Dukel commanded the battlefield with ease. No matter how the daemon before him howled or struggled, the outcome could not be changed.
The Mocker of Fate was kicked to the blood-soaked ground. With a sudden swing of his massive blade, Dukel severed one of the daemon's arms. From the wound, brilliant azure flame spilled forth, burning across the sundered terrain like a river of cursed fire.
Dukel pointed his blade at the daemon's chest.
"Do not fear. I will not kill you," he said. "No... I will show you mercy. I will grant you eternity—just like Carlos. I will bind each of you who claim dominion over fate to my banner, one by one, and force you to witness the rise of humanity's greatest epoch. Then you will understand: my words are not madness. They are the Emperor's will, manifest and inescapable."
The words of the Supreme Warmaster echoed like a thunderclap, etching themselves into the hearts of every loyal soldier. They believed.
The Imperium had been forged on ideals—and it would rise again because of them.
But the daemon scoffed.
"Son of the Curse, your arrogance is premature. Defeating me means nothing. My presence here was preordained. You are but a pawn on His board. You cannot fathom the being I serve. Everything—everything—is part of His design. I accept that. Even if I perish here."
As he spoke, the Mocker raised his remaining arm, clutching a staff now crackling with blue sorcery. Warp energy surged in waves, trying to halt Dukel's advance.
It was useless.
Dukel walked through the psychic tempest as if it were mist. His gait never faltered. His iron-clad form stood unmoved, a monolith in the warp storm. Only his long, black hair danced wildly in the gale, an omen to the creature awaiting judgment.
He reached the daemon. With one swing, he shattered the staff. With another, he severed the daemon's remaining arm.
"I know who your master is," Dukel said, voice low. "Your master is a god. And yes... He is powerful."
The daemon froze at the unexpected admission. For a moment, disbelief bloomed in his dark heart. Had this human—this defiant insect—been broken at last?
The Mocker of Fate almost smirked. It was only natural, he thought. No mortal could stand before the Lord of Fate forever. All would kneel.
But Dukel continued.
"Do you know what we are?" he asked. "We are human."
His voice struck harder than any blade.
In Dukel's eyes, to be human was to be greater than godhood itself. And the daemon understood: Dukel believed it, lived it, embodied it. That truth made even the blasphemous Mocker hesitate.
"You are mad!" the daemon roared, unable to muster anything else.
Dukel did not blink. "This is not madness. It is truth. Even the lowliest mortal will not kneel to fate. We seize it. No matter how small the chance, we take it. We hold destiny in our hands."
"If you knew our history, you would understand. Merely ten thousand years ago, fire itself was a divine terror. Now, we command it. In the blink of a cosmic eye, our fragile species claimed dominion over the galaxy."
"And we will not stop. So long as we possess will and purpose, we shall overcome any obstacle. Be it daemon, xenos, or god. You and your master will fall, like all the rest."
For the first time, the Mocker of Fate felt a true and alien terror.
He, an avatar of inevitability and fear, found himself trembling before a mortal.
He tried to rise, to speak—but when he met Dukel's burning gaze, the courage died in his throat.
Now he understood why that undying fire glowed in the Warmaster's eyes.
"I take it back..." he hissed with the last of his strength. "You are not insignificant. You are the most insane and blasphemous species in the stars!"
Dukel answered with silence.
Then, without ceremony, he ripped the daemon's head—spine and all—from its body, and lashed it to the Destiny Sky Eagle Standard.
The psychic flames clinging to the daemon's remains fused with the flagpole, transforming its surface into crystalline strands glowing with eerie gold and blue fire.
This was no earthly flame—it existed outside of reality, a force of punishment born from nightmare and will.
Dukel lifted the banner high. It was heavier now, stronger. Not just a symbol—but a weapon. A statement.
This fire would sear the minds of the faithless.
The death of a daemon lord shattered the last of the enemy's resistance. The daemon legions crumbled. Their morale, once centered around the Mocker of Fate, disintegrated.
The Red Corsairs and the Daemonic host of Tzeentch could no longer rally. Now, with their leader slain and displayed upon the enemy's flag, they broke completely.
Dukel stood at the vanguard, bearing the blazing standard. Those who beheld it faltered—then fled.
And the loyal sons of the Imperium followed their commander, sweeping the field clean.
Primarchs and battle-brothers advanced as one, crushing traitors beneath their boots.
The fallen knew fear once more.
The reality they clung to shattered beneath the might of loyalist steel.
With the Mocker of Fate dead, none dared challenge Dukel.
He became the storm. The Lord of Destruction.
With each strike, limbs flew, torsos burst, heads rolled.
One final daemon exploded before him in a spray of ichor and fire. The ground groaned under mountains of corpses—traitors and abominations alike.
Behind him, the warriors of mankind raised their voices in triumph. But Dukel did not join the celebration.
He stood apart.
The Crystal Jungle burned. The once-azure rivers of warpfire ran dry, replaced with brackish water. The choking fog dispersed. The sky lightened.
Color faded into pale daylight.
And amid this dawning stillness, Dukel stood—with the flaming standard in his hand, and the fire of humanity in his soul.
The immaterium still pulsed with chaotic resonance, but the world itself was vastly more stable than before.
Like all daemon worlds, this realm had been shaped by the will of its ruling greater daemon. With the death of the Mocker of Fate, its unnatural landscape unraveled, revealing the battered remnants of the original world beneath.
It was a victory worth celebrating. With the Empire's current mastery of the Mechanicum's technologies and the will of the Fabricator General, even a daemon-tainted world could be cleansed and reforged into something useful. So long as the taint of Chaos was expunged, reclamation was possible.
This world would not be glassed by exterminatus.
Though it remained inhospitable to civilian life, it would now serve another purpose—raw material and ground for the Second Legion's expansion. Plans were already laid to transform it into a forge-world-scale manufactorum complex, blanketing the planet in steel and sacred machinery under the blessing of the Omnissiah.
With their objective complete, the Imperial expeditionary force did not linger.
The fleet re-embarked in precise order. Steel-shod boots rang across the embarkation decks as warriors returned to their voidships. Rest was brief. The next crusade objective already beckoned beyond the veil of the warp.
Their true goal was not conquest, but rescue—Saint Efilar had gone missing in battle.
A warrior-saint of immense renown, she had led countless campaigns against the heretic and xenos. For decades, her banners had flown at the front of Imperial victories. She was not just a revered figurehead—she was one of Warmaster Dukel's chosen, a beacon of unity in the eyes of both the Astra Militarum and Adepta Sororitas.
Her absence was intolerable.
None objected to the forced march through the warp. None questioned the urgency of her recovery. No complaint was uttered, not even in thought. To rescue Efilar was not only duty—it was honor.
Meanwhile, aboard the fragmented remnants of Saint Efilar's fleet...
The battle on Ephirar was chaos incarnate.
Warp-born abominations surged through every corridor, pouring in from the ruptured veil between realspace and the Sea of Souls. In the dim corridors of the once-proud vessels, battle-brothers fought tooth and nail against daemons and horrors beyond sanity.
Their ships were surrounded.
Over the vox, hymns and battle-cries rang in overlapping frequencies—oaths to the Emperor, to Terra, to duty. One ship after another fell into disrepair, combat effectiveness plummeting. Nearly a third of their once-glorious fleet was crippled or on the verge of destruction.
If this continued, they would be annihilated before Dukel's reinforcements could arrive.
Worse still, Efilar knew it was a trap. The enemy wanted her to hold position—wanted her to act as bait for Warmaster Dukel's fleet.
But the Saint refused to play the pawn.
As the battlefront shifted through warp-ravaged space, Imperial psykers detected something amid the tides—a daemon world looming nearby, its name echoing through the Sea of Souls: Belia IV.
When the name was spoken aloud, Saint Efilar's expression darkened. Few names could still elicit such unease from her seasoned heart.
Belia IV was a Crone World.
Once a gem among the stars, Belia IV had belonged to the ancient Aeldari. Before the Fall, it had been a center of art, faith, and commerce—a jewel of the Eldar Empire. The colossal temples dedicated to their gods still stood in warped ruins, their once-glorious spires now draped in shadow.
One such temple had been consecrated to Asuryan, the Phoenix King—the Aeldari's chief deity. Once revered as the father of the pantheon, Asuryan had ruled the heavens in myth and memory. But now, he was forgotten by most.
In the War in Heaven, the Aeldari gods had risen to glory, defying the C'tan and battling beside the Old Ones. But glory curdled into madness. After the war, their pantheon fractured, their gods withdrawing or turning inward, abandoning their worshippers.
Without divine guidance, the Aeldari degenerated.
They gave themselves over to hedonism and excess—pursuits so depraved they tore open reality itself. Thus was She Who Thirsts born: Slaanesh, the Prince of Excess, fed on the souls of the Eldar and claimed their gods in the moment of awakening.
Only a few survived.
Cegorach, the Laughing God, vanished into the Webway.
Khaine, the War God, was shattered by Khorne and scattered into fragments.
Isha, the Goddess of Life, was taken by Nurgle and remains imprisoned in his diseased garden.
The pantheon had fallen. Their temples had collapsed. Their people had scattered, broken into Craftworlders, Exodites, and the reviled Drukhari—the Dark Eldar.
And it was the last that worried Efilar.
She had heard whispers among Astartes who had fought in these damned regions: Belia IV was not abandoned. Drukhari had been seen there, lurking like carrion among the ruins, abducting the unwary and feasting on agony.
If her fleet moved toward Belia IV, they risked not only daemons but the wicked cunning of Commorrite raiders.
Still, it was a risk she might be forced to take.
There was no turning back. Not now.
The world below was one of endless conflict.
Ruined spires and alien structures—long since abandoned—still pulsed with the eerie remnants of Eldar technology, half-functioning with logic indecipherable to human minds. Though the Aeldari had fallen, their machines endured, flickering like ghosts of an age long past.
But Belia IV was far from lifeless.
Dark Eldar—Drukhari—roamed its twisted surface and broken webway gates. They slaughtered any soul they encountered, not for conquest or ideology, but out of desperation. Each kill delayed the inevitable pull of She Who Thirsts—Slaanesh.
Under other circumstances, Saint Efilar would have ordered an orbital cleansing—exterminatus fire to scour this tainted place from the stars.
But necessity had twisted fate.
The daemonic hordes that had hounded her fleet through the warp were close behind. They had no choice but to make landfall, to anchor their position, and turn Belia IV's cursed ground into a bulwark.
As Efilar's fleet broke through the Chaos Vortex surrounding the planet, the swirling tides of the warp shifted again.
From the murky undercurrents of the Sea of Souls, another fleet emerged—its hulls daubed in blasphemous scripture and crimson glyphs. The Eight-Pointed Star was carved deep into every prow. Their twisted litanies echoed across vox-channels in maddening tongues.
They bore the symbols of the Seventeenth Legion.
The Word Bearers had arrived.
Efilar's eyes narrowed. She hadn't anticipated encountering them here, in this forsaken system on the edge of the Eye. That they had appeared so precisely meant only one thing—they knew she would come. This was no coincidence.
It was an ambush.
The traitor fleet wasted no time. Even before their emergence from the warp was complete, they opened fire. Their forward guns unleashed barrages wreathed in warpflame—corrupted projectiles cloaked in violet fire, each one howling with caged daemonic energy.
The first salvo was aimed directly at Efilar's flagship.
The spear of purple fire tore through the void, colliding with the vessel's void shields in a detonation of searing light and shrieking reality. Shockwaves rippled across the ether, and the ship's Gellar field groaned under the strain.
Warning klaxons howled across the bridge.
Secondary systems flashed red, and damage reports flooded the cogitators in real time. The Mechanicus personnel aboard chanted litanies of stability as the vessel reeled under the sudden onslaught.
But Efilar remained composed.
Now free from the strain of warp navigation, she no longer needed to drain her psychic reserves. She stepped forward, clad in blessed armor, and retrieved her weapon—a spear forged from rare Argentum, an alloy sanctified by the Magos of Darok and blessed by the Fabricator General himself.
The spear thrummed with energy as she took position on the bridge, its blade humming with righteous fury.
Outside, the battle escalated into a brutal void-war.
The Imperial fleet responded with cold precision. Macro-cannon fire, plasma bursts, and lance arrays carved through the stars as both sides engaged at close range. Trails of fire and debris littered the void.
In orbit above Belia IV, hundreds of voidships now clashed.
Colossal battleships loomed like floating cathedrals, their size and firepower blotting out the stars. Each explosion lit up the dark, every detonation another verse in the grim hymn of war.
Among the chaos, Efilar's gaze locked onto a figure that stood apart.
Amidst the infernal deck of the Word Bearers' flagship, a figure stood like a golden colossus, radiating profane glory. His armor was inscribed with warped Lorgarian scripture, glowing faintly with warp-light.
Even across the battlefield, his presence was unmistakable.
That is—— "Lorgar Aurelian..." Efilar whispered, her voice edged with disbelief and dread. The spear in her hand, forged from Argentum and blessed in the light of the Astronomican, seemed to shiver in anticipation.
The Arch-Heretic himself had come.
...
TN:
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