The massive Chaos fleet loomed like a blood-dimmed storm across the void, its hulls casting a dull crimson glow. Violent bursts of light danced across its formation—plasma ray cannons discharging in wrathful succession.
Void deflection shields shimmered around the Imperial fleet, redirecting incoming munitions. Where shellfire met resistance, red blossoms flared in the suffocating skies of Belia IV.
Two of the galaxy's most powerful armadas clashed with ferocious intensity. Their volleys bathed entire planetary atmospheres in malignant auroras, thick with radiation and raw fury.
Tens of millions of flashes—macro cannon bursts and light spears—lashed out from both sides, an exchange so dense it painted the void in an unholy tapestry. Amidst this chaos, an orbital temple emerged from the far side of Belia IV—a monstrous cathedral of metal and heresy.
Imperial warships reoriented instantly, targeting the icon of blasphemy.
A concentrated particle beam struck the corrupted temple dead-on. Its hull buckled, then ruptured in a series of chain detonations that tore through its gravity core. The void shields flickered wildly… and then died.
Without its stabilizing field, the temple began to list into the void—an enormous, tilting mass of ruin.
The Imperial fleet struck again. Another barrage tore through its bulk, dismembering the corrupted structure piece by piece. The remnants spun into the Warp, lost to the screaming tides of the immaterium.
Even in the jaws of death, the Imperium's loyal warriors declared with thunder and steel: No temple raised in Chaos' name shall endure under the Emperor's stars.
From her place in the Immaterium, Saint Efilar watched the battle unfold. Her gaze pierced the kaleidoscopic storm of the Sea of Souls and found the darkness beyond—where tides of corruption stirred, and horrors waited.
She looked to the towering figure across the void—a golden-armored titan wreathed in Warpflame. He had once been a Primarch. A son of the Emperor. But no longer.
Her voice rang with contempt.
"Every one of your brothers who still fights for the Imperium surpasses you, Lorgar. You couldn't even best me. You're destined to fail, Great Speaker."
From across the Sea of Souls, her words struck home.
She taunted with calculated malice. It wasn't mere pride—Efilar sought to provoke Lorgar Aurelian, Daemon Primarch of the Word Bearers, into error. A misstep. A crack in his control.
Victory meant nothing less than his personal defeat.
Flames surged around Lorgar's warped form. Though separated by impossible distances within the Warp, Efilar's words echoed with perfect clarity.
The jab—"not as good as your brothers"—drove into his mind like a spear. Rage ignited.
He wanted to act. To crush her. To tear her soul from the Empyrean.
But he held back.
Lorgar was not here to indulge his anger. His mission took precedence. The ritual—the alignment—the design of the Eightfold Path. That mattered more than pride.
Back in realspace, the battle raged. The void between fleets became a burning jungle of death, bristling with energy beams and cannon bursts.
Barrels over a hundred meters wide lit up and launched payloads at relativistic speeds. The void shook under the force.
But even amidst the storm, the Imperial fleet began to pull ahead. Through strategic adjustments and superior fire discipline, the advantages of the Omnissiah's technological blessings began to show.
"Milady, the data-scribes report the enemy flagship is an Abyss-class battleship."
A vox-herald relayed the message to Efilar, offering her a data-slate.
She flipped through it quickly and raised her eyes to the star map.
"Target these coordinates."
Her fingers danced over the console, projecting bright glyphs across the holographic interface. A secondary display flared to life, rendering a detailed image of the enemy flagship.
The Abyss-class vessel was terrifying in form—a monstrous construct with a thick, spiked prow. Its hull radiated menace and invulnerability. Conventional macro shells and light spears would scarcely leave a mark.
Its silhouette resembled a sawtoothed leviathan. Three massive, trident-like towers crowned its dorsal ridge.
Bronzed plating sheathed its flanks. Twin plasma arrays blinked coldly beneath, ready to scythe through armor and flesh alike.
Each angular depression in its hull housed massive artillery. Black torpedo silos nested along its belly, and the aft roared with the hellfire of a colossal engine core.
And at the heart of its iconography—etched in Warp-tainted metal—a Book unfurled. The Book of Lorgar, foul scripture of the Word Bearers.
Efilar did not seize command. She knew her place. In the command center, the Imperial Navy Admiral and his staff—masters of void warfare—worked with tireless precision.
"Concentrate all fire on the Abyss-class," the Admiral ordered grimly. "For the Emperor. For the Golden Throne. That abomination must burn."
And the guns of the Imperium roared in answer.
The Abyss-class battleship had been forged in secret, just before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy. Created through the blasphemous alliance of the Word Bearers and radical elements within the Mechanicum, it was a weapon designed for betrayal.
Larger even than the vaunted Gloriana-class vessels, only three were ever completed: the Furious Abyss, the Blessed Lady, and the Triskelion. Constructing them had nearly bankrupted the Word Bearers and their treacherous Magos allies. Thousands of slaves died in their creation, and the munitions required to arm them were counted in the billions.
During the dark days of the Heresy, these monsters of the void carved a bloody legacy. Even the mighty Ultramarines suffered grievous losses beneath their guns.
After ten thousand years, the Abyss-class returned in Abaddon's Thirteenth Black Crusade. Their reappearance brought devastation, and Imperial records speak of entire sectors falling into silence.
But now, that legacy was coming to an end.
More than a dozen Imperial cruisers, hidden in the void and masked by sensor obfuscation, had waited for this moment. When the Abyss-class vessel emerged, they were ready. Without hesitation, they unleashed their full fury.
Lances, macro batteries, plasma cannons—an apocalyptic storm of light and fire raged across the Sea of Souls. The concentrated bombardment was terrifying. Under normal circumstances, a ship of this class could endure hours of sustained assault, protected by overlapping void shields and armored hulls hundreds of meters thick.
But the vessels of the Imperium were no longer what they once were.
Thanks to Dukel and his team of Magos and technosavants, the fleet had been reforged. Their weapons had been enhanced beyond standard patterns. Their strike capabilities now rivaled the lost glory of the Great Crusade.
Even with the Abyss-class vessel projecting both deflection fields and a Geller barrier, the combined strike was catastrophic.
In mere seconds, the Abyss-class battleship's shields flared and buckled under the barrage of light spears and plasma bursts. With a final overload of its generator, the defenses collapsed. Within moments, fire blossomed across the hull.
Twenty seconds.
That was all it took.
The proud vessel turned into a titanic inferno, a burning monolith unraveling into molten ruin. Its reactor detonated in a chain of cataclysmic explosions, creating a miniature sun in the void. A perfect sphere of flame engulfed the doomed ship.
The Admiral of the Imperial fleet allowed himself a rare, grim smile. Even a vessel as formidable as the Abyss-class had crumbled under the might of the Emperor's navy.
The rest of the Word Bearers fleet stood no chance.
Saint Efilar watched it all from the command dais. Her transcendent gaze pierced the veil of the Immaterium and locked upon the distant figure of Lorgar Aurelian—the Great Speaker, the fallen Primarch, the traitor prophet of Chaos Undivided.
What will you do now, Lorgar?
She expected resistance. The Word Bearers had always fought with unyielding conviction. But to her surprise, the traitor fleet began to retreat, moving quickly and with coordination. It was not a rout, but a calculated withdrawal.
She caught one last glimpse of Lorgar's face before he vanished—a twisted mask of bitter reluctance and impotent rage.
Efilar's fingers curled into fists. She wanted to pursue him, to drive her blade into the heart of the Great Bearer and end his foul gospel once and for all. She knew Dukel would have been pleased with such a triumph.
She could already imagine his approving nod.
But the Admiral's voice cut through her ambition like a steel blade.
"This is too clean. Too sudden. They may be feigning retreat to draw us into a prearranged kill zone. We should not pursue."
It was the wisdom of countless campaigns speaking. And it was true—the Warp was still churning, and more hostile fleets lurked in its depths. The danger was far from over.
Reluctantly, Efilar relented. The Imperial fleet broke pursuit and began preparations to descend on Belia IV.
On the surface of the ravaged world stood a monstrous structure, a temple so vast it rivaled the capitals of Hive Worlds.
It was the magnum opus of the Word Bearers—fanatics building a monument to their own heresy. True to the will of Lorgar, the entire complex was shaped in the form of an eight-pointed star, the sigil of Chaos Undivided.
But at its heart stood something stranger.
A black tower, alien in design, had been raised at the center of the Chaos temple. Its twisted silhouette disrupted the symmetry of the eight-pointed star and radiated a wrongness that made even the veterans of the Ecclesiarchy uneasy.
Efilar gazed upon the profane construction with righteous hatred.
"This blasphemy ends now," she declared.
No one objected. Destroying such heretical structures was the duty of every Imperial servant.
The temple had been built within a vast basin, a natural fortress surrounded by high ridges and spiked towers. Around its perimeter stood tall, slender structures—bone towers—xenos relics of Aeldari origin.
These towers were not merely architectural flourishes; they disrupted the influence of the Warp, disorienting daemons and shielding areas from psychic corruption.
A strange irony—eldritch devices once used to shield against Chaos now stood guard over its most grotesque cathedral.
Efilar narrowed her eyes. This entire structure reeked of foul intention, and it would burn.
With their forces entrenched in this defensible position, the Imperium was granted a rare moment of respite.
When the gates of the heretical temple were breached, the expected ambush never came. The structure stood silent and forsaken, a vast hollow cathedral echoing only with absence.
What remained inside were blasphemous runes etched into every surface and piles of ancient bones.
These skeletal remains were not limited to humanity. Among the twisted relics lay evidence of nearly every xenos species: Tau limbs, Tyranid chitin, even Necron shells with their energy cores gouged out. It was a grotesque mosaic of interspecies sacrifice.
In silence, Efilar, the Saint of the Imperium, studied the desolation. She understood then that the Word Bearers had poured unthinkable resources into constructing this temple—a feat beyond the capabilities of ordinary mortals.
One of the Magos Psykana, well-versed in arcane lore, speculated that a sacrificial rite had once taken place here. But what disturbed him was that the ritual bore no clear allegiance to any of the known Ruinous Powers.
This was deeply unnatural. Within the Warp, there are only a handful of true gods who command enough might to be worthy of worship by beings like the Word Bearers. The lesser warp entities—fragmentary, fleeting, and weak—were beneath even their contempt.
Lorgar, now known as the Great Speaker, had long since ceased offering devotion to the Chaos Pantheon. His faith had turned inward, toward the so-called "Primordial Truth", a heresy of unspeakable blasphemy.
The psychic concluded that the sacrificial rite had occurred only recently.
Efilar's thoughts turned to the maelstrom the fleet had encountered earlier—a disturbance in the Immaterium of unnatural violence. She suspected that this temple, this sacrifice, had created that warp anomaly.
The Magos offered no confirmation.
Instead, he continued his forensic analysis of the chamber, studying every groove and icon with meticulous care. To him, the temple's construction and the Word Bearers' sudden withdrawal both reeked of something far more calculated—a hidden agenda yet unrevealed.
But Efilar, ever the fiery warrior of the Ecclesiarchy, had grown impatient. Though she had tempered herself even in the presence of Dukel, the Warmaster of Mankind, the time for reverence was over.
She ordered the Imperial Guard to topple the profane effigies of the Dark Gods, demolish the warp-inscribed stairwells, and scour the walls of heretical symbols. A staging area was cleared within the corrupted sanctum—a temporary bastion for Imperial troops to regroup.
As the soldiers disembarked and set foot on solid ground for the first time in months, the accumulated weight of war came crashing down upon them. A hollow exhaustion settled over the ranks.
Thankfully, the Ministorum's virtual priests—those adept in noospheric meditation—led the weary through guided rites of rest in the Cogitated Dream-Realms. Within these mental sanctuaries, warriors could temporarily escape the horrors of war, recover their spirits, and receive sustenance through neuro-spiritual communion.
In the modern Imperium, this method of rest had become widespread. Even the laborers of Holy Terra routinely visited these digital sanctums, seeking solace after the soul-crushing tedium of endless toil.
Now, the soldiers of the Imperium healed in record time, forging themselves anew for the wars to come.
Meanwhile, the warships still in orbit maintained a high alert status. Those vessels that had sustained minimal damage were fully powered, their macro-cannons and lance batteries primed—not only to deter the Word Bearers, should they dare return, but also to repel the daemonic host rumored to be approaching from the Warp.
In the command sanctum, Efilar reached out through the telepathic noosphere, making mental contact with an unexpected ally: the Eldar goddess Isha.
Captured during one of Warmaster Dukel's campaigns, Isha had since been integrated—if not entirely willingly—into the Imperium's strategic network. As the goddess of life, she retained knowledge of every surviving Webway entrance the Aeldari had ever constructed.
The Imperium traditionally disdained reliance on xenos constructs, but desperate times demanded unorthodox solutions. Even though they now possessed the means to access the Webway, thanks to Dukel's seizure of Isha, the Imperium still preferred its own Void Warp routes.
But this was no longer a matter of preference—it was necessity.
Acting swiftly, Efilar dispatched Astartes scouts, using coordinates supplied by Isha, to search for dormant Webway gates across Belia IV.
If even one of those ancient Eldar pathways remained operational, it might offer the fleet a chance to escape the encroaching nightmare and link up with Dukel, who was even now carving a path through the stars.
...
TN:
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