Tilo III was a planet transformed. An Imperial world that teetered on the edge of damnation, a battle for its very soul. I didn’t know what I was doing here, none of us did. We were guardsmen, not the genehanced sons of the Emperor. Merely the conscripts and volunteers of a hundred worlds, clad in washed olive fatigues and bound under a single name: The Neptunian Dogs. I should’ve known better, should have seen the signs that we were headed in a maelstrom. Many of us, thousands to a single regiment, knew little of the operations we'd embarked upon. Information was need to know and trickled down the grapevine in the form of rumors and conjecture similarly to a bead of water trickling down the ridge of a stalactite. Sergeant Kaelf seldom held back once the operation filtered to his clearance level but Tilo had been different. His skin, usually flushed with excitement or red with fury, had been clammy all the way down. Our orders were to hold the line. Simple as. We all knew what that meant.
God-Emperor only knew what became of Kaelf; I hadn't seen him in days. The reconquest of Tilo III had not been the quelling of a belligerent world unwilling to pay its tithes. No, the very soul of Tilo III was at stake, and it was a duty of which I knew little. Survival was all that mattered now.
***
Another wave of cultist crashed upon our barbwire entrenchments. The rotting corpses of their fallen kin clogged the trench line, forming makeshift bridges of sacrificial flesh. We opened up on them with heavy stubbers and lasguns alike, shressing them to pieces with ballistic armaments, blasting grapefruit sized holes through flesh and plasteel alike with lasfire. Our opponents were not ill-equipped, returning fire in sporadic bursts an occasionally catching some unlucky sap between the eyes or in the cunt; that was hardly the worst of it.
These heretics did not scream as they died, nor did they curse the Emperor with their dying breaths. They seemed to derive an unnatural sense of comfort in death, almost like their souls had already left them. Bloodied faces, ritually carved with ghoulish artistry, smiled with such calm as to unnerve me more than any howl or blasphemy could. Valkyrie gunships zagged across the horizon leaving billowing contrails of black smoke in their wake, their pollution a mere dustup compared to the blackened ash that fell from an unnaturally purple haze, as heavy as snow on Fenris. I could feel it in my bones, the immaterial sickness spreading across Tilo. For as many as we slew it seemed as though another dozen took their place. Throne only knew how many I'd killed.
“Fire, guardsman, fire!” A voice, as hoarse as a crucified saint’s cry, rose above the madness, jolting me into the present. I returned fire at the screaming maniacs charging towards us. Even gloved, painful blisters swelled along my left palm, the flesh tender from a lasgun denied respite. The heat was unbearable, the air choked with the stench of oil and metal and every shot I took left my rifle steaming and tarnished. There would be another wave soon. Another onslaught of deranged fanatics clad in pockmarked purple, flesh and vestments alike marked with a fiendish sigil of amethyst curves.
“Where are the Kriegers?” A fellow guardsman, one I’d never seen or met, cried desperately at my shoulder, “Where are the Legio Gryphonicus?”
Krieg? Titans? Emperor, no, things could not have been that bad. I looked about, seeing that the faces that now surrounded me were nothing like the men I'd grown so accustomed to serving alongside. What had happened to my company? Time did not exist on Tilo, not in the conventional sense, at least. The unstoppable procession of war had been an impossible constant to the senses. The battle, when I saw it, had no beginning and no end, only a cycle of ever escalating horror. How long had it been since I dared look away from the writhing horde before us? How long had I been shooting?
“There!” Another voice, this one belonging to a young, wiry man, so caked in grime and soot that his only discernible features were a set of bloodshot, emerald eyes, pointed to a shadow beyond the wire.
It was massive, as tall as the highest statues erected upon Shrine Worlds, and yet, it plodded through the distant miasma as a living, breathing behemoth. Huge, lumbering, its bulk covered in dark purple plates and weathered greaves, a lumbering beast of a being that boggled human comprehension.
“Is it ours?” I asked, but the young man, a mere conscript, shook his head, eyes widening in abject terror. It was indeed a Titan, but not our own. As smoldering clouds of ash parted in its wake, my newfound companions and I were able to make out the terrible nature of the corrupted god-machine; an evil that would shake the foundations of every temple of the God-Emperor and terrify the hearts and minds of any who dared see it with their own eyes. Its torso was a smooth, unblemished field of amethyst, a perfect oval, curving down to its knees which ended in the clearest, purest legs of polished silver, and from those, its head emerged. It was a skull. The skull of a demon, the skull of a god, of a fallen diety, and it was large as a building. The skull leered and snapped as if possessed, for it most likely was, and chattered endlessly of the most profane blessings delivered by its God. The smooth ridges and ornate plating were testaments to its infernal craftsmen. There was an unnatural sensuality to a it, the ancient machine suffering from the same perversions as the decadent cultist we’d been blasting apart for days. Most concerning were the enormous cannons that jutted from its fleshy right appendage, its length stylized after a comically corrupted phallus that was the size of a building; damnable daemon worshippers.
“It has been the greatest of honors to serve alongside you, brother.” Another unfamiliar trooper whispered to me as though we were kin, his eyes watery with grief yet steadfast.
“I don’t even know you!” If the God-Emperor was indeed watching over us then this was a comedy.
My newfound brothers, sisters and I had accepted our fate when we heard it. A horn-cry that shook the rubble and nearly bursted our already thrumming eardrums. This cry emanated from our rear flank. We turned, cast into darkness by the sun-blotting shadow of another living machine-god as it thundered ahead; the Legio Gryphonicus.
Grand standards of noble heraldry fluttered in the smoke-filled sky, the golden wings of the Imperial Aquila against a field of charred gunmetal. Atop them, upon their own banners, the heads of lions and stags and falcons all held up the golden crown of the Legio household. Our human minds struggled to grasp its enormity, for in truth, the Gryphonicus Legio was equally as large as their corrupted counterpart; two warlord-class Titans, a sight unseen since the days of the forgotten Horus Heresy, when such marvels of mankind’s apex roamed in multitudes never seen again, decimating entire cities in a matter of minutes.
The great beast of silver-and-black had been encased in plates of armor, and it seemed a sculpture, the embodiment of the Omnissiah come to life. As it opened its massive beak of a jaw, it bellowed a war cry that shook the very foundations of Tilo. My hands gripped the hot metal of my rifle with such force that they ached, and I watched in rapt, horrified fascination as the titans began to circle one another. Ours was the first to fire, and thank the God-Emperor, as we surely would’ve been vaporized by the sheer proximity of the enemy’s glancing shots.
“Down, fool!” This time it was a commissar yelling at me before lunging forth and burying both of us in the blood-rich filth below. The volcano-cannon of the loyalist Titan began to glow with blinding intensity, encased in a miniature supernova as it prepared to unleash its vengeance. It fired, a blazing stream of metal-melting plasma that seared the earth below and melted through the front line of enemy infantry. There were collateral casualties on our side as well, unfortunate souls standing just high enough that their bodies were obliterated and left a smoldering stain in the muck.
The enemy Titan had fallen in a pathetic, staggering tumble, its traitorous chassis transformed into smoldering wound of emulsified slag. The quickness of its demise had left us all dumbfounded, but I suppose that was the nature of Titan warfare: a single critical could decimate voidshields and vaporize critical components in an instant.
The volcano-cannon’s lance had parted the choking miasma, splitting the ominous clouds above in twain with the sheer eminence of its power. Even now, the vile blackness was beginning to recede, as if its very nature was tied to that of the demon machine-god. This was the first sign of hope I had seen since arriving to Tilo, and I knew not how to express my gratitude to the God-Emperor.
I could not hear, perhaps none of us could, but we could see as a tidal wave of trench coat-clad warriors rose above the horizon of a neighboring ridge. There were a uniform horde, none distinguished from the other, donning skull-like rebreathers and sporting bayoneted lasrifles. Our silent allies, the Deathcorps of Krieg. They fired at will, an unstoppable barrage of crimson luminescence and buzzing plasma, each one striking a cultist in their ranks with enough force to bring down a great stone column. There was no glory, no honor in this butchery, but these were our comrades, and together, we were the last hope at Tilo’s salvation. No longer would we be facing cannon fodder, as from the heretics’ teeming ranks we could make out the twisted forms of beings never born; lissome creatures torn from a realm of lurid nightmare stuff pirouetted in ballets of death and carnal delight, accompanied by their genhanced flock. Chaos space marines howled to the heavens in sing-song praises to a thirsting god, half moaning at the prospect of sating their sadomasochistic desires. These were the enemies’ true champions, come to play the sweet song of slaughter at last. The enemy numbered in the thousands. Even with the death of their Titan, such a conjunction of demonic entities was a host in and of itself.
My lungs burned from lack of air, my ears were ringing, my limbs trembling, but still, I could make out the distinctive cry of my savior commissar. He was standing along the coils of rusted wire, a chiseled expression of hatred and zeal shining through the squalor of battle. It was quite idyllic. A sight worthy of a remembrancer. The commisar was silhouetted, the object our desires just in the edge of the horizon, the central hivecity of which the corruption emanated; it was a distant collection of twisted citadels and surely debased cathedrals. Even if we survived this bloodbath, the task of driving deeper into the metropolis’s heart still lie before us. In his hands, a relic of a bolt pistol glimmered in the dying light that filtered through parted clouds, raised directly at the enemy and barking in unison with its master, “Rise! Rise and shoot or be damned! Do you wish to live forever? For the Emperor!”