 The attack of Surturvorah was savage beyond anything presagious had ever experienced. Despite their bravery upon the fields of the Crusade against their gargantuan Xenos horrors, not even the viciousness of the hated Fra'al could match the gluttonous murder lust the Firemasters displayed in their shock assault. A score of true messenger god engines fell to the first devastating volley. Their exposed superstructures, bared to the onrushing Surturvorah legio, sundered by searing melted barrages, torrents of mega-bolter fire, and pinpoint volcano cannon strikes. Reactor casings were torn open, the caged sons of the Titan Hearts going critical in a pico-second, birthing fusion reactions of unholy lethality right in the middle of their mustard lines. Vora engines caught in these blast waves reeled, or were fully toppled, even as they hurried to adjust their facings against the storm assault. The slaughter was literally unprecedented. Never in the history of the Imperium had so many Titan-class machines been destroyed in so quickly a time, and yet still Surturvorah advanced, murder burning in hearts as fiercely as the fire emblems of their panoply, war horns blaring their triumph to the falling skies. On the far side of the city, further slaughter unfolded, on a smaller scale, but no less savage and hideous for it. The Calak war host reached the cordons of macro-landing's own Gamma. Having already killed every exertus imperialis trooper, not allied to their secret cause present in their barracks, the host now fell upon the civilian population with unrestrained ferocity, murdering with complete abandon. Into fleeing crowds did they send their tanks, the bladed dozer plates at their fore, crushing panicking civilians into wretched pulp. They tore open disaster shelters, laying into the huddled, terrified masses within with bayonet and combat knife, daubing the walls and their armoured transports, even themselves, but the blood of their victims in acts of profane lunacy. Any resistance met, be it hastily assembled auxilia defensive positions, or even a canny tech priest coven having locked down their manufactoria, the Calak war host directed overwhelming armour or air support to crush their enemies. A wave of super heavy tanks were a mass flight of lightning and avenger strike fliers, obliterating whatever in their path with saturated fire. Despite these clearly coherent responses to mounted enemy defences, it was clear from reports recovered that the Calak objective seemed to be, simply, genocidal slaughter. Their pursuit of the helpless citizenry of Ithrica was simultaneously clinical and lunatic. They seized no ground nor held any. Their divisions that rampaged through the metropolis followed ospex screeds detecting mass human life sign readings. Their malignant hunger for bloodshed appeared insatiable. As the Calak spread ever outwards, new fiery contrails appeared in the skies above the metropolis, heralding the planetfall of more than just orbital debris. For now, unto Ithrica came the arterial red gunships of the word-bearers, and the sinister configurations of ordo-reductor war crucibles. On the fields of macro-alpha, a sterling testament to the character of the legio-presagius was entered into history. Despite the apocalyptic fury of Sertervura, despite their unprecedented casualties, the true messengers did not break, or even falter. Those engines that survived the initial barrage of their lines rallied with admirable speed and coherency, falling as quickly as they were able into a well-drilled trinity shield formation. A favoured defensive tactic of the legio, the alignment consisted of three manifolds of five titans, each the heaviest surviving engines, forming a wedge formation. Void shields were brought to maximum, all spare reactor charge directed to their integrity, and arranged to overlap with their fellow titans. Behind this shield wall, engines of lighter tonnage were gathered in order to protect them. The warhounds and reavers of the true messengers fell in behind the formation, led by a wall of as yet undamaged warlord-class titans, an indomitable fortress, under most any circumstances, save for the one they now found themselves in. Even the void shields of the warlords, powered to maximum integrity, were taking fire from a hundred engines, annihilation-grade barrage weaponry impacting them in unrelenting torrents. The ground itself was becoming vitrious due to the sheer heat of the incoming fire and its impacts upon the void shields, the landing zone's tarmac steadily turning into cracked glass. With the entire legio's senior cadre believed dead in the crash landing of the Arutan, command passed to princeps-seniorus Rico Trieste of the warlord-class titan Oryk Pegasus. Committed to the heart of the shield wall, her assessment of the situation could not have been clearer. Religio was hopelessly and fatally outgunned. Their enemies, erstwhile brethren of now-hated Certer Vora, continued to close, their motivators still recovering from the sheer speed of their initial advance, but no less implacable. Trieste knew that when the distance was closed, the slaughter would be final. The firemasters were simply too many a number, and their broad, kilometers-wide battle-line was primed to fully encircle the engines of presagius. Her first and indeed final command as warmistress of the legio was issued with all possible haste. Those engines sheltering behind the shield wall, warmongers, reavers, dire wolves, and warhounds, as well as a few heavily damaged warlords, were to immediately retreat at full stride into Ithrica proper and disperse. However was to be sought where at all possible, and all efforts bent towards a restoration of void shields and laterally, weapon systems. The man-made ravines of the city were tall enough to conceal even titan-class engines, which, coupled with the division of legio-manipals, would hopefully serve to deprive Certer Vora of its sheer numerical advantage. Nine warlords would buy their kin the time needed to accomplish this, including Oryk Pegasus itself, mounting a full charge at the line of the Firemasters. Two never even made contact with their enemies. One torn to fragments by sustained fire, the other literally knee-capped by a volcano-canon strike and crashing to the ground. This latter warlord's carapace weaponry continued firing blindly for several seconds, stabbing into the tumultuous dust cloud its fall had thrown up until it was overrun. The remaining seven engines collided with their traitor foes with enough righteous fury to sunder their line, forcing Certer Vora to prematurely stagger and close their encircling maneuver to compensate. The scorned ferocity of the true messenger served them well, as did the sheer power of their engines. A warlord titan motivated by pure hatred is no mean thing. And for the first time since the attack began, prosagious reaped vengeance from the traitors. It was, of course, an inevitably suicidal attack. One by one, the counter-attacking titans succumbed to the sheer numbers of the Firemasters. Accounts considered by some to be apocryphal, owing to the narrative satisfaction they carry, state that it was Oryk Pegasus who survived the longest, beating back the enemy with the severed head of a Certer Vora reaver titan clasped in its fist. The carapace weaponry were severed, ashen stumps, its armor was beginning to flow like liquid under so many sustained melto weapon strikes. It and its fellow six warlords died, but did so with honor and success. Their counter-attack had bought the rest of the legio time enough to reach the cover of the city's core. Their names are forever etched into legio memory, enshrined as the nine paragons of Ithrica. Oryk Pegasus, Putarkos, the Lion of Mars, Chrysair's Wake, the Triumph of Akatran, Reason's Thunder, the Silverthorn, Sabrus Reginum, and the Will of Adamant. This majority muster of the legio was not alone in their miraculous retreat. Smaller subdivisions of the true messengers had mustered elsewhere in the macro-landing zones. Some had suffered terribly. Battlegroup Peregrine was utterly annihilated by a fusion missile barrage from the Ordo Reductor in the upper atmosphere, but others were luckier. Battlegroup Argentus, with the reaver titan invigilator at its fore, was saved from the bombardment by their proximity to the legio Sertervora's own muster site at the time of the attack. Under fire from the Firemaster's trailing elements, they had immediately retreated, desperately trying to raise comblinks with their kin on the fields of macro-alpha to no avail. Elsewhere, the armoured squadrons and battle-automata-manipals of the Mechanicum's Tagmata Xerxes had also suffered minimal losses from the orbital strikes, electing in the face of what they had correctly discerned to be a massive engine-scale conflict, to fall back to an industrial zone in Ithrica's southern quarter, which embedded Magi and Mermidans calculated as being the most defensible location within immediate reach. Traitor Auxilia, drawn from the Mordecai occlusion, attempted to intervene in the Tagmata's retreat, but were, in a rare stroke of loyalist luck, completely outmatched. The occlusion was a string of feudal worlds, and while outfitted with decently modern imperial weaponry, its regiments were ultimately lightly armed and armoured, driven primarily by word-bearer-aligned faith, more than actual skill or leadership. The Mechanicum simply annihilated them, suffering nothing in the way of losses. Automata and Mermidans carved a pitiless, clinical path through the traitor Auxilia, as night suits secured their flanks. The heavier weaponry of the Scions deemed a waste of ammunition against such meager opposition. With these elements, and the remains of Prasagius now disengaged and fortifying themselves within the depths of Ithrica, the initial phase of slaughter and destruction was concluded, but the battle of Ithrica was far from over. As the conflict entered into its second hour, it took on a wholly different character. Prasagius, now scattered and embedded in the artificial canyons of Ithrica, sought to use the towering pharaoh-crete hab and administration towers as cover to lay ambushes for the engines of Sertor Vora, while the pharomasters now brought the same murderous fury they had displayed on the landing fields to their destruction of the city, attempting where possible to lay waste to whole quarters in their efforts to flush their prey out. Counterattacks by the true messengers could only mitigate so much collateral damage as they sought to bring the foe to bear, and it was not long before the flashing plasma arcs, thundering apocalypse missile barrages, and howling shellfire began to lay utter waste to Ithrica. Towers were reduced to bullet-shredded corpses of their former selves before collapsing entirely, victims of the titan battle. Dust clouds rapidly rendered all visibility entirely moot. This was an engine war, after all, fought in the realms of all spexes, decided upon by skill and tenacity of the sensori and their princeps. Mids all of this, crowds of civilians unable to previously escape fled in utter panic from the clashing giants. Thousands were caught in the torrents of frometium fire unleashed by Sertivora's favored inferno cannons, flash incinerated to ashen ghosts. Reactor death of titans irradiated whole city blocks in instance, their destruction only adding to that already reaped by weapons fire. A false knight fell on Ithrica, a choking toxic miasma of masonry dust and human ash. Through all this, the presagious battle group Argentum, miraculous survivors from earlier, pressed through it all under the superlative leadership of the reaver invigilator. Outfighting and outmatching every foe they encountered, they were dogged in their pursuit of a singular goal, to reach the downed wreck of the mass conveyor Arutan, for within the princeps of the Manipul bore hope that their salvation may yet live. In Ithrica's eastern sectors, the Calak war host reigned supreme, the murderous advance still wholly unchecked, their death toll impossible to ever establish accurately. They were, finally, now opposed by the ultramarines of the scattered 4th and 24th chapters. Squads and companies from these chapters had been sub-deployed across the city, diverted and separated in what one must presume was a deliberately premeditated attempt to deny them coherency at the outset of the betrayal. Many of these subdivisions had been caught in the blast wave caused by the helicons' destruction, and these survivors now rallied under knowledge far more grim. Their command elements had all been ensconced within the depths of the now annihilated command center. This did, however, provide all points with a mustering site. Desperately, all were seeking to access the massive subterranean network of bunkers that had formed the helicons' foundations. The main site was simply a disaster. Any entranceways were now literally molten, rock flowing like liquid in the aftermath of the Ordo Reductor's dreaded tensions. Auxiliary access tunnels were slowly being opened, often by mechanical adepts or ultramarines taking direct enemy fire, and trapped astartes below were being, pains takingly, rescued. The 13th Legion, however, could not simply ignore the rampages of the Calak. This was both tactical exigency and moral duty. While defending the rescue operations was a consideration, the wanton murder of civilians, self-same civilians the ultramarines were essentially sworn to protect and defend, led many squads to break away from the helicons' zones and seek retribution. In the eastern sector, the counter-attack of unbridled fury slammed into the advancing Calak. Just as the savagery of the Izogdilia had met little to no resistance in their slaughter of helpless innocents, so too were they now powerless against the Legion. Small arms fire pinged uselessly off power armor, just as their bayonets and ritual knives could find precious little purchase in cobalt battle-plate. The violence was astonishing, as anyone who has ever beheld astartes facing baseline humans will ever attest to. The Calak's overrun forward elements, almost entirely light infantry, were reduced to piles of viscera, severed limbs, and detonated bodies. It is a testament to the discipline of the ultramarines that their desire for vengeance did not see them make the same mistake their foes had. When Calak walkers and armor were encountered, tactical withdrawals were immediately ordered until heavier weaponry could be drawn up to further punish the traitors. The sheer malicious fury present amongst the nigh rabid Calak warhosts since their first atrocities in their barrack zones were now being documented amongst other traitor forces in the war zone. The Tagmatas Xerxes recorded a marked uptick in baseline human auxilia hurling themselves at the Mechanicum defenses, seemingly without consideration for survival. Carefully delineated kill zones, methodically mapped out by the Tagmatas' savants of destruction, became clogged with bodies. Yet still the waves and waves of soldiers came, heedless of losses, insensate and raptuous killlust. So constant were these human deluges that the esoteric weaponry of the Mechanicum began to overheat, forcing the application of close quarter combat protocols in carefully timed sequences so that the Magi on Automata may preserve their ammunition supplies and weapons barrels. The potential source of the zealous lunacy was soon to reveal itself. Amongst the human masses now strode figures altogether more massive. The word bearers. The Astartes present at these engagements, thanks to rigorous Mechanicum data extraction, were documented as having quite non-standard upgrades to their power armor. Many bore what appeared to be votive sensors swinging on chains and vomiting forth clouds of hallucinogenic narcotic gases. Augmented helm speakers blared plain song or hymnals in languages unknown to the Tagmatas, but the effect that these Astartes had amongst the unaugmented thralls was clear. Mathematically verifiable even, wherever they strode the suicidal intensity of the auxilia was driven to even greater heights. Not only that, the Astartes themselves were of course no slouches in combat and had brought up field weaponry to match that of the Tagmatas Xerxes. Significant damage was now being reaped upon the Mechanicum. Previously merely outnumbered, the Magi were now becoming outgunned, forcing retreat algorithmica to plot withdrawal courses to hastily but exactingly constructed defensible positions. Not even the once noble engines of the Ligio Sertivora were spared from the murderous wrath, but the masters of the Titans did not seem to pay it any heed. Even their holy name appeared to be a thing of the past. Though the Ligio was born of Mars herself, ancient even by the standards of the Caligia Titanica, Ithrica was the moment they shocked that identity wholly. A new name was being blared across open vox lines, howled into the wind with a rage unbridled, Infernus. It was appropriate on that damnable day more than any others. The fire masters they now truly were. Inferno cannons incinerated city blocks with abandon or deluged, prosagious engines with crawling, melting fury. As the hours of engine war ground on, Ligio Infernus Titans seemed to abandon any tactical rigors of god machine scale conflict. They transformed slowly but surely into less of a coherent fighting force and more of a horde of gigantic beasts unleashed. Engines of the true messengers were hounded like wounded prey. But increasingly, Infernus Titans would abandon these pursuits in favor of glutting themselves upon the helpless humanity that fled from them in all directions. The methods employed in these slaughters had previously only been done so against non-compliant human regimes or Xenos populations. Using the sheer overwhelming sonic power of the engine war horns, the Titans drove people like livestock, deafened their ears bleeding, herded into groups contained by the very architecture of the city before engaging their Inferno cannons and turning the screaming, begging humanity into cinders. Not one scrap of mercy was offered. The sheer horror of the murder was apparently the exact point. For the beleaguered engines of presagius, the massacre of Ithaca's civilians granted them a degree of respite. Distracted Infernus engines were peeling away from pursuing them. Battlegroup Argentus, spared from obliteration, rounded upon the downed hulk of the Arutan, only to find their path barred by a hulking nemesis warbringer class Titan, accompanied by two warhounds. While not the demiligio they had feared to discover gloating over the wreckage of the mass conveyor, the nemesis outmatched any single engine in Argentus, who now steeled themselves for the fight of their lives. The Battle of Ithaca is almost unique upon Calth for being a war zone where a no-combatant held the upper hand for any significant stretch of time. During the betrayal, a status quo typically ended up establishing itself within the first hour of hostilities in favor of one side or another. This was, of course, overwhelmingly in favor of the traitors, possessing, as they did, total surprise and superiority. But loyalist victories did still exist. In Ithaca, no such decisive position was occupied for many, many hours. By the sixth hour of fighting, ultramarine reinforcements, drawn from the 17th and 18th chapters, had poured into the city via gunship and Rhino transports. Having mustered far outside the Metropolis's boundaries, these survivors nevertheless reckoned that Ithaca would provide a more defensible position than the empty scrubland surrounding it. It was no safe harbor, that much was certain, but it would, at the very least, provide cover from aerial strikes of word-bearers black comet chapter fliers that had so punished them since the first wave of attacks. Additionally, Cor Fauron's control of the planetary defense grid had seen renewed orbital strikes targeting locations in the planet's southern hemisphere. Commanders of the 17th and 18th reasoned that, while in no way certain, the word-bearers were less likely to commit orbital fire on a war zone containing their own elements. In the depths of the ruined city, the remnants of the ultramarine's fourth chapter had coalesced under the leadership of Captain Mantargo, who had led a heroic breakout from the subterranean bunkers with the sizable amount of his chapter's armor and artillery divisions. In a superlative tactical decision, the captain deployed his war machines on the high ground offered by the massive Trident Aqueduct. Its systems, savaged by the war, it nevertheless had been built to withstand thousands of tons of water every second, making it the perfect platform for the armor of the 13th Legion. From here, Captain Mantargo was able to direct counter-battery fire at targets of opportunity across the entire metropolis. Although these efforts were limited by vox lines constantly jammed with overlapping hems and chants, so intense and garbled now that they resembled nothing less than constant, primeval howling. At the site of the downed Arutan, the Nemesis Titan, Ravocca, had finally fallen, but only at great cost to battle group Argentus. The warlord class, Evocatus, and the warhound Deathrunner had been lost with all hands, while the commanding reaver class, Invigilator, had suffered heavy damage, along with its two surviving kin. Drawn by the fighting, almost the entirety of prosaegius's beliedgird legio had gathered in the city areas around the Arutan, rallying around the conveyor, as on all sides they were pressed by the mad dogs of the reborn legio infernus. This was, however, no forlorn last hand. At such close proximity, the hopes of battle group Argentus were realized. Voxlings had been raised. Engines, yet lived within the holds of the Arutan. Survivors of the crash, contained within their god machines, but trapped within the massive bark. Void shields could not be activated, and though many may have sorely wished it, none had dared to activate weapons to cut their way out for fear of detonating fuel lines, or worse, munition resupply bays. Legion techmarines, skittarii overseers, and Mechanicum magi were frantically working to free the command echelon of the true messengers, even as Titan-grade weapon fire barraged to the gathering prosaegius, voids wavering under such punishing barrages. Elsewhere, the tactical situation of the Tagmatazerxes was growing ever more dire. Temporary relief had emerged in the form of attachment of knights from the stranded house of Warnhair, but the traitor Horde had only grown with the arrival of more and more word-bearers, and the emergence on their flanks of the black and crimson siege automata from the Ordo-Reductor covenant Mormoth Null, the heretic obliterators who had laid waste to the Helicon from the stratosphere. As the scions of Warnhair sallied forth against Thanatar battle robots and word-bearer heavy armor, the magi of Xerxes worked furiously on a hastily ratified plan to reconfigure a large plasma reactor, the housing of which had become the site of their now seemingly final stand. At Calthmark 06.36.04, the Tagmatazerxes mounted a counter-attack against their besiegers. A wedge formation of the Mechanicum's last Castellax-class automata drove into the traitor host, using servo claws, blunt fists, and powered blades in favor of now spent firearms to tear through the poorly equipped Celtic auxiliaries. Sent reeling by the scale of the counter-assault, a moment was bought for three damaged but operational Thanatar siege robots to drag the modified reactor forth as fast as their hammering piston legs could carry their massive frames and the barely contained nuclear firebomb their magi had rigged. The zealot mob was seemingly oblivious to this, driving forth upon the automata with abandon. But what was about to transpire was no doubt obvious to some of the canneer word-bearers in attendance and was certainly obvious to the captain of the Dirac's lament, still holding in stationary position above the city. Arch Majos Barbatos Hexad, Dominus of the Mormoth Null Covenant, registered the phenomenal and barely contained reaction immediately and ordered his ordo-reductor to withdraw from the field with all possible haste. It was, for the traitors, far too late. Logisticians amongst the Tagmatazerxes had calculated the inevitability of their forces' destruction. The total loss of the Tagma was a mathematical inevitability, dependent only upon timing and unpredictable factors beyond the reckoning of their statistics. Accordingly, the governing magi had enacted procedures of mutually assured destruction. The Communion remotely detonated their device. An area half a kilometer in diameter was immediately atomized in Plasmic Fire, along with anything or any one, helpless enough to be contained within the sphere of atomic annihilation. The blast wave went on to consume 23 city blocks worth of territory with a similar yield to that which had wiped out the Helicon, reducing anything living to dust and anything of metal to molten slag. It is illustrative of the sheer magnitude of the bombardment the Legio-Persagius was weathering, that the destruction of the Tagmatazerxes went utterly unnoticed by the Titans guarding the Arutan. The half-dead invigilator was now the sole engine of Argentus that remained standing, maimed, yes, but defiant. The sacrifice of its battle group was thankfully not in vain. At Mark 07.03.21, the massive assault door of the Arutan hit the earth with a near seismic force, unlocked at last by the valiant efforts of loyalist technicians. From within the cavernous hold of the conveyor strode forth the mightiest engines the true messengers possessed. At the fore was Immortalis Domitor, a warmonger-class Emperor Titan, fully twice the size of the two maniples of warlords that now walked alongside it. Their first volley simply annihilated the park lands in a three kilometer radius of their targets. Initial volley destroying in an instant the Infernus Titans, Tyrant's Fist, Orias, Deus Vassago, and Consecratus Inferna. A single coordinated group under the command of the Ligio's Princeps Maxima, the march of the true messengers was now unstoppable. Even with Vox rendered inoperable by the eldritch howling of the traitor communications, the Princeps of Prasagius utilized tried and true methods of warhorn signaling, short blasts, forming robust signals of advance, defense, and targeting. The blood-mad frenzy of their foes, both the Ligio Infernus and their human auxiliaries, simply fell before the precision and discipline of the true messengers. The Titanic advance spared the harried ultramarine companies, allowing them an opportunity to consolidate their forces. And for the first time in hours, aid in the coordination of evacuation efforts, hurrying what civilians had managed to survive the apocalypse unleashed upon their city, into the largely secured subterranean routes to the archeologies far below ground. These efforts, though paltry in comparison to the death toll, should not go unnoticed. The first dread notice of what was to occur came with the sudden and total silence of the Vox lines. The howling that had blanketed Ithrica for hours suddenly simply was not. For an instant, quiet reigned, until it was followed by another surge of calm traffic. This time, from loyalist units attempting to establish whatever they could of the broader tactical picture. Every possible request nigh jammed the lines, pleas for medical aid, demands for command authority confirmation, requests for situation reports, simple pleas to know why the Imperium's own had turned upon them. Above all this, shunted into the highest priority bands, came a call from the legio-presigius warhound engine, Lucadrio. The scout Titan had been dispatched to the last known location of the Tagmata Xerxes, who had proven impossible to raise on Vox, for reasons obvious to us in this historical record. Shielded as it was against the intense radiological fallout of the devastated industrial zones, Lucadrio had discovered not simply a smoking blast crater, but a horrific forest of twisted metalwork, raised to host thousands of charred, but clearly human, corpses, pinned in place as if by some predatory avian. The arrangement of these spars in concentric circles was so clearly not the artifice of any weapon system known, and the scout Titan's Aspect's grids were so overloaded with contradictory life sign readings that it raised its legio's leader immediately to deliver the report, but was cut off shortly thereafter. Attempts to contact it, both by the princeps of immortalis domitar and several ultramarines damatlys rhinos nearby, were met with failure for the next several minutes. Until it garbled, heavily distorted Vox Burst was received and routed for all to hear. The snippets spoke of a figure, not a Titan, but taller than one, winged, skin blood red, armor of beaten brass, surrounded by a blood fog. It spoke that their void shields had failed, that their armor had been compromised, that their souls must be commended to the omnisia, that save us, then silence. There is little in the way of a concrete narrative that can actually summarize the final hours of the Battle of Ithrica. The eighth hour had been ushered in with the death of Lucadrio. What was recovered in the aftermath is a scrambled mess of legio prosaegius lithocordias, legionnesus dartes, helm logs, ordo reductor cogitator banks, and legio cybernetica necroportical implants. It is, all of it, fundamentally corrupt and unreliable, even by the standards of records saved from Calth following the atrocity. As for eyewitness testimony, the battle had pitifully few survivors, and one's acolytes should be well aware at this point of the memetic hazards posed by testimony of those who witnessed what they did. This is one of the reasons mentioned at the outset of this particular chapter of the Betrayal of Calth, that Ithrica presaged in so many ways the battles of the Age of Darkness, a rising intensity of horror and destruction that would end with the sundering of all that was known. What can be verified is that, at the outset of the eighth hour of battle, several localized rifts in corporeal reality occurred within the city's limits. The tares ruptures in the sky that separates materia from immateria, our world from the warp, provided vectors from which the predatory entities of that realm, the Neverborn, those without the ken to realize the words power will call demons flooded into the mortal plane. The largest of these schisma occurred at the site of the Tagmat Azerxes's destruction, while others emerged at seemingly random sites around the metropolis. Its industrial zones, its mastery arts. Scholars of the Damned have noted, of course, that these sites were likely far from actually random. Rather, they had been locations where the slaughter had been the greatest, the most vile, or the most possessive of narrative significance. The sheer scale and malignancy of the murder performed by the legio in furnace and the calak warhost was now given dreadful, tangible purpose. It was ritual, its significance on a scale hitherto unseen by the Imperium of Man. Against the torrent of immaterial entities that emerged from these portals, there was no preparedness. Their nature was utterly unknown to the Loyalists, even the most senior of Ultramarine's commanders are legio-presagius-princepts. At best, they would have been aware that predatory Xenos, unstudied by humanity, existed within the warp. Had they been, whatever vomited forth from the rents in reality, bore absolutely not one shred of resemblance to whatever prosaic, heavily redacted account they had read. Their forms were a cacophony of malevolence, tidal waves of verminous things, capering half-forms in mockery of humanity, hybrid anemilia with too many mouths, gibbering uncreations of eyes and fire, bestial monstrosities in the aspects of legion-soldiery. Their sizes were as diverse and insane as their forms, but amongst them strode incarnations the size and equal of the god-engines that had ruled the battle-zone for hours. Some plunged from the sky the colour of bruises made of loss, enveloping enemy titans, Loyalist titans, sundering them in fell swoops. At the Avaris Plaza, the reaver titan Nossos was recorded on legionary helm vids, being crushed by a gaseous emanation that resembled nothing less than a cloud of serpents, who coiled around the proud engine to its end. The 312th Solar Auxilia were torn to shreds by half-incarnated things, hooting as they rode bladed chariots through their ranks. The attacks of the Neverborn were not restricted to merely Loyalist ranks, or to the slaughter of remaining civilians. The Ordo-Reductor coven of Mormoth Null were beset by the bale fire and toothed maws of lesser emanations, fleeing for their dropships to evacuate to the Dirac's Lament far above. Traitor Auxilia likewise perished, some in religious rapture, but many, many more weeping in terror and insanity. Only the word-bearers were spared the attentions of the emanations, passing through their immaterial ranks untouched. On the Aqueduct of the Trident, the previously entrenched to Ultramarine's Fourth Company were plagued by a threat from within, as from the body of a captive word-bearer incarnated a massive Neverborn creature, canine in aspect, but with monstrous wings, a body the size of an Imperial Knight and its coming brought great slaughter. Its size only grew as it killed and killed and killed, until its destruction was brought by a strafing run of fire-raptor gunships. The incident bears further parallels with a similar incarnation elsewhere on Calth, several similar incarnations in fact, where, in identical scenarios, near-identical creatures emerged, all of which were reported to have been chanting the same word. This word has, of course, been removed from this record for cognitohazard reasons, as all archival menials committed to confirming its validity died in the process. One must assume that this Neverborn is part of one of their wicked Gestalt emanations, vestigial fingers of some wicked hole contained beyond the veil, yet grasping through it. Although ultimately overcoming this emanation, the encounter, and what he had been able to glean of the beyond-dier tactical picture, convinced Captain Mantargo of the Ultramarines that not only could victory at Ithrica simply not be claimed, but that even their deaths would inflict negligible damage upon their foes. By the thirteenth hour of the Battle of Ithrica, the Captain had sounded a general evacuation order, having discerned he was possibly the last surviving higher authority within the devastated city. The order was quickly taken up in the northern sectors, which had been spared much of the rampages of the Calak war host, and thus the Neverborn incursions. Elsewhere, macro gamma landing fields became a helpful escape vector, they had been spared the initial orbital strikes owing to their status as a traitor mustering point, and now served as an embarkation point for surviving loyalist flyers and overland transports. In the southern and eastern reaches of the city, however, the order went essentially unheeded, not out of disobedience, far from it, but simply because any human or Astartes alive within those parts of Ithrica were far too occupied fighting for their very survival to even contemplate a withdrawal. The enemy was numberless, their forms limitless, they obeyed no law of the world physical, weapons ceased to function against them. Just as how the situation aboard the McCraggs honor had overwhelmed the ultramarine capacity for practical application of theoretical rules of warfare, the greater and lesser emanations of the dark powers made full use of their stunned foes inability to combat them. The orgy of violence that descended upon Ithrica was of a kind unheard of in the annals of imperial history, redolent instead of ancient Terran wood carvings and madman folktales of the darkest depths of the Age of Strife. No record exists of survivors from these theaters of the Battle of Ithrica. They have been assumed, as far as history can establish, to have all simply died, torn to shreds, by capering never-born. Only the testimony of those few true messengers who survived give any hint as to the fate of the legio presages. Even though scant handful only lived through the calamity in hopelessly crippled engines that staggered to some degree of relative safety, being rescued by other imperial armed forces in the aftermath, abandoning their god machines to silent death. It is likely that, once the situation became clear, once the very gates of hell itself had been thrown open and madness reigned, the legio knew that their dozen or so surviving titans could simply not escape. The Arotan was going nowhere, little more than a smoking husk at this point. The only titan-capable landers were those of Inferness at Landing Field Macro Beta, to which even now the Firemasters were retreating to, lest they suffer the attentions of their never-born allies. The lords of the true messengers knew that, even if they were somehow capable of staging a breakout action and making it to the scrubland surrounding Ithrica, they would be exposed wholly, left to the whims of aerial or orbital strikes. The fate presagious resigned themselves to was clear. A last, futile fighting stand against the hordes of war emanations, that they in their actions may buy time for humans or Astartes elements to flee. It is unlikely that they knew, or could have known, the degree to which they succeeded. It is unlikely that they cared. Theirs was not of a character that required such flattery. Duty, to presage the fate of Ithrica, duty, to presagious, was the only reward that was needed. Not a single titan of the legio survived the battle of Ithrica. It is, however, estimated that through their sacrifice, some 4000 ultramarines were able to escape the doomed metropolis, living to fight on against the tides of darkness that were yet to come. Thank you very much for watching.