Cholercaust Blood Crusade

The Cholercaust Blood Crusade was an exceptionally large and brutal Chaos warhost dedicated to the murderous service of the Blood God Khorne that was composed of Traitors, Daemons and Heretics. In the late 41st Millennium the Cholercaust followed the unpredictable route of the ancient blood-red Keeler Comet out of the Eye of Terror, which they believed embodied the will of Khorne, laying siege to Imperial worlds across the stars in a celebration of slaughter for the Blood God. Their ultimate goal was to assault the Imperial Palace on Terra and bring an end to the reign of the Corpse Emperor, but the Blood Crusade was stopped by the 5th Company of the Excoriators Chapter of Space Marines and the intervention of the revenant Astartes known as the Legion of the Damned on the Ecclesiarchy Cemetery World of Certus-Minor.

History
There had been other Blood Crusades dedicated to the murderous will of the Blood God Khorne in Imperial history: 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 of the berserker brethren of the World Eaters Traitor Legion gathered under a single banner. The Cholercaust Blood Crusade's 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 world after world in torrents of blood.

Inquisitorial records often identified the Blood God’s servants operating in wretched warbands that roamed the galaxy in search of slaughter. Greater concentrations of Khorne's faithful were rare, since the traitorous XII Space Marine Legion’s primordial hate seemed to extend to its fellow servants of the Blood God as well as the innocents of the Imperium of Man. The Cholercaust had been different, however. The planetary populations upon which 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 dating to the time of the Horus Heresy in the Blood Crusade's armada, which seemed to grow with every conquest. Some of those Frigates and Cruisers had not been seen for more than 10,000 standard years.

Little was known about the Chaos Champion who led the Cholercaust Blood Crusade, the blood-spattered maniac who had managed the impossible and gathered so many of his murderous and fractious brethren in service to a single 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 that had emerged from the Eye of Terror into the galaxy. Celestial cartographers believed it to be the Keeler Comet, a long-period astronomical body with a highly eccentric orbit, recorded to have passed through both the Segmentum Obscurus and the Segmentum Solar nearly ten thousand Terran years before. Euphrati Keeler, the Remembrancer and early Imperial Saint 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 and permanent Warp Storm known as the Eye of Terror had erupted in its path following the birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh in the 30th Millennium.

As the Keeler Comet blasted out of the Empyrean regions 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, Chaos Cultists and World Eaters Chaos Space Marines that made up the Blood Crusade seemed to believe that the cursed comet embodied the will of the Blood God and would lead them across the stars in a celebration of slaughter, right to Terra and the gates of the Imperial Palace itself. Hadria, Dregeddon IV, L’Orient, Callistus Mundi, Port Koronach and a hundred other worlds were all similarly butchered; all became victims of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade.

Cholercaust Warfleet
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 Corpus-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.

But this was not the only sign of the coming of the Blood Crusade, for many of the Certusian population began suffering from a strange affliction. Many began losing their minds to a mysterious gall-fever. It wasn't physiological in origin and it didn't seem transmissible like a virus or infection. It was a malady of the mind. Males were no more susceptible than a female, young no more than the old. The mental transformation by the gall-fever from Certusian to savage was unpredictable and swift, and that the first symptom was usually murderous bloodshed. The Excoriators Apothecary suspected that it was some kind of psychological condition brought on by the proximity of the strange comet.

Corpus-Captain Kersh knew that the Cholercaust was coming to the doomed planet and that he could rely on the Blood God's servant to meet them blade to blade. They were not known for their prosecution, or even tolerance, of such long-range warfare. Kersh’s experience of the berserker factions had taught him that beyond the ancient warships of the Traitor Legions, the War-Given-Form favoured simple cultships. The Cholercaust armada would likely be made up of armed freighters, fat transports and plundered system ships, loaded to piratical proportions – ready to disgorge their savage cargos of human detritus in a swarm of battered lighters, barges, haulage brigs, tugs and hump shuttles, all reinforced and outfitted as simple drop-ships.

The 5th Company did request reinforcement from the rest of the Chapter but had little expectation of its arrival in time to make a difference. The 5th Company sent long-range astrotelepathic requests to the regiments of the Imperial Guard's Viper Legion at Hellionii Reticuli, the 2nd Company of the Novamarines Space Marine Chapter stationed at Belis Quora and the Angels Eradicant Chapter at Port Kreel. They even sent a message to the Vanaheim Cordon where Imperial forces had gathered to face the oncoming Cholercaust, in full knowledge of its futility, for the Imperial Fists, Exorcists and Grey Knights Astartes stationed there would not leave the line of defence for fear that the Keeler Comet and the trailing Cholercaust Crusade might resume its progress on towards Terra. The Adeptus Astartes contingents stationed at Vanaheim would never leave the sacred soil of Terra open to attack to help defend a tiny Cemetery World.

Initial Assault
The Keeler Comet was no longer an ordinary astral body. It was no longer a simple amalgam of ice, rock and metal plummeting through the void, enslaved to an orbit and the long chain of gravity. It had punched through the Eye of Terror and had changed, its nature abnormal, its purpose warped. Like a claw, tearing at the very fabric of reality, the blood comet had opened rents in time and space, tainting the darkness and creating an immaterial breach through which the raw essence of the warp could bleed. Looking towards the unnatural flux of the sky, it is suspected that the comet’s tail was such a rift, and that the unfiltered insanity of the warp was pouring out into the void before falling towards Certus-Minor with gravitational certainty to streak down through the cemetery world’s atmosphere. It is hypothesised that weak entities and warpforms might burn up on descent, and that the grip other such creatures had on reality might be weakened by such a scorching. What horrified Corpus-Captain Kersh further was his Librarian's belief that anything resilient enough to survive planetfall and impact would be suitably difficult to kill.

Much to the 5th Company’s dismay, Corpus-Captain Kersh ordered them to make a defiant last stand against the invaders, and stranded his forces on the doomed world by sending their Apothecary and their crippled Strike Cruiser the Angelica Mortis to a nearby Forge World out of the comet and the Blood Crusade’s path, taking the 5th Company's precious Gene-Seed with it to be used to create future generations of Excoriators after they had been slain. Kersh commanded less than half of a full company of Astartes as well as an Imperial Guard regiment of Certusian Charnel Guard against a legion of Chaotic Traitors, daemonic Bloodletters and Khornate Berserkers. Despite the odds, Kersh formulated a plan worthy of the Chapter's ancestors who had defended the Imperial Palace during the Battle of Terra, leading a bold last stand by the Imperial defenders at Certus-Minor's capital necropolis of Obsequa City.

The weight of the initial Khornate assault far exceeded even Kersh’s estimates, and things began to look grim for the Imperial forces. The first wave was composed of hordes of chitinous, foul Warp Spawn and Daemons. The valiant Imperial defenders managed to hold back the first assault after fighting continuously for over 20 hours of hard fighting. But Kersh understood, that what they had seen was merely the beginning. The comet's malign influence had turned the Certusian people against themselves and further bolstered the enemy's number. The horrors they had witnessed thus far were merely immaterial overspill, the detritus of the warp, bleeding through into material existence. The Cholercaust had yet even to arrive. When it did, it would make what they had seen so far seem like nothing. An invasion made up of countless cultists, the Blood God’s daemonkin and, worst of all, the Traitor Space Marines – the World Eaters. The Traitor Angels were insatiable in their thirst for slaughter, unparalleled in their desire for wanton carnage. They were and unfortunately still are amongst the best the immortals have to offer on the battlefield. They spearheaded a Blood Crusade that had never known defeat – that had sundered hundreds of Imperial worlds – and they would kill everything on the surface of Certus-Minor.

Final Assault
After the initial assault the Blood Crusade threw its second wave of attack at the Imperial defenders. Thousands of butcher-baptised slave-soldiers from a myriad of conquered worlds, traitor Guardsmen, heretic militia, mutants, fallen mercenaries, piratical raiders, bestial Abhumans, Chaos Cultists. Corpus-Captain Kersh had fought all of them before on battlefields bordering the Eye of Terror. All had gone down under the Excoriators’ blades. Never before, however, had Kersh seen so much Ruinous detritus gathered in one place.

Beyond, Kersh could see an ocean of human detritus. An unending army of ruthless killers. The Cholercaust’s slaughterkin, united in common purpose: to work through the private deviancy of their murderous inclination while simultaneously feeding their faith and daemon deity with acts of wanton annihilation. The cult invaders just kept coming, birthed by darkness, and beyond the gloom, Kersh could hear the savage howls of maniacs-in-waiting.

Amongst the slave-soldiers, traitors and Chaos cultists, Kersh picked out increasing numbers of Adeptus Astartes, false prophets for the ravaging masses, and Ruinous warbands of blood-brothers who had embraced heresy together. Lost Angels who had fallen to the Blood God’s predatory temptations and indulged their base desire to kill over the Emperor’s need for them to do so. Space Marines who had forgotten themselves. Those who had regressed. Those who were now no more than agonising expressions of the savagery from which they were originally crafted: the Goremongers, the Sanguine Sons, the mad Angels of the Thunder Barons, the renegade Red Heralds, The Cleaved, the Angels Apocrypha, the Brazen Guard and the bone-dusted Skulltakers.

The World Eaters
Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh – World Eater and Skull Champion of the Blood God – led the Cholercaust once the berserker armies of Khorne stepped out onto the soon-to-be blood-drenched earth of Certus-Minor. With his warband, the Clysm, the World Eaters champion had fought on a thousand worlds, butchered human and alien alike in the name of wanton carnage, and brought glory to Khorne’s name through his prosecution of crusades, the slaughter of the Dark Prince of Pleasure’s perverse followers and the taking of skulls on an obscene scale. He had killed at the great Doombreed’s side, slayed with Skarbrand, murdered his own with Khârn the Betrayer and fought in every Black Crusade to ever strike fear into the weak heart of the Imperium. He had served with his daemon-father, the Primarch Angron himself, during the Dominion of Fire, on war-torn Armageddon and before the walls of the Imperial Palace on doomed Terra. Now, he served the Pilgrim – daemon prince and Right Claw of Khorne – leader of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade, who would take the Blood God’s disciples back to Ancient Terra and finish what they had started.

He observed the aspirant champions take their place in mob-ranks of common killers. Warlords and butchers, their prodigious taking of life had warmed the Ruinous overlord to them. Amongst these were bands of tainted Angels. A young and fallen brotherhood. Warriors whose shame it had been not to see the slaughter of the Heresy and the apocalypse wrought on the sacred soil of Ancient Terra. It was only after the renegades – young in the ways of the blade – had thinned out the enemy, leaving only the worthiest skulls for the taking, that the Pilgrim unleashed his warbands of World Eaters. Ancient, superhuman flesh within Traitor plate, driven by a mind without doubt or fear. The World Eaters were the very living expression of the Blood God’s destructive power. His daemons might be a bloodthirsty essence, tapped directly from Khorne’s primordial fury, but it was thousands of years of bloodshed, committed in the Blood God’s name by the death-defying sons of Angron, that fuelled such ancient power. In this way, daemonkin might be part of the War-Given-Form, but the War-Given-Form was part of Umbragg and his XIIth Legion brethren’s desire eternal to see the galaxy burn.

Last Stand
As Corpus-Captain Kersh fought pauldron-to-pauldron with his Excoriator brothers, he quickly saw the anatomy of a world’s demise. He now saw see how the Cholercaust Blood Crusade sundered planet after Imperial planet, and how it would go on doing so – right up to the Vanaheim Cordon and beyond. Through Segmentum Solar and the core systems; right up to an unsuspecting Ancient Terra. Unsuspecting, because none knew what he knew now. They would underestimate the Keeler Comet and its strange ability to turn a population against itself, creating reinforcement for an army as yet unarrived. What they would see as an astral body – a returning visitor – he now knew as a gateway to Chaos. They would not call for reinforcement, as others have failed to do, until far too late. They would fail to appreciate the Cholercaust’s number and overestimate their own. They would make a stand – as he had done – because that is what warriors do. They would stand aghast, as he did now, at the Cholercaust’s speed and hunger for annihilation. They would not imagine that a force could end a world in all but a day, overrunning an entire planet with heretic, renegade and daemon. Finally, with Traitor Legionaries – the Blood God’s chosen – falling from the stars and hunting them for sport, they would see how easily they had fallen and the horror that awaited others for whom the same mistakes were equally inevitable.

The Charnel Guard were all but decimated and many of Kersh's Exoriators battle-brothers had fallen. Palatine Sapphira and several of her Battle-Sisters of the Adepta Sororitas Order of the August Vigil remained, along with a small collection of Chapter serfs. Beyond that, only Excoriators survived the onslaught. The sons of Dorn, who fought their hardest and made the enemy pay in blood for every retreating step. The remaining Angels of the 5th Company, held off impossible numbers, as they paired and grouped up. Brothers found each other, protecting each other’s backs, knowing in their hearts that here in the tight ambulatories and posternways – in the shadow of Umberto II’s great Mausoleum – they were to die together.

With a cultist army – even with an Adeptus Astartes contingent – they might have stood a chance. The Blood God sent them monsters, daemonic entities against which their weapons knew limitation. And now, pushed back into the steep streets and narrow alleys, with the full force of the Cholercaust swallowing Obsequa City, they found their retreat compromised. From the sky they sent the Imperial defenders their best. Shock troops to finish off the most stalwart resistance. To end them quickly. The Eaters of Worlds. Now they knew they were doomed. The 5th Company and the remaining Imperial defenders faced their inevitable deaths at the hands of the Forces of Chaos, and in desperation sent a last, prayerful plea to the Emperor of Mankind for assistance of any kind. For a miracle. Beyond all hope, their prayers were answered.

A Miracle
The Blood God's butchers soon became the butchered by the timely intervention of the mysterious revenant Astartes who called themselves the Legion of the Damned. A colossal Gothic designed vessel of unknown origin had remained hidden within the tail of the Keeler Comet. The vessel appeared to be completely without power, a derelict floating in the cold darkness of space. Its massive construction was stunning from a distance, but close up was gaunt and weathered. The stone was cracked, granular and disintegrating, the victim of an eternity of etherical erosion. The craft would have been nearly invisible against the backdrop of the empty space were it not for the spectral fire that burned across every surface and suffused the derelict vessel with a golden, phantasmal glow.

Suddenly the ruined star fortress powered itself up, preparing to launch torpedoes. The great torpedo tubes flared brightly as the spectral gleam of a warhead erupted from the star fortress’s primary weapon. The ghostly torpedo flew straight and true towards Certus-Minor. As it streaked away from the mobile monastery, the aurulent ghostfire of its appearance suddenly intensify to a halo of plasmic propulsion. The Keeler Comet, which had been traversing the galaxy for aeons and had last passed through the Imperium ten thousand years before, exploded. The flash of the torpedo’s impact picked out the irregular shape of the Ruinous object before the destructive force of detonation ripped through the body, wracking it to its frozen core and smashing it into a billion astral splinters. Within moments the comet was no longer there, just the bloody reminder of its void-smearing tail. Instead, the comet had become a rapidly tumbling apocalyptic heavenfall of blood-black ice shards, enormous rock fragments and rare metal nuggets, accelerating towards Certus-Minor at the speed of a bolt-round. The violently transformed Keeler had changed direction once again, this time blasted towards the cemetery world’s all-embracing, gravitational pull. The Cholercaus fleet, stationed in low orbit, didn't see the catastrophe coming. The massive debris rained down upon the marauding fleet destroying the vast armada in a conglomeration of wicked explosions.

On the surface of Certus-Minor, the darkness of shadows became silhouettes in the smoke. The silhouettes became armoured detail, as revenants appeared in bone-moulded plate, auric flames dancing off their ceramite's bitter, black surface. Their ghostly weapons cleaving the World Eaters like so much wheat before a harvesting scythe. Charred cultist survivors reported sightings of silent warriors in sable armour who corralled the Chaos lord and his sadists with flamers before cremating the entire retinue.

Angels haunted the shadowy streets, passages and alleyways of the cemetery world city. Not Excoriators. Not the War-Given-Form’s Traitor World Eaters. Not the heretic brothers of renegade Chapters and warbands that pledged their blades and superhuman efforts to the Blood God’s cause. At first, Corpus-Captain Kersh though he was seeing things, but as he shot past macabre butchery and ghostly gunfire, he realised that the mysterious ghostly revenant which had been haunting him was not alone. His wraith-like brothers were seeping from the shadows, cutting daemons and Ruinous champions down with cold efficiency.

The damned legionnaires burned with an ethereal fire, their bone-sculpted armour a stygian nightmare of darkness and gilt flame. Every stride they took, though silent, was a step of fearless determination. Whereas World Eaters degenerates came at them with the heat of mindless fury and angry blades, the accursed crusaders were cold to the point of repose and ruin. They moved with the certainty of the grave and killed with the indomitable will of beings who already knew what it was to lose life and know the end. Their unnatural presence gave birth to a fear in their enemies that they had not known, an antiquated darkness beyond petty notions of survival or an agonising death. A nightfall of the soul. An eventuality so hopeless and final that their victims didn’t dread the end of their existence – they feared not existing at all. Kersh recognised the flame-swathed Angels of his salvation. A Legion of the Damned, moving about the graves like an army of ghosts, taking the fight to the Ruinous, executing the tainted and delivering doom to the Emperor’s enemies.

In the end, all of the Space Marines of the 5th Company valiantly lost their lives in the valiant effort, save for their commanding officer, Corpus-Captain Zacariah Kersh. Kersh would go on to become Chapter Master of the Excoriators after this pyrrhic victory. The Cholercaust Blood Crusade had been utterly defeated.

Source
[[Category:C]]
 * The Legion of the Damned (Novel) by Rob Sanders