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

==Section 47: “When the Bells of Eternity Sound,Reality Quakes”: The Travesty Burns==




<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">At Corbellus, five Primarchs breached the borders of the Imperium of Travesties, and there they brought battle to one of the greatest military machines in the entire galaxy. Though victory was inconclusive, they were nevertheless sundered and divided. But, this was not defeat for the Primarchs Pentus, but rather the means for the next phase of the war; the razing of the Travesty itself.

Corax, who had entered in the northern border with Pentus, ran amok amongst the worlds of the dark Imperium. In some places, he inspired uprisings against the tyrannical monsters who ruled these worlds. In other places, he simply rose up with his Sons of Corax, and massacred planetary populations too odious and warp-twisted to be allowed to live. But even as Decimus’ Midnight Clad and the vast cultist navies of the Word bearers scoured these worlds of resistance, Corax had already moved on.<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

He struck at supply lines and logistical trains. He ambushed supply fleets, full of valuable slave galleys and daemon fodder, destroying these fleets before they could rush to support whatever demented local warlords demanded their aid. Lash in one hand, crackling claws upon the other, Corax was a living shadow god, grinning with righteous glee as he enacted his destructive policies. It had been so long since the primarchs had had the freedom to unleash such unfettered carnage upon an empire, without thought to consequences. Every world was corrupt, and almost every inhabitant of that warp storm-wracked multi-Segmentum empire was a monster, a sniveling coward or a conniving villain.

Corax fought hundreds of battles and wars with the daemon-blooded warlords of the Northern Marches. Entire volumes of novels and histories could be written from these wars. He was the elusive Lord of Ravens. He was hunted by almost every commander of the north at some point. Even Mortarion and Angron chased him at one point.

Angron had been dragged north unexpectedly, along with his fleet, by the spontaneous actions of two line Sergeants of the Fire beasts and Nemenmarines Commanderies, who had inherited the command of the battlecruiser Crato. Upon fleeing Corbellus, Crato had been speared by one of the Conqueror’s mighty harpoons. Like a fisherman dragged underwater by a struggling fish, Angron’s flagship had plunged into the warp alongside them.

In the sea of souls, the two tethered ships span out of control; Gellar fields flared and rolled around them like exotic bubbles formed in tar. Unreal winds wracked both ships, and pulled apart sections of hull. Many of Angron’s escorts, who had heedlessly followed int he choppy warp wake of the Conqueror, were struck by the flailing battleship, and cast off into the deep. Some emerged sixty years prior to the Pentus war, their crews fused to consoles and their decks haunted by fiends. Others emerged into the starless oblivion at the end of time, and froze like brittle ice sculptures, or were devoured by the sleepless entities that dwelt at the cusp of Heat Death. 

A few managed to occupy the same collective, turbulent Gellar sphere which enclosed Crato and Conqueror. One such vessel was the light cruiser Red Maul, a dauntless class corrupted by the Berserkers, and adorned with an ossified outer shell of frozen bones, and was crowned by a rearing, tusked horse sculpture of basalt and adamantium. The commander of this vessel ordered it to fire upon the Crato, heedless of the fact such an action could cause the destruction of the conqueror. The captain of Red Maul even ignored Angron’s deafening warp hails demanding they cease fire. Several times, the Red Mual tried to gain firing solutions, but fortunately for all involved, it continued to lose its aim, as it continually crashed against the cliff-like flanks of Conqueror. The captan of the Red Maul, furious at his crew’s failing, murdered half of them with his whirring chainaxe, and had the rest of the crew chained to their posts, and goaded with barbed spears until they regained a firing solution.

Meanwhile, Angron had begun to send boarding parties to the Crato, insane as this sounds. Boarding torpedoes would be have been pointless, and teleportation would have zero accuracy as the two vessels were spinning out of control, like two toy boats caught inside a washer’s cylinder. Angron had his men invade the Crato on foot, charging along the mooring chain of the harpoon itself. Angron, tot he collective disbelief of all involved, had infantry march through the void inside the Gellar field, at the heart of a warp transit. Berserkers mag-locked their boots to the chain as they surged across the three hundred kilometre long chain. Meanwhile, his mortal troops hurriedly dragged on void suits and some even remembered to hook themselves to the chain as they rushed out of airlocks like the bloodmad fools they were. Others hadn’t even bothered to put on their helmets, and rushed into the airless void screaming praises to the blood god, even as their eyes burst with red viscera, and their hearts ruptured in their chests. Possessed marines simply crew their talons and scrambled, ape-like across the chain, their bodies long-since devoid of mortal requirements. Angron ordered his men to enslave the crew, and force the Crato to drop out of the warp. Once in realspace and once the Conqueror was stabilised, Angron would then kill every single one of the Crato’s crew, on his own, with his bare hands, as his khornate minions bore witness.

That was the plan, but the Crato’s commanders had other ideas. When the berserkers neared the Crato end of the chain, they found they were not alone. Squads of Fire Beasts and Nemenmarines had also moved out onto the chain. But they had deployed there on the orders of castron of the Nemenmarines. His Fire Beast brother, sergeant Alistor, led the squads from the front, engaging the Berserkers at range with bolters, missiles and silent lascannons. The battle was fought in eerie silence, the only din coming from the screaming inside the helmets of the berserkers, and the laboured breathing of every warrior present. The... unusual terrain of the battlefield was treacherous, and many a combatant who missed their footing even slightly found themselves spinning off into the churning void of the Gellar field.

Despite the desperate carnage, Alistor held the khornate host back, but he could not press ahead even an inch. Fortunately, this was intentional, for their plan was not to invade the Conqueror with barely six squads of Nova Astartes; Alistor was widely believed to be deranged by Castron, but he was not so insane as to face down a Primarch and his hellish legions, virtually on his own. A Nemenmarine techmarine called Vormays, and his team of servitors and void-suited serfs, were installing a device inside the Conqueror’s harpoon chain, even as Alistor’s men fought tooth and nail to keep him unmolested by the enemy. The Crato was not designed with rear facing ordnance, and thus could not strike at the Conqueror or its chain directly. However, Castron had meticulously planned a means of escaping both Angron and the rapidly-collapsing bubble dof realspace around them. Vormays had liberated two macrocannon shells from the gun decks, and his servitors had brought it to the rear of the vessel, and onto the chain itself. There, the techmarine began hastily devising a time bomb, which was to go off the moment Castron disengaged the warp drives, and breached back into realspace, down to the second.

So Alistor fought on, falling back barely inches at a time; each inch accompanied by an appropriate toll in traitor blood. When his bolter was spent, he clamped it to his thigh, and fought the traitors with his chainsword, swinging it double-handedly, like some demented huscarl of a forgotten age. But it was not enough time. Vormays’s trigger mechanism was almost completed, but the techmarine confessed he didn’t have time to perfect the chrono device. Vormays ordered Alistor to fall back to the Crato, as the priest of machines tirelessly worked to complete his weapon. Only reluctantly did Alistor agree to finally pull back, enacting a fighting withdrawal across the chain, back towards the Crato.

As Vormays finished the bomb, his H grade servitors held back the gory tide of berserkers with picks and drills, spinning saws and plasma cutters.

“Acting-captain Castron; I shall detonate precisely when you give the vox signal,” Vormays explained over the vox.

“Understood,” was all Castron replied.

“Your sacrifice will be remembered forever brother,” Alistor promised down his own vox channel, beating his chest with his fist. “There will be feasts in your honour Vormays, this I promise you, on my life and the honour oft he Fire Beasts.”

“That is of little comfort to me at all, Alistor. I’m not particularly fond of any of you. Try not to squander the death I will spare you today. Vormays out.”

Vormays was as good as his word. As Castron ordered the ship to drop out of the warp, Vormays, even as his servo arms grappled with the minotaur-like leader of Angron’s boaring party, detonated his bomb with a resigned sigh.

The blast was like a newborn sun had sprung into life for a moment, between the two capital ships. The blast utterly shattered the Gellar field. Simultaneously, it flung the Conqueror off into the impossible swirling of the warp, and launched the Crato forwards through the puckered realspace breach, on a wave of plasma fire. The aperture was so narrow, the crato lost half of its sensor towers and many of its manoeuvring thrusters, as it was squeezed through a slavering maw of unreal daemonstuff, like a baby being painfully birthed, blinking, into the world.

Unfortunately, the afterbirth of this pregnancy included another vessel. The Red Maul exited the warp only a dozen hours after Crato, and already its commander had picked up their scent. His orders were simple and well known to his crew, for he had been screaming them at the top of his lungs for hours; 

“KILL! MAIM! BURN! KILL! MAIM! BURN! KILL! MAIM! BURN! KILL! MAIM! BURN!”

Conqueror emerged many lightyears from Crato, several sectors distant. Angron’s host had been destroyed in the tumult, leaving him churning in the warp, searching out a new host he could inhabit, preferably close to another warzone, so he could vent his frustration out on one of his hated brothers. It transpired that Corax was the closest brother, and soon Angron surged back into reality with a host of daemons at his back. The little Raven would not escape him.

Elsewhere, across the Travesty, worlds burned and Primarchs warred. Civilisaitons were toppled, and the unfettered Primarchs ran amok amongst this diseased realm. Russ, aboard Sleipnir, washed away the shame of his failing at Corbellus in a tide of fire and blood. His Rout once again became the executioners of old, destroying worlds so thoroughly and so meticulously, that nothing could live upon the blasted worlds that he made war upon. The Travesty was maleficarum, all of it, and he would see it all burn. However, one of his primary goals was locating Fenris, which had fallen under siege many millennia ago. No word had come from Fenris, and none of the chaos commanders he captured and tortured knew where fenris was, even after his Rune Priests pulled apart their minds to learn their secrets.

Something... someone, blinded the navigators to fenris’ location; warp routs which once led there had been severed countless centuries previously, and with so many warp storms breaching reality, its physical location was also altered. No matter how many fleets he broke, keeps he sundered and enemies he routed, his ultimate goal eluded him. Leman Russ suspected Magnus was behind this petulant display, but the red Cyclops was similarly impossible to find; for one could not grasp something which no longer had a form, not even the Wolf King. Russ split his Commanderies into Great Companies, and had them scour the region on this quest; if they could not find fenris, they were content to simply kill the worst and most evil foes they could, and return to the hearthfires of Sleipnir to relate their tales to the rest of the Vylka Fenryka. 

Many were the sagas told of these mighty warriors, enough to fill libraries. For example, there was the saga of Hrothgar the Fanged and how he slew the biomechanical wyrm Gorganis, and escaped the clutches of the kai bane host with the beasts head chained to his ship’s prow. Or the tale of Jorna Flamepelt, whose company slew a billion of Erebus’ cultists, and used their fetid bodies to scale the walls of the basilica of Caged Hope, toppling the evil church’s greatest spire. Russ himself lived up to his fell legend, and numberless enemies fell to his frostblade. He wrestled with Mulkiva Bile-blood, the mightiest champion of fabius’s infamous ‘New Men’. It was said Mulkivas had been turned into a great colossus, as tall as a knight titan, and strong as the root of mountains. Nevertheless, in combat with Russ, the giant was undone, and his broken body was cast back into his own lines, his spine torn from his body, still writihng and hissing in unnatural life.

The Lion pressed on with a similar vigour to Russ, but without the boisterous relish the barbarian seemed to demonstrate. From the bridge of his flagship Antioch, he sombrely and efficiently massacred his foes, and engaged in numerous fleet actions throughout the sprawling conflict. His fleet of vessels was modest compared tot he staggeringly vast armadas of the Word Bearers. However, large fleets were always ponderous, and so the Lion was able to evade the larger fleets, and was free to carefully and irrevocably cripple vital enemy worlds with his forceful but considered blows.

The Khan, who travelled with him, had a slightly different approach. His small, incredibly swift frigate-shuttle, Stormrider, would regularly depart from the Antioch, leading hunting fleets of White Lancers deep into enemy territory, returning occassionally to Antioch, for resupply, and to drop off the armless, legless bodies of important enemy commanders he had personally hunted down and killed. These bodies were piled up in a ritualised hold in the belly of the battleship; the Khan’s trophy room.

At one point, at the battle of Barbaritan the Poisoned, the Khan and Fulgrim almost met in battle. However, amidst the furious city and trench warfare, the two just missed one another; much to Jaghati’s abiding ire. For a long time the Khan had wished to ruin the vainglorious Primarch’s pretty face.

Vulkan’s campaign was fought differently. He gave the worlds he conquered a simple choice; renounce the Ruinous Powers in all their forms, destroy their temples and any daemon engines the world might have been providing for the enemy, and provide a heavy tithe of soldiers to add to Vulkan’s force. If they did that, they were spared, but if not, they were so comprehensively exterminated, that not one living creature ont he planet would survive. Many worlds swore fealty easily, for they didn’t truly care which warlords ruled them, Travesty or Pentus. A few worlds, those which still had garrisons loyal to Perturabo, resisted Vulkan’s offer and chose to dig in. Vulkan did not fight these men, he simply cast rocks from heaven to kill their lands, and heavy planet-cracking fire from Phalanx to finish off their cities and hardpoints.

The worlds Vulkan took or killed seemed to all be feudal possessions of Perturabo and his allies. This drove perturabo into a senseless rage, and destroyed any of his worlds who had surrendered to Vulkan, purely out of spite. He also devoted ever larger fleets purely to hunting Vulkan’s force, which had been Vulkan’s intention. The Salamander Primarch was able to deny Perturabo battle each time however, for he knew where perturabo’s ships were and where they would be. This was due to the turncoat at the heart of the chaos Primarch’s forces. The mongrel prince, Warsmith Honsou, was this traitor amongst traitors. Vulkan’s engineers had implanted a cortex bomb into his mind, which would be activated should he not hold up his end of the bargain; his life was spared, only so long as he fed Vulkan information, and sabotaged Perturabo’s war effort.

The Iron Warriors’ Primarch long sought out this traitor, but the minions he ordered to investigate tended to suffer unexplained accidents; freak plasma core explosions, unfortunate friendly fire incidents, some investigators even accidentally fell into the slave pens with their arms and legs severed, to be mauled to death by vengeful slave chattel...

Through it all, Honsou managed to avoid his duplicitous mission being uncovered; for if he were ever caught... the thought was too terrible for even a space marine to consider.

Wherever the Primarchs set foot, the foe was rooted out and destroyed. But not every Pentus force was fortunate enough to have a Primarch at its head. Many sub-forces of Imperial soldiers were lost in battle with the kai bane Host, who were resistant to all but the most powerful weaponry, or else ambushed and devoured by opportunistic daemons.

This is not to say the non-Astartes forces of the Pentus did not cover themselves in honour. Vultimus Clivon’s Confederate strike forces were invaluable to loyalist battlegroups, as they moved behind enemy lines, eliminating key strategic and logistical targets with the chrono-perfect timing they were famed for. And at the battle of Sturgeos, across the field of sundered cities, their IEU battlesuits battled a great host of valchocht’s mechanical horrors, and won a gruelling victory due to their great mobility, positioning, long range, and precision firepower.

Devil of Catachan was indispensable throughout the war, as it and Phalanx were mobile factories and shipyards, allowing rampaging Pentus forces bases for refitting and refuelling. Devil was protected at all times by the Arks of Ryza, and the formidable fighting prowess of the Plasma Commandoes. They were assailed almsot weekly by chaos forces, and each time they held, buying time for the Devil of Catachan to warp to a new location.

At the same time, the Travesty was assailed by other forces. In the southern marches, the Daemons’ Demesne was invaded by the Callixis Tau and their esoteric human and alien allies from the very borders of inhabited space. Void whales with surreal daemonic howdahs filled with the Corroded and their cursed bows and javelins, clashed in the colourful void against highly advanced starships bristling with some of the most exotic and powerful technology the galaxy had seen. Both sides in this salvation War were horrendous, for the very act of war fed Doombreed, even as his foes assailed his realm, propagating the war recursively, as stronger and stronger tau allies joine dint he conflict.

In the North West, on the fringes of the Travesty, Kol Basilis had fortified the border against the onslaught of the Star Father. Basilis’s garrison armies were huge. Not only did he had all the Blasphematii, psyker Angyl-hunters without compare, at his command, but he had the fealty of Gaur Drozos and all the Blood Pact of the Sabbat Serf worlds, from the hellmouth of Balhaut to the former garden world of Gaunt’s Rest. This was a huge, elite and professional mortal army to support his Angylhunters. In addition, one of the spindly Aurellian Shades, avatars of Lorgar animated remotely by his colossal will, supervised his defence of the marches, alongside innumeral hordes of human cattle and fodder for the Adorant swarms of the Angyls. 

Kol Basilis would need all these fell powers and alliances, for the force which surged from the soul-dead north came as a silver, red and gold tide of blunt vessels and chattering hordes of the blind faithful. The Adorants were diverse as the stars themselves, but all were united in their love of the Star Father.

Canoness Superior Elemris of the Widows lead a host of her warrior sisters, with their silver power armour, black veils, and stylised, weeping face masks of sculpted porcelain. 

With them came the fallen Astartes, who had turned to the Angyls for their guidance, and worshipped the Emperor as this new Dictator God. The most common of the Astartes Legions were the Red Multitude. At their core, they were once Red Hunters, theological extremists even in M41. They had swollen into a Legion ten thousand strong, formed from pious outcast marines and geneseed cloning techniques, armed and armoured from forges on Angylworlds deep int he Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath.

The diamond hard core of the Star father’s host were the Illuminated Exorcists of Grand Master Trencherd. Each of these gold and silver Astartes had taken and banished a daemon from their minds, echoing the supreme force of will that was the Star Father Himself.

This massive invasion force smashed into the cunningly wrought defenses of Kol basilis as a hammer striking an anvil, each as hard and unyielding as the other. The Adorants and their Astartes were the numerically superior force, but they were unsubtle in their engagements; all frontal assaults and maximum firepower. They wished to be the fist that crushed the world, and in their worldview, nothing could resist the Father’s fist. Kol baislis’ forces were more fluid and reactionary, flowing around the blunt implements of the Space Marine legions. Basilis was old and paranoid, and had planned for almost every contingency. His blasphematii could harm the very warp essence of the angyllic hosts, and Kol Basilis personally banished the Archangyl Pax in open conflict, ripping open a warp rift with his mind, before casting the metallic entity into it bodily. Not only that, but the Aurellian Shade’s powers were able to, for a time, drive back the crushing oppressive weight of the Angyls’ war wyrds.

Things changed after three years of this war. Things changed when Thor Incarnus took to the field, bedecked in his flawless silver warplate, wielding his mighty Kaldor Hammer. Wherever Thor Incarnus went, he broke through the Travesty lines. Surrounded by a praetorian guard of hulking giants in archaic Thunder Pattern Plate, Thor was unstoppable. He bestrode the battlefield unflinchingly, as tall and powerful as a Primarch, but glowing with the majesty of one who bore the Star Father’s blazing soul in his chest. His hammer crushed entire platoons of blood Pact with every sweep, his great crown-helmets flickering with lightning as he killed and killed and killed. Even the Blasphematii were but temrites before a gale in his presence. Kol basilis was widely considered, even by the Imperium Pentus, to be the greatest swordsman in the galaxy, but in the face of the embodiment of the Star father, he fled like the pragmatist he was. The Aurellian Shade managed to fight the silver giant to a standstill for five days, a sits shadowy mutagenic magic dueled the thunderclap fierce power of the Stars. In the end, Thor Incarnus simply had more warp power present at that moment, and shattered the avatar in a rainbow-hued holocaust of tidal flame.

Soon enough, the marches were overrun, and the carefully laid plans of Kol basilis were in tatters, much tot he amusement of his rivals within the Travesty itself. Their laughter lessened somewhat when the Adorants and their superhuman allies added their might to the forces invading the chaos empire.

For the Travesty was being slowly, but surely, burnt to a cinder. Its worlds were dying, and the great storms swelled as never before. There was not a world in that Imperium which did not suffer invasion and massacres during the Primarch War.

Across the galaxy, from the eastern fringe to the western halo stars, every planet began to experience reality quakes. Some were naught but mild tremors, and a fell scent on the breeze which no one could fathom. Others opened fissures in their planetary crusts, which swallowed cities and killed billions. This time was also known as the time of final awakenings, as psychic powers seemed to get stronger during this period; previous weak psykers began to manifest full blown powers, and more Alpha level psykers were born in this time than at any other point in history.

More psykers meant more warp breaches alas, and even in the peaceful Imperium pentus, warp storms seemed to burst into realspace at random, like blotches on skin suffering some allergic reaction.

Upon Cadia, the entire planet throbbed with impossible energies, no longer fully solid. It was an entire world on the cusp of ascension, with a black hearted demi-god suckling upon this power. A perfect golden figure, with eyes dark and black as the deepest abyss, swelled with powers incredible and awful to behold. Lorgar Aurellian smiled, as deep bells tolled; bells only he could hear. He raised his arms, and basked in the warming fires of his own collapsing empire. At one side, Erebus stood, his armor smoldering in the mere presence of his Godling Father. To the right hand side stood Ysgar Oppugnant, grinning like the eternal foe of life that he was.

Now all fighting in the Travesty, knowing or not, were dancing to Lorgar's tune.
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