Warhammer Wednesday: The New Chaos Defiler

I may be slightly late to the party on this one*, but I become aware that Games Workshop have released a new Defiler deamon engine for Warhammer 40,000.

Seeing this reminded me that there is a scene in my Warhammer 40K novel Iron Hands where Iron Father Gdolkin goes up against a Chaos Defiler. Iron Hands is available to buy as an eBook from Black Library, and here's an extract to give you a taster...

The wall at an angled junction ahead of them had collapsed into the defile, creating a slope of spoil and earth leading up out of the labyrinthine network of trenches. Then the Iron-Father saw a shape looming up over the crest of the trench, between the Iron Hands and the ordinatus, that made their struggle so far seem like nothing more than a combat training session.

The monstrosity rose up before Iron-Father Gdolkin and his battlebrethren like some obscene amalgam of machine and unholy warp entity, a crab-like creature in form, all pistoning claw-limbs, studded with snagging barbs and cruel spikes. Mounted upon this clanking undercarriage was a baroquely forged gun-turret tank-body in which was contained the malevolent entity whose presence leaked from the rusted war engine like acid, tainting the very air around it with vileness. The main gargoylemouthed cannon of the monstrous construct was ably supported by the reaping gun of an autocannon of archaic design. A robotic arm flexed and stretched like living steel, culminating in a mass of mechadendrite tentacles, writhing with an unnatural life of their own.

Above the thorax portion of this oil- and slime-dripping creation of Chaos, a daemonic visage, formed of rust-discoloured steel, stared down on the Space Marines, as if they were nothing more than insects, baleful witchfires burning behind its eye-slits. A ragged plague standard fluttered in the steady wind blowing over the battlefield above the trench line bearing the unmistakable insignia of the Plague God and the name of the blasphemy: Ebolus. It stung Gdolkin's remaining biological eye to look upon it and he could see glyphs of the Lord of Decay forming in the rusty scars covering the metal of the machine. Each joint was emblazoned with the eight-pointed star of the Fell Powers.

Gdolkin shivered involuntarily. The whole horrific fusion of machine and Chaos-spawned daemon drew a toxic miasma of noxious fumes with it, more polluting than the industry-ruined atmosphere of Fornax Orbis Majoris. It clung to the construct like a second skin, and made the air feel greasy. Sooty exhaust turrets coughed yet more foulness into the air from the impossible engine, pounding its pistons inside the machine beast like the beating of some daemonic metal heart.

'Ferrus be with me.' Gdolkin muttered, feeling the power source of his axe thrumming in his right hand... 

To continue reading the story, click here to buy Iron Hands from the Black Library today.

* As in about six weeks late!