reckon with, yet as the battle for the tower reached its pinnacle, the terminators suddenly found themselves robbed of it. Summoned by the custodians, the null maidens of the Silent Sisterhood, pariah blanks that stole the power of the warp from all around them, had arrived, and with this arrival the fate of the Sekhmet was sealed. The remaining terminators were overwhelmed by the custodians, suffering a defeat like nothing the formation had ever endured, and at the hands of a foe that would not even note such a victory is worthy of comment. Merely a dispassionate acknowledgement that an objective had been secured. With the docks incense your host hands, Valdor delayed the orbital reserves not a moment longer. The remainder of the host's soldiery was ordered to land immediately and at full combat readiness, be they Silent Sisters, Ligio Costodes, Imperial Auxilia, or Mechanicum. The Astartes' elements, however, largely elected to remain for the Wolf King summons. This extended to not only the majority of the wolves still in prosperous skies, but the contingent of sons of Horus Astartes that had joined the host at Beta Garmin. That being said, the 13th great company, Blood Thirsty for the Enemy, and the 11th, those of the so-called Black Kull that had fallen to psychotic battle hunger, elected to join the captain general on this new front, leaving the 4th, 5th, 7th, and 9th companies in reserve, alongside the sons of Horus, and the ebony titan barks of the Ordo Sinister. Valdor highlighted what he deemed to be the most important of immediate concerns. Two objectives. The first to push Northward through the Palatinate Mansions, destroying the remainder of the Magdan Free Corps in the process, and linking up with the embattled Lehman Russ and his first wave. Second objective was an advanced eastwards to seize the great Sosostrian Canal. This latter move would allow forward passage onto the pyramids of the Domus Tenebri and the Preferium Aeternus at the city centre. What resistance barred this path as it currently stood was scattered and half mad with losses sustained. The Spire Guard had ceased to function in any coherent capacity, but had, thanks to their mauling at the hands of the wolves, begun to refuse any imperial demands of surrender, knowing that to do so was death anyway. Pickets of Tizcan units were thus strung out along the path Valdor was electing to take, but none would bar the path of the rapidly deploying censure host, be they Solar Auxilia or Ligio Castodes. Valdor knew that the Thousand Sons would intervene, that as their psychana gave them unparalleled mobility, their actions could not be planned for beyond reactionary retaliations if and when they emerged. Regardless, Captain General had laid out a course that would see another Imperial Offensive drive straight into the city's heart, and it was his hope that this would bring about a swift and decisive end to the Battle of Prospero. Of course, would that it were so simple. The Battle of Prospero was now several hours old. Local chronometers read 1209, Prosperite noontime, as Constantine Valdor's advance from the spaceport first began in earnest. It was, however, difficult to tell, as across the city it appeared for all the world that night was beginning to fall. The opening orbital bombardment that had torched Prospero's biome had thrown clouds of ash and smoke into the atmosphere. But beyond that, the unnatural pal of a building aetheric tempest was forming above the metropolis of the 15th Legion. The Thousand Sons had no intention of letting the censure host gain the upper hand in the battle, and in their fury turned to arts darker than any they had previously wielded. Grimoire's research journals and experiments buried by prudence or morality were thrown open again in a mad rush to capitalize on anything that might kill more wolves. Forbidden practices were now indulged in. The means being justified by the end they would hopefully accomplish. Costs be damned. In the Templums of the Corvide, ritual sacrifices of Legion thralls and Prosperine civilians were undertaken so that the adepts of the cult might be lent enough power to scry the immediate future, discerning Sixth Legion movements from the threads of potential realities spinning out of the Tisken Conflagration. In the Arcology of the Atheneans, similarly brutal arts were invoked, but this time, uncaptured enemies. The telepaths of the Thousand Sons tore at the minds of captives to extract any remotely useful intelligence they could. No potential route was closed to the Legion. Magnus remained silent within the Pyramid of Photep, and the leadership under First Librarian Ariman was actively encouraging the usage of techniques, arts, and skills previously denied to their subordinates, or even themselves. And it was working. Both the Corvide and the Atheneans were able to supply the fellowships and circles of their Legion currently engaged with detailed strategic information, which, in combination with Tizka's portal network, was allowing the Fifteenth to run rings around the embattled censure host. The Third Tyrannic Auxilia, fresh from their landings at the Starport, were, for example, completely surrounded by the Ninth Fellowship, and almost entirely obliterated in a single engagement. Alegio Castore's force of some 500 companions under Valdor himself was similarly ambushed, this time by a massive detachment of Thousand Sons terminators and Legion dreadnoughts of the Order of Ruin. While faring much better against a sudden attack than the Auxilia had, the conflict was nevertheless exceptionally brutal, and affected a significant blunting of the Captain General's advance against the Magdan Freakor at the Palatinate Mansions. Elsewhere across the city, the Eleventh Great Company of the Vilca Fenrica were tied down by waves of Thousand Sons ambushes, but also the sudden appearance of what appeared to be a civilian militia. Whether these were volunteers, or simply mind-throws, sleeved to the Thousand Sons' psychers in desperation, it is unclear, but the waves that crashed into the death-kin of the Morkai served their purpose, depleting the ammunition reserves of the Great Company at the cost of thousands of lives every minute. Sixth Legion Units had no effective counter against the Sikana of the Thousand Sons. The famous Tenacity and Blood Thirstyness was the only edge they yet retained in a fight that was now thoroughly even, even if approaching overwhelming odds. Ivan Ross, primarch that he was, could only be in one fight at once. The Ruin Priests of the Legion, their own psychers whose craft had continued, despite the Emperor's Nikean edict, under some form of ill-defined Fenrician cultural exemption, proved thoroughly outmatched by the majestic savants of the Thousand Sons. What limited counters the shamans employed were brief respits, inevitably overwhelmed in short order by the defenders of Prospero, who, once they had identified enemy psychers, redoubled their efforts to dispatch them. The Fifteenth Legion had drawn a defensive cordon around their Templar Markologies that no amount of pressure from the censor host seemed to be able to crack at this time. Managing to force a rough transmission through the squalls of interference, using a Legion Mastodon's communication array, Liman Russ almost begrudgingly ordered those wolves that remained in orbit to make planetfall with immediate effect. The Wolf King was clearly set on hurling what every last astartes he possessed at the Prosperine.  The resistance of the Thousand Sons and the powers they were unleashing rendered them to Russ' eyes not even wayward scions of the throne, but maleficarum, wretches all corrupted and lost to the sorcerous powers they were now wielding with utter abandon. Purgation was all that Russ could countenance now, and he would offer no mercy to those who opposed it. Prospero was to be scoured clean of all life, be it astartes or mortal. By the word of the Wolf King, the Seventh Great Company, the Black Kull, the destroyers of the Sixth Legion were ordered to deploy their most lethal and proscribed ammunition and weaponry and employ whatever dark technology they had drawn from the magi of Beta Garmin. No stone was to be left standing, and no human to be left alive. Interestingly, an operation of similar mien, but altogether more obfuscated visibility, was currently underway at the behest of 16th Legion overseer Boros Kern. The appearance of the Sons of Horus contingent at the Beta Garmin Master had made for a surprising addition, and one that was unknown previously to both the Terran and Fenrisian forces of the censure host. Launching with the Vilca Fenrica reinforcements from orbit, the Sons of Horus deployed not to the front lines of the fight against the Thousand Sons, but to nominally pacified regions of Tisca, alongside their Cthonian auxiliaries. Boros Kern, his intent questioned by some within the host, stated that the course of the operation was to employ the Sons of Horus' famed adaptability to hunt 15th Legion ambushers that had been plaguing the advance of the Wolves, and given the casualties these ambushers had already reaped, few expressed anything beyond mild annoyance that such a large force of 16th Legion Astartes, some 5,000 in number, were required for such a task. Rather than seek out the order of blindness, as he had stated he would, Kern and the Sons of Horus instead began rounding up any and all civilian refugees they could lay their hands upon. Herded into massive, improvised pens, any who resisted were immediately and bloodily executed, or mutilated and left in prominently visible locations as a warning against other potential dissidents. Within these holding zones, Sons of Horus' overseers, with a tendent mage eye of the Mechanicum, began moving through the terrified prisoners, scrying them with strange devices and medical apparatus, even as a battle for the city raged around them. Those few that were selected by the Sons of Horus were shoved or hoisted bodily by Astartes into waiting sea-green ships bearing the eye of the Warmaster, and transferred rapidly off-planet to the orbiting cruiser that accompanied the 16th Legion Expedition. Once this had been completed, the remaining refugees learned of their fate as artillery shells started falling in their midst, detonating bodies and buildings with equal abandon, as the Sons of Horus sought to expunge all trace of their curious operation. That we even know of this is due only to the most fragmentary of records, as well as operatives from the Sigilites' later night-errant investigative division. This latter body formed during the heresy years that would vast approach hypothesize that since prospering humans had a startlingly high level of psychic genomics, some 10% of the population at early imperial estimate, the Warmaster was, through the chaos of the burning, extracting psychically sensitive humans for reasons known only to himself. Certainly this theory holds merit, as during the heresy, the Sons of Horus, as well as the 17th Legion word-bearers, made widespread use of mongrel cult divisions amongst whose ranks dwelt a high number of frankly insane rogue psychers. Should these poor, prosperous civilians have been quietly exfiltrated to be part of some hideous traitor breeding program whose works would only bear fruit years later, well it speaks volumes to the degree that the Warmaster was already orchestrating assets for a conflict still gestating within his cankerous soul. As Russ was ordering the wholesale extermination of Tizca due to the apparent descent of the Thousand Sons into sorcerous madness, Valdor II sought to unleash his most potent forces, albeit with a far greater degree of logical clarity to his decision-making. However, by a twist of fate, some had been deprived from him. Upon managing to establish communications with the Custodes flagship, the Captain General discovered that the Ordo Sinister, the Psy Titans of the Emperor's secret Titan legio, had already deployed, without any apparent orders, by their own merit to investigate the complete disappearance of the god-engines of the legio Mortis, who had themselves been deployed to investigate the Mechanicum Forge Fane of Shao Arkhad that existed without the city limits. It appeared for all the world that this demimaniple of the legio, the Warmaster's most favored Titan legion, had simply disappeared in the process, whether or not this was due to some sort of sorcerous ploy, or that they had met their fates fighting against the iron vigil of the legio Prasagius was completely unknown, but it appeared that the Ordo Sinister favored the latter. Without the Psy Titans at his disposal, Valdor was forced to turn to the one remaining specialized force he possessed, the Silent Sisterhood. Two options immediately presented themselves. The Captain General could spread the null maidens of the sisters across the entire city, granting localized pariah anti-psychic protection to the most censor host assets possible. Or he could form all their hunter-seeker codras, not currently engaged, into a spearhead to drive into the lines of the Thousand Sons in one incredibly potent thrust. He opted for the latter, reasoning that the former, while a decent option, left the precious pariah sisters open to fragmentary destruction. They were far too precious a resource to see winnowed away in any such fashion. He did, however, place a select number in nominal command of the spaceport, to ensure it remained defended from the infiltrators of the Order of Blindness and to prevent such an important logistical transfer point from being denied to the host for potential withdrawal maneuvers. Valdor's primary purpose was, after all, bodyguard and life ward. It would never allow himself or any he commanded to be cut off entirely from the need of escape should that need arise. This did, of course, deprive many units of the wolves yet engaged of sisterhood support.  The battles this created were predictably bloody and destructive in the extreme. The 11th and 13th great companies of the wolves, combined to force almost 10,000 strong, were led into the southern districts of Tizca by the so-called Uplander Yarl, Torm Gdarec, believed to be the last surviving Terran of that rank remaining within the Legion. A raid against them was the great Vulparain Bastion, a fortress outpost that commanded the great Cessostrian Canal. Should that arterial fall, an ideal assault route to the central districts of the city would be opened up for the censor host, and both sides knew this. Supplemented by siege engineers from the Caranid Sentinel's Imperial Army Detachment, the wolves flung themselves at the Thousand Sons defenders of the Fifth Fellowship, unleashing Phosphax Munitions specifically tailored to burn and melt Imperial Pharoocreat. The living fire was battled in turn by Thousand Sons sorcery, the Magisters of the 15th Legion using Kinney shields to contain the almost unstoppable substance or redirect it to their foes. Despite being outnumbered almost three to one, the defenders held fast, that desperation turning to resolve and spite as they laced the besiegers positions with psychokinetic mines and aetheric lightning arcs, reaping a fearsome tally of wolves and Caranids alike. This pattern was now one repeated throughout the city, as largely deprived of anti-psychome measures owing to Valdor's maneuvering of the Silent Sisterhood, the attackers ground to a bloody stalemate against the fury of the Thousand Sons' defiance. In the Argent Bastion to the north, the second and third great companies had similarly encircled Thousand Sons detachment, but were held at Bloody Bay. While atop the sanctuary mount, another force of Magisters were pulverizing the waves of Imperial Auxilia that menaced them, the censor host attackers only holding due to the presence of Ligio Custode's sodalities amongst them. Even the most forward elements of the wolves, under Russ himself having torn great wounds in the flanks of the temple arcologies of the Corvide and the Raptora, were bogged down and unable to make any progress. The Thousand Sons knew none amongst them were a match for the Wolf King, their common sense easily overcoming any pretensions of pride. So instead of engaging the Primarch and his Varigair directly, they opted for a blizzard of hit and run engagements through the Warportal Network, in tandem with telepathic adepts assailing the forward censor host forces with illusions and phantasmic terrors. The Wolf King, despite his Emperor wrought senses, was caught in lures, directed to and fro from illusory engagement to actual ambush, with each of the latter claiming enough wolves to be bleeding the forward companies of vital manpower. It was, however, not so much succeeding as simply proving adequate. The Primarch was still a Primarch and his most experienced wolves still amongst the deadliest killers in the galaxy. These actions were holding them, yes, but could only do so for so long, and the Thousand Sons knew it. As the Wolf King tore through each diversionary skirmish, the fellowships and circles of the 15th Legion hit the dogs at his heels with all they could muster, knowing time was ill on their side. Truly, the only real success made by either side during this stage of the invasion occurred on the grounds of the Manners. The Magdan Free Corps yet held, largely thanks to reinforcements from the Thousand Sons, but the renewed assault they now fell under combined the forces of almost all silent sisterhood divisions present upon Prospero, where the Magisters had previously been able to tear even Ligio Custode's vehicles apart with raw mental aggression. Their powers now failed them, psychic fire sputtering to nothing, telekinetic barriers cracking, telepathic wards sundered. Such a concentration of sisters had never before been seen abroad across the galaxy, and here the sheer intensity of the combined null effects, augmented by a dozen of their most potent oblivion knights, stole the power of the warp from all within a significant distance. The warp portals relied upon for maneuvering were similarly disabled as a barrier between worlds was closed tight by the presence of the sisters. The Thousand Sons were, however, still a starties. Their genhanced capabilities and martial training could still allow a small number to conquer a world in years past, and in the burning gardens of the Palatenate Manners, there were gathered nearly six thousand of their ilk, including a force of Scarobacult terminators and armored columns from the Order of Ruin, now arrayed against 500 Custodians and two full vigils of silent sisters. Within moments of their initial charge, it was apparent to the Thousand Sons that they stood no chance of victory. Dozens of 15th Legionist artis were lost to inflict even a single casualty upon the peerless Custodians. The action became instead a stand of defiance and of potential opportunity. If Valdor, if the Captain General himself could be wounded, or the very least as many of the sisterhood's null maidens dispatched as possible, then the Prosperine could at the very least claw some recompense from the inevitability of their deaths. The spearhead, straight towards Valdor, was bought at savage cost. The blade scions of the Thousand Sons, Amitara occult, over 100 strong at the beginning of their fatal advance, numbered a mere 30 by the time they reached the Captain General. But reach him, they had in fact accomplished, even deprived of their psychic talents. The blades they held so used to feeling etheric energy were still capable of slicing through Oromite armor. These 30th Artis bore down on Valdor with pure desperation, knowing only their brotherhood stood a chance against such an individual. The Captain General slew them all, in their totality. But not without cost. As a sole Astartes managed to wound the first of the Ten Thousand. It had been a conflict conducted at truly transhuman speed. Mere minutes had seen the Six Thousand Astartes that had charged the Lidio Custodes force annihilated. But the Oric Champions of the Emperor had paid for their victory. Scores of Custodians had died. Even their biology unable to overcome the wounds inflicted upon them by the rage mad Thousand Sons. Valdor himself was wounded. Perhaps, even more seriously for the Sensei host, some 500 of the sisterhood had perished. Despite all this, the Custodians continued to press forward, now turning their attention to what remained of the Magdan Freakor, who, despite hours of resistance against the Wolves, were completely wiped out by this new assailant. A route was now secured to the heart of Old Tizca. Valdor, assigning hunter-codres of sisters to immediately move upon the District to rob the Thousand Sons infiltrators of their abilities that had allowed them to tie down the Wolves of the Black Cull as well as the newly engaged Sons of Horus. What remained of the Fifteenth Legion within this region was quickly dealt with. Finally caught by retributive Sensei host elements, now releasing the Wolves and the Sixteenth Legion both for movements towards the Central District, and Russ' ongoing push towards the Temple of Magnus. At this point in the burning of Prospero, Imperial estimates declare that the Thousand Sons had, despite their powers, lost some 30,000 to starties. Either to wounds too great to overcome, to combat death, or to capture, which, considering the Sensei host summarily executed all prisoners, was death. While the invasion force had taken a similar number of casualties, theirs was a reinforcement pool much deeper to draw upon, and within territory nominally under their control had been established numerous field medicaid outposts for the wounded to be transported to. While the Thousand Sons had their own facilities, such was the desperation of their defense that few of the Order of the Jackal, the Legion's apothecary and cultural division, remained within their Templums to receive those who needed their ministrations. The Sensei host could, in short, absorb far more losses than the Thousand Sons could afford to, as with each sign of Magnus that fell, the Legion's ability to hold ground diminished, pushing them further and further into Tezka. Valdor's deployment of the Silent Sisterhood, as almost one force was a gamble that had paid dividends. Limanroth now counted at his side a wing of the Oblivion Knights, those sisters whose pariah effect waxed the strongest, and whose abilities with it were more honed. With their arrival, no longer could the Thousand Sons maintain their illusory misdirections, no longer could they hide from the Wolf King's sight, and his impact upon their now revealed front lines was nothing short of catatlysmic. Upon the Second and Eighth Fellowships, hurriedly fortified within the precinct surrounding the Raptora Arcology, the twin hammers of Valdor and Russ would fall. Some 10,000 Astartes were ranged against the commanders of the Sensei host, yet through them was carved a trail of purest slaughter. The Varigir and the Black Cull both followed in their wake with annihilation in their hearts, turning the center of Tezka into a sea of blood and fire, death, and misery. Should any Thousand Son have lived to bear witness to this renewed offensive, one must have wondered if they had any capacity yet to believe their legion would triumph over such rampaging gods of battle. That is, of course, until one of their own awoke. Canis Vertex was a warlord-class battle-type, formerly of the Ligio Astorum. It had been enshrined in a position of great reverence by the adepts of the Pyrrhe cult atop their arcology. Having fallen in combat with the Komenka Troika during the Great Crusade, the warlord had been declared a loss by the legion, but the Pyrrhe, unwilling to see such a paragon of destruction be rendered to scrap, requested its retention as a combined museum piece and honorary statue. It had not moved since its destruction. Its machine spirit had long departed, as had its connection to the motive force. It possessed no crew. It possessed no power. And, at 1523, 734-00-M31, it stirred. Balefire lopped and played across its now-motile limbs, while a pulsating eldritch light appeared to glow within its core. Its incarnation heralded a renewed fury from the Prosperine's guise. The aetheric storm now vent its fury in thunder and wind that tore since your host aircraft from the air, like the playthings of children. Canis Vertex howled. Not the blast of a titan's warhorn, but something far more ancient and primal. The fire, now surrounding its limbs, moving like liquid across its entire form. Its resurrection was, of course, no feat of the Mechanicum. But a blasphemic transgression of the machine god's doctrines wrought by the captain of the Sixth Fellowship, Calophis, who also held the rank of Archmageus of the Pyre cult. Within the temple arcology, the profane warlord had just torn itself free from. The Thousand Sons of the cult had torn open a portal to the immaterium and siphoned the energy of the warp itself to fuel the god's engine's wrath. Should recovered records be believed, Calophis was in fact literally incarnated within the machine spirit of the titan, his body lying recumbent within a crystalline throne at the heart of the Pyre's temple. His pyrokinetic abilities, however, were now the font from which the power of Canis Vertex could be directed. Though its guns lived once more, its reactor flushed with power to fuel them, Calophis instead opted to channel the fury of the living flame through his new body of metal. The sheer influx of immaterial energy appeared to reinvigorate the powers of those Thousand Sons yet engaged with the forces of the censor host, and should any of them have bothered to question its source, they appeared to care not. The wrath of the warlord reborn smashed through the null defenses of the sisterhood, who even now were hard-pressed to contain the resurgent legion elements. Where the censor host had been poised to deliver killing blows in multiple theaters across Tizca, they were now suddenly upon the defensive, the anti-psychic capabilities they had wielded, overwhelmed by this unexpected blasphemic reversal that even now strode towards their lines with purest annihilation kindled in its baleful heart. Had this managed to swayed Russ or Valdor from their advance, none have ever seen evidence. The spear of the Emperor and the Wolf King still remained upon the offensive, pushing now into the depths of the Temple Archaeology of the Raptora, both that they may bring the Magisters that remained there within to destruction, and to move them out of the punishment of Calophys' incendiary wrath. The Archaeology was currently being defended by 15th Legionist Artes under the command of captains of the Second and Eighth Fellowships, Phosus T'Kar and Aura Magma. The former was the Magister of the Raptora Cult, most powerful telekin within the Legion, while the latter was Calophys' second in the Pyre. Both set upon their attackers with fury and power unbridled, Aura Magma's fire melting the armor of Varragir Terminators to liquid, as Phosus T'Kar bodily charged both Valdor and Russ, his Kinnyshield completely turning aside all munitions that spat at him as he charged. As the Second and Eighth Captains both engaged the Lords of the Emperor's censure. Elsewhere in Tisga, Seventh Fellowship Captain Fael Tauron found himself and his Astartes hopelessly pinned between the advancing Wolves of the Black Cull and the Warriors of the Ligio Custodes. Of the seven thousand Astartes under his command mere hours beforehand, only three thousand remained alive, and even then the survivors were not concentrated under their captain but scattered throughout the city after the collapse of the portal network. Magister Tauron counted a mere few hundred at his side, and even these loyal, dogged few were perishing despite the powers bestowed upon them by Calophys' bestriding idol. Surrounded by the baying of the Wolves and the clinical precision of the Custodes, soaked in the blood and viscera of his own brothers. What had once been Fael Tauron? Broke. It is perhaps surprising that the trauma and insanity of Prospero had not done so to any member of the Legion until that point. Perhaps it had, and it was only the intensity of the aetheric conflagration that was different in this instance. Perhaps it was a testament to the willpower of the Thousand Sons up to this moment, but for whatever reason, Fael Tauron simply surrendered himself to the warp in its totality. All mental barriers were dropped, the tight mind hold through which all psychers must channel the immaterium was released. As a living conduit for the aether force of the warp, Tauron became a force of total destruction, annihilating those Imperials around him with corescating lightning that flowed through him in a torrent until his body simply dispersed, atom by atom, into nothingness. After action reports around this Chronomark record a significant number of Psi abnormalities amongst the Thousand Sons, and while Fael Tauron was included in these, subsequent examination reveals that it was at this moment that the Thousand Sons as a Legion, perhaps even as humans, ended. The flesh change was a curse born of the Thousand Sons almost since their inception. It had, they had believed, been cured by the work of Magnus the Red, who had cast the full might of his peerless mind against the condition. He had succeeded, or so all who knew of it had thought, until the death of Fael Tauron. From the epicenter of the Seventh Captain's disintegrated body there now emerged a wave invisible, moving ever outwards, a malignancy cast against the genetic coding of the Thousand Sons, and setting it alight. The return of the flesh change was as spectacular as it was horrifying. All across Tizca, the startys of the 15th Legion felt their flesh rebel, and watched in abject shock as their brothers succumbed to grand mal mutations at astonishing speed.  In the raptoran arcology, the change tied Hitora Magma first, turning the captain into a revolting amalgam of fire and liquid meat, sending him running through the halls of the temple, screaming as his flesh and soul burned with a fire that would not let him die. Phosas Tukar, furiously battling Constantine Valdor, swelled with monstrous potency, his body erupting in form until it had become a towering abomination who threw itself at the Captain General with unnatural fury. It is said that, before the killing blow could be struck, the former Phosas Tukar was made aware of his aspect, and in revulsion of what he and his Legion had become, willingly dropped his defences, allowing Valdor to plunge the Apollyon spear into what passed for his chest. All across Tizca, it is estimated that at least 10% of all thousand sons succumbed to the flesh change within a minute of failed Toron's apotheosis. But, and I note this despite advice that it should not be committed to official record, there remains evidence that the change was not restricted to the 15th Legion alone. Information contained within the archival stacks of the Silent Sisterhood noted that, as the thousand sons succumbed to mutation untrammeled, so too did changes make themselves apparent upon the bodies of the wolves. Translated from Sisterhood Thoughtmark, the records speak of ogroid things in the shape of lupine creatures that warred with flesh changed and imperials alike in the grounds of the raptoran pyramid. More berserk wolf than man, these beasts heeded no words, and may have been mistaken for some of the thousand sons afflicted had not their aspects been so eerily similar to each other, and some of their limbs had not still been clad in the dull gray of the Vilca Fenrica. The wolves have throughout these last ten thousand years furiously and violently denied that any such occurrence took place, or has ever taken place. They have worked with not insignificant diligence to ensure that official accounts do not refer to even the possibility that what genetic atrocities emerged on that night could have afflicted those of the 6th Legion, but I, for one, am reminded once more of the saying, there are no wolves on Fenris. Further elucidation on this point will remain for another day, but for now I will trust the word of the silent sisters over a legion whose vested interests remains to this day in presenting themselves as the justicars during so fell a day in history. As a change wrought its hideous work upon central Tisca, Canis Vertex was plough in northwards. Seeking to crush the wolves' beech head, Calophus steered the god Enjun towards the concentric ring of storm birds in the portlands, which, despite a total communications blackout, was still serving as a demarcation point for ammunition reserves ferried from orbit. No enemy stood against the warlord. The titans of the censure hosts had met their fates elsewhere. Its advance was heedless, each stride demolishing whole swathes of the city more totally than even the work of the Black Kull. The tanks of the wolves that ranged their firepower against us were just targets to the lashing flames that spun off its limbs. The censure hosts airpower that continued to mount attack runs on its hull were not even worthy of consideration. It was no external enemy that felt the thing Canis Vertex had become. What failed Toron had unleashed would lay it low. The power required by Calophus to maintain his control over so vast a thing as a warlord titan, torn and rent by devastation emerging from the central districts. Without the mind of the Magister to effectively wield it, the aether fire that had replaced the beating reactor of Canis Vertex flew wildly out of control, blooming into an explosion like nothing anyone present had ever witnessed. Buildings across the city that had withstood the apocalypse of ours now fell under the pressure wave. The titan's corpse crashed into the temple arcology of the Corvide, sundering that ancient structure under its calamitous fall. While at the summit of the Pyre Arcology, Calophus himself was granted one final instant of awareness before arcane feedback turned his body into a fiery conduit. The resulting detonation destroyed the Pyre's pyramid from within and caused untold devastation to the areas surrounding it. Local reality, or what had passed for it upon Prospero for hours now, ceased to function. What can only be described as a localized warp storm emerged over central Tizca for all to behold. The sky became the color of heartbreak, lightning the shade of trauma and captured loss tore across it. Spacetime ceased to be in any true sense. It is at this point that all chronometric marks entirely fail. For what was to come and how long it took little is certain. All we have are accounts, fragmentary video logs, and tales that were it not for the sheer horror of what was unfolding would be discarded as dreams of madmen. Local reality in Tizca was now an open wound, a rent in spacetime from whence the powers of the warp spewed and festered, worming their eldritch tendrils into the fabric of creation to pervert and corrupt. Linear chronology ceased to function in any meaningful capacity. All chronometric marks from this point on are useless, as two timepieces held side by side would record completely conflicting time streams. From the ships of the censure host still in orbit, it appeared for all the world that the city of light had been swallowed by a roiling contusion on the face of the planet, a sickly haze of clouds the colour of things that simply should not be. All within this pocket of nightmares appeared from without to be hazy, incoherent, almost dreamlike in aspect, and any who entered were either not seen from again or emerged with hours or seemingly days having passed in the minutes since they departed. No reports can be trusted entirely, if any could have even been made. All communication, be it mundane or arcane, from within or without had been completely separate. Logisticans and stratagoi positioned above in the void were helpless, sundered from all contact with the senior commanders of the host and unable to even assess the progress that was being made. Their astro-pats were all screaming, or at least those from whom the shock of the wharf rifts emergence had not proved to be their doom. Many officers assumed that this was some sort of doomsday weapon unleashed by the 15th Legion, the final spite of Magnus the Red in the face of Imperial censure, for they had all watched from afar the sheer fury with which the Thousand Sons had met the wolves and the talons of the Emperor with. All that could be done, however, was to log timestamps and await any word from the Wolf King or the Captain General. None would countenance their deaths. For the Lord of the Custodes to fall was unthinkable enough, but that a Primarch should die. Such a thing was surely impossible. Although it seemed that the impossible was becoming ever more dreadfully possible upon the damned world of Prospero. A large part of Tizca was, albeit difficult to ascertain from orbit, not affected by the warp storm, only obscured from the void by its visual and aspect interference. There, what Imperial elements remained in infrequent contact with the vessels above, were issued perfunctory orders to continue with their previously assigned missions, and were assured, albeit with little confidence, that the censure host was still very much in control of the situation. Whether these instructions were followed or not depended entirely on the ears of those they reached. The Black Cull, for instance, did not precisely heed the words of the orbiting stratagoi, but followed their previous mission out of sheer bloody-minded battle lust, continuing the sack of the temple arcology of the raptor occult, bathing the pyramid and its surrounding areas in torrents of phosphics. The twelfth great company, however, seemingly disregarded their orders, and immediately plunged into the storm to seek their Primarch. The Sons of Horus continued with their purgation operation completely unopposed, either by the forces of the Host or the Thousand Sons. At the Valparine Bastion, the resistance of the Thousand Sons had collapsed after the change wave triggered by failed Toron had hit. The Magisters within the Bastion were now having to fight their once-brethren, those changed in flesh, as much as any Imperial elements without. The Carinid Sentinels and the Wolves both, seeing their opening, renewed their barrages, now unmitigated by the Kinney shields of the Thousand Sons. They reduced what remained of the Bastion to dust in short order, burying the raging Fifteenth Legion Astartes beneath hundreds of tons of ferrocrete reinforced marble. As resistance from the Thousand Sons' pockets yet without from the storm crumbled, Sixth Legion elements within mechanized transports, as well as the swift moving Custodes' grav tanks and jet bikes sought to run down whatever Magisters they could find, to free up all possible censor-host forces that they may surround the Warp Rift, or even enter it, and lend aid to their Captain General and the Wolf King. Before one relates what will no doubt be the climax of this most terrible of chronicles, one must elaborate on the means of tracking precisely what occurred within the storm. In point of fact, I cannot use the word precisely, for such a thing simply cannot apply to such an event. All that we are able to establish has been reconstituted from as many sources as are available, but all are fallible in the extreme, especially when faced with the sheer power of the Immaterium in the manner seen upon Prospero. One need not remind Acolytes of the unreliability of personal accounts, either from those who had vested interests in representing a certain perspective, such as the Wolves, or those for whom certain concepts simply do not enter into the framework of their constructed thoughts, such as the Ligio Custodes. Worse yet, there are translation errors, such as the inherent difficulty in rendering silent sisterhood thought-mark into high or low Gothic. Beyond that, Vox's screeds are almost incomprehensible, even those logged in high-gain field apparatuses carried by certain legionaries. What has been recovered often contains cascades of static, fragmentary orders, in some cases orders that were only issued hours after their transmission had been recorded, and in a lot of cases, screaming. Screaming that is disturbing the human, and at the same time, not. Orbital tracking of the battle, as mentioned, was either conducted visually or by all specs pings of ident tags, but was completely futile. All sensorium data, where it could even be logged, made utterly no sense at any given time. Even nulocortical interrogations of captured prisoners or volunteers from the sensor host itself only ever revealed glimpses, and often ones that directly contradicted all other information I have previously mentioned, or even each other. There are independently verifiable accounts from many sources that speak of heroic battlefield actions performed by warriors that had previously perished earlier in the conflict, or accounts that assure that certain individuals had perished, despite it being beyond doubt that they survived this final stage of the battle. In summation, all is confusion. This truly was the impossible battle. All the facts surrounding it defy all attempts at logic, for such is the nature of the imiterium. It undermines the means by which reality itself functions. What hope do we have of sanely structuring accounts of anything that is involved with it?  What work you will hear may contradict what you have previously known. I can only say that this work is done with the best of scholarly attention and ability, and represents all a humble chronicler may do in the face of the terror of this lunatic universe. At best estimates, the vortex caused by the death of the warlord Canis Vertex and its erstwhile master, Colophus, had swallowed the core of the censor host, containing the primarch, Lehman Russ, at the head of some 12,000 of his wolves, Constantine Valdor and around 400 custodians, and approximately 1500 Null maidens of the Silent Sisterhood, as well as two cohorts of the Tyrion Exo Guard auxilia regiment. Ranged against them were some 7,000 of the Thousand Sons, as well as Spire Guard divisions of disparate size. The 15th Legion was now commanded in its near entirety by 3rd Fellowship Captain Hathor Mott and 1st Librarian Azek Ariman, all of whom had fallen back to a new defence cordon set between the arcologies of the Athenean and Pavani cult. The greatest concentration of these forces was around the Pyramid of Photep, to which thousands of civilians and routed Spire Guard still sought to retreat as the final bastion available to them. The establishment of this cordon had largely been aided in the chaos that was caused by the emergence of the Vortex, as well as the appearance of seemingly thousands of mutates within the reaches of the city. All of this, however, merely slowed the advance of the censor host. It did not stymie it. The 6th Legion had faced down the worst horrors of the galaxy in their two centuries of campaigning, and the Geno-engineered Ligio Custodes were literally constructed to pay such things no heed. Russ and Valdor knew that momentum could not be spent. Both constituted whatever forces they could under their direct command, in the face of total communications blackouts, knowing that all other elements were moving to the same objective they were. Naturally, many censor host units were simply unable to link up with the main bodies of Russ and Valdor. Some were lost to the unnatural eddies of reality that the Vortex tossed around like churning water, cursed to wander aimlessly through fractally repeating ruins until the Warp Squall blew out. Others were yet engaged with disparate units of Thousand Suns, forced to fight vicious, unrecorded miniature wars as creation was cracking around them. As some records noted, larger bodies of troops caught in the eddies were often forced to fight the remnants of these petty wars. For such was the fury of some engagements that those who survived it found it impossible to ward off the coming of the flesh change. Many hundreds, indeed likely thousands, of debased creatures roamed the ruins of Warp Choked Tizca, horrifying amalgams of tumourous flesh or feral beasts in the shapes of wolves. Their origins unknown, no longer mattering. The one aspect that slowed the censor host advance was the weariness of what psychic assaults they may face once they threw themselves at the Thousand Suns once more. Consequently, Russ and Valdor attempted where possible to organize their forces into columns, at the core of which stood cadres of silent sisters. Such manoeuvring, under total lack of communications, was laborous in the extreme, granting the 15th Legion even more time to shore up what defences they could around the pyramid of Photep. Such precision care was, for the host ultimately unnecessary. When the battle was joined, when the fury of the censor host was brought to the lines of the Thousand Suns, they were answered with entirely mundane bolter fire, as opposed to the eldritch howling of warp fire and arcane lightning. The 15th Legion seemed to be eschewing their powers, and one must only assume that the terror of the flesh change stayed their hands in that regard. Initially it appeared that this final battle would be fought as of old, with bolter and a blade and raw transhuman rage. But as the heavy transworts of the wolves crashed through their lines, as the siege artillery of the host annihilated their readouts, many of the magistres of Prospero abandoned their restraint and their lives. Loosing the power of the warp through their bodies, their powers heightened now to undreamed of levels.  The Thousand Suns that did died, hacked to ruin by their once brothers, once their sentience had fled and their minds became as broken and corrupted as their bodies. Yet in these sacrifices time was bought and vengeance was reaped. Three times did the censor host throw itself at the lines of the Thousand Suns, and three times were such attacks repelled. Yet the numbers of the 15th Legion thinned with each assault. Seven thousand dwindling to five thousand, the bodies of their fallen mixing with grey armoured wolven dead to form barricades of ceramite encased flesh behind which the defenders prepared for yet another offensive. Cohesion was lost, units scattered, circles and fellowships mingling with no heed to any sort of formation. A scarab occult terminator would stand shoulder to shoulder with a 15th Legion line astartes, both covered by a spire guard human with a heavy weapon. Grim equanimity found at the edge of oblivion. It was then, as the silence had fallen, as a breath was drawn before the plunge, that he came at last. The Crimson King, Magnus the Red, had any words been exchanged between the brothers. One can find no accurate record of it. Genesha Kroll, Knight Commander of the Silent Sisterhood, who witnessed the eventual conflict between Primarchs, stated that Russ and Magnus did indeed speak, briefly, but as to what was said she knew not. Others who beheld the arrival of the Crimson King disagreed with the Solas Queen's account, stating that the two Primarchs immediately flew into combat with nothing but the Wolf King's howl to announce it. This is just the beginning of the disparity between accounts of this confrontation. All appear to have been warped in some manner, both through the mythic aspect such a fight between demigod sons of the Emperor will seemingly inevitably take on, and through the reality shredding tempest that surrounded the Pyramid of Photep. One focal point of agreement however is that the clash began with a howl of purest rage from the heart of Leman Russ. Beyond that we once again return to incoherency, although this is partly due to the sheer unparalleled speed at which Primarchs are capable of engaging each other at. Of those present it is likely only the Ligio Custodis, perhaps even only Constantine Valdor, who possessed any biological capacity to follow and process the sheer speed of their bodily movements. Golden Axe met Silver Blade with a fury that shattered sky and air. The cold rage of the Lord of the Russ meeting the psychokinetic mastery of the Crimson King. Nothing survived contact with their combat, not the architecture of Tizca, not the hulls of tanks, not the plate armor of Astartes. Any of the latter that somehow sought to intervene to aid their gene father, to protect them, were simply annihilated before the combatants were even aware that an attempt had been made. The full force of Russ's martial skills were being leveled directly against every iota of Magnus's psychic might. Neither gave a hint of quarter, but even given all that was being brought to bear to bring him low, even given the titanic capacity for etheric destruction made possible by two centuries of his brother's arcane learning, it is unlikely if there could ever have been any victor other than Leman Russ. It is a general hypothesis that the Primarchs were built to fulfill a specific role that the Emperor had in mind. While Magnus's may only have been known to his father, Russ, perhaps more so than any of his brothers save the lion and angron, was clearly a weapon designed for destruction. In the hell that had come to Prospero, in the etheric tempest that was tearing at the roots of all things, perhaps none but him could have so thrived. Though the Crimson King tore at his brother, wounding him on planes material and immaterial both, it was to Russ that the final blow fell. Some related it as the plunging of his sword into Magnus's torso, but the prevailing account holds that the Wolf King bodily heaved his brother aloft and cast him down across a brutally armoured knee, sundering the back of Magnus the Red and defeating the Cyclops of Prospero utterly. At this moment, this instant played across a billion instances. It is related that a light suffused the entire pyramid of Photep, bringing illumination to an area that had until that moment appeared perched upon the precipice of a night eternal. It had no source, seemingly filling the air itself with an incandescence that was indescribable. Many presumed it a final trick of Magnus, but the Sorcerer King appeared utterly unconscious, maybe even dead, and was in no state to be casting some form of esoteric incantation. If it could be said to emanate from anywhere, the sanctum of the Crimson King appeared the origin, but such identification proved impossible as the light reached a blinding intensity that forced all who beheld it to turn their eyes away, to dull armor auto-senses lest it burn their retinas in its brilliance. The storm however did not simply end, but now appeared to have a new locus. Howling winds began to form a vortex centered on the pyramid of Photep, tearing gales, shearing away rubble and masonry, and even toppling armoured tanks. Many relate that it was at this moment their Vox networks, previously silent or static, were invaded by a cacophonous choir of whispers, while others claim they heard not but booming wicked laughter. Yet others say that upon the winds was born the death howl of the world itself, the pain of a planet condemned to oblivion, and that cracks in the sky of creation began to rend themselves apart, ghostly fingers of things abominable intruding upon reality from the unknowable beyond. Shards of existence splintered, dimensions fracturing and inverting, slicing at minds and flesh as naïves. To many it must have no doubt seemed that the crimson king in his passing had broken the rules of all that was and is. Chaos. But it would not last. The light snapped out of being, the storm bereft now of its locus faded. As if a flame had been put out, local reality reasserted itself. The bleeding of physical laws staunched. The Vox now exploded with frantic activity, ships in orbit and censor host formations across the city hailing their commanders with urgent requests for information. Those commanders, and those of the host yet alive within the former eye of the storm, surveyed the ruination around them. Of Magnus the Red, of his thousand sons, there was not a single sign. In the aftermath of this clash titanic, little was clear. Constantine Valdor immediately ordered a full sweep of the ruined pyramid of Photep with all available resources, imperial and mechanical both, to attempt to determine what had occurred. The area of the city had contained over 3,000 surviving thousand sons, and an approximate number of elite and veterans spy or guard auxilia. There had also been as many as 10,000 civilians cowering in subterranean fiends and catacombs. In total, some 20,000 humans and trans humans had at one moment been present and now simply were not. This was not merely that they were dead. There was literally no trace that they had existed in the first place. There were no bodies, scraps of clothes or armour. Nothing. Even weaponry capable of disintegrating a body in an instant, such as thermite armaments, would leave scorch marks. Rad phages and viral cascades typically left an organic residue or slurry in their wake. Adepts of the attended mechanical matter, well versed as they are in the arts of annihilation, as well as those of the Six Legion's Black Cull, were completely baffled, able to draw no conclusions as to what weapon or device the thousand sons or their primarch had employed at the end of all things. Such conclusions that could be drawn at the time were only able to posit that the arcane was at play here, as it had been throughout those catatlysmic final hours. But as to how, nothing could be said with anything even remotely resembling confidence. But 1917 at local time, on 734-004-M31, the censor host's ground forces succeeded in making contact with their ships in orbit.  Conflict, however, still continued in the devastation of Tisca. Not every thousand son had vanished. Isolated bands yet persisted, fighting hopeless retreats to some indeterminable, perhaps even imaginary, fallback location. Roving bands of mutates continued to attack all they encountered. While Rust gathered his wolves into hunter-seeker units, fresh reinforcements in the form of knights from House Malanax took to the field. The powerful war suits proving more than a match to the gibbering horror things that flung themselves at anything that moved. As many as 2,000 of the 15th Legion still remained within the Argent Bastion at the eastern end of Tisca's walls. All that remained of the Eighth Fellowship, as well as a significant number of Psi Automata of the Castellax Achaomarch. The resistance lasted for maybe an hour after the fall of Magnus the Red before they withdrew to the Bastion's lower reaches, affecting a hit-and-run retreat in face of a punitive offensive of Varragir Terminators and Ligio Custode's sodalities. The fighting was only ended when a blank-eyed Lehman Russ, operating it seemed on more rote than actual drive, took to the tunnels, butchering every single Astartes he could find, with the dispassionate ease that would have been contemptuous if it had any emotion behind it whatsoever. From the records of some of the Custodians present, and the Wolf King been any other than a son of the Emperor, his behavior may have pointed to severe trauma, but of course, such a thing was not possible. Elsewhere, in the ruins of the Valparine Bastion, the Division of Thousand Suns had emerged, having protected themselves from the Citadel's collapse through a superlative series of overlapping kinetic shields. Instead of bothering to engage any wolves or Custodes within the area, these Astartes, now under the command of the line officer named Sul Contep, took to the Citadel's airfields to make flight-worthy whatever aircraft they could. When their presence was eventually discovered, and since your host forces dispatched to their location, the Magisters had managed to evacuate in their totality, packing what ships they could with civilians that remained alive within the area. Departing out over the Valparine Sea, they utilized the ash and steam clouds present to mask their exit. While some were taken down by Ligio Custode's equinox interceptors, great many disappeared from imperial aspectes entirely. The Sons of Horus Division of the Host, having been entirely absent from the Vortex in Central Tizca, had now turned their operations to total purgation. Any who were not of the Sensor Host were put to an unceremonious death. Their corpses left to rot where they fell as green armored Astartes spread out through what remained of the city. In the Northern District, in the ruins of the Prosperine Air Guard's base of operations, the 16th Legion, and several knights of House Malonax, encountered survivors of the Spire Guard, and a significant quantity of civilians under the leadership of Seneshal Prime Lucretia Eluniri, who had been attempting to affect rescue operations as best she could manage as her world fell around her. Believing her rank would grant her some means of parlay, she voxed a demand to the commanders, Boros Kern of the Sons of Horus, and Anrach Hadratha of the Space Wolves' Black Cull. She demanded the proper treatment of civilians and non-combatants under the Lex Imperialis, and for the surrender of her soldiers once they had thrown down their arms.  The pitidus slaughter of every single civilian that remained within Tizca would continue for three days local time, including in its scope operations dispatched to investigate any potential thousand sons' presence elsewhere upon the planet. What pockets at this point remained, usually handfuls of individuals, were treated to the same immediate butchery. At the time the sun sank along the smoke and ash choked skies of Prospero's only city, nothing yet lived within its ruins. No plant, no animal, no human, no astartes, no mutant. Valdor at this point ordered the evacuation of censor host forces, seeing no reason to remain, although Russ in typical fashion did not heed them. The Wolf King had resolved that his men would be the last to leave the planet. It was at this point, at the tail end of the evacuation, that the thousand sons that had fled across the Valparine Sea reemerged, making directly for the final imperial transport arcs. Easily overwhelming the auxiliary present, and completely unbeknownst at this point to the wolves, the arcs made orbit, slipping past the imperial ships in the prosperous skies, most of which had been dispersed into a second bombardment formation. Loyalist destroyers dispatched to intercept annihilated one of the barks, but not before the remaining two killed all drive and power functions, their signals now becoming lost in the orbital debris that had spread out from the remains of Prospero's wrecked, near planetary void infrastructure. While censor sweeps persisted for hours, no trace of the vessels could be found. It was eventually ruled that, as they lacked warp capabilities, those aboard would be rendered too helpless to affect anything of note, so they were simply presumed dead. Leman Russ was the final set of boots to leave the ground. He storm-birded dusting off from a shattered and ruined hellscape. As a final punitive act, a second orbital bombardment was conducted, incinerating anything remaining that could burn, ensuring that any of those who had somehow managed to escape the Emperor's censor would not live to celebrate their already, completely hollow victory. As the ships of the censor host slipped anchor, Vox Beacons were ceded throughout Prosperine approaches, broadcasting the unmistakable Perditus Maximus single. The Lex Imperialis had ruled this planet utterly forbidden, and may approach under pain of death. Thus was Prospero abandoned. A world corpse. A planet of ash and departed pain. A choked orb hanging dead in the void where no sound ruled, saved for the wind through burned bones. At best historical estimates, the cost of bringing the Emperor's writ of censor to Prospero was 30 million lives, of which the overwhelming majority were Imperial civilians simply present on the planet at the moment of the censor host's arrival. Data logged within the Administratum placed the number of civilian survivors at a net zero. The official line would forever be that the Prosperine branch of humanity, which had survived the turning of millennia, the terrors of old night, and the renewal of the Great Crusade had been annihilated in its totality thanks to the follies of Magnus the Red. The same was said for the 15th Legion, Thousand Sons. From 004 until a decade later, upon terror, as the walls fell in 014 M31, the Legion was officially declared extinct. The truth, of course, is that neither the humans of Prospero, nor its astartes, were all wiped out in one fell stroke. Notwithstanding the astartes and civilians that had disappeared with Magnus the Red, there remained many thousands of both who had, through the vagaries of fate, been abroad across the galaxy when the doom of Tisca was wrought. Many were simply put to death by Imperial forces they were serving alongside, usually before news of the censor of their Primarch, or indeed his fall, had even reached them. In one prominent example, 2000 astartes of the 9th Fellowship under Centaur Rami were gunned down by the Ultramarines they served alongside. Similar justice was conducted by the Imperial Fists and the Salamanders, 2000 Sun's forces they had previously counted as allies, but had been explicitly instructed to slaughter. It is perhaps noteworthy that at no point did any of the astartes committing this fratricide attempt to aid the doomed and unaware 1000 Sun's in question. Some, naturally, escaped by their own devices, the prognosticators amongst them becoming aware of their doom before it struck, and for these few, awaited a life, at best, of fleeing from the jaws of Imperial retribution. The largest of these contingents, independently verifiable to history, were 5000 astartes of the 4th Fellowship, constituting its majority, who immediately ceased their great crusade assignment and fled to the stars upon news of Prospero's demise, reaching its expeditionary fleet. Elsewhere, several thousand Sun's of Magnus stationed on Prospero's client-forge world of Shauak had, similarly fled. Of the fates of these 1000 Sun's, nothing can currently be said. In the chaos of the years to come, the threads of their stories are utterly lost. It is quite possible they may have reunited with their Primarch and their Legion before the siege had even begun, but it is equally likely many simply turned to a life of the renegade during the conflagration of the Horus Heresy. Perhaps siding with neither traitor nor loyalist, perhaps they became black shields, or perhaps they simply chose to survive as best they could in a world consumed by madness. In total, the Sensor Host had suffered significant losses in its prosecution of the battle, some 49,000 in total, and a massive quantity of armaments either lost or abandoned in necessity in the Tomb of Prospero. This included several Titan God machines, much to the fury of the Mechanicum. Naturally, the majority of these losses were incurred by the Vilca Fenrica, some 25,000 confirmed killed in combat, as well as the entirety of its 13th grade company simply declared lost in the collapse of the Warp Vortex. This was a significant amount of the Sixth Legion's strength at a crucial time. The Heresy would rupture into dreadful reality mere months later, offering the Legion no time to recover in any meaningful capacity from these losses. The casualties for the Talons of the Emperor, the Silent Sisterhood and the Ligio Custodes, were relatively small and somewhat unverifiable, but when we consider the scale of their commitment to the Host and their rarity and specialities, their losses can still be considered severe by any measurable metric. Some historians have even waxed lyrical on the loss for the latter formations, altogether less mundane, the status of custodian invincibility. Never before had such a large quantity of the Emperor's own life wards been committed to a single action, and even in instances where they had taken to the battlefield alongside the Master of Mankind, rarely had more than a few fallen in pursuit of their goals. Those that had observed them in action, be they Thousand Son, Wolf of Russ, or Son of Horus, learned many a lesson from that day about just how the Custodes prosecuted their war-making, and notes were taken about precisely how they had fallen and when they did. On the loyalist side, darker rumors festered, particularly around the ease and apparent experience by which the Oric champions of the Emperor had dispatched astartes so contemptuously. Some, indeed, wondered aloud if this had been a purpose they had been crafted for, although such opinions, when expressed, were rarely done so to ears untrusted. The ripples of the destruction of Prospero spread outwards from it. Some discernable, others less so. So seismic an event in Imperial history could not simply go unnoted by the many, even if the Imperium's military regime did much to downplay its significance. A triumphant parade was held perfunctorly upon the censure host's return to Terra, one which Russ declined to attend, leading his wolves elsewhere. Valdor's own journal notes that, according to the Wolf King, a king does not invite his blood-stained headsman to a victory feast, although to call it the latter was quite a misnomer. The Emperor was deeply concerned with the loss of Magnus, it is supposedly said, and what it represented for his unknowable goals, declining in his personage to attend any victory celebrations such as they were. The triumph ended on a muted note, with the Courts of the Imperium moving rapidly to declare the Thousand Sons as Perdicia, all records of them to be expunged, all their property seized, all treaties they were privy to rendered defunct. Many worlds brought into compliance by the Legion, especially ones Magnus had sought to shape into visions of his ideal future, made strident objections in court to the Legion's destruction and subsequent expurgation. The representatives of these worlds made little headway, and, returning home, found that there were significant increases in Imperial auxilia presences that was the only response they were ever to receive. Michel Arcade, the Forge world long considered bound to Prospero and its Legion, had long been on the boundaries of both Imperial and Mechanic and Politics, conducting relations cordially, but rarely with both. In the wake of the censure, the world ceased all communication with both empires, bringing it within what most would consider to be a fraction of actual secession. Accusations flew between the Imperium and the Mechanicum of what exactly should be done with the Recalcitrant Forge world, and it is likely only that the outbreak of the heresy prevented a full military expedition from being mounted to bring them once more into full compliance. Of the Warmaster, Horace Lupercow, little could be said about his reaction had he made any form of response. Prosperine Fair had ultimately been one organized at the behest of the Emperor himself, despite the Warmaster's later opportune intervention. Raising of the censure host and its goals were done without any consultation with Horace, despite the Primarch being, supposedly, the ultimate military authority within the Imperium. Some academics have declared that Prospero and the Emperor's bullish ignoring of his son in its devastation was a contributing factor to the Warmaster's resentment and ultimate rebellion. Such accusations honestly seemed facetious to you as truly merely for consideration with the benefit of hindsight of the events that were already in motion. Horace's fall was the cause of Magnus's actions that led to his censure. The Warmaster, made aware of this by his new allies, sought to capitalize. The mind of Lupercow's die that they had already been cast when the Cyclops fell. Perhaps the most profound impact of the destruction of Prospero, besides those already recounted, was that the impossible had been rendered hideously possible. The starties had killed the starties. While two legions had already been struck from Imperial record, their loss is altogether another topic, and the circumstances by which they occurred are clouded with mysteries impenetrable. Prospero, however, was seemingly impossible to hide, a catatlysm in full view of those who had the power to see it. For all the detractors of Magnus claimed his was a circumstance unprecedented, what remained was the simple fact that, in later cases, the circumstance would be entirely precedented. Any one of the remaining 17 loyal legions could suffer the same fate, an existential shock that brought no small amount of disunity to an already fractious brotherhood. The wolves, for their part, drew the anger of many, as shatterers of this covenant of brotherhood, and unrepentant ones at that, they only succeeded in forcing themselves into further isolation. A pariah status they infuriatingly seemed to revel in, wallowing in a bleak reputation that seemed to grant them some measure of comfort as they processed their blackest of deeds. No matter that it had apparently been on the orders of the Emperor himself, the wolves of Russ were now the only legion who had direct combat experience fighting the legion as a startys, and the wolf king was the only primarch to have ever fought one of his brothers to the death. Some would dub him kinslayer, had he cared, he gave no hint. The wolves, however, went one step further than merely garnering their experience. They actually codified it. Rendered from sagas and first-hand accounts, legion serfs compiled the Codex Omega, a treatise designed to be the tactical and strategic reference should the Emperor decree the destruction in force of another startys legion. This was, of course, a direct and plain thread to the legion as a startys by the sixth legion, and one whose contents were shared only with Horus Lupacal and his own legion as Warmaster, an error so unspeakably grave that Russ was later said to admit it was one of his greatest regrets. Almost every legion released immediate missives to the Emperor calling for the destruction of the Codex Omega, save for three. The Iron Hands, the Night Lords, and the Alpha legion, all called instead for every legion to be given a copy. Certainly, the awareness of such a work caused significant discord among the legionnaires. Many shored up inter legion treatise with those they were closer to. Many worked to stockpile arms and armaments, or shifted around garrison forces in what could have been almost nervous agitation were they not a startys. The victor in this, as with almost all things concerning the Prosperine Incident, was Horus Lupacal. The legions distrustful of each other, the executioners of the Emperor maimed and isolated, an unpredictable sorcerer king betrayed, wounded, and cast into oblivion. Seeds of doubt in the Emperor's motives sewn into the galaxy, all of this played into the Warmaster's hands. A Prospero meant to stand as a noble upholding of the law of the Imperium, it instead was now forever to be remembered as a triumph of the traitor Horus, his first act, his first victory, even before blood had been spilled on the soils of Istvan. What, finally, of the fate of Magnus the Red and his thousand sons? All at the time believed him either to be dead, or in a self-imposed exile of sorts. As his body was never recovered, nor any trace of his death identified, this was all that could be surmised. That was of course until the Siege of Terra, when his sundering of the outer walls and his gambit within the Imperial dungeon played out in all its dramatic tragedy. Magnus had survived Prospero, and yet persists to this day, even now, in corrupted damnation. How he accomplished such a feat is known only thanks to later, darker revelations about the fifteenth son's fall. His final sorcery, on his homeworld, was a wholesale transportation of himself, his library, and all of the surviving thousand sons, Spireguard, and Prosperine civilians in the Pyramid of Photep, to another planet entirely. Sortiarius, the so-called planet of the sorcerers. A damned world located deep in the festering reaches of the Ocularis Tereblis, the Eye of Terror. Had such an act been possible for Magnus himself, it would have represented a feat of psychic mastery that surpassed anything any human. Baseline, Astartes, Primarch, or even the Emperor himself, had ever accomplished, or could ever have accomplished. Divisio-Telepathica Investigations, commissioned in the aftermath of the Tatlism in secret, projected that, even if Magnus had sacrificed to some total of every Psyker at his beck and call, the resulting psychometric energy would only have been sufficient to transport a handful of individuals, not thousands. Early studies into this were curtailed by post-scouring imperial suppression. No one was apparently concerned with how Magnus had survived, and it is only thanks to inquisitive minds of later millennia that one has any body of scholarship upon which to build. Those long thousands of years taught humanity the pain of the Primordial Annihilator, the so-called Gods of Chaos, those eldritch intelligences that dwell in the deepest reaches of the Imitarium. Many now believe that, as Magnus could not have accomplished his feat alone, at the moment of his death he opened his hearts to the presence of a force altogether beyond. That in that darkest of moments he embraced damnation that he might save his sons and himself from certain death. Should this indeed be the case, that power responded in kind, spiriting the Primarch and his Legion away to remain until this day under its thrall. Certainly the thousand sons have over ten thousand years been under the many many eyes of the the changer of the ways, as Magnus himself has recently renewed in aspect and apparently vigor as he is in this darkest of millennia. The boons of such a patron would go a long ways to explaining how a mere ten years later, three thousand thousand son survivors became the approximately ten thousand accounted for upon Terra during the siege, although one author posits an altogether different theoretical. According to the theory of the first of the fifteenth, the power offered by the shifting many at the moment was one whose price was unforeseen. Magnus may have desired himself and his son saved, but the changer did so by means rather different. It selected one amongst his Legion, saving this individual, consuming all others, including maybe even Magnus as fuel for this act. The thousand sons thus seen upon Terra and laterally throughout the millennia are merely duplicates, pale copies of those devoured by the shifting many in the final moments of Prospero. Aether stuff becoming part of its great games to be played out for unknown, abominably Machiavellian ends. There is of course but one who could possibly have been saved, and given all this individual has wrought over the years since, one cannot help but consider that this potentially insane sounding theory may hold some merit. That individual, of course, is Azek, Ariman. Maybe I consider this fancy only because the reality is so horrifying, that one of the greater intelligences intervened on the express wish of so far fallen a son of the Emperor himself. Magnus was a shining beacon of progress in a universe that so despised a concept. Consumed by his ego, consumed by his follies, consumed by his arrogance, the price he paid would see the soul his father had forged for him consigned to a damnation eternal, and thus our humanity alongside him. Istvan was the birth of the heresy, yes, but upon Prospero it can truly said to have been begun. Emperor preserve us all that we have lived to see its aftermath. Mave, Imperator. Gloria in excelsis, Terra. You can contact me or follow me on twitter at oculus imperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.


Hi everybody, my name is Tara Paksaraj. I'm a founder of NaGi. Just let me give a brief explanation about what is NaGi. NaGi project is intent to provide all-in-one solution for personal safety management. It facilitates reliable connection between people in health center and responsible organization or people for providing aid, rescue and support. This project is included of the three sections actually. One is the bracelet and the mobile application and in the remote side we have a web server. So the bracelet is implemented and we have a body sensor network. It is labeled by human and it can get the location and heartbeat of the user and transfer the details to a smartphone via Bluetooth. And NaGi application which can connect web server and transfer user location data category of treat, rich context information and users vital sign records. It also can call or send text message or email to define contact. And in web server it is a central management dashboard for organization as well as user. Organization can communicate with health secure and with each other to manage the case more efficiently. Where do you see yourself and what do you see as kind of a projection for the next couple of months, year or so? Where do you think you're going and where do you think you are at this point with your project? Yes Joe, now after the advice from the two mentors and also I met words I could build a team and find the co-founder and now we are trying to apply for some accelerator and incubator and then now we launch the beta version of the website as NaGiProject.com I will be glad if you visit my website and share your feedback with me. And now we are also participating in national and international challenge and competition and entrepreneurship festivals to introduce our project to more people to get more connection to make the NaGiProject a real product.