The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

The Preceptor Line was in ruins – the gateway was choked with dead animals and entire sections of the wall were breached from close-range artillery blasts.

Only one scaffold ramp still offered access to the wall, and Lord Donar climbed it warily, hearing every creak of timber and groan of over-stressed metal. The top of the wall was a shattered ruin of broken stumps where protective merlons had once offered protection. Its entire complement of turrets had been destroyed, or were without ammunition.

Straight away, Lord Donar saw none of that would matter.

The Kushite jungle was gone, wiped out entirely.

Six hundred million hectares of lush vegetation were now an unending morass of necrotic black ooze. Lord Donar knew only one weapon that could comprehensively destroy life with such speed.

The black miasma at the edge of what had once been a jungle of incomparable depth and fecundity began dissipating like night before the dawn. His sensorium broke up into buzzing static as what looked like a trillion flies lifted from the ocean of decay beyond the walls.

Lord Donar punched the canopy release and let the segmented hood of his Knight fold back into its carapace. The stench hit him first, a paralysing reek of spoiled meat, dung and polluted earth.

As the miasma continued to lift, Lord Donar saw an army of invasion grinding its way through the decaying remains of the jungle. Enormous fuel tankers bearing the golden heraldry of the Ophir promethium guilds stretched to the horizon where striding Titans moved with ponderous steps.

Led by a virtually wrecked Rhino, a host of fighting vehicles and giant artillery pieces threw up great clods of black mud from their tracks as they advanced on the wall. Marching grimly alongside them were thousands of Legion warriors in plate that had once been a pale ivory, but which was now plastered with filth and decaying matter.

At the head of the army was an armoured giant in a matted cloak of scraps and iron. His face was a leering skull gagged by a bronze mouthpiece and he bore a reaper blade of such scale that it seemed possible he had hacked the jungle down single-handedly.

Lord Donar saw scores of monstrous culverins and wide-mawed artillery pieces fed enormous breacher shells. His heart hardened as he turned his Knight about and made his way from the wall.

‘Father?’ said Robard, as Lord Donar reached the ground.

‘Knights of House Donar,’ he said. ‘March with me.’

Lord Balmorn Donar strode through the gate, his Knights quick to follow him through the corpse-choked gateway.

The Knights stood before the impossible army of the Death Guard. Grumbling superheavies took aim at them with Titan-killing weaponry; volcano cannons, plasma blastguns and accelerator cannons. The overkill was ridiculous. Target locks appeared on Lord Donar’s auspex, too many to count.

Enough weaponry to kill a dozen Knight Houses were trained upon them and the wall they had spent their lives defending. Lord Donar’s guns were empty and useless. Only his reaper blade was still viable, and he would match it against the whoreson master of the Death Guard.

‘Only one order left to give,’ said Robard.

‘Charge!’ shouted Lord Donar.