The journey to Terra was supposed to be a crusade; instead, it became a nightmare labyrinth where they were played and worn down as they moved along.
As Roboute Guilliman's fleet tore through the Warp, the chaotic currents of the Warp and its denizens fought them every step of the way. Tempests of raw chaos energies and hungry daemonic entities battered the hulls of his ships. The danger was so extreme that the fleet could only make short, threatening jumps.
Ships were lost almost every other jump they made. Geller fields flickered under assaults and failed, allowing the rotting daemons of Nurgle or the horrors of the Changer of Ways to spill into the corridors of the Pride of Hera.
It took the combined fury of Inquisitor Greyfax, Saint Celestine, the Space Marines and the Sisters of Silence to purge the infection, fighting deck by deck to burn the monsters out.
It was even possible to say that the presence of the four blanks amongst the Imperium's forces made the daemons' attacks only more frenzied and terrifying. They were the poison that the Warp wanted to destroy with all its might. And it would stop at nothing to achieve that.
Every time the fleet breached realspace to catch its breath, the news from the wider Imperium was devastating. Astropathic messages painted a picture of a galaxy in flames, even worse than usual: mutant uprisings, massive daemonic invasions, and entire systems going completely dark.
Guilliman's men drew quiet parallels to the Age of Darkness. But guided by a living Primarch, no one spoke of turning back. Her was their guiding light in those dark times and their desperate need to reach Terra.
Then came the first ambush.
Forced out of the Warp by an impossibly massive storm, the battered Terran Crusade emerged right into the crosshairs of a massive traitor armada.
Waiting for them was the Thousand Sons legion, anchored by a monstrous, planetoid-sized flagship shaped like a silver pyramid. At its helm was Guilliman's corrupted brother: the Daemon Primarch Magnus the Red, himself.
Magnus hadn't come to kill Guilliman, surprisingly. He had come to do something else to him.
Using a massive ritual, Magnus summoned tendrils of pure Warp energy that wrapped around the loyalist vessels. With a violent twist, he manipulated the Warp using his sorcery and dragged the surviving half of Guilliman's fleet out of realspace and hurled them into the raging heart of the Maelstrom, a hellish, reality-bending place of space-time, where the Warp and realspace overlapped.
Trapped in the dark, the crusade turned into a desperate fight for survival. They were right where they didn't want to be.
They bounced from one nightmare to the next, trying to find a way out. They raided a glass moon, only for a captured traitor, possessed by a mocking daemon, to gloat about Ultramar burning. Guilliman was the target of mocking and spite, even if he continued to survive and lead those who survived forward.
They attacked a planet made of living flesh, only for the world to literally open its continents and eat several of their ships. They fought off giant, ship-sized plague flies in clouds of toxic spores, and battled Warp-ghosts that tried to drain the energy right out of the Space Marines' sacred relics.
But the worst attacks were happening inside Guilliman's own mind.
Due to being right inside the Warp, daemonic voices were constantly whispering to him, feeding him apocalyptic visions. Guilliman saw Mars shattered, Terra in ashes, and the Emperor's blackened corpse burning on a broken Golden Throne. He saw Macrage fall, Marneus Calgar and Chief Librarian flayed, and Gerhard standing above them, with a corrupted look in his eyes and an eerie smile on his face.
The voices promised him that this was the inevitable future if he returned to Terra. They told him the only way to save the Imperium was to give up and accept his eternal prison in the Maelstrom.
Guilliman, however, was a Primarch, the son of the Emperor of Mankind, and he refused to fall. He kept his composure in front of his men, but in secret, the psychological warfare was slowly chipping away at them the way it was supposed to.
His own fears were used against him to weaken him.
However, the true architect of this torture soon revealed himself.
On a world made of crystalline jungles, the fleet was ambushed by Tzeentchian daemons led by none other than Kairos Fateweaver.
Kairos Fateweaver was one of, if not the most powerful Lord of Change. A massive, two-headed avian Greater Daemon capable of seeing the future and the past at the same time. Kairos taunted Guilliman, declaring that in every timeline, the Primarch failed.
In the only way he knew how, Guilliman tried to fight the monster off, but the daemon's psychological seeds had already been planted and had started to take root.
"YOU ARE A RELIC OF A BYGONE AGE, A FOOTNOTE TO YOUR FATHER'S FAILURES. YOU SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE PAST WHERE YOU BELONGED, PRIMARCH, FOR YOU HAVE NO PLACE IN THIS FUTURE."
In a surprising twist of 'fate', the Sisters of Silence managed to help their Primarch and pull him back from his own spiralling dark thoughts, and fight back the Fateweaver. And yet, the Lord of Change pulled back, managing to set another trap for them and kill one of the Sisters of Silence right in front of her sisters.
It was a tragedy, but they couldn't dwell on that. Before the Primarch saw no other way out for them, hope finally appeared.
It was on a world of black marble and bloody oceans. While exploring a ruined fortress, Guilliman was visited by a shimmering illusion of an Eldar. The alien phantom gave him exactly what he so desperately needed: a route out of the Maelstrom.
He knew that he couldn't trust this vision. There was no way it was the truth. Surely, this was another one of Kairos' tricks, right?
But what other choice did he have? He needed to take the risk, so the fleet followed the apparition's star map, navigating a series of bizarre landmarks until they reached the final hurdle: a massive, sprawling graveyard of derelict spaceships from a dozen alien and human factions, all bound together by colossal chains.
Guilliman's fleet carefully threaded the needle through the tight, chained wreckage. The light at the end of the tunnel was in sight...
However, this was not such a story.
Just as their Navigators spotted the faint, welcoming light of the Emperor's Astronomican, the exit of the hell they were in, the trap was sprung.
The "dead" ships suddenly powered up. It turned out to be a massive ambush laid by the Red Corsairs, a fleet of chaos pirates guided by Kairos Fateweaver's visions and meticulous planning. Disguised as wreckage, the traitors unleashed hell on the boxed-in Imperial fleet and did enormous damage.
It should have been over right there. The Terran Crusade should have ended, and the last living loyalist Primarch should have once again died. But that wasn't how it went. There was something bigger at play here. A bigger picture that no one saw, that no one could possibly fathom.
The Red Corsairs didn't want to destroy all of the ships, especially Guilliman's. No, they wanted to capture him and those on board.
Realising this, Guilliman ordered his forces to brace for boarding parties.
On the bridge of his flagship, the Macragge's Honour, a brutal battle erupted. Daemons and Chaos Terminators poured through the breached bulkheads. Guilliman, Sicarius, Saint Celestine, Inquisitor Greyfax and the three remaining Anathema Psykana fought like mythological heroes, turning the bridge into a slaughterhouse.
Guilliman's flaming sword of the Emperor cut through the chaotic hordes, destroying them for good, while the Sisters of Silence managed to do some of the same. It was their mere presence that allowed the Imperial forces almost to push the endless hordes back.
However, it wasn't meant to be.
Kairos Fateweaver stepped through the breach, knowing what his presence would trigger.
Guilliman charged the Daemon, ready to end the nightmare and cut off the problem by its head. But Kairos didn't fight back with a blade; he triggered the true trap he had spent months building inside Guilliman's head.
The doubts, the visions, the lies and dark promises had all been prepared for this moment.
Backed by a choir of daemonic sorcerers, Kairos spoke a Chaos incantation that weaponised the Primarch's own suppressed emotions. All the guilt, the exhaustion, the simmering anger, and the despair that Kairos had fed into Guilliman's subconscious suddenly erupted outwards and inwards.
The negative energy manifested into reality, tearing from Guilliman's eyes and mouth and solidifying into massive, eerily glowing crystal chains. The chains wrapped around the Primarch and bound his knees, legs, arms and everything else.
The weight of his own psyche bound Guilliman, physically and psychologically. He could not break free.
With the capture of the Primarch, Kairos Fateweaver gave the survivors an ultimatum.
"LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS, OR WATCH YOUR PRECIOUS PRIMARCH DIE PATHETICALLY IN FRONT OF YOU."
One by one, the shocked and angry Space Marines dropped their weapons and surrendered.
The battle was over.
The Terran Crusade had failed, and the last loyal son of the Emperor was a prisoner of Chaos.
.
The Harlequins led Gerhard and soon picked up one additional person on their way through the Webway. To Gerhard's surprise, it was a Space Marine. This man was someone Gerhard, using [Observe], knew.
|Cypher, Lord of the Fallen – Lv.92
|HP: 26,000/26,000
|MP: 500
|The enigmatic Lord of the Fallen. An ancient gunslinger, infiltrator and master of misdirection whose impossible precision and uncanny ability to escape death have frustrated the Dark Angels and the Imperium for millennia.
STR: 155
VIT: 160
DEX: 175
---
The two men observed one another, and while such a confrontation would usually go differently, for the powerful former Dark Angel Space Marine, this time he stood before the galaxy's most powerful Blank, who was not in a joking mood.
He stood in front of the Doom Slayer.
His spirit seemed to be sucked in as soon as Gerhard moved close, and tremendous amounts of rage and hatred were directed at him. But to Cypher's credit, he managed to stay his hand and force himself to focus on the task at hand. He was also lucky that Gerhard kept his distance and was respectful of the larger objective.
The Harlequins thought this was funny and led the two mon'keighs through the Webway and into the Warp, where they emerged in a very interesting location.
Gerhard stepped out of the shimmering portal. As soon as his feet touched the black ground, a ripple seemed to travel through the entire structure and announce his presence to all daemonic and corrupted entities.
Warning systems and klaxons blared throughout the monstrous space station that they had arrived in.
"A Blackstone Fortress," Gerhard mentioned.
The surviving Imperial forces, stripped of their weapons and their honour, had been dragged in chains to the nearest Red Corsairs stronghold, which turned out to be a Blackstone Fortress - an ancient and incomprehensibly massive star fort adrift on the tides of the Maelstrom.
For Kairos Fateweaver, it was the perfect prison. The Lord of Change did not want Guilliman dead; a chained demigod was a battery of fate, a piece on the galactic board that could be used and unleashed later when the time was right.
Kairos was confident in his perfect design. He had foreseen every angle; surely he who saw the past and the future at the same time couldn't be tricked or surprised... right?
Wrong.
He did not foresee the enormous, blood-red armada thundering toward the Blackstone Fortress. The hulls of these warships were encrusted with gore, branded with the runes of Khorne, and trailed daemonic fire.
At the head of the fleet came the comet itself: Skarbrand, the Exiled One, hurtling through the void with his usual insane fury. He was angry, and he had brought his rage with him.
So, when Gerhard, the Harlequin and Cypher appeared within the Blackstone Fortress, a massive, chaotic battle was already taking place.
And the moment Gerhard stepped out of the Webway, everyone was made aware that the Slayer had arrived.
Every conceivable thing had gone wrong for the Terran Crusade, but it was about to get considerably more... bloody.