Maeleum Datum : 888.M33
In a chamber without light, atop a tower that rose far above the screams of Kerlazium's damned souls, two demigods with eyes of purest obsidian met.
Once, they had been brothers, and had fought side by side during the Great Crusade to bring unruly human worlds to compliance through terror. Later, they had spilled the blood of the Shattered Legions together on the black sands of Isstvan V, and waged war in the Thramas Crusade and the Siege of Terra. Only later, when the Eighth Legion had come to the Eye of Terror and claimed the daemon world of Kerlazium as their own, had their brotherhood begun to fray. As the Night Lords Legion had divided in two separate factions, each reflecting one aspect of their Primarch, the two brothers had also grown distant, each falling on a different side of the divide.
Yet despite their differences and disagreements, they still met once every decade, to speak of the past, the present, and the future. And so it was that Apothecary Talos Valcoran of the Tenth Company met with Vandred Anrathi, once a Sergeant of that same company, who was now known as the Exalted.
In the years since the Night Lords had conquered Kerlazium, Talos had risen in prestige among the faction of the Legion who had refused to embrace Chaos and sought to continue waging the Long War against the hated Imperium. Under the leadership of Zso Sahaal, the Talonmaster, Talos had participated in dozens of battles during the Legion Wars. Through his actions and the visions of the future that haunted him, Talos had become a lord of the Vindicators, those sons of the Night Haunter who desired the ruin of the False Emperor and all His works.
By contrast, the Exalted had welcomed one of the Neverborn within his body, gaining the power of a Possessed Marine at the cost of his soul. The torture engines he had designed could extract the akhrali from thousands of damned with nightmarish efficiency, and had earned him enough wealth to claim a sizeable domain on Kerlazium, and the dubious loyalty of hundreds of Night Lords. Though lesser to the Daemon Princes like Acerbus Krieg, the Exalted was still highly ranked among the Dread Lords, as those of Curze's sons who had drunk deep of the Warp's cup called themselves.
For centuries, the Vindicators and the Dread Lords had been at odds, with the occasional flare of violence. Only the presence of their Primarch, whose shadow fell across all of Kerlazium, had kept the Night Lords from destroying themselves – for even in his madness and isolation, Curze had aligned himself with Horus, and would not tolerate the loss of his Legion to internecine conflict. Or at least, so his sons believed – the pale, crazed creature that their gene-sire had become had never said anything to that effect outright.
Among the veterans of the Great Crusade and the Heresy, the Dread Lords outnumbered their saner brothers by a large margin, but the very powers they had indulged in also made them supremely fractious, and their territories on Kerlazium were wretched and desolate places, festering with civil wars waged by armies of the damned for the amusement of their tormentors. By contrat, the followers of the Long War were better organized and unified than the Eighth Legion had arguably ever been before, with a clear hierarchy and a strict discipline.
However, the vaster territories of the Dread Lords hosted untold millions of damned souls, and the Vindicators' need for akhrali far outstripped the production of their own torture facilities, forcing the followers of the Long War to trade with their more debased brothers. The Vindicators were also the faction controlling most of Kerlazium's orbital stations, where envoys from other powers within the Eye came to trade for akhrali, which contributed to the uneasy truce between the Vindicators and the Dread Lords.
Powerful individuals on both sides of the divide desired to maintain this precarious balance, and it was with that aim that Talos and the Exalted met in one of the spires that jutted above the sprawling megalopolis that surrounded the palace of the King of the Night. Few of their brothers knew of the meeting – those who could be trusted not to let their disgust for the other faction overcome their common sense – and of those, even fewer knew its time and location.
"I understand that you don't have the kind of pull needed to get Askhol to stop raiding ships at the system's edge, Vandred. but – Wait. Something … Something is going to -"
The two Night Lords were deep in their decennial discussion when, without warning, an explosion blossomed in the middle of the spire atop which they met. The flare of the detonation burned the sensitive eyes of Night Lords and mortals across the megalopolis – the damned's spectral eyes did not feel anything, used as they were to much greater torments.
The top half of the spire fell, crashing into one of the greatest akhrali extraction factories of Kerlazium's capital – one of the few such structures whose control was shared between the Vindicators and the Dread Lords. The stocks of akhrali were caught in the destruction, and nameless horrors rose from the flames, spawned of the akhrali's eldritch energies and the final thoughts of the factory's workers.
Within hours, accusations began to fly, with the tension skyrocketing once word of the meeting that had taken place there spread. Neither Talos nor the Exalted had been found after the explosion, and both factions began to accuse the other of arranging the attack. Despite the attempts of cooler heads among the Vindicators to de-escalate matters, the simple truth was that the Eighth Legion had ever been riven by distrust, petty grudges and hatred, and soon several of the Dread Lords declared that this insult would not go unpunished.
Things may yet have calmed down, if not for the series of raids and attacks that quickly followed and that each side blamed on the other. In the border territories of the Dread Lords, the complex machinery of torture palaces was sabotaged, causing cascading failures that led to more daemonic outbreaks and even uprisings among the damned. Proeminent Night Lords were found dead in their chambers, murdered by bolters and energy weapons. Finally, the warship Echo of Damnation, one of the Vindicators' vessels in orbit of Kerlazium, went suddenly dark, refusing to answer any hail as it broke formation and opened fire on one of the trading orbital stations, sending its wreck burning through the daemonworld's atmosphere before the Echo was reclaimed by Vindicators' boarding parties, who found the crew dead and the bridge deserted.
The actions of the Echo of Damnation were the catalyst for the animosity that had built up to that point. A last-ditch meeting between dignitaries of both factions degenerated into battle, and the preparations for open war began in earnest.
Across Kerlazium, the Dread Lords summoned their armies. Hordes of the damned were armed with primitive weapons and herded toward the domains of the Vindicators by their cruel taskmasters. Monstrous things that had once been particularly evil souls and had been transformed by sorcerous experiments into ghastly beasts of shadow and rage were released from their prisons. Twisted warmachines designed by the Dark Mechanicum emerged from secret laboratories, fuelled by the unending torments of dozens of damned souls constantly tortured within their chassis in order to produce akhrali for their mechanisms to consume.
Alongside these came the Dread Lords themselves : Possessed and Daemon Princes, with their accompanying Neverborn. Atop great machines of bone and metal, they looked upon their gathered hosts and smiled as they marched toward Kerlazium's capital city.
Meanwhile, Zso Sahaal had mustered the strength of the Vindicators, ostensibly to defend the capital and prevent the anarchy from reaching the Night Haunter's private palace at its center.
Using technology purchased from the New Empire of Fabius Bile, the Vindicators had replenished the ranks of the Legion, which had been bled badly during the Horus Heresy. Entire space stations and Apothecarions had been dedicated to processing these new recruits, who rose from Ascension with no memory of their mortal lives.
Over thirty thousand Legionaries descended from orbit to face the host of the Dread Lords, less than five thousands of them having lived through the rebellion against the False Emperor. With them came tanks, Dreadnoughts, Chaos Knights and Titans – the host of the Long War, marshalled for the first time in order to make war against the other half of the Eighth Legion's soul.
Even at this point, messengers were dispatched to Kerlazium and the Primarch's palace, some begging for the Night Haunter to intervene and prevent the Night Lords from tearing themselves apart, others asking for his benediction for one side over the other. No response came, and the messengers themselves weren't heard from again. Rumors began to spread on both sides that Curze had abandoned his Legion, while others claimed that the Primarch was waiting to see who would emerge victorious, and recognize them as the rightful lords of the Eighth Legion.
Faced with the ranks of the Vindicators – who were far more numerous than they had previously believed – the Dread Lords unleashed their damned hordes, seeking to bleed the strength of their foes before committing their more powerful troops. Millions of incarnated souls charged the lines of the Night Lords, who tore them apart anew with massed bolter and artillery fire. Even so, the sheer numbers of the damned eventually carried them to the Vindicators' lines, and a brutal melee ensued.
As the Night Lords Legion fought against itself, something stirred behind the walls. In the ruins of the tower whose collapse had begun the Darkness War, a figure emerged, clad in midnight blue. Despite numerous injuries, he had dug his way out of the rubble, all the way from depths the rescue efforts had judged impossible to survive. Before the wide eyes of a few onlookers – the slaves, living and damned, who had been set the task of clearing up the debris – Talos Valcoran burst from the earth, his cracked eye-lenses blazing with anger.
The Apothecary quickly interrogated the terrified menials, and learned of the war unfolding outside the city. Cursing his brothers' short-sightedness, Talos still did not rush there. The vision that had struck him moments before the attempt on his life – which, it seemed, had successfully claimed the Exalted's – had intensified during his time beneath the ruins. As the Apothecary dug his way up, his mind had been haunted by a flow of visions, a series of dread revelations bestowed by the curse his gene-line had inflicted upon him. He knew what was happening across Kerlazium; he knew whose hand was behind it all; and he knew what their true goal was.
Leaving his Legion to kill itself, Talos rushed toward the city's center, where the Night Haunter's palace of screams stood. The first guards he found were dead, their bodies still warm. The Apothecary moved quickly, ignoring the pain of his injuries as he made his way to the sanctum of the palace – the Primarch's own quarters. On his way, he found more dead servants and Night Lords, all of whom looked to have been killed by surprise before they could defend themselves.
All signs pointed to an isolated assassin, who had used the confusion caused by the battle between Vindicators and Dread Lords to infiltrate the palace. The identity of its target was obvious to Talos – his mind's eye burned with visions of his gene-sire, seating on his throne of melted damned and still-living Imperial captives, smiling as he looked upon the descending blade of his killer.
Driven by something that, in another soul, may have been called filial piety, Talos rushed to save his Primarch, disregarding stealth for speed. The Apothecary passed by many of the Eighth Legion's nightmarish wonders – the Sculpture of Silence, a hauntingly beautiful piece composed of thousands of human skulls of all sizes; the Throne of Blades, an execution device made from the hammered swords of dead Ultramarines; a painting of Nostramo's destruction realized by a blind slave in whose ears the Primarch had whispered while he worked; and many, many more. Any one of these relics would have driven a mortal man to abject terror, but the Night Lord ignored them all.
Finally, Talos caught up with the assassin, right before the gate of Curze's chambers. The corpses of two Chaos Terminators laid on the ground in a pool of blood, their throats cut before they could even see their killer. Talos, however, could see it plainly as it worked on the complex locks barring its passage into the room beyond. As the Apothecary approached, it turned to face him.
The assassin was an Eldar, hailing from the fabled Dark City of Commoragh. To its cruel and debased kind, it was known as the Blade of Ptesh, a figure of legend and terror even among that race's cruel elite. Of the billions of assassins that lived among the Drukhari sub-species, there were none more dreaded than the Blade of Ptesh, whose name took its roots in the mythology of the Eldar predating the Fall. Even among the Imperium, its name was known, for it was it that had murdered the Ecclesiarch Veneris II soon after his ascension to the rank of High Lord of Terra. A powerful sorcerous artefact hung from the xenos' neck, protecting its soul from the ravenous hunger of the Eye of Terror – without such a protection, its strength would have been drained in days, quickly followed by its soul.
Talos saw all of this in the blink of an eye, the knowledge flashing before his eyes even as his brain burned from the onslaught of visions and blood leaked from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Overcoming the pain through an effort of will, the Night Lord drew his power blade, the stolen Blood Angel sword Aurum, and launched himself at the assassin.
By rights, the duel of Talos Valcoran and the Blade of Ptesh should have ended in moments. The Apothecary was strong, but he had never been one of his Legion's champions, and was wounded and exhausted besides. Furthermore, he was of the Vindicators, and had eschewed the boons of the Ruinous Powers. In contrast, the Blade of Ptesh was a millennia-old creature of murder and deceit, and though its speciality laid in striking from the shadows, unseen and unheard until it was too late, it was still a master of the less elegant aspects of killing as well. A cocktail of drugs brewed in the Dark City's abominable laboratories was combined with alterations made by master Haemonculi to push its abilities beyond the natural grace of the Eldar and into something greater.
Yet Talos managed to match the Dark Eldar's skills, his transhuman speed and reflexes aided by the torrent of split-second visions that still flowed through his skull. The Night Lord could see every move of the xenos before it made it, and this was just barely enough to block and dodge every blow of the Blade of Ptesh's toxin-covered knives.
Before the gate to Curze's chambers the two fought, their duel witnessed by no other soul. Eventually, Talos' visions showed him a path to victory. As blades clashed once more, the Apothecary adjusted his blow by the slightest angle, a motion that seemed born of exhaustion rather than intent. The Blade of Ptesh immediately seized the minute opening this created, and planted its dagger into Talos' right flank.
No sooner had the Commorite blade pierced ceramite and flesh that the assassin realized his mistake. Letting go of Aurum's handle, fighting his way through the agony of his new wound, Talos closed his hands around the Eldar's throat and began throttling him. The Drukhari fought, but was brought down and immobilized by Talos' greater strength and weight. As poisons designed to kill a Primarch flowed through his bloodstream, Talos kept the Blade of Ptesh pinned down as he strangled it.
It was then that the gates opened, and Konrad Curze stepped out of his chambers for the first time in decades. The Night Haunter looked upon the scene – the two dead Atramentar, the xenos and his son locked in an embrace that would soon see both of them dead – and smiled.
"Well done, my son. You do indeed possess the truth of purpose I had foreseen."
With a gentleness none would have believed him capable of, Curze pulled his son off the Eldar assassin and removed Talos' helm, revealing features distorted by veins bulging with the poisons running through them. With his own talon, the Primarch cut his own tongue, and let his rich blood flow into the mouth of the Apothecary. Whether due to the innate potency of the Primarch's vitae or the dark boons he had received since entering the Eye of Terror, the blood countered the poisons, and Talos took a deep, shuddering breath as the agony wracking body abated.
Only then did Curze's black gaze turn onto the Blade of Ptesh, who was stirring on the ground. Talos moved to finish the xenos off, but Curze stopped him with a single raised talon, and instead knelt by the side of the alien as it regained awareness to find the dark demigod it had come to kill looming over it.
"Do not speak. There is nothing you can tell me that I do not already know. But rejoice, little creature : my brother will have a use for you, and therefore you will live beyond this moment."
With the capture of the Blade of Ptesh, it became clear to Talos that his Primarch had known about the plot to assassinate him all along, and had relied upon Talos to capture the xenos assassin once it made its move. As the xenos was locked into a stasis coffin, the Apothecary dared to ask his gene-sire why he had let things go this far. Not only had he himself come to risk – for the weapons the Blade had carried could have slain the Night Haunter had they been given the chance – but the Legion itself was coming apart as its two factions waged war, deceived by the machinations of the Blade's mysterious patrons. Again, Curze only smiled, and told his son that all would become clear in time.
Outside the walls of the capital city, battle still raged between the Dread Lords and the Vindicators. The Talonmaster's strategic acumen had enabled his Traitor Marines to hold against the vastly superior foe, and the fields were littered with corpses, but now the Dread Lords were letting loose their greater monsters, having taken the measure of their foe. A parade of abominations was unleashed, and the Vindicators watched in grim determination as it approached.
Before contact was made, however, Curze appeared atop the walls. The Primarch blazed with eldritch power and inhuman charisma, and as one, the warriors and slaves of the Night Lords knelt before their liege. From the lowest of the conscripted damned to the Daemon Princes of the Dread Lords, all bent the knee – all save for Talos, who stood at his Primarch's side, his helmet replaced on his head, now adorned with a bloody rune traced by Curze himself.
The Darkness War was not over, Curze proclaimed : now it must be waged against the true enemy of the Legion. The rivalries and feuds of the Eighth had been used by outsiders, but this would be no more. The two aspects of the Night Lords would be united under his command, and together they would punish those who had sought to destroy them. At his word, the armies retreated, while the commanders of both sides were summoned to his palace.
Sat on his throne, Curze explained to the lords of his Legion the truth behind the explosion of the spire and the various acts of sabotage and assassination that had followed. He told them of the Blade of Ptesh, and how Talos – who now stood next to the Primarch's throne – had managed to stop it at the last moment. But this was not merely the work of xenos : the Blade had merely been an instrument, a tool in the latest move in the long-dormant Legion Wars.
The conspirators had woven powerful sorceries around the Blade, keeping Curze's second sight from locating the assassin and the rest of their plots on Kerlazium. Agents had infiltrated the ranks of the Eighth Legion's servants, arriving to the daemon world on ships come to trade for akhrali before slipping away into the darkness. With the assassin's capture and imprisonment, however, these spells had collapsed, and all was now revealed to the Night Haunter.
It was the Dark Council of Sicarius, or a faction of it, that had hired the Blade of Ptesh to throw the Eighth Legion into chaos and assassinate its Primarch. The Dark Apostles sought to avenge the humiliation inflicted upon the Word Bearers when Curze had brought Moriana to Sicarius, and the witch's words had broken the will of Lorgar. Constrained by the Aurelian's promise, the Word Bearers could do nothing against Moriana in revenge, but the Night Lords were not so protected.
The Night Lords were enraged by this revelation, and loudly vowed vengeance against the Seventeenth. Smiling – a sight that still disturbed the sons of Nostramo – the Primarch assured his sons that they would have their vengeance. The Darkness War was not over : now was the time to teach a lesson to the Dark Council.
In the weeks that followed, as a vast fleet of Night Lords ships was assembled and prepared above Kerlazium and the agents of the Dark Council in the system were hunted down, Talos was ever at his Primarch's side. The Apothecary was now called by a new title, one that Curze had bestowed upon him years ago, but which the Legion only now understood : Soul Hunter, whose meaning was encapsulated in the Nostraman rune Curze had inscribed upon his son's helmet.
"One soul. You will hunt one shining soul while all others turn their backs on vengeance."
The prophecy of Konrad Curze to Talos Valcoran, during the Horus Heresy
Once the preparations were complete, for the first time since the Heresy, Konrad Curze led his sons to war in person. Enough forces were left at Kerlazium to defend it and keep up the production and trade of akhrali, but nigh on fifty thousand Chaos Marines were aboard a fleet composed of over two hundred ships. Mercenary warbands were contacted, and offerred substantial payments of akhrali to lend their might to the defense of the Night Lords holding while the bulk of their Legion exacted revenge from the Word Bearers. A lesser power might have been worried that these mercenaries would turn on the Eighth Legion and try to plunder Kerlazium, but the reputation of the Night Lords' Primarch, and the fact that all knew him to be a close ally of Horus, made such concernes uneeded.
The Eighth Legion departed the Horusian territories and launched a series of brutal raids on outposts of the Word Bearers and their allies. The discipline of the Vindicators was paired with the ferocity of the Dread Lords, a tenuous alliance enforced by the will of the Night Haunter. Strongholds were destroyed, cities were razed, and amidst the ruins were left the flayed skins of the agents captured on Kerlazium, with Nostraman runes written in blood upon the cured leather, forming oaths of dread retribution for the schemes of the Dark Council. When Word Bearers forces arrived too late to the aid of their ruined holdings, they found these skins, and learned of the scheme of the ever-secretive Dark Council – and of their failure.
Curze led several of these assaults in person, slaughtering the sons of Lorgar with ease, his Soul Hunter at his side. The blood of the Primarch that Talos had drunk had intensified the strength of his visions, and though this caused him great pain, it made him all but impossible to defeat in combat. In the years to come, Talos' deeds during that campaign would cement his reputation as Curze's favored son, and he would serve as herald and representative to the Primarch in the Horusian Dominion and beyond.
In total, the Night Lords laid waste to twenty-seven systems, one for every agent of the Dark Council they had captured alive in Kerlazium. Their fleet moved fast, guided through the tides of the Eye of Terror by Curze, and all attempts by the Seventeenth to face them with a great enough force failed.
When the Night Lords finally declared their retribution complete and the Darkness War ended, many sons of Lorgar called for their own vengeance. But the revelations of the Dark Council's plot – and, more importantly, its complete failure – had sent fractures through the Legion. With Lorgar still isolated within the Templum Inficio, the Legion's leadership had fallen to the Dark Council, who had ostensibly focused their efforts on waging the Long War outside the Eye of Terror.
Hatred of the Ecclesiarchy had helped the Dark Council keep the Word Bearers under control after Moriana's Declaration, yet their failure – which was added to older whispers, regarding the arrival of the Fallen into the Eye, or the collapse of the Crimson Accords – was making many of their warriors doubt that they had the favor of the Gods. Curze's navigation of his fleet across the Eye's turbulent tide had shown that he had the blessing of Chaos, and many wondered if their Legion hadn't turned away from the Path to Glory since Lorgar had seemingly abandoned them.
The Dark Council fractured as factions and plots began to form, with Erebus and Kor Phaeron forced to rely on one another to maintain their position as its head, something which caused no small measure of bleak amusement to those who knew the two had always hated each other. Daggers were drawn in the dark, and in the end, no coordinated effort was made against the Night Lords, though a few Hosts launched isolated attacks on Horusian territories. Many more sought to reclaim the favor of Chaos by intensifying their activities in the Long War, causing a dark age for the Ecclesiarchy as the agents of the Seventeenth redoubled their efforts all across the Imperium.
Meanwhile, as the retribution of the Eighth Legion and its consequences unfolded across the Eye of Terror and beyond, a single ship brought the stasis-locked Blade of Ptesh to Maeleum. For the first time since the Fall, an Eldar was on the daemon world, and was delivered to Horus himself by a squad of Atramentars sworn to absolute secrecy and obedience to their Primarch. Of the few who knew of this cargo, none knew why the Night Haunter had sent his would-be assassin to the Prince of the Eye, nor what the Warmaster of Chaos might want with such a creature.
"What … do you … want … mon-keigh ?"
"I want to offer you a job."
AN : Well, this took longer than planned. I think I had the idea for this chapter back in January. You know, the Before Times. Anyway, here is a new chapter of this alternate timeline.
I have always enjoyed reading about the Night Lords - they make for great villains. I am also still bitter over the fact that, years after the conclusion of the Night Lords trilogy, we still haven't got the story of the Eighth Legion's attack on Craftworld Ultwhe. At least it was mentioned in Vigilus, so we can still hold onto hope.
The Blade of Ptesh was mentioned previously in that story, but it's not an OC : in the Codex for the Adeptus Custodes, its name is mentioned as a xenos who attempted to kill the Emperor on behalf of an unknown patron. I have plans for it in this story - and so does Horus.
I have gone back and changed the references to "Morgana" in previous chapters to "Moriana". I have no idea how I made that mistake - the Morgana character from the Roboutian Heresy is completely different from Moriana from canon.
As always, I look forward to your feedback on this chapter. I am still focused on writing the Angel War. Right now, I have over 24k words worth of "finished" content for it, and I think I am somewhere between a third and half done. Yeah, it's going to be a long one. I don't know what I was thinking when I said I wanted to finish it by the fifth of August.
Zahariel out.