The Imperial forces led by Dukel advanced like an unrelenting tide, sweeping away the defenses of Commorragh one stronghold at a time.
The suddenness of the war threw the denizens of Commorragh—murderers, hedonists, slavers, and sadists—into disarray.
Their raiding fleets and slave barges were still scouring the Materium, leaving behind only meager garrisons with little combat ability. These scattered defense teams were utterly unfit to stand against the might of the Imperium. Defeat was not just likely—it was inevitable.
The Imperial Guard and Adeptus Astartes, long tormented and plundered by these xenos, now returned with vengeance in their hearts. For every Imperial citizen tortured or enslaved, the Imperium would exact blood. Inch by inch, flesh and bone would be crushed under the boot of righteous retribution.
Blood must answer blood.
There was no peace in the webway sprawl of Commorragh. The clash of weapons, the wails of panicked criminals, and the rumble of collapsing bastions echoed through its twisted spires. War had permeated every stone and soul.
Perhaps only one place remained untouched—the inner sanctum of the Black Heart Kabal, where Victor, overlord of this decadent city, presided.
There, in the heart of Commorragh, gathered the leaders of the city's myriad dark factions—the King of the Blood Orcs, the Blade Lord, the Master of Conspiracies, and the Crimson Bride.
They met beneath the vaulted shadows of a Dark Muse temple—one of the profane sanctuaries dedicated to the ancient deities of the Eldar. These Dark Muses were icons of agony and excess, once obscure aspects of the Eldar pantheon, now elevated in prominence following the Fall and the rise of the Cult of the Red Grief and its kin.
With the birth of She Who Thirsts, and the obliteration of most Eldar gods, the worship of the Dark Muses became the dominant faith among the Drukhari. Now, in the very heart of Commorragh, this temple served as both a bastion and a battlefield.
The temple doors yawned open, leading into a realm of shadow and sacrilege.
From within, Drukhari warriors watched the chaos unfolding outside. Their eyes, filled with both dread and hunger, glinted as if longing to feast upon the anguish of others.
Victor stood before a living statue—a tortured Aeldari female, skinned and mutilated, suspended by thorns that pierced her limbs. In one hand, she gripped a thorn-whip, her face frozen in agony. Her tongue had been severed; her throat could not scream, and her pierced palms bled without end.
None present saw her as a person—only as an art piece of exquisite suffering, a monument to the Drukhari's devotion to pain.
Victor brushed a finger across the statue's exposed thigh, dragging it along sinew and tendon. The statue trembled.
"The enemy is too strong," he said, his voice calm but cold. "Commorragh's defense grids are collapsing. The Space Marines, those armored apes venerated as demigods by the Imperium, are breaching the webway gates. Their fury is unrelenting."
"In the arenas, they always made fine sport—blunt, but brutally efficient. They fetched high prices, even if they lacked grace. This time, however, they've come not in chains but in legions. They block every corridor. Their ranks are endless."
He scowled.
"And those wretched Harlequins—the jesters of the Laughing God—have betrayed us. Somehow, they received an omen, a whisper perhaps, and now they've thrown in their lot with humanity. They've joined the Imperials in breaking through our defenses."
His voice echoed through the sanctuary, refined yet venomous. With a sudden gesture, he drove a finger into the statue's calf. A pop of torn flesh. Blood trickled down.
Unfazed, Victor retrieved a satin cloth and delicately wiped the gore from his hand.
A holographic projection flickered to life beside him, casting ghostly images of the battle outside across the temple's walls.
Towering dark crystal spires shuddered under siege. The city's void shields, once unbreachable, now sputtered and flared. Explosions lit the skyline. Human artillery had reduced countless docking towers to rubble. House-sized debris, drawn by Commorragh's artificial grav-fields, plummeted down like meteors, leaving craters of flame and ruin.
Victor maintained composure as best he could, masking panic beneath a noble sneer. But the assault was relentless. The Imperials had broken his city's back.
He was no coward. He had survived the Fall of the Eldar, one of the first to flee into the Webway and carve out a new dominion amidst its fractured strands. He believed Commorragh, hidden deep in the folds of the Immaterium, to be eternal.
But now, death once more clawed at his gates.
"It's only a matter of time before our walls fall," one of the dark lords muttered, gesturing toward the flickering projection.
"We'll fight to the last," Victor replied, his eyes burning. "Let the apes think breaking our defenses will make us bow. Let them believe they've claimed our city. But Commorragh is not conquered so easily. Its labyrinthine streets, its venomous shadows, will devour them."
He stepped forward.
"We will remind them what true terror is. We will carve their memory into the city's bones. Let this battle be their nightmare eternal."
"And those Harlequin traitors—those painted fools of Cegorach—we'll show them that no matter whose dogs they become, they are still clowns."
The war council fell silent. No one refuted Victor's decree.
But within the quiet, each dark lord harbored thoughts unspoken—calculations of survival, betrayal, and vengeance.
Commorragh had always been a city of knives in the dark.
And tonight, the shadows stirred.
Compared to the Imperium of Man—now stretching its warfronts even into the Eye of Terror—the dark city of Commorragh was but a shadow in the void.
Even though Commorragh was vast beyond mortal comprehension, it could not compare to an empire spanning millions of star systems, each teeming with life and industry.
Victor, the Overlord of Commorragh, could read the fear and hesitation in the eyes of the gathered Archons and leaders. A cruel, mocking smile tugged at the corners of his lips. Cowards, all of them.
"We shall not cower behind our walls like prey," Victor declared coldly. "The slaver fleets and raiding parties scattered throughout the Materium have received my orders. They will strike at the worlds of the Imperium without mercy—slaughtering their kin and crippling their resolve. Let them bleed in their own cities before they dare encroach upon ours."
The war council moved swiftly. No one dared oppose Victor. In the twisted hierarchy of the Dark City, his word was law.
Though Commorragh's outer defenses were doomed to fall before the wrath of humanity, the Dark Eldar had prepared for such a siege. Their strategy was simple—draw the enemy into the depths of their labyrinthine streets and unleash the full horror of their artistry in pain.
While their spaceborne fleets would become venomous fangs gnawing at Imperial territory, within the city itself the true terror would begin.
The Haemonculi, vile masters of fleshcraft and torment, unleashed the abominations they had kept sealed in the lowest vaults of Commorragh. Massive, malformed beasts, stitched together from nightmares and the screams of the dying, were loosed into the alleys and courtyards.
Even the Drukhari themselves shuddered at the sight of these grotesqueries. The Haemonculi did not craft monsters—they sculpted suffering, taking perverse joy in every twitch of agony and flicker of terror.
Meanwhile, many among the Dark Eldar remained oblivious, still indulging in excess and violence, convinced this was but another incursion by lesser beings. They expected a swift victory, another round of captives for their arenas, and new toys to carve.
They underestimated the wrath of the Imperium.
On every street corner, engines of torment—spiked walkers, flensing tanks, and sadistic traps—were deployed in anticipation of the enemy's advance.
But above the twisted skyline of Commorragh, the skies told a different story.
The Imperial fleet had shattered much of the city's anti-air emplacements. Shield generators flickered and died under the relentless hammer of orbital fire.
Thunderhawks and Stormbirds streaked through the atmosphere, leaving trails of burning light in their wake. Drones and attack craft deployed by the Adeptus Mechanicus overwhelmed the skies.
The Dark Eldar's prized Voidraven bombers—once the bane of Imperial airpower—found themselves swarmed. Agile though they were, even their hypersensitive reflexes were outpaced. The Imperium's aerial strategies had evolved. Swarms of drones blanketed flight paths, cornering and culling the enemy like vermin.
Victory tilted further and further toward the Emperor's forces.
Commorragh's sky dome cracked with thunder and fire. Warehouses and spires collapsed like rotted teeth. The city's surface ruptured under barrages of steel and fury.
And then came the drop pods.
With the howl of reentry, five companies of Doom Slayers—elite Space Marines under the command of Doom himself—slammed into the city.
Five thousand warriors of the Adeptus Astartes struck like a celestial fist.
The impact raised fire and dust. Pod hatches exploded outward, and from one such craft emerged Doom—red-lit and armored in dark crimson and green. Across his back rested a flame-wreathed blade, and in his gauntleted hands, a twin-barreled shotgun the size of an ogryn's skull.
With a roar that shook the walls, he raised his right fist. A chainsword sprang from its armor-groove, roaring with bloodlust.
"For the Emperor! For the Warmaster!"
A Drukhari warrior surged toward him, moving with blistering speed, his cursed blade already drawn. But Doom was faster. He charged forward. As the two passed, his chainsword tore through the xenos with mechanical precision.
Blood sprayed in an arc. The screaming engine of the chainsword seemed to howl with glee.
The xenos armor was worthless. The Drukhari died in a heartbeat, his body shredded beyond recognition.
Doom didn't pause. He spun around, leveled his twin-barreled weapon at another pack of Drukhari attempting a flanking strike.
"BOOM!"
Red fire burst from the muzzles. Shrapnel tore through the air in a broad cone, vaporizing everything in its path. The street ahead became a storm of gore and ruin.
Behind him, more Doom Slayers poured from their pods, chainswords revving, bolters thundering.
Commorragh was no longer merely under siege.
It was burning.
A storm of fire and shrapnel tore through the Dark Eldar ambush.
Flesh was shredded by razor-hot fragments. Blood hissed and sizzled in the flames. The smell of scorched meat filled the air as bodies were incinerated in the thermal blast.
In mere seconds, an entire squad of Drukhari was annihilated.
Their broken corpses littered the flame-wreathed avenue, grotesquely twisted and smoldering. The once-graceful xenos now resembled overcooked refuse strewn across a furnace floor.
Doom paused for a heartbeat, surveying the carnage. A stray thought surfaced.
"If the Blood Angels were here, they might've tried to cook the meat," he muttered, dark humor flickering behind his visor.
With a thunderous crack, more drop pods from the Second Legion smashed into the cityscape behind him, embedding deep into the fractured ferrocrete.
The hatches exploded open with hissed pneumatics.
From within emerged towering figures clad in the heraldic colors of the Doom Slayers, the elite shock troops of the Second Legion. They stepped forward with disciplined fury, their movements deliberate and unstoppable.
Where the Dark Eldar saw swift movement and agile maneuvering, the Astartes saw only prey flailing in desperation.
One Doom Slayer broke into a sprint.
Standing over three meters tall and clad in Terminator plate, the warrior's thunderous gait sounded like a siege engine in motion. His bulk—close to five tons of ceramite, adamantium, and rage—moved with terrifying purpose.
He barreled through a xenos-built dwelling without slowing, the structure collapsing around him in a cloud of black smoke and shattered crystal.
From the rubble, he emerged gripping a Drukhari warrior.
There was no hesitation.
One punch.
The xenos was reduced to pulp—his torso imploding beneath the blow, blood spraying in a red arc nearly ten meters across. Gore stained the armor of the Astartes, who paid it no mind.
The thin, flexible armor of the Drukhari—designed for agility and evasion—offered no protection. Against the fury of the Emperor's gene-forged sons, it might as well have been paper.
The nearby Comorrite defenders—guards hastily mustered to resist the incursion—froze at the sight. In mere moments, the raiders from the Imperium had shattered their position with brutal efficiency and primeval savagery.
There was a terrible beauty to it—a raw, unfiltered violence that defied the elegance the Drukhari prized.
For a brief moment, hesitation gripped them.
Then came the barked orders of their leader, cold and unyielding.
Cowardice was not tolerated in Commorragh.
Reluctantly, the Dark Eldar rallied, blades drawn, and charged the Doom Slayers head-on.
The butcher's work would continue.
...
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