by Various
‘…we have come for you.’
He shook, trembling with terror and defiance. ‘Your judgement is atrocity. That is not justice, it is hypocrisy!’
‘But we are not creatures made to live those ideals, only to bring them into being.’
For a moment he simply hugged his arms close around himself. He was nothing to look at: a thin man, his age hidden but not banished, wrapped in velvet and silk, weeping in the dark. A stale reek rose from his huddled form. He had soiled himself several hours earlier, in his feverish nightmare state.
‘Everything I saw before, everything I dreamed…’
‘It was only a dream.’ He looked up at me, and his pupils showed that desperate spark of hope that mortals can yet summon even in the bleakest of moments.
‘But that does not mean that it was not real. You have dreamed those moments twenty times already, and you will dream them again.’ I run the finger of my gauntlet across his tear-dampened upper lip. ‘This is the eighth time we have talked, and the eighth time you have wept these tears. It will not be the last.’
‘You…’ he stammers. ‘You are waiting for me to ask for forgiveness?’
‘No. You have already asked for that eight times.’
He began to laugh then. He was still laughing as I dragged him back into the wheel of nightmares.
‘What is your judgement?’
My voice rolled through the vast space. The throne room was silent and bare. The gloom which filled its vaulted space felt lifeless, like an absence left by something intangible. I kept my gaze steady on those ghost-pale features, and the black eyes watching me from the foot of the empty throne. I did not kneel – authority was one thing, respect was another. The pale face twitched, the lips twisting into the mockery of a smile.
‘My judgement?’ He paused, and tapped one finger upon the haft of his chainglaive. ‘My judgement is that if I have to spend any more time in your company then I might be tempted to do something you would regret.’
Sevatar stepped from the throne’s dais to the floor. His movements, even in armour, were like those of a cat. I did not move. Out of habit I made to lean on my staff, but like the hood which had once circled my skull, it was gone. Their absence felt as though I had lost a limb, like a part of me had been stripped away.
That, of course, was precisely the point, and the reason why I stood in a deserted throne room with the First Captain of our thrice-humbled Legion.
‘The edict from the Council of Nikaea cannot be ignored,’ I said. ‘You are the most senior commander of the Legion while the primarch–’
‘While our father-in-darkness is being schooled again by his brothers.’ Sevatar turned away, rolling a shoulder absent-mindedly. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘There must be a judgement upon the Librarius.’ I paused, the next words I must speak catching in my throat. ‘And upon me.’
Sevatar glanced back at me, the shark’s smile on his lips echoed in his dark eyes.
‘I could always cut your throat?’ He turned to look at me, cocking his head and raising an eyebrow. ‘Yes. That could solve several problems.’
I let out a slow breath between my teeth. To say that there was little brotherly affection between us would be to call the sun a candle.
I kept my gaze steady on his face. Those who did not know us always said that Night Lords from the under-realms of Terra and the spoil heap of Nostramo are much alike – true, pale skin and eyes polished black by night marked us all, but to the few who looked further we were altogether different creatures. The black sinks bred a flatness to our features. Our eyes are more sensitive to sunlight even than theirs. We rarely blink. Our skin is naturally hairless, our teeth sharp without the need to file them. There were few enough of us left in the Legion by then, an ill-favoured and withering remnant. I wish that I could say that those of us who remained were an island of slowly fading nobility, but that would have been a lie.
There were few who saw the difference between what we had been and what we had become. Even those who had once served judgement were now servants to terror. Sometimes I wondered if there ever was a difference.
‘The decree…’ I began carefully.
‘You really hate us, don’t you? All of us who came after, who came from a different kind of night.’
I said nothing, and the First Captain’s corpse grin spread wider. ‘Oh, I am not judging your hatred. I share it. It just hurts me less.’
‘Sevatarion…’
I paused, and forced control into my voice. A little of my anger bled into the air between us as a sparkle of frost. Strangely, he had gone very, very still.
‘Jago Sevatarion, you will give me what I demand of you.’
The words melted the mockery of humour from his face. He crossed the room in a flash of lightning battleplate and servos. The deactivated chain-glaive struck me in the chest before I could even raise my hands.
I fell, but his hand caught my throat and pulled me in close. When his voice came, it was a hissing whisper.
‘If you are so desperate for judgement, then here is mine – I cast you out. You are no longer of the Eighth, if you ever were. I stain your hands red. I condemn you to death, should we ever meet again. You are outcast. You are nothing.’ He shoved me away, and I hit the floor with a clatter of ceramite on stone. He stood, his face still, shadows pooling in his eye sockets. ‘Does that satisfy?’
I rose. I was not shocked, or broken. I was angry. I could taste blood on my tongue. The rage twisted and burned brighter even as I tried to restrain it.
But I was not angry at his judgement. No, this anger was nothing so small in scope.
‘And the rest of the Librarius?’
‘I do not care,’ he spat, and turned to walk back towards our primarch’s throne.
‘It was about something once, Sevatarion,’ I called, my voice brittle with rage. He looked over his shoulder, his smile back in place. ‘We were more than this once. It was all for a reason.’
‘Spare me from the guardians of nostalgia,’ he said with a roll of his eyes.
It happened then, before the thought could form in my conscious mind, before I was even aware that I had lost control. Green flames spread up the walls. Sevatar was turning, chainblade roaring to life as the wave of force struck and slammed him into the throne. Between the flicker-pulse of flame and shadow, my hand was at his throat, the fingers closing around the neck seal and the flesh beneath.
‘You murdered us,’ I snarled.
My teeth were bared, and lightning crawled across my scalp. The teeth of the chain-glaive were still spinning, but my mind was wrapped around his limbs, squeezing, crushing. I had no thought for what I was doing, or of the decree which forbade it.
‘You are killing our Legion.’ I slammed his head into the iron of the throne with only a twitch of thought. Servos whined as he fought against me. ‘You and your poisoned world are–’
Flash. Jagged un-light. Brain-fire. Agony.
I staggered back, blood pouring from my mouth, splattering down my armour and onto my bare, empty hands. Truly marked by blood, now, was the only thought I could manage as my head whirled with sights and memories that were not my own.
Sevatar did not rise to follow me. He was sitting on the primarch’s throne, breathing hard, his eyes fixed on the empty space where I thought I had seized him.
‘Go,’ he rasped.
‘Sevatarion–’ I began, gulping air through clotting blood.
‘Get out of my sight!’
I regarded him carefully for a few heartbeats, then turned and left the throne room.
I look up again at my shadowy executioner. Frost has spread over his armour. He has shared my past for an eye-blink of time, but in that instant I have shown him every moment of my life – from the day that the Legion came to me, to the steps that led me back into the darkn
ess below Terra’s crust. To the only home I ever knew.
I allow him to recover, and then I speak.
‘I knew you would come. Judgement comes for us all in the end, cousin.’
I let out a breath, and draw another. It will be my last, of that I am sure. It tastes of damp and blood, of a world that has never known the light of day. For a moment I wonder which sin has brought my end. Was it Nikaea, and the fact that I walked free still using my gifts? Was it the blood that flows in my veins, my Legion’s conduct finally fallen beyond the last limits of Imperial tolerance? Or has the new age finally come, the age in which mankind no longer needed monsters and heroes?
I dismiss the notion. The reason does not matter, only the consequence.
‘I will ask one thing more from you, though,’ I say to the warrior standing over me. ‘I would see the light of the sun one last time.’
I reach into his mind then. Until now it has been my thoughts and memories projecting into the space of his thoughts. Now I take his measure and see through his eyes. I see Sol hanging in the void, and the scattered light of countless stars beyond. Even after these last waning years spent down in the darkness, it is still as beautiful and terrible as I remember.
And then I see why he has come for me.
I see betrayal, and broken oaths, and the deaths of sons at the hands of their fathers. I see what the vision of Imperial Truth and light has now become.
I let go of his mind. He shudders, and his finger tightens upon the trigger.
Can this be true? Can this really be what the galaxy has come to? And there in the darkness, at the core of everything I was and everything I became, is the answer, laughing at me through sharpened teeth.
The Space Marine, armoured plainly in grey, stares at me for a long moment, then lowers his pistol. ‘I am not here to judge you, Fel Zharost. That right belongs to another.’
I nod. I know now why he has come for me, and what awaits me after this moment. I have seen it in his thoughts, like a final jest.
‘Rise,’ he says.
Luna Mendax
Graham McNeill
Peace. The word was meaningless to him. As far back as Loken could remember, he had never known any state of being that could equate to the concept as it was now explained to him. The word had served as a talisman once, back when the universe made sense, an ideal for which to strive. An end of war and the fulfilment of the task for which he and his brothers had been created. He was of the Legiones Astartes, a warrior born and bred, wrought in the Emperor’s gene-labs with forgotten alchemy and unknown science.
What could a being who knew only how to kill understand of peace?
Yet here in the garden, Loken felt something close to it.
Warm sunlight shone in a flickering blue sky, entoptically rendered on the curved inner face of the dome, yet no less pleasing for its artifice. Pictographic clouds drifted in a non-existent breeze, and birdsong chirped from artfully concealed vox-grilles worked into the garden’s structure.
The garden was composed of rough ouslite slabs laid like giant flagstones, arranged around a series of square, shallow basins of crystal-clear water. Lilies and bright flowers flourished in rock pools fed by a branch system hived from the brass tower’s reservoirs. Ferns and weeping trees caressed the water’s edge, and something in their placement stirred a long-buried memory, though one Loken found himself unwilling to examine too closely.
He made his way through the garden, enjoying the quiet and the warm scents of living things. Water gurgled over an ornamented arrangement of smooth rocks, and fell in a spuming waterfall that tumbled into a miniature lake of glitter-gold koi. Curved steps led down to neat rows of planting beds, where the seeds Loken had planted were already beginning to grow.
Clad in a long chiton of unadorned grey over a tan bodyglove with plastek-seals over his armour interface sockets, he was armed only with a few gardening tools hanging from a leather work belt. Loken walked with the heavy steps of a mourner at a memorial, his shoulders broad, but hunched, as though they carried the weight of the world upon them. His features were broad and flat, made blunt by war and drained of joy by betrayal.
Yet as he surveyed the green shoots pushing their way out of the dark soil to the light above, the thinnest trace of a smile came to his lips. Bred to kill, not to care, it gave Loken a sense of the wonder of creation. By his hand was this universe in miniature flourishing.
His eyes narrowed as he saw one corner of the planting beds green with an altogether unwelcome growth of weeds and enveloped with a spun sugar gleam of gossamer-fine spider webs. Loken unhooked a trowel from his belt, one that was entirely too small for his grip, but which he handled with surprising delicacy. He could have asked for tools better suited to his transhuman scale, but the forges of the brass tower were tasked with the production of more important things than mere gardening implements.
Like any warrior, he learned to make do with what he had.
Loken knelt on the corner slab and swept away the spider webs with his hands. Arachnids emerged from hiding at the disturbance, and he flinched at the sight of them. The multi-limbed creatures sparked a memory fragment in Loken: a war of gruelling attrition, hard-fought victories and a glorious time when gods did not make war on one another.
He couldn’t place the memory, but that was nothing unusual. The madness that almost consumed him on Isstvan III had left scars that were slow to heal and quick to flare in jagged pain. The spiders contented themselves with baring their fangs then retreating into their subterranean lairs, and Loken felt an irrational hatred of the creatures swell in his heart.
He dug into the soil with vicious jabs, laying the weed-roots on the slab beside him and seeking to drive the spiders out. This section was particularly overgrown with parasitic plant matter, which was in the process of draining the goodness from the soil and choking the life out of the crop growing here. The seeds had been sown before he had found the garden, and had withered once already, but with his patient attention, the garden had bloomed once again, brighter and more vital than ever.
The previous custodian of this biodome had allowed it to grow wild, neglecting the task of prudent weeding and maintenance. He had since learned that Sister Elliana was long dead on Prospero, and no one had taken up her duties in the biodome. An understandable lapse. The maintenance of a space that existed for purely aesthetic reasons would be seen as wasteful.
And in times of war, nothing wasteful could be tolerated.
Loken had found the biodome by chance, staring vacantly through the armourglass window of the orbital shuttle bringing him back to Luna. He had spent the journey back from the Caliban fiasco in contemplative silence, isolating himself from the crew of the nameless vessel that crept into the Dark Angels domain before slinking away like a thwarted thief.
The abject failure of the mission weighed heavily on Loken, and he had struggled with his part in it through the long, cold nights in the dark heart of the vessel. He was a warrior who had turned his back on war, a man without colours or a Legion to call his own. In the depths of his despair, he had believed himself to be a Legion of one.
Nathaniel Garro had shown him that was no longer the case.
He no longer fought alone, but he cared nothing for the warriors who stood with him. The brotherhood of his former life was no more than a ghost memory now. None of the easy banter he’d shared with Vipus and Torgaddon leavened the times between engagements, only cold hard mission briefings and grim talk of their shadow war.
A shadow war in which he no longer wished any part.
Seated in the back of the shuttle with Iacton Qruze, Loken had felt cramped and claustrophobic, deeply uncomfortable at sharing so confined a space with another refugee from his Legion. Qruze had sensed his discomfort and known enough not to intrude on Loken’s solitude. Only as the shuttle banked during its crossing of the Sinus Honoris did Loke
n notice the glinting diamond of the biodome on the edge of the Mare Tranquillitatis. No sooner had he blink-clicked the selenographic coordinates than the dome was lost to sight as the shuttle spiralled in on its final approach to the Somnus Citadel.
Built on the haunches of the Palus Somni, the fortress of the Silent Sisterhood rose from the uneven, rocky terrain on the north-eastern edge of the great basin. A soaring tower of brass and crystal, its myriad docking bays were arranged one atop the other like the lairs of undersea creatures in a spire of coral. Their scale was impossible to judge, but Loken knew each was large enough to accommodate the sisterhood’s nigh-invisible black ships. Unlike the rest of Luna’s surface, the surface of the Palus Somni was the shade of bleached tan, its hue different from any of the moon’s other plains or mountain regions.
Dorn had been waiting for them.
Already appraised of the mission’s outcome by astropathic means, the primarch of the Imperial Fists had, nevertheless, taken time from the dismantling of his father’s bejewelled palace to hear the ill news from Caliban first-hand. Loken had seen Lord Dorn’s hope that the imperfect medium of astropathic communication had missed some subtle nuance to Qruze’s report, some sign that the Lion’s warriors of Caliban could be counted on to rally to the Emperor’s banner.
Dorn would return to Terra none the wiser, and Loken’s heart had broken at disappointing him.
Loken remembered the first time he had seen Rogal Dorn, deep in conversation with the Warmaster. He had seemed titanic then, a demigod built to match the strength and prowess of Horus himself; no small admission for a warrior of the Luna Wolves to make. Clad in golden plate and seemingly carved from the solid core of a mountain, the primarch had made Loken feel like a specimen pinned to an examination table, scrutinised by a being who understood everything about him in a heartbeat.
Dorn was still that demigod, but Loken saw he was somehow… diminished, as though the burden he took upon his shoulders was growing heavier by infinitesimal fractions every second. Like the trickle of water that over millions of years splits the mountain, Dorn’s role as Terra’s Praetorian was one that would already have crushed a lesser being.
