Editing Siege of Terra (section)

==Final Stand at the Eternity Gate==

Although the Lion's Gate Spaceport had been retaken, the situation continued to deteriorate for the loyalists. Terra itself was dying, shattered and poisoned by the Siege. The unrelenting orbital bombardments from the Warmaster's fleet had gouged out craters and torn deep fissures into the planet's crust that vomited forth noxious gases and immense pyroclastic flows, smothering entire regions in boiling rock and choking fumes. Spilled chemicals, radiation from destroyed munitions stockpiles, and Warp-borne corruption were seeping into the soil, rendering vast swathes of the planet uninhabitable. The dust and ash from tens of thousands of destroyed buildings and uncountable conflagrations filled the atmosphere, blinding sensors, cutting off vox signals, coating the lungs of those who breathed Terra's air unprotected, and turning the sun red. The underground farms devoted to feeding the populace were destroyed and burning. The last sea on the planet was now a dust-choked pile of sludge. In the void around the choking, burning world, the Warp seeped into reality, painting space with unreal colors as the Chaos gods and their minions reveled in the horror they had wrought. The Neverborn now manifested freely upon Terra, gleefully joining in the butchery and devastation.

With the Palace defenses fatally compromised due to the breach at the Ultimate Wall by Legio Mortis, the loyalists were being inexorably forced back to the Delphic Battlement, the last line of defense before the Sanctum Imperialis. Jaghatai Khan was incapacitated, leaving Shiban Khan in command of most of the remaining White Scars at the Lion's Gate. Outside aid was nowhere to be seen, though Sanguinius ordered Corswain and his Dark Angels to stay put and defend the Astronomican to guide the way for Guilliman and the Lion. The traitors sensed that victory was in their grasp. The Emperor's telesthetic shield was failing due to Magnus the Red's psychic assaults in the Webway. The only thing truly going in the loyalists' favor was the degradation of Horus' armies into an uncoordinated horde. The Sons of Horus were the only organized force still fighting in the Warmaster's name. The traitor Imperial Army forces had degraded into gibbering cultists, the World Eaters were an uncontrollable mob of berserkers, the Death Guard were still recovering from Mortarion's banishment, and the Iron Warriors, Night Lords, and Emperor's Children had largely abandoned the siege, with only scattered elements still fighting for Horus. The smaller contingents from the Word Bearers, Alpha Legion, and the Thousand Sons fought on as best they could, though few could impose any kind of order upon the madness surrounding them. With Rogal Dorn and his retinue cut off and besieged at the Bhab Bastion, only a hundred thousand loyalists stood between the traitors and the Imperial Palace itself. This force was largely composed of Blood Angels led by Sanguinius and whatever Imperial Army elements could be salvaged from the collapsing front, but some Imperial Fists, White Scars, loyalist Mechanicus units, and the remnants of Legio Ignatum were present as well to muster on the Delphic Battlement. Under orders by Horus for the first time in weeks, the traitors had a simple mission: break through the Delphic Battlement and capture the Eternity Gate at dawn.

The crux of the traitors' efforts was targeted at the Delphic Archway, the largest gateway in the battlement's walls. The Archway had been conceived and built as a place of triumph through which the Imperium's victorious legions would march along the Grand Processional and up the Royal Ascension, a pathway built from millions of tonnes of stone quarried from a hundred conquered worlds and lined with statues of the Imperium's finest soldiers, scientists, and intellectuals. It had had no defenses before Dorn began fortifying it, and even after seven years of work it was still the weakest point in the wall. Both sides knew this, and so had mustered the greatest parts of their strength there.

[[Grimdark|Before attacking, the traitors hoisted the still-living bodies of loyalist prisoners on whatever could hold their tortured forms in an effort to break the defenders' morale. The Legio Mordaxis Reaver Titan ''Daughter of Torment'' marched forward and opened its power claw to reveal Blood Angels Captain Idamas, who was notably the first Blood Angel Sanguinius spoke to when he first presented himself to his legion decades prior. Idamas was fatally wounded after being pinned to the claw by 7 spears]]. Following these acts of barbarity they issued Horus' offer: flee the coming battle and be granted a pardon by the (soon to be) new Emperor of Mankind, or die. To punctuate the offer and insult, the Titan began closing its claw to slowly crush Idamas to death. However, Sanguinius ordered the skitarii Transacta-7Y1 to kill the captain, both to put him out of his misery and deny his captors the satisfaction of such a murder. [[Awesome|Sanguinius then turned to the defenders and gave a rousing speech so awesome it inspired and/or shamed all of them into standing their ground. After that, he flew to the ''Daughter of Torment'' and cut off the fucker's head]]. With that, the battle was joined.

As the guns of the Delphic Battlement unleashed a cataclysm of fire on the Chaotic horde, they zerg-rushed the loyalists. Tens of thousands of traitor Space Marines and Imperial Army were mowed down, but their sheer weight of numbers allowed tens of thousands more to reach the battlement. Some dragged themselves up the wall with axes and blades. Others launched themselves onto the ramparts with jump packs or clambered across the heaps of dead and the piled shells from the battlement's guns. A Khornate Warlord Titan docked with the wall and disgorged a cargo of World Eaters directly into the battle. At the Delphic Archway itself, the loyalist Titans of Ignatum fought and died against their traitorous counterparts from Audax, Mortis, and Mordaxus. The battle atop the wall quickly descended into a frenetic melee, a hundred thousand individual fights melding into a titanic clash of arms, rage, and desperation that lasted for a day and a night. In the midst of the fight, the Bloodthirster Ka'Bandha arrived, manifested from the torn flesh and spilled blood of the IX Legion's sons. He had been tasked by Khorne with killing five hundred Blood Angels in front of Sanguinius to atone for his failure at Signus Prime, and got pretty close before Hawk Boi swooped in to save his sons. [[Awesome|In a lopsided airborne fight, the Bloodthirster got his back broken with the hilt of Sanguinius' sword and cast down]]. [[FAIL|He was then consumed by lesser daemons who preyed on his weakness]]. Despite, this nothing, nothing could stop the uncountable horde that was pouring through the shattered wall and fighting up through the Delphic Archway. Worse yet, daemons were manifesting inside the Sanctum Imperialis itself as the Emperor's strength waned under the unrelenting stress of holding the Webway shut while fighting psychic duels with Horus and Magnus. As the defenses entered terminal collapse, Custodian Tribune Diocletan Coros ordered the closure of the Eternity Gate, but a maniple of Legio Audax Titans used their Ursus Claws to hold one of the doors open. As Sanguinius moved to cut the chains, Angron made a [[Marvel Comics|superhero (villain?) entrance]] under orders from Horus to kill Sanguinius. Angron had been killing his way across the Inner Palace for weeks, his mind long since subsumed into a fugue of rage and bloodlust stoked to a fever pitch by the demands of the Blood God and the endless gnawing of the Butcher's Nails, and bringing down Sanguinius was the only coherent thought remaining to him.

The two primarchs engaged in a vicious duel that saw Sangy delivering a variety of normally fatal blows to Angron with all his accustomed skill and grace. Unfortunately for him, Sanguinius was exhausted and weak from six months of nonstop fighting and found himself unable to deliver any punishment that Angron couldn't tank by virtue of being a fuckhuge daemon primarch, while Angron's Warp-enhanced strength and fury allowed him to keep fighting even as he was wounded by countless blades and bolts from the loyalist Astartes around him. After numerous abortive attempts to fight while airborne, Angron decided to change tactics and fight on the ground while getting Sanguinius to fight him. Angron slaughtered many Blood Angels to force his brother's attention onto him. The two duelled again, and the exhausted Sanguinius began losing ground. Both Primarchs knew the fight would not (and in the case of the Great Angel, COULD NOT) go on much longer. Angron let Sanguinius stab him to get close and begin crushing his throat, while in the same motion stabbing Sanguinius' gut with the Black Blade. [[Derp|Of course, the ole 'tank a stab to get in close and deliver a fatal blow' trick is not unique to Angron and Jaghatai Khan]]. [[Just as Planned|Sanguinius had had the same idea and used the opportunity to rip the Butcher's Nails from Angron's skull]]. [[Bullshit|This somehow caused enough pain for him to beg Sanguinius to stop]], to no avail. [[Rip and Tear|Sanguinius tore the Nails out, taking Angron's brains and eyes with them]]. Angron's physical incarnation was finally killed and he was banished to the Warp. [[Troll|Khorne laughed at the sight]], while [[RAGE|Angron's less amused sons completely lost it]] and began teamkilling ''en masse'', slaughtering anything and anyone within reach of their weapons. Thus was a second daemon primarch banished from Terra.

Meanwhile, deep below the Palace, Vulkan was dispatched into what was left of the human Webway project to stop Magnus the Red's assault on the Emperor's psychic defenses. Vulkan found his traitorous brother in the Impossible City of Calastar, where he was weaving spells and incantations to shatter the Emperor's resolve. Despite Magnus employing a variety of illusions and horrifically lethal magic tricks on Vulkan, they all proved to be futile against a perpetual primarch. As Vulkan resurrected time and again, Magnus was slowly worn down between the constant strain of maintaining his spells and weathering the Lord of Drakes' relentless assaults. In a final gamble to buy time or convert his brother, Magnus drew Vulkan into his mind to play out his experiences during the Heresy and explain his motivations for turning on the Emperor. Vulkan would have none of it, spitting nothing but facts (including some that Magnus didn't know that Vulkan knew) about his brother's persecution complex and hubris. He pointed out that none of the loyalist primarchs had reacted the way Magnus had to learning of the Emperor's Webway project, that in siding with Horus he had chosen to side with the true author of Prospero's destruction, and that Magnus' deal with Tzeentch hadn't truly cured his legion of the flesh change. Every step he had taken since his foolish attempt to warn the Emperor of Horus' corruption had only led him further down the path of damnation. He also revealed a devastating truth to Magnus: the Crimson King had only imagined being offered a costly path towards redemption by the Emperor, when in reality he was told to kick sand and GTFO. Regardless of [[Skub|why]], the result was the same: Magnus retreated into his shroud of self-righteousness and danced to the tune of Chaos. Magnus attempted one last gambit, pretending to recognize the magnitude of his fall, but Vulkan sensed that if he showed mercy where none was warranted, it would open the way for the corrupting influence of Chaos to seep into his spirit. With nothing left to argue about, Vulkan smashed Magnus into paste with his hammer ''Urdrakule'' while Magnus wove one last spell to unmake Vulkan at the molecular level. Vulkan technically died first, but his hammer blow still fell, crushing Magnus's head and banishing him into the Warp. The two corpses lay side by side for a time, until Vulkan resurrected once more and walked away, a blackened, skeletal revenant still carrying his hammer. Magnus' banishment caused the flesh change to begin manifesting uncontrollably in the ranks of the XV Legion, further blunting the tide of the traitor advance at the critical moment.

With these two events, the Chaos forces were stopped just outside the now-sealed Eternity Gate. The surviving loyalists fled inside and licked their wounds. While the Great Angel regarded his wounds, he and Dorn gave their final goodbyes. The White Scars reactivated the anti-orbital defenses at the Lion's Gate and laughed at the traitor bastards in orbit before tearing into them with all the firepower their defenses had. Roboute Guilliman sent word that he, the Lion, and Leman Russ were only a week away, but the thing that had once been Lotara Sarrin intercepted the message and ordered the rest of the Warmaster's fleet to block the signal. 

This marked the point where the situation for both sides had become truly desperate. Traitorous mortal crews (and many of the Thousand Sons remaining on Terra) could no longer [[Chaos Spawn|maintain forms that obeyed the laws of physics]], the Traitor Legions weren't on speaking terms with the concepts of "tactics", "unit cohesion", or "sanity", and [[Anal Circumference|their fleet's flanks were wide open for a well-deserved pounding from the inbound loyalist relief fleet]]. With nobody left to rely on and only one last chance at victory, Horus recognized that he would have to force the Emperor to come to him, so he did something completely unexpected: he ordered the ''Vengeful Spirit'' to lower its shields entirely. The loyalists unfortunately didn't know any of this, only being aware of the fact that the Grim Reaper would be taking them out to lunch very soon. [[Just as Planned|And thus the die was cast and the stage set for the end of the Siege]].