820.947 Droskael System, Ashveil Reach
The warp was still and untroubled on the return to Droskael. The currents bent around our course as if guiding us home. Three ships in formation, three flames in the void: the Ashen Daughter, the Ashen Promise, and the Black Comet.
Our mission was simple to say and vast to accomplish: to reclaim the Droskael system for the Imperium. That meant the cleansing of xenos — ork and ghoul both — the search for survivors of human stock, and the pacification of whatever disease of heresy might have taken root during the long night. We knew there were people on Droskael Majoris; the vox echoes we had intercepted in earlier expeditions were clear enough. Droskael Minoris was a corpse, its domes and cities cracked and open to the void. So we turned our attention to the living world and its rotting heart.
The Magos warned that the “Ghouls” might yet linger, but the orks were the true threat. Two kill kroozers confirmed, and possibly more beyond the sensor range. We chose to hunt them as they would hunt us — with bait and blood.
We split the fleet. The Black Comet went to lurk near Malis and its moons, her captain Yurian Drex in his element — a pirate once more, but flying under the Aquila. The Daughter and Promise slipped sunward toward Majoris, their void shields low and their transponders silent. It was not long before we found our prey. One kroozer was in high orbit over the planet, the other far out in-system. Perhaps they believed the system theirs again, for they made no attempt at evasion when we struck.
The first fell quickly. The Daughter’s lances tore through its flank, the Promise’s batteries bleeding it of life until its core detonated in a green sunburst.
The second, we hunted down in deep space. The Comet tracked it and fed us interception data. Three days of running battle, and then the kroozer was drifting, split open, its guts spilling into the void.
Two kills, no losses. Even I was impressed.
While we fought in the void, another battle was being waged aboard the Ashen Daughter. Chaplain Iason of the Word Bearers — a man so zealous he seemed to breathe fire through his mask — had found a cult festering among the lower decks. Spiral marks cut into flesh, charms carved from bone, their symbol daubed across the lower decks. He showed me patches of skin cut from the flesh of the wicked — a crudely etched circle spiraling ever inward. It reeks of faith and false gods, he said, and faith is heresy.
At first, he confined himself to “corrective surgery” — the removal of tattoos along with the skin that bore them, and the chastizement of the idolaters. When I heard of this, I ordered a purge. Half-measures breed rot. The Word Bearers took to the task with a ferocity that bordered on ecstasy. Their chants of Unity and Truth echoed through the corridors as the false faithful were dragged away. It was a terrible music, but the ship is clean again.
878.947.M30 – Droskael Majoris
Droskael Majoris hangs tidally locked to its sun — one face a cold wasteland of broken cities, the other a scorching desert that knows no true night. The orks built their fortress on the day side. There stands their great cannon, a mountain of metal and madness, its roots sunk deep into the planet's crust, drawing power from the star itself. From orbit, it glowed like a brand pressed to the planet’s skin.
Our bombardments were useless. The lances flared against its shields, and our plasma warheads did nothing. Then came blinding sunflares that reached all the way down to the planet's surface. Whatever this cannon was made of, it drank energy from the sun and grew stronger.
A landing was the only option.
The Black Comet remained in the outer system as watchdog. The Daughter took high orbit, guns ready to scour anything that rose from the surface. The Promise descended, its hull shedding fire, and unleashed its cargo of Astartes and Auxilia.
We took the landing zone at dawn and held it through the night. The orks came in waves — some riding wheeled contraptions, some on foot, all charging. They broke again and again upon our lines. I held the forward bastion myself; it is my duty to stand where the wall is weakest. When dawn came, the ground was carpeted with their dead, and the auxilia stood upon it to cheer.
By the second day, five thousand infantry and half our armor were planet-side. The air was thick with dust and smoke, the sun a dull red coin in the sky. The Magos warned of seismic instability; the planet itself shuddered as if in pain. We ignored him. There was work to do.
That night, they brought a woman to us. She was human, barely alive, and clad in chains. Four weirdboyz escorted her, their eyes boiling with green light. Through her lips, they spoke. Their warboss, Grak-Tok, sought parley. They wanted to “make deal.” I listened long enough to hear the blasphemy in their words and then had the woman and her masters executed. Diplomacy with orks is like feeding meat to a wild beast — you only make it grow.
The next morning, our scouts reported movement — tens of thousands of greenskins rallying beyond the horizon. The sky filled with their stinking smoke. I called for orbital strikes. The Daughter descended to range and was met by planetary defense fire of impossible caliber. Bolts of energy the size of mountains lanced upward, forcing her to withdraw behind the terminator. We had found our true target: the guns beneath the sun.
The ground battle became a siege. The orks threw themselves against us in madness and joy. When their bodies choked the barbed wire, their war-machines came howling through the gaps. The auxilia fought like veterans; the artillery sang. But we could not hold forever. If we did not break their guns, they would turn them upon the Daughter and burn our ships from the sky.
I chose three strike teams. One was my own — my command squad and the five Daughters of the Second Legion, warriors as fierce as they were beautiful in their austere way. The other teams I drew by lot. Favoritism breeds resentment, and resentment kills. By chance, the Ultramarines were favored again.
Each team was to destroy one of the planetary guns to open a corridor for the Daughter’s lances. We moved out under the veil of a dust storm, thunderhawks skimming low. The world was hellish — cracked stone, boiling air, and the roar of a star too close.
My team breached first, fighting through orks entrenched in honeycombed caverns. Their defenses were crude but effective: iron doors, traps, and enough firepower to flatten a city. We reached the core and set our charges beneath the gun’s plasma feed. When it blew, the sky went white.
One of the other teams reported success; the third was pinned until we reinforced them and cut our way through. By then, the Daughter was already descending, ignoring the flak bursts that scorched her armor. Her lances opened like a choir of angels singing wrath. The ork horde broke beneath that fire, their machines melting into slag.
922.947.M30 – Droskael Majoris
Yet the great sun-gun still stood. No weapon from orbit could touch it. It fed upon the star like a leech. The planet quaked, mountains cracking, rivers of magma bursting from the ground. We did not wait for the dust to settle. We advanced.
Two days of fighting through fire and smoke, our armor blackened, our lungs seared. Then we reached the gun pit — a crater so vast it seemed to swallow the horizon. Within it stood the cannon, a mountain of steel and madness. We breached its shield with our own power fields and brought up the super-heavies: two Fellblades and two Falchions. Their cannon fire shook the sky.
When the core finally went, it was like watching a sun die. Light without heat, sound without end. The shockwave flattened everything for miles. When the dust cleared, the cannon was gone, and with it the last hope of the greenskins. Those who survived fled into the wastes to rot and breed in caves. We will hunt them later.
For now, Droskael is ours. The Imperium claims another world, one more ember rekindled in the dark.
The void is quiet again. It is never good when it is quiet.
Draco Vult.
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