The Death World of Krieg had fought its enemies for over five hundred years. For centuries, the valiant but ugly Death Korps, as devoted to their Emperor as they were to their lasguns, battled in the nuclear sludge of their sterile world against waves upon waves, invasions upon invasions, of mutants, daemons, and orks, often at the same time. Generations of men leapt over the walls of their vile trenches and into the rancid fog of the battlefield, which flashed orange by cause of the artillery. These brave but desperate men would die, falling on the graves of their great grandfather's great grandfather. Though eventually the Kriegans would hammer enough of themselves to death against the foe so to defeat them, there would always be another invasion.
It was then a surprise when a shimmering image of the Emperor, as he had appeared during the Great Crusade, appeared over every Kriegan city and trench.
"My cherished people," began the vision, his words echoing in the mind of every loyal Imperial citizen on the planet, "I am your Emperor. For too long have you fruitlessly fought against these foes in pursuit of ultimate forgiveness. I have come here to impart victory unto you, and to remove your sadness. You are forgiven, every Imperial heart on this planet may feel my warmth." The Kriegans knew by instinct that this truly was their Emperor. They fell on their knees and wept, their tears fogging the lenses on their masks. After so much fighting, the Death Korps had forgotten the meaning of true victory.
"Know that after today, no mutant or ork or beast of chaos will threaten this world," continued the Emperor. "The time of suffering is over, the time of celebration may come, as dawn." Each Kriegan, from the trench-locked soldiers, to the newborn babes, saw a vision in their heads. It was of a golden tower, tall enough to rival the spire of the Emperor himself, stretching into the sky. Every piece of it shimmered golden beneath an equally golden sun, while titanic bas-relief carvings of Imperial saints gazed out from the very walls themselves. Atop the spire's utomost summit was an Imperial Aquilla: spreading its wings out across Kreig from its mighty gold nest.
"Build it, for me, for your victory today, for Krieg. Your enemies are all dead," the Emperor's holy voice thundered. "Build it."
…
[i]And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue he hath his name Apollyon –Revelations 9: 11 [/i]
…
Apollyon looked into the pit before him. His stood, his sword bloodied with the lifeblood of Sifish workers, at the edge of the pit to the webway gate, which sit at the bottom of this gaping pit. Deep inside, he could hear the mad chattering of enslaver voices, growing steadily louder as the swarm got closer to the surface. His eyes looked skywards.
"You…you have lost," Constantor promised, even as he lay in Apollyon's grip. The primarch knew precisely what Constantor was warning him about.
"Have I, indeed?" Apollyon asked the chapter master, who was presently on his knees, his hands ripped off, with Apolyare's taloned hand gripping the back of his neck. A struggle to escape would turn into decapitation, if not, then he would be mauled by the genestealers that swarmed around Apollyon.
"I could have gotten to Holy Terra. I could have warned the Emperor. He could have shown me where in the galaxy the Imperium is. I could have given some order to the way the enslavers emerged," Apollyon lamented while Constantor laughed. "But everyone I met was too damned stubborn. Now the new enslaver plague will not be as a mop: which is controlled, that sweeps the filth away. It will be like an upturned bucket. And whatever is strong enough to resist the spill will prevail."
"The plague stops here," Constantor laughed. Apollyon stepped back from the pit as a beam of pure sun pierced the clouds, driving all before it. The intense, by narrow beam of light shot straight into the hole, to where the webway gate was. Far below, an alien arch hidden amongst the ruins of an ancient eldar vault was incinerated, thousands of enslaver bodies with it. The lance of energy was unforgiving, turning flesh to dust in a heartbeat. Then, like lightning, it was gone, a deep bore in the ground was a testament to its strength. Unknown to the crew aboard the Ultramarine ship in orbit that had fired the lance, their divine shot had just drilled into a deeper part of the ruins where the webway gate was buried. Entombed within the ruins were the graceful shapes of three more webway gates.
"It is over, traitor!" Constantor yelled, his flesh burnt by the lance. "We have won!" Apollyon turned around and advanced on the dying Astartes, stepping across a mound of ashen genestealers, his armored body untouched by the heat. He lifted off his helmet.
"Do you truly think it happens only here?" Apollyon asked. He reached out with his right hand and clasped Constantor's head. Apollyon projected the enslaver's hive mind to him.
In his head, Constantor saw vision after vision of writhing, fleshy columns of enslavers emerging from holes in the ground, caves, ruins, or even from the glowing clouds in the center of naked webway gates standing brazenly in the open. Enslavers of all types, flooding out from their portal like a flood, but larger and faster. Their onslaught was not confined to the earth. Clouds darkened the sky as winged organisms flapped violently out. As the land grew dark under the flood, and the day turned to night under the bodies and spores of the enslaver's legions, the nightmarish shadows of special hive ships flickered into being in the atmosphere, alien energies leaping around them as they solidified their being in the material universe.
This vision was shown to Constantor one thousand times in a minute, with each individual sight lasting less than a second. One thousand pits, one thousand emergences, one thousand hive fleets. Through the madness of the hive mind, Constantor sensed that there were many more invasions than the ones he had witnessed.
"Man's darkest hour is upon us," Apollyon sneered, "but in the wake, mankind will have been hammered into the greatest power that this galaxy will ever know. Even greater than us." He took his hand away and Constantor fell down, shocked by the effects hive mind's contact had on him.
Constantor would awaken Emperor knows after long. The soft, warm forms of alien beasts were slithering over him and the sky was choked with dark brown clouds. He was not depraved enough to guess what had made them so brown. Behind him, he could hear chattering beasts still emerging from the pit. Why wouldn't the chapter's fleet fire again? Did Constantor dare to guess why?
"Your chapter is routed, Ultramarine. They came to Sifo II just as you wanted, right into our hands," Apollyon stated as he strode over to him, his helmet back on. Enslavers veered around him while trampling over Constantor. "Your fleet has nowhere to go: nowhere where my fleets cannot find them." Apollyon leaned down. Enslavers stopped trampling over him. "This is the way the chapter ends, not with a bang, but a whimper."
The last thing Constantor saw in his mind before Apollyon ordered the enslavers to attack him was a vision of the Ultramarine's battle barge being sundered apart by a pair of hiveships.
And so, all across the Imperium, hivefleets emerged. One for every rouge webway gate, one more for every gate-less planet that stood near a planet with a gate. They came out of the jungles, out of hives, out of cities, and poured into hives, into cities, into jungles. Planets besieged by orks, who were rocked with civil war between mutants and humans, found peace as every living thing was devoured. After a day, countless billions had been sacrificed to the enslaver's hunger. Trillions would follow.
…
'The souls of the living,' thought the Night Bringer to itself. All around it, the C'tan could feel the souls of the living dying off. Each lost soul meant one less soul could belong to the Night Bringer. 'I will stop this,' Night Bringer thought.
…
The world of Krieg continued to toil under the Emperor's gaze. A diagram of the Emperor's tower was drawn, but the architects of Krieg soon realized there wasn't enough gold on the whole world to coat the first meter of the tower's husk. Even as they lamented, the required metal materialized upon the naked, muddy ground of the construction site.
"Where will we get all the plasteel for these beams?" another architect asked, knowing that all the world's resources were squandered on bunkers and cannons.
"Go to your enemies." The Emperor's voice said. The Kriegans had no choice but to obey their master, and they found them dead but turned into plasteel! Vast seas of statues, orks and mutants and even some daemons of Nurgle, frozen and built of the purest plasteel that a builder could ever hope for. When the local priesthood raised their concerns about handling the bodies of Nurgle daemons, even plasteel ones, they sprouted stigmatic wounds upon their bodies and perished from them.
As the enemies were melted down to make construction material for the Emperor's tower, the Kriegans laughed and sang their praises to the Emperor. Some unseen force aided their work. Young workers carried massive beams on their own, trucks never needed fuel, the ground gave way to shovels like water, gravity refused to drag down their work even when one of the first beams erected failed upon the muddy ground it was founded on. Before the week was out: the Kriegans had built the foundations to their tower: a century's work in seven days.
The Emperor truly protected them.
…
And with strange aeons even death may die. -H.P Lovecraft
...
The Blackstone Fortress hovered beside the Nero, high above the doomed world of Pompeii, its squalorous cities locked in a brutal was of attrition with one another, while green-skinned invaders rampaged across it in almighty warbands. No one on the world had seen sixty years in over a century. As bad as it might have been, it was well off by modern standards. When the hive fleets emerged from the webway four months ago, they stained the stars brown with their writhing, swarming numbers. Now it was a blessing to be free of their alien touch, no matter how bitter the surface's conflict was.
The chaos space marines did not yet notice the eldar.
"Do not lower your gaze, do not let your protection fall," Maugan Ra warned the warlock coven while they sat in a circle, meditating, surrounding the Grey Knights with a protective field of psyker energy. "If he suspects it, we will have come here for nothing."
…
The Night Bringer could find no soul-stealers here. Nowhere, wherever it looked, did it find one of the lethal clawed things whose species violated the galaxy from arm to arm. It displeased it. Night Bringer had dispatched its necron minions at one of the great soul-stealer fleets and blown its ugly mass to oblivion. The ancient C'tan could feel each death as the fleet was disintegrated by the green, lashing pulses of the tombships. Each individual death: a candle out. But no souls came to it, no feast to be had from that conquest. So, tongue dulled by the taste of nothing, Night Bringer moved its minions to this world.
Hovering over the wasteland of shell-blasted squalor, Night Bringer beheld the monstrous greenskins battling the humans in their trenches. Grenades exploded, lasguns fired, machineguns rattled. Night Bringer could feel each of them die. Even from its position, floating miles above like a wisp of storm cloud, it could feel the deaths of the young men and their brutish enemies. Each death was like a single pebble of sugar falling to it: savory but short. These deaths were but a simple taste. Greater feasts awaited elsewhere. And Night Bringer knew it would have to move fast if it wanted to gorge itself before the vast fleets of soul-stealers did.
As a bright explosion lashed through the greenskins, the Night Bringer's lips grew sweet with souls. Then it was gone: the deaths enjoyed and absorbed. There was no need to call its forces here. Let them kill, let them die, let them ferment for later eating. While there were other feasts amongst the stars, their precious souls being consumed by the souls-stealers, whose bodies released nothing savory upon death, Night Bringer could not stop and wait. Each passing moment meant fewer souls.
The Soul-stealers had to die. All of them.
As the Night Bringer rose up through the clouds, it contemplated the soul-stealers. They were familiar somehow, like an anicient dream imagined on a moonless night, millions of years past. It could not rest its scythe on the detail, but there was something cleanly there, reminding it of an ancient enemy.
'The Old Ones?' the Night Bringer wondered as it passed out of the atmosphere, through a cloaked cloud of necron ships. 'Could it be they?' The thought was unsettling, even for one such as it. The logical thought that came to Night Bringer whilst it rose into the stars was that if the Old Ones had returned, then it and the other C'tan would know. Yet no whispers had been hurled across the void. No Old Ones had arisen.
Therefore, it could only be…the one species whom not even the C'tan could defeat. Night Bringer was beyond fear, but deep down inside it, uncertainty blossomed.
Just then, the heavens themselves lit up, and the lithe, darting ivory shapes of eldar ships swept down upon it. They avoided Night Bringer, swooping instead for the necron ships. Like a swarm of flies they were, darting, whisking, flying whimsically about, their cannon singing stars at the ships that they could not see, but sense.
In a mental gesture, the Night Bringer ordered his fleet to return fire. This fleet was not the mighty sailships or sprawling destroyers of the eldar fleets. Night Bringer was astonished at what it realized was a great squadron of eldar fighters!
'Suicide,' thought Night Bringer as its lashing scythe sliced an eldar plane in twain, releasing the eldar's soul into his spirit stone. All around the Night Bringer, the leaping explosions of eldar rockets and necron weaponry leapt up, playing a brilliant show of colour in the vaccume the world's low orbit. Eldar craft burst apart, their pilots slaughtered. Whole wings disintegrated in single passes by gauss weaponry Such a merciless battle was the Night Bringer's way.
As more eldar ships were swept apart by the necron fleet, which now uncloaked to reveal their crescent forms, Night Bringer looked to the stars and saw the forms of the eldar ships themselves come towards it. Aboard each: more souls. Night Bringer leapt through the emptiness, levitating, scythe ready, necron ships breaking away from the massacre and lunging at the fleet, necron ships flashing up behind it.
The two tides met, necron veruss eldar, death versus dying. Night Bringer howled with glee as eldar ships came apart, taking their crews with them
'Now this is feast!' Night Bringer thought as it reached into a gap blown in an eldar ship to wrench a struggling crewman out. Opening its mouth, it cast the being's soul inside. Night Bringer could taste the modest flavor of a single eldar soul warm its senses. It was ecstasy whilst death flickered all around it.
Then, through the sight of gauss fire, rockets, and flaming eldar ships, Night Bringer beheld a single warrior leaping out of the hull of a single, small eldar ship that lay apart from the battle. The creature was clad in armor made to look like bones. Its head was skeletal, its large body glistened black and white. Its shoulders were carved like skulls, one black and one white. In its hands, it carried a monsterous scythe. Did the creature seek to mock the Night Bringer with its appearance?
With the rest of its fleet distracted, the Night Bringer fell upon this warrior, splitting from the combat. As the creature fired bullets from its weapon into the C'tan, to no effect, the ancient being loomed over the younger whelp.
"Do you truly believe you can kill death?" asked the Night Bringer to the doomed alien as it took him in its grasp.
"I do not run when death calls me! My name is Maugan Ra!" the creature howled defiantly. Night Bringer scoffed and slashed its scythe into Maugan Ra, opening his bony armor, spilling his blood to freeze in space, slaughtering him and releasing the soul to the Night Bringer, who wrenched it from the armor of the being.
'Vile spirit stones,' thought the Night Bringer as it consumed the defiant suicide's soul. It was filled with the sweetness and ecstasy of a soul that had fermented for thousands of years, roasted in death, fried in life, and fermented by the ages. It was like consuming a single feast in one bite. The Night Bringer savored the flavour of a soul it had rarely ever encountered. Such a prize! Such a wonder! Night Bringer could not believe that it had been so fortunate to have a soul of such decadence come leaping towards it.
the harvester of souls hewn by the harvester of souls
…
Skander Moorus could not believe the C'tan did not see them. He was only a kilometer away. He had not yet engaged his ships due to the fact that neither fleets had yet fired upon him. As he looked out the window of the Nero and still came to terms with what his traitor eyes saw, he stopped for a moment and wondered if he was being tempted to use the Blackstone Fortress. So what if he was? Chaos would protect him from the consequences.
"How does the alien not see our ships?" asked the Grey Knight beside him.
"Why should we care?" spat Skander, "by chaos, the thing is the Night Bringer itself. All power to the warp-cannon and fire on the alien." From the window of the Nero, Skander saw the Blackstone Fortress turn upon the Night Bringer, who seemed to be laughing as it shook the skeletal alien's body. "The chaos gods will reward us for the destruction of this hateful beast," laughed Skander. "Fire!"
…
Night Bringer understood at the last minute. The eldar's psykers knew its weakness, the eldar psykers had shielded death's gaze from the ancient cannon and its joyous feast on Maugan Ra had tempted it not to look harder. It was too late now.
The Blackstone Fortress fired, and the Night Bringer disintegrated.
As the storm of energy from the eldar weapon comsumed the remainder of the two fleets, a single signal was sent out across the stars. It echoed onwards, to every tombworld, every warrior, every C'tan. The Night Bringer had fallen, its cause of death not specified. These modern creatures of life could kill the Star Gods. Augmenting this was the fact that if nothing was done, there would be nothing left for the C'tan to consume.
In reply, a single signal was sent out. It began on Mars, then, like an echo through a sunless cavern, it bounced to every corner of the galaxy. Humans of the Adeptus Mechanicus experienced a slight, brief malfunction in their machines. When they checked them, some found the machines emitting a faint electric signal that vanished swiftly. The blamed it on a trivial miswiring. Unknown to them, their machines had been unwitting conductors for the alien signal. The Mars signal found the ears of every necron tomb. Even Deciever sensed it, but it did not try to stop the signal, knowing too well what would happen if it did not.
"The enslavers are back again," Deciever muttered to itself, "And now one of us is dead. The situation is serious indeed. Everything that challenges us must die." It swore never again to hide from the enslavers.
Across the stars, every necron ever built was rising up to take the galaxy back for the Star Gods. Tombworlds in Ultima Segmentum, left alone by the flesh-seeking tyranids, awoke to unleash their own swarms. Machines never seen since the days of the Old Ones.
And so tomb dueled hive, gausss against evolution, crescent against cethlapod, machine against flesh. Upon necron-hosting worlds where the tyranids already were, the battle was instantaneous. Elsewhere, some travel was needed. In Ultima Segmentum, millions of necron warships assaulted the hive fleets from the rear in the skies of that depopulated segmentum. Gauss weapons flayed tyranid into oblivion, leaving nothing for the fleet to reabsorb.
The eldar's gambit had paid off.