‘Brother?’ Now the moment of the attack had passed as swiftly as it had begun, Rafen’s confusion turned to ready distrust. He aimed the damaged tip of the sword at the other warrior’s face. ‘Are you really such a thing, or do you only pretend at it?’ He took a step closer, bearing his teeth. ‘Did you bring me here?’ he demanded. ‘I have fought warpspawn before, and won! I will do so again!’
‘I do not… understand…’ said the white-armoured Blood Angel, holding up his hands. ‘You raise a blade to me? Why?’
‘What breed of daemon tainted you?’ Rafen snapped. ‘Answer me!’
The Apothecary shook his head. ‘These things you say, you speak in riddles!’ He staggered to his feet, glaring at Rafen, his strength returning. ‘You accuse me of complicity…’ He shook his head. ‘Those… those creatures… I have never seen the like. They are the avatars of the poison…’ The warrior broke off, becoming pale. ‘Primarch… It still runs in me.’
Rafen’s broken blade was suddenly at his neck. ‘Then perhaps I should end you.’
‘You would do such a thing?’ An expression of utter disgust crossed the other man’s face. ‘An Astartes, killing an Astartes? Brother against a brother?’ He shook his head. ‘Perhaps it is you that is tainted and false!’ The Apothecary drew the chainaxe, his voice rising. ‘When I came to your aid against the ghosts in the sand, I did not question your honour! Those phantoms had your face, Rafen! But I did not kill you because of it!’
For a long moment, Rafen wavered on the cusp of drawing back the weapon to strike, but then he relaxed his stance and stepped away.
‘I do not know what you are,’ he said. Rafen turned his back and walked on.
Meros followed him; there was little else he could do.
Once, in the time before he had been raised up to join the Blood Angels, when he had still been a child, still human, Meros had heard a mad old seer speak of darker powers and places beyond the understanding of men. The recall of that moment was so far distant that it was barely even a memory anymore. His past life had been smoothed away by the monumental changes that had made him one of the Emperor’s finest warriors, so now all that remained were impressions.
But clear enough to return to him now, enough to remember the fear in the old seer’s eyes. The warp is the sea of souls, he had said. In it, all things can be made and unmade. Everything is mutable, blood and time like sand…
Like sand…
Meros walked behind Rafen, following him up the lee of a steep dune, the constant buzzing dust plucking at him, ripping what moisture there was from his lips and nostrils. Even the nictating membranes over his eyes were gummed with deposits of blown sand, forcing him to blink and brush at his face. His hand came away red with the powdery deposits. Meros lumbered after the other Blood Angel, the only other sound the labouring of the myoma muscle-quads in their power armour.
He reached the top of the ridge and found Rafen standing still. Meros halted and followed the other warrior’s gaze, up and up.
They stood at the foot of the pinnacle mountain, the spire of red rock reaching away into the clouds of dust–
But it was not a mountain. It had never been one. From a distance, the eye had been tricked to believe that was so, the scraps of the shape and image parsed to form what one expected to see.
Laying his gaze upon it all, however, was a revelation.
Rafen and Meros stood at the foot of a great statue, a carving taller than the highest Titan, the base buried in the red sand, the top visible against the shadow of the crimson sun.
‘My liege,’ breathed Rafen, sinking to one knee. Meros did the same, but unlike the other warrior, he did not turn his face away.
Meros looked up. He saw how the rocky crags formed the shape of voluminous robes that ended in a hood, and the carved planes of an infinitely noble face framed there. The patrician, shining majesty of Sanguinius’s aspect looked down on them in judgement, his hands clasped before him, his mighty wings gathered in around his shoulders like a cloak.
‘How can this be here?’ he breathed.
‘Where is here?’ Rafen replied. ‘I fear this is the answer. This place is death.’
Then Meros saw a glitter of gold and raised his arm to point at it. ‘Who is that?’
Rafen raised his head and saw the warrior in golden armour. He stood upon a ridge along the lower part of the massive statue-mountain, a carved line representing a fold in the robes of the primarch. For the first time, the Blood Angel saw him clearly.
About a beatific face-mask, a broad iron halo described a perfect circle. Intricately tooled armour in gold and brass gave the figure a muscular silhouette that mimicked the finery of a Chapter Master’s ornate ceremonial wargear, but where Lord Dante would wear upon his back the engine of a powerful jetpack, this figure grew wings of shining white steel, glittering with the ruddy light of the swollen sun overhead. Great trains of oath-papers hung from his hips, fluttering on the breeze.
‘No,’ muttered Rafen. He saw it clearly and yet did not wish to believe it. ‘You are a myth,’ he whispered. ‘An illusion.’
‘Who would pretend at the glory of our primarch?’ Rafen heard the Apothecary say the words, disbelief equal in his tone. ‘No one has the right to wear the gold…’
‘Sanguinor.’ The word slipped from his mouth. Rafen had heard the tales of the golden guardian many times, the reports of battles so ancient, so far removed from his experiences that they seemed more like fables, like the folklore of the nomadic Tribes of the Blood on Baal Secundus. He had heard these things, and yet he had never truly believed in them.
The galaxy contained many strange sights, many unknowable truths, and Rafen had lived his life in the face of them without credulity. It was how he had been trained by his late mentor, Koris. To see clearly, to challenge everything. The story of the Sanguinor had remained just that – a story. A tale told by the oldest of the veterans in the lulls between battle, a legend meant to steady the will. A metaphor for honour and courage.
And yet it stood before them now. The stories told of this avatar of all that was good and noble in the character of his Chapter, an undying force of pure will that would give its blessing to warriors fighting against the most hopeless of odds. The golden angel of vengeance who would descend from the skies in the moment of greatest need. The eternal and unending warrior.
Rafen had never truly believed, for he had fought at the speartip of wars that shook the pillars of his Chapter’s history, and never seen the face of this legend; and to see it now, in this place, brought a sudden fury to the Blood Angel. He stepped forward, filling his lungs to shout. ‘What do you want?’ he bellowed, his voice rising over the constant winds to echo off the mountainside. ‘Is this your judgement? Show your face! I will tolerate these illusions no more! Reveal yourself!’ He raised the bolter and took aim. ‘Or must I shed your blood to find the truth?’
Meros saw Rafen draw the pistol and he felt the rush of adrenaline flood through him. The figure in gold could only be one thing, one being – for the strictures of the IX Legiones Astartes forbade any but the primarch himself and his personal guard from donning such armour. It could only be the Lord of the Blood, the Great Angel himself; and here before Meros the warrior Rafen was bringing a weapon to bear upon him.
The Apothecary shot forward and grabbed Rafen’s arm, pulling it up and away. ‘What are you doing?’ he snapped. ‘Are you insane? You dare draw a firearm in the presence of your primarch?’
‘Primarch?’ Rafen turned on him, knocking him back with a savage shove. ‘Whatever you see up there, it is not Sanguinius, the Emperor’s Light find him! It is an echo at best, a shadow of his glory released upon the moment of his death!’
Rafen’s words fell like a rain of stones, the force behind them, the certainty, striking Meros with the power of a physical blow. ‘What did you say?’ he whispered. In the next second h
e was at Rafen’s throat, shaking him, glaring into his eyes. ‘He is not dead! The Primarch is not dead, how dare you speak such lies? I saw him stride the battleground at Melchior with my own eyes. I heard his voice call me to arms!’ Meros was livid with anger and confusion, unable to comprehend what would possess the other Blood Angel to voice such folly.
Rafen struggled against him. ‘Then either the Rage has taken you, or you are a liar and a fool! My primarch lies dead, ten thousand years and gone–’
‘Falsehood!’ Meros’s towering anger slipped its leash and he struck out at the unspeakable lie as it fell from Rafen’s mouth. His blow hit home, knocking the rusted bolt pistol from the other warrior’s grip. The weapon tumbled away down the incline of the dune and vanished into the sandstorm.
Despite the clinging, parching heat, a sudden chill washed over Meros as he found a moment of new understanding. ‘You…’ He pointed a finger at Rafen’s face. ‘You do not exist. You never did! You are the poison, eating at my brain! You are the soul-seeker’s venom!’ It made a horrific kind of sense; Meros knew full well from his decades in service to the Legion’s medicae corps that the dark eldar were masters of toxins, their cruelty extending to the deliberate, mind-killing methods of their tainted weapons. All this, everything around him – Rafen, the sand-phantoms and the flesh-ghosts, the mountain and the desert and the golden figure – all of it was a hallucination.
He was not here. He was somewhere else, perhaps still on Nartaba Octus, bleeding out his last while his mind lay trapped in a prison of dreams.
But Meros would not meet his end without a fight.
With a roar, the Apothecary came thundering back at him, the decrepit bolter across his back tossed away, the sputtering chainaxe in his grip. Rafen saw the look in the other warrior’s eye and knew the colour of frenzy when he saw it. He met the spinning, broken teeth of the weapon with the cracked edge of the sword. Each of the ruined blades ground against one another, spitting thick sparks, metal howling and crackling as it burned.
They were a match, these two. Blade met blade again and again, each time blunting on the defence of the other, each time scoring no better than nicks and cuts, never to the bone, never deep enough to cripple.
In the endless storm, under the unmoving red sun, they fought for hours, shifting back and forth, gaining and losing ground, their lethal dance without conclusion. Attack and riposte; feint and strike; block and advance. Each form in their battle schema met opposition and reflected back upon the aggressor.
Thick, chemical sweat sluiced from their bio-altered glands, mingling with clotted blood. The howling wind was the chorus to the grunts of their effort, the thud and clang of sword and chainaxe meeting, parting, meeting again. The heat and the pain dragged on both of them, dulling their strength.
‘Why…’ The Apothecary spoke through cracked lips as their weapons locked for the hundredth time. ‘Why will you not leave me? You will not have my death…’
‘Your words,’ Rafen gasped, ‘my thoughts, false one…’
‘You cannot reach me!’ he shouted back. ‘Your words mean nothing! You are the falsehood, you are the darkness in my blood! I am Meros, Blood Angel, Son of Sanguinius, and I deny you!’
‘Meros?’ The name cut like a knife across Rafen’s heart.
The break-tip sword dropped from its raised position, and suddenly the warrior’s guard was open, but the Apothecary did not strike. He held the chainaxe high, wary of this new tactic.
‘What perfidy is this?’ Rafen asked, weary and wrathful in equal measure. ‘Is that name plucked from my thoughts? Does my mind turn against me now?’ He turned and shouted toward the golden figure, who had not wavered from his place of observation. The warrior beat his fist against his chest. ‘I know Meros!’ he bellowed. ‘I know him here!’
Rafen pressed the hilt of the broken sword to his sternum, to the very spot where his vital progenoid gland lay deep within the flesh of his torso. The progenoid, a complex knot of genetic material, was the legacy of countless cohorts of Blood Angels, removed at the point of death and implanted anew in the bodies of the next generation. They were the most precious of the Chapter’s bequests, the living sources of the gene-memory passed on from brother to brother, assuring that the Sons of Sanguinius would live on forever.
The progenoid implanted in Rafen’s flesh was such a thing, and he honoured the stewardship of it – just as the warriors who had borne it before him had honoured it until their deaths. Rafen knew the names of every one of them, every Blood Angel down through the passage of ten thousand years and more.
Meros was one of those names. An Apothecary, a warrior of note and record who had fought during the darkest chapter of mankind’s history; the civil war known as the Horus Heresy.
He shook his head. ‘It… is not possible!’ In this place of delusion and dark nightmare, it could not be real. Rafen struggled to understand. The burning blood that even now coursed through him – was this the way it would destroy him, twisting his mind, unravelling everything about him, clawing at the threads of his history?
He turned back toward Meros, his voice rising. ‘You cannot be here…’
The other Blood Angel did not pay him any heed, for his daemons – and Rafen’s – had emerged from the storms to assault them both once more.
They came, and they brought the night with them.
It was as if the crimson sun had never shone upon the red desert; now there was only a sky ink-black and scarred with stars that burned cold, the watcher upon the towering sculpture rendered in shadow and cool, aloof shades of silver.
Meros’s poison attacked, the thread-things weaving about him, ripping into his skin. His armour… his armour was suddenly gone, and now all he fought in were his duty robes, stained with blood and patches of dark sweat. The heat of the day was gone, replaced by a bone-deep cold that sucked the energy from him.
Meros battled with the chainaxe, his questions to Rafen forgotten for the moment. Each hit missed, each blow went wide; his wraiths, however, scored every strike with perfect accuracy.
The sands were trying to murder him.
Rafen brought up his hands to cover his face as a hurricane exploded out of the dust. Darkness and cold flooded in, as if he had been thrown into an icy lake. Distantly he registered that the dragging weight of his wargear had somehow ceased to pull upon him. All he felt was the scratching agony of the whirling flecks of grit ripping through the robes surrounding him, scoring his flesh.
He did not dwell on the changes that unfolded. In this unreal place, all Rafen could do was to cling to what he knew to be true, and draw that close.
The broken sword in his hand turned and rattled through the air, and did nothing. The sandstorm ejected him with a sound like laughter and breaking stones, mocking him as he stumbled.
The wraiths danced away as they toyed with the Apothecary. Meros lurched from his knees and found Rafen beside him. The Blood Angel extended a hand to him and pulled him up. He met the other man’s gaze.
‘Will you kill me, then?’ he asked. ‘Or let them do the deed?’
‘I understand now,’ Rafen replied, nodding toward the silent watcher in gold. ‘Do you not see, Meros? We are here and our daemons are here. Alone, they will kill us.’
Over Rafen’s shoulder, the sands twisted into the form of a monstrous armoured Astartes, feral and abhorrent. It came on, clawed hands raised in attack. Behind Meros, the threads of skin reformed into something resembling a dark eldar Incubi, hollow-eyed and leering. Both shapes were becoming solid, real. Lethal.
‘What is the bloodline?’ Rafen asked suddenly. The words had a ritual, rote quality to them.
‘The eternal bond of brotherhood,’ Meros said, the reply coming to him from nowhere. ‘The will to survive beyond death.’
Rafen weighed the old, rusted blade in his hand. ‘This is my will, kinsman,’ he told him, and ges
tured to the axe in Meros’s grip. ‘And that is yours. Do you see?’
A smile formed on Meros’s lips. ‘I do.’
‘To the fight, then,’ said the other Blood Angel, ‘if it may be the last.’ He rocked off his feet, leading with the broken sword, throwing himself not at his twisted doppelganger, but at the avatar of Meros’s pain and anguish.
Meros moved at the same moment, the understanding coming to him. He swung the chainaxe at the phantom that screamed with Rafen’s face, turning the blade toward the neck.
Sword and axe found their marks as one, each killing the nemesis of the other; and in silence, the tainted dreams that tormented the Blood Angels were swiftly ended. The ghostly apparitions dissolved into nothing, captured on the winds and blown to the horizon.
‘It is done,’ said Meros, turning to face Rafen. ‘We are freed. Brother.’ He extended a hand to the warrior and Rafen reached for it–
–and time seemed to become fluid, slow and heavy.
The darkness was closing in, and all around the landscape began to ripple and fade as the certainty that underpinned the unreal place came apart. With no threat to make it whole and give it purpose, the desert was crumbling. The statue-mountain became smoke, dissipating on the never-ending winds.
A great, sudden fear reached into Rafen’s chest and clutched tight around his hearts with claws of ice. Meros saw the look in his eyes and his expression begged the question.
‘Rafen? What is wrong?’
So much, kinsman. Rafen tried to give voice to the words, but he could not move. He was frozen there, his flesh ignoring every command he gave it. So much is wrong. If the Apothecary truly was Meros of the Blood Angels, if he truly was the Astartes who lay as no more than bone and ashes in the halls of the dead on Baal, then in some way Rafen could not fathom, the man lived in another time, another place.
A place before the death of Sanguinius. Oh, what glory to live in that moment. And what horror yet to come.
Hammer and Bolter: Issue 23 Page 3
