The Sapphire King - Ferrus' Wrath, Fulgrim's Love

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THE GAUDINIAN HERESY

ENGINES OF THE DAMNED

Billions of Imperial citizens had been crammed into this ten-mile space, their flesh and bones melded with the steel, circuits and pipes of the machines. Pistons rose and fell with manic speed, driven by great tangles of bulging human limbs. Melted masses of flesh formed twisted gantries where faces writhed and moaned. Human torsos, skin seared and impossibly bloated, jutted from boiler-stacks. They shrieked endlessly as steaming blood vented from their eyes. Here, cogs of bone and raw, bloodied nerves rotated at breakneck speed. There, daemonic weapons were thrust along fleshy conveyor belts by the peristaltic motion of a billion disembodied tongues. Worst of all was the din, a discordant industrial thunder of jarring voices that tore at the air until the Iron Hands were forced to dampen their audio-receptors.

Clan Raukaan advanced into this nauseating bedlam, weapons raised and anger boiling beneath their selfcontrol. The insult was obvious, for here was steel and flesh combined to create something greater than either. Warped weaponry churned through the pulsating machines at breakneck speed, its construction abhorrent yet undeniably perfect. These flesh engines were monstrous beyond words, a daemonic perversion that undermined everything they held dear. Centuries of training and subconscious conditioning fought to suppress the revulsion they felt as they pressed forward. The squads voxed back and forth, Clan Raukaan’s Tactical and Assault Squads taking the lead while the Dreadnoughts, Devastators and Centurions watched their flanks.

They had advanced almost to the heart of the structure, their armour stained with steaming gore and trickling fluids, when the compulsions struck. Assault Squad Neim were stalking along a walkway of writhing wires and muscle, Iron Fathers Kristos and Graevaar in their midst. Suddenly Kristos stumbled to a stop, his whirring limbs stuttering as he missed a step. Graevaar cocked his head quizzically, flexing his powerfist and scanning the machines around him. There was frantic movement everywhere but nothing to indicate the reason for the Iron Father’s sudden hesitation. Kristos gazed around in a daze, sweeping his augmetic eyes across the flesh machines and muttering.

‘Can you not see it, Graevaar? Do you not hear its song? The perfect utility... the efficiency... the strength...’ Suddenly, before anyone could react, Iron Father Kristos plunged a nest of his mechadendrites into the fleshwet receptors of the machines around him. Graevaar’s living eye widened and Squad Neim raised their weapons in shock as Kristos convulsed, jaws stretching wide to emit a strangled whine of scrapcode. The sound rose in volume, Kristos’ voice seeming to multiply into a shrieking binary chorus that swelled by the second. Iron Captain Graevaar broke his paralysis, lunging forward to disconnect the convulsing Kristos, but it was already far too late. The ancient Iron Father’s mechadendrites bulged obscenely, fleshy matter squirting from between their segmented links, and Kristos howled with a thousand voices as his body began to warp and twist.

What living flesh remained to him swelled rapidly, writhing and bulging as it grew. Clumps of snaking, blood-slick wires and tubes burst from between armour segments, coiling around his vein-stretched limbs as they elongated obscenely. The Iron Father’s servo-harness melded with his grossly swollen skin, its limbs becoming monstrous, insectile things that ended in slavering mouths and chitinous claws. Threat runes lit up across Squad Neim’s visors as the seething horror that had once been Iron Father Kristos tore free of the flesh engines and surged forward. The machine-spawn emitted an ululating howl, bladed limbs lashing out to scythe through Graevaar’s waist and tear him in two amid sheets of blood and sparks. The horror ploughed on into Squad Neim, Kristos’ tortured body convulsing as he tore apart his former brothers. Even as the Assault Squad belatedly opened fire, the story was repeating throughout the dome.

 

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Everywhere, Kristosian Iron Fathers were being overcome by the twisted perfection of the flesh engines – the harder they attempted to repress their urges with logic, the faster they succumbed. The effect was already spreading to the most heavily augmetic members of Clan Raukaan. Dozens of battle-brothers lunged helplessly for the hellish machines, many gunned down by their horrified brethren as their weakness revealed itself. The rest jammed augmetics into the fleshy flanks of the machines, cramming foetid tubes into their eyes and mouths as they surrendered to the scrapcode’s siren song. Even as the machine-spawn bloated and twisted, turning upon their revolted squad-mates, reality began to shudder and buckle.

The temperature soared and plunged as a static-laden whine filled the air. Epistolary Lydriik yelled a warning as howling daemonic rents tore into being, shimmering portals of pearlescent smoke that yawned wider with every moment. From each rent flowed perfumed streamers of ectoplasmic vapour that clung and slithered like liquid flesh. From amid these vile fronds burst squealing, gasping masses of Daemons, rippling silks and glimmering jewels set amongst jagged bone claws and lashing, leathery tongues.

With them came warriors of the Emperor’s Children, their gaudily daubed armour and thrumming weapons jarring with the howling, swirling beings that surrounded them.

Madness engulfed the dome. Bolters and flamers roared, yet Clan Raukaan were all but buried in foes. Machinespawn reeled drunkenly through volleys of fire, smashing battle-brothers off their feet with every blow as capering Daemons fell upon them with shrieks of glee. Whiplash talons and glistening blades hacked at flesh and steel amid peals of laughter. As more Iron Hands clamped down upon their suppressed horror and rage, so did more burst into mutation, their locked-down emotions haemorrhaging and rupturing under the Sapphire King’s influence.

Amid roiling clouds of poisoned perfume, the bejewelled Daemon itself strode from a gaping portal to bask in the demise of the Chapter it had brought to ruin. Tall and lithe, with great claws and silken flesh, the Sapphire King revelled in the death that surrounded it, shrieking praise to its god for its inevitable victory. Yet as Kardan Stronos watched another brother of Squad Riis degenerate before his eyes, revelation struck like a thunderbolt. He was disgusted by these abominations, furious at the weakness of the brothers who had allowed themselves to fall. Crushing those feelings would not undo them, only cause them to curdle into corruption, and therein lay the snare. Strength lay not in cutting himself off from his emotions, but from shackling them to his iron will. With a roar of effort, Stronos harnessed the roiling emotions that threatened to tear him apart, blasting shots into the mutating battle-brother before him as he vented his disgust. Activating his vox, Stronos barked commands to the forces around him.

‘Release your anger brothers, let it out before the foe destroys you with it!’ Slowly at first, then faster in a spreading wave, the battle-brothers began to disengage their inhibitor protocols and loose furious battle cries. Emotional floodgates burst open and the Sapphire King shrieked its rage as the repressed energies that had fuelled its spell were vented like steam from a boiler.

Freed from the debilitating Warp-craft, the surviving warriors of Clan Raukaan gave vent to their revulsion, blasting the Daemons apart in rains of ectoplasmic filth or tearing them limb from shimmering limb. Stronos began a coordinated retreat from the dome, the depleted clan company falling back by squad, fighting furiously all the way. They drew Warpspawn and traitors alike into overlapping fields of fire and tore them apart in their hundreds. Dreadnoughts performed sudden counter-charges that pushed the foe back, their massive fists pulping Daemons into paste while their guns roared. Fighting their way free with uncharacteristic ferocity, the Iron Hands broke out into the windswept plaza before the dome, the foe still howling and shrieking at their heels.

The moment the last battle-brother backed through the breach, the tanks of Clans Raukaan struck. Smashing into the flanks of the horde as it flooded forth, their thundering fire and grinding tracks exterminated the Daemons in droves. Still the otherworldly horrors came on, the Sapphire King striding amid a cadre of Noise Marines. The Daemon towered over its followers like a heathen idol given life. Centurions of Squad Haarkol stormed toward the beast, their weapons blazing, but were driven back by the howling guns of the Emperor’s Children with ears and eyes bleeding until their helmets swilled with blood. The Sapphire King berated the Iron Hands in a clashing voice both beautiful and grating – had it not granted them a marvellous gift? Had it not given them the chance to embrace a strength like nothing they had ever felt, to shed mortal weakness forever? Yet they – ignorant droning machine-men that they were – had proven themselves as dull as rusted iron, and undeserving of its blessings. Now they would all die.

Daemonettes on whirling, bladed chariots ploughed through the melee, lopping off heads and limbs as they passed. Machine-spawn drove pulsating tentacles of nervecable into the hulls of tanks and Dreadnoughts, the vehicles shuddering and bulging with vile corruption as their crews drowned in fleshy foulness. The warping screams of the Sapphire King and its underlings shattered armour, reduced bionics to sparking ruin, and caused eyes and organs to rupture in showers of blood. The remaining warriors of Clan Raukaan desparately struggled to hold their lines in the face of such a disorienting attack, and it seemed like they still might lose the battle.

Then, with an impassioned roar that rang over the battle, Epistolary Lydriik charged. With him ran his command squad, bionic limbs pumping and bolters blazing. The Librarian swept the Mindforge Stave in great arcs, each whistling blow hammering traitors from their feet and blowing them apart with thrumming blasts of psychic force. First one Noise Marine, then another, was sent sailing through the air, mashed armour leaking gore as they died. Around him, Lydriik’s warriors fought with a fury they had never before allowed themselves to display, piston-limbed blows lent a sledgehammer strength that staved in plumed helms and hacked through gaudy breastplates.

With a supersonic squeal of outrage, the towering Daemon lashed out, coral-hued claws snipping the arm from Apothecary Ruumas and punching through the faceplate of Brother Lorrgus. Lydriik narrowed his eyes as the beast towered over him, forging his hate and anger into a single white-hot star behind his eyes. Even as the Sapphire King swept its talons down towards him, the Librarian unleashed his roiling powers, sending them surging from the tip of the Mindforge Stave and straight into the freakish Daemon’s face. Tainted blood splattered out amid a spinning shrapnel cloud of warped black bone and flickering jewels. Decapitated by the thunderous blast, the Sapphire King’s body reared backward, claws flailing, rancid black filth jetting violently from its stump of a neck. Still standing, the Daemon’s form convulsed, bulged obscenely, and then exploded in a spray of noisome black filth that stank like rotted perfume.

Their lord destroyed, the Daemons of Slaanesh began to flicker and fade, their strength deserting them by the second until they faded away like smoke on the breeze. Impossibly outnumbered, the last few Emperor’s Children fought on with mad glee, but in the face of Clan Raukaan’s wrath they were swiftly blasted into bloodied ruin. The surviving machine-spawn had died with the Sapphire King, their revolting bodies haemorrhaging black sludge and perfumed foulness. As the dust settled around the last fallen corpse, Clan Raukaan were left with just the howling wind, the muted, horrified murmurs of the surviving battlebrothers, and the distant clamour of the flesh-engines pounding ever onward. Iron Chaplain Shulgaar surveyed the battlefield that had come so close to damning his Chapter forever and knew what must be done

‘Return to the ships,’ he ordered, his voice a grating mechanical snarl. ‘From orbit we will burn it all. Nothing remains for us here.’

A DEADLY PATH
It was at the precise moment that Ferrus Manus’ head was scythed from his shoulders by the traitor Fulgrim that the Sapphire King came into being. Spawned from the psychic bow wave of Manus’ death, this Daemon was forged from the Primarch’s frustrated pride, his boiling anger and sorrow, and from his shame. From the moment of its birth, the Sapphire King fed on the repressed emotions of the soulscarred Iron Hands. It basked in their chained desperation, bound to their fate by the emotions they felt but would not express.

The Daemon bedevilled them across the centuries, offering opportunities for damnation disguised as steps away from the weakness they so feared. It nudged the minds of Imperial officials and potential foes, forever seeking to goad the Iron Hands into spending away their humanity like coin. The Chapter bent their every effort to purging the weaknesses of the flesh, never realising that the more they demonised their wants and needs, the greater the hold the spectre of their repressed emotions gained upon them. As the Kristosian Conclave reached its zenith, the Sapphire King judged the Iron Hands ripe to fall and set its trap in motion. Each Iron Hand carried within his heart a rancid seed, a bomb of repressed passions that could erupt to destroy him at any moment. The Daemon would simply provide the spark to light the flame and watch the Chapter burn upon a pyre of their own emotions.

 

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A DEADLY PATH
It was at the precise moment that Ferrus Manus’ head was scythed from his shoulders by the traitor Fulgrim that the Sapphire King came into being. Spawned from the psychic bow wave of Manus’ death, this Daemon was forged from the Primarch’s frustrated pride, his boiling anger and sorrow, and from his shame. From the moment of its birth, the Sapphire King fed on the repressed emotions of the soulscarred Iron Hands. It basked in their chained desperation, bound to their fate by the emotions they felt but would not express.

The Daemon bedevilled them across the centuries, offering opportunities for damnation disguised as steps away from the weakness they so feared. It nudged the minds of Imperial officials and potential foes, forever seeking to goad the Iron Hands into spending away their humanity like coin. The Chapter bent their every effort to purging the weaknesses of the flesh, never realising that the more they demonised their wants and needs, the greater the hold the spectre of their repressed emotions gained upon them. As the Kristosian Conclave reached its zenith, the Sapphire King judged the Iron Hands ripe to fall and set its trap in motion. Each Iron Hand carried within his heart a rancid seed, a bomb of repressed passions that could erupt to destroy him at any moment. The Daemon would simply provide the spark to light the flame and watch the Chapter burn upon a pyre of their own emotions.

921.M40
A Disastrous Choice
Clan Raukaan are defending the Myrmidia System from Waaagh! Skullsmasha when they receive a distress call from the freighter Endymion, which reveals the Emperor’s Children’s presence. In response, Iron Father Daarmos leads Clan Raukaan in pursuit, but the distress call is a trap, and the Sapphire King’s worshippers decimate Daarmos’ force amid the bone jungles of Skarvus.

 

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THE GAUDINIAN HERESY

The Iron Hands fleet that translated into the Gaudinia System was huge. Iron Father Kristos had assumed the mantle of war leader and had assembled more than eight hundred Iron Hands under his control. This was the greatest deployment of the Chapter for centuries, and was accompanied by the majority of the Iron Council. The Kristosians were present in force, yet Stronos, Verox and Marrus were among a number of Iron Father Kristos’ detractors also on board the ships of the fleet. Initial auguries showed that all six worlds of the Gaudinia System were overrun by mutants and heretics, yet according to the Astropathic distress call, the Emperor’s Children had only been seen around the factory world of Gaudinia Prime. This, then, would be the Iron Hands’ primary objective. While smaller strike forces peeled off to begin the systematic purge of the other worlds, a core of three hundred Iron Hands – including Clan Companies Raukaan and Sorrgol in their entirety – made straight for Gaudinia Prime and approached high orbit. Here they were to face their first signs of opposition as they were forced to blast their way through a scattered cordon of warped turncoat warships.

The craft had once been system monitors, Imperial Navy frigates whose crew had turned to the worship of the Sapphire King. These craft now showed signs of their debasement, weird clashing colours and vestigial mutant outgrowths carpeting their hulls. Thankfully though, the foe was few in number and came on in a disorganised rush as though racing one another willingly to their deaths. With calm efficiency, the Iron Hands ships drew up line abreast, maximised their torpedo and lance spreads, and blasted the traitor ships into atoms. Not a single enemy craft reached battery range, each flaring and dying as their Warp coils overloaded and their hulls broke apart. Ploughing forward through the drifting wreckage that remained, the Iron Hands made orbit with mechanical precision, releasing swarms of space-capable servo-skulls to scan for further foes.

As the auto-divination shrines chattered out reams of parchment, the Iron Fathers puzzled over the readings from the planet below. Gaudinia Prime was a factory world, its entire landmass given over to the processing of raw materials and the manufacture of weapons for use by the Imperial Guard. It was registered as possessing a labour population of approximately 362 billion souls, spread out across the huge planet’s surface. Now, however, the world’s biomass appeared both to exceed that sum and, impossibly, to be less than zero, the figure fluctuating madly even as the scans came in. Stranger still, from the oceanic algae farms of the coasts to the mountaintop spaceports and their cargothrall townships, there was no sign of any life whatsoever, and no trace of the Emperor’s Children. Instead, all signs of life now appeared to be concentrated in one small mapsegment of the primary manufactorum, a nation-sized industrial sprawl in the planet’s southern hemisphere. Iron Fathers Stronos and Verrox counselled caution – the twisted machinations of Chaos were impossible to predict, and logic 26 dictated that they gather further data before launching their attack. Iron Father Kristos was inflexible as ever, driven by his determination to destroy any surviving Emperor’s Children forces before they could escape. Hesitation was for the weak, he announced, before ordering a drop assault in full force upon the primary manufactorum. Throughout the fleet, Iron Hands disconnected from simulus chambers and apothecarian augmentation-frames, submitted to the attentions of the arming servitors and marched to their Stormravens, Thunderhawks and Drop Pods. The Iron Hands would follow the trail of freakish lifesigns to the foe they sought, and there would crush them utterly.

The Iron Hands descended in fire and fury, their Drop Pods and landing craft turning the skies dark with their contrails. Holding to doctrines that had served them well since the days of the Great Crusade, the entire force mustered their strength in a single, mile-wide drop zone to the south-west of the central processing hub. Drop Pods crashed through roofs and smashed craters into ferrocrete roadways, squads of black-clad Space Marines surging forth and spreading out to secure their landing sites, and Raukaan’s massed Dreadnoughts marched forward in force. Behind them, heavier landers descended to deploy squadrons of rumbling tanks and Centurions into the statue-lined squares and thoroughfares of the manufactorum. Squads of Bikes and Land Speeders, the preferred steeds of Clan Morlaag, raced out along labour-processionals and over generatorum sprawls in search of contacts, while Scouts of Clan Dorrvok crept across rooftops and filtered down into the sewer systems to hunt for threats. No sign of any foe could be seen.

The streets of the Primary Manufactorum were empty, save for wind-blown litter. Shrines to the Omnissiah stood empty, their neglected electrocandles burned out. Curdled broth dripped from feeder-tubes in the nutritionals and formed puddles whose skins of mould attested to many days of disuse. Everywhere the Iron Hands kicked down doors or smashed through walls, habs, workshops and medicae stations stood empty under a dusty film of abandonment. Still, the Iron Hands’ auspexes were reading jittering lifesigns from all around. As they worked their way toward the central processing hub they began to hear sounds of industry. Bolters swung up and squads moved into battle formations as the Space Marines approached the vast iron dome of the hub, listening to the frantic cacophony that rang from within.

The hub stood almost two thousand feet high at its crest, ten miles across at its base, and appeared to be sealed tight as though against attack or unnaturally severe weather. From within came a maddened din of machinery interspersed with hissing groans and wheezing screams that caused even the taciturn sons of Ferrus Manus to look askance at one another. Borne on the wind was a stench like burning flesh mixed with some kind of bilious sweetness as though gallons of perfume had been spilled into rotted faeces.

Impassive, Iron Father Kristos ordered entrances to be made in the dome’s walls. He and the other Iron Fathers would lead the warriors of Clan Raukaan to discover what manner of devilry lurked within. Ironclad Dreadnoughts and Assault Centurions moved in, swiftly tearing yawning breaches through which the warriors of Clan Raukaan followed. The tight confines of the processing hub forced the clan company’s tanks and Thunderfire Cannons to remain behind with the rest of the host to hold the vast plaza that ringed the dome. Refusing to show concern, the battle-brothers pressed forward regardless. However, within moments the advance faltered as the Space Marines were confronted by the hellish interior of the dome. Once, the central processing hub had been a hive of gantries, conveyor belts, towering machines and labouring work-gangs. Now it was a vision of hell, for the workers and machines had become one.

 

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WAR UNENDING

In the wake of the decrees laid down during the Tempering and the division of the Second Founding, Clan Company Raukaan were ever at the forefront of the Iron Hands’ wars. Their reputation for aggression stemmed from the days when Clan Raukaan of old had plied the Medusan wastes as piratical raiders. The next ten thousand years would see Clan Raukaan plunged into the fires of war more than any other company. However, several of these bloody campaigns formed ominous portents of things to come. In the last years of M31, Clan Raukaan was deployed wholesale into the Ulmetrican Reach. Supported by elements of Clan Companies Avernii and Dorrvok and led by a cabal of no fewer than four Iron Fathers, this massive force was charged with crushing the rebellious factions that had spread throughout the system. What had begun as a workers’ uprising on the factory moon of Tholsh had spread through the reach like wildfire, swiftly taking on alarming overtones of proscribed worship and fanaticism.

Yet when the Iron Hands translated from the Warp to begin their war they found that their foe was cunning enough to evade open battle. Rather than stage full-scale armed rebellions, the cults were remaining well underground. They used powerful psykers to communicate with one another, and to influence the governors of the worlds they had infested. Initially, Iron Captain Morlus commanded his forces to strike with surgical precision – the Scouts of Clan Dorrvok were deployed on key worlds throughout the reach, sweeping mile by mile with machine-like patience in their search for cultist cells. As each such canker was located, teleport attacks and Drop Pod assault were used to bring massive force to bear and exterminate it completely. Yet almost a year of this approach seemed to bring the Iron Hands no closer to victory, the foe’s numbers still unguessable. Repeatedly, the bravest Cultists used makeshift anti-orbital missiles to strike at Clan Company Raukaan’s ships, each attack causing little damage but serving to goad the Iron Hands’ buried anger a little closer to the surface. With no clear enemy to confront en masse, the majority of Clan Raukaan could do little but train, run drills, and wait for an opportunity to deploy.

Matters came to a head when, on the swamp-choked hive world of Pulus, several corrupt shrines were discovered by Clan Dorrvok’s scouts. These foul, fleshy monuments gave praise to a Slaaneshi Daemon, named by its devoted worshippers as the Sapphire King. From that moment, the entire character of the war in the Ulmetrican Reach changed. The Iron Fathers met in conclave and determined that, by the core tenets of their Chapter and according to the decrees of the Tempering, they had no choice but to declare the entire populace of the reach guilty of the same brand of perversion that had twisted Fulgrim’s Legion against them during the Heresy. That the vast majority of the reach’s populace were not deemed directly responsible was neither here nor there – these supposed innocents had allowed a foul cancer to take root in their midst, and must be punished accordingly. 9With a single command, the Iron Fathers unleashed the full might of their strike force against the worlds of the reach. In a war of extermination that took six years to conclude, the Iron Hands cleansed the taint of Slaanesh from the Ulmetrican Reach by the expedient of system-wide genocide. It was, after all, the most direct method of ensuring success.

 

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A SHOW OF FORCE

In M37, the Iron Council made show of dispatching a huge force to aid in battle against the renegade disciples of the Blind King. Clan Raukaan and no fewer than four other clan companies took the field. In a series of bloody battles, their vast strike force blunted a dozen uprisings on as many worlds. At Pelos they even hurled back the turncoat Titans of the Legio Covenentia with a vast armoured phalanx. As the war ground on, the Iron Hands were lauded as heroes by Segmentum Command and the Martian Priesthood alike.

However, this overt display of force concealed many months of doctrinal wrangling within the Iron Council themselves, some of whom had argued relentlessly that the renegade Tech-Priests of the Occlusiad – who believed the infinitely corruptible and imperfect human race to be an affront to the Omnissiah – might not be entirely in the wrong. Clan Raukaan’s current Iron Father, the venerable Techmarine Daarmos, was amongst the loudest voice in shouting down these pernicious whispers for the madness they were. Raukaan’s forces found themselves in the forefront of the conflict that followed. Yet it was under Daarmos’ patronage that, less than two hundred years later, Clan Raukaan suffered one of their greatest defeats. In the latter years of M40, after a string of brutal battles in the Myrmidia system against the Orks of Waaagh! Skullsmasha, Clan Raukaan received a distress call from the Mars-class freighter Endymion, deep in the neighbouring Corladian Gulf. This cry for help reported an attack by traitors identified as the Emperor’s Children and, more galling still, made mention of fanatical broadcasts claiming the souls of the ship’s crew in the name of the Sapphire King. Iron Captain Maklon and Techmarine Daarmos were quick to respond, leaving a token force to keep watch for the Orks and taking a complement of more than half of Clan Raukaan’s battle-brothers in search of the Traitors.

 

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DISASTER STRIKES

The Iron Hands strike force reached the last known coordinates of the Endymion to find the craft gone. However, localised scans quickly revealed a tangle of Warp signatures leading to the nearby death world of Skarvus. Led by Maklon and Daarmos, the warriors of Clan Raukaan made planetfall amid Skarvus’ jagged bone-jungles. Thunderhawks descended to disgorge a sizeable armoured strike force. Their rumbling battle tanks and transports crunched through vast drifts of bonemeal and ploughed down calcified groves amid lashing squalls of flayer-hail, following the Warp signatures to their source.

Even as the vast, blazing carcass of the Endymion appeared on the horizon, sprawled and broken at the end of a twenty-mile trench, the traitors struck. Sonic weapons howled over the roar of engines, armour plates buckled and tracks sheared as oscillating waves of force tore them apart. Clan Raukaan fought back hard, overlapping fields of fire ensuring the optimum kill-ratio as the traitors advanced. Gaudily coloured figures in freakish armour were blown apart by ruby lances of energy and thudding barrages of mass-reactive shells. Bolters roared and grav-guns pounded the bonejungle flat. Yet the Emperor’s Children outnumbered the Iron Hands several times over, and their well-executed ambush had lent them the element of surprise. Gradually the tanks and warriors of Clan Raukaan were torn apart by lethal sonic bombardments, fireballs blooming and bone trunks lit with the dancing light of white-hot fires.

Only a fraction of Maklon and Daarmos’ forces escaped the ambush on Skarvus alive. Both of Raukaan’s long-serving Iron Fathers had been lost in the disastrous battle, refusing to order the retreat even though they faced impossible odds. Worse still, while the Iron Hands’ attention had been drawn away by the servants of the Sapphire King, the Orks had returned to Myrmidia in even greater numbers, as though they had known the system’s defenders would be elsewhere. The ensuing carnage was a blow to the reputation of the Iron Hands as a whole, for a Chapter whose brethren chose to abandon their posts in order to chase old vendettas must be carefully watched. Clan Company Raukaan – their numbers much reduced and their battle-brothers facing the strictest censure – were placed under the command of the staunchly conservative Iron Father Kristos, a Techmarine of the old guard who was charged with ensuring no traces of Maklon or Daarmos’ shortcomings remained. As the 41st Millennium dawned, Clan Company Raukaan was far from their Chapter’s favour, yet still darker days lay ahead.

 

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THE KRISTOSIAN CONCLAVE

The Kristosian Conclave reached its two hundredth year in 460.M41 with the Iron Council’s lines of division drawn more sharply than ever before. The Chapter was battling on regardless, yet no single Iron Father had been voted as its leader since the conclave began. The Iron Hands direction and focus were beginning to erode as their leaders wrestled with their Chapter’s fate, and the Kristosian hard-liners gained ever more influence.

Then came a name, whispered in the darkness of the Chapter’s astropathic chambers, that put all other debate to an end. In the Gaudinia System, the presence of the hated Emperor’s Children had been reported – operating in great strength, raising cults and subjugating a string of forge and factory worlds. If that were not goad enough, it was said these traitors gave worship to the Sapphire King. Seizing his moment, the now ancient Iron Father Kristos vowed that he would prove the strength of his doctrines and show the purity of his logic in the fires of war. With the assent of the Iron Fathers, and the conclave adjourned, Kristos wasted no time in gathering a mighty force and setting out for the Gaudinia System.

 

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AYOASHAR'AZYR, The daemon known as ‘The Sapphire King’

The challenge had been offered and accepted. The arena had been prepared. ‘Honour’ could be satisfied in only one way. For something held in such high esteem, honour was a vacuous thing. Ferrus Manus had been a being of deep and unshakeable honour, but one crack in it, one perceived crack, had been his downfall. The primarch had feared how his brother Fulgrim’s betrayal would reflect on him. It had been a need to prove his honour, more than any skill-at-arms or guile at the traitor Fulgrim’s command that had destroyed him. What was honour anyway? Every warrior tradition bred its own evolution of the theme, a language of their own, unrecognisable from the root form. Put a Space Wolf and a Dark Angel together and they would agree little on the subject of honour, but victory they would both recognise.

‘She Who Thirsts and Ayoashar’Azyr are the masters of this dance, but it is the Laughing God who shapes their tune, for it is a fine tragedy indeed.’
– Fall

‘If you can give one straight answer, make it this one.’ Melitan held on to the safety rail and leaned over until her mechadendrite was almost touching the front glass of the cell. ‘Has the Dawnbreak device affected you?’ Fall’s laughter this time was unscripted, as though the question had been unexpected. ‘Of course,’ the eldar answered. Her sing-song voice took on a smoky quality as she mirrored Melitan’s posture and leaned forwards. ‘Is your imagination too infertile to understand what the eldar of the final Acts would turn their brilliance to?’ She laughed again. ‘But its effect on me is different. Your minds are different. Lesser. More subject to change.

She Who Thirsts and Ayoashar’Azyr are the masters of this dance, but it is the Laughing God who shapes their tune, for it is a fine tragedy indeed.’ ‘Wait,’ said Melitan, struggling to master her frustrations at the eldar’s riddling tongue. ‘What?’ Fall spread her hands dramatically. ‘Cegorach adores tragedy. It is the dance of Thiraea and Pyr. Desire steals the Wise from Reason, and brings only Death upon that which Desire pursues. I have danced that dance many times and played many of its parts. Always we hope otherwise, but always it ends the same way, and always do I dance it anew on different stages.’

Stronos drew back, knife raised, steady in his grip. Again that sense, that certainty, that he was not alone. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. The servitor made no move to close the distance; it simply rolled its head until its gaping eye sockets found his. The silver edge bit deep into the breastplate of his brother’s armour, and the primarch of the Iron Hands cried out, falling to his knees once again as the blade’s flaring energies parted his dark armour like a fingernail through cold grease. Hot blood sprayed from the wound and Fireblade slid from Ferrus’ hand as he gasped in fierce agony. Stronos stumbled, fumbling his knife as though it had become suddenly heavy. He stared at it, expecting to see his grip soaked in his Father’s blood. Air slammed in and out of his mechanical lungs. ‘No,’ he mumbled, staring at the knife. ‘No. This is… This is not…’ A second servitor shambled towards him, gripped his face in withered, desiccated hands and forced him to look into its eyes.

The primarch’s grip was locked on to the weapon, and even as he recognised how far he had fallen, he knew that he had come too far to stop, the realisation coupled with the knowledge that everything he had striven for had been a lie. ‘Who are you?’ he croaked. He fell to one knee. His knife slipped from his grip and clattered to the walkway. How many times had he revisited that dark day? He still remembered the histories that Chaplain Marrus had drilled into him as a neophyte. He had pored over them since, agonised, they all did, he knew, in their hearts, even if no one ever confessed to it. Their Father was weak. They would not be. Torturing themselves affected nothing. And yet… The third servitor lurched forwards. He would not meet its eyes. It did not matter. Unnatural warp-forged steel met the iron flesh of a primarch. Its aberrantedge cut through Ferrus’ skin, muscle and bone with a shrieking howl that echoed in realms beyond those knowable to mortals.

Blood and the monumental energies bound within the meat and gristle of one of the Emperor’s sons erupted from the wound, and he fell back as the searing powers blinded him, dropping the silver sword at his side. ‘No!’ With a crash, Stronos landed on his back. All his life he had known anger, known grief, known self-deception and loathing, but for one cosmic instant, he knew it as a being beyond him had once known it. As a god that had spent the life of his brother knew it. A knife pierced his heart. A bar of cold twisted his guts in his belly. His thoughts stopped. This was the end of the universe and the beginning of another. This was where he lived now, this moment, forever, no matter how long he lived or what acts he perpetrated to destroy the memory. This was everything. A halcyon moment of transcendent grief to pierce the veil between dimensions, the beat of a butterfly’s wings that had given birth to a storm. Curling onto his side Stronos wept, oil and saline dribbling over his cheeks and blubbering from his lips. When had he last wept like this? As a child? An infant? The final servitor loomed over him, offering a shrivelled paw encased in a rusted steel glove. Glimmers of purple fire burned in its sockets. In a rattle of collapsed lungs and liquefied vocal cords it spoke. ‘You know who I am, Kardan Stronos.’

‘You… are the Sapphire King.’ The servitor chuckled, echoed by the quartet of dead mouths. Stronos drew his hand back along the walkway towards him and concentrated on pushing himself up off the ground. In a squish of dried meat, one of the servitors squatted beside him. ‘Your arm is shaking,’ said the servitor. ‘My systems are exhausted.’ ‘Of course. Your systems.’ Again, the servitor offered its hand. It would be easier to take it than not, use what was given, take the more certain path. He stared at the hand, then took a shuddering breath and pushed himself up onto his knees. He sagged onto his haunches, the stiff armour joints in his legs complaining. A servitor appeared by his shoulder,breathing rasping through its teeth. ‘You would be wise to conserve your strength.’ ‘Fight the battles that need to be fought,’ hissed another. Stronos did not turn, staring back the way he had come as his vision clicked out of wavelength, one nanometre at a time. ‘You were born in the fires of…’ He scrunched his eyes and forced himself to say it. ‘…of Isstvan.’ ‘I am the Phoenician’s pain,’ said one. ‘And his exultation,’ voiced another. ‘His grief.’ ‘And his joy.’ ‘I am his love for his brother.’ The voices swam around Stronos. He pressed his palm into his chest. His hearts were racing. His lungs straining their motors. ‘But this machine. It is eldar. It predates you by a thousand years or more. It has nothing to do with Isstvan, or my Chapter.’ ‘Kristos made it about you. It was crafted by the eldar at the apex of their hedonism, an engine to probe their innermost and lift them towards their desires.’ The servitor emitted a crackling sigh, and another took up in its place. ‘Their desire, of course, was pleasure. That is not Kristos’ desire.’ Stronos forced his mind to concentrate, recalling what the Iron Father had said to him on Thennos, shortly before the Iron Father had ripped off his helmet and left him to burn. ‘The Iron Hands falter. The strength of our Father wavers year by year. What the Imperial Guard found on Dawnbreak was a new direction, a path to perfection.’ Was this his meaning, to use the power of the Dawnbreak engine to realise the Iron Hands’ long-held ambition of perfection through metal? ‘Yes,’ the servitors answered as one. They creaked nearer. He felt them behind him. ‘You are weak, Kardan Stronos. Weak and angry. So very afraid.’

 

[MolotovKraken]

‘I will not allow my Chapter to trade its soul.’ ‘Why not? It is your weakness. Your ultimate weakness. The Dawnbreak engine can make it all go away.’ Stronos snorted. ‘All of what?’ His memories were vivid and painful, but he found that he was no longer as angry as he remembered. His hearts held on to no bitterness that he could not express. The slow erosion of his humanity and of his Chapter’s soul no longer suffused him with the existential dread it once had. The vessel was broken and what it had held inside was gone. Tears on the walkway, a road of bloodily slain skitarii behind him. Stronos did not think it would ever be refilled again and the thought made him… hopeful. He was unsure if that feeling was more or less strange than that of wetness on his cheek. With a shove, he sent the servitor closest to him flying from the walkway. It flailed silently before splattering on the ferrocrete below. The remaining three grabbed at him, steel-gloved claws sliding into grip-holds in his battered plate.

‘Do not think you can defeat me so easily, Kardan Stronos,’ they rasped in unison. ‘I am no creature of flesh. Everywhere a child of Ferrus Manus is tormented by guilt or rage, be they Medusan, Kalavelan, Raikanan, Iam there. That is what you would defy.’The servitors’ bio-augments made their shoulders massive, their biceps bulged with myosin scaffolds and actin ratchets, but the meat of their foundations had rotted long ago. Stronos shook them off, flesh tearing away in clumps, as their prodigious strength clattered piecemeal to the floor. Pushing through them, he advanced on the slumbering machine. For a moment Stronos could see it, even without his eyes. And he felt it see him in return. Blue eyes as hard and ancient as precious stones drilled through the dark between them. A mane of long hair fell from a face that was at once hard and beautiful, shockingly inhuman, yet achingly empathic. His armour was facetted like a jewel, brilliant as a B-type star, draped with white-hot iron chains that spat and fizzled with the creature’s core of fury. Crystalline wings folded partway over its breastplate. Its arms were folded. One hand was metal. Iron. Stronos blinked it away. ‘The Dawnbreak engine is not me.’ The voice did not come from the servitors now. It came out of the darkness. ‘It is a skin I choose to wear, a vessel I choose to ride. You cannot break me with fists.’ Stronos raised his gauntlets. His vision rained with sapphire afterimages. ‘Then I shall begin with your skin.’