First Battle of Paramar - The Plain of Fire: It was the weapons of the Titans that spoke first, for they had found former brothers waiting for them. The War Griffons, the Titans of the Legio Gryphonicus, had stationed themselves in a five kilometre-wide cordon across the vast ferrocrete-paved Landing Zone Secundus of the Paramar Nexus complex guarding the main approach across the open desert.With their own terrible war siren cries, they answered the bellowed challenges of the Tiger Eyes and marched forth to engage the Traitor Titans on the open expanse, their great adamantium-shod feet shattering ferrocrete and sending up grey plumes of dust to shroud their pale granite carapaces. Across the confined distance between the two phalanxes of Titans such a cataclysmic eruption of firepower was unleashed than had seldom been seen, even in the battles of the Great Crusade.Destructive force equal to levelling a city in a single sweep crashed and screamed as the very air between the two walls of rushing Titans was annihilated in a pulse of blinding, tortured light visible from orbit. Void Shields split with shockwave thunder and collapsed, rock and stone boiled and vaporised and Ceramite armour proof against atomic fire crumbled like chalk.The Tiger Eyes' Warlord-class Titan Lyakarri simply ceased to exist, its reactor core rupturing in a hell-storm of plasma which blew the Warhound Blood Thunder which loped beside it into a spill of burning cinders, while the War Griffons' Reaver-class Titan Southron Shield came apart in a fury of las-blasts like a carcass on a butcher's block. These were but the first of many god-machines to die that day.The two lines of Titans unleashing destruction against each other on an incomprehensible scale quickly formed a no-man's land to the fore of the Nexus complex that no man or machine could hope to cross and survive. This factor had already been taken into account by the Alpha Legion's attack plan, and the echelon forces of their strike armour divided in two behind the Tiger Eyes and streamed round the hell zone the Titan battle had created at maximum speed; one striking towards the main landing and provender complex to the southwest of the Terminus, while the other took the longer elliptical route to strike at the Terminus itself from the southeast.While these striking arms raced ahead, already coming under fire from the defenders, the following columns of super-heavy tanks and mechanised infantry also bifurcated in turn, while minor detachments struck out independently for other targets of opportunity or areas of higher ground in which to deploy support weapons. What was to follow was to be direct and pitiless battle, that were it not overshadowed by the calamity and slaughter of the Drop Site Massacre that had occurred so soon before, it would have gone down more infamously as some of the most intense fighting in the Imperium's history to that date.The battlefield was largely open, with little or no cover to be had, and without respite the hammer of the Alpha Legion's armour struck the anvil of the Mechanicum's fortifications, bolstered greatly, particularly around the Terminus complex, by the rapidly constructed Castellan Strongholds of the Loyalist Iron Warriors of the 77th Grand Battalion.By the third solar hour of the battle the duelling Titan Legions warred on, but their numbers had been savagely reduced and much of the vast landing zones where they had fought was obscured by a pall of dense smoke and radioactive fallout from the wreckage of the god-engines that had already fallen in battle. The Provender and supply complexes to the southwest had already fallen to the Alpha Legion, and here they had secured their swiftest and surest victory, Armillus Dynat himself having led the attacking spur here by extant record.Now the ruins of the complex were being used as a firebase from which to attack the Terminus itself, and Alpha Legion Headhunter Squads were now scouring the area, purging it of survivors and seeking ingress to the subterranean complexes known to lie beneath. Across on the far side of the Titan battle, the attackers had suffered a major reversal of fortune, when a large detachment of Iron Warriors super-heavy armour, supported by several talons of Dreadnoughts, had attacked from positions of concealment in underground macro-silos, effectively cutting the western attack spur in half.The Iron Warriors super-heavies, primarily Stormblades, Falchions and Typhon Heavy Siege Tanks, had devoted the bulk of their firepower against the lighter Alpha Legion strike armour from the rear and the result had been carnage. At the same time, the Iron Warriors' Dreadnought talons, reinforced by Legio Gryphonicus Battle-automata, had charged into the Alpha Legion super-heavies to attack them at close quarters.While many of these machines had been destroyed in the charge before they could reach their targets, once they got amongst the lumbering war machines they wreaked havoc, attacking in hand-to-hand combat and tearing open the enemy tanks where the primary weapons of the super-heavies could not engage them.Both sides had finally been thrown back with heavy casualties when repeated energy blasts from a squadron of Glaive super-heavies' Volkite Carronades had accidentally penetrated deeply buried underground fuel lines, drowning the area in an eruption of burning promethium and for a time splitting the battle line apart.