The Arx Doctrine focused on reinforcing the planet's essential core, including the Sanctum Imperialis, the Palace perimeter, the still-dormant Fortress of the Astronomican, and other critical Administratum structures.
Tieron dedicated his time to shuttling between the palaces and headquarters of the different High Lords, using persuasion, negotiation, and even bribery to minimise dissent.
Some recognised the necessity of this approach from the very beginning. Interestingly, Irthu Haemotalion, the Master of the Administratum, became his most steadfast ally during this time. His cold demeanour made sacrificing billions to save the Imperium's inner core seem easy.
But of course, others resisted.
Tieron understood why; they hadn't yet been invaded in significant numbers, and the unrest across the planet was, while disturbing, hardly critical. Merelda Pereth, Lord High Admiral of the Imperial Navy, in particular, loathed seeing the standing defence orders unravel, for she commanded the Imperial Navy's vast resources within the Sol System, and perhaps was seduced by their huge potential.
They had fully equipped squadrons in orbit, including system-destroying battleships stuffed with whole regiments of shock troops. They had thousands of regiments garrisoned across the world's surface, plus three full Titan maniples, huge volumes of Mechanicus forces, an entire company of Imperial Fists Adeptus Astartes, plus scattered representatives of other Space Marine Chapters.
So they were hardly defenceless, but they didn't face normal foes either. Madness spread quickly through the citizenry, fuelled by starvation and lost faith. The Astronomican was gone, and with it, the light that seemed to be the people's hope.
Reports of daemonic incursions flooded in with alarming frequency, overwhelming the inquisitors and leaving them unable to eliminate them. The failure of the Astronomican cut off the already disrupted supply of cargo ships, bringing it to a complete halt.
A long-held belief said that losing just three meals could drive a man mad. For a population already suffering from starvation, disease, and the relentless whispers of the Warp, three meals were far too few.
Above all, two words resonated in the citizens' minds, never spoken aloud, but carried by the Warp's machinations, always present: The Despoiler.
So the Arx Doctrine took shape.
Regular regiments pulled back from distant hives to the walls, ceding control of massive urban tracts to the Adeptus Arbites. Many of those regions swiftly descended into full disorder, while others only retained a semblance of control.
Tieron found the experience painful. It was easy to imagine what it felt like to listen to the comm-feeds from desperate sector prefects, pleading, begging for support as starving masses of heretics swamped their command citadels.
He remembered one exchange keenly. A young-looking woman with a bloodied forehead and damaged armour begged him to send reinforcements to her outlying fief.
[There's no assault on the Palace!" she cried, outraged and broken. "Your walls are secure! By the Holy Throne, what reason do you have not to help us?]
He could only look at her, powerless to intervene. What could he say? That they knew even worse was coming? That the greatest of their kind believed the End Times were upon them, and the Emperor's halls themselves were at risk?
"Remain stalwart, prefect," he said, hating the sound of his voice, or the words that came out of his mouth. "Help will be sent when it can."
[You've murdered us, then," she spat. "You damned dogs! You've murdered–-]
He cut the feed. He couldn't listen anymore. He felt his chest constrict and his eyes hurt. It was terrible, utter terror for him to do this. But he had no choice.
...
Slowly, though, over days and weeks, they built up what defences they could. The orbital grid remained mostly intact even as they lost contact with roughly a quarter of the planetary surface.
The priests of Mars, less susceptible to mortal weakness, lent them what aid they could, though Tieron suspected they, too, feared Mars's precariousness. Their battleships maintained a tight cordon throughout the Sol System.
.
On the 20th day of the Blindness, two developments gave them hope.
First came a flight of silver-grey landers dropped from a strike cruiser newly locked in geostationary orbit over the Palace. The occupants of those craft were dispatched directly into the heart of the Sanctum, marching in pale grey robes beneath the bloody Warpstorm in the sky.
Tieron saw their arrival from afar, but even a distant glimpse of the Grey Knights gave his tired old soul a brief spike of exhilaration.
In the recent past, that sight would have left him mind-wiped, or perhaps killed, but those old regulations seemed pointless now, and he did not fear them. What were they going to do, kill all of Terra? That would be redundant, as the denizens of the Warp were already going to do that.
Tieron understood they would consult with the Captain-General, Trajann Valoris himself, then defend the walls themselves. He could not say how many came. Maybe fifty? They weren't what they needed, but Tieron remembered Arx's words and knew their greatest strength was mustered nearby.
Still, it was something.
The second cause for hope was less visible. Had Arx not said anything, he might never have known, but once the seed was planted, he tracked it down relentlessly.
His agents were sent into every sensor station they still controlled, filtering through millions of planetfall records and orbital transfer dockets. The more they looked, the more they found.
They were careful and discreet, but it was hard to keep secrets entirely on Terra from someone like them, who knew where to look. Sisters of Silence had been arriving on Terra for months, sometimes from Black Ships, other times from chartered transports or military convoys.
After that, they disappeared into the Tower of Hegemon, where the trail died.
Tieron wondered who else knew about this. Did Valoris inform his fellow High Lords yet? Perhaps some of them were in on this for a long time, merely playing along with the rest of the Council. In ordinary times he would dig deeper, but knowing they were there was enough.
It comforted him to know it wasn't just the Enemy who prepared; others had foreseen the darkening of the skies and set plans in motion to counter it. The Captain-General knew what he was doing, and that was, at least partially, comforting.
But Tieron doubted that any living soul on Terra, save perhaps He who dwelt on the undying Throne, truly understood what came next.
The Grey Knights, by whatever means they used to peer into the unknown future, came closest to the truth: Luna, not Terra, was the first target hit.
All they knew was a sudden flash of multihued light that briefly pierced the bloody clouds above them.
He was high up in his private Sanctum, filtering through the day's frantic piles of missives. Jek was with him, as always, and the candles burned low.
Suddenly, beams of dazzling light lanced through the high windows and landed on the stone walls. They both dropped what they were doing and raced to the iron-barred windows.
Jek gasped, and Tieron dropped his quill.
They saw the stars.
He had never seen stars on Terra before. None of them did; toxic cloud cover had been everywhere, too thick, all the time, for thousands of years.
Now, though, they stared into a night sky of flickering, dancing aurorae, torn open for the first time in living memory.
He saw the hulls of the low-orbit defence platforms guarding the world-city, their undersides blinking with markers and their position thrusters churning blue-white.
He saw millions of military aircraft in stark relief, zigzagging across war-tortured skies on strafing runs against their own kind.
But most of all, he saw the moon, Luna, their great naval dockyard, reputed to be as dirt-grey and as damaged as the world it circled.
At that moment, though, it was dazzling, a disc of reflected sunlight that made his eyes water.
"By the Throne…" Jek murmured.
Her gaze moved over the newly freed heavens. It had a morbid beauty to it, a stark, cold view that briefly let them forget all the long-ingrained filth and turbulence around them.
"Do not look," Tieron said, dragging her back from the window.
The lights danced more violently, ripping away great sheets of bloody clouds, but he no longer liked the way they shimmered. The shifting colours became painful, and like the bloody clouds, more tears trickled down his cheeks.
Luna's full face was too bright, as if its core was being conjured to detonate. He heard shrieking and howling on the night wind, too, and the voices sounded inhuman. At some point he felt the lights were so strong that he could almost feel the crushing weight of them.
Tieron pulled the shutters closed and hurried from the chamber, Jek at his side.
"What is it?" she asked, her own eyes bloodshot and blinking.
"Surely you can hear that," he muttered, heading as swiftly as he could towards his command nexus. "Something bad."
By the time he reached the hall, their incoming data feeds were nearly overwhelmed with priority signals. His staff hurried between cogitator stands, clutching long sheets of parchment in their sweaty hands.
The smell would have been abhorrent, but he didn't even realise. None of them had slept for days, and neither had they cleaned themselves of filth. The high armour-glass windows shimmered with multicoloured beams of light from a sky that no longer followed the laws of nature.
"Get shutters down over those!" he ordered, hurrying for the strategium platform.
By the time he arrived, Jek had recovered her usual poise and filtered the comm-chaff for anything useful and informative.
"Multiple launches from Terra," she murmured, scrolling down long rune-lists. "The Adeptus Astartes have been activated. Valoris has issued his own troops."
Tieron had orders from Haemotalion clogging his own feed: to free up Militarum assets for immediate rerouting to Luna, to shut down all non-essential comms outside the Palace perimeter, to converse with Valoris' command to enact immediate lockdown.
"What's happening up there?" Tieron asked, unable to make sense of the increasingly panicked series of missives.
"Unnatural activity," Jek confirmed, studying their clandestine channel into Arx's hierarchy. "Massive. They've got Geller readings off the scale. And gravitational anomalies."
He leaned on the table heavily. He hated this. He hated not knowing what was going on. It was the worst for him, and his irritation had been building ever since those cursed red clouds and damned lightning storms appeared, threatening to erupt.
"I have to see it," he said.
Jek looked at him with some amusement. How she managed that was beyond him.
"I don't think we'll be of much use up there, lord."
Lord. She hadn't called him that in days, and it felt wildly inappropriate now. What exactly was he the lord of? Not even his own body, it would seem.
"I'm sick of this," he said. "I've watched them all go to war, and pulled the strings in safety. Enough. I have to see it."
He started to move, but Jek was suddenly at his side and pulled him back.
"You're an old, fat man," she said crossly. "You've got no business there. It'll kill you quickly and do them no good."
He was too tired to argue. It probably seemed like madness, but then again, they were all going mad anyway, just as Arx had said. The shutters closed too slowly for his liking, and the vivid lights danced across his Sanctum's interior like mockery.
"I've lived too long anyway," he growled, pulling his sleeve free of her grip. "Give the order for my lifter."
She stared at him for a moment, disbelief on her face. Then... she laughed. Something feverish hung over them; their moods seemed to sway all over the place and fracture like the bloody storm clouds above them.
"One more piece of insanity," she said. "So be it. I'll come too."
_____________________________
Alexei Lev Tieron:
- The Chancellor of the Senatorum Imperialis on Terra. While not a High Lord, the position nonetheless makes Tieron extremely powerful, and he gained significant influence over his eighty-year tenure as Chancellor.
Chancellor of the Imperial Council:
- A position within the Imperial government. The Chancellor is the chief bureaucrat of the Senatorum Imperialis, effectively serving as the body's primary administrator.
- Though not a member of the High Lords, the Chancellor of the Imperial Council is nonetheless a powerful and influential position due to the access to the top levels of leadership it provides.
Anna-Murza Jek:
- The aide-de-camp to the Chancellor of the Senatorum Imperialis, Alexei Lev Tieron.
- She greatly aids Tieron in his efforts to keep the Imperial Palace functioning during these times.
Kleopatra Arx:
- An Ordo Malleus Inquisitor who serves as the Inquisitorial Representative on the High Lords of Terra.
High Lordsat this point in time:
- Irthu Haemotalion — Master of the Administratum
- Oud Oudia Raskian — Fabricator-General
- Zlatad Aph Kerapliades — Master of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica
- Leops Franck — Master of the Astronomican
- Baldo Slyst — Ecclesiarch
- Aveliza Drachmar — Grand Provost Marshal
- Merelda Pereth — Lord High Admiral
- Uila Lamma — Paternoval Envoy
- Kania Dhanda — Speaker For the Chartist Captains
- Fadix — Grand Master of Assassins
- Kleopatra Arx — Inquisitorial Representative