Warhammer 40,000 - The Last Crusade

I

I

M37

Calixus Sector

Segmentum Obscurus

The sun glowed an ominous white, diminished by an insidious eclipse that bathed the scorched battlefields in perpetual twilight. Raped and scourged, the planet's once verdant green forests and lively plains were nothing but a cratered, burning desert.

Blood painted the landscape a dark coagulated red, having seeped deep into the earth after weeks of constant warfare. Overturned transports, burned out tanks, and mounds of rotting, mutilated corpses lay scattered across the plains. There was not a single spot of land that did not bear some scar from the unadulterated belligerence.

Rivers of blood poured endlessly across the killing fields from the corpses of hundreds of thousands of dead. The great, burning skeletons of Titan war machines hung low below the horizon, spewing great clouds of smoke and gases that continued to burn long after their fall like somber effigies in a shallow graveyard. Tattered Imperial banners lay strewn about the battlefield, some burnt to ash, others still flapping morbidly in the noxious wind.

Labyrinthian trenches stretched across kilometers of battlefield, where the murder of untold thousands of Krieg guardsman lay slaughtered in flowing pools of blood. Many perished where they stood, dying amongst each other in a mass burial ground beneath the trenches.

The once gleaming forms of astartes, caked with mud and gore where they had stood shoulder to shoulder with their allies, now shared the same burial plots as their Death Korps allies. Many were still alive, struggling for lost bolters only to be executed by the traitorous marines that wandered the smoking battlefield.

Within the ruined piles of flesh, bone and armor, were the exquisite, yet bloodied corpses of Eldar who had died alongside their desperate allies. Where there were mountains of Imperial dead, hills of Craftworld Eldar rolled across the charred battlefield.

It was a battle with a conclusion that had been decided from the very beginning. Millions were to die, and untold billions were to follow. Whispers from the Warp and even the coming of several Phoenix Lords were not enough for the Imperium of Man to heed a millennium old warning.

Even as the dying prayers of the Imperial Creed filled the air for the last time before the wind was cut from their chests, the warriors of the Imperium were too late to realize that the Emperor's light would not be able to reach them in time as the forces of Chaos descended upon the planet in droves.

Far off in the distance, far from the destroyed battlements and coagulated rivers, the war still raged on as the planet's defenders staged a futile last stand. The remainder of the Death Korps of Krieg that had made planet fall now held against hundreds of thousands of traitor warriors in an unending tide of death that wittled away their numbers with every second that passed. Beyond the trenches fought Ebon Purgators' 5th Company, nearly annihilated by the onslaught and reduced to a handful of squads.

The humans knew they were going to die. The bolter and las-fire that streamed across the trenches into the traitorous ranks of Chaos only bought the Eldar the time to finish what their ancient brethren had began long ago, before the Fall. Even then, their greatest enemy had been Chaos, and now - that enemy threatened the very future of their people's existence.

But hand in hand, the fates intertwined, and the runes of the Mon'keigh gleamed between the fingers of an Eldar Farseer as she scryed far into the future. Surrounded by her Warlock retinue, she spared a painful glance to the battlefield not far from where she stood. A tear streamed down her face, mingling with dried blood and patches of mud, turning black as they dripped down her cheek.