Herald of Misery part 2

Chapter 1: Rhalion's Quest:

Few loyalists ever managed to board an Ark of Omen. The few that did and survived were too occupied fighting for their lives to learn much of the mysteries surrounding them. Dante and his Blood Angels were given a unique opportunity when they encountered the Night Terror Ark. The Ark's crew and monsters were either dead, banished, or driven to its depths. As Dante investigated the slaughtered traitors and the strange plant life sprouting all around them, his librarians located and examined the Ark's captive warp portal.



The signs of battle around the Warp portal's organo-techno shrines indicated that many heretics gave their lives to protect it. Further investigation revealed that the portal was not intended to summon reinforcements. Its purpose was to transport some object somewhere else. This conclusion was supported by reports of other Arks and their Balefleets claiming strange and random artifacts, most of which should have been useless for the forces of Chaos. Pieces of rock, broken machines, and ancient statues. More questions arose. Were all these relics being taken to the same place, and to what end?



Perhaps motived by a measure of his Primarch's foresight, Dante knew answers to these questions were vital. While he investigated the mysterious force that slaughtered the Night Terror's crew and inhabitants, Dante assigned librarian led strike forces to pursue the mystery of the Arks' Warp portals, hoping by doing so that the greater mystery of the traitors' agenda for the seized artifacts would be revealed.



Strike force Rhalion was formed around epistolary Venato Rhalion. He was a senior member of the Blood Angel Librarius and was among the most gifted psykers of the chapter. He shunned using his power in displays of spectacular flare. Instead, he drew upon the Red Thirst to use his powers with the precision of a sniper. He burst hearts, severed spines, and overloaded the machines of the enemies of mankind from half a battlefield away. Accompanying his impressive psychic prowess, his over a century of service has forged honor bonds within the chapter and beyond, making him an ideal commander for the strike force.



Aboard their frigate, Star of Dawn, the strike force trailed rumors and reports of an Ark bearing down on the shrine world of Pathassos. They translated into the Geigos system, but all they found was the devastation left in the wake of the Ark and its Baleflet. The void was filled with the wreckage of Imperial vessels and the vox transmissions lamenting the countless dead. The traitors had ravaged the shrine world. They smashed its defenses before launching a planetwide invasion that saw its shrine cities toppled. It became clear there was little to nothing to learn from the fate of the shrine world. The traitors plundered countless relics from the world. It was unclear if the prize they sought was among them or not. The heretics and traitors left behind by the Ark turned out to be nothing but the dregs of the invasion. Mutants, madmen, and cultists that have descended into barbarism after their masters abandoned them. There was no hope of extracting anything meaningful from such as these. Pressed for time, the strike force departed Pathassos with heavy hearts leaving the scattered Imperial defenders to struggle against the remaining traitor forces.



The task of hunting down the Arks proved to be complex and difficult. The Arks weren't attacking as a unified force but scattered across the galaxy. The turmoil of the Warp hamstrung Imperial communication and travel, slowing the strike force's progress and, in some cases, misleading them. A report of an Ark that turned out to be false led the strike force into a lopsided battle against the Kin of the Kronus Hegemony. The Blood Angels had to retreat to avoid annihilation.



Another report proved to be accurate. It brought the strike force on the trail of the Ark Beast in Scarlet. They found the Ark and its Balefleet engaged in a vicious battle with a Necron fleet. While the traitors were distracted, the Star of Dawn drew close to the Ark and conducted a scan. By the time Necron tomb ships forced the frigate to retreat, the Blood Angels had realized that external scans of the Arks would yield nothing substantial. They needed to board the Arks to learn their secrets.



However, Rhalion would not risk his men on a boarding action with no clear plan. Fighting their way to the Waep portal would not be enough to gain insights about the traitors' agenda. Rhalion realized that they needed the expertise of an old friend of his. The battered but determined strike force made its way to Istrouma home world of the Tome Keepers chapter. The old friend was Codicier Bhakir, a librarian of the Tome Keepers who has devoted his studies to Warp portals and the tides of the Warp.



After a brief and joyous reunion, the two librarians proceeded with their serious matter. As it turned out, the Bhakir was studying the same subject the Strike force was investigating. The Tome Keepers had gathered reports and rumors regarding the Arks of Omen, and they noted the mentions of Warp Portals that all Arks possessed. The Tome Keepers had concluded, much like the Blood Angels, that understanding the purpose behind these portals would yield the means to defeat the Arks.



Bhakir delved into the gathered lore of his chapter, including the most restricted books. He found a solution. A psychic ritual that combined his own studies of Warp portals and entanglement with the knowledge of pre-Imperial scholars. It was called the Rite of Echoes. Bhakir explained to Rhalion, in layman's terms, that it would be like dropping a stone in a well to see how deep it is and where the rock will end up. In truth, however, the ritual was more complex. Rather than a well, it will be more akin to a vast labyrinth connected to other wells, and its passages are filled with entities that won't appreciate having rocks dropped on them.



The chapter master had forbidden Bhakir from pursuing the Arks to conduct the ritual. The operation would be a suicide mission that the under-strength Tome Keepers could not afford. However, they might have a chance if the Rhalion combined his Strike Force with the battle brothers under Bhakir's command. Not for a headlong assault on an Ark but a boarding action on an Ark that's either damaged or distracted by an ongoing battle. While the Ark's crew was distracted, the marines would push toward the Warp Portal and conduct the ritual, then escape back to the Star of Dawn before the traitors scattered across the Ark could mobilize a defense or the Ark's firepower destroyed their frigate.



The operation was bound to cause the marines to suffer heavy casualties, but the situation was desperate. The Imperium has to know of the secret of the Arks. Rhalion and Bhakir reasoned that marines were built for such missions, and the ends justified the risks.



Fortune smiled on the marines when word of an Ark invading the same sub-sector as the Tome Keepers' homeworld reached them. The Ark and its Balefleet were besieging a deep space astropathic relay. Its name was the Herald of Misery.





Chapter 2: Opportunistic Obliteration



While the Ark's slave psykers sniffed out the next jump point, Warsmith Czagra led his forces against an Imperial astropathic relay station. He could not ignore this bastion of Imperial arrogance. Moreover, his men detected that the station held a cache of intensely bright-souled psykers. He judged it better if they were used to court the power of the Chaos Gods in his favor rather than be used as fodder for the Carrion Lord of Terra. Once the psykers were seized, he resolved to reduce the entire station to dust with the full power of his Ark.



The armor of the station was strong; it was reinforced by the greatest technologies available to the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. Yet its armor was sundered by the maw engines fixed on the umbilical boarding tendrils of the Herald of Misery. Czagra sent waves of the Riven Reforged cultists before he and his Iron Warrior elites; the Bronzewrought strode in behind them.



Through the mayhem and bloodshed, Czagra saw the station's defenders. They wore black tunics over crimson armor. Their ornate helmets carried the sigil of an eye. They wielded high-powered lasguns that were connected to the targeters that covered their visors like mechanical veils. Czagra marched on them flanked by his terminators. They formed a phalanx with Czagra on the fore. Czagra and his Iron Warriors crushed the dead and dying cultists beneath their tread. Even as they were pulped, the wounded cultists spewed praises for their masters.



As he fought on the station, Czagra assimilated the data flow and directed the fighting across the station and the void war around it. When he brought his full attention to the defenders before him, he noted how pathetic they were. He would not call their feeble struggles a "defense".



The defenders brought heavy weapons to bear on the Czagra and his terminators. The fire managed to cripple one of the terminators. In an instant, Czagra calculated the most efficient firing solutions to take out the heavy weapon teams and then transmitted them to the rest of his warriors. The Czagra and the terminators hastened their pace and kept firing, trampling cultists that were in their way. The cultists in the front panicked and drove themselves harder at the defenders' lines.



The terminators smashed through the barricades with ease. Czagra grabbed a slab of metal and threw it with such force that it flew through a squad of defenders beheading or slicing them in half. In seconds, the Imperial defenders were slaughtered. Czagra then moved on deeper into the station.



Czagra dug his bronze talons into a cogitator shrine; cables and sinew emerged from them and attached themselves to the machine's systems. He was now connected to the machine spirits of the station. The spirits were powerful and shielded with data savior protocols. Yet they were nothing before the Warsmith's will. They screamed as they died, yielding their secrets to Czagra's mind. Finally, Czagra knew the exact location of the psykers.



Czagra marshaled his forces aboard the station and sent them against the last stand of the loyalists. The loyalists had massed in the holding pin vaults area and were reinforced by armored servitors and fortified turret weapons. Despite their formidable defense, the Imperials were caught off guard by the speed of the Iron Warriors' assault. A squad of chosen smashed into the defenders' lines before they could raise their rifles. The carnage they inflicted on the defenders before they were slain allowed Czagra to move the rest of his warband into position. He hit the defenders' lines with a power-armored wedge formation. Czagra's arcane combi-bolter fire sent Imperials flying with blasts of tortured souls before he waded into the survivors with his talons.



The Imperial defenders were shaken; nonetheless, they held the line against the Iron Warriors' onslaught. The servo-turrets unleashed a firestorm of heavy weapons that carved through both loyal and traitor ranks, followed by blasts of psychic energy that exploded within the Imperial lines to incinerate any Iron Warrior caught in them. The masters of the station had come to defend their secret vault, three Primaris Psykers. A smiling Czagra noted how this meant they were desperate.



As the three psykers harnessed more Warp energy to throw at the Iron Warriors, Czagra's master of executions Mandrax dashed in a blur toward them. His bionic eyes were locked on the trio's soul fires. There was no escaping him. He cleaved the first psyker in two from head to groin with his axe before turning to give chase to the next psyker.



The Iron Warriors destroyed the last of the servo turrets forcing the surviving Imperial defenders into the open, where they were gunned down. Czagra bore down on the last Primris psyker and grabbed her with his talons.



While the Primaris psyker squirmed in pain and anguish in his grasp, Czagra watched his men venting the reminder of their anger and sadistic urges on the wounded and dead Imperials, seeking to prolong the butchery a bit longer. The pained Psyker made to speak. Czagra expected some last curse. Instead, the psyker spoke a single word. "Death".



The psyker continued and said that death is all that awaits the traitors in the vaults. The vault was a prison that contained psykers that would serve no one, least of all traitors. It's a blessing by the Emperor that they would serve the Imperium by destroying the traitors should the traitors be foolish enough to unleash them. They are wild, degenerate, uncontrollable, walking apocalypses in waiting.



Czagra tightened his grip on the Primaris psyker, slowly crushing her to death. The last thing she heard was him saying it was exactly what he needed.