Aaron stared down at what used to be a person.
What remained of the officer who had greeted him just the day before, clean-cut, medal-polished, a proud servant of the Conviction Front, was now a half-melted shape smeared across the trench wall, like someone had tried to paint with a bucket of regret and entrails.
The man's helmet had landed upright a few feet away, cracked open like a boiled egg. A strip of parchment still fluttered from its side, scrawled with the words: "Canon is armor."
Aaron sat down, hard, on a box of sanctified munitions and buried his head in his hands. The ground trembled faintly underfoot. Somewhere in the distance, the Redemption Corps were dragging bodies, murmuring prayers that sounded more like surrender than scripture.
It was too much.
Too fast.
Too real.
Back in the dugout chapel, lit with sour-smelling relic candles and guarded by a trench bard with no tongue—Aaron found Aleric poring over a massive scroll, brushing ash off the margins with a toothbrush tied to a saint's fingerbone.
"Aleric," Aaron croaked. "Get me a map. The full map. I need to see it."
Aleric blinked, clearly concerned. "Saint Graves, large-scale military cartography is reserved for high-ritual—"
"Just give me the map before I canonize you through a wall."
"Understood."
Twenty minutes later, they unrolled it on a war-altar made from a shattered altar slab and what Aaron suspected used to be part of a tank.
The map was glorious.
Hand-inked. Weathered. Annotated in five languages—some divine, some just very confused. Every region was color-coded in ornate symbolism, with swirling borders of sunbeams and sanctified void-lines. It was beautiful, apocalyptic, and completely over-the-top.
And Aaron recognized it.
"Oh my God," he whispered. "This is it."
"This is what?" Aleric asked.
"This is the map. The one from the old forum archive. I saw it posted on Reddit. Someone scanned it in 4K. There were entire threads breaking down the politics of this thing... Holy crap, it's all real."
Aleric stared, baffled. "What is a 'thread'?"
"Don't worry about it."
Aaron leaned over the map, muttering to himself.
"There's the Golden Khanate, yeah, northern steppes, mounted necro-barbarian warlords, gold-skinned prophet-kings, check. There's the Sultanate of the Great Iron Wall, east of Baghdad, fortified doctrine maniacs with metal-minaret supercannons. And, there, New Antioch—holy siege state, center of fractured martyrdom theory. Still standing."
He laughed, a dry, borderline hysterical sound.
"They called this fan content. I spent hours arguing over whether this was canon. It is. This is all canon now."
"Of course it is," Aleric said solemnly. "It was spoken by the Wound."
Aaron waved his hand dismissively. "No, I mean internet canon. I saw this stuff on a forum between two memes about trench soup recipes and heretic pin-up art. Half of this map was built by people trying to out-lore each other for upvotes."
Aleric, confused and faithful, nodded as if this was a sermon in tongues.
"Truly," he whispered, scribbling notes, "the Prophet sees the pattern beneath the parchment."
Aaron leaned closer to the map. "But where are we?"
Aleric pointed to a small crescent trench-line east of Aquitaine. "Lower Sancta Patria. Sector Theta-Seven. The Wound marches ended here. We've been holding the line for twelve martyr-cycles."
"And who's nearby?"
"To the northeast, the Teutonic Fortress Choirs. To the south, the Papal War-Basilicas. We lost contact with the Iberian relic convoys. Rumors say they were swallowed by the Cult of the Black Grail."
Aaron nodded. It checked out.
He knew what was coming next.
And right on cue—
A scream split the trenchline.
A scout, mud-caked, gaunt, eyes wide with trauma and divine caffeine, came sprinting into the command dugout. He was missing a glove and most of his left sleeve.
"They're coming!" he shrieked. "The Heretic Legion! They ride on Wolves! They chant backward in the names of forgotten saints!"
He fell to his knees, sobbing, clutching a ripped saint's card in one hand and what might've been his own ear in the other.
Trenaxa appeared moments later, expression hard as relic-steel.
"How far?" she asked, voice flat.
"They crossed the ridge two hours ago. South flank. They—they're laughing, Sister. I saw a Death Commando dragging a priest by the tongue. They made us hear prayers in reverse."
Trenaxa turned to Aaron. "Get ready."
Aaron's stomach dropped.
He knew the Heretic Legion.
Every part of it.
They weren't just enemy troops. They were the corrupted index of the Trench Crusade setting. Stuff that had been argued over endlessly. Too dark for canon. Too edgy for official releases. Too terrifying to forget.
He had memorized the unit list during a late-night wiki binge while half-drunk on root beer and painting hazard stripes.
He recited them now, under his breath, as if listing nightmares might keep them at bay.
Heretic Elites – corrupted champions from every Order, wielding reversed relics, wearing armor that bleeds.
Heretic Priests – preach sermons that erase the listener's past three memories.
Heretic Death Commando – fast, brutal, surgically precise. Former saints turned black operatives.
Heretic Choristers – sing backwards psalms that cause euphoria-induced hemorrhaging.
Legionnaires of Hell – frontline troops with charred armor and flamethrowers that project despair.
Heretic Troopers – standard infantry, zealots with reprogrammed litanies burned into their flesh.
Anointed Heavy Infantry – massive, semi-mechanical heretics blessed by inverted sacraments.
War Wolf Assault Beasts – wolves the size of tanks, armored in relic chainmail, howling scripture.
Artillery Witches – bonded to living cannon-saints. Their shells are lobbed prayers, twisted mid-air.
Wretched – failed clones. Hollow bodies filled with echoing faith. Often explode into insects.
Mercenaries
Sin Eater – consumes the sins of the battlefield to gain unnatural strength.
Goetic Warlock – reality-breakers who summon errors in scripture to create living paradox.
Aaron pressed his hands to his face. "I am so not ready for this, we just finished fighting the swine cults."
Trenaxa handed him a relic sidearm shaped like a melted cross. "You don't have to be ready. You just have to exist. The rest will happen around you."
"That's a terrible strategy."
"Welcome to faith."
An hour later, the fog thickened into something closer to smoke, wet, clinging, intentional. It moved like it had thoughts of its own.
The trench line fell silent.
No movement.
No whispered hymns.
Even the relics stopped flickering.
Aaron stood behind the firestep, watching the northern edge of no-man's-land vanish into grey.
Then came the sound.
Not marching. Not chanting. Breathing. Dozens, maybe hundreds of breaths—deep, rhythmic, ritualized.
And through the fog, shapes emerged.
Massive silhouettes cloaked in burnt armor, their helmets adorned with inverted halos. Their banners were stitched with flayed scripture and charred fragments of saints' robes. One bore a totem made from a cathedral bell shattered and rewelded with heretical runes, dragged behind them like a corpse.
Wolves padded beside them, massive, armored beasts snarling through bronze muzzles, each flank marked by branded blasphemies. Their eyes burned like braziers.
Then came the standard-bearers. Not flags—but icons impaled on spears. Broken relics. Shattered masks. Twisted remains of faith given new, inverted purpose.
Aaron's throat tightened. He recognized some of the designs. Fan concepts from forum threads. Rejected lore. Scrapped ideas that never made it into the "approved canon."
But here?
They were real.
A voice echoed, not loud, not shouted. Just loud enough to carry through the smoke.
"Saint Graves," it said. "We remember. You left your mark in the flesh of belief. Now let us see if it still bleeds."
Aaron felt his knees weaken.
He didn't reply.
Aleric, standing beside him with his hand trembling on a flare trigger, whispered, "Do we hold?"
Aaron blinked.
And said the only thing that made sense anymore.
"We hold."