Chronicles of Ursh - Conquest of the Nordafrik Conclaves: One sequence mentions the general Shang Khal, who had assembled a significant horde of irregular levies from the southern client states of Ursh, and used them to support his main armed strengths, including the infamous Tupelov Lancers and the Red Engines, during the invasion. The Nordafrik technogogues had preserved a great deal more high technology for the good of their conclaves than Ursh possessed, and sheer envy, more than anything, motivated the war. Kalagann was hungry for the fine instruments and mechanisms the conclaves owned.Eight epic battles marked Shang Khal's advance into the Nordafrik zones, the greatest of them being Xozer. Over a period of nine days and nights, the war machines of the Red Engines blasted their way across the cultivated agroponic pastures and reduced them back to the desert from which they had originally been irrigated and nurtured. They cut through the laser thorn hedges and the jewelled walls of the outer conclave, and unleashed dirty atomics into the heart of the ruling zone, before the Lancers led a tidal wave of screaming berserkers through the breach into the earthly paradise of the gardens at Xozer, the last fragment of Eden on a corrupted planet. Which they, of course, trampled underfoot.At the heart of the ruling zone, a ninth, minor battle had marked the conquest, almost as an afterthought. One bastion had remained, the murengon, or walled sanctuary, where the last hierophants of the conclaves held out, practising, so the text said, their "scio-mancy by the flame lyght of their burning realm." Shang Khal, wishing swift resolution to the conquest, had sent Anult Keyser to crush the sanctuary. Keyser was lord martial of the Tupelov Lancers and, by various bonds of honour, could call freely upon the services of the Roma, a squadron of mercenary fliers whose richly decorated interceptors, legend said, never landed or touched the earth, but lived eternally in the scope of the air. During the advance on the murengon, Keyser's oneirocriticks -- which meant "interpreters of dreams" -- had warned of the hierophants’ sciomancy, and their phantasmagorian ways.When the battle began, just as the oneirocriticks had warned, majiks were unleashed. Plagues of insects, as thick as monsoon rain and so vast in their swirling masses that they blacked out the sun, fell upon Keyser’s forces, choking air intakes, weapon ports, visors, ears, mouths and throats. Water boiled without fire. Engines overheated or burned out. Men turned to stone, or their bones turned to paste, or their flesh succumbed to boils and buboes and flaked off their limbs. Others went mad. Some became daemons and turned upon their own.Anult Keyser himself was slain by one such daemon, which had, just hours previously, been his loyal lieutenant, Wilhym Mardol. When Shang Khal heard the news, he flew into a fury, and went at once to the scene, bringing with him what the text described as his "wrathsingers," who appeared to be magi of some sort. Their leader, or master, was a man called Mafeo Orde, and somehow, Orde drew the wrathsingers into a kind of remote warfare with the hierophants. Throughout the chapters of the Chronicles, words such as "sorcery" and "majik" were employed frequency, without qualification, and there were invocations to dark, primordial gods. Possible an early indication of the mandkind's first contact with the the Ruinous Powers.To those raised in the beliefs of Imperial Truth during the Great Crusade, and the later Imperial Creed after the Horus Heresy, the Chronicles depiction of these wars were grandiloquent and outrageous. The account was seen by many Iterators as nonsense because of its talk of "daemons and magick," but some, such as Kyril Sindermann, an notable Iterator who accompanied the Sons of Horus Legion's 63rd Expeditionary Fleet of the Great Crusade, valued it for its historical significance, despite its obvious mistruths and exaggeration in parts. References to Kalagann's "sorcerous" powers, and the "invisibles artes" that formed a key part of Ursh's power, many readers often took them to be hyperbole.In this squence was the first time sorcery had appeared on the page, as a kind of fact. The earth trembled, as if afraid. The sky tore like silk. Many in the Urshite force heard the voices of the dead whispering to them. Men caught fire, and walked around, bathed in lambent flames that did not consume them, pleading for help. The remote war between the wrathsingers and the hierophants lasted for six days, and when it ended, the ancient desert was thick with snow, and the skies had turned blood red. The air formations of the Roma had been forced to flee, lest their craft be torn from the heavens by screaming angels and dashed down upon the ground. At the end of it, all the wrathsingers were dead, except Orde himself. The murengon was a smoking hole in the ground, its stone walls so hideously melted by heat they had become slips of glass. And the hierophants were extinct. It is suspected that these fell creatures and sorcerers were in fact, humanity's first unexpected encounter with the Chaos Gods, their sorcererous followers as well as other minor entities of the Warp.