Siege of the Ring

> "*This is our time. Look upon the great wound in the sky if you disbelieve it. Fight us by all means, for we relish every stinging bullet, every slash of the blade, just as you might relish a delicious feast. But know this truth, and remember it as the night skies curdle above you, we have already won.*"
> ― Unidentified Daemon Lord of the Neverborn
>
>

## The Siege of the Ring

### Attacker

The Brothers Encarmine
Daemons of Chaos

### Defender

The Star Guardians
The Hydra Auxilia
The Rings Defence Force (The RDF)
The Rings Defence Armada (The RDA)
The Veltari Crusade

### Attacking Commander

Lord Widow Latros Dectusson
Chief Librarian Caero Latrodectus

### Defending Commander

Commander Fazel Manesh (KIA)
Tribune Jurgesh Thorn (KIA)
Tribune Kharak Tepalt (KIA)
General Morith Hykal (KIA)
Admiral Ellana Nelexa (KIA)
Ancestral Lord Ehrin Veltari

### Theatre

The Ring, Hydra System, on the border of Segmentum Solar and Ultima Segmentum

### Strength (Attackers)

12,000 Widows of the Brothers Encarmine
Unnumbered Neverborn Daemons

### Strength (Defenders)

5,000 Star Guardians of the Second Division
2 Cohorts of Hydra Auxilia
Millions of RDF soldiers
53 Capital Class Vessels and numerous light cruiser and smaller ships of the RDA, as well as numerous defencive bastions.
Hundreds of Billions of Civilian Soldiers
The Veltari Crusade (Conflicts End)

### Casualties (Defenders)

Extreme
2 Astartes of the Star Guardians survive, both bearing extensive wounds from the conflict
All members of the Hydra Auxilia and Ring's Defence Force perished
Heavy damage amongst the vessels and personnel of the RDA
An estimated two hundred billion Civilian casualties

### Status

Pyrrhic Imperial victory
Tactical and Strategic Traitor Victory

### Outcome

The Traitor Forces takes the Ring out of the early war and deny its facilities to the Imperium
The Ring is depopulated, restricting recruitment possibilities for the Star Guardians in the wake of the Solar War.

The Siege of the Ring was a battle that took place in the earliest years of the Almire Apostasy, in a twofold attempt to deny the stations potent defensive bastions and shipyard capabilities to the loyalist forces, and to bait the Praetorian of Terra away from the throneworld.

The first part of the plan succeeded entirely, the Ring being effectively neutralised as a threat to Almire and his designs as he matched on Terra, but Shaaa was not tempted from the Sol System despite his desires to free his home, world of the greater betrayal having already reached Terra.

Even after the Ring was freed from the grasp of the traitors however, the affects of the siege were still felt by the IVth Legion, their home depopulated to the point where they could no longer supply the legion recruits and keep the station running at anywhere near peak efficiency. This, combined with the loses and number of wounded from the First Solar War, helped to drive the IVth Legion into the waiting arms of the Mechanicus in Exile.

## Dramatis Personae

### The Star Guardians Legion

* Commander Fazel Manesh - The Warden of the Ring, Commander of the 2nd Division
* Sergeant Sarhil - Future Axiarch of the reborn IVth and eventual Axiarch of the Sons of the Ring Battlegroup

### Non-Legion Personnel of the Ring

* Tribune Jurgesh Thorn - Commander of the 92nd Hydra Auxillia Cohort
* Tribune Kharak Tepalt - Commander of the 212th Hydra Auxilia Cohort
* General Morith Hykal - Commander of the Ring’s Defence Force
* Admiral Ellana Nelexa - Commander of the Ring’s Defence Fleet and Captain of the Hyperion Spear

### The Brothers Encarmine Legion

* Lord Widow Latros Dectusson - Commander of the XIIth Legions Widow Companies “The Black Widower”
* Chief Librarian Caero Latrodectus - Chief Librarian of the XIIth Legion

### The Khazadi Empire

* Ehrin Veltari - Ancestral Lord of the Veltari and Commander of the Veltari Crusade

## The Siege of the Ring

In the year M31.055, Almire Leoric, Warmaster of the Imperium and Primarch of the Warmaster's Justicars, put plans years in the making into action, delivering the spark that would set the whole galaxy ablaze, in a conflict soon to be known as the Almire Apostasy. Preparing for a lightning fast strike towards Terra, the Warmaster showed once again exactly why he had been chosen above any other to bear that title, dispatching those forces loyal to him to neutralise any targets along the router to Terra that may hinder his forces, or aid the loyalists, striking all at once to keep his foes from mustering a defence.

As one of a hundred feints and true strikes, designed to wrong foot the loyalists and keep them from mustering a true defence, the XIIth legion, the Brothers Encarmine, were split in two. The majority of their legion, some 100,000 warriors, were sent to the Istvaan system, there to all but eradicate the Palatine Wings from the galaxy. The smaller portion however, the so called ‘Widow Companies’, were tasked with striking at a different target, the memories of their long dead Conjux partners still fresh in their minds, lending them to the near suicidal task ahead of them as they struck corewards.

The Ring, homeworld of the Star Guardians legion, was more than just a symbol to the Praetorian legion. Boasting some of the greatest shipyards in the Imperium, and a bastion to rival many a fortress world, the station would provide any loyalist force with a near unmatched staging ground from which to repair, re-organise and re-arm before taking the fight to Almire’s forces once more. This was something the Warmaster would not let come to pass, but neither could he dedicate the sheer manpower required to wrest the Ring fully from the loyalist hands, all the forces at his command needing to remain whole and unbloodied as much as possible for the eventual strike at Terra and the Solar Guardian Array.

Unperturbed however, the Widow companies struck at the Ring. Those warriors of the IVth left aboard the station rather than being at Terra with their father were caught off guard by the sudden attack from their allies, at first believing it to be a fatal case of friendly fire. Commander Fazel Manesh of the Second Division, demanded an explanation for the attack, ordering the XIIth Legion to power down their vessels and answer for their actions. Soon however, it became clear that this had been no accident, the Widows launching themselves at the Ring’s defencive fleet, even managing to land warriors aboard the station itself. Thousands perished in the short lived war, but the Widows had nowhere near enough manpower to rout the defenders, who were experts in this form of war and fighting for their home, unwilling to step back. The battle seemed to turn, the Widows seemingly about to be overrun and annihilated, before suddenly, they withdrew, falling back from the station with a speed the IVth legion simply could not match. Thousands had died in the sudden strike, but millions more soldiers of the Rings Defence Force were already preparing for a counter strike. Seemingly facing a total and ignoble defeat mere hours after they had struck, the Widows waited on the system edge, adopting a formation to make it seem like victory was all but guaranteed for the loyalists. As the system defence fleet prepare to strike back at their new found foes and banish them from the Hydra Sector, a new arrival heralded the next stage of the plan.

Emerging from the Immaterium, the *Purest Intent*, formerly the flagship of the now shattered and fatherless Palatine Wings legion, entered the fray. With the very hull itself echoing with the death cries of tens of thousands of Astartes, the ship powered forth, already one of the fastest of its kind, it seemed to move ever quicker, its engines burning far beyond their tolerances. Mighty guns of the Ring came about, turning enough firepower to bear to destroy even a Gloriana-class battleship, but here, the true intention of the Widows’ strike became evident. Hundreds of guns suddenly fell silent as a malignant strain of machine code crept into the stations defences, baffling target-locks or locking down motive systems, ensuring the guns could not aim or fire en-mass at the oncoming threat. Those few weapons that were unaffected began firing into the void, but the Widows had planned for this too, the *Purest Intent* ploughing onwards, until she entered vox transmission range.

The moment she did, the vessel began to broadcast on all frequencies, yet more diabolical scrap-code seeping into the systems of the Ring, while thousands of slaves nailed to the hull itself began to sing in beautiful agony, kept alive by the powers of chaos, their plight engineered by warriors of the XXth Legion, the Hounds of Surmah, for this very purpose. In discordant harmony with the attack, conclusively loud music being blasted from the ship’s internal and external speakers, impossibly seeming to cross the usually silent void, creating a psychic scream that overloaded the senses of those mortals who heard it, rupturing ears and hemorrhaging brains merely by the sound. The guns of the Ring and the defencive fleet were seemingly powerless against this otherworldly foe, only a single vessel managing to get close to the *Purest Intent*, the Grand Cruiser *Hyperion Spear* placing herself between the oncoming foe and the station. Her attempts were valiant, but were akin to a wall of sand attempting to halt a tidal wave, the mighty battleship simply powering through her, slicing the vessel in half, heedless of the damage such an attack caused to her own super-structure.

Powerless to do anything more than watch, the warriors of the Ring braced themselves as the *Purest Intent* drew ever closer, before finally ploughing into the hull of the station and detonating with the force of a captive star, the explosion magnified further by salvaged ordnance packed within her hull in the wake of the Istvaan muster.

For a split second, the Hydra system played host to a second star, nothing surviving before its fury, void shields collapsing and untold thousands perishing in the expanding blastwave before its light was finally snuffed out. Where the once proud vessel had been before, now there was only an ugly purple scar, ripped in the fabric of reality itself, and from this scar, came the tide of the Neverborn.

Chittering and whooping with joy from mouths that no mortal creature could have possessed in a language no sane being could have understood, the neverborn flung themselves through the rift, uncaring of the inhospitable nature of space as they poured through the rent hull of the Ring. the warriors of the Ring were already shaken by the power of the blast that had ripped through the corridors of the Ring moments before were easy prey for the daemons, even those who weren’t empowered by an open warp rift as these were. Mortals of the PDF and Hydra Auxilia fell in droves to the weapons and claws of the daemons, while more simply fell to the ground unmoving, their minds snapping in the presence of the neverborn, no mortal mind able to comprehend such foes.

Only the warriors of the 2nd Division could hope to stand against the tide, and when they did, the daemons fell back, but there were less than 5,000 of them, and there were unnumbered enemies pressing in upon them. The Star Guardians could do little more than slow the tide as it spread through the Ring, making their foe pay for every step they took. In the first hours of the Siege, millions perished, and the number would only rise as the war continued.

The Widows watched all of this uncharacteristically passionately. Long known for their grim attitudes and dour outlook on the galaxy since their partners demise, they were feeling joy as they watched spectacle unknown to their kind for decades. They had played their part, they had delivered the ultimate enemy into the very heart of the Praetorian legion. Now they simply had to watch, those aboard guaranteed a slow, agonising death, possible to stave off for a time, but impossible to halt while the rift remained open. The XIIth remained simply to destroy any who attempted to flee, those who escaped the guns of their fleet soon finding themselves boarded and captured, wishing they had seen the quick death of a macro-cannon, rather than the agonising torturous ‘pleasures’ the Widows unleashed to slake their own boredom.

In time, Shaaa and Terra heard of the assault, the Breacher Lord reportedly flying into a rage unmatched since the days of the Squat Wars ending. Only the words of Malchador calmed him, stopping him from sending his own fleet to retake his home, pointing to this as being a clear ploy to draw away Terra’s defenders, something the homeworld had precious few of. Shaaa was powerless to save the Ring, and those aboard could do nothing but survive, making the neverborn pay for every step they took, holding out for a miracle that seemed to never arrive.

The defenders held on with everything they could, even as new horrors were unleashed upon them. A plague swept across one section of the station killing all it touched, while in another section a veritable wave of shambling, possessed corpses flung themselves at the defenders, drowning their foes not in bullets, but in bodies. In turn, the Star Guardians delved into ancient lore, things that Shaaa had sealed away aboard his home, deeming them diabolical. With this knowledge in hand, the dwindling numbers of the 2nd Division soon took to scrawling half-understood runic wards upon their armour, and wielding weapons forged from the scraps of volkite beamers, powered by the same actinic energy as those ancient weapons. Though they did not know it, these warriors became one of the first recorded instances of a Nullificators force, a formation that would soon be adopted by all the loyalist legions, but this knowledge even if it had been known to them would have brought little comfort to the IVth.

Even with these advances, there was no victory to be had on the Ring, the death toll continuing to spiral into the hundreds of billions, the extinction of the Ring seemingly at hand. Victory alone seemed impossible, and with every passing day, reinforcements seemed less and less likely. But finally, almost five years after the Siege had begun, help came to the Star Guardians from the one faction still loyal to the throne who had every reason to merely pass by and allow the traitors to purge their ancient enemies homeworld.

The Squats, ancient foes and bloody rivals of the IVth Legion, passed through the Hydra system on the way to Terra as part of their Veltari Crusade, determined to reinforce the throneworld against the traitors, and needing the shipyards of the Ring to re-arm along the way. It would have been easy for the fleet to withdraw once more, the warriors of the Ring in no state to even detect them. They could leave their hated rivals to die and none would ever fault them, but luckily for the IVth, the Squats were not about to let old grudges, no matter how deeply held, stop them from aiding an ally in times of war.

Attacking from extreme range, the battered but unbroken fleet of the Veltari Crusade smashed into the Widow fleet still holding the blockade around the station, routing or destroying all those who would stand before the might of the Astra Khazadi. Keeping their momentum, the Squats continued, deploying fearsome psi-weaponry and bringing it to bear upon the great warp rift hanging over the Ring. With this advanced warp tech, the scar was forced closed, many of the daemons on board simply vanishing in a cry of anger as they were forced back into the warp. Those that remained, the strongest of their kind, were little match for the forces of the Squats and few remaining Astartes of the IVth, and together the two retook the station, purging the daemons from its halls.

In the hour of their victory, the Squats made to aid in bringing the station back online, helping the Star Guardians in any way they could so that they may continue their flight to reinforce Terra. It was a flight that would never be completed, cut short by a single message, transmitted by the retreating warriors of the Sirens of Kastar.

“Terra has fallen.”