258Horus Lupercal died on Davin.
Within the Serpent's Lodge, the Warmaster of the Imperium passed away, rejecting the promises of power of the Ruinous Powers and the visions they showed him of a nightmarish future for the Imperium. Upon the altar the Dark Gods had made, where destiny could be unmade and fate itself rewritten, the one who would have been the Sacrificed King chose to remain loyal, to trust in his father even though He hadn't fully trusted him in turn.
He knew this meant his death, and though he had many regrets, many things he wished he could have done differently, death was better than the alternative. His pride would not allow him to surrender, to bend the knee to powers he knew nothing about save that the horrors he had already witnessed on this benighted moon were their doing. With the last of his strength, and the help of his brother Magnus, whose sons were burning their lives to sustain the working that allowed the Crimson King to interfere with Erebus' ritual, Horus sent one final telepathic message to his Legion :
"Erebus has betrayed us.
His was the hand behind my murder.
Lorgar has betrayed the Imperium.
Protect my father's dream.
Don't let my death be in vain."
The Sons of Horus did not react well to their father's message, nor to the discovery of his body in the lodge, a serene expression on his noble features that belied the hideous wound that had slain him. Those not overcome by grief instead were consumed by rage, and, remembering their father's last communication, sought Erebus, the worm who had advised them to bring the dying Primarch to this pagan temple. But the Word Bearer was gone, having fled through sorcerous means the moment his despicable ploy had failed – though the warriors of the Sixteenth didn't know it, thinking that the goal of Lorgar's son had always been the death of the Warmaster.
The Mournival assumed command of the Legion. Their first action was to send astropathic messages back to Terra and all the other Legions informing them of Horus' demise and of his final words, specifically of the Word Bearers' betrayal. Their second action was to lead the Sixteenth Legion into a brutal and total purge of the Davinite tribes, the Sons of Horus venting a fraction of their fury upon the followers of the Dark Gods.
The fury of Jaghatai Khan upon receiving the astropathic news was terrible. Of all his brothers, Horus had been one of the few the Khagan had genuinely been close to, and his fury at Lorgar's betrayal was immense. He immediately decreed that the warrior lodges, which he had tolerated within his Legion out of principle, be dissolved, for they took their roots in the poison of the Seventeenth Legion. Since most of the White Scars who were part of these secretive societies had held the dead Warmaster in high esteem, this decree went unopposed.
The same couldn't be said of the Fourteenth Legion. Mortarion's rage at his brother's murder was colder than that of the Khan, but no lesser for it. However, First Captain Typhon, who had long consorted with Erebus and plotted alongside him to enslave their Legions to the Ruinous Powers, opposed the notion, drawing the ire of the Lord of Death. In the resulting confrontation, Typhon's true allegiance was revealed, and Mortarion, horrified that one so close to him could be in thrall to the very eldritch powers they had once fought together on Barbarus, executed his First Captain and purged his Legion of all who would not renounce the lodges' blasphemous practices – and a great many of those who did. At his side during that bleak period was Nathaniel Garro, who had always opposed the influence of the lodges, and upon whose counsel the Primarch would come to depend greatly in the years to come.
On Terra, the Emperor had sensed the death of His son, though the Dark Gods had shrouded the Davin system, preventing Him from noticing the trap they had laid for Horus. When the message arrived detailing what had happened, including Horus' warning of Lorgar's betrayal, the Master of Mankind tasked Rogal Dorn with keeping the Throneworld safe, warning the Praetorian that the Ruinous Powers (after explaining to Dorn what those were and how they were involved in Horus' death) would attempt to destroy His work beneath the Imperial Palace. As for Him, He intended to get answers from Lorgar in person, but first needed to gather His loyal sons to His side, unwilling to walk into a trap. To that end, He sent summons to all the Primarchs, calling them to muster to Ullanor, where once Horus had been honored above all others.
Meanwhile, Lorgar Aurelian was forced to watch all his carefully-constructed plans turn to ash. He knew that his Legion couldn't stand against the rest of the Imperium alone. The rebellion against the Emperor had needed the Warmaster, who could rally the armies of the Great Crusade to his banner. The Gods had promised him allies, yet their promises had now been proven false, yet Lorgar had gone too far and learned too much to turn back now. He knew that, though the Dark Gods had failed with Horus and the Imperium might endure for ten thousand years, in the end it would fall and Humanity would be ashes if it refused to embrace the Gods, becoming fuel for another God's ascension just like the Eldars had done.
Or at least, he needed to believe this to be the case, for else he would have to confront the fact that he had orchestrated his brother's murder for nothing. And so, moving quickly, the Primarch of the Seventeenth Legion set to gathering to his side those of his brothers he believed could still be turned against their father.
The first of these recruits was not difficult to convince. Two decades prior to Horus' death, Konrad Curze, Primarch of the Night Lords Legion, had destroyed his own homeworld of Nostramo before vanishing into the darkness with his Legion, ignoring all calls for him to return to Terra and answer for his actions. For those twenty years, the Night Haunter had been tormented by visions of a future where Astartes killed Astartes and the Emperor's dream was put to the pyre, with one side led by the Master of Mankind and the other by a rebellious Horus. But when he learned that Horus was dead, the lie of those visions became obvious even to the broken, self-serving mind of the Primarch. The future, which Curze had convinced himself was fixed in order to assuage his own sense of guilt for all the atrocities he had committed, was in truth mutable. Free will was real.
Forced to face the hideous truth that all that he had done was his own choice, his own responsibility, his own fault, the Night Haunter went fully insane, plunging into a fugue that lasted for months and left his Legion leaderless, until First Captain Sevatar rose to take command, imposing his will in a brutal coup and purge of the other high officers of the Legion. When the emissaries of the Word Bearers arrived to propose rebellion against the Imperium, the Night Haunter at last emerged from his torpor, though a terrible darkness had seized him. The Night Lords would side with Lorgar, he laughed bitterly, and let the galaxy burn. By this point, following the decades of recruitment from the worst of Nostramo's scum and the purge that had preceded the destruction of the homeworld from any Night Lord still holding onto a semblance of morality, there was nothing left to hold back the Eighth Legion from plunging headlong into damnation. Only later, when the full extent of the Seventeenth's madness was revealed, would a handful of Night Lords refuse to associate with such insanity. Knowing the Imperium would kill them as readily as their so-called allies, they fled into the darkness, far from the growing war, becoming pirates and raiders with no allegiance save to their bloody-handed overlords.
As the Warp stirred with the echoes of Horus' defiance and the unmaking of the Dark Gods' plans, Perturabo stood amidst the ashes of Olympia, watching the ruins of his homeworld while his sons dragged the last survivors of his people to their ships in chains, there to serve the Fourth Legion as slave. For the first time in his existence, the Lord of Iron knew despair, for he knew that the Emperor would never forgive this : not the genocide, for the Legions had done worse things in the pursuit of the Great Crusade, but the failure it represented that it had come to this. He knew of Curze's own destruction of Nostramo, and the standing orders that the Night Haunter be captured and brought to Him for judgement, and the thought of the Emperor's wrath chilled his blood with fear reinforced by self-hatred.
In his despair, Perturabo was vulnerable. The God of Plague, Nurgle, bent his power upon him, whispering in his soul of the gifts of acceptance and rebirth, of how life could be returned even to scorched Olympia. In a moment of madness, Perturabo accepted the bargain, no longer able to bear the horrors of his own deeds, and thus was damned to Nurgle's service. The contagion spread throughout his Legion, and a Warp Storm engulfed the entire system, dissipating only when the transformation of the Fourth Legion into monstrous Plague Marines was complete and they were ready to go to the side of Lorgar, chosen prophet of the Dark Gods.
Angron of the World Eaters needed no convincing at all. Since he had been forcefully dragged from Nuceria and denied the death he craved, the Lord of the Red Sands had hated his gene-sire, seeing Him as the worst of all tyrants. Tormented by the Butcher's Nails and the ghosts of his past, the Twelfth Primarch threw his support behind Lorgar's rebellion without care for the consequences, dragging his Legion with him into ruin as he had ever since his sons had first mutilated themselves in his image. Those who objected, mainly out of loyalty to Horus, were summarily butchered in a Legion-wide act of fratricide that set the World Eaters upon the Eightfold Path and marked them as Khorne's chosen.
For years, the Emperor's Children had been subtly affected by the taint they had encountered on Laer, their quest for perfection twisted into ruthless hedonism. Through sorcery, Lorgar kept his brother Fulgrim from learning the full truth of what had happened to Davin – though even he couldn't conceal the news of Horus' death. Meeting in person with the Phoenician, he invited his brother to a mourning feast, during which Fulgrim and his commanders were exposed to Warp-infused drugs and all manners of perversions, completing their downfall into the service of Slaanesh.
The last of the transhuman forces to join Lorgar's rebellion came from an unexpected source, even to the Aurelian himself. Though Magnus' actions had helped turn Horus from corruption, his dabbling into the Warp after the edict of Nikaea still required punishment. By the Emperor's word, the Space Wolves came to Prospero, accompanied by Sisters of Silence and members of the Custodes. They found the Crimson King waiting for them, ready to follow them back to the Emperor to explain his actions in person. By decree of the Master of Mankind, the Fifteenth Legion was confined to their domain, with the Vlka Fenryka tasked with enforcing that exile.
The moment Magnus left the system aboard the Sixth Legion's flagship, the first of his sons began to suffer from the flesh-change once more. Tzeentch, Chaos God of Change and Lies, was infuriated that Magnus' intervention had apparently turned Horus from his righteous path (though in truth, the choice was, and had always been, Horus'). Aboard the Hrafnkel, Magnus the Red sensed his sons' distress, and knew then the cost of his and Horus' defiance. He spoke with his brother, his jailer, Russ; but though Leman understood the pain of one's sons being turned into monsters he would not turn back and return to Prospero, nor did Magnus ask him to – for what could he do there, except watch his sons die ? At least on Terra there might be a chance for salvation by the Emperor's hand.
Unable to reach his father, knowing that sooner or later the Wolves in orbit would learn of his Legion's plight and react like the barbarians they were, First Captain Ahzek Ahriman, who had been entrusted with the rulership of Prospero and the Fifteenth Legion in Magnus' absence, panicked. As a sign of his trust in him, Magnus had given him his book before departing, the repository of all his accumulated knowledge. With the Book of Magnus, Ahriman began to research a way to save his brothers before they were all lost to the curse or burned from orbit by the Sixth Legion.
There, he found the trap laid by Tzeentch for his Legion : a cure to the flesh-change, a Rubric which would anchor the souls of the Thousand Sons to their flesh and grant them immunity to the mutagenic properties of the Warp's energies. Knowing he must avoid detection, but also that every day of delay may mean the doom of another of his brothers, Ahriman gathered the mightiest psykers of the Fifteenth Legion to his side. He convinced them to assist them, and together they began to perform a great ritual in the center of Tizca.
Inevitably, this drew the attention of the Space Wolves. When their demands for explanations weren't answered, the Wolves immediately went on the offensive, believing this to be proof that the wildest accusations of maleficarum had fallen short of the truth, for the Thousand Sons dared to break the terms of their arrest even as their Primarch was in the Emperor's custody. The battle of Tizca escalated quickly, as the Spire Guard of Prospero fought alongside their Astartes masters to keep the Wolves from reaching the Pyramid of Photep, where Ahriman's ritual was taking place.
Of the thousands of the Vlka Fenryka who participated in the battle, only a handful survived. Later – much later – they would speak in hushed voices of how the very earth of Prospero had cracked under the strain of the Thousand Sons' foul sorcery, of how the skies had burned with eldritch energies and how the people of Tizca had been turned into vile maleficarum beasts. In the end, the entire planet was left a barren wreck, swept clean of almost all life by the power of the ritual as Ahriman lost control over it. The First Captain would blame the interference of the Wolves, claiming that everything would have gone as he planned if they had stayed out of the business of their betters, but his later actions would make such claims bitterly hollow.
Through Ahriman's sorcery, the survivors of his Legion – now freed from the flesh-change, but instead afflicted with a myriad disorders of the mind as Tzeentch tightened its claws around their souls – reached the Caliban system. There, Luther, once the second-in-command and foster father to Lion El'Jonson, lingered in shameful exile, banished from the halls of power of the First Legion by his Primarch. Ahriman and Luther met, and together they hatched a plan to claim revenge on an Imperium they felt had forsaken them and their worlds.
Deep within Caliban laid the Ouroboros, an entity of unfathomable power, spawned in an early age of the galaxy and bound within the planet by beings far more ancient and mighty than the Emperor Himself. Knowing that only through sheer power could they hope to be free of the Imperium, Luther and Ahriman enacted a plan to drain the Ouroboros' power for themselves. The interference of the Watchers in the Dark, these mysterious xenos that had haunted Caliban for untold generations, prevented their plan from fully succeeding; but while Caliban was destroyed even more thoroughly than Prospero by the aftermath, both Luther and Ahriman were transfigured by the process, becoming Daemon Princes of Tzeentch and leading the warriors of their respective Legions away from the doomed planet.
From their alliance was formed a mongrel Legion of Thousand Sons Sorcerers and Dark Angels warriors, under the leadership of the two Daemon Princes. Exposure to the Warp had driven them all either mad or into the arms of Tzeentch, a Legion to do the bidding of the Architect of Fate. Heeding the command of their deity, they journeyed to Lorgar's side, using daemonships and Space Hulks summoned from the Warp itself by Ahriman's call and tamed by Luther's indomitable will.
So it was that Lorgar gathered at his side a coalition of monsters, and declared his war upon the Emperor openly. Knowing a military victory was impossible, Lorgar instead sought to achieve a spiritual one. Perhaps because he was tormented by the subconscious knowledge that what he was doing was wrong, the Aurelian was willing to martyr himself for his cause, to stop the Emperor from denying the Gods and, in his view, dooming Humanity to sharing the Eldars' grim fate. He could not conquer the Imperium, but he could smother the Imperial Truth.
The war that followed, the Aurelian Heresy, was a galactic nightmare. Five Primarchs broke their oaths to the Emperor and embraced the madness of Chaos instead, dragging their Legions with them into damnation. The certitude that victory was impossible drove them first to depths of horror unseen since the Age of Strife, and then deeper still.
The first blow to be inflicted upon the Imperium was dealt by Fulgrim, whose treachery had yet to be revealed. On the way to Ullanor, the fleet of the Third Legion met with that of the Tenth, the Iron Hands. Ferrus Manus and Fulgrim had been close, or as close as two Primarchs of such wildly disparate temperaments could hope to be. Before the Iron Hands could realize there was something wrong with their cousins, the Third Legion opened fire, crippling the Iron Hands' fleet and boarding their flagship, with Fulgrim himself leading the assault.
On the bridge of the Fist of Iron, the Gorgon beheld the Phoenician, and was horrified at the changes wrought upon his brother since they had last met. Gone was the nobility of Fulgrim, replaced by a terrible sense of self-importance and narcissism, while the Emperor's Children had been transformed into monstrosities of stitched flesh, implanted organs and sensory excess. Before Ferrus could recover from his shock, Fulgrim killed him with the daemon-possessed blade he had claimed upon the world of Laer. The death of their Primarch shattered the Iron Hands, who scattered as best they could, leaving them a crippled shadow of their former strength. Beyond isolated raids, they would effectively be a non-entity for the rest of the war.
Across a score of Sectors, the Terata monsters of Fabius Bile left entire cities in ruins, filled with broken and gnawed bones. On Mezanoid Epsilon, eight Dark Apostles and eighty-eight renegade tech-priests activated a corrupt STC template to create millions of Chaos-touched Men of Iron, who rampaged across a hundred worlds before the Alpha Legion managed to destroy their assembly lines and destroy them all in a campaign that left the Twentieth Legion a shell of its former self but earned them the respect of all other Legions at last. All across the galaxy, cults of Chaos that had been seeded on worlds conquered by the Word Bearers rose up and tore up the veil, summoning hosts of daemons into the Materium. Driven by the Butcher's Nails, the World Eaters tore a bloody path across the Imperium, slaughtering all in their way without thought for military value, only bloodshed.
This was not conquest, but scorched earth tactics on a cosmic scale, to make the entire galaxy into a sacrificial pyre for the Ruinous Powers. The three enormous Abyss-class battleships Lorgar had secretly commissioned from members of the Mechanicum loyal to his cause reduced entire worlds to cinders, while stars were poisoned and twisted to bathe whole systems in deadly radiation or the Warp's own baleful radiance. The Immaterium churned with powerful Warp Storms summoned by the atrocities of the Traitor Legions and the rituals of the Word Bearers, and psykers went mad and became gateways for the hordes of Chaos in regions never visited by the renegades.
The Sol system itself wasn't spared. On Mars, hereteks opened the forbidden Vaults of Moravec, unleashing techno-horrors sealed at the command of the Emperor Himself, while intelligent machines, daemon-possessed engines and sentient scrap-code laid waste to the great wonders of the Mechanicum in a terrible civil war. Only the intervention of the Imperial Fists, led by their First Captain Sigismund, kept the entire Red Planet from being lost, for which the Black Templar was honored by the Fabricator-General, Kelbor-Hal. Even on Terra, cultists that had remained into hiding since the Unification Wars emerged, performing acts of wanton terror and meaningless slaughter that kept the Praetorian from joining the wider war, lest the center of the Imperium fall to anarchy and bring the collapse of the empire.
At Ullanor, the Emperor gathered to Him the full might of the Loyal Legions, bolstered by billions of Imperial troopers, thousands of Custodes, Sisters of Silence, and other forces which had been deployed only in secret throughout the Great Crusade. They departed Ullanor having vowed to purge the Traitors, but Lorgar refused to give his father the direct engagement needed to break the back of his rebellion. The Warp Storms prevented any force not directly led by the Master of Mankind from keeping up with the renegade fleets, and the war stretched on for years.
With the Emperor Himself leading them, however, the Loyalists pushed the Traitors back system by system. The Sons of Horus fought at the forefront of every battle, granted by the Emperor the honor of fighting at His side as they sought to avenge their murdered gene-sire. Many among them sought death, preferring it to living in a galaxy without their Primarch.
In the tenth year of the war, Lorgar and his cohorts made their final stand on Molech, where Lorgar had been drawn by the call of his infernal patrons. There, after crushing the defenders left behind by the Emperor and slaughtering the Knights of House Devine with packs of daemon engines, the Arch-Traitor was reborn, transfigured into a terrible avatar of the Ruinous Powers let loose upon the Materium. With his new power, he set about remaking Molech into a daemon world, and called his own brothers to his side, that they might face their hated gene-sire for the final confrontation.
At the side of the Emperor were His loyal sons : Sanguinius, Guilliman, Vulkan, Corax, Mortarion, Jaghatai and Russ. For the treachery of his sons, Magnus the Red had been sent to Terra in chains, to be imprisoned within the Black Cells until the Emperor returned to decide on his fate. Heartbroken by the actions of his sons, the Crimson King had gone without protest, weeping over the cruel doom that had befallen his Legion despite his best intentions.
The Battle of Molech was the final and most terrible battle of the Aurelian Heresy. Billions of troops fought on both sides, armies of Guardsmen battling hordes of mutated cultists in the shadow of Titans, while tens of thousands of Legionaries clashed. The foul sciences of Fabius Bile had allowed the Traitor Legions to maintain and even increase their numbers during the Heresy despite the loss of their power base, though the results of these new recruitment processes bore little in common with the veterans of the Great Crusade.
The tales of that apocalyptic confrontation would fill entire libraries, though only a few chosen souls would be allowed to consult them. For the second time, Angron fought Leman Russ while their Legions battled around them, and the Lord of the Red Sands tore off the head of the Emperor's Executioner, raising his brother's bloody skull to the heavens and being rewarded with ascension to the rank of Daemon Primarch – and forever denied the warrior's death he so craved.
Lion El'Jonson hunted Luther down, fighting him and Ahriman at once and banishing them both to the Warp before succumbing to his many sorcerous wounds and slipping into a death-like coma. But through his efforts, the sorcery of Tzeentch's mongrel Legion was broken, allowing for the orbital bombardment of Traitor strongholds and the extermination of whole battalions of heretics. Jaghatai Khan and Mortarion fought together, an unstoppable combination of speed and resilience which scythed the Traitors down like wheat.
Vulkan faced Konrad Curze, the Eighteenth Primarch enraged by the atrocities he had witnessed the Night Lords commit across the galaxy. Though Curze held the advantage at first, in the end Vulkan smote him down, smashing his head in with Forgehammer and silencing the Night Haunter's madness once and for all. With their Primarch dead, the cowardly Night Lords routed. Few of them had joined the Night Haunter on Molech in the first place, the rest preferring to indulge their own depraved appetites elsewhere, and they were slaughtered almost to the last.
The Great Angel, Sanguinius, was dragged away from the Emperor's side by the full might of the Gal Vorbak, Possessed Word Bearers led by their Crimson Lord Argel Tal. For hours, the Primarch of the Blood Angels fought alone against the horrors his nephews had become, until Argel Tal fell under the shadow of his wings, and the rest of the Gal Vorbak dispersed, unable to withstand the Angel's fury.
At long last, the Emperor came face-to-face with Lorgar, now the vessel of the Dark Gods' power and avatar of their hatred of Him on Earth. In his hand, Lorgar wielded Drach'nyen, an ancient and powerful daemon he had forced into submission on Molech and reshaped into a crozius whose top seemed to blot out the stars themselves.
Father and son fought, and though the Master of Mankind was dealt wounds that would never truly heal, in the end Lorgar proved no match for his gene-sire, even with all the gifts the Ruinous Powers had bestowed upon him. The Arch-Traitor was brought low, his power broken – but before the Emperor could deliver the final blow, He was stopped by the last of the Gal Vorbak, who sacrificed themselves to keep Him at bay long enough for Kor Phaeron and Erebus (who had managed to survive despite the Sons of Horus' leaders hunting him down during the entire Heresy) to recover their Primarch's body and escape.
The Traitors were broken at Molech, with less than one in five of the renegade Astartes who had participated in it being able to escape the system. They fled into the dark corners of the galaxy, while the Word Bearers themselves retreated to the Eye of Terror, where the Primordial Truth had first been revealed to them. Then, the Loyal Legions set upon hunting down the remaining Traitors and rebuilding the Imperium. In the Scouring that followed, Fulgrim yet again struck down one of the Emperor's loyal sons, poisoning Guilliman and earning ascension to daemonhood in the process.
Perturabo built his Rust Cage, a planet-sized morass that combined his architectural genius with the dark boons of his patron Nurgle, and bled the Legions sent to kill him until the Emperor Himself came to deal with him – but by that point, the God of Plague was so impressed by what the Lord of Iron had wrought that he elevated him in turn and whisked his Iron Warriors away to the Eye of Terror.
In the Eye of Terror, the Word Bearers claimed the daemon world of Sicarius, and built a stronghold there where their wounded Primarch could rest. Lorgar was delirious, his soul struggling between the Dark Gods' power and the burning of his father's blade, yet Kor Phaeron and Erebus claimed that these wounds would heal in time, and the the Aurelian would lead them into battle against the False Emperor once more. From Sicarius, the Word Bearers would set about conquering the entire Eye of Terror, either rallying with or forcing the submission of the forces of the other Traitor Legions, that their Primarch might have a suitable realm upon his awakening, however long this might take.
Though it had failed in killing the Emperor, the Aurelian Heresy had accomplished the Dark Gods' primary goal : the Imperial Truth as it had been during the Great Crusade was no more. Suppressing all knowledge of the Warp's true nature was not an option, not when so many worlds had been subjected to its horrors. Instead, a new Truth was forged, one that acknowledged the existence of daemons but decried them as vile entities that would one day be crushed under the boot of Humanity, wiped out from existence so that a better, brighter galaxy could be built.
The Emperor returned to Terra, tasking His remaining sons to keep watch over the Imperium while He continued His great work to bring about His vision of a free Humanity. The wounds He had taken at Lorgar's hands, the damage done to the Imperium and the shift in the Warp following the Heresy meant that completion of His plan had been delayed, possibly for thousands of years. Even dragging Magnus out of his cell and sentencing him to sitting upon the Golden Throne in His place, directing the light of the Astronomican to help the Imperial ships navigate the tumultuous Warp, would only do so much. But the forces of Chaos had been beaten, and they would be beaten again, until such time as their evil was expunged from the stars once and for all.
This the Emperor swore, not just to His sons, but to the Imperium entire, and upon their thrones the Dark Gods did shiver, for Humanity had proven that it could break free of even their greatest schemes.
AN : and here is the seventh and final day of my challenge. This one is based upon a suggestion from Magusmon over at Spacebattles : what would the Heresy be like if Horus had died from the athame instead of falling to Chaos ?
Well, here it is. Not quite as grim as in canon, but quite grim nonetheless.
And with that, my challenge is over and I no longer need fear the retribution of [ACCESS DENIED] for failing to keep my vow. It has been an interesting week to be sure. For those interested, here is the rough word count :
War World : 1600
The Third's Cruelty : 1900
Brothers Bonding Over Beverages : 2170
Draxian Hegemony : 2480
Child of the XIXth : 4370
Khayon short : 3180
Death of Horus : 5000
Total : around 20700 words, or 2957 words per day (around 3k).
Ooooh boy, I am not doing that again in a long time. I am amazed I managed it, though I do feel the quality suffered as a result of the time constraints. For instance, I would have liked to develop the fight scene of the Khayon short a bit more (when Khayon says he "doesn't want to waste ink" describing it, that's all because of me).
Still, I hope you enjoyed that crazy week with me. Despite the pressure, it was fun to write so many different things.
Here are some ideas that didn't make the cut :
A list of homebrewed Space Marine Chapters operating in the same region of Imperium Nihilus, presented as the report of a Torchbearer Fleet tasked with delivering them the technology to create Primaris Marines as well as Primaris reinforcements. Half of these Chapters have turned to Chaos, however.
A Star Wars / 40k crossover set during the period of SW : The Old Republic (more precisely, before the game starts). Ciaphas Cain, born an Imperial citizen (no memory/reincarnation sheananigans) is an officer of the Imperial Army during the Great Galactic War between the Empire and the Republic. Deployed on a world of the Outer Rim, he ends up in command after a Jedi strike force eliminates the rest of the officers (during which he miraculously manages to kill a Jedi Master leading the attack). The one-shot would start as Sith Apprentice Emeli Duboir makes planetfall, sent by her Master to investigate this remarkable warrior.
A group of heretics and outlaws trying to infiltrate an Inquisitorial stronghold to steal a precious relic contained within.
An Inquisitorial strike force deployed to investigate why the mansion where all the top Imperial nobles of the planet have gone for a party thrown by the Governor has gone silent, led by a team of Acolytes.
A short story about a squad of Black Legion veterans ending up stranded in Imperial-controlled territory and needing to escape while hunted down by Imperial Fists Primaris Marines (Unnumbered Sons).
Alright, that's all for now. I am not sure if I will publish the next chapter of Prince of the Eye today or tomorrow, but it should come out soon in any case.
Zahariel out.