The Custodians at his side did the same, lifting and pounding their spear butts down in continual rhythm. It was the marching song of some ancient army, echoing for the first time here in an alien realm. Only twenty of them stood together; Ra had refused to risk any more of the dwindling Ten Thousand when the true battle was yet to be fought. Twenty warriors, each drawn from different squads. Twenty souls to serve as bait.
The creatures responded with roars of their own, none louder than the winged monster in their vanguard. They began to charge. The Custodians kept hammering their spears down in cold, rhythmic unity.
Ra’s retinal display couldn’t lock on to the approaching figures, but approximations of their shrinking distance ticked along the edges of his eye-lenses. He thumped his spear once more, then whirled the blade forwards, levelling it at the charging daemons. The Custodians at his side did the same, in the very same breaths.
‘Kill it,’ Ra voxed.
The wraithbone cairns shifted, dead eldar machines slipping and tumbling as they were cast aside. Imperial robots rose from their blanketing shrouds of alien bone, their somnolent life sparks kindling at the behest of their Mechanicum masters. Fifty of them lined the narrow avenue, each one standing in ragged harmony with its cousins, cannons whirring and joints snarling. They wore the red plate of Sacred Mars, dented and battered from so many years of fighting away from their stolen home world, but loyal to the last.
They opened up as one. Castellax, Vorax, Kastelan – pattern after pattern, no two weapon arrays truly alike – each of the robots lit the tunnel with an unremitting salvo of fire. Laser weapons flashed and cut. Energy cannons flared and roared. Spheres of seething plasma spat from scorched muzzles. Torrents of flame belched forth. Maxim bolters thundered and darkfire beams daggered into the heaving pack of charging creatures.
The daemons went down as if scythed. Those that fell were flayed and taken apart by the ceaseless barrage. Those that kept running were forced down a gauntlet of relentless firepower. At the Ossuary’s end, Ra and his Custodians fired their spears’ bolters, adding to the cannonade.
Battle tanks rolled forwards from the mist on heavy treads, grinding eldar wraithbone into fragments. The Mechanicum’s transports added their heavy weapons to the assault, as did three of the Ten Thousand’s grav-tanks.
A squad of axe-bearing Sisters leapt from a golden grav-Rhino, led by Jenetia Krole. They moved to take position behind Ra and the Custodians, weapons raised in readiness.
All twenty Custodians reloaded in the same two-heartbeat span. All twenty fired again, straight ahead, aiming for the burning, dissolving creature still racing towards them.
This, then, was pain. This was uncreation. The daemon of the first murder felt itself being taken apart, but keener still was the acid of a thwarted hunt. To be trapped like this, to be unmade by mortal anger. This was pain.
Escape. Survive. What passed for its cognition plunged into a ravenous loop of primal urges. Escape. Survive. Escape. Survive.
Still they charged. Hundreds lay dead and dissolving, soon to be thousands, yet still the survivors charged. They answered each of the alpha creature’s bellows, peeling off from the collapsing pack and launching themselves at the closest robots cutting off their escape. Automata fell in smoking, exploding husks. Daemons burst apart with them, willingly sacrificing themselves at their overlord’s whim.
The creature, the End of Empires, reached the Custodians’ battle-line first. There it met the plunging spears and hacking axes of the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisters, ignoring their first blows as it shifted into a chimaeric thing of thrashing serpent-limbs and curved claws. It killed even as aetheric blood rained from its devastated form. It killed even as hanks of sizzling flesh were ripped from its corpus, laying it bare to where a true beast would have bones.
Several of the Castellax battle-automata lumbered forwards, engaging it alongside the humans, tearing at the daemon’s ichorous flesh with their whining buzz saws and industrial fists. They fared no better, their cranial domes and chestplates hammered and mangled, their vital internals torn free in clawed fistfuls of fluid-slick artificial life. They detonated, bathing the daemon in eviscerating shrapnel and petrochemical burns, and still – still – it killed.
It melted its way through forms, shifting and seeking lethality above all, survival-urge and blood-hunger fusing together to force it through change after change, seeking to escape its cage by butchering those that had trapped it here.
The Custodians fell back, the Sisters with them. It gave chase, panic granting it aggression, doing all it needed to do in order to rip itself free of the ambush. It fell upon the very beings slaughtering it because to run from them would only mean swifter destruction. Human blood ran. Golden limbs crashed to the ground. Axes fell from dead hands.
Ra and Jenetia struck in the very same second. The Custodian drove his spear up through the shapeless mass, wrenching it deeper, lodging it within and emptying his bolter inside its body. The Sister-Commander plunged her two-handed blade in alongside Ra’s, tearing a mirrored wound. Scalding filth poured upon both of them, steaming on their armour, burning patches of exposed skin.
A snake-like limb battered Krole aside. The creature staggered, then fell, crashing into the metal-strewn debris of dead robot and abandoned wraithbone. It reached a grasping claw from its seething mess of limbs, its structure breaking down into something amoebic and many-eyed.
End of Empires, it said in Ra’s mind, using Ra’s thoughts. It sounded so weak. Almost fearful, though such a thing could feel no fear. End… of…
The daemon rose from the wreckage like a fire cloud above an annihilated city, haemorrhaging thunder as it roared. Debris and machine oil rose into the air in glistening ropes. Inferno heat rolled from its resurrecting carcass. Black smoke and the blood of its kills congealed into muscle and sinew as its presence billowed higher.
Gunfire from the survivors yet tore into it, changing nothing, doing nothing. A head formed at its apex, rows of eyes burning as bolt-rounds ripped harmless cinders from its torso. Plates of mangled armour rose from the wrecks of the war machines, charring to black as they folded over the daemon’s form.
Ra stood beneath it, bathed in its heat, the coldness of the wounded Sisters beside him pressing back against the naked hunger of the thing that filled the tunnelway. It opened its mouth and breathed in the golden mist.
‘He will live,’ it rasped in a voice that felt like memory.
‘Kill it!’ Ra cried the order, desperate fury turning his tone to adrenal fire. Yet there was almost no one left alive to obey.
The daemon pulled reality towards itself, binding wraithbone and iron and even fire into a new form. It ensconced itself in corporeal armour to ward off the rage of corporeal weaponry.
‘Kill it!’ one of the Golden roared.
Escape. Survive. Anathema. End of Empires.
And, for the first time in its existence, savaged almost unto uncreation, it truly fled. The survivors’ parting fire tore at its temporary form, breaking armour away, but not enough, not enough. The echo of the first murder fled in bleeding, shambling defeat, puppeting a mongrel form of broken robots that fell apart with each step.