A terrifying number of Orks would converge above their world.
That was no good news.
The knightly Constance Family was an ancient lineage on Aval, its history stretching back to when The Emperor still walked among mankind.
They had followed The Emperor in conquering other worlds and earned the honor of becoming a knightly house, ruling their planet and standing as one of its most important families.
Over tens of thousands of years of war, they had paid prices ordinary people could scarcely imagine. While those noble lords were still securing benefits for their descendants, the descendants of the Constance Family had already begun learning to pilot war machines.
In war, these knightly family members who piloted the machines put forth no less effort than the Astartes. Many had to learn from childhood to endure every hardship and overcome the things they feared. Their education was sometimes even more complex and varied than that of the Astartes, and they too received lessons in loyalty from an early age.
Only then could they inherit the honor of a knightly house and become knights who piloted war machines.
Of course, in such knightly families, it was much like serving within a Dreadnought. A single horrific war could see a child who had undergone more than a decade of training roasted alive inside their machine by its searing electrical systems and overloaded energy core.
Yet it was precisely through such generation after generation of sacrifice and death that they had defended their homeland, protected the entire planet, and even retained enough strength to aid other worlds and support other battlefields.
But now—
With the Imperium gone, they no longer had any trace of it. And because they were already so far from the Imperium, even though the Astropaths had tried to establish contact,