Maeleum Datum : 013.M33
At the edge of the Horusian dominions, where the influence of the Theft of Time waned, laid a realm of madness such as was rarely seen even in the Eye of Terror. The anarchic energies tamed by the thousand infernal clocks of Maeleum could not simply be contained : they had to be pushed back, forced out of the great work's area of effect so that time could function in a normal, linear manner. Chaos loathed the order imposed by Horus and Ahriman's work, and at the borders of the Warmaster's kingdom, that displeasure was made manifest in what the Sons of Horus called the Sundered Tides.
There, all the madness that had been exorcised from the Horusian territories was manifested a hundredfold. Unending Warp storms of impossible size and violence roared their unthinking hate. Monsters the size of world blinked into existence or slithered through the ruins of physical laws, before being torn asunder by lightning bolts the size of stars and the color of madness. Among the explorers of the Eye, only one region was known to be more hostile than the Sundered Tides : the Radiant Worlds, where the psychic light of the Astronomican met the Eye of Terror, creating a region of golden, scouring flames where shard-angels did eternal war against the daemonic hordes led by Angron. Those worlds that had been caught within the Tides when the Theft of Time had occurred had suffered the worst, as had the accursed souls that had been trapped on their surface.
To the Sons of Horus, the Sundered Tides were a convenient side effect of the Theft of Time. Like some grand, cosmic moat, the Tides surrounded their territory, making access all but impossible. The only way for a ship to pass through the Tides was to cross one of the few channels that were open through them, created by the will of particularly powerful Chaos Lords who had managed to impose their vision upon daemon worlds lost to the Tides. All of these lords paid fealty to the Warmaster in one way or another, for Horus would not countenance any other being able to grant passage into his realm. Those who did not soon received envoys from Horus, who offered a choice between submission and destruction. Whether arch-hereteks of the Dark Mechanicum, Daemon Lords risen above their kin by the whim of the Great Game, mortal warlords marked by the Ruinous Powers or Chaos Marines, all had either bent the knee or perished.
But not all denizens of the Sundered Tides dwelled within these small pockets of sustained reality. Despite everything, life still clung to the daemon worlds lost to the Tides, broken and paradoxical as it might be. And where the sane man would have seen only death and ruin, some of the Eye's mad lords saw opportunity. In the grand cathedrals of Sicarius, the sons of Lorgar looked at the Sundered Tides, and saw what they imagined the wrath of the Gods to look like. To the Dark Council and its Apostles, the Theft of Time had been nothing short of a blasphemy : an attempt by mortal minds, however exalted, to impose their will upon the rightful kingdom of the Gods.
And so it was that a Host of Word Bearers was secretly dispatched to the Sundered Tides, to find out how to harvest their great power for the glory of the Pantheon. Though its Primarch was in self-imposed exile within his Templum Inficio, the Seventeenth Legion had not forgotten the humiliation dealt to them by Horus at the end of the Legion Wars. Moriana was beyond their reach – not only had Lorgar given his word, but the woman had vanished hundreds of years ago – but there were many Word Bearers who hungered for revenge on Horus and his allies. This, combined with their fanatical devotion to Chaos, made the Host willing to plunge into the Sundered Tides.
Even with all the ritual precautions, the chants and ceremonies on every ship, the chaining of thousands of willing sacrifices to the hulls of the vessels and the blessings of eight Dark Apostles in the light of Sicarius' own infernal star, the fleet of the Host took horrendous casualties. Within moments of entering the Tides, a full third of the Host was destroyed, the souls of the sons of Lorgar torn from their flesh just like those of the mortals they had surrounded themselves with.
After an undetermined period of time, the remaining ships of the Host located a world within the Sundered Tides. With their hulls battered and every soul aboard them tormented by the endless screaming of the Warp, the captains set course toward that world. Such was the violence of the astral currents that only a single warship managed to avoid crashing into the planet. That warship, the Dominus Dei, was also the one carrying the Host's Dark Apostle, a Colchisian named Nergal Velk. Accompanied by his Corypheus and the few hundred warriors also aboard, the Dark Apostle descended upon the ravaged daemon world, to try and make contact with the Word Bearers who had been aboard the crashed ships.
Immediately after making planetfall, the Host came under attack. Nameless, formless creatures hurled themselves at the Word Bearers, and all the abjurations of the Dark Apostle could do nothing to repulse them. These were clearly creatures of the Warp, but of a kind never before encountered by the Seventeenth Legion, nor recorded in any of the sacred texts Nergal could remember. They were Neverborn native to the Sundered Tides, born of the fracturing of time caused by Horus' arrogance. Still, they were similar enough to other daemons for the Word Bearers' weaponry to affect them, and after initial losses taken while trying to bind their attackers, the Host was able to make progress across the daemon world's surface.
One by one, Nergal and his troops reached each of the crashed warships. Those warriors who had survived were added to the ranks of the Host, while those too wounded to follow were ritually sacrificed to the Gods, and the gene-seed of the dead harvested by the Legion's Apothecaries. When the Dark Apostle approached the final crashed warship, it was with a thousand Legionaries at his back and the meaningless, ceaseless whispers of the Neverborn in his ears.
As the Host approached the crashed vessel, the distance separating them from their destination was suddenly filled with cracks running through the air itself. The image of the ship shattered into an infinity of pieces, and from the howling void left in its wake came a new horde of daemons. These Neverborn, however, were not incarnated, but fleshless spirits that flowed over the Word Bearers like a great tide. The seals and protections of the warriors' armors could not keep out these strange hellspawns, and every son of Lorgar, from the Dark Apostle himself to the youngest initiate, was forced to his knees as a dozen or more infernal spirits battled for control of his flesh.
After what seemed like an eternity of suffering, Nergal was the first to rise back to his feet. The Dark Apostle had imposed his will upon the Neverborn that now swam through his blood and soul, though his body and armor had been hideously merged with one another in the process. His crozius in hand, he went to his brothers, and one by one, he helped them overcome this trial, putting those too weak to reclaim control of their bodies out of their miseries.
The Word Bearers who rose from this had all become Secondborn, in the largest simultaneous creation of such Possessed warriors ever recorded, surpassing even the foundation of the legendary Gal Vorbak in the decades before the Horus Heresy was openly declared. Sharing their flesh with the unique daemons of the Sundered Tides, these warriors were blessed with an innate understanding of the region's unique nature. Under Nergal's command, the Host returned aboard the Dominus Dei. The bridge crew of the ship was replaced by Secondborn volunteers, who were bound to their stations by Dark Tech cybernetics in order for the ship's machine-spirit to be able to navigate the Sundered Tides by using that understanding.
On Maleum Datum 013.M33, the warship Dominus Dei emerged from the Sundered Tides and into Horusian territory, bypassing the known channels for traversing the Tides entirely. The dark forge-world of Ingreus, whose arch-heretek had given his loyalty to Horus at the end of the Legion Wars, was caught utterly by surprise as its skies were filled with drop-pods and gunships launched from the Word Bearers' battle-barge. Nearly a thousand Secondborn warriors were unleashed upon the planet, ravaging its industry and plundering its resources while Nergal himself hunted down the arch-heretek and offered him up as sacrifice to the Ruinous Powers.
The skitarii and daemon engines of the Dark Mechanicum observed that these warriors displayed strange abilities, never before seen even among other Possessed forces. Each seemingly operated within his own separate time-stream, able to reverse any injury inflicted upon him that did not result into immediate death. Furthermore, they could move through time as well as space, striking from within enemy strongholds by returning to the past after their gates and walls had been breached. The dark magi, unable to process the paradoxical strategies of the foe, were slaughtered by the thousands, while their tech-thralls and servitors were butchered all across the planet.
"We are the wrath of the Gods made manifest, unleashed upon all those who serve the weakling Warmaster. We are the fury of the Sundered Tides, the children of Chaos. Let the will of the Pantheon be done !"
From the Dark Apostle Nergal Velk, during the sacking of Ingreus
By the time the Sons of Horus responded to Ingreus' cry for help, the Dominus Dei had long since left the system, plunging back into the Sundered Tides with its holds full of plunder and accompanied by several captured Dark Mechanicum ships, each now captained and guided by a Secondborn warrior. From that point on, the daemon worlds on the edge of Horusian territory were subjected to raids from within the Sundered Tides, the defense it had provided thus far proven ineffective against this new and strange force of the Word Bearers.
Not long after that first attack, word of these raids upon Horusian territories reached the Dark Council of Sicarius. Its members were puzzled, for none of them remembered having sent a Host to the Sundered Tides, and their heraldry wasn't recorded in any of the Legion's vast archives. After several weeks of investigation and messages sent to all Hosts of the Legion, it was determined that none of the Hosts had decided to go there on their own either – yet the raids were still happening, led by warriors who bore the colors of the Seventeenth Legion.
So it was that Nergal and his warriors became known as the Orphans of Time, a thorn in the side of the Warmaster that would not be dislodged.
AN : Still working on the next chapter of Warband of the Forsaken Sons. Currently at 13k words, it should be around 15-16k by the time it's done.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter. There is still much more to come in the Prince of the Eye story.
Also, I am currently sick with what feels like a hand tightening around my heart whenever my heart rate goes up, so writing action scenes is a bit of challenge. (To clarify, I am not going to die from it - hopefully - but it is painful and distracting.) Curse you, Nurgle ! Is this about the Iron Hands in the Roboutian Heresy ? I told you, even though they haven't gotten much love in the Times of Ending and don't have much written about them in my notes either, it doesn't mean I have forgotten about them ! It's just that there is a lot of factions in the Warhammer 40000 universe ! They will get their time in the spotlight, I promise !
Blood of the Emperor, that one can be such a diva. His Death Guard already got the spotlight in the canon universe, but it's never enough, isn't it ?
Zahariel out.