Curse of the Wulfen

by David Annandale

  The sound of the explosion was so huge that it drowned out the cries of the dying, yet Harald knew his brothers were being consumed. He could feel the loss in his soul. In grief and rage, he rose before the gale of Guard of Frostheim’s death had fully abated. Icetooth’s hide smouldered. Patches of fur and flesh had been burned down to muscle. Matching his rider’s fury, he answered Harald’s command and lunged upward.

  ‘With me, brothers!’ Harald voxed. ‘Gather and face the foe together. Let the abominations break against the rock of our strength! Cavalry, prepare to rush the enemy towards the keep! Infantry, break with us and scale the walls.’

  The gate was rubble. There was no egress from Borassus. Scores of daemons had vanished in the crash, for all the difference that made. The tide of plaguebearers still ran high.

  The beast in Harald could not silence the tactician. The breakout attempt had failed. The last chance to escape the trap had fallen with Guard of Frostheim. One last charge, then. One last bellow of rage against the enemy. If the cavalry drew the greater part of the daemons away from his brothers on foot, perhaps the Deathwolf infantry would survive to rejoin the heavy armour to the south. If the saga of the company’s thunderwolves ended here, let it be a fitting conclusion, a song echoing with the death of countless unholy foes.

  Sensing vulnerability, the daemon horde redoubled its attack. The roaring beasts shook the ground in their raging hunger. A clamour of tolling bells urged the plague daemons on. Blades of disease and blades of wrath hacked at the Space Wolves. Harald’s warriors gathered around him forming a wall of snarling beasts and ceramite-clad giants. The constant barrage of warpflame struck more down with every second. The daemons of Khorne and Nurgle pressed in, the closing of a vice.

  Canis Wolfborn had come through the explosion with his face a single massive burn. His armour was scorched black. His eyes shone with proud anger. ‘Predators to the last,’ he said to Harald.

  Harald nodded. Canis was ready for the inevitable, eager for the kills he would yet be granted this night. This was good, it was right. Harald raised Glacius in his last defiance.

  ‘For Russ!’ he called.

  ‘For the Wolftime!’ the company answered.

  For us, it has come, Harald thought.

  He felt the hair on his arms rise. He was surrounded by foulness that would drive mortals insane, but something else in the night made him react as if to an unknown threat.

  A flicker rippled over the daemons. It looked like uncertainty.

  Shadows streaked across the rooftops before huge silhouettes struck the flame daemons and tore them apart. The warpfire barrage came to a sudden end. In its wake came a deluge from the air. It was ichor. So many daemons were destroyed in a matter of seconds that their end was a rain upon the battlefield. Harald blinked. The shapes were monstrous, but not as strange as they should be. He heard growls, deep and ferocious, and his blood stirred with recognition.

  His olfactory senses responded to the scent of kinship.

  ‘Brothers…’ Canis said with stunned awe.

  ‘How?’ said Harald. This isn’t possible, he thought. The shapes were too big. Too misshapen.

  And yet…

  He would wonder later. On every roof of Borassus, the daemons were being exterminated.

  Harald signalled the charge, and already it was no longer desperate. The Deathwolves howled their challenge as they attacked.

  The figures on the roofs howled back.

  No, Harald thought again. He cracked the skull of a behemoth wide open, stitched a swordling from head to belly with bolt shells, and again he thought no, torn by hope and unease before the impossible.

  Now the ramparts of Borassus were free of daemons. The figures that could not be familiar leapt to the ground. They attacked the rear ranks of the daemons, butchering their way towards the Deathwolves. They used no firearms. Some had punch-daggers. They attacked with the pure savagery of the animal, shredding the enemy with their hands. Their clawed hands.

  A greater monstrosity overwhelmed the daemons. The Deathwolves fought with the boiling rage of near defeat. Their every howl was answered by the giants approaching them. Now the momentum was with the thunderwolves. Now it was the daemons who were surrounded.

  Now it was the daemons who were doomed.

  The end was inevitable. It came quickly. And when the last daemonic remains were dissolving in their foulness, Harald faced the creatures who could not be there.

  The heavy moonlight reigned over Borassus again. Its quiet was broken by the predatory breathing of giants.

  The monsters were hunched as if ready to spring. They did not. They held back – for the moment.

  Canis was growling in unison with the thunderwolves.

  Harald looked at him. ‘You called them brothers,’ he said.

  Canis nodded, shook his head. He grimaced in confusion. ‘They are, but… their scent is strange. It is old.’ His fists opened and closed. He was caught between the signals of kin and threat. He was on the threshold of attacking.

  ‘Hold fast, brother,’ Harald said. His weapons held low but at the ready, he advanced towards the creatures who had saved his warriors. With every detail he took in, the vertigo of unreality grew stronger. They were huge. Very tall and massively broad, they dwarfed Harald. They were beasts.

  They were wolves.

  They hunched forwards as if running on all fours came naturally to them, and indeed their arms were long. Their faces too were elongated and hirsute. Their fangs were huge, and their maws so lupine Harald wondered if they could speak. There were still aspects of the human in the monsters though; he saw in those faces the thing he had tried to deny but could no longer. He saw the familiar. He saw kinship. He smelled it too, beneath the tang of combat stimulants and thick bestial musk.

  The wolves wore armour. How did the firmament not crack wide open to see such armour in this place and in this time? It was battered, patchwork, barely held together by rough welds, damaged almost beyond recognition. Almost. It was a faded slate grey, the colour of ancient history. The insignia were visible, though close to vanishing beneath battle scars. They were Fenrisian. They were known to Harald. They were known to every Space Wolf. Their memory had been faithfully preserved.

  They had not been seen for ten thousand years.

  ‘This cannot be!’ a Wolf Guard shouted. For a moment, Harald thought the words were in his head.

  No, he thought. This cannot be.

  The 13th Great Company. Lost to the warp in pursuit of Magnus after the fall of Prospero.

  The immense warriors grouped around the largest of them all. The night rumbled with low, wary growls. Harald maglocked his weapons. He held his hands open and away from his sides. He approached the alpha. The great beast watched him with amber eyes. He was so huge that his mooncast shadow swallowed the Deathwolf.

  Harald held the gaze of those eyes, even as he had to crane his head back. I do not come to attack, he thought, but I do come to command. He knew this was necessary. Yet he was closing in on a myth. It was an effort to keep the awe he felt from his face.

  He was only a few steps away now. He saw the beast’s features in more detail. The traces of the human were clearer. The shape of the eyes, of the brows – more and more he saw the lineaments he knew in his brothers, and in his own reflection.

  He accepted the truth of what he saw. The murmurs and warning growls of the Deathwolves behind him were an assurance he was not hallucinating.

  Harald stopped before the alpha. He stood straight, his gaze unwavering. The great beast’s chest expanded as it took a breath. The alpha rumbled.

  Harald braced.

  The beast lowered his head and dropped to one knee. So did all the others. The threat of the moment passed as they acknowledged a new alpha.

  Though he dreaded what these revenants portended, Harald was mindful of t
he debt he owed them too. He placed his hand on the giant’s shoulder and bid him rise.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  The monster’s jaw struggled to shape a name. ‘Yngvir,’ he said.

  ‘Are you loyal to the primarch?’ Harald asked.

  ‘We… are… brother.’ The rasp was entirely animal. Only the words were human. ‘We… are… Wulfen.’

  Why Nurades? Harald thought again. Now you know. He looked at the ranks of the Wulfen, and felt he was gazing into a future seized and made bloody by the jaws of the past.

  Chapter 2

  The Council of Wolves

  Dark Angels Company Master Araphil came to Borassus to hunt for truth. A war had come and gone, and it had left behind shadows. Summoned by Scouts, his company had pierced the warp storm and entered orbit over the polar circle of Nurades. At that moment, the world had still been overrun with daemons. By the time the landing was complete, the daemons were gone. How?

  The marks of battle were everywhere amid the ruined fortifications. The struggle here had been ferocious. The buildings and the ground were scorched and blasted. The walls were pocked with the distinctive impact craters of bolter shells. Other Space Marines had been here. Who?

  Until a few moments ago, the most urgent question had been where Sergeant Arhad and his Scouts had gone. They had vanished from all vox and auspex readings before Araphil’s company had arrived at Nurades. Now Araphil had partial answers, although dark ones. The shadows were deep, but he would hunt out what they concealed.

  He stood in a bunker, surrounded by the remains of the Scouts. The bunker had become an abattoir. The bodies were dismembered, heads torn in half. Viscera had been thrown against the walls and hung over the ledges of gun apertures. Even in the cold of this region of Nurades, the atmosphere of the chamber was clammy with the stench of blood. The Scouts’ armour had long, parallel rents. The sign of claws.

  Who has done this? That was the urgent question. The obvious answer was daemons. Araphil mistrusted it. For all the savagery, for all the butchery, the kills were too clean. Where were the signature desecrations of the Ruinous Powers? It was conceivable that the sheer brutality was a form of Khornate rage. Araphil was unsatisfied with that answer too. He sniffed. His neuroglottis detected the faint trace of animal musk beneath the overwhelming odours of vitae and of bodies turned inside out. Araphil could believe animals had been at work here but he could think of none native to Nurades capable of overcoming even a single Scout.

  Outside the bunker, squads moved through the wreckage of Borassus, seeking truth and secrets. After he had been called here, he had commanded the scene be left to him alone. He wished to commune with the space and the dead on his own. He moved deeper into the bunker, taking in each corpse, recording each name with a prayer and a promise of vengeance, eyeing the wounds and the manner of death. He kept his emotions in check.

  Observe. Judge later. Observe now. Let the shadows speak. Let the dead give their answers.

  To his right, there was a mound of body parts. Were there three victims there, or five? Perhaps portions of more. Something inside the mound moved. The motion was slight, a weak spasm. It was enough to dislodge a hand. Araphil knelt. He cleared away the fragments of corpse until he found the whole body beneath. It was Brother Dolutas. He was difficult to recognise: his face had been clawed to the bone. His armour was peeled back over his ravaged chest and broken ribs. Araphil looked closely, and Dolutas took a breath. It was weak, shallow. It could have been a sigh before dying. Then it came again.

  ‘You have been strong, brother,’ Araphil said softly. ‘Apothecary!’ he voxed. To the Scout he said, ‘Be content. We are here to give you strength now.’

  A blinking light midway down Dolutas’ right flank drew Araphil’s gaze. A servo-skull lay there. Its lower half was smashed and its gravitic impellers were wrecked, but one eye blinked red, red, red. The memory light. The servo-skull had preserved a recording.

  Red, red, red, the eye blinked.

  Answers, answers, answers.

  ‘There are other wyrdstorms,’ Logan Grimnar announced. ‘Storms with the same empiric signatures as the one over Nurades. The astropaths are emphatic. Some died as they confirmed the nature of the storms, and their flesh was marked by the same wyrdflame burns in each case. The storms are scattered, yet they are unmistakable.’

  Silence fell over the Wolf Lords of Fenris as the implications of those words sank in. Around the periphery of the Hall of the Great Wolf, heroes of the Chapter stirred. Serfs froze, sensing a rise in tension. It was, Harald thought, as if a great wind were gusting through the Hall. The totems and pelts on the walls did not stir, but the thunderwolves crouched at their masters’ feet raised their hackles. A raven took to the air above Ulrik the Slayer. Its caw echoed across the hall.

  In the centre of the vast space was the Grand Annulus. Set into the floor were thirteen wedge-shaped stone slabs, each marked with the runes and insignia of a Great Company. The Wolf Lords stood upon the territorial markers of their authority. One of the slabs was obsidian. It bore no markings. It was the painful absence on the Annulus, the break in the circle. It was the place belonging to the lost 13th Company, and so it represented all the lost. Only now the lost had been found. Harald’s gaze kept returning to it. So did the eyes of the other Wolf Lords.

  Krom Dragongaze broke the silence, speaking the question on every mind. ‘What do the storms portend?’ he asked.

  Grimnar turned to Ulrik the Slayer, standing at his side. He nodded. The Wolf Priest advanced to the centre of the Annulus.

  ‘I have spoken with Yngvir,’ he said with a voice ancient yet strong like grating stone. ‘Though his speech is difficult, he was clear that there are more of his brothers coming. On the wings of storm. Those are his words.’

  ‘And this return,’ Dragongaze said before anyone else could respond, ‘if these Wulfen are indeed the Thirteenth, why now? How has it happened? What does it mean?’

  The Slayer waited several beats before answering. Now the silence in the Hall was total. ‘The omen of the Wulfen is clear,’ he said. ‘If they have come back, can Russ be far behind?’

  The Hall of the Great Wolf erupted.

  ‘How can we be sure?’ Gunnar Red Moon demanded. ‘Where is the proof? How do we even know the Wulfen are what they claim to be?’

  ‘Their existence speaks for them,’ Sven Bloodhowl answered. ‘As do their deeds. They saved Lord Deathwolf.’ He looked at Harald. ‘You who are brother to more wolves in your company than any of us must feel the truth of our kinship with the Thirteenth.’

  Harold gave Bloodhowl a long look. The other Wolf Lord was much younger than he was. His hair and beard were a rich brown, and cut short. His symmetrical, rock-jawed features were indeed much further from the lupine than Harald’s. He would feel the complexities and risks of the warrior’s relationship with the beasts less acutely.

  ‘We are kin to wolves,’ Harald said. ‘We are as wolves. We are not wolves. You can see what they have become.’

  He kept his tone moderate, but his words enflamed tempers even more. The Wolf Lords moved towards the centre of the Annulus as they shouted at each other. Harald held back. He had expressed his doubts, said what he had to say. The monstrosity of the Wulfen gave him pause, and there were too many unanswered questions about what had happened on Nurades. He could not easily accept the Slayer’s pronouncement, though he could not dismiss it either.

  The other Wolf Lords were far more vehement.

  ‘Lord Deathwolf is right!’ Kjarl Grimblood said. ‘Look what they have become! An omen indeed! A dark one!’

  ‘How do we know they are really Wulfenkind?’ said Egil Iron Wolf. ‘Why not mutations? After so long in the warp, their Canis Helix could have suffered terrible damage.’

  Erik Morkai snorted. ‘Monsters or not, what does it matter? They fight well. They’re good weapons
.’

  ‘Nothing more?’ Bran Redmaw rounded on Morkai. ‘Is that the depth of your thought and honour? And my war packs, are we the same to you? Savages to be used up as needed?’

  ‘You hot-blooded fool, did I say that?’

  ‘You as good as did,’ Redmaw told Morkai. ‘If that is all you can see in the Wulfen, you are more blind than I ever imagined!’

  The voices rose in anger. Harald looked to the Slayer. The Wolf Priest was regarding him silently. Harald thought of the meeting in the vaults. That was the first omen. How did the Slayer interpret that night? How did he believe it linked to the return of the Wulfen? Harald was convinced the link was there. He could not divine its meaning, nor could he shake his unease.

  ‘The Fell-Handed!’ Krom was saying. He said it again, cutting through the shouts. ‘We must consult Bjorn the Fell-Handed. He knew the Thirteenth. He was there before the company vanished.’

  All eyes turned to Ulrik the Slayer. He shook his head. ‘Bjorn will not awaken,’ he said.

  ‘Good omen or ill,’ said Ragnar Blackmane, ‘we must find the others.’

  No one disagreed.

  Grimnar strode forward. The Wolf Lords stood still. They waited for the Great Wolf to speak.

  ‘Our task is clear,’ he said. ‘We will seek out and return our brothers to Fenris. Whether they are cursed, or whether their arrival means Russ will soon be at our side again,’ he nodded once to Ulrik, ‘we will know in the end. And know we must.’

  Harald nodded at this.

  ‘Brothers, make ready. We sail the Sea of Stars with the Wulfen to gather the Thirteenth Great Company!’