149 - Here You Meet Your End

The plague raged unchecked. No cure could be found. Countless warriors suffered as a malignant presence spread through the ships. The diseases did not kill them. They only tormented them.

Nightmares came again and again. In their dreams, they wore rotting respirators, and beneath uniforms marked with golden aquilas, their bodies were bloated and decaying. They had become hateful monsters, attacking their former comrades. Soldiers woke in terror and begged the Apothecaries still fighting to save them to end their lives. Pain and despair consumed these loyal servants, who would have given the Emperor everything.

“Kill me. Don't let me become a monster. Please.” A Guardsman pleaded with Kaleb as he passed. Pain contorted the man's weathered face. Most of his close-cropped hair had fallen out.

Rotting sores covered his scalp. His respirator had broken from overuse, and flies crowded his wounds in a black mass. They scattered briefly when he raised a feeble hand, then settled again.

“What have we done?” Kaleb looked on in despair. Their own stupidity had caused this tragedy. Had the great Regent been here, his wisdom and caution would never have allowed it.

As time passed, supplies dwindled. Constant harassment had exhausted the soldiers. Everything stood on the verge of collapse.

Celestine was weakening from the relentless expenditure of psychic power. She could not stop. If she did, the terrible Warp storms would scatter the fleet in an instant. Once separated, they would be lost beyond all hope.

Endless visions tormented her as well. Concentration grew harder with every passing moment.

In those visions, she saw the Regent fall. Countless Primaris slaughtered one another. Mighty fleets turned their guns upon each other. Worlds that had only begun to recover descended into chaos again, their people taking up weapons to kill their neighbors. The bright future went dark before it could arrive.

And in the visions, it was all her fault, every disaster born of her arrogance. The Emperor's own son would die because of her. Drach'nyen pierced his towering body, and he crashed to the ground. Whenever the scene returned, it filled her with anguish and despair.

She prayed to the Emperor, searching for hope, but received no answer. Regret and pain filled her heart. She had only wanted to bring him glory and victory. Nothing had unfolded as she expected.

The fleet had become his son's weakness, a trap that could destroy the Imperium. Whispers echoed through her mind day and night. The visions lashed her soul like the cruelest torture. Malicious voices repeated that these were merely fragments of the future.

Her stupidity, they insisted, had turned fate irrevocably toward a disaster beyond repair.

The voices repeated themselves without end, trying to shatter her defenses and consign her to eternal imprisonment in the Warp.

Elsewhere, Guilliman's campaign in the Warp continued in good order. After Celestine had taken her forces away without permission, he had ordered attempts to contact her. He had not rushed off in search of the fleet.

The expedition had now discovered another daemon world. Unlike the others, this planet seemed alive. As the fleet approached its outer orbit, a cursed name began echoing in the minds of its psykers. Malicious whispers repeated it until every listener screamed it aloud: Beisa. In Gothic, the name meant despair, a lightless place, a place of endings.

Scans showed forests of ever-changing crystal covering the daemon world. A dense network of rivers divided them into countless tracts. Blue flames danced along the riverbeds, weaving through the crystal forests. Rivers and forests shifted constantly, taking on forms based upon the number nine.

Sonic scans and energy readings led the intelligence chief to conclude that daemons and renegades were hiding below. Guilliman immediately ordered preparations for an airborne assault. The main gun was already charging. Before it fired, the Primaris would have a chance to hone their skills. The expedition could spare no daemon world, and as it destroyed them, it gathered intelligence.

The Imperial fleet launched its first attack from above. Explosives rained down, leveling the jagged crystal trees and grinding them to powder. Countless trees burst apart, adding their own violent detonations. The crystals held tremendous energy, and their blasts were no weaker than high-explosive bombs. A rash landing could have carried the troops straight into an ambush and obliterated them.

Once the bombardment had cleared the landing zones, the massed drop began.

Pink Horrors and Screamers poured from the forests the moment Guilliman's troops arrived. Tzeentch's daemons attacked from every side. The shapeless Pink Horrors shrieked with exuberant laughter, their bodies mottled with chaotic colors. Their skin glowed pink, and surges of energy burst from their fingers as pink flame.

Under the punishing barrage, the Pink Horrors screamed madly. With gasps of apparent relief, each split into two Blue Horrors. These smaller creatures were perpetually angry and complaining. More vicious than their larger forms, they seized every chance to torment the humans invading their world.

Screamers were glimmering sharks of the sky, riding the winds of sorcery and the tides of the aether. Fangs, sharp horns, and spines covered their bodies. They plunged from above into the human lines. As they rose again, innocent victims lay below, reduced to broken flesh. But the army's overwhelming firepower denied the daemons any advantage.

Screamers and Discs of Tzeentch fought Imperial aircraft for control of the air. The huge Screamers made eerie sounds as they flashed across the battlefield. Under the direction of Chaos sorcerers, the multicolored Discs flattened into sharp-edged circles that attacked and pursued the Imperial fighters.

Renegades appeared on the ground as well: the Red Corsairs. This vast pirate force included heretics, renegade Space Marines, and mutinous naval units. Its leader was Huron Blackheart, the Tyrant known as the Reaver of the Stars. The warband had grown from the Astral Claws, a Space Marine Chapter once charged with guarding the Maelstrom against the renegades and daemons within it.

Resentment had led the Chapter to withhold the Imperial tithe and openly rebel. Huron destroyed an investigative fleet sent to his homeworld of Badab and persuaded three other Space Marine Chapters to join his revolt. The Badab War lasted eleven years before Imperial forces defeated him. The rebels fled into the Maelstrom and became the Red Corsairs.

They were now one of the galaxy's strongest powers. Many Chapters that rebelled against the Imperium chose to join them, swelling their already formidable strength.

Even with the Red Corsairs' aid, Tzeentch's daemons could not withstand Guilliman's army. The superior performance of Imperial aircraft soon secured the skies. Wave after wave dived with a roar, demonstrating the power of coordinated air and ground attacks. Bombs thundered down and tore daemons apart.

Primaris seized Red Corsairs in Terminator armor as easily as chicks and battered them senseless. The traitors had received the Warp's blessings, but they remained pitifully weak beside the fully upgraded Primaris. Constant battle had developed the loyalists' bodies to a terrifying degree. Even an enemy in heavy Terminator armor could be knocked flat with one punch and finished with a bolt round to the head.

Guilliman's forces hammered the allied daemons and Red Corsairs until their morale broke and they fled. Then a terrible surge of aetheric power erupted. A psychic vortex opened high above the battlefield, linked to the Sea of Souls by immense currents of energy.

A daemon emerged from that immaterial sea. An iron halo rose behind him; blue armor and a cloak covered his body. He carried a staff in his left hand and a sword of judgment in his right. Zan'aike, the Mocker of Fate, stepped out of the psychic storm.

His towering presence bore down upon the battlefield. Malice and mockery filled his gaze as he looked at Guilliman.

“Son of the Emperor, you should not have come. Your fate ends here. All your efforts are foolish and futile. You cannot save yourself, much less humanity.”

“I have seen every path the future might take. Every vision shows the futility of your struggle. Of all the Emperor's offspring, you are the least capable and the least worthy of notice. Like your father, the four gods will not waste the slightest effort on you. You have no value.”

The Mocker of Fate taunted him without restraint. Blue fire burst from his sword of judgment, and extraordinary psychic power surged through his staff.

Guilliman gripped the Emperor's Sword in both hands. “If you can see into fate, do you know that today is the day you die?”