Abaddon severed the link with the World Reaper.
The Despoiler stood at his favored position upon the command bridge of the Vengeful Spirit, gazing coldly through the observation vault at the world below. His expression was one of practiced malice—bloodthirsty, yet calculated.
Vigilus.
A bastion world. Fortified. Immense.
Judging by the orbital fleets arrayed around it—bearing the heraldry of various loyalist Chapters, ancient signals blinking across auspex displays—it was clear that Imperial Warmaster Dukel had rendered this planet a fortress, nigh-impervious to conventional siege.
Just as the World Reaper had reported.
Every major force in the galaxy clawed for this world. Even the xenos, feral and alien, could sense its significance, drawn by some primal instinct toward its value.
At the northern terminus of the Nachmund Gauntlet, this was the Imperium's last stable transit station. A gateway to the darkened half of the galaxy—the Imperium Nihilus.
Its strategic weight was absolute. Here, the Imperium would plant its standard and make its final stand. The High Lords would order the defense until the last Guardsman lay bleeding into the dirt.
Exactly what Abaddon desired.
He would not win Vigilus through subterfuge or treachery. No. He would seize it through dominion, by brute force, under the banners of Chaos Undivided. This world would fall by the might of the Despoiler, and its fall would mark the unraveling of the Emperor's rotting realm.
He turned his gaze across the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit, a vessel reborn through ten millennia of war.
Massive macro-cannons flanked its hull, the yawning mouths of its weapons large enough to house entire squads of Astartes. Warp-flame spat from its thrusters, trailing madness and fire across the void. The grated deck beneath Abaddon's boots was dark with dried blood—relics of battle past.
Some of it was rumored to be the blood of the Emperor Himself, spilled during the heresy. Fools called it divine. More still had belonged to Sanguinius, the Angel of Baal.
Had the Angel returned, as the rumors claimed?
Abaddon allowed himself a cruel smile, extending the talons of the Claw of Horus. He relished the memory of their battle. The kill.
Behind him, the daemon blade Drach'nyen pulsed with simmering jealousy, a malevolent presence in his mind.
"Patience," Abaddon murmured to the blade. "You'll taste the blood of heroes again soon."
The Vengeful Spirit, once a flagship of the Sons of Horus, remained an undefeated god of war—a Gloriana-class battleship saturated with the Warp's hate. Thousands of years of possession had made it stronger, more terrible.
Abaddon was now one with it. It was his vengeance incarnate.
Behind his flagship followed over a hundred capital ships. Reinforcements continued to spill in from the Stygian Sector and the Hellforges of the Eye. Every day, new warbands pledged themselves to his banner.
The Black Legion had never been stronger. The Imperial Navy would falter.
Compared to the wrath of the Vengeful Spirit, their vessels were toys—knives thrown at a juggernaut.
Victory surged in his veins like burning ichor.
Had his father—Horus—felt the same anticipation before Terra?
Abaddon believed he had. He had stood at his Warmaster's side long enough to witness the subtle hunger in his eyes.
But Horus had failed.
He was weak.
Terra had endured. But Vigilus would not.
Once Vigilus fell, the Imperium would be severed completely. The war would enter its final stage. The prey would be weakened. Then, Abaddon would strike the killing blow.
Perhaps Dukel, the current Imperial Warmaster, would rise to stop him?
Abaddon admitted little knowledge of the man. Ten thousand years ago, Dukel had been little more than a comet—brilliant, brief, and forgotten. A flicker in the darkness of the Imperium's twilight.
But unlike the other Primarchs, Dukel had vanished without a trace. There were no legends, no epics. Just silence.
Abaddon did not underestimate him.
But he did not fear him either.
He had seen the truth of the so-called demigods. Strip away their grandeur, and you found only flawed, frightened creatures. Their era had ended.
Now it was his.
As the Black Legion descended upon the planet's surface, Vigilus became a crucible.
The main host of the Black Legion advanced alongside the World Reaper warbands and allied greenskin mobs.
The Iron Warriors, ever predictable, sought out their ancestral nemeses—the Imperial Fists—upon arrival.
The World Eaters and Khorne's daemons painted the battlefields crimson, reveling in blood and fury.
The Night Lords, silent predators, slithered into the shadows of Vigilus' underhives—only to be met by the unexpected resistance of a Genestealer Cult.
And elsewhere, in a forgotten shrine-temple on a polluted moon orbiting the planet, the Warp itself howled.
A runed teleportation array flared with unnatural light. Through it stepped a golden giant, cloaked in fire and prophecy.
The Word Bearers fell to their knees in awe. They knew that figure, etched in scripture and in myth.
Lorgar.
The Primarch of the Word Bearers. Prophet of Chaos. Architect of the Great Heresy.
None had expected the Arch-Speaker to arrive in person.
"How proceeds the installation of the Blackstone Demon Crown?" Lorgar's voice was deep, weighty with power.
"My lord," said a kneeling Dark Apostle, "the process advances well. We have surpassed fifty percent completion. It shall be finished within the week."
"And the secrecy?"
"Absolute. The Imperium remains oblivious."
"The Black Legion?"
"They remain unaware, my lord."
"Excellent," Lorgar whispered, finally allowing a smile.
"This device—the Blackstone Demon Crown—will invert the polarity of the Blackstone lattice buried beneath Vigilus' crust. Once reversed, it will destabilize the veil between realspace and the Warp. A permanent rift shall open—a gate to the Empyrean—anchored here."
"This is a sacred task, my sons. There must be no failure."
The assembled Word Bearers bowed their heads as one.
"Yes, Lord Lorgar."
Upon hearing their Primarch's words, a glimmer of fanatical fervor lit up the faces of the Word Bearers.
The Great Speaker turned his gaze to the half-completed Blackstone Daemon Crown in the distance, a flicker of anticipation flashing in his otherwise impassive eyes.
Blackstone—a mineral as mysterious as it is potent. Though born of realspace, it possesses the unnatural ability to suppress the tides of the warp. That such a material exists defies comprehension, a cosmic wonder in itself.
Abaddon's Black Crusades have long been mocked as failures. The Imperium scoffs at his proclamations of victory.
But Lorgar knew the truth: each so-called defeat was but another step forward in the Dark God's grand game.
In the forgotten annals of time, when the Great Rift first split the galaxy asunder, it was the ancient pylons of the Necrons—crafted of blackstone—that had once held reality together. Each of Abaddon's campaigns was not merely a siege, but a surgical strike against those same pylons.
His aim had never been outright conquest, but the dismantling of the galaxy's safeguards: to rupture the veil between realspace and the Immaterium, to saturate reality with warp energies, and to hasten its inevitable collapse.
Now, with the Blackstone Daemon Crown, Lorgar intended to do the reverse—flip the polarity of blackstone itself.
Vigilus was rich with the mineral, its crust riddled with blackstone veins like veins of iron in a dying titan. If their construction succeeded, they would ignite a massive and stable warp rift across the planet—ripping open a permanent wound in the Materium.
This objective demanded his personal presence.
And so, Lorgar had arrived—not alone, but escorted by a multitude of warp-casters and corrupted psykers to aid in the heretical engineering of the Daemon Crown.
"I smell the death of stars," Lorgar murmured. "And he knows your names."
His voice drifted like ash in the stagnant air of the corrupted temple, swirling and vanishing, never finding a resting place—only fading, like forgotten prayers.
His gaze turned northward. The Great Speaker of the Word now cast his chips onto the mad roulette wheel that was Vigilus.
In the northern hemisphere of the world, the city of Dottoria faced its own apocalypse.
The Purifiers of the Plague, a radical splinter of Nurgle's faithful, had descended upon the city. But unlike their kin, they found Dottoria not delightfully decayed—but repugnant.
The Plague Purifiers—apostles of extinction—believe in one singular creed: life must end.
They have rejected even the corrupted vitality gifted by Father Nurgle. Life, in all its forms, is a blight on the galaxy. Their sacred mission is to purge it utterly through plague, poison, and pestilence.
Over centuries of decay-addled meditation, they formed a twisted philosophy: only through the annihilation of all life could the galaxy be purified.
To them, existence was sin.
Thus, they marched beneath the banner of the Black Crusade, descending on Dottoria like an apocalyptic plaguewind.
Yet unlike before, this time resistance came not from humans, aliens, or xenos constructs.
No. This time, the ones who stood in their way were kin.
The Death Guard.
Once united under Mortarion, the schism between the traditionalists and extremists within Nurgle's disciples had grown stark. The Purifiers viewed themselves as the true inheritors of entropy, while the Death Guard clung to their bloated parody of life.
Where the Purifiers desired a dead galaxy, the Death Guard sought a garden—a grotesque, diseased paradise steeped in rot but teeming with perverse life.
The two factions now vied not only for territory, but ideology.
Initially, the Purifiers dismissed their cousins' vision as heresy.
Their focus turned to Dottoria's industrial heart—its smokestacks belching fumes like the last gasps of a dying world. In an orgy of slaughter, the Purifiers massacred plague-infested humans released by the Death Guard, tossing both corpses and chemical toxins into the furnaces.
The smog that billowed out blackened the skies and poisoned the air. Inhalation meant agony, rot, and death. Every breath was a death sentence.
Thankfully, the Ecclesiarchy priests had long since evacuated Dottoria's citizens to the northern Giant's Bastion, sparing tens of thousands from instant death.
But the city itself began to die.
Within days, the very grass withered, the insects vanished, and the earth grew cold and barren. To the Purifiers, it was a canvas of perfection—silent, empty, pure.
Encouraged by their progress, the Plague Purification Army doubled their efforts.
They seized more industrial plants, converted more furnaces, and darkened the sky further. The noxious haze soon spread far beyond the city walls, choking the region in a miasma so thick, even daemons hesitated to cross.
Their grand design, a lifeless world carved from the bones of the living, was coming to fruition.
But in this galaxy, peace never lasts—even the peace of death.
The air over Dattoria had long since become toxic—unfit even for a moment's breath. Any mortal who dared inhale would find their lungs withered and necrotic in seconds.
Rotting plague-zombies now wandered the once-bustling streets. The entire city had become a necropolis—a ruin crawling with the shambling dead.
This desecration enraged the Death Guard, who also operated within Dattoria's ruins. Their contempt for the Plague Purifiers—neighbors who had pushed their perverse ideology too far—simmered with growing disdain. That simmering resentment soon ignited into open fury.
The final spark came when the Scourge—the vanguard of the Purifiers—began eradicating the Plague Walkers themselves. To the Death Guard, this was sacrilege.
In response, Mortarion's sons ceased their assault on the Imperial fortresses. They withdrew from their battles against the xenos encroachments and tightened their formation.
They turned, as one, upon the Purifiers' industrial bastion.
Calls for support echoed across the Warp. Other warbands were summoned to join the siege—any, even the Iron Warriors, would earn the Death Guard's rare respect if they aided in crushing the so-called World Cleansing Army.
Such hatred runs deep—deeper than any loyalty to Nurgle.
What began as skirmishes soon escalated into total war. The unity of the Plague God's chosen shattered. Fleet clashed with fleet in orbit, while the ground war descended into an orgy of mutual annihilation.
No one could say who would prevail.
Even Doom and his gunship—champion of the Second Legion—flew overhead, indifferent to the fratricide. His craft loomed above like an executioner's axe, silent and still.
On the Vengeful Spirit, Warmaster Abaddon watched it all unfold from afar.
And he was pleased.
Infighting was inconsequential. What mattered was that Dattoria had been reduced to ash and ruin—a corpse-city.
But his satisfaction did not last.
Something was off.
Doom—renowned for his ruthlessness—did not commit his forces to the ground war. Instead, his flagship launched a boarding craft. A subtle change. An ominous one.
Abaddon narrowed his gaze.
As unease settled in his gut, a new terror blossomed in the Warp.
A signal—a blinding imperial beacon—suddenly ignited across the stars. Golden light surged across Vigilus, then expanded, washing across the entire sub-sector like a cleansing fire.
Even the Vengeful Spirit was caught in its brilliance. The Black Legion's flagship groaned as loyalist light seared across its corrupted hull. Paint bubbled, turning golden. Wisps of black smoke curled from its tortured plating. The machine spirit wailed in fury, restrained by the Emperor's light.
On the surface, the battle paused. Every soldier, every daemon, every mindless drone—all turned their eyes skyward.
The golden light grew stronger still. Then, emerging from the Warp, a fleet of staggering scale tore into realspace.
At the vanguard, a winged figure stood tall upon a black and green battleship. Flame-like wings extended from her back. In her hand, she held aloft a colossal banner—the source of the holy light.
Abaddon inhaled sharply.
He recognized the vessel.
The Wrath of Destruction—the personal flagship of Doom Slayer.
This was no fluke. This was the harbinger.
And the procession had only just begun.
Moments later, three more fleets exited the Immaterium: The Wrath of Baal, The Heart of Glory, and The Keeper of Secrets. A convergence of legends: Dante, Calgar, Azrael—lords of war, masters of devastation.
An armada of ancient names. Iconic warships. And behind them, the collective fury of the Imperium.
Abaddon, the Despoiler of Worlds, gripped his daemon blade tightly. The blade hummed with anticipation, as though tasting the blood to come.
"The time has come," the Warmaster whispered, "to drink the blood of heroes."
The sword did not answer. It merely trembled in his grasp.
The war for Vigilus was about to ignite once more—and this time, it would blaze with a fury unlike any seen before.
...
T.N:
Support me & 20+ Get Advance Chapters on: Patreon(.)com/LordMerlin