Additional Background Section 28: Commorragh and The Dissected Agonies

[Chronicle Paused.]

[Chronicle Resumes.] [Archives collapsing. Emergency! Emergency!] [Visual Feed: Wraithbone shelves and vaults crumbling to dust, as white light and multi-hued anomalies twist and turn between them. Multiple-limbed creatures engaging with Revelation Shock-troopers (cros ref. Fenryka/Adeptus/Legio Custodia/Commanditarian. Including multiple unknown compositions).

[Audio: Unidentified audio distortion throughout. Gunfire and D-cannon discharge occurs part-way through recording.]

[Visual feed: Figure in gold and grey fatigues crawls towards Chronicle device. Accompanied by Revelation troopers, providing covering fire against unidentified creatures (monstrous! Impossible creatures! ERROR ERROR=====), slender xenos entities and anomalous human warriors.]

[Audio: Subject 1: “Frak it! Keep them off of me! I need to retrieve it!” Subject 2: “Why? She’s dead. It’s no good to Revelation incomplete! Get out of here! We have to fall back!” Subject 1: “No!” (high pitched whining gunfire) “She finished it. She left the documents in her chamber damnit! They show everything. She was recording stuff past, present and future. She knew what was going to happen... how this was going to end... (Impossible noises. Heavy distortion. Void shielding holding. Down 34%) Subject 2: “We do not have time! Take the thing with you if you must, but I am not dying for the words of one mad seer.” Subject 1: She wasn’t a seer. She was a chronicler, but she had access to all records. This library... it exists outside time, it-“ Subject 2: “Enough! Grab it!”]

[Visual feed: Astartes (subject 2) bodily carries Subject 1. Chronicle moves with them. Corridors of swirling colours as the portals die. Subject 1 and the chronicle are thrown. Airborne approx ten seconds before impact upon solid surface.

Image inverted 90 degrees. Last sight of closing portal behind subject 1. Subject 2 turns from subject 1 as portal closes, drawing his nemesis weapon with two hands, before charging into the collapsing library.]

[Audio: Subject 1: “Brother Athun!” Subject 2: “Upload her files. Then leave. Follow the Iron Man. It know the route to sanctuary.” Subject 1: “Athun! Damn you Athun! Athu-“ (Load tearing noise, as portal seals)]

[Chronicle paused.] [Chronicle Resumes.]

[I do not know who I address. Your chronicler seems to have written her history in the assumption that she knew its readers. I suppose I shall continue in that tradition.

I also suppose that it doesn’t matter what the context of my hasty preface is being written at this very moment, because ‘this very moment’ might be many centuries in your past. But as I write, such terrible things have happened, but also such beautiful things. Though the deep is arisen, we are not without allies of our own. The galaxy seems discoloured now, for there are so many rents in realspace now, all leaking their poison into the materium.

The heroic alliance departed at some point last year. If I looked through the remaining sections of this history I might learn of the outcome, but I fear to. If I do, and the outcome is terrible, will I lose my mind to despair? I cannot imagine that this history will have a happy ending, but my imagination is a weak and putrid thing in these days.

Your chronicler is dead. I am sorry to tell you this; she killed herself as soon as she completed the final parts of her history. As she died, bleeding in my arms, she begged me to upload her final sections into her recording machine, in full and unread by myself. Then, she told me to hide it away from prying eyes, in a place which would endure for countless eons unchanged. And so I shall.

I do not know who will read this account, but nevertheless I will present the remaining background sections, in the order specified in the notes of Vasiri the Watcher.

If you are reading this, my task was completed.

Final regards,

Lord Volsanius Greal, the Lion’s Scribe.]

In the final weeks of the fifty-fifth millennium, upon the very cusp of the fifty-sixth millennium, it was said the endless eldar clad in Reaper’s garb led the Wolf and the Raven into Commorragh. We can be so unusually precise upon this date, for this event caused a strange psychic backlash as Maugan Ra forced one of the ancient webway seals into Commorragh. Billions of contemporaries claimed that they had bad dreams in those weeks; dreams of a raven and wolf searching through an endless black patch of brambles, plucking scarred chunks of meat from the thorns, as a reaper shepherded them through the maze, avoiding the droplets of black, poisonous blood that oozed from a great ebony heart that wept above them all.

The two primarchs required the aid of the Phoenix Lord due to his skill at navigating the Labyrinth. Why Ra led aliens against his own race is not clear, though it is self-evident that the parasitic Dark Eldar could not be reconciled with the ultimately-selfless goals of the craftworlders and those who sought to aid them.

Nevertheless, Ra managed to breach Commorragh’s defences easily, and Leman Russ led his brother and the remaining abominations they called their children, into Low Commorragh. They had one goal; to find their lost brother, and deliver him from shadow into light.

Of course, getting into Commorragh was always the most straightforwards part. Leaving the city would be the true test of their abilities. And test them it most certainly would. For, unbeknownst to them, the two Primarchs had set themselves against one of the greatest minds in the entire galaxy; Asdrubael Vect, Archon of the Black Heart, supreme overlord of Commorragh and architect of the Thirteen Principles of Vengeance. As soon as the two Primarchs and their allies entered Commorragh, and felt the feeble light of the stolen suns upon their bodies, they came under attack. Rogue bands of starving hellions swept down upon them, screaming manically as they hacked and slashed at the assembled army of beasts that had arrived in the eternal ruins of Low Commorragh. With them came hundreds of Commorrite eldar, bedecked in a wild profusion of arms and armaments, from splinter rifles to shuriken catapults, to converted human projectile rifles using bullets and shells impregnated with toxins. These wild savages scuttled through the maze of ruins with great speed and ferocity, organising themselves into squads and formations with surprising competency.

But they fought foes far beyond them. Leman Russ and his cohorts of feral warriors took the battle to them instantly, outmanoeuvring the rabble; countering their base hunger with sheer brutal power. The Commorrites were slain swiftly, but a few of the hellions almost made good their escape. It took the precision strikes of Maugan Ra nd his Dark reapers to ensure none of their foes escaped to warn any forces who might be nearby.

“How did they react so quickly? Did they know we were coming?” Russ asked fiercely, accusation in his voice.

Ra explained that everyone was attacked in Low Commorragh as a matter of course. When asked why, he simply responded. “Because you were there.”

Catacombs and minor Kabal spires stabbed up from amidst the endless decrepit corpses of former port cities and scavenger docks, and this desolation spread out as far as the eye could see, and seemed also to curve upwards and loom impossibly over the heads of the rag-tag army of aliens and beasts. The air was alive with distant screaming and gunfire of every variety; with their enhanced senses, Russ and Corax could make out the light of burning strongholds and collapsing towers, and the tiny shapes of swirling flocks of hellions, picking off warriors from both sides of each conflict, without regard to alliances or allegiance.

“This is a den of the mad,” Corax said darkly, his words almost a whisper.

“It is a prison, of sorts,” Ra replied without emotion. “Through their own malice and cruelty, the monsters that live here trap their fellow abominations in endless cycles of violence, recrimination and torment. No one escapes the Dark City. Welcome to Commorragh.”

Ironically, the constant warfare was an advantage to the invading Astartes, for their violent escapades were masked amidst the background noise of constant murder. Through the faltering dawnlight of poisoned grey stars, and through the all consuming shadowy dungeons, from where no light had ever reached, the Primarchs fought. They were guided by the Phoenix Lord, for only one who had visited the city countless times could learn its ever-shifting routes and passages with any degree of accuracy. There were not only eldar dwelling within the ruins; twisted things from the fall scurried through the collapsed citadels and forgotten nation states of the Desolation. Not only them, but older beings, survivors of times before man even existed, made their dens there. The two brothers were forced to utilise all their might to vanquish the monsters they duelled in those terrible places, and they lost many of the Weregeld in these brutal confrontations.

Each time they fought, they took whatever weapons and armour they could find; repurposing it and using it against future foes. As they fought, they gathered unto them the disgruntled and the vagrant; hopeless creatures trapped within the city through no fault of their own. They hated the Dark Eldar more than any sane mind could ever fathom, and they desired vengeance; Russ, in arming and leading them, gave them this chance. Soon, they were fully armed and reinforced. Leman Russ was ready.

In the shadow of a collapsed eldar titan, Corvus Corax and Leman Russ took their brother’s arm in a warrior’s embrace, staring deeply into their eyes. Russ knew what Corax intended to do before his brother even spoke.

“Find our brother. You were always the most subtle of us Corvus. Go; penetrate the black heart of this realm. When you return, we shall take back Jaghati once and for all.”

Corax nodded solemnly. “What do you intend to do?”

Russ smiled his usual savage grin. “I am the Emperor’s executioner. I intend to follow my calling. Can’t you smell the reek of it? The congealed remnants of such maleficarum I can scarcely conceive of it. Their are creatures here that have survived on the misery of the galaxy for countless millennia, that have feasted upon the weak while they remained safe and unassailable. That will not stand. I will not allow it!” Russ hissed. Corax returned his grin, but the Raven knew that Russ’ barbarian smile was a mask for the cold-blooded destroyer that dwelt within. Russ had always been this way. Corax had never liked to mention it, but he had seen a fraction fot he Emperor’s mind long ago and he had seen much... perhaps too much. He knew that the Emperor had never considered the Fenryka to be his executioners. Russ had created his own role in the Imperium; he knew his role in the coming events of the galaxy, even if nobody else had marked him out for this. But Corax held his tongue, casting out such morbid thoughts, and simply allowed his brother to embrace him. Both of them knew that the endeavour they had undertaken could very well be the death of them both. They might never see one another again.

Then, they parted, and the war began in earnest. Corax shrouded himself and disappeared into the ruins of Commorragh. Meanwhile, Ra led Leman Russ’s forces throughthe labyrinth of caverns and passages, towards the holdings of the Kabal of the Hidden Blade. These fortified sites were utterly invisible to the eye at certain angles, and could only be seen on very specific avenues of approach; approaches which were guarded by heavy emplacements and scores of barracks hungry to spread mayhem. Their asymmetrical fortresses were home to a vast army of Kabalite soldiers, with full air support in the form of wing upon wing of Voidraven Bombers and Razorwing Fighters. These aircraft constantly flew sorties across the desolation, destroying settlements at random and hunting down any hellions who dared enter their air space. Hunting parties of Kabalite warriors prowled the ruins too, killing and capturing any unfortunates who got too close, before dragging them back to their citadels for torture. This kept the garrisons fed and also amused the Hidden Blade’s Archon, Olbridesh Suul.

Russ moved carefully in this region, for he wished to avoid detection by the screaming fighter craft that patrolled the skies like hungry vultures. He began his campaign by using his men to draw the hunting parties out of their holds. The Dark Eldar saw the wulfen and weregeld as mere escaped slaves, or possibly rogue pit beasts from the Wych Cult arenas, and eagerly pursued them whenever they could. Russ lured them into carefully constructed ambushes, slaying them and casting their broken bodies across the ruins. For months he continued this campaign of ambush and retreat. The Hidden Blade unleashed hell upon the surrounding region, pulverising great swathes of city with their void mines and scourging missile bombardments. Suul and his Dracons had perceived of a pattern to the assaults; they were more than mere slave revolts. It was an insurgent army. In their indiscriminate destruction, the minor Kabal made few friends amongst the unaligned corsairs and Commorrites who dwelt in the desolation.

But even as they increased the power and frequency of their sorties, they left their garrison with fewer and fewer defenders. Finally, Russ led a surprise assault on the bastions. Dark reapers and ex-slaves armed with captured disintegrators and heat lances duelled with the perimeter turrets, as Russ broke down the doors of the forts with massive assaults. Once a fort was captured, the weapons mounted within were used to bombard its neighbours, spreading confusion and fury amongst the Kabalites. Suul sped back to Hidden Blade as swiftly as he could, assaulting the invaders with his fleet of fighters, shattering fortresses left and right. As the battle wore on, it seemed that the enemy were weakening; Suul ordered his barge to descend, so taht he may feast on their miserable life essences. As soon as he did, Leman launched his final attack. His strongest men cast grapples against the hull of the barge, dragging it down. These men only managed to slow the barge for a second before its scythes cut through the chains, but a second was enough. Russ leapt aboard the ship, roaring with demented hatred. Suul and his bodyguards were slain by the rampaging Primarch, and Suul himself was ripped apart as he wounded Russ in the shoulder with a venomed alien spear.

Archon slain, Russ ordered his army to retreat; it was futile to hold ground when the enemy outnumbered you. Yet without their Archon, and with their fortresses ruined, the Kabal of the Hidden Blade were easy prey for those Commorrites waiting int he shadows for their chance to steal their lands. Hidden Blade fell within two weeks, as the nearby Kabals of the Poisoned Tongue and the Stolen Conscience ripped them apart and subsumed their defeated members.

Russ continued this sprawling war across the Sprawls of Port Carmine and Sec Maegra, yet Corvus Corax had other plans. He passed into the very centre of Dark Eldar civilisation. He could move between the inky black streets without being seen, even when in plain sight. This let him eavesdrop upon the scourge messengers and the other spies and calculating politicians of High Commorragh and the more affluent satellite realms. He witnessed sights and horrors that would make a lesser man weep, but he remained stoic and unmoved; his mind was utterly focussed upon his goal. He could move almost as he pleased within the City; no door or sight was barred to him. That is, save for the City State of Aelindrach, and the realms of the Wraith-Kind. There, the shadows lived and coiled like serpents, shielding all from physical and psychic sight. When Corax attempted to approach, he felt the presence of the Mandrakes. These half-daemon monsters prowled the places between light and Corax was certain they could somehow track him if they spotted him. But the res tof Commorragh was not so psychically veiled.

Amidst images of hideous depravity and excess, Corax learned of rumours which spoke of ‘the Dissected Agonies’; artefacts of unprecedented value to some of the highest Archons. The master of the Raven Guard began to plot. If he and Russ could steal these artefacts, the Archons and the immortal Haemonculi Covens would pay a high price to get them back; Corax had heard of entire sub-realms being traded for but a single Dissected Agony.

Russ’ war against Low Commorragh continued, but soon it was clear, after several months, that he had reached an impasse. His building armies had become powerful enough to gather alien mercenaries and followers from Sec Maegra, the Null City and form a full army with heavy weapons and armoured support; he had even managed to liberate armed gangs of Astartes from slave pens, who realised he was one of their lost fathers after his blinding psychic presence touched their minds. Russ’ armies were growing, but Russ himself was suffering. His festering wound was not healing; even his perfect physique was struggling to repel the Lhamaean venom. But he hid the wound beneath layers of heavy power armour he had built while on campaign.

Russ was able to engage in running battles with the minor Kabals of the desolation; both sides constantly on the move so as not to get pinned down and murdered in a punishing siege. Both sides were followed by thousands upon thousands of the Parched, cadaver-like Dark Eldar withered by lack of sustenance. They fed on the waves of pain caused by the continuous battles and were a constant source of irritation to Russ (and food to the ruthless Kabalites). Yet, this was a mere side show within Commorragh; war was a fact of Low Commorragh and mattered little to those who dwelt in High Commorragh in their impossibly vast towers that simultaneously towered above and plunged down from above. They were always looming just over the horizon, no matter where you stood in Low Commorragh. Russ had no way to pierce the portals leading to High Commorragh; those few Maugan Ra had found were sealed tight.* If he was to breach them, the Corespur Nobles would have to descend into Low Commorragh themselves.

But how would they incur their wrath? How would they force the great Kabals to engage? Russ had a plan; a merciless, cruel plan that proved just how ruthless the Great Wolf could be.

Every few weeks, convoys of sleek slave barges would return to Commorragh, and head towards the arenas of the Cult of Strife, heaving with slaves and fodder for their gladiatorial games. Inevitably, some slaves and beasts escaped from these barges, only to be recaptured by teams of beastmasters and wych retrieval squads armed with their shardnets and agonisers. Once, the retrieval took slightly logner than before; it seemed the slaves had found better hiding places, but they still failed to elude the relentless cackling gladiators.

Unbeknownst to the slavers, Leman Russ had gotten to these slaves first. The slaves were dragged across the Bone Middens, through the portals, and straight towards the greatest of Cult Strife’s magnificent ziggurat-arenas. Once the crowds had fully gathered for the coming show, and the first of that evening’s grand spectacles was underway, the slaves began to explode. Void munitions, stitched into their very bodies, detonated in huge conflagrations that ripped the foundations from the arena. The entire structure began to sag, as thousands of slaves and Dark Eldar were killed in the colossal blasts. But the final slave had one last gift for the eldar. Russ had located a shattered Imperial vessel in the ruins of Low Commorragh, and had liberated a single weapon from it; a virus bomb. Specifically, the world eater. This final detonation unleashed a black cloud that consumed all life within a hundred miles of the arena. Webway failsafes sealed the expanding cloud with a forcefield, before venting it into the heart of a stolen sun. However, the damage was done. Millions killed, and what was worse, an entire City State was horrendously damaged.

To say the Dread Archons of High Commorragh were apoplectic with rage would be a gross understatement. The arenas of the Wychs were the lifeblood of Commorragh, where the common Dark Eldar could be sated. The loss of such a large one was a terrible blow to the kabals, and one they could never have ignored. The most powerful of the Lords joined in an uneasy truce, brokered by the Archons of the Black Heart; under the thirteen statues of sorrowfell, they swore lasting vengeance upon whoever was foolish enough to cross them.

They burst from their runic portals in waves millions upon millions strong. Venoms and raiders filled the dark skies like undulating flocks of starlings, alongside countless screaming hellions and scourges, and a veritable tidal wave of capering wyches. It seemed as if some grand hornet’s nest had been pierced by an arrow, such was the grotesque display.

The spectacle was as spectacular as it was terrible. Russ smiled wryly from his hiding place. “So many... I thought yours was a dying race?”

“They are dying, merely in a different way,” Ra responded coldly.

The grand Kabalite alliance acted swiftly, destroying great swathe sof territory with merciless precision and relentless vigour. The wholing cackle sof the monstrous sadists carried for countless millions of kilometres through the demented, impossible city. Aircraft turned whole generations of Low Commorrites into anguished glass statues. Some hopelessly threw themselves sinto the acidic green River Khaides to escape the terrible horde.

Russ, meanwhile, took the opportunity of the portals opening to force his way through. His embattled men fought a hopeless rearguard to allow the Primarch to breach Corsespur’s high towers. He memorised the faces of every man who fell in his service, be they beast, alien or man; allies were allies, and he’d no sooner forget their sacrifices than he’d forget the treachery and base cowardice of his enemies. Maugan Ra disappeared during this battle, melting into the shadows like the ghost of a whisper on the wind. **

Feverish and sickly from the venom in his blood, Leman Russ nevertheless fought his way free of the portal guards, and descended into the narrow alleys and bottomless pits that lay between the infinitely looming black towers of the city states. This was the vile core of the Dark City. If he was to find his brother, it would be within this terrible realm.

It was Corax who found Russ first. He told him of the Dissected Agonies, and his plan to blackmail the Archons of High Commorragh with them. The two faced the city together, fighting through the degenerate scum that clung to the tower districts like algae to the skin of a behemoth. Bounty hunters and xenos killers of all varieties were hired to track the Primarchs. Each foe would die, but each time the fights grew harder and the superhumans gradually lost their allies to the predations of Commorragh.

The haemonculi in particular were amused by the increasingly infamous actions of the human giants. Urien Rakarth created grotesque abomiantions to sniff them out and duel with the Primarchs. Russ was nearly throttled todeath by a great serpentine flesh-fiend on the banks of the avenue of blades, and corax barely survived an encounter with the Shredding engines of the Everspiral Coven. But as they suffered, the sons of the Emperor were unrelenting in their mission. Systematically, they located each of the dissected agonies; breaking into the private holdings of their jealous Archon owners, killing anyone who got in their way. In vain, the armies if the Kabals searched them out, but each raid left their victims’ holdings ruined, but left no trace of the culprits. Archons from rival Kabals blamed one another for directing the Primarchs towards them, while others simply used the situation to score political points against hated foes.

Several times, a shadowy figure tried to contact them. He said he had seen their fate ‘in the bones’. He warned them they were being credulous fools. The Primarchs ignored this enigmatic being, known as Sathonyx the Lord Hellion, each time fruitlessly trying to kill the so-called Baron. Another trickster was just what they did not need in a city of liars and cheats.

Each dissected agony was a sealed casket, bound with hideous runes of pulsating evil. Leman Russ and the Lord of Deliverance opened each one in trepidation. Their revulsion and horror is beyond my ability to adequately convey. Each casket bore part of a living being. But these were no mere dead limbs; they still writhed in a horrible mockery of life. Yet this was not the worst of it. Leman and Corvus knew these body parts; they knew the markings carved into his flesh. They recognised the ritual scars, daubed in white...

Desperately, they tried to figure out how much of their brother still remained. To their horror, they lacked the final part; the great Khan’s head was missing. Somehow, they knew which Dark Eldar held the final piece of the puzzle. Supreme Overlord Vect became their target.

Russ, now almost putrid with sickness, determined to penetrate the vaults of the Kabal master’s grand holdings. Corax wished to go with him, but Russ needed Corax for a different task. Only Corax had the knowledge to attempt to repair the Khan. Russ made his brother promise to heal him. Corax could only agree. Corax took the dissected agonies, and vanished into the shadows. He promised that he would, “not let another brother fall. Not one more! No more shall die this day! I promise you that Leman. Nothing less.”

The principle citadels of the Kabal of the Black heart were the greatest and most elaborate fortifications in all of Commorragh; limitless turrets, twisted battlements and endless galleries and chambers filled with all manner of horrors that could set the mind aflame with trepidation. Besides the more obvious horrors, there were the subtle defences; forcefields of silent potency and labyrinthine passageways that led off into nothingness, or transported the unwary through dark gates beyond the veil.

But Russ was as cunning as he was formidable, and he seemed to make swift progress through the devious towers. He avoided traps and snares which had claimed generations of assassins and revolutionaries. He bested the skeleton force of defenders through sheer defiant fury. The defenders grew strong on his pain, and they did not die easily, but die they did.

He used his psychic ability to scent his brother through layers of pheromone camouflage and countless vault walls. He followed his senses, plunging upwards through a tower which dangled above and below Commorragh. No twisted geometry could hold him back. Eventually he reached the final chamber, and ripped the doors fromt heir hinges with all his strength.

Inside, a slender, unremarkable eldar clad in thorny ghostplate armour lounged upon a grandiose throne. Even Russ wasn’t quick enough to stop the Lhamaean priestesses that rushed at him fromt he gloom. Even as he slaughtered them with his bare hands, their poisoned blades and tainted blood infested his wounds, enhancing the agony which he was experiencing. Gasping for air, Russ fell to his knees.

From either side of the eldar’s throne, serpentine Sslyth warriors slithered into view. All around the Primarch, Kabalites began to emerge, giggling cruelly at Russ’ fate. Silent Wracks soon sentinel at the side of haemonculi, who drifted eerily just above the ground, like terrible witches from some fairy tale. The eldar upon the throne raised his hand for silence, and instantly got it. Russ fixed his hate-filled gaze upon this Dark Lord. As he tried to rise, Trueborn stabbed him with agonisers, robbing his limbs of motion through awful pain.

The leader leaned forwards fractionally, revealing a flawless face, unmarred by even a single scar.

“You know who I am?” he asked simply. Russ nodded.

“Vect...”

Vect smiled in response. “Quite so. You have been rather entertaining, I have to admit. However, I feel this charade must come to an end now. But truly it is a delight to see the Wolf King... in the flesh.”

Russ realised then that it had been a trap. It had been too easy to penetrate Corespur. Vect had granted the Dissected Agonies specifically to his enemies; those who served Sathonyx in particular.

“You were good though. The arena trick was inspired,” vect continued. As he spoke, the entire chamber rose up from the bowels of the tower, and into the failing light of a Stolen Dawn. The chamber was a glass dome, which revealed the whole of Commorragh from its windows. A star fleet was in high anchor on spurs opposite the tower, surrounded by shoals of support craft and slave barges ferrying the doomed from their holds. Russ saw the huge viewscreens and projectors filling the squares and open spaces beneath the fleet too. Crowds of eldar, millions strong, cheered and jeered as they watched Russ slaughter and maim countless foes. It was a recording of almost his entire campaign.

“We’ve been growing fat from your exploits on the vid-steals. Your brutality is a joy to behold and consume! It should last us until... next week, probably. It almost makes up for the ruination of the Cult of Strife. Almost.”

Vect rose from his throne, supported by his tall sceptre, though Russ could tell the ancient devil was pretending to be far feebler than he truly was. “I know why you came here, mon keigh. You wish to rescue your fellow construct.”

“My brother, you cur!” Russ snarled, his hatred a physical thing, darkening the floor beneath his feet.

Vect nodded. “Indeed. I entertained your incursion for two reasons. Firstly, I was curious; what drives such a being as you? But more than such fleeting fanciful notions, I can see your place in this saga. I know you know of what I speak.”

Russ chose to be silent. Vect continued, condescendingly talking of the forces gathering in realspace as he simultaneously belittled the Primarch and set out what he conceived of the coming armaggedon. The dameons of the deep-warp had to be stopped; Vect above all desired to live. The [REMOVED] would cause all life to fall into the abyss. Russ was unconvinced, until Vect pointed out that in over twenty four thousand years, Asdrubael Vect had never ocne attempted to invade or destroy the Imperium or any stellar empire on any significant scale. Eventually, he produced a casket and presented it to Russ. He showed Russ the head within, which blinked and screamed silently.

Leman demanded the head. “If you do, I might only cut you,” he grinned.

Vect however, could never be fazed by such a threat. He was the bane of all races.

“if I give you the last of my Agonies, I will have lost my toy. That holds no interest for me. I shall require compensation. A Primarch for a Primarch. I will free him and heal all his wounds. All I ask is that you give yourself to me. It is not a great deal to ask.”

Russ looked into Vect’s eyes; he came close to despair for the first time in many years. But then his gaze caught something else, beyond the dome.

Outside, the fleet was moving. One of the ships was turning about, ripping free of its moorings. It opened fire on its docking supports, pulverising the towers that shackled it, before turning its guns on the city below. Corax had made good on his promise. His brothers would not die that day.

Russ rose from his seemingly prone position. The Trueborn tried to bringing him down again, but the light of the warp shone in his eyes, and he began to swell with power. A blast struck the dome, shattering it and subjecting the Court of Vect to gale force winds. Russ set upon the eldar with claw and fang, channelling all his psychic might into his body. Though poison still wracked his body with pain, Russ fought the pain, ripping out its throat and stomping it into the earth. The Sslyth intercepted him as he lunged for Vect. He ripped them asunder. He reached for Vect, but the Dark Lord struck him with an obsidian orb. The black sphere sent Russ reeling for a moment, which allowed the Wracks to swarm over him. With a last burs tof strength, he shrugged them off of him and snatched the last fragment of Khan from Vect’s grasp. Vect chopped away Russ’ left hand, as Russ swept a claw across Vect’s face.

The Supreme Overlord fell back into his throne, as Russ leapt bodily from the shattered dome, onto the hull of the approaching starship. Commorragh’s defenses were already coming online. The Primarchs had to be quick. Russ clung to the hull of the cruiser, as it punched directly through a sealing portal at full speed. Though his flesh caught fire, Russ refused to let go as the ship fled into the webway.

Vect slowly rose from his throne. His face was scratched; his flawless face was tarnished by ragged wounds.

His retinue stood back from him in abject terror. They saw the building emotions in his dark, bottomless eyes.

Vect roared then; a sonorous, baleful noise which seemed to carry and echo around all of Commorragh. All living things in Commorragh cowered instinctively. Vect would punish them all now, out of sheer malicious spite.

Vect, for the first time in his entire life, was bested.

• (How Corax breached the portals, no records tell. I suspect he waited for Kabalite trueborn to pass through the portals on the way to Port Carmine.)

• • (It seems the Phoenix Lord peeled off from the Primarchs to follow his own agenda. As the battle of wits and carnage of the Primarchs brought welcome mayhem to Commorragh, Ra’s investigations would uncover the birthplace of the conspiracy which had brought forth the Nex- [unintelligible madness. Vasiri deleted most of this before it caused a warp breach inside the Library]. The Lords of Twilight listened for too long to those that dwelt in the shadows. They thought they knew the name of the being that called to them from beyond the universe, but they were deceived. The full story of the rise of the Draziin-Maton and their masters will be told in the next background section. )