Pale Stars - Shadow War: The compact sealed, Strike Master Ijax's subcommanders assumed direct command of the planetary musters of a dozen worlds and their system defence flotillas. While most of these forces were but crudely equipped and barely-trained, the Alpha Legion war leaders soon remade them into highly effective armies, utilising each muster's unique knowledge of its homeworld and the particular skills honed there. Having established a core of defensive armies on the key worlds, Ijax ordered his disparate hosts to press outwards into the Pale Stars, thousands of warriors transported in the holds of a motley armada of cargo vessels attended by Alpha Legion Escort ships. The Strike Master's intent was to challenge the freedom of movement the Dark Brotherhood had enjoyed since coming to the region, and in so doing to precipitate an escalation in the conflict, dictated by his own strategic ends.The Dark Brotherhood were far from idle as the Alpha Legion raised the planetary musters and when the Traitor-aligned fleets pressed into the void, they were immediately opposed by the Nemean's vessels. Across the Warp routes of the Pale Stars, the black-hulled warships of the Dark Brotherhood fell upon their foes, exacting a fearsome toll upon those who would oppose their mastery of the Warp routes. The Traitor-aligned ships teemed with militia troops, their holds crowded way beyond capacity, and so the Blackshields' boarding actions were met with such a press of bodies that they were repulsed as often as they were successful. The Dark Brotherhood turned dozens of militia transports into charnel houses, driven by the twin goals of dissuading future attack while capturing what vessels might find employment in their own ragged fleet. The fighting was most intense where Dark Brotherhood and Alpha Legion warriors came face to face, on several occasions upon the burning bridge of some stricken vessel wracked by shuddering death throes. No quarter was given and none sought in such bitter confrontations, and countless Astartes from both factions went to their deaths rather than concede defeat.Dark Brotherhood and Alpha Legion warships clashed across a dozen star systems, the conflict spilling onto the surfaces of numerous worlds as the Traitor-aligned militias were deployed wherever their masters willed. The mortal hosts were mostly treated as less than cattle by Strike Master Ijax and his officers, their presence often serving as provocation to incite attack from the Nemean. The Blackshield lord was no fool, matching the Alpha Legion's cunning with his own so that thousands-strong militia armies were often deployed to isolated regions at great effort to no effect, falling prey to hazardous local conditions or simply starving to death while the Dark Brotherhood committed their efforts elsewhere. At Larsa V for example, transport barques out of Phargos Rex deposited thirty cohorts of the planetary muster into the rhodium dune seas, which dispersed across the ergs and established a chain of fortified strongpoints. The Dark Brotherhood declined to take the bait, however, and within a solar month the entire army of occupation had perished from exposure to the highly irradiated environment.At Mirdath, three Dark Brotherhood vessels succeeded in bypassing the quasi-sentient out-system defence monitors protecting the Dark Mechanicum forge-fane that had long orbited in the system's outer reaches. Striking directly for the fane's macro-provender chambers, a Dark Brotherhood boarding force captured and escaped with hundreds of tonnes of high value supplies. During their escape, though, they encountered some manner of mechanical horror of whipping mechadendrites that slaughtered half their number before they could break clear. It would later be determined that this creature was the product of the Mirdath forge-fane's inner foundry, the holy-of-holies where unspeakable machine blasphemies had long lain dormant.At the outlying system of Dissolution, the Alpha Legion envoy ordered the recall of an army of occupation that had been engaged in a solar-decades-long campaign to eradicate a primitive, yet highly pernicious native xenos strain. As the garrison forces mustered in orbit, the long-suppressed xenos rose up against the remaining Imperial colonial holdings, achieving in a single solar day what the garrison had fought for long solar decades to hold at bay, and tens of thousands of Imperial settlers were sacrificed to the primitive aliens' chthonic fire-gods. Even as the militia watched its world burn from orbit, the Dark Brotherhood struck and a fierce battle erupted across Dissolution near-space. Thousands of Traitor-aligned militia died as their transports were cast burning to the surface below, but the Nemean's forces suffered concomitant losses, for the Alpha Legion had used the garrison force as bait to draw the Blackshields into an ambush by their own vessels.Though the war that erupted across the Pale Stars divided the belligerents between those aligned to Horus and their enemies, the Dark Brotherhood fought not for Terra but for their own cause. That cause, so it would later be claimed, was simple survival, the Blackshields having determined that in a galaxy fallen to darkness, survival lay in the seizing of their own destiny. The Nemean was bitterly opposed to the Traitors' campaign to force the local Imperial Commanders to declare for the Warmaster, for them doing so was detrimental to his own ambitions of a safe haven for his kin. The populations of the worlds of the Pale Stars knew horror at the war the Traitors had brought to their worlds, but any who looked to the Nemean for deliverance would find only disappointment, the Dark Brotherhood unheeding of their suffering.