Mortarion beat his insect’s wings and rose up into the humid air. With every stroke he remembered more of his purpose. At forty-nine feet, he recalled the seven times one hundred years he had searched the warp for the soul of his warlord foster father. He remembered constructing the machines that would let him peer inside the domain of the great powers to seek out the being who had enslaved him. At seventy feet, he remembered the first time he entered the warp, that exultant moment when he had scented his foster father’s soul upon the seething tides of the empyrean, and the endless years hunting over plains of living glass and howling sands, and realms of bloody wastes that crumbled and changed and endlessly reformed.
His foster father’s nameless kind were mighty in life, and in death retained their ability. He had fled, evading Mortarion for centuries at a time. His art had not been enough to shake off his vengeful foster son.
‘Yes! Yes!’ said Mortarion. ‘I remember! I remember!’
His sojourn in Nurgle’s garden had been enforced, he saw, to rest his weary soul, and sharpen his gratitude for the gift to come. Nurgle was a kind god.
At seven hundred feet he could see far across the steaming mires and tangled woods of the garden. Mortarion spied Nurgle’s manse, a crumbling edifice larger than some worlds, whose rooms held universes of delightful suffering.
A light winked on the horizon. A soul flare radiated panic that Mortarion could taste, a piquant savour like wine gone to vinegar.
He raised his scythe in thanks to the plague god, and soared away across the land towards his fleeing foster-sire.
Not long now. The effort of hundreds of years was coming to a close. The soul light of his foster father blinked and pulsed. The afterlife was a perilous place. Souls teemed and whirled in great shoals upon its currents. Some might return to corporeal existences, others became things greater or lesser than the beings they had been. Many more were torn to shreds by the warp’s voracious predators. Others simply faded to nothing.
Not his foster father. His xenos species was steeped in empyrical power. He remained whole. Might like that was rare. Though his kind were extinct in the flesh, their souls lingered in the warp.
Mortarion flew towards his prey. Triumph propelled him at incredible speed. The beating light of his foster father’s soul turned sour marshes into sheets of bronze. Such power was necessary to maintain the coherency of his essence after all this time. It was no avail. He would be caught. Mortarion’s foster father was afraid.
One moment the soul moved with the darting action of a spirit light, the next it coalesced into something approaching the form it had worn in life, floundering through the wetlands on trembling legs.
Mortarion dipped behind it and drove it on. A ghostly, alien face looked back, and the soul sprang up into a point of blue light and surged ahead.
There was no danger of escape. Mortarion had it now.
The Garden of Nurgle, if such a thing can be said to exist, is so vast that it has no edge. The pursuer and the pursued came to the edge nonetheless, a place where sopping lawns gave way to an infinity of surging energy. The line between the two was far from certain. The garden had a ragged coastline, full of bights and bays where the ocean of souls invaded into its territories, and long headlands that extended outwards in counter-attack. Past the contested territory, islands floated. Furthest out stood a lonely tree, its massive boughs dangling noosed cadavers. And there the realm of Nurgle ended in one sense, though not in others. Turned upside down and all about, and the landscape was different. Seen through another’s eyes, different again. From a certain point of view, it was not a landscape at all, nor had it ever been.
A burning light shone far on the non-horizon, a pure, ceaseless light. Mortarion kept his eyes from it.
Radiating pulses of terror, the soul of Mortarion’s foster father leaped from the edge of Nurgle’s realm and screamed in victory at its freedom. Mortarion allowed him these last few seconds. At the precise moment of escape, the primarch deftly hooked the soul around the middle with his scythe, and pulled it in. The soul’s cries turned to despair.
With deft, swift movements of Silence, Mortarion dismembered the essence of his screaming father, leaving it as glowing shreds. He plunged a bony hand inside his robes and pulled out a glass flask whose lid unscrewed and fell to the dying grasses without physical intervention. Like a child scooping fauna from a pond, he caught the glowing fragments in the flask, swishing it back and forth until not a wisp remained.
He lay Silence down, took up the flask’s lid and screwed it on tightly, then held the glass up to his eye. A tiny, screaming face manifested within and was snatched away by its own agonies.
‘On that day, so long gone, the Emperor stole my victory over you,’ Mortarion gloated. ‘At last my vengeance is complete. You are mine to do with as I see fit. A tiny prison to match the one you gave me. Endless torment, in repayment for your unkindnesses.’
The empyrean swam as in a heat haze, holes appearing in the view. The garden became less real, sinking back into the churn of the warp now Mortarion’s thoughts were elsewhere. Displacing the fading landscape and seething eternity was a room of black stone crammed with alchemical glassware and thumping machines that arced lightning.
Mortarion’s person and memory were fully restored. His bitterness multiplied a hundredfold.
Before the warp faded from view, he looked to the burning light in the distance and he swore.
‘One day, Father, I will come for you, too.’
About the Author
Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Pharos, the Primarchs novel Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.
As the Indomitus Crusade draws to a close, Roboute Guilliman returns to Ultramar to face a new threat – the pestilential Death Guard!
A Black Library Publication
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
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Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-811-2
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