Mephiston: Revenant Crusade

by Darius Hinks

  His thoughts raced. He had shared in the glory of their discipline and restraint. He had seen the light on the horizon of their thoughts – the lodestar that kept them sane, even though the galaxy was not. They had shown him the route to self-mastery and, at the same time, his flesh still simmered with the fury of the warp; he had become the perfectly tempered weapon he always wished to be. He had harnessed the curse.

  I must find Mephiston, he thought, his pulse hammering. This is what he has been seeking. If he allies his great gift to these precepts he can unleash it without fear. The Sleepless Mile is exactly what he needs. He will become everything the Angel Sanguinius intended.

  Antros climbed to his feet, then had to steady himself with his staff. His muscles throbbed with warp energy. His time in the warp had steeped him in incredible power. It simmered through his veins, ready to spill forth.

  He extended his fingers and a blizzard of runes enveloped his hand. Blazing, ember-like calligraphy circled his fingers, describing formulas and incantations he had never seen before. There was no need for invocations – power simply tumbled out of him, part of his very essence. The warp was him and he was the warp.

  ‘I must find Mephiston,’ whispered Antros, awed by his newfound power and desperate to explain it to his lord.

  As soon as Antros spoke, Dragomir and the other Sons of Helios opened their eyes. Dragomir glanced at the carnage in the hangar, then fixed his cool gaze on Antros.

  ‘You saved us.’

  Antros held out a hand, extinguishing the glowing runes with a thought and gripping the mirror Dragomir had given him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You saved me.’

  Chapter Master Dragomir strode through the naves and walkways of the Dawnstrike, trailing a wake of bowing Chapter serfs. Everyone on board had heard how close he had come to death. The serfs whispered prayers as he passed, praising him for his bravery and determination, but Dragomir waved them aside, in no mood for their adoration. Whatever he had said to Lucius Antros, he had been sure he would find his brothers alive on the orbital station. He had spent countless hours meditating over their fate and the Sleepless Mile had been clear: they were alive and untainted by Chaos. How could he have misunderstood?

  He stormed through the hallways and entered his private chambers, closing the door behind him. It was a surprisingly simple cell for the lord of an army. Candles nested in alcoves along one of the rough-hewn walls, and the warm light flickered over his few possessions. There was a shrine to the Emperor in one corner and a weapons rack in the other. There was a small case of military texts next to his bunk and a rolled up prayer mat. On the opposite wall there was a small table, laden with charts and lists of troop dispositions.

  Cowled retainers appeared through an archway and fussed around him, carefully removing his ancient battleplate and taking it away to be oiled and anointed. Dragomir stood in silence, head bowed, as they dressed him in sackcloth robes and whispered prayers, drawing invisible shapes in the air as they bustled around him, dwarfed by his massive frame.

  When they had finished, Dragomir waved them away and sat heavily on the bunk, expelling a long, shuddering breath. He muttered a prayer and then leant back against the cool rock wall, his eyes closed. ‘How was I so wrong?’ he muttered.

  For several minutes he sat there, motionless, relaxing each muscle in his body, one by one. At first he found it hard to empty his mind. He pictured Lucius Antros as he boarded his gunship and headed off to search for his lord, Mephiston. The battle on the Horns of the Abyss had altered the Librarian. Dragomir was no psyker but he had no need of arcane arts to notice the change. When Antros bade them farewell, silhouetted by the landing lights of his gunship, Dragomir saw a new fire in his eyes – the same fire Dragomir had spent his own life pursuing. Somehow, as they fell through the warp, Antros had achieved the enlightenment that waited at the end of the Sleepless Mile. But how? He had barely even begun to explain the process by which one reached the Sleepless Mile. It should have taken years for Antros to achieve enough self-mastery to see his own thoughts so clearly.

  Dragomir shook his head, trying again to understand how he could have misread the signals. The Sleepless Mile must have predicted this, but he had failed to understand. He thought back over months of meditation, but all he could see was the ecstatic gleam in Antros’ eyes as he headed off to find his fellow Blood Angels.

  Dragomir was due on the bridge in half an hour. The officers would all be waiting for him. But he could not wait. He had to walk the mile. He had to know what he had missed.

  He rose to his feet, took his agora from his armour and placed it on the shrine. Then he unrolled his prayer mat and knelt before the little mirror, closing his eyes.

  He whispered the old, familiar mantra. ‘We dream, dreaming, dreamed.’ Then his breathing grew shallow as he stepped into the recesses of his mind.

  The visions came quicker than he had ever known. In just a few short minutes, his mind ascended from its physical manifestation, leaving behind the concerns of flesh and rising to the inner path. His cell vanished and ahead of him sprawled a vast road. Dragomir felt a rush of excitement. This vision was new. He had opened a part of his mind he had never reached before. He was seeing Holy Terra. His subconscious was showing him the grand, ceremonial route to the Emperor’s vast throne room. Legions of emaciated, hooded pilgrims stretched in every direction, singing hymns and shuffling on bloody, shoeless feet. Miles away, hazed by banks of incense-laden censer fumes, loomed the mountain-high facade of the Eternity Gate – an impossibly huge structure, adorned with so many murals and statues that one could study it for a lifetime without ever perceiving the full glory of its design. Most of the pilgrims would die, exhausted, long before they reached the shadow of those Titan-guarded doors, but they all knew it was a miracle to have even reached this point. Most pilgrims fell long before setting eyes on the Eternity Gate. These blessed wanderers would die in sight of the doors that led to the Emperor Himself.

  Dragomir’s mind slipped through the shuffling throng, catching glimpses of their gaunt, rapturous faces.

  He felt the same elation they did. This was the furthest point he had ever reached on the Sleepless Mile. He had never travelled so deep into his consciousness. He knew he was really still kneeling in his cell, on the Dawnstrike, but he had learned to trust these waking visions. It was not warp sight or prophecy – it was his mind revealing secrets he had hidden from himself. He moved, ghost-like, through the dream crowds and then, with a thrill of recognition, he saw the same lodestar that always led him through the darkness.

  At first he thought the light had manifested in its usual form – a glimmering beacon, leading him ever onwards to revelation, but as he got closer, Dragomir saw something incredible: the light was shining through the hood of one of the pilgrims. His guide had taken human form.

  The crowds ebbed and flowed, waving their banners and clanging their cymbals and the light vanished from sight.

  Dragomir hurried through his trance-dream, tumbling through the shadowy fumes until he saw the pale gleam again. Now he was sure – the light bled through the filthy, ragged cloth of a pilgrim’s hood. The pilgrim was as stooped and emaciated as all the others and he had his back to Dragomir, but there was no mistaking it: he was the source of the light Dragomir had spent his life following.

  There was no way of knowing if this vision symbolised the past or the future, or if Dragomir’s guide was, at this very moment, approaching the gates to the Emperor’s throne room.

  Again, Dragomir lost sight of the pilgrim, but then he saw why – the hooded figure was moving faster than the rest of the procession, pressing on towards the distant gates and speeding past the arches and porticoes that lined the avenue.

  Dragomir rushed on, his mind crowded with questions. What did this mean? Had he reached the end of the Sleepless Mile? Perhaps his brief sojourn in the warp with the Librarian had been the final step to enlighte
nment? Whatever the reason, he was filled with a growing sense of portent. This vision was far more profound and vivid than any he had experienced before. Perhaps his fall into the warp had unlocked a part of his mind that had previously been kept from him?

  As he neared the pilgrim, the lights along the processional road grew brighter, flashing in his eyes and confusing his sight. Towering statues of mythological beasts lined the walkway, and as the light burned brighter, the griffins and angels seemed to rear over him, reaching out in silent adoration.

  Finally, Dragomir reached the pilgrim and placed a hand on his shoulder. The pilgrim turned around and the lights blazed brighter.

  For a second Dragomir was too dazzled to see the face he had spent his whole life seeking. Then the pilgrim stepped closer and fear flooded Dragomir’s veins.

  There was no face inside the pilgrim’s hood, only the long, bleached beak of a bird skull. It looked blindly at him, but it was not just the absence of a face that caused Dragomir to recoil – the hooded figure moved in a horribly unnatural way, flickering and jerking like a badly edited piece of pict footage.

  As the daemon’s voice entered Dragomir’s mind, utter despair crushed him. He knew, from the first syllable, that his mistake was far more profound than he had suspected. His entire life had been a lie. The path he had led his Chapter down ended not with the Emperor, but with damnation.

  ‘We dream, dreaming, dreamed,’ said the daemon, its voice a chorus of whispers and screams.

  Its robes billowed as serpents spilled from beneath the cloth. A forest of black-eyed snakes seethed out and enveloped Dragomir, their dislocated jaws gaping revoltingly wide. As the snakes devoured him, Dragomir saw through the glare with horrible clarity. Finally he had the revelation he had sought for so long.

  All of the pilgrims had turned to face him. They were standing in silence, thousands of them, their hoods thrown back. None of them were human. They were a menagerie of animal parts and drifting limbs. Their banners were not Imperial relics, but the vile, decadent symbols of Chaos.

  Beyond them, the great gates had opened, revealing the throne. There was a god there, to be sure, but not the god Dragomir had sought.

  Dragomir’s soul screamed as serpents consumed his mind.

  But infinity comes, said the daemon, laughing softly.

  Chapter Eight

  Antros hauled himself from the wreckage of the lander and rolled clear as flames took hold. He had crossed the system in days, as he had promised Rhacelus he would, only to end his journey in a fireball. The lander had crashed into a talon of rock, a spur that soared up from one of the Morsusian mountains, and his roll quickly became a headlong tumble, bouncing him over jagged rock and creating a small avalanche as his power armour smashed through the blackened stone.

  He fell for nearly a minute, then managed to jam his staff into a crag and jolt himself to a halt. Pain suppressors flooded his body but the glyphs scrolling across his optical display reported that he had sustained several injuries in the crash. The worst of them was a fracture in his leg. His power armour was still intact but the bone beneath had twisted several degrees from its normal position. He could feel splinters jutting through his skin.

  The pilot remained slumped in his seat as flames rose around the lander, so Antros limped back up the slope in an attempt to reach him. Electricity shimmered across his battleplate as he leant forwards, forcing his way through the ion-charged clouds.

  He was still twenty feet from the lander when it detonated, kicking him back through the air. He crashed down the slope for a second time and when he came to a halt the lander was a furnace.

  He hobbled down the incline, limping over boulders and scree until he reached the bottom of the slope and paused to look around. Morsus was as irradiated and unwelcoming as any world he had set foot on.

  He cast his thoughts through the gloom, trying to reach out with his mind, but he saw nothing. Ever since breaking orbit he had felt a strange numbness in his second sight – a troubling blind spot that he could not shake. Now that he was on the ground, it was almost impenetrable, like a shroud.

  He held out his staff and whispered an incantation. The filigreed metal blazed into life, shimmering with psychic power. In fact, it burned with far more violence than Antros intended. It rattled in his grip until he could barely hold it. Whatever was dimming his second sight had done nothing to dull his other powers. Since his time in the Great Rift, he could barely contain the warp fire in his soul. It was exhilarating and daunting at the same time. With one potent phrase he could tear a hole through the temporal world.

  He carefully pressed the staff against his leg, muttering a few words of biomancy as the metal touched his battleplate. Heat pulsed through the ceramite, searing wounds and knitting bone.

  He unclipped an auspex from his belt and it flickered into life. He scrolled through data feeds and mine schematics until he found what he was looking for. The same life signs he had identified from high anchor. The storm had not thrown him too far off track. He was only a mile or so from his intended landing point. He glanced back at the burning lander, then sprinted off into the whirling dust.

  The auspex led him down through the foothills into a broad, desolate basin of charred earth. Morsus was shrouded in thunderheads that admitted no light from its distant sun, but the dark was pierced by lights from another source. In some places the ground had split to release a cool, lambent glow. Shards of light knifed up into the air, pale blue spotlights splashing across the belly of the clouds.

  Antros picked up his pace. Implants in his chest had flooded his body with synthetic cells, healing the rest of his wounds with blood clots and scar tissue. Only the arcane arts of a Sanguinary Priest would be able to repair all the damage, but he could run with as much speed as usual.

  The dust storms roared into him, clogging his mouth grille and clouding his visor, but he pounded across the rocks and soon found the remnants of a transitway. The surface was pitted and torn but more even than the rocks to either side. Within the hour, he reached the location he had spotted on his auspex. At the end of the transit­way, the track led up to a pair of doors. They were almost as big as the mountain slope Antros had just fallen down, and they were badly corroded – two huge slabs of rusted metal, wrought in the shape of an enormous shield, with the faint outline of an eagle just visible, spreading its wings from hinge to hinge.

  Rusted, burned-out vehicles were scattered at the foot of the doors; there was no sign anyone had used the entrance for many years. A great drift of dust and rocks was heaped against the doors – hundreds of tonnes of debris that had sealed them tightly closed centuries ago.

  Antros strode towards them, his mind aflame with the knowledge he had brought to Mephiston. The light of the Sleepless Mile would protect the Chief Librarian from his madness. For years, Antros had harboured doubts about Mephiston. He had seen him make decisions so perverse that they seemed almost heretical, but still Antros’ doubts were a torment to him. Either he was right and the Librarius was led by a lunatic, possibly even a heretic, or he was wrong, which begged questions about his own purity.

  He held his staff up into the storm and cried out a command. The cables in his psychic hood burned cobalt and hummed with power, jolting warp fire through the staff and hurling it at the doors.

  The entire, rusted edifice lit up with the force of Antros’ mind. A psychic tracery fanned across the doors, meeting in the centre and arcing out into the night.

  A low, seismic rumble juddered through the valley as the doors shifted, hauled by the tiny figure at their feet. Metal screamed and howled as the doors forced back a mountain of rubble, scattering trucks and bursting pipes with a horrendous din. One by one, the corroded hinges popped from their brackets, firing through the air like artillery as the doors teetered and fell.

  Antros was too far away to be in danger, but he still took a few involuntary steps backward
s as the doors crashed onto the transitway, landing with a boom and throwing up a wall of debris.

  When the dust settled, Antros climbed up onto the fallen doors and pounded across the pitted metal, heading into the mine.

  He expected darkness, but found light. The same blue glare that speared from the ground outside pulsed in the gallery beyond the doors. He passed ruined hab blocks and warehouses, all coated in a thick layer of ash and warped by the intense heat of the Morsusian rock. He followed the signal he was tracking on his auspex and reached the entrance to a mine shaft at the eastern side of the gallery. The lift was long gone, a few cables still dangling into the incandescent shaft. He clasped his staff to his armour’s generator and stepped out into the air, gliding slowly down into light.

  Antros drifted into the inferno for nearly an hour, passing more galleries and rust-sealed doors, before the auspex whined an alert. He hovered for a moment and studied the device. To his surprise, he saw signs of life just a hundred feet from where he was currently hanging. The original signal came from much lower in the mine; this was a second source of heat. Someone must have separated from the main group. Perhaps Mephiston had left the rest of his strike force behind and struck out on his own?

  Antros landed on the tunnel floor. It was a narrow passage lined with corrugated plates – some kind of ventilation shaft. It was so narrow that Antros had to stoop to squeeze his power-armoured bulk through the junctions and intersections.

  He was about to give up and head back the way he had come when he turned a corner and saw a man, crumpled on the floor of the tunnel, just a few feet away. He looked to be dead, but the auspex said otherwise. He was dressed in the uniform of an Astra Militarum officer so Antros hurried to his side and turned him over.