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Path of the 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 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[]

Blood Crusade[]

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 berzerker 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 [[Navis Imperialis] 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 Daemon Prince 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 realspace of 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 Aeldari 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's warfleet was led by the ancient World Eaters battle barge Rancour, under the command of the Master of the Fleet, the vile World Eater Chaos Space Marine Havloc the Cold-Blooded. Behind the mangled blasphemy of the battle barge's once stately dimensions a colossal Chaos warfleet extended. Like a growing stain on the empty void, the Cholercaust continued to grow.

Daily, vessels of all descriptions joined the bloody-minded armada. Some were Renegade 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 of Khorne, whose carnage-clouded visions had revealed to them the potential for 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 ultimately led them to embrace Khorne's doomed path as Chaos Cultists.

Under the ruthless leadership of The Pilgrim the Cholercaust intended to slaughter its way towards Terra, to the crumbling walls of the Corpse Emperor's palace and ultimately through the Eternity Gate itself where they would hack apart the Emperor's decaying body upon the Golden Throne.

For his amusement, the Blood God had blessed the Blood Crusade by placing across their path a world dedicated to the false faith of the Corpse Emperor. A virtual planet of the dead, where the Corpse-Emperor's cult ministered to the galaxy's true silent majority, the dead. The Pilgrim ordered his berserker followers to hone their blades, for they would soon taste priest-flesh.

Defence of Certus-Minor[]

The tiny Ecclesiarchy Cemetery World of Certus-Minor in the Praga Sub-sector lay directly in the path of the Keeler Comet, the blood-red harbinger which heralded its doom. The Navis Imperialis reported sightings of the vast Chaos armada following in the wake of its crimson tail. The Exorcists, the Grey Knights and the Imperial Fists Chapters of Space Marines were rumoured to man a defence cordon at the world of Vanaheim intended to block the Blood Crusade's advance into the 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, was quickly dispatched to the funerary world. The Certusians were first made aware that something heralded their coming doom during a land reclamation project. While the Certusians were moving forward with the drainage of a lake intended to maximise new space for grave plots and extend the burial grounds, they noticed the top of an unusual structure within the lake as its water levels fell. Two pyramids made of skulls, sitting one within the other, that formed a star of eight points -- eight sides to a face, eight corners to run. Eight was the Blood God's sacred integer. The pyramids formed 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' 5th Company, they discovered that the monument had only recently been constructed. The bodies used in its construction probably belonged to Chaos Cultists who had devoted themselves to the Blood God and his murderous ideals. Recently, the Certusian adepts had noticed that graves had been robbed and skulls taken from the desecrated bodies. The martial burial grounds had been especial targets for this desecration since Khorne favoured the skulls of warriors for his throne.

The caskets were reburied to avoid suspicion in the same way that the monument had been constructed in secret on the lake bed. The monument had been entirely constructed by hand as each skull added to the submerged structure would be the death of its bearer. Each cultist wore a lead cape and took a blade with them. The lead cape would sink them to the bottom of the lake, where they would add their grave-robbed gift to the throne. Then each cultist would slit their own throats and baptise the unholy monument in the murk of their offered blood as a sacrifice to their bloody-minded divine lord.

But this was not the only sign of the coming of the Blood Crusade, for many of the Certusian population began losing their sanity to a mysterious gall-fever. It was not physiological in origin and it did not seem biologically transmissible like a viral or bacteriological infection. It was a malady of the mind. Men were no more susceptible than women, the young no more than the old. The mental transformation wrought by the gall-fever from civilised Human to a bloodthirsty savage was unpredictable and swift, and the first symptom was usually an outbreak of unexpected and murderous bloodshed. The Excoriators' Apothecary suspected that the illness was some kind of psychological condition brought on by the proximity of the strange comet and its emanations of Chaos energies.

Corpus-Captain Zachariah Kersh knew that the Cholercaust was coming to the doomed planet and that he could rely on the Blood God's servants to meet them blade to blade. They were not known for their tolerance for long-range warfare. Kersh's previous experience with Khornate Berserkers had taught him that beyond the ancient warships of the Traitor Legions, Khornates favoured simple cultships. The Cholercaust armada would likely be made up of armed freighters, fat transports and plundered system ships, loaded to piratical proportions and 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 their 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 Astra Militarum's Viper Legion at Hellionii Reticuli, the 2nd Company of the Novamarines 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 astronomical body, 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 into the Warp and had been changed by this transgression, its nature abnormal, its purpose twisted. Like a claw tearing at the very fabric of reality, the blood comet had opened rents in time and space, tainting the darkness of realspace and creating an immaterial breach through which the raw essence of the Empyrean could bleed through wherever it went.

Looking towards the unnatural flux of the sky, the comet's tail was such a rift, and 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 Daemonic 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 Zachariah Kersh was his Librarian's belief that anything resilient enough to survive planetfall and impact would be equally 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. The strike cruiser took the 5th Company's precious gene-seed with it to be used to create future generations of Excoriators after the Astartes remaining behind had been slain.

Kersh commanded less than half of a full company of Space Marines as well as an Astra Militarum regiment of Certusian Charnel Guard against a legion of Chaos 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 Siege 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 solar hours of hard combat. But Kersh understood that what they had seen was merely the beginning of what the Blood Crusade could throw at them. 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 main body of 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 Chaos Cultists, the Blood God's Daemons and, worst of all, the Heretic Astartes of the World Eaters Legion. The Khornate Traitor Marines were insatiable in their thirst for slaughter and unparalleled in their desire for wanton carnage. They spearheaded a Blood Crusade that had never known defeat and that had consumed hundreds of Imperial worlds -- and they would kill everything living on the surface of Certus-Minor.

Final Assault[]

After the initial assault, the Blood Crusade threw its second wave of attackers at the Imperial defenders. Thousands of slave-soldiers from a myriad of conquered worlds, Traitoris Militarum, Heretic militia, mutants, fallen mercenaries, piratical raiders, bestial Abhumans, and Chaos Cultists launched themselves screaming at the Imperial lines within Obsequa City. Corpus-Captain Zachariah 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 many servants of Chaos 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 a common purpose: to work through the private deviancy of their murderous inclination while simultaneously feeding their faith and Daemonic deity with acts of wanton annihilation. The Cholercaust invaders just kept coming, birthed by darkness, and beyond the gloom, Kersh could hear the savage howls of even more maniacs-in-waiting.

Amongst the slave-soldiers, Traitors and Chaos Cultists, Kersh picked out increasing numbers of Chaos Space Marines, lost battle-brothers 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. In addition to the World Eaters, warbands representing the Blood Storm, the Goremongers, the Sanguine Sons, the Thunder Barons, the Renegade Red Heralds, The Cleaved, the Angels Apocrypha, the Brazen Guard and the bone-dusted Skulltakers could all be seen in service to the Blood God's murderous crusade.

The World Eaters[]

Umbragg the Brazen Flesh

Umbragg the Brazen Flesh, leads the World Eaters in glorious slaughter

Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh, a World Eaters Heretic Astartes and a Skull Champion of the Blood God, led the Cholercaust's ground assault once the berserker armies of Khorne stepped onto the earth of Certus-Minor. With his warband, The Clysm, the World Eaters Chaos 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 myriad Blood Crusades, the slaughter of Slaanesh'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 Primarch Angron himself, during the First War for Armageddon and before the walls of the Imperial Palace during the Siege of Terra. Now, he served The Pilgrim -- a Daemon Prince and the Right Claw of Khorne -- the leader of the Cholercaust, who would take the Blood God's disciples back to Terra and finish what they had started 10,000 standard years before.

He observed the Aspiring Champions take their place in the mob-ranks of common killers. Warlords and butchers, their prodigious taking of life had warmed Umbragg towards them. Amongst these were bands of Chaos Space Marines whose shame it had been not to see the slaughter of the Horus Heresy and the apocalypse wrought on the sacred soil of Terra. It was only after these 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.

The World Eaters were the living expression of the Blood God's destructive power. His Daemons might be a bloodthirsty essence, tapping directly into Khorne's primordial fury, but it was thousands of standard years of bloodshed, committed in the Blood God's name by the death-defying sons of Angron, that fuelled the World Eaters' ancient power. A power deployed by the XII Legion's brethren whose only remaining desire was to see the galaxy burn.

Last Stand[]

As Corpus-Captain Zachariah Kersh fought pauldron-to-pauldron with his Excoriator battle-brothers, he quickly saw the anatomy of a world's demise. He saw how the Cholercaust Blood Crusade had sundered planet after planet, and how it would go on doing so -- right up to the Vanaheim Cordon and beyond. It would continue throughout Segmentum Solar and the core systems; right up to an unsuspecting Terra. The Imperial defenders would underestimate the Keeler Comet and its strange ability to turn a population against itself, creating reinforcement for a Khornate army as yet unarrived.

What they would see as a simple comet he now knew was a gateway to Chaos. They would not call for reinforcement, as others had 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 true 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 but a single solar day, overrunning an entire planet with Heretics, Renegades and Daemons. Finally, with Traitor Marines 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 Astra Militarum's Charnel Guard were all but decimated and many of Kersh's Excoriators 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 had survived the Khornate onslaught. The remaining Astartes of the 5th Company had held off impossible numbers as they paired and grouped up. Battle-brothers found each other, protecting each other's backs, knowing in their hearts that they were to die together in the tight passageways in the shadow of the Ecclesiarch Umberto II's great mausoleum.

Pushed back into the steep streets and narrow alleys with the full force of the Cholercaust swallowing Obsequa City, the Space Marines found their retreat compromised. From the sky the Khornates assaulted the Imperial defenders with their best. 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.

Miracle of the Damned[]

2011LOTD

The revenant Astartes of the Legion of the Damned annihilate the forces of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade.

The Blood God's butchers became the butchered with the timely intervention of the mysterious revenant Astartes who called themselves the Legion of the Damned. A colossal Gothic 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.

LoD Battle

The Legion of the Damned fighting the forces of Chaos upon the world of Certus-Minor.

Its massive construction was stunning from a distance, but close up the starship appeared gaunt and weathered. The hull was cracked, granular and disintegrating, the victim of an eternity of etherical erosion. The craft would have been nearly invisible against the backdrop of 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 Imperial 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' primary weapon. The ghostly torpedo flew straight and true towards Certus-Minor. As it streaked away from the mobile fortress-monastery, the ghostfire of its appearance suddenly intensified to become 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 Terran years before, exploded.

The flash of the torpedo's impact picked out the irregular shape of the object before the destructive force of detonation ripped through its 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 fall of black ice shards, enormous rock fragments and rare metal nuggets, accelerating towards Certus-Minor at high speed.

The violently transformed Keeler Comet had changed direction once again, this time blasted towards the Cemetery World's gravitational pull. The Cholercaust's warfleet, stationed in low orbit, did not see the catastrophe coming. The massive debris rained down upon the marauding fleet and destroyed the vast Chaos armada in a conglomeration of wicked explosions.

On the surface of Certus-Minor, the darkness of shadows became silhouettes in the smoke. Revenants appeared in bone-moulded plate, ethereal flames dancing off their ceramite battle-plate's bitter, black surface. Their ghostly, burning weapons cleaved the World Eaters like so much wheat before a scythe. Charred Chaos Cultist survivors reported sightings of silent warriors in sable armour who corralled the Chaos Lord Umbragg and his sadists with flamers before cremating the entire retinue of Khornate Berserkers and sending their souls shrieking in pain and fury to the skull-strewn realm of their sadistic god.

The revenant Astartes of the Legion of the Damned burned with an ethereal fire. Every stride they took, though silent, was a step of fearless determination. Whereas World Eaters came at them with the heat of mindless fury and angry blades, the accursed Legionaries were cold to the point of repose. 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 of all things. Their unnatural presence gave birth to a fear in their enemies that they had not ever known, an antiquated darkness beyond petty notions of survival or an agonising death.

This was an eventuality so hopeless and final that the Legion's victims did not dread the end of their existence -- they feared not existing at all. Corpus-Captain Zachariah Kersh recognised the flame-swathed angels of his salvation as a Legion of the Damned, moving about the graves of the Cemetery World like an army of ghosts, 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 effort to stop the Blood Crusade, save for their commanding officer, Corpus-Captain Kersh. Kersh would go on to become Chapter Master of the Excoriators after this pyrrhic victory. The Cholercaust Blood Crusade had been utterly defeated, but many servants of the Blood God remained, still eager to taint their blades with the pumping blood of the innocent and the pious.

Order of Battle[]

Imperial Forces[]

Commanders[]

Astra Militarum[]

  • Charnel Guard Regiment

Navis Imperialis[]

  • Apotheon - Commanded by Lieutenant Heiss, the Apotheon was the remaining Navis Imperialis starship that held geo-stationary orbit near the northern pole of Certus-Minor, a silent observer of the incoming Keeler Comet. The Apotheon observed the intervention of the unknown vessel of the Legion of the Damned which destroyed the Keeler Comet. The resulting explosion and destruction of the comet annihilated the Cholercaust Blood Crusade armada in orbit.

Adepta Sororitas[]

Adeptus Astartes[]

Forces of Chaos[]

Commanders[]

  • The Pilgrim - Known only as "The Pilgrim", the Right Claw of Khorne, The Pilgrim was the Daemon Prince of Khorne who led a vast host of the forces of Chaos dedicated to Khorne known as the Cholercaust Blood Crusade with an uncanny religious conviction, following the strange path of the crimson Keeler Comet out of the Eye of Terror. It was his intention to lead his Khornate warhost to the gates of the Imperial Palace on Terra itself. Little was known about the Champion of Khorne who led the Blood Crusade, or how he had managed the impossible and united so many of his murderous and notoriously fractious fellow Khornates in the pursuit of a single objective. He was slain in an orbital lance strike upon Umberto II's mausoleum.
  • Havloc the Cold-Blooded - Havloc was the Master of the Fleet for the Cholercaust Blood Crusade. He spearheaded the armada from the Command Pulpit of the World Eaters battle barge Rancour. Havloc was killed when the Legion of the Damned's vessel destroyed the Keeler Comet and the debris from its explosion rained down upon the Cholercaust fleet orbiting Certus-Minor, destroying it utterly.

Heretic Astartes[]

Traitoris Militarum Forces[]

  • Anarchan Razorbacks
  • Armoured Volscani Cataphracts
  • Attilan Traitor 32nd Regiment
  • The Bloodsaken
  • The Deathfest
  • Frater Vulgariate
  • Gornan Venals
  • Hellion Dawn
  • Krugarian Turncoats
  • Necromundan Crazy Eights
  • Regna-Rouge
  • Clan Gamibal, Vessorine Janissaries

Abhuman Forces[]

  • Cannibal Ogryns of the Blood Moons of Goethe

Cholercaust Blood Crusade Warfleet[]

Sources[]

  • The Legion of the Damned (Novel) by Rob Sanders
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