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

==Additional background Section 44: Salvation or Damnation? Even seers cannot guess...==


<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">‘Upon the field of slaughter, the man who sets his blade upon the ground is exalted above all others. Mercilessness is cowardice, and the whole galaxy stinks of this spinelessness, for it smells of corpses and gibbets. Do you truly not know who my champion is? 
No? 
Then you’re just as doomed as the rest of them. 
I will mourn you, but only for a moment. 
Then you will be forgotten, like all bad dreams...’ 

'''[Compiler’s note: This quote was located on a loose sheet found at the back of the manuscripts brought back with the remains of Vasiri. Its author is unknown, as is its context. I forget why I placed it here.]'''<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

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To Walk on God’s Skin...: 

It is difficult to pinpoint precisely when the refugee fleet of Iacob reached the sphere, for the galaxy around the sphere was nullified and blunt; neither angyl, daemon nor psyker could communicate through such a grand night shroud. Thus, there were not easily confirmed galactic dates, but there were many localised star dates, based upon the relative location of the fleet to the spherical construction which seemed to grow tremendously as they approached.

Iacob had been drawn to the region. For some reason, Vulkan believed the area of dead space, lurking just beneath the galactic plane, held the key to saving as many lives as possible. But the vast sphere, which was well over 1 AU in diameter, was inert to all forms of scanning, and all attempts at communication failed. What little light it reflected on their approach vector had indicated that the sphere was lighter than an object of its scale should be, but aside from this point of academic interest, little else could be gleaned.

As the colossal refuge fleet held orbit around the massive object, strange things began to occur. Some men went mad, and desperately tried to kill themselves and their colleagues. Soon, the brigs were full of wide-eyed madmen, ranting about ‘God’s Skin’. Some great psionic beacon or force had fallen over the massed ranks of aliens that basked in the unlight of the sphere. It was no psychic trick. Somehow, they knew that the sphere predated the notion of psykers or sorcerers.

It seemed that the more the crews of the refugee fleet resisted this all-pervading, silent siren song, the more they began to succumb to its madness. Men and women spoke in tongues, and fell upont heir faces in wailing confusion. Others wrote in strange alien languages no one could understand. Entire libraries of impossible notes were scrawled onto bulkheads and floors. Tau muttered and cut at themselves with their bonding knives, while kroot began to fast, refusing to eat the ‘madness-tainted’ food of their fellow refugees. 

Captain Trechous, overall fleet commander of the flotilla, began to have disturbing dreams of a silent god, stranded in an infinite void, with all the stars too far away to see. Only the dark, yawning loneliness and the empty vastness confronted him, and he felt a fear unlike anything a mortal mad could imagine. This was ageless, depthless fear. Trechous drove the thoughts from his mind, but this just brought them back all the stronger the next night and the next after that.

Iacob’s infirmaries were filled with refugees; not just those who were sick and wounded when they joined the fleet, but now with others suffering self-inflicted wounds and deranged delusions. It became clear to him then what had to be done.

The first Captain Trechous heard of Iacob’s plan, an unauthorised shuttle was launched from one of the fleet’s flagships. The ship was heading towards the sphere. It intended to land upon its expansive silver surface. At first, Trechous considered shooting down the shuttle, but when he realised Iacob was onboard, he stopped. The man was no lunatic or danger to the fleet. Iacob was one of the few honest, decent men Trechous knew, or had ever known. He let the man continue, evne though he felt primal, elemental dread in the very heart of his being. Whatever was in the sphere was mad, and profoundly dangerous, he just knew it.

Other members of the fleet were not so understanding. One of the armed escorts ships moved to intercept the shuttle. The sphere, perhaps detecting a large vessel crossing an unseen border of tolerability, shuddered. One of its great pylons surge dinto life, and struck the escort fromt he sky. There was an intense beam of green cropse-light, before the escort simply vanished, leaving nothing behind, not even wreckage. But the tiny shuttle somehow slipped past this invisible boundary. It took only an hour for the shuttle to descend to the sphere’s surface. Th gravity of the object was higher than Terran standard, and the shuttle landed with force.

Iacob, clad in a thick, visored void suit, stepped out onto the silver plain, which stretched for countless miles in every direction. The man felt energy pulsing through the ground. He felt power and sublime fear coursing through his body. But he surmounted his fear, as he took several more tentative steps.

He had realised something, as he had watched his charges in the apothecarium sicken and lose their minds. They had resisted the madness oft he sphere, and the strain had shattered their psyches. Iacob had not dones so. As he walked upon this so-called ‘God’s Skin’, he let the madness into his mind. It flowed through his simple, mortal brain. His was a mind of utter mundanity; he was no great genius or warrior. 

Thus, he could neither fight nor comprehend what happened next. As he walked, he felt vast tectonic movement beneath his feet. Then, like mercury crawling up a thermometer, the silver surface began to encircle his feet, then his shins, then his knees. He began to gasp and hyperventilate inside his stifling void suit, before the silver surface covered him entirely.

Then, the fluid receded, leaving not a single trace of Iacob behind.

Shortly after that, deathly green light began to shine from great fissures all along the sphere’s surface area. 

The grand sphere was awake. And it was insane...

###
The Daemons’ Demesne:

On the southern spinwards edge of the great Imperium of Travesties, lies a satellite realm of grotesque evil and symbolic significance to the human species. To the Imperium Pentus, it is called the Poisoned Cradle, the Tau know it as Spacial Abberaton Codename: ‘Doom’. To most other races, factions and species, it is known as the Terran Hells; the demesne of daemons.

Relative to the greater Travesty, this realm should have been small and insignificant compared to other fiefdoms that allied themselves to the Second Word. The Terran Hells, in the materium, only consisted of a handful of systems, trapped within the malign grasp of a single warp/realspace storm. But daemons are beings of imagery, creatures of symbollogy, and they gain power through souls, emotions and the twisted ideas and concepts mortals conceive. The Terran Hells were the former birthplace of humanity and as a consequence the region held vast meaning and history in its mutated bedrock and impossible geometries. Terror, the eye of the storm, was known by all races; once-loved, now loathed and feared. The warp poured into the region, allowing daemons to congregate and propagate their poisonous ideals and self-fulfilling feedback loops of nourishing emotional turmoil, but belief was the mortar that held this diabolical place together. With the Dragon’s minions gone from the system, there was nothing left to check the cancerous advance of the daemons; Mars became the blood-red satellite, forever awash with oceans of gore and rearing turrets of beaten brass and grinning skulls; a hunting ground for such terrible beings.

To list every vile form of daemon that made their home there would be impossible; their names and diverse forms could fill a thousand times a thousand grimoires of forbidden lore, each unique in its form and hungers.

But this realm was unlike most places in the Travesty, where evil men and aliens strove for power, harnessing daemons and warp energy for their own whims, thus bringing fourth corruption. Here, the daemons had the agency, and their mortal servants were the puppets. They were ruled by the Daemon King known as Doombreed, the most powerful daemon of the great devils that was still free. The others, such as the Xexes the Festering, Ingethel and Drach’nyen, were either devoured by rivals, enslaved by the Deep Warp, or else humbled and trapped with items of power.

The court of Doombreed was located deep in the dungeons of the Terran Hells, and he had gathered a great and tumultuous alliance of daemons to his side. The two most prominent were the ever conniving daemon princes Balphomael of Horned Darkness, and Cherubael the Cruel. One was a thing of shadow, with skeletal wings lost amidst churning, horned clouds of smoke, while the latter was golden-skinned and beautiful. Swan wings graced Cherubael’s back like an angelic mantle, and his handsome face held a gaze of exquisite malice. These two constantly argued and vied for Doombreed’s favour, and served as Doombreed’s chief advisors, for what being of chaos would not desire discordant council in all matters?

There were other major daemons under the thrall of Doombreed. This included the prince of a thousand wings, a feathered serpent coiling in the twisted storms of warp-tainted Jupiter’s atmosphere. This terrible beast was one of Tzeentch’s own, and wherever this creature went, flocks of screamers followed like shoals of hungry sharks. The serpent had a great human skull in place of a reptile’s, and its sockets blazed with the multi-hued light of Tzeentch. The rattle of its feathers in the ethereal wind of Jupiter was said to make the sound of a billion chittering souls, all trapped within the evil creature.

The herald bloothirster Skulltaker was said to serve as Doombreed’s executioner, his envenomed hellblade beheading and banishing any daemon of mortal than displeased the Bloodied King of the Terran Hells. Other chronicles claim this role was actually taken up by the daemon Samus, but I don’t see how one could reliably tell the difference between the servants of the primordial annihilator. To my eye they are all creatures dragged from the deranged imagination of madmen, I do not care to catalogue all their vast multitudes.

Alixria the ravenous was another of the greater thralls, and unlike the previous daemons, her form seemed altogether more fixed. She had once been a mortal harlot and starving orphan on some horrible little industrial planet, trading her sexual favours for food and lodgings. But Slannesh had taken her, and raised her to new heights of excess and power. She desired to live forever, as a perfect and immaculate goddess. Slannesh, as with all the patrons of chaos, gave her almost what she desired. Slannesh would grant her greater powers, but instilled in her a diabolical hunger and thirst, that no food could quell or drink could quench. Only through devouring the hearts of those who loved her would she gain beauty and power. Alixria devoured her own family, unrepentant in her vainglorious desire. She grew in scale and power exponentially, and as she grew taller and ever more impervious, her beauty became spectacular to behold. Once she had ascended to daemonhood, she was a towering perfumed princess, as large as a titan but lithe and enchantingly beautiful. Shapely thighs the width of fortress turrets, purple hair long and strong as steel mooring cables, enchanting feline eyes larger than a man was tall. Her glistening tanned flesh was impervious to any attempt to tarnish her perfection. Alixria surrounded herself with drug-addled slaves and hopelessly enchanted lovers, who she would tempt with blasphemous carnal promises, only to betray and devour them. Her minions lived within the towering, disturbing sculptures the daemoness carved into the ossified mountains of her domain.

Though Alixria looked like a normal (if impossibly vast and extravagantly attired) human on the outside, inside she was nothing but churning teeth and thorny lashed tendrils oozing fetid acid and stinking bile, as inhuman as any abomination Tzeentchian madness might have dreamt up. Her lovers suffered slow and agonizing deaths in her eldritch internals. What pack or offer Doombreed made to entice her to join his daemonic court is unknown. Some say she was intrigued by the Doombreed’s indifference to her allure, others that he allowed her to drink a vial of his ichor, and she became intoxicated. I would not wish to speculate myself; I do not profess to know the mindsets of daemonkind.

But of course for all these bizarre and imposing devils, a realm of daemons could never function without mortals to fuel and define them.

The manner in which the Terran Hells was horrendous and disgusting, but I shall relate it to you readers, so that you may understand how such an abomination as this realm was able to stave off collapse, despite all sanity and reason screamed for it to fall. Cherubael had always been despised by his fellow daemons, for they claimed he was tainted by the materium; he thought as a mortal thought, they cursed and slandered with their segmented tongues. In a way, they were correct.

Cherubael knew how humans were created, and how to breed them and how to ripen their souls for a daemon’s feast. Invoking ancient contracts with the Tersis and the other wandering daemon ships that sailed the warp, Cherubael had billions of mortal adolescents dragged to the Terran Hells. Deep in lightless pits, these creatures were reared according to the hungers of the daemons. Some were raised in the infernal brothels and torture chambers of Slannesh, others fought in claustrophobic fighting pits and gladiatorial cages of Khorne. Some were filled with plague and left to fester and multiply in the filthy cesspits and drug dens of Nurgle, while others were dropped into underground labyrinths with no end, but always with the exits marked by Tzeentch. For every daemon and every patron’s nourishing perversions, there were humans and aliens bred specially. These unfortunates were forced to breed and propagate, and their offspring would be in turn corrupted from birth, never knowing anything other than the will of chaos. Only when a mortal slave became wasted and ancient, were they scooped out of the pits and fed to ravenous daemons in lavish feasts and soul-lacerating orgies. The dungeons of Doombreed’s realm became obscene battery farms of human and alien chattel. 

With this powerful source of soul power, Doombreed was able to bribe countless daemons into his service, who suckled at the teet of the daemon king and his chosen lieutenant princes. Doombreed himself managed to define itself as a distinct entity, separate from its former patron Khorne. Doombreed became an unaligned dameon of frightful power. He rebuilt his daemonflesh body in twited homage to his former mortal form; a barbarian king with a great black scimitar of oozing smoke, and a fanged visage of beaten brass with molten iron blood. He bore a crown made of the fangs ripped form the maws of his bested rivals, that eternally drooled their owners’ stinking blood; a simple yet potent symbol of his mastery of the devils myriad. His vast host of daemons similarly rejected the technology of the materium, favouring forms that were mockeries of the pre-technological savges of old Terra that fought and bled in the oblivion before Old Night; chariots and spears, cursed bows and flanged maces, cavalry and whips. These were monsters of a primordial age, where such things as progress were sick lies told by mad fools.

I weep to relate this horror, but please forgive my seemingly-callous tone. It is the only way this chronicler can relate this information to you.

There were some humans, however, who served the daemons, and were not merely food for their impossible appetites. Mortal labour was needed to aid the daemons in the building of structures, and the prosecution of wars. These miserable wretches’ ancestors served the daemons willingly, and over the countless millennia under the glare of the warp-tainted sun, feasting upon the black-veined foliage of thorns that grew on every dameon world of the Terran hells, the descendants of those first chaos cultists became something... else. They were not mere mutants, with bodies corrupted by chaos. These creatures were changed in every way by chaos; even their very souls were decayed and sickly things. Their bodies followed suit, becoming hunched and withered things. Their minds wre cunning, but they were slaves to the will of the daemons. The daemons did not deign to give this malformed and ruined race a name, but their enemies did. They called them the Corroded, for that is what they were, mind body and soul.

Balphomael had mortal puppets and spies all across the Travesty, who kept the Terran Hells informed of matters of the materium, while Cherubael’s fluttering, winged Iolus daemons spied upon the warp and the other entities that forever sought to unseat Doombreed.

As the realm of daemons reached its zenith, Balphomael’s spies brought word that the primarchs were engaged in a cataclysmic war to the north; Travesty versus Pentus versus the Angyllic Hosts. Cherubael suggested that the daemons should intercede on behalf of the daemon Primarchs. With the aid of Doombreed’s mighty army, the Primarchs Pentus would have surely been defeated and scattered to the wind. But, as with every descision with regards warp fiends, there was dissent. Balphomael suggested they look south east, and crush the fledgling empires that bordered the diaspora of Ahriman. But Doombreed only had eyes for the aliens that lingered in the west, to the Tau of calixis. The wandering western Tau had formed a new empire far from their old birth worlds and the sprawling deadzones of the eastern fringe. They had only won this realm through a costly and lengthy war with the Amarantine Empire of the Slaugth, the loathsome maggot men and their equally repugnant biomechanical Vassal constructs. This war lasted centuries, and was only concluded after the Tau reached out to the ancient technocracies that lingered on the very edge of intergalactic space; Magellans and Interexites and Oberuun colonies, Fatemakers and the lesser lost Kronous civilisations. Only with their aid were the Tau able to oust the Slaugth. The Slaugth fled to the deep places of the galaxy, like the worms they most certainly were, and played little further part in the Age of Dusk. 

The tau had long resisted chaos. It was not as if their wills were especially mighty, or that they were pure of heat and deed. The fundamental strength of the tau in the face of chaos’ corruption was their utter lack of personal ambition. They believed in a good greater than the sum of one soul. Their desires were for productive lives and a prosperous society as defined by their Ethereal Caste; what could chaos offer such creatures? Now, daemons are beings of concept above substance, as previously related. Doombreed rejected his advisors’ council on matters of expanding his realm, for the daemon did not care about territorial expansion or temporal gains in the materium. The daemon king knew that if he could at last corrupt the incorruptible Tau, his legend would be unassailable. A daemon with recognition across the entire galaxy is a powerful daemon indeed...

But the daemons needed a way to corrupt the Tau. Individual tau were of no use, and the ethereal similarly were slavishly devoted to their selfless creed. But Doombreed knew he needed to corrupt only one tau, and the rest would fall like corn before a thresher. 

During a routine jump between subsectors, a tau vessel was caught in a warp snare set by the daemons. Appeairng from the warp like ghosts, they slaughtered their way through the screaming crew with monstrous glee, painting the pristine white walls of the vessel cyan with tau blood. At last, the armoured central chamber of the ship was torn apart by the daemon leading the incursion. The ethereal inside stared the glimmering gold daemon down without fear. The daemon didn’t care as it purred.

“Hello little thing. My name is Cherubael,” was all the daemon was recorded saying, before it dragged the ethereal away.

The ethereal taken was Aun’Va himself, the most revered and ancient of all tau in existence, the spiritual heart of the Tau’Va credo itself. 

When news reached the tau command council, a terrible wrath was stirred in the entire western tau culture. They sent emissaries to every empire and civilization that heeded them, calling in favors and pleading for aid. The tau had to retrieve Aun’va from the clutches of Doombreed at all costs, evne if they had to unseat the daemonic abomination from the throne of hell itself.

Within a year, the Tau set sail to the Terran hells, at the head of a technological alliance of human and xenos minor empires, from the halo stars to the mythic Magellenic clouds. Some fought for the honor of the tau, some fought to curry favour with the aliens. Some, the Magellan Reichs in particular, fought because the Terran Hells were a vile insult to all humanity; a mockery of Terra’s once proud and majestic heritage. Such a realm could not be permitted to exist.

This alliance called itself the Salvation, and their war would come to be known as the Salvation War. At first, the alliance thought it would be no great effort to destroy Doombreed’s disciples. The alliance had bested the technologically advanced Slaugth, and in comparison the Corroded and their daemonic masters were savages, fighting with bows and spears. What hope had chariots against the great military killing machines humanity and the tau had devised? 

They believed the daemons would be driven before them with impunity and ease.

They were, alas, entirely mistaken.

The war was horrific and bloody, and there was to be much sorrow and loss before its end.
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