Warband of the Forsaken Sons

by Zahariel

Horus Lupercal, Warmaster of Chaos, is dead, and the Traitor Legions run from the wrath of the loyalists. Amongst them, Commander Arken of the Sons of Horus gathers on his ship an army from the ranks of all renegade Legions, and begins to plan his vengeance against the Imperium of Man ...

41. Chapter 40 : Watchers of the Blind Eye

Announcement : when I published the last chapter of this story on the 07/05/2017, ffnet was encountering technical difficulties and now emails were sent to followers to tell them about it. It seems that by now the problem has been solved, but if you haven't read the previous chapter (the last in the Conquest of the Wailing Storm arc) then go read it right now.

I do not own Warhammer 40000 nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.

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Azarok Sector – Kemyros System

741.M32

It was often said that the fate of all who lived in the Azarok Sector depended upon the decisions made in Kemyros, its capital. And while that was true, most people quoting the saying were talking about the palace of the Lord Sector, on the planet Kemyros itself. And most of the time, they were right to do so, for certainly the Lord Sector held nearly unparalleled power in Azarok. But "nearly" wasn't the same as "totally".

Far from the gilded palace on Kemyros, hidden in the asteroid belt that made the system nearly impossible to enter without the proper navigational data, there was a void-fortress where the holders of another kind of absolute power met. The fortress had no name, for it did not exist on any document. What few supplies were required by its custodians and the mechanisms that kept it habitable were brought by those who used it as a meeting place – a small indignity in return for such a secure place to discuss their affairs.

Still, human nature being what it was, it had always been inevitable that the station would end up with a nickname among the very select few who knew of its existence. To those, all members of the Holy Inquisition who had proven their loyalty, power and intellect a hundred times, the station was known as the Blind Eye. It was something of a joke, or what passed for one in the Ordos. Had the station been equipped with auspex arrays, it would have been a tremendous source of intelligence, its position allowing it to track entrances into the system and to monitor almost every vox-traffic and astropathic sendings. But that would have risked exposing the station's existence, and so those who had built it centuries ago had selected not to do so.

The inside of the Blind Eye was austere, devoid of any decoration or creature comfort. There wasn't any emblem of whom the station belonged to – nothing that could possibly serve as the anchor of a remote psychic viewing. Those who reached it by way of small personal gunships were escorted to the meeting room by blank-faced servitors, whose deceptively simple augmentations hid an array of weaponry capable of tearing through ceramite armor like paper. None living remembered how the servitors had come to be here – the technology that had gone into their construction was now lost to the Imperium.

In the entire Sector, only eight men and women knew about the Blind Eye's existence, using it for their meetings far from both the eyes of their enemies and that of their colleagues. Never before had all eight been gathered at once. But this time, one of them had deemed circumstances were dire enough to warrant calling all members of that elite circle. And it seemed that all had agreed, for eight Inquisitors sat – or stood, for some could not, or would not, sit – in the meeting room, around a table of bare metal.

There were some Sectors where having eight Inquisitors at once in the entire Sector was rare, and that number in one location the prelude to a cataclysm. But most Sectors in the Imperium did not live under the looming threat of the Wailing Storm. The Storm's baleful influence had drawn Inquisitors to Azarok as surely as it had driven thousands souls in the Sector to ruin over the centuries of its unholy existence. More than a hundred Inquisitors were members of the Azarok Conclave, and that number didn't include those operating in secrecy or merely following a trail from another Sector. And still it wasn't enough – there would never be enough Inquisitors in the Imperium – and, at times, entirely too much.

'We have all noticed the same pattern,' began the first of the assembled worthies, a man that had been old before any of the others had been born. 'That is why I have called you here.'

His name was Noriov Eldenswenn, Lord Inquisitor of the Azarok Conclave. His body, hidden beneath a cloak of red and gold marked with emblems that proclaimed his rank to all who looked upon him, was more machine than flesh. Hundreds of years of service to the God-Emperor had whittled away at him slowly, and he had embraced the augmetic replacements rather than vat-grown cloned ones that his ageing body would always end up rejecting after some time. His contacts in the Azarok Mechanicus had allowed him access to the finest mechanical enhancements, making him as strong as an Astartes, if perhaps not as quick.

Despite this, his eyes were still those he had been born with, though they had long since gone blind. He saw with different senses now, a mystical sight that let him peer into the soul of those he judged. Whenever he appeared before the full Conclave, in the official Inquisitorial headquarters on Kemyros, his face was stern and his voice imperious. It needed to be so, if he was to have any hope of keeping the various factions of the Kemyros Conclave under control. But here, with only his most trusted brothers and sisters – if not exactly his friends – around him, his voice was much softer, though there was still a core of adamantium detectable within.

'Cult activity throughout the entire Sector has increased dramatically over the last few years,' he continued. 'In normal circumstances, that alone would be enough cause for alarm. But as you each sent me reports on your encounters with the vile minions of the Dark Gods, I discovered something more. Please, all of you, share with your colleagues what you told me in your letters. Let us verify,' he added with the ghost of a smile, 'that what I saw wasn't just an old man jumping at shadows. Lynessa, could you begin ?'

Lynessa Melkaus was a tall, handsome woman, with short silver hair ending shortly before her shoulders and eyes as green and hard as emeralds. Clad in black from head to toe, with the stylised I of the Inquisition emblazoned on her chest in silver, she had a power sword and a plasma pistol at her hip. Not for her the disguises favored by her more subtle colleagues, or the elaborate clothes suited for life in the courts of Imperial nobility. Her pursuits were, in their own words, simpler and more honest, though no less necessary. She was, and had always been, a huntress of mutants. As such, she technically belonged to the Ordo Malleus, under whose purview fell all things touched by Chaos. But she had often said that another Ordo should be created for those who concerned themselves with the Dark Gods' mortal slaves, rather than their immortal spawns in the Warp.

'I came to Meridior,' she began her tale, 'to investigate reports that the mutated working classes there had begun to organize and were preparing another revolt against their overseers ...'

Azarok Sector – Hive-world Meridior

17 months prior

The screams of the Arbites were almost impossible to distinguish from the braying of the mutant horde. The ordered lines of the force Lynessa had led into the underhive had collapsed what seemed like hours ago, overwhelmed by far greater numbers than anyone had expected the twists to possess. Yet mere numbers would not have been enough to cause the Arbites to scream as they now did, with more panic than wrath in their voice. Especially Arbites from Meridior, a hive-world whose productivity depended heavily upon the work of the mutant classes who lived below the surface. Revolts were common here – every few years, the anger of the twists at their condition grew just as their numbers did, and inevitably they had to be purged back to more manageable levels. Five times already Lynessa had taken part in these purges – in the privacy of her thoughts, she considered it a vacation of sort, far easier than the work she was used to but still productive in their own way.

But this time, not only had the mutants risen in unprecedented numbers, they were driven by something more than mere hunger or dissent. They cared nothing for their own lives – she had seen a pack of them give their lives by stuffing themselves into a Leman Russ' main gun in order to cause it to detonate upon being fired. Now the vast avenue by which the forces of Meridior's elite had descended into the underhive for generations – the Inquisitor knew that the city itself had been rebuilt to facilitate the purges after the first bloody uprising – was a killing field. Thousands of twists laid dead on the ground, but hundreds of Arbites had also fallen, and this was a rate of exchange that favoured the mutants heavily.

Already three members of her retinue were dead, and the rest were forming a circle around her, desperately trying to protect her from the mutant horde. They were tearing through them, each slaying dozens of the twists, but it simply wasn't enough. Sooner or later they would be overwhelmed. Retreat – never an option Lynessa considered lightly – was impossible : they were surrounded on all sides, an island of pure humanity amidst a sea of tainted flesh. For a moment, it seemed as if they would all die here, an ignominious end to an illustrious career – then they saw it.

It came from the depths of the underhive, and the mutant horde parted before it with shouts of praise and something that could only be worship. She caught a few words above the dim of battle - "Great One", "Master", "King", and other titles – and as she took in the new arrival, she could certainly see why the twists would call the creature by such grand names.

The mutant lord towered above even the taller of the ogryn-type twists, every part of its body covered in grotesquely bulging muscles. Its head was covered in a multitude of small, toothless mouths, and the only eyes she could find were on the monster's throat. Beyond the two massive arms that came from its shoulders in the way the God-Emperor had intended, each clutching a metal rod as tall and wide as Lynessa herself, the mutant had three more limbs coming out of its chest. Those were emaciated arms that ended in clawed hands, yet a mere glimpse of the black liquid that dripped from their fingertips sent a shiver down the Inquisitor's spine. No matter what, her instincts warned her, she must not be touched by these claws.

Scraps of colored cloth hid some of the monster's anatomy, and for a moment Lynessa thought she recognized the pattern used by Meridior's noble families. There was a manner in which the monster moved too, that reminded her of her few contacts with Imperial nobility – a sense of confidence, of self-belief in their own importance regardless of reality. Seeing this attitude in the inbred bloodlines of the spire-born was already grating enough – witnessing it on an abomination like this creature was more than she could bear.

Lynessa spat to the ground, and tore her sword from the guts of a two-headed freak who had made it past her guards. Her Acolytes focused on the twists who had a chance of being a threat to their mistress, not afraid of letting her deal with some of the rabble.

'We cannot stand our ground here !' she shouted to them, pointing toward the hulking monstrosity with her blade. 'We must kill this one ! It must be their leader !'

It wasn't much of a plan. The monster's presence must be what had brought so many twists to battle and driven them into such a frenzy, but there was no way to be sure killing it would change anything to the situation on the battlefield. Yet it was the only plan she had, and if she was to die, she would rather die against a greater abomination than torn apart by the claws of hundreds of lesser ones. Together she and her Acolytes pushed forward through the mutated throng, toward the towering beast. It noticed them too, and its mouths curled into hideous parodies of smiles as it began to advance toward them in turn.

It was Barrey who reached it first, the old soldier Lynessa had pulled from the Imperial Guard and into her service more than thirty years ago. He opened fire as he went, unloading his automatic stubber in the mutant lord – yet the shells bounced off its skin, leaving no worse than welts that, while they looked painful, did not even slow the monster down.

A swung of the mutant's club tore Barrey's head from his shoulders and sent it flying through the air like a child's toy. His body fell, fingers still tight on the trigger, sending a few last bolts that miraculously hit the twist – but did no more damage than the previous ones.

Hardening her heart against the loss of her Acolyte, Lynessa charged. She felt the temperature around her drop, and everything she saw was suddenly tinted blue and moved slowly – her psyker, Niraeve, has just cast a quickening aura around her. She ran straight for the mutant lord, racing against the cub it was bringing to hit her. The aura around her would be broken the moment she was hit by it, and it was long enough that the monster only needed to swing in front of it.

She leapt, her sword held in two hands, and hit the creature in the chest. The impact made her head ring, but her power sword was stabbed deep in the monster's sternum. For a moment, she peered into the eyes of the twist – big, blue eyes filled with surprise and shock – then the eyes became veiled by death, and mutant and Inquisitor toppled to the ground.

The rest of the horde screamed as the monster fell – grief, horror and despair all mixed together in a dreadful chorus. When the slaughter the Arbites had inflicted upon them had done nothing to deter their resolve, the death of their leader seemed to completely shatter their morale. Never before had Lynessa seen such a rout – not that all mutants fled. Some did, but others threw themselves at the Arbites even harder, as if welcoming death, and still more remained where they stood, gazing blindly ahead in shock. Already the Arbites were seizing the opportunity, and Lynessa had no doubt that soon enough order would be restored, the numbers of the twists purged.

Yet as she looked down at the giant corpse laying at her feet, she could not feel the familiar tingle of cold satisfaction that usually came to her after a mutant massacre. All she could feel was a sense of dread, and foreboding.

Azarok Sector – Kemyros System

741.M32

'I brought the creature's body back to my ship, to have my savants dissect it. Its physiology puzzled them to no end, but they were able to tell me that whatever it was, it wasn't born on Meridior itself. Its genetic structure is completely different to the local twists – far more altered than they are. Someone brought it to the underhive, to seed dissension among the mutants. They did find this, however, branded upon its chest. I had not noticed it while I was fighting it.'

Lynessa drew a roiled parchment from her pockets and laid it across the table in front of her. It was a drawing of black ink upon the white of the parchment, depicting a circle of chains in which was a horned, bestial head. Gasps of recognition came from the rest of the gathered Inquisitors, and Noriov nodded to himself grimly.

'This symbol, or others similar to it, was a recurrent theme in your reports, and one of the reasons for this meeting. Lynessa, what is the situation on Meridior now ?'

'Order has been restored, praise the Emperor. The death of the leading mutant caused the uprising to collapse far quicker than any had before. As I said, many of the mutants took their own lives or mutilated themselves when it fell. It will take some time for the Arbites to recover – their losses were severe, and recruitment in that organization is always slow, due to their high standards.'

'Better that they remain under full strength that we not be able to trust their competence or loyalty,' said Noriov. The Arbites were one of the few Imperial organizations most Inquisitors at least somewhat trusted, for they were far less prone to any form of corruption than other groups. 'Thanks you, Lynessa. Irwin,' he continued, turning to another Inquisitor, 'what about you ?'

Gregory Irwin was a very different kind of Inquisitor compared to Lynessa. He was a small man, dressed as a member of Imperial nobility, with only the rosette he wore around his neck marking him as a member of the Holy Ordos. His face was perpetually set in a wondering expression that had led many to underestimate him – but all present knew what lay behind the façade. Gregory had spent more than one hundred years hunting heretics of all kinds within the ranks of the Imperium's elite. His clothes concealed sub-dermal armor, and his silver tongue had made dozens of heretics unwittingly confess their crimes to him while the rosette was hidden under his shirt. He was also acknowledged by his peers as the most powerful pyromancer in the entire Sector. His psychic power, in the upper end of the Beta level, had been honed by decades of training and practice.

'I spent the last year on Achillus,' he said, 'tracking an organization of smugglers trafficking in xenos artefacts. Three months ago, I got a lead on a delivery to one of the nobles of Hive Heringrad. I went there with my team, intend on questioning everyone there – I had enough proof of their involvement to have them all executed if I wanted. I had no idea ...'

Azarok Sector – Hive-world Achillus

3 months prior

Hundred of meters below, on the other side of the pollution cover that separated the spires of Hive Heringrad from the lower levels, Imperial citizens cowered in fears as the clouds flared with light. Amidst the burning wreckage of a spire that had once belonged to House Delande, Gregory Irwin wielded fire as his weapon as he did battle against traitors.

The Inquisitor was alone, his entire team slain in the battle's first moment. If not for their sacrifice, he would be dead as well, killed before his mind could register what had happened and understand what he had stumbled into.

Gregory had not expected to have much to do in House Delande. Stay silent and look intimidating while his Interrogator, a thin fellow named Boris, explained to the nobles the punishment for their purchases of Ork skulls if they did not tell everything they knew about the organization that had supplied them. He hadn't planned on making good on those threats – the disruption to the Imperium that would have caused would have been far more than their crime was worth. After the horrors the War of the Beast had visited upon Achillus centuries ago, the noble families of the planet took any occasion to insult the greenskins in any way possible. Some of their members had been alive at that time, after all, when an attack moon had hung in the planet's sky, and Orks had hunted for slaves in the streets. A handful of trophies could be forgiven – possession of Ork bones wasn't even illegal, only the means by which House Delande had acquired them.

It should have been an easy operation, which would have helped Boris grow more confident for the day he wore a rosette of his own. And yet, when the party had battered down the door of the banquet room and proclaimed the Inquisition's arrival, the members of House Delande had not screamed in panic and thrown themselves at the mercy of the Emperor's agents.

Instead, all three members of the House – the head couple and their only son – and all four of their guests – allies from other families – had turned into monsters. One moment they had been normal men and women, clad in fine clothes and staring at the broken doors with shock painted on their faces, a few still holding glasses of wine. The next, the glasses were clattering on the marble floor, and seven nightmares were rising from their seats.

Their eyes had glowed with eldritch lights, their veins bulged with black blood, and their teeth had fallen to the ground, revealed to be dentures hiding small, pointy fangs. They had leapt – no, flown, using some sort of psychic ability that let them levitate – and butchered Gregory's Acolytes with their bare hands. Their transformation apparently granted them supernatural strength, for their thin, noble limbs should not have been able to rip out Boris' head with their bare hands.

One of them – the one who had been the son of House Delande – had had his hands around Gregory's throat when the Inquisitor's reflexes had finally kicked in. The inferno he had summoned – there had been no time for a more subtle invocation – had reduced his attacker to nothing, as well as the corpses of his retinue and nearly the entire level of the spire. But the other tainted nobles had survived, shielding themselves from the heat through the same power that allowed them to fly.

The spire had not resisted the damage Gregory had inflicted upon it, and the upper levels had broken off the molten stump and fallen down, crashing into the hive kilometers below. The Inquisitor was no empath, but even he could feel the fear and pain of those who had been crushed. But there was no time to mourn the death of so many Imperial subjects, no time for anything except fighting. The traitors were all around him, hiding in the wreckage and striking at him when they thought they saw an opening. Already he had slain two more of them – he could not tell which, they had shed too much of their humanity to be recognizable. But four more remained, and Gregory's side was scarred where he had used his power to seal the wound one of his foes had managed to inflict. The blow had pierced through his armor as if it hadn't been there.

Never before had Gregory used his powers so much, drawn so much energy from the Warp. His talents laid in investigating corruption in the Imperium's upper echelons, and that rarely gave him the occasion to simply let loose and burn heretics with the power of his mind. But he had still kept up practicing his skills, and he was glad for it – in a cold, vengeful manner.

The wards tattooed on his skin were sizzling his flesh, burning with the corruption against which they were defending. Even with them to shield his soul, he could hear whispers at the edge of his perception, infernal promises and taunts. He ignored them, drowned them out by filling his mind with the catechisms that had been taught to him when he had been but a child in the Black Ships. He knew that, had anyone looked at him fight, the observer would have been hard-pressed to tell which side of the conflict was the more monstrous. Fire covered him from head to toe, turning him into a blazing avatar of the Emperor's wrath.

A tiny part of his mind, that which wasn't busy controlling the power, shutting off the daemonic whispers or fighting the actual battle, wondered what had happened to House Delande and their allies. Every noble family he had ever seen fall to the lures of heresy had a different story, one he had always uncovered before consigning the guilty to the pyre. But here, he had stumbled onto Delande's betrayal, instead of carefully hunting it down. He did not know the reasons behind the House' corruption, and it irked him for several reasons – not the least of which being that, had he known in advance, his Acolytes would still be alive.

'Why ?' he howled into the flames, his voice amplified to be heard over the sounds of the inferno. 'Why would you do this to yourselves ?'

'Because we would not be prey again,' came the reply in a surprisingly clear voice. 'You will never understand, with all of your power, but we refused to ever be powerless before the predations of the alien again, no matter the cost. The Unfettered offered us a path to power, a path to no longer being prey, and we took it !'

'This is not power,' spat Gregory, his hatred and rage sharpened by the torrent of power burning through his soul. 'It is madness. It is corruption. It is evil ! In the name of the God-Emperor, I name you all Excomunicate Traitoris, cast out from His light from now until the end of time ! Come out of the shadows, and face His judgement !'

Hissed curses answered his proclamation, all traces of humanity gone from the voices. All at once, the four remaining traitors burst from their hiding places, passing through the flames unscathed as they flew toward Gregory. Before they could reach him, the Inquisitor unleashed the full power of his wrath, and a new blast of flame engulfed the ruined spire top. The heretics burned, not even their bones remaining. In the underhive, thousands saw the light through the clouds, heard the distant sound of the blast, and begged the Emperor for protection.

Gasping, fighting to breathe the burning hot air, Gregory looked around him. Judging by the melted furniture, he was in the ruins of a private office of sorts. Miraculously, a wooden desk stood in the devastation, intact – and on it, there was a rolled scroll. Warily, the Inquisitor reached out with his mind to check for traps – it would have been just his luck to slay the heretics only to be killed by their defenses just after – but found nothing. For a moment, he considered leaving it there and be on his way – he needed medical attention, and soon. But this was too much of a coincidence – the hand of fate must be at work. He stumbled to the desk, took the scroll, and, leaning against the furniture for support, began to read.

Despite the fire still raging all around him, his heart grew colder with every word.

Azarok Sector – Kemyros System

741.M32

'That scroll was an abomination,' said Gregory, his face set in stone as his tale ended. 'I destroyed it after reading it, but I remember its contents enough, the Emperor shield my soul. It was instructions for the sorcerous rituals through which the members of House Delande had changed themselves. It also hinted at promises of greater power, in return for future services. There was no name on it, but it was sealed with the emblem of the daemonhead within a circle of chains. After that, I returned to my safe house, and spent nearly a month in bed recovering from my injuries and taking care of the aftermath. The spire was so thoroughly destroyed, unfortunately, that no trace remained that could lead me to any other conspirators. After that, until I received the call to come here, I retreated to one of my private estates. I was still purging myself from the effects of wielding as much psychic power as I did when your astropathic message came.'

'What about this "Unfettered" you said the heretics mentioned ?' asked Noriov.

'I found no mention of that name in the scroll. He might be its author – that would certainly fit with everything else – but no clue as to his identity. All I know is that he possesses extensive knowledge of the most forbidden of subjects, and is surely as black-souled a fiend as Horus himself.'

'What of House Delande ?' asked Lynessa. 'Surely not all of their members were present that night.'

'They vanished,' said Gregory grimly. 'As soon as I could, I sent a mandate for their capture, alive or dead – but all twenty-four acknowledged members of the bloodline were gone, as were some of their servants and not inconsiderable sums from their accounts. Before coming here, I called more of my Acolytes to continue the investigation in my absence. If any of these traitors remains in Imperial space, they will find them eventually.'

'Their disappearance certainly points to them being involved in the foulness you uncovered,' said Noriov, 'and if they spread the unholy knowledge that transformed their kindred, they might constitute a grave threat to the Sector. There will always be those who are willing to do anything in return for power – it is a flaw in human nature against which only the Emperor can protect us.'

The old Inquisitor sighed, before turning his gaze toward another member of the group :

'Logan,' he said. 'I believe you encountered a … different manner of corruption on your last investigation yourself ?'

The tall, dark-haired man in ornate carapace armor standing at his post with a long staff ending in a golden aquila nodded. Like Gregory, Logan Goreth was a psyker. Unlike the pyromancer, however, Logan had not been selected for service by the Inquisition aboard the Black Ships – he had journeyed all the way to Terra and been subjected to the ritual of soul-binding with the God-Emperor's own divine essence. His eyes had melted when he had beheld the radiance of the Master of Mankind, and his eyeless face could inspire dread into the hearts of the most resolute of heretics. Like most soul-bound psykers, Logan still saw, after a fashion, using his psychic senses to compensate for the loss of his eyes.

'My last investigation took me to Pormaces, an agri-world in the Abyssian Marches,' said the blind Inquisitor, talking about the region of the Azarok Sector closest to the Wailing Storm. 'The officers of the Administratum there had reported a string of murders, the circumstances of which were gruesome enough that they dared call upon the Inquisition for help. My personal ship brought me to the system after a journey even more tumultuous than usual in the Marches, and I went to the planet's single spaceport with my Acolytes …'

Azarok Sector – Agri-world Pormaces

8 months prior

The gunship had landed twenty minutes ago, and they hadn't found a single living soul yet. All of their hails to the spaceport had gone unanswered – the ship's auspex hadn't even detected a single vox-signal on the planet. The landing site – a vast expanse of ferrocrete on which cargo carriers had landed to be loaded with the planet's harvested grain for hundreds of years – had been vacant when they had arrived. Now, the party of Acolytes surrounding Logan was drawing near the Administratum's headquarters on Pormaces – or, more precisely, the only Administratum building on the agri-world. Pormaces' harvests might provide sustenance to the people of several nearby systems, but it was still a backwater hole where only the disgraced of the Administratum were sent – but not the truly incompetent, of course. Those rose all the way to the top in that monolithic institution.

Logan saw the world around him as a painting of shadows, a reflection of reality only illuminated by the light of other souls. For some reason he had never been able to decipher, his own soul cast no light in his own psychic sight, but his Acolytes' did. He had brought seven of them here with him, leaving only his Interrogator aboard the ship as a precaution. Their souls were strong, and the light they cast was potent enough that the Inquisitor could 'see' far further than they could with their mortal eyes. And he, too, did not see anyone. It worried him, though he did not let it show.

The Administratum's building was a stocky tower, as ugly as any Logan had ever seen. To him, it seemed as if the walls were only half-there, solid enough to block his view of the inside but less 'real' than the ground. It was often like this with the buildings belonging to the Administratum – there was something in the organization itself that made its holdings less present to Logan's senses.

That was why the Inquisitor had no clue what awaited them inside until Perrion, a tall, muscular fellow who had once been a bodyguard for a crime lord until he had discovered his master dealt in blasphemous scriptures and had gone right to the Inquisition, pushed the main door open. It wasn't easy – the door was locked, and made of heavy metal, yet no proof against Perrion's gene-forged strength. The lock broke, the door turned, and the stench of old blood hit the party like a solid wall.

Skeletons in torn robes – Logan's sight did not include colors, though he could guess these were the grey of the Administratum drones – were scattered all across the vast open space where the clerks had done their job of keeping track of the grain shipments. A giant aquila was engraved in the wall opposite the entrance, above another of the Administratum's countless motto – this one read "Service is its own reward". The eagle's heads had been destroyed, and the wings were pocketed with holes where someone had struck with something very heavy. Yet this was far from the worse desecration.

The corpses laid randomly on the ground, likely left where they had fallen, but every surface, from the floor to the walls to the ceiling itself, were covered in blood. Even dried, the liquid shone faintly in Logan's sight, a sickly light that illuminated the entire space. Still, neither the blood's smell nor its faded soul-light were enough to hide those hiding behind overturned desks from the Inquisitor.

'To arms !' Logan had barely time to shout before their ambushers revealed themselves.

The attackers were thin, starving-looking men and women dressed in blood-drenched rags that had once been agricultural clothes. In their hands, they held scythes, axes and other tools converted into melee weapons. Their faces were distorted by hate, and as they charged, ignoring the hail of fire that cut many of them down, they screamed the same thing as one :

'Vengeance for Carthago ! Delenda Imperium !'

Delenda Imperium. High Gothic for "the Imperium must be destroyed". How had these wretches learned these words ? Surely the population of Pormaces hadn't needed such education to care for the fields. But Logan did not have time to mull on this mystery for long, for more and more of the bloodthirsty maniacs were revealing themselves, and his Acolytes would not be able to kill them all before they reached them for long. The Inquisitor raised his staff, and called upon the lingering traces of the God-Emperor's power that remained in his soul. After so many years, they were little more than embers, the memory of a light so powerful it had seared his eyes away and burned deep into his very essence. He blew on these embers with the currents of the Warp, and they flared for a moment.

He channeled that flare into his staff, and the aquila atop it shone with the merest fraction of the light of the Golden Throne. His Acolytes, their souls pure and their minds devoted, were unaffected. Not so the madmen. Their screams turned from hatred to agony, and they clawed at their eyes, rivulets of blood running down their cheeks. Yet they did not stop their charge, driven forward by something more powerful than the terrible pain they must be experiencing. In fact, those who had been beyond the reach of the flare seemed to be even more enraged, their eyes fixed upon the shining aquila, spitting the same words – Delenda Imperium – over and over again as they rushed forward. Logan saw one of them break his wrist on a desk in his haste to reach the Inquisitor, yet the madman didn't appear to notice. He was shot before he could reach his target, and as he fell, Logan caught a glimpse of the man's bare chest, illuminated by the light of his tainted soul.

The man bore a marking that covered almost the entirety of his upper body, a pattern of criss-crossing scars that formed a circle surrounding a brute representation of a horned deathshead. The scarring must have been horribly painful, and most of the cuts seemed to have been infected. As Logan looked at the other attackers, he saw that almost all of them bore a similar mark on their chests.

On and on they came, and Logan unleashed the Aquila's light three more times when it seemed his Acolytes would be overwhelmed. Only then, when more than a hundred fresh corpses had been added to the pile, did the attack stop. The smell of newly spilled blood almost completely covered that of the old.

Among the dead, a few remained alive, too wounded to do more than crawl as they spilled their guts behind them. Yet even in this state they continued to move toward Logan, their eyes locked onto the aquila atop his staff. Gesturing for his Acolytes to let him pass, the Inquisitor marched to the closest of these wretches and placed his hand upon her head, focusing his will to keep her immobile while he tried to peer into what remained of her mind.

There were no defenses to speak of, only madness and burning rage. He had to steel his mind to prevent the inhuman fury from spreading to his own thoughts. His mind cut deep into the madwoman's fractured psyche. He caught a few glimpses of her life before the madness had seized her – a lifetime spent working in the fields, just like her parents had done before, and their parents' before that, and so on for generations. Then he saw through her eyes as she cut down a man in the Administratum's grey robes, his face a mix of terror and incomprehension. But in the moments before the woman finally succumbed to her grievous injuries, he found nothing to indicate what had driven her and the others to madness. All he could hear in the corners where this knowledge should have been were the same two words, repeated again and again, filled with a malice that transcended mere hatred :

Delenda Imperium.

Azarok Sector – Kemyros System

741.M32

'Carthago,' murmured Noriov once Logan had finished his tale. 'I have never heard that name before. Nor have I ever heard that phrase, "Delenda Imperium". Does any of you know of it ?'

No one had, but Logan had a theory nonetheless :

'The madmen focused their aggression on the Administratum's offices and symbols, and the sight of my staff sent them into a frenzy. I believe that Carthago must be related to the Imperium's past – perhaps a city or planet that fought and was destroyed during the Great Crusade, or one that fought on the wrong side during the Heresy. As for why enemies of the Imperium would use High Gothic as their battlecry …' The Inquisitor could only shrug. 'After this, we searched the rest of the planet, but found no further trace of life. All the settlements were nothing more than graveyards filled with more corpses, the only living being those we had killed in the Administratum building. We could find no survivors, not even children. We … we also didn't find the bodies of anyone younger than fifteen,' he continued, his tone becoming even darker. 'Yet the records indicate there were hundreds of them at the last census.'

'We will all ask our scholars to investigate both the name and the battlecry,' decided Noriov. 'Perhaps a clue as to their fate might lie in this direction. And perhaps your own encounter might be more directly linked to this as well, Mathias,' he continued, turning toward another Inquisitor.

'It is possible,' admitted Mathias Eloric, looking thoughtful – a strange expression on the man.

Mathias Eloric was one of the few Inquisitors who dedicated themselves to war as much as to the primary duties of the Ordos – to investigate the schemes of the enemies of Man, and crush corruption wherever it might take root. In Mathias' eyes, war was the anvil on which the Imperium was forged, and it was in war that the greatest of corruption could take place. A noble who fell to the worship of Slaanesh in a gilded palace might do great harm, true. But to him, the real danger to the Imperium happened when generals and warlords were tempted away from the Emperor's Light. After all, had not Horus succumbed to the lies of Chaos during the Great Crusade ? Soldiers were those who determined the future of the Imperium, and no matter how much obedience they displayed to other authorities, the men and women who fought under the Emperor's banner could only trust one of their own. And so, in order to keep close to those whose downfall could be the most damaging, Mathias had made himself into an instrument of war that few could match in the Sector, even among the Space Marines. He rarely spoke of the other reason – that those who did fall were far more lethal for all their training.

Even here, in the Blind Eye, deep within Imperial territory, Mathias wore his suit of power armor, hand-crafted by the finest artisans of the Adeptus Mechanicus and into which he had incorporated several archeotech devices he had collected over the years. At least he had taken his helmet off for the meeting, revealing a bald, scarred face with an aquila tattooed on his right cheek – a legacy of his time as an Imperial Guard, decades ago, before he had been chosen to serve the Inquisition. The tattoo was cut in twain by a thin line of pale flesh – a scar that hadn't been there when Noriov had last seen his colleague. A power maul the length of a man's body was attached to his back, and an array of smaller weapons hung from his belt.

'Let me tell you of my own encounter with this symbol,' he continued, looking at the scroll still laying on the table. 'For the last nine years, I have been working on Andros' Rest, where the Imperial Guard is still battling the rebellious natives. It has been a difficult task to keep the heretical beliefs of the enemy from perverting the regiments sent to the war, but me and my agents managed it. However, a few months ago, I went to one of the outposts on the front-line to investigate accusations of heresy raised by an officer on his superior ...'

Azarok Sector – War-world Andros' Rest

7 months prior

Block. Dodge. Attack. A body broke apart under Mathias' blow, two messes of flesh flying in separate direction. He whirled his giant maul around like another man might a quarterstaff and rammed it down on the head of yet another foe. Left to its own momentum, the weapon would have torn through the rest of the corpse and hammered the ground with enough strength to send men nearby to their knees. But the Inquisitor redirected it in a curved motion to shatter the blade of a third traitor, alongside his entire right arm.

Another came to his right, wearing a captain's stripes on his bloody uniform. He trust his sword right for the Inquisitor's head, the only part of him that wasn't covered in armor. Mathias moved out of the way, but not quickly enough to avoid the blade entirely : he felt the sharp pain on his face as his cheek was sliced, and the heat of his own blood spilling from it. He realized that the symbol of the aquila had just been damaged, and, for some reason, this enraged him far more than the damage to his own flesh. He let go of his maul with his left hand and drew one of the guns at his belt, letting his instincts guide his hand rather than choose consciously. When he aimed at the soldier, he found that his instincts had chosen his Garstus-Pattern bolt pistol, the weapon his Inquisitor master had offered to him as a reward for his first successful mission as an Acolyte, years ago.

He pulled the trigger, and the head of the soldier exploded in a shower of bone shards and gore. Mathias' left hand wasn't his dominant one, but the Garstus-Pattern included a variety of stabilizers to help firing with precision – it was a weapon made to eliminate individual targets, not to rain suppressing fire upon a mass of enemies. Once again, his instincts had chosen the perfect tool for the situation.

All around him, there was only madness and death, Acolytes fighting Guardsmen and Guardsmen fighting each other. One might think that meant there were two sides fighting here, those loyal to the God-Emperor and the renegades. But that would be a mistake, and likely a fatal one. Apart from Mathias and his escort, none in the entire outpost were still in service to the Golden Throne.

The woods of Andros' Rest had not been in Imperial control for hundreds of years now. When the War of the Beast had come, Andros' Rest had been a pleasure planet, a garden where the nobility had retired to spend long periods resting in even greater indolence than they did in their own palaces and spires. But when the Orks had descended upon the planet, thousands of survivors had fled to the woods and, against all expectations, they had begun a guerilla war against the greenskins. Nobles and servants alike had, somehow, survived in the wilderness, and even thrived. By the time the Imperium had returned to the world, every construction on its surface had been destroyed, every last Ork was dead, and the woods were filled with savage tribes who saw all outsiders as deadly enemies. For decades, emissaries of the Ecclesiarchy had attempted to bring those tribes back into the fold. It had only been ten years ago that, at long last, Sector command had abandoned the idea of retaking the world peacefully and sent armed forces to Andros' Rest – or, as the soldiers named it when they thought no one could hear, Andros' Accursed Backwater Frakking Forest. One of the armies directed to this battlefield had been the 282th Imperial Regiment of Tulark.

The soldiers of the Tularkan 282th, like all those that shared that homeworld, had long been praised for their discipline and their bladework. Tulark was a feral world, where the tribes hunted great grazing beasts and settled their different through ritual duels. Talent with a sword was the measure of one's worth as a warrior, and though the tribesmen took well to the training in the ways of the Astra Militarum, all Regiments raised from this world had used this predilection to great effect in the field. It did cause a worrying tendency to have promotions through the ranks being decided by skill with the blade rather than actual strategic acumen. But as outsiders, the Commissars were there to prevent it from becoming too much of an issue.

The Commissars were dead now, of course. Mathias had seen them die when, all of a sudden, every Tularkan in the camp had gone mad and started killing anyone in reach of his sword. Lasguns and other weaponry hang from their shoulders or laid on the ground, discarded – the traitor Guardsmen weren't using anything but their swords, and their fists if those got broken. He was surrounded, his Acolytes spread out across the vast command room, discussing with other members of the regiments when everything had gone wrong.

It had happened all at once and without warning. One moment he had been discussing the war with the outpost's commander, lying through his teeth about the reason of his presence there. In the heat of battle, he couldn't quite remember what the lie had been – something about an increased rebel presence in the area. Then, the commander and every other Tularkan in the room had started to scream in agony, clawing at the flesh of their right arm. Mathias had caught a glimpse of what they had been clawing at when the commander's nails had ripped through his uniform, breaking themselves bloody in the process. A brand, formed from cuts that had suddenly opened on the flesh and creating the image of a bloody daemonhead surrounded by a circle of chains.

He hadn't been able to get a clear look at the other soldiers – each time he had seen where the brand should have been, it had been covered up by the blood that had spilled from it. But that was enough by itself to indicate that they, too, had been branded, suddenly and without warning. He was no psyker, nor were any of his Acolytes present, but he doubted the Tularkan had willingly embraced this madness. Something had forced it upon them, some sorcery powerful enough to affect their very flesh. Sorcery must have been involved – the Regiment's psyker primaris had died at the moment the screaming had begun, blood flowing from his mouth in a lethal stream.

And so now he fought against men who, despite their sudden madness, had retained all of their martial skills. Like every soldier deployed on Andros' Rest, the Tularkan in the outpost had also been wearing their armor and weapons at all times – even the cooks and other non-combatant personnel had been wearing their sword, a point of honor for the regiment that meant that everyone in the outpost was now a danger to Mathias and his escort. Already two of his Acolytes lay dead, their blood spilling on the floor and mixing with that of the insane soldiers.

With a shout, Mathias whirled his maul around him in a wide circle. In their bloodlust, the soldiers surrounding him didn't try to leap out of the way – the one weakness their madness had inflicted upon them. The Inquisitor barely felt the impact as his weapon tore through armor and bodies alike, sending gore flying through the room. Only the last man hit by the arc wasn't immediately slain, instead thrown to the ground with a sickening sound of bones, skin and organs bursting.

For a fleeting moment, something like sanity passed through the dying man's eyes, and he whispered a few words that Mathias was barely able to hear over the sounds of the battle. The words were filled with horror and devotion, and they echoed in the Inquisitor's mind, sending a chill down his spine.

'… the angel … with broken wings …'

Then that moment of sanity was gone, and the bloodthirsty snarl returned. Despite his wounds, the man tried to raise, his hand still closed tight around his broken sword. Without a word, Mathias brought his power maul down and splattered the contents of his skull on the ground. And as he rallied his Acolytes to him and began to fight his way out of the command center and through the outpost, he made a silent vow, to himself and to every soldier in the camp who had been turned against the Emperor :

I will find this angel, and I will kill him.

Azarok Sector – Kemyros System

741.M32

'We managed to get to our transport and leave the outpost,' finished Mathias. 'The forces I sent later to reclaim it arrived to find the outpost desert save for corpses and a handful of survivors who were promptly eliminated. Afterwards, I sent agents to investigate every other Tularkan Regiment operating in the Sector, and messages to other Inquisitors beyond. I was en route to Tulark myself when I received your message, Noriov.'

'Good,' replied the older Inquisitor. 'The notion of entire Regiments suddenly falling to Chaos is … unsettling, to say the least. And the method by which the Tularkans were turned – these brands you describe – even more so.'

'This "angel with broken wings",' said Logan. 'It could be a daemon – perhaps the one the symbol is supposed to represent.'

Or it could be something else, Noriov thought, but he did not speak the words aloud. There were secrets that were too dangerous to share, even to the other members of this elite circle, secrets that were not his own to spread. He remembered that day, two centuries ago, on a blood-soaked battlefield, when he had vowed to a towering figure in red power armor to keep what he had witnessed that day a secret. Yes, an angel with broken wings could mean many things indeed, and he feared Mathias' vow could end up driving the Inquisitor in places where even devils feared to thread.

'We shall see,' he said out loud. 'At the very least, we know that, as always, the Archenemy reaches out to break the Emperor's soldiers and turn them to its will. The Tularkan would make a powerful instrument for it, but they are still only men. Silviana, your report indicated that you encountered another plot – one that might have far greater consequences than the loss of an entire Regiment.'

Silviana Borlan had little remaining of the body she had been born with – even Noriov looked natural compared to her. After several brushes with death, all that remained of her flesh was her brain and a handful of organs, kept alive in the mechanical body her Mechanicum allies had built for her over the years as she lost more and more of her flesh. To the outside eye, she was a metallic construct in the shape of a human woman, with glowing patterns on the smooth adamantium that covered her. She saw the world around her through a variety of sensors arranged to emulate the senses she had lost – the tech-priests knew that, without enhancements to her brain, which she had refused, she would have gone mad from receiving the full output of what her body was now perceiving.

Now, Silviana directed her teams of Acolytes from afar, rarely taking to the field herself – she was, after all, the exact opposite of inconspicuous. All those present at the gathering were curious to hear what had brought her out of her isolation.

'By now,' she began, 'you have probably heard what happened on Zethirion Alpha. An entire forge-city lost, destroyed from orbit on accusations of techno-heresy. I was the one who signed the order for bombardment in the Inquisition's name. My contacts among the magos called for my aid when they lost contact with the forge-city Zethirion Nine-Six, after reports of monstrosities hunting through its streets. When I arrived to the system, I wasn't the only ally of the Mechanicus to have answered their call for help : there was also a strike cruiser of the Heirs of Sanguinius. It was decided that I and the Space Marines would go to the forge-city, to make sense of what had happened there and rescue the Fabricator Locum, who had gone missing since the troubles' beginning ...'

Azarok Sector – Forge-world Zethirion Alpha

6 months prior

The Heirs of Sanguinius fought well against the tainted skitarii and other infernal constructs that rampaged through the ruined streets of Zethirion Nine-Six. Clad in silver and red, the twenty Astartes who had accompanied Silviana to the forge-city were a blade of purity hat cut through the corruption. Their Chapter was young – it had been created in the Fourth Founding, after the catastrophic losses sustained by the Adeptus Astartes during the War of the Beast – but already they had earned many rolls of honor in the reclamation of the galaxy that had followed that horrific conflict. Another would be added after today, of that she was certain.

Silviana had come without her own Acolytes – she did not want to insult the Space Marines by suggesting their protection wasn't enough, but the truth was that she also didn't want to risk any of her own agents into the death-trap this city had become.

Zethirion Nine-Six was at once ruin and nightmare. Great factories had been torn open, temples to the Machine-God that had been thoroughly desecrated. The ground was spotted with craters where powerful explosive weapons had gone off, and rivers of toxic liquids flowed from broken pipes, filling the air with vapour that would melt the lungs of any living creature. These toxic clouds obscured even her vision, turning her surroundings into something that only seemed half-real. The shadows of silent forges surrounded her party, and within those shadows, monsters lurked.

skitarii that displayed repugnant augmentations and transplant of living, mutated flesh were the most common of those. They were hideous to look upon, and doubtlessly their long, curved claws and other lethal appendages would have made them deadly to the population of the forge-city. But Silviana had fought alongside the skitarii of the Mechanicus, and these things were far weaker. She suspected they had been created as instruments of terror, not war, though she did not dare attempt to dwell too long on the motivations of heretics. The Heirs of Sanguinius had already killed hundreds of them, using their blades in most cases rather than waste their ammunition.

Far more dangerous than the skitarii were the other beasts of tainted iron and blood that stalked the ruined streets. While there was unity to the skitarii's' appearance, who all looked like exact copies of one another, each of these greater constructs was unique. They had fought against three of them so far : one that had looked like a spider the size of a Leman Russ, one that had been like a giant snake with hundreds of mecha-dendrites, and the last one, the most dangerous yet, forged in the image of a man, taller than even the Astartes. This one had moved with something more than the bestial intelligence of the others, and it had slain four Heirs of Sanguinius before it had been put down. Silviana had caught a glimpse of a human brain in the wreckage, covered in implants. Who had it been, she wondered, who had been taken by the horror's creators and turned into its control core ?

More monsters wandered the shadows, hunting for the last survivors of Zethirion Nine-Six. Once, there had been more than a hundred million souls in the city. Now, corpses littered the ground, most of them torn to pieces, meat and augments ripped from their bones. There were still survivors, but they had gone hiding underground, in the deep tunnels connecting every building of the massive city. The surface had been abandoned, with only the few stragglers they had encountered left.

Emperor's Light, thought Silviana. She could no longer feel fear as she had when her body had been made of flesh – the tech-priests who had built her new one hadn't thought it necessary to emulate the complex systems that created this emotion – but she could still worry. Hundreds of tainted skitarii and these monsters are all around us, and we rightly consider them "a few stragglers."

That was the reason they had not come here with a greater force. Had they done so, the Chaos vermin lurking beneath their feet would quickly have risen to face them. As it were, speed was their best asset – they must complete their mission before the evil below could react to their presence, or flight would be their only option.

At long last, they reached their destination. fFabricator Locum Kieral Mazer had occupied the center of the forge-city, as was tradition among magos with such dominion. The gates of his castle laid on the ground, torn open by some terrible force. Cautiously, the Space Marines and the Inquisitor passed through. Their mission was simple : find out what had happened to the city, and if possible, recover the Fabricator Locum. The other magos thought this was a rescue mission – Silviana and her escort knew better. If they found Kieral Mazer, they would drag him to the Inquisition's ship in chains, and question him with all of the Ordos' methods until they learned everything that had led to the forge-city's current fate. And if he was innocent, had merely been a victim or a dupe … he would still die for his failure to prevent this horror. Not even the lords of the Mechanicus were beyond the Inquisition's purview, not once such terrible events had already happened to the domains placed under their responsibility.

The sixteen Astartes and the Inquisitor passed through the gates. They expected a trap – three of the Heirs went ahead, scouting for signs of the enemy. Silviana could listen in on their vox-transmissions, an unusual courtesy, but a necessary one. They didn't find anything but signs of battle that were already weeks old. The castle was desert, silent save for the crackling of what few machines had survived the destruction.

Guided by the plans they had extrapolated from the structure's outside and the recording of visiting tech-priests from the other forge-cities, they continued. In a display of paranoia and secrecy too typical of the Mechanicus to have been suspicious at the time, the Fabricator had not shared the plans of his abode with anyone. But the strike team still knew where to go – to the central cogitator chamber, the place from which Fabricator Mazer had ruled the entire city. Visiting Fabricators had been granted audience in it – it was as much a place of worship to the Omnissiah as it was a center of command and a last sanctum. If Mazer still lived, he would be there with his circle of most trusted servants and whatever defenders he had been able to gather. Silviana doubted they would find him, though. The moment she had realized the Warp-touched had abandoned the surface, she had been doubtful of Mazer's chances of survival. Yet the central chamber was still the best place to go to find answers.

The gates to the chamber were sealed, and bore marks of assault, as if one of the beasts had wandered in the castle and tried to break in. But they were still closed. At a command from Illios, the Sergeant in charge of the Astartes, a Techmarine moved in to the control panel on the door's side. It had been ripped out of the wall, exposing wires that sparked in the air, but the Mars-trained warrior manipulated them for a few minutes, and then the gates slid open.

Inside was a vast circular room, but no living soul. Where rows of cogitators should have stood there was only empty space, and the walls bore damage indicating that devices had been ripped out of them violently. But it was the center of the room, the place from where the Fabricator Locum would have linked with the entire city, that drew Silviana's attention.

The command throne, which had featured in every recording of this place, was gone. In its place stood two melted pillars of black metal, between which laid shapeless fragments of the same. This had been an arc, one large enough to allow passage for the cogitators that had been taken from this room. Silviana drew closer to the ruined apparatus, and saw the sorcerous runes engraved upon the metal, along with the circuitry running under it. Her sensors glitched slightly when she looked at it, which told her that this was a Warp-tainted device if the runes had not. A portal, she thought – a way out of this city, and perhaps even out of this world. She was now certain Kieral Mazer wasn't here any longer – and all but convinced of his guilt. The Fabricator had done this to his own city, let loose the horrors upon it – then he had fled along with his accomplices and the cogitators that contained his blasphemous research, to whoever had brought him to Ruin in the first place.

A curse from one of the Heirs made her look up, and she saw what had drawn the oath. The symbol of the Cult Mechanicus should have been there, displayed in bronze and iron. But instead of the half-cybernetic skull superposed with the Sacred Cog, there was a horned, bestial skull, surrounded by a great chain.

Azarok Sector – Kemyros System

741.M32

'We withdrew from the city using one of the Heirs' Thunderhawks,' concluded Silviana. 'Then I signed the order for the orbital destruction of Zethirion Nine-Six. The other Fabricators protested loudly, of course. They all agreed that the city needed purging, but each of them seemed to think he – and only he – should be allowed to send a last exploring team, to recover what secrets of the Omnissiah might be saved before the corruption be burned away. I refused them all, of course. Better some knowledge be lost than risk the taint spread to the other forge-cities and we later be forced to condemn the entire planet to Exterminatus.'

'Better indeed,' muttered Noriov, the rest of the gathering doing the same in agreement. The Mechanicus was entirely too fond of knowledge at times, and entirely too suspicious and willing to have it destroyed at others, depending on the internal currents of the Cult's politics. But they should have known better than to dispute the decision of an Inquisitor.

Perhaps they had, at that. It was difficult to say, with the tech-priests. Perhaps they had simply sent their requests because they didn't want the Inquisition to get the impression that its members could act too freely on the worlds belonging to the Omnissiah's faithful servants. Or perhaps it had been a way for them to forget the trauma of what had happened, to pretend that Zethirion Nine-Six had merely fallen victim to some natural catastrophe rather than hideous corruption. For all their cold and logical façade, the tech-priests could be surprisingly human in their motivations sometimes. One of the truths Noriov had learned through his long life was that, in the end, it didn't matter that the tech-priests sought to replace all of their flesh with iron. They were still as complex, paradoxical and self-destructive as any unaugmented human – and therefore needed watching just as much. More, since they held so much power.

'The disappearance of Kieral Mazer, his inner circle and their resources is worrying,' he said out loud. 'If they were captured by the forces of the Archenemy, there is much that could be extracted from them. And if they really turned from the Emperor's Light …'

He left his sentence unfinished. The Dark Mechanicum wasn't a subject anyone sane enjoyed talking about. After the horrors of the Horus Heresy and the terrible war that had forever scarred Mars, the hereteks who had joined the Warmaster had been banished alongside the Traitor Legions into the Eye of Terror, and they left this infernal realm even less often than the Chaos Marines. But when they did, they always did so at the head of great and horrible armies. If Kieral Mazer had been tempted into joining the forces of Ruin, that would have been in return for forbidden knowledge, the lure that drew tech-priests the most easily. And who better to have such knowledge than those who were already part of the Adeptus Mechanicus' twisted reflection ?

Noriov turned his gaze toward one of the two Inquisitors who hadn't spoken yet.

'Alphon,' he said politely. 'If you would … ?'

In the Azarok Conclave, Alphon was a mystery, an enigma that had drawn the suspicion of many Inquisitors. Arrived in the Sector less than ten years ago, he had only ever given his name as Alphon, with only his rosette to prove his rank as Inquisitor. But in those ten years, Alphon had built a network of contacts across the Sector that equalled anything his peers had established in decades, or inherited down a chain of master-apprentice relationships that had endured for centuries. He was a man of medium height, with short brown hair and eyes, and a face so ordinary he could vanish in a crowd within seconds. He wore a grey coat, the likes of which millions of Imperial citizens wore on any given Imperial world. There were absolutely no sign of his allegiance to the Ordos anywhere on his person, though Noriov knew Alphon carried his rosette in his pocket at all times.

Noriov alone knew why he had come to the Sector, and that was another secret he intended to keep. But so much secrecy and success in one man drew attention, no matter how much Alphon tried to avoid it. There were plenty of rumors circulating about him in the Conclave – sometimes Inquisitors could be as bad as servants when it came to hearsay. On several occasions, Noriov had had to step down and prevent one of his colleagues from outright accusing the secretive Inquisitor from heresy, an outright ridiculous accusation. Noriov knew full well that Alphon would never deal in anything that approached radicalism – at least not in the way his detractors thought.

'It was on Apollo,' he began, 'that I heard my first mention of the chained daemonhead …'

Azarok Sector – Hive-world Apollo

4 months prior

Marcus Helden didn't look like any street preacher Alphon had ever seen. For one thing, he was fat, nearly obese, though his face showed signs that he must have been even more corpulent before the fever had seized him and he had forsaken all mortal pleasures. There hadn't been time yet for his new ascetic lifestyle to make him truly thin, but the months the prophet had spent in the streets of Apollo's capital city had still left their mark upon him. His body, naked safe for the loin cloth preserving his dignity, was scarred and bruised, and none of these had been inflicted during his capture, which he had not resisted at all.

'I knew you would come,' he said as soon as Alphon entered the small, windowless room that had been converted into a cell as soon as his agents had claimed the building as their base of operation. The man's face showed no sign of joy, only a deep sense of resignation – and a glint of madness in his eyes.

The man had been lucky, in a way. His fiery, apocalyptic sermons had earned him the ire of Apollo's nobility – the spire-born disliked anything that unbalanced the statu quo, and Marcus' declarations had certainly done that. Many of the rabble that listened to him had started to believe that their noble masters would be the cause for everything the preacher had prophesied – though he, himself, had never said so. There had been talk of revolt, and it wouldn't have been surprising for Marcus to be killed discreetly before Alphon's own agents on Apollo could capture him.

Lucky indeed, though many would not see being in the Inquisition's hands as a fate preferable to death. Alphon's agents on Apollo had included a psyker, and he had detected something around Marcus that marked him as more than a mere madman. At their Inquisitor's order, they had kidnapped him in the night, and brought him to this place, one of many secret lairs Alphon's agents had on the planet. Usually, Alphon wouldn't have come here himself – but he had received reports from other psykers across the Sector, vague warnings and prophecies of doom. For reasons of his own, Alphon put some degree of trust in portents, and those told that something terrible was on its way. He needed to know all he could about it, and if Marcus' visions contained even the shadow of a clue, then he was determined to have it.

'I am of the Inquisition,' said Alphon, showing his rosette to Marcus. He wasn't really surprised when the man didn't seem to be scared at all and only nodded to himself, as if this confirmed whatever he had expected. 'I know you claim to be a prophet of some kind, and have foreseen a danger to the Imperium. You will tell me all that you know.'

Marcus began to speak then, and continued for hours. His sanity seemed to fluctuate as he did so, and most of the time he was weeping or giggling, or staring ahead blindly, his lips moving but no words passing through them. Even so, he spoke of a great many things to the Inquisitor. It was impossible to say if what he was seeing was in the past, the present, or the future – he didn't seem to know himself – but Alphon believed it was all three, mixed together in the throes of madness. The very air grew colder as Marcus recited his prophecies, frost forming upon the walls and on the exposed skin of both Inquisitor and captive. But the preacher did not seem to notice the cold.

He spoke of a bat on the hunt, flying through the night, relishing its freedom until, like a hunting hawk, it was called back, unable to escape the will of its master.

He told of unnatural alliances that must be mirrored to obtain victory, and of deluded lords who would lead their people to their doom in the pursuit of false glory, their eyes blinded by the most cruel of lies.

He described shadows dancing at a serpent's song, and statues of ash walking across a barren wasteland.

He wept as he described an entire world's worth of souls consumed, snuffed out forever to fuel the winds of madness and ruin.

He sung a wordless, heart-rending tune for half an hour, then screamed about a knight shackled by deceit and honor woven together by cruel artisans, turned against those he had once loved, in service to a lord without mercy. Amidst horrified screams, he declared that this knight's death would herald peace, and death.

He laughed bitterly as he told of champions reforged under the light of a murdered star, only to be slaughtered and their souls sent to a realm of eternal hate and war. That one, at least, Alphon thought he understood.

Nevertheless, all of those proclamations would need further analysis. Alphon had seers of his own, psykers trained in the Emperor's Tarot, and he could call upon the services of astropaths, used to interpret metaphors and abstractions. But there was one that caught his attention, one that warranted further immediate questioning. Marcus had spoken of "a dark lord, gazing from the abyss with unblinking eyes, seeking the key to ruin and doom."

'Tell me more about this,' Alphon urged in as gentle a tone of voice as he could manage – which was still threatening enough to have a street tough fall on his knees and beg for mercy. 'This dark lord, what does he seek ? What are his goals ?'

'He seeks …' Marcus took a deep breath, his eyes open wide, his face turning purple as he stared at something only he could see, and every word went out of his mouth faster than the last : 'He seeks to snuff out the hope born of the old sin ! To extinguish the twin flame of betrayal and glory so that it cannot stand against the Harbinger of the End when the final days come ! He is coming ! The chained daemonhead obeys his will, but it will be his undoing in the end ! In the fires of wrath shall he be undone, unmade and remade, reforged and destroyed, forever and ever until … until …'

The former merchant seized violently, forcing against his shackles with such strength that Alphon heard his wrists break under the strain. For a few seconds he remained immobile, then slumped down, lifeless. Medicaes rushed in, but Alphon knew that it was too late. The man was already dead – whatever he had seen had been too much for him.

The man's last words were burning in his mind, though. He had been present a few times when an Imperial seer had given a prophecy – a true prophecy, different from the vague hints given by a reading of the Emperor's Tarot. And he had seen them coming true in person three separate times. On each occurrence, the end result had matched the words of the prophecy, though never in the fashion he or anyone else had expected. Yet it seemed to him that Marcus' prophecy, if it truly were one, was as straightforward as those things went. The details were muddy, and would require much analysis and research, but one thing was crystal clear.

After two hundred years of peace, war was coming to Azarok.

Azarok Sector – Kemyros System

741.M32

Silence hung in the room in the aftermath of Alphon's tale. After a few seconds, Alphon added a few details :

'Dissection of Marcus' corpse and psychic communion with his brain revealed that he was indeed a psyker himself, his gifts focused on prediction. Yet he was more than seventy years old, and nothing in his life before that point showed any hint that he had that power. Something caused him to awaken it – but again, there doesn't seem to have been any traumatic experience before he suddenly abandoned his life as a merchant and started preaching in the streets.'

'I have received reports from across the entire Sector,' continued Noriov, 'that astropaths and psykers have received visions of the same nature. The details vary, and my people are working hard to interpret them, but they all point to some nameless threat to the Sector. But before we speak of it, please tell us your own encounter with the symbol of the chained daemonhead, Gaelis.'

Gaelis Serventas was a man with shoulder-long hair, one blue eye and another replaced by a glowing cybernetic replacement. He was sitting, but held in his left hand a ornate cane that was as much weapon as it was a walking aid. He had carried the thing with him ever since he had fought against a cult leader ten years ago and had been forced to have his psyker fuse his foot's shattered bones together quickly, before the castle where they had fought collapsed on them all. The healing had been enough for him to escape, but the pains had tormented him ever since, and there had been nothing any Imperial medicae could do safe prescribe painkillers. Unfortunately, even the mildest of those would impair Gaelis' mind, however slightly. The stubborn Inquisitor had chosen to accept the pains and try to spare his right foot rather than risk his wits being muddled.

'I went to Nerius Sanctus after one my informants told me she had heard alarming rumors about the Cardinal's state of mind, things that, to her, hinted at heretical beliefs,' said Gaelis. 'She had proven several times before that she could be trusted on such matters. I infiltrated the Cardinal's chambers, but alas ...'

Azarok Sector – Shrine-world Nerius Sanctus

13 months prior

The Cathedral was aflame. Daemons walked its corridors, hunting down priests whose prayers failed to grant them salvation. Blood ran from the eyes of saintly statues, forming pools at their feet from which creatures of the Warp emerged into reality. The skies were burning with the light of the fires set across the single city that dotted the planet, built around the grave of Saint Nerius in centuries past. Many had died, but those were the lucky ones, for their souls had escaped the horror of this world and were now safe in the Emperor's keeping. At least, that was what Gaelis told himself. But even if the dead's shades had been burned by the power of Chaos, he suspected it was still a kinder fate than what awaited the thousands who had been taken alive, herded into vast spaces and locked in, surrounded on all sides by leering Warp-spawn.

His own fate, he suspected, would not be any kinder. He had come to Nerius Sanctus thinking to uncover corruption among the ranks of the Ecclesiarchy, perhaps to have to fight against the Temple Guards if things went wrong or the taint was more deeply rooted than he believed. He had entered the Cathedral and summoned the Cardinal to meet him before the Emperor's gaze, that he might answer his questions while his Acolytes searched his rooms. Unsubtle, yes, but the reports of heresy he had received indicated that the man would try to weasel his way out of accusations, unable to even conceive that he might actually be punished. Instead, mere moments after a panicked chorus boy had run out to fetch the Cardinal, terrified screams had begun to echo through the building, soon followed by inhuman howls. Then the Warp manifestations had begun. All attempts Gaelis had made to raise his ship had failed – something was obstructing communications, and judging by the mocking laughter that was all he could hear over the vox, it wasn't something from this side of the veil.

He had not heard from his Acolytes since the horror had begun, and now he doubted he ever would. He had no idea what had happened to the Cardinal. Some of the daemons he had fought had claimed to have tasted his soul, but they weren't exactly a trustworthy source. And it was likely that Gaelis had been duped, drawn to this world just in order to fall victim of this daemonic incursion, which cast the report that had brought him here into a suspicious light indeed.

After several minutes fighting against the unholy creatures – long-limbed creatures with scaled skin and prehensile tongues that reeked of shattered hopes and ruined dreams – Gaelis was finally cast down when one of the daemons wiped his legs from under him and brought a stone club that had once been a saint's sword arm upon them. He screamed in pain, and other creatures seized the opportunity to disarm him, casting his weapons aside before battering them until they were as broken and useless as his legs.

And there, before him, stood a giant in black armor, holding in his hands a crozius that radiated unholy light. He had emerged from the very same puddles of blood as the daemons themselves, and the air around him still shivered with the unnatural energies coursing through him. The emblem of the chained daemonhead was painted on his right shoulder paldron. Infernal sigils burned upon the armor, but the Traitor Astartes went without a helm, revealing a face that was a horrible patchwork of burned, scarred, and absurdly smooth skin. Gaelis had heard of those who carried such weapons among the ranks of the Traitor Legions. Dark Apostles, the heralds of the Ruinous Powers' twisted, evil faith.

'I am Karalet,' said the Chaos Marine in a voice that made Gaelis shiver despite the heat of the fire surrounding them. 'I am the Lord of Ashes, and you will serve me. You, and every soul on this wretched city, this … temple to the False Emperor. In life, or in death, it matters not to us – you will serve.'

The Astartes – Karalet – lowered his crozius until the weapon touched Gaelis' skull. Immediately, pain blossomed within his brain, a burning agony unlike anything he had known before. Compared to this, the pain in his foot was nothing, a candle compared to a nuclear holocaust. It tore through his mind, ripped his defenses apart until his very core was exposed to the dark power of the crozius.

Inquisitor Gaelis Serventas started screaming. It would be a long, long time before he stopped, and by that point there wouldn't be a Gaelis Serventas anymore.

Azarok Sector – Kemyros System

741.M32

'… it was already too late – he had hung himself, amidst rooms whose walls were covered in blasphemous markings, including the image of the chained daemonhead. We disposed of the body, of course,' continued Gaelis smoothly, 'and I had the entire quarters quarantined and thoroughly examined, then cleansed and exorcised. We interrogated the Cathedral's entire personnel, then, having not found any trace of this corruption in them, they were all mind-wiped of the last few months. The Emperor willing, the next Cardinal will never know what happened in his quarters – though I have no doubt there will be some rumors, with so many people having vague memories of this period.'

Once again, the gathered Inquisitors were silent. Gaelis' tale, the madness of a Cardinal, his fall to darkness and suicide, was enough to shock even these seasoned guardians of Mankind's purity.

'The Cardinal's death is an ill omen, but the presence of the daemonhead's mark links all of our tales together and is one fouler still. These are not random acts, nor the sign of an underlying conspiracy seeking to corrupt the Sector from within. Each of these groups you defeated would have done great damage to Imperial forces in Azarok, but that damage could have been healed in time. No, I believe they were tactical strikes, seeking to cripple the Sector's defences before a true invasion.'

'I agree. We have always suspected the Wailing Storm was more than a simple tempest, another part of the galaxy lost to the random fluctuations of the Warp. Now I fear we underestimated the threat it poses – it might not be another Eye of Terror, but the entire Trebedius Sector was consumed by it. One hundred worlds lost to us, and during the Scouring, when the Traitor Legions were still rampant across the galaxy. And an entire Chapter lost as well, caught in the birth of that storm.'

All present made the sign of the aquila, silently paying homage to the memory of the Sons of Calth, the Ultramarines Successor Chapter who had been declared destroyed more than a millennia before. Likely, they had been the champions mentioned by the seer of Alphon's tale.

'The rest of Sector command might believe nothing can live in the Wailing Storm,' continued Noriov, 'but we know better. An attack – a war – is coming, and we must be prepared to face it. These plots we foiled cannot be the only ones – even if they were, we cannot assume it is so. The rest of our colleagues must have encountered such traces as well, even if they did not recognize them for what they are.'

'We must call the Conclave to gather in full,' said Gaelis. 'Share this warning with them. The Ordos must be united to face this new threat, our resources all brought to bear against it.'

'I concur,' replied Noriov. 'Any objections ?'

All of the six other Inquisitors gave their agreement, grim-faced and resolute. They thought they knew what was at stake, and intellectually, they did. But only Noriov had lived through the War of the Beast – only he remembered the terror of feeling the entire Imperium on the brink of extinction. He doubted the threat in the Wailing Storm was on the same scale as the Great Beast – dire as the portents were, they were not that dire yet – but he knew that many hadn't thought the Orks were a threat until they had proven to the Imperium that it would never be truly safe. Gregory's tale of the corruption that had claimed House Delande was just one example of many of the madness that had resulted from the War of the Beast. Even after the Beast had been slain on Ullanor, even after the Imperium had been rebuilt and the High Lords cleansed by the Beheading and Vangorich's summary execution at the hands of the Imperial Fists' Chapter Master, there had still been those who lived haunted by the existential dread the Orks had brought to the Imperium.

'I will send the astropathic summons at once,' said Noriov, tearing his mind free from the horrors of the past and focusing on how to battle those yet to come. 'It will take some time for all of our colleagues to receive them, longer still for all who decide to come to arrive. With any luck, it will be in time, but we should make our own preparations in the meantime.'

'All members and personnel of Sector command must be checked more thoroughly than ever before for signs of corruption, and those who are above all suspicion must be informed. We must send our Acolytes to those worlds that will be key to holding the Sector. We can be relatively certain that the attack, when it comes, will come from the Wailing Storm – the worlds nearest the border must be defended ...'

The meeting lasted several hours longer, before each Inquisitor returned to his or her ship, and began the work that they hoped would safeguard Azarok from the coming war. None of them had spoken the name aloud, but they all knew what was really coming : a Black Crusade.

And only one of them knew who would be at its head when it came – one who was not what he seemed to be, one whose loyalty was not to the Golden Throne but to the Awakened One. One who remembered being Gaelis Serventas, Inquisitor of the Holy Ordos, yet was not that man anymore, if he had ever been. None of the others had seen through him, not even Noriov with his fabled second sight. The walls set in his mind and soul by the Lord of Ashes were strong, forged by an immortal intellect imbued with the power of the Dark Gods themselves. They had taken the bait, as his masters had known they would. They had found the clues laid around for them to discover, foiled schemes that had only been created to catch their eyes and set them on the desired path. Now they would call the rest of their kind and gather them all in one place. Just as his masters wanted – just as they had planned …

None would know, none would suspect the truth. Not until it was too late, and the hand of the Awakened One tightened around the throat of the Azarok Sector. Of this, the being who was called Gaelis by the Inquisitors of the Blind Eye was certain : none could stand against the coming storm.

---

AN : And so it begins, the last arc of the tale of the Forsaken Sons. How fitting that the end should be heralded by treachery and deceit. But don't worry, dear readers - it will take many chapters before we reach the planned finale. An entire Black Crusade of battles, betrayals, and cunning plans from both sides. A few details remain to set before the Black Crusade itself might begin in-story, but I think these shouldn't take too long.

If you think you can decipher the visions of Marcus, don't hesitate to send me your interpretations. I did my best to be as vague as possible, but if I follow my plans for the Black Crusade, all of them should come true eventually.

In the next chapter, we will meet an old friend and some new ones as well. It will also be one in which I will practice my dialogue writing skills, something I think is a bit lacking.

As always, thanks you for your reviews. If you have any questions/suggestions/theories about what comes next, don't hesitate to either leave a review or contact me by PM.

Zahariel out.