It had happened.
The worst possible scenario had arrived.
The planet Cadia... has fallen.
The battle for Cadia had begun in space, where the Imperial Navy launched a desperate effort to stop Abaddon's fleet before it could make planetfall. What had followed after that was an apocalyptic void war on a scale rarely seen even in a galaxy filled with war.
Thousands of ships clashed across the Cadian system. Massive battleships exchanged devastating broadsides while swarms of smaller escorts darted through the chaos. The Imperials and especially the Cadians fought with their usual unbreakable resolve, but Abaddon's armada, strengthened by daemon-infested vessels and the immense power of what were known as the Blackstone Fortresses, slowly began to seize the advantage.
On the surface of Cadia, the fighting was no less brutal.
The legendary Cadian Shock Troops turned every inch of ground into a bastion that made the First World War look like a quick vacation.
Trenches, bunkers, and defensive lines became deadly kill zones for months and months, where Chaos forces paid dearly for every increment of advance. Reinforcements arrived in the form of Space Marines from multiple Chapters, bolstering the defenders and, for a time, giving hope that Cadia might endure once again, as it had so many times before.
A pivotal moment came with the unexpected intervention of the Necron by the name of Trazyn the Infinite.
Trazyn the Infinite is an ancient Necron Overlord of the Nihilakh Dynasty. He is essentially a powerful, immortal ruler of a dynasty, belonging to a mechanical undead race called Necrons.
The Necrons themselves are an ancient species. And ancient means over 60 million years old. They were once living, breathing organisms called the Necrontyr, who had already mastered technology to a ridiculous degree. They were, however, suffering from the worst kinds of cancer; their entire race was. And because of that, they had very short lifespans and suffered terribly. Naturally, it was their wish to be free of such pains.
Through greed, ignorance, and irony during a galaxy-changing event, the Necrontyr had their minds transferred into living-metal bodies via a process known as biotransference. This living metal, Necrodermis, is a trademark resource of the Necrons.
As a result of biotransference, they became powerful, technologically ridiculously advanced, machine-like entities who do not age or die in the normal sense.
Trazyn stands out among the rest of the Necrons as a collector and preserver of history. Immortality has its price, and Trazyn has found a 'hobby' if you will.
From his world, known as a tomb world called Solemnace, Trazyn gathers artefacts, relics, and even entire armies or individuals—keeping them frozen in stasis as part of his vast "museum." Rather than seeking conquest, he is driven by a desire to catalogue and preserve important moments and objects from across the galaxy.
All this is possible thanks to the Necrons insanely advanced technology, which makes them such a dangerous race.
Understanding the sheer weight of the 13th Black Crusade, Trazyn visited the planet during the fighting and unleashed ancient warriors from his vast collection, adding their strength to the Imperial defence.
At the same time, a crucial discovery had been made by Archmagus Belisarius Cawl of the Adeptus Mechanicus: the mysterious Cadian Pylons, as they were known, could be activated to hold back significant overlap between the Warp and realspace and push back the Eye of Terror itself.
Cawl hadn't found that out on his own, though, and was helped by Trazyn to activate those Pylons. How did the Necron Overlord know about them? Because those Pylons were made of Blackstone, as the Imperium calls it, or Noctilith, as it is truly called, and had been created 60 million years ago by the Necrons.
Everything suddenly made sense. That was the reason for the Black Crusades—the Cadian Pylons. They wanted to destroy those, to weaken the barrier between the Warp and realspace and this one, the 13th Black Crusade, was supposed to be the magnum opus of Abaddon, that would finally see the millennia-long plan come to fruition.
For the first time, when Cawl and Trazyn activated the Pylons, the defenders glimpsed the possibility not only of saving Cadia but of striking a decisive blow against Chaos.
Naturally, in this galaxy, no one can ever have anything good. Abaddon would not allow this to happen.
As the Pylons activated and the Eye of Terror truly began to shrink, he made a ruthless and defining decision.
Rather than risk defeat, shame and the undoubtedly immense weakening of Chaos, he directed one of the massive Blackstone Fortresses, a structure the size of a small moon, steeped in corrupted power, on a collision course with the planet.
That's right.
Abaddon used a massive Blackstone Fortress like a battering ram and pushed it into the gravitational pull of the planet. The Fortress smashed into the planet Cadia.
...
The impact was catastrophic.
The Fortress slammed into Cadia, causing massive destruction and forcing many Imperials to begin to evacuate. The Imperial evacuation plans had been worked out at the time of the 2nd Black Crusade, but were often completely outdated, confusing, and just not feasible.
Furthermore, the Inquisition had secretly drafted the "Extremis Protocols", effectively forbidding an evacuation of Cadia due to the risk of corruption spreading from its overly Chaos-exposed defenders. A beautiful example of the Imperium being its own most inconvenient enemy.
The Pylons, which had long held back the Warp's influence, were destroyed in the devastation. And with their stabilising power gone, the barrier holding the Eye of Terror back collapsed.
Warp energy flooded into realspace like a tidal wave. This unleashed a galaxy-spanning catastrophe: the birth of the Great Rift, a massive Warp storm that tore across the Imperium and split it in two.
The creation of the rift through the entire galaxy is what caught the Cadamara and its crew.
Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed, Lord General of the Astra Militarum and Lord Castellan of Cadia, and parts of his Cadian 8th held the line against the returned Daemonic legions, while the planet broke apart underneath them. All so that the Imperials could flee Cadia, and the planet was dragged into the Warp.
.
Creed waved his maimed hand in the air, signalling his troops and shouting loudly to be heard over the howling wind.
"Fall back! Fall back!"
With a shudder, the Cadian line shrank towards the evacuation fields. The winds picked up further, stirring the already massive dust storm to new heights. It was terrible and chaotic. The air was hot and cold, directions were hard to make out, and the eyes started to play tricks on the mind.
Suddenly, Creed found himself alone.
A shadow passed overhead, marked by the cog-toothed servo skull of the Adeptus Mechanicus on its sides. Las-fire lanced from its front, giving rise to screams from daemons which were hidden within the dust storm. Then the engines roared, and the transport grumbled skyward, the last transport. Cadia had become little more than a graveyard now, haunted by the stubborn and the dead... and Chaos.
Creed stumbled.
Despite the medics' efforts, his wounds continued to bleed. He felt his strength fading as his coat got soaked. One last effort, he told himself, then he could rest, just one last push. His will was stronger than iron, and he wouldn't give up.
Only in death does duty end.
The storm parted, revealing a metal giant in a scaled cloak. Creed's hurried shots didn't do anything as his weapon was ripped from his hand.
Light shone on the figure's upraised palm, iridescent polygons swirling in a hypnotic dance.
"Ursarkar E. Creed," the giant's voice sounded like tombstones. "This need not be your end. Eternity awaits."
The last Creed would remember as darkness took him was the giant's laughter.
.
A shrunken fleet of battered vessels and exhausted men and women departed from Cadia's orbit, setting course for the edge of the system as fast as they could. The Eye of Terror, which was no longer contained, spilt out into the galaxy.
There was no happiness or relief aboard the fleet, no sense of victory despite what they had endured. Too many had died, perished, ceased to exist, before Inquisitor Greyfax issued her evacuation order, and even then, only a small fraction of Cadia's surviving outposts received the desperate vox-cast.
At the beginning of the 13th Black Crusade, Cadia had been home to around 850 million souls. Now, scarcely three million were fleeing from Abaddon's forces.
From the start, Warp travel was deemed unwise because the Navigators could not identify safe routes through the Immaterium due to the Great Rift, which prevented them from seeing the Astronomicon. And that was a necessity to orient oneself in the Warp.
Therefore, the ship's plasma drives were pushed to their limits and sometimes beyond, to make their way through realspace.
.
At the front of the fleet rushing away was the Phalanx, commanded by Tor Garadon, the Captain of the Space Marines' Imperial Fists 3rd Company. The Phalanx was no ordinary vessel; it was a colossal battle station, effectively a mobile fortress the size of a small moon, bristling with weapons monstrous and powerful enough to drive fear into pursuing Chaos ships and keep them at bay.
It carved a path through the void, its guns forcing traitor vessels to keep their distance.
Behind the Phalanx were the remnants of the Imperial Navy, damaged warships, troop transports, and a scattering of civilian craft which had been crammed with survivors. These ships carried what little remained of Cadia's population and forces. A pitiful amount compared to what it had been initially.
At the rear, holding the line, were the vessels of the Adeptus Mechanicus under the command of Archmagus Belisarius Cawl. His flagship, the Iron Revenant, was an Ark Mechanicus—a rare and ancient vessel filled with lost technologies and forbidden knowledge, some of which the rest of the Mechanicus would most likely see as tech heresy.
But there was one thing, it also carried... something of immense importance, sealed deep within its stasis vaults. This object was so important that Cawl would sacrifice the entire ship for it.
Among the fleet was also Celestine, the Living Saint.
A Living Saint is a mighty and pious warrior of the Imperial Creed who displays miraculous abilities within their lifetime and is subsequently resurrected, supposedly by the Emperor himself. Living Saints are most often members of the Adepta Sororitas, but some have come from the Imperial Guard.
Saint Celestine is a legendary member of the Adepta Sororitas, the Sisters of Battle. She has lived multiple lives in the Emperor's service, and each time she is slain, she is reborn once more.
While the morale was at an all-time low and the chances of survival were equally low, she provided something crucial in these times: faith. It was she who insisted that a path to salvation remained for them.
.
The retreat was anything but orderly. Chaos forces attacked and pestered the fleeing ships constantly.
Twenty hours into the retreat, a Dictator-class cruiser was crippled by enemy fire, to the loss of all ten thousand lives on board. In the following ten hours, two frigates and a light cruiser met the same fate.
Forty hours into the retreat, the plasma drives on the Agri-Hauler, Pride of St. Cerephos, failed. Tor Garadon, Captain of the Space Marines' Imperial Fists 3rd Company, faced a difficult choice: risk the entire fleet to save those crammed like cattle into the hauler's hold, or abandon them to the enemy, where they would die or experience worse.
Reluctantly, he took aboard what few transport crafts could escape the wreck but left the Pride behind, knowing full well how to calculate what was more important at that point in time.
The captains of the Emperor's Wrath and Dominus Victor were appalled at Garadon's pragmatism; they weren't like him, younger, not as experienced and battle-hardened. They defied his orders and went to aid the Pride of St. Cerephos.
Their decision, though noble as it was, proved unintelligent.
Though they arrived before the Chaos forces, barely half of the Cadian soldiers aboard the Pride of St. Cerephos were taken onto the two battleships when the leading ships of the Black Fleet caught up with them.
A traitor ship's broadside tore apart the Emperor's Wrath before it could disengage its docking beams, killing all aboard. The Dominus Victor managed to break away in time, though with fires burning along its starboard flank, pushing its plasma drives roaring at full power.
With skill and luck, it might have reached the safety of Belisarius Cawl's rearguard; however, the captain was killed during the fighting, and with him went the immediate order and the person capable of making hard decisions and remaining cool under immense pressure.
In a panic, his subordinate ordered an emergency Warp jump, fully aware of the risks involved. A foolish choice.
The heading he chose remains a mystery, but his end is all but guaranteed, because Dominus Victor never emerged from the Immaterium. The panic of those aboard most likely became a delicacy for the hungry maw of Slaanesh.
Thus, another quarter million lives fell to the guns of the Black Fleet, a tenth of whom perished due solely to misguided compassion. How ironic, it was. Compassion, how rare it was, didn't prove to be a trait found in survivors of the galaxy. Those who had it suffered such a fate.
Finally, they reached their destination, the Mandeville Point. One by one, vessels began to break away, jumping into the Warp when brief windows of stability appeared. Massive cruisers, freighters, and transports vanished into the Immaterium, escaping Cadia at last.
But not all of the ships were that lucky.