by Rob Sanders
Striding up the mauled path in the ash and through the twisted frames of bulldozed bodies, Undwyn Pythax – the Dragon’s Breath – earned his title as he bathed the disordered ranks of the Royal Hetch in a streaming inferno from his forearm-mounted flamers and buried oncoming warriors in the rhythmic procession of miniature suns that he pumped from his starcannon. Securing the breach that ran like a runway through the ranks of the Royal Hetch and into the waiting Deneveh Imperfecta – cold warriors of the High Slaughtekh’s own Crimson Doom – was the Crone Company. The wraithbone colossi of the company stomped up through the collateral devastation in a procession, the unrelenting beam-storm of their scatter lasers searing through any chance for the Royal Hetch to regroup and strike back along their flanks. It was carnage – up through which the Continuum’s own unliving army of wraithguard marched, cutting down the machine menace of fragmenting yngiract formations with volleys of cannon fire. Shoving the ancients back with the shimmering surface of their force shields, wraithblade constructs hacked through their alien foe with sizzling axes before retreating back behind their shields. Shoving their way through the next line of skeletal warriors, they repeated the torso-cleaving onslaught.
Kael Ra suddenly felt the wall of wreckage before his shoulder grind to an excruciating halt. At first, the Prince Ecliptic assumed the tangled wreckage had hit some kind of natural feature. Peering over the twisted chaos of yngiract bodies behind, Kael Ra found that he had in fact simply ran into the disciplined ranks of the Deneveh Imperfecta. The legion of living metal had combined their strength to heave their own tangled barricade of bodies – the frames of Royal Hetch – back at the barricade. Like a prophet of doom, ascending a sacred mount, the Prince Ecliptic heaved himself up the side of the heap of wrecked vehicles and presented himself to the Slaughtekh’s Imperfecta – his instruments of the Crimson Doom. The blank skulls of the yngiract warriors peered up at their end. Kael Ra willed the launch pods on his shoulders to priming. The tubes spat their missiles down on the machines. Kael Ra hit them again – and again. The Deneveh Imperfecta – tightly packed behind the wreckage of both the eldar grav-tanks and Royal Hetch – disappeared in a white-hot wave of destruction that rolled outwards through the derelict Engines of Vaul.
The autarch stood there, observing – enjoying – the decimation he had visited upon his foe. As the smoke cleared, Kael Ra saw the scorched earth below, decorated with silver skeletons. The colossal construct that was Ishandor Soulstrider was beside the Prince Ecliptic on the small mountain of derelicts. Behind him, Illimitar Skystorm and his unbreakable wraithguard were ascending. They had raised the high ground and had taken it. Now, from the advantage of its derelict heights, they would end the yngiract legions sent in the name of the Traveller to smash the Alaitoc retreat and secure the world spirit. The Dynasts of the Karnaq Client Annectate, the Royal Hetch and the Deneveh Imperfecta – who had all been killing for as long as time itself – would be no more.
The last of the yngiract slave machines were dying. As Kael Ra walked the battlefield, his steps crunching through the carpet of mangled, metal appendages, the crushed warrior chassis and severed parts that Nemesor Raznaak had failed to reclaim. The Shadow That Walks was by his side, as was Nestra Orphiel in her bipedal war-machine. The three of them were watching Phasmae Eshunesra – The Vyper’s Kiss. The miserable remnants of Raznaak’s legions were dispersed, isolated and broken – but like the Continuum – the bastard machines knew nothing of defeat and were fighting on. Phasmae Eshunesra, a looming, willowy shape moving through the demolished grav-tanks, was making them question the futility of such protocols. Like a petrified tree, her war-dancing form stepped lightly through the aftermath, her movements fluid and deadly. The flaying beams of gauss-death that came at her from the defiant remainder of Raznaak’s legions were elegantly negotiated, the arch of her colossal form, a skip, a jump. As she passed through the tarnished forms of the alien invader, her blades flicked and flourished their gift of defeat through the living metal forms. It was a grace, an economy, a battlefield poetry that no eldar or enemy had witnessed in the thousand years since the former exarch’s end.
‘The Alaitoc?’ Kael Ra put to the spiritseer. ‘The exodites?’
‘Eldorath Starbane will get as many of our people back to the craftworld as he can,’ Nestra Orphiel told him, stepping down from her war walker. ‘The Carnacians are coming from all over and have been for a few days now. The world spirit has warned them that the Crescent-Kharellion is the only safe exodus point. Many are transporting wounded. Many are evading movements of the Traveller’s genocidal forces. We have to give them more time.’
‘They will have every moment we can give them,’ Kael Ra promised her. ‘Uladhar-Thwe?’ the autarch addressed the wraithseer.
‘Had they extended their eternities, the legions at our feet were to finish the Alaitoc retreat,’ Uladhar-Thwe said.
‘We may have put our craftworld kin beyond the yngiract’s vengeance. The spiritseer is right, of course. The Traveller can still exercise his murderous frustrations on the fleeing exodites. Also, he will promise the world spirit to another of cold, metal heart,’ the Shadow That Walked told them. ‘The Traveller will honour his promise in that promises to him will be returned. Nemesor Raznaak, if he did not already owe us the intent of utter destruction, is the guarantor of his master’s promises. He will throw everything he has at us to deliver to the world spirit.’
The Prince Ecliptic was no seer but offered a prediction of his own.
‘The Slaughtekh will try…’
Kael Ra looked down at the sling bag Orphiel carried about her robes. It jangled lightly with the chime of crystal. Spirit stones that she had collected from the wraithguard constructs housing warriors of the dead. The autarch knew that she harboured a pitiful hope that she might get to return the stones to the craftworld and have the heroes of the Alaitoc re-join their honoured ancestors in the infinity circuit. Also within the bag she carried the spirit stones of legends lost to the Continuum: Great Arquin, one of the Lords of Death; Galadarn the Venerate and several members of the Crone Company. Their colossal constructs had been bathed in a flaystorm of gaussian brilliance and collapsed before the dauntless advance of Raznaak’s skeletal warriors. ‘The Slaughtekh will fail…’ Kael Ra assured the spiritseer. ‘Uladhar-Thwe,’ Kael Ra said. ‘Who comes to their destruction next?’
‘The Slaughtekh sends us the Everliving – Lychguards of the Royal Engrammic Observance,’ the seer told him with prognostic confidence. ‘He sends us the High Judicator Neferkar – Executrix of the Prime Directive with the Praetor-Edictra of the Qa’a Indemnification. He sends us the technosorceries of the Conclave Apocryptex.’
‘Assemble your ghost army,’ Kael Ra said to Nestra Orphiel. ‘The enemy comes. No pretence this time. Our foe will arrive. We will fight. They will die. They might have slept away their existence but only we know the true gifts of death. Let us be generous. Let us share such gifts with the Slaughtekh and the Traveller’s warrior-slaves.’
The Continuum waited. Like still statues of the ancients, they stood motionless among the wrecks of Alaitoc grav-tanks and the shattered remains of their machine enemy. The Carnacian suns made their way gloriously to the horizon, saturating the sky with a bloody haze. In the half-light, the yngiract elite graced the battlefield. Heavily-armoured lychguard, marching down on the eldar with scythe, shield and the cold assurance of victory. Battle-hardened Praetorians in disciplined ranks – their number a forest of covenant staffs, that advanced on the Continuum. Cryptek sorcerers – weighed down with the technological doom of the ancients – and crackling with the living energies of their anbarmantic studies. The royalists, the technologists and the loyalists hit the wraithforce hard. The Continuum hit back.
The battlefield sang with the clash of metal on wraithbone. It seared with the crackle and snap of cryptek-cast lightning. It blazed with the beams of brightlances and warp-storming wraithcannon.
Smashing the Royal Engrammic Observance aside, his ghostglaive sizzling against a wall of presented shields, Kael Ra bestrode the battlefield like the demigods of eldar myth and legend. He shrugged off the living lightning of the Slaughtekh’s techno-sorcerers, scything through several of the ancients with his forearm-mounted shuriken cannons. He stepped through the flaming ash spectre of Maldor Nimitar of the Blood Moon – who moments before had succumbed to the Praetor-Edictra of the Qa’a Indemnification – their covenant staffs blasting the wraithbone colossus apart. Coated in Nimitar’s destruction, Kael Ra took his place and the fight to the yngiract praetorians. The elite ancients in his path died badly, with Kael Ra shredding through their ornate armour and workings. Waiting for the autarch was a hunched tomb – all broad rachidian sheen and serrated spine. A cloak of preserved alien flesh – the skins of a hundred beings on a hundred worlds long conquered – flapped about its thick-set frame and it span a rod in its skeletal fingers, each end adorned with a smoking hyperphase blade. This was the High Judicator Neferkar – Executrix of the Prime Directive that Uladhar-Thwe had warned him of. The Executrix completed his deadly display of scythemanship – the leering metal skull of the thing seeming to dare the Prince Ecliptic from beneath its extravagant headgear. The pod on Kael Ra’s shoulder cycled another missile into the launch tube. The missile launcher streaked destruction at the yngiract before blasting him into a thousand pieces of inferno-surfing frag.
As the wraith-constructs of the Continuum cut through the elite of the Slaughtekh’s army it became apparent that Nemesor Raznaak’s faith in his own ancients to destroy the eldar ghost army was waning. Kael Ra heard the shrieking whine of reinforcements on the horizon. Single-construct grav-crafts screeched through the wraithguard, slashing the unliving warriors apart with lightning bolts from forward-mounted weaponry. The Prince Ecliptic ripped through several oncoming screechers with his shuriken cannon before slicing another in two with the length of his sword as it passed. Again and again the swarms of bikers hit them, often while the wraith constructs’ back were turned and their attentions fixed on utterly destroying the lychguard and praetorians.
The true purpose of the ear-splitting assault, however, was to distract the eldar from the monstrous metal walkers advancing slowly on their crab-like legs. By the time the huge Carnacian moon had taken to the heavens and the yngiract constructs lit the battlefield up with the ghoulish glow of their inner life, the stabbing-scimitar legs of the walkers brought them into the fray. The Continuum had been smashed but were fighting on. The yngiract’s ancient elite had failed to end them and were now but a few brazen warrior-constructs impassively crossing scythes and ghostswords with equally indifferent wraithblades.
The impact of the walkers was felt immediately. The two remaining Lords of Death were cut in half by the blisteringly focused beams of heat rays the arachnoid walkers streamed from cannons on their undercarriage. Kael Ra took several broad steps towards Nestra Orphiel, who had now been stripped of her bodyguards. Sensing the same danger Ishandor Soulstrider came up behind, smashing a shrieking grav-craft aside with a swing of his wraithbone fist. Finally Uladhar-Thwe was beside his sister-seer, spearing cryptek sorcerers into the ash with his warp-seething weapon. The damage was done, however. Their anbaric assault on the war walker had frazzled the life out of the vehicle, forcing Nestra Orphiel to leap down to safety. Illimitar Skystorm rushed several of the walkers with a group of his wraithblades but swiftly became victim to the scimitar legs of the walkers, which stabbed down through their borrowed bodies with mantid savagery. Kael Ra knew he had to do something.
Putting the remains of flaming grav-tanks between his construct-colossus and the individual walkers, Kael Ra advanced on the vehicles. Derelicts detonated about him as the yngiract pilots attempted to acquire the towering but graceful target. Within moments the Prince Ecliptic was among them, lopping off their arachnoid legs with his ghostglaive and mulching pilots in their cabs with point-blank blasts from his shuriken cannon. One after another the walkers went down. Two were blasted from their needle-point footing by the autarch’s strategic missile fire, while another Kael Ra simply slammed into with his shoulder and flipped the monstrous thing off its feet and over onto its side. Only then could Undwyn Pythax’s starcannon and the las-storm of fire laid down by the remaining members of the Crone Company pin the walkers down.
At false dawn – with the light of the first of the exodite world’s suns reaching across the razed plains – the Continuum once again found itself alone on the field of battle. With Raznaak’s elite warriors and their heavy support contingents either smashed to oblivion across the ashen wastes or sporadically vanishing in a blaze of emerald light as they responded to their reclamation protocols, the wraith force found themselves once more victorious. If it was a victory, it was a silent one. Nestra Orphiel was making her usual rounds, conducting the ceremonial extraction of spirit stones from their demolished carrier constructs. Her sling bag was heavy with the crystal and responsibility she carried. The yngiract walkers had all but burned the Crone Company out of existence, with only the colossus called Rai-dann remaining. In a desperate battle, Delsarion the Lost Autarch had fought one of the walkers hand-to-hand, tearing the vehicle apart one piece at a time but had fallen to his wraithbone knees and toppled as a column of grav-craft screamed up behind him and lanced the wraith construct in the back with living lightning.
The wraithguard still operational were a sorry sight. Their armour and wraithbone vanes were smashed and their psychoplastic shell rent and cracked. Some had lost the operation of appendages, while others suffered the shattered remnants of their cranial high-helms. A number bore flash-scarring and evidence of electrical fires while wraithbone of almost all of the surviving constructs displayed the sinks, penetrations and savage molecular withering of the yngiract’s gaussian weaponry.
As the ghost army reassumed defensive positions about the graveyard of grav-tanks and enemy combatants, Kael Ra watched the dawn break with Uladhar-Thwe. The seer knew what he was going to say before the autarch said it.
‘The Khufan Household Bladestorm,’ the seer said of the grav-craft, ‘and the Talons of Tantris-Ah in heavy support.’
‘The Talons earned their master’s appreciations today,’ Kael Ra mused.
‘Yet they won’t ever receive them,’ Uladhar-Thwe said, kicking at the battlefield and the pieces of yngiract walker strewn about the plain.
‘Neither will we,’ Kael Ra replied darkly. ‘The Slaughtekh must be running out of options. At least we have his appreciations.’
‘Raznaak will accompany his Destroyers. He will finally commit the Crimson Doom,’ the seer said.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ Kael Ra said with appreciation.
‘Anrakyr the Traveller has sent him a contingent of his own Immortals, the Pyrrhian Eternals.’
‘And now we have the appreciations of the Traveller himself,’ the Prince Ecliptic said. ‘He does not trust that his Slaughtekh will finish us, even like this.’
‘There they are,’ Uladhar-Thwe said, pointing out a horde of yngiract silhouettes, marching and gliding out of the sun towards them. They seemed in no hurry.
‘There is another way,’ Nestra Orphiel said, walking up behind the two colossal constructs. Kael Ra and the Shadow That Walked looked down at the tiny spiritseer.
‘Speak,’ the Prince Ecliptic said. Uladhar-Thwe said nothing. He knew what she was going to say. Knew what the autarch would say in return.
‘We could withdraw,’ Nestra Orphiel said.
‘Withdraw?’ The autarch could not believe what he was hearing.
‘Starbane. Myself. The other seers. No one thought that you would last this long,’ Orphiel said. ‘The Alaitoc are evacuated. The souls of the world spirit transplanted. All exodites who could reach the Crescent-Kharellion will probably have done so by now.’
‘But not all of them.’
‘This st
rategy was entertained in order to give our people the chance to escape the alien invader,’ Orphiel insisted. ‘It has succeeded.’
‘Are you afraid, spiritseer?’ Kael Ra accused. ‘Afraid of death?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ she answered honestly. ‘I am. Are you afraid of failing?’
‘I haven’t failed,’ the autarch said.
‘You are not here to win this war,’ Nestra Orphiel told him. ‘You cannot win.’
The spiritseer looked to Uladhar-Thwe. Kael Ra followed her gaze. The wraith seer shook his high-helm slowly from side to side.
‘You asked me to come here…’
‘It’s over,’ the spiritseer said.
‘I’ll decide when it’s over,’ the Prince Ecliptic roared imperiously. ‘I see an enemy. I see an enemy commander. We can’t just walk away, just leave and return to the infinity circuit.’
‘Perhaps that is what you’re most afraid of,’ Nestra Orphiel said to the autarch softly. The pair said nothing for a little while. Uladhar-Thwe watched the blurry silhouettes of the enemy sharpen with their every marching step and become a silver host, glinting with the tarnished dawnlight. Their progress was steady but their course unwavering. Nemesor Raznaak intended to fight his way through the decimated wraithguard and march on the world spirit. Nestra Orphiel lightly jangled the sling bag of crystals and spirit stones. ‘I fear death as all living things do, Kael Ra,’ she told him. ‘But you are no longer a living thing. The spirits of your warriors – these heroes of Alaitoc – were considered collateral damage. An exchange for many more souls of the living, that Eldorath Starbane needed to bring back to our craftworld. As I carry the weight of this bag, I realise that we owe our ancestors better than that. I owe you better than that, Prince Ecliptic – for we don’t know when we will have need of you again.’
