Sons of Corax (Legends of the Dark Millennium) by George Mann

Author:George Mann [Mann, George]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Games Workshop LTD
Published: 2015-09-25T11:04:26+00:00

Daed

Light and darkness. Darkness and light.

Around him, the world was described only in the stuttering flashes of muzzle flares; the brief, blooming light of detonating incendiary shells; the flickering headlamps of Land Raiders as they roared over the churned earth, now sticky and sodden with spilt blood.

The traitors had shut off the immense, arcing lumen strips in the rocky canopy above and as a consequence the entire bastion – all several hundred kilometres of it – was shrouded in a dense, artificial night. Even with his ocular implants he was struggling to define anything in the intense gloom, and Daed suspected there were sinister powers at work, somehow altering the very quality of the light, or else his perception of it. He shuddered at the thought of such diabolical things influencing his mind. Daed was forced to rely on his other senses, and on the scant few glimpses of the battle he could garner by the muted light of scattershot explosions and weapons fire.

Around him, the bark of bolters and the echoing boom of exploding mortar shells indicated, along with the screams of the dying, where the battle was at its most fierce.

From his elevated position behind the hastily erected barricade, Daed could survey the entire battlefield, and from what little he could tell – given the gloom and the swirling, miasmic mist that seemed to permeate everything – things were not going well for the Brazen Minotaurs. Two entire companies of his brother Space Marines were engaged in the siege, and had been for weeks. They had suffered heavy losses to both troops and equipment, and he mourned each of them with a heavy heart. It would take decades for the Chapter to recover from such grave losses, and the battle was far from over. They had yet to even breach the bastion walls. Only the Emperor Himself knew what horrors they might face on the other side.

The traitors, by contrast, were legion, and cared little for their dead. They spilled over the bastion walls in their thousands, former Imperial Guardsmen now corrupted by the taint of the Sickening, the rot of Chaos. An inexorable tide of stinking, pestilent flesh, washing over his brothers as they slowly inched their way towards the towering plascrete skirts of the former Imperial stronghold.

Daed had slain hundreds of them in the preceding days, but he had done so without even a mote of satisfaction. That a stronghold so important to the Imperium could fall so easily to the sly imprecations of Chaos left him feeling ill at ease, as if a chill fist had wrapped itself around his primary heart and refused to let go.

Worst of all, amongst the enemy marched ranks of daemons: foul, one-eyed beasts with pustulant, bloated bellies and sharp, bony protrusions erupting from weeping foreheads. These creatures bore broken, rusted blades that dripped with deadly toxins, and they shambled unerringly across the battlefield, coteries of buzzing insects trailing in their wake. Obscene, fist-sized creatures festered in their rancid guts, scampering about amongst their putrid organs, breeding disease.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.