pang wrenched inside him. He dropped to his knees over the dead figure, confused and lost. The
anger drained from him and was replaced with self-loathing, guilt and anguish.
He caught the sight of his own reflection in the highly buffed, silver pin on the commissar’s hat
and he lifted it up, staring at his own hate-filled visage.
What had he become? This was the face of the enemy. The False Emperor is the enemy!
He looked upon the two-headed eagle symbol upon the black leather hat he held in his hands and
he felt duel emotions: hate and sadness. They betrayed you! The worship of the False Emperor is a
lie!
Maybe it was a lie, but was this a better alternative? This embracing of evil and slaughter?
Slaughter is the holy sacrifice that the gods demand.
The madness was descending upon him again and he had not the strength to fight it any longer.
He would continue to fall into damnation. No, he would not fall, he would embrace it. He felt the
rage building within him and it terrified him that it was not unpleasant. He would be lost and he
would not care that he was lost.
With the last vestiges of himself, he lifted the pistol from the commissar’s hand and raised it to
his head. Emperor, save me, he thought. Before the unrelenting rage descended upon him once again
and he was completely lost, he pulled the trigger.
At last he had found release from the sound of Chaos in his mind.
“Those damned explosives set! We ain’t got much time!” shouted Laron as he hunkered down
behind the Valkyrie. His storm troopers were firing on the incoming enemies, but they would be on
them in a moment. Bolter rounds impacted against the aircraft, and the crewman operating the heavy
bolter flew backwards as a bolt shell detonated in his skull, splattering Laron with blood. He swore
and took the man’s position, swinging the heavy weapon towards the enemy. A missile slammed
into one of the other Valkyries, which detonated explosively, throwing flaming debris in all
directions.
Laron pressed the twin thumb triggers of the pivot mounted heavy bolter and fired a spray of
heavy calibre rounds towards the incoming foe, dropping several of them. Rhinos could be seen
cutting towards the storm troopers from further off, and Laron swore.
“Set the damned timers! Move it!” he roared in between bursts of fire.
“Sir, we have incoming hostiles from the east,” said a wounded storm trooper as he pulled a
piece of metal from his shoulder.
“Just great,” muttered Laron as he gunned down another enemy.
“All set.” Captain Elias shouted.
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A sudden scream from the base of the tower made Laron glance around and he did a double take
as he saw the scene unfolding. A long, spined arm had reached out of the stone of the tower,
grabbed one his men around the throat and was dragging him towards the wall. Another storm
trooper was hacking at the arm with his knife, and hissing ichor dripped from the wound. Fleshy,
hooked claws burst from the wall and latched onto another man. He was pulled off balance and
tumbled into the wall. He half disappeared into the surface of the stone, and tentacles and claws
gripped his armour and hauled him fully inside as he screamed.
The storm troopers backed away from the wall and began firing at the things materialising out of
the stone surface. Hissing, fanged faces pushed out, bulbous, mutated eyes opened up all over the
stone. A flickering figure of a huge, horned daemon with a twisting blade of fire in its hand strained
to escape the stone, and hellguns blasted as the soldiers targeted the emerging monster.
“Back! Get back to the Valkyries!” shouted Laron, ducking down behind the heavy bolter as
rounds of incoming fire peppered the aircraft.
One of the storm troopers shot their comrade who was still being pulled into the tower. It was a
mercy killing, to end whatever cruel fate had awaited him.
A heavily muscled humanoid figure pulled free of the wall and ran at the storm troopers, hefting
a heavy, archaic broadsword in its muscular red arms. With one sweep of the blade it carved a man
in half from shoulder to waist, and it roared, flames spilling from its eyes and throat.
Laron swung his heavy bolter around and unleashed a long burst of fire into the daemon’s chest.
It was driven back several steps by the impacts, though it appeared unharmed. It turned its snarling
head towards Colonel Laron and began to advance through the barrage.
“Go!” he shouted to the pilot as the surviving storm troopers scrambled aboard, and the Valkyrie
lifted straight up into the air, its powerful vertical thrusters roaring. Boltgun fire ripped through the
undercarriage of the aircraft as it lifted and several men were killed, their blood spraying the roof.
“The charges blow in ten, sir!” shouted one of his men, and Laron nodded as he fired upon the
Chaos Marines below. More things were emerging from the walls of the tower.
The Valkyrie turned steeply, and a missile destined to smash into its side flew through the open
doorway, screaming over Laron’s head and miraculously passing straight out of the other open
doorway, filling the interior with the smoke of its propulsion.
Open-mouthed, Laron turned.
“The Emperor protects!” shouted Elias, laughing at the sheer improbability of the occurrence.
“It certainly seems that way,” agreed Laron, shaking his head in utter disbelief.
He didn’t see the hulking, winged daemon pushing out of the wall behind the turning Valkyrie.
Nor did he see it leap towards the aircraft, nor hear the power of its roar over the screaming engines.
But he felt the impact as it struck.
The tail of the Valkyrie tipped earthwards with the sudden additional weight, and the pilot
struggled to keep it airborne. The head of a giant axe slammed through the raised rear assault ramp,
smashing it asunder. The ramp was ripped from the aircraft as the axe was pulled free, and it
tumbled end over end to the ground below.
The daemon roared as it pulled at the tail of the Valkyrie, its wings beating furiously and its
infernal muscles straining to bring the aircraft down to the ground. It was thrown off as the
Valkyrie’s jet turbines kicked in, but with a beat of its powerfully muscled wings it turned in the air
and its whip flicked out, wrapping around the tail of the aircraft, pulling it sharply downwards.
With its engines roaring, the Valkyrie screamed up into the air as its tail tipped beneath it, and
the pilot lost control. The aircraft slammed into another Valkyrie before flipping upside down and
plummeting to the ground. Laron leapt from the aircraft as it slammed into the earth, rolling into the
dust.
The daemon landed atop the flaming wreck, its massive hooves twisting the metal beneath it. It
seemed impervious to the flames, and Laron scrambled backwards as the malevolent thing stepped
out of the inferno, its burning eyes fixed upon him.
145
It was over twelve feet tall and it seemed to flicker as if it were not fully there. Its skin was as
black as pitch and a burning symbol was emblazoned on its chest, the mark of one of the ruinous
powers.
“Emperor, protect my soul,” whispered Laron.
The charges exploded. Both man and daemon were ripped apart by the force of the detonations.
But the tower still stood.
The Ordinatus fired upon the Gehemehnet, enormous amounts of energy focused into a deadly
frequency that held the power to shatter mountains and crash bones to powder. The air shimmered
as the ultra-high and ultra-low frequencies screamed over the top of the chaotic battle and roared
towards the fifty kilometre high structure. It struck the side of the tower some forty metres up, and
stones were ruptured from within as they were shaken apart. They exploded into sand and were
blown out of the other side. A hole the size of a building was driven through the tower.
Impossibly, the tower still stood, despite the lack of integrity holding it together, for it was no
longer bound by the rules of geometry or gravity. The tower was a gateway to the warp beyond, and
through the hole blasted in its side the roiling darkness and liquid flame of the Ether could be seen.
With a roar that came from the throats of a million infernal entities the Gehemehnet awoke and
the barrier between the realm of the daemon and the material plane was stripped away. Energy
roared outwards from the Gehemehnet, throwing dust up into the air and hurling men to the ground.
It made the black seas beyond the Shinar peninsula rise in a giant tidal wave that roared out from the
tower, and lightning tore apart the heavens. Rumblings shook the ground, and daemons screamed
into being.
They emerged from within the tower, thousands of straining hellish entities clawing out of living
stone, and they roared their pleasure as they manifested. Thousands of others flew from the rent in
the tower’s side, held aloft by pinioning wings or twisting, contorting winds of fire. Screams and
roars thundered across the Shinar peninsula and tens of thousands of daemons poured from the
gateway, descending on the mortals.
The Ordinatus machine fired again, but this time the force of its attack seemed to rebound from
the tower and it hurtled back towards the behemoth, smashing into its void shields and ripping them
apart, the fury of its own power turned against it. The void shields crumbled one by one beneath the
onslaught, robbing the energy of its force, but still enough power hurtled into the Ordinatus to rip it
apart.
The Ordinatus was rocked by the force of its own weapon, though even this was not enough to
destroy it completely. Plumes of smoke wreathed its iron sides, and metal scaffolds and gantries
were shattered. The great weapon housed upon its back, greater than even those of a mighty Titan,
was torn from its housing and collapsed beneath its own weight. Blue fire spurted from breaches in
the plasma core powering the machine and tech-priests wailed as the machine-spirit groaned in
agony.
Daemons streamed across the battlefield, hacking, slashing and ripping. Thousands of mortals
were slaughtered in the first moments of the insane combat, their limbs hacked apart by brutal
hellblades, their bodies turned to liquid by blasts of yellow and pink unearthly fire and their souls
ripped from their still warm bodies by lascivious, hateful daemons.
The clouds overhead were sucked suddenly inwards, towards the Gehemehnet, and fierce winds
pulled at everyone battling upon the plains. Tanks slid across the ground under the force of the
sudden gale and men were sent flying through the air.
As suddenly as they came into being, the daemons of the warp were sucked back towards the
Gehemehnet, screaming in rage as the fabric of their beings was stripped away like melting wax,
and the energies that composed them was drawn back into the tower.
The heavens were cleared of darkness and the great orb of the red planet Korsis could be seen
large overhead.
146
“The conjunction comes,” muttered Jarulek in awe, down on one knee as he strained to resist
being pulled back by the roaring gale, his daemonic pulpit having been sucked back to the
Gehemehnet by the force of the Daemonschage. He put a hand out to break his fall as the wind
stopped abruptly and silence descended across the peninsula, except for one sound.
At the top of the Gehemehnet, the Daemonschage bell tolled as the twelve planets of the Dalar
system drew into line and the energies of the ten thousand daemons contained within the tower were
propelled down the shaft into the core of the planet.
The dense rock that formed the mantle surrounding the absolute centre of Tanakreg was ripped
apart by the unholy power and the land above was shattered.
Massive fault lines ripped up the continents as tectonic plates shifted and smashed into each
other. New mountains were instantly formed as shifting rock plates collided and were thrown up
into the sky, and existing mountain ranges disappeared as they sank into the vast chasm opening up
beneath them.
Earthquakes rolled across the planet, throwing up giant tidal waves that roared across the earth,
destroying everything in their path and creating new oceans as plains were overrun with the deluge.
New continents were formed as the oceans roiled and great upthrusts of rock climbed into the sky.
Volcanoes spewed lava and ash into the atmosphere, and acidic seas boiled away as they were
exposed to rising streams of liquid iron from the planet’s core. Deep, subterranean avalanches at the
core mantle boundary, far below the planet’s surface, disrupted the planet’s magnetic field, and the
integrity of the planet as a whole wavered.
The gravitational pull of Korsis strained at the weakness of the planet and Tanakreg was tipped
off its axis, sending a new shockwave through it, and triggering a second wave of earthquakes.
Great cracks appeared across the Shinar peninsula and the mountains to the east were lost to
oblivion as the continental plate sank. The peninsula was lifted up into the air, throwing the
Gehemehnet off at an oblique angle, though it still stood. Water rushed across the plains as it
vacated the seas below the peninsula, boiling and rising into scalding steam as it touched the rising
lava spilling up through the cracks in the earth.
Ash, dust and gases filled the skies, covering the hot, white sun and obscuring Korsis once more.
The Ordinatus slipped into a giant chasm that opened up beneath it, falling into the molten
magma rising from below, even as the airship docked upon its back lifted off and rose into the air,
smoking and labouring to stay airborne. It drifted sluggishly through the air, hanging heavily to one
side where its gyro-stabilisers had been destroyed, passing over the shattered battlefield. Missiles
impacted with the undercarriage of the airship and it dived down over the edge of the cliff, flame
and smoke spewing from it. The Word Bearers backed towards the base of the Gehemehnet, though
scores of their vehicles and daemon engines were lost as they fell into chasms that opened beneath
them, or were swept away by the black acid sea. At last the continents settled.
And there below the peninsula where the Gehemehnet had been built, deep in an abyssal channel
that just moments before had been hidden beneath kilometres of inky black, acidic waters, was a
structure.
It was a black-sided pyramid, its sides perfectly smooth and gleaming. The burning, shattered
