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.
In the Sanctum Imperialis, most sacrosanct location of all the Imperium, the Throneroom where the Emperor had sat for ten thousand years, Magnus the Red screamed. His brothers rushed to his aid, but only Lorgar could reach the Crimson King, for his scream was psychic rather than sonic, and only the Urizen was shielded by the corona of golden power that spread from him as a barrier.
Omegon, whose schemes to elevate the Emperor to true godhood had turned to dust before his eyes, was sent flying by the uncontrolled power of Magnus. Physical shock briefly replaced the emotional trauma of failure as he smashed against the opposite wall, his body held in place for a second before he fell and crashed onto the floor. Despite the suddenness of the flight, it was not nearly enough to wound a Primarch, but Omegon remained on the ground, his mind trapped in a cycle of abject shock and self-recrimination.
Lorgar was not so distressed, though tears also ran on his golden face. Perhaps Aurelian had suspected his father's true intent, perhaps his own doubts regarding Omegon's plan helped him to adapt quickly, or perhaps his care for his brother overcame his grief for his father. The golden Primarch knelt by his pained brother's side and placed his hands on Magnus' head, reaching out with his own psychic abilities to establish communion with the lord of fallen Prospero.
The Throneroom rippled with the power of the two psychic demigods. The Sword That Was Promised, its blade now marked with golden filigrane where the dust of the Emperor's mortal form had coelesced upon it, was still embedded into the first Throne. It glowed fiercely, casting its radiance upon the three Primarchs.
Slowly, Lorgar's assistance and the Sword's light lightened Magnus' torment, and the scream of the Crimson King ebbed. Yet the one-eyed Primarch, sat upon the auxiliary Throne linked into the mind-blastingly complex machinery of the Throneroom, was still in immense pain.
The Throneroom shook. No, realized Omegon as he wearily raised his head. Not the Throneroom. The Palace shook. Something … something had happened, something outside these walls.
"Go, Omegon !" shouted Lorgar, his hands still resting on Magnus head, his gaze locked with his brother's as the two strained together. "I will remain here and assist Magnus. Terra needs you !"
Omegon ran. He ran through the Cavea Ferrum, passing through the ancient labyrinth built by Perturabo to secure the Golden Throne. He ran past the shocked Custodians of the Companions, who had fallen on their knees before the sealed gate. On instinct, he clasped the shoulder of one such warrior as he passed and hauled him to his feet, some corner of his mind recognizing him as the Captain-General, one who would surely be needed in whatever was to come.
Despite the tumult of his thoughts, his steps were sure, for he had long studied the shifting corridors of this final and greatest of defenses. It would not have done at all, if he had gotten lost on the last stretch of his journey to help the Emperor …
The Emperor …
No. He pushed the thought away. The time for grief had been cut cruelly short, but duty called. He could not afford the luxury of wallowing in his mistakes. Now was the time for action, and perhaps he would be able to find penance in that. The Lord of the Hydra did not know what peril had befallen the Throneworld, what manner of nightmare had come in the wake of the Emperor's choice to reject divinity. No signal could penetrate the Cavea Ferrum, designed as it was to lose anyone within it, but there were sounds coming in from the outside, echoing impossibly across non-euclidian geometries. Some of the Cavea Ferrum's entrances led all over the Imperial Palace, each one secret and guarded by the Adeptus Custodes.
There were screams, and the sounds of battle. It was a music Omegon recognized all too easily.
War had come to Terra.
The Terran Crucible
Part Three : The Angel War
The Emperor, who guided Humanity from the shadows for two hundred thousand years and ruled the Imperium for ten millennia, is dead. In the end, despite all the machinations of the Ruinous Powers, the Master of Mankind went to His death willingly, embracing it as both relief from His age-old torment and as the only path He could see that granted His people the slightest chance of surviving the Times of Ending. The Gods of Chaos, whose existence is defined by selfishness and evil, could not comprehend such a choice – and therefore couldn't predict it. But beyond the madness of Chaos lies the terrible sanity of the truly damned. One of the Dark Gods' chosen foresaw the Emperor's choice, for he, too, made the same terrible decision, leading to his fall from grace. Now, as Light's End falls across the galaxy, an old enemy rises anew, casting aside his disguise of lies to claim the throne that is rightfully his …
I can hear them, brother. Billions of souls, screaming, burning … singing.
The echoes of every psyker sacrificed to the Astronomican in order to keep the fire lit, to preserve our father's life … They are all here with me. The psychic children of Humanity, burned as kindling to light the endless dark. A gruesome sacrifice made in desperation, souls spent to fuel the great engine at the Imperium's heart.
Yet something of them remains in the machine, in the light.
Was this intended ? Is this one final mercy, or an additional torture heaped upon our father by a cruel Fate ? We know so little of the Throne, brother. Even I, who was intended to sit upon it before it all went wrong.
The silent scream is ended. We will speak to you now, brother.
I … We … see …
Six and six and many more, the designs of the Dark Prince's champion unfold wherever the light of Sol touches. Two six-fingered hands close around Humanity's throat.
The hour is late, brother. Midnight has come, and it is not yet written that we shall see the dawn.
The sky burns, and the void is alight with madness. Reality is torn, and nightmares come spilling into the cosmos from the broken Kingdoms in Heaven.
There is a hand at play here. The Ruinous Powers can scheme, but only through champions, for what is a God if not the sum of its worshippers' beliefs and actions ?
We see the war begin. We hear the first movement in this symphony of ruin. It is all too familiar a tune.
See what we see, brother !
Moments after the Emperor's demise, the powers He had held at bay for ten thousand years were unleashed across Sol. All of the Ruinous Powers were caught unaware by the Emperor's willing acceptance of His death, but one of their servants – one, among all the uncounted hosts of the Lost and the Damned – had foreseen this possibility. And now, as his dread scheme unfolded, the very foundations of Terra shook.
Millennia-old spires toppled and burned, and entire sections of hive-cities collapsed as foundations that had endured an age of overcrowding and poor maintenance failed. The mere beginning of the Angel War killed billions before the first shot was fired. As panic spread, cargo ships bringing the endless supply of foodstuffs and materials required to keep the Throneworld alive broke from their appointed trajectories, fleeing into the void and dooming billions more to starvation.
The Astronomican, that psychic beacon that had guided Imperial ships through the tides of the Warp since the Great Crusade, flickered and faded as the Crimson King struggled to channel its awesome power. Across the galaxy, tens of thousands of ships were lost as their Navigators suddenly found themselves deprived of Terra's guiding light. Many of those were destroyed almost at once, their Geller Fields overwhelmed by daemonic hosts, but others managed to survive, beginning odysseys through the lightless depths that would last for years or more.
The Tower of Heroes, atop which rang the Bell of Lost Souls, cracked and fell. Its ancient bell, which had rung more and more often in recent centuries, each peal mourning the loss of another Imperial Hero, shattered into pieces as it hit the ground.
On six locations across Sol, powerful daemons of Slaanesh emerged. Not since the Heresy had Terra been defiled by infernal creatures, but now no less than four Exalted Keepers of Secrets manifested upon its soil, brought to incarnation by sorcery and sacrifice. On Mars, the great abomination N'Kari rose from the Haydesian Kingdoms, reborn from its defeat at Magnus' hands as a Soul Grinder. And on Pluto, the nightmarishly powerful entity known as Zerayah sang its song of ruin and madness, drowning the planetoid's surroundings in horror.
Six times six unholy rituals, guided by six of the Dark Prince's favoured servants. The sacred numerology of Slaanesh acted as a beacon of its own, an anchor for a Ruinous great work. The unleashed energies of the Empyrean poured into the arcane structure laid down by cultists of the Angel and the Blood, and reality was torn asunder.
With the sound of reality ending, a great rift in the fabric of space opened, stretching from Pluto to Venus. The eldritch radiance of the Warp bled from this wound in the Materium, burning in the skies of every world in the Solar system. Even the sides of the planets which were on the opposite side of the system's sun felt the rift's opening, and their own skies were alight with reflected madness.
In the first minutes of the rift's opening, tens of millions went mad, their minds shattered by the psychic outcry. From the Terran hives to the orbital outposts of Venus, riots erupted as Imperial citizens unleashed their fear-driven rage on anything resembling a symbol of authority. Cults that had lingered in the shadows of the Throneworld for centuries were joined by hordes of mad and broken souls as they took to the streets, raising the banner of rebellion and Ruin. The psychic genus erupted, turning thousands of citizens into Warp bombs that detonated, drowning entire districts into the raw stuff of the Empyrean, transforming millions more into deformed, insane mutants.
We see the cultists of Slaanesh. The broken and the deluded, the lost and the damned. Oh, brother, can you hear their cries ? They are doomed, whether their master wins or loses this war. They will perish in purifying flames or be bled to appease appetites that can never be sated.
We see their hiding places, now that the veil has been pulled away. Lairs of depravity and sacrifice, where each of the Imperial commandments is broken every day. Generation after generation, a plague seeded on Terra when last angels danced amidst the ruin that would be Humanity's pyre. The watchers in their towers hunted them down, purged them with fire, yet always more appeared. Terra is an old world, and there are too many shadows where the Slaves to Darkness may hide.
The people of Terra are so tired. Tired of being powerless, of being exhausted, of being terrified all the time. They fear the monsters in the dark, and those who hunt those monsters. The Imperium of this age is not a kind place. What is duty to someone who is the third generation of their family to stand in a line, carrying a request for relief supplies from a world long since lost to famine ? What is faith to the mother who watches her dead children being carried away into the organic recyclers ? The cogs of the empire crush flesh and soul alike, and the echoing whispers took root in that fertile soil. To someone who has nothing, excess can look like paradise.
They think that they carry blades as a sign of defiance to their uncaring tyrants – breaking one more meaningless edict. It is more than that. Blood calls to blood calls to the Angel. We see a crown of glorious madness flickering at the edge of possibility, obscured by the smoke of the burning future.
Pity the Lost, brother. There is no saving them, not if the Throneworld is to be preserved. And so they must be crushed once more beneath necessity's boot. Again and again, the champions of Humanity are made to slaughter those they were made to defend.
Do you hear the Dark Gods' laughter ?
Those few who looked upon the skies and managed to retain their sanity all came to use the same name for it. Even as war and devastation were unleashed across Terra on a scale not seen since Guilliman's rebellion, that name spread like a memetic plague. None would ever manage to pinpoint its origin, but soon, anyone speaking of the blasphemy that had sundered the heavens did so using the same name : the Tear of Nightmares.
From this Tear came daemons uncounted, walking down paths of broken stone and Warp energy as they descended upon Humanity's cradle. The Neverborn children of Slaanesh entered Sol, called forth by the greatest of their kind in the name of their Dark God's chosen champion.
Psykers who had endured the trials of soul-binding and the years of training within the Astra Telepathica's facilities went mad, turning their powers against themselves and those around them in violent outbursts before being put down like rabid dogs. Even those who clung to their threadbare sanity suffered immensely, babbling meaningless words and crying bloody tears.
Since the days of the Great Crusade, Terra had been protected from the infernal by the Emperor's presence, His aura radiating from the Throne and falling upon the world like an all-encompassing shroud of telaethesic protection. Such wards had been limited to the Imperial Palace during the Heresy, but over the ages since, the light of Him on Earth had suffused the entire world.
Yet now this hallowed protection was gone. With the light of the Astronomican flickering and the all-crushing power of the Emperor scattered to the cosmic winds, the old evils rushed back in, like a tidal wave after the dam finally breaks.
Scattered across Terra were the remnants of eras long gone and forgotten. As the baleful radiance of the Tear of Nightmares fell upon these forbidden ruins, things that had laid dormant since before the birth of the Imperium stirred awake. Seals laid down in the Age of Strife by shamans seeking to contain the horrors unleashed upon Old Earth by mad sorcerers eroded to nothing. Relics that had been held in Imperial shrines after being brought from some far-off battlefield suddenly convulsed within their stasis fields as the infernal entities that had been bound within them in ages past by far-seeing Sorcerers sensed the shift in their surroundings and emerged in their dark and terrible glory.
We see the Neverborn. The Daemonettes, the Steeds, the Fiends. Those are the familiar forms, given strength by the Lost and the Damned. When so many know that these are the aspects of the Dark Prince's children, belief becomes reality, and unrelated sins aggregate into the same shape.
The gates of the Silver Palace are open, and the numberless hosts of the Youngest God pour forth.
Are they all here ? Oh, no, brother. Not all of them. The legions of Slaanesh are as numerous as the sins of mortals, and while Terra is certainly drenched in many ancient evils, there is another place where the hand of the Dark Prince reaches.
There are other kinds of daemons, not seen in the Materium since long before our father launched His crusade. Ancient spirits, that were made to kneel before the Dark Prince when he rose from the Eldar's downfall. They were forgotten, in no small part thanks to Father's efforts, their tales and legends banished from living memories one pyre of proscribed texts at a time. But though this denied them the opportunity to walk amidst the stars, they did not vanish – and they did not forget.
As their power waned, their spite only grew. Now the Tear of Nightmare yawns open, and the energies of the Empyrean flows out in an unchecked torrent that calcifies around these forgotten stories, giving them new and horrifying shape.
We see the Satyrs, lingering echoes of Terra's long-dead wild places. Spirits of freedom and abundance, of indulgence and joy, turned into monsters with horned heads, cloven feet and eyes that burn with unrestrained hunger above bestial leers. Once they were little gods, now they are scavenging daemons, feeding off the scraps that fall from the Dark Prince's table.
We see the Carrion-Eaters, rising from the wastelands where once armies led by madmen made war. They are the product of the Age of Strife, left behind by the Imperium and buried along with so much of its past. They are the madness of Old Night, drawn from the Empyrean and wrought into flesh by the witches of that most terrible of ages. When the fools who thought themselves their masters perished, they were left behind, to feast upon the mountains of corpses they had made. Now they rise once more on stick-thin limbs, look upon a world full of life, and lick gravestone-teeth.
We see more, many, many more. There is so much evil on Terra, ancient and slumbering, awakened once more at the dawn of this Age of Nightmares.
The hosts of Chaos descended upon Sol, and unleashed their vile hungers upon its people. Entire hives were lost as scenes of horrors echoing those of the Siege of Terra unfolded. The continental megacities of Merica were among the most afflicted : standing on the other side of the world from the Imperial Palace, they were where the presence of the authorities was weakest. Hundreds of Slaaneshi cults rose in open rebellion, joining with the Neverborn hosts descending from the heavens or manifesting amidst the madness and bloodshed. The ancient proscription against spilling blood on Terra was cast down, and numberless horrors rose from pools filled with vitae.
But Terra was not defenceless, even amidst the chaos of Light's End. The Throneworld was home to billions of Astra Militarum soldiers, household troops sworn to the noble Terran lineages, and Adeptus Arbitesenforcers, with even more having been brought in as part of the Alpha Legion's preparations for the Emperor's ascension. Armies that had been on parade moments ago reacted quickly, moving to secure locations from which they could hold back the tides of Ruin. Imperial Guard Regiments fought alongside Sisters of Battle and Space Marines of all loyal Legions, shouting orders and oaths over the dim of war and insanity.
Their fight was not without hope, for even as the tide of darkness seemed poised to swallow Terra whole, sparks of light ignited to fight it. Upon the death of the Emperor, the tremendous psychic power accumulated through the prayers of trillions of souls for thousands of years had been released, imbued with the Master of Mankind's own radiance and scattered across time and space. Though this had not been their purpose, the schemes of the Alpha Legion had ensured that many suitable souls were on Terra at Light's End, and dozens of Living Saints emerged from the ranks of Terra's defenders and population.
We see the Living Saints. They rise across the stars, each carrying within them a shard of aborted godhood. Their souls burn oh so bright, with the fire of passion, of outrage, of love – and the pieces of our father's broken power are drawn to that blazing light. Like calls to like, it has ever been so.
And so they rise, haloed in golden light, bringing wrath and salvation alike. Daemons recoil before them in fright, for even the least of the Neverborn remembers the light of He whom they called Anathema.
We see them on Terra, here and now, from those Omegon gathered to help shape the god he sought to create. We see Sisters and Guardsmen, standing firm against the tide of Chaos, bringing hope to desperate battles. We see priests and leaders, the spiritual guides of communities that have lived in filfth for thousands of years, holding in their hands the Emperor's own light as they battle to protect their own.
Deux Ex Machina ! But they are not invincible. The cosmos we inhabit does not allow such easy happy endings. We see them fall, cut down before they can come into the fullness of their inherited power. Our father was never the sole author of this play, and the remaining four playwrights delight only in horror and tragedy.
Across Terra, Humanity fought against the monsters of the Outer Dark. The hordes of daemons and cultists seemed without number, but again and again they broke against the walls of Imperial fury and discipline. Pockets of order, of sanity, started to emerge amidst the desolation.
Then broken angels began to rain down from the burning skies.
We see the Tithed Ones. The sons of our lost brother, stolen from the galaxy as their homeworld burned and they rushed through Hell to save it. They burn as they fall, broken beyond mending, looking at the universe through lenses of torment beyond imagining.
We see the twisted weapons they clutch in clawed hands, desperate for the sense of familiarity they bring. Guns and blades, taken from their ships along with them, and remade in the forges of the pit just as they were. We hear the tormented cries of the weapons' machine-spirits, their loyalty and purpose broken with such pain that they long to inflict it upon the world around them.
We see them rise from the craters of their descent, and look upon the world their ancestors bled to save. They do not see what we see. They see only shadows cast by the flames of their pain, only the knives of their tormentors and the faces of their nightmares. They are trapped within the prison of their own minds, and in that state they return to the one thing they know best : they fight.
We see Diomedes. He flies where his brothers fall, on wings whose every feather is one of the torments that were visited upon him. In his hands is the weapon he stole from his captors, now bound to him as he is to the very Power he sought to defy. In the darkness where they were remade, death was no release to the stolen sons of the Phoenician, brother.
They fell from the skies in the hundreds, like the discarded children of a cruel god. In the pit of the Laers' moon-ship, the stolen sons of Fulgrim had been remade, forged through madness and torment into their own dark reflections. The pain of the fall was the last part of that dreadful transformation, hammering together the alloy of Chaotic corruption and the shattered psyches of the Emperor's Children. What rose from the craters of their descent had just enough resemblance left to the warriors they had once been for the denizens of Terra to know true horror at the sight.
Only one of these Tithed Ones did not fall to Terra as a meteor, but instead descended upon the Throneworld like the herald of the coming apocalypse. Once, he had been Diomedes of the Emperor's Children – now, for his heroic defiance of the Dark Prince, he had been rewarded with a special damnation. Six wings the color of blood spread from his back, each feather of a subtly different hue. Like the other Tithed Ones, his flesh had merged with his armor, its color that of a fresh bruise gilded with the gold of coins used to purchase slaves in Old Earth's Antiquity.
In his hands, he held a living spear, with a monstrous eye where the blade met the haft. His head was a parody of a Space Marine's helm, with curved horns, two blazing eyes, and a mouth opened in a perpetual scream that heralded the coming of the End.
[See Nemris' illustration titled "Diomedes, Herald of the End".]
And along with the Tithed Ones came the ones that had made them what they were : the Laers, a xenos race destroyed during the Great Crusade, then resurrected by the machinations of the Dark Prince and turned into his instrument.
We see the Laers. We see the broken chains in their blood, placed there by their creators when the Children of Isha ruled the stars. They were made to be living toys, their flesh reshaped by their masters' whim – but when those masters vanished, swallowed by the maw of Hell, they rose to build an empire the only way they knew how.
The Phoenician destroyed them, but his treacherous son resurrected them, eager to plunder the secrets embedded in their genetic code. The head of the Consortium that did this was careless, and did not realize the trap it had fallen into until death came for it, wearing the face of its greatest creation. Some sins, or rather some mistakes, are too vile even for the Primogenitor.
Through the traces their armada left in the cosmos, we glimpse the Laer Empire, rebuilt in the dark places. A realm of horror and genetic perversion, where the people and the technology are almost undistinguishable. Every Laer is bred for its purpose, from the unholy priests of their Goddess to the pulsing brains that serve as their ships' cogitators. Their entire existence is a prayer to the Lord of Sensations, their births, lives and deaths all given to it.
It turns out that a species can be born into damnation, if its creator is cruel enough. No trace remains of the Laer tongue : they speak in the language of daemons now, mixed with fragments of what Gothic sounds like when hissed through a serpent's mouth.
We see their monstrous ship, looming at the center of their armada. They took a moon and hollowed it, planting the seeds of their evil into the tunnels. We see … It hurts ! We cannot see clearly. There is something there, something vile and potent, something the Laers brought into being and fed with centuries of worship. There is pain, too, so much pain. This is where the Laers murdered the Third Legion. And at the bottom of it all, at the center of the moon, we see …
A pit is a maw is an eye is a hand is a grave …
We look away.
We hear the crackle of energy and the noise of reality's laws being broken. Once before were these sounds heard in Sol – when the green maw opened wide, and almost swallowed the galaxy. Even a beast can have a stroke of brilliance, once every few million years, brother. Scavengers picked at the carcass of the green tide, and brought their plunder to the Laers as a gift. But who ? We cannot see !
We see the horde, scattered across Sol by the same secrets that brought the Laers here. These are the nightmares of Old Night reborn. For the first time since Father's rise, alien predators stalk the surface of Terra.
We see the warrior-caste, born to know joy only in murder. Their serpentine bodies, covered in a thick exoskeleton, stand tall as our sons. Their blades have teeth, their guns laugh as they spit out spines coated in venom. Soldier and weapon are of the same species, bound by something that would be love, if the Laers were capable of such a thing.
They are not. None of their makers had any interest in giving it to them.
We see the priests. Each one is unique, their senses reshaped to honor a particular aspect of their Goddess. Some are nothing but hungry maws, others thousands of unblinking eyes. They should not live, let alone move, and yet, by the dark artifice of Chaos, they do. Not spawns of madness and ruin these, brother, despite their grotesque appearance. They think, they feel, and they pray with enough strength that the Warp around them overflow with all the Neverborn their every thought creates.
We see the torturers, standing on great pain engines. They were the ones who broke the Tithed Ones, and their work is not yet done – not until all of Humanity is one, eternal scream of agony. Their servants bring them still-living captives, who are swallowed whole by the monstrous machines of flesh and metal. They hurt, they die, they live again, over and over, until they break and give in. What took weeks to break the sons of Fulgrim sunder Terrans in mere hours at most. Only then do the chains holding their bodies release them. What need do the torturers have of those, when they have successfully shackled the soul ?
We see the stalkers, flying high on membranous wings. They plunge from the skies, burying their fangs into exposed flesh and injecting poisons that melt organs and introduce soul-breaking ecstasies in their victim's final moments. In ancient times, human shamans dreamt of flying serpents doing the bidding of the gods : truth, metaphor, or a warning cast back through time from this very moment ? We do not know. All we hear are the stalkers' laugh, a cruel, hissing sound that resonates amidst the Warp-lit pollution clouds that choke this world.
We see the sorcerers. Alone of their xenos breed they walk on four legs, beasts with minds sharp as broken glass. Their six eyes see into what is not, and force it into the minds of their preys. We hear the screams of a factory worker seeing a blood-soaked monster smile at him with his own face, while Terra burns around them both. The sorcerers are heirs to the vengeful curse of the Dark Prince, spinning echoes of that false reminiscence. Know this, brother : the Laers did not have psykers among them when their first empire burned. Even then, their makers knew better than to give them such potential. The mad genius who resurrected them spliced the gift in their genetic code, inspired by the whispers that had guided him to the site of their first birth.
We see the nobles, whose bodies were blessed with the reborn soul of one of the Third's victims. It was they who led the attack on the Children's ships, them who stole the descendants of their murderers away, to be broken and remade. Their scales are white as ivory, and their eyes glow with a kaleidoscope of vile colors. Their disgustingly human hands hold great spears and swords, greatest of their flesh-crafters' art. Their lower bodies, clad in flayed Legionary skin, slither on the broken stones, leaving behind them furrows of blackened, corrupted earth. Alone of the new Laers they remember their species' first death, and flavor the brew of their sensations with an old, old hate.
As the Tithed Ones fell and the daemons of Slaanesh descended, the other servants of the Dark Prince made themselves known. In flashes of light, the Laers teleported from their fleet in the outer worlds, appearing in small clusters all across Terra and the other worlds of the Sol system.
All across Sol, cultists, daemons, Tithed Ones and Laers rampaged, seeking to drown the Throneworld in madness. And at the vanguard of this horde of Ruin came the strike forces of Slaanesh : six Exalted Keepers of Secrets, whose coming had completed the ritual that had opened the Tear of Nightmares, and six warbands of Chaos, seeded through the Sol system by the Sanguinor to accomplish specific tasks.
And so began the Angel War.
We see the warbands of Chaos, harvested across the galaxy, each a weapon forged by the Dark Prince's whims into a shape suited for a specific task of this war. Six there are, branded with an aspect of the Profligate One's madness. We smell the sins of these sinister six, seeking to sunder the Imperium's strength. The Empyrean howls of their deeds, of their might. They all walked different paths, but all led them here, with the brand of Slaanesh on their souls and a chain around their neck. We see the glint of golden armor, and hear the beating of great wings. For all their strength, the warbands are but pawns, pieces in a greater game – the Great Game.
But whose hand moves them ?
We see the Exalted Keepers of Secrets. The favoured slaves of Slaanesh, the courtiers of Excess. Hollow beauty and empty sensation, without any true emotion behind pleasure or pain. Six were called, midwives meant to rend the void and usher forth the Angel's kingdom. They do not cry, but their coming heralded the Tear of Nightmares. Hear their names ! Kyriss. Yria. Kalith. Kanathara. N'Kari. Zerayah. Exalted servants of the Youngest God, elevated over the rest of the beings we call Greater Daemons of Slaanesh. Fragments of the narcissistic deity that Isha's children spawned when they turned from the teachings of Asuryan. Four on Terra, one one Mars, and one on Pluto.
But whose will leashes them ?
Stay with us, brother. The Angel War begins. We hear its name – we hear the clarion call – we hear the screams of those yet to die. The future burns. Light's End is here, and in the darkness none can see clearly. Yet the question must be asked :
Why do we call it the Angel War ?
AN : Hello, everyone !
Here we are at last : the beginning of the Angel War. After consulting my readers on Spacebattle, I have decided to publish this part of the Roboutian Heresy in several chapters, rather than wait to have it all done and publish a single, enormous, book-length wall of text.
Each of the chapters of the Angel War will focus on one battlefield of that system-spanning conflict, showing the resolution of the plot threads introduced in the Interludes. Of course, there is also an over-arching plot, which will unfold across the chapters and (hopefully) be resolved at the conclusion of this arc. That conclusion will be the end, not just of the Angel War, but of the Terran Crucible arc (which started with The Hunt for Cypher) as well.
While I have several chapters of the Angel War ready at the moment, it is not the entire thing - far from it, in fact. I still have a lot of writing to get done, though I do have the skeleton of every remaining chapter (and, in certain cases, a few thousands words' worth of notes as well). Here is the table of contents for the Angel War along with its progress (every title is subject to change, of course) :
Introduction DONE
The Tower of Hegemon DONE
At the Hollow Mountain DONE
The Black Cells DONE
Heroes of the Underworld DONE
Justice and Innocence DONE
Faith and Woe DONE
Of Knights and Champions TODO
Madness of Europa TODO
Titanomachy TODO
The Battle of Olympus Mons TODO
The Hall of Judgment TODO
The Outer Worlds TODO
Other Battlefields TODO
[ACCESS DENIED] TODO
[ACCESS DENIED] TODO
Onto this chapter now. My intent was to have it serve as the introduction of the Angel War, showing the immediate aftermath of Light's End and the opening of the Tear of Nightmares. (By the way, I have a map of the Sol system with the planets' position and the Tear of Nightmares running through it ... and gods, but space is huge.) The Laers' "army list" has been introduced as well, along with the Tithed Ones, whose existence proves that the universe truly desires to make the Third Legion suffer, doesn't it ?
The scenes from the POV of Magnus were inspired by the Buzzing from The Secret World. Most of the exposition that, in previous chapters, was done through sidebars will be done through these instead for the duration of the Angel War.
Thanks to Jaenerya Targeryen for beta-reading this, and thanks to Nemris for his amazing illustration. Quick reminder : Nemris' artwork can be found on his page on DeviantArt. There is a lot of awesome stuff there, so please check it out.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter and will tell me what you thought of it. I have some stuff IRL I need to deal with, but I will try to come up with a publication schedule for the rest of the written chapters of the Angel War as soon as I can.
Zahariel out.