Phalanx by Ben Counter

Author:Ben Counter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The days following the Horus Heresy formed the forgotten apocalypse of the Imperium. The Heresy itself was the subject of legends known throughout the realm of mankind – the traitor Horus, waxing great in his jealousy of the Emperor, his treason against the human race and his death at the hand of the Emperor himself. The Scouring, the period of reformation that followed Horus’s death and the Emperor’s ascension to the Golden Throne, was an afterthought, a footnote in the approved histories preached by the Imperial Church. But the truth, appreciated only by a few historians who skirted with heresy in their studies, was that the Imperium was born in the Scouring, and it was born in a terrible tide of blood.

It was a time of vengeance. All those tainted by the deeds of Horus and the many who had sided with them, even worlds who had bowed to Horus under threat of destruction, were destined to suffer. The remaining loyal primarchs led a campaign of bloody reconquest in which collaborators were hanged in their billions. Planets full of refugees were purged lest their number contain the wrong type of war criminals. A thousand civil wars sprang up in the Heresy’s wake, the combatants left by the Imperial Army to fight among themselves until the survivors were weak enough to be conquered, subjugated and re-educated.

It was a time of reform. The Space Marine Legions were split up into Chapters, a process which sparked its own share of shadow wars and near-catastrophes as Space Marines fought in all but open warfare for the right to the heraldries of their parent Legions. The Imperial Army broke up into millions of fragments, miniature fiefdoms with no central command. The Imperial Creed was born among the religious catastrophes that tore at humanity in the wake of the Emperor’s ascension and the Adepta of the Imperium were formed to hold the shattered mass of humanity together. Born in desperation, the Priesthood of Terra and its component Adepta founded the principles of fear and suspicion that would determine their every action in the ten millennia that followed. Whatever image the Emperor had cherished for the future of humanity, its broken remnants were formed by the Scouring into something flawed, something half-born, something fearful when the Emperor had sought to form it from hope.

It was a time of Chaos. The powers of the warp had made their play for power over the human race and though the Emperor’s sacrifice had thwarted them, they had sunk a thousand tendrils of influence into realspace and clung on jealously. The daemonic legions unleashed in the Battle of Terra took decades to hunt down and exterminate; the Blood Angels and their newly-formed successor Chapters seeking them out to exact vengeance for Sanguinius’s death. Horus’s acolytes had opened portals to the warp in the Heresy’s dying days, seeking to seed the fledgling Imperium with secrets waiting to be uncovered and suffered by generations to come.

No one knew how many such portals had been built by the sorcerers and madmen under Horus’s command.

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