to-be and the Imperium they represented, for their fellow Blood Crusaders, for each other, and for themselves.
Like a redirected torrent, murderous thoughts and desires flooded Umbragg, flowing through his psychosurgically savaged brain. The Brazen Fleshed warrior no longer wanted to kill; he needed to kill. The Darkheart was bleeding. The World Eaters had smashed the compartment plating and torn out cabling, hydraulics and mesh-hosing. Blood and ichor sprayed from the damaged section, bathing the Traitor Angels in a crimson shower. Forcing his pack to the wall and wrapping thick ceiling chains about his arms with savage circles of the wrist, Umbragg prepared for the Dreadclaw’s landing.
Before the World Eater knew it, the Darkheart had buried its gear-talons in cemetery world earth. The shock of the brutal landing was forgotten instantly, swallowed whole by the berserker instinct to break free and kill. With the bone-shattering impact of the landing still reverberating through him, Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh had unthinkingly hit the disembarkation stud and snatched his blessed chainaxes, Pain and Suffering, from their compartment mounts. Freed from their descent cages, the World Eaters berserkers of the Clysm dropped down through the retracting bulkhead.
As soon as their ceramite boots hit the planet surface, the Chaos Space Marines’ helmet optics scanned for life signs and heat signatures. The Darkheart had punched its way through a cathedral roof, and the Dreadclaw’s landing talons were buried in the stone floor of the nave. Their optics cut through the dust and debris to reveal warm bodies running down an ambulatory parallel to the cathedral wall. The warband broke into a run, the World Eaters pounding across the nave at the stone wall with an insatiable appetite for violence.
Umbragg reached the wall first, shouldering his power armoured way straight through the masonry to appear like a conjured daemon before the shocked and terrified stream of Charnel Guard and armed cemetery worlders flooding into the passageway. The mortals were already running for their lives from something, and Umbragg feasted on their fear. They ran straight at his axes. Gunning them to full furiosity, the World Eater cut, cleaved and butchered his way through the screaming mayhem. The Clysm joined him, slaking their own thirst for blood effortlessly spilt. The World Eaters descended into a brutal frenzy, chainswords hacking off limbs, axes biting through bodies and bolt pistols taking off heads. Umbragg felt the release of carnage accomplished, the god-pleasing sensation of blood pattering in sheets and sprays across his Traitor plate.
Bolts from lasfusils sizzled pointlessly off the champion as wall-to-wall Certusians were sacrificed on the twin altars of Pain and Suffering. Suddenly the source of the cemetery worlders’ panic appeared, crashing into walls and pulverising the cobbled ambulatory. A brazen-plate beast with a serrated crescent horn and armoured hump charged up through the Guardsmen and fossers, eyes ablaze with animal anger, a monster out of control. It gored and trampled a path through the fleeing crowd, stamping and swinging its razor-horn to the left and right. Umbragg watched the ripple of bodies as they bounced off and over the daemon’s hump. As the kill before him was stolen by the creature’s stampede, the World Eater stepped to one side and buried his chainaxes, in quick succession, in the living metal flesh of the beast. The Chaos Space Marine’s weapons chugged deep into the monster. The juggernaut crashed on, bouncing from one smashed wall into another until it collapsed, the beast’s momentum ploughing its horned head through the dust, debris and cobbled floor. Streams of brazen flame erupted from its fallen form, funnelling through chinks and rents in its armoured hide. The dark energy spiralled upwards, carrying fragments of clinker plate and great brass rivets with it.
Umbragg turned back with a triumphant bellow of rage, his fists to the sky. About him World Eaters continued to cleave through the Charnel Guardsmen. Two cemetery worlders were suddenly before him, dappling his chestplate with rifles that were loud, annoying and pitifully ineffective. Looking down on the taller of the two fossers, the World Eater swung out the back of his gauntlet. Swatting the puny mortal aside, Umbragg took off his head with the backslash.
‘Donalbain!’ the second Certusian yelled, his voice shot through with the weakness of useless human emotion. Shock turned instantly to anger – a feeling Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh could appreciate – and the fosser ran at the armoured giant, smashing at his ceramite plating with the scuffed butt of his rifle. Within his helm, the World Eater licked his cracked and aged lips. Clasping the weakling mortal by both his head and shoulder, the World Eater tore in two different directions. With ease the Certusian’s screaming head broke from his thrashing torso. Tossing both aside, Umbragg showed his bloody palms to the sky. With the massacre coming to an end about him, Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh snorted.
‘Find me Angels!’ he bawled at his dark brethren.
I can feel the city slipping away from me. I am Adeptus Astartes. Sentiment is nothing to a demigod. Death is a way of life. That the citizens of the Imperium fall is of no consequence to an Angel of the Emperor. We save as many as we can – as I have here on the cemetery world. Men fall, but the Imperium endures. The city is slipping from me as a game of regicide from a master. There is a difference, however, between feeling defeat and knowing defeat. I am warrior enough to know I am beaten. My heart beats for my Emperor. I will never lay down my weapons. I will never give up. While I live, my enemies’ lives will pay forfeit. My spirit is unbreakable. These things I feel. What I know is the difference between strategic success and tactical failure – and I have failed.
I see now, as I fight pauldron-to-pauldron with my Excoriator brothers, the anatomy of a world’s demise. I see now how the Cholercaust Blood Crusade sundered planet after Imperial planet, and how it will go on doing so – right up to the Vanaheim Cordon and beyond. Through Segmentum Solar and the core systems; right up to an unsuspecting Ancient Terra. Unsuspecting, because none know what I know now. They will underestimate the Keeler Comet and its strange ability to turn a population against itself, creating reinforcement for an army as yet unarrived. What they will see as an astral body – a returning visitor – I know as a gateway to Chaos. They will not call for reinforcement, as others have failed to do, until far too late. They will fail to appreciate the Cholercaust’s number and overestimate their own. They will make a stand – as I have done – because that is what warriors do. They will stand aghast, as I do now, at the Cholercaust’s speed and hunger for annihilation. They will not imagine that a force could end a world in all but a day, overrunning an entire planet with heretic, renegade and daemon. Finally, with Traitor Legionaries – the Blood God’s chosen – falling from the stars and hunting them for sport, they will see how easily they have fallen and the horror that awaits others for whom the same mistakes are equally inevitable.
We are trapped.
Falling back from the perimeter it became swiftly apparent that all other sections had failed to hold as I had. The Charnel Guard are decimated and many of my brothers have fallen. Palatine Sapphira and several of her Sisters remain, along with a small collection of Chapter serfs – including my own. Beyond that, only Excoriators survive. The sons of Dorn, who fought their hardest and made the enemy pay in blood for every retreating step. The remaining Angels of the Fifth Company, holding off impossible numbers, as they pair and group up. Brothers finding each other, protecting each other’s backs, knowing in their hearts that here in these tight ambulatories and posternways – in the shadow of Umberto II’s great Mausoleum – they are to die together.
With a cultist army – even with an Adeptus Astartes contingent – we might have stood a chance. The Blood God sends us monsters, daemonic entities against which our weapons know limitation. And now, pushed back into the steep streets and narrow alleys, with the full force of the Cholercaust swallowing Obsequa City, we find our retreat compromised. From the sky they send us their best. Shock troops to finish off the most stalwart resistance. To end us quickly. The Eaters of Worlds. Now I know we are doomed.
‘What now?’ Skase calls above the din of battle. The air is thick with the chug of chain weapons, including my own, and Brother Boaz and Squad Whip Joachim are using the last of their grenades. The cloistrium is
