Final Inspirational Friday - Legends of Chaos (until 11/9)

[Excessus]

#1, I can't not post in the final IF...I have time and will try to get a story out for the glory of the empyrean!

 

#2, Scourged, your soul has been marked down and will be taken into account.

[Kierdale]

Scourged, you have my thanks. I can think of no better damned soul to take the golden throne when I vacate it!

[Warsmith Aznable]

The End

 

Hidden Content

Four great fleets converged, each racing to seize control of the enormous spacestation, each with their own agenda unknown to the others. The mighty Black Legion fleet remained menacingly aloof, consolidating its defensive hold around outlaying structures of unknown provenance. The Iron Warriors fleet barreled through all opposition and embedded itself into the manufactorum districts like ticks, disdaining the whirling brawl of battleships and cruisers and shrugging off the desultory lance and torpedo attacks that came their way. The Word Bearers, the most numerous if not the most heavily armed and armoured, raged across the void. Finally, the last to arrive, an Imperial crusade fleet almost as numerous as the three Traitor fleets combined broke warp, gathered strength, then drove into the enemy like a gladius aimed at the heart. The Primarch himself devised the fleet strategy, then led the speartip deep into the Child of Calamity to deny the servants of Chaos whatever it was they sought.

 

+++++++++++++

 

Guilliman marched at the head of the column of blue clad space marines. The Ultramarines and several chapters derived of their geneseed flooded the streets and avenues of the capital city deep within the spacestation. The city curved completely around the ancient colony cylinder, with enough atmosphere and artificial light that the sky shone a brilliant blue just a shade lighter than the tramping warriors battleplate. The suburbs had given way to dense cityscape, and that cityscape had become vast temples, museums, and palaces, all of them orderly and clean, impressive in design and execution. Were it not for their grim demeanor and tense anticipation they might have been on parade through the streets of any Ultramar planetary capital.

 

There had been no enemy action in hours, not since a brutal fight against an Iron Warriors force within a kilometer of the main Imperial entry point. Parts of that battle still raged, but the Primarch had led the main force ever deeper into the space station. The control center at the meeting point of the two original cylinders was their objective, and now it lay only hundreds of metres away.

 

****

 

Hundreds of kilometers away, unknown to and ignorant of his hated brother, the daemon primarch Perturabo killed a dozen Word Bearers with a single swipe of his wicked hammer. The central manufactorum disctrict of the space station burned green flame and molten orange. The criss-crossing iron girders and catwalks groaned and bent beneath the weight of the maelstrom of war machines. The shadows boiled with Neverborn and the bent and twisted shapes of the World Bearers Possessed. The steel grey phalanxes of Iron Warriors legionnaires, Predator tanks, and all many of Dreadnoughts spit forth a steady stream of bolter, melta, and plasma, while their dread primarch loomed large over the hellish industrial battlefield, killing any who came within his reach at will, lost in his battle anger.

 

****************

 

“YIELD TO THE WILL OF THE WARMASTER.” The voxcaster boomed over the shriek and bang of bolter fire, the snap and boom of plasma, and the crack and shatter of ceramite and bone. It looped without end, as did the carnage it sought to stop.

 

Word Bearers draped with fetishes of She Who Thirsts and daubed with lurid symbols of cultic allegiance alongside their legionary emblems threw themselves upon the ranks of Black Legion space marines. Just beyond the battlelines the mortal slaves of the Warmaster worked feverishly to dismantle archaic and esoteric machines and load them onto transports. The Word Bearers fought with a fevered ecstasy, seeking only to destroy. Nothing would remain of the petty empire of those who had once dared to desecrate their homeworld Sicarus with their outrageously and profane invasion. Their wrath was such that once unleashed by the Word of the Council not even the promise of Abaddon’s displeasure could gave them pause.

 

*****************

 

Unlike the primary colony cylinder, the vaulted false sky of the secondary cylinder was an abyssal black. The Dark Apostle’s path was revealed by an unsourced light, the silvery reflections of an nonexistent moon. His motley retinue hurried to follow his angry and eager footsteps, trampling the wilted garden, snapping the brittle thorns and crunching the dried flowers beneath their armoured boots. The casual vandalism of their mere presence gave the Dark Apostle immense satisfaction, though he remained violently focused in his course through the garden maze as they bulldozed a straight path toward the center.

 

“The Warsmith’s Garden.” The Dark Apostle sneered, then absently lashed out with a chaos-mutated powerfist and smashed a weathered statue of a child carved into one end of a marble sitting bench in one of the topiary mazes many private nooks. He spat sizzling acid onto the delicate ornamental carvings of a partially collapsed arch, all without pausing. “This farce finally comes to an end.”

 

+++++++++++++

 

“Do not touch that!”

 

The Ultramarines Reiver froze, fingers a mere centimeter from grasping the haft of the poweraxe embedded into the marble column. Two dozen bolters snapped toward the source of the weak, rasping voice, yet none moved further. The only sound was the heavy tread of Guilliman as the primarch strode through the enormous double doors into the high domed Throne Room of the Warsmith.

 

“There is...” The already weak voice trailed off at the sight of the primarch, then again found strength. “There is a foul warp presence hiding deep within, laying in wait for a new hand to curse.”

 

“And what,” Guilliman’s voice, not raised in anger yet imbued with an unyielding contempt, projected a power that made the speaker of that warning shrink into himself as if weathering a fierce gale. Roboute continued smoothly, moving to stand in the center of the room and leveling his accusatory gaze upon the pathetic wretch, “are you?”

 

Once a celebrated and mighty Legionnaire, what now stood before the primarch was more machine than man. Weak of body and spirit, the pile of worn cybernetics cocooning the aged and infirm flesh had been mistaken for a servitor by the advance force of Ultramarines Reivers. Sitting upon the steps of the throne’s dias, this once proud warrior had looked akin to a garbage heap before speaking.

 

“Traitor!” An Ultramarines Terminator from the bodyguard force that had plodded into the throne room behind the primarch spotted the Iron Warriors Legion badge upon the warriors and his powersword flared as he made to step forward. An unseen command, a moment of will from the primarch, stopped the Terminator in his tracks.

 

“Traitor?” The aged Iron Warriors legionnaire let out a rasping laugh that quickly turned into a painful, dry cough. “Aye. I am a traitor. But to what?”

 

The ancient legionnaire sank once again to an awkward and only semi-comfortable sitting position on the steps.

 

“Your pardon, my lord.” The legionnaire waved a metal hand in absent apology. “I cannot stand for long anymore, not even for you.”

 

“Where is everyone?” Guilliman asked, a cold, clear command in his voice. “Has your master truly abandoned this station?”

 

“He abandoned me.” The legionnaire laughed bitterly and painfully. “And he is not my master. I betrayed him, you see. Yes, that is what makes me a traitor. I was never a part of your Imperium. I was born on this station, here in the capital. I went to scholam here, lived with my parents and sister here, worked baking bread at an eatery downtown before I was screened and selected for the Legion. This place was my whole existence, a good life, and I betrayed my warsmith, my Legion, and my primarch.”

 

“I will not hear your confession,” The Emperor’s Sword blazed momentarily as Guilliman gripped it tightly and began to slowly advance, “And I have no forgiveness for your kind.”

 

“I can see it in you, you know what it’s like.” The legionnaire whispered. He met Roboute’s gaze with one ice blue cybernetic eye and one milky cataract riddled eye. “You know what it’s like to to be the only sane man surrounded by lunatics.”

 

The primarch paused.

 

*****************

 

“And here we are at last.” The Dark Apostle stood in the middle of the topiary maze. A ragged, disheveled form slowly, painfully sat upright as if from a long sleep. “I have to say, Warsmith, you surprise me. No fight in you at all?”

 

“You…. Understand…. Nothing….”

 

“I thought I was prepared for anything.” The Dark Apostle held the back of his powerfist mockingly to his nose. “But I did not imagine you would stink so! You smell like one of them. I suppose it must be true, this rumour I heard that you consort with slavestock. You were given transcendence, you were offered ascendance, and you wallowed in the weakness of mortality.”

 

“Master!” An old woman’s shriek came from behind the Dark Apostle, from among the shadows of his gathered retinue. “Master! I am here, my lord! I am home!”

 

“Let the crone go.” The Dark Apostle snickered. “Let us witness a little more wallowing.”

 

From the silvered shadows lurched an old woman. Her robes were once fine, her armour was once formidable, her face was once beautiful, and her voice once shook whole star systems. But now she was bent and frail, covered in bruises and sores, clothed in rags, with long stringy hair and cracked and yellowed nails and swollen, gnarly knuckles. She hobbled forward past the Dark Apostle, then prostrated herself before the disheveled warsmith, who reached out and tenderly stroked her matted hair.

 

“See?” The Dark Apostle tittered, looking over his shoulder at his motley retinue. “Disgusting. I knew it was worth finding this creature.”

 

“My lord, my master, my friend.” The old crone grabbed the Warsmith’s one hand into her own boney fingers, kissed the back of his hand, and rubbed her cheek against his fingers. “I would not talk, master. I would not let them know, my lord.”

 

“Oh, but she did.” The Dark Apostle laughed. “I had her beaten, tortured, all manner of outrages perpetrated upon her, and she babbled like a child! She gave up all your secrets. How do you think I knew how to find the Child, how to bypass its defenses and find my way straight into your inner sanctum?”

 

“You are the last of my believers, Irena,” The Warsmith reached out with his other hand and lifted up the ragged old woman’s chin. “You are all that’s left, my old friend.”

 

“I knew one day I would come home,” Irena the Searcher wept with joy at the sight of her lord’s face. She continued to whisper intimately close to the ragged space marine lord, the pattern of her speech slowly turning into a sing-song rhythm. “Please, have mercy. Oh my lord, have mercy...”

 

The Dark Apostle sneered once more, but before he could begin his next humiliation he was stunned by the switch motion of the frail and withered warsmith. Before he could act, before he could even ask himself why the Warsmith would do such a thing, the crone Irena’s throat was a gaping, bloody wound.

 

****************

 

“What happened to the pirate bitch?” The Lord of the Black Legion task force grabbed at the shoulder pauldron of his sorcerer-advisor. The sorcerer dropped to his knees, clutched at his heart, and a blast of frozen air puffed from the vents of his helmet. Fractal tendrils of hoarfrost crackled across his power armour, and the Chaos Lord withdrew his fingers as if burnt. All around them the chaos of battle continued to rage, but the Possessed of both the Word Bearers and the Black Legion clutched at their hearts and howled. Psykers screamed, and those with deep sensitivity to the Warp recoiled in shock at they knew not what.

 

The aforementioned pirate bitch, Princess Maya, so-called daughter of the wayward Warsmith Bolverk, rumoured to be half Eldar and half human, and recently pledged to the Wearing of the Black, clutched at her throat. Great sheets of bright red blood flowed through her fingers and drenched her powdered bosom. There was no apparent wound on her long, pale neck, but she choked and spit as if there were, and the blood would not stop pouring from wherever it was coming from.

 

“What is happening, wench!” The Chaos Lord grabbed a fistful of her long, black hair and pulled her head back. Her eyes rolled wildly as she tried to focus upon him. She could only choke on blood that wasn’t there, and only a hollow gasping sound escaped her thin, cruel lips. “Are we betrayed? What has your father done!”

 

The Chaos Lord tossed the flailing woman aside, then grabbed the nearest space marine and yelled directly into his face, “Find someone with a vox, sound the withdrawal, take what we have loaded and set charges to destroy what we cannot take. NOW!”

 

****

 

“My petulant child’s grand design is in motion.” Perturabo paused in his killing of Word Bearers, lost himself in thought for a long moment, then allowed his collection of Warsmiths and champions to catch up to him. “Whatever foolishness he has unleashed, it will consume this station. It is time to go.”

 

The Iron Warriors began an orderly and efficient retreat, defending the vast column of salvage vehicles that were dragging technology, machines, and rare raw materials back to their waiting ships. The Word Bearers milled about in uncertainty, with small pockets continuing their savage attacks upon the Iron Warriors while other, more psychically attuned Word Bearers howled in rage at the unknown source of their pain.

 

+++++++++++++

 

“Call forward the Inquisition contingent.” Guilliman turned to order one of his commanders. “I want him kept alive and questioned.”

 

“I have no secrets to keep.” The aged legionnaire rasped. “I’m dying anyway. Not even your Imperial resources can stop that, I think.”

 

“I consider this attempt to make you useful an undeserved mercy.” Guilliman coldy informed the Iron Warriors space marine.

 

“Mercy.” The legionnaire exclaimed with distaste. “Not deserving it is half the point, isn’t it? But why should I die here and now, anyway? I would have considered myself fortunate to be in your presence once, for certainly you could kill me if anyone could.”

 

“I will not be baited by you, traitor.” But Guilliman did not take his eyes off the traitor, even as his warriors and technicians swarmed through the throne room and past the far arches to assume command of the station’s control center.

 

“I know.” The legionnaire said tiredly. “Because you are a sane man. I was insane, once. We all were. And one by one we died, except me. I tried to die a heroic death in battle, I wanted to earn my way into Waelheim, to be carried in the arms of Khalder to live in the secret haven of the Old Dead Gods, to escape the Ruinous Powers and the oblivion of the Warp.”

 

The lights of the throne room dimmed, and a vibration shook the marble pillars and rattle the great iron doors on their hinges.

 

“The Warsmith was an outrageous liar.” The legionnaire continued as if he did not notice. “I tried time and time again to die. My great sin was survival. I was not good enough, yet. But I lived long enough that they had replaced almost all of my biological parts. And do you know what? There’s a tipping point.”

 

The Child of Calamity rumbled once more, and the control panels in the next room began to hoot and pulse as the Adeptus Mechanicus priests rushed to break their encryptions and penetrate their command protocols. The gravity in the station shifted, shoving everyone in the room hard briefly before returning to near normal.

 

“Once you’ve lost enough of your meat,” The legionnaire grinned a horrible, metal grin. “you start to see things different. I don’t mean metaphorically. I lived. I survived. I was the only one. Castellan Byrlindi, last surviving member of the 49^th Grand Company.”

 

Byrlindi laughed again as the lights flickered, then went out. Emergency back up lights washed the throne room in red, and backup valves ticked and fed gas to torches mounted into the walls which flared to life. A low, metallic groan vibrated through the bones of the station, and in the distance the gunshot sound of rivets popping from girders sounded staccato echoes down the side corridors.

 

“But it was too late.” Byrlindi slapped the chromed plate of his head in a mirthful mockery of frustration. “I conspired with the Warsmith’s own wife, that Eldar witch. Never trust a xenos, my lord, especially the fae. They’ve always got an angle to play.”

 

“He forgave me!” Byrlindi suddenly shrieked, banging a fist on one of the dias’ marble steps. “I gave him up to all of his worst enemies, and he apologised for using me. Even you are here now because of information I fed to your Inquisition through my Deathwatch contacts. You are here because he wants you here, and he wants you here because he is an ego maniac. This is not a trap, my lord, you are a witness.”

 

*****************

 

“You speak of devotion, of faith, of gods….” Warsmith Bolverk gently laid the semi-decapitated body of Irena down gently. “But you are truly ignorant of the nature of the Warp.”

 

“What have you done?” The Dark Apostle stepped forward, then recoiled from the sudden psychic pressure of the Warsmith.

 

“I taught my people to believe.” Warsmith Bolverk did not so much stand as rise into the air. “For millennia I cultivated their faith.”

 

“You spread lies!” The Dark Apostle hissed at him, clutching the fetish of Chaos Undivided that hung about his neck.

 

“That which you worship is merely a reflection.” Warsmith Bolverk’s aspect was no longer that of a defeated old man, but he had regained his large, muscular frame. His dirty rags flared out on an ephemeral breeze, glowed silver in the phantom moonlight, then wrapped around him as fine silk robes. “This world is an illusion, and faith is the only truth there is.”

 

++++

 

Perturabo stared out of the armour-glass viewing port. The Iron Warriors fleet had formed a wedge and tore through the confusion opposition of the Word Bearers. Whatever was happening on the space station was pushing hard upon the Empyrean, and the fabric of reality was getting dangerously thin throughout a large swath of the void centered on the Child of Calamity. A strange melancholy threatened him, but he saw through to its unnatural source and angrily shook it off. The 49^th Grand Company was finally destroyed, millennia after he had planned, but finally. They were his misfits and rejects, thrown together and given autonomy in the hope that they might wreak some chaos upon the enemy in their misguided death throes, but they had somehow endured all this time. It had intrigued him at first, then annoyed him, and then he had forgotten about them. Their performance in the 13^th Black Crusade had called his attention to their assets, and an informant among their ranks had led him to personally target and retrieve that which he most desired among their ill-gotten loot.

And Bolverk was dead. The creeping little was dead and gone, Perturabo could feel his absence as he watched the space station lose whatever exotic energy fields had kept its own mass at bay. He watched as the Child of Calamity crushed itself under its own gravity, degenerating from a technological monstrosity of a lost age to a crushed and twisted parody of its former self, and the daemon primarch felt some cold satisfaction in this.

 

*****************

 

The Dark Apostle smashed the bone daemon aside, narrowly avoiding its long, vicious hook-arms. They were legion, however, and two more leaped to take its place. The black and white horrors snapped at him with tooth-lined beaks of bone, staring him down with hollow eyes, and mouthed silent shrieks as they formed from the shattered bulkheads and bent frames of the station itself. The Child of Calamity was coming apart, and most of it was turning into this horde of daemons that assailed the Dark Apostle and the bodyguard that was dragging him toward their waiting shuttles.

 

“I should have known the dead hand of Malal was somehow behind that madman!” The Dark Apostle bellowed in frustration. “The True Gods preserve us, as we destroy their enemies!”

 

A boiling cloud of light answered his call. Pouring forth into the semi-reality of the space around the Child of Calamity the children of Tzeentch answered the Dark Apostles prayer, and the servants of the Changer of Ways emerged in all shapes and sizes to bring mayhem and destruction to the servants of the Renegade.

 

The Warsmith was gone, the Child of Calamity was breaking up and crushing itself into a spacehulk, but the Dark Apostle could not shake a creeping sense of melancholy. He had faith in the Primordial Truth, he had faith that he had witnessed the oblivion of the blasphemer, and he felt satisfaction that the desecration of Sicarus was revenged in the destruction of this space station. And yet he felt an unsettled hollowness forming deep inside him.

 

His Legion’s debt of revenge had been paid, he told himself, and he would glorify that victory with bloodthirsty zeal once he got home to the sacrificial pits of Sicarus.

 

****************

 

Princes Maya cackled with ecstasy as the Black Legion command element watched the destruction of the space station on the bridge of the flagship.

 

“I am FREE!” Maya spun on her high heeled leg boots and laughed. She had already changed out of her blood drenched clothes into something cleaner, fancier, and more revealing to suit her gleeful mood. “No gods, no masters, only a galaxy ripe for plunder!”

 

“Your parents are dead, which is what you wanted when you came hat in hand to the Warmaster.” The Chaos Lord of the Black Legion growled at her. “You swore an oath and a bargain with the Black Legion, little girl. The Warmaster has plans for you and your pirate fleet.”

 

“Oh ho ho...” Maya put her hands on her hips and saucily walked over to the looming Chaos Lord. She ran a hand down the long plume that jutted jauntily from her tricorn captain’s hat before slapping the back of her hand against his chest plate. “Your so-called Warmaster can have my resignation. My word is freely given and freely taken back. Now that Mom and Dad have passed away I’ve got no one left alive to disappoint except Grandpa Ythwne, and he thinks what I’m about to do to you is hysterical!”

 

“I am not going to kill you, you half breed abomination,” The Lord of the Black Legion task force sneered, “Not until after I teach you the proper respect.”

 

An armoured fist lashed out, but a slender, delicate hand stopped it as if it were made of paper.

 

“Mum is dead, so I suppose that makes me Queen, doesn’t it?” Maya squeezed the space marine’s wrist. Her fingers sank into the armoured plates, and where her flesh made contact the paint crackled and peeled back to reveal scorched gray ceramite. The Chaos Lord grunted, struggled, then fell to one knee so that he was face to face with Maya, who smiled cruelly at him. “Say it.”

 

“Queen Maya,” The Chaos Lord intoned, his voice not his own. He struggled, shook his head, the gasped out, “What are you?”

 

“I’ll tell you what I’m not,” Maya smiled even wider, displaying her meticulously filed teeth. “I’m not a half human, half Eldar abomination. A space marine knocked up a Drukhari woman? Who ever heard of such nonsense! The truth is something much, much worse, my friend.”

 

+++++++++++++

 

Guilliman stood in his private strategium aboard his flagship. The crusade fleet was chasing down the slower ships of the fleeing enemy fleets. Several dreadnoughts were firing nova cannon salvos at key points on the newly formed spacehulk identified by the Adeptus Mechanicus as likely to contain technologies too dangerous to leave intact and too dangerous to attempt to salvage. His prisoner was safely in the hands of the Inquisition.

 

The 49^th Grand Company of the Iron Warriors, a surviving formation of arch-traitors who had fought against the Emperor during the Horus Heresy. But agents of the primarch had discovered during their scouring of the Child of Calamity that they were also the Iron Hounds space marines chapter, allegedly a loyalist founding with a long, if obscure, record of service in defending Imperial worlds against xenos threats. A space marines chapter that had supplied many Deathwatch missions with volunteers. A space marines chapter that had close ties with certain sections of the Inquisition.

 

The Warsmith Bolverk had represented the rot of insanity within the Imperium. That such a man could operate on both sides of the Long War so willfully for so long was ample evidence. His bizarre machinations had come to an end with the destruction of the space station, however. Even if he were still alive out there, he would no longer have the resources or material or safe haven to raise even a squad. He had been laid bare, and he had made too many enemies to withstand in the end.

 

The Indomitus Crusade would carry on. The Warp was strangely calm for several light years around the vicinity of the Child of Calamity since the collapse of the space station began. Already astropathic messages had gone out to nearby fleets. They would gather strength and push forward, using this victory to breach ever deeper into the Imperium Nihilus and make contact with their beleaguered allied on the other side of the Great Rift. Already Guilliman had put away the name of the Warsmith and his egomaniacal delusions of grandeur, something as close as he could get to forgetting as a primarch could do. He was to witness? Witness what? The station lost power and began to break apart and everyone in that bizarre four-cornered war left with whatever loot they could carry. All that was left of the 49^th was the self-loathing of a misbegotten old man who would while away the rest of his life in an Inquisitorial dungeon. The primarch was three steps into his next moves and wouldn’t even bother to read the interrogation report of the aged castellan.

 

=========

 

In an impossible corner of the Warp two souls ascended, uplifted by power that was great, made manifest into forms both beautiful and terrible. Time meant nothing, this divine triumvirate simply always was and always will be, and the immediate enmity of the Great Four meant nothing. Sadness, longing, the suffering of the soul from love and hope and the great emptiness thereof. The Three Sisters, these gods of melancholy and sorrow, their creation rippled backwards across all space and time so that they always existed and always would.

 

Husband and wife, greater daemons of a godhead they willed into existence and fueled with the empty hope of billions over millennia, fueled by the burned out souls of their faithful believers, trapped and recycled time and time again until they were mere reflections of the Warsmith's aesthetic desires, they took their places before the masters that consumed them and consummated their submission for a singular, eternal moment.

 

So it's meant to tie up everything written about the Iron Hounds here, which is fitting, I think, for what is apparently the last Inspiration Friday and my last participation in it. The overall story across all the shorts I've written is a bit convoluted, and I understand that I wrote this hastily and not well and didn't cover all the details, but I wanted to write this last story for my Iron Hounds, an ending for them, sort of like when a television series gets cancelled and the writers have to tie up as much as they can in just one or two episodes.

 

So there it is, that's the end of the 49th Grand Company "Iron Hounds".

Maya the Pirate Queen can safely be imagined to be wrecking and looting everything from here until forever, though, as she is, in fact, an avatar of Malal

[Kierdale]

My apologies for the delay in making this post.

 

Firstly, let me award my last Octed amulet to Warsmith Aznable. I have not yet had chance to read his entry but, knowing that it brings to an end his 49th Grand Company “Iron Hounds” I shall do so with a heavy heart.

 

I did not have chance to pen an entry myself. I had ideas for a piece in the throne room on Terra at the very end, the sensei gathered by the Illuminati... but Real Life just didn’t give me time.

 

I leave the reins of Inspirational Friday in Scourge hands now if he wishes to take them up (and you might want to make a new thread).

 

Thanks again for all the stories, all the inspiration. :)

[Excessus]

Thank you, Kierdale, for your service to the community! You have made the sub-forum a brighter place with these IFs.

[Xenith]

Agreed, I haven't had the time to enter these due to other commitments, but they were great nonetheless.

I hope that the new chaos codex and new edition has somewhat inspired my fellow frater, and that the need for such a thread may have diminished somewhat, however Chaos folks, both in words and conversions, tend to be some of the most inspired around.

 

Let the Galaxy Burn.

[Scourged]

I shall indeed take the reins from here, friend. I'll take your advice and start a new thread, though it's not as if I plan to change much. If ain't broke an' all that. Thanks for your work over the years, a fun collaboration of forces, and a wealth of inspiration. We'll keep the warpfire of creativity burning. 

[Azekai]

Thanks to Kierdale for running this for so long, and thanks to Scourged for taking up the reins (even if he is a shifty Tzeentch worshiper :P).

The Long War continues, brothers!

[MaliGn]

Cheers Kierdale, it's been fun getting to take part in this, some good reads along the way. Good luck scourge, hope we have more good stuff to come!

[Augustus b'Raass]

Thank you, Kierdale, for keeping this thread running all these years. It's been hugely inspirational, reading everyone's take on Chaos.

 

I hope you'll remain as a presence on the forum elsewhere - especially those fantastic Slaaneshi marines of yours! Good luck on your endeavors and may the gods be with you.

[Forté]

Wow. This kept going. That was some list of winners.

[Excessus]

Wow. This kept going. That was some list of winners.

 

And it's not over yet. Scourged will handle the reins from here. :)

[Forté]

 

 

Wow. This kept going. That was some list of winners.

And it's not over yet. Scourged will handle the reins from here. :)

Well done indeed.

[Gederas]

Wow. This kept going. That was some list of winners.

And it's not over yet. Scourged will handle the reins from here.

Well done indeed.

I'm waiting (im)patiently for Scourged's new thread. Maybe we'll see some more new/old faces in it?

 

Because let me be honest, Forté, if you write half as good as your models look when you're done with them, you've got a lot of victories ahead of you in that ;)

[Scourged]

 

Wow. This kept going. That was some list of winners.

And it's not over yet. Scourged will handle the reins from here.

Well done indeed.

I'm waiting (im)patiently for Scourged's new thread. Maybe we'll see some more new/old faces in it?

 

Because let me be honest, Forté, if you write half as good as your models look when you're done with them, you've got a lot of victories ahead of you in that

 

Though I hate to disappoint, I believe I have decided that the new generation of Inspiration Friday will not begin until the start of the new year. I came to this conclusion for a few reasons:

 

First, being realistic, we're in the midst of the holiday season. It's a crazy time for us all in the real world, and so not the easiest for us all to have a seat and type out a narrative or two in the coming weeks.

 

Second, holy crap, GW won't quit churning out new stuff! Seriously, December is looking like it's going to be nuts, with all kinds of new goodies, some for Chaos. That's sure to be distracting in a very pleasant way.

 

Third, in a bit of a sentimental way, I feel as though this thread ended on the perfect note, if you will. Legends of Chaos was a great way to say farewell to Inspiration Friday 2018 - as well as to our own Legendary Leader, Kierdale. It just feels right that this chapter should close on that note. 

 

Once 2019 arrives, so will our new thread. And from it, the next generation of Inspiration shall be born.

[Gederas]

I had the feeling it was going to be next year. Hence why I said I was impatiently waiting :lol:

Will you be linking back to this thread in the first post of the new one? Perhaps as an 'archive' like the first post of this thread has?

[Scourged]

Yup, that's the plan Gederas. That's also a minor reason the launch will be next year - it gives me time to organize all of those logistics of linking to past threads, as well as developing a plan for the year based on the list Kierdale provided of unused topics. I plan to change as little as possible as things go forward. "If it ain't broke" and all that. 

[Forté]

 

 

 

Wow. This kept going. That was some list of winners.

And it's not over yet. Scourged will handle the reins from here.

Well done indeed.

I'm waiting (im)patiently for Scourged's new thread. Maybe we'll see some more new/old faces in it?

 

Because let me be honest, Forté, if you write half as good as your models look when you're done with them, you've got a lot of victories ahead of you in that ;)

Don't panic. I'm not a regular here like I used to be. My tastes in miniatures have changed quite a fair bit.

 

Quite amusingly though; a couple of those awards in your signature were put together by myself a few years back. Good to see them still in use :D

[Carrack]

Thanks Kierdale for running this contests, you always had inspirational topics and fair judgment of the entries. I sincerely appreciate the effort and time you put into this over the years. Thanks.