Editing Story:Warhammer 60K: The Age of Dusk (section)

==Additional Background Section 10: Raising The Siege==

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Titan’s surface is barren and burnt, and daemons crawl across its surface. But the daemons never concerned themselves with the surface, which was constantly scoured clean of life by the regular sweeps of the Dragon’s Silver Annihilators. No, the daemons burrowed and crawled, down and down into the dark catacombs and secret tunnels that perforated the Saturnine Moon like a honeycomb. 
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And there they died. In their endless droves. It was there, deep inside, where the psychic screams of ancient heroes reverberated, and where the sonorous ringing of talons against glinting plate filled the air. The ''Grey Knights'' and the ''Custodians'' still fought, with the tireless courage of doomed men driven beyond extremity by their prolonged test. Purifiers and Paladins formed choke points in the narrow tunnels, and they butchered every wave of daemons. Century upon century upon century had passed. The armor of Grey Knight and Custodian were indistinguishable; each was pot-marked, torn and dull. Each warrior was coated in a hundred years of gore and bubbling nightmare spoors. They had long ago fired their last bolts, every psycannon was spent, promethium had long since been poured, burning into the faces of veritable tides of daemons. Even their power armor had run down, and the energy fields on power weaponry sparked and flared no more. Only the psychic will of the Knights remained undiminished by age or the crushing embrace of time. Nemesis weapons still flickered with soul fire, and the psychic counter attacks of the daemon hunters persisted.

Monsters of every patron came, from juggernauts to winged furies, and more indistinguishable creatures loped from the gloom; pseudopods lashing and beaks scratching. The Knights held them off. But they were constricting and contracting. More and more of the valiant superhumans died every year; their armor stripped and blessed, their bodies anointed in ornate rituals, before being used as blocks in flesh ramparts and barriers to prevent daemonic outflanking in the narrow warrens of the inner sanctums. Only their psychic might sustained their bodies, and even this and their miraculous genetic form could not sustain them indefinitely. Slowly but surely, they began to fall.

Many fell to the ravenous maws of spawn and daemons, others collapsed under the strain of their armor against their ravaged muscles. Others destroyed themselves in psychic implosions, simply to buy time for their brothers to fall back into ever tighter and more dense defensive positions. Eventually, a mere hundred were left, led by the ravaged Custodian Chief and the Castellan known as Obex. Crowe had been lost a decade previously; his malevolent sword, sensing a crack in his resolve, failed him as he clashed with the blubbering Morass of a Great Unclean One. His armor, split and broken, was flooded with entities of the destroyer hive. After a horrifying moment of rigid resistance, his armor fell to the ground, empty. 

But the Knights would not break. They could not break. The names of every one of the ''Million Martyrs of Titan'' were etched into their ceramite, and branded upon their skin. After long last, they fell back to the only chamber left unsullied by daemon flesh; the Vaults themselves, where all the most arcane and forbidden of artefacts were stored. Strange devices and structural masterpieces haunted the pitch black chambers, and the air was impossibly chill. At the very rear of the vault, the embalmed corpse of the Emperor sat, perched upon an Obsidian Throne, threaded with green-veined marble. While they still lived, the memory of his existence and his works would forever be preserved, and he could never truly die. They cared not what his deformed godhead had become in the warp. They were not ignorant however; they had felt his ascension just as the Astropaths had. But they were not duped by the ''Star Father’s'' apotheosis. The Knights and the Custodes knew what the Emperor was; he was no god of the warp. He was champion of humanity; champion of mankind’s dominion over the real, over the sane. The Star Father was a distortion; a monster borne in the minds of the deluded and the weak-willed. Not like the true heroes of the Dead-Imperium. For the true heroes knew that the creed was merely the rallying cry of all of man, and could not be undone by the removal of the greatest man amongst them. No man, no matter how great, could match the collective resolve of humanity united. The Star Father was a disgusting parody of this; a reciprocal entity which devoured its own worship, and created itself. He was not worthy.

And so they fought on. Obax strode out into the arming hall before the chamber’s doors, flanked by the last two functioning dreadnoughts, Alaric and Tancred, to face the onrushing horde, which had swelled to an ever greater size, for the daemons knew the end would be coming soon. The rest of the knights followed them out, but just as ten of them marched out to join their liege, Lord Obax turned and uttered the Command '''‘Terminus’'''. The vault doors sealed, and the majority of his knights were sealed within, leaving but a token force to hold the great hallway before Titan’s final vault. The Custodian screamed and yelled down his vox, pleading with his millennial friend and brother to open the doors, to let him aid in driving back the daemons.

“Together, we may face our glorious doom together!” the Custodian declared in a fierce yet mournful voice.

Obax’s reply was brief. “The tarot has been set, but the last cards are yet to be dealt. Stay by the Emperor’s side Custodian, as you were ever-destined to.”

With that, the vox link was finally severed, and Obax charged into the ravening mass of tendrils and oozing flesh that greeted him. His broken sword was raised, and he screamed the 666 Litanies of Hate as he fought. The dreadnoughts followed suit, smashing apart daemons with their claws and even with the barrels of spent-assault cannons and plasmaguns. Blades flashed and daemons died. Oceans of corrosive sludge pumped from severed heads and bisected maws. It was then that Tancred was hacked in twain by the black blade of a most dreadful of daemons; M’kar itself capered into the fray, at the head of the horde of horrors. The dreadnought Alaric was the first to notice this foe of long years past, and he instantly clashed with the Daemon Prince’s smoking blade. The two giants wrestled as the others fought with all their hearts and all their souls; they wielded their hate as shafts of searing faith, drenched in gore but cackling all the same. They were wild in their frenzy.

But, it was to no avail. Alaric banished M’kar, but standing over his disintegrating form was no victory. The daemon-thing laughed even as it was wrenched from reality. ''“Your time has ended. Your end was determined long before you were created,”'' it has hissed as the daemon perished. Soon after, Alaric fell, dragged down by thousands upon thousands of furies that wriggled through the constricted tunnels like maggots.

The tides of damnation flowed over the tarnished Knights and nothing could prevent what came next. The Custodian listened through the six metres of adamantium separating him from the combat. He heard them all perish, one by one. Defiant screams replaced by gurgling laughter spat out of inhuman jaws. Then, the mockery turned to a sinister murmur, as the daemons turned to the task of opening the vault. Boom after boom resonated through the door. The remaining defenders merely listened to the sounds with downcast helms, sitting amongst the antique items which had never been used, nor could be used. They sat awaiting their fate in a veritable museum of their own history, their own purpose. 

It was then, as even the resolve of the greatest collective wills in the galaxy faltered, that something changed, and a sound which had not been heard for a very long time upon Titan roused them from their misery.

Bolter fire. 

Masses of concentrated bolter fire came from beyond the vault door. Now it was the daemons’ turns to scream. The Custodian located the few remaining techmarines, and demanded to know what was happening beyond the door. Eventually, the Astartes and Custodes managed to rig up a makeshift picto feed to a dead pict-servitor out in the hallway. What they saw confused them, for their reinforcements were Astartes clad in flaming black armor and helms that were the shape of grinning Chaplain death masks. They were the ''Legion of the Damned''. A myth no longer. They killed the daemons in their droves, each silent as the grave as they killed.

So rapt were the Knights that only the Custodian himself noticed that one of the ancient artefacts in the vault was reactivating. It was one of the ancient portals of the Eldar, and it began to shudder into life. As it grew in power and glowed with new found vigor, the Knights and Custodians turned to face this new apparition. Had they not faced enough foes now? What was this new devilry? These questions plagued their war-ravaged minds as the portal, with a final lyrical crescendo, activated.

Out stepped two little girls. They wore their hair in pigtails, and their simple cream robes were the mirror of one another, as they walked from the webway gate hand in hand. Their power was instantly unmistakable. Every Knight in the room involuntarily shivered at their psychic presence; it was rare to be in such close proximity to one Apex level psyker, let alone two. The girls smiled at the assembled giants that surrounded them. One of the Knights managed to bite back his delirious sense of awe and spoke first.

“Why have you come?” was all he could manage.

“We opened the doorway which only we can open, to make Uncle happy with us. You must all come along with us now. Uncle is ever so friendly. But he needs all his pieces if we are to play his game. We so like his games. Come along. The Mad One will wake soon; that’s when it’ll start. We don’t want to miss it,” they replied cheerfully, in unison.

The fact I am aware of this story at all should suggest to you that the Knights and their allies took up the diminutive Apex Twins up on their enigmatic request, and at least survived long enough to tell other souls; other chroniclers of their deeds. So it came to pass that Titan was relieved, and the body of the Emperor was snatched from the jaws of heretical defilement.

Ha, heresy. Such an odd word to use now. Now that I know what is coming.
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