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.
I am Sigismund.
Once, long ago, in a city awash with the detritus of war, I learned the first and only truth of the universe : all power comes from the wielding of a blade. It cannot be otherwise. History is written in violence, and only those capable of it may claim the right to forge destiny to their own vision.
I carried this truth deep within me long before my eyes were opened to the reality of the universe by the power of Khorne. I merely didn't understand the true scope of it. Yet even as I fought at the forefront of the Great Crusade, bringing world after world under the heel of the Imperium under the command of my lord Dorn, I knew that the greatest lie of the Emperor's Crusade was that it would end one day.
In the blood of the great rebellion, I learned another truth, as my eyes were opened. I learned that every murder, every kill, echoes forever in the realm behind reality's curtain, a weight that can either crush or empower you. I made my choice then, the same I have made every day since, and will continue to make until my skull is added to the Throne of Khorne.
And later, as I journeyed across the surface of Esk'Al'Urien and found my way to the very foot of Khorne's throne, another, secret truth was revealed unto me, setting me upon the path I have walked ever since I broke my own Legion upon the altar of Khorne.
In the end, however, these threefold truths are all but reflections of a singular principle, one around which the very galaxy turns.
Blood must flow. In a galaxy of lies, that is the only truth.
Blood for the Blood God, that the wheels of History may turn. Skulls for the Skull Throne, that our right to shape the destiny of the galaxy be proven upon the altar of war.
Let the galaxy burn, and amidst the ashes we shall rise, greater than ever.
Here, at Cadia, the chains that have held back the legions of Chaos will be broken. The walls erected by the weak-willed slaves of the False Emperor will be cast down, and the weakling who cower behind them forced to confront that which they so desperately tried to hide from themselves. A tide of blood will sweep over the stars, and whenever the gaze of Khorne reaches all will have to make a choice :
Fight for Khorne, or die for him. Either way, blood will flow.
Here, on this world that stands in futile defiance to the inevitable, I will lay the foundations of the Age of Blood to come. The weak shall perish and the strong shall endure, and Humanity as a whole shall grow mightier from this conflict, reforged into a blade with which Khorne shall cleave the universe.
I am Sigismund, called the Destroyer by those who look upon my works and despair. I am the Chosen of Khorne, who fights the Eternal Crusade in his name. Behind me stretches the Crimson Path I have carved across the stars; in my shadow lies an ocean of blood spilled by my blade.
And I declare this : all that I have done is but a prelude to what is to come.
For in this grim and terrible galaxy we inhabit, there is only war.
Times of Ending : The Cadian Apocalypse
Part Two : Chosen of Khorne
The worlds of the Cadian Gate are burning. The Black Legion, the Dark Angels, and the Black Templars have formed an unholy alliance, and launched the greatest Black Crusade since the Heresy itself. Through the First Legion's sorcery, the system is cut off from the rest of the Imperium, its defenders forced to fight without the promise of reinforcements against the hordes of horrors disgorged by the Eye of Terror. Although disaster was averted on Cadia itself with the banishment of the Archduke Korahael, the defenders there are still reeling from the blow delivered by the traitor's hand. War, however, is not limited to that particular battlefield, however great its import. As the New Marines are unleashed upon Cadia, the neighbouring world of Kasr Partox is besieged by the hordes of Khorne, led by the Black Templars and their legendary leader, Sigismund the Destroyer …
As the Black Crusade unfolded across the Cadian Gate, none of the Black Legion and Dark Angels assets present in the system approached Kasr Partox. The Black Templars had claimed the fortress-world as their own, and the word of Fabius Bile and Sigismund combined was not something even the most deluded of heretics and renegades were willing to defy. Unfortunately for the planet's defenders, the twice-traitor sons of Dorn and their hordes of followers appeared more than capable of taking on such a challenge on their own.
Like all worlds of the system, Kasr Partox was defended by a ring of orbital fortresses and defenses, crewed by some of the best men and women of the Imperial Navy. But these orbital defenses had not lasted long against the fury of the Eternal Crusader's guns and the combined firepower of the Space Hulks. The best efforts of the hereteks aboard these monstrous leviathans had only been able to restore a fraction of the weapons of the ships that made up the Warp-born amalgams, but what they had achieved was still more firepower than most Battlegroups of the Imperial Navy.
Within hours of their offensive starting, the Chaos Marines had achieved near-total orbital supremacy, challenged only by the powerful anti-orbital weapon emplacements of the greatest strongholds on the surface. Only those, and the void-shields covering the planet's great cities, kept the Traitors from razing the planet from orbit – along with, the Imperial commanders grimly suspected, their desire to slaughter the defenders in person. The fleet of Admiral Quarren could not break the blockade surrounding Kasr Partox, though the Admiral promised to intervene should the heretics show sign of committing to a full-scale planetary bombardment regardless.
The defenders of Kasr Partox were as numerous as they were valiant. Most prominent among them were the thousand Iron Warriors of the 12th Grand Battalion of Warsmith Krom Gat, who had earned the cognomen Indomitable for their steadfast defense against Chaos raider. Despite their continued defiance of the Ruinous Powers, the millennia the Grand Battalion had spent holding the Cadian Gate had taken a toll upon Krom's Astartes. Even among the Fourth Legion, they were dour and pessimistic, haunted by the nightmares the Eye of Terror endlessly sent to try to break their spirits. Many of the Indomitables had fashioned their helmets into hauntingly beautiful burial masks, both as a sign of acceptance of their inevitable death and defiance against the ugliness of the Long War.
A full Company of the Sixteenth Legion had pledged their blades to Kasr Partox's defense : the 34th Company of the Sons of Horus, whose five hundred Space Marines had, under the leadership of Captain Perseus Anistav, operated across the Segmentum Obscurus for over a hundred years. Its warriors were veterans of countless wars against the servants of the Ruinous Powers, having lent their might to the defense of the worlds near the Eye of Terror time and time again. For the last five decades, they had used the name of 'Doom Hunters', after their victory over the self-styled 'Doom Court' of the Bloodthirster Khulzar.
While the Astartes were overly represented in the propaganda broadcasts used to reinforce moral, all knew that the true burden of defending the planet would fall to the millions of Imperial Guardsmen who had been stationed on the planet in preparation for the Black Crusade's arrival. Nearly fifty million soldiers of the Astra Militarum were spread across the planet, a small majority of them being Cadian-born.
But with the Cadian leadership having been found to be compromised, overall command of the Astra Militarum contingent on Kasr Partox had been given to General Camilla Xilloth, who had come to Cadia at the head of twenty-two Regiments of the famed Chemosian Eternals, freshly reinforced and re-equipped. Despite the attempts by some Inquisitorial agents to keep that information from her and her troops, word of the doom that had befallen her homeworld had already reached her by the time the Black Crusade had struck, and she burned with the same righteous fury as the tens of thousands of their fellow Chemosians under her command. She was determined to make the Black Legion pay for what they had done to Chemos, and to make them regret disregarding the 'mere mortals' who had come to defend Cadia alongside the contingent of Emperor's Children who had been lost in the Warp.
Along with Warsmith Gat and Captain Anistav, General Xilloth was part of the triumvirate serving as the supreme commanders of the planet's military forces, assisted by a staff that, even after the purges following the reveal of Creed's corruption, was still of considerable size – as was to be expected of a warzone the size and complexity of a planet.
Ten Castellum stood on the fortress-world, placed so that each would be able to send aid to the others. The only way to effectively besiege Kasr Partox was to do so with enough numbers to attack every Castellum at once, lest the ones left unattacked launch counter-attacks on the rear of the attackers to relieve their sister-cities. The smaller settlements had been evacuated long before the Black Crusade had breached the system, their civilian population brought to the safety of the underground shelters beneath the Castellums. Only a handful of observation outposts were still manned across the planet, brave souls hiding from the enemy and reporting to their superiors anything they could learn of the enemy troops making planetfall.
Unfortunately, the Black Templars had more than enough strength to attack each of the ten Castellum at the same time, keeping the defenders pinned and unable to support one another. The Destroyer kept his Legion ships in reserve, along with many troop carriers and escorts. Meanwhile, the Space Hulks and scores of slave transports vomited their contents onto Kasr Partox, unleashing the hordes of Khornate worshippers the Destroyer had cultivated for centuries in preparation for this Black Crusade.
The Horde of Rage
Within each of the eight Space Hulks that had emerged from the Eye of Terror alongside the Black Templars dwelled a twisted parody of civilization, seeded there by the Destroyer and cultivated by the Blood God through generations of trials and strife. Imperial intelligence officers could only guess how many more of these grotesque amalgams the Destroyer had seeded with Ruin, only for them to end up in failure, with only these eight being strong enough to survive until the day of the Black Crusade. Each brought to Kasr Partox a specific breed of Khornate horror, united only by their desire to kill. During the first stages of the Cadian Apocalypse, six of them disgorged their heretical contents onto the fortress-world. One other, Desolation's Cry, would unleash its deadly cargo later during the advance of the Horde of Rage, while the eighth, Damnation's Reward, ominously remained silent during the entire first phase of the campaign.
Hand of Baphomet – Minotaurs
Beastmen are some of the oldest and most stable breeds of mutants to have ever emerged from the human genetic pool. Unlike the Ogryns or Ratlings, however, they are the result of Chaotic corruption rather than forced evolution (or devolution, depending on which of the many schools of thought of the Magos Biologis one adheres to). The Ruinous Powers, it seems, delight in reducing those who pray to them to little more than beasts, with just enough sentience left to be useful both as cannon fodder and as souls for them to feed upon. Following the Heresy, the human followers of the Traitor Legions followed their masters into the Eye of Terror and the Ruinstorm, where many turned into feral tribes that, over a few generations, transformed into Beastmen. As such, and despite a few theories that the breed actually originates from genetic manipulation during the Dark Age of Technology, Beastmen are hunted down and exterminated within the Imperium wherever they appear – which, of course, drives the few sane ones into the embrace of Chaos in the name of survival and revenge. It is a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle in which the Ruinous Powers delight, making sure that the few Beastmen who are actually able to make a conscious choice about serving them are elevated above their brutish brethren.
There are many sub-species of Beastmen, and each of the Dark Gods has its own favourites. For Khorne, that favorite is the Minotaur, a towering brute with the head of a bull and legs ending in hooves. Aboard the Space Hulk Hand of Baphomet, the wretches of the Bloody Maw cult of Khorne bred these creatures over the course of eight centuries, unleashing them into the labyrinthine corridors of the Space Hulk to test themselves against each other as well as the nameless horrors that dwelled there. This process eventually reshaped the Space Hulk itself, its corridors warped by the influence of the Immaterium and the bestial thoughts of its inhabitants so that they became high enough for the ever-taller Minotaurs to navigate, whether on all fours or standing on their hind legs. By the time of the Black Crusade, the Minotaurs of the Hand of Baphomet had reached over five meters in height, their physiology making a mockery of the laws of biology and physics which normally restrain evolution.
Clad in primitive but thick steel armor and armed with heavy melee weapons, the Minotaurs were brought down to Kasr Partox and immediately spread out across the countryside, fighting anything they came in contact with and feasting on the bloody remains. Only the champions of the Blood God were able to summon them to join the fighting against the Imperials, and even then, their control on them was tenuous at best. But the strength and resilience of the Beastmen more than made up for these difficulties.
Anvil of Annihilation – Kytan Engines
In the Eye of Terror, the construction of new Titans (already a complicated process for the Imperium) is made all but impossible by ever-shifting laws of physics and the logistical nightmares that torment the denizens of that place, along with the more corporeal kind. But if there is one sin that cannot be laid at the foot of the Dark Mechanicum hereteks, it is lacking in imagination.
The Ironghast Foundry was a Hell-Forge of the Dark Mechanicum within the Eye of Terror dedicated to Khorne, until the daemon world was conquered and razed by the Blood Angels during the War of Woe. The surviving hereteks of Ironghast were found by the Black Templars and made a pact with the Destroyer, receiving the Space Hulk Anvil of Annihilation in exchange for their alliance. Since then, they have remade the Anvil of Annihilation into a mobile Hell-Forge, and have sold their services to countless warbands within the Eye of Terror (though never those of Sanguinius' bloodline).
Remembering well how the Slaaneshi Knights allied to the Blood Angels ravaged the Ironghast Foundry, they focused their efforts on the design of a pattern of Daemon Engine that could be built within Eye-space and triumph over the walkers of the Houses. After millennia of experimentation and testing on the Eye of Terror's countless battlefields, their final template was that of the Kytan Engine. Standing as tall as Imperial Knights, the Kytan Engines are daemon engines forged in the image of Khorne himself. They are bipedal, humanoid constructs armed with a chain-axe the size of a tank in one hand, while the other arm is replaced by a ranged weapon of a varying type (some use autocannons, others plasma cannons or more esoteric infernal weaponry).
Though the hereteks sold plenty of their creations to various Khornate warbands, eventually leading to the Imperium encountering the Kytan Engines on the battlefield centuries before the end of the 41st Millennium, by the time of the Black Crusade, the great holds of the Anvil of Annihilation contained over four hundred Kytan Engines, more than enough to challenge the full might of an Imperial Knight House on the field.
Scion of Anguish – Hierophants of Skulls
The Hierophants of Skulls are the spiritual leaders of the Khornate tribes from the Space Hulk Scion of Anguish. Prior to its appearance in the Black Crusade, the Space Hulk had last been witnessed during the Desolation of Berrophon's Heart, where hundred of evacuation transports carrying the civilians from five different systems were seized by cultists of Khorne and crash-landed on it. Few of the millions of men and women who were trapped aboard the Scion of Anguish survived for long, and those who did were soon changed as the Space Hulk returned to the Warp before any could escape.
In order to endure, the survivors of the first brutal weeks turned to Khorne, who granted their prayers by empowering the Hierophants of Skulls to speak in his name aboard the Scion of Anguish. The Hierophants brought the stranded civilians to relatively safe refuges and sources of food and hydration, earning their position as leaders. For generations afterwards, these dark holy men and women guided their people in sacred bloodshed against xenos, daemons, and each other. The survivors splintered into tribes which rose and fell, their numbers replenished by survivors from Geller Field failures brought to the Space Hulk by the tides of the Warp, driven to madness by the horrors they had experienced.
A violent and primitive civilization came to exist within the Scion of Anguish, its people hardened by constant battle and daemonic predations. To fight the latter, the Hierophants of Skulls developed rituals to invoke the favor of Khorne, making offerings of blood and skulls to the God of War in order to ward small sections of the Hulk as well as bestow strength upon the champions of their tribes. Khorne may abhor sorcery and psychic powers, but there is strength in rituals that even the Blood God respects, and each Hierophant is also a powerful warrior, who earned his title in combat – either by killing an existing Hierophant or by slaying some powerful beast spawned in the darkest holds of the Scion of Anguish.
As the armies of Khorne advanced on Kasr Partox, the rites of the Hierophants of Skulls consecrated the land for their bloodthirsty deity, strengthening the influence of Chaos on the world and helping maintain a semblance of discipline within the Horde of Rage.
Sundered Peace – Blood Armors
The corruption of Chaos is pervasive, and can infect the most isolated and forgotten of worlds. For thousands of years, the world of Kvalgron had been kept by the Imperium in a medieval stasis, its people providing a tithe of minerals and exceptional metallurgic artworks as well as Aspirants for the Sons of Horus Legion. But, one hundred years before the Black Crusade, its ruling class slowly became corrupted by Khorne, as civil strife between city-states grew and warlords began to stockpile weaponry. Eventually, they turned to fell means to increase their power, at which point their activities drew the eyes of the Ordo Malleus.
The Inquisitor who came to investigate, however, was none other than Torquemada Coteaz, who would be revealed as a secret heretic and servant of the Blood Raven during the Angel War. Indeed, it was there that the seeds of the Inquisitor's heresy would first be sown, though it would be years before his treachery became real and decades before it was revealed in the battle of the Enceladus Fortress. Regardless, the situation on the feudal world erupted into a full-blow daemonic incursion soon after his arrival, and the planet was subjected to Exterminatus on his order. Some of the great artisans of that world, however, survived, stolen from their planet's demise by the whim of Khorne and left aboard the Space Hulk Sundered Peace along with a handful of their guards and liege-lords.
Within the Sundered Peace, the dark lore these artisans had begun to dabble into blossomed. Within a handful of generations, they had learned to forge the Blood Armors : suits of plate armor crafted from metal harvested within the ships most exposed to the currents of the Immaterium, and forged in sections of the Hulk blessed with the power of Khorne. Within these armors, the warriors of their savage tribes are all but unstoppable, capable of taking on the strongest Warp-spawned horrors and triumph. However, to don such a suit is extremely dangerous, for they are possessed of a malign intelligence of their own, and it is a rare warrior who can manage to hold on to his life and soul through the battle – most often, what is revealed once the helmet is removed afterwards is only a dessicated corpse. Those few who do manage to survive are considered to be blessed by Khorne, but even they are rolling the dice with poor odds should they don a Blood Armor once more.
On Kasr Partox, over eight hundred scions of Kvalgron clad in Blood Armor descended from the Sundered Peace aboard transports sent by the Black Templars. Leading them was a sinister warrior known only as the Red Duke, who had already worn his relic suit of Blood Armor seven times before the Black Crusade.
Fang of Khorne – Bloodgors
In 458.M41, the feral world of Hakka was discovered by the Imperium. Within its jungles, its human population had long since fallen under the sway of Khorne, performing blood rites that linked their warriors together, making them more coordinated on the battlefield at the cost of allowing the taint of Chaos within their soul, as well as feeling the pain of their dead comrades as their own. The war for Hakka lasted several decades, with dozens of Astra Militarum Regiments being drawn to the conflict.
Eventually, the corruption of Khorne seeped into the Imperial Guard fighting on Hakka, with entire Regiments turning their coats and joining the local population in their dark bloodletting rituals. Several more task forces were sent, but between the sorcery of the Hakka natives and the modern equipment of the Traitor Guardsmen, they were slaughtered, until high command decided to cut its losses and burn the planet to ash. An Exterminatus fleet was dispatched, and the Hakkatite shamans sensed the doom coming for their world. Due to the separation of organizations, the Traitor Guardsmen had no ship to escape the planet, only a few troop transports capable of reaching orbit. In a great ritual slaughter, the dark priests called forth a Space Hulk from the depths of the Immaterium, and a vast evacuation of Hakka took place over the next few months, until the arrival of the Exterminatus fleet forced them to stop, leaving millions still stranded on Hakka as the virus-bombs fell.
The death-cry of Hakka returned the Space Hulk to the Warp, where the various heretics within its hull were soon twisted beyond recognition. The curse of beasthood struck them, turning them into a horde of deranged mutants armed with the remnants of their Imperial wargear. They became Bloodgors, beastmen dedicated to Khorne, and claimed the Space Hulk in the Dark God's name, cleansing it of Orks, Genestealers and daemons of the other Ruinous Powers, before baptizing it Fang of Khorne in honor of their terrible deity.
When the Black Crusade began, hundreds of thousands of Bloodgors descended from the Fang of Khorne onto Kasr Partox. Towering beastmen, whose horned heads still bore the tattered remnants of grandiose caps, directed them out of the packed transports and toward the Castellum, bellowing threats and orders. Despite their bestial nature, the bloodletting rituals from Hakka gave them more discipline and cohesion than other such forces among the Khornate hordes. The blood-bonding rites, perpetrated anew every time a member of a pack had perished, had also allowed for some of the knowledge of each member to be passed on to the others and inherited down the line, making it so that even the most bestial of Bloodgors knew how to use a lasgun and the basics of tactics.
Peace's Demise – Hateful Beacons
Khorne's hatred of psykers and contempt for sorcery might be a key pillar of the faith of the Blood God, but it also leaves his worshippers dangerously vulnerable to such methods being employed against them. Khornate champions are often granted protections against psychic powers, but these rarely extend to entire armies, which can have disastrous consequences. The Hateful Beacons are an attempt by the Black Templars to address this weakness, which came into being after a particularly frustrating battle between the warriors of Sigismund and the Farseers of Craftworld Biel-Tan.
In the year 905.M41, a Black Ship, its holds full of tithed psykers, was attacked by a Black Templar raiding party. The Chaos Marines were well-prepared for the raid, and they slew the Sisters of Silence with grim efficiency, successfully preventing them from triggering the ship's self-destruct – a feature present on every Black Ship due to the lethal danger of their cargo should the captives ever break loose.
The prisoners didn't rejoice, however, for what awaited them was far worse than any fate the Astra Telepathica might have had in store. The Black Templars had brought with them hereteks from the Eye of Terror, exiles from the Martian Wars of the Heresy who had studied sciences the Emperor had forbidden to all after they had nearly brought about the end of Humanity during the Age of Strife. Thousands of psykers of varying degrees of strength and abilities were dragged out of their cells and into the hereteks' experiment chambers, where they researched a method to use them in order to protect the followers of Khorne from psychic attacks.
The corridors of the Black Ship, renamed Peace's Demise after its capture, became the lair of uncounted daemons drawn by the suffering of the psykers. Whole derelicts emerged from the Empyrean and crashed into the Peace's Demise as the atrocities taking place within echoed across the Sea of Souls, eventually forming a new Space Hulk. The research took decades, but eventually they succeeded in creating the Hateful Beacons.
Every Hateful Beacon is a vessel for Khorne's unbridled hatred, trapped in a state of unspeakable agony while denied the respite of death by heretekal means and moved on the battlefield by motorized transports attended by a small team of Dark Mechanicum servitors and a heretek. Around them, all psykers find their connection to the Immaterium blocked by unrelenting waves of torment, forcing them to shut down their powers and use all of their willpower to keep the fury of the Blood God at bay.
Prior to the Black Crusade, when the fleets of Chaos gathered on the edge of the Eye of Terror, the presence of the Peace's Demise nearly caused the Dark Angels (who make great use of sorcery themselves) to break the alliance on the spot. They remembered the battle of Exiroak, where the Hateful Beacons had prevented the Chaos Sorcerers of the Dark Angels from opening Warp portals to escape the daemon legions of Khorne, leading to the slaughter of hundreds of Legionaries. But, in a feat of diplomacy worthy of admiration, Fabius Bile managed to keep the Black Crusade on track.
Millions of Khornate cultists and monsters made planetfall in the open plains between Castellums, far from the guns of the Fourth Legion. Unlike the mortal slaves generally used by the Seventh Legion, these cultists were almost completely lost to the Blood God's rage, kept from killing each other only by the iron will of their overseers and the promise of fighting the Imperial forces instead. They split up into several hordes that began marching on the Castellums, picking up momentum as they went.
Lances of Imperial Knights were deployed to harass the Chaos columns as they advanced : more than half the strength of House Caesarean, sworn allies of the Iron Warriors since the days of the Great Crusade, had joined the defense of Kasr Partox. Perfectly familiar with the terrain thanks to Iron Warriors cartographers and able to reload at hidden supply caches, they were able to dance around the Khornate forces, inflicting heavy casualties and driving them into greater and greater rage, leading to several warbands collapsing into bloody internecine slaughter as they sought to vent their frustrated fury on each other.
But the Knights could not cover the entire planet, and even they weren't always successful. The Kytan Engines of the Ironghast Foundry were more than a match for them, having been designed by their Dark Mechanicum creators precisely for such fights. One by one, the proud Knights of House Caesarean were brought low, until the survivors were recalled to join the defense of the Castellum at the walls. Of the hundred and forty-nine Knights who had ridden out, only fifty-three returned, many of them too heavily damaged to take further part in the fighting. A few Freeblades remained behind, determined to expunge the stains on their honor which had led to their status by earning an honorable death against the Horde of Rage.
Guided by courageous spotters – Iron Warrior Scouts and Astra Militarum reconnaissance teams – the intercontinental artillery of the Iron Warriors rained death upon the forces of Khorne. At the same time, flights of bombers and fighter jets of the Aeronautica Imperialis launched from their hangars, along with flyers piloted by the Fourth Legion. In response, the Space Hulk Desolation's Cry disgorged flocks of Hell Blade interceptors, which had been assembled within its hull by renegade tech-priests and were piloted by the daemon-possessed husks of captured Imperial pilots.
It had a name once. It was sure of it. Sometimes, when the pain was at its worst and its mind fled from its intensity, it could almost remember it.
The pain was always there, and it couldn't remember a time when it hadn't hurt. There was no end to it, only degrees of suffering, and the only way to diminish its torment was to fight, to kill, to destroy.
It flew in burning skies, under the shadow of the Nest. It could sense its kindred in the distance, hunting alongside it. They shrieked at each other over invisible waves, warning of perils and prey. They were always on the look-out, always on the hunt, until the exhaustion and hunger became worse than the pain and they had to return to the Nest to rest and feed.
Hadn't it flown differently once ? Hadn't there been something else ? Hadn't -
There. Prey. It plunged down, letting loose its hatred and pain with twin autocannons, the sudden spike of aggression rewarded with an ever-so-slight relaxing of the infernal claw holding its brain and soul.
Chaos armies capable of burning star systems were wiped out by the long-range artillery and flights of bombers, but no matter how many of the Khornate forces were killed, more descended from the void in a seemingly inexhaustible tide. Sigismund had long prepared for this Black Crusade, gathering resources while continuing to prosecute his unending crusade across the galaxy, and the Destroyer was now unleashing everything he had accumulated in his millennia of faithful service to the Blood God. Worse, daemons rose from the broken corpses of the slain Khornate troops and continued to advance toward the Castellums, and the bombardments of the Fourth were far less effective against these Neverborn.
Eventually, Warsmith Krom ordered the end of the long-range bombardments, having been warned by his Librarians and the sanctioned psykers of the Guard that their enemies were harvesting the mass death they caused to thin the veil separating reality from the Warp. After discussing with his peers, Krom had determined that it was best to face the hordes unleashed by the Black Templars on the blessed and warded walls of the Castellums, whose arcane protections would lessen the Warp resonance of the conflict. Those aircrafts which had survived the brutal engagements against the Hell Blades and the flying daemons which were materializing in ever greater number were also recalled, to be kept in reserve until their deployment would be most effective, while the surviving Astra Militarum units in the field were ordered to withdraw to the closest Castellum and bolster their defenses.
In the end, the fate of Kasr Partox would be decided on its walls, as all had always known it would. Though no Castellum was spared the attention of the Horde of Rage, it quickly became clear that the Khornates were focusing their efforts on a few specific targets. To the surprise of few Imperial commanders, who were familiar with the particular madness of the followers of the Blood God, these numbered eight – seven secondary Castellums and the capital-fortress. The founders of Kasr Partox had ensured that their strongholds weren't located in ways that would allow their foes to draw their unholy sigils on the face of the planet itself, as they had done several times during the Heresy, bringing into being calamities that had ravaged entire Sectors and left scars on reality that persisted to this day. But the grim scholars of the Ordo Malleus warned that the symbolism of eight altars of war for the Black Templars to make their offerings would still be powerful.
Eight days after the first landings, the walls of the Castellums came under attack. Bloodletters of Khorne and bands of death-masked cultists passed through the weakening energy shields and climbed up the walls, where they were met by the bolters of the Sons of Horus and Iron Warriors, and the lasguns of the Imperial Guard.
Yet still, more came. Gun emplacements were overrun, their crews slaughtered and their machine-spirits destroyed or driven to madness by Warp contamination, requiring their complete shutdown. Siege weaponry was then brought to breach the walls where they weren't covered anymore, grinding forward on a carpet of Khornate dead. Dark Mechanicum weapons were unleashed upon the fortifications and eventually the infernal creations of the hereteks began to overcome the results of the Fourth Legion's genius.
And all the while, more and more daemons manifested, the power of Khorne pressing down on the planet as his followers made it into an altar to his bloodlust. Some hellspawns began to manifest within the walls themselves, wreaking havoc on supply lines and slaughtering the patients of medical facilities in blood-crazed frenzies before being put down by Astartes and Inquisitorial kill-teams – the Holy Ordos had a strong presence on all worlds of the Cadia system, though their numbers on Kasr Partox were beginning to thin, as they were favoured targets of the Neverborn.
"It is very beautiful."
The words were strange coming from a Space Marine, even ignoring the thick accent and the deep voice. Of course, Luc knew that the Astartes could appreciate beauty : he was a Chemosian, and the Third Legion had always supported the arts on his planet, just like it had supported everything else that made life worth living. But before coming to Cadia, he had thought the sons of Fulgrim to be the exception, and it was all too easy to buy into the stereotype of the Iron Warriors being the dour, grim-faced wardens of the Iron Cages, forever ready to hold the line against the horrors of Chaos.
And they were, that much was undeniable. But they were also more, as he had come to learn since his posting at Kasr Partox Beta and his impromptu acquaintance with Brother Jephan. The Indomitable Iron Warrior had noticed him staring at his helmet, which like all of his brothers on Kasr Partox was shaped into a burial mask, while the two of them were on watch on the walls of Kasr Partox Iota, and had asked him what he was looking at.
It had been an intimidating experience, but Luc had managed to reply that he was looking at the artistry of the mask. That had been an hour ago, during which the two of them had ended up discussing the various methods by which the artisans of Chemos produced the Eternals' own masks and comparing them with the Iron Warriors' own practices. Luc wasn't an expert, but as a veteran sergeant, he had picked up some bits and pieces. Right now, Jephan was inspecting Luc's own mask, which he had removed and handed over. It looked almost comically small in the Legionnaire's armored hands, but Jephan was handling it with a care most people wouldn't have believed a Space Marine capable of.
"It is, isn't it ? Our artisans have had ten thousand years to perfect their craft, so they can achieve wonders even when the subject matter isn't the most impressive specimen," joked the sergeant self-deprecatingly.
"Hmm. I cannot speak for that, but even putting the aesthetics aside, the design is a thing of beauty. I cannot imagine the Mechanicus is very happy with your people having the technology to put so much miniaturized devices inside a single piece of equipment."
"As far as I understand it, we've an accord with Mars," shrugged Luc. "Something the Phoenician, blessed be his name, made when -"
They were interrupted by the sirens going off again, warning of another push by the heretics. Jephan sighed, and handed the helmet back to Luc.
"Here they come again, my friend," said the Iron Warrior, raising his bolter and aiming it down the wall. "Are you ready ?"
"I am a Chemosian Eternal," the sergeant replied as he put his helmet back on, his view once more enhanced by the ingenuity of his homeworld. He knew his squad was listening, and while there were no Commissars nearby, it was his job to keep up their morale. "We are always ready. Aren't we, lads ?"
He got a chorus of approval in answer, and smiled under his mask. Still, there was something … different about the screams of the heretics this time. They were louder, deeper. But according to command, the Black Templars hadn't deployed yet …
Meanwhile, the eponymous capital of Kasr Partox was spared the worst of the fighting. Tens of thousands of heretics had swarmed around its walls, but despite the Chaotic madness holding them in its grasp there were only a few attempts at charging the walls, which the guns of the fortress-city had easily dealt with. Within the walls, Warsmith Krom held back from unleashing the full strength of his artillery to wipe out the rabble massing outside, knowing that they were less of a threat than the daemons their inglorious slaughter from afar might allow to materialize.
Taking advantage of that comparative calm, Captain Anistav led a few sorties to reinforce the other Castellums, his Legion gunships carrying squads of warriors to beleaguered citadels – and, eventually, returning with their holds full of what survivors they had managed to rescue from the collapse of their keeps. Yet with the lives of the millions of civilians hidden in the underground shelters at stake, Krom dared not commit all his forces to a sortie. The defenders of the other Castellums had known such would be the case long before the Black Crusade had begun : the defensive plans for Kasr Partox had always made that much clear. But faced with the evidence that the Black Templars were using the planet for some sort of unholy ritual slaughter, Krom couldn't help but want to strike back.
"This is Inquisitor Cartavolnus, ident code omichron-five-nine-three-alpha-sapphire. The Castellum is lost, I repeat, the Castellum is lost. The heretics have deployed some kind of elite infantry in what looks like primitive armor but can turn aside a tank shell. They climbed up the walls with their bare hands, shrugging off everything we threw at them, and cut a path for the rest of their forces. One of my retinue managed to kill one by engaging it in a duel – it seems they aren't as invulnerable to melee weapons -" *sounds of metal crashing on metal* "… Throne, is that their leader ? … Very well then. FOR THE EMPEROR !"
Last vox-transmission from Castellum Partox Delta
Partox Delta was only the first Castellum to be brought low : one by one, seven of the ten Castellums of Kasr Partox fell. Partox Beta's walls were breached when a herd of Minotaurs climbed up a ramp of their own dead, their mutated bones proving too resilient to be burned by the flamer crews tasked with keeping the base of the walls clear. At Partox Epsilon, a conclave of Hierophants of Skulls caused the earth to open beneath the stronghold, vomiting lava and Bloodletters. Kartox Zeta was lost when the Primaris Psyker located there, a veteran of decades of war under the shadow of the Eye of Terror who had withstood the rituals of the Dark Angels without complaint, was finally overcome by the proximity of the Hateful Beacons and was transformed into a living Warp portal through which poured boiling blood and melted brass.
Partox Theta's gates were brought low by a trio of Kytan Engines hunting the last members of House Caesarean, and the first sightings of Chaos Marines on the planet were reported at Kartox Iota, moments before a horde of Excruciators who had attached themselves to the Black Crusade finally breached its walls. These blood-crazed outcasts of the Seventh Legion had gathered in the Eye of Terror by the hundred prior to the Black Crusade, heeding some divine call only they could hear.
The last of the Castellums to fall in the first phase of the war was Partox Kappa, which succumbed in a single night of horrifying bloodshed. Using their own lives as sacrifices, the cultists besieging it summoned the great Bloodthirster Skarbrand, who in ancient days had been responsible for the slaughter of the psychic Imperial Fists, ensuring few Librarians would remain to advise the Seventh Primarch away from his damnation. The wards of the Castellum were no match for the power of the Exiled One, and before dawn no living soul remained within its walls.
Now only Kasr Partox and the two lesser Castellums Partox Eta and Partox Gamma were left standing, the later two being besieged by hordes of Khornates and beset by storms of Warp lightning that had cut off all communication within the last two weeks. The last vox-messages that had made it out spoke of terrible shapes being glimpsed in the clouds, and of the growing intensity of the Warp-born nightmares plaguing the defenders. Through faith, strength of will and the power of Prosperine wards, the Castellums were holding still, but there would be no daring sortie to relieve the other citadels.
It was then, over three standard weeks after their first wave had made planetfall, that the Black Templars themselves descended upon Kasr Partox, bringing with them the elite of their mortal and immortal servants : the infamous Death Korps of Krieg.
Amalrich the Martyr-Maker approached the figure of his liege. Centuries of service to Khorne had long since inured him to fear, yet he would not deny a shudder of apprehension as he neared Sigismund. Even immobile, the Destroyer radiated the promise of violence and death. The observation platform had been cleared of all servitors and equipment, and the nearest slaves cowered at their stations, casting fearful glances toward the Chosen of Khorne. The blood runes on the Destroyer's black armor burned brighter than the last time the Martyr-Maker had beheld his lord in person. At the same time, and to his hidden horror, there were fewer of them left : several had been extinguished, leaving only burn marks upon the ancient ceramite.
The air around him rippled with the power of the Warp, and despite not having the slightest psychic talent, as befit a warrior of Khorne, images of the Brass Citadel flashed in his vision, briefly replacing the bridge of the Eternal Crusader before vanishing. Yet even in those brief glimpses of the Blood God's Realm, Sigismund remained standing before him, immobile as a statue. The lord of the Black Templars had been unmoving since they had begun their assault on Kasr Partox.
"My lord," said Amalrich, forcing the words past the knot in his throat. "It is time."
With the slowness and inevitability of an executioner's blade, Sigismund's helmet turned to look at Amalrich. The Chaos Marine had to force himself to remain still, instead of drawing his sword or shamefully stepping back – both of which would doubtlessly have ended with his deserved death. Weakness was not tolerated among the Black Templars.
The Chosen of Khorne chuckled, the sound like a boulder falling down a mountain.
"I know what you are thinking, Amalrich. I need not be a mind-reader to know your thoughts, not when you wear them so openly. And you are right."
Those were not the words Amalrich had hoped to hear, but he listened to them nonetheless. None were closer to Khorne than Sigismund, and though the servants of the Blood God could only truly commune with their deity on the battlefield, there was worth in even the smallest morsel of the Destroyer's thoughts, which were said to be echoes of Khorne's own after so long spent serving him so successfully.
"The Darkness closes in around me, Amalrich," continued Sigismund, and Amalrich's blood went cold. "Our father knows I am here, closer to him than I have been in millennia. I can feel his anger, reaching out of the Eye to strangle my soul."
Since the day of the Breaking, the warriors of the Seventh Legion who had chosen to follow the Destroyer had born the weight of the Daemon Primarch's rage upon their soul, though none more so than Sigismund himself. Only through endless rites, constant discipline, and copious offerings to Khorne could the Black Templars keep the Darkness at bay, and avoid succumbing to the mindless bloodlust that consumed so many of the God of War's followers.
The prospect of Sigismund finally breaking under the strain after ten thousand years was … frightening. Black Templars who succumbed to the Darkness were imprisoned and kept locked in stasis until they were unleashed on the enemy, but could any of them restrain Sigismund if it came to this ?
"The Vengeful Spirit is still in system," pointed out Amalrich, changing the subject. "The Sons of Horus will not fail to notice our departure, nor will they miss the opportunity."
"Let the Warmaster's dogs come if they wish," replied the Destroyer. "All will be ready for them."
Sigismund took a deep, shuddering breath.
"Let loose my Templars, Amalrich, and unleash the Death Korps. It is time for Kasr Partox to fall."
The Death Korps of Krieg
The tale of Krieg is sometimes used as an object lesson by the Inquisitors of the Ordo Hereticus, though the exact morale to be learned from it varies depending on the Inquisitor. By decree of the Holy Ordos, only those with the highest clearance may access the records pertaining to that world's doom, meaning only a few Interrogators on the verge of becoming full-fledged Inquisitors themselves after learning their craft under an Inquisitor with a lot of influence (or first-hand knowledge), or Space Marines from Loyalist Legions that were involved in the affair, are allowed to learn that grim story.
Named after a word from a long-dead Terran language meaning 'war', Krieg was, for thousands of years, a peaceful and prosperous planet of Segmentum Tempestus. Its industry was productive without doing too much damage to the planet's ecosystem, allowing its people to live long, quiet lives free from the struggles that plague all too many worlds of the Imperium. Its tithes were paid on time and often surpassed, and the Regiments it sent to the Imperial Guard were well-equipped and trained. What little unrest there was on Krieg was the result of its ruling class, the Autocrats, playing little games of influence and petty intrigue against each other, but even that was kept at such a level the Ordo Hereticus didn't feel the need to cultivate anything beyond the most basic of spy network.
This would prove to be a mistake. In the year 433.M40, the Governor of Krieg, who went by the local title of High Autocrat or Chairman, declared secession from the Imperium, citing the heavy taxation imposed upon his world and the ceaseless kidnapping of the world's children to send them to die in wars that didn't concern their peaceful planet. He was, by all Imperial analyses, a blind and foolish man, ignorant of or unable to understand the magnitude of the threats faced by Humanity in the galaxy and which can only be faced by the united might of the Imperium. It is not believed that he was a follower of the Ruinous Powers, but sheer stupidity can be just as damaging to the Imperium as heresy, which is why his name was struck from all records in Damnatio Memoria.
Not all of Krieg's people were content with rebellion, however. Colonel Jurten of the 83rd Krieg Imperial Guard Regiment was on the planet when the Chairman made his declaration, and immediately seized control of one of the most heavily industrialized cities of the planet, ready to fight until death to reclaim the planet for the Emperor. For years, he and his men held on, using the city's industry and population to fight back against the vastly more numerous troops of the Chairman – and, when he died to a successful assassination, the generals and Autocrats who succeeded him. Attempts to call on the wider Imperium for help went unanswered : the Chairman had fortified Krieg with enough orbital defenses that retaking the planet was calculated to be more costly than the planet was worth (though later investigations uncovered several grievous misjudgments in the Adeptus Administratum, which led to hundreds of executions including several high-profile ones).
Eventually, faced with the certainty of defeat, Colonel Jurten decided to employ the Dark Age weapons that had been discovered by his Mechanicus allies in hidden vaults deep beneath the city. These weapons had long been forbidden by decree of the Emperor, with only a handful of exceptions being granted to the likes of the Inquisition's Ordo Excorium or the Death Guard. But, driven to the brink by years of ceaseless conflict and countless sacrifices, Jurten decided to use them.
Krieg burned. Atomic missiles flew, aimed at each of the rebel cities on the planet. Within moments, the vast majority of a billions-strong population perished. The ecosystem wasn't just ravaged, it was annihilated. The people of Jurten's city had taken refuge in underground shelters and were spared the worst of the radiation, but life on the surface of Krieg had become impossible without heavy protection.
Several days later, Colonel Jurten went to the surface, clad in a thick, rad-proof uniform and wearing a respirator, and looked upon what he had wrought in the name of the God-Emperor he so fervently believed in. It was then, according to the Ordos' investigator, that the Dark Gods reached for his soul, in what must have been a moment of abject horror, doubt and vulnerability. For years now, Jurten had almost single-handedly kept up the morale of his loyalist faction, exhorting them to dedicate their every moment to service to the Golden Throne. Now, he looked upon the ruin he had made of his world, and the Emperor was silent, speaking neither in condemnation nor in approval.
Jurten's soul was overcome by madness and hatred, his guilt at his actions transfigured by the influence of Khorne into an all-consuming desire for vengeance against the Imperium that had abandoned his people and the Emperor who had abandoned him. The cult of personality that had developed around him meant that it was all too easy for his new beliefs to spread to the surviving Krieg. Jurten had already proven that there were very few things he wouldn't do in the name of duty; now, even those few restraints were removed as he completely gave himself over to the God of War.
In vast underground facilities, the Vitae Wombs were used to breed a new generation of Krieg, subtly altered using yet more forbidden technology to be able to operate more easily on their radiation-bathed planet (although even they would forever need gas-masks and thick clothing to survive the surface). New models of tanks and weaponry were designed and mass-produced, and then tested on the mutated populations of the other cities, those few who had survived the initial blast only to be transformed by the radiation, which as the corruption of Jurten and his people progressed became ever more infused with the mutagenic energies of Chaos.
An astropath was found in a still-functioning stasis-pod within one of the ruined mansions of the dead Autocrats, and used to send a signal to draw ships to Krieg, masquerading as wealthy survivors of the war offering a fortune for safe passage off-world. A greedy Rogue Trader answered the call, only to be butchered by the newly rebuilt Death Korps of Krieg and his ships seized. With his army ready and the means to move it across the stars, Colonel Jurten declared his own Blood Crusade against the Imperium in 458.M40.
The Imperium learned of Krieg's survival and the full extent of its betrayal when atomic missiles rained on the paradise world of Yerrefen, swiftly followed by thousand upon thousand of faceless Kriegsmen. Within weeks, none of Yerrefen's population were left alive, and once the plundering was over the Krieg left, taking with them the ships they had seized in orbit. Again and again this repeated, Jurten not being interested in capturing and holding territory, simply in ravaging as much of the Imperium as he could – which, with his Dark Mechanicum allies manufacturing new atomic weapons, was a lot. Task forces were sent to intercept the Blood Crusade, but the sheer numbers, determination and utter disregard for their own losses of the Krieg resulted in a succession of defeats. Transport ships were sent back to Krieg and returned full of fresh reinforcements, cloned in the Vitae Wombs and artificially grown to maturity within a few short years before being sent to die for their world's revenge.
The Blood Crusade moved coreward, and several analysts theorized that Jurten might be trying to make his way to the dead world of Inwit, where once the Daemon Primarch Rogal Dorn had reigned before the coming of the Orks. No one could guess what the Traitor Colonel hoped to achieve there, but all agreed he must not be allowed to. Slowly, with every month of delay costing more lives as the Krieg continued their genocidal campaign, the Imperium mustered enough strength to fight back.
In the end, it took the combined efforts of the Sons of Horus, the World Eaters and the Iron Warriors, along with billions of Guardsmen, to break the back of the Blood Crusade and force them to retreat. By that point, however, Krieg was on the verge of becoming a full-fledged Daemon World, and couldn't be dealt with by conventional means. It fell to the Death Guard to purge the planet, the sons of Mortarion fighting a long and gruelling war in the underground complexes of Krieg. They succeeded, and without the mortal disciples of Khorne the influence of the Warp weakened enough for the planet to be destroyed using cyclonic torpedoes.
In total, over fifty star systems were left ravaged by the Blood Crusade of Krieg, most of them left completely unsuitable for repopulation, poisoned as they were by the fallout of atomic weaponry. The fact that mere men, not even Traitor Space Marines, could inflict such damage on the Imperium shook the Adeptus Terra. The Inquisition ordered all records of the Blood Crusade sealed under all but the heaviest of access restrictions, partly to avoid panic and partly to avoid knowledge of the atomic weapons spreading. These devices, as it turned out when the Adeptus Mechanicus analysed them, are terrifyingly easy to build with the technology available to many civilized Imperial world, and if there is one thing the events of Krieg prove it is that the power of destroying worlds should be restricted to as few people as possible.
But not all Kriegsmen perished with their world. The sheer scale of Jurten's Blood Crusade had earned him the favor of Khorne, and the Blood God was loath to waste such a powerful weapon. Even as the cyclonic torpedoes rained down on Krieg, Khorne intervened, dragging the underground stronghold where the wounded Colonel and his last followers had made their stand into the Warp and depositing it within the Space Hulk Damnation's Reward. There, the Krieg renewed their oaths of vengeance against the Imperium, and began to rebuild their strength.
It is then that their path met that of the Destroyer. Sigismund had been told of Krieg's tale by daemons of Khorne, and even the Chosen of Khorne had been impressed by what mere mortals had accomplished. He found the Damnation's Reward, and offered the Kriegsmen technology and lore the Black Templars had gained from their then-recent alliance with Fabius Bile, whose mastery of cloning technology was the stuff of nightmarish legend. In exchange, he asked that they join his eternal crusade against the Imperium, to which they readily agreed.
In the thousand years since, the Death Korps of Krieg have been sighted on dozens of warzones across the galaxy, often but not always at the side of the Black Templars.
Khorne embodies all of the uncountable cruelties and atrocities of war, and it is the sheer dehumanisation of industrial warfare that the forces of Krieg represent. The Krieg Death Korps are siege specialists, making extensive use of artillery and close-quarter trench warfare. Legions of faceless soldiers obeying their orders without fear or conscience, bringing death to millions without any hesitation. Due to the method of their creation and the bleakness of their short lives, their souls are stunted, malformed things.
Under their uniforms, they are plagued with unseen mutations as the corruption of Khorne is made manifest in their flesh. Those who become crippled by these mutations (as soon as they can no longer carry a gun) are killed and their flesh recycled in the cloning vats, while those whose mutations make them more deadly are used as shock troops. A strange mutation, unique so far to the Death Korps, is the ability some display to transform their own limbs into weapons, altering their shape through willpower and drawing ammunition seemingly from the Warp itself. These particular mutants are regarded with much more respect, considered to be blessed by the Blood God and gathered in squads.
To the Kriegsmen, the only value of their lives lies in killing for the Skull Throne, until the day their own life is offered up as a sacrifice in turn to the God of War. To them, all justifications for war are meaningless, and the only meaning and purpose of war is war itself, a holy sacrament to Khorne.
Even the Destroyer, for all his power and prestige, only loosely controls the Death Korps. While none would pretend they are an alliance of equals, the Death Korps are still powerful enough on their own that the Black Templars must treat them with a modicum of respect, which most are inclined to give given the utter dedication to Khorne of the vat-grown troopers.
It is believed – feared – by some Inquisitors that the Death Korps are what awaits Humanity should Khorne prevail and turn the species into a galactic weapon of endless genocide to sate his ever-growing bloodlust. These Inquisitors would be more afraid should they know that, deep within the Damnation's Reward, Colonel Jurten still endures, kept alive by the blessing of Khorne and the extensive surgeries his followers have performed on him, linking him to the machinery of the Space Hulk itself.
The Black Templars and the Death Korps made planetfall far from their objective, having learned the range of its defensive guns from the carnage they had wrought on the hordes they had previously unleashed. They landed nearly a hundred kilometers to the Castellum's north, within an area secured by the Khornate vanguard, and immediately set toward their destination. Of course, the moment Warsmith Krom learned of their position, he ordered the long-range bombardment to start again – the risk of damaging the veil between Materium and Immaterium was less pressing than the approach of thousands of Chaos Marines and millions of Death Korp troopers.
Unfortunately for the defenders, a localized Warp Storm had formed in the planet's atmosphere above the approaching army. It was believed to have appeared the moment the Destroyer himself had set foot on Kasr Partox, although this couldn't be confirmed : scouts in the area where the heretics had landed had all gone silent, hunted down by the Black Templars vanguard. Trying to shoot through the storm could only backfire, and so the mighty guns of the Castellum remained silent, waiting for the enemy to get closer.
The numbers of the Black Templars had long been a subject of much speculation in the Imperium. The warband was a known offshoot of the Seventh Legion, but the hatred Dorn was known to harbour for its leader was believed to make recruitment, always a difficult proposition for the Traitor Legions, all but impossible. Surely the Daemon Primarch of Khorne would have made it a priority to target any facility the Black Templars might use to create and train new Astartes. But Sigismund had escaped the Breaking of the Imperial Fists with the Eternal Crusader, and the flagship of the Seventh Legion contained its own facilities, allowing for limited recruitment from promising children from ravaged worlds to compensate the losses sustained by the warband over the course of their endless Blood Crusade. Worse, since the alliance between Sigismund and Bile, the Black Templars had received the Clonelord's assistance in bolstering their numbers.
In total, nearly fifteen thousand Black Templars made planetfall on Kasr Partox, vastly outnumbering the transhuman defenders of the Castellum. Some of them had fought alongside Sigismund during the Great Crusade, while others had been raised from the children of war that had shown promise, and others still had burned away their old allegiances – be they to Loyal or Traitor Legions – to march under the banner of the Chosen of Khorne.
And so the fortress-world was the theatre of yet another instance of the old hatred between the Fourth and Seventh Legions playing out across the ages. The Black Templars may have changed their name and repainted their armor black to match their leader, but they were still sons of Rogal Dorn, and they despised the Iron Warriors, whose castles they had broken against time and again during the Heresy.
Despite the might of the opposition, Warsmith Krom didn't despair, and neither did the rest of the Imperial commanders. The attackers might have a considerable advantage in Astartes, but the numbers were far less unbalanced when the human troops were taken into account (if the Death Korps could still be counted as such, which they were for strategic if not theological purposes). Combined with the might of their walls and guns, it was estimated that the siege would last for months if not years, and turn into a grinding battle that, though it would cost the defenders dearly, might well end up sounding the death knell of the hated Black Templars completely as they broke themselves against the defenses of the Iron Cage, just as the Imperial Fists had done thousands of years ago.
They had good reasons for that cautious optimism. Kasr Partox' eponymous Castellum was a Hive-sized fortress which hosted over a hundred million inhabitants in normal times, and whose packed shelters were now refuge to billions – not just from the rest of the planet, but from the many installations and outposts evacuated across the rest of the system as well. Vast stores of weaponry had been opened to arm those of these refugees who could fight. It was perhaps a desperate gesture, for should it come to this then surely Kasr Partox was lost, but the lords of the planet would not deny these people the chance to defend themselves and die for the Emperor, on their feet, and in defense of their loved ones.
Standing between these scared civilians and the hordes of Khorne were millions of the Astra Militarum's best, standing atop some of the best defensive engineering in the entire galaxy. The simulations of the Iron Warriors had shown them that entire Legiones Astartes could be broken trying to take the Castellum, though as ever the involvement of the Warp could make a mockery of what logic, reason and sanity dictated the outcome should be. To help counter that possibility, prayers were led daily on the walls by Ministorum priests who were just as prepared to fight as the Guardsmen around them, and the wards of the Castellum were checked again and again for the smallest signs of weakness.
Meanwhile, the number of Black Templars dispatched to the surface of Kasr Partox didn't escape the notice of the other Imperial forces in the Cadian system. The Destroyer had committed the full might of his warband to the attack, leaving only a skeleton guard of Astartes and the mortal crew to defend the Eternal Crusader, whose guns were largely responsible for the planet's blockade now that most of the Space Hulks had fallen silent, their bellies emptied of monstrosities after vomiting them on the planet.
This presented a unique opportunity to turn the tide of the war, and one that didn't escape Mournival Lord Urkanthos of the Sons of Horus, back aboard the Vengeful Spirit.
Urkanthos, the Hound of Horus
Like many Sons of Horus, Urkanthos wasn't born on Cthonia but on one of the many worlds where the Sixteenth Legion fought to preserve the Emperor's Dominion. His exact world of origin has long been forgotten, possibly even by himself, which isn't uncommon among such recruits for whom the trauma of war combines with that of Ascension. Having served as a Son of Horus for seven hundred years, and as a Mournival Lord for the last century and a half, he has witnessed more ruin and death that most can imagine in their blackest nightmares, but he remains undaunted.
The first of Urkanthos' many battle honors is his participation in the Macharian Crusade. Then a simple battle-brother, Urkanthos distinguished himself by leading the offensive on the Goranna Sixth Gate after the death of his sergeant and every other Imperial officer in a five-kilometer radius due to the actions of the Dark Angels. In the Macharian Heresy that followed the Warmaster's death, Urkanthos rose to command his own Company and fought to purge the traitors who had defiled Macharius' legacy, which led to him being marked by the Mournival as a possible candidate, though it would be centuries before he was ultimately elevated to that position.
Among the current iteration of the Mournival, Urkanthos embodies the ruthless streak of the Sixteenth Legion, that cold-bloodedness that let Horus Lupercal leave billions to die in the Siege of Terra in order to defend the Imperial Palace, knowing the fate of the entire galaxy rested upon it. Some believe that ruthlessness is the result of witnessing what became of the Macharian Crusade, how easily all the glories earned with the sacrifices of so many came undone.
Perhaps that is the case. Regardless, Urkanthos' willingness to make hard choices has earned him the respect of the Iron Warriors tasked with guarding the Eye of Terror, and prior to his death at the Tyrok Fields he was a personal friend of Triarch Khorius Rex. It also earned him many scars, for the Mournival Lord does not place himself above the demands of the calculus of war, and makes a point of always leading the most dangerous operations he orders himself whenever this is practical. His nickname of 'Hound of Horus' was bestowed upon him for his determination on the field, and his relentless pursuit of the Arch-Defiler Noggaroth, who led him and his Company on a chase across the ruins of the Fourth City of Allantes for three months, each day of which was spent fighting the cultists left in his wake before he reached Noggaroth himself and executed him, saving the Garalus Sector.
For weeks, Urkanthos had made the difficult decision of keeping the Vengeful Spirit in reserve while Kasr Partox burned and his brothers died in its defense, silencing the protests of his own warriors. The Mournival Lord knew that an assault on the Chaos fleet around the planet would fail. Even should he dedicate everything to a strike at the Eternal Crusader, to kill a Gloriana was no easy task, and as long as the Destroyer was on board, attempting to board the ship was a futile endeavour. Not only was this obvious from a tactical standpoint, but his Librarian advisor had also informed him that all readings of the Emperor's Tarot he had performed showed that such an attack would not only fail, it would lead to the Vengeful Spirit's destruction. Divination, ever an unreliable tool, had become even more so in recent days as all precognition abilities became blinded by an oncoming something no one could identify, but Urkanthos had no reason to doubt that particular prognostic.
Now, however, with the Black Templars having deployed on Kasr Partox, the prognostic had changed. According to the Emperor's Tarot, a boarding of the Eternal Crusader was all but guaranteed to result in the destruction of the traitor flagship. Of course, the sheer size of the Eternal Crusader meant that there still hundreds of thousands of damned souls aboard, but the ancient warship was more vulnerable now than it had been in ten thousand years, and Urkanthos seized the opportunity.
If he could destroy the Eternal Crusader, not only would he avenge the countless Imperial lives lost to its guns across the ages, he would also gain void supremacy over Kasr Partox. The fury of the Vengeful Spirit's own orbital bombardment might be thwarted by the same Warp Storm which prevented the Iron Warriors' artillery from annihilating the Black Templars and Death Korps from afar, but it could still provide relief to the other besieged Castellums, and the Sons of Horus within its holds could reinforce their brothers on the ground. The Mournival Lord took the results of the Tarot as a sign of the Emperor – the Sons of Horus may not regard the Emperor as a god in the way the Imperium as a whole did, but they were aware that the Master of Mankind could still reach out from His Golden Throne, and surely if any battle warranted such intervention it was the one being fought at the Cadian Gate.
"The Dark Gods hate the Sixteenth Legion.
Such a statement, of course, requires elaboration, for the Dark Gods hate every living thing in the galaxy, including those deluded fools who worship and serve them. But they reserve a special hatred for the Sons of Horus. This hatred takes its roots in the events of Xenobia Principis, where the Warmaster was struck down by a Chaos-touched blade. The records of that distant time tell us that while Horus lingered between life and death, the Ruinous Powers made him the same offer they had made to his brother Guilliman, promising him power and dominion over the galaxy if he would rebel and cast down his father.
Unlike Guilliman, however, Horus had help, in the form of the Chief Librarian of my own Legion, the legendarily controversial Ahzek Ahriman. With his psychic assistance, Horus' closest sons, the Mournival, were able to join him and free his soul from the clutches of the Dark Gods before they could overcome his defiance and turn him into their puppet.
The Dark Gods remember this defiance, and they have never forgiven it – nor shall they ever do so. During the Siege of Terra, Sanguinius was aimed at Horus like an arrow, and events conspired to steal the corpse of the Warmaster from his grieving sons. Looking upon the chain of events that led to the Clone Wars and the birth of the Black Legion, one cannot help but see the hand of the Ruinous Powers at work.
That hatred is the source of the 'bad luck' that seems to afflict the Sixteenth Legion, though of course any member of the Corvidae knows there is no such thing. Still, on any battlefield where they face the Slaves to Darkness, the Sons of Horus will find themselves just a little bit less fortunate, and their enemies just a little bit luckier and favoured. I have fought alongside the Sons of Horus on many occasions, and I can say without hesitation that this curse is a real force, the expression of the Dark Gods' spite toward those who have kept defying them, again and again, throughout all of the Imperium's history.
Weapons will jam at inopportune times, while the random madness of Chaos cultists will take forms helpful to their overseers' goals. Reinforcements will be delayed in the Warp, while its tides will bring new enemies in faster. Imperfectly performed daemonic rituals will succeed instead of ending in the cult leader's messy death. Librarians will struggle to hold back the Warp's corruption at precisely the wrong moment, leaving their brothers exposed. It is never blatant, never something that cannot be explained by a mundane explanation or coincidence. But it is there, as the Chaos Gods put their hand on the balance of destiny, weighing the dice against the Sons of Horus.
That the Sixteenth Legion not only has survived this curse for ten thousand years, but has continued to stand as one of the greatest protectors of Humanity, is a testament to the strength and determination that flows through the First Primarch's gene-line."
From Meditations on the Illusion of Fate, by Azariah Kyras
Urkanthos knew that the inside of the Eternal Crusader would be a battlefield like no other. For all that the servants of the Blood God professed to abhor sorcery, the Sons of Horus Librarians told the Mournival Lord of the horrors that haunted the Gloriana-class battleship : ancient engines fused with living flesh, daemons of Khorne stalking the decks, blood pouring in place of oil and coolant fluids.
Fortunately, Urkanthos had at his disposal a force uniquely suited for this duty, for a full complement of Exorcist Marines was stationed aboard the Vengeful Spirit. Urkanthos had brought them to Cadia knowing that their anti-daemonic abilities would doubtlessly be put to good use, and he could think of no better use than the destruction of the Eternal Crusader. Each of the Exorcist Marines had been subjected to dangerous, soul-threatening rites by the Legion's allies in the Ordo Malleus' more Radical elements. As a result, they were greatly resistant to psychic threats and far more efficient than regular Astartes in battle against Neverborn entities.
Urkanthos himself wasn't an Exorcist Marine : the price paid by these warriors made them unsuitable for positions of command, let alone ones where they would be expected to interact with other Imperial agencies. He still intended to lead the boarding action in person, knowing that even in victory it was unlikely many of the boarders would return.
At his command, the Vengeful Spirit launched a raid on the Black Templars blockade around Kasr Partox, supported by other ships of the Sixteenth Legion and those Navy vessels which could keep up with them. Using techniques that had been perfected over ten thousand years of Legion warfare, the spear of the Sons of Horus struck like the Emperor's own fury, bringing low the void-shields of the Eternal Crusader long enough to send hundreds of loyalist Space Marines in boarding torpedoes and gunships (teleportation was possible, but only a fool would have attempted it on a Chaos-touched Gloriana). The Vengeful Spirit emptied her stores of decoy and chaff to keep the point defenses of the Eternal Crusader from obliterating the boarders before they could even reach it, but even so, scores of Legionaries were blasted to pieces in the void – yet many more made it aboard.
The battle within the Eternal Crusader were every bit as bad as Urkanthos had known it would be. The ship itself fought back against the intruders, opening up sections that had been sealed for centuries and within which Warp-spawned nightmares had bred and evolved into terrifying new forms. Members of the crew hurled themselves onto the Sons of Horus' blades, dying with prayers to Khorne and the Destroyer on their lips. Automated defenses and things that might have been battle servitors at some point took a heavy toll as well, to say nothing of the few Black Templars who had remained aboard the Eternal Crusader. Even the Exorcist Marines' protection against the perils of the Warp was strained to its limits, as were their more mundane skills and bravery.
But eventually, Urkanthos and his command squad made it to the bridge of the Eternal Crusader, breaking through the last line of defense hastily thrown together by the mortal heretics crewing the command deck.
It had been too easy.
Urkanthos had known something was wrong from the moment he had set foot on this thrice-accursed ship, but then of course he had. It would be harder to name one thing that wasn't wrong with the Eternal Crusader.
Now, however, as they stood on the bridge, surrounded by blood crystals and the gory remains of where they had purged the traitors fused to their work consoles and Techmarine Nestor told him what little sense he could make out of the readings from the still-readable consoles, he understood that his tactical instincts had been screaming at him as well as his transhuman ones.
"This is a trap," he said aloud. Then, moving on instinct, he immediately opened an unencrypted vox-channel, broadcasting his words with every marker of authority and urgency at his disposal, making sure every Sixteenth Legion force in range could hear him. "Mournival Lord Urkanthos here ! This is a trap ! The Crusader has been set to blow up ! Everyone, get off this ship ! Vengeful Spirit, move away from it as fast as you can !"
"We won't be able to pick you up if we do that, my lord !" came the reply of the shipmaster. There was no panic audible in his voice, the man was far too well trained for that, but Urkanthos could sense it nonetheless.
"It doesn't matter !" roared the Mournival Lord. "The Spirit is more important than any of us ! GO !"
"… as you will it, my lord. We have engaged the engines at full power and are preparing our shields. May the Emperor watch over you !"
"May He watch over us all," muttered Urkanthos as the vox-link finally collapsed. Truth be told, it was a miracle it had even worked in the first place, which was probably all the mercy the Emperor could spare on them right now.
"Maphelor," he called his Librarian. "Do you see any way out of this ?"
The psyker shook his head, scattering droplets of sweat and blood. He had been under tremendous strain since they had boarded, fighting every step to keep his soul free of corruption.
"Nothing," he said through gritted teeth. "I see only fire and ruin now, Urkanthos. I hear only the laughter of Dark Gods. We are doomed, and it is all my fault -"
"We aren't dead yet," growled Urkanthos. "Remember who we are ! We are the Sons of Horus ! Ours is the blood of the First Warmaster ! If our sire could spit in the face of the Dark Gods, then we will not dishonor him by giving up before it is over !"
He looked around, taking in the entire bridge, searching for … there.
Under his helmet, the Hound of Horus smiled grimly. It was a long shot – no, it was a one-in-a-million shot, and the Mournival Lord knew all too well that chance never favoured the Sixteenth Legion. And yet …
"This isn't over yet, you black-souled bastard," he swore, and began to run.
Exactly as the Emperor's Tarot had foretold, the reactors of the Eternal Crusader detonated. Its surviving crew were annihilated, their souls sent shrieking to the Blood God along with the ancient, malevolent intelligence that served as the ship's machine-spirit. The Vengeful Spirit, forewarned by Mournival Lord Urkanthos, barely managed to get out of immediate danger, though her void-shields took a battering and few, if any of the Sons of Horus deployed in the boarding were recovered.
Even in death, the Eternal Crusader served the Blood God well. The Gloriana-class battleship had been holding in orbit above Kasr Partox, and as it came apart its pieces rained down upon the Castellum in a shower of fiery meteors. Each of these enormous pieces of debris was infused with the psychic echoes of ten thousand years of slaughter across the galaxy in the name of Khorne, and further empowered by the sacrifice Sigismund had made of his own flagship, an act of such lunacy that none of the Imperial strategists could possibly have anticipated it. The technology required to build new Gloriana-class battleships had long been lost, and those few who remained were precious beyond measure in the Long War, yet here Sigismund had sacrificed one of the greatest weapons of the Seventh Legion.
The corpse of the Eternal Crusader rained upon the void-shields of Kasr Partox, and with a shockwave that raised a storm of dust and ash for kilometers, the shields finally collapsed. Like a spear thrown from the burning skies by the hand of Khorne himself, the final fragment of the Eternal Crusader, its blade-shaped prow, fell upon the western wall of the Castellum, instantly reducing a vast section of it to rubble and shaking the fortress to its foundations. A less well-built city would have entirely collapsed from that singular impact, but Kasr Partox had been constructed by the Fourth Legion, and it endured, though a vast hole had been torn through its defenses.
Before the quakes had stopped, the Kriegsmen hurled themselves at the walls of Kasr Partox in their tens of thousands, their gas-masks protecting them from the noxious clouds raised by the death of the Eternal Crusader. Consumed by a bleak nihilistic madness, they cared naught for their own lives or those of their comrades, and would not break or retreat : only their complete annihilation would stop their advance. The Black Templars advanced with them, while the Destroyer himself walked slowly behind the vanguard, his body language deceptively calm while Imperial psykers began to weep and babble about the black storm of hate and fury that approached.
The rubble of the western wall and the adjacent sections of the Castellum became a vicious battleground, as the Imperial commanders sent their reserves to keep the Khornates from gaining ground while they redeployed their tanks around the ravaged area. With the ground made treacherous and visibility reduced to a few meters at best by the dust clouds, what followed was a gruesome butchery, where skill and tactics counted for little compared to sheer endurance, determination, weight of numbers and pure luck. Two hundred Iron Warriors, a hundred Sons of Horus, and fifty thousand Guardsmen went into the Zone Mortalis, performing many acts of heroism that would sadly go entirely unrecorded, witnessed only by the Emperor and the Dark Gods. Less than one in ten survived, but by their sacrifice the ground was held long enough for Warsmith Krom to finish his redeployment and call for their withdrawal.
A wall of tanks and pre-built fortifications had been deployed all around the Zone Mortalis, manned by entire Regiments of Guardsmen and further defended by artillery pieces that had shifted their targeting arrays to the inside of the breached walls. Snipers took position on the closest buildings that had survived the impact, and auspex teams were deployed that carried advanced Mechanicus devices that could penetrate the clouds of dust choking the area.
When the first wave of the Khornate army hit this new defensive line, it held, and was soon adorned with the blood of Krieg and Dorn. The heavy vehicles of the heretics were struggling to cross the broken ground of the Zone Mortalis, their difficulties increased by the targeted fire of long-range missile launchers, whose rockets were equipped with advanced machine-spirits capable of locking onto target through the haze. Enemy casualties mounted, and the defenders dared to hope that the breaking of their walls might turn out to have been a blessing in disguise, a tactical error (few were foolish enough to think it a coincidence) on the part of the Destroyer which would result in his armies being bled dry.
But then Sigismund himself reached the defensive line, and those hopes were dashed to pieces.
Garrus had thought the Death Korps were monsters. Faceless monsters, bred for war and knowing nothing else, unleashed upon the servants of the God-Emperor from whatever hell had spawned them.
He had been wrong. The Death Korps were nothing. This … this was a monster. It looked like the Astartes, but it wasn't one. Its armor was black and red like the Black Templars, but it wasn't one. Garrus had seen Black Templars die as they emerged from the Zone Mortalis and charged the line.
The monster didn't die.
It had cut the Lupercal tanks to shreds with a chainsword whose hunger Garrus could feel in his soul. It had carved its way inside the Baneblade that had tried to ram him from the front and emerged from the back covered in the guts of the crew. It had taken three simultaneous rockets straight in the torso and simply shrugged it off. It had taken more las-bolts than Garrus could count and underneath all the blood, the paint of its armor hadn't even been chipped.
It had killed all of Garrus' squads within a handful of seconds, and now it loomed over him, its horrible red gaze piercing into his soul.
"Go on," said the monster. Its voice was far, far too calm. It should have been a growl, a scream fit to rend reality asunder. Instead, it sounded … calm, and that frightened Garrus more than anything else.
"Go on. Tell them I am here. Let them know their doom has come."
Garrus knew the monster's name. How could he not ? He was the vox-man in his squad. He had heard the communications.
He didn't want to do anything the monster wanted, but this he had a duty. And even now, even as his mind was overcome with terror and the utter certainty of his imminent death, the trooper of the 587th Chemosian Eternals clung to that duty.
"Sigismund is here," he breathed into the vox, somehow managing to keep his voice from shaking. "The Destroyer has arrived !"
Before he could hear the shocked reply, the chainsword descended, and Garrus' skull was claimed for Khorne.
The Chosen of Khorne tore through the line of the defense of Warsmith Krom as if it were wet paper. Imbued with the favor of the Blood God, he was more akin to an elemental force of destruction than a singular warrior. Tanks were rent asunder and entire squads were wiped out in a swipe of his great chainsword, and the gaze of Khorne followed wherever he walked, burning into the minds of the Imperials while filling the heretics with new vigor. Such power was greater than what had been recorded in previous encounters with the Destroyer, and the Imperial savants theorized that Sigismund was on the brink of reaching the dark apotheosis all champions of Chaos pursue.
But Sigismund had been denied transfiguration into a Daemon Prince for ten thousand years, despite his bloody deeds surpassing those of any of the champions of Khorne who had been raised to daemonhood in the interim. Of course, the motives of the Ruinous Powers couldn't be guessed by sane individuals, yet the Imperial commanders still felt something deeper and darker was afoot here. Attempted readings of the Emperor's Tarot returned nothing but the promise of death and destruction, and even the most powerful of seers reported that their second sight was completely blocked, though they were hesitant to blame it on the Black Crusade.
Regardless of the reason for Sigismund's terrible might, the threat remained the same. Khornate forces poured into the hole the Destroyer had ripped through the Imperial lines. Black Templars riding on half-daemonic beasts raced ahead, hunting isolated squads of Guardsmen, while packs of Sword Brethren advanced, supported by the fire of the Death Korps. Despite this, order might still have been restored and the flow of battle reverted, for the defenders had vast reserves of manpower to draw upon.
However, as Warsmith Krom began to give the orders that might turn the tide (though how to deal with the Destroyer himself, he had no clue), Chaos Terminators teleported directly inside his command center from one of the Black Templars ships remaining in orbit, crashing through the anti-teleportation wards and back-up void shields meant to prevent such a thing. Only the Dark Gods knew how many such elite warriors were lost to the Warp in the manoeuvre, and the ship from which they were deployed, the Axe of Wrath, was seen imploding into a raging Warp portal by the auspexes of the Vengeful Spirit, utterly annihilated. But over twenty of the Terminators reached their destination, each and everyone of them a maddened beast lost to the Darkness plaguing Dorn's gene-line.
By the time the last of the Chaos Terminators was slain, his helmet and the skull within turned to shrapnel by an Iron Warrior's thunder hammer, the command center was in ruins, and Warsmith Krom was dead, having taken three of the Khornate berzerkers with him despite only wearing a suit of standard power armor. The cogitators, auspexes and vox-casters with which the defense of Kasr Partox had been managed had been reduced to scrap, and only a handful of the human staff were still alive, and might not remain so for long despite the best efforts of the medicae. In one single strike, the Black Templars had shattered the Imperial chain of command on the planet.
Thankfully, Lady-General Xilloth had been out of the command center leading her troops, as had been Captain Anistav. The Son of Horus commander proposed one last course of action : a concentrated strike on Sigismund himself, putting everything they had into an attempt to cut off the head of the beast. The Destroyer may be more powerful than ever before, but he also stood on the very threshold of daemonhood, and in some ways never was a champion of Chaos more vulnerable than when standing on that precipice's edge. The blessings of Khorne which had kept the Black Templar alive against all odds were no longer in play, the single remaining Librarian of the Sixteenth Legion on the planet was convinced of it.
It was a desperate plan, but as the Castellum burned around them and more and more daemons began to manifest from the bloodshed, it was clear that they were in a desperate situation. The civilians in the shelters couldn't escape. There were no secret tunnels leading outside the Castellum, as the Iron Warriors knew from bitter experience that such tunnels were guaranteed to be known to the enemy, and would at best deliver the refugees into their waiting hands or at worst provide them a route for infiltration. Treachery, despite the best efforts of the Inquisition, couldn't be completely suppressed on Cadia, not when the Eye of Terror forever burned in the skies. Evacuation off-world was also impossible, not with the Black Templar fleet still holding orbits and how little time they had left.
Lady-General Xilloth pulled together as many of her Eternals as she could, while Anistav mustered eleven squads of Legionaries to his side, as well as that number again in Iron Warriors. Since his emergence from the Zone Mortalis, Sigismund had advanced in a more or less straight line toward the command citadel, not stopping as he crushed defense point after defense point, even after the decapitating strike had been successful.
Even as, elsewhere in the system, the warrior who thought of himself as Cerberus learned an awful truth and was taken prisoner by the Clonelord's greatest, most monstrous creation, Sigismund led the final push of the Black Templars into the capital city of Kasr Partox.
Power coursed through Sigismund as he killed, growing greater with every skull he claimed for Khorne. He had lost count of how many he had slain since emerging from the grave of his flagship, his eidetic memory straining under the weight of the Darkness pressing down on him. He saw the world around him as if through a blood-red, hazy filter, despite the enhancements the Dark Mechanicum and Khorne's own gifts had brought to his helmet's sensors.
He was close now. So close. His fate rested on a knife's edge, precariously balanced between ruin and greatness. One more push, just one more, and the goal he had pursued for ten thousand years would be within his reach.
The sound of ceramite boots and rolling engines pierced through the fog of his thoughts, and he turned to see a column of tanks and Space Marines in sea-green armor approach. The leading Astartes held up a power sword in his direction and called out in a powerful voice :
"Come face the Emperor's Judgment, Traitor !"
He recognized the rank markings on the warrior's armor. This was a Captain of the Sons of Horus. It had been a long time since had last killed one of those.
With a bellow of praise to the Lord of Skulls, Sigismund hurled himself at the enemy column.
The Captain was talented. Fast. Experienced. Everything the officers of the Sixteenth Legion always had been, since the days of the Great Crusade. His men were similarly skilled, and the Guardsmen supporting them were well-trained and disciplined enough not to break even in the face of the Destroyer.
It wasn't enough. Within ten minutes, all but one of the Imperial force were dead, and that last survivor was laying against the side of a gutted Chimera transport, her guts spilling on the ground where a glancing blow from Storm's Teeth had eviscerated her.
"You fought well, General," said Sigismund, kneeling down before her so that he could look her in the eye. For the first time since the start of the battle, he was actually wounded : a strike by the Sons of Horus Captain had pierced through his flank, and a small but steady trickle of his blood flowed down. He recognized her rank insignia as well : the Chemosian Eternals had been some of the best Astra Militarum units he had encountered during his Crusade.
"You and your men made worthy offerings to Khorne."
She glared at him through her cracked mask, defiant even as she bled out. Something flickered in her gaze then that gave Sigismund pause – something old and wrathful and utterly anathema.
"You will pay for what you have done," she whispered. "You will … be judged for your sins. Retribution comes for you, Destroyer. May you choke on … the ashes … of your ambition …"
She breathed her last. As she did, Sigismund felt a flicker of something he hadn't felt in so long, he couldn't identify it. There was a pressure in his chest, as if the tiniest dagger had found its way through his wound, passing through his blessings, his armor and his flesh and lodged itself into his heart – but the feeling passed, and he dismissed it. There were more important matters to address, now that he had ended the last of the Imperials' pitiful attempts at denying the Blood God his due.
"KHORNE !" the Destroyer called out, his head thrown back like a beast howling at the moon. "I have given you all that was asked for ! I offer you this world and all skulls upon it ! I ask for the reward that was promised !"
The offerings had been made. The ritual was complete. The Eye of Terror opened, and Khorne looked down upon the work of his Chosen and was pleased. Then, from the Eye came a burning tear that plunged through space with a roar of unspeakable rage that was heard from Cadia to Olympia, on the Ruinstorm's own threshold.
The fiery meteor crashed amidst the desolation of Kasr Partox with just as much strength as the wreck of the Eternal Crusader, despite being a tiny fraction of its size and mass – but that was only in the realm of matter, and those were the least of the laws that applied to this new threat to the planet. Immobile despite the earth trembling violently beneath his feet, Sigismund watched as a gigantic figure rose from the crater its arrival had left.
There, haloed in fury and infernal fire, was Rogal Dorn, Daemon Primarch of the Imperial Fists. For the first time since his banishment on Armageddon centuries prior, the Lord of the Seventh had returned to the Materium; for the first time since the Breaking, Sigismund was face-to-face with his gene-sire.
[Check the illustration by Nemris "We are become Destroyers of Worlds"]
The arrival of the Daemon Primarch sent psychic shock waves across the entire system, but nowhere was the effect worse than in Kasr Partox itself. The civilians who still cowered in the underground shelters of the Castellums were caught in the unending, burning rage and hatred of Rogal Dorn, which had reshaped an entire world within the Eye of Terror.
With the very weapons given to them by their gallant defenders, they turned on each other in an orgy of slaughter. Few had the strength of faith or will to resist the influence of the Daemon Primarch, and they couldn't hope to stand against the blood-crazed horde all around them.
Within the next few hours, hundreds of millions perished, and those who survived were so drenched in the blood of their own kin that nothing remained of the men and women they had been. When the Black Templars breached the gates of the shelters, what emerged were true followers of Khorne, their sanity blasted to bloody pieces by the mere presence of a Daemon Primarch kilometers above their heads.
If Sigismund knew of the atrocities taking place below his feet, he showed no sign of it. The lord of the Black Templars remained standing as the Primarch he had betrayed slowly walked toward him, every step leaving a bloody, burning footprint behind.
The first blow threw Storm's Teeth aside, along with Sigismund's right arm. The second broke through his breastplate and pulped over eighty percent of his internal organs. By the time the fourth blow landed, even the most optimistic Apothecary would have pronounced the Destroyer dead, but Rogal Dorn kept going.
Consumed by the thirst for a vengeance he had been denied for ten millennia, the Daemon Primarch tore apart the son he had once respected above all others. There was no dignity in the Destroyer's end : his flesh was rent asunder by the claws and fangs of the Daemon Primarch of Khorne, his remains battered and broken down until all that remained of Sigismund was a pool of steaming gore. Not even his skull was left intact, such was the fury of Dorn.
Vengeance, at last.
Rogal roared his exaltation at the skies. He could feel more of his treacherous sons all around him – soon their time would come as well. All would pay the price for defying him.
He sensed something below him. A ripple in the Aether, a disturbance that could only be picked up with senses that had revealed themselves to him following his transfiguration. He lowered his gaze to the puddle of gore that had been the so-called 'Destroyer' …
… and saw a crimson claw emerge from it, followed by a black, armoured arm, and then by a humanoid figure in black armor, forged not from ceramite but from the infernal metals of Khorne's own Realm.
It was Sigismund. Sigismund reborn, elevated into daemonhood and sent back to the Materium through a portal made of his own mortal remains. Only one being, one Power, could have done this, and the realization was the only thing that kept Dorn from annihilating his traitor First Captain once more long enough to actually notice what Sigismund was doing.
He was kneeling, like a knight before his liege, though he was missing his sword.
"Speak quickly, Sigismund. Khorne may have granted you immortality, but all that means is that I get the pleasure of killing you again and again."
"As you will it, lord Dorn."
There, kneeling before his Primarch and with his Black Templars watching in awe, Daemon Prince Sigismund began to speak a truth he had kept secret for thousands of years.
The Destroyer's Truth
It began on Esk'Al'Urien, after our defeat at Terra, after Guilliman's failure forced us to depart with our work undone and leave the fate of Mankind into the hands of those too weak to do what must be done. I had carried the pieces of your broken greatsword from the battle of the Cavea Ferrum, and as we settled onto our new homeworld and began to rebuild our forces, I considered how to reforge it.
I decided no mere mortal smith or tech-priest would suffice. I ventured into the wastes of the daemon world, following a call only I could hear, carrying only the pieces of Storm's Teeth and my own blade. Soon, I left the planet entirely, and arrived in the Realm of Khorne, beneath the shadow of his Throne of Skulls.
I fought for survival then, faced with foes that could, and would have, killed me without a single thought to any damage my loss might have done to the cause of our shared god. I fought without pause, without respite, without mercy and without remorse, for nothing more than survival, all other thoughts forgotten.
It was glorious, sire.
Eventually, I found myself reaching the very base of Khorne's throne. There, amidst the skulls of the very first beings to have ever been slain in war, worn so smooth by eternity's passing that nothing could be distinguished of their nature, there was a passage leading beneath the Throne of Skulls. Still heeding the call that had brought me here, I descended into a burning underworld, where bound daemons forged the blades of Khorne's infinite legions.
Any of these smiths could have remade Storm's Teeth, but I kept walking, going deeper and deeper. There were no guards, for only the true servants of Khorne could ever reach this place, and only they could survive so close to the Blood God's own divine presence. Paradoxically, the deeper I went the closer I felt to the Lord of Skulls, though the pact forged in the first Blood Crusade still held, sparing me from the madness that would have consumed any other mortal soul, whether clad in human, post-human or xenos flesh.
In the deepest chamber, I found what I was looking for. I found the source of the call.
I found Khorne's own blacksmith, chained to its forge with eight chains made of the Blood God's displeasure. Two of these had already been broken, the results of bargains struck during previous moves of the Great Game of Chaos. Six remained intact, humming with whispered fury.
The prisoner was a daemon of singular power. It claimed to have been born from the first moment a mortal hand shaped a tool for the purpose of killing. It called itself Sa'ra'am, the Daemon Beneath, the Knife's Edge, the Laughter of War, and a litany of other titles that did nothing to hide the fact that it was a prisoner. I told it as much, and its fury was as great as it was impotent, for the chains that still held it prevented it from doing anything else than using the forge it had been given after being dragged here by the Blood God himself, long before the False Emperor had revealed Himself on Terra.
It would reforge the blade, stronger than ever, but in exchange, I'd pay a two-fold price. I asked what that price would be, and it told me that the first would be to use the restored Storm's Teeth to break one of its remaining chains, that its Song of Obliteration might reach beyond its prison once more. And the second would be that I listen to it as it told me a secret which it claimed would either drive me to untold greatness or lead to me to unspeakable ruin.
I agreed to the bargain, and after the echoes of the forge and the chain's breaking had faded, it told me the promised truth.
It told me of how, after the purge of the Legion of the weak-willed and the great victory on Istvaan V, you began to worry of the uncontrollable rage that spread across our ranks. Of how you went to your brother Guilliman, and asked for his guidance. It told me how Guilliman shared with you the lore he had gleaned in the days before the Heresy, and how the Blood God could be appeased through ritual slaughter.
I knew all of this already, of course, for I was at the forefront of the first Blood Crusade, when we reaved the weak worlds of the Imperium asunder to prove to Khorne that we were more valuable to him if he spared us from being consumed by the inferno of his wrath, sealing our pact with him in blood.
But Sa'ra'am told me something else, something which had been hidden to all. Within the knowledge Guilliman gave you was a trap, a snare laid by his power as Dark Master of Chaos. By sealing our Legion's covenant with Khorne in this manner, so too were you bound to the Avenging Son.
When you led our Legion against the Iron Cage and broke us against the defenses of the Lord of Iron, I realized that your actions were at least partially driven by that leash, tugged by the Dark Master of Chaos even from his stasis tomb. He would use us to keep the Imperium busy and distracted, bleed us of our strength until nothing was left, all to serve his own ends.
And this, I could not tolerate. I refused to see our Legion be reduced to unknowing slaves, puppets dancing on the strings of a corpse-tyrant. We had rebelled against the Imperium to avoid this, and it would not be our fate, not while I drew breath.
If the Legion could not be free, then there would be no Legion at all. From this came the Breaking.
Rage was the key. Rage is the sacrament of Khorne, the crucible and the reward of his chosen. Through your rage towards me, you could ignore the attempts of Guilliman to command you. But it wasn't enough to break the chain.
I made a pact with Khorne then. I offered the greatest of Blood Crusades, ten thousand years of strife across the galaxy in the name of his glory, culminating with this war, and the sacrifice of both my flagship and my own skull to the altar of war.
I did not know that the Blood God would raise me up anew. My own life was a more than acceptable price to free you from the Dark Master's control.
And now it is done, my liege. Now you are free, and so it is time for the Seventh Legion to be one once more.
All hail Rogal Dorn, the son of Khorne. All hail the Imperial Fists and the Age of Blood.
With his tale over, the Destroyer looked the Daemon Primarch in the eye, while around them the Black Templars fell to their knees in emulation of their lord. Seconds stretched by, painfully slowly, as Dorn absorbed the revelations of his former First Captain. Deep inside, some part of him that had been silenced for thousands of years knew all that Sigismund had told him as true. His brother had used him, had deceived him, had sought to enslave him.
"Guilliman lives," he said at last. "I heard the echoes of his awakening all the way to Esk'Al'Urien. His armies march, to lay siege to the home of the foolish Lord of Iron and break the cage he built around Ultramar."
"I will have words with my brother, and make it clear his deeds have made him unfit to rule in my eyes. Through war and battle, the question of which of us shall lead Mankind's future shall be decided, as it should be."
"As for you, my treacherous, most devoted son … Your skull and soul belong to Khorne. Until the day you fail him, I shall hold back my punishment for your actions; but on the day your blade is no longer judged worthy, the fullness of my wrath shall descend upon you."
"Now, let us finish making this world into an altar to the God of War, in celebration of our liberation ! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD ! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE !"
Following the death of Imperial high command and the manifestation of Rogal Dorn, it became obvious that the battle for Kasr Partox was lost. The Imperial ships in orbit conducted desperate evacuations of the troops still on the planet, taking advantage of the confusion caused by the destruction of the Eternal Crusader, but many were left at the mercy of the rampaging Khornate hordes. The war of Kasr Partox was over, and the forces of Chaos had claimed a great victory, not just in the war for Cadia but in the Great Game as well.
For the Seventh Legion, long sundered by the Destroyer, its Primarch too obsessed with hunting Sigismund to give much thought to matters beyond the Eye of Terror, had been forged anew, and the galaxy would tremble once more before its might.
AN : Kept you waiting, huh ?
There are several things I want to discuss about this chapter. First, let's start with the simplest : the world of Hakka, and the practice of Khornate cultists ritually binding to each other through blood, comes from a short story in the magazine Warhammer Monthly, issue 49. I had to go through all 48 previous issues to find it and the name of the world once the idea for the Bloodgors came to mind.
Secondly, Krieg. Yes, they belong to Khorne in this timeline. I dare you to tell me it doesn't fit. I thought to write the scene of Colonel Jurten's fall to Chaos, but then I realized writing someone who just nuked his own planet into oblivion might not be the best thing to do for my peace of mind.
Also, my plan is for the Death Korps to be for Khorne what the Sisters of the Ebon Chalice will be for Slaanesh later : a "mortal" army dedicated to that particular Chaos God, above the common riff-raff of the Lost and the Damned and Traitor Guard. I have ideas for Nurgle and Tzeentch's own armies, but if you have your own don't hesitate to suggest them to me. That stuff is still very much up for change.
Thirdly, inspiration is a funny thing. In the Index Astartes for the Imperial Fists, I wrote (years ago) that Sigismund's Black Blade was reforged with the help of "Khorne's own daemon blacksmith".
Did you see it ? Blacksmith. Singular. But as far as I know, there is no mention of such a being in any 40K material. And Sa'ra'am was mentioned in Slaves to Darkness, the Horus Heresy novel which came out in 2018, years after I wrote that Index. And so, when writing Sigismund's reveal, a random typo I made years ago led to me deciding that in this timeline, the source of the Obliterator Virus did not escape being enslaved by the Dark Gods by hiding in the core of Sarum.
Gods, I love writing.
Recently, I have been reading recent issues of the White Dwarf magazines, especially the Flashpoint sections, which describe particular battlezones of the 40k universe. It has led me to wonder : do you think I should do less "new units" in this story (like the Horde of Rage faction in this one) and more "background/homebrew" variants of existing ones (like Krieg) ? Would that be more interesting ? I mean, designing new units is fun, don't get me wrong. But since I don't have a company to produce the corresponding minis, alternate backgrounds and variants might be more interesting. Let me know your opinion on this.
Then there is the big reveal that Sigismund has been loyal to his Primarch all along (kinda). This is another one of these moments I have had in my head for year, and I hope you enjoyed it. The idea came from the theories that in canon, Kharn's madness isn't as random as it seems, and that his actions at Skalathrax were very deliberate (perhaps he saw that the Twelfth and Third Legions would kill each other on that world and sought to end the fighting himself). Since it seems we might get a World Eaters codex at some point, we'll see if there are more revelations on that front. At the very least, RH!Dorn got a "model" before Canon!Angron did.
No Cain this chapter, which is a shame, I know. The next one (which hopefully won't take five months to write, since I plan to focus on the RH for now) will be much more focused on our favorite Commissar (yes, I know some of you prefer Gaunt. I prefer Cain, deal with it.).
Something he is grateful for, I am sure. You know, I have searched high and low, and there is a shockingly small number of fanfic with Ciaphas Cain online. My plans to write Ciaphas Cain : Warmaster of Chaos are still in the works, of course (I think I will finish Prince of the Eye before starting another story), but if you have any ideas for a story of your own with the greatest self-proclaimed coward of the 41st Millennium, then by the God-Emperor, go ahead and write it ! We could all use some more laughs in our lives.
Thanks as always to Jaenera Targaryen for beta-reading this, and most of all, thanks to Nemris for his amazing artwork. The poor guy had to wait five months between me asking him for it and me contacting him again, yet his work remains as beautiful as ever. Check the rest of his work out on DeviantArt !
Oh, and unless something dramatic happens in the next few hours, you can expect another update on another story soon. Something which has long slept shall awaken again ...
Zahariel out.
Edit : I had forgotten about this :
To be continued in
The Cadian Apocalypse
Part Three : Death of Heroes