Maeleum Datum : 507.M34
The worlds of the Eastern Fringe were heavily policed, as populations far from the centers of Imperial authority were more susceptible to infection by Horusian ideas and other heretical creeds. But even the best efforts of the Holy Ordos and the Adeptus Arbites couldn't keep the agents of the Traitor Legions from establishing a foothold. On the worlds ravaged by the Pale Wasting, these cultists had been harvested alongside the loyal subjects of the Throne, their allegiance making no difference to the Necrons of the Nightbringer. But as the war continued, a few of them managed to send messages to their distant sponsors : desperate pleas for assistance and salvation in the face of this overwhelming nightmare.
These calls reached the Eye of Terror, along with the reports of the spies embedded within the Imperial bureaucracy, and word soon spread of this new threat Guilliman was facing. To Horus, this was an unpleasant surprise, a reminder so soon after the Cacodominus and the Howling that the galaxy contained many secrets that were yet unknown even to him. Part of the Warmaster rejoiced at the difficulties his brother faced, but the nature of the Pale Wasting disturbed even him. Horus desired to rule over Humanity, and if the Pale Wasting triumphed there would be nothing to rule over. Furthermore, that the Dark Gods hadn't seen fit to reveal the existence of these 'Necrons' and their eldritch overlords to him was yet another worrying sign that, for all the power they had bestowed upon him, the Ruinous Powers still only considered him a pawn rather than an ally.
Trusting that the Avenging Son would be able to contain the threat, the Prince of the Eye began to investigate. The Necrons were an old race, older even than the Chaos Gods themselves, but there were places in the Eye of Terror where the darkest secrets of the Eldar Empire yet survived, hoarded by powerful lords of the Changing God. Warbands were sent to the lairs of these Daemon Lords, led by members of Ahriman's Cabalites, and kill-teams sent to capture Eldar scholars for interrogation.
Other powers, however, were less interested in the origins of the Necrons and more in their wondrous technology. Kelbor-Hal, fallen Fabricator-General of the Mechanicum, had kept himself hidden since the Siege of Terra and the exile into the Eye of Terror. He had renounced his alliance with Horus and cut off contact with the Warmaster, choosing to pursue his own blasphemous research away from the struggles and petty conflicts of the Traitor Legions. Only when the Inferna Astra had threatened to enslave the Dark Mechanicum to their madness had he emerged, and even then only to use his authority to give a rallying banner to the Dark Mechanicum so that they might face this mistake of the Thousand Sons with something approaching a united front.
Now, however, the tales of the xenos technology being unleashed across the Eastern Fringe caught the eye of the supreme Arch-Heretek. Thirst for knowledge and technology deemed forbidden to him had once driven Kelbor-Hal to join Horus' rebellion and tear his own planet asunder with civil war, and exile hadn't diminished his obsession. He wasn't stupid, however, and knew that to leave the Eye of Terror would expose him to his many, many enemies in the Imperium.
Instead, Kelbor-Hal decided to send some of his apprentices, along with enough resources to be able to survive in a war zone of such peril the Imperium was expecting the conflict to last for years, even with a Primarch leading them. In the depths of his domain, he gathered armies and put his followers through tests that slew dozens of them before a handful were deemed worthy of leading the expedition to the Eastern Fringe. Meanwhile, eight of the moons orbiting his primary Hell-Forge were prepared for a technological undertaking of a scale not seen since the Dark Age of Technology.
When Kelbor-Hal put his plan into motion, its echoes were felt across the entire Ultima Segmentum, despite the quietude imposed on the Warp by the Pale Wasting. One by one, the eight moons he had selected were hurled through the Warp, along with their entire population and industry, and emerged in the Eastern Fringe. The dark technology used to make this feat possible was based on the principles of Ulan Hûda, the rogue predator-moon allied to the Night Lords which had preyed upon the Thramas Sector during the Heresy at the behest of the Eighth Legion. How Kelbor-Hal had acquired the secrets of Ulan Hûda was unknown, but the arrival of the eight Moons of Kelbor-Hal was yet another scourge unleashed upon the worlds of the border.
The Nightbringer immediately detected the arrival of the moons, their method of travel reminding it of the great machines built by the Old Ones during the War in Heaven. Enraged by this reminder of its ancient and most hated foes, the Transcendent C'tan commanded its slaves to destroy the rogue planetoids. But the moons were well-defended, and the dark magi selected by Kelbor-Hal to command them actually rejoiced at the first attacks, seeing it as their first opportunity to gain insight into the Necrons' technology. Dark Tech shield generators kept the first Necron harvesting fleets from annihilating the moons from afar, but couldn't prevent them from teleporting their deathless legions on the surface.
Taken by surprise by the sudden arrival of their foes on the predator-moons, the Dark Mechanicum suffered greatly in the first battles, struggling to bring their hordes of dark skitarii and heretek horrors in position to face the invaders. But like the Imperium and unlike the Necrons, the Dark Mechanicum could adapt. Within days, they had shifted the frequency of their shields to prevent Necron teleportation within key installations, and make it more complex and energy-consuming everywhere else. Necron warriors were captured and, after much trial and error, prevented from phasing back to their crypts or to self-destruct so that the dark magi could study them. It was perhaps merciful for them that the Nightbringer had destroyed the last shreds of their minds when it had taken over the Dynasty, as Kelbor-Hal's adepts were far from gentle in their studies.
With the arrival of the first anti-Empyric matrix, however, the tides of the battle swiftly changed. Much of the Dark Mechanicum's forces were utterly dependant on the Warp to function, and while most were able to avoid being completely disabled (for had the anti-Empyric matrixes be all-powerful, the War in Heaven would have ended much sooner), their potency was still diminished.
In order to stop this Necron engine from crippling them, the Dark Mechanicum deployed kill-teams of Alpha Legionnaires, whose services Kelbor-Hal had bought for this war in return for vast shipments of Astartes weaponry and ammunition. Using their own technology of unknown origins, two companies of the Twentieth Legion were able to board the anti-Empyric matrix and disable it, before escaping back to the closest predator-moon with valuable samples – though they took heavy casualties in the process, and the dark magi couldn't help but notice that there were a few fewer samples than the number of transports that had escaped could feasibly have carried.
To prevent another anti-Empyric matrix from being deployed and affecting them all at the same time, the predator-moons scattered across the Eastern Fringe. The Nightbringer sent its forces in pursuit, and entire star systems became battlegrounds between the two enemies of the Imperium. Worlds that had thus far been spared the horrors of the Pale Wasting were caught in the crossfire of the Heretek-Necron conflict, trapped between foes equally inimical to their continued existence.
What befell them instead was arguably worse : in order to replenish their stockpiles of ore and flesh, the predator-moons preyed upon them, stripping them of all useful resources. Whole populations were herded into conversion facilities, where men and women alike were fitted with brutish cybernetic implants and branded with unholy sigils, their minds and souls blasted by exposure to Dark Tech until they were but puppets of the dark magi.
Entire landmasses were broken down to fuel the ravenous hunger of the predator-moons, whose forges had been designed by Kelbor-Hal's mad genius to be able to build tanks and daemon engines by the hundred, and were even capable of constructing Chaos Knights, using corrupted STC schematics and levels of automation that the sacred creeds of the Adeptus Mechanicus forbade. Unlike the massed infantry of their dark skitarii, these warmachines required competent pilots still in possession of their faculties, for while daemons could be used as replacements, there was only so much rituals of binding could do to force them to follow orders.
To overcome this challenge, the hereteks used memory clones of a handful of renegade Nobles from the Knight Houses that had sided with the rebellion during the Heresy. Fully grown bodies were decanted within gene-mills and implanted with the memories of these Nobles through intrusive cybernetic implants, before being permanently bonded to the Command Throne of a newly forged Knight and sent into the fray. Those who survived their first battle had their memories copied and added to the records of the corrupted noosphere, along with the last memories of those who died while still in range of the data-harvesters. This process soon turned every single memory-clone, whose sanity had never been that strong in the first place, utterly psychotic, as they remembered dying dozens of times yet still lived. Their Dark Mechanicum overseers didn't care for this, however, so long as the Chaos Knights could fight – which they very much could.
Witnessing these rival harvests, the Necrons accelerated their own efforts, resulting in morbid races between the two factions to be the first to commit genocide upon the worlds of the Eastern Fringe. In some cities, those who had witnessed the merciless slaughter enacted by the Necrons willingly gave themselves to the Dark Mechanicum in the vain hope it would at least allow them to fight back, not having any idea of the horrors that awaited them. In others, the civilians threw themselves before the Necron legions by the millions, that their deaths might at least be quick. In the end, both methods resulted in worlds devoid of life, though the Dark Mechanicum's methods were far more destructive : some of the hives emptied by the Necrons still stood almost intact after their departure, save for a few traces of battle, as if all the billions of inhabitants had simply left.
Thus was opened another front in the war against the Pale Wasting, though it would take some time before Guilliman realized exactly what had happened. The Dark Mechanicum was prepared to fight for years, decades even, in order to gather the knowledge Kelbor-Hal demanded of them. Soon, however, the sheer power the arch-hereteks were able to command so far from the dominating gaze of their lord made them start questioning their allegiance to the former Fabricator-General. In the Eye of Terror, they had been servants, but in the Eastern Fringe, they were warlords and kings.
They did not speak those thoughts aloud, and only thought them on their most well-protected of implanted cogitators, far from the sight of the agents Kelbor-Hal had doubtlessly left on the predator-moons to ensure their loyalty. But the idea grew nonetheless, little by little, in each battle they watched unfold through the eyes of a thousand dark skitarii, manipulating millions of troops like pieces on a game board in their war against the Necrons or possessing them like puppets, experiencing the intensity of battle by proxy before discarding their vessels as soon as they fell in battle.
AN : Yes, the Dark Magi are essentially playing a RTS game against the Necrons. Don't question it, or the logistics of being able to assemble Knight suits so quickly. To be honest, I am not sure the Imperium wouldn't be capable of the same thing in canon if it could operate with what we would consider a bare minimum of efficiency, but then this is a Grimdark setting. Why be efficient when you can instead be inefficient in a way that ruins the lives of thousands of workers ?
Ulan Hûda is a real thing in canon, from the 9th book of the Horus Heresy series by Forgeworld, Crusade. In it, it is an ally of the Night Lords Legion. By the way, did you know Curze had a whole bunch of worlds past the borders of the Imperium which were bound to him by "Midnight Treaties" ? These worlds supplied the Eighth Legion in exchange for Curze hiding their existence and blatant transgressions of Imperial laws from the Imperium. Like the whole "teleporting forge-world capable of preying upon other planetoids", this seems like something which would deserve mention in more than just one background book.
Two more chapters in the "Pale Wasting" arc left (I had to split up the next one in my planning).
As usual, please tell me what you think of this story.
Zahariel out.