Maeleum Datum : M33
Of all the Traitor Legions, the Thousand Sons held the least territory within the Eye of Terror. Their diminished numbers and the defeat of the Crimson Accords had left them with but a handful of daemon worlds under their control, all within striking distance of Sortiarius itself. These worlds had been reshaped by sorcery into nigh-impregnable strongholds, the size and complexity of which would not have shamed Perturabo himself. Within these fortresses, guarded by elite Rubricae, armies of mortal soldiers, bound daemons and stranger, darker things, the sons of Magnus worked.
The servants of Tzeentch were disproportionally active in the Long War, thanks to their mastery of sorcery. In the repressive Imperium, many secret lodges pursuing knowledge for its own sake had blossomed under their distant influence, while cults that worshipped mutation as a boon rather than a curse flourished in the twisted underclasses. But many among the sons of Magnus still hungered for revenge against the Sixteenth Legion and its Primarch, both for the destruction of Prospero and their humiliation in the Legion Wars. However, they were bitterly aware of how outmatched their Legion was in the Eye of Terror compared to the Horusians. Within their realm, the Thousand Sons were strong enough that none dared attack them, but they lacked the means to go on the offensive.
A group of nine Sorcerers, knowing this, designed a plan to change the situation. In order to match the Warmaster's armies, the Fifteenth Legion needed more resources – more territory – more worlds. And while the Thousand Sons had expanded as much as they could, there were plenty of rich systems outside the Eye of Terror.
So was founded the Conspiracy of the Stars, a brotherhood whose purpose was to draw entire Imperial star systems into the Eye of Terror, using sorcery on a grand scale to deliver them within the borders of the Fifteenth Legion's territory.
The nine Sorcerers targeted a trio of prosperous star systems, with a stable, self-sustaining population and a developed industrial base. Then they set to work, using all the methods their Legion had perfected during the Long War and inventing a few new ones. Wary of interference, they left their Legion's domain and ventured into the depths of the Eye of Terror, far from any stellar object whose influence may have disturbed their work, and set up a trio of warded stations from where they could weave their schemes in peace and seclusion.
Three Sorcerers remained within each of these stations, each team focused on a different system. With the sons of Magnus reaching through the Empyrean, discontent, heresy and outright rebellion soon festered. Covens of unbound psykers grew, aided by the guidance of distant, transhuman benefactors. As unrest grew, kept from the Inquisition's notice by high-placed pawns, the Conspiracy began to weave its great scheme. Cultist cells were taught rituals that would, their benefactors claimed, usher in a new age of freedom and progress for their worlds – though they would require the ultimate sacrifice from the faithful, whose devotion would be rewarded with transcendence.
The actual purpose of these rituals was to infuse each of the stars at the heart of the three systems with empyric power. The existence of the Mandeville Point had long proven that astral objects influenced the boundary between Materium and Immaterium, and the cabal of astromancers wanted to turn the immense power contained within a star to tear that boundary down and drag the systems to the Eye of Terror directly, where their populations and resources could be claimed by the Fifteenth Legion.
The three outposts were expanded, with great runic arrays attached to the central chambers where the Conspirators sat in meditation, their astral selves projected beyond the Eye of Terror. Cultists and bound daemons engraved sorcerous sigils, writing down the counterparts to the hymns their masters whispered in the souls of their distant servants. It was not enough, after all, simply to drown the targeted systems in the Warp – they had to be dragged into the Eye of Terror and anchored there.
Unbeknownst to the sons of Magnus, however, their great work had been sabotaged. Agents, perhaps belonging to the Warmaster, or to the Hydra, or to any other of the Eye's myriad factions, had learned of the Conspiracy's goals. They had reported their findings to their masters, and those masters had decreed that the Sorcerers could not be allowed to succeed and upset the delicate balance of the Eye's powers.
Yet directly attacking the Conspiracy would restart the Legion Wars, and so sabotage was chosen instead. It did not take much : the ritual the Conspiracy intended was mindbogglingly complex, and it took very little to disrupt the vast array of runes and sacrifices it required – though much more effort was needed to ensure the Sorcerers did not notice it until it was too late.
However, even the saboteurs did not realize the impact their actions would have. They thought, not without reason, that the ritual would fail, and the backlash would destroy the Conspiracy and discourage any from following in their footsteps. And if the three target systems were obliterated in the process, well, weakening the Imperium was always a victory in the Long War. As long as they were far from the ritual when it occurred, there was no reason to be worried.
But that was not what happened. Perhaps the sheer scope of the Conspiracy's ambition had caught the attention of the Changer of Ways, who would not allow it to come to such an unsatisfying end. Or perhaps the Conspiracy had already been betrayed from within, by one who sought to use the ritual to achieve transcendental power. Or perhaps – just perhaps – it was naught but the result of random chance, of mortal agents meddling in matters complex beyond their understanding. Such things happen, even in the Realm of the Gods.
The ritual began as had been planned. Across the three star systems, cults set in motion schemes decades in the making. Disorder and anarchy spread on hive-worlds, while the magi and witches seized ships and made for the sun of their system. There, they performed a ritual sacrifice, offering up their own souls to empower the Conspiracy's great ritual. The three suns pulsed crimson, and the veil between reality and unreality was rent asunder, dragging everything within the stars' gravitational pull into the Warp. There, the sympathetic connection created by the Conspiracy dragged the systems toward the Eye of Terror, where they emerged from the roiling, Sector-sized mass of Warp energy brought into being by the ritual.
It was then that the sabotage took effect. The souls of the nine Sorcerers were ripped from their bodies and cast into the stars they had stolen. There, they fused with the mass of shapeless thoughts and memories that had been the shades of their cultists. Though the individuality of the Sorcerers' mortal pawns had been completely consumed, the dogma with which they had been manipulated remained.
The result of this unholy fusion was the creation of three sentient, living suns, whose broken minds whole-heartedly believed in the astral theology the Sorcerers had used to deceive their cultists. Their light fell upon the stolen Imperial worlds, and all those touched by their rays had their free will stripped away, their souls branded with an awful mark that compelled lavish obedience to the skyward gods. The terror of having been dragged into the Eye of Terror vanished, along with most of their minds, leaving behind little but automatons, puppets of their star-gods.
The living suns took their servants and reshaped them into new forms, born from the depths of their insanity. Flesh melted like wax under their light, and abominations rose to unholy life. The spires of Imperial hives, most exposed to the radiance due to being above the pollution clouds, were the most affected. The nobles who had grown wealthy on the work of their serfs were hideously transformed, the light burrowing deep into their flesh and soul to create Myrmidons. Their faces and features were burned away, and their nerves glowed beneath their skin with the light that had travelled up their optic nerves and throughout their entire bodies. Little more than puppets of the living suns, the Myrmidons served as reservoirs of their light, carrying it beyond their immediate reach and unleashing it through their blazing eye sockets.
The living suns also imposed their will upon the raw stuff of the Warp, forcing a twisted order upon it to create a new kind of daemon. They reached deep into Mankind's ancient nightmares to find the shape that suited their needs, and created legions of devils, pale-skinned and clad in scorched-black armor. They walked on cloven feet, and in their clawed hands they held spears tipped with slivers of the nameless dread that compels mortals to kneel before altars in supplication.
The thee infernal suns were not satisfied with their dominion, however. Their insanity demanded that they rule all that there was to rule, for their gestalt minds believed that this was their right, their duty, their purpose. Stolen cargo ships and Imperial Navy patrols were brought near the suns, and they infused their metal with their power, twisting their crew hideously, fusing them to their stations and creating things that resembled daemonships yet were unmistakably other.
Vast factories were transformed to create millions of mirrors, which were brought as close to the living suns as possible without melting. Exposed to their baleful light, these mirrors became reservoirs of their power, which were carried as weapons to nearby daemon worlds. All those exposed to their radiance succumbed to the same affliction that had conquered the three stolen Imperial systems.
"Join us. Your resistance only makes this more painful for you than it has to be. You need only put down your weapons and welcome the light within your heart. Then, all shall be well, and all manners of things shall be well."
Inferna Astra broadcast
But the Damned would not meekly surrender their kingdoms unto these pretender-gods. The Inferna Astra, as they quickly came to be called, made great initial gains, conquering several dozen daemon worlds. But soon the might of the Legions, the Lost and the Dark Mechanicum gathered against them. None, not even the Thousand Sons themselves, would submit to the Infernal Suns, and so war erupted once again across the Eye of Terror.
It was a strange coalition that gathered to fight the minions of the Infernal Suns. Warriors who had bled together during the Great Crusade and the Heresy, only to become mortal foes in its catastrophic aftermath, were made allies once more by circumstances and a common enemy. So abhorrent was the rapture visited by the Inferna Astra upon their slaves that all hatreds were, if not abandoned, then at the very least put on hold.
The gates of the Horusian Dominion opened, and the forces of the Warmaster sallied forth. The Dark Council of Sicarius called the Hosts to crusade against the heretical gods. The Plague Fleets were marshalled under Mortarion's banner. A cold signal was spread from one Dark Mechanicum enclave to another, bearing the mark of Kelbor-Hal himself, summoning his once-vassals to war. The armies of the Hexarch, who had once been an Imperial Army General, clashed against the Infernal Suns' light-daemons on three different daemon worlds, winning victory after victory until the Hexarch herself broke the power of the Myrmidons leading the legions.
Sorcerers designed wards that shielded combatants from the influence of the Inferna Astra's radiance, and one by one their banners were cast down from the daemon worlds they had conquered. But while the conquests of the Inferna Astra could be reclaimed, all Sorcerers within the Traitor Legions concurred that attacking the Infernal Suns within the heart of their power was suicide at best, and an offering of new slaves at worst. Yet so long as the Infernal Suns endured, they would remain capable of drawing limitless armies from the raw stuff of the Warp itself.
And so Horus turned to his brother Perturabo, to whom he had entrusted the Forge of Souls after claiming it from the Masters, and bade the Lord of Iron to craft a weapon that could murder the abominable stars.
The agents who had sabotaged the ritual, kept hidden since its disastrous advent, were quietly transferred to the Forge of Souls, and all they knew from the Inferna Astra was ripped from their souls and used to design the means to undo the poisoned fruit of their failures. By the time their chained bodies reached Medrengard, all knowledge of their true masters had already been excised from their minds – lest the fragile coalition risk being torn apart by recrimination and blame for causing the War in the first place.
Perturabo bent his cold intellect to the task, combining the knowledge extracted from the saboteurs with the dark lore he had learned in the days since he had led his Legion through the Eye's black heart and secrets from the terrible war that ended Humanity's Age of Technology. In the deepest quarters of the Forge of Souls, where only the Masters had ever set foot before, the Lord of Iron and his mechanized minions created a bomb of awful potency, one capable of extinguishing a star.
The coalition's forces laid siege to one of the three Infernal Suns, keeping its minions at bay while a suicidal task force was sent to detonate the bomb as close to the star as possible.
It worked. The bomb exploded, and the living sun was slain, turned into a dead black hole. But at the moment of its demise, its shriek ravaged the entire system, murdering every single creature within it. In a single moment, thousands of Chaos Marines and millions of mortal slaves perished, and the agony of their demise created a host of feral Neverborn roaming across the system's desolated worlds and the ruins of their ships.
Amidst the recriminations and accusations of sabotage, one thing was clear : the coalition couldn't pay a similar price to kill the remaining two Inferna Astra, not without significantly weakening the Eye of Terror in the Long War. And so, for the first time since the beginning of the war, Horus left Maeleum and journeyed to the domain of the living suns. The Prince of the Eye made a simple offer to the pretender-gods : they could either remain confined within their home territory, left alone and free to revel in their own absolute power – or they could continue to seek dominion over the Eye, in which case he would destroy them, regardless of the cost.
Despite their madness, the living suns remembered Horus, and knew that the Warmaster would not hesitate to make good on his threats if he were pushed. Faced with the awesome power of the Prince of the Eye and the knowledge that their kindred had already been slain, they relented and acceded to Horus' offer. A blockade was established around the two Inferna Astra to make sure they held to the terms of the accords, and the coalition quickly dissolved, with the first shots being fired within minutes of Horus' return and announcement.
In the following years, the Inferna Astra mostly kept to the terms of the peace. As Horus had known they would, they still sought to extend their dominion, building small ships that slipped by the quarantine, carrying light-infused mirrors and disguised Myrmidons. A new player appeared in the endless games of intrigue of the Eye, and the Infernal Suns even used their ancient knowledge to reach into the dreams of mortals beyond the Eye, finding it easy to corrupt those offshoots of the Ecclesiarchy that took the form of solar cults.
As the thirty-third millennium drew to a close, the Inquisition learned of this new aspect of the Archenemy, and the Ordo Hereticus developed means to detect such corruption, while the Ordo Malleus investigated the strange daemons such cults eventually brought into the Materium and learned how to destroy them.
AN : Yes, this chapter was inspired by what you probably think it was. (If you have no idea what that means, I'm afraid I can't tell you without spoiling something quite impressive to find out for yourself).
I don't have much to say today. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, please tell me what you thought of it and what you would like to see in this fic's future ... Oh, I know : the next chapter of A Blade Recast is almost done. Hopefully I will be able to publish it today.
That's all for now.
Zahariel out.