Chapter 262: The Gift (Patreon)

The battle still raged on.

The Lamenters had been placed in a secure location to rest, at the direct order of Commander Dante himself. Their battered forms bore scars from countless battles, their yellow armor chipped and darkened by the blood of alien monstrosities, yet their discipline held unbroken. They were warriors forged in despair, but even the Lamenters had limits, and Dante had judged that to push them further this day would have been to lose them entirely.

Chapter Master Malakim Phoros, along with the other company captains of the Lamenters, had been summoned to the audience chamber to join Dante.

Upon entering, Dante strode toward the Throne of Command and seated himself heavily. The chamber stretched vast and vaulted, a sanctum of war and remembrance. Its walls bore the weight of millennia, battle honors inscribed upon banners, angelic statues carved from Baalite marble, relics that whispered of both triumph and grief. Yet its grandeur felt muted, suffocated beneath the oppressive weight of the moment.

Dante movements were deliberate, burdened. From beneath the golden mask of Sanguinius, Phoros could hear the rasp of Dante’s breath. It was harsh, uneven, and slow, the sound of a body pushed far beyond mortal endurance.

Phoros bowed respectfully to Dante, then cast his gaze around the chamber. The air shimmered with tension, a palpable silence pressing down upon those gathered. He saw many of the Blood Angels’ senior officers and mortal allies assembled.

Among them were Chief Librarian Mephiston, a towering figure clad in crimson and sable, his presence as heavy as the psychic storm that seethed about him, restrained but never still; High Sanguinary Priest Corbulo,solemn bearer of the Red Grail, his expression carved from grief and duty; General Dhrost, commander of the Astra Militarum regiments sent to Baal’s defense; and even a senior figure among the Adepta Sororitas, her armor immaculate and her face a mask of stern devotion.

A moment later, the great chamber doors opened once more, admitting Captain Karlaen of the First Company, followed by several other Chapter Masters of the Blood Angels’ successor Chapters whose forces had rallied to Baal.

Phoros’s eyes finally settled on General Dhrost, and he noted, with a start, that the man’s eyes burned with an unnatural violet hue.

“Your presence here honors Baal,” Dante’s voice carried across the hall, resonant yet ragged, aged and weary. The tremor in his tone only reinforced what Phoros had already suspected: the Lord of the Blood Angels was wounded.

“This is our dut—” Phoros began, but Dhrost interrupted, his voice sharp with desperation.

“Are you from Cadia?” the General demanded.

Phoros turned his head toward him. The man was almost trembling, his urgency palpable.

“Yes,” Phoros replied.

“What of Cadia?!” Dhrost pressed, the words spilling from him as if he feared the answer would never come.

Phoros answered evenly, his voice firm as stone. “Cadia still stands.”

The General exhaled shakily, relief washing across his features. “Praise the Throne… praise the God-Emperor…” His whispered prayer carried the weight of a man who had lived in torment, uncertain of his homeworld’s fate.

For Dhrost was Cadian by birth. When he had been ordered to lead Imperial regiments to defend the Red Scar Sector in Ultima Segmentum, Cadia itself had been aflame with war. But unreliable astropathic transmissions had been garbled, fragmented by the warp. All Dhrost had known was that Cadia was under brutal assault, its fleet annihilated, its bastions besieged.

Every waking moment since then had been poisoned with doubt, and every night haunted by the thought that he might never again see the fortress-world whose discipline had shaped him.

Phoros turned back to Dante. “I came from the Infernis system,” he said, hesitating. “There…”

“It is already lost,” Dante finished for him.

Phoros, of course, knew this. But he longed to understand the details, why the oceans of his homeworld, Infernis III, had been scoured into desolation, and how the entire system had fallen.

Dante seemed to sense his questions. Slowly, heavily, he began to recount the truth.

Before Baal itself had come under attack, the Cryptus and Infernis system had been the first battlefield, both important Shield Systems for Baal with their unique natural ice aegis, vast spheres of frozen stellar matter that encased their system orbits, a bulwark against void incursions since the Age of Technology.

The Tyranid Hive Fleet had emerged from the Infernis aegis, their bio-ships frozen in stasis as expected. The Imperial Navy had advanced, preparing to destroy the helpless swarm.

But the xenos vessels had revived in unison, erupting from their torpor, and annihilated the fleet in a single cataclysmic strike.

The story repeated in Cryptus, though with cruel variance. The hive fleet had sailed straight through the Aegis, coating themselves in layers of vile resin that froze into diamond-hard shells. This shield not only protected the Tyranids from the unnatural cold but was also proof against the Imperial battlefleet’s massed shell and lance weapons. Numbering millions of bio-ships and lesser organisms, the alien tendril divided as it sailed in-system, splitting like a cancer to engulf each inhabited world.

The Imperial ships were brushed aside, overwhelmed by an enemy that outnumbered them many times over. The battle among the stars was lost in a span of hours, the rest of the system's defenders forced to watch, powerless, from their planetary fortifications as the Tyranids consumed the Imperial fleet and moved in for the kill.

General Dhrost and the Sisters of Battle had fought desperately to repel the Tyranid ground assault, but even their combined defense crumbled. The Canoness herself had been slain, impaled by the talons of a Tyranid Lictor.

Worse still, the chaos of war had awakened a long-buried host of Necrons, who, in a cruel irony, allied with the humans against the Tyranid tide. Together, they unleashed devastation by activating the ancient Necrontyr weapon known as the Magnovitrium, unleashing shockwaves that scorched the entire system.

Even so, the Shieldworlds had been all but broken. Cryptus and Infernis fell.

Dante paused for a long moment, his silence heavy with mourning. Then he said grimly:

“I had no choice but to focus my efforts on defending Baal. To slow the swarm’s approach and to deny them sustenance, I commanded Exterminatus upon the worlds in their path. A dead zone, barren of biomass.”

Phoros’s mind echoed with the name: the Kryptman Gambit. The strategy devised by the Lord Inquisitor Kryptman, whereby to deny the Hive Fleet biomass by burning all worlds to the ground along its advance, creating a buffer zone in hope to divert the Tyranids by denying the sustenance they craved.

But the tactic had failed. The swarm had not been swayed from their path.

“Yet the swarm came anyway,” Dante said, voice cracking with bitter weariness. “They crossed the dead zone without hesitation. As though driven not by hunger, but by vengeance.”

“It is as I have long suspected,” Mephiston interjected, his tone dark and contemplative. “The Tyranids are not mere beasts, driven only by instinct. There is an intelligence guiding them. A will. One that remembers every defeat we have dealt them. And now, it comes for us in wrath.”

Phoros inclined his head gravely. The words resonated with grim truth.

Then Mephiston’s gaze fixed upon him. “And Cadia?” he asked. “It is true, then? The Eye of Terror has… diminished, has it not?”

Phoros nodded. “The Blackstone pylons were activated. The warp was suppressed across the sector. The traitors like Typhus, his flesh rotting, yet still animate, was rendered powerless once the pylons flared to life.”

“Just as I thought,” murmured Mephiston, recalling the battle on Baal.

For when the Blood Angels had stood against the swarm, it had not been Tyranids alone. A Khornate Greater Daemon, known as Ka’Bandha, had sought to breach the veil of reality.

Mephiston and every psyker of the Chapter had strained against it. And at the last moment, as the daemon was on the brink of manifestation, the warp itself had weakened, like a tide retreating. Ka’Bandha had been denied entry.

That moment had changed everything. The Librarian knew that the galaxy itself had shifted, that some greater power had acted to blunt the Immaterium’s reach.

As Mephiston pondered this revelation, Phoros’s eyes drifted back to Dante.

“My lord… what has befallen you?”

The Chapter Master hesitated, breathing heavily. At last, he removed the golden mask.

For the first time, Phoros beheld Dante’s true face, not the indomitable visage he had imagined, but that of a weary, aged warrior. His hair was grey and thinned, his features gaunt and scarred, yet his eyes still blazed with unwavering resolve.

“I am wounded,” Dante admitted, placing the mask upon his knee as he slumped back against the throne. “A Trygon Prime tore its way beneath the fortress, seeking to shatter the void shields. I was too late to stop it.”

His voice shook with restrained fury.

“The beast emerged within the vaults where our Neophytes slept, aspirants yet to awaken to the path of glory. They were slaughtered before they even opened their eyes. Their blood denied to the Chapter… their promise snuffed out.”

Phoros bowed his head in grief, mourning the lost Sons of Sanguinius. To perish in the gestation pods, never to know their gene-legacy, never to wield bolter or chainsword, was a tragedy beyond words.

“Emperor curse those vermin,” Dante snarled, his hands clenching the throne’s armrests. “The facilities that once produced the anti-radiation serums are gone. Even should we win, the system will never be restored.”

Phoros thought grimly that Dante was still being optimistic. Without those life-sustaining treatments, the entire Red Scar sector would wither under the radiation. Its people would die, not all at once, but inevitably.

Dante drew a shuddering breath. “Will you lend your strength to Baal’s defense?”

The humility in the request struck Phoros. The Lord of the Angels was every bit as noble as the legends claimed, and yet he spoke not as a king demanding fealty, but as a brother asking aid.

“To defend Baal is our duty,” Phoros said firmly. Then, after a pause, he added: “But I did not come from Cadia alone. Before my arrival, I made a detour to the Talon Sector, and I have brought gifts from its ruler.”

At the mention of the Lord of Talon, the newly appointed Canoness stiffened, her expression souring. She knew of Talon’s reputation, whispers of heresy, of dealings best left unspoken.

Dante’s gaze flicked over Phoros’s armor, its embellishments betraying the provenance of its wargear. “It seems they were generous indeed. Tell me, Phoros, what gift have they sent?”

Phoros raised his hand slowly, holding up three fingers.

“Enough Tactical Dreadnought Armour, with arms and wargear, to equip three full Chapters of Astartes.”