Izurich
Archetype Zero
Lord Zee
CycloneAugor Astren
Sarghaul Tartareus
Veritas Res
Sarghaul Tartareus
Veritas Res
in
Diversion at Ullanor Quartus
Upon the fringes of the Ullanor system towards the Galactic North, the silent and empty expanse of space outside of the Ullanor Star’s gravity was shattered with the abrupt arrival of an immense wall of ships, scything into being like the stroke of terror accompanying a heart attack. Fifteen Macroclade Fleets of the Ordo Astranoma - each one having warped in arranged in Vanguard formation, mythical Arks spearheading formations of Cruisers, all poised with deadly stillness as light surged and coalesced around the length of the barrels for their nova cannons. For a split instant after the arrival of the armada of vessels, all was still once more.
This lasted only as long as it took each of the mighty flagships to acquire targeting solutions.
All over the Northern Front of the Ullanor system, dozens of Ork vessels were instantly engulfed in blossoming nebulas or annihilating antimatter detonations. Some vessels - such as the mighty Ork Deadnots and a number of tremendous Spacehulks - were even bombarded by multiple Nova Cannon strikes simultaneously, briefly eclipsing even the Star of Ullanor itself in brightness as seething and hideous destructive energies eclipsed their frames.
As the remnant emission of the alpha strike from the Mechanicum vessels dissipated, most of the targeted victims had simply been atomized and erased from existence. A few, however, had survived. The few surviving Ork Spacehulks and Deadnots, mutilated but still somehow - impossibly - functional began to orient towards the new threats, and Ork voxcallers screamed across the system in alert.
“DA HUMMIES IZ HER! WAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!”
The Mechanicum armada of the Orda Astranoma had all emerged at an unusual ingress vector along the Northern Perimeter of the system, and had arrived further out than was strictly necessary. The distance between them and even the closest intact Ork vessel was tremendous, measuring almost more than an entire lighthour. Despite this, their crews saw no good reason not to open fire immediately. Thousands of Ork craft spat projectiles at the intruding Mechanicum fleets immediately as they spun around and began to accelerate through space. Each and every shot they fired - Ork Munitions not being renowned for their accuracy to begin with - careened off into the furthest reaches of space, never to be seen again.
But while there were hundreds of Mechanicum vessels present, there were tens of thousands of Ork vessels now slowly throttling towards them. The Armada’s nova cannons would take a substantial amount of time to recharge, even with their Mars-Pattern reactor feeds enabling them to fire the potent weapons much more frequently than any other vessel of the Imperial Navy. There was nearly an entire light minute of distance between the Armada of the Ordo Astranoma and the nearest Ork vessel, but as soon as the Orks began to charge their own drives to perform in-system warp jumps - a suicidal maneuver to anybody BUT an Ork, with practically no sense of self preservation or fear or failure - even the fractional, damaged survivors to spill from the Warp would be more than numerous enough to simply overwhelm the Macroclade fleets.
Upon the bridge of the Armada’s leading Flagship, the Ineffable Artifice - an immense Ark Mechanicum vessel to rival even Gloriana class battleships - Augor Astren, Primarch of the 12th Legion of the Emperor of All Mankind’s Astartes Space Marines, viewed the tactical display and evaluated the casualties from the transition through the warp. Surrounded by the relatively diminutive frames of his personal cadre, the nearly three and and half meter tall Primarch, augmented from head to toe with bionics and sporting a massive servo-harness of six servo-limbs and countless mechadendrites, seemed more like a massive, spindly siege engine or some chaotic extrusion of the ship itself than Human. Dismissing the tactical readouts with a twitch from one dendrite, the Primarch opened a voxcall with the commanders of the two attache groups that accompanied his armada, the disparate light and color schemes from within the other vessels casting stark contrast across what remained of the ashen-colored flesh of his face, turned a seemingly dead color from a lifetime of saturation with tailored chemical cocktails, volatile energy, radiation, and cybernetic augmentation.
“The Macroclade fleets have made a successful transition through the Warp into the Ullanor system with minimal casualties due to turbulence. Our opening volley has successfully destroyed 90% of all initial targets, remainder are speculated to be too heavily damaged to perform in-system jumps. Numerous Ork Warp Drive signatures have been detected building power for transition. The plan proceeds apace.”
The vox crackled for a moment, without a concrete signal to latch on, before abruptly falling into deathly silence. It was not the mere silence of a lack of communication, nor that of an empty wavelength. There was a dim, oppressive air to that stillness which betrayed its origin - the voxcall had been answered, and the response came from a cold, sepulchral atmosphere. After what had been only a few instants, stretched in perception by that crushing void to the point they could have felt like minutes, a voice spoke, inhumanly low and deformed by a host of intervening mechanical addenda. Besides the thick, metallic distortion of what must have been a heavy faceguard worn by the speaker, it was punctuated by a hollow churning, as if his mouth had been almost level with a watery surface.
“Understood.” A gurgling wheeze, akin to the collapse of a miniature cataract, broke through the terse speech. “The Tempests of the Ninth are keeping pace. Ensure the creatures’ force is mangled by the accorded time.”
“Proceed as was ordained,” a brief and distorted voice responded to their elaborate proceedings. “My Duolons shall follow the prepared routes once our foes have caught interest in your maneuvers.” The voice, an eerie monotone cut vapidly into the aether as quickly as it had entered. Posing an appropriately dissonant reference to the stillness provided by the one prior.
The heavier, sunken words sounded again. “Beginning course corrections to approach Ullanor Quartus. The Orks will be bound to it once the next stage of the battle is joined.” With a flicker, the transmission returned to silence.
At the other end of the vox-line, a great clawed hand tapped the ungainly steel bulk of the interface emitter, deadening a few of its lights and deepening the darkness in the cavernous command hall. A far cry from the luminescent spectacle of Augor’s seat, the bridge of the Tide of Achaeron, the titanic master vessel of the Abyssal Lurkers’ fleet, was as steeped in shadow and devoid of vital sounds as the most recondite of oceanic caverns. Only the faint glow of crucial equipment and projected spatial mapping weakly broke its stygian blackness, and the cold aquamarine eyes of its occupants’ armoured visors - eyes that had no need of light to see. The bulky forms below them, encased in dim plate, would have seemed ghostly and indistinct to anyone else, but their vitreous gazes could discern even the most weathered unit marking on each other’s shoulders.
One pair of those eyes in particular stood tall above the others, almost twice their height from the ground. Sarghaul turned away from the console, leaving it to the attention of the many-limbed acolytes of the Legion’s Forge, and stalked out of the chamber with steps that sent light tremors coursing even through the reinforced carcass of the battleship. Through the wide arched gateway that led to the bridge he went, raising his jagged forearm and giving a light twitch of his talons in a signal as he went - and the imposing forms of two Terminators, encased in Tartaros armour of a blue so deep it was almost black, who had until then stood guard to each side of the threshold, immobile as statues, stirred to follow him. Two more awaited some three metres away, flanking the ample corridor that led deeper into the belly of the ship, and so did they move to follow when their progenitor passed by them. Two more joined them after an equal interval, and then two more, and more yet, until all of the Orcus Lictors, the exalted aegis of the Primarch of the Ninth, were gathered in procession. Glimmers of force coursed along the powered talons adorning their hands in imitation of their master, and the mouths of death-spitting weaponry awned hungrily at their wrists.
Not a single soul crossed the troop’s path as they descended, so that, despite being the heart of all seven Tempests, the Tide may well have appeared as a ghost ship more forsaken than a space hulk, until, after several descending turns through a maze of branching passageways, they emerged into a veritable vault of a hangar. Though merely one of many in the sightless bowels of the battleship, it dwarfed the bridge by orders of magnitude, and without the even so ephemeral glow of control devices it was steeped in utter inky blackness, where only distant clusters of cerulean eyes flitted to and fro like will-o’-the-wisps over a fresh grave. Undeterred, Sarghaul marched towards one of those unstable constellations, the ranks of his honour guard at his heels. What he saw before himself, as clear as day, were no mere lost points of light, but a septet of Expergefactor Techmarines, heavy with the strange paraphernalia of their craft, circling around the crouching mass of a Flegias Dreadnought. The ancient was freshly awoken, still covered in briny droplets from his watery crypt, and unlike most of his entombed brethren bore signs of his age in the guise of commemorative emblems across his frame. A curious collection it was, many of them not having been in use for a long time, predating the reunion of the Tartarean Primarch with his sons, while a few had never been conferred away from Terra; though guessing at the elder’s age would have been fruitless, it was clear at a glance that he was tremendously old even among his kind.
Although the Dreadnought’s custodians could not but have heard their gene-sire’s approach, most of them did not acknowledge him beyond a glance and a nod. Only one took a step forward to meet him.
“The Venerable is awoken, lord, and he has roused the spirits bound to him,” the Expergefactor’s voice, steely and toneless in an inorganic way, could have unsettled even another among the Lurkers, “But he is not yet attuned to the path to come. He awaits your command.”
Sarghaul waved him aside and locked gazes with the opaque sensors of the living sarcophagus. It did not stir.
“Arise to battle, Rethius,” he rumbled, and gave a churning breath, “Speak.”
Moments of silence, then -
“To seek is to suffer. To await is to lie amid thorns. Know only the moment, for it dies as our foes do. It dies.” The flat, mechanical staccato of the Dreadnought’s voice grew echoing as it spun in harrowed circles. “It dies, it dies, it dies, it dies, it die…”
It died, too, as one of the attendants whispered a formula of ministation and slammed something closed on its back.
“A battle awaits that is like many others,” he explained, in a voice that seemed perfectly identical to that of the one who had greeted Sarghaul, “The Elder One has spoken no ill omens. Go with victory, my lord.”
The Primarch dipped his head in somewhat skeptical acknowledgement. He had never been one to give much weight to the oracles of the Expergefactors and their charges, but such was tradition. A faint noise from nearby dispelled those routine thoughts he had revisited before a hundred hundred clashes. Someone was writing in a dataslate, furtively, a sound that would have been imperceptible to any that did not make his home in utter silence, but struck him as an irritating droning. He glanced sideways, and an all too familiar red bionic eye stared back from under a silken hood, frozen if a mechanical organ could be. Before even he stirred to move, one of the Lictors sharply gestured away, and the robed figure, minuscule among the towering Astartes, withdrew with an anxious bow.
That pest of a chronicler usually knew well enough to stay out of the way, but the ramblings of the ancients sometimes drew her out of her corners enough to be a nuisance. He never had quite understood why. Perhaps the meanderings of their withered minds really did seem mystical to impressionable mortals.
In but a few seconds, the Remembrancer was once again all but forgotten as he walked past the now quiescent Rethius, towards files of other Dreadnoughts further away. Many of them would see war again on that day, after months, years, sometimes decades of slumber. The Expergefactor Summus really had emptied the catacombs for this occasion. And they would need it. A world teeming with Orks lay ahead.
A battle like many others, the oracle had said. In spite of all, in one way this was true.
The inhuman would perish.
Time passed. Orks screamed without pause in the void of space, firing innumerable munitions into oblivion - and then their warp drives engaged. Shimmering veils of iridescent light sheared across their bows, and thousands of the crude spacecraft vanished.
“Navigators have confirmed approximate enemy warp vectors. Machine spirits are set for timed salvos synchronized with the emergence of the first vessels. Deployment hangars are pre-jettisoning munitions.” A tech-priest relayed amongst the various fleet-groups in Lingua-Technis - the two attache groups to the armada receiving a delayed Cant Mechanicum translation of the same announcement.
“All vessels begin warp jump sequencing. Prime to jump in concert with the Merciless Service. All vessels confirm preparations.”
A flood of affirmative signals were cast between the vox-relay systems - numerous ships sent back negatives, but their subsequent requests for delay were summarily ignored. The plan had already accounted for a margin of failure in the second warp jump maneuver, and the number of ships unable to make it in time was well within acceptable parameters.
In mere moments, hundreds of Ork vessels - the first in a staggered series of craft that had gone to warp to close distance with the armada - appeared amidst the Macroclade fleets, and were immediately beset by blind-fired macrocannon and lance volleys, aimed only by the most cursory of automated machine-spirit guidance. The simple mass of fire poured into the arriving ships was enough to destroy several and cripple many - but in addition to several stray shots impacting allied ships within the Armada itself, disrupting their preparations to jump to warp, many of the Ork vessels were simply too massive and sturdy to be bent and broken by the deluge of fire. Innumerable Ork Gunners shouted out as they mindlessly directly return fire out at the Macroclade vessels…
Only to be left slack-jawed and bewildered as nearly all of their targets vanished into the void, leaving nothing behind… except for a number of Rad Tempest Void Mines. A scant instant later, they detonated, and the Northern border of the Ullanor system became awash with the incandescent light of a gamma-ray maelstrom that slowly degraded the hulls of every vessel caught within its expanse - both those of the Orks, and of the unfortunate vessels that were unable to make the second jump to safety in time. The maelstrom cascaded and persisted, and continued to churn and burn at the staggered and haphazard formations of Ork craft that arrived from out of the warp in the area.
Several lightminutes away - and now at a substantially closer approach vector to Ullanor Quartus - the Armada reappeared, and after another momentary pause, a second salvo of deadly Nova Cannon fire lashed out from its wall of flagships to thoroughly blast apart the Orkish craft warping into the artificial Rad Tempest, their shields and hulls fatally weakened by the writhing energies upon arrival.
“Second jump stage completed. Initiating high-energy propulsion burns to enter Ullanor system proper. All ships, break into preassigned Macroclade groups and approach your assigned system targets. May the Omnissiah bring us victory.” The monotonous and droning voice of the vox-announcer over the various command craft channels , which was relayed in scant seconds of unintelligible static for the members of the Ordo Astranoma, was then pain-stakingly translated into Cant Mechanicum for the benefit of the other vessels and legions present.
It was time.
Inside their swarm of drop-pods and landing craft, the silent legions of the Ninth waited. Eyes shut behind their visors, they recited the war-mantras of the via consensus in their minds, preparing to emerge from shadowed peace into the chaos of the battlefield and lose themselves in a different way. Not in the soundless oblivion of meditation, but in the unyielding focus of combat and purpose, the determination of slaughter bred into them all.
I wade into the tide of havoc, strong like an avalanche. I am the avalanche. There is no I.
I stand against its waves, firm like a rock. I am the rock. There is no I.
I smother it with a force of silent order, cloying like poison. I am the poison. There is no I.
I am duty. There is no I.
Only duty.
Beside them, separated only by the armoured flanks of larger marked pods, unthinking things of gnashing teeth and scraping claws readied themselves in their own way. They had not been fed in days. They hungered. The narcotic haze they had been shackled with for a long time was fading, and they felt the pangs of visceral desire more and more painfully.
Once, they would have hammered the walls of their prison, cried and begged, pondered and plotted an escape to their plight. Once, they had been human. But none of that remained now. They snapped and howled, impatiently flexing their claws. They craved flesh. They were Infestus, and they were hunger.
Other minds yet stood expectant in the underbelly of the dark ships of the Tempests. They were perhaps purest, bafflingly indifferent in their primitive simplicity. Vast segmented legs scraped the floor of gargantuan dropships. Recurve pincers that could have snapped a Terminator in half tapped together in idle reflex. The monstrous charybdes that gave their Abyssal masters their name did not know where they went, nor did they care. They simply went.
That, Sarghaul mused as he had come into the habit to do before every deployment, was what true Astartes should have thought. What he had been guiding his sons to with his teachings and customs. The arrogant might have thought it a degradation, to bring the human level with the bestial. But this was just that - arrogance. A proper warrior of the Emperor ought to know their place, their nature as a tool, a weapon forged for a single purpose. Anything beyond that was a superfluity and a nuisance.
A vision not just for the Astartes, but for all mankind. For a strong Imperium.
The pod around him screeched and vibrated as it was prepared for launch. Now that the way was clear, so was his own purpose in this moment. To crush the Orks on Ullanor Quartus, to pin them under the weight of his forces, choking off reinforcements to the core of the system.
There was no room for failure, but he was not anxious. He knew no fear.
With a roar, the pod launched.
The descent was a blur, then the impact. The doors slid open, and the colossal Primarch stepped out upon the scorched ground.
Around him, the assault had already begun. The eerily silent ranks of the Lurkers clashed with screaming green hordes in makeshift armour across swathes of earth charred by preparatory bombardment, imbibed with nauseous toxins and teeming with pools of coalesced viral solutions. Xeno bodies in various stages of corrosion already littered the field in mounds amid the rusty heaps of their ruined war machines, victims of the first orbital volleys, but still countless more kept coming, thirsting for nothing but bloodshed.
The Orks knew their one purpose. Of all the wretched inhumans, they were the only ones who came close to being worthy foes. He would grant them their wish.
Emerging from their own transports, the Orcus Lictors formed in a wedge around him as he surveyed the tide of battle. The bulk of the Lurker footsoldiers were already at close quarters with the enemy, their sluggish speed obviated by having made planetfall directly in the xenos’ midst. Here and there, their blue front against the green tide was interspersed with the dark brown of Truthlayer support attachments, who fought in the same grim silence as their brothers. The looming, crawling forms of Dreadnoughts and armoured charybdes went toe to toe with the clattering amalgams that were the Orkish parodies of armoured vehicles, trading thunderous cannon-fire and slashes from gigantic claws. Warped Infestus horrors teared and gnawed at flesh, leaping against charging lines of howling beast-riders. Curtains of venomously crackling green flame and geysers of irradiated sludge roiled where the Legion’s Destroyers plied their forbidden art.
Without so much as a word, Sarghaul motioned to his guard, and they charged into a momentarily exposed flank of the unruly alien mass, sweeping their claws and disgorging bolts laden with withering acid. No sooner had those greenskins whose skulls were still mostly intact rallied from the shock that the giant himself was among them. In the thick of the disorderly mob, each sweep of his titanic claws mauled and eviscerated by the dozen, as lightning coursed in jagged chains to strike at those who sprayed bullets from over their fellows’ heads.
The Orks fell upon him, heedless of how many fell in charred husks or mutilated carcasses. They chopped at his legs, clambered over him from behind, hurled themselves forward with all manner of weapons - all to no avail, as if they had been chipping away at a living bastion.
However, that blaze of commotion did not go unnoticed.
The massed ranks of the xenos were abruptly parted as a massive greenskin, flanked by several armoured brutes as large as Terminators, made his way through them, shoving his minions aside with nary a concern for where they ended up. The Warboss clacked his rusty metallic jaws in anger at the sight of the dark cuneus driven into his army, and cleanly chopped through the head of a hapless nearby grot as he brandished the monstrous ragged plate that passed for an axe in his hand.
“Rrah! Ya want sumfing done proppa’, ya gotta do it yerself!” he kicked a smaller Ork to the ground without even noticing as he advanced against the Lictors and their towering leader, “Get off ‘ere, ya runty gitz, and get dem ‘umie nobz outta da way! Da big one’s mine!”
Galvanized, the Ork mob under the lead of the Warboss’ bodyguards rushed against the Lurker honour guards. Though they fell by the scores to their talons and acidic salvoes, they were many, and now had a single bigger head to lead them. Some of the dark-armoured Astartes fell under torrents of flames and bullets and the sheer mass of green bodies, and the others were forced apart out of formation by the renewed charge. The space between Sarghaul and the giant Ork was clear.
“Dis iz how ya do it! WAAAAGH!” With a bellowing battle cry, the Warboss vaulted at the Tartarean One, crossing the gap between them in a single leap, and brought down his axe against his opponent’s side. The Primarch did not budge, though cracks appeared in his armour where the tremendous blow had struck, and retaliated with a series of scything strikes. Yet the Ork was nimbler and lighter on his feet. He dodged the wide swipes of the massive claws in a dance of agile jumps and sidesteps, now and then finding room to land a hit of his own. The gargantuan etched armour was chinked in more and more places, but still Sarghaul did not let up, unleashing swing after swing at his smaller enemy.
“Hrah, I’z almost gettin’ bored ‘ere!” the greenskin taunted with a roaring laugh that nevertheless betrayed a very real annoyance - like all his kind, he was quick to get impatient. “‘Urry up an’ die already so I gets to take yer ugly ‘ead for da pole!”
He lunged in a mighty, reckless strike, and found no defence as he cut through Sarghaul’s pauldron. But his triumph was short-lived, for he had left himself wide open in a gambit to cut down his foe with this final cleave, and his burly body fell limp as the Claws of Oblivion gouged it open from leg to throat, tips piercing into his skull from beneath his armoured jaw. With a final snap, they sliced from within through the still snarling face, letting the ponderous corpse fall to the ground.
Seeing their leader collapse, the Orks all around hesitated.
“Zog, da boss iz down!” one shouted, “Ya gitz know wot we do now?”
“I sayz we runs back an’ figures wot do, coz’ I sure can’t finks proppa’ now!” another answered, finding time to briefly turn his head and yell despite being locked in combat with a pincer-wielding Assault Marine. His distraction was swiftly rewarded with a beheading snap.
“An’ who sayz ya da boss?” one of the surviving bodyguards snarled, “We just gots to gets togetha’ an’ give dem ‘umie zoggers a shove!”
“Ya all shaddup, ya puny squigz!” the largest Nob still standing smacked an insubordinate boy over the head strong enough to send half of it flying, “All we’z gotta do iz stay ‘ere an’ keep krumpin’, else Boss Urruk gonna ‘ave our ‘eadz!”
And so, though faltering in places, the Ork horde held its ground.
Just as the plan demanded.
Sarghaul tore off an arm from one of the greenskins holding down a Lictor, giving the Terminator an opening to drive his claw through the skull of his other opponent, and turned back towards the bulk of the horde. It had been considerably thinned, but reinforcements were still pouring in from all sides. That was well. His task was to hold as many of them as possible locked in battle over this peripheral planet.
And the more of them he killed, the better he would fulfil his purpose.
“Primarch, IX is proceeding as planned; XII maintaining orbit,” echoed a voice across the vox aboard the Absolute’s bridge, the sound bouncing and reverberating throughout the vast halls therein akin to distant quakes of thunder. It’s origin, the commander of the detachment allocated to service alongside the shoulders of the Abyssal Lurkers, one of the praetorate, produced for their Primarch the final updates before the soon to be undertaken maneuver along the planned course. The ship, distantly removed, along with its fleet, from the Macroclades which it had accompanied upon its system-entry. Adrift in the distant upper-atmosphere, at the edge of the planet’s gravity well, there he listened. There he had bid his time for this moment.
He sat, his optical cybernetics linked into a vast and hulking, behemothic device of incomprehensible complexity, through a series of thick and gruesome wires. Thanks to it, and the cadre of tech-priests heralding from the closely-allied realm of Mortisimo, he could see the ship and all within it. Thanks to his sight, blessed by the Emperor’s kind hand, he could see the future within which he must travel. He stared blankly ahead of him, whilst simultaneously witnessing everything within his flagship. Balisterius Stratama stood humbled as he signed the vox communications and their assorted statistics and calcula for their overlord.
All around him, the imperial navy officers and their staff focused on all things but the Primarch who glared his sun-bright eye against their backs, shivering ever so occasionally. It was no surprise that one individual such as the Truthlayers’ Primarch, one blessed with powers such as he, would inspire both fear and might throughout his ranks. The ship’s foremost captain, Admiral Ysterov, knew far better. He stood at the giant’s side, vocal through both his tongue and his body, making all manner of aberrant gestures as he shouted at his crew to perform their best better. It was soon time, Veritas thought as he saw hundreds of men, women, and even children, pass by his bridge deck before him; shifting from one individual to the next, whilst sometimes being the same. All that he saw was useless but one, for now. He honed upon the path to be taken, and focused on the present moment, raising his voice to a cooled roar without tonation - shouting without the properties of a shout.
“Orient about; engage engines.”
“Aye, Primarch,” responded Admiral Ysterov as he waved towards the vox-operator sat directly below the vast arch-shaped window at the bridge’s fore. The intention was clear, at least to the vox-operator, as he flicked a lever with all his might, and held it in position. “Duolon Primaris, orient about! Engage maximum thrust!” Roared the Admiral, the noise of the unbelievable might of the engines shaking the very entirety of the Gloriana-class battleship under their unified might.
“Truth be brought?” spoke Balisterius Stratama, his voice shallow and hoarse, effort clearly seen with each breath drawn. He locked eyes with his Primarch, almost crushed underneath their steeled stare and unflinching resolution
“It is known,” Veritas responded sharply, the man at his side, Achaelon Omnigus, moving towards distant quarters at the phrase’s mentioning. Likewise, Balisterius bowed pointedly, as deep as his armour could allow him, before he too made his way towards the rest of the legion housed far away from the Bridge. The remainder of the praetorate, those not employed along the side of other legions and their battlefields throughout the system, followed suit.
Veritas stared, what some would consider blindly, into the abyss beyond the window which divided the realms of void and men. But what he saw was not blackness, he saw the realm of Ullanor Prime centered along the prow of his vessel. He loosened his focus, and took in all the hundreds of tactical displays amidst the vast bridge’s expanse; saw the thousands who also beheld them shift and mingle with the changing times. He saw the battlefield he would emerge on, and the orks which he would fell with his own sword.
He felt it.
He felt it deep within his core, the only thing which could make him feel. It was anticipation, anticipation of a great event to come - soon. He would fight along the emperor’s side and prove to him once again that he is worthy to build the dream of paradise just as well as the Custodes at his guard can.
He closed his eyes briefly, returning to the calmness. He felt the chatter, the distant bickering of the fore-most cogitator console operators who believed themselves too distant for the Primarch to notice.
He opened his eyes again, and stared. It’s radiant glow instilling a serene silence throughout the deck once more.
Admiral Yberov stood at his side, the last to do so after all the Astartes had left the deck for the rallying quarters entombed within the center-ship. He was unnerved yet awed at his Lord’s presence. Manifest death and victory within one vessel, he thought before swiftly returning to his mission. He continued to roar directives to the thousands of officers along the vast halls of the Absolute’s command deck.
Veritas shifted his gaze slightly, his emotionless visage leaving both no room for interpretation, whilst also being filled with the prospect for it.
He looked upon the Admiral’s silhouette briefly, coldness evident in his otherwise stellar irises..
With the engines cut, and the shaking ceased; the fleets of the Truthlayers legion were now destined for Ullanor Prime’s orbit.
