I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.
Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex.

Watchers

000.M42
Light's End

It was not a temple.

Oh, it had some of the traits of one, to be sure. Someone who did not know this place's purpose or history could be forgiven for thinking it one, though its wardens would not look kindly upon such a mistake. They would look upon the pillars engraved with names, on the thousands and thousands of candles glowing in the tunnels, on the lifelike gisants that depicted so many of the Emperor's warriors in their final repose, and they would believe it to be a temple – a crypt, where the Emperor's loyal servants could finally rest and know peace.

But it was not a temple. It was a memorial, built to honor warriors who had given their lives in service of a dream none of them had lived to see spread across the stars. It had been constructed when that dream had first blossomed, when the Great Crusade had left Terra to bring peace and order to the scattered pockets of Humanity across the Sol system – and then, to the rest of the galaxy.

As the Emperor's Legions liberated the system that had birthed their species, the Master of Mankind had commanded those who bore the numeral seventeen on their armor, and given them special instructions. It was said, in the records of these chosen's distant descendants, that He had pointed at the sky, and bade them to bring His fallen warriors there, to rest for all eternity amidst the stars for which they had given their lives.

So had been created the Shrine of Unity. The Imperial Heralds – who in time would become the Word Bearers – had been built within a comet whose elliptical orbit brought it within the Solar system every few years. The bodies of the Thunder Warriors and Space Marines who had perished in the Unification Wars had been carried across the void and laid to rest within the catacombs whose digging the Legionaries had directed themselves.

By decree of the Emperor Himself, a hundred Imperial Heralds had been attached to the Shrine of Unity, to care for and defend it. When Lorgar had been found and the Imperial Heralds had become the Word Bearers, that duty had remained, and when the Urizen had travelled to Terra, he had visited his sons and honored them for their work.

In the ten thousand years since, the vigil had continued. Assignment to the Shrine of Unity was seen as an honor among the Word Bearers, and there was a rotation where those who distinguished themselves on the field being sent to Sol to relieve one of the hundred Space Marines keeping watch over the remains of the Imperium's ancient heroes. Beyond guarding and maintaining the Shrine, the Watchers – as they called themselves – were also responsible for guiding Imperial scholars who, for one reason or another, required access to the catacombs and the priceless, irreplaceable records of the Unification Wars laid alongside the fallen warriors.

Over time, they had accumulated other duties as well. They had been called upon to arbitrate disputes between Imperial factions, none daring to contest their neutrality. They had used their small flotilla to journey across the neighbouring systems and help enforce the Emperor's Peace there. The legendarily insular Adeptus Custodes had closer ties with the Watchers than with virtually any other Space Marine force across the galaxy, for while the Custodes were both greater warriors and more skilled diplomats, the sheer intimidating factor of their presence meant that sometimes, it was better to send a party of less-terrifying – but still transhuman – Word Bearers.

Only twice had that vigil been interrupted. First, when the fires of Guilliman's Heresy had reached the shores of Sol, and all warriors had been called to defend the walls of the Imperial Palace. The Shrine had been left untended then, as its guardians – reduced from one hundred to seventy-nine by the echoes of the war that had reached the Throneworld ahead of the Arch-Traitor's armies – journeyed to Terra to add their blades and bolters to its defenses. Warned by Magnus that the renegades could make use of the Shrine's symbolic status in their vile sorceries, Perturabo had used artefacts from the Dark Age of Technology to speed up the comet's path, sending it away from the Sol system's plane, where it would be useless to the traitors' plans.

It had worked, and the Shrine had been left alone, returning to Sol after the carnage of the Siege of Terra had ended and the Traitor Legions had been put to flight. Before departing to join the Scouring, where he would eventually vanish while facing the champions of the Dark Gods on Khur, Lorgar had visited the Shrine one more time – and wept for all that had been lost, and all that would now never be.

The second occurrence had happened during the thirty-sixth millennium, in those dark days known to chroniclers as the Reign of Blood. When Goge Vandire overthrew the Ecclesiarch and added his throne to his own as master of the Administratum, the Watchers had become wary. Like all sons of Lorgar, they had a healthy contempt for the Imperial Creed, but Vandire's proclamations that he intended to purge the corruption from the God-Emperor's Church were judged worthy of at least listening to the man. When the new Ecclesiarch sent emissaries to the Shrine of Unity to explain his plans in detail and ask for the Watchers' support, they were received.

But it had been a trap. Vandire was wisely fearful of the Word Bearers, even more so than he was of the Custodes, whose influence had in those days been much diminished and was now restrained to the security of the Imperial Palace. His "emissaries" were assassins, who used suicide bombs during the meeting to decapitate the Watchers before drowning the Shrine in fanatic Frateris Templars. The Watchers had fought long and hard, but eventually they had all perished – except for a few, who had been on a secret mission elsewhere in the Segmentum. Upon their return to Sol, these warriors had discovered the fate of their brothers, and had eventually proven vital to the Inquisition's efforts to warn the rest of the Space Marines Legions of Vandire's atrocities.

In the wake of the Reign of Blood, the Shrine of Unity had been reclaimed by the Seventeenth Legion, and its defences increased tenfold. The bodies of the slain Watchers had been buried with full honor – no one spoke of what had been done to the remains of the thousands of Frateris Templars they had killed before being dragged down and slain – and the vigil had resumed. And if Sebastian Thor's successors had looked up from their palaces and shivered at the thought of what was out there, watching … well, so long as that thought had helped keep them honest, the Watchers would have been satisfied.

The centuries had passed, and turned into millennia. Generations of Word Bearers had come and gone, protecting the Shrine of Unity and keeping watch over the heart and soul of the Imperium. And now, at the turning of the millennium, things were going to change once more.

By now, every single one of the eight-seven Watchers on station in the Shrine had heard the news of Lorgar's return. It had taken a considerable effort of will for Captain Sor Pheros, the officer in command of the Watchers, not to go straight to his Primarch. Only the knowledge that his duty remained the same – that if the Urizen needed him and his brothers, he would have called for them – had kept him in place. Still, there was no denying the … exuberance that had spread across the ranks.

On its own, Lorgar's return after ten thousand years of absence would have been enough to shake the Imperium to its foundations. But the Urizen hadn't been alone : Magnus the Red, long thought to be all but dead, had also returned, having awakened in time to thwart a Black Crusade aimed at Terathalion. The Crimson King had arrived in Sol soon after the Watchers had received confirmation of Lorgar's sudden presence on Luna.

Sor Pheros wanted to join the Primarchs. By the Emperor, he wanted it, more than he had ever wanted anything else in his five centuries of life. But his duty kept him in check.

It did little for his temper, however, which was why the other Watchers – who had to be feeling the same desire as their Captain – had been very, very careful around him for the last few days. None of them had been foolish enough to ask if they could go to Terra – or Mars, as it seemed the two Primarchs had gone there after meeting up – as "representatives" of the Watchers and the Legion.

As it turned out, Sor Pheros had been right to keep his forces concentrated on the Shrine, though he would never have imagined what was happening across Sol, not even in his worst nightmares.

By chance or destiny, the Shrine of Unity had returned to the Sol system just in time for the turning of the millennium and the Primarch's return. Its elliptical orbit had been forever altered by what Perturabo had done to keep it out of the system during the Siege of Terra, becoming much wider than it had before. It could still be seen from Terra when it returned into the Solar "plane", but only using a telescope. There probably was a metaphor in there, Sor Pheros knew, but now was hardly the time to think about it.

As a result of that altered orbit, the comet was currently somewhere in what was known as the "outer worlds" of the Sol system. The Shrine was beyond the orbit of Uranus, which was currently the closest of the system's worlds.

Yet even from that distance, the Shrine's many auspex and relay networks gave the Watchers a view of the events unfolding across the system. Sor Pheros stood in the command station, a vast, reinforced bunker built on the outer shell of the comet. Surrounded by vox-officers and tech-priests, with a squad of his brothers keeping guard, the Captain of the Watchers grimly listened as the list of disasters grew and grew.

So far, there were multiple aetheric manifestations all across the system, with four different traces on Holy Terra itself. There were signs of battle on Mars' surface, as one of the infernal kingdoms had broken free of the Haydes. An unidentified Chaos ship had appeared near Titan and was sailing directly toward the moon, shrugging off all fire directed its way. Pluto … Pluto was gone – there would be no reclaiming the frozen world, of that Sor Pheros was grimly certain, though the full extent of the threat on that front was difficult to evaluate due to the lack of information they possessed.

Given that they had needed to kill an entire choir of astropaths who had been lost to whatever madness was pouring out of Sol's outermost world, that threat was unlikely to be small.

"Abnormal gravitic readings in the outer system !"

"On screen," ordered Sor Pheros. The main display of the command center shifted, displaying a representation of the void between the Shrine and Pluto.

With Neptune on the other side of Sol, there was an immense region of the system left empty save for the scattered void-fortresses and other outposts. Numbers ran alongside the display, and though the Captain of the Watchers wasn't well versed into the mysteries of the Omnissiah, he knew enough to realize the cosmic magnitude of the energies being unleashed within this apparently empty quadrant.

Then, all of a sudden, where there had been nothing, there was a fleet. The void crackled with arcane energies, and thousands of vessels manifested as if conjured from the blackness of space itself. Each of them was unique, yet they all shared the same alien sense of design. Their hulls were made of some organic-seeming material, painted in a violent riot of colors and twisted into shapes that reminded Sor Pheros of immense, mutated sea creatures. They gleamed in the light of Sol, the reflection hurting Sor Pheros' eyes even through the screens, and the few vox-relay stations that had survived the gravitic shift of the fleet's arrival were obliterated in seconds by torrents of greenish energy.

At the center of this xenos armada was an enormous engine, spherical and hundreds of kilometers wide, its surface bristling with unknown devices that were no doubt weapons of some sort. The cogitators chugged to put together a complete picture of this immense engine, combining imagery gleaned from a hundred different point of views, and a three-dimensional model of the sphere was projected on one of the hololiths. The moon-sized ship had an immense pit on its equator, whose depth the auspex couldn't evaluate – all attempts at scanning the pit's contents returned only a cascade of errors.

Cold realization dawned on Sor Pheros. By teleporting so deep within the Sol system, this fleet had completely bypassed the defenses of the system's halo belt. Thousands of Star Forts, manned by Imperial Regiments and empyrically anchored to the arrival points of the Warp Routes leading to and from Sol, all made entirely useless. There were other defenses deeper in the system, of course, but the vast majority of the efforts made to turn Sol into an unconquerable fortress had been located at its borders. The sheer size of an entire solar system made truly securing it a fool's errand otherwise.

The orbital defenses of every world in the Solar system had been designed by the war-smiths of the Fourth Legion, working with the nigh-limitless resources of the Imperium and the knowledge of the Adeptus Mechanicus. But even they had limits, and it had been thousands of years since they had been truly tested.

A groan of pain drew his attention away from the display. Next to him stood Brother Belagosa, leader of the Librarians attached to the Watchers. Belagosa and his psychic brethren had been the ones to confirm Lorgar's return, and they were also the ones who were suffering the most from what was occurring across Sol. Sor Pheros had ordered the rest of the Librarians to isolate within their warded chambers, but he needed Belagosa's own insight into what was happening.

He wondered now if that decision hadn't been a mistake.

"I can hear them," groaned the Librarian, using his staff as support to stay on his feet, sweat running on his face. "Aboard these ships … they are … singing ? Their psychic presence is … abhorrent, brother-captain."

"Hold on, brother," urged Sor Pheros. "The Emperor needs your service, now more than ever."

Despite the immense pain he must be feeling to let it show, Belagosa managed a weak smile and nodded. Neither of them mentioned that the two Word Bearers behind him had their bolters drawn. They both knew why such precautions were necessary, but there was no need to speak it aloud.

"The cogitators have answered our queries, Captain," called out one of the human officers. "The technology of these ships resemble that of a xenos species encountered by the Third Legion during the Great Crusade : the Laers. But according to the records, the Laers were completely wiped out at the order of the Primarch Fulgrim, and even before that, their space technology was limited to a handful of in-system crafts. Records indicate that the Primarch's decision was made after the Thousand Sons attached to his Legion discovered that the Laers had been corrupted by the Warp."

Sor Pheros' mind flashed back to the astropathic communications they had received not so long ago – the terrible news coming from Chemos, announcing that the Emperor's Children's homeworld was besieged by the Black Legion. The news had been heavily suppressed across Sol – just like the next set of messages, sent by the reinforcements that had arrived to Chemos only to find it in ruins and the Black Legion gone.

It didn't seem like a coincidence that the Laers would reappear now, after those who had supposedly exterminated them had been cast down by the Clonelord's bastard Legion.

The officer visibly swallowed as he continued : "And we also have a hit for the gravitic displacement accompanying their teleportation inside the system, my lord. The auspex registered a similar phenomenon once before."

"When ?" urged Sor Pheros.

"I … I don't know, my lord. The time-stamp is from early M32, with the attached words 'during the Beast's rising, when its grin shone over the Throne.'"

Sor Pheros' blood ran cold. The officer might not know what those words referred to, but he certainly did. The War of the Beast was not the Imperium's proudest moment, and knowledge of how close they had all come to utter ruin had been quietly suppressed over the millennia. Even among the Legions, details were scarce – but Sor Pheros was the master of the Shrine of Unity, and had spent many a night reading through its vast archives.

He knew of the teleportation technology the Orks had used during the War of the Beast, of how it had allowed them to deploy many of their own war-moons across the galaxy – including one in Terra's own orbit. The same archives claimed that the Mechanicus had recovered some of that technology in the wake of the War's end, but that it had ultimately been judged too dangerous and unstable to adapt for the Imperium's use.

Sor Pheros was willing to believe that, given what he knew of Orks and their so-called 'technology'. But the Beast's forces had been scattered all across the galaxy – they had even targeted Eldar Craftworlds and Exodite planets. It was possible that other factions could have recovered pieces of their teleportation technology. And if the Laers had survived the Third Legion's purge …

How long had the foul xenos been planning this attack ?

"I see," said Belagosa suddenly. Sor Pheros turned sharply to look at the Librarian. His brother now stood utterly still, eyes wide open as he looked at something far beyond the confines of the command center.

"They are here," he said, his voice utterly empty of any emotion. "Six and six, the unholy numerology of Ruin. A ritual writ across the void, an offering and a promise all in one. He calls, and they have answered. By six and six they come, and the gates … the gates …"

The Librarian violently threw his head back and screamed, bloody tears streaking on his face :

"THE GATES OF THE SILVER PALACE ARE OPEN WIDE ! THE HARBINGER STAR IS SUNDERED ! THEY ARE COMING ! THEY ARE COMING !"

Somewhere in the command center, a chronometer that had been wrought within the halls of Olympus Mons and designed to be precise to the trillionth of second ticked, marking the sixth minute since the turning of the millennium.

Sor Pheros was no psyker, but he still felt it. There was not a soul across all of Sol who did not – even the Culexus of the Officio Assassinorum and the Pariah agents of the Inquisition felt it, rippling over their empty souls.

The void burned and split. Like skin being ripped apart, a great tear appeared in the blackness of space, spreading from Terra to Pluto and cutting the Sol system in twain. From the point of view of the Shrine of Unity, Uranus simply vanished, swept behind the curtain of madness and ruin.

There were screams, in the command center and beyond it. Sor Pheros felt the terrible weight of the Rift press on his mind, right through the wards, crafted by the Fifteenth Legion in another age, that were supposed to shield the Shrine from the influence of the Warp.

He fought against it, refusing to give in. Around him, mortals wailed and fell on the floor, clawing at their flesh. He drew strength from the sight – those were his people, sworn to follow him just like he was sworn to lead them.

"HOLD FAST !" he roared, slamming his sword into the floor – he had not even realized he had drawn it. "STAND FIRM, SERVANTS OF THE EMPEROR ! THIS SORCERY SHALL NOT VANQUISH US ! HOLD FAST, IN THE NAME OF TERRA AND YOUR DUTY !"

Slowly, order returned to the command center. The pressure didn't stop, but men and women forced themselves to their feet, ignoring the pain they felt in their very souls with a determination that made Sor Pheros' heart fill with pride, despite the grimness of the situation. Not all of them managed it : some were already dead, having succumbed to shock, while others had to be put down by security forces before they could hurt themselves or others.

"Initiate all quarantine protocols," Sor Pheros commanded. "Filter all input through the secondary cogitators before letting the data into our main systems."

The pain was starting to diminish now, in a way not dissimilar to how a cut's initial spike of pain would fade and be replaced with a lesser, continuous pain until it was healed. As the screens resumed activity, displaying an image of the Warp Rift that had cut Sol in two, Sor Pheros didn't think that particular wound would ever fully heal.

The Warp Rift could not be properly measured, but the position of other objects in the system relative to it could – though that required to consider the Rift as a vertical plane, which wasn't true even by a long shot. The Laer fleet was on the same side of it as the Shrine of Unity. They could also still see Mars, but their view of the inner worlds of Sol was almost completely obscured as the Rift splintered down its end, seeming to reach toward the planets like the tendrils of a hungry predator.

"Something is happening in the Laer fleet," called out a different officer from the one who had presented the cogitators' analysis to Sor Pheros.

The main screen switched to a live feed of the Laer's flagship – the enormous, moon-sized vessel. The pit on its equatorial belt was truly immense, and a baleful light emanated from its depths. A tendril of the Warp Rift was reaching inside it, and as Sor Pheros watched, he saw a bright, eldritch light emerge from that pit and flow up the Rift, before speeding all the way to Holy Terra.

Part of the Word Bearer Captain knew that this was impossible – that the laws of physics and the speed at which light travelled meant that even if whatever that light had been had been able to cross the distance between the artificial moon and Terra, he shouldn't have been able to see it. But this was the stuff of the Warp, and the laws of the Materium held no sway over it.

More bursts of light emerged from the pit. They were lesser than the first one, but there were hundreds of them, and they were all aimed at Terra.

Bloody tears ran down Belagosa's face. The two Word Bearers assigned to watching over him had their bolters aimed straight at him now, but they hadn't fired – not yet.

"The stolen sons," he babbled incoherently, twitching in agony as he clutched to his power staff. "The stolen sons, returned from the pits of torment and brought to the Throne once more … Unholy symmetry, a pattern of Ruin woven from their pain ! The Tithe is owed, the Tithe was claimed …"

"Belagosa," Sor Pheros ordered harshly, "take a hold of yourself ! Raise your mental defenses and shut yourself off the Warp. Do it, now !"

For a moment, nothing happened, and the Captain worried that he was going to have to order his Librarian brother executed. But, slowly, Belagosa's twitching diminished, and the frost that had spread around his feet melted away. Sor Pheros managed to catch Belagosa as he collapsed, exhausted beyond even the endurance of a Space Marine. The Captain handed over the Librarian's unconscious body to his minders, ordering them to bring him to the Apothecarion at once.

His focus returned on the displays. They were still centred on the Warp Rift, which pulsated with energy like an infected wound seen through infrared. Tendrils of Warp energy spread from it, worming their way through space and toward inhabited worlds and moons at impossible speeds. One display shifted briefly to the pic-feed of a station on the path of one such tendril, and Sor Pheros saw the true face of the enemy.

These "tendrils" weren't made of Warp energy, after all. They were daemons. Thousands of daemons, rushing down paths of broken stone stretching from the Immaterium and into the Sol system. In the seconds before the display went dark, its data-feed corrupted, the Word Bearer Captain recognized the spawn of the Dark God Slaanesh, Dark Prince of Pain and Pleasure.

And there were so many of these roads, each the size of cities … His mind boggled as he tried to comprehend how many daemons had entered Sol. Billions, at the very least. How could so many manifest at once, especially here, so close to the Astronomican ?

A terrible thought crept into his mind, and he quashed it ruthlessly before it could even express itself into . It couldn't be. It was impossible. The very notion was treachery.

"The Laer fleet is advancing," called out someone, their voice admirably firm. "We are detecting more gravitic shifts on the capital ship – the magi's theory is that they are teleporting troops across the system." The officer – a woman with the markings of a lieutenant on her uniform – turned toward Sor Pheros, and the Captain saw the fear in her eyes, despite her control. "Captain, what are your orders ?"

A Space Marine knew no fear. The capacity for it was removed during the excruciating process that turned an Aspirant into a Legionary. But in that moment, faced with the greatest threat to Sol since the Heresy itself, faced with the terrible possibility that had, however briefly, raised within his own soul, Captain Sor Pheros of the Word Bearers felt something very much akin to terror.

It only lasted for a moment. His training and his oaths reasserted themselves, and he shook himself free of his torpor, scowling at himself for having wasted even a few seconds on such weakness.

"… We fight. We fight until we can fight no longer, and then we keep fighting." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "All hands to the ships," he ordered. "Full battle-readiness. Empty the Shrine and activate the automated defenses. Someone get me the Lord High Admiral on the vox. We must not let this fleet reach Terra."

The Solar Fleet was a powerful force – an entire Battlefleet by the standards of the Imperial Navy, dedicated entirely to the protection of Sol, with occasional forays into its neighbouring systems. Almost every ship of it had been called back for the turning of the millennium – and for all that Sor Pheros was grateful for it now, he couldn't help wondering if someone somewhere hadn't known something he had not.

And yet … just like the other defenses, it had been a long time since the Solar Fleet had seen battle. There were persistent rumors that assignment to the Throneworld's elite defenders had become something of a token of prestige in the Imperial Navy – each position something to be bargained for in the political circles of the Navis Imperialis' elite. The constant drills and manoeuvring exercises should have kept the skills of everyone aboard the Solar Fleet in top condition at least, but Sor Pheros knew all too well just how different real battle was from training – and this was going to be a battle like no other since the Heresy itself.

The Laer fleet outnumbered the Solar Fleet significantly, and the Imperials didn't have anything like the moon-ship of the Warp-spawned xenos. If one counted all the civilian vessels, then the calculus was different, but most of these would be utterly useless except to make the enemy waste their ammunition – if their weapons even used ammunition as the Imperials understood it. The handful of Legion vessels the Watchers would bring to the fray, while nothing to scoff at, were only a drop in the ocean.

But there were other ships in the system that would answer the call to defend it. The great gathering for the turning of the millennium had brought thousands of ships to Sol, and the troop transports had not come without escort. Rogue Traders and Inquisitors, Sisters of Battle, Cardinals and Governors – all had come to Terra, and brought their ships with them. Ordering this disparate assembly into something resembling an order of battle would not be easy, yet surely if one soul in the Imperium could do it, it would be the Lord High Admiral. One did not become a High Lord of Terra by being incompetent – the sheer ruthlessness of Terran high politics meant that any weakness would result in one's downfall.

Even then, going purely by the numbers, death seemed the most likely outcome. And, far worse, so was defeat. But Sor Pheros knew that he was no master of void warfare. The Lord Admiral might see a way to turn this around.

And we have Lorgar, he told himself. The Primarch has returned. We will not fail, not now that the miracle our Legion hoped for has arrived at last.

AN : There. Now the Interludes are done. After much thought, I have decided that the actual Angel War will use the format of Games Workshop's own battle books (like Wrath of Archaon or Vigilus) : it will be divided in parts, each focusing on one particular battle of the Angel War. I still intend to publish it as one chapter once it's done, though, if only because every battle will influence the others.

So ... yeah. It's not going to be finished any time soon.

And no, the Watchers aren't the Watchers in the Dark from the Dark Angels. Sorry about that. I blame my past self for deciding to write these Interludes in alphabetical order. Plus, it's not as if the Word Bearers would know about the Watchers in the Dark.

I realize that many of you may think that Terra is doomed - that the Interludes have stacked the odds too starkly in favor of Chaos, so that only a Deus Ex Machina could possibly save the Throneworld - which, by the laws of narrative causality, means that one of those simply must happen, taking all the suspense out of the Angel War. To those, I say this :

When one thinks of Sol, one thing must be kept in mind :

Scale.

Sol is an entire star system, but it's not just any star system. It is the heart of the Imperium, its brain and its soul all at once. It is the older star system ever colonized by Humanity. Terra alone is home to a trillion souls, and the Machine-God only knows (along with, perhaps, the Collective) how many live on Mars. And those are just two of the system's inhabited worlds.

The War of the Beast saw the fortifications of the Sol system rebuilt nearly to the same scale as they were during the Heresy, and Iron Warriors envoys have done their best to keep them in place.

Then there is the Alpha Legion's preparations for the Ascension of the God-Emperor. Sure, things didn't go as planned, but all the faithful they brought to Sol in order to facilitate the process are still there.

The truth is that, without the Rift's daemonic hordes and the Laers' fleet, Slaanesh would have no chance of victory at all in the Angel War. Oh, Sol would suffer, that's for sure. Billions would die, and should the Astronomican have fallen, the consequences on the galaxy at large would have been impossible to imagine. And maybe - maybe - the Flawless Host could cause a lot more damage if they succeeded in their particular mission.

But six warbands and six Greater Daemons ? Do you know how many billions of soldiers there are in Sol ? How many Grey Knights, how many Custodes ? How many ships, from the Imperial Navy to the merchant vessels bringing the supplies Terra needs to sustain itself and their escorts ?

In all the galaxy, Cadia alone may challenge Terra for the most well-defended world in the Imperium, and even then, it would take a conclave of Iron Warriors to decide.

The six warbands are arrows sent toward important targets. The six Keepers of Secrets are the beacons needed to tear the void asunder. The daemonic legions and the Laers, on the other hand ... They are not here to raid, or to destroy a particular objective. They are here to conquer Sol, and hold it for their lord and master. They are the decisive factor, the almighty hammer that will crush all who resist the coming of Slaanesh's Chosen.

Light's End is here. The night has fallen.

And it not yet written that we shall see the dawn ...