EVENT - The Schism of Mars

[bluntblade]

Blunt:You got any more writing coming for Olympus Mons?

Ooh yeah. We should get a first hand account from a Skitarius or something.

[Beren]

So another red box?

[simison]

[i'm not sure, I think so? I don't remember how FW handles narrative sections.]

 

"The Binary Choice"

 

"...to the [L]egions alone."

 

"Forge worlds [would] chose or were..."

 

"... as elsewhere[,] certainties regarding..."

 

"...discover the disruptions' nature."

 

"...of having [T]raitor sympathies."

 

"...of these [???] surrendered late..."

 

"... Titans themselves[,] it is..."

 

"...into the [T]raitor camp."

 

"The Harbingers['] Primarch, always..."

 

"...of the [L]oyalist Mechanicum would..."

 

"...a struggle[,] and reports from..."

 

"... tends to [be] scattered and..."

 

"Nevertheless[, ]there are..."

 

"...they wreaked [. I]n some cases[,] still do..."

 

"...of Lasaris[,] or the unofficial..."

 

"...of Cognis[, ]that had..."

 

"...Hal, [Arch Fabricator-General] of..."

 

"...knights of [H]ouse Taranis was..."

 

"... was the [Legio] Mortis, who..."

 

"... immediately afterwards[. ]In hindsight,..."

[bluntblade]

They aren't red boxes. They're a page each, I think.

[Beren]

Can we call them testimonies?

[bluntblade]

Let me just check what the book calls them

[bluntblade]

Extermination one is "Excerpt from the sworn testimony of..." 

 

So is Raven Guard chappie in Massacre. I think a Skitarius' one would be called something more clinical though.

[Beren]

I meant for us to refer too, in order to delineate them from red boxes. Otherwise I'm in agreement. Do we have any for the other books?

[bluntblade]

Yeah, testimonies works.

 

Well, there's Crysos Moturg's, working as wraparound narration for Massacre.

[bluntblade]

To give a blow-by-blow account of the battle within the walls is to court futility, for in truth it was a war in its own right. For a week the Loyalists fought their way deeper into the Grand Mountain and destroyed all the enemies they found there, but faced an unforgiving struggle. Kelbor Hal marshalled his remaining strength to hold back his foes, and even the forge-thralls of the city were compelled to fight via their electoo implants. Many of the mortal Loyalist soldiers found themselves occupied with fending off the hordes that resulted, and the corpses piled in the streets. Mercifully, in a few sectors Loyalist infiltrators had managed to disrupt the comma systems used by the priesthood to govern their thralls. Where this was done, labourers regained their autonomy and scattered in fear, freeing the Loyalists to deal with greater threats.

 

The Astartes were just the tip of the spear once the gates were taken, vastly outnumbered by the Skitarii and mortal soldiers who fought alongside them just as they were by the Traitor army. The Warmaster required more bodies than his transhuman forces could provide, both to take and hold territory. However, he committed these elements with a heavy heart, knowing the trials they would face. Against the garrison of the Fabricator-General, now augmented by Kelbor Hal’s tech-heresies, the brave men and women of the Excertus Imperialis suffered greatly, the death toll running into the hundreds of thousands in the first three days.

 

As the Astartes and loyal Mechanicum forces pushed deeper into the city, they began to penetrate the facilities from which Mars had been governed, fortified by the Cult of Mars in the earliest days of its rule. Here they found ever deadlier enemies and mechanisms of fiendish complexity and viciousness, designed to weaponise the very structures. In one temple, three Halcyon Wardens companies were trapped and ambushed by maniples of Vorax and Castellax automata, only saved by Fire Keepers Terminators who cut their way into the building. In another, a Magma city war cohort was sent plummeting into the depths of the city, and Traitor taghma emerged seemingly from nowhere to carve through Army formations. Casualties among the regiments and Solar Auxilia cohorts, both comprising some of the Emperor’s finest mortal troops, rose further.

 

The fruits of Lukas Chrom’s blasphemies were sent against the Loyalist spearheads. Tanks and Knights were joined by AI constructs, lesser echoes of the Raijin Machine. While less powerful, they were a match for any Dreadnought or light tanks. Here heavy armour, Knights and where possible, Titans proved invaluable in destroying the abominations, though their destruction was never without cost. (Fallen Titan to be added)

 

But momentum remained with the Loyalists, thanks to the Primarchs’ direction and the work of the Vth Legion Librarians, exposing enemy rises with telepathy and divination...

[Beren]

A snippet for later.

 

A Line Crossed

 

While the Cognis delegation and their Eagle Warrior escorts successfully fled Olympus Mons with what little of Moravec's artifacts they could spirit away at short notice, they were soon held to account by no other than Icarion Anasen himself. It seemed that the carnage unleashed on Mars went far beyond the Stormborn's intentions, and that it placed the Cognis under the suspicion of being influenced by powers he would rather not bargain with. These events and suspicions would undermine the relationship between Icarion and Xander for months until the Cognis delegation reached it's point of origin. Then, after an interval of days a message was sent to the leader of the Insurrection, stating that the delegation would be summarily turned over to him for judgment, along with countless platitudes regarding the catastrophic mishap that had occurred. Not long after another correspondence was exchanged in which Icarion both accepted Xander's apologies, confirmed the delegations execution, and retracted his sanction for any further use of scrapcode weaponry. Throughout all these communications, the seized records hold no mention of any devices retrieved from the Vault of Moravec, despite numerous pict-captures that show the renegade tech-priests escaping with an assortment of small and well secured storage units.

[Beren]

Thallax Unit MR-K200G

 

The post-mortem identified Thallax MR-K200G is believed to have originated from the forges of Urtzi Malevolus. Partaking in the assault upon Mondus Occulum, the majority of it's cohort was damaged or destroyed by a near miss from a Warhound's plasma weapon and forced to withdraw. After the failed attack's conclusion the remainder were relocated to Olympus Mons until being assigned to the attempted assault upon the Ironwroth’s fortress. This particular Thallax played a critical role in breaking the Secutarii shield wall before being brought down by an Arc-Lance blast.

 

The unit clearly displays it's identification and the heraldry of Urtzi Malevolus ,the latter being somewhat scorched, on the cyborg's shoulder plates as well as evidence of hastily made repairs from earlier combat. The weapon is a multi-melta of the (name here) pattern which was used to force a breach in a living barrier of Secutarii Hoplites. The cohort is one of those believed to have been produced en masse in as part of the run-up to the Martian Schism.

[bluntblade]

Style note: the FW books never say things like "you can see". It's always something like "MR-k200G clearly displays the heraldry of..."

 

It seems a bit odd that an individual Thallax is credited with so much. Maybe you should credit that to the maniple it belonged to? Also "liquefy a breach into" seems wrong, particularly "into".

[Beren]

Modified somewhat. Any better?

[bluntblade]

Better. Will examine properly tomorrow if I have time

[simison]

Not trying to add more to your plate, Blunt, but I have a request when you have a moment. Could you change the thread title to "Mini-book 2A (Alpha) - Schism of Mars"

 

I'd do it myself, but I didn't create this thread. 

[bluntblade]

Will do tomorrow.

[simison]

"[Needs sub-title]" (http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/330234-event-the-schism-of-mars/page-8?do=findComment&comment=4988485)

 

"...ignite rivalries tha[t] were decades..."

 

"...Red Planet[,] there were two [triumvirates] who are..."

 

"...the Martian chism."

 

"... the most [???] in the..."

 

"...him and[,] from his..."

 

"...Abominable Intelligences[,] and Urtzi..."

 

"The opposing [triumvirate] was not..."

 

"Being [the] custodian of Magma city[, ]built within..."

 

(Reading over this piece, when you introduce Maximal, he should have something denoting his source of fame. As it is, you list titles and achievements for Zeth and Kane but nothing for Maximal.)

[bluntblade]

Condemnation of the Damned feels a little OTT to me. A Line Crossed, perhaps?

[bluntblade]

So this will just be its own page, coming just before the epilogue to the campaign:

 

Even considering that Mars was the first Forge World whose surface I had walked, as a lowly sergeant and then newly made captain, Olympus Mons was a revelation which precious few sights have since eclipsed. Knights and Titans, which I have seen dominate the vista in so many urban warzones, were dwarfed by the architecture. So vast was the Temple of All-Knowledge that we could not discern its true shape in the dark, though its shields blazed under our bombardments and fires lit it from below.

 

I am an Angel of Death, wrought into a weapon of war and baptised in the Koloss Syntheticide; I am no stranger to bloodshed on a grand scale. But the Grand Mountain was something else entirely, even if now it seems only a portent of what was the come. Space Marine, automaton and Skitarius slew each other. Mortal soldiers perished by the thousand when radiation or poison gas flooded a zone.

 

Kelbor Hal sent his slaves against us, where our Seekers had not managed to disrupt the electoo relays. Words fail to describe the perversity of that act, forcing us to turn our guns upon men and women who fought with bare hands and crude tools. Human beings were stripped of all reason and self-preservation, throwing themselves at us to clog chainswords with blood and meat. They ran straight into our volleys, never once flinching as our bolsters roared. What was left, scraps of clothing and flesh, fluttered like fallen leaves cast into the air. I saw three Stormlord tanks of the Zanskat Guard unload their mega-bolsters into one such mob, and nothing remained but red mist.

 

By the time we reached the Temple, my company contained fewer than a third of the men who were there at the start. I remained captain, but we had been recombined with two other shattered companies. The systematic element to Imperial warfare never abated, our commanders working throughout the fighting to ensure our efficiency and cohesion. Against the debased Martian Mechanicum, we could not afford to fall short.

 

The forces of a taghmata are so varied as to be bewildering, even under the most conservative magos, and of course the Traitors went far beyond the usual bounds. AI constructs the size of tanks, automata of strange and murderous designs, conjoined combat servitors, we faced all these and more. If not for the presence of the Abyssii and, above all, the Primarchs, we would have broken ourselves in the process of driving the heretics out.

 

We violated a great many of the informal codes regarding taking the weapons of foes. When Seleucus and I made our stand against the Ruststalker clades, back to back beneath the Arch of Reason, I fought with a Skitarii sword claimed on the Mariner Plain, Seleucus with an Arc Maul and his gladius. Just as our superiors laboured to ensure they had coherent bodies of men to fight with, we replaced broken blades and empty magazines with war spoil rather than resort to our supply chains. Techmarines salvaged and repurposed any tank or heavy weapon they could; by the end we had several Dreadnoughts armed with Castellax claws and grav-hammers. So strait were the conditions that any weapon that could be used without fear of outright heresy was swiftly put to use.

 

And yet we may now look back on this enormity as a time of relative innocence, when the true face of our greatest enemy was veiled, when the greatest blasphemies of the renegade Mechanicum were unborn. But even as my fleet prepares to light the skies of Anvilus with scourging flame, I know that the contagion is, at root, the one we tried and failed to stamp out on Mars.

 

Excerpt from the Account of Legate Akylles, generously donated to our order

[simison]

[Continuing where I left off.]

 

"...led by Kelbor[-]Hal himself, ruler..."

 

"...time, with Kelbor[-]Hal moving to suppress his opponents['] influence where ..."

 

"...of the Fabricato[']rs loyalty to..."

 

"...red dunes[,] it was..."

 

"...of Tharsis[, ]held at..."

 

"...of the [Legio] Mortis delegation..."

 

"...Mars entirely[,] these were..."

 

"...as the [T]raitors had envisaged it[,] they would..."

[bluntblade]

First draft of preface . How long should the introduction be?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Dark Age of Technology, humans strode across the stars like giants.

 

Many miracles of our achievement were created at our behest, only to be cast low by our hubris.

 

In the Age of Strife much that was important was forgotten.

 

Much that should be common knowledge was lost

 

Of all the peoples encountered during the Great Crusade it was the custodians of the Red Planet who held the most secrets of the past. It was them who held the responsibility of seeking out the knowledge of the ancients, them who held the ability to comprehend it and implement it. Alas, progress is never seen in two minds alike, and sometimes the sweet lure of progress by any means leads only to damnation.

 

Icarion claimed that it was for the sake of progression stymied and stifled by the Emperor's edicts that Mars would be liberated from His rule, and those who had chafed upon what they saw as a conquest in all but name took up the cause of secession to further their own quests for knowledge pried from the hands of the dead. The disciples of Kelbor-Hal saw the countless dead and ruined worlds of humanity as a testament to what we could achieve.

 

They should have stood as a warning.

 

We sought to build upon the ashes of history whilst avoiding the mistakes of the past.

 

We failed.

 

In the name of progress through dark and twisted paths the Stormborn's allies would raze our best hope for the future.

 

Now we are but a shadow of a shadow.

 

We forgot how we fell once.

 

I will not let it happen again.

 

I saw with eyes of consecrated glass and steel, forged and gifted to me that I might gather information for the Omnissiah. I had my data banks store images as the forges of the Red Planet burned, and recorded the loss of more knowledge than I will ever recover. I saw the data containing humanity's inheritance purged, and mourned.

 

For the resurgence of Reason, we keep fast this knowledge.

 

 

 

I don't know if we can say that the priests of Mars in particular held the most knowledge, but then it is a Martian speaking. That said, I think our guy here should talk about a Lost Age rather than a Dark Age, or talk about impiety in Mankind's use of technology.

[Beren]

Changed and added a bit.

[bluntblade]

Btw, I believe Tal had some units he'd like mentioned in the Ring of Iron segment.

[Talonair]

Yes, the Skitarii Decontaminator should be mentioned, along with possibly the Warhounds deployed into the Ring, and are we going to include the fleet battle?