by Graham McNeill. Art by Artem Demura.
In the Year of the Broken Trinity, the forces of Hell unleashed a full-scale assault on the Levant. While endless waves of infantry attacked the fortifications west of Aleppo, an armoured spearhead hooked around Aintab and pushed south through the Guillaume Gap. The fortress of Roche Guillaume itself was rendered impotent by an unending barrage of infernal bombs hurled by infiltrating Artillery Witches from the east and Sea Hags from the west. The strongholds of Bathemolin and Koumith fared little better, razed by goetic storms as the main force smashed through the Trapesac and Yaghra defence zones. With the road to New Antioch wide open, the Heretic spearhead angled eastwards to skirt the Lake of Antioch, a major site of ongoing hydroelectric development.
The nascent airfleets of the Faithful pounded the armoured column day and night, but their losses were crippling and the damage inflicted was minimal. Nothing could stop the Heretic advance, but the Duke of New Antioch conceived a last-ditch plan to save the city, one that would cost the Faithful dearly, but offered the only hope of halting the invaders. A great call to arms was raised, promising that any who fought to save New Antioch would have all their sins forgiven, and within the day, a numberless host of pilgrims marched out beneath a thousand reliquary banners, chanting the Duke’s name.
The two forces clashed just north of the Iron Bridge, but the pilgrims could not hope to prevail against such heavy armour. It had been hopeless folly to imagine any other outcome, but the Duke had not intended them to be victorious, only to pin the enemy in place by choking their tracks with the flesh and blood of their own bodies. As the armoured assault ground to a halt, engineers at the Patricius Dam on the Lake of Antioch destroyed the great structure and sent millions of gallons of water cascading toward the flatlands. Both pilgrim and heretic alike were drowned in the flood, or dragged down into the sucking nightmare of mud the plains had become. In the wake of the deluge, the sky darkened with the return of the rebuilt and rearmed squadrons of the Faithful.
Unable to escape the quagmire, the enemy tanks were bombed to oblivion, leaving nothing but wreckage and a scene straight from the nightmares of medieval prophets: a graveyard of twisted steel and flesh, of fire-blackened bodies and fused skeletal remains.
With the Heretics defeated, efforts were made to clear the area of unholy taint, but explosions of live ordnance and the curses unleashed from blasphemous sigils etched into the hulls of the wrecked tanks saw such efforts swiftly abandoned. Thus the area was declared off-limits, and a great cruciform monument was raised to commemorate the sacrifice of the fallen.
Yet there are many who risk life and sanity by covertly entering this haunted landscape of rusted metal in search of rare materials, weaponry, and fallen relics. Pilgrim cults drawn by the divine diesel fumes roam the necropolis, chanting mechanical hymnals to a bellowing Tank God of iron and gasoline, grinding tracks and shellfire. Even now, the Steel Necropolis is a place of horror, with agonised faces visible beneath the vitrified mud and the lingering death-screams of the slain drifting amid the maze of abandoned hulks. It is also a place of terrible danger, for thousands of unexploded shells yet remain undiscovered, silently ticking toward detonation. Even worse, the fallen do not rest easy here, and the spirits of the dead who burned alive in their possessed steel coffins are said to call out for rescue, only to slay those foolish enough to answer. Even those who died in service of New Antioch are still consumed by their need to drag those above to join them in the mud below, heedless of whatever higher power they serve.
