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

==Additional Background Section 21: The Final Phoenix [Part Four]==

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Asurmen, the Hand of Asuryan; Lord of the Dire Avengers Aspect. 
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Asurmen, the first of the Phoenix Lords, led the most Exarchs of his brethren. He visited every one of the dead craftworlds. He searched the ruins, slaying any who sought to defile the empty tombs. Some say he was following the aspect of the Phoenix; trying to figure out a means to release Ynnead from its limbo, trapped within the Infinity Matrix of souls. There was a story which told of an ancient trickster king of the Ulthran clan, who had been swallowed whole by a Slanneshi leviathan, but that his fingertips had been severed by the beast’s jaws, and had maintained an anchor within the realm of the living; these fingertips became jewels, which were absent from the ruby scepter of the Queen of the Dead; without which, she could not break free into the endless labyrinth. We cannot know whether Asurmen knew these tales (''or possibly, whether he started them''). We do know that he inspired valor and bravery wherever he went, even among those who were not children of Isha. He had the bearing of a King, not merely a Lord among Phoenixes.

He followed the calling implied by his Temple’s name. He was the Avenger; fighting with valor and honor as he bested the greatest champions of fetid empires, or slew their Tyrant kings upon their thrones. He brought the empire of Fallen names down in a day; a single shuriken cutting the precise artery which caused the towering daemon engine which ruled the world to collapse in upon itself, crushing its entire army beneath its bulk. In a spectacular move, he led an entire flight of Exodite Dragon riders against the Slaugth Empire, and shattered its power forever. How he managed to transport the Exodites fully ten thousand light years across the galaxy to reach the Callixis sector from the northern reaches of the galaxy is unknown, for no known Webway gates led there.

Asurmen, unlike his fellow Asuryata, made no secret of his movements across the galaxy. He moved between the incredibly sparse Eldar fleets, and where he arrived, the enemy died. Much of the time, he had no need to draw the sword of Asur at all; his skill with the shuriken was unmatched across the entire galaxy.

At some point in the latter centuries of the 55th millennium, he sought out a small Empire of allied aliens, deep within a hidden region of space (''called the Veiled Region Belt to humanity''). This Empire, the Heketamon, had been at war with a most bizarre foe for countless centuries.

The Thyrrus were a truly alien race of squid-like entities, bedecked in elaborate and complex costumes. They fought with weapons of exquisite beauty and confusing application. When Asurmen arrived in the system at the head of a flight of unmanned Ghostships, what he saw was simultaneously beautiful and tragic. Entire worlds were engulfed by wars that spread a profusion of fantastic lights and fires across their surface. When Asurmen descended into the atmospheres of these worlds, the beauty of the light-shows projecting into space paled in comparison to the wonderful din of the war against the Thyrrus. The artillery strikes of both the Thyrrus and their foes seemed to be modulated and directed so they accompanied each other perfect. Base notes of throaty macro shells countered the delirious chorus of high pitched laser batteries and streaking hypersonic weapons. Weapons of pure sound blasted buildings into ruins, which fell in an exact pattern each time. 

From low orbit, the Phoenix Lord could see that even the corpses and fallen formed a pattern; poetry had been written across the crust itself. Ancient legends, of the Old Eldar Empire and other prehistoric species’ myths were emblazoned in cursive script spanning kilometers. His Exarchs were almost overcome with the orchestral wonder of the scenes below, for the souls of the dead were mingled with the spectacle in obscene combinations that tugged the heart strings and inflamed the humors.

Only Asurmen seemed unmoved; his slender arms folded across his chest forcefully. He ordered his vessels to scan the systems of the Heketamon and find the largest concentration of Thyrrus. 

The Heketamon were losing the war, but could not understand why. Their tactics were sound, they fell back when necessary, their pressed their advantages where the enemy was thinnest. Nothing seemed to work.

On the world of Illustris, their ruling council had been entrenched for almost a millennium. They didn’t understand how their final major fortress kept their bewildering foe at bay, but they were thankful for it. Asurmen could see why they had survived however. From the air, their last fortress, built and rebuilt according to the concentration of assaults striking particular areas of the fort, was formed into a titanic, stylized face. A face half white, half black, surrounded by a spider’s web. The symbol of the Laughing God.

Asurmen wasted no more time looking upon this work of demented theatricality. He flung himself from low-orbit, plummeting directly towards the Thyrrus hordes. His gauntlet avenger catapults unleashed a storm of glittering shuriken rain upon the colorful monsters. As he fell, banners and cloak flapping about his armored form, he linked his mind with his ghostships and Exarchs, informing them instantly of his designs for the coming battle.

The corpses of the soft-bodied squids built up beneath him, while their spectacular weaponry pierced the sky with a forest of luminescence in a vain effort to destroy him. When he finally slammed into the ground, his final descent was cushioned by a thousand soft Thyrrrus corpses, that exploded as he crashed into them at terminal velocity, followed swiftly by the grav-tanks of his Exarch followers.

As a tide of glittering Thyrrus ichor splashed over the horde, Asurmen was already moving, the Diresword Tethesis in hand, while his catapults filleted any who even thought to raise a weapon against him.

The sword was alive, and responded to Asurmen’s thoughts with empathy only a brother could know. The blade severed Thyrrus bodies with every arcing stroke and energized thrust. Within moments, the Thyrrus force was already spreading outwards, away from the eternal warrior.

As he fought, the Ghostships fired according to Asurmen’s orders, burning away millions of Thyrrus with their precise pulsar bursts and vibrocannon barrages. To the defenders of the planet, this assault was as baffling as that of the Thyrrus monsters; their mysterious ally had picked an apparently arbitrary point to attack the squids. There was no strategy to this.

Little did they know that the destruction Asurmen wrought was tightly controlled and purposefully limited. From above, it was obvious. He was carving the Eldar tale of the Asuryana into the Thyrrus horde, in blood and blackened corpses.

Once he had completed his attack/artwork, he called out the servants of the Laughing God in a loud voice, before throwing his sword towards an empty patch of sky just above the remaining Thyrrus. The sword of Asur... stuck.

The Thyrrus paused, turning as one towards the sword, which had pierced a patch of air just above their heads. Moments later, the holofield unfurled before the assembled crowds’ eyes, revealing the wondrous Eldar grav-barge that was anchored there. In a single bound, Asurmen leapt towards the craft, using his sword as a stepping stone onto the hull, before he pulled it free with a whine of ruptured psycho-plastic. 

“Enough of this, you harlequin dolts.” He stated simply.

The Eldar within allowed Asurmen to enter the vessel. But these creatures were not Harlequins. They were a far rarer faction; the impossibly-ancient Choral players of Cegorach. These strange beings were not mute, as the mimes of the Harlequin troupes. These beings spoke constantly, speaking the lyrics of an endlessly complex song without conclusion. After long hours of difficult attempts at communication, the dour Asurmen and the lilting, whimsical Chorus were eventually able to make themselves understood.

Amidst their rambling, Asurmen was able to discern that Cegorach was enjoying the plight of the galaxy, and that he had installed more and more distractions and conjurations to ‘improve the great display’.

Asurmen cursed them for their flippancy; Cegorach was the last of the Gods! He should be fighting and aiding his children, not dallying with cruel shows and oddities!

They enigmatically referred to the Harlequin God’s ‘dazzling displays’. They were too fool and to misdirect. The glittering lights were the facade; lights that cast a shadow. And in the shadow was where the tinkerer worked. The most cunning and ruthless of the First. So very secret he was, only the forgotten children of troglodyte still remembered him.

Asurmen realized the importance of this information, and thanked the Chorus. They responded with mocking laughter and derision; they claimed that when the truth finally unfolded across eternity’s well, the Phoenix Lord with a King’s mantle may not be so understanding. As Asurmen made to leave, they asked whether he would punish them, would he avenge those who had been wronged? He replied;

“No. But you have not wronged me... yet...”

And with that, he vanished; teleported back into his ghostship’s hold. It was only then that the Chorus realized their vessel was still uncloaked. Seconds later, a flight of Heketamon deathstrike missiles plunged into the Choral vessel in a blinding flash of white oblivion. This broke the back of the Thyrrus, and the counterattack could finally begin.

But the Lord of Dire Avengers was already looking to a different target; his new plan forming within his glorious golden mind. He journeyed into the heart of the Major Krork-hold of Vandergloin. This journey would have been impossible without the Webway; the only route not clogged with death and bloodshed. The warp was alive with warfleets, as they constantly criss-crossed the galaxy responding to incursion after incursion. Realspace was a confused realm of battles occurring across every sector in the galaxy; few ships could hope to cross the galaxy without being attacked by monolithic silver vessels, or torn apart by paranoid planetary defenses.
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Nevertheless, Asurmen reached his target. He broke into the vaults, freeing a waifish human psyker from the slave pens beneath the central bastion. When confronted by the towering wardens, he (''surprisingly'') surrendered. He allowed himself to be directed towards the heart of the complex. Deep in a shadowy vault, stood a great throne room, filled with ten mighty thrones. Upon eight of the thrones, a psyker Krork creature (''known to antiquity as ‘weirdboyz’'') was sat. Their brains were plugged into some sort of matrix, which Asurmen could sense instantly. He felt the legendary ‘War Field’ of the Krork, pulsing through the chamber; the vigorous life-blood of an entire species. Asurmen saw other Krork, of the Mechanical class, fiddling with complex force field arrays around the thrones. These were Krork force fields; the most powerful and complex energy fields the galaxy had ever known. Even Necron force fields were not as powerful (''though the Necrons have many other advantages over ‘The War of the Krork’, as demonstrated in other sections''). The figures within the field were utterly safe from anything Asurmen, or indeed an entire warfleet, could throw at them. In addition, ten foot tall warrior class Krork beasts stood to attention all around the chamber, advanced energy and projectile weapons held close to their vast chests. Their leader was not present, for the planet was still being rocked by the renewed assaults of the Necrons, who were besieging this and indeed most of the Krork bastions in the galaxy at once.

The shivering psyker was terrified, but only marginally less terrified of the golden Phoenix Souls that clasped her shoulders gently, holding her steady in the face of the Krork. Upon the final two thrones sat two diminutive creatures. In another life they would be dismissed as snotlings, but in that period they were the most feared entities on the planet. These were the brains of the Krork war machine; the guiding force behind its great green might.

“Why, Eldar, do you plunder our vaults and presume to relieve us of our slaves?” the first asked, its voice oddly amplified by unknown means.

“I do the bidding of those who come first. Those who Linger.”

At Asurmen’s words, the Brainboys chuckled. “You did not meet those who came first. You are young. We fought at their side. And now, when we awoke after long in the wilderness of battle-lust, we found them all gone. All dead. Swallowed whole by your venereal madness!” the other brainboy growled, his voice instantly translated into the dialect of Ulthwe (''for some reason'').

Asurmen shook his head. “There are those that linger still. Who brought you out of the wilderness? Who fixed you?”

The Krorkish goblinoids waved their hands dismissively. “That trickster did not raise us from madness out of good will. He is a demented glimmer, spread out across the galaxy. He remade us to be another plaything in his selfish games; we are under no illusions about his motives. He meddled with the blue fiends just to see how the Sapiens would react; he crafted them as a taunt! He is a fool and a terror. We and we alone are the ones who remember why we are fighting this Long War against the Mirror-Devils. And we will fight! Fight and win! This is our purpose, ingrained on every single one of our fungal augment-warriors.”

Asurmen was quite for a moment before replying. “I do not speak of Cegorach. His purpose is not to unite and lead. It is to trick and distract; to confuse and confound. I speak of the shadow, that grows and lingers in the spaces between the light.”

Both sides knew who he referred to. The brainboys sniffed. “You are more deluded than I thought. He is dead, just as the others died.”

But Asurmen revealed the truth. The shadowy one, the unseen God, forgotten even in the old Eldar pantheons. Qah had long been active, even when shattered. However, at some point in the Second Age of Strife, unseen by all, he had been healed, and had begun to scheme and plot.

The brainboys scoffed at this, until Asurmen questioned them about their lighting; why did shadows linger in their own throne room, when they had the power to illuminate the room fully? Before they could answer, Asurmen used his inner constellation of souls to illuminate the chamber fully. Only his light could pierce the deepest shadows. For a few brief seconds, the chamber had no shade, revealing dozens of scuttling shapes, clad in mouldering suits of meat and chitin. Seconds later, the shadows returned, and the shadowy figures were gone; scuttling away in fear. The Hrud were Qah’s minions, and they were everywhere. They were the watchers, always in the dark. Ever vigilant, they noted everything they saw. While the Laughing God caused havoc, they moved in the wake of the chaos, manipulating and directing events without ever getting involved. They were maligned as a pest for thousands of years, but Asurmen revealed them for what they were.

(''I suspect they even dwell in this place, though they seem content to let me continue this chronicle unmolested. To be honest, I do not fear them. I fear the Draziin-Maton, and what they plan on doing. But I must continue.'')


His actions proved to the Brainboys that Asurmen was honest and they reluctantly let him leave with his psyker prize. The girl was a particular kind of psyker; a sort of telepathic ‘battery’, she could store the dying recollections of any living thing which had passed away into the sea of souls. This had driven her insane, but it made her useful to the Phoenix Lord (''whom she continually called ‘King Fire-Bird’ despite his stoic condemnation of this nickname.'')

His next destination was a realm which had survived and thrived for twenty thousand years on the blood of men and the screaming madness of superhuman monsters. His target was Baal, the Throneworld of the Bloodknights, and the lair of the first of their number.

If Asurmen wished to further his enigmatic scheme, Mephiston and his twisted Librarians would be the greatest obstacle. Asurmen needed to bring back the dark memories long-repressed by the vampire Astartes and he would have to fight to the death to retrieve it.
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