It began with a spark.
At the heart of one of the twelve daemon-built fortresses orbiting Drol Kheir, where the infernal core that provided it with power burned, a single spark burst from the amalgamation of Warp energy. It flew through the air, passing through the many, many wards securing the core with ease – for this was only a spark of ordinary fire, and the wards were set to prevent the passage of Empyric energies. The spark touched the oil-blessed robes of a nearby heretek, who had spent the last thirty-nine days before the core, endlessly chanting prayers and incantations to maintain the wards. That Dark Mechanicum priest was half-way through his shift : another thirty days, and one of his peers would relieve him. But as it turned out, the shift would end much, much sooner.
The heretek's robe erupted into flames, and the drone of incantations turned into a hideous screech of corrupted binary code as the inferno burnt through what little flesh remained under the vestment. The fire leapt from the heretek's charred corpse and onto the next one in the circle surrounding the core, and then to the one after that, and so on and on, until every one of the two-hundred and sixteen and sixteen hereteks keeping the core of the fortress contained were naught but screaming figures, contorting within the embrace of a powerful daemon's incarnate form.
This Neverborn was old, by these creatures' timeless reckoning. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, back when Mankind had been but a scattering of tribes barely evolved from their ape roots, they had feared the thunder and the lightning, and the strange wood-eating light it sometimes left behind when it struck a dry tree. For generations they had stayed away from this light, after the first to try and touch it had backed away screaming in terrible pain as his flesh burned from the heat.
But then, in the cold season, as a tribe huddled together in a cave to try and resist the cold while a storm raged outside, there was one who saw fire again burning in a lightning-struck tree, and felt the heat as he passed near it on his way back from the hunt. He sought to bring that heat back to his tribe, taking wood to the fire and carrying the flame to the cave. The heat brought comfort to his people, and more wood was brought to keep the fire lit as the night descended.
And in that night, as all slept in comforting warmth, one tribesman got too near to the fire, and the furs covering him touched the flames. He screamed as he burned, and his violent, panicked moves threw embers all across the cave, setting a dozen new infernos. Within moments, the whole tribe was screaming in fear and pain. In the years to come, other tribes would go through the same experience, and eventually Mankind would learn to control fire, to master it and use it as the first step of its path to technological ascendancy. But they would always remember to fear the flames, a fear that hearkened back to that very first moment of fire-brought torment.
The daemon had been born from the pain and terror of that moment. It roared with the screams of these primitive humans as they burned, spoke with the proto-language they had used to curse the one who had brought disaster into their lives. In the ages since then, it had grown mighty by feeding from the fears every technological advancement had ever caused, from the invention of the printing press to the clouds of self-replicating nanites that had been unleashed during the Dark Age of Technology. It was the fear of progress escaping the control of its architects, the nightmare of nuclear apocalypse and Man's hubris being punished by a cruel and perverse universe.
Khayon loathed the creature like he did few other Neverborn, for its very existence stood in opposition to everything the Illuminated Empire stood for. The Necromancer had bound it on Sortiarus, where it had come to bring down the works of the Thousand Sons. The daemon held no allegiance to the higher Powers, but, like all Neverborn whose existence pre-dated human civilization, was compelled to follow ancient debts and compacts, and those strings had been pulled by the Legion's enemies to send him to the Planet of the Sorcerers. Now those strings had been cut by Khayon and replaced by the Exalted Sorcerer's iron grip. He found the irony deeply satisfying.
With the tech-priests dead, the wards around the core faltered, and the chaotic energies bound within it grew out of control. A choir of alarms rose through the fortress' corridors, but it was far too late to do anything but run. A few Legionaries and their favoured mortals made it to the flight decks, but when the core detonated, the ball of incandescent Warp-fire engulfed their transports, incinerating all in an auspex-blinding conflagration that, to those with the ears to listen to it, sounded like a great, booming laugh, made of the screams of burning men and women.
So did the first space fort fall, but the fleet of the Slaaneshi Host, already locked into a long-range engagement with the Sons of Horus armada, barely had time to react before the next strike hit.
Then, there came a scream.
Throughout the corridors of another space fort, humans and mutants raised their hands to their heads as a singular scream pierced through the cacophony of noise and agony that echoed through the fortress, from the impaled slaves whose pain-filled blood sustained the pact that had created the fort to the chorus of Neverborn singers summoned from the court of the Prince of Pleasure. Even the Emperor's Children, long inured to mortal suffering, paused in their work as the scream overpowered even their blasted senses.
And with the scream came guilt, crushing and unforgiving. A great wail of mourning and despair rose from ten thousand throats as the weak-willed were crushed by the weight of culpability, something most had long since discarded. Everywhere they looked, they saw others who shared in their sin, and the only thing they could do – the only thing they could think – was to take whatever weapon they had at hand and turn on each other. Riots erupted across the fortress and cultists of Slaanesh butchered one another, wailing and weeping, feeling sorrow for a sin none of them understood. Images flashed in their addled minds, of pyres and treacherous smiles, of a face twisted by the realization of betrayal and abandonment.
In the primitive ages of Old Earth, when kingdoms waged war with swords and bows, two nations had been at each other's throats for decades. Their people fought and their lands burned so that their rulers may satisfy their ambition and pride. Among that chaos, a girl had risen, driven to free her homeland from foreign invaders, convinced that she was doing the will of her God. Others rallied around her, and she went from success to success – a mere peasant defeating armies led by nobles.
But the girl was betrayed, abandoned by the king who owed her the turning of his fortunes. She was captured by her enemies, accused of witchcraft, and burned at the stake with the knowledge that those for whom she had fought had abandoned her. And so she died, choking on poisoned smoke, before her body was burned to ash and the ashes dispersed by those who feared her even in death. But from that betrayal rose a scream, of pain and hatred, that carried with it the weight of that king's guilt. In that age, the king and the land were one in the hearts of many, and the sin of the king was that of the land. The centuries of posthumous worship that followed that betrayal did nothing to weaken the daemon, who fed upon the hypocrisy of it all, twisting the girl's legacy to its own malevolent ends. The Frankish people had created a monster that would endure long after their millennia-long nation was naught but dust among the ruins of Old Earth.
This daemon had no shape. It had come to Sortiarus as a memetic infection that had spread across the mutant tribes of the Planet of the Sorcerers, driving them insane and turning them against their masters. Khayon had dragged it out of the souls of a thousand beastmen and imprisoned it, but not before it had led to the death of tens of thousands of Sortiarus' lesser citizens. The Necromancer hadn't understood why the Neverborn had been laughing while it was bound – or rather, he hadn't wanted to understand. He had refused to look into that particular mirror held up to his face.
With its crew too busy killing itself to man its guns, the fortress hung in the void, silent and useless. Its shields eventually collapsed under the fire of the Sons of Horus, and without tech-priests to reactivate them, the fortress was torn apart by fusion torpedoes and Nova detonations. And so it went, on and on. In each of the twelve infernal fortresses of Drol Kheir, the Thousand Sons summoned one mighty daemon, and it brought low what Eidolon and his pet Sorcerers had wrought, paid for in blood and souls. Daemons spawned from Mankind's long and blood-soaked past, that had crossed the path of Iskandar Khayon and been bound into the Necromancer's service, now released from their sorcerous prisons to perform their master's bidding.
The wind of pestilence that had decimated the tribes of North Amerika and left them at the mercy of the European invaders left one fortress empty save for the decaying bodies of its crew, lumped over at their stations, their faces locked into death-masks.
The vengeance of the antique city of Sparta's cast-off children, who had been thrown off cliffs at birth for not being perfect enough, rose as a monstrous, distorted human shape of blood, bone and bronze, and slaughtered all in its path, screaming its hate in the voice of a thousand murdered babes. The bane of Slaanesh's minions, it was come to the city of Al'Kyreh because of the exact opposing reason, wandering its streets for weeks in silent weeping before Khayon had bound it.
A creature covered in dusty bandages and wearing a golden mask fashioned after the ancient death-masks of the Geptian kings of Old Earth emerged from the treasure vault of one of the fortresses' commanding officer. Born from a legacy of several thousand years and the vengeance of that legacy upon the desecration of its tombs, the creature left in its wake bodies unmarked by violence, with naught but an expression of utter terror on their face to mark their demise.
Faceless legions of spear men burst from the flesh-pits of another fortress as the Thousand Sons established a sympathetic link with the still-living victims trapped within them. An army of these Warp-wrought creatures marched in line out of a portal built of pulsating meat, led by the shade of a general who had rebelled against his emperor during the First Millennium in a bid to increase his power. This precursor to the Warmaster had failed, betrayed and killed by his own son, but his actions had eventually caused millions of death and the collapse of one of Old Earth's most powerful empires, condemning him and his followers to fight in the realm of the Blood God for all of eternity. Khayon had encountered this army during his first trip through the Eye of Terror after the defeat of the Legions at Terra, and had bound it with a bitter laugh at the irony.
The death of glory, spawned in the trenches of the first war Mankind had fought on a worldwide scale with all the horrible weapons created by industry, stumbled on, covered in mud and spreading clouds of flesh-eating gases as it brought the peace of Nurgle to the slaves of the Youngest God. In its hand, it held a single pistol, whose bullet had started a war that had killed millions and taught the human race that there is no such thing as glory in war – a lesson it had all too easily forgotten in the millennia since. It had been left on Sortiarus in the aftermath of Mortarion's crusade.
A figure with a wide, blood-spattered grin, a dripping knife and a top hat led a host of nightmares into joyous slaughter, unleashing the repressed psychoses of an empire's elite upon victims who only thought they knew everything about pain. No Power laid claim to this being of cruel insanity, for it was too bloodthirsty for Slaanesh, too vicious for Khorne, its actions were too utterly meaningless and without purpose for Tzeentch, and Nurgle had no use for its selfish cruelty. It was a hollow, soulless thing, a grinning mask with no face hiding behind it.
Streams of volcanic ash engulfed mortals and Legionaries alike, turning them into pale statues frozen into their final moments similar to those that had been discovered in the ruins of Pompeii thousands of years before. Their final thoughts would echo in their skulls, their souls trapped within the calcified ashes until the statues were destroyed and their spirits released.
A silhouette clad in dirty yellow robes and wearing a crown of tarnished gold drove all who saw it – even if only through surveillance feeds – to violent insanity, tearing their eyes from their sockets and eating their own flesh. Under its hood dwelt the dreams of madmen and a secret that would shatter the universe, one that not even Khayon and Lilith had been able to take from it. It had been captured within one of Sortiarus' libraries, having walked right in, leaving a trail of screaming scholars in its wake before stopping and destroying a single book from the shelves, obliterating any trace of it in the records and catalogues. No one, not even the Dark Gods, knew why it had done so.
A construct of blades and blood, spawned from the death of a king and a nation's fiery revolt against its oppressors, cut the heads of all servants of Fulgrim it hunted, while around it the complex machinery that kept the station functioning broke apart under the strain of its entropic presence before utterly collapsing, yet another bright detonation piercing the Slaaneshi lines.
A thing that only bore the slightest resemblance to a man emerged from the burning reactors of another fortress, clad in the smoke from all the pyres where innocents had burned at his command, wielding a hammer emblazoned with a stylized "Iˮ and followed by the wraiths of those the first Grand Inquisitor had murdered before his legend had taken the last shred of his tattered soul and twisted it into an instrument of the Hell he had always thought he was opposing.
Back into his body aboard the Tlaloc, the full awareness of his exhaustion hit Khayon like a bolt shell. It drove him to his knees, panting, each breath sending knives into his lungs, each beat of his hearts like a hammer blow to the chest. His vision was swaying, black spots dancing before his eyes. Worse, he could feel the pressure of the Eye on his soul, the tides of Chaos battering against the walls of his Rubric-reinforced will. The wards of the Tlaloc and around this room were powerful, but not even all the lore of the Fifteenth Legion could fully isolate a chamber from the Empyrean's threats while still allowing for rituals to be performed within. His display of sorcerous power had blazed very bright in the Sea of Souls, and the eyes of the Neverborn were upon him, filled with hatred for one who would enslave their kind as much as respect for the power of one who actually could manage such a feat. Before the Rubric had enhanced his power, controlling one such creature would have been the limit of his abilities – he may have been able to control two, or three, if he had been willing to burn himself out entirely in the process.
It had cost him, of course. The summons had drained him and his brothers, not so much because of the effort required to control the daemons than to send them past the fortresses' wards. But he had done it, even if the effort had nearly killed him. The twelve daemonic forts defending Drol Kheir had been destroyed, each brought low by a different Neverborn. The tarot cards he had used to bind them were still on the deck before him, the complex patterns drawn on them burned into the metal beneath as the parchment itself disintegrated. The metal would need to be torn out, melted, and cast into the heart of a star, for it would forever bear the influence of these mighty Neverborn.
Twelve. Twelve daemons, each powerful enough to bring whole cities to madness and ruin, summoned at the same time, sent to locations hundreds of kilometers apart. Twelve daemons, part of the same ritual used to strike at the enemies of illumination. A good omen, if one believed.
He looked up, and saw Lilith staring at him from the other side of the circle, her face impassive.
No, the Necromancer corrected himself, a cold shiver in his hearts. Not twelve. Thirteen.
AN : alright, that's done. Note to future self : next time, don't say there are twelve of the frakking things.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter and look forward to seeing is you can find out what each daemon is referring to, in the case of those a bit more obscure. Don't blame yourself if you can't - I didn't put too much effort into making it obvious.
And now that I have found eleven horrible things that happened in Mankind's past and one other that ... well, that's for later ... if you will excuse me, I am going to go play something about a bunch of kids defeating evil through the power of love and friendship. I need a break from the grimdark.
Zahariel out.
