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Ashes of the Imperium – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

The error of history is to assume greater awareness of circumstances at the time than ever existed; to imagine those of the past knew precisely and with insight what was the case then, what was about to be the case, and what they must do to bring about their desired outcome. So it must be with those days, the days I have made my own study. Will the age come to have its own marker, as the Age of Heresy now has? Will the period become a byword for some particular human failing or accomplishment? Surely it will. And yet, even now, so long after the ashes have cooled, I do not know what it shall be. I propose this, with caution: the Age of Confusion. Or maybe, the Age of Ignorance. For it was this way; there was no certainty, and no ready means of discovering it. As a gravely wounded Terra emerged from its seven-year trial into the fog of a new era, be sure of this one truth: nobody, not a soul, from the greatest of generals to the humblest of soldiers, had the faintest idea what to do next.

– Diomedon of Luna, A Study of the Reconstruction

Now run. Run hard. Nothing else exists. Run, then run some more. You will be doing it forever now.

Those were the words, in the rare moments of clarity, the brief pauses in the headlong rush for doubtful sanctuary. It seemed that this was just the start, the movement into a new way of life that would become eternal. Was death preferable? Maybe another fighter would have thought so. They might have turned, weapons held wide, bracing in defiance before the crash of fury-surf that would dash them away.

But he was not made that way. None of his Legion had been made that way. Iron within, iron without. Live. Survive. Fall back, regroup, rebuild. No pity – not for self, not for any living thing. Run. Run hard. Find a place, a distant place, where you can turn at last, and do so from strength.

A place will be found. It will. That was the other truth: the wheel shall turn. Only live long enough to see it.

So run. Run now. But no, not forever.

He had once had a reputation. The earth itself moulded and turned under his hands, they had said. He would gaze at a landscape, a terrain, a scarp that rose and fell like a drape of cloth, and know how to bend it to his will. He would gauge the substrates, the underlying strata and the surface conditions, his grey eyes glittering while his body was held perfectly still under the glow of massed augur readings.

After a minute, or an hour, or days – however long it took – the orders would come. He would signal for the machines to roll into their positions. The drills would start up, the shafts would be delved, the courses dug out. Pumps would begin to churn, soundings would be made. As he continued to observe, arms folded across his chest now, patient, still silent, the levies of slave labour would march into position, tools at the ready. The earth would be changed. It would protest – the screams and bellows of upended stone, the crack of ancient sediments being wrenched into the open – but his will was the mightier. Always, the mightier. The earth was his servant; he was its master.

Thus it had been before the great schism, the years in which he had fought under the banner of the Imperium. Thus it had remained after the break, as victory drew ever closer – the turning of fate’s thumbscrew, when his Legion threw off its long humiliation and turned its talents upon old tormentors. The tools remained the same throughout. Not for him the doubtful advantages of the daemonic, the sprites and delusions of weaker minds and souls, just the old, familiar instruments, the physical things: the hammers, the machines, the hands, the mortal minds and sinews.

Bitter, they had been called. Resentful, reclusive. Well, there was a reason for that. A host of reasons. And the Emperor, for all his sins, had never forged a weapon without a purpose. You needed to be bitter to do this work. You needed to put your back into it, to channel all that surliness, to direct the force of it into the soil. Because the deep places were bitter too. They were foul and they were deep, the accumulated spoil of a thousand buried lifetimes, all of it stinking, pulling at your boots and dragging at your shoulders. Only the sour-souled endured that. Only a stomach of wormwood could out-spite the earth.

So they twisted and changed the worlds they found. They sunk their fingers into them and made the terrains into stages of death. Sometimes it was defensive – earthworks and palisades against which armies broke like sheets of glass. Sometimes it was offensive – encircling trenches that covered the advance of the Great Machines and suffocated the life out of enemy fortresses. The result, in the end, was the same. Corpses rotting into the mulch, walls slumping into the mud, war engines condemned to slow rust, and the banners of the IV Legion – the Iron Warriors – raised high once again.

It was methodical. It was patient. It had been perfect, so perfectly planned, from start to finish, the product of a mind of hard genius, and one under whom he had been so proud to serve.

The Master of Sieges. That’s what they’d called him back then. Ortag Theokon, the Earth-Tormentor. Honoured among a people who only honoured the most strenuous arts, those of the tool and the instrument, the gauge and the theodolite.

What did it mean any more? There would be no building now. No patient remaking of the earth. Only running, headlong, panicked.

The humiliation of it. The raw, unbearable humiliation. That was the worst wound, far worse than any physical flesh-breaking.

Run. Feel the abjectness, the white-hot shame. Run hard.

He’d got close, though. He still remembered it all, vivid as a shell-burst in his mind – the Palace itself. Months of toil it had taken to get that near, and at times the fatigue had been too crushing even for them, but they’d made it eventually, cresting the slag heaps with their engines and gazing at last upon the wounded prize.

By then, Terra had been sunk deep into the oily embrace of the warp and everything was shifting under their feet. You’d fight your way down a processional for a week only to find yourself back where you’d started, or pursue the enemy into a dead end only to find yourself ambushed by hundreds more spilling out from new roads that had never been on the cartoliths. It had sickened him, he remembered, making him frustrated and impatient. His master had long quit the field, perhaps out of the same disgust, leaving only the most committed of the IV behind. Theokon had hauled his engines out of cussedness towards the end, losing thousands of slaves with every painful advance, no longer caring about the waste, just committed, absolutely committed, to being there when it mattered.

And he had been. He’d seen the pinnacles of the final redoubt with his own eyes, swimming amid an ocean of empyreal saturation. He’d got near enough to train his guns on their faltering structures. He’d been poised to level them all, just as he’d levelled so many other fortresses in the past.

For a moment, for one intense moment, he’d revelled in it. They had won. They had won. The sacrifice, the compromises, the pain – it had been worth it at last. The Tyrant would be overthrown, the Reign of the Astartes Unfettered would begin, and this time the Imperium would be constructed and maintained without lies or compromises.

Theokon did not know if he had ever been happy, not like they said the baseline humans were capable of being, but that moment surely got close. He’d grinned under his rusted helm, felt all the fatigue melt away, clenched his fist high. The moment he unclenched, the engines would go to work – the earth would shake, the sky would split, his accumulated hatred would pour onto those walls and render them down to ashes.

He never got to give the order. It had all happened so suddenly, so completely, so utterly without warning. The entire vista had rocked, slammed over, flexed, shuddered. The crimson skies had flared, the stars had blazed. Fires had leapt up from the earth, spontaneous, almost gleeful. These were no munitions, no fresh weapons firing – this was the universe itself in both rapture and agony, a shaking of its primordial foundations, a snapping-back of reality like a dislocated limb being reset.

The daemons were torn out of reality, howling with horror and disbelief. The warp sky exploded and then gusted back into darkness. A great crack rang out from horizon to horizon, deafening for a split second, blinding for a mere instant, then just an echo – the resumption of physical law, the wrench of the immaterium being hauled away.

Elation was replaced, instantly, with terror. Real fear. A whirl of vertigo, of stomach-churning horror. Hardened Space Marines around him fell to their knees, dropped their weapons, looked to the heavens in dumb amazement. Theokon himself staggered, all thoughts of conquest suddenly gone, barely noticing as the greatest of his precious engines disintegrated from within. A gale whipped up, churning dust and ashes into the already filthy skies. Rumbles of collapse juddered across the poisoned soils. A greater roar rose, gathering strength, resounding and voluminous, coming now from far, far above. So he looked up at last, barely aware of himself or where he was, and saw them: the enemy, not crawling across the landscape in scraps and rags but swarming from the heavens, rank upon rank of them – drop pods, landers, heavy carriers laced with friction lightning. Where had they come from? Who were they? How was this happening?

‘Fall back!’ came a cry, a strangled outburst of wild astonishment.

Theokon might have resisted that, but then the bombardment began – curtains of fire, vengeful fire, lancing down from the hurtling atmospherics, crackling and splitting the air itself. The concentration of it was phenomenal, as if ranks of calderas had tipped out their white-hot contents in unison, dousing the surface in a tide of sizzling ingots even as more were lined up to come.

So he ran. He turned heavily, slipping in the already-boiling mud, limping back the way he’d come, along with all the rest of them, sliding and skidding and dropping to all fours, leaving weapons, leaving shields and trophies, dropping it all, forgetting it all, just scrambling out of that inferno before the waves of pain overtook them and dissolved them down to nothing.

The battlefront was vast – kilometres and kilometres of terrain crammed with millions of troops and vehicles – but the onslaught was everywhere, at all points, sudden and unrelenting. Theokon’s helm display quickly overloaded, immediately crammed with so many threat signals that he blinked it off. He was panting, gasping for oxygen. He felt very cold, even as the air shimmered with heat from the bombardment.

It wasn’t fighting. It wasn’t any kind of contest. It was a rout, an immediate rout, a switchback of vicious, unprecedented severity. Whole squads, whole battalions, were consumed as they attempted to turn. Those engines that had not already been destroyed were now hunted and disabled. The drop pods plunged into the sickened earth, bracketed with insane levels of covering fire, then the doors slammed open and the hunters spilled out.

He never even saw the insignias on those doors – he never knew who was killing them all. He felt as if he might be weeping as he ran, as if he might be dying from the inside out, as if the shame would burst his hearts. He saw Krathos killed, his lieutenant blown up by charges as he tried to scale a sliding dune face of wreckage. He saw Llax and Fidec ripped apart, their limbs and weapons thrown wildly into the air. He kept going, breaking into a heavy run, his boots churning up the blood and oil that saturated the dust. The sky lit up again, then again, then flared permanently white, erasing shadows, picking them all out in savage clarity.

Somehow he got back to the earthworks, the reserve lines. He got a snatched glimpse of the lower plains beyond, the ones they’d spent months fighting across, the badlands they had conquered with so much loss and determination, now a seething mass of bodies fleeing the other way. Millions of them. Billions of them. Mutants, beasts, mortals, Astartes, screaming and slipping and going mad. No daemons. None. All gone, all pulverised. He saw the once-possessed limping around in agony and terror, their sundered souls amputated back to wholeness.

He stumbled on through the trenches, his ears filled with the roar of slaughter behind him. He glanced up again, groggily – saw a big lander coming down less than a kilometre off, its swollen hull running with friction-flame and smoke, its flanks split open to reveal rows and rows of launch cradles. Beyond that was a voidship coming down. A voidship! Hells, it was massive, its high-atmosphere passage kindling thunderheads and scatter-lightning, its mighty thrusters burning up what was left of the cloud cover, its stressed void shields crackling like corposant.

What had happened to the Grand Fleet? Where was the orbital defence picket? How were those things getting through?

No time to speculate, no time to think, just stagger onwards, slip and skid and stumble and keep moving. Borasc was killed, shot clean through with some kind of ice-white energy beam. Nuih and Gorkolis were dropped next, overtaken by the hunters, engaged, snarled in combat, cut to pieces. They were being chewed through, ground up, minced down to gobbets of blood-soaked, bone-flecked detritus. The hunters were closing, coming into visual range now, loping after them with terrifying speed. He spat blood into his vox-grille, viscous and slimy. His breathing was like an old man’s, wheezing out of overworked lungs.

Then he saw the Stormbird, a few hundred metres off, grounded, its marker lights on, unguarded, half lost in the tumbling smog banks and mortar flares. IV Legion – his own. He’d be able to crack it open, activate the thrusters.

Who was still with him? Alescu was on his shoulder, limping badly. Old Mnon, bitter old Mnon, just behind him. A few beyond that, struggling in the haze and the disintegrating terrain – five or six, no more.

‘Take it!’ he roared, his voice strangled and hoarse.

No one was guarding it, its old crew were gone. They piled inside, activating the drives while the crew-bay doors were still creaking into place. The gunship took off in an explosion of mud and filth and chem spillage, erupting out of the mire and labouring to gain loft. Almost immediately, targeting runes flashed up across the cockpit console – dozens of them, hundreds of them. Another Stormbird had achieved take-off just ahead of them, one caked in mud and bearing the symbols of the Night Lords. It took a hit to its spine that punched it back down to earth, another to its starboard flank that kicked it over, then two more to its cockpit before a seeker missile corkscrewed into its exposed underbelly and blew the whole thing up.

Theokon piloted straight into the cloud of shrapnel, risking damage to benefit from a few precious moments of sensor-overloading heat and plasma. The forward viewer ran blank with raging flames for a split second, and then they were out again, boosting and slanting through a forest of energy beams and hard rounds, a crowded airspace of descending hunters and desperate prey. Visibility was non-existent beyond a few hundred metres, just a miasma of explosions and flying wreckage and somersaulting flyer carcasses. No tactics, no possibility of evading incoming fire, just the hope that those around you, the ones you’d just been fighting alongside as part of the greatest army ever assembled, would take the las beam or the projectile strike in your stead.

This was wretched. This was base, ignoble, cowardly.

Keep running.

Somehow they had made it out of the first kill-zones, climbing erratically, pushing the envelope to gain speed, streaking clear of the core volume of airborne destruction. Theokon had tilted hard to evade a reeling Thunderhawk, turned his head for an instant, and got what he instinctively knew would be his last view of Terra.

The entire Himalazian plateau lay far below, an ellipse of fire from horizon to curved horizon, the great stage of all their dramas. It was burning, all of it now, glimmering an angry red, punctured by millions of dark points streaming down from the fleets above. In the very centre stood the mighty Sanctum Imperialis, the last redoubt, vast beyond vast, compassed by its concentric rings of trenches and earthworks, its soaring domes cracked and its towers splintered. It was solid, blackened, like a hateful pupil set in a loathsome eye, unblinking, devastated, lingering.

It would endure. They had not killed it. It would remain. It would be gazing after them as they fled into the void, staring, staring, never leaving them.

Theokon screamed. Not from fear now, but from frustration, from fury, from a diamond-pure hatred that surged up within him and flooded his every vein and artery.

He gazed at that eye, the great eye of the earth, fire-ringed and eternal, and screamed at it.

Live. Survive. A place will be found.

The Stormbird flew hard and fast, a spear thrust out of the heart of ruin, streaking through the burning heavens.

Live.

This was all that remained. To persist. To not be extinguished.

Survive.

They had lost. They had lost everything.

Get. Out.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2025.
This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
Black and white internal artwork by Jodie Muir.

Ashes of the Imperium © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. Ashes of the Imperium, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Siege of Terra, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80407-764-1

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

For Hannah and Alex, with love.

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