Kasr Interlude 1
D'leh stood atop one of the outer bastions of the kasr, his gaze sweeping over the colossal construction site below. Even for an Astartes, hardened by several decades of war, a being who had lived for many years in the fortresses and bastion of the Mallusian Imperium and was used to grand scale, the sight was staggering. The walls stretched in both directions like the backbone of some primordial beast, bristling with incomplete weapon emplacements and skeletal frameworks for future hangars. Massive trenches and firing lanes beyond the walls carved precise geometric shapes into the landscape, as if the earth itself had been drafted into the war effort.
The mortal scurried to and fro like ants beneath his gaze, the bright gold of his armour a beacon to them, or so it should be at least, for many of them refused to look upwards lest they catch his gaze.
The central keep, a city within a fortress, was only a shell now, but D'leh thought few among those who came to live here could truly comprehend what it would become. One day, it would rise into a monolithic spire, the core of a future hive city, a fortress whose walls could withstand not just the weapons of a Greenskin Waaagh! but the very passage of time itself. And yet, here they were, driven by the Emperor's will, or more likely, by fear.
D'leh had no memory of hive cities. He had grown to adulthood on the Chapter's fleet in the Warp, and subsequently on Mallus. The idea of such a construction, the highest levels of which pierced the clouds, was truly heartening and a monument to the Imperium's strength. It was not even thus on Elysium, the Chapter's hold homeworld, D'leh knew. Rather he now thought of the hives of Necromunda, of Atoma Prime or those of lesser providence and size.
Hundreds of weapon emplacements were still vacant, placeholders for what would soon be an arsenal of ground cannons and anti-aircraft turrets. D'leh could already picture the macro-cannons swiveling into place, the rail lines winding through the mountains delivering their payloads of munitions from distant mines. Mag-trains thundered through tunnels, bringing the precious metals from the far-off mountains where the Emperor's workers laboured day and night. Steel, stone, and rare minerals flowed like rivers to this place, sucked dry from towns that would never recover.
And yet, to D'leh, it still looked like a half-finished ruin. The vast workshops below echoed with clanging hammers, but what use were these people if their work had not yet borne fruit? He could smell the toil of the humans below. They laboured under the illusion that their lives meant something, that their small contributions mattered. Perhaps the Emperor's will did require their sacrifice, but that didn't make them worthy. They would never be Astartes after all, but kine still had their uses he supposed.
Far below, the people of Sylvania, Ostermark, Stirland, and other regions had begun to settle into their new fortress-home. Many had come unwillingly, dragged from their villages or displaced by industrial development or new strip mines, forced by circumstance into labour.
For the most part though they came willingly, for the Kasr Drakenhof was already perhaps the most secure place in the Empire, or perhaps north of Southlands entirely. There was already a significant contingent of the Serf Militarium, including heavy detachments of tanks and two wings of the Aeronautica Mallus. Here the Imperium would use the Kasr to project power out into the Empire and the World's Edge Mountains, monitoring the threats that lay beyond and establishing a centre of production and supply in case of a need for a larger deployment into the eastern lands of the humans. There were other such bastions being established, of course, but these were smaller forts and strongplaces, or supply dumps and so on, not a single great fortress like Kasr Drakenhof.
Once word had got out that the Emperor's sons had flattened the old lands of the vampires and the first reports had come back, many people had started to make their way to a new life. They toiled, it was true, but they received absolute security, superior healthcare and education for their children, and could better their status through labour and obedience. Strangers though the folk were, they were making this place their own, as humans always did. They had adapted, D'leh grudgingly acknowledged that much. From turning protein powder into traditional foods, to the way they adapted their dwellings to suit their cultures. He saw all of it from his vantage point, though none of it impressed him.
The city within the walls was taking shape now, its hab blocks beginning to resemble the miniature fortresses they were meant to be. Even here, though, D'leh saw the differences. The Stirlanders were a dour people, preferring habs with small windows, clustered near defensible choke points in the city's interior. They feared the sky, distrusted the open air, and huddled like vermin in the dark. Contrast that with the hill tribes, wild folk suspicious of any structure larger than a hut. They balked at the sheer scale of the place, squatting in building lots or public spaces until the Enforcers drove them out when construction machinery moved in.
Others had joined in more ably which D'leh appreciated. They were bold folk, Sigmarites used to the discipline of their faith and led on by drill-abbots and preachers who extolled them to greater labour in the eyes of Sigmar and the Emperor. They were unafraid of progress, and D'leh had spoken before them of the torchbears of old, those heroes who drove back the Long Night.
Beyond the walls, settlers had already begun personalizing the trenches and firing lanes meant for war. Makeshift awnings had been thrown up over market stalls, crude gardens sprouted in the cracks between stonework, and the scent of strange foods, likely cobbled together from ration concentrates, wafted through the air. D'leh could hear the workers murmuring about recipes, prideful in their ability to turn the bland sustenance into something resembling a local dish. Foolish, he thought. These little comforts would mean nothing when the time came for battle, and besides that, the only additional foods the Celestial Lions were accustomed to other than their ulta-dense rations of minerals and cal-cubes was meat from beasts caught on hunts. There was little enough to hunt in Sylvannia, save for mutant creatures which D'leh had led his squad to destroy more than once.
Others moved through the workers. There were several giants, paid in painkillers and other drugs designed for their specific physiques, as well as Dwarves, the Terrestris of Mallus. The strength of the later and their natural aptitude for stonework gave them an edge the humans could only hope to imitate, but D'leh still remembered cutting his way through one of their fortresses a few decades ago and how their spawn had screamed on his combat knife.
He had to grudingly admit they were useful though. They'd come to the administrators with ideas about changes to the layout, and after close consultation many of the points were adopted. D'leh could see the "Maraz," or "splitters," below, cunningly planned lanes which would funnel any attackers into kill boxes across the inner ring of defences.
They'd destroyed the old fortress utterly. That had been D'leh's task and he'd wrestled with horrors below the earth before it had finished. Hath-Horeb, the Burning Sage, had come, the Chief Librarian sitting in meditation in a ring of warp-touched stones as orbs of green crystal hovered around him, discerning the evil of the place.
"We must make this fortress anew." the Spiritwalker said, "Only with life can we defeat the deathly aspect which lays heavy here."
D'leh had heard his words, and by the order of Kabor Brighthand, Warleader of the Celestial Lions and Magister Militum of the Empire of Sigmar, they had begun preparations to establish a great city on the ruins of the castle, the simple weight of living souls heavy enough to crush the spirits of the unquiet dead.
Now the foundations of the central spire and the future heart of the hive were already in place. This fortress, like the hive that would one day grow from it, needed to be unyielding. Even a thousand years from now, the walls must still stand, and the weapons must still fire. There could be no weakness.
Mag-rails stretched out from the fortress, winding through the mountains, linking it to distant mining outposts like Karak Varn. There, the Skitarii had already begun setting up their operations, eager to exploit the strange deposits found in Black Water lake. D'leh had overheard talk of rare earth elements, gromril, and even warpstone from fallen meteors though he knew little of such matters. It was the duty of the Mechanicum's explorators to unravel those mysteries, not his.
He surveyed the setting below him again, turning through hypotheticals and attack vectors in the manner of his kind. The roads through the fortress could carry tanks with ease, and soon the hab blocks would be their own fortresses, just as heavily defended as the walls themselves. The sheer scale of the construction was impressive but beneath it would be more so, with the true heart of the fortress underground, where the great manufactorums and workshops were hidden. There, the weapons, armor, and supplies for this future hive city would be produced in quantities beyond imagination. Warehouses deep beneath the earth stored materials for construction that hadn't even begun yet.
"Sergeant." came the call of one of his squad and he turned from his thoughts.
The figure who approached wore burnished armour like his own, Mark V 'Heresy Armour', which both Astartes wore with pride. At their hips were bolt pistols of an older mark from the armouries of the Serenkai, and upon their gauntlets were the Lions Claws, four serrated and barbed blades secured with molecular bonding studs to their vambraces. The armour was slower, heavier, and much less efficient at high power usage than other armour variants in the Chapter, but such was the equipment given to all Neophytes upon completing their training now, the superior armour marks held in reserve for calamities, or to be used as tokens of respect upon a Space Marine reaching a higher rank or status.
D'leh dreamed of such a day, but for now, his duty was the settling of Kasr Drakenhof, and he would see to it to the best of his ability.
"The Goldskine is ready?" he asked his brother.
"Just arrived." replied Kollus, one of the first Mallusian natives to be inducted and the child of two of the desert folk who'd first come to Pharos in the early days.
"Good. Call the squad then, I will see to it's installation personally." D'leh said, stepping away.
I realised I should include one of them as a character based on the discussions previously
