Editing The Battle of Lion's Gate (section)

==The Bloody Gauntlet Thrown==

Warp rifts opened across many of Terra's hive-cities, and from these streamed 88 [[Bloodletter]] cohorts led by 8 massive [[Bloodthirster]]s. They were tasked with one thing: take the throneworld and prove [[Khorne]]'s superiority to the other Chaos powers.

Did we mention that it ''started raining blood'' through all of this? Metal.

Whatever Loyal Imperial forces weren't swallowed up by the daemons were pushed back against the walls of the Imperial Palace. Even with the mighty weapons emplacements raining down ruin on the daemon hordes, desperate battles erupted all across its base as those Custodes trapped outside the walls and the [[Grey Knights]] strike teams they led tried to stem back the tide. The surprise arrival of contingents of [[Sisters of Silence]] (including one [[Tanau Aleya]]), recalled by [[Trajann Valoris]] himself and flown in via Aquila landers from their orbital muster points, helped even the odds a bit for the defenders, but the daemons were seemingly endless.

Then for the first time in ten thousand years the Lion's Gate opened, and out of its depths charged out a full four thousand angry and oiled up Golden Banana-men, as well as their aircraft and support vehicles. The golden host struck hard at the red tide of Daemonkin, with the Captain-General himself leading the attack on the biggest Bloodthirster within striking distance.

With this sea of gold marched the proud remnants of Guilliman's crusade, with Bobby-G in the lead, followed likely by [[Saint Celestine]], [[Belisarius Cawl]], [[Cato Sicarius]]. Its was during this battle that the first of the [[Primaris Space Marines]] were awakened by Cawl, and it is here that they proved their worth.

The fighting was fierce, with even Big Blue forced into a mano-el-mano duel with a Bloodthirster on the ramparts, but after several hours of hard fighting the last daemon was banished back to the Warp. While the Imperial defenders won, the daemons left much uncertainty in their wake, and while the shattered defenses can be eventually rebuilt, the confidence of the [[High Lords of Terra]] in the homeworld's invincibility was no longer as ironclad.