I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.
Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex.
THE HALL OF JUDGEMENT
The Adeptus Arbites are the fist of the Imperial Law, the brutal and merciless enforcers of the Lex that binds the disparate worlds of the Imperium together along with the mortar of the Imperial Creed. Those who don the Judges' uniform must abandon all notion of mercy and compassion, for these are weaknesses through which the entire edifice of law and order may be torn down. Now, they must face an enemy that represents everything they abhor, for the Violators, children turned into transhuman killers that embody every sin of the Ninth Legion, are coming for them …
We see the Hall of Judgement, where lies the beating heart of the Lex Imperialis. Ten thousand years have made the creed of the Judges impossibly complex, a twisted labyrinth of oft-contradicting precedents. Our father Himself couldn't recognize what the Arbites have made of His will.
There is no spirit here, only the letter of the law, slowly strangling justice in a draw-out agony.
Throughout the Imperium, the face of law inspires not hope or relief, but only fear. Innocents recoil from the Judges in fright, knowing that their lack of sin will not protect them. The rolls of the condemned drone on without end, punctuated by the fall of the executioner's blade.
Justice without mercy, without compassion, is not justice at all.
Was it necessary ? Is tyranny the only way to keep Humanity's worst instincts at bay, when dealing with something the size of the Imperium ?
That is the question those who rose in the wake of our father's silence had to ask. They looked upon the ruins Guilliman and his cohorts had made, they stared at the horrors our fallen brothers had unleashed upon the galaxy, and they asked themselves what price must be paid for survival. The Inquisition burns worlds and sentences billions to die, but their actions are driven by the necessities of a secret war without end against foes that would destroy the entire species if they could. The Judges, on the other hand, act solely to preserve order.
Order, not justice. That is the crux of it, the choice that these ancient High Lords made when they reforged a broken Imperium. We see them, these heirs to a sundered kingdom, emerging from the desolation wrought by warring demigods. We see past their august masks, and behold the anguish that gnawed at their souls when they made the choice that would shape the fate of untold trillions across thousands of years. We see all the blood spilled as a result of their decision.
They chose tyranny. They chose the rule of law. There shall be order, they declared, and a traumatized Humanity embraced their edict as fervently as they embraced the unwanted faith in our father's divinity, so afraid were they of Chaos. We do not believe that there is no shame in learning to love the leash, if it keeps you safe from the wolves in the dark that hunger for your soul. Not when the choice is so clearly-cut, made so by those who think, rightly or not, that they know better.
Were they wrong ? The Imperium still stands. Humanity has survived, which was the prize they sought to buy with such a terrible cost. But was it all truly necessary ? The galaxy is a place of darkness and dangers, of temptations lurking in every shadow. In the struggle to keep Ruin from consuming all, can one ever truly go too far ?
We do not know, brother. For all our wisdom, for all our lore, we do not know.
Do you ?
The greatest stronghold of the Adeptus Arbites was surprisingly (and deceptively) small. On a world of towering cathedrals and void-reaching spires, the fortress of the Judges was a squat, heavy construction of black walls. Of course, it only appeared small in comparison to the Administratum spires that surrounded it, and in whose shadow it dwelled. Even then, the Hall went much deeper down than it did up, its foundations dug in an age before the Imperium had become the blind leviathan ten thousand years had turned it into. The symbol of the Arbites, a gauntleted fist holding two balanced scales, was inscribed on the walls and above the great gates. Few weapons were visible, for the Arbites would not, or perhaps could not, admit to feeling any fear of the masses that surrounded them.
Like many things on Terra, that lack of weapons had been a lie, meant only to keep up appearances. With the coming of the Angel War, hundreds of weapon emplacements were revealed, the black, semi-reflective walls of the Hall parting to reveal heavy bolters and lascannons. There was a reason why even Goge Vandire at the height of his power and madness had never tried to bring the Arbites under his direct control – though it was a black mark on the Judges' records that they hadn't been the ones to bring the usurper to justice.
From the moment the psychic impact of Light's End was felt across the Throneworld, the many arched gates of the Hall had been under attack. Even the preparations for the millennium's turning couldn't have cleared the hosts of petitioners, tens of thousands of desperate men and women demanding entry to the Hall, whether to plead for innocence, to denounce some sinner, or to inquire as to the fate of a friend or relative taken within. To avoid accusations of impiety, preachers had been spread among the throng, guiding the waiting supplicants in prayer even as they stood in line.
These priests had been the first to die when the Angel War had begun, torn apart by their crazed flock. Guilt, fear and worry turned to bitter hatred under the poisoned light of the Tear of Nightmares, and the petitioners screamed their madness and fury as they charged the gates of the Hall. Within seconds, hypno-conditioning took over the Judges guarding the gates, and they opened fire without warning nor hesitation, while calmly relaying the situation to their superiors over short-ranged vox-links.
The Hall had come under attack many times since its construction. Most of these had been riots, as the population of Terra drove itself into a frenzy and lashed out against the symbol of Imperial authority.
Sometimes, these riots were instigated by heretics, who sought to use them as cover for their own ends.
Regardless of the cause, the answer was always the same : opening fire into the crowds with heavy weapons while the black-armored Judges kept the mob at bay with interlocked shields and melee weapons.
The ground around the Hall of Judgement was soon covered in gore, as thousands of crazed rioters charged the black walls and were cut down, often only carrying improvised weapons that were less of a threat to the Judges than the sheer mass and number of the bodies wielding them. Daemons emerged from the bloody muck, fashioning bodies out of the torn remains of slaughtered Terrans. Never before, not even in the secret histories kept by the highest authorities of the Holy Ordos, had the walls been assaulted by daemons, but the children of the Youngest God died to the concentrated firepower of the Arbites just as well as the heretics around them, for there was symbolism at play here wholly different from the drama taking place on the other side of the world, on the Ecclesiarchical Palace, at the same time.
Even under siege, the Hall of Judgement was an island of order amidst the sea of anarchy created by Light's End. The Judges' training and indoctrination had left them mostly unaffected by the psychic malaise that had struck Terra's population : the Emperor might be dead, but the Lex remained, and it was to the Lex that the Judges had dedicated their existence. The opening of the Tear of Nightmares gave those few caught in doubt an immediate threat to focus their attention, for daemons and cultists hurled themselves at the gates of the Hall. To all slaves of the Dark Prince, the very existence of the Adeptus Arbites was an affront, for at the core of what passed for Slaaneshi philosophy was the simple axiom "do as you will shall be the whole of the law".
Against the hordes of heretics, all of whom had condemned themselves to death in the eyes of the Lex by their actions, the Arbites unleashed the full power of their arsenal. Rank upon rank of Proctors in full armor emerged from the walls, holding riot shields and power mauls crackling with energy, all settings set to maximum. Behind them, their comrades opened fire without aiming with bolters and shotguns, ripping holes into the wall of living flesh hurling itself at the Hall. Cybernetic mastiffs, usually employed to track down criminals, were now deployed as weapons of war, let loose in packs to tear into the soft meat of the attackers, aggression hormones flooding their bodies as their control collars were set to maximum lethality.
And so, through discipline and the ruthless application of might, the gates of the Hall of Judgement held against the monsters and madmen that the Angel War hurled against them.
Then came the Violators.
We see the Violators. Our fallen brother's truest sons, bereft of Glamour and lies, showing their abominable nature for all to witness. We see the Thirst that burns in their sunken eyes, the corruption that flows through black veins so vivid on pallid skin. They are the sin our brother feared would spell his Legion's doom, before he made the pact that sealed its damnation instead.
We see their dread genesis, a traitor's mad desire for brotherhood that unleashed this blight. We see too young minds shattered under the weight of an Angel's madness, bestowed the power of demigods, and let loose in Hell. We see the disgust even the other Damned felt toward them, we witness the wars of extinction being waged time and again, with a ferocity that makes a mockery of the Heresy.
But corruption such as this is not so easily purged, not when a Dark God smiles upon it. We see the hand of Slaanesh intercede over and over, always saving a few Violators who have distinguished themselves in its eyes, letting them escape the slaughter to spread their taint anew. We see more children stolen and made into monsters, more fallen angels tempted by the sweet promise of oblivion in unrestrained consumption.
We see the old soul that dwells among them, tainted blood cloaked in usurped flesh. We see its past, stretching all the way back to the first days of our brother's fallen Legion. We see it pass from one host to another through cannibal rituals twisted from practical origins into unholy practice by the whispers of the Dark Prince. How far back did the corruption of the Ninth begin ? Time means little to the Ruinous Powers, but some events are so momentous they ripple backward as well as forward in time.
The Angel fell on Signus Prime. He sold his soul and his Legion to the Profligate One. And because he did, his sons were always under the shadow of the Youngest God. That is the way of things. Chaos is a cancer that spreads through time as well as souls. If we were to look back even further, past the Crusade itself, past the Age of Strife and the First Diaspora, back to before Mankind first left its homeworld, we would find the traces of our brother's damnation there, written in ink on paper made of pulped trees, or whispered in fright by peasants huddling in the dark as they exchange tales of blood-drinking corpse.
Strigoi. Vhampyri. Vampires. Violators. Peel back the mask of false beauty, and behold the abomination beneath. It is an old tale, but where did it start ? Was our brother's fall shaped by the old myths, the icon of the beatific Angel broken by blood-thirst ? Or were the legends warnings, foretelling of his damnation ?
Yes. That, brother, is the way of the Warp.
Amidst the countless horrors that befell the people of Terra during the Angel War, the fate of those near the Hall of Judgement was especially of note for its vicious cruelty. The spires surrounding the Hall, in which were crammed billions of Administratum serfs, were sundered by the sudden descent of an entire flotilla of Chaos-marked warships. The entire warband of the Violators had been transported from the Eye of Terror to the skies of the Throneworld, through sorcery of such scale it was only possible thanks to the unique circumstances brought about by Light's End.
The Violators emerged from the husks of their crashed ships, clad in crimson armor and eyes burning with blood-thirst. Along with them came ill-maintained, stolen tanks whose machine-spirits had been subjected to torments every bit as vile as their former crews, until they were broken to the will of their new masters. Packs of shrieking Raptors took the skies on mutated jump-packs that resembled malformed wings, joining the flying Neverborn and Laer stalkers.
To the terrified civilians who encountered them, the Violators were nightmares come to life, every vision from the Echoes of Blood that had haunted their slumber for untold generations suddenly made horribly real. The Chaos Marines fed on that atavistic terror as they advanced on the Hall, drinking their fill from any mortal that crossed their path, but even this grotesque feast was only a sideshow, a distraction on their way to their true target.
Daemons of Slaanesh flocked to their side, drawn by the utter corruption of their souls, knowing that where they thread, pain and horror were soon to follow. The courtesans of the Dark Prince clung to the shoulders of the Violators, whispering promises in their ears in a language no sane mortal could comprehend but that the Violators understood perfectly.
The Hall of Judgement had been protected from the devastation of Light's End and the crash of the Violators' fleet by its potent void-shields, which had automatically activated when the madness had begun. The Hall's deep foundations had also preserved it from the quakes that were shaking the entire Throneworld, though entire sections of it had still collapsed, burying hundreds of clerks under tons of debris. But all in all, the stronghold of the Adeptus Arbites had withstood the Angel War admirably so far.
However, like every void-shield in the Imperium save for a few relics from the Dark Age of Technology, the Hall's defensive fields were useless against ground forces, which was why the Judges had been forced to defend the gates with manpower. The tide of cultists parted before the Violators, any who did not make way for the Chaos Marines mercilessly crushed underfoot, the Thirst of the Violators sharpening as they neared the foe they had been brought to Terra to destroy.
The first line of Proctors broke under the assault of the Chaos Marines, their riot shields and power mauls insufficient against the raw violence an Astartes, however fallen, was able to unleash in close quarters. But they held as long as they could, and the seconds they bought were enough for the rest of the Judges to bring their heaviest firepower to bear against the Violators.
The Judges' bolters, granted unto them primarily as instruments of intimidation, proved their worth that day. Bolters were one of the few weapons that could reliably penetrate ceramite, and the fact that every Judge carried one kept the battle from immediately turning into a slaughter. Instead, the battle at the gates of the Hall of Judgement became a protracted carnage, a grinding battle in which a score of Judges fell for every Violator brought low. Cold calculation told the leadership of the Arbites that this was a price they could afford to pay – but they had not taken into account the next blow of Slaanesh's disciples.
The cells of the Hall held thousand upon thousand of inmates awaiting judgement. They had been shipped off to Terra from all over the Imperium, accused of crimes that, for various reasons, required that they be tried on Terra itself. Some had committed treason against the Imperium as a whole, while others had too much influence in their home systems for the local branch of the Judges to deal with them without potentially catastrophic fallout.
Though they had yet to be judged, their fate was already sealed. Only death awaited those who were brought to the Hall in chains. Even in the cases (the very, very rare cases) where someone was found innocent, they were usually already dead by the time the decision was reached, either executed or having succumbed to old age or the conditions of their captivity. On a world forever on the brink of starvation, few resources were spared to the scum waiting in the cells of the Hall.
The prisoners knew this. They knew that their lives had effectively ended the moment the prison ship carrying them had reached Sol and they had entered the Hall, never to leave it again. Even their corpses wouldn't leave : by ancient tradition, the bodies of the condemned (who, to observe the prohibition against bloodshed, were executed by hanging) were incinerated, and their ashes unceremoniously disposed of in matter recyclers.
Due to the huge and ever-growing backlog, most of the captives had been languishing in their cells for years, denied the means to end themselves until they passed before the Emperor's judgement. Some of them, left alone with only their own thoughts for company, found remorse in their hearts for what they had done, and spent the rest of their lives in quiet prayer, awaiting their deaths with the closest thing to peace they could hope for.
But those were rare indeed. The vast majority of the Hall's prisoners festered with hatred for the ones responsible for their predicament. They dwelled endlessly on thoughts of vengeance, of returning to their worlds and bringing down those who had brought them to justice.
For many, these thoughts were all that kept the crushing despair of their situation at bay, and they had turned into obsession. This made them a resource that the mind behind the Angel War had chosen not to ignore, and when the Violators attacked, its plan for them began to unfold.
The golden angel had come to him in his dreams, and offered him all of his heart's desires.
He had accepted the angel's bargain, and drank from the cup it had offered. When he had woken up, the pain that had wracked his back and legs for the last twenty years was gone. The next day, a glitch in the cogitators had resulted in his monthly stipend being increased ten-fold. He had spent the money in one of the licensed houses of pleasure, carefully splitting it over several nights so as not to draw attention. It wasn't as if anyone would remember him coming several nights in a row : who cared about one more drone working in the endlessly churning gears of Imperial bureaucracy ? Not even his colleagues, the people he worked next to sixteen hours every day, knew his name.
He had given his life to the Arbites, and what had that brought him ? Nothing. Nothing but drudgery, dirty water and tasteless nutrient paste. Nothing but a pained body doomed to a short and miserable life, in an empire where the rich and mighty could live for centuries in luxury he couldn't imagine, even now.
So when his hands moved to strangle the man who had shared his shift for a decade, before he pulled the levers and silenced the alarms, he felt no regret. When he entered the authorization codes the angel had whispered to him in his sleep, triggering protocols that had never, in the Hall's ten thousand years history, be activated, he felt no regret. And when the cry of shock came from behind him, when the maul slammed into his back and hurled him to the ground, when the bolter filled his sight and the trigger was pulled, he could only think of one thing :
He regretted nothing.
Through treachery among the adepts tasked with managing the Hall's complex infrastructure, the gates of every cell in the Hall of Judgement opened at the same time. Not all captives were freed : some had been considered dangerous enough that they were shackled to the walls of their cell. Most, however, were granted the ability to walk within the tight confines of their cells, and after a few moments of utter shock, they seized the unthinkable chance that had just been offered to them.
The released prisoners poured out of their cells, before falling upon servitors carrying weapons and ammunition to the frontline and stealing the equipment for themselves. Some of them – not many, but enough – suddenly twisted, their bodies wracked with uncontrolled mutations, before detonating in showers of gore and viscera to reveal incarnated daemons. Others fell to the ground screaming and convulsing, before rising with burning eyes and too-wide smiles, their bodies turned into hosts for powerful Neverborn that had found a way through the wards carved in the Hall's structure. How many of these had been latent psykers who had escaped notice, and how many had been deliberately sent to the Hall by the intelligence behind the Angel War, no one but that dread architect of ruin would ever know.
Monsters and vengeful men struck at the back of the Judges' lines. At the very same time, the Violators redoubled their assault, driven by nameless instinct to seize an advantage that hadn't yet made itself clear on the battlefield. The defenders wavered, their ammunition running dry and their reinforcements missing. Not a single Judge fled from the ravenous Chaos Marines, even as they witnessed their comrades cut down and drained of blood by vampiric predators.
The Violators' heavy support focused its fire on the battlements, and between this artillery and the Raptors and other winged monsters, soon the high walls of the Hall of Judgement fell as well. But the battle of the Hall was far from over, for the fortress was vast, home to hundreds of thousands of souls. As the gates fell and the outer sections of the Hall became the Violators' playground, Aveliza Drachmar, Grand Provost Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites, directed the forces she still had under her command.
Beyond the gates, the Chaos Marines were casting down the statues of previous Grand Provost Marshals, from the weathered figure of Uwoma Kandawire, first to ever hold that title, all the way to Maximilien Dredd, who had been Aveliza's predecessor until his death of what had, at the time, seemed like natural causes.
Finding out the truth behind that murder had been Aveliza's first order of business upon ascending to her exalted function, and by the time she was done twelve noble families from Hy Brasil had swung from the gallows. The Inquisition itself had gotten involved, but there hadn't been any heresy involved : just greed, and the fact that Maximilien had been on the verge of finding out that these families had been stealing tithes for the last couple hundred years.
They had still hung, all of them. Aveliza had pulled the lever herself. She had owed as much to the old bastard. They had argued until the very end, not believing that this was happening to them, convinced that their bloodline put them above the punishment decreed for their crimes by the Lex.
That was her function. That was her purpose, as ordered by the God-Emperor.
Except … except the God-Emperor was dead.
Not twenty-four hours ago, she would have killed anyone who dared to voice such a heretical notion in her presence. Now she could not deny its abject truth.
What had they done, these demigods returning from exile ? What had they done, in the Imperial Palace, where no one had dared to stop them ?
What had they done, that the God-Emperor was dead ?
She didn't know. Some of her peers among the Twelve had known, she was certain of it. They had expected the arrival of the Primarchs. Their journey to the Palace had been too smooth for it to be otherwise.
But her ? She hadn't been told. Two of the Emperor's sons had returned from myth, and the woman tasked with enforcing their father's Law across the entire Imperium hadn't been told !
Aveliza had gone to the Hall to muster her forces, and to study the most ancient texts, those describing the standing of the Emperor's sons in the age when they had still marched among mortals. Then the sky had torn apart, and all of Holy Terra had come under attack.
How convenient for the Primarchs, she thought, that the Hall had been breached. How convenient that there were no reinforcements available to relieve them, even after the master of the Alpha Legion, that notorious nest of serpents and intriguers, had reached the Tower of Hegemon and claimed authority over every military force on Terra without even pretending to bother with due protocol. And how convenient, that the Twentieth Legion would have so many operatives scattered across the Throneworld that no one knew about, ready to rise up at a moment's notice.
Aveliza didn't believe in coincidence, and what she saw spoke of a conspiracy. She didn't believe that even this Omegon (a Primarch whose name wasn't in the rolls of the Emperor's loyal sons) had foreseen the cataclysm of the Angel War, but the very existence of this 'Damocles Protocol' betrayed his intent. Whether with the knowledge and approval of the lords Lorgar and Magnus or not, Omegon had been plotting a coup against the High Lords, to take control of the Imperium away from its lawfully appointed rulers and return it to the Primarchs.
Perhaps he thought this was necessary for the Imperium. It didn't matter. It was against the Lex.
She was the Lex, Emperor or not, and no one was above the Lex. By her hands, the Primarchs would be judged, and the sentence, no matter what it was, would be delivered.
There was a knock on the reinforced door leading to her command center. It took Aveliza a few seconds to realize that any sound that she could hear above the constant dim of alarms and shouting could not possibly be a mere knock, and she turned around with wide eyes, hand moving to her weapon.
For all of Drachmar's tactical insight – which was considerable, even if her function had always required her to focus more on investigation than warcraft – the High Lady was in a hopeless situation. Rampaging monsters had emerged from the very depths of her fortress, and the ones at the gates were mightier than any forces at her disposal.
Particularly violent riots had broken inside the Hall before, though the records of these events were sealed and knowledge of them had been ruthlessly purged afterwards to preserve the Arbites' image of invincibility, but this was something else entirely. With the war raging all over Holy Terra, there were no reinforcements inbound, while the Violators could rely on virtually unlimited support from the Warp-crazed cultists and Neverborn. And for all their training and weapons, the Judges were only human, while the Violator were the demented children of a fallen demigod. All the strategic prowess, courage and discipline in the world could not compensate for so bad a tactical position.
The defenders of the Hall were doomed. All that remained was the killing blow, and it would be delivered by a champion of Chaos that no living soul, be they Imperial or dwelling in the Eye of Terror, had any idea even existed.
The creature that still thought of itself as Ishidur Ossuros walked slowly down the corridor leading to the command center, surrounded by the dead and the dying.
The name meant little these days, of course. Few even remembered it, even among the Ninth Legion. But he had found that using it, if only in the privacy of his own thoughts, helped him keep a sense of his own identity – and it needed all the help he could get with that.
He remembered the days before they had been Blood Angels, back when they had been called the Revenant Legion, a name spoken in half-masked contempt by generals and whispered in fear by troopers. This was the time before Baal, before the Angel, and the Legion hadn't tried to hide its nature then.
He had been Legion Master then. It had been his life, his first one and all the ones that had come after, until the Primarch had been found and the old ways had been cast into the shadows, to make way for the teachings of their lord. But they hadn't been forgotten, oh no. Even as the Angel broke all that they had been and reforged them into something more to his liking – as was his right – there had been those who had remembered. The rites had continued, the blood passed from one to the next, taken from the corpse of the fallen Ishidur and to the mouth of the next one.
That it had gone on for so long unnoticed was, he knew now, the result of their Legion's future patron looking at the practice with approval. And when, at last, the Legion had embraced its true nature once more and forever, Ishidur had awakened in full.
It had happened on the black sands, where thousands of Legionaries had died at the hands of their brothers, and a demigod had perished. After the carnage was done, his latest incarnation had laid dying, and been devoured by another. This time, it hadn't been a ritual : merely the act of a Blood Angel lost to the Thirst.
He had awoken then, in the body of that blood-drunk Legionary, with all the memories and experiences of all the warriors who had borne his name. A score of lives and more, but he had decided to keep the name of Ishidur Ossuros, if only in the privacy of his own thoughts. It had seemed … right, somehow.
After that, there had been the rebellion, when the Ninth had rampaged across the galaxy to slake the Thirst with the blood of Imperial worlds. He had died again at Terra, his body rent asunder by none other than Horus Lupercal himself when the Warmaster had taken to the walls of the Palace and called his brother to face his wrath. Later, after he had returned in yet another body, he had died again, this time at the blade of Dorn, on Iydris at the end of the War of Woe.
It amused him that many Legionaries had died at the hands of a Primarch, but only he could truthfully claim to have been killed by two of them.
And after Iydris … well. The Legion had been broken, the Angel lost to dreams of times that never were. Ishidur had moved on, like most Blood Angels. He had found the Violators then, and joined their ranks quietly. He had died many times since then, but there was never a shortage of Violators wanting to drink the blood of a dead brother, and so he had kept coming back, over and over. The anarchy of the warband had allowed him to keep his presence hidden, though there were rumors about him circulating anyway – he still had no idea where those had come from. His best guess was the Warp-crazed visions of a psyker catching a glimpse of forbidden truth in the tides of the Eye.
And now, here he was, back to the world where Ishidur's first body had been born. The circle was completed, and it would end with the doom of the Imperium they had built ten thousand years ago.
The gate cracked open under the impact of his blade, the daemon within snarling in his mind as its might was pitted against the solidity of the obstacle. The weapon, one Ishidur had claimed from the dead hand of a Salamander warlord, cut through the reinforced metal with ease, and he strode into the command center of the Hall of Judgement. Behind him laid the corpses of twenty of the Judges' best men, all of whom had died without taking a single step back despite the fear that had run through their blood.
They had fought and died well, for mortals. Their blood had been a suitable appetizer to the rare feast that awaited him now. Reaching this place ahead of the rest of the warband had been challenging, but the prize that now stood before him was well worth the effort.
Bolt shells from her guards' guns slammed into his armor, and he ignored them as he cut them to pieces, letting his sword drink deep – it could have these morsels, his next meal would be much greater. Only the weapon in his quarry's hand registered as a threat : it was a bolt pistol, but one of much older and heavier design, made weightless by small grav-generators affixed on its barrel. A relic, that, almost as old as he. It would pierce through his warplate and kill him dead, and by the time he returned someone else would have gotten his prey.
He ripped off her overly-ornate helmet and plunged his fangs into her throat. Blood flowed down his gullet, hot and old, and memories not his own filled his mind -
- "Do you swear to uphold the Lex above all else ?" -
- she pulled the trigger and watched the man's skull disintegrate right in front of her face -
- seventh food riot to put down this month alone -
- feet dangling in the air as they hung -
- no one was above the Lex -
Ishidur gagged as the utter blandness of the Grand Provost's life flooded his senses. This woman hadn't revelled in the power she wielded, as he had expected. She had never found any joy in what she did, in the influence she held over trillions of souls. She had contemplated the prosecution of Primarchs, and she had felt no elation, no terror, no excitement at the thought. Only duty.
He snarled and tossed Aveliza aside. She smashed on the ground with the sound of bones breaking inside her armor, still alive, her hand weakly clutching at her torn throat in a vain attempt to stop the torrent of blood. He caved in her skull with his boot, splattering her brain across the floor. He had wasted his time here, though even now a part of him considered the tactical benefits of removing the enemy leadership. But he didn't care about that. He had come here seeking the blood of a High Lord, believing that one who had risen so high must be a rare threat, and be badly disappointed. The Thirst was surging now, demanding blood, demanding that he fill his mind with the memories and sensations of mortals.
Very well. The Marshall had been a disappointment, but there was other prey to hunt. Perhaps, thought the creature that Neverborn called the Devoured Lord, the blood of a Primarch would be more satisfying …
After the death of the High Lady and the collapse of the Arbites' defense, the Violators took their time in defiling the Hall of Judgement. Pockets of resistance fought on for hours, the Judges refusing to break with stubborn tenacity, until they were overwhelmed and slaughtered.
The archives of ten thousand years were put to the torch, and the corpses of the Judges roasted over the flames before the Violators and their daemonic hanger-ons feasted upon them. The great cogitators processing the myriad details of countless trials were broken apart, and the venerable tomes of vellum upon which the Lex had been written by the hands of generations of scribes were torn apart. The freed captives who had survived danced and laughed and screamed amidst their liberators, sinking deeper and deeper into madness with every heartbeat.
For a time, the Violators remained in the ruins they had made, relishing the rewards of pleasure their Dark Prince bestowed upon them in return for their success. Their bodies shivered with delight as Warp-touched hormones flowed through their veins, pushing them to dizzying heights of sensation that made every drop of blood they drank sweeter than ever. More daemons descended, drawn by the desecration, and the very walls of the Hall were warped and twisted, becoming a place of torture and cruelty inflicted upon all too weak to defend themselves.
But eventually, they ran out of victims. Then, they turned their gaze upon the broken spires that surrounded the Hall, and licked their lips at the thought of all the souls, and all the blood, that yet remained to be taken.
Without orders being given, but with the synchronicity of a flock of predators migrating to new feeding grounds, the Violators departed the Hall of Judgement. Without a clear target, they were free to pursue their own appetite, and the warband splintered into dozens of small groups of Chaos Marines, daemons and mortal cultists, hunting for prey in the desolation.
A few, however, sensed a call. Those whose soul-fires shone brightest, whose star was in ascendancy in the eyes of the Youngest God, felt an undefined urge to move in a specific direction. Even this was no orderly march : they simply advanced toward the same place while hunting for blood and sport, most of them not even realizing they were answering a call.
But they still marched, these chosen Violators, through smoke and fire and screams, toward Lupercal's Gate.
AN : Hello, everyone ! I hope you enjoyed this chapter. The monologues from Magnus' perspective are still just as fun to write as they were before. I am going to miss that when the Angel War is over, though I am sure I can think of a way to keep using them in later arcs.
Ishidur Ossuros is a canon character from the Forgeworld books (more specifically The Horus Heresy Book VIII - Malevolence). His backstory is pretty similar in canon to what I wrote here : until Sanguinius was found, the Legion Master of the Ninth (then called the Revenant Legion, because they were hardcore back then) was always called Ishidur Ossuros, with a new Legionary taking up the name whenever the current one died, in a succession that involved devouring the corpse of his predecessor.
I mean, given that I made the Blood Angels into a Legion of vampires in the Roboutian Heresy, how was I supposed not to use a character like that ?
Thanks to Jaenera Targaryen for beta-reading this. Next up should be a chapter for A Blade Recast, and after that the continuation of this story. The next part of the Angel War is going to be tricky to write - I am likely going to use a different format as a consequence. And while I know the beats of the chapter, the details are still very much up in the air. The one thing I can say for certain, though, is that it's going to be quite the epic story, given the characters and the scale involved.
Zahariel out.
Next : The Outer Worlds