Additional Background Section 37: The Dark Before The Dawn

(Chronicler’s note: This account is close to completion. I feel the weight of history pressing down upon me. So many died, I cannot get this wrong. God’s womb, I refuse to dishonour those who sacrificed all for our sake! )

Before I can adequately relate to my readers the greatest war in human (and perhaps even in xenos) memory, the pieces must first be set, so that one can comprehend just precisely what was happening at roughly the same moment across the galaxy. The following three sub- sections attempt to apply context to two out of the four primary battlefronts of the Last War, namely the Kaela Mensha War and the Cyclopean war. This section does not cover the opening gambits of the Despoiler/Blackheart war which engulfed the northern reaches of the galaxy, or the Primarch War in the west. However, all four will be covered in detail in later sections. 

1) The War of the bloody-handed. Khaine’s triumph.

The eastern fringe, as mentioned before, was in ruins by the start of M56. Countless billions were dead, and the military forces still defiantly fighting on were battling through a multi-sector meat-grinder of planetary invasions and counter-invasions, naval engagements and pitiless sieges; fighting like starving dogs over the rancid meat left hanging from the corpse bones of the fringe. No prize was worth the hate and fury that went into that war. No prize.

As mentioned before, the necrons were depleted, the Krork were battered, and the Tau and human realms (including Ultramar) had retreated to defend their fastnesses against the encroaching hordes. There were no bystanders in this war; those who wouldn’t fight were enslaved by either Krork slavers or by the numbing influence of Angyls and their Exorcist minions. Amidst this carnage, there rose the Hadex Multitudes. The region around the anomaly had ground into an ugly bruise on the face of the galaxy, close in scale to the Maelstrom itself. Here, countless different warbands of corrupted tau, humans and various other xenos struck out and claimed worlds for themselves. Their daemon patrons fought with each other for supremacy, leaving the Multitudes leaderless.

Leaderless, that is, until a champion of sufficient power and influence commandeered them. On the eastern fringe, there was only one such entity of sufficient skill, tactical prowess and sheer monstrous fury. This monster was one of the oldest and most unique of warp entities; Kaela Mensha Khaine. Khaine was fuelled my madness and fury, chained within an unloving host, churning with internal furnace light that glowered infernally beneath his cracked steel flesh. He had led his army of Khainite cultists into glorious war with the nightbringer, but his cult was insufficient. Thus, he had travelled to the Hadex anomaly aboard the Wailing Doom, his living flagship, and there he had set to work. He bested and enslaved every daemon prince, every greater daemon that sought to challenge his supremacy as the God of War and Murder. He was a thing of Khorne. He was both the ancestor and the descendant of the King of Skulls and in a galaxy of war he was Khorne’s mightiest ally. He smashed the leadership of every warband, and took its warriors for his own, alloying them together like a blacksmith working metal in a forge.

Khaine, unlike any other warp entity in the arsenal of the Ruinous powers, was resistant to being banished back to the immaterium, for his body was made of immortal, living metal. It was an open wound that couldn’t be closed. With a vast army of warriors at his behest, Khaine felt complete again, and he waged his war anew. The galaxy had not seen the likes of Khaine since the Emperor walked, clothed in flesh. He led his armies to victory after victory that left the broken survivors weeping his name. Khaine, annointe din the blood of a thousand extinguished civilisations, fought with the fury only a living weapon, nay a God of weapons, could.

It was said that Khaine could alter his size at will; sometimes he was barely taller than a Primarch, other times his blade was said to be large enough to behead mountains. He routed seven Krork forces at the battle of Aemorvast, and some say at the climax of this war, he saw a war hulk in orbit with the planet, bombarding his frenzied ground forces. With a mighty roar, the weapon in his hand became a colossal javelin, as long as a naval torpedo. He cast the javelin into the heavens, surging through the firmament like a newborn comet, before it plunged through the flank of the hulk, and erupted from the opposite side in a tide of molten metal and frozen Krork corpses. The hulk was cored a second time, as the javelin was recalled to Khaine’s fist, and pierced the vessel once more. The hulk, sundered beyond repair, exploded like a new star in the sky, and Khaine saw that it was good.

Khaine rejected the whispered deals and promises of the lingering Umbral shade; Khaine was no longer an ally of those who had abandoned him to his fate. No elder god or eldar whelp would know his friendship now. He perceived the Aspect Temples, and they disgusted him. The exarches, creatures bound with a thirst for battle akin to his own, served the eldar. Those sense-whores had brought about his sundering during the Fall, and one of their champions had even raised Anaris against him; yet they now had had the temerity, the gall, to steal his broken fragments? Khaine would extinguish the eldar in time, and break them, just like he shattered Anaris into three murdering Eldanesh.

Ultramar’s Librarians vomited blood for weeks each time they tried to observe and report on Khaine’s whereabouts, and many M’yen tau psykers died trying to guess where Khaine would strike next. Fortunately for them however, Khaine did not notice the realms of the mortal races, at least initially. He had bigger game in mind. Once again, Khaine made war upon the nightbringer and his Destroyer Cults. This was a longer, more arduous war, but Khaine did not relent. His warp-born allies and his many fleets of ravenous chaos warbands consistently outmanoeuvred the single-inded nihilist necrons. They were destroyers, but they didn’t care about war, only ending lives. Victory didn’t matter to these necrons, only extinction. Khaine eventually defeated the Nightbringer’s united shards via a trap.

The C’tan attempted to face Khaine upon Galverra, a dead world which had once played host to a federation of a hundred peaceful alien races (all long since destroyed by the necrons). Khaine used the world itself against Aza’gorod Nightbringer. He inflamed the cloying souls of the murdered aliens, until the world itself split asunder, warp portals unleashing the ghosts of the dead and the hungry daemons that hunted them, onto the surface of the world. The warp weakened the Nightbringer’s powers, and Khaine wrestled with the C’tan, toppling towers and crushing armies in their wake. Khaine could not slay the nightbringer, nothing could slay death itself. However, the warp did manage to drag the star vampire down, down into the cloying, fanged reaches where sanity is a myth and dreams and solid and carnivorous. In that realm, the nightbringer became something... else. I think perhaps words are not adequate to describe what happened to the majority of the nightbringer’s shards when they fell into the warp’s cauldron that day. If you can, imagine a patch of reality, folding in upon itself a trillion, trillion times, as the warp unpicked it molecule by molecule. Yet, the C’tan cannot be dissolved, and eternally destroys the ethereal energy it imbibes, rebuilding itself in ever more contorted forms. Impossible to unmake, yet rooted in a dimension without form or physical laws. In a way, the nightbringe rbecame Khaine’s counterpart in the warp. Khaine was a warp entity trapped in the materium, while the nightbringer was a material entity trapped in the immaterium.

With the fall of the nightbringer, it seemed as if there was now nothing and no one to oppose Khaine in the eastern galaxy. Khaine’s army grew daily, as he consumed any refugee fleets who hadn’t escaped the fringe in time, and all the murderers and monsters of the Eastern region of the Segmentum Ultima were gathered unto him. There stood then only a few hard centres of resistance. Regent Folkar of Ultramar, the Realm of Fathers, Commander Hopeshield of the meta-Empire and Warlord Ulchaeru of the War of the Krork, knew that this was their moment. As the war between Pentus and the Imperium of Travesties would decide the fate of the western galaxy, so this coming conflict would determine whether sanity and life could triumph, or whether madness and the great Dissolution would unmake all.

2) The Sorcerer’s Desolation; Dominion of Change:

This section covers the basic structure and form Ahriman’s southern empire took during the period directly proceeding the war between Imperium Pentus and the Imperium of Travesties. This section also notes the final phase in the turbulent history of the Theologian Union and the greater Segmentum Tempestus, which had played host to countless regime changes and vast cultural transitions over the course of twenty thousand years of history and strife.

The Segmentum Tempestus area had long been a place of failed empires. In the period of the Petty Imperiums, this Segmentum had always contained the most fractious and numerous Petty Imperial domains, ever striving to place their own Emperors upon the throne of the one true master, long since past. The one time this realm seemed to unite under one banner, it was under the banner of the Ideologically insane and the corrupt. War and fear had brought the Theological Union into being. On a personal scale, the political and religious union of Tallarn and the Ophelians lasted for hundreds of generations, and perhaps thousands of years. But in the end, it was no more lasting than a castle of sand in the wind, when compared with the great span of history covered by this account of the Age of Dusk.

Some say it was the war with Vulkan which was the final deathblow of the Theologian Union, and in many ways they are correct. The loss of this war, and the subsequent destruction of the Ophelian shipyards (by infiltrating Sons of Corax strike teams), meant that the power of the Theologians was broken and the rule of Ceylan the Pure was fatally weakened. She had bet all her dogmatic capital on her holy war, and her defeat was seen as a sign. There were many rebellions at that time, and the Imperial metropolis worlds hadn’t the manpower to stop them. This disorder reached a climax when the Imperial family had to flee from their palace-ship as rioters and turncoats ransacked it. The Union had decapitated itself from within.

In this weakened state, the Union was infected with the poison of chaos. At first, it seemed that the preachers of Erebus might be the first to install their cults within this realm, but it was in fact Ahriman who came first, with his black cube fortress. His cabal of Sorcerers and their vast army of Rubric marines struck at the hearts of the anarchist cults that had caused the discord across the Union. They appeared before the stunned populace, wreathed in multi-coloured fire. Their voices were loud and clarion clear. The Cabal destroyed those who opposed them, and seemed to induct those who prostrated themselves before them as acolytes and lackies, who went on to built their huge sorcerer’s towers in the years to come.

Ahriman, however, had no desire to rule this realm of credulous idiots and superstitious cowards. Is sorcerers took what they wanted from the worlds of the Union, and gave them nothing in return.

But the people now had hope (albeit false hope). Ahriman’s cabal had met with the planetary governors of every single world in the empire. They each declared each Governor as the rightful Emperor of the Theologian Union. The sorcerers claimed they had no wish to administer an empire, and needed these men to be a single, strong voice who spoke for every world. They told every planet that they were the new capital world, and they psychically insinuated that all the other so-called Emperors were imposters, who were jealous of the rightful heir to the throne. If the governor could only subdue his wayward subjects, then peace would come, and enlightenment...

It was a cruel trick. The Thousand Sons offered hope, and the people believed them, when all their talk had achieved was a war on three thousand fronts; every single world’s Governor was at war with every other governor for control of the empire. Trading merchants found themselves paying extortionate tribute to every world they visited, or else declared enemies of the state. Some worlds starved, others were consumed by civil war and interplanetary strife. And, amidst all this, Ahriman continued to research his unholy sciences and forbidden Lore, uncaring of this misery inflicted on his orders. Tzeentch, conversely, gorged hungrily upon the hope of the power hungry, and the constantly changing political landscape. The Union became known to its former allies* as the ever-changing Dominion, a place of terrible desolation.

Ceylan’s heir had survived and went into hiding alongside his loyal minions. This organisation became known as the Disciples, a hidden group with cells across the three thousand worlds of the ‘Union’. Though they claimed to be freedom fighters, in practice they were nothing but terrorists, punishing those they perceived to have turned their back upon the old regime. They bombed the schola of politicians and any fools who thought to worship some other god than the Emperor of the Wasteland. They also kidnapped so-called ‘demagogues of the heathens’. These supposed demagogues were any people who the public seemed overly fond of; celebrities, political personalities, preachers, parish wardens, satirists, scribes and actors from state-sponsored holo-films. They burnt down churches, vandalised any post-Ceylan public works, and occasionally launched ineffective guerrilla wars against the Thousand Sons themselves. If Ceylan could not rule the Dominion of Change, then the Disciples would rather ruin the place for everyone else.

Ahriman was allied with Lorgar’s Imperium tangentially, through ancient pacts and rites sworn under the despoiler’s regime, but the Imperium of Travesties had no physical presence in that region (except for within the warp storms Belphoman and Vulfustan, where Draziin-maton were said to linger and- [chronicler spits out black fluid from his mouth. Not saliva-analogous.], but I digress.)

Ahriman was close to apotheosis. He had modified his mind beyond the scope of a mere Astartes, and he had employed Fabius to utilise the Emperor’s laboratory to enhance his form. He and Bile also used the black cube’s labs to create a terrible desecration of life. Ahriman, thinking himself as powerful and knowledgeable as the Anathema himself, sought to build Primarchs of his own. However, the Primarchs were never merely miracles of gene-tampering. The creatures he and Bile built were wrong; mindless, hulking things. Larger than even Magnus the red, these things were pale and hairless. Where Primarchs had souls of star-like intensity, these monsters had merely husks of souls. These things were known as the Golarches; failed paragons and pitiable nightmares. Though brain-damaged and mad, a Golarch was phenomenally strong and fast, able to shatter fortress walls with but a blow. They were thus tamed and enslaved by the Cabal of the Rubric, who used them to guard the Black cube.

Before Temestor Braiva attempted to defeat Ahriman, the Imperium Pentus had sent an earlier force to accomplish this task. However, Ahriman had sensed the coalition of Nova Astartes coming from half a sector away. Their commander, Gregory the Forgefiend, was a brave and ruthless Fire beast Captain, and he sought to strike at the heart of Ahriman’s realm directly.

Ahriman left him. However, the Sorcerer manipulated the warp tides, and made his vanguard arrive long before his support fleet. When the support fleet caught up to Gregory’s fleet, they found the system smashed by the fire beasts, their ferocity unbound. However, soon, the Astartes coalition cold and calmly turne dupont heir support fleet. Their guns pounded ships to scrap, and their boarding parties callously despatched every living person on the surviving support elements. They never removed their helmets, and they killed without passion or rage. They were puppets; new Rubric marines created through Ahriman’s megalomaniacal genius.

• (The most prominent of the Union’s former allies was the Praetorian Kingdom, which was virtually next door to the Theologian Union in astronomical terms. This was a realm which had built up around the world of Praetoria. During the Age of Strife, Battlefleet Gothic went into exile to escape the flood of madness which overwhelmed their sector, as did Battlefleet Obstiresi, after the Despoiler had their naval dockyards atomised. These fleets came out of the warp near Praetoria, and the wealthy merchant houses and nobility of Praetoria allowed them to stay. Without the Imperial Guardsman tithe, the Praetorian redcoats and this new, huge navy were able to take and hold a whole sub-sector, and keep hold of it through the millennia. Many of these worlds were industrial planets, with downtrodden populations toiling beneath aloof nobility; it was a simple matter to replace one set of native nobles, with the Praetorian nobility. Most of the common, pale-faced serfs of these worlds didn’t even notice the political shift. The praetorian Kingdoms maintained tight trade agreements with their neighbours, but rarely engaged in war with them; so long as the trade routes survived, they didn’t care. Equally, the Praetorians continued to trade with the Dominion of Change. The Mad King Harold XII had no intention of aiding his striken, fundamentalist neighbours.)

3) Szarekh returns:

As mentioned in a previous section, Szarekh, the silent king’s attempt to use the Celestial Orrery to destroy the Dragon’s united shards failed, and the C’tan caught the master of the necrons. Szarekh had tried to make the C’tan see reason, but the Dragon had not listened. The C’tan cast Szarekh, bodily, through time, there to erode away to nothingness in the wasteland at the end of the universe.

Yet, somehow, through means unknown, the Silent King managed to return from the far flung future (a time, apparently, long after even the present period of time in which I am compiling these notes, my predecessor’s life’s work). He had seen a future nightmarish to behold. No archive is strong enough to contain the psychic visions he witnessed, so I will not utter them here for the sake of my historical document. Yet, somehow, Szarekh had found an ally in that gods-forsaken time, which had drew him back to the Age of Dusk. He had witnessed the future, and knew that his necrons* had some role to play in the coming confluence of events.

He at first came to Szeras the Illuminor, for he was the original architect of the necrons, and shared Szarekh’s desire to ascend beyond their soulless android bodies. However, when Szarekh travelled to the Flesh Pits of Zantragora, his old allies were dumbstruck when they saw him. It was only then that Szarekh realised his android body was changed. He was no longer machine, but equally he was not flesh; he had become some strange amalgam of the two. Veins made of cables and translucent capillaries pumped blood that wasn’t blood through to false muscles that grew like fungus between his servos and living metal bones. His immortal jaws were filled with a writhing, living tongue. He desperately tried to communicate his dire warnings to Szeras, but the Illuminor saw only the melding of living and necrons; this was a chance to become more than machines, and Szeras captured his king for science. For a year, the insectoid cryptek subjected Szarekh to coldly calculated torture and bisections. Szarekh, meanwhile, wept openly. Not because of the pain, but for the fact he could now feel pain, for the first time in millions upon millions of years.

Szarekh was eventually liberated from his prison by a fleet of Triarch Praetorians. They swept into the Zabtragora tomb fleet, smashing aside any resistance. With a kind of cold fury, the Triarch Praetorians unleashed their Stalkers and Doomscythes upon Szeras’ assembled legions. They carved open his laboratories, and plucked Szarekh from captivity. The Silent King instantly ordered them to take the fleet south east, towards the Krorkish bastion worlds of the fringe.

However, as the Praetorians retreated, Szeras had his revenge. He was the architect and designer fot he original necrons, and such blatant violence against him could not go unpunished. He downloaded a custom-made virus into the android brains of the departing Praetorians. Slowly, over the next few months, the necrons of Szarekh’s fleet began to collapse and fail. Their own reanimation protocols had been compromised, and they began to crumble in mind and body. Only the semi-organic Szarekh was immune to this horrific phage, but when his fleet of ruined necrons eventually exited from a Dolmen Gate, they found themselves surrounded by a fleet of Krork Cruisers and war hulks. Szarekh was soon captured by the martial xenos. He requested that he be allowed to parlay with the leaders of the fleet. This wish was granted, and Szarekh found himself face to face with the two Gretchin commanders** of the war fleet. But when he was taken to this place, the broken, half-demented, bleeding King of the necrons did not speak with the Gretchin, but instead looked into their eyes, and spoke directly to the shadowy force that seemed to guide the ‘War of the Krork’ from afar; the Shadow Master, he who had Lingered, he who was allied to the Jackal, the Stranger and the Serpent Beneath.

Szarekh’s ruined biological eyes watered as he slurred vocalised words past his sodden grey tongue of meat.

“We have been at war. For so very long, we have turned our minds to the other’s defeat, at the exclusion of all else and it has achieved nothing. Look at this galaxy; this is a realm built upon our fallout, and populated by the abortions and monsters we called into being, we allied with, in order to win. Every victory we win, every defeat we suffer, feeds something... else. Something so primordial, it existed before it was created. This is our enemy; it always has been.”

“What do you propose?” the gretchin asked in unision, the power of their voices unnaturally resonant.

“Help me free my children,” Szarekh wheezed. “And the War in Heaven ends.”

• (His necrons referring primarily to the necrons allied to the Triarch. The Destroyers were a lost cause, for they were nothing but exterminators, and the warrior androids of the C’tan were necrons in appearance only, for the C’tan had built them from the hollowed-out souls of countless dupe races.)
  • (Every Krork battlefleet is commanded by two gretchin. These highly-psychic creatures form a kind of biological battle computer, relaying instructions and orders from central command. Each gretchin is ceremonially given the title of either Gorcanus or Morcanu, the names of the first of their kind.)