Dukel stood upon the bridge of the Heartfire, his boots planted firmly on the shoulder plating of the Queen of Glory, the massive warship drifting silently in Mars' orbit. Before him loomed Terra, not far in astronomical terms—but utterly unreachable now.
By all accounts, he should have arrived long ago. Under standard warp-travel conditions, the journey between Mars and Terra was trivial.
But in his psyker sight, Terra was no longer visible as the beacon of humanity. Instead, it was wreathed in a crimson tide—a blood-drenched Shifting Realm, a manifestation of the Warp bleeding into realspace. The Blood God's Ritual within the Throneworld had succeeded far beyond expectation, corrupting even the northwestern quadrant of the Imperial Palace's superstructure in the High Heavens.
The power of the Lord of Skulls was now unleashed in full.
Time and space had fractured. The Heartfire's approach had not brought it closer, but instead trapped it in a maddening loop—each moment stretched, each second warped. Terra grew more distant, not in miles, but in metaphysical essence.
This was wrong. Abnormally wrong.
Dukel frowned. His thoughts turned toward the Master of Mankind. Even in His shattered state upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor's will could still shape the Warp. If He had desired, the Sea of Souls would have erupted with psychic storms fierce enough to cast the armies of Chaos beyond the galactic rim.
Even if the Emperor was unaware, others would have acted. The Commander of the Imperial Guard, the Lion King—Lion El'Jonson—now wielded supreme authority in His name. They should have crushed the heretic cults long before any ritual reached this magnitude.
The failure was unthinkable.
Still, Dukel felt no fear for Terra's survival.
The billions of Null-priests stationed within the Imperium's psychic bastions, each tied to the Webway and the Empyrean alike, were themselves a force potent enough to incinerate any daemonic incursion.
It was then that a transmission rune flared into life—Macragge's Glory had opened communication. The voice of Roboute Guilliman echoed across the vox channel:
"Dukel, I've received a distress beacon from the sons of Dorn. I'm moving to support. What are your next steps?"
"Aiferal is preparing the teleportation matrix," Dukel replied. "Once I tear open this blood haze, I'll be on Terra."
"Brother, I was meant to oversee the Warmaster's celebration," Guilliman said, tone heavy. "Now it's fallen to ruin. I should've mobilized the Ultramarines earlier, purged those heretics before they rooted. This is my failure."
Dukel laughed. "Brother, I have no need for flowers or fanfare. I care not for parades. Blood and fire—that is the only celebration worthy of my name."
As the two Primarchs spoke, Terra descended into apocalypse.
"Fall back to the fortress!" Waldo commanded, his vox-channel crackling as he directed the mortal auxiliaries.
Under his orders, the regiments began to retreat—but before they could make distance, a psychic blast ruptured through the atmosphere. All felt it. A pulsing, daemonic scream that split the skies—
"ROAR!"
The heavens turned scarlet, and the skies boiled with wrath.
The atmosphere of Terra was no longer air and ozone, but a blood-red ocean. The veil between reality and the Immaterium was torn apart as something ancient and furious broke through.
The roar was not just sound—it was rage incarnate. It infected the minds of every living thing, instilling a thirst for slaughter and the taste of blood.
Molten brass flowed like rivers of lava. Within the sulfurous mists, monstrous silhouettes emerged—vast and infernal.
The Greater Daemons of Khorne had arrived.
With every footstep, they scorched the sacred ground of Holy Terra, brass chains clanking as they advanced.
They brought war in its purest, most blasphemous form.
This was no rabble of Chaos. This was a hierarchy of madness. The Blood God's chosen, an elite cadre of daemons, each forged in the crucible of endless slaughter. On this human cradle where illusion and reality now intertwined, they stormed into the Materium, their fury unmatched.
The Warp storm intensified.
Through the blood-mist and magma glow, the Flesh Hounds of Khorne charged first. Their barking echoed with unholy joy, brass collars spiked and gleaming with gore. Their fangs dripped saliva and carnage.
Behind them came the Berzerkers, clad in jagged armor, twin axes raised high.
Then the Bloodletters, spears glowing with daemonic essence.
A terrifying legion, driven only by one truth—kill or die.
But it was only the beginning.
The skies darkened further still—so black and heavy they seemed ready to collapse upon the world. Warp-energy condensed, and from it, something worse emerged.
Cracks split the sky.
Bound in brass chains, exhaling sulfur, a Great Daemon descended. Its vast wings blotted the light. Its mountainous form radiated murder. In one hand, a cleaver of brass and rage. In the other, a whip that screamed as it lashed the air.
"Blood for the Blood God!" it bellowed.
A shockwave tore outward. Blood waves surged. Terra trembled.
Imperial Guardsmen watched in awe and horror, the thunderous roar rattling armor and skull alike. Their lungs refused to work. Their spirits faltered.
None had ever witnessed a Khorne host of such scale.
High above, the Commander of the Imperial Guard and the Archangel stood watch from the Lion's Gate. Though their expressions were calm, their eyes betrayed concern.
They knew.
This was only the vanguard.
And then, eight minutes later, another monster tore through the veil.
"Skulls for the Skull Throne!"
Lava rivers split across the ground. The air stung with sulfur. It wasn't over.
Another Greater Daemon emerged—but this one bore broken wings wrapped in iron chains. He did not fly.
He strode.
Step by step.
Skarbrand had entered the field.
His fury burned so hot that the air itself rippled and boiled around him. His wrath was so total that the Warp screamed in sympathy.
And still they came.
Under the horrified eyes of the Imperium's defenders, daemon after daemon marched forth.
A full eighty-eight Greater Daemons.
Each led their own legion.
Eighty-eight legions of Khorne—his champions, chosen among the 18,880,000 daemons that bore his brand.
The Warp surged.
Reality buckled.
Brass lava flooded the cracks in Terra's sacred soil.
And above all, the Sea of Blood awaited.
There would be no mercy.
Endless blood and countless skulls painted the signs of the coming apocalypse.
"Your Majesty, please save us!"
Across Terra, in sanctified zones guarded by the Adeptus Ministorum, the faithful of the Imperium wept and prayed fervently to the God-Emperor. Despair and terror twisted their souls as priests walked among them, chanting hymns of the Imperial Cult to soothe the masses and shield their minds from the taint of the Warp.
Only through such liturgy could they be spared corruption.
Meanwhile, beneath the surface of Terra, shadows stirred.
An elite warrior of the Dark Angels Chapter, acting under direct orders from Lion El'Jonson, scouted deep within the subterranean layers. His mission: to locate and report on the ritual nodes used by the Khorne cultists to anchor their sorcery.
But what he found was more nightmarish than expected.
He discovered an altar—ancient, blasphemous, soaked in malevolence. Carved with profane runes, it stood at the heart of a brass dais, crowned by a towering throne of skulls. Brass spikes stabbed into the heavens, piercing even the heights of surrounding infrastructure.
Under their long shadows gathered cultists, foul war machines, and worst of all—heavily armored World Eaters.
From a distance, the Dark Angel could see the sigil of Khorne blazing atop the tallest spike—above it, a corpse impaled and bleeding, its lifeblood cascading into runnels carved around eighty-eight sacrificial altars.
Mad chanting echoed across the chamber. The heretics—both mortal and post-human—raised their voices in praise to the Blood God. Beside a tower of headless corpses, cultists slit their arteries, offering themselves in blood-drenched devotion.
At the heart of the unholy rite stood a crimson-robed priest, arms raised upon the brass altar. The energies of the Warp—the fury of the Immaterium—coalesced around him, thick with hatred and rage.
The Dark Angel drew a slow breath.
He understood: this was the epicenter of the upheaval wracking Terra.
But he did not strike.
He turned to leave.
The Lion had not given the order to attack.
As he vanished into the shadows, a violent rupture of energy erupted from the altar. Warp-spawned fire engulfed the ritual site. Cultists were torn apart as their bodies detonated in unison. The tower and the eighty-eight altars surrounding it were reduced to ash. Even the great brass spikes were obliterated in the inferno.
From that cataclysmic eruption—of fire, blood, and hatred—rose a towering figure.
The Red Angel.
The Lord of the Red Sands.
The Gladiator King.
The Son of Betrayal.
Angron.
Bat wings unfurled with a snap of thunder. His monstrous form burst into reality, and his first act upon arrival was to butcher the surviving cultists.
They were beneath him.
Disgusted, Angron crushed the final heretic's skull beneath his boot.
The worthless skull held no meaning.
But atop his head, like a nest of serpents, the Butcher's Nails writhed—drilling, gnawing, howling. The cursed implants screamed with unending fury, stoking his pain, feeding his bloodlust.
"Father? Brother? What are they, if not skulls to be offered to the Brass Throne?"
Above Terra, the Blood God's domain spread like wildfire. The sky cracked. The ground wept gore. Billions of anguished souls screamed in the winds. Blood rained, flowing into rivers across the crimson-hued earth.
Daemonic armies marched across carpets of crushed flesh.
Eighty-eight hosts of greater daemons roared as one—an orgy of carnage incarnate. The most primal hunger of sentient life—the desire to kill—was made manifest.
Yet none of that compared to the dread that followed:
Angron's return.
After ten thousand years, the Primarch of the World Eaters walked once more upon his birth world.
The ground trembled with his rage.
The heavens wept with shame.
As blood fell like holy water, Angron turned toward the Imperial Palace.
As he had done millennia ago, he sought to tear open its gates and drag the Emperor from the Golden Throne.
Every step reeked of murder. His fury was so absolute that even the berserk World Eaters fell back, stunned into reverence.
Angron had returned.
Not to conquer.
But to avenge.
To destroy the world that birthed his torment.
To defy the tyrant who had named himself father.
In the echoing howl of his shattered soul, chaos danced in step. Rage fueled every blow, every breath. He no longer sought to reclaim anything. He had only one desire left—
To drown this world in an ocean of blood.
To bury the past beneath skulls.
Long ago, Angron had been different.
Before the Butcher's Nails, he had been gentle—sensitive to the pain of others, absorbing the suffering of his fellow gladiators.
He had been their protector. A balm to their wounds. Even while enduring abuse, even while forced to fight for the amusement of noble scum—those days, twisted as they were, had been his most cherished.
Even with the Nails boring into his mind, he had clung to the shreds of his humanity.
And when rebellion came, he did not hesitate.
With two thousand fellow slaves, he rose in defiance.
Together, they swore an oath beneath bloodied banners: they would never kneel again.
They would crush the tyrants. They would win their freedom.
But they failed.
They were not soldiers, only broken men with weapons and rage. They died one by one, cut down by trained armies.
Angron should have died there too—his body surrounded by his fallen kin.
He had been ready.
And then He arrived.
The so-called Lord of Mankind.
The "Savior" who took him—not to freedom, but to servitude.
To fight again. To kill again. For an empire that resembled his cage.
To serve a master no different than the slavers who had broken him.
To wear new chains.
Chains forged in gold.
In the name of his Father, the Lord of Mankind freed Angron from the siege.
But of the two thousand gladiators—his brothers, his kin in chains—the Emperor spared none.
They were left behind to die.
Angron, bathed in blood and anguish, watched as the only ones who had ever shown him love or loyalty were slaughtered like animals. His pain boiled into madness.
He snapped.
Fury consumed him as he turned on his would-be saviors. With bare hands, he shattered power-armored Custodians and tore a soldier apart in blind wrath.
The Emperor did not flinch.
The Master of Mankind seized Angron by the throat, lifting him like a ragdoll, and in a voice devoid of warmth or pity, gave his decree.
"You will lead a Legion. You are needed for the Great Crusade."
Angron's voice, hoarse with grief and rage, thundered in reply:
"I would rather have died with them!"
But such sentiment only triggered the agony of the Butcher's Nails—cursed neural implants burrowed into his brain. Every memory of those lost, every flicker of sorrow or regret, was punished with searing pain.
Angron howled as his sanity was devoured by sorrow. Reason gave way to rage.
He was forged in torment by the slave masters—and now he would bring torment to all slave masters in return.
A blood-chilling roar echoed across Holy Terra, rattling the void shields and shaking the very crust of the Throneworld. Mortals trembled and wept, curling into themselves as the skies burned crimson and the air trembled with psychic echoes.
The End Times had come.
On the high spires of the Lion's Gate Spaceport, two figures stood tall: Sanguinius, the Angelic Primarch, radiant even amid despair, and Captain-General Constantin Valdor, his golden halberd gleaming in the blood rain.
Together, they beheld the approaching storm.
An endless wave of World Eaters, blood-maddened berserkers howling in praise of Khorne. Daemonic hosts, hideous and vast, their ranks led by eighty-eight Greater Daemons, with Angron—Daemon Primarch of the World Eaters—towering at their center, his wings outstretched like a living apocalypse.
The flood of wrath surged toward the walls of the Imperial Palace, a tide of madness and hate.
Sanguinius gripped the handle of his Blade Encarmine tighter. Valdor locked eyes with the red horizon, his face a stoic mask of grim resolve.
They would not yield.
The defenders of Terra fought like men possessed. Bolter fire, macro-plasma blasts, void shields straining at capacity—the sky itself was aflame with the Empire's fury.
Autocannon batteries and defense turrets turned whole regiments of daemons to ash.
But it wasn't enough.
For every daemon slain, more poured forth from the Warp. The sky had torn open, and Terra bled.
Even the combined might of the Custodes, Sanguinius' Blood Angels, and mortal defenders could not stop the grinding advance.
Within eight hours, the outer defense lines surrounding the Lion's Gate were all but overrun.
Faced with extinction, the Angel unleashed his full power. Wings wide, blade blazing, he carved a path of ruin through the enemy ranks, a living storm of vengeance.
Every fortress bastion thundered with gunfire.
But Terra was drowning in blood.
For every daemon destroyed, the Warp screamed louder, reality weakened further, and Angron's laughter—deep, guttural, and mad—echoed above all.
No matter how bravely they fought, the defenders of the Imperium faced an uncomfortable truth:
They were not holding the line. They were delaying the inevitable.