 There is next to no disputing of the overwhelming tactical advantage possessed by the word bearers during the first 24 hours of the Battle of Calth. They had complete control of the orbital volume thanks to the Campanile Strike, subsequent surprise attacks by their fleet and their possession of the orbital weapons grid. On the planet's surface, word bearer ground forces immediately gained possession of every single significant tactical objective and had inflicted such devastating casualties and infrastructural damage as to deny the Ultramarines any opportunity to organize cohesively, let alone mount a counterattack. The 13th Legion's resistance was, at best in the early hours, able to form in isolated harried pockets around survivors bereft of any other options. It is notable then that as the hours of slaughter and massacre ground on, the word bearers appeared for everything to squander the position of superiority they held, abandoning fundamental military strategy in favor of genocidal actions. Seemingly without recourse for strategy or objectives, the 17th Legion and their cultic auxiliaries, in almost all Grand Warfare theaters, descended into a sort of butcher lunacy, seeking for all the world to merely kill and destroy and kill and destroy. It is a testament to the sheer advantage the traitors held and the utter surprise of their betrayal that even with these bizarre and flawed tactics, they were still able to inflict staggering numbers of casualties upon the Ultramarines, their attached auxilia, the Mechanicum, and Calt's civilian population. It is likewise a testament to the training and character of the 13th Legion that in almost all documented cases, isolated detachments of Ultramarines under attack put aside the pain of their foes' perfidy in favor of devising methods of defense and survival with whatever tools they had at their immediate disposal, resolving to inflict as much pain upon the hated foe as transhumanly possible. Two tetrarchs of Ultramar, iconic senior officers of the Legion, formed loci of resistance during the early hours of the betrayal. At the Holofusicon, a museum dedicated to imperial culture and civilization, Icos Lamiat, the Iron Warden of Conor, had drawn to his banner regiments of the Imperial Army and scattered bans of Ultramarine's heavy armor, supplementing his retinue of solar auxilia from the 41st Esbandor, as well as a sole Contemptor pattern dreadnought and a single Thanatar siege automata from the Ligio Cybernetica. Lamiat's band forged a path through the scrub deserts surrounding the Holofusicon, organizing survivors into columns heading towards Lanshir. The second tetrarch, Toro Nicodemus, led the remains of the Ultramarine's 9th chapter against the 17th Legion forces commanded by Fodral Fel. The wordbearers had fragmented, under orders from Fel to annihilate Erud Province, allowing tetrarch Nicodemus to surgically strike the most isolated and apparently blood-mad units, while avoiding larger forces, while following an isolated, but powerful Vox Transmission emanating from a fortified manner belonging to the planetary governor Adleptius Numinius. Far to the south, in the burning forests of Sharud Province, the remains of the 11th and 12th chapters of the Ultramarines mounted an extraordinarily coordinated defense against traitor-mechanicom automata and wordbearer support units. Fire teams defended roughly established dugouts of earthen defenses and felled trees, the secondary teams to the rear hurriedly preparing new improvised fortifications. In a display of ad hoc coordination, likely unmanageable by all but a few legions. As fighting ground on, as more and more wordbearer momentum bled away as the legion indulged in seemingly pointless slaughter or bizarre grotesque rituals, Ultramarine survivors were granted some measure of respite, however brief. It has been noted by certain scholars that, had these been astarties of legions shattered at Istvan, this relative lull would have been caused to regroup and strike at the nearest available enemy formation, in an attempt to sell their lives as dearly as possible in a forlorn, last-ditch attempt at vengeance. But the loyalist muster ongoing at Lanshire, including a miraculously unscathed titan-manipal from the legio Oberon, they were seemingly assembling a force that would have been capable of such a blood-thirsty advance. Whatever your scholastic or personal opinion of Gilliman's sons, it is notable that no such strike was attempted, not even necessarily contemplated. Records show that what senior officials were present in the outskirts of Lanshire all agreed that linking up with fellow loyalists, collating combat forces, logistical support, and experiences, was paramount above all else to their survival, even over the reaping of vengeance. This example is admittedly one amongst what was, generally speaking, wholesale slaughter. The loyalists were losing by any measurable means, as minutes turned into hours. Enumerable murders, both vast in scale and intimate in their atrocity, played out across the entire globe. Neverborn incursions were summoned by word-bearer esoterists and dark apostles across Sinachi province and the southern continent, lesser emanations beset fleeing civilian columns in orgies of senseless bloodshed beyond human description. On the fields of Komesh, 20,000 ultramarines lay dead or mortally wounded, the latter being recovered by word-bearer starties to be nailed bodily to the hulls of their tanks, oozing blood-dobbed in putrid sigils on their shattered blue armor plate. Korfeiron, in orbit, ordered the destruction of the Korvel Islands by nuclear fire, seemingly without any reason, beyond the fact that the path of his starship brought them within range of a firing solution. Allegio Cybernetica, division at Cylantor, ammunition long since expended, fought back hordes of ragged cultists with piston-driven arms as a magi in charge, desperately devoted percentages of their enhanced brain power to restoring some measure of a communications grid. In the manufactoria at Danehold, less than a thousand ultramarines of the 15th and 8th chapters were besieged by word-bearers of the flayed hand, resisting their advances for nearly 12 hours of constant combat before succumbing to an assault by 200 cataphractii armored terminator as starties. From all of this, in the grand historiography of the Calth atrocity, the battle of Ithrica tends to emerge as a point of focus for many scholars, notable not only for its sheer apocalyptic scale, even by the standards of the atrocity, but for how much it presaged the conflicts that were yet to come in the age of darkness. It stands as an example of the sheer ferocity of war between betrayer and betrayed, for the malevolent forces unleashed by its unfolding, and for the sheer implausible carnage. Ultimately as well, it noted that the war would not be one merely fought by a starties legions, nor would they be the only ones to suffer. Other august and ancient bodies of the Imperium and humanity would surely fall alongside both. The city of Ithrica was the most important orbital transfer hub on Calth, with only the docks of land sheer rivaling it in terms of sheer tonnage moved every single day. Several thousand square kilometers of landing zones, warehouses, and transfer infrastructure formed an uneven triangle across the region, with the city growing around and below it, linking to significant subterranean archaeology developments. At first thousands, then millions of residents called Ithrica home, and with them came webs of arterial roadways, networks of maglev train lines. In typical ultramarian fashion, the city appeared organic, but its development was highly planned, easily housing its population all the while preparing for millions more to come. At its center, the heliocon served as primary orbital traffic control for Calth's southern reaches, and the Ithrica docks in particular, while also standing prepared to serve as a backup hub for the orbital defense grid. To the north of the metropolis lay the sea, the coastline that was dominated by a gigantic industrial aqueduct, linking to three massive water reservoirs and desalinization plants, intended to provide the city with both drinking water and coolant for its many manufactoria. When the Calth conjunction had been called, Ithrica transformed into its war footing, the formidable logistical capacities of the city given over to ammunition storage and transfer, the scale of its macro facilities allowing it to permit the landing of the largest of orbital dropships. Naturally, thanks to the latter in particular, this made its hinterlands the ideal location for the muster of the titan legions attached to the Astartes forces assembling. Two legions gathered in their near entirety, the legio prosaegius, the true messengers, and the legio surter Vora, the fire masters, combining some 200 god engines in total, the force sufficient to raise an entire subsector to ash. Locals likened it to the city suddenly developing a second skyline, but the titans lined up in ordered ranks in the scrublands beyond the metropolis's boundaries, their warhorns carrying even over the thunder of orbital launches. It was not just the titans of the collegia that the city's capacity had room for. It had also been marked as the host for the exertus imperialis' heaviest tank divisions for both repair and rearmament. The largest amongst these was the Kallak war host, formed of regiments drawn from the industrialized tidally locked night worlds of the Kallak sequence. The host alone numbered some 90,000 strong, all entirely mechanized infantry and armored divisions, as well as five artillery companies and two cohorts of super heavy tanks. The fourth chapter of the Ultramarines, the Aurorans, armored warfare specialists themselves, were hosted alongside their machines in the city's subterranean core, as well as the 24th chapter, the Exitium. This latter formation formed the legion's strategic reserve, less a frontline chapter, and more a dedicated, above-strength contingent bearing an abundance of support weaponry, mobile artillery, and ammunition reserves, all designed to be seconded to any chapter should said chapter suffer egregious losses in any area that would diminish their combat efficacy. Supplementing this was a further 250,000 exertus troops, everything from feral tribal levies brought by the word-bearers to the solar auxilia regiments of Ultramar, as well as automata and magi from the Tagmata Xerxes of the forge world Akatran. The Ithgrimustr was being conducted to the highest of Ultramarines logistical and efficiency standards, which is to say some of the highest standards in the entire Imperium. Despite this, it was noted in the recovered, if of course, damaged, records of the city, that there had been a notable spike in unexplained and uncanny phenomena in the weeks prior to the atrocity itself. In particular, those collected from an arbitrator notary's personal logos core, found in the records of Archaeology Epsilon 14, align perfectly with the arrival of the Calak war host in the region, five weeks local standard prior to the Camp Neal's murder of Calthverdean anchor. Power outages, localized freak weather patterns, and a 300% increase in equipment failures range amongst these reports. Aligning them with files recovered from municipal Arbites precincts, scholars have traced a significant upsurge in civil unrest, domestic violence, and mental health breakdowns, leading to, in the immediate days prior to the Calthotrocity, to a spike in murders of a most extremely brutal nature. Alongside this, missing person reports skyrocketed, both in the civilian population and Exertus imperialis regiments stationed across the city. The wave of incidents culminated in the day before the eventual attack, when a fully loaded passenger maglev train arriving at its terminal station did so entirely empty, save for blood and viscera coating every interior surface in staggering quantities. This latter event was so extreme as to require escalation far above municipal authorities, calling as they did for the eyes of the ultramarian regime's secret police, the vigil operati. The report filed alongside the request curiously and specifically states that these incidents should not be attributed to the Calac war host. The host's insularity and apparent barbarism, as well as lack of cooperation with local authorities, had marked them for many as deeply suspicious. Citing, however, Ultramar's creed of tolerance for the lesser cultures of the Imperium, the author commented that it was not uncommon for armed forces drawn from worlds, grown savage during the Age of Strife, to be treated poorly abroad across the Imperium, and that the Calac's technology was clear proof that, for all their moral and social regression, they were a proud people, and that the word-bearers had readily and easily brought them to compliance not two decades before. Only in the wisdom of hindsight are the author's defenses laid bare for what they are. When the fleet tender Campanile struck Calte Verlidian anchor, the disaster was not immediately made apparent to the residents of Ithrica. Located as it was in the southern hemisphere, Calte's own mass concealed the light of the orbital detonation. Local dinoral it was mid-morning, meaning the port was in full logistical productivity. The legio's certervora and presagius, in conjunction with the rigorous timelines of the muster, had finally moved to embarkation. Massive orbital bulk haulers were being deployed to ferry the god-machines to mass conveyor-barks in the void above. Given their prestige within the realm of Ultramar, the true messengers had been granted the honor of first embarking. The bulk of its battle group, some 70 titans in number, were arrayed in close marching order at the primary macro-alpha landing zone, with sub-deployments, seconded as they were, to other orbital ships, spread across relatively smaller but still vast landing pads of macro- beta at the alpha's edges. The most venerable, and thus heaviest and most valuable, of presagius's engines had already been ensconced within the cyclopian holes of the Arutan, a purpose-built mechanical titan conveyor two kilometers in length and a kilometer across. Such was the sheer mass that the very passage of this craft caused atmospheric disturbances to local weather conditions for days following its passage. So powerful were its plasma lift engines, the dedicated air traffic lanes had been rigorously enforced around it, effectively grounding all ships within a large radius of the landing zones for the time being. The vessel had only just cycled its titanic engines to full power, its impossible bulk only beginning to rise from Calte's service. When the constant new-spheric data deluge, the coordinating logistical lifeblood of the world, died in an instant. The victim of the Campanile's attack on Viridian anchor on the planet's far side. The Arutan continued to rise above Ithrica, as those magi not killed by neurosystemic feedback that was caused by the initial failure cascade, tried desperately and ineffectively to reignite the manifold, establish connection with the planetary news sphere, or even affect improvement of local Vox networks. In place of the moments of dreadful, total silence that followed the initial break, a rising tide of incomprehensible audio and neural signals was now present, the bow wave of a scrapcode infestation now claiming ruinous ownership of Calte's data grid. Every networked cogitator, every networked magus, was now assailed by the pernicious code as it rampaged across the realm of information, killing and destroying with utter abandon. To those traitors present, the silence and the subsequent howling from the grid neither affected nor surprised them. It was not a death shriek of technological systems, it was a holy call to arms, the signal they had been waiting for, to strike. Sir Tuvorah, as one, rose to almost full engine bloom, reactors powering to maximum as hard and as fast as even the feckless engine seers of the so-called true Mechanicum could risk. On encrypted, still operational Vox networks, legio-princepts barked orders in the harsh Martian dialect born of their home within the Mons, Sir Tuvorah. As the engines of the Firemasters began to move, as the first firing solutions were tracked, destruction began to fall from orbit. The first strikes by the orbiting wordbearers fleet had been pre-targeted, carefully planned to arrive within seconds of the attack on Viridian anchor. It is testament to the seventeenth knowledge of the sheer martial power gathered at Ithrica that this took priority even over engaging crippled void ships in their proximity. Lance beams, supplemented by plasma burst cutter barrages, struck landing zone macro-alpha as the princeps of prosaegius, deaf and blind within their data-deprived engines, were furiously attempting to establish simply what had happened. They were, of course, utterly helpless, and the destruction was only beginning. The Arutan and its embarkation schedule had been widely known ahead of the attack. The logistics of the matter were common knowledge on channels for both Legionnaires' starties involved in the conjunction. The fact that her departure was seemingly timed with the Campanile's attack run was likely to have been, at best, coincidence, but one that served the traitors' purposes extraordinarily well. Lance beams attacking Ithrica from orbit bit deep into her hull. Designed to deliver the god engines of the Titanic to active war zones, the armor of the bulk conveyor was no paltry thing. She was more akin to a battleship in robustness than a mere freighter. What she lacked, of course, was active void shields. There was no need for them in peacetime. The power requirements could be much more readily used in simple engine management. Her upper hull took the full brunt of several battleships worth of broadsides. Even armor of this quality could only survive for so long. The plating, heating red and beginning to become molten, the Arutan wavered in its ascent, slipping slowly, terribly sideways in the air, until one of the four plasma engines took the full brunt of a multi-lance strike, breaking from the hull and plunging in fiery death, planet side. The Arutan, slowly, terribly, began to fall. Three remaining engines still burning, this was not a simple direct downward plunge. The Mechanicum Conveyor slid across the skyline of the city. The Navarcos aboard desperately attempting to maintain lift to no avail. Her passage began to tear the tops off the tallest buildings, obliterating towers, hab blocks, and thermal exhausts by her passage before it came to a meteoric landing in the civic parklands in the city core. The Legio Prasadius, though horrifically mauled, were far from the only victims of the punitive orbital strike. Whole squadrons of fighter craft had been obliterated alongside orbital lifters, gunships, and shuttles idle in Ithrica's many landing zones as lance beams tore through munition dumps, runways, and fuel reserves. Further horror was unfolding outside the city's boundaries, in the massive barrack zones of the Exertus Imperialis. Billeted together in attempts to improve inter-regimental coordination, loyalist forces were now set upon by traitors in the most mundane of spaces. Commissaries, recreational halls, training fields, supply depots, their own beds. Across the barrack blocks, soldiers were gunned down at point-blank range in utter surprise. Parade formations were set upon by armored vehicles, grinding stunned loyalists to pulp underneath thundering treads. Blades plunged into sleeping off-shift troopers. It was murder, venal, and base, played out now here as it was across the entire planet. Fifteen minutes into the massacre, and a deep, thunderous sound was reported to have echoed across the city of Ithrica. Powerful enough even to drown out the howling of disaster sirens and the ongoing tumult of weapons fire and explosions. Given cross comparators with the mark of Calth per ultramarine records, and taking into account distance, this can be surmised to have been the impact of the Grand Cruiser Antrodamechus in the city of Calca's fortilece, to that metropolis's utter devastation. The death of the cruiser was immediately answered across the burning swath of Ithrica by another howl altogether more malevolent. The hundred or so titans of the Ligiosurter Vora sounding their warhorns in bloody exultation. A legion bellowing for the kill as one. To the titans of Prasagius, isolated from the unfolding battle on the fields of macro alpha, it was one more mystery atop the torrent they had been subjected to. Their engines had been rendered almost helpless by the loss of the newspheric links. Those that had managed to fire their reactors, light their voids, and restore some measure of aspects had done so only to see the lords of their legion plummeting to apparent destruction as the Arutan fell from the skies. The true messengers were aware that they were likely under attack, but were bereft of information as to how or where from. The actual fighting at this point in the atrocity was primarily restricted to the imperial army's owns. The forces of Prasagius and the Mechanicum Tagmataserxes were far too isolated to know how to react, and still under the presumption that this was either a dreadful accident at best or a Xenos incursion at worst. It was to their credit an exemplary reaction by imperial standards. Fire was withheld, the destructive power of the titans known all too well to their princeps, the knowledge that were they to open such fire they would be doing so at the center of millions of civilians, and this only strengthened their resolve to navigate some means out of the catastrophe. The true danger, of course, would come far too late for the true messengers to properly react. To the southwestern flank of the city, seismic alarms were sounding, detecting an entirely different set of activity, distinct from the aftershocks, rippling through Calth's crust from the impact of the Antrodamacus. From out of the great span of the spur wastes, a barren scrubland that separated landing zones macro-alpha and beta, drawn out in a curved battle line seven kilometers in length, came over 100 titans, charging, running at full stride like a line of ancient clansmen. They were Surturvorah all, the near-full might of that fallen legio, baying for war. Anything in their path, and there was plenty in their path, was simply pulverized. Barracks, Bivouacs, armor pools, supply depots, friend and foe, both all were dashed to rubble or bloody gore by the passage of Surturvorah, flattened by the pounding of the god-engine strides. The sheer speed of their advance was nigh unmatched in the annals of the Caligio Titanica. Only the imperial hunters of the legio Solaria had ever been recorded for having been able to move titans over such distances at such speed in such coordination. But historians have been quick to point out that only the overwhelming element of surprise and utter disregard for collateral damage allowed the firemasters to accomplish this. Similarly, they note that weapons fire was held until what was, for titan-class engines, point-blank range. This is certainly verifiable, and ensured the targets of Surturvorah were kept in a state of unawareness until the last possible moment. Prosagius, attempting to regroup across the spans of macro-alpha and macro-beta, were unable to detect their foes until it was far too late. Rounding a line of bombardment shattered and blazing refineries at the boundaries of the landing zones, the power that had been diverted to the titans motivators were shunted to weapon systems, even before the legio had brought up its voids. Turning from full charge to maximal fire mode as quickly as their systems could manage, Surturvorah prepared to open fire. As this was unfolding, above the city, blooms of light, pulsing instances of half-sun's birthing and dying, indicated a fight in orbit to anyone who had cast their gaze skywards. Slowly, at first, but increasing in quantity and lethality, debris began to fall on Ithrica, the fragment corpses of ships caught in the gravity well of Calth. The indiscriminate impacts added exponentially to the chaos unfolding in the city, as civilian infrastructure was overwhelmed both by disaster relief efforts and simple crowd control, terrified workers fleeing for their lives in every direction. One such fiery orb plummeted skywards, somehow managed, and any observed, to arrest its fall, coming instead to a just visible stationary position within the atmosphere far above the metropolis. The Inferno was, thanks to recovered sensorium logs, the sign of the orbital re-entry of the Mechanicum Tritonus class Galleus, Dirac's Lament. The vessel was both principal conveyor and sovereign domain, of a covenant of the Ordo Reductor, known as Mormoth Null, beholden to no one forge in particular, but serving as mendicant destroyers for whatever tag-mata elected to contract their services. Obtaining position in precise geosynchronous orbit above Ithrica, the Galleus fired every single one of its missile batteries simultaneously. Rather than the, one supposes comparatively merciful, atomic bombardments of some cities across Calth, this was altogether more slower at death. The warheads contained within the missiles fired were directed melted charges, precision instruments of destruction. A great many of them targeted the Ithrica heliocon, the command and control hub of the city's Mechanicum, wherein even now, frantic clades of lex mechanics were attempting to reignite the manifold and regain some level of control over the rampaging scrapcode. Other missiles streaked towards less primary, but nevertheless valuable targets, surviving generator hubs, medical facilities, arbiters precincts, all targets designed to inflict the most amount of damage to infrastructure that was possible. Precisely 50 meters above these targets, the missiles detonated, their systems channeling their power in exact downward-facing cones of annihilation. Heat and radiation equal in brightness and lethality to a late-stage star obliterated all before them. Adamantium was liquidized, ferrocrete was turned to black dust. The heliocon, bearing the brunt of the bombardment, simply ceased to be. The fusion energy unleashed by the order reductor, marking its presence in a vast, unspeakable mushroom cloud rising skywards. The pressure wave of superheated air incinerated tens of thousands of civilians in an expanding circle, flash burnt to their ashes, the howling winds demolishing train lines and scattering ground autos like children's toys. On the landing zones, the titans of prosagius angled their voids and shifted their frontage to face this onrushing danger, to best protect those engines only for at this moment. The engines of Sertervora to strike at this instant, at their most vulnerable flanks. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.