by Darius Hinks
Blood Angels had entered through another doorway and there was a brutal firefight taking place. The scorched remains of Adeptus Mechanicus robots were piled across the passageway. They were kastelans, venerable, armour-plated automata that would have towered over even the Space Marines if they had still been standing, but now they were just a makeshift barricade – hulking, blasted shells, piled with the corpses of skitarii troops.
There was a whole squad of Blood Angels trapped on the near side of the barricade, pinned down beside the chipped remains of the robots. Calx scrambled for cover, diving behind the pedestal of a toppled pillar. Bolter rounds hit all around him, filling the air with dust and spinning shards of stone. The proportions of these Space Marines were even more impressive than the Blood Angels outside.
‘Tacticus armour,’ breathed Calx, awed to be witnessing the creation of his great tutor, Archmagos Cawl. The Blood Angels had painted their battleplate red and adorned it with all the fetishes and battle trophies of their ancient brotherhood, but there was no disguising the work of his masters on Mars. These were Primaris Space Marines, the pinnacle of Adeptus Astartes power. They were goliaths, and their weapons were lethal works of art.
Only a few of the Blood Angels were returning fire. The grand narthex beyond the barricade swarmed with orks, all howling and firing their crudely made weapons, but the Blood Angels struggled to shoot back. Those that were firing were shooting wildly, blasting chunks from the ribbed stone overhead or ripping up the flagstones beneath their boots. Some of the Blood Angels staggered as they fired and others clutched their helmets. The chanting of the orks was deafening. The din was so great that the building seemed to judder in time with their cries.
The orks were changing reality with their chant. The architecture pulsed in time to their war song, becoming a great, slavering maw.
Mephiston stood calmly at the heart of the crossfire, surveying his reeling men with cool detachment. He summoned the magos to his side with a wave of his hand.
Calx did not move. The air was full of bolter rounds and incendiary blasts, but it was not the battle that gave him pause. Each time he moved, the orks’ chant threatened to overwhelm his senses.
Mephiston waved again and Calx’s legs clicked into involuntary motion, scuttling over the toppled pillar towards the Chief Librarian.
Calx clutched his head. This was the thing he had been dreading for so long – the soul-sickness that had taken his men. The pulsometer was the source of the corruption. The cool, ordered reason of Calx’s brain sank beneath a hail of brutal visions. They were all just hunks of torn meat, he realised, tumbling inside a pair of enormous jaws. Their flesh was worthless, a pointless encumbrance; he may as well burn everything down in a blaze of violence.
He laughed as reckless, destructive urges gripped him. The sanctity of this place seemed suddenly absurd. The galaxy was burning, so why not fan the flames?
Mephiston strode through gunfire and staggering Blood Angels, immune to the violence. Not a single shot landed on or even near him. But this only added to Calx’s hysteria. He raised his pistol and aimed at a column supporting the central arch of the narthex. The chanting of the orks swelled in his mind and everything became liquid and distorted, spiralling around the fighting.
The air shimmered with radiation as Calx’s shot tore through the middle of the column, adding more dust and debris to the mayhem. Calx laughed as the explosion threw the whole scene into a whirl of colours and shapes. He was destroying reality itself. All around him, he saw the Blood Angels joining in, tearing at the building in a glorious, riotous frenzy.
The column slumped backwards, tearing the vaulted ceiling, revealing the frigid skies beyond.
The orks chanted louder, raising their weapons in triumph, swarming over the corpses, thundering towards Mephiston.
Mephiston mouthed an invocation and reached up into the air, his fingers splayed. The column froze mid-fall, hanging over them at a peculiar, drunken angle. With his other hand Mephiston trained his pistol on the orks and fired, his hand kicking back with each blast as orks flew from the barricade, their armour torn open by the super-heated plasma.
Calx’s laughter died on his lips as a fierce, cold determination flooded his mind.
‘Mephiston,’ he gasped, as the Librarian’s sentience enveloped his own.
As the Chief Librarian took hold of him, Calx saw that the building was not warping and flowing, but simply crumbling under the weight of gunfire. Neither were the Blood Angels tearing it down – they were actually tearing at their own armour, clawing at their gloriously engraved battleplate. Several had fallen to the floor, twitching and thrashing in the rubble, just as he had seen so many of his own men do. The madness plaguing Hydrus Ulterior even had mastery over the Emperor’s finest. The Adeptus Astartes were not immune.
The wall of fallen robots detonated, hurling orks and machine parts across the antechamber. Even Mephiston was kicked backwards by the blast and Calx cried out as they both tumbled over the rubble towards the doors.
When the dust cleared Calx laughed drunkenly. A towering figure emerged through the banking clouds – a rusting, bipedal goliath, bolted togaether from crudely hammered plates of armour. Welded into its centre was a crippled ork. Spider legs of warp fire splayed out from its malformed head, kicking and lashing, juddering over the corpses and rubble. It carried a copper staff daubed with colourful paint and it was draped in skulls and animal hides.
The creature was in paroxysms, drooling and thrashing as warp flame poured through its limbs. Its spine twisted and arched in pain, but its jaws were open in a leering howl. Its febrile body hung from a lopsided, oversized head and its wiry arms were covered with a gaudy collection of fetishes. It looked like a performer in a deranged carnival, summoning madness from the air for the amusement of its audience.
The machine booted its way through the barricade and even the orks scattered, their war cries faltering as they leapt clear. They stared at the twitching figure trapped in its chest, and for the first time Calx saw fear in their tiny, bestial eyes.
The war machine was nearly thirty feet tall and as it stooped over Mephiston it threw him into shadow. The ork shaman jolted forwards in its cage, and with a rattling belch it vomited a column of writhing green light at Mephiston.
Mephiston staggered backwards, lowering his hand and losing his psychic hold on the ruptured column. It crashed down, ripping the ceiling away as it went.
Masonry rained down around Calx. He jammed another cartridge into his jaw and, as the blocks slammed down, a sphere of dented plates clicked into place, cocooning him in plasteel. The landslide ceased and Calx emerged from his shell, drawing his gun and scouring the carnage.
Mephiston was on one knee at the centre of the antechamber, reading from a small, leather-bound book. None of the debris had landed near him. His incantation had left him in an odd, bowl-shaped depression at the heart of the wreckage. He held the book with one hand and with the other he pointed his sword at the strange shape hunched before him. The iron giant was on its knees, like an enormous, chastised hound. It juddered with the effort of trying to stand and the harder it tried to rise, the more violent its tremors became, shedding rivets and sparks as Mephiston’s words droned out through the chamber.
The ork shaman in the machine pointed its copper staff at Mephiston and clutched its misshapen skull with its other hand. Its head flashed with blinding, green light and the ork howled, wrenching green fire from the heads of nearby xenos.
As the psychic flames engulfed the shaman’s head, the other orks became even more alarmed. Their war cries turned to panicked howls and they tried to climb back over the rubble, clutching their own heads as they reeled from the fight.
The Blood Angels gunned their jump packs into life, screaming across the fume-filled chamber and unleashing a deafening salvo at the routed orks. It was brutal. As they ripped through the orks,
chainswords growling, some of the Blood Angels fought with hands and teeth, discarding weapons as they savaged their prey. The comms tower collapsed around them, slamming enormous pieces of architecture down into the fray.
There was now a tornado of warp fire around the ork shaman’s staff, wrenching the walls apart and forming a column of whirling, aetheric fury. The ork shrugged off Mephiston’s psychic commands and stood, laughing through its pain. Emerald light knifed from its jaws as it raised a fist to summon more energy. It jabbed its copper staff at Mephiston and hurled a dazzling blast.
Calx flinched but Mephiston remained kneeling with his head bowed, as though in prayer, as he caught the torrent on his force sword. The ork howled louder and the column of warp fire grew in fury, forming a blinding sphere as it collided with Mephiston’s sword. The glare was so bright that Calx could see nothing but the rippling silhouette of Mephiston as he rose to his feet, dropped his book and grabbed his force sword in both hands, hammering the blade into the ground.
The light vanished and an ominous quiet washed through the building.
Mephiston dashed across the rubble, leapt high into the air and jammed his sword through the shaman’s mouth. The sword released the charge it had harnessed and the ork’s head imploded with a muffled crump. A dazzling fan of beams smashed through the heads of the nearby orks, creating a drum roll of explosions. Skull after skull spattered brains across the walls and floor.
The war machine toppled backwards with Mephiston still attached, fumes trailing from the shaman’s corpse. It crashed on to its back and the rest of the Blood Angels powered forwards, ploughing into the remaining orks with a flurry of chainsword strikes. Those orks that still had heads were dazed, scrambling for cover, and the Blood Angels slaughtered them with ease. The fight was over in a few minutes.
Calx stood up, stunned. Most of the comms tower had collapsed, leaving a ring of broken rockcrete heaped with xenos dead. A shaft of light broke through the gloom and flashed in his optics, blinding him for a moment.
‘Saved,’ he whispered, allowing the winter sun to fill his thoughts. The Omnissiah had answered. The Machine-God had brought these death angels to Hydrus Ulterior and cleansed it of filth.
The sound of fighting rang out again and Calx whirled around, raising his pistol. He was sunblind for a second, but when his vision cleared he saw that the noise had not come from an enemy, or at least none that he could understand. It came from some of the Space Marines who were wrestling with one of their own battle-brothers. He thought for a moment they were attacking him, but then he saw the truth. The Blood Angel was unable to rid himself of battle frenzy. The orks were all dead, but he was howling and clawing at their corpses, raging as he hacked and bit into their scorched remains. It was shameful. Unbecoming of an Imperial warrior. Calx looked away.
The gap in the clouds closed and, plunged back into gloom, Calx’s euphoria began to fade. There was something hideous about the sound of the Blood Angel barking and snarling. He could hear anger and shame in the voices of the other Space Marines as they tried to wrestle him away from the cadavers.
Calx’s discomfort only grew as his gaze fell on Mephiston. The Chief Librarian was silent but he had grasped the burnt corpse of the ork shaman and he trembled with anger, crushing the skull between his hands.
Calx was unsure how to act. Between Mephiston’s quiet fury and the ranting of the deranged Blood Angel, he felt he was intruding on some private moment. He backed away to the edge of the ruins and turned to look out across the fast-growing lake.
Through the battle fumes he could make out the rest of the xenos army gathering on the horizon. The dam was only one of their targets. As his optics whirred and clicked, Calx saw titanic war machines stomping over distant outposts. It did not matter. The Blood Angels had achieved this first victory with incredible speed. He mouthed another prayer to the Omnissiah. The Machine-God maintained balance and order in all things.
Mephiston still crouched over his kill, but Calx summoned the courage to interrupt him.
‘Chief Librarian,’ he said, ‘I have troops in reserve, beyond the dam.’ He climbed over the corpses, back to Mephiston. ‘If you give me time, I can rally them. It would be an honour to join you when you make your next attack.’
Calx backed away as Mephiston turned to face him. His porcelain skin had shattered. It was crisscrossed by hundreds of hairline cracks and each one leaked dark fire. Mephiston was bathed in a dark nimbus – a swirling, fume-like halo that boiled across his armour. There was terrible violence burning in the Chief Librarian’s eyes.
‘I am still blind,’ said Mephiston, his calm tones in sharp contrast to the anger contorting his face. He was not looking at Calx, but at one of the other Space Marines. It was another Librarian, dressed in the blue of that discipline, and he was the first Space Marine Calx had ever seen to look old. His skin had the smooth, hardened texture of polished bark and the silver bristles of his beard were like short iron blades.
The Librarian had been helping subdue the ranting Blood Angel, but at Mephiston’s words he loosed his grip and came to study the fallen war machine. ‘But the madness. It came from here. I felt you end it.’
Mephiston stared up at the leaden sky and whispered a venomous curse.
The ground shuddered beneath him. There was a loud cracking sound as the flagstones began to tear. Calx stumbled as the ground opened up next to him.
‘My lord!’ cried the veteran Librarian, grabbing Mephiston’s arm. ‘Do not do this. Not here. Do not let the others see. There is still time. We will study the auguries again.’
To Calx’s relief, Mephiston seemed to hear his battle-brother. He gripped him by the shoulder and nodded, closing his eyes. ‘The rift, Rhacelus. We have so little time.’
‘We can be gone within the hour. The Blood Oath is still at low anchor. Antros is waiting.’
Despite his fear, Calx found himself speaking up. ‘Gone?’
The two Blood Angels turned to face him and he felt insect-like beneath their gaze. They looked as though they could barely conceive of so lowly a being.
Calx waved at the distant armies on the horizon. ‘I would not presume to…’ His voice faltered as they continued glaring down at him. He tried to quash the dreadful realisation forming in his mind. ‘I mean… Would it not be better to continue your offensive immediately? The other greenskins will soon learn what happened here.’
Mephiston shook his head. His appearance was now as it had been when Calx first saw him. The strange, ebon fire had gone, but there was still a terrible intensity to his stare.
‘There is no offensive.’ Mephiston looked out across the lake of corpses he had created. Burning oil had turned the valley into a funeral pyre. Blackened husks floated through the inferno and the smoke played games with distance and size, making it hard to distinguish ruined vehicles from scorched cadavers. Along with the orks, Mephiston had killed countless hundreds of humans.
As he surveyed the destruction he had wrought, Calx saw a new emotion cross Mephiston’s face – confusion, perhaps, or maybe recognition, Calx could not tell. It vanished as quickly as it came, replaced by an expressionless mask. ‘This is not my fight,’ said Mephiston. ‘My duties require me to be elsewhere.’
Cold horror settled over Calx. ‘Elsewhere? Then why did you come here?’
‘I thought this world was the source of my blindness.’ He muttered something Calx could not quite hear.
‘Blindness?’ Calx tried to stand. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Of course not,’ said Mephiston. Then he noticed something on one of the dead Guardsmen and stooped to examine the corpse.
The other Librarian approached and helped Calx to his feet. His expression was just as imperious as Mephiston’s but when he spoke there was, if not sympathy, at least a hint that he understood Calx’s desperation.
‘We have other matters to pursue
, magos. The Great Rift grows wider by the day. The final battle is upon us. Lord Mephiston has a great task ahead of him. But we will alert the rest of the fleet to your situation. There may be others in the sector who can aid you.’
Calx stared at the ruined dam. ‘Why did you do this, if not to save us?’
‘Save you?’ Mephiston stood and looked at Calx. He was holding something he had snapped from the Guardsman’s neck – a small, oval locket. It glinted in the dull light as he secreted it in his robes. ‘That is exactly what I intend to do, Magos Calx.’
Mephiston nodded at the other Librarian. ‘Summon the ships. There is nothing more for us here.’
Calx fell back against the ruined walls and stared into the distance. Even from here, he could see the orks massing, preparing to attack in force.
He started to pray.
Chapter Two
As always, it was the curse that called him home. Hunger pulsed through his veins, reminding him that he had veins, and his hearts lurched, reminding him to move. The bloodline, bane and blessing, hauled him back to life.
He rose from the abyss, a broken shadow trailing shards of memory. He saw Dante, lord, general, Chapter Master – pure and noble as his Sanguinius mask, unbowed despite everything he had faced. He saw home: blessed, indomitable Baal, burned and defiled by xenos too strange to comprehend their own barbarism. Above it all, he saw the face of the Great Enemy, coursing through the stars, an untrammelled fire, devouring, brazen, emboldened – revelling in the wound it had burned through the galaxy.
Faces and memories spiralled around him, illuminating and bewildering. The history of the universe became a moment trapped in his mind and he saw everything.
Everything, that is, but his own name.
Again, he caught the scent of blood. His pulse leapt in response and his jaws ached with the need to clamp and tear. The ancient hunger. So ugly and debased. It was bestial and shameful but it drew him back to a fixed moment of temporality.
