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.
Violators
They had always been monsters.
Not for them the ancient legacy, despoiled by treachery and the machinations of a cruel Fate. Not for them the loss of innocence and honor, the fall from grace that had cast the Angel and his sons into the abyss. They had been raised to demi-godhood in Hell, and it was Hell that coursed through their mutated flesh and tattered souls.
They were of the Angel's blood, created by one of his sons during the War of Woe. He had taken the children of a hundred daemon worlds and infused them with the strength of dead Angels, hoping to raise new brothers to replace the ones he had lost. But when he had opened the sarcophagus of the first, that Apothecary – who had taken part in the purges of Istvaan III and the slaughter of Istvaan V, before following the Legion in its ravenous crusade across the Imperium and the madness of Terra – had been horrified.
For these young Astartes did not possess the Glamour, and embraced the truth of what they were, displaying its awfulness for all to see. With a pale, corpse-like face and blood-red lips that peeled back to reveal vampiric fangs, the first of the Apothecary's creations looked back at his maker and knew only hunger.
He had tried to kill them, but by then it had been too late. They had risen from their sarcophagi, their eyes burning with the Thirst, and their father and his helpers had been the first to feel their fangs. Then they taken the weapons and armor that had been meant for them, and with those they had made war upon the Eye of Terror.
They had been monstrous in ways few could match, even among the Traitor Legions who had claimed the Eye as their home in exile. They had made no pretence of honor, neither given or asked any quarters, and what prisoners they took they made sport of before devouring them once their amusement passed. They attacked any and everyone, uncaring for the pacts and alliances that bound the principates of the Eye, tenuous as those ever were.
Even as the War of Woe accelerated toward the final confrontation between Sanguinius and Dorn on the crone world of Iydris, they raided outposts of the Seventh and Ninth Legions both. Not even the Raven Guard, feared across the Eye for their eldritch powers, were beyond their depredations, and though they suffered greatly for every slight against the Ravenlord's get, they did not hesitate to strike again.
And so they had been named Violators by those who fought them, the mad children born of the coupling of the Eye and Sanguinius' tainted blood. A warband, but one without lord, without hierarchy, without law but that of "do as you will". Their ranks had swelled with warriors from all eight of the Eye's bloodlines as fresh recruits broke with the teachings their forebears tried to impose upon them, rejecting a past they had never known and grudges they cared nothing for, and embracing the dark majesty of the now instead. Born to the Eye's timeless tides, for them there was no past, no future, only the joy of savagery and cruelty. Even those who hailed from other gene-lines were transformed over time, losing the traits of their parent Legion and receiving the curse of the Thirst thanks to the debased rituals and celebrations of the Violators.
They were marked by the Youngest God, avatars of the unending lusts and appetites that are the true nature of Slaanesh, past the beautiful masks and the drug-hazed lies. They were selfishness and excess incarnate and unrestrained, and the Legions regarded them with naught but hatred and contempt.
For millennia afterwards, the Violators had continued their depredations. They had raided the holdings of the Traitor Legions, the Dark Mechanicum and the Lost and the Damned, sating their Thirst on the blood of the other slaves of Ruin. More akin to some unnatural disaster than an organized force, they had rampaged unchecked, and in their wake had trailed hosts of daemons and lesser followers of the Dark Prince, hoping to pick at the carcasses they left behind.
Though they originated from Sanguinius' blood, not once had Azkaellon called upon them to join the defense of the Angel's palace when the shadowed wars came upon the Harbinger Star. This may be because the Angel's loyal guardian was disgusted with them, but more likely it was because every emissary who had ever been sent to the Violators had been eaten alive, no matter who had sent them.
There had been attempts to destroy them. The Imperial Fists had gathered a host of their enslaved mortal armies and allied Chaos Knights to break the Violators upon the ashen plains surrounding the Grave of Spring, following the sinking of the Suspended City into the lakes of lava boiling beneath. One of the Salamanders lords had spent a century hunting them down after they pillaged one of the infernal forge-worlds under his protection. Outside the Eye of Terror (for the Violators had found ways to slip past the Iron Cage on occasion), the Iron Warriors had thought them annihilated three times, always at the end of long and costly campaigns whose human survivors more often than not had needed the Emperor's Peace afterwards. The Farseers of Craftworld Ulthwe had, at Eldrad Ulthran's direction, broken the warband's back on two separate occasions, ambushing them as they emerged from the Eye of Terror and inflicting tremendous losses upon them.
Yet always some of the Violators had survived, and their monstrous banner been raised anew.
Those who studied the lore of Ruin whispered that they were beloved of Slaanesh, and that their evil would not be allowed to die out before the Lord of Pain and Pleasure willed it so.
So it went, for thousands of years, the Violators' dreadful reputation growing even as their numbers waxed and waned. Then, as the Times of Ending loomed and the Eye of Terror echoed with the call to join the Black Legion in its preparations to break Cadia once and for all, the Violators were visited by a golden angel.
The Sanguinor, that mysterious creature with unclear ties to the Ninth Legion, came to the Violators accompanied by an escort of Blood Angels. Immediately, the mad children attacked the intruders, slaughtering the Sanguinor's escort but failing to put down the Sanguinor itself. Perhaps something in them recognized the Herald's power and compelled them to at least heed its words – but more likely, it was the thirteen champions the Sanguinor turned into corpses in single combat that persuaded them to listen.
The Sanguinor spoke to the Violators in the ancient tongue of Baal, the long-destroyed homeworld of the Blood Angels, whose words flowed through the warband's blood as surely as the Thirst. It spoke to them of a great war on the horizon, of the promise of plunder and revelry such as had not been since since the Roboutian Heresy itself. It spoke of the devastation the Violators would wreak if they joined this grand endeavour, appealing to their monstrous nature. It spoke of blood old and new, spilled in such quantities that even they would be sated for a time.
Spellbound by the Sanguinor's words, more and more Violators gathered, some leaving their ships to go aboard the one where the golden angel spoke, others listening in over infernal vox-casters. For six full days the Sanguinor spoke, until at last it ceased its tale and asked the Violators a simple question : would they join this great battle, or turn away from it ?
As one, the Violators howled their answer, and it seemed as if the golden mask of the Sanguinor twisted into a smile. It walked among them, and they drank deeply from its ever-filled cup. Around the warband's fleet, the Eye of Terror pulsed in response to their hunger and approval, and the bargain between the Herald of Sanguinius and the nightmarish entity that was the Violators' collective "soul" was sealed.
The tides of the Warp surged, enveloping the fleet, and when they withdrew the Violators had vanished, displaced across time and space to deliver them to the battle that had been promised to them.
And so did the Violators came to Sol, to play their part in the Angel War.
The skies above Terra burned and screamed as the Chaos ships burst forth from the Warp, brought across the galaxy and far beyond the Mandeville Point by the Sanguinor's malevolent will. Orbital platforms broke apart and plummeted toward the earth under the sudden gravitic shift, and the kilometer-long ships crashed onto the sprawling hives of Terra. Within mere seconds, millions were incinerated or crushed to death as the ships of the Violators fell, like spears thrown from the heavens by a cruel god. Yet they did not detonate, for such was not the Sanguinor's will, and in that moment the laws of physics that ruled the Materium held little sway over the wrecks of the Violators' dreaded fleet.
As the confusion from Light's End and the other events preluding the Angel War was added to by this sudden attack, the Violators themselves emerged from the ruins of their ships, caring nothing for their loss. For there, amidst the devastation, standing tall and proud and shielded by heavy-duty void-shields that had been activated the moment the warband's flotilla had appeared, was their target :
The Hall of Judgement, from where the Grand Provost Marshal enforced the Lex Imperialis as head of the Adeptus Arbites. The center of the galaxy-spanning juggernaut that, from the chambers of the Imperial Senate to the farthest outpost of the Imperium, enforced the Law of the Emperor.
It was a monument of order, a symbol of the Imperium's control over the stars, and to the Violators, it was an abomination they hungered to destroy more than they had ever desired anything else in their twisted existences. As the earth shook and spires toppled, the Hall remained standing firm, its deep foundations proof against the devastation unleashed around it.
Hundreds of Violators ran madly among the burning ruins, driven by the leash the Sanguinor had woven around their souls. Salvaged tanks and transports emerged from the bays of the fallen ships, and Raptors flew in the air on jump-packs that ran on pain rather than fuel.
A monstrous shriek rose from the Violators host. It was not a war-cry, for such things were for armies, or even hordes that possessed at least a modicum of unity. But the only thing that kept the Violators together as they charged the Hall of Judgement, the only thing that had kept the warband functional since its blood-drenched birth in the gene-mills of their murdered creator, was raw, malevolent hunger. A hunger to destroy, to rend and tear down all that stood between them and their immediate desires.
The vile, mad, true sons of Sanguinius' accursed blood screamed, and Terra shivered in remembrance of the last time such screams had been heard on its surface.
AN : There ! The last of the six warbands is done. Now only one final Interlude remains. As I have said previously, this one will take some time, because it's the most important of all fourteen.
Also, I am going to focus on A Blade Recast in the next few days - with perhaps something special for Prince of the Eye, if I can find the inspiration to finish it.
Like the Flawless Host, this Interlude started with me taking the name of a Chaos Warband existing in the canon universe and twisting its origins to fit the Roboutian Heresy. What do you think ? Do the new Violators seem appropriately horrifying to you ?
As always, thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and stay safe, everyone.
Zahariel out.
Next : Watchers