflicted was always lethal. Bones were shattered, limbs were severed, and blood, red and vivid even in the gloom, soon coated the walls. Allaten’s berserker charge with the Anathame left him separated from Myrinmar. To his horror, he saw the pirates retreat, as rapidly as they had descended. He fought to reach them, but soon the shadows swallowed them. He found himself alone and lost. Myrinmar was gone, and with her the choir. He had to find her.

The Prognosticator stalked the halls, listening out for either Hawke or Myrinmar’s voices, reaching out with his psychic senses, but only finding confusing interference. It was then he realized this interference was deliberate. The souls behind it were pure and strong, so could never be the shriveled, rotten souls of the commorrites. The original crew, he mused, but despite realizing this, their location was still hidden from him (and presumably the raiders too). Mouthing a prayer to the Emperor to guide him, as the Emperor had guided him so many times before, he raised Anathame, and let the hungry blade lead it once again on its inscrutable quest.

When he at last found the shrouded corner of the cavernous vessel, the Silver Skull was set upon again by desperate eldar. But these warriors bore glowing soulstones, and when he summoned warp energy into his radiant soul, he felt other equally powerful entities, holding back his sorcerous fire. As shuriken and las bolts pattered against his armor, Allaten was forced to wade into close combat, weathering the blows against his armor as his singing sword sought to catch one of the cautious eldar.

But before he could land a killing blow, another warrior entered the fray. Almost as tall as the space marine, but slender as a reed, the warrior leapt into combat like a whirling dervish, his spear howling as it swept towards him in a blistering series of arcing blows. The eldar had a single bionic eye that glowed with pleasant amber hues; quite at odds with the harsh crimson bulbs Imperial bionics favored. The man was skilled, and without his psychic abilities, Allaten found himself hard pressed against such a tenacious and skilled combatant. Finally, the spear tip swept down in a decapitating arc, and all Allaten could do was throw up a hasty block with his own weapon.

The two blades crashed together with a thunderclap, flooring both warriors, and all the eldar encircling them. In that instant, the two well-matched foes saw the turn of the universe.

There was a vision of a diminutive hero standing alone before a cliff face of molten metal, a thousand feet high, beneath a red moon’s light.

In the hero’s hand was the spear of twilight.

In the hero’s hand was the anathame, blade of midnight.

In the hero’s hand was a curving blade, glowing golden with the morning’s early light. Dawn’s sword.

Then the cliff grew claws, and its own great black sword descended. Shadows fell, and the blade fell.

Anaris fell too. It shattered thrice and fell into the river, where its currents carried them all away. The hero was unarmed when the claws came finally to strangle him.

“Yriel... late of Iyanden, protector of Biel-Tan... I presume?” breathed Allaten, the first to rise. He took off his helmet, so Yriel might see his grey eyes.

The ancient eldar warrior, youthful always save for a wisp of grey amidst his thick top knot of soot black hair, held Allaten’s gaze. “Allaten of Varsavia, warrior seer,” he returned, gesturing for his men to lower their weapons, which they did only warily.

Allaten revealed his mission, and his compact with the Myrinmar and the Biel-Tan eldar. Yriel, in turn, revealed that the foe that had overcome his vessel was a terrible pirate lord, called Duke Sliscus, the Serpent. The serpent’s minions ambushed the Flame of Asuryan as it made to leave a system on the fringes of the Eastern Chaos Imperium; attacking from all vectors with a loose coalition of commorrite raiders, all eager to bring down the pirate who had become a king. Yriel had been forced to breach the webway, diving into the labyrinth, even as the Duke’s men were boarding via their breaching modules. The majority of the hunters were denied their prize, but three of the Duke’s cruisers had remained attached. The craftworlders were few in number at the best of times, and the necessary crew aboard a naval ship was even less. Such a skeleton crew couldn’t hope to resist Sliscus’ veritable hoard of half-born savages and null-city scum. Though it pained Yriel to even remember, he told the astartes of how his crew had to barricade themselves within the few strongpoints throughout the ship; munitions holds, scrying chambers, the infinity circuit’s domed temple room. One by one, these strongpoints were overwhelmed, until only Yriel’s psychically hidden remained.

Yriel believed he would perish in the hold of his own ship, starving like some urchin wretch. But the sight of Allaten, and the news of the wraithbone choir of Altansar, and the revelation that he and a mon keigh held in their very hands, gave the old reaver prince new resolve. Only a handful of the survivors were eldritch raiders like him, but he determined that this would be the end of Sliscus’ charade. Whether Yriel survived or not, the sociopathic monster lounging on in his bridge would draw his last breath that day!

Meanwhile, Hawke had found the dedicated orchards of the Flame of Asuryan. The forest had grown wild and fecund in its period of becalmment, spreading out across several floors, enclosing unrelated chambers and systems with its pale, fruit-bearing trees. Hawke gorged on the forest. He’d not cared for fruit much as a guardsman, and had nothing but protein paste as a bondsman. But after so long eating nothing but strange crystalline plants, he found the feast irresistible. Those he didn’t devour immediately, he stuffed into his satchel, for later consumption and perhaps distillation, if he could ever find the parts to make a decent still in the labyrinth dimension.

His meal was disturbed when he heard the sound of cruel alien voices, hissing and hooting at each other in tones he couldn’t hope to understand. He fled from the eldar pirates, rushing through the foliage like a game animal. Much unlike a game animal, he swore in an almost uninterrupted stream of profanity, the entire time he was running. The eldar must have sensed this feeling of being hunted, as they proceeded to set their dogs upon him. The warp beasts were like gigantic, flayed hyenas, large as horses and covered in mouths. Breathless and terrified, Hawke sprinted heedlessly through the orchard jungle, slamming into walls and bulkheads and trunks in his haste.

The daemonic hounds loped after him unhurriedly, as sadistic and cruel as their beastmaster. Soon they were just on his tail, snapping at his heels with skinless jaws of gore-streaked ivory, black tusks of bronze squealing as they snapped shut, closer and closer to him each time. At last, Hawke could run no more, and flung himself forwards into the last chamber he could find. The hell hounds leapt after him.

The crystal dome he found himself in was only devoid of trees. It was an odd thought to have before his death, he considered. Still, a pretty enough sight to go out on.

But this was not the ordained moment of his death it would seem. As the warp beasts entered the dome, the walls came alive with pinpricks of light. Millions upon millions, moving as a great tide or a termite swarm. Each of the scuttling lights was made of crystal and energy. As one, they enveloped the snarling daemonic horrors, which squealed and screeched in oddly human tones as they perished. With morbid fascination, Julius Hawke watched the tide of white spiders deconstruct the daemons bodily, like a sped up pict video of a corpse’s decay. Within moments, the silent warp spiders devoured the corrupted monsters. Even the fetid stench of daemon essence had been drained away, leaving the dome as pristine as it had been moments ago.

Hawke expected to die too, but the spiders merely crawled over him like curious ants, before scuttling back into the walls themselves. He almost laughed in relief. Then, he looked to the bodies laying peacefully all around him, and his smile faded.

Myrinmar was brought to the bridge of the flagship, where a fop in an extravagant coat of tanned human hides and elaborate ruffles and ribbons, slouched upon the command throne, one leg brazenly flung over the arm of the chair. The man was offensively handsome; his long hair gleaming platinum, his pale, translucent face unblemished by a single year of age. His lips were painted blue, and his eyes glowed with azure fire. Yet, the cold cruelty, and the way the warmth of his smile didn’t reach his piercing eyes robbed him of the title of beautiful.

Duke Sliscus leapt from his throne, and dramatically embraced Myrinmar as she lay bound and helpless in the arms of her captors. Sliscus kissed her cheeks, and welcomed her warmly to his vessel.

“Forgive the current state of disrepair. Some terrible lout sabotaged the central power core. It was almost as if he... resented me taking possession of this wonderful palace of a ship. Can you imagine the nerve?!” Sliscus tittered, and his ragged crew chuckled with forced humor.

His good nature evaporated when Myrinmar refused to tell him what the wraithbone choir was, or how she’d got onto ‘his’ vessel. That was when the torture began.

One thing the commorrites knew intimately was the art of torture. Within minutes, she was screaming in miserable agony, as neural spines were driven into her skull and into her joints.

(The chronicles go into what I would call, unseemly detail about the myriad torture techniques Sliscus employed in the short time he was in Myrinmar’s company. I have omitted the worst, for I feel it serve no other purpose than gratuity.)

“I am afraid we lost our haemonculus on the first day, alas. I am sorry our efforts are so... slapdash, my beautiful little bumpkin,” Sliscus purred softly in her ear, as she dangled from the ceiling on hooks, bleeding from places she had never known possible. She was weeping, but felt no shame in that, for who could resist the torturers of commorragh, truly? She watched the eldar cluster around her, their eyes glowing that little bit more with every shriek she made. She wanted to laugh; laugh at their pathetic state of existence, at their paltry, parasitic lives. They were all doomed; only the craftworlders would be reborn when Ynnead rises, while these monsters would be trapped forever on the path of appeasement, slaved to a murderous bitch goddess until they died. But she couldn’t bring herself to laugh, and the effort only brought more coughing and retching.

Finally, after only an hour of torment, she slurred something. Sliscus smiled. “You will have to speak more clearly child. Haul her down.”

They did so. Sliscus waited patiently for her to speak again.

“You must help me. The choir... it is important. Without it, millions will die... billions... trillions... all life...” she wheezed, begging the cruel dandy to heed her.

Sliscus laughed at her. “And I should care why? I have won!” he cackled, flourishing his twin swords, called ‘the serpent’s bite’, like some swashbuckling hero. “What have you won?” she spat bitterly, slumping in her captors’ arms. He grinned. “I have proven that I am the greatest corsair there has ever been! The mighty prince Yriel, the dashing hero and infamous legend, was humbled by me. Me! The Duke, not the Prince, is the winner!”

“That’s petty, even for you.”

The Duke shrugged. “I don’t care. Let the universe kill itself. We shall wait here, in the webway as we always have. Then, when the dust settles and the mewling survivors scuttle from their holes to see what the damage is, we will hunt them anew. The Sky Serpents shall rain down from the heavens, and the galaxy will know my name and no other! No one will stand before me, and I shall take what has always been mine!”

“This is madness! There won’t be a galaxy Sliscus, or a webway! The dissolution... it will... the N-”

“Don’t speak to me of prophecies of doom, craftworlder! Do you recall your doomsayers, from the time of the Fall? They claimed all would be destroyed, and yet... we endure. We survive, and we...thrive,” he shivered with perverse delight.

She saw the megalomaniac then, and realized any hope of reason was lost. He was insane. Despair took her then. Tears rolled down her fleshly-scarred face, each droplet a stinging reminder of his foul attentions.

She mumbled something else.

“What now child? Do you want to play again? Just deny my demands once more, and we can play all over again. What did you say?”

She held his gaze then, through her one good eye. “I have been in one place too long. Things won’t go well now,” she said, with odd, calm clarity.

Even Sliscus was confused, and his sudden smirk barely concealed his irritation. “Why is that?”

“Because... I am marked.”

She threw herself to the ground, as her two guards suddenly spasmed and died. The Sky Serpents turned as one to a corner of the room, where they were sure there hadn’t been anyone before. Now, there were suddenly five giants; shadowy hunchbacks, with singular orbs, blazing with corpse light.

Deathmarks.

Instantly, the two sides opened fire. Within moments, the bridge was a chaotic storm of fire, flame and eldritch energies being unleashed. Myrinmar took her chance. She leapt forwards, ignoring the agony lancing through her bones, and snatched a sword from a sky serpent’s belt, bisecting the commorrite from hip to armpit with a single stroke, before planting the sword up to the hilt in the raider clutching her rifle.

She was still fast, but the pain slowed her just enough, for a green-haired hellion to get the drop on her, hissing through sharpened fangs. Its whip lashed out, snatching her rifle from her grasp, before the fiend struck her dozens of times with its spiked boots and gloves, savoring every cut. Her rifle stock cracked against his body over and over but that only made the eldar stronger, driven to delight by the pain. She stumbled onto her rump, and prepared for the end. It was at that point that the hellion suddenly found its head bisected by a precision shuriken.

The Eldritch Raiders burst into the chamber in a wave of multi-colored fire. The warlocks unleashed lightning storms and singing spears, as Allaten, wreathed in fire, smote all who came near him, with flame and anathame stroke. Yriel could barely be seen, for he leapt so swiftly and so deftly through the confused throngs of murderers and metal killers. The battle for the bridge became a confused three way skirmish; a storm of blades and discharging weapons. Holes were punched into the hull, and soon ethereal winds from the webway billowed through the tides of carnage and murder.

Myrinmar scuttled on all fours through the press; desperately reaching for the wraithbone construct she had spent so long searching for.

Yriel and Sliscus sought each other out, as both sides knew they always would. The two clashed in a blur of blade against blade, acrobatic and flawlessly graceful despite their advanced ages. These were two supreme eldar warriors, unsullied by the millennia, as fearsome as deadly as ever. But Sliscus, for all that, had one advantage; he had two weapons, against Yriel’s single spear. No matter how potent, the spear struggled to be everywhere at once, which is where Sliscus struck. Every vector, every angle, every blow possible, he struck. Neither opponent could afford to be struck even once; the spear of twilight was a fiery remnant of the elder blade of Eldanesh, and would kill with any solid connecting blow. Meanwhile, Sliscus’ serpent’s bite was so profoundly venomous, but a single cut against flesh would boil the blood and corrode the flesh.

Despite Yriel’s legendary skill, Sliscus was winning, and he knew it, with every cut and thrust he grew stronger, and his grin widened. “I am better than you. I told you, I was always better than you!” he cackled finally, delivering a brutal back kick across Yriel’s face, staggering the eldar lord. But even as he tumbled, Allaten was there, anathame in hand. Allaten was fractionally slower, but his blows were herculean compared to Yriel’s, and this time Sliscus staggered backwards, his arrogance faltering for but a second.

All around them, the Deathmarks calmly walked forward sin unison, killing with the same effort a scythe reaps wheat. The eldar continued acrobatically murdering each other, each side screaming the name of their corsair warbands.

“Sky Serpents!”

“Eldritch Raiders!”

Myrnimar finally managed to reach the wraithbone artifact. She clutched the choir to her chest, and made a dash for the control console; the heart of the bridge, and the psychic link with the entire flagship. Her body was a ruin, and every motion was an agony akin to walking through fire. But she ignored the pain. She had to.

Sliscus now faced both Allaten and Yriel, and now he was hard pressed. Several times, he fled behind his men, and thrust them into the fray, cursing as they died too quickly. His face was full of indignant rage now, his hair a mess, his flesh tainted with blood splashes, his outfit ruined by narrowly avoided blows.

“Curse you! You let mon keigh fight your battles! Truly, you are as weak and pathetic as I suspected! I will not be mocked!” the Duke finally screamed. Desperately, he threw aside one of his sword, and drew his blast pistol. Allaten only just swayed aside as a bolt of pure darkness thundered past him. His psychic hood was shattered by the glancing blow however, exploding in a shower of sparks and psychic feedback that made even Allaten recoil.

Taking this chance, Sliscus skipped from the podium, and fled the bridge. The two sides of eldar had begun to focus on the necrons at last, as the killing machines cut down eldar after eldar with their synaptic disruptors. One by one, the necrons were dragged down, until even their reanimation protocols could not stem the flow of damage against them.

Myrinmar reached the command console, and slotted the wraithbone choir home. The choir seemed to morph and mold itself to the aperture of the console, eagerly merging and communing with the Flame. This was her final gambit; a hundred thousand apex farseers, scholars, bonesingers and warlocks, all plunged into the fiery, living heart of the ship’s living form. She felt the ship shudder in sudden, pleasant undulations. Light played across every surface, like the wheel of a galaxy as seen through a concave mirror.

She smiled serenely. This was what needed to happen, she realized. This was peace.

She kept her smile, as the crackling beam from the last deathmark struck her, and ended her thoughts forever more. It was odd, she thought at the end. It didn’t hurt to die.

She didn’t even make a sound as she felt.

The Sky Serpents began to flee, as the Flame of Asuryan’s systems began to light up with white fire, lashing out with ghostly tendrils.

Sliscus, who had fled first, was separated from the rest. Each step he took, he gazed backwards, towards the waking ship’s light filled veins. He had to escape. This was not how he would end.

When he rounded the corner, the last thing he had expected to see was a mortal mon keigh with a shard carbine. Distracted, Sliscus didn’t see the carbine fire until it was far too late. The torrent of crystals shredded his crotch and thighs, as Hawke pumped hundreds of shots into the eldar, heedless of who this commorrite was even supposed to be.

Sliscus crumpled to his knees, gasping and mute as he desperately clutched at the ruins meat of his abdomen, his own weapons forgotten. Tears in his eyes, he stared up in disbelief at Julius Hawke.

“That’s embarrassing,” Hawke chortled.

If Sliscus was going to say anything; some final retort or curse, Hawke didn’t give him a chance. He shot Sliscus in the face, splinters tearing his handsome visage to gory ribbons. Hawke continued on his run, desperately searching for his two remaining friends in the entire galaxy. Sliscus died alone; killed while running away by a mon keigh bondsman, more by accident than anything else. Such was his legacy, and such is how I choose to remember such a petty thing. He died writhing on his belly, as all snakes do.

The power of the choir flooded and re-energized the Flame of Asuryan. Like the Phoenix King, it was reborn in fire. The first two cruisers were destroyed, as the energies travelled down their umbilical connections to the battleship. The third managed to disengage, but with motive power and weapons active, the Flame made short work of the dark eldar vessel.

Hawke found Allaten and Yriel, slumped either side of the command throne. Upon the throne itself, Myrinmar’s corpse had been placed. Her soulstone was dull. And, surprisingly, her entire body had turned to crystal.

“You won’t believe the trouble I’ve had apple scrumping down there. Wait, we’re moving?” Hawke asked, as he saw the view screen image come about. Allaten simply nodded, too drained to speak. Yriel held the crystal hand of Myrinmar, and said nothing.

Hawke looked around, took a seat at an empty console, and took another fruit from his satchel.

The Flame of Asuryan sped through the webway, given new life by revenant souls. Its destination was clear; the only place where craftworld eldar still lived in any great numbers.

All roads led to Biel-Tan.

Section 51: The Last Loyal Son, and the Queen of Smog

[Compiler’s note (Volsanius Greal): It breaks my heart to find these notes. I don’t want it to be true, but I cannot doubt Vasiri’s visions, not now. I was a scribe for many years, and I knew him longer than any other person I’d ever met. Yet, he was so shut off, secluded. Who could truly know his mind? I swear that I had no idea that these events had transpired. Smog was a standard cleanse mission, according to almost every account in the histories collected in these archives. But this one account... it changes everything I thought I knew. Forgive me. If I had known... perhaps I could have saved them... or at least warned them...] [Secondary note: The term ‘Pentus’ and ‘Pentum’ are generally interchangeable, as both forms of address are found in the histories of the Five Brothers’ Imperium.]

Loyalty is a complex notion in a world of changing authorities and powers. From a historian’s vantage point, treachery and loyalty look different, for we look from above, and we see an overview of the dynasties and shifting fortunes of factions. We can tell whether the allegiance of a loyal soldier was deserved by his master, through their actions and the ultimate result of them. But those who lived the histories I and Vasiri relate to you, they have no omniscient view. Even those beings who appear omniscient are not infallible, and nor are their visions of the world complete. In the end, whether primarch, post human or lowly serf, we are all, ultimately, stumbling forwards through the dark. I feel this should be remembered when I relate to you the tumultuous latter years of the Imperium Pentus’ crusade against the Travesty.

The war had been raging for long years, measured in billions of lives spent in folly and death. After Corbellus, the five brothers waged individual wars using their own fleet elements. Vulkan had established a rotational strategy. Logistically, having all fleets engaged at all times was a drain upon resources. Thus, while four primarchs engaged the Travesty, one was always recycled back to Pentum, to replenish their supplies, repair their fleets, and recruit new volunteers for the war effort. This way, his fleets could return, fresh and well-stocked for another campaign. At this stage of the war, the Khan returned to Pentum, leaving the four remaining brothers to organize the various fleets of their crusade. Through these coordinated efforts, they divided and drew out the frenzied armies and armadas the Empire of Travesties sardonically referred to as ‘its people’. These armies were not united, for unity was anathema to most of the corrupt, chaos-worshipping warbands and reaver fleets plaguing the Western Chaos Imperium. The main advantage of the Ruinous Forces was the growing, spreading warp storms and reality quakes that filled the region like fissures in crazed glass. Warp travel was torturously slow, with only primarch-led Pentum fleets being guaranteed a path through the tumult. The Tersis, the dread former Black Ship, turned herald of anarchy, toured the Travesty at the head of an impossible pilgrimage of ships granted sentience and partial ascension by the N[dontmakemesayitanymorepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasebeggingyou]estroying themselves before death took them. Like a plague carrier, the Mistress and Master of the Tersis conjured madness in their wake, and the warp spilled out into reality, coating everything in ichors and drooling impossibilities. And where the Deep Warp pooled, Draziin-maton could come into existence, crawling from the spaces between atoms, and the dark places where nothing should be. Nevertheless, Vulkan and his allies were winning the war in the materium, if not the immaterium.

Lorgar, euphoric and swollen with unnatural power, summoned Perturabo to Cadia. The mechanical prince came reluctantly, and was anointed Warmaster by the Aurellian within the Grand Womb-Cathedral that grew like a tumor from the cadian surface, up into the upper atmosphere. Lorgar, at this point was less a creature, and more a force of unnatural power. The roots of his essence burrowing into the mantle of Cadia, and formed grotesque, living architecture; Cadia, long abused and defiled, was becoming one with the living warp rift that Perturabo had once begrudgingly called brother. Once such a weakling preacher, he was now a conduit for the fundamental powers of the endless pantheons scratching at the boundaries between worlds. The central throne room of the cathedral would be impossible to describe to a mortal with a mind made of meat. We only have second hand legends and stories of the Daemon-Imperator’s court. Stories of a throne of barbed spines, a mile tall, festooned with eight million, eight hundred and eighty eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty eight mewling human corpses, all bonded with Lorgar by looping tendrils of sentient blood. Draziin-maton clustered like gargoyles around him, suckling on his nourishing, nauseating waves of corruption. Only Word Bearers possessed by daemons could maintain their forms in that deranged cavern. Perturabo accepted his new title, but Lorgar granted him this boon on the condition he crush the five brothers, and bring the Death Guard into the war.

Early on, when the Draziin-maton were conquering the daemon-primarchs, Mortarion evaded their control through rotting away before them. While the others were shackled to Lorgar’s patrons, Mortarion was free, and when the Travesty and Pentum made war, his Plague Marines, unified under common purpose, did as they pleased. They brought pestilence and famine, taking what they wanted from either side.

Upon leaving the molten, shifting palaces of Cadia-Lorgar, Perturabo sought out Fulgrim on his pleasure world. The soporific world of indolence and vice was coated in countless creatures engaged in relentless fetid copulations, rutting and moaning in ecstasy, even as they drowned on the shores of oceans of perfumed oils. Like some delirious opium fiend, Fulgrim lounged within the solid gold spire dominating the planet, where the scant few surviving Emperor’s children maimed and killed themselves for his flickering amusement.

Perturabo was unopposed as he led his daemon-bound Thallax legions, known to history as the Kai Bane Host, into the Spire of Indolence. Valchocht the Maker was a god of dark intellect and relentless drive to create and build, and Fulgrim’s excess and corrosive idleness was an affront to the god Perturabo served, and he picked his way through the morass of degenerates with distain. Fulgrim had squandered his military forces, and now wallowed in his own folly. He smiled a reptilian smile when his Ironclad brother shattered his doors, and almost dismissively crushed the great hydra-daemon Fulgrim had bred to be his guard dog beneath Forge Breaker.

Perturabo announced his new title and powers, and summoned Fulgrim to rejoin the fight against Pentum. Fulgrim, who had shed his serpentine form and taken on a deceptively mundane humanoid visage, gleaming gold and naked in the pink-mist of the palace, chuckled at Perturabo’s presumption. The Phoenician had been fighting, he claimed, showing Perturabo the terrible wounds inflicted by Russ and his hounds. They had dueled amidst the airless asteroid rubble that had once been a world, the Wolf and Phoenician fighting as the world Russ’ fleet had cracked leaked mantle in exotic streams. Fulgrim had barely escaped, or so he said.

“Had I not earned a moment to lick my wounds? Or have my wounds licked?” Fulgrim asked salaciously, whispering of all the beautiful, garish, carnal machines the two of them could create together. Perturabo sneeringly ignored Fulgrim’s depraved words, and demanded his brother come with him. Fulgrim eventually agreed. He was running out of playthings anyway, he’d need to recruit more.

Once aboard the great daemon engine, Fulgirm was set upon by Perturabo, his Iron Warriors and his Kai Bane monstrosities. Bound in runic chains forged in the pits of Malice, Fulgrim was eventually subdued, though a mound of smashed kai bane and dead astartes marked his capture. Spitting acidic green ichors, Fulgrim cursed Perturabo for his duplicity, mostly because he betrayed Fulgrim first, before he could betray Perturabo; ever was the twisted logic of the warp-tainted madman.

Fulgrim was a liability to the Scion of the Maker, a wretched fool reveling in his pointless, unproductive campaigns of torture and his carnivals of sin and depravity. He was much more useful to him as a prize, a gift to present to those Perturabo wished to bring into allegiance with the Forces of Travesty.

Soon, the Goliath Engine arrived in orbit over the world of Smog. If it had a previous name, I can find no record of it, and all who knew of the diseased world called it Smog. The reason was self-evident, for even in orbit it was clear the world was shrouded in dense, yellow-green clouds of noisome fog. It clogged the atmosphere and strangled the surface, suffocating everything below. This was the lair of the Queen of Smog, and garrisoned by her champion, Mortarion. Plague Marines flocked to the toxic world, drawn to their master and the Grandfatherly call of the Great Unclean God.

An ossified castle stood amongst the great putrid heaps of dissolved matter, atop a great mountain bier, where the Lords of Decay dwelt. He delivered Fulgrim to Mortarion, alongside a hundred cohorts of Kai Bane, half a chapter of Iron Warriors, and hordes of daemon engines; crustacean defilers, great hound-like maulerfiends and decimators, as well as many new and monstrous daemon engines; strange tracked centaur things, whipping iron krakens and indescribable scuttling, saw-limbed monsters of daemonflesh and perverted technology. Some were no larger than a dreadnought; others would have dwarfed the Imperator titans of old. This was the price Mortarion demanded. In exchange, he would bring his plague fleets to Perturabo’s cause.

It wasn’t until Perturabo’s great Goliath Engine departed that the chained form of Fulgrim was dragged before the Reaper.

Mortarion, rasping and disturbingly malodorous, strode from the coiling toxic mists like a shade, his rusting scythe larger than Fulgrim was tall. Fulgrim, his powers bound by hostile magicks, was made to kneel by the bloated Plague marines, who jabbed him with their cursed knives. Ordinarily, he would have relished the feeling, but the warp stench of Nurgle was about them, and each incision burned, as his slanneshi essence clashed with that of the nurglitch.

“Fulgrim. My brother,” said Mortarion, his voice barely a rasp of a whisper through the oil- drooling mask that grew from his hooded face. Almost tenderly, he placed the tip of his scythe beneath Fulgrim’s chin, and tilted back his head. “Look at us, brother.”

“I am your brother now? So soon are the bonds of fellowship forgotten once dear departed Horus left us?”

Mortarion did not laugh. He was ever humorless, even amongst the incongruously cheerful daemons of his patron. “You cast off the bonds just as readily, Fulgrim. Or should I name thee... Angel Exterminatus?”

The name made the other creatures haunting the chamber to hiss and spit in loathing. Fulgirm hadn’t noticed the pale, spindly things, not at first. They wept green tar and bore pointed ears, pointed teeth, pointed elbow spurs. Emaciated as plague corpses, the aliens were disgusting parodies of eldar forms. Eldar, albeit twisted half- daemon corruptions, amongst the halls of the Grandfather. Now Fulgrim had seen everything.

“I did not take you for a consorter with xenos, Mort,” Fulgrim laughed spitefully. “Though you’re as moribund and miserable as a craftworlder, I admit. Whose wretches are these then?”

“They are mine.”

The new voice was powerful, echoing from all around. And it was female. The Queen of Smog had hidden herself from the primarch’s daemonic perception, no mean feat when the daemon in question was one of the most powerful there was. But once she spoke, the spell was broken, and his offensively handsome features focused in like a laser upon the speaker.

She was indistinct, like an old photographic negative accidentally laid over another, and her edges rippled with the raw essence of the warp, churning and billowing with smog as she perched upon her throne, so translucent, the skeleton of the towering female was more visible than the pale and putrefying flesh that clad it.

“I know your name too, maiden, daemon princess,” Fulgrim spat. “But you are just a shadow, a shade of a swallowed goddess. Nothing so very powerful.”

Fulgrim fought against his chains, drawing upon the Angel Exterminatus, his own slannesh- born warp essence. But he found his powers draining away, leeched somehow. Fulgrim did not know that Mortarion had learned of how to bind the powers of daemon primarchs the hard way. Mortarion knew Fulgrim’s true name, and ritually invoked it as Fulgrim lay trapped. This ceremony, combined with all the other indignities inflicted upon him, was enough to sap his daemonic powers.

She laughed, though it was a savage, petty laugh of mockery and desolation. “I do not need to be the most powerful... only more powerful than you. This is my world, a wedding gift of my Lord husband, my Great Unclean One.”

“You are not Isha. Perhaps you are an echo of the dead eldar witch, but no more than that; a fragment of some story, animated by nurgle. She, the Prince of Perversion, ate her! I know I can taste her on my forked tongue!”

Fulgrim felt the smog constrict around him, crushing his throat. “Weakling daemon, a lot has changed. The warp shifts, and ever does the Great Game continue. Slannesh’s power wanes. That bitch’s star is no longer in the ascendancy. You have no power over us.”

“Take off these chains, and I shall show you my power!” Fulgrim spat. The shadows of great pinions shimmered at Fulgrim’s back, before they began to wither and crumble to nothing. Rotting, all decay. War and despair were growing in power in the galaxy, as the new gods rose and the Dissolution loomed. “Anger is not your ally,” Mortarion pointed out wearily to his brother. While the Queen of Smog loathed Fulgrim, Mortarion was grimly resigned to events. He felt neither joy nor sorrow for the other daemon’s fate. “You spurned him millennia ago, and Khorne has not grown any fonder of you brother.” The Queen of Smog leaned forward, her form shimmering as the Smog passed through her. “Her adherents are almost all extinguished. You have killed more than a few of them. No more to replace them, to give her storming protuberance form and an image. Like a gargoyle eroded by entropy’s touch, her face is being worn away, and with it her power. Even the Eldars Ynneas have been stolen away from her, cocooned in cold and shadow by Mephet’ran, the Jackal, the Morningstar, Venus, Deceiver, Yngir star-hungry and its deceptive plot. My beloved’s champion, he who is named Death, has sent his Destroyer Hive to find my living children and bring them to my side. But Slannesh devoured my other children, and I will reclaim what was stolen from me by She Who Thirsts. Starting, I think, with the souls YOU stole, Angel Exterminatus! And when you are but a husk and I am Mother of Eldar once more...”

She pointed to a sword, chained to one of the ossified walls. A curved sword, a sword Fulgrim knew well.

“Impossible,” he whispered as he looked upon the Laer sword, the sword which had led him down the path to ascension and beyond.

“The deep w rises. All is possible in these end times. The laer sword returns, and with it, you perish.”

Fulgrim felt fear then, for the first time in as long as he could remember. As the chaos eldar and Plague marines dragged him towards a great cage, he called out to Mortarion to save him. He called upon the memory of their old bonds of brotherhood and kinship. But Mortarion was deaf to his pleas, and watched as Fulgrim was carved, stabbed, peeled, pierced with throbbing tendrils of rotten vines, that drank deep of his daemonic ichors and intruded upon his manifested form. Fulgrim screamed, roaring and bursting with claws and snarled maws as his daemonic form rebelled at the violations. Plague marines were crushed by lashing tentacles, spindly half-eldar lacerated by sprouting pincers and tusked maws. But still the Queen of Smog, a fragment of a murdered pantheon, reborn under Nurgle’s besotted influence, drained and tore at the Angel Exterminatus. The serpent within writhed and fought, clinging to Fulgrim with its venomous talons, desperate and all the more monstrous for it; Fulgrim’s form shifted and churned through a million different combinations, going from humanoid to cephalopod to crustacean to things indescribable.

“Mortarion... please...” he gurgled, from a dozen slavering lips. Mortarion’s hollow eyes were weary, so weary, but he said nothing. He left Fulgrim chained and humbled, watching his own executioner’s blade from across the hall.

The Lord of the Death Guard turned instead to his massing military forces, spread out upon the mountainside. Plague marines of the Death Guard remnants were joined by other renegade nurglitch Astartes, equally corroded and corrupted. Their geneseed was poison, and there would be no more of them once the war was done. But then, all would die by the end of this war. Dusk would set for all. Still it was almost twenty thousand space marines assembled before him, like some dark parody of a Crusade-Era Legionary muster. With them, they brought daemon-infested fellblades and land raiders, predators and speeders, manticores and whirlwinds swollen with blight. And now, he had daemon engines of Valchocht, soulgrinders, defilers, giant machines like armored drakes and hounds, tracked centaurs built in mockery of men, one-horned engines gilded with iron and gore. Cohorts of daemonic robot things, Perturabo called kai bane. There were phallic, semi-organic artillery pieces, festooned with fangs and tendrils, that loaded cursed shells like octopuses shoveling food into their beaks. Largest of all the daemon engines was a terror that had perhaps once been an Imperator titan, but instead of bipedal leg towers, gigantic hinged spider’s legs protruded, with snapping pincers on each warhound-sized limb. Daemonic flesh grew across its shoulder bastions like septic coral, covered in writhing, fang-tipped trunks and proboscises. It looked like some grotesquely overgrown defiler, with a roaring war horn that shook the world when it brayed. Perturabo had not given it a name, but Mortarion could feel the daemon prince that was infused into every black-blooded vein of the defiler-titan. He tasted the life of the creature, which had once been an Iron Warrior before it had ascended to become something greater, and yet far worse. Its name was Grendel. Another daemon engine looked like no one thing in particular. It was a strange amalgam of tracked vehicles and walkers, tanks and aircraft, valkyries, basilisks and dreadnoughts, festooned with randomly placed turrets and whirring close combat weapons. His Deathshroud bodyguards referred to it simply as ‘the Khimyra’, which was apt enough, as they thing was a fusion of broken parts of other daemons, trickling through the warp, pressed together painfully by the Maker’s fell champion.

This was a force to conquer worlds, to defile space ever further, and his great plague fleet waited at anchor in orbit, waiting to take this force from Smog, to war. Mortarion knew eventually Lorgar would draw him into the war, just as he knew he would perish in it. But he was trapped, his fate was fixed. Despair and bitter resignation was a part of him now.

Eventually, he returned to the throne room, to watch his brother slowly dying. His shifting form was spent now, and he had taken on his crusade-era form; perhaps hoping to fan some ember of pity Mortarion had for the brother he once knew.

In contrast, the Queen of Smog was growing more solid, more radiant, as she drank of the warp stuff siphoned from the Angel Exterminatus. The warp was growing stronger around Smog, warp predators and Draziin-maton were massing, he could feel them. Perturabo should not have brought Fulgrim here. Did he not see that every warp power in the galaxy was looking for a way to transcend the Dissolution? The daemon queen, whether Isha or not, was no different. It seemed only Mortarion had no desire to survive this war. There were several moments in the history of the universe, moments where Mortarion was vulnerable, where he could be harmed. At this point, another such moment was approaching.

“You are alone now Fulgrim. All your beauty and genius is for nothing,” taunted the daemon queen. “Nurgle has chased Slannesh from Smog, and left you here at our mercy. No daemon now, and barely a primarch. You have no friends here.”

For some reason Fulgrim, who still sagged in his chains, smiled at her words. The Queen was confused. “Mortarion, why does he smile?”

Mortarion had no answer.

But Fulgrim did. He raised his head.

“I smile because you are right. I have no friends. And yet, I have plenty of enemies,” Fulgrim leaned back, his eyes closed, as if he were listening to something far away. “Enemies that have been searching for me, ever since I called out to them when my Ironclad sibling first caught me.”

Mortarion knew what his Master of the Fleet was going to say before even as he voxed him. Because he suddenly sensed what Fulgrim did. He knew who was coming. “My lord, I am detecting multiple warp translations at system’s edge, I-”

“The Lion is here,” Mortarion replied with his voice of rasping death. He drew forth his scythe, even as Fulgrim began to cackle like a delirious idiot.

It was a fool who underestimated a primarch, Mortarion realized. So long as an immortal, he’d almost forgotten.

###

The Antioch entered Smog’s system, the White Spear blazing. The lance beam carved through the perimeter fleet, leaving bisected ruins to blaze in the silent void as it sped towards smog, wreathed in blazing void shields as it weathered all attempts to impede it. At its back, a vast fleet erupted, similarly intent on getting to grips with the enemy.

Only the Lion came, for Vulkan and his fleet could not traverse the psychic null rift left in the wake of the Ophilim Kiasoz, as it unmade its way towards the heart of the Eye. It would be up to the Lion and his forces alone.

Fortunately enough, the Lion possessed one of the largest of Pentum’s fleets at this point in the Age of Dusk. Not only was he in command of half of the White Lancers Commandery and support elements from the Knights Supplicant, Jade Princes, Nemenmarines and the Vanquishers; he had a Ryzan exterminator armada, heavy laden with Titans and the Ninth Thunder Lizard tank regiment. While on his rotation away from the war, the Lion had also sent forth a strike cruiser of White Lancers to search for any sign of the Dark Angels, those who had not fallen to madness or become traitors.

As they searched, he came to the planet of Kimmeria, the secretive recruitment world for another commandery, the Lion’s own commandery. While the White Lancers were pure and effective warriors, they were in essence a commandery divided, for the Lion and the Khan shared them in the early years of Pentum, due to the Khan’s injuries making him unable to sire new space marines. Consequently, the White Lancers had a schizophrenic nature, for they were an amalgam of knightly virtue and codes of practice, with the more intuitive culture of personal deeds of the nomadic Jaghati Khan. Jonson wanted a commandery he could mould to his desires. And by the time he returned to Kimmeria they were ready to be cultivated for the war effort. Though Kimmeria was an advanced civilized world, the Circle Cults of Kimmeria had been active on the planet ever since it was a feral world, as far back as M35. Back then, it had been a recruitment world for Dark Angels post-Caliban (possibly even the homeworld of the mythological figure of Master Azrael, though that might have been a fiction concocted by later historians), and so to was it again. When the Lion came to Kimmeria, they instantly agreed to produce his marines, and welcomed his geneseed scientists like conquering heroes. They even helped build orbital docks across the Kimmerian system, so the Lion could build his new commandery a fleet and material to wage galactic war. While the other commanderies warred with the Travesty, he had this new force set to work, fighting alongside the White Lancers, policing and protecting the Imperium Pentum, facing off against the lesser daemons and rebels arising due to the spreading warp storms all across their empire. This secret commandery learned fast and fought well.

He called this new commandery the Angelos Primitus, or ‘First Angels’. They wore the black panoply of the First Legion, and took the symbol of the antique numeral ‘I’, surrounded by faint grey wings upon their pauldrons; a bold statement, which proclaimed them as the inheritors of the First Legion, a return to the time when they were the only Legion, and the Great crusade was a simpler, nobler enterprise.

Thus, when the Lion returned to the Travesty war, not only did he bring his White Lancers, he brought a full two commanderies worth of First Angels.

The Lion’s fleet plunged through the plague fleet’s defenses like a hot dagger plunged between ribs, while the escorts and attack ships drew the chaos forces into a time-consuming void war, the landers and transport ships advanced into low orbit. After barely a day of maneuvering, the Lion’s forces were ready to deploy against the cursed world of Smog. Initial orbital bombardments were implemented by the Nemenmarines, who thought it folly to land without even attempting to annihilate the enemy in orbit, or at least burn off the cloying fog that obscured any attempts to scan the surface. Yet, virus bombs were consumed, volcano shells detonated, but the gaps they blew in the smog closed soon afterwards. Some daemonic force was shrouding the planet. They had encountered similar forces before in the long war against chaos. Ground forces were needed to land, destroy the daemon, and open the world up to orbital scouring.

Their landing zone, some twenty miles from the solitary mountain castle, was cleared by a preceding macrocannon barrage that scattered the cloying smog for long enough for the landers to navigate their descent safety. Only the Thunder Lizards did not require landing ships, for they descended on their retro-thrusters, falling slowly to the ground on columns of white orange fire. The infantry remained with the fleet, for the smog would liquidate even power armored warriors within a few hours of exposure. Only the heaviest, armored elements were chosen, terminators, dreadnoughts, tanks and walkers. The Ryzan Titans took one flank, alongside their freeblade knights and their sturdiest robots. On the other flank, the Thunder Lizards deployed. The Tyrannosaurus Rex, the largest and most formidable of the Tyrannosaur class, landed first before the rest of the different castes of tank landed around it; heavy domed Ankylosaur transports, Allosaurus hunter-killers, Brachiosaur self-propelled macrocannons, and all the other support vehicles required of the legendary armor Regiment. In the centre deployed the Lion and his elite Astartes; the Lancers in gleaming white, the First Angels in ominous black, terminators deployed inside a column of Land Raiders. At his side also deployed Tsulganor of the Salamanders, Vulkan’s envoy to the Lion’s fleet, there to maintain the ‘continuity of purpose’ the Pentum Imperium was supposed to possess. Hundreds of dreadnoughts marched beside the land raiders, led by the Contemptor Nullan, an ancient Iron Hand who had begged the Lion for deployment, desperate for the chance to revenge himself upon the Gorgon’s killer.

Yet, even as they marched towards the Queen’s keep, her dreadful miasma descended upon the army once more. Alert sirens sounded within every vehicle, as the toxic gas already began to work its vile purpose. But the war machines of Pentum were built to survive and endure, and the armored landing party forged on through the cloying smog, relentless and resolute in the mission the Lion had tasked them with. However, the smog also caused visibility to plummet, until the way across the poisoned soil was obscured only two hundred meters ahead.

The two armies, Mortarion’s and the Lion’s, stalked each other across the featureless grey fields. Though they could not see, their thermal sensors and sonic detectors could roughly pinpoint their counterpart’s locations. Neither side could ever hope to be silent; one side was filled with the roar of throttling engines, the other with the daemonic shrieks of neverborn horrors. The Ankylosaur tanks of the Thunder Lizards opened up their flanks, deploying their legions of diminutive servitor tanks, known as Deinonychus scouts, to expand the army’s sensor web, so the blinded force might augment its sight. Despite this, indirect fire became paramount, as the big guns of the two monstrous hosts began to fling their ordinance through the smog near-heedlessly. Craters were blasted, tanks were immolated or simply vaporized, but every shell fired by one side was answered in kind by the other. The poison clouds of Smog were illuminated by the artillery, till it seemed as if a thunderstorm raged upon Smog’s surface.

Death howled on the turgid winds, while capital grade weapons exchanged impossibly bright munitions. The Smog burned when the Thunder Lizards and the Titans began to fire. It was only then that the two forces realized just how close they were to one another. The Death Guard and Grendel’s daemon engines took the shallow foothills of the ossified mountain, while the Lion’s forces were just before them, a stone’s throw further down the slope. No more waiting, no more blind-fighting and scanning daemonic smoke for a hint of a foe. So close, the two armored forces clashed at skirmish range, knife-fighting distance. Battle cannons blared and great chainswords revved, as the freeblades took to the enemy. Melta beams scorched, lance beams carved, missiles corkscrewed into blossoming conflagrations, while blight munitions erupted with black tar that melted even dreadnought skin. Rattling bolter bolts crisscrossed between the closing armies in their millions, rippling detonations bursting like raindrops splashing, but where they burst with water, bolters did with fire and shrapnel.

Dreadnoughts marched uphill against helbrutes and decimators, unleashing flurries of missiles and whirring assault cannon torrents, while the twisted daemons and chaos-cursed space marines returned fire with equally undulled fury. When the rocket launchers and rotary cannons were spent, they clashed in melee, claw, barbed scourge and siege hammer tearing into armor, pulverizing the flesh within. Like brawling drunks, they wrestled in the grey mud, artificial voices growling and cursing as they killed and killed and killed.

Defilers crawled about the bodies of struggling warhounds, dragging them down by sheer weight of numbers, while maulerfiends were beheaded and trampled by raging freeblade knight titans, each death heralded by a triumphant blare of their warhorns.

Khimyra had a hundred turrets, and all of them were blaring, firing in all directions. The mad fusion of obliterators and daemons didn’t care which side it killed, for the mechanical spawn was a thing of schizophrenic monstrosity. It stumbled through the Pentum lines, tottering atop pincers and crawler tracks drunkenly. It spun about a pivot which some might call a waist, laying into the foe with reckless abandon. It is said a massive industrial crane, once part of an Ark Mechanicus’ construction yards, sprouted from one side of the gargantuan abomination, and upon it dangled a mighty flail, the heavy of which was a dead land raider, fused with the chain. As it spun, the flail swept whole battalions to ruin, and flipped tanks onto their sides, and even breaking the armored knee joint of a warlord titan, just as it lined its volcano cannon up for a kill shot. The titan instead toppled backwards down the hill, crushing lord-knows how many of its allies in its wake.

The Lion and his coterie of tanks charged up the hill like an armored spear tip, crashing against the fetid space marines bloated by nurgle’s curse. Lionsteed, his personal land raider, didn’t even slow down as it smashed Death Guard aside bodily, or else crushed them beneath its tracks like burst pus-filled blisters. Lascannons and assault cannons filled the air with whickering fire, sending many APCs and predators to an early grave, but more still pressed on past the burning hulks, inexorably pushing towards the looming Bone citadel, wreathed in the thickest banks of smog on the world.

Meanwhile, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, mightiest of the Thunder Lizards, led the charge up the hill, void shields scorching any who barred its path to ash, and blazing away with its lance turret every few minutes. Lesser tanks were vaporized by the Thunder Lizards, and some were even driven over by them, predators and whirlwinds pressed flat by the Russ-width tracks of the superheavies. Plaguereapers, haunted tanks of Nurgle that might once have been called baneblades, descended besides corrupted fellblades to meet the Thunder Lizards, and at such closing distances, both sides began to lose units. While the Thunder Lizards could weather the cannons of the Nurgle tanks, Mortarion’s armor was too close for the Thunder Lizard main guns to engage them effectively. Some of the plaguereapers got around this by ramming the Allosaurs and Tyrannosaurs directly, punching through the voids and shattering against the armored prows of the superior tanks. The odious remains of the tanks, however, soon dissolved their killers, mission-killing them in turn. Only the Rex was too large and powerful to impede, and when a plaguereaper attempted to ram it, the Tank Commander deployed great piston rams at the prow to flip the foe, end over end, to land on its roof, crushing its turret flat and taking the reaper out of action. Rex approached the citadel, and even managed to line up a perfect shot with its lance turret. But that was when Grendel lunged out of the smog, and leapt upon the Tyrannosaurus Rex, instantly catching fire as it slammed into, and then through, its void shields. The titan-defiler’s claws closed about the lance turret, and with a horrific howl and shriek of sundered metal, it tore the turret’s barrel from its mounting, and cast it back down the mountainside.

The Tyranosaurus was not done however. Even as the defiler-titan tore chunks from its hull, its secondary turrets and missile pods plunged point blank weapons fire into the belly of Grendel, burning it from the inside with coruscating fire. In a last ditch attempt to free themselves of Grendel, Rex engaged its landing thrusters, and began to ascend with Grendel upon its back. The tank rose high, right to the edge of the smog layers before Grendel finally lost its grip. The sight of a titan tumbling from thirty thousand feet is staggering. There are over fifty works based upon the scene of Grendel’s smoting, as it crashed into the mountainside, and exploded in a storm of freed souls, that howled as the nova-burst fire of his destruction then engulfed them all over again.

Alas though, the Rex, having expended its emergency reserves, also tumbled back to Smog, reaching terminal velocity just as it plunged into the ranks of the daemon engines, and detonated with a far-less haunted, but no less lethal, blossom of nuclear fire. (Note: The honor rolls of the Thunder Lizards lists the crew of the Rex highest amongst their regiment, and forever after, the command tank of a Thunder Lizard regiment was always referred to as ‘the Rex’ in memorial, regardless of the actual model of tank deployed.)

The Lion’s predators and supporting supply tanks began to fall behind as the primarch pierced the noisome veil between them and the citadel. The Smog was thick here, and began to dissolve even the thick adamantium and ceramite of their hulls. Soon, they had to turn back, leaving only the land raiders and their terminator cargo to push on to the palace of the Smog Queen.

The Lion was the first from his land raider as they reached the gates. Bedecked in his black armor, trimmed with deep green trim and his mighty winged helm, he laid into the assembled plague marines with the Lion Sword singing in his hand, a unique pistol of roaring volkite destruction in the other. He fought with a skill even his brothers would struggle to match, swift as a striking asp, yet with the clean, workmanlike precision of a swordsman almost without peer. The plague marines assailed him, but could not withstand him, even their formidable constitutions struggled to endure decapitations and flurries of bisecting blows. When Tsulganor and the other assault terminators caught up, they finished the job, and breached the great gates of corroded, daemonic bronze. But this was but the vanguard of the horrors that were soon to assail the Dark Lion of Pentum. The Kai Bane were deadly, with their daemonic kai guns and bronze pincers that could pierce even tactical dreadnought plate with ease. In the close, stagnant confines of the palace, space marines and daemon engines died screaming, dragging each other to oblivion in the swirling, confusing melee. The maze of corridors would have been an impediment to most forces, but Tsulganor’s hammer, a gift of Vulkan, smashed through the walls like rotting paper, punching a path through the nest of ugly nurglitch things that sought to encircle them. Further plague marines appeared, and with them veritable tides of the undead, pressed back into unnatural life by the smog, which infested and animated them. Dozens were cut down by the flashing blades of the Lion’s retinue, but dozens more pressed against them in their wake, and those that died continued to crawl mindlessly. Only the cleansing fire of flamers, and the Lion’s volkite weapon permanently put down the rotting masses. When the Lion finally smashed the hinges from the inner sanctum of the bone palace, only five terminators, armor corroded and rusting in cancerous patches, stood with him. Almost instantly, they were assailed by a new foe; whip thin monsters, crude mockeries of the eldar they once were, with smog billowing from the joints in their organic armor. Despite the putrefaction of their bodies, they were whip-quick and lethal with their poisoned blades and ancient eldar weaponry. Having slain the others, Tsulganor found himself holding off the corrupted eldar with his flaming thunder hammer, as the Lion pressed on towards the Queen herself.

She was swollen with power, writhing with the souls of countless eldar reborn in her belly. Skeletal wings spread from her shoulders, and darkened the hall where they passed. Her eyes still wept with tar, but they wept with joy, her translucent lips glistening as she smiled. Her decayed form was rebuilding itself, re-knitting and regenerating before the Lion’s eyes. To her left, a great fireplace roared with sickly green flames. To her right, chained by his wrists to the wall dangled Fulgrim. He had regained his humanoid form, but looked no less wretched for this fact. Stripped of his armor, he was a muscular Adonis, though compared to the perfection of his form before the Heresy, he was a gaunt shade, miserable and hollow. He could only scowl hopelessly as he saw his lost betrayed brother return.

“Free me Lion. Free me. You cannot kill him... free me...” Fulgrim demanded, though his voice had lost all of its arrogant conviction. The Lion strode past him, heedless.

“Welcome, weary traveler. Come, rest by our hearth fire. The fight is over. Come, surrender to death with me. Embracing your fate will ease its passage,” she said, her voice a whisper, louder than any mortal shriek. The soporific scent of her smog was warp-tainted and fought to bypass the Lion’s mighty winged helm, to drag him into the despairing morass that clung to her ethereal bones. But Jonson was not one to fall for traitors’ tricks or vile sorceries.

The Lion calmly approached warily, his sword raised in a high guard position, like a knight from a fighter’s manual. His deep emerald cloak swept behind him, and his armored boots rang against the cold stone below.

Two Death Guard in ancient, pale terminator armor stepped from the shadows and stood either side of the Lion, guarding the two secondary entrances into the chamber. The Deathshroud made no move to attack the Lion, or communicate in any way. Their manreapers were held across their chests as if in anticipation. The mere fact of their existence told the Lion just who the Queen’s champion was.

Mortarion appeared as a condensing mass of smoke and bile, which slowly contorted and formed a solid entity, like an image of a rotting corpse in reverse. Vast and hooded, wreathed in the raw stuff of the warp, the Death guard primarch had long ago transcended the mortal limitations of his primarch body. His scythe was larger than the Lion was tall, and his very presence seemed to make the room shrink, as if cowering from his very being. Impossible winds billowed about him as the Reaper peered down at his former brother.

“I knew this day would come, eventually. I had not expected to meet you so soon though brother.”

“Do not call me brother. The day you spat upon your oaths was the day my brother died.”

Mortarion laughed bitterly, his breath a wheezing gale from his hidden face. “Ever since Barbarus, I told him I had no time for tyrants. Typical of the Emperor to not even consider he was the tyrant, unworthy of our adoration.”

The Lion jabbed his sword forwards, roaring in fury. “It doesn’t matter what he is! You accepted his legions, and fought his wars! You swore fealty to him, and to the Imperium of Man. The one Imperium of Man.”

Mortarion blocked the sudden rush of blows directed towards him, his scythe darting with effortless speed to intercept every blow. He continued to speak, in mocking sadness, as he dueled.

“I fight against tyrants. For a civilization, no matter how monolithic and cruel, cannot last forever. Everything rots, just as every system eventually falls. Nurgle remade me so that I could do so until the end of time. I am entropy and the rust that breaks the chains of the slavers who serve order, security and ‘peace’.”

The Lion’s blows came faster and faster, as he pressed Mortarion back, across the octagonal throne room. He fought with grim intensity, while Mortarion fought with the irresistible inevitability of an avalanche. As they fought, Tsulganor wrestled with the eldar, crushing those he couldn’t burn with his flamers.

Fulgrim watched with building desperation. He strained in his chains, drawing on all his remaining might. The laer sword stood, taunting him, daring him to come and claim it, to prove he was worthy once more. Slannesh, that frigid bitch, had abandoned him here, driven him into a lazy fugue for a thousand years, and let him kill his own men just to please her. But she was not here, he wouldn’t help Fulgrim. He turned to his own reserves of might, those powers innate to a primarch. He screamed as the manacles began to bite, and the chains began to cut.

The Lion taunted Mortarion as he cut at the malleable grey flesh of his former brother. “And yet you serve that golden-skinned lunatic. How many has he chained? Angron, mad dog he is, has a new collar I hear, and the daemons have their leashes now. If the Emperor was such a slaver, what does that make the Travesty?” The Lion lunged, spearing his sword for the daemon primarch’s heart, but he sidestepped, and swept he scythe perilously close to the Lion’s head.

“The Travesty? It is transitory. It is already dying, just as every empire crumbles. The Imperium is dead, the Imperium Secundus died, the eldar empire, and the realms of the First Kind before them. Pentum dies too, soon. All of it is going to be undone, and we’re going to be riding the world ride as it plunges into fiery oblivion!” Mortarion roared, his scythe hacking through pillars and statues as he rained down countless smoking black arcs against the eternal Knight. The Lion staggered backwards, barely fending off blow upon blow upon blow. Finally, the Lion was flung upon his back as he deflected a fearsome backhanded blow from the great Reaper. “Every primarch will die before this is done. Every last one! We all die!”

The Lion rolled to avoid a descending blow, and brought his sword up in time to slice deep into Mortarion’s flank.

“So be it. We all die,” he growled, dragging the blade free in a tide of venomous oil. “But you’ll die first.”

Mortarion swirled around, and punched the Lion with a fist as large as a contemptor’s claw. The primarch was pitched backwards, hurled bodily into the fireplace. The Lion roared in anger and confusion as his cloak and his armor was engulfed in the tainted green fire. He rolled to try and put the flames out, but they were malicious and hungry. In his desperation, he dropped the Lion sword. Before he could retrieve it, Mortarion grabbed his ankle, and flung him into the air, before slamming him down into the floor again, splitting stone and carving a man-shaped crater into the polluted tiles. The Lion’s blow still bled freely from Mortarion’s side, nurglings giggling and cavorting in the black puddle pooling around them.

The Lion drew his volkite pistol and emptied the power clip into Mortarion’s face. The daemon recoiled, braying like a titan as the plasma fire ate into his blasphemous form. The Lion cast aside his spent pistol, and leapt to retrieve his sword. It was then that the two Deathshrouds waded into combat, slashing at the unarmed knight with their daemon weapons. He fought them off with defensive forearm blocks, before he punched a hole in the chest of the first and caved in the head of the second. Still, the two space marines came at him, chopping into his black armor with methodical blows. He was forced to rip them limb from limb, beating them into green and red ruins with their own dismembered arms.

The Lion almost reached his sword, before Mortarion recovered and swept his scythe into him. The Lion pivoted to avoid the scythe, but was just a little too slow. The blade bit deep, and passed through the artificer armor with diabolic ease. The Lion screamed in horror more than agony, as his left hand tumbled away from him. Before it even hit the floor, unnatural sorceries rotted the hand to bone inside its gauntlet. The Lion retreated from the Reaper’s next blow, only just managing to snatch up his sword before the scythe took anything more precious to him.

Now the Lion was worried. He circled around Mortarion, lion sword raised and pointed at the Reaper’s chest, warding him away with hasty jabs. “Death by a thousand cuts is it? Inevitably, you will lose such a contest, for you are still, in the end, mortal. Cut me a million times, and I will survive to cut you a million and one times. Everything you lose, I will gain. You will weaken, and I will not. This is how the Lion loses its pride, and dies like all the others. I am beyond you brother.”

Mortarion lunged forwards, his scythe raised. The Lion sprang forwards, and chopped low then high, cutting through knees and opening up Mortarion’s belly. Serpentine intestines billowed out from the wound, slithering and trying to strangle the Lion, even as he cut through them like a jungle explorer cuts vines. Mortarion chuckled darkly, elbowing his brother in the helmet. The knight stumbled, reeling drunkenly from the daemonic force of the blow. Shaking his head, he backed away, clutching the stump of his left wrist under his armpit.

Mortarion simply turned to face him, ignoring the wounds that drooled and bubbled with his evil juices. “Don’t fight this. I cannot be withstood. You know this. You have always known this. I am Death, and death cannot die, not until all other things have perished.”

Mortarion looked as if he might say something else, but before he could, promethium flame engulfed him, head to foot. Tsulganor stepped forwards, his wrist flamers dumping their entire fuel reserves into the daemon thing.

Aflame and screaming, Mortarion clashed with the Lion with renewed vigor, forcing the knight to go on the defensive, using all the skill he could muster while fighting one-handed.

The Queen of Smog watched, entranced. Drunken with stolen power, her senses were dulled, her own intoxicating miasma blinding her to all but the duel fought by her champion. The daemon queen was powerful, glutted with terrible reserves of warp energy, but she was not immune to being surprised. And she was certainly surprised when Fulgrim broke free of his bonds, and leapt upon her, winding his runic chains around her great neck. The warded chains clashed with her daemonic aura like molten steel plunged into ice water. She howled and roared, segmented tail thrashing as her talons clawed at Fulgrim’s face. But the chains separated her from the great wellspring of her powers, so she could only use her physical form to resist the primarch. Fulgrim held onto the thrashing monarch with all his might, hissing and panting with exertion, desperately throttling her with the chain, which glowed and steamed as it burned her.

“You should have stolen it all and killed me. Trust an eldar to play with its food!” he snarled, biting into her ear. The acidic ichors burned his throat and stained his chin, but he didn’t care. The two creatures wrestled and fought for supremacy, claws and teeth tearing chunks from one another, while the Queen choked and Fulgrim bled.

Tsulganor charged Mortarion, his hammer rose, but was swatted away almost as an afterthought. His armored cracked, and the Salamander’s hammer was sent skittering across the pulverized flagstones.

The Lion fought fiercely, and cut Mortarion again and again. But, true to his word, the Death Guard simply would not die. Organs and body parts tumbled away, rotting to grease in seconds, only for more putrid appendages and vital fluids to fill the voids and re-grow his rotted form.

Each time the Lion blocked the Reaper’s scythe, it grew a little harder to resist, each time the scythe was stronger, the Lion weaker. But as they fought, they both noted how the toxic gas filling the chamber seemed to be receding, the Smog clearing. Both combatants spared a glance to the throne. Fulgrim straddled the Queen of Smog, throttling her with his former slave chains in one hand, his other clutching the laer sword, which erupted from her chest. Already, the daemon’s form was dissolving back into the immaterium. Her bid for ascension was thwarted. Fulgrim stepped down from the throne, as the Queen vanished in a cloud of burning embers, leaving the naked form of Fulgrim alone, his sword drawn.

The Lion seized on this moment of distraction, and thrust the Lion sword into Mortarion, up to the hilt. The tip erupted from his chest in a spray of bubbling acid. Mortarion twisted on the spot, flinging the Lion and his sword away dismissively, but in the process opening up his chest. His chest wound split apart like a red smile, revealing his odious, pulsating organs within. But still, he could not be undone.

Fulgrim charged now, screaming as he swung the laer sword. Mortarion swatted the blade aside, before sweeping back to behead Fulgrim, who deftly avoided such a fate. He was cackling like a mad man now, passing his sword between his hands eagerly.

“Brother? Dear brother!” Fulgirm called out to the Lion. “It seems I am to be the hero today. Shall we face our foe together? Three hands are better than two after all. Well, four hands would be even better, but i shan’t hold that against you,” Fulgrim laughed, as he darted aside Mortarion’s increasingly irritated scythe sweeps.

The Lion didn’t reply, but responded instead by charging at their mutual foe, his sword raised. They both circled Mortarion like hunting wolves cornering a deer that no longer wanted to run. Their blades were swift as lightning strikes, striking wherever Mortarion’s scythe was not. Even a daemon prince couldn’t fend off two primarchs without showing its back to one of them, and so Mortarion distained blocking their blows. Let them cut him, he thought, for they cannot harm him. Even then, the two primarchs were tiring, the toxins and injuries they had suffered weighing them down, even as Mortarion fed upon the damage inflicted upon him. Fulgrim ducked his blade and plunged the curved laer blade inside the opened ribcage of his brother. He saw something there, and made to call out to Lion, but the Reaper’s fist slammed into his pretty face, sending him sprawling. Before Mortarion could finish Fulgrim, the Lion hacked off the Lord of Death’s arm, sending the hideous limb spiraling away in a tide of blood. From the stump, tentacles sprouted and lashed at the knight primarch hungrily.

“Damn you, why can’t you die?” the Lion cursed aloud as he hewed the writhing daemon limbs.

“His heart! The name! He cannot endure that!” Fulgrim slurred. The scythe slashed across his bicep as he tried to sidestep the daemon’s vicious follow up strike. Fulgrim nevertheless sprang forwards, stabbing through Mortarion’s remaining arm, as the Lion jumped onto the broad shoulders of the towering pillar of corruption. The Lion was thrown off, but not before slitting Mortarion’s blubbery throat. While the daemon prince gagged on his own putrid juices, Fulgrim tackled him bodily. His arm disappeared into Mortarion’s chest, up to the elbow. Mortarion’s severed arm had grown back, and with it he plucked Fulgrim up, and flung him away with a piercing roar. Fulgrim struck the Smog Queen’s throne, smashing it into powder as he landed. But Fulgrim smiled wickedly as he rose again. For in his hand pulsed a great black heart, pulsing with green veins. And upon that heart was etched the one thing that could bind the Lord of Death. His true name.

Mortarion was no more his real name than Aurellian, Lupercal or the Phoenician was the true name of those primarchs. Mortarion was the name of death, but it was a title all the same. But the name, carved there in ancient times by a long-dead nemesis, bore the daemon primarch’s true name. And Fulgrim spoke it aloud. The resultant blast destroyed the heart utterly, and threw Fulgrim to the ground, a smoldering ruin. But the effect upon Mortarion was worse.

Suddenly, his powers were bound, his form fixed. An anchor point, a place in history where Mortarion could be killed. He screamed, his scream undulating and filled with existential agony. He clawed at the gushing wound in his chest, desperately pawing for his vanquished heart. All of a sudden, the Lord of death was all too mortal.

That was when the Lion stepped in front of him, and took off his head with a single backhanded swipe.

“This ends every traitor.”

Outside, the smog was fading, recoiling as its patron daemon was vanquished. This opened the skies to the ordnance waiting in orbit. The Nemenmarines were all too eager to unleash their pinpoint lance strikes on the chaotic ground forces below. Such large targets were easy prey for the waiting fleet, and Mortarion’s forces were soon decimated. The survivors fled to what few space capable vessels they had left. The remnants of the plague fleet fought through the Lion fleet’s blockades, and fled back to the warp.

The palace of bone would be next. The Pentus forces only needed word that the Lion was clear before they could begin their macrocannon onslaught, and end the threat of Smog forever.

Inside, the Lion stood before Fulgrim. Both were wary, both had their swords drawn.

“Are you going to slay me now Lion? I thought you had honor. Such honor, that you cling to it like a shield to shelter behind. I saved you, I aided your Imperium Pentus. Will you let me leave?”

“No. You are a traitor. Once long ago, I thought I could make peace with traitors, but I am older now, and I know that traitors can suffer only one fate.”

Fulgrim spat at the Lion’s feet. “Capture me then, take me to the others. Let them judge me.”

The Lion shook his head, his sword still pointed at Fulgrim. “I do not spare traitors. You were useful to me, but your prowess does not wash away your manifest crimes. Your treason and sedition. They must be punished.”

“Treason? You speak to me of treason? Then what of you, with your Imperium Secundus? You and Roboute with your sneaky little plans.”

“Enough! The Imperium Secundus was a continuation of the Imperium of Man, I was always loyal to the Imperium of Man and the one true ruler of our race!”

Fulgrim paced around the Lion, passing his sword between his hands carefully. He was without armor and drained of much of his essence, and the Lion was without a hand, and he had discarded his ruined helmet. He couldn’t tell how a duel at this moment would end, and this unnerved the usually arrogant duelist.

“And what now? Vulkan’s little enterprise isn’t a continuation of the Imperium is it? I have seen the Smith’s great new civilization with its freedoms and its religions. The Emperor is dead, and now the primarchs rule as they please. I am a traitor, yes, but no more than you,” Fulgrim hissed, expecting the last barb to send the Lion into a rage. Instead, he was quiet. Oddly quiet.

Fulgrim frowned. “You didn’t argue with me. You... wait...” Fulgrim paused, his eyes wide. Then he grinned. “You agree with me. You agree that the Imperium Pentum is a den of traitors too! Oh this is too good!”

Fulgrim raised his arms, beckoning the Lion. “You’ve finally seen the galaxy for what it is. Without the Emperor, what is loyalty? Come, my brother in treachery, come and embrace one of your own.

The Lion stepped forwards, and plunged the Lion sword through Fulgrim’s unprotected chest. Fulgrim blinked in surprise, their faces inches from one another. The Lion ripped the sword upwards, then across, cutting through all the vital organs of the primarch. Fulgrim’s mouth trickled with gore.

“You don’t know me, brother. You never have. The Emperor’s ideals are not dead! Loyalty is everything. Loyalty is worthless if one is only loyal when it suits them to be, when it is convenient. Just because the Emperor is gone, does not give my brothers the right to forsake their vows, their oaths and forsake their Father’s decrees. Not you, not Mortarion, not Vulkan or Russ or Corax. They are useful to me, as you were, but their destruction of the Travesty does not expunge their guilt. And they are guilty, every one. They ignore the teachings of the Emperor, they consort with xenos and spread permissiveness and spare our enemies! Only I keep the faith, me! I am the last loyal son!”

With that, the Lion ripped the sword free, before finally slashing open Fulgrim’s throat.

Drenched in blood, the Lion turned around slowly, and met the horrified gaze of Tsulganor, who had retrieved his hammer. The Lion stepped towards him, and the marine flinched back, raising his hammer warily. The Lion’s expression remained fixed and grim.

“How much did you...?”

“Enough,” growled Tsulganor, his voice quivering with fear and wrath in equal measure.

“Think about what you do next very carefully.”

“I have to inform my Lord Father of this treachery. You know this.”

“I am not a traitor. When the others are gone, when the Imperium is returned to what it once was, you’ll understand.”

Tsulganor gripped his hammer tightly, and fixed the Lion with a tearful scowl, his red eyes smoldering. “I don’t think you know me at all either, my Lord.”

###

The siege of Smog ended with a firestorm, once the Lion and the rest of the armor elements left on the surface were retrieved. Cyclonic torpedoes turned the surface to a rolling maelstrom of molten rock and scourging volcanic surges. Tsulganor, killed by Mortarion during the initial storming of the palace, was afforded the highest posthumous honors possible within the Imperium Pentum.

The Lion’s fleet left the world to burn, and he set out to rejoin the Pentum fleets in their war of annihilation against all those who were heretics and accursed. Little could any of them realize the roiling tides of anger beneath the Lion’s cold, unreadable features.

Section 52: The God of Dust: The Battle for Tallarn

[A Note from Volsanius Greal, Compiler: The conclusion of the war against Ahriman’s Dominion of Change is a battle which was not widely known about on a galactic scale. Even searching through Vasiri the watcher’s psychic dreamscapes yields little of use, as around the same time (roughly late M56, if my records are correct) as the siege of the Black Library by the dreadful Draziin-maton. After the opening to this section, I will simply be quoting wholesale from contemporary sources who were present at the battle. The writer of the opening, as will soon become apparent, was not privy to the subsequent sections I am adding in here today...]

[[EXCERPT ONE: ‘A Conclusive History of the War of Change, and the Identity of the Real Victors.’ By Wiltem Cazzerite, historian of the Fourth Radius Research facility, of the Interorb, Blessed be our Outer Queen]]

Who won the War of Change?

This has been a question which has baffled historians and psyker-scholars ever since records of this ancient, near-forgotten battle were uncovered in the great masses of documents brought to us in the second and third waves of refugees.

It is fundamentally a vexing question to answer, chiefly because the war seems to lack a military objective. By all accounts, Braiva defeated the Dominion of Change the year before, in the masterful Battle of a Thousand Emperors. For certain, we have extensive, reliable records for this battle. Through a masterstroke of interstellar sleight of hand, Temestor Braiva, the Lord Obscurus of the Imperium Pentum and the High Commander of what Legend would later call ‘Braiva’s Best’, had managed to outmaneuver and conquer the thousand warring petty Emperors of the former Theologian Union. He had also allied himself with both the Lychen and Praetorian Empires, and the human fleet thus gathered was the largest deployed since the fall of the Imperium of Mankind.

This was arrayed against the forces of the sorcerer Ahriman, the last of the petty Emperors of the Dominion it seems, who had chosen Tallarn as his throneworld. An attack by several companies of astartes commanderies had been broken over Tallarn by this Ahriman, who had some source of incredible power on the planet’s surface, apparently a Cube-shaped fortress steeped in high magicks and techno-sorcery.

Despite Ahriman’s evident military hardiness and power, the scale of Braiva’s Armada (which I maintain is likely a hyperbolic number embellished by subsequent scholars) seems like overkill. This would turn out not to be the case, as the invasion fleet suffered setback after setback, including troublesome warp translations, maintenance problems and, most disastrously of all, the death of their great general Temestor a day before they reached Tallarn.

The siege should have been routine, but most contemporary writers I can find begin to go off on flights of fancy, depicting outlandish, insane sights, and events which made no logical sense.

I speculate that-

[[EXCERPT TWO : Diary fragment. Author unknown. ]] I am afraid.

This is rare for me. I had escaped Ahriman decades, centuries ago. The things he did to me will haunt me through all the eternity of my life. If I could, I would have fled to the farthest corners of the galaxy, and let all these egomaniacs, tyrants and monsters kill themselves. Kage keeps telling me that option is still open.

“Say the word Crol, and I’ll steal you a shuttle, and slit the throat of anyone that gets in our way. I’d kill the world if us three get to live through this.”

The three of us; he means the baby. If I run, if I am selfish, I can save the baby. But I can’t do that. I’m not built like Kage. I used to be, before Revelation woke the hero in me again. I made a promise, even if it was just in my dreams. Ahriman cannot rise. Revelation needs a chance to rise, and to reach the Well of Eternity before the walls of reality finally collapse. If they do, nowhere in the galaxy will be safe for us.

I told Kage that, and he understood. He has been having dreams too. Dreams of feathers and blood, but he won’t tell me more than that. Can I stand to be a mother again? To outlast my child and watch them wither and die as an old man, while I persist? I have no answer for that yet. I can’t think of the future. I have to think of the moment. There is nothing beyond Ahzek Ahriman.

The warp transit has been hell in this dark, cold shell, deep in the bowels of the ship. When we translate in system, we have perhaps an hour to reach the shrouded shuttle, and make our way through the naval battle, to the surface. If Ahriman notices us before I reach the cube, we are all, as dear old Ollanious might have said, fucked royally.

The sudden jolt, and the end of the mournful warp shrieks, told us the journey was ended.

Kage hauled me to my feet, and we ran.

[[EXCERPT THREE : From ‘Memoirs on Apocalypse’, by Admiral Wellsley of the Praetorian High Void Fleet]]

Commanding a navy, as I have said in many previous chapters, is not merely require willpower, intelligence or strategic brilliance. It takes the mind of an administrator, a governor of whole worlds, to keep a fleet running smoothly, for every frigate is a suburb, every cruiser a town, and every capital ship and command station a vast metropolis, full of men and women, factories and farms, laboratories and churches, homes and garrisons and gunnery decks. Millions upon millions to command and to understand, as cities go to war with one another over millions of kilometers.

Admiralty of a modest fleet is a goliath undertaking. For the battle in the wizard’s jaws, in the Tallarn-system, I was tasked with commanding a fleet of one million of ships.

One. Million. I still can scarce conceive of the gargantuan armada I was entrusted with. There were a five hundred ad hoc fleets from the petty emperors of the Dominion of Change that had turned to our side, alongside the diamond hard core of Tyme’s Absolution and Braiva’s attendant fleet, the hundred jagged prows of the uncouth Lychen Butcher Navy, and of course our own Royal Praetorian High Void Fleet.

The Legendary Temestor Braiva was dead, assassinated during our miraculous warp jump to Tallarn, leaving his son Obediah Braiva to take up his father’s sword. But the boy was no void commander, and thus when we reached the materium once more, it was decided unanimously by the war council that I should organize the armada in the coming battle. Lector Ikriskiall of the Gama-Meson psyker-warriors insisted on assigning me an honourguard of his most potent warriors, to defend my body and mind from the predations of the Sorcerer King.

We returned to realspace with a thousand less ships than when we entered. The warp howled and shrieked and tore at us mercilessly, puckering up and driving our navigators insane. Several of Praetoria’s most excellent navigators were turned to soup in their thrones, such was the maelstrom. So close did we sail in formation, many of the smaller frigates crashed into one another and burned, while others were torn away from the warp bubble surrounding out fleet entirely. Some say these ships were disrupted by Ahriman and cast into the deepest vaults of the warp, or else consumed by daemonkind, but I cannot say. Every one of my many fleets suffered losses. Those that survived looked ravaged. Even my ship, War’s Spite, bore and ugly scar across her glittering golden prow (a slight I meant to avenge).

Once back in the tranquility of the materium, I set to work organizing my fleet. Firstly, I had promethean engineers construct a domed hololithic display, from where I could commune with by two hundred vice-Admirals, who would in turn relay orders to their own captains, and thus maintain control over the entire unwieldy force.

After two days of careful wrangling, coercion and clenched-teeth diplomacy, I changed the armada from a loose nebula of divergent fleets, into a coherent structure. The formation was shaped like a lance one light minute long, banded by a dozen dense rings of thorns, ready to sweep into flanking positions from every angle in the tactical engagement sphere.

The Lychen Butcher Navy were composed of vessels almost exclusive tailored for frontal assaults, festooned with forward facing weapons with engines over-taxed to the point of disaster, yet undoubtedly fast. Jurrasek, the Lychen King, had a flagship that dwarfed all but Tyme’s Absolution. Meglodon it was called; made from the hollowed out husk of some space monster (legend would have it was one of those extinct ‘Tyranid’ creatures from the dawn of history) which was then clad in adamantium and bronze, and filled with cavernous abattoirs and troop holds, gun batteries and boarding torpedoes. The Lychens were the bloody iron tip of my lance.

The body of the lance was formed by the High Void Fleet, escorting the gigantic carriers of the fleet in their hundreds of thousands. Just behind the Lychen tip I deployed the landers and planetstrikers; once the tip pierced the body of the beast, the ground forces would flow into the wound like debilitating poison, crippling planetside defense lasers and support infrastructure. Obediah and the Heroes of Macharius would lead the ground assault, and storm the Black Cube, the heart of Ahriman’s empire of fiction and change.

The rings girdling the lance were swarms of frigates and squadrons of destroyers, constantly buzzing in and out of formation as they made their crazed patrols between lance and ring.

At the rear we towed nineteen Star forts, and even more orbital stations, waiting for deployment over Tallarn.

Tyme’s Absolution, and the venerable flagships of the Heroes of Macharius took pride of place at the heart of the fleet, serving as logistical hubs and arming stations for the fleet around them.

This was a fleet which could mass-scatter entire planets and swallow whole moons without noticing. It was a chimera of conjoined navies, destined to only hold together for a single battle, but a force the likes of which the galaxy has seen but twice before. No convention navy could have withstood us, withstood me.

But what we faced, in high orbit around Tallarn, was anything but conventional. I have seen wonders and horrors in my time, sights that would turn the hair of a space marine white with fright, or burn the mind of a krork to ash. But this was so... incongruous, so bizarre, it will stay with me for all time.

Flames of every hue flowed through the clouds of Tallarn, bewitching the eye and stopping the heart. Impossibly, lightning filled the void, striking at the accretion disk of ruined starships that orbited the warp-tainted world. There were... faces, boiling through the clouds, hundreds of miles across. No, not faces, one face multiplied a thousand fold as it rippled through the firmament.

“Apotheosis... Dissolution...” my psyker guardians muttered, clutching their force swords that little bit tighter before this spectacle.

My bridge crew were dumbstruck, my hololithic admirals likewise lost for words. Jurassek though grinned, and beat his chest like a jungle ape, eager to face a rival male in a challenge. Slowly, the fleet continued its advance, closing the distance hour by hour. As we did so, some of the space debris began to coalesce, binding together like the formation of a planet.

But this was no planet. It was as if the hulks of smashed cruisers and gutted battle barges were molding, coiling to form a statue, a dread idol of Ahzek Ahriman, the Lord of the Rubric himself; the same great horned helm, the same T-shaped barbute visor, the same colossal staff. Except, this statue, ten kilometers tall, could move. It raised a palm.

“Halt. I have forgiven your trespasses, but only to a point. The mice may steal from my pantry, but they may not feast at my table.”

The voice was smooth and toweringly arrogant, and it echoed in every mortal skull like a hammer blow. Even I heard the voice, though it was dulled by the psyker wardens about me.

“It is all parlor tricks; a magicians cloak to hide his frailty!” I bawled, trying to regain control of the situation. The fleet hesitated, cowed by their enemy’s power.

Ahriman’s idol pointed towards me, as if it were singling me out specifically to be gifted. Eldritch energies wreathed the bridge in fire, as the Gamma-Meson guardsmen began their battle cants, whirling their force blades like warding shields. But still I felt the leeching pressure on my very soul, and an insidious whisper, asking me.

“Is this a parlor trick, little man? How frail am I?”

I truly believe I would have died then, on my own bridge, pawing at my throat like a drowning man. But, as fate or the Throne decreed it, in that moment, the Captain of the Stormchild, one of the High Void Fleet’s silent grey battlecruisers, chose to break formation, and take the Stormchild all ahead full. Lances scything, dorsal batteries flaring, the battlecruiser charged the idol, burning away molten chunks of the hateful giant. Distracted, the giant released me.

Stormchild was struck by warp lightning and tainted asteroids, that ripped through its hull and gutted its galleys, but it carried on.

Its escorting frigate was pulled apart like an exploded diagram, as if some impossibly vast hand had peeled it apart with an artisan’s deftness. But still Stormchild charged on.

Even with the bridge aflame and its lances torn away, it managed to fire its final armament. The novashell was the size of a building, and crossed the void at a high fraction of the light speed barrier. When the projectile struck, the flash was blinding. Moments later, the idol doubled up in pain.

Seizing the moment, I rose from by throne and ordered the ships to fire at once.

You have never seen a million ships firing at once. Indeed, if you did see such a thing, it would be the last thing your tortured retinas would ever see. Mercifully, there were no portholes on the War’s Spite’s bridge, nestled in the heart of the ship, and so I only felt the ship shuddering as it unleashed five throbbing volleys, joining its fire to the fleets.

The idol was destroyed, and the debris rings blazed like a newborn stellar cluster. With the void ablaze, the lance thrust into the burning crucible. The flames and the debris were alive with fury, coiling around my ships, deliberately colliding with those that got too close. Soon, my best laid plans, sketched out over a fortnight before, were as dust on the wind.

The enemy was not an opposing fleet or a rival armed force. The fleet battled a snarl of disrupted realspace itself, a crawling hell of semi-sentient hulks and ghost ships that grew weapons like rotten meat grew mould. It was like trying to wrestle a forest fire, or engage in a swordsman’s duel with a thunderstorm.

It was madness, it was chaos. Ships rolled and banked in the upper atmosphere, desperately firing in all directions to rid themselves of the strangling coils of sentient deck plating that tried to constrict them. Ships used to dueling at light minute ranges were engaged at ramming speed. Reports flooded in of enemy boarding actions; blank-eyed Tallarn meat puppets charging armsmen positions with suicide belts and demo charges, pink daemons capering with the entrails of weeping men, gold and sapphire giants marching in immortal lockstep, bolters blazing and swords methodically carving through ratings and soldiers alike.

Some of the fleet’s captains had been driven mad, and fired upon whoever got closest to them, friend of foe. Other ships from the conquered petty emperors, threw in their lot with Ahriman out of fear, and attacked the rearguard. These few were destroyed by their fellows, and their wreckage was in turn animated by Ahriman and his Cabal to become new foes for us to face.

Tyme’s Absolution was doing the best out of all of us, its bombardment cannons designed for close range.

Any enemies trying to board that battle barge found fully equipped regiments of Steel Legion veterans, Macharian Lion Legionnaires, Elysium Drop troops, Lussorian Narc Warriors in their proto power armor and the lethal Ryzan-Catachan Plasma Commandoes to greet them. The Lychen too revelled in the carnage, their modified prows simply ramming their way through the living wreckage. The Lychen met their boarders well too. The bloody halls of those haemovore savages ran with more blood than the Lychen knew what to do with. Their stocks of meat would never run low in such a butcher’s yard.

By this point, my only concern was clearing a path for the landing ships. I ordered the captain to punch through, and the War’s Spite, like a gladius through meat, did just that. In its wake the drop ships descended through the bruised clouds, to an uncertain future below.

All I could do then was pray to the Golden King of all Humanity to watch over them.

[[EXCERPT FOUR: Untitled Piece. Author Unknown ]]

The whole world wanted us dead. But we were soldiers of the Imperium Pentus; everyone wanted us dead. We had left pieces of ourselves at every battlefield for a thousand light years. We were the tempered Edge of the Steel, and we do not break, we lacerate. The moment I landed I shat my breeches however, and vomited into my rebreather. The air was not just poisonous, it was filled with madness. I was lucky. Some folks turned inside out, or twisted their own heads off and kicked them away, the head laughing manically as it fell.

Fire-breathing worms burrowed through the multi-colored sand dunes, and spiders clambered over the clouds, vomited white muck which made predatory trees grow in the bellies of the dead. Many eyed things slavered and lashed at us. Our tanks broke them apart, we bayoneted the spiders, and the artillery burst the bellies of the worms. They were killing us with every breath, every sweep of a bladed arm, but we were killing them too.

Somehow, Obediah got through to us on the radio. He was wearing his father’s uniform, and rode atop his super heavy tank, Macharius’ scepter in his hand. We managed to fight in formation, even though the landscape kept shifting beneath us, seeking to drown us in ash and sand. We were to converge on the great black block, which sat at the top of an insurmountable hillock. The edges of the dunes kept falling away, refusing to stick to the cube.

The Lussorian false-space marines fought as hard as their namesakes, clambering over mountains of Tallarn dead. The poor Tallarn folk were dead-eyed puppets, fed into the grinder, grasping at us with bladed fingers, that we neatly cut off.

The Chevantai wove a ballet of death around them, their lithe forms drifting weightlessly between combats, long laser lances neatly killing where they may. Plasma Commandoes scoured the way ahead with green fire, unrelenting and methodical as clocks. The Lychen... they fought with a red miasma of gory foam about them, heedless and hungry for flesh. Any flesh.

I giggled when I saw row upon row of redcoat Praetorians in their pith helmets. They were like stiff ribbons of crimson in a sea of boiling soup, straight where everything else was curly. It was only when they fired, row after row, that the power of their firing drill became apparent, chopping down whole tides of Tallarn folk like wheat before a scythe.

But Ahriman couldn’t be finished this way. He had his own terrible things to set on us. The rubricae were automatons of sapphire and gold, and nothing we did mattered to them. Our lasrifles were useless, and our heavy weapons only slowed them down. Every time they fell, they always rose again. Their bolters killed more of us than anything. Some of the rubricae looked like commandery astartes, only their helmets were filled with the dead light of Ahriman’s enchantment, goaded forwards by his cabal of sorcerers.

Ahriman’s image itself, fashioned out of blue flame, wandered the battlefield lazily, languidly gifting anyone nearby with instant death. With a wave of his hand, he swatted scores of men to the ground, burnt to a cinder in moments. Nothing could harm these apparitions, for they were not the true demi-god. That lay within the cube. The cube we could reach.

There were other things too. Bigger than ogryns, they were faster and stronger too. The golarch were like mindless astartes imbued with strength beyond conception. Only the artillery could bring them down, and not before the giants tore apart tanks and infantry with equal ease.

I was distracted by one of the golarch abominations pulling Duc de Aronelle’s legs off when I died. I looked away once, and a rubricae put a bolt shell through me. I burst apart like a grape.

“Clumsy me,” I giggled as my face fell away from the bone.

[[EXCERPT FIVE: Diary Fragment. Author Unknown. ]]

Braiva’s Best were a distraction. That’s all I intended for them, though it pains me to admit that. Something to catch Ahriman’s gaze as I put the knife in.

We were close now. Kage was almost carrying me at this point up the dunes. Pregnancy and running was never going to be a realistic outcome. Ahriman couldn’t see me. I had aided him in the construction of his cube, or his god engines, and I knew the back doors and hidden alcoves in the psychic architecture. And where I opened the doors, I left them open. I broke his seals, each just a fractional amount. Nothing he might spot in his mania, but enough for two souls to split through and leave a weeping wound behind.

This route, there were just a few Tallarn puppets opposing them, and Kage put them down with his pistol with the casual ease of a natural born killer.

We were running out of time. I could feel Ahzek on the cusp of transcendence. More than daemonhood, this was godhood. And with it, one step further to dissolution for all. I could taste Ahriman’s name on the tongue, on the tongue of every sentient being.

I fumbled with the invisible black door of the cube, remembering the codes I had inputted two lifetimes ago. He had changed them, but not enough. Ahriman in his towering arrogance hadn’t considered I would dare return.

We were in. The riotous colors outside were absent inside. Inside the cube, it was acrid light and long inky shadows, cast by exotic machineries all bound together by umbilical cords and human sinew. It was like being inside a daemon’s clock, a device of impossible complexity. Amidst this machinery, I saw the tell tale form of webway portals. They looked like the human webway project, their edges too definite and blunt to be eldar. “Why of course it is Crolomere,” Ahriman purred. “What my father ruined with his bumbling weakness, I have completed. Upon my ascension, I will stream through the webway, to all corners of the galaxy to proclaim my majesty. And the universe shall weep with joy, at the fulfillment of prophecy.”

His voice was like ice water, and froze me to the spot.

The lights banished all shadow inside the cube. Rubricae emerged from all around, encircling us in a wall of sapphire and gold. Behind them, Ahriman’s sorcerers emerged, clutching their staffs like spears. Ahriman himself wore no armor, or even clothes, and glided weightlessly towards them calmly, arms outstretched. He was a giant, swollen to primarch scale now, his old armor orbiting him like moons about a gas giant. He was beautiful and terrible to behold.

“Did you truly think I would not notice your progress, in my own inner sanctum? Or that you were lowering my ward spells? What do you hope to achieve? I am beyond even grandfather, the anathema now. I see all, I know all, and I will know more. I am paradox and unity, love and horror, I will be everything at once and ever shifting. I topple Tzeentch, I vanquish Lorgar. There are none who can st-”

“Oh shut the fuck up,” Kage spat. Ahriman paused in disbelief.

I looked to Kage in horror. He just shrugged. “What? He was going on and on.”

Ahzek raised his hand... then one finger, and slowly drew it across his throat. Kage fell then, clutching his slit throat desperately, blood dribbling between fingers.

I screamed, but Ahriman sealed my mouth. One of the larger rubricae took up position beside its master, watching dispassionately as she suffered

“Why are you so afraid? That mortal was always going to die? But you cannot die perpetual,” he purred.

I tried to hide my next thought. I couldn’t. Tears came unbidden to my eyes.

“Ahh... but the bastard in your belly... you fear that is quite killable, hmm?”

He heard my next thought. “Who are you praying too? All the gods are dead or slaves, save me. Are you praying to me? How sweet,” he said, leaning down to touch my cheek. “I see into your soul, as I see everything.”

The giant rubricae exploded then, and from it rose a copper-skinned titan from my nightmares.

“Not everything, my son,” Magnus the Red explained, as a crimson burst of fire swept Ahriman from his feet. The rubricae did nothing, frozen in inaction between two masters. Released from my spell, I crawled away. Crawling towards the heart of the machine.

I couldn’t look back, but I heard the flaring of the two demi-gods, and saw glimpses of red and blue flames dueling, like lightning before the thunderclap. If I witnessed the sorcerers exchange, I feared I would be cast into oblivion, or worse.

“I will become a god! I have already surpassed you!”

“You prattle like a child Ahriman. A child with a gun, who does not understand what trigger he is pulling. I am here to save you.”

“Save me? Then who will save you? I will devour you father, consume the red and end this charade!”

The two warring essences fought on every plane, flowing between walls and through times, killing Tallarn and birthing new worlds in forgotten timelines. They wrestled as giant men, and writhed like paints in a watercolor. Ideas were weaponized and sharpened to points, and songs were sung that unraveled spacetime around them.

Kages followed me, crawling along the floor on his elbows, clamping his throat closed. He left a red smear as he did so. I blinked back tears as I worked, carefully tearing pages form the rubric tome, plugged into the heart of the cube. I read them in every connotation, before tearing them up. Fleshy cables were rerouted, and psychic complexes altered and remade anew. I knew what Ahriman had done, because I was the one who showed him how to do it. I felt a familiar tightening pain as i worked. Not now... do not come now...

Ahriman’s cabal seemed at last to notice Kage and I, and the threat we posed. The rubricae turned from their dueling masters, and advanced upon us. They couldn’t risk shooting the machine, and so drew their energized khopesh blades as they closed in on me.

No one save me noticed that the webway portals had activated. With the psychic wards lowered, the cube was open to the webway. The black armored nightmares which burst forth from the portals were wreathed in fire, and their faces were masked in bone. Leading the charge of the Legion of the Damned charged a howling berserker astartes of Fenris, with the black axe Morkai held aloft. Upon his shoulders sat two giggling children with dark pigtails and pretty dresses. As the wolf killed, they laughed and braided his shaggy mane. A sorcerer turned with staff raised, but too late to avoid the blow which bisected him from neck to navel.

“Revelation! We are the rout!” howled the space wolf.

“We are twins!” added one of the girls, unhelpfully.

I ducked behind the machine as the two breeds of deathless horror tried in vain to kill one another. Ethereal blades cut into rune-etched armor, and khopesh blades passed harmlessly through incorporeal forms.

Somewhere near, or eons distant, I heard Magnus shriek and scream, his voice then fading away. All eyes save mine fell upon Ahriman then, who held aloft a blazing red eye, wrenched from the skull of his once invincible father.

Time slowed then, at that moment of convergence.

Ahriman swept the apex twins aside with a gesture.

The space wolf threw Morkai.

And I grasped a fetid cord of sacrificial muscle, and I gnawed through it like a dog. The world froze. I felt a billion billion voices, neverborn and never to be born, scream in one mighty voice, before being silenced. I felt the souls of thousands, ensnared in a crystal trap, howl in elation and freedom. I felt all of Ahriman’s godlike power, all his raw warp energy, pour into the rubric.

But not to enhance it. I had seen to that.

It was to reverse it.

The entire world shuddered, as more contractions wracked my belly.

The fire in the rubricae’s eyes faded. They all, as one, staggered onto one knee.

Ahriman screamed. It was disturbingly shrill and piercing for a space marine. His luminous form faded, until he was merely a naked man on his knees.

He locked eyes with me and through the pain, I stared right back.

I have never seen an astartes look so afraid. He was weeping, as his flesh began to desiccate and crack, slowly at first, then more swiftly.

“All... is... dust...” he wheezed, as his lips began to dissolve.

“Not all,” I spat through bloody lips. “Only you.”

Ahzek Ahriman collapsed then, into naught but drifting ash.

I didn’t watch what happened next. I vaguely heard the concussive boom of bolters, and the alarmed shouts of the dying, but it was all far away and distant. All I could focus on was the baby spilling from me. It was stuck. It couldn’t break free. In pain and fear I continued to shriek.

Kage saw me, saw the fear writ large across my face. I knew what he was going to do before he did it.

“Don’t,” I breathed weakly.

He didn’t listen. He unclasped his hands from about his throat, and reached for me. The blood flowed in a tide from him, but even as his life and strength were failing, he pulled the child free, cutting away the umbilical with his combat knife. He slipped the little boy into my arms. I saw him smile before he fell on his face, and moved no more.

My head reeled, my mind swimming through treacle. The cube was fading away, leaving me in the dark. I heard the flutter of great wings. Pale white feathers, stained in blood fell all around me.

I looked up blearily, and saw the most beautiful face in the world. The man smiled at me.

“I know you,” I said with a drunken grin.

A vast hand wiped away my tears. “A blood sacrifice, shed in love and honor was needed to bring me...us here. What grace is left of me is now His. My nephew, in life and death.... Take him from this place Crolomere. Take him through the winding path.”

“The webway? Who... who are you? Tell me your name,” I asked, as the figure began to fade.

The man’s perfect smile was the last thing to vanish, and it said. “I wish we had met sister. Perhaps things would have been different, if we had known our sisters...”

Strong hands carried me after that, and I was led into the portal, and beyond the materium entirely...