House Draconis - The Storm Breaks: In the few solar days that remained before the beginning of the invasion, House Draconis prepared itself as best as it could. While a few border towns refused to be evacuated and were left to fend for themselves -- none would survive -- the vast majority of the serfs of House Draconis heeded their masters' call and headed for the safety of House Draconis' mighty keeps.Under the protection of their Knight escorts, refugee columns several Terran kilometres long made their way to House Draconis' ancestral keep, the Draconspire, as well as Fort Redfang and Mount Imperius which harboured Adrastapol's astrophatic choir and the military headquarters of the Draconis Household Army.The evacuation effort was still not concluded when the vanguard of the Ork armada -- a fleet in excess of 4,000 vessels -- reached Adrastapol's atmosphere. Given the enemy's numbers, the local defence fleet, the so-called "Bastion Fleet," did not try to oppose the landings for it did not have the numbers to prevail. In accordance with the high king's plan, the Bastion Fleet retreated and launched their own attacks once the Ork Rokz landed.Adrastapol's orbital defences opened up once the Ork vessels entered effective range, destroying hundred of the crude vessels, but the Orks easily had the numbers to cope with such losses. An estimated 2,000 Rokz and other vessels tried to make it to the surface of which a little over half succeeded.Several dozen Rokz landed in the sea or on Adrastapol's polar continents to be assaulted and destroyed by the local mega-fauna, while others failed to decelerate before impacting the planet's crust or were shot down by Adrastapol's orbital defences. But even with these losses more than a thousand Rokz made planetfall.During the first days of the invasion, House Draconis took to the field, several battlegroups of Knights attacking isolated Rokz or smaller warbands. It soon became evident that this breed of Orks were technologically superior to the greenskins that had previously invaded Adrastapol.Wearing blue war-paint and making extensive use of captured Imperial war-engines such as Basilisks and Leman Russ tanks, these Deathskulls even brought their own combat walkers, a crude parody of the Draconis' own noble Imperial Knights.Perhaps most unsettling was the weaponry of these walkers, such as electrified nets designed not so much to destroy their opponent as to allow for its eventual capture.Some techno-savants estimated the strength of this WAAAGH! to be three or four times the strength of WAAAGH! Skarjaw which had nearly conquered Adrastapol in the past. The confirmed presence of super-heavy Ork walkers such as Stompaz ultimately made retreat the only logical course of action for the Knights of Adrastapol.A solar week after the beginning of the invasion, the Orks had already successfully isolated each house on its own lands and captured several secondary fortresses.The mountainous terrain of its homeland gave House Pegasson a slight edge over the attackers and only one mountain pass was taken by the Orks. However, their momentary success was cut short when the last Imperial defenders activated the demolition charges placed higher up the mountainside and buried the Orks in a triggered landslide.House Minotos, which had refused to invest much of its wealth in the high king's outlandish reforms, suffered the most from the invasion, as the absence of orbital and aerial defences had allowed the Orks a relatively uncontested landing than within Draconis or Pegasson territory.Whilst the high king was willing to come to his allies' aid, orbital scans and reconnaissance flights conducted by Draconis air assets showed that he would not be able to do so. The greenskins were massing their strength and marching on the Draconspire even as both Mount Imperius and Fort Redfang were already besieged.Soon, Killfist's hordes would also reach the Draconspire and all hope of sallying forth to aid the other houses would be lost.While the overall leader of the WAAAGH!, Warlord Gorgrok Killfist was leading his own horde down from the north, a second army commanded by one of Killfist's lieutenants was closing in from the east.Aerial reconnaissance by swift Lightning-fighters soon identified the smaller of these two hordes to be led by a smaller war chief, another Warlord going by the name of Drogg whose troops and vehicles bore the markings of the Goff-klan.With Killfist's larger army some six solar hours behind that of Drogg, High King Danial ordered the gathered might of House Draconis to muster for a sortie.As Warlord Drogg's army advanced on the Valatane Plains, House Draconis exited the eastern gates of the Draconspire and assembled into five distinguished formations in front of the two-hundred Imperial feet high outer walls.Each formation was led by one member of High King Danial's Exalted Court, with the high king himself riding to war in his faithful Knight Errant Oath of Flame, now upgraded to be fit to carry the high king of Adrastapol into battle.