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askjenetiakrole · 5 years

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The Betrayal at Byfrust

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Perhaps the most curious addition to the Chondax fleet was a demi-vigil of the Silent Sisterhood. The Council of Nikaea, to which the Khagan had not been summoned, had not yet placed any restrictions on the use of battle-psykers within the Legions, and the White Scars continued to rely on their Stormseers to counter such threats. Some have opined that the reason for the inclusion of the Sisters was less because of their unique abilities and more due to the Terran-made jetbikes issued to one of their vigils, machines for which the White Scars held a noted curiosity. Others have noted the Khagan’s tendency to recruit advisers from the most unusual places, seeking differing perspectives from his own.

Byfrust, one of the final targets of the cleansing campaign, was host to a sizable force of White Scars, perhaps eight brotherhoods and atached militia forces that included detachments of the Charonid Sentinels and the Silent Sisterhood. A glacial world where the orks had dug vast fortified dens in the deep canyons away from the cutting winds that swept the world’s surface clean, Byfrust had proved a welcome challenge for the White Scars. Their mounted brotherhoods had been more than adept at clearing the glacial plains of orks, but less effective at fighting in the crude tunnels beneath. They had instead relied on the formidable skill of the Charonite engineers to force the orks to the surface, blasting shafts down with melta-charges before filling the warrens below with phosphex, after which they could be easily harried across the ice.

Having only recently ceased combat operations after the final battle, the gathered brotherhoods, under the overall lead of Tsolmon Khan, maintained deep-range patrols of the icy wastes, vigilant for any ork remnants. Instead, by pure luck, the patrols stumbled across the marshalling forces of a full battalion of the Alpha Legion and one of their two hidden bases within the Chondax system. Unwilling to allow the advantage of surprise to be lost, the Alpha Legion loosed their own mounted squadrons in pursuit, seeking to silence any warning before they fell upon the main host of the White Scars on Byfrust. However, they could not match the Vth Legion for speed or the peerless control they had over their mechanical mounts, and were quickly outdistanced. Tsolmon Khan, forewarned of the host approaching, had ample time to abandon his makeshift base and escape, but in doing so would surrender any chance of warning the Khagan of the Alpha Legion’s treachery. Neither he nor his warriors would abandon their duty and, despite the approach of the far larger Alpha Legion force, held their ground and attempted to transmit a message through the maelstrom of new signals now flooding the system.

The White Scars could not know that their Khagan was blasting a path directly away from the fighting on distant Byfrust. Tsolmon Khan’s attempts to warn the primarch failed, drowned out by the signals that had flooded the system, and the oncoming force of Alpharius’ sons bore enough heavy firepower to quickly reduce his meagre fortifications to ruin. In the face of overwhelming odds, Tsolmon is recorded as making the following statement, which has since passed into legend:

“Brothers, we know not from whence our betrayal has come, from the Warmaster or our Emperor, and it matters not. We fight for our honour and the Khagan, not at the demand of some distant tyrant. We fight because we were born to do so, not for the ambitions of emperors. We are the White Scars, we are the storm on the horizon and we bow to no one.”

And the White Scars charged, laughing as they went into battle, forming a flying wedge of jetbikes, assault land speeders and light armour aimed at the heart of the Alpha Legion formation. Little expecting this subtle ferocity, the Alpha Legion were initially taken by surprise, though such surprise would only be momentary. Yet this was all the opening the White Scars required. A detachment of the Golden Keshig opened a hole in the ranks of the Alpha Legion, lances shattering ceramite and spearing through even Terminator plate. Behind them came almost every warrior Tsolmon could muster, White Scars and Imperial soldiery alike staking everything on one desperate charge. The target of the assault was the commander Malek Striga and his acolytes, to cut the heads from the hydra. The heavier elements of the White Scars attack slowed to engage the main body of the enemy, granting the fleeter Scimitar and Erinyes jetbikes of the White Scars and Silent Sisterhood the opportunity to push deeper into their formation, seeking its corrupted heart.

Hurtling down upon the Alpha Legion’s command cadre, the jetbike-mounted warriors were met by a wall of dark, roiling warp-flame, the work of the sorcerous powers of Consul Striga and yet another sign of the Alpha Legion’s descent into treachery and abomination. The White Scars faltered as Striga and his acolytes unleashed hell upon them, gouts of rancid flame and shrieking beams of impossible energy tearing holes in their phalanx and stalling the assault in its tracks. Through the hel-storm, however, came the surviving warrior maidens of the Silent Sisterhood, warp-flame recoiling from them as though alive and terrified of their presence. Immune to the dark arts of the Alpha Legion’s sorcerer, the Silent Sisters threw themselves at the renegade Legionaries, the acolytes falling to their blades as their psychic kine-glaives failed them.

Knight-Centura Calistis Merovin, wounded and exhausted from battle, faced Malek Striga in single combat. Though a superlative warrior in her own right, the Silent Sister could not match the sheer transhuman might of the Legiones Astartes consul and was cast down, mortally wounded by his lance. As Striga prepared to deliver the final blow, Tsolmon Khan appeared through the failing psychic miasma that surrounded the pair, weakened as it was by the Knight-Centura, and struck him dead with his thunder hammer. Fading into the twisting glacial tunnels and redoubts so recently held by the orks, the Alpha Legion surrendered the field, no longer willing to indulge the White Scars in open battle.

At this point, as if in answer to the desperate alarm broadcast at Tsolmon’s order, a lone cruiser slid into high orbit over Byfrust. Yet this was no sleek White Scars vessel, but the blunt, efficient form of an Alpha Legion bombardment cruiser, later identified as Phi-Hekator. The Alpha Legion ship moved into geosynchronous orbit above the battlefield, weapon batteries primed and locked onto the site of the White Scars’ short-lived victory. Below, only now made aware that the Khagan and his fleet were far across the system, leaving Tsolmon and his troops with no hope of rescue of reinforcement, the last few hundred White Scars gathered, seeking out their wounded on the field that they might meet death defiantly on their feet. Tsolmon Khan himself, his fleeting success now rendered meaningless, tossed aside the corpse of Malek Striga and gathered up the fallen form of the Knight-Centura before joining his men that they might meet their fate together.

Less than three hundred warriors remained out of thousands - Legiones Astartes, Silent Sisterhood, and sentinels of the Charonid fanes all bound together by the betrayal perpetuated upon them. All waited in silence for their end as Phi-Hekator slowly turned to bring its vast macro-lance batteries to bear. Yet fate had decreed a different end, and when the sky lit up, it was not with the searing light of descending lance fire, but instead with the death throes of Phi-Hekator itself, struck without warning by another vessel.

This new arrival was barely recognisable, hull plating melted and deformed by the extreme heat it had endured and still bearing the marks of an earlier battle, but those few scraps of heraldry that remained marked it as the Hawkstar. Presumed lost in an earlier battle on the far side of the smaller companion star of the Chondax system, the Hawkstar had circumnavigated Chondax Alpha-Secundus under cover of its outer corona, finally emerging near Byfrust. Its first salvo had crippled Phi-Hekator, and its second obliterated the Alpha Legion ship before it could recover or return fire. The battered White Scars cruiser settled into orbit over Byfrust, still radiating the excess heat accumulated during its voyage as it dispatched landing craft to recover the survivors below.

On the surface, Tsolmon Khan and his warriors delayed their escape to perform one last duty. Upon the icy plains of Byfrust they raised a cairn of stone and fallen ship spars, a rough and harsh monument to those who had fallen valiantly in battle. Within, they interred all of the loyalist bodies they could find, from the lowliest battle-brother of the Vth Legion or initiate of the Charonid auxilia to that of Knight-Centura Merovin. In death all were made equal, and those who yet lived were humbled by the courage that they had shown on the field of battle. On that crude tomb, raised on the bleak and lonely surface of a world unknown to the wise and the mighty, they inscribed no lengthy tributes nor gilded laurels, only a few short words of praise in the flowing Korchin script of Chogoris:

Under blue heaven, empires rise and then they fall. Heroes cannot die.

- The Horus Heresy Book Eight: Malevolence

#warhammer 40k #horus heresy #white scars #alpha legion #sisters of silence #Silent Sisterhood #Chondax Campaign #the Age of Darkness #Tsolmon Khan #Calistis Merovin #Documentarist Archive #Imagist Archive #the Horus Heresy Malevolence #Betrayal at Byfrust #Miniatures #FW #The Hunt That Never Ends

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