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The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up
- Thread starter Durin
- Start date
ArchAIngel
Sorcerer Supreme.
- Location
- Right behind you.
I'm also pretty sure while she and Rotbart don't get along, she's smart enough to know Rotbart is very good at war.
And as such, listening to him when he says "Go out there and murder things HERE with your heretical xenos powers" is a good idea.
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
pretty much, it also dictates how much support you send with her
- Location
- Australia
@Durin, I think you missed this.
Commissioned art by @Slayers148
@Durin
1. Do you want any changes to this?
2. If you don't want it for Frederick, do you think it'd fit someone else?
Last edited:
- Location
- A Place Miserably Bereft of Cats
[X] Leave heroes where they are- Reduces the risk of losing a city on a secondary front
[X] Deploy airforce- Suffer significant damage to airforce, cause major damage to daemons on primary front
[X] Keep Areatha at Priority 2
She'll keep those troops alive. That's better than most deployments!
[X] Deploy airforce- Suffer significant damage to airforce, cause major damage to daemons on primary front
[X] Keep Areatha at Priority 2
She'll keep those troops alive. That's better than most deployments!
- Location
- Australia
Found something that's pretty interesting if it's right.
And by interesting I mean terrifying.
And by terrifying I mean awesome because we have so much power in our hands it's not even funny. (It's actually very funny.)
And by interesting I mean terrifying.
And by terrifying I mean awesome because we have so much power in our hands it's not even funny. (It's actually very funny.)
https://www.quora.com/How-much-work...be-done-to-part-the-Red-Sea-the-way-Moses-did
THE PSYKER HUNT
- Location
- Toronto, Ontario(occasionally)
@Durin , there's an Omake here, also maybe read the italicized bits and the bit at the end.
THE PSYKER HUNT
Johann muttered under his breath, reciting the litanies of fear his sect had drilled into his head to keep his feelings under control as waves of irrational rage washed across the district and the bleeding sky gushed across the upper portions of the hive hundreds of meters overhead. He couldn't see the bloodfall but somehow he could tell it was there anyways.
All men fear.
Fear is the root of purity.
Fear is the origin of defiance.
Fear of failing. Fear of falling. Fear of damnation. Fear of death with your duty left undone.
Fear unbound by reason is cowardice.
Fear is not an ideal or a shame, but an obstacle.
Fear is the mind killer, prevailing fear is the harbinger of complete obliteration.
Observe fear.
Allow fear to pass on and through.
A call to action held only when vital.
Aimed by wisdom and training.
Where fear has passed only its lessons of purpose remain.
The litanies of fear were not so much a comfort as a repetitive reminder to maintain control and keep that fear directed at something useful.
His purpose was to seek and destroy the unholy and the corrupt. Ferreting out those individuals weak enough to serve as conduits to bring such forces into the world was the work of others, though he had some experience and training in the art.
Such skills would be underutilized in the current battle, given that the powers of Ruin were everywhere one looked, surrounding the hives, digging through reality to appear inside of the hives, and scratching at the doors to the minds of everyone caught in this miserable mess.
People were getting angry, two militiamen they'd remanded to police cells had been suspiciously fascinated with their bayonets, and psykers were finding their powers and losing control of them in the same instant across the hive, the walls would start bleeding and the top of the hallways fill with blood-rain clouds at irregular intervals as taint fluctuated, people would see unsettling or upsetting things in their reflections or vid screens, angry words would become screaming mirages of bloodthirsty faces in mid air, minor daemons were irregularly rising from any pool of blood large enough, and nearly two hundred honor duels had been refused and had their challengers face potentially lethal censure because of 'inclement weather' in his assigned districts alone!
People were doing the best they could to deal with it, holding up hand signals when they noticed themselves becoming uncharacteristically angry, and generally sticking to distantly polite speech and the deescalation procedures they had all been trained in to prevent anyones rage from spiraling out of control or gaining targets they could rationalize as justified outside of combat with the enemy. The troops engaged on the walls had it the worst, given Khornate's traditional 'come at me bro' approach to corruption. The militia were also tossing incendiaries at any puddles of blood that started to form, not that that didn't create its own problems in a crowded hive.
The Psyker Hunters were spread throughout the districts, essentially on call to respond to anything the militia suspected might be their problem. They were being pulled in a thousand directions, as militia ran into things that were too weird or obviously supernatural to leave alone, then either blew them up or failed to blow them up and essentially said 'fuck this man I'm out' and evacuated while calling their area's Psyker Hunters or Psykers to fight and/or poke it.
The Witch Hunters on the other hand were being kept together and deployed in force to respond to anything the psyker hunters needed a hammer to deal with, and parceled out in squads to follow the handful of diviners who could still reliably get work done under these conditions.
Johann and the two squads with him were following one such psyker. He didn't really understand what the psyker was doing, just that he was leading them to newly triggered psykics to either give them the Emperor's mercy or get them into the nearest warded sector of the city as fast as possible.
What this looked like in practice was a little under twenty men packed into a twelve man Chimera, with some sitting on each others laps, and one crazy bastard strapped to the outside.
The vehicle's attached siren screeched its continuously rising and falling tone as Johann desperately tried to focus on his litanies and ignore the way that the madly grinning commander was taking turns at three times the speed limit, occasionally going fast enough that only one tread was touching the ground, with the psyker in the cockpit passenger seat poring over runes, a small disemboweled animal, a map, and what looked like playing cards, the mutant giving directions and fiddling with the numerous colored lenses attached to his helmet.
Johann also tried to ignore the occasional patches of flames or blood rain they passed through, the minor daemons they swerved across the road to ram, the reason they had a man strapped to the roof daubing at the purity seals with a damp cloth and reporting the rate that they were singeing away, his irritation with the unsteady soldier seated on the lap of the man in front of him who kept breathing in his face and kicking his shin, and the angry voice at the back of his mind cursing him for blasting it with a Krak missile after it had destroyed their other chimera.
It was loudly claiming that this was a dishonorable denial of its victory and not proper procedure and they needed to stop and let out enough men to put the vehicle back under its maximum load, in a way that would have hurt his ears if it had been coming in through them, but instead was just giving him the beginning of a headache.
Johann was pretty good at ignoring things when he needed to be. Besides, it was clear that the voice was lying, proper procedure made provision for packing more troops into a chimera than was advisable, generally to run from whatever wildlife left them without enough chimeras. The voice did not take him pointing this out gracefully. 'gargle your heart' uh huh, 'rip out your intestines' mmhm, 'whip you with your own circulatory system', yeah right.
It also did not take well to being told it was a sore loser.
Johann's head slammed into to vehicle wall with another sharp turn, he bit back a series of cusses aimed at the worthless driver and his shitty driving, see how he likes getting his head slammed into the walls over and over. Then closed his eyes, counted the three and held up the hand signal for being angrier than he should be. Glaring straight ahead at the pair piled into the opposite seat as the territorial guy to his left who had been bumping his arm out of position with his elbow the whole ride made distance like he had the cooties.
Johann switched over from the litanies of fear to the related ones on faith. Mostly because he was starting to get more concerned about this daemon that was following them, it seemed to be trying to worm its way into influencing their minds to stop them, and it was a struggle to keep his mind about him and remain rational.
Faith had long been the mainstay of Imperial defence against mental taint, and was still a good enough tool for the job. He kept up his muttering against the rising urge to lunge out of his seat and wrap his hands around the commander's throat that was overwhelming his mind.
All good men have faith.
Faith is the fount of self sacrifice.
Faith is the basest form of defence.
Faith in men. Faith in institutions. Faith in ideals. Faith in the Emperor.
Faith unbound by reason is Abomination.
Faith is not a shield against the unholy, but an ideal to follow.
Faith is anesthesia for a small mind, blind faith is the end of sanity.
Keep faith.
Feed faith on doubts resolved.
A spurr against accepting corruption stoked and restrained to defend kindred.
Tempered by reason and knowledge.
When faith is allowed to wane only its lessons of self abnegation remain.
The chant was a reminder of the church rituals, calling to mind the most intense moments of faith he had experienced, much like the ringing of a bell calls food to the mind of a pet cat.
With these memories filling his head with the feeling of being filled with, and existing for the sake of, something greater than himself, it made the Daemon's blandishments seem lesser … smaller somehow.
For while it could fill his mind with rage his rage could never become greater than his faith, and faith and devotion to the God Emperor and Humanity trumped any petty concerns his personal feelings might put forward.
His devotion demanded he restrain himself and THINK, keeping at the forefront of his mind what was truely causing this and why he couldn't put his knife through the commander's eye while he was driving. This anger wasn't who he was, and some pathetic psykic projection couldn't change that.
A guttural, savage growl filled his mind, purest hostility given voice, but it was a sound of frustration, coming alongside the feeling of the daemon's presence withdrawing from his mind.
He put his hand back down, slightly embarrassed now by having let the daemon get that far while they remained inside of the warded vehicle.
But his mind didn't stop there; the Daemon's sheer persistence a sign that there was more at play here than simple vengeance, no matter how much it yelled about its rage at banishment.
After all, if the daemon simply wanted him dead it would have focused his anger at his fellow armed passengers, not the distracted vehicle driver, though the psyker could have been a target anyways.
And when was the last time a Khornate made arguements about proper procedure anyways?
He needed to get to the bottom of this, but couldn't figure it out beyond understanding that the daemon wanted to delay them or turn them away from their path, or maybe just kill their psyker? Honestly it was hard to tell.
The Witch Hunters are one of Avernus's most elite military forces and certainly the strongest willed. They need to be, given their role in the defence of their homeworld.
Local priests watch their flocks for those best and least able to resist the psykic influence off the wildlife, and report these people to authorities for further investigation.
Many newly-turned Khornate cultists and newly active psykers have been caught in this manner, alongside some of the strongest willed Avernites, singled out for examination and sent to help keep the witch epidemic under control, this was how Johann had come to the attention of the Witch Hunters as a recruit.
He didn't begrudge his pastor for doing so, but also didn't go back to that church except when family begged him to. Instead he had joined a somewhat more extreme church group, one growing out of the psyker hunters that fought and found untrained psykics.
The Seekers of Veracity were devoted to Truth, with it being seen as the highest calling for a member to let go of their worldly concerns beyond the search for truth through meditative exercise and ascetic living, and to base their life on that devotion.
Johann got ready to pile out of the vehicle as it screeched up a ramp into a hab block, Sergeant Drestin stood by the door, giving each man the go to leap out, checking each man's equipment and calling out the order to prevent the overcrowded vehicle compartment from tripping over each other and collapsing into little 'c' chaos.
He was last, being one of the three people seated nearest to the drivers compartment, with the sergeant's hard gaze focused on him as he barked out Johann's name to get him moving, still keeping the surface of his mind focused on his religious past while the mechanism of his subconscious mind kept grinding away at the problem and his body moved almost automatically to rush the entrance to the housing block. Ignoring others dropping command activated mines and not slowing any of his operations at the scuffing noise of the sergeant stumbling off of the Chimera behind him.
Johann had joined the Seekers of Veracity while they were still a new group, but they had already had a good reputation for their founders' success and had seemed promising once examined, given their extensive research into the numerous religious traditions of Avernus and correspondence with the Muspelheim archive while establishing their doctrine.
Especially interesting to him at the time was the way they taught a number of useful meditative tricks, with a surprising amount of insight into the way that humans learned meditation to allow them to both train those who had no talent for it, and keep pushing the limits of those who did.
With the proven link between meditative exercise and self control, and thus resilience against mental intrusion, high intensity meditation was quite common on Avernus. With 'high intensity' often meaning: 'while people dump freezing water on you' or 'while noisemakers or emotionally charged scenes distract you and electrodes shock you if the brainwave scanner says you're not focusing on the meditation' or 'while fighting half a dozen men as a telepath tries to distract you'.
He very carefully didn't think of the training to maintain a distracting surface line of thought, or of playing poker against psykers.
Johann rushed though the building entranceway, already opened by vox command and guarded by a quartet of militiamen, not stopping at the chorus of howls rising behind him. The rear ten men, including him, were ordered to hold the doors and lay down fire to keep the Daemons away from the Chimera, orders yelled over the screams for blood while the others rushed inwards.
They all dropped frags past the rolling vault door of the hab, blasted the rushing Hound of Khorne that burst through the rapidly closing door, and rushed to the firing slits, having to climb up on stands to reach them in their position near the roof of the entry floor.
He might have joined for the training, but as he stayed he found himself taken by the Seekers of Veracity's philosophy towards mental defence, and to what men should actually be devoting themselves to in order to develop their spirits'. In the end, while faith, loyalty, and altruism are perfectly suitable to base a defense on, they are still vulnerable, a little bit too close to honor for loyalty, and while altruism's connection to Slannesh through compassion is weak, so is the motivation compared to others more easily held in the human mind, and with the rise of the Abomination faith is more a matter of carefully controlled weakness built into strength than something a person can throw themselves into wholeheartedly and with abandon for defence. A 'double edged sword' as the saying goes.
The firing slits had clever little spring loaded doors on them, intended to keep the enemy from throwing something through them when unoccupied, he would have been more interested in the mechanism that opened them for anyone leaning against the firing slit ledge, if he hadn't been busy shooting a bloodletter in the top of the head as it charged, then wrenching his gun back as a Flesh Hound ran UP the wall to bite at his protruding barrel, and shooting it in the stomach as it passed.
The vault door plug to the Hab complex was nearly flush with the wall when the bloodletters grabbed it.
That was the problem with cheap doors like these, they took too long to close.
The grinding sound of a stuck door mechanism sounded as it resisted attempts to pull it backwards, up until someone on a higher level showered the lot of them with burning liquid and the Chimera scattered the entrance with heavy weapons fire, paining the Daemons into letting go.
The warded Chimera careened by outside, taking a zigzagging path to run interference on the Flesh Hounds nipping at its treads. With that interference ending in a gory crunch as often as not, as the vehicle commander was a bit more aggressive in his interpretation of running interference than most would be.
Johann saw his squad mates duck down to reload and did the same, watching Penny Harper switch to his underslung flamer, and the sergeant brace his back to the wall to reload out of the corner of his eye.
He kept thinking, the Seekers say: 'Is not the Last Saint a man of Truth', 'is not the revelation of man's purpose in the universe named the Imperial Truth'. Truth, they think, is both the beginning and the end of the matter of spiritual sanctity. A man can devote himself to seeking Truth as wholeheartedly as he can devote himself to having faith, and can find the same feeling in doing so, the feeling of being overwhelmed and overcome by something more important than any other mental state that might arise within or be forced upon his mind.
Their preaching goes into detail on the subject, the Seekers say:
Only when the blinds of self are put aside and distractions from purpose overcome can the Truth be sought.
The Truth will be our deliverance.
Do not obsess over the Truth, it is a calm, rational devotion that will save you.
Do not view the Truth as an ideal or a standard of respectable behavior, or become frustrated in the challenges that arise, the search for Truth must be an intensely personal one, sought with patience and for selfish reasons by whatever means come to hand.
Do not seek truth to fulfill an ambition, the goal or the knowledge gained are not the purpose of seeking Truth, a search for Truth is its own purpose.
Do not reject or endure the Truth, no matter how horrible, rather you must work to come to acceptance of it.
Do not simply accept whatever others tell you, or assume an answer is correct because everyone else does so, constantly examine your own assumptions and drives for what Truths they may be concealing from you.
When nothing remains within you but Truth, then you are free.
In that moment, reloading and watching his team mates start to return from their mission, everything gained a crystal clarity to it. He knew what was about to happen, and the blade of a herald of Khorne bursting through the door seal accompanied by a paralysing wave of bloodlust and hatred for the psyker bundled over the shoulder of one of his fellows almost seemed unimportant.
Johann raised his gun, with only the shot in the barrel remaining, and preemptively raised it and turned towards his target as he tracked his vision across the psyker child. The target of their mission sedated and with a warded and runic helmet clamped over his head.
It wasn't so much that he didn't feel the hatred that his fellows visibly struggled to hold back, he felt it rather intensely, but that upon seeing it for a lie and recognizing it wasn't a part of him he could no longer feel that it was important compared to this terrible clarity.
Johann's weapon snapped up and fired.
He cursed. Not a kill! As the hurried shot hit Sergeant Drestin in the elbow and interrupted the man's attempt to draw a bead on the psyker by shattering his joint.
The Daemon hadn't stopped following them, just given up on Johann as a target and on delaying their travel to fall behind this force of Daemons, and instead started wearing down someone else to kill the psyker without having to wet their own blades! Sergent Drestin had always been a fierce and agressive man, but everyone had thought he controlled it too well for this to happen.
"THE WITCH BLEEDS!" Cried the sergent, as he drew his knife and leapt at the man carrying the child with clearly unnatural force.
And Johann leapt to meet him in a mid air tackle.
He bore the tainted man to the ground, their knives already skittering over each others armor, but not biting against the tough and well designed plate. "DON'T YOU SEE? WE NEED THE BLOOD FOR HIM!" was yelled into Johanns face, the tainted man's skin already taking a reddish cast to it and his tongue developing a fork visible through the faceplate of his power armor. Johann grabbed at the underside of the man's arm and side of his waist and pulled, ignoring the continued unsetting skittering scrape of a deflected blade seeking a weakness and taking advantage of the damaged arm to slide over to a position nearly behind the sergeant in a grapple.
Despite the Sergeant being twice as strong as a man in power armor should be and 'blessed' by the blood god his defeat was inevitable now, it wasn't strength or skill with a blade that most often decided a close fight in powered armor, but advantage in a grapple.
With Johann's position behind his enemy he could now grip the tainted man's remaining arm, then put the force of his entire upper body into it in a twist that sounded the snapping of electrically motivated fibre bundles, the screeching of deformed metal, and the pop of a dislocated shoulder.
The tainted man screamed, his frustrated and pain filled cry ending in a pained gurgle as Johann's knife stabbed up through the armpit joint and into his lung, once, twice and thrice. Leaving the heretic who was formerly sergeant Drestin to end his life choking to death on his own blood.
A fitting end for followers of the Blood God.
Johann looked up to the sound of a melta going off, the rest of the team had been focused on dealing with the herald of Khorne and its remaining pack of lesser daemons. Having just killed the big one with a meltabomb and fire from the Chimera outside, and breached the half-wrecked doorway with the same bomb. The building damage control crews would need to be alerted, they would need to weld a plate over this hole before anything could get through.
The other team's Sergeant was eyeing him warily and fingering his gun. Suddenly Johann was very aware that his only loaded weapon was his pistol and he would need to drop his knife before going for it.
"He was corrupted. You saw what he did, just look at his face if you want proof." Johann blurted out while dropping his knife and holding his hands up in a carefully non-threatening gesture.
The standoff continued for a few moments more as the other sergeant's unreadable gaze played over the scene. Then the man turned to the battle. "Pick up your weapon and get back to the Chimera. This fight is nearly done and our psyker is already choosing our route to the next target. We'll drop the kid off on the way."
Johann hurried to do exactly that, realizing what situation he would be in, the senior members of a squad were split between the front and rear of a Chimera to reduce to odds of a single attack taking all of them out, with his new position of command he just knew that he would be the butt of constant jokes about killing his superior to take their place.
If only he could recapture that feeling of absolute clarity, he knew he would be trying to regain the feeling of overwhelming Truth he remembered in days to come.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To most effectively resist daemonic influence a person requires an extreme state of mind. They need to feel as if they are filled with, and possibly overwhelmed with, something larger than themselves, something beyond their ability to control, something that is utterly opposed to the nature of the festering reality cancer before them.
Essentially they need a motivation to oppose Chaos that they perceive to be above and beyond them, and thus beyond the ability of any influences on them to overwhelm.
Faith won't reliably do it anymore, but then I got to thinking.
The root of religious thought in humans is as much questioning 'why?' as it is the need to believe in something. Then having trust and faith in the answers.
Skip the whole 'getting answers fed to you' bit and get back to the roots of human spiritual thought.
Allow yourself to become consumed by the process of and desire to seek out and understand truth, not by becoming obsessed with truth, but through meditative exercise and ascetic habits aimed at letting go of or suppressing other motivations.
I'm sure that some journalists, detectives and spiritualists in the real world have reached the state of mind that I am thinking about.
It is also a state of mind that would come very easily to our psyker hunters and witch hunters, as they seek out hidden threats to the community, endure mental attacks, and are exposed to inspiration by Musphelheim records, the varied religious traditions of the original Avernite colonists, and Saint Lin in general.
The mental effects of daemons and psykers can be conceptualized through the lens of lies, when a Khornate daemon fills you with hatred and bloodlust it is lying to you, trying to show you that this is who you are, but a person who has spent their life devoted to Truth and can see this for a lie will be girded against it.
Weaker against subtle threats than faith, as the strongest defence relies on self knowledge to detect unusual mental states, and less suitable for dim and uninsightful individuals, as they are less likely to get the positive reinforcement hit of satisfaction for figuring things out without an environment designed to feed it to them.
Maybe I'm wrong and this isn't a valid mental framework to resist corruption, but I think I might be right.
Edit: some more clarificarion as to what the heck I'm talking about:
Edit2, next up, either Marshal Kohl's duel or something with marshal Waters.
THE PSYKER HUNT
Johann muttered under his breath, reciting the litanies of fear his sect had drilled into his head to keep his feelings under control as waves of irrational rage washed across the district and the bleeding sky gushed across the upper portions of the hive hundreds of meters overhead. He couldn't see the bloodfall but somehow he could tell it was there anyways.
All men fear.
Fear is the root of purity.
Fear is the origin of defiance.
Fear of failing. Fear of falling. Fear of damnation. Fear of death with your duty left undone.
Fear unbound by reason is cowardice.
Fear is not an ideal or a shame, but an obstacle.
Fear is the mind killer, prevailing fear is the harbinger of complete obliteration.
Observe fear.
Allow fear to pass on and through.
A call to action held only when vital.
Aimed by wisdom and training.
Where fear has passed only its lessons of purpose remain.
The litanies of fear were not so much a comfort as a repetitive reminder to maintain control and keep that fear directed at something useful.
His purpose was to seek and destroy the unholy and the corrupt. Ferreting out those individuals weak enough to serve as conduits to bring such forces into the world was the work of others, though he had some experience and training in the art.
Such skills would be underutilized in the current battle, given that the powers of Ruin were everywhere one looked, surrounding the hives, digging through reality to appear inside of the hives, and scratching at the doors to the minds of everyone caught in this miserable mess.
People were getting angry, two militiamen they'd remanded to police cells had been suspiciously fascinated with their bayonets, and psykers were finding their powers and losing control of them in the same instant across the hive, the walls would start bleeding and the top of the hallways fill with blood-rain clouds at irregular intervals as taint fluctuated, people would see unsettling or upsetting things in their reflections or vid screens, angry words would become screaming mirages of bloodthirsty faces in mid air, minor daemons were irregularly rising from any pool of blood large enough, and nearly two hundred honor duels had been refused and had their challengers face potentially lethal censure because of 'inclement weather' in his assigned districts alone!
People were doing the best they could to deal with it, holding up hand signals when they noticed themselves becoming uncharacteristically angry, and generally sticking to distantly polite speech and the deescalation procedures they had all been trained in to prevent anyones rage from spiraling out of control or gaining targets they could rationalize as justified outside of combat with the enemy. The troops engaged on the walls had it the worst, given Khornate's traditional 'come at me bro' approach to corruption. The militia were also tossing incendiaries at any puddles of blood that started to form, not that that didn't create its own problems in a crowded hive.
The Psyker Hunters were spread throughout the districts, essentially on call to respond to anything the militia suspected might be their problem. They were being pulled in a thousand directions, as militia ran into things that were too weird or obviously supernatural to leave alone, then either blew them up or failed to blow them up and essentially said 'fuck this man I'm out' and evacuated while calling their area's Psyker Hunters or Psykers to fight and/or poke it.
The Witch Hunters on the other hand were being kept together and deployed in force to respond to anything the psyker hunters needed a hammer to deal with, and parceled out in squads to follow the handful of diviners who could still reliably get work done under these conditions.
Johann and the two squads with him were following one such psyker. He didn't really understand what the psyker was doing, just that he was leading them to newly triggered psykics to either give them the Emperor's mercy or get them into the nearest warded sector of the city as fast as possible.
What this looked like in practice was a little under twenty men packed into a twelve man Chimera, with some sitting on each others laps, and one crazy bastard strapped to the outside.
The vehicle's attached siren screeched its continuously rising and falling tone as Johann desperately tried to focus on his litanies and ignore the way that the madly grinning commander was taking turns at three times the speed limit, occasionally going fast enough that only one tread was touching the ground, with the psyker in the cockpit passenger seat poring over runes, a small disemboweled animal, a map, and what looked like playing cards, the mutant giving directions and fiddling with the numerous colored lenses attached to his helmet.
Johann also tried to ignore the occasional patches of flames or blood rain they passed through, the minor daemons they swerved across the road to ram, the reason they had a man strapped to the roof daubing at the purity seals with a damp cloth and reporting the rate that they were singeing away, his irritation with the unsteady soldier seated on the lap of the man in front of him who kept breathing in his face and kicking his shin, and the angry voice at the back of his mind cursing him for blasting it with a Krak missile after it had destroyed their other chimera.
It was loudly claiming that this was a dishonorable denial of its victory and not proper procedure and they needed to stop and let out enough men to put the vehicle back under its maximum load, in a way that would have hurt his ears if it had been coming in through them, but instead was just giving him the beginning of a headache.
Johann was pretty good at ignoring things when he needed to be. Besides, it was clear that the voice was lying, proper procedure made provision for packing more troops into a chimera than was advisable, generally to run from whatever wildlife left them without enough chimeras. The voice did not take him pointing this out gracefully. 'gargle your heart' uh huh, 'rip out your intestines' mmhm, 'whip you with your own circulatory system', yeah right.
It also did not take well to being told it was a sore loser.
Johann's head slammed into to vehicle wall with another sharp turn, he bit back a series of cusses aimed at the worthless driver and his shitty driving, see how he likes getting his head slammed into the walls over and over. Then closed his eyes, counted the three and held up the hand signal for being angrier than he should be. Glaring straight ahead at the pair piled into the opposite seat as the territorial guy to his left who had been bumping his arm out of position with his elbow the whole ride made distance like he had the cooties.
Johann switched over from the litanies of fear to the related ones on faith. Mostly because he was starting to get more concerned about this daemon that was following them, it seemed to be trying to worm its way into influencing their minds to stop them, and it was a struggle to keep his mind about him and remain rational.
Faith had long been the mainstay of Imperial defence against mental taint, and was still a good enough tool for the job. He kept up his muttering against the rising urge to lunge out of his seat and wrap his hands around the commander's throat that was overwhelming his mind.
All good men have faith.
Faith is the fount of self sacrifice.
Faith is the basest form of defence.
Faith in men. Faith in institutions. Faith in ideals. Faith in the Emperor.
Faith unbound by reason is Abomination.
Faith is not a shield against the unholy, but an ideal to follow.
Faith is anesthesia for a small mind, blind faith is the end of sanity.
Keep faith.
Feed faith on doubts resolved.
A spurr against accepting corruption stoked and restrained to defend kindred.
Tempered by reason and knowledge.
When faith is allowed to wane only its lessons of self abnegation remain.
The chant was a reminder of the church rituals, calling to mind the most intense moments of faith he had experienced, much like the ringing of a bell calls food to the mind of a pet cat.
With these memories filling his head with the feeling of being filled with, and existing for the sake of, something greater than himself, it made the Daemon's blandishments seem lesser … smaller somehow.
For while it could fill his mind with rage his rage could never become greater than his faith, and faith and devotion to the God Emperor and Humanity trumped any petty concerns his personal feelings might put forward.
His devotion demanded he restrain himself and THINK, keeping at the forefront of his mind what was truely causing this and why he couldn't put his knife through the commander's eye while he was driving. This anger wasn't who he was, and some pathetic psykic projection couldn't change that.
A guttural, savage growl filled his mind, purest hostility given voice, but it was a sound of frustration, coming alongside the feeling of the daemon's presence withdrawing from his mind.
He put his hand back down, slightly embarrassed now by having let the daemon get that far while they remained inside of the warded vehicle.
But his mind didn't stop there; the Daemon's sheer persistence a sign that there was more at play here than simple vengeance, no matter how much it yelled about its rage at banishment.
After all, if the daemon simply wanted him dead it would have focused his anger at his fellow armed passengers, not the distracted vehicle driver, though the psyker could have been a target anyways.
And when was the last time a Khornate made arguements about proper procedure anyways?
He needed to get to the bottom of this, but couldn't figure it out beyond understanding that the daemon wanted to delay them or turn them away from their path, or maybe just kill their psyker? Honestly it was hard to tell.
The Witch Hunters are one of Avernus's most elite military forces and certainly the strongest willed. They need to be, given their role in the defence of their homeworld.
Local priests watch their flocks for those best and least able to resist the psykic influence off the wildlife, and report these people to authorities for further investigation.
Many newly-turned Khornate cultists and newly active psykers have been caught in this manner, alongside some of the strongest willed Avernites, singled out for examination and sent to help keep the witch epidemic under control, this was how Johann had come to the attention of the Witch Hunters as a recruit.
He didn't begrudge his pastor for doing so, but also didn't go back to that church except when family begged him to. Instead he had joined a somewhat more extreme church group, one growing out of the psyker hunters that fought and found untrained psykics.
The Seekers of Veracity were devoted to Truth, with it being seen as the highest calling for a member to let go of their worldly concerns beyond the search for truth through meditative exercise and ascetic living, and to base their life on that devotion.
Johann got ready to pile out of the vehicle as it screeched up a ramp into a hab block, Sergeant Drestin stood by the door, giving each man the go to leap out, checking each man's equipment and calling out the order to prevent the overcrowded vehicle compartment from tripping over each other and collapsing into little 'c' chaos.
He was last, being one of the three people seated nearest to the drivers compartment, with the sergeant's hard gaze focused on him as he barked out Johann's name to get him moving, still keeping the surface of his mind focused on his religious past while the mechanism of his subconscious mind kept grinding away at the problem and his body moved almost automatically to rush the entrance to the housing block. Ignoring others dropping command activated mines and not slowing any of his operations at the scuffing noise of the sergeant stumbling off of the Chimera behind him.
Johann had joined the Seekers of Veracity while they were still a new group, but they had already had a good reputation for their founders' success and had seemed promising once examined, given their extensive research into the numerous religious traditions of Avernus and correspondence with the Muspelheim archive while establishing their doctrine.
Especially interesting to him at the time was the way they taught a number of useful meditative tricks, with a surprising amount of insight into the way that humans learned meditation to allow them to both train those who had no talent for it, and keep pushing the limits of those who did.
With the proven link between meditative exercise and self control, and thus resilience against mental intrusion, high intensity meditation was quite common on Avernus. With 'high intensity' often meaning: 'while people dump freezing water on you' or 'while noisemakers or emotionally charged scenes distract you and electrodes shock you if the brainwave scanner says you're not focusing on the meditation' or 'while fighting half a dozen men as a telepath tries to distract you'.
He very carefully didn't think of the training to maintain a distracting surface line of thought, or of playing poker against psykers.
Johann rushed though the building entranceway, already opened by vox command and guarded by a quartet of militiamen, not stopping at the chorus of howls rising behind him. The rear ten men, including him, were ordered to hold the doors and lay down fire to keep the Daemons away from the Chimera, orders yelled over the screams for blood while the others rushed inwards.
They all dropped frags past the rolling vault door of the hab, blasted the rushing Hound of Khorne that burst through the rapidly closing door, and rushed to the firing slits, having to climb up on stands to reach them in their position near the roof of the entry floor.
He might have joined for the training, but as he stayed he found himself taken by the Seekers of Veracity's philosophy towards mental defence, and to what men should actually be devoting themselves to in order to develop their spirits'. In the end, while faith, loyalty, and altruism are perfectly suitable to base a defense on, they are still vulnerable, a little bit too close to honor for loyalty, and while altruism's connection to Slannesh through compassion is weak, so is the motivation compared to others more easily held in the human mind, and with the rise of the Abomination faith is more a matter of carefully controlled weakness built into strength than something a person can throw themselves into wholeheartedly and with abandon for defence. A 'double edged sword' as the saying goes.
The firing slits had clever little spring loaded doors on them, intended to keep the enemy from throwing something through them when unoccupied, he would have been more interested in the mechanism that opened them for anyone leaning against the firing slit ledge, if he hadn't been busy shooting a bloodletter in the top of the head as it charged, then wrenching his gun back as a Flesh Hound ran UP the wall to bite at his protruding barrel, and shooting it in the stomach as it passed.
The vault door plug to the Hab complex was nearly flush with the wall when the bloodletters grabbed it.
That was the problem with cheap doors like these, they took too long to close.
The grinding sound of a stuck door mechanism sounded as it resisted attempts to pull it backwards, up until someone on a higher level showered the lot of them with burning liquid and the Chimera scattered the entrance with heavy weapons fire, paining the Daemons into letting go.
The warded Chimera careened by outside, taking a zigzagging path to run interference on the Flesh Hounds nipping at its treads. With that interference ending in a gory crunch as often as not, as the vehicle commander was a bit more aggressive in his interpretation of running interference than most would be.
Johann saw his squad mates duck down to reload and did the same, watching Penny Harper switch to his underslung flamer, and the sergeant brace his back to the wall to reload out of the corner of his eye.
He kept thinking, the Seekers say: 'Is not the Last Saint a man of Truth', 'is not the revelation of man's purpose in the universe named the Imperial Truth'. Truth, they think, is both the beginning and the end of the matter of spiritual sanctity. A man can devote himself to seeking Truth as wholeheartedly as he can devote himself to having faith, and can find the same feeling in doing so, the feeling of being overwhelmed and overcome by something more important than any other mental state that might arise within or be forced upon his mind.
Their preaching goes into detail on the subject, the Seekers say:
Only when the blinds of self are put aside and distractions from purpose overcome can the Truth be sought.
The Truth will be our deliverance.
Do not obsess over the Truth, it is a calm, rational devotion that will save you.
Do not view the Truth as an ideal or a standard of respectable behavior, or become frustrated in the challenges that arise, the search for Truth must be an intensely personal one, sought with patience and for selfish reasons by whatever means come to hand.
Do not seek truth to fulfill an ambition, the goal or the knowledge gained are not the purpose of seeking Truth, a search for Truth is its own purpose.
Do not reject or endure the Truth, no matter how horrible, rather you must work to come to acceptance of it.
Do not simply accept whatever others tell you, or assume an answer is correct because everyone else does so, constantly examine your own assumptions and drives for what Truths they may be concealing from you.
When nothing remains within you but Truth, then you are free.
In that moment, reloading and watching his team mates start to return from their mission, everything gained a crystal clarity to it. He knew what was about to happen, and the blade of a herald of Khorne bursting through the door seal accompanied by a paralysing wave of bloodlust and hatred for the psyker bundled over the shoulder of one of his fellows almost seemed unimportant.
Johann raised his gun, with only the shot in the barrel remaining, and preemptively raised it and turned towards his target as he tracked his vision across the psyker child. The target of their mission sedated and with a warded and runic helmet clamped over his head.
It wasn't so much that he didn't feel the hatred that his fellows visibly struggled to hold back, he felt it rather intensely, but that upon seeing it for a lie and recognizing it wasn't a part of him he could no longer feel that it was important compared to this terrible clarity.
Johann's weapon snapped up and fired.
He cursed. Not a kill! As the hurried shot hit Sergeant Drestin in the elbow and interrupted the man's attempt to draw a bead on the psyker by shattering his joint.
The Daemon hadn't stopped following them, just given up on Johann as a target and on delaying their travel to fall behind this force of Daemons, and instead started wearing down someone else to kill the psyker without having to wet their own blades! Sergent Drestin had always been a fierce and agressive man, but everyone had thought he controlled it too well for this to happen.
"THE WITCH BLEEDS!" Cried the sergent, as he drew his knife and leapt at the man carrying the child with clearly unnatural force.
And Johann leapt to meet him in a mid air tackle.
He bore the tainted man to the ground, their knives already skittering over each others armor, but not biting against the tough and well designed plate. "DON'T YOU SEE? WE NEED THE BLOOD FOR HIM!" was yelled into Johanns face, the tainted man's skin already taking a reddish cast to it and his tongue developing a fork visible through the faceplate of his power armor. Johann grabbed at the underside of the man's arm and side of his waist and pulled, ignoring the continued unsetting skittering scrape of a deflected blade seeking a weakness and taking advantage of the damaged arm to slide over to a position nearly behind the sergeant in a grapple.
Despite the Sergeant being twice as strong as a man in power armor should be and 'blessed' by the blood god his defeat was inevitable now, it wasn't strength or skill with a blade that most often decided a close fight in powered armor, but advantage in a grapple.
With Johann's position behind his enemy he could now grip the tainted man's remaining arm, then put the force of his entire upper body into it in a twist that sounded the snapping of electrically motivated fibre bundles, the screeching of deformed metal, and the pop of a dislocated shoulder.
The tainted man screamed, his frustrated and pain filled cry ending in a pained gurgle as Johann's knife stabbed up through the armpit joint and into his lung, once, twice and thrice. Leaving the heretic who was formerly sergeant Drestin to end his life choking to death on his own blood.
A fitting end for followers of the Blood God.
Johann looked up to the sound of a melta going off, the rest of the team had been focused on dealing with the herald of Khorne and its remaining pack of lesser daemons. Having just killed the big one with a meltabomb and fire from the Chimera outside, and breached the half-wrecked doorway with the same bomb. The building damage control crews would need to be alerted, they would need to weld a plate over this hole before anything could get through.
The other team's Sergeant was eyeing him warily and fingering his gun. Suddenly Johann was very aware that his only loaded weapon was his pistol and he would need to drop his knife before going for it.
"He was corrupted. You saw what he did, just look at his face if you want proof." Johann blurted out while dropping his knife and holding his hands up in a carefully non-threatening gesture.
The standoff continued for a few moments more as the other sergeant's unreadable gaze played over the scene. Then the man turned to the battle. "Pick up your weapon and get back to the Chimera. This fight is nearly done and our psyker is already choosing our route to the next target. We'll drop the kid off on the way."
Johann hurried to do exactly that, realizing what situation he would be in, the senior members of a squad were split between the front and rear of a Chimera to reduce to odds of a single attack taking all of them out, with his new position of command he just knew that he would be the butt of constant jokes about killing his superior to take their place.
If only he could recapture that feeling of absolute clarity, he knew he would be trying to regain the feeling of overwhelming Truth he remembered in days to come.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To most effectively resist daemonic influence a person requires an extreme state of mind. They need to feel as if they are filled with, and possibly overwhelmed with, something larger than themselves, something beyond their ability to control, something that is utterly opposed to the nature of the festering reality cancer before them.
Essentially they need a motivation to oppose Chaos that they perceive to be above and beyond them, and thus beyond the ability of any influences on them to overwhelm.
Faith won't reliably do it anymore, but then I got to thinking.
+ Half a hundred other references to truth, + the name 'the new imperial truth'
It feels like the idea of truth deserves more examination.
The root of religious thought in humans is as much questioning 'why?' as it is the need to believe in something. Then having trust and faith in the answers.
Skip the whole 'getting answers fed to you' bit and get back to the roots of human spiritual thought.
Allow yourself to become consumed by the process of and desire to seek out and understand truth, not by becoming obsessed with truth, but through meditative exercise and ascetic habits aimed at letting go of or suppressing other motivations.
I'm sure that some journalists, detectives and spiritualists in the real world have reached the state of mind that I am thinking about.
It is also a state of mind that would come very easily to our psyker hunters and witch hunters, as they seek out hidden threats to the community, endure mental attacks, and are exposed to inspiration by Musphelheim records, the varied religious traditions of the original Avernite colonists, and Saint Lin in general.
The mental effects of daemons and psykers can be conceptualized through the lens of lies, when a Khornate daemon fills you with hatred and bloodlust it is lying to you, trying to show you that this is who you are, but a person who has spent their life devoted to Truth and can see this for a lie will be girded against it.
Weaker against subtle threats than faith, as the strongest defence relies on self knowledge to detect unusual mental states, and less suitable for dim and uninsightful individuals, as they are less likely to get the positive reinforcement hit of satisfaction for figuring things out without an environment designed to feed it to them.
Maybe I'm wrong and this isn't a valid mental framework to resist corruption, but I think I might be right.
Edit: some more clarificarion as to what the heck I'm talking about:
Edit2, next up,
Last edited:
Through Eyes of Blood.
- Location
- madison
Through Eyes of Blood.
Hellmourn fate stealer, traitor prince and defiler of Uorilia smiled for the first time in centuries. his host was marching on the crucible of ancients, a world so deadly every chaos god save the youngest had tried and failed to claim it, the world that had beaten back even exalted An'ggrath. This was no pointless squabble among the gods, no petty kingdom as unremarkable in death as it was in life, this would be a battle of legends. This was what he had been promised when he first swore himself to Khorne. That he had been given a lesser target was no matter, he would reap a great harvest of blood and skulls upon a world so deadly even demons feared it. Their fear was not unearned, every mile was paid for in blood, every tree, every beast every insect was deadly and fought with a single-minded purpose worthy of his legions. thousands fell, and dozens where given True death, before they were even in sight of their target. Such was the glory and slaughter he almost wondered if perhaps the merely human foes would be a letdown, how could any mortal fastness compare to the work of those older than the gods themselves? Then the guns of Cassarondo spoke with the fury and a forgotten age, annihilating a hundred demons in an instant and Hellmourn wept with joy.
The city, no, the fortress was like none he had ever seen. Weapons that on lesser worlds would be legendary relics, the centerpieces of impregnable fortress dotted the walls like scales on a dragon, void shields of a potency to shame anything he had seen coved it so thickly he could scarcely see the adamantine walls and the defenders, oh the defenders. They were more than worthy of their fortress. They wielded weapons no less potent and fought with a skill that seemed almost obscene to see among unblessed mortals, but this was not all! He could taste the cold will of their commander behind them, men spent unflinchingly but not a single life wasted. This, this was why he had slain his father, why he had offered Khorne the skulls of his siblings and the souls of his people. A battle upon which the entire might of his pathetic birth world would be less than an afterthought. He would ruin this fortress and slaughter its people. Their skulls and blood would go to Khorne, but their souls... their souls he declared shall be his! with such a bounty of warriors of such skill he would at last overtake his rivals, at last earn the right to march at the right hand of the warmaster, his blade eternally wet with the blood of worthy foes!
Hellmourn knew better then to send even demonic footmen against such a citadel, without the swiftness of a mount even his demons would die a thousand times before reaching the walls. It is fortunate then, that he had long since acquired a beast for every demon sworn to his service. The ground thundered under the hooves of khornes beasts, Juggernauts, fleshounds, and nameless bloody nightmares from the wild warp who would accept no name charged forth, throwing themselves into the killing field with the fearlessness of those beyond death. 8 times they charged forth, and 8 times they where beaten back. but once did they reach the walls, only to be met by bloody handed champions beyond fear seeking death and glory. But Hellmourn had been beyond caring for the loses of his forces for centuries. Even as his lumbering demon engines finally arrived his men where finding their way back to the material world, drawn forth by oaths and the promise of battle. Where demonic flesh had failed, demonic brass and steel would succeed.
It was his sister, her soul bound and screaming in her blood blessed ancestral knight that first breached the walls. Dancing through the burning hulks of lesser demon engines and ghosting through withering fire with the skill that denied him is birthright lifetimes ago. Reaching near point-blank range she brought to bear the terrible destructive power of it's infernally charged Meltas , at last leaving open the way forward. For a moment it seemed as if she would once more give him victory, as she had had so many times before, and then a knight to shame any he had ever seen strode forth and cast her down, Shattering the last relic of Uorilia and sending the bound soul within weeping back to its phylactery. Hellmourn smiled, already imagining the power of his sister bound to the knight that had bested her, once it had been properly sanctified. once more he ordered his legions forth, and the battle entered the next phase, as giants of steel and fire warred before the walls of Cassarondo.
it had been 5 hours since the siege had begun, 5 hours of unceasing assault be legions beyond the limits of mortal flesh, and yet Cassarondo stood strong. for a time it had seemed the walls would fall, that the breaches and gaps bought with oceans of demonic ichor and melted brass would finally open the way into the cities beating heart, but he had underestimated the defenders. Buying time with sallies they had used some strange techno arcana to erect new walls admits the breaches, lesser than what they had replaced but still mighty and wielding the weapons of a bygone age. twice now his demon engines had torn them down, only for a sally of the enemies own warmachines to push them back while new walls where moved into place. he did not have the time, nor the forces to tear them down until the enemy bleed the last of their war machines with such tactics. not if he wanted to have the forces to storm the city once it had breached the walls, and so Hellmourn offered the defenders a warriors salute, before reaching for his greatest treasure. A fate of victory torn from the beating heart of a mighty changer of ways, painstakenly shorn of trickery and malice until it was as close to a pure oath of victory as could exist. The winning of this prize had been what had fully elevated him to demonhood. It was not the only fate he had stolen, but it was the first and greatest. For centuries he had sought a worthy battle upon which to use it, now, at long last, he had found one. with an impossible twist, the bindings of his prize fell away and he could feel the fate fall upon him.
Any Who Fight You Shall Fail.
It was not truly his fate, and like all stolen fates it would seek to twist and bite him, but it's words were true beyond truth, and words such as this left little room for it to betray him. Laughing with glee and adorned with glorious purpose he charged into battle, his greatest servants at his side. Defenders saught to smite him with the might of ancients, their weapons found no purchase on his fate guarded hide, Giants of adamantine and fire sought to slow him, they died forming a ramp for him to reach the walls, frantic defenders sought to survive, and he feasted upon their souls. Hellmourn roared triumphantly as at last his servants swarmed up behind him, and his roar was met with a cry of challenge no less savage. A blur of iron ripped through his forces, laying waste to anything too slow to get out of its way.
At first, he thought it a Servitor, a war beast of dead flesh and metal, but it moved with far to much skill, its eyes shone with the focus of a warrior, and it's soul reeked of death. No unliving thing was this, this was a living champion. Hellmourn smiled, the grip on his ax tightening as he locked eyes with this new foe. For a moment he considered charging, a chance to offer such a skull to his god was rare indeed. But he had not grown old stealing fates by foolishness. The champion smiled as he approached, yet he smelled of a man expecting defeat. Hellmourn snorted derisively, he had expected the bite of this destiny to be more subtle than a champion seeking death. No, he dared not fight this man, not bearing this destiny.
"The one who brings me his skull shall be my right hand."
his retinue charged, and Hellmourn took flight. he would find the commander of this fortress and ensnare her in his stolen victory. Perhaps he would get a new lieutenant, or perhaps his retinue would shame themselves being banished, but it mattered not. A single champion would not be enough to save an entire city, not once he'd paraded the general's corpse before it's defenders. with a leap and a few flaps of his great wings, he left the man to his missions as he sought out the mortal commander, guided to them by the failure of their men to shield them from him. In mere minutes he found them, weapon in hand with an honor guard of men doomed to failure at her back. Hellmourn chuckled as their weapons played futility against his hide, the general was his first disappointment of this world. A brilliant leader, but no great challenge to one such as himself. He would take his time with her.
@Durin I made a thing.
Hellmourn fate stealer, traitor prince and defiler of Uorilia smiled for the first time in centuries. his host was marching on the crucible of ancients, a world so deadly every chaos god save the youngest had tried and failed to claim it, the world that had beaten back even exalted An'ggrath. This was no pointless squabble among the gods, no petty kingdom as unremarkable in death as it was in life, this would be a battle of legends. This was what he had been promised when he first swore himself to Khorne. That he had been given a lesser target was no matter, he would reap a great harvest of blood and skulls upon a world so deadly even demons feared it. Their fear was not unearned, every mile was paid for in blood, every tree, every beast every insect was deadly and fought with a single-minded purpose worthy of his legions. thousands fell, and dozens where given True death, before they were even in sight of their target. Such was the glory and slaughter he almost wondered if perhaps the merely human foes would be a letdown, how could any mortal fastness compare to the work of those older than the gods themselves? Then the guns of Cassarondo spoke with the fury and a forgotten age, annihilating a hundred demons in an instant and Hellmourn wept with joy.
The city, no, the fortress was like none he had ever seen. Weapons that on lesser worlds would be legendary relics, the centerpieces of impregnable fortress dotted the walls like scales on a dragon, void shields of a potency to shame anything he had seen coved it so thickly he could scarcely see the adamantine walls and the defenders, oh the defenders. They were more than worthy of their fortress. They wielded weapons no less potent and fought with a skill that seemed almost obscene to see among unblessed mortals, but this was not all! He could taste the cold will of their commander behind them, men spent unflinchingly but not a single life wasted. This, this was why he had slain his father, why he had offered Khorne the skulls of his siblings and the souls of his people. A battle upon which the entire might of his pathetic birth world would be less than an afterthought. He would ruin this fortress and slaughter its people. Their skulls and blood would go to Khorne, but their souls... their souls he declared shall be his! with such a bounty of warriors of such skill he would at last overtake his rivals, at last earn the right to march at the right hand of the warmaster, his blade eternally wet with the blood of worthy foes!
Hellmourn knew better then to send even demonic footmen against such a citadel, without the swiftness of a mount even his demons would die a thousand times before reaching the walls. It is fortunate then, that he had long since acquired a beast for every demon sworn to his service. The ground thundered under the hooves of khornes beasts, Juggernauts, fleshounds, and nameless bloody nightmares from the wild warp who would accept no name charged forth, throwing themselves into the killing field with the fearlessness of those beyond death. 8 times they charged forth, and 8 times they where beaten back. but once did they reach the walls, only to be met by bloody handed champions beyond fear seeking death and glory. But Hellmourn had been beyond caring for the loses of his forces for centuries. Even as his lumbering demon engines finally arrived his men where finding their way back to the material world, drawn forth by oaths and the promise of battle. Where demonic flesh had failed, demonic brass and steel would succeed.
It was his sister, her soul bound and screaming in her blood blessed ancestral knight that first breached the walls. Dancing through the burning hulks of lesser demon engines and ghosting through withering fire with the skill that denied him is birthright lifetimes ago. Reaching near point-blank range she brought to bear the terrible destructive power of it's infernally charged Meltas , at last leaving open the way forward. For a moment it seemed as if she would once more give him victory, as she had had so many times before, and then a knight to shame any he had ever seen strode forth and cast her down, Shattering the last relic of Uorilia and sending the bound soul within weeping back to its phylactery. Hellmourn smiled, already imagining the power of his sister bound to the knight that had bested her, once it had been properly sanctified. once more he ordered his legions forth, and the battle entered the next phase, as giants of steel and fire warred before the walls of Cassarondo.
it had been 5 hours since the siege had begun, 5 hours of unceasing assault be legions beyond the limits of mortal flesh, and yet Cassarondo stood strong. for a time it had seemed the walls would fall, that the breaches and gaps bought with oceans of demonic ichor and melted brass would finally open the way into the cities beating heart, but he had underestimated the defenders. Buying time with sallies they had used some strange techno arcana to erect new walls admits the breaches, lesser than what they had replaced but still mighty and wielding the weapons of a bygone age. twice now his demon engines had torn them down, only for a sally of the enemies own warmachines to push them back while new walls where moved into place. he did not have the time, nor the forces to tear them down until the enemy bleed the last of their war machines with such tactics. not if he wanted to have the forces to storm the city once it had breached the walls, and so Hellmourn offered the defenders a warriors salute, before reaching for his greatest treasure. A fate of victory torn from the beating heart of a mighty changer of ways, painstakenly shorn of trickery and malice until it was as close to a pure oath of victory as could exist. The winning of this prize had been what had fully elevated him to demonhood. It was not the only fate he had stolen, but it was the first and greatest. For centuries he had sought a worthy battle upon which to use it, now, at long last, he had found one. with an impossible twist, the bindings of his prize fell away and he could feel the fate fall upon him.
Any Who Fight You Shall Fail.
It was not truly his fate, and like all stolen fates it would seek to twist and bite him, but it's words were true beyond truth, and words such as this left little room for it to betray him. Laughing with glee and adorned with glorious purpose he charged into battle, his greatest servants at his side. Defenders saught to smite him with the might of ancients, their weapons found no purchase on his fate guarded hide, Giants of adamantine and fire sought to slow him, they died forming a ramp for him to reach the walls, frantic defenders sought to survive, and he feasted upon their souls. Hellmourn roared triumphantly as at last his servants swarmed up behind him, and his roar was met with a cry of challenge no less savage. A blur of iron ripped through his forces, laying waste to anything too slow to get out of its way.
At first, he thought it a Servitor, a war beast of dead flesh and metal, but it moved with far to much skill, its eyes shone with the focus of a warrior, and it's soul reeked of death. No unliving thing was this, this was a living champion. Hellmourn smiled, the grip on his ax tightening as he locked eyes with this new foe. For a moment he considered charging, a chance to offer such a skull to his god was rare indeed. But he had not grown old stealing fates by foolishness. The champion smiled as he approached, yet he smelled of a man expecting defeat. Hellmourn snorted derisively, he had expected the bite of this destiny to be more subtle than a champion seeking death. No, he dared not fight this man, not bearing this destiny.
"The one who brings me his skull shall be my right hand."
his retinue charged, and Hellmourn took flight. he would find the commander of this fortress and ensnare her in his stolen victory. Perhaps he would get a new lieutenant, or perhaps his retinue would shame themselves being banished, but it mattered not. A single champion would not be enough to save an entire city, not once he'd paraded the general's corpse before it's defenders. with a leap and a few flaps of his great wings, he left the man to his missions as he sought out the mortal commander, guided to them by the failure of their men to shield them from him. In mere minutes he found them, weapon in hand with an honor guard of men doomed to failure at her back. Hellmourn chuckled as their weapons played futility against his hide, the general was his first disappointment of this world. A brilliant leader, but no great challenge to one such as himself. He would take his time with her.
@Durin I made a thing.
Last edited:
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
1. looks fineCommissioned art by @Slayers148
@Durin
1. Do you want any changes to this?
2. If you don't want it for Frederick, do you think it'd fit someone else?
1. no
1. no they can't. if there is one it is probably on the other continent though
1. yes
2. shifting her to 1 would increase her impact
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Hmm. Chaos Gods in order of Avernite preferences:
1. Nurgle - Blink Spider Immunity Promises GOGOGO
2. Khorne - On Avernus there is only war. Do you see how many Leads from the Front we have?
3. Slaneesh - Aphrodisiac Pollen? Population growth emphasis? Whoop!
4 Abomination - On one hand, faith. On the other, Doctrine: Initiative 4 Life.
5. Tzeentch - Keikakuwhat? We are all brothers here.
And the other way around, Avernus in order of Chaos God 'preferences':
1. Khorne - THERE IS ONLY WAR, BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD
2. Nurgle - Holy shit disease everywhere this is the best. LEF? Venom? If only they didn't have this shitty medical infrastructure in the way..
3. Tzeentch - Destroying the galaxy.. hmm... Psykers... hmm.. Hrm.
4. Slaneesh - Stupid blink spiders ruining fucks.
5. Abomination - THE SAINT MUST DIE
1. Nurgle - Blink Spider Immunity Promises GOGOGO
2. Khorne - On Avernus there is only war. Do you see how many Leads from the Front we have?
3. Slaneesh - Aphrodisiac Pollen? Population growth emphasis? Whoop!
4 Abomination - On one hand, faith. On the other, Doctrine: Initiative 4 Life.
5. Tzeentch - Keikakuwhat? We are all brothers here.
And the other way around, Avernus in order of Chaos God 'preferences':
1. Khorne - THERE IS ONLY WAR, BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD
2. Nurgle - Holy shit disease everywhere this is the best. LEF? Venom? If only they didn't have this shitty medical infrastructure in the way..
3. Tzeentch - Destroying the galaxy.. hmm... Psykers... hmm.. Hrm.
4. Slaneesh - Stupid blink spiders ruining fucks.
5. Abomination - THE SAINT MUST DIE
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- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
1. not significantly
- Location
- Australia
There are plagues other than LEF that we suffer from.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Haven't weaponized them very much though. I figure Avernus is deploying such things on it's own ofc.
- Location
- Australia
We actually have, it's just been a background thing. Now whenever we want to initiate bio-warfare we use Avernite plagues (among others) by default.
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
yes, not that they are having that much effect
Contributions of Sanctioned Psykers to the Defence of Avernus During the Second Daemonic Incursion
- Location
- Australia
Contributions of Sanctioned Psykers to the Defence of Avernus During the Second Daemonic Incursion
++Thought for the Day: The industrious may escape death.++
Over the course of the Second Daemonic Incursion, the psykers of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica would prove crucial in the defence of humanity's presence on Avernus. While the servants of the Blood God were certainly more resistant to their powers than other foes, the sheer power of the Adeptus was still enough to inflict considerable damage to them. Of course, the adepts of that organisation contributed in a number of other ways, particularly the sanctionites. The particularities of the various disciplines would confer many unique advantages upon the defenders that, because of the large gaps in Avernus' technological databanks, the defenders otherwise wouldn't have had.
Order of Restoration
The Order of Restoration would find itself chronically overworked over the course of the daemonic incursion, but such is always the case when it comes to medical professionals during wartime. The Order of Restoration would be best known for saving numerous lives by healing the grievous wounds given to the defenders by the infernal enemy. Another way that the flesh-healers assisted was by treating the plagues that the daemons carried, contracted both by simple exposure to Avernus and the occasional human-deployed bio-weapon. The order as a whole helped in other ways too.
Between potions of rest being unavailable to the bulk of the defenders and the biological limits of the human body's capacity to take in combat drugs, it would ultimately fall unto the unnatural powers of the Ordo Sanguine to fight back exhaustion and keep the defenders fighting. Though there were certainly limits to even their own power's ability to abate fatigue, they were nonetheless responsible for many guardsmen and PDF troops holding the line where they would otherwise falter from weariness.
The wisdom of those who founded the order would be realised more than ever before during the Red Skies Incursion by its third major contribution. When first planning out the order's functions and seeking out recruits to join its ranks, biomancers were not the only candidates. In addition to the healing of the flesh that the order would obviously be in charge of, it was envisioned that the order would also heal damage to the mind and the soul. To that end, telepaths and daemonologists would also join the order for their expertise in their respective fields. (Along with a few specialist diviners as diagnosticians.)
Thanks to the telepaths, the horrific mental scarring inflicted by the daemon, the witch, and the heretic would be greatly reduced, aiding both the war effort and in stunting the number of cultists that would rise after the incursion.
As for the daemonologists, they would prove the undoing of one of Khorne's most infamous - and many argue hypocritical - weapons: blood curses. Many good, faithful men and women have found themselves afflicted with maladies such as ever-bleeding wounds and crippling pains that can only be abated by the shedding of blood. With so much psi-medical technologies lost to post-Dark Age humanity, the Emperor's Mercy was commonly the best treatment these victims could receive in past times. Thanks to the Order of Restoration, however, these curses would have their power drained away by the powers of daemonologists, saving many lives and souls and improving the reputation of the oft-maligned discipline substantially.
Order of Warding
A major reason why the psyker cities held out for so long and so successfully despite both their status as high priority targets and the Khornates' resistance to their powers is the cities' wards. Oftentimes it was difficult and even outright impossible for the less powerful of the warp entities to even approach, and they were always badly weakened when they could. Assaults against them would require sub-optimally large warhosts, inefficiently dense concentrations of banners, the presence of daemons of extraordinary power, or the slow whittling down of the walls by daemon engines prior to the battle's beginning. As the ones who were largely responsible for the erecting of not only these wards, but the wards protecting various other critically important locations, the Order of Warding's contributions to the war effort are obvious.
The Order of Warding did not remain inactive during the Incursion, however. They were crucial in recharging runes, repairing or replacing broken wards, and even erecting new wards in the midst of battle to protect fortifications and sections of walls.
Sanctionite Teachers
The Sanctioned Psykers in charge of teaching new psychic students would also have a role to play in the war. In the first week, they were crucial in organising, calming down, and watching over the panicked and dangerously undisciplined children who were, without doubt, a great hazard to the safety of the psyker cities. Without their long experience managing unruly masses of immature psykers, a great amount of chaos would've befallen the cities and the loss of psyker cities during the first week would've been all but assured.
Their impact throughout the rest of the incursion would be lesser but still of pivotal importance. Their charge was to safely contain, manage, and in some cases protect those newly-awakened nascents brought in by the various internal security forces of the Hives. Throughout the chaos brought about by the new awakenings, they were significant forces in reducing the disorder to manageable levels.
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Since there was confirmation that there's only a low possibility of Areatha dying:
[X] Leave heroes where they are- Reduces the risk of losing a city on a secondary front
[X] Deploy airforce- Suffer significant damage to airforce, cause major damage to daemons on primary front
[X] Switch Areatha to Priority 1
[X] Leave heroes where they are- Reduces the risk of losing a city on a secondary front
[X] Deploy airforce- Suffer significant damage to airforce, cause major damage to daemons on primary front
[X] Switch Areatha to Priority 1
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
1. it really depends on the city, the City of Glass is a pyrimid, the UNseen Univeristy looks like a nomral city, Salamaca and Nogrod are buried, Roke Island is a tower
2. not at all