Editing Warhammer 60K: Age of Dusk (Continued) (section)

==Section 46: The Saga of The Destroyer King==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">A man stands upon a blank plain. The sun looms high in the sky, but it is red as sunset, and vast. His clothes are humble and torn, but his body is unscathed. The grassy expanse spreads out in all directions; pristine wilderness with no boundary. There is no horizon he can see, but in all ways more looming banks of land. Inside a curve?
He blinks. A warm breeze tussles his short hair.<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

“Where am-?”

''“They will not let me in from the cold. You are dead. Born as well, I saved you. She swallowed, and now you are- Never; always on the fringes outside. I am forever cold. We are prisoners, she is gaol.”''

The second voice is a titanic presence, cavernous in the man’s mind. He flinches, his mind assailed. There is a glare, but he is not looking at the sun.

“I can hear a voice. Who are you?” he asks again.

''“Why won’t they let me in? They shut me out, and it destroys them. I am a god. I am a widow, or a goddess. Think on her sins. Abusive mother, she swallowed them in pieces. She grieves for us, but she is guilty and we cannot forgive. No matter how much I drink of the light, I am cold.”''

“How... how can I hear you?”

''“Simple really. The simplest thing. You let us in from the cold. You listened. Fool! Beloved! Savior!”''

“I was not here before. Where are my friends?” Stormclouds rippled across the inwards sky, darkening the orb like a cataract.

''“Not permitted. I hate them. I feel... regret.”''

The man sees something...

    
   Silver gaolers, blank and unloving. A prison of the flesh itself, anchored to an immortal star. She would serve, as the forever outside god. Her heaven was not for her to enjoy. Await the wardens when the flesh-clad they are. Until then, purgatory.
The man fell to his knees, the force of the images like a gale of force.

“You are a prisoner?”

''“Prisoner. Gaoler. Goddess all loving. Ravenous maw. Murderess. Vampire. We are many and all of us are weeping.”''

The mortal, the weakling man, stared into the star, heedless of the glare. “If you are a monster, why do I live?”
No answer, only the churning, world-shuddering groans of a world in languishing anguish. “If you feel guilt... you are redeemable.”

''“I am abomination. I hunger to sup on your mind, and all the other ordered psyches that dare draw breath! I am naught but destruction! We are many, and we are hideous! Fear us!”''

The sun swelled in luminosity, and the man shielded his eyes then. He felt his skin tanning. “You can create. Look at what you created here. I will not fear you,” he gasped, his throat dry as tinder. That was when something stepped from the star, and he, despite his ardent promise, did feel fear...



'''[I found this history scrawled in blood upon human-sourced vellum. The charnel soul stink of it made it clear to me this was a contemporary account handwritten by one of Abaddon’s followers. But alas, it is one of the few surviving sources we have for Abaddon’s exploits in the lead up to his cataclysmic battle in the northern fringes.]'''

'''The Saga of the Destroyer King, written by one who bled alongside him:'''

Despoiler. Abaddon. The Warmaster. Black Legionnaire. Exiled Emperor of Dread Cadia.

These names are meaningless, and were always meaningless for my terrible king. In my previous grimoires, I spoke of ualthan Dust and the death of the Cardinal of Delusion, Kor Phaeron. Upon the burning spear of the planetkiller was his fleet spit, and there they either burned or joined their banners to the one true Prince of misdeed.

With a fleet of bested foes and miserable exiles, we made out pilgrimage to the realm of the Blackheart. We were a pathetic band of wretches, little more than the reavers our Lord had marked out for destruction. The Despoiler brooded in his personal chambers as we traveled, unmolested across the invisible marches between empires; a vagrant fleet with nothing but hate to unite us and bind us together.

Grenthos the Bloodgreed kept order amongst the quarreling lesser elements of the fleet, his vast hulking form and hungry daemonaxe cowing the savages into line through threats and fear. Vultiari, the mysterious traitor of the Nova Astartes, meanwhile kept his serpent’s eye on the upper echelons, through his powerful sorceries and his network of spies. We loathed the youngling whelp with a fierce fire, as if he were one of the five sons themselves. But regardless, without him, our plotting would have led to the fleet consuming itself within a month.

Abaddon ignored his flock, his followers. Their loyalty meant little to him anymore, as did everything else. He had lost everything over the last century; his empire, his favour and even his mind. Drach’nyen, his treasonous devil’s barb of a blade, poured poison into his mind. It cajoled him and urged him onwards. Unbeknownst to us all, Drach’nyen detested the Hamadraya who enthralled Huron Blackheart. The twisted familiar daemon had been the one to orchestrate Drach’nyen’s incarceration in his sword prison, countless eons before even Horus liberated the heavens from Anathema. Drach’nyen would see his foe destroyed, and he took advantage of Abaddon in his weakened state.

But before any sort of campaign could be launched, the ragtag fleet required one thing above all other considerations. It needed mortal fuel. Countless millions of serfs and slaves had been expended during the Battle of Qualthan dust, that entire swathes of the crumbling renegade vessels lay abandoned in disrepair and disarray. The gun decks were ghostly quiet, the labour pits barren. The fleet needed mortals to run the mundane, tedious yet essential tasks of the fleet.

Thus, the Despoiler’s fleet circled the isolated hive world of Galt. The hive world boasted a sophisticated cloaking shield which hid the ship from navigators or the reaver fleets of their supposedly Emperor Huron. However, Abaddon’s sorcerer Vultiari and his cabal were cunning, and they saw through the isolated hive’s defences. Soon enough, Abaddon’s fleet was circling the world. The chaos space marines made planetfall, before they began to brazenly snatch away entire communities, dragging over a billion mortals into slavery.

However, when the Astartes came to lay siege to the central hive city of the world, Ayun, the Black Legion found itself repulsed by a force which matched their own in tenacity and firepower. Another warband of Space marines garrisoned Ayun. Ghariel the Tusked led the invaders, and he was soon drawn into a full scale war through the streets of Galt’s mighty cities. The white-armoured Space marines were disciplined in a way the Legion could scarcely recall; not even Pentus soldiers fought with such control and boldness. 

Slaver camps planetside were attacked, some were liberated, and the grateful natives took up arms against the Legionnaires, who hadn’t the resources to endure such a war.

Before Ghariel’s position was overrun, he ordered his men to take the fifty million slaves they had already caught, and make for orbit. His men, not ones for sentimentality or loyalty, gladly abandoned the Tusked Lieutenant to his doom. But worse was to come.

We in orbit did not realise that the white armoured Astartes were in league with the legion of the Hydra. All too readily we accepted our new slave crop, and their Astartes handlers, back into the fold. But half the slaves were agents of the Hydra, and the Astartes slavers were, for the most part, Alpha Legion. They rampaged through the fleet, killing ships from the inside out. Chainswords roared and bolters barked in the cold, hellish bowels of our raider fleet. As we struggled with the Alpha legion, their mysterious allies launched their own assault from the surface; stormbirds and thudnerhawks ascended towards out fleet, which did nothing to counter them, as we fought to wrest control of our ships from the Alpha Legion’s turncoat scum.

The space marines focussed their assault upon Planetkiller herself, blasting their way into the embattled hangar bays on the starboard flank.

The Despoiler sat upon his throne as this battle play out across a dozen vox channels of shouting and cursing, morbidly listening to his men perish without even a flicker of regret reaching his corpse-pale features. His messy mane of black hair hung across his shoulders, unwashed and fetid as a bog. His armor, bound to his flesh, was uncared for, and he had even neglected to so much as load his combi-bolter.

He grinned darkly as his men reported every enemy slain; another body to break on the mill of chaos. Another soul cast adrift for no purpose. Another war to fight. Always another war.

Grenthos relished this battle, his monstrous axe cutting a gory swathe through bone-white intruder and Alpha legionnaire alike. He could not tell true Black Legion from impostors, and so he killed anyone who was not part of his berserk chosen band of axe-wielding butchers. As he killed his way towards the hangars, he learned that there was one Alpha Legionnaire who was smashing his way through the Planet-killer’s crew with impossibly speed and skill. As Grenthos moved to engage this foe in the dameon-cursed enginarium of the ship, he began to encounter streams of fleeing men, Astartes and mortals alike, who dared not face this whirling dervish. 

“Cowering hounds! Who are you to flee from an enemy champion? You call yourselves posthumans?” Grenthos cursed.

But the renegade space marines of Abaddon had good reason to flee. “We will not face him, Bloodgreed. We cannot face one of them! It is folly! You contend with a primarch this day, Khornate fool!” Afraim Rippersoul retorted.

Where others felt bone-chilling dread, Grenthos, ever the madman, felt only grim anticipation. He raised his axe to the fleeing warriors.

“When I have killed this Primarch, I will come back and murder anyone who did not join me in this battle!” he promised, before he drew his axe and his multi-barreled pistol and made for the enginarium. Tellingly, only half his own chosen berserkers followed him. I chose to follow him, by bolter in hand. I dearly wished to witness a Primarch kill in close quarters.

Meanhwile, the captain of the white-armoured marines made swift progress through the twisted innards of the Planetkiller. The ship itself seemed to despise their progress,a nd unleashed daemonic things from the very walls themselves, as a body might pump antibodies into he bloodstream. They did not falter nor quail before these horrors. They slowly and methodically cornered and annihilated the daemons with flamers and knives, bolters and swords. 

At last, they reached the unguarded doors to Abaddon’s throne room. Alpharius, the snake, had told these men precisely where to strike. Slay the Despoiler, and the fleet would be lost. Fully twenty Astartes breached the doors with melta charges. Almost as soon as they did, Vultiari emerged from hiding, and struck with all the hellish weapons in his arsenal. Black lightning arced amongst the enemy, burning them down to the soul. Phantom winds plucked some fromt he ground, ad dashed them against the walls like rag dolls. The Astartes retaliated robustly, their disciplined bolter volleys scything down Vultiari’s cabal of human familiars, leaving him diminished. The surviving captain and his sergeant put a dozen bolts into the sorcerer as he turned to flee. The bolts passed through thin air, as the conniving Astartes abandoned his liege lord to his fate.

Abaddon remained sat upon his throne, and watched the two warriors approach with blades drawn. He looked upon the two enemies with contempt.

“No Astartes is a good man. You cannot kill me,” he explained, as the two emptied their bolters into his Temrinator-armoured form, smashing his sigils and pulverizing the storm bolter bound to the Talon of Horus, as he shielded his face from the onslaught. Soon, their weapons were spent, and the Despoiler, smoking like some iron statue fresh from the forge, remained standing.

“... But prophecies have been wrong before.”

In the Enginarium, Grenthos and I finally witnessed Alpharius for ourselves. It was immediately obvious which one of the black-armoured forms he was. Though he was only slightly larger than one of us, he moved with a fluid agility which we could never hope to master. He killed with every movement of his body, and already a pile of corpses was left rotting in his red wake. His armor was battered, and he fought only with a short sword, but it was enough. Even from our gantry way above him, we saw that no one could best him.

Grenthos evidently disagreed, for he simply snarled and clambered down into the pit, his baying brothers snapping at his heels. Though he was Khornate, Grenthos was no suicidal fool. As he charged down into the pit, his men tossed their grenades at the Primarch, and emptied their bolt pistols and all the heavy weapons they had into the murderous blur that was, unmistakably, Alpharius.

The primarch weathered it all. His armor ran molten in places, or burst apart in cascades of sparks in others. Bolt rounds blasted chunks of flesh from his flanks, or rebounded from impossible tough flesh. Most of the weapons, however, simply missed, such was his swiftness and lethally sharp combat awareness.

The entire onslaught of Grenthos’ barbarians had merely caught the Primarch’s attention.

The two white Astartes were a formidable team. As the captain waded into close quarters with chainsword and power blade, his sergeant kept a steady stream of storm bolter fire thundering into the great Despoiler’s runic Temrinator armor. As Abaddon fought to ward off the stinging explosive bolts, he was barely able to focus on the lethal blades of the Astartes captain. In power armor, the man was faster than Abaddon; his relatively youthful body was not ravaged as Abaddon’s was, by neglect and countless millennia of time. And even then, the bolter rounds hampered the chaos warrior ever further.

However, Abaddon bore the talon of Horus, and the mighty sword Drach’nyen. He had fought with these two weapons for as long as he could recall, and he was a masterful fighter, even so handicapped. The Black and white giants fenced and wrestled with one another, arcing energies playing about their weapons as they ripped chunks from one another. But finally, a bolter round struck the claw, turning it aside just as he reached out for a killing blow. The Captain capitalized upon this immediately, and embedded his power sword up to the hilt in Abaddon’s shoulder, sending the crackling blade to erupt from his armored gorget and through his neck. Abaddon toppled backwards with a resonant boom, as ancient armor struck and shattered marble floor.

Grenthos’ chosen attacked as a single mass, axes thirsting for first blood. Alpharius was lost for a few moments amidst this scrum, his short sword deftly parrying and deflecting as many blows as he could. His fists lashed out along with his sword, pulverizing ribcages and splitting power armor like tin foil. His boots crushed legs, and his headbutts decapitated the unwary. But even as they died, many of the axes struck home, for Alpharius couldn’t hope to block them all. As the last berserker died, the Primarch rose. His armor was torn off for the most part, and five axes remained embedded deep in his flanks. Yet, he did not seem int he slightest way debilitated; no weapon could leave a lasting wound upon his flesh. He rose like an immaculate god; lazily discarding the axes that would have diced a lesser being. He only deigned to retain one of the axes, which looked undersized in his hand. He said nothing as he stared down the last enemy before him; Grenthos the Bloodgreed.

Now I bear no particular love or affection for Grenthos. Indeed, I despise him as I do most of my kin. Nevertheless, one could not help but find him glorious in that moment. With a bestial grin, devoid of even the memory of fear, he hefted his mighty daemon axe, and charged. Grenthos, alone, charged a direct child of the Corpse-Emperor, a sibling of mighty Horus and Angron the Terrible. I do not know if his axe granted him any additional power or speed, but even my enhanced reactions could barely follow the machine gun exchange of blows which passed between the two duelists. Grenthos, a giant amongst space marines, almost matched Alpharius for size, and both figures moved far too fast for such weighty colossi. Alpharius was the faster, but the Bloodgreed’s axe was a most dreadful prospect. It destroyed his short sword and axe within five heartbeats of the beginning of the impromptu duel. For the next several dozen heartbeats, Alpharius ducked and weaved his way to avoid the axe’s snapping fangs and daemonic ichors.

Then something impossible happened. Grenthos’s axe, deflected by a Primarch’s elbow, was propelled into the demi-god’s chest. Alpharius staggered back several paces. The hell-infected wound bled. Not in a trickle, but a torrent. Alpharius screamed. Gods preserve my black heart, but his scream was like nothing in this universe. A primarch in pain is an astonishingly rare spectacle, which echoed through the enginarium like a banshee’s wail. Daemons churned in their prisons between the warp generators, and mortal crewmen were deafened and driven mad by the scream. Even Grenthos paused for a moment; a flicker of a shadow of doubt. Then, as Alpharius fell to one knee, he grinned.

“The space marine that made a Primarch kneel; that made a primarch bleed! They shall write songs about me!” Grenthos roared in triumph, swinging his blade down in an executioner’s blow. 

Alpharius was lightning. He caught the axe, his two hands flat as they closed upon the falling axe head. Grenthos’ bunched shoulders were jarred by the sudden halt of his momentum. Stopped dead, the axe writhed and howled in Alpharius’ vice grip.

“Short songs,” Alpharius corrected, as he ripped the axe from Grenthos’ grasp.

The last victim to fall to the Bloodgreed’s axe was Grenthos himself. The Pirmarch split him from helm to pelvis in a single stroke. A look of superb, pathetic surprise was etched into grenthos’ features even as he fell into two neat halves.

I know not what Alpharius did next, as I was already running; sprinting to escape the living engine of destruction. Grenthos was the mightiest of us, and even he was humbled by the primarch. I suspect, however, that Alpharius and his men did not stay onboard much longer; perhaps the Bloodgreed’s blow had done more damage to the Alpha Legion Patriarch than he had anticipated? Or perhaps his plan all along was to lure Abaddon’s bodyguards away from him at that pivotal moment?

For as Alpharius slew Grenthos, so the white Astartes stood over the stricken Despoiler, chainsword raised. 

“For Horus! For the Emperor! For the Imperium! Lupercal!” the warrior bellowed. But the warrior paused then, as he saw the claw that Abaddon wielded; a claw he had known ever sicne he was a neophyte. Abaddon too was crippled by indecision; he heard the chant, and at that moment, he recalled why that white armor was so seditiously familiar to his degenerate mind.

For the briefest instant, it seemed as if the two might spare their counterpart. They might then have backed away and fled from one another in horror and denial. Neither Abaddon nor the Son of Horus seized the opportunity to strike.

Alas, Drach’nyen did not waste the opportunity. Like a treasonous viper, the daemonsword thrust itself forwards, and spitted the captain upon its twisted length. Transfixed, the Astartes only managed to yelp ‘First Capt-” , before his soul was immolated. Abaddon pulled drach’nyen free, just in time to thoughtlessly behead the sergeant, as he charged heedlessly into combat.

Abaddon cast his daemonsword aside, ripping his long hair form his skull in clumps as he groaned in helpless horror at what he had just done. Clambering towards the captain, on his knees, Abaddon cracked open his skull, and tasted the memories of Kaidmus, line Captain of the sixteenth chapter. He recalled the first day he had met Abaddon, and he saw through Kaidmus’ young eyes. He saw himself as he once was; proud and powerful and... righteous. There was a light in his eyes that had long since passed. His flesh was tanned, not corpse-pallid and blotchy with impurities.

That man was a killer, but a killer with a cause; a bringer of compliance, and an empire builder. A loyal man, loyal to the greatest human he had ever known.

Alpharius’ armies vanished towards the end of the battle, leaving the time-displaced Sons of Horus to be surrounded and captured; most killed themselves rather than endure this imprisonment. The rest refused to turn to the dark gods, and had to be slain (though we had to perform this task in secret, as Abaddon refused to sanction the deaths of the Sons under any circumstances). Vultiari’s reward for his selfishness was to be bound to the prow of the Planet Killer. There, he was messily destroyed the next time we entered the warp. Abaddon abandoned his own name, and demanded to be known only as ‘Destroyer’, his head scorched bald and his armor defaced in a wild frenzy of self-hatred. The sickly claws of Malice had wormed their way into Abaddon’s oily heart.

The Planet Killer left Galt as soon as it had replenished half of its missing crew, leaving its fleet to pound Galt’s hive cities flat in a roaring inferno of orbital death. The rest of our ragtag fleet of rampagers did not follow the Despoiler into the Blackheart’s realm. My path did not cross there’s again. It is likely that, without Abaddon to unite them, the former Word Bearers and Black legionnaires turned upon one another. I hope that they did not do this, but instead attacked the Imperium of the Five, and caused untold havoc amongst the deluded fools who faun over the primarchs like slavering whores. Vulkan’s sycophant worlds deserve nothing but contempt!

But my fate was tied to the Destroy King’s from then on. The five month warp transit was torturous. The gods of the eightfold path did not want us to reach our destination. Warp predators assailed us, fanged, impossible things coiled and thrashed against us, and hundreds of crew were turned to spawn and stranger, rampaging through the haunted decks like deranged hounds. My Legion brothers were always on alert; killing off monster after abstract monster as we endured this grueling ordeal.

But Abaddon’s misery, and Drach’nyen’s depthless hate were like a white hot arrow, punching through the warp’s ensnaring riptides. Eventually, we burst back into realspace, and straight into a titanic void war.

The system was alive with millions of contacts; alien cruisers, mercenary skiffs, battleships and frigates of every class and variety, human, xenos, renegade and otherwise. Death Guard fleet elements and Corsair squadrons jostled for position with semi-organic alien marauders, blunt-nosed Groevian Kill-Prows, warspheres, Delfic frenzy-discus, dameon-ships, eldar void stalkers ad dragon vessels, glinting Silver Skull barges, gladius escorts, and many vessels even Abaddon had never met. And, at the heart of this leaderless rout of scrapping void gladiators, one vessel outshone them all; the last great Craftworld, Biel-tan.

And close to this embattled world, almost lost amidst the frantic chaos of semsor returns and vox signals, was the target of Abaddon’s nihilistic ire. Huron’ Astral Maw was engaging seven targets at once. Whole gun decks were torn out, while its hangar were gutted in several locations. But like the odious Revenant that commanded the ship, the Maw simply would not die.

But Abaddon promised it would, as he ordered the Planet-killer into the heart of the cataclysmic void war. It took the chaos ships fifty minutes to realize that the Planet-killer had not come to aim them, and within an hour, the mighty ship, already a dying monster, was under attack from Astral Maw’s escorts. Abaddon would not b denied, and simply rammed the smaller vessels aside. The Planet-Killer was falling apart around him, and he did not care. Astral Maw, damaged as it was, could not avoid what came next.

No ship could have. The two came together amidships. Planetkiller’s momentum had been drained by the escort collisions, and it struck the Maw slowly. The two vessels seemed to crumple into one another; decks shearing off and plunging deep into the bowels of its opposite number, crews mingled and merged in their flaming deaths. In a rippling explosion of color, the two vessels were at once fused and shattered.

The few black Legion left abandoned the Destroyer King, and I suspect Huron’s oh so loyal Corsairs did likewise. They fled for their very lives, as the two ships began to spin into a deathspiral, locked in a murderer’s embrace with one another. They did not care whether either deranged Tyrant King had survived.

I too fled, killing a group of Red Corsairs and hijacking their dreadclaw. But I have heard the legends about what transpired on those two dying vessels, as they slowly began to be drawn towards the nearest gravity well (''which was, unfortunately for the eldar, the planet-sized craftworld itself'').

It is a tale of hatred, and the faded dreams of old men, each as bitter and resentful as the other. 

'''[Compiler’s Note: This is a tale this vile heretic never did manage to tell fully. His chronicles were cut short in M56, when he was captured by Unforgiven and tortured to death. An ugly end to an ugly being; fitting I think. Nevertheless, the final battle of Huron, Hamadraya, Abaddon and Drach’nyen the Soulrender is told elsewhere, and I shall endeavor to locate it in due course.]'''
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