The Shriven - Battle of 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.