 The crisis of the 1st Corps had ground progress across the Varaxian front to an effective halt. All to grant high command and the departmental immunatorium the time required to simply assess the sheer scale of the losses inflicted upon the enemy, and more importantly, sustained by the 88th Siege Army. Any advance orders, amongst the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th line corps, were immediately ceased. The Varaxian militia's 2nd defense line held firm. There would be no mass imperial rush upon it. The 1st line, although costly to crack, had been far larger, with its defensive capabilities far less concentrated. This inner line was now bolstered by what enemy forces had managed to fall back, in addition to its previously formidable manpower. It was the opinion of high command that, tempting as a headlong rush into the militia's teeth may have been, the 2nd line must be taken as the 1st had been. Careful, relentless imperial attrition, grinding away at the defenses that one fragment of them may yet crack. In circlement, followed the pattern the Kreeg had laid down many, many months before. At the very beginning of the Siege. Crawling artillery barrages covered the soldiery of that dead world, as they broke out their entrenching tools to establish rudimentary lines, before chugging Atlas excavators transformed the creeping web of man-dug ditches into more permanent emplacements. To those Kreeg that had survived the first fage of the siege, it may have struck them that time was in repeat. The whole bloody, grinding business of their work begun again. The landscape had not even noticeably changed. Clogging mud of the Van Meersland wastes was the same here as it had been kilometers back. Such, of course, is the fate of the Kreeg soldier. It was not until 120, 816, M41 that Imperial Command echelons felt confident enough to commit to another offensive. But when the move was taken, it was not done without full commitment. Six entire Kreeg regiments were thrown upon the militia's lines. To what was, to the annoyance of the commanders in their relative comfort far behind the lines, absolutely no effect. The pattern here was entirely the same as it had been for the first defensive line. After saturating an enemy line segment with punitive artillery bombardments, the military would advance through the mud of no man's land, plunging into the opposing trenches to fight in brutal close quarters combat with the enemy. Where gains could be made, they were transitory. Should a Kreeg squad be lucky enough to slaughter the enemy in one particular trench section, pre-cited Vraxian artillery would then saturate the area, cutting off the Imperials from reinforcements while turning bodies into red, muddy pulp. The opening offensive of 816 M41 set this pattern, and it was repeated again and again across the entire length of the second defense line. Worse, the sheer necessity of each stall widening the field of engagement pulled more and more platoons into combat situations. A vital sector where a push looked to even possibly gain some ground would not be considered secure until its neighbouring sectors had been locked into their own engagements. The negligible gains did not apparently seem to factor into this. The pressure, according to High Command, must be maintained. Hundreds if not thousands of advances across no man's land were ordered over the following months, but not a single one achieved a breakthrough. Even in the north, in the remnants of the First Core's disaster, enemy skirmishers delayed full reclamation of the land lost by six whole months. Another year passed. And then another. And then another. There is little within this particular span of the Siege of Vrax worthy of notation to Acolytes. Never an exactly fluid situation, the conflict had truly entered the realm of the Tallymen. The remorseless slog of the siege now functioning like a bloody grim clockwork. The lines were effectively static, each side making itself known only through daily artillery barrages, vicious nighttime raids, and the occasional whirlwind clash in the churned ruins of the wastes. Soldiers died and were replaced. The numerical designations of the Kreeg infantry ticking up noted, recorded, committed to ledgers of cost. These were, of course, people, humans, like you or I, and yet their lives were spent to achieve naught but the static preservation of an operational situation as was. Of their individual tales, of the terrors of their final moments, we will never know anything. To bruise these records of these years of the siege is to see nothing but numbers bereft of meaning, an endless screed of loss removed from anything remotely personal. The arithmancy of death. It was not until 649-818 M41 that the military reports provide an incident of note. 158th Regiment had been tasked with mounting a raid on sector 5045. Military Intelligence Analyticae adepts had identified the presence of a laser defence silo in the region, part of the Varaxian Citadel's outlying orbital defence capabilities. As with all such weaponry, its systems had been sunk deep into the planet's surface to prevent it from suffering from orbit, meaning no surface-based artillery had any hopes of harming it or the militia currently garrisoned there. No forward shellfire would attempt to soften the facility, which had the added benefit of providing the 158th with the element of full surprise. Per Standard Creek Doctrine, the attack was led by the Grenadier squads of the regiment, who began their advance under the cover of the gloomy night. The journey across No Man's Land was a perilous one. Raids were a commonplace occurrence on Varax, and both sides constantly bathed the wastes between their lines with the harsh phosphorescence of starlight flares. Each time the land was lit by the slow arc of one such flare, the Grenadiers were forced to simply play the part of corpses, squatting amongst the torn ruin of their former comrades and former enemies. Progress was torturously slow and difficult. Several squads became simply lost in the wastes, with one running into an enemy scouting party, the clash erupting into a ferocious, brief firefight. Eventually, contact was made by the forward Grenadier squads with the outer ray as a wire banks. The creak began the slow process of cutting through the wire. With only a small entrance path cleared, suddenly the entire area was lit up by a randomly fired starlight shell. Freezing, the Imperials hoped that simply by not moving would they escape undetected, for the area was, unfortunately, entirely corpseless. They had no cover. Maybe they would have managed to avoid detection, or it not for a malicious sentry recognizing the unusual shapes on his outer perimeter and immediately raising the alarm. A creak soldier answered, a las gun barking in response, and suddenly all was gunfire. A defense heavy bolter spat massive caliber shells at the attackers. Alarms whooped in the depths of the silo, and people began to die. Opting in typical creak fashion to push forward rather than retreat, the Grenadier squads that had made it through the razor wire charged the enemy, fully aware that the area they must now cross was an active minefield. Militia squads were rushing to their posts, and into them were flung grenades, mud, and creak bodies with seemingly equal measure. One bunker suffered under a deluge of promethium from creak flame troopers, the explosion of its magazines torching the area around us, and bathing the whole combat zone in flickering orange light and choking smoke. Dawn broke, weak, and shrouded, and from the imperial lines all that could be seen of sector 5045 was a blank, impenetrable haze. Officers in command could simply not establish the truth of the situation. No survivors of an aborted attack were returned, but neither had a mission accomplished signal been given. Clearly, the fight was still progressing. Given all the options, the order was given to advance in full, to provide reinforcements, and hopefully force a break in the line. The soldiers of creak advanced to their death. The attack of the Grenadiers had completely failed to take any significant portion of the enemy line. The fighting seen from afar were the last stands of hopelessly outnumbered squads. When the wave of imperial reinforcements slogging through no man's land came under immediate artillery and heavy arms fire, forcing an eventual retreat with severe casualties. Captured Grenadiers were tortured for information before their corpses were hung from the razor wire, grisly marks of arch enemy devotion carved into their putrefying flesh. It should serve as an apt illustration of the sheer inertia of the conflict on Vrax, that this almost completely archetypal spat over a small segment of the line was one of the largest and most furious engagements in years. It was now some seven Terran standard years, since the first Imperial shells had fallen on the first defense line. The death toll was now within millions. While the 88th siege army had made progress, the resolve and capability of the defenders were nowhere near to collapse. Lord Commander Zwellk was painfully aware that the Vrax campaign was falling upon the more dire side of the Munitorum's forward planning spectrum. His dispatches to his batters were full of clarifications and reports of the issues involved, but there was one aspect of a recent dispatch he had yet to bring forward. The missive in question, delivered in early 820 M41, concerned an attack mounted on sector 5249 by the Kriegs 261st Regiment. The offensive, mounted by the Krieg in heavy Gorgon assault transports, had actually managed to overrun the outer enemy trenches and looked to be threatening to force an actual breach in the second defense line. That was until the typical counterattack arrived in full, which, to the horror of those reading the reports, introduced a new element to the siege. Power armoured Astartes in dark blue rain. The breach was sealed. The entire Krieg assault force butchered. The appearance of space marines on the enemy side was a matter of gravest concern. While few within the command echelons had even served alongside the Adeptus Astartes, much less faced those in the thrall to the arch enemy, they were at least tacitly aware of the existence of heretic formations of space marines. Such a force, should it add to the siege, would catastrophically upset the balance of the conflict. All modelling of the siege had been conducted on the understanding that it was a conflict of the unaugmented. Baseline humanity struggling against baseline humanity, however corrupted the enemy may be. Mutant and abhuman strains were accounted for within these strategies of course. Genetic super-soldiery was not. Astartes operated on simply another level. One that the 88th siege army was now being forced to contend with. After a prodigious amount of humming and hawing, Zwellke decided that this simply must be escalated. Dispatching emissaries to the Lord Commander militant of segmentum obscurus, he tasked his representatives with identifying the chapter involved, along with a requisition for another full line core that would be added to his available manpower. Zwellke argued outfearing that the appearance of Astartes combatants would lead to a dramatic increase in an already higher than expected body count. It appears that Zwellke also hoped the additional manpower may give him the edge in forcing open the second defense line, perhaps as an attempt to disrupt the enemy as much as these Astartes had spooked the imperial command officials. As a munitorium processed the manpower request, the attempt at identifying the Marines proved significantly more challenging. Certainly no chapters operating within the segmentum had men unaccounted for, and if they had, surely there would have been no reason beyond basest heresy for them to be murdering loyal imperial soldiers. While the ultimate explanation would not be uncovered until many years after the siege's conclusion, Astartors have been able to establish that the first heretic Astartes present on fracks belonged not to mere renegade chapters, but to elements of one of the most hated traitor legions themselves. The Alpha Legion, originally the 20th Legion Astartes, had arrived in system at some indeterminate point aboard the Battle Barge Anarchy's heart. Under the command of an individual styling himself Lord Arcos, the traitor Astartes had surveyed the volume, processing all the intelligence their sensorium suites would allow them, and laterally in an active, stunningly brazen confidence, had landed their squads in the imperial held spaceport far behind the front lines. Posing as loyalist Astartes, their arrival caused a flurry of Vox traffic around the port itself, but none raised a higher command. Whether this was due to Alpha Legion interference, interception, or simply because the duty officers did not wish to counterman the orders of space marines, one cannot say. But ultimately the Astartes were permitted to land and proceed to the front with no resistance whatsoever. Likewise, upon crossing no man's land with no attempt to disguise their passage, they encountered no challenges to their entry to militia territory. Their true allegiances now profess to sentries and watch captains guarding the second defense line. Lord Arcos presented himself, his warriors and his services, to Cardinal Zafan within the citadel of Rax, stating that the war would provide an anvil upon which the Imperiums hold over the Scaras Sector could be smashed. A victory here would be a beacon to which rebellious activity would turn to and be emboldened by. The Imperium was bleeding soldiers and shells with every year, committed now, unable to simply withdraw. With the Astartes on the side of the arch enemy's forces, they would bleed further still. By 821 M41, Lord Commander's welks' requests for reinforcements had yielded fruit. Cashing in on his political capital, the commander had obtained the Kriegs 46th Lion Corps, previously hallmarked for deployment in war zones much further afield. They were, however, soon joined by an altogether different form of reinforcements. Alarmed by the reports of heretic Astartes upon Rax, the Lord Commander Militant of segmentum Obscurus himself had superseded Zwellk's operational oversight and sought to petition the adeptus Astartes for aid. There was no longer a chance that Rax would escalate into an altogether different form of warfare. It was already happening. And segmentum authorities, over seven years into the siege, were not about to risk any of its progress. Somewhat surprisingly, the response was immediate and substantial. The Dark Angels, formerly the very first Legion Astartes, ancient defenders of the Imperium, answered the Lord Commander's petitions, committing over half their entire chapter to the Rax operation. Led by Supreme Grand Master Azrael, aboard the Battle Barge Angel of Retribution, the fleet of the chapter left their fortress monastery in the Caliban system at full wake. Azrael communicated neither his intentions, nor even his imminent arrival to the 88th siege army, nor to Commander Zwellk. The adeptus Astartes very wildly in terms of their ability to work coherently with other branches of the Imperial military. It is a perennial point of contention amongst military commanders that the Dark Angels in particular are supremely unwilling to act collaboratively. Azrael briefed his subordinates on their stated mission, the destruction of the Citadel's spaceport, to deny the traitors easy access to off-world reinforcements. While gross breaches in security akin to that the Alpha Legion had exploited in their own landing, could only be accounted for upon the Imperial side, the deprivation of their landing zones would, it was hoped, prevent any further traitor forces, and traitor Astartes forces from engaging in the escalating war. Azrael saw no need to inform any military commanders of this course. The Dark Angels required no assistance in their duties, and one must suppose that the actions of the Alpha Legion had significantly damaged the Grand Master's trust in their ability to maintain security of intelligence. As Zwellk was adjusting operational assignments to accommodate his new line core, the Dark Angels were already in orbit, preparing for a landing in force. Thunderhawk gunships of the chapter committed a landing in the CERNA Flats, directly to the south of the Starport, the fleet of the Dark Angels holding orbit just outside the range of defense batteries. The landing was completed in a couple of hours. The Astartes are far, far faster in this regard than the Astrum and the Tarum. Speed was, generally speaking, of the essence here. The Astartes were not troops of attrition. To deploy the Dark Angels to trench warfare would be akin to using a chef's blade to fell a tree. On 944, 821 M41, an armored column of Dark Angels tanks powered across the CERNA Flats towards the spaceport, comprised of land raiders, predators, rhino-armored personnel carriers, whirlwinds, and vindicators, supported on the flanks by the anti-grab land speeders of the Dark Angels' Revenwing Division. Aerial cover was provided, if needed, by Thunderhawk gunships, although the chapter would deploy them only warily lest air defenses prove a bit too capable. The starport of Vrax was less well-defended than any other position's planet side. The Kreeg had made no moves upon it, and accordingly the Militia had fortified it fairly minimally. With a force of 500 space marines now making rapid progress towards it, the Vraxian forces' first moves were to locate and identify precisely what they were now dealing with. Scout sentinels and salamander reconnaissance vehicles criss-crossed the flats in a frantic effort to simply locate where the Angels of the Emperor were, only to be picked off by counter-surveillance land speeders at velocities faster than unaugmented eyes could seemingly even track. The Dark Angels had a 200 kilometer advanced cover. This was all the time the Militia had to reinforce their starport. Azrael was fully aware of the time constraints, but was likewise aware that the starport lay across a massive fault line from the citadel. The Balan Trench, as the chasm was known, was a geographic feature common upon the porous surface of Vrax, and had been bridged by the departmental immunatorium in several locations to allow for road access to the starport. A wing of Thunderhawks under Dark Angels' third company Captain Aureus had thus been assigned to their destruction, denying an overland route to the citadel. In a stunning display of Astartes' prowess, the first bridge was captured within minutes. What retribution and enemy armored column attempted to meet out was denied by pinpoint fire from Dark Angels' devastated Marines. By the time the Thunderhawks bore the third company to their next target, Commander Aureus' casualties amounted to minor injuries on only three Astartes, all of which would be in peak condition thanks to their transhuman physiology by the time the gunships arrived at the next bridge. As the Dark Angels moved into visual range of the starport, Ravenwing Landspeeders detected an inbound armored column from line sector 7046. Azrael immediately signalled Thunderhawk air support to intercept an attack against which the pitiful hydro-battery fire of the column had little effect. Without dedicated air elements, most of the militia were at the complete mercy of Astartes' fliers, such that by the time the Dark Angels' armor engaged the enemy, the scanned remaining Leeman-Rus tanks were attempting to flee to the built-up areas of the spaceport, cut down now by last cannon fire from the lead of Astartes' tanks. Swinging his column to the east, Azrael's broad pincer maneuver was unfolding precisely to plan. Once Commander Aureus' task had been completed on the remaining causeways, the Thunderhawk-mounted Dark Angels would sweep into the port from the west, catching the enemy upon two fronts. Speed was not surrendered. Barely had the Angels mopped up the last of the tanks, then the vindicators of the chapter entered the outskirts of the port, demolisher cannons, targeting and obliterating militia-occupied buildings. Ravenwing Speeders continued to select targets, all of whom were moments later saturated by bombarding rockets from whirlwind batteries. The tempo of the battle was unremitting. Astartes needed no rest that mortals required, and pushed forward on every approach even as the night began to fall. The eastern approaches were completely cleared by the hour of the sun's rise, the militia having fully withdrawn in disarray to the warehouses and hangars around the port's landing fields, attempting to barricade and fortify the area even as whirlwind rockets continued to rain down upon them. Azrael, confirming the destruction of the remaining bridges, was content to simply bombard the enemy for the time being, allowing them to concentrate in one single area he knew his forces could capture with relative ease. Over the next five days, the Dark Angels winnowed the enemy with ruthless efficiency. The counterattacks of the militia were repulsed at every turn. They could not and would not break out. Upon the eighth day, forward Dark Angels squads reported precisely what Azrael had been waiting to hear. Trader legionaries of the Alpha Legion had joined the battle for the spaceport. While Imperial echelons had not even been informed of the Dark Angels' attack upon the spaceport, they were likewise uninformed of even the more secret agenda for the Dark Angels' presence upon Vrax. The near-soul objective of hunting these heretic Astartes all in service of their ongoing search for the Fallen, those members of their original Legion who had betrayed the Emperor during the fires of the Horus Heresy 10,000 years previously. The Alpha Legion's trade of secrets and lies made them prize targets for Dark Angels interrogator chaplains. The chapter was nothing if not utterly relentless in their pursuit of anything that may grant even scraps of information about their traitorous kin. That their hunt may in the process aid another part of the Imperial war machine was merely pleasant happenstance. Azrael committed the lead elements of his first, second, fifth, eighth and ninth companies to a massive assault on the final militia positions with he himself leading the terminators of the Dark Angels' death wing in the attack. As with all conflicts involving such a large amount of Astartes, the destruction was on a scale unparalleled and at a speed undreamed of by mortal minds. The addition of traitorous Astartes to the mix only heightened it. In the ferocity of the assault, the Grandmaster's land raider was struck by a las cannon bolt, the subsequent detonation of its heavy bolter magazine severely damaging its tracks. Undeterred, the commander of the Dark Angels simply plunged into the fray, scything his way through militia soldiery without mercy or compunction. The Alpha Legion, however, were never one to engage on the enemy's terms. Their counter-attack targeted brother and male of the Angels, bearer of the chapter's sacred standard, who fell to a deluge of Bolterfire. Knowing that Azrael would not permit the banner to fall, even into dust and dirt let alone enemy hands, Lord Arcos merely had to wait for the Grandmaster to rush to the body of brother and male. Before emerging from the flames and smoke, the Barak, an ancient power armor of the Alpha Legion traitor, bedecked in runes that swam across its ceramite surface. Their jewel shattered stone and masonry with its fury. The blasphemous power of the warp the traitor had drunk from, empowering his form with ungodly vigor. Reigning blows down upon the Dark Angels Grandmaster. Arcos was fully aware that he would never surrender the sacred standard he now clutched and sought to exploit this at every turn. Targeting the joints in Azrael's Artifacer plate, Arcos was relentless, pushing the loyalists to start his commander back, back until finally he had laid him low. Permitting himself a laugh of triumph above the prone and now weaponous Azrael, Arcos was mere seconds from the killing blow itself. But his indulgence, so rare for the pragmatic Alpha Legion, cost him everything. A burst of assault cannon fire heralded the arrival of Belfigor, the expedition's interrogator chaplain, at the head of the Deathwing. The black clad chaplain amongst the ivory patterned Terminators canoned into Arcos bodily, following up the impact with a blow from his Crozius. Concern for the chapter master's health overrode Belfigor's desire to end the foe, however, and administering to the barely conscious Azrael, Arcos was permitted to escape into the merc. The evacuation by Thunderhawk of the Grandmaster was now a priority, with a path that carries summon to deal with the wounds inflicted upon him. Command of the ground forces now passed to Master Aureus, although at this point the battle was a slaughter in favour of the angels. The Alpha Legion withdrew as formlessly as their commander had, vanishing into the dust and smoke, whatever objectives they had been pursuing either achieved or denied to them. It would take another two days to fully purge the surviving militia, fragmented and fleeing as they now were, and once their absolute control over the port had been achieved, the Dark Angels wasted no time in demolishing the facility past any point of salvage. The price, unfortunately, had been quite high. The bulk of the Angels' losses had occurred at the hands of their traitor targets. Some 200 battle brothers had fallen. The Grandmaster still recovering from the wounds sustained in his battle with Arcos. Not a single member of the Alpha Legion had been captured alive, although several high-ranking militia officers were now occupying the cells aboard the Angels' Battle Barge, awaiting the ministrations of the interrogator chaplains. The only communication the 88th Siege Army received following the destruction of the Starport was sent as the fleet of the chapter slipped high orbital anchor. Despite having spent the entirety of the previous near two solar weeks attempting to raise the Astartes, all Lord Commander's wealth ever received from the Dark Angels was a confirmation that their mission to the Starport had been completed. With that, the ships of the chapter left the system and the War for Vrax simply ground onwards. Thank you very much for watching.