12. NEVERMORE (VI, 7K)

To date, Soren Volk had witnessed twenty-nine summoning rituals. Though still young, he truly counted as well-traveled and well-informed.

The first had been seventy-eight years ago, when he was merely a battle-brother, fighting a band of Ork pirates alongside the Black Templars near four star systems north of Caliban.

Everything had initially gone normally. The peculiar zeal of Dorn's most fervent sons had made their somewhat reckless frontal tactics successful. The Ork warships had all had their engines disabled after boarding actions, and victory was close at hand—as long as Soren and his brothers successfully carried out the decapitation strike.

And the mission had indeed succeeded.

That greenskin was dead—there was no doubt about it—but the Ork force that had formed under its leadership did not disperse. There had to have been an exceptionally cunning individual among them. Taking advantage of the chaos, it had forcibly seized command and led a battered little vessel away.

Everyone knew that one could never let a single Ork escape, unless one wanted trouble.

Forty-two hours later, they caught up with the fleeing Orks on a small agricultural world known only by a designation. By then, the Orks were almost all dead. Who had killed them? A group of cultists equipped well enough to be considered formidable.

The fleeing greenskins could never have imagined that, in some backwater populated by "humies," they would run into lunatics even crazier than themselves.

Ridiculously, according to the subsequent investigation, things might not have become so chaotic if they had not charged directly into the cultists' ritual site.

It had been a terrible day for every side involved.

For the Orks, they had escaped the wolf's den only to enter the tiger's lair. For the Black Templars and Raven Guard, hunting down the Orks had already been troublesome