Cholercaust Blood Crusade

The Cholercaust Blood Crusade was an exceptional large and brutal Khornate warhost composed of Traitors, Daemons and heretics that followed the unpredictable route of an ancient blood-red comet out of the Eye of Terror, which they believed embodied the will of the Chaos God Khorne, laying siege to Imperial worlds across the stars in a celebration of slaughter for the Blood God.

History
The Cholercaust Blood Crusade had built a fearful reputation of barbaric efficiency. The Blood God’s servants couldn’t help themselves. Survivors weren’t a strategic consideration. The Slayer cared little for the tales of victims-in-waiting and what others might do with such information. Its tactics were always the same: uncompromising, overwhelming and savage. Where hearts beat with the defiance of life, the goremongers raged, honouring only the razored edge and baptising worlds in torrents of blood. There had been other Blood Crusades: the Odium Wars, the Coming of the Brazen Host, the Dominion of Fire, and the Black Crusade of the Daemon Prince Doombreed. But not since the First War for Armageddon had so many berserker brethren of the World Eaters Traitor Legion gathered under one banner.

Inquisitorial records often identified the Blood God’s favoured operating in wretched warbands roaming the galaxy. Greater concentrations were rare, since the traitorous XIIth Legion’s primordial hate seemed to extend to brother-slayers as well as the innocents of the Imperium of Man. The Cholercaust had been different, however. The planetary populations upon whom it descended were always slaughtered to the last man, woman and child. Failed Adeptus Astartes interventions and Imperial Navy gauntlets had confirmed large numbers of ancient World Eaters vessels in the screaming cultist armada, which seemed to grow with every conquest. Some of those frigates and cruisers identified hadn’t been seen since the Horus Heresy, thousands of years before.

Little was known about the champion that led the Blood Crusade, the maniac who had managed the impossible and gathered so many of his murderous brothers to one cause and objective. He was known only as ‘the Pilgrim’ and led his vast host with religious conviction, following the strange path of a blood-red comet. Celestial cartographers believed it to be the Keeler Comet, a long-period body with a highly eccentric orbit, recorded to have passed through both Segmentum Obscurus and Segmentum Solar nearly ten thousand years before. Euphrati Keeler, the remembrancer of great antiquity, immortalised the comet over El’Phanor in The Ancient Traveller, a pict rumoured to hang in the Imperial Palace and reproduced across the Imperium. The comet had found the galaxy much-changed upon its most recent return. The xenos empire of the Eldar had fallen, the Imperium had been shattered by civil war and the colossal warp storm known as the Eye of Terror had erupted in its path.

As the Keeler Comet blasted out of the immateriality of the Eye, it became apparent that it too had changed. A blood-red beacon, it appeared to wander with a mind of its own and trailed in its wake the Pilgrim and his Cholercaust Blood Crusade. The daemons, cultists and World Eaters seemed to believe that the cursed comet embodied the will of their Chaos god and would lead them across the stars in a celebration of slaughter, right to the Imperium’s finest and Holy Terra itself. Hadria, Dregeddon IV, L’Orient, Callistus Mundi, Port Koronach, among a hundred other worlds, were all similarly butchered; all victims of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade.

Cholercaust Fleet
The Cholercaust Blood Crusade fleet was led by the Battle Barge Rancour, under the command of the Master of the Fleet, the vile Havloc the Cold-Blooded. Behind the mangled blasphemy of the battle-barge’s stately dimensions a colossal fleet extended. Like a growing stain on the empty void, the Cholercaust continued to grow. Daily, vessels of all descriptions joined the Ruinous armada. Some were warships, eager to join the Blood Crusade and prove themselves worthy of Khorne’s favour. Others had been led there under the command of killers and champions, whose carnage-clouded visions had revealed to them a slaughter without end, a patron-pleasing brotherhood of the barbarous. Others still were captured freighters, traders and heavy transports, swarming with the surrendered slave-stock of sundered worlds, Imperial innocents whose fate now lay in the Blood God’s claws and whose depraved treatment aboard the seized vessels led them down Khorne’s doomed path.

Under the ruthless leadership of the Great Pilgrim they physical embodiment of the Blood God's was leading the Blood Crusade back towards Terra, to the crumbling walls of the Corpse-Emperor's palace and the Eternity Gate. For his amusement, the War-Given-Form had blessed their path with a world of faith. A virtually planet of the dead, where the Corpse-Emperor's cult-cubines ministered to the galaxy's silent majority, the dead. The Pilgrim ordered his berserker followers to hone their blades, for shortly they would taste priest-flesh.

Certus-Minor
The most recent world to suffer the predations of The Cholercaust Blood Crusade was the tiny EcclesiarchyCemetery World of Certus-Minor in the Praga Sub-sector. Certius-Minor lay directly in the path of the Keeler Comet, the blood-red harbinger which herald their doom. The Imperial Navy reported sightings of the vast armada trailing its tail. The Exorcists, the Grey Knights and the Imperial Fists were rumoured to man a cordon at Vanaheim – to prevent a crusader advance on Segmentum Solar.

The inevitable invasion was first brought to the attention of the Excoriators Chapter. The 5th Company, under the command of Captain Zachariah Kersh were quickly dispatched to funerary world. The Certusians were first made aware that something heralded their doom during a land reclamation project. During the drainage of a lake to maximise plot space and extend the burial grounds, they noticed the top of an unusual structure as the water levels fell. Two pyramids made of skulls, sitting one within the other forming eight points: eight sides to face, eight corners to run. Eight - the Blood God's integer. The pyramids formed the symbol of the War-Given-Form of the Khorne. It was an impromptu throne of skulls. It was a throne to be taken, an invitation issued. A beacon beckoning forth the Cholercaust Blood Crusade.

Upon further inspection by the Excoriators's 5th Company, they discovered that the monument had only recently been constructed. The bodies probably belonged to cultists devoting themselves to the Blood God and his murderous ideals. Recently graves had been robbed and the skulls were taken. The martial burial grounds were targeted because the Blood God favoured the skulls of warriors for his throne. The caskets were reburied to avoid suspicion in the same way that the monument was constructed in secret on the lake bed. The monument has been entirely constructed by hand. Each skull added to the submerged structure would be a one-way ticket for its bearer. Each cultist would wear a lead cape and take a blade with them. The lead would take them to the bottom, where they would add their grave-robbed gift to the throne. They would then slit their throats and baptise the unholy monument in the murk of their offered blood. Murder – of the self.