13th Black Crusade - The Clarion of Truth: As dawn broke the next morning, Promethium flames leapt hungrily towards the stars. The defenders of Kasr Kraf had neither manpower nor time to bury their dead, and so honoured them the only way they could -- in cleansing flame. Betimes, the wind shifted, carrying with it the thunder of battle from the south, as Baroness Vardus' Knights obliterated those Traitors abandoned by the Black Fleet. The pyres burned for two solar days and nights, fed by whatever fuel could be spared, preserving the honoured dead from the corruption of the Dark Gods, and the defilement of their living thralls.Those final rites had come at Celestine's insistence, and Creed had yielded. Not out of necessity, nor even out of respect. The Lord Castellan of Cadia sought solely to keep his soldiers' minds and bodies occupied. Activity, fruitful or otherwise, was always the best way to buttress failing morale. They'd realise the grim truth soon enough -- a truth Creed had embraced even before Celestine had hurled Urkanthos' corpse from the top of the wall. Kasr Kraf's greatest moment of defiance had been its last. When the Despoiler's hordes came again -- and Creed was certain that they would, if only because the abyssal spectres of the Legion of the Damned now stood silent sentry out on the Elysion pylon fields -- the defiance of Cadia would continue elsewhere, if it did so at all.Thus Creed left the Living Saint to her ministrations amidst the flames, grateful for whatever resolve she awoke, and entertained unthinkable notions of retreat. The arrival of Phalanx offered a new opportunity. Though devastated in the course of its lone stand against the Black Fleet, the battle-station was still capable of Warp travel. It could carry a vast portion of the forces stranded on Cadia to safety. A voice in Creed's head urged him to remain, to fight on. But the more he dwelt upon the matter, the more Creed came to wonder if that voice spoke with the forked tongue of pride, rather than duty. Perhaps Cadia's battle was at long last done, and it was time to defend the outer jaws of the Cadian Gate from Agripinaa or Belis Corona.Little by little, reinforcements dribbled in from the outer system. Some were lost the moment they hit realspace, ill fortune bringing them under the guns of the Black Fleet. Others fared better, braving the dead-fire zone above Cadia's equator and coming safely into the waiting arms of mighty Phalanx. First to do so were Captain Ruis Tracinto's 5th Company of the Crimson Fists, driven back from Kasr Partox with the remnants of the Cadian 14th Regiment. A dozen battered Cruisers limped in from Solar Mariatus, their hangars crammed with the tanks of the Armoured 51st Regiment and the Knights of House Taranis. Their crew whispered tales of an escape in the face of inconceivable odds -- one achieved only when slate-grey Cruisers had emerged from the Warp and boarded the leading vessels of the pursuing Chaos fleet. Upon learning those Cruisers bore the faded brands of the Space Wolves, Creed inquired of Orven Highfell if further reinforcements might yet arrive from Fenris. He received no other answer than a stony glare.The last to arrive was not only the most unexpected, but also the most welcome. An Adeptus Mechanicus fleet, inbound from the arid backwater of the Eriad System. Ever the pragmatist, Creed saw their arrival as an opportunity to remake a portion of Cadia's shattered defences. In this, he was disappointed. The newcomers had suffered travails of their own -- though the fleet remained battle-ready, their Skitarii maniple had been greatly thinned by strife, the ranks of artificiers and battle-masons expended to defend a now-abandoned archeologica site. Worse, the fleet's commander, the Archmagos Belisarius Cawl, intoned a warning that Creed was initially loathe to believe, for it meant that the danger to the Imperium -- indeed, to the galaxy as a whole -- was far greater than any yet knew.In a council of war held within the remains of Kasr Kraf's command bastion, Cawl laid out the scope of his discoveries on Eriad. Few understood the detail of his theories. The Archmagos constantly slipped into and out of the buzzing binharic cant of the Omnissiah, and even those parts of the explanation rendered in High Gothic dealt in subjects so arcane that Cawl might as well not have shared them at all. Yet the singular, awful truth was plain enough. For long aeons, the Cadian Pylons, and others like them, had held the galaxy together. Without them, the tides of the Immaterium would consume all. Abaddon had spent ten thousand standard years obliterating the pylon fields, weakening the stitches holding reality together.None present wanted to believe Cawl's words, but the clarion of truth has a sound peculiar to itself. Moreover, the theory made new sense of so much. The rising darkness of the passing millennia. The ever-increasing prevalence of Warp Storms. The Despoiler's constant obsession with assaulting Cadia. Abaddon's Black Crusades, so long dismissed as failures -- if ones greatly to the Imperium's cost -- had been the product of strategy more layered than any had believed. Cancephalus. Arkreath. Kromarch. The Gothic War. For millennia, they had been viewed as causes in and of themselves. Now they were revealed as camouflage for Abaddon's true agenda, one envisioned by an immortal's eye in the prosecution of a war without end.Cawl did not speak of everything he knew or guessed. Veilwalker's cryptic missives remained his secret. But he assured all that hope was not lost -- that the pylons contained the key to Abaddon's defeat, as well as his victory. This last was merely a projection -- the first guess the Archmagos had entertained in many centuries, if not the first lie offered to allies unversed in the logical precepts of the Omnissiah. And yet Cawl told himself his words contained a kernel of truth. The pylons were tools, and it was one of the founding precepts of the Adeptus Mechanicus that the difference between tools and weapons existed only in narrow minds.To hear Cawl speak of it, there was no way to know how many pylons had already fallen, or how close to the tipping point the galaxy had come. Yet one thing was clear to Creed: retreat from Cadia was no longer an option -- Abaddon would be denied his prize today, as he had in millennia past. All that remained was to determine how that impossible goal was to be achieved. And swiftly, before the quiescent Black Fleet awoke to new fury.The first move occurred in the skies. Phalanx's abused Plasma Drives hauled the battle-fortress southward across the equator, attaining geostationary orbit over the pylon fields of Cadia Secundus. Every eye upon the bridge scoured the astral Auspexes and sensor banks for the Black Fleet's attempt to counter the move. No such retaliation came. Phalanx had taught Abaddon's captains caution, if not respect -- it seemed none amongst them had any stomach for mutually assured destruction that day.With the skies thus secured from the threat of bombardment, Creed fashioned a new defence. Trenchworks and aegis lines were established across the Elysion pylon fields. The catacombs below, originally envisioned as a final line of defence, now became the sprawling heart of a makeshift fortress. Above ground, massed Cadian ranks waited alongside the Sisters of Our Martyred Lady. Below, Cawl's Adepts laboured beneath the unblinking gaze of their Skitarii protectors.The dwindled forces of the Adeptus Astartes, now reinforced by the Crimson Fists' 5th Company and the survivors of Garadon's depleted command, formed a single strike force under Master Korahael. Only the Ironwolves forsook unity of purpose, striking out on their own to roam the Elysion perimeter. Korahael disdained their choice, blaming the ancient enmity between the Sons of Leman Russ and of the Lion. But Garadon wasn't so sure. He had fought alongside the Wolves of Fenris many times before, and had never known any so taciturn as the Ironwolves. That night, when the wind carried distant howls across Elysion, a chill passed through Garadon's bones, though he did not know why.The wind howled about the crumbled spires as Highfell approached, his every step heavier than the last. No. It was not only the wind.The Wolf Priest waited in silence at the door. Sundered by the Black Fleet's initial bombardment, the bastion was worthless as a redoubt, but it would yet serve as a cage."How many?" Highfell growled softly.Harkan twitched his lip, the gesture setting the tips of his plaited moustache dancing. "Three more."With an effort, Highfell kept his expression neutral. The Curse of the Wulfen had followed them ever since Mygdal. It would consume them all, given time.He turned to Harkan, his face an unreadable mask. "Keep them bound. When battle comes, they will do their part. As will we all."Solar hours crawled by. With every second, the inevitable grew closer. Fevered anticipation of the fateful hour grew worse than the fear of death. All who waited on the Elysion Fields, whether born of Cadia or some distant world, silently yearned for the battle to begin, for death or triumph to find them now, while they yet had nerve and strength to face it.Celestine and her Geminae Superia hovered silently in the skies above, their radiance bright against a dark future. Yet even the Living Saint felt foreboding in those hours. Waking dreams assailed her with each new dawn -- visions of a fortress afire, of its defenders drowning beneath a bloody tide. Her wings damaged in those dreams, Celestine could not outrun that flood. Each time she made the attempt, its waters claimed her. And yet each time there was a presence beyond the tide -- a warrior's silhouette, familiar and yet not, trapped beyond a wall of ice strewn with the Black Legion's dead. Each dawn, Celestine blinked the vision away. Knowledge would come in its own time. Until then, the Emperor would guide her, as He always had. She was His hand.Amidst the roots of the pylons, Belisarius Cawl wrestled with secrets denied to Mankind for ageless millennia. Fusion-welders assailed the faceless stone, blazing silently for solar hours untold as they sought samples for analysis. Cawl sent Servitor probes into smooth-edged breaches in the pylons' flanks, set loose every functional tech-scryer he had salvaged from the abandoned compound at Eriad VI. Nothing bore fruit. The black skin resisted all attempts to breach it. Contact was lost with each Servitor precisely six solar seconds after it vanished into the depths, and the scryers found nothing that was not already on record.All Cawl knew for certain was that the pylons' low-level energy resonance, amply quantified by generations long dead, was growing in amplitude. Indeed, several of the pylons showed signs of fatigue, as if their silent exertions were as damaging to the structures themselves as to the squalling currents of the Immaterium. Cawl hypothesised that as one pylon field was destroyed, the burden intensified upon those that remained. When one field ceased to function, those on distant worlds automatically adapted. Was Cadia the last? The Archmagos had no way of knowing, but decided it was only logical to assume that it was. Still the pylons refused to yield their secrets. Until, that was, a cloaked figure made its presence known.With his thoughts thus directed, the Archmagos at last grasped the elegance of the pylons' construction, of technologies whose meanest function far outstripped the dreams of his long-dead mentors. Though the detail remained as far beyond him as his explanation of the pylons' function was beyond his allies on the surface, Cawl at last grasped the shape of the makers' intent. Imagination awoken to fevered life by the possibilities, Cawl began his labours anew.Meanwhile, in the silent void above Cadia's southern pole, dormant hangars stirred to life, and the first dropships blazed into an outer atmosphere choked with the debris of failed conquest.The Battle of Elysion was about to begin.Cawl disengaged his primary consciousness from the scryer's datascreen and stared upwards. The inscrutable bulk of the Cadian Pylon stood like a shadow against the strata of the cavern wall. Defiant. Mocking. Had he merely traded one world of obdurate secrets for another? Days of toil, and not even a scintilla of progress.Had Veilwalker deceived him? Or had he deceived himself -- read more meaning into her words than had truly been there? Was it all a grand distraction, waylaying his attention while she stole the reliquary? Cawl felt his rebreather quicken. He could not imagine why she would do such a thing, but what cause did a xenos truly need for malice?A familiar sensation crept across his sense-flaments. He was not alone. It seemed Cadia had yet more in common with Eriad VI than he had expected. "I projected your arrival before now, Veilwalker."Cawl turned, servo-crawlers scuttling beneath him. The intruder was not the Aeldari Shadowseer. Green eyes blazed from beneath a hood of metallic scale. The power core of a burnished staff glinted."I mean you no harm." The figure cocked his head to one side. "Are those the correct words? I find that no matter which I use, no one ever believes them." He paused. "Wait...What did you call me?"Secondary circuits meshed, retrieving ancient data. A Necron. A soulless embodiment of the Motive Force. A blasphemy against the Omnissiah. Cawl's Arc Scourge slithered to life, energy crackling across its coils. "You are an abomination."The Necron set his staff aside. "'Thief' normally suffices. I prefer 'honoured guest.' But abomination or thief, you and I have common cause."Cawl willed the Arc Scourge's tendrils to war mode, already anticipating the joy of dissection. "Logic dictates otherwise.""Then you don’t seek to understand the nature of this matrix?"The Arc Scourge grew still at Cawl's wordless command. This was unexpected. Or was it the abomination's trick to preserve its mockery of existence? "You comprehend its secrets?""I was there when they were first erected. Or perhaps I wasn't. You of all people should understand that memory is a fickle thing."Cawl allowed an angry hiss to rattle through his rebreather. "We share no commonality.""Perhaps. I went to the fires of biotransference in chains. You, I think, have gladly sliced away your humanity piece by piece." The Necron stepped closer, eyes blazing. "But neither of us desires to see this galaxy ripped asunder by the Empyreal Ones. Destroy me if you wish. I will simply awaken elsewhere. Nothing will change. For me, for you ... for this world."Cawl remained silent, probabilities warping and reforming with fresh data. First an Aeldari had set him on this path, now a Necron offered to guide his steps. But if the knowledge preserved the Omnissiah's Imperium ... "Show me."Sardonic laughter, dry as dust, echoed around the cavern. "I thought you'd never ask."