"We are warriors, not cattle. We are the predators, not the prey. It is time we acted as such."
- — Chaos Lord Argento Corian
The Shriven are a warband of Chaos Space Marines that are now part of the Black Legion. They were once a Loyalist Chapter of Space Marines of unknown origin and Founding known as the Brazen Drakes.
The Shriven are the first known former Space Marine Chapter whose Primaris Space Marine reinforcements also turned against the Imperium and went Renegade.
They later aligned themselves with Fabius Bile and served as his key allies during the War of the Spider in the midst of the Psychic Awakening of the Era Indomitus.
The Brazen Drakes may have later been resurrected as a Loyalist Chapter as Space Marine forces of that same name are noted to have taken part in the Charadon Campaign to defend the Charadon Sector from assault by the warriors of the Death Guard.
Warband History
Early History
Khassedur had long been the Chapter homeworld of the Space Marines known as the Brazen Drakes.
Noble and selfless defenders of Humanity, the Brazen Drakes had fought in the Emperor's name for over five thousand standard years.
Chapter's Rebellion
Soon after the opening of the Great Rift in the Era Indomitus, there was a sudden proliferation of supernatural phenomena across the galaxy that was known as the "Psychic Awakening."
This included the strengthening of psychic powers among those who had already possessed them and the emergence of such dangerous abilities among those who had once not been considered psykers.
During this period, many of the Brazen Drakes' Astartes began to spontaneously exhibit uncontrolled and potentially dangerous psychic powers.
At first, Chapter Master Argento Corian agreed with his most trusted officers to take aside those Space Marines "touched by the taint," and personally executed each one of them with his Lightning Claw in rites of purification to hide what was believed to be Chaos corruption from the wider Imperium.
However, the psychological stress of having to kill his own battle-brothers slowly ate away at him from within, until in the midst of a campaign against the forces of Chaos' Lost and the Damned he finally refused to end Brother Kier's life, an Astartes from Captain Cathal's company who had defended himself from a berserker Ogryn by suddenly unleashing psychic flames.
He told his inner circle that the Brazen Drakes had fought for many Terran years for the Imperium and if they were to be condemned as Heretics simply for the uncontrolled emergence of psychic powers, which he had no doubt would afflict all of them in time, then Corian was determined that the Chapter would fight only for itself from now on.
Corian convinced the rest of his inner circle to rebel openly and purge those among their brethren who resisted their decision.
Accounts of the brutal civil war that followed could fill a volume in their own right: how Corian renamed himself "the Enlightener" of his faithful disciples; how their conflict with their Loyalist former brethren spiralled out to consume three entire Imperial star systems; how at last the Brazen Drakes were defeated by the Torchbearer task force charged with delivering Primaris Marine gene-tech and reinforcements to these once-loyal Space Marines.
Greyshields' Rebellion
"You have torn this fleet in two, traitor! You have turned on the Emperor's loyal servants. You have slain my brothers and forced my hand!"
"The heretical gene-seed within your bodies is its own condemnation. I am Custodes. I speak with the Emperor’s voice. Were you loyal, you would set down your weapons and accept your guilt. But you side with your brothers before your Emperor, as the Adeptus Astartes always have."
- — Exchange between Captain Gerion and Shield-Captain Tyvar on the bridge of the Lux-Imperatus
At an unknown point during the Indomitus Crusade, a Torchbearer fleet was sent out from the crusade with a complement of two Greyshield Primaris Space Marines companies and detachments of Adeptus Custodes and Sisters of Silence commanded by Captain Gerion, Shield-Captain Tyvar and Knight-Centura Dessima, respectively.
The Torchbearers' goal was to reach the Brazen Drakes' homeworld of Khassedur and convince the Brazen Drakes' Chapter Master to accept the Primaris Marine reinforcements and the gift of Belisarius Cawl's Primaris upgrade technology.
After long solar months of toil and trial, blazing battlefields and ferocious Warp Storms, the fleet arrived at its destination and discovered the planet had been ravaged by war -- and the Brazen Drakes had already been damned as Hereticus Diabolus Extremis by an Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus.
Immediately upon learning the news of the Brazen Drakes' decision to turn Renegade, Shield-Captain Tyvar ordered that the Greyshield Primaris Marines who were intended to join the Brazen Drakes be designated as Traitors and captured.
Shocked by what he perceived as the sudden and unexpected betrayal of the Custodians when the Primaris Marines had as yet done nothing wrong, Captain Gerion tried to argue in defence of his brothers, who had fought faithfully for the Emperor up to that point.
But Tyvar rejected this appeal, believing that the taint already present in the Brazen Drakes' gene-seed was now obviously present in their Primaris brethren. Instead, the Custodian requested that Gerion order his warriors to disarm themselves and accept that as the bearers of flawed gene-seed their very existence had now made them a danger to the Imperium.
In that tense moment, one of Gerion's Astartes present on the bridge of the warship Lux-Imperatus raised his voice in protest, and was executed at once by Tyvar with his Guardian Spear.
Gerion responded by opening fire upon Tyvar and ordering all of his Primaris Greyshields to seize the Torchbearer fleet, claiming that they were the ones who had been betrayed by the Custodians.
A fight broke out on the bridge between the Primaris Marines and the agents of the Emperor, which ended with the death of Gerion and approximately ten of the Greyshields. In the wake of the Greyshields' rebellion, Tyvar proclaimed his intention to not rest until every Brazen Drakes Space Marine, old or new, lay dead.
From Khassedur, Argento Corian, the so-called Enlightener, and the ragged remains of his Brazen Drakes Astartes fled final retribution. They made for the Nachmund Gauntlet and the perception of safety offered by the lawless wilds beyond in the Dark Imperium where the light of the Astronomican did not shine.
In their wake, the Torchbearer fleet -- commanded by Adeptus Custodes Shield-Captain Atal Tyvar -- destroyed the Primaris gene-tech they had brought with them and executed the handful of surviving Brazen Drakes Greyshields, lest the taint of their Chapter's heresy run through their veins.
Tyvar then vowed that he and his fleet would hunt the Enlightener to the ends of the galaxy, and set off in furious pursuit. Little did they suspect that news of the Brazen Drakes' treachery had made it back to Terra by secret channels, and that another Imperial force was mobilising elite assets to track Corian down and slay him...
War of the Spider
"What unclean power burns within these aberrations? Not the dark purity of the Daemon, nor the genetic might of the Space Marine. No, this is something else, something debase and singular. I must have its secrets for myself… "
- — Chaos Lord Argento Corian
The foul Heretic Astartes fleshshaper Fabius Bile's path converged with that of the Enlightener Argento Corian by chance, deep within the war-torn expanse of the Cadian Gate. The Primogenitor was ever a master opportunist and soon turned happenstance to his advantage.
Bile was labouring in service to a grand new scheme, one he had conceived of even as the galaxy writhed with the opening of the Great Rift. Speculation was rife throughout the Eye of Terror and beyond as to what the Spider might be planning: another attempt at cloning or creating his own primarch; the fashioning of some dread new altered army; development of a weapon that could lay low Roboute Guilliman or indeed any other similarly godlike being.
Bile himself had revealed nothing of his schemes, even to his closest lieutenants, but he moved with a purpose through the mayhem and horror of the Imperium Nihilus.
That purpose had first manifested in the theft of a mighty arcane artefact that had originally been bestowed upon the Death Guard by none other than the Great Unclean One Rotigus himself. Named the Ark Cornucontagious, this gruesome gift of Nurgle seethed with a Warp malady that triggered catastrophic and uncontrolled bodily regeneration in its victims.
To the unnatural physiognomies of the Death Guard this was a boon, for the Ark's foul emissions allowed them to heal battle damage faster than their foes could inflict it. To any other being, however, the Chaos relic's effect was a monstrous blight that soon reduced even the mightiest warrior to a heaving mound of diseased flesh and ruptured, blubbery innards.
What uses Bile could have for such a perilous and revolting Chaos artefact was a secret he kept to himself. Regardless, at the head of a ragtag alliance of Renegade Chaos Space Marine warbands he had braved the perils of the newly conquered Nurglite Scourge Stars and successfully made off with the Ark, safely swathing it within a potent stasis field.
That campaign had cost Bile all but a handful of his followers, however. Now he fled back towards the Eye of Terror, through the roiling Warp Storms of the Imperium Nihilus, with Typhus of the Death Guard himself at his heels.
Bile could not flee directly back to his lair in the Eye of Terror lest he bring the wrath of the Death Guard down upon it. He needed fresh allies who could help him dissuade his pursuers before he made good his escape. Fate, or perhaps the Dark Gods, sent him the Enlightener.
Argento Corian had not been idle since reaching War Zone Cadia. He had claimed the tainted Fortress World of Dessah for his base and had reforged the Brazen Drakes into a Heretic Astartes warband calling themselves "the Shriven," who now fought under the colours of Abaddon the Despoiler's Black Legion.
Yet Corian had caught wind of the vengeful Imperial pursuit even now bearing down upon him. Thus, even as Bile saw in the Shriven an army he could turn against his pursuers, so they believed that with the Primogenitor's gifts they would be strong enough to crush the Imperial agents coming for their heads.
It was a diabolical alliance of mutual mistrust, and one that Bile soon turned to his twisted advantage.
Ambush on Limaxis
The poisonous light of a mutant star painted the brutish towers and redoubts of Dessah as Fabius Bile and Argento Corian cemented their alliance. Bile co-opted a sprawling suite of bio-warded vaults within which to continue his great works.
He concealed the Ark Cornucontagious behind runic locks and servitor guns, then set his acolytes to work augmenting an initial wave of the Shriven's warriors. The Enlightener, it seemed, had lost none of the strategic cunning or charisma from his days as a Loyalist Chapter Master.
Bile saw evidence of not only a prodigious private army of Heretic Astartes serving at Corian's whim, but also hordes of Chaos Cultists, mutants and rogue psykers as well as a menacing complement of Traitor warships that prowled the void beyond Dessah's orbital envelope.
Bile knew he could do much with such resources, but time was of the essence. Even as he worked upon Corian's bio-augmentations in person, the Spider urged his new employer to swift action against the approaching threats.
Though he was initially fixated upon his Imperial pursuers, the Enlightener soon grasped the true scale of the more immediate peril represented by Typhus' Death Guard. He might have been expected to fly into a rage when he realised the size of the army that pursued his new ally. He did not.
The elixirs Bile had injected him with had made Corian stronger, but had also plunged the hooks of addiction and dependency into his soul. Coupled with certain subtle but invasive augmentations the Spider had wrought within his nervous system, the Enlightener was now Fabius Bile's creature whether he wished it or no.
Warp auguries by Corian's slave-sorcerers suggested that Typhus' flagship, the dreaded Terminus Est, was but days from exiting the Warp above Dessah. Worse, the omens told of a fleet of plague ships sailing in his polluted wake, all of them packed to the gunwales with the diseased worshippers of Nurgle.
If Typhus' force was allowed to attack the Shriven in such strength then the fight might well go ill for Bile and his new allies. Even if they prevailed against the Traveller, the Shriven would be decimated, left powerless to stop the Imperial retribution forces also drawing closer by the day.
A preemptive strike was required, to bleed Typhus' forces so badly that their attack would stall, or be called off altogether. The Enlightener suggested the world of Limaxis. Though Dessah shared its local space with a handful of gas giants and radiation-bathed hellscapes, Limaxis was the only nominally habitable planet that now lay between Typhus and his quarry.
In the wake of whatever catastrophe destroyed its cities, Limaxis' oceans had risen to swallow all but one of its landmasses. This region, now known only as the "Drowning Wastes," had become a swampy morass from which rose the rusting cadavers of dead hive cities and long-abandoned Imperial fortifications.
Such terrain was hardly the ideal theatre in which to face the relentless Death Guard or their corrupting plagues, but with their strategic options limited, Bile and Corian elected to proceed.
Moving fast, the Enlightener mobilised almost half of his military assets. He and Bile led a formidable force into the void towards Limaxis, accompanied by the first batch of grotesquely altered Shriven -- known as the "Terata" -- and augmented with certain arcane technologies that Bile had accumulated over his long years.
Their plan was set. The Spider was determined to drive Typhus from his trail, and cared little for what this would cost his allies.
As the enemy pounded his warriors with harassing fire and probed for weaknesses, Typhus used the powers of a slave-sorcerer to contact his plague ship captains in orbit. What he learned gave the Death Guard fresh heart; successfully reforming their line, the plague ships Filthmonger, Vermian Curse and Leper’s Blood had driven the Shriven cruisers back, mauling both the Hand of Darkness and the Bloodied Talon in the process. Typhus’ captains requested permission to press their attack and smash the smaller Shriven fleet, but the Traveller refused.
Instead he had the least damaged of his ships form a blockade to hold the Shriven spacecraft at bay. Meanwhile, the Moribund and the Rancid Blade settled low in Limaxis' atmosphere and unleashed carefully targeted creeping bombardments.
As lance beams and plague bombs screamed down from on high, the outermost Shriven support elements suddenly found themselves in the midst of a devastating firestorm. Herded inwards by the encircling fire patterns, Bile and his forces found themselves caught between ruinous detonations to their rear and the thundering guns of the Death Guard to the fore.
Worse was to follow as fresh waves of Death Guard made planetfall amidst storms of fire to the north, southeast and southwest of the crash site. From their lowered ramps issued wave upon wave of plague-ridden Poxwalkers.
The grinning, groaning zombies spilled from their landing craft like vomit and encircled the Black Legion forces with the horrible inevitability of a wasting sickness. It appeared that the ambushers were now caught in their own barbed web.
The Limaxis offensive had never been intended as a fight to the death, however, and Bile and Corian had their contingencies in place. Vox signals flashed northwards to where three of the Brazen Drakes' Renegade Thunderhawks and an ancient Emperor's Children Stormbird waited amidst the shadows of a rusting Imperial hangar. Not for nothing had Bile conditioned his slave clones to bring his captured Death Guard ship, the Wretch, down where they had.
Tangled screens of foliage burned away as the four heavy gunships burst from concealment with a scream of powerful engines. Blitzing the Death Guard's northernmost landing site as they went, the aircraft made for the looming hulk of a drowned habblock that had been designated as the Black Legion extraction site.
Led by Corian and the last of Bile's first wave of Terata, the Spider's surviving forces cut a bloody path through the groaning Poxwalkers to reach the slumped hab-stack. Transhuman warriors were dragged down and buried by mounds of grinning neverdead, their armour peeled off them bit by bit, their eye-lenses smashed out and questing fingers thrust into the gelid orbs beneath.
Yet with Bile's augmented warriors rending, hacking and bludgeoning at the fore, and Corian's psychic blasts reducing swathes of Poxwalkers to ash, the Black Legion reached their objective. Bile himself led the push up the hab-stack's tilted, creeper-hung stairways and was the first to reach the lowered boarding ramp of his relic Stormbird.
Battle of Bairsten Prime
The forces of the Adeptus Custodes face the Shriven on Bairsten Prime.
In the days following their triumphal return from Limaxis, the Shriven moved with even greater confidence. They had outmanoeuvred and -- to their minds -- outfought Typhus himself. Having seen how ferociously the Terata fought, they were able to gloss over the horrors of the warriors' demise, and Bile found himself with no shortage of willing test subjects for his surgeries.
Warbands of Shriven took to the Warp aboard swift frigates, returning with more luckless "raw materials" for his elixirs and experiments. The Spider worked busily day and night.
But Argento Corian was less than delighted with Bile's successes. The Enlightener was sharply conscious that, day by day, his authority was being undermined.
With Bile's compounds running through his veins, he could not bring himself to act against the parasite he had invited into his fortress. He could, however, remind his followers who their true master was. This he resolved to do.
Auguries and daemonic whispers revealed that the Imperial retribution force was now only a handful of short Warp jumps away. Corian's seers told him that his enemies had halted in the Belis Corona System and were currently in orbit over the world of Bairsten Prime.
Corian announced that he would not cower and wait for his enemies to beard him in his lair. Instead he mustered all but the most essential garrison forces and took ship at once for the Belis Corona System.
Bile accompanied him at the head of his latest batch of altered warriors, yet he had little interest in supporting what he saw as the Enlightener's posturing. Instead, Bile had his own agenda upon Bairsten Prime...
Shield-Captain Tyvar had led his Torchbearers through the war-torn Nachmund Gauntlet, through the fringes of War Zone Vigilus and on into the very rim of the Eye of Terror. He and his comrades had remained strong, their purpose unwavering, but their road had been perilous indeed.
Even with a full cadre of Silent Sisters scattered across their craft, each Warp jump through the storms of the Imperium Nihilus had been hellish. They had faced hostile forces time and again. They had suffered losses.
Now, with their quarry close at hand and the moment of truth almost upon them, Shield-Captain Tyvar had elected to rearm and repair his surviving forces before running his prey to ground.
Tyvar's hopes of refitting at the Imperial naval docks of Belis Corona were dashed; that mighty fortress was beset by myriad foes, and what resources it had were required to keep its own fleets operational.
Instead, Tyvar's task force settled into high orbit above Bairsten Prime in the hopes that the tech-magi who ran its famed duralium mines could be prevailed upon to effect repairs.
In fact, the Torchbearers found a world abandoned and fallen into ruin. What catastrophe had overtaken Bairsten Prime was unclear, but repeating warnings cycled across every vox frequency, beseeching all to avoid this cursed world in the Omnissiah's name.
Tyvar was in no mood to heed such ghostly deterrents, however; not when auspex confirmed vast quantities of refined duralium languishing in rusted silos within a complex signified as Refinery XVI.
Leaving his own tech-adepts to make what repairs they could upon his warships, the shield-captain led his forces to the surface. They dove through its furious electrical storms to claim the resources they required.
Such was the Imperial disposition when the Enlightener and his fleet tore their way from the Warp into the Belis Corona System. Swift and powerful though they were, the Imperial warships were in the midst of repairs. Heavy shuttles plied the void between their warships and the surface refinery.
Presented with the sudden threat of an advancing Black Legion fleet, Shield-Captain Tyvar's ships could do little more than fend off the Heretic ships with battery fire and do what they could to protect the vulnerable ore shuttles.
The Enlightener had little interest in the Imperial ships, however; his quarry lay on the planet below, for he had sworn before all his warriors that he would slay Atal Tyvar in single combat. The enemy's fleet could be dealt with later, once the warriors they transported had been slain.
On Corian's orders, flights of armoured gunships and combat landers flurried from the embarkation decks of his cruisers. Escorted by flights of Black Legion Heldrakes, they swept down upon Bairsten’s equatorial mining plains and the isolated life-signs around Refinery XVI.
The leading Shriven dropships were met by ferocious anti-aircraft fire. Tyvar had awoken the servitor crews of the refinery's Icarus air defence turrets; now the weapons tracked and span, barrels thumping as they fired clouds of flak shells up at the descending craft.
Heldrakes pinwheeled away trailing flames and wing fragments. A heavy lander detonated, raining wreckage and blazing bodies down upon the refinery. It was Fabius Bile himself who gave the order for the Shriven to redirect their assault, sending their dropships swooping away towards the small industrial spaceport a kilometre to the south.
Three such ports serviced the complex; solid, utilitarian assemblages of landing pads and outbuildings, all connected to the refinery by mag-rails set atop high rocky causeways. Shield-Captain Tyvar had set squads of Custodians to defend each of them.
As the Shriven craft swept down one after another upon the southern port, however, it rapidly became clear that the odds were impossible, even for warriors of the Adeptus Custodes. Shrugging off hammering volleys of fire from the dropships, the Custodians fell back with their Guardian Spears blazing, and fled along the causeway.
Corian and his Shriven were right on their heels. Bile, for his part, hung back, marshalling a sizeable force of Terata before following more cautiously in the Enlightener's wake. His approach proved prudent as, halfway along the causeway, a band of Vertus Praetors struck. They had streaked in low, using the rocky bulk of the causeway to mask their approach.
Now they reared suddenly into view amidst the howl of powerful engines and subjected the Shriven to a punishing salvo of missiles. As they did, the retreating Custodes turned and let fly. Explosions tore Heretic Astartes apart. A Shriven Predator detonated with a fiery roar, chunks of its wreckage spinning away ablaze.
The Enlightener's furious oaths echoed across the lightning-lashed plains. The air quivered with empyric tension before the altered sorcerer unleashed a furious storm of psychic energies into the causeway.
Even the vaunted aegis of the Emperor was not enough to stop this explosion of raw force, which hurled three of the Custodians from the causeway and sent two Dawneagle Jetbikes spinning away to explode on the hard bedrock below.
Again the surviving Imperial forces fell back and again the Shriven gave chase. Again Bile hung back amidst the bulk of the assault force, watching with detached interest as Corian and his Chosen warriors reached the railhead in the shadow of the refinery's towers.
Here the Imperial forces struck again, bolters and flamers roaring as squads of Null-Maidens sprung an ambush of their own. Even Bile recoiled at the null-aura that the Silent Sisters projected, while Corian -- front and centre in the Renegade battle line -- howled in agony at the sudden stifling of his empyric senses.
The attack might have faltered there and then, but Bile hissed orders of his own. Altered warriors and flesh-twisted Heretic Astartes Bikers bulled their way to the fore with Bile in their midst and hurled themselves at the outnumbered foe.
At the same time the surviving Heldrakes swept back in, their draconic shadows criss-crossing the engagement area as Warpflames belched from their maws.
Once more the Imperial forces fell back in good order, leaving their fallen blazing or bolt-riddled in their wake. This time the Enlightener halted; he had successfully claimed a beachhead upon the rocky plateau that housed the refinery proper, but only thanks to Bile's quick thinking. Conscious that his control was slipping, and perhaps his sanity with it, the Enlightener fought to think clearly and strategise.
Snapping out orders, he broke his surviving warriors into several smaller warbands, each supported by Obliterators and Daemon Engines, each led in by squads in Rhino APCs who could watch for further traps as the Shriven pushed forward. Auspex showed the majority of the foe gathered around the macro-silos at the refinery's heart, and so the Shriven pushed that way through the tangle of rusted machinery, creaking cranes and abandoned structures.
Bile, however, split his small force off from the main advance. Corian was only too happy to see him go, ordering only that Bile should stay out of his way. The Spider, for his part, was also pleased, for here was a rare chance to harvest fine specimens for his great work.
He vanished into the gloomy alleys between the refinery's towering buildings, taking with him several squads of his most heavily altered followers as well as a gaggle of gibbering acolytes clad in rubberised surgical gear.
Again the Imperial forces struck at the Shriven, and again. Now, though, the Heretic Astartes met them with disciplined fire and vicious counterassaults that saw even the Adeptus Custodes driven back. At last Corian led the way into the refinery's central processing yard amidst blizzards of psychic fire. There the Shriven met the main strength of the Imperial force and, had their master been in his right mind, they might have rethought their assault.
Shield-Captain Tyvar had gathered a formidable force of Custodians and Null-Maidens around him, Venerable Contemptor Dreadnoughts and even Land Raiders rumbling up in support. Yet Bile's twisted surgery had done terrible things to the Enlightener, and to many of his followers.
Unable to restrain their psychotic battle-lust, they hurled themselves into a maniacal charge and battle was joined. As the fighting raged, none noticed the dark figure that crouched amidst the rusting walkways of a macro-silo high above. The figure stayed still as death, a long and deadly-looking rifle cradled in its hands.
Only now that he had his harvest did the Spider turn and lead the last of his altered warriors back to Corian's aid. He arrived in time to see the Shriven hard-pressed and teetering upon the brink of collapse. The Enlightener himself, however, was hanging suspended in a corona of witchfire, eyes blazing and hands outstretched as he drove Shield-Captain Tyvar to his knees.
It was then that the echoing crack of the high-powered sniper rifle wielded by a Vindicare Assassin cut through the din of battle. Argento Corian jerked in mid-air. Blood puffed from the side of his skull. His fires blinked out in a heartbeat and his body crashed heavily to the ground.
The battle ended in that moment. In the rout that followed, only the martial might of the Shriven allowed them to execute a fighting retreat to their drop craft. Amidst the mayhem and bloodshed, Bile's Terata bore the twitching body of Argento Corian from the field. Bile led them, gunning down the few Loyalists who barred his path and smiling all the while.
Battle of Dessah
The Shriven seers wailed of not one but two foes drawing closer with every passing solar hour. In desperation, some amongst the warband beseeched Fabius Bile to aid them, while others muttered darkly that the Spider had already done more than enough.
For his part, Bile was satisfied with events. He had not predicted Corian's fall upon Bairsten Prime and had some grave suspicions about its authors, but he had been quick to capitalise upon this unexpected boon. Bile had made great strides behind the sealed doors of his laboratory. Now he sought to make good his escape.
Bile gathered the Shriven within the Enlightener's grand throne room on Dessah and addressed them. He spoke of his desire to see these invaders crushed, both the filth-ridden Death Guard and the presumptuous corpse-worshippers. He could do it, he said, but not without the complete loyalty of the remaining Shriven. This was at last too much for Argento Corian's surviving Chosen.
Tempers flared as they accused the rest of their warband of being duped. They called Bile an opportunist ghoul, cursed the day he had come to Dessah, and laid the Enlightener's death firmly at Bile’s feet. At this, the Spider merely smiled and signalled his surgeon-acolytes to unveil his latest masterpiece.
Argento Corian was much changed. The parts of his brain not destroyed by the round passing through his skull had been scooped out by Bile's Chirurgeon. The altered golem that stalked into the throne room was the Enlightener in name only.
Bulging red eyes stared from a face riven with stitch marks, scarified runes and wires. His armour strained to contain his muscle-bulked physique. Pipes and tubes gurgled with weird fluids, flushing them through Corian's armour and body alike.
Unbridled psychic potential crackled around the Enlightener, though with his skull emptied of its contents all but Fabius Bile wondered how such a thing could be.
Incensed, those loyal to Corian's former incarnation went for their blades. The Enlightener annihilated them with beams of psychic fire. Bile asked again for the loyalty of the Shriven, and this time, standing over the blackened and mangled remains of their former comrades, they agreed to a warrior.
Bile planned to augment every remaining Shriven Chaos Space Marine. He ordered all defenders concentrated within Dessah's Primary Bastion, which was partially built into a towering mountain. He commanded that the outer defences be demolished and laced with booby traps, ensuring his enemies would have to come at him through a lethal killing zone.
When the foe attacked, the Enlightener and the Shriven were to stand firm in the fortress' defence, drawing the foe in and pinning them before the walls. Only then would Bile unleash his master stroke. A flight of modified Heldrakes would belch neurotoxin fumes over the battle.
Bile assured his followers this would leave them untouched while driving the Death Guard and Imperial warriors into a murderous frenzy. With their enemies lost to madness and tearing one another apart, Bile and the remaining Shriven could flee aboard a swift frigate and slip away into the Warp.
The surviving Shriven warships attempted to use Bile's night shields to ambush the Death Guard again. This time Typhus was ready. He had spread tracker entities across his fleet and given each of them the Warp-scent of the Shriven. Thus, even as the Black Legion cruisers pounced, they found gun batteries primed and pointed right at them. Explosive carnage filled Dessah's orbital envelope.
Wreckage rained down as flaming meteors through the planet's atmosphere. When the Battle Barge Drake Rampant attempted a desperate and horribly misjudged boarding assault against the Terminus Est, the battle swung in Typhus' favour.
Soon enough the rusting, plague-riddled hulk of the Drake Rampant was tumbling away while Death Guard landers swept down upon the Primary Bastion.
As one, the Heldrakes swept from their perches atop the mountain's peak. They screamed down upon the warriors battling furiously in the breach.
The Enlightener was hammering the enemy hordes with one psychic blast after another, his Shriven laying down fusillades of fire as the last of their tanks fired again and again.
Still the Death Guard pressed forward, Poxwalkers in their hundreds clambering over their own fallen to totter into the fight. The undead buried the altered warriors with their numbers while Plague Marines raked the Black Legion lines with fire.
Further back, out amongst the ruins, the Imperial forces were cutting a gory swathe towards the breach, but their momentum was slowing in the face of the relentless servants of Nurgle.
Now it was time to trigger yet more anarchy and bloodshed. One at a time the Heldrakes opened their jaws wide and, as they swooped low over the battle, breathed roiling clouds of mauve gasses across the combatants. Bile had possessed neither time nor inclination to tailor his toxins to his foes, but he had ample data concerning the altered biochemistry of his augmented Shriven.
Thus, as the clouds drifted down and flowed into rebreathers and open mouths, it was the Enlightener and his warriors who were driven to new heights of berserk fury, not their foes.
One last betrayal of his ill-fated allies by Fabius Bile; one last trick to ensure that they kept his pursuers busy long enough to cover his escape.
Execution Force Retaliation
"Holding position in orbit over Dessah. Execution Force Retaliation is en route. Target is of Adeptus Astartes origin, Excommunicate Traitoris: Brazen Drakes, Chapter Master Argento Corian. May the Emperor’s retribution strike swiftly and irrevocably."
- — Officio Assassinorum Adept
At some point after Argento Corian led the Brazen Drakes into their betrayal of the Imperium, the High Lords of Terra ordered the deployment of an Officio Assassinorum Execution Force, codenamed "Execution Force Retaliation," to eliminate the Renegade Chapter Master Argento Corian.
The agents located their target on the world of Dessah and deployed at once to hunt him down.
Corian survived the attack and the Renegade Brazen Drakes later joined the Black Legion as a new warband of Heretic Astartes that became known as the Shriven.
As the Enlightener and his berserk warriors struck at the Death Guard, they had torn and blasted so many foes that mountains of dead lay all around them. Yet their numbers too were dwindling. It was now that the Execution Force despatched to Dessah struck, determined to finish the job they had nearly completed at Bairsten Prime.
First came a rifle round, fired from atop a ruined spire. The Enlightener's head snapped up and he obliterated the bullet in mid-air with a psychic blast. The empyric bolt roared on, back up the shot's trajectory to impact with killing force. Amidst the explosion a ruined, black-clad figure tumbled blazing to its death.
Next came the Callidus Assassin, morphing into her true form as she suddenly emerged from amidst the Enlightener's shocked cultists. Her neural shredder howled as she blasted first one Shriven Terata, then another and another. Flipping over a fourth, the Callidus swept her phase sword around to decapitate the altered warrior, then drove the blade into the Enlightener's chest.
The sorcerer roared with pain then blasted the lithe assassin backwards into a mound of corpses with another psychic pulse. Yet his bellow of triumph became a howl of agony as a beam of raw darkness hit him, banishing his psychic powers in an instant.
The Enlightener looked up to see the eerie figure of a Culexus Assassin flickering towards him. Before the sorcerer could regather his powers the skull-masked figure of an Eversor Assassin tore through a knot of Terata like an artillery shell and ploughed into him.
The frenzied assassin tore madly at the Enlightener. One hand was blown off by a bolt round from the Eversor's Executioner Pistol before the Assassin's hypodermic talons sunk deep into the Enlightener's face.
One eye punctured, flesh blackening with toxins, the altered sorcerer grabbed his assailant by the throat, lifted him high and snapped the Assassin's neck with raw psychokinetic force.
The Enlightener enjoyed a moment of triumph before the Eversor's blood chemistry went into critical meltdown and his body exploded with the force of a demolition charge. As the dust settled, the ruptured corpse of the Enlightener golem finally twitched its last. With his death, the Shriven effectively ceased to exist as a functional Chaos Space Marine warband.
Warband Beliefs
The nature of the original Chapter cult that defined the Brazen Drakes is unknown, although they were a Chapter once known for their strength of will and resolute spirit.
Upon Chapter Master Argento Corian's rebellion, the Brazen Drakes became convinced that they didn't deserve to die due to the development of their unexpected psychic powers, nor for what they came to see as the hollow, corrupt ideology of the Imperium.
Instead, under Corians' command, they believed that they had a right to fight for their own destiny and to become the masters of their own future.
Among the Greyshield Primaris Marines assigned to the Brazen Drakes, Captain Gerion violently protested Shield-Captain Tyvar's accusation of heresy, as he still considered himself a loyal servant of the Emperor, and he likewise refused to condemn his Primaris battle-brothers just because they had been assigned to a Firstborn Chapter that had turned against the Emperor before their arrival.
It is not known how the majority of the Greyshield Primaris Space Marines assigned to the Brazen Drakes reacted to the news of the execution of Gerion at Tyvar's hands, but at least half a dozen of these warriors came to defend him on the bridge of the Lux-Imperatus.
Notable Brazen Drakes/Shriven
- Chaos Lord Argento Corian, "the Enlightener" (KIA) - Also known as Corian the Enlightener, Argento Corian was the Chaos Lord of The Shriven and the last Chapter Master of the Brazen Drakes. It was he who led the rebellion of the original Firstborn forces of the Chapter against the Imperium. Corian possessed psychic abilities and was heavily augmented by the work of his untrustworthy ally Fabius Bile, and found himself increasingly addicted to Bile's various stimulants and alchemical drugs, which led to a slow loss of control over his warband. Corian was effectively slain by a Vindicare Assassin on Bairsten Prime when he was shot through the head, but Bile resurrected him using his Warp-alchemy as a vile Chaos sorcerer-golem. Corian was finally killed by an Eversor Assassin during the Death Guard assault on Dessah, who took the Chaos Lord's life by detonating his body with explosive chemicals.
- Chapter Master Kaslyn - Kaslyn was the last Loyalist Chapter Master of the Brazen Drakes before their turn to Chaos and Corian's direct predecessor in the position.
- Captain Cathal - Cathal is the captain of an unknown company of the Brazen Drakes. He supported Corian's decision to rebel against the Imperium to save his battle-brothers.
- Captain Gerion (KIA) - Gerion was the Primaris Captain of one of the two Greyshield companies sent by the Indomitus Crusade's Torchbearer fleet to reinforce the Firstborn Brazen Drakes Chapter. He refused to turn himself and his warriors in to Shield-Captain Tyvar and called upon them to resist and seize control of the Torchbearer fleet. He was executed by Tyvar soon after for this act of treason.
- Brother Kier - Kier was a battle-brother of Captain Cathal's company. He manifested spontaneous psychic powers, but was saved from execution for this mutation by Argento Corian's rebellion against the Imperium.
Warband Appearance
Warband Colours
The Brazen Drakes' Chapter colours are not recorded in current Imperial records.
As The Shriven, the warband adopted the standard colours of the Black Legion, black and gold.
Warband Badge
The Brazen Drakes' Chapter badge is not recorded in current Imperial records.
As The Shriven, the warband used the standard heretical iconography of the Black Legion.
Sources
- Psychic Awakening - War of the Spider (8th Edition), pp. 4-5, 8-19, 74
- Warhammer Community - Psychic Awakening: Burden of Brotherhood
- Warhammer Community - Psychic Awakening: Consequences
- Warhammer Community - Psychic Awakening: Retaliation
- Warhammer Community - Psychic Awakening: War Zone Cadia
- War Zone Charadon - Act I: The Book of Rust, pp. 40-41