The Solace region had once been the beating heart of Kronos’s faith. Here, billions had made their pilgrimage, their prayers rising toward the God-Emperor’s golden throne. They would do so no longer.

The city lay in ruin. The presence of the Tyranid and the Chaos forces have altered the landscape. Once great palaces, turned to ruin during the fights with the Planetary Defence Forces, were overgrown by corrupted bioforms.

The Emperor’s Children had left their mark upon the ruins. Holy temples bore new frescoes: the Princess of Pleasure entwined with the Immortal Emperor in grotesque matrimony, a blasphemy rendered in loving detail by cultists’ hands.

The organisms of Hive Fleet Aurora were feasting on whatever live remained in the city, hunting down the defenders, before advancing to devour the whole continent. It disturbed the unholy mission of the Carnival of Excess. And so, the Emperor’s Children legion was deployed, to wipe the alien life forms off the continent.

The Hive Mind’s scouting lifeforms must have sensed the incoming threat, for a matching army was quickly produced and sent to intercept the Traitor Legion.

As the Necron and Tau fought on the other side of the planet, the two armies met in the city. At first, they were both careful, both the aliens and the demons gauging the enemy, planning the best strategy to attack. The Emperor’s Children did not rush. They were artists of war, and like all artists, they required the perfect moment.

And then the fight began.

Corrupted Terminators materialised amid the southern ruins in a crack of displaced reality. They pressed on, aiming to break through Tyranid lines, to strike a devastating blow into the heart of the adversary. They did not reach their objective. Within seconds, Genestealers and lictors ambushed the Terminators, surrounding them from all sides. The Terminators, warriors who had endured ten thousand years of war, did not land a single blow. The Genestealers moved on, already hunting new prey, before the bodies had finished falling.

On the northern flank, a squad of Tormentors took their positions with absolute precision, certain of their own magnificence. The cunning aliens were also prepared for that. The Zoanthropes unleashed their Witchfire on the chaos squad, burning them to ash in mere seconds.

Then the Keepers of Secrets came. Two beings of impossible beauty and impossible violence, stepping between the ruins as though the battlefield had been arranged for their amusement. The warriors of the Emperor’s Children fought with renewed ferocity in their presence.

The Hive Mind’s answer was cold and immediate. The Norn Emissary advanced to secure the city’s strategic arteries, its vast intelligence processing a dozen engagements simultaneously. Behind it, the Hive Tyrant coordinated the swarm’s response with the brutal efficiency, its golden form towering over the bioforms that swarmed at its feet.

Norn Emissary was a terrible threat to face. And yet, Keepers of Secrets and a Demon Prince fell upon it, locking it in a frantic dance of battle. With strikes of their deadly claws and whips, with the fire of their psychic powers they wore the monster down. The Emissary bled from a dozen wounds. Its hearts were failing. And still it fought, its talons swiping at the enemies that had no true flesh to rend. It was buying time. The Hive Mind’s calculus was clear: every second the Emissary endured was a second the swarm spent advancing. Even when the Daemon Prince’s blade finally found its heart, the beast did not fall, but fought for a few more moments, driven by the Hive Mind’s resolve.

Multiple times had the Tyranid army concentrated its full firepower on the Keepers of Secrets. But they would not be harmed, shrugging off even the most devastating of the alien arsenal. The Zoanthropes summoned their Witchfire onto the demons, but the psychic attacks did nothing. The Tyrannofex, its gun matching those of the Necron, opened fire - once, twice, again, to no effect. The lesser bioforms held their fire entirely. Hive Mind deemed this effort futile, as the weak guns had no chance of wounding the adversaries. And so the demons pressed on, slashing through endless tides of chitin and claws.

Suddenly, for a moment, the battle has turned. A squad of gargoyles, led by a Lictor was deployed at the legion’s back lines. Aiming to break the Chaos formation from within, they opened fire. They were met with a swift counter-attack. The Flawless Blades and a Demon Prince charged, with uncanny speed and mesmerising grace. The Gargoyles did not survive the counter-charge. The Lictor died moments later, trying to fulfil the Hive Mind’s will, locked in a duel with the Demon Prince.

Then fortune, that most un-Slaaneshi of forces, intervened. The Keepers of Secrets fell.

One, struck down, in an ill twist of fate, by a stray shot from a bio-artillery unit, a creature that could not even perceive the demon it shot at. The Keeper of Secrets came apart in an explosion of psychic energy, escaping to the Warp.

The other was devoured by a Psychophage - a grotesque lifeform that the Hive Mind created specifically to fight the Warp-touched. It tore the immaterial body apart with its tendrils and fed. Never satiated, until now forced to feast on mere mortals, it devoured the corrupt flesh in a gory display of violence.

The legion did not fell though. Instead, they kept fighting, inflicting more and more grievous losses on the Tyranids. If their strategy was a blade, it would have been flawless.

But the city had already been decided. While the Flawless Blades were slaying the Genestealers, the swarm had been working. District by district, ruin by ruin, the Tyranids had taken and held what mattered. Where the Emperor’s Children had desecrated, the bioforms now simply consumed, stripping Slaanesh’s mark from the stones alongside everything else. The holy city of Solace was being cleansed.

At the city’s edges, gold was massing. Countless reinforcements were already arriving at the city’s edges, ready to throw their life into the heart of the fight. A tide of gilded chitin that cared nothing for what it would crush next.

The Emperor’s Children withdrew. The city was not worth the performance.