Chronicle, entry number seventy-nine.
The chopsticks were for ramen.
The Primarch Corvus Corax, the most silent, somber and fearsome of the Primarchs, the one who vanishes into the shadows and reappears behind his enemies, has a weakness.
Just one.
It is called Ichiraku Ramen.
I discovered it on the third day, when I found him sitting on a wooden stool far too small for him, at a street stall in a ninja village, ordering his fourth bowl.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He said: “If you write this down, I will kill you.” I’m writing it down.
We’ll see.
I.
The Hidden Village
The Village Hidden in the Leaves—Konoha, as its inhabitants called it—was a village of ninjas.
Red-roofed houses, immense forests, a mountain with the faces of its leaders carved into the rock.
Its people could walk on walls, breathe fireballs, summon giant toads and create copies of themselves.
For weeks, nobody knew the Raven Guard was there.
Corax had sent his scouts first.
Scout-Brother Caedon and Brother Varron, two of the finest infiltrators in the XIX Legion, had hidden in the forests around the village and watched it for days.
They had studied the guard rotations, the patrol patterns, the combat techniques.
They had watched the ninjas train.
They had watched their missions.
And they had watched a boy.
“My lord,” Caedon reported over the encrypted channel, “there is something in the village you should see.”
“A threat?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Caedon paused.
“It’s a boy. Blond. Loud. Dresses in orange. He has something sealed inside him. Something enormous. Our psykers say it’s a daemon.”
“A daemon?”
“A nine-tailed chakra beast, my lord. Sealed inside his body since he was born. The villagers hate him for it. They treat him as if he were the monster.”
There was silence on the channel.
“And how does the boy react?”
“He smiles, my lord,” said Caedon.
“All the time. He’s a sealed bomb in human form, and he smiles anyway.”
II.
A Warning
Corax did not conquer Konoha right away.
First, he sent a message.
One night, an elite ANBU team—the masked ninjas who secretly protected the village—set out on a reconnaissance mission.
Four ninjas.
The best.
They never reached their destination.
The next morning, they were found at the village’s main gate, bound, unharmed, asleep, their masks hanging from a nearby tree.
On each one, someone had drawn a raven in black ink.
The Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, an old man with a pipe and tired eyes who had returned to lead the village, spent a long time staring at the masks.
“No one,” he said, “can do this to an ANBU team without being detected.”
Jiraiya, the toad hermit, one of the most powerful ninjas in the world, examined the ropes.
“They’re not ours. They’re not from any known village. And whoever tied them knew exactly where to press to put them to sleep without hurting them.”
Tsunade, the slug princess, the finest medical ninja in the world, crossed her arms.
“It’s a warning.”
“A warning of what?”
Shikamaru Nara, a young chunin with a face of perpetual boredom and the most brilliant mind in the village, answered without looking up from the shogi board he was playing on alone.
“That they’re already here. And that if they wanted to kill us, they would have already.” He moved a piece.
“What a drag.”
III.
The Alley
That night, Naruto Uzumaki was walking home through a dark alley, hands in his pockets and belly full of ramen, when a shadow moved on the wall.
He spun around.
Nothing there.
He kept walking.
The shadow moved again.
“Hey! Who’s there? I’m warning you, I’m Naruto Uzumaki, the future Hokage! If you attack me, you’re gonna regret it, believe it!”
The shadow peeled away from the wall and became a giant.
Corvus Corax stood nearly four meters tall, with skin as pale as the moon and hair as black as a raven’s feathers.
He wore dark armor, dull and unreflective, and a pair of lightning claws on his hands.
His eyes were completely black.
Naruto froze.
For a moment, he didn’t know what to say.
Then he said the only thing that came to mind.
“You’re huge!”
Corax looked down at him.
“You are small.”
“I’m gonna grow!”
“No doubt.”
They looked at each other a while longer.
Then, to Naruto’s astonishment, the giant sat down on the floor of the alley.
Even sitting, he was taller than him.
“I am told the villagers hate you,” said Corax.
Naruto tensed.
“What’s it to you?”
“It matters to me.” Corax looked at him steadily.
“They hated me too. For being different. For what I carried inside.”
“And what did you carry inside?”
Corax thought for a moment.
“Rage,” he said.
“A great deal of rage.”
Naruto sat down across from him, on the ground, legs crossed.
“I’ve got rage too. But I try not to show it.”
“I know. That is why you smile all the time.”
Naruto didn’t answer.
He sat there looking at the ground.
IV.
The Fox
That night, Naruto dreamed.
He was in the usual place: a dark corridor, flooded with water, with a gigantic cage at the far end.
Behind the bars, two enormous red eyes watched him.
The Kyubi.
The Nine-Tailed Fox.
But that night, the fox wasn’t talking to him.
It was looking at something behind Naruto.
Naruto turned around.
In the corridor, standing in the water, was Corax.
“How’d you get in here?” Naruto asked.
“I am a psyker,” said Corax.
“Not much of one. But enough.”
The fox rose inside its cage.
It was immense.
Its nine tails lashed like flames.
“You,” it roared.
“I know you. I don’t know from where, but I know you. You’re a predator. A predator of souls.”
“I have hunted things like you,” Corax admitted.
“In my universe, beasts like you feed on the rage of men.”
“And you’ve come to hunt me?”
“No.” Corax turned to Naruto.
“I have come to see whether the boy can tame you.”
A deep, terrible laugh.
“Him? Tame me? He’s a brat!”
“Every great warrior was one once,” said Corax.
“So was I.”
Naruto looked at the fox.
He looked at Corax.
Then he crossed his arms and grinned from ear to ear.
“Of course I can tame you! I’m Naruto Uzumaki! I’m gonna be Hokage!”
The fox stopped laughing.
It stared at him for a long moment.
Then it lay back down in its cage, growling.
“What an annoying kid.”
“I know,” said Corax.
“That is why I like him.”
V.
The Fall of Konoha
Konoha did not fall by force.
It fell by habit.
For two weeks, the Raven Guard were everywhere and nowhere.
They turned up at council meetings, sitting in the empty chairs, without anyone having seen them come in.
They left messages on the jonin’s pillows.
They disarmed the ninjas’ traps and rearmed them, slightly better.
One morning, the Third Hokage found his pipe packed with fresh tobacco, of better quality, with a note: “With the compliments of the XIX Legion.”
Konoha’s ninjas tried to hunt them down.
They used every technique they had.
Shadow clones, tracking seals, ninja hounds, Byakugan eyes that could see through walls.
They found no one.
By the end of the second day, Kakashi Hatake, the Copy Ninja, one of the best trackers in the village, returned to the Hokage’s office frowning—which was rare for him, since he wore a mask.
“I spent twelve hours following a trail,” he said.
“In the end, the trail led to my house. To my kitchen. They’d left breakfast made for me.”
“And what was for breakfast?” asked Jiraiya.
“Pancakes.”
“Were they any good?”
Kakashi hesitated.
“Very.”
* * *
On the third day, the Konoha council met to decide what to do.
Sarutobi, Tsunade, Jiraiya, Shikamaru and the council elders argued for hours.
In the end, it was Shikamaru who spoke.
“We can’t fight something we can’t see,” he said.
“And they haven’t hurt us. Not once. If they wanted to destroy us, they’d have done it already.” He sighed.
“What a drag, but I think the only option is to hear them out.”
That very night, Corax walked into the council chamber.
Through the door.
It was the first time they had ever seen him enter anywhere.
He sat down at the table.
He listened.
He spoke little.
When the meeting ended, Konoha was part of the Imperium.
The next morning, a two-headed eagle flew over the Hokage Tower.
Beneath it, on the same flagpole, someone had hung a small raven of black cloth.
VI.
The Apprentice
Naruto Uzumaki became the first apprentice of the Raven Guard who was not an Astartes.
Corax trained him personally at dawn.
He taught him to move without a sound, to disappear into the shadows, to wait.
Naruto was terrible at waiting.
Every time Corax told him to stay still, Naruto stayed still for about thirty seconds.
Then he started talking.
“How much longer?”
“A little longer.”
“What about now?”
“A little longer.”
“What about now?”
“Naruto.”
“Okay, okay!”
But something changed in him over those weeks.
He learned to control the fox’s chakra.
He learned to listen.
And above all, he learned that there was someone in the world who looked at him and didn’t see a monster.
One day, one of the Tech-priests accompanying the Legion ran a full scan on him.
When he was done, he turned to Corax, eyes shining with excitement.
“My lord, the subject’s genetic compatibility with the XIX Legion’s gene-seed is ninety-three point seven percent. He is an exceptional candidate. I recommend immediate implantation.”
Corax looked at Naruto, who at that moment was trying to eat four bowls of ramen at the same time.
“Not yet,” he said.
“Why not, my lord?”
“Because he wants to be Hokage,” said Corax.
“And I think he would make a good one.”
Chronicle, entry number eighty.
The Primarch Corax has paid out of his own pocket for a full year of ramen at Ichiraku for Naruto Uzumaki.
The stall’s owner, Teuchi, told me the Primarch stops by every time he is in the village, always at night, always alone, always at the same hour.
He orders the same thing: tonkotsu with double egg.
Teuchi says he is the most polite customer he has ever had.
And the biggest.
He had to reinforce the stool.
VII.
Pandora
Months later, Corax arrived on a very different world.
Pandora was a jungle moon, covered in giant trees, floating mountains and bioluminescent creatures.
Its inhabitants, the Na’vi, were blue humanoids three meters tall, with tails and cat-like eyes, who lived in harmony with a neural network that connected every living being on the planet: an entity they called Eywa.
And upon Pandora, like a wound, was the RDA: a human corporation that had come to extract a mineral called unobtanium, and that was willing to raze the entire jungle to get it.
Corax gazed down at the planet from his ship for a long time.
“My lord,” said the captain beside him, “Imperial doctrine on xenos is clear. The Na’vi are an alien species. We should…”
“I know.”
“Then?”
Corax pointed at the screen, where RDA excavators were toppling a tree a hundred meters tall.
“Then first we will deal with the humans who behave like xenos.”
VIII.
Jake Sully
Jake Sully was a paraplegic ex-Marine who had come to Pandora to operate an avatar: an artificial Na’vi body controlled remotely.
He was supposed to be a spy for the RDA.
He had ended up falling in love with a Na’vi named Neytiri and becoming one of them.
When Corax appeared in front of him in the jungle, Jake was practicing with his bow.
He turned, saw the pale giant in black armor and raised the bow on instinct.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Corvus Corax. Primarch of the XIX Legion of the Imperium of Man.”
Jake lowered the bow slightly.
“Man? You’re human?”
“More or less.”
“And what are you doing here?”
“I have come to drive the RDA off this world.”
Jake stared at him, mouth hanging open.
“By yourself?”
Corax gave the faintest smile.
All around them, out of the shadows of the trees, the warriors of the Raven Guard appeared one by one.
Ten.
Twenty.
Fifty.
Jake hadn’t seen or heard a single one of them.
“Fuck,” he said.
IX.
The Seeds
The Na’vi were distrustful.
The Na’vi were always distrustful of those who came from the sky.
Tsu’tey, the proudest warrior of the Omaticaya clan, planted himself in front of Corax with his spear raised.
“The sky people bring only death.”
“Some of them,” Corax admitted.
“Not all.”
“And how do we know you are not one of those?”
Corax didn’t answer.
There was no need.
At that moment, something began to drift down from the Tree of Souls, the sacred tree of the Na’vi.
Seeds of Eywa: small white creatures, luminous, like floating jellyfish, that appeared only at very special moments.
They descended slowly, floating on the air.
And they settled, one by one, on the black ravens that accompanied Corax.
The Na’vi fell silent.
Neytiri brought her hand to her mouth.
Tsu’tey lowered his spear very slowly.
“Eywa,” he whispered.
“Eywa has chosen him.”
Corax looked at the ravens, covered in tiny white lights.
For the first time in many centuries, he didn’t know what to say.
“I believe,” he said at last, “she just likes birds.”
* * *
Imperial doctrine was clear: xenos had no place in the Imperium.
But Corax wrote a report to Terra requesting an exception for the Na’vi.
The report was forty pages long.
The last sentence read: “If Eywa trusts us, the least we can do is trust her.”
Terra’s reply arrived a week later.
It was a single line, signed by Malcador the Sigillite:
“Exception granted. Don’t get used to it.”
X.
Welcome to My Jungle
The war against the RDA was a guerrilla war.
And there was no one in the Imperium better prepared for a guerrilla war than the Raven Guard.
Except, perhaps, the Catachans.
Corax had brought with him a small detachment of six soldiers from the death world of Catachan, the deadliest planet in the Imperium, where even the plants were carnivorous.
They were enormous men, with arms like tree trunks, knives the size of machetes and zero sense of humor.
“Six men,” said Jake when he saw them.
“Only six?”
“Six Catachans,” replied Corax, “are worth a battalion.”
The Catachan sergeant, a giant with a red bandana on his head and an unlit cigar in his mouth, looked out at Pandora’s jungle with an enormous grin.
Then he turned to the Na’vi warriors, who were watching him warily.
“All right, blueberries,” he said.
“Welcome to my jungle. Today we’re gonna learn how to set traps.”
The Na’vi, who had been living in the jungle for thousands of years, were a little offended.
By the end of the day, they no longer were.
The Catachans taught them to set up ambushes no RDA soldier could detect.
The Na’vi taught them to ride the ikran, Pandora’s flying dragons.
One Catachan fell off three times before he managed it.
The fourth time, he stayed on.
He cried with joy.
He said it was the wind.
XI.
Quaritch
The RDA fell in a week.
The Raven Guard hunted its soldiers through the jungle like shadows.
The Na’vi attacked from the air.
The Catachans blew up the supply depots.
And the Mechanicus, from orbit, hacked the computer systems of the corporation’s main base.
Parker Selfridge, the RDA administrator, a man with a golf shirt and no conscience whatsoever, suddenly found that every screen in his office was showing the same image: a black raven with red eyes, staring straight at him.
“What is this? Somebody turn it off!”
Nobody could turn it off.
* * *
Colonel Miles Quaritch, the RDA’s head of security—a veteran Marine, hard, cruel, with three scars on his face and absolute faith in brute force—was the last to fall.
He faced the Raven Guard in his AMP suit, a mechanized combat exoskeleton armed with a giant knife and a machine gun.
Corax waited for him in a jungle clearing.
Quaritch attacked.
Corax dodged.
Quaritch fired.
Corax was no longer there.
Quaritch turned, and the Primarch was behind him.
With a single stroke of his lightning claws, he sheared off the AMP’s arms.
With another, he split open the cockpit.
Quaritch tumbled to the ground, unarmed, panting.
Corax looked down at him.
“I could kill you.”
“Then do it.”
“No.” Corax signaled to his warriors.
“We will take you to Terra. You will stand trial.”
Quaritch spat on the ground as they cuffed him.
Before they took him away, he raised his head and looked at Jake Sully, who was watching the scene from the edge of the jungle.
“I’ll be back, Sully,” he said.
“You’ll see. I’ll be back.”
Jake shrugged.
“They always say that.”
Chronicle, entry number eighty-one.
The RDA has been expelled from Pandora.
Parker Selfridge is in a cell on Terra, awaiting trial.
So is Quaritch.
Or so I thought.
This morning, a Raven Guard report said his cell was empty.
There is no trace of him.
No camera recorded him leaving.
Corax read the report three times.
He said nothing.
But he ordered the watch on Pandora doubled.
Jake Sully has been officially transferred into his Na’vi body, thanks to the help of Eywa and a very excited Tech-priest.
Neytiri gave him a necklace.
The Catachans gave him a knife.
Corax gave him a raven.
The raven, according to Jake, “looks at him funny.”
My next posting is a double one.
The Primarch Guilliman awaits me in a city called Paris, where there are two teenagers in ladybug and black cat costumes.
And the Primarch Lion wants me in a kingdom of spoiled nobles where, according to the report, “there is a very annoying girl and her quartet of suitors.” I asked Corax which of the two was worse.
He told me: “The one with the teenagers. It is always the one with the teenagers.”
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.