Hive Fleet Nidhoggr: Ignition

The following article is a /tg/ related story or fanfic. Should you continue, expect to find tl;dr and an occasional amount of awesome.

It started on a clear autumn day. I had ended my shift, and was headed back to the barracks when the Global Defense Alarm sounded. Immediately the base was back on high alert, Guardsmen scrambling to their posts, grabbing their equipment and jumping into whatever transport they could find. After everyone had made it to the briefing area, we were told that a series of bizarre meteor strikes had occurred across the planet. We were to assist in humanitarian aid and ensure that the Adeptus Mechanicus could get to the various strike locations and study the impacts. We rolled out of there with the techies and were off to the closest impact site: Municipal Centre #142, where two Class II meteors and one Class III meteor had struck. We weren't optimistic about what we would find, but we had our orders, and we planned to carry them out.

After arriving at the Centre, we discovered that the meteors had impacted on the eastern edge of the city, reducing most of the financial district to dust, but sparing a good portion of the residential district. Luckily, casualties at the time were put at an acceptable 550,000, far lower than the 3.5 million which would have resulted had the meteors struck the center of the city. The Mechanicus were stationed at the edge of the impact craters, set up to do whatever they usually do, and we were given boxes of purified water and corpse rations to hand out to the local population. Clean-up and recovery took a few months, but eventually the outer portions of the city were restored to working order. Now, I'm an Emperor-fearing man, and I've never put much stock in the Omnissiah or those "machine-spirits" the Mechanicus always mumble about, but some of the stuff they discovered from the samples of the rocks and shit they took from the impact site made me a little uneasy. They tell us that they found bio-mass within the craters; more specifically, from the xenos known as Tyranids. I knew a man once, lost his arm and a good bit of his face fightin' them filthy xenos, and he always said that they were the most terrifying sight he had ever beheld. I shuddered to think that they may bear down upon us. I might have shuddered more if I had known what was to happen in the days to come.

Nearly three years after the meteor strikes, we received communications from the Tech-priests that they had made a breakthrough with the impact craters. After scanning through the earth beneath them, they had uncovered several unusual shapes within the crust of the planet. The Mechanicus had granted them some of their more sacred technologies to drill down as far as they could and try and retrieve a sample from the anomalies. They would keep us posted on their findings. A battalion was dispatched to the Centre to keep an eye on things, as civil unrest was flaring up around the anniversary of the calamity.

Seven days after the initial report from the Mechanicus, all hell broke loose. Planet-wide earthquakes rent the continents along major fault lines, resulting in massive damage to infrastructure and the population of the planet. We received frenzied reports of creatures emerging from the choking pyroclastic flows and terrifying lava geysers, but no two reports were the same, and we lost contact with nearly every Guardsmen outpost on the planet, save one: the one at Municipal Centre #142.

From there, we received a final report from the commander in charge, complete with pictures of the foul xenos. They were far more terrifying than I could have possibly comprehended. The smallest were nearly eight meters tall, and the largest reached a staggering forty. They were clad in obsidian-like armour, jagged black claws rending flesh and tearing plasteel apart like it was paper. The most horrifying aspect of these beasts, however, was their ability to spew molten geysers of lava from within their very bodies. I saw men I had known my whole life turned to dust; I saw tanks melted, buildings reduced to ash. I saw all these things, and I know the face of fear.

Nidhoggr. The All-Consuming Flame, the Eater of Yggdrassil.

May the Emperor have mercy on me.