[center][h1][u][b]Sins of the Father[/b][/u][/h1]
[b]-Battle for Mount Ararat-[/b]
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[hider=The Slaughter]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/nwOIjyP.jpeg[/img]
[b]Credit: Dima Sokolov on ArtStation[/b]
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[hr]
The slope was still burning in three places when the Custodians turned on them.

The taste of victory had been on their lips, the final victory as the last bastion of the old world died.

Harrak didn't understand it at first. His mind was still in the fight, cataloguing the living, the angle of the remaining enemy positions, whether the left flank had pushed far enough. The banner was going up on the ridge above. Someone was shouting the declaration. His hands were shaking and he had forty seconds ago driven a man's skull into the rock he was sitting on. For a moment when the first gold-armoured figure turned and raised a weapon he thought it was a mistake.

Then the man beside him dropped.

The sound that went through the camp wasn't a battle-sound. He had enough years to know the difference. Thirty metres away a brother called Ossa had both hands up, still holding his weapon, and was shouting something into the face of the Custodian walking toward him, not a war-cry, something else, something with a question in it. The Custodian didn't slow.

Harrak's body moved before the rest of him arrived at a decision. He got his arm up in time to take the first blow across the vambrace, the impact driving him sideways into the loose scree of the slope. Above him the Custodian was already repositioning, unhurried, His head was full of a sound like the ringing of iron. The battle before this one had given him three cracked ribs and he felt all three of them now with a sharpness that burned through the noise.

Across the slope the rest of it was unfolding. The new legionaries were coming up from the eastern approach, and he could see his brothers dying in ones and twos between them and the Custodians, caught between, disoriented, some still turning to face the wrong direction. Twelve years of war, twenty, thirty. Men who had held the line at Urals. Men who had broken a mountain fortress in nine hours. Dying in the wreckage of their own victory.

He got his weapon up. The Custodian came back at him with a speed that the size of the armour had no right to produce and Harrak took the strike across the chest and felt something give. The world tipped. His back found the ground.

The sky above Mount Ararat was going amber, the smoke from the fires below threading through it. The banner was still up there. He could see the bottom edge of it against the light, snapping once in the wind off the mountain.

It was the last thing he saw.

[hr]

Cassius rammed his shoulder into the metallic rubble of a shattered barricade. The staccato of bolterfire echoed above his head in precise volleys, followed shortly after by the snap of volkite conflagration rays. He took the spare second he was offered to empty his bolter magazine and slapped a new one in. His red gauntlets brought the weapon close, offering a short prayer to whatever was listening. He’d need the luck to overturn this betrayal.

“For Uni-” he had begun to shout as his genetically enhanced body vaulted the barricade. His bolter had been outstretched to open fire on his golden opponents; however, they had been faster. By the Emperor, they had been faster than he ever could’ve imagined.

A spear with a smoking barrel on the end had caught his chestplate square in the center, hoisting him from his sprint and churning his insides. He coughed out blood from his half-helmet, splattering crimson vitae onto the conical dome of the warrior beneath him. Cassius grit his teeth, reaching down to the shaft of his opponent’s weapon. The emotionless, golden geneknight watched as he pulled himself further down onto the spear.

“[b]T… Traitors![/b]” Legionnaire Cassius of the Storm Callers, Veteran of the Ur-Atalan Slaughter, screamed out. He point-blank fired the bolter into the golden plating of the Custodes aiming for whatever soft spot was visible. The Thunder Warrior would never get the chance.

Another golden effigy stepped effortlessly behind their comrade, piercing through the Cataegis’ helmet with the ease of a genecrafted killer. Cassius fell silent as crimson cascaded down his forehead. A twist of the Custodes’ wrist saw the body of the genewarrior fall from the spear, emphasized further by a deft kick to wrench his weapon free from the ceramite carapace.

The golden pair stared behind the fallen Thunder Warrior, witnessing the carnage that a single one of their number had committed in such a short time. Several Astartes lay mangled and butchered in their slate-grey ceramite, emphasized further by a single Custodes among their midst. Each had been savaged beyond recollection. 

This was their duty. This was their reason. 

[hr]

Vortax maniacally laughed as he cut through the Astartes. His two-handed plasma axe was a knife to butter against their freshly crafted, slate-grey ceramite. Even as they attempted to reunite with their pack-mates, he’d simply cut them off and butcher them. Five others of his kindred followed after him, each in brilliant crimson-yellow offset plating. They were the same as he was, cackling and chortling at the carnage that had been unleashed.

It wasn’t his fault that they had slipped the collar that the Custodes had so wrongfully leashed them in. If they didn’t want this type of response, then they should’ve started this sooner. 

The mega-furnaces of the mountain pumped fresh lava around them in tumultuous droves, filling the basins of the macrosmithing complexes with new life. Being in the proximity of these leviathan machines was enough to melt the skin off an unenhanced mortal; however, Legionnaire Vortax of the Infernal Phoenixes wasn’t a mere mortal, nor were the rest of his kindred.

He would’ve loved to reunite with the rest of the legion and continue the butcher, but the Custodes had been smart. Vortax remembered the moment as the last of the Araratian insurgents fell and Unity was proclaimed. The vox had cut out. His auspex had gone dim. Everything had changed in a heartbeat and his squad was separated from the legion. The gunfire had started after that. The butchery by the Spears of the Emperor not long after. They had made a deadly mistake. They were Thunder Warriors. Built for defiance from all and any odds. He’d never forget the moment that his axe had bisected one of the Emperor’s own, golden knights. A glorious feat. One of many tonight.

“[b]Unity! Slaught-[/b]” One of his squadmates began to roar out in praise before her waist exploded into visceral gore. An aftermath explosion saw her torso jettison from the rest of her corpse.

The Cataegis responded immediately, unloading their sidearms into the left flank of the superheated thoroughfare. Their own bolters collided with slate-grey ceramite, devastating a squad of Astartes that had awaited them. One of his brethren rushed forward, nearly hunched over in a dead-sprint like a rabid animal. Their freshly minted cousins attempted to tactically retreat to an advantageous position. Vortax’s brother ripped them apart for their folly.

His bliss wouldn’t last. Another one of his squadmates fell behind him as bolter rounds flew through the air to their immediate right. Rays of brilliant orange perforated the air, melting the ceramite of one of his brethren into superheated slag. How had he not noticed the ambush? A century of pure war, fighting against the Jermani and Nordafrik, and he had not noticed such an easy-to-notice tactic?

Vortax screamed in rejection. Some part of his brain snapped as he sprinted into the midst of the Astartes. None of his comrades followed him. They had already perished in the ambush set by their gene-cousins. He couldn’t feel his left arm anymore, but that didn’t matter to him. Only slaughter. Only Unity. Only-

The Infernal Phoenix never got to finish the last thought as the Astartes easily parted away from his deadlong sprint. They moved as a single, functional organism. The first of their number lured the Cataegis in and feinted behind a pillar of the macrofurnace. The second shot out his left leg. The third shot out his right leg. The fourth cut the plasma axe from his remaining arm. The final genewarrior plunged their combat knife into the Thunder Warrior’s exposed neck.

As the last of the Cataegis’ squad died, the Astartes calmly rallied to the center of their ambush site. Several clicks passed between their emotionless helmets. In unison, they turned away from the dispatched Thunder Warriors and ran down the thoroughfare without a second glance.

[hr]

Ghothar watched the five Custodes descend on their fireteam with the calm ferocity known to their number. Their red-plumed helmets appeared like fiery tendrils from the scalp of some primordial warrior being. At that moment, he felt as if they were godlike. Too calm to be mortal. Too powerful to be a human. Too perfect to be a natural creature of mankind. That made the next part easy for him.

He lifted the volkite caliver and unleashed a ray of superheated death upon the first of the Custodes. Five other rays echoed beside him as his squad performed righteous vengeance on the Emperor’s dogs. The godlike, golden warriors were found wanting as the first of their number died to concentrated fire. Ghothar always knew that they could be easily killed, especially when hunting in packs. Those creatures made from genealchemy were never built to fight together like this.

“Vox?” Ghothar rumbled out to a Cataegis behind him. His voice was filled with the smog of Mount Ararat and tinged with the quiet fury known to the Fourth Legion.

“As the Primarch expected. Dead,” Ralran responded, a sturdy Thunder Warrior with a bulky voxpack attached to his ceramite plate. Dark blood stained the metallic steel of the Fourth Legion’s colors on his greaves. 

“Not surprising,” Mordak grimaced. He dropped his volkite weapon, quickdrawing a multi-barreled plasma pistol with practiced ease. A squeeze of the trigger saw another Custodes dispatched as they rushed on towards their position.

The remaining three headlong sprinted at them with their emptied guardian spears behind them and their misercordia drawn. Attendants, nigh-invisible on the battlefield of demigods, were hurriedly snatching the weapons and reloading them with stress plain on their face. Ghothar would remember to rip them apart. Limb by limb.

The six Steel Lords pulled out their variety of melee weapons, each a trophy from a century of warfare across Terra. Ghothar himself bore a reward from the Primarch - a savage, one-handed chainaxe with monomolecular teeth stolen from Indoi. He had named it Priestkiller once; however, it would need a new name after this. He smiled. Maybe Emperorkiller.

All three of the golden deities dived into the melee with the prowess suited for their kind. Dodging, slashing, piercing, and feinting where possible and refraining from any unnecessary movements. Ghothar could see why so many of their kind had already fallen to them. His legion would’ve been the same once had their Primarch not been so astute - or perhaps it was their tie with the First Legion. It didn’t matter. His fist met the conical faceplate of the first Custodes, whiplashing them with his unnatural strength. Priestkiller met their cracked helmet soon after, tearing perfected skin and driving their form to the ground. He didn’t stop moving, lunging into the next Spear without hesitation.

His brethren weren’t nearly as skilled as him, but they still put up enough of a fight. Enough that Ushotan would be proud. Mordak had been cut at the throat, but he remained standing long enough to smash his cranium against his engaged Custodes. The imbalance was sufficient enough for him to drive his plasma pistol into the gut of the golden warrior. A laugh echoed from within the Cataegis’ helmet as he overcharged the sidearm and caught both of them in the explosion. Ghothar grimaced at the loss of his friend. The other had already been butchered by the remaining Cataegis, their shining auramite rendered by the brutalist weapons of the Old Night.

“There’ll be more coming, especially their Astartes hounds. Rendezvous at the gathering point as Ushotan had planned,” Ghothar commanded. The other Cataegis responded in their own, failing manner. He reached down before leaving and tore the helmet from his slain Custodes. A new trophy to decorate his armor once this was all over.

Maybe Custodeskiller would be a good name for his axe for now.

[hr]

Doran had remembered the silence following the call of victory over Mount Ararat. The outskirts of the stronghold-volcano had been filled with untold numbers of Legio Astartes in any manner of color. Most were slate-grey. A few groups echoed the patterns of their own Cataegis. It was a sobering thought that their replacements sought to emulate them.

The next moment he remembered was when they all started to move. It wasn’t the staggered forward-march of a military unit that had just been given orders. It was the elicit call of some foreign deity that compelled them on. To him, they appeared like walking statues awoken to a long-awaited duty. They would’ve amazed him were it not for the slaughter that began seconds later.

The Dawnhunters that had held the lower floors of Ararat’s ingress were butchered by precise, crisscrossing boltfire. They didn’t stand a chance against a menace of that caliber. The Legio Cataegis assault vehicles on the perimeter were invaded, their occupants slaughtered, and their weapons turned on bystanders. His chronometer had recorded it all in seconds. Several seconds was all it took for their genecousins to dismantle their carefully crafted siege. 

Betrayal. They had been betrayed by the Astartes. He grit his teeth beneath his plumed helmet and tried to activate the vox. The Master of the Lines must be alerted. The Primarchs needed to know about this. Their numbers were so few, including the Custodes.

Fear. The forcewide vox was dead. Their longstanding interlegion vox was scrambled with static overlaying what little messages attempted to pierce the veil. Doran quickly rationalized the possibility of enemy interference. Even dead opposition could lay traps after they had expired to the might of the Emperor. A quick glance at the oncoming Astartes below told him everything that he needed to know.

It wasn’t that the vox was dead. The Cataegis - sworn-warriors of the Master of the Lines for over a century - had been cut from the voxnet. 

“My Emperor…” Legionnaire Doran of the Dawnhunters whimpered as he dropped his magnoculars. He could hear the calls for action from his squadmates behind him. They were already beginning to organize guerrilla actions against their attackers. Some had grenades tied together into explosive clumps. Others readied meltabombs to be used on support pillars.

The legionnaire, however, had a different solution. His armored feet brought him to the parapet overseeing the outskirts of Mount Ararat on the second level. The descent below him was untold kilometers high. He closed his eyes as his kin rushed towards him, calling his name over and over again. He wouldn’t listen to them. The pain of betrayal was too much. 

Doran leapt from the parapet.

[hr]

The tunnels of Mount Ararat, once used for quick egress and ingress of the stronghold, were now repurposed into a mausoleum of macabre proportions. Bodies of Imperials and insurgents crammed the hallways from floor to ceiling. Carefully carved walls reinforced with plasteel supports were slick with dripping vitae, heated from magmatunnels that ran parallel. Flickering glowglobes, those that weren’t shattered in the siege, scarcely lit the passages through the haze of blood and gunfire. An awful, mixed stench of fresh corpses, gunpowder, and sulphurous compounds carried through the unnatural caverns. 

All of these would’ve made him sick were it not for the intoxicating familiarity he had with them. In places such as these, Corvinius felt more at home than he did in the cold passages of the Himalazians. Perhaps it spoke to his morbid twist on the geneflaw experienced by his legion. Perhaps it was these feelings that he felt that led him to his current situation. Questions that he’d never get proper responses to. After all, he was going to die here.

But not before he killed every Astartes and Custodes that dared to stalk these tunnels.

Corvinius flicked a claw-tipped gauntlet free of recently drawn blood. The Astartes that he had murdered hadn’t  been aware of his presence. They died similar to the rest of their squad, butchered by the rest of his Obsidian Crows spread out across the tunnels. He reached down to the ceramite, collecting much-needed boltrounds for his revolver and thieved them away into chest-strapped pouches. His feathered cloak shuffled with each movement, torn in several places by bolterfire and singed by magma runoff from Ararat.

The bark of a bolter drew his attention. He listened deeply to the sound. The dull thud of a bulky weapon. The sharp slam of mechanisms colliding. The rhythmic thunk of new shells sliding into the barrel and out the muzzle. The nigh silent tap of a paddle against a shaft. It was a sound intrinsically familiar to him. A guardian spear.

How many of the Custodes had he already killed in the tunnels? Their pride broken by a Thunder Primarch with a bolt revolver and a plasma knife. How many of his legionnaires had waylaid them for ample ambushes? Enough to give them several minutes of pause before sending fresh, golden reinforcements into the passages. Enough to force them to divert precious, special weapons to force out the Crows. From this distance, Corvinius could hear the infernal blast of firepikes and nauseating disintegration rays.

He smiled at the thought as his body sprinted forward through the darkening haze. His presence alone had warranted the usage of such intricate technologies. It was a warm notion to know he was remarked so highly. He had long eschewed the use of heavier, rudimentary systems on his power armor in favor of speed and silence – something he appreciated more than ever in this moment. One would say that he was more silent than the Black Hawk.

Corvinius’ quarry lies at the end of several crisscrossing passages. A lone Custodes backed by a pair of Astartes in jet-black ceramite. He could’ve easily mistaken them for God-Slayers were it not for their lack of alabaster cape and diminutive, comparative size. His eyes picked out disintegration rifles in their gauntlets, actively utilized in dispatching a trio of midnight clad Cataegis. Their sacrifice would be necessary for his success.

Approximately fifteen meters out, the Astartes snapped their helmets towards his direction and aimed their rifles for accurate fire; however, they’d never make their shots. Deadeye shots from his bolt revolver saw their helmets crumple into smoking craters, one shot perfectly pierced between their eyes. The genewarriors fell limp as the Custodes strode forward, drawing their misericordia upon recognizing the Cataegis before them.

The golden knight was fast, bred for superiority and overwhelming swiftness. Their spear struck out first, followed shortly after by their misericordia to make Corvinius dance. The Primarch recognized their martial ka’tah for what it was. His bolt revolver hipfired against the sword, angling the implement out of the way as he brought his plasma knife to bear. A corona of azure lined the blade as he cut into the powerfield of the guardian spear. Unconventional energy collided, igniting a small explosion between the two. Enough to separate them briefly, yet the Cataegis was already on the Custodes with a speed unlike his siblings.

The fight was over. His bolt revolver unloaded into the Custodes’ right thigh, blasting the soft tissue of the armor and tearing through muscle. It would never be enough to bring down one of the Emperor’s spears; however, it was sufficient in giving a minute pause, allowing his plasma knife the time it needed to find the genewarrior’s throat. Corvinius’ tore through the golden warrior, tearing the conical helmet from their body and moving on. He couldn’t remain in one spot to relish his kill, neither could he mourn the loss of his legionnaires. The Primarch knew that the Black Hawk’s own would be upon him soon enough.

His greaves brought him a hundred and fifty meters further east, while his hands saw the bolt revolver reloaded with uncanny, practiced speed. The Primarch heard boots bouncing off the tunnel walls. It quickened his step in haste to the next kill like a predator drawn to wounded prey. A grim smile grew on his lips at the realization that he enjoyed this hunt. He wondered if this was what his flaw was. Clairvoyant in thought. Obsessive in nature. Corvinius would’ve laughed if the situation was different.

At last, the Primarch stopped at the edge of a clearing in a hunched position. The tunnel slightly widened out into the cross section, meticulously carved to allow a larger thoroughfare into the main artery of Ararat’s underpass. Corvinius would’ve pressed on were it not for the sheer quantity of Cataegis corpses. He narrowed his eyes, quickly dissecting their wounds by sight alone. All of them shared crisscrossing scars in the form of powersword burns. Some were pierced through the ceramite. Others were cleanly decapitated.

Corvinius, Primarch of the Obsidian Crows, was not alone, and that was a fatal error.	

These cramped tunnels were not built for the gods that now stalked them. Golden armor swallowed up the choked passageways, and blood-spattered boots crunched corpses underfoot. Signs of carnage ran in great rivers through the serpentine passageways, Imperials and insurgents united in common cause now as their blood flowed together. Reva wondered if they had seen the morbid humor in that, barbarian and Thunder Warrior alike dying with defiance of the Emperor upon their lips.

Probably not, she reasoned as she stepped over another fallen Cataegis, his face gnarled up in a hateful deathmask. They weren’t clever enough.

But these pitiable members of the rank and vile weren’t why she stalked further through these tunnels, following a trail first comprised of Astartes, then finally some of her own cohort. The thrill of the hunt roused in her blood, and already she gorged herself on sensory data spooling through her helmet. With it, she could track the Cataegis remnants that resupplied themselves in the clearing ahead, licking their wounds and scavenging for ammunition while the battle raged all around them.

They had done well, carving a path through Imperial opposition and finding a defensible position with legionnaires watching each of the entrances. They had even collapsed two of the tunnels that approached the thoroughfare, limiting the approach of their erstwhile allies to just a few passages that now served as kill boxes. Imperial forces had abandoned this theater of slaughter for the time being, seeking easier prey elsewhere within these blood-soaked catacombs, but Reva knew better. Within their hijacked comms, she could hear a name upon their cracked lips. Corvinius still lived, and he kindled resolve in these broken ranks as word spread of his continued defiance.

She’d put a stop to that.

Bursting through the entryway, bolter fire ricocheted off her armor, and she slipped past volkite volleys with ease, the shots sizzling against the wall behind her. There were at least fifty of the remnants arranged in ragged formation and in various states of lucidity. Some barked orders, while others just bellowed in defiance at their approaching doom.

She lashed out with one of her swords towards one of the warriors ostensibly meant to be guarding the entrance, making minute adjustments and passing through the startled warrior’s defenses. She brought his face near to hers when she caught him in the neck, making sure he could see the strike coming in the instant before she’d decapitated him. Misshapen and ill-suited tools though they were, the Thunder Warriors remained children of the Emperor, and she would give them a death befitting their station. If they must die, it would be quick and clean.

Once the brute’s body started to sag, Reva shoved it hard enough to send the corpse flying towards his allies. The remnants avoided it easily, but the Champion made the most of that split second, crossing the yawning length of the room and leaving death in her wake.

Weapons roared as the Thunder Warriors died, each one put down as quickly as she could manage. Arteries burst and heads rolled from shoulders, all while the Blade Champion shrugged off their assault like they were children. She waded through them, batting aside their grasping hands or severing them at the wrists. It was cruel, Reva thought, for their last moments to be spent feeling so powerless, but these legions had earned a bit of cruelty after dealing out so much of their own.

Blow by blow, she cut down humanity’s heroes, bodies piling atop one another as they first fought as one. but when they realized how woefully outmatched they were, a few of the Cataegis had tried to withdraw back towards one of the tunnels. None of them made it that far. Perhaps it was more merciful that they’d died with their backs to her. At least they hadn’t seen it coming.

When the wicked work was done, the Blade Champion turned away from the field of the dead and pressed on down another corridor. But right when she did, she plucked out a distinct sound from among the din of battle. The sound of crashing, preternatural footfalls approaching from the south.

Something that sounded very much like her.

She smiled under her helmet, and stepped back into the dimly lit entryway, turning to face Corvinius.

“Some of them were yours, Primarch. They fought well,” Reva said, gesturing to the corpses with the tip of her blade while she held the other at the ready. The pair crackled with power, smoke coiling off of them in thin columns and catching in the already dismally low light.

“I am sorry, Corvinius,” She sounded genuine, for all that it mattered. “Sorry that your warriors have no place among the stars, and no lands on Terra that might hold them.” Reva brought both blades around and lowered  into a Victus stance, one blade held forth while the other remained coiled back to strike. “For everything else you have done in His name, you were a terrible remedy to a terrible sickness.”

“Champion Reva,” Corvinius stated as he took a cautious step closer, uninterested in his butchered comrades. He had anticipated one of the many venerable warriors of the Emperor, yet the Primarch had not expected [i]her[/i]. His plasmaknife was brought up reversed in a defensive stance, while his bolt revolver lowered to counterattack. The Thunder Warrior smirked as he continued, “don’t offer sympathy when you have none. We both know the Custodes and Cataegis were ready for this. The Emperor more so than anyone.”

“It’s a shame you’ll have to contend with me, Custodes. I’m sure Aeternus would’ve given you the duel you’ve always wanted,” the Primarch joked as his thumb cocked back the hammer of his revolver. Corvinius knew that he was going to die here. This was as far as he went. He hoped that his siblings would make it further. “Raptor Imperialis, Reva,” he said in the moments before she moved.

She lunged, her first blow a feint to hide the second that aimed for his head. She was not half as cavalier as she’d been with the chaff, carefully taking her measure of him with each strike. But what was considered careful for a Custodian remained downright blistering, and each sweep, stab and riposte coming faster than the last, building up a combat catalog of the Primarch that would long outlive him.

The two complimented each other in dueling technique to a surprising degree. Corvinius anticipated her feints and parries as if he would’ve performed them himself. Each stab of her sword saw his bolt revolver hammer a reactive round into close combat, forcing the blade off-balance and a swift repositioning of her stance. Every strike of his plasmaknife was countered with her left sword, carefully gliding off of the plasmicfield of the implement so as to not detonate her own powerfield. A martial method that few could master in this era, but if any could do it, then he would’ve bet on Reva and Valdor. His senses honed in to a dangerous degree, ignoring all other instances of sensory distraction to fight against the Custodes. It was all he could do to remain engaged, but he was already losing ground.

Together, the godlings danced, circling ‘round and ‘round the makeshift arena, scoring the walls in their grand struggle.

The echo and boom of bolt shells rang across the tunnels as Corvinius fiercely fought to maintain some semblance of superiority. Dueling was never his speciality. Patient, precise, and instantaneous combat was what he excelled at. His bolt revolver remained the only reason the duel lasted as long as it had, each shot grossly accurate and superiorly reactive. His plasmaknife was already losing effectiveness as Reva’s powerswords hammered his left side. The ammo count of his sidearm was rapidly dwindling.

Reva’s armor was a mess, a pauldron stripped off with a crushed gauntlet laying beside it in the dirt. Her cuirass was crushed in a half  dozen places, and a lucky strike  from the plasma knife had caught her under the right arm, shredding redundant muscle and reminding her how sluggish she felt with power armor alone.  Another shot shattered the left lens of her helmet and caved in the metal around her eye. Slick, oily blood flecked in gold sluiced from the wound when she tore her helmet off entirely and threw it at Corvinius before resuming her assault.

She could see his resources wavering, and pressed the advantage.  Anticipating his shots, her grip shifted subtly in the instant it took the primarch to fire his revolver. Her blade carved through his armor, tearing off chunks from the supportive exoskeleton beneath, but still she could not land a mortal strike

As the ammo count of his bolt revolver tracked to a singular ‘I’ over his helmet’s display, the Primarch tossed the weapon in front of Reva. His plasmaknife sliced downwards like a bolt of lighting, bisecting the sidearm with a single bullet left in the chamber. Corvinius’ beloved revolver exploded, separating the duel for a brief moment in a small shower of smoke and debris. He lunged forward through the smoke, utilizing the haze as cover to launch an attack on the Custodes. His right gauntlet pressed against the hilt of the plasmaknife to strengthen the strike as he emerged from the explosive wake.

The explosion drove Reva back, and she commended the primarch for his ingenuity. Even here, even now, he hadn’t lost himself.  But she knew a forlorn hope when she saw one, and she rose to meet his strike head-on.

“[b]Unity![/b]” Corvinius cried out beneath his avian-shaped helmet. He put all of his soul into the cry. All of his desperation. All of his pride as a Thunder Warrior. All of the love for his siblings. All of his devotion to the Master of Mankind.

Reva took his charge, her armor splitting as the blade sunk deep between her ribs, bursting one of her hearts before the hilt hammered against her chest. She glanced down at it, admiring her prey’s handiwork as blood pooled inside her abdomen, then dropped one sword and closed her fist around his, crushing his fingers and deforming the hilt of his knife while leaving the blade lodged in her abdomen.

“Unity,” Reva agreed in a somber voice, and plunged her blade into the primarch’s neck.

She left him there, surrounded by his misbegotten siblings, and staggered over to retrieve her helmet. Too misshapen now to be worn effectively, Reva instead spoke directly into the comm-link to deliver word.

“Corvinius, Thunder Primarch of the Obsidian Crows, has fallen.”

[hr]

The Stone Wolves had come to Mount Ararat, at the entrance to their tunnels. The air permeating from them was thick and foreboding, something was pushing back against them even before the fighting started. They were known for their mastery of the Earth but even the Earth here seemed to growl against them.  It unnerved even their most hardened. But they had their duty and they were ready to die if necessary.

For the first of their battles, that’s exactly what so many of them did. Even as Stone Wolves heaved the ground beneath them, they had been so used to victory and so used to the land enabling their warpath they almost didn’t know what to do when that advantage evaporated. When pieces of the outlying tunnels had come heaving in towards them, crushing swaths of the Legionnaires, and yet leaving a causeway for anyone who came behind them. Those Stone Wolves who did not respond in time to the frantic drop of stone so perfectly manipulated to bury them did not block the passage. It did what it intended, it buried many of the wolves beneath dirt and those who survived and dodged relied upon their wits and their personal skill. Those who died fell forgotten while their compatriots pushed forward over them.  There was nothing left to do but push on. No way to save those buried, for doing so risked making the collapse more permanent. They had to move on or be consumed by the failure of their old tricks and tactics that proved ineffective.

“Advance forward, don’t unbury the lost, we can’t afford to! We will not taste defeat on this day!” One of the Stone Wolves commanders demanded.

But it was not to be so easily done. It was clear they were rocked, and the Earth cried in rebellion against them. Having lost some of their most valuable advantages, they could barely make do. The mountain was clearly not their ally here. The Legion began to splinter and crack.

“Turn back, and the earth behind you will swallow you. whole” The Commanders yelled. “If you can’t push forward, hold steady.”

So they held the tunnels, only giving passage to those who pushed up, while letting no enemy break their rank. They had become that bulwark that held onto the tunnels at their entrance and along the outside.

That’s what they did, the Stone Wolves dug in and they made themselves into a barrier that would not, could not, be broken. Glory was not theirs on this field,  but even sacrificing that, their duty never waivered. It would be disastrous for the Legion as their numbers of dead piled up.

But in their entrenchment, they did not let themselves give in to the urge to flee. And so many of them died to give the other legions the time they needed to advance beyond them.

[hr]

The center of Mount Ararat was a storm unlike all others, where the magma veins poured into the Araratian macrofurnaces. Great falls of molten fury spilled out from tunnels into adamantine funnels, then further divided into enormous thermal generators below. A complex system that rewarded the defenders until their dying breath. Ironic, then, that their final words would be posthumous laughter. For all of their ingenuity and valor, it would never be the infernal dwellers of this mountain that waylaid the Emperor’s Thunder Warriors.

Their deaths came now in the form of the Legiones Astartes, clad in their slate-grey ceramite in tactical groups or dispersing others in vibrant wargear. The angels of the death had come for them and it was a perfect farewell for a life beholden to war and war alone. Primarch Alfovathan, Lord of the Umbra Paladins, thought as he fought through the onrushing tide of genecrafted warriors. 

They had spilled out of the tunnels in perfect synchronization like insectile warriors subservient to a higher power. His patchwork company of legionnaires had already been exhausted from fighting the Araratians with their Solarite weaponry. The Astartes cut through them like a scythe through grain, attempting to finish what the insurgents had started with horrific precision. He was thankful that none of the Custodes were present, but Alfovathan could see their golden figures sprinting behind them further up the mountain. 

Another legionnaires’ skull exploded into pink-misted particles as the Astartes advanced on their position. He grit his teeth and pulled up the thermal pistol, unleashing a wave of molten-core fueled ray into the genewarriors. Their ceramite melted at the barest touch, slagging them within microseconds of contact. It was a small fortune that the Araratians had left their weapons behind. A shame it had to be used on the Emperor’s ‘finest creations’.

Alfovathan’s shield flared as combined fire attempted to pull him down. His obsidian hued form remained standing against the onslaught, yet the Primarch took cover behind the industrial wreckage. Whatever remained of his Cataegis had managed to pull the Heart of Ararat from insurgent hands; however, it left them split across the entire chamber and locked in with the Astartes. He was tempted to sacrifice it all and ignite the core. Rationality won him over as he’d prefer to give his kindred a fighting chance. The thought remained throughout the fight, regardless of his desire.

“They’re switching tactics! Ready your blades!” One of his legionnaires, Karrak, called out as the gunfire died down.

His call was astute for the Astartes had begun to descend from their elevated positions with a myriad of melee weapons drawn. By Terra, he’d never seen so many since the dawn of the Unification Wars. Combat knives, chainswords, chainaxes, powerblades, and more descended with cold, calculated vigor. He felt a pang of disappointment as they wordlessly charged towards his position.

“For the Emperor!” One of the Astartes called out in a bloodthirsty tone. Their call to arms riled the rest of the prismatic, ceramite-clad horde. A series of shouts rose from their lungs to the top of the chamber. It made his hearts pound with something akin to jealousy and pride.

“Damnable traitors,” Alfovathan said through smiling lips. He refused to allow them their pitiful victory. They, who had not witnessed the birth of the Unification Wars, had yet to witness the glory that were the Thunder Warriors. He’d change that today.

“[b]Raptor Imperialis! Unity![/b]” The Primarch of the Umbra Paladins shouted aloud with his executioner’s blade raised high. He put every ounce of his soul into that warcall. A final call to welcome their death. A final cry against the injustice visited upon them. A glorious echo of a glorious era with glorious battles. 

The Cataegis replied in kind with a cry that could shatter Mount Ararat’s earthly walls. They had practiced such a call for a century and more from fighting against the worst that mankind could muster. Their shout was a crack of thunder so powerful that some Astartes hesitated for a fraction of a second. It was their death knell as they drove into the Astartes with suicidal abandon.

Alfovathan laughed and smiled as he tore apart the Astartes with his two-handed sword. Even as diamantine teeth tore his ceramite and bolt rounds shattered his flesh, the Primarch of the Umbra Paladins continued on. The Thunder Warriors died around him with the same energy, lost to their flaws or living in the glory of their final moments. He would never find out how many of the Space Marines he’d killed nor did he care to learn. 

His final moments came as a thunderhammer caved in his plumed, knightly helmet. The Primarch’s regal, ceramite form continued on even without consciousness. Black gauntlets tore through the masses of Astartes like a wyrd-stricken giant possessed by an infernal spirit. It lasted for several seconds as the Thunder Warrior’s body finally caught up with its demise. The Twelfth Lord of the Cataegis crumbled forward with his armor cut to ribbons. The rest of his company followed soon after as the Space Marines finished their gruesome work.

[hr]

“Betrayal! The golden bastards are shooting at us!”

There was more bitterness than surprise in Voslek’s voice as he peered over the ruined parapet at the mountainside below, lit afresh by energy fire despite the call of victory having gone out moments prior.

Ushotan merely grunted in reply, tossing away the now useless vox.

“Then this is the field they’ve chosen.”

The Steel Lords command squad was hunkered by the remains of an Araratian fortified barracks, the last crucial objective they had taken in the quelling of the short-lived rebellion. The sturdy dome-roofed building, its facade now cracked and floors strewn with the bodies of its garrison, sat high on the mountain’s upper slopes. Before its breached entrance, a terrace had been flattened to form a narrow parade ground, now occupied by the Cataegis. The sentry points around its cliffside edge had been toppled, and the parapet their lookout leaned on was a jaw from which the teeth had been torn.

With heavy, unhurried steps, the Thunder Warriors filed out into the thin, polluted mountain air. They were the last, few proud remnants of the Legion that had once brought Maulland Sen to its knees, a small shard of the thousands-strong ranks that had marched to battle like a wall of steel. But it was a shard that had lost none of its sharpness. Unlike the more fatalistic of their siblings, the warriors of the Fourth Legion had not allowed their equipment to degrade in the wake of the last great battles of the Urshic campaign, but stubbornly maintained their armour and weapons in preparation for a sterner final battle than Terra seemed capable of giving them.

A battle that was now upon them.

“Ready to die for Unity?” Roldran smirked with lips as scarred as the mountain beneath them.

“For Unity, any day,” the Primarch replied, flexing his shoulders in anticipation, “But not so that I’ll be replaced by the likes of them.”

He spat in disgust as he looked at the gold-gleaming figures that were already ascending towards them. The Custodians moved with astonishing speed despite their size and smooth, unhurried strides. [i]Like soulless machines, not men,[/i] Ushotan thought contemptuously, [i]and those starch-arse Astartes are even worse.[/i]

His sneer turned to a ferocious grin. “Let’s see if they can at least die like men.”

For many among the Cataegis, the auramite blade thrust into their backs had been a shock, an impossible betrayal. But Ushotan and his brothers were crafty beneath their coarse appearances, and they had seen the signs mounting ever since Aeternus had summoned them on the eve of Mosvoroth’s siege. The Master of the Lines was letting the Thunder Warriors’ fire die out, little by little, and in its place building files of stiff little puppets, obedient toys He could arrange to his liking. But the soon-to-be Emperor had misjudged how hot those last embers could still burn, and He would pay for it.

As the Custodes climbed the last steps onto the road that wound up Ararat’s upper reaches and to the barracks, the Primarch thumbed the detonation rune on the device in his hand. The Steel Lords were masters of the siege, the rip of the ram hurled at the hardest wall, and this had served them well in these last engagements, when their looming fate weighed on their shoulders. Their skill had revealed the paths they could take in a swift retreat, and their fury had carried them far ahead of the rearguard, buying them time to prepare.

The lip of the road exploded under the golden warriors’ feet. Two were hurled into the air and tumbled into the rocks below. The three others had soon regained their footing, but their moment of hesitation had been enough. As Ushotan’s command, the Steel Lords opened fire. One Custodian was torn from the ground by Voslek’s missile, the impact hurling him in the wake of his fellows. Another fell to the supercharged plasma shot from the Primarch’s own pistol. The last one snapped his spear forward in a blindingly swift motion, loosing an adrathic beam that shore through the parapet, but before it could cut down any of the Cataegis its wielder fell to a crossed volley of bolter fire.

“After me!” Ushotan shouted, taking off down the shattered road, “We cut through the crags, link up with Ghothar and the others at the first command post, then break from the slopes!”

The Steel Lords followed like the beginnings of an avalanche, leaping down from the elevated road their mines had shattered and into the rocks of the untended mountainside. The conurbation of what had been the city-state of Ararat did not cover the entirety of the peak, and the Cataegis had calculated that the swathes of rough terrain would afford them the best protection.

Yet they were not the only ones, and the Primarch cursed as another squad of Custodes stepped out, with disconcerting suddenness, from behind a sharply descending cliffside. They were too close to avoid the fire of their guardian spears, and three Thunder Warriors were felled with hoarse cries and the crack of breaking metal. There was only one way forward.

“Charge!” roared the conqueror of Nordyc, swinging his plasma-blade over his head like a bloodlit torch, “Show these husks how real warriors fight!”

The bellowing line of the Cataegis crashed into the deathly silent one of the Custodes, and a bloody, desperate battle was joined. A lesser force would have broken against that wall of gold and black, all the fury in the world powerless to so much as dent it. But the Steel Lords were themselves wrought by the Emperor’s hand, masterfully sharpened for their one and only purpose, and where their opponents had seldom seen true combat, they were each a veteran of a hundred campaigns.

Ushotan found himself facing the blank, resplendent helm of one adversary. The Custodian thrust forward with inhuman precision, but though the Primarch was a fraction slower, there was no strike that could surprise him. His sword, beaten and leaking corrosive red light, came forward to deflect the speartip, then smoothly dipped into a vicious upward swing. The enemy showed no sign of surprise as he grabbed the haft of his spear with both hands to stop it, then pressed forward with a horizontal sweep at Ushotan’s head.

He ducked under the swing and twisted his sword sideways, an abrupt movement that soon revealed itself as a thrust of his own. The unconventional attack caught the Custodian’s left arm, piercing through auramite, flesh and bone alike, and his hand fell limply from the spear. Though the golden warrior did not move a step back or even hesitate, uncaring of the pain, Ushotan now had the advantage, and pressed it brutally. With only one good arm, the Custodian now had a whole flank open despite the superior reach of his weapon, and in a moment the blood-red broadsword was cleaving between his neck and shoulder. He fell without a sound, and the Primarch disdainfully kicked the body before turning to aid his warriors.

The melee had taken less of a toll than the volley, the Cataegis’ slight numerical advantage and greater experience allowing them to hold their own against the enemy’s superior vigour. Two more brothers had fallen, though more were wounded, and Voslek had to discard his missile launcher as his maimed hand could no longer aim it.

“It will make a good scar,” he laughed.

“Don’t waste yourselves bleeding them,” the Primarch’s snarl of victory was metallic with the effort to hold back the rage that even now threatened to surge, “It’s what he wants. We’ll put a bigger spit in his eye the more of us make it down alive.”

The Thunder Warriors had always been strong in how they fought without avoiding death, he thought as he led the way down the treacherous slope once more. But not anymore. This time, they would make their own victory.

[hr]

Blood. It was all Rutgier saw. One moment, it was the blood of the enemy, warm and steaming on the frozen ground.

The next, it was his own, a fresh wave of vital red on the crimson of his armour.

He stared, uncomprehending, at the sanguine blotch. His mind was a faultless mechanism of battle, subconsciously charting the trajectory of every strike, and it now struggled vainly to understand what had wounded him. The last enemy had fallen before his blade moments before, and his brothers had felled the final strongpoint that had scourged them with its solar cannon. The vox spoke of total victory on all fronts, of the final demise of Ararat. There was nothing that could have struck him, unless…

He threw himself to the ground as the inevitable conclusion lit up the haze of his thoughts like a flash of lightning. The killing blow of the Custodian’s guardian spear cut through the air millimetres above his head, the blade’s power field carving a gouge into his already scarred helmet. Charmagnol had warned them, echoed a voice in his ringing skull, he had warned them, but remembering was so difficult. The rage hung about him day and night like a bloody fog, and the unfamiliar confusion that set upon him now had robbed him even of the strength of that red fire. What remained of his mind knew the golden killer for an enemy, but some unthinking part of him hesitated to understand the magnitude of what this meant. He rolled aside, sluggishly, and saw his doom come down towards him on the tip of the spear.

There was a cry, a roar, and the blade wavered as a crash of metal stirred the murk from Rutgier’s brain. A mass of black and yellow struck the golden silhouette like an avalanche. He knew that voice, one of the few things he could trust not to lose - the war cry of Torgal the Annihilator, once a bitter rival, now his brother in a fellowship forged over the ashes of their Legions. Seeing his comrade spring to battle dissipated Rutgier’s doubts. It was clear now the Custodes were the enemy. They had betrayed - them, the Master, Unity, [i]someone[/i] - it did not matter, they had betrayed, and now he would kill them.

Screaming his defiance, Rutgier, Red Knight of Thunder, rose from his knees and ran to the aid of his sworn brother. The Custodian had already turned on Torgal, the gleaming arc of his spear drawing blood from a pierced vambrace, but he could not hope to survive being flanked by two Cataegis. He stepped back, attempting to regain distance, and the Annihilator’s chainaxe screeched to his right. Simultaneously, Rutgier’s broadsword stabbed at his gorget, and he fell.

“I can’t believe it,” the Knight clutched his head, clinging to the scraps of clarity left to him, “What is this madness? Is it the end?”

The vox screeched at him with an useless garble of static, grinding the thread of his thoughts, and he crushed the unit in his hand in annoyance.

“Maybe,” Torgal shrugged, as terse as ever, “Still. We fight.”

“We fight,” Rutgier nodded, the rage boiling in his words. He felt the world fall to pieces around him, and the Thunder Warriors had only one answer to chaos. They fought.

Clouds of smoke and dust were rolling down Ararat’s lower slopes, stirred by the violence of the battle, and all of Terra’s immensity seemed to be lost in this acrid mist. He heard heavy steps approach, and braced himself as two huge shapes emerged into sight, immediately relaxing a fraction as he saw they were fellow Cataegis. He recognised them both, the once proud ranks of their kind having grown as thin as the populace of a wasteland town - Maire of the Verdant Raiders, her ice-blue eyes wild with frenzy, and Pheidipas of the Infernal Phoenixes, beard matted with blood and the filth of battle.

“The Custodes!” the Raider raved, brandishing her two-headed axe as if beset by ghostly enemies, “They’ve turned on us! All of them!”

“The Astartes, too,” Pheidipas added grimly, “They are all coming for us. The vox is dead. This will be our grave.”

Rutgier heard Torgal snarl something in response, but could not make out his brother’s few disjointed words. The static of the vox seemed to have flowed into his head, eroding his thoughts like a sandstorm. [i]The sands of Midafrik crunched under his feet as he swung his blade against the massed armies of the hive despots…[/i]

“No, we won’t die,” he managed, every word a struggle, “Not as long as we fight. We’re surrounded - we must break through the encirclement. Then we’ll make sense of this.”

A plan of action was something the Cataegis took readily to, and the four turned towards the descending slope of the mountain. They were not far up the side of Ararat, well within reach of its foot, and the smoky haze was covering their movements for now. It was not hopeless.

“Now,” Torgal growled through rigid jaws, “Run.”

They rushed forth without a war cry, four lost and unremembered dregs of a fading age, disparate in their stained liveries, but alike in the singleminded fury that rose raging within them. Gunfire and rays of lethal energy streaked around them through the fog, and they answered with their own bolters, nescient of whom or what they fired at. 

A golden figure stepped out from the smoke to bar their path, its spear sweeping wide in a stance each of them knew could not be escaped. With a howl, Maire cast away her axe and charged at the towering Custodian barehanded. The spear pierced her chest with almost contemptuous ease, but still she ran, tackling the massive warrior and hurling all her weight against him. They disappeared into the fog with a dying shout and a scrabble of feet over yielding stone, and Rutgier heard the Raider’s voice fall away and downward, cut off by a terrible crash.

Then the shroud of smoke was behind them, and the remote sunlight was a balm on their eyes. The chaos of battle seemed to fall away with it. Ahead of the three surviving warriors, a steeply hanging crag formed a shadowed passage towards where Ararat’s foot met the land below. A natural fortification, it had remained largely untouched by the forces of the city-state. The few defensive emplacements had been knocked out at the very beginning of the assault, and Imperial forces appeared to have left the place behind. This negligence would serve Rutgier and his brothers well.

He strode into the darkness, squinting to find the way ahead. The sun was now so high that everything under the crag’s overhang was plunged in shadow. [i]Like in the underhives he had cleared with bolt and blade…[/i]

Rutgier’s foot struck something with a clang. He looked down, and grunted in dismay as he saw the corpse of a fellow Cataegis, his armour in the colours of the Titan Scythes.

“Look,” Pheidipas whispered hoarsely behind him, and he blinked away the haze lingering in his eyes, straining to pierce the shadows with his sight.

He almost wished he had not.

More bodies yet lay strewn on the stony ground ahead, Thunder Warriors who had sought escape by this concealed path. It was not so much their number that dismayed him as their state. Their bodies had been brutally desecrated, armour sliced away to expose the flesh to barbarous predations. Their heads were missing. Raw muscle glistened where skin had been flayed away. Limbs and chests were torn open and their bones ripped out. [i]The vilest and most debased of the Empire’s foes had fought so, the warp-cults and the mutants and the dark priests.[/i]

Rage surged unstoppably in the Red Knight’s breast at the sight of such brave warriors so cruelly mocked in death, and he unleashed it in a wordless roar that shook the earth. His two brothers joined him, shouting their challenge to the shadows.

The shadows answered.

[i]The shadows had teeth.[/i]

Shapes of nightmare stepped out from the darkness, and in Rutgier’s feverish eyes they seemed to materialise from the murk itself. They were daemons, there was no doubt, hellspawn like the ones he had faced in the catacombs under Baoungai. Smaller than him, yet much larger than mortal men, their skin was dim green metal, their bones black iron, and their hands cruel knives and whirring chainblades. Some had skulls for heads, others bared snarls with dozens of long, sharp teeth; some were cloaked in ragged human skin; some were studded with spikes and broken blades, the walking ghosts of forsaken battlefields. They screeched and chittered in an abominable tongue as they advanced, closing in from both sides, outnumbering the Thunder Warriors ten to one.

Horrors of Old Night. He had fought long and hard to cast them into oblivion, but they had returned, and they were coming to take his soul.

“For Unity! Kill!” he barely knew what he shouted as he charged at the daemons, swinging his sword at their hateful glowing eyes. They parted before him, loping and springing with insectile grace, wicked blades slashing from every side.

Metal struck metal heavily at his side, and Torgal grunted. With the corner of his eye, he saw that three daemons had jumped on the Annihilator from the dark above, and now clung to him like hounds to a bear, stabbing ferociously at his neck with long recurve knives. The warrior drew his bolt pistol with a superhuman effort, shattering the leering skull-face of one monster with a point-blank shot, before collapsing under his wounds.

Rutgier howled in anguished fury and lunged, bisecting a daemon as it swung at him. Another one leapt at him from behind, and deftly turning about himself he ran his blade through its chest, cutting though hellish armour and flayed skin. Pain stabbed his flank as a third fiend seized the opening and gouged him with a screaming chainblade.

A burst from Pheidipas’ bolter made the creatures recoil, but the reprieve was short-lived. Ponderous steps thundered from the shadows, and blackness knit itself into large, lumbering figures. They looked like abyssal mockeries of Thunder Warriors, massive and bloated, ill-fitting armour straining and cracked over bulging folds of pale flesh. Eyeless faces. Maws of long bestial teeth. The brutes’ pestilentially swollen hands bore autocannons, painted with arcane symbols, and they spat a storm of death. The last Phoenix slumped to the ground, his plate breached by the mighty shells.

Rutgier did not scream again. His throat burned, and he preserved his breath, pouring all his strength and fury into his strikes. The daemons closed in on him, their misaligned bones and tattered skin crowding his sight repulsively, and he hacked ferociously at them. Some crumpled with hideous shrieks, but for each one he felt more blades biting into his own body. His plate was twice-red with his own blood. [i]He would die here.[/i]

With a desperate effort, he battered through the ring of bone and darkness and cruel blades that was closing ever tighter around him, but blows slashed at him from all sides, and he fell at last, the last of his strength oozing from his wounds. The last thing he saw was the rictus grin of a skull-faced daemon hunched over him, and then the shadows took him.

[hr]

Legion Master Scraphurst had long foreseen the death of the Thunder Warriors. Most of the Praetors of the 8th legion had, even if they had never spoken about it in detail. Memories of their mortal days as gangers had taught them important, if cold and brutal lessons about loyalty and the burdens of leadership… and what needs to happen when a fellow ganger starts to unwind at the steams. 

There were many reasons that it could happen. The lifestyle came with no end of pressure or vices that could start to tear apart a man’s sanity. Everyone who survived for long would develop their quirks. But there was [b]always[/b] an ill defined point where the instability could no longer be tolerated. Where the negatives of keeping someone around outweighed the positives and a brutal calculus needed to be employed for the sake of survival. 

 Did they know in advance that it was to be this day? This mountain? No. At least not before they had been informed of what was to occur [i]after[/i] the Mountain King and his forces had been broken. But a day like this had always been on the cards. 

As such, it was why Pho had offered his legion to take on an important, but not glorious task for the operation that kept them well out of the fighting. As far as the official plan and the Thunder Warriors were concerned, the 8th legion had been tasked with preventing enemy forces from either fleeing the mountain, or reinforcements from unknown quarters from coming in. 

In fairness, that was what the 8th was there to do. It was just that the term ‘enemy force’ was a bit broader than what was originally stated at the briefing. 

A few Thunder Warriors had tried to break through their lines. Between the firing positions and the mine fields they had set up, they hadn’t even gotten to them. Didn’t stop them sending some people out to collect their gear. Waste not after all.

Of the countless dead Astartes that would no doubt be littering Mount Ararat on this day, Pho took some pride in the fact that the black and red of the Alchemists would not be joining them in any notable numbers. 

[hr]

“It is done,” Aeternus breathed out in eternal relief as he closed his blackened gauntlet. Meat and bone shattered as the Mountain King screamed in agony. All of the pleas and cries had been drowned out by the onrush of agonizing pain. A jet of viscera escaped his clawed digits as the man finally perished. His horrifically altered, solarite-reinforced armor fell to the floor free of its skeletal binding.

The Primarch of the God-Slayers turned around with the fleshy mess in his gauntlet. His legionnaires remained standing, twenty-five in all, with their myriad weaponry freshly utilized. Amber giants in suits akin to the Mountain King were strewn across the entirety of the summit-citadel, torn asunder by his warriors. He’d remember this moment forever as their knightly helmets watched him with bated breaths.

“[b]Unity![/b]” Rex called out to them with a raised fist. The zmaj skull twisted against his pauldron whispering, “[i]Your time has come, O conqueror mine,[/i]” into his ear as he lifted the skull fragments of the Araratian pretender-lord. His alabaster cape slapped against his plating, dyed midnight black by the mountain cinders.

“[b]Unity![/b]” His legionnaires replied with a pride that he had not seen in nearly a century. Energy entered their voice for the first time in decades. A purpose fulfilled. An endeavor accomplished. A quest completed. The dream of Unity had arrived. Their hollers and cries filled the night air for several minutes.

The Primarch stepped down the obsidian dais of the Mountain King’s summit-throne. All of it had been maimed by their fight as Apocrypha collided with the Araratian’s solar sword. His wounds ached from the duel and his muscles cried out for respite. He would not give his body the rest that it wished for. Rex owed it to the warriors that would never see Unity. Even in the Cataegis that remained, Aeternus could see the vestiges of Nero and Caligula. He offered a smile for their absence.

“It is [i]finally[/i] done,” Tiberius said as he approached. There was an unmistakable giddiness to the Cataegis’ tone. One that was known only to Aeternus in their decades-long friendship.

“It is,” the Primarch of the God-Slayers replied in a tired voice. There was no lion left in him to roar its courageous cry. There would soon be a time to rest and he was preparing for the inevitability of a slow death. One spent in garrisons, training the future warriors of the Imperium as the Emperor fought for their birthright.

“I wish that the rest of the legion was here for this,” Tiberius mentioned in a somber tone. Rex halted in his tracks as they crossed the throneroom.

“I wish that all of them were here for this,” Aeternus finally replied. The words left unspoken wafted in the dying embers of their conversation.

Aeternus pressed on through the remnants of the Araratian pretender-king’s chamber. He peered out through his winged helmet at the Heart of Ararat far below them. The Mountain King’s throne had been built on obsession and hubris - a wide, circular chamber with plascrete pillars and no walls for his viewing pleasures. He had watched the downfall of his empire from a coward’s seat, clad in armor not built by his own people’s hands, and surrounded by elite warriors that could’ve turned the tide. It was a glorious and righteous battle regardless, one that could fill a man’s stomach for eternity

His God-Slayers fell in as he passed them, each falling into step in their own way. Veterans of a hundred wars and the last survivors of the First Legio Cataegis, Rex couldn’t be more pleased with them. They would never see a death more glorious than it could’ve been in this battle. They still fought with all the valor and courage that was known to their namesake. It brought a grim smile to his lips as he crossed the archway onto the summit proper

Mount Ararat greeted him and his warriors with all of the death and carnage that accompanied it. Leagues of soot-blackened mountain traced Terra’s spine for untold distances. Great, ruptured Araratian structures lay shattered in eerie silence against the rigid slopes. Volcanic ash and industrious smog painted the tainted sky above in a darker hue, cinders dancing around them in a perpetual dance. Igneous stone crunched beneath their greaves as they perforated a magmatic haze. Steam threateningly hissed out of gaping thermal fractures, further torn open by mountainous machinery. A manmade, miniature caldera awaited them several steps ahead with plascrete stairs leading down.

The Cataegis descended out of the Mountain King’s domed palace into a thermal courtyard ninety meters wide and a hundred meters deep. A miniature Ararat fashioned from obsidian-plascrete composite stone. A sanctuary for the Araratian lord to enjoy the fruits of his people’s labors in a lavish thermae. Now it was a charnel house filled with the dead attendants and sentinels to the rebel leader. They had been butchered to an extreme degree, precisely dismantled by bolter rounds and flensed of skin by volkite rays. Limbs had been cut by powered weaponry. Their bodies torn to ribbons by chainswords. The mixture of all their vitae pooled at the bottom of the crater with their allies.

A throng of Thunder Warriors awaited below. Aeternus could see Cataegis from every legion that had once marched across Terra. Amongst their number, Rex could pick out the Sixteenth and Second Thunder Primarchs: Bodiciia and Gilgamenses. The former towered over the other geneknights with her greataxe hefted against her shoulder. The latter was pacing back and forth, stabbing his reforged trident into freshly dispatched Araratian corpses. The rest of the cohort recovered their strength while their weapons cooled from recent combat. All of them snapped their eyes to the arrival of the God-Slayer. The First Primarch raised his blood-splattered gauntlet into the sky. His final vexillarius, Gaius, echoed the sentiment with his banner.

The false caldera erupted into a shockwave of warcries. Thunder Warriors raised their weapons into the air. Some wildly shot their bolters with gleeful abandon. Others revved their chainweapons with childish joy. His God-Slayers echoed the sentiment, calling out to their genekin with praises to the Emperor. He cherished their savage screams and committed it to memory as he descended the final step into the thermae. Bodiciia approached him without her helmet, a grizzly grin growing across her severely scarred face. Gilgamenses began to saunter towards him with his helmet’s visor cast across the ridges.

Then the vox died. A terrible, eerie silence filled the ‘net where battle orders and statuses would’ve once chimed in. He momentarily turned away, beginning to believe it was a trap laid by the Araratians. Apocrypha fell from his pauldron tip first against the false caldera’s tile. Aeternus raised the other gauntlet against his helmet to listen deeply. A moment’s mistake.

There was a roar of a jet and a sickening sound of wet meat and metal colliding with each other and the Categis began to take solace in their victory. A single knife had fallen amongst the gene-enhanced soldiers who had fought so valiantly for Imperium and given their bodies and minds to its victories. Primarch Gilgamenses, one of the hallowed few who had walked amongst the Imperium since its inception, had scarcely begun to speak of their victory and the uselessness of their Astartes counterpart when his body lurched to the side. 

Time slowed to a crawl for all of the warriors present, witnessing one of their vaunted gene-fathers falling to a strike so swift and precise that all that could be seen was the silhouette whose blade had taken the head of Sixteenth Thunder Primarch. It was the knife, and that knife was an executioner's blade falling upon all the Categis in that moment. Their victory, their triumph, brought to its bloody beheading in a sickening celebration of the work that they had done in His name. All could recognise the black-clad figure that had already recovered from their strike, preparing her blades for the lesser of the Categis present as the momentum of her pack carried her across the ground, metal against stone. 

It was the Black-Hawk, the executioner of the Categis - and she had arrived to do her duty.

Amalasuntha’s blade carved through flesh and armor alike, the blade Aeternus had given her masterfully cutting through two as she surfed past them, hardly able to react to the bird of prey that had fallen upon its quarry. Those that could bring up their weapons to defend themselves, but she was already gone at that moment. Her pack activated, carrying her faster than the warriors could aim their weapons. They would hardly have time to prepare themselves once more before true carnage would follow.

The rim of the caldera rumbled with the sound of a hundred greaves moving in synchronized step. Figures clad in black ceramite streaked with silver appeared as Amalasuntha began her slaughter. Hefty bolters began to fire precise salvos into the Cataegis, while volkite beams superheated the air in tight firing solutions. Bulky disintegrator rifles momentarily illuminated the air around the wielder in azure light as they shot. Thunder Warriors died in the first, unwavering volley of the ambush. Ceramite exploded inward, melted to slag, and was torn apart atom by atom.

“We are the final judgement,” spoke the Legion Mistress of the First Astartes, not as battle-cry but mere statement of fact. She and her gene-warriors, who had dogged every step of the First Categis, bore their colors upon their armor and learnt at their feet the arts of war, had changed after the victory at Ursh. Their own identity had been forged in the unspeakable horrors of that final siege, one that some of the Thunder Warriors had once hoped would serve to at last set apart the two Firsts.

Few would live to discover just how right they had been.

“Kill them all! [b]Raptor Imperialis![/b]” Primarch Bodiciia roared to life as she charged the Black Hawk, pulling her greataxe into her gauntlets.

The Thunder Warriors woke from their momentary shock with the Primarch’s call to action. Cataegis scattered in all directions, forcing over thermae decoration as cover to use as the Astartes advanced on their position. As if the essence of their soul had come to fruition, they moved as a single organism just as their genecrafted descendants. The staccato of bolterfire from the arriving warriors was rewarded with the boom of heavier instruments from the Dark Age. Rays of volkite danced across the distance from both sides while bolt shells snapped and exploded in a torrent of furious gunpowder. A vortex rifle snapped from the Cataegis’ line, warping a column of Astartes in a miniature blackhole. A plasma chain-cannon cut through the Astartes in the southern rim. 

Aeternus, Primarch of the God-Slayers, froze as the world around him turned into chaos unbridled. Gilgamenses’ headless corpse was falling in front of him in slow motion. Bodiciia was charging at Amalasuntha with her chaingreataxe raised. The Black Hawk was already repositioning to riposte the attack and kill the Second Thunder Primarch. His God-Slayers were spreading out around him in a protective circle. His refractor field was already igniting around him. The zmaj skull on his pauldron smiled knowingly. “[i]She will not slay you, O victor mine.[/i]” Rex could hear the Astartes advancing in behind him.

“Brother-” Tiberius had begun to speak as his helmet exploded. A well-placed headshot from a bolter saw ceramite, vitae and bone ejected into Aeternus’ warplate. His outstretched gauntlet slipped from his pauldron as the Cataegis’ corpse slumped forward. The last Praetor of the First Legion.

Time dilated further for the First Primarch. He heard the rattle of chains pull tight and snap into a thousand, separated links. An ancient monster cooed and cackled into his ear. The last words traded with the Emperor loomed over him like a guillotine. The last sight of the Thunder Primarchs lingered on the edge of his vision. Rex saw them all as they once were, fresh from their Master’s Himalazian enclave and untainted by the flaw. A spectral hand held his cheek from behind and a blade against his back. He felt phantom blood spill from his spine.

Reality clicked forward in a dead sprint as a combat cocktail filtered through his system. His left gauntlet snapped out and unloaded Ea into Astartes descending the stairway. Their ceramite blossomed into azure flame as the Primarch of the God-Slayers began to move. His grip tightened on Apocrypha, plunging it further into the false caldera with all the strength that could be afforded to his genewrought body. He grit his teeth as the black blade pierced the stone composite. As the sword reached into the thermae, Aeternus thumbed the activation rune and ignited the blade in a crimson corona. Steam violently hissed out of the sword, unfurling the wings that made up the weapon’s crossguard. The empty eye sockets of the weapon’s skull burst to life with red wisps.

An eruption reverberated from beneath the false-caldera. Crimson plasma spilled out in an explosive web around the foundation of the thermae. The ground beneath their feet violently shook as the destructive feat unraveled the environment around them. Pieces of the rim shattered and broke, forcing the Astartes from their advantageous position. All were unbalanced by the seismic force produced by the event. It was not enough to break the Mountain King’s pleasure-abode, yet it was enough to stun the battle.

“[b]I am Aeternus Rex, Thunder Primarch of the God-Slayers and the Emperor’s Champion. I have walked Terra for a century and brought to heel the warlords of the Dark Age. I have brought doom to the greatest witches that have ever lived and slain great creatures born from the wyrd,[/b]” the Blade of the Emperor stated with a lion’s roar. His helmet amplified the sound, projecting it throughout the fractured caldera and funneling it out into Mount Ararat’s sky. He pulled Apocrypha from the smoking fracture in the ground, the blade still wreathed in crimson plasma.

“[b]I demand retribution! I demand Him to account for His betrayal! I demand His greatest to come forth and dare,[/b]” Aeternus continued to yell as the battle came to a halt. His warplated form stepped forward toward Amalasuntha with Apocrypha in his right gauntlet and her misericordia unsheathed in his left. He stopped several paces away from her as the Second Primarch backed away. 

“[i]I demand the Emperor of Mankind[/i],” the God-Slayer growled with a certainty unlike any tone he had held before.

The zmaj head cackled on his pauldron, a sound that struck through his resolve like a chime through glass. “[i]He will not see you, O child mine.[/i]”

Amalasuntha wanted to press the advantage on Bodiciia, but she recognized the words of Aeternus instantly. A sorrowful anger filled her heart as he made his demand, but it was her duty to act as their executioner. His will had led to this, laying down defective tools that would no longer be needed for the age to come. Her pack idled as she stared upon the only of the Categis to earn her respect, eyes peering onto him as a raptor its prey. 

“Your demand rings hollow, Aeternus. Accept your death with dignity, accept that you are no longer needed in this cruel world,” Amalasuntha spoke with an eerie calmness. She hefted her blade to ready herself, but she dared not move - waiting patiently as the sounds of battle increased around them. The Categis would be too concerned for the pressing Astartes to interfere now, but with two of their Primarchs staring her down she could not afford to attack so recklessly now that she has lost the element of surprise. 

“[i]I will not[/i],” Aeternus responded as he rushed forward to the Black Hawk. In ages past, the First Primarch had been compared to Valdor in brutality, yet subpar in swiftness; however, this Cataegis was now peerless in might, free of his chains. He met the Custodes in a fraction of a second, his greaves booming like the crack of thunder and his form advancing with the restless volatility of a macrotempest. The understanding, patient Thunder Primarch was gone, replaced by the entity known as the God Slayer.

The misericordia lashed out first with bristling speed, cutting the air and throwing a shockwave of force with it. A feint. Apocrypha followed up in quick succession, swung with impossible might for a weapon of such weight and size. Crimson plasma ionized the air as the greatblade cut downwards, arcing down with the thunderous strength of an angry deity. As the blade collided with the ground, Aeternus cut upwards with the shorter sword to move Amalasuntha further backwards into the caldera. As she moved with geneforged reflexes, the Cataegis was already swinging his other implement sidewards toward her.

As the two legendary warriors fought in a theater built by destiny, the ongoing battle continued from its momentarily stalemate. Primarch Bodiciia bounced back away from the Black Hawk, knowing full well that only a few select warriors could match the Custodes in might. She moved close to a group of Thunder Warriors readying their heavy armaments for another barrage.

“Pull back to the center! If Amalasuntha has arrived, then-” She would never get to finish the sentence as her words were cut off by the familiar, piercing cry of null-grav generators and precision thrusters. Their silhouettes filled the sky as they descended from above. A flock of auramite clad hawks, cultivated by the Emperor’s greatest aerial warrior - the Stygian Talons had arrived.

Bodiciia heaved her great-axe ready for their onslaught, but the Custodians never had the intention of granting her a death worthy of a warrior. Whereas Aeternus would’ve had the cunning to divert fire upon their descent - Bodiciia was never the greater tactician of the two. The Venetarri of the Stygian Talons descended wielding blades in one hand and melta-charge packs in the other. The Primarch’s eyes widened in last minute recognition as the custodians found their demolitions down upon them. In her last moments, not even a sound came out of her before the onslaught of explosives encompassed her being.

Those near her died to the rain of charges near instantly as weapons meant for tanks and structure proved more than able to dispatch the Categis as well. Auramite clad figures landed and charged through smoke and debris, falling upon the Thunder Warriors with speed and savagery afforded to them by their creator. By the time the smoke from the initial charge cleared, dissipated by the rushing of gene-perfected soldiers advanced, there was little left of Bodiciia save for scraps of her armor and her axe which lay broken several meters away from where she had stood.

The sudden charge meant little to the two engaged in a desperate battle, Amalasuntha danced around the twin blades of Aeternus. Knowing she could not directly parry the Primarch, the Black Hawk relied on her agility, aided by her jump pack she remained just out of her opponents reach. Even still, Amalasuntha was hard pressed on her defense - all her movement had to be calculated in the moments even before Aeternus’ movements began. [i]No,[/i] she knew she would not be able to beat him, but perhaps she could last long enough for victory to be secured.

The First Legio Astartes advanced on cue of the Custodes’ arrival, the last veterans of Sanctii at the van. Several squads descended the false-caldera, sliding down the fractured stone with their weaponry lowered. More of the dark clad Space Marines took their spot on the rim, steadying themselves for suppressive fire on the Cataegis position. Those that made their way to the thermae pulled free their melee weapons, activating runes to ignite powerswords and chainsword engines. Doom lingered over the cohort.

Until the first of the Venatari died to a God-Slayer. As auramite plate met the composite tile of the Araratian thermae for their descent, the First Legio Cataegis engaged with a ferocity unmatched. They echoed their leader in overwhelming, brutalistic superiority, discarding whatever remained of their leashed doctrine. A black gauntlet collided with a venatari half-mask as they sprinted out of the smoke, bursting the skull of the genecrafted warrior into fine mist. Twenty-two other God-Slayers followed after with a mixture of dangerous, Unification Wars trophies. Their last vexillarius dug their banner into the stone as they pressed on. A symbol of Unity. They became the sole focus of the Talons.

The cohort rallied even as they perished under the arrival of the Custodes and the advancing Astartes. Whatever remained of their heavy weapons turned away from the false-caldera’s rim to the skies above, unleashing hell and fury into the descending Custodes. A squad of Red Knights filled in the area that the God-Slayers left, hefting their stormshields and meeting the First Legio Astartes with powersword in hand. The remainder frequently swapped cover, discarding their spent weapons and reclaiming their fallen kindreds or acquiring the decimated Araratian insurgents armaments. They persisted and died, fighting until the last of them were ready to keel over. Except for one.

“A mistake,” Aeternus coldly stated as Amalasuntha continued to successfully parry and dodge his strikes. The lack of offensive bite to her form was telling and he utilized that weakness to his fullest advantage. He had spent hundreds of accumulated hours throughout the Unification War witnessing her martial ka’tah. Rex knew her more than any of her geneforged kindred. 

The misericordia lashed out like a venomous serpent, angling for her jugular with persistent intensity. She dodged the strike as it bit the air directly next to her half-mask, switching her position with assistance of her auramite pinion. The Custodes came face-to-face with the wrist-mounted weapon of the First Primarch, Ea, as it savagely shot azure-tinted bullets into the space between them. Air ignited into cobalt flame as bolt rounds shot across the gap. Amalasuntha evaded the shots as if she were wind itself, utilizing short controlled bursts of her pinion combined with her advanced genealchemy to throw her into a favorable position; however, Aeternus advanced on her for every step that she took and forced the advantage as it made itself aware.

Apocrypha sliced up from the lower right of Amalasuntha’s position, its crimson corona a telltale sign of the oncoming weapon. She anticipated the strike and dodged back, continuing the dance with every ounce of genewrought agility that she had as a Custodes. Aeternus thumbed the activation rune in the brief second before potential contact, expelling steam from its winged crossguard and throwing a plasmic projectile. A wide, vertical slash of brilliant red cut through the right wing of her auramite pinion, bypassing her refractor field through close contact. The plasma tore across the battlefield, melting thermae wall into slag and bisecting Astartes enroute to the fight.

Amalasuntha remained hardpressed and now that Aeturnus recognized his advantage, an expected result and one she had accepted would come since even the planning of this engagement. There could be no miscalculation in her movement, to do so would mean death but even then the question remained of how long she could keep up with the God-Slayer. She had to find a way to give Aeternus pause, a way to put him on the backfoot for even a fraction of a millisecond. 

Being unable to rely on the now engaged Stygian Talon, who fought tooth and nail with the remaining God-Slayers in an untold number of one-on-one combats where they could, the Black Hawk would have to rely on her own cunning. In the moment, he was recovering from using Apocrypha, there was a moment where Aeternus was vulnerable enough to take the risk of assault. Instinctually, Amalasuntha flung her spear as if it were a javelin - sailing center mass toward the thunderous Primarch with the force of His will behind it. 

The First Primarch hurled himself into the path of Amalasuntha’s spear, expertly twisting his body to receive the attack head-on. Her strike landed with a thundering shriek of powerfield punching through refractor field and churning ceramite armor. Instead of punching through his chestplate, her attack raked across the lower left side of Rex’s armor. She scored a new scar on his body, opening his waist and exposing the searing muscle beneath. Vitae would’ve spilled free were it not a powerweapon, instead cauterising the meat and armor together. The weapon sailed past the Primarch with its pound of flesh taken. It did little to stop the Cataegis’ charge, but the Black Hawk could see his left side weaken by a fraction. A sight that she had trained for for a hundred years.

Aeternus repaid her in kind. The Thunder Primarch launched his right knee up as she attempted to recover from her mighty throw. A physical blow from his genewrought might was astonishing even for a genecrafted being such as herself. To some degree, it was comparable to the Axe of the Emperor’s indomitable strength. She was pushed backwards several inches away, splitting apart a God-Slayer and Stygian Talon dueling for their lives. Amalasuntha recovered as her comrade was decapitated by Rex’s greatsword, treated like a simple annoyance instead of an actual threat. The duel continued as he hurled back into her with the misericordia lowered and Apocrypha raised.

The battlefield grew heavy with ashen smog pouring out of Mount Ararat, cinders piling up over the false-caldera like fresh snow on the Nordyc plateaus. Cataegis squads were quickly dwindling into fractured duos or trios as their positions were overwhelmed. The Astartes advanced as a horrifying, endless horde of hounds unleashed by an uncaring master. Those daring enough to enter melee with the Thunder Warriors found themselves brutalized, yet their sacrifice was sufficient in cutting down another of their dreadful numbers. Heavy armaments no longer barked into the skies, allowing the Stygian Talons free reign to descend into their desperate cohort. They were struggling to survive. Their end was nigh.

The God-Slayers did not care any longer for their duty, even as their comrades failed to hold the perimeter. Caesar had managed to outwit a Venatari, smashing his skull into their faceplate and bisecting their body through brute strength. Claudior was slain by another Talon, who wielded her buckler like a mythological guardian and evaporated her opponent with an archeotech pistol. Aulon was fiercely dancing with another, trading blow for blow with a Custodes who perfectly matched his attacks.

The perimeter continued to shrink as the Red Knights died behind the God-Slayers, dissolved into imperceivable atoms by disintegration rifles. Vena, Caedis, and Regia returned to the throneward flank as they finished off their Stygian opponents. Several Astartes were already advancing on them with chainswords and bolt-pistols, sprinting to fill in the space their allies had made. The First Legio Cataegis made quick work of them with paragon blade and powersword, slaughtering their genedescendants with swift, precise slices. Already, they could feel more Stygian Talons descending from overhead; however, their duty remained for their brethren. They readied themselves for the next warriors to take their place.

This duel’s crescendo was wrong - it felt off and it had felt off since its inception, the Black Hawk knew this. Aeternus should have killed her by now, he [b]should[/b] be moving into range for her gunship to be finishing him off. That window had passed - the Talons had to improvise as they should’ve been pulling back to allow the Astartes to suffer the blunt of the casualties. Amalasuntha felt vague annoyance cross her mind that her own time table had been breached.

She flew back - far enough that it would take Aeternus several bounds to reach her. Then she spoke in a flat and plain voice, “You toy with me, Aeternus. You delay doing what must be done. Why?”

“The Emperor values you,” the First Primarch dispassionately stated as he followed after her. Even with her auramite pinion half-destroyed, Amalasuntha was still the most agile of her kindred and had leapt far out of his reach. He sprayed Ea in the Black Hawk’s direction to keep her moving as he sprinted, azure bolt rounds splashing off of her refractor field. A sigil in his helmet warned of a low ammo count. Aeternus continued to speak as he closed the distance, “and Valdor demands your victory in this fight. I will defeat you and I will force his hand, but I will not kill you Amalasuntha.”

There was no further explanation for his words as he reached her within several, specific bounds. His suppressive fire had been inefficient in inflicting any damage, yet it held back support from the Astartes and limited her movement. Several Space Marines had attempted to move to Amalasuntha’s aid to no avail as they were caught in Aeternus’ and the surviving Cataegis’ crossfire. The Talons were slowly winning, yet they remained bogged down in fighting the best that the First Legion could offer.

“Every passing moment is a Cataegis granted the promise of a glorious death,”  the God-Slayer growled as he reached Amalasuntha. The misericordia lashed out, splashing against the refractor field’s weakening grasp. His greatblade followed after as quick as a lightning bolt, throwing a shockwave of physical energy and cinders into the surrounding area. As she attempted to recover from the onslaught of attacks, Aeternus threw a punch with his left gauntlet that sent her sprawling; however, the force of the attack was weakened by her earlier strike. He spoke as she recovered, “and I will allow them their glory until the moment my own demise arrives.”

Their duel became the centerpiece of the battlefield as the original Cataegis perimeter broke, transforming into several desperate brawls and close combat skirmishes. The Astartes on the ridge of the false-caldera were forced to holster their hefty armaments lest they hit ally and enemy alike. Slowly, they followed their melee-focused kindred down into the thermae with their sidearms unholstered and ready. The Stygian Talons broke into pairs as reinforcements arrived from above, expediting their God-Slayer duels and maximizing their efficiency at the cost of honor. 

Legionnaire Titus watched as the last Annihilators were slaughtered by a trio of Astarters, systematically cut down with combat knives and chainswords. The brief distraction was enough for his dueling Talon to skewer him through the chest with her lance and he fell limp against her weapon. In his dying moments, he held onto her spear and forced his bolt pistol into her midriff, unloading whatever remained in the magazine by that point. The two fell atop each other in death as bolt rounds tore through the soft joints in her auramite armor.

Legionnaires Vena, Caedis, and Regia had perished with a dozen and a half Astartes corpses spread between them in the throneward flank. Lucius took their place alone, his Stygian opponent butchered by the Emperor’s Champion himself. He struggled to hold both paragon blades, yet the Thunder Warrior was beyond the point of no return. The Astartes came for him with volatile firearms. Lucius was quicker and deadlier, bisecting them as they arrived and suicidally rushing into their midst. He smiled wide beneath his knightly helmet, grateful for the time he had left spent like this.

A flurry of melees that spawned behind the First Primarch began to reach their climax as Legionnaire Traijan pierced through a Venatari’s skull with his archeospear. Gilgamenses would no longer need it and he thrived in the satisfaction of using the weapon. He witnessed Aulan perish with a decapitating salvo from an arriving Custodes, their sidearm blasting apart his cranium in three shots. The Thunder Warrior raised the trident like a javelin and hurled it like a bolt of lightning, skewering the golden warrior before he himself was slain by a new auramite-clad opponent.

Whatever remained of the pleasant waters of the false-caldera thermae were now saturated with the meat of Cataegis, Astartes, and Custodes. The raw stink of cooked meat, ionized and roasted, wafted through the area above the scent of volcanic sulphur. Mount Ararat hissed and boiled with reinvigorated, molten energy as she quaked with inconceivable amounts of death. It was as if the spirit of the land cried out in primordial agony.

“A glorious death?” Amalasuntha hissed in response as she steadied herself - recovering from her sprawl as easily as Aeternus had sent her. There was movement below her half-plate, she was speaking into the vox, Aeternus could tell. Yet, Aeternus could tell in an instant what it meant, the Stygian Talons began breaking away from those left alive, clearly unwilling to allow themselves to be felled in some twisted notion of honor. The Astartes of the first would suffer the blows, not the Emperor’s own.

Then it revealed itself, the Black Hawks’s own dropship screamed into view at its mistress’ decree and it would spit death into the ranks of Categis and Astartes alike in cold efficiency. Aeternus had forestalled her enough. “You waste my time, you waste His resources in such a foolish endeavor of a warrior’s death,” she called as she dodged more of his blows, lashing out and barely slicing his wrists with his own blade.

“We are all nothing more than His tools and if he told me to die then I would do so happily!” She roared as she finally moved for a proper attack, believing he had swung with his great sword. Aeternus’ own knife moved to his neck in the motion of the mercy killing he had done so many times. Amalasuntha knew that this would need to end, and she knew this would force him to either die or kill her in self-defense. There would be no more honor.

“[i]Then you are unworthy of His servitude[/i],” Aeternus callously responded. The First Primarch dropped Amalasuntha’s misericordia in his left gauntlet and forced his open gauntlet onto his diamantine blade with surprising speed. It pierced the ceramite, sliced through the flesh and broke the bone beneath in a single, fell stab. Rex pushed his hand further down the blade until his fingers overlapped hers. Firmly caught within his grasp and unable to escape, the Cataegis rolled back his head and slammed it against her skull. Precisely hard enough to incapacitate and fracture, but not enough to shatter her cranium.

Even then, the Black Hawk continued to her best to fight on, futilely and weakly did she attempt to raise the blade Aeternus had gifted her to his throat. Consciousness flickered in her mind as her senses all screamed for her to do her duty to the Emperor. Even then, her mind knew that this wasn’t a lethal blow, Aeternus surely knew - and she questioned why he wouldn’t kill her at that moment.  Amalasuntha sputtered what words she could, the blade falling from her hands, “Y-you are -“

As the Custodes went limp, Aeternus calmly set her down and flung the diamantine blade out of his gauntlet with immeasurable force. The dagger disappeared in the bloody cinderpiles of Mount Ararat. Amalasuntha’s misericordia returned to the scabbard on his left side. The Stygian Talon dropship loomed overhead, massacring the Astartes and the Cataegis in a violent tempest of bolts and lasers. Little remained of the Cataegis aside from a few God-Slayers and a handful of other legionnaires. His refractor field threatened to explode with each salvo that strayed too close. Rex ignored it as he approached a fallen Custodes with an archeotech spear jutting out of their auramite - Gilgamenses trident. Even in death, the Sixteenth Primarch remained a stubborn thorn.

Aeternus quickened his pace, sprinting to the spear and breaking into a leaping lunge even as his body screamed for rest. His cut and broken hand violently spilled vitae as the archeotech spear - Enūma Eliš - entered the First Primarch grasp. The Talons couldn’t respond in time, having retreated moments ago to Amalasuntha’s order. Rex thumbed the weapons activation rune, electrifying the trident’s shattered head. A fulguris coat of lightning wrapped around the spear  like an angry thunderbolt. He flung himself into a screeching halt, tearing muscles and tendons in his legs to perform the feat. Just as the Black Hawk had thrown her own spear with all of His might, the Thunderbearer launched the spear out of his hand like a streak of lightning at the dropship. The repercussive force of the throw was enough to toss him backwards and erupt a flurry of wind around him.

The thunderbolt connected with the dropship echoing a clap of electromagnetic energy. A shower of smoke and debris plumed up over the vehicle as the archeotech spear disappeared. The battlefield fell silent in the fallout of Aeternus’ herculean throw. A serenity began to blossom over the silence until the dull scream of null-gravity engines broke through. The compact voidshield of the Custodes’ warship flickered for a brief second as it spooled up to fight once more. All of its weapons honed in on the First Primarch, who readied Apocrypha for another futile assault.

Then the sky split open.

It was not the Stygian Talons' vessel that descended. The Orion gunship that tore through the smog-choked firmament. Its hull scarred with the evidence of a hundred campaigns. Its engines roared with a basso profundo that shook loose cinders from the caldera walls, and its descent was not the graceful hover of the auramite-clad but a violent, deliberate plunge. It sought a target.

The craft punched through the layer of ash and sulfur like a fist through rotten timber, its void-shields flaring white as they shrugged off stray small arms fire. It drove downward at an angle that would have shattered any mortal craft, and at the last possible moment, when the ground seemed certain to claim it, its thrusters ignited in a screaming column of incandescent flame. The landing struts struck the volcanic rock with a sound like the tolling of a funeral bell, and the shockwave alone cracked stone and bone.

The boarding ramp descended before the landing struts had finished groaning under their burden. The figure that emerged from within the shadowed interior did so without haste, without ceremony, without the theatrical flair that lesser warriors might have employed. As he descended the battlefield seemed to contract around him the way water contracts around a stone dropped into still water.

[b]Constantin Valdor[/b].

The Captain-General of the Legio Custodes wore no helmet. His face was a mask of cold, imperial marble. His eyes were the color of winter steel, and held just as much warmth. They found Aeternus with the mechanical precision of a targeting auspex. In his right hand he held his spear. Its blade caught the hellish light of Mount Ararat and threw it back in shards of molten gold. The great red cloak set about his shoulders snapping in the raging tempest of the air.

He did not speak immediately. He surveyed the battlefield with the dispassionate efficiency of an auditor reviewing a ledger. The dead Cataegis, the fallen Astartes, the site of the great betrayal.

Valdor paused a moment further, helm detaching from its mag-lock at his belt, before he set it over his features. When the gleam of his lenses set on the Primarch once more the blade of the Apollonian Spear crackled into life.

[i]Finally[/i], Aeternus thought with grim relief. He flexed his left gauntlet, cutting the river of blood pouring from his palm. The alchemy of his artificial body dammed the crimson torrent for now. Rex brought the greatsword into a two-handed grip and stepped toward Valdor. Amalasuntha’s misericordia remained sheathed on his hip. The First of the Cataegis and the First of the Custodes met as cinders danced around them. The Thunder Primarch raised his greatsword into a duelist stance, its brilliant red corona pointing at the sky above.

The First Primarch exploded forward with a genetic might known to his name. Apocrypha arced downwards, ionizing the air and sending a shockwave of dust and debris scattering the impact zone. The Emperor’s Spear had dodged the attack with ease, minimizing the space between himself and Rex’s attack. Aeternus had anticipated the attack, brutally carving diagonally and upwards to meet the Apollonian Spear. Both of their powerfields collided, illuminating the nearby area in a flash of destructive brilliance. Neither giants of the Unification Wars were moved by the eruption, maintaining their indomitable stance.

Both of the warriors breathed the same immediate air in their macabre waltz. They did not dance as duelists. Their powerful, unyielding forms were too brutal for such a delicate word. An invincible titan fought against an unconquerable giant. Every step of their greaves was a shattering of tectonic plates. Every strike was a fracturing of mountains. Every movement was a deafening crack of thunder in a tempest. They were locked in a supernatural contest of insurmountable strength, impregnable toughness, and methodical speed. The two legends were a match unlike any other in martial prowess. 

Rex did not speak as he fought Valdor. He refused to think of anything other than the fight in front of him. What remained of the Thunder Warriors had dwindled to so few that their end was inevitable. He had achieved his goal in delivering them a glorious death. No doubts remained for the God-Slayer. His stance echoed the mentality, every movement reflecting his mental tranquility. Every attack was practised, perfect, and strengthened by a resolve made years ago. 

Apocrypha came in fast and low, angled for the hip. Valdor stepped off the line, the powerfield's discharge scorching a black seam across his pauldron, and drove the shaft of the Apollonian Spear across the inside of Rex's lead arm.

Rex turned with the pressure rather than against it, and the greatsword came back across his body in a shortened arc that offered no wind-up to read. It caught the spear's haft and dragged. Valdor released the bind, stepped through the gap it created, and struck with the butt-end at the base of Rex's gorget. Stone cracked under the Primarch's heel as he absorbed it.
One pace back.

Valdor pressed. His attacks carried no signature, no preference of side or angle — each one placed where the pattern of Rex's last position made defence hardest. While the blows of each fighter met with the shuddering force of a block or parry, it was Valdor who controlled the space, moving the Primarch steadily in whichever direction he designed. The caldera edge was thirty meters behind the Primarch. He began to account for this.

The greatsword came diagonal and two-handed, the blow that had opened the first exchange. Valdor did not dodge it a second time. He caught it on the spear's haft, planted his rear foot, and held. The shockwave pushed cinders outward in a ring. His boots did not move.
He released the bind and stepped back once, putting space between them.

Valdor spun his spear in his grip, while his focus remained entirely on the Primarch, the head of his spear spat death into the torment of ash and dust surrounding them, surging into the darkness to fell a pair of warriors, anonymised by the dust and smoke, as they looked to approach him from the rear.  Rex was fast enough that before the spear could be swung back into position he was on the Custodian, but not fast enough to prevent Valdor fighting back with precision, the rear pummel of the Apollonian Spear jabbing with enough force to turn away blows that would sunder any mortal attempt at a parry. The last swing of an otherwise masterful flourish of killing strikes was turned ever so slightly wide,  just enough for Valdor to have the space to reverse his grip, the momentum of his movement bring the head of the spear around with such force it rippled through the rock of the mountain, let alone the point of impact.

The Spear of the Emperor was well renown for decisive killing strikes, but this was not how he was killing Rex, nor would it seem, was that an option for so capable an opponent. Here Valdor called upon techniques he had not required for an age, yet always honed. The death of a thousand cuts. The Primarch was pushing the Custodian, challenging him in ways few foes ever had, but for every additional effort he forced on Valdor, the Custodian took blood. 

For a moment it looked as if the Primarch had achieved a decisive blow, a surprise attack among the otherwise controlled maelstrom. His blade cut upwards, renting the chestplate of Valdor’s armour with an ugly crack that bled molten armour. There was enough force behind that blow to crack and harm even a Custodian, and perhaps any other of his order would have stumbled back from the blow. But this was not any other member, and despite the near killing blow, Valdor instead stepped into the assault, one hand leaving the grip of his spear to pull the misericordia from its place at his thigh. The weapon plunged up and towards the Primarch, made with the precision of one of the few beings alive who knew the genecraft of the Emperor’s warriors, and where exactly the lie of their immortality was most exposed.

A heartbeat before Valdor’s misericordia shot at him like a lance of lightning, the First Primarch reacted. His black gauntlet released the two-handed grip on Apocrypha to pull free Amalasuntha’s treasured misericordia. The dagger flew from the scabbard like a shadowed hawk, glancing against his opponent’s mirrored weapon. His fatal attack was forcefully diverted away from Rex’s neck towards his helmet, sundering the battleworn ceramite with genewrought might. Blood jettisoned out of Aeternus’ cleanly sliced face, revealing his scarred features beneath. A cut eye stared out from beneath the damage. The Thunder Warrior responded with a flurry of new attacks.

Aeternus’ misericordia plunged downwards towards Valdor’s gauntlet. The Custodes responded by parrying the blow and maneuvering his blade against the Primarch’s dagger tip. Metal viciously sparked as the two weapons met, scattering shredded cinder in their proximity. Their balance broke a split second later. Both of their swords remained in their gauntlets, symbols of conquered tyrants with renewed purposes.

The Thunder Primarch threw himself back into Valdor’s reach, slamming his misericordia into the other’s dagger. Apocrypha was swung one-handed downwards, arcing unstable, crimson plasma as it fell like a guillotine. His body screamed out in desperation as blood spilled from all of his injuries. His left gauntlet ran slick with a torrent of vitae, his chest and waist with smaller punctures courtesy of the black hawk, and his helmet cried a river of red. He was dying with each and every attack thrown at the Emperor’s Spear. 

Valdor exploited the First Primarch’s growing weakness, turning aside Amalasuntha’s misericordia and slicing through his wounded palm. His own misericordia left Rex’s gauntlet a mess of severed digits and gore. The God-Slayer’s dagger flew from his shattered grip. He shifted his bodyweight, accounting for Aeternus’ proximity and twisted the Apollonian Spear upward to meet Apocrypha. The spearhead of his weapon bypassed the thin, crimson weave of the greatsword’s plasmafield, striking the Primarch through the right armpit. A pained grunt escaped his opponent’s lips.

Apocrypha fell lightly against Valdor’s right pauldron, ineffectively hitting its intended target. Aeternus’ black gauntlet slid free of the greatsword’s hilt and its crimson corona disappeared into the aether. A cough of blood escaped his mouth, splattering against the Custodian-General’s auramite. With a final act of desperation, the First Primarch pulled himself further upon the Apollonian Spear with agonized determination. The Custodes impassively watched him as he struggled. 

The God-Slayer rolled his head back and prepared to slam it against Valdor’s sculpted helmet, but the strike never came. Aeternus’ strength gave out at last, his fractured helmet slumping against the Custodes’ headwear. His consciousness began to flee away along with the righteous retribution that puppeted his body. The zmaj skull cooed empathetically. He fell limp against the Apollonian Spear, his breathing slowing with every passing second. Rex felt the spear pulled free and the Custodian-General’s arm grab him as he descended.

It was a slow descent to the ground, Valdor almost cradling the Primarch as they did so. There would be no errant tumble for these honed killing machines. Around them, the pair of Custodian Gunships opened up in full around the summit. There would be no cover allowed for any who might seek to make the summit now.

Despite the almost respectful manner that the Custodian-General held his stricken foe, Valdor was not the first to speak, the lenses of his helm boring into his opposite with the same appraising coldness as they had the moment before their combat had begun.

“Unity…” Aeternus Rex, Thunder Primarch of the First Legio Cataegis, gurgled out with the last whispers of his consciousness. His ruined eye peered past Valdor into Terra’s tainted sky. The God-Slayer’s ugly, scarred lips curled in a satisfied, knowing smile.

“Few have fought harder in its name.” Any emotion that may have been in Valdor’s words were robbed by the modulation of his helmet. The purpose of the embrace revealed itself in the pressure the Custodian was placing upon the lethal wound to Aeternus. That those were wounds he had inflicted made little difference to Valdor. “That service is not yet at its end, we will speak further.” The words of the Custodian were almost drowned out as his Orion gunship settled down, its disembarkment ram slamming to the mountain’s summit to disgorge a retinue of smaller figures. Not other Custodians, as would be customary, but instead a number of the Emperor’s mortal servants. Those skilled in the craft of bringing the living back from the cusp of their final rest - the genewrights who had brought forth the Astartes, gazing upon the charnelhouse of their final proving.

The last Aeturnus heard as blackness took him, and the almost childlike hands of mortals began to tend to his wounds, was the zmaj laughing once more. “[i]Death is a release you have not yet earned, O prisoner mine.[/i]”

Valdor stood to allow them access to Aeternus, speaking to the leader of their number. “The Emperor has need of his service, speak not of this to any others. Fly from here.” Whatever subterfuge the Custodian-General was committing, his loyal attendants did not even blink at the order, swiftly stabilizing, and restraining, the Primarch before whisking him into the hold of the gunship.

Constantin Valdor strode away from the ramp, moving to the peak of the Summit. The devastation all around was total, but easing, smoke and ash drifting higher still than even the summit as he surveyed all.

“Terra Concordia.” He proclaimed, before allowing himself a moment of relieved humanity. “At last.”
[hr]
Credit: [@MarshalSolgriev][@Lauder][@Ezekiel][@Grimely][@Bright_Ops][@Oraculum][@One Health Hiro][@Ogden]