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

==Section 53: The Last Craftworld==


<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">The rise of the Seventh God of Dissolution, the God Whose Number Was Three, was marked by the death of the last bastion of the Eldar of the Path, Craftworld Biel-Tan.

The entire northern region of the galaxy pivoted about this central battle, hundreds of fleets from dozens of factions had dueled in the void and upon the embattled surface of the world ship. Though the exact make up of each side in this war is almost impossible to gauge, they broadly fell into three categories, those who fought to crack open the craftworld and feast upon its riches, those who would defend them, and those who were drawn to carnage and fought both sides.<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

Expeditionary fleets from Pentus joined with Silver Skull led human coalitions that fought beside the eldar due to prophecy and fate. Almost every eldar in existence added to the armada. Every eldar that could fight donned their war masks, and bled their souls into the Infinity Circuit as they died in droves; each death an unbelievable tragedy, yet all of them lost amidst the greater letting of blood.

Typhus and the festering legions of Nurgle flooded Biel-Tan like a plague, barely registering their renegade and chaos legionnaire allies as they rampaged. No matter how many died, they persisted, spreading like damp rot through a crumbling house. Even in death, the blood of the nurglitch festered and corroded. Biel-Tan was forever poisoned, and even if it was to survive the siege, it would die of its infected wounds most assuredly.

At the climax of this mighty siege, a third faction entered the fray; a fleet of ravaged, ancient renegades surged from the warp like daggers carving open the heart of the materium itself. They were led by the foreboding barque Planet Killer; a ship of such evil renown, it had no other name, for it needed none. The valiant heroes of Biel-Tan groaned in woe, for they thought the tide of victory had turned to the polluted ones. But to the surprise of all, the Planet Killer rammed the Astral Maw amidships, even as it loomed high over the crippled leviathan of Biel-Tan itself. Though each was many kilometers long, they seemed such tiny and ephemeral things compared to the enormity of the bloated craftworld, a speck diminishing as it reached terminal velocity.

The two ships bonded in fire and tortured metal, spiraling out of orbit in a hellish dance. Down, down towards the craftworld. Moments before the two ships crashed, a single silver thunderhawk made its escape from their burning bowels. Kelfdon, the Silver Skull within, spoke only the great warning granted to him by his hideously burned passenger;

“Drach’Nyen rises. We have to leave.”

To the eldar within Biel-Tan, the first they saw of the crash was when the two flagships shattered the great dorsal domes of the craftworld. The crystal blue skies were falling in shards of fire, wraithbone and bewitched daemon-metal. The impact was like a newborn star, white and scourging. A hundred thousand eldar were erased in a single instant, and the entire dorsal cavern burned with purple fire for ten minutes. Even Nurgle’s pollution was vanquished in that terrible conflagration. Air pockets across Biel-Tan ruptured, snatching away the atmosphere into the void. Millions of Typhus’ mortal chattel perished without a word, their screams silent without the air to voice them.

Tectonic lesions shuddered throughout the ship, disrupting any hope of strategy, killing anyone in their path. 

Even Typhus, who was the author of this siege, realized that victory was chaos’ now, whether he stayed or not. With Manreaper in his hands, he carved his way back towards his landing ship, intent on returning to the Terminus Est. 

Autarch Llanquelliqn would not allow this. She swooped down upon the host of the Destroyer Hive, heedless of the destruction all around her. Her world was dead, and her species would perish soon enough too, but she could not die until Typhus joined her.

“You do not get to leave, festering one! You do not get to win!” she cried, as she stood valiantly between Typhus and his escape ship.

“Foolish whore,” Typhus rumbled with slobbering laughter. “I already have. Did your Seers warn you of this doom? I thought not.”

With that, the terminator charged, and the Autarch met him in battle. She was like quicksilver, he was like a mountain fastness. He was the stone, and she was the water that would erode him. No matter where he swung his scythe, she was not there, her own executioner blade carving chunks from the sickly hulk.

The destroyer hive, a churning cloud of daemonic flies, surged about the Autarch, but her fusion pistol scorched them into ash with every blast. Typhus’ corrupting magic washed over her body like oil across the skin of a deep lake, for she had the will of a council of farseers remotely guiding her hand and shielding her body, expending the last of their souls’ fire for the chance to avenge themselves upon this last mortal figurehead of their civilization's demise. 

The two foes tumbled through the floor as another great quake shook the craftworld, ripping it open ever more grievously. Typhus struggled to rise, a wraithbone girder punched clean through his archaic terminator plate. His helmet had been torn away, and his hollow head was revealed; a decaying undead skull, bilious with flies. Tainted fuel was leeching from some broken section of the worldship, drooling the corrosive matter directly into Typhus’ face, burning through his eye sockets. Llanquelliqn lay shattered beside the herald, every hollow bone in her body broken and drooling with shocking scarlet blood. Her only succor as her eyes dimmed was that she could watch Typhus’ own eyes burned in his skull, and his flesh slough away in layers, like pastry left to dissolve in the rain.

From somewhere deep in the dorsal sections, something terrible roared with a voice of thunder. At the heart of the five hundred mile firestorm raging in the heart of the Planet Killer’s impact crater, a monster writhed, coiling itself in terrible raiment. Clothed in the daemon-haunted adamantine flesh of the two chaos capital ships, the beast arose. Its great pinions were kilometers across, its segmented spine longer than a grand cruiser. Its lashing tail beheaded the artificial mountains in the craftworld’s garden decks, and its claws ripped up miles of wraithbone decking with the ease of a raven tearing gossamer. Eldar, monkeigh and daemon alike turned to behold this terror with sublime terror. Its form was fluid, armoured sections undulating, fusing and breaking, only to seep with oily pus than shone a thousand hues. Its blood was the blood of the millions of cultists and traitor marines that had perished and been melted in the inferno’s heart. The monster could not be seen clearly, for a miasma of Drazin-Maton dust and sentient daemon-smoke sheathed it, and the centre of the armoured goliath blazed with a warp rift, pulsing with deep warp malevolence, blinding and impossible to behold. It resembled perhaps a Heldrake of the Soulforge, only swollen to the scale of capital ships.

Nobody knew what this nightmare was and yet, every voice on Biel-Tan whispered the same name;

“Drach’nyen’drya.”

Drach’nyen, the daemon-wyrm, the Beast of Dissolution, the Great Red Dragon of the Nex-
'''[Images of molten hate, driven through the skull with things neither wasp nor spinner’s wheel. Narrator shudders, spitting out elemental black ooze from between his teeth.]'''

Drach’nyen’drya roared again, and Biel-Tan suffered more tremors. The great dragon of chaos stumbled forwards, shedding fire like a newborn foal casting off its mucosal afterbirth. It barged through crystal spires, and flattened entire armies beneath its bulk. Terminator shield walls were swept aside like broken toys, flights of jetbikes and swooping hawks were themselves swatted from the sky by bladed wings as large as a cobra class destroyer. Wherever Drach’nyen touched, the raw stuff of chaos seeped out. It mutated the ground, melding humans and eldar and trees, making penumbral shadow tendrils coil with sentience from the heart of inanimate forms. Orchards of pleading eyes sprouted like grapes from the walls, and men were driven mad simply at the sight of the daemonwyrm.

The war between chaos and nurgle was forgotten for a moment, as every gun and blade on Biel-tan turned against this newborn abomination. Even the mortal servants of the Realm of Travesties feared this thing, for it was hunger, and it would devour them all. There was some gnawing, hollowness in its gargantuan soul. 

Nothing could halt the wyrm in its thrashing, burrowing through the crust of the Craftworld. Deck by deck, it burst through, belching lilac fire which mutated even as it incinerated. Eons of years of history vanished like smoke on the wind, turned to less than ash. Every artillery battery within range poured torrents of fire upon the wyrm to no avail; the more it shattered, the more it grew, consuming everything in its path with great snaps of its crocodilian maw.

Beyond Biel-tan, the many fleets in orbit began to depart, each battling vessel fighting to reach the warp translation points before their rivals. Everyone knew the craftworld was done, and no one wished to be caught in the warp storm which would surely follow.*

Where others fled, the eldar fought on. Their grav ships swarmed like a nest of hornets, raining endless plasma and prism laser fire upon Drach’nyen’drya. The wyrm fought through it, uprooting city blocks and buckling bridges. It drank the emerald ocean dry in a hundred thirsty gulps, and spat white hot steam across the defenders in return.

The eldar would not despair. Even as the nurglings tormented them, mocking the eldar’s pointless sacrifice, they fought on, killing everything that was not eldar, and pouring whatever fire remained at the possessed capital ship drake.

“Your Phoenix Lords forsook you, spindly children of a tainted seed,” called a Great Unclean one from atop a battlement. “See how your prayers remain unanswered. See how your soul stones grow dull upon yours deaths. Where are your souls going my spindly ones? Perhaps She who Thirsts claims them? Or perhaps your hearts are truly devoid of hope, and have fallen into Grandfather’s kind embrace?” it chortled and spat, only silenced when a Wraithknight’s D-cannon wrenched the daemon by to its devil-haunted halls beyond reality.

It was then, as the wyrm began to devour another eldar city, that the Avatar of Biel-tan joined the fray. Their Wailing Doom became the form of a great warbow, and the Avatar turned to the aspect of an archer, leaping from tower to tower, launching burning arrows of pure destruction into the Dran’nyen’drya’s body. These bolts were empowered by the will of the dying eldar, and each strike was like the punch of a macro-cannon when it struck cursed daemonflesh. The dragon recoiled, roiling with demented agony. At a distance, the Avatar was a mere speck of orange, a firefly circling an inferno, and no matter how many bolts its cast, it could not finish the dragon at range.

With agility astonishing for a twenty foot tall animated statue, the Avatar leapt upon the pockmarked hide of Drach’nyen’drya. It jumped between gnashing fangs and probing spines, charging headlong through the surreal cityscape riding across the dragon’s back. Wailing Doom was a spear one moment, stabbing and carving through metal, the next it was a many flanged mace, bursting the daemon’s many eyes like pus-filled blisters, blinding the Drach’nyen’drya to the Avatar’s advance. The Avatar gained pace, mindlessly relentless as it scaled the dread monster. Inexorably, the warrior construct approached the base of the dragon’s neck. It was nearing the heart of the fiend, buoyed by the will of the eldar desperate for it to succeed.

The Avatar fought sub-daemons that began to wriggled free of the dragon’s flesh like parasitic leeches disturbed by an outsider. Things kin to centipede and wolf launched themselves against the warrior and were cut to gory ribbons, while snakes and worms tried to trip the hero of biel-tan, wasp-like things with infantile human faces wept tears of excrement as they burst against the burning flesh of the Avatar.

Drach’nyen’drya in frustration tore at its own flesh, in a vain effort to dislodge the hateful flea that kept piercing its body. Chunks the size of baneblades were wrenched out of its hide, cascading in molten metal to the craftworld below.

The Avatar only stopped when the gunfire of the eldar finally ceased. After weeks... months of utter carnage, being hunted through their own homes by a daemon fueled by an active warp rift in its heart, the eldar were spent. The last of the defenders fell, and their soul stones went dark.

The very last eldar to die was a young mother. After smothering her infant to spare her from the claws of the daemonkin, the mother breathed in tainted smoke, and grew still. She was dead by the time the daemons found their bodies. Their soul stones were empty.

The Avatar, starved of souls to fuel its animus, ceased up, freezing in mid-motion, Wailing Doom raised as a sword above its head.

Roaring in triumph, the wyrm took the statue in its jaws and smote in into the ruins of Biel-Tan. Then, it began to dig. Drach’nyen’drya was a nascent power, on the cusp of existence. It was a hybrid of daemon and drazin, fueled by the warp rift which powered the Planet-Killer’s gun. The world-ending energies were being funneled into its soulless shell, making the daemon grandiose beyond reason. Drach’nyen had the energy, but like fossil fuel, it polluted and it was finite.

This energy was nothing compared to the glut of soul-stuff now trapped in Biel-tan’s heart. For within Biel-Tan was a link to the eldar afterlife, to the very fountain of mystic energy. The Infinity Circuit trapped the souls of every eldar not consumed by Slannesh. Every eldar who failed to reincarnate before the fall, and every craftworld eldar thereafter too. The Bonesingers and Soulsmiths of Biel-tan had been cleverer still, tapping into the world spirits of the Exodites, and the wild world spirits of the great untamed planets of the galaxy.

If the daemonwyrm had cracked open Biel-tan, it would have drank deep of the pure energy of the stable warp, imbuing itself with a galactic warp source, fuelling its ascent into true chaos godhood; a seventh ruinous power to oversee the dissolution of matter and space and time.


This is not what happened. Unbeknownst to the Wyrm, another vessel translated into the system-wide graveyard, where all others had fled. This ship was known as a dragonship, but its name had naught to do with Drach’nyen’drya. For this ship was to be the dragon’s bane.

It had traveled through the blighted webway for what seemed like many lifetimes of mortal men, fighting perverted dark kin and daemons and worse, but through fire and faith they had made it through the crucible, at the time of Biel-tan’s greatest need. At its helm was an eldar, turned to crystal. Beside her was a hero in silver warplate, bearing the sword of midnight, the anathame. Allaten of the Silver Skulls was his name, and he had grown ancient, his beard long and white. His old bones were still solid steel as his flesh withered in his powered armor. 

Opposite him was an eldar of royal pedigree, a rogue and a king both. So old was he that his flesh was turning to crystal the same as the pilot. He was the last craftworlder. He was Yriel, and he bore the spear of twilight.

The fourth figure on that ghost ship was a man. Just a man, a monkeigh, a blasphemer and a coward and a scavenger. It is from his memoirs, his mad dreams, that much of this tale was uncovered, for he was our imperfect window into the birth of something that changed the galaxy forever.

“I am sorry,” said Allaten, behold the desecration of Biel-Tan, a hollowed-out husk haunted by the dragon’s roar. He looked to his once enemy, and now fierce friend.

Yriel wept, but he wept with a smile upon his face. “Do not be sorry, old friend.”

“This is a sorrowful time. Your race... it is gone.”

“Yes... the eldar are dead. Now you will see what the dead might dream in the time hereafter.”

Before Allaten could react, the ghosts that governed the Flame of Asuryan sent the vessel on a collision course with Biel-tan. Julius Hawke barely had time to vomit over his shoes before the vessel struck the craftworld at a fraction of c.

That should have been the end; the ship should have atomised in an instant of pure destruction, blazing briefly and blindingly like a newborn sun. Certainly, when they struck, Drach’nyen felt the shudder of the craftworld, and the bright flames that consumed the ironically named ship.

Onboard the Flame of Asuryan, the last wraithbone choir, stolen from Trayzn the Infinite, and smuggled through hell and back, at last united with the rest of the eldar Infinity Circuit. In that attosecond, as the choir and circuit met, yet before the ship impacted, reality changed.

Hawke reluctantly unscrewed his eyes, and opened them onto pure white in every direction. At first he thought this the human heaven, but when he felt his arthritic knees and his overlyjuvenated spine crack and groan, he knew he was still alive, suspected in a moment of expanded time.

He saw... things, in the whiteness. Things this chronicle would struggle to describe. The motes of light on a whispered promise to a dying man, the light of creation before people had crawled from the primordial muck. He saw ghosts, phantoms from histories that could have been, before the fall spoiled it all. Ghosts of the true past, and the ghosts of children never born. Yriel vanished in the white void, and Allaten vanished too, sword and all.

Biel-Tan glowed, every fiber of the living ship, every vein and sinew and wisp of wraithbone blazed with holy light. Divine light.

The wraithguard, the wraithknights, the wraithlords; all were reborn in shining aspect. Drach’nyen’drya found itself assailed on all sides by wraith constructs, and gigantic crystalline warp spiders, larger than any seen before.

The dead rose up. They looked like eldar, except they were composed of purest diamond, with circulatory systems filled with light instead of blood.

The Wyrm would not be vanquished easily, and fought on, slaying millions upon millions of the new constructs, only for the light of the divine to fill them with renewed vigor and set them upon it again. The Avatar led this circus of the dead, but it was fashioned in Khaine’s likeness no longer; for this was an Avatar of a new warp goddess, clad in armor with a gleaming lance of celestial brilliance, which pierced the dragon’s belly.

Wraith ships in orbit suddenly came online once again, and began to bombard Drach’nyen from orbit with capital grade weapons. It was this which finally spelled the end to the colossus. 

Drach’nyen’drya howled in voiceless rage as the warp rift at the heart of its host body consumed it. Like a collapsing star, the daemonwyrm imploded, crumbling and crumpling in upon itself.

When the drgaon was slain, silence fell across the ghostworld. Why Hawke was spared is unknown, but I suspect he was allowed to bear witness, so he could tell the other mortals of this god’s ascension.**

Across the galaxy, all the other dead craftworlds began to light up. Their infinity circuits began to wake, and their crystalline dead move with new life.

The eldar had a prophecy once, in the half-remembered 41st Millennium, of the god of the dead. They had failed once to rouse them, but that was because the eldar had not fulfilled their prophecy. Only when every eldar bound to the infinity circuit died, could their race truly transcend.

In the closing centuries of ''The Age of Dusk'', the Eldar race went extinct. They died to the last child.

In that same year, the Ynnead race was born, the children of the Goddess of Vengeance, whose number was Three. The Seventh God of Chaos, and the Second God of Order at once.

But be it god of order or chaos, another god rising only meant young Revelation had little and less time to reach the Well of Eternity before the veil was to fall completely...

*'''[It was said the Silver Skulls were the first to leave, after discovering a signal, transmitting from some far distant point, just below the galactic plane; a signal of hope, blaring across the cosmos to all who would listen.

The signal spoke of a new world, a refuge from the dying galaxy. A world within a world, where the Last Good Man held court: a world of unity and peace, where all refugees were welcome. The Prognosticators, guided by the burned old warrior who had helped to slay Huron Blackheart, divided a truth to this signal, and convinced the Silver Skulls and the fleet of desperate homeless humans and xenos following them to steer a true path through the tattered skein of reality to this new home.

The end of that tale is famous amongst our culture I know, but I insist upon revisiting this story in a later section. Volsanius Greal is nothing if not an admirer of the old classics...]'''

**'''[Hawke claims Ynnead sent him to a place of his heart’s desire when it was done with him. Our ancestors found him drunk in a bordello on Henrich’s Planet, with a runic branch burned into his back and a lady on each arm. Make of that what you will...]'''
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