Chapter 229: The Silent King Falls
Hastur voiced what all of them felt. "There is no value in negotiation with these metal abominations. They bear no goodwill toward Mankind. I suspect they would revel in humanity's annihilation without hesitation."
Little Horus's response carried the edge of barely-restrained violence. "Then we destroy them first. Their arrogance is intolerable."
"Location locked," the Communications Officer announced. "Coordinates confirmed and held."
Abaddon turned to his Primarch, his expression hungry for violence. "We have them, Commander. Let us begin. Let them understand that their age is finished."
"I concur," Torgaddon affirmed. "The time for words has passed."
Hastur stepped forward, bearing the confidence of a warrior eager for the hunt. "I volunteer for the vanguard, Commander. Grant me the honor of opening the assault."
Horus studied the faces of his warriors, the fire in their eyes, the tension coiled in their frames. They burned with righteous anger. They craved the dissolution of the Silent King with an intensity that bordered on religious conviction.
After a moment's consideration, he nodded.
"Then we march to war. In the name of the Luna Wolves and the Imperium Ascendant, we shall obliterate them utterly."
And so began the conflict between the Luna Wolves Legion and the Szarekhan Dynastym, the most ancient and powerful of the Necron dynasties.
Szarekh's position as head of the Triarch rested upon his authority over the Szarekhan Dynasty itself. Once, that dynasty had dominated all Necrontyr civilization, the most powerful, most terrifying, most advanced in technological mastery. No other dynasty could claim equality.
Had circumstances remained unchanged, the Shadow Wolves would never have possessed sufficient strength to challenge the Silent King directly.
But circumstances had transformed utterly.
With the Raven's aid, the Imperium had undergone metamorphosis. What had once been formidable had become something transcendent, a Heavens-tier power capable of prosecuting wars across dimensional boundaries, across the very fabric of multiple universes.
Though the Shadow Wolves constituted but one of twenty Astartes Legions, the technology they wielded and the destructive capacity they could project matched or exceeded even the Szarekhan Dynasty's most forbidden arsenals.
The war that erupted was apocalyptic in scope.
Imperial fleets and Necrontyr armadas clashed across voids spanning thousands of light-years. Boarding actions and counter-boarding operations became continuous. Occasionally, residual Tyranid swarms were drawn into the conflict, creating a three-way cataclysm.
Yet the Luna Wolves' overwhelming military supremacy and technological mastery gradually tilted the balance inexorably in their favor.
Necrontyr warships fell one by one.
Forbidden weapons, instruments of spatial, dimensional, and temporal destruction, tore through living metal. The ancient constructs were shredded, their self-repair mechanisms systematically negated, their regenerative capabilities stripped away.
The legions of the Szarekhan Dynasty bled.
Finally, the Luna Wolves encircled the Silent King's flagship, the Forgetfulness Song.
The vessel was massive beyond conventional measurement, a mobile world unto itself. According to records, it had been constructed with direct assistance from the C'tan themselves, rendering it a weapon of singular terror and power.
The escort fleet was methodically destroyed. The Forgetfulness Song stood alone, surrounded by an armada bent upon its annihilation.
Yet its defenses proved extraordinarily resilient.
Even when Imperial forces deployed spatial warheads capable of collapsing the very fabric of space-time, the damage was merely superficial, perhaps tens of square meters of two-dimensional space created before the breach forcibly restored itself.
Antimatter payloads, each sufficient to tear continents from a planetary body, detonated upon its hull. The explosions carved deep, terrible craters, yet inflicted no true harm on the vessel's essential systems.
Time-acceleration beams, weapons capable of reducing organic matter to atomic decay in microseconds, washed across its superstructure without visible effect.
Repeated temporal bombardment seemed to pass through the Forgetfulness Song as though it existed outside causality itself. As if some eternal enchantment had rendered it immune to the ravages of temporal erosion, untouchable by any power that time itself could exert.
Conventional siege tactics became the only recourse.
The Astartes would board and fight their way through the vessel's interior, a tactic born of their very essence as warriors of close-quarters devastation.
After a final, devastating bombardment created a breach in the shield envelope, assault gunships launched en masse. They pierced the wound in the vessel's defenses and penetrated into the Forgetfulness Song's interior.
Abaddon, Torgaddon, and the other senior officers each led strike teams through the vessel's labyrinthine passages, destroying vital systems and reducing core infrastructure to rubble.
Horus reserved his personal attention for a more specific objective: finding Szarekh himself and settling their dispute through the ancient language of single combat.
After a bitter, grinding campaign through the flagship's corridors, Horus discovered his prey.
The Silent King occupied the Triarch Throne itself, a seat of power wreathed in the elite guard of the Necrontyr: the Triarch Praetorians, each a masterwork of lethal precision.
Horus's enhanced perception conducted a comprehensive tactical analysis as his Gene Engine processed every detail.
The Triarch Throne was itself a weapon of apocalyptic design, built from countless advanced technologies layered into a singular purpose.
At its core burned fragments of a C'tan—Nyadra'zatha, the Burning One, lending its eternal power to the throne's function.
Szarekh's cloak was woven from C'tan alloy, ancient beyond reckoning.
The Rod of Office he held channeled the power of the C'tan themselves, capable of unleashing destruction of unfathomable magnitude.
The pair of Triarch Steles flanking the throne was equally formidable, capable of amplifying the Throne's inherent power and projecting a weapon known as the Wrath of the Gods.
"I did not anticipate such a remarkable species would flourish in my absence," the Silent King communicated, his words not passing through the air but resonating directly within Horus's consciousness through pure mental projection.
"You are... unexpected."
"And You are a relic," Horus responded, his stride carrying him forward without hesitation. "An artifact of a dead age."
The Praetorians moved to intercept, but Horus's personal guard surged forward to engage them. Combat erupted, a savage melee of superhuman strength and lethal precision.
Yet Horus himself continued his advance, unconcerned by the fighting that raged around him.
Any Praetorian foolish enough to place itself directly in his path was swept aside, dismembered by the sweep of his claws or pulverized beneath his warhammer with brutal finality.
The Triarch Throne flared with radiance. Szarekh raised his hand, unleashing annihilation beams that could reduce worlds to their component atoms.
They were utterly ineffective.
A Primarch embodied godlike power. The Triarch Throne could unleash forces capable of unmaking creation itself, yet it could not touch him. Its weapons could not even scratch his void shields.
Realizing the futility of ranged assault, Szarekh rose from his throne.
It had been eons since he had engaged in close personal combat. Yet the muscle memory of his ancient youth remained crystalline, preserved in perfect clarity as if only moments had passed.
His form was sculpted from the finest living metal civilization could produce, a mechanical apotheosis of perfect engineering. His neural structures, fully synthesized and operating through pure logic, were superior to any organic mind. Flesh and blood could not compete with such perfection.
Szarekh moved to meet his opponent.
Every observer in the chamber believed this would be a contest of legend, a battle that would echo through the ages.
Horus swung his warhammer in a devastating arc.
The first blow shattered the Rod of Office entirely. The force behind it drove Szarekh to his knees, the ancient king reeling from the impact.
"Is this what you desired, xeno?" Horus's voice thundered through the chamber, thick with barely-contained fury. "Your epoch has ended. With a gesture, I can consign you to irrelevance."
Szarekh raised his head, his optical sensors burning with incandescent rage.
In that same instant, Horus's claws, each one capable of rending adamantium, pierced through his chest cavity.
"Negate all probability vectors regarding this entity's survival," Horus commanded the systems integrated into his very being. "Define its survival probability as absolute zero."
"Instruction acknowledged. Initiating causal modification sequence. Target survival probability is designated as 0."
And thus the Silent King, the sovereign of an ancient dynasty, the rebel against the C'tan themselves, the architect of empires, ceased.
...
While Horus prosecuted his vendetta against the Szarekhan Dynasty, another Primarch was advancing upon a very different objective.
Vulcan, master of the Salamanders Legion, had arrived at the world of Cadia—the outer sentinel of the Eye of Terror itself.
"This place reeks of ignorance and spiritual decay," Vulcan observed, surveying the world below from his position in the upper atmosphere.
The world of Cadia spread beneath him like an open wound in reality itself.
Upon arrival, he had immediately dispatched forward reconnaissance teams and diplomatic envoys to the surface. They had begun their work: establishing contact with the native populations, disseminating the Imperial Truth, and offering the path of the Omnissiah.
The natives of Cadia existed in a state of profound degradation. The long Age of Night had stripped them of all higher learning, all accumulated knowledge. They had regressed entirely into tribal existence, their entire consciousness consumed by superstition and faith-based thinking.
Their bodies bore strange tattoos, intricate patterns formed from Warp symbols rendered into flesh.
Temples and altars marked the landscape like a plague of devotional monuments.
Most peculiar of all, their eyes bore an unusual coloration, a deep, unsettling violet that appeared nowhere else within Imperial space.
The very sky above Cadia was abhorrent. Both daylight and darkness existed simultaneously beneath a writhing chaos of distorted Warp phenomena. Spiraling vermillion and amethyst storms churned overhead like some vast, unblinking eye perpetually surveying the world below.
Those violet eyes, Vulcan understood, had turned that color precisely because of this environmental phenomenon.
"Is this corruption by Warp influence?" Numien, the Captain of the Pyre Guard, inquired carefully.
Vulcan's massive frame was still as carved stone. Within his consciousness, the Fire Dragon Engine, the transhuman intelligence integrated into his being, processed data in cascading analytical chains.
"The Fire Dragon Engine has integrated all available environmental and biometric data concerning Cadia. Cross-referencing against localized space-time readings yields a definitive conclusion: these natives have been subjected to Warp corruption," he replied.
"The degree and extent of that corruption requires additional empirical data before precise quantification becomes possible."
Numien gazed at the Cadia projection suspended before them, then back to his Primarch. "What is our operational directive?"
"The Imperium's mandate is to construct a Subspace suppressor here, to seal and begin restoration of the Eye of Terror. These people are so utterly wedded to their demonic faith that they will never permit such construction willingly."
"We shall attempt persuasion first," Vulcan replied, his words measured and deliberate. "I will demonstrate the Imperium's benevolence and offer them salvation through compliance."
"And if they refuse?" Numien pressed, raising his eyebrow, noting that they will eventually butcher the way here, so why bother with wasting time.
"Then we shall demonstrate the Imperium's absolute authority," Vulcan responded, his voice dropping into registers that suggested far darker implications.
The teleportation portal tore open, a wound in space-time itself connecting the Forge of Flames to Cadia's surface. Vulcan emerged surrounded by the Pyre Guard, each warrior radiating barely-controlled power.
To the natives watching, the Primarch descended as a deity might, divine, terrible, and absolute.
The natives responded with reverence born of primal fear. To minds steeped in superstition, the advanced technology displayed before them was indistinguishable from godlike power.
A figure emerged from the crowd, a man clad in a cloak dyed a faded peach, its coloration suggesting age and significance. He approached Vulcan and fell to one knee in supplication.
Vulcan's perception, augmented by the Fire Dragon Engine, immediately began analyzing the cloak's composition.
Human skin. The garment was woven from human skin, worn as though it represented honor and status.
Vulcan's expression darkened.
[End of Chapter]
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