House Vornherr - Doom of House Vornherr: At the moment of the death of Calth Veridia Anchor, the bulk of the Knights of Vornherr were arrayed in a great phalanx on the muster field at Platia City, with perhaps a further quarter forming a demi-house assigned to shadow the Titans of the Legio Praesagius in the coming war and thereby mustered with them at the great city of Ithraca.The departure of the house from the surface had not long begun and one orbital conveyor, the Iaxth-CV, had embarked its cargo of the house's war machines but had yet to lift off, two dozen Knights secured in its hold, including Duke Bhaevenwulf himself.When the Mechanicum's planetary data-manifold suddenly fell silent, the Sacristans gathered in echelon upon the muster field set to invoking their own localised command and control net, a task doomed to failure as the darkening skies overhead filled with the contrails of burning debris already falling from orbit.The Sacristans had all but completed their task just over a solar hour after the Campanile had struck the orbital yards, mere seconds before the Word Bearers' planetary assault squadron, led by the warship Destiny's Hand, unleashed its bombardment of the southern island cities, and even though a sudden warning pulsed outwards through the mustered household at the speed of thought, none had time to heed it, for hell was quickly descending upon Platia City.The Destiny's Hand is said to have loosed an atomic bombardment so potent that the city and every Knight gathered at its mustering field was incinerated in a creeping barrage of inexorable nuclear fire. As if anything could possibly have survived the assault, the Word Bearers followed it up with an attack of singular, almost vast overkill, as simultaneous waves of meson-converter attacks, rad-caster saturation and pin-point Lance strikes hammered home so that the island that had been Platia City's foundation was broken into rubble, the rubble scoured from the sea bed and vast swaths of the ocean around it vaporised.Not a single Knight of House Vornherr was left upon the Platia battlefield, nor indeed did any living organism on the entire island survive.At the moment of the death of Calth Veridia Yard, the orbital conveyor Iaxth-CV with its precious cargo still inside had performed an emergency launch as its auguries detected the incoming wall of missiles from above, and its ponderous bulk had been rising through the skies away from the target zone as the atomics struck.The blast blinded its pilots and the electromagnetic fury of the assault all but burned out the conveyor's command systems, and even though the damaged craft struggled valiantly to reach Ithraca for an emergency landing, a wall of fire rising behind it, the wounded craft was soon spiralling towards the turbulent ocean entirely out of control.The conveyor overshot its destination and crash-landed off the coast of Ithraca, the wreck rapidly settling to the sea bed. Those crew not killed on impact were quickly drowned, but the Knights inside survived, their systems keeping the pilot-scions alive as the starship's hull, intended to withstand the vacuum of the void, collapsed under the pressure of the ocean.Recovered tactical in-load archives depict the scene as the doomed conveyor's interior flooded and Duke Bhaevenwulf girded his mighty Reaper Chainfist. With a grinding downwards stroke, he tore a great slash in the hull and as the ocean crashed in and the interior cargo space was flooded, the Knights inside were able to push through the breach and into the open sea beyond.Only fragmented battlelogs exist from which an account of the Knights' march across the sea bed can be constructed, and it is apparent from the garbled tacticae-vox traffic that passed between them that they had no way of knowing what had occurred in orbit. All they could attempt to do was head north towards the coast of Ithraca in the hope of linking up with outlying elements of the Legio Praesagius. They had no way of knowing that just over a solar hour into their sea bed trek, the remainder of their house would be gone and they would be its only survivors on Calth.Scrolling data-tracks imprinted over the recovered pict-feeds showed at that point a sudden and drastic rise in exterior temperature and in moments the seas through which the Knights trekked were boiling. With visibility reduced to almost zero, all that could be seen was the Knights' arc-lights stabbing through churning clouds of sea-debris, and as they pushed forwards, chunks of rock were torn from the sea floor by the blast and cast along the boiling tides, striking the Knights as they fought with desperate resolve towards the coastline of Ithraca, the temperature soaring ever higher as the seas vaporised and raged around them.Finally deliverance came as at last they forged across the burning shoreline of Ithraca City. The lead Knights found themselves stumbling from the boiling oceans, their pict-feeds depicting not churning sea but a bank of super-heated fog from which torn and ember-hot docking cranes towered like a twisted forest.Within solar minutes, a dozen or so Knights had emerged from the flash-boiled seas and it was clear that those not at their sides must surely have perished. What happened next has gone unrecorded, or at least the Knights' datacore in-loads returned to Luhnborg by agencies of Ultramar much later were purged in order to spare the surviving Vornherr the truth. The very last scene captured was of a mass of dark figures parting the fog, their eyes lambent with the guttering hell-light of the Warp. Then nothing.Solar months later, a Legion recon squad of the Ultramarines operating from Arcology Epsilon-XXIV in the central massif of the Ithraca Basin came upon a scene that more resembled a deathly tableaux vivant than the aftermath of any battle they had ever witnessed.A dozen Knights were arrayed as if in battle against an unseen foe, their joints frozen and their armour scoured, rent and pitted as if by the talons and teeth of a host of predatory animals. The Knights were mustered about a single figure -- the Cerastus Knight-Acheron Surcease of Sorrow of Duke Bhaevenwulf himself, as if rallying to him in the midst of heated battle. All were dead, their forms burned coal-black by the touch of some second empyrean fire. Of the foes the duke and his Knights had fought on that blasted battlefield, no trace remained but blackened smears upon the cratered ground.When at last word of the fate of the Knights of House Vornherr that had joined the Calth Conjunction reached the garrison at Luhnborg-IX, all knew this must surely spell the end of the ancient house. All that remained was a handful of old barons and young squires, and in token of their fate they obscured the bold colours of their armours with black and pronounced their oath to serve Ultramar unto death discharged.Released from their bond, they swore a new oath -- to avenge the fallen duke at any price, and in so doing go boldly to their doom. Their death-oath sworn, the remnants of House Vornherr deactivated the stasis seals on their ancient armoury vaults and equipped themselves for the final war of the house's long and glorious history.