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"Ability is not enough. Dedication is not enough. Even victory is not enough. You must embody all of these, until the end of time and the extinction of mortal flesh..." ++ 'ERE GEHENNA COMES ++ ================================= When I burst through the wall, two of the heathen bastards stain my streets with unworthy corpses. A Techmarine would perhaps say the wall and my mass was enough to drown them in bricks laid by my ancestors. I call it the weight of sin. Four hours my kin and I lay in wait for the column of mongrels who bite at our world, chew on our dust, and now they have come here to die. For this is Gehenna. The ambush executes perfectly, and the traitors are destroyed as my squad erupts from the very ground the enemy defiles. The world, my world, my city, devours them with precious Bolts and the savage rending of shotgun chokes. Combat blades lance up into groins, severing arteries and painting the grey-brown rubble with crimson effluent and human offal. The ambush has killed sixteen men in moments, making a garden of bones in my home. One of my squad, Ardian, takes an Astartes entrenching shovel and chops one of the mewling wretches into gruesome silence with a thunk of metal into meat. I laugh. It is the only prayer of forgiveness that utters from my lips. The bitter bark is short-lived. The business of war is about us again in moments, and Julo makes the sacrifice as an Iron Warrior Predator crunches through the wall of a hab-block, slewing a torrent of plascrete down to fill the road. I launch to my left, hearing the grunt from my Brother as the autocannon on the tank fires it's odd bam-bam cadence, before Julo goes silent, his life-sign fading from my displays. Yet, every inch of Gehenna is paid for in blood, and the predator driver, keen for the kill has driven into our trap. Three zones were left for him, for us to make prayer over his burning corpse, and now he will be our offering to the Great Primarch Dorn. Having shot his bolt, the predator revs, belching smoke and fumes from the exhausts, and Ardian trips the detonators, thunder raking the sides of the tank, casting up more rubble and pulverised spumes of powder to blind the result, but I know. The trembles run through the ground in my armour, and the sudden pitch of the engine as the tank falls into the cellar beneath the house, a rat in a trap. It pitches up, the autocannon flung up in some kind of odd salute, firing into the sky with petulant fury, hitting nothing but air. The augurs of our Soundstrike are not so vexed. Deploying a super-krak missile, my augurs register the flash-heat, the displaced punch of air. The tormented squeal of metal is followed by the hollow crunch of the explosion. It sounds so little for what it is, but when the dust and smoke clears, Melius proves his strike true. Hellish spikes and tusks protrude from the once proud machine, but now are festooned with chains and the skulls of the righteous. Yet we have rendered them impotent, a boar speared with a lance. I signal my squad to collect what we can of Julo, his sacred armaments and gene-seed, cut from his flesh by my own trench knife, for I am the last of the Brethren who wears the skull helm, even if it only painted on. Ardian clambers atop the blasted Predator, raiding the ammunition supplies. They think us weakened, broken, yet blow by blow do we take from them all, the means of their destruction. Tomorrow, our heavy bolters will rake them with their own shells, my Oath to Dorn upon it. A hatch clanks open, and from it, a battered bloody parody of the Emperor's gene-science emerges. He pulls his helm free, shattered and sparking from the connections hastily abandoned in his evacuation of the tank. he retches up bile and blood, crawling on hands and knees, an Astartes brought low by sin, again. The Techmarines would say it was gravity. This time, it was hubris. I stride across to his half-corpse, pumping a round of chromatic metal into my Throne pattern assault shotgun. The sound echoes, louder than the one killing the tank. It is the sound of an end, of mercy. My sabaton flips the recidivist over, then crushes down on his plastron. His face writhes with tentacles where his mouth should be, a red, raw gullet beyond. His heresy, so obvious, disgusts me. Yet am I not the most forgiving of men? +Welcome to Gehenna.+ I blow his head into ruddy spatter, then turning, observe the dawn on a new day. Our Vespers are concluded, and I lead the brethren into the sunlight of a world blowing itself to pieces. I load my shotgun with more prayers.