Oraculum

From Ashes We Rise : A New Dawn. A Warhammer 40,000 Alternate Timeline RP

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Elysian Warp Gate
Sol System
Segmentum Solar

The stars were distant points of light in the blackness of the void. Around the ridged flanks of the silently gliding ship, around its spiny turrets and heavy ventral blocks, the darkness seemed welcoming, like the arms of a long-lost mother spreading out to embrace her wayward children after many years apart.

Yet these sons of the cold night were not returning home. Perhaps, in their nomads’ hearts, they suspected that the vast and trackless outer dark had always been their ancestral land, and only a brief and cruel jest of life had let them and their many fallen brothers be born on a blasted and hallowed rock. Perhaps their eagerness was not merely that of young conquerors rearing to wet their blades, but something deeper and less understood. Be that as it may, in that hour none of them felt that they were coming back to something, but rather foraying out, issuing forth from a too-long closed gate at the order of their master.

The Ninth Legion was riding to war.

Ahead of their small yet redoubtable expeditionary fleet, the battle barge Mortifex swept majestically towards the ominous roil of the Elysian Gate, its flanks bearing the same numeral that marked every Reviled’s pauldron. Long and angular, it was a sword thrust out into the galaxy, not gleaming gold like the Master of Mankind’s own destrier, but dark like the dread of starless nights. At its sides came the flock of its sister-ships, cruisers and destroyers that carried reserve complements of Astartes. Umbra Ferox, Silent Blade, Achaeron were their names, and many others of suchlike grim portent. In their wake, like scavengers, trailed clumsy transports, supply hulks, forge-ships, all that had been judged necessary to make war for long decades.

Poised on the edge of material space, the dark ships prepared to cross into the truly unknown.

---

A dense penumbra hung over the strategium of the Mortifex, sparsely pierced by the electric shimmer of devices and the spectral haze of the central hololith. For perhaps the first time since their inception, the Reviled had a new, gleaming and polished space all to themselves, rather than rusty and cavernous landships, bloodstained transports or dirty and ragged tents, but the sight of it must have been uncongenial to them. The same murky pall that filled the halls and corridors of all their vessels covered even its best and greatest as they stood by the edge of the command podium, resting their hands on the smooth iron bar of the guardrail. No other soul breathed in the chamber, for the Legion’s command had anomalously set up in a separate place from the bridge proper, connected to them only by vox relay.

It was a risky luxury, but the warriors of the Ninth ill suffered the company of the unaugmented. They did not suffer the affliction of their lineage and were forever outsiders to the brotherhood.

Of the necessities of the Great Crusade, sharing their habitations with those not of the blood was the only one that truly galled the sons of the ice wastes. Still, they would endure.

But this sufferance was not at present demanded of the Legion Master and his two faithful hands. Time and many past battles had left their mark on them, but yet they seemed inexhaustible. Here was Osorin Skorr, ever the elder brother to all. Though his rank was the most exalted and his call of victories among the longest, he wore no trophies on his person, no ornaments save the marks of station and the eagle’s plume upon his helmet, which seemed to shine even now that it had so little light to reflect. The only plunder he allowed himself to bear was purely functional, and hung now at his belt in the stead of his old chainblade - a long power sword with a recurve tip, taken from the bloody hand of one of Kalagann’s last knez. Even the traces of execration, which insidiously sapped his forces, were hidden, with mechanical organs fashioned by the adepts of Mars to replace his failing ones invisibly beneath his plate.

Here was Tevr Nyrid, the first blade. The years had left more visible marks on him, and on his left side both the arm and the leg below the knee were skeletal black iron. Of the three, he was the most restless. The polished skull that lay over his helmet had long not been renewed, and like with all the most dedicated fighters of the legion, the wait before the beginning of the Crusade had been agony as he felt the apex of his skill slip away day by day in pointless inaction. He was old enough to even fear that he might succumb to the inner rot before he saw battle again, and the word to muster had been an immeasurable relief. He, too, had taken up a new weapon since the last days of Unity, the silvery edge of Lunar make glimmering as a remote companion to Skorr’s feather.

Here also was Tzosh Ghaal, the imperturbable healer. He alone seemed strangely rejuvenated, difficult as it was to say under his sealed armour. His prosthetic arm was gone, as if by miracle, and no other deformities had appeared in its stead. By contrast, large opaque tanks were fastened alongside his power pack, and tubes of various sizes ran from them to several custom-made ports on his warplate. The largest snaked over his shoulder and fastened to his visor, the breathing beneath it audibly heavy and dense.

The three brothers looked up at the high armaglas observation window and the unquiet, strange-coloured fabric of the Immaterium beyond. Staring at it for too long was painful even to their transhuman eyes.

“I do not like this,” Nyrid said slowly, “Giving ourselves to the mercy of the wyrd is not something that should be done. All these warlocks we have on board, astropaths and navigators and other devilry, we can kill anytime if something in them turns ill. But when we dive into this madness, our survival will be out of our hands. It troubles me.”

“It is not so unlike a flight in a Stormbird,” offered Skorr, “There too our lives depend on our enemies’ valour and not our own.”

“The formless wyrd is like no other enemy,” Nyrid shook his head, “We may as well be crushed by an avalanche as by its coils. An accident is an ignoble end.”

Ghaal said nothing as the rift in realspace steadily grew to fill the entire window view. Then there was a shudder, and though nothing had visibly changed, all of them knew that there was nothing more to be seen anywhere around the ship. For a moment, it was as though they had many thousands of eyes, extruding at every angle from the battle barge’s hull, and witnessed the nauseating churn of unnameable colours, whose vorticous spinning was growing more restless by the moment.

But what was a moment anymore?

_{Ililgaak… Nukaalugaj…}

“Did you hear this?” Ghaal asked quietly between the heavy drafts of his respirator, cocking his tube-studded helmet to the side.

“Something, perhaps.” Skorr’s voice was careful, the quiet rasp of augmentic lungs controlled like an expectant chainsword, “You, Tevr?”

“No, I have not heard,” the blade-champion shook his deathly visor, “But some words suddenly came into my mind. I thought how it would be if someone called me little brother in the old tongue.”

“Nukaalugaj…” the Legion Master enunciated every sound of the word in the whistling language of their ancestors. He added, pensively, “But it is a strange thought. We are no one’s little brothers anymore.”

_{Uvaguk… Sagvigsuk ilaanni…}

This time, Nyrid’s skull-face snapped alert. He looked to his brothers for confirmation, and saw that Skorr rested a hand on the grip of his sword, while Ghaal was braced as if expecting an assault.

“An illusion of the wyrd!” he called out, his voice echoing strangely from the metal walls of the strategium, “It is stirring words in our minds. Look away from it!”

Skorr nodded and extended a hand towards the command panel on the edge of the hololith table, seeking the switch that would close the observation window. He moved with an odd, incongruous-looking wary focus, as if he were balancing on a tightrope above a yawning abyss rather than reaching for something less than a step away.

_{Iluitchuk… Kasungaruk ilivsik…}

Then the ship lurched.

There was no sound to herald it, no thunderous crash, not even a change in the nameless patterns that flowed outside the window. One moment the Mortifex seemed unshakable in its monolithic mass, and the next it was staggering like an ancient wooden galley on a stormy sea, pitching from side to side in oppressively total silence.

The three Astartes were almost thrown from their feet, only their sheer armoured bulk holding them upright. The guardrail crumpled and deformed in their powerful grips, sheer metal taking on the appearance of wrung cloth in a matter of moments. A dizzying and unnatural weightlessness had come over them, not the lightness of zero-gravity, but a disorientation in their own nerves, almost like a sea-sickness magnified a thousandfold so that it might stagger even their superhuman constitution.

Dropping to one knee, Skorr managed to reach the panel and lower the heavy adamantium blinders over the observation window with a flick, though he knew it was pointless. The invisible perverting power of the Warp had surely penetrated the ship. He felt a sickly force coursing through his body, a contortion of muscles bending in ways they ought not to, and was obscurely aware that he should thank his already corroded frame for giving it little purchase. Even so, he felt ill, more than he ever had since his memories of his new life began. His ruined stomach was twisting into knots, his skin constricted the flesh beneath, what bones still remained intact in him vibrated agonisingly. Only his head remained clear, and he held it tall, slowly rising back to his feet with a terrible effort.

He saw that next to him, Nyrid was doubled over, both hands crushing the guardrail as he struggled with all his strength not to succumb, and could hear the sickly rasp of his breathing. To his other side, Ghaal was on his hands and knees, fighting to remain stable closer to the ground. Several of his tubes had snapped loose from their ports, and pressurised streams of a poisonously bright green vapour were escaping from them.

Exerting all his strength to master his own movements, the Spitefather reached back to the control panel and pressed the button of alarm, then that of the shipwide intercom.

“Brother Reviled,” his voice carried through hundreds of loudspeakers and vox-nodes, strained with effort but resonant and even, “The turbulence of the wyrd is confounding us. Hold fast and keep your strength! Only death can stop us!”

This was, after all, an enemy they would have to fight with their own forces.

---

When the alarm sirens began to ring, Captain Synor Chrol had been deep in the Mortifex’ vehicle hangars. Even back on Terra, his Blade-Breakers had often taken on the role of the legion’s techno-shamans, gathering to themselves the brothers most dexterous in repairing engines, quelling their spirits and feeding their burning thirst. Thus, when the greater disposition of the expeditionary fleet had begun to form, it was only natural that they would be the ones chosen to liaise with their fellow tenders of machines among those not of the blood. Those were for the most part the armoured regiment of the Timaini Cragrunners, the cyborg soldiers who had fought alongside the Ninth against the monstrosities of Kalagann and traded rites of friendship after that glorious battle, as well as their new allies the magi of Mars. Spending so much time around outsiders might have irked some Reviled, but Chrol felt a kinship for those two peoples, who like him took the machine into themselves.

He stood in the dim light of distant lumens, deliberately kept at half-strength to only partially light the great vault, in the very middle of the hangar’s width, on the partition line between the bleak-green columns of Legion Rhinos and the teal ones of Cragrunner battle tanks. Both stretched to either side in scores, and the disembarkation order of such a mighty force was a fine balance he had been grappling with since they had set sail for the Elysian Gate.

At his side were a squad of his veterans, the jangling panoply of shattered enemy weapons upon their armour only a little less imposing than his own. Aiding him across the aisle were the Timaini Commander Sandar-Naiman with his own staff, in their pale blue rubbery bodysuits with tapering masks and dark visors, and Magos Inrech Ferriak, his massive form draped in the black and crimson robes of the Mondus Gamma forge temple.

“The fourth columns should be moving around the perimeter while-” Sandar-Naiman was saying, keeping a concealed eye on the bulging cyst of the integrated data-node on his left forearm, before the mournful whine of the alarm had cut him off. In a moment, angry red light lit up in the dusky space above them like distant bonfires.

Chrol heard the Spitefather say something over the vox network, but crackling interference swallowed half the words. He glanced interrogatively at Ferriak, who shrugged with three pairs of arms.

“Problematic Warp translation,” was all the magos managed to blurt out in his cavernous voice before the ship quaked.

It was not a mere shuddering vibration, nor a listing of the great vessel to one side, for such notions had little meaning in the void. Rather, it was as though the metallic floor under their feet had momentarily turned fluid and rippled, raising them up and immediately pulling them down again. Chrol reflexively sent out a neural command to engage the magnetic clamps in the soles of his boots, but to his surprise he found that it gave him no more stability, the sensation of being tossed around by waves still coursing through his bones.

He fell to one knee with a rattle of trophies, his veteran squad collapsing after him. Astonishingly, the Cragrunners appeared far less dramatically struck, with only a few having lost their footing and the others stumbling as if dazed. Ferriak, braced on his four thick, arachnoid pistoned legs, was almost unaffected, looking at the others with confusion writ on the few organic scraps of his face.

“Captain, do you hear them?” rasped Ulgar, the youngest of his squad, “These voices…”

Chrol shook his head. He did not hear any voices, indeed he could barely hear his brother close by. He focused on the parts of himself he felt as the firmest, those melded with the power of the machine - his hands, the joints of his legs, the innards of his chest. Forcing his lips into obedience, he whispered an incantation to the spirits of iron, calling on them to lend him their might. Slowly, painstakingly, the cogs of his joints ground to renewed life. Though an impossible nausea he ought not have been feeling weighed him down, he rose, standing stiff upon hardened metal.

With another effort, he forced himself to look around. The vehicles were still aligned in their columns, and relief filled him as he saw that each of them had not budged by a millimeter from where it was fastened to the hangar floor. Then his eye fell on Ulgar, and he froze with an emotion he had not felt in a long time. Not fear, for he knew none, but the revulsion for unnatural things,  known to all those who had fought in Nordyc and Ursh.

The younger legionnaire had cast off his helmet and looked up at Chrol from his knees. His face was wasting from within, diminishing with astonishing speed. It was as though Chrol saw a time-lapsed sequence of degeneration play out, but there was no artificial acceleration in his sight. Flesh and muscle under Ulgar's skin withered and seemed to evaporate. His right eye followed suit, shrivelling like that of a dried corpse and vanishing in a wisp of greasy smoke. Scars swelled up where there had been none. Within scant seconds, the Astartes’ face was reduced to a hideous rictus mask.

“The voices… They are the malediction,” he choked out, and Chrol thought that he was looking into the face of death itself.

---

Maggak stumbled along the corridor, gripping the wall to steady himself. Wherever his fingers touched, oozing stains of thick dark rot were left on the metal. The pain that shot through his hand at every contact did not bother him. It was the wet, sucking sensation he felt every time he leaned on it and pushed forward, as though he were plunging his palm into a swamp, and the knowledge that this marshy filth was nothing but the decomposing fabric of his own body. He would gladly have gone without this, but his feet were so damnably unsteady. The floor beneath him jumped like an ice-crawler rolling over rocky ground, and he swore he could feel his bones slipping around his body as they were jarred out of place.

He was not alone in his obstinate crawling advance. Many warriors were forging onward ahead and behind him, a haphazard jumble of insignas and trophy patterns from many different companies. Some were Bone Walkers like him, but along the way they had been joined by legionnaires from the Excoriators, the Blood Mark, the Hecatombion and almost every other brotherhood on board the Mortifex. He saw a few Astartes in jagged off-white armour in a design he did not recognise, and disgust filled him as he realised that it was not battle-plate at all. These were afflicted whose stigmata had been inflamed by the wyrd beyond anything he had ever seen, their misshapen growths of bone sprouting like plates over their skin and imprisoning them in a carapace of their own tissue. They staggered forward unsteadily, and Maggak winced, knowing that the pain he felt was nothing compared to the torment of his plagued brothers.

Compared to them, he was lucky, though the invisible radiation of this evil dimension was scourging his body hideously. Wounds had opened on their own all over his body, skin parting as if sliced and torn, and immediately turned necrotic, suppurating pus and the sticky sludge of decomposition. He felt the interior of his armour slick with corruption and spit out the foulness that clogged his throat. The floor of the corridor was slick and reeking, as many of the Reviled retched and vomited thick black bile, spewing it through the grilles of their helmets when they were not fast enough to remove them. Most of them were covered in putrid wounds like Maggak; others had been suddenly afflicted, spurs and spikes of bone growing through their flesh; others yet wore withered and skull-like countenances, as if they had aged by centuries in moments. Strangely, he noted, few of them had already been blighted enough to wear limbs or organs of metal.

The diseased throng was pushing into a narrow hall at the meeting point of two curving corridors, both of which were clogged with advancing Reviled. There, a third passage led into the sanctum of the Navigator. The reasoning that drove the crowd was hasty and simple: if the hoary mutant was the one who had taken them into the realm of the wyrd, killing him would return the ship to material space and end this unnatural epidemic.

Heavy reinforced doors had slid closed to bar that threshold now. With so many savage fighters before them, even unarmed, they would normally not have held for long. But each of the legionnaires was debilitated, unable to stand firmly upon a surface that shifted in defiance of every other sense.

They moved like the waves, the massed scores of them leaning first back, then pitching forward, slamming into the door like a battering ram. Maggak limped into the packed hallway and found himself swept into this oscillating rhythm. Back. Forward. Crash.

Amid the pain and delirium, he felt himself move in perfect unison with his brothers, many and multifariously wracked bodies with a single invincible will, and his ruined lips smiled.

---

Ymorag closed his eyes, shutting away the sight of the chamber. Its walls and corners seemed to churn and swim as if he were submerged in troubled water, and the disorientation was distracting him from his purpose. From the moment he had heard Skorr’s warning over the intercom, he had understood there was a danger on the battle barge that only he could avert, and it was a task which would take all of his focus.

Blindly, but with the ease of long practice, he removed the gauntlet from his left hand. With the right he drew the combat knife of the legion, wrought in a design peculiar to the Ninth - an elongated blade, curving in a fashion reminiscent of a falcata. In the hands of a lesser human, it could indeed have served as a veritable sword. It was a pattern useful for many things, be it killing, scraping bone, flensing skin, cutting open entrails.

The Captain of the Harrowers pressed the tip of the knife to that of his left index finger and drew it in a shallow cut.

In the days of the Unification Wars, most of the Ninth Legion’s recruits had been drawn from the Dronemaw tribe of the Antarctic ice desert, a large and prosperous willing vassal of the Emperor. Not so Ymorag. He was one of the last sons of an ancient and fading tribe, which had at one point been tributary of the Dronemaw, but whose bloodlines had vanished altogether during his own lifetime, definitively mingling with those of their overlords. The tribe’s name was forgotten, but its traditions had borne a wealth of old wisdom from the dark age, which even as a youth he had learned avidly and committed to memory.

Tevr Nyrid had been teaching him the rites and practices that would keep the spirit of the legion alive, but Ymorag knew certain things that even his mentor did not.

With the blood dripping from his finger, he began to trace a line of symbols across his spiked breastplate, renewing the cut when his Larraman cells hastened to scab it over. The iterators of the New Truth would have scowled at what he was doing, but this knowledge had protected his ancestors from the perils of sorcery through long and dark years, and he knew for certain that it would help him now.

Once the line was complete, he let his finger clot, and began to breathe deeply. There would be no immediate relief. While he was assured that the talismanic symbols would shield him from the deadly currents of the wyrd, like in all things much would also depend on his own strength of will. He inhaled, held in his breath for a precisely measured moment and exhaled, letting the rhythm of his body lull him into a meditative quiet. Nausea and the taste of rot mounted in his throat, but he paid them no mind, directing his full concentration upon the act of drawing in fresh air. Little by little, the bilious knot receded, and when he was entirely confident in his mastery over himself, he opened his eyes.

His chamber was as it ought to have been, an austere cube of metallic walls hung with grim trophies and crude tribal amulets. An extinguished brazier stood on a low stone block in the centre. Two Astartes of his company, Irayar and Tugalik, stood by the door across from him. They were still struggling through the rite he had just performed, the lines of bloody sigils across their chests incomplete. Ymorag crossed over in a few cautious steps and aided them in drawing the signs of warding, giving them a moment to focus their breath afterwards.

“Come, we must see to him,” he spoke, and without a word they followed him through the door.

Beyond was a narrower, bare room, in some eerie ways similar to a cell. There, seated cross-legged on the ground in a plain robe, was Nuvor, the Reviled twice-cursed - once with the affliction that was common to them all, and twice with the touch of the psychic.

On Terra, Nuvor had fought alongside a fellow psyker, Esargon of the Eighteenth Legion, and the advice of his cousin had done much to strengthen his fraying mind. It was plain, however, that now this tempered resolve was all that kept him from a horrifying collapse. The muscles of his ashen-pale face were painfully drawn, his skin slick with sweat, and a terrible corpse-green glow burned in his eyes.

He raised his face, and Ymorag’s hand unwillingly gripped his knife, as if expecting his brother to transform into something horrible at any moment.

“See it…” Nuvor spat out, every word a herculean struggle, “Cannot… Hold…”

His eyes rolled back in his head, their whites veined with sickly colour, and his lips twitched. He tried to clench his teeth, but his mouth seemed to move despite himself, as if raving in the grip of a fever.

“Kasangaruk…” he spat in the old tongue, “Ilivsik..”

Then epileptic shivers began to shake his body, and as bloody froth dripped from the corners of his mouth, he began to speak in a language none of them had ever heard.

“A curse!” snapped Tugalik, “If he finishes it, we are all dead!”

The two legionnaires sprang forward and heaved up Nuvor’s spasming body. Tugalik closed a gauntleted hand around his jaw, which continued to grind and shake despite the steel grip restraining it.

“The wyrd is consuming him,” Ymorag spoke in a firm voice, “There is only one way we can stop this. When a witch-child was born to the tribes, before casting it out our ancestors carried out the Silencing.”

Nuvor stiffened at the words, and the Captain laid a hand on his shoulder.

“You are not a mere witch-worm, brother. You will still fight with us.”

Despite the tremors coursing through him, the psyker managed a nod that almost looked solemn. Ymorag turned and stepped back into his own chamber, the two Harrowers half-supporting, half-dragging Nuvor along behind him.

The Captain cast a splash of prometheum into the brazier and lit it with a gout from an ornate hand flamer that rested on two iron hooks at the stone pediment's side. The fire leapt high with a crackle and immediately began a strange and hypnotic dance despite the stillness of the air. Ymorag thought he saw faces of the dead leering at him among the flames, but he looked away from them, holding the blade of his knife over their lapping tongues.

Once he felt that the metal was incandescent, he motioned for his warriors to approach with their charge. Nuvor had regained some control over his body in presence of the fire, no doubt remembering the words of his pyromancer battle-brother with new force, and stepped up almost on his own, standing fast as the red-hot knife was raised to his face.

“May your eyes be dark and the endless night your home,” Ymorag intoned, and thrust the blade into Nuvor’s eye-socket, deftly cutting away the eyeball and plucking it out. A groan rose from the psyker’s clenched lips at the terrible pain, but he did not flinch, not even when his second eye was blinded in the same manner.

“May your tongue be stilled and silence your dominion,” the Captain continued. Tugalik held the psyker’s jaw open, and Irayar stretched out his tongue. With a stroke, Ymorag severed it, the searing metal cauterising the wound even as it cut.

He cast the eyes and tongue into the fire and spoke the final formula, “May your spirit fold upon itself like strongest steel, driving all evil from you.”

The three Harrowers staggered as their own sight was suddenly snatched from the physical confines of the chamber and somewhere else, somewhere that was in no place. It seemed to them that they stood in a great cavern, dimly lit by phosphorescent growths, coarse and damp stone underfoot. Tunnels branched out in every direction, some large, some narrow, some high up out of reach. They heard Nuvor’s breathing, and knew that they saw what he now saw in his darkened mind. They felt another presence as well, lurking out of sight - something vast, dark and terrible, but which their hearts somehow knew was also benevolent and guiding. The sensation filled them with a bitter, longing ache, and the vision faded.

They stood once more in the chamber onboard the battle barge. The fire had gone out. Nuvor was kneeling before them, and despite his mutilation, his features had a firm, determined cast whose like the Captain had not seen in years. A new inner strength was building in the psyker, and even the poisonous breath of the wyrd seemed to recede before it.

Ymorag cut a long slice in his left palm with the cooled knife and rested it on Nuvor’s forehead, crimson rivulets running down his skin and dripping into his hollow sockets.

“You shall be Tuk-Nayag, the Dream Eater,” Ymorag spoke, and his warriors smote their chests in salute, “May our enemies’ fear be your sustenance.”

---

???
Ultima Segmentum

When the expeditionary fleet emerged into the Materium, it seemed to those on board that no time had passed, or rather an indefinable length of it. Chrono-pieces on the ships had been unsettled by the violent translation, but none showed that more than two weeks had elapsed. It was as though the battlegroup had collectively stepped out from a period of feverish nescience, where days and hours had blended together, and steadily found its footing in the world of the real once again.

Almost miraculously, no ships had been lost, the route through the warp gate a solid one despite the harrowing journey. Even more astonishingly, not a single one of the Ninth's Astartes had perished. Some were crippled by the stigmata that had so suddenly manifested, but not irretrievably, and indeed many saw their wounds quickly fade once they had returned to realspace, as though they had been nothing but the fruit of nightmare. There had however been a number of deaths among the naval crews and menials, some trampled by the Reviled in the disorder, others found already rigid by their fellows, masks of lethal fright frozen on their faces. It was weeks before the fleet's Navigator dared step out from his sanctum, but for the time his services were not needed.

Ahead, just within reach, a stellar system gleamed brightly against the sable cloak of the void. Already, remote auspex sweeps were returning signs of habitation, light orbital devices, trails of interplanetary traversal. Prey.

The Reviled had grappled with the perils of the Warp and come out victorious. Now, new foes awaited the bite of their blades.

From Ashes We Rise: Chronicles

Remnants

Last days of the Unification Wars
Former Pan-Pacific territory, undisclosed site

---

There was nothing remarkable about the building. Not from the outside. It was a broad, squat fortified thing of stark rockcrete, one among millions of bunkers that had sprung up across the face of Terra like a plague of sterile grey fungi as her inhabitants sought the protection of durable walls against the madness without. Nothing greatly differentiated this particular fastness from the innumerable others that the Exercitus Imperialis had taken by storm during the conquest of the Pan-Pacific Empire: not its flat roof resting upon blocky walls, not the narrow windows, better suited for gun barrels than human eyes, not even the wide entryway that now stood open, a black gaping pit like a sepulchral maw, after its doors had been blasted away, leaving dark scorch-marks around its frame. The only slightly unusual feature about this facility were the outer walls, an additional layer of defense crowned with barbed wire, and the utilitarian white symbols painted around their gates. The universal signs for “contamination” and “lethal danger” loomed large among the Pacifican script.

These days, most things on Terra were exactly what they seemed. There was little purpose in embellishments that might be marred the day after, and few could afford even the luxury of deception. Thus, a fortress was always no more nor less than a fortress, an army was an army, and what was dead was certain to have been reduced to that state with uncompromising ferocity. Something that concealed a hidden truth was an ill omen. It meant that either the wyrd was at work, or perhaps something yet worse.

For this reason and others, Sharpshooter Bartok did not like hidden truths. In the life of a man at arms, the unexpected and the unknown always meant danger, and danger was a step away from death. So it had been with this place. At a glance, it looked precisely like an empty, hollowed-out bunker, scoured of all resistance. Something to mark on the map and move on to the next straightforward, clearly defined objective. Nothing to worry about anymore.

But empty bunkers did not swallow half a company whole.

“Still nothing?” Bartok turned to the trooper crouching by the field voxcaptor set on the ground. They had struck a tentative camp in the front part of the courtyard, between the breached outer gates and the eerie abyss of the facility door. None of the company’s roughly hundred surviving men liked this arrangement. Even the sentinels by the outer wall were on edge, shuffling nervously at their posts in their dark green longcoats. They still had it better than the teams watching the door, who huddled miserably behind a makeshift barricade of rubble, surmounted by emplaced heavy stubbers and sentry guns in case something other than the missing platoons came out.

The vox-man, a swarthy fellow from somewhere near the Xeric borders named Marhej, shook his head. The receiver machine continued to crackle uselessly. It was both a torment and a relief. Neither of them truly hoped or even wished to hear anything else after that last message, but a new sound, whatever it might be, could at least displace the echoes still ringing in their minds after two hours.

Gunfire. Screams, screams that did not even sound human. Something crashing, tearing, breaking. A voice, unrecognisably distorted by pain and terror, shrieking into the vox. “Bomb it! Bomb this place! Blow it all to fra-!”

That had been the last any of them had heard of the first platoon.

Bartok spat on the ground and looked away from the door. He should have known it would turn out badly. The assignment had already started with a hidden truth. Despite its appearance, the place they had been sent to capture was known to be no mere fortified holdout, though neither was it clear what exactly it was. Some sort of gene-lab, the commanders said. A valuable thing, to be taken as intact as possible. That had not seemed so bad at first. With the Pacifican genewarriors long since annihilated on the frontlines, it was unlikely any would be left to guard the facility. When they had crossed the gates, Bartok had been glad to not be in the units assigned to clear out the place. Sweeping up some lethargic guards and cowering geneweavers was going to be dull work. Now, beneath the dread and anguished uncertainty, he was even gladder.

At least it was certain no more of them would be going in again. Their side’s own genecrafted elite was arriving, the Master of the Lines’ own terrors to fight those of the devouring unknown. While their coming had been a relief, Bartok still did not quite like just how well those words applied to the first of the Astartes to arrive. He had heard awestruck tales from those who had fought on the frontlines alongside the striking Legions clad in bronze and black, in yellow or unvarnished grey. These newcomers, in their drab green battleplate, were nothing of the sort.

Even as far as they were now, in a far corner of the courtyard, it was clear they were an uneven lot. There was no uniformity to their postures or even sizes. Some were of the towering stature expected of a genewarrior, others much larger yet, broad and immense, heavy and lumbering of step. Several stood hunched, limbs perpetually bent and leaning forward like upright birds of prey. Most of them wore great cloaks of cheap industrial cloth, ragged and filthy, to conceal their forms, but now and then their movements revealed unwelcome glimpses of what lay beneath. Metal crudely melded to inflamed flesh. Engorged, cancerously swollen folds of muscle under cracking skin. Spurs and protrusions of what looked like exposed bone. Bartok suspected his comrades were just as uneasy about the presence of these uncanny giants as they were about the facility; he certainly was. This entire war was supposed to cleanse the world of monsters, not create more of them. He spat again and looked away.

Fortunately, they would not be left alone with their silent company much longer.

Indeed, they were joined by the troops of the Fifth, now fashionable late. They were clad in quite variant colours, the result of them all having adapted camouflages for different scenarios. However there likely wouldn’t be any need for such herein, and thus they hadn’t bothered to refresh their paintjobs. 

They were split into two groups. One was clearly the ‘heavy’ team for lack of a better term. They wore power armour with field modifications like extra plates of plasteel or ceramite welded on, in particular on the front while being armed with weapons suited for the most violent of combat within the laboratory. Additional flashlights would complement rotor cannons, grenade launchers, melta guns, flamers, shotguns and different shields. The second team were their opposite. Wearing skintight mesh armour, they carried long monoblades, and more sleek firearms with large muzzle devices. As a conscious effort, the Fifth tended to recruit shorter individuals where possible, a fact when compounded with their geneseed not making the Marines bearing it as tall as other Legions let these fellows be just about believable as mere mortal humans, if perhaps afflicted with acromegaly. These were meant to provide a softer touch, akin to more traditional mortal special forces.

Separate, would be the leadership. The Fifth had little in the way of leading from the front. Still, they were cognizant that they needed to take advantage of the fact they were Astartes. Thus the command squad would look as ordinary as Space Marines could, bearing a boltgun each. 

It would be them that approached the elements of the Nine, raising a hand in greeting. Once closer, it would be clear that three of the five in the command squad were Apothecaries. They looked upon the Ninth with a mixture of pity as if towards an injured orphan child, and curiosity as if looking at an already rare flower with a new and interesting mutation of colour. “Are you ready, comrades?” One would ask.

Their counterparts had already begun to turn and approach, some more ponderously than others where they were weighed down by their own overgrown bodies. From the front, their makeshift shrouds revealed more of the malformations beneath. Most wore sparse and haphazard pieces of armour, plates of outgrown bone or bloated proportions distorting them so severely as to make full suits impractical. The helmets of those who still wore them had their grilles removed, leaving what remained of their faces bare below the visors - unfleshed rictus snarls of withered mandibles, or wide mouths propped open by their own forests of long sharp teeth. Their armaments, however, were undiminished - the folds of the cloaks bristled with chainblades, flamer tubes, muzzles of bolter and volkite alike. The larger mutates even bore heavy culverins and autocannons in their oversized hands.

The group that came forward to meet the Fifth, however, was untouched by this grotesquerie. Fully covered in grey-green powered plate, they were as unremarkable as any Astartes squad besides for the number of mechanical replacement limbs, each body welded to at least one. Several among them likewise wore familiar tools, the narthecia and bone-saws of the apothecarion.

“Ready and eager,” the foremost of the Ninth, one of the bearers of medical tools, replied in a grave voice. Evidently he was the one that had been designated as the detachment’s leader in the preliminary data transmissions - one Tzosh Ghaal, curiously with no formal rank except an odd primus medicae. “It will be well to fight along our twice fellows, in rebirth and calling both.”

A chuckle came from the one that had spoken to the Ninth, the Apothecary Arvo briefly pointing out his counterpart as the Fifth shared glances. “A good attitude, comrade.” Though obviously ugly things, perhaps the Ninth were more similar to the Undying Onslaught than the much more aesthetically pleasing Legions. Still, they wouldn’t deign to call them brother or cousin, finding the term objectionable despite any similarities. 

They wouldn’t wait any longer, and started heading towards the entrance as they kept speaking. “We trust you have reviewed the footage and records from the army units previously wiped out? We had hoped to at least in part trace them up until their failing points.” 

“For as much as we have,” Ghaal gestured to the gaping darkness of the doorway with his good hand. His brothers slowly began to rise from their places and file after him towards the building, damp cloaks raggedly hanging about them. Their movements were no less ungainly than the features that could be glimpsed among the drooping folds, each echoing their particular sorts of malformation. The larger ones trudged heavily, more similar to stiff-limbed automaton walkers than anything human. The others loped in a hunched, furtive way, bent low by crooked spines and unstraightening joints. Wretched as the sight may have been, there was something predatory in these shambling figures, an air of tense aggression ready to spring forth from their distorted limbs.

"The truth is that we have little to guide us," Ghaal was saying, "No plans of this place have been found. The Army only had a rough map of the first three floors and a record of their vox transmissions to give us."

He glanced towards the soldiers at the listening post, who were nervously avoiding to look at the Astartes for more than a few moments.

"We can at least triangulate the movements of the first groups and where contact stopped," the Primus Medicae continued, "But we will have to scout for ourselves. Are enough of your brothers skilled in the duty?"

Arvo tilted his head this way and that, as if within it were weights being balanced until finally reaching an equilibrium within which he could confidently speak to his counterpart. “Yes, we do. However, from what we have reviewed, at least the initial entry doesn’t merit scouting. Well, beyond scouting-by-fire.” As if to punctuate this, one of the Fifth’s warriors in his improvised heavy armour spun the barrels of his rotor cannon by hand.

“Once we progress past the point that the Army did, we hope there will be confines that our lighter warriors can scout within. But until then, we expect them to follow behind.”

The space beyond the ominous maw of the blasted doorway was indeed not only well-known, but almost unthreatening in its ruinous silence. A wide unadorned corridor, now thinly carpeted with dust and debris from the breach, ran directly from the entrance into the depths of the building, soon becoming lost to the sight of anyone not equipped with some form of night vision. Eerie as it appeared in the feeble patches of light that filtered down from the grey sky, it was also almost disappointingly banal. Nothing about the entryway set it apart from a hundred other fortified facilities that had been breached during the conquest of the Empire. Dimly glimpsed doors lined bare walls, showing fragments of unadorned, regularly-spaced rooms within. Despite the open entrance, the air stank of dust and metal.

Nothing remarkable, and yet a company was gone.

Drops of murky rain began to fall from the darkening sky. They passed through.

The first floor had evidently been the administrative part of the complex as well as its outermost watchstation. Those of the rooms that had not been emptied held little but worn metallic desks, simple data-nodes wiped empty or outright broken and the occasional hololith. What little physical documentation remained was reduced to formless shreds tossed into corners. There were no signs of life throughout.

Strangely enough, the bulk of the internal defensive emplacements were not concentrated by the entrance. While most had been removed by the first Army squads, even at full condition they would have paled before what was arrayed before the access to the lower floors. Heavy, double-layered metal vault doors stood open at the far end of the large arterial corridor, under the silent watch of deactivated sentry guns fixed to the floor and walls. A simple control station was in the closest room, its observation hololith rendered inoperable. The stairwell leading down was sparsely lit by electric bands, most of them dark and shattered. Rising from below was a faint reek of antiseptic and, perceptible only to Astartes senses, the iron tang of spilled blood. Silence reigned.

The Astartes of the Fifth looked between each other, and then at their hideous comrades. “Proceed.” One of the Undying Onslaught spoke, his word bearing a strange music to it, as if it could be interpreted as an order, or a polite request, or a suggestion by the Ninth. The warriors of the Fifth moved carefully, a constant hum of their rotor cannons and the soft spin of active but not in-use chainblades as a sort of theme to their movement. In a way that might be alien to the Ninth, the Undying Onslaught would speak very swiftly, using short-hands to relay every single piece of information they came upon; descriptions of doorways, messes on tables, the slightest details would be spoken of over their vox networks such that in real time an almost perfect recreation of the scene was being made just a few hundred meters away by fellow legionnaires in the event that this foray also failed in the same way that the mortals had. 

Despite the curious glances they occasionally threw at their counterparts and their flurry of action, the legionnaires of the Ninth had remained mostly silent until then. The less misshapen among them called out now and again, signaling a room or piece of furniture, but their words were clipped and almost reluctant in contrast to the Fifth’s brisk efficiency. Nevertheless, they did not lack in vigor, prowling ahead in the dim corridors more deftly than their malformed limbs would have suggested. Two among the bloated-bodied giants took point at the stairway while the medicae behind them nodded to their compatriots, and the metallic steps groaned under huge armoured feet.

The opening to the staircase below mirrored the one on the ground floor, similarly barricaded and reinforced with now inert turrets, with the sole difference that the defenses faced in the opposite direction. A small access zone, reminiscent of an airlock, led into another central corridor, though this one bifurcated some way past the middle of its parallel. The doors in its sides were fewer and markedly wider.

Here the Astartes saw the first signs of the exploration force that had preceded them. A dozen bodies in the dark green of the Exercitus regiment guarding the facility were laid by the reinforced door. Their comrades had evidently planned to carry them on the way out when they returned, but never been afforded that opportunity. The dead bore wounds from bladed weapons, a few with the cauterised edge of a power field, but mostly simple slashes and gouges. Further along the corridor were the remains of some of the culprits. Muscular bodies in dark bodysuits, the sort that the infamous Pan-Pacific commandos wore underneath their armour. These few fallen were not as large as the dreaded stealth warriors, however, and some had oddly bulging, asymmetrical muscular masses. Like their equipment, their augmentation seemed to have been incomplete.

Behind the doors on this floor were far simpler, yet denser sights than on the floor above. Each led to a large hall, necessarily low but very ample, filled with rows of metal tables. The size and shape of these surfaces, which would have been at home in an operational room, left little to the imagination, but even inference was unnecessary. A few of them still held bodies covered with rough cloth, mouldering after days of neglect. The smell of antiseptic hung in the air.

“They received a fresh batch recently,” one of the Ninth Legion’s medicae remarked, glancing at a printed schedule pinned to the wall in the first chamber.

Following their comrades, the Fifth examined the place. They came to similar conclusions, but knew a few things that they had to do. Warriors would walk up to corpses, taking pictures of the fallen to be identified, before a boot would carefully be brought down a few times on each dead man to be absolutely certain that the dead wouldn’t get up behind them and shoot them in the back. The Apothecaries got to examining the dead for anything else they could learn from the corpses, while yet others of their formation got to further work. They put large vox-casters in points about the scene, setting up to help extend the range of their connection such that they wouldn’t lose contact when going further inside. Others would go about a third task, carefully placing mines about the place. Adding themselves and their comrades to the IFFs of the proximity charges lest they end up running for their lives from the scene, while also relaying their exact locations back to their comrades on the outside. 

“A grim business!” Arvo remarked, crushing the last of the dead. Perhaps it was unnecessary, but even slim and seemingly nonexistent risks had to be removed. But, most interesting to the natural lust for knowledge of the Fifth was the information still herein. They would look over the collected information of the surgeon’s tables. What could possibly be so important, so scientifically fascinating that they had such thorough and layered protections for their findings? But, even that was not all. Some would begin placing charges about the place for its eventual demolition from within. While yet others would go to find points of egress, ways that they could be flanked, poring over every wall to make sure it wasn’t a path of ambush. 

“We may see worse yet,” nodded Ghaal as he motioned to his cohorts. Unlike their brethren, the Ninth had no supplementary materiel to bring to bear, but the wealth of their supplies was measured in living flesh. At their leader’s command, two of the less disfigured legionnaires remained standing by the stairway access, while four more took position to watch over the newly placed vox units. The remainder had joined the search for hidden passages and documentation, however even the united effort of the two legions yielded tantalizingly little. A number of the tables bore cryptic labels with what seemed to be chemical dosages not unfamiliar to the medically trained - steroid cocktails, hormone stimulants, stabilizing salves of the sort used after implantation surgeries. Along with the dead commandos, it was evidence enough that this had been one of Narthan Dume’s genehancement facilities, but nothing thus far explained the abnormally heavy defenses.

Yet it was certain that nothing had been removed from the complex before the Army had surrounded it. Whatever answers it held awaited in its depths.

The Apothecary laughed. “And inflict twice as much I am sure!” The Fifth would be cordial to the Ninth to their face, and would never make mention of the disfigurement. But in private the fact they were malformed creatures wouldn’t be said merely because there was total concurrence. However, that just made them all the more pleasantly impressed at even the slightest bit of wittiness as such from them. They expected them to be… well, inarticulate, if simply because even the most cosmopolitan and open minded of people wouldn’t be willing to look past those visages. Thus them being more developed than a toddler in speech was already grand.

A partition in the corridor covered the way to the next downward staircase, evidently intended to regulate the flow of bodies coming up from below, but too flimsy to withstand the augmented strength of space marines. More alarming was the darkness - the phosphor-tubes along the walls and ceiling had been blown out, and only a few stablights placed by the first expedition cast sparse patches of illumination on bare grey surfaces. While it was little obstacle to transhuman senses, the poor lighting was a sign that something was amiss below.

Very slowly, the Fifth would at least temporarily lead the way. Rotor-cannon barrels were spinning as fast as they could be now, ready to turn organic matter into goo with a stream of bullets. Rather than the proud march one might expect of Astartes, they seemed more like nervous humans taking half-steps. In some sense, that was because that was exactly what they (or at least, some of them) were, the veterans in their ranks far more eager to indulge in human self-preservation instincts than the bravado having youth of their Legion and others. All the while, one of them also walked with an exceptionally large auspec device, one sized more for artillery systems than infantry for indeed it was torn off of a captured self propelled gun. Still, the Fifth were absolutely confident it would come in useful, the one carrying the device on his back having his eyes flick side to side frantically on his heads-up-display; if anything was hidden away, they were sure this big dish would sense it. Then again, a place this dense with esoteric (often archaeotech) devices might manage to avoid it through strange means. “We should consume the minds of the dead below.” One of the Marines hissed, turning his whirring gun this way and that in anticipation of attack. 

“A sound thought,” Ghaal agreed in a low rasp with almost disconcerting facility, and motioned for the contingent of the Ninth to follow after their legion-brothers. With their lumbering, prowling gait and disproportionate weaponry, it seemed a wonder that none of them had yet tripped or crashed into their fellows, but the ravages of their bodies had not wholly withered the inhuman grace that was the Astartes’ gift. They made for an unsightly procession as they filed down the corridor, yet an orderly one nonetheless. It could not have escaped the most observant of the Fifth, however, that their medicae brethren had thus far acted as ambassadors as much as guides for the afflicted lot.

The descent to the second sublevel was made more laborious by the force’s alert pace, the doubled-up stairway an uncomfortable bottleneck halfway sunken in darkness, but other than the fading light nothing impeded the Astartes’ progress. The ominous signs, however, continued to mount. As they stepped down, a deathly reek rose to meet them. Previously muffled by the antiseptic smell that pervaded the floor above, the scent of a fresh slaughter now struck their enhanced senses with intimations of spilled blood and opened bowels. Fortunately, the sickly sweet notes of decay were still thin and weak, kept at bay by the sterile air of the facility. Most aggravating of this foetor was that it cast a pall over any other scents, too rich for even the neuroglottis to parse.

Such stench was a fitting harbinger for what the group’s enhanced eyes saw in the penumbra once they had reached the lower floor. In a great hallway, almost as wide as the entire first level, the Imperial Army’s expedition had met its end. A mire of blood and dismembered bodies covered the ground, scraps of uniforms and battered weapons strewn about it like stones in a morass. Accounting for the casualties they had encountered earlier, there ought to have been little less than a hundred bodies here, but such was the ruin that their number was difficult to discern. By grim fortune, a number still had almost intact heads, sufficient for the Astartes’ macabre plan.

The unit had clearly been wiped out in a brutal close-quarters engagement against a foe of rare violence even by the measure of Terra - a foe that, troublingly, was nowhere to be seen now. Even the vague sounds heard earlier had died down. Only the massive auspex carried by the Fifth’s legionnaire now caught signs of life at their height, numerous indicators of motion and heat signatures quietly drifting somewhere in the maze of side-passages they could see branching out from the landing. The improvised maps cut off at this point, however, making it impossible to pinpoint these unknown presences more precisely.

The Auspex bearer of course immediately alerted his comrades, motioning for them quietly in battle-sign to approach. Certainly the enemy would hear their presence, but it would be best to not risk alerting them to what they were saying. He pointed out the presence of the foe, whilst several of the Fifth went to very carefully isolating brains from the skulls that were their shells, a disconcerting carefulness and practiced touch to this affair as if separating long dead humans into components was second nature to them.

“There are too many to take in an assault without losses. We need to engage them, and make our return here in a fast retreat. Funnel them, rather than let them surround us in the winding hallways and passages.” It wasn’t confirmed, but the experiments were used by the Fifth’s Apothecary to not subtly imply that this foe was likely some sort of engineered monstrosity that was not a master of tactics and strategy. 

Silently, what passed for the Reviled officers signed their assent to the plan, then turned to their brothers with a sharply gestured series of instructions. A band of the mutated Astartes stepped forward to join the Fifth’s light vanguards closer ahead in the hall, towards where the shadows of the branching corridors gathered. These were not the less degenerate sort left to stand sentry earlier, or the trudging hulks with their heavy weapons, but those hunched with contorted spines, bony spurs emerging from their skin and armour. They moved surprisingly limber on their bent legs, with a long elastic gait that had something starkly ferocious to it. Their steps seemed to produce no more sound upon the metallic floor than they intended.

Meanwhile, others joined in the dissection of the mangled bodies. Unlike their more clinical counterparts, their movements were dry and jerky, less the manner of surgeons than that of tribal warriors accustomed to claiming trophies of skull and scalp. More unsettling still were those who approached to sample the gray matter. Their jaws, exposed under their half-helmets, were distended by long, recurve teeth, resembling those of some abyssal creature more than anything human. The ease with which they bit into cranial bone and scooped out the tissue underneath in a single motion almost seemed to suggest that, despite being an aberration of growth, they were formed for no other purpose than this.

What the investigators of both Legions saw, in the echoed memories of the omophagea, was stark in its premortem clarity. Past the confused remnants of the soldiers’ long-term recollections, their final moments were burned into their neurons, marred only by the emotional haze of disorientation and fear. The sublevel had met the unit with a screaming darkness that disgorged hideous shapes glimpsed in the flashing of stablights, instants which the acute minds of the Astartes wrung for every detail. Scores or hundreds of grotesque figures that had once been human, bent limbs and misshapen thoraces swollen with muscles and scabbed skin, hands deformed into something that resembled talons or organic blades, faces that were nothing but displaced eyes and teeth. There was a method to these grotesqueries the apothecaries could recognise, however, unlike the surreal mutations of the wyrd. It was as though the human features of these things had been pared down to only what was fit for violence, and then magnified outrageously.

“Well that was bloody useless.” one of the Apothecaries remarked. “But the flavour was better than that of many other mortals at least!” Arvo jested, remarking upon those in his ranks that laughed sycophantically. 

The senses were surely one such thing, for the probing advances of the vanguard teams into the mouth of the corridors, their steps calculated to emit a measured amount of noise, had stirred something. The ears of the Astartes caught a distant shuffling, low but distinct. On the auspex, the points of sound and heat multiplied, certain of the latter curiously feebler than should have been expected of vigorous bodies. Slowly, the subterranean dwellers were beginning to converge. There was little coordination to most of their groupings, driven by what was evidently an animalistic intelligence, but their visible quantity was steadily increasing.

There was not much they could do but prepare to take the foe head-on, albeit ready to retreat. Mortals were far less than Astartes. But the suffering and terror inflicted on these souls wasn’t something to be discarded as simple human weakness; these were professionals that had fallen not mere press-ganged thugs as some parts of the Imperial army were. 

As one final precaution, a gust of promethium flame was made to cover the ground. Astartes power armour and physiognomy could navigate it unharmed if they sprinted fast enough, but any man (or beast) would have his very bones turn to ash trying to cross it. Barrels of rotorcannons spun, eyes stared down reticles, and nerves tensed in preparation of horrible carnage.

They were not to be disappointed. The signatures on the auspex intensified, drew closer still, and soon they could feel the enemy approach. Charnel stench, the smell of infected wounds and exposed muscle, wound through the tang of burning fuel. Steps pattered down the dark passages, stealthy at first, but gaining in weight and numbers as the creeping approach of the enemy grew into a rushing charge, enough to overtake the crackle of chemical flame.

The first of the foe emerged into the hallway, and it became clear that the fate of the Army contingent had been sealed the moment it had penetrated the sublevel. A throng of lithe, muscular figures pushed out from the junction corridors. They were superficially human, yet distorted in a way born of the madness of Old Night. Their long, sinewy limbs had too many joints, legs curving backwards below the knee, arms stretching and bending at mesmerizingly grotesque angles. In places, their skin was split, unable to grow apace with the brutal modifications to the body, and torn wounds wept a thin, translucent pus. Some few carried combat blades and wore the remains of tattered bodysuits, but most were naked, their only weapons the long, bony talons that flexed in place of their fingers. Faces frozen in hateful grimaces of mangled jaws and too many teeth glared at the Astartes, and with a mad screech the foremost ranks sprang forward.

Despite their appearance, the wretched creatures moved with the speed and coordination of transhuman commandos. Groups of them clung to the walls, seeking to flank, while more rushed straight into the flames, heedless of pain. Where they fell, the next assailants leapt over their writhing bodies. Bolts and autocannon rounds swept them off their feet in broken heaps, but greater numbers continued to spill into the central space, which now felt claustrophobically tight. Monomolecular-edged claws reached for vulnerable spots in the legionnaires’ armour, slashing and scraping at joints and throats. Whatever the stigmata of benighted science on the grotesques’ bodies, their minds clearly knew no purpose but to kill.

Roars were bellowed by the Imperials, for even through the outright miasmic flood of firepower into the oncoming foemen many of the victims of intellectual hubris in the facility were able to make it into close combat. Chainblades whirred, their naturally aggressive noise almost as deafening in the confines as the heavy weapons. They didn’t pass now through meat and bone the way they usually did, these aberrations impressively resilient. The naturally curious minds of the V legion made their eyes almost glaze over with fascination even as they bore whatever weapons they could to beat back this assault. 

The gurgles of throats cleaved open by keratinous growths too alien to be called claws or nails among a great many other wounding sounds would foreshadow the adjustment of their HUDs to signal a comrade down.

Here at least, whatever the Fifth might have lacked in martial prowess that other legions might bear would be compensated in their extra-martial pursuits with the great number of Apothecaries they brought rushing forth to save the lives of the warriors who would otherwise be felled forever. 

So great was the chaos that even as they ministered to their wounded comrades of both Legions, the Apothecaries were forced to parry or even strike with their narthecia.

As the waves thinned, the gross fascination of Legio V was amplified by contrasting their wounded cousins with their foes. So far apart, and yet in some fashion so similar. Much as the nascent Imperium might deny this, this facility was in spirit not dissimilar to its own efforts.  To that end, the Apothecary contingent shared glances, that without speaking communed great interest in whatever was being done here, if for no reason that to learn enough of fleshcraft to be able to avoid the fate of their distant genetic kin. 

There was undoubtedly a similarity to be seen. Like the altered assailants, the Reviled fought in a way that adapted not so much to their environment as to their own bodies. They clove and hacked at the enemy with furious blows, yet the Apothecaries’ expert eyes could see how their motions were calculated to compensate for deformed limbs and frames. Warriors whose joints were stiffened by protruding bone growths favoured stabbing, lunging strikes, leaning into the angles of their bent spines to propel their weight forward, or flexed their wrists with a deftness that could only have been specially trained. Those made bulkier by their mutation used their mass to anchor themselves to the ground, withstanding the recoil of weapons that would have been fit for a towering mechanical shell.

Though the grotesque experimental soldiers were a lethal enough foe even to the measure of Astartes, their overwhelming numbers and instinctive tactics sealing the end of several warriors of either Legion, they were not inexhaustible. Had whatever project had spawned them reached completion, no doubt the conquest of the Pan-Pacific would have been far bloodier even than it was, but as the last of the living prototypes was cut down, the legionary contingent had borne a lesser cost to extinguish them than the human troops before them. Indeed, a number of losses would have been avoidable had the Reviled fought with less disregard for their own integrity. 

Even as the Apothecaries of the Fifth ministered to those that could yet be saved, they were met with surprised looks. Their charges had clearly not expected such care.

“You show us a rare mercy,” one of the Ninth’s medicae remarked, a rumble of dark mirth in his voice. Ghaal and his cohort had stood back during the struggle, fighting with precise shots from a distance, and as they moved forward now they seemed more interested in examining the dead than tending to the living. “When our execration grows so advanced, most of us seek a swift death in battle. Many of our brothers joined us here hoping just for that.”

“The Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you - remains a maxim we can adhere to freely in our crusade for mankind’s future.” A gentle kick was given to one of the dead opponents, as a demonstration that the application of this idea of reciprocity went in the realms of both violence and healing. “There might come a day when we need the same grace from your kindred.” Platitudes all insincere yet politically correct to the framework of the Imperium. It wasn’t that they didn’t care for this field between art and science, it was merely that they simply cared about extrapolating what they might learn to a much greater scale, and how it would impact their own personal growth. And, if the Ninth could be made a friend in the growing conquests, that would only be a boon.

Despite his words, the wounded bowed their heads in silent thanks for the succour, not trusting their throats to speak.

Arvo then took off his helmet, wiping a little bit of sweat from his brow. “Have you no faith that a day might come wherein the most afflicted of your ranks could be truly cured of this? Or perhaps at least come to cope with it.” much as he fancied himself cold and logical, the Apothecary found the mind of his comrade to be an unpleasant cocktail of fatalism and pessimism. Astartes were meant to know no fear, but he was certainly unnerved by this alien life of the Ninth. Even if war took his legs and arms and eyes, he thought that he would still cling on to dear life. 

“I believe our friend Ghaal tires of this, let us end this affair.” More grunted than spoken, the words came from one of the Undying Onslaught that was a mere warrior, having just finished adorning his shield with bits picked from the dead monsters.

The elder medicae nodded, motioning for his unit to assemble. He turned his helmeted head, its lenses meeting Arvo’s eyes. Something told the Apothecary that the stare underneath was just as stonily solemn as the immobile visor.

“That day will indeed come.” His words seemed almost arrogant in their plain certainty. “It is why I am here.”

With the last of the augmented soldiers slain, the sublevel was left empty of life. Its seemingly labyrinthine corridors spread further than the floors above, but followed a simple enough plan, radiating from the centre towards several large, symmetrical chambers. With the lumen system disabled, the only light came from the occasional intact piece of machinery, faint and tinged in green or red. Operating tables and gestating tanks alike filled them, most of them damaged by their escaped creations. Blood and nutrient fluids stained the walls and floors, and shattered glass crunched underfoot. The screens of a few monitoring stations still flickered with fading sparks of life, within hope of recovery.

Quickly scanned by the rapid eye of the Astartes, their contents were revealed to be tantalising, but yet limited. The level’s databanks held the records of the procedures that had created the enhanced foes, detailed anatomical outlines and lengthy series of medical logs that could not fail to catch the Apothecaries’ eye, designs ingenious by the debased standards of Terra - but no more than that. Some form of compartmentalisation had been in effect. The installation’s central vault of knowledge, the records indicated, lay on the final sublevel, the last one that remained for the Imperial force to descend to. Warning markers pulsed that some form of containment breach had struck it as well. Still, the Fifth’s intellectuals eyed one another with unspoken language. This information was important, piecemeal as it was. They pored every line of data, pretending these were cursory inspections all the while they committed every character of information to memory.

The last stairway, located at the far point where the two centremost corridors reconverged, seemed itself to bear some macabre sign of danger. The metallic steps and railings were slick with a murky residue which smelled of blood, although only partially human. A dim red glow burned steadily below, and fetid warm air wafted through the well in uncannily regular streams.

Of the Fifth’s warriors, they were already gibbering, almost frothing like rabid dogs at the excitement of yet greater violence of a thus far unbeknownst taste. Nothing they had gone against was like these enemies. It was unprecedented stimulus, it was never before experienced change and an opportunity to unique and unparalleled veterancy. 

But, Arvo decided to broach the subject that would inevitably arise. “What is done here - horrible as it is - could be relevant to your Legion’s plight. As detestable as these would-be creations are, it would be a shame if the intellectual fruits were spoiled by mere association.” Nonetheless he steeled himself, whirring his narthecium in preparation for violence, as if this passing comment was just given as an accidental matter of fact rather than a prelude to a pointed suggestion.

Ghaal and his cohort stopped in their tracks, slowly turning to face their fellow Apothecary. The elder medicae regarded him for a moment, as if considering something beneath the cover of his helm, then slowly nodded, moving a step closer.

“Yes, you are right,” he rumbled evenly, “We of the Legions wield weapons of the dark age for a worthy end, and this would be no different. As a fellow medicae, you can see how much good this knowledge could do in better hands.” He added, with disarming bluntness, “Not just the biotechnica, but ours and yours as well.” The response was better than what the Fifth had hoped for. Before the syllables had even been uttered, one could see behind translucent helmet visors the shift of skin into devious grins. 

From below, dim emergency lights glowed bloodily. It was as though their light had solidified into the gory grime underfoot, for the tang of iron was thick in the suddenly warm and heavy air. Lenses and auspex screens fogged over, and more reddish condensation dripped from the underside of the staircase and the ceiling beyond. The access to the final sublevel was much narrower than either previous one, the landing immediately giving way to a low, metallic corridor, damp and greasy all over its rectangular length. Despite the heat, there was here a stirring in the air, a flow too irregular to be born of a mechanical ventilation unit, and yet strangely and unsettlingly constant. Sounds accompanied it, a wet rasp when it receded and all fell still, and a rough, wheezing whistle when it stirred again. None could miss the eerie resemblance to that most familiar of organic routines - a respiration cycle.

Yet something even more macabre was plain to see. Running along the slick walls were lengths of stretched, knotted matter, clinging to the metal like parasitic vines. But there was nothing vegetal in their slow pulsation, nor in their uneven, ruddy colour. A glance of superhuman eyes was all it took to confirm it - the strands were flesh and blood, somehow, impossibly human, distended in a way no body had ever known. They were boneless ropes of knotted muscle, nerves and arteries, glistening wetly in the red gloom. Ragged patches of skin grew over them, sparse and disjoined, as if the growth of the epidermis were struggling to keep pace with the unnatural extension of the red tangle beneath.

As the first Astartes approached the bottom of the stairs, the endings of the organic web closest to them began to twitch and vibrate, stirred by a wave of animation. 

Again as they progressed, the warriors of the Fifth made sure to cover their rear. Mines were placed, a few keypresses marking the Astartes as safe for the IFF system. They were purely fragmentation charges, a concern of the building being brought down preventing any kind of Krak or melta from being a practical option. Their comrades of the Reviled followed close, weapons held ready to cover the minelayers, or prowled warily in the vanguard.

They considered striking the tendrilous meat with a chainblade, but a hand was raised and the action was waved away. Who knew exactly how this aberration worked? Perhaps this would merely warn it of impending threats. Besides, many wanted to see what exactly this would lead to. Arvo in particular was excited, shoulders heaving with raggedy breath as if a hungry old bear in deep rasps.

As they advanced, the growths rapidly intensified, soon covering the walls and ceiling entirely in a lightly pulsating tapestry. Strings of muscle, strips of skin and blood vessels wove and interlaced in an outlandish mosaic that quietly thrummed with life. A few strands of flopping skin even drooped to the ground, though they were sparse enough to be easily avoided. Even the air was growing heavier, increasingly pregnant with a wispy, humid fog the further they travelled. It churned along with the breath-like breeze, its spectral folds soon making the corridor ahead indiscernible.

What the space marines did soon perceive, however, was that the corridor was becoming narrower. Despite the relatively brief distance they had travelled, the shift in dimensions was gradual enough that unaugmented eyes might have missed it. Even more subtle, however, was the fact revealed to closer scrutiny. The passage’s architecture was not tightening. It was the fleshy weave upon it, now a veritable wall of nerve and sinew, that crept inward at a painstakingly slow pace, constricting the space available to the Astartes little by little. The foremost were already almost brushing against the crawling funnel, the slow throb coursing through it audibly matching the hot wafts from the mist.

They had to stop, for this was almost certainly the last threshold before they reached the place where this would all conclude. The beginning of the end, yet also the end of a beginning of something between the two Legions. 

Several Legionnaires took off their helmets, trying to wipe down the lenses that had managed to get misty even as they weren’t made of a material that this ought be possible on. “We will have to go one at a time.” A Legionnaire Kalev croaked. Putting his helmet adorned in a crown of barbed wire back on his head, he hoisted his shield, volunteering to go first with a few beats of adamantium upon adamantium; the improvised chainmail mouth-guard of the open faced helmet was jingling with his heavy breath.

Knowing the danger he was going in, his comrades handed him a grenade each, lest his corpse need to be used as an improvised explosive on the other side. He had no occasion to prime them, however, before he reached the end of the corridor, which now resembled some nightmarish intestinal passage.

Beyond its opening, a ring of flesh that moved like a vast sphincter, a circular chamber spread as wide as half the entire previous level. The charnel growth covered it entirely, carpeting the ground with a weave or undulating skin, hanging in tumid clusters from the walls, dripping from overhead. It crawled over the thermal grilles that heated the room like a greenhouse, spread its membranes over the furious-red lumens, oozed from the ceiling in organic stalactites that throbbed with a now maddeningly familiar cadence.

Faintly visible among the roiling fog were several large, bulky shapes, like shadows cast in blood. Around the chamber’s circumference were what appeared to be a score of massive generator vats, all of them cracked open and overgrown with the hideous flesh-fabric, spilling from their innards. Dwarfing even them was what stood at the very center, a pillar or indeed a wall of writhing raw muscle. Huge vitreous globes swayed upon its surface, engorged mockeries of spinning eyes, and misaligned rows of overgrown teeth sawed into the restless tissue with every heaving breath.

As soon as Kalev stepped on the threshold, a thrumming groan seemed to run through the entire level, propagating from every damp pulsing surface and through the infested corridor. At once, every inch of organic matter was thrown into frenzied motion. Crude pseudopods formed from the walls, battering the Astartes in their stretched formation, and heavy masses of sloughing tissue dropped from the ceiling to crush them. More weight accrued with every blow. Foul-smelling digestive acids sprayed from suddenly emerging glands.

Chainblades whirred to life, and the flesh-walls spasmed madly.

It was far too dark to accommodate the full breadth of the scene, but as chaos erupted this hardly mattered, the flash of muzzles and the explosions of bolts made things far more apparent. But the cacophony did slowly get quieter as unnatural appendages one by one inflicted casualties. The meaty lianas needn't pierce armour or even skin. It more than sufficed to simply fling or strangulate or whip with such force that vertebrae snapped, skulls cracked and organs burst. Some would be recoverable losses, but these were attacks completely different and of a greater magnitude than the mere stub gun shots and shrapnel wounds that were the most common injury most Legionnaires faced thus far.

The noise of screaming and weapons and unnaturally fleshy sounds was overwhelming even to Astartes, especially with other sources of disorientation like the fog in their visors and the alien smells overwhelming even their transhuman nostrils. 

In any direction he looked, Kalev found new sensory experiences, so much to process with so little time. Left a comrade was snatched up and away by bloody vines, screaming as he would be never heard from again. To the right one was wrapped in so many that they simply pulled on different directions and pieces of disassembled Space Marine fell down. Then he looked down, stomping on a tendril about to wrap itself around his foot. 

But, there they were, the grenades. More than a dozen total, an assortment of frag, krak and incendiary charges. He thus took off his helmet, and stuffed them all in there. He didn't know if this would have any effect. But the focal point found in the form of the large pillar was a target they could focus on, and so he would. “Priority target!” He called out, pointing with his finger and marking it on the HUDs of his fellow Astartes. They couldn't gun it down in entirety. But perhaps they could make a large enough hole to jam his improvised bomb into.

The response was staggered. Those legionnaires who had already reached the chamber opened fire, aiming for the points where the living pillar’s layered muscle appeared thinnest. Most, however, were still struggling to clear the constrictingly narrow corridor, made even worse now that the creeping flesh on the walls surged to engulf and pin the embattled warriors. Those who became trapped in its viscous folds clogged the passage for their brothers behind. Chainswords were well-suited to shredding through the flailing appendages in sprays of strange-smelling blood, but the biomass seemed inexhaustible, as if flowing from the chamber in imperceptible tides.

And yet they pushed through, stumbling over the fallen and tearing through the lashing membranes. A flamer was brought to bear, unsuited to the dense crush within the corridor but witheringly effective against the crude pseudopods that emerged from the walls. More bolters and eventually an autocannon added their weight to the stream of fire, blasting chunks from the shuddering skinless bulk. Thick blood spurted in jets, tissue quickly contracting to stem it before being torn away by the next volley. The groans and vibrations radiating from it grew feverish, seeming to shake the entire complex.

It was not enough to cut through the quaking bulk, not by far, but a steady stream of precise fire had soon torn a ragged crater that reached into its spasming core. Kalev wasted no time. He had been fighting off meaty growths ever since he had made the order, and he knew for the luxury of firing at a non-immediate target at least a few comrades would perish. But it was now or never, and so as the gunfire lulled from reloading, obscured vision, or simple death of the bearer of said weapons he ran. He felt a vine go around one foot, then another, but he wouldn’t be stopped now. He rammed the helmet full of bombs into the gaping wound, but just as he primed one of the grenades and turned to run it was spat out in an almost peristaltic motion, as if this flesh had transmorphed into a throat.  He picked up the helmet again, and rammed it inside, his augmented hearing making every single tick of the arming system echo like a toll of bells. 

The strange foe tried to push out the intrusive object again, but his arm remained. He kept the explosives where they were meant to be, even as teeth like overgrown cillia and digestive acids made armour and then his flesh into goo. He closed his eyes, and then smiled. He didn’t hear the explosion, his ear drums burst instantly as about a quarter of him was vapourized. He was flung to the ceiling from where he bounced back down, but even in his fading consciousness he had the happy rictus of a man who had just seen a job well done. 

Soon, the sounds of violence wound down. The world wasn’t fighting back against them, and the Astartes could regroup, get to their senses, and tend to their wounded. 

Arvo was the first to speak on anything beyond analysis of the situations tactical and combat-medical. “Whatever horror one might see in this, that same one could not deny its efficacy. The minds herein were onto something, and the greatest shame is that they perhaps will never have the chance to truly share what they learned.” 

The surviving medicae of the Ninth cast glances about the twitching remnants, inclining their heads in a way that could have seemed appreciative. Ghaal limped over, his armour cracked and scored with corrosion, one leg stiffly dragging as he walked.

“No doubt, our enemies had a talent for their craft. They have failed to contain its fruits,” he stepped over to one of the shattered growth tanks and tore away the engorged mesh of blood vessels from what had been its monitor slate, “But we are not them.”

The damaged device displayed only fragmentary information - something to the effect that the rampant growth had evidently been designed as a reactive synthflesh culture, capable of autonomously adapting to seal any wound - but more alluring yet was what lay further. With the death of the amalgam, the heat of its diffuse body had begun to drain from the chamber, dispersing the vaporous fog little by little so that a doorway at its further end became visible. In the stillness left behind now that the vast breathing had ceased, a faint thrum of machinery became audible.

Ghaal’s head was one among those that snapped up to catch the remote sound. “Not everything might be lost to us. If the main cogitator can be recovered, neither their deaths nor ours will have been in vain.”

Arvo tilted his head, eyes impassive as his counterpart spoke. He was silent for a long time, perhaps almost signalling hesitation, but then he spoke. “Many might curse us for this. Emotional, weak minds. But that has been thankfully sifted out of us. Our task has just begun, the few of us willing to look a few steps forward know our task will outlast our lives, this war to last centuries even if not merely on Earth. And the generations that come after will sing us as heroes for not casting them into ignorance.” 

He stood up from the fallen Marine to whom he had delivered the Emperor’s mercy and extracted the gene-seed of, wiping some ichor off of himself. Perhaps his words were full of hubris and hypocrisy, but he spoke them nonetheless: “But though the right eyes ought feast upon this trove, the wrong ones ought not. What weaker minds might conjure with this….” He shrugged, and got to another fallen warrior. “It is merely luck that the right people came here.”

“Perhaps. We have travelled far in the hope to find something as this.” As if reassured, the elder Reviled shambled to the files of his own wounded, and the shrill of the narthecium’s bone-saws punctuated his words. “But we were lucky indeed to have you at our side.” He inclined his helmet. “Brother.”

From Ashes We Rise : A New Dawn. A Warhammer 40,000 Alternate Timeline RP

The Ninth Primarch

N O L R A K H, T H E V E I L E D O N E

N O L R A K H, T H E V E I L E D O N E

^{“Drown the stars in blood.”}

A P P E A R A N C E _________________________________________________________ Seek not to lift the veil... Obscure flaws in the Ninth’s genes have conspired with the Warp to undermine the image of physical perfection that ought to have been his birthright as a Primarch. A germ of disfigurment forever gnaws at him from within, regularly rising to hiderously transfigure him before being forced back by his innate regeneration in an agonizing cycle that repeats every solar month. At the peak of his health, Nolrakh could well pass for truly human were it not for his stature. Towering at some twelve feet in height, he has the robust frame of a warrior, though his pale skin belies his darkling habits. His firm, if subtly tense posture and unscarred bald head do not appear out of place among the Imperium’s gene-altered troops, and his stern statuesque features lend him an air fit for command. The only flaw marring them are his eyes, of whom one – which precisely is never constant – is a hollow socket, and the other murky, with no discernable iris. This peak of health, however, only endures for a matter of days, after which an unholy transformation begins. Skin frays and recedes, hard white growths part twisting flesh, and facial features drift almost fluidly overnight, until in about a week the decay is complete. In this state, Nolrakh’s body is a horrific mass of knotted strands of muscle, ragged coils of pale skin and exposed plates of hardened bone extruding from a fantastically misshapen skeleton. Thin strips of purulent necrosis are nested between the ridges and chaotic contours of his frame. His hands are claws of sharpened bone, his head little more than a skull of exposed osseous exoskeleton, pitted and gouged like a lunar surface. His eye, now truly cyclopean, sits in its fractured center, surmounting the rictus death-grin of a lipless mouth, from which issues a voice at once guttural, crackling and sibilant – a mere ruin of the curt and acerbic, yet compelling tones of his apex. In time, the process of healing begins, and the horror is steadily swathed in healthy skin and flesh once more, but ever it remains skulking under the surface until it is ready to emerge anew. Ashamed of his monstrous and unstable essence, the Ninth usually hides his features under heavy robes or armour, with a veil or hood that lends him his moniker. D E T A I L S _________________________________________________________ Legion Name: The Reviled / Star Reavers Homeworld: Laethem Psyker Grade: Zeta

C O N C E P T ________________________________________________________________________________________ Essence: A living paradox, a loftiest pinnacle of humanity and a most vile of miscreations coexisting in a single tormented body, Nolrakh is a being haunted by his aberrant nature and forever goaded by the hope for salvation, or at least redemption. Burdened by what he sees as his innate sin, he at once abases himself before the Emperor he has failed and is driven to acts of tremendous hubris in his efforts to restore himself, be that atrocious carnage in a futile bid for glory or the blackest scientific inquests in search of an escape from the unnatural cycle that measures his existence; in the same breath, he yearns to serve humanity and immolates it on the altar of his desperation. Tragic spirit and loathsome butcher, champion and abomination, Primarch and mutant; such is the fate of the Ninth. Skills: Haunter of the Dark: Born and grown under distant stars and in deepest shadow, Nolrakh shuns the light and takes to darkness as his home. The sight of his vitreous, atrophic eye is dim in the glow of day, but seizes upon shapes and motion with uncanny precision when immersed in penumbra, painting a colourless but stark world of outlines to his mind. Where the shadows grow too deep even for this gift, his psychic ability to perceive the minds of living things in his vicinity supplies, along with the strange senses of his mutated physiology - the taste of the wind, the tremors of the soil, the vibrations in the air all lead him to his quarry. Despite his imposing size, his deftness in moving unseen and unheard as long as darkness cloaks him is downright preternatural, even when armoured; no predator nor prey can match his nightly stalking. Horror Made Flesh: Fear and revulsion are the mutant’s lot, and Nolrakh is no exception. As heavily as his ghastly appearance weighs on him, he knows it can be leveraged to inspire dread in his enemies, and is skilful in doing so should it be required. Misshapen claws and teeth flashing at the edge of one’s vision, or the apparition of a hideous visage, can break the staunchest spirits, but the Ninth Primarch’s potency of fear goes beyond mere physical intimidation. A hypnotic force dwells in his eye which can strike those who meet its gaze with paralyzing anguish, or plague them with hallucinations were they even to escape its grasp. Should all else fail, he summons forth raw psychic might to batter down the most stubborn mind with the force of Warp-induced emotion. The Flawed Fortress: Nolrakh’s body is perpetually at war with itself, wracked by periodic surges of degeneration and reconstruction which preclude all attempts at an external cure for his deformity. His regenerative potential, truly stupendous by any standard, stubbornly rejects surgical or bionic alterations as well as the fruits of his mutation, which in turn never fail to reassert themselves in the same immutable forms. Grisly a fate as this may be, a hidden blessing lurks in it, for harm is likewise unable to leave a lasting mark on the Primarch. No matter how deep the wound or thorough the mutilation, he can recover from virtually any injury as long as he is not slain outright, and even regrow entire limbs with minimal medical assistance. This, together with his resilience to pain, enables him to fight in an uniquely lethal style, recklessly exposing himself to damage that he might strike with ferocious abandon.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

IX Legion

T H E R E V I L E D

T H E R E V I L E D

^{"Death walks with us!"}

D E S C R I P T I O N _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ Ferocious tribal warriors bedecked in macabre trophies, the sons of the Ninth Legion are harrowed by the curse inherited from their sire. Though stable enough on implantation, as if eager to infect healthy bodies, their gene-seed is fraught with the exsecratio corporis, the malediction of the flesh, a plague of cascading mutation that ravages them as they age. Some of them swell and bloat into faceless, spike-toothed unwieldy hulks the size of tactical dreadnought armour; others are twisted into hunched, predatory shapes, with exposed plates and ridges of bone matching those of their progenitor. In the vast majority, however, the exsecratio manifests as a gradual atrophy of limbs and organs, forcing its victims to seek bionic replacements. The Reviled channel the pain and rancor of their affliction into a peculiarly vicious and gruesome form of warfare. Thirsting to mangle their foes’ bodies as well as shatter their spirits with abject terror, they often strike in darkness, bearing down in close combat with a fury of roaring metal and fearsome weapons from Terra’s past. Many take oaths to die in battle before succumbing to the rot, and slay unfeelingly without fear or remorse. Like their forebears, they are sworn to the chainblade and the flame, and like them they give no quarter. D E T A I L S _________________________________________________________ Allegiance: Imperium. Status: Nominal, circa three thousand Astartes active. Location: Sol System.

C O N C E P T ________________________________________________________________________________________ History & Background: The Ninth Legio Astartes was descended from Antarctic stock, drawn from the tribes of techno-nomads who travelled the benighted ice wastes in great armoured caravans. It is a legacy of little pride or renown, but they have always clung to it fiercely, ever since the affliction in their geneseed began to torment them in their very first days. The Emperor’s own reassurance that a cure would be found under His auspices did much to bolster the nascent legion’s spirits, but it was the adoption of its native tribal traditions that forged its sons into what they have become, brutal warriors who fight without fear of death. In their first great campaign since their deployment, the Reviled marched to cleanse the lands of Nordyc from the taint of the priest-king of Maulland Sen. Despite battling alongside forces from the Sirens of Terra in the opening clashes, the abominations of sorcery they witnessed during the purges have left the warriors of the Ninth deeply mistrustful of psykers. Legion tradition holds that the IX earned its colours in the decisive Battle of the Red Frost, taking the bleak green of the northern tundra for its plate and the cyan of the witchfire-lit glaciers for the trimmings. Once the confederacy of Maulland Sen was not more, the afflicted Legion went on to join the fight against Kalagann, the lord of Ursh, raiding across the frozen plains before reuniting with the Imperium’s thrust against the fortress-capital. Throughout the Unification Wars, the Reviled fought alongside many of their sibling Legions, as well as the occasional unit of the Exercitus Imperialis and the Thunder Warriors – but the latter are spoken of no more. Goals & Objectives: To fight and overcome every enemy, both in the dark of space and within themselves. Notable Members: Osorin Skorr, the Spitefather: Not the best fighter in the IX, nor perhaps even the best tactician, Skorr nevertheless emerged from the first generation as its best leader, and has since then borne the honour and the burden of being Master of the Legion. Charisma and facility for rhetoric are rare gifts among the darkling Reviled, and the Spitefather is blessed with both, wielding them to embolden the spirits of his brothers and show a personable face to outsiders. Despite his fabled tongue and calculating mind, however, even he is not safe from the execration, and already parts of his body are beginning to fail. Tevr Nyrid: The finest blade of the first generation, the grim and fatalistic Praetor Nyrid has with time become more than just the Legion’s champion. Despite his appearance as a savage and silent warrior, he is one of Skorr’s oldest and most valued advisors, the Spitefather’s right hand, as well as a keeper of tradition, teaching his younger brothers of the old ways. Shaping the Reviled’s culture has been his calling, but now that it is consolidated, many believe that he shall soon take the Oath of Death, and that he is training Captain Ymorag of the Harrowers to succeed him as master of rituals. Tzosh Ghaal: Primus medicae and now Apothecary, Ghaal was the last of the informal triumvirate that arose in the early Ninth Legion, and the most talented in the laborious art of healing. He has taken it upon himself to not merely mend his legion’s battle wounds, but to in time excise the flaw rooted in its genes. Startlingly arrogant in his placid bearing, Ghaal mistrusts the skills of mortal savants and seeks to take the task into his own hands. While the malediction of the flesh has drawn first blood in their struggle, he has said that he does not intend to die soon, and is one to hold to his word. —

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This place has autosave

The Ninth Primarch

N O L R A K H, T H E V E I L E D O N E

N O L R A K H, T H E V E I L E D O N E

^{“Drown the stars in blood.”}

A P P E A R A N C E _________________________________________________________ Seek not to lift the veil... Obscure flaws in the Ninth’s genes have conspired with the Warp to undermine the image of physical perfection that ought to have been his birthright as a Primarch. A germ of disfigurment forever gnaws at him from within, regularly rising to hiderously transfigure him before being forced back by his innate regeneration in an agonizing cycle that repeats every solar month. At the peak of his health, Nolrakh could well pass for truly human were it not for his stature. Towering at some twelve feet in height, he has the robust frame of a warrior, though his pale skin belies his darkling habits. His firm, if subtly tense posture and unscarred bald head do not appear out of place among the Imperium’s gene-altered troops, and his stern statuesque features lend him an air fit for command. The only flaw marring them are his eyes, of whom one – which precisely is never constant – is a hollow socket, and the other murky, with no discernable iris. This peak of health, however, only endures for a matter of days, after which an unholy transformation begins. Skin frays and recedes, hard white growths part twisting flesh, and facial features drift almost fluidly overnight, until in about a week the decay is complete. In this state, Nolrakh’s body is a horrific mass of knotted strands of muscle, ragged coils of pale skin and exposed plates of hardened bone extruding from a fantastically misshapen skeleton. Thin strips of purulent necrosis are nested between the ridges and chaotic contours of his frame. His hands are claws of sharpened bone, his head little more than a skull of exposed osseous exoskeleton, pitted and gouged like a lunar surface. His eye, now truly cyclopean, sits in its fractured center, surmounting the rictus death-grin of a lipless mouth, from which issues a voice at once guttural, crackling and sibilant – a mere ruin of the curt and acerbic, yet compelling tones of his apex. In time, the process of healing begins, and the horror is steadily swathed in healthy skin and flesh once more, but ever it remains skulking under the surface until it is ready to emerge anew. Ashamed of his monstrous and unstable essence, the Ninth usually hides his features under heavy robes or armour, with a veil or hood that lends him his moniker. D E T A I L S _________________________________________________________ Legion Name: The Reviled / Star Reavers Homeworld: Laethem Psyker Grade: Zeta

C O N C E P T ________________________________________________________________________________________ Essence: A living paradox, a loftiest pinnacle of humanity and a most vile of miscreations coexisting in a single tormented body, Nolrakh is a being haunted by his aberrant nature and forever goaded by the hope for salvation, or at least redemption. Burdened by what he sees as his innate sin, he at once abases himself before the Emperor he has failed and is driven to acts of tremendous hubris in his efforts to restore himself, be that atrocious carnage in a futile bid for glory or the blackest scientific inquests in search of an escape from the unnatural cycle that measures his existence; in the same breath, he yearns to serve humanity and immolates it on the altar of his desperation. Tragic spirit and loathsome butcher, champion and abomination, Primarch and mutant; such is the fate of the Ninth. Skills: Haunter of the Dark: Born and grown under distant stars and in deepest shadow, Nolrakh shuns the light and takes to darkness as his home. The sight of his vitreous, atrophic eye is dim in the glow of day, but seizes upon shapes and motion with uncanny precision when immersed in penumbra, painting a colourless but stark world of outlines to his mind. Where the shadows grow too deep even for this gift, his psychic ability to perceive the minds of living things in his vicinity supplies, along with the strange senses of his mutated physiology - the taste of the wind, the tremors of the soil, the vibrations in the air all lead him to his quarry. Despite his imposing size, his deftness in moving unseen and unheard as long as darkness cloaks him is downright preternatural, even when armoured; no predator nor prey can match his nightly stalking. Horror Made Flesh: Fear and revulsion are the mutant’s lot, and Nolrakh is no exception. As heavily as his ghastly appearance weighs on him, he knows it can be leveraged to inspire dread in his enemies, and is skilful in doing so should it be required. Misshapen claws and teeth flashing at the edge of one’s vision, or the apparition of a hideous visage, can break the staunchest spirits, but the Ninth Primarch’s potency of fear goes beyond mere physical intimidation. A hypnotic force dwells in his eye which can strike those who meet its gaze with paralyzing anguish, or plague them with hallucinations were they even to escape its grasp. Should all else fail, he summons forth raw psychic might to batter down the most stubborn mind with the force of Warp-induced emotion. The Flawed Fortress: Nolrakh’s body is perpetually at war with itself, wracked by periodic surges of degeneration and reconstruction which preclude all attempts at an external cure for his deformity. His regenerative potential, truly stupendous by any standard, stubbornly rejects surgical or bionic alterations as well as the fruits of his mutation, which in turn never fail to reassert themselves in the same immutable forms. Grisly a fate as this may be, a hidden blessing lurks in it, for harm is likewise unable to leave a lasting mark on the Primarch. No matter how deep the wound or thorough the mutilation, he can recover from virtually any injury as long as he is not slain outright, and even regrow entire limbs with minimal medical assistance. This, together with his resilience to pain, enables him to fight in an uniquely lethal style, recklessly exposing himself to damage that he might strike with ferocious abandon.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

IX Legion

T H E R E V I L E D

T H E R E V I L E D

^{"Death walks with us!"}

D E S C R I P T I O N _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ Ferocious tribal warriors bedecked in macabre trophies, the sons of the Ninth Legion are harrowed by the curse inherited from their sire. Though stable enough on implantation, as if eager to infect healthy bodies, their gene-seed is fraught with the exsecratio corporis, the malediction of the flesh, a plague of cascading mutation that ravages them as they age. Some of them swell and bloat into faceless, spike-toothed unwieldy hulks the size of tactical dreadnought armour; others are twisted into hunched, predatory shapes, with exposed plates and ridges of bone matching those of their progenitor. In the vast majority, however, the exsecratio manifests as a gradual atrophy of limbs and organs, forcing its victims to seek bionic replacements. The Reviled channel the pain and rancor of their affliction into a peculiarly vicious and gruesome form of warfare. Thirsting to mangle their foes’ bodies as well as shatter their spirits with abject terror, they often strike in darkness, bearing down in close combat with a fury of roaring metal and fearsome weapons from Terra’s past. Many take oaths to die in battle before succumbing to the rot, and slay unfeelingly without fear or remorse. Like their forebears, they are sworn to the chainblade and the flame, and like them they give no quarter. D E T A I L S _________________________________________________________ Allegiance: Imperium. Status: Nominal, circa three thousand Astartes active. Location: Sol System.

C O N C E P T ________________________________________________________________________________________ History & Background: The Ninth Legio Astartes was descended from Antarctic stock, drawn from the tribes of techno-nomads who travelled the benighted ice wastes in great armoured caravans. It is a legacy of little pride or renown, but they have always clung to it fiercely, ever since the affliction in their geneseed began to torment them in their very first days. The Emperor’s own reassurance that a cure would be found under His auspices did much to bolster the nascent legion’s spirits, but it was the adoption of its native tribal traditions that forged its sons into what they have become, brutal warriors who fight without fear of death. In their first great campaign since their deployment, the Reviled marched to cleanse the lands of Nordyc from the taint of the priest-king of Maulland Sen. Despite battling alongside forces from the Sirens of Terra in the opening clashes, the abominations of sorcery they witnessed during the purges have left the warriors of the Ninth deeply mistrustful of psykers. Legion tradition holds that the IX earned its colours in the decisive Battle of the Red Frost, taking the bleak green of the northern tundra for its plate and the cyan of the witchfire-lit glaciers for the trimmings. Once the confederacy of Maulland Sen was not more, the afflicted Legion went on to join the fight against Kalagann, the lord of Ursh, raiding across the frozen plains before reuniting with the Imperium’s thrust against the fortress-capital. Throughout the Unification Wars, the Reviled fought alongside many of their sibling Legions, as well as the occasional unit of the Exercitus Imperialis and the Thunder Warriors – but the latter are spoken of no more. Goals & Objectives: To fight and overcome every enemy, both in the dark of space and within themselves. Notable Members: Osorin Skorr, the Spitefather: Not the best fighter in the IX, nor perhaps even the best tactician, Skorr nevertheless emerged from the first generation as its best leader, and has since then borne the honour and the burden of being Master of the Legion. Charisma and facility for rhetoric are rare gifts among the darkling Reviled, and the Spitefather is blessed with both, wielding them to embolden the spirits of his brothers and show a personable face to outsiders. Despite his fabled tongue and calculating mind, however, even he is not safe from the execration, and already parts of his body are beginning to fail. Tevr Nyrid: The finest blade of the first generation, the grim and fatalistic Praetor Nyrid has with time become more than just the Legion’s champion. Despite his appearance as a savage and silent warrior, he is one of Skorr’s oldest and most valued advisors, the Spitefather’s right hand, as well as a keeper of tradition, teaching his younger brothers of the old ways. Shaping the Reviled’s culture has been his calling, but now that it is consolidated, many believe that he shall soon take the Oath of Death, and that he is training Captain Ymorag of the Harrowers to succeed him as master of rituals. Tzosh Ghaal: Primus medicae and now Apothecary, Ghaal was the last of the informal triumvirate that arose in the early Ninth Legion, and the most talented in the laborious art of healing. He has taken it upon himself to not merely mend his legion’s battle wounds, but to in time excise the flaw rooted in its genes. Startlingly arrogant in his placid bearing, Ghaal mistrusts the skills of mortal savants and seeks to take the task into his own hands. While the malediction of the flesh has drawn first blood in their struggle, he has said that he does not intend to die soon, and is one to hold to his word. —

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The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

“It’s certainly not,” the tarrhaidim rumbled in reply, reeling his consciousness back to his body after diving into the lingering Chasm-shadow of the huge carcass, “This is an etheric transmitter all right, but it’s been stabilized by entirely physical forces. May the Nexus spit me out if I know what that means.”

He could make a guess, of course, or indeed several ones. If the slime was the stabilizing agent without being etherically active itself - and indeed he had felt no traces of Chasm ripples from it even before - it had to be some clever device. Organic technology, perhaps, or more unsettlingly the secretions of some material predator of Chasm-spawn. A very large one, from the size of the dead entity. Sure, the antenna meant that at least some sapient activity was involved, but in a place like Sargasso one thing did not exclude the other.

The quake interrupted these grim thoughts, and Ilshar immediately went to ground, cursing as the comms and sensors in his helmet died. While it was a rather rudimentary suite, it helped compensate for most of his eyes being covered by the voids-sealed membrane, limiting him to what he supposed must be a human-like field of vision. Damned uncomfortable. He extruded more optical clusters around his mouth, but this only helped so much.

When the comms returned after a tense minute without any enemies taking the opportunity to attack, it was a relief he thanked the Spiral for.

“Understood,” Ilshar voiced back to Rasch, before switching direct communications to the other voidhanger, “Ready to provide cover fire. I doubt we’ll be blessed with a chance to take prisoners.”

Keeping low behind what ridges of torn metal and drifting debris could afford some cover, he crept on a wide, curving trajectory towards the trailers, keeping his machine gun ready. Out here in the vacuum, he would have to use self-propelled rounds if he was to hit anything, and those had to be used sparingly at the best possible angle. Even if the suspicious movement was some enemy advance unit taking advantage of the disruption to assume a vantageous position, he was not about to be caught by surprise.

From Ashes We Rise : The Imperium Is Born

Ursh: The Charge

---

Radiation had long stripped the tundral wasteland to the South East of the city of any lingering life, a long past disaster leeching any vitality remaining in the scorched rock. Even generations of twisted technobarbarian warlords had not bothered to attempt further building or settlement of the territory, a few haunted ruins all that spoke of a long dead metropolis.

The Emperor’s forces were better equipped against such lingering death, however. The power of technology providing defence against a problem of its own making. The grand firepower of the Emperor's armoured legions, vehicle and astartes both, could at least linger in the shadow of the clicking death, and so they rolled forth in number, preparing to bring the heaviest guns of the Imperium to bare on the citadel from a direction it would have been weakest.

Ursh did not care for the survival of its people, but mortal men would die before they could even be of use to their final purpose. So, as the Emperor's vehicles ground on, they found the earth beneath them bursting with activity. Forms made of flesh and metal, towering above even the largest of the Emperor's armour erupting from the rock, intent on carving open the metal shells before them, unaware that to breathe the air around them would mean a slow death to even their twisted forms. Would such things even care if they had the mind to know?

The armoured vanguard that raced to meet them had resolved to render any such question hollow, bearing a far swifter demise. A fleet of light vehicles, rapid and temperamental like wild steeds, had fanned out across the plain ahead of the heavier bulk behind. Rhinos and their manifold cousins from all across the hemisphere, a few wolflike Predators, even armoured and converted rigs of dubious origin made up this scything blade, their drab colours and wreaths of savage trophies marking them as the war-convoy of the Reviled. To cross forbidding wastelands and strike at the enemy’s weakest point was their way, as it had been that of their ancestors, and they would not be halted by either the rad-fields or their monstrous guardians.

Beneath the strung bodies and studded chains, the vehicles had been readied for their greatest battle yet. Their guns were primed and charged. Improvised weapons had been affixed to their prows, giant spikes, boring lances and threshing blades to aid in the slaying of the foe. Most striking however were the shapes that crouched on top of the armoured hulls, uncaring of the radioactive phages that soaked the air. These were Astartes of the Ninth in the final throes of their curse; those afflicted by swollen flesh, plagued by piercing bone or the many consumed by decay until they were almost more machines than men. Their faces were daubed in ash, running with blood as the exposed skin blistered and cracked in the foul air. They knew this would be their final charge, for they had vowed to die for Unity that day rather than slowly rot away.

Engines clashed with mutated muscle, and battle was joined. The guns of the Reviled spat steel and flame, prow-blades impaling monstrous gargantuans even as they flipped transports to the side and cracked open their hulls. Those Astartes within who were not crushed outright spilled out to join their ash-painted brothers, bones broken and skin torn, but their warlike spirits undimmed. From the top of their vehicles, the overgrown bloat-giants fired weapons as heavy as the Rhinos’ own, autocannons and beam carronades bellowing in concert. The plagued and the crippled vaulted onto the colossal bodies of Mosvoroth’s beasts, clambering over them like murderous beetles as their blades sought openings for a mortal strike. They cut, they fell and they died, harsh warcries on their corroded lips.

The beasts of Mosvoroth, their minds of singular searing purpose, seemed to revel in the bloodshed. Bloated warmachines, taller than a Rhino and consisting of crab-like appendages and ballooned, fleshy bodies, hulked weapons meant only to be fired until their short ammunition supplies were drained. They let loose great barking reports from cannons fused to the centers of their bulbous bodies, rending armored vehicles to smoldering hulks with every muzzle flash.

Smaller, more agile monstrosities skulked in their shadows. While their larger allies wrought death en masse, these creatures leaped and bound with a berserker's grace. They wielded wicked swords of barbs, twice their own height, and employed them with brutal efficiency.

The monsters left from the shadows of the artillery walkers, descending upon passing transports of the Ninth in pairs and threes. Rending swipes of their swords took the Reviled closest to them from atop the Imperial machines, and the beasts, skin as red as hot embers, bellowed in excitement as the Astartes of the Ninth turned to face them.

Each vehicle had soon become a tassel in the restless mosaic of battle. Red and brass was everywhere, washing over grey and drab green. The Astartes who clashed with the screaming assailants had found an enemy to their measure, one whose way of fighting unsettlingly mirrored theirs and whose ferocity was no lesser than their own. Fighting in small squads was for the Reviled as much of a necessity now as a well-accustomed tactic, and the narrow space of the transport roofs constrained them while the fiendish creatures bounded about with superhuman agility. Every struggle among dozens swiftly became its own contest of skill and strength. Space marine chainswords interlocked to block the slashes of incandescent blades before unfolding like roaring petals of predatory plants, the pointmen of each squad hacking at the snarling faces while their brothers kept their sides covered. It was a cruel game of attrition, a stricture the Ninth Legion was loath to be forced into. Yet for now the bestial warriors struggled to pierce the nigh-instinctual coordination of each band’s sworn brothers, and a concerted dance of strikes and parries tipped the balance time and again between the evenly matched numbers of each clash.

A struggle no less dire was being fought under their feet by the Legion fleet’s drivers. Harried by the crimson skirmishers and now pummeled by the fire of the crablike monsters, they were at the same time given very little space to manoeuver. The vanguard of the Imperial armoured advance depended on them. The Charge could not afford to lose momentum, or, bogged down in a chaotic battle, its ponderous engines would be easily picked apart by the enemy.

The Legion vox network, until that point tensely silent, came alive with rapid, clipped coordination chatter. In the heat of the moment, communicators barked into their sets louder and louder to overwhelm the strange and grating interference that mounted the closer they came to the walls of Mosvoroth.

“Zathrin cohort command to third, fourth, shift to unakna!”

“Turning by fifty, clear the path!”

“Voithir, firing on tungal center-two!”

“Ruptured, advancing till graachal! Glory!”

“Sikigal cohort, clear fire path!”

Embattled as they were, the Astartes pilots worked wonders with their scarred machines. Here two Rhinos swerved abruptly from their formation, crushing a pack of snarling assailants under their treads, and at the same moment a salvo from their fellows tore through the air where they had been and blasted a segmented leg from under one of the crawling monstrosities in a shower of bilious fluid. Here another, its ramming spikes still stuck in the fallen carcass of a colossus from the first wave, was joined by four more, who together pushed the great corpse forth like a macabre bludgeon that swept foes from its path and slammed a crab-beast to the ground. There a command Predator burst through the burning ruins of a Rhino, smearing the remains of fallen brothers over the irradiated earth in its unmerciful advance, and wreathed in smoke it struck a crawler from its blind side, felling it with a ferocious burst of autocannon fire.

Yet for all their formidable efforts, they were losing more than blood and men - more grievously yet, they were losing speed. Even the smoothest turn into a firing position shaved precious instants from the counter, and that was the purpose and victory of Kalagann’s defenses. Delay was impardonable. The Reviled could welcome death, but they would not accept failure.

“Legion command to breacher force!” Legion-Master Skorr’s voice called out over vox-waves issuing from the Ninth’s command vehicle. It was a trophy from the whisper-shrouded Mallaund Sen campaign, a relic machine of strange and unique form: alike in size to a Mastodon, but vertically towering and bristling with turrets where it lacked a landing ramp. Festooned with chained and impaled bodies of felled foes, it was an inviting target for the crimson-skinned marauders, but none had thus far breached past its autoguns and the defensive circle of lesser transports that surrounded it.

“Forward elements, match our fire!” the Master spoke with a hurried yet precise hardness that brooked no disobedience. Wary though many in the Exercitus Imperialis may have been of the aptly-surnamed Reviled and their uncomely features, a far more hideous enemy lay ahead now, and in the field the authority of Astartes was not to be contested. “Strike at Legion-marked targets as given!”

“Understood, Legion command. Executing.” The reply had come with some slight delay, no doubt to organise the input of multiple channels into a singular communication, yet faster than such an operation ought normally to have been possible. The reason became evident when elongated plumes of radioactive dust from the southeast heralded the approach of an armoured division that was detaching itself from the rumbling Imperial column and nearing the crux of the combat. The cold teal markings on their battle tanks and their unit heraldry, a circle asymmetrically ringed by four lesser ones, marked them as Timaini Cragrunners, dwellers of the cratered lands far east of Arkhangelsk. Word had it that they had often traded with the Terrawatt Clans, and that machinery dug deeply into their bodies as well as their traditions. Their cybernetic coordination, however, had left them no less eager to visit their homeland’s vengeance against Ursh.

The forward tanks began to fire long before optical contact. As imposing as the monstrous crab-beasts were, the Timaini’s cannons could not possibly strike them past the chaos of battle unless their gunners minutely tracked the Reviled’s signals by the instant. But once again augmented bodies and unity of purpose worked miracles. The first Cragrunner salvo gouged the earth close to their targets; the second, guided by cybernetic eyes and wire-strung brains, cut down two of the crawling brutes, shreds of muscle and warpborn armour rattling like shrapnel from the nearest Legion transports.

Again and again came the directed fire, more intense by the volley. Rhinos and Predators swerved and scattered ahead of it, Astartes and hell-warriors both clinging grimly to their shells even as they indefatigably traded blows. The rad-field had become a chaos of fire, wreckage and mangled bodies, but the charge was not about to be stopped.

The sudden arrival of the Cragrunners began to tip the scales back into Imperial favor. Artillery beasts, battered and bleeding, lost legs to the incoming fire and toppled over with ponderous speed. Other beasts burst into viscera and flames as the Cragrunner’s shells found ammunition stores and esoteric energy reactors buried within the masses of flesh and metal that strode the battlefield as gods mere moments before. The Cragrunners ran up their tally with machine precision.

The reinforcing mortals were solidly engaged with the line of hell-beasts, trading fire and lives even as their most forward vehicles were still several kilometers out from joining the XI Legion’s advance. Then, new nightmares arrived.

Auspex warnings screamed inside the Cragrunners’ vehicles. Two new contacts closing fast, ghosting in and out of detection, were advancing from behind. Tank commanders, torn between trading fire with the beasts ahead and facing an unknown advance from behind, divided their attention. The inhuman speed of coordination between the mortals saw the reaction measured out in heartbeats rather than confused minutes. A platoon of tanks split from the main advance, five tanks, their cannons still smoking and targeting auspexes growling in anticipation turned to face the new threats.

Five tanks versus two new vehicle contacts. The Cragrunners, cold logic, and experience their guide, had by all accounts overcommitted to the new auspex blips. The lead tank fired, the shot seemingly random through the dust and smoke of the armored battle raging around them. The shell screamed into the dark, disappearing long before the telltale flash of a detonation heralded the end of its brief flight to a target the tanks could not see. Auspex, unreliable against the backdrop of burning vehicles and the titan claps of battlecannons, screamed a warning to the platoon.

++PROXIMITY ALARM++

The contacts emerged from the smoke as nightmares given steel flesh and unholy purpose. Pistons slammed home as four legs carried each beast too fast and too far for their size. Furnace heat vented from maws of steel teeth and between red-hot ribs. Balefire, cold and white, thrashed against steel as if attempting to escape.

The first tank was batted aside without a thought. Tracks screamed as the fifty-five tons of armor and steel slid at speed across the radwastes. A tread bit deep, and the tank levered over, ejecting its turret and pulping the crew as it slammed into the mud. The rest of the platoon fired.

The beast took three rounds to the chest, not so much as losing an ounce of momentum as it charged with a gleeful machine smile toward the next nearest tank. Auspex warbled and failed to lock as the first beast closed. The second beast leapt into the air, landing atop a tank with ease as it sank its bladed claws through armor meant to stop tank shells. To observers, it appeared to flex its hands, almost testing the strength of the steel it clung to before it ripped the tank in half as a rusted can opener might similarly open a canned ration.

The Cragrunners began to take the threat seriously. More tanks peeled off the main thrust to assist the IX Legion. Targeting solutions returned null errors, auspex wailed in horror as instruments tried and failed to lock and track the pair of beasts, and gunners vomited in their rebreathers as they attempted to sight the nightmares manually.

An iridescent beam of energy lanced out from the reinforcing tanks, a single Destroyer Tank Hunter finding its mark as it came to a stop and let the true tanks continue headlong against the pair of mechanical horrors. Armor dripped away in molten slag, and the nightmare screamed not in pain, but in anger. The second nightmare shifted its focus from the tank in its grasp, the turret whining in steel pain as it attempted to traverse against the creature's grip, and simply crushed the tank between two clawed arms before taking off at a sprint to end the Destroyer. The new counterattack began to meet the same fate as the original five tanks to advance on the pair of nightmare engines as clawed limbs and balefire dissected Imperial armor and laughed at incoming fire.

Waves of unnatural disorder spilled from the bodily carnage into the ether. The fevered vox-chatter of the Imperial fleet suffered no less from the metal monsters’ mere presence than its hulls did at their hands. Unearthly wails and shrieks of white noise cut through the chatter in operators’ ears, deafening and wounding as surely as blades. Invisible tendrils of chaos slithered through the communication networks, threatening to spill into the backlines.

More than one vehicle screeched to a halt or spun wildly off-course before even reaching in sight of the beast, and the Cragrunners, bound as they were to their machinery, suffered all the more grievously. Yet the Astartes were made of sterner stuff. Severed from one another by the failing comms, their crews fell almost by reflex into the order of scattered battle, where every unit was its own force.

Three of the Rhinos closest to where one of the metallic terrors had broken past the vanguard swivelled about in roaring turns, brushing hairs past each other as their pilots forcefully drove their stocky machines into feats of agility. Their topside complements had been decimated in the skirmishing against the daemonic boarders, only a few legionnaires hunkering stubbornly on the bloodstained decks. Badly wounded and doomed to a swiftly approaching end by rad-exposure, they did not flinch as the transports under them swerved and careened into a broad semicircle, nor when they were brought to face with the blasphemous hulk itself. Beneath the hulls, drivers and gunners ground their teeth, biting into their cheeks and tongues as their eyes began to dim and throb from the baleful power of the monster’s very sight.

Pain. Blood. Real as the ground under a warrior’s feet. Too real, perhaps, in this cauldron of madness - hands clenched violently around their levers, eyes grew wide and bloodshot, the already misshapen features of the Reviled appeared to change with dreamlike ease, growing longer, feral, less human. But they were set on their courses.

The Rhinos’ fire thundered against the monster’s metallic hide. It looked up from its latest prey with an eerily lifelike movement, almost visibly amused by the harmless rattle of heavy shells. In a sickeningly fluid lunge, it swung an arm out to strike one of the transports, gargantuan talons tearing into it too fast to evade. No sooner had the vehicle crumpled under its force, however, than the other two abruptly accelerated, the full vigour of their engines withheld until the last dearly bought moment. Their prows slammed into the beast’s forelegs, folding under their own momentum. The survivors topside, seized by some bloodthirsty madness, threw the weight of their bodies into the tangle of metal and leaking fuel. As the monster struggled to free its limbs from the ruinous mass, one of them braced his flamer and wildly sprayed forth.

The conflagration shook the ground and hurled up clouds of tainted ash atop a pillar of flame. The beast’s grotesque frame listed forward as its front pair of legs were blasted from under it. It swiftly drew itself up on its arms, ape-like, venting balefire from its jaws in a strange imitation of animal fury. Its head snapped from side to side, as if seeking upon what best to vent its rage, but what caught its eye first was not prey.

As the destructive crash unfolded, the ponderous Legion command tank had been slowly rotating its turrets, angling them so as to expose the fewest possible of its crew to its target’s corrosive presence. Now was its moment, and as the monster stood mired in the wreckage of the Rhinos, the superheavy unleashed at once a salvo of its ordnance. Cannon shells and heavy missiles arced through the poisonous air and struck the metallic amalgam like the Emperor’s own fist. Sickly fire and shrapnel burst from among the black smoke as the crippled monstrosity was pummeled into scrap, the otherworldly force animating it bleeding out from its fractured shell.

Yet the barrage had marked the Reviled’s relic vehicle as a threat. The Cragrunners’ reinforcing waves had only briefly distracted the second beast, and now its snarl turned to the large and inviting target. In a few ground-quaking bounds, it was among the command tank’s encircling force, flipping a Rhino on its side as a gutted carcass with a single swipe. The other armed transports froze or gave disorderly jolts, their drivers momentarily stunned by the psychically disruptive enemy suddenly in their midst, as the superheavy began to sluggishly crawl backwards.

This hesitation only lasted seconds, however, as almost at once the Astartes operators found the presence of mind for a simple command. The landing hatches of a score of Rhinos rattled open, like so many mouths recklessly gasping for irradiated air, and out rushed the warriors of the Ninth. They were more remote from death than their hull-riding brothers had been, not bound by oath to precipitate their end on the contaminated field, but each of them was just as ready to meet it, eager to perish in glory rather than be gnawed to nothing by their flaw. Their cries rose above the roar of engines, and for a moment even the turbid pall over the vox seemed to part before their voices.

“Raptor Imperialis!”

“Graachal!”

“The Oath of Death!”

“Qasechik!”

“Reviled by flesh!”

“Death walks with us!”

“Unity!”

Even the abominable construct appeared, for the merest of moments, incredulous before this madly single-minded charge. It swatted away contemptuously at these minuscule rushing figures, crushing them like insects, but more of them came from every side. They climbed its jagged shell, heedless of the disorienting throbs of bile in their throats, of the infernal incandescence heating their own armour to the point it burned the skin beneath, of their struggling organs failing one by one. One after another clung to spurs and edges of metal and set alight the grenades in their hands, the suicidal blasts cascading along the bandoliers strapped around their chests. Each detonation was less than the sting of a gnat to the colossus, but beast-like it snapped and struck fruitlessly at the tiny pests that dared to needle it.

In these moments of bloody diversion, the Legion’s drivers had regained their bearings, and their guns now stood aligned at the same target. The command vehicle vomited fire once more, and this time it was joined by the chorus of its escort. The last of the rushing Astartes were caught in the roaring blasts along with their foe, blood and scrap and pale flames crushed into a hellish display of inorganic mutilation. When the cannons and missile pods quieted at last, the monster’s unnatural fire was extinguished, its remains a mountain of blades thrust skyward.

Behind, the rumbling of the Imperial armoured force approached, its fury soon to rain upon Kalagann’s walls.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

Although the sterile openness of exposed space might have seemed more welcoming to the voidhangers, it was not so for Ilshar, accustomed to humid and overgrown environments more than bare expanses. Though long since surpassed by augmentations, the naturally limited senses of a tarrhaidim were put on edge by open spaces, and his close skirting of the trenches was as much of a psychological reassurance from closely available cover as it was reconnaissance. Harvest’s mention of large pirate forces on the move did not help ease his mood - in the warrens and corridors, the enemy’s numerical advantage would have been much reduced, but if any forayed out here, the Envenomed would be an inviting target.

Finding the terminus point of the etheric trail he had picked up was a welcome distraction from those thoughts. He stopped next to Kleo at the trench’s lip, hunching forward slightly for a better look at the anomalous carcass below.

“Confirmed, there’s what looks like an emitter struck through a dead Chasm-spawn.” It certainly felt dead enough to his every sense. “And it doesn’t read like oneiric-attuned technology. It’s suspicious. Chasmborn matter doesn’t usually stay coherent for long after death, certainly not on an unstable place like this.”

Inorganic technology that interfaced with the ether was uncommon and often of scielto make, which this spike clearly was not. If it was stabilizing the corpse, it was in some way Ilshar had never seen before.

Tentatively, he reached out with his senses, not towards the spike, which eluded his firmly biologically-rooted understanding, but to the remains of the oneiric beast. If the device was channeling any sort of energy through its unearthly nerves, it could perhaps be traced, at the very least enough to determine if it was being drawn from the mass into the metal or the other way around - a difference crucial for understanding the transmitter’s less obvious purposes.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

With the shredded remains of the last corpse-puppet fallen to the ground, everything was suddenly much quieter. Embedded lattices of synth-osseous matter - emergency scaffolding that was forming around damaged areas - gave a barely audible creak as Ilshar pushed himself back to his feet. The internal autocasts were going to be a pain to extract once back at a base of operations, but they would keep him walking through the rest of the mission despite the knots of crumpled muscle where he had been struck. At least the rest of the squad seemed to be doing all right besides one of the ‘hangers, and even she was clearly not critical.

“We’d best be wary of engaging going ahead,” still stepping rigidly at first, he carefully kept his distance from Echo’s disinfestation fumes, jaws involuntarily contracting at the antiseptic smell within King’s bubble, “Another one of those could send us to the final coil.”

He gestured at the sealed door behind which the ether-mind was hopefully still preoccupied with the scavenger worms. Truthfully the gunship worried him almost as much as the threat of more hostile nests. Even beyond his own squad, the comms chatter was a reminder of what sort of eccentrics the Intransigence tended to employ, and an incautious missile hit on a motley carcass like Sargasso could be disastrous for someone close to the impact. If the Nexus was generous, there would be no need for its support, but the station was full enough of ill omens.

---

The way over the hull turned out to be as foreboding as Ilshar had suspected. The silence around the Envenomed was more than that of footsteps in the vacuum - it was the absence of the subtle work of decomposition. Sargasso was a graveyard, and it had maggots to its measure, but not here. The only signs of scrambling life had gone cold long ago.

“A corpse is not truly dead,” the tarrhaidim commented over the squad comms as he half-jumped over a nasty-looking spar of gouged metal protruding in his way. The weakness of the almost makeshift mag-clamps in his boots was a boon here. “It’s always crawling with renewed life, even when you can’t see it.”

He looked over the edge of the trench the group was passing by, noting how starlight glimmered across the more prominent pieces of debris. Almost like a mollusk’s residue. His etheric senses pulsed quietly.

“There’s ether-trails all over there,” he pointed at a particularly cluttered pit in the scratched fissure, “It’s like something marking its territory. I say we avoid these pits.”

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

Following a trail demanded a measure of caution to make sure that one was not sprung upon by whatever lay at the end of it, and nowhere was this as true as in the ether. Between Ilshar’s damaged body and the combat still raging around him, that sort of light mental touch was hard to keep in the moment. Fortunately, precautions turned out to be unnecessary, as the ether-mind responsible for the cadavers appeared to have problems of its own. One less thing to worry about, though as his senses fully returned to his body and he took in the situation, it suddenly seemed like a small blessing indeed.

His eyes sprouted as widely as his helmet’s visor would allow, taking in the broadest angle he could manage. Not good. The corpses had closed in for a brawl, one of the ‘hangers looked to have taken a bad hit, and their partner squad sounded too far to be of immediate help. At least none of the creatures was aiming for him, and as long as their controller was kept busy no more would be coming.

“As long as that fight is going, we’ll have no more hostiles,” Ilshar grit out into the comms, both in reply to Flux and as reassurance for the rest of the squad. He had neither time nor energy to go into more detail - as he spoke, he leaned back from the support of his ulvath and laboriously raised the machine gun while shifting his weight to his still numb legs. It was not the most comfortable firing position, but it would have to do.

There was a wealth of targets, but not as many practical ones. The ulvath was not a precise weapon at the best of times, even less so now. Ilshar took aim for one of the less mobile enemies - the intact but staggered puppet that was threatening the human - and fired a burst in its direction. A compartmentalized anatomy meant his hands were steady enough, despite the recoil shuddering through his torso.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

Some people around the galaxy thought that tarrhaidim did not feel pain. At this moment, like a few times before in his life, Ilshar found himself wishing that this urban legend were true. The terrible hit from the walking corpse-pile had dented his armour inwards, crushing some neural nodes and cutting into the webs of others, to say nothing of the damage from the hit itself. It spoke to his conditioning that he did collapse when the shock wore off and the full sensation of the wound came flooding in, even as the seraph worm spooled back into its lair of non-space, reluctant after its first taste of live prey.

While a tarrhaidim could ache as much as any cerebrate organic, though, there was no reason for an Intransigence agent to do so while a fight was not over yet. Signalling for implanted glands to release sense-deadening agents into his damaged lower back, Ilshar propped himself up with the stock of his gun, quickly surveying the room with multiple eyes at once while he drew himself to one knee. With the amalgam destroyed, the ether-mind presence seemed to be losing its grip on its dwindling thralls. This was not necessarily good. If the entity slipped away before it could at least be identified, it or its ilk could return for another attack later. In a place like Sargass, one should never be comfortable after an apparent victory.

“I’ll trail it through the ether,” he nodded to Alice, then pointed at the remaining husks, “The rest of you take out those dregs.”

Following the traces of the Chasm presence was harder now that its influence had receded, but luckily there was a clear focal point in the fading core of the fallen monstrosity. Ilshar directed his ether-senses upon it, latching on the imprint left by the worm’s teeth, and probed for a departing wake of the familiar mental force. If he was still favoured, perhaps it could be pinpointed to a physical location somewhere nearby - although that was itself far from certain.