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 Impossible City shakes as man-made gods make war against all the hosts of Hell.
The Ten Thousand Companions of the Emperor fight alongside the Sisters of Silence, the Talons of the Emperor unleashed upon His truest foes. With them are the Titans of the Ordo Sinister, and the secret armies of the Great Crusade, recalled from fighting against the Arch-Traitor's daemonic allies in the wider Imperium in order to hold this line just one moment longer.
Arrayed against them are the hordes of Chaos, legions without number. The walls of the Labyrinthine Dimension, erected in another age by a long-dead species, are cracking, letting in the foulness of the Empyrean in its myriad aspects.
This is the Age of Heresy. This is the Hour of Horrors. This is the Fall of Calaster.
This is the last stand of the War in the Webway.
Leading the Imperial defenders of the Impossible City stands the Cyclops, in his full panoply of war. He has cast off the rage born of his homeworld's razing by the Wolves, letting it go to grow on its own and eventually become the Power that will save his life and his Legion thousands of years in the future. Yet he is undiminished by it, and the daemons of Chaos tremble before his might. The fires of truth and retribution burn from his one eye, fuelled by the revelation that made him reject the God of Lies to its face, and they consume entire infernal hosts at a time.
The greatest warriors of the Imperium fight alongside him, with Titans armed with weaponry forbidden to all but His chosen servants unleashing volleys of something that can only loosely be defined as artillery upon the daemonic horde. Every second, hundreds of Neverborn are torn to shred by blade and bullet, their spirits hurled back into the foul pit from which they crawled.
But it is not enough. Every soul that falls in this war is one that cannot be replaced, while the daemons are as numberless as the sins in the hearts of men. Magnus knows this – every one in the Imperial host knows this. And yet they fight all the same, because to stop fighting means the end of everything.
The Webway shakes. A shadow rises at the back of the infernal horde, crushing and devouring lesser Neverborn in its path. It is a living storm of teeth sharp as knives – a pillar of flesh covered in hands holding bloody rocks – a hungry blackness darker than even that which can be glimpsed in the Webway's cracks.
It has grown strong since its blood-soaked beginnings, stronger still in the last few years. The act it embodies has been perpetrated again and again, by beings whose gene-forging has left them with heightened senses and emotions. It has fed on the smoke of the galaxy's pyre, and comes now to devour the only light that might defeat the darkness that spawned it in the first age of Humanity.
Magnus sees it. He recognizes it from the visions that haunt him whenever he dares attempt to rest his exhausted body. The Crimson King's knowledge of the Archenemy has grown tenfold since this war began, and for all his love of learning this is lore he would gladly forget.
He knows its name, for it is screaming it into the souls of all who stand between it and its prey, a sound that is not a sound but is instead the deed that created it. In that name, the Cyclops sees that moment, aeons ago, where the first ape-like human picked up a rock and used it to bash in his brother's skull. He understand the horrible genesis of this incarnate nightmare, the seed of ruin from which it has grown into the terrible thing that now towers over even the Titans that have come to fight in the tunnels.
Drach'nyen is here.
And Magnus knows, with absolute certainty, that this is an opponent he cannot defeat.
Times of Ending : The Tower of Uralan
To the Salamanders, power is everything, and the weak serve or perish at the whim of the strong. None embody that corrupt principle more than Vulkan, Daemon Primarch of the Eighteenth Legion and first of the Emperor's sons to murder another. Now the covetous eyes of the Black Dragon look out from his lair toward the worlds of the Imperium, while his servants assemble a great arsenal of terrible weapons that will shake the very stars themselves. But Vulkan knows that mere strength of arms will not be enough for him to reach his goals. With the coming of the Times of Ending, old prophecies and older promises have been set in motion. Ancient powers are unearthed, ready to play their part in the Great Game of Chaos once more. And Vulkan, the Black Dragon, who above all desires godhood, has sent Tu'Shan, one of his greatest sons, to recover one of these powers for his own use : the legendary daemonic weapon Drach'nyen, the End of Empires, whose voice has haunted the dreams of would-be conquerors for aeons …
On the fringes of the Eye of Terror, where unreality and reality met and the tides of the Warp were at their most violent, sailed the Chaos ship Sundered Crown. The ship was able to withstand the aetheric currents which kept the Lost and the Damned trapped within their infernal realm, but even the craft of the Eighteenth Legion's indentured hereteks had its limits, and they were sorely tested by the swarms of Neverborn hurling themselves at the Salamanders warship.
The Sundered Crown had been built during the Great Crusade in the shipyards of the Sol system, and given to the Eighteenth Legion, then known as the Dragon Warriors. Like the Legion, its name had changed when Vulkan had been found and had taken command, and like it, it had changed greatly since then. It still resembled the battleship it had been built as, but millennia in the Eye of Terror had warped it, covering vast sections of its hull with black scales hard as adamantium and morphing its guns into the shape of dragon mouths. It was a terror of the void, a great predator with few rivals, and it had slain scores of enemy vessels in the Legion Wars that ravaged the Eye as well as in raids beyond its borders.
In ten thousand years, the Sundered Crown had changed hands many times, though it had always remained in the control of the Salamanders. Now, it served as the flagship of the warband of the Chaos Lord Tu'Shan the Cruel.
Tu'Shan the Cruel
Unlike many of the most prominent Chaos Lords of the Traitor Legions, Tu'Shan wasn't alive at the time of the Roboutian Heresy. He was instead born within the Eye of Terror, among the slaves of the Salamanders, and selected by the Promethean Conclave for induction into the ranks of the Legion. Only the strongest and most ferocious of the Nocturne-descended can ever hope to achieve such a thing, and Tu'Shan distinguished himself for his brutality and ambition even then. Within ten years of leaving Hephaeros, Tu'Shan had killed his pack leader and taken his place, and within twenty, he had overthrown and replaced his Chaos Lord, feeding his former master to the maws of a daemonic horror dwelling in the lower decks of the Sundered Crown.
In the Eye of Terror, where atrocity is commonplace and evil deeds are richly rewarded by the Dark Gods, it takes a particular kind of individual to earn the title of 'the Cruel'. Tu'Shan received that nickname at the end of the prolonged hunt for one of the Great Drakes of his Legion's daemonic homeworld, Hephaeros. Bred from the ancient reptiles of lost Nocturnes, these immense beasts are among the few things the Salamanders regard with reverence, even if they have all long since succumbed to torpor and slumber deep inside asteroids in the Hephaeros system, lulled to sleep by the prayers and sacrifices of dark temples constructed on the surface of these planetoids.
After a raid by a warband of the Imperial Fists, one of the temples was razed, and the Great Drake it contained was awakened. Consumed by rage and hunger, it broke free of the asteroid and escaped Hephaeros, but not before destroying several space installations of the Salamanders.
The lords of the Eighteenth Legion were divided on how to act. Some wanted to capture the Great Drake and return it to Hephaeros, bind it under a new temple and force it back to sleep before it could reveal the existence and potency of the Great Drakes to the enemies of the Salamanders. Others wanted to harness its power for their own warband, to make the rest of the Traitor Legions tremble at the knowledge that there were more like it slumbering around their homeworld. They debated for weeks, discussions degenerating into battle on several occasions. Tu'Shan, however, chose another path.
Having recently killed his master and taken his place as commander of the Sundered Crown and its warband, Tu'Shan sought a way to cement his position and make his name as a Chaos Lord. Without telling the rest of the Legion, he took his ship and hunted down the Great Drake, following the trail of destruction it had left in its wake. Eventually, he cornered it in a system inhabited solely by Neverborn.
There, Tu'Shan faced and killed the Great Drake, slaying it without compunction or remorse. Through sheer willpower, he was able to make use of the Eye's fluctuating reality to infuse his warhammer Stormbearer with the Great Drake's essence, turning the power weapon into a tool of terrible power. When he returned to Hephaeros with the corpse of the Great Drake, the assembled Lords were shocked that he had dared to attempt such a thing, let alone succeed. Some tried to punish him for slaying the Great Drake, but with the power of Stormbearer at his command, Tu'Shan easily dispatched them, and eventually it was decided that his survival was a sign of Vulkan's favor. He was awarded the name of 'the Cruel' by the Legion's half-daemon Overseers, and lived up to the title ever since.
Since slaying the Great Drake, Tu'Shan has led his warband on many raids and several campaigns, all of them within the Eye itself. His name is not known to the Imperium, except to a few seers tormented by visions of the Cruel One, and to the few operatives of the Hydra and the Ordos who risk damnation to spy upon the activities of the Traitor Legions within their own domain. These agents have marked Tu'Shan as a potential grave threat, for should he ever fully master the power bound within Stormbearer, Tu'Shan would become capable of slaughtering entire armies by himself.
After returning to Hephaeros from a fruitful raiding campaign against renegade elements of the Imperial Navy who had found their way into the Eye, Tu'Shan had been summoned by his Primarch. The Black Dragon had tasked him with the task of finding for him the legendary daemonic weapon Drach'nyen, whose existence had long been considered by the various factions of the Eye to be nothing more than legend at best and a deliberate trap of the Dark Gods to weed out over-ambitious conquerors at worst. Scores of mighty warlords had sought the blade, many being driven to madness by its insistent calling, only to lead their fleets and armies to utter destruction.
Fortunately for Tu'Shan, he had with him something none of the previous seekers of Drach'nyen had possessed. The Katabasis had been, at some point, a Navigator, but its third eye had been torn out and replaced with a red jewel that burned with Vulkan's own fire. That same fire had all but consumed the Katabasis, leaving it a skeletal wretch that constantly muttered to itself in daemon speech.
Hereteks had linked the Katabasis to the Sundered Crown, and the irascible spirit of the Chaos vessel had been bent to follow the commands of the creature. The rest of the warband's fleet had been left behind at Hephaeros, for they couldn't follow where the Katabasis would guide the Sundered Crown. Tu'Shan had emptied his escorts of warriors, bringing the total count of Salamanders aboard his flagship to just under two hundred – one of the largest numbers of any Salamanders warband, for it took a special kind of tyrant to keep the sons of the Black Dragon under control – as well as tens of thousands of mortal soldiers.
Some within the warband had privately questioned why they, of all the warbands, daemons and armies Vulkan commanded, had been chosen for such a task. Only Tu'Shan's inner circle knew the details of their mission, of course, but to receive any command directly from the Black Dragon was both an honor beyond compare and a terrible danger. The Salamanders still told tales of Cassian Dracos, who had returned from the Gothic War having only partially accomplished his objectives. The ancient Dreadnought had descended into the lair of the Daemon Primarch, but had never come back out, and all of Hephaeros had trembled at the strength of Vulkan's rage.
Still, none dared even think about not following the Black Dragon's orders. Centuries had passed since the last time a Salamander had been stupid enough to defy Vulkan, but his skull was still screaming atop the archway leading to the Promethean Conclave.
The journey from Hephaeros was not pleasant, even by the standards of the Eye. The Katabasis took the Sundered Crown into the most dangerous section of the Great Eye, and the Salamanders were kept busy fighting off daemonic incursions and waves of spreading madness and mutation among the crew. The most dangerous such event was the manifestation of a Keeper of Secrets in the lower decks. Tu'Shan had to descend there himself, accompanied by his personal guard, in order to banish the Greater Daemon with Stormbearer and slaughter its followers to the last, purging the entire deck with fire to make sure none of the Slaaneshi corruption remained.
Finally, the Sundered Crown reached Uralan, breaking out of the storms and into a pocket of relative calm centered around the daemon world. The Katabasis directed the ship toward a position in orbit, while Tu'Shan gave orders to his warband to prepare. Before they could get close to the planet, however, the Firetide struck the daemonworld in a torrent of divine golden flames the size of a solar flare.
The Firetide
On Holy Terra stands the Astronomican, radiating the psychic radiance of the God-Emperor, fuelled by the daily sacrifice of hundreds of psykers. This psychic beacon illuminates the darkness of the Warp, giving the Navigators of the Imperium a point of reference they can use to sail the tides of the Empyrean, as well as lighting the paths between star systems they can direct their ships upon.
In the Eye of Terror, the Astronomican's light takes another form. By the nature of the Great Eye, the Materium and Immaterium melt into one another into a state that is neither one or the other – which is the reason why the ships of the Lost and the Damned rarely need to make use of their Warp engines, though Geller Fields are still very much necessary to survive. Due to this, the Astronomican's psychic radiance meeting the borders of the Eye of Terror results in something called the Firetide : a psychic fire that scours entire daemon worlds clean of life to the cellular level, as it is imbued with energies utterly anathema to anything touched by Chaos – which, in the Eye, translates to almost everything.
Some regions of the Eye are permanently bathed in the Firetide. They are named the Radiant Worlds, and the followers of Chaos avoid them at any cost – not that they could easily get to them in the first place. There, the Dark Gods endlessly fight back against the Emperor's intrusion into their domain, resulting in endless wars between legions of daemons and divine spirits of fire, wrath and order, given shape by the prayers of the Imperium's faithful. Some of the most fanatical devotees of the Ruinous Powers seek to go the Radiant Worlds in order to join these battles, but they rarely manage it, and even those who do fail to make any difference : what occurs on the Radiant Worlds has less in common with war and more with the sea meeting land and creating foam.
The Firetide cannot reach deep within the Eye of Terror, but it regularly strikes at its outside regions in random bursts of psychic fire. It is believed by some scholars of the forbidden that what remains of the False Emperor's consciousness can direct such gouts of psychic energy in vain attempts to strike at the domain of those who killed Him, but there's only circumstantial evidence for this theory.
The Firetide struck Uralan, bathing an area thousands of kilometers wide in golden fire before fading. The amount of psychic energy involved should have been enough to obliterate the planet, but Uralan was protected by the will of the Ruinous Powers. Even so, the scorch marks could be seen from millions of kilometers away.
Had the Sundered Crown arrived to Uralan but moments earlier, it would have been caught in the full strength of the Firetide. Not even the ancient warship would have survived such an attack : it would have been melted into slag, and the souls of everyone aboard incinerated into oblivion. Suddenly, the attack by the Keeper of Secrets, which had slowed the warband until Tu'Shan had dealt with it, could be seen in a very different light.
Even then, the battleship was close enough to feel the Firetide's effects. Burnt scales fell off the hull, revealing pulsating flesh. Reinforced windows of plexiglass were melted, letting in the tainted void. A secondary ammunition depot detonated on the left side of the ship, and sorcerous wards all over the Sundered Crown had been broken or disturbed. It took several hours of feverish activity before the resulting crises were dealt with, and by that point Tu'Shan's patience was wearing thin.
At the Chaos Lord's command, auspexes that had been reinforced to function in the Eye were aimed at the planet. They quickly found the warband's target : there was only one structure on the entire daemon world, though its exact dimensions baffled even the infernal cogitators of the Sundered Crown. The Tower of Silence was also right in the middle of where the Firetide had struck, surrounded by scorched earth but seemingly untouched by the god-like power that had been unleashed upon Uralan.
And when the Firetide had abated, like seashells deposed on the sand by a retreating wave, it had left behind a host of warriors who burned with divine fire. Aboard the Sundered Crown, wyrds began to scream, rambling about the graves of unsung heroes and weeping under a crushing weight of regret and guilt – emotions that, as one would expect, were almost unheard of aboard a vessel of the Eighteenth Legion.
The Legion of the Damned had come to Uralan.
The warrior who had once been Ragthor Sphek of the Seventh Great Company looked up at the heavens. Like many worlds in the Eye of Terror, Uralan didn't have a sun. Instead, it was lit by the false-light of the Sea of Souls, with neither light or day. Here, at the edge of the Eye, to gaze at such a sky would drive a human mad within minutes, but Ragthor had long since moved beyond such things.
He saw the shape of the enemy ship approaching, a dark shadow against the baleful radiance of the Eye. He lowered his gaze, and took in his surroundings. The Tower of Silence loomed on the horizon, its immense presence pressing against his soul with the weight of the secrets and horrors it contained. Beneath his feet, past the scorched earth, he could feel the guardians of this awful place coming up.
Around him, his brothers in life and death were preparing, hosting bolters that fired ectoplasmic shells and blades wreathed in spectral fire. And there, among them, the figure of their champion, taller than all of them in his ancient Terminator warplate, wielding a scythe engraved with sigils of banishment and condemnation. For him to have been sent here showed how important their mission here was. The sons of Vulkan had to be stopped. They couldn't be allowed to claim what waited in the Tower. Ragthor didn't know how he knew this, only that it was true.
So much had changed. He could hear the prayers of the faithful, coursing through his body in lieu of blood. For thousands of years, the iconography of death and fire had been used by the Ecclesiarchy as symbols of the Emperor's wrath, with the Space Marines regarded as avatars of His might and protection. Perhaps in another time, the imagery of angels would have been embraced instead – but with the fall of the First and Ninth Legions, such icons had become sources of horror and corruption, and been mercilessly eradicated by the Inquisition.
Ragthor and his comrades were the manifestations of these prayers, the psychic echoes of a trillion souls accreted around the spirits of warriors who had seen and done too much, and sought a way to serve without having to drown themselves in innocent blood to prevent greater evils. And for their service, they had been rewarded with an answer to their own, silent prayers.
For this battle, like all the battles he had taken part in since his rebirth in death, would be a good battle. There were no innocents here that might be hurt, and all other forces were evil beyond question. There was no dilemma here, no crisis of conscience. No piled bodies of children, killed because of the nameless things growing inside their flesh, waiting to be born and spread across the cosmos.
To Ragthor, this was paradise.
Although they were little more than a legend in the Imperium, the Legion of the Damned was not unknown to the Salamanders. Many times, the mysterious fire-wreathed, skull-faced Astartes had appeared to thwart the Eighteenth Legion's attacks on Imperial worlds, holding them back long enough for Imperial reinforcements to arrive or coming to the rescue of Imperial citizens fleeing from the Salamanders' slaver gangs. Tales of their interference had been swapped between warbands, and though Tu'Shan's had never encountered them, these tales were enough to recognize the forces that had appeared on Uralan.
Despite the grandiose manner of their arrival, there weren't all that many Damned Legionnaires near the Tower of Silence. Auspex returns (which, admittedly, weren't that trustworthy in the Eye at the best of time, let alone after so many sensors had been fried by the Firetide) showed between five hundred and a thousand enemy Damned Legionnaires on the surface. Orbital bombardment was off the table : besides the unreliability of such methods against daemon worlds, Tu'Shan didn't want to risk damaging the Tower and the prize within, unlikely as that was. Instead, the Cruel directed his forces to make a landing beyond the immediate surroundings of the Tower of Silence, securing a staging ground from which they could march toward the Tower.
He told his men there was no need to rush : the Legion of the Damned had its own concerns to attend to. From the moment the Firetide had faded, the Damned Legionnaires had been under attack by Uralan's denizens. The Salamanders would have to fight them as well in order to get to the Tower : they might as well let their enemies weaken each other first before joining the fray and crushing them both. Bulk transports filled to the brim with mortal soldiers began to descend, while gunships carried the Salamanders themselves to the surface.
Meanwhile, the Legion of the Damned advanced on the Tower of Silence, fighting its defenders with every step. The daemons guarding the Tower were unlike any others, for the Dark Gods would not trust its defense to any of their or their rivals' servants. Instead, in a rare act of collaboration, the Ruinous Powers had drawn upon the metaphysical weight of the Tower itself to create elemental spirits from the stuff of Uralan itself, drawing sustenance from what laid within and dedicated to protecting it both because of their makers' command and because, without the Tower's power, they would fade away into nothingness. They were simple, bestial creatures, lacking the cunning necessary to consider claiming the contents of the Tower for themselves.
Figures of ice, crystal, fire and earth erupted from the ground in their thousands, surrounding the Legion of the Damned on all sides. The Firetide had sent them into disarray, but they had recovered quickly. Yet the guns of the Damned Legionnaires were imbued with the very radiance of the Firetide, perhaps owing to their method of transportation, and they cut the daemons down by the hundred, continuing their slow but methodical advance without being bogged down.
The Damned Legionnaires fought for hours, led by a reaper armored in Terminator armor, until at last they reached the gates of the Tower of Silence. The gates were closed, and would not open for the servants of the Emperor, be they living or dead; but the Legionnaires didn't seek entry. Instead, they began to secure defensive positions before the gates, preparing to hold them against a foe far more dangerous than the elemental daemons that even now continued to hurl themselves at them.
On the bridge of the Sundered Crown, Tu'Shan saw all of this unfold, and gritted his teeth. The Chaos Lord had underestimated the strength of the Legion of the Damned, and now his path to the Tower of Silence was blocked by a foe far more formidable than the infernal denizens of Uralan. Already his forces planetside were under attack by yet more of the elemental spirits, who made no distinction between the Legionnaires and the Salamanders and their slaves, regarding all as intruders to be killed.
Still, Tu'Shan was confident. He had fought other Astartes many times before, and though the Legion of the Damned possessed strange, eldritch capabilities, the Salamander Lord was used to battles against foes blessed with unknown powers. The gifts the Dark Gods bestowed upon their servants in the Eye of Terror were, after all, infinitely varied.
Like most Salamanders warbands, Tu'Shan's forces were mostly composed of human and mutant soldiers. Over the centuries of his life, the Cruel had gathered a motley collection of mortal troops, from renegade Imperial Guard Regiments to tribes of reptilian beastmen and mutant hordes. They were equipped with gear mass-produced in the foundries of Hephaeros, which was tough, ugly and deadly, as with most things to ever come off that daemon world. As his army reached the base of the Tower, Tu'Shan gave the order for these lost souls to charge the defensive positions of the Legion of the Damned, throwing thousands of bodies at the crude but effective earthworks the Legionnaires had erected in the past few hours, while under near-constant assault by the Uralan daemons.
Soon, the ground was soaked in gore, as the Damned Legionnaires unleashed volley after volley of spectral shells into the packed ranks of the Salamanders' bolter fodder. From afar, the Chaos Sorcerer Hazon Da'kir drew upon the blood spilled to summon daemons of Khorne and Tzeentch. Through sheer will, the Sorcerer was able to direct these Neverborn against the Damned Legionnaires, though the daemons were already inclined to do so in the first place, their infernal spirits burning with hatred for everything the Legion of the Damned represented.
These daemonic reinforcements were enough for the mortal followers of Tu'Shan to finally reach the defensive lines of the Damned Legionnaires. Facing the spectral Astartes in close quarters after hours of forced march, the bloody assault on their position, the constant harassment by the Uralan daemons and the horror inherent in fighting alongside the Neverborn summoned by their overlords would have been enough to break the morale of most armies. But the Salamanders' slave troops had long since been broken to the will of their masters, and feared incurring their wrath far more than they feared death on the field. They hurled themselves at the Damned Legionnaires, knowing that their only hope of survival laid in victory, however unlikely and costly it might be.
The Legion of the Damned suffered almost no casualties in that first stage of the battle. A few powerful or lucky individuals among the Chaos horde managed to take a handful of Legionnaires down, their corporeal form dissolving and their spirit returning to the Aether in a burst of bright light. But each Legionnaire had a kill rate in the hundreds, and their armor was proof against most of the mortals' weapons and Neverborn claws.
But all of this was as Tu'Shan had planned. Having confirmed that the Legion of the Damned was now locked in place, the Cruel made his next move.
The lair of K'gosi had once served as one of the Sundered Crown's landing bay, hosting gunships and tanks along with a small army of servitors and hereteks to maintain and repair them. Now, it was full of the riches the Dragon Warrior had accumulated throughout his millennia of service to the warship's commander – whoever this was at the time. Tu'Shan didn't know how one of the oldest and mightiest Dragon Warriors of the Eighteenth Legion, one who had fought in the Great Crusade as one of the Lords of the Legion, had come to lair within the ship, only that he had inherited the pact with K'gosi when he had killed and replaced his former master.
Silver, gold and platinum coins clinked under the Chaos Lord's armored feet as he walked through the lair, surrounded by mountains of more precious metals. Priceless weapons and armors were scattered amidst the treasure trove, along with pieces of technology the Dark Mechanicum would, and had, killed for. Yet Tu'Shan barely paid any attention to the fortunes around him, focused instead on the owner of the room, which was descending toward him, slowly climbing down the greatest pile of loot, sending waves of coinage flowing with every ponderous step.
K'gosi as tall as a Warhound Titan on all fours, with jaws that could swallow a Terminator whole. Yet after standing in the presence of Vulkan himself, Tu'Shan found to his middling surprise that he wasn't that impressed.
"Little brother," said the Dragon Warrior in a deep, rumbling voice.
"K'gosi," answered Tu'Shan with a slight nod – the greatest courtesy he would show anyone not his Primarch. "I require your assistance once more."
"And what payment do you offer, little brother ? I see no coffers of gold behind you, no precious items. Not even slaves to slake my hunger."
"I offer you nothing," replied Tu'Shan.
"Nothing ? Nothing !? Who do you think you are talking to, little brother ?!"
"I am," Tu'Shan said calmly, "talking to someone who will be glad to assist me in doing Vulkan's will."
There was a moment of silence. K'gosi lived isolated from the rest of the warband : there were a few Salamanders who were brave or foolish enough to visit him, bringing him tribute in exchange for his knowledge of the Legion's past. But Tu'Shan kept an eye on these visits, and he knew none had occurred since they had left Hephaeros, so the Dragon Warrior hadn't known about the purpose of their journey.
Still, K'gosi knew Tu'Shan wasn't stupid enough to lie about such a thing. The Dragon Warrior growled, before spreading his wings wide and throwing his head back. His roar made the entire deck quake, and was the signal to open the bay to the void, that K'gosi might depart.
K'gosi flew out of the Sundered Crown, passing through the void and into Uralan's upper atmosphere without trouble – physics had little to do with a Dragon Warrior's ability to fly. He descended towards the Tower of Silence, while Tu'Shan left the bay and hurried to another one, where his elite guard awaited him for the Chaos Lord's own descent to the surface.
The ground shook and the air shimmered with heat as the Dragon Warrior took to the field. Both mortal soldiers and Damned Legionnaires were bathed by his fiery breath, the monstrous Salamander caring nothing for his supposed allies. The spectral flames surrounding the Damned Legionnaires granted them some protection against the breath of Vulkan's spawn, but that protection was far from perfect. They fired back at the Dragon Warrior, their aim good enough to hit a target moving at such speed even through the heat-distorted air, but K'gosi's scaled hide turned aside every shot.
K'gosi might well have slaughtered the entire force of Damned Legionnaires single-handedly, if not for their leader. The scythe-wielding giant raised an armored palm toward the Dragon Warrior and let loose a bolt of white lightning that struck the beast in his chest. The attack wasn't enough to slay K'gosi, but it did successfully bring him down : the Dragon Warrior crashed onto the ground, sending corpses and Legionnaires flying. Arcs of sorcerous energy coursed through his body, preventing him from taking flight once more, but in truth, K'gosi was too enraged to think of fleeing. Instead, he sought the warrior who had dared bring him low, and found him soon, for the Damned Legionnaire was walking straight for the fallen dragon.
In a mirror of another battle that had occurred thousands of years ago on the world of Pandorax, a reaper came to make battle against a black dragon. Both protagonists of that confrontation of legend were far from here, one dwelling in his fiery lair and the other amidst cold stones, but their transformed sons were determined to repeat that ancient performance. Amidst the Salamanders lines, the Sorcerer Da'kir saw this unfold, and felt something akin to dread.
By all rights, the battle that ensued should have ended in seconds, with K'gosi crushing the enemy leader in his jaws, ripping him asunder with his claws, or incinerating him with his breath. But the spectral Astartes had been powerful in life, and now wielded freely the gifts he had suppressed during his mortal existence out of fear of corruption. That fear was gone now, empowered as he was by the Firetide and the other power that inhabited the Legion of the Damned. The flames of K'gosi couldn't touch him, and he moved with impossible speed, avoiding the Dragon Warrior's blows while his own tore through black scales and spilled torrents of mutated blood that the earth of Uralan drank up greedily.
Even so, the reaper was not left unscathed. Even a glancing blow from K'gosi could rend his armor, and though the Damned Legionnaires didn't bleed, they could still suffer from accumulated wounds. By the time the reaper buried the blade of scythe completely into the skull of K'gosi, unleashing a psychic burst that destroyed the Dragon Warrior's brain and finally killed him, his armor was in ruin, leaking ectoplasm from more than a score of wounds. Even so, the sight of the mighty beast slain struck the final blow to the mortal slaves of the Salamanders. They still didn't retreat, but they became easy prey for the remaining Damned Legionnaires, who swiftly dispatched the last of them.
Only a third of the Damned Legionnaires remained standing before the gates of the Tower of Silence. Even the daemons had retreated from the fiery cataclysm. Nodding in satisfaction – the death of K'gosi was well worth the damage he had inflicted upon their foes, and now all the treasures of the Dragon Warrior were his to claim – the Chaos Lord gave the order for his elite forces to advance, leading the charge in person. Among the Salamanders, like among all Traitor Legions – and, it must be said, most of the Loyalist ones as well – a leader who doesn't fight on the frontlines couldn't hope to keep the respect of his men.
The Followers of the Dragon
Inferno Guards
The Salamanders Legion is well-known for the ambition and greed of its members, as well as their complete lack of conscience and loyalty. Even Vulkan only rules through absolute power, knowing that any of his sons would betray him if they thought they could replace him. This is an inevitable consequence of the dark philosophy of 'might makes right' and the pursuit of absolute power the Eighteenth Legion has embraced, but it poses a quandary to the lords of the Legion. Since the first empires of Humanity, tyrants have often been overthrown by their own bodyguards turning against them, so how can the Salamander Lords avoid the same fate ? The answer is the Inferno Guard.
As is the case in most Legions, both loyalist and traitor, the personal guard of a leader is composed of Terminators, tasked with keeping their master alive at the cost of their own life if need be. In the case of the Inferno Guard, however, such purpose is enforced not through duty and loyalty, but sorcery. The soul of each member of the Inferno Guard is bound to the life of his ward by powerful rituals performed in Hephaeros by a reclusive cult of the Black Dragon. They are rendered unable of treachery and disobedience, and should their master ever perish, their souls shall be torn from their bodies and hurled into the ever-burning pit that serves as the cult's sacred ground and ritual location.
Most members of the Inferno Guard are forced into the role, having earned the ire of their master for some failure or attempted treachery. But a few through the ages have volunteered for it, seeing it as a quick shortcut to power and prestige and binding themselves to masters whom they believe will rise far in the Legion. The one way out of the Inferno Guard, after all, is for the master to ascend to daemonhood, a process which flows through the bonds of the Guard and results in them being similarly elevated, becoming immortal servants of the new Daemon Prince. The process of soul-binding also grants the Inferno Guards pyrokinetic abilities, making them even more dangerous in battle and letting them perceive heat even without the use of their wargear's sensor, the better to detect any and all threats to their ward.
Inferno Guards possess all the strength one might expect of a Terminator, and all of them have their armor further enhanced by the best smiths and hereteks their master has access to – and considering the reputation of the Eighteenth Legion, those are some of the greatest in the Eye of Terror. The few suits of Inferno Guard battleplate that have escaped the possession of the Salamanders have been known to trigger wars between warbands of other Legions, as these suits grant all the resilience of a Dreadnought with only a slight decrease in mobility compared to Terminator armor – and, more importantly, without the need to be entombed into a life-sustaining sarcophagus for the rest of eternity.
Pactwraiths
There are few things among the Salamanders that can earn prestige like the recovery of a piece of the Legacy of the Dragon, these relics crafted by their gene-sire before his ascension that are scattered across the galaxy. In the hunt for these priceless, cursed artefacts, one Forgefather uncovered a piece of jewellery fashioned by Vulkan that had transformed its wielder into a wraith, bound to the Materium only by the artefact's power, their soul hollowed by the relic's power until they were nothing more than a conduct for Vulkan's will. The Forgefather knew better than to try and claim the relic for himself, as doing so would disturb whatever plan the Black Dragon had for his undying minion, but the encounter left its mark upon him, and when he returned to Hephaeros, he attempted to make his own, lesser version of the artefact. His initial successes led to trading his secrets to other Forgefathers and Chaos Sorcerers of the proper inclination, and so the use of Pactwraiths spread through the Legion.
Pactwraiths are created by binding the soul of a mortal subject (voluntary or not) to a prepared artefact, which must then remain in the subject's possession. Often, the Salamander will claim that this will make the subject immortal, and that is technically true, but its is a false immortality, as the body of the wearer will decay at an accelerated rate – though without diminishing physical abilities, and instead enhancing them instead – until it disappears completely and all that remains is a specter animating a cloak or suit of armor, depending on the Pactwraith. The psychological impact of the transformation is even more severe, as Pactwraiths lose all empathy, compassion and love, replaced by an eternal loyalty to their artefact's maker. The hollowing of their soul also renders them immune to psychic manipulation, and daemons recoil from their presence in abject disgust – before trying to destroy them.
Pactwraiths retain the skills and abilities they had in life. They are used as messengers, assassins, bodyguards, but also for more mundane uses such as political and strategic advice as well as assistance in crafting the terrible weapons of war for which the Salamanders are justly feared. It is said that He'stan, greatest of the Forgefathers, keeps an entire collection of Pactwraiths taken from among the best craftsmen in the galaxy, including Eldar smiths, Tau Earth Cast members, and even Ork Mekboyz.
The creation of a Pactwraith's binding artefact requires considerable effort and resources from its maker, which is why the Salamanders haven't conquered the galaxy at the head of a legion of undying minions. Upon the death of his master, the relic of a Pactwraith will crumble and his corpus will disintegrate, before his spirit is dragged to Hephaeros, where it will remain without form and power, condemned to suffer in the spiritual flames of the daemon world. It is possible for such a lost creature to be returned to material existence only if another anchor is crafted by a Salamander who wishes to make uses of the Pactwraith's skills.
Despite millennia of work by Forgefathers and Sorcerers, Pactwraiths remain pale imitation of Vulkan's own craft. Before his destruction at Prospero, Aghastri the Necromancer was one such entity, and his power was great enough he was able to challenge the Heralds of Prospero on equal ground. Though the Imperium won a great victory when Khayon the Black destroyed Aghastri's cursed ring and banished his spirit, there are other such beings lurking in the galaxy's shadows, wielding items imbued with the symbology of submission and surrender to the Black Dragon, each pursuing sinister goals in the name of Vulkan. Rumors among the Eighteenth Legion even speak of Pactwraiths created not from mortal souls, but Space Marines – who may not even have been Salamanders in life …
Fellfire Fiends
When the Salamanders came to Hephaeros, the daemon world was already inhabited. According to their own oral histories, the Fellfire Fiends rose from Hephaeros' lava flows in the time between the birth of the Youngest God and the fall of Guilliman at Terra. Born of the myths of fire spirits that exist among almost every culture that mastered fire, their first act was to wipe out the corrupted Eldars who had survived the rise of Slaanesh by dedicating themselves to the Dark Prince. Their genocide complete, they ruled Hephaeros unopposed, until the arrival of the Salamanders.
Though the Fellfire Fiends submitted to Vulkan, and indeed were among the firsts to worship him as a god, they didn't recognize the Salamanders' authority, and a new war was waged upon Hephaeros. The Black Dragon didn't deign to intervene : perhaps he was still recovering from his banishment at Pandorax, or perhaps he saw this conflict at the correct way to resolve things according to his dark philosophy.
One Fiend could fight and kill an entire squad of Salamanders, and there were thousands of them scattered across Hephaeros. But because of their innate potency, they hadn't developed weapons, and their infernal heritage made them unable to work together. Ultimately, they proved no match for the tanks and arsenal of the Chaos Marines. Most of the surviving Fellfire Fiends were forced into servitude, and used as living weapons by the Salamanders in the Legion Wars, while others retreated to the fringes of the dreadful civilization the Salamanders built on their new homeworld.
Though they are undeniably daemonic in origin and aspect, Fellfire Fiends aren't true Neverborn. They possess material bodies of their own, and have a reproduction cycle whose details they have ferociously kept from all outsiders. Only adult, full-grown Fiends have ever been observed on Hephaeros or elsewhere, and they are an imposing sight indeed. They are humanoids over five meters in heights, their bodies covered in a thick hide and without any apparent sexual characteristics. Their heads are perpetually wreathed in flame due to their fiery breath, and sport ram-like horns that are charred black and sharp enough to pierce through ceramite.
Fellfire Fiends are master pyrokinetics, capable of conjuring armaments made of the same sorcerous fire that burns within their breast. Those who leave Hephaeros as part of a Salamander warband have either been persuaded to join at great cost, or been defeated in battle and given a choice between servitude and death. Regarding themselves as superior to all other forms of life, their arrogance is tempered only by the knowledge of their defeat by the Salamanders, and the memory of it is a festering wound to their pride, further inflamed as their worship of the Black Dragon warps them even further. It isn't uncommon for Chaos Lords employing them to have custom armor and weapons commissioned for them, either as payment for their service or to make them even more deadly on the battlefield.
Dragon Mortars
The dreadful arsenals of the Salamanders are justly feared across the Imperium, for the sons of Vulkan are as ingenious in designing armaments as they are devoid of conscience, a combination that has ever produced fearsome weapons for Mankind's use. During the Great Crusade, the Salamanders were willing to use many weapons the Emperor had restricted – and, after their betrayal at Isstvan V, others that He had outright forbidden. After their exile into the Eye of Terror, the Forgefathers continued to pursue their blasphemous craft, building instruments of death and ruin capable of laying waste to entire worlds. However, since the Salamanders desire conquest and plunder, these doomsday weapons are seldom used.
The warmachines known as Dragon Mortars, then, are something of an unholy compromise between destructive power and usefulness in raids and invasions. On the surface, they resembled long-range artillery pieces on tracks, whose firing tube is more often than not shaped in the semblance of a dragon. They are capable of hurling shells across battlefields and over hive walls with pin-point accuracy. But it is no mere explosives they send, but the foulest creations of the Forgefathers.
Ever-burning phosphex infused with the soul-consuming fires of Hephaeros; vortex bombs that leave permanent scars in the fabric of reality; soul-flaying shrieks that slay all living but leave buildings standing : there is no end to the panoply of horrors a Dragon Mortar might unleash, each shell a darkly unique masterwork of Infernal Technology. Furthermore, within the metal of each shell fired by Dragon Mortars is bound a Neverborn spawned in the forges of Hephaeros, created from the fires of the daemon world and the dreams of destruction of the shell's maker and his thralls. Imbued as they are with the terror of the uncounted millions who have perished to artillery throughout Mankind's history, shots from a Dragon Mortar pass through void-shields and are immune to all anti-artillery measures.
Due to this, the shells are too dangerous to be stored anywhere but under the most potent of seals. Merely being in their presence for more than a few minutes tends to drive mortals mad, willing to do anything to unleash the terrible death contained within the shell. Not even Salamanders are immune to this effect, though they can resist it longer. To bypass this, the Dragon Mortars each carry their own deadly cargo within a hold where the laws of space are warped in order to contain their entire reserve of shells, each dragged from that nightmarish realm and loaded into the Mortar's gun before firing through a process as ritualized as any of the Martian tech-priests' ceremonies. Dragon Mortars are piloted by Salamanders selected among those with the strongest will and trained in their use, but even they are eventually changed by the duty. It is common for a pilot to be physically merged with his engine after years in the Eye, resulting in blasphemous unions of flesh, metal and daemon that exist only to inflict destruction upon the universe.
Echidnian Tyrants
When the Legion structure of the Salamanders fell apart after the Heresy, most of those who had been trained as Apothecaries abandoned their duties, seeing no personal gain in helping their brothers survive. Some of them, however, became fascinated with the strange biology of the Eye's denizens, and sought to harness it for use in war. Or at least that is the reason they gave : in truth, they sought to indulge in the lust for domination that festered within their heart, fuelled further by their gene-sire's ascension to daemonhood. They began with the beasts of Hephaeros, studying captured specimens and developing methods of control involving pain, drugs, and crude cybernetics. Once these methods were perfected, they turned to breeding their beasts in order to produce the strongest ones possible, travelling across the Eye of Terror for stranger and more potent individuals to use. Through selective breeding, gene-splicing, and their own desires influencing the Warp into twisting their creations in accord with their vision, they created breeds of bestial abominations that rival any of the Dark Gods' own monstrous spawns.
For this, and for the callous cruelty with which they treat their creations, these corrupt Apothecaries were named the Echidnian Tyrants. Each works alone, with a staff of mutated assistants who more often than not end up devoured by the menagerie of beasts their master keeps. Competition between Tyrants to create and control the most terrible beasts is fierce, and they are willing to lend their craft and creations to Chaos Lords of their Legion (and even others) in exchange for fresh material and the opportunity to test their creations on the field of battle. It is considered a sign of prestige among the Salamander Lords to keep a Tyrant on retainer, and the might of their creations reflect on both Tyrant and sponsor.
An Echidnian Tyrant will go into battle surrounded by a selection of his finest beasts, while often letting loose a horde of failed experiments to soften up the enemy and see if there's anything worth recycling in the batch. To face a Tyrant's menagerie is to face a collection of disparate horrors united only by their lethality and hatred of all living things, their master and themselves included. The Tyrants themselves are as capable fighters as any Chaos Marine, and carry a collection of wicked devices to protect themselves from their own creations that can stun, torment, or kill with a touch.
Still, for all the many horrors they have created, in the eyes of Fabius Bile, founder of the Black Legion and Pater Mutatis to countless monsters, the Echidnian Tyrants are petty flesh-wrights lacking visions, who waste their skills tinkering with beasts. Meanwhile, the Apothecaries of the Raven Guard gently laugh at their cousins' best efforts while making walking nightmares capable of ravaging entire worlds out of men. The Tyrants know this, and burn with envy, knowing that they are inferior to both despite all their protests to the contrary.
The Chosen of Prometheus
The pursuit of immortality is not limited to the human followers of the Black Dragon. The Salamanders do not exactly fear death : that capacity was removed from them, as it is from every Space Marine who ever swore his loyalty to the Golden Throne. But they fear failure, and to perish with their ambitions unfulfilled and greatness unrecognised is among the greatest possible failures. As a result, the Salamander Sorcerers delved into the lore of resurrection, developing the rituals that later formed the foundation of the Draconite faction of renegade Inquisitors. However, the very strength of a Salamander's soul makes it a beacon to the daemons of Chaos upon death : it is therefore rare for the resurrection rituals to work on the Legion that designed them, as by the time they are ready, the soul has often already been devoured.
Due to this, when a Salamander dies, his body is usually looted of everything valuable by his battle-brothers, and then given to the hereteks of the Promethean Conclave to recycle its gene-seed in order to create new warriors. Some Salamanders, however, achieve a level of infamy that forces even their proud brothers to give them respect, and earn a more dignified treatment. Their bodies are returned to Hephaeros, and brought to one of the great volcanoes of the daemonworld, covered only in a black cloak made from the scales shed by the Great Drakes slumbering in Hephaeros' moon-temples.
After a ceremony inspired from the funeral rites of long-lost Nocturne, the body is placed upon a metal bier crafted specially for the occasion and lowered into the lava, which consumes it completely. In nine cases out of ten, this is the end of the warrior's saga, his flesh devoured by the fiery homeland of the Salamanders. But every so often, the warrior is instead resurrected. These chosen souls awaken on the ashen surface of Hephaeros, recalling only the faintest suggestions of the time between their death and resurrection.
Named the Chosen of Prometheus after the moon that brought destruction and renewal to Nocturne, these warriors are now Secondborn, sharing their soul with daemons said to be spawned from the dreams of Vulkan himself. Among the Salamanders, daemonic possession is regarded as a sign of weakness – though many still embrace that path in order to survive – but the Chosen of Prometheus are granted some prestige by the nature of their daemonic cohorts. Even so, they are barred from holding leadership positions over any but each other and mortal slaves by decree of Vulkan himself, for reasons the Black Dragon has never explained, nor ever been asked to. Instead, they sell their services to other Chaos Lords, lending their knowledge and might in return for tribute.
Chosen of Prometheus travel in packs, each member a veteran of thousands of battles who managed to earn the honor of being brought back to Hephaeros after death. In battle, their bodies transform into terrifying Astartes-dragon hybrids, combining their prodigious martial skill with infernal potency to devastating effect. In this form, the bestial side of their nature is heightened, leading them to feast upon the flesh of their foes mid-battle – often not caring whether they are still alive as they bite down.
As the Salamanders approached the Tower of Silence, a great number of elemental daemons converged on the battle in a tide that nearly covered the horizon. If they reached the battle, both sides would be overwhelmed and slaughtered – an outcome the Damned Legionnaires were perfectly fine with, so long as the Salamanders were kept from fulfilling their task. But Tu'Shan had foreseen this possibility, and at his command the four Dragon Mortars of his warband fired in all directions others than the Tower, inflicting upon Uralan wounds that ran even deeper than the burn the Firetide had left.
At considerable expense, the Cruel had been able to secure the services of four of these apocalyptic weapons, each of which was capable of forcing the surrender of entire hive-cities with only a handful of shots and the threat of more. Using them on empty ground went against the burning desire for slaughter that inhabited their pilots, but Tu'Shan's will was strong enough to force them to obey. Each Mortar fired a shell loaded with a different kind of apocalypse.
When the detonations ceased and the ground stopped shaking in agony, the battlefield was surrounded by unimaginable devastation. The daemons of Uralan were stuck on the other side, even their bestial consciousness hesitant to enter the ruination unleashed by the Dragon Mortars. Those few too consumed by bloodlust threw themselves into the death zones and were annihilated in seconds. In one move, Tu'Shan, who didn't want to risk using the Dragon Mortars close to the Tower of Silence, had isolated the battlefield and left nowhere to run for his foes, not that he expected the Legion of the Damned to break.
The Salamanders' assault on the Legion of the Damned's smouldering defensive position was made of three distinct groups, attacking in a three-pronged formation. On the left flank charged the handful of Fellfire Fiends Tu'Shan had spent the better part of a year tracking and battling into submission with Stormbearer. The great monsters matched their own infernal fire against the Legionnaires' eldritch flames, while three packs of Chosen of Prometheus, who had joined Tu'Shan's warband on Hephaeros without asking for tribute after his meeting with Vulkan, followed in the Fiends' wake.
The Damned Legionnaires focused their fire on the Fellfire Fiends, but the wrought armor Tu'Shan had purchased for them at the cost of thousands of slaves repelled most of their fire, while the Chosen advanced behind them, using the larger creatures as cover. As they charged into the heat of battle, the bodies of the Chosen shifted to assume their war-shape. Their helmeted skulls warped into draconic visages, the ceramite of their armor split into black scales, and their limbs twisted into reptilian claws fused to their weapons or holding balls of warp-fire.
On the right, the Echidnian Tyrant Harath Shen unleashed his menagerie. Monstrosities that could only be born in heretical laboratories rushed along with abominations that could only survive within the Eye of Terror in a parade of horrors. Harath Shen's experiments ranged far and wide : some of his beasts resembled enormous arachnids with reptilian scales, others feathered mammals with the jaws of wolves, and others, less recognizable combinations of genetic slicing and grafted mutations. Electrical collars around their necks and other remote shock devices implanted in the flesh of these living blasphemies allowed Shen to control them and direct them at the Legion of the Damned.
Moving with unity born of countless years of fighting together, the Damned Legionnaires opened fire on the tide of warped flesh rushing toward them. The beasts moved with preternatural speed, and despite the heavy casualties they suffered, they quickly reached the lines of the Legion of the Damned, leaping the final meters and crashing into the spectral warriors.
Not even the post potent of Eye-born venoms had any effect on the eldritch physiology of the Damned Legionnaires, who were more memories than flesh, given form by the psyche of the Fourteenth Legion and the power of the Astronomican. And terror, the other main weapon of an Echidnian Tyrant's creations, similarly didn't affect them. Drawing blades, the Legionnaires cleaved through the beasts.
Shen's experiments didn't fight alone, however. Tu'Shan had deployed the Chaos Sorcerer Hazon Da'kir on the same front, along with his entourage of enslaved Pactwraiths. During his centuries of service to Tu'Shan, Da'kir had bound many of the strongest mortal warriors they had encountered to his will, spending considerable time within his chambers creating more cursed items to bestow upon worthy souls. All that time, Da'kir had pretended not to know Tu'Shan had orchestrated the destruction of several of his Pactwraiths in the past, as well as sabotaged his efforts to create more of the artefacts required for their creation. Meanwhile, Tu'Shan had pretended not to be aware Da'kir intended to overthrow him with the help of his undying slaves.
Despite the discreet sabotage of his own warlord, Da'kir had amassed a formidable force of Pactwraiths, matched by few other Chaos Sorcerers of the Eighteenth Legion. Former tribal champions fought alongside accursed Traitor Guardsmen and exiled Disciples of the Dragon, all that they were burned away by the artefacts they bore until all that remained was their skill in battle. They arrived behind the beasts, Da'kir himself striding alongside Shen, who was taking notes on his creations' performance even as he fired at the Damned Legionnaires, dictating his observations to a servitor trudging behind him. The Pactwraiths moved together, striking at the Damned Legionnaires who had been separated by the beasts' onslaught like packs of wolves bringing down bears. Their weaponry was infused by the same sorcery that anchored their undying existence, and they bit into the fire burning within the Damned Legionnaires' breast with cold, ruthless hunger.
Finally, the central front was occupied by the warband's core of Chaos Marines, led by their Chaos Lord. At Tu'Shan's side were his Inferno Guards, and in his hands was Stormbearer, whose terrible might the Cruel unleashed in great bolts of lightning and fire, every attack a battle of will against the weapon's own bitter, vengeful spirit. The essence of the Great Drake Tu'Shan had slain empowered the warhammer, but some of its awareness lingered within it as well, full of hatred for the one who had murdered it and forever trying to destroy him in turn.
The Inferno Guards walked alongside their lord like a walking wall, their armor proof against every gun in the Legion of the Damned's arsenal. They fired back with heavy bolters loaded with armor-penetrating rounds, each of which had been engraved with Nocturnian curses. Damned Legionnaires fell, their warplate punctured and the complex lattices of energy animating them disrupted by the fell alchemy contained within the Inferno Guards' ammunition.
The three hosts slammed into the Legion of the Damned's defenses, and the battle of the Tower of Silence began in earnest. Within moments, the lines of battle dissolved into a giant melee, the Damned Legionnaires unable to hold their ground against the enemy's superior numbers after the casualties they had taken from the Dragon Warrior's attack. Tu'Shan kept going forward, and soon, the Chaos Lord came face to face with the reaper who had slain K'gosi.
K'gosi had done well, even if he had ultimately failed. Tu'Shan could see that his foe was on the verge of dissolution, his corpus held together by strength of will alone. That was good. Tu'Shan's only feared Vulkan's wrath, but the sight of the reaper killing the Dragon Warrior had impressed even him, and a confrontation against that warrior at full strength was something he would rather avoid.
With a gesture, his Inferno Guards spread out to keep others from interfering. He felt some hesitation at his order : the Inferno Guards had witnessed K'gosi's death as well, and knew the fate that awaited them should Tu'Shan fall as well. Still, they had no choice but to obey, just like Tu'Shan, in truth, had no choice but to face that opponent alone. Keeping his control of the warband would require no less.
"Do you know who I was, son of the Kinslayer ?" said the reaper as Tu'Shan approached. His voice was like creaking tombstones.
"No," replied Tu'Shan, "and I don't care." Dead legends didn't matter to a Salamander : their concern was the present, and the future they would rule over.
"That was ever your Legion's greatest failing, even before the night you renounced your oaths and I died to save the embers of hope from the maw of Hell. You do not care enough, and that made you butchers instead of warriors."
The Cruel didn't waste any more time bantering with the specter, and launched his first attack. Stormbearer crashed into the revenant's great scythe, the two weapons erupting with unrestrained psychic energy at the contact. Like Tu'Shan's hammer, the scythe was imbued with great power, but the greater part of it had been spent in slaying K'gosi.
The two warlords fought for several minutes, but in truth the outcome had never been in doubt. The most difficult part of the battle was keeping Stormbearer in check, as the hammer battered against the walls of Tu'Shan's will.
Eventually, Tu'Shan broke the scythe and hurled the Damned Legionnaire to the ground with a mighty blow to the chest.
"You won't claim your prize, dragonspawn," rasped the reaper. "The end approaches -"
Tu'Shan slammed his hammer into the wraith's skull-faced helm, silencing his rambling.
One by one, the last Damned Legionnaires were slain, their bodies turning into Warp-fire that burst upward into the sky and vanished into the storms above like reverse lightning.
Up close, it was obvious that the Tower of Silence was not made of stone, metal, or any mundane material. It was the very idea of a tower, rent from the Immaterium and thrown onto Uralan by the Dark Gods themselves. All who looked upon it saw it slightly differently, the only constants being its shifting but ever-titanic size and foreboding aura.
The gates of the Tower of Silence were closed, with no obvious way of opening them. The Katabasis was brought down from the Sundered Crown, the hereteks beginning the process of returning command of the ship to its crew and bound Navigators. The creature was brought to the Tower of Silence under heavy guard, and Tu'Shan commanded it to open the gates.
The Katabasis knocked with a withered fist, and the Tower shook – but the gates did not open. The wretched thing knocked harder, and again the Tower shook but did not yield. The eyes of the Katabasis glowed crimson, and black fire shimmered around its body as it drew upon its connection to the Black Dragon in distant Hephaeros, and this time, when it knocked, the doors swung open, slowly and reluctantly. Beyond them was only darkness that even the eyes of the Salamanders couldn't pierce, and the barest suggestion of distant shapes.
This proved too much for the Katabasis to bear, however. Its body was burned inside out by the power it had channelled, and it fell to the ground, its flesh dissolving to ash, leaving behind naught but blackened bones. There was a moment of silence, as the Salamanders wondered how they were meant to complete their task without their guide. But Tu'Shan prevented any doubt from being voiced by raising Stormbearer and proclaiming that the creature had played its part in bringing him this far : he would complete the mission Vulkan had bestowed upon him on his own from this point on.
Tu'Shan wisely didn't trust the other members of his warband to accompany him inside the Tower. Not even his Inferno Guards, for all that their loyalty to him was enforced by sorcery. He didn't know what awaited inside the Tower, but he knew there were wonders and treasures, and great power as well : power great enough to make any true son of Vulkan turn on their lord, perhaps even enough for an Inferno Guard to free himself of his chains. So the Cruel ordered his men to guard the entrance of the Tower and not let a single soul pass until he had come back out, and to wait for him however long it took, lest they face the wrath of Vulkan themselves. Then he went in.
Darkness pressed on Tu'Shan from all directions. His armor was no defense against it, despite all the sorcerous protections that had been added to it. He felt the intent of the darkness as it beheld him, like a piece of metal under the evaluating gaze of a Forgefather.
He was being tested, he realized. The darkness had been placed here by the Tower's makers, to block entry to all but the worthy.
Anger swelled within him. He was a Salamander Lord, a true son of Vulkan ! None but the Black Dragon had the right to judge his worth !
He roared at the darkness, forcing his voice out in the silent black all around him. Whatever this trial was, he rejected it. He had no need of the approval of the Ruinous Powers, for they too were fated to serve Vulkan or be destroyed, like the rest of the universe.
The thought made something flare inside him, a vestige of Vulkan's power that had marked Tu'Shan during his first and only encounter with the Daemon Primarch. It drove the darkness away, and Tu'Shan finally crossed the threshold of the Tower of Silence.
Tu'Shan emerged from the blackness and into a vast hall with a domed ceiling covered with Chaos runes and held by pillars of brass, silver, bone and living, pulsating flesh. He stood at the edge of the circular hall, whose dimensions were just as impossible as the Tower's. Torches set in the pillars (of which there were too many to count, despite each appearing to be at least a kilometer away from the closest one) lit the scene, letting Tu'Shan glimpse something at the center, though he couldn't make it out clearly.
For lack of a better course of action, he walked towards it, and didn't make it ten meters before coming under attack. The elemental spirits outside the Tower were, it turned out, the least of its guardians : the very shadows cast by the torches suddenly animated, and constructs of dark matter rose from them like Khornate daemons from blood pools. There were scores of them, and they swarmed Tu'Shan from all directions, seeking to drown the Chaos Lord with their numbers. Any warrior, no matter his skill, would have been overcome then; but Tu'Shan wielded Stormbearer, and in that moment he realized why Vulkan had chosen him to carry out his will.
Though Tu'Shan didn't know it, being no psyker himself, all sorcery was blocked with the Tower of Silence. But the power of his warhammer rested within the weapon itself, rather being forcefully drawn from the Immaterium. Every blow let loose a burst of lightning, obliterating a handful of the shadowy creatures at a time. Even as immaterial claws sought to tear at the edges of his darkling soul, Tu'Shan kept moving as he fought, advancing toward the center of the room, reasoning that if the guardians wanted to keep him from it, then it must be the correct path.
Time meant even less in the Tower than it did elsewhere in the Eye. Tu'Shan felt as if he had fought for an eternity, his memories of an existence before the struggle to advance and fight beginning to fade, when suddenly, the fight stopped. Tu'Shan looked around him, and saw that he had reached the center of the room : there were still many more of the Tower's guardians, but they weren't approaching him, instead forming a circle around him and his destination, as if held at bay by a circle of binding.
Warily, Tu'Shan turned his back on the guardians and examined what laid at the center of the immense room. There stood a black crystal over three meters in height, with eight sharp spikes jutting out of it like spikes on a crown. Focusing his gaze, the Chaos Lord saw that underneath the crystal was a stairway going down.
Tu'Shan struck with his warhammer, shattering the crystal into thousands of razor-sharp shards that did little more than scratch the paint on his armor. The stairway was cleared, but Tu'Shan's blow had also released the crystal's prisoner : a mortal man, who landed amidst the shards without a single one cutting his flesh, and took a deep, shuddering breath.
Though his face was lined with age, his eyes were bright, and his hair was still dark. He had a warrior's musculature. He was clad only in pieces of chitinous armor and burned scraps of cloth, that left much of his body exposed. The fact he appeared untouched by mutation was noteworthy, but all in all, he didn't look that different from the thousands of men Tu'Shan had seen and killed in his life.
Except there clearly was something different about him. He looked up at the Cruel without fear, something that hadn't happened since he had become a son of Vulkan.
Tu'Shan placed Stormbearer next to the man's skull. The threat was clear : one twist of his wrist, and he would take his head off.
"Who are you ?" he demanded rather than asked.
"My name is Arguleon Veq. Once, I stood among Chaos' mightiest champions."
"I've never heard of you."
"Of course you haven't. This is the Tower of Secrets, where the Dark Gods hide that which they desire to be forgotten – but not destroyed."
"And what do they do with those secrets ?" asked Tu'Shan, genuinely curious.
The old man chuckled. "How would I know ? I am only a prisoner in this place."
"And how did that happen ?"
"I defied the Dark Gods, as revenge for all the lies they told me and all others who follow the Path to Glory. I searched for a way to hurt them, and engineered the destruction of the daemon world Torvendis, in the Maelstrom." He smiled, and it was a surprisingly vicious sight. "I believe that loss, at least, hurt them."
"After that, I sought out my own death. To that end, I wandered the Maelstrom, throwing myself at its petty lords in hope one of them would be able to kill me. None were, however," said the old man without any pride. "The Dark Gods refused to give me the death I craved, and it was only much later, during my captivity here, that I realized they were using me even then, baiting me with the death I desired so that I would clean up the Maelstrom and make way for its new masters. But eventually they grew bored with that game, and destroyed my ship in the Immaterium. It had served me well for thousands of years, survived countless battles, and it died broken apart by the Warp storms."
He sighed, sounding genuinely grieved. "It deserved better."
"And you survived ?" asked Tu'Shan, doubtful.
"In a manner of speaking. I should have died, of that there is no question. But here is the thing, lord : by my defiance, I had angered all four of the Dark Gods. I suspect they couldn't agree on which one of them should get my soul to eternally torment, and so they put me here instead, to rot alongside all the other secrets they want the universe to forget about."
"How do you know this ?"
"I knew much before I ended up here, and there wasn't much to do in my prison, except stretch out with my senses and try to figure this place out. For example, the secrets and treasures you seek – for I doubt you came here to rescue me – aren't in the Tower itself." He nodded to the floor. "They are below us. The Tower of Silence is named such because its sole purpose is to hide what waits beneath, to shroud the Gods' secrets from the inquisitive eyes of mortals."
"I have no interest in the trinkets of the Ruinous Powers. It is a weapon I seek, in the name of my master Vulkan."
"A weapon ? … Hah. I see. It is Drach'nyen you seek, is it not ?"
"You know of it ?" asked Tu'Shan, taken aback.
Veq gave a short, bitter laugh. "Of course I know of it. I was hearing its voice in my head centuries before the Dark Gods put me here, and it hasn't stopped whispering in my skull ever since. It wants me to pick it up, to unleash its power and evil upon the galaxy. As if I ever would do that."
"You didn't try to claim it ?" Such a lack of ambition was unheard of in a champion of Chaos.
"Didn't you listen ? I rejected the lies of the Path to Glory, lord. Drach'nyen is a trap, a lure laid by the Dark Gods to draw a champion strong enough they can shape him or her into a weapon capable of killing the Emperor, who is the only one they fear."
The idea that anyone could reject the Dark Gods was a novel one. The Salamanders prided themselves on not selling their selves to the Ruinous Powers, instead bartering with them for power like their sire had done during the Heresy.
"I have come here to claim Drach'nyen in the name of Vulkan," announced Tu'Shan, frowning. "And the Black Dragon does not serve the Dark Gods."
Veq looked up at Tu'Shan with a thoughtful gaze. "Does he ? Well. Then perhaps … Perhaps I can be of assistance to you, lord Tu'Shan."
"How so ?"
"The prize you seek lies beneath us," said Veq, gesturing to the stairs his crystal prison had blocked. "The Dark Gods placed me here, on the threshold between the Tower of Silence and what it was built to guard, as an additional torment. If you came here on another's behalf, then Drach'nyen won't speak to you, and you could wander the crypts for an eternity without finding it. But I can guide you through the maze under our feet and to the resting place of Drach'nyen."
"Why would you help me ? Besides to keep your life, of course." The man might have claimed to have sought his own death, but Tu'Shan didn't believe him. No one who really wanted to die would have lived through what he had described.
Veq smiled. "Spite, lord. Spite and anger. I seek revenge against the Dark Gods still, and Drach'nyen being removed by someone they didn't select as their puppet would certainly serve as such."
Tu'Shan considered it, then nodded. That was a motivation he could understand.
The two chosen of Ruin, one who had turned on his Gods and one who served a claimant to their throne, descended into the depths below the Tower of Silence.
As Veq had said, there were crypts down there. In it were entombed the failed champions of Chaos, beings from all the ensouled races that had populated the galaxy since the War in Heaven and the dawn of the Primordial Annihilator. Here were buried those who had committed the cardinal sin of the Path to Glory : they had hesitated. Faced with the ever-increasing horrors they must commit to continue their journey toward ascension, they had flinched, had refused to throw anymore of their soul away.
For that unforgivable failing, they had been struck down, slain by their own allies or killed in battle by enemies who took advantage of their hesitation. Their souls had been cast into the burning hells of the Dark Gods' realms, to suffer untold torments until nothing remained of them, but here, on Uralan, the very memory of their existence was hidden away. When the priests of Chaos claimed that those who fall by the side of the Path to Glory would be forgotten, they knew not how very literally they were speaking, for the Ruinous Powers would not tolerate that the example of these failed champions might spread doubt among their followers.
The secrets of the Dark Gods were hidden in prisons of black crystal similar to the one Tu'Shan had rescued Veq from. As they passed by them, Tu'Shan saw glimpses of those forgotten champions' past in his mind's eye : great battles and dark deeds committed in the name of the Four and the Undivided, erased from the recollections of mortals save as half-forgotten myths and legends. Veq claimed that his own name was still remembered in the Maelstrom, though the truth of his deeds had long since passed into legend. The only reason he was still remembered was that he still lived – but, once again, it was clear he took no pride in this, which baffled Tu'Shan.
The crypts were arrayed in a maze made of mirrors, surrounding the two intruders with endless reflections of themselves, all of which were subtly wrong. Lesser souls might have been unnerved or confused, but Tu'Shan and Veq possessed stronger wills than that. They ignored the mirrors, walking through the labyrinth as if it were made of stone.
The walls of the maze moved whenever they weren't directly observed, corridors turning into dead ends and dead ends turning into crossroads. Whenever they reached a fork in the path, Veq would choose the way, forcing himself to focus on the call he had done his best to ignore for centuries. Neither knew how long they walked, for time meant less than nothing here, in the tombs of the Dark Gods' shames.
There were custodians in the maze, tasked by the Dark Gods with keeping watch over the buried secrets. They were tall, hooded figures, towering above even Tu'Shan, and didn't reflect in the mirrored walls. Their faces were hidden in the shadows of their hoods, or perhaps they only appeared to be as a result of the human psyche refusing to acknowledge their true appearance. They held long-fingered hands covered in corpse-blue skin clasped together in front of them as if in prayer, and moved silently across the labyrinth's corridors or stood in front of a crypt in complete immobility, watching the images flaring within the crystal, or performing strange arcane rituals of unknown purpose.
The duo encountered several of them, but they made no move to attack, though Tu'Shan almost went on the offensive by pure reflex when they saw the first one, before Veq shouted for him to wait, and the creature had passed them by in silence. Right or not, he almost killed the man there and then for the temerity of daring to order a son of Vulkan.
Instead, the Salamander questioned his companion, asking why these creatures weren't hostile if they were meant to protect the labyrinth's contents. Veq told him that the keepers were tasked only with preventing the secrets from escaping, and it was a weapon they sought. Drach'nyen may have been locked under the Tower of Silence, but it had always been intended to be claimed one day, and thus didn't fall under their purview. Of course, that didn't mean there wouldn't be more challenges ahead : reaching the Tower was only the first of the tests the Dark Gods had prepared for the End of Empires' claimants.
The closer Tu'Shan and Veq got to Drach'nyen, the deeper beneath the Tower they descended, and the stranger the secrets around them got. In the beginning, the crystal tombs had contained the hidden memories of human and Astartes champions of Chaos, showing the rise and fall of chosen of all of the Four. There had been xenos present as well, but members of Humanity had been far more numerous : Veq had mused that this was because Mankind had spread all over the galaxy, whereas most alien species touched by Chaos were restrained to a single world, where the tale of their champions' hesitation could do less harm to the Primordial Annihilator.
Now, however, there wasn't a single human or transhuman around them : only xenos, many of whom belonging to species neither Tu'Shan nor Veq recognized. In all the aeons Chaos had poisoned the galaxy's soul, thousands of species had raised from the muck, and the Primordial Annihilator had touched almost all of them. It didn't surprise Tu'Shan to see Eldars among the forgotten champions, for though they now belonged on the ash heap of History the Children of Isha had reigned over the galaxy for millions of years before their catastrophic Fall. Their descendants may now claim that their ancestors had always fought against Chaos, but the very fact they had eventually birthed Slaanesh made it obvious they had been as susceptible to the Ruinous Powers' influence as any of the species they deemed 'lesser'.
As they drew very near to Drach'nyen, and the call became nearly unbearable to Veq, even these tombs vanished, replaced instead by much larger ones, so vast that there were no more walls to the labyrinth, merely tight paths between the crystal structures. For the first time, both Tu'Shan and Veq had to avert their gaze from them and focus on the path before them, for what lurked within was too vast, too incomprehensible even for them. A mere glance had caused Tu'Shan to taste blood in his mouth, and Veq had spent almost a minute staring at them before Tu'Shan had shaken him free of whatever lunacy had almost claimed him. He had broken the old man's shoulder in the process, but Veq had thanked him all the same once he had stopped babbling in a language neither of them spoke.
There was a sense of impossibly ancient history about these tombs, as if the newest of them had already stood there for millennia when the Eye had first opened, and Uralan itself had simply been brought to the Eye in the aftermath. It was impossible to count them, for mortal minds couldn't tell where one ended and another began. They were too vast, their contents too alien.
Eventually, the two reached a threshold, represented by the very idea of an archway. They crossed it, and found themselves out of the maze and into a chamber of the same impossible size as the one above where Tu'Shan had found Veq, with pillars of the same materials holding it up.
There were bones on the ground, along with pieces of broken weapons and armors. Tu'Shan recognized some of the fragments as Astartes wargear of ancient and more recent make, though the colors had faded beyond identifying the Legion to which their wearer had belonged. These were the remains of those who had come before, of the previous claimants to Drach'nyen who had failed the test ahead.
Tu'Shan was no claimant, but he would not fail. He walked over the remains, crushing them underfoot, and at last, beheld his prize, standing atop an altar of black stone that resembled the crystal prisons he had seen so far, except this one was opaque, saturated with the power of what laid upon it.
It was an echo of the forever twinned screams of victim and killer. It was a promise of Dark Gods, wrapped around the original sin. It was a prophecy of the Ruinous Powers, written in the blood of the first murder. It was a shard of shifting darkness in which could be glimpsed the galaxy's damnation. It had no shape but that which the beholder's mind tried and failed to force upon it.
It was Drach'nyen, Tu'Shan's quarry. And there, emerging from the too-dark shadows surrounding it, was the last guardian and obstacle to his quest, a figure of golden fire clad in a suit of armor the likes of which Tu'Shan had only heard about from Salamanders veterans.
Tu'Shan had no idea how a Custodes had come to be here, in the hidden stronghold of the Ruinous Powers, but there was no denying that was what the figure was. At first, he had thought it to be a trick, a shape-shifting daemon taking the appearance of one of the False Emperor's personal guard dogs, but that wasn't the case. But he recognized the taste of the power emanating from the figure : it was kin to that of the Damned Legionnaires and their reaping lord, and no creation of Chaos.
The Custodes was almost identical to the ancient picts he had seen of them, taken during the Crusade. He was wreathed in a nimbus of golden fire and held a spear of ancient design, made using technology lost to the rest of the galaxy. There was a rent in his chest from which emanated a blinding white light, and as Tu'Shan looked at it, Drach'nyen briefly flickered into the shape of a long, barbed spear behind the warrior – the same weapon, Tu'Shan suddenly knew, that had inflicted the wound in the first place, though how the Custodes had survived he couldn't tell. Clearly the Imperial was no more a living creature than the Damned Legionnaires he had fought outside the Tower.
Behind him, he heard Veq take a few steps back, letting the demigods decide how this would all end. Good, Tu'Shan didn't think he would have the luxury of watching his back when this turned into a fight.
"I am Tu'Shan the Cruel, of the Salamanders," he called out. "I have come here across the Eye of Terror, past the guardians of the Tower above us and the last, pitiful attempt of the Corpse-Emperor to keep me out, all in the name of the Black Dragon, whose will shall reign eternal over the stars. Who are you ?"
There was a moment of silence, then the Custodes replied in a voice that echoed in impossible ways, so that it seemed to be coming from all around them :
"To speak my entire name would take too long, and it has been many ages since I last had to formally introduce myself. Know that I am Ra Endymion, and I am here by the Emperor's will alone."
"This is the Eye of Terror," Tu'Shan pointed out. "The False Emperor has no power here."
"And yet," said Ra Endymion, "here I am."
"But by whose will ?" challenged Tu'Shan. "That which you guard was made to kill your master by the Ruinous Powers. I have been told they have been searching for a champion worthy of wielding it and fulfilling its destiny for thousands of years, and judging by the dead around us, you must have met the greatest claimants yourself."
"And by killing them, I have kept Drach'nyen from being let loose upon the galaxy once more. You call me its guardian, but I am its warden, son of the Dragon."
Tu'Shan laughed. "No, you fool. You are just another obstacle, another test. Because if the claimants couldn't kill you, how could they hope to kill the Emperor ? You have kept Drach'nyen from falling into unworthy hands, but rejoice, Ra Endymion. Your long service is about to end."
"My service never ends," replied the Custodes, and the two began trying to kill each other.
From the first exchange, Tu'Shan was on the defensive. The Chaos Lord was strong, the result of thousand of years of his Legion culling the weak and rewarding the mighty, but Ra Endymion was one of the Custodes who had fought alongside the Emperor in the last years of the Unification Wars and throughout the Great Crusade, before surviving the brutal casualties the Webway War had inflicted upon the Legio Custodes during the Heresy. And after that, he had successfully killed every claimant who had made it this far, all without any help and so deep beneath enemy lines it had taken the Firetide for the Emperor's light to reach the surface of the planet.
The power of the Great Drake within Stormbearer didn't affect him, the thunder that had scattered armies and slain Damned Legionnaires washing off him like raindrops. That left only martial skill, and in that Ra Endymion was Tu'Shan's better. The Chaos Lord was forced to give ground, again and again, and his ornate power armor took more than a few glancing blows, as well as some that weren't glancing at all.
At least Ra Endymion fought in silence, without the taunts and insults another Chaos Lord would have thrown at Tu'Shan in such a one-sided fight.
With a beautifully complex and perfectly executed flurry of blows, Ra Endymion brought Tu'Shan's guard low, and aimed his spear for a blow that would take the Cruel in the chest, piercing his primary and secondary hearts in a single stroke. Tu'Shan saw it coming, but there was nothing he could do -
Which was when Arguleon Veq rammed a rusty power sword into Ra Endymion's neck from behind. Somehow, the old man had picked up one of the discarded weapons laying on the chamber's floor, moved behind a Custodes without being noticed by either fighter, grown to the size of a transhuman warrior and pierced through the auramite gorget in a single blow. Suddenly, his claims of having been the Maelstrom's greatest warlord didn't seem so far-fetched.
The Custodes stumbled, and Tu'Shan took the opening, driving Stormbearer up and into his chest and hurling him to the floor, his spear slipping from his fingers. Golden liquid poured out of his ruined throat, but the Cruel didn't take any chances : he leapt after the down Custodes and struck him again and again, until all that remained was a pool of ectoplasm, the last guardian of Drach'nyen finally slain.
Suddenly, Tu'Shan recoiled as new knowledge flared into his mind, yet another secret of this place that was forced into his skull -
This is one of the secrets of the Tower, stolen from the Anathema during the War in the Webway and come to rest on Uralan. This is the story of the Twelve.
In the bloody years that marked the transition from the Age of Strife to the Great Crusade, Terra was the site of battles whose violence would only be surpassed centuries later, when Guilliman brought the hosts of Chaos to Mankind's cradle. One by one, the techno-barbarian warlords of Terra were brought to heel by the armies of Unification, led by He who would be called Emperor. It was during that age of transition that the Twelve were born.
The Twelve were not human, for all that they looked like pinnacles of the species. The gene-tests, performed upon them in absolute secrecy when they were nothing more than babes, were clear. They had inherited the alterations of their parents, and had been altered further themselves. Each was the son of one of Old Earth's techno-barbarian monarchs, the fruit of thousands of years of eugenics and gene-forging perpetrated upon their own lines by the most brilliant of Humanity's madmen.
And so the Emperor found himself in a dilemma many conquerors had faced in all the long, bloody ages of Mankind. These children were the spawn of His enemies, yet they had committed no crime. To kill them in cold blood might seem to be a small sin when weighted against the carnage of Unification, but the Emperor knew that such an act would echo in the Empyrean, and might in time be used by His true foes to undo Him. Instead, He took them to His Palace, and there He remade them into His Companions, to serve and guard Him forevermore.
Even then, despite the treatments and conditioning, some traces of the Twelve's origins remained. They were even colder and more distant toward mortals than the rest of the Custodes, looking down upon the rest of Humanity as inferiors rather than seeking to elevate them as the Emperor intended. But still, they served as well as could be asked of any Custodes.
One by one, the Twelve died, perishing in the course of their duties to the Throne their birth parents had fought against to the death. By the time of the Heresy, only five remained, and by the time the Emperor made His preparations to seal the Webway Gate on Terra, sacrificing His great plan for Humanity in order to salvage even the possibility of a future for His people, only one was left.
Then came the final battle of the War in the Webway, as the Emperor made His choice, sacrificing His great work to buy more time for Humanity. He descended into the Labyrinthine Dimension Himself, and there, in the ruined city the Eldars had once called Calaster, He unleashed His full might upon the daemonic hordes that besieged Holy Terra – and oh, the hosts of Ruin knew fear on that day.
But among the daemons was one the Emperor could not defeat, for it was fated to kill Him, empowered to do so by the decree of Chaos itself. Its name was Drach'nyen, the End of Empires, born of the First Murder, its very nature opposed to that of the Emperor's vision of civilization and peace of Humanity.
The Emperor arrived just in time to save His son, the Crimson King, from Drach'nyen, but He couldn't vanquish it either. And so, the Emperor made one more sacrifice. As Drach'nyen took the shape of the blade fated to end Him, He spoke words that were old when Babylon fell, and threw the daemon into the flesh of the last of the Twelve, binding it there before giving His final command to the warrior : that he run from this place into the endless corridors of the Webway, and keep the monster inside him from ever returning to Holy Terra.
The last of the Twelve ran into the darkness, and the power of Drach'nyen made the predators flee from him. For years, decades, centuries he ran, sustained by his master's command. Yet eventually, the Dark Gods decided that letting the End of Empires wander the Webway could be tolerated no longer. They arranged for the blade and its guardian to end up in Uralan, and trapped them both beneath the Tower of Silence, until the day they decreed Drach'nyen's time had come once more. There at last, the last of the Twelve was freed of Drach'nyen's bite, but the experience had burned away the last of his humanity, leaving nothing behind but a shell driven by His word alone.
This is the story of the Twelve, but it is not complete. For what of the daughters of the tyrants of Old Earth ? There were many of the same age, and they could not be taken as their brothers had been. Listen, then, for this is a secret only Him on Earth still knows.
The Emperor handed these daughters' fate over to His faithful servant, the Sigillite, who gave Him his word that he would take care of them. The old man kept his promise, but none ever heard of these daughters again. With knowledge taken from the atrocities of Long Night, he remade them into tools of His will, hidden killers that could go anywhere and be anyone.
After all, what better way to hide one identity that amidst a thousand usurped others ?
- but he shook his head and growled to himself and to his surroundings, forcing himself to focus. The secrets of the distant past were of little interest to him, unless they helped him achieve his goals in the here and now.
Veq had returned to being the old man he had been when Tu'Shan had found him. The Cruel regarded him with new respect and wariness, wondering if this was when he would attempt to claim Drach'nyen for himself. But the renegade champion of Chaos made no such move, instead looking up at the unseen ceiling with a vicious smile on his face. The room shuddered briefly, and Tu'Shan realized that the Dark Gods weren't exactly pleased with how the two of them had dealt with their final challenge.
Not that Tu'Shan cared one whit what the Ruinous Powers thought, so long as he got what he had come here for. With a pained grunt, he made his way toward the center of the room, where Drach'nyen awaited, the daemon weapon having observed the battle in complete silence.
As Tu'Shan approached it, the shard of darkness took the shape of a sword, long and wicked. It still hurt to look upon it, making it obvious to any that this was merely the image Drach'nyen chose to adopt rather than its true form, but it would make carrying it out of the Tower easier. Tu'Shan made to seize it, but he never completed the gesture. For just as he was about to close his grip around the hilt, on Holy Terra, in the Throneroom, Lorgar Aurelian struck, and released the Emperor from His torment.
With that act of filial love, the promise of the Dark Gods came undone. Drach'nyen could no longer kill the Emperor, for the Emperor was dead. All daemons are creatures of lies, and the one at the core of Drach'nyen's being was now revealed by the coming of Light's End. The destiny wrought by the Ruinous Powers was unmade as the Emperor chose to sacrifice Himself, and Drach'nyen had changed too much since its spawning as the spirit of the First Murder to endure. Suddenly, it was a piece with no place in the Great Game, and it was cast aside as such.
It broke as it fell from the board, and Drach'nyen was no more. But power cannot be destroyed, only taken or spent. And there was one nearby who had once hosted terrible power of his own, who had broken his own oaths to the Dark Gods after understanding their promises to him were lies. Arguleon Veq screamed as the power of the Ruinous Powers' broken promise, the power that had been meant to kill the Emperor, poured into his soul. His screams would have echoed across the galaxy, a counterpoint to the chorus of Light's End, if not for the Tower of Silence smothering his cry as it had silenced those of the unworthy dead for so very long.
Past the gates of the Tower, Tu'Shan's warband heard nothing but the faintest scream of pain, in a voice they didn't recognize. It didn't trouble them, for they had heard and caused much worse, but a few did wonder why that particular scream had passed through the blackness beyond the gates when no other sound had since their lord had walked through.
A few hours later, the Cruel emerged, carrying his prize under his arm and holding Stormbearer in the other. Transports were summoned from the Sundered Crown, descending in the area between the Tower and the lands ravaged by the Dragon Mortars, and carried the warband back to their ship. There, at Tu'Shan's orders, the Navigators who had been linked to the vessel's engines once more began the journey back to Hephaeros.
During the entire journey, Tu'Shan said not a word of what had transpired within the Tower of Silence.
Once again, Tu'Shan knelt before his sire. And once again, faced with the might of Vulkan, he knew fear.
He had returned to Hephaeros to find the Eighteenth Legion preparing for war. Vulkan had called his sons to him, and mustered the full might of the Salamanders. Fleets of warships had gathered above the burning daemonworld, kept from turning on each other only by the Black Dragon's irrepressible will. Vast armies had been assembled from disparate warbands' thralls, and the chain of command of the Legion had been reforged. Most telling of all, the Calamities, those super-weapons whose existence had been limited to rumors so far, had come out of hiding, departing from the secret forges and laboratories where Forgefathers and Dark Mechanicum hereteks had toiled to build them.
It was an armada fit to unleash the end times upon the galaxy, and Tu'Shan joined it having failed in his task.
"Where is it ?" asked the Daemon Primarch. "Where is Drach'nyen ?"
"It broke, my lord," replied Tu'Shan, eyes low, not meeting his master's gaze. "It shattered when the False Emperor died."
The thought of it nearly was enough to make him forget his surroundings. The Sundered Crown had learned the truth during their return to Hephaeros, as the wyrds who had survived the Firetide managed to unravel the fresh madness that had filled the Sea of Souls. Details were scarce, but over the months of the journey, Tu'Shan had managed to piece together the broad strokes : Lorgar and Magnus the Red had returned to Terra, the two having escaped the torments the Dark Gods had devised for them. Then the Corpse-God had died, and in the wake of His demise Slaanesh had attacked Sol, with none other than the mad fool Sanguinius leading the charge – only for him to die as well, a true and permanent death, his essence wiped out from the universe by his own brother Lorgar, wielding a sword as powerful as Drach'nyen had ever been.
On any other occasion, the ramifications of these events would have occupied all of Tu'Shan's thoughts. Right now, however, he was far more worried about his immediate future. A part of him had even considered flight, but even if he had managed to convince his warband to follow, he knew there was no escaping from the Black Dragon's wrath.
"You come to me in failure, and seek to make excuses ?" Vulkan snarled, and the riches-filled cavern shook with his anger. "I didn't think you a fool when I chose you for this task, Tu'Shan. Drach'nyen was meant to be used for more than removing my father from the board. Guilliman has awakened, and seeks to retake his position as Dark Master of Chaos. With the End of Empires in my keeping, his claim would have rung hollow."
"My lord !" Tu'Shan gasped, feeling his chest being crushed under the weight of his Primarch's displeasure. "I … I could not bring you Drach'nyen, but I do not return to you empty-handed !"
He gestured behind him, where another figure lurked in the shadows at the entrance of Vulkan's lair.
The fallen champion of Chaos had changed much in the months of their return to Hephaeros. The power of Drach'nyen had settled inside his flesh and soul, and wrought a great transformation upon him. His legs and arms were covered in small bone spikes, purple lines shone on his skin where veins should be, and his eyes were twin pits of colorless unlight. Worst of all was the perfectly circular hole in his chest : where his heart should be, instead there was a pulsating thing of impossible angles and scarlet light, so bright it hurt even a Salamander's crimson eyes, even through their helmets' eye-lenses.
He had become powerful too, though how much of that power came from what had been salvaged from Drach'nyen's destruction and how much Veq had already possessed prior to his imprisonment, Tu'Shan didn't know. Events had forced him to reconsider his assumption Veq had been lying or mad when he had told the Chaos Lord his past.
Veq, or the thing he had become, wore only two things : a pair of grey pants covering his lower half, the leggings already shredded by the spikes on his legs, and a crown decorated with Nocturnian runes that glowed with eldritch light.
After Veq had ravaged an entire section of the Sundered Crown upon waking up in a state of mindless fury, Tu'Shan had ordered Da'kir to craft the crown of jagged edges that now circled his brow, using the corpse of the Katabasis as material, along with a few shards of the armor of the golden spirit Tu'Shan had killed beneath the Tower of Silence. The crown hadn't bound Veq to the Sorcerer's will, and Tu'Shan had made it very clear to Da'kir not to even try, unless he wanted his soul to be destroyed, if Tu'Shan didn't kill him first. But it acted as a focus, blocking the echoes of Drach'nyen's murderous impulses (which, given its nature, had been pretty much the entirety of its being).
Forcing the crown upon Veq's skull had cost a quarter of the forces that had survived Uralan, but it had worked. The creature had been, if not obedient, then pacified for the rest of the journey, and had accompanied Tu'Shan to Hephaeros with what the Cruel could only describe as eagerness.
The crushing weight of Vulkan's wrath on Tu'Shan abated as the Daemon Primarch took in the crowned monstrosity.
"And what might you be, little one ?"
"I am the Slaughtersong," said the thing that had been Arguleon Veq in a voice like the chorus of a thousand damned souls. "I am the last Calamity in the arsenal that will burn the galaxy down. I am the will to see the Ruinous Powers fall, and the power to end a god."
Vulkan looked down at the Slaughtersong, who stared back at him.
And for the first time in millennia, the Black Dragon laughed.
AN : Well, I planned to have this released for Halloween, but it ended up taking much less time than anticipated. Come to think of it, the same thing happened when I wrote the Index Astartes for the Salamanders : I distinctly recall writing around 5k words for that Index in a single day, which might be the fastest I have ever written anything, period.
I am not sure what that says about me that cruel tyrants with draconic iconography seems to inspire me like nothing else, but I am not going to dwell on it. Anyway, this chapter's size is about what should be expected for later one-chapter narrative arcs, and there won't be monstrosities like the chapters of the Terran Crucible arc if I can help myself.
For those who don't know, Arguleon Veq is a character form the 2003 novel Daemon World by Ben Counter, which I re-read before writing this. Apart from a few inconsistencies with canon established later (such as calling the Word Bearers a "Chapter" instead of a "Legion"), it holds up surprisingly well. The Firetide is a canon phenomenon, first (and, to my knowledge, only) shown in the novel Talon of Horus by Aaron Dembski-Bowden.
Thanks to Jaenera Targaryen for beta-reading this. As always, please tell me what you thought of this chapter. The second half was somewhat different from usual, with less strategic-scale narration and more adventure-style one : what did you think of that ?
By the way, Jaenera managed to figure out the identity of the Damned Legionnaires' leader. Can any of you do the same ?
The next book of the Times of Ending will take place at Cadia. Yes, I am actually following the list in Magnus' visions in the Terran Crucible. There is a couple of short stories I have had in the works for months and that I want to finish, then I think I'm going to focus on Warband of the Forsaken Sons so that I can finish it this year.
Zahariel out.