It is beyond the 41st millennium and there is no escape. From the safety of the ground, the denizens of the galaxy could imagine their dreams in the stars. All those who have reached the stars, or have had the stars reach them, know that the void holds far worse than nightmares.
A galactic imperium carves a bloody path without rest until every planet is put to the sword. Monsters from beyond comprehension devour minds and worlds alike. Ancient spirits stir to reclaim all they once ruled. Countless more horrors await those with the misfortune to meet them.
To be in such times is to be one amongst untold trillions. To live is to invite tragedy and suffering for the folly of existing. To fight is to invite madness and corruption for the folly of hope. To mourn is to invite contempt, for only the sane would cry for a galaxy where the insane prosper.
Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget the luxury of harmony and enlightenment. Forget the notion of freedom and compassion.
There is no peace among the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war and the laughter of thirsting gods.
The Imperium of Man was founded by the God-Emperor to assert mankind’s rightful place as rulers of the galaxy. To wrest worlds from the malignant grip of aliens and non-believers, legions of men and women rise in the name of the God-Emperor and in service to His Imperium.
Of all these legions, none are more devout to His will than the Adepta Sororitas, women who give their whole hearts and souls in service to Him. Within the Imperium, the Sisters are revered as healers, scholars, priestesses, diplomats, artists, and ritualists. Without the Imperium, they may serve as all this and more: Sisters of Battle, the standing army of the Ecclesiarchy and sword of His will, cleanse the taint and filth of the unclean that pollute the sovereign territory of mankind. No heresy is too small to be beyond their sight, nor monster too terrible to be beyond their wrath; their lives for the God-Emperor, they wage war to the far flung reaches of the void without fear, doubt, or mercy.
The Order of the Sacred Rose, each daughter molded in the image of Saint Arabella, spread across the vast and distant regions of the Imperium to bring His light to the darkness. Just as Saint Arabella the Liberator marched with calm as the wrath of His grace struck down the wicked, so too did the Sisters of the Sacred Rose push forth eastward in the Ultima Segmentum where they rout the enemies of mankind with poised determination and raise parishes to protect the faithful flock.
Incheo was one such world that the Sacred Rose planted roots in. The tyranny of a witch had kept the mountainous pangea of Incheo in primality and ignorance. The witch’s beasts had to be culled before the Frateris Clergy and Ordo Sabine could enlighten and uplift the savages. Occult shrines and pagan fetishes were supplanted by churches and rosaries. Disparate villages were paved over with rockrete and connected by road and rail. Untamed wilderness and hills were saddled with infrastructure to make use of them. In short time, the world had been civilized beyond recognition, and the witch was driven off the continent into a misty isle. The grateful masses learned the same meaning of hope that all other lost colonies of man learned since the Emperor set in motion his great work to reunite mankind and reassert its rightful place in the galaxy.
That was until calamity rent the Imperium in twain.
The Great Enemy poured all their terrible might in a plot a hundred centuries in the making to smother His light. So was born the Cicatrix Maledictum, a curtain of hell under which the slaves and gods of darkness run amok without heed of His gaze. The Sisters on their crusades or guarding faithful worlds were cut off from the Imperium, and each other, and preyed upon by the shadows that they had worked so tirelessly to beat back.
For Incheo, sunlight was strangled cold and worse than witches or beasts descended.
The Imperial Navy was swallowed whole by the warped empyrean that encircled the planet. The men of the Imperial Guard were debilitated by torturous disease until they capitualated and became willing vectors of contangion in betrayal of those they were meant to protect. What remained of the Incheon populace and fledgling defense force retreated to the safety of Sacred Rose parishes. Despite years of valiant efforts and selfless heroism, their muffled prayers did not reach The Throne and the parishes fell until only one convent remained.
The whole city of Gyeo had collapsed into madness, the enemy so assured of their victory that the cultists began to tear eachother apart in the streets for the right to claim a greater share of glory to their vile gods. The warp miasma fell so thickly that reality bent to the defilement of the neverborn who clawed their way out of their blighted pit. The Sisters, buoyed by remnant soldiers and ramshackled militia, with the statue of Saint Arabella beating at the heart of the convent, defended against the onslaught, yet dwindling ammunition, medicine, and subsistence numbered their days of defiance.
From within the last barricade, the survivors could only watch as all that was sacred was desecrated and all their people enslaved to heresy or tormented by taunting daemons. The veteran celestians and retributors weathered bile and threw back fury to a chortling cacophony, each member so bloated and mutated that the heretics could no longer be distinguished from the daemons. They laughed along the defensive lines that had fallen to their infestation, assured of the hopelessness of resistance and the inevitability of their triumph. This world was already the Fly God’s.
Among the bodies that laid trampled was Kim Min-Ji. The Sister Superior who had guided Kim since she was a novitiate was forced to watch her subordinate’s decapitated body be consumed by layers of filth. As the Superior was the last of her squad, Kim Min-Ji blended into the corpses in the eyes of everyone else, yet when the holy hymns began to whisper underneath the chortling cacophony, both the faithful and the damned were drawn to the source as if by command.
Kim Min-Ji rose her arm with a blazing blade that silenced the snickering heretics that stood on her. She unfurled smoldering wings that scorched the corruption around her and silenced the chortling cacophony. The filth that bound her was incinerated and Kim Min-Ji stood, her helmet a furnace roiling with fire that spilled out of her eye sockets.
The plagueridden scarcely turned their focus when the Sisters had joined Kim’s hymns, the chortling cacophony now completely overturned by a Righteous Symphony. The song of the faithful reached through the veil to the God-Emperor on Terra. With Him by their side once more, and Kim Min-Ji as their speartip, the Canoness and veteran Sisters advanced from the convent to turn the tide.
The dark forces had collapsed entirely into infighting as the occult gods squabbled over the world. A horde in disarray was picked apart by the disciplined and the committed. The Righteous Symphony, ceaseless in their song, united the scattered individuals and pockets of resistance that endured with their faith and loyalty intact. At first street by street, then block by block, then city by city as the faithful, men and women, young and old, joined the chorus with fervor to take back their world. The turmoil of the Maledictum’s birth subsided, and while his light was still smothered, the grip of the neverborn was weakened, their corruption and cults all burned away in the Cleansing that followed in the next century.
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That was the story of how the Order of the Righteous Symphony was founded. The saga of Kim Min-Ji’s was sung by the chorister in the hold of the thunderhawk every time a Flamewing strike force was deployed to the Sinui Mountains. Over the roar of the engine and the howls of turbulence, the chorister’s vocal tubes immortalized and amplified his youthful voice so that he may serve as part of His eternal choir. Song would steel the body from the thick layer of sickly smog that permeated these mountains and bolster the mind by reminding the Sisters of their purpose in even the most enfeebling mire. What the holy notes could not repel would have to be filtered out by the rebreather in their helmets.
The Sister Superior and each of her Seraphim crossed their arms over their breastplate and gripped their bolt pistols in the sign of the aquila as they harmonized with the chorister’s lead. The Ophanim, silent though she seemed in comparison, hummed to herself from her role’s own hymnals to sate the machine spirit of her heavy flamer and clear her mind.
Nearly over the target now, the Sisters stood as their song raised to a crescendo. The Thunderhawk swooped from the clouds with its assault ramp open to pour out the flamewing, unleash a salvo of missiles, seal the ramp, and ascend just as fast as it appeared.
The flamewing squadron dove alongside the missiles, unperturbed by the flak cannon fire that filled the sky around them. Black clouds and jagged shrapnel could pierce neither their armor nor their calm, and soon enough, the missiles raced forward to snuff out the mobile artillery that harried them. A desperate hail of bullets flowed around flamewing, scraping the white enamel off their power armor and puncturing holes in their yellow cloth as they hurtled toward their target.
Pus-rain had long despoiled these hills, the fauna reduced to withered fields and sloughing trees, and the Sinui spread their vileness by further infesting the land inch by inch. It was the duty of the flamewings to prevent this infestation from expanding by dismantling encroachment before they could take root.
The Ophanim was the first to turn herself over and activate the thrusters of her winged jump pack. All the Seraphim followed their Superior, only activating their jump packs when they neared the ground so that they may strafe the encampment with bolter shells. Twin pistols in hand, and hymns to guide their aim, more than enough bolts struck true to their targets, no matter if they hid in trenches or behind smoldering trucks.
These bolts were no mere bullets: they carved through the rusted plate and rags of Sinui conscripts to dig into their bellies and brains where the bolt detonated for maximum effect. Those struck reduced to mists of gore and discombobulated limbs. What few that survived the initial salvo were propped up by the mutations and will of their heretical god, a state that could barely be called life, and soon were annihilated all the same. The pink frame of their pistols made them akin to roses that spat destructive thorns.
The Seraphim landed with their superior to a base thrown into panic by their assault. With bursts from their jump packs, the sisters pounced on the scattered conscripts like osprey upon fish. Pus and blood sprayed across filthy mud and rotten rockrete structures. When a pistol needed to be reloaded, a sister could eject the magazine, insert a new one from the maglocked bandolier on her legs and waist, and continue to fire without missing a beat.
The Ophanim finally landed upon a bunker. The enemy was too broken to take advantage of her relatively sluggish movement, fallen to the primal urge of survival for they lacked the determination to fight, a fatal error as the Ophanim was the threat who would seal their fate.
She took aim at the trench behind the bunker where conscripts and engineers had huddled for safety as if the rest of the flamewing would pass over them like a bad storm if only they could hunker it out. This craven hope was immolated when the Ophanim’s heavy flamer flooded the trench with ignited promethium. The heretics died screaming as the burning oil melted their bodies. The flames spilled down their trenches so that more cultists would share the same fate and those still in the tunnels would choke on the toxic fumes.
To slay the blasphemers was all well, but the Ophanim was entrusted with the true purpose of this strike. As descendants of the Retributors, the Ophanims inherited the ordinance and concentration needed to tear down enemy fortifications in the thick of battle. Here, her heavy flamer would purify the land from the creeping corruption that the Sinui spread. Their poisoned feed, their heretical domiciles, their diseased bodies, their infested infrastructure, all of it would be wiped clean by cleansing flame before they could take root, like loose soil washed away by rainfall.
With the trenches a moat of bubbling sludge and the tunnel collapsed into ruin, she dropped down and turned her heavy flamer to the bunker door so that she could force feed justice that would melt it from within. The cultists climbed out through the embrasure as charred bodies as the bunker bellowed fire. With bursts from her jump pack, she leapt to her targets to continue her work, razing barracks, mess halls, armories, roads, clinics, tents, depots, roads, everything and anything for not a single tainted blade of grass would escape her notice. That the heretics were caught in her flames was all the better, and those that were flushed out into the open were gunned down by the Seraphim.
A first time observer would wonder, if flamewing strikes such as these can so effortlessly dance over Sinui cultists, how loyal servants of the Emperor have not already trounced the feckless traitors. The experienced and learned would be well aware that this is merely a probing strike against an anemic force vaguely aware such strikes would occur yet impossible to maintain readiness against while meeting construction goals. These strikes had to be done before the Sinui could properly dig in for they would grow exponentially more difficult to dislodge if left to their own devices. The slaves and conscripts they use as meat shields and trench diggers would be replaced by disciplined soldiers whose thoroughly mutated bodies—bloated with pus, mucus, and parasites—could absorb bolt detonations with nary a flinch. The tracked flak cannons were temporary measures meant to buy time for fly hives to be nourished: once developed, the hive would thicken the air with biting flies whose sheer number could seep into the seams of armor to devour the wearer and gag missiles and jet engines with their corpses. The hills and mountains would each be made a fortress, tunneled and infested with equal parts munitions and contagion. The land itself would become malleable to the whims of their vile god.
Every inch they grew was another inch they could use for their housing and rituals, another inch closer they could organize their regiments and tank battalions for assault, and another inch that would have to be purified and retaken with the blood of martyrs. The Sinui cult was a cancer upon Incheo. The Righteous Sumphony struggled to contain any tumorous cells it tried to spread, but one day, the cancer would be excised completely, lest the whole world fall to the Fly God.
One last bolt ruptured open the rib cage of a Sinui recruit before the Sister Superior maglocked her pistols onto her legs in favor of a flare gun she fired into the air. The light of the flare pierced the smog to draw both the rest of the flamewing and the Thunderhawk. The date, length, or depth of a strike like this was always different as to keep the Sinui in confusion on how to respond: a brief strike like this paved the way for other strikes to reach their target by making them fear committing forces to grasping at dust; deep strikes forced them to defend key targets while the outskirts were overwhelmed. For all their fury and burning desire to drive out the heretic, Sisters of the Righteous Symphony never lost their composure to bloodlust and followed their Superiors’ wise retreats. Long before personal carriers could haul reinforcements to the smoky remains of the encampment, the Sisters will have piled into their Thunderhawk well on their way over the mountains.
Whether a flamewing squad could demolish their target or find the opportunity to spread further destruction, so long as the enemy was disrupted, delayed, and distracted, the operation as a whole would be a success. The rest they could have faith to leave to the wrath of the Emperor made manifest, for under the cover of flamewing strikes, Kim Min-Ji would launch her own intercession into the heart of enemy territory.
