176.948.M30 – Droskael System, Ashveil Reach
The guns fell silent over Droskael Major. For the first time since we crossed the Gate, there was no enemy fleet, no storm, no great calamity pressing down upon us. Only the slow, methodical work of cleansing what remained.
Victory is never the end. It is merely the pause between purges. The Magos calls it “system reclamation.” The Word Bearer chaplain prefers “purification.” The mortal crews call it “The Scouring.”
Droskael Majoris
The world still burns, though the orks are broken. Their warbands shattered, their warboss slain, their weapons silenced. As always, some survive, scattering into the wastelands to infest the ruins and the deep places. Orks are a disease, not a species. You do not cure a disease; you endure it until it mutates into something worse. That task will fall to the generations that come after us.
Our attention turned instead to the Ghouls — the foul breed the squats call “Thrax” and the voidsmen whisper of as “Eaters.” They had infested the shadow-cities that ring the habitable belt between day and night, burrowing into the cracked remains of human architecture, transforming them into hives of poison and rot.
A full company of Astartes made planetfall under my command, supported by the 2nd Legion’s wardens, auxiliary regiments, and the Ashen Daughter’s small craft. The fighting was brutal, room-to-room, tunnel-by-tunnel — the kind of war where light itself dies.
Their lairs betrayed them. Just as their ships’ drives could be tracked by their radiation plumes, so too did their burrows bleed poison into the atmosphere. We followed the stench like hounds through a graveyard.
The last of their strongholds fell in the ruins of Carthis, a city that once sprawled across the twilight zone of the planet. The broodmaster was a giant of fused flesh and metal, half-machine, half-carrion. It fought with the rage of a dying sun — and beside it, a new horror: a psyker. A Ghoul with the warp-touched mind of a human host, lashing out with waves of psychic bile that boiled armor and flesh alike.
Fortunately, Warden Anaïs of the Second was with us. She is small by Astates' standards, but when she raised her hand, the world seemed to still. The Ghoul’s psychic roar collapsed into silence, its power strangled mid-cry. We closed in. Bolter fire, chainswords, flame. When it was done, only ash and the smell of metal remained.
The Magos dissected the bodies afterward. His findings chilled even him.
The Ghouls are parasites in the truest sense. They implant their larvae through the ear canals of their victims — I have seen the scars myself — and the worms burrow into the brain, feeding and spreading until nothing of the host remains. For a time, the body lives on, a puppet in service to its masters. Then the larvae devour the brain and crawl free, consuming the corpse, and sometimes one another, until the strongest survives.
Each new Ghoul carries something of its host: posture, musculature, even fragments of memory. The older ones — those swollen with augmetics and scars — are patchwork abominations of a hundred lineages. Not gene-craft, but crude, instinctive eugenics. And always hungry. Always breeding.
It is a wonder they ever reached the stars. Or perhaps the stars are where such creatures belong — feeding upon the refuse of dying worlds.
We found no navigation data, but mountains of data-slates filled with what the Magos calls “scientific abomination.” He will decode them when he dares. For now, they are sealed in stasis aboard the Daughter.
The Remnants of Humanity
Human life endures here, stubborn as rust. Scattered tribes survive in the ruins, and others shelter in subterranean vaults — the largest called Persephone.
Persephone is a place of superstition, ruled by a matriarch named Halix Serane, who preaches salvation through the Patron. She calls it the “Savior in Silver.” The people carve its likeness into their walls and sing hymns to the ships that once came from the sky.
It is heresy of the most wretched kind — the kind born not from rebellion, but desperation.
When I visited Persephone, I found their halls draped in banners of pale cloth and silver thread. Their air smelled of incense and rot. The Chaplain Iason of the Word Bearers came with me. He spoke the Imperial Truth for two hours, voice thunderous, eyes burning with zeal. When the sermon ended, Halix Serane spat at his feet and called the Emperor a false prophet.
I declared her cult apostate.
The Chaplain carried out the sentence.
What few recanted were spared. The rest were given to the fire.
Later, we found survivors from the outer shelters — wanderers, scavengers, hunters from the cold side. Their stories were different. They said the silver ships did not bring salvation. They brought death. They descended without warning, their hulls gleaming like mirrors, and when they rose again, the people were dead where they stood, untouched, unmarked. Then, inevitably, the Ghouls came to feast on the corpses.
If the Patron were a god — and it is not — it would be a god of ruinous extinction.
No wonder these ragged souls kneel in gratitude when we speak of Unity and the Truth of the Emperor. To them, the Imperium is the true miracle they have prayed for — the first proof in generations that there is order in the universe.
We leave behind a garrison — a regiment and a half of Auxilia, armored support, and a squat engineering cohort from the clan-ship. Their work will be slow and bloody, but they will rebuild. Perhaps one day, Droskael Major will be more than a tomb.
Droskael Minoris
There is nothing left to save. The cities are shattered domes, their skeletal frames littering a world scoured by time. No signals, no bodies, no life. Even the deep shelters are silent.
Yet there is power here. The Magos’ instruments hum with readings he cannot explain — faint traces of energy, like ghosts whispering through the metal. He warns against interfacing with any systems until a full quarantine is established. We remember the Myrmidon. We remember the madness that burned at Eremus Gate. Some knowledge is poison.
Cthonis
The demiurg holdfast, Kar-Kesh, answers our hails at once. The squat lords remember our aid, and the trade pact is renewed with firm handshakes and many mugs of some foul-smelling liquor. They offer us dock space, repair crews, and ore rights in exchange for protection and access to the Imperium’s trade routes — once we establish them, of course.
The Daughter’s wounded flank is patched and plated anew. The dwarves work like termites and sing as they weld. Even the Magos seems faintly impressed.
The Hadranis Belt
The last of the Ghouls hide here, scuttling between asteroids like rats in a burning house. Their own radiation trails betray them. We burn them out one rock at a time. Most die in the void; a few require boarding actions. It is ugly, short work. Bolters don’t sound the same in zero gravity — the percussion becomes a kind of heartbeat.
When the last nest is silenced, the Magos declares the sector “purged.” I am less certain. Things that feed on the dead have a way of returning when the lights go out.
Malis and Its Moons
The orks hold on longer than reason should allow. Their raiders swarm the moons and the orbital debris fields, attacking in packs, roaring their hatred into the void. Without a warboss to unify them, they are nothing but feral rage.
We answer with precision. The Comet lures them out, the Daughter’s lances slice their ships apart, and the Promise finishes what remains. The engagements are brief but fierce — the orks die laughing, as they always do.
When the last raider’s engines flicker out, the stars over Malis are quiet again.
Thus ends the scouring of Droskael.
Three worlds cleansed, one restored, a system reclaimed.
What remains now is not conquest but stewardship — and that is not our purpose.
Our next destination lies beyond the Gate, deeper into the dark.
The space hulk we detected months ago — the drifting grave of a thousand ages — waits for us still.
The Navigatrix says she can find it.
The Magos says it may hold secrets that Terra and Mars desire.
The Chaplain says it must be purged.
And I… I am eager to see what waits in its shadows.
Draco Vult.
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