[Soul Drinkers 06] - Phalanx by Ben Counter

Author:Ben Counter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-04-23T22:33:31.474792+00:00

Chapter 9

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 hung 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. Some were vast

gateways on forgotten worlds, ready for explorers or refugees to speak

the wrong words or cross the wrong threshold. Some were built into

the foundations of cities rebuilt in the Heresy’s wake, runes worked

into the streets or dread temples far beneath the sewers and

catacombs.

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