NationStates Jolt Archive

Sangaur III

Dawn broke over the smouldering ruin of the Kurakis Citadel. Her once-proud walls were cracked, pockmarked and breached, rendered almost undefendable against the onslaught promised by the new day.

Bare sixteen hundred remained of the Citadel's garrison, once five thousand strong. A full Sangaur PDF infantry regiment, with armoured and artillery support, had suffered through one hundred and three days of bombardment and despair. Kurakis was the last bastion of organised resistance on the entire planet.

This was their final hour.

***

Major Almun Tanden ran his fingers over the crumbled ramparts of his last command, his face drawn and pale with fatigue. Beyond this walls lay an innumerable host of men and machines, led by depraved daemons from the darkest depths of hell. When the war began, he had been third officer in the 6th Sangaur Hive Primus Grenadier Regiment, a most prestigious and coveted post. His son had still been alive.

Then the enemy had come. Sangaur's orbital defences had been annihilated within minutes, their crews atomised by the awesome firepower of the enemy fleet, or worse, had survived the attacks to die cold and alone in the frozen depths of space. Drop-pods and carriers had fallen like black rain from the skies, thick and fast. Utter chaos and confusion had destroyed the planetary defence force more surely than the enemy's own guns.

Overwhelmed by the armoured giants and screaming fanatics who emerged, the majority of the Sangaur PDF was effectively neutralised within three weeks. A fighting retreat had been frantically organised, and numerous units escaped towards the northern continent. Few survived.

Tanden sighed, casting his eyes over the scorched plain before the Citadel, littered with the blackened wrecks of enemy and PDF vehicles and tanks. Sunlight glittered from a thousand sections of torn steel. In the distance, the enemy were beginning their final advance, and Tanden returned to his men.

The coming of dawn was a herald, a sign of things to come. Raised high in the sky, the firey orb of Sanguar's sun cast a searing light upon the ruination of the citadels defences. They had come to spread light, not the flawed and long-snuffed out radience of the False Emperor. They brought the holy Word of Chaos, the blessed script that burned clean worlds and scoured the doubt from the minds of the unworthy.

Ecanus stood before the assembled war host of the Ascendant Daemons, his pale features marked only by a cold determination. He clasped one gauntleted hand around the shaft of his Crozius, leaning upon the sacred instrument as he regarded the kneeling Astartes and mortal devotees of the blasphemous faith. Some of them wore the flensed skins of the populace like robes, others had painted their own flesh with the spilled blood. He saw one who sat, his skin pierced and decorated with shards of shattered bone. It pleased him to look upon them, children of the Gods...

"Let it be done...The Gods have spoken, brothers! This world is promised to the Dark Prince, it's populations to be made slaves beneath the glory of his will and the Eight Pointed Star! All praises be to Chaos!"

"All praises!"

He knelt, taking the face of one of the acolytes in his hand, cupping his cheeks with an almost reverential grace.

"You know what must be done."

"I serve, great Lord! I serve you and through you, the Gods!"

"As it should be! Go! Show them the meaning of agony. Spill blood, maim flesh...Be the living sacrifices."

The wave of screaming cultists crested the hill as they approached the Citadel, hideous and heterogeneous beneath the crimson eye of the rising sun. A thousand voices raised in blaspehmous praise, lasguns and stubbers stabbing out against an enemy well-fortified. A howling missile struck out against the heathen servants of the False Emperor, as others surged forward, plunging into the enemy firing solutions with prayers on their lips.

Some pushed ahead, streaming through the throng before triggering the melta-bombs sutured to their flesh, mighty explosions rising at the base of the walls. They screamed, they died, writhing in their own blood and excrement, roaring in obscene pleasure. Captured Guard vehicles came in their midsts, cannons roaring, vox-amplified voices howling in rapture with every detonation, thrilling to every carnal second of vicious killing.

They looked upon hell itself, upon their very future. They would triumph here, or become these things and worse, be debased by the powers of the Warp. Some would favor death over such torment, some would fight to the bitter end. It mattered not.

For the Chronosians had only begun their endgame...And Sanguar had not felt the final punishments of those true Warriors of the Gods.

Thre remnants of the 6th straddled the crumbling defences of their bastion, and presented their arms to the oncoming tidal wave of bodies. Autocannons and heavy stubbers, their ammunition panniers almost dry, were uncovered and moved into position. Major Tanden gave the order to fix bayonets, and the walls glittered with reflected light from a thousand blades. The breaches had been mined, and blocked as well as they could be with sandbag walls and razorwire.

The enemy approached.

Tanden stood with his men on the remaining tower of the Solar Gate, a lasgun in his hands. Beside him were the remaining fourteen men of his platoon, their faces a mix of fear and disbelief at the coming of their death.

A stream of rocket-propelled explosives rippled from the mass of enemies, undisciplined and ragged, though terrifying in its intensity. The high-explosive warheads rained onto Kurakis, further breaking her walls. One round arched high in the air, finally landing dead-centre on a stack of ammunition crates in the main courtyard. The slug-rounds detonated with crackling, staccato pops as their wooden containers began to burn, and could not be safely doused. They were abandoned to the flames.

The enemy were in range.

"OPEN FIRE!" yelled the Major, and the order was echoed along the walls. A thousand lasguns and stubbers barked, their chattering call quickly echoed by the fanatical enemy. The ground before the Citadel was again scorched and torn by a storm of las-fire. The screaming mass was numberless, and while thousands fell to lie shrieking foul oaths in the dust, their rate of advance only increased.

On the left flank a cluster of Leman Russ battle tanks, their proud hulls adorned with blasphemous slogans and foul trophies, locked targets and opened fire on the walltops. The mass-caliber high-explosive rounds gouged into the rockcrete walls, sending men screaming into the courtyard below. One round clipped the rampart, detonating directly in front of a platoon of grenadiers above one of the breaches. The wall was swept clean of men, their bodies reduced to fragments and a fine red mist, which settled softly and almost unnoticed on the clustered troops guarding the breach.

The enemy charged.

A mindless, howling wall of flesh, weapons blazing as they ran. They threw themselves into the breaches, dragging the coils of razorwire aside with the sheer weight of their bodies. Anti-personnel mines ripped bloody holes in their ranks, leaving scores of mutilated bodies. Those who fell were trampled into the mud by the horde, chanting frenzied litanies of corruption as they stumbled over the bodies of their comrades.

Grenadiers met the assault in the breaches, face to face with the monstrous foe. Lasguns on full automatic tore into the unarmoured cultists, but the fighting quickly degenerated into a mud-slicked melee. Cultists with melta-bombs and det-packs rushed the combats, ripping away the detonation tapes of their suicidal weapons and blasting friend and foe to smouldering scraps in the confines of the breaches.

Seeing their comrades being slowly pushed back from their positions, the grenadiers on the wall unhooked their frag grenades and tossed them onto the swarming enemy. Murderous fire from heavy stubber emplacements in the courtyard cut down the cultists as they topped the breaches, and the weight of bodies began to slow their advance.

On the Solar Gate, Major Tanden vainly dared to hope of victory.

OOC: Tag

"They have served their purpose. The Changer has named it so." The twisted Sorceror-thing bore the name Ishmael and whispered in a half-heard voice, a whispering that seemed touched by a thousand other voices, hissing from his warp-touched flesh. "The Lord of Lies decrees that the hour is nigh, that the host march and bring fire to the apostates."

"I know the will of the Gods, Sorceror." Ecanus snarled as he turned, light gleaming off of his black armour, refracting from plate marked by godly scripture and polished by the worn fingers of a thousand slaves, slaves now dying beneath the guns of the hated foe. "Their Emperor abandoned them long ago, it is time to bring them back to the fold." He let his hands trace along the runic patterning of a great Daemon Engine. "The guns thirst...Let them drink deep. Let them fire!"

Thunder howled and snapped from the barrels, a discharge of ruinous artillery, the pulsing of dozens of volleys blending together into the raw and roaring cacophany of war. Ecanus grinned to hear it, to glory in the conduct of yet another chapter of ceaseless war. This world was another trophy for his tally, another planet to be conquered and made compliant. Such was the will of the Gods, that a galaxy bow in worship...

Cultists flew in every direction as the assault commenced, pounding not only the walls and its defenders but those gullible fools who thought themselves truly worthy. On countless worlds, it was always the mortal chaff who served the will of the Gods, before those true servants swooped in to utterly decimate the foe.

The battlefield seemed to twist and warp, alive with a carnal fire, defying even the mighty guns. Great Terminator armoured warriors strode forth, their combi-bolters crackling with death as they swung power weapons against those who stood before them. Bullets and las-rounds cracked and dissipated against ceramite plate, driven back as the first of the Astartes warriors surged across the battlefield, or appeared out of thin air. Thunderhawks swooped through the air, Raptors seething from their open hatches, screaming with vox-enhanced fury as they descended, roaring chain-weapons readied to kill and maim.

Through the maelstrom of battle, Ecanus strode, howling cants and prayers to the forbidden Gods. His crozius hungered for blood, for flesh, for the suffering of lesser beings. His devotional markings and tattoos were aglow with a furious intensity, his most trusted warrior-guards, also clad in Terminator plate, at his side.

"Come forth, heathens! Come forth and taste the judgement of the Four Gods!"

The defence collapsed in an instant. The daemonic horde, led by a vanguard of the most fearsome warriors in existence, scythed into the defenders with unstoppable force. The grenadiers fought beyond the limits of their duty and their courage against the immeasurable foe, individual acts of futile heroism lost within the tide of chanting warriors. Chaos Terminators strode among them like true warriors of the gods, invincible in their fury and joyous in their hate.

Major Tanden and the remnants of his platoon were butchered within seconds as raptor squads assaulted the towers and wall-tops, filling the air with limbs and shrieking battle-cries.

***

Three hundred grenadiers, the last, luckiest, most cowardly, most hardened remainder of a regiment of five thousand warriors, fought a bloody retreat to the central blockhouses. Their fists caked with the lifeblood of the enemy and the barrels of their weapons glowing red, not a man among them was unwounded. Laying down a withering hail of fire from las and stub weaponry, some even bearing the weapons of the enemy, bereft of commanders and direction, they fought solely to survive.

Las-fire and bolt rounds tore into their ranks, leaving a bloodied trail of the dead as they withdrew. A thousand screaming fanatics threw themselves at the line, heedless of the merciless fire which cut down more than half their number before they reached the foe. They assaulted the grenadiers with terrifying ferocity, the savagery of their attack matched only by the brutality of the reply as the infantrymen fought with with blade and buttstock. Those who had lost their weapons fought with berserk courage, smashing at the cultists with fists and feet, elbows and heads. Questing thumbs found soft eye sockets as men killed each other with rocks, fragments of burning shrapnel and shards of jagged glass in the maelstrom of combat which asked and gave no quarter.

With barely twenty of their number still drawing breath, the cultists fled from the frenzied warriors, their faith discarded in a frantic scramble for life. Less than two hundred grenadiers remained as they resumed their retreat.

"Where is your god? Where the heroes of his name?" Ecanus' voice echoed across the battlefield as he strode forth, a skull crushed beneath his boot, shattered in his implacable advance. "Where are Astartes pouring from the heavens? Where are the Sisters of Battle and the Saints amongst their ranks? Is this all the might you have to offer?" Laughter poured forth, thick and rich, gloating and victorious. "The Emperor has abandoned you, as he has abandoned all his domains...Ours..." He paused, savoring the words. He was alone, his Terminator guards standing behind him, rallying with the rest of his troops.

In a moment, the Astartes could crush the last survivors of this worlds defenders. Instead, their lord and master gave voice to his thoughts, his offer...

"...Ours is a Great Crusade. To reunite and reunify those lost dominions of mankind, and to illuminate them! The Corpse-God is an impotent lie, unable and unwilling to defend those he considers his sons and servants! Where is the Emperor!? Where his fury!? Where his wrath!? It does not come for us, most favored of the true Powers! The Powers of the Warp who offer glory to those who forsake false idols and fall on their knees to be saved!"

He thrust his crozius into the air, it's head ablaze with warp-fire, scintillating in its intensity, maddening in its complexity.

"Who will bow before the favored of the Gods? Who will hear their Word? Who will die here as a dog?"

The silence was total.

From the blockhouses, walls pitted with laser burns and fresh, crumbling shell-holes, a lone figure emerged. A solitary soldier, his scarred face and hands smeared with blood, dust and scorched flesh, walked from the temporary safety of the bunkers. Jeers followed him, but they were few and wavering.

He stopped, ten metres from the armoured warrior whose taunts and offers still echoed across the inner citadel.

"What would you offer us," he spat, "save a quick death? The glory of a pit-slave shackled to the service of a foe? I would rather die fighting, and slay my last share of your bonded warriors, than accept such a fate."

"You are already a slave. You toil as a gladiator or a prisoner in a gaol, but you cannot see your bars, so blinded by impotent, worthless faith. You worship a corpse, mouldering and gone these last millenia, so long dead that he wishes to drag you down with him. Humanity, proud and glorious, heirs to a galaxy, writhing in their own filth, praising an empty deity, screaming at the dark with your last breath." He slammed the pole of the crozius into the ground with an echoing bang, his eyes were ablaze with dark faith, alive with the fury of his will and his belief.

"We offer you freedom. You will fight as men answerable to none but the Gods, you will fight as no other men before you. I look at you and I see the potential for limitless brutality, endless carnage. You would conquer worlds with their might in your hearts, rather than slave away endlessly in the service of a figment.

Your Emperor will make you slaves...Chaos, will make you as the Gods are, free, limitless, infinite in their potential and their...Divine mercy. You would enlighten others at the edge of a blade, and cast those who resisted into the fires of the Warp, to suffer for eternity." He chuckled dryly. "The choice is yours, and that of your comrades."

"By your lips," said the soldier, "my choice is between life or death. Death without offer of salvation, my soul to be consumed by the creatures of the warp and my body left to rot in a citadel of the dead. The galaxy will continue without care. If I choose life, I will make war in the name of dark gods, and my hands shall know nothing save to kill - yet I will draw breath."

He sighed, the weight of the decision almost unbearable.

"Then I choose life. Life and all her curses and afflictions, all challenges to be overcome. I refuse to die, and if my only path is to become a warrior of Chaos, then my way is set for me. I will swear loyalty to the Gods, and will kill in their name to prove my worth."

The soldier locked eyes with the Space Marine.

"I am Karesh Magellon," he said. "I choose to be a traitor and a heretic, for there is no other path."

"No other path." The marine bent his head, shoulders shaking with dark mirth. "All Praises."

"ALL PRAISES!" Each of his company let their voices rise, terrible and mighty in the gathering dark. Ecanus chuckled, his mind reaching forth to coil about that of Karesh Magellon. "All Praises..."

He saw the galaxy in flames.

They wore the armor of warriors, of Guardsmen, soaked in carrion and reeking of death. He felt brands and burns and scars upon his features and his body, felt them intimately as a lover. He knew every inch of his form, knew everything he was capable of. Pain bubbled within him, cast aside as he brought his blade down, again and again, spilling the blood of the heathen.

He saw the Throne of Terra cast down and the rotting corpse of the Emperor given up to the elements. He saw the halls of Earth itself in flames, the Golden Throne eclipsed by a mountain of bone, a vasty peak of skulls, a brass throne at it's head. He saw the God of War casting down the unworthy, he saw it drive the other three from it's presence with howls and ululations. He saw the armies of the Blood God pour forth, a liquid tide, rising from seas of running lifeforce.

He felt his heart beat in his chest, pounding like a fist into a face. The wet slap of his frail biology seemed enhanced, pulsing with the energies of the Warp, undulating with the strength of kings and gods and heroes.

He felt alive.

He felt unstoppable...

"All praises!" He let his crozius rise once more, waiting to hear it from their lips, to hear these men surrender all they were to the Gods. "You will kneel and know the Word of the Gods, you will know pain, and you will suffer...But you will emerge from the crucible, purified. You will bear the scars of war as medals, you will know the heart of human brutality as others might know their Creed.

You will be forged in the fires of war, and you shall be legends."

Blood ran freely from Karesh's nose, matting his close-cut beard with thick crimson liquid, which dribbled past his chin to drip slowly to the ground. His eyes rolled back into his head as the power of the Gods flooded through him, gnawing at his inhibitions, his remorse, his pity and his guilt and filling his mind with ambition and promises of power.

He sagged, falling to his knees as his body struggled to understand the forces which commanded it. Karesh stared blankly, seeing in his mind's eye the truth that the apostle preached, that mankind was doomed to extinction as long as it refused to accept the terrifying power of the Chaos Gods.

"I..." he murmured wetly, spit and blood bubbling at his lips. He struggled to rise, his movements sluggish and uncoordinated. He grasped at the feet of the gigantic marine, eventually managing to regain control of his trembling legs. The light was so bright. "I thank you so much... I cannot truly say what you have given me, but the... pain is sublime."

Karesh turned back the way he had come, facing the blockhouses. His face was a rictus of pleasure, and every man within them who had the strength was watching his every movement and listening on his every word.

"Come to me!" he called to them, "come and be blessed, my brothers of war! Give your lives to me, and I will lead you to riches and glory beyond compare!"

Slowly, with conflicting senses of fear and hope, of caution and apprehension, they walked to him.