In the previous chapter of Amageddon Crusade: The Red Angel's Gate, we were introduced to the major players of the latest in a history of conflict on the planet of Armageddon. The greatest threat of all, it seemed, was the Red Angel's Gate, a hole in reality and blatant invitation for the arrival of Angron the Daemon Primarch of the World Eaters. The Grey Knights arrived on Armageddon to prevent this cataclysmic event.
The second chapter, The Season of Blood, begins the narrative re-telling of the warw and it starts with what I thought was going to be the climax of the story. In just the first 2 pages of the chapter, Angron arrives through the Red Angel's Gate, and drives the Astra Militarum back from their trenches. So that's the starting point and, as you can imagine, things only get worse.
Through the middle of Armageddon is an equatorial jungle, untamed and uninhabitable. Armageddon Prime is west of the jungle, and Armageddon Secundus lies to the east. To the northeast are the Fire Wastes, uninhabitable without environmental suits. Inconveniently for the Imperial troops, the Red Angel's Gate has formed largely over the Fire Wastes. The nearest remnant of Imperial civilsation to the Fire Wastes is Hive Thoraddis.
,PP Castellan Holzer, of the Black Templars, concentrates on the ruins of Hive Thoraddis with the help of Colonel Korss and his Krieg 74th Line Korps. Hive Thoraddis is overrun with heretics and traitors, and so Holzer and Korss wage a fierce advance from Hive Hades east toward Thoraddis. It's slow going, with Korss's engineers quickly fortifying and entrenching the territory they win.
Unfortunately, Thoraddis is the stronghold of Askarra the Ensanguined, and all the spilt blood is only feeding the Red Angel's Gate. Angron arrives through the gate, and brings hordes of daemons with him. The Imperial line is forced to retreat from Thoraddis.
Over on Armageddon Prime, Khornate armies are hounding the Astra Militarum on the plains of Anthrand. Nobody's got time to notice that the battles have meandered dangerously close to territories that had been overrun by orks way back in the First Armageddon war. The orks hardly fail to notice the battles, and of course they turn up to the party despite not having been invited.
The ork involvement arguably doesn't do anything to change the course of the Third War, but at least they do provide another target for the Khornate murdertide. Logan Grimnar sends support, and the Space Wolves are able to take advantage of the ork distraction to deal a serious blow to the Khornate army.
While the Space Wolves and Black Templars and Astra Militarum wage war, the Grey Knights have been busy looking for a solution that strikes at the core of the daemonic problem incursion. Much of the Grey Knight story, appropriately, is told in redacteh blocks sf black bars and in side bars. We only get hints of what they get up to, until they join the others on the battlefield.
Rothwyr Morvans has developed a plan to destroy at least the physical form of Angron first, and then to unbind the Red Angel's Gate to prevent Angron from returning.
Both plans are dependent upon finding relics. For the first half of the plan, they secure help from the Priesthood of Mars, the Adeptus Mechanicus. Together, they are able to locate and recover some Void Missiles buried in a long-forgotten vault. For the second half of the plan, they need 8 fragments of a sword that Angron once wielded.
We don't see much of the recovery of artefacts, which at first disappointed me but, in the end, I think is fair This isn't Pariah Nexus or the Adeptus Mechanicus codex. This is the story of a big epic planetwide battle, so the dungeon crawls are left to your imagination and tabletop. The point is, the Grey Knights get all the relics they need, and show up to the fight at just the right moment.
Morvans and the Grey Knights construct a pentagram with a warhead off the Void Missiles at each point. They lure Angron into the circle, which he steps into boldly, confident that warheads that tear open reality can do nothing to harm him, a creature of the Warp. And he's right. The warheads don't hurt Angron, but what he didn't realise was that they weren't intended to. In fact, the .void created by the detonation of the warheads serves as a sort of containment field for the attacks the Grey Knights targeting the Daemon Primarch.
Chapter 2 was a great read. It follows and expounds upon the tactical maps, and does a great job of bringing the fight to life. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.
The book strikes the perfect balance between exposition and obfuscation. Several chapters of Space Marines are mentioned on the tactical map, but never get a mention in the narrative, and I don't mind that. I'm even glad that my faction, the Adeptus Mechanicus, only gets a cursory mention.
Side bars do a lot of the heavy lifting here. One side bar casually mentions that void battles resulted in an Imperial victory there. We see that for ourselves at a couple of points in the story, when loyalist troops require ground strikes and the navy is able to provide. And, should you feel like playing the story of void battles out, the same side bar name drops Boarding Actions as a reasonable way to do that. I like the focus of the story, with lots of little invitations to add to it on your own tabletop.
Angron is destroyed, but the Grey Knights know that he was only part of the threat. The daemons pouring through the Red Angel's Gate are dominating the planet, so the gateway must be closed. That will take a powerful ritual, and it must be performed within the eye of the storm, in the Fire Wastes.
That exciting conclusion happens in the next chapter.
Photo by Freddy Castro on Unsplash and modified by Seth Kenlon.