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| - There had been other Blood Crusades dedicated to the murderous will of the Blood God Khorne in Imperial history: the Odium Wars, the Coming of the Brazen Host, the Dominion of Fire, and the Black Crusade of the Daemon Prince Doombreed. But not since the First War for Armageddon had so many of the berserker brethren of the World Eaters Traitor Legion gathered under a single banner. The Cholercaust Blood Crusade's tactics were always the same: uncompromising, overwhelming and savage. Where hearts beat with the defiance of life, the goremongers raged, honouring only the razored edge and baptising world after world in torrents of blood.
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| abstract
| - There had been other Blood Crusades dedicated to the murderous will of the Blood God Khorne in Imperial history: the Odium Wars, the Coming of the Brazen Host, the Dominion of Fire, and the Black Crusade of the Daemon Prince Doombreed. But not since the First War for Armageddon had so many of the berserker brethren of the World Eaters Traitor Legion gathered under a single banner. The Cholercaust Blood Crusade's tactics were always the same: uncompromising, overwhelming and savage. Where hearts beat with the defiance of life, the goremongers raged, honouring only the razored edge and baptising world after world in torrents of blood. Inquisitorial records often identified the Blood God’s servants operating in wretched warbands that roamed the galaxy in search of slaughter. Greater concentrations of Khorne's faithful were rare, since the traitorous XII Space Marine Legion’s primordial hate seemed to extend to its fellow servants of the Blood God as well as the innocents of the Imperium of Man. The Cholercaust had been different, however. The planetary populations upon which it descended were always slaughtered to the last man, woman and child. Failed Adeptus Astartes interventions and Imperial Navy gauntlets had confirmed large numbers of ancient World Eaters vessels dating to the time of the Horus Heresy in the Blood Crusade's armada, which seemed to grow with every conquest. Some of those Frigates and Cruisers had not been seen for more than 10,000 standard years. Little was known about the Daemon Prince who led the Cholercaust Blood Crusade, the blood-spattered maniac who had managed the impossible and gathered so many of his murderous and fractious brethren in service to a single objective. He was known only as "The Pilgrim" and led his vast host with religious conviction, following the strange path of a blood-red comet that had emerged from the Eye of Terror into the galaxy. Celestial cartographers believed it to be the Keeler Comet, a long-period astronomical body with a highly eccentric orbit, recorded to have passed through both the Segmentum Obscurus and the Segmentum Solar nearly ten thousand Terran years before. Euphrati Keeler, the Remembrancer and early Imperial Saint of great antiquity, immortalised the comet over El’Phanor in The Ancient Traveller, a pict rumoured to hang in the Imperial Palace and reproduced across the Imperium. The comet had found the galaxy much-changed upon its most recent return. The xenos empire of the Eldar had fallen, the Imperium had been shattered by civil war and the colossal and permanent Warp Storm known as the Eye of Terror had erupted in its path following the birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh in the 30th Millennium. As the Keeler Comet blasted out of the Empyrean regions of the Eye, it became apparent that it too had changed. A blood-red beacon, it appeared to wander with a mind of its own and trailed in its wake The Pilgrim and his Cholercaust Blood Crusade. The daemons, Chaos Cultists and World Eaters Chaos Space Marines that made up the Blood Crusade seemed to believe that the cursed comet embodied the will of the Blood God and would lead them across the stars in a celebration of slaughter, right to Terra and the gates of the Imperial Palace itself. Hadria, Dregeddon IV, L’Orient, Callistus Mundi, Port Koronach and a hundred other worlds were all similarly butchered; all became victims of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade.
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