I do not own Warhammer 40000 nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.

Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex.

THE MADNESS OF EUROPA

To the west of the Imperial Palace, in the sprawling continental hives of Europa, the corruption of Chaos waxes in full. The death of the Ecclesiarch and the emergence of Xanadu's Mark has plunged a poisoned dagger into the heart of Imperial order there. The Keeper of Secrets Kanathara leads a vast host of daemons, Laer and soul-broken Imperial citizens west, drawn by the prospect of killing the three Primarchs and ending all possibility of the Imperium surviving Light's End. In its path, however, stand heroes ready to lay down their lives in the name of Humanity …

We see Kanathara. Kanathara the Reaper, Kanathara the Harvester of Hope, Kanathara who was cast down after twenty years of atrocity. It took the death of a world to end Kanathara's rampage when last it walked the Materium. We see that last, desperate battle, where a handful of knights made a terrible choice and sacrificed billions to prevent and avenge the death of billions more.

Now it is returned, its claws already red with the blood of a High Lord and its name burned in millions of souls, now forever lost.

The knights of silver know of it. They were the ones to defeat it, and such was the devastation it wrought that they inscribed its name upon the rolls of the Conclave Diabolus, where the titles and deeds of the hundred and one most dangerous Neverborn are recorded. In ten thousand years, never did the Reaper stir, yet never was its name removed, never did the vigil end.

But another vigil laxed. The record-keepers of the Imperium forgot about the Reaper, forgot about the interdict, and fresh souls were sent to walk its dead prison. We see the hand that pushed one record out of place, to be lost in the labyrinthine bureaucracy that seeks to bring order to the galaxy. We hear the quickened beat of a traitor's heart, who knows only that he has been paid to lose that particular record. We see the gleaming blade in the dark that ends the traitor's life and prevents any from learning what he did.

We look up the thread of intrigue, and at its end we find Kanathara smiling back at us. If we looked deeper, would we see something else behind it ? Perhaps.

We see the Mark that brought the Reaper forth, and it burns our eyes, but such pain means nothing to us, and the lies it carries have no power over us. Would that we could share our revelations with those whose lives are stolen by it, but they are too weak to bear that which would shield them from this damnation. This is the tragedy our father faced, when He searched for the means to protect Humanity from the nightmares that lurk within the darkness of the galaxy's soul. This is the conundrum to which we must find a solution, if we are to make a reality of the dream we have inherited.

But the dream may yet die stillborn. Kanathara comes east, drawn to the flickering light, and before it comes the horde of the Lost and the Damned. It comes to us, brother, and such horrors come along with it. The ancient cities scream as it passes, and all the evil that festers in their depths rises to the surface.

We see a tide of corruption rise, rise, rise, in a great wave to crash against the walls. Will they hold ? That, brother, is not for us to decide. We are but witnesses to this war, even as we struggle to ensure that it can be fought at all.

To the east Kanathara marched, and Europa fell apart in its wake.

Among the infernal hierarchy of Slaanesh, Kanathara had stood higher than most Greater Daemons even before it had been Exalted and unleashed upon Terra by the machinations that had brought about the Angel War. Now it strode the burning Throneworld like an incarnated god, blazing with unholy power that sundered the souls of all who caught but a glimpse of its dark majesty.

In each of its hands it held a blade emblazoned with Chaos runes, and on a spike of bone that rose from its shoulder was impaled the head of Baldo Slyst. Malevolent energies coursed through the macabre trophy, binding the soul of the High Lord to his remnants and forcing it to witness the desolation wrought upon the Throneworld – punishment for having dared defy Kanathara to the death, in spite of the exquisite torments the Greater Daemon had visited upon the Ecclesiarch.

The continental landmass was home to some of the oldest hives of Terra, built on the rubble of cities that dated back to the Age of Antiquity. When the Emperor had risen in the Age of Strife, Europa had been one of the first places His armies had conquered in His name, crushing a thousand feuding tribes and clans under the fist of Unity. So vast were the hive-cities of Europa that any distinction between one and the other was purely administrative, a matter of lines on a map for the lords of the Imperium to argue over, but one with no importance to the billions who lived there.

As the end of the forty-first millennium approached, millions of soldiers had been brought from all across the Imperium to participate in the celebrations there, to parade before the people of Europa and the Ecclesiarch himself, who had taken over the organization of the celebrations in this region of the Throneworld.

Now, amidst the madness of Light's End, the Regiments of the Imperial Guard who had expected a few months of easy duty and celebration on the most hallowed world of the Imperium were forced to fight for their very lives. The chain of command had dissolved under the radiance of the Tear of Nightmares. Every company was left to fend for itself until it could link with other units that still clung to their sanity.

Kanathara could have destroyed these armies itself, or turned them to its cause, with comparatively little effort. But for all its power, all the dark blessings it had received, Kanathara remained the same monster that had brought ruin to entire Sectors during the Heresy and the Scouring long after it was clear that Guilliman's rebellion had failed, for no other reason than to sate its depraved appetites. Death and despair were far sweeter to it than the mad worship of soul-broken puppets. And so it herded its followers ahead of it, watching and laughing as they slaughtered all they encountered who had not surrendered their soul to Slaanesh – and were slaughtered in turn, felled by the score wherever they encountered any armed resistance.

Yet despite the carelessness with which the Exalted daemon spent the lives of its slaves, still Xanadu's Mark brought more to replace them. The Chaos rune that had summoned Kanathara was circulating on grimy pic-nets, jumping from one screen to another. Communication servitors plugged into the networks screamed as the Mark passed through them, and those few tech-priests who remained at their posts amidst the confusion of Light's End had their brains fried for their devotion to their work.

Those who witnessed Xanadu's Mark were twisted into vessels for the power of Chaos, but the furthest Kanathara went from the site of its manifestation, the more distorted the Mark became. Yet while its power was diminished, the horror it inflicted upon its victims only grew. Bodies mutated and twisted to reflect the damage done to the soul within, leaving hosts of deranged mutants who attacked all in their vicinity, be they cultists, soldiers, or terrified Imperial citizens.

Such was the Harvester of Hope's power that it drew to it a guard of hundreds of the scattered Laers, and its approach overwhelmed Imperial citizens with sheer terror and awe. With their minds already fragilized by the advent of Light's End, the people of Holy Terra were more vulnerable than ever to the temptations of Chaos. As the Reaper advanced, tens of thousands of formerly compliant citizens embraced heresy, turning their back on the Imperial Creed in the hope of being spared by the hellish hordes.

They looked up in surrender, gazing into the Tear of Nightmares, and in exchange for their souls and sanity were granted unholy knowledge. Neverborn spawned from the obsessive search of forbidden lore whispered into their ears the guttural syllables of the daemonic tongue. The mad tortured the sane in prolonged and bloody rituals, chanting the daemonic names of Kanathara and its minions, and helping more of the Neverborn to step across the ever-thinning veil between reality and the Realms of Chaos. They called out to the Slaaneshi daemons descending from the Tear of Nightmares, their corrupt devotion serving as beacons to the hordes of Neverborn that were unused to even the weakened reality of the Sol system.

Churches of the Imperial faith were destroyed by gangs of newly-fanged cultists, their souls blackened by hatred at the revelation of His death. Those priests of the Imperial Creed who were taken alive suffered the most abject fate, as the Lost and the Damned sought to emulate the Reaper's slaying of the Ecclesiarch. A few temples became battlefields as the faithful gathered to defend them from the heretic throngs, but they were isolated and lost in a tide of madness, and fell one by one despite all the bravery of their defenders.

Kanathara advanced to the east, bringing destruction, madness and genocide along with it. But the Harvester of Hope would not find its path to the walls of the Imperial Palace unhindered. As its host crossed the nigh-imperceptible boundary between one Terran hive-city and the next, the sounds of organized resistance began to be heard over the cacophony of the Angel War.

Many pockets of order had appeared amidst the anarchy of Light's End, but the one that had formed in the Reaper's path was larger than most. Somehow, even as the skies burned with Warp-fire and the planet's collective soul reeled from the shock of the Emperor's death, thousands of Imperial Guardsmen had retained their sanity and cohesion.

In the days before Light's End, these soldiers had dreamt of a shining sword, and risen from slumber with their purpose and faith in Humanity renewed. Even as the horrors of the Angel War unfolded around them, they clung to that memory of light for strength, refusing to give in to the darkness.

Learning of the dangers of Chaotic memetic infection from the ramblings of the few certified psykers who had survived the opening of the Tear of Nightmares, they had broken the screens of their auspex, and tore out their own augmetic eyes. Through their deeds, the spread of Xanadu's Mark was stopped cold, unable to find purchase.

And so, when Kanathara's soul-broken slaves approached them, the Jopallian Liberators stood in their way.

The Jopallian Liberators

Life in the Imperium is harsh more often than not. That is a fact that even the most idealist of its leaders and champions – be they preachers of the Emperor's love or warriors of the Eighth and Twelfth Legions – must accept, lest they be drowned by despair. The galaxy is a dark and cruel place, and the manifold dangers that haunt it require that the lords of the Imperium rule with an iron fist – for dissent is an open gate to heresy, and heresy to ruin in all its forms. And so most Imperial worlds are ruled by tyrants; some benevolent and as fair as they can afford to be; others petty and cruel, though rarely for long before one of their own court turn on them in the name of their own advancement.

For thousands of years, such was the case of the agri-world of Jopall, in the Segmentum Solar. Proximity to the Throneworld, and its endless need for imported foodstuffs, meant that the ruling class of Jopall enjoyed absolute control over its labouring population, so long as the shipments of processed grain continued on schedule. Over the centuries, this unchecked authority had grown more and more draconian, with the demands made by the rulers over those they ruled growing ever more impossible. Quotas were increased with every passing generation, to the point where even giving the entirety of their production to the tithe-takers and starving to death would not be enough. To survive, the people of Jopall were forced to take out "loans" from their overlords, which took the form of alleviated taxes in exchange for a lifetime of complete servitude … and more.

Such debts were passed on from parent to child, and soon the entire citizenry was born in debt to the Imperial aristocracy, with no way of escaping their bondage. Despite Jopall's relative prosperity and technological advancement, its people lived in squalor while their rulers enjoyed lives of luxury matched only by those of Holy Terra's own nobles. The only way out of debt, which was dangled over the citizens of Jopall like a tantalizing fruit, was to join the agri-world's Imperial Guard Regiments : the Indentured Squadrons of Jopall. Through service in the Squadrons – under the command of officers from the disgraced sons and daughters of the nobility – a Jopallian could hope to alleviate his kinsmen' burden.

Since the founding of the Imperial Guard in its current form in the wake of the Roboutian Heresy, Jopall had dispatched thousands of Regiments and billions of its children to die in the Imperium's war. Meanwhile, its aristocracy continued to enjoy its unopposed privileges, protected from most inspection by the sheer necessity of the food Jopall produced. In the year 989.M41, however, this changed.

For the last four years, the aristocracy had been raising a new batch of Regiments for the Astra Militarum, in order to replace the Squadrons that had been completely destroyed in service to the Master of Mankind. Tens of thousands of recruits were being trained in vast manoeuvring fields as well as drilling orbital facilities.

Unknown to both the soldiers-in-training and the distant Imperial Segmentum officials, however, corruption had taken root on Jopall of a kind that not even the Imperium's apathetic bureaucracy would not have tolerated. A cult of the Disciples of the Dragon, those high-born traitors who deceive themselves into believing they are Vulkan's chosen, had grown to take control of almost the entire Jopallian aristocracy. Over the course of centuries, this heresy had encouraged the greed of the nobles, their poor treatment of their lessers, and the outright abuse of their Emperor-given authority.

The cult was not ready yet to cast aside any pretence of loyalty to the Throne and seize control of Jopall openly in the name of the Black Dragon. But unforeseen circumstances forced their hand when a group of Sons of Horus came to Jopall unannounced, accompanying an Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus.

The Inquisitor had no idea of the nobles' treachery – her presence on Jopall was a pure coincidence, brought by her return to Terra after dealing with a Nurglite conspiracy in the Segmentum's frontier Sectors. But the nobles, fearing they had been discovered, put their plans in motion early. They killed the Inquisitor and half of her Legionary retinue, before launching their campaign to make Jopall free of the Throne's grip.

The surviving Sons of Horus escaped to the Guardsmen's camp, and told them of what had transpired in their overlords' palaces. The details of what followed are murky, but the Jopallians rose against the treachery of their lords and masters. With the training and equipment they had been given, they fought fiercely against the Draconites and their armed forces. For almost an entire year, Jopall was the site of a brutal civil war, as those loyal to the God-Emperor battled the Disciples of the Dragon. Daemons were summoned and monsters were bred, great reptilian horrors that were thought by the Disciples to be pleasing to the Black Dragon. But eventually, the loyalists prevailed, and just as the ships of the Imperium darkened the skies, the banner of the Regiments was raised upon the smoking heap that had once been the Governor's palace.

The remaining Sons of Horus interceded in favor of the Jopallian, telling the Inquisition of their valiant defense of their world against the heretics who had infiltrated it. With this support, the Regiments were spared from being purged for the sin of having witnessed the daemonic allies of the Disciples, though they were closely examined and a few dozens soldiers disappeared in the night, never to be seen again. At the same time, sweeping reforms were enacted across Jopall as a new regime was put into place – one that would be watched much more closely, both by the Ordo Hereticus and the Sixteenth Legion. Every outstanding debt was absolved, and a new age of prosperity began for Jopall's population.

Due to their time spent fighting the Draconites, the Jopallian Guardsmen had gained an understanding of the Slaves to Darkness' methods and horrors matched by very few other Regiments. They fought with cunning as well as bravery, not hesitating one moment to use tactics that others might judge dishonourable. Faced with the unholy sorcery and superior equipment of the nobles' household troops, they had developed guerilla tactics as well as a mastery of urban and outland combat. This would serve them well in the years to come.

For the next few years, the newly-christened Jopallian Liberators accompanied elements of the Sixteenth Legion and the Ordo Hereticus across the Segmentum Solar, purging all traces of their former oppressors' conspiracy. In hive-cities and across vast fields, atop glittering spires and in the depths of vast catacombs where resurrectionist cults dwelled, they fought hard and well. During that time, they were closely watched for signs of corruption or rebellious sentiment against the Imperium – and none were found, though their distrust of the Imperium's ruling classes was deeply entrenched. But in the eyes of the Inquisition, this distrust could actually be considered a good thing : it ensured that, no matter where the Liberators were deployed, they would not be influenced by local politics and remain true to their Imperial mandate.

At the end of this crusade, the Liberators were called to Holy Terra, the orders subtly influenced by the Hydra, which had been watching them since they had defied the pawns of Vulkan. There, they were to be honored for their courage and valorous deeds with the chance to not only walk upon the Throneworld's hallowed ground, but to participate in the parades and celebrations meant to mark the turning of the millennium.

The Commissars of the Liberators belonged to what was called – with varying levels of fondness, derision, and outright scorn – the Cainite school of thought. They mixed a healthy level of intimidation with mercy and care for the troops whose moral was their responsibility, and limited field executions to those who actually broke ranks, abandoning their comrades to face the enemy alone.

As Light's End descended, they had been forced to perform more such executions in a few hours than they had since the Regiments had been formally founded, putting down those whose will was broken by the Tear of Nightmares or who succumbed to the Warp's pervasive influence. But because the soldiers knew and trusted them – as much as a Guardsman can ever trust someone bearing the scarlet sash – they had managed to preserve discipline. More importantly, they had preserved morale, despite the horror of the situation both on the tactical and spiritual level.

No less than five entire Regiments of Jopallian Liberators had managed to come together, and the fifty thousand Imperial Guardsmen were reinforced by a scattering of other Imperial forces. Squads of Sisters of Battle, carrying holy flamers; phalanxes of skitarii, who had willingly cut themselves off their noosphere networks to prevent the spread of Xanadu's Mark; and half a company of warriors of the World Eaters, part of the Twelfth Legion's detachment to Holy Terra for the celebrations.

Against them came the tide of Ruin : millions of bodies, driven forward by Kanathara's baleful command. Among the corrupted citizens and summoned daemons were Laer soldiers and Tithed Ones that had been caught in the advance of the horde and subsumed by the Exalted Greater Daemon's will.

A command went across the Imperial lines, and the heavy fire died down. The Imperials didn't have limitless ammunition, and it was best to save it for those foes that could not be slain by lesser weaponry. Las-fire and slug weapons opened fire instead, in coordinated volleys that slew heretics by the hundreds. Many of the traitors who fell were still alive, only to be trampled to death by those coming behind them, each of their final, terrified moments another prayer to the Lord of Pain and Pleasure.

Among the throng of soul-broken cultists were lesser daemons – Daemonettes of Slaanesh, as well as the other predators of the Warp that had been brought forth by the Tear of Nightmares. Even with their auspexes scrambled and their optics deactivated to prevent contamination, the Imperials saw the Neverborn coming – it was impossible not to. An aura of dread and panic preceded the daemons, and the Liberators' moral began to shake.

Until the first of them began to shout words they were all familiar with. Another voice picked up the words, and another, until nigh-on fifty thousand voices were singing a hymn that had first been sung on distant Jopall, in the bloody battles of the world's civil war. Officially, the song was prohibited, due to referring to matters no Imperial citizen should have knowledge of. But the Commissars smiled, and sung along – and the daemons in the horde sneered in displeasure at the mortals' defiance.

"The high and proud have broken their oath,
The beast of black rises so great,
But down here the light we carry,
For that is our sworn duty !

(Chorus)
So bring your slaves and your daemons,
Send your hellspawns and your dragons,
Here we stand and here we fight,
From crack of dawn till darkest night.

We, who are given this one chance,
Raise high our banners of defiance.
You will learn, with your last breath,
Heresy brings only death !

(Chorus)

Oh you who have embraced greed,
Know that this has been decreed :
For you who have thrown your soul away,
By our guns come judgement's day !

(Chorus)

In cities and in fields, in the deeps and the void,
In His service our lives and blood are employed.
So come at us with your awful lies,
We are the Emperor's own, and won't avert our eyes !"

- 'So Send your Dragons', unofficial hymn of the Jopallian Liberators

The battle lasted for hours. Heretic bodies piled up in front of the Imperial barricades. The Jopallian Liberators' casualties mounted, but the advance of Kanathara's host had been stopped dead. At the back of its horde, the Greater Daemon could feel this obstacle, and something like curiosity sparked in its infernal mind. It had expected resistance, of course. Even now, with the Anathema dead (and it still had difficulties accepting that was truly the case), the defenses of this most hateful of worlds were still formidable. But it was still far from the walls of the Palace, where the wards that had thwarted its kind during the Siege still flickered with remnants of seraphic power.

That these mere mortals dared to resist its slaves was something it had not foreseen. It was not angry, not yet. But it was curious. It wanted to see what it was about these mortals that let them stand firm while the rest of Terra burned; and then, it wanted to break them, tear out whatever elusive element had allowed them to do so, hollow their souls and minds, and bind them to its will.

With a cohort of Laers and Tithed Ones capering around it, Kanathara advanced. On its shoulder, the head of Baldo Slyst opened its mouth in a silent scream.

The daemon made no effort to conceal its approach. Among the embattled Imperials, the Space Marines realized that, should it reach the frontline, all hope of holding back the Slaaneshi horde would be lost. And so, with a final volley from their artillery, the Imperials tore a path through the Chaotic throng, allowing the surviving sons of Angron to charge at the Harvester of Hope.

No warrior ever looked so noble as these Legionaries did as they fought and bled to reach their foe. No scion of Nuceria ever earned a more righteous death than those who fell on the way to the great abomination. Even as Holy Terra descended into madness, the World Eaters had held fast to their bonds – of honor, of duty, of brotherhood.

But it was not enough. Of the forty-three World Eaters that charged into the fray, twenty-nine reached Kanathara. The first died a few heartbeats later, his head torn from his shoulder by a swipe of the Exalted daemon's razor-sharp whip. The next perished almost at the same time, burned to ash by Kanathara's baleful glare, smouldering pieces of his armor clanging onto the gore-soaked ground.

The last of the sons of Angron died three minutes and eighteen seconds after the first of his brothers was slain. He died on his feet, transfixed by Kanathara's infernal blade as it cut right through his warplate, erupted from his back and bit into the earth. Even the ground itself blackened and twisted, seeming to recoil from the weapon's monstrous touch.

With the World Eaters dealt with, Kanathara resumed its leisurely approach, licking its lips in anticipation of the feast of emotions to come. And this time, as the Exalted Keeper of Secrets loomed over the battlefield and an awed silence descended upon heretics and Imperials alike, the Jopallian Liberators did not sing. They did something much, much worse.

They laughed.

They had seen the World Eaters, greater warriors than any of them, slaughtered like cattle by the Greater Daemon. They knew that this creature was responsible for much of the horror that was consuming the Throneworld, and they knew that their own odds of defeating it, much less surviving such a confrontation, were so remote it would take the full processing power of a conclave of Martian priests to properly calculate. But faced with such a desperate situation, they refused to give in.

And so they laughed.

It was something they had picked up while fighting the Disciples of the Dragon. Vulkan's followers were driven by pride as much as greed, and perceived mockery enraged them, which made them commit tactical errors in their haste to crush those who dared laugh at them. It was a sound of defiance, and it had helped the Liberators stand their ground against the Draconite horrors their foes had unleashed against them.

Against Kanathara, the effect was somewhat more pronounced.

To daemons of Slaanesh, most laughter is merely another source of emotion to feed upon. Those who laugh at a good jest, those who cruelly mock their victims, those whose minds are so sundered by revelation they can only laugh – all of these are but another meal to the Neverborn children of the Silver Palace.

But it is not that kind of laughter that rises now from the ranks of mortals arrayed before Kanathara's servants.

Kanathara remembers. In the first moment of the new age, when the Dark Prince rose from the grave of the Eldar Empire, the Harvester of Hope was there, and it remembers.

The Mocking One. The Laughing God. The one who did not break, did not flee, did not perish. The one who looked into the eyes of Slaanesh and mocked Perfection Incarnate.

In that moment, Slaanesh was denied his victory. Cegorach's defiance of the Youngest God prevented him from devouring the entire Eldar race. The Lord of Pleasure and Pain was enraged by the Fool God's mockery, and in that rage his invincibility ended, for no one truly invincible can be mocked.

Perception becomes reality becomes law. Such is the way of the Warp. Such are the rules by which the gods dreamt of by mortal souls must abide.

And now, as Kanathara hears the laughter of mortals who have never seen a child of Isha, it remembers that awful moment when the last of the free Eldar Gods changed the course of galactic history. And because Kanathara is a fragment of the Dark God that spawned it, the Keeper of Secrets suffers just as Slaanesh suffered – for that, too, is the way of the Warp.

It screams in pain, feeling the flow of power from Slaanesh slip from its grasp. It claws at it with all its infernal will, but the laughter continues, shaking the very essence of the Greater Daemon. Kanathara is pride and cruelty incarnate, its nature shaped by the atrocities committed by the Eldars at the height of their power and decadence. Of all the Keepers of Secrets, it is most aligned with the echoes of Slaanesh's ascension, and the laughter of the Liberators tears into it, until …

… until the stream of power snaps out of its reach, and it is Exalted no more.

The Liberators saw Kanathara recoil, as if struck down by some invisible blow. Suddenly, the monstrous fiend did not appear so mighty, so unsurmountable. Even to the eyes of those without second sight, the Greater Daemon seemed diminished somehow, and new resolve filled the Imperial ranks. When Kanathara's shock turned into rage and it drove its slaves forward once more, the Liberators stood their ground, laughing defiantly in the face of the Archenemy. They were outnumbered a hundred to one and more, and even with the Keeper of Secrets unexpected weakness, their deaths were all but certain.

Yet still they fought, and still they laughed – and still Kanathara seethed with impotent rage, and something very much like fear.

But even the greatest valor only counts for so much, and eventually the Jopallian lines began to buckle under sheer weight of number. Tithed Ones rampaged amidst the Guardsmen, tearing holes in Imperial formations before they were put down by concentrated fire. Monstrous Laer war-machines rode to the front lines and disgorged cargoes of soul-broken Imperial citizens, whose ruined minds desired only to die rather than return to their torments.

Step by step, the Liberators were forced back, but they refused to break – for each and every one of them knew, in their heart of hearts, that in the Angel War, there was nowhere to run. For an entire hour, they fought in this grinding conflict, giving no mercy and receiving none. The blood of heretics and heroes alike flowed, but just like Xanadu's Mark, the advance of the Reaper was stopped.

As all hope seemed lost, Kanathara finally resumed its march to the frontline, hungry to punish the souls who dared to defy it, and silence their defiant laughter. But as the Keeper of Secrets advanced, the sound of engines was heard over the cacophony of destruction that served as the Angel War's constant background music.

From the east came a fleet of transports, loaded with the household troops of over a score of Imperial noble bloodlines. Leading this host was Saarim Farrokzhad, a Chosen of Magnus who had once walked within the halls of the Imperium's elite, before his psychic prowess had been discovered and only the Fifteenth Legion's intervention had saved him from the Black Ship. Dispatched by Omegon from the Tower of Hegemon, Saarim had made good use of his journey. Plying every trick of diplomacy, persuasion, and outright blackmail he had learned in his years serving as an intermediary of sorts between the Thousand Sons and the Imperial nobility, he had convinced those Terran nobles who held out against the madness in their spires and fortresses to join him.

As the transports approached, a host of Laer stalkers descended upon them, but they were met with psychic fire. For along with Saarim, Omegon had dispatched Darius Turani, a master of Pyrae arts. To Darius, the horrors of the Laer were nothing, for he had witnessed the predations of the Nineteenth Legion a hundred years prior, and the Slaaneshi xenos' evil paled in comparison to that of Corax's Purebloods. Sitting in the lead transport with his eyes closed, the Librarian smote entire swarms of stalkers at a time, drawing the very fires that consumed Terra in order to incinerate the flying reptiles.

Firing their guns over the heads of the Jopallians and into the infernal horde, the transports unloaded thousands of Holy Terra's best-trained and equipped troops. To the surprise of even Saarim himself, they were led by a handful of the Throneworld aristocratic elite. Each of these lords and ladies had ruled over billions of Terra's denizens before Light's End, and had been trained from birth to be able to serve their duties as stewards of the Emperor's domain and leaders of His people. They had been taught how to fight in duels, how to play the game of intrigue and politics. It would have been easy to dismiss them as fools with no understanding of the truth of life in the Imperium, separated from those they claimed to lead.

But when the Angel War had come, each of the seventeen who accompanied this relief host had chosen to risk their own lives rather than remain within the relative safety of their stronghold. And as the Jopallian Liberators saw these men and women of high breeding stride forth at the head of their troops, they understood that these were very different lords from the ones they had fought on their homeworld.

Nobles fought side by side with former peasants, and together they drove back the hordes of Hell. At the will of Darius, great firestorms engulfed thousands of Slaaneshi slaves, while the Pyrae master remained protected by a ring of the households' own elite, deep within Imperial ranks. Blood ran under his helm as the son of Magnus forced himself to draw upon the powers of the Warp even as it roiled with the corruption of Chaos. The protections of the Rubric burned in his soul, and he could feel himself dying a little bit more with every working he performed.

But like every Thousand Son on Terra, Darius could feel the pain of his Primarch on the Golden Throne, and his own torment was nothing in comparison.

Saarim fought on the frontline with blade and staff. His presence swiftly became a rallying point, and when Kanathara finally reached the Imperials, the Greater Daemon came directly upon the Chosen of Magnus.

Saarim slammed his staff down, while behind him Darius drew upon the last reserves of his strength and summoned a great wall of fire that cut off Kanathara from the horde that still poured from the ruins to the west. With the blow came a psychic sending, directed to every Imperial combatant in range of the Greater Daemon.

The sending was simple. It was a single word, a command whose meaning and target were obvious :

Fire.

As one, a thousand guns opened fire on Kanathara.

On their own, these shots would not have been enough. But at the exact moment of impact, the decapitated head of Baldo Slyst, in which the soul of the late Ecclesiarch was trapped, briefly shone with golden light. Faced with the heroic defiance of the Jopallians, Baldo's spirit had been renewed, and the momentary flash of holy power released so close to Kanathara's unholy form was enough to cause a flicker in the daemonic wards that shielded it from harm.

Hundreds of bullets and las-bolts slammed into the Greater Daemon's usurped flesh, and it was too much for it that was no longer Exalted. And so, Kanathara, the Reaper, the Harvester of Hope, whose defeat had taken the work of the Grey Knights and the sacrifice of billions, fell, brought low not by transhuman warriors infused with a shard of the Emperor's own radiance, but by mortal souls who had refused to submit to its vile divinity.

"For every soul you have defiled, for every life you have ruined !" roared Saarim, standing high and proud over the fallen form of the Harvester of Hope. "For the people of Terra and the Imperium ! Face the wrath of Magnus the Red, daemon !"

As the sword of the Chosen descended and Kanathara lost its hold onto corporeality, as its incarnation faded and its spirit was hurled back into the Sea of Souls, the Greater Daemon could still hear the sound of laughter.

AN : Well, I am surprised I got it done in time, but here it is.

Here is something interesting to know : when I was writing the outline for this chapter, I decided to have Kanathara be fought by "normal" Imperial Guardsmen. As I thought on the backstory of the Regiment, I came up with the idea of them having "rebelled" against a Draconite upper class. Then I searched for a canon Regiment I could use ... and found the video "Jopallian Japes", from Bruva Alfabusa. I watched it, thought to myself "this has got to be exaggerated". Then I read the wiki for the Jopall Indebted Squadrons, found out that their homeworld was located in the Segmentum Solar, and it was just too perfect an opportunity to pass up. Which is how we ended up with the Jopallian Liberators.

The song in this chapter was inspired by A Practical Guide to Evil, which uses them from time to time. There is no particular melody it should be sung on, though if you find one that works, please tell me.

For information : the "IT" of the previous chapter is an entity known in canon as "the Angel". I am not sure whether its existence is still canon anymore : it was only ever mentioned in the Inquisition Conspiracies series. You can find more about it online, though of course the details are different in the RH.

We have definitely reached the end of my backlog for the Roboutian Heresy : I only have a single page of notes for the next part of the Angel War. So having it done for next week is ... highly unlikely. On a brighter note, I have finished the outline for the next three chapters of A Blade Recast, so that fic should see some updates before the end of the year.

That's all for now. As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this, and please tell me what you thought of it.

Zahariel out.

Next : Titanomachy