Chapter 3: The Festival of Fear
Gregor's heart sank as the haunted town transformed around them. The rituals had taken hold, and the veil between realms was rending. Mad cackles and shrieks of the damned echoed from all directions. Things older than human worlds were now loose under the night sky.
He and his troops tightened into a circle in the square, blessed weapons, and psychic powers ready against the swelling tide. Strange scents and tendrils of mist curled around them, channeled by the eldritch glyphs scratched into the stone.
A dark parade emerged from the twisted alleys feeding into the open plaza. Leering citizens in garish costumes and beastly masks danced and cavorted toward the central effigies. They sang and chanted in praise of ancient powers drawn forth by their rites. Eyes reflecting the hunger of the warp watched eagerly for living meat to join their profane celebrations.
At the parade's heart shuffled unnatural creatures not fully of this realm. Sinuous beasts wrapped in shadow and adorned with horns and spines leered with mouths filled with needle-teeth. Skinless apes and creatures stitched together from mismatched flesh jabbered and cackled at the onlookers.
Towering over them all loomed a monstrosity in chains. It wore the skinned hide of a massive bull draped over its hulking bipedal form. Frozen gore dripped from the hollow flesh it had crudely worn. A crude iron crown topped its bovine skull.
Gregor sensed a terrible cunning emanating from its black eyes. This was a High Priest amongst the entities crawling forth on this cursed night. As it passed, the chained horror spoke a single ritual utterance that drove needles of pain into Gregor's mind: "Samhain..."
The procession encircled the heroes, trapping them at the square's center. Gregor watched uneasily as shadowy scaffolding began to rise around the ritual area. Something terrible was nearing completion.
A child's distant plea carried over the din. "Help me! It's coming!" Gregor saw a small, costumed form fleeing across the roofs, pursued by an airborne, wraith-like darkness.
"We end this now!" roared Gregor. Bolters flared to life, striking down the lead chaos beast and blasting smoldering chunks from the chanting horde. Psykana lightning seared the closing monstrosities.
But more kept coming. The chaos legion was without number. They hurled hexes and curses from the perimeter, whittling down the loyalists. Soon they would be overwhelmed.
Gregor whispered a final benediction for those soon to fall. Above, a silent black moon hung dead in the starless void, gazing down with malevolent hunger upon creation.
...
The scent of burnt flesh and ozone hung heavy as the Marines cleared a path into the Things writhing in the darkness. Vicious claws and spells tore into Ceramite, but the Emperor's warriors pushed forward.
Brother Garus swept his flamer across a pack of beast-like creatures tearing at his battle brothers. They released chillingly human-like wails as purifying fires consumed their bodies. Yet their flames seemed only to spread outward, transforming into new horrors.
Meanwhile, the shadowed scaffolding had taken the form of an immense stage wreathed in sorcerous vapors. Fear gripped Gregor's heart at the scene depicted before them.
A simulacrum of the Golden Throne held an eviscerated corpse wearing a despoiled Imperialis mask. Surrounding it cavorted a procession of blasphemous archetypes - the shark-toothed demagogue, the clockwork man, the ravenous ignorant. This was a profane foretelling of what fate these powers intended for the God-Emperor.
Righteous fury burned away Gregor's dread. He pushed toward the towering effigies of the living saints used as macabre puppets in this play of the damned. Purifying flames would purge this obscenity from reality.
A chorus of poppings and giggles surrounded him. From hollow eye sockets in a hundred leering jack-o-lanterns, fluttering eyes on papery wings now stared back. The heretical icons turned their sadistic grins upon Gregor, promising him horrors yet to come.
The scattering of blessed shards from Brother Garus' bolter kept the things at bay, but their numbers were beyond counting. For each wretched spirit or homunculi blasted apart by sanctified shells, a dozen more swarmed to take their place.
Gregor glimpsed figures hung on rusted iron frames being carried toward the ritual stage. Some were clad in the blood-soaked robes of his own Throne Agents, now lifeless sacrifices in this profane drama. Their fate would soon be his unless the tide turned.
Cutting through the shambling hordes, Gregor glimpsed a pulsing flash from the wards laid around the central idols. Eldritch lightning crackled upward, merging into a growing maw of boundless darkness. The veil was fraying quickly now, revealing the true nature of what lay Beyond.
Brother Orias' armor smoldered, pitted by drops of ectoplasm that clung and burned with unnatural ferocity. The blessed oils running low, his cleansing flames began to gutter. A dense wave of wings and claws dragged the battle brother down into the shadows, his chainsword whirring uselessly against their press.
The Librarian's psychic hood flared wildly as he tried to disrupt the ritual's power matrix. But the linked wicker men merely shuddered in their death throes and continued channeling. Soon the rift would be wide enough for the Old Ones to emerge, as they had so many Halloween nights before.
Flickering shapes moved in the darkness beyond the ritual ground's boundary. The sheer mass of entities barred further advance, ihrevery breath rasping with menace.
Brother Orias' psychic senses screamed from the constant barrage of mortal terror and hatred pressing upon reality. What ancient evils had welled up from the planet's dark heart that dreadful night?
Writhing blobs of malformed flesh dropped from scaffolding above, scorching and melting armor on contact. Sergeant Haolis collapsed as a membranous sac engulfed his head, suffocating him inside the sound-proof horror womb.
Vicious poltergeist lights swarmed Brother Malius, blinking in and out existence. Ghostly hands reached from the emptiness behind to crush his neck servos and pull him into the forever dark.
White noise built to an unbearable drone as the Librarian disrupted the ritual matrices. But the gibbering horde drank in the unleashed energies, growing more corporeal and ravenous with each backlash.
A child's distant plea carried over the din "Help me! It's almost here!" Gregor saw a small, costumed form fleeing across the roofs, pursued by an airborne, wraith-like darkness. Then obscuring flesh boiled up to engulf the scene.
The Librarian's helm flickered wildly then went dark. An inaudible pop marked the death of his soul. Now uncomprehending, the psyker began blasting indiscriminately, no longer an ally against the darkness.
Pustulant fluids burst from Gregor's ears, drowning his equilibrium. The ritual entered its final crescendo, the full weight of the immaterium pressing down like the gravity of a dying star. They had failed the Emperor this night.