Haxtes
The child that would eventually become Agent Haxtes Guilliman was born in 973.M41 (i.e. 23 years ago) on the Imperial World of Protasia/Malfian Sub-sector/Calixis Sector/Segmentum Obscurus. Protasia was a prosperous and well-governed world, well able to provide for its 2.5 billion inhabitants while meeting the Imperial Tithe. Alas it would not last, for the people-elected Senate of Protasia decided that they would no longer be considered part of the Malfian Sub-sector, citing rampant corruption and gross negligence of part of the Malfian Adepta. And so it came to pass that they petitioned Terra for the creation of new sub-sector, with Protasia at its heart. Perhaps there was some merit to the petition, for Malfi really is a cesspool of vice and corruption, but if so any justification was wiped away by the heresy that is disobedience. The envoy was arrested and turned over the the Holy Ordos and the petition routinely turned down. Protasia was ordered to surrender and its leaders turn themselves in for processing and public execution. They failed to comply, taking this rebuttal as a sign that the greater Imperium was just as bad as the Malfians...
Haxtes breathed the air of his homeworld for the first time even as the plasma-bombs and kinetic penetrators started falling from orbit. As he was lain at his mother's breast Imperial Landers deposited the first Stormtroopers at key landing sites across his homeworld, preceded by a torrent of suppressive fire from hundred squadrons of fighter-bombers. When sleep came to him it was to a lullaby of a thousand heavy tanks churning across the plains. The Imperium had arrived to wage righteous war on the rebel world, to punish its wayward people and to brink them all back into the Emperor's light.
But victory did not come easily or cheaply. Indeed, victory failed to come at all. The Protasian fleet failed to prevent the Imperial navy from achieving orbital control, but inflicted severe damage on the task force before being forced to retreat. The loss of the battleship Heart of Fury and the heavy damage sustained by six battle-cruisers would force the theater commander to petition Sector headquarters for additional forces, a grave loss of face that eventually drove Admiral Nakemi to suicide and prematurely ended the career of Lord-Marshal Maxim Maximus.
Yet the Navy had accomplished it mission; the gargantuan Guard transports were largely intact and in low orbit, and immediately started to drop sixty Division-equivalents onto the surface, opening up three key theaters and securing key sites planet-wide. Losses to enemy naval assets, orbital defense grids, planetary defense batteries and anti-landing assets were four times higher than expected, averaging out at 20% or 120.000 dead and injured. Despite the stiff resistance the Imperial Guard reached its initial objectives within a fortnight, but then the advance ground to a halt as dwindling troop troop densities made further advances impractical.
Over the next few years the envisioned swift campaign of liberation became one of endless war instead. The Protasian defenders proved both capable, extremely well-equipped, and quite willing to continue the fight. The Protasian Navy would also return time and again to harass the Imperial Navy, even managing to break the blockade on several occasions, and causing havoc throughout the sub-sector by staging raids on other Imperial holdings. Compliance was clearly not something that would be soon in coming.
Battlefleet Calixis was eventually forced to send two full battle-groups to reinforce the Protasian Theater, and finally manged to destroy or drive away remaining enemy naval assets. Two-hundred-forty new divisions were eventually levied over the next decade and shipped piecemeal to the war-zone. Even then compliance was deemed impossible without resorting the a more thorough approach; the entire planet of Protasia was declared a war-zone and the rules of engagement revised accordingly. By 982.M41 eighty percent of the planet's inhabited areas not already seized by Imperial forces were reduced by strategic bombardment in an effort to crush the Protasian will to fight.
This was the life into which Haxtes was born. At first it was not so different from life on other worlds, but as time passed the situation on Protasia grew worse and worse. Haxtes' father left when he was very little, to fight the Imperium that had brought the war with them. He never saw him again. His mother was forced to sell herself to feed her three children, first to local men and later to the Imperials when the seized Haxtes' home-town. One day she did not return, leaving Haxtes and his brother and sister to fend for themselves. That did not go well. Jax, aged fourteen, was taken by Protasian insurgents in the night, given a gun, and told to fight the occupiers as once his father had. A few months later his sister Eleena, aged twelve, was taken by the Imperials. No reason was given. Neither was seen again.
At the tender age of eight Haxtes was alone in the world, having witnessed all his family and all his friends either die or disappear. His world had all but been destroyed and his home-town, once a fair city of millions was now under brutal Imperial occupation, and occupation that became bloodier and more merciless by the day as Protasian insurgents continued to fiercely resist the occupation force. Eventually the Imperial's would be forced to abandon the city of Tzhula, but upon doing so the took their vengeance by savaging the city with plasma warheads, megaton kinetic strikes, and flesh-eating viral attacks.
Haxtes somehow survived it all. He not only survived, he grew strong, he thrived. Unfettered by morals, unbound by compassion, he took what he wanted and killed those that stood in his way or might one day come to threaten him. Always alone he was, never trusting others, he grew to become the Shadow of Tzhula, a wraith that moved unseen and struck without warning, laving the dead bereft of food, weapons, or valuables. At age twelve he was something of a local legend, though few ever suspected the truth; that he was just a small boy.
It all changed in the harsh winter of 983.M41. Food and other resources were all but gone, and the survivors of the war-zone turned upon one another with unusual abandon. Haxtes lived better than most, but even he grew desperate. And so, despite his gut feeling to the contrary, he tried to take the life of a hooded black-clad stranger, seeing as he might have valuables for use in trade. It did not go well; Haxtes had finally met his match and was beaten half to death...and taken into captivity.
Thus began the next phase of Haxtes' life, a phase that would last for six long and grueling years, a phase that would take him away from Protasia to the dark spires of the Absolom Hive-complex on Malfi, home to the cult-monastery of the Veiled Hand, one of the most notorious assassin clans in Calixis Sector. Six years of pain, deprivation and degradation followed. Six years of conditioning of the body, the mind, and the spirit. Six years of honing Haxtes' killer instinct from something crude and base into the finely tuned instrument of death that is a trained Cult Assassin.
That Haxtes was talented cannot be doubted – only the talented survives their training – but he something beyond talent; a true knack for the trade chosen for him. That only led his masters to push him harder and further, but as with his years on Protasia hardship only made him harder and stronger. So after only six years standard he was chosen to become a Death Cult Initiate; a graduate assassin, ready for his first assignment kill.
Three times he was sent out, and three times he returned alive with his target eliminated. The first was a fat banker from a minor Malfian spire, he died silently, but his bodyguards did not – they screamed as they died. Haxtes was censured for excessive use of force, but the contract had been fulfilled. The second was a member of the Arbites who was about to uncover evidence of some crime best forgotten; that ended in a five-minute dance of death as the murderous style of a Cult Assassin clashed with the brutally effective style of the Emperor's lawbringers. Haxtes survived, but the injuries he suffered were severe enough to earn him another censure. The last target was a young female tech-adept that had somehow earned the ire of the Adeptus Mechanicus. She made for hours of good bed-sport before providing equally well as blood-sport. Three kits, three censures. Clearly Haxtes was talking an altogether unwholesome interest in his trade. Which was why the Cult Masters singled him out for induction into the Circle of Shadows, the inner coven of the Veiled Hand...
They came in the dark of night. Preceded by a concentrated wave of guided warheads carrying plasmatic pulsars that blew out every defensive shield and boiled away every sensor blister, leaving the spire monastery blind and naked. Then came Navy bombers screaming down from low orbit, fat with self-guided hyper-velocity penetrators, targeting the many retractable weapon hard-points and concealed launch bays dotting the spire. A hundred explosions rocked the halls and corridors of the Veiled Hand as kinetic energy translated into thermal energy with explosive force, slaying and destroying indiscriminately.
The first attackers followed only split seconds after the penetrators had done their job, null-black Adeptus Astartes boarding torpedoes screaming in a ten times the speed of sound, their near-heretical power fields and force dampeners acting simultaneously to force an entrance and preserve their occupants from instant annihilation. One hundred battle-brothers of the Deathwatch, the cameleoline skin of their armor a matte black, save for the emerald green and gold heraldry of the Chapter – the Green Knights Chapter – upon their right shoulders. One hundred Angles of Death come to claim the lives of those that fancied themselves bloody-handed slayers of men. One hundred sons of the Emperor leading the assault of the Calixian Ordo Xenos upon the Cult-Monastery of the Veiled Hand.
At their heels Inquisitorial stormtroopers guarding the cloaked figures walking between them; ten Inquisitors, one of them a Lord, and their retinues, come to oversee the ruin of the Veiled Hand and all that it had touched. If the shocked cult members had hoped that their colossal and warren-like fortress would provide some sanctuary they were sadly mistaken; crawling silently up from the main spire along hidden ducts and passageways came the infiltrator-servitors of the Lathes Mechanicus. Their task not to kill or destroy, but to flay open the technological innards of the fortress, stripping away every defense and opening every avenue for the Emperor's scourging fire...
Haxtes survived the first murderous minutes of the assault, finding himself drawn into an impromptu bodyguard for Lady Ghaela, one of the senior Masters, as she fled towards the null-ship hidden within the spire. Coming face-to-face with the enemy for the first time Haxtes experienced a surge of confusion; before him the darting dark forms of the Astartes and between then...a tall woman clad in black, with the seal of the Inquisition gleaming upon her neck. Try as he might Haxtes found that his conditioning amounted to nothing – he could not bear to raise his hand against this shadowy Imperial angel of vengeance!
Knowing his life was forfeit he could feel his legs giving away and his weapons falling from limp fingers, even as mass-reactive bolt shells and adamantine chainblades tore apart his fellow assassins in a gory display of Astartes might. Lady Ghaela fared no better, for all her vaunted skill with the blade she amounted to nothing, her body seized by some unseen force and hurled repeatedly and with great cruelty into immovable durasteel panels. Inquisitorial troopers, their forms warped by the gloom into the semblance of glistening black beetles, moved in to secure the fallen Master and dispatch the mutilated living left behind by the Marine advance.
One beetle-form, placing the muzzle of its hell-gun upon Haxtes' brown, halted by a silent signal, told to leave the angel's prey alone. A perfectly sculpted pale face descending, lips a rick blood-red, thick dark hair kept in place by diamond firmament and black-gold pins. A smooth and cold voice speaking to the waiting dark; “This one is clearly not one of the xenophiles, but he is witch-touched. I claim him for the Ordo Hereticus. Tag him and bag him.” The face gone, to be replaced by a high-heeled boot slamming into Haxtes head with considerable force.
That face again. Suspended in mid-air before you. No, not suspended. Just poor lighting, masking the rest of her in shadow. A voice, her voice, but different. The sound ringing painfully in your head with every word. “Welcome back dear. Did you sleep well? I am Xerza. Of the Inquisition. You are my prisoner, awaiting transfer to the Black Ships. Do you understand?” Her lips are not moving, but the voice is in my head. “Your life would normally just be forfeit; for you have been found guilty of heresy by association. But you are also a witch, which obliges me to send you forthwith to Holy Terra, where you will dine one final time – at the Emperor's own table no less.”
A witch? I'm not a witch! ”Oh but you are a witch Haxtes Guilliman. Just because you don't know it doesn't make your a non-psychic. Much as with your association with the the blood-cult festering within the Veiled Hand; you didn't know it for what it was, but that does not make you innocent – heresy by association is still heresy.” Of course there is a blood-cult! The Veiled Hand is a death cult, like many others like it within the Imperium. ”Yes, but those death cults operate within the bounds laid down by the Imperium, whereas your cult saw fit to not only deal with xenos, but actually adopt their bloody-handed god as its patron. I know that you are not an initiate, but you would have been made one soon enough, that much is plain from your own memories – flashes of your kills pass through your mind, lingering on the woman – and the pathetic confessions of your former masters, many voices howling in your mind, screaming out their self-incriminating confessions, all the while begging to be put to death – and heresy about to happen is still heresy.”
Xerza rocks back on her very high heels, laughing out loud; her first sound so far. The laughter is contagious and you find yourself laughing hard, enough so that your bonds bite into your naked flesh. Before the self-constricting bonds can do you any serious harm they relax at some unseen signal, sending you slumping forward onto the cold metal floor. You can feel the hum of distant machinery. “You're a fine one Haxtes. That you are. You would have made a fine xenophile heretic; I see you need a bit of blood and pain to become properly aroused.” The laughter is gone now, and you find yourself hauled back to your feet by strong and supple hands. She whispers into your, her breath hot on your skin. “I've a proposition for you Haxtes. You can go to the Black Ships and die screaming as the Master of Mankind devours your heretical soul. For the Holy Ordos. For Inquisitor Tancred. For me. Would you like that? To kill for the Emperor rather than for yourself or some lesser cause? Or is blood all you crave? Tell me now – it's a one-time offer only.”
“Good. I'm glad you're with us. It will do your immortal soul good. And besides you're just the kind of man I like having around. Young, handsome and well endowed.” That last part directed towards your private parts no doubt. “And a witch. The old witch quite likes young witches, even a lousy Eta grade like yourself.” You get a non-too-gentle kiss as a welcoming present, leaving you with a bleeding lip, before she reluctantly steps away. Your bounds spring open, but this time you manage to catch your balance, and even catch the black synth-weave coverall she tosses you. “You are to stay here Haxtes. And no funny business or I will come for you personally. Trust me, you wouldn't like that. Oh, and welcome to the Inquisition!” With that she steps out of the room through an unseen exit, leaving you to get your genitals in line and put on your new wardrobe.
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Holding page of stats/rewards etc.
HAXTES
Starting: 1200 + 600
Prelude: 450
Shattered Hope: 475
Edge of Darkness: 425
Rejoice: 900
Illumination: 925 + 25 (cry-baby bonus ;-)
Maggots/Twilight/Chapter 1: 925 +75
House: 800
XP total: 6800
03/27/11 10:01:00 am, 3 comments
