Earth, 2021
Aboard the Oath, in a colossal dark chamber resembling a cathedral, Maloris stood in solemn silence before a towering statue of the Emperor of Mankind. Flickering candlelight danced across the cold stone, casting elongated shadows that writhed like tormented souls, while thick incense coiled through the air, heavy with the scent of rituals and unyielding faith.
Behind him, a hololith hummed faintly, projecting a dim, ethereal glow along the pathway leading to the statue.
A hooded servitor, its flesh augmented with rusted cybernetics and eyes glazed in mechanical obedience, tended the device without a word, ensuring the giants among men could behold the sacred vision. They had glimpsed it through their own hololiths aboard their ships, but the raw, unfiltered sight of ancient Terra stirred something primal even in these psycho-indoctrinated war machines....beings forged in the fires of eternal conflict, who could never tire of gazing upon the cradle of humanity.
This was Holy Terra, or at least the ghost of what it had once been—a verdant world untouched by the scars of ten millennia of ceaseless war.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Maloris finally spoke, his voice rumbling like distant thunder echoing through the void, heavy with the weight of ages and unspoken burdens.
"For millennia, you have fought to shield humanity from the encroaching darkness that threatens its very survival. How does it feel to gaze upon the infancy of what you bleed for?" Maloris turned from the statue, his imposing frame pivoting with deliberate grace, to face the Astartes captains arrayed before him. His gaze lingered briefly on the Canoness of the Adepta Sororitas—the Sisters of Battle, as they were known among the Imperium's faithful. Her presence had been mandated as a necessary safeguard for this expedition, a decree from on high that brooked no dissent.
Though dwarfed in stature and overshadowed by the transhuman might of the Astartes, the Canoness radiated an unquenchable zeal in her piercing eyes—a fire that spoke volumes of her order's lethal devotion. Clad in ornate power armor etched with litanies of purity and seals of martyrdom, she stood as a bastion of unyielding faith, her hands resting on the hilt of a blessed chainsword, ready to ignite in righteous fury at the slightest provocation.
"Lord Maloris, what would you have us do?" one of the Astartes inquired, his voice a measured growl. He was clad in dark green ceramite armor, adorned with draconic motifs and flame-etched pauldrons that evoked the volcanic forges of his homeworld. His skin was as dark as the abyssal voids at the chamber's edges, a rich ebony forged in the heat of Nocturne's relentless trials, but his eyes burned with a glaring crimson intensity, like molten iron drawn from the deepest forge-cores. Yet, beneath that fearsome exterior, his tone carried a subtle undercurrent of compassion—the hallmark of the Salamanders, sons of Vulkan, who tempered their wrath with a profound regard for human life.
"What do you do, Salamander, when xenos invade the cradle of mankind and defile the seat of the Golden Throne?" Maloris countered, his question a blade unsheathed, testing the warrior's resolve rather than offering guidance.
"Purgation," the Salamander captain replied flatly, his voice devoid of hesitation, echoing the unyielding doctrine of his Chapter: to burn away impurity with righteous flame, leaving only ashes in the wake of salvation.
Maloris nodded approvingly, a subtle gesture that conveyed volumes in the grim silence of the chamber.
"I summon you not merely to indulge in the sight of ancient Terra, but to lend your hands in purging a threat that endangers humanity's survival in this forgotten antiquity." His words hung in the air like the tolling of a death knell, each syllable laced with the inexorable gravity of Imperial decree.
"The methods of this era are insufficient for true retaliation; therefore, we shall stand and fight as the Emperor's vanguard. Each of you was selected for this fleet by the Master himself—your chapters' finest, drawn from the shadows of doubt and forged in the crucible of loyalty. I do not demand fresh oaths from you, for your vows are bound eternally to Him on Terra. What I require is your unwavering compliance." Maloris's gaze swept across them all, piercing like an auspex scan, acknowledging the diversity of their thoughts and the varied paths they walked in service to the Emperor. The Salamander's compassionate fury, the stoic resolve of others.....these were tools, honed for war, yet each bore the potential for independent judgment.
Maloris, for his part, harbored no illusions about the Astartes' unswerving adherence to his mission down to its marrow. He trusted not their blind obedience, but their unparalleled efficiency in the art of war—their ability to rend worlds asunder and excise threats with surgical, apocalyptic precision.
After all, the Astartes were the Emperor's ultimate retort to a galaxy that knew only war, a universe that bled its inhabitants dry, stripping them to the last vestiges of sanity and soul. A force of such magnitude was far better as an ally than an adversary, despite their inherent flaws. Oaths of loyalty bound them, yet these transhuman warriors had proven defiant when commands clashed with their core beliefs—a trait admirable in its purity, yet one that sometimes rendered them less than the flawless instruments they were designed to be.
"Your ceaseless efforts to preserve the Imperium across the millennia have not gone unnoticed by the Lord," Maloris continued, his tone shifting to one of solemn acknowledgment, as if reciting from the sacred scrolls of the Ecclesiarchy. "Every brother and sister lost in the fray has been accounted for, their sacrifices etched into the annals of eternity. For He sees all and hears all, from the Golden Throne's unblinking vigil."
"You may harbor skepticism about your role in this expedition—why we plunge into the abyss of the unknown, chasing shadows redacted from memory and record. But know this: understanding will dawn in due time, as surely as the Emperor's light pierces the warp's veil."
"We shall lay down our lives to the last of our brothers if it means fulfilling the Emperor's will," declared an Astartes clad in black armor with stark white pauldrons, his voice a fervent proclamation that reverberated off the chamber's vaulted ceilings. The Black Templar bore the heraldry of his Chapter proudly: a Maltese cross emblazoned in obsidian against the white, his armor etched with purity seals fluttering like banners of condemnation, and a tabard bearing litanies of hate against the heretic and the xenos. His eyes gleamed with zealous fire, a fanatic gleam that brooked no compromise. Sons of Dorn, champions of Sigismund, the Black Templars had spent the last ten thousand years on eternal crusades, scouring the galaxy in unending campaigns of purification, their bolters roaring hymns of destruction against all who opposed the Emperor's divine mandate.
Their loyalty was absolute, a finality etched in adamantium—but it was a double-edged blade, for anything deemed contrary to their rigid creed was branded heresy, demanding immediate and total eradication. His words were extreme, a clarion call to martyrdom, yet they resonated with the grim duty shared by all present: to fight and perish in the Emperor's name was not merely an end, but the highest honor a Space Marine could aspire to, a transcendence through blood and bolter-fire.
"I am well aware of your zealous devotion to the Lord, Templar," Maloris replied, his voice steady as the chamber's unyielding stone. "But I do not require the lives of you and your brothers." He paused, letting the weight of his words settle like the pall of incense.
"Nor any of yours," he added, addressing the assembly with a sweeping gesture that encompassed the Salamander's compassionate ferocity, the Canoness's unyielding piety, and the silent vigilance of the others—each a colossus of war, their armor scarred from countless battlefields, their postures radiating the coiled lethality of apex predators in a galaxy of endless prey.
Maloris fell silent for a moment, the chamber's oppressive gloom pressing in, broken only by the faint whir of the hololith and the distant, muffled echoes of the ship's vast mechanisms—reminders of the fragile vessel hurtling through the void, a bastion of Imperial might against the uncaring stars.
Then, a cherubim drifted into the chamber, its diminutive form a grotesque parody of innocence: vat-grown flesh twisted into an angelic visage, with pallid skin stretched taut over mechanical augments, tiny wings of feather and servo fluttering erratically as it propelled itself on anti-grav suspensors. Its eyes, wide and unblinking, glowed with faint lumen strips, and in its chubby hands it clutched a data-slate etched with glowing runes. The creature hovered toward Maloris with eerie grace, a harbinger from the ship's command deck, relaying tidings in a voice that warbled like a corrupted vox-cast—innocent yet infernal, a whisper from the grimdark future where even children were weapons.
The message it bore was terse, encoded in High Gothic ciphers, but its import was clear: the hour of reckoning approached.
"Prepare your companies," Maloris commanded, his voice now a forge-hammer strike, igniting the warriors' resolve. "Canoness, ready your Sisters for the fray."
The Astartes shifted imperceptibly, their massive forms humming with restrained power, bolters and blades at the ready—titans of gene-forged might, their faces masks of stoic determination etched with the lines of endless campaigns. The Canoness nodded, her zeal flaring like a promethium blaze, as the chamber seemed to pulse with the anticipation of violence, the air thick with the promise of purgation in the Emperor's name.
"It is time."