The Shadow-pattern Stormbird descended silently. William Wood, Lord of the Twelfth Chapter, stepped down the ramp.
Beside him walked a form even taller and more elegant than the Avenian, a gleaming spear held in her right hand.
William gazed at the distant horizon, at the rolling white tide.
Tens of thousands of snow-shrikes flew towards War-Hold Ninety-Three. The Black Emperor's swift assault had drawn the enemy from the Phoenix's Crag, hoping to keep a god at bay.
A faint, mocking smile touched William's lips as he looked up.
The Avenian's only city was, like their war-holds, embedded in the mountain rock.
Towers, scaled-down dwellings, workshops, and other structures were woven into its fabric, forming a complex labyrinth of surface buildings and underground passages.
A flicker passed through the diviner-psyker's obsidian eyes. Even an Astartes assault in such a complex environment would be fraught with difficulty.
This elegant city of art would be reduced to rubble in street fighting.
But William had a plan. He would fulfill the Black Emperor's divine command to preserve the Avenian's Phoenix Court.
The "Marionettist" turned, activating his "Spirit Body Thread" vision, looking towards the Farseer puppet connected to him.
The Black Emperor had helped him create this puppet from the most powerful Farseer of the Avenian craftworld, Mag Ciraeth.
"Pleased... to... serve... you," the Farseer puppet said, bowing with a graceful, though slightly stilted, Avenian accent.
She rose, raising her elegant arm, her left hand extending towards the mountain peak.
William watched the surging Warp tides around him with unease. He had never seen anyone summon such a vast amount of Warp energy.
The Black Emperor, the god who walked among mortals, was beyond such.
Perhaps the Emperor or Magnus could, but he had never witnessed it.
William looked up. The snow and ice, mingled with hail, that swept across the southern polar region burst apart, turning into a thick mist.
The mist was not pure water vapor. It was laced with a psychic haze visible only to psykers.
The mist settled, shrouding the entire city, cloaking the mountain like a veil of gossamer.
William watched the supernatural mist form and silently opened his Chapter's comm channel.
"Attack!"
From the landed transports, the "Magician" \led the charge, one hand gripping a divining rod, channeling spirituality into it, the other sweeping a bolt pistol, directing their battle-brothers forward.
William walked forward, his diviner-psyker's sight unaffected.
He saw the "Clown" assault teams, cloaked by the psychic mist, moving swiftly towards the fortresses at the mountain's base.
The "Clowns" leaped, twisting in mid-air, slapping melta bombs onto the fortifications.
Without pausing, they rolled and tumbled, leaving the forts behind.
Boom, boom, boom...
Bunkers erupted skyward, their flames rippling through the mist.
"Magicians" leaped through the flames, climbing rapidly to the mountainside.
They surged into the panicked Avenian formations, their lightning claws hissing, tearing through their lines.
The Avenian warriors, disoriented in the sudden fog, searched for their enemies, but their vision only extended two meters.
The Shadows of Order's own perception was also limited by the psychic mist to fifteen meters. But the "Fortune Teller" captains' divining rods guided them to the enemy.
They fired their Bedrock-pattern boltguns before the enemy could react, their deadly barrages erupting from the flanks and rear.
The Avenian, confused and looking about, were cut down before they could even see their attackers.
William, the "Marionettist," walked unhindered, his Farseer puppet beside him, onto the magnificent arch-boulevard.
The boulevard stretched upward. At its end lay what the Black Emperor had called the Library of the Phoenix's Crag.
William could just make out the shadow of the building at the end. Avenian warriors, wearing ornate, plumed helmets, suddenly surged from both sides of the road.
They stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a dense phalanx.
William looked up towards the upper levels. The "Magicians" had already broken through, tearing the Avenian leaders and politicians to pieces.
In their hour of greatest need, the enemy's elite had not appeared at their political center, but here, defending their great library.
Clearly, the Avenian held their culture, the accumulated wealth of millennia, in the highest regard.
'Rest assured. I will preserve the crystallization of your civilization and offer it to my Lord.'
William, the "Marionettist," stared at the shield wall of Avenian warriors before him, and moved his mind.
The Farseer puppet stepped forward. The Singing Spear in her hand spun.
The gleaming spear burst with brilliant light, revealing her tall, elegant form.
The Avenian did not flinch from the attack. They raised their weapons and unleashed a concentrated volley at the intruder.
William watched as the Farseer puppet's slender fingers plucked at supernatural threads of fate in ways even a diviner-psyker could not comprehend.
Dozens of bullets deviated from their straight paths, colliding with other rounds.
The deflections grew like a snowball. The barrage collapsed in on itself.
Boom!
As the explosion sent up smoke, the Singing Spear screamed towards the Avenian line.
Bang, bang, bang...
A series of detonations. Avenian warriors were blown to fragments.
The Farseer puppet raised her hand. The Singing Spear spun back into her waiting left palm.
Then she raised her right hand. As it reached its apex, a crackling sounded overhead.
William looked up. A lightning-wreathed psychic storm was building in the sky.
The Farseer puppet swung her arm down. Bolts of destructive lightning fell.
In a silent explosion, elegant light armor shattered, tough bones crumbled to dust.
William walked forward, his boots imprinting the Avenian's ashes into the scorched boulevard.
As he advanced, the mist gradually dissipated. The magnificent structure grew clearer.
As the mist fully receded, the white sky was dominated by a silver-white pyramid.
Augur scans scrolled across his tactical display: [Height: 600 meters. Width: 2 kilometers...]
William stared at the pyramid, embedded in the mountain's main peak.
The Library of the Phoenix's Crag.
The Avenian's greatest repository of knowledge and history.
An image of Prospero's pyramids flashed unbidden into his mind.
Though he had never visited Tizca, the City of Light, many warriors in his Chapter, under the auspices of the alliance between their Legions, had journeyed to Prospero's ruins to hunt the soul-eating bees.
They had brought back holographic images of the pyramids of the five great cults and of Primarch Magnus. They had told him of their time on the Thousand Sons' homeworld.
The similar pyramids and great library, even the soul-eating bees and the flying shrikes...
All of it made William think of Prospero.
As the sounds of battle subsided, William gathered his thoughts.
'I have fulfilled my Lord's divine command. The great library is intact.'
....
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