by John French
Massak felt the warp pour into the chamber, furnace-hot and ink-black. Cracks formed in the air as a thing that flickered between forms stepped out of the edge of sight. The corpses hanging in the air burst into a blaze. Molten fat and burning blood spun from them, falling up and congealing into arms, tentacles, eyes, chitin, fur and quills. Massak drew on his will but he could feel the currents of the warp coiling around him, squeezing, suffocating even as he tried to reshape it with his thoughts.
He saw Dorn raise his sword, bloodied but unbowed.
Samus looked at the primarch with eyes that held clusters of dying stars. And it lashed forwards, the world hissing its name as it reached for the Praetorian.
‘No…’ Massak cried. ‘No, lord!’ And he was stumbling forwards, his axe in his hand. ‘Lord Dorn!
Archamus was at his shoulder, firing without pause. Warp-formed shapes exploded.
‘He cannot win this,’ gasped Massak at the Huscarl. Archamus flicked a glance at him. The front and side of his helm was a ruin of shredded ceramite.
‘We cannot–’
‘This is only a part of it,’ Massak shouted back. ‘A single hand of many. It is all around us!’
A sheet of lightning flashed out. Massak blinked away blindness in time to see the primarch ramming the blade of his sword into the beast’s chest. It withered and shrank as Dorn sawed the lightning-wreathed edge upwards. Massak felt a surge of power in the realm beyond. Red spots of blood blistered his sight. The daemon was straightening, growing even as Rogal Dorn cut it. It grabbed the Praetorian’s shoulder, claws burning as they touched gold. It pulled closer, the blade vanishing into its flesh, its other claw rising.
Loken slowed. His skin was prickling, his breath ice in his throat. Nothing stirred in the reactor chambers. Soot lay across the towers of machinery. White teeth grinned from charred heaps of flesh. There was no sign of living crew. The chamber hummed with the outpouring of reactors into conduits to feed the Phalanx’s flight. There should have been a company of warriors barring his path into this chamber, and a swarm of tech-priests and servitors tending the systems. He had seen none, just drifts of ashes. He was not alone, though. It was here. He could feel it now, gliding over his senses.
He blinked. There was light. Distant flickering around a corner, the blue of plasma.
He moved forwards, so that he could look around the cliff of machinery blocking his view.
A figure stood on a gantry that projected out before a pit of brilliant illumination. Beneath it shone a sphere of blue-hot plasma held in buzzing fields. Arcs of power flicked out of the sphere and burrowed down conduits lined with magnetic coils. Loken knew what it was, though not the mysteries of its working. It was a plasma junction, where the raw power of the reactor was pooled and then drawn off into hungering systems. The woman before it was looking down into it, light playing across her face. Blood dripped slowly from her fingers.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, taking a step forwards. A sound like wind whining through rock fissures slid into the silence. He had his sword in one hand, his bolter in the other.
He could feel the cold breath of the madness in his thoughts. He was Cerberus, the hound of the underworld, vengeance and death.
‘Captain Loken,’ said the figure. ‘Do you have a story to tell?’
He did not hear but took another step forwards, finger ready by the trigger, thumb resting on his blade’s power stud.
‘I can see it. I can see it all. There it is, you see, in the falling water…’ she said, raising her hand, and as she traced an arc up in the air, the world changed.
Loken froze. The reactor chamber was gone, the vast machines replaced by a slanting cavern of natural rock overlooking a deep fault. A spit of stone projected out over the blackness beneath. Water fell from above, spattering off the faces of the rocks. He knew this place. Even through the mist of madness, he would always know this place. This is where it had begun, where he had seen the first sign of what was to come: The Whisperheads. Sixty-Three Nineteen. The beginning of the end. All again, here and now.
‘Mersadie?’ he asked. The kill instinct faded. He was not Cerberus. He was Loken, captain of the Luna Wolves.
Mersadie pointed at the cascade. ‘Do you see your story? It’s there. Just look.’
He felt himself begin to look… He stopped. His mind flashed clear.
Samus. It was Samus. He snapped forwards, sword lighting, arm rising, Cerberus snarling rage and vengeance with his mouth.
Mersadie turned. Blood had run from her eyes and clotted on her cheeks.
‘Loken!’ she cried, eyes wide with terror. ‘Loken!’
His blow faltered.
‘Mersadie?’
She took a step towards him. Hands rising, fingers shaking.
‘Oh, you poor fool…’ she said. ‘No.’ And she smiled as her hands closed on his wrists with a sound of shattering ceramite and snapping bone.
Frigate Persephone, Inner System Gulf
‘Lord Sigismund, we are approaching boarding range with the Phalanx. The Ophelia and Son of Stars are locking formation with us. Coming alongside now.’
‘For our oaths, my brothers,’ Sigismund called, raising his voice over the roar of the ship as he brought his sword up and rested his head against the flat of the blade.
‘Stand ready!’ roared Rann, slamming his fist onto his shield.
The doors of the boarding gantry stood before him. Behind him and spread through the staging chambers was every warrior of his command who could yet wield a blade. They had taken a single oath of moment – find Rogal Dorn. The primarch was still alive, Sigismund was certain of it. Inside his helm, he watched the distance runes cycle down to nothing.
Too slow… much too slow…
The whole of the Persephone was shaking as it poured the last of its ammunition into the ships converging on the Phalanx. Sigismund’s force had left its slower ships scattered in a thin arc between them and the oncoming enemy vessels.
The deck around them was quaking as vast gantries extended from the flank of the Persephone. Chains rattled through tank-sized spindles. Amber lights flashed from red back to amber. A metallic roll of thunder boomed through the chamber.
‘Alongside now,’ said the voice of the bridge officer in Sigismund’s helm. ‘Boarding gantries in hull contact.’
Sigismund closed his eyes, felt his will pull the beat of his hearts down into a low drumbeat of calm.
‘Lord!’ The shout filled his ears. The deck and walls shook and shook again. ‘Lord there is a… distortion around the Phalanx, lord. There are things in the void–’
Something struck the ship, flipping it over like a toy thrown from a child’s hand. Alarms blared as the world rolled over and over.
The metal of the doors before them bloomed with rust as creatures burst through in a wave of wide mouths and reaching claws.
The Phalanx, Inner System Gulf
‘Look at him,’ said the voice behind Mersadie. Around her, the image of the Phalanx’s reactor chamber blurred and blinked into the image of a family house on Terra, then it became the cell she had lived in for the last seven years, then it was a dark cave filled with the sound of falling water. In all of them, Loken stood before her, frozen as he staggered backwards, sword falling from his hand. But his eyes were alive, and alight with pain. ‘Weakness is a habit, you know,’ said the voice behind her. ‘You return to it like a dog to its vomit…’
She felt her body move forwards and pluck Loken’s sword from the air as it fell. She kicked him. The force and impact would have broken her leg but the strength that moved in her was not her own. Loken’s frozen form tumbled back. The scene around them was still the cave. A black abyss opened beneath the spit of rock they stood on. Loken lay on its edge.
She felt her neck move, so that she was looking down at him. The sword in her grip felt light, it
s weight and bulk a feather.
‘Our dreams cannot change the stars. But sometimes, our deeds can change the universe even if it is only by accident.’ She heard the memory of her own words, and waited for the voice behind her to comment or laugh, but it was silent, focused on Loken lying on the floor next to the abyss.
‘You did the same thing with Jubal,’ said a voice that came from her mouth, but was not hers. ‘And then with the lodges, and then with Horus… Even after all you have seen and all you have done, Loken, you just can’t quite believe the worst is happening. And so you have hope, and pity, and so you suffer for your weakness.’ The sword in her hand rose, the point resting on Loken’s throat just above the collar of his armour.
‘And that is enough?’ the memory of Vek’s voice said.
Still there was no reaction.
‘We could let him choke,’ said the voice behind Mersadie. ‘Stop the muscles in his lungs. Crush him bit by bit…’
‘It is all we have…’
‘But I think this is better. Everything has meaning, and what does it say that this last lost son of wolves dies by his own sword.’
‘No,’ said Mersadie. She heard the word in her mind and felt it come from her mouth. The presence behind her, the shadow in her mind, recoiled. ‘I think that his story ends somewhere else.’
And, slowly, with all the will and rage that gathered to her, and the voices of the dead shouting from memories, she turned around and looked behind her.
Blackness…
Stars…
Moon rising above bare trees…
Cold light caught in the water of a black pool. A shape like a man, fur and flayed skin, shadow and blood. The man in her shadow.
‘The end,’ she said. The thing snarled, its ragged shape looming to the sky. ‘And the death.’
The sword struck the daemon in its throat and punched out of its back. Yellow eyes went wide. Shadows collapsed.
She jerked back, dragging the blade free, turning. And the vision of cave and moonlit night blurred. Substance became translucent, and for a second her sphere of sight was not narrow, but broad and infinite, and she could see along all the paths to the fragments of Samus’ presence. She saw Rogal Dorn, blade locked with a thing of claws and flame; she saw the ships trying to dock with the Phalanx while coils of darkness gripped them.
Then the vision went and she was looking at Loken trying to rise from the floor. The chamber around them was whining as energy poured from reactors out into the ship. The ground they stood on was not a spit of rock but a gantry, the abyss the glowing light of the plasma junction.
There was a dead weight pulling her arm towards the deck. She looked down and saw that she still held Loken’s sword. She let go of it. The blade struck the deck with a clang. Loken’s eyes opened.
‘Loken,’ she said. He looked at her and there was suspicion and rage in his eyes. He was already halfway to his feet. Fresh blood scattered from tears in his armour. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. She could feel a burning presence building in the distance of her thoughts, rushing towards the present like a thunderstorm racing across a still plain.
‘It is you now,’ he said, his voice hovering on the edge of a question. She looked just as she always had, bloodied but still the same. But that, of course, did not mean anything.
She nodded.
‘It is me. The… the daemon is not here now, but it will be coming back. And this needs to be over before it does. If it cannot overwhelm the ship it will breach the reactors and burn it to nothing. It wants to make it a nest but if it cannot, it will make it a pyre.’
Loken was rising, his armour grinding, blood seeping from breaks and joints.
She stepped back, shaking her head. The skin across her back prickled with static.
Black spheres were forming in her sight, and she could hear a voice calling to her out of the depths of her mind, coming closer like the sound of pistons onrushing through a tunnel.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said. ‘The… the thing I brought here, it needs me, you see. It needs a door and for that door to be open. And while the door is open, it cannot be defeated. It’s like a memory, or a story – it carries on for as long as it is told. But it’s going to be all right.’
She saw the shadow fall across his face, then. Saw the flash in the night depths of his eyes.
‘I am sorry,’ she said, before he could speak. ‘I am sorry, but I doubt anyone will ever know your story.’ She laughed. ‘Maybe for the best – it’s a good tale, but I have always thought that I would struggle to do it justice. Ignace would have been better. It would have looked fine in verse. The making and undoing of a dream by beings greater than men, but weaker than gods.’
She saw him twitch. Blood coughed from his mouth. He spat, shook his head.
‘I have always struggled with poetry,’ he said. He looked at the sword lying on the deck between them.
A heartbeat of time passed. He did not move. The sword lay still on the metal of the gantry.
Mersadie smiled one last time.
‘Thank you, old friend,’ she said.
And let herself fall back into the glow of the plasma conduit.
A howl of rage tore into her mind as a presence like night poured back into her soul.
She fell, and the voices of her past spoke one last time.
‘I understand you have a story… I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’
‘Which story?’
Oblivion swallowed her, and the past fell silent.
So fall the walls of heaven
Thirteenth of Secundus
The Phalanx, Inner System Gulf
Su-Kassen felt the world expand around her. Shrill pain stitched her skin. The fire and shadow filling the Phalanx’s bridge became a flat sheet stretched taut over the world. She breathed in. Sulphur and the reek of burnt metal filled her lungs. She felt bile rise to her tongue. Her head was spinning, echoing with the hiss of voices that sounded as though they were draining into the distance. She retched. Shipmaster Sora lay in a heap of many parts across the command dais. Lights pulsed red on consoles. Some of the human crew around her were sobbing; some were not moving. Some would never move again.
But the daemons were gone. Vanished away like nightmares after waking.
She focused on her breathing, and then on standing. The blare of sirens still echoed across the bridge, but there was no gunfire, no scream of blades. She still had her gun in her hand. She snapped its magazine open. It was empty and her fingers found the reloads gone from her belt. She looked at her hand. Blood caked her palm.
‘Admiral.’ The voice brought her head around.
Rogal Dorn was climbing the stairs of the dais.
There was shouting coming from the other side of the torn bulkhead doors, the clang of armoured feet, the whine as guns in the hands of the surviving Huscarls built charge. There were more Imperial Fists moving onto the bridge now. Some of the warriors bore the twin axe emblem of the elite Assault Cadre, others the black-and-white heraldry of the Templars. Holo-projections were blinking to life again, painting the sulphur-spiced air with a story of blood and disaster out in the void.
‘Admiral,’ said Dorn again. She focused on him. His face was streaked in soot and blood. The gold of his armour was scorched almost to black. But something in his presence held still the rush of her thoughts.
‘What happened to–’
‘The walls of heaven have fallen, admiral.’ She looked at him. ‘And so I must send you from my side.’
Loken limped onto the deck of the grey ship. It seemed untouched, as though the tide of neverborn had passed over it without realising it was there.
His broken hand rested on the pommel of his sheathed sword. His armour growled with every step.
‘Cast off,’ he said to the robed crew who glided forwards
to meet him. ‘Full speed to Terra.’ The crew bowed assent but did not speak. He limped on step by step. Light shifted in the corridors he passed through. The hull rang as docking cradles unlocked and engines woke to full life. He walked on, silent, hollow.
He reached the sanctuary at last.
Wide eyes looked up at him as he keyed the door release.
Noon shifted from where he had been curled on Mori’s lap. The girl just looked at him, fear in her eyes. The boy took a step towards Loken, and looked up.
‘Where is Mersadie?’ the boy asked.
Loken found that he could not reply.
Sigismund looked up as the image of the Phalanx became a golden speck in the darkness of the Persephone’s viewport. Before them, Terra shone. Shells burst in the night around them. The view hazed. It would be a short race to the Throneworld, a last journey to a final war.
He turned and saw Rogal Dorn standing a pace beside him. The Praetorian had sent his flagship out into the battles that still burned amongst the planets, but returned to Terra in person, the master of the citadel returning to its walls. The Persephone would carry him there, outrunning the tide as it rolled in.
Sigismund moved aside, bowing his head, waiting for his father to speak. The primarch did not look at him, and did not speak, but kept his eyes on the light of Terra.
Su-Kassen looked about her at the ruin of the command deck. Imperial Fists, servitors and tech-priests moved around her, securing the damaged bridge and repairing it as best they could. The dead had gone, but their blood remained.
‘Transmit the signals as soon as we are clear of the primary battle sphere,’ she said, to salutes and words of acknowledgement.
She looked around as one of the sets of holo-projectors activated and cast a sheet of blue light across the air. It was an enhanced image from visual sensors, a view of Terra alone against a field of stars.
‘Go,’ Rogal Dorn had said to her. ‘It is as we talked of, admiral. The battle will blood the earth now, not the void, but there is still a war to fight, out there to the edge of the sun’s circle. And the burden of that fight I must place on you.’
