"The Magician :
Generally depicted as holding in his right hand a scroll (inscribed with holy symbols) raised toward the celestial realm and pointing down to the material world with his left hand, the Magician represents the interaction between Humanity and the God-Emperor, the divine impulse that guides us to fulfilling our part of His plan. The card indicates that an opportunity to use one's talents in service to the Master of Mankind approaches, if one has but the will to embrace it.
Reversed, however, the Magician represents decrepitude and disgrace, the ruin of a once-noble thing or being."
Extract from the Treatise of Divination, a text describing the meanings of each of the seventy-eight cards of one of the most widely used versions of the Emperor's Tarot, author unknown, M31.
Azarok Sector – Zethirion System
745.M32
The war of Zethirion was such as poets had once imagined Hell must be, back when industry had first spread across Old Earth unchecked, and men had killed each other with machines rather than guns.
Entire armies of mechanized mortals battled in the shadow of great behemoths of metal, spilling blood and oil on soil that had been polluted far beyond the point of recovery centuries ago. Great forges had been reconverted to produce only weaponry and other tools of war, fresh tanks emerging from the assembly lines only to be blown to pieces a few hours later. Unformed daemonic spirits haunted the battlefields, seeking wounded and dying warriors from both sides of the conflict to use as vessels to incarnate in the material plane.
The skies were burning, fires from the surface illuminating the clouds of smoke that covered almost the entire planet like a thick, poisonous blanket. Temperatures were freezing in places and scorching hot elsewhere, and the air was filled with toxins. An unaugmented and unprotected man would have perished in minutes just from walking the surface of Zethirion Alpha even if he had the fortune of not encountering any of the forces fighting for it.
Those ancient poets would have been ill-pressed to distinguish between the armies fighting in this desolate landscape at first, until they saw the infernal icons and Warp-shrouded horrors that fought beneath the banner of the chained daemonhead.
The bulk of the forces the Dark Mechanicum of the Wailing Storm had committed to the Black Crusade had come here, driven both by their hatred for their old peers and by the Awakened One's command. Like all of the tech-priests domains across the Imperium, the Zethirion system had been heavily defended – ostensibly against xenos invaders and other foes of Humanity, but it was always understood that these defenses also protected the Adeptus Mechanicus' fiercely treasured independence.
When the Black Crusade had begun and mechanical monstrosities had begun to emerge from Zethirion Nine-Six, the Mechanicus had still been confident enough to dispatch reinforcements to neighbouring systems pleading for assistance. Now, the Martian tech-priests had tried several times to recall these forces, but to no avail : the Warp around Zethirion was burning, devouring all astropathic communication and making Warp travel extremely hazardous.
They had no reports on what was going on outside of Zethirion, but in the system at least, the war was not going well for the servants of the Machine-God.
Orbital defenses hang in ruin above the forge-world, swarming with Argentian salvage crews. They had given a good account of themselves before the end : scores of Dark Mechanicum fighters and several of their malevolent-seeming ships had been destroyed as well, their husks given over to the same scenes of carrion-like salvage. But there remained more than enough traitor vessels to blockade the system. A combination of the forge-cities' potent anti-orbital defenses, void-shielding, and the Argentian forces' desire to capture Zethirion's infrastructure as intact as possible had prevented orbital bombardment. Instead, the Dark Mechanicum had landed their forces on the forge-world in mass, laying siege to forge-cities already hard-pressed dealing with the monsters crawling out of the desolate ruins of Zethirion Nine-Six.
The system's two moons had already fallen, their mining stations overwhelmed by a seemingly endless horde of Dark Mechanicum skitarii warriors. The data-screams of those who had been taken alive had been broadcast by the invaders across the noosphere, turning them into yet another weapon among their arsenal of scrap-code and data-eater algorithms.
Worse than the military situation however was the logistical front. Like most forge-worlds, Zethirion Alpha's vaunted independence was more proclamation than fact : the overy-industrialized planet depended heavily on imports from nearby systems, supplying it with the resources needed by its voracious forges. This flow of resources had dried up completely, and while the planet had possessed sizeable stockpiles in case that the vagaries of the Empyrean delayed the regular deliveries, those had been quickly eaten up by the demands of war.
The Dark Mechanicum could apparently recycle its dead and their foes' endlessly, harvesting corpses and metal and turning them into new cloned warriors within days. At first, the Martian defenders had ignored this, refusing to even contemplate the heresies of their foe. But as supplies dwindled and the situation worsened, the tech-priests began to wonder where their enemy was drawing the considerable energy required to sustain such efforts. Dissected enemy forces (and not a few vivisected ones) revealed the hereteks had somehow managed to draw anima directly from the Warp itself, transforming its baleful energies into something that could power their blasphemous devices.
Amidst the loyalists, the Motive Force required by all vessels of the Machine-God's glory was becoming scarce. Stocks of untainted promethium and other energy sources were diminishing. But to take in the energies of the foe was to damn oneself in the eyes of the Omnissiah.
As had been the case in all wars, despair gave way to ruthlessness. The skitarii warriors and engines dispatched to the frontlines, where their life expectancy was measured in days, were commanded to feed their mechanisms from the corrupt energies of the enemy. The calculation of their masters was as simple as it was cold : since they would perish anyway, better to save the remaining pure energy for their betters, those who would survive.
The outposts closest to Zethirion Nine-Six, those subject to the most attacks, were among the first to employ this tactic. For now, it was working, though all tech-priests wondered what the long-term effects might be on those few battle-constructs that, by chance or skill, survived for some time on the frontlines. The doomed skitarii were denied the right to link with the hallowed power-grids of the forges, lest some of the taint they may have taken in spread, forcing them to rely only upon their ghoulish feedings to survive.
The apparent deadlock would end on the day that the most powerful auspexes of Zethirion Seven-Four detected a sudden and brutal disturbance in the Warp in the void, characteristic of a forceful and catastrophic ship's re-entry into the Materium.
Haloed Fury was dying, her final moments spent in the fulfilment of her duty.
The Grey Knights frigate's journey from Berrenos had been beyond difficult. The tides of the Empyrean had been spiteful in their assaults on the ship, and even the hexagrammatic wards engraved in her hull hadn't been enough to keep her safe. On several occasions, the Grey Knights had needed to purge the ship from daemonic manifestations that had slipped through the flickering Geller Field and the cracked wards.
They had emerged from the Warp at their destination, which was good. They had done so well beyond the Mandeville Point, however, which was bad. The tormented hull of Haloed Fury simply broke apart, unable to withstand the strain of the contradicting forces affecting it.
The gun bay was in ruins, flooded with fire and liquid madness. In order to escape, the Grey Knights would need to rely on the escape pods – the very last-ditch option, but the only one left to them. Of course, this was a Grey Knights ship : even the escape pods had been constructed using the best technology of the Imperium, and were protected by wards empowered by the willing sacrifice of purified psykers.
Of the twenty-six Grey Knights aboard Haloed Fury, only half made it out. The rest died trying to navigate the ship's corridors in her final moments, or holding back debris and fire long enough for their brothers to reach the escape pods. Even the survivors didn't make it out unscathed : the escape pods shuddered and trembled as they crossed the last of the distance to Zethirion Alpha at full speed, crashing through the cloud of debris orbiting the planet. Machine-spirits worked hard to hide them from the Dark Mechanicum fleet as best they could, and keep each pod in a loose formation with the others. United in psychic communion, the Grey Knights bent their power to influence the direction of their barely-controlled descent, aiming their pods as close to their ultimate destination as they could manage.
Like a clutch of comets, the escape pods burned through the tormented skies of the war-torn forge-world, and came to sudden and devastating stops in the wasteland between Zethirion Seven-Four and Nine-Six. Almost immediately, the mechanized horrors of the ruined forge-city converged on their location, like vultures drawn to carrion – except, of course, that this corpse was not yet dead, and had talons of its own.
In the reclaimed ruins of Zethirion Nine-Six, the Dark Mechanicum had built a vast complex, half laboratory and half altar to an aspect of Chaos those who were not more machine than flesh would struggle to comprehend. This monument to the Eightfold Omnissiah spread for kilometers, and housed hundreds of thousands of tech-thralls, all moving to the will of the former Fabricator-Locum.
At the center of it all laid the room where Kieral Mazer had escaped the forge-world before the Black Crusade, passing through the Empyrean and ending up in the holds of the Forsaken Sons' fleet through the sorcery of the Coven. Dozens of machines surrounded the great wound in reality that laid there, torn open anew by sorcery. In a manner similar to the Great Device of Argenta Primus, they drew power from the breach, every spark of energy reinforcing the connection with the Hell-Forge world.
When the Fabricator-Locum had turned from his world, Pareneffer, once a Sorcerer of the Coven and now a Chosen of Arken, had been there to welcome their ally. His Infernus Dreadnought form had suitably impressed their guest, even before he had revealed to him the might of the Dark Mechanicum arrayed under him.
The newest Arch-Heretek of Argenta Primus had taken a lot of work to turn, Pareneffer would give him that. From within the Wailing Storm, the Chosen of Arken had spent months (which had translated to decades in the Materium) prior to the Black Crusade in meditative trance, his metallic body immobile while his astral form flew the currents of the Sea of Souls, past the borders of the Warp Storm.
Like a tempting daemons out of Old Earth's myths, Pareneffer had whispered into Mazer's mind. He had worked slowly, playing on the man's pride and chafing at being subject to the distant authority of Mars. He had shown him images of the wonders the Dark Mechanicum had crafted in the Iruset system, carefully deadening his horror at the sight and allowing him to feel only awe. With the lightest of touches, he had altered the logical protocols of the Fabricator-Locum, influencing his calculations to reach the result he wanted.
Truth be told, it hadn't been that much different or more difficult than manipulating a mind purely of flesh would have been. For all the Mechanicus' claims of surpassing the weaknesses of Humanity through the purity of the Machine, the reality was much more mundane. Behind the veil of mysteries and secrecy the tech-priests cloaked themselves in before the rest of the Imperium, they were still very much human at the core.
Eventually, Kieral Mazer had been illuminated. He had looked upon all his works, all the power at his command, and realized that despite it all, he still knew nothing. Only the trite rites of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the formulas and incantations that drove the wheels of industry. The true secrets of the universe were as hidden from him as they were from the lowest menial in his service : he might be a king in all but name, but he was still a slave kept in ignorance. The Martian Omnissiah's promise of knowledge and order was a lie meant to keep the tech-priests into servitude, nothing more.
It had been then that Pareneffer had made open contact with his target. Zethirion Nine-Six had been turned into a city of nightmares as Mazer let loose his long-denied creativity, inspired by the knowledge Pareneffer had granted him. Even as the Inquisition bombarded the planet, the Fabricator-Locum had used the bloodshed as a sacrifice to tear open the veil of the Materium and open a portal that reached all the way to the Wailing Storm, letting him escape the devastation and complete his pilgrimage on Argenta Primus itself.
With his illumination and teaching complete, Mazer had been sent back to Zethirion, the dark magi of Argenta Primus using the lingering connection established by his departure to re-open the Warp portal between forge-worlds. Through coordination made possible by means that would have seen Pareneffer executed by his old Tizcan teachers and every mention of his existence wiped out from the records of the Fifteenth Legion before Prospero's fall, the former Fabricator-Locum had returned to the ruins of his city at the same time Pareneffer's fleet had reached the system, and the Mechanicus had found itself facing a war on two fronts.
Mazer would never leave Zethirion Nine-Six. He had (of his own free will, if any of them could be said to possess such a thing) become part of the great machine they were building there, of which the entire temple complex was merely the casing. His soul, which had been bathed in the raw energies of Argenta Primus in a lengthy and complex ritual, was forever twinned to that crack in reality through which the invasion force drew the power to sustain its engines.
With Mazer's completely focused on the machine, it had fallen to Pareneffer to lead the martial campaign for Zethirion. The shrivelled husk of his body hung in his sarcophagus, connected to the troops scattered across the forge-world through desecrated phylaptic controls. Like a ghost, or a god, his mind was spread throughout the entire army. As a result, he had sensed the arrival of the new foe immediately.
The Chosen of Arken had been warned of the coming of the Grey Knights. Soon after the fall of Berrenos to the Imperials – and truth be told, the Unbound Lord had held longer than Pareneffer had expected – the Awakened One had contacted him using the Metatron creature aboard the new Crystalline. The lord of the Forsaken Sons had warned Pareneffer that his work in Zethirion was likely to draw their attention, and that he should not, under any circumstances, underestimate them. Little was known about these mysterious warriors, even it seemed to Arken himself, but what had been learned from the Breaking of Berrenos painted a grim picture.
Even the timing of the Grey Knights was worrisome. Another day, even just another few hours, and they would have been too late : the temple complex would have been ready, its purpose activated and Zethirion would have been theirs forever. But instead the Imperials had arrived with just enough time left to conceivably intervene and ruin everything.
Still, Pareneffer commanded legions, and the only a handful of warriors could have escaped the ship that had so disastrously re-entered the Materium within the system.
At his command, corrupt skitarii moved toward the Grey Knights, numerous as a locust swarm and about as mindless. The cultivation process of the Dark Mechanicum did not bestow them any intellect : they were little more than puppets of flesh and metal, driven by the programming of their augmetic components and the whims of the occasional daemons dragged into their circuits as a side-effect of Argentian technology. On a one-to-one basis, they were vastly inferior to the Mechanicus' own augmented ground troops, who were equipped with the best wargear the forge-world could produce, and with the tactical input of their overseers complementing their own instincts and training.
However, quantity had a quality all its own, as the old adage went, and so long as the goal had been to keep the war churning while the great work progressed, they had been more than sufficient. Now, however, with the Grey Knights approaching and the Mechanicus making one last, desperate push, the horde tactics were insufficient.
Pareneffer moved from host to host, spreading his consciousness across the Dark Mechanicum battle-cyborgs. The creatures had almost no mind of their own, and their soul-sparks were tiny and feeble sparks, easily overwhelmed by the raging inferno of his own power. Unfortunately, they were also very fragile – or at least they appeared so when faced with opposition of the Grey Knights' calibre. Whenever the Chosen of Arken settled in a heretek skitarii close enough to the Grey Knights to get a good look at them, it didn't last for more than a few seconds before being cut down, and Pareneffer's attempts to puppet his borrowed bodies hardly helped.
Within minutes of the initial contact, the Grey Knights had slaughtered hundreds of the Dark Mechanicum skitarii, The Imperials refused to stop, refused to let themselves get bogged down. They kept moving forward, no matter the numbers arrayed against them. For all their might, their advance toward Zethirion Nine-Six was still slowed down, and a quick calculation showed Pareneffer that at this rate, the knights would be too late to stop them.
Unfortunately, the Grey Knights' arrival had been noticed by more than Pareneffer. From the fortified outpost of Zethirion Seven-Four, one of the closest holdouts of the loyalist Mechanicus, came a strike force of skitarii warriors. The magi of Seven-Four must have seen the might of the Grey Knights from afar and quite rightly believed that these warriors were the only hope of shifting the tides of the war for the forge-world before it was lost. In a move that was either pragmatism or desperation, they sent hundreds of their diminished reserves to join the Grey Knights, companies of skitarii soldiers accompanied by a score of their remaining heavier engines.
As Pareneffer watched the meeting of the two Imperial groups through the optics of a downed but not yet shut down Argentian construct, he let himself hope that the Grey Knights would turn on the loyalists. Many of them were, after all, using the same Warp-born energy as the constructs of the Dark Mechanicum, and surely the Grey Knights wouldn't fail to notice that.
That hope was dashed quickly as he witnessed the Grey Knights and Mechanicus forces make common cause. It appeared that, for all their claims of highest purity, the knights were pragmatic souls at heart. No doubt they were thinking to purge the skitarii warriors once their task was done. Pareneffer could admire that kind of cold-bloodedness : even the Awakened One was wary of slaughtering his own allies, though this was more because Arken abhorred waste than out of any moral restraint.
Briefly, he considered whispering the Grey Knights' intents into the minds of their new allies, before discarding the idea. Any skitarii would gladly lay down their existence to save their forge-world from what the Forsaken Sons had planned. Most of the time, the only way to get them to turn against the Martian Mechanicus was through their masters, who were much more susceptible to temptation.
When they resumed their advance, the Space Marines acted as a force multiplicator to the Mechanicus army that followed them, dealing with the greatest threats among the foes and drawing the fire of most of the horde, which bounced off their ceramite harmlessly.
Pareneffer summoned more reinforcements from the forces harassing the other forge-cities, as well as from the ships in orbit. Daemon engines rained from the skies of Zethirion, the Neverborn bound within them howling in pain and rage. They could sense the Grey Knights' purity, and it offended them. Tanks rolled out of Zethirion Nine-Six, each crewed by a singular skitarii that had been specially vat-grown to be possessed of more wit than its numberless siblings.
The ranks of damned souls clad in tainted iron marched forth to meet the advancing host, and broke upon them like waves on a cliff. Black blood and oil spilled in torrents, and the Aether vibrated with the shrieks of Neverborn being hurled back into the Warp after their shells of metal were destroyed. And still, the Imperials advanced, undaunted. It would have been admirable if it wasn't so infuriating.
It was madness. Worse, it might be failure. The Grey Knights had taken casualties of their own since landing, but the attrition rate wasn't good enough, not with the loyalist skitarii added to the equation. They were going to reach the temple complex, Pareneffer realized with something that wasn't quite fear, but tasted far too much like it for his liking. He had seen the Empyric equations and schematics of the great work, and understood it almost as well as the renegade Fabricator-Locum.
The consequences of any interference at this late stage, especially one caused by beings such as the Grey Knights, would be … catastrophic was too weak a word. Pareneffer had felt what had happened at Nerius Sanctus all the way here, on the other side of the Azarok Sector, but even that disaster would pale in comparison to what might occur if the delicate balance of eldritch powers at work here were disturbed.
… Very well. If the hordes of mindless constructs couldn't deal with the Grey Knights, then he would do so himself.
Zethirion Nine-Six was defended by more than the cloned rabble the Dark Mechanicum hurled at the loyalist forge-cities to keep them occupied. True skitarii warriors, their augmetics handcrafted by the dark magi of the fleet, stood guard, along with a circle of Daemon Engines chained at the edge of the complex, where the Neverborn trapped inside them couldn't interfere with the delicate work taking place within.
But that wasn't all. As Pareneffer returned his consciousness to his body and reactivated the dormant systems of his Dreadnought chassis, he sent a message to those of his brothers who were on Zethirion Alpha. By the time he opened his 'eyes' to his immediate surroundings, they were there, waiting for him.
In the days that followed the alliance between the Forsaken Sons and Argenta Primus, the Fabricator-General of the Hell-Forge, Elveros Anestis (who had arrogantly claimed a title normally reserved for Mars' own overlord) had presented his new allies with one last parting gift. Found within the holdings of the renegade Heinorius had been several sets of Terminator warplate, which the dark magi of Argenta Primus had repaired and refitted before offering them to the Forsaken Sons.
Tenoch, Urik and the other four Astartes who remained by Pareneffer's side had accepted the boon with enthusiasm. True, it might pale in comparison to the rest of Heinorius' assets which had been granted to the warband, but the might of Terminator armor was something most Legionary aspired to, and the Forsaken Sons' supply was small, with most being reserved for the Awakened One's own praetorian guard. They had taken to wearing them in almost every battle, until their old suits of armor were only worn while aboard the Crystalline, where the standard Astartes warplate was more comfortable to wear during the journeys of the armada.
Then had come the battle of Lydeus II. There, the being that called itself the Arch-Vile hadn't gone down with any sort of grace. With its final breath, the bloated daemonhost had unleashed a curse that had wiped out most life on the entire hemisphere. Sealed within his Dreadnought chassis, Pareneffer had been untouched, but his brothers had been stricken, their Terminator armor barely keeping them alive even as the Arch-Vile's death-curse slaughtered thousands of Argentian cyborgs around them.
For weeks, they had laid in the Crystalline's med-bay, trapped in constant agony that made even the bite of the Butcher's Nails in Tenoch's skull pale in comparison. Between grunts of pain, the Fleshmaster had told Pareneffer to put them out of their misery, but Pareneffer had refused to give up on his brothers. Instead, he had sought the help of the dark magi who had once been called Omechron-One-Nine-Three, and was now simply called Arch-Heretek Omechron.
With Omechron's help, Pareneffer had been able to save the other Forsaken Sons. He had turned the daemonic plague ravaging their bodies into something else, sublimating its infernal essence in a ceremony that had been half sorcerous ritual, half surgical intervention. It had lasted for nine days and nine nights, and though Pareneffer remembered only a fraction of it, the rest of his memories being lost to Warp-induced fever and self-inflicted purges, it had left marks on his soul that would always be there.
But when it was done, Tenoch and the other five Astartes had risen, alive … but changed. The fusion of their flesh and the Terminator armor they wore was the least of the alterations they had undergone. To save them, Pareneffer and Omechron had essentially replaced the Arch-Vile's plague with another, one that, in the Eye of Terror, was called the Obliterator Virus. Its origins laid somewhere in the Heresy War, with the Iron Warriors – Pareneffer remembered seeing forces of that type deployed by the Fourth Legion at the Siege. The six Traitor Marines had become walking arsenals, capable of mutating their own bodies into all manners of weapons, which never ran out of ammunition so long as they fed themselves on oil and plasma in sufficient quantities.
It had required … adjustment, to say the least, on the warriors' part. For an entire month, Pareneffer had been forced to lock his brothers in one section of the ship as they vented their rage and madness on every luckless crew trapped in there with them. Eventually, they had calmed down, and resumed their position at Pareneffer's side. Their capacity for violence had been increased even further, as had the awe the Dark Mechanicum felt for them. Like Pareneffer himself, they had become demigods in the eyes of the hereteks, incarnations of their Eightfold Omnissiah's wrath.
Omechron had been less than pleased with that aspect of the transformation, which might explain why he was gone now. Decades after the battle of Lydeus II, as the separate fleets of the Forsaken Sons converged before the Black Crusade, the Arch-Heretek had attempted to overthrow Pareneffer, sending daemon-possessed killers to attack his chambers and those of the Obliterators. The assassination had failed, though two of Urik's diminished pack had perished in the resulting confrontation. Hours of excruciation later, Omechron had confessed to the most banal of motives – the simple desire to lead the armada they had mustered back to Argenta Primus, and use it to claim the Hell-Forge as his own, overthrowing his old master.
Pareneffer had made sure to keep Omechron alive long enough to give what remained of him back to the master in question. The Chosen didn't know if Omechron lived still, but he was certain that if he did, then he surely wished he didn't.
The Chosen of Arken returned to his physical surroundings to find himself in the company of four Obliterators. Around them were the caskets of the other hereteks linked to the skitarii hordes across Zethirion Alpha. After Omechron's attempted betrayal, they had been reduced to brains floating in life-sustaining tanks, to discourage further treachery. It was difficult to overthrow your leaders when you couldn't move, and killing you was as simple as pulling a few cables or smashing through the reinforced container holding every bit of flesh left to you.
The sight of the hereteks trapped within their control cradles would have been enough to drive a mortal man to catatonia. Yet it paled in comparison to the horrifying sight of the Obliterators themselves, whose bodies were constantly in flux. Gun barrels emerged from where their fingers had been, gleaming in the red light before vanishing, replaced by mono-molecular sharp claws or the muzzle of a flamethrower. Their veins glowed with plasma, and their eyes were twin pits of merciless darkness that contained nothing but the promise of violent endings.
"Brothers," Pareneffer greeted them over the vox. Using telepathic communion had fallen out of use since their transformation : their thoughts had become nests of razor-sharp wire that cut into his mind whenever he made contact. "As you have no doubt noticed, we are under attack."
"The dogs of the False Emperor are finally here ?" asked Tenoch. The voice of the former World Eater was like the grinding of metal gears.
"Yes. And they are every bit as dangerous as Arken warned us they would be. At the rate they are advancing, they will be at the gates within minutes."
"Release the beasts at the walls from their leashes. Drown the bastards in Daemon Engines," growled Urik. "No one would survive that."
"You're likely correct," replied Pareneffer, "but we can't risk the beasts breaking in once they are done with the foe. The work is too close to completion."
"True," said Tenoch. "But this puts us in a difficult situation. This place wasn't designed to withstand an attack; that's why we put so much effort into keeping the Mechanicus on the back foot.
"I refuse to let all our work here come to naught because of a bunch of Imperial heroes coming in at the last minute." Despite the mechanized nature of his voice, Pareneffer managed to infuse the name with a prodigious amount of contempt. "We will meet them ourselves, and stop them or die trying."
His declaration was met with a moment of silence. It was Tenoch who broke it.
"Well," said the Fleshmaster with what could generously be called a chuckle, but in truth sounded more like a gunshot. "I know I don't intend to explain to the Awakened One how we failed in our mission. So we better get to it, eh ?"
The Imperials breached the border of Zethirion Nine-Six, shattering the metal shells of the Daemon Engines guarding that section of the edge. The Grey Knights could sense the gathering power, and they moved past the secondary temples and forges, walking on the paths through the complex that had been left open for both ritual and practical purposes. It took some discussion to convince the skitarii – or rather their distant masters, whose link to their forces was growing more and more unreliable the closer they got to the source of Zethirion Alpha's woes – to pass the horrors in their way without destroying them.
A mechanical voice boomed across the entire complex, spoken by thousands of gargoyles and station-bound servitors.
"Warning. Imperial forces have entered the complex. All forces proceed to intercept at once. Countdown to Ignition : twenty-seven minutes. All hail the Eightfold Omnissiah."
The final battle for the fate of the Zethirion system was fought on the very steps of Mazer's sanctum, near the beating, pulsating heart of the complex. There, Pareneffer and his brothers stood behind hastily erected defensive positions, along with four scores of the best skitarii warriors the Dark Mechanicum of Argenta Primus had to offer. Each of these fighters had been the recipient of unique augmentations, crafted with masterful care by the greatest hereteks among the Black Crusade's fleet. In their hands they clutched weapons of absolute lethality, which they had used at the command of the Forsaken Sons time and time again during the conquest of the Wailing Storm.
Some of them had died during that conquest, only to be dragged back to life by Dark Tech and sorcery, their corpses filled with yet more forbidden devices and brought back with great arcs of Argentian energy, their souls pulled from the claws of daemons by the brute force of their masters' will. As far as Pareneffer could tell, such resurrections didn't seem to leave any mark upon the warriors, so lost to the Dark Mechanicum's Eightfold Omnissiah they had already been.
Behind them stood one of the eight gates leading into Mazer's sanctum. This close to the nexus, the gate only partially existed in the material universe : its metallic surface rippled like water, shapes briefly appearing on its surface that poisoned the air around them. With his psychic sense, Pareneffer could feel the waiting potential lurking within the gate, hungering for the moment it would become reality. Each of the eight gates had been forged on Argenta Primus, and carried from the hell-forge aboard the Crystalline.
There were no grand speeches, no shouted threats, as the Imperials came into view. It would have been almost impossible to hear them anyway, between the omnipresent noise of the device in its final moments before activation. Even the most secure vox-transmissions were garbled and almost unintelligible, and to use telepathy outside of the command chamber from where Pareneffer had directed the war was an invitation to madness and ruin.
Living weapons charged at one another, driven to violence by ingrained instincts and the will of distant and uncaring masters. Las-bolts, streams of plasma and fire, solid ammunition loaded with radioactive and explosive payloads, and other, rarer forms of death hurled in the air between the two forces. Skitarii on both sides fell, spilling blood, oil, and Argentian energy in the long corridor.
Pareneffer added his own fire to the onslaught, unleashing the full might of his custom lascannon. The daemon's head that formed the weapon's extremity came to life as power flowed through it, the Neverborn bound within the sculpted metal briefly enabled to let loose its hatred upon the universe. A beam of scarlet light cut through the battlefield, aimed at one of the Grey Knights. But the warrior dodged it, moving out of its way at the last possible moment, with reflexes no mere mortal could possess. Somehow, the knight had foreseen the attack, though his precognition hadn't saved the handful of skitarii behind him that were caught in the beam and obliterated.
After so long spent on the offensive, it felt strange to see the enemy charge at them instead. For decades, the Forsaken Sons had been the attackers, the invaders, the conquerors. Even the Black Crusade had been more of the same so far. Now they were on the defensive, protecting what they had built from those who would destroy it all.
Pareneffer, who had once been a Legionary of the Fifteenth Legion, didn't enjoy that reversal of fortune at all.
Then the Knights were among them, and there was no time left for contemplation. They were smaller and lighter than their rebel counterparts, moving with greater speed, yet their armor appeared nearly as tough as the Obliterators' hide.
Pareneffer fought savagely, drawing upon every bit of power granted to him by the enhancements made to his frame by the Dark Mechanicum. It had been years, decades even, since he had last fought as a Space Marine on Parecxis, and the conquest of the Wailing Storm had given him plenty of time to become perfectly attuned to his condition. Psychic lightning crackled across his armor as he drew energy from its Argentian reservoirs, creating a shimmering shield around the adamantium plating.
Up close, he was able to use his left limb. Like its right, it too had been remade by the Dark Mechanicum since his interment. Each finger of his power gauntlet was covered in sharp thorns and ended in a vicious claw marked with Chaotic runes, and the flamer in the palm unleashed pure Warp-fire rather than burning promethium imbued with his own psychic might. Pareneffer had summoned and bound the daemon of Tzeentch used in the process himself, in order to ensure its submission.
The glowing spear of a Grey Knight smashed against his torso as he bathed another in sorcerous fire, failing to penetrate the sorcerous protection. He battered the weapon away with his lascannon before catching the Knight's upper torso in his gauntlet, and closing his fist. The Knight's helmet came apart in his grip with a satisfying crunch, and the Dreadnought threw the corpse away.
A volley of bolt shells slammed into his lascannon, and he took a step back as the energies imbued within the projectiles detonated and mixed with the infernal power coursing through the weapon. The daemon screeched, its essence corroded by power Pareneffer recognized – he had encountered it before, in the seraphic wards that had surrounded the Imperial Palace during the Siege of Terra.
Anger surged within him. Why had these warriors been judged worthy of sharing in His power, when the Legions of the Great Crusade had not ? Why had they been told the truth that had caught the Space Marines unaware ? Why were they trusted with the knowledge for which Prospero had burned ?!
He drew on his anger, using it to fuel his power rather than letting it control him. As the Neverborn within his lascannon was destroyed, the tattered traces of its essences cast back into the Sea of Souls, he poured his fury into the husk of his damaged weapon, unleashing a final blow that bisected one of the Grey Knights, moments before the entire armament detonated.
But though Pareneffer fought well, it wasn't enough. He saw Urik die with a blade in his throat, its point emerging from the back of his skull. He saw Forek and Deren, veterans who had first shed the blood of other Space Marines in the ruins of Istvaan III, vanish under a swarm of skitarii, knowing they had perished only when the piles of mechanized warriors exploded as the two Obliterators' power plant (or whatever passed for one after their transformations) detonated in one final act of spite.
Tenoch died last, with both his arms shaped like axes tearing through the flanks of the same Grey Knight whose spear was buried in his chest.
By the time the Fleshmaster perished, Pareneffer was the last defender left against four remaining Grey Knights. None of the skitarii, be they Imperial or Argentian, had survived this far. Caught between warring demigods, even the tech-priests' elite forces had stood no chance. Their bodies littered the corridor, black and gold mingled with red and chrome, with the occasional patch of silver where a Grey Knight had fallen.
With one remaining limb and his armor scarred and dented, Pareneffer made his last stand. But the Grey Knights were well used to acting together against single targets – they were, the Chosen of Arken had come to realize, hunters of daemons and Sorcerers, precise instruments loosed from wherever they dwelled to take down individual of particular threat.
Put more bluntly, they were executioners. Put even more bluntly, assassins.
They moved to surround Pareneffer, taking advantage of the hole in his defenses created by the loss of his lascannon. In a bid to reclaim the initiative, the Infernus Dreadnought charged the closest Grey Knight, only for him to move out of the way of his gauntlet before cutting through the cables running through the limb's length, spilling ichor and Warp lightning. The Tzeentchian Neverborn, sensing the weakness in its confines, immediately started to struggle.
With a growl that translated to his audio-speakers as the scratching of nails on chalkboard, Pareneffer struggled to re-establish dominance on the daemon. He succeeded, but the brief shift of focus was enough. Moving as one, two of the Grey Knights struck, burying their blades into the Dreadnought's legs. He fell backward, his vision immediately filled by the remaining warrior, who climbed on him and buried his spear into his chest.
This time, with Pareneffer's focus lacking and his power all but exhausted, the weapon pierced through wards and adamantium alike, and reached the mutated remnants of the Legionary's body inside the sarcophagus. Pain, true pain, blossomed in the Chosen of Arken's consciousness.
"Countdown to Ignition : twenty minutes," sounded the automated voice of the facility.
Huh. So their last effort to stop the advance of the Grey Knights had only lasted seven minutes. Despite the chronometer running in the corner of the visual feed transmitted to his brain by his Dreadnought chassis confirming this, Pareneffer could've sworn it had lasted much longer than that.
The Grey Knight wrenched his spear from Pareneffer's mechanized torso. The pain was agonizing, matched only by what Pareneffer had felt when Serixithar had cut him open and left him to die on Parecxis after stealing the body of the last Child of Woe the Sorcerer had created.
Already his killer's eyes were on the gate, calculating how to break through in what little time he and his brothers had left.
Then the automated announcement finished :
"Ignition beginning. All hail the Eightfold Omnissiah. All praise His power and will."
Pareneffer felt the shock of his killer, and despite the pain, despite how close to death he was, he laughed. The sound that left his vox-speakers resembled the tortured scream of a damned soul. With a final effort of will, forsaking all caution, he broadcast his words into the Aether, making sure that the Grey Knights heard them even amidst the mayhem of the complex's activation.
"Why ..." he wheezed, "would you possibly think we would let you hear the real countdown ?"
As the darkness closed in and the consequences of a lifetime of sin opened their jaws on the other side of the veil, Pareneffer took comfort in the knowledge that, in the end, he had beaten the Imperium's dogs. This time, when the Emperor's executioners had come, he had not run, nor had he failed in his mission.
This time …
The damnation of Zethirion, when it came, was as swift as it was terrible.
From the temple complex in Zethirion Nine-Six, a great pillar of Warp-fire erupted. The column of eldritch energy rose up to the heavens, and then kept on rising, past the atmosphere and into the void. Aboard the vessels of the Dark Mechanicum, whose position across the system was now revealed to owe more to ritual imperatives than strategic ones, dark magi chanted twisted hymns of their own while they activated what passed for their ships' Geller engines in anticipation of what was to come.
Reality cracked and burned. A great howl echoed in the minds of every living creature across the system. No mortal could look at what happened next, but had a god looked down on the entire Zethirion system from above, they would have seen something resembling a great cord of Warp-fire lashing around the system, before abruptly tightening and vanishing, leaving only the blackness of the void behind, while the aether rang with a sound like the mechanical laughter of the Eightfold Omnissiah.
Elsewhere, two suns shone together, entwined by the will of Chaos expressed through the Dark Mechanicum's engine. Through the brutal opening of the minute connection between them, the Zethirion and Iruset systems had become one, both of them trapped within the Wailing Storm. In the material universe, such a union would have come with lethal consequences. Every world in the system would have been burned by the suddenly doubled output of solar energy it had previously received. But this was the Wailing Storm, where the laws of physics were slaves to the will of the Dark Gods. The proper entreaties and sacrifices had been made, and the will of the self-proclaimed Fabricator-General of Argenta Primus, Elveros Anestis, was strong enough to bend the fluid matter of the Empyrean. The only ruin this transfer would inflict upon Zethirion Alpha was that which its architects had intended.
In the city of Illuria, the Arch-Heretek who held dominion over Argenta Primus witnessed the completion of the transfer through a thousand eyes. He didn't smile, for he had no mouth of flesh, but he did feel pleased. As the Forsaken Sons had promised, an entire forge-world had been delivered into his domain. With a thought, he sent a command to the vast fleet that orbited his world. Strikers and transports began to move, the commanders aboard them awakening from their long slumber to prepare for the conquests to come.
As the loyalist tech-priests looked up to the Warp-torn skies, they began to realize the depths of their predicament, even if they lacked the knowledge to properly understand how doomed they were. Only the surviving Grey Knights, retreating from Zethirion Nine-Six, understood what had transpired. They had been forced to flee from the temple complex as it came alive around them, leering faces emerging from the walls to spit Warp-fire at them while the corpses of slain foes and allies alike rose once more, turned into puppets of flesh and metal for the Neverborn to use.
Only the sons of Titan looked upon the twin suns shining amidst the madness of the Wailing Storm and knew what it meant. Before, they had been stranded on Zethirion Alpha because of the loss of their ship. Now, they were stranded because there was nowhere to go. Even if they seized a ship capable of Warp travel, navigating a Warp Storm was beyond their ability.
The bitter taste of failure was on their tongue as they discussed their next move, all the while moving out of Zethirion Nine-Six, their every step dogged by hosts of daemons. In the end, though, the decision was simple. Trapped and doomed as they might be, they were Grey Knights still, and their duty remained the same. Zethirion Alpha was infested with Chaotic corruption, and things were not going to get better in the long run now that the system was trapped in a Warp Storm. The forge-cities that had remained loyal – though their loyalty had already been dubious in the eyes of Titan's sons due to the energies coursing through their skitarii warriors – would either perish or turn soon enough.
They were alone and surrounded by the foe, with no hope of escape. Their doom was certain, their death inevitable. Therefore, all that was left was to fight, and either purge the entire world of taint, or perish in the attempt. The traitors believed that they had won, and perhaps they had. But they would soon realize their mistake in thinking that the sons of Titan could ever be beaten down.
This, the Grey Knights swore.
AN : There ! Now I am done with Mechanicus armies for some time.
Just like the original chapter introducing the Dark Mechanicus of Argenta Primus was heavily inspired by Doom (2016), this one was inspired by Doom Eternal. Argentian energy is almost identical to Doom's Argent Energy, after all ... Wait. Is that a spoiler for Doom Eternal to say so ? Hmm.
It was W8W's review that inspired Tenoch and the others' transformation into Obliterators. Admittedly, they didn't get much screen time ... sorry about that, W8W. I hope what little you got was good enough. If you like you can try submitting a request for a short story including them on my other fic.
One more chapter in the "Tarot cards" series to go. Don't expect it to arrive as swiftly as this one did, however : there is a lot more work that needs to be done on it, and I also want to continue A Blade Recast.
As always, please tell me what you thought of this chapter, what you generally think of this story, and where you thing it's going (or would like it to). While the course of the story is set, there is always room to shift the details !
Zahariel out.