Event · M41–M42

Dark Cells Escape

The Dark Cells Escape was Cypher’s flight from the oubliettes beneath Terra’s Imperial Palace during the Great Rift crisis. The Dark Cells, also called the Black Cells, lie in catacombs under the Imperial Palace. They hold entities and artefacts dating to the Age of Strife alongside more recent prisoners, sealed behind rune locks, wards and sanctic circles, and watched over by the Shadowkeepers, a Shield Host of the Adeptus Custodes numbering some hundred Custodians, with a service entrance called the Door of Cogs used by Mechanicus tech-priests. Cypher, the renegade Fallen Angel, had been taken and held among them. No precise date for his arrest is recorded, but it falls within the period of the Great Rift’s opening and the warp assault on Terra that followed. When the warp storm broke over Terra, several cells were found empty and the Shadowkeepers stationed within them slain, a sign that the wards had already failed in places. Into this breach came a small Dark Angels force under one Mordachi, which fought its way into the Palace to seize the Fallen for itself and destroyed the cells’ generators; the usual redundancies did not hold, undone by the wider war, the warp incursion and the damage both had caused. Cypher and fellow Fallen named Azkhar, Bakhariel and Korlael slipped free in the confusion, evading Dark Angels, Custodians and Imperial Assassins alike, recovering their old wargear and destroying the Palace’s central communications hub before descending into the catacombs. Cypher’s purpose was not flight from Terra but passage toward the throne room itself. Through a disused way known as the Path of Martyrs the group fought off further Dark Angels and Assassins, reaching the Bridge of Ascension short of their goal. There the wounded Custodian Warden Hekkarron, acting on a vision of the Emperor, spoke two words to him: ‘not yet’. Cypher accepted the warning and withdrew from the Palace.

See where Dark Cells Escape occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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