Let The Galaxy Burn

by Marc

  Cortez was at once afraid and awfully fascinated by what could be lurking behind the seals.

  ‘Vog, Vog?’ he mumbled, transfixed by the growing sense of rhythm. Vacillating, nervous, he was unsure if he even wanted to know the truth at all. Perhaps it was fitting that a plunge into the unknown would draw closed the final curtain on his life. He drew a breath. He watched. He felt ready.

  A door cracked opened on the graven cylinder, and a billowing carpet of vapour escaped, to roll down the steps in heavy fetid waves. Cortez quickly reached for his field glasses to better view the spectacle.

  ‘Terminator!’ he gasped, and his blood ran cold. An armoured figure stepped over the threshold of the cylinder with a heavy, deliberate tread. The governor could see that this creature’s eyes were closed, as if in a trance.

  ‘Stasis slumber.’ he whispered, hoping for a logical and less than sinister explanation.

  Then recognition struck him as if with a physical blow, and he reeled back from the hated window. In a sudden flurry of revelation Cortez knew what transpired below.

  ‘Vog!’ he whispered, barely able to form the name. Cortez now remembered where he had heard the name before. This was Lord Vog, the Chastiser of Worlds. Also known as the Apostate of Charybdis, Vog was a notorious creature of Chaos from beyond the Eye of Terror. Vog was a Word Bearer priest, a twisted parody of the chaplains of the Imperial Space Marines. He was also rumoured to be mutant, a being whose voice could loosen the veil betwixt reality and the warp.

  ‘Bringer of demons!’ Cortez gasped, horrified that such an entity sought out Tenebrae for its ministrations.

  With terror came a strange dulling of his senses, and Cortez was surprised to find that now he was more curious than ever, for he knew beyond doubt that Vog’s presence could only signify one thing: the absolute defeat of Tenebrae. The Chastiser was here to perform a victory mass for Chaos.

  The governor shuddered involuntarily, watching Vog as though hypnotised. Slithering over the collar of his Terminator armour came a glistening, slender tentacle. Vog’s head tilted back and he inhaled sharply. The whites of his eyes showed through slits as the slimy, pink limb writhed and whipped with its own, unwholesome volition.

  An aperture on the side of the Terminator’s thick neck dilated and oozed a glutinous clear fluid. The point of the tentacle dug into the hole and began to feed its length into the Apostate’s neck. The skin on his throat bulged obscenely, its moisture catching glints of the weak light. Vog came fully awake when the organ was in place, embedded in his larynx.

  Lord Vog stepped out into the twilight of Tenebrae. All eyes were upon him and Cortez almost joined the chorus of his demented acolytes as a great cheer rose up from the adoring crowd. Vog scanned his congregation imperiously, his chin held high. Lord Vog radiated arrogance and pride and, it seemed to Cortez, a strange nobility every bit as impressive as the great Space Marine leaders he had encountered during that distant military service.

  As Vog started his address to seal the victory of Chaos, the governor marvelled at the way the Apostate’s voice carried throughout the broad plaza. His words were at once perfectly clear to Cortez, yet somehow buried within a sonic murk which was truly inhuman. The cacophony from the Apostate’s mouth covered a broad spectrum of sound and was counterpointed by an eerie chanting. This sound, which might have emanated from the very pit of hell itself, redolent with the torment of a million damned souls, all came from the lips of a single man. For such was the Eulogy of Pandemonium, the corrupt chorus of the Word Bearer chaplains.

  ‘Those gullible fools who daily endure the worship of that rotting monolith, the Emperor, would do well to heed the word of Lorgar.’ Vog’s voice clutched mockingly at Cortez’s heart. ‘We offer our worship to true gods who govern the affairs of mortals. Not a mortal whose affairs are governed by the delusion that he is a deity.’

  The discord of his address and the dreadful import of his words wracked the Governor’s soul with its vile, atonal reverberations. Cortez doubled over, gasping, and attempted to block the unholy sound by clasping white, trembling hands over his ears. Kneeling on the sterile floor of his office, high above the ruin of his world, Dane Cortez convulsed with long, shuddering sobs of denial. It was over and there would be no atonement for him.

  THE TONE OF the address had changed. Lulled by the droning, white noise of the Word Bearer’s pontifications, Cortez was drawn, almost hypnotically, back to the window.

  His attention was drawn and held by the sight of a corpse far below him. It was huddled in a corner of the forecourt where Vog was giving his speech. Yet another mute testimony to a tired, frightened old man’s failure. The body was that of an Imperial trooper who had fallen trying to defend the Administratum building.

  ‘Rigel Kremer.’ The name swept into his memory, but there was no space in Cortez to mourn one friend in the midst of such atrocity. The name seemed… inconsequential. As his consciousness swam to the chant, Cortez found that he could find room to marvel at the play of light on the wet lips of Rigel’s wounds.

  ‘Beauty or horror?’ The old man abruptly cackled, seeing that the warm, red defilement of flesh almost looked beautiful when viewed in a certain way.

  ‘Rigel?’ Cortez asked querulously, as if expecting some answer from the corpse below. ‘Rigel, how soon will your carmine beauty give way to the lurid hues of putrefaction? Your attractive red liquid fester into rank, black necrotic fluids?’

  Cortez’s wet eyes glazed over, drained of vitality and volition as bizarre, alien thoughts flayed at the layers of his consciousness, sinking keen talons into his essential being.

  ‘Then what, Rigel? Answer me! I am your lord, damn you!’ Cortez’s fingers scrabbled in futility at the window as the Chastiser’s voice droned ever on. ‘After decay has taken hold of the sack of meat that was once you, Rigel, what then?’ He wagged an admonishing finger at the distant body. ‘Let me tell, you young Kremer, let me tell you!’ Spittle flew unheeded from snarling lips and smeared the window. ‘Your thrice-damned carcass will generate new life. Oh yes, Rigel, maggots will burst from the eggs laid around your eyes and mouth, and bacteria and mould will break you down into nutrients for the humblest of plants to thrive on’.

  Abruptly, Cortez leapt back from the window and screamed in anguish, terror and horror. He was appalled at the heretical train his thoughts had taken, realising that somehow the droning voice of the false priest below had slid into his stream of consciousness, tempting him. And he had succumbed so easily.

  Tears of shame and loss burned on seamed, leathery cheeks.

  ‘All for nothing?’ He shouted, anger beginning to blaze within his core. ‘All this to no end save Chaos?’ Anguished, he was assaulted by a rush of memories. They overwhelmed him as if eager to escape his corrupted mind.

  The long and fraught journey through life. The disappointments, and the fresh hopes. But most cruel of all was the opening of his eyes to the excesses of tyranny during military service. He had left the Imperial armies to become a planetary governor and use his new found understanding to make a better life for people.

  ‘A better life! All I wanted was a better life!’ He sobbed, chest heaving with barely controlled misery.

  ‘And this is how the mighty Imperium repays me?’

  This dead end. This inevitability.

  Cortez howled aloud. In a frenzy of violence, the old man heaved his desk over, scattering precious artefacts and ornaments to be trampled unheeded.

  ‘Oh Emperor, where are you now? Have you forsaken me?’

  Regret, disappointment, terror and misery were gone in a blinding explosion of all consuming, inarticulate rage at this most subtle of temptations, and at just how badly he had been betrayed by uncaring fate. Bellowing like a maddened beast, Cortez pounded on the window with liver-spotted fists.

  ‘Where is my Emperor?’ he howled in self mockery.

  And what succour could the Emperor offer this poor, tormented soul now? he thought bitterly, face r
eddened in helpless anger. Striding to his neatly ordered shelves, he cleared them in one swoop of his arms. The medals of the various campaigns in which he had served and the sundry paraphernalia of his office he hurled across the chamber with an inarticulate howl.

  ‘As the traitor claimed, so you are!’ he shrieked, pointing accusingly toward the skies ‘A… a… a deluded rotting monolith!’

  The last medals clattered from his fingers with a finality that told him he no longer had any allegiances.

  ‘Only myself now!’

  In that moment of deepest betrayal, of deepest loneliness, of deepest despair, Dane Cortez hated with the purity and intensity that could change worlds.

  ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ he cried challengingly. ‘Why?’

  Red, shifting haze started to appear within the room. Cortez stared aghast yet transfixed as the fabric of space and time dislocated. Charnel smells assaulted his nostrils as shifting, nebulous figures coalesced within the gathering miasma.

  ‘No!’ he shrieked, his shrill voice an entreaty to the uncaring gods of both Chaos and men.

  An awful eerie, mocking laughter ballooned within his skull. His only answer.

  A warp gate was opening.

  Too late Cortez realised what he had done. By the very act of resisting the temptation he had been subjected to, the violence of his maddened thoughts had opened the way for the crazed servants of Khorne, the lord of blood and war. The one faction missing from the assault on Tenebrae had come in full glory.

  Crimson light glowed eerily as the gate widened, allowing sleek, red-skinned humanoid figures access to this dimension. Heavily muscled and fearful in aspect, they stepped into the chamber, uncertainly at first, as though unfamiliar with the sounds and textures of this realm.

  Cortez backed away, mouth agape, choked with stark terror.

  Cruel mouths were filled with rows of carnivorous, glistening fangs. Nostrils flared wickedly as they smelt his mortality. Blazing daemonic eyes fixed him with a predatory glare. There was to be no escape from that malign intelligence or the bloodlust so driven by it. The bloodletters wielded serrated black swords which were enchanted with the power of death, fit to reap a harvest of souls for their lord.

  The old man scrabbled at his belt for the laspistol as the snarling fiends shook themselves free of the fading warp gate. Grinning in terrible anticipation, they loped towards the heavy wooden desk, long tongues flicking down to the bases of their chins in expectation of the soul-kill.

  Cortez knew without a flicker of doubt that he was about to die.

  ‘And for what?’ he lamented, gibbering in near mindless terror.

  Death stalked ever closer, and he was overcome by a sulphurous blast, the infernal reek of Hades.

  To die for the Imperium – unwieldy and uncaring behemoth which would have as soon put him to the sword had he approached them for help?

  ‘No!’ he cried, and the bloodletters hissed appreciatively. A tang of terror was such a sweet morsel.

  Then for the foul abominations released by his very own weakness?

  ‘No! Never that!’ Cortez shrieked, backed hard against the far wall of his chamber.

  As the daemons approached, bearing his doom on their wicked blades, a solution began to form in Cortez’s anguished mind. Against all odds, the governor found a new strength of resolve within him.

  He determined it would be neither. Not the Imperium nor Chaos. The answer was obvious. So obvious that he smiled even as he unlatched his holster flap.

  So obvious.

  The daemons paused momentarily, confused by the unexpected change of emotion. Fear they knew. Terror they relished. Confidence they despised.

  The delay was enough.

  ‘For me.’ he whispered.

  Before the daemons could strike, Dane thrust the muzzle of his ornate laspistol into his mouth and depressed the trigger.

  Against all the odds, he had escaped. Finally he was at peace.

  DAEMONBLOOD

  Ben Counter

  THE SPACE MARINE and the Battle Sister gazed across at the sight before them. It was an ocean of corruption. It was a continent of evil.

  The morass undulated gently, lit by the phosphorescence of vast colonies of bacteria and fungi. It spread so far through the subterranean darkness that it formed the horizon, and far away island-sized buboes spurted like volcanoes. Rivers of ichor oozed across the slabs of fat and tattered, stretched skin, bursting with the sheer immensity of the creature it contained. Here and there huge spires of splintered bone jutted up from the vile sea, picked clean of flesh by the layer of flies that hung as thick and vast as a city’s smog and obscured the cavern’s ceiling. This sea of flesh was dead, yet alive. It was the diseased green-black of decay, and yet it pulsed with the life of the pestilences that had made this rank, boiling ocean of filth their home.

  Sister Aescarion of the Ebon Chalice tore her eyes away from the sight, bile and vomit rising in her throat. What she saw was a manifestation of everything she had been taught to fear, and then to hate, throughout all of her life. Yet there was little room for fear here, or even hatred. It was a blank revulsion that overwhelmed her.

  She was lying on her side, still wearing the fluted angel-wing jump pack, for she had landed badly on the thin promontory of rock which arced over the sea. Instinctively she checked her auto-senses. The respirator in her power armour was working hard to filter out the toxins in the air, and warning runes flashed all over her retinal display.

  Hurriedly she tried to remember where she was, and the image of the heretic city flitted back into her mind. Far above them, on the planet’s surface, the city of Saafir raged as the heretics and their daemonic allies fought her brothers and sisters. And here was surely the heart of Saafir’s evil, encapsulated in an unimaginable sea of writhing corruption.

  Beside her stood Sergeant Castus, the deep blue armour of the Ultramarines glinting strangely in the half-light. He had removed his helmet, and held his bolter by his side. His centuries-old armour sported several fresh dents and bullet scars, a testament to the ferocious battle which he and the Sister had fought to get here. Like all Space Marines he was tall, and his dark hair was cropped close. His face was as strong and forbidding as a cliff of rock, his eyes fixed grimly on the sight before him.

  Aescarion grasped her simulacrum, rolling the ivory beads in the black gauntlet of her power armour. In spite of its comforting presence she knew the sea was alive, and that it could tell they were there. She knew that it would not make do with merely killing them.

  ‘Brother Marine.’ she called to Sergeant Castus, her voice small and quiet when usually it was strong and inspiring. ‘Close your mind to it. Look away!’ Castus did not seem to notice her.

  I have my faith, she told herself. I am alive where no human should have a right to survive. The Emperor is with me always. I have my faith. But I fear for the Space Marine. Why do I fear so?

  A ripple of movement shivered through the air. Aescarion reached out and grasped the haft of her power axe where it had landed next to her. Its head, like a giant chiselled shoulder blade, thrummed angrily with the power field around it. She could not hope to hurt the creature in front of her, but she was not ready to die on her knees, and death in battle with such a thing would be a glorious end in itself.

  Am I really going to die here? asked that voice of faith deep inside her. A spirit true to the Imperium never dies. And the Marine? He would have great strength of mind, as he had been trained – but strong enough?

  A kilometre or so across the corpse-ocean, a chasm many leagues long sluiced apart, revealing layers of fat and necrotic muscle beneath, bloated and useless organs. Further away, two orbs the size of cathedrals rose up from the mire with a great, vile sound like a hundred bodies being pulled from a swamp. They shed their filthy membranes to reveal a gleaming black surface. Castus took a few steps away from the rock’s edge, but he did not take his eyes off the monstrosity.

  It was a face. A mouth and
two eyes. When it spoke, it was with a voice felt rather than heard, deep and slow, and Aescarion could feel the waves of malice that swept across the promontory along with the thing’s noisome breath.

  ‘What curiously small creatures you are to present such a thorn in my side.’ The words roared and rumbled through the air, thick with dark amusement. ‘What little bundles of ignorant flesh. I am Parmenides, called the Vile, chosen Prince of Nurgle. I am the virus which the Plague God sends to infect your mortal worlds. I am the festering in your wounded empire. Do creatures as insignificant as yourselves have names too, I wonder?’

  ‘Sergeant Castus of the Ultramarines, Second Company.’ the Marine replied in a defiant voice, as if he were trying to impress the daemon prince.

  The horrific gaze turned to Aescarion, questioning.

  ‘I would not give you my name, though it cost my soul.’ the Battle Sister snarled, and she gripped her axe tighter.

  ‘Such a shame.’ Parmenides replied. ‘But the girl I can understand. Her mind is most infertile. What has she ever questioned? They teach her and she believes.’ The corners of the chasm turned upwards. The thing was smiling. ‘But you, my man. You are different, are you not? You can travel across the stars – but you do not know what lies between them. I could show you, my boy. I could show you why your omnipotent Emperor chooses to let his Imperium of toy soldiers be eroded by Chaos.’

  Parmenides’s immense face rose up in a vast static tidal wave that surrounded them like an amphitheatre of flesh. He gazed down on them from above, drowning them in his blank gaze. Sister Aescarion took an involuntary step back, then held firm. Sergeant Castus continued merely to gaze upon the corrupt being, his eyes steely, jaw set in righteous defiance.

  ‘Now ask yourself, who is in the ascendancy? Every year more and more worlds are lost to you. No matter how you lie to yourself that the warp is held at bay, you know deep in that untaught part of yourself that humanity will fall. The girl cannot see the inevitable. But you can. And do you really want to be dragged down by the Imperium as it sinks? You will die knowing your efforts were futile. You will die knowing that you know nothing!’