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 OUTER WORLDS
Teleported from their hidden empire into the Sol system, the Laer Fleet advances towards Terra. Should it reach the Throneworld, the billions of Chaos-tainted xenos soldiers it carries will tip the balance definitely into the Dark Prince's favor. Standing in their way are the Solar Fleet, and the Watchers of the Seventeenth Legion. And as the two fleets draw near, at the system's edge, a baleful psychic hymn continues to emanate from Pluto, turning all who hear its siren call into pawns of the Exalted Keeper of Secrets Zerayah. Out here in the cold void, inconceivable distances away from Holy Terra, the fate of the Angel War will be decided …
We see Battlefleet Solar. An armada sailing only a handful of systems, tasked with defending the core of the Imperium from threats that haven't reached this far in millennia. There are those who decried the expense. So many ships, kept so close to the Imperium's heart while its borders burn in a thousand wars. Surely there are places where they could be better used, they called. Not all of them had the best interest of the Imperium in mind. We glimpse thorns hidden in the shadows, catch whispers of conspiracy … but no. Our resurrected brother hid his crown of lies well.
We see the Lord High Admiral of the Imperial Navy, sitting on and in his throne, watching the void burn through a thousand mechanized eyes. We hear the grinding of the cogs in his mind, reducing every soul under his command to variables, every ship to numbers as he calculates war of a kind the human brain was never designed for. We see the trail of death he has left in his wake as he rose to his office, the uncountable battles waged over decades, slowly eroding his ability to see people as anything but assets or obstacles.
We look upon his soul, ground down by duty, and we understand another reason why Father created us. He wanted to spare His people from having to do this to themselves in the Imperium's service.
We see the Watchers. Defenders and diplomats, arbiters of disputes and advocates of truth. Oh, brother, how proud of your sons you would be. Ten thousand years, yet still they cling to the ideals of our youth, still they honour their oaths. Still they refuse to give in to the pressure that has so twisted the Imperium of old.
We see the fleet of the Laer Empire, its terrible might revealed to us at Light's End. We see the souls of their living ships, different from their pilots' only in scale, not in kind. They grew in the skies of their hidden empire, leviathans of the void created for this singular war. And at the center, attended by them all like a queen by her court, we see the hollowed moon where the Third Legion died.
We see the billions of Laer that crawl within, waiting for their turn to be taken by the eldritch light that burns in the pit, to be transported to the war on Terra, the war for which their entire species was reshaped by the Goddess they worship with such hateful faith. They might tip the scales and doom everything, if they reach the Throneworld. But they are not the only threat that comes from the void.
We hear the song defiled. The first message of Humanity to the stars. So full of hope, of promise. So naive. So ignorant. They took that innocence and defiled it. They stole the voice and used it to sing the melody of ruin.
There will be a reckoning for that. Do you hear us, you old monsters ? There will be a reckoning. Such desecration cannot, should not, must not be forgiven.
We see Pluto – THE SONG THE SONG THE SONG – IT BURNS BLACK – SILENCE THE HOLLOWING MELODY – SHUT DOWN THE UNHOLY SIGNAL – DESTROY THE UNDERWORLD – KILL THE DAUGHTER OF THE DEEPS –
SLAY ZERAYAH !
I am Zerayah. She whose melody shall drown your souls into the Abyss. Come to me, children of Man. I shall welcome you all into my embrace.
Under the direct command of Lord High Admiral Petroclus Agrippa, Battlefleet Solar gathered its might to confront the approaching Laer armada. From his flagship, the recently refitted Emperor-class Battleship Excelsis Cruor, the High Lord had imposed his will upon the anarchy reigning in the Sol system's void, and mustered all Imperial assets available under his direct authority.
Lord High Admiral Petroclus Agrippa, the Liberator of Kos
In the Imperium, the ascension of a High Lord is never a quiet affair, and only rarely one that occurs without bloodshed. In the Emperor's silence and the absence of the Primarchs, it is the Twelve who chart the course of the galaxy-spanning empire of Mankind, each holding absolute authority over trillions and influence over every single human in the Milky Way. The intrigue that takes place at such high levels of power is more bloody and terrible than most wars, and the casualties only slightly lesser.
But even for one of the Twelve, Petroclus Agrippa's claiming of the office of Lord High Admiral distinguishes itself. At merely a hundred and thirty years old by the time of his ascension, Agrippa was the youngest High Lord in millennia, barely qualifying as an adult by the cut-throat standards of the Imperial Court's highest circles.
In the year 964.M41, Agrippa's predecessor, Merelda Pereth, took Battlefleet Solar to war. A rebellion had erupted in the Segmentum Solar, within the system of Kos, which was only two Warp-jumps away from Sol. At the time, the political situation in Sol was growing more and more unstable as news of the various threats arising across the galaxy arrived, and a rebellion so close to Holy Terra was both an affront to the God-Emperor and an opportunity for the High Lords to reassert their control over the Imperium with a crushing victory.
To that end, two-thirds of Battlefleet Solar, along with an Inquisitorial presence to investigate the causes of the rebellion and over twenty millions Astra Militarum soldiers were dispatched to reclaim Kos. On the way there, at the fortress-system of Vorlese, the armada was reinforced by several World Eaters Companies which had come to the system for resupplying. These Legionaries were led by Captain Arkhan, who would later become Legion Master of the Twelfth. Lady High Admiral Pereth was reluctant to share the glory of the coming campaign with the Space Marines, but had no reasonable excuse to refuse them, and welcomed them in the reclamation fleet.
During the crossing from Vorlese to Kos, the fleet was caught in violent Warp tides, and emerged from the Empyrean in disarray, only to be immediately struck by a coordinated ambush by renegade forces. The precision of this attack couldn't have been achieved without having known exactly where the Imperial ships would arrive, which meant that the rebels were involved with the perturbations in the Warp. This was no mere insurrection, realized the Imperial commanders, but true heresy.
The Excelsis Cruor, Pereth's flagship, was the primary target of the ambush. Merelda Pereth perished in the attack on the bridge right after the battleship's emergence from the Sea of Souls, slain before she could give a single command. The rest of the command structure was gutted, both in similar attacks and in assassinations and acts of sabotage – some of which had been planned by the rebels, others by technically loyal officers of the Navy seeking to take advantage of the war to remove rivals.
The true scope of Kos' treachery and corruption was discovered as no less than a Tetrarch of the Thirteenth Legion, one of the four Daemon Princes said to be thrall to the Arch-Traitor Guilliman's damned spirit, revealed his presence on the rebellious world. For decades, the nameless Daemon Prince had orchestrated Kos' rebellion, directing the secretive sect of heretics called the Spineam Coronam, or Crown of Thorns, in order to deal the Imperial Navy a crippling blow that it wouldn't be able to recover from before the appointed hour of his liege lord's resurrection at Maccrage.
Daemonic incursions began across the surface of Kos, summoned by the Tetrarch's power. Regiments that had raised the banner of rebellion claiming to fight the corruption and weakness of the High Lords were unveiled as Chaos cultists, following the example of their infernal patrons as they turned on the population.
Meanwhile, the Imperial fleet was in disarray, caught in the rebels' trap and seemingly about to be destroyed by a force that was less than ten times its size. Then Admiral Agrippa took command of his battlegroup, before making contact with other like-minded officers and enforcing his authority over the fleet. Ships who refused his commands, some of which were captained by officers decades his senior, were overthrown in mutinies led by junior officers. After witnessing the utter disgrace that had accompanied the ambush, Agrippa was completely and utterly done with the politicking games of high command, a feeling echoed by many in Battlefleet Solar.
Through his ruthless assumption of command, which his rivals would call usurpation in the decades to come, Agrippa was able to turn the tides of the void war, crushing the rebel fleet before delivering the might of the Imperial Guard and the World Eaters to Kos. There, a brutal war was fought, culminating in a duel between the Tetrarch and Arkhan, ending in the latter's victory and the Daemon Prince's banishment.
Though the duty of delivering the killing blow had belonged to Arkhan, the newly-titled Lord of Blades proclaimed that the honor of the victory belonged to Agrippa, whose actions in the void had permitted the blow to be delivered at all. For this, Agrippa was named the Liberator of Kos, and he returned to Terra in triumph, wielding that acclaim and the support of both the Inquisition and the Twelfth Legion to rise at the top of the devastated Imperial Navy's high command after being acquitted of all charges in the emergency tribunal conducted to judge his actions at Kos. At the time, it was rumored that Agrippa had no desire to claim the title of Lord High Admiral, seeking only to restore the Navy and purge it of the politicking that the heretics had used to their advantage, but lack of another viable candidate and the pressure of his supporters eventually left him no choice.
In the decades since the liberation of Kos, Agrippa led a profound and ruthless reform of the Imperial Navy's high command, collaborating fully with the Ordo Hereticus' own investigations while also directing a program of rebuilding to replenish the depleted ranks of Battlefleet Solar. All the while, the Excelsis Cruor, which had been dragged back from Kos badly damaged, was also being worked on, the reparations of the Emperor-class battleship becoming a symbol of the Navy's own undergoing renewal.
It was very fortunate for the Imperium – indeed, for all of Humanity – that the Lord High Admiral had been aboard his flagship when calamity had struck, rather than attending the celebrations on Holy Terra. Petroclus Agrippa had come aboard the Excelsis Cruor after learning of the arrival of the three Primarchs. Due to the circumstances of his ascension, Agrippa hadn't been part of the Hydra's conspiracy, but he had rejoiced at the news nonetheless, and sent a message informing the Primarchs of his unconditional support while he prepared the Imperial Navy to deal with any crisis that might arise as a result of the return of the Emperor's sons. Granted, Agrippa had expected such a crisis to take the form of civil war as other among the High Lords tried to prevent the Primarchs from challenging their authority, but it had still placed him in a position to use his skills and influence in the Angel War.
In the moment before Light's End, Battlefleet Solar had been dispersed across the Sol system, attending to the myriad duties that were part of protecting Humanity's capital. The opening of the Tear of Nightmares had sundered the battlegroups, cutting communication and placing half the Sol system, including Mars and its great orbital stations, on the other side of a Warp rift no psyker could look past.
Madness had spread through the millions crewing the thousands of ships in Sol as surely as it had on the surface of the system's worlds, though hastily-raised Geller shields and greater experience with the corruption of the Warp meant that the void-born fared slightly better than their Terran counterparts. Still, anarchy reigned in the wake of Light's End, and it took time for Lord High Admiral Agrippa to restore even the semblance of order. Scores of ships whose crew had fallen to madness, or who were dead or too far gone to answer hails, had to be destroyed before they could crash into Solar infrastructure, and Agrippa imposed his will upon the panicked ships with an iron fist.
Every ship capable of fighting was commandeered to join the armada High Admiral Agrippa was forging out of the devastation of Light's End. Battlegroup commanders grateful for orders, Inquisition-mandated warships, Rogue Trader and lightly-armed merchant vessels : all were brought into the fold of Battlefleet Solar, for the hour was dire and every weapon would be needed.
The Emperor-class battleship Word of Magnus, captained by Lady Admiral Kiya Sarkath, took position at the head of one of the ad hoc battlegroups. She had carried the Crimson King from Terathalion to Sol, fighting her way through the raging Sea of Souls, and though there was damage left on her hull from where the claws of the Neverborn had tried to break her, she remained a queen of the void. By coincidence or the will of unseen hands, the Rogue Trader vessel Endless, belonging to Vala'kir Ecale of the Coils of the Hydra and responsible for transporting Lorgar Aurelian from Luna to Mars, was part of that selfsame battlegroup.
Nigh on a thousand ships were thus mustered, though they were but a fraction of the total number of vessels that had been within Sol at Light's End. Thousands more had perished in the opening of the Tear of Nightmares, or fled into the deep void with maximum propulsion and refused to answer all hails regardless of provenance – not an unreasonable course of action, given the madness that screamed over most vox-channels. And of course, there were the cargo ships that would be utterly useless to the fleet except to soak up the enemy fire – though it was only because they would have slowed the fleet too much that they were spared being conscripted to serve as precisely that.
The commanders of the Imperial fleet met through distorted holograms, every minute of discussion bought at the cost of several tech-priests burning out from purging the worse of the Tear of Nightmares' interference. Most of these exchanges were dominated by the Lord High Admiral, as he explained the battle plan to the rest of the fleet's commanders.
Battle raged on Terra, of a scale not seen since the Roboutian Heresy. The situation there was dire, but if the xenos fleet reached orbit and unloaded the billions of life-forms that crawled aboard it, then all hope of victory would be lost. Every ship in the armada had seen the auspex readings that showed the immense fleet that had somehow materialized between the Plutonian and Neptunian orbits. Details were scarce, but the gist of it was that these "Laer" ships, as they had been identified from the oldest and most forbidden of records, had to be stopped, no matter the cost. Contact had been briefly established with Primarch Omegon, and he had confirmed that preventing the Laer from drowning Terra with reinforcements was more important than providing orbital support.
The Laer ships were many, but it was their capital vessel that worried Imperial command the most. It was monstrous in size, dwarfing even the legendary Gloriana-Class warships that served as the flagships of the Legiones Astartes. The chief astropath of the Excelsis Cruor, who had managed to retain her sanity after the opening of the Tear of Nightmares, had called it the Abominable Maw, and the name soon spread across the Imperial fleet. Putting a name on something, even something as enormous and terrifying as the Laer's flagship, was the first step to defeating it.
The Abominable Maw was responsible for the tens of thousands of xenos fighters that had teleported all across Sol, adding to the pressure of the daemonic hordes that had emerged from the Tear of Nightmares. The technology employed was beyond anything the Mechanicus was capable of, but there were records dating to the War of the Beast that mentioned similar feats being performed by the Orks, of all species. According to these records, the technology had been notably unstable, though the scale of the War of the Beast and the sheer disregard of the greenskins for both the safety of their kindred and their own had still let it be a devastating advantage against the Imperium.
It was unlikely that the Laer version of mass-teleportation was any safer than the Orks' had been considering the creatures seemed to be infused with the stuff of the Warp at a genetic level. A plan was quickly hatched to destroy the Abominable Maw, with the hope that this would both remove the threat of the xenos armies stationed aboard it and cripple whatever command structure the Chaos-tainted aliens might be using.
On the bridge of the Seventeenth Legion strike cruiser Urizen's Fist, Captain Sor Pharos of the Watchers looked upon the arrayed might of Battlefleet Solar. In all his years as a Watcher, never had the Captain witnessed such power gathered in one place. It was almost enough to make him forget how desperate their situation was; almost enough to make him think there couldn't possibly be anything capable of standing against such overwhelming force.
Sor Pharos watched as one ship tried to break formation and flee, and was obliterated by combined fire from nine nearby vessels. The Lord High Admiral would tolerate no cowardice from the host he had assembled. That the dead ship had been a civilian cargo hauler, with only the barest of armaments, was no excuse : if one was allowed to flee, then more would try, and the armada would break apart like sand. Morale across the entire Battlefleet was shaky in the wake of the Emperor's ... the Emperor's ...
Sor Pharos forced himself to finish the thought. The Emperor's death. If he, a Captain of the Word Bearers, couldn't find the strength to think those words, then how could he hope the rest of the Imperium would be able to survive ?
As commander of the Watchers, Sor Pharos had met with High Lords several times. They were all, to put it bluntly, monsters. Mundane men and women did not rise to such dizzying heights of power, where the fate of trillions of souls hung on every decision. Each and everyone of them would have been a tyrant in the distant ages of Old Earth, a leader that would have left behind a legacy of broken kingdoms and a rising empire. But within the crucible of the Imperium, they had become much more. Sor Pharos genuinely believed that the changes wrought by the transformation of children into Legionaries paled in comparison to what the Adepta did to those who would one day head them.
Of all the trillions of souls who toiled in the name of the Imperial Navy, Petroclus Agrippa was the one who had become High Lord. The one who had risen to that position of supreme power. Such things did not happen by accident, regardless of the unusual nature of Agrippa's own ascension. The ruthlessness bred by the ferocious competition was an intended feature of the system, for one could not sit among the Twelve if one wasn't prepared to make great and terrible decisions – the kind of choices that would shatter the souls of more humane men and women.
Decades, centuries even, of duty and intrigue, of responsibilities and consequences, all performed so close to the Throne and its burning psychic light. Where did human nature end and the will of the Emperor begin ?
It was a thought dangerously close to the preaching of the Ecclesiarchy, but unlike those priests (and oh, but how Sor Pharos wondered what they would make of these latest developments) the Captain had never ascribed the power of the Emperor to any divinity on His part. The Master of Mankind was powerful, yes, immensely so. Even with His body crippled by the Arch-Traitor Guilliman, He had still guided Humanity and the Imperium throughout the ages, reaching out from the Golden Throne to act with the vision of one who saw so much more than any of them could.
As the fleet sailed through the Warp-torn void, the Astartes vessels remained behind their Imperial Navy counterparts, in the safest position of the fleet – though the Tear of Nightmares made a mockery of the notion of safety. It rankled to be held back in such a manner, but they had their orders, and should they disobey, they would be destroyed as surely as that civilian craft had been, Legionaries or not.
The exotic designs of the Laer ships made boarding actions unwise : there would be no way of telling what was vitally important from what was decorative. Instead, the Lord High Admiral had ordered all boarding forces to hold, for they would be deployed in full on the Abominable Maw, tasked with destroying it no matter the cost. Sor Pharos understood the reasoning, and agreed with it. The xenos flagship would be all but impossible to destroy by conventional means. Attacking it would be a landing, not a boarding, and there was no question that the casualties would be atrocious.
But then, this entire war was made of atrocities.
The fleets met in the void near the Uranian orbit, though the planet itself was on the other side of the Tear of Nightmares. The frozen world was invisible to Imperial instruments, but quick calculations showed that the planet would be very close to the Tear – perhaps even inside it, depending on how wide the Warp Rift was and how much distance still meant. The first attempt to reach the orbital complexes surrounding Uranus returned only screams and yet more dead astropaths, but it was certain that the Uranian void-clans were facing some of the Angel War's greatest horrors.
At last the Imperial fleet faced the Laer armada, though the xenos ships lacked the discipline and precision with which even the hastily-assembled Battlefleet Solar sailed. There was order of some kind in the Laer host, that much was clear, but it wasn't an order born of any kind of human mind, and several Imperial void tacticians had to be sedated after studying the Laer formations for too long.
The Imperial armada opened fire, and for an instant the baleful radiance of the Tear of Nightmares was eclipsed by that of their guns on the occulus of hundreds of ships. When the glare faded and the reports came in, the entire vanguard of the Laer fleet had vanished.
Now the Imperials only needed to do that twenty more times, and the entire xenos fleet would be wiped out. Unfortunately, their foe was not going to give them the chance. They were closing in the distance, sailing through the wreckage of their dead comrades, and soon their own, shorter-ranged weapons fired as well.
There was a tense moment on every ship's bridge as the enemy volley approached. Scores of smaller vessels were obliterated, but the shields of others held, and that was confirmation enough : whatever fell artillery the Laers were using, it couldn't pass straight through Imperial void-shields. Given the madness that had seeped into the Sol system, even that much hadn't been guaranteed.
The engagement broke down into smaller battles as battlegroups split off the Battlefleet. Slowly, over the course of an entire hour, Agrippa orchestrated the battle to draw most Laer ships away from the Abominable Maw, before giving the order to the ships he had held in reserve : now was the time to launch the operation that, Emperor willing (it would take a long time for such sayings to fade out of use, if they ever did), would remove the Laer threat without destroying Battlefleet Solar in the bargain.
During the mustering, several Legiones Astartes ships had joined Battlefleet Solar. Their holds were all but bare of Legionaries : all Space Marines who had the opportunity had joined the war on Terra, bringing their blades and bolters to the aid of the beleaguered Throneworld. But even without their deadliest cargo, the ships of the Legiones Astartes were killers of the void, and there were still Space Marines who had remained in orbit, either due to being unable to join the fray on the surface or due to their commanders deciding that they would do the most good in the void.
Those ships equipped with teleportation crucibles were explicitly forbidden from using them. The tech-priests weren't certain what would happen to those foolish enough to pass through the Warp to reach the Laer capital ship, but doom was all but certain, and every warrior would be needed on the surface of the Abominable Maw.
Deploying forces on the moon-sized vessel would have to be done the old-fashioned way, with gunships and drop-pods. Under the cover of thousands of fighters, the Imperial armada let loose a deluge of transports, unloading every Guardsman and armsman they could fit in whatever could get them down onto the Abominable Maw. Many were destroyed before reaching the surface, shot down by point defenses or caught mid-descent by the nameless things that flew in the void around the engine in defiance of physics and reason. But the sheer number of attackers meant that thousands reached the surface … and found themselves stranded in hostile territory, surrounded by millions of Laer xenos that had yet to be teleported to Holy Terra. A thin but breathable atmosphere clung to the surface of the Abominable Maw, though every soldier who had a gas-mask wore it – and kept an eye on those who didn't.
The battles fought on the Laer moon-ship were as brutal and desperate as any the Imperium had ever fought. Thousands of Imperial forces perished with every minute, replaced by still more coming in from the void. After several minutes where the entire operation balanced on a knife's edge, the Imperials managed to seize and hold a small area, turning it into a makeshift landing zone for the gunships and transports (the drop-pods still slammed wherever their machine-spirits took them).
That area was small, less than a dimple on the moon-ship's monstrous visage, but it drew the attention of the Laers. Seemingly limitless hordes of the xenos monstrosities converged on that point of invasion, led by their dread noble caste. The diversion, whose cost had been calculated by the Lord High Admiral and judged acceptable, was working.
Now it fell to the Space Marines to make the butcher's bill worth it.
The Watchers had lost two full squads merely trying to make landfall, and twelve more warriors had perished in the battles since. But they had reached the edge of the immense pit that seemed to be the center of the Laer's teleportation engine, and rallied several more squads of Space Marines from other Legions on the way there. There were warriors from most loyalist Legions participating in this operation, and all of them would be needed.
Every Space Marine in the Imperial fleet had been given the same order : disable the Laer teleportation device. How they were supposed to do that had been left entirely in their hands : right now, their plan could be summed up as "find something that looked important and hit it until it broke", though of course they had phrased it as "locate and engage targets of opportunity in order to disable enemy assets".
This was exactly the sort of impossible missions deep in enemy territory for which the Legiones Astartes had been made, and they would not fail. Sor Pharos had overall command by virtue of seniority in this theatre, as well as the fact that most other officers were on Terra, but every squad would be acting independently, moving through the Laer's nightmarish structures. Belagosa, his Librarian, was at his side, never more than a sword's length away. Taking a psyker into the Laer moon-ship was a risky gambit, and victory or defeat Belagosa's life would most likely be forfeit once the day was done. But the situation allowed for no half-measure, and the Librarian had known the price his duty would demand of him sooner or later.
Right now, Belagosa's face was a mask of concentration as he struggled to defend his mind against all the horrors surrounding them. What Sor Pharos saw with his mundane senses was already bad enough : he couldn't imagine what the Librarian's psychic perceptions were picking up from this abominable vessel.
He could feel its gaze, like a weight on his soul, seeking to crush his resolve and turn him into yet another empty puppet for it to make dance. But the sons of Lorgar had ever been the slayers of pretender gods, and the horror the Laers had brought into existence would be no different from all the other false idols they had cast down.
This was it. The auspex on the Shrine of Unity had associated the energy readings of the Laer teleportation with the engines the Orks had deployed during the War of the Beast, but the Laers had done more than simply replicating the greenskins' gutter genius. Like countless Slaves to Darkness before them, they had infused technology with the powers of the Warp, melding machine and daemon to create abomination. This eye, this ... entity, was the source of the teleportation the Laers were used.
And as the Space Marine commander looked at it, it looked back at him, its baleful attention tearing through the psychic protections woven by the Librarian and slamming into Sor Pharos' soul.
It is a thousand voices and more, screaming at him in hateful unison. Some of the voices are alien, others are hauntingly familiar.
These are the voices of the victims whose torment the creature devoured – Laer and Emperor's Children alike. This is the chorus of damnation.
You are nothing, it sings. You are no one.
I will not yield, he thinks.
Your master is dead, it whispers. Your Imperium burns.
"I will not yield," he shouts.
The dream of Lorgar is dust, it growls. You fight in defense of a corpse.
"I WILL NOT YIELD", he roars, and something inside him breaks forever.
In that moment, Sor Pharos succumbed to, or perhaps embraced, the flaw that had haunted his Legion for thousands of years. His soul ignited with cold, depthless hate at the evil he beheld. Remorse and regret were burned away, and the Captain of the Watchers became an Iconoclast Marine.
With the absolute focus and clarity that came with the Word Bearers' peculiar breed of genetic madness, Sor Pharos led his forces deeper down the pit and closer to the abomination. For all its power, the creature was still partially of the Materium, having been bred by the Laers to serve as a conduit between the Immaterium and their corrupted engines. The mind rebelled at the mere thought of the experiments that must have been necessary to gene-craft that particular xenos horror, and the calamities the failures must have caused.
As the Space Marines drew nearer to the bottom of the pit, resistance against their advance increased. Most of the Laers' forces were occupied on the surface, but the sheer number of xenos lifeforms on the Abominable Maw meant that thousands yet remained to bar the Legionaries' path. Scores of Space Marines laid down their lives in battle against the monstrosities haunting the pit, not all of which were Laers in nature. The prolonged torment of thousands of Emperor's Children in the cells of the pit, combined with the eldritch energies rampaging across the megastructure, had given life to nightmares. Drawn from the visions of the Reminiscence and the images of the pain of Fulgrim's sons, these creatures harassed the Imperial force every step of the way, taking the shape of twisted Space Marines and reptilian horrors that even the gene-craft of the Laers couldn't have brought into existence.
Of all the Space Marines who had gathered at the top of the pit, less than thirty made it to its depths. By that point, all but Sor Pharos were reeling from the psychic weight of the abomination, barely able to hold onto their sanity. Many had died in battle due to being only able to fight on instinct, their minds too occupied by the struggle to keep the influence of the creature out. Some too had died at the hands of their brothers, given the Emperor's Peace swiftly when they succumbed to the pressure. But at last, the survivors had reached their destination.
Now all that remained was for them to kill a god.
It had been born in the dark, and had never had a name until a soul aboard one of the ships fighting near it had called it the Abominable Maw. Even the Laer priests who had attended it, cultivated it, had never named it. They had not dared to, for to name a thing was to give oneself power over it, and to do so with that entity would have been sacrilegious.
Close to it, reality bubbled and sizzled. Its singular eye glared at the Legionaries, seeing much more than just their physical appearance. It saw their thoughts, their souls and their past, and it attacked all three. Thoughts frayed, emotions wholly alien to Astartes hearts flared and guttered out, and might-be versions of the warriors flickered in and out of existence, lashing out at their actual selves with their perfect faces twisted in hideous smiles.
The weapon had been brought out of the vaults of the single Fourteenth Legion vessel in the Imperial fleet, and carried down to the Abominable Maw by the one son of Mortarion who wasn't fighting on the surface of Terra. That warrior was dead now, having been cut down by a Neverborn with claws shaped out of the horror of a son of Fulgrim in the moment before he had broken and become a Tithed One. But every Legionary in the taskforce had been briefed on the weapon's use, which was deceptively simple.
As Sor Pharos pressed it against the pulsating flesh of the thing at the bottom of the pit, Belagosa spent the last of his strength protecting his Captain. He heard the Librarian's scream as his skull ignited with purple fire, but didn't turn back, or react to it in any way. Brotherhood, that pillar of the soul of a Space Marine, was a distant and faded thing in the Iconoclast now.
Sor Pharos was no expert, but he was fairly certain possession of such a weapon would have drawn the Inquisition's ire even in the hands of a Space Marine. But the Death Guard had ever been the Legion most distant from the rest of the Imperium, waging their wars far from sight and against foes their cousins could scarcely imagine. It was an open secret that they made use of weapons that were forbidden across the rest of the Imperium, and few Inquisitors were foolish enough to challenge the methods of the Lord of Death's sons.
Employing such a weapon in the Sol system would be another matter entirely, no doubt, if not for the unique circumstances of the Angel War.
The Death Guard Legionary had called it a Woeful Clarion. Only seventeen had ever existed, and of those only three were left, the rest spent in the Death Guard's wars of extermination. In human hands, it could only be used once, though the sons of Mortarion suspected that their original makers had been able to use them at will before their extinction. Outwardly, it was a sphere of adamantium, forty centimeters wide and inscribed with warding sigils woven of silver. The Carrion itself was contained inside the sphere, which protected the weapon's surroundings rather than the weapon itself. Sor Pharos had no idea what the Woeful Carrion actually looked like : all he knew was that the Death Guard had promised it would kill the creature if activated when in close proximity, that the activation rune wasn't the obvious red button but the small Barbarus inscription on the other side ...
... and that it was very unlikely any of the Space Marines would survive the weapon's activation.
Sor Pharos didn't hesitate. No true Space Marine would have, but an Iconoclast simply couldn't.
The Woeful Clarion activated, and the Abominable Maw screamed. A death that had waited for millions of years was released from the cage in which it had been bound. It poured into the largest life-form nearby, and for all its eldritch nature the thing in the pit was still, at its core, built upon the Laer genetic code that a clone of Fabius Bile had resurrected thousands of years ago.
Corrupted and steeped in the power of Chaos as it was, it was still a living thing, and that meant the Woeful Clarion could kill it. The unsealed death sank into the Abominable Maw, draining the Clarion completely, leaving the surviving Space Marines miraculously spared.
It screamed as it died, sensing its doom with complete and utter incomprehension – and from that, the Space Marines were not spared. Sor Pharos saw Belagosa, the only Librarian who had made it this far, simply come apart, his own psychic power unmaking his existence as he heard the monster's scream.
All Sor Pharos thought at the sight was that he wouldn't have to use a bolt shell to kill the psyker himself.
Shielded by his hatred, Sor Pharos alone of the Space Marines survived the death-scream of the entity. But even the Iconoclast didn't escape unscathed, his very soul scoured by the unleashed psychic energy. What made it out of the pit might have Sor Pharos' body and even most of his soul, but his mind was forever marked, the patterns of hate and ruthlessness permanently seared into him.
With the death of its controlling intelligence, the infernal engine began to overload. The energies it drew from the Empyrean began to pour forth uncontrolled, while the dying spasms of the entity sent conflicting orders across the daemonic machine. Arcs of raw power the size of continents leapt from the Abominable Maw, drawn to the lesser teleport beacons aboard the Laer ships that had enabled the fleet's mass teleportation from the hidden Laer empire to the Sol system.
On the desolate surface of the moon-ship, Sor Pharos found a gunship belonging to the Twentieth Legion. Pushing aside the body of its pilot, he turned the engines on and left, sending word of his return and the events that had unfolded ahead. Meanwhile, the entire Imperial armada was in retreat, putting as much distance as it could between its vessels and the rampaging energies of the Abominable Maw.
Almost as soon as the gunship landed in the bay of the Urizen's Fist, the Abominable Maw detonated. Imperial terminology lacks the words to describe what happened next, at least not without using terms and concepts whose knowledge is forbidden by the Inquisition's less-known divisions. A moment of time was simply lost, cut out of the flow of the universe : one second the Laer fleet was there, the next it wasn't, and the corpse of the Abominable Maw floated in the void, falling into smaller pieces as its megastructure began to give way.
Well, well, well ... what do we have here ? A mortal soul, burned with the kindled spark of immortal rage ?
Slowly, over the course of several hours, Agrippa reassembled the Battlefleet. There weren't as many executions this time, though a few of the conscripted civilian ships had to be destroyed when they thought to use the confusion to escape into the deep void.
The Laer threat to Holy Terra had been dealt with, though tech-priests and psykers alike warned that not all the xenos had perished in the uncontrolled teleportation flare. Entire flotillas worth of alien vessels had been displaced to unknown positions, and given the potency of the energies unleashed they could be anywhere in the entire galaxy.
The Underworld is mine. It was given to me, by the one who holds authority over it through right of conquest. You shall not reclaim my kingdom from me.
This, however, would be a problem for another day, one the Lord High Admiral would face gladly, since it meant the Imperium had survived the Angel War. For now, there remained another threat that only Battlefleet Solar could stop. On the far end of the Sol system, the planetoid men had called Pluto for tens of thousands of years had become the lair of a daemon of unimaginable power, whose corrupting influence was spreading farther into Sol with every passing moment.
Agrippa wasn't blind to the risks of bringing so mighty a fleet anywhere near an entity that had demonstrated its capacity for warping minds and souls. But the alternative was doing nothing as its influence grew and grew, and that was unacceptable. The Lord High Admiral called another conclave, this time to ask for options. None presented were satisfactory, until Sor Pharos, who had remained silent as the grave throughout the proceedings, spoke.
"If Pluto is the seat of this threat, then Pluto must be destroyed."
Sor Pharos, addressing the leadership of Battlefleet Solar during the Angel War
War and conquest, oppression and genocide. Your empire feeds us with every choice it makes.
The Iconoclast's words were followed by great outcry. His proposition was heresy : Sol was the system of Humanity's birth, every stone within it sacred. Pluto's population was already lost, of that there was no question, but the planetoid could be reclaimed in time, just as countless worlds had been purged and sanctified anew across the Imperium after being subjected to daemonic taint.
More practical objections were also raised. The gravitic ballet of any solar system was a complicated mess, as every object pulled at the others to establish cycles that might take centuries or millennia to complete. Destroying Pluto would impact these cycles in ways that no one could predict – not when the laws of physics in Sol were already being made the plaything of the Ruinous Powers. Once, Humanity had possessed the means to correct such changes, but that technology had been lost long ago (which was probably for the best, given the few surviving records that spoke of how it had been used in times of war).
In the end, pragmatism won out. Whatever impact destroying Pluto would have would take years to manifest at the very least, while letting the corruption linger would doom all of Sol – and with it, all of the Imperium – in weeks. And in the wake of the Emperor's death, the heresy inherent in destroying Pluto felt like a minor concern, easily ignored.
With the decision made, next came the choice of method. The Imperium had many ways of destroying worlds, and the armories of Battlefleet Solar and its auxiliaries held all but a few of the more esoteric ones. This time, it was Agrippa who cut the discussion short : they didn't know what the daemonic entity on Pluto was capable of, so they would use everything at their disposal and crack Pluto apart like an egg with the full might of Battlefleet Solar, from as far away as possible.
By that point, time meant less on Pluto that it did across the rest of the Warp-torn system. The planet laid at one end of the Tear of Nightmares, serving as one of its anchors as it bled the Sea of Souls into the Materium. Pluto had become a daemon world, suborned to Zerayah's will.
The people of Pluto who hadn't been sacrificed or torn apart in frenzied celebration had been transformed by their proximity to Zerayah, their flesh warped until it resembled the Greater Daemon's memories of the corrupt Eldars whose vices had brought it into existence. The same transformation was affecting the unfortunate souls crewing the ships caught in the Song of the Deep, though distance from their overlord slowed the process to an agonizing crawl, and many of them were also fused to the metal of their ships, becoming living components of the vessels' shifting forms.
Zerayah knew the plan of the Imperials to kill it. It could sense their desperate hope, their fear and their anger, rippling through the raging Sea of Souls, and it was old and cunning enough to understand them. Its song shifted, burning new orders into the blasted minds of its thralls aboard the ships it had claimed. Other things heeded its command too, old and nameless things that had emerged from the Tear of Nightmares, drawn by the Song of the Deep. Things of bone and sinew that stretched for kilometers, things born of ancient cruelties; the primordial reflections of a species' first steps toward absolute decadence.
No two of them were identical, or even remotely similar, for each was the incarnation the sins of a different Eldar world. In the eyes of the Imperium, all of them were classified as 'daemonships', and they joined the horde of ships Zerayah gathered in its defense. More continued to appear, a procession of fresh horrors added to the madness of the Angel War.
Agrippa's chief astropath, the one who had named the Abominable Maw, started screaming, screeching about the voices each of these new arrivals brought to the chorus of Zerayah's Song. She took a bolt shell to the back of the skull before she could threaten the Excelsis Cruor – but her torment did not end with her death.
By that point, every ship in the Imperial fleet had raised its Geller Field back up, and preachers were on every deck leading the crews in prayer even as they worked. News of the Emperor's death had spread even there – every soul in Sol had felt the passing of the Master of Mankind in some deep, unfathomable way – but so had the tales of Living Saints rising on Holy Terra to fight against the abominations. Even aboard the ships, a few Living Saints had awakened, and the desperate crews clung to that knowledge like drowning men to a piece of wood (not that most of them had ever seen a tree, or a sea made of liquid).
Even then, the closer the Battlefleet got to Pluto, the worse things got. The Song of the Deep would not easily be denied, and while the Imperials were still far from the range at which it could simply break their wills, it was still an insidious and corrupting whisper. Every time there was so much as a flicker in the Geller Fields, someone would hear the Song. The lucky ones went mad immediately and were put down after going on a rampage; the others struggled for hours against the canker hidden in their souls without even realizing it, until they lost and the corruption burst out into the open, transforming their body in a sudden frenzy of mutation that they only rarely survived. Those who did survive the transformation, however, became great threats to the ships on which they had been stationed.
Confronting these altered souls was the only way in which the Imperials witnessed the appearance of Zerayah's thralls. Their skin was silver and scaled like that of fish, and their bones could be seen through it, glowing with eldritch light. Their eyes were too big, and their skull warped so that they seemed to be wearing a spiked crown of bone, cracked and leaking a clear liquid that resembled the tears of the dead. They moved with supernatural strength, and laughed with mouths that were far too wide and were filled with row after row of perfectly human teeth.
Several ships were lost to sabotage, or detonated their engines when the mutants succeeded in bringing down the Geller Field and exposed the entire crew to the Song of the Deep. One vessel, the Reflection's Price, had to be destroyed by combined fire of the nine closest warships after its enginseers failed to overload the reactor in time and the very metal of the ship began to shift as a result of the corruption of the souls within drawing tendrils of Warp energy from the Tear of Nightmares.
The Reflection's Price didn't die well, nor gracefully. Even as enough firepower to turn a hive-city to dust slammed into its flanks, more Warp energy continued to pour into it. It detonated with impossible strength, annihilating the ships that had been firing on it. These ships then detonated in turn, punching a hole in the Imperial formation. The Geller Fields of a dozen other ships were breached as the Warp fed on the souls of the dead.
It was then that the thrall-ships of Zerayah reached the Battlefleet, and the second major void engagement of the Angel War began.
They were not going to win this.
The realization didn't disturb Sor Pharos, because nothing could disturb him now. He was past such things, though he didn't know how much of it was due to having become an Iconoclast and how much was the result of psychic damage from being on the Abominable Maw when it had died. He didn't know enough about what his Legion saw as a genetic defect to guess. Generally, Word Bearers who weren't part of the Apothecarion were too uncomfortable about the Iconoclasts to study them.
This didn't disturb him, either. The battle was what mattered, and they weren't going to win it.
Agrippa was doing his best, that much was clear even to Sor Pharos, whose knowledge of void warfare, while only middling by the standards of the Legions' voidmasters, was still enough to comprehend the broad strokes of the engagement.
Between the hole in their formation that the fiery death of the Reflection's Price had opened, the daemonships, the Song's malign influence and the general breakdown in communication that came with the void being saturated with Warp energy, Battlefleet Solar was being hammered. It wasn't a rout, because the enemy only slightly outnumbered them and none of the corrupted Imperial ships had been anywhere near the equal of the Excelsis Cruor or the Word of Magnus. But, slowly but surely, they were being ground down, one squadron at a time.
Sor Pharos considered all of this, while around him the bridge of the Urizen's Fist was a storm of activity as crewmembers called out to one another, the shipmaster gave orders, and the battleship shook with the thunder her guns and the impact of the foes' on her void-shields.
You are a hollow creature, Sor Pharos. Your father would weep if he saw what you have become.
He didn't answer the voice, nor did he let any sign of hearing it show in his composure. His crew was already scared enough of his presence – there were stories among the Word Bearers' serfs of what the Iconoclasts were capable of in the pursuit of their objectives, most of them true – and knowing that he could hear what he was fairly certain was the voice of the daemon of Pluto wouldn't have helped.
Sor Pharos had first heard the voice as he made it back aboard the Urizen's Fist. He had considered killing himself before it could use him against the Imperium, but had decided against it. The link that had formed during the destruction of the Abominable Maw didn't seem to enable it to do anything more than speak to him, though that was probably because of the damage to his soul. He had calculated the odds that the daemon might let slip something of use, balanced them against the damage he might cause if he were corrupted and the odds of that happening, and come to the conclusion that, given the circumstances of the Angel War, this was an acceptable risk.
The daemon called itself Zerayah, the Song of the Deep, Greater Daemon of Slaanesh, along with a plethora of self-aggrandizing titles. It was powerful, that much couldn't be denied, not when it had remade an entire world and enslaved billions to its malevolent will. But power was no mark of worthiness, this all Word Bearers had known since Aurelian had cast down an entire false faith out of sheer outrage at its corruption. Sor Pharos felt no awe toward Zerayah, only hatred for its crimes against Humanity, and he could tell that it enraged the daemon. The Song of the Deep wasn't used to being disdained like this.
Your fleet burns. Your hope falters. In life or death, all will join my chorus.
The Iconoclast (he wasn't a Captain anymore, and wouldn't have been even if any of the other Watchers had survived : there were regulations against any of those who embraced Lorgar's fury holding command) kept his gaze on the battle. He watched it all with cold eyes, absorbing the data and letting his subconscious parse it all in search of something ...
There.
"Auspex," he called out. "Quadrant six-four. What is that ?"
The officer flinched at his voice, before magnifying the image. There was nothing there that machine or man could see, but Sor Pharos' mind had detected something, a pattern amidst the static that -
The mortal gasped in awe, a sound echoed by the rest of the bridge crew as what had drawn the attention of the last Watcher suddenly became visible to all. Where before there had been only the blur of static and impossible Warp-spawned auspex returns, now there was a ship, appearing seemingly out of nothingness high above the engagement on the Solar plane.
The ship was huge, almost twenty kilometers in length, and of a pattern from which only a handful of vessels had ever been built, and fewer still remained. Sor Pharos recognized the class if not the ship herself. For a moment, he wondered if perhaps this might be the Pride of the Emperor, returned from her disappearance at xenos hands to save Sol as she had once before. There would be a symmetry to that, he thought, that might be enough to twist the hand of Fate.
Then the first vox-transmission came through :
"Battlefleet Solar, this is the Alpha Legion flagship Beta. For the Emperor, we stand with you !"
The arrival of the Beta turned the tide of the void battle. The ancient flagship of the Alpha Legion, shrouded in mystery long before Guilliman rebelled against the Emperor, was a ship with few equals left in the galaxy. Since the Heresy, she had fought wars most of the Imperium had never known needed to be fought, and over the ages her masters had spent enough resources in maintaining her to bankrupt a Sector.
In the years before Light's End, Omegon had pulled the Beta from her duties and recalled her to Sol as part of the preparations for the Emperor's ascension. She hadn't been included in the Damocles Protocol, but her shipmaster had received the transmission of the Primarch from the Tower of Hegemon. The Gloriana-Class Battleship had been positioned deep in the void, hidden within one of the countless space stations across Sol, which had been taken over by the Alpha Legion a few centuries prior and turned into what amounted to a hive-sized hangar capable of concealing her.
Despite the various calamities of the Angel War, the shipmaster had waited. A veteran of many void battles, he was all too aware of the importance of timing. The position of the Beta prevented her from joining the fray against the Laer fleet, but she had been uniquely placed to intervene in the fight against Zerayah's thrall ships. The Beta had run through the void using the bare minimum of power, hiding her presence through devices that the Alpha Legion had received from their Eldar allies at the dawn of the Unremembered War.
A single ship, even one as powerful as a Gloriana-Class, could hardly turn the tide alone. The Beta had enough mortal crew to operate at full capacity, but only a minimal Astartes presence, preventing her from performing boarding actions – not that the nature of the enemy fleet lent itself to that avenue of attack.
But her appearance allowed Agrippa to solidify his control of the Battlefleet, as shaking morale was reinforced by the sight of a legend of the Imperium's distant past returned to aid them in their hour of need. The Beta engaged the daemonships, taking some pressure off the Battlefleet, which the Lord High Admiral used to launch a counter-attack.
By the time the last of the thrall-ships and infernal vessels had been dealt with, only half of the host that had first assembled in defense of Sol remained. The void was littered with the husks of dead ships, a cosmic graveyard haunted by mindless daemons spawned by the crews' final moments and given actuality by the energies of the Tear of Nightmares. Every ship remaining had suffered some damage, with more than a few needing to be abandoned before the fleet could continue its advance toward Pluto.
You do not hesitate, do you ? They were your brethren once, before they heard my voice in their heart of hearts. Do you truly think them so lost ? Is that so comforting a lie to tell yourselves as you slaughter them ?
Because it is a lie, Sor Pharos. No matter what I do to them, no matter how I bless or curse them, they are still your kin. No truth, no matter how great or small, can rewrite every part of a soul.
On the bridge of the Urizen's Fist, which was preparing to add her own fire to the apocalypse coming for Pluto, Sor Pharos spoke back to Zerayah for the first and only time. He said only two words :
"Be silent."
In the past, the Imperium had attempted to perform Exterminatus on daemon worlds outside the Eye of Terror on several occasions. Most of the time, such attempts had gone horribly wrong, as the methods by which Humanity may murder a world relied upon the laws of the Materium holding dominion. The Neverborn ruling such worlds had bent their will to preserving their kingdoms, turning aside the Imperial weapons or preventing them from detonating.
But no Exterminatus fleet had ever possessed the raw firepower of Battlefleet Solar. Agrippa was gambling that the sheer amount of ordnance would be too much for Zerayah to defend against, and that if the bombardment failed, the Battlefleet would be far enough to avoid the Greater Daemon's wrath while they came up with another plan.
The gamble paid off.
The fury of a hundred Imperial warships slammed into the daemon world, and it cracked and fell apart. The molten core of the dwarf planet erupted, and the six-mouthed form of Zerayah, which dwelled in the temple its cultists had made for it still, was bathed in lava. The mutated cultists of the Song of the Deep perished, granted release from their warped existences, though their souls wouldn't escape Slaanesh so easily.
As Pluto died, pieces of the broken planet slammed into the orbital stations and civilian ships that remained in anchor around the planet, and the moons of Pluto began to drift away. Two of them, Nix and Styx, were dragged into the Tear of Nightmares (which, despite the destruction of its anchor, persisted in blighting Sol) and vanished, swallowed like pebbles in the mouth of a giant. Hydra, which had served as an astropathic relay station for millennia before the Song of the Deep remade it into an amplifier for Zerayah's influence, appeared to Imperial auspexes to simply vanish, imploding on itself in a kaleidoscope of nightmarish colors and shapes.
At Agrippa's command, battlegroups aimed their weapons at Charon and Kerberos, the remaining moons, and destroyed them. All that remained of Pluto and its satellites was a cloud of debris, full of rock, ice, a much smaller proportion of metal from the destroyed orbital stations and ships, and an even smaller proportion of dead flesh from Zerayah's thralls.
As the Song faded and Zerayah's essence was hurled back into the Sea of Souls, its first and only incarnation destroyed, the daemon that could have been a god, had the doom of the Eldar occurred down but a slightly different course, spoke one last time to Sor Pharos.
Ah, Sor Pharos ... You poor, broken, deluded fool.
You have killed me ... and in doing so, you have doomed yourselves.
You have cast me back into the Sea of Souls, to join these lesser creatures that think themselves my brethren.
Six sacrifices, six lords laid low. Even the exile of the renegade was foreseen by our guiding hand, and a replacement brought forth to fill the part.
Our departure has torn open the gate that he might pass. The power bestowed upon us is free, and seized.
Now, he comes. Our lord and master, the true champion of Slaanesh. The upstart godling who hid his glory until Light's End.
He comes.
He is here !
And in that moment, Sor Pheros realized the trap he and the entire Imperium had walked into. But it was too late, too late to stop it, too late to walk away, too late to make another choice. The overarching plan of the Angel War had reached its final phase, and its architect was coming to Terra.
And this, the Iconoclast discovered with some surprise, did disturb him.
AN : Well, over a year has passed since the first prelude for the Angel War (Beloved, for those of you keeping track, which was published on the 3rd of April 2020). And here we are. It has been quite a year, hasn't it ?
The next chapter isn't part of the Angel War anymore, but will be the fourth part of the Terran Crucible instead (first part : The Hunt for Cypher, second part : At Light's End, third part : The Angel War). From a narrative perspective, I decided it made more sense, and also it means that the Angel War has, counting the introduction, thirteen chapters. And it has been thirteen months since I started to publish the Angel War ! Fancy, that.
No, I still am not trying to use this story as a numerology-based ritual to sunder the Veil and call Those That Slumber across from the obsidian pyramids where they and their infinite children await.
I don't know why you would possibly think that.
Back to next chapter. I already have an outline of what will happen in it - in fact, I have had that outline since before I started working on the Angel War, though I have kept tinkering with it since then. The same is true for the chapter after that one, come to think of it.
I have recently finished Mortis, the latest book in the Siege of Terra series. As with the previous volumes, there were revelations about the setting that shouldn't be considered canon in the Roboutian Heresy, though I may use some of the lore revealed at some point. I know that this increases the divergence between universes, but come on. That was inevitable the moment I started writing this story while new lore was still being added to the original setting.
On a more personal note, I really enjoyed that book, as I have all of the Siege novels so far. Ironically, one of my favorite parts of these books is the author's notes at the end, where the authors of the Black Library talk about the writing process for something so ... let's say "monumental".
I am still hoping to finish Warband of the Forsaken Sons this year. Right now, the plan is to finish The Terran Crucible, before focusing on that. There is one chapter of A Blade Recast that's almost done, but as you might have noticed, there is quite a difference in tone between that story and my other works, which means I need to mentally shift gears every time I get back to it. So I can't make any promises as to when that chapter will come out - it might be tomorrow, it might be in three weeks. Such are the vagaries of my Muse, I am afraid.
As usual, thanks to Jaenera Targaryen for beta-reading this, and thanks to you all for reading this. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and are looking forward to the next stage of the Terran Crucible.
And speaking of which :
To be continued in
The Terran Crucible
Part Four : The Angel Descends
Zahariel out.