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

==Section 49: Despoiling A Black Heart==


<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">[Compiler’s Note: The author of this section is unknown. How they could have been present for the story they relate here, I cannot guess. Perhaps they merely dreamed this tale? Or maybe they embellished this story based upon legends told by former Red Corsairs, Legionnaires and the survivors? As ever, I leave the authenticity of such sections tot he discretion of my future readers, who read this long after all else is cold and vanished.]


The two ships had merged, and their carnal union was destroying them both. Fire and screaming flooded every crevice. Decks crashed together like pancakes, as poison and chaotic effluence conspired to undo the bonds of reality. The Planet Killer was killed, and the Astral Maw was swallowed; both were burning, and both would soon perish.<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> 

The disturbing powers flooding their warp engines and generators exploded from containment, warping the very walls and spilling daemons into the materium like oil from a ruptured supertanker. The walls and corridors coiled and turned upon one another in maddening patterns mortal minds would be broken trying to decipher.

Abaddon staggered onwards, his armor glowing white hot with resisting the malevolence flooding the conjoined ships. He too had no idea where h was going, but Drach’Nyen did. The sword was held aloft, dragging him forwards in its infernal eagerness. With his father’s talon, he ripped apart the mewling spawns that threw themselves in his way; each one was once a corsair or a mortal, turned to something both greater and far lesser at once by the raging warp furnaces. Daemonic ichors coated his hair, bleaching in an ugly rancid grey. 

He found a window, and saw a void war consuming heaven. Silver strike cruisers were hurtling towards the conjoined ships, but Abaddon paid them no heed, his eyes desolate and black. 

++ Silver Skulls, decks twelve through fifteen! Repel boarders! Repel boarders! ++, a voice on some shipwide vox squealed ineffectively. There was no one alive who heeded or cared what the desperate bridge officer demanded.

All around Abaddon, power was building. The great agents of ruination sensed him, and even after all these millennia, evne after all his actions in the mortal world, they still called to him. ‘Pick me, forsake the others’ was always their seditious whisper. Give in, forsake the materium, and take up your prince’s mantle. 

But Abaddon the Destroyer, the Emperor of Travesties, the Warmaster and chosen of chaos, could not just let go; for he saw each of his patrons, and he felt what the great Pantheon did not what him to see. They were afraid, as much as an abstraction of a blasphemous concept could be afraid. They were losing their identities; something else pushed them up and out. Something deep and with a name no mortal could speak was thrusting up, turning all pretense of form within the realm of chaos to nothingness. The greatest lie of the Gods was that there was some guiding principle behind them, some fundamental division. Chaos was Undivided, and soon chaos would be extinct; replaced with something infinite and unknowable. The Deep Warp would end them all.

So, Abaddon thought, as he marched to his doom, why should I submit to the chaos gods now? It was all futile; the Dissolution was coming, and not even Gods would survive it. Abaddon’s grand plans were all in tatters; all he had left now was something incredibly petty. He didn’t like Huron Blackheart, and he would kill this rival Emperor for daring to reject Abaddon’s rule millennia hence. 

He found Huron at the centre of what was once a ship’s bridge. But all the crew were melted into the walls, giggling and chanting manically. The room was an eight pointed star, expanding and deforming like a great daemon was breathing.

Huron Blackheart, the great Cadaver King, sat upon a throne at the centre, watching the world around him burn with an unreadable expression. His head turned slowly towards Abaddon as he registered his presence. From behind the throne, some great bloated yellow thing crept. It was like some great fat toad, with long spindly limbs and a fixed grin full of ivory tusks. Hamadraya, the Deep Warp Imp, and the silent architect of the Eastern Chaos Imperium. Drach’nyen strained in Abaddon’s grip; the sword hated Hamadraya more than any other entity in all existence, for the Imp had been the one to trap Drach’nyen within the blade’s prison all those countless eons ago.

Huron smiled; his face peeling partially away with the effort. “You look a mess... my liege...” he rasped mockingly.

Abaddon said nothing; he simply stomped forwards, eyes fixed upon Huron. He raised the Talon of Horus, and unleashed a fearsome barrage of cursed bolts into the Blackheart. The munitions struck some invisible field as he rose, bursting above him in a cascade of azure fire. Huron creaked as he moved, like some homunculus puppet animated by a necromancer’s will. He opened his claws, and grew his mighty cursed axe, striding to meet his counterpart in final battle. Around them, the walls were crumbling, and the ethereal winds of the warp billowed through in impossible hues.

“You have destroyed my ship and yours as well. Where is the Despoiler, who always had such grand schemes and elaborate strategies? Pathetic! You got your empire stolen, your brothers slain, and all you can think of is to brawl with me in the belly of a doomed ship? Your time is through now Ezekyle Abaddon! I am the future. The Long War is a joke, a bitter old warrior’s dream!” Huron screame,d his voice metallic and discordant, his eyes blazing red with the madness driven by unending agony.

Abaddon said nothing, his pace merely quickening. 

“This is my time Despoiler! Mine!” Huron screeched, gesturing for Hamadraya. The daemon thing leapt towards Abaddon, its body swollen with stolen warp energies. If it had struck the Warmaster, it would have undid his flesh and made him spawn in an instant.

But Hamadraya realised too late, what dwelt within Abaddon’s sword. Abaddon threw the sword into hamadraya without a second glance. Drach’nyen embedded itself in Hamadraya’s bloated gut, and drove itself and the yellow monster backwards. Hamadraya screeched inhumanly as it was instantly pinned to the Blackheart’s throne by the blade.

As the dameon’s dueled, the two ancient Astartes crashed together with a hideous crunch, ceramite on ceramite,adamantium on adamantium. Abaddon bore terminator armor, so was slower than Huron, who landed a flurry of furious blows against the Despoiler’s guard. Without Drach’nyen, Abaddon was forced to fend off Huron with only his Talon, and was pushed back by the undead might of Huron. Where his claw was swatted aside, his axe landed a blow, carving glowing grooves in the runic terminator plate. Desperately, Abaddon shoved the Tyrant back, giving him a moment of space. Huron raised his claw’s palm, and rewarded Abaddon’s ploy with a torrent of cursed fire. 

Abaddon screamed, throwing his hands to his face as the flamer’s breath consumed him. His hair was burnt away entirely, his flesh crackled and spat like pig’s fat on a furnace. The runes of his ancient war plate blazed ever brighter. As soon as the flames relented, another flurry of axe blows crashed against Abaddon. This time, he was too stunned to defend himself effectively. Chunks of flesh and armor were chopped away by Blackheart, until Abaddon sank to his knees.

Pinned to the throne, Hamadraya screeched pitifully as Drach’nyen twisted and writhed in its belly, spilling warp fire over its being as the sword slowly, but surely, began to dissolve...

Huron was flooded with warp energy; the same power Abaddon had always denied. He smashed his axe into Abaddon’s unprotected left arm again and again, savoring every grunt of pain he elicited. There was no way such a decrepit and broken specimen of a space marine as Huron could be so strong and fast and fearsome.

Chaos was punishing Abaddon for spurning their offers. They gods were fickle and jealous, he always knew this. They wanted him to perish here. The Despoiler refused to bow to their spiteful demands. 

With a last great burst of power, Abaddon reached forth with Horus’ talon, and ripped away the Eastern Emperor’s breastplate, wrenching it free in one almighty motion. It pulled away in a torrent of mucus, like the peeled shell of a beetle. Huron staggered backwards, letting the armor fall away. Inside, Huron was a mass of messy bionics, bonded to rotten strands of black flesh, held together by thorny scuttling centipedes and writhing, segmented worms. The Tyrant screeched and cursed wetly, as his organs spluttered and spat like hissing cobras, spewing vileness in all directions. Huron looked down to the wound in bewilderment; he should have been healing. Always, no matter the wound, he survived and was held together by the will of the Gods. The Blackheart looked to Hamadraya. The daemon was growing pallid, its struggles growing weaker and weaker as it fought to remove Drach’nyen as the sword merged with the festering wound in Hamadraya’s gut.

Huron was alive, but for the first time in so many years, he felt vulnerable. Wild-eyed, he turned back to his foe.

“Your death is a long-stalled certainty it would seem, miserable Wight!” Abaddon wheezed hatefully, struggling to rise. Cursing in all the fell tongues he knew, Huron raised his Tyrant’s Claw again, and the flames ate into the Despoiler hungrily. The fire wriggled into the rents cut into Abaddon’s armour previously, and the Despoiler felt his body cooking from within. He would have screamed, but his tongue and cheeks were ash, and one of his eyes had burst like and overripe grape. 

Huron strode over to Abaddon, and stamped a boot onto his talon, immobilizing his right arm.

“Death?” Huron sneered,raising his axe over Abaddon’s ruined head as an executioner might. “Death has no power over-”

The lens of one of his bionic eyes burst in a shower of sparks, and from the wound poured a trickle of treacle-like gore. Huron dropped his axe, and fumbled at the wound. Another needle splashed into his exposed chest with barely a sound, followed by two others. His hearts exploded, alongside whatever fetid dameonic organs had been installed alongside them.

For a moment, it seemed as if Huron might simply shrug the wounds off. Then, with the inexorable momentum of a felled tree, he collapsed with a sonorous clang.

Abaddon watched this unfold as he lay smoldering on the deck. If he could smile, he would have. A silver-armored space marine in scout carapace emerged from behind him, clutching a needle rifle to his chest. The Astartes stood over Huron, and emptied the remainder of his magazine into the Tyrant’s twitching corpse. 

"It seems the eldar were right, you filth!" the scout snarled, spitting on the gurgling carcass.

It took a sudden lurching quake to bring the space marine back to his senses. The young soldier turned to Abaddon’s prone form. The boy’s face was clean and lantern-jawed, and filled with a righteousness Abaddon had learnt to loathe thousands of years ago.

Was this the last good man? Was this his end? Abaddon watched the scout’s rifle. Slowly, the weapon was lowered.

“Can you walk marine? What chapter are you? Get up, or you will perish here with the Blackheart! We have mere minutes before we strike the craftworld. We must move; now!” the boy bellowed, hauling Abaddon up to his knees. “My name is brother Kelfdon of the Silver Skulls; your assistance was most welcome.”

Abaddon was confused, until he saw himself reflected in the burnished breastplate of Kelfdon. His head was healing, but it was still a scorched and skeletal ruin. His armor, once so distinctive, was sullied and ruined by years on the run from Lorgar, and still further smashed by Huron and his hellfire. Even the talon was broken and rendered generic by the sooty flames.

Kelfdon wouldn’t be fooled for long, Abaddon knew. If there had been more time, he might have used this confusion to his advantage. However, a much more pressing matters than the ship crashing, or even deceiving the loyalist dupe.

“Drach...” Abaddon began, his tongue still only half-formed in his mouth.

“I cannot understand you, what say you?” Kelfdon asked.

Abaddon gave up talking, and simply gestured with his functioning hand. He gestured towards the mewling, growing thing festering on the Blackheart’s throne. Hamadraya was squealing as it was consumed, collapsing in upon itself, coiling about the molten ruins of the dameons word in its gut.

That was why Drach’nyen wanted to come here, Abaddon realized. It needed the warp power of the Hamadraya and the sundered cores of the Planet Killer and the Astral Maw.

Kelfdon’s eyes widened as he turned to witness something rising from the oily ruins of the Hamadraya, cloaking the entire chamber with unnatural shade.

Drach’nyen, at last, was unbound!

And so they rose, and fled before the '''[Portion Missing/Corrupted]'''
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