Maeleum Datum : 189.M36
In the Eye of Terror, there was an Apothecary who had once been of the Seventeenth Legion, the Word Bearers. He had fought in the Great Crusade, and spread the worship of the Emperor to isolated human worlds. Then he had been made to kneel in the ashes of Monarchia, like so many of his brothers, and learned that the Emperor was not a god deserving of worship. Later, he had learned the Primordial Truth, and risen in rebellion against the deceiver on the Golden Throne in order to bring ascension to Humanity. He had fought hard, and made bargains to survive that had deprived him of his very name. But the rebellion had failed, and he had been forced into exile along with his brothers. Then he had realized the truth : that the Gods had lied. They would not, could not, deliver Humanity the transcendence they had promised.
The gift of daemonhood was only ever bestowed upon their favored champions, and they were merely toys, pawns to use in the endless games the Gods played against one another. Through his investigation, the Unfettered had come to believe that the ascension to daemonhood had very stringent requirements, beyond the mere whims of the Chaos Gods – though he also believed both interpretations to be correct, being different approaches to a concept that was beyond mortal minds. It was the Unfettered's belief that, through careful psychic and physical 'attuning', a mortal soul could be made fit for daemonhood, needing only enough Warp energy to trigger the infernal transfiguration. All that remained was finding a way to achieve this.
Such a belief was entirely antithetical with the Dark Creed of the Seventeenth Legion. And so, the Apothecary who was now called the Unfettered had broken away from the Word of Lorgar. He had become a heretic, seeking a way to steal apotheosis from the divine. As he pursued his blasphemous research, he realized that without the name he had given up, the Dark Gods of Chaos could no longer affect him directly, which he suspected was the only reason they hadn't struck him down yet. But just because they couldn't destroy him outright didn't mean they couldn't send their myriad servants after him. Members of his old Legion tracked him wherever he went, and aspiring champions of the Ruinous Powers were given quests by their dark patrons promising great rewards in exchange for his death. Yet the Eye of Terror was large, with plenty of places to hide, and the Unfettered was skilled enough to elude or kill these pursuers so far – but not to prosper.
The Unfettered needed allies, both to protect him and to help him in his research, but he didn't know where to turn : he knew how seemingly impossible his goal was, and the other powers of the Eye were unlikely to spend resources on what looked like a guaranteed failure. Even should someone believe in his research's potential, they would merely attempt to use it for their own ends rather than use it to drag Humanity toward what the fallen Apothecary saw as its manifest destiny.
Fortunately for him and unfortunately for the Imperium, he found such allies in the end, and to his immense surprise, there were members of his gene-line among them. Yet this was nothing compared to the shock he felt when he saw their leader : Moriana, the prophetess whose words had broken Lorgar Aurelian's resolve and ended the Legion Wars.
As the witch approached the Unfettered's field laboratory on the war-torn daemon world of Eidolon, she was accompanied by none other than Kairos Fateweaver, the Oracle of Tzeentch, who had set Lorgar on his path to rebellion and roused Horus Lupercal from his death-like slumber from the injuries he had sustained at the Siege of Terra. How the two had come together, the Unfettered didn't know, but as he heard Moriana's offer, he soon didn't care.
Somehow, Moriana had learned of the Unfettered's research, and claimed that it aligned with her own goal of ushering in Humanity's ascension as masters of the Warp. As for Kairos, the Oracle's two heads gave contradicting but equally plausible answers whenever he was questioned as to his motives : one said he was there to ensure the Unfettered's research succeeded and ushered in a new age of daemonic supremacy across the galaxy, while the other said that the Unfettered's failure would help bring about the end of the Long War. Regardless, Kairos' power and influence in the Warp made his help too valuable to discard – and, as Moriana later explained to the Unfettered in private, turning on the Oracle would result in a battle they weren't sure they could win.
The Unfettered accepted the witch's proposal and joined her. Together, the dread triumvirate travelled to Aftermath, the City of Cities, aboard the cruiser Ashdrinker, which served as flagship of Moriana's warband, and had changed much since it had been gifted to her by Lorgar along with her guard of Legionaries.
In Aftermath, they met with the exiled Masters of the Forge, and after many, many days of negotiations, received priceless knowledge from the one named Master Lore. What they gave in return, what promises they made, none but the Triumvirate would ever know. With that knowledge, the Unfettered's research advanced considerably, but the anarchic nature of the Eye of Terror made it unsuitable for further experimentation. There were places of relative stability in the Eye, but those were some of the most ferociously fought for locations, and the warband was far too small to lay claim to one of them. The next step of their plan would have to take place beyond the Eye.
With the guidance of the Fateweaver, the Ashdrinker was able to depart the Eye of Terror and slip past the Imperium's defenses without being detected. At first, the Unfettered suggesting sailing for Segmentum Pacificus : the independent kingdoms that had grown in the wake of the Sundering would surely be easily tempted by the prospect of daemonic ascension, once properly rephrased. But Kairos objected, one head claiming that the Horusians kept too close an eye on the region while the other swore that they couldn't possibly fight their way through the Imperial blockade and other perils that guarded the way to the Sundered Kingdoms.
Therefore, the Ashdrinker remained in Segmentum Obscurus, and the Unfettered resumed his experimentations with the assistance of the other two members of the Triumvirate. Finding volunteers was easy : selecting worthy applicants from among them was more difficult. But those were nothing compared to the difficult of the process itself. For several decades, they remained unsuccessful, and their failures would become legends in their own right. The Child-Beasts of Sangua Terra, the Whispering Horrors of Belisar, and the Screaming Code of Lucius : all were created as by-products of the Unfettered's unholy research.
But eventually, through thousands of ghastly experiments, the process was refined, and the first artificial Daemon Princes, called the Transcendent Ones, were created. Only a couple of these abominations against the God-Emperor and the Dark Gods both were crafted from the burning souls of willing subjects pursuing power no matter the cost, but that was enough to prove that the process could be performed semi-reliably.
"Usurpation is the one path to true power."
The Unfettered
The Triumvirate knew that their activities would soon draw attention, and that unless they had overwhelming power on their side, they would be destroyed and their research either stolen or destroyed. They needed to create more Transcendent Ones, enough that they would be able to face off against any force dispatched against them. To that end, they devised a large-scale ritual that would allow the simultaneous creation of multiple Transcendent Ones. They called it the Festival of Transcendent Souls, and at the suggestion of Kairos Fateweaver, they selected the Imperial world of Dimmamar as the place the Festival would take place.
With the two existing Transcendent Ones, who had claimed the names of Gog and Magog out of one of Old Earth's ancient religions, leading the way, the Triumvirate's warband descended upon Dimmamar. Its defenders were taken completely by surprise, and were slaughtered with contemptuous ease, allowing the Triumvirate to seize control of the planet and start preparations for the Festival within weeks of their arrival in the system. Dimmamar's population was enslaved and put to work building great monuments engraved with eldritch runes all across its surface, while the Unfettered and his acolytes scoured the billions of men and women to find suitable candidates.
By the standards of the Imperium in that age of oppression and ruthlessness, Dimmamar had been a pleasant and peaceful enough planet, but the Long War had reached even there, planting the seeds of doubts and resentment. Many candidates were found, and by the time the material preparations for the Festival were completed, dozens of them had survived the preliminary examinations, trials and procedures. The Unfettered had studied each of them in detail, and tuned the process to the variations in their souls to maximize their odds of success.
As the Triumvirate had foreseen, however, they would not be allowed to proceed with their plans unopposed. On the distant moon of Titan, in the Sol system, the Prognosticators of the Grey Knights, that mysterious order of Space Marines tasked with hunting the daemonic wherever it dared to invade the Emperor's domain, had sensed the Festival's echoes through time. Even with veteran diviners had found it difficult to make sense of their visions, for the Unfettered's research was something none of them had ever even considered possible, but they knew enough to send the full strength of their Chapter to stop the Festival of Transcendent Souls.
And so, in the year 189.M36, the Warp around Dimmamar tore open to reveal the fleet of the Grey Knights, gathered in numbers not seen since the Heresy. Leading them was none other than Janus, the Supreme Grand Master of the Chapter. Sensing the Festival in progress, the Grey Knights immediately landed in force, divided into several task forces targeting the ritual sites that formed a continent-sized sorcerous pattern on the planet's surface. Janus himself lead the spearhead aimed at the greatest ritual, where the Triumvirate themselves were overseeing the Transcendence of no less than thirteen candidates.
Moriana's sorcery had enslaved and twisted the remaining population of Dimmamar, turning them into mutants and demented cultists who hurled themselves at the Grey Knights in their tens of thousands, giving their lives to slow the silver warriors enough for their masters to complete their foul work. Every step the Sons of Titan took was steeped in the blood of formerly loyal Imperial subjects, and the slaughter combined with the rituals to thin the veil between the Materium and the Immaterium, fuelling the Festival as more Warp energy became available to transform the candidates.
In several places, the Grey Knights arrived in time to prevent the Transcendence from taking place, while in others, they had to fight the newly transformed eldritch demigods created by the Triumvirate. This was the case in the main site, located in what had once been the planetary capital. There, no less than eight of the thirteen candidates managed to survive the process and avoid the utter destruction of their not-so-immortal souls by the terrible energies involved in the Transcendence process.
What followed was a battle beyond description. As the Grey Knights drew upon their own psychic might to match that of the Transcendent Ones, reality buckled and cracked, letting yet more daemons into the Materium. If not for the fact that the Neverborn attacked the Transcendent Ones just as readily as they did the Grey Knights, the Imperial champions would have been overwhelmed.
Amidst the madness, the Unfettered fell, slain by daemons whose shapes defied comprehension and classification. His soul slipped from his ravaged corpse and, nameless, fell into the Empyrean, shielded from the claws of the Neverborn by his lack of an identity for them to hunt.
Janus himself perished as well, fighting Gog and Magog on his own after having been separated from his personal guard. When the Grey Knights found their Supreme Grand Master, he was dying, but the first two Transcendent Ones had been defeated, banished screaming to the Warp. His body was recovered and brought back aboard their ships, to await transfer and burial on Titan.
Eventually, after days of fighting as brutal as any that had taken place since the last hours of the Siege of Terra, the Grey Knights were victorious, though it had cost them over two-third of their number. The last of the Transcendent Ones brought into existence on Dimmamar was destroyed, and the cultist hordes were slain.
Before leaving the system, the Grey Knights made sure that no trace of the Unfettered's heresy was left behind. Their ships burned Dimmamar to cinder, wiping out the entire surviving human population. Only then did the sons of Titan leave, knowing that the hunt for the rest of the cabal was only beginning. For though the Unfettered had perished and Kairos Fateweaver had disappeared at some point during the battle, Moriana had escaped with what remained of her warband, returning to the Ashdrinker before departing Dimmamar, the ship's infernal enhancements enabling it to avoid the guns of the Grey Knights' fleet.
In the years that followed, Moriana spread the knowledge of the Transcendence process far and wide, though none would ever match the Unfettered's mastery. Without the Word Bearer's expertise, another Festival was impossible, but countless heretics sought to use the rites to claim the power of daemonhood for themselves – unaware that such power came at a cost, for no defeated Transcendent One, not even Gog and Magog, the first and greatest of their kind, ever returned to the Materium, their essences having been seized by the Dark Gods upon their arrival into the Realms of Chaos and subjected to a fate best not thought of.
An age of war and madness descended upon Segmentum Obscurus, as newly ascended Transcendent Ones rallied armies around them and waged war against the Imperium. The Legiones Astartes were forced to direct the bulk of their forces to Segmentum Obscurus, along with countless billions of Imperial Guardsmen and other forces, putting an end to any hope of reclaiming Segmentum Pacificus.
These conflicts would be called the Ascension Wars, and would draw even the Primarch Sanguinius, whose sight had been blinded to what had transpired on Dimmamar by Kairos' machinations. The Great Angel fought across Segmentum Obscurus, often alongside the Grey Knights, whose involvement in the Ascension Wars was so intense that they were forced to abandon their usual protocols of purging those they fought alongside. There was simply no point to their secrecy any longer, not when they had been dragged into such an open battle.
And in the Realms of Chaos, sat on its throne in the Court of Change, Tzeentch laughed with a thousand and one mouths, as Kairos Fateweaver bowed before the Architect of Fate and, on Terra, a man named Goge Vandire took up the mantle of Master of the Administratum.
AN : Those of you who don't recognize the name of Dimmamar might want to google it. You'll understand why Tzeentch is laughing better.
And so we reach the end of the four chapters where each of the Dark Gods makes a move in the Long War. Yes, the Unfettered is the same character as the one from my other story, Warband of the Forsaken Sons. I already mentioned Arken earlier in the story, after all.
This makes it three times I have killed Janus in one of my stories. Four if you count the Roboutian Heresy, but that didn't happen "on-screen", so I don't. It's not that I don't like him or anything, it's just that he's such a major character that I've got to address his existence in alternate timelines.
The reason why this update was so late is that Nurgle has struck me with a plague most foul ... well, more "annoying" than "foul", but still, it's done a number on my writing ability in the last two weeks. I've mostly recovered now, and I'm on vacation, so I'm still going to try to finish this story before the end of the year. We'll see how that goes : if everything goes to plan, there are only two more chapters left, and then the epilogue.
In any case, happy holidays, everyone. See you soon (I hope).
Zahariel out.