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

==Additional Background Section 17: Gathering The Pieces; Fragmentary Data==

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I cannot place these sections. I haven’t the time. I am being hunted. I know this now. I only just managed to rip these fragments from a matrix of data before I saw them, loping through the fog for me; silent, slender and tall.
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All I can say with certainty about these sections is that they all occurred roughly concurrently with the five year period of re-conquering that followed the short Vulkan-Fulgrim war, and the much longer war of insurgency fought against Ceylan’s Theologians.

Make of this what you will:


1) The warriors of Castervoss.

[Fairy tale or chronicle? It seems a bit like both to me]

The warriors of the Gene-Prince Kadance were vicious and cruel; strong of arm and mean of spirit. They stepped over the abused heads of the lesser workers and slaves of the world Castervoss. Many heroes rose to try to topple the terrible Tyrant. Clever men built war machines of wonder to siege his cities. The warriors tore them down and bested the clever men. Bold men clad in shining plate led their armies to valiantly do battle with the evil creatures. They were bested, and their bodies spitted upon his pikes. Even gods in their sky-boats could not best the Prince, for he was a thing enthralled to elder daemons, and they would not let him lose.

The people grew desperate, and looked no more to heroes to save them. Instead they turned to a twisted man with a glinting smile. He promised them a victory, if only they would a simple request; he wanted the vaults beneath the Prince’s palace for himself. The people agreed, and the stranger set off.

He came to the Prince clad in blasphemous attire; drenched in blood and evil runes. He called himself a sorcerer, and claimed he could enhance his warriors until nothing could kill them. Not even the gods of Chaos. Hungry for more power, the Prince agreed, and the sorcerer set to work. He used dark magicks and sly technological sorcery to make the warriors swell and grow in power and malice. These warriors rampaged through the lands of the helpless, and the people lamented.

But this was more than just a betrayal of them. For the giants continued to grow; they swelled and bulged and expanded. Rolls of fat flooded streets and corridors; blubber and bones split towers asunder as they grew to the size of cathedrals and larger. Their eyes and brains burst in their over-worked skulls, and they mewled for a death which wouldn’t come soon enough. The Tyrant cursed the name of Caleb the liar, the dark sorcerer, even as folds of greasy flesh entombed him in his palace. The world was drowned in meat, until a blistered layer of glistening skin and muscle coated the entire world. It was then that the sorcerer unleashed the virus weapons from the gene-Prince’s vaults; necro-toxins joined the chemical contagion, and it consumed the flesh of the world. Then, from Castervoss’ moon, the liar dropped eight burning shuttles to the surface. When they set the noisome soup of decay alight, it formed a mighty star pattern across the night time hemisphere. When the fires subsided, the once smog-filled skies were clear as crystal; clear to see the Eye as it rose from the horizon.

Nobody came to Castervoss again. For it is said every single person died in the exact same instance, and their souls all leaked out at once. This was the worst of omens. Or such souls remained whole as they fell into the abyss.

2) A deal brokered:
[I cannot confirm this event. Supposedly it had an eye-witness but frankly, why was he not killed instantly? Either this man is a lying braggart. Or, more sinisterly, these monsters let him escape...]

Menantus was a merchant captain in the newly formed Vulkan Imperium’s attempts to unite wayward, lesser Imperiums with his own without warfare (because, despite what histories tell you, most empires would very much like to avoid wars. Chaos is an exception, but chaos is, as the name implies, not the most stable of mindsets...). Unfortunately, he became becalmed in the warp.

Menantus had been foolish, and had travelled perilously too close to the Storm of the Emperor’s wrath. This warp overlap had become a dead zone, where reality stagnated and time slowed. This was because the Angyls were known to exist in vast concentrations there and their influence was obvious. After several decades trying to move a few thousand miles out of orbit of a dead world, Menantus gave up, and let his ship crash to the surface. Miraculously (perhaps), his vessel survived the impact. As did much of his crew.

Feverish and freezing, they stepped out from their vessel in the vain hopes of finding materials to repair their ship. Hundreds died as they wandered across the frozen tundra of the planet. Supersonic winds ripped their environmental gear from their heads, and radiation bred tumours in their guts and flesh. But these were but the beginning of their woes.

Because, soon enough, they came across the Angyls. They appeared to them as beautiful beacons of warmth and safety, and welcomed them with long open arms. But there was no joy or warmth there. It was a cold light, and those who came to them lost their minds and became adoring drones, who smiled stupidly as they bowed in the dust, uncaring that their naked bodies were crystallizing through chill. The Captain hid, and he watched helplessly as his men were enslaved and broken.

Yet, the Angyls had not come specifically for this paltry prize of measly half-starved ratings. They had been on the planet first. They had been waiting. Eventually, Menantus realised who they awaited.

The dark veined craft were heralded by churning thunderstorms that flashed with lightning as they slowly descended upon the becalmed world. They were larger than cities, yet the ships did not seem to suffer any strain as they effortlessly held low orbit over the planet. Menantus recognised the deep crescent shapes of the craft from the dark legends coming out of the Eastern fringe; these were mirror-Devil ships. Necron Tomb Vessels. But these did not bear the etched symbols of C’tan allegiance, but instead were covered in algebraic patterns of maddening complexity.

Menantus hid himself from sight, but he could not help but watch as skeletal silver phantoms shimmered into existence beneath the ships. All of them were uniform and cold, crackling with green corpse-light. All save their leader. This figure was bedecked in golden plate and a living cloak of smoke-like steel. Lightning coursed through its body, flaring from the tips of its claws to lash the ground as it walked. This was almost certainly the Storm Caller; a renegade Necron who led a significant faction of the metallic soul constructs. But it was said that he had been forced to endure the storms of Medusa V, and there he lost what little remained of his once mortal mind. But, he had been saved from destruction by other unaligned Necrons, who saw him as their champion (or perhaps, their pre-programmed minds were simply malfunctioning. Who can tell with these inscrutable fiends?). The Storm Caller’s time in the warp had also given it an insight into the realm of the soul. It decided that it needed allies on both planes.

Only one warp faction could ever satisfy his need for a sterile materium AND immaterium. Thus, it would seem, the Renegade Lord came before the Angyls to parlay. 

Unbeknownst to Menantus, the world he had crashed upon was no mere wasteland, but was Ophelium itself; the Stolen heart of the old Ophelian empire and the first of the Angylworlds. As he watched, horrified by the way the Necrons calmly flayed the few surviving members of his crew with arcs of incandescent death, the Angyls began to appear. They folded upwards out of the solid ground itself; creatures of blades and rolling, snapping wings. The Angyls squealed, their voices like church organs raised in pitch to painful levels. The Necrons in contrast were utterly silent. Slowly, they advanced upon one another, each side glittering with barely contained energies; one warp-bound, the other born of ancient science beyond mortal ken. 

As they approached, the Storm Caller’s lightning clashed with the electrical discharges of the lead Angyl, causing both sides to pause briefly. The leader of the Angyls rose up, buffeted by its own ethereal energies. Slowly, its wings peeled open like a lotus, to reveal the slowly forming features of one of the Archangyls. Soon enough, the enchantingly beautiful features of Celestine the Pure Flame rippled into existence before the assembled aliens. She glared down upon the Necrons before her with no hint of emotional response. The Storm Caller raised its clawed hand. As it opened its claws, a hologram was called into being between the two forces.

It is glowing green depths, the entire galaxy was displayed; spinning slowly as the central stars churned the stars like a ladle. Soon, it dissolved into the form of a humanoid figure, streaming with soul fire. With a harsh clawing gesture, Storm caller ripped the burning soul away from the hologram, and let it drift... into the open fist of the Star Father, who reared up within the display. The shrivelled body of the now-helpless mortal was then pressed into vast constructs of Necrodermis and green fire; their vital energies drained from them over what seemed like eternities.

Menantus’ account then descends into rants and incoherent ramblings, many of which may have been waking nightmares tainting the veracity of his vision. We do not get to witness how the two forces communicated beyond this hologram, nor whether they managed to reach agreement.* Menantus was eventually found naked upon Valhalla’s arid nuclear desert, calmly carving his tale into the irradiated bedrock with a broken femur. How he got there is unknown.

*(But we can assume they did, considering the events that would later unfold...)

3) Capturing Anarchy’s Child.

Four Battalions of bounty hunting Fremen, backed up by expensive Krieg Serf Soldiers bought by the Mercenary Captain, attempt to capture the legendary Malalite Sparrod during the siege of a rebellious planet in the Theologian Union.

Needless to say, they fail, and are destroyed when Sparrod uses his position as chief Planetary administrator to destroy the force-field dams keeping the planets magma rivers in check. There are no survivors. Also, they inadvertently unleashed a toxin into the planet’s merchant navy, which poisoned up to a hundred neighboring worlds with a form of Khornate murder-meme contagion, which led to years of pointless civil wars across an entire sector. The Fremen were said to have all died just as dusk fell, and the Eye of terror peeked over the horizon. The Krieg continued to fight the rebellious lunatics, ignoring the magma as it burned them to their bones.



4) The Fall of Thex Prime.

Thex Prime was a gaseous giant, surrounded by dozens of inhabited blood-red moons; each world was spanned by continent scale cities and titanic trading ports. The Blood Moons, even at this time, were one of the three great cosmopolitan metropolises in the entire galaxy alongside the ruined city of Freegeld, T’au Sept and Commorragh. Only the spectacular black cancer that was Commorragh had a larger diversity and profusion of races, creeds and species than the bustling trade centre of the Thexian Trade Empire. The deep caverns where prehistoric Thexians once dwelt were hollowed out into giant factories and mines for the hunched Grongolem race. Spires and fantastic spiraling mesh-cities floated in the skies; home to the sinister spindly Ulthian Bone Eaters. In orbit, Drong Monasteries and Nisscassar Dhows plied the congested void, amidst Actorian merchant barges and the barrel-like vessels of the venomous acid Fulgars.

Within a hundred different cities, creatures and species of all shapes and sizes flooded the streets, hooting screeching and bawling bets, debts and haggling for parts and goods. Tau Water Caste envoys remained inside their chambers, relying upon Kroot and N’dras drone-suits as bodyguards. Lumbering purple L’Huraxi rubbed shoulders with Tarellian dog soldiers and Nekulli warriors, while Loxatl scuttle amidst the rooftops like gargoyles brought to life. Truly, the cities of Thex Prime were the most bustling and vibrant civilizations in history. And this was down to the influence of the Thexian Elite. Though the highest amongst them lounged within palaces of polished precious metals, the vast majority of the infamous Thexian Elite were hidden amongst the populace themselves. While all of the Elite shared the same bat-like battle-form, their secondary forms could take on the form of any species. They had used this species imitation to infiltrate hundreds of races; bringing them all into benevolent competition with each other. Each race fought and struggled to make their own races profit and flourish, but they remained united militarily against the silver outsiders. All the while, the Thexians played them all, and made themselves obscenely rich in the process.

This prosperity may seem strange to my readers of course, because this metropolis survived within a vast Empire in a state of constant war with the Nightbringer’s forces. Indeed, even a couple of systems away from the Bloodmoons, wars were raging on a horrifying scale; entire populaces were being eradicated, and stars were becoming sick under the C’tan’s influence. But the Thexian Elite used this conflict to keep their own factional races distracted, while they calmly maintained their empire from unassailable thrones, only feasting upon convicts and enemies of the state when their blood-drinking lust became too much to ignore.

Or so they thought.

For in fact, they too were being played and deceived. The Elite were not immune to manipulation; all it took was finding where the kinks in their armour were. The most obvious candidate were the unruly cousin-species of the Thexian Elite; the self-titled horrors known as Cythor Fiends. In contrast to the Elite, the Cythor Fiends had no desire to intermingle or imitate the lesser species of the Empire. The cythor fiends remained in their black-pinioned battle-forms at all times, clad in finery that seemed to contradict their monstrous forms.

The Cythor Fiends did believe in manipulating and shrewdly outmaneuvering their opponents politically and economically however, and they did so enthusiastically in the latter years of M54- early M55. They clashed with the Elites over numerous perceived slights; there were Thexian Elite politicians such as Tomork, who called for the disbanding of the Elite, and their full assimilation into the Empire’s species, while other Elites tried to freeze Fiend assets, or actively intercepted contracts and tenders meant for their own shell-companies and economic endeavors.

The Cythor Fiend retaliation surprised even the Fiends themselves. One rogue Fiend actually unleashed his fury in a public place, ripping apart a hundred citizens, and fatally wounded one of the Elites themselves, who had been discreetly monitoring the situation. There were voices amongst the Elites, and from the other races for the Cythor Fiends to be censured; they were a menace to the peace the Empire required to survive during the Long War. This culminated in the arrest of Barosk, the Chief Executive of the Cythor Fiend coven, who was tried and imprisoned for inciting reckless, economically suicidal laws, and failing to condone his faction’s violence.

Meanwhile, an Ulthian Bone-Eater (a member of the race which the Fiends were more closely affiliated with than any other), put this censuring in a different light; it pointed out how the Elites were forming ever-closer ties with the Tau Empire through the Nisscassarian elements. This sparked a kind of subtle paranoia in the Fiends, as they started to see the rest of the Empire as being against them; a menacing multitude of aliens, waiting for their chance to topple the Cythor Fiends. The Tau seemed to grow in their estimation as an enemy; they were indeed the eldest foe of the Thexian Trade Empire, except for the Nightbringer. They felt trapped, and desperate. So much so that, when a golden stranger appeared to Barosk in his cell, he actually listened to its offer.

Mephet’ran countered the Cythor Fiend’s scepticism of its motives by reminding the alien that the C’tan’s own, personal forces had never once attacked the Thexian Trade Empire; in fact, his Necrons more often than not fought his fellow Star Vampire Nightbringer and the tau. But never the Fiends; for Mephet’ran understood Barosk and his race of monstrous terrorgheists (terrorgheist is the true name of theirs and the Elite’s species, or so a dozen roughly-complimentary biologus reports collected over the years suggest). The bat-like aliens were a Vampiric race of blood drinkers, and they understood the vampiric urge to enslave their cattle for an easy feast. Mephet’ran was a vampire too, and he felt the Cythor Fiends could be a valuable ally. He offered to aid them in toppling the Elites, and let the terrorgheists lead the Trade Empire in the last war against the tau.

Barosk immediately demanded to know the price in exchange, making the Deceiver smile a wicked, inhuman smile.

“Facilities, dearest Barosk. If I am to help you topple your wayward siblings, I shall of course needs the tools to do so.”

The Deceiver wanted a weapon factory, installed within Thex Prime. In exchange, the weapons would be given to selected Cythor Fiend mercenaries, who would storm the Elite Palaces and slay the rulers. Then, the Cythor Fiends would use their neglected shape shifting ability to assume command of the Empire.

Cautiously, Barosk agreed to the deceiver’s terms, and got to work. Through coded messages delivered via visitors to his cell, the Executive organised for one of the Grongolem families to be shifted around, and discreetly, several hundred vast warehouses and storage yards were rented out to a rich aristocrat, calling itself ‘the King of Silvae’.

This figure was the Deceiver itself. This transaction was hidden from the ruling elites by the cunning Cythor fiends, behind oceans of bureaucracy and proxy accounts. Of course Barosk was not completely gullible however; he didn’t trust anyone, especially not one called ‘the deceiver’. To do so was immensely foolish. But Mephet’ran could be useful, so he indulged the Star God somewhat (even if he did implant high explosives into the warehouses he loaned the C’tan, just in case...).

Eventually, the Deceiver entered the system unseen, and his factories activated quietly. Slowly at first, but soon every warehouse loaned was full... of something. Years passed, and slowly the presence of something dark at the heart of the Empire became apparent. Convicts were dying. Not only were they drained of blood, their bodies were turning to dust in the bowels of the deepest prison complexes.

Even while the Cythor Fiends were deflecting attention away from the warehouses, they themselves sent spies into the cavernous complexes to see for themselves what was occurring. What they saw terrified even them.

There were not just advanced gauss weaponry down there in the depths. There were Necrons. Millions upon millions of Necrons. These were not the ancient warhorses of the Nightbringer’s cadaverous legions; killed so many times over and over, they were now a legion of automata. These were brand new Necron warriors. Barosk could not think how they were powered. Then he recalled the convict-deaths, and groaned. Before he could warn anyone however, his prison was assaulted from below by coiling Wraiths and burrowing Flayed Ones. Though he found with terrible fury, he was slain, alongside the entire prison population. This could not be ignored.

But by then, it was too late. The Cythor Fiends desperately tried to reverse what they had done, and detonated the thousand megaton warheads they had implanted within each Necron. To their abject horror, they watched as the weapons, which had long ago been moved by the Deceiver, exploded within the Grongolem factory complexes, collapsing the caverns and entombing millions of Grongolem within.

The surprise of the Necron ambush was utter and complete. The citizens and warriors of Thex Prime were slaughtered over five full days of carnage, as the Mirror Devils rampaged through every city. These necrons were new, powerful and utterly demented. They vividly recalled the pain of their passing, and had a disgust for all the fleshy enemies around them; those organic swine who had imprisoned them and fed on them for centuries. Vengeance drove these new necrons to extremes of cruelty not seen in the necron constructs since the early decades of the War in Heaven. The Deceiver did curb their slaughter somewhat; a selection of Thexian Elites and various species members were spared and enslaved by the C’tan, while the Ulthians, the deceiver’s true allies, feasted upon the atomised bone dust of an entire murdered civilisation. For the Deceiver had planned it all. He had played both sides, for he was a shape-shifter beyond compare. He had been the rogue Cythor Fiend, he had played the part of Tomork also, and he had advocated Barosk’s arrest and show-trial. And he was not done yet.

The Golden Star God twisted into the form of the President of the Thexian Elite Council, and summoned up the fleets of the Trade Empire to gather together in the Vellan system. He claimed they were gathering for a decisive push into the Reaper-space. He claimed he ‘would end the war in a matter of weeks’. For once, horribly, he was not lying. When the fleets of Tarellian, Gorngolem, Fulgars, l’Huraxi and Nekulli gathered around Vellan’s baleful star, the trap closed. The deceiver, using his powerful technologies, caused the star to go supernova, destroying the entire system. Only the toughest Grongolem forge-ships were hardy enough to survive the blast, but they still all burned inside their vast ships helplessly. Some ships avoided the rendezvous, and were hunted down by the Deceiver’s vessels.

In one fell swoop, in the year 998.M55, the weakest Star God ripped the heart from the Thexian Trade Empire. Within weeks, thousands of helpless worlds in their empire were purged of life by the Nightbringer’s now-unstoppable forces. Such carnage had not been seen since those dark days of the New Devourer. After a few more weeks, the Thexian Empire had fallen. It is likely most of the terrorgheists fled the Empire and infiltrated other civilisations far from the Eastern Fringe, while others hopelessly sought shelter with the only faction that would take them; the Tau.

But now the Tau faced the unenviable task of facing down the entire might of the Necron hosts, alone.

This war is of too large a scope for this fragmentary section, but to illustrate succinctly the Tau response to this horror, I have recovered some telemetry from the bridge of ‘The Transcendent Path’, Kor’O’Vana’Va’Shas’s (translation: Admiral Firesoul’s) capital ship, and the flagship of the Tau High Fleet, barely a month after the fall of the Thexians;

[Telemetry 0:04837:2847 to 0:14382:2847. Transcript begins]

[Primary, weightless air caste bridge.]

Admiral: Please repeat report helm.

Helmsman Kor’la: Reports coming in across vectors 2,3,4 through to 9,9,9, every elevation. Mont’ka in-bound. First and second picket fleets insufficient. Moving to mobilize cadres seventeen through four thousand-eight.
Helmsman Kor’Ui: Negative, insufficient, we have Necron vessels coming in plane-wards and spin-wards.

Admiral: [sighs, rubbing nostril slip and forehead wearily.] The Mont’ka and its devils are ever inbound; we are the Undying Light. We can hold them back. Call up secondary and tertiary reserves. Contact N’dras; we need another hundred thousand Idealist class shipped up and mobilized by the end of this week.

Helmsman Kor’la: But sir, the testing-

Admiral: [Calmly] I do not care if they are not up to level Sigma safety standards; needs must. By Aun’Va, I don’t even care if they are unpainted. We just need to hold the Necrons here, then we can fall back to the Perdus Rift line; there we can crush this incursion. [Smiling encouragingly.] We can do this my caste-men. Have faith in our Ideals and we cannot fail. 

[Crew cheers. One of the Gue’vesa at the sensory pit on the 1 G secondary deck is not cheering. He is instead extremely pallid, with lips quivering. The Admiral notices.]

Gue’vesa’Ganon: The Necrons... they are coming...

Admiral: Human Helper Gaxon, are you ill? Of course they are coming. Do you have a lock on FTL sensors? How many are coming?

Gaxon: ...

Admiral: Ganon, I order you to tell me now! How many?

Gaxon: ... All of them...

[The Admiral’s smile fades.]

5) Containment.

On the world of Jokven, the malalite cultist smuggles the cargo stolen from the vaults of Castervoss into the Governor’s personal menagerie. The item taken from the vaults was a preserved one eyed monster, which the gene-Prince had apparently bought from Grand Sicarium at some point in the past. This horrific regenerating beast was unlike anything the people of Jokven had ever seen, and they struggled to contain its rampages.

Eventually they decided to pump a paralysing nerve agent into the zoo-complex that had cornered the bellowing carnifex within. Unfortunately for them, the malalite’s minions caused the nerve agent canisters to be ruptured in transit to the site, and the planet’s PDF unwittingly spread the chemicals through the streets from their half-tracks and chimeras, and tainted the water supply in the process. The entire capital city slowly began to lose the ability to move their bodies under their own power.

The people were terrified that they would all die slow, agonising deaths through starvation. This was not to be however, as soon enough the ancient one-eyed beast was released from the zoo’s containment, and hungrily began to devour every last human within the city. By the time the other settlements of Jokven arrived, there were only the mewling carcases of a million half-eaten citizens left alive. The horrified rescuers looked up from the carnage to the evening sky, just as the Eye of Terror made its daily transit across the heavens...

6)	Iacob and Crolemere.

Around this time period, there developed tales and stories across the Vulkan Impeirum and beyond about a strange, perfectly symmetrical cube that would appear upon a planet, then vanish once concerted forces came to investigate its purpose and form.

This was of course Ahriman’s doing, for he had escaped from Terra by shifting a perfect cube of Imperial Palace into the warp. What his purpose was as he jumped from planet to planet is unknown. He was almost certainly researching or studying something integral to the cube’s interior itself (indeed, he wasn’t actually noted leaving the cube in any of the previous legends). Yet, every time he shifted the cube, the planet he departed would suffer tectonic disturbances, and an increase in psyker/daemonic incursions, due to the unfortunate consequences of creating warp portals in gravity wells.

However, Crolemere, his mysterious Grey Sensei ally, did seem to leave the cube. She was a figure of fear amongst many worlds as they did not understand the meaning of the cube’s arrival. Some believed the golden haired woman was a ghost or a phantom, as she never seemed to age, and always vanished with the cube.

What most histories do not record is that she was actually acting as an assistant to Ahriman; acquiring ingredients and artefacts for his experimental warp science and sorceries. She was also looking for something else; some figure who was essential to the unfolding events spreading across the galaxy like wildfire. Crolemere would be sent out to infiltrate the planet, and locate potential candidates; subtly questioning the motives of those she met and noting their responses to her.

On one world, her mission was interrupted however. As she tried to gain access to a city, she was caught up in a fire in one of the planet’s subterranean transit systems (caused ironically, by the cube’s gravitational disruption effects). Everyone on board the tube engine were burned to ash, but she managed to crawl free, skinless and burning from the wreckage. As emergency units of re-purposed PDF tried to douse the blaze, medicae units tried in vain to locate survivors. Crolemere slipped away, whimpering in agony as her flesh smouldered and her bones ground together like burnt driftwood in a furnace.

She was taken in my a man named Iacob. From what we know, this man seemed unremarkable, even at this early stage as a young man. But this man took her from the street. He was a medicae, and he tended to her wounds.

Yet, as he took care of her, it became apparent she was no normal human. She healed rapidly, her flesh knitting together seamlessly without even scarring. Soon enough, her beautiful golden locks sprouted from her scorched scalp as it regenerated her warmth complexion. Within a week, she seemed utterly unharmed.

Unlike on a hundred other worlds, Iacob did not fear her supernatural abilities. Across the galaxy, most humans were superstitious, malevolent or just insane. Even upon his own world, the witch-hunters and demagogues were out in force; hunting for the ghostly occupant of the Cube, which had appeared upon a nearby hillside like a bad omen.

Iacob was nothing like those cowards and monsters. He saw her healing as miraculous and something he found mystifying. He eagerly asked her questions about her abilities and her purpose on his world, all the while hiding her from the roving bands of red-clad redemptionists, who began to scour the city for blonde females, for the prophecies always mentioned the blonde immortal witch...

She answered Iacob’s questions as best she could, because the man, while enthusiastic, could not really understand the warp metaphysics involved. She spoke of her mission for a great entity known as the Rubric Sorcerer, and how they intended to defeat the dark forces rising up to consume reality. In turn, Crolemere asked questions of her own, and over the course of months, discovered that this man was a possible candidate for Ahriman’s purposes; Ahriman needed ‘a truly good man, unburdened by affiliation to any faction or power’; she rejected the oppression of the ancient powers and wished to create a new culture. Crolemere refused to believe that in the galaxy there was only war; there had to be more. Discreetly, Crolemere signalled her success to the Sorcerer.

Before she could get Iacob to come with her however, events overtook her. The Redemptionists, in their conical hoods and brandishing their flaming weapons, cornered Iacob at his home, after they discovered that he had sheltered the Grey Sensei. They tried to force their way into his home, but he went out into the street to confront them, unarmed and smiling. He called upon his neighbours to depart, and he promised the Redemptionists that Crolemere was no threat to them. The cultists did not believe him, and struck him down. Though her purpose was to be discreet in all things, Crolemere was running out of time, and she could not bear to see one of the few truly benevolent humans alive killed by fools. She leapt from the roof of Iacob’s hab quarters, and into combat with the robed zealots.

Though unarmed, Crolemere was a wayward scion of the Imperator’s bloodline, and her abilities were formidable (especially after tutelage by Ahriman himself in tapping into her power). Her body glimmered with starlight as she ripped the cultists apart. She dodged and deflected their chainblades, as she ripped flamers from their hands and tossed them aside with contempt. Within moments, the cultists were all dead or fleeing, screaming, “The daemon! The witch! She is risen!”

Even as iacob was gathering his wits once more, she grabbed him and tried to force him to come with her; they had to escape, now the whole city would be after her, and Ahriman’s Rubric entities would be preparing to secure the area. But Iacob resisted, challenging her convictions as a self-proclaimed saviour. He was still drenched in the blood of a hundred men slain by her, and he would not go with her. She implored him desperately; she explained that if he didn’t go, Ahriman’s men would kill everyone in the city to protect his prize. Iacob had no desire to be a prize, nor did he like the sound of this Ahriman; a man who would calmly order the deaths of millions of scared people just because he was in a hurry. In the end, Crolemere gave him little choice; rendering him unconscious before throwing him into the back of an idling half-track and setting off for the cube.

Ahriman was as good as his word and the outskirts of the city were ablaze, as the immortal Rubric Marines clashed with the PDF of the world in a storm of fire, steel and ethereal energies. Crolemere drove her stolen vehicle through the storm of mud and fire, as the city’s forces laid siege to the Cube, and the hill it stood upon.

Marauder bombers dropped thousands of high explosive bombs upon the shielded edifice, while infantry marched fearlessly up the hill, walking over the bodies of those soldiers who fell to bolter fire before them. They fought to (in their mind) defend their city from an out of context menace that would threaten the lives of all who walked upon the planet’s surface. Crolemere tried to ignore the carnage, and the brave soldiers dying by her ally’s hand, but she couldn’t. Her eyes were moist with bitter tears, as her half-track finally ran out of fuel. Arms around his shoulders, Crolemere desperately dragged Iacob through the mud and the ruined carcasses. Her fine features were tainted by the detritus of blood and dirt that splashed across her as she fought to reach the cube.

She was interrupted in her flight by a peculiar sight. The heavens suddenly burst into flaring color just ahead of her. Moments later, an eldar venom anti-grav craft careened through it. It was missing a fin and burning from several places, but still it somehow managed to stay afloat long enough for its strange crew to leap from it before it crashed into the ground with a mighty detonation that flung Crolemere upon her back. She dropped Iacob as she fell.

The vessel had three crew members, according to the accounts of this confrontation. None of them were eldar. Two were obviously old men arguing furiously, the eldest chastising the younger man in a cloak of shifting color on his recklessness. The third figure was a sinister man, clad in dark clothes with glowing eyes that shone with a piercing blue. Yet, it was not a man at all,and it moved with slick, deliberate precision no human could emulate.* The artificial being gunned down Crolemere with a dozen las bolts to the heart and temple. As she lay healing in a pool of her own congealing blood, they abducted her captive, before the colorful man stumbled back into the rent in reality, closely followed by his allies. 

Ahriman dragged Crolemere from the battlefield using his formidable powers, and moments later, the cube too vanished in a storm of screaming warp fire. 

Why Ahriman wanted Iacob was unknown at the time. But he seemed key in one of the Sorcerer’s schemes. Yet, that encounter did plant the smallest seeds of doubt in Crolemere’s mind; what was the Astartes Sorcerer truly up to. It lead her to iinvestigate her ally. It was then she learnt the horrific truth of the Thousand Sons renegade.

7)	Oblivion’s pattern.

For over three thousand years, there had been no word or rumor of it being active. Many hoped that it had left the universe, as the New devourer had done, or had consumed itself in some dark corner of the galaxy. But, like a shark flocking to a sinking ship, the manifest disasters and misery at the close of M55 almost seemed to summon it back into our reality.

Navigators noticed its presence during their annual charting of the warp lane’s of Vulkan’s Imperium. Planets, systems and at one point an entire sector; all went missing. Patrol ships who investigated found their former locations utterly empty. Psykers hadn’t even detected the telltale warp howl that always accompanied planetary destruction. It was as if they were unmade a some fundamental level.

The Ophilim Kiasoz was mobile. Hopes were dashed; it was back. Only the oldest members of the galaxy realized what this entity promised; they had known its destruction in the previous ten thousand years.

Imogen of the Brethren of the Willing would not be perturbed by this entity. As soon as possible, she gathered all the data she could on the attacks; those of the past, and those of her present. She had locked herself into her chambers after she had stored the Anathame, and her fevered mind was still reeling from the apocalyptic conspiracies and revelations she was discovering. The Ophilim Kiasoz was the most unfathomable and potentially dangerous of them all, and she knew she had to find out where it was going.

At first, as she looked upon her updated galactic charts, the Ophilim Kiasoz’s path seemed utterly random; it appeared to move for a couple of hundred years at half c. For a couple of lightyears in one direction, before appearing at an entirely different site and continuing on a sub-light path for another couple of centuries, and so on. It was not until she began to calculate the likely locations of black holes and neutron stars, and folded her maps along geometric lines linking these phenomenon, that she realized that the Ophilim was not moving randomly. It was moving in a perfectly straight line, roughly towards the western edge of the rim-wards galactic plane. But the Ophilm Kiasoz was not travelling through space. Instead it was somehow bypassing vast swathes of space; travelling through some other medium Imogen could not fathom.

However, she could predict where it was going to appear next. She took her findings to the ruling Councils of Armageddon with all haste. She implored them to begin the evacuation of those systems that fell beneath the pattern of the Ophilim Kiasoz’s path. However, during this time the Vulkan Imperium was rebuilding itself after a major war, and Vulkan was out re-conquering swathes of the Empire. The council argued that it required all the border worlds it still possessed, in order to survive. Imogen countered that those systems were doomed either way, with or without defenders there; for the Ophilim could not be stopped by mortal means of war. Yet, there was a member of the Promethian Court who argued otherwise; a brilliant scientist known as Cayden, who had looked at Imogen’s findings and noticed that the Ophilim Kiasoz only made its ‘jumps’ when it neared a gravitational/solar anomaly. He boldly requested that the Council of Equals allow him to access the forbidden armoury, beneath Hades Hive; the location of the ancient Nova weaponry of the long-dead Dark Age of Tech culture. He claimed he had a method of diverting the Ophilim Kiasoz away from allied worlds. All he needed to do was conjure a celestial anomaly.

Eventually, the Council narrowly voted to give the scientist’s plan a chance. However, they also sent word for Imogen’s plan to also begin to be initiated, should Cayden fail.

The two distinct rescue forces rushed to the western marches of the Imperium; one a fleet of millions of repurposed merchant vessels and grain storage vessels for carrying billions of potential refugees, the other a military armada of mothballed vessels and reserve ships, hastily called up for Cayden’s scheme.

Cayden’s fleet amassed in the Deimia system, where a super massive blue giant burned erratically and with a fierce light bright as a million Terran suns. It was here that he began to install the nova bomb dischargers, in a loose ring of heavily shielded satellites around the star’s equator. This system was chosen for his operation because it was in an isolated sector far from any neighbouring friendly systems; the resultant nova kindled in its heart would not scorch any Vulkanian worlds inadvertently. 

It took his teams weeks to set up the optimal configurations and calculate the resultant blast that was going to be produced. This was too long, and soon they were running out of time. As the Ophilim neared, strange things began to occur. All their chronometrical readings and time keeping devices lost their consistency, fluctuating wildly with discrepancies. The planets orbiting the star changed their orbits; some became elliptical, others failed to complete their orbits, and simply began to turn back upon themselves in a spectacular display of astronomical readjustment. The pressure began to mount onboard his vessels, but Cayden pressed on with his work. Every psyker on his ship inexplicably went mute and deaf, and all the food supplies went stale overnight. One of the frigates escorting his flag ship drove all ahead full into the heart of Deimia; their void shields bursting like a soap bubble within the crushing, blazing embrace of the fusion furnace. There was no explanation why.

Then things began to get stranger. The star itself began to fluctuate in its readings; not just radiation levels, but actual surface details changed. Lines and patterns formed in the sun spots, which preceded gigantic tidal shifts in the sun, with huge sections of plasma sliding out of the star like stone blocks, much to the crew’s utter bewilderment and wonder.

They could wait no more. They set the nova weapon dischargers on a timer, and fled the system as fast as the warp would carry them. Only Cayden and a handful of warships remained behind, to ensure the weapon detonated. Nobody knows what happened to them. Cayden’s last message to Imperial space was a garbled signal relayed by a deafened psyker, of his last words (it would seem).

Even this archive couldn’t scrub the entire message clear of distortion, but a single sentence was made out (though it still makes little sense to this day. I suspect Cayden merely wished to say something enigmatic before he died, to preserve his legend.)

His final message is short. The majority of the ten minute burst was static and bizarre noises that might have been the sound of a hull ripping, or rapid temperature change causing micro-fractures and plasma container rupture. I cannot be certain. But here are the clearest sections:

[Distorted]... Can’t-[distorted]-I- [distorted]-ull integrity fai-[distorted/corrupted section]-All follies come home. All- [distorted. Metallic din? Static distortion?]

In the end, the worlds in the path of the Ophilim were saved. However, it took Imogen a while to recalculate the Ophilim Kiasoz’s new multi-dimensional path. Five worlds were nullified in that time. This led to any further attempts to divert or attack the Kiasoz anomaly to be called off by executive order of Vulkan himself.

Some things should be left alone...
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