Chronicle, entry number sixty-one.
For the first time since the Webway began, the Imperial Fists and the Iron Warriors have left Terra.
After the arrival of the Alpha Legion to cover the walls, Primarch Rogal Dorn announced that he would be taking “a vacation.” His captains looked at one another in terror.
No one knew the Primarch even knew that word.
As it turned out, for Rogal Dorn, a vacation consists of liberating Europe.
I.
Stalingrad
It was snowing over Stalingrad.
The city was a skeleton of brick and twisted iron.
The factories were burning.
The streets were trenches.
In the fountain of the central square, beneath the statues of children dancing in a ring around a crocodile, a young Soviet soldier named Dimitri Petrenko was playing dead among the corpses of his comrades while German soldiers finished off the wounded.
Beside him, another body moved.
“Don’t move,” whispered a hoarse, heavily accented voice.
“Not yet.”
It was a sergeant with several days’ worth of beard, the eyes of a wolf and a sniper rifle hidden under his coat: Viktor Reznov.
“We are the only ones left, Dimitri. The only ones. And there is a man we must kill. General Amsel. The butcher of this city. He is the one who…”
Reznov didn’t finish the sentence.
The sky split open.
It wasn’t a bombardment.
It was something far louder.
A drop pod the size of a bus slammed into the center of the square, throwing up a column of snow, brick and German soldiers who went flying in every direction.
The hatch opened with a hiss.
Out stepped a giant in yellow armor.
Reznov and Dimitri, still lying among the corpses, stared at him open-mouthed.
The giant looked around.
He saw the German soldiers running and firing.
He saw the bodies in the snow.
He raised a weapon that looked like a handheld cannon and spoke in a voice that boomed through the ruins:
“I am Brother Sigismund, of the Imperial Fists. Who is in command here?”
Reznov slowly sat up, snow sliding off his coat.
“I am,” he said.
“I suppose.”
II.
The Shot
Sigismund heard Reznov’s whole story in ten minutes.
General Amsel.
The massacre.
The dead comrades.
The vengeance still owed.
“Where is this general?” the Champion asked.
“In that building.” Reznov pointed at a half-collapsed structure on the other side of the square.
“A whole battalion guards him.”
Sigismund looked at the building.
He made a quick calculation.
“My Legion can bring it down in four minutes.”
Reznov put a hand on his arm.
The hand barely covered a single plate of the armor.
“No. Please. This is something we must do ourselves.” He looked at Dimitri.
“He must do it.”
Sigismund studied him for a moment.
Then he nodded.
The Imperial Fists understood the value of an oath better than anyone.
“Then we will cover you.”
What followed was the strangest sniper operation in history.
Dimitri Petrenko took up position on the third floor of a ruined building, Reznov’s rifle in his hands and his breath frozen.
Reznov was beside him, whispering instructions.
And behind them, in perfect silence, four Space Marines watched the stairs, so still they looked like statues in a cathedral.
“Easy, Dimitri,” Reznov whispered.
“Breathe. Wait for the wind to settle. Remember what I told you: there is no such thing as the perfect shot. There is only the necessary shot.”
General Amsel stepped out onto the balcony of the building opposite to smoke a cigar.
“Now,” said Reznov.
Dimitri pulled the trigger.
* * *
Amsel fell.
The Germans started firing at the building.
Sigismund stood, walked to the window and planted his shield in front of the two Soviets.
The bullets bounced off it like hail against a steel door.
“Good shot,” said the Champion.
Reznov, his eyes wet, slapped the armor.
“Someday, when they tell this story, they will say it was Dimitri Petrenko who killed the butcher of Stalingrad.” He paused dramatically.
“And that the yellow angels watched his back.”
“We are not angels.”
“To me you are, comrade. To me you are.”
III.
The Red Army… and Gold
The Red Army received the Imperial Fists with a mixture of distrust and enthusiasm that only the Soviets knew how to combine.
High command sent a political commissar to interrogate Rogal Dorn.
The commissar arrived with a list of forty questions about the Imperium’s ideology.
Dorn answered every one of them with absolute sincerity for three hours.
At the end, the commissar closed his notebook, pensive.
“So, your Emperor… is he a tsar?”
“Not exactly.”
“Is he a general secretary?”
“Nor that.”
“Is he the people?”
Dorn considered it for a moment.
“He would say so.”
The commissar wrote something in his notebook.
He crossed it out.
He wrote it again.
In the end, he sent a report to Moscow that read: “Recommend alliance. Do not ask further questions.”
* * *
A few weeks later, the soldiers on the Eastern Front began sporting a new emblem on their uniforms: the hammer and sickle, embroidered next to an Imperial double-headed eagle.
No one knows whose idea it was.
The Mechanicus deemed it “heterodox iconography.” Rogal Dorn let it be.
The night before the offensive, around a bonfire on the outskirts of the city, Reznov gave a speech to his men.
He had a bottle of vodka in one hand and a hunk of bread in the other.
Behind him, parked like a monument, stood an Imperial Leman Russ tank.
“Comrades!” Reznov shouted.
“Look at this beast! It weighs sixty tons! Its cannon can go through a mountain! And do you know what it is called?”
“No!” the soldiers shouted.
“Leman Russ! Like the Primarch! A man so big, so fierce, so hungry, that they named a tank after him! Imagine what the man must be like!”
The soldiers roared.
A Tech-priest at the back raised his hand to clarify that the tank actually bore that name for complex historical reasons.
Nobody paid him any attention.
“Tomorrow we march with these giants!” Reznov went on.
“URAAA!”
Rogal Dorn watched from the shadows.
Beside him, Sigismund drank a glass of vodka with the same solemnity he would have used for holy water.
“What do you think?” asked Dorn.
“These people know how to suffer, my lord,” said Sigismund.
“And they know how to rise again. They remind me of Terra.”
“Me too.”
IV.
Berlin
The offensive on Berlin took half as long as that world’s history books had predicted.
Soviet tanks advanced alongside Land Raiders.
Katyushas fired alongside Basilisk batteries.
The Imperial Fists led the vanguard, breaching the city’s fortifications the way you’d open a tin can.
Reznov and Dimitri were right behind them, shouting, shooting and, in Reznov’s case, narrating the battle out loud for anyone who cared to listen.
“And so, comrades, the enemy trembled before the fury of the people! Their walls crumbled! Their men fled! And Sergeant Reznov, with unbreakable courage…!”
“Sergeant,” said Dimitri, “can we advance first and narrate later?”
“A good soldier does both at once, Dimitri!”
* * *
The Reichstag was defended by what was left of the SS: fanatics armed to the teeth, dug into the regime’s last building.
The building’s bronze doors had withstood three days of shelling.
The Venerable Dreadnought Brother Arcadius, a veteran of the Great Crusade who had spent centuries sealed inside his war sarcophagus, walked up to them, gripped them with both fists and tore them off their hinges.
He tossed them aside as if they were cardboard.
Then he stood for a moment on the threshold, looking at the inside of the building.
“We should have come a thousand years ago,” he said in his voice of mechanical thunder.
No one in Berlin understood what he meant.
But Rogal Dorn, standing behind him, did.
In his own universe, Old Terra had suffered wars like this one for millennia.
And no one had come to stop them.
* * *
At sunset, two flags flew over the Reichstag.
One red, with the hammer and sickle.
The other gold, with the two-headed eagle.
Reznov had insisted on raising the first one himself.
Sigismund had raised the second.
Then they had shaken hands on the roof, with Berlin burning at their feet and the snow beginning to fall again.
The next day, when the smoke cleared, the children of Berlin came up out of the cellars.
Many hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks.
Some of them approached the Dreadnought Arcadius, who was still standing in front of the Reichstag, motionless as a statue.
A little girl placed a flower at his foot.
Other children did the same.
By noon, the Dreadnought was surrounded by flowers.
Arcadius didn’t move all day.
The Tech-priests, worried, checked his systems.
Everything was working perfectly.
He simply didn’t want to step on them.
V.
A Toast
That night, Rogal Dorn—the most serious of the Primarchs, the one who never drank, the one who never laughed—sat down at a field table with Reznov, Dimitri and Sigismund.
Reznov poured him a glass of vodka.
“To the fallen,” said the Soviet.
“To the fallen,” Dorn replied.
He drank it in one go.
There was a silence.
Everyone was waiting for something.
A reaction.
A gesture.
Dorn set the glass down on the table.
“Another.”
Reznov let out a roar of laughter that was heard throughout the camp.
Chronicle, entry number sixty-two.
Sergeant Viktor Reznov has applied to join the Astra Militarum.
They asked him why.
He answered: “Because I have seen the end of one war. Now I want to see the end of all of them.” Then they asked him whether he had any conditions.
He said yes: he wanted Dimitri to come with him.
Dimitri, standing behind him, said all he wanted was to sleep for a week.
They gave him the week.
Afterward, he enlisted too.
By my count, this is the third time I’ve seen someone cry at the sight of a Dreadnought.
The first was out of fear.
The second out of awe.
This was the first time the Dreadnought was the one crying.
Well.
Technically, what came out was oil.
But I know what I saw.
VI.
An Academy of Magic
Many worlds away, Leman Russ arrived on a world where everyone had magic.
Everyone but one.
In that kingdom, magic was everything: social standing, work, the right to exist.
Those born without magic were considered defective and quietly eliminated.
The noble families controlled magical power through an institution called the Magic Bureau, and the schools were factories for the elite.
Russ, who had just returned from a pirate world with two Marine admirals aboard, arrived in that kingdom hungry and out of patience.
“Magic?” he growled as he read the report.
“I hate magic. Magic is cheating.”
“My lord,” said Admiral Fujitora, the blind swordsman who now commanded the Space Wolves’ fleet, “perhaps we should understand the situation first.”
“You understand it. I’m going to eat.”
Smoker, the other former admiral, with his eternal cigar in his mouth, leaned out of the bridge window.
“There’s an academy down there. Looks important.”
“Does it have a cafeteria?” asked Russ.
“Probably.”
“Then it’s important.”
VII.
Easton Academy
Easton Magic Academy was the most prestigious in the kingdom.
The children of the most powerful families studied there, competing to become Divine Visionaries: the kingdom’s supreme mages.
When the Space Wolves landed in the main courtyard, right in the middle of the start-of-term ceremony, Headmaster Wahlberg Baigan—an old man with a long beard and the look of someone who had seen it all—peered at them through his spectacles and said:
“Well, well. Now this I have not seen before.”
The students reacted like students: some screamed, some drew their wands, some hid behind the columns and some started taking bets.
A senior, Abel Walker, leader of a faction of elitist students who controlled their classmates with puppet magic, stepped forward with his wand raised.
“Who are you to interrupt the ceremony?”
Bjorn, the oldest Space Wolf in the Legion—and not just any Space Wolf, but a veteran with centuries of scars—stepped forward as well.
“We’re the ones who’ve come to shut down your puppet school, boy.”
Abel cast his spell.
Glowing magical threads shot from his wand and coiled around Bjorn’s arms.
The Wolf looked at the threads for a moment.
Then he flexed his arms.
The threads snapped like boiled noodles.
“That’s it?” Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Abel backed away.
Bjorn advanced.
The fight lasted a handful of seconds and ended with Abel hanging by the back of his uniform from the statue of the academy’s founder.
VIII.
You.
Destroyed.
My.
Cream Puff.
In another corner of the academy, far from all the commotion, a first-year student was sitting on a bench eating a cream puff.
His name was Mash Burnedead.
He had been born without magic.
He had survived thanks to his muscles, which he had trained since childhood with absurd dedication.
He had a completely expressionless face.
And he loved cream puffs more than anything in the world.
A squad of Astra Militarum soldiers—freshly landed, nervous, under orders to secure the perimeter—rounded the corner and saw him.
“Halt! Identify yourself!”
Mash kept eating.
“Student! Hands where we can see them!”
Mash raised one hand.
In it was a cream puff.
One of the soldiers, a young recruit fresh out of training and very scared, took the cream puff for a weapon.
He struck the hand with his rifle butt.
The cream puff fell to the ground.
There was a silence.
Mash looked at the cream puff.
Then he looked at the soldier.
His face didn’t change at all.
But something in the air did.
“You destroyed,” he said, very slowly.
“My. Cream puff.”
The official reports describe the following eleven seconds as “an incident of non-magical physical resistance.” Twelve Astra Militarum soldiers ended up unconscious, stacked in a neat pile, their rifles bent into bows.
Mash picked the cream puff up off the ground, blew on it and took a bite.
Leman Russ, who had been walking down the corridor looking for the cafeteria, saw the whole thing.
He stopped.
He looked at the pile of soldiers.
He looked at Mash.
He looked at the cream puff.
“Have they got more of those?” he asked.
Mash looked at him.
“In the cafeteria.”
“Take me.”
IX.
The Council
While Russ and Mash stood in line at the cafeteria—Russ with a tray holding forty cream puffs, Mash with one holding thirty-nine—the war was being decided elsewhere.
Smoker took the town near the academy without firing a single shot: he wrapped the square in a cloud of smoke, waited for the guards to surrender from coughing and then offered them mints.
At the border, Fujitora faced the most dangerous man in the kingdom: Innocent Zero, leader of a secret organization that had spent centuries manipulating the world’s magic to achieve immortality.
A sorcerer who had fathered children solely to use their bodies as spare parts.
It was a strange fight.
Fujitora, being blind, wasn’t fooled by Zero’s illusions.
Zero, being immortal, wouldn’t be killed by Fujitora’s sword.
For hours, the admiral brought meteors crashing down onto the battlefield, and the sorcerer sent them back in the form of broken clocks.
In the end, Zero vanished.
He didn’t flee: he simply stopped being there.
Fujitora lowered his sword and tilted his head, listening.
“How strange,” he murmured.
“He’s gone. But he hasn’t gone far.”
He sent a report.
In it he wrote a sentence the Imperium’s analysts would underline twice: “Before he vanished, the sorcerer smiled as if someone had opened a door for him.”
* * *
The Council of the Magic Bureau met in its ivory tower to decide how to respond to the invasion.
They were in the middle of arguing when the wall of the chamber disappeared.
Leman Russ walked in through the hole, a cream puff in his hand and the wolf Freki behind him.
“You lot are the ones who kill the children without magic?”
The councillors looked at one another.
“It is… a historical policy…”
“Not anymore,” said Russ.
The Council was dissolved that same afternoon.
The broadcast of its dissolution, carried live to the entire kingdom, included one especially memorable moment: when the Council’s president tried to cast a fire spell at the Primarch and Russ blew it out like someone blowing out a birthday candle.
X.
The New Kingdom
That night, Russ gathered the academy’s students in the dining hall.
He announced that the law for eliminating people without magic was abolished.
That magic would no longer decide anyone’s place in the world.
That the schools would be open to everyone.
Then he asked if anyone had anything to add.
Mash raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“Bring cream puffs.”
Russ looked at him for a long moment.
Then he turned to Fujitora.
“I want this boy in my Legion.”
“My lord, the Astartes recruitment procedure requires…”
“Look what he did to twelve soldiers. No magic. No weapons. With a cream puff.”
“Technically, the cream puff was already on the ground.”
“Even better.”
Mash was officially nominated as a Space Marine candidate for the VI Legion.
He asked for time to think it over.
He said he didn’t know whether there were cream puffs on Fenris.
Russ promised him that if there weren’t, they would invent them.
* * *
Chronicle, entry number sixty-three.
Admiral Fujitora has asked me to add something to the chronicle.
He says: “The sorcerer called Innocent Zero has not been captured. I do not believe he is dead. I believe he is waiting.” I asked him waiting for what.
He told me he didn’t know, but that he recognized that kind of silence.
“It is the silence of someone who has found a new master,” he said.
I don’t know what it means.
I’m noting it here so that someone smarter than me can figure it out.
Tomorrow two worlds await me where magic is not a privilege but a threat.
One is being visited by Primarch Mortarion, who hates magic more than anyone in the universe.
The other by Primarch Magnus, who loves it more than anyone in the universe.
I have been asked to cover them both.
I think someone in the Office of Remembrancers hates me.
I’m a novice writer with many stories still left to tell and a great passion for Warhammer.
I love imagining dark worlds, epic battles, and imperfect characters.
I write to learn.