The Complete History of the Fall of Orpheus (Warhammer 40,000 Lore)

In this most dangerous galaxy of ours, doom may come from countless corners, seeking our human end by bolt or blade or claw or maw. It is our fate. this endless war. We are forever trapped in a terminal decline where we must face and fight the end of all things every day. In many cases, we are granted all too much awareness of such calamities as they bear down upon us, howling their coming to the stars, that the gods themselves may watch the coming wars with gluttonous glee. Yet others are quite the opposite. Patient are they, a lingering terrible presence, content to bide time and seize upon the opportunity to bring ruin at the hour of their choosing. [music] Our tragically human conception of the passage of time is so inconsequential to these minds as to verge into hilarity. To them, we are pests. No, we are bacteria. An infestation so beneath contempt as to barely factor within calculations. The tale of this chronicle is of one such war. A conflict fought against an end inevitable. Battles whose outcomes were decided millennia before they had even been fought. Know then that this is a record of the fall of Orpheus. The Orpheus sector located in the veiled region of Segmentum Tempestus on the very borders of Imperial space is believed to have been settled first by humanity in the dark age of technology. The little evidence we have of this comes from great crusade era Imperial exploratory expeditions that first brought the emperor's banner to the local volume. most notably those of rogue trader Lady Arcia Orpheus. The Lady Orpheus was the first Imperial expedition into the Mandraaran stars of the Segmentum, intended to be a pathfinder for the true expedition fleets of the Estartis Legions and the Imperial Army. She discovered remnant human planets, much reduced in power and sophistication, dwelling within an uneasy parody with several Xenos species. although which ones we have no record as they were laterally annihilated by the advancing great crusade. Notably, the systems cataloged were marked by the extreme age of their planets, the majority of whom were long since incapable of sustaining life. Such was the apparent age of these worlds. It was difficult to establish if their barren nature had always been the case or if they had been subjected to some celestial calamity in the far distant past. Curiously, the furthest flung of these planets, the ones closest to the galactic rim, apparently bore remnant ruins of a prehuman civilization, although it appears Lady Orpheus did not examine or record those in detail beyond noting their deeply sinister character. Although marked for further exploration, the veiled region did not see colonization during the outward rushes of those late crusade years as the advent of the great heresy put paid to hopes of expansion and prosperity. Instead, the region, owing to its remoteness and navigable difficulty, became a haven for refugees, corsairs, briggins, and all manner of galactic flatsom, dwelling under neither the banner of terror nor the wararm master. The Veiled Region became a battleground during the scouring as fleeing elements of the Alpha Legion under the leadership of warlord Dinat Mal claimed the volume for themselves, harrowing all Imperial forces sent to exterminate them. The last Imperial outpost in the region, a garrison station at Amara, was destroyed by the Alpha Legion during the campaign, ending what little presence the Empire yet possessed there. It became known as the Dark Marches, passing from Imperial concern for nearly a millennium. It was not until M32 that an incursion by the Adeptus Estart's Ravenguard chapter marked the first attempts by Terra to pursue the enemies within the region. While expecting to assess traitor strength, the Raven Guard instead found a grave. The remains of the Alpha Legion Strike cruiser AAM's Razer had been grounded on the jungle world of Apollon, surrounded by skeletal remains of 20th Legion Estartis alongside curiously relics and wargeear from the Iron Hands and White Scars Legions, as well as remains of mutant humans, Ildari, Crave, and other unidentified Xenos species. With no evidence forthcoming as to quite how this charal house had been affected, and with their vengeance denied, the Ravenguard departed to make their reports to terror. The Dark Marches went relatively untouched for several more millennia, with the Imperium focusing efforts on the pacification and settlements of volumes closer to major population centers and possessing less dreadful reputations. This would change when in 610 M36, segmentum tempestus was at the height of a renaissance in power. Imperial chronicers have termed the rising storm. Loyalist fervor burgeoning in the aftermath of the age of apostasy was at its apex. And with the segmentum relatively unscathed by the conflicts that had marked that epoch, Imperial authorities launched numerous crusades to expand the Emperor's realm, make safe its borders, and bring its light to the darkest reaches of that region of the galaxy. The Dark Marchers Crusade was an especial success and indeed was led by Lord Tempestus Hal Orpheus, a lineal descendant of the rogue trader who had initially explored the region. Over the course of 150 years, the crusade claimed nearly 600 worlds for the Imperium, eventually being declared a triumphant success and seeing the birth of four new Imperial sectors. Hakan, Leak, Urichi, and Orpheus. The capital of the latter was Amara, the site of the previous Imperial garrison destroyed by the Alpha Legion. Sitting as it did on the nexus of several stable warp corridors, the worlds of Arcantis, Gedrid, and Midwinter were granted as prizes to the Astromeitarum regiments of the Crusade that had distinguished themselves most highly, while the dead worlds of the Meer system rich in mineral wealth were granted to the Adeptist Mechanicus as their sovereign territory. Initial colonization efforts were deemed too slow, forcing the administr to redirect refugee flows from a dozen nearby war zones towards the Orpheus sector. Such an act is far from uncommon within the Imperium and was further supplemented by an additional invocation of the Edict of Transmission, an administratum act allowing worlds whose populations are in terminal decline to be forcibly relocated. Their homes abandoned by the Imperium that their human stock be preserved elsewhere. In practice, these efforts consigned many millions of human subjects to a dangerous journey into a relatively unknown frontier, resulting in the deaths of millions of souls aboard vessels lost in transit and on failed colony drives. In 976 M37, after a millennium of relatively comfortable frontier prosperity, all contact is lost with the LEX sector. While itself not especially uncommon upon the Imperium's borders, what with tempestuous warp storms of the Galactic Rim, the incident is marked by an unusual amount of obfuscation on behalf of the Ordo Xenos of the Inquisition, whose segmentum conclaves seal all records of the occurrence while simultaneously ordering Segmentum authorities to massively increase the military tithes on the Orpheus sector itself. The near crippling economic impact of mass conscription, significant expansion of the sector's battle fleet, and construction of orbital defenses around key worlds halts all rimward colonial efforts almost overnight, further stymied by an inquisitorial ban on further exploration of those most remote volumes. A millennium of ceaseless military expansion followed by consistent refugee and pilgrim population influxes created conditions of significant unrest within the sector, forcing the first of numerous purggation crackdowns to root out social malcontents. The situation was primed for the disaster that was to follow when heretic followers of the fought St. Von Malice caused mass uprisings on the world of Appirus and Kolskath, [music] rendering both into wastelands and draining sector resources in the process. Epirus itself was a massive loss as one of the sector's key agri worlds. Famine would persistently stalk the Orpheus sector for centuries to come, ultimately contributing to the rise of the cultistari amongst the nobility and burgeois of the sector. those who had suffered the greatest economic losses from the previous thousand years of tithe and destabilization. The cult's resources and connections would make them an almost impossible presence to fully stamp out. Despite the best efforts of the Ordo Hereticus and the Adeptus Arbites, despite the forever persistent machinations of the archeneemy, this particular sect was not dedicated to the worship of the ruinous powers. Rather, the Celestrii worshiped an ancient race of powerful beings that cult dogma said were slumbering within the hidden reaches of the galaxy. Beings whose day of awakening would bring bloody ruin for their enemies and eternal life for their supplicants. Ordo Hereticus records, one has been permitted access to state that religious ceremonies were held by the cults around recovered xenoarchchaeological artifacts of unknown provenence, rights that were often cannibalistic in nature. The tensions within the sector came to a bloody apogee between 860 and 903 M39 when disaffected nobles, chartists, and efficients began a series of bloody vendettas that dragged the sector into interign bedum. The House of Orpheus had decades prior been replaced in its gubernatorial role by the House of Lan. A decadent aristocratic lineage renowned for their profleacy whose corrupt skimming of what little fat remained in the economically strained volume was the final straw for many under their nominal charge. Tithe tensions and constant xenos raids pushed the moneyed class of Orpheus into a campaign of assassinations, sabotage, and piracy. A tangled web that inevitably led to a full-on civil war when the honor clans of the Dusilan cluster seceded from the Orpheus sector, providing a rallying point for several other renegade factions and fundamentally undermining the sector's stability. Desperate to make an impact on the ongoing power plays, the governing parliament of Amrafell resorted to employing Xenos mercenaries, deploying the vile Crave against their rivals. Inevitably into this conflict stalked the depradations of the arch enemy as bleeding over from the nearby Haxon sector's conflicts, chaos aligned groups provoked uprisings on Celikar and Apollon with demonic emanations breaching the warp on both planets and all Imperial control breaking down as hell stalked the populations. Orpheus's deliverance was wrought from an entirely unexpected quarter. Above the skies of Amara arrived a ramshackle crusade force made of a desperate collection of astromeitarum elements, ragtag militias and threadbear pilgrims. But zealots all a flame with the glory of the emperor and driven by an arch confessor of the ecclesiarchy named Marduk of Helvon. Driven by ecstatic visions he claimed were granted to him by the emperor, Marduk sought to styy the doom of the sector, a great calamity he claimed would rise, quote, from where the light of Orpheus falls forever into shadow. Regardless of his motivation, the Confessor's arrival alongside his more than 100,000 fanatics was a pivotal moment in the sector's history. The ensuing war of faith pitched the crusade against the archeneemy forces which were revealed to have the support from heretic estates of the alpha legion nightlords and deathmongers. Accordingly, the angel's revenant chapter of the adeptus estartes alongside the order of the valerous heart of the adeptus aoritas responded hastily to the petitions of age from the arch confessor supplemented by a task force from the segmentum's ordius inquisitorial conclave. This escalated conflict ultimately lasted two decades and put to death a full 20% of the sector's population in its calamity. The climactic battle over the world of Kolskath remained for a millennia a curious and enduring mystery until later events brought revelation to its sorry tale. The planet heavily fortified by the warpsmiths of the deathmonger heretic estates was besieged by Marduk himself with the full might of the surviving baseline human crusaders. Rather than involving his Aardis and Sororitas allies, Marduk decreed the emperor had wished for the common soldiery to claim the world in his name. Indeed, the arch confessor was initially quite successful. His final communicates to nearby Imperial forces were full of his customary fiery vigor, stating that the faithful had broken the orbital cordon and forced multiple landing zones into heretic territory. only suddenly for astropathic communication to cease, save for a garbled message of pure alarm. An intervening Angel's Revenant strike cruiser, rushing to the aid of the crusade, and believing a hitherto unknown heretic force had suddenly joined the battle, was ambushed as soon as it translated in system by two small but extraordinarily powerful void ships. They resembled no vessel on record that the chapter had ever encountered, and the exotic weapons deployed likewise had no precedent in Aard's combat doctrine. The strike cruiser was ultimately victorious, but horrifically mauled, managing to destroy one of the ambushing vessels before the other retreated. Sensorium suites recorded distinct energy discharge patterns similar to those of the ambusher's weaponry being unleashed further in system. corresponding readings speaking to a massive fleet engagement taking place. Given the estates's vessel's condition, it could do little but limp in system, arriving far too late to intervene in whatever battle had taken place. The mysterious attackers had departed. What they left behind was a graveyard. Burning hulks of Imperial ships drifting in orbit, sundered by devastating weaponry. Survivors yet lived amongst the debris field, but below the planet was a howling storm of radioactive ash and unearly fire. Seemingly all trace of Imperial and archenee enemy forces utterly obliterated. The world was renamed postmortem as St. Marduk's Bane, lost forever to grand environmental collapse, but now bearing the name of the lost, martyed, and canonized [music] Arch Confessor. The crusade concluded on a grim note, and of the mysterious attackers, no trace was ever found. The rebuilding of the Orpheus sector involved centuries of consolidation and repopulation efforts. The forces of the War of Faith were instrumental in the early aspects of the latter, laying down arms in exchange for plots of land on war ravaged worlds, with the Inquisition maintaining a significant roving presence in the sector to root out surviving heretic cells and purge suspected populations of possible taint. Napoleon, as the center of many of the warp breaches and incursions, was granted to the holy ordos in perpetuity, becoming an inquisitorial fortress world. While the small colony of Lethra was recast as a shrine world in the honor of St. Marduk, a cemetery for the millions of war dead and a fortress monastery for the Angel's Revenant, who prior to the Orphan War of Faith had been an entirely fleet-based chapter. The Imperial efforts and the lingering zeal of this crusade allowed the sector to prosper and flourish once more despite the omnipresent threat of xenos incursions from beyond the Imperium's borders. An orc invasion, for example, was thoroughly crushed by Orphan regiments in 319 M40. But while the resurgent sector established itself in admirable time, the first half of M41 was marked by a reversal of those fortunes. The docopoulos conspiracy weakened the sector's centralized regime on Amara, while the centuriesl long aetheric disturbances dubbed the storm tide saw the Inquisition conduct dozens of pograms to root out unsanctioned psykers. In 744 M41, a curious string of murders sthed through the Kellerman Scholom, seemingly targeting academics sanctioned to study xenoarchchaeological artifacts common across the sector, and it was suspected financially supported in doing so by the cultistari. Witnesses to these murders, half mad with distress, reported a figure walking through flames, emerging from thin air only to butcher their colleagues, taking the artifacts with them as they vanished. In the waning years of M41, portants of doom spread by mendicant preachers became stock and trade for the major worlds of the Orpheus sector. They were not without reason. The aetheric disruption of centuries pasts had still yet to fully expire. Ships were being lost at a far higher rate than usual, consumed, it was generally believed, by warp storms. One such storm had swallowed whole the penal colony of Moros Lacriml, rendering the fates of its 13 million prisoners, as well as several penitentiary hulks, utterly unknown. In 811 M41, a mortally damaged void Drummond belonging to the flotillaa of rogue trader Caleb Gilderoy approached the Adeptus Mechanicus garrison at Harrow Watch. Transmissions received from the vessel indicated the crew were in distress bordering on lunacy, raving about a terror, quote, from beyond the stars that had slaughtered their fellow craft within the expedition. Begging for sanctuary, but receiving no permission to enter sovereign Mechanica's territory, the Drummond was destroyed as it refused to turn back from the defense perimeter. Matters came to a sudden head in 990 M41 when after centuries of immaterial disturbances, the warp squalls within the sector came to an immediate end, seemingly as if some massive aetheric shock wave had blown them away. Unfortunately, such an ending was no time for rejoicing. The resulting bow wave of psychic pressure caused a major loss of life amongst astropaths sectorwide. severely hampering interstellar communication. Mass hysteria, dreadful night terrors, inexplicable murders, and a whole host of violent delusions and criminality stalked the populations of the Orphan worlds, leading the Inquisition to presume that a major demonic incursion was imminent and to begin preparations for just such an occurrence. With Imperial attention focused upon the immaterial, next to no one noticed an Adeptus Mechanicus report that within the depths of the Forbidden Caracall system, a binary star pair had gone supernova simultaneously. Such a stellar phenomenon is unlikely to the point of numerical impossibility. But what was more curious still was its timing. The event had seemingly occurred when chronologues adjusted for relative time at the same instant the warp storms beding the sector had blown out. Such evidence was unfortunately only discovered in the aftermath of what was to come. At the time of the twin supernova, the Harrows Watch defense station merely logged the incident for later perusal by Mechanica stellar carttographic and for forwarding onto the relevant authorities within the Imperium. It was however noticed by the magisters within the cultistari. The group's writings spoke of just such an event as a harbinger of the time for their mysterious masters. An era of change, destruction, and rebirth. Many magesters and their acolytes seeded through the wealthy and powerful within the sector began to draw their plans for the upcoming time of revelation. While Imperial authorities were focusing their attention on the supposed coming demonic incursion, the signs were there. Brit upon the pyramid itself, yes, but also buried within the 10,000-year history of the Orpheus sector. None could see them. So scattered were they, and so hopelessly ignorant of the horror that lurked beyond was the Imperium that what was to come was effectively pre-ordained. had any the ken to connect these scraps of history or the curiosity or will to follow the trails of these scraps. It is possible that billions of human lives may have been saved. Alas, that was never to be the case. When the attack came, it was not upon one world, nor even one system, nor even several systems. Scores of Imperial worlds came under sudden, unprecedented, and overwhelming assaults from quarters unforeseen. The invasion was so coordinated and so total that beyond its front line lay only the deathly silence of worlds that had already fallen to total annihilation. Death came to Imperial outposts so fast that many had not even the chance to scream into the void. No astropathic cries were hurled into the rest of Imaterium. Such was the destruction first that befell the riward stars under the emperor's light that even in the aftermath of their doom, it is impossible to establish the timing with which they fell. [sighs] They simply vanished, lost in an instant to the Imperium, as if a pal of purest darkness had been drawn in a massive line across the whole sector of the worlds of Catris, Boris, Landing, Palisite, Aith, Epirus. We know nothing beyond the fact that the enemy came and won and did so with an almost impossible speed. One of the purest scraps of information that did survive was in a salvation pod of the Adeptus Mechanicus deep range infiltrator unit Cobalt Sigma assigned to the defense station of Harrow's Watch. It merely speaks of a curious violence amongst its crew, rising instances of technological malfunction, and ultimately a disaster heralded by wicked sickle ships dancing like carrying crows through seething plasma fires. It was the Inquisitorial Fortress of Apollon that was first able to raise the alarm when a badly damaged Ordo cutter vessel was able to translate in system at Amara, bearing an urgent report of the sudden loss of scores of Imperial held systems. That this vessel had managed to overcome and escape these invaders beggars's belief. But with this missive, the disbelief of such a doom could be overcome by the unquestionable seal of the Ordo Melius upon it, and by the Inquisition's urgings that the sector battle fleet beat to quarters [music] and Amara raise its defense regiments and prime orbital batteries for invasion. Astra Militaram forces mustering for the assault on the Kimarian system were hurriedly retasked to sector defense while messenger vessels bearing orders were dispatched to coreward systems benited as they were by the loss of astropathic life with the sessation of the warp storms. Only as these communicates were attempted by authorities on Amara was the true scale of the invasion starting to unfold and the measure of imperial losses that already impossibly been incurred. The true nature of the invaders was yet utterly unknown. There was no afteraction reports. There were no picked or vid logs. There were no offspec greeds because the invaders had left no survivors. Messages sent to the rimward worlds were unanswered. Any vessel that attempted to pass the line of darkness that stretched across the sector from Cla to Airis vanished, presumably with all hands. Most disturbing of all was the silence of the shrine world of Lethra, fortress monastery of the angel's revenant. For centuries, the sector's boldest defenders. For Nart's monastery to be struck with so total an apparent loss was a portant beyond dire. What enemy could manage such a thing? It is perhaps to the credit of the Orphan Imperial commanders that such panic as this information no doubt instilled was channeled into rapid organization of planetary defense systems rather than some rash muster and charge forward into enemy territory out of blind vengeful belligerance. As part of these preparations, Imperial and Mechanica bent every Ospect grid, atheric scrier, and even optical scope towards attempting to glean information about the worlds lost thus far to the mysterious invaders. And these efforts came to Nort. With little options, sector command dispatched military reinforcements to the world of Drusilla Majorus and Midwinter. Prosperous and heavily populated planets that had up to now been core worlds of the sector, yet now became frontier worlds against the advancing dead zone. Amara, directly threatened in kind, pulled in armies and warships desperately from the core volumes of the sector. The governor, Calabbron Lan, progressively stripped away shielding forces from other core worlds to booster Amara's own defenses, pulling warships and commerce vessels into a centralized fleet at the battle fleet Orpheus Anchorage in the capital system. Elsewhere, Imperial forces waited for the hammer to fall. They waited for their skies to darken with the ships of the unseen invaders. The panic that followed the initial alarm changed within days to a cooler but omnipresent tension. A taught anxiety that only grew more so as the days stretched into weeks and then months. There was nothing but silence from the impenetrable front of darkness. No enemy ships were cited. No word emerged from the Gulf that remained with lost worlds held within its grip. Governor Lon was placed under mounting pressure to do something, anything, than merely wait in grim anticipation for the next blow to fall. Petitions from the nobility, chartis captains, the militarum, and the navy daily assailed his offices, containing plans for everything from a naval expedition in force to a full-scale popular counter crusade in the style of the ancient war of faith. Several suggested an immediate counter strike at the world of Lethra. For surely the angel's revenant were not lost. They were merely besieged by invaders and desperately in need of reinforcements. Governor Lan rejected all in kind, fearing that to grant even a modicum of support or hearing to any of these plans would give ground he could ill afford and was to his significant relief backed up in this by the grim presence of Inquisitor Lord Hyram Nitona of the Ordo Melius. Nitona was the only ranking member of his Ordo currently at large in the Orpheus sector and one of the surviving chamber Apollon. the inquisitorial conclave and thus a significant political power. Nitona was ironclad in his belief that the calamity was malefific in nature. It was surely the work of the ruinous powers, for what else could so become the warp, corrupt the mind, and seize so large a volume of space completely and utterly. He counseledled patience. Aid was being summoned from the Imperium, and it was vital the sector command make no attempt to enter the darkness until it had arrived. On 3806991 M41, everything changed. Whereas before there had been not but cryptic silence, there was suddenly an assault of signals, a data storm flaring across super luminal auguries, blinding Imperial watch posts in a torrent of information. Astropaths reeled against the discordance of distress calls and echoing psychic aftershocks of their dying and dead kin distorted into near incomprehensibility and folded in overlapping chronometric markers. It was as if the tormented cries of all of these doomed souls had been frozen perfectly in time only to be unleashed in a single instant. Riding on this immaterial bow wave were other far stranger signals. Blazing pillars of energy spiking into the warp on the edge of the veiled region unlike anything the Imperium had ever encountered. These pulsing fonts of unknowable power spilled off howling gales of radiation and charged particle storms that seemed free to transcend the gulfs of distance between stars in mere moments, defying the physical laws of this terraquous reality. The storms of energy dance like static discharge along warp routes. Ship crews observe the phenomenon clinging like ghostly fire to the hulls of their vessels. A vile electromagnetic contagion spread with it, invading vox channels, destroying the gin wards of supposedly sealed and secure communication webs, fading echoes of agonized screams emerging from speakers. The voices it carried whispered in an unknowable Eldrich tongue, sounds that were wholly inhuman, born in a language that rocked the foundations of sanity. Yet within this binaric blasphemy, this soural atrocity, there was contained one phrase in Imperial Gothic repeated again and again, a declaration and a promise of doom beyond inevitable. Main arc comes. A imperator Gloria in Excelss terror. Even in the nigh impossibly distant past of the Nekron race, back before their encasement within the living metal of their Necroneris, the dynasty of the Manarch held a reputation quite sinister amongst the many factions of that ancient species. Their courage and warfare was unquestionable. Indeed, many other dynasties feared their battlefield ferocity to such a degree as to manarch demands before conflict had even broken out. This was not done out of respect for their honor. Quite the opposite. The manarch's bellacosity was of a uniquely vicious sort. They possessed a spiteful malice that other Necronier nobility found profoundly distasteful. Nevertheless, their ruthlessness made them a great power within the Infinite Empire. They drew the special attention of Zarak, the Silent King, who often employed the Manarch and its reputation as a tool of ultimate resolution in his policing of the many vendettas, feuds, and civil wars that constantly raged between the fractious dynasties. As mentioned, the mere hint of their involvement could stay the hand of less powerful polities. Such was their sheer malignance. The silent king's favor also permitted them a great deal of leeway in the brutal expansion of their claimed territories. The advent of the great bioransference did not cure the manarch of their bloodlust. As with so many dynasties, the idiosyncrasies of their pre-engrammatic minds were metastasized when placed within the unliving necroermis. Their seemingly inherent darkness of character was not purged or even tempered. But now enslaved in perpetuity by mimetic shackles and the tyranny of command protocols. The lower ranks of the dynasty were purged of anything resembling empathy or compassion. While its nobility found their worst traits elevated beyond what they had been in biological life. So too did their role prior to biot transansference become even more integral. When the necrons rose up against the katan star gods who had imprisoned them within their new bodies, the manarch were at the vanguard. The epitome of the silent king's most violent tendencies unleashed against the nekron's divine enemy. While the Imperium has cataloged only the barest, most mythic essentials of this uprising against the deific, the Necrons are scarcely more equipped to scry their own past. Engramatic degradation is quite common some 60 million years later. But we must also consider that reality itself bear scars from this conflict. Even the greatest dynasts of the Nekrons ill remember such a time, for their own linear causalities were altered by the forces they themselves unleashed to shatter their former gods. Only the silent king himself bears the most wholesome recollection of what has occurred. And even his own memory banks are no doubt hampered by the hypometric weaponry his kind unleashed. for he is known to have removed knowledge of these devices and technologies from his subjects. So fears he their continued use. Having made their fouian bargain with the thirsting katan and gained their new bodies, the Nekrons broke their gods apart. And it was, according to Nekron legend, that by the Silent King's express order did the Manarch Dynasty personally affect the destruction of the katan known as Clandigore, the Flare. Not merely sundered to shards like its kindred. No, destroyed, obliterated from existence. It is likewise said that in the moment of that divine annihilation, the malicious entity cursed its betrayers, infecting them with but a sliver of its own ceaseless hunger. A curse so fundamental, so inescapable that it was woven into the base code of reality itself. This is the so-called flare virus, [snorts] also known as the flare curse. and the longing sickness. It causes those necrons infected by it to degrade in mental faculty until the point they are little more than subsapient beasts, animals of metal that possess a ceaseless, tormenting hunger for the flesh of the living. A hunger their bodies will never allow them to sate. The curse goes beyond the mental engrams of the Necrons, usering their Necroeris and resurrection protocols, transforming their bodies over time into hunched, blade limbmed monstrosities. These creatures, dubbed fade ones by the Nekrons, will debase themselves in a manner grotesque to all sane races of the galaxy, but ever more so to the Nekrons themselves. To thirst for the viscera of others, to attempt the blasphemy of eating is a horror most vile. It hearkens to the deeply seated disfacron. The terror of a once biological mind suddenly remembering that it is sealed forever within an unliving android body. Unable to eat, unable to drink, unable to breathe. There's no cure for the flare virus. >> Once a Nekron begins displaying the curious desires that mark the early stages of infection, their fate is wholly sealed. Crypteks have spent thousands, if not millions of years attempting to find a remedy to the condition to no avail. A legend persists amongst the Nekrons that such a cure may lie with the Nythic Val Ghoul, the Flare King, supposedly the only one of their species to have succumbed to the hunger, but yet retain their fundamental sense of self. Should this be the case, and should the Val Ghoul even exist as a single individual, such a cure has not been forthcoming. As several inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos have posited, the Mainarch possessed such a bloodthirsty reputation that other dynasties were fully willing and indeed gleefully eager to pin them with the responsibility for causing the Flare Curse, defaming them in the eyes of all Necrons. Their overzealousness had not merely shattered Clandigore, but destroyed him, resulting in one of the worst depradations to ever befall the species. It is likewise verifiable in Nekron historical record that the first instances of flade ones were observed skullking in the darkest corners of mainarch courts and following its legion like Carrion. The uncertain nature of the curse's progression, as it can infect by necrodermal contact, or it appears interstitial proximity, made the already maligned mainarch total exiles from their kindred within the infinite empire. They retreated into their core domains in the galactic southern rim. the stench of blood that pervaded their gatherings, consigned now to their dark, grim courts, forever stalked by lurking fllayed ones. Where once these worlds had seen the Manarch hunt the servants of the old ones during the war in heaven, they were now lifeless tombs wherein dwelled nobility, contemplating their knowing hunger for flesh. when the great sleep was enforced. The silent king bidding his subjects to enter into stasis until the galaxy could be safely reclaimed from the calamities of the war the Necrons had unleashed. Several dynasties, notably the Sawek and the Atun, counseledled their lege that he should use this opportunity to quietly and peacefully exterminate the Manarch. So reviled were they by the other dynasties. The silent king, however, appeared to yet have use for them. For as the dynasties of the Nekrons went to their rest, he removed ctographical information of the Manarch's crown worlds from Nekron archives and command protocols, ensuring that his red-handed annihilators would be hidden securely until their rising, safe from any opportunistic interlopers who would be all too eager to see them destroyed. It may have been supposed by not only other Nekron dynasties, but the main arc themselves that the millions of years spent within the hold of the great sleep would spell the end of their lineage. That within the stasis crypts, the Eldrich curse of Klandigore would poison the soulless minds of all that bore the Manarch Cartou. that what would emerge from the lifeless worlds of the dynasty would be nothing more than a horde of flayed ones, possessing no desire but to butcher and bloodlet with senseless abandon. Such a fate befell other dynasties most assuredly the bone kingdom of Drazzac ruled by the mythical flare king the Val Ghoul for example or the early awakened Ithacus dynasty and its mad fyron Unus. Indeed, this latter dynasty and its heir, Altics, are supposed to have a curious relationship with the Val Ghoul, although this is a subject best reserved for another record. Suffice it to say, however, no such fate befell the main ark during their long slumber. Their stasis crypts persisted for the millions of years undisturbed, location known only to the watchful eyes of the Triarch Ptorians. Given that their rimward location was known to suffer from severe and destructive celestial phenomena, the Mainarch had fashioned their tomb worlds with advanced solar manipulator arrays and hyperspaceial flux generators to ward them from any damage, no doubt at great cost to the isolated and friendless dynasty. This apparent foresight was to prove invaluable to their survival. Many of their kins saw whole tomb worlds devoured by freak stellar accidents during the upheavalss of tens of millions of years, but not so the main ark. Warded from such catastrophes and further protected by the danger of their volumes warding off expansionist lesser races, the dynasty persisted in silence. Intrusions into their territory were quite rare, but when they did occur, the paranoia and bloodthirst of their nature allowed no quarter given or chances taken. The intelligences tasked with Tomb World Defense would not be content to merely exterminate an inquisitive Imperial Explorator team or kin mining expedition, but would awaken whole fallances of war machines and koptic constructs to track the origin point of these trespassers and exterminate whole population centers to ensure no trace of the dynasty's existence could possibly be discovered. This paranoia should realistically have been the dynasty's downfall. Such a heavy-handed response would surely have drawn eventually the notice of aggressive parties, bringing to the tomb worlds a far greater threat than the mainarch could have awoken in time to battle. But so great was the ignorance, insularity, and fractiousness of their main neighbor, the Imperium of Man, that a realization never occurred, despite there having become the prominent dominant power sitting upon the slumbering dynasty's proverbial vestibule. So consumed by conflict, ideology, politicking, [music] and deliberate obfuscation was the Imperium that none of the many, many signs your humble servant has previously outlined in this chronicle were heeded. Not by civilian or military authorities, or even the Segmentum's Inquisition. This has been true across the galaxy. Within volumes quite heavily populated, undiscovered Nekron tomb worlds have arisen in recent centuries to bring ruin to the worlds of humanity in the name of restoring the infinite empire. And in many cases, whole dynasties have gone utterly undetected throughout mankind's 10,000year reign of this galaxy. The Orpheus sector is not unique here. What is noteworthy is that the manarch are perhaps the most objectively zenocidal, violent, and heavy-handed of the Nekron dynasties yet encountered by the Imperium. Content to let their suspicion of intrusion and discovery push them to heavy-handed reprisals that risked precipitating that very discovery. Yet, the Imperium did not respond, notice, or even really bother to note any of these instances. Wholly oblivious to the mingering terror that lurked under the surface of the dead worlds just beyond its light, the Imperium was utterly unprepared for what was to follow. Its relentless instability surrendered the initiative, preventing any chance of a strike at the dynasty while its greatest forces still slumbered. The signal of their awakening had long ago been seared into the engrams of the main ark. It was a celestial configuration, a moment that marked for them the bidding of the silent king and the triarch to rise from their long sleep. That signal was the death of the Caracall stars. In this system, there were no tomb worlds. instead lay the graves and ruins of entities more ancient and terrible even than the Nekrons. Cast amid the Dolman gates that the katan had used to wage the war in heaven. It was these gates that served to broadcast the apocalyptic deaths of the stars into the warp and beyond. A grand clarion bell tolling across the heavens, portending on earthly doom. It is unknown if the binary supernova was the work of the silent king himself. While such a thing is undoubtedly within the power of Zarak to accomplish the death of the Caracall stars could have been something more eldrich still beyond the ken of even the Necrons. It may even have been cosmic chance predicted countless eons ago by ancient astromancer cryptex to occur within an acceptable time frame. Regardless, with the stellar violence came the rise of the main arc dynasty. Awake now for the first time in tens of millions of years and possessing a hunger within that defied comprehension. Many thousands of thearch that emerged from the great sleep did so already terminally insane. They had been placed within their stasis crypts already in the throws of the curse. Insane with a desire for flesh and blood, they awoke screaming in ancient malice. And from this hunger, they created thousands more of their kind. As many more Nekrons fell to Clandagore's thirst quite quickly, forming packs of fllayed ones that began to rove the tomb complexes or disappeared into the ghost wind, the strange, illunderstood subdimension their debased kind used to traverse the galaxy. Still, there remained hundreds of thousands of Nekrons that had survived the curs's predations, from lowly warriors up to mighty lichgard and the courtly nobles that ruled them. While it is likely all possessed some measure of the hunger, especially the aristocracy, many had managed to suppress the curse deep within the roing core flux at their mechanical hearts, twisting it into something more inshed with their metastasized personality matrices. The more radical of the Ordo Xenos inquisitors, who have penned treatises upon the dynasty, have posited that perhaps owing to the inherent bloodthirst that had seemingly always been a part of Manarch culture since long before biotansference, they possessed approximate kinship with the hunger of the curse. Perhaps indeed a resistance to it that other Nekrons could never comprehend. or perhaps still their fall would merely be extended, prolonging torturously their inevitable fate. It is almost certain that all Necrons within the dynasty that retained the nobility for independent thought were aware of this annoying hunger, a faminous ache that afflicted their cores and were driven to nihilism by it. resigned to a life lived in defiance of a mindless end. Others likely hoved to madness of a more violent kind, driven to affect carnage and slaughter upon a world they could no longer possibly care for or relate to. What saved the manarch from collapse into total anarchy was the ironclad will of the donastic leadership. Those sealed within the most heavily protected tombs on the crown worlds of the donastic corps. They asleep for 60 million years. They who now rose bellowing names that had once cowed whole arms of the galaxy by their mention. Ixatk the jackal regent lord hunter of the void. Clazalt the faceless Nemesis of Tro. Mlan Kutlak the world killer. And finally, the dynasty's frak zunakir, the mother of oblivion. It was these figures that imposed their brutal rule on the worlds they rose from, bringing the legions in line, expelling the greater packs of the flayed ones to the wastelands or to the ghost wind. They who took counsel from the attending and aged triarch ptorians. It was within airless courts, cold enough to freeze fleshed glass, that these ancient intelligences took stock of their domains and ordered chronommancers to compress time in space that they may treat with their kindred upon other mainarch worlds. They came to awareness of what had changed within the galaxy. They had awoken to, of the rising bastions of the infinite empire, and with a disgust the teeming verminous hordes of the unclean that infested every corner of the void. They appraised the existence of nearby tomb worlds belonging to other dynasties and former mainarch satropies. Those that would have to be immediately brought to bend the knee or become enemies of the dynasty in their own right. One thing became clear to these nobles. The iron hold of the silent king's command protocols. Those that he had used to shackle his species during the war in heaven were now gone. The Manarch were free. Free to pursue their own aims, chart their own course within the infinite empire, even perhaps to its zenith. The course the mother of oblivion bade was clear and eagerly desired by all who called her Fyra. Extermination. Nothing short of the systematic genocide of all life would suffice for the manarch. Then it would begin with the filth that clogged their nearspace volumes. Despite her resolve and her hunger, Zun Beckir would not allow her dentists to rush into the void to hunt. Patience must hold at present to allow for intelligence to be gathered, legions mustered, weapons tested, and the best plans laid. To that end, the fringe worlds that bore the tread of humanity, but yet contained Nekron stasis crypts were instructed to remain hidden and dormant, such that at a time the mainarch were ready to attack, they could rise from beneath the feet of the interlopers. For all the engramatic cancer that gnawed at their machine minds, the manarch were yet numerous and powerful. Prior to the great sleep, they had been counted not far behind the greatest dynasties in terms of direct military power. While admittedly hampered in their advancement by the deep distrust of other necrons, this did little to diminish their efficacy and deep personal capacity for violence. Indeed, being the target of so many feuds and politicking, the typified Nekron society in turn led the Manarch to take what they wanted through naked, unrelenting force, where subtle means were disallowed to them due to their political isolation. What client dynasties took to their power did so with the direct threat of slaughter. What this had created, what had now awakened was a force of utter genocidal wrath. One possessing hundreds of thousands of warriors, millions of koptic constructs, and hundreds of warships. What was leveled against the Imperium was a military juggernaut, one powered by hatred and madness, utterly implacable in its desire to exterminate. The coming conflict would not be a war against an honored foe, but a dark harvest of the living, for the spoils of war, the very flesh and blood of those slain by Nekron hands, would be reaped and given to appease the weward children of the manarch as a vile mercy for those they deemed afflicted. and no other reason. The soulless nobles of the court no doubt told themselves no other reason at all. To say the Imperium was unprepared would be a horrific understatement. Simply no one knew the horror of what was about to unfold. Ave imperator Gloria in Excelsus terror. In the wake of the mainarch dynasty's proclamation came a fear as infectious and fastm moving as the technological plague the Necrons had already unleashed. The shroud that had fallen upon Imperial communication was wrenched back revealing the horror that had already been committed. The thousand basilicas of Ethra, the fortress of the angel's revenant had been reduced to a field of lava. The very crust of the world split and weeping under whatever planetkilling weapons had been targeted upon it. Apolium, at bastion of the Inquisition, had likewise been shattered. The Necrons had caused its moon, [music] Elohim Mortua, to crash into the world, ejecting whole continents into the void. The news spread like wildfire. The very communication nets it was carried upon continuing to swirl with the sinister glyphs of these mysterious invaders. Amrafell and Midwinter saw the outbreak of massive riots, lurching them towards the brink of total civic collapse as imperial authorities attempted to suppress them. The hope of inbound reinforcements from the Uradici sector did not to stem the tide of terror. The first wave of the invasion had already riven the sector with hundreds of millions of human lives being snuffed out in total blackness. What hope could yet there be? On the morning of 4917991 M41, the sun failed to rise on Drusilla Majorus, capital world of the Drusilla subsector. The 6 billion humans of the hive world, gripped now within a night that may never end, could only watch as a dreadful cold descended upon their planet. All Vox traffic with ships in the nearby volume was abruptly cut off. And out in the ash wastess of the hive hinterlands, Eldrich monuments of black impenetrable stone began to rise from the polluted sands. Edififices revealing themselves to the terrified onlookers. Elsewhere, guarding the orbital shipyards of Midwinter, the Ramilies class star Fortress Taurus received panicked distress calls, claiming to be under attack from unknown vessels and boarding parties of figures, quote, fashioned as specters of death. Despite even the major worlds of his sector appearing to be toppling like timber, Governor Lon refused any order of aggressive action, retreating to a fortified bunker beneath the gubernatorial palace on Amara, while the tens of millions of mustered soldiers and hundreds of warships remained on station high above. One by one, the systems surrounding the capital shrieked for aid before falling silent. Their deaths marked by blazing corpusant pulses of celestial fire. A stamp placed upon the realms once held by humanity, but now deathly silent. Amara alone stood to beg the Imperium for aid. In every other respect, the Orpheus sector had been cut in half. The fall of over 50% of the Orpheus sector to the Manarch dynasty has entered into the annals of imperial history as the bloody hund so-called because it took less than 100 Terran days standard. To accomplish the seizure of such a volume in such a time as less than 3 months was not without precedent per se, but the chaos and panic in its wake are entirely understandable. Billions of lives had been lost, and the enemy had barely been cited and decidedly not yet confirmed. This was no orc war, the presence of which could scarcely be any more explicit, or an archeneemy campaign, replete with grand displays of debased religiosity. The main arc invasion was implacable, silent, and supremely deadly, [music] turning Imperial retreats into panicked, formless routes, snuffing out worlds with near warning nor word. Victory after victory they claimed, seizing a staggering volume of space during the bloody hundred before once again halting in place. On 3964992 M41, Governor Lan ordered the general retreat of every single surviving Imperial military element to Amara, hoping to use the reprieve to gather whatever scattered forces he could. As the days wore on, Lon's paranoia and mental instability, both of which had been growing since the beginning of the bloody hundred, appeared to become significantly worse. interfering with the strategic planning of Amara's defense. Relief began to appear in the form of outof sector reinforcements, trickling in from the systems Mandavville point. Yet more sector local units from the Arcantis cluster far behind the line drawn between the main arc crown worlds and Amara that marked the invader's advance thus far. Likewise redirected to Amara, depriving them wholesale of any military protection. This significantly damaged imperial morale and planetary political stability within the Arcantis cluster with terrified populouses and ruling classes both now well aware of the advancing doom that was taking place across the sector leading to outright mutiny on several occasions only to be bloodily suppressed at the hands of Prus commisarats and the adeptus arbites. The halt in the Nekron advance granted the Imperial forces almost 3 months to muster. And this was far from wasted. The army's array at Amara had grown to formidable proportions. Over 19 million Astromeitarum Guardsmen with almost 10 times that number in militia raised under emergency edict and armed and equipped along the Munatorum's Cadian pattern. One of the last contingents to arrive in system and perhaps the most storied of all outof sector militarum reinforcements were 2 million soldiery of the death corps of led by the veteran 17th line corps under the command of marshal caris vener. It was however not only the militarum that answered Orpheus's plea for aid. The call to arms had been heeded by several chapters of the Adeptus Estartis, most notably what appeared to be the entirety of the Minotaur's chapter, entering the northern reaches of the sector with brutal haste alongside a company from the Marauders chapter. Elements from the Red Seraphs and the Nemesis chapter had likewise delivered astropathic missives to Amara, notifying it of their imminent arrival. The battle barges of these chapters, now numbering in four, added their might to the Armada orbiting the capital. Several hundred escort class vessels and more than 60 rated cruisers and capital ships of the Imperial Navy. It was a staggering force of arms arrayed for the defense of a single world, even a sector capital, at least by modern imperial standards, especially when even the barest hint of the enemy's nature still remained wholly unknown. Belligerent calls for more immediate action became more common as the weeks proceeded, but Lan and his advisers remained resolute in their strategy of patient, unyielding defense. The idea of a counterattack into the lost regions of Orphan space was simply not countenanced. But likewise, Lon forbid even the conducting of reconnaissance in force to establish even the most remote facts about enemy movements, strength, or nature. For all the world, it appeared the governor and his council simply dared not disturbed the dark veil that had been thrown over the lost worlds of Orpheus. In a report laterally compiled by Inquisitor Scarman Havas of the Ordo Xenos following the fall of Orpheus, Inquisitor Hyram Nithona, high-ranking survivor of the sector's inquisitorial conclave and a close adviser to the governor following the beginning of the bloody hundred was ruled postmortem to have had his conduct in this period found wanting. Nitona had been an esteemed and rightly lorded demon hunter of the Ordo Melius for some two centuries and his record was genuinely unimpeachable. The unavoidable conclusion of Inquisitor Havas, however, was that in this final trial of the emperor's service, the venerable Nitona had allowed his own fears and paranoia to become his undoing from the beginning. As one has noted in this record thus far, Nitona was adamant that the calamitous invasion was a ploy in the schemes of the dark gods of primordial annihilation whose abilities to invoke malefific stellar phenomenon on a large scale is undeniably based in fact. Nitona viewed the progress of events as merely a preamble to a greater threat to come. Even as the situation worsened and no extent proof of demonic incursions provided itself in the least. Owing to this it was laterally concluded by the Inquisition that vital intelligence was not given full scrutiny or indeed was passed on by Nitona to the servants of the Ordo Xenos where Inquisitor Havas noted with no small amount of prideful shortity actual value may have been gleaned. Havasa's report points to Inquisitor Nitona's close association with Governor Lan and his inability to properly deal with the governor's clearly degrading mental functionality as proof of his lapse of judgment. To quote the report, "Following the beginning of what the Imperium now knows to be the Nekron assault on the sector, Lan became plagued with a series of increasingly vivid nightmares in which he found himself seated at a great feasting table, surrounded by terrifying deathly figures, Lan himself describes as being quote, masked in bone and gilded steel, clad in the golden and darkly jeweled reignment of barbarous alien kings and princes. Set before them were platters and dishes on which lay alternately gray dust, glowing cinders, and raw bloody meat. At the head of the table is a vast enthroned figure, quote, more terrible than the rest, so fearful I knew my heart would fail if I looked directly upon them. In this dread company, Lon found himself trapped and bidden to eat the strange meal while the deathly court looked on. All watching him in malignant silence, save one, draped in raw skins that ravened at the unholy banquet, smearing bloody chunks of flesh onto its twisted mask, even though it could not eat, drenching itself with flaggins of steaming blood even though it could not drink. When in the dream, Lon could not stand any more of this horror and cried to be let go, a hooded and shrouded figure appeared at his back and whispered to him, quote, "These are the worlds that were once ours. The worlds that you trespassed upon and are now ours again. The worlds on which we have risen have already been cleansed. The worlds where we once walked, we shall now walk again." As the rights demand, you are given [music] a cycle of the pale stars to prepare yourself for extermination. Manarch comes and the banquet shall be served again. Inquisitor Nitona being of demon hunter stock clearly interpreted these recurrent dreams as the work of the warp. Demonic emanations of the vilest source insinuating themselves into Lahan's sleeping mind, tormenting the governor with treacherous prophecy designed only to deceive Lan into surrendering intelligence on troop movements to their foul masters in the material world. Ironically, in hindsight, based on significant Ordo Xenos encounters with and study of the rising threat of the Nekron dynasties in the era Indomitus, it is quite likely that everything within these dreams was the stark literal truth. In cross-referencing Lan's case with those reported elsewhere by inquisitors Boas, Straker, and Valyria, it is likely that Lan, despite being an Imperial commander and surrounded by the protections such as the office brings, was abducted covertly with the Manarch nobility daining to treat him as the head of the forces opposing the Nekrons in the region. In this, the dynasty was extending to him the ancient courtesies and honors their culture had demanded of foes prior to the great sleep. Even as a member of the species, the Nekrons themselves consider utterly beneath them in every capacity. The experience was so clearly so unearly, traumatic, and malign that it irrevocably damaged the mind of Governor Lon in such a fashion that caused his surface consciousness to block it out. It remains a terrible irony that once again the signs of what was to come were very readily available, drawn in a string of crumbs across history and rising to greater prominence. Yet the Imperium's dogmatic and hidebound nature rendered it wholly unable to see them. On 3 970992 M41, the battle of Amara began as suddenly as the initial mainarch invasion had without preamble, preface, or prelude. No astropathic shock wave announced to the Nekron attack. No deep system or sweeps detected them. At 1534202 local time scale, a massive gravitational flux sprang into being near the Armara star. Its shock waves causing the sun to violently eject plasma and radiation into space in a series of massive solar flares. Such was the fury of these flares that the systems innermost planet Oric was flash incinerated on its dayside in a single instant. Vox, Sensorium, and Augur networks across the system failed immediately, drowned in a cascade of stellar radiation, rendering much of the Imperial defenses blind and deaf. Many unshielded technologies, not hardened against E-mag shocks, were likewise disabled. The confusion and chaos was so total that it wasn't until the Sentinel 4 battle station in deep orbit suddenly detonated that the cause became monstrously clear. The enemy had finally come for the Imperium. At Leighton, third planet in the system, the Imperial battle fleet had been arrayed for months in a solid defensive picket, blockading what was, by any conventional wisdom, the shest route to the capital planet from the systems Mandeville point of warp translation. Such wisdom, of course, did not apply against the Nekrons. As backup auguries and visual suites came online, the commanders of the fleet saw with horror that an armada of black ships hung in the near space of the dead battle station, accelerating still at speeds barely registerable. Calculus Loji stated they would be in Amara's orbit in mere minutes. The battle fleet had been utterly bypassed. To use a simplistic analogy, the enemy was within the walls. The orbital minefields and weapons batteries of Amara's near space were the next target. The invading fleet swept through them with a clinical precision. Carefully constructed defenses of decades impeding them not one bit. The remaining Sentinel battle stations, [music] each with the proportional firepower of an entire cruiser squadron, were systematically obliterated. All while the Imperial battle fleet was still firing up their engines, beating to quarters, and desperately trying to plot the fastest intercept course available. There was simply no time to interdict. Planet Fall was happening with the inevitability of a bullet already fired. Unnatural storms boiled across the capital world skies, sliced through by cracks of vivid lightning. It seemed that for all the world, the enemy rode in upon the lightning. First contact between invaders and defenders is believed to have occurred in the wide ceremonial plazas of Kosheen Hive, where a veritable army of humanoid forms in black iron materialized in advance with no pause of fanfare, committing themselves immediately to the base slaughter of the terrified populace that fled before them. At Duranad Starport, swarms of insecttoid constructs emerged from subterranean access tunnels, tearing apart the shuttles and gunships on the runways around them like a plague of ancient caththeric mythic tracts. New Vasburg, one of the planet's largest hives, was targeted by crescent-shaped enemy flyers, identified laterally as Doomcythe and Night Shroud class aircraft by the Ordo Xenos. The latter, in particular, launched pinpoint barges of antimatter bombs, shredding structural supports until the hive simply imploded in a collapse that killed countless millions. While the cities were clearly the primary targets of the Nekron attack, they soon began to target military installations. Foremost amongst them, the Bastian Militaris, located at the planet's northern pole. Against this, the Nekron set fearsome siege constructs, hovering soundlessly above the ice flows, but unleashing apocalyptic barges from their energy weapons and seismic obliterators, shredding and cracking the walls of the Imperial Fortress. Elsewhere, the barrack blocks of Marovven Peninsula, built to house nearly a million guardsmen, were simply annihilated from orbit, leaving nothing but ash and fused silica glass, where once an entire army had been billeted. Despite these already punishing losses and the ability of the enemy to simply appear within their midst, the Imperial defenders mounted what counterattacks they could muster. At Koshin Hive, the tanks of the Techarn 234th Armored Battalion learned the hard way that they were quite susceptible to even the small arms fire of the Nekrons, whose Gaus flares could strip the plating of a tank with ease. An open battle was death, forcing the Techarn commanders to concentrate their forces on open plazas and thoroughaphares to grant them the advantage of long range wherever possible. Engaged by rank after rank of Nekron warriors, the numbers of the invaders seemed barely to be dented, and those yet damaged by Imperial shellfire began before the eyes of the defenders to reassemble their mechanical bodies. The Techarn did not relent in their barrage and kept firing until their cannon barrels began to glow dull red with heat. A stalemate of sorts had been struck, but one the Techarn officers knew they could not sustain. and indeed did not. Death struck them from below and above simultaneously. According to survivor testimony, the Nekrons deployed their achenthright koptic constructs. Believed to be some of the first Imperial forces to encounter such blasphemous automatons. Unlike the koptic rates who bear a similar form, achenthrites are capable of atmospheric flight and their thermal beams function akin to Imperial meltas. Plunging from the skies upon the column, the constructs reaped a fearsome toll of Imperial war machines. Slaughter only added to by a pinser attack from below. As Koptek tomb sentinels, horrific burrowing anthropodlike machines burst forth, massacring what remained. Within days, Amara Prime was in ruins. Every single main hive had fallen to the main arc dynasty. No quarter or mercy was offered. No demands had been made. No reprieve was granted in the implacable xenocide. Yet Loai of Imperial defenses remained intact and functioning. The death core of under Marshall Venner had been deployed in Carala industrial district far from the main hive conerations. Upon the outbreak of hostilities, they immediately set about fortifying their position with trench imp placements connecting command stations, dugouts, and ammunition dumps with the region's pre-existing utility tunnel network. Such foresight allowed them to weather the first wave of attacks relatively unscathed, the enemy seeming to avoid their fortifications in favor of weaker Imperial targets and civilian population centers. When the counterattack was launched, it came in force and was aimed specifically at incorporating surviving Imperial forces into itself. Marshall Venner personally executed many senior commanders of surviving bands for dereliction of duty, permitting the surviving guardsmen opportunities as martyr redemptors upon the line core front lines. The Marshall's forces swelled to over 200,000 Astromeitarum within days, as well as nearly a dozen cobbled together squadrons of aeronautica Imperialis aircraft. The Death Corps's renowned skills in operating in annihilated environments such as the ruins of Amara was highly valuable at this stage of the campaign. The core shifted their tactics based upon several first engagements with the Nekrons, applying overwhelming artillery fire to deny the Nekrons long-ranged fire at every opportunity. The relentless advance of Nekron warriors was stalled by similarly implacable guardsmen, fanatical in their devotion to the Imperial cause, making great success in comparison to other militarum forces, but at a horrific toll in lives. Marshall Venner was of course aware of the dire nature of his situation. What victories he was winning were temporary at best and the enemy were seemingly in total control of the planet already. In perhaps archetypal mentality, he settled upon glorious martyrdom in the emperor's name as the only route worthy of consideration. But he would not do so without a target. This he was provided thanks to reconnaissance undertaken by the Minotaur's chapter who had established that within the ruins of New Vasber, a step pyramid of green black stone, the angles of which hurt the eyes of all those who beheld it, had risen from the rubble, appearing to pull bolt after bolt of lightning from the boiling skies above onto its apex. Several other lesser citadels made of that same malignant stonework rose around it, connected to each other by a web of angular alien trenchwork. Necron forces in great number patrolled this complex and could be observed dragging human corpses into the great hungering mo of the pyramid. Venner's attack on the Nekron citadel was horrendously bloody. The sentry pylons of the fortress reaped hundreds of advancing cre and other guardsmen within minutes and the opening Imperial artillery bombardment was deflected by advanced energy shields of the pyramids. Committing everything to the attack, Marshall Venner was met with similar commitment by the Nekrons, who unleashed a horde of warriors and koptic constructs in the defense of their imp placements. As probing attacks against Imperial artillery began to deprecate their effectiveness, the nevertheless managed a breakthrough upon the battlefield, [music] reaching the outlying alien citadels at the cost of thousands of their own, surrounding Nekrons and bracketing them within murderous crossfire. Engineers, experts in breaching fortified structures, were hurriedly deployed, cracking open each citadel in turn and rushing within. Despite the utterly unknown workings of the Xenos technology they beheld, they were nevertheless cre with explosives and judiciously applied the Emperor's destruction to whatever power conduits or energy outputs they could determine would be effective. One by one, the Nekron pyramids were destroyed, often at the cost of the soldiers that brought them down. As the death toll on Amara climbed into the billions, the Nekron fleet turned its attention to the Imperial ships within the system. If Imperial commanders had believed the relatively tiny amount of Xenos ships would flee before such a vast human armada, they were sorely mistaken. With an ease that one senior officer described as almost contemptuous, the Nekron ships smoothly came about and arrayed themselves against the incoming Orphan fleet and began to accelerate to speeds that almost defied sensor readings. The main arc fleet held by Imperial readings less than a quarter of their number and by logistic standards far less tonnage with their ships being thin or small in comparison to Imperial Navy behemoths. The exception to these were two mighty tomb ships 15 km in span with sinister pyramids crusting their surfaces. These were codified by Imperial Strategos as the Sunkiller and Dead Hand for identification purposes and marked as targets of extreme priority given their size. Having now identified the invaders as Necrons, the senior navy officers noted that the concentration of power before them, however small in comparison to their own navy, still represented one of, if not the largest deployment of Nekron starships on Imperial record. Previous encounters were extremely rare, but had gone very poorly for the Navy. And the Mechanicus Magi aboard were frantically hailing bridge officers regarding unknowable energy readings concentrated around the largest enemy ships. On the bridge of the Apocalypse class battleship Araka Dominus, Grand Admiral George Caro, Knight Commander of Battlefleet Orpheus, conferred with the helmeted form of Ayion Molo, chapter master of the Minotaurs via Hollith. Moolok himself aboard the relic battle barge Dalos Crreta and commanding a dozen Estarti strike cruisers besides declared that he would take a secondary echelon behind the Imperial forward battle volume preparing to strike at a potential weak point in the Nekron vanguard or to deal with any ships that attempted a breakthrough. This was not a move poised for discussion. Moolak simply did as [music] he saw fit, daining to inform Admiral Caro out of basic politeness. The admiral acceeded, ordering his fleet to advance and engage only as ordered under pain of death. Not that the Imperials would have any much opportunity to slip their leashes. As the Nekron ships entered extreme weapons range even before the line of battle [music] had been fully formed, ranging fire was immediately ordered through which the Nekron ships passed completely undeterred. Even as a swarm of torpedoes was launched, the Xenos made no move to correct their course or take evasive maneuvers. Now entering terminal range, scores of the torpedoes simply ceased to function. They sped off in entirely new directions or exploded harmlessly on the hulls of the Nekron vessels. Hoving now into lance range, the invaders finally discharged their weaponry to ruinous effect. Massive gravitational distortions were registered as Imperial ships detected incoming weapons fire approaching at nearly the speed of light. Afteraction reports logged by the pitiful few survivors that made it out of this conflaguration later claimed that what sensor readings could track the projectiles labeled them as fragments of dead stars. The battle cruiser Rickenbach, a vessel whose service record dated from the beginnings of the Great Crusade, was hit amid ships and simply detonated. It was merely the first. Admiral Karu ordered the entire battle fleet to come about and affect broadside fire at will, clearly seeing the futility in attempting the usual careful, coordinated dance of ships that typically defined void warfare. The Nekron ships sliced through the Imperial fleet amidst a hail of lance fire and macro cannon shells, discharging their own fearsome batteries in return. Both armadas rad each other without pause or mercy. But as they [music] parted, fully a quarter of the Imperial ships present had been destroyed or crippled beyond rescue, with barely any damage having been registered upon the Nekrons. The Xenos, having passed to the rear of the Imperial fleet, were expected to begin a slow arc back, hopefully granting Karu some time to ready up another storm in response. But to the horror of all observers, the alien ship simply stopped. Their momentum was utterly, impossibly arrested. And then they simply turned with impossible ease. The ships came about and began returning on the path they had come, straight into the exposed rear of the Imperial fleet. The second attack, perhaps predictably, was supremely more devastating than the first. Blinded by their own drive flares, the Imperial ships could barely detect the positioning of the alien vessels as they came within killing range. They were the easiest of prey. Admiral Caru bellowed disengage orders into his Vox, but it was still too late. The retribution class battleship Talisman of Grace was caught before the Sunkiller and sheared in half by its Gaus arrays. While the heavy cruiser Mendicatus was pulled apart mercilessly by a pack of Nekron raiders alongside dozens more craft burning and breaking in the silent void. What line of battle had remained was quickly sundered, with Imperial starships plunging in whatever direction they could, lashing out at any targets of opportunity. The Arcia Dominus, against the odds, claimed the life of a Nekron harvest ship, only to be targeted in return by a trio of Nekron raiders who gutted its starboard batteries and set fire to her main engineerium. Out of control, the flagship tumbled away into the void. The horrified senior command watching on flickering hollow spheres as the xenos ships danced amongst the dead and soon to die like carrying beasts reing in slaughter. Aion Mollik of the minotaurs having observed the debacle knew even his estates ships would likely be wholly outclassed by the firepower, durability, and maneuverability of the xenos. The dower chapter master instead ordered an immediate attack upon a single target. The tombship labeled dead hand and opting an attack formation in the shape of a bull's head with the datalos crater forming the protected skull and the chapter's three battle barges the jaws. Its eight strike cruisers the horns. The Minotaur's fleet smashed into the heart of battle. Engines at full burn. The strike cost them the daughter of Tempests. a battle barge taken as a prize in the Badab war alongside the Fidelitas Lambda and a trio of strike cruisers. It did however bring the Minotaurs into the boarding range they sought. The boarding torpedoes that delivered the chapter into the heart of the dead hand brought the brazen estarties into a charal house of a wholly alien sort. one whose constructs and warriors reacted to the invading marines as a body reacts to a virus. Losses were extreme. Within a half hour, only Terminator squad Xalion survived, having fought its way into the heart of the ship's central chamber. Within that massive area, a kilometer wide, arose a great deis upon which stood the overlord of the fleet, clad in a cloak of raw darkness. It would be the last sight the warriors of Squad Exthalion would see as Lichgard stepped from within the seemingly living darkness to butcher these human transgressors. They survived long enough to send a signal to the Dalos crater, one the battle barge used to target the chamber and fire every weapon battery they could upon the location. Curiously for Nekron vessels, the Manarch tomb ship was recorded as having an atmosphere, likely an aspect of the flare curse that befell the dynasty, for no Nekron had any reason or need to breathe. The fact was exploited by the Minotaurs. Central Chamber was breached by the targeted bombardment with explosive decompression, bucking the tomb ship off course. One great arm of its crescent sweep caught the datalos crater in a dancing blow, [music] sending the relic battle barge spinning in space, where aboard Asterion Mollock alongside his chapters in terminator elite and several Hecaton contempted dreadnots crashed through the veil of reality in an audacious teleport assault. Against the sinister fleet lord did Malo range himself in a clash of silent, wordless fury. Their singular combat, an honor perhaps dained by the Nekron lord, was not abided by Malik, who sought only to kill. The Hecaton dreadnots of the chapter aided their master. But such was the skill of the Xenos overlord that ruin was brought upon their ancient chassis. But triumph Mulliko did impaling the sinister figure upon the black spear of the minotaurs before a catastrophic impact dislodged the two combatants and swept Malik and the surviving Astartis back out into the void. The dead hand tombship turned slowly, pivoting away from the burning hulk of the battle barge Fidelas Lambda. The Minotaur ship had rammed the Xenos vessel at full speed, but this dying act had forced the tomb ship to affect a retreat. With their flagship on the move, the Xenos fleet likewise disengaged. Driven off at best, not defeated, leaving within their wake utter devastation. The Sunkiller and a dozen escorting raiders unexpectedly split from the body of the fleet and made landing on the night side of Oric, whose face was soon consumed by dark storms and pulses of unnatural radiance. The remainder and the wounded dead hand simply vanished without a trace whatsoever. It is possible that they affected an acceleration so fast that Imperial augers were unable to track them. or perhaps some altogether more unknowable technological means covered their retreat. Either way, they were gone. But the victory could hardly have been any more pirick. Less than 10% of the Imperial ships remained operational, and even these survivors bore deep, painful scars. Amara Prime, although now liberated from its primary invasion force, was a graveyard of billions. Whatever recompense the Imperium had claimed there had been bought at the most terrible price. The surviving forces were evacuated as quickly as possible from the ruins, pulled back to the outer worlds of Laymon and Calama to regroup. Of the remnants of the civilian population, those unlucky enough to remain alive in the dark, Charnal destruction, the Imperium abandoned them to whatever fate awaited. The battle of Amara was over. By the dawning of 995 M41, the Orphan War, such as it remained, had reached a bloody punitive stalemate. But scattered forces did not retreat from the destruction of Amara or Hydrogast, were wholly cut off from the Imperium, left to wither or sell their lives. Attrition rates along the front line reached some 60%. With no imperial gains or advances being made, the line held, but at a staggering cost. Worse still, fresh conflicts broke out in the Chimarium system as planets fell to the hands of the arch enemy who had launched opportunistic invasions with the Imperium reeling from the Nekron assault. At Meyer and Amrifell, Xenos probing attacks were increasing with Imperial Strategos rating the possibility of a full invasion occurring as quite high. This combined with the difficulty of immediate resupply and the utter devastation of battle fleet Orpheus during the initial invasion led the Sinod Militaris of Segmentum Tempestus to conclude that the Orpheus sector could not be saved without the deployment of a crusade level military force which by muniatorum calculations accounting for the already in progress segmentum conflicts and the vagaries of future ones occurring would not be at the Imperium's disposal. for approximately 3 to 5 decades. This report worked its way through the upper layers of the munatorum and administratum before being delivered to the eyes of the high lords of terror for a conclusive vote. It is apparent from historical records of senatorum proceedings that the Ordo Xenos had a very heavy hand in the progress of this report. The emergence of the Mayanarch dynasty in such force had at the time been one of the largest and most aggressive awakenings of the Nekrons yet encountered by the Imperium. And the scale of the devastation it had unleashed had forced major cinnids of the Ordo to urgently re-examine their writings, protocols, and policies concerning Imperial engagement with the species. In consultation with the death watch chapter of the adeptus estates, the Ordo Xenos was in the process of launching exploratory and research expeditions into what remained of the Orpheus sector and clearly wanted to ensure little could impede their efforts. The chamber Morai in recommendation to the Senate and championed by Inquisitorial representative Cleopatra Arcs advanced and passed the Orphan decree, an edict Imperialis that formally disccorporated the sector. As of 026699 M41, Orpheus was no more. It did not exist. Its tithes were enulled, [music] its authority stripped, its history sealed, and committed to the deepest vaults to be unremembered. A cordon of fortress worlds, primarily based in the neighboring Uradichi sector, were ordered constructed and a military cordon enforced. To deny the Nekrons any resources they could claim from planets still controlled by the Imperium, the Minotaurs were ordered to commit Exterminatus, pending their refitting and rearmament following their losses. Thus did Orpheus fall in cold fire. Thus did a region of Imperial space collapse. Millennia of history snuffed out in scarcely a year by a foe who had dwelled beneath its surface all along. Its fate remains as we leave it. A blackened husk of space, a testament to the blinkered ignorance of the Imperium, a loss of staggering scale, and one rendered into relative obscurity only for the immense losses and calamities the Imperium was to endure in the waning months of 999 M41. The fall of Cadia, the Nocta Satna, the opening of the Kikatrix Meladictum. Even for the Manarch Dynasty, their current disposition and fate remains unclear to imperial scholarship. The return of the silent king and the unfolding of the pariah nexus has cast new fears that the bloodyhanded warriors of Zun Bakir may throw themselves a new at the imperial cordon that has yet to keep them in check, affecting a breakout from their dynastic heartlands in an effort to rejoin the lord of their species. This remains to be seen. As for the Minotaurs, one cannot independently confirm if their proposed Exterminatus campaign was ever carried out. Their presence upon Terra during the Hexarchy crisis casts doubt upon this, but given the extreme chronological disruption to the galaxy following the Noctis Eterna and the curious nature of the chapter themselves, we will likely never know. For now, the Orphan War has been as totally buried as the population that once dwelt there. A shameful chapter of history that the Imperium would rather forget. A Imperator Gloria and Excelsus Terra. This video and this channel were made possible thanks to the very kind donations and support from my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com/oculousimperia. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter @ Oculusmperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback. And as ever, thank you very much for watching. Hallelujah. Glorious. [music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> is [music] [music] [music and singing] All >> [music] [music] >> Israel. [music] Hallelujah. [music] She [singing and music]