Ashmotaria

The world of terror had been mired in an invasion of total attrition with the last hive fleet. Though the tyranids were fighting what could have been their last war, it was still a fact that their whole race was focused in one spot. The chaos defenders could not hope to hold off the seething nightmare, even with the power of chaos.

Now, the eldar had the world lassoed in their power. While their warriors battled and died on the other daemon worlds, their farseers were twisting the warp and harnessing their eldritch magic to do a great task. A storm of warp energy consumed Ashmotaria and spirited it through the depths of space and time, unloading it into real space lightyears away. It appeared from the warp, right over Cherondessorar. A collision was inevitable.

Krieg.

The name, according to some scholars, meant "war" in an ancient Terran language with a name that sounded like "Joy-Men." A more appropriate christening could not have been granted to this world, whose entire history bled it. Another war on the planet was nothing fresh. But of all the wars, all the deaths, all the battles, not one approached the nature of this conflict. The whole planet, formerly desolate, was dotted with the beginnings of sprawling cities, which had been built from the dusty ground upwards by grinning workers. The ground shifted in change to help them dig their foundations. The air grew cloudy when they needed rain and clear when they needed warmth. Unfortunately, to the people of Krieg, their master was Tzeench and their dependence on his poisoned miracles chained them to the god's will. They worked slavishly for him, serving him without question, spurned onwards by promises of a perfect tomorrow. A perfect tomorrow was something the war-ravaged Kriegans desperately wished, but as with so many of their dreams, it was doomed to come tomorrow.

Then the Imperium came. The Kriegans had their dreams surrounded by besieging armies. Construction sites were hurled down into ruin. Roads were blasted, wells were poisoned, and their shrines to their lord of change were wrecked.

"Die for me," Tzeench told his followers. "Sacrifice yourself for others. Your deaths will be the mortar and bricks for a greater tomorrow."

"Die for our lord!" cried the millions of Kriegans. And they stormed forward in living waves against the Imperial lines. Once more, the war-weary Kriegans were plunged into battle.

...

"Cheers!"

The circle of tankards struck together in a massive toast over the circular wooden table. The white froth, with the appearance and shape of sea foam, wobbled like a drunkard from side to side in every tin tankard, sometimes wobbling so much that a certain quantity would trickle down in a wet line of foam.

"Goodbye boys!" read a colourful banner that hung across the streets of the city that basked in to young night while young people celebrated in the square in front of the old library. Twenty-six young men and over three hundred friends reveled around the library, having a tremendous time. Tables by the dozen were set up in the large, empty lot around the library. Barrels and barrels of ale, courtesy of the local brewer's guild sat by the side of the library whose flat walls of cold brown stone were the ideal places to support a stack of barrels.

'I'm gong to miss Dynorak' Anar thought as he took a deep swig from his tankard, not caring if any of the bitter contents dribbled down his chin and onto his vest. He noticed one of his friends nearby, Derander, on his back while facing the sky. His mouth was wide open and his love, a young woman named Cinder, stood on the table. In her hands she had a tankard and was carefully pouring its contents into Derander's mouth. Her friends around her encouraged her. Anar walked up to the table.

"Cinder, don't spill it" one girl laughed.

"Keep talking and you'll make me" Cinder replied.

"Oops!" Anar shouted as he poured the remnants of his tankard into Derander's face. Cinder followed the example and carelessly poured the remains.

"Anar" Cinder asked Anar, her light, fluffy voice abruptly turning heavy and manly.

"What?" Anar asked as the illusion wore off...

…

"ANAR!"

"What?" Anar asked in alarm.

"ANAR GET UP! ARE YOU HIT? ARE YOU HURT"

An explosion shattered the calm, throwing dirt and mud into the air. Anar felt someone lift him up by the back of his flak jacket. He wiped his eyes and swept mud from his skin. He raised his helmeted head over the trench and spat out a mouthful of mud.

"Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," Anar told the sergeant, "funny, when that mortar round hit, I started remembering the day we shipped out is all. A vision, if you would."

"I don't give a frek! Chaos is coming! Can't you damned hear it!?" Anar looked out across no-man's land. Mud, twisted corpses, and broken trees. Those few words was all the description he could give to what he saw. They lay there outside of his trench mixed together in a disgusting cocktail of rancid decay. The lightless sky hung cheerlessly over Krieg while the distant sound of Imperial and chaos gunfire rattled through the air. More explosions shattered the ground, covering no-man's land with a fresh layer of dirt. In the Imperial trenches, men braced themselves, whispering prayers and aiming their lasguns at the explosions. Soon, the Tzeench-twisted Kreigans could counterattack. Their warcry was already rising like a tide.

"For the Emperor," said Anar's sergeant.

"For the Emperor!" echoed the trench, hundreds of voices speaking as one, with that oath sealing their resolve never to retreat. Anar licked his lips and closed his eyes. Inside the privacy of his mind he saw his home again. He would die to save it. His eyes opened.

The Kriegans emerged from the hanging dust left by the artillety shells. They wore long coats with dehumanizing masks. In their eyes, a light blue fire gleamed. These worthless shells of men lived for the promies from a fickle and uncaring god. Not Anar. It was what made the guardsmen better than these dregs.

That and the other thing.

As Imperial lasguns cut into the Kriegans, the true extent of corruption revealed itself. Dying Kriegans burst apart to show the uniforms were empty. Dust leaked out of holes punched in their uniforms and bones clattered out when heavy bolter shots cut them apart. These men, given heart and soul to Tzeench, were no longer men but living ghosts trapped within their uniforms. Down they went, in sprays of grey dust. Heads came from shoulders with pinpoint shots from bolter rounds. Anar noticed that the blue light coming from the eyeholes in their masks persisted for a few moments after the death of the ghost inside the uniform before the light finally went out. The Kriegans retuned a few shots, which bounced and bounded through the Imperial trenches. To Anar's left, the sergeant died. To his right, another man fell.

'Home, home, home,' Anar thought, his face sweating, his grimy hands clasping his lasgun and shooting fiercely into the living wave. More Kriegan ghosts crumbled to dust, blunting their charge. With a last sweep of bolterfire, the Kriegans fell back, leaving behind a carpet of empty uniforms and bleached bones.

A cheer arose from the Imperial trench, short and grim: the best these war-weary men could handle.

However, the victory was too quick. As the sound of thunder filled the stormless sky, a few men looked upwards just in time to see several large capsules descend: dark blue with gold trim. The Thousand Sons.

[i] It was another vision. All of it had been. [/i]

"It's them!" Anar cried from behind his masked face. "Kill the Thousand Sons!" His gloved hands raised his lasrifle to the drop pods as they violated the Kriegan trenches. Though Anar's flesh had long since rotted away, his bones carried his uniform's weight with the warp's help. The sockets that had once held his brown eyes stared intensely at the Space Wolves.

"I die for my home," whispered Anar's skeletal head, "I die for tomorrow!" Around him, his fellow Kriegans hurried, their masked faces could not show fear, neither could their fleshless heads.

And outside the trench, a carpet of bloody Imperial guardsmen lay.

…

Odeen howled as he materialized outside the trench, eager to support his brothers. From their drop pods, the Space Wolves rushed out into the Kriegans, chainswords whirling, armor turning away lasblasts, pistols blowing Kriegans into powder. He saw a chainsword go through a Kriegan. It always puzzled him to see one of these skeletal men die. How could something so fragile even stand? He raised his axe and rushed into the trenches while more Space Wolves teleported in. The nearest Kriegan was too late to bring his lasgun to bear on Odeen. The axe carved straight through his left arm, releasing a short spray of dust from the stump. Odeen hurled himself further into the trenches, to more enemies of the Imperium.

…

Anar cried, his remaining hand trying to stem the flow of blood coming from his severed arm. He could see the dead faces of his friends looking at him: victims of the Thousand Sons. Biting his lip, Anar squeezed his eyes closed and thought of home and how he would get back. His wife and their twin children. But how his arm hurt! All he could do was open his mouth and, from the depths of his lungs, let out a shriek of mortal pain. A second Thousand Son entered the trenches. Anar fumbled for his lasgun but could not get it. The Thousnd Son noticed him, wicked eyes staring from beneath a gold-crested head.

That was it, he would die. Little Mhaldin and Fenera would grow up without a father. But it would do them proud to know that their daddy had died for a better tomorrow.

"For the Emperor!" Anar yelled, his unmasked face bent in defiance as the Thousand Son raised his boot.

…

Odeen turned around fast enough to see Frekka stomp on a fallen Kriegan's skull. The foot fell, crushing the mask and the fleshless skull that lay within. He pointed his bolter brutally chopped down two of the surviving Kriegans with bolterfire. The whine of chainswords abated one by one as the Kriegans were eradicated. Odeen sighed and wiped dust from his axe. So far, no Thousand Sons had been seen anywhere.

"Well, there it is," said Odeen to himself as he stared out across the field to the great looming shape in the distance. His Astartes eyes could clearly make out the ring of squatting fortresses surrounding the shape and he had no doubts that each was manned by hundreds of Tzeench-corrupted Kreigans and other horrors of the warp. The shape itsef was a tower of epic scale. It was crested by a statue of a two-headed vulture that was posed like the Imperial eagle. This tower was what funneled the warp-energies into Krieg, keeping it in real space. This tower was the only objective that meant anything. Other Space wolves looked in its direction and judged how many kilometers it was. Odeen stepped calmly though the trenches, searching for fallen Space Wolves.

"For the Emperor…" Odeen looked down in the voice's direction and flinched in surprise. One of the fallen Kriegans had not died. He had been cloven in two surely enough, but the torso was intact as was the skull. Something had torn the man's mask off, showing a naked skull upon a spinal column. Odeen had seen many things, but nothing like the sight of a fleshless skull's jaw move and a living man's voice echo forth from it.

"Chaos will never prevail," the skull gasped as if in pain. Odeen flinched when the skull looked at him. "Abaddon will lose. Tomorrow will be bright."

"No," Odeen replied, "this is the final battle. This is part of Ragnarok. The future will not be bright." Then he stomped the skull into shards.

…

Again, Apollyon stared at a planet from afar as the hive mind had done with so many other planets. He could feel the hive mind considering that peacock of a world above him in the sky with its ususal murderous hunger, the hunger that had damned so many countless millions of trillions of creatures to the fate of being distilled down into a genetic soup to be used as the building blocks for the unspeakable creatures that peopled the enslaver swarm. To Apollyon, the enslavers could not have been named more appropriately.

He stared at the planet through different eyes of different fleshy incarnations of the Hornet Legion that stood across the strange darkness world. And from the surface of the world that he watched, he also had incarnations of the Hornet Legion, whose eyes he also used. Both parties of him could see how the two worlds would collide. There was no stopping the approach. These worlds had scant minutes left apart as their respective gravities began their work.

None of Apollyon's Hornet Legion flinched as the two worlds collided. Two mundane worlds would have wrecked one another. These planets mashed into each other and stuck, like what one would expect if two balls of clay struck the other. Apollyon felt every enslaver creature fall over under the force of the force of the ensuing earthquake. And then it was still: the daemon worlds were now one. One simply hung off the other like a parasite.

Inside his mind, Apollyon saw the last hive ships of the last hive fleet raise their attention to the other world. As they drifted towards it, their senses detected the heat of interstellar engines. Within seconds, the hive fleet had spotted a vast Imperial fleet over the other world.

'What are the eldar trying to do?' wondered Apollyon while an ocean of enslaver creatures flooded towards the place where the two daemon worlds connected.

Before long, it was total war. Across the two daemon worlds, now attached like conjoined twins, it was total war. On the ground, tyranid beasts fought a grinding battle of attrition with the forces of chaos. The eldar, however, were nowhere to be found. Apollayre knew, as surely as was possible, that they had retreated.