A sweeping run by a squadron of Kataphraktoi saw a pack of flesh hounds skewered on crackling lances, a salvo of flakburst missiles launched from jetbikes finishing the task.
These were but skirmishes, preludes to the greater struggle.
A massive host of red-skinned foot-soldiers dominated the processional and threw their bodies onto the spears of the Hykanatoi with reckless abandon.
Meroved saw dozens raised up, impaled and then decapitated by a sentinel blade a moment later. Hundreds leapt at the Custodians, cackling, only to land again in severed pieces. A shield wall formed, bearing the brunt of the daemons’ fearless charge. Limbs shattered. Skulls cracked. The Custodians pressed forwards into the mass, grinding bodies underfoot into slowly disintegrating ichor. A spear-tip of gold and black drove into the sea of red, parting it like the prow of an inexorable ship.
Having weathered the onslaught, Valoris led the counter-attack.
Meroved saw only glimpses, but he felt the shape and rhythm of the battle changing as the Custodians battled their way free of the gate and began to fight as they were always meant to, as individuals but acutely in synch.
The attack was devastating, a thresher of golden blades hacking apart the daemon-kin with deadly precision.
This was their war, the war against the one true enemy. It lent the Custodians fury, not the unshackled wrath of their crimson-fleshed counterparts but the pure, focused anger of a surgical laser cutting out the foe’s heart.
As the battle wore on, it expanded. Meroved found himself fighting alongside Cartovandis and Adio, each warrior complementing the other though acting entirely alone. It was a curiosity of the Custodians to fight in such a way; it had been thus since they were a Legio, before the adepts they had become. No other warrior of the Imperium could do the same – even the much vaunted and tragically flawed Adeptus Astartes needed the strength of the pack. The Ten Thousand felt no such dependency and yet they were in tune.
In a rare moment of respite, Meroved took stock.
Fires burned in the Terran night, reaching up in swirling conflagrations to touch the sky and set it aflame. Ash choked the air, thick with blood and black dust. Everything burned. A diabolic lens had imposed itself over the Throneworld and here at the Lion’s Gate that reality would fade or be made permanent.
Meroved would die before letting that come to pass, and his brotherhood was not alone in that conviction. Silver-armoured Grey Knights fought beside the Ten Thousand, daemon-killers by trade if not by right, and the Neverborn army faltered. The defenders of Terra pressed their advantage, slaughtering without restraint, constantly moving to the next battle, to the next enemy.
Terra must be rid of this filth.
Meroved intended to see that come to pass.
A hefty gouge had been carved in the ranks of the bloodletters, which bayed and fought and snarled at their gradual but certain dissolution.
Meroved had barely been struck, and his armour had weathered with ease what few blows had breached his defence. Cartovandis and Adio were similarly unscathed, advancing alongside him out of instinct. As they were pressing forwards, a horn sounded, a deep discordant note that echoed across the entire processional.
Adio paused, looking to his shield-captain. The din that had initially assailed them had lessened since the battle had worn on and it was possible to speak and be heard again as the horn’s reverberations faded.
‘Hold here…’ Meroved warned. The air changed, thickening with humidity. His voice and all ambient noise became muted.
Cartovandis hacked apart the last of the bloodletters they had been fighting and looked up, his blade and the mask of his armour flecked with sizzling ichor.
‘I feel the approach of something, brothers,’ he said, his gaze drawn skywards to the boiling red and black.
Nearby Grey Knights struck up a chant, joining in a psychic mantra as they took on a pearlescent aura. The Paladin who led them unclasped a book from his vestments and began to read in an ancient tongue, his words sharp and acerbic.
A warrior clad in the armature of a Nemesis Dreadknight stepped over the steaming corpse of a hell beast, his eyes on the churning sky. Locked in the arcane exo-frame, the pilot towered above both the other Grey Knights and the Custodians. Pistons growled in the Dreadknight’s legs and the rotator cannon on its left arm cycled in fresh daemon-killing rounds. The pilot raised the sword in the Dreadknight’s right arm to the dark heavens and spat out a curse. ‘Kharneth exilium!’
And the dark heavens answered.
On black and smoking wings, a beast plunged out of darkness and fire.
The flagstones of the processional shattered beneath its hooved tread as it sat hunched, exuding palpable menace, its wings furled around it like some leathery cocoon. As it rose from a crouching stance, a brutish head crowned by two horns and sat upon a brawny neck slowly acknowledged those who challenged it.
A bellow ripped from its canine snout, wings thrust to the extent of their massive span and a whip uncoiled from around its wrist, as thick as the haft of a guardian spear blade. A breastplate of blackened iron wrapped its torso, still steaming as if fresh forged on some black anvil. Tufts of stiff crimson fur jutted from beneath the metal.
It had many names – Eater of Gore and Flesh, Lord of Skulls, High-handed Slayer; each honorific was as gruesome and forbidding as the last.
But the Ten Thousand knew it by a different appellation.
Cartovandis’ lip curled. ‘Bloodthirster.’
The Dreadknight rushed to meet it, but with a savage beat of its wings the Bloodthirster smashed into the war engine and bore it down. Hunching over its stricken form, the daemon tore the pilot from his exo-frame. With the sound of hard rain splashing against metal, silver turned to red as the Bloodthirster bit deep, hurling the sparking exo-frame into the other Grey Knights, scattering them as it gorged on their dead comrade’s corpse.
Snorting, a half-chewed, silver arm still hanging from its mouth, the Bloodthirster unhitched a black-bladed axe from its back and turned towards the Custodians.
Meroved felt the weight of its hatred and raised his spear.
He charged, Cartovandis and Adio on his heels.
It was like running headlong into a furnace, the air choked with ash and shimmering with heat.
The whip snapped at him, almost sentient, but Meroved eluded it and found a gap in the Bloodthirster’s breastplate. It roared, half in pain, half in fury, spitting up partially dissolved bones and pieces of armour. Spattered in acid-eaten gore, Meroved thrust his spear deeper in the hope of reaching something vital.
A desultory swipe of the Bloodthirster’s wing sent him sprawling, his guardian spear still embedded in its form. His shield clanged loudly, lost somewhere beyond his sight. Caroming over the broken processional like a stone skipping over water, Meroved reached out and grabbed a jutting rock to arrest his violent tumble.
Adio had closed on the daemon, castellan axe swinging for its arm. He jerked, suddenly pulled to the side as the whip snared him, and he came up short. Dark leather tightened around his waist as Adio was wrenched off his feet and hurled into the air. He flailed into the distance, crashing down as he was lost to the sprawl of the battle.
Meroved was back on his feet. He stooped, retrieving his shield at a run, as Cartovandis turned an axe blow on his shield and stabbed hard into the Bloodthirster’s hide before falling back. Meroved made the most of the distraction to get close enough to yank out his spear.
The whip arced around, the barbs along its length cutting air but forcing both Custodians back.
A rope of thick, phlegmy blood jetted from the Bloodthirster’s flared nostrils as it snorted its contempt. It bled from dozens of minor wounds, leaking sizzling ichor like oil. Its massive shoulders heaved with its heavy exhalations. It even breathed angrily.