Editing Nobledark Imperium Drafts (section)

==== Be'lakor and the Alpha Legion ====

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Every legion at a role to play in the War of the Beast, even if that role wasn’t immediately obvious. Such was the case with the Alpha Legion. When war broke out, the Hydra continued its work in the shadows, though they weren’t too happy about it. It was not the job of the Alpha Legion to fight on the front lines. It was their job to find the source of the threat, the man behind the man, and stop the problem at its root. [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Urlakk_Urg|Urlakk Urg]] was the obvious threat to the Imperium, but there was clearly more going on. One did not just go from being a former warboss with no empire to his name to head of a galaxy-spanning WAAAGH! in less than six standard years. Chaos was clearly a factor, but beyond the four Ruinous Powers there were other players behind the scenes vying for power, ones the Imperium did not even know about yet.

The Alpha Legion was first put onto the scent of one of these players after the end of the Nurthene Campaign, which had ended in disaster when the natives, who considered autoguns and tanks to be the cutting edge of warfare, had unexpectedly gotten their hands on Chaotic Exterminatus-class weaponry and the means to fleshcraft nightmarish golems in the image of their animalistic gods. Despite stymying assets of the Imperial Army, Astartes, and even a Titan legion, the Nurthene insurgents known as the Echvehnurth could only slow, not stop, the Imperial advance, and in a grand act of salting the earth the Echvehnurth activated a Chaotic weapon known as a Black Cube. The Black Cube stripped Nurth of all life and left it an uninhabitable, primordial wasteland, killing all upon it but at the same time denying it to the Imperium and inflicting heavy casualties.

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The Alpha Legion were perplexed by this turn of events. Never before had their intelligence apparatus failed them so. It is possible they would have continued to be perplexed had they not heard from their contact with the Cabal, John Grammaticus. Alpharius and Omegon had heard from Grammaticus and the Cabal several times before, the two organizations having shared useful intel, but this time all Grammaticus had was a single cryptic line courtesy of the mysterious Gahet.

“Go to Eolith. The answers you seek will be there.”


As fellow espionists themselves, the primarchs of the Alpha Legion were at first unsure of whether or not to believe Grammaticus, but ultimately decide to investigate it for themselves. They didn’t fully trust the Cabal, but the Cabal’s goals were straightforward and their information had been reliable in the past. Additionally, even if the Cabal’s weren’t telling the whole truth, that didn’t mean what they said was incorrect. An expeditionary force was dispatched to investigate the Cabal’s claims, consisting of several cells of Alpha Legionnaires as well as reinforcement by the Geno Five-Two Chilliad. The Chilliad’s knack for pinpoint coordination and tactical adaptability had impressed the Legion’s twin primarchs, and meshed well with their own combat sensibilities. What’s more, the Chilliad knew how to keep a secret. The Chilliad and Alpha Legion had worked together several times in the past, and when the Alpha Legion was in need of more traditional military assistance the Chiliad was normally who they thought of. However, Uxor Honen Mu was not at the head of this expedition, having stepped down following her loss of cept many years ago at the beginning of the Great Crusade. Instead, the Imperial army detachment was commanded by Teng Namantjira, the commander who had overseen the Nurthene disaster. Namantjira’s record had been spotless until Nurth, and the commander was eager to discover whether some external force had caused his offensive to fail.

Their destination was a world which the Imperium had cataloged and ignored during a routine survey as 42 Hydra Tertius, but the source knew as Eolith. Eolith was a strange world. At first glance it seemed utterly out of the ordinary, but closer inspection revealed otherwise. Surveys of the planet found plateaus with perfectly sheer faces and straight lines buried in silt under the ocean’s continental shelf, resembling starship landing pads. Nature does not build in straight lines. The rest of the planet was also more abnormal than it appeared, basins were exposed hundreds of meters below sea level, while the planet’s core suggested a lack of rotation that made it hard to imagine how the planet could sustain a breathable atmosphere or magnetosphere. Indeed, in other respects the planet was almost too ordinary, having an atmosphere that was almost identical to Earth’s, albeit with more neon and oxygen and less argon and nitrogen in the atmosphere, and a gravity 1.5 times that of Earth, despite its diameter suggesting it should have had a gravity twice that. At the north pole of the planet found an unusual energy signature, suggestive of a continuously open portal into the eldar Webway, but the records the Imperium had gained on the labyrinthine dimension from the eldar never indicated that any such portal existed here.

Given such an anomaly, the first place to look seemed obvious. Taking half of the forces of the Chilliad with them, the Alpha Legion descended upon the basin at the planet’s northern pole. There, sitting in a basin that was supposed to be three hundred meters below sea level, was what looked like an open Webway gate, albeit one that didn’t look like it was made from wraithbone, but instead an eerie black stone that resembled obsidian, but seemed to reflect no light. The members of the Chiliad were commanded to secure the margins of the basin, while the Alpha Legionaires would act as the tip of the spear and enter the portal first. Nobody wanted an enemy force potentially attacking them from behind, and if there was something nasty on the other side better the Astartes go first.


Upon entering the portal the Alpha Legion found themselves in a shrine dedicated to a being older than recorded history and an evil older than man. The reliquary was lined with numerous paraphernalia and artifacts atop singular pedestals, fossilized statues of a horned and winged being carved out of fossilized bone, five thousand year old scrolls from the Age of Strife made from tanned human skin and written in blood, horn fragments that seemed to be both material and immaterial at the same time, all illuminated in an eerie half-light that seemed to come from spotlights that did not exist. More recent items were also present, grisly trophies from the Massacre of Teuthowald, the Battle of Pydinia and the Nurthene Campaign, all Imperial defeats or losses that had seemed to have no real culprit, at least until now. The halls were lined with cyclopean blocks of stone, inscribed with writing and hieroglyphs that no one had ever seen before.

At the very back was the centerpiece of the shrine, a massive mural several stories high. One of the Alpha Legion, a Katholian, immediately made the holy symbol of Quolious for protection upon seeing it. It depicted a single entity surrounded by flames, vaguely reptilian in countenance, with forward curved horns and three eyes, shrouded by a pair of leathery wings. One of the Alpha Legionnaires remarked that it vaguely resembled depictions of the devil in their home planet’s religion. The face of the being was hard to read due to the lighting in the room, but the shadows gave the impression of a vengeful god with power over life and death. Strange beings were on their knees surrounding the creature, supplicating it for mercy but seemingly receiving none. The beings were abstract and almost devoid of detail, akin to ancient Grecian black pottery, but the Alpha Legion recognized some that looked disturbingly similar to simplified humans or eldar.

The Alpha Legion may not have been able to read the stone carvings, but the text on the scrolls was decipherable, resembling an extinct dialect spoken on a world the Word Bearers had reluctantly purged for being violently insane and too extensively tainted by Chaos. It spoke extensively of the writer’s lord, a being it referred to as “Be’lakor” and called “The First Prince of Chaos”. To the Alpha Legion, it seemed clear the writings spoke of a Daemon Prince, but one on a scale in which the Imperium had never seen before, and which the Imperium knew nothing about. Having seen the scale of the den of iniquity they had found themselves in, the Alpha Legionaires turned to each other and grimly nodded to one another. The Steward had to know about this. The Alpha Legion set about meticulously documenting the scene, taking vid-picts of every artifact and helmet cam footage of the entire sordid shrine. Even if they didn’t know the meaning of every symbol, that did not mean someone else might.

Then, the Alpha Legionnaire Mathias Herzog made a fatal mistake.

He reached out and touched the stone mural. 


At once the shrine reacted to the Alpha Legionnaires presence, much like an immune system suddenly recognizing the presence of an invader. The chamber began to shudder and contract, wretched artifacts rattling and falling off of their pedestals. The Alpha Legion made for the exit at once. But where their trip into the portal had been uneventful, now all the sudden the space within the pocket dimension was like quicksand, actively fighting their attempts to try and escape, the short space to the exit seeming to telescope endlessly. The Alpha Legionnaires could see what was going on outside the portal but were helpless to do anything about it. All they could do was watch what happened next.

It was not just the dark shrine that had reacted to the Alpha Legion’s presence. As the Alpha Legion struggled to escape, the planet itself seemed to break apart, whatever force was holding it together seemingly relinquishing its ownership. The planet’s atmosphere vented itself into space as if realizing it wasn’t supposed to be there, whereas whatever artificial force was holding the oceans the way they were suddenly dissipated leaving the oceans to slosh around the planet as intended by the laws of gravity once more. Including into the basin below sea level where the portal had been.

The Alpha Legion tried to make it through the portal to warn the Chilliad of the oncoming flood, having been aware of the planet’s self-destruction before they were, but were unable to escape from their own predicament in time. Nor could the ships in orbit provide any assistance. As rescue craft descended towards the planet, space-time seemed to ooze around them, slowing their descent to a crawl as they pushed their engines to the limit trying to reach the surface before the planet fell apart. They didn’t make it in time to save the Chilliad forces on the ground. The lucky ones died when the ocean reclaimed the basin. The unlucky ones asphyxiated when the atmosphere dissipated. When the Alpha Legion emerged from the portal, protected from the changed planet by their power armor, they did so at the bottom of the ocean and surrounded by the bodies of their dead comrades.


It wasn’t until the return trip from Eolith that the Alpha Legion noticed something else was amiss. At first it was relatively minor. Shadows out of the corner of one’s eye, strange flickering of the lights when people occasionally entered a room, nothing unusual to see on an old void ship. Then people started to get the feeling they were being watched, and some claimed to see the silhouette of a humanoid figure standing in the doorway in their peripheral vision that disappeared when they turned to look. Then people started having “accidents”. Then they just started to disappear.

The Alpha Legion quickly noticed that the people who were dying were not random, but were all people who had entered the portal on Eolith. At the same time, the shadowy phantoms became bolder, no longer disappearing when people turned their gaze and bearing a striking resemblance to the statue the Alpha Legion had seen on Eolith. When Mathias Herzog turned up dead, not vanished like all the others but his flayed body simply appearing in the middle of the mess hall between a brief flicker of the lights, it seemed clear what was happening. Be’lakor, the being referenced in the shrine on Eolith, had discovered their trespassing and was now following them.

As the days went on more people continued to die, first the last of the Alpha Legionnaires who had survived the portal on Eolith and then all who they had told what they saw. Be'lakor seemed to know exactly who had learned the secret on Eolith and who had not. People started to survive just long enough to describe what was happening to them. Be’lakor was no longer content to hover over people’s shoulder menacingly, but was now coming after his victims with a slow, predatory walk. Victims would burst into rooms, begging for help from phantoms only they could see, only for their would be rescuers to die in turn. But the Alpha Legion was determined. They had to get the information out there, no matter the cost.

And so began the ultimate game of cat and mouse. No matter how far they ran, and how fast, it always seemed like Be’lakor was just two steps behind them. Nothing the Alpha Legion could do seemed to stop it. Be’lakor was implacable, unstoppable, more like a villain from a slasher movie than anything else. All the Alpha Legionnaires could do was keep the intel alive, passing the information on to as many operatives as possible in the form of encryptions and secret codes hopefully below the daemon's notice, and then buy as much time as they could before inevitably dying. Then their comrades would pick up the information, and the hunt would begin anew.

When Be’lakor did catch them, he either killed them on the spot or took what information he needed out of them to continue his hunt, relying on torture techniques honed over millions of years of cruelty. However, Be’lakor’s strategy was starting to exhibit a major flaw. He had spent so much time toying with the Alpha Legionnaires, punishing them for daring to trespass on the hallowed ground of the Old Ones, that the Alpha Legion were getting further and further ahead. First by minutes, then by hours, then by days. A told secret tends to spread exponentially, and before long the Alpha Legion were reporting their findings to the highest levels of the Imperial military. The secret was out, and the truth had become so widely disseminated there was no way Be’lakor could ever cover it back up again. Be’lakor was informed of this fact by one Alpha Legionnaire, who cheekily called himself "Alpharius", though he almost certainly was not. Be’lakor had started to become worried after he noticed that cleaning up this little operation was taking longer than expected, but after hearing those fears confirmed, Be’lakor’s rage was explosive and immediate. The Alpha Legion could not say to have won the battle, having lost too many men over the course of the operation to claim the most pyrrhic of victories, but then neither had Be’lakor. The Imperium still does not know the whole story, believing Be’lakor to be an impossibly ancient Daemon Prince rather than his true nature, but they know he exists. And that is enough.

The loss of fully half the Chilliad and the Alpha Legion’s helplessness to do anything to stop the death of their long-term allies is thought to have been another contributing factor to the Alpha Legion helping the Chilliad disappear after the War of the Beast. The Alpha Legion and its primarchs had [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The_Hydra_Uncoils|done their share of horrible things throughout the years]], [[grimdark|often to people who did not deserve it]]. But that does not mean they were incapable of caring about others. After all, if they did not care, how could they call themselves human?
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