Maeleum Datum : 259M33
By the time the Legion Wars had ended and the Long War begun, the Traitor Legions had been all but bled dry. The purge of the loyalists within their own ranks, the gruelling campaigns of the Heresy, the slaughters at Beta-Garmon and Terra and a thousand other, unremembered worlds, had left them a pale shadow of their former strength. The Apothecaries of the rebel Legions had been driven to extremities never before contemplated to replenish their decimated ranks, abducting the youths of conquered worlds and brutally transforming them into warriors whose only purpose was to die in the Warmaster's service. Gene-seed had been experimented upon to try and stretch the limits of its growth, resulting in the birth of malformed, insane monsters that could only be used after extensive cybernetic augmentation to make them controllable.
For every success the Apothecaries had found, there had been a dozen gruesome failures. And now, within the Eye of Terror, the Traitor Legions faced extinction once more. Their numbers had been diminished by the Legion Wars, and though those had now guttered down and the Long War had turned into a form where there was less need for Astartes troops, all within the Eye knew that they must find ways to restore their lost numbers. To do otherwise was to risk destruction at the hands of rival Legions, and perhaps even the inability to act when at long last the Imperium collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy. The mere thought of having survived so much only to die a slow death over the course of millennia of attrition was unbearable.
The Apothecaries of the Traitor Legions had made pacts with the Dark Mechanicum and constructed facilities where they could turn boys into more Chaos Marines – but there were precious few untainted children within the Eye. With Dorn's defenses surrounding the Eye of Terror and preventing raiding parties from capturing the children needed, the Apothecaries turned to darker means still, seeking to adapt the sacred process of gene-seed implantation even further so that it may take root within young mutants. Catastrophic failure rates, however, soon drove the Apothecaries to desperation, and their masters to wrath. Faced with many punishments, the least of which was death, the Apothecaries spoke of a name, of one who had displayed mastery over the Emperor's gene-craft greater than any save the Master of Mankind.
They spoke of Fabius Bile, Chief Apothecary of the Emperor's Children.
Bile had last been sighted at Skalathrax, where he had abandoned soon after the arrival of Horus and the end of hostilities between the Third and Twelfth Legions. The Chief Apothecary had departed the planet aboard a single warship, the Pulchritudinous, and had not been seen since.
Even Horus, when faced with the failure of his Apothecaries, sent his agents to find the Chief Apothecary and bring him to the Warmaster, so that his expertise may be put to the Prince of the Eye's service. Using daemonic trackers, these agents followed the spore of Bile across the Eye. Beginning at Skalathrax, they recreated the journey the Chief Apothecary had taken more than a thousand years ago. The quest was difficult, for the trail had been muddied – whether by the tides of the Eye, the will of the Gods, or the machinations of Bile himself, the hunters could not tell.
For decades, the hunters continued their fruitless hunt. Sometimes, they came upon traces left by Bile's activities : worlds overrun by twisted mutants, or whose population still trembled and fled at the sight of power armor. They found ruins haunted by things that only distantly resembled men, mass graves filled with billions of corpses, and monuments built from the salt of mourning tears. The mark of Bile had been left on these worlds, written in atrocity and genetic coding. It was these discoveries that led to Bile being nicknamed the Father of Monsters among the ranks of those tasked with his capture.
Other times, the hunters dispatched by Horus came into contact with warbands from other Legions, pursuing the same quarry. Bile's expertise was sought by all those with the wherewithal to realize the peril faced by the Traitor Legions in their exile. Most sought to make use of that expertise themselves, but a few wanted to make sure it died with him, consigning the Legions to a slow death that would leave them as the favored champions of the Ruinous Powers.
Such encounters rarely ended well, and fresh corpses and atrocities were left atop those caused by Bile himself. But for all the effort and blood shed, the truth was that the hunters were no closer to finding Bile now as they had been when they had begun their quest. It was then, as the Son of Horus leading them was starting to consider returning to Maeleum and face the punishment for his failure, that the ship of the Alpha Legion came. A single vessel, barely entering the range of the hunters' auspex, transmitted a single message : a set of aetheric coordinates that could be used by a Navigator experienced in the Eye of Terror's tides to find a particular location, and a short sentence : "There be the father of monsters."
The allegiance and motives of the Twentieth Legion had always been suspect, and this reeked of a trap. But so desperate were the Sons of Horus that they decided to go to the coordinates anyway. The Navigators and bound daemons that guided the fleet were fed the knowledge that the message had carried, and they followed the path laid down by the sons of the Hydra, abandoning the trail they had followed thus far to no avail. They plunged into the depths of the Eye's eternal storms, and, though the journey was hard and many crew were lost to daemonic manifestations, they eventually reached their destination.
The gate to Bile's kingdom was a literal Gate : an ancient Gateway, built by a xenos species long since dead and dragged into the Eye of Terror when the Eldars' folly had birthed the Dark Prince. Slowly turning around a black hole, it was a ring of arcane technology over a thousand kilometers in diameter, a wondrous feat of engineering that spoke of the advancement of its creators. Whatever scientific principles had once enabled the Gate to function had been twisted by the Eye long ago, however. Daemons born of the last nightmarish echoes of the Gate's creators infested the kilometer-wide ring, and the alien technology had been corrupted into a parody of itself.
Yet despite this, the Gate still worked. A vortex of eldritch energies filled the ring, patterns forming in the endless swirling that caught the souls of several crews foolish enough to look upon it directly. Their bodies fell to dust with a sound akin to a sigh, their spirits ripped from their flesh and cast to whatever doom awaited them within the Gate.
As the Sons of Horus came to the Gate, they realized that they hadn't been the only ones told where to find their prey. Ships bearing the heraldry of the Emperor's Children, the Death Guard, the Thousand Sons, the World Eaters and other, lesser factions of the Eye were arriving. The true intention of the Alpha Legion in revealing this location (if the Gate even led to Bile at all) had become obvious, though their motives remained as obscure as ever.
"Let the Eye of Terror burn anew, in an inferno lit by the spark of false hope."
Anonymous Legionary of the Twentieth Legion
Half-hearted attempts at communication soon broke down. All of them had come for Bile, and none of them were willing to let the others have him. The flotillas prepared to engage each other, as bloodlust and old hatred overpowered the impulse to do the tactically sensible thing and let the others slaughter each other first. But before the first shot was fired, the Gate pulsed, and a fleet emerged from the vortex. Surprised, the hunters disengaged and unlocked their weapons from one another, turning to face these new arrivals.
Leading this new armada was the Pulchritudinous. The venerable cruiser, which had born another name during the halcyon days of the Great Crusade, had changed greatly since its coming to the Eye of Terror. But beneath the fleshy growth and Dark Tech augmentations, its original identifier beacon still pulsed its name to the hunters, who matched it against the records of their data-engines. By contrast, the ships that followed the Pulchritudinous like wolves behind a pack leader were entirely unknown. Their designs clearly originated from Terran standards, but they had deviated far from the original STC blueprints that had been the source of most of the Imperial Army's vessels. Strange weapons and devices were affixed to their hulls, drawing not upon the dark lore of the Warp, but other technological paths that had either been long forgotten or forbidden by the Mechanicum.
The fleet was almost a match for all the hunting flotillas combined, and even with its coming there was no chance of the hunters working together against it. At its head was none other than Fabius Bile himself, who stood on the bridge of the Pulchritudinous. The Chief Apothecary of the Third Legion appeared on the screens of the ships that had searched for him, his gaunt face looking even older than it had at the end of the Heresy, his eyes burning with alloyed madness and conviction.
"I do not serve Fulgrim, nor any of the other failed Primarchs or the foul entities that control them. I am the Primogenitor of a new race, a New Empire, which will inherit the galaxy long after the Imperium and its enemies have burned down to ash.
Welcome to Newgate, cousins. Now, shall we speak business ?"
Fabius Bile, during the confrontation at Newgate
The images of the crew that showed in the transmission were disturbing. They seemed human, yet not. This was not the alien feyness of the Eldar, whose form was only vaguely similar to Humanity. There was nothing that distinguished these beings from normal humans at a first glance, yet any who looked upon them knew, in their heart of heart, that they were something else. It was a deep, instinctive repulsion, an evolutionary drive to destroy and purge a competitive breed.
These were the New Men, Bile's latest creations. After Skalathrax and the disaster at the Broken Conclave, the Chief Apothecary had grown disillusioned with the Primarchs and his own kind. After his journey through the Eye, gathering followers and resources while leaving abominations in his wake, the Father of Monsters had discovered Newgate, and raised an empire on the other side – one populated solely by his creations, the New Men he had forged from Humanity's genetic code.
With the might of his New Empire's armada behind him, Bile was able to dictate his terms to the hunters. By the time those made it back to their lords, it was easier for them to accept the Father of Monsters' proposal, and a new neutral power appeared in the Eye, though its actual presence was very limited.
A space station was constructed at Newgate, orbiting the same black hole. Aboard it were members of the Consortium, the Apothecaries from various Legions that Bile had gathered to his side during his errance across the Eye of Terror. Named the Fleshmarket, this station became the point of contact between the self-titled New Empire and the rest of the Eye of Terror.
In exchange for a bounty in technology and resources, the Consortium helped replenish the diminished ranks of the Traitor Legions. All who could meet its prices were given access to the gene-mills, where machines straight out of the Dark Age of Technology gave birth to thousands of untainted, flash-grown children ready for implantation and indoctrination - both of which could also be performed by the Fleshmarket's facilities.
Ships of the New Empire regularly passed through the Gate on their way to the Fleshmarket, taking the tributes and bringing supplies and the warriors created in the Empire's own laboratories. While all the Chaos Marines the Consortium produced were created within the Fleshmarket, there were other services available to those with truly extraordinary offerings. Several warlords came to the Fleshmarket as pauper, only to depart with an entire flotilla of New Empire vessels and an army of cloned soldiers, because they had brought something that had caught Bile's attention. Such lavish rewards led to many seeking to earn the Father of Monsters' favor, though few managed to gain it, no matter the lengths they went to in order to secure ancient technology or samples of exotic lifeforms.
"Three tonnes of Eldar wraithbone, a technomantic array recovered from Medusa itself, the children of a high-gravity world and a drop of Yu'vath blood, whatever those are supposed to be. I tell you, I have no idea what the Chief Apothecary is up to nowadays."
Conversation overheard on the Fleshmarket between two members of the Consortium.
There were many who questioned Bile's motives, given his declaration of enmity against both his former Legion and all of the other powers of the Eye. The prevalent theory was that, for all his bluster, the Father of Monsters knew that he could not hold his precious "New Empire" against the combined wrath of the Traitor Legions. The Fleshmarket was a solution to the Traitor Legions' problem, one that no one liked, but, crucially, one they could live with, and one that didn't grant any advantage to a specific Legion. By playing the factions of the Eye against each other, Bile had ensured no one would risk passing through Newgate and launching an invasion of his New Empire.
Of course, that didn't stop them from trying to send spies to find out more about the Father of Monsters' mysterious domain and his New Humanity. Trying to use stealth crafts to pass through Newgate was a doomed endeavour, as the Gate's emanations would reveal any ship that crossed it. Instead, the spymasters of the Eye tried to infiltrate operatives aboard the supply ships. Security was tight on the Fleshmarket, as was expected of a place where such valued goods and services were exchanged, but no security was ever truly foolproof, especially in the Eye of Terror. Hundreds of agents made it aboard the New Empire's vessels, vanishing alongside them through Newgate.
None were ever heard of again. It seemed that the security on the other side of Newgate was even greater, and with no way of obtaining information on what kind of defenses the New Empire was using, the spymasters were forced to resort to brute force in the hope that eventually one of their spies would report something. Even the attempts at summoning daemons and asking them about the New Empire failed, as the Neverborn knew nothing of Bile's creations, reinforcing the idea that Newgate may actually lead beyond the borders of the Eye of Terror.
As a result of all this secrecy, the Chaos Marines born from the Fleshmarket were regarded with suspicion by their brethren, who wondered what hidden directives Bile may have implanted deep within their psyches. The best efforts of the Legions' mind-scourges revealed no such thing, which only made those who suspected their presence more paranoid. Yet these reinforcements were too desperately needed, even if the new bloods would forever be kept subservient to the veterans of the Long War, safe for a few exceptions.
And so, thousands of new Chaos Marines were added to the ranks of the Traitor Legions, their only memories being of the Eye of Terror and the Long War. Like the recruits that filled the loyalist Legions now, thousands of years after the Siege of Terra, they knew nothing of the Great Crusade and the Heresy but tales passed down by their elders. Their lives were filled with the brutal battlegrounds of the Eye, as this influx of fresh warriors caused rivalries between warbands to re-ignite, though things didn't escalate into a return of the Legion Wars.
By a cruel irony that was entirely typical of existence in the Eye, only the Death Guard and the Thousand Sons, two Legions that stood opposed in every way, did not make use of the Fleshmarket. Their unique conditions prevented them from employing the Consortium's services. The Thousand Sons' reserves of gene-seed were all but gone because of the Rubric, and the Death Guards were forbidden from stepping foot aboard the Fleshmarket for entirely different reasons. The sons of the Crimson King used different, altogether more eldritch means of maintaining their decimated numbers, while the servants of the Plague God depended upon sorcery and ritual to make worthy mortals, no matter how corrupted and genetically deviant, ascend to the ranks of the Astartes.
Only a few ever suspected that, perhaps, Bile's purpose in opening the Fleshmarket went beyond simply securing his domain. These scattered souls looked upon the renewed conflict between the Traitor Legions and wondered if maybe, just maybe, the Father of Monsters sought to hasten the destruction he had prophesied ...
AN : No matter the timeline, no matter what changes, one thing remains constant :
Fabius Bile is always a monster.
The Clonelord remains one of my favorite characters of the 40K universe. What lies beyond Newgate ? What horrors are being wrought within the New Empire ? The answer to these mysteries will probably never be revealed, so feel free to come up with your own twisted ideas and share it with others in your review.
12 days left before Christmas, and my special project isn't progressing as well as I would like. I blame both my still being recovering from illness and the fact that the parts I am struggling with are utterly different from anything I have ever written. But I shall not falter ! I shall not fail ! Before the 25th, it shall be ready !
In order to achieve this, however, I am going to need to focus entirely on it. So don't expect much output in the coming two weeks. Until then, here is something to occupy you : there are currently three chapters planned for this fic, which could be written in any order without impacting the story. So I have decided to let you guys decide which one I should write first. Here are your options :
Option 1 : The War of Infernal Suns, a tale of horror and ruin, woven through sorcery and ambition.
Option 2 : The Firsts of the Damned, the intrigues of the elder lords of the Warp in reaction to the Prince of the Eye's ascension.
Option 3 : The Testament of Veritus, a look at how the Imperium has changed since Horus' exile to the Eye of Terror.
Leave your preference in your review. Keep in mind that I fully intend to write all of them eventually, so even if the one you choose doesn't win the vote, it's nothing to worry about.
Also, it turns out that writing a Choose Your Own Adventure story is hard. Who could have predicted this ?! So while I haven't abandoned the idea of making one set in Aftermath, it's on the back burner for now.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it, and I will see you all (hopefully) soon for something ... quite different. Quite different indeed, yet perhaps familiar at the same time ? Who knows !
Zahariel out.