Editing Story:Warhammer 60K: The Age of Dusk (section)

==Additional Background Section 35: The Last Chance; The Drazak Raid==

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The Bone Kingdom was aptly named, for it was an ancient city literally submerged beneath layers upon layers of dry, dessicated bones, picked clean of flesh. This ossified desert was almost a mile deep, burying all but the tallest pyramids and tombs that erupted from the tomb world’s surface.
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There, upon those fields, was a legacy of murder and mindless bloodletting stretching back millions upon millions of years. This was where the flayed ones, the miscreant progeny of Llandu’gor, made their lair. The flayed ones were mad necrons, who had modified themselves for the purpose of flensing flesh, and modified their skeletal heads with snapping jaws, to rip off chunks of meat they could never eat. They were compelled to drape flesh over their bodies, as if desperately trying to regain their stolen physical forms. Only automated systems could reliably control their tomb fleets and technology, for every other necron upon that blasted nightmare realm was utterly, irrevocably, insane. For light-years around the world, there were worlds depopulated by the flayers, seemingly isolating the flayers form the greater events of the Second Age of Strife and all that came later. These necrons were nothing but predators, and it didn’t matter to them who or what they killed.

No one could invade the planet and hope to be victorious. Those who somehow bested the orbiting harvester fleet of Valgul the Fallen Lord would find nothing to capture or occupy upon Drazak itself. They would land and be consumed by wave upon wave of silver berserkers, glistening red with fresh blood. No matter how many shots you fired, they flayers would eventually reach your lines, and reap a terrible toll upon you. Orbital bombardment was futile, for what was there upon the surface for the enemy to destroy? Bones, or perhaps one could burn off the air which the flayers did not need? This was known to all sides in the Age of Dusk. It was suicide to invade the flayer’s realm.

Ahriman knew this also, when he took Crolomere, the grey sensei, to this damned place. The warp around Drazak was always churning; ironically, the massive numbers of mortal deaths on the surface greatly fed Khorne and the rest of the expanding Pantheon of the primordial annihilator. This made ordinary warp flight into the realm incredibly difficult. However, Ahriman was a master of the warp now, a genius on a par with his former master Magnus. He guided his great black cube through the warp’s turbulent tides with ease. All the while, he tortured Crolomere.

The woman was a perpetual; an immortal and one who possessed the blood of the Anathema in her veins; the same blood which flowed through the first perpetual shamans, at the dawn of mankind. But she had abandoned her fellow perpetual long ago, and she had taken upon her the mantle of one of the Grey, foes of chaos and Imperium alike. Ahriman could never corrupt her soul to chaos, but he had managed to deceive her mind long ago into aiding him. It is claimed she knew Ahzek Ahriman before even the mythical Horus Heresy and had been heart-broken at his betrayal by the Wolves. This made her more willing to believe his lies of being repentant and contrite in the Second Age of Strife and beyond. 

However, when he had seized power in the Theologian Union, and had created the Golarch abominations and had begun to expand his Rubric to consume new victims in its magical bindings, she instantly recognised that Ahriman was no changed man. He desired to be a god; more than a mere daemon prince, Ahriman wished to be a daemon Primarch. Nay, he desired to copy the Emperor’s works and thus become a new power within the pantheons itself. But Crolomere’s ancient eyes saw that he was merely a pawn of Tzeentch, as he had ever been, and Tzeentch itself was the architect of a new power’s rise; a power which embodied all the endless depths of madness, of which the chaos gods were simply the first part. She likened the chaos gods to the fins of a shark, protruding from the opaque surface of a black river; to anyone observing the fins, they seemed like several independent creatures, moving together but distinctly separate. But to those who could see beyond the surface, they would see the full body of the shark, and realise how impossibly large and dangerous it was. That was how she perceived the Deep Warp and the Draziin-maton. 

She sabotaged one of Ahriman’s experiments, and had stolen a ship and attempted to flee from his Realm. But he had caught her, and took his time in tormenting her. She could not die (save if her soul was obliterated), but Ahriman could harm her greatly. Never once did he raise his voice as he subjected her to his secret torments, and she whimpered in sorrowful agony as Fabius Bile was unleashed upon her flesh over and over and over again. But she always healed, and she refused to tell Ahriman what she had done to ruin his experiment. Thus, he decided to banish her, to the worst place he could conceive of for one with latent psychic empathetic psychic powers and the ability to suffer an eternity of being flayed and ripped asunder; Drazak the Bone Kingdom.

He slipped past the defences of Drazak, and cast Crolomere to the surface, before he and his cube simply dissolved into the warp, returning almost instantly to his unassailable empire. She was stranded amidst a cauldron of churning misery. She witnessed weeping infants peeled by the flayed ones, and saw entire generations of xenos and human races butchered in mindless orgies of cacophonous death. She could do nothing to save these people, or their souls. She hid herself amidst the cathedrals of bones and she wept for them. Her heart was broken. No one could save her, because to do so, one would have to invade Drazak, and only the mad or the doomed would attempt such a thing...

... Or so she thought.

Six years into her ordeal, Drazak received visitors. This was unprecedented; no one came to them, for flesh bound races would surely be slain, and necrons did not visit, for fear of contracting the flayer virus.

The ships were human; medium sized freighters and merchant shipping vessels, old and decrepit. Perhaps they were a human convoy, blown off course by warp tides, and stranded in the worst possible place? Or maybe they were foolish explorers, eager to become famous? Either way, this handful of ships seemed doomed, as the flayed one fleet descended upon them. What scant defences the ships had were disabled within minutes. The ships only managed, collectively, to launch a single torpedo, which missed the necrons entirely, and spiralled off towards the inner system, and the dead worlds and dying sun that had residence there...

Minutes after that, the necrons carved their way inside the vessels, and swarmed inside, hungry for flesh and blood, their desire for real bodies manifesting as a cannibalistic urge to eat. They shredded meat with their long clawed limbs, and ripped servitors apart with casual ease. So consumed with madness were the flayed ones, that they did not realise the ships were almost entirely manned by servitors, or that the few truly living beings on board had barricaded themselves around the warp engines. I could find no record of the names of these men, but they must have been devoted to their cause. They stubbornly held off the waves of flayers for about an hour. This was just enough time for each of the ten ships to trigger warp core breaches. As each vessel imploded, they took with them scores of necron ships, and millions of flayed ones.

Soon after, another wave of ships broke from the warp. Unlike their predecessors, these vessels did not slow down as they entered the system; they flared their plasma reactors to capacity, their crews offering silent prayers to the Five Brothers and the Emperor Revenant, or whatever other deities these doomed souls prayed to. All ahead full, this fleet of old and outmoded vessels surged. Within a few minutes, they reached a significant fraction of c. The necron vessels were faster, but their automated systems were still reeling from the initial assault. Only a handful of alien ships managed to reach the speeding vessels. Half of the human ships were blasted asunder by powerful arcs of azure energy, while others ploughed into the orbital defence platforms of Drazak, even as they roused themselves to activity and blasted another dozen foes apart. However, all of this occurred within less than three seconds, such was the unfathomable speed these ships were travelling. Even those ships destroyed by the necrons couldn’t hope to arrest their momentum, or the unbelievable kinetic energy unleashed by their reckless manoeuvre. Ships were turned to clouds of plasma and glittering metal wreckage, which all struck the necron ships and defences at roughly 0.6c. The effect would have been spectacular; like a new sun rising a few million miles above Drazak’s necropolis surface.

One ship, amidst the searing chaos of the naval ram raid, did not destroy itself in explosive fashion. A solitary Luna class cruiser, the Triumph of Salazan, one of the most ancient and famous designs of vessel still maintained by the Imperium Pentus, used the bombardment to cover its advance, for the commander onboard had executed his plan perfectly, with the aid of naval advisors. It made an initial burn towards the centre of the system, but then the vessel let its own momentum carry it forwards. This minimised the energy signature of the ship and avoided the unwanted attention of the flayed ones. On the bridge of this vessel, Colonel Schaeffer stood by the Captain’s chair, watching the penitent fleet burning. A cigar was always smoking in his clenched teeth, and his semi-bionic form was unmoved by the sight of such death. Yet, for those who were unused to such carnage, it was a harrowing sight.

The Captain balked, expressing shock that so many people could perish so swiftly all at once. One of his helmsmen sneered.

“They were criminals and degenerates. It is no tragedy that they are destroyed.”

At this, the Colonel of the 13th Legion hoisted the helmsman from his chair, and drew his plasma pistol threateningly.

“Though scum in life they might have been, in death they find redemption, and sit at the Emperor’s side as Imperial heroes. You will not speak ill of the glorious dead again.”

It was a statement, not a request.

The remainder of the Thirteenth Penal Legion, all four thousand of them, were crammed into every available spare room or open space on the Triumph. All manner of scum made up this reformed regiment of the Imperium of Old. There were demented engineers skilled in illegal technological experiments. There were hundreds upon hundreds of penal colonists, armed by Vulkan’s smiths and trained by life times fighting for their very lives in the dark pits of prison. Salvar Chem Dogs spared destruction from the Necromundan war made their bunks beside captured prisoners of war too proud to swear fealty to the five Primarchs. Cults of redemption captured in the Theologian war readied their flamers for one last, glorious purge. Necromundan nobles, claiming to be children of the Illustrious, Infamous House of Jericho, found themselves slumming it besides mad men liberated from asylums across the Imperium Pentus. The journey was a long and violent one, as so many violent thugs in such cramped conditions was bound to create tensions. Only the mercilessness of Sister Agravain and her hastily-assembled force of former commissars and ex-Arbites, kept a semblance of peace, by beating any dissenting figures and keeping the ‘Last Chancers’ away from the crew sections of the ship. 

There were only two figures in this army who remained unmolested by either their boisterous fellows or Agravain’s goons. One was a figure infamous for being the closest thing to a friend the colonel still had in the galaxy; a knife-wielding figure known only as Kage. Rumour had it, he had freed his soul from the clutches of a daemon long ago, while others claim he merely made a pact with it to spare his worthless carcass from the warp’s fires. The second figure was unusual, in that he was not a mortal at all. He was an Astartes; his armour stripped of paint and all chapter markings removed. This strange figure kept to himself, in a lightless, sparse cell at the aft section of the Triumph. No one dared disturb this superhuman, until the time came for battle. And even then, only Schaeffer had the sheer adamantine balls to do so.

After several weeks of tense, silent running through the newborn debris fields of Drazak, the Triumph was close enough to deploy its attack craft. Its old compliments of fighters and bombers had been stripped out, in favour of flight upon flight of modified thunderhawks, enough to transport the entire Penal Legion to the surface. Once the Triumph was roughly twelve thousand kilometres from the atmosphere of Drazak, it suddenly flared back into life and launched a furious salvo of macro cannons, plasma bolts, and lance strikes, directly towards the surface of Drazak, followed soon after by a mighty swarm of Thunderhawk gunships. Once it had delivered its cargo, the chase was on, and the Triumph fled from rapid necron naval retaliation. It was up to the Last Chancers now.

The descent to Drazak was like a descent into hell itself. The clouds churned with green grave-light, and the scuttling silver of canoptek scarab swarms. Dozens of thunderhawks perished as their squadrons made for the surface as swiftly as they could. Dozens more were destroyed by opportunistic tomb blade fighters or linked pylon gauss weapons, or the living lightning of the few land-based defences not destroyed by Triumph’s first orbital salvoes. Though hundreds died, thousands still got through the aerial death trap. They were rewarded with a clear view of the ossified nightmare of Drazak’s continental bone fields, stretching as far as the eye could see, illuminated only by the dull red light of a dying star. Almost straight away, flayed ones began to shimmer into existence, on the very wings of the thunderhawks themselves, scratching and tearing at the adamantine hulls with mindless fury. The guns of the hawks blazed red hot through constant firing, as they fought to destroy the necron attackers, and even so, fifty more spacecraft corkscrewed burning from the sky, to destroy themselves on the bone yard far below. 

Yet still, onwards they flew. Crolomere, the only living soul amidst the necropolis, was not hard for the Penal legions psykers to locate, and they made all haste towards the outcrop of sundered ruins that she had hidden herself. The thunderhawks landed, forming a rough perimeter using void shield pylons and the hulls of damaged thunderhawks as barriers against the incursion of the flayed ones.

The necrons, unlike their more sane fellow androids, attacked the Thirteenth Legion in waves, millions strong. They had no ranged weapons, but with such numbers of deathless killing machines, they almost didn’t need them. Schaeffer led the Penal legion gun lines from the front, bellowing orders as his plasma pistol blazed in the haunting half-light of Drazak. Lascannons, autoguns, missiles and mortar shells repeatedly scythed down hundreds upon hundreds of the psychotic flayed ones, but still more foes clambered into the fray behind them, and most of those who fell simply rose again, pulling their shattered limbs back together carefully, with the calm precision of a clock smith.

As the colonel fought on the surface, Agravaine and Kage led forces into the smashed catacombs beneath the ruins they occupied, searching for Crolomere. In these depths, wraiths and scarabs crawled through the very walls to attack them at every turn. It was close quarters carnage. Demented knife men and convicts clashed in the darkness with blade-limbed nightmares from the dawn of time that parted flesh and armour alike with equal, disdainful precision. Terror gripped many of these criminals, but they were trapped in the dark and only fighting the enemy would ensure they could escape. These were hard men and women, who had fought all their lives to avoid the death by their fellow prisoners or the hangman’s noose; they were frenziedly determined not to die in this foul underworld.

Kage was the first one to smash his way into the old armoury of the crashed ship that formed the heart of the ruined complex. Inside, he found a woman, bloody and sobbing. Her flesh was covered in bloody gashes, and her eyes were red raw with bitter tears. Even an immortal like her could only take so much punishment before her body began to fail, and she seemed close to a true and lasting death. She hadn’t long and she could no longer walk unaided. Thus, Kage determined to carry her back to the surface. It was said that when Kage lifted her from her gory resting place, her eyes briefly looked into his, and she whispered ‘Illuminatus’, much to Kage’s confusion, before passing into unconsciousness. With that, Kage and Agravaine desperately fought their way back the way they came, clambering over the many corpses of former allies. These bodies were piled five men deep in some places, faces ripped off and bellies slit open like abattoir fodder. 

Meanwhile, the surface battle had become a desperate, hopeless affair. The Flayed ones had burrowed beneath the forcefield pylons, and had destroyed them one after another, before swarming into close quarters with the Penal Legionnaires. Fires raged all around, as the soldiers and their few remaining military vehicles fired at near point blank range at the terrible silver phantoms, clothed in the still-wet skin of their fellow soldiers. But if the Flayed ones thought they might break, they were wrong. The necrons never did fully understand the psyche of humans, and in particular the psyche of those of the criminally insane. Both sides fought with animal ferocity. When lasguns were spent, they were thrown into the fires raging all around, and their owners leapt into combat with knives and pistols, clubs and even crew suicide weapons built from demolition charges draped over their fists. The few survivors would then snatch up the lasguns form the fires, and unleash the last remaining las volleys upon their murderers.

The Colonel was unfazed by the insane carnage raging around him. He fired his pistol into close combat without a second thought, his power sword also flashing relentlessly as it carved apart his foes. He was almost as much metal as the necrons he battled, but his machinery could not repair itself as readily, but this would not stop him. As a deep and terrible night descended, the fiery battle continued to rage. Kage and Agravaine eventually reached the surface, alone save for the prone sensei. Agravaine formed a rearguard to Kage, blazing away with her bolter at the pursuing canoptek constructs. Escape from one hellhole led only to another; out of the frying pan, into the fire. Kage cursed as he stumbled into the chaotic battle with the flayed ones, hellpistol drawn in his one free hand. 

The Lieutenant instantly began to make for the one Thunderhawk left undamaged by the anarchy engulfing the ruined starship. He and Agravaine didn’t even spare a backward glance towards Schaeffer and the few hundred surviving Last Chancers dying behind them (one must remind oneself that these two were not good people, even though their heroic actions may sometimes fool us).

However, before they could reach the Thunderhawk’s ramp with their prize, their hopes were dashed. A flayed one, larger and more ornate than any they had yet witnessed, emerged from the shattered bones between them and their craft. Valgul; the lord of the flayers himself. The towering silver figure had perfectly articulated claws and fangs, and its eyes glowed with a terrible green fire. Blood stained the creature’s fine ornamentation, and desiccated skins were stitched across its shoulders like some madman’s cloak.

Kage fired his hellpistol, but the las weapon’s wounds healed almost as soon as his mag was spent. Agravaine also squeezed the trigger of her bolter, but the weapon clicked empty. The flayer lord said nothing as it charged the short distance between them. Kage’s face set in cold resignation, and Agravaine’s jaw clenched in reflexive fear. Death came for them.

It came as a shock to both of them when the flayed one was smashed aside by a great, grey mass of ceramite. The Overlord was sent sprawling for a moment. Kage’s savior rose first, his unpainted armour pitted and scarred by many blows. The towering Astartes rolled his shoulders, keeping his eyes at all times upon the rising Necron killer.

“Depart with her, and redeem us all,” the space marine rumbled, his voice rendered inhuman by his helmet’s snarling grille. Kage and Agravaine didn’t need to be told twice, and virtually sprinted to the Thunderhawk with all haste.

“I shall spill your blood and flay your flesh. You shall be deboned and your body will be peeled,” Valgul explained to the Astartes callously, as his claws began to crackle with energy.

“Your bloodlust is but the shadow of a memory,” the Astartes growled, as he began to draw his melee weapons from their sheaths. “I have known true berserkers, former brothers; men with true mortal lust for death and the flesh of their foes. And you, xenos, are a pale facsimile,” he snarled, grinning beneath his helm, as the implants at the bas eof his neck filled his mind with nothing but the white noise of mindless wrath.

The Astartes revved his twin chainaxes as he charged into battle with the Lord of the Flayed Ones. It took several minutes to start the thunderhawk’s engines, and Kage desperately watched the epic clash of demi-gods from afar as he waited for the ship to power up. They had to escape Drazak this evening and every single second counted. 

Schaeffer eventually found himself stood atop a pile of corpses; his own soldiers, dead all around him. Every one of them had died with a weapon in his hands, and everyone was thus saved from damnation in the Colonel’s mind. There was only one sinner left, he noted as he fought on against the encircling foe. His pistol arm had been severed, and he had been burnt, disembowelled and most of his remaining skin had been ripped off. Yet still he stood, hacking and slashing apart foe after foe with his glittering powersword. He even continued to cut down his foes after the sword’s power supply had been severed, leaving it just a sharp, sparking length of adamantine. Soon, even this was shattered, and he continued to punch ineffectually at his enemy as they bore him to the ground, impaling him over and over again with energised claws.

Valgul and the repentant World Eater fought like legends from the lost millennia. The Astartes bled from scores of wounds, but shedding his own blood simply sent him into a deeper frenzy of blows. His axes carved deep wounds into the living metal skeleton of Valgul, and his blows never stopped falling against the necron. No matter how many wounds Valgul inflicted, the Astartes would not fall, just as Valgul’s reanimation protocols prevented him from collapsing under the weight of so many furious, powerful strikes. As they wrestled through the bones like wild terrors, kage and Agravaine’s thunderhawk at last began to rise, banking and deftly soaring between the arcing energy lashes of the necron defence grid.

Schaeffer, broken and bleeding upon a mound of the dead, looked up to the early morning sky, and saw the hawk rising, leaving contrails in its wake. He could not talk, for his lungs and mouth were full of blood, but he did grin, for perhaps the first time in living memory, the colonel of the thirteenth grinned with genuine happiness. Soon, Valgul appeared before him. The Overlord was a sundered ruin, his head cloven half in two, his broken mechanics sparking and ruined beyond even his reanimation protocols could repair. Nevertheless, the Lord was still very much alive, and he gently pressed his metal foot onto Schaeffer’s chest, making the ancient human to wince in agony. Hatefully, the Colonel spat his still-lit cigar into the necron’s blank face. But when the necron pressed his foot harder into the Colonel’s chest, he did not wince, or scream or curse Valgul. He simply smiled, his eyes fixed upon the rising sun. The sunrise was bright, brighter than it had been in Drazak’s entire history. Valgul watched in confusion as the human flesh beneath him began to blacken and burn. Likewise, all the flesh draped over his fellow flayed ones was burning and melting before his eyes. It was then that Valgul realised what had happened, and turned towards the rising sun, that loomed vast and white in the sky.

That one torpedo, the stray torpedo his fleet had not troubled themselves with destroying in the opening few minutes of the initial naval battle, had reached Drazak’s dying star. Ordinarily, that would have meant nothing, but that torpedo bore no simple plasma warhead. 

It was a nova bomb.

In orbit, the triumph received a single thunderhawk, and instantly made its way towards the edge of the system. Behind them, Drazak’s star was going supernova, not merely nova. They had barely ten minutes to reach the translation point before the radiation of the explosion crossed the void and reached them. The necron fleet was rushing towards the nova. Perhaps they were attempting to quell the nova using their miraculous science? We shall never know, for all history remembers is that, on that day, as the Triumph made an emergency warp jump inside a planetary system, Drazak the bone kingdom, and all the planets and ships still inside the system, were consumed by a colossal supernova, which, after seven years, expanded to depopulate many neighbouring lightyears of space. At a stroke, the flayed ones were almost entirely wiped out by the most powerful natural force in the entire universe.

However, all was not well aboard the retreating Triumph of Salazan. For, just before they had translated into the warp, a pack of desperate flayed ones had teleported on board, just as the triumph had lowered its shields to allow Kage’s ship to dock. In the warp, isolated from any help, the crew of the Triumph were easy prey. The flayed ones stalked the corridors like ghouls, ripping apart crew members and any armsmen who attempted to hunt them down. They left gory, skinless corpses as the only mark of their passing. Desperate and terrified, the crew attempted to barricade themselves in various fortified areas of the ship, and hold out the storm of carnage throughout heir ship. Crolomere was only just recovering, as this new horror befell them. She could feel the warp churning with hungry daemons, like sharks around a boat spilling fresh blood behind them.

The low calibre weaponry of the naval security forces were in no way adequate in taking on reanimating necrons, for even the mighty shotcannons were insufficient to permanently put down a fully-powered necron android. In the first few days of warp travel, almost half the crew were dead, left to their own defence by the captain’s armed forces, who focussed on protecting the navigator and the warp engine block.

It seemed as if the Triumph would die an ignominious end, slain with pathetic ease by the remnants of their vanquished foe. However, the beleaguered Luna class cruiser had one weapon left in its arsenal; Crolomere the Grey. She was healed, and she had a plan. She escaped the infirmary, moments before it was overrun by flayed ones, and made her way to Kage’s quarters. Eventually, she had gathered together Kage, Agravaine and some of the surviving crew; men in tattered rags, desperately following whoever looked like they knew what they were doing. Together, Crolomere explained her audacious plan to them all.

She, Kage and the crewmen made their way towards the bridge, making as much noise and commotion as possible. Her intention was to draw the flayed ones towards them, and it worked horrifically well. Within an hour, the flayed ones could be heard approaching, metal clattering against metal as they ran through corridors and scuttled through vents to find their quarry. Meanwhile, Agravaine made her way towards the aft sections of the ship, fighting her way through any misguided defenses the paranoid crew had erected to prevent anyone from passing. She didn’t think twice about murdering the crew in her way; she was a psychopath, without the burden of empathy that afflicted her fellow, lesser humans. She eventually reached her destination, and pressed her bolter to the Magos’ temple.

“Do exactly as I say,” she purred. “Or you might be meeting your Omnissiah sooner than you would like.”

The flayed ones were fast and lethally efficient in their killing, and Crolomere had lost half of her allies after barely ten minutes of battle. Eventually, the survivors made a last stand in one of the ship’s mess halls. They made makeshift barricades with the long benches and tables inside, and engaged the flayed ones with the few autoguns, shotguns and handcannons the crewmen had been able to salvage from their dead comrades. It was not nearly enough. The necrons shredded the crew like blind cattle. Their feeble weapons barely even scratched the undying abominations that eagerly skinned them alive for their trouble. Kage’s stolen shotgun was soon spent, and he instead drew his inferno pistol, and began to fire at the surrounding monsters, backing away towards Crolomere, who likewise emptied a magazine of her bolt pistol into the undead aliens. 

“Hold me. Close,” Crolomere panted to Kage.

The convict almost laughed, thinking she was scared and looking for his comfort. “When your plan goes down, we’re dead. I’m no comfort to you, I promise you.”

However, when he looked into her eyes, he realized she was not scared, but was coldly determined, her will like Iron. Her plea was not a request, but an order. He had only seen eyes like that once before, on old Schaeffer himself. Kage did as he was told, and she hugged him close to her chest. The flayed ones closed in.

“Agravaine! Now!” Crolomere yelled into her vox. 

For roughly five point seven seconds, Agravaine had coerced the magos controlling the ships Gellar field, to lower the shield, before raising it again. In that moment, a veritable avalanche of warp entities flooded the ship; a billion monsters drawn to the Triumph by the slaughter of the flayed ones. The necrons recoiled, as they felt the flayed skin draped over their shoulders begin to writhe with unnatural life. The flesh coiled and constricted, mutating as it flowed like wax into new and obscene forms. The androids screeched with their rasping, artificial voices, but to the horror of Kage, their machine voices morphed into real voices. Their living metal was flooded with horns and tendrils, rippling with newborn nightmares that burst and crawled across their glossy surfaces. He watched the machines regain their souls, only for them to be devoured and shredded all over again. Even Kage, the hardened criminal, turned from this horrific sight, and buried his face into Crolomere’s shoulders.

The warp and all its madness washed through the ship, destroying hundreds of the crew, and driving even more of them utterly mad. Yet, the tide of damnation was all flooding in the same direction; towards the sensei. The warp churned around her like a great whirlpool. She was the becalmed heart at the centre of the storm, the eye of the hurricane. Daemons rushed to consume her, and were rebuffed by her raw power. She called upon all her powers. She was grey no longer, as she silently screamed out to her father and his power, infused in her blood, was unleashed. 

The Gellar field reactivated, and the daemons, cut off from their power, dissolved and withered in Crolomere’s presence. She released Kage, who stumbled backwards onto his rump. For a few moments, he was dumbstruck as he beheld Crolomere. She shone golden as the dawning of Sol, for an instant before the shimmering halo of power dissipated. Power spent, she collapsed.

Several months later, the Triumph broke into realspace, on the edge of the Armageddon system. The ship was battered, ravaged by huge claws marks, and part of the hull seemed to have fused with a fungal warp entity. Inside, almost the entire crew were dead; the few survivors were gibbering lunatics, running naked through the haunted corridors. These men were put out of their misery by the Steel legion rescue teams sent in to investigate the wreck. However, locked inside the navigator’s chamber, the team found the navigator, alongside Crolomere, Kage and the now-lifeless Agravaine. They were sane and quite alive.

I must confess, as I write this tome, I search my study for further histories about this event. There are none. No legends or epic poems were written about these unsung heroes, and the Imperium kept no records of this black ops event after it had returned successful. To the wider galaxy, the Last war of the Thirteenth was a merchant fleet, which had died with all hands during a freak warpstorm. However, now the truth is known. This was a pivotal battle for many reasons. Firstly, after returning to Armageddon, Crolomere was spirited away by the brethren of the Willing, to an audience with Vulkan and his advisors, to aid in the war against her former ally, Ahriman the Sorcerer. The second reason is less obvious at first. I only discovered it truly after we accessed the Black Library’s Cognate crystals, where the jumbled memory of all sentient life were stored haphazardly. The memories I accessed there, relating to Kage, were rather revealing.

Kage was given his freedom at long last, but the borderline madman found himself lost, cut adrift in a world he no longer recognised. The past is a foreign land, some scholars claim, but the future is just as alien. Kage was a man out of time and recognised nothing. He had been given a monetary reward for his efforts on Drazak, but no recognition by the general populace. He was merely a violent ex-soldier to the Imperium. He could get no work in the Steel Legion, and he had no skills that he could turn to peaceful work, beyond becoming a labourer. Instead of this drudgery, he turned to drink, frequenting various bars across Armageddon’s cities, recounting tales of when he killed the rogue Governor of Armageddon when the world was still a toxic hellhole. He became some forgotten, drunken derelict, feared and detested by the common man.

However, one night, when he was at his lowest, he was visited at his table by an odd gentleman. This man was youthful, but his eyes were ancient. His coat was multi-coloured, and Kage found he could not follow the swirling colours, but dismissed that as his own bleary vision playing tricks on him. The man was accompanied by a tall, slender figure; a bipedal machine, which stood attentively at his master’s side like a butler. The mysterious man smiled warmly as he sat down opposite the bearded vagabond Kage, setting a book down on the table, just to his side.

“Hello Lieutenant,” the man began, catching Kage’s attention almost instantly. “My name is Bronislaw. We’ve been looking for you for quite a while now.”

“Why?” Kage said bitterly.

“You were possessed.”

Kage said nothing, glaring at the colourful man threateningly.

The man continued. “Of course, many people are possessed. However, very few manage to toss their unwanted lodger back out again. The Exorcist marines managed it, and the Illuminati, but they are out of our reach presently. But you did it alone; a mortal man, alone against the might of a daemon, and succeeding. That is very interesting to us. To the Throne.”

The last sentence was spoken quietly. Kage grinned at the man spitefully.

“The Emperor is dead, friend. What millennia are you living in?” Kage laughed mirthlessly.

“M56 I believe... or is it M55?” the man chuckled. As Kage got up to leave, the machine man placed a hand on his shoulder, urging him to sit down again with silent insistence. He did so.

“I think you know that isn’t true my friend; what you said about Him I mean,” the stranger clarified, like a scholar chiding a wayward student. “You felt her power, firsthand, didn’t you?”

Kage said nothing. He didn’t need to.

Bronislaw nodded. “You tried to rationalise it as her being a latent psyker, but you’ve felt psykers before. You’ve felt daemons before too, closer than most mortals could dream of. She’s neither. Her blood is His, and if she still possessed power, then he is not dead.”

Kage considered this, and the revelation nearly floored him. He had never been particularly pious, but this was different. So much different.

He took a moment to respond, wetting his dry lips and running a hand through his scraggly beard. “What... what do you want with me?”

Bronislaw smiled, his expression full of expression and excitement. “You have a strong will; possibly one of the strongest in a normal human. We need men like you, where we are going.”

“And where are you going?”

After hearing this question, Bronislaw Czevak opened the book on the table, and then he told former Lieutenant Kage their destination.
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