The Iron Waltz
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"Despite his warmth among his Marines, Lord Arelex's presence could be quite unsettling when something aroused his curiosity. All pretense of humanity dropped away, and we were left with... I cannot truly describe it. An entity that walked like a man, looked like a man, spoke like a man, but who thought in terrifyingly alien patterns, whose razor voice and piercing gaze stabbed you to the core, peeled away your defenses. Nothing you said was forgotten. Nothing you did was misremembered."
"And the Eldar thought they could hide from such a man. Trick him and toy with him. Play games with him."
"Madness, even for a mad race."
- Napotiel Greybeard, speaking to Imperial historians post-Heresy, era unknown.
(Part of the campaigns of the War Scribes.)
Scouting forces reported strange sensor echoes, flickers of things that might have been vessels, but maddeningly stayed just out of reach of auspex lock. The sightings seemed to intensify the closer the Legion Warfleet drew to an unnamed region, known to neither Imperial records nor ancient tales of Man. This was a wild place, full of strange stars and undetected planets encompassed only by the Scarlet Banner, a dense veil of ionized hydrogen gas thrown off by some long passed supernova. The fleet pressed on through the mist, bold in the face of peril.
Days passed with only the drifting gas to provide relief from inactivity. Many of the Legionnaires grew perturbed, though for now they held their tongues. After all, there was always something to be done. Some piece of equipment to attend to, some new training exercise to practice, or even simply conversing with one another. And then the Sword class frigate Terrax Mortis failed to report back to Legion command. And soon after, its sister ships Providence of Man and Bannerbearer fell silent, all three patrolling the Legion's starboard rear. The Lunar class picket ship Exiled Vengeance likewise vanished without trace, the rearmost watcher upon the port flank. A sense of deep foreboding fell across Legio Secundus then, even as Arelex gave orders to close ranks, seething with rage. Something was out there. Hunting them.
Passing into the deepest hydrogen clouds, each Imperial vessel grew still and silent upon their Primarch's command, mighty power cores banked to lowest idle and the massive guns halting their endless sweep. As one, the warfleet drifted cold and dark. It is said that no sound of the void is more terrible than the silence that fills men's ears, for even the wounded's cries and the sound of genetoriums exploding are sounds of action and life. A silent ship is fear itself to veteran spacers, and the Legion's human auxilia felt fear knife deep into their hearts. But Marines are made of sterner stuff, and well knew the Palaestram's stillness. And Arelex himself seemed to drink in the quiet, attuning himself to the ship in some indefinable way as if listening in a place where there could be no sound. Three hours passed, and slowly, agonizingly slowly, the Primarch brought his hand down upon the Emperor class battleship's main drive controls. With a roaring wordless warcry upon his lips, Arelex brought the Pollux Ascendant's engines to screaming life and hurled the titanic vessel forward into an unassuming patch of mist.
For a brief moment, the Legion wondered if their Primarch had erred. A battleship's engines could not long endure a full burn from a cold start, and alarms were beginning to wail from stem to stern. Their misgivings were silenced when the armored prow slammed into something unseen, yet all too solid. A ghostly voidcraft flickered into view, nearly as large as Arelex's own battleship but made of swooping curves and sail-like fringes. Beautiful and elegantly deadly, it surely moved like a shark among clumsy baitfish. But with an Imperial Battleship inelegantly spearing it amidships, the bird of prey had been brought low and the lumpen beasts below would feast. Even an apex predator could make a single damning mistake.
Thousands of Marines surged forward, some flying in via Thunderhawk, some crossing directly from the flagship, and a brave few spearing into the xenos vessel's flanks riding inside Caestus Assault Rams. From every angle the Legion struck, even as their Primarch kicked a hole through the strange, bonelike bulkheads and forced his own way in, accompanied by the Legion's veteran soldiers. Resistance was fierce and many Legionnaires met their end flensed into pieces or speared by strange flechettes of unknown materiel. The Eldar weaponry was of peerless quality, spearing through bone and armored ceramite with equal ease, yet the frenzied savagery of Legio Secundus' battle-charge carried them forward and through, trampling the enemy beneath their boots without regard for loss. The Primarch himself was a merciless engine of destruction, bathing the corridors with fire and shell. For every graceful Eldar that met its end withered and crumpled upon the floor with proud turquoise, purple and gold regalia blackened, charred and shattered, Arelex called out the name of a single crewman dead upon one of the lost Imperial vessels. One did not prey upon the family with impunity, and he would have his price in blood.
Elsewhere in the colossal xenos starship, the members of Legion Command were exacting their fearsome vengeance in their own way. Following in his lord's footsteps, mighty Ang-Quos hosed the decks with incandescent flame from within his Terminator Armor. Under his left arm, a Heavy Flamer belched gouts of Promethium, sucking every scrap of oxygen from the air and replacing it with acrid smog. Under his right arm, a Multi-Melta cleaved through armor and bulkhead alike, opening paths through the mazelike vessel as he pleased. Wreathed in poisonous fumes and hellish fire, Ang-Quos relentlessly drove towards the xenos' Enginarium, scything through its systems like a hot knife through flesh. With savage abandon Ang-Quos brought the control room to a roaring boil, scouring all life from within its walls. There would be no escape from his Legion's wrath. For his actions, the former member of II Legio's Sacred band would earn the title "The Cremator", and bear it with pride.
Bursting into the Eldar command deck, Arelex and his Marines found themselves struck down by crackling waves of arcane energy. Three xenos warriors stood before them, guarding the glittering seer that surely must command the vessel. With bolts of lightning and waves of invisible force, the Legionnaires were sent reeling back as their bolter shells and plasma rounds impacted harmlessly upon a shield of pure thought. The xenos denied them, and the arrogance of their act drove Mohxes Pellen, former Sacred Band member and foremost Legion psyker to act. Just as he had on Terra, Mohxes defended his comrades with an energy shield of his own, willing the lightning to ground itself harmlessly. Space Marine psychic and inhuman Warp-wielder stared each other down, the air crackling between them. Though the Legion escorts has fallen, burned to ash inside their Mark 3 power armor, Arelex regained his footing and immediately charged into the three alien bodyguards, silently trusting Mohxes' expertise in this field. They would not interrupt the duel of minds.
"Xenos witch. You think to stalk a grox, but you have found a predator born." The Farseer merely chuckled, gazing down at Mohxes with gleeful disdain. Her voice was like honeyed steel, sweet and sharp all at once. "Mon-keigh, you over-reach yourself. I have planned this moment in every detail." A thunderclap of Warp-lightning hurtled from Mohxes' fist swallowed the Eldar whole, but in a twinkling she stood behind him, even as he whirled to face her. "You might want to pay more attention to your liege lord. I hear he's not feeling quite himself." Mohxes froze in horror as the three Seer Council members speared their crystal lances as one into the minute seam between helmet and neck joint, flooding the ancient armor with psychic energy even as their bullet riddled corpses fell to the deck. Primarch Arelex stood immobile, silent as the grave. The Librarian struck the Farseer a devastating backhand blow, screaming in rage. "What have you done to him, Eldar... WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! ANSWER ME!" Laying prone on the floor, the Farseer spoke a single word. "Kill."
Without a sound, without even seeming to move, Arelex's monstrous armor loomed over Moxhes. Blue ghostfire flickered across his body, pouring from every seam. "He's my thing now, little mon-keigh. My chosen toy. Only my will moves him. The will of the Eldar." Rising from the floor on a curtain of rippling psychic energy, the Farseer took advantage of the Librarian's paralyzing shock and welded his armored soles to the floor with a flourish of warpfire. "Now then, beast. Die by your master's hand. Arelex? Take his life." The deadly blade rose, humming with unrestrained fury. Falling, the air screamed with its passage. It stopped, mere inches from Mohxes' armored helm, held rigid by psychic power. The farseer's eyes grew wide. Mohxes' voice was cold as the void beyond the hull. "Eldar witch. Your lies undo you. If Lord Arelex was awake, I would already be dead. If he truly wished me slain, I would have been happy to fall at his feet. But the best you could do was make him sleep, and put your foul mind inside his armor? You speak of control, but you summon only an illusion. This suit of armor does not possess my master's strength. And so it cannot, will not, harm me."
Mohxes grew quieter now, his mind wandering back across the years. "On Terra I was called the Hive Breaker. My job was to tear down old bulkheads to make room for treasure hunters and settlers. A hard job for a boy, but had I refused, I'd have been killed because of my powers. They exiled me to the darkness, forced me to fend off mutants and animals each day. I lived day to day as a tool without will of my own. But the Emperor gave me a purpose, taught me how to use my mind to build, rather than destroy. And that purpose was to support his son. I can never repay the Emperor for lifting me from the darkness. But that doesn't mean... I forgot how to tear things down." The Librarian's eyes burned like twin suns, flaring white-hot with an icy fury as his helmet exploded from the uncontainable force. "Repent, alien, for you dared to challenge me in a contest of wills." Without turning to look at the Farseer, Mohxes cradled his Primarch's thrashing armor with psychic tendrils even as he immolated her, his mental focus tearing apart her psychic shroud. Arelex sank to the deck like a puppet with its strings cut. Without another word, the Librarian Terminator freed his feet, hefted his Primarch atop one shoulder, and marched back to rejoin the Legion.
When Arelex reawakened, the Legion quailed before his wrath. The insult to his person would not, could not be allowed to stand unpunished. The Legion fleet scythed through the drifting wisps of crimson gas like maddened piranha seeking blood, but the Eldar eluded them at every turn, scattering like minnows the moment Imperial auspexes locked onto their vessels. Though one of their largest ships had been destroyed under the Legion's guns, significant forces still remained in the nebula based on the multitude of engine traces scattered through the smoke. At last, the Primarch had had enough. Opening a forward hatch on his command ship, he stepped out into the void, unshielded and unprotected, to the horror of his Legionnaires. For hours, he meditated in the vacuum. He neither breathed, nor ate, not slept, nor drank, nor showed more than a faint glimmer of mental activity even to the Librarians' senses. Only the faintest of muscle tremors in his ears betrayed any signs that Arelex had not frozen to death in the vastness of space.
Finally he stood, returning to the command bridge, and gave a sequence of nonsensical coordinates to his navigation crew. They would take a winding, looping path through the fog, seemingly aimless, and they would do so with all possible stealth. Nervously, his Legion complied. "Every voidship has its own voice, like a wordless song. The more observant among you may have noticed the Space Hulk's dull hum when you were aboard. The ship we are on now sings out with a growling fierceness, and the other Legion vessels combine into a chant of war to my ears. I hear the Eldar all around us. Their alien ways are like bells, a single tone for each ship. One note resonates across each wraithbone hull. We cannot catch them, unless they make a mistake like that battleship did. And now that the Farseer and her cadre have paid the price for their arrogance, the others will be wary. We will not get a second chance to ram. But... far ahead of us, I hear a choir. Hundreds and hundreds of tones, bound together into an alien harmony. Whatever lies ahead, it is large, and slow. We will catch it. AND. WE. WILL. CRUSH. IT. The Eldar will long remember the might of Legio Secundus." The Legion roared their defiance from every duty station, and the fleet began to move. Vanishing into the roiling fog, they began to hunt the hunters.
"Wolzhi." The Terminator snapped to attention. "Yes, my Primarch?" "I have spoken to the engineseers. The Pollux Ascendant's prow cannot be repaired after ramming the Eldar battlecruiser. The damage is too severe. I can hear the vessel's pain. It is time for it to rest. It will see us to our destination, but that will be its last voyage. Assemble the Caestus Assault Rams, cut landing bays for them into what's left of the prow. When the time comes, I want every Caestus available to launch all at once. Prepare your warriors. It falls to them to brave the Eldar's opening salvo." "You do my warriors great honor, Primarch. The strike teams will be ready at your command." Without a moment's hesitation, the former Sacred Band Legionnaire left the flight deck to begin carrying out his Primarch's will. Hour after hour, the shattered bulkheads were chopped and rewelded, forging row after row of crude launch catapults. Hundreds of Caestus Assault Rams were towed into position, under the watchful eye of Wolzhi Steelblood.
Three days passed. Three days of drifting through reddish vapor. Three days of silence, and hard labor, and ever-increasing tension. The Legion was on edge, and seventeen thousand Marines champed at the bit to be unleashed. On the third day, Primarch Arelex, clad in the terrible majesty of his archaeotech armor, pointed his gauntleted hand towards the forward viewscreens. "Behold, Marines. Your prey. Our vengeance." Looming through the clearing mists was a vast voidship. Unbelievable in scale, the Eldar ship defied comprehension. It was the size of a continent, and hab-spires as large as an Imperial battleship jutted from every surface. It was beautiful, in a terrifying way. An Eldar Craftworld. And it was virtually undefended, its swarm of support vessels still hunting the Imperial fleet through the nebula. The Pollux Ascendant brought its thrusters to full burn, and the last Imperial personnel rushed to the escape pods after locking the cogitators on a collision course. The ancient battleship's final resting place would be a fitting tomb, buried in the heart of a mighty corpse.
The month-long struggle upon the unnamed Craftworld passed into myth and legend almost as soon as it was finished. The Primarch refused to give the Eldar even the dignity of an honorable remembrance, one of the few times he voluntarily allowed himself and his Legion to omit anything from their vast records. It is known that the Pollux Ascendant smashed a hundred kilometer wide opening into the Craftworld in its death throes, exploited mercilessly by Wolzhi Steelblood and his Caestus swarms. With a secure beachhead, the rest of the Legion poured in behind them, laying waste to all in their path. What exactly transpired within, few outside of the Legion's inner circle could say, for the Eldar's psychic witchcraft twisted memory and mind as easily as it did metal and bone. Unbridled savagery won the day, and the Craftworld eventually succumbed to internal sabotage and relentless naval bombardment, breaking into a jagged constellation of turquoise, gold, and purple hues.
Arelex decreed that the Craftworld should become the Legion's trophy, consumed in every way by the Imperium of Mankind. In so doing, the Legion colors would become that of their defeated foe, an eternal challenge to any Eldar that dared defy them. Breaking with tradition, a vast harvest of xenos artifacts took place within the ruined fragments, for the Magi of Mars would surely offer wondrous relics in trade for Eldar captives and materials for dissection. It was sorely needed, too. Out of 17,000 Marines who assaulted the Craftworld, only 10,000 made it out alive. Of the Legion's hundreds of capital ships and lesser vessels, a scant few dozen of the largest and most resilient pulled themselves free of the Crimson Banner to laboriously make the trek back to Sol System, stuffed to the brim with Eldar loot.
Though the Emperor fully supported his sons, and greatly desired the subjugation of all xenos, the Legion's records speak of multiple heated conversations between father and son during the voyage home. Attacking a Craftworld with a still-young Legion was foolhardy at best, and suicidal at worst. He extended congratulations on a victory decisively won, but the Emperor was far from pleased that such casualties came from the void of space, and not from capturing planets for the Imperium to inhabit. Great threats though they might be, Craftworlds were low on the Emperor's priority list, and he let Arelex know it in no uncertain terms. Unless directly attacked, the Primarch of Legio Secundus was not to repeat this engagement again. Still, Arelex found it hard to feel chastened, and his Legion celebrated for the whole journey to Mars, toasting the living and honoring the valiant dead. New recruits and grizzled veterans alike had sharpened their claws on a worthy foe, and the sense of camaraderie brought the whole Legion closer together as a unit than ever before.