Warhammer 40000: Imperial Guardspony

Chapter Eleven

The missile struck, and the ponies lay under what could be described as destruction in the purest of forms, shielded only by intense concentration and magic. By sheer force of will they survived, standing in a brand new crater, which was devoid of anything else, and strained quite far past their limits.

What remained of the demonic horde- a discouragingly large amount- still came closer over the lip of the crater, bellows for blood and killing permeating the air, which stunk of burning fuel, bodies, and nearly everything else imaginable. Torchlight and Blinding Flash stood between their own shattered forces and their insatiable, bloodthirsty adversaries. Battered, singed, and bruised, but not weakened of resolve, the ponies stood fast.

Just in front of the horde, they could see five red bolts of what looked like lightning strike the ground. What appeared at the point of impact were five massive Chaos Terminators, one of which wielded a very large sword with what looked like faces on it, along with a wicked claw-like appendage attached to his gauntlet, which also included a twin-barrelled weapon. His appearance was ornate, and simply screamed importance. He didn't wear a helmet, and the other four Terminators were armed with large weapons and strange-looking gauntlets. They fired at the ponies, the doubly-thick magical shield holding the attacks at bay. Both unicorns aquired the special Terminator as a target. If they were going down, they might as well take this guy with them.

As the began to focus their spells, they felt a series of small tremors. A glance behind them explained the source. Space Marine Drop Pods in a steel-blue grey color. They opened, revealing their contents. Strange-looking Space Marines, heavily equipped with both peculiar and ornate weaponry, emerged from the pods. With chants of loyalty to the Emperor and death to his enemies, which could be heard over the approaching demonic horde, they proceeded with their attack. The unicorns fired their initial salvo of powerful armor-piercing spells, only for them to merely slow the special Terminator. To support their attack were the efforts of the odd Space Marines, whose strange weapons belched stranger flame, not like demonic flame, regular flame, or magical flame, but something else. It simply burned away the charging Bloodletters without mercy. The entire tide was halted by the efforts of merely a trio of squads consisting of these elite warriors.

Neither Torch nor Flash wasted any time. The Terminators had re-directed their attacks toward their new assailants. One of them fell victim to a strange blast whose point of origin was obviously another one of the Marines' weapons. The Terminators did not appear shaken, and instead quickened their pace. Between the Marines and the Terminators stood Torchlight and Blinding Flash. They would be first to engage the massive Chaos warriors. So they steeled themselves for close-range combat, Torch throwing up a wall of fire, and Flash focussing his light beam. They walked through the fire wall and the continued attacks of the ponies' reinforcements, and shrugged off Flash's beam.

Mere meters away, the ponies were defended only by a shield and whatever else they could devise as an effective attack after their previously-effective spells were rendered useless. The two ponies looked each other in the eyes, then nodded. Focussing pure magical energy to their horns, they broke into a gallop, closing the distance between them and their foe in the blink of an eye. Each unicorn's horn glowing brilliantly, they struck the warrior at full tilt, feeling their horns piercing the armor, and the magical energy discharging into their target, and then struck the hard metal of their target's armor on their foreheads. They were knocked back by the impact, and remained conscious for several seconds longer, long enough to see the great warrior felled by their attack. They'd made it count. They'd made a difference.

Epilogue

The fourteenth Black Crusade was over, though the circumstances of its decapitation and subsequent retreat are quite fuzzy to almost all parties involved. Abaddon the Despoiler had died, but nobody knew what happened that day, on some embattled corner of Cadia. Nobody but the Inquisition, of course. The other Imperial belligerents of that battle 'vanished without a trace', as per their policy in regards to deploying their trump card- the Grey Knights chapter of Space Marines.

Neither Torchlight, the excitable, fire-wielding unicorn mare, nor Blinding Flash, her loyal and unwavering stallion friend, ever returned home. To Equestria, the fates of these two would never be known, and interest in their fate would fade in time. For the Imperium, however, the case was simply a number, like so many before then. Of the two hundred and fifty-four members of the Imperium's armed forces executed following that pivotal battle as per the Inquisition's order, two ponies were counted among them. An unceremonius end, but in a vast galaxy, of what was likely quadrillions of life forms, forgotten heroes were only too common.

Equestria, in which the Imperium saw little use in keeping as any real ally following the shattering of what could have been Chaos' final attack of any significant measure, began using not just many of the unicorns that volunteered to assist the Imperial cause to assist the Golden Throne's insatiable need for psykers. Instead every single one of the unicorns was taken directly to Terra, where they would serve to feed the appetite for life that the Golden Throne seemed to bear. No being in Equestria knew anything about it, and this would continue for as long as their ruler, a one Princess Celestia, remained alive. They were well aware of the creature's influence over the Astronomican. She had threatened it with destruction, psychically linking any hostile action toward the planet of Equestria's ruler to the fate of the Astronomican, assuring its destruction at her whim. If she died by their hand, the Imperium would too. So they would not take that risk, and instead siphoned the foolish inhabitants of the world for the Emperor's continued survival, kidnapping when necessary to reach quotas. The two empires co-existed tensely for long afterward, a waiting game of sorts for both sides.

The End