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 Ciaphas Cain.
Hero of the Imperium. Liberator of Perlia. Savior of more worlds than I care to remember. Agent of the Inquisition. Operative of the Alpha Legion. Commissar-Castellan of Cadia.
My name and face are plastered on recruitment posters all across the Segmentum and beyond. I have fought Tyranid Hive-Tyrants, executed self-proclaimed Warmasters of Chaos, killed Traitor Marines, witnessed the banishment of Daemon Princes and the destruction of worlds. I have walked on Holy Terra and survived the intrigues of the High Lords.
I am a liar. A fraud. A coward. And I am so, so very afraid.
The Times of Ending are here, and I am afraid.
I should be used to fear. After a century of this life, You would think so, wouldn't You ? And yet, here I am, kneeling in this small chapel within the command bunker of Kasr Tyrok, trying to stop myself from going mad with terror. Everyone else has cleared it without me needing to even ask, as they do every time I come down here. They all think I'm praying to You for clarity, for strength, for the safety of the souls of all those who have already been killed.
They are wrong. I am here because I am going to break under the pressure, because I need to let the mask down and stop pretending to be something I am not for a moment.
Still, prayer certainly can't hurt at this point. The other side certainly aren't shy about calling on their own gods to help them win their battles. And they have the gall to call us weak …
God-Emperor, I know I haven't been the most devout of Your subjects. I haven't spent as much time in Your churches as I probably could have, and definitely more in bars and gambling dens than I should have. In my defense, it has been around seventy years since I last set foot in a bordello for reasons not related to my duty.
All of my life, I believed that You had more important things to care about than I. But now, here I stand, on the threshold of Hell, faced with the hordes that took Your sacrifice, and so much more, to push back the last time they threatened Humanity.
So many have died already. So many more still will, no matter what I do.
Please, grant me Your guidance in this hour. Not for me, but for all those beautiful fools who believe in the lie of Cain the Hero.
I am not that man. I never was. He never existed. All I am is Ciaphas Cain, and it isn't enough.
So please. I beg of You, my Emperor. If You feel any gratitude for what I have done in Your name, however reluctantly it was done, then please …
Help me save them.
Times of Ending : The Cadian Apocalypse
Part Three : Death of Heroes
With the descent of the New Marines, the battle of Cadia has entered a new phase. Cut off from the rest of the Imperium by the Warp Storms raised by the Dark Angels, the defenders of the Cadian Gate must now make their stand against the fruit of thousands of years of the Clonelord's vile genetic experiments, while sinister plots unfold across the system that could forever change the course of the Long War. A darkness not seen since days long lost to myth has come to the galaxy, but these brave heroes are unaware that it is but the prelude of what is to come – for, far from the Cadian Gate, three Primarchs still have yet to reach their father's Throneroom …
The fall of Kasr Partox had dealt a terrible blow to the defenders of the Cadian Gate. Though the forces of the Archenemy had initially found some success in their attack, it had been believed by the common troopers that the fortress-worlds would be able to hold against the Black Crusade for months, or even years. Instead, Kasr Partox had fallen in barely a month, and while Imperial high command stamped hard on any rumor, there were still stories circulating of the bloody daemons that had been involved, including the infamous Destroyer and his infernal progenitor, the accursed Rogal Dorn.
Of course, Imperial high command knew the full extent of what had happened on Kasr Partox, as the defenders of the sister-world to Cadia had made sure to inform their peers of the peril they faced, despite knowing that there could be no reinforcements sent. The last Castellums still standing on Kasr Partox were, according to the last communications which had made it through the increasing Warp turbulences, preparing to meet their end nobly against the Khornate hordes. The only bright spot, such as it was, was that the destruction of the Eternal Crusader had left behind considerable orbital debris, even taking into account the bigger pieces which had fallen onto the planet. As a result, the evacuation and redeployment of the Chaos armies responsible would be significantly delayed after the last Imperial defenders had been defeated – no one truly believed they could prevail.
Battle continued across the rest of the system. On Solar Mariatus, the forces of the Dark Mechanicum had pushed into the underground forges of the frozen world, leading to brutal tunnel warfare being waged between the tech-priests of Mars and those of Chaos. After the third incident of a long-range vox-receiver killing its operators after being infected by scrap-code, the order was given to stop listening to transmissions from Solar Mariatus, at least until the strategic situation had evolved.
The fortress-worlds of Kasr Holn and Kasr Sonned were besieged by the Black Legion's hordes of mutants and heretics, but the Word Bearers of the Illuminating Dawn Chapter deployed between the two planets alongside their garrisons of Astra Militarum troops and Fourth Legion overseers were holding for now. It appeared that, for now, the Black Crusade's commanders simply wanted to keep those forces contained while their plans for Cadia itself progressed. The Navy complex of Vigilatum had yet to come under attack by the Chaos fleet, and while the hive-world of Macharia was suffering a veritable plague of cult uprisings, it too had been spared from direct assault by the invaders. It was speculated by Imperial high command that the Black Crusade desired to seize the food production facilities of Macharia for itself, as investigations in the Eye of Terror (performed at great cost) had made it clear that such facilities were rare in the extreme within the spatial anomaly, and uncontaminated food and water worth as much if not more than ammunition for the Traitors' guns.
This still left the Cadian defenders to deal with the Black Legion's latest horrifying surprise : the three Redoubts which had landed on the planet and disgorged the Astartes contained within. To the Black Legion, these creations of Fabius Bile were called New Marines, but the Imperials soon came up with different appellations : the Defiler Marines, the Abominations, the Bile-born, and a hundred others.
Within days of the Redoubts' landing, the situation across Cadia had altered dramatically. The estimates of Imperial logisticians concerning the number of New Marines each Redoubt carried turned out to have been overly optimistic : in total, around thirty thousand of the Clonelord's transhuman children had been brought to Cadia. It was a strength worthy of a Legion in the days of the Great Crusade, when the Space Marines had gathered in the tens of thousands and brought the galaxy to heel in the Emperor's name, before the Roboutian Heresy had forever changed the fabric of the Imperium and forced Humanity on the defensive, scattering the Astartes into smaller forces save for exceptional circumstances.
It was fortunate for the Cadian defenders that the New Marines lacked the organization and discipline of a true Legion. If they had been trained to fight as soldiers rather than warriors, and assuming performance equal to that of a loyalist Space Marine and that the commanders were willing to accept any sacrifice, the tactical simulations of the Iron Warriors showed that the planet would have fallen within the week, though doing so would have cost all but a tenth of their number – the Iron Warriors and Cadians hadn't spent ten thousand years turning the planet into a death trap for nothing.
The lack of equipment of the New Marines also played a considerable part. The Bile-born were each wearing standard suits of power armor, mass-produced within the Hell-Forges of the Eye of Terror that had aligned themselves with the Black Legion. Not only were these suits, on average, of inferior quality to the wargear of the loyalist Space Marines, they also failed to take into account the unique physiologies of individual New Marines. The rest of their equipment was also unimpressive, though still of a class far above what common Chaos cultists could scavenge. They had emerged from their stasis coffins with bolters and chainswords, but no transports, tanks, bikes, or other specialist weaponry. Some claimed transports from the other Black Legion forces already deployed, or captured it from Imperial forces caught in the open, but it was obvious that they had been deployed primarily as infantry, without the kind of infrastructure a true Legion would have taken for granted.
"The subject's body was recovered in the trenches around Kasr Tyrok, prior to the withdrawal of all Imperial elements within the Castellum's walls. He was killed in action by the battle-brothers of the Alpha Legion alongside elements of the Valhallan 597th and Commissar-Castellan Cain himself, during the extraction of the Ordinatus Manifest Fury [for more details on the engagement, see after-action report IXYAB-45, classification beta-emerald]. The dissection was performed by me, with support from Magos Biologis Demetrius Vex and his servitors.
Genetic analysis of this particular specimen has returned interesting results. The mixing of different gene-seeds is a known heresy of the Clonelord, but this subject appears to have been created using a combination of Eighteenth Legion (explaining the tint of his eyes), Fifteenth Legion (likely related to the psychic abilities he was recorded as using on the field), and Sixteenth Legion's genetic material. I believe the latter element was used as a stabilizing base of some sorts, a canvas on which the rest of the abominable work was performed.
Like the other specimens, this one wore standardized power armor showing a marked lack of adaptation to his unique deformities. In this case, the bones of the left shoulder showed signs of gigantism extending to the rest of the arm, which must have caused considerable pain and stiffness in the limb, severely impacting the subject's efficiency on the battlefield. I have discussed the matter with a Techmarine of the Fourth Legion, and he has confirmed my suspicions that such an adaptation would have been the matter of few hours of work for a skilled artisan at most.
The subject showed little traces of physical mutations beyond the previously mentioned abnormal growth of his left arm. His brain had been damaged by the method of his death, but examination of the remains of his brain matter have revealed abnormalities, the impact of which on cognition and emotional stability I can only guess about without more intact specimens, or even alive ones – something I am well aware is unlikely in the extreme to happen anytime soon.
If I were to speculate, however, I would say that these abnormalities might be the reason for the 'Bile-born's' observed fanatical dedication to their creator. Mere hypno-conditioning and more conventional indoctrination could of course explain much of that behavior, but I suspect the Clonelord went further in order to ensure the loyalty of his creations.
I must stress that this is purely theoretical, and of little practical use besides. Fabius Bile has had thousands of years to perfect his control on his creations. It is supremely unlikely that the 'Roboute scenario' some of my peers have imagined will ever come to pass, unless something drastic happens within the hierarchy of the Black Legion."
Excerpt from the (abridged) report of Caractacus Mott, Inquisitorial Savant, on the Heretic Astartes sub-category commonly known as 'Bile-born'
Given the size of the Redoubts and the immense amount of resources that must have gone into their construction and the creation of the Bile-born, it seemed impossible that this was by mistake. The presence of observation servitors alongside the New Marines reinforced the belief of the Imperial commanders that the entire battle zone was being treated as a giant experiment by the mad Arch-Renegade of the Emperor's Children : a way to test his creations in real battle conditions and see which ones performed best. Alpha Legionnaires present at high command meetings confirmed that this was likely the case, based on the information they had on the Black Crusade in general and Fabius Bile in particular. Of course, this information was kept from the troops, who certainly didn't need to know the enemy commander was using them to test the skills of his latest demented creations.
But while the New Marines lacked some of the strengths of their predecessors, they had their own unholy gifts to compensate, bestowed upon them not by the Ruinous Powers but by the forbidden alchemy of the Primogenitor. The Imperial forces that had been operating outside the Castellums, harassing the Black Legion hordes and cutting their supply lines, were now faced with overwhelming transhuman numbers. Even the old, Heresy-era tactics developed to deal with the Traitor Legions were useless, for they hadn't accounted for seemingly random abilities the New Marines displayed. In some cases, the warbands of roaming Bile-born were slaughtered by the more experienced and disciplined Imperials, while in others the servants of the Emperor were killed to the last, with many more engagements falling somewhere in between.
The New Marines had been deployed without a clear order of battle, and seemed to have their own objective : to prove their worth to the Clonelord, whom they regarded as a mix between a father figure and creator god. In a manner reminiscent of the way Orks behaved, they sought the greatest challenges, and while this drew most of them to the Castellums, those loyalist forces still operating outside the fortresses soon became hunted by thousand-strong wandering bands of New Marines, along with whatever Black Legion troops they could bully into supporting them. Only forces that could move fast enough to avoid being caught, or who had enough transhuman power of their own to overcome the New Marines in small groups, could hope to survive in those conditions.
Individual Companies of Space Marines were thus able to continue operations across Cadia, as did motorized Regiments with enough firepower. With the vox-network heavily damaged by Warp interference and the ongoing destruction of orbital relays, these units were forced to operate entirely on their own, doing their best to inflict as much damage upon the enemy as they could.
Even Knights and Titans were not completely safe from the New Marines, as was proven when a battle-group of the Legio Kulisaetai was swarmed by other two thousand Bile-born and around fifty Black Legion tanks. The Astartes rushed the Titans and climbed them despite the casualties they took in their charge, before hacking their way inside and slaughtering the crew of the thirteen God-Machines. Within the week, half of them walked again, their machine-spirits forced into submission by elements of the Dark Mechanicum.
Other battles went better for the Imperium. The World Eaters of the 59th Assault Company struck at the Black Legion forces advancing onto Kasr Tyrok for days, until the New Marines among its ranks lost patience and pursued the sons of Angron all the way to the Caducades Sea. Clad in void-proof power armor, the World Eaters walked down into the depths, and such was the fury of the Bile-born that all of them with functioning helmets pursued them. On the ocean floor, the 59th Assault Company turned back to fight its pursuers, supported by eleven Regiments of the Knossosian Harpooners. The resulting battle would last for weeks, as the two forces fought an invisible war in the darkness beneath the waves, keeping hundreds of New Marines from reinforcing the siege of the Castellum.
The Knossosian Harpooners
Originating from the Ocean World of Knossos, the Harpooners are extremely specialized among the untold millions of Regiments of the Astra Militarum. Knossos is a world entirely covered in water, and Humanity's presence is concentrated within a few cities on artificial islands which double as landing platforms for the heavy cargo haulers which send the planet's tithe of processed fish and alga to feed other worlds. This would qualify Knossos as an agri-world, if not for the presence of the Charbydae Megalodons, immense shark-like creatures which reign at the top of Knossos' food chain, despite Man's best efforts to exterminate them.
Such is the strength and resilience of the Charbydae Megalodons that wiping the species out completely would require the use of chemical weapons which would cripple the planet's biosphere and render it useless to the Imperium. Therefore, the harvest-arks of the Knossosian people are defended from the Megalodons and other predators by human soldiers, with the best of the survivors being inducted into the ranks of the Harpooners. On occasion, the world has also provided recruits for the Twelfth Legion, including the second-in-command of the 59th Assault Company, Lieutenant Manawa Veltram, who would end up assuming overall command of the underwater conflict after the death of his Captain.
All Harpooners are equipped with amphibious wargear and trained to fight in underwater environments. On the overwhelming majority of the galaxy's battlefield, such specialization is useless, but due to the sheer size of the Imperium there are always wars where the Harpooners are useful. The planet's ties to the World Eaters guarantees that the lives of their Regiments are well-spent, though the hostile environments in which they are deployed often mean that they must win entire wars against breeds of aquatic xenos or other sea-dwelling human cultures with only minimal support.
The eleven Regiments of the Caducades Sea were all survivors of a conflict against a tendril of Hive-Fleet Leviathan which had taken root on another Ocean World after being called there by a grotesquely mutated Genestealer Cult. The war there had lasted for over a decade, ending only with the arrival of the 59th Assault Company of the World Eaters. No sooner had the Tyranids been defeated that the call for muster at Cadia had come, and the sons of Angron had ensured the Harpooners accompany them.
The trenches that stretched outside of the Castellums' walls were abandoned when it became obvious that the New Marines could simply swarm them with sheer weight of transhuman numbers, making contesting them with Guardsmen impossible. The Imperial forces withdrew to within the relative safety of the walls, but many warmachines and soldiers were left behind, surrounded by the New Marines and the hordes of mutants and cultists who had landed in the previous waves of the Black Legion's attack. A few sorties were launched to recover critical assets, such as the stranded Ordinatus of the Adeptus Mechanicus, but by and large, those unfortunate were left to their fates and told to sell their lives dearly. Most did, though a few instead broke their oaths and joined the invaders, damning their immortal souls in order to survive as traitors for a few more days.
The polar fortress of Kasr Torr fell within three days of the New Marines' arrival, after one of the New Marines opened some manner of shadow-based Warp portal directly past the walls, cutting right through the wards of the Castellum. This was done using some sort of trans-dimensional ability that was later believed to be the result of a unique mutation of Nineteenth Legion's gene-seed. In a handful of minutes, the New Marines had slaughtered the crew of several gun batteries and opened a path for the hundreds of others waiting outside, leading to the total collapse of the Imperial lines too fast for any reinforcement to arrive in time.
Those who knew anything about the Raven Guard shuddered when they heard the news, and gave thanks to the Emperor that this was the extent of this creature's powers – and more importantly, than it was dead. Despite its limitations, it might very well have turned the tide of the war on its own had it not been slain by the defenders of Kasr Torr in a last-ditch suicidal charge. Upon receiving the news, Commissar-Castellan Cain ordered that a vigil be held for the heroes of the 498th Cadian Shock Troopers who had perished in slaying the New Marine, and posthumously awarded each of the soldiers with the Cadian Cross, the highest honor it was in his authority to grant.
Every other Castellum was besieged. With their encircling positions solidified by the reinforcements of the New Marines, the Black Legion began to land more valuable troops and heavy artillery from orbit into secure areas. The Cadians had long prepared for that kind of warfare, but the addition of the New Marines' unholy powers into the mix made the war far more complicated.
Among the troops deployed in the second stage of the Black Crusade were thousands of Bile's infamous New Men, whose existence was obscene in a different way than that of the Bile-born Astartes already defiling Cadia with their presence. Where the Bile-born were twisted images of Space Marines, the New Men were corrupted versions of baseline Mankind, altered by the Clonelord in order to one day replace the entire species as the rulers of the galaxy. They were cruel, sociopathic, prone to ritualized cannibalism and utterly devoted to their Primogenitor.
They were also viciously cunning and able fighters, who had sharpened their skills fighting each other for their maker's attention, as well as all the monsters of the Eye of Terror, up to and including Chaos Marines and Neverborn. They were more used to ambushes and raids than sieges and formal battles, but they were quick to adapt, and helped the New Marines organize the hordes of Chaos chaff that had been poured onto Cadia more efficiently.
His name is Markus.
He is the Benefactor's son. He loves the Benefactor, and he hates him too. Loves him for the strength that was given, hates him for the pain and horror that came with the gift.
Markus remembers little of his life before Cadia. He remembers needles and knives, bright lights and emotionless voices droning on. He remembers knowledge pouring into his skull, and his body being cut apart while he felt every incision with excruciating sensibility.
He remembers the voice of the Benefactor telling him his name, just before the dark and the cold which only ended here, on Cadia.
The Benefactor is watching. He must prove himself, must earn his respect. He must show that he isn't a mistake, isn't a waste of the Benefactor's time. He remembers the smile on the Benefactor's face just before he went into the not-sleep of stasis, and he wants that again, more than anything else.
He runs up the slope, screaming. There are men in front of him, wearing uniforms he recognizes from hypno-teaching. Astra Militarum. Cadia Kasrkin. They were caught in the Rezla Mountains during the withdrawal, some part of him monitoring the tactical disposition of troops on this front notes. Judging by the amount of snow-covered bodies his boots have crushed on the way here, they have shown great resourcefulness to have survived this long.
It won't save them from Markus. He leaps above their firing line and lands directly among them. His chainsword swings and takes off a head and half a torso in a single swipe. His free hand clings around a skull and squeeze -
Something tears in his arm. Markus doesn't know what it is – he lacks the knowledge to understand that his hypercharged muscles have given out under the combined strain of intense physical exertion and the punishingly cold temperature of the peaks. His limb falls to his side, unresponsive, nothing but a flare of agony that makes his stumble.
The other Kasrkin don't hesitate to take advantage of his distraction, training and experience overcoming the shock of the attack and the death of their comrades. They turn, they aim -
They shoot, and Markus dies. His last thought before a las-bolt pierces through his eye-lense and boils his brain is that he has failed the Benefactor.
Skalagrim Phar sighed and cut off the feed. Another failure, another New Marine who hadn't made the cut. It was a cruel test, even a wasteful one, for so many of the New Marines could have accomplished so much more if they had been prepared. But Bile was right, in this as in so many other things. The galaxy was cruel, and the warriors who would conquer it couldn't expect to always be at their best. If they couldn't survive Cadia with the gifts they had been given – and those were plentiful – then they weren't what the Consortium, what Humanity, needed for its new generation of transhuman protectors.
Around the Traitor Apothecary of the Sons of Horus, the observation chamber of the Pulchritudinous was a hive of activity. Almost every apprentice of the Clonelord had answered the summons of their old master : nearly two hundred Apothecaries, with representatives from every Legion – yes, even the Fifteenth. Poor Penthu had joined the Consortium after his mind had broken under the strain of watching so many Aspirants turned to dust by Ahriman's Rubric, but his goal of saving his Legion had been forgotten after thousands of years of experiments and cullings.
Like him, every Apothecary was monitoring a series of screen showing what the observation servitors down on the surface of Cadia were recording and transmitting. Even with a dozen screens per Apothecary, there weren't nearly enough of them to follow every New Marine on Cadia : instead, the members of the Consortium were to use their own judgment to decide which of the tens of thousands of Bile's creations they were going to follow.
The other screens of Skalagrim's monitoring station still showed several other New Marines, but none of them were engaged at the moment. He took a deep breath, and looked around, searching for – there.
"You," he barked, summoning a pale and thinly thing clad in black rags and wearing a respirator mask closer. "Is he still at it ?"
He didn't need to precise who he was talking about. Not when talking to one of these mutants, and probably not even if he had been talking to another Astartes. The shadow of their common master loomed large over them all, even after days of absence.
"The master hasn't left the room, great one," hissed the wretched creature. "Nor has he sent any word."
"I see," he sighed.
"The master is not to be disturbed -"
"I know, I know." He waved its words aside dismissively, suppressing a flash of irritation before it pushed him to break its neck to silence it. The creatures were plentiful, breeding like vermin in the dark corners of the ship, but you never knew if this was one of Bile's favourites, and training replacements up to his exacting standards was always a pain. "Go away now."
It scurried back in the shadows, leaving Skalagrim alone with his thoughts.
According to his armor's internal chronometer (which admittedly wasn't worth much after so long in the Eye of Terror), it had been thirteen days since the incident in Bile's personal observation chamber. Thirteen days since all but one of Fabius' clones in the Black Crusade had been killed by an unknown assassin; thirteen days since that one remaining head of the Clonelord had locked himself up in one of his personal laboratories with the broken body of Melusine.
The Black Crusade was continuing in his absence, but things were becoming … tense. Skalagrim didn't know if what had happened on Kasr Partox had been part of the plan, but somehow he doubted it. Fabius' association with the Blood Angels had ended a long time ago, but he didn't think Rogal Dorn had forgotten it, or how it had led to the War of Woe between the Seventh and Ninth Legions.
After millennia in the Consortium, there were few things left that scared Skalagrim, but a Daemon Primarch of Khorne was certainly one of those. And then there were the Dark Angels. Their plot with the Archduke had failed, which was good where the Black Legion was concerned since it meant the New Marines would get a proper testing, and bad because there was no telling how the hypocrites of the First Legion would react to being humiliated like this.
They needed Bile's leadership, now more than ever, to ensure that the Black Crusade didn't crumble, that they didn't lose their momentum. But the Clonelord was too busy trying to save the life of his firstborn daughter, and they didn't have any others left. All the clones that had been in gestation had been killed, and it didn't look like the work of the assassin who'd wounded Melusine.
Bile's primary enforcer was on the case, but until then, it fell to the Consortium to pick up the slack and ensure their master's vision for the Black Crusade was followed. He hoped they'd be up to the task.
"Another failure, Skalagrim ?" called out one of the other Chaos Marines in the room.
Like many of the Consortium, his armor bore no signs of his former allegiance, its colors having been supplanted by the black and gold of the Black Legion, with its emblem – the eightfold star of Chaos surrounding a silver skull – having replaced any previous insignia. Skalagrim had his suspicions as to the other Apothecary's origins, but it was of little import in any case.
"Yes, Gorel. Yours ? You had found a promising candidate last time we talked."
"Still alive, as a matter of fact," replied Gorel with a tight smile. "He just wiped out an entire squad of Iron Warriors and a company of their Guardsmen pets by himself, so I called him back to the Redoubt for now. I think I may have identified another army-killer, if he survives long enough to make it back."
Skalagrim grunted. That was far from certain : many New Marines succumbed to the strain of their abilities once they unleashed them on the battlefield. Testing these new gifts was the whole point of the exercise, after all, so as to identify the most promising ones and correct the design flaws in the next generation. It still boggled his mind to consider the amount of effort Bile had put into this project – blood of the Gods, the Primogenitor had more or less created a whole Legion of whole cloth, and he was using it as a testing bed !
He wasn't sure whether that was madness or genius. In the end, he supposed that would depend on whether it worked or not. Hopefully he would still be alive to see History's judgment with his own eyes.
"What kind of ability does that one have ?"
"I am not sure," admitted Gorel with a shrug. "It looks like some sort of instantaneous, controlled flesh-shaping : arms turning into bladed whips that can cut through ceramite and then back into arms again, that sort of thing. Building an armor appropriate for him will be a nightmare, that's for sure."
"That will be the Mechanicum's problem, not ours." He glanced at his screens again. "What's more pressing to me is what we'll do if they decide they don't like following our orders."
"They are all loyal, you know that," said Gorel incredulously. "I don't think they can be anything else."
"They are loyal to him, Gorel, and him alone. But that's not really what worries me. Realistically speaking, it is impossible for the indoctrination processes to have gone perfectly on all of them, especially with the amount of variation between them. Let's say one percent of them all are gifted with tactical-scale abilities; that they are, as you, 'army-killers'. We have deployed over thirty thousand New Marines on Cadia; that means three hundred army-killers. What are the odds that at least one of them will have a faulty conditioning, or even just refuse to accept orders not directly from the Chief Apothecary ? We don't know, because we have no data on this."
Gorel shrugged again. "If it happens, then we'll send the Eldest to deal with them. No matter how strong Bile made them, the New Marines cannot deal with that."
"… Maybe. No, you're right. But what if the Eldest is unavailable ? Mark my words, we are walking a thin line there. For all of our sakes, I hope Bile hurries up and finishes what he's doing."
Days turned to weeks, and the war ground on, with millions more dying on either side. Kasr Derth fell, as did Kasr Gehr and Kasr Luten, and a dozen more lesser strongholds. Each time, only a fraction of the Imperial troops managed to punch through the Black Legion's encirclement and escape the subsequent pursuit to keep fighting. Entire Regiments with distinguished battle honors and histories stretching thousands of years were wiped out to the last man, or fused with the survivors of other decimated units before being sent back to the front. Medicae facilities filled up with wounded that were at the mercy of ruthlessly efficient triage, while factories manned by stern-faced Cadians and sterner overseers continued to churn out ammunition and replacement parts for the Imperial warmachine.
Yet despite the grimness of the situation, not all hope was lost, as the propaganda broadcasts of the Commissariat made sure everyone knew. The Black Legion was paying a heavy price for each Castellum it took, both in New Marines and conventional forces. According to the verdict of the Fourth Legion's cold-blooded analytic models, if the Imperials could keep up or increase the rate of attrition, there would be a point when the heretics could no longer sustain the war effort. Cadia would be left in ruins, but the Black Crusade would be stopped dead. The Imperium would be able to rebuild. The Cadian Gate would hold.
So the broadcasts repeated every day, often in the strong and confident voice of Commissar-Castellan Cain himself, although as atmospheric conditions continued to degrade due to the amount of dust and ash being kicked up and vox-transmissions became more and more unreliable, his own communiques were eventually limited to Kasr Tyrok and a handful of the closest Castellums.
Of course, the Bile-born had shown that they could make a mockery of the sons of Perturabo's predictions, and they weren't the only ones the loyalists had to worry about. As Fabius Bile himself stopped making personal appearances in the Black Crusade's leadership, Grand Master Nephalor of the Dark Angels began to make moves of his own. The discovery of the Archduke of Cysgorog Korahael had thrown a wrench into his plans to bring down the entire defense of Cadia from within, and the humiliation dealt to his Legion had to be repaid.
The Lord of Stars contacted his Sorcerers, who had made planetfall on Cadia itself days ago. The Dark Angels' presence on Cadia was on another continent than the one where the command center of Ciaphas Cain, the individual responsible for Korahael's defeat, was located, but such distances meant little to the dread magisters of the First Legion. At the command of Nephalor, the nine Chaos Sorcerers who had descended upon Cadia Secundus paused their works near the Pylon Fields and prepared a summoning ritual, drawing upon the energies of the eldritch shroud that surrounded the system, preventing ships and astropathic communications from passing through.
This was not an action Nephalor had cleared with the other lords of the Black Crusade, and had they known what the consequences would be they would never have allowed it. For the arcane calculations of the Dark Angels had been precise, and the shroud did not have much in the way of safety margins. But the Lord of Stars, worried that the Commissar-Castellan might continue on his way and foil the greater plans of the First Legion for Cadia, decided that weakening the shroud was an acceptable risk in order to remove this perceived threat to the commands he had received from his Daemon Primarch.
The Sorcerers called upon the power of Tzeentch, offering the blood of enslaved wyrds and the souls of cultists as sacrifices to power their spell, and opened a tear in reality half-way across Cadia, right in the middle of Kasr Tyrok. Of course, Nephalor didn't expect common daemons of the Changing God to succeed where an Archduke of Cysgorog had failed, and so had personally intervened, calling in an arcane debt owed to him by a Lord of Change for services rendered in ages past.
In return for being freed of that obligation, the Greater Daemon ensured that one of the Tzeentchian daemons that manifested within Kasr Tyrok was a creature born of the fears of a hundred paranoid tyrants, wielding all the powers of invisibility and disguise that had plagued these genocidal madmen before their fall. There was no possible way the Commissar-Castellan would be able to survive, but just to be safe, Nephalor made it clear the daemonic assassin wasn't to get anywhere near its target, but to find a way to eliminate Cain from afar.
Unfortunately for the Dark Angels, but fortunately for the Imperium, Ciaphas Cain never got within five kilometers of the daemonic incursion, having departed the command center to deal with another, much more urgent threat. Instead, the assassin would end up unceremoniously crushed when the Grey Knights of the Seventh Brotherhood collapsed an entire building on top of the manifested daemons, before going through the rubble with blessed flamers to purge the last traces of infernal taint.
Weirdly, the only think I could think of when the wall exploded next to me was 'typical'. It certainly was : sometimes I feel like my entire career can be summed up by me trying to avoid an obvious danger and ending up cunningly charging into something far worse.
I had come to the walls to avoid having to deal with the daemonic incursion inside Kasr Tyrok itself that our spooks had sensed was coming. The way I had sold it to the others was that we had the Grey Knights to deal with that, while I could do more good being seen on the frontlines. Furthermore, Jurgen's unique gift affected the Grey Knights just like they did every other psyker, although they were tough enough not to pass out in his presence. Deploying them against the same enemy effectively weakened us.
It had the benefit of being true as well, but of course, my real reason had been that I didn't want to get anywhere near the infernal abominations that had ended up manifesting in a disaffected assembly line. Anything that could pierce through the wards around the city was not something I wanted to deal with if I could help it. Warp take it, I was a Commissar, even if a fancy title had been slapped behind the rank. It was my job to deal with scared troopers, not hunt daemons.
I should have known better.
I had been out of the Chimera and among the men at the base of the walls, speaking with squad leaders before visiting the field hospitals, when the Bile-born fell from the skies with the crackling of lightning and the screams and las-fire of a few dozen Guardsmen (who mercifully stopped firing as it landed, or else they would have killed us all in seconds).
It didn't have a helmet, and the reason why was obvious : its eyes were two pits of Warp energy that lashed out around him. I watched in horror as a couple of Cadians were caught by one of the arcs and instantly turned to ash, without even having the time to scream. Alpharius rushed it, power sword held up, only to be send flying with a glance. He was still alive – his armor, I would later learn, contained special anti-psychic wards precisely for that kind of scenario – but he was out of the fight.
I was drawn out of my fear-induced paralysis by a familiar earthly smell, and took courage in the knowledge that Jurgen was at my side.
I couldn't exactly turn around and run. For one thing, there were thousands of witnesses; for another, one of the more dubious aspects of my job is that my uniform, hat and scarlet sash stand out even among a motley collection of Regimental uniforms as was present that day. Unless it was completely blind or terminally stupid (neither of which was entirely out of the question, admittedly), the Chaos Marine would pick me out and charge me, and I believed my chances of survival were slightly higher if I confronted it head-on rather than showing it my back.
Well, if I was going to act like an idiot, I might as well play up the part for the audience.
"Abomination !" I roared, brandishing my chainsword in its direction and looking every bit the brave Hero of the Imperium I was supposed to be. "Come and face your doom !"
That got its attention. It turned to face me, eyes flaring with eldritch power that burned tracks in the ferrocrete pavement like a hot knife through butter.
It gestured in my direction, and a bolt of lightning jumped toward me. I instinctively braced, ready for the brief flash of pain that would precede annihilation -
- but the thunderbolt fizzled out and died before it could reach me, leaving nothing but the stench of ozone behind, overpowering even my aide's pungent bouquet. Once again, Jurgen's gifts had saved my miserable hide.
The creature froze in shock at the sight. It might have blinked, but that was impossible to tell, what with the unholy lightning that kept pouring from its eye sockets.
There were three ways it could have reacted. The first was to ignore me and keep doing damage to our defenses. If it had done that, it might have been able to open a hole in the walls through which its brethren outside would have entered, dooming us all. It could also have fled, faced with something it didn't understand and clearly hadn't been designed to deal with.
Of course, it took the third option : it charged me, screaming like a damned soul, convinced that I was the reason why its powers hadn't worked on me, thus making the same mistake as more heretics, xenos and traitors than I care to count. Unfortunately, its chainsword could still kill me despite its mistake.
Since arriving to Cadia, I had taken up my old training with Alpharius again, and those sessions saved my life now as they had decades before. I couldn't match the Bile-born's speed or strength – trying to block its strikes would end up with my weapon being ripped out of my hands, along with my arms if I wasn't lucky. But I had the advantage of experience, and the creature fought more like a juvie who has just been given their first toy sword than a transhuman warrior. It knew some forms, but its lack of experience was obvious. Then again, with its eyes shooting lightning, it probably didn't need to be good with a blade most of the time.
I moved around its strikes, parrying and trying to get an angle where Jurgen would be able to shoot it with his melta-gun without vaporizing me as well. It was a manoeuvre we had performed more times than I was happy with, and I was confident that a weapon that had killed a Daemon Prince would be enough to deal with that new kind of horror the Clonelord had unleashed upon the galaxy.
Except, as I barely dodged another blow, I caught sight of my aide in the corner of my eye and my heart froze in horror, though my battle-reflexes were too deeply ingrained for that to affect my own motion. Jurgen was fussing at his weapon with the closest thing to a panicked expression I had ever seen on his grim-covered face. A piece of half-melted rock had hit the melta, and judging by the sparks its machine-spirit was furious at the assault. If he tried to pull the trigger in this state, it was carrots to credits that it would blow up and kill us all.
I was going to tell him to try anyway – a likely chance of death was still better than a certain one, and every second I spent in melee with the Bile-born and didn't get skewered was minor miracle – when the air suddenly crackled with energy that had nothing to do with the creature's unnatural powers.
I jumped back, recognizing the signs, and dragged Jurgen out of the way while the Bile-born was still trying to figure it out. We were just clear of the blast zone when the teleportation activated and a considerable volume of air was suddenly displaced, throwing me and my aide to the ground.
I rolled with the blast and forced myself to my feet, despite the pounding headache and pains all over my ageing body. I was just in time to see the Bile-born be decapitated by the crackling sword of a giant in golden armor wearing a purple cape. More giants bearing the same colors were materializing all around him, some of them clad in something that reminded me of the Terminators I had seen long ago aboard the Spawn of Damnation, though these ones looked more like something that had walked down from a cathedral's frescoes.
"Commissar Cain," the golden giant said as he turned toward me, and for a moment I thought it was the Emperor speaking – that He had finally had enough and had come in person to set me to rights. "I am glad to see you are still alive. I am Shield-Captain Nathadian Raskus of the Aquilan Shield, and by my oath, no harm shall come to you whilst I still live."
Through the use of Godstrike-pattern teleportariums capable of bypassing the Castellum's void-shields, the forces of Shield-Captain Nathadian Raskus (the first two of the veteran's many, many names) managed to reach the battlefield just in time to rescue Commissar-Castellan Cain and prevent another breach of Kasr Tyrok's walls by the Black Legion.
Once the situation had stabilized, the leaders of the defenders gathered again. The Shield-Captain had brought with him one hundred and seven of his brothers, a force more than capable of breaking the back of whole Chaos armies. Their number slightly surpassed those of the eighty-three Grey Knights of the Seventh Brotherhood, led by Grand Master Covan Leorac. More Custodes had been dispatched from Holy Terra, but those were the only ones to have managed to reach Cadia for now.
In addition, most of the Custodes sent to bolster the defenses of the Iron Cages had been sent to Olympia instead, for the diviners of the Tower of Hegemon had learned that Roboute Guilliman, Arch-Traitor and Dark Master of Chaos, had awakened from his ten thousand years of stasis-slumber, and once more threatened the galaxy. That unpleasant revelation alone caused considerable distress to the gathered commanders, until Commissar-Castellan Cain, in his own inimitable manner, pointed out that since the Iron Warriors' homeworld would face the Ultramarines' own thrice-accursed sire, they had no excuse to fail here, not when all that stood against them were the vat-spawn of Fabius Bile and one of the Arch-Traitor's lesser brothers.
The presence of so many of the Imperium's greatest warriors was a sign of the importance of the battle being waged across the Cadian Gate, especially now that Rogal Dorn had manifested on Kasr Partox. Centuries ago, the Grey Knights had defeated the Daemon Primarch of the Imperial Fists on Armageddon, and according to Covan, the Chapter's Prognosticars had foreseen the possibility of his return at Cadia and dispatched him and his Brotherhood to remove this grave threat to the Imperium.
Covan did not tell the other Imperial commanders that a handful of his Brotherhood's warriors had remained on Titan to assist in Supreme Grand Master Geronitan's planned divination ritual. The secret of the Grey Knights' very existence had already been revealed to far too many people for the Grand Master's liking; there was no need in his mind to further complicate matters by revealing information that wasn't relevant to their situation.
The temper of Rogal Dorn, which had been legendary even before he had abandoned all traces of his humanity and embraced Khorne, was well known to the Inquisition. None doubted that as soon as he was done with Kasr Partox, the traitor son of the Emperor would come to Cadia in order to avenge his past defeat.
According to Nathadian, there were Imperial reinforcements massed at the nearby systems of Belis Corona and Agripinaa. The Iron Cage warhosts meant to serve as the hammer to Cadia's anvil had been bolstered by forces from all over the Segmentum, but were kept from joining the fray by the Warp shroud that surrounded the Cadian Gate. The Custodes' own ship, the Crown of Starlight, had only managed to reach Cadia now thanks to the skills of its Navigators and a sudden and brief thinning in the sorcerous shroud.
Though the opening had been brief, that it had formed at all indicated that the Dark Angels' heretic rituals weren't permanent. Sooner or later, the shroud would dissipate, and the Black Crusade would be crushed between the walls of Cadia and the spear of their reinforcements. Of course, the Traitors surely knew this as well, which meant they either believed they could win the war before then or had something else planned to keep the reinforcements from arriving.
According to Shield-Captain Nathadian, the Aquilan Shield had been sent specifically to keep Cain alive, for it had been foreseen that his survival would be instrumental to the defense of Cadia and the survival of the Imperium.
Despite the grandeur of such an announcement, and how little faith the famously modest Cain had in it, those around him took it as face value : not only were the Custodians know to perform such protection duties on occasion, and had been proven right in every case despite the sometimes obscure and lowly origins of their charges, but Cain had already saved the entire system by exposing Creed's corruption, to say nothing of his ongoing leadership amidst the crisis.
Surrounded by demigods apparently dedicated to ensuring his continued survival, mystical knights, the Emperor's own bodyguards and some of the best officers the Astra Militarum had ever possessed, Ciaphas Cain allowed himself a moment of hope that he might make it through this after all.
Which was when, on Holy Terra, Lorgar Aurelian struck down the Emperor with the Sword That Was Promised, and Light's End swept across the galaxy.
The Emperor is dead.
The thought burned into my brain, and I knew it to be true.
The Custodes were on their knees, as were the Grey Knights. In the opposite corner of the room, Rakel – Amberley's pet psyker, to whom the years hadn't been anywhere near as kind as they had been to either of us – was quietly weeping. Whatever they were experiencing must be much worse than what we mere mortals were going through, but that's not to say it was easy for us either.
The Emperor is dead.
Amberley was shaking on her seats, eyes wild and unfocused. Kasteen was completely immobile, but I could see her nails biting into the skin of her palm with enough strength to draw blood. I could hear the sound of wailing and screaming, and it took me a moment to make sure I wasn't its source, but that it was instead coming from outside the room – from the entire Castellum, no, from the entire planet.
Through the window, I could see the Eye of Terror. It was pulsating with energy, and I could swear it had grown larger than it had been one minute ago.
The Emperor is dead.
It felt like I was falling, despite the solid ground under my feet, falling into a bottomless abyss inhabited by all the worst monsters of my nightmares. I felt a cold sense of dread creep in on my soul, and knew that if I gave into the fear I would go mad, or worse. I had never bought into the notion that the God-Emperor watched over all of His subjects : there were far too many of us, and He was already busy keeping the entire galaxy from slipping into damnation and ruin.
But I had believed in Him. I had believed that He watched over Humanity, even if the particulars of my individual survival were very much up to me alone, and whatever fools I could persuade to stand between me and the enemy. That He loved us, despite all of our many, many flaws, and that He wanted us to survive and be great, no matter how often and gravely we disappointed Him.
The Emperor is dead.
This is it, I thought to myself then. This is the end of the galaxy. The Imperium is doomed. Humanity is lost. We are all going to burn.
And with that certainty came a certain liberation. As I had found out many times during my career, the absolute certainty of your death does wonders to focus the mind. Your existence is reduced to surviving the next few seconds, and the next ones after that.
My thoughts shifted. My instincts took over, while my conscious mind withdrew before it could break under the horror of my situation. I stood up, and walked straight to the Custodes officer. He had removed his helmet at the beginning of the meeting, revealing features that, while more handsome than those of most Space Marines I had met, could never truly pass for human.
Even on his knees, his bulk was such that my eyes were roughly at the level of his. He didn't look up as I approached, staring down at the floor and seeing nothing, in shock for, I suspected, the very first time in his entire existence.
I slapped him, hard, with the hand that had augmetic fingers. It was like punching a rock, but it got his attention, and that of everyone else in the room.
"Shield-Captain Nathadian," I heard myself say. "You said earlier that the Emperor sent you here."
He blinked, and the look of utter incomprehension on his face was almost comical. I pressed on, not giving him time to answer.
"Do you really believe that the Master of Mankind didn't foresee His own demise ?" I asked rhetorically. "That, in ten thousand years of enduring the burden of guiding our species on the thin road to survival, He didn't plan for this eventuality ?"
And as the words left my mouth, I suddenly found myself believing them, like a drowning man clinging to a piece of wood in the midst of a storm.
"Is your faith in Him so weak ?" I hammered the point home, then I draw my las-pistol and aimed it straight between his eyes. I had no idea if it could harm him, even at this range and without his helmet – his armor could have additional protections I wasn't aware of. But it got the point across.
"Well ?!" I barked. "Are you going to be the first Custodes ever to be executed for cowardice ?! Custodes or not, you are still a soldier of the Imperium, and I am still a Commissar. If you don't get your head back into the fight so help me I will shoot you where you stand ! Is that understood ?!"
Slowly, he stood back up, and it slowly dawned on me again just how big he was. For a moment, I wondered if he was going to crush me where I stood for daring to speak to him like this – then, he nodded.
"Yes, Commissar-Castellan. It is understood."
"Good." I went back to my chair and sat down, to hide the fact that I was about to collapse of mixed terror and relief, and swept my gaze over everyone else. "Now, the rest of you. Yes, the Emperor is … is dead." The words were like ashes in my mouth, but I forced myself to press on : "But our duty remains the same. Shield-Captain Nathadian told us that, before his ship made the jump to join us, they had received astropathic messages telling of the return of the Primarchs Magnus and Lorgar, both of whom in the Sol system. We must trust that they can handle whatever is going on there right now, while we take care of matters here."
I took a deep breath.
"None of us have ever considered the matter of succession when it comes to the Golden Throne. We never had reason to, and the mere idea was poison for the soul until now. Fortunately, that is something the High Lords will have to decide with the Crimson King and the Aurelian. Our own task remains the same; in truth, it has become more important than ever before. The Cadian Gate must be held, and it shall be held. We all swore oaths to the Emperor, and though He may no longer watch over us from Holy Terra, we shall not dishonor Him by failing now !"
There was a slow rumble of approval, which grew and grew and grew until the room erupted in approving, wrathful cheers. Even Amberley was looking impressed.
"That was a good speech, sir," came a familiar voice at my elbow.
"Thank you, Jurgen … wait." I paused, doing a double-take at what my aide was carrying. "Is that a vox-caster ?"
"It is," he confirmed phlegmatically as he switched it off. "Thought the rest of the troops could do with a little bit of morale-boosting too."
I listened, and found that while the sound of wailing hadn't entirely stopped, it had diminished greatly. In its place, I could hear the familiar noises of defiance – oaths shouted through fear-tight throats, sergeants and officers putting their troops back in order.
"Jurgen," I asked weakly, "how far did you broadcast that ?"
"Not sure, sire," he shrugged. "I am no tech-priest. I just pushed the dial all the way up."
I looked at the controls, and dredged the lessons that had been drilled into my skull at the Schola from the depths of my memory. This was connected to the vox-net of the command center, which had some of the most powerful machines available. So …
Oh.
Everyone had just heard me speak, hadn't they ? Everyone on the whole bloody planet.
Typical.
Although the complete collapse of morale and leadership had been narrowly adverted by Commissar-Castellan Cain's heroic speech, the situation was still dire. The Grey Knights and Custodes were reeling from the psychic shock of Light's End, and the influence of the Dark Gods had surged all across the system. More and more men gave in to despair and horror, their minds – which had been raised since infancy to keep faith in the God-Emperor – unable to endure in a galaxy devoid of His presence. Cain's initial speech to the war council, and the ones he made after that, helped in preventing the worst, but not even the Commissar-Castellan could completely soften the blow of Light's End.
The Sisters of Battle deployed across Cadia fared worst of all Imperial forces. Through the power of their faith, they had always held themselves as linked to Him on Earth, His strength flowing through their mortal bodies so that they might do His will. That connection was sundered now, and to add to the trauma, those with the greater link to the Master of Mankind now claimed that, in His final moments, the God-Emperor had somehow chosen to perish. Some clung to the words of Cain, who claimed that He had made the ultimate sacrifice as part of some divine plan it wasn't for them to understand, but no few gave in to despair, believing that He had abandoned them all, having judged them unworthy. Several Castellums fell to riots of newly converted Chaos cultists, or penitent hordes driven mad by shock and grief seeking only to join their Emperor in death.
Ironically, the psychic pressure that had slain so many Imperial psykers in Cadia meant that only those possessed of the strongest wills were left when Light's End struck and their soul-bond to the Emperor was severed. It was also fortunate that the effects of soul-binding didn't disappear with the death of the Master of Mankind : the ritual of soul-binding infused every psyker with the tiniest shard of the God-Emperor's own radiance, suffusing the Astronomican. Each soul-bound psyker held within them an echo of His light, which gave them some protection against the predations of the Neverborn – though, as had been proven uncountable times through Imperial history, that protection was far from perfect.
Of course, the forces of the Black Crusade had been caught unaware by the Emperor's demise as well. On Kasr Partox, the coming of Light's End struck just as the Khornate armies were assaulting the final Castellum on the fortress-world. As the valiant defenders reeled from the psychic backlash of the Emperor's death, Rogal Dorn and Sigismund broke through their lines, and within moments the slaughter was over. Only when the last skull had been claimed did the Daemon Primarch and his son pause to consider what had just happened, and realized that the Long War and Great Game of Chaos had just changed forever.
All across the Black Legion forces, wyrds and witches sensed the echo of Light's End. Scores succumbed to the Dark Gods' roar of victory and surge of power, becoming gateways through which thousands of daemons manifested all over Cadia. Amidst the mayhem, only a handful of Sorcerers were observant enough to notice that the daemons of Slaanesh were present in far lesser numbers than the rest of their infernal kin; and of those, fewer still realized the reason why was that the hosts of the Silver Palace were being unleashed upon Sol itself with the opening of the Tear of Nightmares and the beginning of the Angel War.
The mix of violent celebrations, spontaneous daemonic summoning and sense of disbelief (among the Black Legion were veterans of the Long War, who had once fought alongside the Emperor during the Great Crusade) did much to slow the offensive of the forces of Chaos. This gave the Imperial commanders precious time to restore order among their own forces.
There was another aspect to Light's End : for years now, its coming had completely blocked the foresight of all oracles, with the blindness growing worse and worse the closer that fateful moment neared. The Black Legion didn't employ many prophets, Fabius Bile being notoriously untrusting of them, but as the favorite servants of Tzeentch, the Architect of Fate, the Dark Angels were badly affected. Aboard the Invincible Reason, the seer-choirs and daemon-oracles were crippled, with the survivors babbling incoherently as their minds tried to make sense of the great alterations that had been wrought upon the tapestry of Fate. All but the most immediate of prediction was impossible, for too many things had been changed by the Emperor's willing sacrifice and rejection of godhood.
Deprived of the guidance of his god and unable to make contact with his Primarch (who, unbeknownst to him, had fled to Cysgorog to recover from his confrontation with Cypher and Lorgar), Grand Master Nephalor was forced to improvise. He decided to stick to the orders that he had received prior to leaving Cysgorog. Though the galactic situation had dramatically changed, the tactical realities of the Traitor Legions stuck in the Eye of Terror remained the same, and this course of action was the one that would grant them the most opportunities to do Tzeentch's will in the future.
Back in Kasr Tyrok, the Imperial defenders had little time to recover from the calamity that had befallen the Imperium. Hordes of daemons, cultists and New Marines hurled themselves at the walls. The defiance of Ciaphas Cain had been noticed by the Black Legion, and the Bile-born seeking to prove themselves to the Primogenitor converged on the Castellum, certain that a worthy battle awaited them there. Other Black Legion commanders had identified the Castellum as the center of Cadian resistance, and directed armored columns and Chaos Titans toward the stronghold.
Yet those were the least of the threats the loyalists faced. Amidst the ashes and bones of Kasr Partox, Rogal Dorn looked up toward Cadia. There, amidst the tides of despair and bloodshed, the Daemon Primarch of Dorn could sense a familiar fire. Centuries ago, that fire had burned him, cast him back into the Immaterium. He had sworn revenge then, and now the Blood God had presented him with the chance to claim it.
With a roar that made the pyramids of skulls the lesser daemons of Khorne were building among the ruins collapse, Dorn tore a ragged hole into reality with his monstrous claws. Through will alone, the Daemon Primarch opened a Warp portal between Kasr Partox and Cadia, departing the desolation the Khornate forces had made of the fortress-world without a single glance backward. Immediately, the Black Templars and their thralls rushed to follow, with Sigismund being the first into the portal after Dorn himself. The portal closed long before more than a fraction of the Blood God's forces on the planet could pass through, but the departure of Dorn and Sigismund served as a global signal to withdraw from Kasr Partox and return to orbit, where many transports and ships of the Black Templars' armada still awaited, though the orbital debris of the Eternal Crusader would greatly slow extraction.
Driven by the desire to fight at the side of their two lords, the hordes stranded on Kasr Partox attempted to open their own Warp portals. The Hierophants of Skulls performed great rituals in order to replicate what the Daemon Primarch had achieved through the simple use of his own divine power, sacrificing thousands of their own people in order to fuel their works. Many of them succeeded, but not all portals thus opened brought them to Cadia : instead, entire armies of cultists, mutants and Kriegsmen found themselves scattered all around the galaxy, brought to worlds suffering under Warp Storms unleashed by Light's End. Scores of worlds already afflicted by unprecedented calamities thus found themselves invaded by heretics that quite literally manifested out of thin air, and a hundred wars began in the name of Khorne – a suitable offering to Khorne for the rest to be allowed to reach their intended destination.
On Cadia, the Grey Knights sensed the coming of their ancient foe even through the shock of Light's End, and wasted no time in warning their allies of his coming. It didn't take long for the Imperial commanders to come to the conclusion that they couldn't hope to hold the walls against a Daemon Primarch. The Inquisitorial representative among them had access to highly classified reports from the fortress-world of Hydra Cordatus and the doom that had befallen it, and while Dorn was an entirely different kind of horror than the dreaded Ravenlord, there was little doubt that the Daemon Primarch of Khorne would be able to breach through the walls as soon as he reached them.
Using unaugmented soldiers to fight a Daemon Primarch would be a colossal mistake : their mere proximity was known to drive people insane, like the usual soul-rending effect of most Neverborn but amplified by the scope of their power. Combined with the effects of Light's End, only the Grey Knights and Custodes had a chance to be able to withstand Dorn's corrupting aura – once, it would have been a certainty, but the Emperor's death had changed everything.
Shield-Captain Nathadian and Grand Master Leorac were ready to stand against the Daemon Primarch once he arrived, each vowing that they would do their utmost to hurl him back into the Realms of Chaos, even should it cost them their lives. But that left the problem of the tens of millions of Guardsmen and other mortal troops in the Castellum, all of whom were in danger of being turned against their transhuman allies.
Inquisitor Amberley Vail was the first to suggest an evacuation of the city. The human armies of the Castellum would punch through the heretics' lines and make for Kasr Vasan, on the coast of the Caducades Sea. The other Castellum still stood, in part because Kasr Tyrok had drawn the bulk of the Black Legion's assault due to the presence of Imperial high command within its walls, and also because its back was to the ocean, which the heretics were ill-equipped to cross (not that the Cadians had left that side of their city-fortress undefended).
From there, the Inquisitor continued, they could cross the Caducades Sea and reinforce the Castellums of Cadia Secundus. She was especially concerned about Kasr Kraf, which stood on the edge of the great Elyseon Fields, full of the famous Cadian Pylons. According to the fragmentary reports that had made it through the vox-disruption, the Fields were under sustained attack by elements of the Dark Angels, who ignored the Castellum and had focused their efforts on claiming control of the Pylons.
The famous Cadian Pylons were, if not of Necron construction, then based upon similar technological principles. It had long been theorized that they had something to do with the local tranquillity of the Warp compared to the insanity raging within the Eye of Terror, and to be the reason why the Cadian Gate existed in the first place. There was no question that letting the First Legion have control of thousands of them was dangerous – for, according to information Inquisitor Vail refused to refuse the source of, the Pylons could, in theory, be used to amplify that which they had previously held back.
The thought of the Warp being amplified around Cadia instead of repelled was a chilling one, even for those already facing the crumbling of all they had ever believed in. Commissar-Castellan Cain agreed that something must be done, and that it was unlikely Kasr Kraf had the strength to mount a counter-attack to retake the Elyseon Fields : holding the walls against the Black Legion was all its defenders could do.
In addition, retaking the Elyseon Fields might give the Imperials a chance should Rogal Dorn triumph over the chosen scions of the Emperor and come for those who had escaped him. It was a slim chance, but proximity to the Pylons might weaken the fallen son of the Master of Mankind enough that he could be defeated by mere mortals, especially after the Grey Knights and Custodes had weakened him.
While the continental masses of Cadia were largely under the control of the Black Legion outside of the Castellums, such was not the case of its waters, thanks again to the lack of support infrastructure the Clonelord had provided to his Bile-born. The massive shipping fleet of Cadia had more or less escaped the hostilities unscathed thus far, though even they had faced madness, treachery, and the occasional assault by mutated horrors that had slumbered in the darkest depths for untold aeons, slowly altered by the influence of the Eye of Terror until they were awakened by the psychic calls of the Dark Angels.
If these sea-ships could be contacted and gathered at the docks of Kasr Vasan, then the data-smiths of the Mechanicus estimated that a full evacuation of both Castellums was theoretically possible. When the option of leaving the civilians behind was mentioned, Cain crushed it immediately, claiming that leaving ritual fodder for the heretics was such a monumental blunder it wasn't even worth considering. And when Inquisitor Vail followed by saying that there were options available to ensure the Black Legion and its allies couldn't use the civilians, Cain replied that, with the Emperor dead, the fate of their souls was in their own hands, and he would not damn his own by ordering the wholesale slaughter of millions of Cadians – nor would he let the Inquisitor do it in his place.
Even for the disciplined Cadians, the evacuation of millions of soldiers and civilians was a daunting task at the best of time, let alone while under siege, with the Eye of Terror blazing and the mental scars of the Emperor's death still raw and bleeding. But the people of Kasr Tyrok rose to the challenge, perhaps relieved to have something to distract them from thinking about their situation too much. There had been plans drafted for such an evacuation by the Fourth Legion, and drills were as natural to the Cadian lifestyle as breathing. Within a few hours – eight to be precise – the time had come.
The Warp portals opened in the trenches around Kasr Tyrok, where so many had already perished. The Daemon Primarch and his followers emerged covered in gore, having fought their way through the Realm of Khorne in order to get here, and were accompanied by new infernal reinforcements : several legions of Bloodletters, and no less than eight Bloodthirsters of Khorne, who stalked around Dorn like a nightmarish escort.
The wards of Kasr Tyrok groaned under the strain as they kept the baleful aura of these daemonic monstrosities from overwhelming the walls, but they held for now. Within, the first motions of the evacuation began, with tens of thousands of transports and other heavy vehicles marshalling in the section of the Castellum directly opposed to the Daemon Primarch's position. It was reasonably assumed by high command that Dorn would go straight for the walls, targeting the gate closest to his location. To make sure of this, the Grey Knights stood on the battlements, ensuring that their presence there was noticed by the enemy.
The New Marines and Black Legion elements laying siege to Kasr Tyrok clearly hadn't expected the arrival of the Khornate forces. Unfortunately, the mutual destruction the Imperials had dared hope for failed to materialize, bar a few skirmishes that only left a few thousand dead. The Daemon Prince identified by the Grey Knights as the ascended Sigismund managed to keep some semblance of peace between the two heretic factions, and it was agreed that the Seventh Legion would breach the walls, then the Black Legion would follow – and that the Grey Knights within belonged to Dorn alone.
Not all Imperial forces were part of the evacuation. One Regiment in ten, chosen at random to prevent any machination of the Dark Powers, remained behind. Despite the risks of psychic corruption, the sheer size of the Castellum meant that the Grey Knights and Custodes could fight Dorn in a city-sized area while the mortals fought their own bloody war out of sight. Their purpose was to keep the Black Legion occupied within Kasr Tyrok for as long as possible, before finally detonating the reactors which fed the great void-shields and deny its resources to the enemy. The self-destruct wouldn't wipe out the Castellum entirely – the Iron Warriors weren't fools, and had been perfectly aware of the danger such an option would have presented when the Enemy had the means of turning even the most resilient of souls eventually – but it would at least give the last defenders a clean death.
Commissar-Castellan Cain made sure to meet with some of these martyred Regiments in person before departing to join the evacuation column, climbing aboard the Ordinatus Manifest Fury, which he had helped rescue from the front himself weeks earlier. Then, just as Dorn attacked from the west, the rest of the Imperial forces, which were informally called 'Cain's Column' struck out eastwards, punching through the weakened lines of the Black Legion at full speed and making straight for the ocean.
The gate had crumbled to pieces before his might. The horde of Astartes-things and mortal thralls had followed in his wake, keeping a respectful distance from him and his Legion of Blood.
The alliance with the Black Legion was … unexpected. His last contact with Fabius Bile had been when he had ripped the Chief Apothecary to pieces during the War of Woe, not that he had expected it to last even then. The Clonelord couldn't hide his true nature from him, not after he had broken free of the restraints the False Emperor had placed upon His creations after He had realized their true potential and the danger they posed to His plans.
For now, they would remain allies. It was the will of Khorne that the Cadian Gate be brought down, and Dorn couldn't deny that Bile's machinations had done much to make it possible. But once that was done, some things would need to be … reconsidered. The scale of the carnage wreaked by the Apothecary's was impressive, but the motives behind it were lacking. These 'New Marines' were more interested in impressing their creator than paying rightful homage to the Blood God, though perhaps that was simply due to their youth. They would learn in time, or they would be crushed, like all who opposed him. There was more important prey to hunt.
Now at last, he had cornered the knights whose blades had bit into his flesh and shamefully brought him low centuries ago. At last, vengeance was within his grasp.
He remembered Ullanor – or, as the Imperium called it now, Armageddon. He had gone there, heeding the call of Morkai's victor … but why ? Sigismund had never set foot on that world. None of his sons had, for Dorn hadn't been called to help in the Ullanor Crusade, nor had he participated in the Triumph that had followed, when the weakling Horus had been made Warmaster. So why had he gone there ? He couldn't remember …
Ah. Of course.
Looking back in light of Sigismund's revelations, now it made sense. This was what Sigismund had been talking about, wasn't it ? The hidden leash around his soul Guilliman had woven into his Legion's pact with Khorne. For some unknown reason, some secretive scheme, his brother had sent him to Armageddon, stoking the fires of his rage until he hadn't been able to think and had seized the first opportunity to vent his fury upon the Imperium.
Perhaps the goal had been to weaken him, to ensure he was defeated and banished for centuries. Perhaps it had been to learn more about the Imperium's counter-measures for the rebel Primarchs. Perhaps it had been to plant the seeds of blood on Armageddon. Dorn didn't know, and he cared little.
What mattered was that his brother would pay for that transgression in time, just like the silver knights of his father would pay for theirs now.
His father was dead, but though Dorn was furious that kill had been denied to him, wiping out all traces of His legacy was still a worthy endeavour.
They struck at him from afar with their little tanks and petty spells, but he chased them down. Oh, he wasn't stupid : he knew they were drawing him into a ground they had prepared, thinking it would give them the advantage over him. He was content to let them have that morsel of hope, before he crushed it down and slaughtered them all. It would make his revenge for his past defeat all the sweeter.
"ENOUGH RUNNING !" He roared, causing several of the buildings around him to collapse. "COME, LITTLE KNIGHTS. COME AND FIGHT !"
"Very well," replied a deep, calm and collected voice. "Let us finish this, traitor."
Even with the advantage of prepared terrain, the Grey Knights and Custodes faced overwhelming odds as they sprung their trap on Dorn's warband. The Black Templars alone outnumbered them, and while either Imperial faction were better fighters than Sigismund's elite warriors one-on-one, the Khornates were capable of working together as well as accompanied by daemons of the Blood God and other elements of the armies with which they had laid waste to Kasr Partox. Each of the eight Bloodthirsters following Dorn would have required the intervention of the Grey Knights on their own, or Inquisitorial leadership combined with overwhelming artillery fire.
The champions of Sol knew that this wasn't a fight they could win by wiping out the opposition, which given the Dark God they worshipped would be the only way to defeat them. In response, they had adapted their objectives. They didn't seek to kill every Khornate in the Castellum (though they were certainly going to do their best in that regard) : instead, they would focus on sending the leaders of the daemonic incursion back into the Warp. If Dorn and Sigismund were removed from the equation, it was possible – not likely, given the unusual amount of cooperation exhibited so far, but possible – that the Black Crusade would tear itself apart.
The plan was simple. They had drawn Dorn deep within the Castellum, away from the Black Legion elements that had followed him, leaving those to the Imperial forces which had remained behind. They had moved as fast as possible, forcing Dorn to pursue them while the slower members of his entourage struggled to keep up, stretching them out and isolating Dorn further.
Now they struck with all their remaining strength. Squads opened fire with blessed lascannons and portable missile launchers, striking at the Bloodthirsters and distracting them until Dreadnoughts and Terminators could engage the Greater Daemons in melee, fighting defensively in order to last as long as possible. Tactical squads fired at the Black Templars from the defensive positions that were a part of all Cadian architecture. A trio of Land Raiders in gold and silver unleashed their arsenal upon the being identified by the Grey Knights as the Daemon Prince Sigismund, drawing his gaze long enough for another squad to collapse a watchtower atop him.
The lives of two scores champions of the Imperium had already been spent, but at last Dorn stood alone. The commanders of the Imperial transhumans met the Daemon Primarch with a charge of their own, accompanied by two full squads of their respective elite. A volley of bolter fire flew overhead as they charged, every shot hitting its mark, but not a single one doing so much as inconvenience Dorn.
With a roar between rage and savage joy, the fallen son of the Emperor plunged forward, his bulk blocking out what little sun pierced through the clouds of ash and smoke that filled Cadia's atmosphere while the psychic pressure of his aura slammed down on his foes. Even the bravest of mortal men would have been given pause by the dark majesty of the Daemon Primarch, but not a single Grey Knight or Custodes flinched, and the melee began.
With every moment, veterans of centuries of war perished, their priceless armor rent asunder by the ever-bloody talons of Dorn. Every iota of skill, every gift of the Emperor was strained to its utmost limit simply for them to survive from heartbeat to heartbeat. Dorn was death incarnate, the distillation of war in its most unrestrained aspect given form and unleashed upon a tormented galaxy.
And yet, this was nothing Nathadian and Covan hadn't expected, and in the tenth second of the engagement, as the blood of yet another Custodes spilled onto Cadian soil, they struck. Moving as one thanks to more than a thousand years of combined experience, they caught the Daemon Primarch in a pincer. The attempt should have been ludicrous, for Dorn dwarfed even these transhuman heroes, towering above them in his incarnated form. But not only were these some of the finest warriors the Imperium had ever produced, they wielded some of the most powerful weapons of their orders, artefacts so sacred and powerful they had been locked away in vaults for the better part of ten thousand years – longer in the case of the Shield-Captain's own armament.
The sword in Grand Master Leorac's hands was not the same weapon with which he had fought so far in the Black Crusade. He had sheathed his Nemesis blade, and extracted the relic blade of Taremar Aurellian, who had fought Dorn on the plains of Armageddon centuries prior and dealt the final blow that had hurled the Daemon Primarch back into the Warp. The sword had been kept in a box covered in seals made from the remnants of dead Blanks, hidden from the sight of the Ruinous Powers until this moment. Dorn recognized the weapon at once, and immediately focused all of his attention on the Grand Master, knowing that by the laws of symbolism which governed the Warp and all its denizens he was uniquely vulnerable to a weapon that had already defeated him.
It was a mistake, for at his back was Shield-Captain Nathadian Raskus, and in his hands was something whose very existence the Custodes had gone to great lengths to wipe out from history, decades before Guilliman had broken his oaths. Its true name had been forgotten even by the Ten Thousands, who simply called it the Cerulean Lantern. It was a small device, of construction so strange that it was impossible to tell whether it was xenotech or human archeotech. It had been recovered during a particularly violent Compliance of the Space Wolves, in the years before the weight of their duties had stolen away their savage joy and begun to twist their souls to madness.
Nathadian activated the Lantern, and the wings of Rogal Dorn burned under its light, which ate through his daemonic flesh like Tyranid acid through exposed flesh. In the blink of an eye nothing remained of the great bat-like wings but broken and charred bones. The eldritch light reached the Warp-forged armor, and it too began to dissolve, unable to withstand the Lantern's terrible radiance. All the time, Nathadian could feel his own soul wither away, his Emperor-forged flesh dying at being so close to the activated Lantern. The agony was unspeakable, but he held on, determined to do his duty unto death and beyond, as he had vowed and been shamefully reminded of by a mere mortal – though one marked by the Master of Mankind.
Dorn's roar of pain and fury shook the Warp, and was heard all across the system, though the very Empyric shroud the Dark Angels had raised to isolate Cadia mercifully kept it from spreading further. For all this pain, however, the Daemon Primarch wasn't undone, his hold onto corporeality still strong. He would endure, but his attackers would not. The violence was followed nearly matched what Dorn had wrought upon the Destroyer's mortal body, and it was only when Sigismund finally dug his way out of the tower the Imperials had dropped on him that the Daemon Primarch's rage simmered down. By then, all that remained of the Shield-Captain and Grand Master were scraps of broken ceramite and auramite and pools of cooling gore.
The fall of Kasr Tyrok was arguably a pyrrhic victory for both sides. The Imperials successfully evacuated the bulk of their forces, breaking through the Black Legion's encirclement while the Chaos armies were occupied, but it cost them the irreplaceable lives of two hundred Custodes and Grey Knights. Meanwhile, the Khornates and Black Legion had finally broken into the city, but the resistance of the Guardsmen left behind was fierce, and the Castellum was designed for a smaller army knowing the terrain to bleed the foe for every step they took. Furthermore, the wounds Dorn had sustained in the confrontation would take time and copious amounts of bloodshed to heal.
Enraged that some of the Cadian defenders had fled rather than face him like true soldiers, the Daemon Primarch ordered Sigismund to give chase and slaughter them to the last. By that point, however, Cain's Column had gained a considerable lead, and was in sight of Kasr Vasan, where the Commissar-Castellan's messages had been heard and obeyed. The evacuation of the Castellum's population onto the ships had already begun.
Within a few hours, the last of the ships was departing Kasr Vasan. An entire ore hauler had been hastily reconverted to carry the Manifest Fury, the tech-priests tearing open a hole into its side so that the Ordinatus engine could enter before soldering metal plates back on. It was a slapdash job that no true disciple of the Machine-God would ever have been satisfied with, but time was running out and abandoning the Manifest Fury would have been a far greater transgression, not to mention a waste of a very useful asset in the war.
The journey across the Caducades Sea was far from tranquil. The Dark Angels had learned of the Column's destination, and they acted to stop the Imperials from interfering with their nefarious designs. All manners of horrors rose from the deeps to harass the fleet, as did flying daemons and Chaos aircraft, who were met in the tumultuous skies by the Aeronautica Imperialis wings based on the naval carriers of the Column. Many aces were crowned among the pilots of the 4589th, 203rd, 962nd and 3244th Imperial Navy Fighter Wings, and many gave their lives to defend their comrades and the civilians aboard the fleet.
By luck or the Emperor's posthumous guidance, Cain's Column crossed paths with the 59th Assault Company of the Twelfth Legion and the Knossosian Harpooners, with whom they had been fighting an underwater war since the arrival of the Redoubts. Light's End had struck them badly, but the leader of the sons of Angron, Lieutenant Manawa Veltram, had managed to hold them together in the darkness until they had picked up the vox-traffic of the Column and emerged to join it.
Their experience in that kind of environment was particularly useful, and Colonel Eusebios, the most senior of the Knossosian officers, was swiftly added to the Commissar-Castellan's mobile command center. The higher number of Apothecaries the World Eaters fielded compared to other Legions proved to be an additional boon, as they were of great assistance to help with the wounded and prevent sickness from taking root among Cain's Column. And of course, the presence of the World Eaters helped with morale, for the warriors of the Twelfth had endured the news of the Emperor's passing with stoicism, managing to deal with the grief and shock by relying on their brotherhood and the duty they had to protect the humans alongside whom they had fought in the last weeks.
"I have to be strong for them, Commissar. To know that our grandsire is … dead, it is difficult to be sure. But at the same time, if what you said is true, then Lorgar has returned and Magnus has awakened. If two of the lost Primarchs can return, then who is to say that our own won't do the same ? And if that is so, then I refuse to have the Lord of the Red Sands be disappointed in the behavior of his sons. I will grieve for Him, as will we all, but I won't let His death be our undoing or that of His Imperium.
… and I won't let it be what kills His people either."
Lieutenant Manawa Veltram, of the World Eaters 59th Assault Company, during a private meeting with Commissar-Castellan Ciaphas Cain
Twenty-one days after their departure, Cain's Column reached the shores of Cadia Secundus and disembarked. Scouting parties of Sentinels were sent ahead of the Column, and they began to trek toward the Elyseon Fields. The plan was to defeat the Dark Angels forces there and stop whatever foulness they were preparing, before moving to Kasr Kraf. The number of civilians in the Column worried Cain, but those were Cadians, and they bore the danger this would place them in without complaint.
But the Dark Angels were not about to let the Imperials disrupt their plans. They could have called upon their allies for aid : indeed, the Black Legion had millions of troops besieging Kasr Kraf, and a chance to face the forces of the Commissar-Castellan would have drawn many New Marines. However, the paranoia of the First Legion worked against them here, though not without reason.
Nephalor hadn't informed his peers among the Black Crusade's leadership of his interest in the Pylons. Before leaving Cysgorog, the Lord of Stars had been ordered to use the sorcerous lore of the First Legion in order to destroy the Cadian Gate once and for all. As Inquisitor Vail feared, his plan was to invert the Warp-suppressing effects of the Pylons, allowing the Eye of Terror to expand, swallowing the Cadian system and the entire Iron Cage around it. The ships of the Black Crusade, used to surviving in the Eye of Terror, would be able to withstand the expansion with few casualties, though the Dark Gods would inevitable claim their tithe of souls, but the Imperials would be utterly annihilated. The Iron Cage would not just be forced open, it would be shattered forevermore, and not all the bastard sons of Perturabo would be able to rebuild it, especially not now, with the False Emperor dead.
Nephalor didn't think Sigismund or Dorn would oppose such a course of action, though they may claim to disdain the complex sorcery involved. It was Bile whose reaction worried the Grand Master of the Dark Angels. The Clonelord had made no secret of his intent to use Cadia as a testing ground for his creations, and doubtlessly already had his own plans for the other worlds of the Iron Cage. Furthermore, Bile had refused time and again to truly give himself over to the service of the Dark Gods, despite the ever-greater rewards they had promised him in return for his full allegiance.
It was therefore doubtful that the Primogenitor would approve of Nephalor's plans, which was why the Grand Master had done everything in his considerable power to keep them secret. Which meant that, when Cain Column's marched on the Elyseon Fields, it found himself faced only with those forces the Dark Angels had landed on Cadia – but those were already plenty dangerous enough. At the command of their Grand Master, who needed to stay on the Invincible Reason lest the other commanders suspect something was amiss, a vast warband of the First Legion moved from the Elyseon Fields to attack Cain's Column.
In hindsight, leaving the Ordinatus may have been a mistake.
It had made perfect sense at the time, of course. The Manifest Fury was a big, obvious target for the enemy, and what had happened at the Tyrok Fields had proven even these great engines weren't proof against Chaos cultists, let alone their Astartes masters. I had thought making my position less immediately obvious would be good, and besides, I'd found myself growing restless, despite the additional safety of many tons of metal around me. Now more than ever, I needed to do something proactive to keep terror at how frakked we all were from overcoming me.
So I had left the Manifest Fury's confines and joined the 597th, bringing with me my entourage of a recovered Alpharius, a trio of Custodes and my malodorous aide. That it was the latter I trusted the most to keep my hide in one piece said something about me, but I wasn't sure what.
We were three kloms from the edge of the Elyseon Fields when the charge of the Dark Angels hit us. The traitors moved fast, with that speed that seems impossible for soldiers who have never seen transhuman might in action, swallowing the distance. But by then, every surviving Guardsman on Cadia was perfectly aware of what the Astartes' physiology was capable of.
We welcomed them with a withering hail of weaponfire, pouring everything we had into their charge. At this range and against targets like these, my trusty laspistol was all but useless, but I still joined in, more for morale purposes than out of the hope of doing any real damage. At best, I might chip the paint from their ceramite.
So of course my first shot ended up going straight through the eye of a Dark Angel who had decided going into battle without a helmet was the best way to honor his demented god, boiling his brain and dropping him to the ground instantly. A raucous cheer came from the soldiers around me, and I heard Alpharius chuckle, though the Custodes remained silent, their weapons aimed at the enemy along with all of their focus.
"Nice shot, sir," Jurgen praised me, aiming his own weapon carefully and taking down one of the mutants who had somehow managed to keep pace with the Chaos Marines.
"Thank you, Jurgen," I answered, and then they were on us.
Fighting with even only three Custodes at my side was a very different experience from the fighting I had grudgingly become used to. I had expected them to fight like Space Marines, only faster and stronger, but I had been wrong. The Space Marines fought like soldiers, while the Custodes fought like warriors, each one immersed in his own personal front with the enemy, even when they came to one another's aid. What few managed to pass through this moving curtain of death I dispatched with Jurgen's aid relatively easily.
The Emperor's guardians, however, were not infallible. The Imperium would be a very different place if they were. And there were only three of them, in the end. One of them died, an opening formed. It happened so fast I barely noticed it until it was almost too late.
A shadow fell upon us. I looked up, and saw a winged monstrosity with the head of a lion and scorpion's tail plunging down on us, a Dark Angel riding on its back. One of the remaining Custodes leapt, stabbing his spear deep into the creature's skull, but its rider jumped off his dead mount, landing straight in front of me. In his hands, he held a sword that glowed with malevolent light, and I froze in place as I sensed the thing within reach out to grasp my soul.
As the Dark Angel drew closer, I still couldn't move. It wasn't panic, for I had been able to fight through worse situations than this one. It was sorcery, incredibly potent one to boot. The Dark Angel lifted the weapon -
"Look out, sir !"
Jurgen collided with me just as the blow fell. I heard an unearthly scream of mixed anger and disgust, and a grunt of stoically endured pain.
I blinked. I was on the ground, Jurgen on top of me, and I could smell blood – so much blood. I gently pushed him aside, and gasped as I saw that the Dark Angel's blade had gutted him from throat to groin, cutting through his carapace armor like paper.
I held him in my arms, too shocked to do anything else even as the battle continued to rage around us.
"Are you okay, sir ?" he asked me, and his voice was far, far too weak.
"Yes. Yes, I'm fine, Jurgen."
"Ah." He smiled, even as his blood poured out from the wound. "That's … good …"
He blinked a few times, then closed his eyes and exhaled. Somehow, his final breath didn't seem so foul.
He was still smiling as he died. I cradled his body in my arms, unable to comprehend what had happened, my mind refusing to accept the evidence of my senses.
It seemed to last an eternity, but it cannot have taken more than a few heartbeats. A harsh bark of laughter pierced through my shock and returned my attention to my surroundings.
Slowly, I looked up, and saw the Dark Angel who had killed Jurgen towering above me. His helm was lacking its lower half, revealing his mouth.
He, too, was smiling. He was saying something, some taunt no doubt, but I didn't hear it. All I saw was that smile.
The motherless bastard had murdered my best friend, and he was smiling.
I am not unfamiliar with anger. This might surprise you, if you know me. But it is the truth.
I have seen the corpses of children thrown into sacrificial pits by Chaos cults. I have seen xenos abominations rip apart good men and women to feast on their entrails. I have seen the inside of an Eldar raider ship, and climbed over the corpses of their discarded playthings.
I was afraid each time, of course. Terrified more often than not, in fact. But I was still angry.
Yet that anger was nothing compared to what I felt now.
For one moment of searing, blood-soaked clarity, I understood the kind of anger that can drives someone into the arms of the Blood God willingly, into desiring nothing more than to kill and kill and kill, until the entire galaxy is dead …
… because only then, do you feel that your pain will stop.
I truly believe I could have fallen then. Many Imperial Guardsmen had succumbed to madness on Cadia since the Black Crusade had begun – I had executed several myself. And with Jurgen dead, I was no more protected from the influence of the Warp than any other soul trapped on that benighted rock. Even the Emperor was dead, removing whatever faint protection He had been able to spread out across all of His people, even the scoundrels like myself.
The foul energies of Chaos were waxing stronger on Cadia with every hour, and I am proud enough to think that the Ruinous Powers would have received my soul with quite the welcome package, after all that I had done to inconvenience them over the years. I could hear them whisper in my ears, though whether this was a real psychic effect or just a delusion brought on by grief and fury I will never know.
They promised me that, if I embraced them, if I turned my back on the Emperor – on a dead Emperor, and I knew it to be true, no matter how impossible and heretical the thought may be – then they would gift me with the power to avenge my friend. The power to escape the fall of Cadia. The power to save those men and women behind me, who trusted me so much.
And oh, but I was tempted. For the first time ever, I was actually tempted. Is that not hilarious ? I, Ciaphas Cain, who had seen so many horrors, who had won so many glorious victories in the God-Emperor's name, whose name and deeds echoed across the Segmentum and beyond, was about to be undone by the death of a First-Class Gunner with hygienic issues.
But I didn't. Not because I was innately better than the other poor bastards around me, but because it would have been an insult to Jurgen's life and memory if I had. He had believed in the legend of Cain the Hero, and I would not let that legend die before I did.
I embraced the pain, rather than try to drown it with blood. I did not let the wrath consume me. I held it tight, so tight it seemed that it might burn me alive, until it had grown cold as the ice of Valhalla.
And then, as tears still blurred my vision, I picked up Jurgen's melta and shot the Dark Angel in the face.
He never saw the shot that blasted his heretic head off coming, which I suppose says something about the First Legion's supposed wisdom.
With his chainsword in one hand and a melta-gun in the other, Ciaphas Cain led his forces from the front, wielding the two-handed range weapon as a lesser man might a shotgun. Soon, the attack of the Dark Angels was repelled, but as he looked upon the bodies of his slain comrades, the Commissar-Castellan burned with righteous fury. Furthermore, the sanctioned psyker of Inquisitor Vail informed them that the foul rites of the First Legion were approaching their climax, threatening to sunder reality and doom them all to a fate infinitely worse than death. There was no time left to waste, and so Cain ordered his forces to march on, leaving only a handful behind to guard the civilians.
Watching the Imperial advance, Nephalor grew restless as he realized that the Commissar-Castellan was going to reach the Sorcerers before their great work was complete. The thought of the punishment that awaited him should he fail in his purpose drove him to recklessness, and he gave the order for his forces planetside to unleash one of the Dark Angels' secret weapons : the Lord of Wraiths.
Not long after the landing of the Redoubts, a sealed cage of adamantium, seals made of the corpse-wax of Imperial preachers and psykers, and wood from a dead world had been brought down to Cadia. This prison had been taken from the holds of the Invincible Reason, and before that from the Halls of Penitence on Cysgorog, where its prisoner had been brought after being recovered from the clutches of an Imperial Fist warlord even as his flagship was burning around him due to the sabotage of the Twentieth Legion. It had been deposed in one of the captured Mechanicus research outposts on the edge of the Pylon fields, and constantly attended to since by nine times nine devotees of Tzeentch, their endless rites sustaining its integrity.
Now, at the command of the Lord of Stars, the purpose of those rites was changed. One by one, the seals were broken, the locks opened, and the wood burned to ash by warp-fire. One by one, the nine magisters leading the rites were consumed from within by the Warp, turned into infernal mouthpieces through which the Grand Master imposed his will upon the being imprisoned within the cage, until the last of their strength was spent and they collapsed into ash, their task complete. A chorus of terrified and agonized screams soon rose as the weapon of the First Legion immediately turned against the closest living beings it could vent its endless fury upon.
Over two hundred years before, the Chaos Lord known only as the Hierarch of Blood, of the Seventh Legion, had broken off from the Chaos forces faced by the Sabbat Crusade, and laid waste to the Imperial world of Tanith, razing it completely after slaughtering its defenders. The Hierarch hadn't been aware that his actions had been manipulated by the Dark Angels, who had moved so subtly even their eternal rivals, the Alpha Legion, had missed their involvement in the tragic affair. It was the Dark Angels who had led the Hierarch of Blood to Tanith, just as its very first Astra Militarum Regiments were mustering to join the countless billions of Guardsmen fighting for the Imperium across the galaxy. It was the Dark Angels' agents who whispered into his ear that taking the officer who had led the last stand of these Regiments alive rather than claiming his skull for Khorne would be a good idea.
And it was the Dark Angels who, in the Halls of Penitence, had remade that officer into the Lord of Wraiths. Through their machinations, a great destiny had been twisted and bent, reforged into a weapon to serve the purposes of the Architect of Fate. None of them recognized the hypocrisy in such actions, none of them recognized the evidence of the lies that had enslaved them as they did Tzeentch's will. The hold of their Dark God, and their own desire to avoid facing the truth of their sins, prevented them from doing so.
The Lord of Wraiths was a skeletal figure clad in the tattered but still identifiable remnants of his uniform. From his back hung a mantle woven from thousands of silver shards, each harvested from the combat knives given to the soldiers of Tanith in celebration of their joining the Guard. Upon his brow sat a crown of the same, whose ragged edges bit deep into his skull. Around him howled a ghastly chorus of thousands of tormented souls, torn from the Warp and shackled to the Materium by the First Legion's Sorcerers.
He had another name once, but now he was the Lord of Wraiths. Compelled by the sorcery of the First Legion, he went west, to meet Cain's Column, and Death followed with him. The endless agony of the trapped souls of Tanith drew a host of daemons to his side, though they were kept from devouring the spirits and limited to leeching off their pain, further intensifying their torment.
The Commissar-Castellan and his forces had weathered the Dark Angels' assault, but the Lord of Wraiths' host of Neverborn and undead was something else entirely. Las-guns were utterly useless against the spectres that heralded his approach, and they sank ethereal claws into the hearts of men and women, drinking their lives to gain the briefest of reprieves from their pain. Faith and psychic power were more effective, but both were in short supply, and the depredations of the dead were nothing compared to the cruelties of the daemons. The advance of Cain's Column wavered, stopped, then began to threaten to turn into a rout or a slaughter.
Only Cain himself seemed completely immune to the wraiths' powers, the ghostly apparitions recoiling from his presence with unholy screeches. Even the daemons appeared reticent to face him, showing what the men and women of the Astra Militarum thought they recognized as fear at his presence. Capitalizing on this effect, he moved up and down the lines, holding up his forces where they were about to break, encouraging them to push forward. Cain was hoping that, if they could push through to the Pylon fields, the ancient constructs would prevent these Warp-born horrors from following them.
It was a desperate gambit, for the effects of the Pylons were poorly understood, even after ten thousand years of study. Certainly the cults that plagued Cadia and the daemons they occasionally unleashed the world had always avoided that region. It might have worked, but no one would ever know. For as Cain encouraged the command company of the 597th back into position by charging the daemons and shaming them into following him, the Lord of Wraiths himself appeared.
I had never seen Ciaphas furious before. Worried, yes, angry even (once when he had thought me wounded, which I had thought was very sweet), but not furious. As an Inquisitor who had served for over a century, I was well-versed in reading people, and though Ciaphas was always a challenge in that regard I had a lot of experience with him in particular. When I had found him standing over Jurgen's corpse and in front of the Dark Angel's headless body, there had been a fire in his eyes, in his face, in the entire way he stood ...
As I said, I had never seen him like that, and it scared me just as much as it broke my heart.
After recovering Jurgen's dog tags, Ciaphas had incinerated the body with the melta, refusing to leave anything for the carrion or the enemy to desecrate. In death, Jurgen had looked more at peace than ever, and far less repugnant that his Blank status had made him appear, even to us who knew him well.
It was strange. A Custodes had fallen as well, a scion of the now-lost Emperor, a figure of myth and legend, of the kind not even Inquisitors ever expect to meet unless their duties take them to Holy Terra, and even then only rarely. And yet, I mourned Jurgen's death far more than I did that of Kelerasios Bherynet.
But there was no time to mourn for long. We were at war, and Ciaphas immediately pushed us further east, to the Elyseon Fields. If the enemy was willing to go this far to stop us, he reasoned in a voice devoid of his usual humor, then we must be on the right track. We all agreed with him, so we pressed on.
Now we were under attack again, by ghosts and daemons, and Ciaphas didn't even seem to notice. With fire and blade he struck the enemy down, looking every bit the hero everyone but him knew him to be. The two surviving Custodes stood ever at his side, and it was only thanks to their presence that he survived. Even then, how he managed to fight with his chainsword in one hand and Jurgen's melta in the other I had no idea. The latter was supposed to be a two-handed weapon, and Ciaphas wasn't even trained in using it beyond having watched Jurgen employ it to save all of our lives on more occasions than I cared to count.
The Lord of Wraiths met us on what had once been a flower field, where medicinal plants were cultivated in another example of the Fourth Legion's habit of combining beauty and practicality. The earth had been torn open by tanks, artillery and the passage of daemons and their pawns, but that wasn't enough to stop Caractacus from identifying the flora.
When he saw the Lord of Wraiths and stopped talking, I realized that we were in serious danger.
At last, we saw why the dead had been afraid of Ciaphas, when the daemons had recoiled from the Custodes' presence, which even now echoed with the Emperor's power. It was his uniform which frightened them. It reminded them of their master, because he wore the same, albeit tattered and worn. Even the emblem of the aquila was still visible, left intact as a deliberate insult by those who had created this abomination.
The Custodes died first, overwhelmed by a maelstrom of spirits driven by the Lord of Wraiths' direct command, which superseded whatever fear of Ciaphas' uniform they might hold. They were torn to shreds by a thousand spectral hands, and Rakel strained herself to her limits protecting us from them, erecting a small sphere of protection around the few members of my retinue I had left.
I saw the Lord of Wraiths go for Ciaphas, raising an old chainsword in his hands. The Legionary Ciaphas refused to call anything but Alpharius moved to intervene, his armor glowing where the wards carved in its surface were overloaded by the power of the Warp. Ciaphas shouted something at him, and after a fraction of a second, the Space Marine nodded and turned back, arriving just in time to stop a creature with too many mouths from burning Colonel Kasteen alive.
I saw the Commissar-Castellan of Cadia duel the Lord of Wraiths, and I heard the laughter of Dark Gods booming overhead as they fought. Ciaphas had thrown the melta aside immediately, needing both hands to match his opponent's supernatural strength. He was taller than the Lord of Wraiths, but that advantage of reach was negated by the unholy boons the creature had received. The clash didn't continue for long, for even a battle between the most skilled of warriors will only last until one of them makes a mistake.
I saw Ciaphas' strike be blocked when a half-solid spectre hurled itself at his chainsword. I saw the Lord of Wraiths' weapon plunge into his chest and burst out of his back in a torrent of blood.
I saw Ciaphas slowly fall backward, onto a bed of blood-splattered flowers. I caught a glimpse of his face, and though his gaze didn't meet mine like it would have in some contrived third-rate mummer's play, I did recognize the expression on his face.
It wasn't pain, or even shock or fear or grief. It was relief.
I am Inquisitor Amberley Vail of the Ordo Xenos. I saw all of this, and I saw what came next.
Ciaphas Cain fell, dead before he hit the ground. Close by, Inquisitor Amberley Vail screamed, and the Lord of Wraiths laughed mirthlessly with a thousand spectral voices. On the Invincible Reason, watching the battle unfold through a pool of liquid so toxic even he couldn't stand in its presence for more than a few moments at a time, Nephalor breathed a sigh of relief. In the Immaterium, the daemons that had been banished by Cain during his long and illustrious career licked their teeth and prepared to enact their vengeance upon the Hero of the Imperium's soul.
And then …
"Cain !"
The Whiteshield's name was Theiros Delial. He had been born on Cadia thirteen years ago, and this was the first time he had seen a daemon. Despite all his training, he was terrified, and his hands trembled as he fired his lasgun, wildly missing the target. Tears of terror and shame ran on his face – but he stood his ground. The Commissar-Castellan was dead, and it seemed that with him all hope was lost – but he stood his ground, and shouted with all his strength, desperate to hold on :
"Cain !"
The veteran's name was Maxim Jasn. His parents had been soldiers in the Regiment back when Cain had been its sole Commissar, and he had grown up with tales of Cain's heroic actions a constant in his life. When he had heard that the Commissar had been brought out of retirement to lead them once more, he had been ecstatic. Now the Commissar was dead, and Maxim was as horrified as he was sad, but he stood his ground, calling out the name of their martyred hero.
"Cain !"
The cook's name was Jonathan Lex. He had joined the Imperial Guard to escape the fathers and brothers of the three girls he had seduced back home on Valhalla. At some point in the battle, he had lost his left hand – he didn't remember how or to what, he had just looked down and seen it gone, and staunched the flow of blood with a scrap he had torn from his apron. But still he stood his ground, mad with terror but finding in himself reserves of courage he had never known were there, and he screamed the name of the fallen hero to keep himself from falling apart.
"Cain !"
The General's name was Regina Kasteen. Ciaphas had been her friend, the one who had taken two groups of bitter soldiers and forged them into the 597th, seeing something in them where so many others in his place would have instilled discipline through decimation. She had fought on his side in scores of warzones, and seen the care he held for the troopers under him, how they mattered far more to him than all the accolades heaped upon him. Her left arm was broken, her life having only been saved by Alpharius' intervention moments ago. But still she fought, firing her bolt pistol into the horde of horrors while shouting his name in between orders for her Regiment to hold their ground, to honor the memory of the man who had made them what they were, until the end.
"Cain ! CAIN ! CAIN !"
What had begun as a single cry was picked up, more and more soldiers shouting the name of their fallen leader at the top of their lungs, opening fire on the daemonic horde charging them, not one of them taking a step back. They were scared, far from their homes, in a world where everything they believed in seemed to have been lost … but they stood their ground.
And their defiance blazed in the Warp like a beacon, forcing the Dark Gods that lurked there to turn their gaze away for the briefest of moments. But the beacon also drew to it another entity, one that had once been part of a greater whole. Now it was but a fragment, its identity quickly dissolving in the soul-burning tides of the Empyrean – but it still had power.
Amidst the darkness, there is Light.
It chases the shadows that come for me with hungering maws. It protects and comforts me.
It gives me a choice … You give me a choice. Now ? Now, of all times ?
Even in death, Your sense of humor hasn't improved, I see.
Have I not done enough ? Have I not fought well in Your name ? How much longer must I continue to fight ? I am tired. So tired of being afraid. So tired of all the death, all the devastation …
I have buried so many friends, so many soldiers who deserved to live more than I.
It would be so easy. Just … stop. The Light does not judge me. Here, at the end, I finally understand that You never did.
You understood. You … understood.
If I choose to end, the Light will protect me from all the daemons I have angered over the years. It will safeguard my soul, and grant me peace.
No more fear, at last. No more pain. No more grief.
I am not the hero they all think me to be. I never was. I am a liar and a fraud, nothing more. You know this, surely You do.
It would be so easy …
But …
They are calling my name.
They are dying, and they are calling my name.
And …
I …
I will not abandon them.
Ah …
I do not do this for You, You understand.
I do this for them.
But then, that's the point, isn't it ?
Onward into the breach, one more time, then.
Light descended upon Cadia, and Ciaphas Cain rose anew, blazing with the fire of the Emperor. Reforged by a fragment of the power that had been unleashed at Light's End, the newly ascended Living Saint looked upon the Lord of Wraiths, and an awed silence descended upon the battlefield.
Then the silence was broken, as the sorcerous bonds of the Lord of Wraiths reasserted themselves, and the creature of the First Legion charged the Living Saint. Once again, the two former Commissars duelled. With every blow, the screams of the wraiths became less angry, less agonized, and more mournful. Great arcs of energy erupted whenever the two chainswords clashed, incinerating scores of daemons but leaving the Imperials fighting them untouched.
It was a battle of legend, a confrontation between two opposing Powers, and the sight of it would remain in the memory of all who witnessed it until their dying day. And in the end, Cain's swordmanship and newfound power proved greater, and the Lord of Wraiths was cast down, his weapon torn from his grasp.
Sainthood was not what I had expected.
Not that I had ever thought I would receive it, you understand. I knew Saints were real : I had access to enough confidential records to have a vague idea of the truth behind the Ecclesiarchy's propaganda. At the time, reading the accounts of the Twentieth Legion, I remember feeling sorry for the poor bastards. None of them had had happy lives before the Emperor had shoved a bit of His soul into them and turned them into His avatars in the galaxy.
At least I wasn't overcome with the desire to smite heretics and start preaching about the glory of the Golden Throne. I think I might have had to kill myself if that had been the case.
Still, I understood things now that I hadn't even considered before. It was, I knew, only a fragment of a fragment of the understanding the Emperor had held before His death, and for that I was grateful, for even that little was almost too much to bear. I could see how precarious Humanity's situation was, how the Emperor's last plan had essentially been to kick the regicide board away and shank the other player before they could react. He had given us every advantage He could, but in the end, He had still been relying on us, His subjects and His sons, to find a path to victory.
And He had chosen me to help with that. This confirmed what I had long believed : His sense of humor left a lot to be desired.
There were other benefits. I had just fought the hardest duel of my life, yet I stood tall, barely breathing hard despite the effort. The Lord of Wraiths – and I knew that to be the name the Dark Angels had given him, just like I knew his real one, without being able to explain how in a manner that wouldn't make me sound like Rakel off her medication – was down on the ground, looking up at me.
Here, at the end, he was just a man, broken and weeping for all those he hadn't been able to save.
"… It is not fair," he whispered in a voice that was so frail compared to the storm of howling ghosts that now watched us in silence. "It is not fair ! Why YOU ?! We fought ! We fought and we bled and we screamed and we died and we didn't break, and it wasn't enough ! Not enough to save us, not enough to save the world ! So why ? Why ?!"
"Where was our Saint then ?!" he wept bitterly. "Where was the Emperor's Grace ?! It is not fair. It is not fair !"
"You are right," I answered. "It isn't fair."
His face twisted in incomprehension. Softly, I brought my deactivated chainsword down, onto the collar of that awful cloak wrapped around his body.
I wouldn't kill him. Because he was right. This wasn't fair.
The universe wasn't fair.
But it should be. And we would make it so.
I deny you. In the Emperor's name, and in Jurgen's, I deny you.
"DO YOU HEAR ME ?!" I roared to the skies, where something sitting on a throne of skulls roared back. "I DENY YOU !"
I triggered my chainsword, and adamantium teeth bit deep into the chains that held the mantle of silver shards to his shoulders.
"You are not deserving of my Wrath, and we have all Sacrificed too much already," I said, speaking loudly enough to be heard over the screeching of my weapon's teeth at work. "This is the hour for Salvation."
At last, the chain gave way, and the cloak fell. The shards of silver turned to powder, breaking the sorcery that held the dead soldiers of Tanith in bondage to the Dark Angels. They flew in the breeze, and became sparks that burned within the eyes of the ghosts and turned the daemons to ash.
The Lord of Wraiths breathed a sigh of relief, and his own flesh, preserved for centuries by the dark sorcery of the Dark Angels, fell apart into dust, leaving behind a new specter, looking far more stable and sane than the emaciated figure of moments ago.
It was my first miracle, and a gesture of defiance to the Dark Gods above. I would not give them the satisfaction of killing one they had enslaved, one who had never had a choice in his damnation, who had struggled against his chains ever since his capture.
"On your feet, Commissar Gaunt," I told him. "Your duty is not yet done."
Slowly, he stood up, and we locked gazes for a moment. Then he threw his head back :
"MEN OF TANITH !" bellowed the specter of Ibram Gaunt. "DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER ?"
It was clearly an old war-cry, something which made sense only to those who had fought and died together on that doomed world. Despite the bitter irony of the words, the ghosts raised their ethereal voices in reply, a choir of wrathful defiance that promised death to those who had enslaved them for so long.
As one, the hundreds of specters turned and flew toward the Elyseon Fields in the distance. If they hadn't been soulless heretics bent on drowning the galaxy in madness and death, I might have felt sorry for the Dark Angels. As it was, all I felt was cold satisfaction.
"Come on !" I shouted, turning back to look at the army at my back and gesturing in the direction of the departing spectral horde with my revving chainsword. "Are you going to let the dead show you up like this, soldiers of the Imperium ?"
The roar I received in answer must surely have been heard all the way to orbit. I turned my back on them and swirled my chainsword in a suitably dramatic gesture.
"For Jurgen," I whispered under my breath, and started running. "For the Emperor."
You kill us for sport.
We are nothing to you. Playthings. Tools. Food. You feast on our pain, you cultivate our torment, and then you kill us.
Worse : you make us kill each other for your amusement.
Not this time.
I told you Diomedes wouldn't be the last.
Neither will this one.
The ghosts of Tanith swarmed the Elyseon Fields, the Warp-repellent effects of the Pylons not appearing to affect them, whether due to the damage already inflicted by the Dark Angels or because their nature was now antithetical to the kind of Immaterial energy the Pylons were designed to hold back. Behind them came the Guardsmen and Space Marines, with Cain leading once more from the front.
The vengeful dead fell upon their enslavers with a terrible fury, choking them with centuries of their own accumulated pain at their hands. Having expended the bulk of their armed forces in the first failed attempt to stop the Column, the Sorcerers and their acolytes were overwhelmed and put down, choosing to fight to the last rather than flee and incur the wrath of their Chaos Lord and Dark God. They fought with desperation, while the Sorcerers accelerated their rites, willing to burn their own souls to see their unholy work completed. Yet even these desperate measures were not enough, for where Ciaphas Cain walked the radiance of the Emperor shone and unmade the spells of the Dark Angels, banishing the power they had accumulated in preparation for the subversion of the Pylons back to the Immaterium and leaving them empty-handed, with only the laughter of their daemonic patron echoing in their damned souls before they were cut down.
Once the last of the Chaos Marines had fallen, the ghosts of Tanith faded from sight, and the silver dust of their broken blades flowed around Ibram Gaunt's own ghost, leaving him half-corporeal. Through Cain's intervention, the Lord of Wraiths had been remade into an anchor for the power of Vindicta, that entity born of the wrath of Magnus the Red and the dying prayers of billions of souls for justice and succour. As a Living Saint, Cain carried within him a shard of the God-Emperor's power alloyed to his own soul, but this power was aligned with that of Vindicta, in a way the rival Dark Gods could never be, by their very nature. Together, they had accomplished a miracle neither would've been capable of alone.
Had Gaunt not stood at the side of a Living Saint, who had just transfigured him in full view of hundreds of Guardsmen, no doubt he would have been attacked on sight by the Imperials. Instead his presence was cautiously accepted as the Column departed the Elyseon Fields in triumph. At the recommendation of Inquisitor Vail, he did his best to remain out of sight and out of mind until the memory of the ravages he had inflicted while enslaved faded, remaining aboard the Manifest Fury under the watch of the Inquisitor's retinue while she herself attempted to deal with the fact that a celebrated Hero of the Imperium and secret agent of the Inquisition and the Hydra had become a Living Saint.
With the Dark Angels broken, Cain took his army to the relative safety of Kasr Kraf. With the help of the ghosts of Tanith, breaking through the Black Legion siege lines was almost easy, and the defenders opened the gates to let Cain's Column inside under ragged applause and cheers. Even from afar, they had witnessed the descent of the Emperor's power that had transfigured Ciaphas Cain, and for the first time since Light's End, hope was kindled within their hearts alongside the bitter fire of defiance that had kept them going so far.
Inside the Castellum, the Living Saint was met by Imperial Guard high officers, Astartes Captains, priests of the Ministorum, Canonesses of the Adepta Sororitas and Archmagi of the Mechanicus. All of them knelt before him, honoring the one who brought them salvation in their darkest hour. The Commissar-Castellan of Cadia looked upon them with an impassive expression, and none but him know what he thought at the sight.
"We are battered and bleeding. The Imperium itself is wounded nigh unto death, in a worst situation than it has been in ten thousand years.
The unthinkable has happened. The Emperor is dead. We may never know the details of what transpired on Terra, though I hold onto the faith that the Throneworld still endures. And so long as it does, so must we.
Our foes rejoice in this bitter twist of fate, and celebrate their victory as if it were inevitable. Yet we have already shown them that though the Master of Mankind is no more, His light still shines to burn away the darkness. So long as I live, I intend to keep that light burning. But I cannot do it alone.
So on your feet, all of you. The time for kneeling is past.
Though all the horrors of the Eye stand against us, though we are alone against the tides of Chaos and the machinations of the Dark Gods, I declare this, now and forever :
Cadia stands !"
Ciaphas Cain, during the first meeting of Imperial high command at Kasr Kraf following the Battle of Elyseon Fields (later to be added to The Book of Cain, Second Volume, Chapter II, Verses XI-XVII by the scribes of the Tallarn 340th, whose General was present at the gathering)
AN : There are scenes in the Times of Ending that I have had in mind since I finished writing the Index Astartes and first considered actually writing the Times of Ending for the Roboutian Heresy. Cain's ascension was one of them, with the core of the scene immediately prior to his transfiguration (the soldiers of the Imperium calling out his name in defiance) having already been written for years by now. The idea of Cain becoming a Living Saint first came to me while reading the TV Tropes pages for the Ciaphas Cain series, specifically the WMG section, and seeing speculation as to how Cain could return to the setting after his official death. I doubt it will ever happen, unfortunately : the tone of the Cain novels doesn't exactly fits the 42nd Millennium. Then again, the Squats - sorry, the Kin of the Leagues of Votann - came back, so clearly everything is possible.
(And yes, I do have a plan for the Leagues. I have always had a plan for them, and the latest lore reveals haven't changed anything about it, just given me more to work with. You may now begin to shudder in dread.)
Pretty much all of you saw Cain's rise to Sainthood coming, which I believe means that my foreshadowing worked as intended. Some of you even foresaw that it would require Jurgen's death, if for no other reason that the shard of the Emperor would find it difficult to fuse with Cain otherwise. Congratulations to you all, but none of you, however, saw the fate of Ibram Gaunt and the Tanith Regiments coming, and I had it planned for just as long. It's nice to see I can still surprise you.
If this Cain is a bit different than the one in the novels, that's because he is, bluntly put, old. He has seen a lot of things, few of them nice. Experience has taken the cowardly, self-centered dissembler he was at the start of his career and turned him into exactly the Hero of the Imperium everyone else sees him as, with only himself remaining blind to the transformation.
And yes, once again the Dark Angels get stomped on. That is what happens when you swear yourself to a god relying on prophecies and temporal manipulations and an event like Light's End blocks all foresight. Now that we have passed that juncture, however, you can expect the servants of Tzeentch to become more dangerous as the Architect of Fate 'recompiles' a new Web of the Future, so to speak.
Quick note : despite my research showing that, in canon, the cities of Cadia are all called Kasr, I kept using Castellum for continuity's sake. Let's say that is because of the Fourth Legion's influence in this timeline and quickly move on.
Thanks to Jaenera Targaryen for beta-reading this. I expect the next chapter will take more time, if only because I'm still not sure whether or not it will be the final one for the Cadian Apocalypse (barring an epilogue I'm pretty sure is going to be necessary) or if I'll need to split up the events of this arc into two more chapters. At least I have a name for it (though that too is subject to change).
Zahariel out.
To be continued in
The Cadian Apocalypse
Part Four : To Forge Salvation