THE HORUS HERESY
Mitchel Scanlon
DESCENT OF ANGELS
Loyalty and honour
v1.2 (2011.11)
The Horus Heresy
It is a time of legend.
Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history. The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.
First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat. Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.
Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme, and his ambtion knows no bounds.
The stage has been set.
CONTENTS
DESCENT OF ANGELS
The Horus Heresy
CONTENTS
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
PRELUDE
BOOK ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
BOOK TWO
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
BOOK THREE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
BOOK FOUR
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
AFTERMATH
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Order
LION EL’JONSON, Commander of the Order
LUTHER, Second in command of the Order
ZAHARIEL, Knight Supplicant of the Order
NEMIEL, Knight Supplicant of the Order
MASTER RAMIEL, Training Master of the Order
LORD CYPHER, Guardian of the Order’s traditions
BROTHER AMADIS, The Hero of Maponis, Battle Knight of the Order
SAR HADARIEL, Battle Knight of the Order
ATTIAS, Knight Supplicant of the Order
ELIATH, Knight Supplicant of the Order
The Knights of Lupus
LORD SARTANA, Master of the Knights of Lupus
The Dark Angels
BROTHER LIBRARIAN ISRAFAEL, Chief Librarian of the Dark Angels
The White Scars
SHANG KHAN, Leader of White Scars Expeditionary Force Bearers
KURGIS, Astartes battle-brother of the 7th Chapter
The Saroshi
LORD HIGH EXALTER, Leader of the Saroshi Bureaucracy
DUSAN, Saroshi exegetist
Non-Imperials
LORD GOVERNOR ELECT HARLAD FURT, Overseer of the Sarosh territories
CAPTAIN STENIUS, Captain of the Invincible Reason
MISTRESS ARGENTA, Fleet Astropath, Invincible Reason
RHIANNA SOREL, Composer and Harmonist
PRELUDE
IT BEGINS ON Caliban.
It begins back before the Emperor came to our planet, before there was even the first talk of angels. Caliban was different then. We knew nothing of the Imperium and the Great Crusade. Terra was a myth, no, not even that. Terra was a myth of a ghost of a memory brought to us by our long-dead forefathers. It was an ephemeral and half-forgotten thing with no bearing on our lives.
It was the time of Old Night. Warp storms had made it impossible to travel between the stars and each human world was left to fend for itself. We had passed more than five thousand years in isolation from the rest of humanity: five thousand years. Can you imagine how long that is? Time enough for the people of Caliban to develop our own culture, our own ways, drawing from the patterns of the past, but separate from what had gone before. Free from the influence of Terra, our society had developed in a manner more in keeping with the world in which we lived.
We had our own beliefs and customs, aye, even our own religions.
There’s precious little of it left now, of course. It was all swept away by the coming of the Emperor. It is amazing to me, but there are children born of Caliban today who have never even heard of the Watchers or ridden a mighty warhorse. They have never known what it is to hunt the great beasts. This is the sorrow of our lives. Over time, the old ways are forgotten. Naturally, those who came in the Emperor’s wake claimed this was all to the good. We are making a new world, a better world: a world fit for the future.
We are making a better world.
It is always the way with conquerors. They don’t say they have come to destroy your traditions. They don’t talk about banishing the wisdoms of your grandfathers, turning the world upside-down, or replacing your ancient beliefs with a strange new creed of their devising. No one willingly admits they want to undermine your society’s foundations and kill its dreams. Instead, they talk about saving you from your ignorance. I suppose they think it sounds kinder that way.
But the truth of it remains the same, regardless.
I am getting ahead of myself though, for at this moment in Caliban’s history, all these things were unknown to us. In time, the Emperor would descend from the heavens with his angels, and everything would change. The Great Crusade had not yet reached us. We were innocent of the wider galaxy. Caliban was the sum total of our experience, and we were content in our ignorance, unaware of the forces heading towards us and how much they would transform our lives.
In those days, Caliban was a world of forests. Except for a few places given over to settlement or agriculture, the entire planet was covered in primordial, shadow haunted woodland. The forest defined our lives. Unless a man made his home in the mountains or lived near the coast, he could spend his entire life without once seeing an open horizon.
Our planet was also the domain of monsters.
The forests teemed with predators, not to mention all manner of other hazards. To use a word we didn’t know then, a word taken from the lexicon of Imperial Cartography, Caliban is a death world. There isn’t much here that is not capable of killing a man, one way or another. Carnivorous animals, poisonous flowers, venomous insects: the creatures of this world only know one law and that is ‘‘kill’’ or be ‘‘killed’’.
Of all the dangers to human life, there was one class of creatures that was always viewed as being set apart from the rest. They were more fearsome and brutal than any other animal we knew.
I am talking about the creatures we called the great beasts.
Each great beast of Caliban was as different from its fellows as a sword is different from a lance. Each creature represented the only example of its kind, a species of one. Their diversity was extraordinary. An individual beast might appear to be modelled after a reptile, or a mammal, or an insect, or else combine the features of all of them taken together in chaotic collaboration.
One might attack with tooth and claw, another with beak and tentacle, ano
ther using horns and hooves, while yet another might spit corrosive poison or bleed acid in place of blood. If they had one dominant feature, it was that every one of them appeared to be crafted directly from the stuff of nightmares. Allied to that, they each possessed qualities of size, strength, ferocity and cunning that made them the match of any ordinary human hunter, no matter how well-armed he might be.
It would not be overstating the case to say that the great beasts ruled the forests. Many of the customs we developed on Caliban owed their origins to the beasts’ presence. For humanity to survive we had to be able to hold the beasts at bay. Accordingly, knightly orders were formed among the nobility to create warriors of exemplary skill and ability, armed to the highest standards, and trained to protect human society against the worst predations of these monsters.
They were aided in this by the persistence of certain traditions in the making of weapons and armour. Most of the technology our distant ancestors brought with them to Caliban had been forgotten in our isolation, but the knowledge of how to repair and maintain pistols and explosive bolts, swords with motorised blades, and armour that boosted a warrior’s strength and power had been preserved. Granted, they were relatively primitive versions and they lacked the reliability of the more powerful models later brought to Caliban by the Imperials, but they were effective all the same. We had no motor vehicles, so the knights of Caliban rode to war on the backs of destriers – enormous warhorses selectively bred over thousands of years from the equine bloodstock brought to our world by its first settlers.
In due course, the knightly orders went on to build the great fortress monasteries that still serve as many of the major places of settlement in modern Caliban. Whenever one of the beasts began to prey on a settlement, the leader of the local nobility would declare a hunting quest against the creature. In response, knights and knights-supplicant would come to the area from every land, seeking to prove themselves by killing the beast and completing the quest.
This, then, was the pattern of life on Caliban for countless generations. We expected it to continue indefinitely. We thought our lives would follow the same well-trodden path as the lives of our fathers and grandfathers.
We were wrong, of course. The universe had other plans for us.
The Emperor was coming, but the first currents of change in our society were already at work long before his arrival. Some time before the Emperor came to Caliban, a new knightly order had been founded among our people. It called itself simply ‘the Order’, and its members put forward the startling proposition that all men were created equal.
Previously, it had been traditional for knights to be recruited strictly and solely from among the nobility, but the Order broke with accepted practice to recruit from all layers of society. So long as an individual could prove by his deeds and his character that he was worthy of knighthood, the Order did not care whether he was a noble or a commoner.
It may seem a minor matter now, but the issue sparked no small amount of turmoil and controversy at the time. Traditionalist diehards among the more established orders regarded it as the thin end of a wedge that they thought would inevitably bring the whole edifice of our culture crashing down, and leave us as easy prey for the great beasts. In one case, this issue even led to open warfare.
A group calling itself the Knights of the Crimson Chalice attacked the Order’s mountain fortress at Aldurukh and laid siege to it. In what would later be seen as one of the defining moments of Caliban’s pre-Imperial history, the knights of the Order sallied forth and counter-attacked before the enemy had completed their siege lines.
The resulting battle was decisive. The Knights of the Crimson Chalice were routed, and the survivors hunted down to the last man. With this victory, the future progress of the Order was guaranteed. Supplicants flocked to them from all walks of life and, within the space of barely a few decades, the Order had become one of the most powerful and well-regarded knightly groups on Caliban.
This was only the beginning, however. Whatever subtle changes were brought to our society by the rise to prominence of the Order were as nothing compared to what would happen when the Lion came to Caliban.
With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Lion El’Jonson is one of the primarchs, wrought in gene-labs by the Emperor to lead the armies of his angels, but at the time he was far more extraordinary to us.
We were not an unsophisticated people, nor were we primitives. Imagine the effect, though, as word spread across our planet that a man had been found living wild, like an animal, in the deep forests of the Great Northwilds, his features handsome and beautiful beneath the matted hair and the mud caked to his body.
No one knew who he was, and he spoke not a word of human language. He had survived for years, naked and unarmed, in the wilderness of the most dangerous region on Caliban – a place where even fully armoured knights hesitated to venture unless as part of a larger group. Nor was it the end of the wonders associated with this strange figure.
In light of the details of his discovery, the wild man came to be called Lion El’Jonson, meaning ‘‘The Lion, the Son of the Forest’’ in the old tongue of Caliban. Having been brought to human society, Jonson soon demonstrated a prodigious talent for learning.
He quickly assimilated human ways, learning the habit of speech within a matter of days. From there, his rate of progress increased exponentially. Within a few short months, he was the equal in mind of our finest savants. A month later, he had exceeded their greatest achievements and left them trailing in his wake.
He never spoke of his days in the forest, nor could he account for how he had come to be living there or where he had come from, but his powers of reason and intelligence seemed unaffected by his time in the wilderness.
His intellectual capacity was matched only by his physical power. None could match his strength or prowess in combat, and he swiftly mastered the skills of knighthood to be accepted into the Order.
As might be expected, given his abilities, Jonson rapidly ascended through the Order’s ranks. His achievements were legendary, and coupled with a natural talent to inspire intense devotion in others, his presence soon led to a marked upsurge in recruitment. As the number of knights within the Order increased, and new fortress monasteries were built to accommodate them, Jonson and his supporters started to press for a crusade to be mounted against the great beasts. Their proposal called for a systematic campaign to clear the beasts from the forests, region by region, until Caliban was finally free from their scourge.
Objections were raised to the proposal, of course. The Order was the dominant military power on Caliban, but it was still only first among equals in the eyes of the other knightly orders. Given the size of the scheme Jonson had put forward, it would require the actions of every knightly order working in unison to a common plan to have any hope of succeeding. This was no small undertaking, considering that the knights of Caliban had always been inclined to feud and squabble amongst themselves. Combined with this, the plan would also need the support of the wider nobility and the common population. In general, though, we are not the kind to easily follow after leaders on Caliban: each man has too high a regard for his own opinions.
Then, there were other problems. The faint-hearted said it would be impossible to truly clear the beasts from the forests. It was too grand a scheme, too much the product of hubris. Some viewed the great beasts with supernatural dread, believing that any plan of extermination would only awaken an apocalypse by uniting the beasts against humanity.
Finally, there were concerns, even among those who backed Jonson’s aims. Some of them counselled caution. Jonson had envisioned a span of six years from the beginning of his war against the beasts to victory, but even his allies thought this was not enough time to achieve the plan’s objectives. They feared he had failed to take full account of the human factor. He had forgotten that the plan would be carried out by individuals who did not share his own extraordinary mental and physical abilities. Jonson migh
t be superhuman, but he was the only one of his kind on Caliban. His plan would not be carried out by supermen. The real, hard work would be done by mortal men.
In the end, Jonson carried the day. His supporters argued that the people of Caliban had skulked for too long behind the walls of their settlements. They had lived too much in fear of the beasts. Man was made to have dominion over the wilderness, they said, not vice versa. It was time to restore the world to balance, to end the reign of the beasts and give mankind dominion over the forests.
‘This is our world,’ he said. ‘It is not the world of the beasts. It is time we took our stand.’
So, the decision was made and Jonson would have his campaign. One by one, the beasts were hunted down and killed. They were driven from the forests. They were tracked to their lairs and destroyed. In one thing at least, though, some of those who had opposed Jonson were proven right, for it took more than six years to finish the campaign.
It took ten years of constant campaigning, ten years of hardship, ten years of friends maimed and lost, but ultimately it was worth it. Our cause was just, and we achieved our ambitions. Ten years, and not one of the great beasts remained.
It occurs to me that I have been slapdash in one respect in telling this story, for I have made no mention of the one man who could hold forth knowledgeably on all the topics before us. I have talked of Caliban, of Lion El’Jonson and of the campaign against the great beasts, but I have neglected to mention the most important player in our drama.
I am talking about Luther.
He was the man who found Jonson in the forest and gave him his name, the man who brought him to civilisation and taught him the ways of human society. He was the one who, through all Jonson’s exploits and honours, stood side-by-side with him and matched him. Luther had not Jonson’s advantages in matters of war and strategy. He was born a man, after all, not created to be more than human. Yet, as Jonson’s actions began to change the face of Caliban, Luther kept stride with him, equalling the wild man’s accomplishments with his own.
Too often, the Imperium portrays Luther as the devil. Some say he grew jealous of the Lion, for though the two of them had shared in many victories, it was always Jonson who was lauded for these triumphs. Others say Luther grew increasingly bitter at being so much in the Lion’s shadow. They say a secret seed of anger was born in Luther’s heart in those days, the seed of future hatreds.
Descent of Angels Page 1
