The icon of the Night Lords Traitor Legion.
Yharas Kine is a Chaos Lord of the Night Lords Traitor Legion who commands the battleship Nightmare of Celyx.
Kine commanded the Night Lords forces that invaded the Talledus System during the Talledus War. The Dark Cardinal of the Word Bearers Legion Kor Phaeron, who led the overall forces of Chaos in the assault, convinced Kine to take part with promises of pious souls to torment and the finest pickings of a resource-rich Imperial star system.
He has engaged in a cat-and-mouse war within the Tears of the Emperor asteroid field of the Talledus System against three White Scars Vanguard Space Marines strike forces commanded by Jodagha Khan.
History[]
The Chaos Lord Yharas Kine and his Night Lords warband found rich pickings amidst the Talledan asteroid field known as the Tears of the Emperor. Broadcasting a terrible psychic signal, they lured their prey into darkness before hunting and tormenting them with sadistic delight. Their latest quarry, however, would not prove such an easy kill.
The Nightmare of Celyx drifted through the Tears of the Emperor, broadcasting its terrible signal across the stars. Following the siren ship closely were the shadowed hulls of Night Lords vessels. As Imperial cruisers and escort ships were dragged off course into thebelt, these reaver ships would strike hard and fast, firing boarding hooks and unleashing hunting parties of Heretic Astartes upon their stricken prey.
Such was the horror let loose by the Night Lords that the Tears of the Emperor burned blood red. The asteroid field was visible from the surface of Talledus' war-torn worlds, a ragged wound in the sky that promised a bloody and terrible end.
As the battle for the Talledus System raged on, more and more desperately needed reinforcements disappeared. Driven mad by the strength of the psychic broadcast, Navigators were drawn unerringly into the Night Lords' trap. Astra Militarum generals and officers of the fleet despaired, for every lost ship was a heavy blow to the Imperium's hopes of containing the Talledus conflict.
Salvation came from an unexpected quarter. A strike force of White Scars Vanguard Space Marines under the command of Jodagha Khan, the captain of the 10th Brotherhood, had been tracking the movements of Yharas Kine's Night Lords for several solar months, following the psychic spoor of the Heretic Astartes' tortured victims.
The White Scars had witnessed first-hand the trail of horror that the Heretic Astartes had left in their wake, and their revulsion at the depravity of their fallen brethren was absolute. The Khan's stealth cruisers followed the flight of the Nightmare of Celyx straight to Talledus, and to the Tears of the Emperor.
There the Khan and his Battle-Brothers found a graveyard of tornand twisted vessels, orbited byflayed, vacuum-frozen corpses still wearing expressions of agony. There was no sign of the siren ship itself, but the sudden shriek of proximity sensors revealed a host of incoming vessels -- dagger-shaped Night Lords strike craft raging toward them at full speed.
The resulting void battle was swift and brutal. The smaller Night Lords force had approached under thecover of drifting asteroids, and was upon the White Scars before the Space Marines could bring their lance batteries to bear. The cruiser Thunderstone was boarded by several kill-packs of Raptors, who wreaked terrible carnage upon the crew and sabotaged several motive systems before being driven off by squads of White Scars Infiltrators.
As soon as the tide of battle turned, the Night Lords vessels slipped back into the impervious cover of the asteroid field.
The Night Lords had turned the Tears of the Emperor into their hellish playground, mastering the deadly, shifting battleground and turning it against their foes. The White Scars found themselves not only assailed by the Heretic Astartes, but staggered by the devious traps and lures that the Night Lords had assembled throughout the asteroid field -- planetoids laced with cyclonic charges and astropathic signals that drew the White Scars into pre-prepared killing zones.
Only the multi-spectrum precognition arrays of the White Scars' stealth cruisers allowed them to navigate a path through the haunted darkness. So began a shadow war of escalating brutality, as the warriors of Chogoris sought to track down their hated foes through a maelstrom of blazing rocks and ruined spaceships. The Night Lords had spared the lives of the Navigators from these gutted vessels, though the survivors found themselves subject to a far worse fate than death.
Flayed, agonised and kept alive and conscious by Warp magic, they howled their torment into the void. These disruptive, psychic screams obscured the siren signal broadcast by the Nightmare of Celyx, rendering it all but impossible to discern the ship's exact location.
Each of these lures was an ambush site guarded by kill-packs of Night Lords Raptors, Chaos Space Marines and Daemon Engines. Whether they were located on drifting asteroids or the skeletons of dead vessels, every inch of ground was rigged with las-grid traps, scatter mines and booby-trapped corpses.
Incursor Squads paid a heavy toll to clear out each ambush site, utilising their Divinator-class auspexes to fashion a full-spectrum analysis of the battlefield and disperse this vital combat data to their Battle-Brothers.
Infiltrator Squads breached the lightless halls of dead ships, hurling Smoke Grenades and firing disciplined bursts from their augur-scoped marksman Bolt Carbines.The tenets of speed and constantmovement, central to the art of warfare practised by the warriors of Chogoris, were stymied by the Night Lords' devious tricks.
Yharas Kine and his contingent -- masters of the art of stealth and subterfuge -- delighted in the challenge provided by the Vanguard Space Marines. Claws of elite Chaos Terminators launched short-range teleportation strikes into the hearts of the White Scars formations, butchering and eviscerating with Lightning Claws and Power Axes.
Heldrakes preyed upon the White Scars' dropships in the vacuum of space, and the nightmarish fiends known as Warp Talons breached the hulls of Space Marine cruisers, running amok in the darkness.
For all the cruel ingenuity of the Night Lords' attacks, the White Scars, under the command of the Khan, adapted with remarkable speed. They feigned desperate retreats, drawing the Traitor forces into kill zones of their own. Damaged ships were sacrificed to lure in those Night Lords drunk on the thrill of murder and torture.
The ambushers suddenly became the ambushed as White Scars warriors appeared in their midst, yelling blood-curdling war cries and engaging the Heretic Astartes in brutal, close-quarter battles.
Yet even as the momentum of battle shifted from hour to hour, the Nightmare of Celyx remained unseen, still broadcasting its demented song. Until the White Scars had cut off every false signal, the desperate fighting within the Tears of the Emperor would continue, as the Talledan War raged on with no end in sight.
Sources[]
- Psychic Awakening - Faith & Fury (8th Edition), pp. 11, 18-19