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They called him the Inheritor.

Eliphas, Dark Apostle of the Word Bearers Legion, faithful servant of Lorgar, looked at the tarot cards before him. Their faces were obscured, hidden from his sight. Chaos had guided his hands in picking them out from the deck, he was certain of it. Now all that remained was to turn them over.

The first. Apocalypsi. The image on the card was a mountain of burning skulls in a sea of blood. It foretold great battle before him. Eliphas was certain of that - he had prepared beforehand, culling his Host to the number seen in his visions, the six-hundred and sixty-six strongest fighters, in a week of gladiatorial combats. Attached to that number were thirty Khornate Berzerkers of the Word Bearers, five Obliterators (mercenaries; Eliphas hated those types), and an innumerable number of cultists and slaves (there was little distinction between the two).

The second. The Evangelist. Lorgar's Word would be spread, it seemed. Ah, it would be glorious. To spread the sacred Word of the Urizen in blood and fire was a privilege many of the innumerable cultists and fanatic-slaves on board this Battle-Barge would gladly die for. They might be dogs and below their betters, but even they might have ambition.

The third. The Tower. False pride, false gods would be cast down. Eliphas knew that was another privilege - to tear down a false god, like the Corpse-Emperor on Terra was, to grind its temples into the dust, to slaughter its priests and followers and make its very name forgotten - that induced great satisfaction in him.

Now the fourth, the most important. The Chariot. Success, victory, that was what the card meant. It promised him that, the card. Self-assured, Eliphas rose and swept the cards aside with his crimson-gauntleted hand. One fell through the grating of the floor into the fires below, but Eliphas disregarded that. The cards, as a method of divination, could be replaced. Eliphas walked, striding regally across the floor, a knee-length cloak of black leather (flayed from the living flesh of his predecessor) flowing smoothly behind him. Eliphas' power armour was ornate, artificier-crafted, images of screaming daemons worked into the silver trim, the crimson plates the colour of Hell itself. Their eyes occasionally flared a dull red, testament to the daemon bound within. His helm was also expertly crafted, the elegant silver horns that rose from it testament to the skill of the crafters that had wrought it. The twin eye-slits glared the malevolent red of a still-burning furnace.

Eliphas closed the bulkhead to the divination chamber behind him as he left, arcane mechanisms locking with a snickety-snick sound. As he walked from the chamber to the main chapel where the Host was congregated, slaves and cultists prostrated themselves in obeisance, eyes held to the deck for fear of looking upon their Dark Apostle and thus igniting his wrath. Their terror was not unfounded. As he strode through the corridors of the mighty starship, knowing the passages like the back of his hand, bound daemons wailed and screamed, denied full expression in the material realm but trapped within it by the existence of the starship, forced to serve by innumerable rituals and runes of binding. Eliphas touched the chapel door - it opened to the touch, opening inward with a loud creaking sound and the sound of metal grinding upon metal. Eliphas strode upon the black metal floor, faces cast into it, until he reached a platform of black stone, upon which a lectern stood. A copy of the Book of Lorgar was bound to the lectern with thick iron chains, bound in black leather of human origin.

Beside the lectern stood the Coryphaus, Phael Toron. The Coryphaeus was clad entirely in heavy Terminator armour, wielding a combi-bolter and a long power-sword which glowed with fell red light. On the other side stood sorcerer Tartaron, wielding his staff which glowed with many colours, colluding around its tip, which was a Chaos star. Eliphas solemnly opened the great tome, leafing through the pages of human skin, to find the verse he was looking for. The words of Lorgar were written in human blood, which retained a reddish tinge, even after all the millennia it had seen, by the most delicate auto-quills.

'And look; and I saw the Ninth Inheritor, and the Powers of Chaos followed him,' Eliphas uttered, quoting from Lorgar's writings. He raised his Accursed Crozius at the same time, the daemon-weapon burning from unnatural flame.

'As it may be, we are about to begin an invasion,' Eliphas continued. 'Of a whole galaxy, which lies like fruit ripe for the plucking by the powers of Chaos! My visions and divinations have guided me to the rift, the rent in space from which we shall begin this blessed invasion. Shall it not be glorious? Shall it not be wondrous, to bring the blessings of Lorgar, of Chaos, to this new galaxy? Let the Changer of Ways guide us, may Great Khorne and Grandfather Nurgle give us strength and Great Slaanesh give us the power to lay waste to these wretches and bring Chaos! Let us raze their worlds, their fleets, and let them learn that CHAOS IS THE ONLY TRUE ANSWER!'

The sea of crimson and silver beneath him erupted into fanatical cheering.

'We will teach them,' he continued. 'With plasma-gun and bolter and melta-lance and virus-missile and las-cannon and THERMAL CHARGE! Death the resistant shall beg for, death eternal! But we shall deny them that blessed oblivion, OH YES! Let our daemons take them to a Hell without exit or end, where the gaze of the Chaos Gods shall stare into their eyes and shatter their souls, and make them crawl and beg and DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE FOR CHAOS, IN THE NAME OF LORGAR!'

The cheering only grew louder.

'We translate to the Warp in ten minutes, making for the rift,' Eliphas stated calmly. 'Prepare for battle.'

The Host left, leaving Eliphas alone.

~*~

Qui-Gon Jinn was concerned. Maybe it was the recently-catalogued wormhole that had opened near the Naboo system, but something filled him with great unease and, although he didn't want to admit it...fear. That said, as he had just been dispatched to said system to negotiate with the Trade Federation, maybe it was just nerves. He could deal with nerves easily.

The main bridge of Eliphas’ Battle-Barge, the Diabolicum, was a cavernous, vaulted chamber the size of an ancient Terran cathedral. And it was as richly decorated as one. Stained-glass windows showed the glory of Chaos and displayed sequences from the rebellion against the False Emperor – the Istvaan Massacres, the battles of Calth, the siege of Terra, the Pilgrimage of Lorgar, and many others. Icons showed Dark Apostles, battle sequences, ancient wars forgotten to all save the Word Bearers. The greatest one was an icon of the daemon-primarch Lorgar, the gene-father of all the Word Bearers. At the centre of the vast chamber sat Eliphas the Inheritor’s command throne, a great obsidian construct that pulsed and glowed with the glorious power of the Empyrean.

Around the command throne on its dais, were sensor relays, linked by cables to the throne, relaying relevant data about the ship and its immediate surroundings directly before Eliphas’ eyes, linked to the heads-up display of his helm’s lenses among various pieces of tactical data that weren’t relevant right now. Beyond these relays were the postings of the bridge-crew – mostly Chaos-servitors cabled to their postings, mono-tasked to certain functions such as co-ordinating weapons fire, nothing left in their tiny minds but the functions for which they had been created. A notable exception was Magos Uzai, an agent of the Dark Mechanicum, who was the main sensor officer, responsible for long-range and planetary scanning. He also led the tech-priests aboard the vessel, those who maintained the war-gear of the Host and wrought new and ever more terrible weapons in the soul-forges deep below.

The fell light of the Immaterium shone through the windows, bringing madness to the weak with its roiling storms – but Eliphas found staring into the domain of the Chaos Gods a somewhat calming experience, knowing that he was protected by them. Daemons battered at the ship’s geller field, their immaterial claws searching for the slightest weakness, but the geller field was an adamantium wall, a bubble of Materium around and within the ship within which they could not enter. Finally, Eliphas gave the order to exit the Immaterium. They were almost at their destination.

Reality teared and buckled to permit the ship out of the Empyrean. Its inside might seem sinister, but its outside was malevolence incarnate. The ship was shaped like a Heresy-era Battle Barge, painted the crimson red of the Word Bearers, all unpainted components a bright silvery metal. Lance batteries glared menacingly, as did innumerable weapons batteries. At the ship’s armoured prow were ports for plasma torpedoes, a Nova Canon slung under it. At the centre of the system they were in glowed the rift in space for which Eliphas had been searching, formed from a stellar explosion, the cosmic energies unleashed having torn reality asunder. There were no planets – all nearby had been obliterated when the star they had been orbiting tore itself apart. There were no Imperial ships nearby – something Eliphas hated, as it denied him a chance to indulge in his favoured pastime.

But patience, soon, in the strange galaxy beyond the rift, there would be plenty of sport. Eliphas ordered all power to engines and the mighty behemoth began to move quicker than its size might suggest. In a matter of hours it was almost at the rift. Cosmic energies danced along its void shields, mighty arcs of electron plasma and rays of cosmic radiation. But it was nothing the mighty vessel had not already endured before, and in any case it was insignificant compared to a simple lance broadside. With a great burst of power, the Diabolicum drove straight into the heart of the rift.

~*~

Captain Patrus of the science vessel Bird of Hope considered himself a rational man. He believed that ultimately, everything could be measured and quantified, even the Force. It was as such that he had led the expedition to the recently-opened wormhole as soon as news had reached him of it opening. The scanners were working double-time to establish data on the gigantic wormhole, it seemed to be fluctuating heavily. That was when something burst out of the rift, a gigantic ship. It was covered in crimson paint, about eight miles long – the immensity of it staggered his mind. It also seemed to be covered in weapons. Something seemed to hurt his eyes as he looked at it – he realised that the thing’s geometries were simply wrong, painful to the eye. The scanners found nothing of the ship beyond generalities like size and shape, the energy it gave off made specific information impossible to find.

That was when a malevolent voice issued itself from the speaker grille next to him.

This is Eliphas the Inheritor, the voice said. What is the nature of this vessel?

‘A...a science ship,’ Patrus replied.

Are you faithful?

‘N...no,’ he replied. Well, he didn’t believe in any gods – even the Force, unknowable as the Jedi considered it to be, could be quantified, he was certain.

He instantly noticed that the lights on the bridge had all gone dark. He frantically checked the holo-net relay – there was only darkness there.

A diabolic voice exploded through every corner of his mind.

Then die.

He fell to his knees, barely noticed the lance-strike that vaporised his unshielded vessel and scattered its atoms through the darkness of space.

~*~

Eliphas smiled, one more faithless wretch had died. In the instants before he had destroyed that pitiful vessel, a scrapcode devised by Magos Uzai had provided a measure of information on this new galaxy. It seemed ripe for the slaughter he would unleash.

‘Spectroscopic analysis of nearby stars complete,’ a dull servitor-voice uttered.

Eliphas had the results filtered through to his helmet’s HUD – it seemed there were multiple habitable systems nearby.

Which one he despoiled first was just a matter of choice.

The Senator from Naboo will be quick to use this as proof of an extra-galatic threat that the current Senate leadership cannot deal with. This timeline might speed up the creation of the Empire, as I can imagine Eliphas serving as a better jedi trap than the clone wars were.

I like the premise.

The Warp of this galaxy was strange, Eliphas had to admit. He could still feel the fires of his own galaxy’s Immaterium burning within him, still feel the touch of the eightfold-blessed Chaos Gods on his flesh and on his soul. But the Warp here was placid, calm even – the currents were stable, and there was a notable lack of storms. They were very close to the nearby system, after only a few minutes’ travel through the Immaterium, speeds that Eliphas had doubted were even possible. Several minutes later, the data relays of the ship brought the mass-shadow of a terrestrial planet to Eliphas’ senses, and he gave the order to move out from the Immaterium.

Reality vomited out the hell-ship into the Materium, and sensors began their work. The planet was classified, mapped, scanned. Numbers and estimations spiralled through Eliphas’ HUD. Sentient lifeforms: 600 million. Not enough to build a proper Gehehmanet, Eliphas thought drolly. There seemed to be a group of strangely-shaped ships in orbit – without proper void shields or geller fields, they were open books to his faster-than-light sensors and psychic powers. There seemed to be a low amount of proper souls aboard each in proportion to their size – Eliphas, familiar enough with the Imperial Navy’s use of ratings in the thousands, guessed that it was crewed mainly by Servitors or something similar. Energy levels indicated that they were armed – with what, he couldn’t guess.

They were positioned in a fairly standard blockade formation, although they were too far away from each other to help in case of attack. Just what he needed. There was one transmitting signals to the ground – giving orders to an occupying force? Eliphas didn’t care, he needed blood. He disengaged the link to his HUD, then left the command throne. He walked through the corridors of the ship, till he found the Anointed members of his Host. The Anointed numbered sixty-six, after the gladiatorial combat he had ordered to let the strongest rise to full power, but he was taking only five of their number with him – it made for better sport. They were armoured with Tactical Dreadnought Armour blessed in the name of Chaos Undivided by himself personally, armed with mighty thunder-hammers designed to shatter all obstacles and opponents, and combi-bolters that could blast men apart with pathetic ease. One was armed with a Heavy Flamer.

Eliphas was armed with his Accursed Crozius – the tip suitable for use as a heavy bludgeoning tool even before daemonic and technological enhancement, the other end ending in a sharpened edge power-fielded and one atom thick – and a plasma pistol that had earned its worth many times over in its combat history. He entered the teleport chamber with his Anointed, the heavy bulkhead intended to slow down any daemons that breached the localised geller field until appropriate firepower could be deployed. It closed, and a path opened through the Warp, Eliphas hurling himself through it, his Anointed close behind.

~*~

Cleanliness. That was what this vessel smelled of. Sight returned quickly, the first thing Eliphas saw was a silvery humanoid. His HUD scanners showed that it was wholly mechanical, not a hint of flesh within. A thing of iron and silicon, fitting only of obliteration (although some in the Dark Mechanicum might disagree). With a single blow, he sent the thing’s head flying off against a wall, then crushed it beneath his armoured foot. The automaton was now motionless and still. There was a bulkhead ahead – the Anointed smashed it with ease. More automatons, more Men of Iron lay ahead. Fortunately, combi-bolter fire blew them apart with ease. The Anointed silently followed in single file behind Eliphas, hoping to find some type of opponent that would actually fight.

The corridor filled with gas. Undoubtedly poisonous, fortunately the helmet automatic filter systems worked excellently. A sting of pain hit Eliphas in the shoulder, his neural interface reacting in response to damage to his armour’s shoulder-pad. He fired three plasma pistol shots into the gas cloud, the stinging stopped instantly.

‘Advance,’ he ordered. They followed eagerly.

Ten minutes later, their enemy appeared. The gangly automatons had some rifles, seeming to fire plasma bolts – far weaker than the Imperium’s use of the technology.

‘Enemy detected, roger roger,’ the lead one stated. Eliphas silenced its annoying voice with a single plasma shot, blasting its head apart in a spray of white hot fragments and vapour. Combi-bolters blasted apart other automatons, their weak frames falling apart at the slightest prodding. More and more kept coming, but were felled easily with single shots. After some time, Eliphas ordered an advance into close combat. Thunder hammers blew the automatons apart with so much force their individual parts were sent flying in opposite directions.

‘Brother Virgilius,’ Eliphas asked over the vox-link. ‘Do activate that heavy flamer of yours.’

The chamber was bathed in white hot flame. Automatons literally melted with the ambient heat, screaming in hideous agony or sending garbled orders as their programming broke down. The bulkhead before them was red-hot and on fire, until a blast door closed, blocking the flames from a source of oxygen. One of the Terminators set a melta charge on the blast door, then walked away. The blast door ceased to exist, vanishing in a blinding flash, instantly reduced to a layer of slag on the floor.

Then, Eliphas the Inheritor strode imperiously through the ruined doorway.

~*~

Nute Gunray of the Trade Federation took a long look at the menacing figures and then took three steps back in absolute terror. The lead figure was more than three metres tall, carrying a hand cannon in his left hand and a strange cudgel that made his eyes sick in his right. He was obviously some kind of droid, painted a deep crimson, but what droid would carry a trophy rack of skulls upon its back? Behind him stood five even taller figures, carrying giant spiked hammers and even more hand cannons – save one, who carried something that looked like a flamethrower – a massive one, if what Gunray saw was no illusion. The lead figure then holstered its massive pistol and took its horned helmet off.

It took Gunray a few seconds to rationalise what he saw. The figure was human, male, and massively scarred, as if it had been tortured. Around the scars, words – no, sentences – were tattooed in a deep red ink – maybe it was blood, given the thing’s trophy rack? The words were tattooed around another tattoo, in black, an eight-pointed star. The monstrosity said one word in a language Gunray didn’t understand.

‘Xenos.’

What did it mean? Gunray was far too terrified to move. Then the abomination put its helmet back on and levelled its pistol.

The plasma pistol was designed for breaching tank or similar armour. Thus it was no surprise that when Eliphas fired it at the Nemoidian, it overpenetrated. Spectacularly. The alien’s head exploded, as its brain was superheated and burst. A Nemoidian standing behind his target was struck in the back and screamed, but was cut short as his spine melted and his lungs exploded. The Terminators continued the assault, bolt rounds blowing aliens apart.

There were none left in a matter of seconds. Eliphas sent a mental command to the Diabolicum, ordering it to bring him and his Anointed back – and to teleport in some of the Dark Mechanicum adepts aboard the vessel. They would have a field day with its workings, indeed.

This is quite cool. I especially like the characterization of Eliphas. It shows a chaos commander as a proper intelligent person and not just another insane lunatic. Brilliant.