Short snippet I probably wont use...

[Paradigm]

This is a Short I wrote as an addition to my diy renegades, index astartes article. I don't think I will be fleshing them out at this point. So I suppose I might as well release it as is. It's pretty raw, but maybe somebody will like it.

The Black Templar glowered upon his fallen enemy with baleful eyes, and the world around him came slowly into focus. Where once were verdant seas, now was desert, once islands were scorched rocks. The Fortress-Monastery of the Executors was little more than a rubble strewn catacomb. Black drop pods, and the remnants of ships fell from the explosion lit sky, a fiery deluge that both destroyed and carried harbingers of annihilation and holocaust. The arrogant, fledgling chapter had stood little chance against the combined wrath of the Black Templar and the God-Emperor’s Most Divine Inquisition.

 

His many baubles and relics rattled against his armor, as the marine took the cover of a large heap of rubble. Vengeance rounds impacted a fallen buttress, leaving their characteristic molten scar, against the space he no longer occluded. The lone templar spoke a prayer to the Emperor and charged round his cover, bolter screaming in brazen retort.

When the bolter fire clove his body a-twain he wept with joy, for the Emperor greeted him with the birth of a sun, erupting across the sky, amongst the stars in His heavens…

 

The captain of the fourth, his chaplain, and his command squad, save Halkuon, were dead. The apothecary ran from body to body, delivering the Emperor’s mercy to as many dying marines as he could keep up with. The deck plates were alive with serfs writhing in agony, among marines who stoically bled out across the floor. The strike cruiser, Hepta, was a scene of horror.

 

A fluttering servo-skull impacted with a clang into the apothecary’s shoulder, its damaged voxcaster hissing a loop from the bridge. >> COMMANsssss…… PREssssNTZsZssssss…. REQssTED at COssROLssss>> Realizing he was all that remained of command, Halkuon sprinted toward the bridge.

Minutes later he stood in shock as the only battlebarge, belonging to the Executors, the Basileus Antiochus, careened into an enemy ship, the Inquisition Grand Cruiser. Both ships erupting volcanically, casting a pseudo dawn, fleetingly the stars faded out.

 

For an apothecary, Halkuon was young, and like a young man, learning he was to be a father, stood on the bridge agape, in realization that he was now the only remaining leadership, of the Executors chapter.