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BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD indeed. Great work so far, easily my favourite fiction on the site by far!

Patiently waiting for a new installment, and when one and I finish reading it I feel sad that I have to wait for more

The Armageddon Defence Fleet stationed in far-orbit above the Northern Hemisphere registered the Bloodstorm as it spread across the face of the planet. They were spread far in a web of steel and fire, initially there to halt any further incursion by Greenskin fleets, however their role had severely altered in the last few weeks with more Orks actually coming from the planet rather than to it. Like vermin fleeing a fire the Ork ships rocketed from Armageddon, their trajectory to the far rim of the system, seemingly flying to anywhere but the world they had previously ravaged.

Most were obliterated, their fiery corpses cast back into the atmosphere like so much shrapnel or doomed to orbit the world as frozen and bleeding wreckage. Many escaped however, their ramshackle engines speeding them in a manic escape: They did not defend themselves, did not attack or raise fire against the Imperials, which was highly unusual for Greenskins. A species bred purely for violence fleeing one of the most hostile warzones in the known universe should have been a major cause for alarm. But pride oft comes before a fall, and as the Bloodstorm crept across the surface many felt the fall to come.

Monitor stations based in the mountains and plains of Armageddon’s vast deserts registered peculiar atmospheric readings, high winds rising and falling against the natural systems of the planet. Vox relays across the planet crackled and pinged as communications became swamped with static, squalls of feedback and screaming distortion drowning any attempt and cohesion between the great Hive Cities of the world. Attempts to rectify the errors were met with grim failure, and in some cases terrifying accidents. Vox-Operators and Tech-Priests stationed at the relays went mad, brutally attacking their fellows in a fit of breath-taking panic. When subdued, the gibbering individuals claimed to have heard whispers and growls amid the distortion, maddening voices spilling forth in relentless babble. They all spoke one name, over and over, in every language under and beyond the stars. When pushed for the name, the afflicted wept openly pleading for their colleagues not to make them utter the foulness.

The Imperium of Man is however an uncaring beast, and its questions would be answered whether through force or coercion, and each of the afflicted eventually revealed their secret, most dying in the process. They said the whispers spoke one name, a name heaped with ruin and despair, a name cursed and thrice-damned beyond all measure. And it was coming, coming to this world to slaughter in the name of beings far older and crueller than any man or woman could fathom. It would bathe in victory and the blood of the human world.

The name was the end of them all, they said, the end of the worlds of men.

The name was Angron…

And if you look to your left, you see Angron marching to Armageddon. And... It's gone

Why would orks run from one of the greatest fights in the galaxy just when it was about to get even better? I would think this event would draw even more orks to Armageddon... after all there is not much difference between 'Umie and Spiky'Umie.

Perhaps for reinforcements? Then, they could come back like a wrecking ball, crushing worlds in its path.

OOOOOHHHHHH!!!! Many intrigue, such mystery.

Yes!!! Chaos it is! I got it right!

The blood rain hammered down, relentless and grimly forceful, like the sky itself was wounded and spilled its lifeblood on the world it had once protected. The sky bled upon the Hive, and the Hive bled in panic in return. Something terrible was happening on Armageddon, a world that was no stranger to terrible things.

Gheron had already vomited twice, the foul liquid seeping into his mouth through his rebreather, clogging his nose and throat. It tasted of copper, and a stale corruption that hurt his guts and turned his stomach. His platoon were similarly shaken, with many of them being escorted away by medicae personnel. The journey from the outer curtain to the inner Hive had taken a toll on them all, and Gheron counted himself lucky that he was still standing.

He stood at the entrance to the Hive’s inner concourse, linking the outer civilian districts to the main commercial sectors further in-hive. Several grand highways and autobahns converged at this point, and thousands of people flooded the area, all heading in-Hive away from the driving gore-streaked rains. His platoon had been re-deployed to aid in evacuation efforts, the people of Hive Tempestora panicking at the sudden unnatural deluge. A show of strength, the Masters of Armageddon had agreed in their ordinatus-proofed bunkers, that is what was needed. As many uniformed bodies as possible was filtered from the defences to the evacuation routes, charged with keeping order and helping the beleaguered Imperial citizenry to the shelters at the centre of the Hive. It was a thankless, grim task.

They milled like lost children, the people of Hive Tempestora: droves and droves of red-stained humans, all faces down-cast and terrified. Some held coats and blankets over themselves, trying to cover themselves from the bloody downpour. Others carried umbrellas of myriad shapes and sizes. Every single one of them was stained a glistening red, like fresh meat in filthy water. Gheron waved another group forward through his checkpoint, his armour and helm equally crimson and sodden. He heard his comm-bead click in his ear and heard Theresa, her usually calm and sarcastic demeanour noticeably downcast and serious. The rain had spooked her too.

“We’ve got another big group heading our way, lots of baggage. Command says to check ‘em and discard of anything that’ll take up too much room”

The platoon, including Gheron, nodded their agreement, and approached the crowd, hands outstretched in a gesture of halt. The line of people halted, standing seemingly in a daze, the red liquid hammering into them and pooling around their feet in a gross puddle.

The people were terrified and dejected, and stood near motionless as the troopers frisked and patted them down. Gheron couldn’t look them in the eye as he opened their belongings, casting clothes and keepsakes onto the bloody ground. Some glared at him in anger, most simply looked utterly defeated. He knew it was for their own good: there was no room in the shelters for erroneous belongings, but still he felt guilty. He was one of them, this was his home Hive. How would he feel in their shoes?

He moved down the line, scanning faces and checking papers until his advance was halted by a small girl, surely no more than six years old. She stood in shock, a small doll gripped tightly to her chin, covering her face. Her hair had been blonde at one point, but now hung heavy and blackened against her skin. She was coated in a sticky coat of red gore, like an ivory statue stained with heavy, heady paints. Her eyes were like white pools amidst the red gore that covered her small face, and she stared terrified into his face. She reminded Gheron so much of his own daughter, Myrtle, so much so that he stopped directly in front of her. He had to force himself not to think of his family, he had a job to do here and couldn’t be distracted. His wife Anne-Marie would know what to do. They had talked many times about what to do in an emergency situation. They would be safe.

He prayed that they would be at any rate.

He crouched in front of the girl, removing his rebreather so she could see his face. He smiled the smile that he had developed in his years of Fatherhood, and hoped that the child would react. She stood with her doll covering her face, impassive but wholly alert. The bloody rain seemed to drip off her covered chin onto the tarmac below. Theresa approached from his left and crouched beside him. Again the girl did not react. Theresa leant in next to Gheron’s ear, her voice rising just above a whisper.

“This one by herself?”

Gheron nodded solemnly.

“Seems so, although I haven’t looked for parents yet. Sorry...she reminded me of Myrtle”

Theresa shook her head, but her eyes voice was sympathetic.

“Focus Gher - We need to process her, we’ll double check the crowd, see if anyone knows her.”

Theresa rose and leant forward to take the girl gently by the arm, her hand enclosing the small right shoulder. Gheron was rising too, reattaching his rebreather when a startled shout of warning left his lips.

The doll fell away from the small girl’s mouth and revealed what she hid beneath.

Where the nose and mouth should have been was a bloody hole, ragged and torn vertically like a violent wound. Gheron at first thought it was indeed an injury before he saw the gory hole split open and dozens of needle-like glassy fangs erupted from the girl’s diseased gums. Within the bloody, shadowed hole bubbled numerous eyes, each white, lunatic and staring, all fixed on the form of Theresa. Gheron moved forward to swat his colleagues hand away but he was too slow.

Much too slow.

The girl-thing squealed like a panicked swine and pounced on Theresa, her small frame boasting strength grossly beyond her size. She buried her small face into Theresa’s neck, gripping onto her like human lamprey and bit down into the flesh of his comrade’s shoulders. Theresa’s mouth cracked open in pain, screaming in utter terror as the small child savaged her. Gheron seized them, trying to pull the small devil from his friend. A keening wail rose from the crowd similar to the squealing of the she-devil, and Gheron knew as he punched at the child’s head and Theresa convulsed under the assault in the driving, bloody rain that they were doomed.

Things have got bad, the monsters are inside the walls!

Noooo! Noooo! Another hive is crushed! Noooo!

Children of the Khorn?

Wait until he found out his kid (Myrtle) was eaten by a daemon. (I'm assuming it's a daemon rather than a hrud at this point, since, ya know, Angron is coming to town)

Lamprey mouth killer children... I swear I've seen that somewhere before and not just in my imagination...

Not that that's a bad thing, creeps the hell out of me everytime. And I love a bit of good horror every now and then.

What's next? Infants in the wombs of mothers begin tearing and eating their way out and begin terrorizing everyone a la dead space babies?

Your giving the all typing fingers ideas!

That's creepy as heck but also brilliant and equally messed up.

The Galaxy needs a hero. One with a 2+ invulnerable save.

Or a big gun, and an immunity to everything.

lliu wrote:
Or a big gun, and an immunity to everything.

I don't know why, but Deadpool was the first thing to pop into mind.

 King Pariah wrote:

lliu wrote:
Or a big gun, and an immunity to everything.

I don't know why, but Deadpool was the first thing to pop into mind.

Whilst I do like Deadpool, I can assure you he is not going to appear

Maybe Mat Ward should pop into the universe and be like, "Did soooomeone say Moderaaator?" In a really gakky voice.

Please - try to at least make some passing effort at staying on topic in here!

Wait, is this daemon child thing Myrtle possessed? It's been mentioned repeatedly that she reminded Gheron was reminded of her while looking at her.

Deamon children, someone fed them Khrone flakes for breakfast

You mean Khorne flakes?

Sweet Emperor, this is EPIC!! Just got caught up with this section. And holy , that scene with the kid and the monster scared the crap outta me! You have a gift, truly, to frighten anyone.

Well, all I say was the end of the second most recent Resident evil film, where the mandibles erupt from the dude's mouth, except it's a little girl's. Awesome stuff man.

The Imperium of Man is no stranger to suffering and brutality. Indeed, most of its subjects live in a state of ceaseless drudgery and totalitarian terror, a life that by most standards would in no way be worth living. The wars and crimes of mankind are enough to fill the military histories of several other species and civilisations combined with literally no end in sight. But what was to occur on Armageddon would silence even the grimmest warrior, the most battle-bitten general, and the most cold of assassins. What was to occur on Armageddon was no less than petulant vengeance through callous slaughter. It was the death of a world to quench selfish pride.

The populace of the world first turned on itself. The driving blood-storm had demoralised and defeated millions, and those that were most soaked by the unholy gore and most terrified by the coming doom changed. Their forms were fractured and twisted, as denizens from beyond swallowed their minds and took their bodies for their own. Crooked horns split from wet skulls, lank hair and branches of muscles sprouted from tortured backs. Mouths splayed and broke as fangs and monstrous tendons and antennae forced their way from screaming throats. Eyes split and organs liquefied into red-skinned terrors, metal and flesh and bone fusing and running into new terrible forms. With a braying call these horrors were birthed into the real world, keening their limitless hunger to the bloody skies. They set upon the populace with rank fury and maddened hysteria, butchering men, women and children in profane genocide.

Across the battlefields and desert-straits of Armageddon, monstrous beasts formed of dark-matter and lunacy clawed their way from underground and out of deep puddles of the pooling blood rain. They rose on disjointed and shaky limbs, dragging weapons carved of ivory and madness with them, leaving bubbling lines in the soil. They marched under colossal banners sewn from star-dust and the tears of all sentient species, blowing great trumpets and striking drums made from the rib-cages of murdered martyrs. The great hosts amassed and struck against the bastions of the Imperium. Fortifications designed to hold back the Greenskin hordes fell to the unnatural assault, daemons bleeding and squirming through the walls to fall upon the defenders within. Crimson lighting and corpse-light streaked the skies above the hordes, setting towers and mountains aflame. The sky filled with harsh screams and relentless spiteful chattering, driving men and women of pure heart to delirium. Madness ran rampant across the cities of man, and death followed quickly as the hordes of bronze and red set the world to the torch.

The armies of Armageddon tried to resist, tried to fight back. The standing Titan Legion of Armageddon, Legio Arriaga, marched as one against the nightmare descending upon their home, the power of stars and comets rocketing from their fists and backs. Swathes of daemonic horrors boiled and burned as the Titan’s weapons scoured their lines, huge craters of gore and melted ground left in their furious wake. Great columns of flesh, enormous putrid sacs of cancerous muscle crawled from the shadows cast by the God-Machines and set upon them as hungry dogs. Malformed hulks of blackened flesh rose higher than the Hives and mountains of the world, and smote the bipedal war machines into shattered fragments. Great bloody wounds ripped from the hulks, revealing acid-lined gullets and tongues lined with colossal fangs. They bit into the Titans with the sound of continents breaking, even as the noble Legio fought to survive, failing as they were consumed in turn.

Orbital lasers and defence ships fired their weapons at the hordes below, lighting new suns upon the world and fusing their targets into gore-streaked glass. Monsters with power beyond anything of the mortal plane drove great spears of gristle and hellfire into the skies, tearing through the atmosphere like shooting stars. The burned and melted the weapons platforms, and overloaded the shields of the great ships that defended Armageddon. Winged devils and titanic horrors of glassy bone and sinewy pinions rose up through the airless heights to meet their foes, sundering the defence fleets and ships in a flurry of silent death. Twinkling, frozen blood and silent metal bled into the void, the monstrosities screaming with no sound into the swallowing black.

The massed manpower and armoured formations of Armageddon, so effective against the Orkish waves that infested their world found themselves wholly unprepared for the daemonic assault that fell upon them. Soldiers turned and fled as their comrades fell beneath blackened blades of meteoric iron, tank crews wept and bled in their vehicles as living flames bathed and cooked them within their armour, commanders and commissars shouted for order and stability even as they were hewn and messily consumed by gibbering, multi-eyed horrors. The Imperial war machine was in rout across Armageddon, fleeing for safety within the hives. But the Hives had been infiltrated and warped by the daemonic incursion: men and women becoming beasts and hunting each other in the streets. Blood filled the gutters, hellish fire claimed the Hives and hatred stalked the very air itself.

Misery and murder held sway over the world.

But the worst was yet to come.

Above the great Diamana Strait, a grassland that had seen much of the hostilities between mankind and the Greenskin upon Armageddon, something damned came into being. A star of broken, blackened light cracked into existence, its angles wrong and its light madness-inducing. It bled steaming gore from it central point onto the ground, setting the stark, pale grass alight with whipping reddened flame. Magma bubbled and dripped from the star, its shimmering form warping and cracking in the already tortured sky, and some thing birthed itself into the realms of men. The tearing of realities in this vile birthing smote the fabric of time and space itself, creating a dome of non-air and bitter unreality were it crawled from its festering womb-wound. It smote the ground in dripping, burning afterbirth and bellowed its madness to the skies above.

In life, the creature had only ever truly made one decision in its long and sorrowful existence, its mind and soul being enslaved by its peers and its own shattered mind. It had never known freedom, never known the power of individual will. And now, in damnation, it was more a slave than ever. This lack of true identity, this shifting façade meant it held no one, true form. The lack of control that dominated its being gave it a shifting, liquid mien, a consequence of an existence of dark servitude.

Some would see it as shining giant, a being crafted of liquid gold carrying a scimitar of endless twinkling nebula. Its face was without mark or feature, and on its back rose two brilliant pinions of silver fire. These were lined with crimson, hate-filled eyes which set everything they gazed upon ablaze.

Others saw the creature as a hulking tower of torn muscle and flesh, a pillar of maddened anatomy and limitless suffering. A black sun orbited its upper-most limits, screams of the dying and doomed filling its orbit.

Many lost their minds as they saw a shrivelled and warped wraith, its bulbous head like a cancerous fruit, rotten and swollen, festooned with a billion, billion lunatic eyes looking in every direction at once. Many twisted and arthritic arms dragged its swollen stomach and trailing innards across the strata of the world, leaving burning acid in its colossal wake.

To the driving hordes of daemons, it was a being of brass and blood, a monumental testament to anger and aggression. A black, burning crown sat on its dog-like brow and it wielded every weapon ever conceived in its endless, armoured arms. Its voice was battle and its gaze was victory.

A gifted few would see the thing as it had once been, a man of great strength and potential honour, clothed for war and glory twisted and broken by circumstance. They would note the endless sadness and fury in its eyes before dying of a broken soul under its gaze.

Many more could not even perceive the beast itself, its form too maddening and lunatic for a mortal mind to comprehend. They simply saw a nothing where they knew something should be, a hazing in the fabric of reality. Like some colossal black hole given life, they could only see it by the gravity it inflicted on the world around it, the ground and sky themselves warping and splitting under its advance.

The perceptions of the horrific entity were endless: a shadow built of broken dreams, an orb of shattered glass and terrifying potential, a great hound of fire and star-death, a labyrinth built of human flesh with an endless, hungry maw at its centre. Its faces were many, its forms never ending. It was the wrath of Gods and the desolation the Earth.

It had but one name.

Angron, favoured of the First God and traitor-spawn of the Emperor descended upon Armageddon once more, and this time victory would be his and his alone.

Ooh, brilliant job with describing Angron in his final form! Can't wait for more!

Wow, just wow. This is simply outstanding. Whatever you're doing, you're doing it right.

Wow! Again, I prove my point! And, yeah, in my synopsis post I did not know what would happen to Armageddon. This is incredibly amazing!