C. Goto - Dawn of War

Suddenly, Bale burst out of the confined tunnel into a wide chamber. He lost his footing as he charged into the subterranean cavern; the ground dropped away from a ledge at the end of the tunnel, and he fell a couple of metres into a pool of liquid. Landing on his feet, Bale flourished his scythe in a dramatic arc, ready for whatever lay in wait for him.

Splashes sounded all around as a squad of Marines leapt down into the water to support their lord, and behind him he could hear the clatter of footfalls as the rest of the detachment fanned out around the stone ledge.

The darkness was dense, and Bale opened his augmented eyes wide, straining to see the details of the chamber. But there was hardly any light this far under the ground, and he could make out very little. Then, far away, presumably on the other side of a huge chamber, Bale saw the glimmer of Sindri’s staff.

“Sorcerer!” yelled Bale, formulating threats in his mind as his deep voice resonated through the cavern.

The point of light stopped moving, and then rose into the air, growing brighter as it did so. Bale shot a signal to his squad to spread out and prepare to return fire. But the light continued to increase in intensity, and the radius of its reach started to seep out across the cavern, lighting Sindri himself like a target on the ledge against the far wall.

After a few seconds, the full extent of the massive chamber began to become evident. The ceiling was a giant rocky dome, vaulted and grand, as though carved out to approximate the interior of a cathedral. The stone walls above the ledge were curved in a huge circle, and they were covered in frescoes and images, painted crudely in a deep red ink. Below the ledge was a vast lake of liquid, big enough to submerge a small city. The ledge itself seemed to mark the intersection of the rock-layers of the valley walls from the soft soil-strata of the river basin on the valley floor.

Bale looked around the chamber in amazement as the orb of light from Sindri’s staff flooded out to fill the whole space. As the light crept over the surface of the water, Bale noticed that it was not water at all. Scooping his hand down into the dark liquid, he lifted a fistful up to his mouth, tasting the rich iron as the thick liquid gushed down his throat.

It was blood.

This was a vast, underground reservoir of blood, cut into the river basin below Lloovre Marr and, from the look of it, it had been lovingly created and cared for over a long, long time.

“We are nearly there, my lord,” came Sindri’s voice from the other side of the chamber, apparently unsurprised by the scene around him. “But we must hurry. The path heads back up into the cliffs now, and it will take us up into the heart of Lloovre Marr itself. Come.”

The farseer slumped to the ground, exhausted and spent, as the pool of warp-energy on the flagstones faded out of existence. A couple of Striking Scorpions sprang forward from their places in the defensive emplacements around the monument, gathering the farseer into their arms and carrying her back behind the elegant barricades, leaving the figure that had just emerged from the pool crouched into a ball on its own. It looked as though it had just been born, fully formed and terrible. The figure was huge, much bigger than any other eldar, even in its crouched posture. As it gradually unfolded itself, drawing itself up to its full height and stretching its metal skin in the dying light of the red sun, even the Striking Scorpions shrank back from it.

The Avatar of Khaine threw back its head and let out a blood-curdling howl that could be heard for several kilometres in every direction. Macha narrowed her eyes in pain as the hideous sound scraped into her ears, grating against her finely tuned sensibilities like teeth down the blade of a sword. She knew that every eldar in the city would hear the cry, and that they would fight with renewed passion as the spirit of Khaine riddled their souls with the lust for blood.

Great bladed horns rose from the avatar’s ornate wraithbone helmet, and a plume fluttered between them, displaying the colours of the Biel-Tan. Its armour burned with a fiery red, as though its molten blood radiated through the plates, and the intricate web of runes that laced its body glowed with ancient powers, forgotten even to the eldar themselves.

Its left hand was a dripping mess of blood and pulp, as though it had been melted in the wet heat of boiling oil. But this disfigurement was a mark of distinction and, more than anything else about the avatar, it was this bloody hand that would inspire the Biel-Tan to greater feats on the battlefield. It was the mark of Kaela Mensha Khaine himself-echoing the injury inflicted on him at the beginning of time, when the Great Enemy had destroyed him and scattered his substance across the material realm. This Avatar of Khaine was the embodiment of one such fragment-a fragment kept in the heart of the Biel-Tan craftworld until its moment of greatest need.

Jaerielle? asked Macha, speaking her words directly into the avatar’s mind, searching for any spark of recognition. But there was nothing, just a cold blast of psychic energy that washed back into the farseer’s mind, chilling her to her soul.

Pulling herself onto her feet, Macha drew her own ancient force sword from its holster on her back and walked gingerly forward towards the avatar. For the first time in the history of the Biel-Tan, the avatar had been incarnated without its Wailing Doom-the ancestral weapon of this god-eldar.

The Ceremony of Awakening had been performed too quickly, and shards of the avatar’s energy were still missing. It was born incomplete.

As Macha stumbled, too weak to support the weight of her own weapon, the two Striking Scorpions rushed to her aid once again, grasping her elbows and supporting her weight. Her blade was a pathetic shadow of the great Wailing Doom lost on this very planet three thousand years before, but it was the finest blade on the whole of Biel-Tan, and a weapon worthy of a great eldar warrior.

The farseer walked towards the avatar, and dropped to one knee before it, holding her long, two-handed force sword out in front of her. The avatar looked down at the small figure of the farseer and tilted its head slightly, as though confused by an inappropriate sight. Then it reached out its right hand and lifted Macha back onto her feet, before kneeling itself and bowing its head to the farseer who had brought it back from the fathomless depths of Biel-Tan’s infinity circuit. Macha nodded with satisfaction and held out the sword. Without a word, the avatar took the great blade into one hand, and leapt backwards away from the farseer, flourishing the sword in a complicated and elegant pattern. Then, as it turned its back on her to set out into the city, a Typhoon missile blasted out of an adjoining street and smashed into its chest.

The land speeder banked around the building on the corner of the street, bursting out into the plaza. Gabriel hit the brakes hard and skidded the Typhoon, banking again to bleed some energy as Isador punched the trigger of the missile launcher. The rocket roared out of the turret and spiralled straight into the chest of the monstrous warrior in the centre of the plaza, where it exploded in a shower of flames.

Meanwhile, the Blood Ravens assault bikes poured into the plaza out of the street behind them, each skidding to a standstill in a neat formation across the square, training their front guns on the green eldar figures that flickered with motion behind the structure around the statue of Lloovre Marr. As the bikes opened fire with their twin-linked bolters, battering the barricades with a tirade of explosive shells, the Rhino finally rolled into the plaza, spilling Matiel’s Marines out of the back before it had even stopped moving.