Horus gazed at the nascent forms of his newly born brothers, suspended within the vast bio-culture vats. Their eyes—clear and unclouded—stirred something complicated in him. He hadn't expected such quiet, such vulnerability from demigods. The raw pride and power of the Primarchs made one forget they ever began as anything but gods of war.
He lingered by their side, reluctant to leave. But time pressed against him like a blade.
Dukel could discover them at any moment—and Horus could ill afford delay.
He stepped out of the sterile sanctum where the young Primarchs gestated. The next phase of his plan awaited: the opening of the gate—the path to the power that would forge these weak shells into the gods they were meant to be.
Legend claimed that it was through this very portal that the Emperor had once struck his bargain with the dark gods—offering the essence of what would become the Primarchs in exchange for the knowledge and arcane wealth to craft them.
To the Ecclesiarchy, it was heresy dressed as myth.
But Horus knew the truth. He knew the portal was real.
Because he had walked through it himself.
Moloch's Gate—ten millennia ago, on the cusp of the Great Heresy, Horus had stood before it. Powerless to face the Emperor in open war, he had dared to enter, seeking the strength to shatter a god.
To others, he had vanished for mere hours. But Horus alone knew the weight of time inside.
Perturabo had once stood against a chronoweapon, sacrificing thousands of years of his own life in a heartbeat. Only his prematurely white hair betrayed the loss.
But when Horus emerged from Moloch's Gate, even a Primarch's near-immortal form bore the touch of time. His aging could not be hidden.
No mortal passed through unscathed.
Yet Horus would enter again—because he must.
To realize the vision he carried… to alter the ruinous fate being carved into the galaxy by Dukel.
He remembered those innocent eyes within the vat. And with that, his stride grew steadier, his resolve hardening like steel.
On the other side of the galaxy, Imperial Warmaster Dukel prepared for war.
Caligus, High King of the Knight World Darok, had once again torn apart the Imperial summons.
He declared independence—severing his world from the Imperium and defiling its sacred borders.
His treason had long festered. Even during the chaos of the earlier campaigns, he had attempted to seize Vigilus, hoping to intimidate the Imperial Navy with his show of strength.
But the Navy, now reinforced with Mechanicus-forged wargear and battle-ready, responded with precision. Their counterattack forced the rebellious king to retreat back to Darok, licking his wounds.
And now, after his latest insult, came Dukel's reply:
"In the annals of the Imperium, traitors are more reviled than any xenos.
High King Caligus—if you choose rebellion, then whether you hide among men or in the Eye of Terror itself, I will find you.
I will strike you from the stars.
I will butcher your bloodline and reduce your throne-world to cinders.
I will become ruin incarnate.
Make your decision, and make it wisely.
In the fire to come, you will witness the Emperor's will—manifest and unrelenting."
There were no political games. No honeyed words. Just clarity—brutal and unambiguous. Even a child could grasp its meaning.
As Caligus read the final lines, his hands trembled in fury.
"To treat me as an alien... as less than human..." he muttered, voice taut with rage. "Blasphemous arrogance!"
He hurled the letter across his war desk.
Caligus was no fool. He would not provoke the Imperium without reason. He believed himself ready.
The fall of the Cadian Gate had torn open the galaxy. From the Eye of Terror had erupted the Great Rift—a cataclysm that nearly split the Imperium in two. The warp-scarred anomaly known as the Cicatrix Maledictum had drowned whole sectors in chaos.
The Imperium teetered on the brink. Even the Astronomican—the soul-light of the Emperor—had flickered and died.
Without it, Warp travel was suicide.
And during that long darkness, Dukel had not yet returned. The Astronomican was eventually rekindled through the desperate efforts of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica and the Mechanicus' senior Magi.
But the damage was done. Countless systems lost contact. Entire sectors, cut adrift in silence, renounced Imperial rule. Darok was one of them.
Its location made the situation far worse.
When the Great Rift opened, the Kermond Corridor became the Imperium's only stable bridge between its two fractured halves—between the Segmentum Solar and the Dark Imperium. Darok sat like a gatekeeper at the throat of that corridor.
And now, in defiance, it blocked that vital artery.
Dukel, fresh from reclaiming Vigilus amidst the galactic maelstrom, had transformed it into a staging ground. A full tenth of the legions now moved through Vigilus, launching strikes across the Rift, rescuing Imperial worlds from the tide of madness.
The Departmento Munitorum had fortified the Vigilus and Red Earth systems, anchoring the Kermond Corridor with space fortresses.
Yet now, Darok, poised at its most critical chokepoint, sought to leverage its position—to coerce the Imperium into legitimizing their secession.
But Dukel had already spoken.
Darok would not be permitted to stand in the way.
Not while the galaxy burned.
The High King had expected the Imperium to send envoys—diplomats with offers of negotiation, compromise, perhaps even tribute.
He had not expected the Warmaster's reply to be so absolute.
"Is he insane?" Caligus snarled, teeth clenched as he crumpled the threat-letter in his fist. "If both sides are destroyed, who gains anything?"
But he already knew the answer. This was not politics. It was the Imperium's wrath.
Darok had never been loyal—not truly. Isolated, distant from Terra, and perched on the edge of the Warp-scarred galactic wound, the planet had long danced with madness.
The constant pressure of the Immaterium—the hellish realm of Chaos—had twisted the people of Darok. Its ruling caste became increasingly erratic and brutal, and its population suffered frequent waves of hysteria and mass delusion.
Refugee ships caught in Warp Storms often sought sanctuary in Darok's void space, only to be met with silence—or worse, destruction. On the edge of the system, hulks drifted like tombstones, wrecked vessels and the frozen corpses of desperate survivors, littering the orbital graveyard.
Even liaison officers dispatched by the Departmento Munitorum had gone missing—executed by paranoid warlords or torn apart by the frenzied mob.
And yet, not all on Darok had fallen.
When Vigilus teetered on the brink of loss, there were those among the Darok who abandoned their home to fight for the Imperium. These loyalists were welcomed. The Imperium remembers loyalty.
But Darok itself was lost.
The Imperium could not—and would not—allow a secessionist regime to hold dominion over the Kermond Corridor's throat.
And the Warmaster, Dukel, was not a man who entertained bargains.
If destroying Darok meant bleeding the Imperium, then so be it.
The Departmento Munitorum prepared for war.
To prevent the daemonic hosts of the Warp from exploiting the conflict, Dukel ensured that the Vigilus and Argentum defense forces remained in position, their void shields primed and guns locked. Instead, he drew reinforcements from other sectors and forged a new expeditionary army—one tailored not for diplomacy, but annihilation.
It would crush the rebellion and reclaim Darok.
And with it, the corridor.
There were secondary motives, too. Tech-Priests of Mars had been eager to test experimental combat systems in live-fire conditions. Radical Magi within the Adeptus Mechanicus argued that firsthand data was vital. The counterinsurgency fleet thus carried weaponry and automata still in prototype phase, designed for war in hostile and warp-touched environments.
But even as this machine-fueled vengeance approached, Caligus stood defiant.
He mobilized his fleet, ordering it to intercept the Imperium's advance. Darok's void-warriors readied for a space battle.
Yet what came was… puzzling.
The Imperial fleet did not charge into orbit.
Instead, it halted at the system's edge.
Only a few tiny pods—barely visible sparks of light—were launched toward Darok.
From the command bridge, rebel fleet officers detected the strange, glimmering objects. None were more than ten meters long. Certainly not torpedoes. Not even drop-pods.
"What insult is this?" one of the rebel commanders muttered, watching the voidscreen. "A provocation?"
Perplexed, they sent immediate reports to the High King.
Through his command throne's hololithic display, Caligus watched the data feed and narrowed his eyes. These were no known Imperium weapons. Macro-cannons and nova-lances were massive by comparison. These were… something else.
Then a priority transmission came through.
Saint Efilar, commander of the Sisters of the Heart, requested parley.
She was granted an audience.
Her image resolved on Caligus' screen: a radiant young woman clad in silvered armor, framed by purity seals and glowing incense. Her expression was calm, serene. Not the fire and fury the High King expected from a warrior of the Adepta Sororitas.
The High King gave a scornful smirk.
"To send a girl to speak for the Empire," he muttered, unimpressed.
Unaware of the reforms that had reshaped the Imperium during its darkest hours, he believed this was the product of corruption. In his mind, the Ecclesiarchy and the High Lords had become nothing but senile fools and self-serving bureaucrats. That such a figure held command only confirmed his view.
He believed himself lucky to have broken away when he did.
He had escaped rot.
"Your Excellency, Supreme King," Saint Efilar began, voice as composed as it was clear, "this is your last chance."
Her tone held no pride. No malice. Just solemnity.
"There will be no further offers."
Caligus sat back, scowling.
"There's no need for this 'chance,'" he said, dismissive. "We've declared independence. We will not kneel."
His voice was firm. But his eyes—strained and sunken—betrayed the truth. He was tired. Stretched thin by years of rule under madness and fear. Behind his bravado, the High King was a man cracking beneath the weight of his world.
And the sparks outside his system had just begun to fall.
In recent nights, the High King had been haunted by the same dream: the world of Darok, burning in voidfire, its cities turned to ash, its people screaming as the heavens collapsed.
It was not prophecy, but inevitability.
"Don't let your people pay for your stubborn pride. The Warmaster's will is clear. You do not comprehend the kind of force you've provoked. Lay down your arms. Accept judgment. There is still time to preserve something."
Saint Efilar's voice was calm, even gentle, as she delivered her final plea.
Her expression—projected in shimmering hololith before the High King—held neither hatred nor arrogance. She was a living saint, a chosen of the Emperor. Her words were not her own, but the echo of divine will.
But Caligus sneered.
"Spare me your sanctimony. Darok will never bow again to that festering corpse on Terra. My knights stand ready. My fleet hungers for battle. If you come, we will drive you back in disgrace."
His decision was made.
There would be no surrender.
"Lord Caligus," Efilar said, a flicker of sadness behind her eyes, "your choice weighs upon the lives of hundreds of millions. Choose carefully."
"I am not some fool to be cowed by sanctified threats. You want to set foot on Darok? Then come. And let our spears meet your righteous blades."
Efilar's voice fell to a whisper, almost mournful.
"Then you have chosen destruction."
She cut the transmission.
For a heartbeat, the command bridge of the Sisters of the Heart flagship was silent.
Then the Saint turned to her attendants.
"Activate all sparks."
Across the bridge, a chorus of tech-priests and adepta operators nodded. Without hesitation, they donned neural links—arcane Mechanicus interface helms—connecting directly to the prototype war-devices scattered throughout the void.
The sparks, once drifting innocently near the Darok fleet like specks of stardust, pulsed with sudden crimson light.
And then they moved.
Streams of red burned across the stars as dozens of sparks accelerated at impossible velocities. They carved through the vacuum, leaving trails of energy like comets.
In the Darok fleet command ship, alarms screamed.
"They're powering up! Unknown signature—uncatalogued energy source!"
"Target them—now! Open fire!"
To his credit, the fleet commander acted fast. Targeting data was fed to the weapons decks, lance batteries rotated, torpedo locks acquired. The sparks were fired upon.
But it was already far too late.
The sparks danced through flak barrages and point-defense grids as if guided by some higher will. One after another, they struck with surgical precision.
They pierced void shields.
They shredded adamantium hulls.
They bypassed all traditional defenses, their weapons born not of brute force—but of divine innovation from the Fabricator General's forges on Mars.
In seconds, the first Darok flagship—the pride of High King Caligus—was engulfed in light.
Its reactor detonated.
A chain of secondary explosions tore through its spine, splitting it apart like parchment. The wreckage scattered across the void, consumed by its own fire.
The commander of the Darok fleet froze.
"What… what just happened?" he whispered.
The bridge was silent except for the echoing klaxons and panicked shouting from subordinate officers.
"Are we under cyberattack? Check the datafeeds! See if a data-virus has corrupted our sensors—this must be a malfunction!"
But the truth was undeniable.
There was no error.
They had witnessed the impossible: a weapon, no larger than a land speeder, had vaporized a ship that spanned kilometers.
The commander's knees buckled as he fell into his command throne, hollow-eyed.
The hololithic display continued to replay the battle: sparks streaking across space like crimson angels of death, ships igniting in succession, crews silenced in a blink.
In the glowing reflection of a dying fleet, despair settled into his soul.
"Could... could that really be the hope of the Imperium?" he muttered.
By then, it no longer mattered.
The negotiations were over. There would be no second chance.
Only fire.
Only ruin.
...
TN:
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