Calth
The news of the orbital mustering yards’ total destruction in what seemed like a terrible accident reached us some twenty minutes before the XVII Legion launched their treacherous attack on our side of the planet. The Mechanicum refineries in the sector were overrun in less than an hour, their defenders’ corpses violated for war trophies. What the traitors couldn’t loot and turn against us, they smashed to scrap, and soon the proud manufactorums were but burning rubble and ruin casting thick smoke into what earlier was a vibrant blue sky.
We dug in in a warehouse – or what was left of one anyway – some distance from the largest munitions plant in the sector. Soon enough the Word Bearers came in force. It wasn’t an organized attack, but rather a frenzied mob, a pack of animals charging at their prey. They had defaced their armor with spikes, horns and fell graphics and carvings that had a reek of the occult to them, stuff of the ancient ages of religious fear and superstition. Their Dreadnoughts bore outrageous trophies and idols hastily made from the corpses of mortals and Astartes alike, and among the legionaries came horned horrors, like walking avatars of rage and slaughter that carried swords born from war itself and which would not register properly on our targeters and auto-senses. Worst of all were the malformed abominations wearing twisted and cracked Legion battle plate, clawed monsters that no sane man would ever call his brother in arms or otherwise.
Thermilion, Master of the 11th Chapter, his Terminators, and Captain Lyceon of the 20th Company were at the forefront. With hate in our hearts and the Primarch’s name on our lips we went to war under a dying sun.
