"I see through that man's gaudy golden shell," said Dukel, his voice cold and cutting. "But you are still blind to it."
The Great Speaker's eyes rested on the Pope with something like pity—this man had offered his unwavering devotion to a hypocritical god, a false idol swathed in light.
But Dukel did not laugh. Once, he too had worshipped the man enthroned in gold. He had fought, bled, and ruled in His name—only to be discarded, broken, and defamed.
There was something tragic in the priest's unshaken piety. It stirred echoes of the past, of the blind faith that had led legions to ruin ten thousand years ago.
And yet, this priest—he could still be saved. He simply needed to see.
Dukel, ever the apostate and prophet, was willing to be that guide—not for the sake of the priest, but to strike at the Emperor's foundations, to turn even His most faithful against Him.
But the priest did not bend.
He shook his head slowly, lips parting with calm certainty.
"The true God does not demand belief. He neither compels nor pleads. If you chant His name, He may gaze upon you with mercy. If you scorn Him, He will not grieve."
Dukel went still.
That wasn't the priest speaking. That was scripture—his scripture. The Canon of Illumination. The holy text he himself had penned in a time when faith still warmed his heart like fire.
He bristled, his eyes narrowing. "You call Him a true god? That man is cruel. He sees you as tools, little more than instruments of His eternal war. He shows no path to peace—only endless suffering. He commands you to bleed and calls it purpose!"
His words were sharp, aimed at the heart.
But the priest was unmoved.
"We choose to follow," the man replied, serene in his madness. "All is according to His will. To serve Him for reward would be barter, not belief."
Dukel faltered.
There it was again. The beginning of deviation. The priest's words drifted now from the Canon—not false, but twisted. Contorted by ten millennia of institutional rot. What had once been poetry had become doctrine, sharpened into dogma by time and necessity.
He had been trapped in the Shadow War, under siege by the Crowfather for ten thousand years. He did not know how far the state religion had evolved—or mutated.
"You speak in His name," Dukel pressed, "but He abhors divinity. He hates to be called God."
The priest met his gaze without hesitation.
"Only a true God would deny being one. He is God. So, if He says He is not, then He is not—because He is."
Dukel: "…"
The Great Speaker fell silent for a long moment. His eyes twitched. Then he snapped.
In a flash of movement, he seized a flamethrower from one of his gene-forged sons. The weapon crackled in his hands, humming with stored wrath.
"I should burn you alive!" he snarled. "There is no salvation for you. Not from your god. Because He is not one! A true god would not stand by while His flock suffers!"
The daemon Primarch's voice roared like thunder. The chamber trembled with his fury. Even his war-hardened progeny drew back in fear.
The priest trembled—but he did not kneel.
"Suffering is a gift," the priest whispered. "A trial from the true God. In suffering, we are refined. In the crucible of pain, virtue endures. The flame may take my flesh, but it will cleanse my soul. And in the final salvation, my faith will carry me to His light."
Dukel's eye twitched. His lips curled in rage. Every syllable was another lash of pious chains.
The flamethrower's ignition rune glowed beneath his finger.
Then—he dropped it.
The weapon clattered to the floor. Dukel turned, his voice hollow.
"…He cannot be saved."
He left in silence, his earlier resolve smoldering into ash.
When Horus heard what had transpired, he frowned.
The priest was no anomaly. And though Horus found blind faith contemptible, even he would not underestimate its power.
"I hope this won't cause unforeseen complications," he muttered, then turned to the robed figure beside him. "Is this part of your plan as well?"
The man in blue smiled faintly.
"Of course. All is proceeding as foreseen. Every deviation is calculated. Every ripple... desired."
Horus studied the man's smug expression. He said nothing more.
But a strange, almost irrational impulse rose within him.
He wanted to strangle the man.
Synnlaith IV — Ground Warzone
From within the bunkers of Vigilus, the defenders could already see the oncoming swarm—an ocean of monstrosities surging toward them like a tidal wave of flesh and hatred.
Even the God-Engines of the Legio Titanicus would be engulfed in such a tide, their armored limbs clawed apart by countless daemonkind.
The heretics advanced in blasphemous formation. Corrupted aircraft howled through the sky, chasing Imperial flyers like carrion crows. Steel wings were clipped mid-air. Flame-wreathed wreckage plummeted to earth, detonating with city-shaking fury.
At the heart of a temple-city, Canoness Efilar prepared for deployment—only to pause as an unexpected party emerged before her.
A company of Harlequins. Laughing, dancing Eldar—the servants of the Trickster God. They had come bearing war materiel… and orders from the Imperial Warmaster.
Elsewhere, Asmodai—once a grim Chaplain, now reborn through the Primaris transformation—strode across the scorched earth.
He beheld the plague mist rising into the heavens like a burning pillar. The Sea of Souls churned above, and its currents now reached down into the mortal realm.
The tendrils of the Warp were coiling—around every loyal soul.
Asmodai had fought for days. His armor bore scars. His blade was slick with daemon ichor. And yet, exhaustion had not dulled his fury.
No. It fueled it.
Vengeance blazed within him like a star going nova.
He was a priest, yes.
But he was also a weapon. A hammer in the hands of vengeance. And he would not stop until every blasphemer was ash beneath his boots.
Asmodai chanted a sacred litany to the Emperor, each word a blade of faith, even as he swung his weapon with precision and fury.
His prayers were not in vain. Every utterance of the Emperor's name sent shrieks through the warp-tainted ranks—the shrill howls of abominations recoiling from the holy resonance. To the damned, the Emperor's name was a curse, a blinding light in their darkness. His presence, invoked through the devout, tore through their essence like fire through parchment.
Wherever Asmodai strode, morale surged. The mortal defenders—beaten, bloodied, but unbroken—cheered at the sight of him, their spirits lifted by the shadow of a living legend.
But those cheers were brief. The battle allowed no respite.
Wave after wave of the enemy followed the fallen. As the latest horde was driven back, fresh horrors emerged from the noxious fog. Shambling corpses, bloated and broken, their insides spilling from ruptured bellies, rose to join the fray. Even in death, they served—slaves to Grandfather Nurgle, their souls shackled and desecrated.
They had once been human. Now, they were puppets of pestilence.
Asmodai raised his voice in prayer once more—but this time, his words faltered. His throat burned with unnatural heat, as if scalded from within.
The plague had taken root. Though it posed no fatal threat to one such as him, it dulled his voice and strained his breath—an insidious attempt to silence the Emperor's wrath.
With fury replacing his failing voice, Asmodai plunged into the fray once more, his chainsword roaring with righteous hatred.
"Fire!" bellowed a commissar of the Astra Militarum.
Crimson lasbeams seared through the fog, piercing corpses and carrion. But it was not enough. The walking dead did not fall. Their heads exploded; their limbs disintegrated—yet still, they came on.
"Bring the flamers forward!" the commissar ordered again, voice strained.
Asmodai fired a krak grenade into the oncoming swarm. The blast shredded a cluster of zombies, the holy detonation obliterating what little soul still clung to their rotting flesh.
With fire and fury, the tide was pushed back—for now.
Yet no cheer rose from the trenches.
All knew the truth: this was but a skirmish in an unending siege.
"Movement to the southeast! A large formation inbound!" came the warning from a recon trooper's vox.
Fire support was requested, and soon white phosphorus shells rained down from above. The horizon ignited in searing flame. Burning zombies stumbled from the inferno, dragging their charred limbs forward, their malice undeterred by agony.
Through the fire came something worse.
Lumbering war machines with insectoid limbs and screeching saw-blades crawled through the haze. Defilers—daemon engines of the Warp.
One crashed into the trench, crushing a soldier beneath its rusted bulk.
Before panic could take hold, Asmodai charged. With a deafening roar and a flash of ceramite and steel, he drove his chainsword through the beast's hull, ripping its daemon heart to shreds.
The monster collapsed in pieces. The line held.
"Stand fast!" Asmodai rasped, turning to the mortal troopers. "Weapons up! Let no abomination breach this trench!"
Together, they cut down the last of the plague-swollen attackers.
Breathing heavily, Asmodai took a moment to drink from a sanctified vial—a talismanic solution prepared by a battlefield Magos. The burning in his throat eased. Barely.
The fog thickened once more, visibility reduced to less than five meters.
Then came the song.
It rolled from the mist like a funeral dirge, wet and suffocating, like breath exhaled through a lung filled with bile. It gurgled with sorrow and rot. And yet… there was a grotesque joy in it. A dirge of decay and twisted peace.
Asmodai stepped forward, shielding the mortal line with his armored bulk. Despite his presence, the men faltered. Fear crept into their eyes.
Then came the laughter.
High-pitched, mad, and hateful. It sliced through the haze.
From the pallid mist stepped a bloated giant in rusted power armor, its vox-grille twisted in a rictus of infectious glee. His form was swollen, his joints swollen with tumors, his helm pitted and caked with filth. Still, Asmodai knew him.
Plague Marines.
"Traitors," Asmodai snarled.
"Throne protect us," muttered the commissar beside him. "Heretic Astartes."
The corpses had been fodder, nothing more than a diversion to drain ammunition and morale. Now the true threat emerged—once noble warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, now bloated parodies in service to Nurgle.
Cunning. Patient. Deadly.
"Hold!" Asmodai called, voice hoarse but firm. "Hold the line!"
A chorus of affirmatives followed, but even among the brave, there was fear. He did not blame them. To fear Chaos is to understand its horror. But it is precisely that fear which gives courage its value.
"Open fire!" came the commissar's cry as the enemy entered range.
"For the Emperor! For the Warmaster!" a soldier yelled, squeezing his trigger with trembling hands.
Red beams lashed the fog. Hundreds of lasguns lit up the trench.
Asmodai watched as one Plague Marine took five, then ten direct hits—chunks of armor blasted away, rotting flesh exposed—yet still, he lumbered forward, blade in hand, unrelenting.
The defenders' faith would be tested.
But Asmodai's faith would burn hotter still.
With the vile blessing of the Plague God, lasfire was proving nearly useless against the corrupted Astartes.
The heretics advanced through the web of crimson beams as if walking through mist. Their plodding march was unbroken, unstoppable.
From the vox-grilles embedded in their bloated armor, guttural dirges seeped into the air—wet, wheezing tones rasped through corrupted lungs and rusted speakers.
As they closed in, their grotesque forms were revealed. These blasphemers were no longer men. Once noble Astartes, once defenders of mankind, now reduced to festering abominations.
Bloating with rot, their ceramite was fractured and corroded, hanging in jagged plates over skin that festered with sores and necrosis. Pus oozed freely from open wounds. Maggots and daemon-worms wriggled through flesh and armor alike, thriving in the decay that now defined their existence.
Still they sang—low, mournful hymns laced with eerie joy.
A thick, putrid miasma rolled ahead of them, coiling into the trenches like a living thing. Though the troopers of the Astra Militarum had sealed their rebreathers, the stench clawed its way through the filters like a sentient force.
Asmodai's enhanced physiology faltered. Even through the filters of his Astartes-grade helm, the stench was overwhelming. He nearly gagged.
"All this... is a gift from my loving father," crooned one of the Plague Marines, lifting a rusted grenade launcher overhead.
Though their bodies had rotted, their minds remained dangerously sharp—refined over millennia of slaughter. Their aim was precise. Their movements coordinated with the efficiency of long-dead battle doctrines now twisted by Chaos.
The grenade launcher barked.
Explosions rocked the trench, hurling gore into the air. Guardsmen who had dared to peek above the firing step were torn apart—bodies shattered by the force of plague-laced munitions.
Their flak armor, never intended to stand against weapons of Astartes origin, was as paper before the storm.
From the shredded corpses, swarms of daemon-flies rose—fat, buzzing things that shimmered with unholy light. The trench filled with shrieks and the sickening hum of infernal wings.
Despair spread through the ranks. Some guardsmen faltered. Some turned their eyes skyward in silent prayer. Others simply wept.
Then, over the cacophony, a voice rang out—hoarse, cracked, but resolute.
A hymn.
Woven with agony, but steady.
Asmodai, voice raw from plague and smoke, had opened his vox-channel.
The words were from the Canticles of the Emperor Triumphant, old and sacred. A balm to the soul.
"Though we walk in the valley of shadow, we fear no heresy. For His light endures. His wrath is eternal. His will—unyielding."
The litany poured into the ears of the embattled guardsmen.
And slowly, the despair receded. Bayonets were fixed. Weapons lifted again.
Asmodai clenched his bolter tight, standing tall atop the trench wall like a living bulwark.
This was not the end.
...
TN:
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