By then, Ilshar could not find it in him to be glad at how this new standoff was defused. Yes, they had gotten out of it without a bullet fired or embedded in their hides, blessed be the Nexus, but the fact that a misunderstanding had wasted this much time irritated him. Worse still if these guerrillas had a direct link to his employers, as their equipment suggested, in which case the whole scene could have been averted with a bit of coordination, something that had been in precious short supply in this operation so far. Downsides of working at the scale that the Intranszjednota did, he supposed, and with forces as haphazardly mixed at this. His first off-planet missions before the war had been clean jobs in comparison.
“If you’re hanging back, keep an eye open for whatever did this. Would hate if it was patrolling and caught us in the attack,” he rumbled into the transmitter before shambling ahead. Specialty or not, the group in the woods looked more than heavily armed enough to provide decent support in a direct assault; more likely than not they simply saw Echo as an excuse not to put themselves at risk. Arguing the point would be worse than pointless, but they had been preparing to face whatever had taken out those vrexul, so at least they could put those railguns to use.
Whatever dregs the universe gave, he would scrounge them. That was how one survived.
A further stretch of tense woodland march later, Ilshar’s vision organs leered at the first line of defenses before the squad’s ultimate target. The armoured hulk that directed the automated soldiers brought back unpleasant memories of just what being outgunned by League heavies meant. These cybernetic shells were an unpleasant way of overcompensating for other bipeds’ lack of tarrhaidim-kind’s rotborn blessings. They did have their own poisons, but EMP rounds were so damned expensive.
“Killbox, good idea,” he nodded to Rasch as he chambered the precious lightning-marked ammunition and pointed onward to the left with a momentarily free hand, “I’ll cut off from over there, keep the pressure from the front.”
Ilshar was about to disappear under the double veil of overgrowth and aetheric cloaking when the other voidhanger’s voice almost made him start. With how quiet their kind was, he tended to forget she was there.
“The higher-ups would like it if we take him alive,” the tarrhaidim grunted noncommittally, “But I wouldn’t risk it. Nexus knows he’ll have some failsafe implant, I don’t think whoever sent him wants to leave loose ends if things go bad for their side.”
With those words, he shuffled quietly forward, taking an advanced and slightly lateral position away from the main group. His Ulvath had neither the voidhangers’ precision nor Echo’s indiscriminate potency, so to make the most of it in a surprise attack he had to make the most of firing angles. From where he crouched, he had the widest view of the armoured soldier and the lineup of automata, and the advantage was more than an observational one. As the rest of the Envonomed opened up on the target, Ilshar fired off a quick burst at the power armour’s conspicuous center of mass, then smoothly trailed off into a cone that swept over the enemies’ profile. The most damage with the fewest wasted rounds, a prize that would be worth his riskier station.
The land was no stranger to storms, since even before the seas had boiled away, the land had been beaten by frigid winds pulled off long gone seas, surging past far away mountains.
This was not a storm of such making, but the work of the species who had ruined the oceans and the land, and were doing so yet again. In a moment, a thousand, thousand munitions fell upon the far off emplacements of the enemy. The fringes of a corrupt empire, given way to witchcraft and mutation that nestled in the mountains of old Nordyc. The Maulland Sen were some of the worst of the human nations that the Imperium would have to sweep away, should it seek to claim the mantle of Terra.
A first blow in a war that would no doubt cost much in time, men and resources, but a minor one, were it not for the providence of those who watched it. There was a second storm at play, but the second was simply the presence of a being powerful enough that reality seemed to bear his presence with only great trepidation. The Emperor did not need the pict-imaging devices his commanders were using to examine the bombardment from afar, instead he simply watched, alone for the moment, as the Balt-Forts began to show the first signs of damage to the torrential bombardment the Imperial Army had begun the day before.
Even with the shell cracked, the meat within would hardly be vulnerable, it would be yet another early test of the new warriors he had forged. His space marines, that had been made from what remained of his greatest project.
“Come before me, I will listen.” The Emperor spoke before he was addressed, sensing the approaching presence of his warriors, a scant number of them, who might interrupt his private viewing of the battlefield to come.
With heavy, hesitant steps, three figures drew near, as if rising from the soil itself at his beckoning. Faceless in the smooth masks of their visors, featureless in armour of dull slate and bare grey, they truly seemed fragments of the dreary northern landscape come to life, all the bleaker before a presence that dwarfed even their superhuman size. They bore no identifiers save for the numeral IX on their pauldrons, but one was clearly the leader; as the others remained standing at a distance, he moved several more steps forward before lowering himself to one knee.
“My Emperor,” he began in a guttural voice with an odd, harshly whistling timbre, “We are your instrument. We fear no enemy, no death. But doubt eats at our warriors from within.” He bowed his head. “Before even we reached the front, many of us were crippled as organs and muscle failed them. Too many, we were told, and too late for simple rejection of the procedure that made us, but no more than that. Now the others grow uneasy. They dread that their bodies might fail them, and that they might fail you. We beseech you, my Emperor. If anything can choke these doubts, I would not have them poison our spirits.”
The towering figure of the Emperor did not turn as the warriors spoke, the gleaming gold of his armour standing out against the wasteland of his surroundings. Forged in recent days by the smiths of the Terrawatt clans, it was a great work of marvel, one of many that his vision had brought about in recent times, but in his own opinion, a far lesser one than the work which had forged those who now spoke to him.
“Your concerns are heard, my warriors.” It was only then that he turned, the full might of his presence falling upon the men, the air around him seeming to shimmer with intensity. “Each of my new legions is not alike, you come with great strengths, and challenges, that are all your own. We are on the cusp of greatness that will propel us far beyond the scope of this world, but for this vision, there will be sacrifices, as you all well know.” The future Master of Mankind stood with his hands clasped behind his back, a pose of military formality, yet still his expression provided some familial warmth to the helmeted warriors. “It may not seem such, but even this contributes to our cause, to defeat what ails you will provide you with greater strength for these wars to come.” The Emperor paused for but a moment, before continuing it a barely quieter tone, “I am not deaf to your worries, however, we will continue to improve the manner in which new legionnaires are made, and to protect against the ravages that it inflicts.”
Awed by the force that fell upon them with his every word, the legionnaires were silent for a time, their visored eyes downcast, until at last their leader found his voice again.
“Then we shall fight to master our weakness in your name, as we do your enemies in the field. But…” He halted, clearly uneasy at the thought of raising a demand, were that even a humble one. “Allow us to carry a word from you to our fellows. A command to drive them forward without fear, knowing your eyes are on them. Their misgivings would be ash on the wind, and the priest-king’s blades snowflakes in their path.” His voice dipped, little more than a reverent whisper overtaken by his whistling accent. “My Emperor.”
The Emperor paused for several long beats of his warriors’ augmented hearts before one hand drifted to the great eagle that sweapt from his left pauldron, the insignia of the Aquilia which had been adopted across the nascent Imperium he was building. His fingers touched upon the wing of the golden bird, before pulling away. A single feather of gold seemed to seperate, in a structural impossibility, from the armour. Small in the Emperor palm, he offered it down towards the speaker.
“Take more than words, carry this with you, the bearer of my singular honoring of yout kindred who have, and will, perish from this trial. Let none who hear of it use it as a weapon against you, for none have given more to my cause so early in their great service.” As the Emperor spoke, the pounding of the guns which had become little more than white noise backing their discussion rose in a fearful roar, a great intensity of bombardment that could only herald the imminent commencement of the assault. “You will fight with me this day, let us strike the first blow together.”
Three figures walked down over the coldly dry Nordyc soil. Behind them was the light whose spark they now carried; ahead, others like them – many others – awaited the resolution of their audience. Before their Master, they had stood nameless, for they did not doubt he knew all that needed to be known. Yet among their own ranks their names, these echoes of a desolate and frostbitten land much like the one they now trod, carried the great weight that had propelled them to this honour. From a host of orphans, they had emerged as leaders.
They were Osorin Skorr, who always found the finest words and thoughts, and now bore a gleaming feather with reverent care; Tevr Nyrid, whom none could surpass with the sword; and Tzosh Ghaal, who already in the gene-labs had been the most curious and observant.
“If the next generation is gestating now,” Ghaal rumbled in his cavernous voice, “We can expect an improvement in the third at the soonest. Likely much later.”
“I was naive to hope it could be all solved so easily,” conceded Skorr. Now that he no longer addressed the Emperor, the whistling accent is his words had emerged as strongly as in his fellows’. “But you heard him. We are not to be discarded, even if death walks with us. Give him reason for his faith, and we shall not only be free, but among the most favoured.”
“And if we do not live to see it?” Nyrid asked grimly.
“Then we will at least have died a proud death.”
“Were it only for me, I would not mind,” the blade-champion shrugged, “But the others need our guidance now, Osorin. We were all taken young. So few of them remember anything of our traditions, the way of battle in our blood. If we are gone too soon, what will be left when a perfect generation comes will no longer be us.”
“What concerns me,” Ghaal spoke up, “is who is to find this cure for us. Our makers were so clumsy and sluggish, and I was still nascent when I saw them.”
“They are the Emperor’s finest,” Skorr chided.
“And yet they are only human.”
They walked a few steps in silence.
“We will do this,” said Skorr finally, “Tevr, make sure our people awaken to their birthright. I will give them a push with this,” he lifted the gleaming feather, “and you lead them through the forge of battle. Tzosh, however the day goes, many of us will fall. Look at the bodies reviled by flesh and see if you can find anything, if you are not one of them.”
“I do not count on dying,” Ghaal answered without a hint of jest.
“Then it is decided.”
The three warriors mounted a knotty ridge, and a sea of familiar grey metal stirred to receive them.
Nexus be praised, everything had worked out after all, at least for now. There was no telling if these new presences would remain even as friendly as that, but having fewer guns pointed at him right not was something Ilshar could appreciate. At the very least, these people knew what exactly they were going up against on the way to the cannon, and namely what had slaughtered these vrexul in the clearing. What was "worse than an unztadlige". Ilshar could think of a few things, but none that would not have been visible from this distance already. If they could get some intelligence, and better yet some fire support-
Of course, the channel was cut just then.
Grumbling, Ilshar hauled himself to his feet and shuffled over to where Rasch was holding the transmitter, hands no longer up but weapon safely dangling away beyond threatening reach. Through his many sight-organs, he kept moving with ease while looking at the brief transmission that circulated the squad's displays. Good thing he was not there, he thought. Unnerving as the still unknown defenses they were facing might have been, he would much rather go up against them than jump into the sort of furnace the rebellion had stirred up. Still, that did not mean they could get careless now.
"Ask them what exactly we're up against here, I'm tired of this unknown," he gurgled, leaning in as the voidhanger tried to restore contact with the other party, "And if they've got something that can help kill it."
The unpleasant wave of sensation hit Ilshar an instant earlier than the putrid nerve-clusters in his body could interpret it, drowning him in a surge of vague but stifling unease that would have made someone less hardened freeze up on the spot. As it was, his body was already halfway behind a rock, a proper lithoid one, before he recognised the sense of vulnerability for what it was. Open. Defenseless. A clear target. Augmented senses screamed danger at him, and the message they sent was every bit as clear as the whizzing bullet and the peremptory words that followed it. The feeling did not fully subside even when the rock was safely interposed between most of his body and the now even more sinister treeline, and every inch of himself he left exposed to keep watch over the woods made him keenly aware of itself.
He was about to growl something in response to Rasch, when the staccato of a new series of shots interrupted the gurgle in his amorphous throat and left his shard-toothed maw hanging open in bemusement. The pure human - Kleo, was it - seemed determined to antagonise every force on this worm-forsaken world, to the point Ilshar was beginning to doubt if she was some sort of double agent embedded in their ranks to sabotage them. Most humans were Leaguers, after all, weren't they...
"Kadharra! Hold still!" he cursed, churning as loud as his voice would carry. Perhaps the force in the trees would hear that and take it as a sign of goodwill on his part, but to pray for such a fate would have been hubris at this point. Regardless, he had to make some attempt to defuse the situation, and the only vocal channel was with Rasch. The tarrhaidim let go of his gun and raised both empty hands, splayed wide oped, over the rim of his covering rock. The gesture was universal enough; it remained to be seen if the hidden guerrillas would trust it for what it was.
Drifting through the cosmic graveyard of the Halo Stars, Laethem is a bleak, monochrome world of dark skies, desolate lands and icy starlight. Much of its surface is covered in barren rock wastes, broken only by sluggish inky seas wherein swim vast and somnolent things of curious and archaic appearance, the only form of life to stubbornly cling to existence under the open air. The thinness of Laethem’s atmosphere and the distance from its star, white-faced Achrum, cast upon it a perennial pall of chilly night, pierced more strongly by the sinister constellations that loom over it at all times than by the feeble sun. To venture out unprotected for longer than brief hours would spell death from cold and asphyxiation in the deepest valley as surely as on the highest peak.
Given the planet’s remote location and the poverty of its conditions, it is perhaps surprising that it should ever have been chosen by ancient humanity not merely as a site of habitation, but of massed settlement. Three great hive spires were built upon the world, though only one still stands to this day, and the already immense networks of caverns and tunnels in its crust were further expanded by gargantuan mining operations until they formed an interconnected web spanning Laethem’s full extension. These feats of engineering have given the modestly sized, inhospitable planet deceptively extensive space for its population to multiply, and in the havoc of Old Night it has grown unchecked, fracturing over the generations into three wide strata roughly distinguished by their proximity to the surface.
The people of the surviving Hive Koytos have deviated the least from base humanity, and still desperately fight to maintain the purity of their lineages. The severity of the struggle, and the harshness of life in the spire, have hardened them into a rigid, severely regimented martial society which brooks no dissent or scruple in the fight for survival. They are beset from below by the teeming hordes of the Pale Ones, the abhuman breeds that have mutated and grown in Laethem’s subterranean labyrinths. Strange and grotesque are their visages, with lean, spindly bodies and chalky hairless skin, their eyes vestigial or wholly absent; some even sport huge nostrils whose fine smell guides them as well as any other sense. While parts of the Pale Ones still cling to vestiges of civilization, many have devolved into barbarism or been swayed to the worship of cruel monster-gods, and seek the conquest of the spire above. The other two hives have already fallen at their hands, destroyed by their last defenders in final acts of defiance.
Deep in the lowermost levels of Laethem’s maze, where even the Pale Ones rarely tread, there lurks a third, seldom-seen strain of deviate humankind. Bred in the distant past for heavy labour in the mines, the ogryn-like colossi known as the Ghug roam vaults that no light has reached in millennia. Never gifted with developed minds, they are now little better than cannibal beasts, and the rare times when their voracious hunting packs ascend from their pits become days of storied dread for the world’s underdwellers.
Psyker Grade: Zeta. A telepath of notable strength, Nolrakh is nevertheless limited in the forms his talent can effectively manifest in, none of which are beyond the reach of most trained human psykers.
Skills and Abilities:
Haunter of the Dark: Born and grown under distant stars and in deepest shadow, Nolrakh shuns the light and takes to darkness as his home. The sight of his vitreous, atrophic eye is dim in the glow of day, but seizes upon shapes and motion with uncanny precision when immersed in penumbra, painting a colourless but stark world of outlines to his mind. Where the shadows grow too deep even for this gift, his psychic ability to perceive the minds of living things in his vicinity supplies, along with the strange senses of his mutated physiology - the taste of the wind, the tremors of the soil, the vibrations in the air all lead him to his quarry. Despite his imposing size, his deftness in moving unseen and unheard as long as darkness cloaks him is downright preternatural, even when armoured; no predator nor prey can match his nightly stalking.
Horror Made Flesh: Fear and revulsion are the mutant’s lot, and Nolrakh is no exception. As heavily as his ghastly appearance weighs on him, he knows it can be leveraged to inspire dread in his enemies, and is skilful in doing so should it be required. Misshapen claws and teeth flashing at the edge of one’s vision, or the apparition of a hideous visage, can break the staunchest spirits, but the Ninth Primarch’s potency of fear goes beyond mere physical intimidation. A hypnotic force dwells in his eye which can strike those who meet its gaze with paralyzing anguish, or plague them with hallucinations were they even to escape its grasp. Should all else fail, he summons forth raw psychic might to batter down the most stubborn mind with the force of Warp-induced emotion.
The Flawed Fortress: Nolrakh’s body is perpetually at war with itself, wracked by periodic surges of degeneration and reconstruction which preclude all attempts at an external cure for his deformity. His regenerative potential, truly stupendous by any standard, stubbornly rejects surgical or bionic alterations as well as the fruits of his mutation, which in turn never fail to reassert themselves in the same immutable forms. Grisly a fate as this may be, a hidden blessing lurks in it, for harm is likewise unable to leave a lasting mark on the Primarch. No matter how deep the wound or thorough the mutilation, he can recover from virtually any injury as long as he is not slain outright, and even regrow entire limbs with minimal medical assistance. This, together with his resilience to pain, enables him to fight in an uniquely lethal style, recklessly exposing himself to damage that he might strike with ferocious abandon.
Appearance:
Obscure flaws in the Ninth’s genes have conspired with the Warp to undermine the image of physical perfection that ought to have been his birthright as a Primarch. A germ of disfigurment forever gnaws at him from within, regularly rising to hiderously transfigure him before being forced back by his innate regeneration in an agonizing cycle that repeats every solar month.
At the peak of his health, Nolrakh could well pass for truly human were it not for his stature. Towering at some twelve feet in height, he has the robust frame of a warrior, though his pale skin belies his darkling habits. His firm, if subtly tense posture and unscarred bald head do not appear out of place among the Imperium’s gene-altered troops, and his stern statuesque features lend him an air fit for command. The only flaw marring them are his eyes, of whom one – which precisely is never constant – is a hollow socket, and the other murky, with no discernable iris.
This state, however, only endures for a matter of days, after which an unholy transformation begins. Skin frays and recedes, hard white growths part twisting flesh, and facial features drift almost fluidly overnight, until in about a week the decay is complete.
In this state, Nolrakh’s body is a horrific mass of knotted strands of muscle, ragged coils of pale skin and exposed plates of hardened bone extruding from a fantastically misshapen skeleton. Thin strips of purulent necrosis are nested between the ridges and chaotic contours of his frame. His hands are claws of sharpened bone, his head little more than a skull of exposed osseous exoskeleton, pitted and gouged like a lunar surface. His eye, now truly cyclopean, sits in its fractured center, surmounting the rictus death-grin of a lipless mouth, from which issues a voice at once guttural, crackling and sibilant – a mere ruin of the curt and acerbic, yet compelling tones of his apex. In time, the process of healing begins, and the horror is steadily swathed in healthy skin and flesh once more, but ever it remains skulking under the surface until it is ready to emerge anew.
Ashamed of his monstrous and unstable essence, the Ninth usually hides his features under heavy robes or armour, with a veil or hood that lends him his moniker.
Concept:
A living paradox, a loftiest pinnacle of humanity and a most vile of miscreations coexisting in a single tormented body, Nolrakh is a being haunted by his aberrant nature and forever goaded by the hope for salvation, or at least redemption. Burdened by what he sees as his innate sin, he at once abases himself before the Emperor he has failed and is driven to acts of tremendous hubris in his efforts to restore himself, be that atrocious carnage in a futile bid for glory or the blackest scientific inquests in search of an escape from the unnatural cycle that measures his existence; in the same breath, he yearns to serve humanity and immolates it on the altar of his desperation. Tragic spirit and loathsome butcher, champion and abomination, Primarch and mutant; such is the fate of the Ninth.
Legion Name: Legio IX, “the Reviled”; later known as the Star Reavers.
Associated Primach: Nolrakh.
Concept: Descendants of savage techno-nomads from the nighted Antarctic plains, the warriors of the Ninth Legion are harrowed by the curse inherited from their sire. Though stable enough on implantation, as if eager to infect healthy bodies, their gene-seed is fraught with the exsecratio corporis, the malediction of the flesh, a plague of cascading mutation that ravages them as they age. Some of them swell and bloat into faceless, spike-toothed unwieldy hulks the size of tactical dreadnought armour; others are twisted into hunched, predatory shapes, with exposed plates and ridges of bone matching those of their progenitor. In the vast majority, however, the exsecratio manifests as a gradual atrophy of limbs and organs, forcing its victims to seek bionic replacements.
The Reviled channel the pain and rancor of their affliction into a peculiarly vicious and gruesome form of warfare. Thirsting to mangle their foes’ bodies as well as shatter their spirits with abject terror, they often strike in darkness, bearing down in close combat with a fury of roaring metal and fearsome weapons from Terra’s past. Like their forebears, they are sworn to the chainblade and venerate the ice-flame, and like them they give no quarter.
Drifting through the cosmic graveyard of the Halo Stars, Laethem is a bleak, monochrome world of dark skies, desolate lands and icy starlight. Much of its surface is covered in barren rock wastes, broken only by sluggish inky seas wherein swim vast and somnolent things of curious and archaic appearance, the only form of life to stubbornly cling to existence under the open air. The thinness of Laethem’s atmosphere and the distance from its star, white-faced Achrum, cast upon it a perennial pall of chilly night, pierced more strongly by the sinister constellations that loom over it at all times than by the feeble sun. To venture out unprotected for longer than brief hours would spell death from cold and asphyxiation in the deepest valley as surely as on the highest peak.
Given the planet’s remote location and the poverty of its conditions, it is perhaps surprising that it should ever have been chosen by ancient humanity not merely as a site of habitation, but of massed settlement. Three great hive spires were built upon the world, though only one still stands to this day, and the already immense networks of caverns and tunnels in its crust were further expanded by gargantuan mining operations until they formed an interconnected web spanning Laethem’s full extension. These feats of engineering have given the modestly sized, inhospitable planet deceptively extensive space for its population to multiply, and in the havoc of Old Night it has grown unchecked, fracturing over the generations into three wide strata roughly distinguished by their proximity to the surface.
The people of the surviving Hive Koytos have deviated the least from base humanity, and still desperately fight to maintain the purity of their lineages. The severity of the struggle, and the harshness of life in the spire, have hardened them into a rigid, severely regimented martial society which brooks no dissent or scruple in the fight for survival. They are beset from below by the teeming hordes of the Pale Ones, the abhuman breeds that have mutated and grown in Laethem’s subterranean labyrinths. Strange and grotesque are their visages, with lean, spindly bodies and chalky hairless skin, their eyes vestigial or wholly absent; some even sport huge nostrils whose fine smell guides them as well as any other sense. While parts of the Pale Ones still cling to vestiges of civilization, many have devolved into barbarism or been swayed to the worship of cruel monster-gods, and seek the conquest of the spire above. The other two hives have already fallen at their hands, destroyed by their last defenders in final acts of defiance.
Deep in the lowermost levels of Laethem’s maze, where even the Pale Ones rarely tread, there lurks a third, seldom-seen strain of deviate humankind. Bred in the distant past for heavy labour in the mines, the ogryn-like colossi known as the Ghug roam vaults that no light has reached in millennia. Never gifted with developed minds, they are now little better than cannibal beasts, and the rare times when their voracious hunting packs ascend from their pits become days of storied dread for the world’s underdwellers.
Psyker Grade: Zeta. A telepath of notable strength, Nolrakh is nevertheless limited in the forms his talent can effectively manifest in, none of which are beyond the reach of most trained human psykers.
Skills and Abilities:
Haunter of the Dark: Born and grown under distant stars and in deepest shadow, Nolrakh shuns the light and takes to darkness as his home. The sight of his vitreous, atrophic eye is dim in the glow of day, but seizes upon shapes and motion with uncanny precision when immersed in penumbra, painting a colourless but stark world of outlines to his mind. Where the shadows grow too deep even for this gift, his psychic ability to perceive the minds of living things in his vicinity supplies, along with the strange senses of his mutated physiology - the taste of the wind, the tremors of the soil, the vibrations in the air all lead him to his quarry. Despite his imposing size, his deftness in moving unseen and unheard as long as darkness cloaks him is downright preternatural, even when armoured; no predator nor prey can match his nightly stalking.
Horror Made Flesh: Fear and revulsion are the mutant’s lot, and Nolrakh is no exception. As heavily as his ghastly appearance weighs on him, he knows it can be leveraged to inspire dread in his enemies, and is skilful in doing so should it be required. Misshapen claws and teeth flashing at the edge of one’s vision, or the apparition of a hideous visage, can break the staunchest spirits, but the Ninth Primarch’s potency of fear goes beyond mere physical intimidation. A hypnotic force dwells in his eye which can strike those who meet its gaze with paralyzing anguish, or plague them with hallucinations were they even to escape its grasp. Should all else fail, he summons forth raw psychic might to batter down the most stubborn mind with the force of Warp-induced emotion.
The Flawed Fortress: Nolrakh’s body is perpetually at war with itself, wracked by periodic surges of degeneration and reconstruction which preclude all attempts at an external cure for his deformity. His regenerative potential, truly stupendous by any standard, stubbornly rejects surgical or bionic alterations as well as the fruits of his mutation, which in turn never fail to reassert themselves in the same immutable forms. Grisly a fate as this may be, a hidden blessing lurks in it, for harm is likewise unable to leave a lasting mark on the Primarch. No matter how deep the wound or thorough the mutilation, he can recover from virtually any injury as long as he is not slain outright, and even regrow entire limbs with minimal medical assistance. This, together with his resilience to pain, enables him to fight in an uniquely lethal style, recklessly exposing himself to damage that he might strike with ferocious abandon.
Appearance:
Obscure flaws in the Ninth’s genes have conspired with the Warp to undermine the image of physical perfection that ought to have been his birthright as a Primarch. A germ of disfigurment forever gnaws at him from within, regularly rising to hiderously transfigure him before being forced back by his innate regeneration in an agonizing cycle that repeats every solar month.
At the peak of his health, Nolrakh could well pass for truly human were it not for his stature. Towering at some twelve feet in height, he has the robust frame of a warrior, though his pale skin belies his darkling habits. His firm, if subtly tense posture and unscarred bald head do not appear out of place among the Imperium’s gene-altered troops, and his stern statuesque features lend him an air fit for command. The only flaw marring them are his eyes, of whom one – which precisely is never constant – is a hollow socket, and the other murky, with no discernable iris.
This state, however, only endures for a matter of days, after which an unholy transformation begins. Skin frays and recedes, hard white growths part twisting flesh, and facial features drift almost fluidly overnight, until in about a week the decay is complete.
In this state, Nolrakh’s body is a horrific mass of knotted strands of muscle, ragged coils of pale skin and exposed plates of hardened bone extruding from a fantastically misshapen skeleton. Thin strips of purulent necrosis are nested between the ridges and chaotic contours of his frame. His hands are claws of sharpened bone, his head little more than a skull of exposed osseous exoskeleton, pitted and gouged like a lunar surface. His eye, now truly cyclopean, sits in its fractured center, surmounting the rictus death-grin of a lipless mouth, from which issues a voice at once guttural, crackling and sibilant – a mere ruin of the curt and acerbic, yet compelling tones of his apex. In time, the process of healing begins, and the horror is steadily swathed in healthy skin and flesh once more, but ever it remains skulking under the surface until it is ready to emerge anew.
Ashamed of his monstrous and unstable essence, the Ninth usually hides his features under heavy robes or armour, with a veil or hood that lends him his moniker.
Concept:
A living paradox, a loftiest pinnacle of humanity and a most vile of miscreations coexisting in a single tormented body, Nolrakh is a being haunted by his aberrant nature and forever goaded by the hope for salvation, or at least redemption. Burdened by what he sees as his innate sin, he at once abases himself before the Emperor he has failed and is driven to acts of tremendous hubris in his efforts to restore himself, be that atrocious carnage in a futile bid for glory or the blackest scientific inquests in search of an escape from the unnatural cycle that measures his existence; in the same breath, he yearns to serve humanity and immolates it on the altar of his desperation. Tragic spirit and loathsome butcher, champion and abomination, Primarch and mutant; such is the fate of the Ninth.
Legion Name: Legio IX, “the Reviled”; later known as the Star Reavers.
Associated Primach: Nolrakh.
Concept: Descendants of savage techno-nomads from the nighted Antarctic plains, the warriors of the Ninth Legion are harrowed by the curse inherited from their sire. Though stable enough on implantation, as if eager to infect healthy bodies, their gene-seed is fraught with the exsecratio corporis, the malediction of the flesh, a plague of cascading mutation that ravages them as they age. Some of them swell and bloat into faceless, spike-toothed unwieldy hulks the size of tactical dreadnought armour; others are twisted into hunched, predatory shapes, with exposed plates and ridges of bone matching those of their progenitor. In the vast majority, however, the exsecratio manifests as a gradual atrophy of limbs and organs, forcing its victims to seek bionic replacements.
The Reviled channel the pain and rancor of their affliction into a peculiarly vicious and gruesome form of warfare. Thirsting to mangle their foes’ bodies as well as shatter their spirits with abject terror, they often strike in darkness, bearing down in close combat with a fury of roaring metal and fearsome weapons from Terra’s past. Like their forebears, they are sworn to the chainblade and venerate the ice-flame, and like them they give no quarter.
The tension in the air did not dissipate, but neither did the treeline erupt in fire and shrapnel, and thus after a few slowly creeping moments Ilshar felt safe enough to turn his attention away from the looming uncertainty and back to the plate still held in his hand. The intensity of the sensations he could feel seeping from it was unsettling even to an ether-touched mind, perhaps moreso due to how familiar they were as opposed to the slippery and nebulous emanations of the Chasm. Unfamiliar as he was with vrexul spirituality, he wondered just how much of the fallen insurgent lived on in this fragment. How fitting, he thought, as he slotted the plate into a loose gap on his back, to be properly integrated where his suit was lacking once conditions were more favourable. The fungus thrived on the dead and almost-dead. Such was the way of the Nexus.
"These ones were on our side. What got them is after us," he replied over the comms. On their side as far as Zanovia went, at least. Who, if anyone, the vrexul had truly followed remained a mystery, though Ilshar was ready to wager that they had been breakaways from the war. A venomous resentment much like the one he felt now had suffused those he had seen turn away from the battlefields and disappear into the void. What was less familiar, however...
"And they've been tampered with." It did not look like simple looting, certainly not his own crude groping and severing. Even if the CivSec and their allies had decided to harvest the vrexul's organs for some reason, it seemed much too clean for the hasty field job it ought to have been. Perhaps their main goal had been to make space for these implants, but this only raised even more ominous questions. The fact that the pulsating tangle did not look like an obvious booby trap, be that a bomb or an infection vector, did little to set him at ease. "I'd stay clear of them."
With crouching, wary steps, Ilshar began to make good on his own warning, keeping close to the ground as he edged away from the bodies and towards the surer protection of the rocks. The unpleasant suspicion lingered that he might already have been too late to avoid the bio-construct's effects, but for the moment it was drowned out by the awareness that he was an exposed target. He kept his gun trained on the edge of the clearing, noticing with some relief that the voidhanger looked ready to provide cover. Even if he did make it, however, he knew the safety would be temporary. There were too many unclear things in this place for it to be secure - and the cannon still waited ahead.
There was something wrong about this place, that much Ilshar agreed with as he dropped off the unztadlige's back onto the clearing's blasted ground. The increasing distance they had gained from the sounds of battle below had not been unwelcome, but there was always such a thing as too quiet a moment, especially this close to an enemy's positions. He found himself doubting whether the steadily creeping fog that had welcomed them among the trees was itself some trick of the cannon's defenders, an artificial vapour released to obfuscate the approach to the mountaintop. Excessive as that might have seemed in a heavily wooded area like this, it might not have been without its advantages. Right now, much to his irritation, it was interfering with his own detection attempts. The organs of taste and smell opening and breathing about his skin were quickly flooded with its bland humidity, leaving these senses useless. All he was going to perceive without seeing it were qillatu discharges through his more exotic implanted receptors, and even than might have been too little, too late.
And then there were those bodies.
Ilshar trudged up to the grotesque heap of mangled carcasses and crouched beside them. He had seen similar-looking things before. Not quite identical, but then they tended to be as augmented as any military type in the Expanse, if not more. The memories he had of them were not good.
"Hope these aren't what I think," he grunted aloud as he dug about the mass of splintered carapace and insectile viscera, now and then extruding a long, wormlike tongue to try a piece to the taste. If the League had brought vrexul, they valued this planet much more than anyone had imagined, and his squad's job had gotten that much harder and more dangerous. But even if these were vrexul - he was still not fully sure - had they actually been with the League? If their shells had borne any signs of their allegiance, most of it was now too battered to tell. As he rolled over a dismembered body with no small effort in search of identifying marks, Ilshar spotted an intact smaller plate on its underside. The material looked solid. Too heavy for a whole suit, certainly, but this much was just about the right amount to patch up a vital spot on his own piecemeal armour.
He had just finished painstakingly tearing the segment of slick bio-metal from its host when he heard Rasch's warning. Rotting Abyss, let it not be vrexul. He hunkered as best he could behind the heaped bodies, reaching for his gun and casting out his ethereal senses. If the Nexus was propitious, this cover, however improvised, would be enough.
With the situation defused, Ilshar eased back into his usual slumping hunch, briefly raising a hand as the ZRF group departed. Ultimately, it was a small thing they fought for. A planet, a government, a few billion lives at most. A little spark for hatred; the lords of the League or the Dominion, every bit as mortal as they were, would have thought nothing of it. But it was all their world, and it was hard to blame them if they snapped at the blundering of those supposedly here to help. Here to help - the Dolsilvec people had sounded like that during the war, too, and what had come of it? The good kind of allies kept quiet and did what they had to do, and so he, too, remained silent as he listened to the Intransigence contact's briefing, eye-rifts warily opening in his squadmates' directions all the while.
"Ready," he finally assented once everything had been laid out and the group prepared to move. Approach, seize, commandeer. The human had been right to look askance at him; that had never been his specialty. Covert approach and sabotage, yes, but the plan here was supposed to be something a touch more elaborate. What that would leave for him to do besides watching the approach once they got there remained to be seen. "Any of you good with League systems?"
If they got there, of course. If CivSec had any neurons, they would not have left their benefactors' gift lightly defended.
As Ilshar ambled towards the improvised assembly point, his lateral perceptors saw the bipedal symbiote of the huge Echo - or was it actually an extension of the unztadlige? - briefly fall into step beside him. He scarcely had the time to wonder if it, too, was there to ask for something before it rattled at him in its mechanical way. "Notice: Apologies. Elaboration: This platform may have caused unintended friendly fire during fire mission." Of course, the ether-worm. It had been taken out by Echo's shot. Not in little part, Ilshar reflected, his own fault for failing to consider just how destructive that cannon was.
"No harm done," he grunted back. These things happened on the battlefield, and at least this time nobody had died. He did appreciate the gesture for putting him more at ease about the unztadlige; machine-like as it sounded and looked, there was something like a living mind under its metallic carapace after all. That was well. Thinking machines unsettled him.
What he appreciated much less were the shots that rang out behind him and the confusion of voices that followed. Ilshar turned about and ground his teeth together in annoyance as he surveyed the degenerating situation. That fool human. Did the Intransigence recruit just about every thrill-seeker with a loose trigger they could dredge up from the Expanse? He could sympathize with their guides over more than just a shared genetic heritage. Had someone like this been with him on Enthuur during the war, odds were that he would have ended splattered across a wall.
"It shames me to be reduced to fighting alongside such a one as this," he raised a hand in a placating gesture as he replied to the ZRF leader in the closest approximation of the latter's language as he was fluent in. It was not something he had used often before but still it rolled out from his mouth far easier than any lingua franca intelligible to non-tarrhaidim ears. "Had my fortunes in my own war of survival been any better, I would have been glad to avoid her smooth-boned kind."
He nudged a shoulder towards the rest of the squad. "But consider, my fellows in the cosmic sowing, thattheirmasters will seek retribution for their pawn, and it will be the worse for us. You still have the greatest prize," the Ulvath's barrel nodded in the scielto's direction, "One such as the regime surely values more than the blood-driven hominids. You need not brook this one's meddling much longer. This force should be gone soon, and all that is in my power to aid your cause elsewhere on this world, I will do." Ilshar nervously squinted a few half-formed eyes at the Envenomed's contact and Rasch, who had been far more peremptory in his address. He hoped the former was not about to contradict him about the squad's departure, however unwittingly.
Izurich
Archetype Zero
Lord Zee
Cyclone
