Some people voiced interest in this, so I dug it up. Sadly, the original author is unknown as of now.
"Lord Dorn is going to invent new means of torture and execution just so he can use them on us." Skane rasps in his augmetic voice, the grenades and vials on his bandolier clinking against his black Destroyer armor as the mismatched band of World Eaters makes their way through the bowels of the Imperial Palace.
"Tell you what." Kargos answers, the Apocethary's smile evident in his voice over the vox. "If we're all still alive tomorrow, I'll be happy to help him come up with something suitably horrible. How about that?"
"Both of you, enough." Kharn snaps. "We've all seen the feeds. Eternity Gate will fall in minutes unless we take appropriate measures."
"What a wonderfully circumspect way of putting it." This from Vorias, as he leads the last eight of members of the Twelfth Legion's Librarius at a measured distance from the rest of them. "You could also say, unless we defy the express orders of the Emperor's anointed representative and undertake a course of action likely to end with all of us dead. He was locked away for a REASON, Kharn. You saw what happened, we all did! He killed more of our Legion in the Petitioner's Quarter than the damned traitors did! The Nails...Angron's mind is gone, and..."
"He is our father." the Eighth Captain answers wearily, the sounds of distant battle and the presence of so many psykers causing his own Nails to snap and snarl inside his skull. "It isn't right that he dies like this, like a rat in a trap. You know it as well as I do, or you wouldn't have come with us. So spare me the caterwauling."
"Die on the walls or die down here with you fools." Vorias mutters softly. "Does it really matter which end we choose?"
Normally, the cell block they are entering would be heavily guarded by the Custodes themselves, but stands empty now, the Imperial tactical staff having thrown everything they can into the desperate struggle on the Palace walls. The only living thing in this wing is the prisoner forced into the most heavily secured cell in the opening days of the Siege, when it became obvious he was completely out of control. Opening the cell door usually requires a complex array of gene coded verification markers and electronic clearance signifiers, but Kharn makes do with a plasma pistol, his power armor groaning in protest as he pries at the armored door while the glowing metal that was once a lock dribbles down onto the stone floor.
"Angron? Sire? We..."
It is on him before he can get the door all the way open, before he can speak another word, a gibbering, slavering thing that bears him to the ground with a predator's leap, tearing away chunks of war plate and Astartes meat and bone with equal ease as it sobs and laughs to itself.
DO NOT DRAW YOUR WEAPONS.
The thundering chorus of the Communion, the union of the remaining Twelfth Legion psykers into a single gesalt being, booms in the minds of the remaining World Eaters as hands instinctively shoot towards the butts of pistols and the hilts of blades in reaction to Kharn's hideous demise. Their Nails howl in protest, biting back against the violation with wild red hate, but the entity will not be denied. They remain frozen as unseen energies wrap themselves around the creature that continues to rip apart Kharn's corpse, killing him five, ten times over.
Whatever the united will of the coven is doing, it is clearly not without cost. One by one, the slumping forms of the psychic World Eaters succumb to a variety of agonizing demises, helms splitting open to reveal cracked skulls and boiling brain matter, red flames igniting from nowhere to devour ceramite and flesh with equal hunger. When Angron finally rises from his feral crouch, the only one left alive is Vorias himself, although not for long if the blood streaming from his helm's seals and the gurgling sounds he is making into the vox are any indication.
"Brothers! Sisters!" Angron's eyes are glazed, unfocused, and he seems completely oblivious to the gore splattered all over him. "I can hear the thunder...the high riders! They come for us at last! It all ends today, eh?"
Kargos realizes, then, just what the coven has done, what bait they found to draw the Eater of Worlds out of his Butcher's Nail induced madness, playing on the one thing Angron desires more than any other. In his mind, Angron isn't fighting his treacherous brothers at Terra...he's standing with his gladiator army in the mountains of De'Shea, watching the assembled armies of the world draw near to crush his doomed rebellion. It takes all the Apocethary's self control not to rip his helmet off and spit on Vorias's corpse, but what does it matter now? At least this way his father can achieve something useful with his death.
"Yes, the high riders." Kargos mutters, when it becomes clear none of the others intend to take the initiative in speaking to their insane Primarch. "You'll need your armor and weapons first, sire." Angron's playful cuff lands on his shoulder plates like the impace of a power fist as the maimed giant laughs at him.
"Sire? Sire? 'Sire', indeed. Am I a paperskin now, that you should speak to me so? HA! You'll be making them laugh when they finally cut your head off, won't you, Asti?"
Lhorke, the first Lord of the Legio XII War Hounds, is the last living defender of Eternity Gate, even though his current condition stretches the definition a bit. The Dreadnaught has killed with his combi bolters until they ran dry of ammo, killed with his lightning claws until a lucky melta blast severed the neural connectors that let him maneuver his deadly ironform, and even then he continued to snarl curses at the attackers, damning them in Low Gothic and Nagrakali until one of the whoreson Sons of Horus shattered his speakers with a spiteful hail of bolter fire.
Now he can only watch as the last of the defenders falls under before the press of traitor bodies, as Legionaries in the eye searing purple of the Emperor's Children and the sea green of the bastard Warmaster's own charge past his prone position in disorganized packs. What a glorious end for the Twelfth, herded into a breach in the walls like fodder to buy time for more reliable warriors to organize a true defense elsewhere.
He doesn't blame Rogal Dorn for using them so. He blames ANGRON, for ruining the host he once led, turning disciplined phalanxes into screaming mobs who hurled themselves out of their fortifications at every opportunity, throwing their lives away before the superior numbers of the traitors in useless, worthless counter attacks. True sons of their pathetic father, every one of them, blood mad berserkers heeding nothing except the implants mutilating their minds.
Even though he can't move or speak, Lhorke can still "see" and "hear" inside his amniotic coffin, enough of the audiovisual links between his machine shell and his decrepit corpse remaining intact to provide him with a wonderful view of Eternity Gate's last moments. It has been well and truly breached this time, and the howled Nagrakali battle cries and gunning chainblades he hears approaching will not do a damn thing to change these simple facts. He has no idea what the defenders are thinking throwing a few more World Eaters into this disaster, unless Dorn is simply taking the opportunity to purge a little more unreliable chaff from his ranks.
The Dreadnaught is forced to revise his initial assessment when the first of the Traitor vanguard are hurled back past his position. This is not mere hyperbole...bodies and pieces of bodies in the armor of the III and XVI Legion are literally thrown through the air to rain down around his paralyzed machine body. Lhorke is the only surviving Imperial to bear witness to what follows, and he will only speak of it once, when the Praetorian himself kneels before his sarcophagas and softly whispers "How did my brother die?" Even then, he will recount his story with a barely disguised contempt. "My brother" indeed. Such a change from "the beast" and "that lunatic" that Dorn spat around the strategia table when Horus's fleet first broke out of the Warp. Truly, nothing improves a reputation like dying.
Lhorke has seen his gene father fight many times before, and even he will admit that for all his MANY faults on the battlefield Angron is an unrivaled force of destruction. But he has never seen him fight like this. The Twelfth Primarch is transfigured, leading his white armored sons through the Traitor ranks with no concern for the numbers arrayed against him, the bolt rounds biting into his flesh, or anything else. How do you fight something like that? How do you battle a thunderstorm, an earthquake, a wildfire? You don't. You get out of its way, or you die.
The traitors are certainly managing the latter well enough, Astartes in the livery of Perturabo, Lorgar, and Alpharius joining in the fight only to be mowed down as easily as the rest. More and more enemies pour through the shattered gate, dropping out of the sky on jetpacks, setting up heavy weapons behind their dying brethren, Word Bearers calling up nightmare beasts of unreality and directing them towards the raging Primarch. It suddenly seems to the old War Hound that he is watching two battles. He is never certain, to his dying day, whether this is some trick of shared blood that flows even in his corpse's veins, or a merely a mechanical malfunction caused by the injuries his iron coffin has sustained, but he sees what he sees nonetheless.
In one battle, Angron and an ever shrinking pack of World Eaters reap a jaw dropping harvest of life from other Legionaries, and in the other....in the other Angron fights beside the emaciated, filthy forms of mortals, clad in rags. The stone beneath his feet is not the marble floor of the palace, but the uneven grey of a mountain ridge, covered in white snow. His enemies are armored not in burnished iron or blood red, but gold, polished so bright it hurts the eyes to look at them directly. He is laughing as they shoot and stab and burn him, laughing as the figures fighting at his side fall one by one.
"COME ON! COME ON, THEN! COME SEE ME FIGHT ONE LAST TIME, YOU SONS OF DOGS! I DEFY YOU! WE ALL DEFY YOU! WE WILL WEAR YOUR CHAINS NO MORE! COME AND DIE, YOU GUTLESS BASTARDS!"
He is fighting alone now, still fighting, blood of the Emperor, how he fights. Lhorke has not thought there was anything left in the universe that could still freeze his blood with awe, but he was wrong. It should be impossible for any one warrior to stand against so many, even a Primarch. It is a simple truth, grounded in basic arithmetic. Angron meets that truth and defies it, denies it with his own, even simpler truth. He will not surrender. He will NOT be conquered. He will NOT lay down his life. The high riders, the paper skins, the sneering, arrogant slavers of De'Shea...they're going to have to take it.
The end is sudden when it comes. One minute, the Warmaster's followers are still throwing themselves at the mad Primarch to die beneath his blades. The next they are falling back, Emperor's Children fleeing in a mad sprint, Iron Warriors quickstepping backwards in good order, bolters still barking defiantly in spite of their cowardice. Angron ROARS after them, throwing his head back and lifting his axes to the sky, then allows his head to slump forward, chin leaning on his armored chest in repose.
He is still in that same position, still standing, dead muscles locked in place by rigor mortis and lactic acid, when warriors in the battered and grimy yellow of Dorn's Legion reverently remove Gorefather and Gorechild from his corpse's hands.
It is later, much later. So much has been lost, and so many have died, but a select few have been judged worthy of commemoration in stone and metal, a measure of immortality to inspire all who gaze at them. Ostian Delacour is one of those judged worthy of this vital task, charged by Dorn himself with memorializing the Twelfth Primarch at the site of his final battle at eternity gate. He studies his sketches, prepared with the aid of the VII Primarch, thoughtfully. A beatific form, gazing benevolently down at all who pass through the Gate, its features wracked with just the hint of a martyr's pain.
The reverberating thud of metal on marble makes him look up, to the the towering Contemptor Dreadnaught in bronze and pale blue stomping down the entranceway towards him.
"You're the sculptor, then?" it asks.
"Ye-yes?" he ventures after a moment, his voice momentarily stolen by the fear evoked by the enormous war machine's towering presence.
"And that, that is the....no."
"No?"
"No. No, no, and no. I've kept silent while idiots turn that lunatic into a thricebedamned saint, but this...no. No. He ruined the Twelfth, butchered more innocents that I can count, but the son of a whore held Eternity Gate all by himself. That counts for something. I owe him that much, you understand?"
"You...you do not care for the statue?"
"You won't be carving it. At least, not that monstrosity. You'll shape it like I tell you to shape it, you understand?"
"But...but Lord Dorn..."
"Is not standing here, ready to blow you off these walls and take his chances that the next artist they send will be more amendable to reason." The Dreadnaught finishes, its internal mechanisms loudly cycling more ammo into the enormous guns mounted on its arms.
"I..I...what changes would you like made, my lord?"
Throughout the Imperium, there are many wonderful works of art created in remembrance of Angron, the Red Angel of Nuceria, who laid down his life at the Siege of Terra. Paintings of his noble countenance can be found in almost every Ecclesiarchy structure of note, and his regal, knightly image is a popular subject for friezes and murals depicting great military triumphs.
But the most well known one (if not the most popular) is at Terra herself, viewable only by those with the wealth or influence to journey to the throneworld. Cast in jagged granite, this statue has none of the grandeur or divine beauty most other representations of the Twelfth Primarch seek to capture...it is a ragged, ruined thing, face twisted by wounds new and old and by a fury that seems more akin to that the more lurid brand of noveau artists portray upon the daemons of the Warp than one of the heroic sons of the Emperor. It is said that to meet that raging gaze, sightless stone though it is, has caused strong men, powerful men, Lord Militant Generals and Warmasters to tremble. A few simple words are inscribed on the plinth it stands atop, the only accolades a cantankerous dreadnaught would allow.
ANGRON OF DE'SHELIKA RIDGE
HE DIED FREE
Submitted October 22, 2018 at 10:52PM by ShogunTrooper https://ift.tt/2PO8lpi
No comments:
Post a Comment