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

==Additional Background Section 45: The Wraithbone Choirs==


<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">The ancient eldar, on the very cusp of the fall, created the craftworlds from the vast trading vessels of their empire, intending them to be grand arks for the majority of their race to flee the fall. However, a scarce fraction of the eldar fled when the farseers warned them of their impending doom. Nevertheless, the craftworlds were built to house countless trillions of eldar souls (''even if most eldar were consumed by She Who Thirsts... or worse''). The infinity circuits were grown to rescue the fallen souls of slain eldar after the fall.

However, this is only a fraction of the potency of the infinity circuit. The infinity circuits of each craftworld were unfathomably vast, their soul reserves spread out through the non-physical planes, which meant their infinite capacity was stored in relatively condensed wraithbone repositories in the material realm. Not only were all the fallen souls of each craftworld saved and stored, but the best and brightest souls of these worldships were distilled, alongside all the greatest intellectual works of the craftworld were stored in legendary artefacts known as the Wraithbone choirs. Should a craftworld fall, and its infinity circuits be breached or the entire population of the craftworld were exterminated before they could flee, the wraithbone choirs would be ejected into the void as metaphysical life rafts, waiting to be returned to the eldar race.<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

By the Age of Dusk, almost all the Craftworlds had fallen, and almost all of the Wraithbone Choir had been recovered by Biel-tan and allowed to dissolve into their infinity circuit. Through this process, the eldar believed that they could free Ynnead, the great goddess of death formed from their conjoined souls, which they could feel trapped within the infinite depths of the circuit. However, three of the wraithbone choirs were still missing by early M56. Sensing slanneshi corruption, Kaelor’s wraithbone choir had abandoned its host circuit in M41, and had been lost ever since. Altansar’s wraithbone choir had been ejected on the dark day it fell into the Eye, before Maugan Ra single-handedly drew the craftworld back out again. Before the eldar could find it, Trayzn the Infinite snatched it away to Solemnace, to covet obsessively alongside all his other thefts. Khey-Ys’s choir abandoned its craftworld under the worst circumstances. The craftworld had been overrun by the Great Enemy itself, led by the Greater Daemon known to mortals simply as ‘Heartslayer’. His daemons infested the world, and drank the infinity circuit dry. And into that dead husk of a world ship, the raw power of Slannesh was poured. Heartslayer possessed the Avatar of Khey-Ys, and moulded it to suit his grandiose whims, becoming astatuesque, languid humanoid; beautiful yet awful to behold. The wraithbone of the craftworld became saturated in the poison of the warp, and Khey-Ys became a throne for excess and venal horror. But the spirit of the craftworld saved itself, if only barely, and for long millennia, it remained lost and safe.

But alas, I cannot lie to you and claim this forever remained the case; for they were found, and the drama of what transpired upon the finding of two of these lost choirs occurred on a rather unassuming planet known as Irist.

Irist was a mundane world, which had the misfortune of being located within the Imperium of Travesties. It had once been a thriving industrial world, but the majority of its planet’s twenty billion inhabitants had been abducted by various warlords who needed warrior fodder for their wars and rituals, or as mortal fuel for their starships. The rest of the planet’s people had been taken some other, more horrendous way; the planet was covered in what looked like the claw marks of animals, only each claw mark was miles across, and were visible as scars on the brown world’s surface, even from orbit. Amidst the ruins of Irist’s empty capital city, two meteorites crashed. These were the wraithbone choirs of Kaelor and Khey-Ys. How they had somehow met with one another and made planetfall on the same evening is unknown; perhaps they were psychically active, or perhaps it was truly fate? Goddess only knows. But I digress.

Whatever their reason, fall they did, into the rubble of the dead city. Decades later, there came other visitors to Irist. These were the scavenger Mutts of a warlord known as Galruut. These dog-headed beastmen landed their ramshackle ships on Irist’s surface, looking for scraps of technology they could pillage, and subsequently sell to the daemon worlds patronised by Valchocht the Maker. These beastmen were carrion eaters at most. Galruut’s minions scoured the world for useful scraps, but found little of value. That is, except for the two choirs, that sat, unharmed in the bottom of the smouldering craters they had delved into the planet’s surface. At first, the Mutts considered smashing them for useful components, but their chieftain Galruut recognised the technology as being from the mythical eldar race. He knew very specific parties who greatly desired any eldar technology, and he had his sorcerer send a message directly to those self same parties.

His message was received not only by its intended recipients, thankfully. A Task force of the Warrior King Commandery, after departing the Corbellus system to mount raids inside the Travesty’s territory, came across Galruut’s signal, and they made planetfall a few weeks after the Mutts’ arrival. After their strike cruiser destroyed the beastmen’s ship in orbit, the seven squads of the Warrior King Sub-Captain’s taskforce deployed via drop pod. The ensuing battle was short but incredibly vicious; despite the obvious superiority of the Nova Astartes, the Mutts were dug in and had nowhere to go. But the result was never in doubt, and after half an hour of fighting, the Mutts defending the chaoirs were all but slain.

Galruut, bleeding out, could only gasp in fright, not at his impending death, but at something worse. “This prize was not meant for the likes of you. Do you not know who you are stealing from?”

The space marines ignored him, as they prepared to depart the worthless world. However, in orbit, their strike cruiser reported that they could not leave; warpstorms were springing up in the warp all around Irist; as if a great hand were closing around the world, or some vast cyclone were coiling into being, with them becalmed at its eye.

Galruut died laughing spitefully. He expired, gurgling. “The heartslayer comes... you are all naught but fodder now...”

At the edge of the system, the warp was breached. From this colossal tear in reality, something vast slid into realspace. It was hundreds of miles long, and looked like some abominable shark or leviathan of the deep, but festooned with domes, puckering lamprey mouths, and undulating breasts studded with spines. Living flesh, carved with blasphemous runes coated the hull of this monstrosity, but this hell ship was no more alive than a screamer or a fury. It was animated by daemons, and was ruled by a regent amongst daemons, a keeper of secrets and lies. Eldar called the nightmare Ail’Slath’Sleresh, but all others knew it as Heartslayer, and the hell ship that served as his chariot was just as infamous. It was Khey’Ys defiled; a ruin in this life and the next.

It was the Warrior Kings’ turn to witness the death of their vessel, which exploded in the upper atmosphere after a sudden and catastrophic incursion by daemons. Less than seventy Marines and a a hundred Justice Confederate drop troopers stood upon the dead world of Irist, and they watched with undisguised awe as the heathen craftworld entered irist’s orbit, and blotted out its weak sun entirely. The sky above them became nothing but a vista of a hellscape, inverted and poised above them like a false reflection of the surface below.

Sub-Captain Roburt Telemas activated his power fist, but even he knew this was a fight which could not be won. From Khey-Ys, the daemons simply dropped to the surface, swooping down just on the horizon; they relished the fear of the Justice Troopers and the fierce loathing of the Astartes, and wished to savour the coming kill as they massed in all directions around the city, countless millions of daemons massing for the feast; daemonettes, fiends, serpentine snakes covered in breasts and claws, wailing banshee daemons and cursed ghosts of the fall, innumerable were the manner of devils that came to destroy them.

The daemons swept towards them with the speed of jetbikes, scuttling across the rubble and ruins without even slowing. They charged into the guns of the Pentus soldiers, heedless of the damage done to them; at Khey-Ys’s black heart, a raw wound in the warp was held open using perverted eldar science, and thus the daemons were tremendously strong and durable. The marines and troopers fell back into pre-planned strong points, luring daemons into killzones and bottlenecks, but the daemons did not care, banishment meant nothing to them. The humans were ripped down one by one, until there were but a handful of them left. Telemas fell back into the collapsed building where the Mutts lay slaughtered, where the deceptively small Wraithbone choirs sat, humming their silent psychic lament.

To his surprise, he was not alone in there. Eight figures stood in the ruins, where no one had stood mere seconds before. Each of the nice threw off their travelling cloaks, to reveal eight ornate alien warriors, in elaborately ornate eldar armour.

Before Telemas could say a word, their obvious leader, a tall swordsman with a great crested helmet, spoke.

“You have defended the Choirs as best you could, honoured mon keigh. But you need not die here. Depart.”

“We have no choice. We cannot depart, even if I wished to, which I do not,” Telemas explained, as he heard more of his men fighting and dying just beyond the ruined building’s walls.

Another one of the aliens, a winged figure with a grinning mask, spoke in a similarly dead tone of voice, at once one voice and many. “You are stranded here? This is unfortunate.”

“Indeed, but we can ensure you survive. Continue to guard our precious quarry, mon keigh ally, and we shall kill the enemy,” one of the aliens, a hulking reaper, explained coldly.

Telemas almost laughed, despite his hopeless situation. “You eight shall defeat this host? You alone?”

“We shall,” one of the aliens said with finality, an alien with beautiful armor studded with fist-sized spherical ornaments.

“Then go, slay,” telemas replied. “I will guard these... choirs.”

Without another word, the warriors leapt from the ruins, springing bodily over the walls, and into the massed daemonic host.

Their boasts were not idle, for these were the Phoenix Lords of legend. One alone was enough to turn back armies and slay cities. But the hosts of the Heartslayer did not face but one; they faced eight. Asurmen the Dire Avenger, Fuegan the Lord of Fire, Maugan Ra the reaper, Zandros the Slicing Orb, Jain Zar the Storm of Silence, Baharroth the Cry of the Wind, Karandras the Hunter of Shadows and Lhykosidae the Wraith Spider.

The daemon host exploded around each Phoenix Lord. Each blow of their weapons, or breath of their guns slew daemons, three rows deep, so fiercely and painfully they were banished for a thousand years. Asurmen became an indistinct blur, as shurikens and dire sword cuts erupted from him faster than even an Astartes’ mind might follow. The daemonic fire of sundered daemons swirled around him like the wake of a ship in a storm.

Karandras vanished into the mass of writhing purple dameonflesh, before a tidal surge of dying daemons seemed to appear in a jagged line through their ranks, each ripped apart and cast to the eight winds like flotsam.

The Wraith spider in his golden armour, stepped between worlds with the ease a man might pass through a door of his house. Where his twin blades fell, daemons were beheaded or declawed, wherever he walked, warp portals dragged any daemons who got near into the warp directly, deporting them tot he sea of souls without a second glance.

Jain Zar shrieked as she cut down foe upon foe, her horrendous scream dissolving daemonettes where they stood. Those that did not fall were destroyed by her bladed discus and her mighty spear. 

Maugan Ra climbed to the top of the tallest remaining spire of Irist’s capital, and rained down a terrible deluge of fire upon the daemon host with his cannon Maugetar; it is said he slew the most on that evening form his perfect perch. Any winged daemons which evaded his gun, met a swift end upon the scythed bayonet of his weapon. They were bisected before being contemptuously smote upon the ferrocrete far below.

Fuegan’s fire pike was the most feared weapon, for it brought melta fire upon the hordes of slannesh; a daemon’s bane. Rivers of molten daemonstuff flowed around his ankles, as he literally waded into combat with the larger daemons, his fire axe castrating and hamstringing the monsters, before he beheaded them with fiery contempt.

Zandros at first seemed unarmed, but in became apparent what his power was when the spheres built into his ornate battle armour detatched and fell to the floor. Before the spheres struck the ground, they stopped mid-fall. Then, thye began to spin, and the molecular blades at their equators unfurled with a resonant buzzing. Zandros was a master of the path of the battle-kine; weaponised telekinesis. The orbs began to orbit Zandros, faster and faster, as he walked unhurriedly towards the slanneshi host. A sphere of lethal force surrounded him then, and any daemon that neared him instantly became sundered paste, or else were shredded into violet ribbons of flesh, which burnt on the breeze like tinder.

The daemons wailed and fled before the Phoenix Lords, whimpering and crying in mocking emulation of human sorrow and fear. Many fell back towards the looming craftworld, and only the fear of Heartslayer’s petulant wrath forced them to return to the fray. However, within half and hour, the Phoenix Lords had pushed the daemons back to the outskirts of the city, leaving naught but fizzing warp matter dissolving in their wake.

Onboard his throneship, Heartslayer grew frustrated, and sent down reinforcements. These were even larger and more deadly foes; corrupted wraithguard and wraithlords, possessed by daemonspawn. But even worse than these blasphemies were the daemonic eldar titans that emerged onto the field of battle to face the Phoenix Lords.

The humans witnessing this amazing spectacle thought they were witnessing duelling gods as they beheld the impossible carnage wrought by the eldar warriors. Only the Primarchs equalled these creatures in sheer majesty and presence. 

The titans were a tough prospect for the Asuryata, for their D cannons and vibro weapons could utterly destroy a Phoenix Lord’s armour if they hit.

If.

Maugan Ra had to leapt form his perch, as a sonic blast turned his spire to rubble in an instant. Karandras and Jain Zar dodged and hopped across the ground, deftly avoiding the colossal energies unleashed by the approaching titans. Asurmen rushed forth, crossing swords with a dozen leering daemon-wraithlords. Each one fell, but each time was slightly harder than the last, for Heartslayer poured masses of elemental warp stuff into his minions.

Baharroth saw his opportunity to attack as one of the titans was sent reeling from a barrage of orbs from Zandros. Just as the titan regained its bearings, the winged Phoenix Lord surged through the air. At the last moment, he clutched his wings close to his body. He struck the abomination with the speed of a railgun, and the force of a macrocannon. Baharroth punched straight through the titan’s chest, erupting from its back a moment later. Firing his lasblaster into the wound, he caused the staggered titan to explode in a spectacular detonation, visible from telemas’ vantage point a mile away.

Lhykosidae jumped through the warp, and emerged inside another titan, ripping it apart from the inside out. Daemon within slain, the titan simply fell to its knees and did not rise again.

Karandras appeared upon the shoulder of one titan, hacking away at its armour seemingly ineffectually. But his plan became clear when one of the titan’s fellow war machines turned its D-cannon towards karandras, who leapt to safety only moments before the vortex bolt struck. It instead beheaded the titan he had been standing upon in a single blast.

Fuegan charged the final titan, but his charge seemed futile as the war machine raised a cannon arm to slay him. The shot went wide, as zandros telekinetically shunted the gun arm aside. This gave Fuegan time to melt one of the slender machine’s legs. Hobbled, it stumbled forwards, and was overcome by the nine phoenix lords who proceeded to clamber over its fuselage. 

From above, Khey-Ys began to rise slowly; Heartslayer meant to reach high orbit, and destroy the planet and all the Phoenix lords with them. Asurmen’s disciples knew this, and they could not let this happen.

The Wraith Spider grabbed a hold of Karandras and Jain Zar, and the three vanished through his teleport. Asurmen and Fuegan grapsed Baharroth’s ankles and he swept them directly upwards with tremendous speed. Zandros simply began to rise under the power of his own mind, levitating Maugan Ra alongside himself and his dozen slicing orbs. All were converging on the Khey-Ys.

The Phoenix Lords fought their way into the craftworld, and each one of them found terrors to match and surpass the forces that had made planetfall. Ancient terrors beyond the dreams of men lay curled in the recesses of Khey-Ys, for it was a playground for monsters. Using his magic, Heartslayer separated the eight, hoping to isolate and overwhelm them in the vast expanse of the corrupted eldar ship.

His plan almsot worked. The Phoenix Lords fought furiously against their foes, but most of them could not reach his inner sanctum. Only Maugan Ra and Asurmen managed to locate Heartslayer’s lair. Where ocne the temple of Khaine had stood, now a grotesque Bordello of vice and evil lay. In place of a iron throne, a chaise longue of purple silk and the stitched together flesh of a hundred eldar infants. Heartslayer’s towering metal body lay upon thise hideous piece of furniture, gently caressing the stolen wailing doom in his hands. By his side, a most horrendous creature stood.

Ysgar Oppugnant was its title, but whatever name the thing had ocne had was long since lost. The tall, slender creature was a thing of nightmares, but it was no daemon. It was some child of the Crone Worlds, some half-breed wretch from darkest legend.* It smiled as the two Phoenix Lords entered, and whispered something to Heartslayer. Heartslayer laughed.

“We come to devour two eldar relics, and eight more appear and offer themselves to us. How delightful! You think we fear you, little eldar? Your greatest power is your ability to keep on dying, over and over. That is nothing to brag about now is it? Come, let us dance this little dance of ours,” he chuckled, as he slowly rose from his seat and brandished his stolen sword.

Maugan Ra did not wait on ceremony, and he shot Ysgar a dozen times, as did Asurmen. Ysgar raised his hands and halted the shuriken mid flight. The bladed disks rotted to black nothingness moments later.

Meanwhile, Heartslayer leapt into combat with Asurmen. Blade met blade a thousand times in the space of a dozen heartbeats, and the pornographic tapestries around the chamber erupted into flame as the sparks flew from the two clashing blades of Wailing Doom and the Diresword.

Ysgar unleashed a storm of multi-hued warp energy upon Maugan Ra, but the Phoenix Lord resisted the foul magicks, blazing with pure white soul light between the cracks in his black and bone white armour. Ysgar swept through the warp, appearing mere inches from Maugan Ra, and rammed a dagger into the Reaper’s gut. But Ra was swifter, and deflected the blow with the butt of Maugetar, before slashing the throat of Ysgar. The scythe passed through Ysgar Oppugnant like a sail through smoke, before ysgar appeared behind him and attempted to impale the reaper once more. Maugan deflected the blow, and soon the combat descended into a swirling tornado of blades, with Ra rooted to the spot at the eye of the storm. He could not help Asurmen against the Heartslayer.

The duel between the daemon-avatar and Asurmen was turning against the Avenger. The giant had the reach advantage, and with every stroke, he got faster and faster, his blows becoming ever more unpredictable and forceful. Heartslayer cackled with glee; he was facing a Phoenix lord, and he was winning! The thrill of the fight flowed through him, the hunger for victory; the desire to kill and to murder. Asurmen was being forced backwards with every flurry of blows, and every exchange of thrusts and ripostes.

Heartslayer was howling with joy, his eyes ablaze with rapturous glee. But something was wrong. He felt heat through his stolen body. He felt something uncoiling from a dark corner of the iron statue.

“The joy of murder. The hunger for death and the thrill of combat. We know these aspects well,” Asurmen explained, as heartslayer staggered backwards, his languid form beginning to glow with orange furnace fire.

“What have you done?” shrieked Heartslayer, dropping his sword. He looked to his hands. They ran red with unreal blood.

“We embody the Aspects of Khaine, tempered by Asuryan. We are Khaine’s fury and Khaine’s fuel. No matter how complete you thought you rooted him out of that body, you did not. You only caged the fire of the Bloody Handed Prince. I am Asurmen, and I am Khaine’s vengeance. I awake the Avenger in your stolen host. Now you will know what it is to be consumed Ail’Slath’Sleresh. Go now, and trouble us no more.”

Heartslayer made a final blood-curdling scream, which began as a piercing wail, but faded until it was but an echo. Molten metal poured form heartslayer’s eyes and mouth, and his body began to run molten, melting through the floor as his physical form began to collapse. The last thing to go was his red right hand, and then, he was nothing.

Ysgar, realizing it was outnumbered, bowed theatrically, before it simply vanished.

Without heartslayer to control the myriad daemons possessing Khey-Ys, the craftworld began to devour itself. The eight fled the doomed daemonship, and returned to Irist, battered and damaged, but still alive.

Roburt had been good to his word; the dameons had attacked his men as soon as the Phoenix Lords had invaded Khey-Ys, and his men had kept the dameons from the Wraithbone Choirs. Asurmen thanked the mon keigh, and told them to warn their Primarchs about Ysgar; the Crone Worlder would return, and his destiny is tied to that of Lorgar. And with that, the eldar departed, taking the two choirs with them.

Of the Wraithbone Choir of Altansar, that was beyond the reach of the Asuryata. It rested in the care of a most unlikely trio of saviors, running through the webway from a kleptomaniacal android from the dawn of time.

But that is a story for a later section I feel...

*(What exactly Ysgar was, we will never know. He looked to be perhaps some hideous hybrid between man, eldar, and something altogether less wholesome. One might have called him a chaos eldar, though such a name seems rather crass to describe such a fiend. All we know is that he was some sort of messenger or spokesperson for the Draziin-Maton, or perhaps even one of the eldar who created the host bodies for the Neverborn to inhabit.)
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