Maeleum Datum : 510.M34
Despite its isolation and lack of apparent strategic value, Kronus was a world with significant history. Aeons ago, it had been conquered by the Sautekh Dynasty and, at the end of the War in Heaven, had been made into one of the Necrons' tomb-worlds, where they had slumbered during the Great Sleep. Millions of Necron warriors slept below the world's surface, hidden away in great crypts that had endured the passage of galactic epochs more or less undamaged. Such had been the importance of Kronus in that age that a shard of the Nightbringer itself was contained there, imprisoned within a Tesseract Vault that had endured better than the one on the Larkorakh crownworld.
In more recent times, during the Horus Heresy, Kronus had been the site of violent battles between the Ultramarines and the Word Bearers, the latter led by the Dark Apostle Eliphas the Inheritor. Eliphas' plans to build a basilica dedicated to the Ruinous Powers on Kronus had come to naught when his Primarch had summoned him, castigating him for wasting manpower and resources on a distraction to the greater war. Still, traces of that bloody fratricidal war yet remained on Kronus, waiting for but a spark to animate them once more. As news of the Pale Wasting reached the Eye of Terror, Eliphas had attempted to use the cults he had cultivated on the planet, only to fail miserably, as the local Imperial authorities managed to locate and eliminate the cultists before their work in the Deimos Peninsula could be completed.
The combined Imperial fleet arrived in Kronus first, to the shock and awe of its population. For years now, they had heard rumors of the wars raging across the Eastern Fringe, though they'd remained untouched so far. Learning this was about to change terrified the Governor, but he immediately began preparations to protect his people, driven to do his duty by the presence of the Avenging Son. In an impressive display of logistics, the people of Kronus were evacuated and shipped off to Ultramar, where great refugee cities had been built to welcome those who had fled before the Pale Wasting with typical efficiency. Kronus' abandoned cities became fortified camps for millions of Guardsmen, while orbital forts were towed in the system, and Ultramarine Scouts located the entrances to the Necron crypts.
Three months after Guilliman's arrival at Kronus, the Nightbringer and its Pale Wasting appeared, and the battle began. The C'tan had brought no less than three of its anti-Empyric matrixes, and their combined effect on the humans was devastating. Entire Regiments were lost without ever firing a shot or even seeing the enemy, their will to live sapped by the soul-deadening effect of the Necron engines. The cults of Chaos that Dark Apostle Eliphas had sponsored were afflicted worst of all, driven to suicide in the middle of the ritual that would have allowed the Inheritor's warriors to reach Kronus and strike at Guilliman.
It was fortunate for Eliphas that he had kept the details of his plan to himself, and that mortal cultists failing to perform Magnus' ritual of portal creation was a common occurrence. Had the rest of the Word Bearers realized he had missed the opportunity to strike at their hated foe, the Thirteenth Legion, his future would have been a bleak one indeed.
The Imperial ships were similarly afflicted, but for once the fanatical priests of the Ecclesiarchy proved their usefulness to Guilliman. Space Marines could fight through the soul-deadening field through sheer will, like Guilliman himself, but in mere men and women the fires of faith proved an adequate substitute, and fiery sermons broadcast across entire vessels allowed their crew to keep doing their duties even under the weight of that crushing psychic void. They engaged the xenos fleet, and the void of Kronus was soon filled with the bright flares of dying warships.
At the same time, battle was joined on the surface of Kronus, the Necrons not needing anything so crude as troop transports to land their forces on the planet. By then the Adeptus Mechanicus had managed to cobble together devices that prevented the Necrons from simply teleporting in the middle of their strongholds, using a brute-force approach that had eventually worked, though no two tech-priests could agree on why.
The hosts of the Nightbringer had taken losses during the war, and unlike Guilliman the C'tan had no allies to call upon to replenish its silent legions. It lacked too the innate techno-sorcerous lore some of its kind were recorded to have possessed in Eldar myths : perhaps it never had held it, or perhaps it had lost such knowledge during its sundering. Regardless, while its enslaved Crypteks could restore defeated Necrons from all but the most absolute of destruction and perform minor repairs on the greater engines of the Pale Wasting, they couldn't build new ones, or repair those destroyed by the Imperium and the Dark Mechanicum.
Only by plundering more tomb-worlds could the Pale Wasting recover and grow, and the Triarch Praetorians had managed to empty those it had found before – but not Kronus. Glitches in the AIs of the Sautekh Dynasty, combined with the secrecy imposed on all tomb-worlds hiding a shard of the Nightbringer, resulted in the lords of Mandragora no longer remembering the planet's location, and in some cases its existence. Only one Necron Overlord did, the infamous rogue Trazyn the Infinite, and he was more interested in salvaging any historical relic on Kronus than he was emptying its crypts of common warriors to deny them to the Transcendent C'tan.
The Imperials had avoided disturbing the crypts, unwilling to rouse the Necrons from their slumber and add further complications to the battle. They had instead elected to guard the entrances to the tombs, unaware that the Nightbringer could simply break in using teleportation. Or rather it could have, had Trazyn's thievery not caused the tomb-guarding AI to raise its defenses to their maximum level, preventing even the Transcendent C'tan from forcing its way inside lest it damage the resources it desired to claim. Instead, it was forced to attack the entrances in order to gain access, while also sending its legions against the human population centers.
The whole of Kronus shook as Humanity fought against the Pale Wasting, but of the Nightbringer itself, there was still no sign. Guilliman had taken to the field in person, leading his Ultramarines on the planet against the greatest concentration of the foe. Had the battle been allowed to reach its end like this, perhaps the Imperium would have prevailed, though it would have lost nearly all its forces on Kronus in the effort. But Guilliman, and Farseer Kylian, had other plans.
The Avenging Son had kept one of his greatest forces from the battlefield, and now that the Pale Wasting was committed he gave the order to unleash them. The Black Templars, those sons of Dorn who had dedicated themselves to hunting down the enemies of Man while their gene-sire held the Cadian Gate against the Arch-Traitor and his foul minions, had answered the call of Guilliman in force. Several of their Crusades had come to fight the Pale Wasting, merging into one singular fleet under the command of none other than Sigismund, the founder and High Marshall of their order. A veteran of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy, Sigismund was millennia old, and the wounds he had sustained in the course of his duty had long since required his burial within a Dreadnought sarcophagus.
But his zeal for the God-Emperor burned bright still, for among the Legiones Astartes the Black Templars were unique in that they had espoused the Ecclesiarchy's creed, believing the Master of Mankind to be a deity in truth, despite His vehement denials of it during the Great Crusade. That faith had seen the Black Templars grow ever more isolated from their more secular cousins, but now it served them well, for they did not have Librarians for the anti-Empyric matrixes to cripple, and appeared wholly unaffected by the other effects of the field. At Guilliman's signal, their ships threw themselves at the great engines, unleashing thousands of black-clad transhuman killers upon them, tasked with the single purpose of disabling the matrixes no matter the cost.
And the cost indeed was great, for nigh on ten thousand Black Templars went into the jaws of death, and less than four thousand of them made it out. Worse, from the perspective of the Black Templars, Sigismund himself had perished in the attack. But the sons of Dorn fulfilled their mission, and as the sixth Kronusian dawn rose above the planetary battlefields, the last of the anti-Empyric matrixes was undone. Immediately, the stasis fields that had held the Librarians of the Thirteenth Legion and the battle-psykers of the Astra Militarum were switched off, and they unleashed the full array of their powers upon the deathless xenos.
Then came the Nightbringer in all its horrific majesty, enraged by the loss of yet more of its great engines of woe. It scythed through Guardsmen, Skitarii and Ultramarines alike, shrugging off artillery fire and even the wrath of the Mechanicus' own God-Machines. In what passed for its eldritch mind, it recognized Guilliman as the leader of its enemies, and moved toward the Primarch, determined to devour that most radiant and powerful of souls as first repayment for the losses it had endured.
But the human psykers were not the only force returned to the field by the destruction of the anti-Empyric matrixes. As Primarch and Transcendent C'tan finally faced one another, Guilliman beholding the true face of the Pale Wasting and finding it more terrible still than the Daemon Prince his brother Fulgrim had become, the Eldars of Alaitoc made their move. They emerged from inactive Webway Gates that had been smuggled on Kronus by agents of Guilliman whose loyalty was such they would not question such orders, led by Farseer Kylian, and began a their work.
At the cost of thousands of lives and great peril to his own, Guilliman had drawn the Nightbringer to a specified point, where the aetheric currents waxed strongest on all of Kronus. There, the Eldar spellweavers drew upon the fullness of their power, which they always kept themselves from to avoid drawing Slaanesh's hungry gaze. Their souls flared bright, and as one they struck the Transcendent C'tan. Lightning descended from the heavens and struck the sundered god, once, twice, three times in as many heartbeats. With every strike, a score of Eldar were lost, their bodies burning to ash and less than ash, their soulstones cracked by the terrible energies they were wielding. This was a price they had all known they might pay, and they paid it willingly, for they were children of Alaitoc, sworn to oppose the deathless horrors at any cost.
For all these sacrifice, the Nightbringer wasn't brought low so easily. It had feasted on billions of souls since its liberation, and on the stuff of the stars themselves. It would take more than the petty sorcery wielded by the degenerate descendants of its ancient foes' slaves to end a being that had existed since the dawn of the universe. There was a reason, after all, that mighty Szarekh himself, the Silent King of the Necrons, had chosen to break the C'tan rather than kill them. It was no small thing to slay a god, and not one without consequences.
But Roboute Guilliman was willing to suffer those consequences so long as the people of his father's Imperium were kept safe from the Pale Wasting. The Avenging Son struck the weakened Nightbringer with his two Gauntlets of Ultramar, each weapon infused with technology now lost to the Imperium, crafted in the heydays of Humanity and reforged for him by the greatest tech-priests of Mars. With these weapons, Guilliman had struck down aliens, traitors and daemons.
Again the Eldars called down lightning, pouring their very souls into the attacks, reasoning annihilation was a better fate than what awaited their spirits on the other side. On their own, the Eldars couldn't have hoped to defeat the Nightbringer, who had stood against the power of the Old Ones and emerged triumphant. But Roboute Guilliman had been gene-forged by the Emperor Himself, and like all of his brothers He had imbued the Avenging Son with the power to slay the false gods He sought to free Mankind from. Drawing upon that power within him, Guilliman at last delivered a final blow, unravelling the infinitely complex matrix of energy that made up the Transcendent C'tan's core.
Yet even in his triumph, Guilliman fell, trapped in a state that was neither life nor death by the final curse of the Nightbringer as its eternal existence was at last unmade. His sons found him in death-like sleep, and brought him back to Maccrage, where all their efforts to wake him failed. In the end, they interred him in the Fortress of Hera, with ten Terminators assigned to keep watch over him at all time lest one of the Primarch's many enemies sought to finish what the xenos godling had begun.
In the Eye of Terror, Fulgrim roared in displeasure as he sensed the Avenging Son's fall, having hungered for the blood of Guilliman since he'd been denied it by Sanguinius thousands of years ago. To take his mind off this lost pleasure, the White Naga indulged in such excess that entire worlds outside the Eye were overcome by its psychic echoes, their population succumbing to madness and destroying itself in hedonistic orgies.
The entire Imperium shook with grief at the news that one of the Emperor's sons had fallen. The Inquisition had intended to keep the details of the war against the Pale Wasting as secret as possible, but the involvement and loss of a Primarch made that impossible. From the outer rim to the Throneworld itself, the bells of mourning rang, in some cases without pause for years on end. The Avenging Son and all those who had perished in the war against the Pale Wasting were honored on Holy Terra, their names recorded in the halls of heroes, along with a plaque said to have been engraved by the Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes on behalf of the Emperor Himself. Upon it were inscribed the words :
"By their mortal sacrifice and unmatched valour unmade that which cannot die and so preserved the most holy realm of Mankind."
Those few Eldar who had survived the Battle of Kronus withdrew immediately through their Webway Gates, knowing that without Guilliman to vouch for them the alliance was at an end. The eldritch arches crumbled to dust behind them, and though its losses were but a fraction of a fraction of those the Imperium had sustained on Kronus alone, it would be many cycles before Alaitoc recovered from the sacrifices it had made to stop the Nightbringer. Hundreds of its most powerful psykers had given their life to strike the Yngir, yet in the end it had come down to the might of the mon-keigh king, a tale which found little favor in the Craftworlds.
To ensure that no threat like the Pale Wasting ever rose again, a new organization was founded : the Deathwatch. Composed of veteran Space Marines from all loyalist Legions, it would hunt down the xenos menace within its own lair. They would serve as the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Xenos, whose influence had waned in the days since the Proclamation of Horus. From hundreds of void-fortresses scattered across the galaxy they would stand guard, with the first and greatest of these being deployed in the Eastern Fringe. It was from them that the name Deathwatch came, for they were to keep watch over the dead, lest they stir anew to bring ruination upon the Emperor's realm.
The Inquisition was more successful in suppressing the truths revealed to Guilliman by Farseer Kylian, and which the Avenging Son had shared with his closest confidants. The Pale Wasting was said to be the remnants of a xenos empire throwing itself at the Imperium after its leader had gone mad, and the existence of the other Necron Dynasties was kept secret. Inquisitorial agents and Mechanicus exploration teams began to search for the tombs of the Necrons, to quarantine or plunder them.
The involvement of the Dark Mechanicum was silenced, with entire systems being declared forbidden lest someone stumble upon the remnants of the terrible weapons used by both sides of that awful conflict. The wrecks of the predator-moons disabled and scoured clean of life and power by the Nightbringer were hurled into the closest star by servitor-crewed tug-boats that followed them into fiery oblivion.
Not all of Kelbor-Hal's apprentices had perished, however. Some of them had fled before the Nightbringer had come for them, abandoning the priceless predator-moons despite knowing doing so would earn them the Fabricator-General's eternal displeasure. Taking with them the most prized treasures of the war and the knowledge they had gained from studying the Necrons, they went into exile in the Eastern Fringe, establishing small enclaves where they continued their blasphemous research.
In time, Horusian agents would reach out to these isolated enclaves, and offer them a partnership. The Dark Mechanicum would provide weapons and tools for the various cults and rebellions sponsored by the Prince of the Eye, and in return would receive resources and technological relics. It was an agreement that suited both sides, though the Horusians wouldn't remain the sole patrons of the exiles for long. In the centuries to come, the Eastern Fringe and the entire Segmentum would be plagued by the legacy of Kelbor-Hal, and many tech-priests would be tempted down heretekal paths by the dark wonders of the exiled magi. Kelbor-Hal himself seemed satisfied with the lore his apprentices had sent back to him before their defeat, and didn't see it fit to waste resources hunting down his renegade students.
On Mandragora, the relief of the Necron Lords was short-lived. Soon after the defeat of the Pale Wasting, the Triarch Praetorians returned in force to the crownworld, and used the secret protocols of the Silent King to erase all memory of the event, as well as all records that the Larkorakh Dynasty had ever existed. This was done to preserve the image of invincibility of the Necrons and their Silent King, and keep any from wondering just how it was that a lesser race like the humans had managed to defeat a Transcendent C'tan of such power, as well as to keep any from questioning the wisdom of Szarekh in ordering the Great Sleep given that they had forgotten about an entire tomb-world as a result.
This was not the first time such memory-altering protocols had been used, and by the end, only one Necron Overlord remembered the Pale Wasting outside of the Praetorians' ranks – for Trazyn the Infinite was cunning, and had ensured the Praetorians only thought they had wiped out his own recollection of the events. He did not think it treason against the Silent King : after all, how was a historian to do his work if his own knowledge of the past was questionable ?
Sanguinius wept.
The Primarch of the Blood Angel was alone, kneeling on the cold stones of an abandoned Imperial church. There, before the image of his father that had been carved centuries ago by a man who had never seen Him, Sanguinius wept for his brother.
He hadn't known what would happen to Guilliman, but he had known the possibility of his brother's death existed. And yet, there had been nothing he could do. Too much of him was invested in the legend of the Great Angel, too much of his essence was intertwined with the prayers and hopes of trillions of souls across the galaxy. The anti-Warp weapons of the Pale Wasting would have unmade him, would have reduced him to a shadow of his current self.
And the Imperium needed him, much as it burned his soul to think of it like that. Horus was still out there, plotting in the Eye of Terror. Sanguinius could see glimpses of his treacherous brother's schemes unfurling in the future, and knew with absolute certainty that it was the inevitability of their confrontation which kept the Arch-Traitor in his lair.
He had to stay alive, a symbol and a sword hanging over Horus' head. Even as his brothers vanished or fell, Sanguinius must endure.
His father had commanded this of him, and he would not disobey.
And so he wept, mourning his lost brother and the shame of his inability to save him.
AN : And here is the final part of the "Pale Wasting" arc. I feel there is a lot more I could have done with it, but this story is about short chapters narrating historical events, not a deep dive like the Roboutian Heresy. Also, it would have taken days/weeks of work, and to be perfectly honest, I feel that time would be better spent on my other stories.
Still, I hope you enjoyed reading this. The bit at the end with the Inquisition trying to suppress all knowledge of what happened is something I can well see having happened in canon. I mean, we have very little detail about the Pale Wasting's canon nature, but a prematurely awakened Necron dynasty fits what we are told. Also, the Inquisition burying the truth to the point that when the rest of the Dynasties awaken thousands of years later even the Inquisitors feel they are fighting the Necrons for the first time seems perfectly in-character for me.
Suppressing knowledge of the past has its downsides. Who would have thought ?
And on that same subject, the bit about the Praetorians editing the memory of the Necron nobles is also canon. Which is terrifying when you think about it. Everything we know about the War in Heaven, except those bits of legend from the Eldars, come from the recollections of the Necrons who fought in it. And their memory was edited by one of the participants. Which means anything could have happened back then, so long as it ends with the Old Ones gone and the C'tans sundered. The reason for the War, how the Necrontyrs became the C'tan, how the war went before and after biotransference, everything could have been rewritten.
Here is a quick example : for all we know, Szarekh wasn't the Silent King at all, but made his deal with Mephre'tan the Deceiver and brought the secrets of immortality to each Dynasty, not telling them they would become his slaves in the process, and rewrote their memories so that he had always been their Silent King and therefore this was normal. Or the being currently known as Szarekh isn't the original one, but someone who killed and replaced him and erased all trace of it, before leading the Necrons in rebellion against the C'tan.
Of course, I doubt GW will reveal anything like that. But the possibility of it is intriguing storywise nevertheless.
Zahariel out.