For the Warmaster, no help was to be had from the Crusade’s secondary front Comprising as it now did the Fifth, Seventh, Ninth and Twelfth Armies, the second battle group was operating trailwards of Macaroth’s principal strengths.

Archon Gaur, the Archenemy overlord, managed to withdraw his forces from the Carcaradon Cluster with sufficient alacrity to construct a robust position of resistance along the Erinyes border. “After a promising period of advance, Warmaster Macaroth’s main battle groups were brought to an unexpected and complete standstill at the frontiers of the Erinyes Group. But the hunter had an open knife in his pocket, and the knife slit the beast’s belly open from inside, and all of the villagers were spilled out and saved.” -from the Nihtgane legend of the hunter and the beast “At length, the beast fell upon a hunter and devoured him too. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day so that he may never truly die. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies.

For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. BLOOD PACT Gaunt’s Ghosts - 12 (The Lost - 05) Dan Abnett (An Undead Scan v1.1)

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