'Halt!'
The two Word Bearers slowed, and turned towards the voice.
'Problem?' breathed Jarulek from the concealing shadow of his hood. Sor Talgron knew that he would be clutching his athame beneath his robe, ready to strike. Against those that approached, it would do little.
'Maybe,' he said.
A trio of Custodians strode towards them, artery-red capes and plumes flowing out in their wake. They came to a halt before the pair of legionaries, the bases of their guardian spears ringing sharply on the deck.
'Yes?' said Sor Talgron. His hand itched for a weapon.
The faceplate of the lead Custodian slid back, revealing the stern features of Tiber Acanthus.
'You are leaving us, then,' he said.
'We are,' said Sor Talgran. 'Dorn has ordered all legionaries of the Seventeenth within the Solar System to Isstvan. We go to join the muster.'
Tiber Acanthus nodded. 'You had some delays getting here? Servitor pilot failure?'
'On the ornithoptor, yes. A slight delay. An inconvenience, but nothing more.'
The Custodian's gaze lingered on the hooded and cowled figure of Jarulek.
'Was there something else that you wanted, sentinel?' said Sor Talgron, and Tiber Acanthus's attention turned back to him. His expression was severe for a moment, then broke into something only a little warmer.
'Merely to wish you well,' he said. 'It has been an honour to know you during the years you've served within the Solar System.'
Sor Talgron removed his helm to look the Custodian in the eye. The respect he felt for the sentinel was genuine. He extended his hand, and they shook in the old warrior manner.
'Fight well,' said Acanthus. 'May we meet again.'
'I feel certain that we will,' said Sor Talgron.
* * *
The stormbird descended, buffeted by the roiling eddies left in the wake of the cyclopean detonation. It came in hard, and the writhing, cloying mists clinging to the mountains rose to meet it, reaching out with tendrils of flame.
Jet turbines rotated downwards, and the gunship roared in under the deep overhang of the landing platform. Its clawed landing gear was not extended - the platform was no longer solid - but its assault ramp lowered, opening to the roiling tumult beyond. It hovered unsteadily in the air, shuddering and reeling as the white flames licked across its chassis and began to burn.
Two figures bedecked in flaming Cataphractii armour stood awaiting it, a charred figure held between them. Half crawling, half limping, they staggered towards the gaping ramp, dragging the lifeless warrior. It was too much for the first of them - even the immense void-hardened Cataphractii suits were not able to maintain their integrity against the ravages of phosphex. He collapsed, and the last standing legionary on Percepton Primus hauled the charred body up onto the ramp alone, pushing it in before clambering up and collapsing inside.
The Stormbird's vectored engines roared. Its hull was being eaten away now where the gelid, living flames had licked at it. It pulled away, its engines rotating, turning down towards the blanket of white-green death that was consuming the land below from horizon to horizon, and it rocketed skywards, screaming back into the upper atmosphere.
Only once it reached the void was it given a reprieve from the phosphex. Extended exposure to a cold vacuum was the only way to put out those flames once they had taken hold.
In the Stormbird's troop bay, the Terminator-armoured legionary held the burned husk of his commander as all the air within was vented into the void. Then he collapsed, finally succumbing.
'Infidus Diabolus, this is Stormbird AT-394, inbound on aft launch deck fourteen,' said Dal Ahk from the cockpit of the gunship. 'I need an emergency medicae crew prepped and waiting. Ready the apothecarion to treat extreme phosphex and void-sustained injuries. Priority primus.'
'There are no free medicae units, Stormbird AT-394,' came the static-infused response. 'The Apothecarion is already overrun with the influx of casualties.'
'I am bringing in Captain Sor Talgron,' Dal Ahk said, simply. There was a momentary pause, then the connection clicked to another channel. A new voice spoke then.
'Understood, Stormbird AT-394. A medicae team will be ready and waiting.'
THIRTEEN
'Will he live?'
Urhlan glanced back to the one who had spoken; the Dark Apostle, Jarulek. He stood with arms crossed over his chest. There were a handful of other officers and legionaries clustered around the slab. All of them bore evidence of battle, and most sported wounds of varying severity.
'I am surprised he is even alive now,' Urhlan said, making a vain attempt to wipe the blood from his helmet's visor lenses. 'I was surprised that he was alive when he got here.'
'But can you save him?'
Urhlan looked down at his patient, writhing on the slab before him.
'No,' he said.
'Then his fate is in the gods' hands,' said Jarulek.
Urhlan turned back towards the now comatose, twitching mass of chem-melted flesh on the slab before him. It was hard to believe that this was his captain.
'Get out,' he said over his shoulder. 'Let me work. I will do what I can.'
He was in the hole with Volkhar Wreth.
The predicant's chest was closed, the shattered warp-flask sealed within him. They had dropped him into the oubliette that Jarulek had prepared, and he'd hit bottom of the shaft hard - his useless, paralysed legs folding beneath him. The tight confines had pressed in around him, keeping him partially upright, but he was a sorry sight, crumpled into an awkward foetal position at the bottom of the hole. Jarulek had stitched his eyes open before they'd thrown him in. It was a spiteful act, and one that Sor Talgron regretted not halting.
They had then wedged flagstones and rock down into the oubliette on top of him, the first pieces lowered carefully, the remainder hurled in haste. Many of the pieces were large, the gaps between them substantial; he wouldn't run out of air for a while, at least. Finally, they had dragged the heavy stone altar back over the hole and locked the tomb, sealing it with chains and heaped rubble.
Wreth had been awake when they had dropped him in and he lived still. The things that had replaced his heart kept him awake and compos mentis, his sus-an membrane suppressed. How many years could a mind remain crumpled in darkness, conscious but unable to move, before he went mad?
Sor Talgron would find out, now.
He was in the hole with Volkhar Wreth.
They were pressed togeter. The darkness was complete, but he was able to see. He didn't question why. Wreth's breathing was coming in short, sharp gasps, and it became more rapid as he saw that Sor Talgron was so close by.
His skin was an unhealthy shade of grey, and thick purple-black veins throbbed within the meat of his body. Things were moving within his flesh; things that writhed and pulsed. He was an incubator, a host, and what was contained within wanted to come out. Sor Talgron could hear its whispering, maddening voices in his mind. It wanted to emerge through Wreth's corporeal form, to enter this realm of existence using his flesh as a gateway.
It was not yet time, though. Not yet.
What dwelt within Volkhar Wreth's flesh was but a tiny portion of its whole - the rest resided in the railing depths of the warp, waiting, impatient and full of hatred. It did not feel strange to know this.
'I'm sorry,' said Sor Talgron. 'This was not the way I had hoped it would be. But it is necessary. When the time comes, the palace must be breached. Anything to further that goal must be done.'
He could see Wreth's wide, blood-infused eyes. He was staring back at him, eyelids crudely stitched open. Tears of blood and hissing ichor ran down his cheeks. There was horror writ in his gaze - he knew that something was being birthed within his flesh. He knew that his flesh was no longer his own.
'I'm dead,' said Sor Talgron. 'That's why I am here. This is my punishment.'
He reached out a hand, noting in passing that the flesh of his arm was blistered and smoking, and pressed
his fingers to the roughly sutured wound on Predicant Wreth's sternum. The skin had not healed, and he pushed his hand within.
Things squirmed in the darkness. He felt them probing at his hand and arm. Then they began to burrow into his flesh. It was not an uncomfortable sensation. The worm-like tendrils squirmed up from his forearm, up into his bicep. They made his hideously burned flesh ripple and flex.
They wriggled and burrowed further in, up through his shoulder and then deeper into his body, digging around in his organs. One pressed itself up through his neck, making his throat bulge. It pressed up through the base of his skull, and burrowed into his brain. He felt the pressure of it pressing against his mind. He smiled and a chuckle escaped his lips at the strange sensation. He saw fear and loathing in Wreth's unblinking eyes.
Then the tendrils began to retract, and Sor Talgron's smile was replaced with sudden panic. The daemonic protuberances had rooted themselves in his flesh, hooking into him, and they would not release their hold.
He fought against them, but he could not escape their grip. They had bonded with him, and were as much a part of him as his bones and muscles now. They retracted back within their host - it was not its time to emerge, not yet and Sor Talgron was dragged with them. He roared and screamed and shouted, fighting them the whole way, but was pulled inexorably in.
His hand was still within Volkhar Wreth's body. It was impossible now to pull it free. In the space of a breath, he was pulled in up to his shoulder. He could do nothing to forestall it. Logically, it made no sense, but then the predicant's mortal shell being host to a daemon, the majority of which dwelt beyond the veil, was not logical either.
He felt the knives and bonesaws cutting into his tortured flesh, true, but it was a distant thing, as though it might be happening to someone else. He saw what was left of his arms and legs hacked from his torso, his limbs having suffered too much trauma and damage from the phosphex flames. There was nothing left to salvage.
His hearts were melted, useless things, and they were replaced with synthetic modules that whirred and clicked. His lungs were gone. A humming machine was doing his breathing for him.
'Brain activity is spiking,' he heard a voice say. It was muffled, like he was underwater. 'We're losing him again!'
Sor Talgron strained against the force pulling him into the body of Volkhar Wreth, but it was too strong. His world disappeared as his whole body was pulled within that infested torso. They dragged him in deep. He was hauled down and down and down, into the deeper darkness that lurked below.
He was dragged down still further, and the darkness gave way to a liquid, milky red. He was gone from the material plane and out into the roiling nightmare of the warp, and he felt monstrous eyes turn towards him, felt the pressing intellect of unattainable sentience there, felt the presence of the gods and daemons that he had always denied; beings that had been old long before man had come down from the trees and turned into the petty creatures that they had become. He was being strangled in the bosom of hell, engulfed by the tentacles of beings the mortal mind was unable to truly fathom. He felt the crushing weight of their attention upon him and he screamed, his lungs filling with liquid fire.
He struggled to free himself, to swim clear of this sickening, maddening morass of hatred and fury and rage, but he could not. This was his prison and his damnation, and what was worse was that it was one he felt he deserved.
Darkness closed around him. It was all but complete, when a golden radiance appeared before him. He looked up into the face of a demigod hovering before him, and he felt the strangling tentacles fall away.
My son.
It extended a hand out towards him, light spilling from every pore. He reached up and took the mighty being's golden hand. The demigod's fingers closed around his own and golden light infused everything.
'That's it,' said a voice. 'It's over. He's gone.'
The bloody, limbless thing on the table that had once been Sor Talgron was dead. It was actually the eighth time that he had died on the slab, but this time they had been unable to revive him.
Apothecary Urhlan stepped away, unplugging the machines that had been straining to keep the captain alive. Their beeps and whirrs became a single, uninterrupted whine. He was covered in blood. It dripped off his arms and chest in thick rivulets.
'It was always unlikely that he'd survive,' he said. He glanced nearby, where another legionary lay unconscious, his flesh pierced by dozens of cables and tubes. 'That one is doing better, though. The one who brought him in. Who is he?'
'Cataphractii Sergeant Kol Badar,' said Dal Ahk in a hollow voice. He was staring dead-eyed at the fleshy ruin that had been Sor Talgron. 'I thought I'd saved him.'
The master of signal turned and walked away, head down.
One by one, the other legionaries drifted away until Jarulek was alone. The Dark Apostle stepped in close, staring down at Sor Talgron's melted face. He saw something twitch.
He blinked, thinking he'd imagined it, but then he saw it again. An exposed ligament twitched in the right side of Sor Talgron's face. Looking closer, he thought he saw something moving within the captain's ravaged flesh, just for a fraction of a second...
He felt the touch of the warp, then. It was seeping off the corpse of Sor Talgron like an odour, and his eyes widened in wonder. Sor Talgron twisted on the slab, and his jaw opened, working silently. A beatific smile broke across his lipless mouth.
'Apothecary!' Jarulek shouted. 'He's alive!'
Sor Talgron turned his mutilated face towards Jarulek, his empty, bloodied eye sockets locking unerringly onto him.
'The Urizen,' Sor Talgron croaked.
Jarulek dropped to his knees. 'Lorgar Aurelian? What of him, brother?'
'He... He lifted me from the darkness.'
'Apothecary!' Jarulek shouted over his shoulder again.
'I saw them, Jarulek,' Sor Talgron whispered.
'Saw who, my lord?'
'The gods...' he breathed.
EPILOGUE
The angled prow of the ship cleaved through the living anti-matter of the hellscape visible beyond the oculus portal. Beings of raw emotion, manifested in forms drawn from the nightmares and horror-bred psyches of mortals, scratched upon the ship's Geller field, straining to breach it.
Sor Talgron stood upon the bridge of his hulking capital ship, staring out into the churning madness of the warp.
They had not interred him within the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought after the shocking injuries he had sustained on Percepton Primus. No, instead they built a new body for him - one of bionics, pistons, gears and synthetic organs. Almost nothing remained of his former self.
His face was a tortured horror of mutilated flesh and malformed scar tissue. They wanted to gift him a new one. Vat-grown synthcultured muscle tissue and harvested living bone. He had laughed at the suggestion.
His eyes had been replaced, however, and he stared out into the empyrean with a pair of black orbs, eyes manufactured by adepts of the Mechanicum and enhanced by his own prayers, exhortations and dark blessings. Attuned to the warp and its variances, they gave him a unique perspective that he found pleasing.
He was taller than he had been in the first incarnation of his life, that empty existence he'd experienced before he had come to his faith. There was no way of separating where his armour and flesh became one.
The Book of Lorgar was affixed to his breastplate, open to display litanies and catechisms of defilement. At his hip hung his helmet, newly fashioned in the likeness of a leering skull.
He had been reborn anew upon the apothecarion deck of the Infidus Diabolus. A new purpose drove him, a new conviction. A new path had opened before him. A new way.
The staff of his newly attained office hung across his back. It was a potent weapon as well as his staff of office: a giant crozius, tempered in the blood of martyrs.
He had lost fully two-thirds of the 34th Company on Percepton Primus when the Ultramarines purged the world. It was a staggering fin
al act by a beaten foe. Percepton Primus was forever tainted, but that, Sor Talgron judged, was a small loss for the toll the Ultramarines had inflicted.
He had lost much on Percepton Primus. But he had gained much, as well.
Clarity. Purpose. Belief. Faith.
At his hip, a warp flask throbbed. A heart beat within it - the heart of Volkhar Wreth.
'Soon, my old friend,' he said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthony Reynolds' work for Black Library includes the Word Bearers trilogy, the Knights of Bretonnia series and the Horus Heresy short stories Scions of the Storm and Dark Heart. Originally from Australia, Anthony moved to the UK where he worked within Games Workshop for many years before returning to his homeland. He is currently touring the world, taking inspiration from natural wonders that he can twist into devious monstrosities to populate the 4lst millennium.
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