The Equus Crusade

Chapters

Hunting Pirates
The Hengroen
A bloody meeting
Boots on the ground
A message in the dark
Temple of the Five
Mountain of madness
Burning Skies
Gathering storm
On the moon
The Pride
Imperfect return

Hunting Pirates

Five brothers advanced with their bolters and chainswords pointed towards a colourful crowd of fleeing enemies. They were the knights of squad Tiberius, they had shed blood in His name side by side for decades, some even for centuries, they were among the best warriors of their entire chapter and now they were hunting down a bunch of disorganized, poorly equipped and untrained pirates. Obviously, the astartes felt like their talents were being wasted.

The armours of the five knights were mostly grey like the walls of the vessel, their black pauldrons were decorated with the symbol of their chapter: a single white hammer pointed upward crossing a grey screaming skull.

Their chapter, the ancient but poorly regarded Star Lords, had sent them on patrol duty around their home planet. Many in the Imperium did not love them, and not many requested their aid unless there was no other chapter available to answer the call of battle. The last great campaign in which they had participated had finished ten years before and since then they had been only protecting their own little turf.

Their enemies, weak and honourless, had fled the moment they had seen the transhuman soldiers and had yet to stop after running for several minutes. Tiberius had always hated the enemies of the Imperium, as all astartes should, but this was the first time he outright despised them, even most Orks had the decency to die fighting.

“This is bad comedy” angrily said Cadriel, the youngest of the five, as his chainsword cut through two men who were running away. His relative youth meant that he the one who was most looking for glory, but there was none to be found in that forsaken vessel.

“Focus on duty, brother, not on glory” Tiberius scolded him as his bolter made quick work of three pirates; their bodies disappeared in a bloody explosion as the rounds hit them.

Even if those unlucky enough to find themselves in that forgettable place made the mental effort to remove the blood and body parts from the corridors of the vessel, they remained an unpleasant sight. Most of the cabling was dangerously exposed to the outside world while the floor and walls were made out of various pieces of looted metals of varying quality and sometimes even out of wood. The entire thing had been covered by mould on the ceiling and on the walls and an unhealthy layer of trash on floor. A scene that could have been taken straight out of a hive where universal poverty was the only respected and enforced rule.

“What are the other squads doing?” Aphaniel calmly asked, his voice a deep and cavernous grumble, as he followed the retreating defenders while shooting them with his bolter. Aphaniel was the oldest brother of the squad, and was expected to succeed Tiberius once the sergeant met his hopefully glorious end. As such, he was the one with the honour of carrying the squad’s banner into battle, but that was not a battle worthy of any banner owned by their chapter.

“Squad Telemachus is cutting its way to the escape pods and squad Titus is going towards the engines, brother, we will be the ones who will take the command bridge” Tiberius explained the mission to the rest of the squad, then shot a man right in the head causing an explosion of blood and bones.

Icarus, the apothecary, had opted for not shooting at the enemies. Instead, he was in the rear, with his bolter ready to strike at any moment, watching his brothers' backs and making sure that their enemies wouldn't attempt to ambush them like the cowards they were. He was comfortable there, in the rearguard where he could watch over his brothers.

Cassius, the techmarine, was right next to Tiberius, firing his bolter in unison with his sergeant. The two of them had been inseparable for as long as they had been brothers and had fought in countless wars across the galaxy, many around them felt like one could not exist without the other.

Once the squad turned around a corner, they were greeted by a firing line of six las-guns doing their best to damage their armour. The defenders were firing everything they had from a hastily assembled barricade. Their most valuable piece of equipment was a machine gun placed at the centre of the barricade. Three terrified men did their best to fire their weapon as precisely as they could even if most of their hits were clearly having no effect on the supersoldiers in front of them.

“Is this the best you have, whelps?” Cadriel shouted as he fired several bursts with his bolter.

The reply came in the form many more las-gun shots coming from the end of the corridor. A great deal of them missed, but even more found their marks in the power armour of the astartes. Such weapons didn’t possess enough power to wound even one of the marines, especially when their numbers were so low, but they did succeed in making Cadriel even angrier and getting him to fire a full burst instead of the single shots he and his brothers had been carefully using until that point.

“End of the corridor, twenty humans” Tiberius said as he joined Cadriel in firing at them.

“I can see that!” Cadriel replied, clearly annoyed by his sergeant, as he kept on firing and killing more men. Most of them would have screamed from the pain of being ripped apart by the explosion, but the bolter rounds had completely pulverized their lungs and throats. All that some of them could produce was a muffled gargle as blood clogged their mouths and stained the floor before dying.

Instead of talking, Cassius simply stepped forward and fired several full bursts from the hip with perfect accuracy. This simple act completely shredded the barricade and machine gun on it. The men shooting the gun were sawed in half as the most of their torsos ceased to exist in the blink of an eye. They didn’t even have the time to look confused because a final burst made their heads disappear.

Cassius always preferred actions over words, he found them to be more helpful during a battle. This habit of not being much of a talker had prevented him from rising too much through the ranks of the chapter or gaining the honours and decorations associated with a brother of the first company, but the knights of squad Tiberius knew they could always rely on him and his skills.

His brothers were right behind him as he then charged at the barricade he had already almost completely demolished with his bolter, their chainswords roaring to terrible life as what was left of the pile of wood was utterly destroyed by the impact of five astartes hitting it at full speed. Behind it, there were almost fifty men prepared to fight for their lives.

The moments that followed were a chaotic blur of blood and fire as the carnage painted the room with blood, gore and bits of shattered bones. “Cleanse them in holy slaughter, brothers!” Tiberius shouted as he cut a spinal cord in half with a single punch and his right hand fired his bolter into the crowd that now seemed to be looking for death.

“Death by our hands is their way to salvation!” Replied Icarus while plunged his chainsword in the belly of a man. The other three were coldly performing their sacred duty without the need to exchange any words, just three killing machines working as intended by their creator.

As the carnage was about end just as quickly as it began, Cadriel asked, “Why did these men decide to fight now? They were fleeing just moments ago”

“I think I know the answer to your question” replied Tiberius “Squad Telemachus, this is squad Tiberius, what’s your status? Over” he asked over the vox.

“This is squad Telemachus, we have reached the escape pods, brothers, we’re holding position as we destroy them, resistance is occasional and ineffective, over” A booming and powerful voice replied.

“Understood, hunt well, over” Tiberius ended the short exchange fo words and reported the news he had just received to his brothers.

“So they are choosing death now that their retreat has been cut off” replied Aphaniel as he ended the fight by cutting the head of a man who was charging straight at him “I do not blame them” he added as the man fell to the ground.

The severed head rolled on the floor for a few brief moments before being crushed like a rotten grape by the sergeant’s armoured foot.

“This changes nothing for us, maintain attack formation and keep moving towards the command bridge” Tiberius said as he fired the last round in his bolter on one of the wounded crawling on the ground.

The fight towards the command bridge was uneventful, the astartes tore down more frail barricades and more men died by bolter and blade. The five knights soon began to find the entire affair to be cripplingly boring, even during the fights. No barricade was a real obstacle and none of the ambushes were inspired or cleverly timed.

These pirates were insulting the art of war, the art the Star Lords chapter tried to perfect with every battle, only to see it defiled by a bunch of honourless scoundrels. The anger that soon began boiling in the veins of the marines quickly became a welcome substitute to the boredom in their minds.

After almost half an hour of little skirmishes and pointless ambushes, the five brothers found themselves in front of a large steel door with a single golden Aquila at its centre.

“They have sealed this one, but it’s a fragile thing, it will not hold for long,” said Aphaniel as he placed his large armoured hand on the door.

“Cassius and Cadriel, stay right by my side, Aphaniel and Icarus, stand ready on the left side” Tiberius ordered then added “as soon as I kick this door in, Aphaniel will throw a grenade, then you will rush in after me and prioritize the sides, I will take care of the centre, is that understood?”

“Yes my liege” the four brothers replied in unison and placed themselves accordingly. Cassius and Cadriel on the right side of the door, right next to Tiberius, and Icarus and Aphaniel on the left side. Aphaniel already had a grenade in his right hand.

As predicted, the door had no chance resist the powerful kick of a space marine and it flew for several metres because of Tiberius’ powerful kick. Aphaniel threw his grenade immediately after, causing many screams form the defenders.

Tiberius led his brothers into the room anticipating only the usual weak and poorly equipped rabble, he was caught completely by surprise when several bolter rounds flew in his direction and exploded right behind him.

They were coming from a man who was clearly in his later years as his weak arms could barely hold the powerful gun, he wore a ragged Imperial Navy officer’s uniform and held one of the bolters that were usually issued to the Adepta Sororitas in his right hand. Despite possessing weaponry infinitely superior to that of his subordinates, Tiberius did not let himself be intimidated and proved him to be just as fragile as the rest of the crew as he made his head explode with a well-placed shot between his eyes.

What remained of the crew quickly disappeared under the volleys of fire from the marines. One of the men desperately attempted to reach for the bolter that had fallen to the ground, but Cassius swiftly cut him down.

The slaughter was over in a matter of seconds. As the last man fell to the ground, Tiberius took some time to analyse to room. A massive portrait of the man who had greeted them with a bolter in hand was hanging between two large windows that allowed the room to receive decent lighting from the void. A black table surrounded by six red chairs, clearly the seat of some pirate council, dominated the small command bridge. Two cogitators near the window hummed quietly now that they were no longer in use.

“At least this room doesn’t look like an underhive” Cadriel said as he reloaded his bolter.

Looking outside one of the two windows, Tiberius recognized the grey and long shape of the battle barge Hengroen, the mightiest vessel belonging to their chapter. It was from that ship that the assault on the pirate vessel had begun.

Looking at the vessel, the sergeant remembered that it was his duty to report his success to his liege, Brother-Captain Galahad.

“Brother-Captain Galahad, this is squad Tiberius, we have reached our target and achieved our objective, no casualties to report, over” the sergeant reported over the vox.

The captain replied almost immediately, his voice stern and authoritative “understood Brother-Sergeant, head to the hangar area of the vessel, a thunderhawk will pick you up once the other squads have finished dealing with their objectives, over”

As the five brothers entered the belly of a thunderhawk, Icarus asked “brothers, do you think it was a rogue officer we found in the command bridge?”

As expected, Tiberius was the first one to answer “Doubtful, brother, an Imperial officer who had turned on His light would have run once he saw a battle barge, this one was too ignorant to know a fight he had no hope of winning”

“What about the uniform, and that bolter?” Icarus insisted as the thunderhawk took off and its door closed with a metallic sound.

“He probably got them in exchange for something else, mayhaps a far better ship than what he had in his last moments” Aphaniel inserted himself in the conversation “he wouldn’t have been the first or the last man to be fooled by a smooth talking merchant”

During the flight to the Hengroen, Icarus and Cadriel were the most talkative brothers of the squad, both expressing their sentiments towards the fight that had just happened, with the latter making sure that all his brothers knew how much disgust still gripped his bones after he had to slaughter the unworthy.

In the void of space, the noise of their discussion became the only discernible sound in the belly of the thunderhawk besides the ones produced by the engine. This greatly annoyed the other three space marines, who were trying to be as quiet as possible.

“I command silence! From the both of you!” Tiberius ordered with all the authority his powerful voice could muster “The moments after a battle are meant for meditation, brothers, not for boasting or bickering, this behaviour is beneath you” he turned away from the two bickering brothers who became very silent immediately after.

The silence ordered by the sergeant set immediately after as each warrior focused on their inner thoughts about what they had done and how they had killed. Paying close attention on where the vessel of their minds sailed after they recalled of particular killing or action and occasionally steering it away from the dangerous waters of satisfaction and vainglory where only damnation waited if one lingered there for long enough.

After letting the mind wander for some time, they took to the helm and guided themselves in the direction of the seas of devotion and dedication to Him, where sacred duty finally found meaning and the mind could rest.

The silence remained in place for the rest of the flight, not a single soul dared breaking it, not even the pilot once he reached the hangar bay of the Hengroen. He simply landed and opened the landing ramp; everyone knew the procedure, there was no need to announce it every time. The only surprise was Brother-Captain Galahad standing outside, clearly waiting for them.

He was not wearing his helmet, his white hairs and red bionic eye were in full view of his brothers “greetings brothers, hunted well?” he asked with a smile.

“It was no hunt, just butcher’s work, a waste of time” Cadriel spoke out of turn, earning himself a stare through the red eye-lenses of his sergeant “My liege” he then added, just to spite his superior.

“As our brother said, there was nothing in that vessel that could have wounded any of us” Tiberius intervened “To what do I owe the honour of your greetings right on the hangar?”

“I am here to proclaim that you will no longer have to face unworthy foes, for now” he announced with pride in his voice.

“You found a target for the company?” Aphaniel asked, but no one reprimanded the old marine for speaking out of turn. Despite his lack of rank, his years had earned him the quiet respect of his brothers.

“Yes, we finally have real orders” Galahad explained “astartes forces have been requested, and the chapter has decided that means us”

Now it was finally Tiberius’ turn to ask a question “May we know who calls for our aid?” .

“The order to deploy come from the homeworld itself, brother, but the request for additional forces comes from the Ordo Xenos, we are going on a crusade”.

The Hengroen

The five knights of squad Tiberius were in the belly of the Hengroen, training for the oncoming war against the xenos. They were wearing grey robes while their armours looked at the black walls of the room like ancient guardian statues covered by the shadows of a forgotten temple.

The chapter had made the room exclusive for squad Tiberius’s use, so that the field specialists may train together and develop their bonds of brotherhood. The practice of having small teams of superbly skilled knights who would operate with a high degree of autonomy on the field was not a practice adopted by most chapters, but it had served the Star Lords very well in their long history.

Outsiders viewed the creation of a small elite caste within the chapter with suspicion, but those within deemed it necessary. The chapter did not have suits of terminator armour or a vast armoury filled with all sorts of vehicles, so they had to rely on special infantry teams, like squad Tiberius, to achieve victory. They all had access to rooms like the one squad Tiberius was using.

The room was large enough so that several land raiders could fit in it and still have lot of room to manoeuvre. It had no windows because all windows were structural weaknesses and the room was supposed to be one of the safest places in the entire vessel. It had a shooting range with moving targets and covers, a large arena with a sand floor where the knights could practice fighting with foes on their level and a smaller one that could be filled with combat servitors.

Icarus and Cadriel were sparring together in the large arena at the centre of the room brightened by a large rectangular light on the ceiling. Both of their chests, arms and legs were exposed so that any new cuts could be immediately noticed and a winner declared. They only thing they were wearing was a short white loincloth.

Their godly physiques were not covered in scars like the veterans; they had earned their share of wounds and permanent cuts, but much of their excessively white skin was still smooth like glass. They were not born that way, it was a side effect of the chapter’s gene-seed: the once pure blood of Dorn had mutated in a way that gave all Star Lords white hairs and an unnaturally smooth skin regardless of their age.

Icarus was keeping his blade close to himself, guarding his legs and chest while strategically giving ground as he tried to tire his opponent out and waited for the perfect moment to strike and disarm him.

Cadriel was the opposite of his older brother. He knew he was being lured into a trap, but he felt he had the skills necessary to fight his way out of any situation. He chased him, not giving a room to breathe as he kept himself as close as possible to him hoping he would eventually make a wrong move he could exploit.

Tiberius watched the duel in silence with his blue and made mental notes of his brothers’ technique so that he may criticize it once the duel was over. Cassius was right next to him, also observing the duel and taking notes, but he was planning to let the sergeant speak before uttering a single word of his own.

Aphaniel was also there, but he had no interest in the duel and he was carefully picking apart his bolter and rebuilding it again and again. He had no care for duels and critiquing of his brothers’ worth as warriors; he knew they would all do their part when the time came and that was enough for him. He had never had a reason to doubt their skills.

Cadriel basked in the light and the attention as he relentlessly attacked Icarus, who was not having any problems deflecting his blows.

“So these Xenos we are about to fight” he said between sword strokes “Do we know anything about them? The captain said nothing”

“Only that they are not just one species” Tiberius replied, “We will be facing a confederation”

“A confederation! You will enjoy the variety Aphaniel” Icarus commented as he deflected a powerful blow from Cadriel and almost disarmed him with quick move of wrist, but failed due to his brother’s wise decision to pull back before it was too late.

“Indeed I shal!l” Aphaniel lifted his bolter in front of his eyes “I heard of their dragons and they do sound like worthy foes”.

“I doubt they shall be as mighty as those of songs and myths,” Icarus said as a long thrust forced him to take a few steps back.

“We shall know their might when we join battle with them, not before” Tiberius was annoyed by the speculations of his brothers. They sounded like a dangerous lack of focus in his hears.

“Speaking of battles I am going to win” Cadriel rushed forward, and Icarus replied with a wide slash from the right.

He deflected the attack and grabbed the blade’s pommel; Icarus instantly reacted with a punch straight to the face and breaking his brother’s nose. It was exactly what Cadriel needed, his own blade moved like lightning as it inflicted a wound on his Icarus’s exposed arm.

Just like that, the duel was over. Both sides lowered their blades and shook their hands.

“Well fought,” Icarus said, his blood had already coagulated.

Knowing the duel had ended in his defeat, Icarus went to place his training sword on its respective place on the weapon rack and put back his robes while Cadriel did the same.

It was all part of their morning routine, the two young marines would train under the gaze of the veterans, who would offer critique if they deemed it necessary, before spending the rest of the morning using their bolters.

Tiberius himself stopped them just as they walked out of the arena “now I will show you what you did wrong” he already had a blade of his own.

Icarus complied immediately and walked back toward the arena, expecting to receive a lecture on his defensive technique, but he was stopped once again by his sergeant.

“Not you, Cadriel is the one who has to learn something today”

“Me? I won, he lost” Cadriel was just as surprised as Icarus, he thought that only losers had to learn lessons. That was the reason why Tiberius wanted to focus on him "why do you single me out like this?"

“Just get back in the arena” Tiberius ordered as he removed his robes and stepped in the arena, the light from above made his skin even brighter than usual.

Tiberius and Cadriel went to opposite corners of the arena and rushed at each after a quick bow.

A normal man would have been turned to red jelly after being hit by one of the two astartes because of the superhuman speed they had reached in a matter of seconds. Their blades flashed and sparkled as the astartes fought faster than lightning. They dashed, dodged and parried with the experience born out of centuries of combat. The fight looked like a well choreographed dance performed by two superb dancers preparing for a great spectacle to be enjoyed only by the nobles of the upper spires in a famous hive city.

The two warriors were equally matched and equally aggressive with their moves. For each move that Cadriel had mastered, Tiberius had a counter move that forced the take a step back and try again but Tiberius himself could not yet break through Cadriel's defences yet.

The first crack in the defences was when the blade of Tiberius got dangerously close Cadriel’s right leg.

“You have neglected your defensive techniques for far too long, Cadriel,” Tiberius said.

“Tell me, Sergeant, have we ever been on the defensive?” Cadriel closed the distance and tried to force Tiberius to step back, but he held his ground

“More times than you could expect, but you are young, you will learn all aspects of warfare one day”

“Do not patronize me, old man!” Cadriel was struggling with mainlining a good defence, but his pride prevented from taking a step back. His sergeant had singled him out and he needed a spectacular victory to preserve his honour.

“I am not that old” Tiberius chuckled, he was barely three centuries old. Aphaniel, with his four and a half centuries, deserved the title a lot more than him.

Cadriel’s blood began to boil as heard the chuckle.

“Do not laugh at me!” Cadriel’s rage propelled him forward and made his attacks stronger and faster, but less graceful and more predictable. He was completely out of position, a fact that Tiberius could easily exploit

“Well, stop making me laugh”

It was Tiberius’ turn to step forward and make his first real move. Exploiting his brother’s wrong footing, he inserted his leg between Cadriel's thighs and used the advantage he just gained. Cadriel fell to the ground with the grace of an elephant dropped from orbit.

He looked up at his sergeant with a mixture of rage and surprise. His hands and arms were trembling, itching for a fight, as if he wanted to continue the duel regardless of the rules. Only the respect he still had for his sergeant and brother stopped him from doing so impulsive.

“And this is why you do not neglect your defences” Tiberius offered him a hand, but he was rejected with a snarl.

“Spare me the lecture, sergeant, Icarus is the one has to learn how to attack”

“His lesson will come, for now you are the crack in the blade, your rage blinds you and leads you to foolish mistakes, I cannot afford that”.

“Let us just get to the bolters already,” Cadriel said as he finally got up, not even looking at Tiberius.

Icarus had already put on his robes and was silently waiting for them with Cassius, standing at attention like marble statues glimmering in midsummer sun.

As they all stepped out of the arena, bright flashes of red light invaded the room, giving everything in a darker hue as the voice of Brother-Captain Galahad filled their ears

“All astartes forces to their battle stations, Squad Tiberius and Telemachus to the command bridge”

They all knew what that meant, the Crusade was about to begin.

A bloody meeting

Twilight was one with the Canterlot’s Pride. From the burning fuel to the occasional flickering of the shields and the movements of the crew, she could feel everything that was happening on the ship and outside of it.

A storm of claws and jaws surrounded her as she made her way through thunderous dark clouds and malignant faces with blue eyes and deformed mouths. Occasionally, the thunders lashed out from the cover of the clouds and crashed into a wall of purple light.

Immaterial energy was pressing against her shields, attempting to break them and flood the ship. She had learned the hard way that she could not allow that to happen, no matter the cost.

No one really knew why, but any kind of direct contact with the ‘Endless Sea’ could cause several psychiatric Illnesses. That had been the undeserved and undignified fate of Flurry Heart, who had received the honor of leading the first expedition into space.

Twilight still remembered the pride in Flurry’s shining eyes and her wide smile before she ventured into the unknown. That image, combined with the memory of what had returned, was one of the many stab wounds in Twilight’s heart.

She had not died, but the energy that invaded her soul had cursed her with a terrible case of paranoid schizophrenia. Screaming voices, hallucinations, and apocalyptic visions of the future now haunted her mind. It was a fate many, Twilight included, considered to be far worse than death.

Twilight herself invented the spell necessary for safe space travel, the one she was using at that moment, after Flurry was placed in a mental hospital for her own safety. The spell required a significant amount of concentration and magical energies and could leave a weak unicorn exhausted for days.

Only unicorns with marks related to their strength of will or their magical prowess could safely guide a vessel through the Endless Sea without losing their minds, but the eldritch energies of the Endless Sea never left them completely untouched.

Twilight, being an alicorn, had no problem in guiding her ship and chasing away anything that approached her. She could feel an ancient and malignant will coming from the concentrations of energy near her.

She had been sitting on the throne at the center of the command bridge for what to her felt like a couple of hours, but it had probably been few days for the rest of the crew, when she felt she had reached the system were the pirate base was hidden according to an intelligence report.

The journey through the Endless Sea had been a strain on her energies and her mind, but she had just enough power left to open a portal surrounded by blue light and close it behind her as soon as she returned to reality.

As her consciousness left the ship and returned to her own limited body, nine yellow lights assaulted her eyes. The lights were the only source of brightness in the otherwise dark command bridge. Iron shutters prevented the crew from looking outside when it was exceedingly dangerous to do so.

The shutters retreated slowly with a metallic sound, allowing the light of a blue star to illuminate the room, chasing away most of the remaining shadows. Nineteen other ships that had returned to real space alongside the Canterlot’s Pride blocked a small portion of the rays and created new darkness.

A fleet of twenty ships was unusually large for any military expedition, but she and Spike had made an exception for what intelligence officers were sure was the location of the elusive pirate base they had been trying to find for years.

Spike was sitting right next to her on a smaller silver chair. Like her, he was looking at the sea of stars in the distance and the holograph in front of the throne showing a heat map of the surrounding area of space. The holograph emitted a soft white light that brightened Twilight and Spike’s faces. In front of him, there was a small black terminal.

The only sources of heat were the other nineteen ships around the Canterlot’s Pride. Every other part of the map was utterly devoid of any signal. The void in front of them was silent and empty; the only feature was an asteroid belt of glistening black and grey rocks in the distance.

“All captains report,” she said, sure that a microphone could easily pick up her voice and send it to the other ships.

One by one, the captains replied. Dangerous energies or malevolent entities had not gotten into contact with any of the ships or their crews. Only a heavy cruiser, the Helpful Spirit, had some minor issues with her engines, but the captain had said that her subordinates could easily fix everything in a couple of hours.

“No signs of them or their base,” Spike said, giving voice to Twilight’s thoughts. “And no signs of the colonists either,” Spike continued as he looked at every corner of the map.

“But the intelligence report said their base was in this system,” Said Twilight. “Maybe we missed the exact spot, but I know it has to be here, we should spread out and search for it,”.

Twilight knew there was something else there; she could feel it.

They had separated the fleet into four groups of five ships to cover as much ground as possible while maintaining a reasonable amount of firepower if they found the enemy.

For the last three hours, the ships had explored the previously unknown system without successfully finding anything. They had sent probes and scouts to look into the distant corners of the system where the scanners and radars could see nothing.

“This is captain White Tail reporting from the Silver Star,” said a bored voice in the primary communication channel. “There is still nothing to report, I think it’s time to leave this place, the intelligence guys were wrong, over”.

“Negative captain,” Twilight replied. “The other unicorns and I still need a few more hours to recover from the spell, keep looking, over”.

“As you wish, princess, over and out”.

As soon as the brief conversation was over, Spike turned to her.

“That captain is right, Twilight,” he said. “Whoever gave us the report is bad at his job”.

“Maybe, but there’s nothing we can do about it right now, the only thing we can do is to explore this system as much as possible. Maybe they are just very good at hiding”.

Before any attempt at carefree exploration could begin, however, White Tail reported once again. This time there was uncertainty and fear in his voice.

“Ma’am, I apologize for reopening the primary communication channel so soon, but my… my group found something”.

“Enlighten us,” Spike said, annoyed by the vagueness of the captain.

“I’m sharing the feed of one camera on my ship so you can see it for yourself,” a new holographic image appeared in front of Twilight. The broken round hulls of several colonial ships were fluctuating lifeless in the cold, uncaring void; many of them had been cut in half by single shots, obviously fired by weapons larger than anything the Equestrian navy could have dreamed of, and those weapons had reduced many more colonials ships to twisted pieces of smoldering metal flying alone in the dark. “We have found the colonists, but I don’t think we’re dealing with pirates here, over”.

“No, I don’t think we are,” Twilight paled as she tried to imagine what kind of alien weaponry could do such devastating damage and what kind of monster would open fire on a civilian vessel. “Every ship, converge to White Tail’s position at once!” she ordered immediately after.

Even without being one with the ship, she could still feel her turning around as the crew followed her order immediately. The engineers who designed the Canterlot’s Pride had the aim of making a ship with superior mobility despite her size. That meant she could change her heading and course in a matter of seconds.

She could also feel something else, something that was getting closer and closer with every second that passed. The sensation, which was sending a deathly chill down her spine, had been growing since she had arrived in the system, but now it had overtaken her mind.

It was a side effect of having to guide a ship through the Endless Sea: she now had a permanent connection with that dimension and she could always feel the flow of immaterial tides around her.

As the minutes passed, White Tail’s ship became recognizable in the distance and she slowly understood what the sensation meant. There were many things, vessels, in the Endless Sea around her, and now they were about to enter the system.

She felt empty bubbles in the immaterial plane approaching her from three different directions at a frightening, thunderous speed. Whoever commanded them, it was someone with access to technology centuries, if not millennia, ahead of what anyone in Equestria could come up with.

“It’s an ambush!” she quickly warned the rest of the fleet as she realized what was about to happen.

“I can confirm it,” said White Tail, who also shared the same connection to the Endless Sea. “Something is coming our way,”.

“Every creature to their battle stations,” Twilight ordered.

Every commander repeated the order to their crew while they felt exactly what Twilight had felt before them. However, it was already too late. Before any ship could report being ready to combat, a multitude of dark, long shapes of black steel and stained glass emerged from their blue tunnels.

The unknown fleet completely dwarfed the Equestrian one, both in sheer numbers and in the size of the individual ships. Each of the flying cathedrals, even the smaller ones, could have contained at least three Equestrian ships and the gargantuan ones could have made an effortless meal out of her entire fleet.

“Spike, can you see if we’re already in range of their guns?” she asked him, wanting to know how much time she had before the battle started.

“The computers are still making speculations about it, I think should have just enough time to join White Tail, but look at the Helpful Spirit,” he pointed at a small yellow spot behind all the others, quickly being approached by a much larger one. “I’m sure she’s technically already in range of whatever guns they have; they just don’t want to shoot at her. She’s about to get boarded”.

The command bridge of the Helpful Spirit was quiet, despite the situation that was unfolding outside. It was all thanks to the leadership and the discipline of the white unicorn mare sitting on the silver chair in the center that imposed calm and order on everything around her.

Warm Breeze, captain of the Helpful Spirit, was not having a very good day. Traveling through the Endless Sea was never a fun experience, especially if she had to do it for a long time. Then she had to deal with the engine problems that caused her vessel to get left behind several times while her crew tried what it could do to fix it.

An excess of optimism had poisoned the report where she had said that her crew could fix the engines in a matter of hours. A mistake on her behalf that she intended to avoid in the future.

The lowest point of her day, however, had been the swarm of enormous and probably hostile ships sitting right in front of her view, and the slightly smaller and grey one that was approaching the Helpful Spirit.

“Ma’am, the grey ship is trying to hail us, awaiting your directive,” a changeling officer working in front of her said.

“I authorize the communication,” She spoke with the calm and collected attitude her subordinates knew her for, but she could not deny the fear that told her she should ignore the safety protocols and run away immediately. She hoped the translation spell worked on a completely alien species.

“As you wish,” the officer pressed a small yellow button.

A broad and tall bipedal creature covered head to toe by grey steel appeared in front of her. The heavenly white escaping from the lenses made him look like an angelic spirit trapped within an impressively large suit of armor.

“This is captain Warm Breeze of the Helpful Spirit,” she began. “Please identify yourself by providing your name and your rank if you belong to any military force,”. She felt stupid saying it, as the creature had a large pistol hanging from his belt.

“You speak to captain Galahad of the Star Lords, I belong to the knights of the Silver Tower,” his booming voice was powerful and deeper than anything she had ever heard in her life. “Relay my words to your lords and ladies, tell them that our banners will soon fly above their walls while theirs shall be trampled and broken as their worlds burn, tell them that the end of their kind is coming, and we are its harbingers,”

“I understand you are proceeding with a formal declaration of war, I have the authority necessary to receive it and accept it,” Warm Breeze maintained her stony expression and her stiff demeanor. “Is there anything else you wish to add to your message before hostilities begin?”

“This chivalrous formality is over, but I will deliver one final message to you, Xeno, if you really are a leader to your kind then know that your head will find its resting place in the halls of the Tower of Memories”. With that threat, so confidently uttered as if it were an honest promise, the conversation was over.

Once the giant disappeared, she heard the forceful sound of an explosion reverberating through the entire ship, and blaring red sirens warned the entire crew that a boarding party had penetrated the hull.

“This is Captain Warm Breeze of the Helpful Spirit, actively hostile personnel has gained access to our third deck and is moving rapidly toward the command bridge. We are at war,” the captain remained calm as she communicated with the rest of the fleet. “An attempt to reinforce us is tactically inadvisable, over”.

“Understood Captain Warm Breeze, good luck, over” Twilight replied.

“The sentiment is appreciated and reciprocated, princess, over and out”.

The channel was closed just as the fire of what sounded like an automated grenade launcher was becoming noticeable. The second after, the black cathedrals opened fire, the blazing trail of their shots piercing the darkness of the void as they finished their short travel by crashing against energy shields and thin iron.

The shots instantly pulverized several ships that had not raised their shields quickly enough. Their positions on the holographic map became brighter for a few seconds as the flames of their explosions enveloped them before disappearing completely as if they had never existed.

Twilight did not have time to mourn the brutal termination of hundreds of lives because she had to focus on trying to survive and not get the Pride destroyed. She had hoped Spike would help her win a battle against pirates, but he was undoubtedly just as lost as she was. No admiral ever had to deal with such a destructive force, that battle was not something anyone could solve with a magic trick or a clever maneuver.

The response of the Equestrian navy was totally ineffective as all their shots just bounced off the shields of the enemy. Even their largest weaponry, naval artillery meant to pierce any energetic barrier with a single shot, was nothing but a mild and imprecise nuisance.

The only thing she could do at that moment was trying to survive long enough to have a chance to escape through the Endless Sea.

“Everyone increase distance from the enemy, now!” The order was instinctive, like the cry of a scared prey to the rest of her herd.

The aliens were methodical, they focused their overwhelming firepower on a single ship, tore it apart, and then moved on to the next target. It was an unsurprisingly deadly and efficient tactic, claiming several ships in a matter of minutes. The absence of a nearby planet meant that the escape pods had nowhere to go to if they were used and entire crews perished with their ships.

It didn’t take long for anyone to realize that getting away from the enemy was not a realistic possibility, as the alien fleet had completely encircled the Equestrian one and was slowly directing all of them toward the center. They were like trapped animals, waiting to be slaughtered.

It didn’t take long before many of the surviving captains became desperate enough to attempt the most obvious, but dangerous, plan to escape.

“This is Captain White Tail of the Silver Star, I am taking the necessary risk to save my crew,” Twilight knew what he meant and what the risks were, he was going to access immaterial space before it was safe to do so. She couldn’t criticize him for trying to save his crew in the only realistic way out.

“Captain White Tail, are you aware of the risk you are taking?” another captain asked him, knowing full well that the unicorns were still not ready for long-range space travel and what could happen if something went wrong while traversing the Endless Sea.

“I know that remaining here means dying a pointless death,” She saw a dark and blue portal open in front of the sleek and long shape of the Silver Star “I don’t need to know anything else,”.

She disliked the idea of risking the sanity of everyone in the fleet, but she knew White Tail was right, she couldn’t afford to wait any longer. If she wanted anyone in the fleet to have a chance to live, she had to risk an unsecured voyage through the Endless Sea.

“Close the windows,” Twilight said to the officers on the command bridge, letting them know she intended to do the same thing White Tail had just done. The chance of getting out of a one-sided bloodbath had unsurprisingly improved the mood on the command bridge, and the windows were closed as soon as the officers heard the order. The room was instantly wrapped in shadows as nine yellow lights in the walls did what they could to get rid of the darkness.

“This is Twilight Sparkle addressing the entire fleet, White Tail’s action has my blessing. Follow his example immediately,” she mustered all the confidence she could despite the dire situation. Then she fused her conscience with the Canterlot’s Pride once more.

She felt the heavy shells battering her shields like hammers against a soft rock; the effort of keeping them activated was herculean and she could only continue for a few more minutes if she was lucky. She opened the portal as fast as she could, knowing she could not afford to wait a single moment now that she was the target.

The portal swallowed her like a gluttonous maw, and she found herself enveloped by darkness.

Boots on the ground

The chapel of the Hengroen was the holiest and largest chamber in the entire ship. Small silver shrines, arrayed orderly near the two long walls, displayed relics of ancient heroes on top of rectangular pedestals surrounded by thick glass. Two rows of alabaster columns, shielded by giant statues of marines on all four of their sides, lead to a monumental golden altar, long and rectangular. An army of candles of white wax produced all the light one might need, and the stained glass on its right side gave a yellow hue to the rays coming from the void. Two marines stood guard near the altar, their bolters close to their chests.

Lines and lines of stone pews filled the area between the two rows of columns. The chapter serfs used them when they gathered for their morning and evening prayer. The chapel was one of few areas marines and serfs frequently shared. A few of the humans were scattered around the place, using their free time to pray.

The chapel had two secondary wings, giving it the shape of a cross if looked at from above. Each of the wings was Identical to the main corridor, but both ended with gargantuan stony statues of hooded angels wielding a long scythe with both hands. Each angel had the head and hands of a skeleton with empty eye sockets. Both statues stood atop rectangular white pedestal several meters high that bore the names of many martyrs of the chapter.

The stone was ancient; the best attempts at maintenance had only delayed the inexorable advance of the ages as cracks appeared on the hands and wings.

Tiberius was kneeling as he prayed in front of one statue. He was wearing his armor, as he had to be ready for the incoming battle, and had his bolter at his side. He knew that one day his brothers would carve his name into the stone holding the grim statue above.

Looking right at the pedestal, he saw rows of enormous banners commemorating the greatest battles fought by the chapter. Many of them always brought back a mixture of good and bad memories in Tiberius, because he had fought in several of them. The one with the word ‘Mortiva’ written in its lowest section was the one who caught his eyes the most.

It portrayed five knights forming a circle atop a black hill as a tide of blue daemons, led by one with a golden staff and the head of a bird, charged at them from every direction. There were no real symbols of the ruinous powers, but recognizing the servants of the Changer of Ways did not require any effort from those who had seen them.

Mortiva had been the place where he fought his first battle as a sergeant, and where he lost his first squad.

The heavy steps of power armor distracted him from his observation of the flag and his memories as he realized someone was approaching him. The marine stopped every few steps as he paid his respects to many of the statues near the columns, which represented many of the brothers he had once known personally before they fell in battle.

“Your presence brings merriment to my soul, Aphaniel,” he rose and turned to great the veteran. “But do tell me, do you come to me with news? Are we mayhap ready for war? Or is this encounter the result of mere fortune?”

“The star of fortune did not lead me to this meeting,” Aphaniel swiftly kneeled in front of his liege, his eyes looking down to the floor. “I apologize for interrupting your prayer, but I have come here of my own will to inform you that the squad is ready for deployment just like you ordered before heading here.”

“I commend you for your swiftness, brother,” Tiberius said. “But I cannot head into the fires of war before I consecrate my bolter, as that is what the law demands. Will you join me in the ceremony? I assure you the affair will be swifter than the wind.”

Tiberius was no chaplain, but he had received the privilege of leading small ceremonies as a reward for being the only one of the first company to make it out alive and uncorrupted from Mortiva, a privilege he relished.

“Words fail to express how much that would honor me,” Aphaniel looked at Tiberius. “I accept your offer.”

Once Aphaniel rose, they both headed to the golden altar. He saw that the equine head of an alien captain, a trophy captured by squad Telemachus, was on the right end of the altar with her eyes closed and her facial muscles relaxed. Telemachus himself had carried it on a silver ceremonial shield.

Captain Galahad opted to give squad Telemachus the chance to gain some honor of its own and sent them to board the alien vessel and kill the enemy captain. The decision did not please Tiberius, who had spent half an hour discussing the matter with Galahad before being forced to give up.

The two marines guarding the altar stomped their right foot once, then stepped in opposite directions and let him begin the ceremony.

He had repeated the movements and the words of the ceremony a thousand times, and he knew what exactly what to.

He placed his bolter at the center of the altar. His first move was to raise a bronze scepter with a bulbous head lying next to it and handed it over to Aphaniel. Then, he walked to the opposite side of the altar so he may look over the entire sanctuary, and he lit up a small incense burner to pass it over the bolter.

“Almighty Emperor, Master of Mankind, from the tides of the nameless beasts, you have protected us,” he began reciting the traditional formula for blessing a weapon, the fumes and the aromatic smell they carried already reaching his helmet. “From the hate of the alien, you have shielded us. From the foulness of the arch-enemy, you still shelter us.”

Aphaniel touched the bolter with the scepter three times in three different points, the extremities and the center, doing his part in the quick ceremony.

“Yet we still call on your help once more, for we are the most worthy of it” Tiberius continued. “We are the defenders of your Imperium, we are your proud sons, we are the tip of your spear. Just like we have been blessed by your blood, we ask you to give your blessing to this weapon with your spirit so it may become a better tool in your service.”

“In your service!” Aphaniel said as he brought the scepter to his chest before putting it back on the altar, right next to the alien head. The two marines, who had observed the ceremony in silence until that moment, stomped their foot once more and returned to their positions near to the altar, facing the distant exit.

Just like that, Star Lords’ law considered the gun blessed.

Tiberius put down the incense burner and picked up his bolter. It did not feel any different from before. The consecration of a weapon was almost always a pious formality, but it was not something he could ignore. He was a sergeant, a highly decorated one, with more than a century of service in the first company. It would have been unbecoming of him to eschew tradition in the name of practicality.

Aphaniel put the scepter back on the altar and walked to his liege’s side.

“Now that I finish this task, I say it is time for us to leave this sacred place, for fate has deprived us of alien blood for far too long,” Tiberius pronounced the last words of the ceremony.

They both slowly walked out of the chapel and into the crowded corridors of the Hengroen.

The corridors were not as bright as the sanctuary and bore almost no decorations on them except for the occasional ruby-eyed statue. The narrow windows on the right side allowed the rays of the local sun to enter the ship, making the armors of the Astartes glisten.

Taking a glance outside the windows, Tiberius could see the alien world he would soon set foot on. Its surface was verdant, with healthy blue seas and only a few cities visible from space already being bombed. A few white clouds painted its skies. It reminded him of his own world.

The two knights towered over all the chapter serfs as they walked with confidence to their destination and paid no mind to the surrounding humans. Tiberius’ thoughts were focused on Aphaniel. He felt his brother was there for something more than a mere report. He was usually more talkative before a fight, sharing details about the briefings and discussing a plan for their part in the battle. In addition to that, Cassius was the one who usually reported to him.

“If there are thoughts on your mind, haunting your spirit, you are free to speak of them now,” he said. “You need not fear my judgment.”

“I think of the training session, yesterday, my mind goes back to when you sparred with Cadriel,” he stopped and turned to face him. “There was no need to wound his pride.”

“I had all the reasons to hurt his pride,” Tiberius did not hesitate to reply, he knew the reasons for his actions and was not afraid to defend them. “I have already seen the path of a gloryhound leads, I will not let that happen again if I can do something about it.”

“He is no Mordred, darkness is not in his path” Knowing who Tiberius was alluding to, Aphaniel raised his voice. That action earned a few worried looks from the surrounding serfs. “I suggest you do not worry about what thoughts are haunting my mind because I see that the memory of your failure at Mortiva is still preying on yours.”

Hearing that name, the one he hated above all else, made Tiberius’ blood boil. He stepped closer to Aphaniel and also raised his voice.

“Do not mention that vermin’s name so close to the chapel, lest you sully such a grand hall” More serfs were now glancing at them, even if none of them dared to stop their work. “And Mortiva was not a failure, we won.”

“I offer my most heartfelt of apologies for speaking rashly, but Cadriel needs the trust of his brothers if he is to focus on the oncoming war,” Aphaniel turned and looked at the alien world, Tiberius walked to his right side. “Am I mistaken? Is a Space Marine not entitled to the trust of his brothers? Dark thoughts have gained ground on your mind, Tiberius. Blood of Dorne, listen to your own words and tell me if they have not come from accusation and distrust, This is not our way, brother.”

“Mayhaps there is truth in your words,” Tiberius conceded. “But I know a dark path is tempting Cadriel, a simple path to glory and fortune, and my sacred duty is to stop him.”

“Then I hope the wisdom that led you to your rank will tell what to do in such an hour of need,” Aphaniel said, sounding disappointed by his superior. That sentence terminated the conversation as Aphaniel walked away from the window.

The two knights traveled through the rest of the ship all the way to the drop pod room in silence as they both understood that there was nothing else to say in the matter.

They walked through many more corridors in a religious silence, as they were both deeply lost in thought about what they had just said to each other. The winged statues of mythical figures they found at their right side expressed wordless judgment with their inscrutable stone faces and eyes of ruby.

The statues became more and more frequent until they became a regular appearance once they reached their destination, an iron door protected by two high-ranking chapter serfs. They were armed with short swords and kite shields and wore chainmail under a full plate armor decorated by lines of gold near their belts and eyes.

The two serfs opened the door and let the Astartes through, not intending to question the motives of their superiors. They were there to stop other humans, not Space Marines.

The smell of oil and rust invaded Tiberius’ nostrils the moment he walked through the door, crashing into a servitor and making it fall to the ground as he approached his brothers. The room was mostly dark, with only exceptions being the yellow rays produced by the rare electrical lights on the ceiling. Several servitors mindlessly and tirelessly worked on the drop pods scattered around the room.

The rest of the squad was waiting for them near an already prepared drop pod. Icarus and Cadriel already inside looking eager to bring war to the alien, while Cassius was checking and re-checking his systems.

“I have come, I apologize for not being here sooner,” Tiberius said to them all. “Prayer and ceremony took more of time than I expected.”

“Understandable,” Cassius said laconically. “The drop pod is ready, sergeant.”

“Excellent news,” Tiberius stepped into his position in the drop pod, looking forward to the proper start of the crusade. “Then it is my belief that the time has come for one last prayer.”

The drop pod, its interiors caressed by a soft penumbra, was silent as it fell from the sky. The hour of the first great assault had come, and squad Tiberius was ready for it. They would deploy slightly to the north of enemy lines, with simple search and destroy orders, and sow confusion while the primary force advanced from the south. Everyone expected an easy victory; in that case, hunting freely was well within their rights.

All five knights were silent, every important detail had been shared, every prayer had been offered, the only thing left for them was to wait for the pod to reach the ground.

Tiberius had been told that the local anti-air batteries, the few that existed, had been destroyed from orbit long before the Guard even landed just outside of the largest city on the planet, so nothing could stop the deployment.

“This is Brother-Captain Galahad, addressing all knights of the first company,” The voice of the first captain echoed in the helmets of the knights of squad Tiberius. “Today is a glorious day for the Imperium, today we bring war to an alien world and claim it for humanity and the Emperor, let honor guide through the battle as you shed this new blood, let faith be your weapon, for the Emperor and the Tower!”

“For the Tower!” they all said in unison, not needing much encouragement to shout their Chapter’s battle-cry.

Tiberius then heard a loud boom coming from the sky outside, then several more. The next sound was that a full barrage covering the skies and multiple pods bursting into flames as the projectiles hit them.

“This is squad Tiberius, addressing Captain Galahad,” he said to the vox. “The xenos are still in possession of anti-air guns, this vector of approach is no longer safe, over.” He hoped his words would save his brothers still on the Hengroen.

“Acknowledged, the rest of the company will find another way, saints and Emperor be with you, over and out,” Galahad replied.

One of the many explosions outside then struck the upper section of the pod, but the hit was a superficial one and did not break the steel. The only result of the hit was robbing the pod of its center of gravity and making it spin like a maddened compass.

“The machine spirit is confused,” Cassius said with his usual laconic tone, no sign of worry in his voice. “It cannot provide us a safe landing.”

The constant shifting of gravity would have been too much for a normal man to handle, but Tiberius felt no need to vomit or to pass out. His senses were as sharp as ever, and his only concern was about how much the hit had altered the landing course.

“Squad Tiberius, do you hear my voice?” Galahad’s voice reached all five of them through the vox. “I can see your course has been altered. Do you still live? Over.”

“We can hear you, captain, and we have suffered no injuries,” Tiberius reported. “A superficial hit almost robbed us of our lives, but they remain out of the icy grasp of death. Cassius reports that our landing will not be a standard one, over.”

“I am glad to know you still live,” Galahad quickly said. “It would be a shame if you fell before you could shed alien blood once more, over and out.”

The pod reached the ground only a few seconds later. Tiberius finally heard the familiar sound of crushed concrete as the steel punched through it like a bullet through thin armor. After a few more seconds of crashing through the concrete, the drop pod stopped.

Tiberius and others were upside down and had to punch and kick their way out.

The steel yielded and bent in the face of the superhuman strength of an astartes, and light entered the pod as the walls were violently opened and broken. If one of the flying horses looked at the pod, they could have compared it to a flower with long iron petals.

In unison, the knights leaped out of the pod and stepped over the grey cobblestone of a small plaza with a humble white fountain at its center. Many of the surrounding buildings were in ruins, their roofs and floors torn apart by artillery shells, and their stones and bricks covered the ground like broken marbles thrown away without a care.

Several more drop pods descended from above crowded the already blackened skies. Tiberius could also see the long barrels of several almost well-hidden guns on a hill dominating the skyline of the city, all of them were pointed at the pods.

Tiberius could not waste more time to admire the destruction the Imperium had already had delivered on the Xeno, because a sniper’s bullet lodging itself in his chest announced the beginning of a fight.

Small arms fire, quick and precise, began pouring out of the shattered windows of a distant house. The soldiers, all of distinct races and sizes, were taking cover behind the rubble created by the artillery and Tiberius could have sworn some of them were changing the color of their skin the better blend in with the environment.

The attack was not a surprise. His approach had not been a subtle one, and he expected to find enemies near the landing zone. It was all part of his plan.

“This is squad Tiberius to Galahad, we have landed and we have already joined battle with the enemy,” He kept his report short, as he wanted to focus on the fight. “I see the equivalent of a standard guard company at half strength. They are at close range, less than five hundred meters, over.”

“Hearing that pleases me,” Galahad replied immediately. “Your orders have not changed, the guard is already taking care of the guns, hunt well, over and out.”

With the report over, and his captain satisfied, Tiberius closed the vox channel just as the volume of fire intensified.

“Return their greeting, brothers!” Tiberius said once he was finally free to turn all of his attention to the battle.

He hit several targets right in the head, and broke their bodies as their shattered bones turned into bloody shrapnels, but many more survived by moving to cover at the last second. The sight made him smile. He was no longer fighting clueless pirates.

Cassius was the only one who did not open fire on the aliens because one of his hands was holding up the squad’s banner, and the other had a chainsword. As always, the enemy fire focused on him, which was the purpose of the flag. For the moment, they were doing everything Tiberius expected them to do.

“I suggest we close on their position and kill them in close-quarter combat,” Cadriel proposed as he took cover behind the fountain because of how annoying the enemy fire had become. “It will be an easy fight”.

“I agree,” said Icarus. “These are soldiers, not warriors. They are ill-equipped to withstand our charge.”

Tiberius did not want to feed Cadriel’s all-consuming hunger for glory, but he had to admit he was making the right decision. Icarus’ agreement made his next move easier.

“It is decided then!” Tiberius threw a smoke grenade to obscure his advance, his chainsword roaring. “We shall take their position with our blades, follow me!”

He dashed into the smoke, firing his bolter, and his brothers were behind him as he emerged from it like a summoned daemon coming out of the darkness.

Once he was closer, he could better see his opponents and their equipment. A white griffon and a unicorn of the same color were operating a machine gun as a burly, and increasingly distressed, yak directed their fire even if he could see it was ineffective. He was shouting in a language Tiberius could not understand.

All around the two of them, aliens of all shapes and sizes fired at them with long black rifles, and a minotaur, who Tiberius assumed was their commander because of his white uniform, stood proudly among them as he shouted commands at them and tried to maintain discipline. He had long white horns, black fur, and blue eyes.

Even if his enemies were not human, Tiberius could tell when his presence had instilled terror in his foes. The widening pupils, the worsening aim, and an increased voice pitch were all things he expected from his non-transhuman foes.

The moment squad Tiberius reached the door, the minotaur left his position and the bullets stopped coming. If he was preparing to meet them at close range, Tiberius respected that, but he assumed he was looking at a tactical withdrawal.

The room waiting behind the door was large enough for the five of them to stand apart and move their arms around if they wished. Red wood, cracked in many places, provided a humble floor and the locals had painted the walls a soft yellow. The electricity no longer worked, but several holes in the roof allowed tilted columns of light to enter.

He did not have the time to further analyze the room, because a grenade provided a humble greeting. Tiberius swatted it away with his bolter while it was still flying, and it exploded far away from him and his brothers. He paid no mind to the noise.

The mare who had thrown the grenade, an apparently young pegasus with a green coat and purple eyes, became subjected to the cruel attentions of Icarus’ bolter with predictable consequences.

She had good enough reflexes to avoid the first burst, but the second one shattered her wings. She was an easy target after that, and the bullets soon cut her in half. Her organs and blood forming a pool between the parts of her body as her lungs struggled and she cried in pain.

“An impressive throw,” Icarus said, looking at the broken body of the mare before finishing her with one last shot to the head. “Considering the distance.”

“Keep your guard high!” Tiberius ordered, expecting the rest of the now obvious ambush to spring at any moment.

He was immediately proven right.

The defenders opened fire from different sides of the room and the broken ceiling, and the knights replied in a split second. Icarus provided covering fire as Aphaniel charged at his foes on the right side of the room while Tiberius and Cassius did the same on the other side. Cadriel exploited a large hole in the ceiling to jump his way to the floor above and began his carnage there.

They all reached their targets in a matter of seconds and began the butchery like hungry wolves attacking a flock of sheep. The aliens might have known how to fire their guns, but Cadriel had been correct in assuming that they would not know what to do once engaged in melee combat.

One alien stood like a proud exception from his peers, like a lonely mountain in a green plain. A tall black dragon, with razor-sharp golden claws and blue eyes, charged at Aphaniel with no fear and engaged him in a duel. His blue eyes shining like thunders in the night.

His bestial roar caught the veteran’s attention, who turned around with blade and bolter ready for action only to be engulfed by a tide of red flames. Aphaniel leaped out of the fire. His armor already bearing multiple black marks.

He replied to the flaming attack by charging right at his foe, and the dragon reacted with unexpected speed and stepped back before attacking with his right claw.

The strike connected with the flat side of Aphaniel’s chainsword and knocked it out of his hand. The knight did not attempt to recover the blade; he pointed his bolter at the enemy and fired a full burst, only for the dragon to move at the last possible moment and avoid every bullet.

The dragon’s eyes shined as he stepped forward and punched the space marine right in the chest. The powerful punch would have crushed the lungs of a lesser man, but Aphaniel only took two steps back and let the dragon realize he had shattered every bone of his own hand.

A howl of pain emerged from his contorted face, his confidence stolen by the pain he had inflicted on himself, but the howl was short-lived as Aphaniel took that moment to hit the dragon right in the throat with his armored gauntlet.

Aphaniel’s punch crushed the dragon’s windpipe, broke his neck, and sent the corpse flying through a nearby wall.

The sudden death of their best fighter broke the enemy’s morale, and they had understood the only thing they could do was retreating in large groups to the safest possible distance. Tiberius saw the minotaur officer blowing some sort of whistle as he ordered the retreat. He wondered where he had hidden while his soldiers died.

They had chased the aliens out of the house, but had stopped for one reason: Cadriel had stayed behind. Icarus confirmed he was still alive, because he had not lost his signal, so Tiberius assumed that something in the house was keeping him there.

“Cadriel, talk to me,” he said. “What is halting your advance? Over.”

“Nothing that should give you reason to worry,” Cadriel replied after a few seconds of silence. “I am just making sure none of these xenos run away, over.”

“Are you certain our assistance is not required? Over.”

“Worry not, sergeant,” Cadriel chuckled. “I shall soon prove I am safe and that these xenos are no threat to me, over and out.”

The moment communications were closed, several large cracks appeared in the upper floor’s wall of the house in which they had fought. The cracks then opened in an explosion of rubble and smoke to reveal Cadriel standing proudly and looking at his brothers as he held a frightened and bloody yak by the head.

Tiberius could not understand what the alien was saying, but his experience told him he was probably begging for his life. He did not have time to beg for long, as Cadriel’s next move was to decapitate him with a single strike of his chainsword.

“A mighty deed,” said Tiberius, sounding more annoyed than impressed. “Now join us, I command it.”

Cadriel jumped to the floor and landed punching the ground and cracking the road. He then walked to Tiberius and put a hand on his shoulder.

“As you can see, I am perfectly capable of standing alone,” he said proudly. "My liege."

“Not all that is possible is also advisable,” Tiberius replied as he removed the hand on his shoulder. “Remember this, brother.”

“The xenos are getting away!” With a shout, Icarus brought the attention back to the battle just as the last group of soldiers disappeared behind a street corner. Tiberius only had the time to see their tails before they vanished. “May we proceed now?”

“Yes, it is time to move.”

They rushed through the street with the speed of an eagle approaching its prey. The frontal section of the houses and shops appearing and disappearing before them in a matter of seconds, like a succession of moving cards.

In less than a minute, they had closed the distance and killed once more. Some of the braver aliens decided to stop and fire back at the knights, but none of them made anything more than few dents in their armors before their lives ended brutally.

Cadriel, as expected, was fighting ahead of his brothers, his enthusiasm about melee combat and the broken enemy inspiring him to leap forward. Tiberius and the others were more methodical, stopping every few seconds to ensure the enemy they caught was truly dead. A retreating enemy deserved no mercy and no quarter.

They never fought the second group of alien soldiers or many of the others, not because death found squad Tiberius before its time, but because it found the second group instead. The deathly touch of lasguns had horrifically burned and deformed the faces and limbs of the aliens.

Around the street, they saw the scattered corpses of guardsmen.

“The guard has already broken through this sector,” Tiberius assessed the situation. “Still, we must move on and find out if that minotaur still lives.”

“Then I suggest we run, I am picking up a lot of guard chatter around here,” Cassius informed. “They might reach your prize before you.”

As to encourage him to increase the speed of his hunt, a Chimera escorted by a small squad of guardsmen appeared behind him. He recognized them as cadian soldiers, although he did not recall the specific regiment.

He knew his laws demanded that he spoke with them; he sometimes questioned the wisdom of that law.

“Look, sarge,” one human said. “We’ve got marines in here, job just got easier.”

“First new guys, then this?” another one said as he added. “This has gotta be our lucky day.”

“Will you two shut your trap already?” A third man in the back sounded annoyed by his fellow soldiers. “He’s about to talk, let him do his thing.”

He stepped towards the tank as he spoke with all the pride he could pretend to muster in his voice.

“Hail soldiers of the Imperium, I am Sergeant Tiberius of the Star Lords,” he began. “Who from amongst your ranks wields the authority to speak for all of you?”

“That would be me,” a man emerged from behind the tank and walked towards the five brothers with a formal smile. “Sergeant Hekter, of the twenty-fifth Cadian, mechanized infantry. A pleasure to meet all of you, I hope this is the beginning of a fruitful cooperation.”

“That depends on your direction and your orders,” Tiberius replied, hoping to soon part ways with the unnecessary humans. “For we do not wish to derail you from your sacred duty.”

“Actually, the enemy here is completely broken now; we’re just clearing out pockets of resistance,” The man informed Tiberius. “It’s way faster than expected, but hey I’m not gonna question good luck, and that means we are free to assist you in whatever you are doing.”

He knew that tradition demanded he accepted that offer.

“We gladly welcome your aid,” he told him, feigning enthusiasm. “We are hunting what we think might be a local commander, he resembles a minotaur of olden legends. Do you have any reports that might tell us whither he has taken refuge or if he has been slain?”

Hekter spent a few moments thinking and looking up at the sky.

“You are lucky, if by minotaur you mean a buff guy with the head of a bull, I think we might have your target,” he said. “Guard Command just identified him as a commander gathering all the local aliens to him two clicks to the north.”

“I can see the report too now,” Cassius said. “Unbelievable swiftness, mayhap he employed a portal?”

“Report said nothing about warp activity here, well, except for some of their defensive spells,” Hekter replied. “But you gotta keep an open mind about this kind of stuff, right?”

“An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded,” Tiberius scolded the human. “Be careful with your thoughts guardsman, a lost mind wanders in dark places.”

“Oh, right,” Hekter lowered his eyes. “Anyway, I think we have a target now and we don’t wish to delay you any further. Do you wish to lead the way?”

“Chivalry demands that we do.”

“As you wish.”

Hekter then went back to the tank and emerged from the turret.

“Marines will lead our way, boys, don’t get soft now.”

They kept a steady pace, both the humans and the astartes, who sometimes had to slow down to allow the guardsmen to catch up.

There were many distractions during the travel. Like other humans who joined forces with them are occasional pockets of five or six aliens defending individual streets to the death and opting for suicidal charges once they ran out of ammo or noticed the marines.

In another circumstance, the easy but honorable battle would have taken all of Tiberius’ attention, but the circumstances were not normal. Tiberius could focus on only one thing: He wanted that minotaur’s head and bring it to Galahad. The coward had fled their first encounter; it was not an offense Tiberius would let go unanswered.

With grim determination he advanced north, killing all of those who stood in his path, his reflexes enhanced by his burning desire for vengeance.

Eventually, squad Tiberius and the humans reached their destination. As Hekter said, the minotaur had taken position just outside a forest and had already dug out some trenches. The trees were tall columns of wood with branches twisted like claws gripping the skies and sparse dark green leaves that covered all light from above.

Tiberius caught sight once more of the minotaur, who had a determined look in his eyes, and made a gesture for to him as he stepped outside of the forest brandishing a spiked mace covered with blue energy, occasionally looking back into the dark forest.

He first heard, then saw the chimera’s main gun pointing toward the minotaur, obviously preparing to kill him quickly.

“If you take that shot, all of you shall perish by my hand,” he warned them. “The minotaur’s head is mine alone to claim. Join battle with other aliens.”

“Understood, Sergeant Tiberius,” Hekter said as the gun immediately began to pint somewhere else. “We’ll find a more appropriate target.”

Knowing that his target was secure, Tiberius rushed to face him.

Not even feeling the bullets that hit him, he ran towards his prey. Small arms fire bounced off his armor like rain on steel, and the few explosives his foes threw at him were easily dodged and sidestepped. He used his bolter only to fire at the few aliens wielding their largest weapons, except for Icarus, his brothers were doing the same.

What happened in the trenches was a repeat of the events in the house from which they had run away. The marines easily tore them apart, and the fight turned into a one-sided butchery.

They soon all retreated under the dark cover of the forest, with one exception: The minotaur himself, who gestured for Tiberius to come to with a smile on his face and a minor star shining in both of his eyes.

He stepped forward and attached his bolter to his belt; he then gripped his chainsword with both hands, mind and body prepared for the duel.

Pleased by what he saw, he also stepped forward and gripped his mace with both hands.

They walked in a circle for several seconds. The minotaur was probably trying to find a weakness that he would never find, but Tiberius was just waiting for him to make a mistake he could exploit.

A movement of the shoulder was all the warning Tiberius needed of the incoming attack. He stepped back as the minotaur struck from above. He reacted by trying to cut off both his arms with a single cut, but the minotaur retreated a second before that could happen.

Tiberius attacked again, but his opponent was once again swift enough to avoid his blows. In fact, he was much swifter than what Tiberius had observed him to be before. He assumed some combat drugs caused his unnaturally quick reflexes, but perhaps there was something very peculiar about this alien’s biology. Whatever the origins of the reflexes were, the results were the same.

The mace appeared from out of his field of vision and hit him in the chest. The enchanted spikes pierced both adamantium plate and transhuman flesh with ease and drew blood. Tiberius felt himself losing contact with the ground and being slowly lifted above the grinning minotaur’s head.

Feeling the need to spit blood, Tiberius removed his helmet and considered aiming for the face, but he wanted to bring Galahad a pristine head, and the acid in an Astartes’ spit would have ruined that. He instead aimed for one of the hands that held the mace.

The shot landed perfectly and forced the minotaur to drop both the mace and Tiberius to the ground as he clutched his burned hand. He had enough composure to not scream because of the pain.

Tiberius took a few seconds to spit some excess blood still in his mouth and to put his helmet back on while his foe took those moments to grab his weapon with his still uninjured left hand.

Not one to be discouraged easily, the minotaur was once again the first one to strike, but this time he was slower than he had been at the beginning and Tiberius intercepted the attack an instant before it connected with his head.

Both sides pushed with all their strength, but Tiberius’ advantage in sheer physical prowess was enormous, and soon the tide turned in favor of the knight and the mace’s spikes pressed against the black fur.

The two fighters were separated when the minotaur kicked Tiberius in the chest just as the spikes were about to pierce his flesh.

They both charged at each other, blade and mace meat on the air multiple countless times as both of them were sure their victory was just one good stroke away. The only question was who would the first fatal mistake. Tiberius lost count of many of his attacks were deflected just moments before they could land, and of how many times he had to take a step back to save his life.

The long-awaited mistake came when the minotaur finally took one second too long on a swing, something that Tiberius exploited immediately to cut off the only good hand his enemy still had and then buried his chainsword deep into the alien’s chest.

Defeated, he fell on his knees, and took one last look at the dark forest before Tiberius unceremoniously decapitated him. His body hit the ground just as his blood poured out like water from a fountain and covered the dirt and the once yellow leaves.

Tiberius grabbed the severed head, quickly polished it, and then attached it to his belt. He had not even noticed his four brothers were now behind him.

“The Sergeant and the Minotaur!” Icarus was the one to break the silence. “A moment for the Tower of Memories for sure, my liege.”

“I doubt it, I did not behave with honor in this duel. Many hours shall I have to spend praying for forgiveness,” Tiberius pointed at the forest. “But now is not the time to think about that. I am sure he was defending this place for a reason. I want to discover what it was, but we shall not venture in there alone. We will return to this place, with greater numbers.”

A message in the dark

The forest, a many-pillared hall of wood and earth, was covered by a ceiling of black foliage and twisted branches that let only lonely and thin rays of sunlight reach the undergrowth. Its imposing columns of polished wood gave it a regal appearance.

While it was dark, the forest was not silent. Not because of the animals living in it, in that regard it was lifeless, but because of the columns of guardsmen advancing through it. Humans were not the only forces of the imperium in the forest: the Star Lords had deployed a quarter of their first company to the forest.

Tiberius and his squad were some of those brothers.

He and his brothers advanced, enveloped by darkness and rare rays of sunlight. The darkness was no problem for them, as the night vision embedded in their helmets allowed them to see the woods around without a problem. There was no undergrowth hiding the rocky and dry ground and the hungry black roots that emerged and submerged several times from the earth like worms looking for food in the grey earth. The only animal they saw was a solitary black owl with his sight fixed on them.

The sergeant had organized his brothers in a V shape, with Tiberius at the tip, Cadriel, and Cassius on his right and left sides and Aphaniel and Icarus at the extremities. Behind them, there was a column of soldiers of the Imperial Guard. They were Cadians, both men and women were tall and well built. Their clean uniforms and coordinated marching only highlighted their discipline. Armored vehicles should have protected their flanks and vanguard, but the narrow paths of the forest had forced everyone to walk.

They were walking on a serpentine path of cobbled stone. Its rocks had an ethereal glow reflected by the enormous trunks around them, giving the place a ghostly appearance. The trees were only on the left side of the path, and on the other, there was a bottomless dark chasm that seemed to lead into depths the depths of the earth.

“For many decades I waged war at your side, yet you still surprise me,” Cadriel’s mood had been dark since he heard that Tiberius had received orders to stay close to the Guard during the exploration of the forest, it had dashed his fantasies of exploring the dark unknown alone. “You, accepting to fight side by side with the guard. I thought the news was a mere jest!”

“Do not take your anger on me, brother,” Tiberius said. “The Captain has given his order and we obey, always. Keep your focus on the enemy.”

The guard was not there at Tiberius’ request; they were merely chasing after a retreating enemy. Tiberius had merely attached his squad to one of the many columns.

“I have no knowledge of this world,” Tiberius said to his squad as the light died. “But one needs not be familiar with this place to understand that there is something rotten within this forest”.

“Indeed!” Icarus replied. “A great power resides in here; I feel it in my bones”.

“Then let us hunt for it,” Cadriel said, his eyes scanning the surrounding area. “Great will be the glory we shall earn on this day if we slay a foe yet unknown to humanity”.

“Not unknown,” Icarus warned as he looked at one particularly large tree. “Not unknown at all.”

As his brothers talked, Tiberius tried to give a quick report to Captain Galahad about his position, but his vox channel was filled with static noise. Whatever was in the forest, it was jamming all communication devices.

“Cassius, can you do anything about the interference?” Tiberius asked.

“What you ask is beyond my means,” Cassius replied. “The interference is too strong, and I believe it will only get worse with time. It may be possible to mitigate its effects for a short while, but it will eventually cut us off if we continue down this path”.

Tiberius was about to acknowledge his brother’s efforts, but was soon forced to acknowledge something much different. A twig snapping, accompanied by several more. He had not seen a single animal in the forest since he had entered it.

Someone or something was watching them.

He lifted his left arm and closed his fist in a motion that ordered everyone behind him to stop.

More twigs snapped, and Tiberius lifted two fingers from the fist and then used to make a circle in the air in a clockwise movement. His brothers understood the order and moved to form a circle around him. Bolters and blades pointed towards the forest to the left.

An owl hooted, and two more replied. Then all hell broke loose.

A ray of energy appeared from somewhere behind the trees and instantly evaporated the heads of two guardsmen, their bodies falling to the ground. No blood poured out of their headless necks because the energy was hot enough to instantly cauterize the wound.

“Take cover!” someone in the column shouted, and the guardsmen immediately rushed towards the nearest trees.

Tiberius and the squad were ahead of them, firing towards the aliens that had now revealed themselves. They were all unicorns, and they were wearing blue robes and hoods that covered their eyes with a hole in the middle for their horns.

Despite that, their aim was deadly accurate. These were not the soldiers he had easily butchered his way through; they were something far more prepared and deadly. If Tiberius did not possess his transhuman reflexes, they would have soon reduced his head to dust.

Behind the Astartes, the guardsmen were dying in droves. Heads and chests simply vanished in the blink of an eye, the victims did not even have time to scream before they fell to the ground, lifeless.

The only effect of their lasguns was to set several trees on fire. White shields also made of energy blocked the few shots that could have hit the unicorns. The rounds from the bolters were met with a similar end, exploding on the shields before they could do any actual damage. A high concentration of rounds was the only thing that could break through the aliens’ defenses, so the kills were slow and rare as many unicorns teleported away before their magic failed them.

“Onward brothers!” Tiberius commanded. “We must break them in close quarters!”

“Is it wise?” Aphaniel asked as he rolled to dodge yet another beam of white energy. “We might…”

“Run out of ammunition before can slay them all,” Tiberius threw a frag grenade as he completed Aphaniel’s sentence for him, the explosion killing one alien that was too slow to teleport away. “Our blades and our faith shall be our weapons of the day.”

So they followed him. From tree to tree they moved, laying down suppressive fire every few seconds to allow one of their own to move.

They slowed their careful movement when several beasts with a lion’s head, bat’s wing, and scorpion’s tail appeared from behind the unicorns and lunged at them.

These creatures were not protected by any magical shields and were gunned down with a few bolter rounds each, but they still slowed down all five marines. Not all of them were going for the Astartes, the vast majority were going directly for the guardsmen. A lot of them died, but many more reached their targets and were put down only after slaughtering dozens.

“We have to help them!” Icarus said as he heard the screams of pain and the sound of limbs being ripped apart.

“No, brother, leave them to their fate,” Tiberius did not even look at the guardsmen. “To die is their duty. In addition, we have to kill these Xenos now before the fires force them to retreat.”

“The laws of chivalry demand we fight the foe who sheds the most blood,” Icarus insisted, taking cover behind a tree and point to the humans with his chainsword. “Duty before glory, you taught me to live by these words.”

“They shall come back for us,” Aphaniel pointed out. “Better to fight them now while they are distracted.”

“So be it,” Tiberius reloaded his bolter and took a step backward. “We make for the path once more!”

A blazing had slowly grown out of the fires started by the lasguns. The flames were quickly spreading from trunk to trunk and many branches as large as logs were violently hitting the ground. A dark grey smoke filled the air, camouflaging the armors of the Star Lords.

Squad Tiberius still tried to move from cover to cover, but the fire was quickly becoming so hot that even they had to stay far away. To add salt to the wound, the unicorns began summoning fire with their magic. Balls and walls of fire hotter than promethium were quickly flying everywhere.

With their cover denied, the marines resorted to kneeling to offer a smaller target and rolling backward when the opportunity presented itself.

The enemy’s fire, of course, was focused on Aphaniel. Like all other foes, they wanted the banner.

To gain a few seconds of peace, Icarus opted to throw a frag grenade. The second he spent with his arm out as he watched the result of his throw cost him his hand as a ray of energy vaporized it in an instant. The shrapnel of Icarus’ grenade then killed the unicorn who took the shot, but the damage was already done.

Icarus did not react to the sudden loss of his hand. Instead, he kept moving backward as nothing had happened. No Star Lord would ever show that the enemy’s fire had any effect on them.

Eventually, the five reached the path just as several columns of fire swept through the forest.

What they found on the path was the aftermath of a blood bath. The beasts had torn every guardsman limb from limb or in half and were now feasting on the carpet of lifeless bodies.

Blood coated the entire path, and all manners of organs were scattered everywhere. Lungs, hearts, guts, and pancreases, the entirety of the human anatomy was presented to the Astartes in a gory display.

The blood also covered the beasts themselves who seemed satisfied by the feast of flesh they had gained. The flames had scared away many of them, and the lasguns had killed several more, but some of the larger ones had decided to stay to continue filling their bellies with human flesh. The eyes of those specimens were set alight by red flames, and their fur-less bodies were clearly made out of brass so thin it could barely contain the fire within.

At the very least, the magical rays and fire spells had stopped for the moment.

Icarus was the first to shoot, hitting his target in the throat. The round shattered the brass and caused an eruption of fire from the wound as the creature turned with a mechanical roar that dashed all remaining illusions it was something from the material world. The air around it had a bright and lively red hue.

“Run back to the forge that spawned you, daemon!” he shouted as his second round found its mark right between the eyes of enraged thing of brass and fire. It charged at him with another powerful roar as it showed no sign of being affected by the bolter rounds it had received. Only a seventh shot stopped its charge just a breath away from Icarus’ face.

His brothers soon joined him in with their bolters. Soon the roaring of bolters and the explosion of their rounds filled the air as the fire and smoke fully enveloped the trees.

Beast after beast they killed, and yet the enemy kept rushing towards them. It was not long before they had to put down their bolters and use their swords. The melee soon degenerated in an orgy of violence, with the armors of the Astartes gaining burn after burn and several deep scratches as a mountain of lacerated brass bodies formed around the squad.

Aphaniel, as expected, was at the center of the melee, the banner always attracted the enemy. The creatures of brass moved with unnatural speed, slashing and biting faster than the human eye could see, but they had met their match in the Astartes.

While many of their attacks did find their mark, none were capable of doing anything more than superficial damage as the marines moved fast enough to keep their vital organs safe and intact. For ache strike they suffered or narrowly avoided, they replied with several bolter rounds to the brass heads.

The largest of the creatures, one that towered three times over the rest of his kind, did not head for Aphaniel like so many others, instead, it headed for the most active of the five, Cadriel. Its mane and wings were made out of red fire and black smoke.

Cadriel had just enough time to lower his head before a paw of brass could cut it right off in a single movement. As he felt the hot hair flowing above him, Cadriel rolled forward so he was under his foe’s belly. There, he plunged his chainsword upward and then moved it forward as he created a large wound from which fire poured out. His chainsword had melted in a matter of seconds, but Cadriel did not care and he rolled to the side once more before the creature fell as it roared in pain.

As its belly hit the ground with a loud thud, everything ended. The moment the brass made contact with the dirt, the fire in its eyes died and reality reasserted itself. The other beasts roared in blind rage as they disappeared from reality, the air regained its natural color as even their dead vanished one by one leaving behind only the burns caused by the fire within them.

A distant booming thunder signaled the sudden beginning of a storm, a torrential downpour that had no problem getting through the thick foliage accompanied it. The newly arrived clouds above snuffed out what little remained of the sunlight and of the inferno that had been raging only a moment before.

“Another battle, another victory,” Cadriel said as he recovered what was left of his chainsword from the vanishing belly of the beast. Only the handle was left in a still usable shape while the rest was bent like a hook. “The xenos and the powers have tried their all and failed to best us.”

“Do you feel like a victor?” Icarus pointed to the sea of bodies and organs.

Many dying men and women were groaning and twitching in pain as they clutched either their wounds or their broken guns.

The pouring rain had quickly killed the fire, leaving the forest a wall of black and twisted columns. A strong, howling wind was now coming from the right side of the path, bringing small objects, like helmets and pamphlets, into the burned forest.

“Brother, a word,” Cassius stepped towards Tiberius. “In private.”

“I concede it,” Tiberius said. “Be swift.”

Tiberius then followed Cassius into the woods. They walked on the blackened earth until they were sure they were out of sight and earshot of the rest of the squad.

Tiberius did not see it coming; he only felt it. A gauntlet hitting him in the right face, turning his head around, and breaking his teeth.

“You almost had us all killed! Charging into a blatant trap!” Cassius made his anger clear by pinning Tiberius to a tree with his forearm. “And for what, the quest for glory so many of us are cursed with? I thought you better than that.”

Tiberius pushed Cassius away from him.

“I was about to close the distance with xenos,” Tiberius defended himself and took a step towards Cassius so the two of them were face to face. “Had it not been for Icarus and his adherence to the law, we would have slaughtered them.”

“Five against a legion? We did not have the numbers to win that clash,” Cassius stared right into his sergeant’s eyes. “Icarus’ chivalrousness saved us all; we would be burning in the inferno the xenos had prepared for us if not for him.”

“Icarus’ words cost us a greater victory,” Tiberius answered the unspoken challenge for dominance with his gaze and stared back. “There is much he still has to learn.”

Cassius removed his helmet, and then kept looking at his sergeant, but his eyes did not look threatening.

“For a long time I have followed you, but for a longer time still I wished that I could follow you, watching you from the distance as you earned your name and rank,” he said after a few moments of thinking. “I remember a knight I would have been proud of calling my liege if I could have followed him back in my youth. I remember feeling pride when you picked me for your squad when I returned from Mars. I have not seen that knight I looked up to in a long time. Where is he? Did he die on the battlefields of Mortiva like so many others? Have I been following a mirage since then?”

“You are being dramatic, Cassius,” Tiberius pushed Cassius’ helmet to his chest. He was surprised to hear his usually laconic brother speaking for so long, it was not like him at all. Tiberius realized his actions of the day, his search for a duel against a nameless commander, and his blind charge against the ambushers, had impacted Cassius much more than he had thought. “I am still the same knight you followed all that time ago.”

Tiberius’ reassurance had the opposite effect than the one had hoped for, as a look of disappointment appeared on Cassius’ lowered eyes.

“I hope not, it would mean I am a worse judge of character than I had first thought,” Cassius put his helmet back on. “I would have followed you to that accursed planet if I could have, now I question whether or not should follow you through this crusade.”

The threat was far from empty, all veteran Star Lords had the right to follow whatever sergeant they wished to follow, it was the first right they gained once they ascended to the first company. If Cassius wanted to, he could request reassignment to another squad, and Tiberius would have been powerless to stop him.

“I cannot stop you brother,” Tiberius admitted. “If you wish to leave my service go ahead, find the better liege. I have one request before you do so: in memory of the many wars we have waged side by side, I ask that you wait until the end of this one before you pass your final judgment upon me and my action.”

“Your demand is acknowledged,” Cassius put his hand to his chest and bowed slightly. “And accepted. I bind myself to you until the end of this war; your actions will decide if I will stay by your side after these xenos are vanquished.”

“I hope I can prove myself worthy of your services,” Tiberius also put his hand right over his heart. “To lose you would be an unforgivable failure of mine.”

With both marines having said everything they needed to say, they both walked to the rest of the squad. The other three brothers were talking about the battle, but they all fell silent when they saw the sergeant returning and waited for the next order.

Tiberius had decided he would lead his squad forward. If he gave up on his pursuit of whatever thing his instinct told him was hiding in the forest, all that happened in the forest would have been for nothing.

He only hoped Cassius would not judge him too harshly.

It had reached a new section of the forest, a much greener one, with a rich undergrowth and lest thick branches that allowed some rays of sunlight to pass through the thick foliage. There was life there, nothing larger than a fox, but enough to make the place not feel like a ghost town.

Shining white marble had replaced the cobbled stone, with several milestones of the same material placed at regular intervals. A line of lapis stones split the path in half, almost serving as a guide for those who walked on it.

There was no smell of burned wood or spilled blood, only the pleasant sensation of clean air filling the lungs and the chirping of birds all around the marines.

The rain was still coming down, but it was no longer a torrential downpour. It had been reduced to thin drops gently tapping the ground and the armors. The light had returned to the scenery despite the clouds above. The drops of water on the leaves and the grass scintillated like small gems put there by a careful artisan.

The marines were not silent; the daemonic beasts of brass and fire were the object of a long conversation that had occupied them since they resumed their march. The conversation was centered on what the appearance of warp-tainted creatures would mean for the rest of the crusade.

Icarus was convinced it was the beginning of an escalation, that the crusade would have to switch its focus from the xeno to the forces of the Immaterium. Cadriel, on the other hand, was dismissive of such ideas. One group of servants of the powers was hardly a prelude to anything in his mind.

“Your assessments come too early,” Aphaniel had eventually said, tired of the speculation he was hearing from his brothers. “For we know, we have just joined battle with the work of a local cult, nothing more than that.”

“Still, the other crusade forces should be aware of what we faced on this day,” Icarus made his suggestion to the rest of the squad, but was met with shaking heads from the others.

“No,” Tiberius reply was laconic and swift. “Not unless vitally necessary. Information is power, and we do not share power if we can help it.”

Icarus opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by Cassius cutting into the conversation after he had tried to reestablish communications, without success.

“This is pointless, brother,” Cassius said. “It is clear this path leads to no place of importance.”

“I shall not give up yet,” Tiberius replied. “There must have been a reason why the enemy retreated through here, why we were met with an ambush.”

“You are speaking…” Cassius interrupted his speech when he saw something in the distance.

It was a unicorn mare, casually walking in their direction, seemingly oblivious to their presence. She was wearing the same blue robes of the unicorns that had taken part in the ambush. Without saying a word, Tiberius threw a grenade at her and took cover behind the trees, where his brothers had already taken position.

When the flames and the noise of the explosion settled, there was no trace of the mare. Not even a piece of her robes. Only a small crater and multiple cracks in the marble were left in her place.

“Target down,” Tiberius stated. “Keep your guard high, there might be more around us.”

“I am here!” a feminine voice with a strong accent said in High Gothic, taking Tiberius completely by surprise. He turned to see the source of the voice. The mare was staring directly at him from one of the branches above them. “I’m not that easy.”

“You know our tongue, witch?” Tiberius fired at her.

She effortlessly dodged every single shot with several athletic jumps and spins, but she did not fire back. Instead, she just stared at him as the golden rings in her eyes emitted a soft light.

“I know many things, Tiberius of the Star Lords,” the mare said as she teleported away. She reappeared right back where the grenade had exploded, but her voice remained as clear as it had been a moment before. “Your language is just among one of them.”

Once again, he was taken aback by hearing his own name coming from the mouth of this alien but did his best to not show it, not in front of an enemy.

“I am not here to fight you,” she said. “My master wants me to talk with you.”

“I shall walk in the warp before I trust you,” Tiberius emptied an entire magazine in her direction as he addressed her. “The word of the xeno is poison.”

“Brother, she offers parlay,” Aphaniel put a hand on Tiberius bolter. “There is no harm in mere talk.”

“Let us talk then,” Tiberius grunted put down his bolter. “But I will not do this unless I know the name of whom I speak with.”

“Oh Star Lord, so typical, so predictable in your request. I will grant it,” the mare used one hoof to point to herself. “My name, for now, is Golden Path, but who knows what it could be in the future?

“Of what do you wish to speak?” He asked her, willingly ignoring her allusion to greater powers.

“I am here to deliver a message from my master, nothing more,” she said. “He has sent me to invite you to the Glittering Library. All five of you will be welcome. You might find the place a bit emptier than what is normal, although these are hardly normal circumstances.”

“This master of yours,” Aphaniel took a step forward to insert himself in the conversation. “What is his name?”

“I am sure you will figure it out,” Golden Path replied. “It will not take long. Just reach the end of the Library; he has left you a present.”

She teleported once more and reappeared on a different branch. She then lowered the branch and made it unnaturally longer until she was just outside of swinging distance from Tiberius.

“He has been waiting for this day for a long time, by the way,” she said as she shrank the branch back to a more natural length. “He would be very disappointed if you didn’t show up; you might even make him mad.”

“Why should I take your words as truthful?” Tiberius scowled. “Already one ambush you have cowardly laid upon us.”

“If my master wanted you dead, you would be,” Golden Path giggled. “Do not tell me you think you are alone right now? You Astartes are supposed to be smarter than that. Your death is not scheduled for today, the ambush was not for you..”

As she said that, several flocks of small white birds took flight and swarmed around the squad, chirping and flying right into the Astartes’ faces.

“Tell me of this library,” Tiberius grabbed one of the small birds and closed his hand a second after, killing instantly. His hand was covered in an explosion of blood, feathers, and tiny hollow bones. “Where is it located?”

“Thanks for taking out that idiot. Go on like that, and we’ll be friends in no time,” many of the small birds flocked right towards Golden Path and settled around her branch. “To answer your question, the Library’s entrance likes to move around, like me.”

With yet another teleportation, she reappeared right in the middle of the squad. Tiberius was half tempted to attack and break the parlay but stopped that train of thought when he noticed she was not projecting any shadow on the ground. The scarce rays from above went through her as if she was made of air.

“You are not really here, are you?”

“Took you long enough,” Golden Path walked right through Cadriel’s leg “I am not an idiot, I have to keep myself safe. However, going on, the Library‘s entrance should appear to your left in a few moments, you might find some of your brothers there. I am sure they will be delighted to see you, you look so great after all.”

“Your message is delivered,” Tiberius stated. “This parlay is over, and too long it has lasted.”

“But you haven’t told me if you accept the invitation,” Golden Path gave a fake sadness to her voice. “What will I tell my master?”

“When we find its entrance, we will access it,” Tiberius hoped the phrasing of his sentence would be enough to avoid any verbal trap. “I will say no more. Now cease this illusion and report to your master.”

“It will be my pleasure,” The mare smiled genuinely for the first time.

With that said, the mare turned into a white owl and flew away, leaving the marines alone in the forest.

“Do we wait here and do nothing?” Cadriel was the first to speak up. “For what we know, this could be yet another trap.”

“Yes, we will,” Tiberius looked to his left, where the mare said the entrance would appear. Just like she had said, an ornate golden door had appeared on the side of a wall of stone Tiberius could have sworn was not there just a moment before. It was open, and a quickly vanishing white light was coming from the inside. “Messengers to the enemy do not get killed.”

He took a step towards the door, and then he heard someone talk in the vox.

“This is squad Telemachus, receiving a new signal. Identify yourselves. Over.”

They had met with squad Telemachus, consisting of marines in assault gear, right outside the gate. The squad’s sergeant was not wearing a helmet, letting his flowing white hairs reach his shoulders. His pale face had a deep scar over his right eye.

His banner, carried by one of his brothers, represented a single sword pointed downward surrounded by a red circle.

“Hail, brother. The star of fortune favors us to bring us here,” Tiberius greeted him. “What brings you here to the same place as us?”

“Luck it was not,” Telemachus’ voice betrayed his youth, being one of the youngest veterans of the first company, being a decade short of two hundred. “I can swear there is sorcery afoot, as this is not the location where we found this place’s entrance.”

His squad nodded in assent.

“In that, I must agree,” Tiberius pointed at the gate. “This gate appeared from the side of the rocks as if summoned. More than that, a Xeno sorcerer invited us to this place.”

“I cannot say we had the same experience, but we did battle with the Xenos,” Telemachus caressed his plasma pistol, a rarity among the Star Lords. “A vile ambush it was. The guard perished, but we survived. There are other squads here who can share the same tale.”

“We also were ambushed,” Tiberius noticed the information did not surprise at all. “But enough of talking, there is a xeno den to explore.”

“Indeed, the other squads are already deep within,” Telemachus agreed and turned around to get into the Library.

A moment later, both squads were inside, and what he saw surprised him quite a lot. He had expected an underground place to be filthy or at the very least dark, but that could not be further from the truth.

It had a floor of waxed white marble that reflected the warm light of blue candles, and there were several detailed paintings on the walls of the corridor leading to the library proper. Each painting portrayed a single unicorn covered in robes. Out of the corridor, the white light coming from shining crystals on the ceiling greeted the squad.

Large, gargantuan shelves with thousands of books each reached the ceiling, and left distance between them created corridors large enough to accommodate a Leman Russ and a half. The entire scene was as bright as day.

“Where are the other squads?” Tiberius asked.

“Closing on our location as we speak,” Telemachus replied swiftly, knowing the question would be asked. “Three of them, with no casualties.”

Soon enough, the other squads had arrived. Titus and his devastators, despite being at full number, had suffered a horrific mauling during the ambush they were subjected to. Half of the sergeant’s armor was scorched black as the night and one of his subordinates was missing an arm. The squad’s banner represented one green skull imposed over a red flame.

The other two tactical squads, led by the sergeants Gallienus and Eremiel, completed the team for a total of twenty-five Astartes. The two of them had nothing peculiar about them. They were not one of the special squads of the Star Lords, just regular veterans without the honor of carrying a banner into battle.

Almost no words were exchanged at that point. They all knew this place had something to hide. It was only a matter of time until they discovered what it was.

Each squad took its position in a well-practiced formation, with Titus providing the tip of the spear with Telemachus right behind him and the other squads covering the flanks and rear. Tiberius had positioned his squad on the left flank.

Their advance was slow, as the wide space between each shelf formed large corridors that would have made them easy targets for a sniper, but not directionless. On the marble, there were symbols and arrows all highlighted a single path. The symbols were all cosmological, a sun, a half-moon, or a purple star. There was also one that seemed out of place, a crystalline heart; Tiberius could not explain the reasoning behind its presence.

At the corners of the shelves, there were silver statues of hooded equines looking at those below them with emotionless expressions on their faces. With their size, they made even the space marines look small, so large and tall were they.

“Brothers, do you hear what I hear?” Aphaniel asked.

“No, there is only silence in this place for me.” Tiberius’ reply was followed by those of his brothers. All were echoing the same sentiment. Even the marines in other squads said the same thing. Except for the Astartes’ walking, there was no sound in that place.

“Do you not find it odd?” He then asked his next question. “That a place this large should produce no sound?”

“It is most odd indeed,” Tiberius agreed with the veteran. “There might be more foes yet waiting for our blades.”

Just as they talked, a bolter fired a single shot. All turned towards its source the second they heard the sound.

The shot had come from Eremiel, who had taken the rearguard as his responsibility, in front of him there was an equine made entirely out of dark smoke. It kept walking as if nothing had happened, its glowing green not seeming to acknowledge the fact that it had just been shot.

It was carrying a small stack of books enveloped by a green aura.

Eremiel shot a couple more times but soon decided against wasting the ammunition. His brothers made the same decision.

“May I ask if any here know what this is?” Eremiel asked as he looked at the other squads.

“Sorcery of some kind,” Aphaniel inspected the dark figure, focusing on the eyes, as he also tried to understand what it was. “Although I am not privy to what kind of sorcery we are witnessing now.”

“It matters not,” Cadriel shot a full burst at the smoke creature, earning himself a bewildered look from Telemachus. “All sorcery is to be met with annihilation.”

“Ammunition is not be wasted,” Titus’ voice was deep and powerful, like that of a demigod, and it immediately convinced Cadriel to stop firing. “We need to move onward. Whatever this sorcery is, it is of no concern to us. I say we ignore it.”

“I second his assessment,” Tiberius turned away from the still oblivious smoke creature. “We do not have all eternity to waste.”

The rest of the walk was uneventful. More smoke ponies appeared carrying books around and the marines ignored them. Tiberius eventually concluded that they were little more than servants assigned to the Library, and he wanted to discover who their master was.

As they went deeper into the library, it slowly morphed into an archive. Black steel lockers stacked upon each other replaced the shelves. These also reached the ceiling. The statues were gone, and the white marble and been replaced with a shining blue variant.

One thing had not changed; the crystals from the ceiling had only grown longer. Some had become so long that they reached the floor and blocked some paths entirely.

Although it seemed endless for a moment, their walk did not last forever, as a large square eventually appeared in front of them. Large did not give it justice, as the entire Star Lords chapter could have been arrayed there, carrying all of its trophies and battle honors, and there would have still been room to spare.

In the far distance, Tiberius could see several circles of various colors carved into the wall of black rock. In the middle of the circles, there was a glowing white door.

“Now that is a sight to behold,” Lamorak said as he put his bolter to his belt and looked into the distance. “The fact xenos built this place is the only thing that mars it.”

“Do not lay words of praise onto the Xeno, brother,” Tiberius casually admonished the other sergeant, his words having little weight as he spoke. “In addition, it is my belief that the xenos were not alone as they built this Library. Greater and darker forces are on the move here.”

“I agree,” Telemachus pointed to the glowing door with his plasma pistol. “Let us get there as swiftly as possible. I feel we are close to uncovering all we need to know about this accursed Library.”

“This open area would be perfect for an ambush,” Titus noted. “We should move on the sides of this plaza, where cover will be more easily available.”

“And that is why such an action would be predictable, an ambusher would make plans expecting us to fear them,” Telemachus pointed out as he placed his plasma pistol on his belt. “Rushing directly to our target would not be an expected course of action.”

Others, Tiberius included, voiced their agreement with Telemachus, and the decision was taken. The Astartes would make a direct dash for the glowing door, and Telemachus with his assault marines would take point.

An odd thing then happened. It was not the violent oddity, a hidden foe or a trap, but something Tiberius was definitely not expecting. He barely had time to notice that the door grew much larger than it should have with every step he took while his brothers slowed down as if they were moving through a sea of honey. He had only taken a dozen strides when he was already in front of his objective. The other marines were still far in the distance.

Looking to his left and right, he could see that the circles he had seen from afar had black runes carved onto their sides and smoke was coming out of them before vanishing into the surrounding air.

What interested him much more, however, was the palatial door in front of him.

A white tree with a purple star near the top of its trunk shone upon the black steel of the gate. It was supposed to have five branches sporting from the top, but they were not painted beyond more than a stump. Tiberius did not know if the missing branches had been intentionally removed or if they had faded out over the centuries, but he understood a symbol of loss when he saw one.

As if on cue, the door opened slowly and soundlessly. A white fog-like gas crept up from its base, reflecting the light coming from the runes. It thus gained the appearance of a shining white sea quietly surrounding Tiberius and then enveloping him below the belt. It was cold as a mountain breeze on a spring night.

After waiting for the door to stop moving, Tiberius once again stepped forward into what he could only call a massive corridor.

Its builders had sloped it downwards, so the water in the two canals on its sides could gather in a single pool at the end. Accompanying the canals there were two lines of thin white and gold columns holding up an archway of lapis stone. The archways themselves were holding up a white pointed roof that shielded the water from the rays of blue light until it reached the pool.

Elevated from the center, there was a large pedestal. Upon it, the statues of four equines looked with a kind smile upon those who entered. They seemed larger and taller than the ones he had seen before.

Nine rows of wooden pews, all facing towards the pool, stood between the two canals.

It dawned on Tiberius that he had not stumbled into a mere corridor, as he had first thought. The four statues were objects of worship, he realized as he focused his gaze on the four. The artisan who crafted the statues had refined much of the facial features of what they thought were divine beings.

Walking past the pews, Tiberius found himself in front of a wooden altar and saw yet another thing that he did not expect at all.

It was not the closed book with the blue cover that he found unusual. A religious book in a religious place was barely worth a brow raise. He instead fixated his eyes on the Astartes combat knife that pinned the book to the altar.

He scanned the surrounding area, expecting the owner of the blade to be watching him from some shadowy corner.

“If you value your honor, reveal yourself,” he said as he pointed his chainsword in front of him. “Step into the light.”

There was no response. The blue air inside the alien cathedral was still as he put his chainsword back on his belt.

Keeping his senses alert, he stepped closer to examine the combat knife.

He noticed it was not only pinning the book to the altar, but it also held a letter written on yellow paper in place.

The knife was easy to pull away. Tiberius threw the book to the ground and grabbed the letter. It was written in a Low Gothic dialect Tiberius was very familiar with. The calligraphy itself was exquisite, regal.

It read: “Mine eyes did witness your craft this day

And my servant brought me word of it,

Ah! much she did speak of your retreat

Much delight was in what she did say

Old brother, I am glad you have come

Carrying the old banner of mine,

Cold blood and hard steel shall break the line

Olden hands will claim what you took home”

“It and retreat? His written work always was weak,” Tiberius crumpled the paper and threw it on the ground next to the book. He then looked up and saw that his brothers had finally arrived. “The years have not changed Mordred.”

Temple of the Five

It was a loud night in Canterlot, its streets bustling with all manners of creatures from all over Equestria and its colonies as the noise of their walking and chatter reached up to the palace itself. It was from one balcony of that palace that Spike could observe and hear the scene below. He then looked at the city’s skyline that expanded until it almost reached the horizon, but stopped just before reaching it. Ponyville had become a neighborhood of Canterlot, swallowed up by the relentless advance of industry and progress, while the Everfree forest had been given a wide berth. A thin layer of smog covered the chimneys and apartments in the most distant parts of the city that Spike could somehow see just as clearly as if they were right in front of him.

His vision had never been so perfect, and no doctor could explain why it had improved so much after his return to Equestria. All Spike knew he could see every nook and cranny of Canterlot from that balcony. His hearing had also improved considerably, allowing him to pinpoint the source of even the faintest noise. No matter how much the doctors studied him, they had yet to find a rational reason for such a change.

It was because of the inexplicable improvements that Spike’s ears constantly heard the sound of the feast going on in the palace, despite him having closed the door behind him. He had been trying to ignore it with no success.

He took one last look at the Canterlot Central Hospital. Its cylindrical shape reminded him of the problem he could not solve on his own. Like a crack in a pair of glasses, he could only wait for someone more experienced than him to fix it. With that thought in mind, he went back inside.

The room was longer than it was wide, with the long sides having several large stained glass windows, but it still had enough space to have a constellation of tables scattered around with no precise pattern, each furnished by a dark blue or white piece of cloth. Every table had enough food to sate a dragon lord, if not for the lack of meat. Close to the windows on each side, but far enough to allow two ponies to walk side by side without feeling constrained, there were two rows of white columns reaching up to a blue ceiling with silver stars painted on it.

Many guests were performing an elegant dance in the center of the room while a crowd of them had gathered around them to watch. The notes coming from many violins and a black piano dictated the slow-paced movements of the dance. It was a somber song; the deliberately slow notes engendering in Spike a feeling of melancholy and loss as if he was trying to remember something he had lost forever.

A long table was on one end of the room, with a large blue and white flag behind it. High-ranking officers and powerful nobles from all over Equestria had their seats there close to Celestia and Luna. The two sisters had come back, on Spike’s written request, to act as regents while Twilight was in her coma.

Spike’s seat was on that table, that accursed table at the very center of the public eye. Celestia and Luna thought they were honoring him by giving him a seat right in front of them, but all he wanted were a few hours of peace, something that the entire universe seemed to be hell-bent on denying him.

“If you ask me,” a feminine voice Spike had heard before said from his right. The words were slurry, clearly the result of alcohol. “This seems a bit in poor taste.”

He turned to see who had spoken; it was the Lieutenant Golden Path. She was carrying a goblet of wine with her levitation magic and was struggling to not fall on the floor.

“Doesn’t even feel like a war has started,” she continued. “With all this food and wine, at least it’s good wine.”

She took a big swig from the cup and emptied half of it in the blink of an eye.

“I was not aware a Lieutenant could enter here,” Spike was surprised to see her, he had been told the little feast Celestia and Luna had thrown to inaugurate their hopefully brief regency was reserved for high-ranking officers and powerful nobles, and yet she, a simple Lieutenant, had gotten access to such a gathering.

“Oh, Blue Song got me in,” she casually admitted as she then finished the cup with a second swig. “He wanted a pair of friendly eyes and ears here, but I don’t care anymore. Got better stuff to do.”

If Blue Song’s hooves were not behind it, she would have impressed Spike with her achievement.

“Are you feeling alright?” he asked her, worried by her lightning-fast drinking.

“Never felt better!” she grabbed a nearby bottle and filled up her cup once more as she slurred her reply. “How are you holding up?”

“Me?” he was not expecting a drunk mare to worry about him. “I’m doing fine.”

“Great! You know, all the… hic… all the…” She paused for a second so she could drink more. “The veterans from your crew came back with all sortsa problems, they’re all weird in the head… but you’re fine! Thank the gods.”

Once again, she drank all the wine in her cup with surprising speed, making all the contents of the cup disappear behind her lips in just a second. Spike, however, was paying more attention to the last few words coming out of Golden Path’s mouth. An officer who wore her religious beliefs on her sleeve was a rare occurrence indeed. The state presented itself as secular and most officers had no issues with not crossing that line in the sand, at least in public.

He blamed the slip of etiquette on the mare’s intoxicated state and thought little else of it. Her beliefs were her own, and her drinking was a much more pressing issue for him.

“So,” he said as he grabbed the wine and looked at it, pretending to be interested as he thought of some question to keep the mare distracted. The label said it was two hundred years old. “Did you pick this one for a reason?”

“Nah, I always grab the nearest bottle,” she smiled at him with mischievous pride, as if she was a filly admitting her misdeeds to her disapproving parents. “The others at the table were such a bore.”

She pointed at an almost abandoned table, with only one old griffon with grey feathers sitting on one of the nine white wood chairs around it.

“There was an… an economist and, like, a philosopher and they kept talking with each other,” She moved to drink again but stopped when she realized her cup was empty. “Bummer. Anyway, it was so boring I had to drink and drink. I was supposed to be paying attention and stuff but…”

“You drank too much?” Spike did what he could do to stop what he felt was an incoming rant.

“I… drank… just enough,” she tried to grab the bottle with her weak levitation magic, but Spike’s grip held firm and she almost slipped as she tried to grab it with her hooves. “Can I finish it?”

“No,” he said as he held onto the bottle. “Just come with me for a second.”

Thinking some cleaner air would do this drunk mare some good, and to spare her from further embarrassment, he led her to the balcony. He was sure the air would not be so cold that it would pose a threat to her.

“Whoa… pretty,” Golden Path smiled like a filly in front of a candy shop as she looked at the city below with its dazzling lights and elongated skyline. She then looked up, and some of her smile faded. “No stars… bummer.”

It was far from the first time he had heard those words; they had only become more frequent as the new Equestria absorbed the old one and the light pollution increased exponentially. In moments like that, Spike wished he had not seen the old world so that he could enjoy the new one without the burden of so many old memories.

“Still pretty,” she stumbled forward, the alcohol in her system having weakened her legs significantly. The rail of the balcony stepped her unexpected advance. “Hey, I can... I can see my temple from here.”

“Your temple?” Spike gently pushed her away from the ledge.

“Yeah… it’s right there.” she went back to the ledge and pointed at a small octagonal building not too distant from the palace. It looked modern, clashing with the historical architecture around it “We gather every week, it’s a great time.”

“That’s… great,” he patted her over the right shoulder as he tried to get her away from the ledge. She wouldn’t have been the first drunkard to fall to her death. “Can you take a step back?”

Perhaps bringing her to the balcony was not the best idea he ever had, he thought.

“I think… I think you should come,” she mumbled. “To the temple.”

“What?” he tilted his head as he heard her proposal and wondered why she thought he would ever accept it. He had shown no interest in those matters before. “No thanks, I have other stuff to do.”

“Why not?” her voice shifted tone in the blink of an eye, the words coming out quickly and confidently. “I can give you something that you’ll like… a lot”

The behavior of her eyes had also changed without warning. No longer aimlessly looking around, they had focused on him alone with a gaze that could pierce scales, flesh, and bone. Behind those eyes, Spike saw an all-consuming ambition burning brighter than the stars.

“I’m not interested.” Spike rejected what he was sure was an indecent proposal.

“It’s not about that,” she giggled, and then her expression turned dead serious as the last traces of inebriation vanished. “I have something more useful. I know you won’t say no to it.”

“No, I don’t like being tricked,” Spike said decisively, then moved to turn around, only to be stopped by one of the mare’s hooves holding his left hand. "This conversation is over."

“Oh, come on, I just had to get you isolated to make sure no one will hear us,” she pleaded. “Half of that room works for that damn admiral.”

Hearing the freely given information, Spike decided he would not leave just yet.

“You still haven’t given me a reason for visiting your church.” he pulled his hand away from her but remained where he was. “Tell me I should not turn away and report your behavior. I should not even be talking with you.”

“Because if you do what I ask you to do,” she took a few steps, circling him as she spoke, never losing eye contact. “I will heal and save Twilight.”

He had angrily dismissed the invitation at first. The thought that a small and unknown religious group could do something the best doctors in Equestria could not was absurd. Surely, he thought, scientific professionalism would once again prove it had no need for petty superstitions and religious beliefs. That had been the norm for the entirety of Twilight’s reign.

The ideological foundations of Twilight’s reign had been science and reason. Religions and superstitions were not persecuted but were understood to be a mere leftover of a less enlightened past, one that would fade away with enough time and education.

In the morning after Golden Path’s offer, Spike witnessed the formation of a terrifying crack in Twilight’s ideology.

A single stallion dressed in a white doctor’s suit rushed inside the throne room, where Spike was acting as an advisor, to deliver a piece of world-shattering news: Twilight was dying. The doctors were doing everything they could, but even their best estimates gave her a week of life in the best-case scenario. He said that the worst could happen at any moment, and they could only wait for it.

After hearing the doctor’s words, Spike had rushed to the Canterlot Central Hospital, unwilling to believe those words without seeing any proof. All he saw was the dried-up shell of Twilight, just a bundle of skin and bones barely clinging to life as her heart kept beating dangerously slowly.

It was there, in that hospital room, that the mare’s offer suddenly gained appeal. He did not even know if her words had been true, if she really did know how to heal Twilight, but dark circumstances have a way of shining light on even the shadiest offers.

He went back to the palace and he waited for most of the day to pass, as Golden Path told him the gathering would happen in the evening. He then sneaked out of the palace just as the sun touched the horizon and long shadows covered the streets of Canterlot’s historical city center. To avoid being recognized, he wore a long robe and hood to hide his body and face.

After a few minutes of walking down old alleyways, the temple appeared before him once he turned a corner.

From a closer distance, it was even more of an eyesore for Spike. The eight black and windowless walls contrasted horribly with the ancient marble around it. It was also larger than it had seemed before, dwarfing the small houses around it and casting a long shadow over several blocks.

Golden Path was there, talking in front of a small gathering of what he assumed were her fellow believers. He was far enough that could not hear the words, but all those who listened seemed to be entranced by what she was saying. She was not preaching, merely talking, but it was enough to win her the undivided attention of everyone around her. She was wearing a blue hood over her head and a robe of the same color.

Noticing he had arrived, she stopped talking and waved at him, causing the rest of the congregation to turn around and look at him. All of them had something slightly off about them, whether it was unicorns with horns longer than what was normal or griffons with flamboyant colors on their feathers. Their looks deviated just slightly from what Spike knew to be natural.

Deciding to ignore the feeling of wrongness, Spike walked towards Golden Path as he kept a stern and inscrutable expression on his face.

“I knew you would come!” she said with a blindingly bright smile as she offered to shake his hand.

“You know I don’t have a choice.” he shook her hoof out of politeness. “I just hope I’m not wasting my time.”

“That’s why I knew you would come,” she said, maintaining her cheerful facade. “And don’t worry; this will be worth your time, I made sure of it. Let’s get you inside.”

With the brief introductions out of the way, she led him and her small congregation through one of the four gates of the temple. He could feel the congregation watching his every step, but he did not let that feeling stop him.

The inside of the temple was lit up by enormous cauldrons of fire, one for each of its alabaster walls, casting dancing lights onto the black marble pavement and producing a moderate amount of grey smoke. Precisely in the center, surrounded by eight thick pillars of red marble that reached the flat ceiling, there was a larger cauldron with an enchanted fire. It switched from blue to purple, then to green, and finally settled for a few seconds on red before the cycle began anew. Spike had not seen it in the night, but the ceiling had a large hole in its center that allowed the smoke from the fires to exit the room. There were also four additional doors that clearly did not lead outside.

“Welcome,” Golden Path said as she moved one of her forelegs above her head in a grandiose motion. “To the Temple of the Five.”

They walked towards the center, but Spike did not wait long before he opened his mouth. “You made a big promise to get me here. I hope you’ll keep it.”

Golden Path slowly turned to face him, the golden trim in her eyes somehow glimmering through the shadow cast over her face by the flames. “The ritual will begin in minutes, just a matter of waiting for everyone to show up,” she spat out those last two words, visibly annoyed at all the delayed arrivals. “But I swear it will happen before the first ray of sunlight.”

“I don’t have time,” Spike said quickly. “Twilight might die at any moment; I need what you say you have, and I need it now.”

“Do not worry,” she reassured as she glanced at the central fire which had just turned green. “The Grandfather has promised me he will keep her alive for as long as possible.”

“The Grandfather?” The cryptic glimpse into her faith had left him with another question. If he was going to put hope in this blind long shot, he would need to know all that he could about it.

“You will know him one day if you wish to walk the same path I did,” she then shifted her gaze towards the colorful flame, and then kept speaking. “But all you need to know is that he is a god of life and death at the same time.”

“Forgive me if I’m not entirely convinced,” the mare’s words could have come out of the mouth of any preacher that had appeared in Equestria in the last twenty years, hardly convincing for Spike. They went against everything Twilight’s Equestria stood for, and that did not help her case. “I would need evidence of this Grandfather’s power.”

“As would I,” she nodded in agreement. “I would not be in this temple if the gods had not shown their power to me.”

He had heard the same words from another preacher many years before. All he had to convince him of his faith were dreams and the flight pattern of birds above the Everfree forest. She, he was sure, would be just as nonsensical. Only his desperate hope this mare had one last trick up her sleeve kept him from storming out.

“And what would that proof be?” he asked, expecting the worst.

“They saved my life,” she replied, her speed showing she had expected that exact question. “When pirates captured me when I was young, the gods vented all of them into space and returned the ship to safety.”

A little filly misinterpreting what was happening around was not the worst explanation for faith he had ever heard, he thought. Spike had seen with his own eyes how faith had given hope to the desperate, and it made her religiosity more genuine than the one of a run-of-the-mill scammer. Perhaps he had been too harsh in judging her so quickly.

Their conversation had the added benefit of making time pass with relative speed, and it was not long before a small crowd had gathered around the central cauldron of fire. All were wearing a hood and they all had something that Spike could only define as mutations just like the ones he had seen outside.

“Finally, forty-nine,” Golden Path exclaimed as once again she smiled, this time in a much more satisfied manner. “Now the ritual can begin.”

Golden Path spent a few minutes giving orders to those who had gathered in the temple. After everyone had received their directions, the ritual began.

After a nod from her, the forty-nine followers spread out to form seven concentric circles around the fire while Spike and the mare remained near the fire, both observing the ceremony from the center. With another identical command, the entire congregation intoned a chant.

It was a barely audible murmur at first, but it slowly grew louder. The words were incomprehensible to Spike’s untrained ear, but the cultists had practiced them so many times they knew them by heart.

As the chant grew in potency and otherworldliness, strange things happened in the temple. The walls glowed in different hues, matching the one shining from the one in the center as all the fires grew stronger with each second. With a mechanical buzzing noise, the hole in the ceiling expanded to let the smoke, which had increased in volume because of the stronger flames, flow out into the sky.

As it did so, the ceiling also turned transparent so that only its eight supporting beams remained visible to the naked eyes essentially forming an eight-pointed star right above Spike and Golden Path.

Golden Path could not believe it was all working so perfectly. She gave her thanks to the Architect with her thoughts as she performed her part of the ritual.

The lighting up of her horn was the signal her fellow cultists were waiting for. The circle closer to her began rotating in a clockwise manner while the one behind it did so in the opposite direction. All other circles repeated the same pattern until all of them were moving. They did not stop chanting for even a second as they did so. They did not know the words were meaningless gibberish, but that did not matter. The belief and the emotions behind the words were the real fuel.

Charging up her magic powers, she could feel they had increased massively thanks to Imperium providing emotions and turmoil all over the little sector Twilight called an empire. It made the wait for the inevitable escalation of the war almost unbearable. The Lord’s attention to the sector was growing, and she was sure he would soon demand his tithe.

Focusing on the moment, Golden Path channeled the energy of the ritual into a healing spell that, thanks to the power of the Gods, would have put any other spell ever cast in Equestria to shame. Just the effort of holding up so much power gave her a head-splitting migraine that quickly spread to her entire body. Her frail mortal form could not handle so much power from the warp and the price for even attempting to do so was unspeakable agony. Despite her legs trembling from the pain and the feeling of all her bones being about to splinter, she pushed on. Pain was merely a gift from the Prince, so that she may better enjoy all pleasures in life.

That thought allowed her to steel herself and focus once more on her duty instead of her pain.

With an unnatural roar, she released the energy in the form of a green wave expanding outward from where she stood and she felt it traverse the entirety of Canterlot. It healed everything it touched, from crippling injuries to seasonal colds and especially the one mare the entire operation revolved around. Just as Golden Path lost track of her energy, she felt the princess moving, jumping up from her bed with a scream.

“It is done,” she said with composure. The time to celebrate was still far away. What she had done that night, she knew, was merely the first step of plan centuries in the making, all she had to do was to wait for when the citizens of Canterlot would come asking questions and for Blue Song to play the role the Architect had designed for him.

After all, he was the one in charge of the toys.

Taking her out of her thoughts, Spike scoffed. “This is it?” He asked. “Just a weird spectacle and a magic trick?”

“Go to the Central Hospital and see the results for yourself,” she calmly told him. “I am sure you’ll like the results.”

“If I found that you lied…”

“You won’t,” she dismissed the veiled threat. “Now please go, there is a princess that is feeling very confused right now. She will have questions, and you should be there to answer them.”

Spike went to one of the doors, understanding the truth behind Golden path’s words. He only stopped for a moment to turn around and speak one last time. “I’ll be back.” He pointed his finger at her. “With questions.”

Then he walked out, gently closing the door behind him.

“I’m sure you will,” she said as she turned to look at the central flame. “You wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?”

For a few minutes, she just looked at the fire, contemplating her role in the designs of the great gods. Compared to them, everything that lived was a petty animal of no significance; only by being useful to the gods could a life gain any real meaning. She was no different, but, unlike many, she was happy with her place in the universe.

That was how she saw herself, a willing and enthusiastic tool of the gods. She did not pray at their altar because she hoped for a keener mind or a stronger body. Those gifts were nice obviously nice to receive, but they were not her reason for her faith. She followed the gods because she agreed with what they represented, in their entirety, and she worshipped them all in equal measure, as everyone should.

She had not lied to Spike, not completely at least. She had just omitted some details about the pirates that had taken her. They were the ones who had inducted her into the faith, after all.

Her contemplations could not go on forever, and acolyte eventually approached her. She turned to face him before he opened his beak, startling him with the quick movement of her head.

He was a young griffon with feathers of every color imaginable, surely a gift from the Prince.

“Speak,” she ordered. “But be quick, I have a meeting with the Master soon.”

“If I may ask,” the griffon hesitated, only irritating her. “Why did you let him leave? He was right where we needed him.”

He pointed to where every cultist hid a dagger if they were wearing robes of any kind. The griffon was not carrying a dagger because his talons were sharp enough to make them excellent substitutes for almost all blades.

She took her eyes from him, and once again looked at the ever-changing flames. “Because we need him to spread the word,” she explained. “The Lord of Battle will surely understand if we deny him one drop of blood for the sake of spilling much more in the future.”

The reference to a god the griffon did not either worship or even understand had the intended result of making him step back, the alternative would have been to admit his hedonistic impulses to ruin the entire plan for the sake of a quick thrill. No matter how hard she tried to understand them, she could only have contempt for those who gave themselves to one god only. Just fools unwilling to see the bigger picture, she thought.

As the griffon left her alone after nodding to pretend he understood her words, she walked towards one door that did not lead outside and walked down the stairs right behind it. As the air became dank and water dribbled down from the rocky ceiling, she reached a large cave with many glowing circles on the rocky walls.

They were portals to various Equestrian colonies. Establishing them had taken years, for some even a whole century, of work. Despite that, using them was still a nauseating experience, but they allowed all cultists to move in secret across the colonies. She had already shut some of them down because of Imperial arrival, but many were still functional. Soon she would have to shut down all of them, she thought, as they would no longer be necessary.

At the center of the room, there was a solitary figure. It was dragon-like in size and posture, but it wore a grey set of armor that Golden Path knew to be impenetrable by regular Equestrian weapons besides explosives. Its helmet had a white beak almost like that of a griffon and two glowing white eyes. It had a sword longer than the entire mare hanging from its hilt and an enormous gun on the other side of that hilt.

“Master, I have succeeded,” she said as she bowed to the figure and kissed the floor. “The fuse is lit.”

“Commendable,” the master’s voice was booming and powerful. “Then I believe it is time for my brothers to arrive. I hope your rulers will be… accommodating to their presence.”

Author's Note

Sorry for being late but uni stressful.

Mountain of madness

Hekter huddled behind a rock as he listened to the screams of dying guardsmen. In front of him stood a deep chasm that went all the way to the flat plain below. The burning husk of his chimera provided the only source of heat on the snowy path up the mountain.

He dared to stand up for one second to look at the aliens and quickly realized they were only ten.

It seemed impossible. The Imperial Guard had broken through those alien armies with ease, but only ten of them had stopped an entire armored column and were leaving no survivors. Just ten against two hundred, and there had been no contest at all.

They had simply popped into existence in front and around the column and started taking out tank after tank before moving to the surrounding infantry. Their fire was organized and never missed, not even once.

The flak armor of the Imperial Guard was as effective as smoke against the purple rays from the aliens. The only silver lining was that the enemy fire was so hot that it cauterized all wounds instantly, so there was little blood on the ground.

When they fired at a tank, they prioritized the ammunition compartment, killing almost all the crew instantly and sending the turret flying. Some survived, but the aliens gunned them down as soon as they crawled out of their vehicles.

Hekter was lucky to have gotten out of it with his life and all of his limbs. The charge of some brave guardsmen had provided a distraction for a few seconds. By the time those men were dead, Hekter had already found his hiding spot. From there, he could only listen as all the other guardsmen died.

With one last scream of pain, the battle ended, and the aliens teleported into the burning remains of the column. They wore shining golden armor and wielded shoulder-mounted cannons on their right side. Hekter saw one of them finishing a wounded guardsman with a retractable blade on his right hoof.

One alien had a slightly different helmet with silver wings and purple eye lenses. Hekter realized it was a leader, and thought about shooting at it. The realization that his lasgun would have never pierced the armor stopped him from pulling the trigger. He wanted to survive, glorious sacrifice was for others.

He lowered his lasgun and rested his head against the rock behind him, hoping the aliens would not look for survivors and be content with having made a mockery of an Imperial column.

After closing his eyes, he held his breath and thought a prayer as he waited to either die or drift into unconsciousness.

Sleep came with no warning and brought no dreams. It was like he had skipped forward in time. He reopened his eyes when he heard steps crushing the snow.

It was already night by then, with the moon occupying the spot of a setting sun and no stars in the sky because of the thick layer of clouds obfuscating the mountaintop.

He stood up and looked at his now frozen chimera and saw what had made the noise that woke him up. The three enormous men with power armor could be nothing but Astartes, and he even recognized their grey armor as belonging to the Star Lords. They were kneeling to get a better look at the corpses, turning them around to see their faces.

Salvation had arrived.

“M-my Lords,” he said, making the three marines stop what they were doing. “I am so glad to see you. We got ambushed and-“

He stopped when the Astartes turned to look at him and stepped into the moonlight. There was something wrong with them. Their armor bore cracks in several places and had symbols he had never seen on any imperial force. The telltale sign he had made a terrible mistake was the eight-pointed star on the helmet of one of the marines.

“At least one of you whelps lived,” the one with the star said. His booming voice sounded like seeing Hekter amused him. “I must offer you my sincere thanks, for your survival means this day is not a waste.”

Since survival was no longer a possibility, Hekter fired his lasgun. All he achieved was a laugh from the Chaos Marine, who rushed towards and easily yanked his gun from his hands and lifted Hekter by his head with two fluid moves. He then took one step forward so that Hekter would be beyond edge and ready to be dropped at any moment.

“You shall not need this anymore,” he said as he tossed the lasgun away. “Not for a long time.”

Being close to an Astartes was always a terrifying experience, but being face-to-face with one serving the enemy was bowel-liquefying. He knew it would take no effort for the Space Marine to crush his head like a grape.

“No, you shall not perish on this day,” he reassured him, making Hekter think he was reading his thoughts. A moment later, he realized that his thunderous heartbeat was giving away his terror. “Our new friends need you for a simple test.”

“Can’t you just kill me?” he asked, frozen in terror.

The evil giant laughed. “You have nothing to fear, future friend. You will just have a chat with one xeno, nothing that will put your life at risk.”

“And my soul?” his eyes looked away from the Space Marine as he asked his second question. He did not do so out of fear, but because of the shame building up within him from his act of cowardice. Perhaps the Emperor was punishing him, he thought.

“You hid from a battle against hated xenos,” the Space Marine lifted Hekter’s chin so that he could not look away. “Would the Emperor welcome such a coward in his paradise? I think not. You have already fallen, now it is only a matter to discover by how much.”

The Space Marine had a crack where one of his eye-lenses should have been, and Hekter saw that his skin was as pale as a frosted corpse and his visible eye was a black void with one green dot in its center.

Another marine approached the one holding Hekter and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Brother Charon,” his voice sounded like that of a smoker paying the consequences of his addiction. “The xenos will shut down the portal in an hour. We need to move now.”

“Vitus,” Charon turned towards his treacherous brother. “Where would I be without you and your attention to time?”

“Stuck on this planet,” Vitus deadpanned. “Probably.”

With nothing else left to say, the three marines walked away, dragging Hekter with them. Charon kept one hand over Hekter’s mouth to keep him from screaming.

Only a week had passed since Tiberius had gotten out of the alien library. A week all imperial forces had spent moving at breakneck speed through the almost empty valleys of the planet, breaking any strongpoint they found in their way.

The battles were clean and direct affairs with no tricks or ambushes, just two sides meeting each other face-to-face in combat. It was a week of war waged as it always should be.

The stunning advance had come to a screeching halt, however, when the Imperial Guard had met their first unsurmountable obstacle: a solitary mountain turned into an impregnable fortress by alien work.

After ten disastrous assaults with no survivors, the Imperial Guard had asked for help from the Star Lords.

Tiberius was one marine who answered the call for reinforcements, but he was not thinking of combat at that moment. He was walking forward alone with his bolter and chainsword hanging from his hips. Grey clouds covered the sky above and soft rays of moonlight lit up the dirt path ahead.

His target was a round and white tent with a hole in its center from which a column of light grey smoke emerged.

Rows of smaller tents lined up the path. They were not for the Astartes, who would spend the night awake, but for their serfs who had followed them on the ground.

The Star Lords had set up camp under the shadow of the mountain, so they had brought almost everyone but their servitors and the most necessary elements of the Hengroen’s crew down to the surface.

Tiberius could see the mountain by looking to his right. The snow still covered its steep slopes in a thick white blanket which allowed only the biggest of its many jagged rocks to emerge from it. The curved shape reminded him of a feral beast’s tooth pointed at the sky.

The Star Lords had considered approaching it with drop pods, but the scouts had revealed a truly staggering amount of anti-air weaponry, mostly composed of surface-to-air missile launchers, which would have turned such an assault into a waste of resources and lives. Going by land was the only acceptable path to victory.

The camp was just a rallying point for the night, as Galahad had decided the attack would take place in the morning. He hoped the sun would provide a distraction for the enemy’s heat-seeking rockets so that thunderhawks could operate in peace.

A few chapter serfs, dressed in plate armor, saluted Tiberius as they walked past him, their blades red with the blood of some alien beast they had hunted in the nearby forest. Almost becoming an Astartes came with many privileges like that.

To his left, a trio of serfs was erecting one of the last tents. Their plain brown and white clothes marked them as some of the many who failed during the early trials, and their sweaty faces showed all the signs of exhaustion from a long day of work. They were too tired to notice his presence.

Two Space Marines with silver laurels on their helmets and a four-pointed white star on their chest plates stood like statues outside the tent Tiberius was about to enter. They were the Captain’s honor guards, and they were already reminding Tiberius of why he was there.

Galahad summoned Tiberius once the sergeant had submitted his first report of the crusade. With the combat slowing down for a few hours, it was time for him to answer the call.

The two guards stepped aside without even looking at Tiberius, and he went inside the tent with apprehension for the future.

Captain Galahad was there waiting for him, flanked by two more honor guards. He was not wearing a helmet, so his pale face was like a glass wall with visible black and blue veins underneath the skin because of the firelight. His age had only worsened the effects of the flawed gene seed, making his skin so pale that strong light could effortlessly go through several layers of it.

“Brother,” Galahad said with solemn calm. “Remove your helmet.”

Tiberius complied, taking off his helmet and placing it under his right arm. A gesture to show utter trust, as it rendered his sword-wielding arm useless.

The two honor guards did their part in the ceremony by walking one step behind and lowering their bolters.

“Your summon has reached me, my liege. I am here because this is what chivalry demands,” Tiberius kneeled as he pronounced the traditional words. “With the stars as my witnesses, I swear myself to secrecy on the words of this meeting. May my brothers strike me down if I betray this oath.”

“I welcome your words,” Galahad placed his hand on Tiberius’ shoulders, instructing him to rise. “Never shall I forget them, not until the day I am buried.”

With the formalities over, Tiberius put his helmet back on. It made a clicking noise when reconnected with the rest of the armor.

“Why did you summon me?” he asked him. “Are you unsatisfied with my performance in this war?”

Tiberius knew he would have a good reason to scold him. He had been reckless in the past few days. Each time he meditated on his behavior in the first battle of the crusade, he could not help but feel ashamed of his actions. Cassius’ words still lingered in his mind.

“It is not your performance that concerns me, but your conduct, that is troubling. You are not acting like the Tiberius I welcomed in the first company with open arms,” Galahad’s words were exactly what he expected. “But that is not the reason I summoned you. The reason for this meeting is your latest report.”

“I see,” Tiberius kicked himself for not immediately understanding the real reason for the meeting, but that had become crystal clear the moment Galahad finished speaking. He kicked himself for not thinking about it before. “If you will allow me to guess, I believe this is because of Mordred?”

“Correct, brother,” Galahad nodded as he confirmed Tiberius’ suspicions. “His presence here is of the utmost concern. Discovering the degree of his involvement with these xenos is now your primary concern, even above the crusade. Hunt him down, brother, him, and all those who followed him. I give this task to you because I hope your methods will be discrete.”

It was almost traditional for the Star Lords to pursue their objectives in a war zone, so Tiberius did not bat an eye at the request to treat the crusade as a secondary matter.

“It shall be as you command,” he banged one fist against his chest. “But I have one request if you will allow it.”

“Ask,” Galahad nodded. “And I shall see if it is within my power to give.”

“I swore to my old squad that I would avenge them with Mordred’s life,” Tiberius said. “If any of our other brothers, or even you, were to find Mordred before I, let me be the one to slay him. I took that oath beneath clear starlight, not fulfilling it would bring me great shame.”

“Your desire is noble,” Galahad said. “I shall do all I can to grant it. Now go, the mountain shall fall when the sun rises.”

After one polite bow, Tiberius finally stepped outside.

The recently risen moon cast a pale light on the camp’s tents. Most of the serfs had gone to sleep, and only a few gathered around some fires as they shared stories.

There was only one Space Marine in the vicinity, Icarus. He was sitting on a tree stump as he looked at the mountain in the distance. Tiberius could hear him tapping one finger against his knee in sets of three.

Because Icarus was not wearing his helmet, Tiberius could appreciate how much less the flawed gene seed had affected his brother compared to others. His skin, while still mostly pale, showed hints of color scattered around in patches all over his face, and his hair still had some black strands in the back. His face looked almost human when compared with the average Star Lord.

For The Star Lords, marines like Icarus were mysteries they could not explain.

“You look like you are hunting for a sign,” Tiberius said as he approached his brother. “Yet neither sky nor moon has caught your eye. Tell me, brother, what is that you observe?”

“No brother, I do not seek a sign,” Icarus shook his head. “I observe a skirmish.”

“And what do your eyes see? What is noteworthy about this fight?” Tiberius noticed red flashes coming from firing lasguns.

“It is a slaughter like those before it,” Aphaniel replied and tapped his finger three more times, the exact number of flashes in the distance. “Do you see now, brother?.”

“No brother, open my eyes to what can be observed here,” Tiberius shook his head. He had a suspicion, but he would let Icarus speak it aloud. “I seem blind to this lesson.”

“I have observed all the skirmishes,” Icarus informed him. “Each lasgun only gets to fire three shots before falling silent, never one shot more or one less. Whatever is killing those guardsmen is being methodical about it. The enemy holding that mountain will be nothing like what we have faced before.”

“A commendable observation,” Tiberius felt a surge of hope of once again meeting something that might match him. His enthusiasm for the crusade had already waned after the first easy battles. It was apparent the aliens he had faced in the forest were just an exception to the rule. “I hope it will be true.”

“I do not make mistakes when I observe my foe,” Icarus said, then turned his head to look at Tiberius. “Will you join me? Or does duty already call you somewhere else?”

“Indeed, I shall,” Tiberius replied and set his eyes on the mountain. “There is no better use of time outside of combat than to observe the enemy.”

Hours passed as the two marines observed the combat on the mountain. Judging by the distance in time and space between each fight, Tiberius could see that the enemy was quick, but not quick enough to be an Astartes.

He would not fight his treacherous brothers yet. Not in the morning, at least.

That morning arrived sooner than expected, a feature of the planet’s smaller-than-average size.

As the hot sunrays warmed up Tiberius’ armor, an oliphant’s long and monotone noise ritualistically signaled that the Astartes would soon attack.

With no more time to spare, Icarus stood up, and Tiberius followed him as they went to join their brothers.

Bright Mark’s eye lenses gave a green tint to the underground corridor he was currently traversing with determined speed. His steps hit the steel floor with heavy thuds, an inevitable consequence of his heavy golden armor.

The weight and noise pleased him immensely. It had been far too long since he had gotten the chance to wear his battle attire instead of those pompous uniforms he had to endure in Canterlot.

Gone were the days of Royal Guards being glorified light infantry. During Twilight’s reign, they had turned into an elite force with the best gear and equipment at the expense of their numbers.

The lights on the ceiling dangled because of the artillery shells striking the mountain’s surface. There was a full-scale assault going on, which meant he was running out of time. Not because of its scale, but because of its participants.

He had spent the entire night fighting against the regular soldiers sent by the invaders, dispatching them with ease, but the morning had brought the alien giants against whom he knew he could not win, so Bright Mark and the others had retreated to the network of tunnels and corridors under the mountain.

For all Bright Mark knew, the battle was already over and he was already dead. All he could do was not leave his duty unfulfilled, and he was not there to protect the mountain.

Other Royal Guards, nine, were accompanying him. They walked in a double-lined V formation, quickly making their way toward a thick steel door. It was protected by two private security guards wearing a steel helmet emblazoned with the logo of the company for which they worked: Arcane Solutions.

The logo was a single white unicorn horn surrounded by two thunderbolts and standing on a sky-blue field.

Officially, Arcane Solutions was just an energy provider. When a police investigation uncovered the existence of a secret facility on a remote planet, protected by enough weapons to stop an army, Bright Mark and his Royal Guards received orders to investigate the matter in much more detail.

He had arrived a few days before the invasion started and had faced a nigh unbreakable wall of red tape and bureaucratic procedures every time he had tried to look anywhere.

“Halt!” the biggest of the two guards said when Bright Mark reached the door. “You do not have the proper authorization to enter.”

He looked down at him. Even though the guard was wearing a black mask over his face, Bright Mark could sense his fear. His armor’s sensors picked up all the signs and compiled them into an easy-to-read sheet floating right next to the stallion’s head whenever Bright Mark looked at it.

His heart threatened to burst out of his chest, and an ocean of sweat drowned his face.

With a second look, Bright Mark saw black patches covering vast sections of the guard’s lungs because of his blatant smoking habit.

Despite his big muscles, the stallion was no threat to Bright Mark.

“We are her majesty’s Royal Guards,” Bright Mark stated flatly. “You will let us through or face the consequences.”

“I cannot allow-“

The stallion attempted to reply but stopped when he saw a short and smooth shoulder-mounted cannon pointed at his face. Bright Mark would no longer waste his time with a security force that could not stop wet paper if truly tested, no matter how well armed.

The other guard looked at his colleague and shook his head. A moment later, they stepped aside and the door opened, seemingly of its own volition.

Bright Mark and the others walked in one by one. The room had no windows, relying on sterile electrical lights dangling from the ceiling to receive any illumination. Large rectangular screens covered the upper half of one wall and showed scenes of the ongoing attack, adding to Bright Mark’s sense of urgency.

A few rows of employees were quietly working on their computers but stopped when they saw and heard the Royal Guards entering. They silently stared at the Royal Guards without moving a muscle. Bright Mark’s sensors revealed their heartbeat was steadily getting faster and beyond what would be healthy.

“No, no, no, you can’t be here,” a frantic pegasus mare with a long black mane and purple coat said. “I told you… you will get all your files in time. Get out!”

She was the director, Purple Rose, the one who had delayed all of their efforts to receive every information about the place.

Bright Mark was married to his duty, and could not be distracted by something as frivolous as physical attraction, but even he could not deny that Purple Rose was the most beautiful mare he had ever seen.

Her face especially seemed to have a magnetic pull that could attract those with less self-control. He thanked his training for allowing him to keep himself together.

As invisible tendrils wormed their way into Bright Mark’s head, an image of Purple Rose sitting on the throne in Canterlot surrounded by an adoring crowd flashed in front of him. He cursed himself for the intrusive thought and almost made a mental note to meditate on it before he remembered he would not have that long to live.

“The time will never come,” Bright Mark pointed to one screen. The giants were making mincemeat of the private security guarding the outer defensive line. “We will all be dead before the sun sets, and I intend to die knowing my task is done.”

All at once, the employees stood up and stepped towards the Royal Guards. Their one step, done in unison, echoed around the room.

“Guards!” The two stallions who had stood near the door entered as soon as they heard the call. “Escort these outsiders to the exit.”

The two hesitantly approached Bright Mark, pointing their trembling side-mounted rifles at him.

“We will not comply until we have received our answers,” Bright Mark said, not even looking at the guns pointed at him. Their caliber was too low to pierce through his armor. “You will tell us the purpose of this place out of your own free will, or I will have to extract your memories by force. Every embarrassing little secret your company holds will be mine to see.”

Instead of responding, the mare rushed to a steel microphone on the closest desk. “Brothers and sisters,” she said, her voice echoing from every speaker outside. “The hour has come, kill the-“

She did not finish the sentence. One Royal Guard fired a burst of purple energy that cut off both of Purple Rose’s frontal legs, causing her to fall to the ground. There was no blood, as the heat instantly cauterized the wounds. The mare’s scream was not of pain but pleasure, making it like she enjoyed her mutilation.

A moment later, many employees rushed towards Bright Mark and the others. Some of those in the back armed themselves with scissors and long pencils.

The two private guards were the first to go, their heads turned to vapor a second after they fired their guns. Only one of their bullets hit its target but did not leave a scratch.

Bright Mark scanned the crowd in front of him, and his helmet counted forty targets. He had trained for worse odds. All he needed to do was to calculate his moves and find the path to victory.

“Each one of you takes care of four of them,” he said to the others, then he assigned the stated number of targets just by thinking about it. He could do so because of the neurally reactive qualities of his armor which allowed it to turn the wearer's thoughts into actions and orders.

With his choices marked by red squares on their heads, Bright Mark took a second to plan his actions. Two of his targets were close enough for his blades, with only three steps separating them, but the others were in the back of the room.

He killed the first one, a kirin, by slashing his throat with the retractable blade on his right foreleg’s armor. Even if he had practiced the move a hundred times during training, he still reflexively closed his eyes for a second when the blood spray hit him.

Killing enemies who looked like civilians was nauseating, but he knew the time for diplomacy had passed.

With no time to further dwell on his actions, he fired his shoulder-mounted cannon at one target in the distance and vaporized his head. The headless body fell to the ground with a flat thud.

He took a sideways step to the left and repeated his previous moves like a passionless machine running on autopilot, and just like that, the battle was already over.

The other Royal Guards had been just as quick with their targets and were the only living things left in the room, or so it seemed.

Bright Mark heard a grunt and looked down at the cooling carpet of corpses. Purple Rose was still alive and trying to crawl away with her two remaining legs.

“I warned you,” he said as he approached her and lifted her with his magic. “Now we'll do this the hard way.”

He focused his thoughts and let out a slithering trail of energy that gently caressed Purple Rose’s forehead. As her mental barriers crumbled under his magical assault, terrible images of murder revealed themselves. She had committed them all with the same curved dagger, plunging it into a victim already bound over a rock.

Before he could see anything else, the visions stopped as Purple Rose gurgled and Bright Mark felt another spray of blood hitting him.

Purple Rose had slit her own throat with a dagger she held with one of her wings. It looked like the one in her memories.

A glance at her head revealed that her heart was still and all brain activity had ceased. She was already dead, too quickly to be a completely natural occurrence. He let her corpse join the others on the floor and noticed the lack of noise when it hit the ground.

The blood pooling around the mare’s open throat disappeared whenever it touched the curved dagger’s blade. It was not merely vanishing, the blade itself was absorbing it like a sponge in water.

He obeyed the instincts that told him not to touch the dagger, but he risked one quick look at the handle. Its gold was so clean Bright mark could see the room reflected on its smooth surface and it had an eight-pointed star dangling from a chain from its lower end.

“Warder,” said one mare who addressed by his rank, what less disciplined forces would call a sergeant. She was looking at the screens. “What do we do now?”

“No easy way now, so we’ll go straight to the source,” he said. “The laboratory.”

The laboratory at the very top of the mountain was highly restricted, but Bright Mark figured it was no longer a concern.

“Their guards will be here soon,” noted one earth stallion everyone called Mountain because of his muscles so big they could imagine him crushing rocks as a pastime. “They will not allow us through.”

“They cannot stop us,” he replied. “Remove all combat restraints on my authority, engage targets at will. No teleportation. We do not know this place well enough.”

So they did. Using the energy weapons mounted on their shoulders and the retractable blades on their hooves, they carved their path through defenders who dared to stop their advance. Shooting the civilians never got easy, but they left them with no choice when they attacked the Royal Guards without caring for their lives. If not for the medicines provided by the armor, Bright Mark would not have been able to keep his focus and would have vomited everything he had ever eaten because of his rising nausea.

Bright Mark noticed one detail as he shot what remained of a horde.

“They are enjoying this,” a Royal Guard next to Bright Mark voiced his thoughts for him.

“Yes,” Bright Mark nodded and looked directly at the body that had just reached the ground; the data from his helmet confirmed the absurd. “Someone tampered with their pain receptors. They can only feel pleasure.”

“What in Twilight’s name is this?” Mountain asked, making no secret of how unnerved he was at the sight of the smiling bodies.

“Sorcery, that’s what it is!” Another Royal Guard proclaimed.

“No such thing,” Bright Mark snapped at the word. It reeked of the superstition Equestria had relegated to the dustbin of history. “There is only magic, and even that word is a stretch.”

“Look at them and tell me this is the same thing Twilight could do.” Mountain pointed a hoof toward the body of a mare he had cut in half with his cannon. Despite the guts scattered around the floor, the open mouth and rolled-back eyes revealed only pleasure in the dead mare’s face. “No, this is something different; I can feel it in my bones.”

“Science and reason have built Twilight’s reign,” Bright Mark proudly repeated one of the propaganda lines he had memorized since his basic training. “And whatever you might feel at the moment doesn’t concern them. If I call this magic, then that’s what this is.”

“Then, with all due respect, Warder Bright Mark, you are being stubborn,” Mountain told him as he shook his head. It was rare for him to address Bright Mark by both name and rank, as he usually preferred the latter. “This might be a new threat we just discovered. Why not use a new word for it?”

“I barely tolerate the word magic. I will not bother with another word for what we don’t fully understand yet. That's all this is.” He explained. “Now let’s keep moving. We don’t have all the time in the galaxy.”

After that, they exchanged words only to notify each other of which target they had acquired. They maintained a fast pace thanks to the artificial muscles underneath their armor, which allowed them to move much faster than their respective species ever could without even a sweat.

With the roaring of the giants’ weapons coming ever closer, the Royal Guards reached the laboratory’s entrance. Two black-clad ponies stood in front of an even darker door that killed any rays of light that touched it.

They dispatched the two ponies in less than a blink and shot the door open in the next blink.

All of them leaped inside, guns ready to fire upon anything they saw. What they found was a target-rich environment. Six ceiling-high stained glass windows should have allowed plenty of natural light inside, but all the rays quickly died shortly after entering, shrouding the room in a permanent penumbra that almost looked like a dark fog.

Six concentric rings of ponies and other creatures were spinning around a floating purple flame as they chanted in a language Bright Mark had never heard before. Each word reverberated through the air as if it was echoing from a distant valley.

Listening carefully, he could hear there was a feminine voice replying to the chanting, it felt maternal and gentle, despite speaking in the same incomprehensible language.

With each word spoken, the purple flame grew brighter and taller, threatening to reach the ceiling and go beyond it.

Bright Mark acquired the closest target with the aid of his helmet and fired, breaking the first of the six circles.

For once, it looked like Icarus had been wrong. Squad Tiberius had never fought an easier battle.

Something had done the Astartes’ jobs for them, leaving behind a trail of scorch marks and broken corpses for them to walk over. It was almost disappointing, but Tiberius would not complain about someone saving him some bolter rounds.

After half an hour of killing off the wounded and the stragglers, squad Tiberius reached an already open door with two headless alien bodies next to it. Even rushing ahead of the primary force provided no challenge.

“Never have we vanquished a foe with such ease,” said Cadriel, not hiding the amusement in his voice. “May all of our battles be like this one.”

“Be careful with what you desire,” Aphaniel warned him. “You might receive it.”

They entered the room in two groups, the first two brothers inside being Icarus and Aphaniel. Both marines covered ninety degrees of the space in front of them, while the three behind formed a secondary line and offered additional firepower against whatever target the first two might spot.

A battle was already underway. Ten golden aliens were butchering scores of their kind dressed in black robes.

The ten moved with speed and certainty Tiberius had yet to see in their race. Perhaps those were the warriors Icarus had seen fighting in the night. Their fighting style seemed methodical enough to make them look like the probable candidates.

“Target the cultists first,” Tiberius ordered. “We shall deal with the golden xenos once the rabble is dead.”

“Yes, my liege,” his brothers said. “As you command.”

With the Astartes on one side and the golden warriors on the other, they wiped out what remained of the cultists in a couple of minutes. Covered in the blood and guts of their kind, the golden aliens immediately turned to face the Astartes.

Tiberius pointed his bolter at the closest alien, but never got the chance to fire it.

As he acquired his target, the purple flame in the room turned into a furious column of fire that finally pierced through the ceiling and created a wind so powerful it sent the walls and glass flying. All that remained were six grey supporting arches that connected above the center of the room like the bars of a cage.

The howling wind of the outside blizzard quickly blanketed the alien corpses under a growing layer of snow.

With what sounded like a scream of ecstasy, the flame emitted a shockwave that caused everyone to lose their balance and Tiberius stumbled backward for several steps before falling to the ground just before he went over the edge.

Tiberius looked down at the distant rocks that would have greeted him had he been just slightly less lucky. After a second of observation, he noticed they were getting smaller, more distant.

“My liege!” shouted Icarus. “The heavens open before us!”

He stood up and looked at the sky. It had a new gaping wound, a cut in reality from which a black fog spilled forth. The cut was steadily expanding from the column of purple flames.

“Cassius!” turned in his brother’s direction. “Contact the Hengroen. We need extraction now!”

“Yes, my liege!”

Before Tiberius could give another order, the platform wobbled as it went up in the air, beginning a steady ascent towards the wound in the sky. It took him all of his enhanced senses to remain firmly planted on his own two feet as the floor trembled like a wild horse dispatching a new rider.

The golden aliens were faring similarly, planting their hooves on the ground to hold on to their position. Judging from the sparks on their boots, Tiberius figured they must have had some magnetic properties.

He tried to shoot at them, but the constant movement of the ground forced him to readjust his aim far too many times. He only fired a couple of rounds, and a purple bubble they had formed when he fired the first shot easily deflected those.

Tiberius heard a woman giggling behind him as she then sweetly whispered in his right ear, and his experience and training took over.

With startling speed, he turned around with his chainsword in hand. When he finished his move, he had cut through a woman with black hair and eyes, pale purple skin, and long crab-like pincers where her hands should have been.

“Daemons!” shouted Aphaniel, who was already fighting with two of the things that had appeared from thin air.

The things came out of the five arches as a purple mist that quickly turned into solid matter. There was some variation in the shape of their claws and their haircuts, but their shape was overall familiar to Tiberius who had faced the slaves of the Lord of Pleasure countless times.

Space Marines and aliens delayed their battle once more as they turned their focus on their private fights with the daemons.

The aliens formed a defensive ring and dared the daemons to come to them, their energy weapons pulverizing many of them before they could even get close to them. Tiberius could not tell if it was just their shoulder-mounted cannons and their armors that did the trick, or perhaps they were gene-enhanced in some unclear way, but the effectiveness of their gear was undeniable.

Squad Tiberius opted for a similar strategy, with four brothers taking position around Aphaniel and his banner, but occasionally shifting their position when one of them had too many targets to deal with.

“Why are they here?” Asked Icarus, who was calmly firing at the daemons. His superlative aim allowed him to fire effectively despite the unfavorable ground, while his brothers had to rely mostly on their chainswords.

“Your aim is sharp, brother, but your eyes lack focus. The battle was a ritual,” Aphaniel pointed to the dead cultists on the ground. Their blood was flowing towards the center instead of pooling around the bodies. “This summoning is our doing.”

“It is not like we could have suffered these xenos to live,” Tiberius commented as he swapped a magazine. “We shall deal with these horrors in the same way. For the Tower!”

The fight kept going with no apparent end in sight for what felt like hours, but was closer to twenty minutes. Squad Tiberius was doing all it could to hold the line against the increasingly large horde, but the daemons were only growing more numerous no matter how many of them died. To make the situation even worse, with each passing second the floor went up higher and even increased its speed.

“Cassius, how long until our extraction is here?” Tiberius’ voice was the closest his kind could get to sounding worried.

“Ten minutes if lady luck smiles upon us,” Cassius said. “But these winds are creating troubles for the thunderhawk. Twenty minutes is the worst-case scenario.”

Tiberius dared a look upwards and saw that the once distant gap had quickly grown large to cover his entire field of vision. Little white stars were twinkling in the dark fog, giving it the impression of being a night sky come to life.

“We do not have ten minutes,” he realized aloud. “Let alone twenty.”

“Then what is your command?” asked Cassius.

“Call off the extraction,” he said. “We will take the long journey out of this battle.”

He smiled under his helmet, sensing a deed worthy of a song in his future.

Saureil was doing all he could to keep a straight trajectory with his thunderhawk, but the ever-shifting winds were doing all they could to test his century and a half of experience. He could have maintained a steady course, had it not for the second nuisance, the large birds attempting to ram him, forcing him to waste precious time with evasive maneuvers.

After yet another turn so narrow it would have broken a normal man’s neck, he received a hail on his vox from the squad he was there to rescue.

“This is Saureil,” he said. “Receiving your signal loud and clear.”

“This is Cassius, speaking for squad Tiberius,” he could hear the roaring of bolters and chainswords behind his brother’s voice. “Abort our extraction, now!”

“For what reason?” he asked. “I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“It is not fast enough,” Cassius quickly informed him. “Give word to the chapter of our fate, so that it may not turn into yet another mystery.”

He turned the thunderhawk vertically and killed the engine for one second, causing one of the large birds to overshoot and end up in his sights. It was the dead a second after, its body torn apart by bolter rounds.

“I will not run,” he said. “With the stars as my witnesses-“

“Saureil,” Tiberius overtook the conversation. “Do not be too proud to live. Do you remember the wisdom of the codex?”

“No glory is earned in pointless death,” Saureil recited the words by heart. “I understand, sergeant. What shall I tell my brothers?”

“Tell them that the warp stole us from this world,” Tiberius said. “Tell them also that we shall return one day.”

“As you wish,” he nodded. “Aborting mission.”

With a quick split S, he turned the thunderhawk around, away from the treacherous winds and his brothers. He steadily gained altitude to exit the planet’s atmosphere and after a few minutes of passing through fire and turbulence, he was outside the atmosphere.

Perhaps it was a leftover from the chapter’s early nomadic days, but Saureil always felt more at home in the void of space instead of the countless alien skies he had seen. Not even the blue skies of the homeworld, Aldroc, could give him the same serenity that the parade of stars waiting for him every time he flew in space.

From his cockpit, he could see a large portion of the crusading fleet. The red livery of the Mechanichus ships made them the first to catch his attention. They had small grey skulls surrounded by a gear wheel above each gun port for their main cannons, at least six for each side and sometimes more. There were also smaller flak guns scattered around the hull.

The Imperial Navy was no less grandiose but in a different way. Instead of ostentations of hoarded technology, their ships were flying prayers to the Emperor with statues and windows of stained depicting Him when He still walked among mortal men.

His ship, the Hengroen, stood slightly apart from the rest of the fleet, content to stalk the other vessel like a grey shark.

There was also another ship, so distant that it looked like a grey speck of dust on his glass. As he went to clean it, he saw it move behind an asteroid belt, and then it was like it never existed.

Squadrons of ten fighters each patrolled the blind spots of their home ships’ guns or escorted troop transports as they went down to the surface. A pair of Thunderbolts flew right in front of him, and he saw one of the human pilots staring at him with that mixture of awe and respect he expected from mortals. Saureil knew that if that man survived the crusade, he would tell his children about the day he got to see a Space Marine, perhaps even embellishing the story as all talented storytellers do.

“This is Hengroen flight command,” said a female voice in his vox. “Welcome back, Lord Saureil. How did the mission go?”

He knew the woman well. Enid had been with him on his flight missions for over forty years, always being the voice that announced when he could finally let his guard down. For a moment, he felt shame when he knew he would have to announce his first failure to her.

“Aborted,” he said. “On squad Tiberius’ request.”

A second of silence passed as Enid processed what the report truly meant.

He heard her type a familiar number of letters on her cogitator. She even paused after each set almost as if she want to confirm to him what she was doing. He never thought he would be alive to see Sergeant Tiberius counted as a casualty.

She was the one to break the silence. “Understood, did they mention what their lament should focus on?”

He told her everything Tiberius had asked him to report, and then once listened as she corrected what she had typed a moment before. She had assumed that squad Tiberius was dead, and he did not blame her for it.

“And this crusade was going so well, too. Seems impossible that even you Lords are taking casualties,” she said in a lower tone of voice. “In any case, you are now clear to land in the hanger, broadside approach. May the stars guide you.”

“And may they brighten your darkest nights,” he finished for her. “Going to the hangar.”

There was no fanfare waiting for him when he landed, not even one brother to greet him or chastise him for his failure, as most of them were down on the surface. He found only an eerie silence occasionally broken by menials and servitors going about their duties.

Only one woman was paying attention to his arrival. She was sitting on a munitions crate as she calmly inspected her bolt pistol. Saureil had never seen her before, but she lifted her head when she heard the thunderhawk landing.

With a sigh, Saureil lowered the ramp and walked outside, sure to see the woman waiting for him. She was wearing a dark blue hood and polished silver armor from neck to toe. A black cloak hid her shoulder and reached to the floor.

“Greetings,” she said. “I am glad to make your acquaintance. I believe you have a minute to speak?”

She enunciated each word perfectly, like a superbly educated noble would.

“My answer depends on your identity,” he replied. “State it, or leave my presence.”

With one fluid motion, she produced a small trinket from her belt. It was an ‘I’ with a skull in its center and a thin silver line running around it.

“An Inquisitor,” he said. “To what do I owe the displeasure?”

“The inquisition has many eyes, and let’s just say that your errands on this alien world have not gone unnoticed, especially when that forest took fire,” she explained casually, then put her Inquisitorial rosette back on her belt. “I was hoping to have a chat with the squads that were seemingly most involved with it, just to clear out some facts. There is nothing to fear unless you lot have something to hide.”

“Threatening a Space Marine on his own chapter’s battle barge is a brave move,” he told her. “But it will earn you no reward. Squad Tiberius is lost to us. Your quest ended before it could begin.”

Saureil attempted to walk past her, for once eager to be free of his armor for a few hours, but he stopped when she placed her hand on his chest plate.

“Not so fast, pilot,” her voice seemed amused at how easily she had stopped him. “I have commandeered your service for as long as this crusade continues.”

“You did?”

“Yes, I spoke with your Captain,” she explained. “It was either this or allowing me to have a room aboard the Hengroen. Galahad decided that lending me one pilot would be the lesser evil.”

“Why not get your Deathwatch lapdogs?” Saureil could not believe his ears. “I have seen their vessel on my way here.”

“Really?” the woman smiled at him. “Such a keen eye you have. No, I do not need to deploy the Deathwatch. I will keep you close to me so I can monitor and understand your chapter.”

Saureil was about to reply but stopped when he understood there would be no point. Others had already decided for him. It seemed like fate had presented him with a way to do some penance for his failure.

Author's Note

"It's Alive"

Sorry to keep you waiting, a delay this long is kind of embarrassing tbh.

Hopefully, the next update will be in less than a year :rainbowlaugh: .

Burning Skies

The tunnels beneath the Temple of the Five were utterly lightless, but Golden Path could see just fine thanks to her divinely enhanced eyes. Its smooth walls were of black rock that would have reflected any light like a polished mirror, and the same was true for the floor and ceiling.

Carved into the wall to Golden Path’s right was a cell with thick steel mesh. It contained the one pitiable human captured by Mordred’s brothers. They had stripped him of his arms and armor and thrown him in rags in that cell.

For three weeks, Golden Path had taken care of him, mostly through her subordinates, and shown him the glory and truth of the true gods of the universe. In her generosity, she had granted him one blessing from each of the gods, even if he could not appreciate what she had done to him just yet.

She would have him change his tune soon enough.

Golden Path watched him from the cover of darkness, as he kneeled in his cell carved into the corridor’s walls. He was a beauty in her eyes. Bearing the influence of all the four great gods was not a privilege granted to most.

She lit up her horn and revealed her presence to him.

Suddenly struck by the light, the man looked away from her in fear and kneeled with his back to her as he then intoned a prayer. “Almighty Emperor, hear my voice now that I walk in the valley of evil-“

“Grant me your light so I might find my way through this darkness,” Golden Path continued for him, and he stopped praying at hearing her speak those familiar words. “Protect my body from all harm, grant my heart the courage to face any foe, and my mind the wisdom to reject all evil?”

She finished the prayer as a question, mockingly asking him if the words were correct.

“Yes, how?” the human asked her as he turned to look at her face. “How can a xeno know this?”

“Of course, I know your sacred words. Why would I not?” Golden Path replied with a question. “It was my prophet who wrote them. He put them to paper before he understood the one great truth of the universe.”

The gods had granted Golden Path many visions of the life of Lorgar Aurelian and she had seen in him the path toward enlightenment. Lorgar was a symbol for her, someone she had strived to imitate from the first moment she knew of him.

“What is that supposed to mean?” he asked another question, unable to understand what she was talking about. The human’s innocence and ignorance endeared him to Golden Path, making his future conversion even more appealing. “Where am I?”

“All in due time, human,” she smiled at him, the first smile he had seen since the start of his captivity. “I just want you to look at what you are, what we made you into. Go on, look at your reflection on the wall.”

The man did exactly as Golden Path commanded and turned pale as marble when he saw what his body had turned into. His jaw hung open as he watched the effects of what Golden Path’s subordinates had done to him, unable to say a single word when confronted with the horror of his new body.

His teeth were razor sharp like those of an apex predator, and extended over his lips, ready to draw rivers of blood in the name of the great Lord Khorne in close combat. A mosaic of green and yellow pustules covered his exposed belly, and from them flowed a seemingly endless flow of pus, a kind gift from Grandfather Nurgle. Under his natural pair of eyes, Golden Path’s subordinates had placed a new set of glowing blue ones, larger and brighter ones, so that he may better see the plans of the great Architect Tzeentch. Finally, his skin had turned so pale and white it resembled porcelain, a great work of art to praise Prince Slaanesh.

She had truly outdone herself with her generosity to him.

After admiring the results of her craft for a few more seconds, Golden Path broke the silence.

“Scarred and deformed,” she said. “Why would the Emperor allow this?”

“The Emperor protects,” the human muttered his predictable response, barely listening to what she was saying. “He must.”

“Does he?” Golden Path chuckled at him and got closer to force him to pay attention to her. “How can this happen if he protects you? Perhaps he wants you to follow this path, or maybe, just maybe, he is a weak god, unworthy of your soul and your devotion.”

“What do you want from me, xeno?” the human asked her with gritted teeth and looked away from his reflection.

“Nothing, I am here to show you the truth of the universe, so may join its splendor,” she explained. "You have lived your life dedicated to a god who clearly cannot or does not want to protect you, who has allowed you to turn into what you see now, but what if this is no curse? It is normal to fear the darkness, human even, but it is a weakness that shackles your potential. You now have the chance to embrace true freedom. The gods have taken an interest in you, they have seen the fire burning within you and can give you the spark to light it up. All they need is your acceptance to grant you power and joy beyond mortal measure.” She caressed his chin with her magic and lifted his gaze upward. “I am their messenger. I bear their sacred word, and they have sent me here to lead many into the glorious future that awaits us all. You have a bright future, little human.”

The human stood stock still, not even breathing as he thought about her words and looked away from her to stare once more at his reflection. He wept as his brain began to truly understand what Golden Path and her followers had done to his body and that there was truly no way back for him.

Golden Path had expected the weeping. It was natural to do so when faced with such monumental change and with sudden exposure to the truth of the universe. She would be lying if she said she did not enjoy the sounds, which became a symphony of anguish in her ears.

She waited for his response, so she could welcome him into damnation.

Before the human could answer, Golden Path heard armored footsteps approaching her fast. She turned around and saw the towering figure of Mordred walking quickly toward her, as always moving too elegantly for such a towering figure. The white line over his helmet’s beak slightly glimmered when hit by magical light.

“Master,” she said. “I am glad to see you here.”

Mordred kept moving towards her, his armored boots sending their echoes down the corridor. When he was close enough, Golden Path could see the white light of his helmet’s eye lenses resembling a burning star in the night sky.

“You have done well with this human, Golden Path,” he told her, his voice as cold as ice echoing in the corridor. “I take it he shall soon see the truth?”

“He will, master,” she replied with an obsequious tone, then smiled at him as she skipped the formalities. “But you have not come here to check on this human, have you?”

“No, I have not,” He stated flatly and quickly. “I am here to command you.”

“I await your orders,” Golden Path said. “What is your will?”

“The imperium will be here soon enough,” Mordred informed her. “Get the cult ready to take over the city.”

“So your brother, Tiberius, is coming too,” Golden Path thought aloud, thinking of the Space Marine she had seen not so long ago. “Shall I bring you his head?”

Golden Path was already relishing the opportunity to test herself against that one. That Space Marine could become a genuine test of her skill and a wonderful sacrifice.

“No, leave him to me,” Mordred said and caressed his sword, even tapping it a few times. “I cannot wait to put that old dog to rest.”

Mordred’s words left an ashen taste in Golden Path’s mouth. She had always hated having to call him master, and now he planned to steal her kill, and with it her glory. Hot anger boiled in her head and her muscles tensed as she considered betraying the Space Marine right there and then, but her mind prevailed and she barely maintained her self-control.

All in due time, she told herself.

“What am I to do?” she asked him.

“Spread the word,” Mordred ordered her. “You must all be ready for combat when the drop pods and troop transports descend.”

Golden Path nodded in feigned deference. “It will be as you command. I have one last strategic meeting to attend with the alicorns and their officers before that, however.”

She presented her success in front of him to show he had not complete control over her, to remind him of her power and influence that she still held regardless of his might and connections.

“Then get to it,” Mordred said. “I shall keep this human company in the meantime.”

Three weeks had passed since Twilight had woken from her coma, and she had not rested for a single second of those days and nights. Often she stayed awake for seventy-two hours at a time, only sleeping when her body rebelled against her and demanded a few hours of uneasy sleep.

Twilight did not look forward to sleeping anymore, not only because she how much she needed to do to prepare for the invasion, but also because nightmares haunted her every time she closed her eyes.

The first one was an incomprehensible crystal maze from which she could not escape no matter how much she ran.

Cruel and mocking laughter echoed through its nonsensical corridors, made only worse by the whispers in language that Twilight both knew intimately and felt utterly alien to her ears. She was not alone there; small creatures with pink skin and round bodies gave chase to her, laughing maniacally as they flung every kind of spell their way.

Hitting the beings with her spells was of no use, as they just split into two blue versions of their previous selves and their mood turned angry and spiteful.

When she was not exploring the maze, she wandered in an endless forest of rotten trees covered in pus and surrounded by bloated corpses that served as food for large green and brown flies caked in filth. They hugged their victims like one would a dear friend before leaving them once they had squeezed everything out of them.

There were other beings there, stumbling on two legs as they counted, with no rest or end in sight to their task. Some went after her, but they did not run, instead they just maintained the same glacial speed, inevitably getting closer despite Twilight’s running as she stumbled on the many obstacles and pools of mud and pus covered with brown leaves.

She only woke up when the monsters were almost upon and she always had a head-splitting headache for the entire morning that no medicine could cure.

The third of her nightmares was a battlefield under a blackened sky, with the ground covered by a carpet of fresh blood and severed limbs. Hulking warriors of any race fought and killed each other wherever she looked. With no care for colors or allegiance, they just killed and moved on to the next target. In the distance rained what Twilight thought was regular water, and eventually realized to be skulls and black blood.

In a twisted way, she preferred that kind of nightmare to the others because of its simplicity. Even when she had to defend herself from a frothing berserker gripping a constantly bleeding two-handed axe, she knew there was no hidden trap or illogical twist of fate waiting for her. It was an honest and direct fight, one that she had to win without her magic, which refused to work during those nightmares.

Recently she had suffered and enjoyed visions of a fourth place, a palace that she could hardly describe when she finally woke, only leaving within her the wish to sleep a bit more, just to see one more scene of that accursed and blessed palace, to satisfy one more desire.

She could remember little of that place in the morning, but she knew her soul yearned for more, to experience more. The lack of memories was a subtle torture, causing her to think of the palace for days after dreaming about it and longing to return there.

Twilight had asked Luna to accompany her in one of those dreams, but Luna could not find her in the dream realm, no matter how hard she looked.

All of that led to a mixture of fear and frustration dwelling and growing within Twilight as she prepared one meeting after another to discuss and coordinate the ongoing war. For all her efforts, the enemy would soon reach Equestria, they all knew it, and the latest meeting would prepare the defenses for the inevitable invasion.

The meeting room under the palace was less crowded than it had been the last time Spike had been there. Many officers had either died in action or were away on duty with no way to communicate, so there were some familiar faces joined by recently promoted ones.

Celestia’s presence dominated the room, her white coat and constantly moving mane seeming to sparkle despite the penumbra around her as if she had a light of her own. She wore a golden suit of armor similar to that of the Royal Guards but with no helmet. She had placed that particular piece on the round table in the center of the room.

She kept her eyes locked on the holographic map coming from said table. It showed that the enemy had advanced even further and had functionally surrounded Equestria. Multiple invading fleets infested all sable routes through the Endless Sea, and were helping with the siege of the related worlds. Each red sector was signaling the loss of millions of lives, as there was no way to send reinforcements or evacuate the population.

Luna was also there, but not physically, as her body was on the Moon. She attended the meeting as a hologram despite the many protests of security officers and S.M.I.L.E. agents worried about creating an electronic path into an otherwise secret room.

Twilight’s authority had overruled them all. She could trust Luna without a doubt, and it would be their job to keep the connection safe from any would-be listeners.

The least expected and appreciated officer in the room was Golden Path, whose rank would have barred her from any important location. Once again, Twilight’s word was the one that mattered and Golden Path had taken a seat right next to the Princess, much to the disgruntled mumblings of many officers. Her rescue of Twilight’s life landed her face in every newspaper and even earned her a few interviews. Openly mentioning her faith during those interviews had done nothing to endear her to the other officers of every branch.

The mare was in uniform, with a silver medal pinned to her chest in recognition of her service to the crown.

Blue Song was not there, as they did not invite him. His idea of defeating the enemy in detail had ended with a series of massacres when faced with the enemy’s overwhelming firepower. The failure has seen the admiral disgraced in officer circles and lost him a lot of social influence.

If Equestria did not need every officer it could get, Blue Song’s career would have already been over. At that moment, however, his fall from grace did not go beyond no longer being admitted to strategic meetings and a considerable resizing of the number of ships under his command.

Spike was the only admiral worthy of note in the room, the two griffons next to him having achieved their rank only through seniority, not actions or personal connections. He looked well rested, with a shiny bright look on his face and scales so polished they almost sparkled.

“Now that everyone is here, we can begin,” Twilight said, causing everyone to look at her. “First things to-“

She stopped in the middle of her sentence. Someone or something was watching the room. Her senses immediately felt a magical gaze looking straight at her, but she could not discern the source of the spell, only that its caster was at a cosmically significant distance from her.

Twilight looked at the ceiling and then those around her before setting her eyes on Celestia.

“I feel it too,” Celestia said as she lit up her horn and looked around just as Twilight had done. “It’s a powerful spell.”

“What is it?” Spike asked them.

“Someone is using magic to spy on us,” Twilight explained, and lit up her horn. “It shouldn’t be possible. I made no mistakes with the ward, I'm sure of that. No one can break through them, not as long as this place is intact.”

“If I may make a suggestion,” Golden Path raised a hoof and lowered it after a nod from Twilight. “Why break a thing when you can go around it? What if this wizard is just circumventing your seals?”

“Do we he any idea who it might be?” Twilight turned to Talking Hooves, the kirin Captain of the Royal Guard.

The Captain had ditched the uniform in favor of his armor, as he knew the enemy could arrive at any moment. His armor sported intricate arboreal designs that served as frames for scenes from Twilight’s life. From her transformation into an alicorn to her coronation, the artist had carefully lined the scenes up to form a clear narrative that celebrated her reign. From her ascension to the throne through the unification of the planet and all the way to the exploration of space.

The Captain’s helmet had a white crest with one red section for each extremity. Twilight knew one section was a recent addition. They marked the failures of the Royal Guard. One was for Flurry Heart and the other one was for her.

“No,” he signed. “I know of no magic user more powerful than an alicorn in general, and you in particular.”

The Captain was born mute, but the technology of the Royal Guard had made that an irrelevant factor during his rise through the ranks.

“I might have an idea who it could be, but I do not know the name,” Golden Path replied. “I thought he busied himself with looking at wolves lately, but I guess I was wrong.”

After those words, the moment was over as quickly as it began. The alicorns turned off their horns and let their magic dissipate.

“It’s gone,” Twilight announced, then thought of Golden Path's words. “What else do you know of this wizard?”

“Not much,” Golden Path shook her head. “Only that he has looked at my temple in the past for reasons beyond me. I never thought it would be a problem, but this wizard must have an interest in me specifically. I will investigate the matter now that it has proven a security flaw. Perhaps he has put some curse on me that allows him to bypass the seals, if that is so, I will remove myself from this meeting immediately/”

“It will not be necessary, I will send some unicorns to assist you with this matter,” Twilight said before picking up a stack of white papers that went above her head. “We really should get started now.”

The meeting that followed went on for twelve hours, as Twilight wanted a complete review of Equestria’s military situation. In any other circumstance, she would have relished the chance of dealing with so many numbers, but the reality of what they represented sapped any joy from the activity.

They began with the fleet, as just a look at the holographic map told that the enemy would enter the system in a handful of days if not less. The list of active vessels painted a grim picture of a force reduced to a quarter of its former size and crippled officer core.

One detail that disturbed Twilight was how much the creatures invading her domain resembled those she had met in that alternate dimension all those years ago, only they seemed a thousand times more hateful. She hoped the two species had no relationship, as any connection between them looked impossible. The hate-filled monsters she had to face could not be descendants of those kind girls she had helped and called her friends.

Twilight decided that the fleet would serve in a defensive role until further notice and found unanimous support from all in the room.

Then came the army’s turn. Which regiments were on the planet and which ones could arrive fast enough or at least receive the urgent order of reassignment before it was truly too late? They looked at their ammunition supplies, compared them with the number of soldiers at their disposal, and speculated on how long they could last.

Two weeks was the most optimistic estimate for most regiments, with only a few exceptions. The regiments on the Moon fared better, with two months’ worth of ammunition, although both Twilight and Luna questioned its viability. Too many years in storage could have made it useless.

A long list of army officers followed, listing both the live and dead ones, their citations, their medals, and their contributions to military theory with their related publications. In lack of an actual war, most officers had spent their years locked in academic discourse with each other on what a large-scale conflict might look like. The war had proven most of them wrong, but some, like defense in depth, seemed to have survived contact with the enemy.

One general in the room brought up the idea of initiating a draft, just to remedy the number disparity, but Talking Hooves and Twilight both rebuked him by pointing there would be no time to do such a thing efficiently. Even if they could, it was not worth the potential riots that could have come from such a drastic decision.

Eventually, they moved on to discussing Equestria itself, starting with the food supplies and their related silos and warehouses, both of which were plentiful but lacked the proper protections to withstand enemy bombardment. They would have to ration the food, despite its abundance, and move a lot of it to secure locations while writing off the rest as already lost.

At that moment, when she saw the food supplies being cut in half because of their indefensible locations, Twilight wished she had focused on different things during her reign. What good was all the scientific progress and artistic expression she promoted when most of that was about to burn under enemy fire?

Planetary defenses were next, both the ones flying in orbit and the ones on the surface. The Moon stood as the one actual fortress on the system, with its arrays of ground-to-void cannons and missile platforms coupled with its substantial garrison. It could offer some serious resistance to the invader, but even Luna knew it would not last forever, and she said as much. There were other minor defense installations, mostly concentrated on the planet’s poles, but nothing that would dissuade an invading force.

Port Luna was the only military station in orbit of note, but that was calculated as part of the Moon's own defenses. They figured that it could deny enemy landing for as long as it stood.

Celestia urged her sister to come back to the relative safety of Canterlot, but Luna refused, claiming someone would have to make sure the defenses held for as long as possible, and she had to be the one. No matter how much Celestia pleaded with her sister, Luna would not budge, and she eventually forced her to relent. Celestia frowned as she gave up the argument, making everyone know the discussion was far from over.

Finally, they reviewed the performance of the Royal Guard, and it looked like they had been fighting a different war. The dead and wounded were rare, and each fallen had taken down several invaders before falling surrounded by a pile of enemy bodies.

Their only weakness was in the numbers. There were only a thousand Royal Guards spread around Equestria and its colonies, nowhere near enough to turn the tide of the war. Twilight regretted not investing enough resources in making their armor easier to produce. Talking Hooves did not lament the situation, or even comment on it, ignoring it in favor of dealing with the cards he had.

With the much briefer section of the Royal Guard over, they could claim to have reviewed every section of the Equestrian military. The Research Corps members were always more adventurous and eccentric researchers with guns than frontline soldiers. Their contributions would not go beyond scouting ahead of the fleets or serving as escort vessels.

“Now that we are aware of everything concerning our defense,” Talking Hooves signed. “What are your orders?”

“We cannot defend everything,” Twilight stated confidently. “We must gather the population in the cities we can defend and rebuild the rest after the war.”

After the war, Twilight did not dare to admit that those words rang hollow to her.

“Are you sure?” Spike asked her. “This will not please the rest of the confederation.”

“We’ll save the citizens; I hope it will be enough to calm them down,” Twilight quickly replied, already running the unfeeling arithmetic of warfare in her mind and realizing there might not be enough space to save everyone, she did not have the heart to tell him that. If only she could use that old spell to go back in time once more, she thought, then she would rule differently, much differently. “This meeting is over. We’ll be back here in eighteen hours to discuss which locations are suitable for defense.”

As Twilight allowed herself to fall back into her chair, knowing that the meeting was finally over, then she jumped back up when he heard the near-defeating blaring of several sirens followed by red lights flooding the room in a rhythmic pattern.

The sirens kept their noise coming for several more seconds before something started speaking.

“To all soldiers and officers in this facility,” a metallic voice said, the voice slightly reverberating on the cold grey walls. “Enemy forces are about to enter the system. We cancel immediately all shore leave permits. Report to your assigned stations within fifteen minutes. Do not be afraid. We are the largest concentrations of Equestrian forces in history, and the strength of four alicorns is with us. Trust in each other and your superiors. We will survive this storm.”

Blue Song frowned as he sat on his command throne. His plan of defeating the invaders in small, manageable groups had crashed against the reality of the enemy’s overwhelming firepower, earning him the scorn of soldiers and officers alike. Years of his career had gone up in flames alongside thousands of lives delivered straight to the gods.

Sacrifice was something he could justify in his mind, especially when considering how poorly the war was going, but there was no way he could justify wasting lives. Those crews had died for less than nothing, and that thought and the guilt it carried weighed heavily on his mind and threatened to crush it like a rock would an insect.

The idea had not been completely his. Golden Path had made a casual suggestion during one of their many private discussions, and he had made it his own. Despite that, he would not throw her to the wolves and took full responsibility for the losses.

That sensation of friendship had dwindled rapidly in the past days, and he could feel a growing resentment towards the mare who did not know her place in the hierarchy. He felt stupid for even allowing her to speak to him in private, despite their difference in rank. All of that happened because she followed something that sounded like his parents’ religion, his familiarity with the subject had allowed for a plethora of private conversations on it. His interest in what she had to say had been merely academic, but Golden Path spoke to him like a preacher, and he would have lied if he said he had not found himself drawn to her words like a moth to a flame.

He was sitting on the command throne of the Shield of Truth, his newly assigned ship, as a holographic map of the space around the vessel filled with red dots representing the incoming enemy. There were hundreds of dots quickly approaching the Equestrian fleet. Blue Song’s eyes stared at the map, mesmerized by the sheer size of the force he would have to face.

The bridge was smaller than what he was used to. Its look was artless and spartan, being a much older model, with sharp angles on the windows and doors and no decorations on its grey walls making the place feel soulless. At least, he thought, his command throne was still slightly elevated and at the very back so that could oversee everything happening on the bridge. Some design choices had not changed since the early days, why fix something that was not broken?

“Hundreds of contacts!” reported one changeling operating the closest console, the one dedicated to the long-range radar. “It’s beginning. They’re here!”

Blue Song had felt them coming, of course, so had every officer in the fleet worth anything. Such a massive force was impossible to hide in the warp, but it still felt surreal to see them in front of him. Fate had set its strands in one inexorable direction, and he did not feel inclined to act the correct role in the play.

“Everyone to their battle stations!” he ordered, and the console operators in the room began tapping quickly as the ship’s combat systems came to life.

He could see a report fluctuating in front of him showing him the guns powering as up as they appeared on a quickly growing list.

Under the list of weaponry, he saw the status of the ships under his direct control. Only ten light frigates, five of which had suffered damage to their hulls, could operate all of their guns. His usual fleet was larger, but his recent debacle had seen it massively reduced as he lost his ships in battle or saw them assigned to more cautious admirals.

Only a week prior, the sight of what remained of his fleet would have sent him fuming as he looked at the destruction of his ambitions. Yet in the last few days he had spent away from Equestria, it was like a fog had vanished from his mind, and all he could feel at that moment was regret for having wasted so many lives for nothing.

Anger finally rose within him, but he directed it at himself for having paid attention to the snake that was Golden Path. If he ever made it out of the war alive, he would discipline her for her breach of discipline and her double loyalties. One day, Blue Song had almost converted, but his pride and his memories stopped him before what even then he felt would have been an irrevocable decision. He knew from his parents that what the gods gave with their right hoof they took with their left. He could still hear their shrieks as daemons dragged their souls into the warp all those years ago. They had not been so immortal after all; he chuckled to himself.

He focused his thoughts by looking at the map and saw that the other admirals were moving their much larger fleets away from the enemy, communicating their new direction every time they altered their course.

A moment later, the battle started.

The invaders fired the first shot, a bright lance of light that gutted a ship called the Gentle Light before she could raise her shields. The secondary explosion from the ammunition compartment snuffed the two thousand souls aboard out in an instant. Some of her fragments lodged themselves in the engines of one of the largest cruisers in the fleet, the Rarity’s Memory, and crippled her where she stood. The injury made the cruiser unable to dodge a second shot, which destroyed her command bridge before exploding and splitting the ship in half.

A moment later, the Equestrian fleet responded, spreading out as much as possible as every available ship opened fire. They did not fire at every target available. Instead, multiple groups focused on a single target at a time, hoping to overwhelm their shields through the sheer volume of their fire.

Blue Song focused his fire on one of the escort vessels, which had gotten a few kilometers out of formation. A trifling distance in space combat, but enough to make it stand out.

“Fire Crystals,” he ordered as he highlighted the ship on the map by tapping it with one hoof, Crystals being the Equestrian callout sign for void torpedoes. “Then withdraw at full speed towards the planet.”

The set of six torpedoes flew vertically upward from the hull for two seconds, then turned sharply towards their target and sped away. For one minute, they flew ahead of a barrage of white energy shots. They sped through the staggering expanse of space, leaving behind a trail of hot-blue flames and short-lived white smoke. The target’s defensive weaponry intercepted three of them, and another two smashed against her shields. One, however, punched right through them and vaporized one cannon on her sides. The shots coming behind it just carved their way through the hull before the shields reactivated to put an end to the destruction.

Not a good trade, Blue Song assessed.

He got another look at the map. The enemy fleet was spreading out from its line of contact like a hunter’s net, and would soon cut any avenues of escape. A concentrated salvo of missiles had destroyed a battleship, the Dash of Courage, by blowing up her engines a leaving her as a drifting hulk as secondary explosions made their way through her corridors. Other smaller ships were facing similar fates, with the battle’s death toll already passing the tens of thousands.

He would not waste more lives than he already had.

“Belay the second order,” he said. “Head outside Equestria’s gravity well while I prepare for entrance into the Endless Sea.”

He would have wanted to make the jump immediately, but the pull of gravity made it hard to focus when his consciousness was one with the ship. Entering unreality when so close to so much real matter could have deadly consequences for the crew.

“Sir, with all due respect, this leaves both the Moon and Port Luna undefended,” someone from further away on the bridge protested. “And what of the admirals? We might get court marshaled for this.”

“If they stay near Equestria, you can count them as already dead,” Blue Song stated quickly. “Inform them of my decision and reasoning, but do not wait for a response before executing.”

The bridge officers all looked at him and murmured to each other, but eventually, all of them complied with his command. One by one, the other ships in his fleet complied as well, with only a few promising to file a complaint about him. He even sent a message to the commanders on the Moon and one directly to Luna herself, just to be thorough.

It was not long before he received complaints from other fleets. They ranged from accusations of cowardice to promises of him being court marshaled for said cowardice, as he was retreating far too early for the fighting withdrawal High Command had ordered in case of an attack.

Not all the other admirals protested. A few recognized his maneuver as the only course of action that would not end in their death, and followed suit, or feared that his withdrawal spelled the end anyway and had no choice but to do the same. Either way, several Equestrian fleets began disengaging, giving more to their engines as they kept themselves as far away as possible from the enemy.

After a few more minutes, he received a response that caught his eye: Luna’s reply. “I understand,” were the only words of her message.

An alarm’s sudden blaring got his attention away from the messages and back to the world in front of him.

“Vampire, ripple, bearing two seven zero, too fast for point defense,” One Yak operating a short-range radar said frantically. “High likelihood of shields not holding.”

Five anti-ship missiles, vampires, were on their way. The Yak quickly added them to the map as dazzlingly fast red lines, and Blue Song could see they were on a collision course with his ship. He had already seen enough of those missiles at work to know that even one could tear the Shield of Truth in two.

“Intercept with Crystals,” he gave the order with the calm he knew was necessary. His behavior would be an example for his crew. Panic was not a luxury he could afford. “Then hope for the best.”

He watched another set of torpedoes fly away, two for each target they were supposed to intercept. A part of him wanted to move the Shield of Truth out of the way, but he knew the missiles were tracking the ship’s heat and would correct the course if he moved; only making the job harder for the far less maneuverable torpedoes.

Shutting down the engines was not an option either, as it would make the Shield of Truth a sitting duck for every enemy weapon, which had not fired because of the kilometric distance he had kept from them that made avoiding their shots relatively easy.

As he considered what else he could do to increase his odds of survival, he received the first report.

“One vampire splashed,” said one weapon operator, then he repeated his report two more times, leaving two anti-ship missiles intact. It was still enough to cripple the ship and still too fast for point defense to be of any use, and Blue Song knew that one of them was enough to punch through the shields.

A moment later, the second part of his prediction happened, and the shields flickered out of existence like a dying electrical light.

The last missile was soon close enough that he could see it from outside his bridge, getting closer and larger with each passing second and leaving a quickly vanishing trail of white smoke as traversed the void.

Officers and sailors of every rank ducked as they saw the end approaching them, but Blue Song kept still on his command throne as he closed his eyes and lit up his horn. He focused and let the Endless Sea flow into him.

Nameless things immediately scratched at the corners of his mind, trying to get his soul during a second of perfectly normal weakness. Blue Song’s parents would have called those things gods or angels, but he knew better than those superstitious fools. Golden Path had made a more convincing point about their power, but that still not made them worthy of his worship in his mind, so he rejected their offers and stole all he could while giving nothing back.

Those things deserved nothing anyway; they were tools to be used and nothing more.

He opened his eyes and focused his gaze on the rapidly approaching missile, and touched it with his mind.

He began with the exterior, picking apart the missile’s casing and throwing it into space before moving on to the wires, causing them to detach and flail in space like noodles before vanishing completely as Blue Song unmade even their molecules. Last was the warhead itself, which exploded into a bush of mechanical components that Blue Song then scattered away.

What he left of the suddenly harmless missile was a foal’s play to dismantle and soon there was no sign that it had even existed besides one last puff of white smoke.

Some on the bridge erupted into cheering as they realized they would not die just yet, but most quickly went back to work as soon as they recovered from their surge of fear.

Blue Song look at his officers and noticed several of them in praying positions. Religiosity had been in rapid increase since the war’s beginning. He had never been a fanatic loyalist of Twilight’s rule, but even he respected her pursuit of rational progress and her rejection of superstition. To see so many supposedly much more loyal officers turning to prayer made him visibly sneer in contempt.

After one more minute of everyone getting back to their stations, a bridge officer addressed him. It was a Kirin assigned to a communications console. She wore a tiny medallion with two wings, one white and the other purple.

“Sir, we’re receiving new messages,” said a kirin with a nasal voice. “From a civilian ship.”

“Which one?” Blue Song asked her.

“It’s the Zephyr Heights,” she marked the ship on the holographic map, making her assigned dot blink several times to catch Blue Song’s attention. It was a refugee vessel, holding at least twenty thousand souls onboard. “Her captain is requesting permission to merge with our fleet as we move outside the gravity well.”

Civilian vessels had simpler names than military ones, being named after towns and cities with no further embellishments. The Zephyr Heights were among the hundreds of refugee ships that had reached the Equus system since the war had started, overcrowded and carrying tens of thousands of souls each.

His fleet had been fast enough to get outside of the range of most enemy weapons, something that he could not say for the many who were facing the full destructive power of the invaders. Green dots were disappearing every minute, each one representing hundreds or even thousands of lives lost. The Equestrian Navy was vanishing before his eyes.

Blue Song considered his options for one second. Leaving the civilians to die would have allowed him to get out faster, making it an acceptable sacrifice at first glance. What turned the sacrifice into a waste were his thoughts about the future.

Since he had no intentions of seeking out the enemy if he managed to escape the battle, he was about to spend months in the void, and he would have no support, contract, or oversight from other fleets. He would turn into a king. It was wise to start his rule with an act of kindness to give a good impression on his crew.

Perhaps he should have called them his subjects instead of his crew, as his mind was already warming up to the idea of kingship.

“Slow down and allow them to merge,” He said as he watched two more Equestrian ships disappear from the map and gripped his throne. “Fire the last crystals to provide a distraction.”

“Roger,” said the weapons officer. “We’re dry on crystals now.”

It would be long now before Blue Song would see those columns of white smoke again, he thought as he watched them go into the darkness, not caring about the effect they would have on their target. Perhaps, he thought, he would never find new ones.

Blue Song looked at the map to observe what he knew was the end of the Equestrian navy on the map. A few other small fleets had reached his position, but all of them had suffered losses and had become even smaller than Blue Song’s skeleton group, despite starting with much higher numbers.

Merging into a cohesive formation took half an hour, the Zephyr Heights took her position in the center to be shielded by the heaviest ships, while the lighter ones formed the outer layer. Once all was done, they had fifty vessels capable of moving and had to abandon five others because of the damage they had suffered when trying to get out of the battle. Two Research Corps vessels also added themselves to the group, filling the role of escort ships.

After a painful hour of taking and avoiding enemy fire, they reached a spot where they were completely out of range of the enemy and the pull of Equestrian gravity well was weak enough that a jump was possible.

Overall, he called himself lucky to have gotten away with only three ships lost during that hour. Peanuts, compared to the massacres he had already witnessed that day.

“All magic users prepare for the jump of their assigned vessel,” he said in a channel he had ordered the communication officer to create. “We can’t waste more time.”

A proper jump required some minutes of preparation, as Blue Song did not intend to repeat what had happened to Twilight Sparkle and her fleet. Only her ship had made it out of her disastrous jump, and she had taken a life of her own returning to the warp despite having no crew left.

Blue Song had kept quiet when heard of that last detail, even if he knew his parents’ gods were behind it. He was sure his imminent jump would not be as disastrous, as his energy pool was unaffected by the spell he had used. All he had done was to channel the warp through his mind, nothing more.

“To where, sir?” asked the commander of one ship, unsurprisingly a unicorn. The higher ranks of the Equestrian navy were full of the few species capable of magic, like kirins and unicorns.

Instead of answering with words, he sent the coordinates to every ship in his fleet. The spot he had chosen was not any system in particular, but it was in the dark space between the stars where he knew the enemy would not look for them.

“Are you sure, sir?” the same commander asked.

“Affirmative,” Blue Song said, then on his communications with the other ships under his command. “This is only a temporary measure. We will return.”

As Blue Song prepared the spell and felt his consciousness flow out of his body, becoming one with the Shield of Truth, he had one last thought before he was no longer himself and something more at the same time.

He really should have warned Twilight about the cult.

Author's Note

This chapter is brought to you by Grandfather Nurgle, who got me sick enough to stay at home and actually do some writing.

Gathering storm

For the first time since his ascension to the ranks of the Astartes, Tiberius could feel his otherwise near-perfect memory failing him. He could not remember how he had gotten into the circular room he was currently in. He only remembered a long, serpentine being grabbing him and his brothers as they floated in the dark.

The creature had then carried them through the warp until Tiberius' memories and consciousness failed him. When he regained control of his body, he could feel himself lying on his back against a cold steel wall.

Waves of pain passed through Tiberius' head as he slowly opened his eyes. He looked around the room, finding it covered in a soft penumbra that somehow highlighted its finer details.

Its rusty red walls tilted inwards at their middle point and caused the ceiling to be half the size of the floor. The ceiling in question had one large skull in its center, with small torches dangling from its eyes. An industrial wheel encircled it.

He pointed his bolter to the nearest square door and scanned the room once more as his armor’s systems came back to life. At first, Tiberius ignored most of the information his systems gave him, as he did not care for the exact metallic composition of the walls or which shipyard had produced it a thousand years before.

That piece of information made him pause and look at the data in front of him, a thousand years was no small amount of time even for an Astartes, the ship was clearly more interesting than he had originally thought. His systems could not tell him her name, but they could identify her as belonging to the Mechanchus, and the specific metallic league of her walls made it clear she came from the forge world of Mezoa.

His four brothers were with him in there, taking their time to get up as they also prepared their weapons.

“A Mechanicus ship,” Cassius stated calmly as he observed the room. “I once hoped to be inside one again, but not in this manner.”

“Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment, brother,” Aphaniel recited the old saying to him before facing Tiberius. “My liege, what are your commands?”

Tiberius hesitated to answer the question, as he needed a moment to think about what his next step would be. He was under no delusion that he was out of the warp, and yet the surrounding space, while clearly abandoned, seemed to be unaffected by the reality-denying powers of Chaos. The rusty walls had no eyes or gaping wounds, the stale air was perfectly breathable, and nothing was whispering promises in his ears.

A glacial silence surrounded the squad, and the sergeant realized there was truly no one around him besides his brothers. If his enemies were patiently lying in wait for the right moment to strike, they were doing it so well they might as well not have been there. There were no signs of life coming from anywhere around him, not even automatic responses from the ship's systems as he reached out to them.

“We move,” he said and pointed at the nearest door, picking it for no real reason. As long as he kept moving, any direction would do just fine. “If the Emperor smiles upon us, we will eventually return to real space.”

The door he had pointed at bore another skull of the Mechanicus in its lower half. It had a crack spreading from the primitive axe lodged in its left eye. The axe’s position was too low to have been left there after a melee and had no blood dripping from its edge. No swing would go so low, not even if the weapon had been in the hands of a novice.

“Someone threw this axe in haste,” Icarus approached the weapon in question and placed a hand on it. “And someone else made it, recently.”

“What makes you so sure, brother?” Cadriel had been the last to wake up and was still lying his back against a wall as he calmly checked his chainsword and lazily swung it in front of him.

“First, the angle at which it struck the door is not consistent with a well-aimed throw,” Icarus said and picked up the axe, which seemed like a toy weapon in his huge hands. “Second, look at this metal. It shows signs of high-quality work for the standards of a primitive civilization, which means there is life here, life intelligent enough to craft primitive weaponry.”

He handed the axe to Cassius, who confirmed his statement with a nod.

“A wasted weapon then,” Aphaniel said, then paused for a second as he seemed to think about something. “Why would its owner use it in haste?”

"Fear causes many baseline humans to act against their best interest," Icarus said and looked at the floor, slowly going over every tile as he and Tiberius realized the same thing. “There is no blood in this room. If there was a fight in this place, it moved away from here as soon as it began.”

“Then we have a direction, brothers,” Tiberius said. “I am sure the fight left more signs as it moved through this ship.”

The squad formed up behind the sergeant. Tiberius took point while Aphaniel and Cadriel were right behind him and Cassius and Icarus followed.

He touched the door and it immediately fell to the ground. Tiberius quickly stepped forward and grabbed it before it could make any loud noise. He gently accompanied it to the floor only letting it go once it touched the steel below. There was no need to make any unnecessary sounds before a battle. Some of the chapter's elders would not approve of such a timid action, but they would not be able to legally punish him even if they found out about it.

The squad walked out in absolute silence, the only noise coming from their heavy steps on the metal floor. They occasionally used their shared vox channel to confirm the lifelessness of the space around them. Most lights were either dead or flickering, but the primitive torches on the walls allowed for perfect visibility.

Every turn revealed the same thing, a seemingly endless set of long, cramped hallways with no signs of life in sight. The Mechanicus vessel was a maze with many paths and staircases that created a labyrinth of red walls and empty rooms.

There was no way to tell where they were going in such a claustrophobic environment, so Tiberius, who had given up on the idea of following the signs of a fight after finding none after two hours, just did his best to stick to one direction and hoped he would eventually reach an exit. He occasionally took detours from the main path to look for things that might be hiding in the ship, only to find nothing.

After what felt like an eternity of walking, there was finally something new in the air. It was a powerful metallic smell they were all familiar with.

“Fresh blood,” several marines reported in unison, recognizing the smell as soon as the putrid odor hit their noses.

“But no breathing,” Tiberius pointed out as he let his nose lead him to the smell’s source. ‘Whoever has bled here is already dead."

He approached a door large enough for only one Astartes at a time and checked its corners with his armored gauntlet before pushing it open.

Once inside, Tiberius saw what was producing the smell.

Three skinned human corpses, two men and one woman, dangled from the ceiling with a noose wrapped tight around each of their necks. They had no eyes anymore and a thin black thread kept their mouths sealed shut. The killers had tied the victims’ hands behind their backs and bent their legs at impossible angles. Their broken bones emerged from their red muscles.

“Professional work,” Aphaniel was the first to break the squad’s silence. “No doubt about it. Whoever did this was no amateur. There are no unnecessary cuts in their muscles, and each noose is near-perfect. Their killers have done this many times before.”

Tiberius took a better look at the room. It was small, with a flat ceiling and no functioning lights. The dried blood on the walls gave them an even darker red shade than the rest of the ship, and a couple of spears made entirely of metal rested next to the door.

“Were these people hunters or sentries?” Cadriel asked.

“To answer your question I would have to guess,” Tiberius responded. “These-“

He stopped speaking because of a noise that came from deeper in the ship, echoing from the crimson walls in several waves. It was a terrified scream followed by the explosion of a bolter round. It was distant, yet clear.

“Reach the source,” Tiberius commanded. “Be ready for combat.”

They quickly got out of the room and moved carefully through the corridors leading to the noise. Each brother mentally checked their equipment as they prepared themselves for the fight ahead. First, Tiberius checked his systems, once he was sure they worked perfectly, he made sure his bolter still had ammunition and his chainsword could still work.

His bolter had only half its ammunition, but the chainsword worked just fine. It was not an ideal situation, and he would have to make it work or die trying.

There were no more bolter rounds following the one that had drawn Squad Tiberius’ attention. Perhaps the noise was simply a way to lure them into an ambush, Tiberius thought, but he would fight his way out if it was so.

They finally stopped before a large steel door. Two charred corpses lay at its sides, each dead man gripping his spear close to his chest.

“Prepare to enter, loudly, brothers.” The sergeant tightened his grip on his bolter. With one fluid motion, he opened the door and leaped quickly to its left side so that his brothers could rush inside. A moment later, he followed them and readied his bolter for whatever waited for him and his brothers.

Only for him to find no one.

The room had a grandeur that was absent from the rest of the ship. Two rows of black metal pillars flanked a red carpet that led to an elevated platform. There, a pile of spears and axes covered a command throne almost completely, allowing only the armrests to emerge from the collection. In front of the throne, there were several rows of consoles with cracked screens.

The red carpet had a golden trim and covered the middle of the room, its surface covered in bodies and darkened pools of blood. It led to a big hexagonal door guarded by two statues of tech-priests holding halberds. With their wall of green eyes on their black marble faces, the priests' statues seemed to be looking at every corner of the room.

Tiberius expected to see either the emptiness of space or to stare directly at the warp when he looked at the room’s large glass windows. What he saw instead was a wall of jagged rocks with white veins running on their surface.

A totem of human skulls with a chaos star made of blackened steel on its top stood in the middle of the room, making the humans’ allegiance clear for the five marines.

The squad walked between tents of human leather scattered around the room with no apparent order. There were corpses anywhere Tiberius looked. Men, women, and children, all kinds of unaugmented humanity lay in the carnage, their limbs severed and their eyes gouged in a display of cruelty.

Some bodies had the telltale fist-sized holes that only a bolter could make, with those who had received a shot in the head resting in a pool of blood and gray matter. Many were completely black from the burning effect of the weapon that had killed them.

“Blood of Dorn,” Icarus let out a whisper at the macabre scene surrounding the squad. "Such painful deaths... a waste of time for targets so weak."

Like all Astartes, the Star Lords were no strangers to massacres, but the one in front of them was unlike any they had seen. The Star Lords had participated in the dispensation of imperial justice, but never in such a needlessly brutal way. What had happened there was far beyond what was necessary to send a message to would-be traitors.

“Such are the wages of sin,” Aphaniel said as he stomped a mutated man’s head with his armored boot. “I call this justice served.”

“If the executioner is as wicked as the condemned, can you really call it justice?” Tiberius walked towards the rows of dead consoles at one end of the room. “This was no punishment. The killers who did this acted for their own pleasure.”

He stopped before the largest console, where a man dressed better than the other corpses laid with a hand over its dead screen. The man wore a blue helmet with a pair of curved horns on top and a suit of studded leather armor reinforced with thick pieces of steel on its chest.

Next to him was a man with a spear in his gut who was carrying much more familiar gear. He wore a dark blue flak vest that resembled the kind used by Cadian regiments. Tiberius went closer to the dead man and noticed a small medal pinned to his chest. It was a small pair of red wings with a dagger between them.

The man's face was pale and marble-like. He looked like he hadn't seen sunlight in years and had facial features similar to a nobleman, with a clean face and a short beard. His black hair reached just above his shoulders, and his eyebrows were thin and neatly trimmed. His dark blue eyes stared lifelessly at nothing in particular.

“I do not recognize this regiment,” Tiberius said as he knelt in front of the dead man’s body to inspect it better. “I believe he was a mercenary, but that leaves the question of his employer unanswered.”

Walking next to his sergeant, Icarus went to inspect the corpse and knelt in front of it.

“He looks well-fed,” he said as pointed at the dead man's arms and legs. “Which means he had access to a great deal of supplies.”

“An organized force did this then,” Tiberius said, then he walked away from the body and once again looked at the brutal scene around him.

Looking up, he noticed several skinned bodies dangling from the ceiling he had not seen when he had walked in.

“One with Astartes at their side, or access to bolter weapons,” Icarus pointed at the headless body of a woman. She wore a simple brown dress and a necklace with a tooth dangling from it, both tainted by the dark blood staining them. “Either way, they outmatched these barbarian heretics.”

Cadriel walked apart from the rest of the squad, looking at one dead body after another.

“Half of me wants to admire those responsible for such a use of violence. This is the sort of act that sows terror in every traitor's mind,” He said in a low tone. “The other half despises this cowardly act, to use such overwhelming power on barbarians. I say we find those responsible and force them into a proper fight.”

Tiberius knew no fear, but his brother’s words caused something that he could at least call concern. Cadriel’s admission caused an old memory to emerge from the recesses of his mind.

He thought of Mordred, the man who had been in his brother even before they were Astartes, saying there was nothing wrong with the use of terror. “If the enemy is too terrified to fight,” he had argued. “Would they not surrender sooner? Would there not be less bloodshed? Where is the honor in conducting a campaign the proper way if it leads to more deaths in the end?”

“Kill the first half and feed the second,” Tiberius said to Cadriel what he should have said to Mordred, bringing his mind back to reality. “We have seen everything here, brothers. Let us keep moving.”

The exploration of the rest of the vessel had been uneventful, the discovery of a few more skinned corpses being the only thing worthy of note in their silent journey.

They stopped walking for one moment when they found a room with one wall blown apart by a powerful piece of ordinance. Its fractured and blackened border showed signs of burning just like the rest of the room around it. Two broken Skitarii lay on the ground, their mechanical bodies frozen in place like discarded toys.

Outside the ship, there was a lightless wide space. Even the marines of squad Tiberius had to wait a few seconds before being able to see inside its empty rocky confines. If they were not Astartes, they would not have been able to see past the darkness waiting outside.

Neither their lights nor their night vision systems could pierce the darkness, but their naked eyes could at least figure out the outlines of the space ahead and slowly reveal more of what was outside. It was a large cave, with jagged walls of grey rock and several stalactites growing from its ceiling

“Time to get outside this wreck, brothers,” Tiberius said, and then he took one step out of the vessel and dropped to the ground below. His armored boots hit the sturdy rock creating small cracks and sending an echo down the cave’s walls. The echo’s returning wave let him know there was no one waiting in ambush.

It was not a polite thing to acknowledge in front of the upper circles of the chapter, but the Star Lords had a talent for moving in near-lightless conditions. Only their strict self-imposed laws, and their ruthless enforcement, prevented them from becoming one of the many cowardly chapters that struck from the darkness.

His brothers did the same, their contacts with the ground producing four similar sounds to his and allowing him to get a better understanding of his surroundings.

Looking forward, he could see a corridor carved through the rock and a line of white electrical lights attached to its right wall. Mentally, he was glad to see a sign of proper civilization, even if he suspected it would be hostile.

Keeping their bolters at the ready, the squad followed the guidance of the white lights, feeling no warmth from them as they kept a slow pace. The corridor was wide enough for two marines to walk side by side, with Tiberius and Cassius forming the first pair, Cadriel and Aphaniel behind them, and Icarus in the rearguard.

The path turned left, and they all heard steps approaching them. Judging by the noise, they were some form of unaugmented humans in light armor, two to be precise. Tiberius raised his closed left fist and his squad immediately stopped.

“I count two humans, we shall slay them with our hands,” he said in the squad’s vox channel. “No need to waste bolter rounds.”

“Acknowledged, my liege,” each of his brothers replied in quick succession.

Tiberius ignored the unchivalrous instincts that were surfacing from the back of his mind. They commanded him to withdraw from the light next to him and take advantage of the shadows behind him to better observe the two incoming humans. He appreciated the logic, but the chapter’s laws demanded he stood proudly and fearlessly in the light when approaching any foe unless it was blatantly suicidal to do so.

If he did not follow the laws and rules of the chapter, how could he and his brothers prove their validity to the rest of the galaxy? The Star Lords believed their laws should be the standard for the entire human race; the least he could do was follow them to the letter to set an example.

He stood tall in the light as a pair of humans turned around the corner in front of him and stopped as soon as they saw the five Astartes. They wore a dark blue flak vest similar to the one worn by the dead body in the Mechanichus vessel and had short, barely visible, black hair.

Instead of attacking squad Tiberius, the two humans saluted the marines by bringing their fists over their chests.

“Greetings lords!” one of them, an older man with a few grey hairs in his short brown beard, quickly said in a heavily accented Low Gothic. “Lord Varl commands all his brothers to-“

The man stopped in the middle of his sentence as the familiar expression of dread appeared on his face. Tiberius has seen it on many humans before they died by his hands, his mere presence turning courage to abject terror in the unaugmented and the alien. He wished it was not so, for there was no challenge in killing the terrified, but he could not help it.

“Wait...” he picked up the lasgun strapped to his shoulder by a leather harness. “You’re not with-“

Once again, he did not finish his sentence, as Tiberius promptly snapped the man’s neck and Cassius did the same with the other man.

“We are dealing with Astartes then,” Aphaniel said as Tiberius and Cassius guided the bodies to the ground to prevent excessive noise.

“But we do know how many there are. It could be a renegade squad or a legion reborn,” Tiberius replied, stepping above the man he just killed. “We will take a good look at their number, then we will change the plan accordingly.”

The squad resumed their walk, following the trail of white lights until they reached a large steel wall. It was clearly a piece of another old vessel. Many lines of electrical lights came out of one rusty macro cannon resting like a tired beast on the rocky surface of the cavern. Those lights then disappeared into other tunnels like the one they had used.

Rust covered large sections of the steel wall, but many others still had a bright green paint job over the metal. There was a window of stained glass to the left with a white dragon’s head painted above it.

“They dare defile Vulkan’s legacy,” Tiberius said as he noticed the symbol. He had fought once side-by-side with the Salamanders when he was a squire, and remembered them to be phenomenal warriors, even if they were more concerned with civilians than he would ever be. “Let us do a favor for our cousins, brothers.”

Some of the ship’s systems still worked and responded when Tiberius tried to identify her with his helmet. The vessel’s name appeared on the bottom right of his vision alongside a three-dimensional model of the vessel. She was called “Ashen hand”, but her name and allegiance were far from its more interesting detail, which was her age.

“Brothers, are you seeing it too?” Tiberius asked his squad. His breathing got slower as he took a step inside the macro cannon.

“Yes, sergeant,” Aphaniel responded. “This is a vessel from the age of heresy.”

The air seemed to turn heavier as Aphaniel’s words seemed to turn the abstract data in front of him into tangible reality. Tiberius could almost taste the history surrounding him, and for a moment he wondered what heroes had been in that old vessel. Had Vulkan himself walked through its corridors or stood in its halls nine thousand years ago, commanding his sons during a war against a vile alien race?

“She is a relic,” Icarus’ observation brought Tiberius out of his thoughts.

“Yes,” Cassius answered, caressing the weapon’s barrel with an almost gentle touch as he went further inside. “Yes, she is.”

As expected from a vessel of the Great Crusade, the corridors of the Ashen Hand were spacious enough for a squad of Astartes, but they were not quiet. Every few minutes, the marines heard heavy footsteps following them, always at the same distance but never from the same spot. Frustratingly, the sound was never clear enough to carry any kind of valuable information.

Unlike in the caves, there were no artificial lights on the ancient walls, but their genetically enhanced vision allowed them to understand where they were going. That, and the map of the ship they could on their lenses.

Tiberius saw something, a shape moving so quickly in front of him that even he could not understand what it was. Before he could squeeze the trigger or call out a contact, it had already disappeared behind a corner. If not for his photographic memory, Tiberius would have doubted anything had ever been there.

When he went to check the corner, there was no trace of the armored figure he was sure he had seen, but he could see a light at the end of the corridor.

It was a faint green glow coming from behind a large and broken blast door with a white dragon’s head painted above it. Someone or something had punched its way inside, causing the door to bend inwards and creating a large hole in its center.

Acting on instinct, all five marines lined up on the right side of the breach in a textbook preparation to enter. Tiberius carefully moved to the other side, keeping his bolter pointed towards the center. It took only a few moments to understand there was no need for such a precaution.

There was nothing there, nothing alive at least.

A carpet of old skeletons covered the floor of grey metal tiles, each one lying next to rusted lasguns and bolt casings. Since all the skeletons were intact, Tiberius assumed the kills did not belong to the Salamanders.

The room was devoid of any furniture or decorations, with two noticeable exceptions. A hololithic projector on the ceiling was showing a flickering green hologram of a Salamander floating just above the ground as he spoke. Behind it, there were several dead screens large enough to cover an entire wall, and it was clear they had once belonged to a now-dead cogitator.

The room was relatively large, with enough space for several marines to walk in it without obstructing each other. The walls were grey and bare, and many of its doors were sealed shut or covered by piles of rocks.

“No contacts,” Tiberius said, then he lowered his bolter and entered the room. His squad followed him one by one.

“Finally, a place with some power,” Cadriel said once he stepped inside and saw the Salamander’s hologram.

“Barely,” Cassius replied as soon as he heard him. “The machine spirits here are not dead but are in hibernation so deep they might as well be as far as our current capabilities are concerned. The fact that this projector still works after nine thousand years is a miracle of the Omnissiah.”

“Your days on Mars are behind you, brother,” Icarus said as the squad approached the hologram. "Why do you still entertain the philosophy of the red priests?"

“You would too if you knew what I do,” Cassius replied and stopped right in front of it.

The skeleton of an Astartes lay right below the image of the Salamander, giving the impression that the spirit of the ancient warrior was speaking to them.

“If you hear these words… de-dead,” he said, the words having a slight echo around the room. A sudden static noise made the message incomprehensible for several seconds. “…Carry our torch, bring word to our father… Vulkan must know… Horus... more allies than...”

The message became incomprehensible again, then looped to the beginning.

“We cannot afford to linger on this mystery,” Tiberius said as she looked away from the hologram and saw another open door on the opposite side of the room. He headed towards it and his squad followed him, leaving the looping message behind them.

Squad Tiberius went outside the room and found another long and dark corridor, but larger and far more decorated. There were large statues of space marines placed in pairs every twenty paces, all wielding different weapons. From catphractii armor to volkite rifles, the ancient cracked statues showcased the entire arsenal available to the Legiones Astartes of old. Between the statues, there were flags bearing the legion's emblem or its number.

They walked through the corridor for several silent minutes, glad to no longer hear the previously constant noise of armored boots coming from all around them. The relief quickly faded as they were left alone with their thoughts, and soon felt like intruders in a piece of history that did not belong to them.

Tiberius occasionally looked up at the statues, feeling the weight of that history bearing down on him. His chapter kept some records of the Heresy, which Tiberius had greedily consumed during his training. Even if those warriors were not his ancient brothers, he could not help but feel a sense of awe as he looked at those who had built the Imperium. He also pitied them just a little, knowing what their legion had through in the Isstvan system.

When he and his squad reached the corridor’s end, a large door with a white dragon’s head painted in its center blocked their path. Two statues of Salamanders flanked the door, each one planting their power sword into the ground with both hands. Their eyes of stone stared into the darkness beyond making them look like mythical guardians protecting a treasure.

Tiberius noticed that the door was slightly open already and slowly pushed it in while keeping his bolter ready to fire the moment he saw anything moving inside the room. After a few seconds, he could see the precaution was once again unnecessary and lowered his bolter.

“This place is empty,” he declared and entered the room. “At least there are no skeletons.”

He and his squad looked round the room, finding it to be a steel grey box with no identifying marks anywhere on its walls or ceiling. It was small, and they traversed in only a few steps before reaching an already open door on the opposite side and venturing into the space beyond.

There, the squad found another maze of corridors, but with clear signs of being lived in. The gentle white light from the ceiling glimmered on the half-empty bottles of dark amasec on black steel tables. Playing cards were scattered both on the tables and on the floor, clearly abandoned in a hurry by their users.

It was not long until they found a headless body lying still on the ground. With just one glance at it, Tiberius noticed a lack of blood next to the corpse. Whatever weapon had killed the man had also instantly cauterized the wound, preventing any bleeding.

“This is too clean for plasma, too precise,” Icarus stated as he looked at the body.

The squad did not stop to analyze the corpse and instead walked straight past it after each brother had a passing glance at him. One look was all that was necessary for them to form an opinion on it.

“And yet the wounds are clearly heat-related,” Cassius said. His voice was neutral, like that of an academic man adding to a dry philosophical discussion. "It resembles the wounds delivered by the xenos in golden armor."

While the marines prepared to discuss the nature of the dead man’s wounds, a new sound reached their ears, marching feet, thousands of them. They were not coming towards them, but the noise still revealed a sizeable force somewhere right ahead of them.

“Finally,” Tiberius ordered. “Time to see the true numbers of our foe, brothers.”

They increased their pace, once again preparing themselves for a fight and checking their ammunition. There was not much left, so they would have to make it count.

After turning a corner, they saw a light at the end of the long corridor they had just entered, revealing powerful electrical lights beyond.

To journey towards the end of the corridor was brief, and waiting for them there was a wide balcony overlooking an enormous hangar. The balcony was large enough for squad Tiberius to stand comfortably side by side on it and still have room to spare.

Looking down, they could see there were thousands of troops, tens of thousands, all marching in formation while Astartes walked between them. A few wore a chaos-corrupted version of the armor used by the Star Lords, but the majority had colors and heraldry Squad Tiberius did not recognize immediately.

Those traitors had on midnight blue armor with white lightning bolts and skull-shaped helmets. Some helmets had dark red wings added to them. On their kneepads, many of the traitor space marines had the gothic numeral ‘eight’ etched in and painted white. As expected from their kind, many traitors had white skulls attached to their pauldrons kept in place by heavy chains. A few even had multiple skulls or severed hands dangling from their belts.

Their unaugmented infantry looked like a heretical parody of the Imperial Guard. Men and women marching in perfectly regimented columns all wielded polished lasguns which they held close to their chests. On their dark blue flak vests, they wore rank-related insignia alongside small silver or gold medals.

The humans’ expressions were stern and focused directly forward, towards the transport at one end of the hangar. The troop transports were near-identical to those employed by the Imperial Guard but had chaos stars painted on their hulls.

Chimeras and Leman Russ tanks shielded the flanks of infantry squares but left enough space for the traitor marines to walk freely between them. Cranes on the ceiling carried other vehicles to prepared positions, where their crews patiently waited for them.

The sheer size of this force in front of them could conquer star systems with ease, and it was mobilizing for the conflict its infernal masters had created it to fight.

“This is...” Tiberius struggled to find the right for what he was seeing but did not have to finish his sentence as a new voice came from behind them.

“You’ve gotten sloppy in all your time away from us, brothers,” said a powerful voice of an Astartes, and Tiberius could hear a hint of amusement in it. “But I am so glad you’re back.”

The sergeant quickly spun around and aimed his bolter at whoever had spoken. The marine in question wore the midnight blue armor of the Astartes below but with no helmet. His face was clean and hairless, with a pallor that only highlighted his pitch-black eyes.

All five marines pointed their bolters at him the moment they saw him. Despite the speed of their movements, the traitor was faster. He used his right hand to create lightning and destroyed the bolter rounds of Squad Tiberius while they were still in the air.

More lightning came forth from the traitor’s fingers as he fired another volley, which hit all five space marines at the same time. The energy went through their armor and into their flesh, burning them as if someone had poured acid into them. All their equipment suddenly felt powerless and much heavier than normal as the traitor's sorcery shut down all of their systems.

Pain Tiberius had never imagined possible flowed through his body, sending him to his knees. His strength left him as his transhuman muscles failed him for the first time in his life. All fibers in his body were burning as waves of agony washed over him and paralyzed him. Despite his instincts commanding him to fight, he could only remain and take the pain he was receiving.

He did not scream, nor did his brothers. Not one made as much as a grunt even as they also fell to their knees in pain. They would not show more weakness than what their bodies could not hide.

“Forgive me for such a dramatic introduction,” the traitor said with fake politeness in his voice. “We will have a chance for a better conversation later. How about you get some rest before that?”

Darkness crept from the corner of his vision like a moon slowly eclipsing the sun until it fully covered it, taking him into a dreamless slumber.

Author's Note

Many darlings were brutally murdered in the making of this chapter.
Also, I apologize for the delay.

On the moon

It had been going so well.

Sergeant Kaela remembered just a week prior when she and the rest of her regiment had been the first to set foot on the alien moon. It had been like the rest of the war until then, they had quickly scattered the small number of aliens who dared oppose them and established a camp from which they would advance further.

That had been her last simple day.

She did not know where the aliens had gotten it from, but since then, the Imperial Guard had to deal with more armor and fortified positions than they had in the entire crusade. For the first time, they took meaningful losses, with fields of their dead covering the grey dusty field of the blasted alien world.

Kaela was gritting her teeth as she ducked behind a rock next to her vox caster and fired her lasgun blindly at the enemy. The vox caster was dead, his body slumped against the rock and mouth agape after a rock had crashed into his visor and exposed him to the airless void of the alien moon. His eyes’ blood vessels had popped almost instantly, coating the sclera in deep red in the few seconds before all his blood froze.

To her left and right, two Leman Russ tanks were naught but quickly cooling wrecks surrounded by the bodies of soldiers. A column of fire had ejected the turrets of the chassis before dying off in a few seconds.

The turrets had never come back down.

Their destruction had been the signal that the attack had not just failed, but had been an utter disaster. Despite that, Kaela knew she and the others did not have the liberty to retreat without an explicit order, so they had marched straight into the hail of bullets, energy beams, and rocks thrown at terminal velocity, They had kept trying to push through the defenses for hours with only corpses and wrecks to show for it.

She had learned quickly that, on that moon, even the smallest puncture in a suit could lead to a swift and painful death. That reality had made the combat there the most deadly she had ever seen in her brief experience of the galaxy.

“This is Sergeant Kaela. I am pinned on sector three-a!” She shouted in the vox, ducking her head as she heard and felt the heat from one of the alien energy beams hitting her rock chipping away at it. It would not be long before it broke through. “The assault is a bust, half the company is wiped. We need reinforcements now!”

On the other end, she heard only white static, and she mentally cursed the aliens. The vox had stopped working the moment they had approached the alien lines, and her shouting into it was more a result of desperation instead of genuine hope for relief.

“Where are the Space Marines?” She shouted again, this time less at the vox and more like a loud thought.

The Marines had been with them, well, mostly around them, during the entire crusade until that point, but now they were nowhere to be seen.

Even without them, the combat had been a walk in the park for them and other imperial forces. Sure, the idiots and the unlucky got killed, but the casualties had never been so high that she had ever doubted the outcome of a single battle besides that odd delay the guard had faced on one mountain.

Now they were paying for every mile they took with hundreds of bodies. She had even seen rows of those unsettling Skitarii going down, although their fights were a much more balanced affair than what unaugmented humans had to face.

It wasn’t just a matter of the aliens suddenly becoming more determined. The two destroyed Leman Russes reminded her that their gear had gotten a sudden upgrade as well.

She had never seen them pour out so many bullets and shells of any kind until then, especially not in such a short amount of time. Many of the craters she saw around her were not part of the moon’s natural landscape but were the result of the artillery barrage that had spelled the end of their assault.

She dared to poke her head over her protective rock to look over the gray dusty wasteland that preceded the complex line of trenches and white bunkers they had slammed themselves against for the last three days with nothing but corpses and wrecks to show for it.

The bunkers seemed to almost merge with the lifeless environment around them, and the trenches would have looked like normal depressions in the lunar ground if not for their pattern, and the alien heads occasionally poking out of them. Hovering far above the trenches and bunkers, she could see many rounded purple disks that intercepted their artillery shells, denying them the easy way through the defenses.

She ducked back just in time to avoid an energy beam that would have turned her head into fine vapor and looked at the Imperial forces behind them.

Discipline had utterly vanished, and each unit was doing its thing. All were charging, of course, but there was no coordination between the squads.

And she could only think of squads at that moment. Any semblance of cohesion had gone to the wind when the commissars, officers, and their few brave souls had perished in the charge. Now it was just a mad dash to the enemy lines and a quick end.

The squads and soldiers that were still alive had gathered in the craters around the field, occasionally firing back before alien artillery wiped their position in a flash of fire.

Kaela knew it would be only a matter of time until either the artillery or the energy beams claimed her as well.

It was then, while she was looking at the Imperial forces, that she saw them, the Space Marines. They had been there the whole time, but her brain had not realized it immediately as their grey armors blended perfectly with the lunar surface, now that she knew what to look for, she could at least make out their outline.

They were immobile, still like ancient statues if not to point at something about the alien defenses or their weaponry.

She raised a hand to wave at them and beg them to come down from the hill, but they showed no reaction to her gesture because they didn’t see her from that distance or, as it seemed more likely. After all, they were choosing to ignore her.

She had grown up with tales of the heroic space marines, those mighty heroes of the Emperor in shining armor, thinking of them being myths at first, only to realize they were real once the Imperium took her to the stars.

Realizing those heroes of hers had watched the entire slaughter and not moved a muscle, something in her head snapped and she made her choice.

She reached down to her belt, picked her only frag grenade, and held it in front of her. She saw her haphazard orange environmental suit and the chains and sword on her shoulder pads representing her penal legion and all the mistakes she had ever made in her life.

All the time she had spoken up or annoyed those around or even above her or thought herself smart enough to ignore imperial laws coming back to haunt in one simple symbol.

Her explosive collar still blinked with a tiny red light threatening her with immediate death should she even take one step back without an order, and she was aware her handlers were watching her.

It was only then, while staring at that blinking red light, that she knew she was doing the right thing. Maybe the order to retreat was just about to come, but she no longer cared about it.

She would make her first choice in a very long time.

“This is Warder Thunder Storm. All hostiles approaching sector twenty-five have been terminated, over,” a voice said in Luna’s radio transmitter.

“Acknowledged,” she replied drily. “Maintain position until relief arrives, over and out.”

She then closed the channel and looked at a tiny explosion in the distance, probably some kind of grenade. Luna wondered if it was a manufacturing defect or a deliberate choice by its user.

She was standing in the trenches, with one hoof on no mare’s land and overlooking the first enemy assault wave fizzle away into nothing under the sustained fire of just fifty royal guards dispersed in small squads of five amongst the thousands of regular soldiers defending the trenches and bunkers.

Then again, fifty royal guards were nothing to scoff at.

Such a number was a fifth of their entire presence on the moon, a considerable investment of resources for just one small trench section, but the enemy had assaulted it relentlessly, so the golden warriors had been the only thing keeping the area from falling into enemy hands.

The enemy was about to put centuries of defensive construction and theories to the test, and Luna intended to make them pay for every inch.

Looking at the invaders’ bodies, torn apart and left to lie on the grey ground in their orange suits, she felt her heart tugged in two directions. They were invaders, so they had to die so others may live, but she also wondered if their souls were truly as black as their genocidal actions in the colonies suggested and if violence was truly what they desired.

It mattered little, Luna thought as she saw the second wave assembling in their positions and prepared herself mentally for another round of fighting.

She looked to her left and right and saw five royal guards bedecked in golden armor standing at attention, waiting for the enemy to come to them. Their resplendent armors reflected the sunlight in slightly different ways because of the many details on their surfaces that a distracted viewer might not notice.

A symbol there, a name carved here, an especially bright gem on the forehead, and so on. The armors could not look more different to Luna if they tried, with the abundance of gold being the only thing they shared. That, and the oxygen tanks on their backs, which were not a standard part of their gear.

Just behind them were soldiers of every species belonging to every species of the confederation, wearing pale grey suits with small eye-slits of reinforced black glass and heavy oxygen backpacks that looked like slightly rounded blocks with smooth tubes reaching under their helmets.

Luna had usually walked around the moon with no protection from the void of space, the only creature able to do so, but now even she had to wear protection just like everyone else. She considered another sign of the changing times.

Her armor was a black and blue suit that hugged her body and enhanced her movement’s speed and strength with something that Twilight had called artificial muscles. For her, there was no need for an oxygen tank, so she was glad she did not have to bear that added weight like everyone else. Luna had also rejected the option of having combat stimulant injectors built into the suit, no matter how much the engineers in charge of the design had tried to convince her, stating that she had no desire to alter her senses regardless of what she would have to face.

She had never understood the technology’s finer details, not really, but she had learned how to use it and she trusted that its creators had come up with an excellent design, despite her one restriction.

“Warder,” she addressed the nearest royal guard. “Prepare for combat; wait for the enemy to be in optimal range and focus on officers and move into melee should they reach the trenches.”

“As you command, ma’am,” the pegasus nodded and aligned her shoulder-mounted cannon with the horizon.

For one minute, Luna waited in silence as the wave of aliens rolled and marched over their dead comrades. Her helmet’s sensors automatically highlighted and cataloged all their gear and presented in a list on the top right corner of her vision that she could expand with a blink.

She noticed that these had dull brown suits, not bright orange like the previous ones, and had what looked like gas masks on their faces. Their rifles also seemed longer than those in the previous waves. Lastly, she saw that some of them, probably their officers, wore light metal cuirasses over their chests and had sabers with elaborate handles attached to their belts.

With two blinks to the left of her vision, she shared that information with the royal guards next to her. The private network in their respective helmets allowed its users to share pieces of information in a few blinks.

“This is Luna calling on third artillery company, fire for effect on grid coordinates twelve twenty-five, over,” she then ordered over the radio.

“Acknowledged, fire for effect on grid coordinates twelve twenty-five, over and out,” the pony on the other side repeated her order.

A few seconds later, she saw the shells land in the middle of the advancing enemies, claiming dozens of them every time. Because of the lack of air, the explosions were silent and created a surreal experience for her and her troops.

The attackers dispersed, but not in a panicked way, like all the others before them. They carried some of their wounded with them, but only those with light injuries, never bothering with those who were twitching on the ground or had lost limbs.

Seeing that the enemy kept advancing, Luna shouted the order to fire and watched as a silent volley of bullets and tracers hit the ground and pierced the enemy’s suits. If they screamed in pain in their last moments, Luna could not hear it.

She ducked as the response arrived as red beams that punched small holes into the soil they hit. They dug slightly deeper than what all the previous weapons had used. A few of the shots found their marks in the faces of unlucky soldiers who ducked too slowly or went for a second look, but most went nowhere close to their targets and were meant to suppress the defenders. The bolts that connected with something alive pierced right through their targets’ helmets and skulls, leaving the bodies to fall slowly and silently to the ground.

Earlier in the war, she had felt the weight of every death and every wounded soldier, feeling they were a personal failure of hers, and that a perfect commander could keep all her soldiers alive. Now she just accepted them as an ugly inevitability that should not keep her awake in the few moments of rest she allowed herself.

She was not sure she enjoyed thinking in such a callous manner.

A bolt coming dangerously close to her head broke her out of her thoughts and she noticed that, heedless of danger or casualties, the enemy was now charging at them in what looked like a mad dash to the trenches.

They were moving much faster than the previous assaults, having covered the same distance half the time. She dared distract herself for a moment to look up and saw the magical shields above the trench flickering while a storm of silent explosions hit them.

Before she could think more about the losses that would follow the moment even one shield failed, she lowered her eyes just in time to see that her enemies were already almost upon the trench.

Looking at them up close, she could not help but find them unnerving, with their disregard for casualties and industrial gas masks.

“Fix bayonets!” she ordered, perhaps too late, and the soldiers quickly obeyed with well-practiced movements.

A few seconds after the soldiers attached the blades to their rifles, the first alien jumped into the trench to be followed by a swarm of his kind.

In all her long years, Luna had never seen anything uglier than trench combat. She was glad there was no air around her, because the moment she saw the first guts being spilled onto the ground, she knew the smell would have made her vomit anything she had ever eaten. It had happened the first time she had seen someone die in front of her, and the second, and the third, then the sight just gave her nausea.

The silent fight around her was brutish and short, with bayonets piercing equestrian and alien flesh in equal measure, and the blood turning into vapor the moment it poured out of the wounds as the dying screamed their soundless cries that never went past the air in their helmets.

Luna and her royal guards were right in the middle of the melee, and the exception to the brutal and unpredictable combat around them, their armors putting several steps above their assailers. Luna’s helmet almost fought the battle for her, telling her when to strike with the retractable blades and when to dodge or parry the flurry of blows and shots directed at her.

The royal guards were odd soldiers in Luna’s eyes, they were perfectly coordinated thanks to their systems, but each one seemed to be fighting their own battle and just happened to be sharing the same field with their gold-clad brethren, with different styles of combat and sometimes even different gear.

Luna watched as one of the royal guards, a unicorn, used his telekinesis to wield a long golden spear with a gun next to its tip. It was an odd design for a weapon, Luna thought, but she could not deny its effectiveness as she saw him skillfully alternate between cuts, thrusts, and shots in a deadly dance that claimed a life with each move.

Another royal guard was one of the rare dragons in its ranks, and his style of combat was much less refined. He was cleaving through multiple targets at once with his ornate axe. The weapon had a roaring lion’s head at the top of its handle from which the blade sprung forth.

Luna wondered if the war would be looking as desperate if they had spent more time and resources creating such weaponry instead of investing in civilian projects.

After a blur of fighting on auto-pilot, Luna realized the combat had ended and looked around at the surrounding massacre.

The enemies had fought to the last, and their bodies lay strewn about the trench network, creating a carpet of dull brown bodies covering her soldiers. The fact that helmets covered every face made the sight easier to bear, but not enough to avoid giving her a slight sense of nausea.

She noticed that the enemy had blown up several bunkers in the trench network, leaving round craters in their places.

“This line won’t hold for another attack,” the warder, who had walked next to her as she examined the aftermath.

She was surprised to hear him speak so clearly immediately after a fight and wondered just how powerful some of those combat stimulants were.

“Indeed, it’s time to withdraw to the previous line,” Luna nodded and began to walk to the back of the line. “Relay the order to the army and start laying the proximity mines around here.”

Luna had expected this moment, as she knew she did not have the number to hold the enemy forever. She planned to fight a long retreat through a long succession of trenches for as long as she could to give Twilight as much time as possible to prepare.

She could only hope it would be enough.

Most construction projects of the Equestrian Confederation were sensible things, done with sensible budgets and unimpressive at first glance. Just plain, efficient buildings with little to no frills attached.

That was not so for the colossal structure that was the southern polar fortress, one of the two places where the military budget had truly gone, with the other place being the tunnel network under the Canterlot palace.

Even from a distance, could see the southern polar fortress dominate the horizon with its grey walls and a lineup of black turret-mounted guns atop them.

The fortress appeared like an unassuming circle that Luna knew hid the labyrinthine corridors beneath its thick grey walls.

On the roof, she spotted the reasons why the enemy had not landed on Equestria just yet, and why she had to hold that fortress for as long as possible.

The long and stretched railguns dominate the structure’s top like the main spikes of a crown of thorns made a mockery of the idea of armor or shields.

Even at their low number of just seven, they prevented any large-scale landing operations. The invaders could still slip through and land small raiding parties on Equestria, but never in overwhelming numbers. A large-scale landing operation required time, which was exactly what those weapons were denying the enemy.

The northern fortress also had three of those guns, but the structure was nowhere as impressive as its southern counterpart.

According to the reports she had read from Equestria, the raiding parties were small bands of cyborgs that self-destructed the moment victory in combat looked anything less than certain.

Luna was observing the fortress from the seat in the magic-shielded maglev train of pure white metal racing through lunar waste as it speedily approached its main station alongside several other trains coming from other tracks all converging there.

She had removed her helmet as soon as she had stepped inside her carriage, enjoying the freedom of her man and neck.

The train passed the station’s force field and her ears could finally hear noises from the outside beside the constant gentle humming of the train’s engine. It was mostly the marching steps of hundreds of soldiers, the barking of orders, and the yelling of regimental mottos, but it was better than nothing. The five royal guards following her could do many things, but smooth conversations were not part of their skill set.

Her station was a steel grey surface of smooth metal, just like the rest of the surrounding area, with powerful electrical lights from every angle chasing away any shadow from the many soldiers standing there at perfect attention.

Once the train came to a smooth halt, she immediately stepped outside of it and immediately saw a company of soldiers saluting her, their eyes brightening the moment she appeared in front of them.

Luna knew her mere presence was an inspiration to these soldiers. She had been in retirement for centuries, and most of them had heard of her from dusty history books. Now she was walking among them and many of them saw her as a hero from their golden age coming back in their hour of need.

She imagined herself giving a speech to them, truly inspiring them before they went into combat once more, but she had never been talented with words when she was in power, and now she found those skills had degraded even more.

She resorted to just saluting them back and going on her way, her royal guards following behind her.

Luna made her way through the entire train station, seeing several other companies of fully equipped soldiers waiting in square formations for their trains or others dismounting from their rides back from hell.

Finally, she reached a hexagonal door that withdrew into the wall like a camera’s lens when she approached it and stepped into the sterile white corridor beyond it.

The recycled air entered her nostrils as soon as she stepped through the door, carrying a thousand smells she had not realized she had been missing until they returned. Her nostrils picked up the scent of sweat, the pungent taste of machine oil, the sterile aroma of disinfectant, and some sort of meat-like odor from a nearby canteen.

Her hoofsteps echoed down the fortress’ clean white walls as she walked down a now familiar path. Soldiers and officers, who were all waking at a sustained pace to whatever station they were assigned to, parted to make way for her and her royal guards.

“I need those anti-air guns repaired an hour ago!” she heard an officer, a griffin, shouting into his radio as she walked past him and walked through another hexagonal door.

In comparison to the train station, the fortress’ interior was a stark and sterile white labyrinth that assaulted her eyes with their brightness.

Her destination was a circular and predictably white room with black consoles hugging its walls and a round table in its middle with a holographic map of the moon. Several sections of the map were marked red to signal enemy control, but far less than she had feared when she had first seen the enemy land.

A few petty officers circled the map, but there was only one that mattered to her. Looking resplendent in her mountain of golden armor, Commander Fair Sight looked stoically at the map in front of her, its red and white lights enhancing the shadows on her dark grey face and slit pupils.

As a commander, the bat pony mare had authority over a quarter of the royal guard, and her troops had proven invaluable to the defense. She had also brought Luna up to speed with modern combat practices and how much things had changed since the days of swords, shields, and spells.

Necessity had forced her to learn and adapt at a pace she had not thought possible before, but it had worked, and now she knew how to operate a modern force to the best of her abilities. Somehow, giving military orders was becoming much easier than interacting normally with ponies and other creatures.

“I am glad to have you back, princess,” the Commander cracked a hint of a smile on her face. Luna did not know why she used the title she had abdicated centuries ago but was not willing to start questioning her at that moment. She had much bigger concerns than an outdated title. “I trust everything is going as we planned?”

“We withdrew from the first line just as planned,” Luna informed the Commander. “We held it for as long as possible, but I gave the order twenty-five minutes ago.”

“Good, you held it for a bit longer than what the simulations predicted,” Commander Fair Sight said, her smile fading away and her face growing serious again as she pointed to a specific point on the moon. “I think their next assault will be there. It’s a deliberate weak spot.”

Luna looked at the area Fair Sight had indicated and saw that it was a thinner section of the second line compared to the rest. She also noticed that the ground in front of it was perfectly flat, unlike the uneven and crater-riddled ground around it.

“They’ll think it’s a trap,” Luna pointed out while wondering what she was missing about this. “They’re not that foolish.”

“They’ll know it’s a trap, but they won’t have a choice. There is no other spot they can effectively attack,” Commander Fair Sight explained. “The other sections are one continuous fortress on elevated positions with uneven ground and minefields in front of them. They have to go there.”

“What if their giants show up?” Luna asked.

With that question, Commander Fair Sight’s face turned to stone. The giants were the unspoken ace card of the enemy, the one force against which nothing had worked during the entire war. She thanked her lucky stars they had not shown up on the moon just yet, but she knew it was only a matter of time until they showed their gray-armored faces.

“If they do, we will meet them and see who is the better killer,” Commander Fair Sight’s voice was ice cold as she spoke those words. “For now, our focus should be on conventional attacks.”

“I understand,” Luna nodded and stepped away from the map. “I will check on the armory before going back on the field. These royal guards are now back under your authority. Give them a deployment.”

“Roger,” Fair Sight replied mechanically, and her eyes returned to the map.

Luna quickly walked out of the room alone and into the maze of corridors and doors beyond it. She followed the signs placed at regular intervals that guided her through the fortress until she reached the white doors of an elevator.

The elevator’s interior looked far less clean than the rest of the fortress’ corridors, with its rusty bronze surface and cracks spreading along its walls. If Luna did not already know from experience the elevators there were safe, she would have boarded none of them.

The ride down felt longer than it had any right to and she almost sighed in relief when she felt the elevator finally stop and the door opened with a hiss.

The corridor in front of her was dimly lit, with one flickering lightbulb and some cracks in the floor tiles. At the end of the corridor, Luna saw a little equine robot with a pink and light purple artificial mane and green eyes that were approaching her at a brisk pace. The walls were a dim brown, a stark contrast to the clean look of the upper floors.

Luna got off the elevator and waited until the little robot was in front of her. Its eyes seemed to brighten when it looked at Luna, and a smile formed on its tiny mouth.

“We are glad to have you,” the robot said in a synthetic and emotionless voice that Luna found to be oddly soothing. “Please state your destination and we will guide you, or do you prefer to continue our previous conversation on light density on the upper floors?”

The fortress had dozens of these robots and many other automata roaming around it, doing everything from simple janitorial chores to complex work, like fixing and maintaining weapons and vehicles.

Luna had interacted with a few of those robots but had never heard one of them offering her to guide her through the armory.

The automaton in front of her had a clean, white shell bolted onto its metallic skeleton and its artificial mane flowed down her head like that of a young filly. She recognized the little thing as a very advanced artificial intelligence model she had seen before somewhere else.

“I’m just doing a check-up on our stocks. Guide me, starting from the experimental weapons before reaching our stocks of conventional ammunition,” Luna informed the robot. “And please tell me who you are. I don’t think I’ve interacted with you.”

She usually did those checks alone but figured that one robotic guide wouldn’t hurt the process.

“This hardware is designated as SWB-42, but we have already met several times so there is no need for introductions,” SWB-42 said as it began walking down the hallway, gesturing with a mechanical hoof for Luna to follow it. “Please follow us.”

Luna followed silently for a moment, trying to understand what the small bot was talking about while they walked past many doors with little markings on their handles that indicated what was beyond them. For the moment, they were just mundane cleaning supplies and spare parts for repairs.

She had done this more times than she could count already and while she never found the simple act of checking on things, reading numbers, even remotely enjoyable, she understood the importance of doing it personally and appreciated the few minutes of solitude it granted her.

“Are you sure we have met before?” Luna asked after they passed through several locked metal doors.

Most of them were failed projects sealed away in the hopes they could be restarted once their science progressed forward, but a few were powerful artifacts that could be studied to discover their military potential.

As long as those doors remained sealed, everything was fine.

“Of course,” SWB-42 said and looked back at Luna. “We remember you being here just sixteen hours ago.”

Luna checked her memories. While that was true, she had visited the storage just sixteen hours before; she did not remember meeting this robot or interacting with any similar models besides watching them walk around the armory.

She had no idea what the robot was talking about. Luna had met others like it, but not this one. She was quite certain of that.

“Let’s just get this check done, shall we?” she asked, putting the question aside as they turned a corner.

“Acknowledged, please-” SWB-42 began, only to stop when the ground trembled for one second and almost threw the both of them off their feet. “Explosive-caused structural damage detected. Please evacuate.”

“Explosive? from where?” Luna asked as she stood up and ran down the hall, with the robot right behind her.

“Explosion located at this level, would you like us to guide you to its source?” the little bot asked, pointing in a seemingly random direction.

“Lead the way,” Luna said. “Can you access the security cameras here? Do you have any idea of who or what got inside?”

“Negative, affirmative, the intruders are one female invader and one of their giants,” SWB-42 reported in its usual soothing tone, but Luna noticed the words were coming out slightly faster than they had before.

Had the air from the explosion somehow damaged its vocal unit?

“Oxygen levels dropping rapidly, users are encouraged to equip an oxygen mask and evacuate the area. We thank you for your cooperation,” the robot informed her, but she wasn’t paying attention to it. Oxygen had never been her concern, anyway.

The fact that even one giant was there caused an icy hand to grasp Luna’s heart. She knew from the reports what even one of those monsters could do and knew she was about to face the greatest challenge in her life. If that thing got inside the polar fortress, it would all be over.

“Since you know who and where they are, can you do something about them?” Luna asked, hoping to avoid the fight or at least even the odds.

“As AI-powered assistant robots, we are unable to assist you in such a capacity. Please forgive our inadequacy,” SWB-42 responded. “If there is any other way we can help, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“I’ll deal with it myself then,” Luna sighed as she kept following the robot through the corridors.

Saureil hated every second he was spending with the inquisitor. Her name was Kateryna, but that was the only thing he had learned of the woman since he met her.

Sure, he knew inquisitors were never the talkative types, but he had expected to at least have a vague idea of what their mission was if they ever recruited him into their service.

That had not been the case.

She had kept him at arm’s length, but at the same time demanded that she follow him on all her little missions since she had forcibly recruited him.

Kateryna had dragged him along the various alien colonies, visiting what looked like old temples in the middle of nowhere and never taking part in the crusade, even when the fighting had been a few hundred meters away.

He had no idea how, but the inquisitor was aware of a cave network running deep under the alien moon’s surface and had brought him along on the long underground journey in absolute darkness. She claimed that her psyker powers had guided her there, but Saureil had found such a straightforward explanation unconvincing.

There was something in those eyes that caused him to grip his bolter tighter than usual every time she spoke of her powers and visions.

The only reason he had not questioned her further was because he knew to never look too much into an inquisitor’s business.

He had hoped to find some alien beast waiting to pounce on him so that he could prove his valor, or an alien ambush, to give him a taste of the many battles he was sure his brothers were having. Instead, they had met nothing but dark silence in the tunnels that went for miles until, just after what felt like hours, they reached a wall on which Kateryna had ordered him to place the melta charges he had carried for the entire journey.

The explosion was a satisfying sight to his eyes and ears and Saureil immediately rushed into the newly created hole to enter the fortress’ interior. The walls were of a dull brown that reminded him of wet fertile soil despite being metal, and Saureil was grateful the lighting was at least bright enough that he did not feel like he was fighting in the shadows like a coward.

“Not to question your motives, inquisitor, but should we not have shared this information with the crusading forces, or at least with my brothers?” Saureil asked as he checked his surroundings, his finger already on the trigger.

“They would get in the way,” Kateryna replied, her tone leaving no space to doubt that. “Let’s go. This is what we came here to do.”

“Mayhap that’s true, yet this remains a weakness in the enemy’s shield. It would be just and wise to share this knowledge,” Saureil said as Kateryna walked ahead of him and he followed her.

She had come there expecting a fight, that Saureil could tell from looking at her equipment when she walked in front of him. Her light grey carapace was graceless but effective, leaving no skin exposed with its sharp angles and thick plates of interlocking metal. On her right hand, she wielded a power mace that crackled with energy that occasionally lapped at the ground beneath. With her other hand, she wielded a laspistol with an especially long barrel. Despite his expensive knowledge of weaponry, Saureil did not recognize the model, so he assumed it had to be a custom piece.

To complete her gear, two red grenades with a bone-white skull engraved on their surface rested on her belt, one to her left and one to her right. The grenades seemed to be hand-painted, and he figured that there had to have been an easier color to use than white for such minor details. Perhaps it was a show of wealth on the part of the grenades’ creator?

“That is true, and you may do so after we finish this mission,” Kateryna replied without bothering to look back. “Now we must move. Someone powerful is here, and there is no time to waste.”

“As you wish,” Saureil grumbled as he sped up.

While he took no joy in going along with the inquisitor’s commands, he hoped to meet this powerful thing that was apparently within these tunnels and meet it soon. He imagined the songs the bards would compose of him slaying such a beast before remembering that none would be there to witness such a feat.

Despite that reminder, he would not let the lack of glory dissuade him from his duty of bringing ruin to the alien. If the aliens had a powerful creature hidden beneath the ground, it would do what his honor demanded and slay, even if he would have preferred for such a thing to happen under his brothers’ gaze.

Kateryna was walking at a confident pace through the fortress, turning at seemingly random corners and passing by doors in a steady walk, as if she knew exactly where they were going. Her head was always focused forward and he could have sworn he could have seen her eyes glow for fractions of a second each time.

Saureil had no problem keeping up with her, but could not help but wonder why she seemed so sure of her direction.

When they turned a corner, Saureil was both glad and disgusted to see an alien life form. Glad, because it meant he could finally unleash his bolter’s fire on something else than dirt and rock, and disgusted at the very nature of the thing he saw.

It was some kind of abominable intelligence, with a metal body and an artificial mane. Its body was that of some four-legged machine with two needlessly large eyes in its front that Saureil immediately shot, causing them to explode with sparks. Its body collapsed to the floor while electricity coursed over its damaged structure.

“Target destroyed, but now we know they are either aware of or looking for us. Whatever your target is, inquisitor, I suggest you hurry for your own sake,” Saureil informed Kateryna.

“Don’t underestimate me, space marine,” Kateryna smiled and looked at her maul. “I think we’re close.”

“If we get surrounded, I can guarantee my safety only,” Saureil warned her. “I do not desire a dead inquisitor in my history of deeds.”

“Your desires are of no interest to me, only your skill of arms,” Kateryna answered curtly as she turned another corner.

The place was so full of twists and turns that even Saureil had a hard time remembering its layout, yet Kateryna showed no signs of confusion during their walk. Every corridor they went through looked nearly the same with its dim and flickering lightbulbs, cracked brown walls, and red markings on the door handles.

“May you tell me what we are looking for now that we are here?” Saureil asked after another uneventful turn of a corner that did not reveal the enemy to him. “I could serve you best if I am aware of what our quarry looks."

“It is a green dagger, with Eldar runes on its blade. That's all you need to know,” Kateryna’s voice suddenly seemed distracted, as if she was thinking about something else while she talked to Saureil. “We are almost there. I can sense it is nearby.”

Saureil spotted two more robots observing from the distance and shot them down with three shots each.

Those were two targets that would have required one bolt around each, he realized as the bots’ heads exploded. His performance immediately disappointed him and he decided he would spend even more hours in shooting the practice the moment this inquisitor released him from her service.

His years as a pilot had softened his shooting arm, he realized, and he decided it was about time he corrected such a flaw within himself.

Such weakness was unacceptable.

Kateryna glanced at him before she finally stopped and turned to look at a large door with a glass window on it. Saureil approached her while he continued to scan the surrounding area.

Kateryna walked ahead, and he watched her raise her mace-wielding hand and smash right through the door, shattering it into a thousand shards in just one motion. The mace’s electricity then turned most of those shards into fine dust.

They both entered the room while the dust settled, his helmet’s systems allowing him to see through the smoke as he scanned for an enemy to put his bolts through. The room was a large and mostly empty space with a single bronze pedestal on which he spotted the dagger Kateryna had spoken of.

His sensors, and his experience, immediately recognized that an Eldar’s hands had crafted the blade, but that opened more questions than it answered.

The Eldar had not shown their faces for the entire crusade until that point. Now this dagger made him think that they might decide to try to recover their dagger.

He knew how sentimental the Eldar could be with some of their trinkets, after all.

Much to his disappointment, there were no guards for him to kill.

The inquisitor wasted no time in walking up to the blade and plucking it from its pedestal with a swift motion before placing it on her belt and turning to Saureil.

“We still have time to-” she began, only for her to stop talking when Saureil turned around and readied his bolter on what remained of the entrance.

He could hear steps, some metallic and others organic, getting closer to them. The sounds seemed to come from far away, telling him he had enough time to prepare himself for the incoming.

“If you wish to leave with life and prize, do so now or let yourself be trapped in this room,” he advised the inquisitor before stepping away from her. “Xenos will soon crawl all over this area.”

“Lead the way, Astartes, take the same route I used,” the inquisitor demanded before slowly walking to a spot behind Saureil. “I lingered too much. How foolish, Emperor, forgive me...”

It was the first time he heard her voice falter. While he was very familiar with the simple terror that gripped mortal hearts, the woman’s voice made it clear she was still in control of her mind and was just aware of something that he wasn’t.

He added that to his growing list of frustrations with the inquisitor.

“It shall be as you command,” Saureil replied as he raised his bolter and took his position in front of the hole that had taken the place of the door, with his back turned to the inquisitor and his eyes fixated on the corridor in front of him.

Seconds passed while the noises grew louder, causing the grip on his bolter to tighten. He decided he would step outside the face the enemy head-on like a space marine should and Kateryna followed him.

The moment they stepped out of the room, a bolt of dark blue energy struck his right pauldron, causing him to stagger for a moment before he instinctively fired at his attacker and looked at his target.

It was one of the four-legged aliens, but different. Her dark blue mane seemed to move with a force of its own, and she had both wings and a horn. A familiar expression of anger was on her face as her eyes glowed with pure white energy, her horn shining with the same magical energy as she floated above the floor and unfelt winds started howling around them.

Next to her was one robotic equine similar to the ones he already destroyed, but a few sizes smaller than most of its counterparts.

One of his shots had gone wide while the rest had found a magical blue shield blocking their way and had exploded harmlessly on its dark surface long before hitting the target.

Sensing a proper battle incoming, Saureil attached his bolter to his belt and raised his chainsword, hoping that his might could pierce through the sorcery only for another blast from the alien to sweep him off his feet and hit the ground with a loud thud.

He heard thunder crackling through the air and turned to see Kateryna’s eyes emit several arcs of blue lighting. She swung her power mace once before a bright flash momentarily blinded Saureil, followed by a deafening thundering noise that seemed to have no end.

The ground between the inquisitor and the alien cracked and split as each of them stood defiantly against the other and unleashed their reality-bending power.

Clouds of energy gathered around the two psykers as they unleashed their powers against each other in a confrontation in which Saureil knew he could take part without being turned to vapor.

There was no glory in a foolish death, after all, and his claims about being able to guarantee his safety had been fatal hubris, the most deadly of killers.

Saureil had never liked psykers, barely tolerating his brothers with such a curse because of their usefulness and often despising the human ones, but Kateryna was proving a tolerable exception to his hatred of magic as she stood toe to toe with the alien witch.

“This is not a battle for bolter and blade, space marine, and I don’t think I can overcome this alien right now. We must leave now,” Kateryna shouted while blasting a shockwave that sent the alien sorceress flying back and giving them an opening to take a few steps back.

Withdrawing from a fight felt like an act of cowardice for which he would have to do penance in the future, but he would not let the inquisitor out of his sight. When he saw her rush away from the combat, he reluctantly followed, occasionally turning around to fire his bolter at the alien with little effect, while Kateryna did the same with her bolts of electricity coming out of her mace.

“If your Deathwatch pets can hear you, this would be to call for their aid,” Saureil said as his heart pumped blood into his ears and the sound of his legs hitting the ground reverberated into his skull while he ran after Kateryna.

“There is no Deathwatch here!” Kateryna’s frustrated shout surprised Saureil.

Since when did the Inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos not travel with the Deathwatch? At least when they knew they would spend a long time in alien territory.

They turned around another corner, and Saureil fired a shot at two alien soldiers who seemed both surprised and terrified to see him appear in front of them.

Reinforcements were coming. That was a problem if he wanted the inquisitor to live.

His bolts made quick work of his targets, leaving nothing but a bloody stain behind them, but noted his shots had barely struck them. If the targets had worn effective armor, they would have fired back.

He kept running forward, slowing his run to a pace that a human could keep up with.

Just as he saw the hole his melta charges had created, he heard Kateryna scream behind him and turned around in a split second to see her on the floor with her right leg missing. He noticed there was no blood around; the blast having instantly cauterized the wound the moment it made contact.

He rushed to help her up, momentarily putting away his bolter and kneeling for a moment to lift her in his arms. Despite all her gear, she felt surprisingly light when he hoisted her.

“The grenades, throw one of them,” she pleaded, and Saureil obliged. “Throw it!”

The alien witch turned the corner the moment after he had thrown his grenade, getting caught in the blast. Saureil had expected a powerful blast, but what he saw was an odd dispersal of golden dust that caused the alien witch to stumble back.

Suddenly, her alien eyes turned to normal, and she looked powerless as her mane lost its unnatural motion and fell with her body. Even the howling of the winds, which had been a constant since the fight had started, had stopped howling in an instant. It was as if reality had immediately reasserted its power over the material plane.

The blue glow on the alien’s horn flickered and faded while Saureil stared at the result of what he could only describe as the most peculiar weapon he had ever seen in his life.

The alien looked horrified at her suddenly and was taking several steps back while her eyes focused on the space marine. She was quickly regaining her senses and increasing the speed of her retreat as he stared at her while one hovered over his bolter.

“Let’s go, now!” Kateryna ordered, surprising Saureil, who was already mentally visualizing his metal boot crushing the alien’s head.

“But we have her,” Saureil protested. “This xeno witch must-“

“It is not her time,” Kateryna interrupted him, sounding desperate, and Saureil could feel her squirming as he held her in his arms. “That xeno still has a role to play in the Emperor’s plan. She must live. If you care for the Emperor’s designs, you will not take that fatal shot I know you wish to take.”

Saureil hesitated for a moment before nodding.

“As you wish, inquisitor,” He said as he started walking again, entering the dark caves from which they had arrived. “I hope I do not regret following your commands.”

“So do I,” Kateryna whispered in response.

A moment later, the two of them disappeared into the subterranean darkness from which they had arrived.

Author's Note

Damn, eleven months this time, I'm getting slow.
Honestly, I'm not exactly happy with how this turned out, but I wanted to have something before reaching the 12th month.
All of this because I wanted to show the moon a bit.
Many darlings were brutally murdered in the making of this chapter.

The Pride

To Twilight, Equestria looked beautiful from space. An arabesque of city lights covered large parts of the surface as great ships, with their round and colourful hulls, flew in the clean atmosphere as they went to explore the wonders of the galaxy like the adventurers of older and simpler times.

She observed her native planet from her room aboard the Canterlot’s Pride, the largest and newest ship in the entire Equestrian fleet. Her room was well furnished, with a large purple bed at its centre flanked by two identical wooden bedside tables and several wardrobes all painted in the same colour. A white carpet covered the entire floor.

The walls were also purple, although they were not as dark as the furniture, one of them had a large white clock on it and another one was just a large window from which Twilight looked at Equestria.

She was not alone there; Spike had just entered the room carrying two documents in his hands. He had grown taller and broader since the day of Twilight’s coronation, but could still fit within the large corridors of Equestrian ships. He approached her in silence, already knowing what she was thinking of.

“Sometimes I wish they could see what I have built… do you think they would like it?” She asked him, her eyes looking at a bright concentration of lights she knew was Canterlot.

“Probably, but they were all so different” Spike was not always an expert at comforting her, but he still tried his best “who knows what Rarity would say about all the new fashion”

“I just wish I could see them one more time, it’s been so long,” She said looking to the south of Canterlot, right where Ponyville used to be.

All of her friends had been gone for centuries, but she still missed them all as if they had died only a day before. Fluttershy had been the first one to go, followed shortly after by Rarity and all the others. Their deaths had occurred so long ago that Twilight often remembered all of them happening in the same day.

Spike was her only remaining friend, but she knew even he would have to leave her one day. Then she would become even more alone than she had been before Celestia sent her to Ponyville.

Living such a long life, much longer than any pony, had been a blessing and a curse. She, of course, cherished the ability of guiding her nation towards greener pastures and being able to learn so much about the worlds beyond her own, but she hated having to deal with so much loss. Even the friendship with Spike was now strained by their duties and responsibilities to Equestria; she knew he had not come there to have friendly chat with her. He was there to give her a report.

“Has something important happened?” she asked him once she had stopped thinking.

“Yes” Spike approached her and gave her the document “another three colonial vessel went missing along with their escort ships” he did his best to sound as calm as he could.

“Again?” Twilight did not pretend to sound calm, she had thought her efforts in the frontier had made it safe, but apparently it was not enough. Her efforts were ever enough.

“And Admiral Blue Song is here right now,” Spike informed her. "He wants to discuss this with you immediately”

He gave her the second document, which bore the admiral’s minute signature written in black ink. His decision to come aboard the Canterlot’s Pride without asking for permission was a sign of how little respect the entire military had for her.

“Of course he’s here,” she sighed, “I can deal with it, go tell him I will be there in a moment”

The crew of the Pride was not composed only of ponies. Thanks to Twilight’s efforts, Equestria had become a confederation of all the species on the planet. All of them were serving aboard the ship distributed across every branch and rank.

Earth pony sailors were playing a game of cards with a yak marine and having a good time as a dragon officer passed through the large corridor carrying a stack of documents to somewhere and a changeling aide followed his every step.

Seeing so many races working together was one of the things that made Twilight think that her suffering was a necessary evil.

The ship’s corridors were not as bright and pretty as her personal room. Bright grey was the dominant colour of the corridors, but there were still some occasional spots of paint and pieces of art scattered throughout the entire vessel.

The command bridge, where Blue Song was waiting for her, was slightly different from the rest of the ship. The first obvious difference was the constant noise made by the countless communication officers working on their consoles and talking with each other.

The second major difference was the darker tone of grey the prevailed in the entire room; someone had done everything he could to deprive the place of anything resembling joy.

The third and last one was the throne overlooking the entire bridge. It was supposed to be an imitation of the throne in Canterlot, but Twilight had quickly found out that the two of them were not even comparable. The one on Canterlot was larger and softer, but a lot less decorated.

Blue Song was close to that that throne, with a welcoming smile on his blue face. He was very thin, even for a unicorn, but he had been able to make a career in the navy thanks to his magical talents and his competence in military matters. Spike was right next to him, waiting for her to approach the admiral.

“Slept well princess?” he asked, not even waiting for permission to speak.

“Yes, just tell me what you need” she said, wanting to skip the pleasantries and get to the point. Her life was too long to be spent listening to pointless words.

He stepped away from the throne and approached her. His face became more solemn, as if he was about to deliver a long speech about duty, honour and sacrifice.

“You already know about the colonists and their escorts, I won’t give a boring report about the facts and we all know it’s pirates” He paused for what he sure thought was a dramatic effect “they will soon demand a ransom, but I have better idea” he paused again.

Twilight waited for him to finish, but he was expecting her to play her part in the act “and what is your idea?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

“The Pride has been in this orbit for too long, it’s time for her to make a show of force” He paused yet again, something that was clearly getting on Spike’s nerves “And I should be the one leading the mission”

That last comment made Spike snap “why? Twilight is right here”

“I can defend myself, Spike, thank you” She said “but please tell me why you should be the one in charge”

“I’m the one who went to military academy, and this could be a delicate operation” Blue Song made his case pretty clear and strong “And I’m the only high ranking officer here”

“No you’re not” Spike intervened again on her behalf, but he was right. Twilight had made him an admiral because she wanted to have at least one friendly face in the Equestrian High Command.

“I meant the only real one” He looked him straight in the eyes “I earned my place at the top”

That was a jab at Twilight herself. Spike’s appointment had earned her the ire of many officer who felt like they were far more deserving than a lucky dragon who had never gone to any military academy. It had costed her the respect of the military. The comment had also caused an argument between Blue Song and Spike, whose narrow eyes showed he was only a few bad words away from incinerating him on the spot for his insolence.

The second problem the military had with her was her perceived weakness and indecisiveness when it came to situations that required a generous use of force. Now she saw an opportunity to improve her image and dismiss this arrogant admiral with a single move.

“The Pride is my vessel, I will lead it” twilight said, interrupting the intense argument between Blue Song and Spike. She relished the silence that ensued, it sounded like peace.

The admiral seemed taken aback by her decision, even taking a single step back before regaining his composure.

“Are... are you sure about this?” His voice trembled "The frontier is still a very dangerous place, filled with all sorts of..."

“I’m positive, you are dismissed admiral, you may leave this vessel at once,” She said with a smug grin on her face, glad to know she still knew how to deal with ambitious officers like this one.

“As you wish, but you are making a terrible mistake” he said, clearly angry that his stupid plan had been foiled so easily “good luck with the pirates” he coldly added before leaving the room.

That last sentence was the only thing that actually made her think about what she was doing. She was not a military expert, the pragmatic choice would have been to send a local and experienced force to deal with the pirates, but that would make her look like the greatest coward in Equestria.

She only hoped that Spike’s more aggressive attitude would help her achieve an easy victory.

Imperfect return

Wardrobes, chairs, and tables had all been assembled to form a large barricade just outside the command bridge of the Canterlot’s Pride. Electrical torches were pointed outward, toward the light-devouring mist that was slowly advancing toward the four soldiers standing behind the barricade; guns pointed outward and ready to shoot.

They had heavy bags under their eyes, a direct effect of the little time they had to sleep. The constant scratching sounds from behind the wall and the nightmares they had every night had made sleep a nigh-impossible task.

At the opposite side of the corridor, a bright bulb of light advanced towards the soldiers at moderate speed, but they did not grow nervous. Light, they had learned in their extended stay in the Endless Sea, meant life and protection from the encroaching darkness. Any light that could survive in the mist was a good thing.

“Oh, they’re back,” one blue unicorn said, exhaustion dripping from his voice. “Lucky them.”

“Let’s hope they haven’t lost anyone this time,” a large and green earth pony added as she lowered her long rifle, allowing herself to relax for a moment. “We need numbers.”

After a few more seconds of silence, the bulb of light emerged from the mist, almost blinding the soldiers for a moment, and then finally dissipated to reveal those it had protected.

Spike walked alongside a blue unicorn and a green changeling. All looked deprived of almost all their energies and had barely enough strength to reach the barricade where several helpful hooves pulled them over the wooden mountain.

Spike’s uniform was cut in several sections, especially the arms, and he was carrying a large bag filled with rations on his back.

“Four, huh?” The green earth pony asked.

“A moment of weakness,” the white unicorn seemed about to whimper, his shaky voice struggling to come out. “My magic flickered for a second, that’s all it took.”

He lowered his eyes in shame, it had not been the first time he had lost someone. This time it had happened because, in the blink of an eye, monsters had dragged three soldiers kicking and screaming into the darkness.

“We found another crazy one,” Spike said, hoping to turn the attention away from the unicorn. “Poor guy.”

“Another one?” The athletic red pegasus that had asked that question did not sound surprised. “What did he say?”

“Nothing new,” Spike replied. “The usual doom and gloom. Also, I checked the hangar again, the transports are still gone.”

At first, the deranged crew members they had encountered their food-hunting expeditions had been insightful, revealing hidden monsters and traps waiting in the corners. Recently, however, they had all become prophets of doom and seemed more interested in sharing their nightmares instead of providing any help.

“I think you should start killing them,” The red pegasus said casually. “At this point why not?”

“What? How could you say that?” The proposal shocked a purple and skinny unicorn mare with a clean and pretty face. “Never thought you were a monster.”

“You would rather let them live like they are living now? You heard the stories,” the pegasus said. “Killing them is the nicest thing you could do now. While we’re at it, we should stop looking for survivors.”

“We?” the mare exploded with rage. “I will not help you…”

“No one will do any killing.” Spike ended the discussion before it could escalate into one of the many ugly brawls he had witnessed. “We’ll just need to endure this a bit more; Twilight will get us out of here.”

It had only been two weeks, at least he hoped it was only two weeks, since Twilight had temporarily saved the Canterlot’s Pride, but now Spike was caressing the idea that the quick death the violent aliens were offering was probably better than the slow descent madness he had witnessed.

Despite that thought, he couldn’t bring himself to harm a member of the crew unless he saw no other option, and he definitely was not brave enough to turn a gun on himself.

“How is Twilight?” He asked the blue unicorn, trying to take his mind away from that last dark thought.

“Cold as usual, just checked on her a few minutes ago.”

“Anything else I should know?” he asked again to the same unicorn.

“Not really.” The unicorns scratched the back of his head. “The lights are still blue, and everyone is still on edge. That’s all there is to say.”

“Thank you for the information, soldier.” Spike thanked him and then moved on towards the command bridge while the other survivors of the trip took their places with the soldiers on the barricade.

The doors opened slowly as the metal creaked as they revealed the almost empty room beyond. Most of the high-ranking officers had been the first ones to go mad when the dark mist had appeared two weeks before, and now the command bridge resembled a ghost town.

Just like the unicorn had said, an intense blue light colored everything in the room, giving the impression that the bridge was underwater.

On the wall to his right, there was an extensive collection of photographs that reminded everyone present of all those who had not made it. A lonely, weeping mare was lighting up a small candle next to the memorial.

Next to the memorial, someone had hastily assembled an altar to Twilight with the electronic equipment that no longer worked. A single pole rose from a square base and ended with a smaller square at the top. Its builders had tried to use candles to replicate Twilight’s mark extending from the base, but they quickly abandoned that project in favor of creating a small circle. Spike wondered where they had found any candles at all, but he decided he would worry about it when and if the ship came back to real space.

The crew, what was left of it, was so much smaller than it had been. Spike could not even call it a skeleton crew, as it had gone from almost five hundred to barely over thirty lost souls.

A couple of them were still trying to get their consoles to work, but their buzzing grey screens signaled that their efforts were pointless. So most officers were just sitting around, doing nothing besides playing cards and drink what little alcohol remained. Around the altar, the few that were not drinking had gathered, murmuring desperate prayers.

The cult of the alicorns had never been particularly big in Equestria, as the education system taught all there was nothing divine about them, but the weeks of desperation had quickly pushed the most desperate members of the crew towards anything that may bring salvation to them. The fact that the dark mist had stopped advancing when the altar was constructed only helped in spreading the religion to the last few unbelievers.

Spike was the only one who did not convert to the new faith, as the idea of worshipping any alicorn like some sort of divine being was absurd for someone who had grown up with one. If the crew was not so desperate, he may have even laughed at them for believing in something that sounded so stupid to him.

Both severe breaches in discipline reminded Spike of how much things had changed in such a short amount of time. What had once had been a professional security force patrolling colonized space had transformed into a ragtag band of drunkards and frightened converts.

After dropping the bag next to the door, he made his way to Twilight, feeling the air growing colder as he approached her perfectly immobile body. The crew not even paying attention to his arrival. She was like a purple frozen statue with eyes brighter than a young star. The most devout officers had placed several tokens of good fortune, mostly necklaces and family photos, in front of her.

There was a chair next to Twilight, reserved for him. A thin layer of solid ice had covered the armrests, and a small eight-pointed star had formed over the top rail. Looking at the star filled Spike with a slight sense of unease, but he did not understand why.

He sat on the chair, the ice melting when touched by the ever-warm body of a dragon, and looked at Twilight. There was nothing else he could do, the crew was non-existent, and she was not under his control. All that he could do was watching over one of his last real friends.

Many minutes passed with him sitting silently on the cold chair, watching over Twilight, his heart jumping into his throat every time he saw her legs twitch. He usually watched over her until his body consigned him to the many nightmares everyone had endured since the start of the ill-fated journey, but something much different happened this time.

It began with a tic, her head constantly twitching to the right. Spike worried for a moment, but thought very little of the event. When the twitches began spreading, soon reaching down to her legs and became increasingly more violent until they became spasms. That was when understood something exceptionally dangerous was happening right in front of him.

The light in her eyes became even brighter, akin to a floodlight, as it overpowered the surrounding blue. It quickly overran the room in a flash as she began grunting like an animal, as if she was lifting the heaviest weight imaginable.

Spike stood up a moment after seeing that, ready to rush to her side to offer any kind of help, but everything was over before he could take a second step. The light in Twilight’s eyes flickered out and faded before she collapsed to the floor, immobile and drawing shallow breaths.

As he and the crew rushed to her side, checking her normal heartbeat, a voice came out of the few loudspeakers that still worked.

“At-t-tention crew, the-the ship has ret-turned to-to real space.” The robotic voice remained understandable despite the technical issues “Eme-mergency measures will be lifted immediately, we apo-pologize for the inconvenience.”

Some survivors cheered as loud as they could as they heard the news and the iron shutters slowly retreated, but many others, Spike included, were too tired to do anything and just remained as silent as they had been before. Some simply collapsed from exhaustion just like Twilight had.

Spike feared that the Endless Sea was about to play one last trick on the poor crew, and half expected to see the maddening vastness of immaterial space to appear in front of him. Instead, Equestria, with its lightshow from the surface and many ships flying in its orbit, slowly came into view, and he finally allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief.

His relaxation was short-lived, however, as he soon heard the unmistakable beeping sound of someone trying to hail the ship. He quickly opened the communication channel, surprised to learn that it now worked perfectly, just like every other piece of equipment that not been dismantled for the sake of the altar.

“This is Port Luna,” the voice of a young mare said. “Please identify your vessel before docking, over.”

“This Admiral Spike, commandeering control of the Canterlot’s Pride. Princess Twilight is incapacitated and most of the crew is dead. We require immediate medical assistance.”

“My apologies. Can you repeat your identity?” the mare asked. “The readings confirm it, but your vessel has been declared destroyed three weeks ago, over.”

If Spike had more energy left in his mind, he would have questioned how they could have been declared dead before their mission had even started, but he was too tired to ask that. Only one thing was on his mind at that moment.

“I know who I am and what ship I am leading. Send a medical team now, and a transport. Ours have vanished without a trace. Admiral Spike, over and out.”

Five unicorns, all dressed in white, had entered the command bridge. Their faces were green with nausea because of what the horrid sights had witnessed in the corridors. They had gathered around Twilight’s body and were putting her on a stretcher while one of them scanned her several times with his magic.

Even if the electrical equipment had started working once more, everything else had stayed as it had been before. In fact, the star on Spike’s chair had inexplicably grown slightly larger and a chromatic blue eye had appeared in its center. Even the icy feeling coming from the chair had not gone away.

A mare, wearing the white hat of a navy officer, had quickly approached Spike the moment she had entered the room. Her yellow face looked calmer than that of the medical officers with her. She had an azure coat, and Spike could see a ring of gold shining in both of her blue eyes.

She saluted him once she was in front of him.

“Lieutenant Golden Path, reporting for duty,” she said, her voice having a strong accent that stressed her every use of the letter r. “Admiral Blue Song sent me to collect a detailed report about your unfortunate travel; he said he is interested in the recent events.”

“So interested that not only did he not come here himself, he sent a lieutenant to do it,” Spike replied, annoyed at the mere mentioning of the Admiral’s name. “Tell him that our interstellar travel encountered deadly complications that resulted in the loss of most of the crew. That’s all he will know.”

The mare nodded and then continued to speak.

“He also wanted me to bring his apologies for his absence here,” she then stated. “Admiral Blue Song could not be present here because he is currently busy representing the navy at the ongoing strategic meeting.”

“What?” If Spike had been a less controlled dragon, some fire would have spilled out of him. “He was never given the right to be at that kind of meeting.”

“He was the only admiral in Canterlot when the meeting started,” she explained. “He said he would be happy to see another admiral with him.”

“And he will,” Spike said. “As soon as Twilight is at the Canterlot Central Hospital, I will be there. That is the second message you will give him.”

“As you wish, sir, the transport is ready to carry everyone here to Canterlot. We move when you and your crew are aboard.” She nodded and then walked out of the room.

Spike then waited several more moments, looking from a distance at the medical squad working on Twilight. They seemed to be almost done with their procedure and ready to move out; they were only checking if all the straps of the stretcher had been secured properly.

Eventually one of them, a stallion, approached Spike. As expected, he saluted him.

“Everything is in position, sir,” he said. “I suggest we move immediately.”

“Of course.” Spike’s reply made the stallion turn his head around for a second to nod at the other medics. They started moving, and with them, everyone else in the bridge, Spike and the stallion included. “What is her status? Is she in danger?”

“Yes and no,” the stallion sounded less than confident to Spike’s ears. “She’s not dead. Her body works perfectly and her soul remains attached to it. The problem is that she seems to have fallen into a coma, a very deep one; we do not if she will ever wake up from it.”

“Is there nothing you can do?” Spike asked as he did his best to contain his worry from spilling out from his voice.

“Not here I’m afraid, sir,” the stallion quickly stated it as if it were a mere matter of fact, but the subtle trembling of his voice betrayed his desperation. “We need the equipment of a real medical facility to be able to do something.”

There was little else to say after that, Spike and everyone else followed the medical team through the corridors, Twilight and the medics in front and everyone else behind, in a grim parody of a religious procession. Twilight was akin to a ghastly object of worship, followed by a desperate and starving flock of devout followers. Spike contemplated the absurdity of worshipping something stuck in a coma, but his two weeks in hell had taught him that the desperate would worship anything capable of giving them hope.

What he witnessed in the corridors soon overtook his attention. He was glad to see them clearly once again, even if he still wondered how and why the lights had started working once more. To his eyes, the colors of the somehow still intact pieces of art were more vibrant and the figures more detailed, but the corpses on the floor spoiled all that beauty.

Many of the bodies were of equestrian creatures, their faces locked in a final wide-eyed expression of agony and terror. That sight alone was enough to induce vomit from several witnesses, but other bodies induced an even stronger reaction of disgust and horror, as none had ever seen their accursed forms before. They were shapeless bundles of bleeding meat slapped together by some sick god and covered by a sea of jaws, deformed eyes, and fist-sized craters. Rows of spikes and a thick layer of blood covered many of their long tentacles, some still twitching despite the death of the bodies.

From the distance, far away from Spike’s path, all could hear wailing screams interrupting the quasi-religious silence of Spike that had overtaken the group. They were sounds that should not have existed, the wrongness of their absurdly high pitch evoked images in their mind of being alone in a dark forest while unknown monsters roamed freely around them, all ready to strike and devour them.

The screams encouraged all to increase the speed of their walking, and soon they had reached the hangar, where a large transport had landed. All the others, just as Spike remembered, had vanished.

The transport itself was a welcome sight. It was tall and long, and its thick armor smoothed its otherwise rough edges. Spike knew that its experimental shields could deflect almost anything. It had been designed to carry officers even through asteroid fields in relative safety, after all. Nothing less than a direct crash into the largest rocks would have pierced the hull. When he had first seen the prototype for the transport, Spike had wondered how many schools could have been built with the money allocated to the project.

It was probably the safest vessel in the entire Equestrian navy. It was also never meant to transport more than a couple of officers at a time, so Spike considered it an odd choice.

What did not elicit relief was the hangar around the transport. While the rest of the ship had mostly regained all of its power almost magically, the hangar looked like had gone years, maybe even decades, without basic maintenance. Most of the lights were broken, and few that had survived could do little but flicker incessantly as they produced an annoying buzzing noise. The floor was littered with dirt and rust, and the acid dripping from the ceiling had created small holes in every nook and cranny.

Worst of all were the bugs crawling all over the floor, making it appear as if it had a life of its own. The smell reaching down to Spike’s throat reminded him of rotting corpses covered in excrements and all other bodily fluids mixed in a single, disgusting concoction.

The smell was familiar to Spike, as he had passed through the hangar several times already, but the sight was enough to turn his face green for one brief second.

The disgust they felt kept them moving quickly, and they soon rushed towards the large transport ship, glad to see its insides had none of the wear and tear of the outside. Its interiors were large enough to have several rooms connected to a large central one. The central room made Spike feel like he was in a hospital, with perfectly clean white walls and a few desks to the right. To the left, there were two metallic doors two leading to either a small private comm room or to an operating room. One last door, on the opposite side of the entrance, led directly to the cockpit.

Golden Path had surprisingly arrived long before him, and was compiling some notes near a desk with a bored expression on her face. She barely reacted to Spike’s arrival.

The moment the landing ramp closed, Spike breathed in the clean air and looked one last time at Twilight as they brought her into the medical room.

As the transport’s engine roared to allow it to take off, Golden Path spoke.

“Admiral Blue Song told me he wishes to speak with you in the comm room.” Her voice sounded lifeless, like her body was just going through the motions of being alive. She lazily pointed to the entrance of the communications room. “He was quite adamant about it.”

Spike considered ignoring the request for communications from the Admiral. After all, the two had never even pretended to like each other. He thought talking with him would have been a waste of everyone’s time.

Slowly but surely, however, his professionalism won over his distaste of the stallion and he decided he would listen to whatever he felt the need to say. The reality of how little else there was to do also helped with that thought process.

As remnants of the crew tried to find some place to rest and process what happened, some completely breaking down in tears, Spike entered the comm room.

Unlike the entrance, the comm room was small and with black walls. There was only one desk with a white circular hologram hovering above several lines of buttons and dials. The black chair in front of the desk, Spike noticed as he sat on it, was much softer than he expected it to be.

A red button was blinking. He knew it meant someone was trying to open a communications channel. He pressed the button, and the hologram changed shape to show him Blue Song’s head. The color, however, remained white.

“I was told you wanted to speak with me,” Spike said. “Why?”

“Because I believe every high-ranking commander should be aware of what we are facing. The information I need to share comes directly from the ongoing strategic meeting. Since you expressed tour intentions to be here, I deemed that the professional thing to do was to share this valuable information.” Blue Song spoke quickly and with confidence. He had probably expected that exact question. “I know we are not friends, but things have never been this serious. I am being a professional right now, I expect you to do the same.”

Even when keeping a professional attitude, Blue Song could not help but try to make himself look like the superior part. Despite that, he was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in this situation, as the memory of the alien attack was still fresh in his mind.

“Ok,” he said after a sigh. “What do I need to know?”

That simple question opened the floodgates of a discussion that lasted for the entirety of the travel to Canterlot. First, there was the news that five, a full quarter of the Equestrian colonies, had ceased communications and only a few ships from those regions had returned to Equestria, all with crippling tears on their hulls.

Then had come a blistering casualties report, with horrific numbers that showed the loss of thousands of soldiers and dozens of ships, most taken by surprise in the first hours of the attack. Both Spike and Blue Song understood the numbers were probably much higher, and they both said so. At least on that, they had found something on which they could agree.

What took most of the time was the status of the Equestrian fleet in comparison with the estimated numbers of the attackers. Each group was dwarfed even by what they had deemed to be mere enemy scouting fleets, and none had ever received enough supplies necessary for a long war. The very idea of a long war had only existed in dusty books written by military theorists imagining a worst-case scenario, but not even they could have imagined the sheer size of what the Equestrian military faced.

That last part, the revision of each Equestrian battle group, took almost six hours. Six hours spent looking at a succession of maps, charts, and projections of potential future supply situations for each of the battle groups and trying to come up with an estimate of how long each of them could be able to delay enemy action. They deemed only the most promising groups to have the capability of deviating an invading fleet from its path, and that was only because of their capable commanders or the experimental technology they had on board.

He may have disliked Blue Song for his attitude with Twilight, but he could not deny he was more than competent at his job.

The six hours spent losing hope as he assessed the terrible predicament Equestria was now in made it impossible for him to sigh in relief when they heard a voice on the loudspeaker announcing that the transport had finally landed. Instead, he was filled with dread for the future.

“I assume this is the moment when you join us in person?” Blue Song asked.

“Yes, it is,” Spike replied as he got up from his chair. “I will be at the meeting momentarily.”

His stay at the hospital had been short, much shorter than Spike would have liked; they had left him and everyone else with no medical qualifications in the waiting lobby, while they carried Twilight to a large lift and she disappeared from his view when the large metal door closed. He was then told he could not see her for at least two weeks.

No matter how much he would have wanted to stay at the hospital and wait for Twilight to wake up, his awareness of Equestria’s dreadful situation compelled him to go to the war meeting as quickly as he could.

It was for that reason that he had immediately gone to the Canterlot Palace. Not to the throne room, but in the labyrinth constructed underneath. Spike’s voice had been of the few that had spoken against the proposal to build the Joint Headquarters in such a secluded location, away from prying eyes. It reeked of secrecy of the worst kind, and Spike did not want to make the government look like it had something to hide from its citizens. Twilight had even agreed with him, but the overwhelming support for it coming from the rest of the upper echelons of the military and civil administration had forced her to accept the proposal.

After many years of work, and the expenditure of millions of bits, the work was finished. The result was a web-like labyrinth that extended far beyond the perimeter of the palace above. Twilight had reserved several sections for the construction of impressively large laboratories dedicated to the study of all the new things discovered in the colonies, but the area remained under the control of the military.

There was barely anyone as Spike walked through the sterile white corridors, nothing more than the occasional researcher or low-ranking officer. They were mostly empty and lifeless, with steps of solitary clerks and buzzing of the electrical white lights. If not for the many maps and his memories, Spike might have gotten lost in the identical corridors.

The Head Quarter he reached after half an hour of walking was a moderately large room. It had several steel lockers near its walls, Spike knew to be filled with the most recent reports that had yet to be sent to military archives, and a large round table of the same material. Officers of all branches sat on all seats, with only the ones reserved for the navy being almost empty except for the one being used by Blue Song. Spike also saw four much larger placed at the four cardinal points of the table.

From the center of the table, a purple light created a large hologram showing a map of Equestria’s little colonial empire. It also highlighted five sectors in red. Blue Song was the only one with the white cap and blue elegant uniform with golden trims and buttons. The rest wore the green uniform of the army or the white and yellow coat belonging to the officers of the Royal Guard. All Royal Guard officers had a medal representing a small purple shield imposed on a white field.

There were also several officers wearing the clean white uniform of the Research Corps, Twilight’s addition to the armed forces. They were the most numerous, as their fleet was so much larger than the one with explicit military purposes. Their explicit purpose was to venture into the unexplored regions with the explicit purpose of looking for unknown things to be further researched back in Equestria. Spike knew them to be far more adventurous than all the other branches.

A large circular white light on the ceiling cast the lower parts of their faces in shadow.

All were arguing furiously, with loud voices and angry faces. Many had brought old and dusty books to the table, and they seemed more interested in finding someone to blame for Equestria’s unpreparedness rather than trying to come up with a plan.

“We predicted this a hundred years ago,” one of Research Corps’ officers said. “Why did you not prepare anything substantial?”

“Ah yes,” a changeling of the Royal Guard was pretending to be amused by the accusation of negligence. “How could we forget about one of the sixteen theories about alien races? What fools we were…”

Blue Song had tuned out of the discussion, and was focused on writing a letter on a yellow piece of paper. He put the letter down when he saw Spike, and did not look relieved despite his smile. His eyes were red from the lack of sleep and his breathing sounded heavier than normal.

“Take your seat, admiral,” he said. “We’re gonna be here for a while.”

Spike sat down a moment later, receiving a few lazy salutes from some generals, who were all too tired for formalities.

“Calm down, everyone,” Blue Song said to the generals, and every sound in the room stopped.” Whoever is at fault does not matter; we need a plan, not scapegoats.”

“Go ahead,” the changeling that had spoken before replied. “I am sure we can find a place for your plan among all the others.” He pointed at several large folders filled with yellow papers.

For a fraction of a second, Blue Song’s narrowed down to slits, looking at the changeling with what appeared like murderous intent. His well-defined muscles tensed, making him look as if he were about to strike, then he replaced his anger with a mask of apathy. If Spike had not been looking directly at him, he would have missed that.

“My plan is not my own,” he said as he lifted an enormous book he had been keeping under the table. It had a grey hardback with a golden circle on its front cover. “My grandfather in the Research Corps came up with it.”

“Grey Star had many interesting ideas,” A griffon of the Research Corps interrupted his probably well-prepared speech. “None of them sound. There’s a reason we gave him a dishonorable discharge.”

“I know my grandfather’s service history very well.” Song kept a neutral tone as he addressed the concern. “I am not here to defend his crimes, as I am not his lawyer. Despite his service record, you will soon understand he had the perfect plan for a situation like this. In that regard, he was ahead of his time.”

“Even if his ideas had any value, why should we listen to you?” the griffon scoffed. “You are just one admiral among many, and you should not even be here.”

“I don’t see many any other admirals here,” Blue Song smiled. “Unless Spike has formulated a plan while he retreated, I see you do not have many options. Need I remind you that all of your operations rely on our approval and cooperation?”

Spike a mental note to explode with rage when he was in private. The admiral was using him to make himself look better by comparison, as Spike was already unpopular with the officers. He contained his rage only because he knew how to play the game. Each branch would adopt a facade of unity and strength when interacting with not belonging to it. Making a scene would have seen him even more isolated from his few allies.

“Go ahead,” the griffon sighed. “Enlighten us.”

Blue Song opened the book as Spike mentally prepared the harsh words he would say once the two of them were alone.

“Here on the third chapter of his magnum opus,” he said as he pointed to one page and smiled. “My grandfather had prepared a plan to deal with the overwhelming force we face right now. I will start by describing it with three simple words: Defeat in detail.”

Author's Note

I'm a bit unhappy with how this one came out

Next one should come out sooner