C. Goto - Dawn of War

The Librarian’s eyes flickered back into blue, and he gazed up at his old friend with his own eyes for the last time. “I was wrong, Gabriel,” he coughed, trails of blood seeping out of the corner of his mouth. “I thought that I was strong enough to control it. I thought that I could use its power for the good of the Imperium… you must see that.”

“I believe you, old friend,” said Gabriel, smiling faintly as he saw the familiar light return to Isador’s eyes. It flickered weakly, on the point of extinction. “That is why I bring you redemption myself.”

Gabriel dropped his chainsword to the ground and drew his bolt pistol. He knelt for a moment at the side of the dying Librarian, and reached out his gauntleted hand, grasping Isador’s wrist firmly. “Goodbye, Isador. May the Emperor shelter your soul from the storm.”

Standing slowly, Gabriel fired a single shot from his boltpistol and turned away. He strode to the ruined city wall without looking back, and vaulted over it, landing smoothly on his bike on the other side. Kicking the bike’s engine into life, Gabriel spun the rear wheel and left the old city in the dust.

C.S. Goto (ebook by Undead)

01 – Dawn of War

The convoy of Blood Ravens had ground to a halt several hundred metres short of the summit. The storm had finally reached the mountain, and great sheets of lightning tore into the mountainside, forming a ring of warp energy and fire around the twin peaks. The mountain itself had cracked open along the line of the barrage from the storm, and the dual summits had been torn into the air, floating like impossible islands of rock in the tumult of energised rain. An archipelago of islets, blasted free of the mountain top, were held in impossible suspension all around them.

Through the purpling curtain of warp lightning, Inquisitor Toth could make out dozens of figures on the two islands, and constant flashes of gunfire. Right on the point of the highest peak, Mordecai could see the silhouette of a Chaos sorcerer in a bladed helmet, his arms held up into the storm as though calling it to him. In his hands burned two red flames.

The storm washed down the mountainside, rippling out from the sorcerer’s peak and hurling lashes of hail and spikes of lightning through the gale-force winds. The tumult roared through the ring of warp energy and beat against the Blood Ravens as they waited for the order to advance on the summit. Mordecai and Corallis looked out of the roof-hatch of the lead Rhino, surveying the unnatural scene as the lashes of another realm streamed into their faces. Against the roar of the wind, they could not even hear each other speak.

Corallis stared into the firestorm, his enhanced vision able to pick out individual figures in the kaleidoscope. He narrowed his eyes in disgust as he recognised the shapes of a number of Imperial Guardsmen in the fray, fighting alongside the hulking figures of the Alpha Legionaries. On the second island-summit, lower than the one on which Sindri stood calling to the storm, stood an eldar farseer, her arms upheld to the heavens as though entreating the gods for assistance. Around her was a small, dwindling group of eldar warriors and wraithguard. They were completely outnumbered and outgunned, but they fought with incredible desperation, discipline and grace, as though their very souls depended on it.

Dropping his eyes from the scene, Corallis shook his head-he had never seen a battlefield like it before. It was as though the forces of nature themselves were at war, and the various races of the galaxy were simply caught in the fray. He looked along the line of the sheet of coruscating energy that stood between the Blood Ravens and the theatre of battle, and saw that the border was strewn with corpses-some human, some eldar, and some hidden in the huge suits of armour of the Alpha Legion. They had clearly fought all the way up the mountainside.

He turned to look back down the mountain, over the heads of the Blood Ravens and Imperial storm troopers that had spilled out of their transports, realising that the only way onwards would be on foot. Even in the gathering darkness shed by the black clouds of the warp storm, Corallis could see how the route was speckled with death and doused with blood. He did not pretend to understand what was unfolding here, but he knew that it had to be stopped.

Cresting a rise to the west, Corallis saw a burst of red in a cloud of dust. Flashes of lightning reflected brilliantly off the speeding form, making it flash like a beacon. The sergeant gripped Mordecai’s shoulder and spun the inquisitor round so that he could see, nodding his head towards the approaching rider. Mordecai squinted his eyes against the wind and rain, but then a crack of lightning lit the mountainside and Gabriel’s assault bike shone in the sudden light as he roared across the slope towards the Blood Ravens.

Mordecai nodded firmly to Corallis, but the sergeant was still staring out across the mountain. There was something else over there. As Gabriel drew closer, a great cloud of dust began to emerge over the rise behind him. After a couple of seconds, the cloud of dust turned into a line of ork warbikes, bouncing and roaring in pursuit of the captain. And in the wake of the warbikes came a clutch of wartrukks, battlewagons and the rumbling forms of looted Imperial Chimera transports.

“Orks!” yelled Corallis into his armour’s vox unit. “Orks approaching from the west.”

Mordecai snapped his head back towards the speeding figure of Gabriel, who was already within range of the small vox units built into the Blood Ravens’ armour. The ramshackle line of orks behind him was clearly in view now.

“Ordnance!” came the crackling voice of Gabriel, as his bike bumped and skidded over the increasingly wet ground.

The turrets of the Predators and Whirlwinds rotated smoothly to the west, and a flurry, of fire erupted from the tanks in the Blood Ravens’ convoy, their shells flashing through the air over Gabriel’s head. A series of explosions detonated on the mountainside as the rockets and shells punched into the ork line, toppling a gaggle of warbikes and dropping a battlewagon into a sudden crater.

At the same time, Tanthius’ Land Raider streaked through the driving hail towards the orks, passing Gabriel’s bike on its way. Behind it growled one of the Rhinos being used by the storm troopers. Tanthius and Ckrius, standing against the elements in the open hatch in the side of the Land Raider, snapped a crisp salute to Gabriel as they roared past, the vehicle’s gun turret lancing parallel streams from its twin-lascannons as it went.

As he reached the rest of the Blood Ravens, Gabriel hit the brakes hard, skidding the bike over the sodden ground and stopping perilously close to the lead Rhino. He vaulted from the bike, straight into the side-hatch of the transport, greeting Corallis and Mordecai with abrupt nods. The rain and wind whipped them.

“We cannot approach the summits, captain,” explained Corallis through the vox-channel. “The storm hobbles the systems in our vehicles, and… well, the mountain top is unsound, as you can see.”

Gabriel stared forward into the curtain of warp energy for the first time, his mind racing with questions that had no answers. The scene on the other side was simply impossible-with islands of rock floating amidst floods of fire, wracked with bolts of purple lightning and lashed by torrents of rain and hail. The Alpha Legionaries and a knot of damned Imperial Guardsmen were assaulting a sub-summit, held by the eldar witch that had saved Gabriel’s life in Lloovre Marr. She was a blaze of blue fire, but her forces were dwindling. And there was Sindri, standing on his own on the top of the highest island, calling to the daemons of the warp, the Maledictum in one hand and the curved dagger in the other.