"People of Tallarn, people of the Imperium, hear us.

We are the Illuminated Empire. Cast out from the galaxy, exiled into the Eye of Terror, we have reforged ourselves into a new kingdom, free from the shackles that still hold you into bondage.

We have watched as the Imperium we bled to build was eaten from the inside by corruption and decay, as the dream of illumination died in the name of convenience. All to preserve the power of a handful of usurpers sitting on their thrones, in the hallowed halls of the Imperial Palace.

We have watched as the Imperium betrayed the very principles upon which it was founded, rejecting truth and embracing ignorance and superstition out of fear and weakness.

We have watched, and wept for all that has been lost. And now, we have returned.

We will bring low this twisted empire, this pale reflection of what should have been. We will drag Mankind into a new golden age of knowledge and power like none before, even if we have to do it by force. In the Great Eye, we learned the truth of the universe, and we will share it with all of Humanity, that they may be freed from their chains of lies and join us in our glory.

Like us, you will be reborn, remade into a new form fit to survive in a galaxy filled with horrors and threats. Like us, you shall claim the power that is Mankind's birthright.

And all who oppose us shall be crushed.

Our cause is just, for the Imperium can no longer keep its promise to safeguard the future of Mankind. The Orks proved how fragile the dominion of the False Emperor has become, and we won't allow the species to continue on its current path. Our destiny shall not be denied us.

We have come to this benighted world to stake our claim in Mankind's future. Try and stop us if you will, but you will not succeed. Tallarn will be ours, as will the entire galaxy. Join us and rejoice; fight us and suffer. Such is the choice you now face, the same as was offered in the first Crusade.ˮ

Such was the sole transmission sent to Tallarn before the invasion began. It was also the formal declaration of war between the Illuminated Empire and the Imperium of Man, and would eventually find its way to Terra and the Council of the High Lords. It was spoken by the voice of Ahzek Ahriman, Arch-Sorcerer of Tzeentch and Lord of the Rubric, whose pride and will were unmatched across all of the forces gathered to break Tallarn and claim what laid beneath its sands. It was spoken from the bridge of the Truthbringer, that new abomination born of the greatest minds to ever sell their souls to darkness, and one vox-receiver out of every hundred that received it directly became infected with the madness of the Warp and erupted in eldritch flames within which screaming faces could be glimpsed.

A single volley from the Chaos fleet crippled Tallarn's orbital defenses, with the Truthbringer's guns sending its main space station crashing to the surface in flames. Its fall in the desert turned the sand to glass for kilometers around the impact point, and the tremors were felt all across the globe. The main cities were still defended by powerful cannons, but the vast deserts were open for landing. With nothing left to stand in its way, the Black Crusade descended upon Tallarn like the wrath of the Dark Gods, and the Warp seethed with violence and death all around the planet.

Vast armies made planetfall and immediately set off for Tallarn's cities, each a stronghold built to endure on the desert planet, and the war began in earnest. Armoured tanks clashed with Dark Mechanicum engines, and the Thousand Sons summoned the memories of Tallarn's past horrors to stalk its people once more. Circles of Sorcerers reached deep into Time, and brought forth the phantoms of those who had perished on the sands of the desert world.

Though Tallarn had survived in a new form, the planet's past had still been murdered by the Iron Warriors when they had attacked the planet during the Heresy, and there were ghosts aplenty to raise from the sands. Warriors from many Legions had come to take part in the battle of Tallarn, even if very few had ever known why it was being fought at all. The planet's fierce dedication to the worship of the God-Emperor had kept these wraiths from manifesting, but the Exalted Sorcerers called to them now even as the very presence of the Black Crusade's host thinned the veil between reality and the Warp, and they rose, passing through the walls and causing mayhem and insanity in one terrible night – and as the dawn came, so did the more physical servants of Chaos.

Hordes of shape-shifters scaled the cities' walls, shrugging off all but the most focused las-fire. They had received strict order to capture the cities rather than wipe them out, but the creations of Bile and Ahriman were still creatures of Chaos, and they indulged in their cruel instincts, leaving trails of broken bodies and minds in their wake, using terror to break their enemies' will to resist. The Ancients didn't take part in those massacres : the Illuminated Empire was holding them in reserve, their seers having foretold that they would have a greater part to play. Instead, the five Ancients went with Ahriman, to find that for which Tallarn had burned, many years ago.

Kroeger of the Iron Warriors had been one of the Trident during the first Battle of Tallarn, one of the few Perturabo had trusted with full knowledge of why the Fourth Legion was fighting. The exact location of their target was unknown to him – the Iron Warriors had been recalled by Horus Lupercal before they had been able to uncover their prize, else the war would have ended very differently indeed – but he brought what he remembered of their research to the table. Combining these insights with their divination, the Thousand Sons were able to locate their target within an area of less than a hundred square kilometers, in the middle of one of the planet's greatest deserts, hundreds of kilometers from the most remote outpost.

While the war raged on the rest of the planet, Ahriman and his personal forces landed in the area and began the excavation, using great machines that had been built by the Dark Mechanicum for that specific purpose. For weeks they searched as Tallarn burned, and by the time they reached their goal, the Imperial resistance had been reduced to a handful of warbands wandering the desert too fast to be caught. The cities had fallen, their population caged and their minds too hammered by psychic probes to be able to rise against their conquerors. Many were sent to the site of the discovery, to help dig out that for which the Illuminated Empire had set the Segmentum ablaze.

It was immense. A circle of black, unidentifiable material, hundreds of meters wide and etched with humanoid figures of impossible grace frozen in positions of ecstasy – or agony, it was impossible to tell. Alien runes glowed on the ring's inner side, with the same kind of glow embers possess after the pyre has long since gone out, but before its heat has completely faded away. The Sorcerers among the excavation team knew that, had the artefact been left alone, these runes would have continued to glow with residual power long after Tallarn's sun had died out. Now that it had been dug out, it blazed to their second sight, and they were forced to raise their mental shields lest its whispers drive them to madness.

They had found it. The relic for which Perturabo had searched during the first War of Tallarn, for which he had thrown the full might of his Legion into a single campaign, ignoring the summons of Horus until the Warmaster could no longer be denied. The key to power that Magnus the Red had promised to the Lord of Iron, in exchange for the Fourth Legion joining the Illuminated Empire.

It had many names. To the Iron Warriors' Navigators, driven beyond madness and into terrible clarity by what they had witnessed at the Eye of Terror's core, it was the Black Occulus. To the Eldar keepers of the Black Library, it was the Cursus of Alganar. In the time of the Eldar Empire, it had been known as the Gateway of the Gods, one of three such devices built by the Children of Isha at the height of their power, before the spiritual rot that would create Slaanesh set into their souls. But in the end, no matter what names mortals put upon it to avoid facing the truth of its nature, there was only one that perfectly described it.

Hellgate.

They had to use manual labour to rise the structure, as no Sorcerer was stupid enough to use his powers on it and the engines of the Dark Mechanicum refused to get anywhere near it (though they had to kill three dozens of their handlers before the Thousand Sons gave up). With cords and pulleys and the muscles of thousands of enslaved men and women, the Black Occulus was raised, and though it could still be seen through, those who did couldn't help but think there was something subtly wrong about the other side.

'What are we supposed to do with the bloody thing ?' asked Kroeger to Ahriman, the two of them standing a respecting distance away from the Hellgate. 'We can't get it aboard our ships, not with what it's doing to our machines.'

'We must activate it first,' replied the Arch-Sorcerer. 'Its lingering energies are wild, unfocused : that's why they interfere with our machines. But once it's properly activated, we will be able to tap into its own power to transport it aboard the Truthbringer, and then to the Eye of Terror.'

There were many things Kroeger wanted to say, but he settled for the most pressing :

'And how do you suggest we activate it ?'

Ahriman tore his gaze from the Hellgate and turned to look where Bile was advancing toward them, a pair of stasis fields hovering behind him. Within the fields could be seen the two Ancients who had turned their own kind against itself, frozen mid-vivisection once their creator had learned all he could from them.

'Sometimes,' said Ahriman, 'the oldest ways are the best. We want to open a gate between the realm of mortals and that of daemons, and the Neverborn have always been keen on symbolism and traditions …'

'Sacrifices, then', understood Kroeger.

'Exactly.'

They cut out the hearts of the two treacherous Ancients in a grand ceremony, atop a pyramid of black stone whose stone had been mined on the Planet of the Sorcerers and put together by the enslaved people of Tallarn. Hundreds of sons of Magnus stood in a many-layered circle, chanting and pooling their energies to grant the ritual of sacrifice even greater weight in the Empyrean. All of them heard the screams of the Ancients as their Warp-touched souls were torn out of their bodies and fed into the Black Occulus.

'The energy levels are rising,' observed Ignis. The Master of Ruin stood next to Ahriman atop the pyramid, part of the inner circle of Exalted Sorcerers directing the ritual offering. 'But it's not enough to activate it yet. We need more.'

So began the Culling, with the shape-shifters turning on their own to bring the weak, the foolish and the unfavoured to the pyramid so that their lives and souls may be offered to their Gods. From the newly transformed who had proven disappointing to the progeny of the Ancients who had fallen out of grace, the shape-shifters paid the price of their loyalty. Many volunteered, walking the black steps freely and meeting their ends with a smile on their lips. Those who were caught and herded eventually gave in, once they realized there was no escape, that this was the best way they could serve their Gods. And if Ahriman felt anything like regret at the sight of so many souls made willing to offer everything to his cause, no trace of it could be seen in his aura as it blazed so very bright.

And when that wasn't enough, the remaining shape-shifters went into the prison camps, and turned thousands of humans into their own kind before dragging them to the sacrificial knives before they even had a chance to recover from the traumatic transformation of their bodies and souls. Day after day, the sacrifices continued, never pausing, never slowing, and all the while Ignis reported on the recharging of the Hellgate, in a tone of voice as cold and indifferent as if he were monitoring a spaceship's plasma reactor.

It took thousands of sacrifices to open the Cursus of Alganar after its long slumber. Rivers of altered blood flowed down the steps of the pyramid and into canals that formed sorcerous patterns, extracting the last drop of power from the spilled ichor. The skies turned dark and crimson as the Veil thinned, and arcs of eldritch energy coursed on the Hellgate's surface, making it seem as if the engraved figures were moving.

From time to time, Bile took one of the transformed Imperials, curious whether transformations on such a scale would have an effect on the final result. He was especially interested in the psychological effects of the transformation on those individuals who had held a particularly strong belief in the False Emperor's godhood prior to the change.

And then, as the Black Occulus was nearly fully charged, they came. The Warp shattered at the edge of the system, and a new power arrived to join the battle for the galaxy's future. The first part of the fleet only counted a handful of vessels, but each was a master-work of Imperial ingenuity, crewed by the best men and women from the Imperial Navy, their skills undiminished by the complete brainwashing and conditioning they had gone through. Their livery was silver and grey, shining in the light of Tallarn's sun in defiance of the darkness that had shrouded the system. Behind them came more vessels, from the Imperial Navy, the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Space Marines Chapters, and the Rogue Traders. This host was only half the size of the Black Crusade amassed in Tallarn's orbit, yet all psykers in it felt dread as its flagship sailed toward them on full speed.

The Dark Gods screamed in outrage, and on the desert planet, every warrior of the Fifteenth Legion felt a potent mixture of shock, fear, and shame. A great psychic voice boomed into their heads, driving them to their knees before the shocked gazes of the shape-shifters. They clawed at their heads, screaming incoherently as long-suppressed memories of failure and dishonor were dragged to the surface, past all the walls of dissembling and arrogance they had erected to protect themselves from the truth of what they had become. Even cold and calculating Ignis struggled, his soul unable to hold onto his perfect patterns of destruction before the onslaught of horrifying recollections – he had done so many horrible things in victory's name, long before the Legion had turned its back on the Imperium.

Only Ahriman was strong enough to keep standing. His pride and conviction would not allow him to fall, and he clung to his Black Staff, drawing his power to him, and then casting it around to shield his brothers from the psychic onslaught. One by one, they fought back the tide of memories and stood back up, but the words of their adversary still burned within their souls. By his mere presence, this most secret warrior of the Imperium had brought the lords of the Illuminated Empire to their knees. The time of reckoning had come, for all sons of Magnus knew who it was who led the armada the Imperium had sent to stop them.

'Ahzek,' proclaimed Janus, Supreme Grand Master of the 666th Chapter, born of the flesh of the Corvidae Revuel Arvida and a splinter of the soul of Magnus the Red. 'I have come for you.'


AN : And here he is ! We all knew it had to happen some time. From the moment I started working on this fic, I knew I would have to involve Janus at some point. I have plans for him, which I am not going to spoil for you.

Work on the Roboutian Heresy continues. The next chapter is all but done. In other news, I have finally started writing Warband of the Forsaken Sons again, and am up to 4k words for the next chapter.

As usual, please tell me what you thought of this chapter and what you would like to see in the next ones. The battle of Tallarn will soon come to a close, and then we will switch back to Khayon and Abaddon in the Eye of Terror, hunting for Eidolon on Drol Kheir.

I have written a short Warhammer 40K short story on spacebattles, titled "Buried Secrets", as part of the ongoing writing contest on that website themed "Spaceship in the wilderness". I will post it on ffnet once the voting is over (I think that's in the rules), so go check there if you want to see it before then (since the voting ends at the end of July). Follow the indications of the website's banner, and you should be good.

Zahariel out.