Chapter 140: The Death Lord's Judgment
Valkis had transcended mortal limitations through lichdom. Her form now resembled a blackened corpse wreathed in necromantic power. Jade flames burned in the hollow sockets where eyes once resided. Her purple robes bore intricate golden embroidery and flowed around her desiccated frame.
A meticulously crafted headdress of gold and ruby crowned her skull. She wielded a staff topped with a crimson dragon's head that pulsed with malevolent energy.
"Foolish mortal," her voice carried the authority of ages, "kneel, and mercy may yet be yours."
Black mist coiled around her floating form like living shadows.
"Death calls to you," Mortarion replied. His voice was a sepulchral whisper as he charged forward. The Death Scythe gleamed with predatory hunger.
As fate's nodes shifted throughout the universe, the cosmic restraints upon the Primarchs continued to weaken. Mortarion's movements became fluid poetry of destruction. Each step was faster. Each strike was more lethal than any mortal could achieve.
Valkis had endured countless millennia. She had mastered the most forbidden secrets of necromancy. Among those beneath the gods, few could match her terrible knowledge.
Unfortunately for her, she faced a Primarch.
"Dead Man's Bind!" Her skeletal fingers wove patterns of entrapment.
"Wailing of the Undead!" Spectral voices shrieked from the beyond.
The floating lich unleashed a symphony of necromantic horrors. Curses that could drain life from the living. Bindings that could paralyse armies. Spiritual assaults that could shatter sanity itself.
Yet every attack met the same fate. Mortarion either flowed around them like mist or intercepted them with his Death Scythe. The weapon drank deeply of her dark magic.
In the end, Valkis discovered the gulf between ancient power and transhuman perfection.
Mortarion's scythe cleaved through her defences and bisected her form in a single, elegant arc. The hungry weapon immediately devoured half her soul. It fed its insatiable appetite for spiritual essence.
"I will return!" Valkis shrieked as her form began to dissolve. The inherent nature of lichdom would eventually restore her through the phylactery—but significantly weakened.
Mortarion watched her ashes scatter in the wind. A cold smile touched his pale features. "Come back, and I'll kill you again."
While Mortarion concluded his grim business, Perturabo and Lorgar faced a far more daunting challenge. Dragon Queen Tiamat's divine might was beyond mortal comprehension. She was a living embodiment of chromatic destruction.
With Hell's invasion weakening the cosmic laws that usually constrained divine power, Tiamat's suppressed strength erupted in its full glory.
Her dragon fire burned with temperatures that reduced steel to vapour. Her impenetrable scales carried divine enchantments that deflected both physical assault and metaphysical curse.
Mortarion joined his brothers after dispatching Valkis. Together, the three Primarchs engaged the Dragon Queen in combat that shook the foundations of reality itself.
Yet as the battle progressed, their expressions grew increasingly grim. Tiamat's defences proved nearly impregnable.
Even the Death Scythe's keen edge managed only superficial wounds against her divine hide. Perturabo's war hammer and Lorgar's crozius arcanum struck sparks from her scales but achieved no meaningful damage.
"Without awakening their true essence and implanted Gene Engines, their combat effectiveness remains limited," Raven observed.
He had expected this outcome. While the Primarchs possessed strength far beyond ordinary mortals, they had not yet unlocked their full potential.
The tide turned when Valdor entered the fray. The Gene Engine's overclocking mode transformed him into something approaching a force of nature.
"Space Tear."
Reality bent to Valdor's will as he collapsed the space around Tiamat into two dimensions.
Then he violently restored it to three. While the Dragon Queen's divine constitution weathered this spatial manipulation, her lesser draconic servants were instantly shredded. Their forms were reduced to scattered fragments across multiple dimensional planes.
The three Primarchs watched in stunned silence.
They knew of the Gene Engine's existence. They had heard reports of Guilliman and others receiving the augmentation. But witnessing its battlefield application was altogether different. Such casual manipulation of spacetime represented power approaching true divinity.
"These damn Outsiders!" Terror crept into Tiamat's five hearts as she witnessed the slaughter of her followers. What she had assumed would be an easy conquest now revealed itself as a trap that might claim even her divine life.
Her five heads unleashed torrents of elemental destruction at Valdo. Then she wheeled toward the still-open Astral Gate in desperate flight.
"Time Rewind."
Reality blurred as Valdo's temporal manipulation seized hold of causality itself. Tiamat found herself instantly returned to her previous position. Her five expressions registered confusion at the impossible reversal.
Before she could process what had occurred, Valdo materialised behind her massive form.
His spear was wreathed in a tearing force field that could part the fabric of space. It punched through her divine scales and buried itself deep in her flesh. Superheated dragon blood erupted in gouts of crimson steam.
"Perhaps... we can negotiate," Tiamat gasped. Her supreme arrogance crumbled in the face of imminent destruction.
The Emperor's response carried the finality of extinction. "There is nothing to discuss. Kill it."
Tiamat's final roar shook the heavens as she made her last desperate stand. But against the combined might of three Primarchs and an enhanced Imperial Guard, even a Dragon Queen could not prevail.
Her five heads fell one by one. Crimson ichor painted the ruined cityscape below.
Her massive corpse crashed earthward with tectonic force. It created a crater that sent fractures spiralling outward like a vast spider web of destruction.
With both Valkis and Tiamat's avatar destroyed, the joint Githyanki-Chromatic Dragon assault collapsed entirely. Teleportation gates opened across the battlefield as Imperial magical forces returned from distant campaigns. They methodically eliminated the surviving raiders.
The Emperor's voice carried the weight of absolute judgment. "They began this war, but its conclusion belongs to us alone. Now we act."
The counter-offensive began immediately. Astral gates bloomed like deadly flowers as Imperial armies boarded enchanted warships bound for the Astral Plane itself.
The notorious space pirates who had terrorised countless worlds from their scattered communities across the Astral Plane now faced unprecedented catastrophe.
The Empire's transformation under the Emperor's guidance had created a war machine that dwarfed anything the parasitic Githyanki could field. Magical industrialisation, integrated resource management, and unified command structure proved overwhelmingly superior to their raiding-based society.
Mortarion led the vanguard assault on a Githyanki stronghold. His Death Guard methodically purged every structure. An elderly Githyanki knelt amid the flames, cradling his slain child while crying out to uncaring gods.
"Why must we suffer? Gods, open your eyes!"
Mortarion's response was the whisper of his scythe through flesh. No mercy existed in his pale features, only the cold certainty of death itself. He regarded the corpse with detached professional interest before continuing his grim harvest.
The Githyanki had made a fatal miscalculation. These gaunt, yellow-skinned raiders had built their society on warfare and plunder, believing themselves superior warriors.
But they had never faced an enemy like the Imperium. They had never confronted beings who waged war not for profit or glory, but for the complete annihilation of their foes.
Toril held special significance as the third planet orbiting its crystal sphere's sun, the most populous and powerful world in this reality, with its major continents of Faerûn and Kara-Tur. The gods themselves had used it as a genetic reservoir, transplanting species to populate barren worlds throughout the cosmos.
This elevated status made it a prize coveted by both celestial and infernal powers.
When fate's predetermined course shattered into chaos, Hell's attention immediately focused on this pivotal world. The Hell Lords saw an opportunity in the confusion. They would conquer Toril, corrupt its inhabitants, and then use it as a staging ground for a planar conquest.
They chose the continent of Kara-Tur for their invasion, its connection to Faerûn making it strategically invaluable.
"Kill them! Kill them all!" Demonic hordes poured through Hell Gates, slaughtering innocents with gleeful abandon. The souls of the dead were harvested immediately.
They were dragged into infernal realms to be twisted into new demons for the endless war.
But the gods possessed their own agenda. Under the pretence of combating the demonic invasion, they opened Heaven's Gates and dispatched their own forces.
Celestial armies of heroic spirits and angelic warriors marched not toward the demons, but toward Silvermoon City.
The divine plan was transparent. Eliminate the upstart Emperor before addressing Hell's incursion. They intended to remind this arrogant Outsider that the gods' authority brooked no challenge.
Divine avatars surrounded the Imperial capital. Their celestial legions were arrayed in perfect formation. The air itself seemed to thicken with accumulated divine power.
An elven god materialised. His halo blazed with righteous fury. "Kneel, Outsider, and beg for our mercy."
A dwarven deity's voice boomed like mountain thunder. "Receive your punishment, tyrant!"
The Emperor stood atop his palace's highest spire. His golden armour caught the light of distant stars. For a moment, he seemed almost amused by their display.
"You call me tyrant," he said, his voice carrying across the battlefield without strain.
"Yet you would murder mortals to preserve your own authority. You would let demons ravage entire continents rather than see your power diminished."
His expression hardened. The mask of divine majesty gave way to something far more terrifying: absolute conviction.
"I am not here to rule you. I am here to erase you."
The gods' response was immediate and overwhelming. Divine wrath descended like an avalanche of pure destruction.
But at that precise moment—
The Emperor smiled.
[End of Chapter]
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