Editing Nobledark Imperium Forces of Chaos (section)

==The Crumbling Wall==
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Every Legion had its black sheep in the War of the Beast. Luther, of course, for the Dark Angels. Sigismund of the Imperial Fists. And for the Iron Warriors, Captain Varkand. 

Captain Vandro was in command of the Astartes of the 144th Unification Fleet on the outbreak of the war. Ambitious, aggressive, and dour, he wasted no time assuming overall command when the Sky Marshal and his second-in-command were both killed when the flagship hit a vortex mine. Likewise, finding himself cut off and behind enemy lines, he wasted no time in ordering a series of raids and counter-attacks, trying to cut enemy supply lines and throw the drive towards Terra into disarray. 

Some historians suggest that he deliberately arranged for the death of his superiors so that he could seize control of the 144th, but there is no evidence of this. By every account, he served with honor, courage, ability, and loyalty through the Great Crusade and the early stages of the War of the Beast. He would have been remembered as one of the heroes of the war, except for what happened next.

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Vandro, an Iron Warrior to the core, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the raids he was making and the damage he was doing. The Crone-Worlders and their various puppets had erected a great fortress out of the hollowed-out ruins of the sector capital hive, Riskail; as long as that fortress still stood, he became convinced, the Croneworlders could never be driven out. He resolved to lay siege to it, crack it open, and kill every last enemy of the Imperium in the place.

The initial assaults did not go well. Vandro had spent a great deal of time in the sector capital, and expected his deep knowledge of Riskail's architecture to deliver a swift victory. However, its destruction and reconstruction at the hands of Chaos had eliminated all the vulnerabilities he had planned to exploit, resulting in a series of embarrassing defeats. Worse, the enemy defense was commanded by a sorcerer of considerable power, who used his talents to turn every defeat into a catastrophe. Stung and furious, having lost hundreds of Astartes and tens of thousands of human soldiers with nothing to show for it, Captain Vandro settled in for a long siege. 

As days turned into weeks into months, supplies grew short and the 144th turned to increasingly dubious methods to maintain the siege. Captured enemy weapons were used, regardless of how deeply Chaos-tainted they were. Roving elements of the fleet started, essentially, extorting and enslaving surviving pockets of civilization within the sector. Worlds already ravaged were stripped to the bone to fuel the demands of the war effort. 'Liberated' slaves were herded right back out to clear minefields and act as decoys for enemy guns. There were sporadic instances of cannibalism as food supplies grew tight. 

Captain Vandro finally breached the outer walls after five months, but this was hardly an improvement. The sorcerer and his cabal had not been idle, and had transformed Riskail's interior into a ghastbone maze carefully wrought to mislead and confuse on the psychic as well as physical plane. Casualties skyrocketed, and the 144th began to crumble under the continued psychic assault. From atop the stump of the DAoT-era space tether Riskail was built around, the sorcerer constantly mocked the attacking forces, and his words were themselves lethal weapons.

Captain Vandro and the 144th Unification Fleet had been sliding into the abyss for a while by that point. Now, they acknowledged the inevitable. Captain Vandro was the first to fall, pledging his soul to Khorne, and the rest of the fleet swiftly followed. 

The murder-maze that had once been Riskail fell swiftly afterwards. The newly-empowered Iron Warriors simply shrugged off every psychic assault directed at them, smashing through the walls of the ghastbone labyrinth with supernatural ease. Captain Vandro himself killed the Croneworld sorcerer with his bare hands. 

The 144th were pushed back into the Eye of Terror along with the rest of the Fallen, where they re-organized as the Crumbling Wall. They retain the Iron Warrior focus on fortification-breaking, and have a hatred of psykers remarkable even among the servants of Khorne. The destruction of fortresses is their sacrament to Khorne, and they have gotten very good at it. At the time of their treason, the Crumbling Wall had about 8,000 Astartes and 5 million mortal soldiers.
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