[SPEAKER_01]: The ship was old, that was the first thing he noticed, before the cold, and before the silence, and before the grey armoured figures who watched him from the shadows of corridors that seemed to stretch on forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ship was old, in a way that he had never encountered before, not in all his years of service to the administrator, and not in all the archives he had cataloged across a dozen
[SPEAKER_01]: It had a deep settled antiquity of something that has been cared for across the millennia by hands that understood its value.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each new keeper adding their own small repairs and their own small marks to a thing that was ancient when their grandfather's grandfather looked up at the stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: The corridors were long and dim, lit by lumin strips that cast a pale blueish light, a long walls of aged metal, that had developed something that was not rust, not corrosion.
[SPEAKER_01]: But something more like the darkening of very old silver, a depth of colour that showed centuries upon centuries of atmosphere in use, and the slow patient chemistry of time doing its work.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had come aboard by mandate of the Imperial Palace itself, which was the only authority in the galaxy, sufficient to secure passage upon a vessel whose masters had never invited anyone aboard for any reason in recorded history.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mandate was sealed with sigils that he had been told.
[SPEAKER_01]: In quiet and rather serious tones, by the senior clerk who had handed him the assignment, were not to be examined too closely or discussed with anyone who did not already know what they meant.
[SPEAKER_01]: He carried the mandate in a leather satchel, pressed close against his chest, and he had presented it upon a rival to a figure in great terminator plate, who had regarded him with eyes that were entirely black.
[SPEAKER_01]: No iris, no white,
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing but a liquid darkness that reflected the dim light of the corridor, like water at the bottom of a very deep well, and who had taken the mandate and examined it without expression, and returned it without comment, and gestured, with a gauntlet large enough to crush his skull, toward the interior of the ship.
[SPEAKER_01]: That had been the extent of his welcome.
[SPEAKER_01]: No words of greeting, no escort to sign to guide him, or explain the layout of the vessel, or warn him which areas were forbidden to mortal feet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Simply the gesture, and the black eyes watching him go, and the silence that followed him through corridor after corridor like a patient animal that had decided to keep him company, whether he wanted it or not.
[SPEAKER_01]: The silence was the thing that unsettled him most in those first hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had served aboard Imperial vessels before, troop ships and cargo haulers, and once memorably, a cruiser of the Imperial Navy during a transit through contested space, and all of them had been noisy in the way that large ships are noisy.
[SPEAKER_01]: filled with the constant background hum of engines and the distant clatter of servitors at work, and the murmur of thousands of human voices, going about the business of keeping a void-faring vessel alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: This ship had none of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: The engines were there, somewhere far below but their sound was felt, rather than heard.
[SPEAKER_01]: A deep subsonic vibration that moved up the deck plates and climbed up through his boots.
[SPEAKER_01]: Beyond that, nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The corridors were empty and still, and the few figures he passed, grey armored giants regarded him with those black, featureless eyes, and said nothing at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was tolerated, that much was clear, not welcomed certainly, and not resented either, as far as he could tell, simply tolerated.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way one might tolerate a small and harmless creature that had wandered into one's home.
[SPEAKER_01]: and would presumably wander out again in due course.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Kakaridon's astra had been informed through whatever channels connected this ancient vessel to the distant authority of terror, that an archivist was coming, and that he was to be granted access to whatever records the chapter possessed.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had acknowledged this instruction with the minimum of communication and the maximum of compliance, which seemed to be their way in all things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they had made it clear in the clipped and archaic high-gothic that was the only language they'd aimed to use without ciders.
[SPEAKER_01]: that he might document what he found, but that the chapter owed no explanation to anyone, save the one they called the void father.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been given access to their records, such as they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not data slates or cogitator files or any of the forms of documentation that the administrator would recognise, but rune stones inscribed with symbols he could not yet read.
[SPEAKER_01]: and all histories preserved in the memories of warriors who had lived for centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: And totemic carvings whose meanings were layered and elusive, and resistant to the kind of straightforward interpretation that his training had prepared him for.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was he reflected, rather like being given permission to read a library, written in a language one did not speak, in a script one had never seen, by authors who had no particular interest in being understood.
[SPEAKER_01]: but he was patient, and he was thorough.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had been chosen for this assignment precisely because he possessed both of those qualities in abundance.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, after the long and silent walk through corridors that smelled of old metal, he arrived at the small chamber that the carcaradone said set aside for his use, and he set about making it his own.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not much of a chamber, a cell, really.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of space that might once have been a storage alcove or a secondary monitoring station.
[SPEAKER_01]: repurposed for human habitation, with the addition of a sleeping pallet, a metal writing surface bolted to the wall, and a single lumen globe that cast a small circle of golden warmth against the blue grey dimness of the surrounding ship.
[SPEAKER_01]: The walls were bare metal, cold to the touch, and the air carried the same faint chill that pervaded the rest of the vessel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though in this smaller space it felt less oppressive and more like the cool of a cellar on a summer day, the kind of cold that one can live with and even come to appreciate once the initial shock has passed and the body has made its adjustments.
[SPEAKER_01]: He unpacked his things with the unhurried care of a man who has learned that the first task in any longer assignment is to make a home.
[SPEAKER_01]: However small, in whatever place one finds oneself.
[SPEAKER_01]: His instruments came first, the quill stylus and the ink wells and the sheaves of pressed vellum that he preferred over data slates for original work, because there was something about the act of writing by hand that helped him think, that forced his mind to move at the pace of the ink rather than the pace of his anxiety.
[SPEAKER_01]: He arranged them on the metal desk with movements of long habit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each item in its accustomed place so that his hands would know where to find them, without his eyes needing to look.
[SPEAKER_01]: His books came next, a small collection, carefully chosen, wrapped in oil cloth against the damp that afflicted all void ships sooner or later.
[SPEAKER_01]: Reference texts mostly, and a battered copy of the indices are starties, that had been his companion on every research assignment since his earliest days as a junior scribe.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's margins crowded with notes in his own increasingly illegible hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: He stacked them at the corner of the desk, where they would be within arms reach, but out of the way of his writing, and he allowed himself a small moment of satisfaction at the sight of them there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Familiar spines in an unfamiliar place.
[SPEAKER_01]: Old friends keeping him company in the quiet
[SPEAKER_01]: Then came the Recaft Pot, brand new, and purchased on his travels to this place.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a simple man, but the warmth that comes from a hot drink was one of the few luxuries he allowed himself during work like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had filled it before boarding, and he poured a measure into the kid's mug, and held it between his palms, and breathed the steam, and felt for the first time since stepping aboard this ancient and silent vessel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that approximated comfort.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lumen globes golden light pulled on the desk and softened the hard edges of the chamber, turning bare metal into something far more inviting, almost welcoming.
[SPEAKER_01]: The velem lay waiting beneath his hands, smooth and clean, and ready to receive whatever he could coax from the silence of this place.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took a sip of his drink.
[SPEAKER_01]: He smoothed the vellum flat, and he began to write the history of the Karakaradans, as compiled from the fragmentary records, oral traditions, and runic inscriptions.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Karakaradans are not a chapter that yields its secrets willingly, and the archivists who attempt to tell their story must be comfortable with the knowledge that the story will always be incomplete.
[SPEAKER_01]: This then is what the silence was willing to share.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a book in the deepest archives of terror, not the public archives that servitors maintain, but the sealed vaults beneath them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ones that require three inquisitorial seals, and the written permission of individuals whose names are not recorded in any
[SPEAKER_01]: And within this book, there is a single passage that may be the oldest surviving reference to this chapter.
[SPEAKER_01]: The book is called the Mythos Angelica Mortis, and it was written by the scribes of the secretariat militum, sometime late in the 35th millennium, which alone would make it a thing of extraordinary antiquity, but the passage in question is not original to the Mythos.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was copied from an even older work, one that has since been lost entirely, dating back to the era of the Astropath Wars.
[SPEAKER_01]: That strange and violent period spanning the late 32nd and early 33rd millennium, a time so thoroughly purged from imperial history that less is known of it than even the Horace Heresy or the Great Crusade, which is to say that almost nothing is known of it at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: and somewhere in the records of that erased age, someone thought it important enough to write down that a space marine chapter had been dispatched into the outer darkness upon an endless voyage, to ravage the enemies of mankind, and to set about the traitor, the alien, and the renegade without mercy, and harrow them in their places of strength.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the first trace of the Kakaradan's astra.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not a founding record.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not a charter of creation or a role of honor, or any of the careful administrative documentation that accompanies the birth of most space marine chapters.
[SPEAKER_01]: The normal meticulous ledger entries that the administrator so dearly loves, and upon which so much of the imperiums institutional memory depends.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a fragment copied from a fragment referencing an age that no longer officially exists, a whispered instruction to go out into the dark, and to kill, and to never stop killing, and to never come home.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now the imperium of man is many things and not all of them flattering, but forgetful is not usually among them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The administrative keeps records of records and archives of archives, redundancies built upon redundancies in a vast and tottering edifice of bureaucracy that stretches back 10,000 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: and which has, in that time, developed a memory so comprehensive and so stubbornly detailed that the loss of any single chapter's history would ordinarily be quite impossible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every space marine chapter has a founding, a lineage, a place in the great ledger of the Imperiums Defenders.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are records of their creation and records of their battles and records of the honours they have won.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if those records are sometimes incomplete or contradictory, they at least exist, which is more than can be said for the chapter we are discussing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the carcaradone's astra, or the space sharks, as they are sometimes called in logothic, though they seem to find the name beneath their dignity, exist in the margins of imperial history, the way certain deep water predators exist in the margins of an ocean.
[SPEAKER_01]: which is to say that you do not see them clearly, and you rarely see them at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: What you see, if you are patient, and if you know where to look, is the disturbance they leave behind?
[SPEAKER_01]: A reference in one archive, a fragmentary account in another, a name that surfaces in the records of one century, and then vanishes for three more, before reappearing thousands of light years away
[SPEAKER_01]: and the names themselves shift like currents, the void repos in one account.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bloodsharks, in another, the carcaret on astra, singular, in a third.
[SPEAKER_01]: Imperial scholars have spent the better part of their careers trying to determine whether these are all the same chapter, wearing different names across the millennia.
[SPEAKER_01]: or several chapters with overlapping iconography whose histories have become tangled through the simple entropy of time, or some other explanation that has not yet occurred to anyone.
[SPEAKER_01]: The accounts are consistent on certain details, the grey armor, the savage but calculated methods of war, the shark toothed heraldry that adorns their battleplate.
[SPEAKER_01]: But consistency across fragmentary records is not the same as proof, and proof is something the car caradons have never been inclined to provide to anyone.
[SPEAKER_01]: For any reason, under any circumstances.
[SPEAKER_01]: They do not explain themselves, they do not keep records that others may read, or if they do, they keep them in forms that outsiders cannot easily decipher.
[SPEAKER_01]: Roan stones and oral traditions, and totemic markings whose meanings are known only to those who bear them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They do not submit to the oversight that other chapters accept as a matter of course, and when questioned about their origins or their purpose, or their place in the Imperiums Order of Battle, they respond in clipped hygothic and say nothing of substance, and their black eyes give away even less than their words.
[SPEAKER_01]: What can be said with certainty is this.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Carcardons are entirely fleet-based, and they follow a pattern of operations so rare that most Imperial scholars have never encountered it outside of theoretical texts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Written for the edification of students, who were almost certainly never need the knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is called the Nomad Predation Pattern, and it is as old as the Imperium itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most fleet-based chapters follow the crusading pattern, which is to say they move from warzone to warzone within Imperial space, maintaining supply lines in communication with the wider Imperium, even as they travel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Never truly cutting the threads that bind them to the civilization they serve.
[SPEAKER_01]: The no-mad predation pattern is something altogether different and altogether more lonely.
[SPEAKER_01]: It describes a force that has severed those threads, a fleet that voyages beyond the imperiums borders without end, sustaining itself from what it can find, what it can take, and what it can salvage from the wreckage of the enemies it destroys.
[SPEAKER_01]: A chapter, following this pattern sails the spaces between stars where the astronomical does not reach, and the light of terror is not even a memory, but an article of faith, something believed in rather than perceived.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are no resupply convoys in the outer dark, no reinforcements, no communication with the worlds they are sworn to protect, no word from the civilization that sent them forth, no way of knowing whether that civilization still stands, or has long since crumbled into dust.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is only the void and whatever waits within it, and the patient necessity of finding enough resources, enough weapons, enough ammunition, enough young bodies to replenish the ranks of the fallen, to keep fighting for one more decade, one more century, one more millennium in a war that has no foreseeable end.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fleet must choose its battles with great care, for the scales of survival in the outer dark are unforgiving.
[SPEAKER_01]: Strike too ambitiously, and the losses sustained were crippled the chapter beyond recovery.
[SPEAKER_01]: Strike too cautiously, and the slow attrition of time and entropy will accomplish the same end, only more gradually.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a mode of existence that demands absolute self-sufficiency and absolute resolve.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if one is being honest about it, it is a mode of existence that sounds very much like exile.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though whether it is exile freely chosen, or exile imposed upon them, is a question that the carcaradons have never thought to answer, and which the fragmentary evidence can be read to support in either direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: The carcaradons themselves claimed to have been doing this for 10,000 standard years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ten millennia of service to the one they called the Voidfather, their name for the Emperor of mankind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Spoken with a reverence that is ancient and deep and utterly unlike the hollow ceremony of the modern imperial count.
[SPEAKER_01]: A reverence that sounds less like worship and more like the memory of someone they once knew and loved.
[SPEAKER_01]: and have been faithful to ever since, a 10,000 years of war in the spaces beyond the galaxy's edge, unrecorded in any archive, unacknowledged by any authority, unknown to the billions upon billions of imperial citizens, whose safety they have purchased with their blood, and their solitude and their silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are no battle honours inscribed in their name, no monuments raised in their memory on distant worlds, no grateful populations who tell stories of the grey-clad warriors who came from the dark and saved them from the things that dwell between the stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet they keep fighting.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have kept fighting for longer than most chapters have existed, in conditions that would
[SPEAKER_01]: and they have done so, without complaint, and without recognition, and without any of the things that the Imperium offers its defenders in exchange for their service.
[SPEAKER_01]: No glory, no remembrance, no home to return to.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the fighting is done, because the fighting is never done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And home is a concept that the Karakradon seemed to have abandoned so long ago, that it might as well belong to another species entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever mandate sent them into the outer dark, they have honoured it with a faithfulness that borders on the incomprehensible, and the answer to why they have done so.
[SPEAKER_01]: why warriors who could demand recognition, who could demand a home world and a place in the Imperiums hierarchy, instead chose to sail the void in silence for a hundred centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lies deeper in their history than the mythos Angelica Mortis.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the traces are there, scattered across 10,000 years of war and wandering, preserved in the testimony of the very few imperial servants, who have encountered the carcaradons in the flesh, and lived long enough to describe what they found.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what they found, each and every one of them, was something that seemed to belong to another age, as though a door had opened in the dark, and through it had stepped warriors from the very dawn of the Imperium, still fighting the wars of a bagon era, still faithful to oaths that everyone else had long since forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is those encounters we turn to now.
[SPEAKER_01]: As we've said, the accounts of these warriors are fragmentary and often contradictory in their details.
[SPEAKER_01]: As accounts given by frightened people in extraordinary circumstances tend to be, but taken together, read carefully, and with an eye for the patterns that emerge when one lays them side by side, they begin to tell a story.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is to two of these accounts that we now turn, separated by more than 2,000 years of imperial history, and by distances so vast that light itself would grow old in the crossing, and yet so alike in their essential character that they might have been written by the same hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first takes place during the 7th Black Crusade in the year 811 of the 37th millennium, and it concerns the blood angels, the most tragic of the first founding chapters, the sons of sanguineas, whose golden armour has graced a thousand battlefields, and whose sorrow is old.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blood angels had come to the world of Midian, to stand against the forces of abadden the dispoiler, who had launched his seventh black crusade from the eye of terror, with the particular and implacable fury that has always characterized his hatred for the sons of the loyal primax.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at Midian, a button singled out the blood angels with a malice that went beyond strategy and into something far more personal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Leading a band of cornate berserkers, those frenzied and blood-man warriors who have surrendered everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was ever human in them to the Skal God's hunger, directly into the teeth of the blood angels devastate her positions.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a terrible engagement.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blood angels fought well, but the Buzerkers would be on reason and be on pain.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even the blood angels' own assault Marines could not dislodge the warband or recapture the bodies of their fallen brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: The battle went badly.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blood angels were rooted, which is a word that history uses when it wishes to be polite about a disaster.
[SPEAKER_01]: and a bad-on's forces pursued them with the gleeful savagery of predators, who have tasted blood and want more of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It seemed for a time, as though the sons of sangrinius might be destroyed, ground down between the hammer of the pursuing bazaarcos and the anvil of a hostile world.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then something happened that no one present could adequately explain, then or afterward, from the outer night, from the void beyond the world, from the darkness between the stars, when no imperial fleet had been reported, and no allied force was known to be operating.
[SPEAKER_01]: A chapter of space marines fell upon a baton's pursuing forces with a fury that matched the berserkers' blow for blow, and exceeded them in cold, precise warfare.
[SPEAKER_01]: They struck from nowhere, appearing as though the void itself had opened a door and let something terrible through.
[SPEAKER_01]: and they hit the chaos forces at the precise moment when those forces were most overextended.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most committed to the chase, most vulnerable to exactly the kind of sudden and overwhelming assault that materialized around them like a storm that had been waiting patiently for the right moment to break.
[SPEAKER_01]: We know of this because of a woman named Cassandra Love, later sainted, who wrote of these events in our canticle.
[SPEAKER_01]: A vast mythologised and often deliberately oblique account of the wars of the seventh black crusade that has frustrated literal-minded historians for millennia, but which remains one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of devotional literature the Imperium has ever produced.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in her cantical, she describes the arrival of these unknown warriors in language that is worth lingering over.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it captures something essential about what the car caradons are and how they appear to those who witnessed them.
[SPEAKER_01]: She writes of grey-clad space marines, who came from the outer night, whose jagged more did swallow the stars, and whose black gays did mirror the void of oblivion.
[SPEAKER_01]: she writes of them falling upon the servants of corn, with great fury from the darkness, unseen as the beast that lurks beneath the black waters, and she describes their intervention in terms that are both vivid and strangely intimate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Death for death she writes, blood for blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: As though the violence they brought was not random or excessive, but carefully measured,
[SPEAKER_01]: The blood angels were saved, they rallied, turned upon their pursuers, and the forces of chaos were driven to ruin.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the Great Land Warriors were gone, as suddenly, and as completely as they had arrived, leaving behind no identification, no communication, no explanation of who they were or where they had come from.
[SPEAKER_01]: or why they had chosen that particular moment to intervene in a battle that was not by any reckoning, their concern.
[SPEAKER_01]: On the crypto world of hypersightes, which was created to house the honoured dead of the seventh black crusade.
[SPEAKER_01]: The events at Midian are depicted in repeated fresco and bass relief along the walls of the great burial vows.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blood angels are shown in their golden glory, the berserkers in their blood red madness, the battle in all its terrible detail.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the faces of the intervening space marines, the grey-clad strangers who turn the tide, are not shown at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: In their place, setting to the stone with careful and deliberate craftsmanship, are featureless discs of black obsidian, smooth and blank, and revealing nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: like the eyes of a deep water creature gazing up from beneath the surface of a dark ocean.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one recorded who gave the order to obscure those faces, no one recorded why.
[SPEAKER_01]: The official imperial classification for the event is listed simply as a probable encounter.
[SPEAKER_01]: A recorded sighting, the bureaucratic language of an institution that has witnessed something it cannot categorise, and has therefore chosen to file it away and speak of it no further.
[SPEAKER_01]: The strike from the void, the assault at the moment of greatest enemy vulnerability, the savage and decisive intervention, and then the disappearance as swift and as total as the arrival, as though the warriors had never existed at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: More than 2,000 years later, and half a galaxy away, on a world called Loth.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pattern repeated itself, and this time there were survivors who could describe not only what the Grey Cloud Warriors did, but what they looked like, and how they spoke, and what they asked for in return.
[SPEAKER_01]: Loth was a world of perpetual night.
[SPEAKER_01]: A place where roiling clouds smothered the sky so completely that the surface knew no illumination, saved the intermittent flash of lightning.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was here that a rogue trader named Basil Herothus found himself in very serious trouble indeed.
[SPEAKER_01]: A ruthus had brought his ship, the stark vengeor, and a considerable force of armsmen to lorth, as part of the great Anjavan crusade, that was conquering the calix expanse.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had come to fight the jukari pirates of the cabal of shadowed thorns, which was, in hindsight, a rather more ambitious undertaking than he had appreciated.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fighting beneath those eternal clouds went badly from the start.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Drucari are cruel and capricious hunters, who delight in pain the way other species delight in music or wine, and they struck at Herothus's armsmen in savage hit and run raids that blood his forces dry.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then, before he could withdraw, they struck at the stark danger itself, a flight of razeering fighters crippling the cruiser's main drives and slowing her out of low orbit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Forcing her oath is to attempt an emergency planet for, that only his considerable skill as a ship handler allowed him to survive at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: But survival and safety are not the same thing, and heroth is found himself in what my charitably be described as a dire predicament.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Stark Vengeur lay beached upon the shadow shrouded plains of life, like a great wounded beast, and the Drucari circled it the way shark circle a bleeding swimmer, striking at random, killing and capturing crew members, dragging them away into the darkness for purposes that do not bear thinking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: All herothes could do was send an astropathic plea for help and use the ventures remaining guns to keep the raiders at bay.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for a full solar month he did exactly that.
[SPEAKER_01]: While his crew grew smaller and his ammunition grew scarcer and the Dukari grew boulder with each passing day.
[SPEAKER_01]: After a month, the vendor's guns were all but spent, and the carbel of shadowed thorns began to press a sustained assault into the beach vessel itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fighting reached the bridge, and herothers and his surviving retainers found themselves in desperate hand-to-hand combat with a press of cavorting witch gladiators.
[SPEAKER_01]: Terrible, graceful killers who treat battle as performance art, and then in the space between one heartbeat in the next, two boats of bruised colored lightning split the mass of witches apart.
[SPEAKER_01]: The strikes left behind two figures, standing in clouds wreaking of ozone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two enormous grey-clad warriors in the unmistakable bulk of tactical dreadnought armor, their lightning claws already hissing with killing energy.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not pause.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not announce themselves, or demand surrender, or offer any of the cutacies that the imperiums warriors sometimes extend, even dehated foes.
[SPEAKER_01]: They simply tore into the riches, with a savagery so swift and so absolute, that within moments, the decks were slick with alien blood, and the survivors were fleeing for their lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same happened across the entire vessel, simultaneously, as though the attack had been coordinated.
[SPEAKER_01]: A salt terminator's appeared wherever the fighting was thickest, and ripped through the jacari invaders.
[SPEAKER_01]: The carcaradans made no sound, no war cries, no battle hymns, no shouted orders.
[SPEAKER_01]: They killed in perfect terrible silence, and the only sounds were the wet impacts of their weapons, and the screams of those who fell beneath them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Drucari fled the ship in panic, pouring out onto the shadow shrouded planes beyond the hull.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there they found sixty grey-clad warriors drawn up in loose ranks outside their gunships, waiting for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors did not fire, they stood in silence as the Drucari charged toward them, howling with rage and wounded pride, dark energy beams crackling overhead.
[SPEAKER_01]: they did not fire when the fast discourages close to 200 meters or 100 or 50.
[SPEAKER_01]: They simply stood immovable and unharrid, as though they knew something that the jukari did not.
[SPEAKER_01]: and when the enemy was precisely where the grey-clad warriors wanted them to be, the surface of law, knew light for the first time in living memory.
[SPEAKER_01]: Searing large beams split the clouds from orbit in an incredible display of precision targeting.
[SPEAKER_01]: scouring the ground around the venga and the waiting space marines, incinerating the dracari to ash in an instant.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only then did the great clad warriors spring into action, hunting the survivors through the darkness until they fled, wailing back to their webweigh gates and vanished from the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: After the conflict, Harothis spoke briefly with the commander of the Space Marines, and his description of that conversation is the first direct account we have of what a Kakaradon looks like up close.
[SPEAKER_01]: The commander was deathly pale of countenance, Harothis reported, with blank black eyes that held no iris and no sclera.
[SPEAKER_01]: and teeth that were sharp in a way that seemed less like a mutation, and more like something that had always been intended.
[SPEAKER_01]: He spoke only in ancient hygothic, a dialect so archaic, that herothers, who was himself an educated man of considerable learning, struggled to follow
[SPEAKER_01]: The commander informed Herothus that reinforcements from the Crusade were inbound, which was useful, and politely but firmly requested a tie of war supplies from the Vengeance Votes, which was lesser requests than a statement of terms.
[SPEAKER_01]: He refused to identify himself, or his warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: He departed three solar days before the first Imperial Navy Outriders arrived.
[SPEAKER_01]: and it was only when the Crusades in Quisitorial Representatives questioned Herothus afterward that the connections were drawn to ancient myths of a long forgotten chapter.
[SPEAKER_01]: and there it is, a part of the pattern laid bare across two millennia of imperial history and half a galaxy of distance.
[SPEAKER_01]: The car caradons do not arrive to save, they arrive to kill.
[SPEAKER_01]: If their killing happens to benefit those in need of rescue, then that is a welcome consequence.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is not the purpose, and the car caradons make no pretence of altruism.
[SPEAKER_01]: their intervention is transactional, they come, they destroy, they take what they need in payment and they leave.
[SPEAKER_01]: At Midian, they struck the pursuing chaos forces at their moment of greatest vulnerability, and then vanished without a word.
[SPEAKER_01]: On Loth, they appeared inside a doomed vessel, annihilated the invaders in silence, drew the survivors into a killing ground of their own design, and then requested supplies as calmly as a merchant settling an invoice.
[SPEAKER_01]: The silence is always there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The calculation is always there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The willingness to use the enemy's own aggression against them, to wait, motionless and unharrid, while the foe commits to a charge that has already been accounted for, is always there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the departure is always absolute, as though the car caradons cannot bear to remain in the company of others, for longer than the killing requires.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is one final detail worth mentioning before we move on, because it refers to the antiquity of the Carcoidon's methods and to the breadth of their capabilities, in ways that the ground engagements alone do not capture.
[SPEAKER_01]: When engaging enemy vessels in the void, in ship to ship battles that are among the most brutal and claustrophobic forms of warfare, the galaxy has ever known.
[SPEAKER_01]: called the Earth's claw.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is an ancient and crude device, massive in scale, fashioned like an enormous barbed harpoon, the size of a smaller escort vessel in its own right.
[SPEAKER_01]: When fired, it punctures through an enemy ship's hull, and locks to the vessel's innards with magnetic force.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, with a malice that seems almost deliberate, the carcaroden vessel recalls the spear on immense chains, ratcheting at home with agonizing slowness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dragging the impaled ship closer and closer, until it is within boarding range.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, in every sense, the technique of a predator, the deep water hunter that strikes from below, buries its teeth in its prey, and drags it down into the dark where escape is impossible, and the only remaining question is how long the dying will take.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is not an invention of the Kakaradans.
[SPEAKER_01]: The technique was pioneered during the Great Crusade 10,000 years ago by the World Eaters Legion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those bloody-handed Berserkers, who would eventually fall to corn, and become the very monsters that carcarried ons, have spent 10 millennia hunting.
[SPEAKER_01]: that the Carquerodon still use a weapon designed by warriors who became their enemies is a detail that invites questions no one has been able to answer, whether they inherited it, adopted it, or simply never saw a reason to abandon a tool that works is unknown.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is known is that once the Earth's claws have done their work, and the prey vessel
[SPEAKER_01]: the beast that lurks beneath the black waters.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cassandra Lev wrote those words more than 5,000 years ago, and nothing in the millennia since has given anyone cause to improve upon her description.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are threats in this galaxy that the Imperium knows well.
[SPEAKER_01]: The traitor legions brooding in their warp-torn strongholds, the arc hordes that sweep across entire sectors, like green tides, the ancient and inscrutable aildari, whose motives are never quite what they appear to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are dangers that have been studied and cataloged and planned against from millennia.
[SPEAKER_01]: and while they are terrible, they are at least understood, in the way that a sailor understands a storm even when he cannot survive it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there are the tyrannids.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tyrannids come from beyond the galaxy itself, from the vast and lightless gulfs between the stars, from a darkness so absolutan so ancient that it makes the void through which the carcaret on sail look welcoming by comparison.
[SPEAKER_01]: They do not conquer worlds for territory or resources or ideology.
[SPEAKER_01]: They consume them utterly and completely, stripping every scrap of biological matter from a planet's surface and oceans and atmosphere until nothing remains but bare rock and silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are hunger-given form, and appetite so vast and so patient, that it has crossed the space between galaxies to feed, and they are drawn to their prey by psychic signals that blaze like beacons in the darkness of the warp.
[SPEAKER_01]: Signals that call them home, the way a lighthouse calls a ship.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was precisely such a signal that brought the car credoons to the shrine world of Piyati five, though the story of how that signal came to exist is in its own way, as terrible as the thing it summoned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Pioti-5 had been a world of faith once, a shrine world, dedicated to the worship of the Emperor, its cities filled with cathedrals, and its people filled with devotion, or so the records would have one believe.
[SPEAKER_01]: But beneath that pious surface,
[SPEAKER_01]: something had been growing for a very long time, something patient and insidious that had woven itself into every level of the world's society with such care and such thoroughness, that by the time anyone might have noticed, there was no one left uncorrupted to do the noticing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cult of the star saints, they called themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were a gene-stealer cult.
[SPEAKER_01]: A hideous network of humans, Zenos hybrids, that serve as the advanced guard of the tyranny at high fleets, seeding worlds with genetic corruption, generations before the swarm arrives.
[SPEAKER_01]: Worshiping the very monsters that will one day consume them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the psychic signal generated by the cult's patriarchy was so potent, so blindingly bright in the currents of the warp, that it had begun to lure a tyrannid hive fleet from below the galactic plane, not from within the galaxy, where hive fleets a terrifying enough, but from beneath it, from the cold void, below the spiral arms, where the swarm drifts,
[SPEAKER_01]: The Karkarodon's found this threat in the course of their endless voyage through the outer dark, and their chapter master, the one called Tiberos, a name that carries weight even among space marines.
[SPEAKER_01]: For Tiberos is spoken of in the few accounts that mentioned him as something enormous and terrible and very, very old.
[SPEAKER_01]: He looked upon the numbers arrayed against his chapter, and saw extinction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not defeat, not a difficult campaign, or a costly victory, extinction.
[SPEAKER_01]: The complete and final destruction of the Kakaridan's astra, a chapter that had survived 10,000 years of exile in the void, only to be consumed by the very kind of horror.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had spent those millennia hunting.
[SPEAKER_01]: The high fleet's numbers were simply too great, even if every battle brother in the chapter fought to the last, even if they sold their lives at the most favorable exchange rate imaginable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mathematics were inescapable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The swarm would swallow them whole and barely noticed the bones.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, Tiberos did something that tells us a great deal about the carcarrodons, and about the nature of the alliances they have forged in their long history.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alliances that would make most imperial authorities profoundly uncomfortable if they knew of them, which for the most part, they do not.
[SPEAKER_01]: He called upon the Ashen claws.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Ashenclaws are a subject that requires careful handling, because what they are and what they have done, places them firmly outside the bounds of imperial law, and the Kakaradan's relationship with them raises questions that neither chapter has ever shown the slightest interest in answering.
[SPEAKER_01]: During the darkness of the horror's heresy, that great civil war that tore the imperium apart, ten millennia ago, and whose wounds have never fully healed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not every force of space marines cast their light, with either the emperor or the traitor horrors.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some in their despair or their disgust, or their simple inability to choose between two
[SPEAKER_01]: The Ashen claws were among those who left.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had been the 18th chapter of the Ravenguard Legion, and they had watched the galaxy descend into madness around them, and they had felt their own primax contempt for the slave of practices that had once defined their way of war, and something in them had broken, not toward chaos, which would have been simpler and in some ways more forgivable.
[SPEAKER_01]: but toward a cold and bitter independence that acknowledged neither the emperor's authority, nor the war masters.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had turned their fury upon the nightlords and their home sector of Nostrama, unleashing devastation upon those cruel and sadistic warriors, and then they had slipped away into the void and vanished from all records, imperial and otherwise, as completely as if they had never existed,
[SPEAKER_01]: They are renegades by any legal definition the Imperium possesses.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are also, as it happens, the Kakarodans can, brothers in exile, if not in purpose, and the Kakarodans are among the very few souls in the galaxy who know that the Ashenclaws still exist, let alone where to find them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pact between these two brotherhoods is ancient and fraught and not at all friendly, as we shall come to learn in greater detail.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in this hour of desperation, with a high fleet rising from beneath the galaxy, and the chapters survival measured in weeks rather than centuries, Tiberos called upon that pact and asked for aid.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he sent Baal Shah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Captain Bell Shah of the third company was dispatched to Piety 5 with a single precisely defined objective.
[SPEAKER_01]: Find the patriarch, kill it, and silence the psychic beacon that was drawing the high fleet ever closer.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the beacon could be extinguished, there was a chance however slim that the swarm would lose its heading and withdraw back into the void beneath the galaxy.
[SPEAKER_01]: If it could not, then nothing the car caradons did would matter, because the hive fleet would arrive, and consume everything in its path regardless.
[SPEAKER_01]: This started a campaign of brutality that reveals perhaps more clearly than any other engagement in the chapter's history, the way the Kakaradans think about war, not as a contest of honour, or a demonstration of martial prowess, but as a problem to be solved with the minimum expenditure of resources, and the maximum inflection of violence, applied it precisely the right moment, and in precisely the right place.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shard did not attempt to cleanse Pia T5.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not try to root out the cult through careful investigation, or surgical strikes against its leadership.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did something far simpler and far more terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: He provoked the entire cult into a general uprising, deliberately drawing every corrupted soul on the planet out of hiding and into open war.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he cut his way through the resulting tide of screaming, mutated humanity, like a blade through diseased flesh, killing thousands upon thousands of cultists, not because he needed to destroy them all.
[SPEAKER_01]: but because he needed to reach the one creature that mattered.
[SPEAKER_01]: The third company fought its way to the heart of the infestation and allowed itself to be surrounded, deliberately, knowingly, understanding that sometimes the most effective trap is one that uses yourself as the bait.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were driven back, or seemed to be driven back, into piety-fives' primary imperial cathedral.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the cultists pressed in around them from every direction, howling and screeching, and throwing themselves forward in waves that should have overwhelmed the great-lad warriors through sheer weight of numbers.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then Shah sprung the trap.
[SPEAKER_01]: Terminator squads teleported into the heart of the cult's advance.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their storm bolters roaring in the confined spaces of the cathedral.
[SPEAKER_01]: And alongside them came something older, an ancient contempt of pattern, dread not.
[SPEAKER_01]: one of those venerable war machines that hounds the broken body of a fallen hero within a walking sarcophagus of serimite and adamantium, and which fight with a fury that seems to draw upon not only their pilot skill, but their pilot's rage at having been denied the peace of death.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dreadnought tore through the cultists like a plow through soil, and the terminators ground forward beside it, and the bloodshed was so great and so sudden that the patriarch itself, the ancient and cunning creature that had hidden at the center of its web for so long, was finally drawn into the open.
[SPEAKER_01]: A librarian of the third company was waiting for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The details of what happened when Psycha met Xenos of Omination are not recorded in any account that has reached imperial hands, but the result is known.
[SPEAKER_01]: The patriarch was obliterated, and with its death, the psychic beacon that had been screaming into the warp was silenced, as suddenly and as completely as a candle-flame extinguished between wet fingers.
[SPEAKER_01]: The remaining cultists deprived of the will that had bound them together, broke apart into disorganized mobs that could be hunted down and destroyed peace mill.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was at this moment that the Ashen clause arrived, whether by prior arrangement
[SPEAKER_01]: or by some instinct of timing, that only those who share blood and exile can fully understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the two brotherhoods fell upon the shattered cult together and grounded into nothing within solar hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far above, in the cold spaces beneath the galactic plane, the high fleet faltered.
[SPEAKER_01]: The beacon that had been drawing it forward was gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: And without that guiding light, the swarm
[SPEAKER_01]: And it withdrew slowly, reluctantly, like a vast and mindless predator that has lost the scent of its prey, back into the void from which it had come.
[SPEAKER_01]: The car caradons had been spared extinction, if only temporarily.
[SPEAKER_01]: Several weeks later, an imperial retribution force arrived at Piety 5 to find a ruined world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its cities shattered, its population decimated, the evidence of a gene-stealer infestation, plain for all to see.
[SPEAKER_01]: They set about culling the few surviving cultists and filing the reports that the
[SPEAKER_01]: and they did so without ever learning the full truth of what had happened on that world.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not learn that a chapter of space marines had fought and bled and nearly died to silence a beacon that would have drawn a high fleet down upon an entire sector.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not learn that Renegade astarties had fought alongside loyalists in defensive and imperium that neither brotherhood fully belonged to.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not learn how close the sector had come to annihilation, or what it had cast to pull it back from the edge, or that the warriors who had saved them were already gone, vanished back into the outer dark, as silent and as unacknowledged as they had ever been.
[SPEAKER_01]: the imperium never learned.
[SPEAKER_01]: The carcaradons did not expect it to.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had not come to Piety Five to be thanked.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had come because there was a threat and the threat needed to be destroyed and destroying threats in the darkness when no one else can see.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is what the carcaradons' astra have been doing for 10,000 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Grattitude was never part of the
[SPEAKER_01]: For 10,000 years, the Karkaradon's astra had existed as rumour and shadow.
[SPEAKER_01]: A name half remembered in sealed archives, a grey shape glimpsed at the edge of a battlefield, and gone before anyone could confirm what they had seen.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had fought their wars in the spaces between stars where no one was watching.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they had left behind no records, and claimed no honours, and asked for nothing in return, except the right to continue their endless voyage through the dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, in the year 910 of the 41st millennium, they came home.
[SPEAKER_01]: Home is perhaps too strong a word for what the Imperium represented to the Carquerodons by that point in their long exile.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is the word that captures the significance of what happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because for the first time in living memory, for the first time in centuries, or perhaps millennia, the Carquerodons' Astra sailed back into Imperial space, and announced themselves to the very civilization that had forgotten they existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: They arrived in the maelstrom zone, where a conflict known as the Badab War had been grinding on for years.
[SPEAKER_01]: A brutal and deeply ugly affair, in which several space marine chapters had risen in secession against the Imperium under the leadership of Huron, the tyrant of Badab, and the loyalist forces sent to bring them to heal, had found the task far more difficult,
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the kind of war that the Imperium fights against itself, more often than it would like to admit.
[SPEAKER_01]: A war of pride and principle and legitimate grievance twisted into something poisonous, a war in which both sides could claim with some justification that they were fighting for what was right, and in which the truth, as it so often does, had long since been trampled into the mud between them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Into this bitter conflict came a single strike cruiser, fire blackened and ancient, its whole scarred by voyages that no living soul could remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: It identified itself, using imperial authorization protocols that were old, staggeringly impossibly old, but which remained upon careful examination, technically valid.
[SPEAKER_01]: The codes had not been revoked, the seals had not been rescinded, whoever had issued them had done so with an authority so high and so permanent that even the passage of millennia had not eroded their legitimacy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The vessel claimed to belong to a chapter called the Karkarodon's astra.
[SPEAKER_01]: the ancient hygothic form of a name that meant nothing to most of those who heard it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though a few of the more learned inquisitorial staff felt a distant and uncomfortable stirring of recognition.
[SPEAKER_01]: As though they had read the name once in a footnote to a footnote, and had not thought of it since,
[SPEAKER_01]: The Kakaradans had come, they said, in answer to a summons from terror itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had come to offer their aid to the loyalist cause against the secessionists, and they wished to be granted permission to enter the war zone, and, in their words, draw blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: The phrasing was noted by several of those present, as being somewhat unusual.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their force commander came aboard the loyalist flagship, to present his credentials in
[SPEAKER_01]: and what the officers assembled their saw was something that none of them had been prepared for.
[SPEAKER_01]: His name was Tyboros, and he was enormous, not just large in the way that all space marines are large, but vast, a towering figure in ancient terminator plate, whose physical presence seemed to compress the space around him, and make even other estates feel small.
[SPEAKER_01]: He carried with him, notices patent, formal documents affirming the rights and titles of
[SPEAKER_01]: issued and sealed by several high lords of terror, and inquisitors, whose names were known to history, but whose mortal lives had ended centuries or millennia ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: The documents were genuine, the seals were authentic, the authority they conveyed was by any measure absolute
[SPEAKER_01]: and then Taboros did something that no one had expected, and that showed the character of the chapter he commanded.
[SPEAKER_01]: He submitted himself, voluntarily and without protest, to psychic probing, and gene sampling, by the inquisitor legot, who was overseeing the prosecution of the bedab conflict.
[SPEAKER_01]: He allowed strangers to sift through the surface of his thoughts, and draw blood from his veins, and examine the very building blocks of his genetic heritage.
[SPEAKER_01]: and he did so with a patience that seemed less like submission, and more like the quiet confidence of someone who has nothing to hide and knows it, and who understands that trust must be earned through deeds rather than demanded through words.
[SPEAKER_01]: The inquisitor examined what was offered to him, and he vouched for the carcaradons, Lord High Commander Karab Kulin, of the Red Scorpions, the Supreme Commander of all loyalist forces in the Maelstrom Zone, accepted the carcaradons into his line of battle.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though not without reservations, Kulin was a man of the Codex astators,
[SPEAKER_01]: a warrior who believed in doctrine and discipline, and the proper order of things, and the carcaradons were, by any code extanded, deeply irregular.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their organization did not match prescribed patterns.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their equipment was a patchwork of relics spanning 10,000 years of history.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their culture was alien and impenetrable, and their methods, as colon would soon discover,
[SPEAKER_01]: but they were loyalists, their gene seed was clean, their hatred of traitors was, if anything, more absolute than his own, and the better war needed every blade it could get.
[SPEAKER_01]: The car caradons were deployed not to the bad absector itself, where the heaviest fighting was taking place.
[SPEAKER_01]: But to the end dimeon cluster, a group of worlds governed by the secessionist mantis warriors chapter, who had been waging a campaign of guerrilla warfare and hit and run attacks that had proven enormously effective against the loyalist forces sent to subdue them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mantis warriors knew the endimian cluster, the way a hunter knows his own forest.
[SPEAKER_01]: They knew every moon, every asteroid field, every hidden anchorage and secret supply cache.
[SPEAKER_01]: They struck where they pleased and vanished before retaliation could arrive, and the loyalists had been chasing shadows for months.
[SPEAKER_01]: The carcadons did not chase shadows.
[SPEAKER_01]: what they did instead was methodical and merciless and entirely characteristic of the way they approach every problem, not with finesse or subtlety, but with a cold and calculating brutality that strips away every advantage the enemy possesses until nothing remains but open ground and open war.
[SPEAKER_01]: where the car carried on savage superiority in direct combat can be brought to bear without hindrance.
[SPEAKER_01]: They systematically annihilated the worlds in the endimian cluster that were known to have harbored the mantis warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not conquered, not pacified, and annihilated, rendered useless as bases of supply or shelter or retreat.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thoroughly destroyed that the mantis warriors could no longer use them for anything at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the strategy of a predator that poisons the waterhole to force its prey into the open, and it worked exactly as intended.
[SPEAKER_01]: Deprived of their hidden bases and their local support networks, the mantis warriors were forced to abandon the guerrilla tactics that had served them so well, and mass their forces in defense of the worlds they could not afford to lose, which placed them exactly where the carcaradans wanted them.
[SPEAKER_01]: in a stand-up fight where stealth and local knowledge counted for nothing, and only violence mattered.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was during this period that an incident occurred, which tells us something important about the Kakaradans, not about their tactical ability, which was by now well-established, but about the depths of their ferocity, and the terrible places to which that ferocity could lead them.
[SPEAKER_01]: an imperial navy patrol, investigating reports of pirate activity on the desolate world of course here at two, discovered the wreckage of a smuggler's base in the dust waste.
[SPEAKER_01]: What they found inside was a scene of carnage so complete and so horrifying that even hardened navy officers struggled to describe it in their reports.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two forces of space marines had fought each other to mutual annihilation within that base.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sub-company-sized detachments, one from the Karakaradans, and one from the Executioners.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another chapter, infamous for its savagery and its unyielding approach to warfare, had met in that desolate place and had fallen upon each other.
[SPEAKER_01]: the base around them had been ripped apart.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bodies of both sides showed evidence of fighting on despite wounds that should have been instantly fatal.
[SPEAKER_01]: severed limbs, massive trauma to the torso, injuries so catastrophic that it seemed impossible the warriors had remained upright, let alone continued to fight.
[SPEAKER_01]: Several of the dead were found locked together in death grips.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their gauntlet still clenched around each other's throats, or buried in each other's armor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Striking at their enemies with the very last strength their failing bodies could provide.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one knows what started the engagement.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one knows which chapters last surviving warrior stood alone among the dead to claim whatever bit of victory could be claimed from such a slaughter.
[SPEAKER_01]: Neither the Carcrodons nor the Executioners have ever acknowledged that any of their numbers survived to tell the tale.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the event is recorded in Imperial Files, simply as the Courser and Massacre, a name
[SPEAKER_01]: The Badab war ground on for three more years after the Kakarodon's arrival, and in the year 913 of the 41st millennium, it reached its final and most terrible chapter on the world of Badab primaris itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The seat of the tyrant Huron's power, the fortress at the heart of the secession.
[SPEAKER_01]: The loyalist assault on Badab primaris was a massive and coordinated operation involving multiple chapters, but the role the car carried on's played in it was uniquely devastating and uniquely characteristic of their approach to warfare.
[SPEAKER_01]: because the car caradons did not fight their way through the hive cities, or storm the tyrants' fortifications, or engage in the kind of grinding urban combat that consumed the other loyalist forces.
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, they went beneath.
[SPEAKER_01]: Deep below the hive cities of Badger Primaris, lay the ancient atomic and geothermal reactors that powered the world's infrastructure.
[SPEAKER_01]: vast engines of energy that fed the planetary defense batteries and kept the hive cities functioning.
[SPEAKER_01]: The carcaradans found these reactors, and they sabotaged them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reactors failed, and when they failed, they did not simply shut down.
[SPEAKER_01]: Entire sectors of the hive cities collapsed into yawning chasans that opened in the earth beneath them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Swallowing buildings and streets and thousands of souls into the darkness below.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where the ground had been, seas of molten lava rose to take its place, and the fires that consumed Badeb primaris were not the fires of orbital bombardment or incendiary weapons, but the fires of the world itself turned against those who lived upon it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The death of Badab Pramaris ended the war.
[SPEAKER_01]: The remaining secessionists, what was left of the astral clause, the executioners, the mantis warriors, the lamenters, were put on trial before especially convened court of their peers and sentenced according to their crimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Badab War was over, and the Imperium had won.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though the cost of that victory was measured in dead worlds and broken chapters, and a bitterness that would linger for centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the Kakaradans were not finished.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before departing the maelstrom zone, the chapter fleet returned to the endimian cluster, one final time, not to fight, but to collect what was owed to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: With the tacit agreement of the firehawks, who had assumed authority over the mantis warrior's former territory, the car caradone's descended upon the tranquility system.
[SPEAKER_01]: whose worlds had once served as the primary recruiting and training grounds of the defeated mantis warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there, they conducted a red tie.
[SPEAKER_01]: an entire generation of young men was taken from those worlds, harvested in the chapter's own terminology, which is a word that tells you everything you need to know about how the carcaradons view the process.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who were selected were not asked for their consent.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not given the choice that recruits in other chapters are sometimes offered.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chance to decline the honour that is being bestowed upon them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were taken, and they
[SPEAKER_01]: and those who survived that culling were deemed worthy to begin the long and brutal process of becoming Carquerodon's neophytes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was payment of a kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: The car caradons had come to fight a war, and they had fought it, and they had bled for it, and now they were taking what they needed to replace what they had lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no cruelty in it, or at least no cruelty that the car caradons themselves would have recognised.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only the ancient logic of a chapter that has survived for 10,000 years by taking what it needs and wasting nothing and asking no one's permission.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then they left.
[SPEAKER_01]: The last sighting of the Kakurodon's astra after the Bad Abwar was recorded by an explorator orgury beacon on the edge of Imperial space, a single automated sensor that detected the chapters fleet passing through the warp.
[SPEAKER_01]: ascending above the galactic plane, climbing away from the light of the astronomical and into the blackness of the outer void from which they had come.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had returned to imperial space after an absence of unknown centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had fought a war with savage and decisive efficiency.
[SPEAKER_01]: they had submitted to examination and proved their loyalty beyond reasonable doubt.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had been offered in the aftermath, the chance to remain, to claim territory, to establish a homeworld, to take their place among the recognized chapters of the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_01]: They chose the dark instead, whatever mandate drives the car caradons, whatever oath or edict or ancient promise binds them to their endless voyage.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is stronger than the pool of belonging, stronger than the comfort of recognition, stronger than the simple human desire to come in from the cold and be known.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had tasted what it meant to be part of the Imperium again, to fight alongside brothers who shared their purpose if not their methods, and they had turned their backs on it and sailed away into the void, as though ten thousand years of exile had taught them that home is not a place you return to, but a duty you carry with you, and that duty lay not in the light, but in the darkness beyond it.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have seen now what the Carcardons do when they make war, the silence and the savagery, the precision and the sudden overwhelming violence, the way they arrive from nowhere, and vanish into nothing, and leave behind only the dead and the questions of those who survived.
[SPEAKER_01]: But war, even for the emperor's finest, is not the whole of existence, and a chapter that has been sailing the void for 10,000 years must do more than simply fight.
[SPEAKER_01]: It must endure.
[SPEAKER_01]: It must feed itself and arm itself and replenish the ranks of the fallen, and it must do all of this without the support networks and supply chains and institutional infrastructure that other chapters take for granted.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the car caradons have none of these things and have not had them for longer than most imperial institutions have existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The question of how they have managed this, how a single chapter cut off from everything, has sustained itself across a hundred centuries of unbroken warfare in the most hostile environment imaginable.
[SPEAKER_01]: is answered by two words that the Kakaridans themselves use, and which tell you a great deal about the kind of brotherhood they are, the red tithe, and the grey.
[SPEAKER_01]: The red tide is the harvesting of flesh.
[SPEAKER_01]: We caught a glimpse of it at tranquility after the Badaab war, when the Kakaradans descended upon the mantis warriors' former recruiting worlds, and took an entire generation of young men.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that was a tie of opportunity, conducted after a major conflict when the chapters losses demanded immediate replenishment.
[SPEAKER_01]: The truth is that the red-tithe is not an occasional measure, but an ongoing necessity.
[SPEAKER_01]: A practice as old as the chapters exile itself, governed by ancient documents known as the edicts of exile, that grant the Kakaradans, the right to descend upon imperial worlds, and take what they need from the populations they find there.
[SPEAKER_01]: the responsibility for this falls to the reaper prime.
[SPEAKER_01]: A title that carries with it, beyond the ordinary duties of captaincy, the sacred obligation to ensure that the chapter never once for fresh aspirants.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the carcaradans fleet identifies a suitable world, ferro, feudal, far from the imperiums' attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: the repaprime oversees the descent and the harvesting begins.
[SPEAKER_01]: The vast majority of those taken will never become space marines.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are not meant to.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chapter's great fleet requires thousands of ordinary human hands to function, serfs and slave laborers who maintain the ships, work the foundries,
[SPEAKER_01]: These souls are taken from their homes and pressed into service aboard vessels they will never leave.
[SPEAKER_01]: In a life they did not choose, serving masters who regard them, with the distant and not unkind indifference, of those who have long since ceased to think of the transaction as anything other than necessary.
[SPEAKER_01]: But a few those of the right age and the right temperament, those in whom the car carried on see something worth cultivating, are given the chance to become something more.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are subjected to trials of such severity that the attrition rate exceeds even the brutal standards of most chapters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the reasons for this are not cruelty, but necessity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Kakaradans cannot afford to invest their precious and irreplaceable gene seed in candidates who might fail at a later stage.
[SPEAKER_01]: Better to lose them early, before the resources have been spent, then to discover too late that the flesh was not strong enough, or the will not deep enough, to carry the burden of what a car carried on must become.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who survive the initial culling undergo intensive hypnoconditioning, a process designed to strip away every loyalty, every memory, every attachment to the life they lived before.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not done with malice.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is done because a warrior who remembers his mother's face or his village's name or the sound of wind.
[SPEAKER_01]: through the trees of a world he will never see again, is a warrior who carries a wound that will never heal.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the carcadons have learned over 10,000 years, that some kindesses are cooler than they appear.
[SPEAKER_01]: What emerges from this process is a scout, a great-clad initiate, known only by a number, assigned to the 10th company for training, and then attached to one of the chapters battle companies to learn the craft of war.
[SPEAKER_01]: Over the course of a decade or more, if they survive and many do not, they begin to earn their exile markings.
[SPEAKER_01]: those jagged tattoos that spiral in loops upbed for arms and across pale-shaped scouts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each one a record of service rendered and bloodshed and when at last they have proven themselves when they have fought and bled and endured long enough to earn the trust of their brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are given two things that mark the transition from initiate to warrior.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first is a void name, a true name chosen to replace the number they have carried since their induction, and name that belongs to the chapter's own language and culture, and that connects them to a tradition, stretching back to the very founding of the Brotherhood
[SPEAKER_01]: The second is a suit of power armor, the sacred battle plate of a full void brother.
[SPEAKER_01]: And from that moment forward, they are Kakaradon's in truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: The grey tithe is something different, where the red tithe provides flesh, the grey tithe provides steel.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the duty of the harvester prime, another captain bearing responsibilities that extend far beyond the battlefield.
[SPEAKER_01]: To ensure that the chapter is constantly supplied with the weapons and equipment and vehicles that an astarties brotherhood requires to wage war.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the Imperium proper, a chapter might requisition such things through official channels, drawing upon the vast industrial output of the forge worlds and the ancient agreements between the adapter societies and the adapter's mechanics.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Kaka Redon's being exiles have no such luxury.
[SPEAKER_01]: What they have instead is the outer dark, and the things that can be found within it, if one knows where to look.
[SPEAKER_01]: The galaxy is old, and the spaces beyond its borders are older still, and scattered throughout the void are the remnants of ages long past.
[SPEAKER_01]: dead worlds and derelict stations and ancient caches of technology, left behind by civilizations that rose and fell before the Imperium was even a dream in the Emperor's mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Harvest of Prime seeks out these relics, this Archaeotech,
[SPEAKER_01]: and through ancient pacts, with the tech priests of Mars, pacts that predate the chapter's exile, and that have been honoured, however grudgingly, across the millennia, trades what is found for the weapons and armor, and equipment that the chapter needs to survive.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a tenuous arrangement, dependent on the Kakaradon's ability to find things of sufficient value, and on the Meccanicus's willingness to honour agreements made by tech priests who have been dead for thousands of years, and in times of true desperation.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the great hiths alone are not enough, the carcaradons have been known to use their salvaged architect as leverage in negotiations with the Ashenclaws instead.
[SPEAKER_01]: Trading technology for flesh, when the mechanics cannot provide what is needed, and the red tiths cannot replenish what has been lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Kakarodans ships are a site unlike anything else in the Imperial Navy, or in the fleets of any other chapter.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are wildly different in design, some ancient, some relatively modern, some so heavily modified that their original classification is impossible to determine.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they span eros of construction that cover the full breadth of the Imperians history.
[SPEAKER_01]: A vessel built during the Great Crusade might sail alongside one captured from Xenos Raiders, three millennia later.
[SPEAKER_01]: Both of them patched and repaired and modified so extensively that they are held together as much by stubbornness as by engineering.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same is true of the warriors themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: A Kakarid and battle brother, my carrier Fobos Patton Bota, alongside a combat blade of far more recent manufacture, and were a suit of Mark V power armor that dates back to the Horus Heresy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's plate scarred and repaired and reinforced across millennia of continuous service.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing is wasted.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing is discarded if it can still function.
[SPEAKER_01]: They sleep in cryotanks, individual chambers of frozen stillness, that hold a warrior in suspended animation, while the fleet crosses the immense distances between the stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is how the chapter preserves its strength across voyages that might last decades or centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: and it is how the younger brothers overcome the deep void sickness that afflix those whose minds have not yet learned to endure the crushing emptiness of the spaces between galaxies.
[SPEAKER_01]: The young sleep often and deeply, then newly implanted membranes guiding them into a hibernation that is part meditation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The older brothers sleep less, finding it harder to surrender consciousness
[SPEAKER_01]: and the eldest are said to have abandoned the cryotanks entirely, to have not slept in hundreds of terren years, to exist in a state of permanent and watchful wakefulness that is no longer quite human and no longer quite sane.
[SPEAKER_01]: But which serves in its own grim fashion, as a final watch against the dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have spoken now at some length about what the Carcaretons do, how they fight, how they endure, how they sustain themselves across the millennia through tides of flesh and steel, and the frozen sleep of warriors who have forgotten what it means to rest, but we have not yet spoken of what they believe, or of who they are beneath the gray serimite and the black eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is here, in the quiet spaces between the battles and the tithes, that the true nature of the Kakarodon's astra reveals itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not as the merciless killing machines, that their enemies perceive.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nor as the strangers that their allies distrust, but as something far more complex and far more sorrowful than either of those descriptions would suggest.
[SPEAKER_01]: the carcaradans are, despite everything, despite the silence and the savagery and the ten thousand years of exile that would have driven lesser brotherhoods to bitterness or madness or the cold embrace of chaos, a faithful people, deeply unshakably faithful in a way that has nothing to do with the modern imperial cult and its hollow ceremonies and its gilded
[SPEAKER_01]: The car caradons do not worship the emperor, or rather they do, but the being they worship is not the distant and incomprehensible deity of the ecclesiarchy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The silent golden figure entombed upon the golden throne, more symbol than person, more idea than man.
[SPEAKER_01]: The being the carcaradons revere is someone they remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not personally, of course, 10,000 years is too long for even the most enhanced of memories, but through a tradition of belief so old and so carefully preserved that it carries with it the weight and the texture of genuine recollection.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way a family might remember a grandfather they never met through the stories told by those who knew him.
[SPEAKER_01]: To the Karkarodans, the Emperor is Rangu, the Voidfather.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in that name, and in the way they speak it, there is something that the modern Imperium has almost entirely lost, which is intimacy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Voidfather is not a concept.
[SPEAKER_01]: He is not a theological abstraction or a political necessity or a figurehead propped up by millennia of institutional momentum.
[SPEAKER_01]: He is a person, a titan, who once walked among mortals, who breathed the same air and trud the same ground, who looked upon his warriors with eyes that could see and spoke to them with a voice that could be heard.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Kaka rotan's creed is older than the ecclesiarchy by a comfortable margin, rooted not in the age of churches and dogma, but in the age when the emperor was still alive
[SPEAKER_01]: still leading his armies, still building the civilization that would bear his name, long after, he could no longer speak it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Holy Terror, the distant half-mythical world, that most Imperial citizens think of, when they think of it at all, as the seat of a bureaucracy so vast and so impersonal that it might as well be a natural phenomenon.
[SPEAKER_01]: is something else to the Kakaradans.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not a concept, it is a place, a real place with soil and sky and history pressed into every stone.
[SPEAKER_01]: And their connection to it is ancient and primal and has sustained their loyalty and their determination in the loneliness of the outer dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: When they were first banished, none had expected them to survive, let alone remain united
[SPEAKER_01]: but survive they did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their disparate heritage bound together by their faith in him on old earth, and nothing in ten millennia of darkness and war and isolation has been able to shake that.
[SPEAKER_01]: This faithfulness expresses itself in ways that would seem almost quaint if they were not so deeply felt.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kakarodon's battle brothers carry devotional prayer scrolls on their warrior, the parchment yellowed with age, and inscribed in a script so archaic that modern imperial scholars would struggle to read it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The culture that has grown around this faith is unlike anything else in the Imperium, because it has had total isolation in which to develop.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uninfluenced by the trends and doctrines and fashions that have shaped every other chapter's identity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Karkarodans traditions are primitiveists in the truest sense, not primitive, which implies a lack of sophistication, but primitiveists, which implies a deliberate return to something fundamental and essential, stripped of all ornament and pretension.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their battle brothers carry skrim-shore talismans, carved from materials found in the void,
[SPEAKER_01]: and they decorate their armour with intricate abstract traceries that depict fangued mors and death's heads and oceanic predators.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are not just decoration, they are expressions of identity, of belonging, of a culture that has evolved its own language of symbols in the absence of anyone else to speak to.
[SPEAKER_01]: The codecs are starters, which governs the organization and insignia of most chapters, with the loving detail of a particularly thorough accountant, holds little authority here.
[SPEAKER_01]: The carcaradons have abandoned the prescribed symbols and markings that signify rank and assignment in a conventional battle company, replacing them with a system of totemic and personal markings that correspond to their own internal hierarchy.
[SPEAKER_01]: a hierarchy that outsiders find impenetrable.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there is tapu, a word from the chapter's own tongue that describes a sacred prohibition, a line that cannot be crossed without violating something fundamental about the order of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the Karakaradon's culture, it is forbidden for a lower ranked void brother or chapter
[SPEAKER_01]: The prohibition is absolute.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not a regulation to be enforced through punishment, but a truth to be understood through faith.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way a devout person understands that certain things are holy and must not be profane.
[SPEAKER_01]: It speaks to a chapter that has built its entire social order around concepts of sacred hierarchy and spiritual cleanliness that have no parallel
[SPEAKER_01]: and which are all the more striking for having developed in complete darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far from any influence that might have shaped them.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is, it must be said, a shadow that falls across the car carried on's culture, a darkness that is not external, but internal, woven into the fabric of what they are.
[SPEAKER_01]: They call it the chill of the void, and it is the chapters genetic curse, the floor in their gene seed that manifests in those brothers who begin to lose their grip on whatever it is that keeps a space marine functioning as something more than a weapon.
[SPEAKER_01]: It comes in stages.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first is a withdrawal into cold formality, a brother who was already taciturn, becoming something closer to frozen, speaking only in the most archaic high gothic.
[SPEAKER_01]: treating all non-car caradons with a distance that borders on contempt.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second is mercilessness, not the calculated ruthlessness that characterizes the chapter as a whole, but something more absolute, a state in which the afflicted brother will execute any enemy he encounters, regardless of circumstance.
[SPEAKER_01]: be they surrendering combatants, or frightened civilians, or allies who have simply made the mistake of standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the third stage, the final stage, is silence, a withdrawal so complete that the brother ceases to interact with others entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Carrying out his duties alone, fighting alone, existing in a solitude so total that it becomes a kind of death, while the body continues to function.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a cruel curse and a fitting one, because it takes the qualities that define the carcaradans, their reserve, their severity, their comfort with solitude, and amplifies them until they become a prison.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chill of the void does not make a carcaradone into something he is not.
[SPEAKER_01]: It makes him into more of what he already is, until the silence that was once discipline becomes isolation.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the isolation becomes oblivion, and at the heart of all of this, the faith, the culture, the curse, the ten thousand years of exile.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a mystery that the car carried on's guard more closely than any other.
[SPEAKER_01]: A secret that touches upon the most fundamental question, any space marine chapter can ask of itself, which is, where do we come from?
[SPEAKER_01]: The Kakarodans call their primarch Timatangaro, the forgotten one.
[SPEAKER_01]: They speak of Him rarely, and when they do, it is with a reverence that is tinged with something that might be sorrow, or might be resignation, or might be the particular kind of love, that one feels for someone who has been gone so long, that the memory has become more real than the person ever was.
[SPEAKER_01]: They do not know who the forgotten one is, or if they do, they will not say.
[SPEAKER_01]: What they believe is that they're exile, the edicts of exile that govern their existence and that mandate their eternal crusade through the outer dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can only be overturned by the forgotten ones return.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he comes, if he comes, the carcaradans will be called home at last.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until that day, they will continue to sail the void and fight the Emperor's enemies in the darkness, and they will do so without complaint and without hope of recognition, because that is what was asked of them, and they have never known how to do anything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: The paradox is almost too painful to contemplate.
[SPEAKER_01]: A chapter, faithful beyond measure to an emperor who may not know they exist, waiting for a primarque who may never come, serving an imperium that has forgotten their name.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ten thousand years of loyalty, unrewarded, unacknowledged, sustained by nothing but faith and duty, and the memory of a world they left behind, when the emperor still walked upon it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, we come to the part of this history that changes everything, because the clues to the Kakaradan's origins scattered and fragmentary and carefully examined by the very few imperial scholars who have been permitted to study them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Point to what an answer that is in its own way, more tragic than the mystery itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The gene seed tells the first part of the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: There has been precisely one opportunity in recorded history to examine Car Caradonne's gene seed.
[SPEAKER_01]: A single extraction performed by a death watch apothecary on a slain battle brother whose body was recovered from a massacre site.
[SPEAKER_01]: The body was purportedly carcarried on, and the apothecary who performed the extraction noted two things of great significance.
[SPEAKER_01]: First that the gene seed appeared untainted, though subject to some degree of long-term genetic degradation, the kind of slow drift that accumulates over millennia in the absence of the careful maintenance that most chapters perform upon their genetic legacy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And second, that the gene-seed bore several genetic markers that were reminiscent of the Ravenguard.
[SPEAKER_01]: the raven guard.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 19th Legion, the sons of Corvus Correx, masters of stealth and shadow, whose pale skin and dark eyes are among the most recognizable traits in the adapter societies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when one looks at the carcadons with that knowledge in mind, the grayish death-like power of their skin.
[SPEAKER_01]: the liquid black eyes that develop in the most ancient brothers, as dark and as featureless as the void itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The resemblance is unmistakable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not identical, certainly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Melania of genetic drift in isolation have created something distinct.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that has diverged from the raven guard baseline, the way a river diverges from its source, as it flows further and further downstream.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the source is there, if you know what to look for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chapter recruits from a wide variety of planetary populations.
[SPEAKER_01]: The red tithes draw aspirants from whatever world the fleeting counters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet every car carried on, regardless of his origin, develops the same pale skin and the same tendency toward those black, featureless eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mutations are not a product of environment or homeworld.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are a product of the gene seed itself, rewriting the body of every warrior who receives it in the image of something ancient and cold, and recognisably, unmistakably, of Corvus Correx's lineage.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if the carcaradans are sons of the Ravenguard, then how did they come to be what they are?
[SPEAKER_01]: How did a successor of one of the Imperiums most disciplined and strategically sophisticated legions become a brotherhood of exiled predators, sailing the void in silence, practising rights and traditions that bear no resemblance to anything in the Ravenguard's recorded culture?
[SPEAKER_01]: The answer lies not in the raven guard as they are now, but in what they were before, before Corvus Correx, before deliverance, before everything that the modern Imperium associates with the 19th Legion.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the earliest days of the Great Crusade, before the Emperor's scattered sons had been found and reunited with the legions that bore their genetic legacy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 19th Legion was commanded by a Terenborn warrior named Arkas IV.
[SPEAKER_01]: He held the title of Legion Master and the epithet of Shade Lord, and he had led the 19th for three solar decades.
[SPEAKER_01]: A long time, even by the standards of the estates, and long enough to have shaped the Legion's culture and practices in his own image.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the image of Arkas Far was not gentle.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 19th legion under the shade lord was defined by the traditions of the Terran-Zeric tribes from which many of its earliest members had been drawn.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cold blooded, unscentamental warriors whose methods of war leaned heavily toward oppression, repression, and occupation.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not subtle, they were not merciful, they were the emperor's blade in its most unadorned form, a weapon designed to cut without artistry or elegance until the cutting was done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, Corvus Correx was found.
[SPEAKER_01]: The primar could spend his formative years on the moon of Lycaus, fighting a guerrilla war against the slavers, who ruled the mining colony of deliverance, and when he looked upon the legion that bore his blood and his heritage, he saw something that horrified in.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw, in the terren warriors who had served under the shade lord, something akin to the very slivers he had spent his life overthrowing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cold men, who crushed populations beneath their boots, with the same casual brutality that the masters of like hair said employed, and who saw nothing wrong with it, because it was what they had always done, and what the emperor had made them to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Corax began to reshape the legion in his own image.
[SPEAKER_01]: He imposed the ways of likeayas over the old Terrain traditions, stealth over brute force, liberation over oppression, the precision of the shadow over the bluntness of the bludgeon.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a transformation that made the raven guard into one of the most tactically sophisticated legions in the Imperium, and it was a transformation that required, as all transformations do, the displacement of those who embodied what had come before.
[SPEAKER_01]: Arkas Fowl was among those displaced, the Shade Lord and other senior officers of the Old Terran Guard were reassigned, moved away from positions of authority, their influence carefully and deliberately diminished.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some were attached to rogue trader fleets or other independent commands on the fringes of imperial space.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Fowl himself, the warrior who had led the 19th
[SPEAKER_01]: who had shaped its culture, and fought its wars, and given it the identity that Corax now found so abhorrent, was sent away at the head of a nomad fleet, dispatched to the edges of the galaxy on the Primax Direct Order.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was never recalled.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fleet was never mentioned again, and the fact that Correx made no effort to bring them back, suggests, with a clarity that requires no speculation to understand, that they were considered a body apart from the Legion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exized, like a surgeon, exizing disease tissue, and sent into the void to do whatever they would do, far from the sight of a primarck, who could not bear to look at what they
[SPEAKER_01]: and there it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: The answer to the question that has haunted every investigation into the Carquerodon's origins, laid bare in the history of a legion that tried to forget its own past.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Car Caridon's Astro are not merely successors of the Raven God.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are the original Raven God, the Terran-born warriors of the 19th Legion, as it existed before Corvus Correx was found.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cold and brutal fighters, whose methods and whose nature so disgusted their own primarck that he cast them out and remade the Legion without them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are the sons that the father chose to forget, the brothers that the family chose to disown.
[SPEAKER_01]: The face of the 19th Legion that Corvus Correx could not stomach and so consign to the darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: and they have been faithful ever since.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the tragedy at the heart of the carcaradone's astra, the wound that lies beneath every other wound, the sorrow that 10,000 years of exile has not healed, and perhaps never will.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not cast out by the Imperium, they were not punished by the Emperor, or condemned by the High Lords, or sentenced by any court or tribunal.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were rejected by their own genesire, by the primarch whose blood flows in their veins, and whose face they will never see.
[SPEAKER_01]: The father who looked upon his sons and found them wanting, and sent them into the outer dark, and never spoke of them again.
[SPEAKER_01]: The forgotten one, Tamatangaro.
[SPEAKER_01]: The primarke they wait for, the father whose return will end their exile and bring them home at last.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are waiting for someone who chose to forget them, and they have been waiting for 10,000 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: and still they fight.
[SPEAKER_01]: Still they keep faith, still they sail the void in silence, carrying their prayer scrolls and their scrim-shore talismans, and their ancient, unbroken loyalty to an emperor who may not know they exist, serving a premark who sent them away, and an imperium that has never learned their name.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they do not waver, and they do not break, and they
[SPEAKER_01]: The archivers set down his quill stylus, and sat for a long time in the golden light of his small chamber, listening to the deep and patient hum of the ship around him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he did not write anything more for the rest of that evening.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pages before him were covered in his careful hand, page after page of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ink longs since dried on words that traced a history, stretching many years.
[SPEAKER_01]: From the sealed vaults of terror to the massacre sites of the Badat War, from the mythologised poetry of Cassandria love, to the cold and clinical notes of a death-watch apothecary, examining gene-seed that bore the fingerprints of a legion that had tried to forget its own children.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had compiled the record, assembled the fragments, laid the pieces of the puzzle out in whatever order made the most sense, knowing all the while that the puzzle would never be complete, and that the silences between the pieces were in their own way, as much a part of the story as the pieces themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: He poured the last measure from his thermal flask and held it between his palms and breathed the steam.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the warmth of it was a small and precious thing in a place that had known so very little warmth for so very long.
[SPEAKER_01]: Since the opening of the Great Rift, the Kakarodans Astra have been granted the mantis warriors form a homeworld of Uthika, to do with as they please.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is on the surface a remarkable gesture, a world of their own.
[SPEAKER_01]: After 10,000 years of wandering, a place where they might had last put down roots and build something permanent, and come in from the cold that has been their only companion, since before the Imperium was whole.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether they were used it is another matter entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: A chapter that has spent a hundred centuries in the void does not simply stop.
[SPEAKER_01]: The edicts of exile still stand, the forgotten one has not returned, the mandate that sent them into the outer dark has never been rescinded, and the conqueror domes have never been a brotherhood inclined to assume that silence means permission.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were told to go, they were not told to come back.
[SPEAKER_01]: And until someone tells them otherwise, until Tematin Garo returns from wherever primax go, when they are lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until the void father speaks from his golden throne, in a voice that can be heard, across the lightless gulfs between the stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: They will continue to do what they have always done.
[SPEAKER_01]: They will sail the void.
[SPEAKER_01]: They will hunt the enemies of mankind in the places where no one else can see.
[SPEAKER_01]: They will conduct their red tithes and their great tithes and sleep in their cryotanks between engagements, and the young will struggle with the void sickness, and the old will keep their long and sleepless watch.
[SPEAKER_01]: The archivists thought about that as the ship hummed around him, and the light held the darkness at arms length.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought about what it meant to be faithful for ten thousand years without recognition, without gratitude, without even the certainty that the one you served knew you existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought about the black eyed warriors who moved through these corridors in their ancient great plate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Carrying prayer scrolls inscribed in a language older than the Ecclesiaki, and skimshot talismans carved from the bones of creatures that had never known sunlight.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he wondered what it cost them to keep going.
[SPEAKER_01]: Century after century, millennium after millennium, alone in the dark, with nothing but duty and memory and the distant gathering hope that someday, somehow, someone would come to call them home.
[SPEAKER_01]: He finished his drink, he cleaned his quilt stylus, and stopped at his inquels, and stacked his pages neatly at the corner of the metal desk.
[SPEAKER_01]: Beside his battered copy of the indices are starters, with its margins full of notes that no one but him would ever read.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ship sailed on, somewhere beyond the hull.
[SPEAKER_01]: Beyond the last faint whisper of the astronomic onslaid,
[SPEAKER_01]: the stars thinned and failed, and the galaxy fell away into the immense and empty black.
[SPEAKER_01]: The outer dark, the space between everything and nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cold and endless sea that the carcaridon's astra had called home.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere in the outer dark, the forgotten ones children kept their vigil, and the void which had been patient for 10,000 years,