Prelude

This is the beginning of the Crusade of Brass and Iron, as it was recorded by the Mechanicus Cult Cambria during the waning years of the 41st Millennium.

The latest Chapter of this story and polls to vote on its continuation can be found in the Gallery of Brass and Iron.

### The Gates of Cambria

Prologue, 908.M41

*For ten thousand years it stood unyielding, the gateway to a cyclopean tomb of technology,*
for ten thousand years the bulwark of a past long forgotten.

The gate stood tall, the sole feature of a monolith reaching higher than the sky, extending further in all directions than any world would naturally allow. Before its walls, the land itself crumbled into dust, even time seemed to bend in its pitch-black shadow. The gate of Cambria stood eternal, a monument worthy of the Omnissiah's crown.
Within it, there lay the single most complex mechanism to ever be encountered by the Explorators who found the Ringworld Cambria. Wrought from a material stronger than known laws allowed, older than the Imperium's written memory, it was an enigma beckoning. The gate could not be forced by conventional means, nor any attempt ever is made by the Mechanicum. For the priests of the Omnissiah recognized in this mechanism a creation of the Machine God, a blessed relic from the Dark Age of Technology.

On the threshold of their heaven's gate, the servants of the Omnissiah erected a kingdom of machines, a hierarchy of cogitation. All logic engines the explorator fleet could muster and a thousandfold more cogitators were united in a grand monument of circuitry, their voices of binary chant converging into one great choir, one communion of machines intent on but one task in all the universe, to open the gates which beheld the great maker, the Omnissiah, to unveil secrets of a glorious past and reclaim these blessed gifts for the betterment of the Cult Mechanicus Cambria.
Ceaselessly toiled the Kingdom Tartarus, its spirit tended to by engineseer and magos legions. The oldest and the brightest minds of all the ring of Cambria would make their pilgrimage before the gate and link themselves to the great chain of cogitation, adding their own self to the work which had begun so many generations before.

In the twilight of the waning forty-first Millennium, the great work of the Cogitator Kingdom Tartarus came to an end. Ten thousand years after the first explorators beheld the Cambrian Gates, their gargantuan mechanism was first set into motion again. Wheels beyond the memory of all mankind turned once more, circuitry from the Dark Ages aligned and from deep within sounded the echo of a waking god in the machine. Countless souls rejoiced, the flesh and minds of a hundred linked ascended generations, as they bore witness to the opening of the Gates of Cambria. Prophets of the Great Maker across all of Cambria proclaimed the coming Age of Revelation.

### Silica Animus

Beyond the threshold of the open gate, the devout children of the Omnissiah found naught but light. A light so powerful as to overwhelm their god machines, a light so magnificent as to blind all those who laid their eyes on it, a light so fundamental as to overwrite the memories and data banks of all machines for many thousand miles. It could be nothing else but the Omnissiah's will incarnate and it shot skyward to the firmament.

The light soaring up from the Cambrian Gates was reflected by the inner mirror plains, gathered into a ring of livid fire around the sun. And on all the ringworld it was bright as day, the sky burning with an azure flame, an omen half-remembered only in the most ancient prophecies of few untouched tribal descendants from the dark ages long gone.
But the fire n the sky had a mind of its own, had no need for remembrance by any living soul to fulfill its purpose by some ancient design. Protocols written in the binary chant of the Omnissiah engaged the machinery of the ring and for the first time in a hundred centuries, the mirrors of the Ringworld joined together and created a lense to send the light out into the universe. A beam, a column of white and sky-blue flame began soaring outward bound, into the depth of space, its course determined for an unknown destination.

For three hundred days, the sky was set alight and the great beam of the Cambrian gates continued ceaselessly. And for three hundred days, the cogitator kingdom Tartarus was thrown into chaos, unable to comprehend the fires unleashed from what they had thought to be a temple to the Omnissiah. Only the wise and old of the Cult Mechanicus Cambria, those who had lived to reach wisdom beyond that of any flesh and blood, could see the truth of the matter in all its terrible clarity. And they proclaimed, offering their lives as prophets of a great mistake, the coming of an evil greater than any soul of Tartarus had ever imagined.
In opening the Omnissiah's ancient gates, they had awoken what had once angered the machine god so and spelled doom for all mankind long before even the ruinous powers of the Immaterium were unchained.

Silica Animus, An Abominable Intelligence returned.

### The Destruction of Airanaha

The light sent forth from the Gates of Cambria was the least in the spectrum of exotic energies, the vengeful voice of a technological horror buried in the red sands of an artificial world. It was ancient and powerful but shackled by the laws of mundane reality as they had existed in an age before the warp was stirred. To break free from the force which binds the continuum of space and time together, it had been aimed by an elder, malevolent intelligence at the sole place where the dimensions of the universe collide, the event horizon of the nearest singularity, a black hole fifty-two lightyears away.

Burning for three hundred days, the gates had created a lance of unknowable energies, a flash wiping away all that which was in its path. And the storm of lightning left nothing but shadows in its wake, shadows of the living and dead and the strained souls of those unlucky enough to perish in the blinding light.

In the fourth year of its journey cutting through the interstellar void, the lance of Cambria came upon the half-forgotten system Airanaha, on the fourth world of which dwelt a menial, but devout civilization. They knew nothing of the coming light, for no warning had reached them in time, nor could it have changed the fate of a world in the path of such an old terror. None of their kin could have expected the coming of doom, safe for the mad prophets who were carried away by the black ships of the inquisition.
And so it was an unremarkable day in the calendars of Airanaha when the sky was set asunder suddenly, in bright and blinding light. And those few who happened to look up at the moment of doom saw, in a scant few seconds, the moon of their world break apart, just before the end.

Life left the system of Airanaha on that day, wiped clean from the husks and bodies left behind. Not the bloody torment of a Xenos invasion took their souls, not the torturous corsairs nor the twisted demons who would add them to their damned legions.

These lives were ended with the cold, lifeless precision of steel, a simplicity the likes of which could only be created by the malevolent machine.
If there had been any doubt about the nature of this signal and their coming foe, the archeotechnicieans of the Cult Mechanicus Cambria knew now with certainty: This could be the work of nothing else but the machines of old, the apocalyptic engines of a dark, angered Deus Ex Machina.

## Weaving Scrith

There was a beauty in the Light of Cambria which only the augmented minds of the high domini among the Cult Mechanicus could comprehend. Through the blood-red lenses of their sensoriums and auger arrays, the bright shimmering column revealed a spectrum of exotic energies rarely found anywhere in the modern galaxy but known to the Adeptus Mechanicus nonetheless as the rare omen foretelling archeo-technology. And for all destruction sown by the signal, the Mechanicus was not blind to its insurmountable value as an artifact left behind by ancient humanity. For all its malign purpose, was it not a creation made not by the corrupt chaos nor the vile Xenos hands, but forged from the hands of pure humanity?

Afflicted with an insatiable ambition to unravel the secrets lost to the galaxy for more than te -millennia, many of the Cult Mechanicus Cambria flocked to the predetermined focus of the beacon's light. At the end of their pilgrimage stood the deep abyss beyond a black hole's event horizon, where the light breaking forth from the Cambrian Gates would break and unfold through a prism of un-reality, foregoing the warp to break the boundaries of space and time.

This much they had determined of the beacon's intent, and it was a wonder worthy only of the highest order of the Omnissiah's blessings – or, inversely, of the highest blasphemy which could be committed by the Silica Animus in a perversion of the will of the Machine God. In one case or another, there could be no doubt in the duty bestowed upon the Cult Mechanicus by the Omnissiah: Not to flee the light unleashed by eldritch machinery, but to seek it out and capture it and to end the signal's way in whichever way could be devised.

Determined to gain what wonder the distant forefathers of their kin had wrought, the wise and ancient of the Cambrian Order devised a plan unprecedented in its daring and scope. Those wise Arch-Magos Domini derived their plan from those utmost ancient texts which they had found uncovered in the ruins of the Cambrian Gates, in which was told a story from the very age when construction on the Ringworld itself began. And this was the plan they conceived:

Around the dark star, where the beacon's light would meet its end, they would construct a hallowed cage from the most valued scrith of which their own world was spun. Stripping it from the surface of the Ring, they would weave it into a new form by means of a device long forgotten in the crypts of Cambria.

And this cage was to guard the event horizon of their reality, surrounding the black hole, so that no light nor exotic energy might pass. Instead, the power unleashed by the gates would be trapped, encapsulated and forever bound in the elder matter, engraving the very fabric of its existence in a form which might one day be rediscovered by the Cambrian Order.

Thus, by the decision of the Mechanicus Lords of the Ringworld Cambria, the scrith weavers were called upon for one monumental effort. Their task to create a trap for the elder light was to be finished in no more than three-quarters of a century. Such haste in their efforts, none of the ancient masters had ever known, for their task for uncounted centuries before, had been the slow and steady recreation of lost sections to the Cambrian Ring.

Nonetheless, inspired by the hallowed order of the Omnissiah, they did justice to their duty and for the first time in the Imperial Age left the Ringworld Cambria for the stars.

For long years they served and toiled and from the fabric of the universe weaved the stuff of which the Ringworld was made, and they clad themselves in strands of living scrith as offerings to the Omnissiah, so that the Machine God may look kindly on their work and see their vision become manifest. All the while, the beacon's light steadily approached and before long was marked as a new, invisible star of damnation, which would judge their efforts on the day of its coming.

## The Signal meets Event Horizon

When the beacons fire struck out of the endless dark, the blue streak cutting through a firmament of haunted stars, the Cult Mechancius Cambria stood ready.

At anchor above the black abyss of Event Horizon were many thousand ships clad in slates of lead and ceramite. Dark silhouettes, their ever-growing number surrounded the deep well in space and time, their windows blackened and their engines silent, dead. Like shadows flocking to the darkest star, they were mimicking the black hole in their midst, shadows of shadows, ascended from a different realm. They were devout, silent, and waiting. Upon each and every last vessel was set a holy chronometer, counting down the years, months, minutes and seconds before the light from beyond the Gates of Cambria would come. It was their prophecy and destined fate, to which all looked up in awe.

Such was the nature of this black fleet, that all living souls were barred from seeing the light of stars and moons. And madness was abounding among the organics among them, but their unrest was quelled by the iron fist of the machine. And by the time the burning light crosses the threshold of the outer system, half a century after being freed from the cyclopic gates, they constellations of Gondwana were all but forgotten aboard the black ships waiting.

They knew of only one light to determine their destiny and through the instrument-senses of machinery witnessed the coming of exotic energies. The burning white, which in their wake had left an entire system depopulated, celestial bodies boiled and broken, and had come at the behest of ancient malice to overcome the boundaries of space and time.

And the Beacon Light of Cambria met the hallowed cage of woven scrith, the shell barring the way into its final destination as it had been erected by the order of weavers. For the first time since the Emperor's visiting of Holy Mars, servants of the Omnissiah saw the indestructible, unchangeable material, the Scrith as it had been conceived at the height of man, react so quickly to an outside force.

Under the halo of blinding, deadly light, in the hailstorm of exotic waves and radiation, the sphere of woven scrith began reverberating with the echoes of unholy information, capturing the totality of unnatural energies and concentrating them into a single, seething sun. Buckling, boiling, the plasma unleashed from the raw and sparkling energies enveloped the black ships waiting, and compared to its terrible horror, the madness of darkness was but a blessing to those afflicted.

Thus, they continued to stand watch over an unholy, manmade star, which for another half-century would burn unchallenged, a new enigma to the servants of the Omnissiah.