{oOo}
The great bells of the Imperial Palace tolled solemnly once, every hour.
Tomorrow they would toll every half hour, the day after every quarter hour... increasing in frequency until on the seventh day every bell of the palace would toll every sixteen seconds in tribute to the fallen.
Parades of black-robed Astartes marched across thousands of worlds, followed by great columns of mourners.
Crowds of hundreds of thousands gathered outside museums that were home to tokens that somehow were symbolic of the Imperium's loss. On Terra, it was the great Museum of Angron's Sons, where the Princess and her court gathered in mourning garb and the crowd outside was hundreds of millions, swarming around the army of great hound statues that stood silent guard over the Hive Tower.
The Ratel Legion, a chapter of the third founding, had fallen. The brothers lay looking down upon the fields of battle from atop the mounds of the dead they had felled across thirty worlds where detachments had been operating. Their outposts and towers had been levelled, with every cellar and sub-bunker torn open by furious orbital bombardment to the point that no less than three of those thirty worlds would be rendered uninhabitable for centuries. Their great chapter house, a citadel that had been dug beneath an ancient mountain on an airless moon, had been torn from the surface by ancient and awesome devices and flung into the sky where legion after legion of the slave-soldiers of the ancient Slann had stormed aboard, dying by the thousand to bring down the surviving Ratel Legionnaires one at a time.
It was an empty victory for that dying and decrepit race.
The great vaults of geneseed stored within the fortress had been purged with virus bombs, rendering the facilities inaccessible to all and the contents corrupted ruins. Trophies and banners had been destroyed rather than surrendered. Secret hoards of archeotech weaponry had been opened and unleashed upon the invaders at great cost. Even as the cunning and corrupt Great Mage of the Slann stood before his braves upon the dais where once the now pulverised throne of the Chapter Master had been placed, he knew that his fate was sealed. That in trying to avert the doom of prophecy he had called it down himself
There was no mourning in the echoing halls of chapter houses and flagships of the XII Legion. It was not their way to wail in grief.
Fifty thousand Astartes girded themselves for war. It would be the Slann who would wail and howl and scream in anguish. Angron himself, flanked by Ira and by Alta would wage war to the knife upon the race that had presumed to cut down the 14th Chapter of his Legion. Upon the ashes of alien homes the last legacy of the Ratel Legion would be the expiration of their killers. Only then, like a phoenix, would lots be drawn and the sons of many different chapters assembled to rebirth the Ratel and take on their legend.
And upon distant Terra, Serenity wept for the soul of her brother and for those of his brutal, beloved sons.
{oOo}