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

==Additional Background Section 38: Blackheart’s Diaspora and The Incarnation of Stars== 

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While the Eastern Fringe suffered the attentions of Khaine, and the Primarchs of both Pentus and the Travesty mustered their forces for the great Western Conflict, Huron’s wild realm also began to feel the first nauseating pangs of the escalating war betwixt sanity and madness that was rapidly encircling the galaxy like some monstrous girdle.
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For many thousands of years, Huron’s realm was kept in a state of obedience, if not order, by the might of the Corsair’s great raiding fleets. The Red Corsairs dominated the spaces between worlds, and prevented any significant consolidation of resistance to his misrule. For a long time, only Biel-Tan and Varsavia put up any sort of meaningful opposition to his rampant abuses. Huron Blackheart reigned as a mad and capricious Emperor. After the fall of Baal, he expanded his empire eastwards, consuming many of the surviving Bloodknights into his own ravaging armadas. Worlds quaked in fear at his passing, and the Maelstrom spread northwards like sepsis through an infected cut. Even his alliance and fealty to Cadia did not lessen his power and influence. He ruled from the throne chamber of the Astral Maw, his flagship. The ship had once been a vast Necron tombship, before the Hamadraya had unleashed a daemonic contagion into the silvered veins of the living metal ship, and his own Corsairs had stripped out the Necron ostentation in favor of the charnel vileness of a true chaos space marine flagship.

Huron’s Corsairs were a black legend amongst the cowed populace. His fleets regularly visited each world of his Imperium, raping them of their human and mineral resources. However, the Blackheart was not a simple predator, he was a game keeper. He made sure not to visit the same world twice within ten years. Savaged worlds were given a decade of paranoid peace in which to rebuild their cities, and replenish their stocks, before the dreaded crimson ships loomed over them once again. Then the nightmare would play out all over again. With space superiority, the Red Corsairs and their Eldar Corsair allies could violate planetary populations at their leisure. This method of Imperial rule had advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, Huron had no singular metropolis, where he could be trapped, besieged or starved out of; he was mobile and slippery as he was invulnerable. On the other hand, he relied heavily upon his large Corsair fleets to do not only all the resource gathering, but also all the planetary defence, as the terrorized cattle worlds he ruled over were too broken and weak to defend themselves, their PDFs little more than ceremonial after constant massacres every decade.

These weaknesses were never truly tested until after the Varsavian massacre. At Varsavia, Huron had gambled a large fraction of his total fleet power on breaking the siege of the Silver Skulls. However, the Eldar/Astartes alliance smashed Katan’s fleet. The remnant fled with the Groevian known as the Junnergan, who seceded from the Eastern Chaos Imperium, taking a large chunk of the far eastern Imperial/Baalite border region with him, forming the Groevian Empire. Suddenly, Huron had lost many hundreds of thousands of ships, and countless millions of Marines and warriors. With his fleets weakened, Huron could no longer send his fleets to every corner of his Empire, and insurrection and multiple xenos invasions became commonplace. For every one enemy he squashed with his arrow-quick naval actions, three more sprang up. Duke Sliscus, unpredictable as ever, turned upon the Blackheart at the first sign of weakness. The piratical Dark Eldar allied with dozens of different allies every year, and betrayed them as soon as he got bored with them. Soon, Sliscus was attacking Red Corsair fleets as much as he was devouring prey worlds.

In the west, the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath had expanded noticeably. However, this was no boon to the Pirate King, for it was not daemons who made their lair in that warp storm. It was the haunt of the Angyllic hosts, and as the storm expanded, so too did the number of Angylworlds and Adorant slave-planets; worlds covered in towering monuments to the Star Father, filled with mindless cultists who constantly exalted their God, throwing themselves and everything they had against the Corsair fleets in the hopes of proving how obedient they could be to the Angyls’ cause. Necron raids increased during this time as well; this was likely a result of the monumental events taking place within the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath.*

The Eldar of Biel-Tan took this opportunity to increase their precision strikes against the Blackheart's infrastructure, stretching his resources even further. Huron felt his control slipping, and his actions got progressively more extreme. He burned planets and smashed cities into embers. He put entire worlds to the torch and everywhere there was horror. 

In his mad rage, when a festering plagueship from the west entered his territory at the head of a fleet of daemonships, Huron almost fired upon it. That was, until he heard the hollow voice of Typhus across the vox channel.

“Salutations, Lord Corsair.”

“Why do you sully my empire with your putrescence this day, herald of Nurgle?”

At this challenge, Typhus chuckled heartily. “Perhaps I have come to observe your empire rotting? Your realm is in sweet decay after all. Or perhaps I come bearing word from Erebus? Which would you find least repugnant?”

Huron permitted Typhus to enter his realm. The host of the Destroyer hive had been sent by Erebus to reinforce Huron’s realm, as concern was building that the Blackheart was the weak link in the noose around Pentus’ neck. Typhus spread his zombie contagion far and wide across the Eastern Chaos Imperium. Worlds who had once tried to break away from the fold became nothing but stagnant monuments to apathy and decay, peopled by living corpses growling with mindless hunger.

Ku’Gath the Plaguefather was summoned, and the plaguebearers bound this crumbling empire with putrid sinews. The Terminus Est and its crusade of filth reinforced the stretched Red Corsair fleet.

As it turned out, Typhus’ intervention had come at just the right time. For within months of the Death Guard’s arrival, the Planet Killer was detected, crossing the indistinct border into the Red Corsair’s domain. 

*A note on the Angyl/Necron alliance, and its annulment:

Draigo had returned to Ophelia at the head of a vast Angyl-host, bearing a great prize for the Arch-Angyls. The prize had been taken from Trazyn the Infinite’s vaults in Solemnace, and was utterly unique. It was the still-living head of Sebastian Thor. The head had been stolen from its tomb on Dimminar by Trazyn, who had heretically reanimated it, solely for aesthetic reasons, when he had set it amidst his other exhibits. Who knows what madness Thor had suffered in those twenty thousand years of disembodied immortality?

Nevertheless, Draigo, guided there by Imotekh’s knowledge, had freed the head and he took it deep into the heart of the Ophelia’s vaults. There, the arcane sorceries of the Thorian cultists, the impossible science of Imotekh’s Crypteks and mysterious Angyl magicks combined to grant the living head new flesh, new muscle and new power. But the Thorians were not finished there; they had constructed a great throne, capable of channeling a vast portion of warp energy directly into the regenerated host. Like some perverse lightning rod, the central bastion of Ophelia was struck millions of times by ethereal warp bolts and electrical power from beyond the materium. For almost an entire year, the warp was funneled through the throne and into the Thor avatar. The planet groaned and thrashed tectonically under this divine onslaught. Thousands of Exorcists from the Legio Illuminatus flocked to the bastion, led by Grand Master Trenchard, clad in his finely sculpted Cataphractii armour that glinted red and silver in the blinding glare of the bastion’s building light. The battle sisters of the Weeping Brides came too, and all fell to their knees in sheer ecstatic fervor. Adorants and lesser men simply died, bodies destroyed by psychic fallout. The Necrons watched this event with stoic disdain, for they had seen such concentrated power before, when they had incarnated the C’tan.

Eventually, the great gates of the bastion opened, and the slaves of the Star Father, Angyl and mortal alike, knelt as one. Only the Necrons remained standing. The figure was a giant, tall as a Primarch and bathed in a psychic brilliance which was awesome to behold. His face was beautiful and terrible to behold, for his golden eyes shone with callous might and monstrous indifference. Sedition and thoughts of free will melted like steel before a fusion furnace. His form was that of a man, but his flesh was like sculpted stone, hard and unyielding.

“I Am!” the creature said. As he spoke, his words carried like the greatest clarion horn, dynamic and sonorous. “I Am Thor Incarnus, And I Am The Way Of Might! Glory And Humanity Is Mine. The Father Is Incarnated, And Fealty Is Owed.”

Imotekh watched this display with supreme indifference. He observed Draigo, who beheld Thor Incarnus with his featureless helm. The Angyl-Prince rose from his kneeling position.

“I am Kaldor Draigo,” he declared.

“You Are My Armour Of Contempt,” the giant boomed, and raised his hand. Draigo nodded in acceptance, as Thor melted the adamantine-skinned Angyl Prince. Soon, Draigo was naught but a molten puddle of silver. Moments later, the liquid metal flowed across the floor, and climbed onto the giant’s flesh, coating it organically, as an assassin may don a synthskin bodyglove. Draigo sculpted himself into an ornate suit of pristine perfection. In Thor Incarnus’s hand, Draigo’s sword and shield became a mighty hammer; a hammer of witches and deviants.

Imotekh took this moment to speak out.

“Young Trenchard,” the Phaeron began, his voice metallic and almost weary. “Enough of this pomp; we helped you construct your warp weapon, now it is time for recompense. You and your hosts shall hold up your end of our agreement. These are fine words your puppet speaks, but we have a war to win.”

Imotekh spoke like a teacher chiding a student for self indulgence.

The Astartes, still kneeling, turned to face the Necron. He scowled at the alien android. However, Thor answered for the Space Marine.

“I Am No Mere Instrument. I Am Anathema Incarnate; The One True Emperor. I Am Your God. Kneel.”

There was silence for a moment; a silence pregnant with terrible promise. This silence was eventually broken by a dry, rasping, incredulous laugh, which rattled from the Storm Lord.

“The Necrons have no gods. We need no gods. We have outgrown them; you are a pretender. We were already ancient when you were but mewling babes,” Imotekh growled mechanically. “Gods? We shattered our gods, and chained them to our anvil of war. You dare speak of godhood? You stand before your betters!”

Thor seemed hardly concerned, his expression impossibly stern. “Discordance Cannot Be Permitted. Our Concordance Is Nullified.”

With that, Trenchard rose from his kneeling position. “Brother Izrale.”

With that curt order, one of the Exorcists rose, his meltagun rising to his shoulder in the space of less than a second. Imotekh was fractionally quicker. The Phaeron turned the marine to ash inside his armour with a single bolt of his lightning. The electrical surge leapt between marines, striking them even as they rose into attack formation. A dozen were dead within a minute. The other Necrons fell upon the Astartes and Angyls, and soon battle was joined.

Through all this, Thor Incarnus stood impassively. Imotekh, full of rage at being betrayed, turned his staff towards the giant, and unleashed the full power of his technological sorcery. The air turned to plasma, as the lightning of the Storm Lord surged towards Thor at the speed of light. Impossibly, Thor Incarnus was quicker. He raised his hammer, and the lightning was channeled into the great eagle-headed weapon. Charged particles and plasma fire wreathed the Incarnation, but it remained unharmed. Even as the lightning sheathed him, Thor spoke clearly and calmly.

“When I Was A Boy, When We Were Merely Sebastian, We Read Of The Father. He, Now We, Were The Father Of Arik Taranis And His Brothers. You Are The Lightning,” Thor began, as he lunged forwards and dealt Imotekh a single mighty blow, which sent the Phaeron bodily across the chamber, to shatter against the far wall like some broken tin toy. “BUT I AM THE THUNDER!” the giant concluded, his face wreathed by a burning halo.

Imotekh survived this encounter, and the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath became a battleground between silver automatons, between Necron and Angyl. Eventually, Imotekh fled from the Storm, and departed the region aboard his command ship. There, he returned to the Sautekh Dynasty, and began a campaign of vengeance against all life.

As for Thor Incarnus? He and his Legion of mindless adherents played their own part in the Primarch War, for He was the One True Emperor, and would permit neither the vile pretender Lorgar nor the sentimental coward Vulkan to sully the title with their existence.
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