Descent of Angels
T
HE
H
ORUS
H
ERESY
Mitchel Scanlon
DESCENT OF ANGELS
Loyalty and honour
v1.2 (2011.11)
The Horus Heresy
It is a time of legend.
Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history. The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.
First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat. Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.
Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme, and his ambtion knows no bounds.
The stage has been set.
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Order
L
ION
E
L
’J
ONSON
, Commander of the Order
L
UTHER
, Second in command of the Order
Z
AHARIEL
, Knight Supplicant of the Order
N
EMIEL
, Knight Supplicant of the Order
M
ASTER
R
AMIEL
, Training Master of the Order
L
ORD
C
YPHER
, Guardian of the Order’s traditions
B
ROTHER
A
MADIS
, The Hero of Maponis, Battle Knight of the Order
S
AR
H
ADARIEL
, Battle Knight of the Order
A
TTIAS
, Knight Supplicant of the Order
E
LIATH
, Knight Supplicant of the Order
The Knights of Lupus
L
ORD
S
ARTANA
, Master of the Knights of Lupus
The Dark Angels
B
ROTHER
L
IBRARIAN
I
SRAFAEL
, Chief Librarian of the Dark Angels
The White Scars
S
HANG
K
HAN
, Leader of White Scars Expeditionary Force Bearers
K
URGIS
, Astartes battle-brother of the 7th Chapter
The Saroshi
L
ORD
H
IGH
E
XALTER
, Leader of the Saroshi Bureaucracy
D
USAN
, Saroshi exegetist
Non-Imperials
L
ORD
G
OVERNOR
E
LECT
H
ARLAD
F
URT
, Overseer of the Sarosh territories
C
APTAIN
S
TENIUS
, Captain of the
Invincible Reason
M
ISTRESS
A
RGENTA
, Fleet Astropath,
Invincible Reason
R
HIANNA
S
OREL
, Composer and Harmonist
PRELUDE
I
T
BEGINS
ON
Caliban.
It begins back before the Emperor came to our planet, before there was even the first talk of angels. Caliban was different then. We knew nothing of the Imperium and the Great Crusade. Terra was a myth, no, not even that. Terra was a myth of a ghost of a memory brought to us by our long-dead forefathers. It was an ephemeral and half-forgotten thing with no bearing on our lives.
It was the time of Old Night. Warp storms had made it impossible to travel between the stars and each human world was left to fend for itself. We had passed more than five thousand years in isolation from the rest of humanity: five thousand years. Can you imagine how long that is? Time enough for the people of Caliban to develop our own culture, our own ways, drawing from the patterns of the past, but separate from what had gone before. Free from the influence of Terra, our society had developed in a manner more in keeping with the world in which we lived.
We had our own beliefs and customs, aye, even our own religions.
There’s precious little of it left now, of course. It was all swept away by the coming of the Emperor. It is amazing to me, but there are children born of Caliban today who have never even heard of the Watchers or ridden a mighty warhorse. They have never known what it is to hunt the great beasts. This is the sorrow of our lives. Over time, the old ways are forgotten. Naturally, those who came in the Emperor’s wake claimed this was all to the good. We are making a new world, a better world: a world fit for the future.
We are making a better world.
It is always the way with conquerors. They don’t say they have come to destroy your traditions. They don’t talk about banishing the wisdoms of your grandfathers, turning the world upside-down, or replacing your ancient beliefs with a strange new creed of their devising. No one willingly admits they want to undermine your society’s foundations and kill its dreams. Instead, they talk about saving you from your ignorance. I suppose they think it sounds kinder that way.
But the truth of it remains the same, regardless.
I am getting ahead of myself though, for at this moment in Caliban’s history, all these things were unknown to us. In time, the Emperor would descend from the heavens with his angels, and everything would change. The Great Crusade had not yet reached us. We were innocent of the wider galaxy. Caliban was the sum total of our experience, and we were content in our ignorance, unaware of the forces heading towards us and how much they would transform our lives.
In those days, Caliban was a world of forests. Except for a few places given over to settlement or agriculture, the entire planet was covered in primordial, shadow haunted woodland. The forest defined our lives. Unless a man made his home in the mountains or lived near the coast, he could spend his entire life without once seeing an open horizon.
Our planet was also the domain of monsters.
The forests teemed with predators, not to mention all manner of other hazards. To use a word we didn’t know then, a word taken from the lexicon of Imperial Cartography, Caliban is a death world. There isn’t much here that is not capable of killing a man, one way or another. Carnivorous animals, poisonous flowers, venomous insects: the creatures of this world only know one law and that is ‘‘kill’’ or be ‘‘killed’’.
Of all the dangers to human life, there was one class of creatures that was always viewed as being set apart from the rest. They were more fearsome and brutal than any other animal we knew.
I am talking about the creatures we called the great beasts.
Each great beast of Caliban was as different from its fellows as a sword is different from a lance. Each creature represented the only example of its kind, a species of one. Their diversity was extraordinary. An individual beast might appear to be modelled after a reptile, or a mammal, or an insect, or else combine the features of all of them taken together in chaotic collaboration.
One might attack with tooth and claw, another with beak and tentacle, another using horns and hooves, while yet another might spit corrosive poison or bleed acid in place of blood. If they had one dominant feature, it was that every one of them appeared to be crafted directly from the stuff of nightmares. Allied to that, they each possessed qualities of size, strength, ferocity and cunning that made them the match of any ordinary human hunter, no matter how well-armed he might be.
It would not be overstating the case to say that the great beasts ruled the forests. Many of the customs we developed on Caliban owed their origins to the beasts’ presence. For humanity to survive we had to be able to hold the beasts at bay. Accordingly, knightly orders were formed among the nobility to create warriors of exemplary skill and ability, armed to the highest standards, and trained to protect human society against the worst predations of these monsters.
They were aided in this by the persistence of certain traditions in the making of weapons and armour. Most of the technology our distant ancestors brought with them to Caliban had been forgotten in our isolation, but the knowledge of how to repair and maintain pistols and explosive bolts, swords with motorised blades, and armour that boosted a warrior’s strength and power had been preserved. Granted, they were relatively primitive versions and they lacked the reliability of the more powerful models later brought to Caliban by the Imperials, but they were effective all the same. We had no motor vehicles, so the knights of Caliban rode to war on the backs of destriers – enormous warhorses selectively bred over thousands of years from the equine bloodstock brought to our world by its first settlers.
In due course, the knightly orders went on to build the great fortress monasteries that still serve as many of the major places of settlement in modern Caliban. Whenever one of the beasts began to prey on a settlement, the leader of the local nobility would declare a hunting quest against the creature. In response, knights and knights-supplicant would come to the area from every land, seeking to prove themselves by killing the beast and completing the quest.
This, then, was the pattern of life on Caliban for countless generations. We expected it to continue indefinitely. We thought our lives would follow the same well-trodden path as the lives of our fathers and grandfathers.
We were wrong, of course. The universe had other plans for us.