It will soon be time to leave Colchis.
He turns the first card. In its milky surface, he sees a burning torch carried in a strong hand. Truth.
Something calls to me. That is a truth I am only now coming to accept. Something out there is calling to me.
I am not Magnus, to stare into space and easily hear the heartbeat of creation. My powers are not those of my dearest brother, nor my ascendant father. But something has always called to me. In my youth, it reached my mind as visions, nightmares, hallucinations. And now...
Erebus and Kor Phaeron – through their patience and guidance – aided me in growing attuned to the call.
My tutors in the Covenant, and my heart’s family now. We meditated, pored over the Covenant’s texts, and we decided the Legion’s destiny.
Something calls me, faint but infinite, prickling my sixth sense like an echo in the stars.
He turns the second card, and sees himself – robed and cowled, turning away so as to avoid his own gaze. A common card, this one. Faith.
Humanity is nothing without faith.
Faith raises us above the soulless and the damned. It is the soul’s fuel, and the driving force behind millennia of mankind’s survival. We are hollow without it. Existence is cold and arbitrary in a godless galaxy – faith shapes us, raises us above all other life, defines us as perfect in our sentience.
In eras where faith was choked, weakness and decay infested the species, withering its innards. That is something the Emperor, beloved by all, has always known, but never admits.
Yet he knows, and he forges his empire accordingly. A god need not be named a god in order to stand in supremacy. Names are meaningless. Supremacy matters – and my father stands ascendant over all mortal life in the galaxy: a god in power, a god in wrath, a god in vision.
A god in all but name.
The Old Faith of Colchis is one that shares roots in thousands of human cultures, across thousands of worlds. That alone is evidence that somewhere within its meandering parables, and the unsubtle blending of myth into history and history into myth, there exists a core of absolute truth.
The loveliest legend is that of the empyrean, the Primordial Truth.
It is known by countless names, of course. The empyrean is the name we spoke on Colchis. Others named it heaven – a means of existing into eternity, long after the death of the mortal form. A realm of infinite possibility: a paradise of potential where the souls of every mortal in history coil around one another.
Even I know such things are myths, stories spoken and passed down imperfectly through countless generations.
But... imagine it. Imagine the reality behind the myths. Imagine a place in the universe where gods and mortals meet. Imagine the miracles of power that could be performed.
Imagine a state of utter chaos, utter purity, where anything is possible. Life ends in death, but existence does not.
If there is truth to the Old Faith, I will find it.
He turns the third card. A haze of heat makes the sky shimmer above a skyline of towers and domes. Colchis. The City of Grey Flowers. Home.
The people of Colchis have always looked to the stars for answers. The Legion born on that world, the Bearers of the Word, is no exception. Many Chapters within the Legion are named for the constellations that brighten the night sky. Even the name they bestowed upon me, the name spoken by no one outside the Legion, has its foundations in antiquity. ‘Aurelian’, they call out as they wage war. ‘The golden’.
Yet its linguistic roots go further back, to a truer meaning, created by those ancestors that forever stared skyward for inspiration.
Aurelian. The sun.
It is natural for us to seek answers in the stars. Life comes from them. The Emperor descended from them. The Legion rose into them.
Fate awaits us beyond them.
Colchisian legends tell tales of primitive space-faring vessels leaving the world in search of the gods, much in the same way the Afrikaharan and Grecianic peoples of Ancient Earth once sought their deities. I have read the fragments that remain of their cultures, and I have walked the ways of the past with my brother Magnus. The travels of Osyrus and Odisseon in Terran myth are the travels of Khaane, Tezen, Slanat and Narag – prophets born of Colchis, great seekers now lost to time’s embrace.
Their journey to seek the home of the gods is known to us as the Pilgrimage.
He turns the fourth card. The psychoreactive liquid forms architectural wonders in his fingertips: an arching bridge, a meandering path of stone through a great garden... A journey. A pilgrimage.
The Pilgrimage is the oldest legend in the Covenant of Colchis, and the one most often seen in human cultures scattered across the galaxy. Humanity has a fundamental need to believe in it. The Primordial Truth: heaven, paradise... It exists somewhere, in some form – home of the gods, underworld of the daemons. The layer behind natural reality. Anything is possible within its boundaries.
The Pilgrimage is nothing less than the journey to see it with one’s own eyes. To confirm where mythology ends and faith begins.
Heaven. Hell. Gods. Daemons.
I will have the answers I seek.
He turns the fifth and final card. The Emperor, bedecked in finery, all details writ with punishing clarity except the one aspect that matters: his face. A golden lord.
I was weaned on the old scrolls – the very scrolls we cast aside in favour of worshipping the Emperor. Now, I cannot help but look back to the teachings of my youth, and think of those legends and their cores of truth.
In crude imagery, the old works showed a stain on the stars – a scar in reality, where the Primordial Truth reached out into the universe of flesh, bone, blood and breath. Each of them foretold of a golden lord, a being of godly power that would carry humanity to divine perfection. It had to be my father. It had to be the Emperor. And I believed it was, until the moment it was not.
He was not the golden lord. The Emperor will carry us to the stars, but never beyond them. My dreams will be lies, if a golden lord does not rise.
I look to the stars now, with the old scrolls burning runes across my memory. And I see my own hands as I write these words.
Erebus and Kor Phaeron speak the truth.
My hands.
They, too, are golden.
Part Two
PILGRIMAGE
Three years after the Legion’s
departure from Colchis
IV
A Child’s Dreams
I can only imagine how the primarch’s heart shattered when the Pilgrimage ended.
Three years of the Seventeenth Legion scattered across the stars. Three years of the Word Bearers sailing farther and faster than any of their brother warriors, reaching into the edges of space and pulling the boundaries of the Imperium with them.
So much of humanity’s dominion over the stars is owed to the sons of Lorgar – a bitter reality after the years of ponderous, meticulous advancement, earning them nothing but scorn.
But I know the temperament of this Legion. For every peaceful compliance – for every culture brought into the Imperium and quietly encouraged to follow the new Word – there will have been a world that now spins in space as a dead husk, fallen victim to the Word Bearers venting their wrath.
The Pilgrimage revealed many truths: the flaws written into the Legion’s precious gene-seed; the arcane gestation of Lorgar Aurelian himself; the existence of the neverborn – named as daemons, spirits and angels by a million ignorant generations of mankind. But the greatest truth revealed was also the hardest to accept, and it broke a primarch’s heart.
And of course, it changed his sons. The Word Bearers could never go back to a time before the truth.
Argel Tal and Xaphen were my closest links to a world I could no longer see, and the Pilgrimage’s destination changed them in ways far more profound than mere physical differences. The knowledge was a burden to them: that they and their brothers in the Word Bearers Legion must be the ones
to return to the Imperium with this terrible truth.
I cannot conceive how they endured, being the heralds of such tidings. To be the ones chosen to enlighten an entire species that humanity would struggle from now until the day creation died. There would be no Golden Age, no era of peace and prosperity. In the darkness of the future, there would be only war.
Perhaps we are all playing the roles marked out by the gods. People who are destined for greatness will often dream great dreams as children. Fate shapes them for the years to come, offering their young minds a teasing glance at what will be.
Blessed Lorgar, Herald of the Primordial Truth, dreamed like this. His childhood was tormented by visions of his father’s arrival – a god of gold, descending from above – as well as nightmares of someone unknown, something unseen, forever calling his name.
And that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Word Bearers Legion. Their father knew he would be one of those bringing enlightenment to humanity, but he could never foresee how it would come to pass.
The primarch has spoken of his brothers and how they dreamed similar dreams. Curze, born on a world of eternal night, dreamed of his own death. Magnus, Lorgar’s closest kin, dreamed the answers to the universe’s mysteries. One was cursed with foreknowledge; the other blessed by it. Both were destined to do great things as they reached maturity. Their actions have shaped the galaxy, just as Lorgar Aurelian’s have.
As for myself, I only remember one nightmare from my youngest years.
In my dream, I sat in a blackened room, as blind in the darkness then as I am now. And in that darkness I sat in silence, listening to a monster breathe.
Where is the line between prescience and fantasy? Between prophecy and a child’s imagination?
The answer is simple. Prophecy comes true.
We just have to wait.
- Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’,
by Cyrene Valantion
TWELVE
Death
Final Flight of Orfeo’s Lament
Two Souls
Xaphen lay dead at the creature’s feet.
His spine twisted, his armour broken, a death that showed no peace in rest. A metre from his outstretched fingers, his black steel crozius rested on the deck, silent in deactivation. The corpse was cauled by its helm, its final face hidden, but the Chaplain’s scream still echoed across the vox-network.
The sound had been wet, strained – half-drowned by the blood filling Xaphen’s ruptured lungs.
The creature turned its head with a predator’s grace, stinking saliva trailing in gooey stalactites between too many teeth. No artificial light remained on the observation deck, but starlight, the winking of distant suns, bred silver glints in the creature’s unmatching eyes. One was amber, swollen, lidless. The other black, an obsidian pebble sunken deep into its hollow.
Now you , it said, without moving its maw. Those jaws could never form human speech. You are next.
Argel Tal’s first attempt to speak left his lips as a trickle of too-hot blood. It stung his chin as it ran down his face. The chemical-rich reek of the liquid, of Lorgar’s gene-written blood running through the veins of each of his sons, was enough to overpower the stench rising from the creature’s quivering, muscular grey flesh. For that one moment, he smelled his own death, rather than the creature’s corruption.
It was a singular reprieve.
The captain raised his bolter in a grip that trembled, but not from fear. This defiance – this was the refusal he couldn’t voice any other way.
Yes. The creature loomed closer. Its lower body was an abomination’s splicing between serpent and worm, thick-veined and leaving a viscous, clear slug-trail that stank of unearthed graves. Yes.
‘No,’ Argel Tal finally forced the words through clenched teeth. ‘Not like this.’
Like this. Like your brothers. This is how it must be.
The bolter barked with a throaty chatter, a stream of shells that hammered into the wall, impacting with concussive detonations that defiled the chamber’s quiet. Each buck of the gun in his shaking hand sent the next shell wider from the mark.
Arm muscles burning, he let the weapon fall with a dull clang. The creature did not laugh, did not mock him for his failure. Instead, it reached for him with four arms, lifting him gently. Black talons scraped against the grey ceramite of his armour as it clutched him aloft.
Prepare yourself. This will not be painless.
Argel Tal hung limp in the creature’s grip. For a brief second, he reached for the swords of red iron at his hips, forgetting that they were broken, the blades shattered, on the gantry decking below.
‘I can hear,’ his gritted teeth almost strangled the words, ‘another voice.’
Yes. One of my kin. It comes for you.
‘This... is not what... my primarch wanted...’
This? The creature dragged the helpless Astartes closer, and burst Argel Tal’s secondary heart with a flex of thought. The captain went into violent convulsions, feeling the pulped mass behind his ribs, but the daemon cradled him with sickening gentleness.
This is exactly what Lorgar wanted. This is the truth.
Argel Tal strained for breath that wouldn’t come, and forced dying muscles to reach for weapons that weren’t there.
The last thing he felt before he died was something pouring into his thoughts, wet and cold, like oil spilling behind his eyes.
The last thing he heard was one of his dead brothers drawing a ragged breath over the vox-channel.
And the last thing he saw was Xaphen twitching, rising from the deck on struggling limbs.
He opened his eyes, and saw he was the last to awaken.
Xaphen stood stronger than the others, his crozius maul in his hands. Through the blur of Argel Tal’s returning consciousness, he heard the Chaplain speaking orders, encouragement, demands that his brothers stand and pull themselves together.
Dagotal remained on his knees, vomiting through his helm’s mouth grille. What he produced from his stomach was much too black. Malnor leaned against the wall, his forehead pressed to the cool metal. The others were in similar states of disarray, hauling themselves to their feet, purging their guts of stinking ichor, and whispering litanies from the Word.
Argel Tal couldn’t see the daemon. He looked left and right, targeting reticule not locking on to anything.
‘Where is Ingethel?’ he tried to ask, but the only sound he made was a sick, thick drawl of wordless growling.
Xaphen came over to him and offered a hand to help him rise. The Chaplain had removed his helm, and in the chamber’s gloom the warrior-priest’s face was unnaturally pallid, but otherwise unchanged.
‘Where is Ingethel?’ Argel Tal repeated. This time, the words came forth. It was almost, but not quite, his voice.
‘Gone,’ Xaphen replied. ‘The vox is back online, and power has been restored to the ship. Squads are checking in from all decks. But the daemon is gone.’
Daemon. Still so strange, to hear the word voiced out loud. A word from mythology, spoken as cold fact.
Argel Tal looked up at the glass dome ceiling, looking out into the void beyond. There was no space. Not true space, at least. The void was a swirling, psychotic mass of flensed energy and clashing tides. A thousand shades of violet, a thousand shades of red. Colours humanity had never catalogued, and no living beings had seen before. Stars, stained by the riot of crashing energies, winked through the storm like bloodshot eyes.
At last, in the window’s reflection, he saw himself. Pearls of sweat rolled down his face. Even his sweat stank of the daemon: bestial, raw, ripe – the reek of organs, failing to cancer.
‘We need to get out of here,’ said Argel Tal. Something moved in his stomach, something cold uncoiling within him, and he swallowed acidic bile to keep from throwing up.
‘How did this happen?’ Malnor groaned. None present had ever heard the stoic warrior so unmanned.
Torgal staggered over to them, rubbing reddened eye
s in sallow sockets. His chestplate was painted with a messy scorch-streak of burned ceramite – the black acid-burn of his vomit.
‘We need to get back to the fleet,’ he said. ‘Back to the primarch.’
Argel Tal caught sight of his own broken blades, scattered in jagged pieces across the decking. Repressing the sting of loss, he reached for his discarded bolter. As soon as his gauntleted fingers touched the grip, an ammunition counter on his eye lenses flickered at zero.
‘First, we need to get to the bridge.’
Every human on board was dead.
This was something Argel Tal had first feared as he moved in a lurching stride from corridor to corridor. The fear became reality as more and more of Seventh Company’s squads voxed to report the same thing.
They were alone here. Every servitor, every serf, every slave and preacher and artificer and servant was dead.
Deck by deck, chamber by chamber, the Word Bearers hunted for any sign of life beyond themselves.
Smaller than De Profundis, the destroyer Orfeo’s Lament was an attack ship, a sleek and narrow hunter, not a line-breaking assault vessel like many Astartes cruisers. Its crew numbered just under a thousand humans and augmented servitors at full complement, in addition to the hundred Astartes – a full company’s worth.
Ninety-seven Word Bearers remained alive. Of the humans, not one.
Three Astartes had simply not awoken as the others had. Argel Tal ordered their bodies burned, with the remains to be blasted out of an airlock as soon as the ship managed to get clear of the warp storm.
When, and if, that would ever be.
Evidence of the human crew’s demise was everywhere to behold. Argel Tal, bred without the capacity to feel fear, was not immune to disgust nor shielded by his genes from feeling regret. Each corpse he passed watched him with a lifeless stare and open jaws. They screamed in silence. Shrunken, yellowed eyes accused him with every step he took.
‘We should have defended them from this,’ he murmured the words aloud without realising.
‘No.’ Xaphen’s tone invited no argument. ‘They were naught but resources for the Legion. We do the Legion’s work, and they were the price we paid.’
The First Heretic Page 16
