Editing Warhammer 60K: Age of Dusk (Continued) (section)

==Additional Background Section 40: Battle is Joined==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">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.<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

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 thermonuclear 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 disdain. 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 magazine 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 armoured 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 armour, 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 manoeuvres 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 turnignt hem 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 honour. 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 defence 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 humourlessly 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-psyk 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 armour 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 armour 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 honourable man. He masked this honour 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 wartorn 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 utilised 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 manoeuvring thrusters. The fraternity were 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 defence 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, Braiva’ best were already upon them. His fleet, a sone, 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 utilised 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 assaltants.
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-psyk required perfect concentration to be effective. If they got too over-excited or wrathful, their conjurations might fail. Thus, sombrely, 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 disembowelled. 

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-armoured 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 Judgement; 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 defence lasers planet side 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 defence fleet crumbled into a disordered retreat. They were immobilised 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 favour 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 armour before they could gun down the infantry, and the Vashiri held up any ranged support from returning the favour and striking at the Commandoes. The Vashiri were protected by battle-psyk 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 specialisation 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 defences were neutralised 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 sombre 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 radicalised 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 who 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 ritualised 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 gruelling 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 levelled. 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 favour. 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 centre 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 categorise 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 civilisation. 

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 defences, long assumed to be dormant, activated at the approach of primordial force sof 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, pulverised 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 colour, 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 colour.

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 kilometre-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 kilometre 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 defences turned the transports to smouldering 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 pulverised the heavy armour 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 battlelines, were actually being drawn into perfectly timed ambushes by their colourful 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 dameons 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 elda rof 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 centre 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 molluscs. The colossal fat abominations tipped voer 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 cauterising 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 mouldering 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,a nd the siege of Biel-tan would escalate. The portals to the maiden and exodite worlds, closed by the Biel-tan elda 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 civilisations, 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 Cyclopean 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 were 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 moulded by the preconceptions of Khaine’s mortal servants. Bloodletters started to be born into the materium shaped like bestial aspect warriors, compelte with sculptural alien armour that glowed with internal fire. Great dameons 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 channelled the berserker rage of khorne into a focussed, 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 realised 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, centred 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 honour 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 armour 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 organise 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 thye 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, centred on the battlesuit. Your dreadnought armour 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 untilt hey 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 demoralising 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, who 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, thebattlesuit 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 rof 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 cauterised 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 psonic-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 temrinators 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 intot heir 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 civilisations 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 nd 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 exhile fromt he 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 banner sof 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 liminal 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 hollow0eyed. 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 civilisations. The necron defences 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 vaporising 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. Bt 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 defence. The orbital defence 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 defence 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 pulverised 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 bio-transference 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 realised 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 necorn 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 was 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 int he 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 realised 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 repair.

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.
</div>
</div>