The Scouring
Chapter 1: Holocaust
In the wake of the Horus Heresy mankind was left reeling, war had devastated countless worlds and left nought but ashes behind. The armies of man were crippled and weak, the population starving but worst of all the Emperor was bound forever into the Golden Throne his wisdom and benevolence lost. The few scattered survivors turned on each other, old enmities long suppressed by the Emperor's Legions surging forth once more. Under the shadow of glorious monuments to victory and towering repositories of learning men killed each other for mouthfuls of bread and sips of water.
Gleaming cities burned and with no one left to maintain them most machines rusted away to nothing, machined tools were used as clubs and workshops as shelters from the rain. All the precious knowledge gathered during the Great Crusade was torn up and used in the struggle to survive. Libraries and archives were looted for firewood and all the technological achievements of a thousand generations were torn down in the anarchy.
The only technology that proved resilient enough to survive the carnage were fragments of STC designs, saved by far-sight individuals desperate to preserve even the tiniest part of the power humanity once wielded. Amongst the ranks of the army the rot found true purchase previous comrades in arms waged war upon one another, claiming pocket empires wherever they could. Some fought over territory, supplies and rations but others fought over nothing more than imagined slights and ancient grudges. Those who should have been leading humanity in this dark hour were at each other's throats.
On Terra itself a new wave of madness arose, fanatical cults gathering together amongst the billions of refugees sheltering under the walls of the Imperial Palace. Demagogues and preachers urged the people to embrace faith in the God-Emperor as the path to salvation, only through supreme sacrifice could they draw his attention and make him stand up from the Golden Throne to lead men once more.
Under their cruel lash they competed to outdo each other in mad acts of devotion, lashing and flagellating themselves for days on end. Men whipped themselves until their backs bled and plunged their hands into naked flames as tests of devotion, they cut out their tongues and gouged out their eyes in an attempt to make the Emperor return but he still said nothing.
Convinced that only greater acts of sacrifice would stir the Emperor the cults turned on those would not listen, dragging them from their beds and burning them in mass pyres. Fearful and desperate the people surged to join the cults swelling them to millions, and then they turned on each other. Madness spread through the streets as gangs of cultists hacked and stabbed with crude knives and spears each more determined to prove that they alone knew the Emperor's will.
From out of the darkness came a new threat, Xeno races thought long extinct returned from the shadows of wilderness space and sought vengeance upon the Imperium that had driven them out. They fell upon the helpless worlds of men and unleashed suffering that eclipsed the worst atrocities of the Horus Heresy. Orks and Hrud, Demiurg, Fra'al, Knib, Taiidani, Laer, Quietude, Talestrians, Eldar, Jorgall, Nephilim and some foes too terrible to name all returned and revelled in the carnage.
In desperation the people called out to the few surviving loyalist Primarchs to bring their mighty Legions to save them as in days of old. Yet the brothers hardened their hearts and turned their faces away, they were obsessed with reckoning with their traitor kin, blind to all else but vengeance. From Terra they chased the Traitor Legions into the galactic north, never ceasing their pursuit, leaving the weak and helpless to die uncared for in their wake.
It seemed that mankind's last hour had truly come, that the new day of enlightenment had ended and all that was left to huddle around the last flickering firelights as the night fell upon them. Brother fought brother and friend fought friend as all around swarms of Xeno laughed at the folly of man. Despair and violence spread like a virus infecting all with its taint, the madness was in the air, it was everywhere.
Yet even now there were those who held that humanity, the great species that had risen from the ashes of its own extinction, could fight this new enemy. A valiant band of brothers who gazed upon a galaxy of death and horror yet knew no fear:
They were the Ultramarines.
The last viable fighting force left in the galaxy.