[center][h1][u][b]Ursh: The Hammer[/b][/u][/h1][/center]
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Consciousness returned to Agama Zur, and he wakened to a dream.

Entombed within the adamantium walls of his sarcophagus, the Astarte floated listlessly as his mind processed the twin streams of memory and digital readouts.

His body was broken, but he was [i]strong[/i]. A strength beyond any man, beyond any Astarte, beyond even the Thunder Warrior that had struck him down. His withered muscles, his missing arm, his shattered legs - none mattered now, while he still had his mind. Time was lost to him in his long sleeps, but he still remembered when he was reduced to such a state, and how he had accepted what was to come, for his end.

Agama Zur was right about many things then - never again did he walk, but on one, he had been sorely mistaken. He had once again seen the face of his master, for not even in death did duty end.

The flood of data declared his second body, his salvation, and his grave, ready for combat, and with a shudder of creaking metal, he walked, the sound of his armored foot slamming down echoing back at him as his brothers and sisters took their first fateful steps towards the war they had been created for.

From a hundred battlefields had the Master of Mankind scavenged His soldiers, and to the revenant warriors the campaigns of the First Astartes had come into a cynical clarity. Time and time again, the Legion had been thrown into butchery, but of a calculated sort, leaving just as many maimed as slain to disappear into the tents of chirurgeons and Biotechnical Division laboratories, never to be seen again.

Until now.

The dead marched into the breach, the massive bulk of the warframes marked only with the simple sigil of their Legion and the Raptor of the Emperor. Immense avatars of war walked forward from their transport bays, treading inexorably towards the breach in the black citadel’s walls. They towered over all others upon the field, save the most fearsome of daemon Ursh had brought to bear, and cared nothing for their lessers.

As the Saturnine deployed, Agama Zur began to sing. His death-song rang out, joined by his siblings in their waking dream. The Emperor’s judgement had come.

The wyches of Ursh answered the assault of the dead in kind. A tidal wave of flesh spilled forth from the great breach in the walls. Thousands upon thousands of the civilian mortals of the city, their lives snuffed out from starvation, artillery shelling, or their own “defenders,” poured out toward the advancing Ist Legio Saturnines.

The warmachines, yet unseen on the battlefield, unleashed hellish firepower upon the tidal wave of the dead. They scoured the front ranks, eviscerated the middle, and hammered the rear all at once. But the tide continued. The groaning of the mass of the undead was so loud, its frequency so bass, as to rattle the teeth of the assaulting Astartes, Saturnine or not, as they charged inexorably toward their doom.

The lines clashed. Power fists met rotting flesh, blowing great arcs of the undead apart as the strikes connected. Flamers belched promethium and melted the foe in great sweeping gouts of flame. Assault cannons spat rounds at dizzying rates, point-blank into the mass of flesh. Saturnine fists crushed torsos and scattered brain matter with every sweeping blow. The dead, their morale unbreakable, wavered. But only for a moment.

Above the cacophony of combat, the true enemies arrived. Daemons, their bodies twice the size of the Saturnines, bloated and rotting, swatted their undead allies out of their way. They drooled acid that burned their own flesh as they ponderously galloped toward the advancing line of the Ist Legion. Guttural roars sounded as the two unstoppable forces met in a world-ending display of martial might. Saturnine’s melted under gouts of brown-green vomit from the daemons, or were cleaved in two by rusted blades attempting to pass for swords. Yet the warp-beasts did not go unharmed, several were rent in half by crushing blows or torn to shreds by concentrated supporting fires as the Ist acquitted itself well against such inhuman force.

The melee raged.

The Ist’s Terminators strode forward as the daemons materialized, the greatest among them hefting axes and hammers forged by artisans in the lost days when Mankind had freely strode the stars. The living fought to defend the dead, holding the tide of unreality at bay as the sarcophagus-engines divined targeting solutions from beyond the haze of death. Ancient energies were roused to war once more, and the material anchors of the daemonic host were banished from the sight of the Astartes, born and bred for the salvation of the birthworld.

“We are His judgement,” the Legion Mistress declared, cleaving a daemon’s head off of its body with one swing of her war axe, her Saturnine armor covered in the badges of Unity’s campaigns. The statement, for it was no dramatic cry, was taken up all along the line, an affirmation of will that required no bombast.

A reply came, but not from the enemy. Towering above them, the half-dead heroes of the Legion blared their answer from warhorns, announcing the Emperor’s will to the field.

“Death!” Agama Zur sang as he advanced.

The dreadnoughts arrival on the field tipped the scales. The larger monstrosities,  and their smaller companions, their morale unbreakable, pressed their counter assault against the incursion at the breach. 

A tide of undead, rotting adversaries continued to spill forth from habzones further into the beleaguered citadel. They stood little chance against the Ist, their ranks obliterated with martial prowess and technological might. But they gave their betters scarce seconds they needed to advance.

The rotting, bloated daemons trampled their smaller allies without care, and batted Ist Legion Astartes aside as afterthoughts in their singleminded rush for the dreadnoughts. The dead things recognized the dead within the Imperial machines, and a hunger to add those lost and broken souls within to their ranks appeared to drive them into a frenzy.

Dreadnoughts cleared huge swathes of the undead with ease, allowing their still living companions room to breathe and maneuver against the onslaught. But it wasn’t without loss. A dreadnought, isolated in a tide of the dead, was dragged under the roiling mass of bodies as a larger of the true daemons slammed into its front with reckless abandon.

With the judgement pronounced, the living Astartes of the Legion fought in a grim silence as they cleared the field for the great titans to do battle. Terminators cut down lesser abominations by the score as they kept themselves well clear from dreadnought and daemon both, the greater conflict becoming a series of duels between the greatest forces to ever stride the surface of Old Earth.

Reality wept as ancient technologies and profane sorceries both made a mockery of physics, each encounter a contest between forgotten science and forbidden warpcraft. But in the end, this was to the advantage of the empyreal host. A daemon shorn of its limbs with a chest cavity made principally of rapidly dissipating elementary particles could still fight, still kill. A dreadnought exposed to the raw fires of the Immaterium was simply dead.

Yet there was one thing that they had which the daemons lacked, one weapon which they did not expect. For as his brothers and sisters continued dying around him, Agama Zur continued to sing. A song of death, of defiance, of all they had fought for and all they had lost - all these things were in the death-song of those trapped in their undying dream. But also of the hope they had carried to their graves, the dream of what they had sought to accomplish, and the will to see it made.

And there before the walls of Ursh, where the fabric of reality itself had grown thin, such things had more power than they ought. Blades and claws, which should have hewed flesh and pierced armor, found themselves catching upon the most unlikely of impediments, while the weapons of the Emperor seemed to hone in on the weakest portions of hide over and over again.

The Legion Mistress hesitated at first, until she too rose her voice in the chorus, the Terminators joining in a dirge as they made ready for their dying day.

The bloated beasts of Ursh pressed forward into the Ist Legion, their numbers felled by blade, bolter, and flame. Yet they did not hesitate; even as they were cut down, they laughed. Their limbs, jerking in death and rent of flesh, caressed the dreadnoughts' armored sarcophagi. Their maws of rotten teeth and swarming carrion flies smiled as they found their ends in the thunderclap embraces of power fists. They sang their own song, insidious and low, a bass thrum that vibrated the teeth of those nearest them and hazed the vision of those further. 

Whispers carried on the wind, enticing promises of a future yet to be seen, fleeted at the edge of the Ist Legion’s perception, suggestions of voices tugged at the still fresh minds of the dreadnoughts.  Even as flamers belched their acrid concoctions, melting the monsters before them, the dead promised salvation.

“no.”

The voice was so quiet, so small, that it should have been impossible to hear over the din of battle. Yet heard it was, embracing the Astartes in warm reassurance and rebuking the daemon in cold denial. Even so, the song and the whispers continued, as did the fighting and the death.

“No!”

Louder now, firmer, the battlefield seemed to pause as every combatant froze in confusion. The veil was thin here, but not even the creatures of the wyrd knew what their transgressions had roused the attention of. They would not have long to contemplate it.

“No no no no no no no no no no no no no!” the voice cried out again and again, breaking down into choking sobs, sounding from everywhere and nowhere at once. And then the most impossible thing of all happened.

For the first time in countless years, rain began to fall over the blasted lands of Ursh - not the dark, fetid droplets of the bile-storms of the sacrificed hives or the caustic vapor-steam blown in from the rad-wastes, but water pure and untainted. Tongues of silver flame lapped up from where the raindrops fell, engulfing all in the sudden downpour.

The very touch of the corrupt sloughed away where those flames licked, and the wyrdcraft of the enemy quailed at the sight. The Astartes of the Ist were changed as well, infected wounds purified and cauterized, fatigue dropping away as the burden of many wounds was removed as a pack from a weary traveler, and their armor with its stolen colors changed then and there into soot-black etched in blinding silver.

“No!” sounded once more across the field as the Astartes joined in the cry, and the living and the dead poured their wrath into the ranks of the Neverborn, surging then into the breach, entering into the black walls of Earth’s last sorcerer-king.

Behind them were left scores of their fallen, their bodies left in silent repose, united in death in a way none could have foreseen. Whoever they had been before, all now bore the same face.