[Horus Heresy 12] - A Thousand Sons

by Graham McNeill - (ebook by Undead)

  “Maybe they were once, but now they are just expensive statues.”

  “They are the guardians,” repeated the masked tribesman.

  “They are Titans,” said Khalophis, slowly, “giant war machines. In ages past they could level cities and lay-waste to entire armies, but now they are dead.”

  “Our legends say they will walk again, when the Daiesthai break the bonds of their eternal prison.”

  “I don’t know what that means, but they won’t walk again,” said Khalophis. “They are just machines, dead machines.”

  He pointed up towards the giant head of the construct. “The princeps would sit up there if this was an Imperial Titan, but since it’s alien, who knows what’s really in there? A giant brain in a jar, a wired-in collective of self-aware robots, it could be anything.”

  The Aghoru tribesman said, “What is a princeps? Is that a god?”

  Khalophis laughed uproariously. “He might as well be. It’s not a term in favour, but what else really gets the sense of it across? An Astartes is a god to mortals, a Titan… Well, that’s the god of the battlefield. Even the Legions take note when the engines of the Mechanicum walk.”

  “These have never walked,” said the tribesman, “not as long as we have known them. We hope they never do.”

  “It’s Yatiri, isn’t it?” asked Khalophis, bending down.

  “Yes, Brother Khalophis, that is my name.”

  “I am not your brother,” he hissed. Even cut off from his powers and unable to communicate with his Tutelary, Khalophis felt energised, not with the surging tides of aether that normally empowered him, but by the act of domination.

  “We are all brothers,” said Yatiri, calm in the face of his hostility. “Is that not what your great leader teaches? He tells us that we are all one race, divided by a great catastrophe, but drawing together once more under the watchful eye of the great Sky Emperor.”

  “That’s true enough,” conceded Khalophis. “But not all who were divided wish to be drawn together again. Some of them fight us.”

  “We are not fighting you,” said Yatiri. “We welcome your coming.”

  “That’s your story,” said Khalophis, leaning on the altar and regarding the mortal through the green-hued lenses of his battle helm. Though this was designated a compliant world, Khalophis had his combat senses to the fore. The Aghoru falarica were picked out in white, the tribesmen themselves in red, though the threat indicators were negligible.

  “We are the story,” said Yatiri. “From the moment your leader set foot on our lands, we became part of it.”

  “That’s remembrancer talk,” spat Khalophis. “And I don’t trust people who wear masks, especially masks like mirrors. I ask myself what they’re hiding behind them.”

  “You wear a mask,” pointed out Yatiri, walking past Khalophis towards the cave mouth.

  “This is a helmet.”

  “It achieves the same thing, it conceals your features.”

  “Why do you wear them?” asked Khalophis, following the tribesman towards the towering guardians of the Mountain.

  “Why do you?” countered Yatiri without turning.

  “For protection. My helmet is armoured and it has saved my life on more than one occasion.”

  “I wear this mask for protection also,” said Yatiri, reaching the foot of the leftmost giant.

  “From what? Your tribes do not make war on one another and there are no predators of any great size on this world. Where is the need?” asked Khalophis.

  Yatiri turned and rested his hand on the smooth surface of the enormous foot. This close to the giants, the scale of them was truly breathtaking. Khalophis thought back to the fire-blackened ruins of Kamenka Ulizarna and the sight of Magnus the Red standing before the might of the greenskin colossus. That had been a battle to remember, and standing this close to an alien war engine made him fully appreciate the power of his beloved leader.

  “Our legends speak of a time when this world belonged to a race of elder beings known as Elohim,” said Yatiri, squatting beside the enormous foot, “a race so beautiful that they fell in love with the wonder of their own form.”

  Yatiri turned his gaze towards the cave mouth and said, “The Elohim found a source of great power and used it to walk amongst the stars like gods, shaping worlds in their own image and crafting an empire amongst the heavens to rival the gods. They indulged their every whim, denied themselves nothing and lived an immortal life of desire.”

  “Sounds like a good life,” said Khalophis, casting a suspicious glance into the darkness.

  “For a time it was,” agreed Yatiri, “but such hubris cannot long go unpunished. The Elohim abused the source of their power, corrupting it with their wanton decadence, and it turned on them. Their entire race was virtually destroyed in a single night of blood. Their worlds fell and the oceans drank the land. But that was not the worst of it.”

  “Really? That sounds bad enough,” said Khalophis, bored by Yatiri’s tale. Creation and destruction myths were a common feature in most cultures, morality tales used to control emerging generations. This one was little different from a hundred others he had read in the libraries of Prospero.

  “The Elohim were all but extinct, but among the pitiful survivors, some were twisted by the power that had once served them. They became the Daiesthai, a race as cruel as they had once been beautiful. The Elohim fought the Daiesthai, eventually driving them back to the shadows beneath the world. Their power was broken and they had not the means to destroy the Daiesthai, so with the last of their power, they raised the Mountain to seal their prison and set these giants to guard against their return. The Daiesthai remain imprisoned beneath the world, but their hunger for death can never be sated, and so we bring them the dead of our tribes at every turning of the world to ensure their eternal slumber continues.”

  “That’s a pretty tale,” said Khalophis, “but it doesn’t explain why you wear those masks.”

  “'We are the inheritors of the Elohim’s world, and their destruction serves as a warning against the temptations of vanity and self-obsession. Our masks are a way of ensuring we do not fall as they fell.”

  Khalophis considered that for a moment.

  “Do you ever take them off?” he asked.

  “For bathing, yes.”

  “What about mating?”

  Yatiri shook his head and said, “It is unseemly for you to ask, but you are not Aghoru, so I will answer. No, we do not take them off, even then, as pleasures of the flesh were among the greatest vices of the Elohim.”

  “That explains why there’re so few of you on this world,” said Khalophis, wanting nothing more than to return to the encampment and re-establish his connection to Sioda. With the power of the Pyrae in ascendance, his Tutelary was a winged essence of shimmering fire. His connection with Sioda allowed Khalophis and the 6th Fellowship to burn entire armies to ashes without firing a single shot from their many guns.

  The thought empowered him and he snarled, feeling his anger rise to the fore. It was good to feel controlled aggression after so long keeping it in check. This world was nothing to the Thousand Sons, and he railed against their enforced presence here when there were wars to be fought elsewhere. The Wolf King had demanded their presence in battle, and yet they wasted time on a forgotten world that offered nothing of value.

  Khalophis reached out and ran his hand across the Titan’s foot, feeling the smoothness of its surface. Such a material must surely be brittle, and he longed to destroy it. He clenched his fists and dropped into a boxer’s stance.

  “What are you doing?” cried Yatiri, leaping to his feet.

  Khalophis didn’t answer. The strength in his arms built, the strength to shatter steel and buckle the hull of an armoured vehicle. He pictured exactly where his fists would strike.

  “Please, Brother Khalophis!” begged Yatiri, putting himself between Khalophis and the enormous, splay-clawed foot. “Stop this, please!”

  Khalophis distilled hi
s focus into his clenched fists, but the blows did not land. His consciousness rooted itself in the eighth sphere of the Enumerations, but he forced his thoughts into the seventh, calming his aggression and shackling it to that more contemplative state of being.

  “Your strength would be wasted,” cried Yatiri. “The guardians are impervious to harm!”

  Khalophis lowered his arms and stepped back from the target of his violence.

  “Is that what you think?” he asked. “Then what’s that?”

  Rising from the ground and spreading into the foot of the towering construct like cracks in stonework, thin black lines oozed upwards like malevolent, poisoned veins.

  “Daiesthai?” hissed Yatiri.

  Kneeling on the sun disc of his glittering pyramid, Magnus closed his first eye and unshackled his body of light from his flesh. His captains and warriors required the Enumerations to achieve the separation from flesh, but Magnus had mastered spirit travel in the aether without being aware that such a thing might be considered difficult.

  The Enumerations were philosophical and conceptual tools to allow a practitioner of the mysteries to sift through the myriad complexities involved in bending the universe to his will. Such was his gift, the ability to achieve the impossible without knowing it was beyond comprehension.

  On a world such as Aghoru, that process was eased by the aetheric winds that blew invisibly across the planet’s surface. The Great Ocean pressed in, as though around a precious and delicate bubble. Magnus plucked a thought from the third Enumeration to express the concept; this world was a perfect sphere, structurally impossible to improve upon, yet the Mountain was a flaw, a means by which that perfect balance might be upset. When he had entered the cave with Yatiri, he had observed all the formalities of the Aghoru ritual of the dead, but the pointless chanting and somatic posturing had amused him with its naivety.

  The Aghoru truly believed they placated some dormant race of devils imprisoned beneath the earth, but the time was not yet right to disabuse them of that notion. Standing in the dark of the cave, he could feel the vast pressure of the Great Ocean far beneath his feet, leeching up through wards worn thin by uncounted aeons.

  There were no devils beneath the Mountain, only the promise of something so incredible that it took Magnus’ breath away. It was too early to be certain, but if he was right, the benefit to the human race would be beyond imaging.

  What lay beneath the Mountain was a gateway, an entrance to an indescribably vast and complex network of pathways through the Great Ocean, as though an unseen network of veins threaded the flesh of the universe. To gain control of that network would allow humanity free rein over the stars, the chance to step from one side of the galaxy to the other in the blink of an eye.

  There was danger, of course there was. He could not simply open this gate without the Great Ocean spilling out with disastrous consequences. The secret to unlocking this world’s great potential would be in careful study, meticulous research and gradual experimentation. As Yatiri intoned the meaningless rituals for the dead, Magnus had drawn a filament of that power upwards, and had tasted the vast potential of it. It was raw, this power, raw and vital. His flesh ached for its touch again.

  The things he could do with such power.

  Magnus rose up, leaving his corporeal body kneeling upon the sun disc. Freed from the limitations of flesh, his body truly came alive, a lattice of senses beyond the paltry few understood by those whose only life was that lived on the mundane realms of existence.

  “I will free you all from the cave,” said Magnus, his voice unheard beyond the walls of the pyramid. His body of light shot through the pyramid’s peak, rising into the night sky of Aghoru, and Magnus relished this chance to soar without company or protection.

  The Mountain reared over him, its immense presence towering in its majesty.

  He rose up thousands of metres, and still it dwarfed his presence.

  Magnus shot higher into the sky, a brilliant missile that twisted, spun and wove glittering traceries of light in the sky. His dizzying flight was invisible to all, for Magnus desired to remain alone, and masked his presence from even his captains.

  He flew as close to the Mountain as he could, feeling the black wall of null energy radiating from artfully fashioned rocks and peaks designed with but a single purpose: to contain the roiling, unpredictable energies trapped beneath it.

  Magnus spun around the mountain, relishing the aetheric winds whipping around his body of light. Ancient mystics had known the body of light as the linga sarira, a double of the physical body they believed could be conjured into existence with time, effort and will, essentially creating a means to live forever. Though untrue, it was a noble belief.

  Onwards and upwards he flew. The atmosphere grew thin, yet the subtle body needed no oxygen or heat or light to sustain it. Will and energy were its currency, and Magnus had a limitless supply of both.

  The sun was a fading disc of light above him, and he flew ever upwards, spreading his arms like wings as he bathed in the warmth of the invisible currents of energy that permeated every corner of this world. The world below was a distant memory, the encampment of the Thousand Sons a pinprick of light in the darkness.

  He saw the vast swathe of the galaxy, the misty whiteness of the Milky Way, the gleam of distant stars and the impossible gulfs that separated them. Throughout history, men and women had looked up at these stars and dreamed of one day travelling between them. They had balked at distances so vast the human mind was incapable of conceiving them, and then bent their minds to overcoming the difficulties in doing so.

  Now the chance to take those stars, to master the galaxy once and for all, was in their grasp. Magnus would be the architect of that mastery. The ships of the Thousand Sons hung motionless in the void above him, the Photep, the Scion of Prospero and the Ankhtowe. Together with Mechanicum forge vessels, Administratum craft and a host of bulk cruisers bearing army soldiers of the Prospero Spireguard, they made up this portion of the 28th Expedition.

  Up here, bathed in light and energy, Magnus was free of his earthly limitations, self-imposed though many of them were. Here, he saw with perfect clarity, his form unbound by the laws and bargains made by both him and his creator. Unlike his brothers, Magnus remembered his conception and growth, recalling with perfect clarity the bond that existed between him and his father.

  Even as he was forged in the white heat of genius, he spoke with his father, listening to his grand dreams, the colossal scale of his vision and his own place within it. As a mother might talk to the unborn babe in her womb, so did the Emperor speak with Magnus.

  But where a growing child knows nothing of the world outside, Magnus knew everything.

  He remembered, decades later, returning to the world of his birth to travel its forgotten highways and explore its lost mysteries with his father. The Emperor had taught him more of the secret powers of the universe, imparting his wisdom while little realising that the student was on the verge of outstripping the teacher. They had walked the searing red deserts of Meganesia, travelling the invisible pathways once known as songlines by the first people to walk that land.

  Other cultures knew them as ley lines or lung-mei, believing them to be the blood of the gods, the magnetic flow of mystical energy that circulated in the planet’s veins. His father told him how the ancient shamans of Old Earth could tap into these currents and wield power beyond that of other mortals. Many had sought to become gods, raising empires and enslaving all men before them.

  The Emperor spoke of how these men had brought ruin upon themselves and their people by trafficking with powers beyond their comprehension. Seeing Magnus’ interest, his father warned him against flying too long and too high in the aether for selfish gain.

  Magnus listened attentively, but in his secret heart he had dreamed of controlling the powers these mortals could not. He was a being of light so far removed from humanity that he barely considered himself related to his primordial ancestors.
He was far above them, yes, but he did not allow himself to forget the legacy of evolution and sacrifice that had elevated him. It was his duty and his honour to speed the ascension of those who would come after him, to show them the light as his father had shown him.

  In those early days, Terra was a changing world, a planet reborn in the image of its new master as shining cities and grand wonders were raised to mark this turn in humanity’s fortunes. The crowning glory of this new age was his father’s palace, a continent-sized monument to the unimaginable achievement of Unity. It took shape on the highest reaches of the world, a landmass of architecture to serve as an undeniable symbol of Terra’s new role as a lodestar for humanity. It would be a shining beacon in a galaxy starved of illumination during the lightless ages.

  Magnus had studied the ancient texts his father had assembled within the Librarius Terra, devouring them all with a hunger that bordered on obsession. He stared into the heavens from the Great Observatory, toppled mountaintops with his brothers upon the Martial Spires and, greatest of all, soared upon the aether with his father.

  He had watched in amusement as Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus vied for supremacy in the Terrawatt forges beneath Mount Narodnya, debated the nature of the universe with Lorgar in the Hall of Leng, and met ever more of his brothers as they travelled to the world that had birthed them.

  He had felt a kinship with some, a brotherhood he had not known he craved until it was right in front of him. With others, he felt nothing; hostility even, but he had not returned that hostility. The future would vindicate him.

  When the time had come to make his way in the stars, it was bittersweet. It had seen him parted from his beloved father, but could not have come soon enough for his warriors, as the gene-defects that plagued them were growing ever more severe.

  Magnus had led his Legion to Prospero, and there he had…

  There he had done what needed to be done to save his sons.

  Thinking of his Legion, he turned his gaze from the stars and remembered his father’s warning of flying too high and too far on the aether. He turned his flight back to earth, dropping like a comet towards the surface of Aghoru. The dark ground raced up to meet him, the encampment of the Thousand Sons like a lone campfire on an empty prairie. The minds of his warriors were the flames, some gently wavering, others blazing with ambition.