 The night darkens, even so much as day turns to night on this world. Such a concept can even be comprehended this deep within its crust, this buried under the tracts and chronicles and records and tomes heaving with the weight of ages past and times forgotten to all that live. The night darkens. It whispers, then howls, then whispers again. Dread tidings does it bear. I have word the preachers above say the same, frothing demagogues spouting tirades of the end approaching from the pulpits on prayer barges whose augmenters deafen any who hear them that their last words may be one of divine prophecy. Annihilation comes, whispers the night, bellows the zealot. An end most assured, destruction most total, we have heard these tidings before. We always do. The world is over, for has it not been dying for millennia? Our imperium, trapped in a spiral of calamity, whirling entropically in the vortex of absolute extinction. I know not. I am no priest, no prognosticator. I have no pulpit from which to speak, merely my books, my quill, my vox corridor, and my will to document, to collect, to chronicle, that there may yet be some ears that may hear my words whose minds may be elucidated by what wisdom I can simply pass along from that which has been. Manicled am I in body and soul, the eyes of the inquisitive ever upon me now, yet labor I must though my work may do not. It is all I can to do, but try. Is such a work godly? I care not any longer. It is the only purpose that I have any more, it is the only thing I can do, so do it I shall. The night darkens, and the night whispers. What secrets does it bear? The words they speak of, the arch enemy, dispatches and reports to speak of monstrous things of rock and metal breaching the sky of reality to bring fire and ruin. The cards of the tarot are more mysterious still, the fool inverted, the tree of life, the shattered world, the demon inverted, the lightning tower, the night surely not for another time that, the night darkens and the night whispers. Know then that this is a record of time's foul and of deed's fouler, of the turning of the clock, a record of the arcs of Omen. It began, in so much as there is a beginning, aboard the vengeful spirit, flagship of the black legion, bearer of Abaddon named Despoiler the now self-styled warmaster of Imperium Nihilus. Since the usurpation of his plans on Vigilus, the Despoiler had been content to maintain a detached presence amongst the hosts of the arch enemy, directing a thousand wars from afar, building his crimson path to terror, brick by careful blood-stained brick. Many, although they no longer lived, had questioned why precisely he had not simply struck for the throne world following the death of Cadia and the birth of the Great Rift. Indeed, many an imperial stratego had been terrified of this eventuality, that the second siege of the imperial palace by the hosts of the never-born was a mere prelude to the arrival of the arch enemy's mortal Astarti servants. Abaddon, however, is not Horus. He has never been Horus, and his devotion to the ways of his long-dead father perished when the first warmaster did. Horus's march to terror, the grinding progress of the heresy, had both swelled and bled his hosts, and had provided for the concentration of the Imperium's best defenders. Abaddon would, and likely will, never grant us this opportunity. He has stated to those close within his circle, as a certain prisoner within the depths of the Inquisition's dungeons has related to me, that the Imperium will not be granted its siege, its final last stand, its noble battle at the end upon the world the Emperor claims for his throne. Should the ships of the Black Legion never arrive into Terran orbit, they will do so as the executioners delivering the killing blow to an utterly defeated enemy, the final falling of the hammer from a position of simply inevitable victory. A mercy killing, as the Dispoiler himself has purported to have said, the Imperium will be defeated piece by piece, world by world, human by human, until it simply no longer exists in any meaningful fashion. From his post-vigilous position of command, Abaddon has sought to scry the strands of fate for portents, visions and signs, through which he may make his next ploy. The Dispoiler is locked in permanent conflict with the arch enemy, Gods, he nominally represents. He will never submit to their will, never take from one or all the gifts they promise, merely to use the tools provided by their servants to achieve his own goals. As such, the Gods themselves cannot permit the Dispoiler to succeed, for submission to their will is paramount to them. Thus do they seek to usurp, twist, sowing conflicts between their own hosts and the hosts of their fellow greater intelligences. Abaddon must balance this all within the talon of his father, and chart a course through the maelstrom of insanity that he calls his side. One supposes it is little wonder he pays so much attention to the scryings of the Immaterium. The Gods may lie, but they pepper these lies with kernels of truth that are yet possible to find for those with the ken to understand them. During one such session with his enslaved prognosticators, the vengeful spirit appeared to undergo significant issues with its internal systems. Everything from power fluctuations to gravitic distortions played havoc with the fallen Gloriana-class ship, unused to being placed in a position of ignorance and furious at the insult of it all. The Dispoiler ordered his black legion to immediately seek the source of the issues, or to discern if the legion was under some form of esoteric assault. Over of his sorcerer retinue, Zorfas, isolated aetheric energies from a seemingly inconsequential forward sensorium suite. One of the sections of the spirit that had sustained damage during the battle for Vigilus, adepts of the so-called True Mechanicum, had long elabored with its repairs, and it was a team of them that Abaddon and his body ward, Falcus Kybra, or at least an entity pretending to be that individual, located at the source of the disturbances. The massive runic device that had been etched into the deck plating within the sensorium was at its centre now host to an impossibly complex mass of shifting, coiling metal. The circle, clearly intended to contain whatever these magi had taken it upon themselves to summon, was failing. Mechadendrites speared out from its mass, seeking purchase in all of the devices that surrounded it. Dispatching the magi for execution, Abaddon consulted his sorcerer, and claimed the concentration of immaterial energies were seeking to co-olate themselves upon the very bridge of the ship. The scene that greeted the dispoiler in his entourage upon reaching the command deck was one of chaos. Mechadendrals sprouted from every surface, coiling amongst themselves, flesh metal questing and strengthening, piercing hardwired servitors and helots, yet more of whom tore themselves from their stations to crawl bloodily and limblessly towards these filaments. What was growing amidst the wreckage of the bridge appeared as a monstrous mechanical tumour, flesh pulsating, technology writhing, a blasphemy emerging within a chamber of blasphemies. And yet, for reasons known only to himself, the dispoiler was seemingly content to watch. Abaddon, one supposes, wished to see what precisely was going to transpire out of this, an act of perhaps extreme confidence in the abilities of himself and his black legion, or perhaps one of simple curiosity. The latter was to be satisfied quickly. Burbling's scrapcode blending with binaric cant erupted from every speaker aboard the bridge as the tumour thing condensed, converged, compressing space and time in and of itself, until the form shifted into one of a massive humanoid, an entity of living metal and corrupted technologica. Fixing eyes of molten steel upon the dispoiler, the being named itself Vastor, the Arcephane, and it had come to the warmaster this day with an offer. If one's acolytes know little of Vastor, one cannot blame them. There are an infinite number of never-born, as many as exist as has ever been ideas in the head of sentient beings across all spans of time. Their abilities and power relative to each other are constantly in flux, subservient to the tides of the immaterium and its interactions with the mortal world, as well as to the greater intelligences of the dark pantheon that consume so much of it. The four gods are cardinal aspects of creation, representing fundamental pillars of material reality as reflected through the warps on holy prisms. Thus, do they consume so much of the Imperian with their presence and influence. There are, however, multifarious beings of power that are orders of magnitude greater than the most base of the never-born, but yet other orders of magnitude weaker than the greater intelligences. Although one is loath to apply the terms laden with implications of divinity, the best Gothic term possible, for the sake of mutual understanding, remains demigod, so it must suffice for these purposes here. Should a concept not be necessarily swallowed up by one of the four entirely, the energies woven into it may find a new home within a warp entity that will see its power grow in kind. Vastor is by all accounts one such being, unaligned with any of the dark pantheon in particular, yet a master of invention, science, art, and engineering, corrupted innovation bereft of any hint of ethics or morality. Art, after a fashion, driven to its most toxic extremists. Whenever a scientist seeks to blend the universe to their will through material creation, Vastor lurks within that idea, preying upon the mortal need to push technology forward at any human cost. His incarnations in the material plane have been staggeringly few for a being of such reputed power. I, myself, have barely encountered any reference to him in my scryings of my own archives. His creature appears to be content to dwell upon his own schemes within his own realm, an aspect of the immaterium cryptoscholors of the Arcane refer to as the Soulforges. In this blasphemous segment of unreality, Nightmare industry is at work. Vastor and his lesser emanations striking bargains with petitioners or other never born for the forging of demon engines and other infernal devices, with the souls of mortals forming their hideous currency. Curiously, and deeply unlike any of his demonic or deific contemporaries, it is against Vastor's nature to lie precisely. This is a character forged of contract and compact. He is willing to make them complicated, potentially hazardous, full of all sorts of little sub clauses. This is true, but he is more than content to leave the usurpations of truth to his subordinate emanations in their own attempts to enslave mortal souls. Indeed, the nature of the demonic has seen many of these souls captured and enthralled to Vastor's services, as the Archiphane will never leave a contract unfulfilled, be it with a mortal or a fellow demon. Should a never born or human attempt to deceive him or an egg on their obligations, Vastor will ensure their soul debt is paid at punishingly high interest. Well no mighty player in the Pantheon's great game. The ingenious blasphemy of the Archiphane's creations has rendered him a vital player in the wars of the legions demonic. None of the four wish to become the only one who loses access to the soulforges, so none of them will move against him, ill at ease as they are, with this streak of independence. He is an agent of none, beholden to himself alone, and one cannot understate the sheer danger that could represent to the Imperium, with his recent, extremely rare incarnation. The initial interaction between Dispoiler and Archiphane was expectedly tense. Naturally, the Warmaster's initial demand was simply for precisely why the intruder had manifested here, and apparently at the expense of his bridge crew, many of whom had been hardwired to their stations for millennia. Said the Dispoiler, how had the entity even manifested aboard one of the most secure vessels in the fleets of the arch enemy? Abaddon no doubt expected riddles and half-trutes, veiled inferences being the conversational currency of the demonic. One can only imagine his surprise then, when he received a rather frank and candid set of answers. The source of its manifestation had been a plot hatched by Vastor some time ago, plucking the tendrils of faith to ensure the tome containing its own summoning ritual fell into the hands of the Magi it discerned would then be assigned to the spirit. Vastor made no secret of the fact that it could have destroyed the vessel, should it so please, adding that the spoiler need only see for himself the repairs already being woven aboard his beloved ship at the Archiphanes behest. Before Abaddon's own eyes, the bridge was indeed healing, systems repairing themselves through clearly arcane means, technology knitting itself as if flesh. Reports hurriedly requested were received from across the ship. The distortions that had preceded Vastor's incarnation had vanished, and the wounds of Vigilus were being healed at phenomenal speed. In many areas they had been enhanced by uncanny biomechanical systems unlike anything the Magi in charge had ever beheld. Abaddon smarted at this, stating that in ten millennia of war he had needed no deal with no entity, that his knee would not be bent to a mere demigod who he had even scarcely heard of. Vastor demurred, deterring no such thing was even sought. The archiphanes needed no thrall, but desired instead an alliance, mutually beneficial. From the soulforges, Vastor had become aware of Abaddon's grasps at prophecy, knowing that the despoiler was hunting for anything that would allow him to gain the upper hand against the hated Imperium. According to the Archiphanes, such a thing was within the Warmaster's grasp. He was all but unaware. In exchange, Vastor made its own aims clear, immaterial apotheosis. The Archiphanes no longer wished to be merely the weapons dealer of the Pantheon, but one of them wished to ascend to equal status alongside the Four, becoming the fifth greater chaotic intelligence. It believed, seemingly in all earnest, that the path to its ascension lay in unlocking one of the prophecy's Abaddon had already uncovered, and that in aiding the despoiler's long war against the Imperium, deliverance of both goals could easily be achieved. To allay the despoiler's suspicions, Vastor wrought across each and every hollowness and vid-screen upon the bridge of the spirit words of prophecy. In my dreams the sky is burning, the stars blaze bright enough to drown out the darkness. Words of import, words occluded, but most importantly known full well to the Warmaster, heard by his own ears from the mouths of his own sootsayers, not ours beforehand. The reasons Abaddon of the Black Legion had for distrusting the words of the demon are without counting. Since the declaration of his long war those millennia ago, the Warmaster of the Primordial Annihilator had been ironclad in his commitment to prosecuting it his way. The hosts of the demonic are liars, cheaters, vexatious imps that sought to merely ensnare mortals. There were tools, weapons to be utilized by the forces under Abaddon's command. He would never submit, he would never ascend, he would never be the puppet primarchs that his gene father's brothers had become, bloated creatures of ill desire and scorned ambition unable to see their own befallen states as they squatted in the depths of the great eye. Of course, as one has discussed, this is the great paradox of chaos. The gods will never allow Abaddon to succeed, so they seek to usurp him. To this end, Abaddon's long war has been one fought on two fronts, against the Imperium on one side and against the Dark Gods. For his hatred of the latter is only atlipsed by his hatred of the former. Ever do the Pantheon seek to scorn the Dispoiler's triumphs, petty are they grotesque hurricanes of psychic force, and the Warmaster knows this all too well. The emergence of Vastor as a self-proported new player in the great game, and its bluntly stated desire to become a fifth of the Dark Pantheon, would have seemed to any such as Abaddon a gift all too good to be true, and thus to be granted not one niota of belief. It is the purpose of the demon to lie. Even should scraps of what they sprout to be truthful, the inherent goal is deception, and they may ensnare a soul in a contract to their own ends. Vastor did, however, have some shreds of credibility working in its favor at this moment. It was clearly a being of no small power, having integrated itself within the workings of the flagship of the Dispoiler with a parent ease. Aside from the theatrics of its incarnation, it made no moves or ploys beyond stating its aims and wishes, flexotically placing all the more suspicion upon its words. Its candor, however, was uncommon, cloaking its proclamations with none of the usual flowery language the demonic favors so readily. The Warmaster of Imperium Nihilus remained unconvinced. Vastor offered a solution to the potential deadlock. The location of an item of power, the Arkafein referring to it enigmatically as a piece of the puzzle, a breadcrumb along the forest trail at whose end lay a weapon of unspeakable power, a device that would be the greatest boon the Dispoiler had ever received, and the crux around which the ascension of the Arkafein could be wrought. Known only as the key, the device would be one mutually beneficial, declared Vastor. If Abaddon had only to reach out his claw and grasp what was offered, the power to change the galaxy was apparently at stake. To the world of Maglador did the finger of the Arkafein point. A tribal planet of no large population, it was a ward of the Iron Angels chapter of the Adeptus Astartes who acclaimed it as their fife following the destruction of their original homeworld in M33. In the dawn of a past, their Ark-Ives having perished with their first home, the Iron Angels were nevertheless resolved to start anew, hollowing out the peak of the tallest mountain upon Maglador and setting within its caves their new fortress monastery, the Angels Crown. What relics they had been able to rescue from the death of their homeworld were interred within its vaults, along with their precious, but dwindling, gene-seed stock. Millenia passed, the Iron Angels continued to bring their wrath to the foes of the Emperor, but often at great cost, their stoic doctrine forbidding retreat unless absolutely necessary. This, coupled with the propensity of their new world's human herd to require frequent culling for psychermutation outbreaks, placed the Iron Angels forever on the precipice of extinction, albeit stubbornly refusing to yield in the best traditions of their chapter. This would, of course, change when the vengeful spirit and her escort fleet tore a wound in reality and vomited forth into the orbit of Maglador. The astropaths of the fortress flung a hurried distress call into the ether, but all astarties of the chapter knew the truth. They stood alone here against the arch-enemy, for whatever reinforcements that could be made available would be weeks away at best sale. The fire lit the sky as the Angel's fleet moved to intercept the vengeful spirit, but not before the flagship of the Dispoiler discouraged flocks of hell-drakes and swarms of landing craft. Abaddon viewed the proceedings from the Strategium. Vastor had departed prior to the sailing of the spirit and had not been seen since. The Dispoiler naturally suspected some trap or trick lay within its presence upon Maglador, but nevertheless knew that any chance to annihilate a chapter of loyal astarties would be worth the effort regardless of the greater concerns of the day. Resolving to relish such an extermination personally, Abaddon led a teleport assault of terminators into the heart of the Angel's peak, even as his black legionnaires fought imperial astarties upon its landing paths and approaches. The slaughter within the peak was profound. The resolve of the Iron Angels was impeccable, yet they simply could not stem the tide that was Abaddon's ferocity. Loyalist warriors, even the cream of the chapter fell before his blade and the thundering bulters of his terminators. A trio of librarians faced the Warmaster. He bisected each. The hell-forged plate of his armor turning aside their psychic fire. His rang with gunfire and banners ancient erupted into ash as the black legion laid waste to the monastery. As Abaddon grew closer to its inner reaches, however, he came across scenes of devastation and destruction, wrought by a hand other than his own warband. Imperial astarties and chapter thralls alike were splayed across the flagstones in torn and ruined forms. The first amidst them were what appeared to be servitors. But swollen, mutated, transformed, limbs turned into bladed protrusions, a bizarre cog weaponry that still guttered with scraps of warp flame. The hand of the Dispoiler's new ally was obvious, and Abaddon sought now to make best speed lest the Arcafain cheat him of a prize. The Dashdor was discovered at the Fortress's heart, at the head of a host of demonic war engines, besieging the chaptermaster of the Iron Angels and the remnants of the first company, locked now in a defined last stand against the invaders. One has no doubt that the fight that followed would have entered many a laurel into the honor rolls of the chapter had they not been exterminated to the last by the creatures of the arch-enemy. It is believed chaptermaster Nymarne fell last, at the hand of the Dispoiler himself, the demon for Drachnien draining his lifeblood as it erupted from the back of his torso. Their foes dispatched, warmaster and Arcafain both strode into the now defenseless recluseum, faded banners of past glories and relic weapons lining its flanks, until Vastor seemingly had found its prize. The tall marble pillar held aloft in a suspensor field with the suggestion of a space marine carved atop it. Vastor understood the Dispoiler's curiosity and distrust and requested a mere few hours aboard the vengeful spirits to deliver him the knowledge he sought. It is currently unknown precisely what transpired in that meeting between Dispoiler and Arcafain. Not even Abaddon's most trusted chosen were permitted to hear the words of the demon. What is known, however, is the results. Merging from the chamber, Abaddon declared that the Black Legion and Arcafain were now allies or as close to such a concept as any under the thrall of the ruinous powers are capable of understanding or maintaining. In the depths of space, over the course of months, Abaddon and his demonic associate amassed a space-born armada the likes of which had scarce been seen since the darkest days of the twelfth Black Crusade, the Gothic War itself. But this time, it were not the mysterious and tenorous Blackstone fortresses around which the void power of the Dispoiler evolved, but something else entirely. Around the vengeful spirit and the mustering war fleets of the Black Legion and warbands diverse and fowl hung not merely one or several, but dozens of corpulent, corrupted space-hulks. Twisted adlomerations of ships, asteroids, and other spatial debris, space-hulks even alone are ruinous threats to the sanctity of the Emperor's realms. Armed by the simple accrual of wrecked starships and other galactic refuse, the sheer scale of these hulks often permits the creation of a localized atmosphere, and the randomly fluctuating technology of their components permits them to apparently randomly enter and exit warped space, during which time, of course, their components fuse, link, spread, and corrupt. They are supremely dangerous flotsam, breathing grounds for all manner of Xenos and demonic entities, and their appearances in Imperial space are carefully logged, reported, and marked for pregation operations by chapters of the Adeptus Astartes with all possible haste. These were the monstrosities, the ambitions of Abaton and Vastor now sought to chain. Entire military campaigns were required to simply make each capable of the modifications the archiphanes declared necessary. No hulk was alike, and no foe found within was the same. Orcs, gene-stealers, rack-gall, beast-men, even fellow chaotic renegades, all are known to use these conglomerations as their dwellings and unhinged transportation. All aboard the hulks gathered by the Dispoiler had to be cast back, purged, wiped out alongside nightmares all together uncannier and unknowable. It is impossible to know how many lives the Warmaster spent as chaff coin in order to achieve workable spaces, but it is known that once he had, the machinations and machinery of Vastor was put to work harnessing the hulks to the archiphanes' control. Ritual wardings of phenomenal power were inscribed upon their hulls, suppressing or purging the malevolent or rampant machine intelligences that lingered deep within them. Flesh metal neural pathways were threaded throughout them, their ganglia spreading synapse-like to form control pathways, culminating in a central axos wherein the demon machine hybrid pilot things of the vessels could now effectively control them, fly them. The twisted genius of Vastor was here on full display, a grandiose act of infernal artifice, and thus did the archiphane berth upon the galaxy, but we have now come to call the Arcs of Omen. The path the Dispoiler now set himself upon was a direct one, but vast in scope. The collection of the remaining fragments of the key. This was the true purpose behind Vastor's incarnation in the mortal plane. The fragments were scattered across the material, each bearing a unique signature in the warp, yes, but lost across time and space, and in the hands of parties, disparate and opposed. It is quite likely said parties knew little to nothing of the import of what they possessed. The artifacts in their holdings were considered valuable for reasons entirely separate from the purpose the archiphane intended of them. Others yet were buried, cast in tombs beneath the tread of civilizations unaware of the arcane might they had built over. Yet for their recapture and eventual use, Vastor needed the armies of the Dispoiler. Abaddon, clearly now feeling the demands of the long war aligned with the demon's purposes, committed warbands aligned to him to the command of the Arcs of Omen. Each arc was offered as a prize to any warlord beholden to the ruinous powers, upon the understanding that they would, as their first priority, seize the key fragment assigned to them. The Arcs were payments, prizes for services rendered. After the task was completed, these warbands would be free to use the Arcs for their own purposes, and as each was a war monstrosity capable of laying waste to an entire planetary system, Abaddon had no shortages of pledges to his cause. Many of these early commanders of the Arcs were affirmed loyalists to the cause of the Black Legion, but ever suspicious, Abaddon knew to withhold his actual legion's strength. No lives of his closest Ezecharion, nor any of the Black Legion themselves, would be spent on these errands. Trust was simply never going to be granted to a being of the warp. Better to sell the lives of petty renegades and heretics hungry for glory and power, to reap the rewards of the future than to deplete even Aniota of the Black Legion's strength. Around each arc was gathered the flotillas of those pledged to the Dispoiler's cause, and even as the Arcafane laboured on the creation of yet more, Abaddon bade the first dozen to set course across the Imitarium. Plunging out of the depths of Imperium Nihilus, enforces now rivaling the endometous crusade battle groups launched by the Primarch Reborn. These Baal fleets now sailed the stars, and under their shadow would Imperium's Nihilus and Sanctus now quake. No segmentum was spared the wrath of the Baal fleets. The arcs of Omen vomited forth from the warp galaxy wide. Their predations have been terrible indeed. To the commanders of the Imperium these attacks at first seemed entirely random, if unprecedented in their size and ferocity. Since the emergence of the Great Rift after the destruction of Cadia, arch enemy raids have become all too commonplace, but this sudden escalation was bizarre. Instead of the usual targets, attacks struck everything from quiet agri worlds to hive cities of colossal size to scarcely populated death worlds. Yet it was not long before keen eyes discerned patterns amidst the chaos. First and most prominent amongst these were of course the arcs themselves. It was not exactly uncommon for the denizens of the warp to emerge from their ensconced within a space hulk, yet the presence of one at the heart of each of these fleets spoke of a darker concordance afoot. Laterally, and only through initially hesitant sharing of cross-organizational intelligence, the Inquisition discerned that many of its own supposedly secret enclaves and outposts had been raided and sacked during these attacks, their vaults pilfered of Archaeotech and forbidden lore. The unearing accuracy with which these holdfasts were uncovered, not to mention this sheer speed, was frightening to the Ordos to say the least. No pattern emerged in precisely what had been taken. Ordos majorus and minorus both had suffered losses. It was more understandable for the heretics of the warp to covet the demonic artifacts sealed by the Ordomelius, but what purpose could a tome belonging to the Ordocronus serve? Far too many questions were going unanswered, despite the immediacy of concern now rapidly spreading throughout imperial command echelons. The forces of the emperor were not, of course, without teeth. Some of the targets of these bail fleets were heavily defended, and if their objectives had been accomplished, they paid dearly for it. Several of the first wave of arcs were caught in rechibratory imperial counterattacks, boarded and purged, but the secrets they possessed were as of yet occluded. Indeed, it was not the imperial alone that felt the crashing fury of the arcs of Omen. In the Rasputur cluster, the bail fleet surrounding the arc Bane of Life plunged directly into the midst of the war between the coronous hegemony of the Votan and the orcs of Wa Skullcracker. While in the Serpessa Nebulae, the bail fleet of the despoiler played a deadly game of predator prey with a desperate alliance of the Dukkari, of the Cabal of the Iron Throne, and the Acerianni from Craftworld Althway. The renowned strategic mastery of the apostate despoiler was rapidly becoming clearer. He had with these bail fleets masterfully channeled the anarchic nature of the forces at his disposal into a wickedly effective format. A bail fleet, with an arc of Omen at its core, was a fully self-contained and self-sufficient military force. While the forage embedded by Vastor within the arcs could not produce, the experienced reavers of the fleets could scavenge and co-opt. Their missions were blunt, and once achieved, the key fragment, the real power of which was intentionally kept from the commanders of each arc, was dispatched back to the vengeful spirit through a bespoke warp portal embedded by the arch-a-thane deep within each space-hulk. Delivery and objective secured, the bail fleet was now free to set its own objectives, operating nominally within the despoiler's overall long war, but unshackled from the grand strategic exigencies, the battle groups of Gilliman's Adomatus Crusade were required to be a part of. The individualistic, temperamental characters of these fallen heretics need not be required to bend far beyond their natural selves. Precisely as the warmaster envisaged, they spread chaos in their wakes. Slowly, painfully, through scraps of frantic astrophatic transmissions, through discoveries of sundered fleets, and through investigations of devastated worlds, the forces opposing the primordial annihilator pieced together information on this new wave of enemy ferocity. A delegation of farceers, the prognosticator cast of the Aildare responsible for psychically scrying the threads of futures yet unraught, approached inquisitor Torquamada Cotiers of the Ordomelius, believing that despite his demon-hunting fury, the pragmatic inquisitor would at least hear their words. Each, from different craft worlds all, had perceived a different stream of fate that drowned in darkness unfathomable, and stated quite bluntly that the Aildare could not avoid this doom without the aid of humanity, enemies at heart, though they may be. Though not conceding much in the way of tangible support, Cotiers allowed the visitors to depart with their lives, and immediately launched plans for an active operation to deny bail fleet activity through whatever means he could co-opt. What information the Inquisition could muster was disseminated to the group masters of the endometous fleets as quickly as astro telepathy could master, granting enough discretionary powers to secondary elements of their battle groups, or diverting them entirely, to halt any arcs of Omen before they reached their intended, or at least assumed, targets. Inquisitorial intelligence had hands in several of these early engagements. The destruction of the arc reapers shadow along with the planet Rodyar, which it was attacking, for example, as well as a heavily redacted void battle near the accretion disk of the Black Hole dubbed the Howling Pit. The diversion of the first company of the Iron Hands Astartes chapter to board and purge the arc Morbidius was also directly attributed to the Inquisition. The Astartes, indeed, were the Imperium's first line of offence against the arcs of Omen. The lethal environments of all, coupled with the Marine's already stated role in space-hulk-pargation operations, made them natural fits for the current situation, but the sheer scope of the despoiler's onslaught and the size of the accompanying Bale fleets meant that all arms of the Imperial military were needed, forcing the Navus Imperialis adeptus aurortus astromilitarum and adeptus mecanicus tagmata into demanding situations requiring close coordination, never an easy thing for these disparate bodies at the best of times. Despite some success, few of these first intradiction assaults on enemy Bale fleets could be considered wins in a conventional sense. Arcs of Omen were slowed, delayed or damaged, but rarely halted, and even more rarely captured. Such was the size and insanity inherent in space-hulks, that even over 10,000 years the Imperium has never been able to proffer a fully manable solution to them, merely managing the problem they represented. What hope now lay in combating such a monstrosity when it was directed with malicious intent? Ironically, most of the Arcs that changed hands in this period did so thanks to the actions of rival Chaos Warlords, greedy heretics desperate to increase their standing with the Dispoiler, gain revenge in a millennia old vendetta, or simply to seize a weapon of unparalleled lethality for themselves. One Ark, for example, vanished as it entered the maelstrom territory of Huron Blackheart, captured no doubt by the tyrants Red Corsairs. Elsewhere, word-bearers broke the hexagrammatic wards sealing the demons bound to the Ark Neverlight, seeing their imprisonment by the Arcafane as an affront to the will of the Dark Pantheon. It was, however, the loss of the Deer's discordant that saw the Dispoiler himself intervene, ordering his own fleet to personally interdict and recapture the Ark that had fallen to the demonic kin of the Blood God. Now, once more in the field, Abaddon led the Deer's discordant to its stated objective, the planet Chiron Tertius. Defended by a regiment of the Astromilitarum drawn from the planet Cadia, the timbre of the battle rose to an intensity hitherto unmatched since the launching of the Arcs, and saying so is something of an understatement. Before these guardsmen was the monster responsible for the planet Kil of their home, come anew to reap and ruin the God Emperor's realms. Their resistance was by what records formidable and equally as useless. The Dispoiler is a foe unlike any the Imperium has seen since the days of his father's heresy, as one of the traitor's most formidable combatants. To say that he tore through these Cadians will simply never capture the speed and viciousness of the Dispoiler in open combat. It is lunacy for an unaugmented human to place themselves before him, yet by all accounts these Cadians did, and by all accounts these Cadians died. It was not until the drawing closed of the finale, when the crescendo of violence was at its peak, that word was dispatched to Abaddon from his demonic, smithy ally, word, apparently, of an unforeseen complexity. The world of Malakvale, wherein lay a specific key fragment, had been suddenly reinforced. The entire fourth battle group of the endometous crusade was mustering there, in its orbit. Vastor, upset by a sudden confluence of force around a target world the Imperium could surely be unaware of their designs for, wished to hear from the Dispoiler why this was the case. For what could be unleashed against a single world that could warrant this concentration of force? The answer was a word laden with the deaths of billions, redolent of blood that flowed in oceans, of murder on a scale incomprehensible, and wrong. Until such a time as this tale may continue, Ave Imperator, Gloria, and Excelsis Terra. Or follow me on Twitter, at OculusImperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.