Tales From A Burning Galaxy

by Warsmith Demetrios

From the 30th through 42nd millenniums, the galaxy has been in flames. The warp poisons reality, and the tides of blood drown out the screams of the faithful and the heretic in equal measure. In these thousands of years of perpetual war, these stories are but vignettes in a tapestry only observed in their multitude by capricious, ever thirsting, laughing gods.

Pilgrimage

Olympia was burning.

Two standard system solar rotations, a little over 800 days if the chronometers held any accuracy, had passed since the war for the Fourth Legion's home world – and that of their gene father – began in earnest. Even in those final days before the retribution force had blackened the skies with their armada and rained fire down on the surface, forces from the shattered hosts of the fallen Warmaster continued to trickle in, seeking haven among a hostile galaxy they had been poised to conquer almost a decade prior. Traitor regiments of Imperial Army, battered naval vessels bleeding oxygen, flame, and crew into the void, throngs of mutants and cultist fanatics upon warp-capable bulk haulers and mass-landers. All were represented here, mere hints of innumerable tendrils of the broken armada who had thrown in their lot with Horus Lupercal, now hunted across the stars by the vengeful force of a resurgent Imperium of Man.

Most notable among these stragglers were the Adeptus Astartes, warbands and rag-tag groups ranging in size from dozens of transhuman warriors to entire Grand Companies. Most came from the Fourth Legion themselves – Iron Warriors who, either in their lust for victory or inability to procure transport among the disorganized horde the Warmaster's forces had become by the end of The Siege, hadn't followed their Primarch in his withdrawal from Terra. Occasionally, warriors from other legions could be found in their midst; a pack of Night Lords here, the occasional Alpha Legionnaire there. Some, bedecked the shallow-sea green livery of the Sons of Horus, stuck together like the frightened, orphaned littermates they had become, and if one looked hard enough, they may have even spotted several Astarte's clad in the silver-trimmed, red plate of the Word Bearers.

It was a mismatched tide of morass on a near-galactic scale; the Warmaster's shattered horde of traitorous mortals, Dark Mechanicum, and Traitor Astartes alike racing into the dark in hope of refuge. Many had already proclaimed their intent to find succor within the great wound among the stars, where the poisonous currents of the warp bled into reality -the newly titled "Eye of Terror" -equal parts prison and sanctuary. Others were more reluctant to do so, dead set on retaining what gains they had made during the Great Heresy.

When Demetrios, a sergeant of the Iron Warriors 54th Grand Company, had reunited with the bulk of the IV legion after the Warmaster's defeat at the hands of his father, The Emperor, he had expected censure. His Warsmith, Krellen, had refused Perturabo's edict of withdrawal of The Siege, as had several other Warsmiths, company champions, and other Astartes of influence. They had been swallowed up by the insanity of the horde, promises of glory and vengeance upon the Imperium, who had time and again failed to deliver them their just due in its formation, poisoning their souls and rending logical thought down to nonexistence.

Decimation was certain at least, he had thought to himself, if not outright execution. That was before Sebastus IV, when instead of even deigning them worthy of such, Perturabo had organized the companies and warbands who had defied his initial summons to fight and die in the thickest of the fighting. Whispered in quiet tones among those who had been there, or at least claimed the honor, was that Perturabo had … ascended – Emperor's shit that sounded wrong – to some warp-suffused form, not unlike the Red Angel or the treacherous Fulgrim, at the end of the battle.

He almost refused to believe it; the 54th had been exposed to enough during their time among the Warmaster's horde at the twilight of The Siege to understand the implications of such a rumor. Demetrios and his brothers had fought alongside those drowning in their own corruption, relishing in it as though it were some debased virtue. That was to say nothing of the "neverborn", those vile shards of the extraplanar intelligences that some had chosen to call gods. From what he had gathered from the words of those with knowledge to speak on the subject, when a mortal soul catches the attention of those things in the dark, gifts are bestowed upon them, the premiere of which being a suffusion of the raw stuff of creation, and ascension into a daemonic entity all their own. Had he not witnessed his father change in such a manner, a sight that had sent him and several others into paroxysmal agony and sent tears of blood streaming from his eyes, he would have killed those fool enough to utter such a foul lie in his presence.

When the 54th set foot upon Olympia what felt like years later, Perturabo was nowhere to be found. Instead, a council of leading Warsmiths from across the legion had convened to organize the defense of their home world, alleging that their Primarch had take a lion's share of the IV and sailed into the Eye of Terror as they relayed orders to a scarred and weary Krellen and what remained of his Grand Company.

"We are to make ready for a siege."

Days later they had come: the loyalists seeking to scour the Traitor Legions and their vassal forces from the face of the galaxy, to erase all evidence of their existence in a storm of fire and consign them to myth and children's tale as dark forces slain by the righteous. The sky was lit on fire by orbital bombardment, piercing thick storm clouds and leaving devastation in their wake as they pounded the earth below. In their wake the loyalists came; the tell-tale screeching of Legiones Astartes drop pods in their thousands accompanied by millions of Imperial Army infantry and their accompanying pieces of armor numbering in the thousands.

Almost two years now, the fighting had gone on. The interstellar dominion the IV legion had carved out amidst the Heresy, with Olympia at its heart, had been swept away by the enemy. It was only by virtue of their bitter resolve – which some might have ascribed to mere childish pettiness – that the home world of the Iron Warriors had not yet been abandoned to the foe. The Imperium's former premier siege force, unrivalled in the art of urban warfare and fortress-cracking, had become the besieged.

Demetrios brought the phobos-pattern bolter up, firing a burst of mass reactive rounds downhill as he left the cover of the marble colonnade. In the distance, two mortal infantrymen, clad in segmented armor the color of autumn-red leaves and navy-blue mesh, died among their comrades as they attempted to set up a heavy-weapons platform within the cover of a ruined hab-bloc. The first evaporated into a haze of gore from the abdomen up as the bolt round buried itself within his sternum before detonating, while the other, a woman, screamed for but a brief second as the right side of her torso burst apart.

The mortals returned fire, blue-colored las bolts leaping from their position at their gene-hanced adversaries. A trio of scorch marks peppered Demetrios' shoulder guard, one scoring a hit between the eyes of his legion's iron skull motif. Warning runes blared his helm's visor as he took cover behind the column, the enemy's volume of fire increasing as more loyalist infantry poured into the ruins of the square. Though lasrifles had next to no hope of piercing a Space Marine's power armor, he had seen enough Astartes fall to overwhelming volleys from the weapon during The Siege as to develop a grudging respect for it.

"Where the hell is our support?"

Demetrios shouted over the din of battle to his brothers, his helm's vox grill distorting his words into an almost mechanical roar. To his right, Maelgor, the squad's heavy weapons barer, unleashed a storm of suppressive fire from his heavy bolter, paying no heed to the blue lances of energy scoring pockmarks against his metal-colored plate.

"Maelgor!"

Helmetless, Maelgor only pried himself away from his killer's craft to answer his sergeant after a grazing hit from a las bolt seared away a chunk of his cheek. Snarling in pain, he drew back behind the griffon-headed column, servos and auto-loaders whirring as they pumped fresh ammunition into his weapon.

"Ugh." he growled, the bleeding from his burnt and bruised face having almost been stemmed completely by the larraman cells in his veins. His helmet, an old MK II pattern he had kept in pristine condition throughout both the Great Crusade and Heresy, lay a scant few meters away, the ceramite warped and battered beyond repair. Finally turning to face Demetrios, he merely raised an ear as though straining to hear him.

"Did you hear anything word of reinforcement before you lost your helm to that blue bastard?"

"Reinforcement?" The other Astartes nearly laughed the question before spitting a globule of saliva on the corpse at his feet, steam rising from the armored corpse of the Ultramarine as the Iron Warrior's acidic spit chewed away at the paint.

"Where would those be coming from, sergeant? There's no cohesion to this damn thing anymore!"

An altogether too familiar sentiment, ever since The Siege of Terra. For a long while, Legion Command – or what had passed for it on Olympia– had masterfully coordinated a defense that would do their gene-liege honor. In time however, that cohesion had begun to break down: specific orders became general directives, while carefully laid plans of attack became lawless skirmishes and brawls, the leading Warsmiths seemingly more concerned with consolidating their own power bases amidst the carnage while the average Astarte focused on bleeding the enemy as much and as quickly as possible. Demetrios hadn't even heard word from Warsmith Krellen in weeks, and with the fresh arrival of the Ultramarines to bolster the already considerable loyalist force, things were looking to take a grim turn.

Cursing under his breath, Demetrios caught sight of Kephon, the Iron Warrior's reinforced MK III plate peppered by scorch marks and much of his legion iconography burnt away. His brother was aiming a missile launcher down the road at the silhouette of an approaching Chimera APC, the long barrel of the weapon wrapped in chains and razor wire from which bandoliers of bleached skull dangled haphazardly. He pulled the trigger of his weapon as soon as the perfect targeting solution presented itself, sending the launcher's explosive payload arcing over the enemies cover and directly into the vehicle's fuselage. The boxy transport went up in flames, its gang ramp flinging open as its immolated occupants spilled out into the street, tearing at their burning armor and fatigues as their screams joined the chorus of battle.

"Ha!" Kephon roared, "Serves the whoresons right!"

Demetrios rejoined the fighting, one hand hefting up the power hammer he had wielded since his promotion to squad sergeant, the other his boltgun. He picked out his targets amidst the scurrying mortals with a surgeon's accuracy; the one raising his plasma gun up, ready to take of the Astarte's head, the small group who had organized themselves into a disciplined volley at the direction of a commanding officer. They died in droves, none surviving the legionary's precision with his weapon, up until the belt-fed ammunition of his weapon – for he had long ago run out of a reliable source for sickle-clips or ammunition barrels in this conflict – ran dry.

"Shit." he practically spat, mag-locking the weapon to his extensively modified MK III plate's power supply. The thoroughfare below the square's central forum complex was littered with a sea of bodies, most of them stemming from the mortal soldiery of both sides. The auxiliary detachments of the Iron Warrior's "Seleucid Thorakitoi" hadn't lasted long past the opening stages of this engagement, and they almost formed a carpet of dead flesh as their corpses mingled with those of the attacker's. In contrast, those islands of bloodied flesh and rent flak armor were occasionally interrupted by the mountainous form of a fallen Adeptus Astartes, felled by one another in most instances.

Demetrios had started with twenty legionaries and two hundred Thorakitoi auxiliaries in this engagement; he now had half that number in Astartes, and though the enemy was paying direly for every inch of ground they gained, it was clear that they were more willing – and able -to pay that blood price than the Iron Warriors were. If the past hours weren't enough to prove that, then the first vox-hail he had since dawn, informing him of several Astartes armor pieces and transports moving on his position, was. Drawing his bolt pistol, he fired sporadically into the crowd as he called over the squad vox-feed to fall back to a more defendable position.

"Fall back?"

The vox feed among the remaining ten Iron Warriors was alight with equal parts request for confirmation, and incredulity. It was a natural question to his order, for it was indeed his order. The squad's standing directive was to hold this position, denying the enemy access to the city's arterial highways which would ease their access to various strongholds and redoubts of the IV legion. With Krellen's silence and the 54th split among various detachments however, Demetrios and his warriors – along with those who had adopted his company and leadership in the aftermath of their own crippling defeats – had defaulted to orders from the council of Warsmiths who had taken reign of the defensive effort.

Indeed, at least three of the Astartes fighting alongside him now hailed from other Grand Company's, carving the numerals of the 54th into their armor at whatever junction they felt best to signify their new allegiance. It made him uneasy, as though they weren't proclaiming allegiance to the 54th and their Warsmith but to him personally, like some barbarian warlord drawing a host of killers to his side through deed and write.

"Sergeant," Kephon called over the vox, "have our orders changed?"

"No Kephon," Demetrios replied, moving back slowly as he fired, taking another few bolts to his shin guard as he signaled for the helmless Maelgor to follow him, "this is my decision; if we stay here, we'll all die, and we'll be as much use to Olympia as a pile of grox shit."

Over the vox one of his warriors was growling, a deep and bestial sound that vibrated within the stomach and put to mind the old genetic fear of the great cave beasts of Old Terra. The source of it wasn't hard to find, for it stood scant feet away, firing wildly at the enemy with his boltgun, the chain bayonet at the end of the weapon chewing the air as it was revved. Growling became muttered ramblings, speaking of battles fought and blood yet spilled, foul oaths and syllables that scratched at the eardrums spilling asynchronously into the warrior's speech.

"Grythe."

The warrior didn't acknowledge his sergeant, though unlike Maelgor who could be excused, for it was hard to hear anything – even for posthumans such as they – over the din of a heavy bolter without a vox feed, this was with intent. A bastardized suit of power armor, the core of which was formed by MK III plate with IV, V, and VI additions, and a functioning helm and vox bead provided him all he needed. Instead, his chanting on became more energetic, words sounding like skull, soul, throne, blood and prince spilling into the verbal vomit.

"Grythe!"

Placing a hand on his brother's shoulder guard, Demetrios tore his warrior away from concentration. Grythe rounded on him, the eye lenses of his helm almost seeming to flare with otherworldly rage as he did so. In that moment, Demetrios was almost certain the other Iron Warrior would strike him, but after a few long moments, the blow never came, and he repeated himself, this time through the grille of his helm for all to hear.

"Come, we're leaving."

"Leaving?" The words were practically poison in Grythe's mouth, venom to be spat like a weapon. "Why the hell would we do that?"

His patience wearing thin, Demetrios replied matter-of-factly and for all to hear, "Not only because I am your superior, but because we will die to the last if we remain!"

"Coward!" Grythe shouted back manically, shoving Demetrios back with one arm. Several of the other Iron Warriors raised their weapons in their brother's direction, yet Demetrios urged his brothers to lower them with a slow hand gesture. Grith, on the other hand, drew the weapon from the maglock upon his back: a masterfully crafted power axe, pried from the dead hands of a Blood Angel at The Siege of Terra. Uncommon as it was to see a line-Astartes with such a weapon of artifice, it was hardly the oddest of things to be found among the forces of the Traitor Legions since their split with the Imperium.

"Can't you all hear that?" Grith called out to his brothers, gesturing wildly in the direction of the enemy with his drawn axe, seeming to pay no heed to the bolter he had dropped on the tiled floor below. "The pierced heart of a galaxy bleeding out? The things beyond the veil, the lords in the warp, singing the song of creation to us? I know you hear it too!"

Several amongst the Iron Warriors drew away from their brother, voicing their disgust at his mania with snarls or quiet utterances of the Litany of Iron. Demetrios wanted to ignore Grythe's ramblings; he wanted to ignore the eight-pointed star – an octed, or star of Chaos, if he recalled correctly – carved crudely into the ceramite over his helm's right visor socket. He also wanted to dismiss the small fetishes and charms, which would be more at home among the tribal savages of some feral world, corded and hooked along his brother's tabard of chainmail. More than anything else, the sergeant wanted to deny that, if he listened close enough, he too could hear the shallow whispers of things beyond the veil, their voices coalescing amid the dirge of battle.

Their time on Terra had changed them, Demetrios knew that well enough. If he didn't, he could see it in his brothers, uncomfortable truths that he had chosen, and would continue to, ignore until they became impossible to do so. From Maelgor's eyes, thick tears the color of oil seemed to run constantly, their flow especially thick during his taking of life, though his skin seemed to reabsorb it almost immediately. Beneath Kephon's helm, a pair of impish horns threatened to burst through the skin of his forehead. Grythe, on the other hand, had been prone to flying into manic diatribes, screaming of the things he heard lurking just behind the curtain of reality. Their time among Warmaster's horde had impressed itself especially upon the youngest Astartes of the squad, as Demetrios had found Grythe attending all manner of bleak ritual and flame-lit black mass.

When scholars of forbidden lore among the Holy Ordos of the Emperor's Inquisition would, in later millennia, ponder on the why's, how's, and who's of worship of the Dark Gods among the various legions, many would make the mistake of viewing them as monoliths. That was to say, because an Inquisitor is to know any number of Night Lord warbands to eschew the worship of the Dark Gods in their entirety, utilizing the powers of the warp and its denizens only to inspire greater terror among their enemies, they assume they all share the philosophy of pseudo-agnosticism. Or that the members of Demetrios' own legion, so often rejecting the overt zealotry of their cousin legions and their lords in favor of their father's pragmatic and domineering approach to the powers of Chaos.

Such a narrow view was to disregard that each legionary warband, from the size of the 54th Grand Company down to individual squads, packs and harrows, were their own distinct entities. Time within the Warmaster's hordes upon Terra during The Siege, their subsequent flight from the Throneworld and the battles for survival they fought in its wake, and the Traitor Legion's later imprisonment within the Eye of Terror. They lived an existence where the stuff of unreality suffused every facet of life, and the influence of the things beyond the veil spoke in much clearer, more direct manners there. For every warlord who espoused the notion that the gods and their neverborn were merely another tool in the arsenal of humanity's inevitable domination of the galaxy, another was encouraging full-fledged devotion to the Ruinous Powers. Such was the nature of the Forces of Chaos.

An explosion rocked the interior of the structure, and the gathered Iron Warriors spun on their heels, the argument between Sergeant and his subordinate interrupted as a wave of loyalist Imperial Army entered, emboldened by what they had thought to be a true retreat by the traitor Astartes. When it was discovered that this was not the case, they scrambled, firing wildly as they desperate sought cover. Grythe growled, flexing his fingers along the haft of his axe and he stalked toward the foe, shrugging off las bolts as though they were the stings of some impotent insect.

"Blood," he snarled, saliva filling his maw beneath the helm he wore, "blood and souls for The Four."

"Grythe, you insane bastard –"

He was already firing, along with his brothers, into the Loyalist army troops when the bark of bolter fire and high-pitched whine of las bolts were interrupted by a bone-shaking roar, a howl of righteousness undercut with hatred that ran impossibly deep.

"TRAITORS!"

From the opening into the square below, erupting through the mounds of shattered statuary and collapsed columns, an Astartes Rhino transport blazed into view. Its armor plating, pock-marked with plasma scorches and holes formed by bolt-round detonation, was colored in the deep blue of the Ultramarines, who were currently spilling from the lowered gang-ramp in the vehicle's rear. It was the Astartes that flung themselves from the Rhino's rooftop plate, however, that the equal-parts cry of accusation and challenge had emerged from. Such uncouth methods and feral eagerness to join the fray was more at home among the World Eaters or White Scars, and if the Iron Warriors' sergeant hadn't seen it, he almost wouldn't believe them capable of such.

Charging through a renewed hail of las and bolt fire, five of the Imperial Fist's Templar Brethren blazed ahead of their Ultramarine cousins and Imperial Army allies, swords drawn and shields up. This had been exactly the kind of asymmetric conflict Demetrios, low on resources and manpower, had been hoping to avoid. Yet, turning their back to the enemy now meant certain death for him and his squad, whereas fighting there way out of this situation at least offered a shred of a chance at survival. Raising his thunder hammer high, he called upon the brothers of the IV legion in their old war cry.

"Iron Within!"

"Iron Without!" they called back, and the battle was once again joined.

The clashing of transhuman warriors in close quarters combat was akin to watching two tectonic plates crash against one another at high speed. No matter how much effort may be made to mitigate it – which was to say, oftentimes none – the surrounding environment and its inhabitants were guaranteed to suffer some modicum of collateral damage. Grythe, having loped ahead of his brothers, crashed into the foremost Imperial Fist with savage abandon, raining blows down against the son of Dorn's shield and his raised blade. The two tumbled and spun wildly as they dueled, their respective rages blinding them to all around them. A wide sweep of the Fist's power sword was dodged by his target, instead halving an unfortunate infantrymen caught in the blade's arc. Another pair, scurrying to find new cover as theirs was disintegrated in mass reactive round detonation, was reduced to slurry of viscera and shattered bone as a shield bash from the Templar Brethren sent Grythe crashing into them with the force of a speeding land raider.

Herrix, the youngest among them and barely a newblood by the time his legion laid siege to the Imperial Palace, advanced slightly downwind of Demetrios, unloading the magazine of his umbra-pattern bolter into the lead Imperial Fist, a Templar bedecked in wax seals across his bastard marriage of MK III and VI power armor. None of the rounds landed, detonating harmlessly against the XII legionary's storm shield, only serving to warp the already battered and chipped Aquilla of bronze that took up much of its surface. It was clear that the warrior had no interest in the young Astartes, a low growl emanating from his helm's vox grille as he continued his advance toward Demetrios. Herrix himself barely had the time to draw his combat knife before another of the Templar Brethren, a warrior missing half of his shield-arm, tackled him to the ground in a mad bullrush, the two posthumans engaging in a deadly grappling match as their respective champions approached one another. Overhead, one of Kephon's missiles leapt from the barrel of his skull-headed launcher, sending an explosion of rubble and limbs flying into the air, while Maelgor and the others took up suppressive lanes of weapons fire against the foe.

The world around the two Astartes faded as they sized up one another, the Templar flourishing his sword in wide practice swings capped off by a dervish, while Demetrios tightened up along the haft of his thunder hammer, his other hand tensing along the grip of his sidearm, a bolt pistol with an ugly, curve-bladed bayonet attachment. The Imperial Fist wore not only the marks of his Templar Brotherhood upon his plate, but other honorifics beyond count. More telling however, where the oaths of moment, those either carved into his armor, or flowing from special seals of scarlet wax. Demetrios knew the sigil at the center of that seal, having become all too familiar with it in the battles since The Siege. It had developed a following in the years of The Scouring, spreading from all facets of the Imperial military structure, from low-ranking infantry to grand admirals, and even among the nine loyalist legions, though all unofficial.

It was centered by a haloed throne; the Golden Throne upon which the Emperor of Mankind now lay immobile. It was a symbol worn by those who had been there, who had fought and bled in the dirt of humanity's home world during The Siege.

"I know you."

Demetrios was shocked. Not by the words of his cousin legionnaire, but that he had spoken them at all. The warrior's vitriolic cadence was a departure from the often boorish, silent stoicism with which the sons of Dorn fought. Before Demetrios could reply, the Templar opened their melee with a series of probing blows from his power sword. He took several steps back, attempting to parry and block with the head of his thunder hammer in the hopes that the concussive field the weapon's power supply generated would disarm his opponent if he applied enough force. The Imperial Fist was no fool though, pulling his strikes back at the last second before contact could be made, launching into a new series of slashes and stabs at the first opportunity, scoring several shallow, biting blows. Bellowing his rage at the most hated of his cousin Space Marines, Demetrios drew the thunder hammer in a wide arc around him before bringing it down in an overhand swing, the head of his weapon crashing brutally against the head of the storm shield's Aquilla, just barely raised to block the assault in time. Instead of pulverizing the legionary's left side as was his intent, Demetrios merely managed to chip away the leftmost eagle head on the double-headed shield.

He drew back, raising his bolt pistol from its maglock and firing a trio of rounds from the hip. One bolt went wide in his haste, the other two detonating uselessly against the Templar's storm shield before he returned the favor with a lunging jab, shield close to his chest as he brought the blade back down, the power sword's disruption field bisecting the sidearm in the Iron Warrior's hands as though a knife through butter. Grimacing as the white-hot heat singed his fingers even through the layers of ceramite, he raised his right leg, and with the grinding of servos and strain of exhausted transhuman muscle, he kicked the Templar in his breastplate, pushing both warriors back from one another and momentarily breaking their melee.

Growling, Demetrios threw the wreckage of his sidearm to the ground, gripping the haft of his thunder hammer with both hands now as the Imperial Fist gathered himself. He could see that the warrior was without an intact helmet, the right portion of MK III faceplate sheared away and the flesh beneath pulped and bruised. The exposed eye, despite being surrounded by swollen meat, stared widely out at Demetrios with nearly uncontrolled murderous intent.

"I know you." The Imperial Fist repeated once more. "You were at Terra. I saw you among the Warmaster's dogs in the final days."

He practically spat in retort as they circled one another; two apex predators, one fighting for the sake of survival and spite, the other for retribution. Demetrios had wanted to call him a fool, tell the Fist that there were thousands of Iron Warriors within the throng of Horus' warriors even by the end of The Siege and he could be referring to any of them. But he couldn't, for a legionary's mind was forged through gene-science and conditioning into an eidetic archive. His armor, MK III plate to the last component, was heavily stylized in the iron skull of his legion, along with the brassy trim and chevrons they were known for, and with the garish excess of arrows, leering daemon-skulls, and other additions the adepts of Kelbor Hal's Dark Mechanicum had made without his consent in those days when he requested repair. The first few instances, he had made his displeasure known at this violation by crushing their skulls and leaving the red-robed adepts' bodies for the cult fanatics and scavengers to have their way with along the camp's edge. Finding that this had little in the way of affecting change afterwards, however, he had eventually acquiesced. If it kept him alive till the end, what did it matter, the stylistic additions they made?

Now, all he could do was wish he had made the point clearer by ripping them limb from limb in full view of their comrades for how much they had made him stand out.

"Congratulations," Demetrios snarled bitterly, "your eyes work. Should I take it that matters to you, in some way?"

"It matters, because you're one I missed." The Imperial Fist replied, the hatred slipping into his tone betraying the stoic cadence he was trying to convey.

"A traitor, spared from my blade for far too long."

The Templar was good, to put it mildly – one did not join the ranks of his order among the Imperial Fists without being an accomplished swordsmen – and for as much skill as Demetrios had with his hammer, he wondered in that moment if he could best his cousin in this duel. He had killed dozens of Imperial Fists, both during the days of the Great Heresy and afterwards at Sebastus IV, but he had never walked away from an engagement with the legendary Templar Brethren of their legion without new scars and visits to the medicae bays to show for it. The skull of the last one he had fought, within the winding bunker complexes of Sebastus IV as artillery shook the earth, hung from corded leather around his armor's waist. He had nearly taken one of Demetrios' lungs; this one, judging by his superior skill with a blade than his predecessor, may very well take his head.

Like any true son of Perturabo, he'd make him fight for that honor, and, universe willing, spitefully take his cousin with him into the abyss.

"Go ahead and try it, whoreson of Dorn," Demetrios hissed, gripping the haft of his hammer so tightly he could feel the metal strain for a moment, "it'll be your last act in the service to the corpse of our Grandfather you call Emperor."

They clashed once more as the world around them devolved into anarchy. Demetrios struck first blood, lashing out with a jab from the spiked head of his hammer that staggered the Templar, his upper breastplate suffering a piercing rent. The Son of Dorn retaliated as he lost ground, lashing out with his blade in a downward blow that would've amputated his cousin legionary's arm had he not moved back in time., The power sword still bit deep, however, carving through the reinforced plating of his forearm plating to the flesh beneath as though it were paper.

Gritting his teeth in fresh pain, Demetrios planted his right foot hard into the ground, almost a full ton of transhuman-operated power armor digging inches into the already battered stone. The Fist was bleeding from his wound, rich red vitae falling in a smear across the yellow-and-black armor of his Templar order. A few inches lower, and he may have pierced his heart. Around them, the battle had lost all sense of order. He could see Grythe, screaming his insane praises to the things in the warp, among Ultramarine and Imperial Army alike, hewing any who dared to be too close with savage swings of his stolen power axe. Maelgor, his ammunition spent, wielded his heavy bolter like a club alongside the chainaxe he had drawn from its maglock on his armor's power supply, driving it deep into the weak point between the neck and helm of an Ultramarine sergeant. The grappling match between Herrix and his Templar opponent was nearly finished: the power sword rammed through his abdomen to the hilt, the newblood was bereft of his MK V helm, his head exposed to the full force of the Imperial Fist's fury as he drove the jagged remnants of his arm's bones into his face like a prisoner's shiv, roaring in both agony and rage all the while.

Did he know Herrix had been dead for several minutes now, as he howled this was for The Emperor? That he had snapped the blade of his combat knife against his plate in vain attempts to find some weak point in the reinforced, segmented abdominal plating the hung from their torso like a tabard? Or was he so eaten up by his righteous letting of traitor blood, that all the world was red to him?

"Look at you all," Demetrios spat, gesturing toward that and the dozen other scenes of savagery playing out around the old forum building, "fighting like brutes in the dirt. That must wound your pride, I imagine: being just like us, at the very end?"

If the Templar was taking his bait, he didn't betray it with words, merely flourishing his blade in a complicated sequence of arcs and twirls that spoke to decades of honing his craft. Demetrios imagined this one fancied himself a student of Sigismund, if not a direct competitor for the title of greatest swordsmen in the Imperium with all his pomp. It was almost angering to even think about, for hated as the Imperial Fists may be by the IV legion, only a few among the legions could compare themselves to the Black Swordsmen at the height of the Great Crusade, and even less could claim that honor now.

"What, no grand speech?"

"I'm going to gut you."

In that moment, the Templar leapt at him. Demetrios barely had time to swing his hammer, batting aside the thrust from the bottom tip of the Fist's shield that otherwise would've pierced his helm's visor. The concussive boom of his weapons power field almost sent the warrior to his feet, but he recovered just in time to raise his shield against a barrage of blows from Demetrios. Gene-crafted muscles howled with lactic agony as he drove his cousin Astartes back, fueled by rage for his pain and losses, and hatred for his cousin and his father, their uncle, Rogal Dorn.

In a moment of respite, the Templar lowered his shield, now a mangled mess of shattered bronze and dented ceramite, poised to finish this bout with a stab through his opponent's heart. Demetrios didn't allow this however, instead freeing one hand from the haft of his thunder hammer and driving it square into the exposed portion of his shattered helm and against the flesh beneath.

A blow from a legionary's fist would have disintegrated the head of most on the receiving end of it, reducing their cranium to a red haze of grey matter and skull fragments. Instead, the Iron Warrior's punch pulped the Templar's flesh, bursting his eyes and shattering jaw, cheek, and socket bones to dust. He went sprawling to the floor, his curses and reflexive howl of agony a bloody slur as vitae from sundered flesh and shattered teeth filled his mouth. Demetrios was under no illusion that he hadn't been incredibly lucky in that exchange of blows, the Templar's own eagerness to end the Iron Warrior's life his undoing. Had the other Astartes ammunition for his bolt pistol, which rested useless upon his leg plate, he imagined he would've waisted no time in blowing off his head. He drew toward his downed opponent, bringing his foot down hard on the other Astartes' gauntlet as he reached for his power sword. Before he could raise his shield to swat him away, Demetrios brought the head of his hammer down hard, the force of impact and concussive field generator mangling the Templar's arm into a fused mess of shattered bone, ruined meat and crumpled ceramite.

"Death," Demetrios panted, struggling to catch his breath as all three of his lungs greedily pulled oxygen from the air, "to The False Emperor. Death to Dorn. Death to his sons."

The Templar didn't respond, though he still lived, straining even now in a desperate attempt to escape the weight of his opponent's armored heel and reach his sword. Grunting, Demetrios raised his hammer high, ready to deliver the killing blow and at yet another tally of slain Imperial Fists to his hammer's haft.

In moments such as these, it was easy for one to become lost in the primal ritual that was single combat and forget that a whole battle was raging around you. Transhumans, even with their rigorous training and psychoconditioning, were just as – if not more – susceptible to the instinctive appeal of letting the world around them fall away in such bouts as mortals. So, when the bolt round detonated against his shoulder guard, interrupting his downward swing and causing it to miss by about a foot, pulverizing the floor beneath, he didn't see it coming. Only now, in that moment, did he hear the calls from his surviving squad members to find cover over the vox, and the shadow that obscured all light from the Olympian sun at the forum complex's opening falling over him.

"Shit…"

He had only laid eyes on the battle-worn Vindicator tank in the color of the Imperial Fists – its dozer blades wrapped in shredded razor wire and smeared in gore – before its demolisher cannon belched its explosive payload. Demetrios threw himself to the floor as the shell soared overhead, piercing through several columns and mountains of collapsed statues b before detonating with a spine-rattling boom!

"Fall back!" He snarled over the vox feed as he rose shakily to his feet, the world spinning around him, "Fall ba-"

The sergeant of the IV legion had no chance to finish his sentence before the world around him began to fall apart. Chunks of stone from the complexes' roof fell in a rain of heavy masonry as the remaining columns rumbled and cracked in protest at the newfound distribution of structural weight. Marble gorgons and statues of Olympian rulers and IV legion heroes broke into great shards as they fell from their plinths, crushing those unfortunate enough to not find cover in time. Ahead, a collapsing statue of Warsmith Forrix of the 1st Grand Battalion reduced the trio of Imperial Army soldiery beneath it to smears of gore. Grythe, indulging himself in brutally beating a helmless Ultramarine with the severed MK III helm of the Templar he wielded like some stone age primitive, was still shouting of his red god's demand for blood as the sword-wielding gargoyle of slate fell upon him, its blade skewering both him and his foe alike down the middle. Demetrios found it vaguely ironic that Grythe, for all his faith, found no protection from his "Dark Gods" in that moment.

The Imperial Fist was rising slowly now, his ascent hampered by the occasional tumble of masonry that shattered against his power armor like thick glass. Demetrios wanted to end this, deliver the coup de grace and conquer yet another champion of his hated Uncle, yet to stay here any longer would consign him and his men to death. Instead, he began to back away, just short of turning his back on the enemy and breaking into a sprint toward the exit, when yet another roar wrenched itself free from the Vindicator's demolisher cannon. The shell landed much closer this time, detonating with an explosive hail of debris that rained ruined stone, dust, and gore upon friend and foe alike. The battle had devolved into anarchy now, apparently the Iron Warriors having slain enough of the Loyalist conglomerate as to warrant indiscriminate fire.

"Fall back!" He called out over the vox once again as the earth heaved beneath his feet. He caught sight of Kephon, taking aim with his missile launcher at the Vindicator, when a hail of mass reactive rounds from the tank's pintle-mounted bolter fell upon him, the detonative force bursting through his armor front-to-back. A lucky bolt round caught his heavy weapon's autoloader, and the chain-reaction within sent both Kephon and his immediate surroundings upon in a ball of fire. Now on his feet once more, the Templar was retrieving his blade, stepping once more toward Demetrios.

"Only in death," he breathed wetly between mouthfuls of swollen flesh and barely clotted blood, "does duty en- "

His grandstanding went unfinished, and Demetrios' retort that he had no time for this went unsaid, as with the force of abrupt tectonic separation, the ground beneath them gave way as the complex began to collapse in earnest. Demetrios took a hasty step back, a void to the depths of the earth beneath their feet crumbling into existence where he had stood spare seconds ago. The Fist stumbled back, his attempts to avoid the rapidly widening sinkhole as the structure around them fell in on itself thwarted as an obscenely large chunk of a statue of Perturabo fell upon him, knocking him into the void. Were he not about to be swallowed up by that same abyss, Demetrios may have found some grim humor in that.

He wouldn't get the chance, however, as the brass frame of one of the forum complexes chandeliers, each branch tipped with the steel skull icon of the Iron Warriors, crashed into him from behind. He cursed as his balance was lost, and now he was falling, deep into the lightless chasm as the light faded with each new chunk of rubble and falling column, sealing off his portal to the surface, and sealing him in the metaphorical hell that was below. When he finally crashed after what felt like an impossibly long time, it was without grace, his helm cracking against jutting stone and gnarled roots of ancient trees. If he were conscious after that first impact, he may have even felt the rest on his way down into the depths…

"Lord?"

He didn't recognize the voice calling to him as he stirred. Part of him thought he was dead; he must've died, and this disembodied voice, a woman's by the sound of it, was the last firings of neurons dredging up old memories from his nearly two-centuries of life. Then the pain came, crashing against him in waves of increasing frequency. By the blood of The False Emperor, it hurt. Then, he realized, he was indeed dead, and this was hell. The Word Bearers were right, the bastards. Hell was real, and it hurt like a bitch.

"I think he's dead, Laurel."

"Shut up! He's not, I saw him move!"

Who were these voices, and why did they stink of fear? There were men and women murmuring about him as he drifted through the murk of this supposed afterlife. Was this his punishment? Did his legion's betrayal of their Grandfather earn him this place in an afterlife of wracking pain and the nagging of mortal voices?

"No," another voice replied, this one dripping with both authority and certainty enough to cut through the miasma of pain that clouded Demetrios' mind, "he's not dead, they aren't done with him yet."

Wearily, his eyes flickered to life, and the first thing he found peering back at him in the dark, his Astartes physiology and the cracked remnants of his helmet's visor providing him clear vision, was a mortal woman hovering over him, a lasrifle gripped in her hands.

"There, you see!" She proclaimed to her fellows, "He just mo-"

Instinct amplified by a surge of combat-stim injections from his power armor's automated systems took hold, and Demetrios snatched out at the woman, gripping her hard by the throat as he rose to his feet. Each movement sent fresh lightning bolts of pain through his bolt, but he didn't stop, his grip around the infantrywoman's neck tightening into an unbreakable vice. She didn't have the chance to utter even a yelp of shock before her neck snapped, throat and trachea reduced to a mess of crushed cartilage and burst veins.

The men around him shouted, some begging for mercy or attempting to supplicate him with bows. One stood frozen in fear, back against the rock wall of this strange cavern they all found themselves in, lasrifle gripped in a white-knuckled grip as he soiled himself, muttering pleas for salvation. The only light in this dank cavern came from the mortal soldieries shoulder-mounted glo lamps, or the flashlights they favored over bayonets, slung beneath the barrels of their rifles, and secured by utility tape or thickly bound straps of leather.

How monstrous he must appear to them, these mortals who had only moments ago thought him their savior, holding the limp corpse of their comrade in the dark as though she were a feather. He held no regret for his actions; to do so would be meaningless. While he may not have held the Legion's mortal thralls and auxiliaries with the same degree of disdain and callousness as some of his brothers and cousins did, he was Astartes, and to assign them any more than their due of value would be akin to bemoaning the insects crushed beneath any greater creature's footfalls.

"H-he killed Laurel!"

Demetrios, gritting his teeth as agony slowly returned to him in waves, unceremoniously dropped the woman's corpse to the floor. The built-in mechanisms of his power armor were struggling to stem the tide with the injection of painkillers and combat-stimms into his bloodstream, seemingly two steps behind each new lance of pain. In stuttered bursts, his visor flashed warning runes detailing the extent of the damage he had suffered. Hairline fractures riddled his limbs, cracked ribs accompanying them and causing pained breath. A skull fracture, earned from his helm cracking against an outcropping of rock on his way down, and the last vestiges of internal bleeding even his larraman cells had struggled to clot. By all rights, he should be dead.

"She was a fool," the mortal – the man who seemed to be the leader of this little troupe – said with disdain, "approaching him like that without announcing herself."

Demetrios turned his head to behold this gathering of men and women. There were five of them now, bereft of their earlier compliment of six with the woman, Laurel's, demise. They wore a mismatched assortment of armor and uniforms, hailing from worlds and regiments the Iron Warrior either didn't recognize, or only had passing knowledge of. A scant two wore the segmented iron plate and crested helms of the Seleucid Thorakitoi, the torn cloth of their skin-tight jumpsuits beneath. The others were clothed in drab browns and arterial reds over green and black flak armor, inconsequential in nearly every way.

What he noticed among them all, however, were the signs of their faith, either carved in the form of octed stars or eye-scratching runes upon their armor or hanging from their belts or around their necks in feral fetishes. Seeing this simple-minded blasphemy seep into men and women hailing from Olympia was almost enough to make him spit.

They, like many of the regiments of Imperial Army not originally seconded to the IV legion during the Great Crusade and Heresy, were likely press-ganged into service by the Iron Warriors during their arrival in Olympia's orbit. While they all hailed from different worlds and cultures, they were united in one thing: if they wore that damned star upon their person, they widely seemed more than happy to abase themselves before the Legions and do their bidding.

Demetrios had always thought them lost sheep, desperate for the guiding hand of their shepherd legionaries to give them purpose once more. Perhaps it was a marriage of all these individual facets, though those hopes were dashed as the hordes of mortals were sacrificed in the thousands to soak up enemy munitions.

The one that caught his eye, however, was the leader. A man, likely in his early thirties by his facial features, stood at the fore of them, seemingly unaffected by the phenomena that was transhuman dread. His hair fell to the side in cheek-length strands of full, oily locks, the left side of his head shorn down to the scalp. He wore standard-issue flak armor the color of packed dirt; his right shoulder guard accentuated with a guard of shined steel. Animal pelts were bolted at asymmetric angles into his vestments, the leg of some feline thing forming a loose approximation of a tabard. In his hands, he held a ratty autogun, the barrel-grip of the weapon worn down and supplemented with straps of white cloth.

He would've been wholly unremarkable, just another on the millions of personalities that kept it together enough to lead a small band of mortals in their final days, were it not for how he seemed to display no sign of fear – in voice, demeanor, or scent – of the Astartes that had just crushed his comrade's windpipe moments earlier. That, and the medallion of burnished gold around his neck: an eight-pointed star of the octed, centered by the snarling head of a daemon wreathed in licks of flame. A sign of dark patronage, courtesy of the sons of Lorgar.

"Who are you, soldier," he practically spat, distortion from his helm's vox grille warping his gritted inquiries into an almost feral snarl, "and where the hell are we?"

The lead mortal continued to look up at the towering Astartes. Were Demetrios bare headed, the infantrymen may realize he was peering right into his eyes as he spoke.

"Rhenton Valari. 110th Faithful Rifles, my lord. The others…"

He nodded to the gathering of Seleukid Thorakitoi and other, unannounced regimental infantry before he continued. "Souls I ended up in charge of in defense of the catacombs."

He had never heard of these "Faithful Rifles", though judging by the daemon's-head pendant he wore, and the faded cuneiform etched upon his armor, he and his had been attached to the Word Bearers at some point prior to the current state of affairs. Just another piece of mortal chaffe, sacrificed by the millions since the days of the Great Crusade, when the ideals they fought for were far loftier. Now? In the aftermath of Horus' folly that saw half the species – mortal and transhuman alike – pitted against one another and faced with extinction? There's were lives spent as cheaply as the rounds in the autogun this "Rhenton" fellow touted, their blood spilt in oceans to buy the Traitor Legions yet more time to chase some hope of sanctuary.

"The catacombs?"

"Yes, my lord." Rhenton replied plainly. "We were dispatched in our hundred down here as irregulars. The goal was to stem any travel through here into the major city districts."

The Olympian catacombs were holdovers from a bygone age. Even before the planet's unification by Perturabo and the coming of the Emperor and His atheistic Imperial Truth, much of Olympia's city states existed as secular civilizations. The gods of their ancestors were spoken of in lecture halls and described in museums, with most of their invocation coming in the form of curses spat by laborers or the occasional supplication from petitioners hurling their hopes into a wider universe.

Some held fervently to pieces of the old faiths, however. The catacombs, illuminated only by the flickers of candles brought by those paying homage to the bones of their ancestral dead, proved perfect for such clandestine gatherings. The central forum complex must have once served as a funerary temple or death shrine during Olympia's more archaic epochs, the catacombs carved from the bedrock beneath for the internment of the deceased, that their souls may be ferried on to some farcical afterlife by their false idols.

"What's the situation down here?"

Demetrios already knew the answer. Not one of mortal soldiers before him was free of the scars of battle. One of the Thorakitoi's faces was wrapped almost wholly in medical bandaging, concealing the scalded flesh from sight and obscuring his left eye, though the Astarte could smell the cooked flesh beneath. One of the women in unfamiliar fatigues had lost her leg at the mid-calve, hobbling along on a crude prosthesis of warped metal fastened by tape a cabling serving in place of the limb. Rhenton too was not immune, a gap in his flak armor wrapped in bandages and caked with dried vitae.

"Dire, to put it mildly. The Loyalists just keep throwing more bodies at us. At first it was just Army, then Fists and Ultramarines. We haven't had word from any sort of command in days, and even longer since any reinforcements or fresh conscripts joined us."

In the resting place of the dead, the living joined their rank in their walk to oblivion. Demetrios supposed it was fitting, in a different time, on a different world and against a different foe, a remembrancer may have turned this into a flowery story of conquest for the Imperial Archives.

"The situation above ground is just as dire," he admitted after a brief silence, "the city is a lost cause, and I do not intend on meeting the fate of the brothers I fell here away from."

He was walking now, his armor's servos whining in protest equal to the internal shrieking of abused muscles as he forced himself forward. Behind him, the mortals murmured amongst themselves, unsure of their next move.

"My lord?"

"Demetrios," he introduced himself to Rhenton, though his name, amplified by his helm's vox systems, carried to all the soldiers, "I am your lord Demetrios. Come." he ordered them as he knelt for a moment, retrieving his thunder hammer from beneath a mound of rubble, yanking it free by its haft.

"I have need of a guide out of the underworld."

They walked through the pitch black of the catacombs for what felt like hours. Indeed, that easily could've been the case, though with the haywire state of the chronometer of Demetrios' helm, there was no true way of knowing. They passed corpses, along which several of the mortals stopped alongside, stripping them of anything valuable like desperate prairie scavengers. One of the women – Kleio, he believed he had heard her name was – greedily drained the canteen of a fellow Thorakitoi, practically choking on her own thirst. The two men, Kailor and someone else, split a ration pack of dried meat recovered from a fallen Loyalist's kit.

Rhenton was the only one keeping pace with him, as much as a mortal could do so at least. All the while Demetrios could feel the mortal's eyes upon him, the adulation practically rolling from him. The Astartes gene-sons of Lorgar had done a good job of imbuing a healthy respect among their mortal thralls and cult savages for their Space Marine lords, but their zealotry was unnerving. To Rhenton, Demetrios was not merely a transhuman, but a demigod in his own right, a favored scion of the Primordial Truth.

He had asked the mortal how he had ended up on Olympia, far from the bulk of the XVII Legion its hangers-on. It was a story he had been all-to-willing to tell. His Legion Host's Dark Apostle had guided a small flotilla of vessels into the warp in the wake of Horus' death, seeking out great gatherings of the Traitor Legions as his charges flung themselves randomly upon the tides of the empyrean. He refused to give up his lord's name, not that Demetrios couldn't guess it from amongst the handful of Word Bearer hosts and presumptuously named chapters that had taken up space in orbit.

"It's an old tradition on my home world," Rhenton had explained to the Astartes, "one dares not speak the name of their warlord aloud, lest they earn the ire of the gods who elevated his name."

A patently stupid and wholly inefficient convention, especially among military men. The mortal had then gone on to explain that this Dark Apostle had been more than willing to lend what remained of his forces to Olympia's defense, as much of a missionary trip as it was a show of cousinly-loyalty.

"My lord wanted you all to see."

"See what?"

"The Primordial Truth, what those of your brothers among the Warmaster's Horde had seen. What you-"

A stern look, and a gesture from the head of his thunder hammer silenced the fool almost immediately. Demetrios asked where his fellow Faithful Rifles, and Dark Apostle, were now.

The answer was simple enough. Most of the 110th Faithful Rifles, battered and ill-equipped, were fed into the grinder as harrying irregulars and staffers of makeshift fortifications of rubble along thoroughfares and arterial city avenues. The Word Bearers had deployed themselves more conservatively, lending their legion elements alongside those of their cousins where the fighting was thickest. The bulk of the host had been engaged in the ongoing void war above Olympia's surface, gleefully partaking in boarding action against the vessels of the VII legion. With the arrival of the Ultramarines, however, their tether to continued existence had been cut. The Dark Apostle's ship came undone within the span of minutes.

"Rhenton!" one of the Thorakitoi hissed lowly in the dark, his voice barely above a whisper, yet carried in the catacomb's chthonic silence. The mortal turned to his fellow, a quizzical expression painting his features.

"What is it, Harrol?"

The smell of freshly spilt blood was what first alerted Demetrios that something was amiss, followed by the dimly illuminated corpses strewn about as though children's toys. He gripped the haft of his hammer tight, cursing the loss of his bolt pistol. By Rhenton's account, this post they were coming upon, dimly lit by bloodstained floodlights fed by fuming gas generators, had been active as of earlier in the day. The grizzly sight they beheld now was far from a well-manned military checkpoint. Limbs had been hacked and heads lopped from the bodies of the fallen, exclusively Thorakitoi auxiliaries in origin. Their faces were twisted rictuses of surprise, horror, or a marriage of the two, some quartered and dismembered directly, others reduced to pulped mixes of ruined flesh and armor fragments.

He recognized the clean cuts through flesh and flak vests for the work of a power sword, and however unlikely as it was, he couldn't help but ask the question.

"Did you come looking for me," Demetrios posed the question to his newfound pack of mortal thralls, "or another?"

"Lord Demetrios," Rhenton, as always, replied for the group, "there were … reports of an Astartes wandering within the tunnels. When we found you, we had just assumed you to be him, laid low by your injuries."

That settled it. He was down here. The bastard Templar with his bastard blade, butchering his way through the catacombs ahead of them. Judging by the caked streaks of blood in the final stages of clot, the Imperial Fist had set upon the mortals little more than an hour prior. Though he could make out no sign of his immediate presence, Demetrios balked at the idea of staying here amid his carnage for too long. Were he to burst from the shadows, employing his swordsmanship upon the small following of mortals he had gathered, he'd have no one to guide him from these catacombs.

"Keep your guard up." Demetrios snarled, nodding for them to stay close and continue onwards.

The woman, Kleio, had long since fallen behind. Though he did not see her die, Demetrios imagined that she had struggled to keep up with the rest of her party with her crude prosthetic. The others had been in no great hurry to help her, hoping to avoid the fate she herself seemed to have befallen. Swallowed up by the shadows, a victim of old Olympian architect's fetishization of the convoluted and labyrinthine. He thought he may hear her call to them from the abyss, announcing both their presence and her position to the enemy. To her credit, she did not do so.

Or the chance to was robbed from her by a knife in the dark.

Harrol was the next to go. The silence of the catacombs was periodically interrupted by above-ground rumblings, the result of heavy shelling of the city above by the advancing enemy. Usually, this resulted in the ceiling stonework rattling, a rain of pulverized rock fragments spilling in a light feathering. A new danger – that of tunnel collapse under sufficient duress – was revealed to them when he was buried in an avalanche of rubble. One of the other army soldiers in octed-inscribed flak armor, in his attempt to dig his friend out of his cairn, had the content of his skull dashed upon the floor when one final, jagged stone pierced the back of his knelt head.

Demetrios kept Rhenton close after that, as he was the only one who seemed to know his way through the tunnels. When they came upon a squad of Loyalist Imperial Army, he had thrown the mortal to the ground behind him, soaking up what little resistance the shocked foe, worn and dazed from wandering these tunnels without direction, had to offer. Rhenton's last remaining companion however, a red-haired man in a tattered gas mask, was torn apart by stray las bolts as the Iron Warrior set upon the enemy with hammer and fist. When Rhenton rose, it was not without pain. Not only was the wound beneath his bandages reopened, wet blood mingling with the dried remnants from when he had stemmed the wound's tide earlier, but the Astartes shove had cracked at least two ribs.

"Don't you dare die on me yet, mortal." Demetrios growled, disgust for the frailty of the unaugmented man clear in his words.

"I wouldn't dream of it, Lord Demetrios." Rhenton replied, hid words choppy between deep, phlegmy coughs.

"I still have more to do before I meet The Gods."

For two hours more they continued, silent other than for the mortal's occasional motions and hushed whispers of guidance. Demetrios swore, if this man's directions were false, the last thing he'd do was kill him. For a moment he imagined doing so anyways, consuming Rhenton's flesh and wrenching the memory from his blood via the omophagia organ. He dismissed that as a last resort should Rhenton fall, for there was no concrete way of knowing he'd even see that portion of the man's memory, let alone that his time in the dark hadn't played its tricks upon his recollection of things. Judging by their troglodytic hunches and pallor prior to their deaths, the Loyalist Imperial Army troops they had just slain would be no better.

"Just through here, my lord." Rhenton claimed between wheezing breaths, pointing down a tunnel flanked on each side by chipped, stone obelisks. "We are almost there."

Glo lamps and lit candles illuminated the cramped, low-roofed passageway. Demetrios found himself having to stoop, almost to a kneel, to pass through. Rhenton, a foot and a half shorter and much leaner than the Space Marine, had no problem at all, yet peculiarly bowed his head as they continued along. At a massing of carved stalactites, the mortal's limp turned to a crawl as he attempted to avoid their sharp edges. Demetrios stood in silence in moment, watching the mortal disappear into the space beyond. Grunting, he raised his hammer high, his off hand balancing the weapon at the lower third of the haft.

With a lightning crack's boom, the mass of stone was pulverized as the force of the Astarte's swing, coupled with the weapon's mass and the detonation of its power field. A cloud of dust erupted from where they had once held vigil over the catacomb's tunnel, fist-sized chunks of rock skipping on the floor along with smaller shards and pebbles. He stepped through the haze of his making, finding Rhenton only a second later.

The "tunnel" had been no passageway to the surface at all. Rather, its function had been as an antechamber, one which led to the octagonally-carved sanctum the two now found themselves in. Just as the passage had been, this place too was lit by candlelight, their transparent red wax casting a baleful, crimson light upon the floor in conjunction with their flames. Fresh footprints crisscrossed the dusty tile, both those clad in Imperial Army combat boots, feline-striped with bandages, or bare. Statuary and idols, cracked and worn by the passing of what must have been millennia, littered this place. Harpies, satyrs, cerberii and sphinxes; all of these and more erupted in asymmetrical birthing's from granite columns that stretched to the chamber's roof. In their shadow, small and impish things lectured packs of small, stone children, mischievous grins carved into their unmoving faces.

In the center of this place, Rhenton stood silently, hand grasping at his bleeding gut in the shadow of four, roughly hewn statues, each one dwarfing any of the others present. A light smile graced his ragged features as he urged Demetrios toward him with one trembling hand.

"Come, my lord. We have arrived!"

Had he a bolt pistol, he'd have shot the fool then and there. Delirium had clearly taken him during their trek, perhaps long before. That pendant around his neck spoke volumes enough, for Demetrios had seen more than his share of raving, gibbering lunatics baring similar idols and marks during Horus' rebellion, and many more in the years after. He made for the lunatic in great strides, covering the distance between the two of them in three steps, his hammer raised and a litany of angry shouts and demands on his lips. To his credit, Rhenton made no move to flee, nor did he prostrate himself before his new lord and beg for forgiveness. Rather, he merely pointed with one thin digit, urging Demetrios to look in the direction before the hammer fell.

Millenia would pass, and in span of time, he struggled with finding a reason for why he entertained the man's request. No conclusion he came to would satisfy him, and eventually Demetrios abandoned the quest for an answer. When he turned his head, he stopped cold in his tracks, his arms slowly going slack as he took in the same shadows as Rhenton.

The four chief statues of this sanctum dominated the room. At their feet, legions of

stone beasts, spirits, and those with the countenances of both, reached up in offering and the search of alms from their lords. Upon a rocky throne, its arms capped with cracked skulls, a bearded warrior in the garb of the old Olympian hoplites reclined, his stone arm drawing a simple goblet toward his lips, his snarling-hound helm resting in the crook of his arm while the other held an impossibly long pike. At the feet of another, a pack of imps and gargoyles held aloft tomes and scrolls, the hunchbacked elder leaning down to examine their contents. He wore a bird mask beneath the cowl of his robe, while a marble raven, its eyes set with rubies in mimicry of albinism, had its head cocked in curiosity as it perched upon the head of a worn walking-staff.

Upon the emaciated forms of beggars, their faces twisted in a mix of shock and joy, a bloated and plague-stricken man of great weight dispensed coin. His facial features were swollen with pox, and one eye was sealed shut with boils and tumorous flesh. Demetrios recognized his condition almost immediately as Olympian slum rot, and the mason of this effigy had taken great care to carve streaks of vomit and pus upon his otherwise luxurious wear. The last statue was of a woman, stepping down upon a stairway of naked, writhing bodies locked in congress. Just as she herself was carved in the image of lustful perfection, her body hidden behind a short, thin toga that hugged her curves – and the assemblage of leather accoutrements and inscrutable instruments of pleasure hidden beneath – so too were her supplicants. Lost in the unnatural beauty of this base relief, one would be hard-pressed to identify the sickled carving knife dancing between her fingertips, or the fork within the tongue the graced her inviting lips.

A flood of memories, each long thought repressed, assaulted Demetrios as he gazed upon these statues. He saw two children, garbed in rags and bandages, kneeling before them, and placing their meager tribute of grain and dried rodent meats at the feet of their idols. He saw a man, bald and bearded, his muscular stone mason's arms crossed in a stoicism only betrayed by the single tear as his sons said their last prayers. Images from another life – several lifetimes ago by a mortal's count – long lost to him and his ilk among the Adeptus Astartes. Hypno-indoctrination, gene-seed implantation, and over two centuries of warfare had a way of dulling a Space Marine's memories of their pre-transhuman years. Yet, fragmentary recollection and shards of the past, buried deep, occasionally shone through.

In the days before his induction into the IV Legion, in the aftermath of Perturabo's elevation from ruler of Olympia to master of the Iron Warrior's, one of the eighteen Primarchs of the Legio Astartes and son of The Emperor, his father had taken him to a similar sanctum. There, with his eyes clouded with unwept tears, he had them whisper words and phrases in the old way, swearing that where they went, they would take the spirit of their family and Olympia itself with them.

May you walk as brothers forever among the stars, my sons…

"My…" Demetrios reached to his helm with one hand, faintness taking him as the storm of recollection surged through cracks in his Astartes psyche. Rhenton, meanwhile, looked on as the transhuman grappled with his own memory, the candlelight dancing almost malevolently in his eyes. His posture had improved since the two of them had entered this place, and now he stood tall, an unnatural vigor filling his tired and battered body whereas before he seemed on the brink of expiration.

"My father," Demetrios said between grit teeth, "he took me to a place like this in my youth."

"A man of faith." Rhenton said with sickening appreciation. He tossed aside his autogun as he raised his hands high, allowing the greedy dark to swallow it up as it fell away from view. "He knew nothing beyond the most surface of scraps yet was more enlightened than most all the same!"

"What is the meaning of this, chattel?"

It was settled. He would kill the man, rend him a slurry of bone and pulverized meat before the secret lodge of the old Olympian cult-religions. He'd find his own way out of these accursed catacombs, he –

"If you kill me, my lord," Rhenton said with a resigned cadence, seeming to read Demetrios' intent, "it'll do you no benefit. Spilling my blood, in their name or your own, will serve their thirsts all the same."

"Shall it?" he replied with a sarcastic growl. "I'm thinking instead I feast upon your brain, as I should have from the start, and climb out of here myself."

"I suppose you could. Yet," Rhenton chuckled to himself, the candles dimming for a moment as the earth above them shook, "my role here is done. I have played my part as my lords demanded."

"Your lords?"

"Them!" Rhenton exclaimed, turning to face the looming statues. "The people of this world knew them by dozens of names; the same way cultures without count did! Names and titles for as many humans walk these stars, all for one Primordial Truth!"

He knew little of the "gods" in the warp, least of all the visages their followers knew them for. He had heard their names, however, roared and chanted and hissed by their followers. Some were lofty, flowery things, while others were patently simple. All scratched at his eardrums like the claws of a feline on a data-slate, and among them he had heard four names most frequently. If he had to guess, each one of them corresponded to the statues before them now, and somehow, he knew each to whom they belonged.

"This was your plan, then?" Demetrios growled, turning back to face Rhenton. "To bring me to this… temple? For what?"

"Enlightenment, my lord Demetrios."

Though he had not moved an inch since this exchange began, the shadows seemed to coil around Rhenton in languid, serpentine caresses. Even with his transhuman vision, Demetrios was having difficulty piercing the veil they cast. The air reeked of blood and ozone, while at the very edges of audible sound, he could almost hear make out the whispers spoken in all languages and none, by people who were both their and not. They were familiar voices, those of the traitor Imperial Army soldiers who had once been Rhenton and his travelling companions through the catacombs.

"Witchery." He spat as the realization dawned on him.

"I dreamt of you." Rhenton continued, unperturbed by Demetrios' killing intent as he spoke. "In the nights I slept at all, as my Lord Apostle cast the fleet to the tides in search of sanctum. I lead the iron son of a demi-god to the truth of creation."

The mortal chuckled as he spoke; his voice distorted to a throaty, hoarse thing that no human throat should ever be able to accommodate healthily. The candles dimmed, an unnatural wind fluttering their flames and almost extinguishing them entirely. Demetrios tightened his grip on his thunder hammer, bracing himself for what may come. During the crusade he had slaughtered enough witchbreeds and psychic xeno-forms – and encountered more than enough of the neverborn in the Warmaster's Horde – to understand he was in the presence of an otherworldly force.

"I thought myself blessedly mad, and then I met you. Down here, in the underworld."

"Your god-things want my faith this badly?"

"They knew you'd never come to it on your own," Rhenton replied, "that it would take an exchange: a meek and pious soul for that of a strong and skeptical convert."

"And yet," Demetrios noted with a snarl, taking a step toward the mortal man, "you are not dead, yet. This seems like a trade doomed for failure."

Rhenton laughed now. Not the thing of levity and jot emitted from mortal throats, but the grumbling roar of an apex predator, flush with satisfaction from fresh slaughter. Whispers clawed at Demetrios from the very edges of hearing, saying nothing he understood, yet urging him to heed this… thing wearing the shape of a man all the same. Rhenton, stepping from the shadows that clung to his form like overbearing lovers, deposited a wrapping of blood-soaked bandages upon the tile floor. The voices grew louder, a cacophonous litany of praise for not only the Astartes, but the base "man" as well.

"Oh," he chuckled, a malicious grin painting his features, "but I have been dead for a long time, my lord."

The wound was a savage one, to be sure. A fist-sized hole in Rhenton's guts leaked fresh blood in quantities that increased with every heartbeat. A las shot had taken him some days prior, the skin around the weapon's kiss singed to a crisp, a sight that was accompanied by the smell of charred flesh. By all rights, the wound should have killed him; by The Emperor's corpse, he shouldn't even be able to walk! Around it, a series of smaller flesh wounds seemed to pulse; cut in the shape of runes whose image offended the eyes of any observer. These markings seemed to pulse with some vile form life as they were revealed, and their barer ran his fingers across them in that moment, smearing his blood across the flesh of his stomach.

"I had been praying that morning," Rhenton explained, "a week ago now, I think. Here, in the dark. Then the enemy came for us, and on my deathbed, the True Gods visited my dreams once more."

"They made you a deal?"

"Five souls." Rhenton said, holding out his hand with all digits raised, as though the Astartes was a child being taught simple arithmetic. "They would take five souls and, in exchange, grant me just enough life to lead you here."

The voices in the dark were clearer now, the raging tones of the damned and betrayed replacing their once exultant cadences. Demetrios recognized them in that moment, though they almost immediately returned to their whispered, nonsensical chattering's only seconds later.

"You bartered with the lives of your squad?"

"All for you, my lord. That I may bring you to the Primordial Truth!"

"And tell me, witch, what truth is that?"

Rhenton, despite his gaping wound and light pallor, seemed almost swollen with strength in that moment. Indeed, by the moment, he almost seemed to be getting larger in a literal sense as well. Were the shadows not obscuring his view of them with their unnatural gloom, perhaps Demetrios would be able to discern it for reality or a trick of the eye. Later, as his understandings of such things grew, he'd understand that, in that moment, Rhenton was too enraptured with his gods-given task to explain to the Space Marine that he was no witch.

"Everything we do," he explained as he stepped forward, his own shadow cast unnaturally large in the dancing candlelight, "whether in their service or that of another, honors The Four. Khorne cares not if one kills in his name or that of The Emperor. Tzeentch takes power from every lie told in good will or malice. Grandfather Nurgle honors every death equally, be it that of a cell or the whole body, for from which springs new life, while the Dark Prince feeds on all conceivable passion."

In over two centuries of life since his induction into the Iron Warriors as an Astartes, Demetrios had never once cowered from an enemy. All manner of xenos, from whole packs of ork savages, to the varying types of the perfidious eldar had fallen to his might, along with a dozen others. The tech-lords and gene-warriors of humanity's lost brethren among the stars had been crushed beneath his boot in the quest to bring the species back into the fold of the Imperium. In the days of the Great Heresy, he had felled cousins from almost all the nine Loyalist Legions and been among those who had fought till the last moment upon the birthplace of the species. He had seen things that would – and indeed had – break the minds of mortal men five times over, and never faltered.

As he approached, Rhenton's flak armor seemed to recoil from his body, the material boiling away at such a pace the steam rising off it seemed to scream, while the cloth of his undershirt and pants seemed to burn away. The small portion of psyche in Demetrios' brain that remained of the mortal he had once been, the boy in the cavern, who only a day later had been taken by the apothecaries of the Iron Warriors, was screaming at him to flee. The Astartes' hypno-conditioned and indoctrinated mind, however, would not allow him to, and as the thing before him that had once been Rhenton Valari of the 110th Faithful Rifles took new form before his very eyes. He was watching a monster being born – no, an ascension – into the galaxy before his very eyes, and unlike during the rapture of his Primarch into his new form, Demetrios could not look away this time.

"Away from me, daemon." He hissed between grit teeth, his legs locked in place as blood poured from ruptured vessels in his eyes and nose. He tried to raise his hammer, yet the strength to do so was sapped from him as soon as the thought entered his mind. Rhenton, if he could be even called Rhenton anymore, grinned as he came face to face – for indeed, he and the Astartes now stood at the same height – with him.

"In but a moment, my lord." His voice was daggers, a storm of them, each one piercing Demetrios' ears with the full force of a gravity weapon. The shadows seethed around him now, excited serpents that were coiled for the strike. He reached into the malformed mass, his massive, clawed hand producing a writhing ball of non-matter that he pressed into the center of Demetrios' breastplate. It carved away at the ceramite, melting metal colored armor like wax, and reshaping it as it went, its unnatural heat searing the Iron Warrior's torso beneath. He grunted in agony, and even that voicing of discomfort was something he barely managed in this thing's presence.

"The Gods are us." Rhenton proclaimed, a long carnodon's tongue emerging to lap and fleck at his newfound maw of filed, silver teeth. "Whether you serve them as a zealot, a pragmatist, or a man of singular will, you WILL serve them in serving yourself! Rejecting them is a fools errand."

With those words spoken, the coiled serpents of shade suddenly fell upon Rhenton, filling both orifice and wound in a frenzied retreat within his body. He roared, shaking the chamber with a mighty birth cry that sounded both of satisfaction and agony as his very soul was sundered, reformed in that moment into something both less and more than he had once been. Wings of tattered flesh flung themselves from his shoulder blades, while a tail tipped with a hissing serpents maw burst violently from his tailbone in a smattering of viscera. Horns not totally dissimilar to those Kephon had been growing beneath his tainted flesh, ripped their way through the skin as bone reknit itself.

For a moment, everything in this secret place became real. Unreality washed over the chamber, and the stone monsters, daemons, and spirits of Olympian legend took life from the warp. Gargoyles and chimeras filled the air around them, while imps were swallowed up by ravenous sphinxes and cerberii hounds. Satyrs frolicked among the moaning forms of men and women locked in rut, and sirens sang their unearthly death songs.

"Fair well, my lord Demetrios."

In a flash, just as quickly as they had appeared, both the daemons and Rhenton ascended vanished into thin air. In their place remained statues which, with the final gusts of the aetheric breeze, crumbled to fine dust. Demetrios stood there for longer than he could remember, pulling himself back from the brink of shock and madness at what had just transpired. The sorcerous shadows had retreated now, and what little candlelight remaining along with his gene-hanced vision clearly illuminated a passageway behind where the four statues of The Gods had once sat.

He waited a few moments longer, allowing the vital signs displayed in his helm's visor time to relax as they blared on about his near fatality mere minutes prior. Before he took the first steps out of hell, he removed his helm for a brief moment, wiping away the pooled blood that had accumulated beneath upon the skin of his face and, when he finally dared, looked down upon where the mortal-turned-daemon had touched his breastplate. the Iron Skull of his Legion was still set proudly in the center of his chest. Yet, where none had been before, it was now centered within the eight-pointed star of the Dark Gods.

Making his way through the opening and into the final passageway, he thought on the Rhenton-thing's words. Upon the fields of Terra, watching brother and cousin alike fall to the madness of their insidious whispers and dark promises, he'd sworn to himself he'd be no slavering zealot. What he did, he would do for himself and his brothers – if any remained. Yet, in his hearts, he knew Rhenton spoke true. He had seen too much in the past decade to deny as much. The Dark Gods would always be there, and whether he flagellated himself or never spoke their names again, it would matter not. In every deed performed by man, an unknowing offering was made, and in every act of war, betrayal, passion, and death, they grew in strength. They were the things that feasted upon the inverse of reality, lavishing their gifts upon those whom, within their souls, they had found purchase. Whether or not the Legions wholesale had accepted their new patrons, it mattered not, for they were hopelessly intertwined now.

They would take his measure, for that was the way of these capricious entities of questionable sentience. The old gods of Olympia had been described as capricious things, as liable to curse their mightiest champions and most devout adherents while granting boons and riches to the unworthy. Metaphysical forces of human nature, acting as a storm prone to the occasional bouts of lucidity and intent. Already, Demetrios had witnessed their favor granted to many, and wondered if, in the aftermath of his trials in the catacombs, they would bequeath him the same dubious honors. If they did not? Damn them to the darkest places of their realm then, he would take their favor. That was the way of the IV Legion Astartes, the Iron Warriors.

"Iron within," he intoned his Legion's litany, "Iron Without."

He first saw the warrior as light, true light, entered his vision.

Olympian sunsets had been a thing of beauty in the past. Now, they were marred with pillars of smoke rising from conflagrations of apocalyptic scale choking the atmosphere and rendering the sight a thing of poisoned reds and purples. Aerial elements of both Loyalist and Traitor alike danced among the polluted skies, and if he were to crest the tunnel to its opening, Demetrios would notice the distant outline of dueling titan god-engines.

None of it mattered in this moment.

"I thought you were dead."

The Imperial Fist spoke as he turned to him, in even worse shape than when they had met prior that day. The heraldry of his Templar order had been mostly burnt away, what little remained scored and pitted by las fire. Gore coated his blade, and the ruin of warped metal that had once been his storm shield was mag-locked upon his armor's power pack.

"A hole in the ground won't kill me," Demetrios grunted, pushing his shredded muscles to the brink with each step, "and neither will it you, it seems."

The Templar raised his blade, poising it above his shoulder with the flat angled to face the Iron Warrior. Demetrios, in turn, raised his hammer in acceptance of the challenge. It was time to end this, one way or the other.

"For Dorn," The Templar hissed, venom and hate oozing from each syllable, "and The Emperor of Mankind."

"For Perturabo and the IV Legion." Demetrios replied and, after a moment, added just one more grouping of words.

"And for the Dark Gods."

With the clang of metal, the hiss of meeting power fields, and a thundercrack boom, the bitter rivalry was ended in but three minutes. The warrior collapsed, his head and the right side of his upper torso caved in in the same way Demetrios had sought to deal his death earlier in the day. This time, in his haste to execute the traitor Astartes, he had left his guard down and, without that damned shield, the Iron Warrior had exploited the fatal mistake. A shame though, he mused as he exhaled deeply, he'd have loved to keep the helm intact for a trophy.

"Demetrios," a scrambled voice called to him over his helm's vox-feed, "Demetrios, are you there?"

Shocked from his moment of warrior's musing, he called back to the voice, almost frantically as new life surged through his battered body. "Alyios? Is that you, my brother?"

He could almost hear the other legionary's grin across the vox-feed as he began to reply. His brother, his true gene-brother, yet lived. Two centuries of fighting in some of the most grueling battles of the Great Crusade and Horus' betrayal, and the promise and prayers he had made before a father whose name was long-forgotten, and the things he had been too young to understand were gods, had been yet kept. He wished to ask how he fared, but not before a rougher, cement voice cut in on their conversation.

"Demetrios, where in the Primarch's name have you been?"

"My lord Warsmith." Demetrios answered Krellen, the unfettered fury in his lord's voice enough to make even the hardiest of carnosaur species piss themselves. "I- "

He didn't get to finish his words before Krellen cut him off, asking for a status report on Demetrios' squad mates. In a somber recounting, he informed the Warsmith of their demise at the hands of the enemy, and how he himself had barely escaped the clutches of death. He chose to exclude mention of Rhenton, instead relaying that the catacombs had been breached, and the city had been overrun by the enemy.

"I had told the other Warsmiths holding that region was becoming a fool's errand," Krellen snarled over the vox, "and now I've been proven right. Nine of my own company dead!"

"My lord," Demetrios asked, for the first time in his life since his ascension to the Legion having no idea what the answer would be, "what are we going to do now? If we fall back to a more fortified urban center-"

"We shall do nothing, sergeant." The Warsmith replied, resignation and smoldering, quiet rage equally present in his response. "Olympia is a lost cause. We shall retrieve you and the rest of the brothers of the 54th remaining on the planet's surface and depart."

"We're abandoning the home world to the enemy?"

"No." Krellen answered sinisterly, and Demetrios had a sinking feeling in his gut as to the nature of the IV Legions solution if that was the case. They had already committed a genocide upon the very planet that bore them once when they raised their banners against the Imperium. Now, the idea of letting it fall back into the hands of the empire they had spent centuries building, only to betray? It was unthinkable.

"Then … what are we going to do, my lord?

After a long, sullen silence, Krellen finally responded.

"A stormbird is being sent to your coordinates," he spoke, the clanking of terminator armor interspacing every word as the Warsmith moved to wherever his destination was, "enjoy the view while you can, sergeant. It'll be the last time Olympia sees the sun free of rad-haze…"

A note from the author: I've had the story of Warsmith Demetrios, my - eventual - warlord for the - eventual - force of Iron Warriors I plan on collecting, converting, and painting up for years now. I really wanted the first chapter of this story to illuminate the reader to his origins, fall to Chaos, and mindset. Don't worry, you'll be seeing much more of him, as well as other representatives of all 9 traitor legions, as this story progresses!