I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.
Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex.
Honsou watched as the fortress burned, and monsters moved amidst the ruins and the dead. The Cadmean Citadel, which had stood since the days of the Great Crusade, had fallen.
The Iron Warriors had fought well, no one could claim otherwise. And the Imperial Guards had done their best too, Honsou had to admit. If all they had faced had been the numberless hordes of the Ninenteenth Legion, then he had no doubt the walls would have held. This was a Fourth Legion world, and the day hadn't come when mere numbers would be enough to break something built by the sons of Perturabo. No one knew how the Raven Guard had made it past the Iron Cage, especially in such numbers. It didn't matter, though – finding the hole and closing it would be a job for the Legion's high command. The Iron Warriors on Hydra Cordatus simply had to repel the invasion, and for the first month of the siege, they had done an excellent job of it, piling the corpses of their foes on the fields surrounding the Cadmean Citadel.
But then Corax had come. The Sorcerers of the Raven Guard had drenched the rock in blood and, with their foul sorceries, had torn a hole into the fabric of the universe through which their dark lord had come. The living walls of the Citadel, built from long-lost technology to be able to repair themselves, had developed cancer-like defects, hideous amalgamations of flesh and stone rising from the battlements to attack the shocked defenders.
Warmsith Shon'tu had managed to get the astropathic choir to send a warning to the Imperium - it had started as a call for help, but it had soon become obvious no help could possibly arrive fast enough. All that mattered was to get word to the Imperium that the Ravenlord had returned. Then the old Iron Warrior had put the astropaths out of their misery, commending their spirits to the Emperor before killing them. Honsou had been by his commander's side then, and he knew that it had been a mercy. The blind witches had taken the arrival of Corax worse than anyone else on the planet – and no one had taken it well.
There had been a surge in summary executions within the ranks of the Imperial Guard, as Commissars put down soldiers driven mad by the Ravenlord's arrival. In eight separate cases, the soldier's body had begun to change after his execution, and had to be destroyed with fire and explosives. The sanctified psykers had all just pulled out their service weapons and blown their own heads off, and the Librarians had been unable to call upon their powers at all, lest they invite the corruption of Corax within themselves. The Ravenlord had cripped the defenders simply by being here, and then things had gotten worse when he had taken to the field.
Corax had walked through the broken walls and into the Citadel, and nothing the Iron Warriors had could so much as touch him. Three of the fortress' Warhound Titans had charged the Daemon Primarch together, only to fall writhing to the ground, cancerous flesh growing from their joints as the crew inside was hideously warped by Corax's will. They had risen again a few minutes later, and turned on their former allies with Warp-infused weapons, driven by a terrible hunger for death. Such was the might of a Daemon Primarch in the fullness of his power.
Other creatures had come with Corax, following the Ravenlord through the rift his coming had opened into reality. Terrible, immense things with too many limbs, that had climbed over the walls and plucked unfortunate souls from the battlements to feast on them, while bolter and laser fire ricocheted harmlessly off or passed directly through them.
In the wake of the Ravenlord and his giant horrors had come the horde of mutants and Spawn Marines, driven to new heights of fanaticism by the presence of their long-absent master. Even the Trueborn, usually distant overlords to their teeming slaves, had joined the fight, eager to fight alongside their Primarch once again. As madness descended onto the battlefield, the legendary discipline the Iron Warriors imposed on their surroundings had collapsed, and the battle had degenerated into a chaotic melee, which played much more to the advantage of the Traitor Legion.
Honsou had seen Shon'tu die, slain by the cruel talons of the Chaos Lord Kayvaan. Then he too had been felled, though his opponent hadn't seen fit to finish the job. His wound was bad - one of his hearts was gone, as were two of his lungs, and his spinal column was broken in several places, paralyzing him completely below the neck. He had laid where he had fallen, forced to watch as the battle ended in the slaughter of the Imperial defenders.
Something cold and vile crawled up his spine, and the figure of the Ravenlord entered his field of vision. Up close, Corax was even more revolting than he had been when Honsou had first glimpsed him from kilometers away, immediately after his arrival onto Hydra Cordatus. He was darkness made manifest, a wound unto reality through which the madness of Chaos Undivided bled. Honsou's mind kept trying to put some familiar image onto what he saw, placing armor the color of the void onto the Daemon Primarch, but Corax's horrific nature always pierced through. Only his face betrayed the slightest resemblance with Humanity, pale as death and crossed by black veins.
'Well, well, well,' said Corvus Corax, and his voice was like the death of sanity and the promise of every horror the galaxy had ever known, along with many it had only dreamt of, in the dark places where angels feared to thread. 'What do we have here ?'
Honsou tried to speak, but found that he couldn't. He could barely breathe, and that had nothing to do with his wounds. This close to the Daemon Primarch, his infernal presence was a battering of the senses. Every sensory organ of Honsou was revolting against what they were registering, and the Iron Warrior could feel his very soul being tainted simply by being in such close proximity to the nightmarish entity that had once, very long ago, been one of the Emperor's sons.
From iron cometh strength, he thought, clinging to the familiar words of the Litany. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honor. From honor … from honor …
Honsou found that he couldn't think of the next part of the Litany. It was taking all of his will to hold onto his sanity in the face of Corax's presence. The Ravenlord looked at him, and something like interest flickered in the pits of unholy darkness he had for eyes.
'There is strength left in you,' mused Corax, watching Honsou. 'A great deal of strength, for one of Perturabo's unimaginative get. I think … Yes. It would be a waste to let you die here.'
The Ravenlord bent over Honsou, and reached out with a clawed hand to touch the dying Space Marine's forehead. There was a surprising gentleness in the motion, but the contact of the Daemon Primarch's claw sent Honsou screaming. His flesh started to melt like wax under the touch, and he could feel his bones bending out of shape even as his organs were twisted by the warping energies Corax was pouring into him. Astartes were naturally resistant to mutation, their genetics anchored into shape by the strength of the Emperor's design – but Corax's power was simply too great. His armor broke apart as his body swelled, his augmetics were pushed out of his flesh, and his very soul was violated by the undiluted essence of Chaos Undivided.
By the time Honsou stopped screaming, there was nothing in what was left of him to indicate it had ever been a proud son of Perturabo – nothing indeed to indicate that it had ever been human at all. The Iron Warrior had been transmuted into a grotesque cocoon of pulsating skin through which strange shapes could be glimpsed, moving as their hyper-evolution continued. The Ravenlord withdrew his hand, looked upon his work, and thought it good.
'Bring him aboard,' commanded Corax to the Apothecaries that had gathered, and were watching the cocoon with open fascination. 'Make sure he is taken care of until the process is complete. Come, my sons. There is much work for us to do … but for now, we are going home.'
Far above, in the war-torn skies of Hydra Cordatus, a shape began to appear, emerging from the Empyrean directly above the planet in violation of all the laws of Warp travel. The thing that had once been the Shadow of the Emperor, Gloriana-class flagship of the Nineteenth Legion, loomed over the world like a terrible, hungry god of primordial myth. It hadn't been seen since the Unborn Crusade, when the Ravenlord had emerged from his isolation to lead his Legion out of the Eye and through an Ork-ravaged Imperium, all to destroy the one the Ultramarines called the Ascended One. Not even the sons of Corax themselves knew with any certainty why the Daemon Primarch had decided to act back then, though there were plenty of theories, and more than one Trueborn had used it as justification for his own attacks and betryals of the Thirteenth Legion since then.
The Shadow of the Emperor seemed to fill the sky, impossibly huge yet only half there, remaining halfway between reality and the Immaterium, like a leviathan of the depths rising just below the surface, watching the land-dwellers with hate-filled eyes that had evolved beyond the need for light or warmth. The few Guardsmen who had survived and been lucky enough to avoid looking upon the Ravenlord went mad as its shadow fell upon them, and its horrible whispers filled their ears.
The stolen gene-seed of Hydra Cordatus was brought aboard the leviathan. There, in the same laboratories where the crew of the Shadow had been resurrected into new and terrible shapes after the Legion's first journey to the Eye of Terror, the sacred progenoids of the Fourth Legion would be remade. During the trip back to the Raven Guard's homeworld, the Apothecaries would defile and alter them, imbue them with the power of Chaos and the blood of the Ravenlord. With such a bounty, the decaying system that created the Spawn Marines would be revitalized. The Legion's diminishing numbers of slave warriors would be replenished, and then … well, it all depended on the Ravenlord's wishes. With his return, the coalition of warlords that had led the attack on Hydra Cordatus were no longer in command. Kayvaan the Lastborn, leader of the group, was on his way to the Shadow to meet his gene-sire for the first time, and make his formal vow of allegiance to the Ravenlord.
The ships of the warband settled into an approximative formation around the Shadow of the Emperor. Aboard them, the Raven Guards and their thralls were exultant, revelling in the Ravenlord's return from his long self-imposed exile in the Ravenspire, on the Legion's daemonic homeworld. After ten thousand years of freedom, some were less enthusiast than others, but none dared speak discontent aloud. The Trueborn knew the purpose for which their Legion had been forged, and the Spawn Marines … well, the Spawn Marines would follow their masters' orders, whatever they might be.
One by one, the ships vanished, drawn back into the Empyrean, following paths through the Warp and back to their stronghold known only to Corax. The echoes of their departure spread into the Sea of Souls, pushing the astropathic message sent by Warsmith Shon'tu onward even as they corrupted its contents. On a thousand worlds, people woke from their slumber covered in cold sweat, or did not wake at all, their dead faces frozen in a rictus of abject horror. Eventually, the message made it to its intended destination, but by then, every Chaos cult, every wandering warband knew the truth :
Corax had returned.
AN : Well, how did you think that particular battle was going to end ? The Iron Warriors are good, but they are not that good. And while the Grey Knights could possibly have stood a chance against the Ravenlord, they are far, far away, and it only took hours for Corax to destroy the fortress. Armageddon only got off lightly when Dorn manifested because the Daemon Primarch of the Imperial Fists had an entire world to conquer.
I wish I had the time to answer some of your reviews, both to the last short story and to the chapter before that, but I am busy tonight and won't be able to. Tomorrow, hopefully, it will be different.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse of what Corvus Corax is truly capable of. Don't hesitate to tell me what you think. Tomorrow's story is going to be titled The Greater Evil, and it, too, will contain quite a few tasty morsels of information.
Zahariel out.