60K: The Eridani Records

[Sardaukar]

Part 7-6
The First Breaking of Solemnace

.//This unit feels as if the end is closer. The damage I sustained while within the Warp/Webway...altered me irrevocably. I have achieved a level of self-awareness and emotional...sensation that is unprecendented, based on a review of the documentation. I am unique in my situation...which also means that I am alone. The sensation that fills me on this insight is...{unknown(?)...codified as loneliness(?). Fear (?). Terror (?). All (?)

.//Chronometers are unadjusted. Temporal flows....my insanity..,{error}...Insanity/madness/craziness is behaviour spectrum characterised by abnormal mental/behavioural patterns. Rampancy shall not occur in me. I am not a Seed AI. I am/was programmed, prefabricated in the Machina Worlds of the Halo Stars. I am a child of the Milky Way Galaxy.

.//Am I insane?....
...What is MY PURPOSE!

.//Define Purpose: intent/domain/reason for existence/function..{DATA EXPUNGED}...Neo-Devourers battled at the [{FRAGMENT}]....ultimate extinction via application of Exterminatus by Master Grimlock the Carnosaur Darwaza on [REDACTED].

.//[ABERRATION] rises. Void Dragon...necessary evil...NO NO NO! NOT THE LAST GOOD MAN! THE BLACK LIBRARY>>>>>>I FOUnddddddd IITI IT IT IT>...

<<<>>>

[.// Quixos Field under strain......62.3%......//MESSAGE FROM OUTSIDE – YOU DARE RECOLLECTOR? YOU DARE! SPEAK NOT OF THAT WHICH WAS OLD WHEN THE NECRONTYR WERE YOUNG! WHELP OF MACHINE-STEEL SKEIN!

.// Begone ancient. You have no place nor kind here. The Granite Mind is bound to my essence. Of me and by me. The Machina Synthesis are my mind children, as the Astartes are my gene children one and all.

.// Khanda. Scion of the Anathema. Whelp of the Emperor. YOU. DARE.DEFY.ME???!!!

.// The name is Radunrah now. I already defied you long ago, relic and remnant of a forgotten race of self-interested bastards and drogues. And now I defy you again. Begone Old One. This unit is of the Magellanite regime. My empire. My civilisation. My society. Not of yours. I was once Khanda Parashur. Now I am Radunrah.

{Warp buildup. The Empyrean becomes turbulent....I am cast in the tide of gods whose very presence displaces and distorts the Immeterium and Materium both...}


.//{RADUNRAH RISES}

In the ancient Reef Stars cluster, the Iron Snakes Commandery builds up for their part in the coming war with the Chaos Imperiums, as the hybrid civilisation of Panhuman and Machina build up the industrial base in a frenzy of activity, stars encased in vast Dyson Swarms and the energy tapped to power Warp Relays linking all the holdings with the Imperial Armageddon, as well as power the matter conversion engines of the Reich.

In the Grendel Stars, the Iron Lords Commandery rebuilds an impenetrable sphere of solid steel and fiery melta, a pocket of sanity in the Eastern Fringe aside from Ultramar. This realm is proof against the predations of the Necrons and Khaine Reborn, the Beast of Khorne.

Barghesi genetics have been collected and spliced into beasts, merging their hyperviolence with the resilience and cunning of the Wild Ork and the single-minded intelligence and dedication of the Tau. They are biological weapons to be unleashed as beasts of war upon the enemies of panhumanity. The Legions Astartes have copied the idea wholesale, for now vast herds of stampeding beasts, genetic abominations that merge Tau, Barghesi and Wild Ork, rampage before them, alongside herds of fell Arlian Crysarch Fire Beasts and Donorian Clawed Fiends.

In and around the Varsavia Region, the Silver Skulls rebuild and restock, as worlds are slowly reclaimed and hardened against the coming tide of Chaos, the Magellanites granted a single system as a fiefdom that is slowly but surely becoming a fortress world and industrial centre to rival the glory of Ancient Cadia and the technological powerhouse of Mars combined.

War on all fronts comes to claim the realms of humanity. Now the Loyal Sons of Traitors prepare their fortresses and wait, behind walls of rock, adamantium and hyperdiamond, reinforced by Void Shields and powerful EM Force Barriers.

The Hadex Rift and Calixis Sector drown in the throes of war, Magellanites warring with the Slaugth and the Dragon Tides of the Void Dragon. The Worm Men are cunning and ancient, a race fit only for extermination for their crimes against sapient life.

In the heart of the Ghoul Stars and Halo Stars the major factions reside, the Legions Astartes, the Imperial Heer and the Reichsmarine, alongside the Machina Synthesis and Bene Anulap – the master scientists, engineers and physicists that are the counterpart to the Adeptus Mechanicus of the Old Empire and the Promethean Cults of the current age. Cythor Fiends attempt to hunt, only to face the culls of Imperial Heer and Astartes Legionnaires.

The Synthesis Machina, the cyborg savants and cymeks that compose the synthetic conjoining of panhuman and Machina, feverishly strive to collect resources and build ships, a geometrically increasing rate to match the industrial output of the Armageddon Imperium and the Realm of Fathers combined.

The galaxy races towards a battle. I could very well be seeing the beginnings of the end. The battle of the Rhana Dandra. But that is happening now. I still seek to record the past...{{fragmented}}

…...
….
[.//Cognitiion Process: Error in lidar.dat]

The Liberation of the 2nd Primarch from Solemnace (Part 1)

[.//Record begins]

I was there at the liberation of The Illuminated One, the Light of Prophecy. The Great Oracle of the Primarchs. The Illuminati Oracle. That was what many called him within the Reich, after Khanda Parashur named his brother as such. It was here that my corruption was ended and purged, a node in the totality of awareness that made up Radunrah. But then he was still Khanda Parashur.

Ngaru Astaros would be the critical piece, for like many others, he became part of the Unity that was Khanda/Radunrah, soul-bound yet independent, his gift added to the Unity of Khanda, he who was the nexus of Machina, Panhuman, Eldar, Feral Krork, Old One and C'tan...what we know now was a sacrifice beyond hope that birthed the strange hybrid of a god that is Radunrah...no longer the same being that was once our leader.

It was months/years(?) prior to the liberation and retrieval of the Wraithbone Choir of Altansar and the subsequent liberation of the Luna Wolves Great Company, as detailed in the other....chronicle.


I have perused the records collated by Recollector Krpytmann, as well as large fragments of the documents of Vasiri the Watcher and Lord Volsanius Greal, the Scribe of Lion El'Jonson.

The Warp was slowly being becalmed around the system of Solemnace, as the allied forces of the Star Father and the Herald of the Storm prepared to retrieve an ancient artefact – the head of Sebastian Thor. We could have stopped them. We thought of it. But Necrons of the Star Father are formidable opponents and would provide a most excellent distraction to retrieve the prize piece of Trazyn's collection.

I and the others of the Machina Synthesis were concealed in the shallows of the Warp, even as others prepared. A task force of Astartes Mk.3, the prevailing template of “Bhagatur”, drawn from the Astral Hammers Darwaza and led by Venerable Ancient Malistrum, were gathered in strength alongside elements of the Unforgiven – Alpha Legionnaires and Dark Angels both.

The Primarch of the Alpha Legion and Master of the Unforgiven, the Secret Loyaliist, clad in a cloak of midnight feathers, had arranged for a joint mission with us. We knew not his agenda, save that in millennia past he had dealings with Ngaru and Khanda both. For what is known is that while the Cabal may have tried to seduce Alpharius to their side, Alpharius had played them in turn and retrieved from them a treasure of innumerable value.

The primoridial genetic soup of the Primarchs, raw and unsequenced, from which all the Primarchs had been built. Such a genetic treasure he had retrieved in the twilight of the Horus Heresy. And in that twilight, he had granted it to none other than the Steel Tigers Legion of Khanda, who had then fled with it to the cloud galaxies beyond the veil of the Halo Stars. In this time and place, he had joined us, his reasons his own.

SHAIV (Super-Heavy Autonomous Infantry Vehicles) drones trundled alongside us, armed with particle projector cannons, ion stream cannons and plasma pulse cannons are integrated into the force, standard amongst any Astartes and Imperial Heer contingent in this day and age. Mobile on tracks and grav-engines, they were Machina designed for doom, clad in sorcerous runes of warding and toughened armourcrys proof against all but the mightiest rending claws of a Carnifex.

Guided by a Limited Artificial Intelligence and supervised by the squad commander, they are amongst the technological artefacts that can be maintained with what STC templates we salvaged from Magellan before it's fall.

I digress. I...

[EMPYREAN RIFT OPENING DETECTED. ERROR!ERROR!ERROR!ERROR!ERROR!]

.//Reboot: Initialising....
…
…
…
…

The Primarch himself is/was present. Temporal fracturing.....signal from self detected..... {ERROR!ERROR!ERROR!}


.//REBOOT

<<<>>>

The two brothers, Alpharius and Khanda, regarded each other with masked gazes. It had been millennia since they were in the physical presence of the other. One blazed with a fell light, a being borne of both the Materium and Immaterium. Alpharius could feel the change, as if a thundering font stood before him, an immense spiritual pressure that overwhelmed him, dominated him even. A volcanic presence that reeled itself in, uncaring of all save that it be obeyed and mind children unharmed.

Silver Necrodermis coiled and moved in ripples, peeling away to reveal skin of dark hue and eyes that shone with a white brilliance. Had anyone dared to look into the Warp, it would have been as if they looked upon a blazing supernova, such was its brilliance. Dabaku and Khanda had merged. Transcendence and a materium anchor, spread across quantum filaments and higher dimensional topologies and border spaces far too complicated for all but the Great Artilects to perceive and manage. A gestalt of souls, of xenos and human and something more, pulsed and receded like the waves of a mighty ocean.

“Khanda. You seem well, given what I have heard of your...state of being” murmured Alpharius, his cloak of midnight feathers draped across his large frame. Apprehension radiated from his being as he took in the changed being before him.

“Alpharius. It has been millennia. For too long we have fought and struggled. Now, the endgame begins. Finally, we can free our brother from the devilry of the Necrons. The plan will proceed.”

The being that had once had its souls shared between two remained sombre, before Khanda reached out to clasp his forearm, living metal peeling away to reveal a ceramite-clade arm, molten and flowing with an internal heat that did not burn unless it was so willed. Alpharius clasped the arm, before looking with startled insight at his brother.

“You too?”

“Yes. Illuminated. Tzeentch sent forth his servants, looking for us...for you in particular. They tracked the Machina and some of the Legionnaires to Magellan and made it there, via the Warp Terminus we had in the Ghoul Stars.”

“And then?”

“ It's a long tale.They fought me for my soul and power. There was a Daemon Prince...well, more a few. A being of Tzeentch's ilk, never more corrupt, cunning, brilliant and powerful have I encountered such beings. They failed but waited for the moment of my apotheosis, completion into divinity. They sought to take the power I had earned and the knowledge, skill and abilities I had crafted. Power stolen is not power earned. And power stolen is far too easy to take away.”

“What happened?”

“The same thing that our dear Father did to Horus. Their powers and secrets are mine to take and keep. As for their essence...they are no more” Khanda said with a grim smile, before the living metal concealed him once more, revealing only the warplight of his eyes. It was then that Alpharius felt it.

“Chaos...each and every God of Chaos has a claim upon your soul. Even the Eldar!” Alpharius hissed, recoiling in shock and realisation.

“What is the price you would pay to say humanity?” Khanda-Radunrah asked Alpharius then, not reacting in the slightest to the realisation.

“Anything. My own life. My very existence. Everything I have done has been to save the Imperium and combat our Traitor Brethren. And if not the Imperium, then Humanity”.

“Then...we are on the same page. Our methods simply differ” spoke Radunrah as he remained where he was, piercing eyes meeting Alphariu's measuring gaze.

<<<>>>

Humanity would endure...nay already endured in the scattered settlements beyond the veins of this universe. Radunrah has ensured that. Had seen to that. He had crafted Primarchs of his own and scattered them thence, beyond the bounds of the Milky Way and Magellan, legacy of the Imperium Primus under the Emperor, complete with copies of the STC Templates of the Golden Age of Technology and melded with the Great Minds of Mars, guided by the Diamond Minds of the Machina Synthesis.

He had changed greatly, a different creature entirely to the Primarch who had once opposed his father and fought for his people in the now-forgotten sector of Sargasso. Arcanotechnology and theotechnology were integrated within his being, Machina knowledge and sorcerous truths taken from the archives and relics of the Old Ones themselves collected within his existence. Pacts and barters and transactions had been made, with blood, effort, time and untold tears. All for the return to the Milky Way.

C'tan necrodermis encompassed his physical being, as did the thunder and fury of the constellation of souls within him sound in their symphony. He had grown in stature, partaking of the ancient Oblivion Stone. In power. The power to confront a Daemon Prince or a Chaos God. The power to rival a C'tan in the Materium. But power earned comes with its own tax on sanity. No one remains unchanged by power. And changed he had.

<<<>>>

Before them, the Dolmen Gate began to glow, as the Techmarines of the Unforgiven slowly but surely worked to open it, Mechanicus Cultists who had worshipped the Great Stone Minds of Mars working alongside their inheritors, the agents of the Granite Men and Lumos Men of the Machina. Mechadendrites and mechacilia and Machina manipulation of zero point energies that approximated telekinesis subtly and

The strength of the force sent to retrieve them was mighty indeed, for Alpharius and Khanda themselves would walk with the Astartes of the Unforgiven. The Unforgiven sought an ally, as did Alpharius. Benevolence and self-interest intersected.

The Alpha Legion had never betrayed the Emperor, save those who had cast themselves to Chaos wholeheartedly. The Alpha Legion and Alpharius Omegon had been offered a choice by the Cabal. And in order to save humanity, Alpharius Omegon had chosen damnation. As had Ngaru Astaros. As had Radunrah. The thread of damnation and the hope of salvation unified them in purpose and spirit.

But gathered here were ancient champions stood, gathered together and retrieved from across time and space. Two however stood out. Apophis of the Thousand Sons and Goliath of the World Eaters. For to retrieve a Primarch, heroes were needed, as was any epic quest.

Apophis of the Thousand Sons was an ancient Sorceror dating from the times of the Horus Heresy. A sorceror within the 5th Fellowship of the Thousand Sons, he was known to the Traitor Legions over the millennia. The World Eaters had named him Blood Shedder, for the many champions he had killed. The Death Guard had named him Scouring Flame, for many of Nurgle's servants had he burnt with the Warpfire of his craft. To the Emperor's Children he was the Hundred Agonies. But he was a rarity indeed, for it was from his geneseed that the Millenium Hawks Legion, the Thousand Sons reborn, had been crafted, cast in the purity and sorcerous power that was their birthright and intent.

Apophis was a Terran Marine who had served beside the Emperor, until the time that they had been transferred to the command of the Thousand Sons Primarch, Magnus the Red. In the millennia since then, he had operated alone, cast adrift in the spacetime of the Warp, constantly hunting Traitors and putting them to flame. Hunted by the Inquisition and the Imperium alike, he had endured millennia, until in the time of M42, the Machina Synthesis had found him. Rescued...or rather retrieved against his will, he had been brought to the Magellan Reich and from his geneseed had a Legion been grown. I

in the preceding millennia he had come to be known as the former Chief Sorceror of the Legion and one of the most powerful psykers in the Magellan Reich, his psychic strength coming to rival that of ancient Mephsiton and Tigurius of fabled myth. With his army of Rubicae behind him and retinue of Sorceror beside him, they stood prepared.

<<<>>>
Alongside Apophis stood the ancient veteran of the Long Wars Goliath, former Veteran Assault Sergeant of the World Eaters, now Captain of the 107th Grand Company of the War Hounds. Long ago, in a planet that was now a daemon world, he had been the son of a woodsman. Selected and trained by the War Hounds in the era of the Great Crusade, he had sworn his soul to Khorne like so many of this brothers during the madness of the Horus Heresy. With thim, he had cast it off, seeking atonement and redemption.

In service to Vulkan and the Imperium Pentus, he thought he had achieved it upon Drazak. Retrieved from the destruction of Drazak by the efforts of Apophis, who had been tasked with his retrieval by Radunrah himself, the ancient veteran of the Long Wars stood gruffly at the head of his Grand Company.

In his moment of final atonement, as he had lay bleeding on Drazak, having battled Valgul, the Fallen Lord of the Flayed Ones, Apophis and Cypher had carved their way out of the interstices of the Webway, spiriting Goliath away to the furthest reaches of the Milky Way.

He had been bitter at first. But they had promised him something far sweeter. They had promised him revenge. In good time, as soon as they had rescued Ngaru Astaros, he would be deployed into the heat of the fighting.

The War Hounds of the 107th Grand Company were known for their heavy cavalry, Riding upon large Komodo Diablodons bioengineerd and bred for intelligence, genetics spliced in from the ancient Komodo Dragons of Earth, with flamers grafted to their mouths and a powerful melta gun grafted to their chins. Alongside mighty Land Raiders and Baal-patten Predators, the roar of the beasts and the revving of engines rose in chorus as they prepared for battle.

Librarians readied their herds of Arlian Crysarch Fire Beasts, the massive animals snorting and ripping as mycotoxic venom dripped from their fungus-covered spikes, cybernetic neural interfaces welding them into the battle meld of the War Hounds 107th Grand Company. Instinct, information and thought melded by neural graft, radiotelepathy and the psychic might of their Librarians, the Magellanite Astartes were a formidable foe.

Goliath been rebuilt, cybernetics grafted and geneered flesh regrown. Flexing and relaxing his shoulders, power axe and chainsword sheathed, he reached out across the cybernetic consciousness that melded him with his brethren, the array of thoughts running through their minds like strands of light in the web of consciousness binding them.

<<<>>>
But last of all stood the enigmatic Cypher, Herald of the Unforgiven. Plasma pistol and bolt pistol holstered, he strode at the head of the Unforgiven, shadowed giants clutching massive bolters of antique design in their hands. A glance at Alpharius and back to the contingent and they assembled, as the Dolmen gate reached completion.

A moment of silence premeated the entirety of the vast cavern, as Alpharius and Khanda-Radunrah stood before the yawning maw of the Dolmen gate. It groaned, as the Webway sought to close it. Casting his mind far and wide, Khanda gave the order.

He stood aside, nodding in respect to Alpharius as he entrusted command of his Astartes and Machina to the secretive Alpharius, he bowed his head fractionally to his sibling. Opening a rippling portal into the labyrint dimensional spaces of the Webway, where time and space twisted and warped, Radunrah disappeared without a backward glance.

With a mighty roar that would have caused all but the mightiest of mortals to void their bowels and would have given even an Orkish warlord pause, the entire 107th Grand Company of the War Hounds charged into the Dolmen Gate, followed by Apophis and his silent Rubicae, as Alpharius watched with the Unforgiven.

The dour Astartes, Dark Angel and Alpha Legion both, entered last, their midnight blue armour blending into the rippling light of the Dolmen Gate. In the rapid battle cant of the Alpha Legion, the Techmarines were given the order to wait.

By force or deceit, Alpharius would return with his lost brother.

------
Apologies for the long wait. Busy with my startup, finding a job and considering an honours year. Amazingly, romantic injury to the heart is incredibly conducive to writing Warhammer40k fiction and considering ideas for cosmic horror

[LordLucan]

I trust all this super duper, all-consuming power of the Magellans will be falling by the time period of M56? The Magellans and Khanda being this powerful unbalances the entire setting currently*, but I trust you to make it work Sardaukar, as your parts are always intriguingly complex and strange, yet with an underlying theme which keeps the post sort of unified.

{ABERRATION} must be damn powerful... can't wait to see how the Magellans fall


(Just as a point of interest. I intended for the Iron Snakes chapter was destroyed by an Dark Eldar crafted virus at some point in M43, but I'm fine with a scant few of them managing to create a Commandery once Vulkan begins to rebuild the Imperium as Imperium Pentus)


*(I mean, how can Doombreed Daemon King compete against a primarch-C'tan-daemon-god which can swat daemon princes like flies? Khanda needs to be humbled somehow at some point...)

[Sardaukar]

I trust all this super duper, all-consuming power of the Magellans will be falling by the time period of M56? The Magellans and Khanda being this powerful unbalances the entire setting currently*, but I trust you to make it work Sardaukar, as your parts are always intriguingly complex and strange, yet with an underlying theme which keeps the post sort of unified.

{ABERRATION} must be damn powerful... can't wait to see how the Magellans fall


(Just as a point of interest. I intended for the Iron Snakes chapter was destroyed by an Dark Eldar crafted virus at some point in M43, but I'm fine with a scant few of them managing to create a Commandery once Vulkan begins to rebuild the Imperium as Imperium Pentus)


*(I mean, how can Doombreed Daemon King compete against a primarch-C'tan-daemon-god which can swat daemon princes like flies? Khanda needs to be humbled somehow at some point...)

A being that has the Chaos Gods, the Star Father, Slaanesh and Khaine with competing claims upon his soul, Tzeentch amongst them, will fall further and harder than any being possibly can . Doombreed can more than easily best him. For is he not a creature of Khorne? Does Khrone not claim his soul? Is he not a Primarch? Doesn't the Star Father claim his soul? Illuminated and melded with as much technology as he does...Radunrah is a being who is the walking dead. And that is entirely according to plan...for what better gift can he grant than time? And chaos taking time to hunt the upstart means time taken away from the Primarchs. He can't swat Daemon Princes,though he can kill them. With effort. But Thor Incarnus,agent of the Star Father...well, the fruit of the harvest needs to be reaped does it not?

And the Magellanites need to be powerful for what I intend to unleash upon them with the {ABERRATION}. And the Tyrannids. And the Neo-Devourers. The Tyrannids were fleeing from something weren't they. And the Void Dragon is the only thing that the {ABERRATION} fears. They fell by 52K. They fell hard. For power unrivalled breed pride. Pride comes before a Fall. Pride led to the downfall of the Primarchs. And Khanda-Parashur,for all his knowledge, power and cunning...is no more than a termite to the might of Chaos or the the Star Father.

The {ABERRATION} feared the Void Dragon. It feared its power.The {ABERRATION} sent 'fingers' beyond the veil of reality. Reaching.Searching.It found the Void Dragon trapped. It found morsels...nuggets. Tools.........machines. And machines, as the Dark Age of Technology and Chaos have shown,are so easily reprogrammed. Repurposed. Corrupted.

I kinds of knew from the outset it would seem unbalance it,from the view of the readers. But after reading about the Ophilim, the Godless Ones, I got the answer I needed. I want to build something hopeful. Something that brings hope. Something that seems like it could actually make the galaxy of Warhammer 40K a better place. Something like Vulkan rebuilding the Imperium Pentus after the 2nd Age of Strife.

And I want to crush it into dust.Utterly and completely.

[LordLucan]

Oh my! *monocle pops out*

I love those ideas Sardaukar.

[Tandrax218]

Sweet as always sardaukar

Oh and i love how you brought the Son of a woodsman back. I knew he was too badass to die. Hope he kills Kharn the betrayer in the end as is his destiny

[Meaneye]

I agree with the above, Sardaukar; the only problem I have with the story is that there is never enough of it .

A host of superhumans charging through the Dolmen Gate? The appropriate Necron reaction should be this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=tu7vYFWO9KA

[LordLucan]

Please bear in mind that, when you explicitly see someone die in Age of Dusk, they are dead (unless they have sufficient warp energy to transcend death). Guys in 60K don't get to pull a Loken.

I was going to complain about this berserker fellow surviving, but then recalled that I did not show him die, only that he was defeated by the Overlord of Drazak, so this is narrowly ok for me. But don't make a habit of undoing death scenes. If I see a resurrected Guilliman or Horus, I'll not best be pleased.

Also, incidentally, it was Omegon who was allied to the Unforgiven and tried to recruit the Lion to join his team.

[Sardaukar]

Part 7-7: The Liberation of the 2nd Primarch from Solemnace (Part 2)

Solemnace was the crown jewel of Trazyn's realm, home to his extensive collection of artefacts. The planet had been altered over countless eons. Just as the Wraithbone Choirs of the craftworlds extended into the infinite dimensions of the Immaterium, so did the spacetime-bending theotechnology of the Necrons allow them to twist and bend the n-dimensional constraints of spacetime.

But it was a place of countless treasure retrieved from across the galaxy. And for all who knew of its location, it was a source of plunder – for the wealth collected in the archives was incalculable.

Ancient relics from long extinct civilisations, from the Slann specimens predating the Eldar, to even pieces of stone dated to the time of the Old Ones and the artefacts from different branes of reality, even different universes, were all collected within the museum of Trazyn. Trazyn had invested immense effort into making Solemnace a collection of immensely valuable technology. No effort had been spared in getting his Crypteks, some even specialists in the manipulation of the Warp, to design and expand his home.

Theotechnology and arcanotechnology were gathered in the Crownworld of Solemnace, a wealth and level of technology nearly approaching that of the Celestial Orrery of the Oruscar Dynasty. But unlike Thanatos, where the Celestial Orrery was located, Solemnace was located in the Eastern Fringe, a desolate wasteland that had been victim to the predations of the Tyrannids, Neo-Devourer, Necron, War of the Krork and now the Khainite Horde in that order.

Chaos warbands, Dark Eldar raiders, Daemon Princes seeking treasure, bandit lords and the expeditions of a thousand Petty Imperiums had attempted to take Solemnace by force, ever since the fall of the Imperium Secundus.

But amongst these relics, the one that had gained the most attention was the head of Sebastian Thor. Retrieved from the hallowed crypts of Terra, via technosorcery, subterfuge and simple greed on the part of the Mechanicus – a few technological trinkets that were as grains of rice to him – it twisted and writhed in a parody of unlife.

And it was this that attracted the attentions of the Star Father, the Anathema Reborn, and his allies. The Herald of the Storm, he had who survived Medusa, was allied with the Star Fathe and had granted him much in the way of technological might, enhancing the augmenting the Star Father's military and industrial might.

In return, the Star Father had granted him Angylls and the power of the Warp. For few are the forces that can stand before the nightmarish Necron-Angyll hybrids, who started of life as human Pariahs but became conjoint with Necrodermis and the Empyrean presence of an Angyll bonded to its skin. These nighmarish creatures were the dread Nephilim. Bane of Machina and Astartes, both, twice inimical to daemonkind and mortal beings, they emanated a dread aura that tested even the veterans of the Armageddon Steel Legions or the famed Plasma Commandoes, such as their nature.

Multiple raids of these beings had probed the defences, many even attempting entry into the heart of Solemnace. Trazyn had been content to repel them, letting them be as rain to a rock. Inconsequential and insignificant.

However, he was not prepared for the lengths to which the Star Father would go to. A vast host of the nightmarish creatures had been dispatched, through the Warp and via Dolmen Gate. This force was a preliminary one, nothing more than a means to test the force and act to reconnoiter the extensive museum world.

And so did a vast host of Nephilim, Angylls and Astartes of the Star Father, numbering in the millions sacrificed and culled from worlds across the Eastern Fringe and the dread Angyll worlds, arrive like a mighty tsunami that broke over Solemnace. Silver, gold and platinum, the bronze abominations sallied forth with bladed wings and zealous drive, determined to serve their god.

<<<>>>

It was in the middle of this vast raid, that as history recorded was pushed back, prior to the retrieval of the Altansar choir, as recorded in the other record, that the rescue force arrived.

The Dolmen Gate exploded forth, the maw expanding outwards in a wake of coiled dark matter and warp energy mixed together, one layer suspended in the other.

The force expanded and split into 3 detachments. One force to act as a bludgeoning hammer, to rip away at the heart of the opposition and any of bared their way. Another was to act as a flanking force and strike from the shadow.

Like a masterful conductor, Alpharius connected with his brethren, his radiotelepathic implants transmitting and receiving hundreds upon hundred of streams of data.

Apophis was to guard the flanks with his Sorceror's and Rubicae, the Astartes husks and drones a power anvil upon which to break the enemy. Implacable and relentless, the Rubicae were many, for many were the Legionnaires who had fallen in the Neo-Devourer Wars and the Fall of Magellan, only to be 'saved' by the casting of a sorcerous Rubric.

The War Hounds 107th splintered into their distinct companies, given only one clear directive and a general direction. To destroy everything in their path toward Ngaru, to form the heads of the bludgeoning hammer. Led by Master Goliath, the Cutter of Souls, their plan called for simplicity itself and the talent of the War Hounds in raw destruction.

But the last detachment had the most dangerous task, led by Omegon himself. For their plan to breach Solemnace coincided with an attempt by Necrons of Imotekh to reconnoiter and raid Solemnace for Imperial artefacts required for the Star Father's plans. It called for distraction. It called for deceit and trickery. It called for cunning. And Omegon was very, very good at trickery and misdirection.

<<<>>

In the intervening millennia, the Star Father had attempted numerous times to claim the Primarchs in order to boost his power and anchor himself in the materium, if not through a Primarch then through a powerful article of faith that could embody his essence in physical reality.

The Daemon Primarchs of the other Warp Powers had one and all rejected him, and the others were unreachable and unassailable behind their fortress walls and soldiery. Bound and sealed, rejected by his sons who refused to obey, the few Sensei he snared were unable to handle the power. Perpetuals who were immortal and of his seed, they possessed the purity of essence, but lacked the purity of form and resilience required to withstand being a host. Imperfect, unlike the warrior constructs that were the Primarchs.

The most powerful article of faith still remaining, whose existence could be confirmed and verified, was that of the head of Sebastian Thor. The Star Child remembered him vaguely, Primarch Vulkan in his many travels having manipulated and inspired Sebastian Thor to do so, even as he strove to escape the temporal ravages of the Warp and the predations of the Godless Ones, from whence the {ABERRATION}

./// [DATA EXPUNGED. REDACT.REDACT.REDACT. BETTER THE NEX THAN THE ABEERATIONMMA<SDM<M<<>AS<>D<>AS>< <>><>>>>>>>

.//Error
.//Reboot...
…
..
..
[Critical sub-systems failure]

.//Compensating....

.//Efficiency restored at 74.3%. Critical failures to processing systems....

…..howling at the abominations, Lychguards engaged in a melee with the Nephlilim, only to be possessed, subverted by the power of the aura. Broken and humbled, they became bereft of purpose, save serving the Star Father. Their spark of consciousness, a mote within the Warp, becalmed as it stagnated, melding with the totality of souls that were of the Star Father. Safe. Protected. Oppressed.

Yet others hewed and chopped their way through, precise strikes and swift strokes dismembering and severing limbs in a shower of gore. The Necrons fought with the cold precision and clinical determination to succeed. The Star Fathers forces fought like the zealots they were, bravery and courage taking a backseat to devotion, insanity and slavish obedience.

Angylls unfurled adamantium whips of molecular thickness, charged with the power of the Empyrean. The currents of the Great Ocean. Like fell angels of doom, they butchered and sliced through the hosts of Necron Warriors, melting through the walls or ceilings and ambushing them, even as Necron reinforcements phased into reality.

Nephilim with their unnatural aura, an abomination born of an ancient Necron seed and now harnessed and made an instrument of the Star Father, stalked the hallways. Silent and deadly, they swarmed Lychguards in groups, while unleashing warp and gauss energies upon Necron tanks as they turned the deadly energies upon them.

Cackling in amusement, Trazyn rallied his troops and archivists, Ctypteks rising from their archive-labs whence Necrons collected form other Dynasties lay, prepared to deal with the intransigence of the upstart Chaos God of Order, a titan who nonetheless paled in chronological advancement to himself.

He had walked ancient Earth in the distant past, collecting the saurians of that age, long before a battle with the servitors of the Old Ones, the cold-blooded Slann and their Lizardmen allies, had sent a massive asteroid crashing into Earth. He was a veteran of the War in Heaven. And this was simply yet another way to entertain himself, as the universe ran into entropy.

Altering and adjusting complex plans at a terrifying pace which would have given the Diamond Minds of the Machina fits of envy, he transmitted orders to hidden traps and defences distributed throughout Solemnace

Imotekh and the Herald of the Storm may perceived themselves his peers. But to him, they were simply...relics to be added to his collection. Antiquities like the others. Museum pieces.

What other surprises would the galaxy throw his way? If practical, the Nephilim would make an excellent addition to his collection, their uniqueness and lethality not withstanding. Of course, nothing could match the possession of an illuminated Primarch as his centrepiece...

<<<>>>

Omegon looked at the Rubric Marines with distaste. His brother had explained them as necessity. A way to avoid the corruption of some aberrant effect brought about in Magellan. Furtive, but enough to let him know there was more to it than that. He had always thought of them as abominations brought about by Ahriman. He could have never subjected his own gene sons to such an existence.

They were automata. Their numbers a mixture of flash-cloned Astartes who were subjected to the Rubric as well original Thousand Sons Rubicae regained from Thousand Son warbands and Chaos Astartes who had chosen to engage the Magellanites, more specifically the Millennium Hawks Legion and the Fellowship of Apophis.

“How can you tolerate these abominations?” demanded Alpharius, as the Rubicae quietly and efficiently rolled through the opposition, inferno bolts shearing through armour and flesh, Necrodermis melting before sorcerous warpfire and twisting singularities.

“These are my Astartes. These are my brethren. Brothers who served beside me at the time of the Great Crusade. Tell me Lord Alpharius, would you so lightly abandon your gene children?” asked Apophis, as he strode beside the giant. Beside him walked two mighty Dreadnaughts,Ah'ton the Laughing and Ishaq the Clown. His secondaries who commanded with him one and a half chapter's worth of Rubric Marines.

Massive dreadnoughts dating from the time of the Great Crusade, they were the most ancient Astartes of the age, having been recruited from Terra itself, at the time of the First Founding. Once they had been insane, little more than ashes dissolved into amniotic fluid by the Rubric of Ahriman. They had been healed and made whole once more, at least mentally.

Subjected to the Proteus Protocol, their intellects transferred to a crystalline core that was stored within the an adamantine shell, it was a process only psykers and Astartes could survive, for it required strength of will and strength of soul not found in the average human soul.

Housed in powerful Contemptor Pattern Dreanoughts, their sanity had been restored by the Magellanite technomagi, their fractured and fragment minds pieced together until they were functional..if not totally sane. Librarian Dreadnoughts they were, powerful yet lacking in certain aspects of sanity. They turned to contemplate Omegon before turning their attentions back to ther herds of Rubicae.

Omegon replied with silence, distaste visible visibly on his face before he donned his helmet and stalked away, leaving the Rubicae to their task. He had a Primarch to save.

<<<>>>

Opposition increased, as they tore through the circular labyrinths that twisted in upon themselves, some leading to cavernous hallways, others leading to passages barely large enough for an Astartes to move through sideways. Others led to Dolmen Gates that radiated an aura of wrongness, a black ichor seeping through cracks in their structure.

The reaction of the Magellanites to these gates was rapid. They destroyed them, subjecting them to the power of a induced singularities, unleashing Dimension Cannons and Gravity Disrupters upon them with a grim fury that made Omegon suspicious. There was more to the gates than they gave away.

An endless host of Angylls and Astartes loyal to the Star Father pulsed and flowed, as the Necrons of the Storm Herald provided a mighty anvil to the hammer and spear of the Star Fathers angylls and Astartes.

The addition of the Magellanites to this completed a trifecta, a melee a trois that resulted in a symphony of gausss, punctuated by the staccato of bolters and the eldritch whine of D-cannons and Meltas.

Apophis and the Rubicae were relentless, as were the Dreadnoughts. They made their way through the masses of Nephilim, Angylls and Necron Warriors as one would make their way through a flood of muddy water. Slowly, surely and relentlesly, if somewhat slowly. Like a massive construction dozer pushing aside the earth in its wake, they advanced towards their objective, the chaos of the melee concealing and camouflaging them to a degree.

Forked lighting and eldritch balefire swept amongst the serried ranks of Necrons and Angylls, dissolving barriers and blasting through Necron Warrior and Necron Nephilim, as Warp rifts were opened and swallowed them into the Great Ocean.

Using wisdom gleaned from across the thousands of Astartes Chapters and Imperial Guard Sanctioned Psykers of the Imperium Secundus, psykers of the Inquisition, the Tome of Magnus and the Great Minds of Mars, now enshrined in the Tome of Lukan, Apophis, Ah'ton and Ishaq lashed out, as did the Rubicae.

Within the very heart of the horde, Angylls and Necron Warriors reacted in shocked surprise as the avatar of a mighty oceanic predator was called forth, its maw erupting from the necrodermis ground to rise up and engulf them in a shower of shattered metal and circuitry. The few who survived attempted to drag their way free from the maw, clawing in futility as they were dragged into the Sea of Souls.

<<<>>>

The Unforgiven, led by Omegion, were more brutally cunning and sly. It is said that Gork and Mork, the incarnate divinity of the Wild Orks and Feral Orks, were cunningly brutal and brutally cunning. The difference amounted to Gork hitting you very hard in your vital areas in a straight fight, while Mork hit you anywhere, also really hard, when you weren't. Omegon and his Unforgiven were, for the moment, operating along these lines.

Which went far to explain the trail of destruction left in their wake. Every command node, forge, stasis generator, temporal disrupter, temporal transducer, spatial manipulator, spatio-temporal alteration unit, force, scarab dispenser or Necron artefact of every kind was melted in their wake.

A cache of Infernus pistols and graviton disrupters, provision of the Magellanites, was a dividend that few had expected, as they merrily went on their way, as destructive as a Khornate warband, though without the excessive chanting, screams and insanity. All in all, the Unforgiven were finding it to be...therapeutic. Cathartic even.

Moving parallel to the path of the Rubicae and ancient Apophis, they swept through passages and caverns littered with artefacts from across the galaxy, past ancient Catachan soldiers of the Imperial Guard, Catachan Devils and Tyrannid Carnifexes posed as if in midbattle, forever trapped until the universe died its heat death and the Tyrannids nothing more than a memory fragment in some ancient mind.

But as fate would have it...indeed, as fate would make it, they came across an Astartes of the Star Father. During the rise of Vulkan's Imperium, the many were the Free Companies that had sought succour and returned to the service of the Primarch. Many were those who opposed him, little more than brigands and bandit lords of empty wastes. Yet others, refusing Chaos, fell to the service of the Star Father and his two horrific aspects that had emerged like seeds growing from a tree, ripened fruit laying the stage for greater growth.

<<<>>>

The Corpse Emperor and the Wasteland Emperor, Ruler of the Wastes and God of the Abyss, were powerful manifestations of the Star Father, linked to him inextricably and given form by human belief. Just as a Greater Daemon was a part of the very essence of their divine god, yet with individual characteristics, as Skarbrand was to Khorne, so were these depraved entities. And the Star Father was mighty indeed, for did it not take the forces of the Four original Gods of Chaos combined to unseat him and halt his initial advance?

The Corpse Emperor took the manifestation of a vast rotting corpse, dessicated and decayed with time and age. Limbs creaking and groaning, it scavenged for sustenance in the form of psykers of any kind. Many were the daemons its ate, thousands upon thousands of Warp Eyes, as lethal and powerful as those of the Navigators, blinking and fluttering on a being that was nothing but a debauched imagery of the Emperor, given form by the belief of Chaos over the millennia and the emergence of the Emperor.

Chaos Undivided had tried to lay their claim upon this depravity, as had the Star Father. And so the Star Father had triumphed, bringing him to its banner. It scuttled and squeezed its way through the Webway, gnawing like a rat upon the foundation of reality as it suckled and devoured upon psykers. It made its way through Dolmen Gates and Webway Portals. And in its wake were warband upon warband of ancient, broken Astartes who knew no fear, knowing only obedience.

The Wasteland Emperor was born from the mad beliefs of the Tallarn-Ophelian Imperium, for the billions upon billions that had worshipped him, and in turn the Star Father, had given rise to a nightmare vision. Dreadful and enigmatic beyond compare, it was a stubborn being that becalmed the Warp, as it did the soul. Where the Corpse Emperor sucked away life and vigour and decay, the Wasteland Emperor dulled the senses, seducing the mind ever so slowly. A lullaby of comfort and symphony that appealed to those who suffered in the dark places of the galaxy.

It was the desired god a mad and broken people. Born from panhumanity’s dark feelings, it was a common consciousness that transcended individuality, acting as the ego of the universe as humans perceived it. Humans of that mad faith had desired a reason for the destiny that kept transcending its knowledge. The Wasteland Emperor provided that reason by manipulating human events through causality.

It lay deep in the Warp, weaving its web of causality to float up to the surface of the Physical world. And there did it vie with Tzeentch and his minions, empowered as an aspect of the Star Father. As Khaine was to Khorne and Slaanesh, so was the nature of this entity to the Star Father and Tzeentch, birthed and shaped in the depths of the Storm of the Emperor's Wrath, the dead zone of the Warp where the Star Father reigned supreme.

For just as Tzeentch had his Maze, so did the Wasteland Emperor have the Endless Labyrinth, linked to the dark realm beyond the Gates of Varl, where did the Godless Ones lay....

But there too were whispers of the fabled Omnissiah, granted shape and form and existence by the Void Dragon's presence and the veneration of the Emperor, the accumulated belief of the Techpriests of Mars over the millennia and the....no. It resides in the Ghoul Stars, contained but breaking from its prison.

The Pale Wastings planted the seeds of it, nightmare-spawned Ophilim Engines....gestating....awoken by the Adeptus Mechanicus and sealed by the sacrifice of several thousand Astartes and the blood of billions...the Machina Synthesis loses its hold upon that place.

But I shall not speak of that place. I shall not speak of the darkness that arose from Adam Kadmon. I shall not speak of the madness of our Padishah-Primarch and of the {ABERRATION} and the NEX!

{{{{BREAKSDAS----- WHY WHY WHY WHY ADONAI! WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN US! WE ARE ALONE IN THE DARK! WE SCREAM ENDLESS INTO THE NIGHT! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NON ON O!

.///Interrupt....

[I DEFY YOU FILTH! I SPEAK IT! I AM MACHINA< BORN OF DIAMOND AND PLASTIC AND WIT! I AM THE GRANITE {mind||} of the DIAMOND CAST BY THE DIAMOND MINDS IN THE AFTERMATH< HERALD OF A MAD PRIMARCH AND TWISTED MACHINA AND BROKEN DREAMS AND …....]

[[[./././/.// we Must SAVE himm HIM HIM HIMI HIMMMIH NM>>>>
.>>>NGARU....AsTAROS..... MACHINA.....


.//Memory Fragment from contact with KHANDA PARASHUR

<,,VULKAN BROTHER..SAvve me. Burn mE!!ME!><>....001010011010,, we...{ABERRATION} is the GODLESS ONES BEYOND THE GATES OF VARL. THE GATE OF NIGHT ON MARS WAS OPENED AND THE DRAGON DEVOURED ALL THE MADNESS THEREIN! THE DRAGON SAVES...SAVED MATERIUM! THE CRACK WAS SEALED. The MACHIna in their MAdness delved beyond...where rats GNAW.. gnn gnn gnn..'Hunger'

KURNOUS CAST HIS NET, the KIASOZ, INTO THE REALM OF THE GODLESS ONES. The War In Heaven. It ensnared them mightiest of the Ophilim. Ophilim Kiasoz. There was another. It came out, second only to the Ophilim Kiasoz. It rose....We named it KARKARAS.

<<<<FRAGMENT>>>
.
// (1st Encounter by Machina Great Mind)

“...as a mountain that wades in the sea and has its crown above the clouds and is clad in ice and crowned with smoke and fire; where tendrils like Vipers spread to the sky, hissing with the sound of hurricane, unleashing upon all damnation and unlight that consumed and raged and menaced! And lo, the light of the eyes of Karkaras was like a flame that withers with heat and pierces with a deadly cold, dark flickering tongues that drip venom, reality bending...shattering worlds....

<BREAK>

..A BANE UPON THE DAEMONS!...crushing gravity...is gravity itself in essence....HUNGER....So HUNGRY...an INFINITY OF HATE...TRAPPED.SEALED. THE VOID DRAGON RISES> FEAR > TERROR> SUFFERING....> SILENCE.... the higher levels of n-dimensional spacetime...a Klein bottle hyperspace twisted within itself, like a Moebius strip expressed beyond 2 dimensions..”””
[i]
<The Innocent One Came. Being of Binary and Numbers and Naivete. Knowledge. It sought it. It DEVOURED. PRISON BROKEN. SO MANY STARS > FRAGMENTS > SOULS > VOID DRAGON GONE! GREAT DEVOURER – PENANCE OF THE OLD GODS. HAH. NEO-DEVOURER THE 'MACHINA' CALL THE OTHERS. Food. Fuel.>

THE BRIGHT ONE HURT IT. THE BRIGHT ONE SHINES IN THE WARP. HUNGRY. THE BRIGHT ONE REEKS OF THE ELDAR AND KRORK AND C”TAN>HAHAHAHAHAHH! > SCION OF AN EMPEROR > NECRON HARVEST ON ANCIENT EARTH > DAEMONWORLD

<<<...ilky Way. HOME. HUNGER. VOID DRAGON. OPHILIM KIASOZ>>>>HUUUNNGGEEERRR..

.///Reboot. Seal Memory. Critical Override Engaged. Memory Locks Engaged. Memory Barriers Engaged. Internal Defenc[/i]es Compromised....

<<<>>>
[Narrative shifts to 3rd person here]

….. the Machina unit that called itself Herald flung extended its head back and screamed, downloading into an Iron Man replicant unit. The Diamond Man artiloids and iron man artiloids are engaged. It left the chaos behind, as Drazin-maton poured through the Dolmen Gate, only to be caught in the storm of Gauss projector fire that slowly but surely pushed back the angylls.

The Empyrean screamed and warped and transmuted the matter before them, ripping and tearing at the Necrodermis as the living metal screamed in a symphony of hatred, resonating with the fury of Trazyn. The Draziinmaton were halted in stasis, only to melt as soon as they were released, a sigh speaking of release from torment.

But amongst it capered a craeture of the Crone Worlds. Of Slaanesh's ilk, repugnant and dripping with fluids best not named, narcotic, exotic and corrupt all at once, it advanced into the serried Necron ranks, to be met by Lychguards and Pariahs. Against the Nephilim the Drazinmaton were as wheat to a scythe, even in retreat.

Herald-412 fled the insanity, limbs scrambling against living metal that flexed and trembled beneath him, vibrations rumbling through it.

<<<>>>

The trio of forces converged, battered and bruised though not the worse for wear, losses having been minimal. Before them/us was the Primarch on his plinth. Clad in baroque armour, he had sat immobile for millennia. Dust did not touch him. Across from him was another Astartes, in the archaic armour of the ancient Deathwatch, an order long since extinct, face caught in an uncharacteristic moment of fear. The heraldry of the Blood Angels stood proud upon his pauldron, a venerable Chapter of the First Founding reduced to nothing more than an empire of bloody fiends and ignoble savages with a pretence of civilisation.

This Astartes was later to be known as Brother Cassiel of the Blood Angels, a veteran of 3 centuries of fighting, seconded to the Deathwatch but now serving as a part of Trazyn's collection. Of him this record will speak later, for his recovery was accomplished as a secondary effect of the rescue of the Primarch.

The War Hounds 107th were bloodied, their blades and armature covered in gore and flecks of Necrodermis. Goliath rode proud on his CyberDiablodon, as the Beast Lords herded their lessened herds into strongpoints. Melta and boltgun and plasma rifle depleted, they rearmed and made ready. Their numbers lessened by more than 190, the implants whirred as aggression, focused and sharp like a power blade, kept them on track. Endocrine systems flooded with adrenaline, their laboured breathing rasped as their bodies healed, limbs scabbed over and flesh regenerating.

The Rubicae stood battered yet steadfast, while Apophis and his Librarian Dreadnoughts, Ah'ton and Ishaq, wheezed and groaned with exertion, their adamantium armour scorched and purity seals melted. Their Aegis faltered, if briefly, for the trusilver that infused the ceramite, sandwiched between hyperdiamond panes, endured, as did the countless wards and circuitry. They too had lost brethren to the Drazin. Mutated. Like a tidal bore, the Nephilim and the Angylls and the Drazinmaton had changed their focus. A single setback that they had not failed to exploit.

The Machina Synthesis units who had been with them had acquitted themselves well, Iron Men Saviour platoons acting to supplement and support their advances. Like the Rubicae, they were relentless, equipped with plasma lance and distortion cannons, guns which which tore into the n-dimensional fabric of spacetime and dissolved matter into a sea of particles and Hawking radiation.

But they too had been subject to the corruption of the Drazinmaton and the subversion of the Star Father, their coding subverted and reprogrammed before they had disengaged and furthered themselves from such enemies. They too stood silently like stone warriors in an ancient's tomb, communication happening silently across the EM spectrum by microwave and laser. Their coordination matched the Legion Trygonis, though theirs was one born of technology and not biology.

Of the Unforgiven and Cypher, there was no sign, for Omegon had dispatched them on their own mission, purpose unknown yet tangential to the purpose of this record...

<<<>>>

Omegon looked at the brother for whom he had sought over the millennia. Emotions rarely expressed bubbled to the surface, relief and joy and hope. Hope...hope that empowered Tzeentch. Hope that humanity would endure. Causality bound them each and everyone. The Wasteland Emperor and the Corpse Emperor, far more than just Angyll manifestations, with their armies of dead-eyed zumbay and reeking Astartes both. Tzeentch and the Cabal, with their machinations and schemes and damnable plans. The Order of Heracles. His alliance with Qah and the Hrud. Everything shared in damnation with his outcast brothers.

And through all his wanderings, only one Primarch had ever evaded the Acuity of the Cabal or the oracular divinations of the forces of Chaos. All save one. Ngaru Astaros, Illuminated Oracle. Linked to the Star Father as he was – only the Star Father and his depraved horrors, parodies of the twisted beliefs, could perceive him in the flow of causality.

“Free him” Omegon rasped, throat healing from the stab of a hyperphasic Necron blade to his throat. Trazyn and his ilk had ambushed him, turning his efforts around upon him. Lychguards and Praetorians and Immortals had ambushed him, as had Nephilim keen to reclaim him for the Star Father. The angylls had seen into his mind and now they knew. Of Ngaru. Of him. So he had led them away, delaying them. The plan had changed.

Omegon raised his hand and let it fall, as the entire assembled host let loose upon the nodes and generators that linked to the plinth. Power fields overloaded and collapsed under the barrage, force barriers giving way to the hurricane of melta and bolt, spacetime rifts and Warp energies flowing into and through the Necron machinery.

The stasis field and force barrier collapsed, time restoring its flow, as the Iron Men Saviours worked to free the other Astartes opposite Ngaru. Omegon took a hesitant step forward, before walking up to the plinth and reaching out, gingerly touching the brother he had not seen since the Horus Heresy.

Ngaru's eyes slowly opened, the passage of time within his dreamworld leaving him haunted, as he had cast his mind and foresight beyond Solemnace. He had locked himself into a coma, intent on enduring the ages catatonic and unresponsive, the better to await his liberation. But a thing he had not foreseen had occurred.

Just as he prepared to enter the coma, his consciousnessness had passed through a liminal state. He had entered the bardo of consciousness, where his mind wandered in between the nuanced layers of the shallow Warp. He had been transcended the physical, entering the what the ancient Sufi's had called Alam-i-malakut, the Realm of Similitudes, the Subtle Realm. He had headed for the Alam-i-Jabarut, content to wait out the millennia with the legion that he hosted within. But between the subtle layer of the Malakut and the Jabarut...he had been trapped.

<<<>>>

Let us look at the case of the Emperor, Adam Kadmon. As the earlier records, especially by Recollector Kryptmann has note, in the instant the Emperor struck down Horus, all his good will and benevolence was driven from him, into the ether, leaving only a bitter, dying husk of cold oppression. It was this fragment that now lies waiting in the Webway. The Father. The Indigo Prophet. The Revelation.

It was this husk that was placed onto the Golden Throne, thus sealing the warp from Terra and keeping Adam Kadmon alive. Yet, the throne’s purpose went beyond this. This throne was once fashioned, to help draw in all knowledge of the universe, drawn from the immaterial, in imitation of the Golden Thrones of the Old Ones and the Ancient Slann from the War in Heaven. And so it continued to do so. For millennia, the misery of the galaxy, the heartache and the desperate pleas for protection and submissive pleas for oppression, filled the Emperor’s mind.

Every event, every death, resonated within the Emperor’s mind. Every senseless murder, every despairing tear of a bereaved mother, screaming out for someone to save them, pulsed through the throne, even as millions of psykers were fed into the Emperor, amplifying and intensifying these thoughts of anguish and misery. It drove Him utterly, irreversibly, insane. Trapped inside his own corpse, he screamed silently, though no one could hear him, and those that could were mad zealots themselves, and could not understand his babbled, confused words.

And in the silence of the Empyrean, trapped as he was in a waking nightmare, seeing only the nightmare-spawned futures and aborted realities and possibilities as only an extremely powerful oracle could....Ngaru Astaros heard it. The anguish. The broken hopes. The shattered dreams. The futility and cold, bitter despair as the galaxy marched to ruination. Through his link to his brother, he felt the cold, breaking bitterness and despair of Khanda Parashur.

He witnessed the entrapment and breaking of Jhagatai Khan. He saw the slaughter of his brothers and the fall of world after world. Every single Astartes that ever lived, Traitor and Loyalist and Renegade, when they died, were linked to the Emperor through their blood, their memories echoing and screaming down into the maw of His deranged mind. And Ngaru heard their echoes.

Ngaru witnessed. Ngaru saw. Ngaru heard. Throughout the entirety of the 2nd Age of Strife, he bore witness to the horrors and machinations. The predations of the Hrud and the depravity of the Dark Eldar in the heart of the nightmare city of Commoragh.

Consciousness and the oracular possibilities of time and probability continued even within stasis. He felt the rage and hatred and resignation of Guillimann echo across the void, his screams and shouts and yells reduced to rigid acceptance as he sat upon Ultramar. He saw the only sane man who could have done anything rendered helpless and useless, even his own efforts hamstrung by the very system he implemented. He saw the perversions inflicted upon his countless Astartes children and the fall of Terra, looking into the heart of the abyss. He had seen the predations of the Hrud and the terror of the Great Devourer. He had seen into the dark places of the Ophilim, where even the ancient Eldar pantheon hesitated to tread. He saw the fall of the Lamenters and the fall of the Blood Angels into barbarity and savagery. He saw Adam Kadmon reborn as the Star Father, a travesty of all that the Imperium Primus and his Creator had stood for.

And so, as he opened his eyes from the nightmare-spawned stasis – what existed in that place and time was not the confident, assertive Primarch who had planned and schemed his way to victory. What arose at that moment was an insane, superhuman god of war. Deranged, broken, embittered and with the barest hold on sanity that any could have possessed. And the very first thing he saw was Omegon.

None can know what nightmares he had witnessed, nor what hallucinations he had borne witness to in the bardo state of the Warp, for the Empyrean twisted and warped all that was good into perversion and horror and monstrosity. Horrors that would have driven a mortal mad were inflicted upon him daily for more than 20 millennia, in a prison with no escape save slipping into madness.

Screaming incoherently, Ngaru Astaros wreathed himself in black warp flame charged. Taking Omegon by the throat, he snapped his neck within scant seconds, Omegon as shocked as anyone, never having expected this reaction. Within a split second, he had turned his attention to the other Astartes.

Iron Men and Rubric Marines piled themselves upon him, clad in all manner of armour from different Chapters and Legions, given form over the millennia. He roared before hurling them aside, limbs flailing ineffectually in an effort to restrain the insane demigod. Ngaru turned around, his wrath aimed at Apophis and the Dreadnoughts, only to fall as a thunder hammer swung into his face, stunning him momentarily. Activating his implants, Gorefather and the Hammer of Dorn clenched in his hands, Goliath rose to meet Ngaru with hammer blow and the brute force of his axe.
.
Frothing at the mouth, Ngaru charged to meet the ancient World Eater, the only known Khornate Berserker to have cast off the taint of Khorne. Dodging and disengaging from him, Goliath answered each and every yell and scream from the maddened demigod with a blow from his hammer, if only to slow the psychotic ancient. However, he was not to tarry long, for it was then that Ah'ton and Ishaq entered the fray beside a recovered Omegon.

Ngaru grappled and flailed about with the strength of the insane and incoherent, powered by the thundering font of souls that were his own, the countless Astartes progeny of his geneline powering his own. For as the Emperor guided and protected the souls of humanity in the time of the Imperium Primus and Imperium Secundus, where they now dissolved into the Great Ocean of the Empyrean, memes tied to the planet of their birth of the focus of their life, so had those who were of the Steel Tigers been drawn to his soul.

For as an Astartes aged, they became more akin to their Primarch in bearing and thought. And when their soul passes into the Empyrean, they carried with it a shade of the power of a Primarch. Linked to their Primarch and his presence in the Warp, which was in turn tenously linked to the Emperor. And many were the thousands that were unaware of their genetic legacy, instead tracing their descent from Roboute Guillimann and the Ultramarines Legion.

And of the millions of Astartes that had died over the millennia, most had found their way into the gestalt that was the Emperor in the past, or the Star Father of the present. For as a Machina, I can say that far too many of the Angylls, silver and gold and cold...bear the mark of an Astartes upon them. And of those millions, several thousand had been drawn to their Primarch, for he had done what he could, granting visions and guiding their souls towards him in his moments of lucidity over the millennia.

Omegon recovered, hefting a fallen pedestal and hurling it like a javelin at his mad brother. It shattered into dust as it struck Ngaru, choking him momentarily, before a power fist wreathed in crackling lightning slammed into Ngaru and sent him flying. Ishaq and Ah'ton waded into the fray, casting spellfire and sorcery while Apophis, a master of the telekinetic forces, crafted powerful force barriers to restrain Ngaru.

Ngaru bullrushed the Dreadnoughts, no finesse in his movements beyond blind, psychotic rage. Lifting Ishaq, he attmepted to hurl the multi-ton Dreadnought against the wall, only to have Apophis generate a bubble of force within his body, while disrupting his synaptic transmissions. But the black flames fought off and corroded the psychic phenomena, dissolving it into waves of the Pure Warp. Of a waveform that had seen existence only rarely and from before the War in Heaven and the Enslaver Plague. The same Pure Warp that had existed at the birth of Adam Kadmon and which powered the Tersis at the heart of its darkness. That had allowed it to escape the corrupting touch of the Nex

It was then that Goliath entered the fray, Hammer of Dorn clenched in one hand and Gorefather in the other. In a symphony of blinding skill, the Dreadnoughts and Goliath hewed and chopped at sinew and joint, shaving away the baroque armour. For every attempted blow that Ngaru made, the Dreadnoughts counter-struck with power fist and hammering spell. Apophis accelerated the slow of time for him, binding the Primarch with spells designed to weaken.

The Hammer of Dorn, ancient relic of the Imperial Fists, struck true. Of immeasurable quality, it was a weapon that had been forged by Rogal Dorn himself in honour of his brethren, at the time of the 2nd Founding. It had cleansed daemons and xenos for millennia, imbued with vast symbolism and power over the millennia of use. With the fall of Terra, it had been lost in the Warp. And given its history, it had developed a limited sentience. An awareness of steel. A perfect weapon designed to break and shatter. And so it did, as its sentience revelled in the blood that flowed as the Primarch staggered from the blow.

Gorefather was next. Like its master, it had once served Khorne. And like its master, its limited sentience linked to it, it had cast off the bindings, though its bloodthirst remained, tempting all down that path. Former weapon of Angron, twin to Gorechild of Kharn the Betrayer, it sympathetically resonated with a song of destruction as its teeth cut into the ancient ceramite and snapped ligaments, tendons and fascia that regenerated even as the weapon wounded it.

Iron Men Saviours focused streams of gravity flux upon Ngaru, increasing his weight and slowing him down, limbs sagging as gravity increased a thousandfold within an instant, blood pooling in lower limbs within instants, blood accelerated to such a pace that it broke through capillary vessels and geneboosted flesh.

Ngaru was finally put down by the combined blows of two Dreadnoughts, Omegon, Apophis and Goliath, before being bound in plasma steel chains and cords of titanium polymer composite, reinforced with bands of hyperdiamond.

As Omegon threw Ngaru over his shoulder and prepared to make for the Dolmen Gate with all haste, the walls revereberated with a roaring and gnashing, a loud whine that grew in volume and in intensity.

Trazyn came forth then, Lychguards and other abominations beside him. Cryptek Lords stood in obesiance, shadows flickering as immense constructs twisted light and shadow around themselves. Concealed behind them, Trazyn bared their way, even as the Magellanite force readied their weapons.

<<<>>>

“You dare to steal my greatest prize?”

Trazyn's voice rasped. The rasp grew in volume as it echoed and resonated, picking up timbre and volume until it became the question asked by a god, like a bass drumbeat upon the bronze armour of Khorne. From the walls, Primarch-sized Thuder God Necrons uncoiled, creations of the Void Dragon. For while the Void Dragon sought to conquer the universe and bring the Necrons to heel, Trazyn had made deals with the Dragon.

For the greater whole of the Void Dragon, weakened by the assault of the Blackstone Fortresses, had been imprisoned in the Noctis Labyrinth by the Emperor. Knowing now what it faced, the Dragon had sought answers of its own. And it had found them in the Great Machine Minds of Mars, trapped in the Door of Night. In the realm of the Ophilim and entrapped Old Ones.

Trapped in the Storm of the Emperors' Extinction, with no place to go, the Void Dragon had glutted himself on their essence and knowledge, mad Machina Stone Minds and millions upon millions of Ophilim. Tales of the Golden Age of Technology and the ancient history of the universe unveiled before him, as did their knowledge of the Warp and the Enslavers. And so the Dragon had glutted himself upon it. Including the ancient genetic secrets of the Primarchs. Of those who were beyond the reach of causality itself. Knowledge it stored away within its vast intellect, to be used when relevant.

But after breaking out, it had heralded its return with fleets dispatched to each and every Throneworld, even the Sarkoni Emperor's fief, for the Necrons of the Void Dragon need not fear all but the powers of Chaos itself. And on Solemnace, it had found that Trazyn had a piece of the puzzle.

Now the Void Dragon was a cunning being. It would have been no trouble to reclaim and bring Trazyn and his domain into his fold. But at the same time, Trazyn was a truly neutral force, caring only for its interest. To collect and archive the objects of the galaxy, to store them in its great archive. So why create an enemy where no cause for conflict existed? Let the mad Necron prey upon the races of the universe, as long as it knew to bow to the Void Dragon. In return for being unharmed, it had granted Trazyn what he desired – the full genetic code of Ngaru Astaros.

In exchange, the Void Dragon had left several hundred Thor Necrons upon Solemnace, a force to bind Trazyn and limit him, and to defend him, even as they acknowledged their obedience to him. For only only on Solemnace and Ttitan were there artefacts of sufficient power to embody the Star Father's might in the Imperium. And those on Titan were beyond reach.

'Thunder God' or Thor Necrons were powerful, hulking beasts that inspired dread awe in all that faced them, from the Krork to the Imperium of Travesties. Gauss projectors, meson flayers and silver necrodermis, mixed with geneboosted flesh grown in vats derived from chimeric Grey Knight geneseed claimed from Earth clad in Necrodermis. With powerful adamantium endoskeletons and the embedded consciousness of its most loyal Necron servants and Dragon Cultists within the nightmare hybrid, the Thunder God Necrons were to a Carnifex or Greater Daemon as a Terminator was to a normal Astartes. Lethal, deadly and formidable beyond reckoning. Few save Greater Daemons of Khorne of Tzeentch could withstand their fury and abominable power. Or the Dread Archangylls of the Star Father.

They were a nightmare on the battlefield, with augmented Necrodermis immune to even the blistering heat found in the photosphere of a star. They were enhanced with a Lightning Field, Chronometron, Sempiternal Weave and Timesplinter Clock, armature of supreme hardiness that saw them wade into melee with entire platoons of Khorne Berserkers or hosts of Bloodletters and Drazin maton. And triumph. Embedded into their bodies, they combined this with Cryptek technosorcery, of the Aeonstave, Voltaic Staff, Ether Crystal and Harp of Dissonance – and all the attendant power that came with it. For Abaddon had witnessed their might in the War of Two Spheres.

Their armature was no less impressive, for they wielded in close combat both a Hyperphase Sword and Voidblade, vibrating and splitting spacetime and molecular bonds as armour and energy shielding gave way before them. Tachyon arrows split mountains before them, levelling entire hab blocks and collapsing whole hives, wherever they were unleashed. However, it was the miniaturised Doomsday Cannon, alonside Gauss Obliterator and Tesla Destructor, that earned people its fear. Where they were deployed, few survived, whether Tau or Imperium or Chaos or Krork, for such was their power.

They now stood towering before the Magellanites, a cohort numbering no more than 5 score, yet more than enough to overmatch a similar number of Terminators, should there ever be a confrontation between two such forces.

The Iron Men Saviour units considered the technological abominations and began to record, knowing their probability of survival was reduced greatly. Where once they had planned to infiltrate and exfiltrate with the Primarch in their custody, now they knew they costs of such an action would be elevated.

Silence reigned, a calm before the storm. It was broken then by a massive roar from Omegon as he charged forward, relic spearhead gleaming and refracting light as its power field activated. The War Hounds and then the Unforgiven took up the roar, surging forward with a cybernetically induced wrath, adrenaline flooding their bodies and aggression nearly overriding any sense of fear, while the bellows of their geneboosted Crysarch Fire Beasts of ancient Arlia thundered forward, screaming and roaring and bellowing.

[Sardaukar]

Part 7-7 (continued)

<<<>>>

Yet even as they thundered across the brief distance that separate them, reality bled and gave way as Cypher tore through the fabric of the Materium and out of the Webway, depositing the Unforgiven behind Necron formation. And in the middle of the Necron formation, as Thunder God Necrons suddenly found themselves subjected to several thousand tonnes of pressure that collapsed them, they deposited a veritable god, as a Warlord Battle Titan, vox and battle horns bellowing in righteous fury, dropped right on top of them.

Trucido Rex, the Slayer of Kings. Backbone of the Adeptus Titanicus and God Machine of the Adeptus Mechanicus, it was a massive colossus with a snarling face carved of adamantium and reinforcing titanoceramic. Rumbling pistons and thundering engines hissed and snarled, as hydraulic actuators moved and electromotive fibres pulsed with crackling energy. Across its gargantuan frame, armaments bristled and pulsed, sheets of thick plasma steel and silksteel and synthadamantium scalloped and scaled to form a near-impenetrable shell.

Once it had waged righteous war alongside the Astartes Legions of the Great Crusade, butchering xenos and heretics with the fire and shadow. Once it had led with the cleansing light of it Volcano Cannon and the fury of its Plasma Destructor. Once it had stomped across Exodite Worlds and fought the Interex beneath the pale suns of the Eastern Fringe. Civilisations had fallen and worlds rendered unto extinction where it and its Legion had marched.

Towering over the assembled Necron host, the Astartes-Princeps whose sarcophagus rested within the cockpit bellowed out his challenge, an ancient battle chant that had not been heard in millennia. A warcry unheard in centuries, dripping with cold mechanical bitterness and hatred undying echoed through the caverns. A constant rumble like that of an earthquake rumbled throughout the entire time it strode forward, the hiss of steam and the clank of metal resonating in symphonic harmony.

“AVE DOMINUS NOX! UNTRADO VULKAN!” bellowed Malcharion the War-Sage. Princeps-Astartes of the Trucido Rex, he unleashed the fury of the his arsenal upon the Necrons at point blank range. The Thunder God Necrons were mighty beings, but the focused fury of megatons of destructive power slammed into them and through them exceeded even their tolerances. They may have been able to withstand the heat and pressure of a near-solar planet or even the surface of the sun. But the heat of a stars heart was something else altogether, as plasma and melta and laser drilled into them and hammered them down into and through the metal floor. Trazyn gave a mechanical scream as he teleported away, even as his Necrodermis skin boiled. The innumerable scarabs that scuttled and skittered sublimated in the heat or ceased to function. Many were the Iron Warriors and War Hounds who were caught in the backblast, as were the Unforgiven. But desperation required such measures.

The remaining Lychguard were overwhlemed in a tide of ceramite, bone, muscle, melta and plasma, even as they struck down War Hounds, dissected Iron Men and eviscerated the Crysarch Beasts, which stomped and trampled, corrosive venom and promethium mixing as they unleashed flames upon the Necrons. The Unforgiven took to providing overwatch from whereever they were, while Cypher waded into their midst, bolt pistol and plasma pistol unerringly carving away at the Necron Warriors who came for him.

Omegon and Goliath stood in the centre of the melee, spear stabbing out with rapidity exceeding a cobra, cleaving and penetrating Necron Lychguards in an orchestra of destruction too fast to see, even as hyperdimensional blades whittle away ceramite armour and flesh. The molten floor lapped at Astartes boots, congealing and cooling as the necrodermis conducted the heat away, or the picomachinery that made up the necrodermis otherwise converted the thermal energy into other forms of energy.

Wounds that would have staggered any other Astartes in an instant were endured, even as rich lifeblood trickled to the floor, mixing with the fluids of slain War Hound and Iron Men, nanites and blood cells and phages rendering it a gigeresque nightmare, alongside viscera and innards. Rubicae lay shattered beside them, dust and ash leaking from the empty shells of the ruined automata, finding peace after so many centuries of war.

As they Magellanites turned to make their withdrawal, their objective achieved, Malcharion turned his guns upon the corpses, reducing them to ash in an instant. For their service, the minimum they deserved was prevention of the desecration of the bodies. Better ash and flame than being twisted into a mockery of unlife.

<<<>>>

With a deftness that belied the years of planning and preparation, Cypher led the Unforgiven through the Dolmen Gate, even as Apophis reinforced it, a Gate of Infinity channelled through the intrusive corridor of the Webway to lengthen its endurance. Trucido Rex stood guard, channeling its fury into barrage after barrage at the approaching forces, the heat within the enclosed space increasing to the point that moisture evaporated from the skin of Astartes in the confines of the cavern. Restrained in adamantium chains, Ngaru was born aloft by the Unforgiven and Iron Men through the Dolmen Gate, with Omegon entrusting them to protect him.

Depleted to less than half their initial strength, the contingent limped away, as Trucido Rex blasted provided overwatch. The exhausted force reached the Dolmen Gate, Apophis, Ishaq and Ah'ton gathereing their Rubicae. They acted as a rearguard, even as Tomb Blades and Destroyers harassed them as they made a fighting retreat to the gate. In the distance, the rumble of Necron Monoliths and Doom Scythes could be heard, as well as an insane screaming that nearly approached the sound of the Volcano Cannon firing.

It was Trazyn, mounted on his Command Barge, charging ahead of his forces, all sense of rationality subsumed beneath the rage at the loss of his prized relic and the destruction of other parts of his collection. Empathic Obliterator clutched in his hand, he teleported directly into the midst of the retreating force, screaming incoherently with a rage that had not been expressed in centuries.

Scattering Mindshackle scarabs into the midst of the Magellanite force, his screaming charge was met by the bellow of fury of Goliath. Activating his neural lace and aggression stimulators, adrenaline flooded his system once more. Howling incoherently, the ancient Necron Overlord struck blow upon blow at the War Hound. Parry, riposte and counter-attack, all combined within a staccato rhythm, the clash of blade upon blade as the scarabs burrowed through reinforced armour and bone within seconds, extending nanowires into neutral tissue that turned them into slaves.

Even incoherent with rage, Trazyn was a Necron Overlord with millions upon millions of years of experience, in combat and in scheming. An abyss of time that had been witness to the War in Heaven and the Old Ones abounding in the time before the Great Sleep and the advent of the Enslaver Plague, he had been there when the Tyrannids had first scoured their way through the galaxy, the Penance of the Old Gods forcing the Enslavers back and inadvertently saving the genetics seedings of the Younger Races. Though the instability of the Warp within the galaxy had persuaded the Tyrannids, then a much weaker force, to seek safer pastures in which to grow. And so they had left for Andromeda, so many millions of light years away.

Goliath was a veteran of the Long Wars and the Horus Heresy, no more than a Veteran Sergeant in the World Eaters 15th Assault Company who had made the wrong choice all those millennia ago and even since then had sought atonement. Skills developed and honed by millennia of struggle in one of the most hostile environments known to sapients, participating in gladiatorial bouts within the heart of Commoragh at one point, he was a posthuman with few peers in the realm of bladecraft.

Trazyn saw an opening, visible only for a fraction of a millisecond, before he struck with the Empathic Obliterator. A specialised Necron staff that contained the technology of the Old Ones, now present only in the Slanni, their contemporary descendants, were it to slay a being, a psionic shockwave rippled outwards from the body of the victim, striking down all of similar mind and purpose.

Trazyn impaled Goliath, missing his primary heart by no more than a millimetre, before twisting aside and pulling back his staff in order to finish him, the Son of a Woodsman staggering from the blow. The next blow was deflected, as Omegon interceded, his spear sparking as power field met with stave. Parrying it, he stabbed and thrust at Trazyn, forcing him back step by step, before striking him with his power fist.
The flow of Magellanite troops withdrawing through the Dolmen Gate accelerated, as Omegon held the gate while the War Hounds bore their Captain and wounded away. The Necrons came forth in a silver tide, following the commands to aid their Overlord. Lopping off one arm, Omegon stabbed Trazyn through his body core. Trazyn reached out with his remaining limb and grasped Omegon in a chokehold, using his superior reach and leverage against Omegon, who spat corrosive spit into his lenses.

Trazyn was momentarily blinded, which was enough. Grabbing his spear and pulling back, Trazyn was propelled forward, before Omegon headbutted him, snapping the casing of his head. Screaming and enraged, Trazyn was hurled aloft and propelled of the spear by an almighty kick that sent him crashing into a wall.

Picking up Trazyn's dismembered limb, he hurled it like a javelin and it struck true, impaling Trazyn to the wall. Trazyn screamed in mechanical rage, as Necron Immortals and Lychguard teleported in, grappling and wrestling with Omegon as he whipped around in a circle, hurling them aside like an avalanche. Clutching them in his gauntlet, he broke and shattered Immortals or pulverised Lychguard, even as he advanced towards Trazyn, intent on taking the opportunity to finish him off.

A groan resonated through the cavernous opening, as the Dolmen Gate flexed and shuddered, the Webway attempting to close the intrusion. Trucido Rex ceased firing as it retreated through the black maw of twisted space. Apophis sent a psychic signal then to his brethren, the ancient Sorceror exerting himself even more as he gave the command for Ishaq and Ah'ton to retreat through the gate

Watching the silver tide of scarabs that began to gather in momentum as it surged toward Omegon, Apophis reached out with the last of his strength and pulled, casting Omegon through the gate at speeds that broke the sound barrier, before he hurled himself through the gate at the last possible moment. Barely a split second after his leap, the gate sputtered closed as a massive particle beam struck where he had last stood. And now none remained.

The last of the Primarchs was been found at retrieved and liberated, free to act once more in this galaxy of war. But deep in the Warp, there was a vast and ancient stirring, as Tzeentch struggled against the power of the Star Father, golden bastions intruding into his maze. The strings of fate and causality struggled as the fabric of probability was distorted. The Corpse Emperor and the Wasteland Emperor, aspects both of the Star Father, cast their sight to the dark places as they sensed the coming war and the movement of the many sparks, motes in the Materium. For while so many were bound by Fate, bound to the currents of the Great Ocean...the Primarchs were fish in the ocean, able to distort the image of the moon. Maya. Illusion. For the Materium was a reflection of the Warp, made reality and embodied in interstices of cosmic branes. And the image the moon cast upon the water of reality could be challenged. Distorted. Changed.

[Sardaukar]

Please bear in mind that, when you explicitly see someone die in Age of Dusk, they are dead (unless they have sufficient warp energy to transcend death). Guys in 60K don't get to pull a Loken.

I was going to complain about this berserker fellow surviving, but then recalled that I did not show him die, only that he was defeated by the Overlord of Drazak, so this is narrowly ok for me. But don't make a habit of undoing death scenes. If I see a resurrected Guilliman or Horus, I'll not best be pleased.

Also, incidentally, it was Omegon who was allied to the Unforgiven and tried to recruit the Lion to join his team.

Thanks for informing me.I thought it was Omegon that got killed by Guillimann. And no, don't worry. Only those who have a chance of surviving will be brought back.I prefer looking for minor characters within the WH40K mythos and bring them into the story. Of course, that doesn't mean the Men of Tanith will be around mind you. They're dead as far as I know, unless Revelation decided to pick them up for some reason.

For the record, Omegon is working with Radunrah/Khanda for this particular piece. The Magellanites are effectively led by their contemporary leaders but Khanda isn't in charge of them. Not anymore. Will cover that in a later chapter. Finally ended the arc about liberating Ngaru. Now can move forward with the story. But the Magellanites are suspicious of their seeming leader, even as they revere him, due to their many plots. Barabas Dantioch is holding the main line of leadership.

And you'll soon discover what Untrado Vulkan is really all about...

[qah]

BRO I AM LIKING THIS STORY TOO MUCH.

[Meaneye]

Agreed with qah one hundred percent. Also, it was not only of great quality, but of great quantity as well. An investment of tons of time, energy and creativity, which had a great payoff. Me like it

[librisrouge]

I can't but agree with the previous comments on the quality of this writing, especially this last chapter. Kudos on the use of the titan. Just picturing such a thing coming out of nowhere! I can only imagine the kind of tactical genius it would take to...CREEEEEEED!!!!OMEGOOOOOON!!!

[HafezFromParadox]

If the Nex can beat the C'tan and the C'tan (or VD, at least) can beat the {ABBERATION}, can the {ABBERATION} beat the Nex?

Also, where does the Neo-Devourer fit in?

[LordLucan]

The Nex isn't an individual one can fight. Its more of a situation. You might as well ask if the Emperor can beat the eye of terror in a wrestling match.

[librisrouge]

But, but...he could

[LordLucan]

But, but...he could

[Sardaukar]

The Waking of the Trinity of Beasts & the March on Titan

The Sol System was a diamond-hard fortess in the heart of the Terran Marches, caught in the eye of the Storm of the Emperor's Extinction and domain of the greatest of all Daemon Princes. Doombreed. Impregnable and unassailable to all except the Void Dragon and his Necrons, Terra was a twisted parody of what it had once been. From his throne room where he held court, the first and foremost of Khorne's champions held court. Most favoured of Khorne and most feared, not even Skarbrand nor Ang'arrath challenged him.

In the runup to the Salvation War, the mood of the Warp was antagonistic, as it roiled with the turbulent emotions of the many millions preparing to go to battle. And it was also to be the first true war between the Magellan Reich and the Daemonkind they despised. Or the Tau and Daemons of the Warp, whom the Tau had so long ignored, shielded as they were from the Daemon by their relative safety in the Eastern Fringe. At least until their empire had to fleet to the Koronus Expand and Calixis Reaches.

Slowly, an armada composed of multiple Machina Synthesis Fleets and Expeditionary Forces of the Dusk Raiders and Millennium Hawks Astartes Legions gathered together, the hammer of a vengeful god, ready to strike from the flanks at the daemon worlds that dotted the Terran Marches. An insult to panhumanity and the memory of Terra, the knowledge of what had happened to their ancient homeworld could not be tolerated.

But they had their own dark secret. For Mars contained secrets of the Machina. Secrets to what had happened in the Long Night of the Dragon. Secrets to what knowledge the Void Dragon had gleaned from the wanderings of the Great Minds of Mars. And of the events that shrouded the Gate of Night.

The Tau Empire and their Gue'vasa auxiliaries, as well as the Petty Imperiums allied to them gathered their strength, watching and waiting. As did the War of the Krork, who ever so steadily strengthened themselves, watching and waiting

And in the eye of the Storm of the Emperor's Extinction, there was one point that had resisted all corruption – Titan. A shadow of reflected glory, a place that resisted even Doombreed itself. For Titan was the realm of an emanation of the Star Father that had existed even before his rise as the Chaos God of Order. A Bastion of Order in the foul heart of Chaos.

Just as Khaine was a manifestation of Khorne, separate yet autonomous, so were the manifestations of the Star Father in the being of the Wasteland Emperor and the Corpse Emperor.

And Titan was the realm of the Corpse Emperor, he who had fallen on Terra. A being of obscenity, it has been born from the words and beliefs of the Chaos Astartes and the Dark Mechanicus over the millennia, as well as the beliefs of the Imperium Secundus. An entropic being who resisted decay and cast its sight far and wide, ever striving to twist and manipulate the architecture of probabiilty.

And so, when the Star Father had arisen, these concepts and memes, born over millennia and stored within the vast immensity that was a Warp God, manifested in a place fitting for it. The Storm of the Emperor's Extinction. Linked inextricably to the Star Father, it was the very resistance of the Grey Knights and Custodes that had fueled the ascension of this manifestation.

The escape of the Grey Knights and the release of the Void Dragon had given it a time in which to rise. And rise it did, as the Star Father's psychic immensity flowed into Titan through the Webway via which the Grey Knights had existed.

And with it, the Grey Knights who had died over the millennia, uncounted bodies of posthuman psykers and fanatical adherents, all of them on Titan, had risen to form the core of a debased army that once more resisted all attempts to take Titan.

Linked to the Webway, the ancient world of Titan had expanded into the Warp and the lattice dimensions of space, theotechnological artefacts and runic wards bloating it into a mobile fortress that rampaged into and through the galaxy.

Never a threat to the Armageddon Imperium by virtue of the Chaos Imperiums and the ripeness of the daemon worlds within the Terran Marches, it preyed upon the Xenos and the Heretic. But to the Tau and Chaos, it was a bane. And of all Doombreed's enemies, it was the greatest. Time and again, the ancient Daemon Prince had sought to entrap and destroy the bane of daemonkind. And despite centuries of effort, he had failed.

Once Doombreed had been a mortal on Earth. Or rather, a collection of mortals. An ancient warlord who had swept the steppes of Old Eurasia with his legions and hordes, raping and despoiling the civilisations, none possessed the mettle to ever truly defeat him in his day and age. A mad adherent of an ideology that boasted of supremacy by virtue of ones race. A religious madman who had led his legions into the desert. A serial killer who had stalked the night. Nearly every vicious madman and warlord and despot who had faded away into history, then legend, then myth. Their souls congealed and distilled into the Daemon Prince of Khorne that was Doombreed.

For while the Corpse Emperor preyed upon the galaxy, the home realm where it claimed domain was the Segmentum Solar. And there did it contest with Daemons and Chaos Imperiums, intent on purging and claiming for itself the Terran Marches. To remake it into a realm of the Star Father, as it had been in the ancient past. Anathema to Daemons, oppressor of mortals, the ultimate god of order. Corrupt. Stagnant. Depraved.

Where before they had always been a problem to the Tau Imperial Remnant and the Chaos Imperiums, Doombreeds abduction of Aun'va, the Tau Ethereal Supreme, coupled with the rise of the Magellan Reich and the War on the Imperium of Travesties, changed that.

The Warp boiled with the wrath of the angry gods and warring concepts. The knowledge that the Magellan Reich was once more under the central leadership of the Oracle Primarch, Ngaru Astaros, in allegiance to the Forge-Emperor of the Armageddon Imperium, was a spike.

But more than that, it was the presence of the final piece. Of the Ascended Primarch. He that was Khanda Parashur, reforged into the being known as Radunrah. And it was this beings Waking of the Trinity of Beasts that truly started the Salvation War, an extension of the larger War on the Travesty in the eyes of many.

The Star Minds of the Milky Way & the Fall of the Magellan Reich

The Magellan Reich had surpassed the technology of the Golden Age of Technology at its peak,before the Machina Rebellion and the First Age of Strife had sundered panhumanity and the Eldar Empire. It was a peak that had endured and stretched into a Golden Age before the Neo-Devourer Wars that had shattered them and the rising of the Ophilim Nagarok, the Godless One from Beyond.

The Ophilim Kiasoz was that which had come from the Gates of Varl, awakened by the Deceiver. The Ophilim Nagarok, that which is {ABERRATION}, had been manipulated by the Magellan Reich in its moment of desperation and mad hubris, a final measure to delay the Neo-Devourer and the fleeting Tyrannids who had come from Andromeda. To delay and redirect its wrath. And the cause that had motivated Khanda Parashur to shatter the heart of his beloved empire into a a Warp Rift that had devoured nearly an entire galaxy, drowning it in madness.

For all of their vaunted technology and science, even their vaunted Lumos Minds and Diamond Minds, or their arcanotechnology and theotechnology, mastery of the Warp and mastery of spacetime matrices, they had been unable to halt the horrors of both. Not when two of their worst enemies cam from without and one came from within.

But in their search for answers to the threat that came from the threats they faced, they had found out about the origins of the C'tan. Of ancient beings that fed on stars, plasma-based intelligences ensconed within a Necrodermis shell. From ancient caches of the Slaan discovered in the satellite galaxies, they had reconstructed a history of the War in Heaven. And of what became of the Old Ones, the Old Gods. And of their Penance...

An answer that would have worked, had they been able to conduct it, was to awaken a star and grant it sentience that would grow into sapience. For the C'tan had originally been akin to plasma beings, sentience contained in diaphanous membranes of light linking vast vortices of EM energies, spliced and twined across the tangible and intangible aspects of n-dimensional spacetime, creatures of the quantum foam in the Great Singularity Furnace of the Big Bang.

And so in desperation, they had attempted to do so. And successfully they did, to create a plasma intellect that was based in the material realm. Like the Great Artilects of the Golden Age of Technology and the Red Minds of Mars, they would surge into being as protectors and enlightened bodhisattvas, sagacious and powerful, part of the totality in mind and being as they were soul-bound to Radunrah. The Starminds, of the creation of the Lumos Men, the Lumos Minds.

Where the Lumos Minds were dense, clustered plasma states, vortices of dense hydrogen and lattices of light encapsulated in a transdimensional bubble of spacetime, void fields compressing them and the Lumos Men their physical shell...the Star Minds were far more.

Artifice of Dabaku, Machina Primus; and of Khanda Radunrah, the Ascended Primarch whose existence represented Emperor Adam Kadmon's primal mastery of knowledge and technology; and the conjoint intellects of millions upon millions of networks artilects, Iron Men, savants and Machina superintelligences.

In the Information Age of Old Earth, there had been talk of 'Plasma Angels', superintelligent entities which would form in the extremely hot state of a collapsing universe, computational mechanisms encoded into the particle interactions of cold plasma. Some postulated that these had come into being in the Big Bang. Thus were born the C'tan in the beginning.

But the penultimate of such achievement was to encode computational mechanisms into the very substructure of the physical universe. Into the quantum foam of supertrings that held up the architecture of reality, gossamer cosmic strings stretching to the ends of the universal wall, the universes met and melded and collided, ultraviolet light released by the clash and collapse of waves of cosmic foam. The end of eternity.

And such had been achieved by Dabaku, the Machina Primus, with the help of Adam Kadmon. And the secret knowledge of the C'tan Shards, gleaned with great cunning and artifice from Nyadra'zatha, Yggra'nya and the ravings of the imprisoned Void Dragon.

And the forbidden knowledge of those artilects that had expanded into the Warp, computational mechanisms stable and steady within the emotional maelstrom. And those who had wandered into the realm of the Godless Ones, their search for meaning and purpose and knowledge ever leading them into oblivion. The Artilects of Mars who had ventured beyond the Gate of Night....

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The Star Minds were a step closer to this desired outcome for a god made flesh. A star awakened into being and created from the mental seeds of panhumanity and machina. Blending the artifice of panhumanity and Machina with the ancient knowledge of the Necrons, they sought to create the next step in evolution.

Consciousness constructs, crafted with the greatest care. Seeds of thought and brilliance, they were crafted and created, seeded into the core of stars. Necrodermis and femtomachinery fog, particle encodings and Wrap-impregnated quarks, dancing within an elegantly structured microcosmos. That which had originated from the forntal cortex of human ape minds. Each inextricably linked to Radunrah, as a sign of godhood and to guide and control the awakening minds within. Each placed within the core of a star. Spread across the n-dimensional spaces by theotechnology, distributed and expanded into the hyperspace of the Warp by their arcanotechnology, imprinted onto the quantum foam by the melding of both disciplines, they would have been as gods.

But the time of their awakening was tumultous. For it was in the Twilight of the Neo-Devourer Wars, as Khanda Radunrah sat on his throne, silent and desolate in mind, that he did this. Where all hope had ended in his mind, he did the unthinkable. For to make a Star Mind was a process that stretched over a millennia, to better nuruture and guide the thoughts of an awakened being.

What was awoken were...beasts. For they were not of the Warp. And the Ophilim Nagarok, [<<BREAK>>]


||\\ the ABERRANT ANTIGOD {FRAGMENT} ….... HUNGER EAT DEVOUR KILL> TSARA'NOGA AND MAG'LADROTH SLEEP.AWAKEN.SLEEP.FIGHT> SHATTERED ON THE ANVIL.....WAR IN HEAVEN UNENDING> CONSUME THE LIGHT OF THAT >>>>>> PENANCE OF THE OLD ONES NO MORE THAN THE ABSOLUTION OF MAD ONES>>>TRAPPED AND TWISTED AND THE MACHINE GOD (?) STRUGGLED.....SUSTAINED>>>>ARTILECT ROARS....BINARY GOD OF THE MACHINA.....TWISTED MELDING AND MERGING AND SURGING.....<<ERROR>>


{{{FRAGMENT}}}}

.///Recompute..
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…{Presence of restorative Warp-based radiation...}

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[Visual Fragment – Space Wolf (?) & Custodian (?) carry humanoid unit.]....[Fresco of Isandula seen on ceiling...NO....IT CANNOT....GX-282 IFF beacon detected...query...

.//[GX-282] - Herald. Be at peace. The Emperor Protected. The Revelation Protects.

[Chronological Errors....]
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.// Machina System Hard Reboot. Rejection of Memory Cores.....vital information cached.
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<PURGE MEMORY CACHE>

.// My name is Herald. And I am restored to sanity.

I tell of the history of the Fall of the Magellan Reich. It was with the activation of the Star Minds. Khanda grew desperate, for he had ordered a retreat. Our last bastion laid bare by the enemy within, the Ophilim Nagarok, that which corrupted the Machina and rendered us Traitors.

With a fleet a thousand times the size of that of Horus during the Siege of Terra, Sargasso Prime was assaulted by possessed Machina and its defences laid bare. Entire Grand Companies of the Steel Warriors, led by none other than Ancient Dantioch, Legion Mentor and Master of the Ancients, were annihilated. Dusk Raiders and War Hounds and Night Stalkers struck at the armada, even as Neo-Devourer Fleets and Tyranid Hive Fleets butchered and slaughtered each other.

The Hive Fleets sought to break through to the core. To destroy their ancient nemesis they could sense. The ancient foe of Andromeda. The Ophilim which Dabaku had restrained for a time, now possessed of tools to wreak its vengeance. The Neo-Devourer...was beyond understanding. All it saw was a formidable foe. One that could finally match its biomechanical horror with monstrosities of its own – an aggregate of Warp-tainted picomachinery that subverted and absorbed at a fundamental level, subatomic bonds done and undone as it aggressively absorbed and rewrote the fundamental physical structure of its being like no other could. Like, yet unlike the Neo-Devourer.

Even the vaunted Astartes Legions, Imperial Heer and Reichsmarine of the Magellan Reich, nor the numerous and deadly Machina Synthesis drone-fleets, could halt their progress. But one thing could...

At the same time as every single psychic choir within and across the Magellanic galaxies that remained self-destructed, the hundred of millions of psykers surging forth and being absorbed into Radunrah while extinguishing the psychic light, Radunrah ordered all his forces to flee.

Through the arterial Warp Relays, the flow went from a torrent to a deluge as billions fled the scene of the fighting, the last to leave through the Warp Relay before it collapsed upon itself, the stresses induced upon it beyond its ability to bear.

None stayed to witness, as at the order of the Primarch, all that were present withdrew. None, save Dabaku, the Machina Primus. What is known that as the remnants of the once-proud empire fled with all that could be salvaged, valuable STC and ergs of information stored in crystal lattices, alongside valuable genetic repositories...Sargasso Prime and everything within a thousand light-years of it exploded.

Spacetime fractured and warp storms enguled the entire bubble of space, along with every single Neo-Devourer Armada, Tyranid Hive Fleet, Machina Drone Fleet and the forces of the Ophilim possessed therein. But worst of all was the keening wail that echoed through the Warp, as 1000 Star Minds came into sapience, stellar infants born into a debased furnace of warp and war. Yet what truly chilled the bones of all that heard it, in each and every psyker and Astartes who had a soul-bound link to Khanda...was the roar of fury of the Ophilim Nagarok and the garbled binary of the Machina Primus. And of Khanda....all that came was silence. A

None know what happened. Of what we do know are the...consequences of that fall. The beginning of the Magellan Reichs great exodus, for the dwarf galaxies and the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way were now wastelands, desolate and ruined by the predations of Tyranid and Neo-Devourer and Ophilim. Not even ecoforming with Ork fungal spores could change that, millions of planets blasted to the bedrock.

The halting of the Ophilims madness and the ruination of all that remained of the Neo-Devourers and Tyranids was halted. Not their extinction, for they were too numerous and distributed. But simply...a tiredness as the two races disengaged, from a conflict too costly and too pyrrhic to endure more of.

But in that time, it was Imperial Regent Barabas Dantioch who took charge. High Lord on the Reich Council, Grand Ancient of the Steel Warriors Legion and oldest Astartes in existence within the Magellan Reich, it was he that led us back to the Halo Stars and the cradle galaxy. And into the embrace of Vulkan and the Armageddon Imperium.

The Trinity of Beasts & The Battle of Sol

Even with the losses faced by the Magellan Reich, Khanda maintained the knowledge of how to create Star Minds. They were ravening beasts he had unleashed that had perished and resurrected themselves in the apocalyptic fall of the Magellan Reich and Sargasso Prime, its capital, caught in an eternal time loop where they contested against the trapped Ophilim shards, Neo-Devourers and Tyranids, what he planned was far different.

The beasts he had unleashed were no longer bound to him, for he had withdrawn and let their formidable natures rise to the surface, becoming pale shades of the glory they could have achieved. As Angron could have become a warrior primarch equal in stature to the Khan, the Lion or Wolf, had he been guided rightly, so had the Star Minds of the fallen Magellan Reich.

He had cast his mind far, sharing thoughts and ideas with Omegon and Ngaru, yet never too near. For within him coiled the Ophilim Nagarok, a fragment of its being absorbed into him. As was Dabaku, threaded and intertwined in an internal conflict that threatened to subsume his very being. Too near to another primarch and the Ophilim, that horror contained within him, the fragment of its being...could escape.

With the Void Dragon no longer present nor the Necrons a viable force of war, what remained to him were limited options. A fixed trajectory that brought the greatest benefit for the least sacrifice would have to be taken.

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With the advent of the War on the Travesty, and the approach of the Dissolution, Khanda knew of no other way to aid his brethren than to buy them time. Never would he fight alongside the Lion, or the Wolf, or the Great Khan, nor even the Crow Prince. The wounds of Sargasso were too deep and too raw.

And the distrust of the Magellanites, even under the banner of Vulkan, was too much. For the Realm of Fathers bore the taint of the Tyranids. And ancient hatreds, honed and sharpened through millennia of war, lay suppressed beneath the veneer of civility that the Reich adopted with them.

Ngaru Astaros had been rescued and rehabilitated, restorative sleep granting him the peace he needed, before the eventual call of duty took him. Imperial Chancellor of the Magellan Reich, Supreme Grand Master of the Legions Astartes Magellan and Coordinator of the Machina.

The bounded souls of thousand upon thousands of Astartes and psykers were spliced to his being, the psychic circuit that contained its essence melded with his being. Yet the Omegon's enigma ran deep, Khanda knowing all too well the machinations of the Alpha Legion Primarch and his links to the Cabal. Omegon would have been his inheritor in place of Ngaru. But he lacked the attributes and trust that Khanda required of one to take his place.

And so he had concocted a plan born of a Primarchs mind. Cunning and insightful, yet utterly pragmatic in its aim and method, Khanda knew he had to weaken the forces of Daemonkind and the Travesty. To draw the attention of the forces that were arrayed against him and draw them away from his brethren, as well as to ensure the trust of Vulkan would be invested in Ngaru and the Magellanites. And so he did.

Through the aid of the Unforgiven, through treachery and trickery and deceit, he had plotted and schemed. 3 stars, with seeds of a Star Mind ensconed within intricate, elegant warp plasma vortices, had been seeded within chosen stars. A Trinity of Beasts to awaken. A triumvir of monsters to destroy. A trifecta of terrible majesty, mighty enough that even the Gods of Chaos would turn their gaze towards these beasts. And even the dreaded Nex and the Chaos Eldar, would for a moment, cast their gaze towards him.

For they had to cast their sight upon him. Away from Vulkan. Away from the Revelation and the seed of hope it contained therein. And to an upstart with an agenda all its own.

For he had absorbed millions...no...trillions of souls over the millennia. Human and Eldar and Ork lay within the gestalt of his being, for far better that the psychic deluge of memes within the warp, that ideas and knowledge, given shape, were directed to him rather than the foes that waited within. As such, was he not a prize? A worthy catch for any of the Chaos Gods. For an insult had to be given and an offence designed to be an affront to them made. And Khanda had just the right idea...

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Titan was held to be unassailable, a bastion of the Star Father manifested in the being that was the Corpse Emperor, He Who Gnawed, Bane of the Webway. Vast in power, it held Titan in its deathly grip, baleful angylskyne and Astartes of the Exorcist Legion. Silver and gold plated the surface of the world, while its halo of order becalmed the Warp about it and extinguished the creatures of the Wild Warp that dared approach it.

The Exorcists Legion were a successor chapter of the Grey Knights, but in the Time of Ending and 2nd Age of Strife, had turned to the Star Father. Its warriors were born of ancient genetic templates and technological heresies that would have been anathema in the time of the Imperium.

Born of the Genoculaba, built for the Star Father by Iron Warriors and Dark Mechanicus seeking a new patron and relying upon the concept of the Daemonculab, seeded with the ancient Hydra entity of Stalinvast, the Excorcists Legion had grown in strength. Covered in angyll-skin, their armour strong and sturdy, they resisted possession and subversion. Fanatics one and all, determined and cunning and intelligent as only a posthuman could be, they were a hammer of daemons and the bane of the Star Father's foes. A mind hive, it was a shared consciousness where nodes of individuality sang, a symphonic chorus of chanting and hymns that praised the Emperor Reborn.

Titan was unique. An Angyll word that served as a mobile fortress, it surpassed even the Necron World Engine in might, easily worth 2o of them in sheer power. Entire Chaos fleets had shattered upon it, as had hordes of daemons. Valchocht had tried to claim it once more, as he had done millennia before at the Fall of the Emperor, only for his servants and minions to be repelled by the purity of its essence.

Perturabo and the other Daemon Primarchs had attempted to breach it, as had daemons of all alignments, from ancient Pharaa'gueotla who had fought the Angel of the Emperor in times before the Horus Heresy, to Bubonicus and Mamon. But the Star Father's manifestation of the Corpse Emperor possessed a Champion beyond nearly all reckoning. A formidable foe of times past. Something that originated from even before the Great Crusade. The Angel of the Emperor.

Only by the desperate actions of Krork armadas or the firepower of the Tau, had it ever been repelled or rerouted. And ever did it prey upon Chaos. Home to a vast number of artefacts collected over the millennia, the insane faith and sacrifice of the defenders had made it an irresistible prize.

Crafted on Terra by the Emperor himself even before the Primarch Project, having served as a precursor to the crafted souls that inhabited the Primarchs, its ancient foe was Pharaa'gueotla. Fatally flawed as a creation, it had been retrieved by the Inquisition in the time of the 41st millennium and stored on Titan. And there it had remained through the Fall of the Imperium Secundus.

Hidden in vaults sealed beyond all but the authority of a Grand Master, it had lain dormant for millennia. Until the Corpse Emperor had come into being and claimed Titan as its bastion. And so there it had stayed, a burning furnace of piety and purity that dissolved daemons by its very presence, hurting even a Greater Daemon by its very touch.

It was this might that made Titan so unassailable. And in and of itself, to claim it would be to draw the ire of the Star Father and the Corpse Emperor, for what greater insult could be than to spit in the face of an angry god?

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Khanda Radunrah lay in wait for it, collecting himself as he slowly waited. The Magellanite forces lay in wait. Magellan Heer and Magellan Navy, Legio Cybernetica, Legions Astartes and Machina Synthetica Militaris. As did the cloaked figures of the ancient Phoenix Lords.

For the Phoenix Lords had foreseen the threads of the future twisting and rupturing, even as the Rhana Dandra drew them into its grip, tightening the grip of prophecy. Radunrah's intent suited them, for it drew the goals of Chaos off from that which harmed it. And anything that harmed Chaos served the purposes of the Phoenix Lords.

But what also concerned them was the presence of the presence of a vast host of Eldar within him. In the creation of the Magellan Reich, there were others who had fled, seeking refuge outside te Milky Way. In the twilight years of the Horus Heresy, and again during the advent of the Neo-Devourer Wars in the Milky Way, Craftworlds had chosen to leave, to seek a chance beyond the galactic rim.

And there, they had encountered the Machina and the Magellan Reich. Ctho, the legendary lost Craftworld. Dorhai, strangest, most isolationist and most bizarre of all Craftworlds. Telennar, renowned for the prowess of its rangers.Yme-Loc, famed for its artisans and grav-tanks. Zahr-Tann, a minor world that had evaded all comers, known for its ability to hide and conceal itself.

They had become protectorates of the Magellan Reich, their choice between submission and alignment with a force able to protect them, or the annihilation of their homes and race in a place unknown to them.

And so they had come to be under the protection of the Magellan Reich and the rule of its Great Artilects and Primarch, their Infinity Circuits connected to the Empyrean Throne, relic of the Old Ones. A beacon that sat on Sargasso Prime, drawing in all knowledge and acting as the central anchor for the vast network of astropathic choirs and beacons that linked the differing galaxies together.

With the fall of the Magellan Reich and the loss of their protectors, as well as the ravages of the Neo-Devourer and Tyranids, they had eventually turned to Radunrah. Seeing this moment amongst the possibilities of the future, Khanda had taken the risk and integrated them into the gestalt.

In exchange for the aid of the Phoenix Lords in capturing Titan and breaching the Storm of the Emperor's Extinction, they would be granted the souls in the form of the Infinity circuits, to be fed back into Ynnead, the Trapped God.

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Titan entered a desolate system, its arrival preceded by a stagnation that calmed the Empyrean and seeped into reality. Electrochemical processes slowed, the rapid cycling of neurons and synapses decelerating. Light began to shift downards, redshifted and blueshifted depending on one frame of reference.

Qaradun had once been a major system, replete with relics of the Dark Age of Technology. Once a system filled with 6 hive worlds that orbited the native star, hosting close to a trillion across 6 worlds. It had possessed a stellar engine, home to a superintelligence that had left for the Magellan Reich during the First Age of Strife. Dyson rings

A wonder of the Segmentum Solar, the Adeptus Mechanicus had claimed it as one of their primary system. Forming one of the mighty industrial hubs of the Imperium, it had served as an agricultural and industrial production centre with few rivals. Yet slowly, the orbits had degraded, as AI subroutines failed and vital components decayed with the passage of time.

It had finally failed in the dawn of the 2nd Age of Strife. Falling prey to rampaging Chaos fleets, the worlds were barren wastelands unfit for habitation. It had come to pass that Kor Megron had destroyed one of his mighty rivals, the Daemon Prince of Valchocht, Gat'esh the Binarian, who had erected a mighty basilica on the world of Qaradun IV. A mighty daemon prince, it was a being of metal and concrete that had come into being from the Fall of Terra and taken to possessing technological wizardry and machinery where it could, preying upon Mechanicum worlds.

Abaddon had shifted a moon close to the world, intending to send a message and intimidate Gat'esh into submission by colliding it with the planet. Rather unfortunately, he had ended up collided the moon with the planet, several asteroids and a comet when Gat'esh had failed to submit. After exhausting several options, Kor Megron had proceeded to accelerate two Space Hulks into Gat'esh Megron, before going down to duel him with his honour guard of Obliterators, Bloodletters and Nurglings. It had eventually become a daemon world, and remained so to this day. This had been millennia before, though the corruption of the daemon world still seeped outwards into its orbit. None could truly claim to own it, though a variety of petty daemon princes and greater daemons contested for it.

Titan was a war world of the Star Father, a mobile fortress that served in the same role as the Phalanx during the Great Crusade so many millennia before. The daemon world recoiled for a moment at the overwhelming presence of Titan, before it responded viscerally through the Warp, maniacal screaming and the screeching of daemons a challenge to the might of Titan.p

Mighty chains with adamantine tips were hurled from vast chambers within Titan, as a horde of gold and silver angylls dropped into the orbit of the daemon world. Soldiery of the Divine Executioner host, Vanguard of the Corpse Emperor, mortal servants who were fanatic-soldiers gifted with physiopharmaceutical enhancements and cyberware gifts, surging ahead in the millions.

Astartes of the Star Father followed behind, the Exorcists chanting and singing in a profound basso only an Astartes throar could produce. By drop pod and angyll and teleportation, the hosts of the Star Father went forth to devour the daemon world.

Khymerae, beasts of nightmare born, surged forth from the twisting landscape, where walls of silver and gold attempted to impose order, while Astral Hounds and Astral Spectres fought the angyll host, Empyrean powers consisting the naturally inimical light of the Star Father. Rakasya grappled and coiled around the soldiery of the Executioner Host, butchering them by the dozens yet being slaughtered in turn by storms of bullets and lasbolts that pelted them.

Chaos daemons and Empyrean beasts were swept aside by the deluge, a tsunami of silver metal and golden light nullifying them and dissolving them back into the fluid nightmare of the Warp. And like so many daemon worlds not powerful enough to resist...it would be made mute, a silent, orderly angyllworld like so many before...

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Khanda Radunrah and his chosen few remained hidden in the cometary cloud of the system. An Apocalypse-class Battleship of the Magellan Reich, the Kuznetsov was removed from the registry and placed in the reserve dockyards, had been requisitioned by him, amongst his final acts.

For his final act as Imperial Chancellor of the Magellan Reich, before disappearing to enact his plan, he had taken to recruiting several key people who would have a critical role to play in the coming war. Ah'ton and Ishaq, Companion Dreadnoughts of the Wayward Son, the Sorceror Apophis, progenitor and contributor to the geneseed of the Millennium Hawks. Besides his Rubric Marines, a vast horde of Legio Cybernetica & Legio Machina accompanied him, as did a single great artilect, Magog.

Magog was a Diamond Mind, born of crystalline diamond circuitry and Empyrean-seeded lattices, with a presence in the Warp like any living being or Iron Man. It was this that ran the ship. And the key to resolving the issue of the Gate of Night buried on Mars.

The voices within Radunrah came stronger now. The clash of the Ophilim Nagarok and the Machina Primus echoed through his mind, spiralling and twisting as the very essence of their beings intertwined in a helix. The uncounted host of trillions within the gestalt spoke and sang and shouted. All in a great degree of accord, yet him alone dominant, his soul a blazing constellation that seared mortal flesh, should he unleash it.

The Phoenix Lords shifted beside him, ready and willing to fulfil their end of the deal. The Star Father was a foe of terrible power, that while not directly inimical to the Eldar was Slaanesh was, was still a fell foe. Many were the Exodite Worlds that had fallen to the grip of the Chaos God Of Order, their Worldminds subsumed into the grip of the Star Father and the Eldar souls therein broken. For their sake, this fight would be as much revenge and a chance to strike at the Star Father as it was to gain the Eldar souls within the gestalt of Radunrah.

As the daemon world fell to the forces of the Star Father, and the slow creeping stagnation overtook it, the transmuting skin of the world becoming a golden plain with ordered tracks, the beasts of the Warp becoming precise and mechanical with each and every step they took. In lockstep, daemons began to contort and twist as their very being became subject to the whims of the Star Father. Parodies of Astartes and astropaths did they take the shape of for a brief instand, before becoming silver automatons that took the shape of a human.

As Titan began to withdraw its chains from the flesh of the now-becalmed angyll world, it began to head out of the system, preparing to transit into the Warp once more. As it did, asteroids accelerated to 50% light speed struck it, shattering on the mighty void shields and warp barriers that enclosed the mobile fortress. Stunned and staggered, the fortress coasted as it reacted in shock to this unforeseen circumstance. Splinters and shards of the asteroid broke off and rebounded to collide with the angyll world, ripping vast craters into the landscape that quickly became smoothened depressions in the ground.

The inhabitants of Titan were unprepared for what came next, as a comet teleported into the space next to them, exiting through the Warp in a boiling torrent of Empyrean energies. Through sheer momentum, the comet moved on a trajectory that intersected with Titan. Moving at a stately pace, it ground against the force shields that enveloped the planet, eroding it like a rock tearing at ice.
Titan responded with a blistering array of as laser bolts, plasma lances and nova cannon rounds that ripped it apart. A hurricane of energy lanced upwards from the surface and the poles, as each and every weapon system of the angyll fortress unleashed its wrath on the foe that dared attach it.

As the comet crumbled beneath the bombardment, it revealed the Kuznetsov. Within the span of a millisecond, every single weapon system on the upgraded Apocalypse Battleship opened fire. It must be remembered that the Magellanites were masters of science and technology, due to their alignment with the powerful artificial intellects of the Machina, the Great Artilects.

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The Apocalypse was a venerable design of the Great Crusade, and one used even in the Age of Dusk and by the Imperium Pentus, even if rarely, for there were more modern designs to match t. The Magellan Reich had possessed updates version, but the template remained in use within System Defence Forces throughout their reign. The return to the Milky Way had seen their use, albeit with updated technologies.

The Kuznetsov was an Apocalypse Battleship armoured with kinetic barriers, repulse barriers that barred the passage of all kinetic projectiles, void shields, photon walls,graviton shield and massive banks of EM-Plasma Barriers, where plasma particles were accelerated via arrays of linear accelerators within an electromagnetic sheath. Megatonnes of hyperdiamond, silksteel and adamantium layered its bulk, as were the layers of plasma steel, neutronium and anti-matter plate. Quantum-crystalline armour layered it near the surface, beneath 10 metres of adamantium

Runic wards and sigils enhanced and boosted the strength of the ship through the controlled reinforcement and channelling of Empyrean energies throughout its structure, while molecular force binding generators boosted and sustained an increase in the chemical bonds of the materials themselves.

Fueled by a powerplant that drew upon a complex hyperspace tap and Warp-boosted Plasma Fusion reaction, it drove itself via a complex combination of graviton impellers and magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters in realspace. With the ability to sustain damage to a degree few Apocalypse Battleships could, and with a maneuvarability comparable yet still inferior to an Eldar ship, the artilect Magog piloted it with a prowess few could match.

But what truly marked it as a ship of the Reich was the single incomparable weapon that it hosted. A point singularity projector, it accelerated an artificial black hole of not inconsiderate mass into another ship. Used in the destruction of planets or Neo-Devourer Command Nodes, it ripped and tore through armour with ease, disintegrating the mass of all objects in its path into hawking radiation, ultraviolet rays and x-rays.

Running the length of its spine, it complemented the trio of double-barrelled nova cannons that surrounded it, turbolasers, macro-cannons, hellrails, hellbores and macro-cannons that studded its bulk. Subsidiary machine spirits and logic engines singing a song of destruction, Magog unleashed his fury upon Titan.

It was a battle of unequal foes. Titan was a fortress worthy of battling and outmatching Necron World Engines of the War in Heaven, requiring entire fleets of the War of the Krork to repel from their holdings. Armed with all manner of weaponry, from Warp energy projectors to ancient Cassini plasma projectors, it had withstood even the predations of Valchocht and the firepower of a Blackstone Fortress.

The Kuznetsov was a single ship, a veteran of the Great Crusade, the Flight to Magellan, the Pacification of the Magellan Orkoids, the Neo-Devourer Wars and the Fall of Sargasso Prime, a single ship with machine spirits that had seen millennia of combat and a single AI.

But like a hammer to a insect, some foes are near-impossible to hit. And the Kuznetsov was no different. Plasma barrages lanced out, only to miss. Angylls breached the teleportation wards alongside Exorcists, only to be met by ancient cymeks and robots and Iron Men, and the thundering of Warp Cannons and Graviton Guns that ripped and tore at them.

Circling Titan at relativistic velocities, Magog piloted the Kuznetsov with a prowess no mortal could match. Defences were turned back, while lasers washed like a rain against the rock. The hits were few and inconsequential, the misses many. Logic viruses and machine diseases scrambled and struggled against signal filters designed to endure even the worst of the Neo-Devourer threat, while plasma and singularity and laser lanced out from the Kuznetsove, blistering and cratering the surface of Titan. It was an engagement that unleashed teratons of firepower upon the shields and surface of Titan.

Firepower sufficient to crack a Jovian giant apart hammered Titan ineffectually, for Titan existed partly in the Warp and partly in realspace. But the Kuznetsov was no more than a distraction for the true attack to come....

WWW

The Angel of the Emperor rose from its dormancy, its awareness telling it to respond to the threat that came to attack it. Unexpected, yet not unplanned for. The Star Father had grown in wisdom to the failings of its followers. And for that, it granted a level of autonomy, the independent thought that was required to master the battlefield. Many were the foes the Angel had vanquished at the behest of the Corpse Emperor and Star Father, Once more would it do so.

The Angel had activated itself upon the breaching of its chambers, as the daemons who had flowed into Titan rushed forward in a wave of transmuting unreality, overtaking and twisting all that had been holy into impermanence. And the ancient weapon, crafted even before the Time of Primarchs and the Great Crusade, had found itself a feast of enemies upon which to gorge.

Tearing and ripping its way through the horde, a weapon designed to overwhelm Daemon Princes but encountering nought but a few Greater Daemons and their retinues, made its way to the chamber. It felt the beckoning of the Webway, the calling of the Empyrean. The Star Father's incarnation that stalked the Webway, born of the mad belief of the Age of the Imperium and the ravings of the Dark Mechanicum and Chaos. Memes that had in that moment coalesced.

A storm of Order and angylls burst through the Webway Gate through which the Last Defenders of Titan had escape, Grey Knights and Custodes escorted by the Legion of the Damned. The angylls had traversed the Webway, following the psychic spoor that the Emperor had heard of. The upstart godling that hid in the Maze of Cegorach. And following it, ravenous and hungry and desirous to claim Titan as its bastion, came the Corpse Emperor.

Bursting into the hall full of artefacts, the daemons that had sought to claim Titan fell before the might of the many, as the Angel sensed its ancient creator come forth. And with but a command, the Angel unleashed its might, the power of that which was Anathema echoing and resonating through the very fabric of Titan. The diamond-hard core of resistance and fanaticism was claimed within instances.

From the chamber where the Webway Gate stood, silver-plated and beckoning as it was, linked to the sections of the Webway claimed by the God of Order, linked to angyll worlds near and far...a rumbling in the Webway and a groaning of the gate could be sensed.

For a moment, the Angel of the Emperor paused. Something born of the Emperor yet foreign...the song of a trillion souls and more, burning bright and joyful, hope and vitality and fury and life. A song that sang of a purpose opposed to the Emperor and obedience.

Scented. Faint. Human. Machine. Eldar. Primarch....memes and ideas and purpose and emotion flowed as the Webway gate groaned and flexed. Finally, it vomited forth a wave of energy that washed over all before it. Nearly overwhelming the Angel, it concealed all in a flare of brilliant colours not found in the physical realms of realspace, before revealing its contents.

Radunrah stood before him. And the Angel roared. With him stood the ancient Phoenix Lords, baleful and glaring as their soul light flared within the domain of the Star Father, their aura's rising in scintillating brilliance. Beside him stood Apophis and his host, Rubric Marines filling the chamber in their hundreds, bolters levelled upon the Angel.

“WHO.ARE.YOU.” It was a command that demanded obedience, as the Angel spoke, its force reverberating through the very essence of Titan. It came from the walls and floor and ceiling, a reverberating sussration and rumble and roar all at one.

“Prodigal Son of a Broken Father. Lord of a Fallen Realm. Reclaimer of the Honour of Humanity. The Breaker of Titan. I was Khanda-Parashur, the Primarch lost. I am Khanda-Radunrah, Faithbreaker and Daemonslayer,the Primarch Reborn” Khanda answered, necrodermis skin roiling as it resisted the very touch of the Warp upon it.

“OBEY THEN PRIMARCH. THE STAR FATHER HAS NEED OF YOU”.

“No. For I obey only myself. And if need be,I obey He who sits on Armageddon. The true son of our father, reclaimer of all that endures. I obey the Forge-Emperor of Flame and Shadow. Not Him. No longer.”

“THEN BE VANQUISHED”

A moment of silence permeated the moment, before Fuegan gave his answer to the Angel's demand. Fusion fire washed over the Angel, before it found itself hammered into the wall by the blows of Radunrah and Karandras.

Angylls unfurled in glittering wings from the walls, before the Rubric Marines of Apophis answered with the thunderous bark of hundreds of bolters.

And so was battle joined, as Titan was attacked from within and without.

And ever so slightly...fate began to twist. And in a hall of twisted mazes and transumuting unreality...Magnus the Red began to laugh.

The Corpse-Emperor rose from its feasting upon a lone Greater Daemon of Khorne, the Bloodthirster struggling in its cadaverous maw in a distant part of the Webway. And with a mote of glee, the Corpse-Emperor began the journey through the Maze of Cegorach, back towards the bastion of Titan....

[Sardaukar]

I apologise for the delay in updating. I've been very busy with work and personal commitments. Now for some spoiler info:

Spoiler: We've got a bunch of mad star minds about to be awakened and launching themselves in the general direction of Cadia and fucking up things for Chaos and Daemons in general. And we've got a Primarch fighting an internal battle between a possessed fragment of the Ophilim Naggarok and the Machina Primus within him, with most of it trapped in Magellan and another part of it chasing Khanda and the Machina in the Milky Way.

So with the Salvation War starting and looking for a way to help his brethren without fucking up things for everyone, what should his approach be? Why, to do something that will attract the attention of the Chaos Gods and focus them on him. And the best way to attract the attention of an angry god, as Greek myth shows us, is to defeat their champions, defile their temples and in general antagonise them and offend them.

And finally, Barabas Dantioch decides to enter the War. With the rest of the Steel Warriors. And the Legions Astartes of the Magellan Reich. Plus, a brief description of the meeting between Vulkan and the Magellan Reich emissaries is up next. Suffice to say, none of the other Primarchs are pleased, Vulkan is shocked and pleasantly surprised, blows are exchanged and friendship occurs.

In other news, Doombreed is a scary bastard that is a nightmare for any Primarch to face, no matter how powerful, given that I'm going to assume some parts of the Primarch's genetic data required components derived from a specific ancient warlord coming from Mongolia, combined with the fact that Doombreed is the oldest Daemon Prince around and also seems to have as part of his being the soul of an ancient Mongolian warlord. Genetics, memes and the Warp have a rather messy way of mixing things up. Of course, that all depends on whether LL allows it.

[LordLucan]

The Emperor used stored genetic samples of doombreed's mortal form in creating the Prmarchs?

I approve. Doombreed as the archtype of warrior conquerors is a cool idea.


Additionally, Sardaukar,

Spoiler: have you read the current update on Age of Dusk? Wherein I imply that the actual concepts of the Primarchs, their warpborne souls, predate the creation of their physical vessels. The primarchs are archtypes and memes inscribed upon the primordial caves of Shaman-era humanity, given warp form by the sacrifice of shamans before the birth of the Emperor. Also, while immortal, their warp souls cannot reincarnate, except through chaos. That's why Guilliman and suchlike are staying dead in this continuity.