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Shadow Knight – Aaron Dembski-Bowden
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Shadow Knight
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
The sins of the father, they say.
Maybe. Maybe not. But we were always different. My brothers and I, we were never truly kin with the others – the Angels, the Wolves, the Ravens…
Perhaps our difference was our father’s sin, and perhaps it was his triumph. I am not empowered by anyone to cast a critical eye over the history of the VIII Legion.
These words stick with me, though. The sins of the father. These words have shaped my life.
The sins of my father echo throughout eternity as heresy. Yet the sins of my father’s father are worshipped as the first acts of godhood. I do not ask myself if this is fair. Nothing is fair. The word is a myth. I do not care what is fair, and what is right, and what’s unfair and wrong. These concepts do not exist outside the skulls of those who waste their life in contemplation.
I ask myself, night after night, if I deserve vengeance.
I devote each beat of my heart to tearing down everything I once raised. Remember this, remember it always: my blade and bolter helped forge the Imperium. I and those like me – we hold greater rights than any to destroy mankind’s sickened empire, for it was our blood, our bones, and our sweat that built it.
Look to your shining champions now. The Adeptus Astartes that scour the dark places of your galaxy. The hordes of fragile mortals enslaved to the Imperial Guard and shackled in service to the Throne of Lies. Not a soul among them was even born when my brothers and I built this empire.
Do I deserve vengeance? Let me tell you something about vengeance, little scion of the Imperium. My brothers and I swore to our dying father that we would atone for the great sins of the past. We would bleed the unworthy empire that we had built, and cleanse the stars of the False Emperor’s taint.
This is not mere vengeance. This is redemption.
My right to destroy is greater than your right to live.
Remember that, when we come for you.
He is a child standing over a dying man.
The boy is more surprised than scared. His friend, who has not yet taken a life, pulls him away. He will not move. Not yet. He cannot escape the look in the bleeding man’s eyes.
The shopkeeper dies.
The boy runs.
He is a child being cut open by machines.
Although he sleeps, his body twitches, betraying painful dreams and sleepless nerves firing as they register pain from the surgery. Two hearts, fleshy and glistening, beat in his cracked-open chest. A second new organ, smaller than the new heart, will alter the growth of his bones, encouraging his skeleton to absorb unnatural minerals over the course of his lifetime.
Untrembling hands, some human, some augmetic, work over the child’s body, slicing and sealing, implanting and flesh-bonding. The boy trembles again, his eyes opening for a moment.
A god with a white mask shakes his head at the boy.
‘Sleep.’
The boy tries to resist, but slumber grips him with comforting claws. He feels, just for a moment, as though he is sinking into the black seas of his home world.
Sleep, the god had said.
He obeys, because the chemicals within his blood force him to obey.
A third organ is placed within his chest, not far from the new heart. As the ossmodula warps his bones to grow on new minerals, the biscopea generates a flood of hormones to feed his muscles.
Surgeons seal the boy’s medical wounds.
Already, the child is no longer human. Tonight’s work has seen to that. Time will reveal just how different the boy will become.
He is a teenage boy, standing over another dead body.
This corpse is not like the first. This corpse is the same age as the boy, and in its last moments of life it had struggled with all its strength, desperate not to die.
The boy drops his weapon. The serrated knife falls to the ground.
Legion masters come to him. Their eyes are red, their dark armour immense. Skulls hang from their pauldrons and plastrons on chains of blackened bronze.
He draws breath to speak, to tell them it was an accident. They silence him.
‘Well done,’ they say.
And they call him brother.
He is a teenage boy, and the rifle is heavy in his hands.
He watches for a long, long time. He has trained for this. He knows how to slow his hearts, how to regulate his breathing and the biological beats of his body until his entire form remains as still as a statue.
Predator. Prey. His mind goes cold, his focus absolute. The mantra chanted internally becomes the only way to see the world. Predator. Prey. Hunter. Hunted. Nothing else matters.
He squeezes the trigger. One thousand metres away, a man dies.
‘Target eliminated,’ he says.
He is a young man, sleeping on the same surgery table as before.
In a slumber demanded by the chemicals flowing through his veins, he dreams once again of his first murder. In the waking world, needles and medical probes bore into the flesh of his back, injecting fluids directly into his spinal column.
His slumbering body reacts to the invasion, coughing once. Acidic spit leaves his lips, hissing on the ground where it lands, eating into the tiled floor.
When he wakes, hours later, he feels the sockets running down his spine. The scars, the metallic nodules…
In a universe where no gods exist, he knows this is the closest mortality can come to divinity.
He is a young man, staring into his own eyes.
He stands naked in a dark chamber, in a lined rank with a dozen other souls. Other initiates standing with him, also stripped of clothing, the marks of their surgeries fresh upon their pale skin. He barely notices them. Sexuality is a forgotten concept, alien to his mind, merely one of ten thousand humanities his consciousness has discarded. He no longer recalls the face of his mother and father. He only recalls his own name because his Legion masters never changed it.
He looks into the eyes that are now his. They stare back, slanted and murder-red, set in a helmet with its facial plate painted white. The blood-eyed, bone-pale skull watches him as he watches it.
This is his face now. Through these eyes, he will see the galaxy. Through this skulled helm he will cry his wrath at those who dare defy the Emperor’s vision for mankind.
‘You are Talos,’ a Legion master says, ‘of First Claw, Tenth Company.’
He is a young man, utterly inhuman, immortal and undying.
He sees the surface of this world through crimson vision, with data streaming in sharp, clear white runic language across his retinas. He sees the life forces of his brothers in the numbers displayed. He feels the temperature outside his sealed war armour. He sees targeting sights flicker as they follow the movements of his eyes, and feels his hand, the hand clutching his bolter, tense as it tries to follow each target lock. Ammunition counters display how many have died this day.
Around him, aliens die. Ten, a hundred, a thousand. His brothers butcher their way through a city of violet crystal, bolters roaring and chainswords howling. Here and there in the opera of battle-noise, a brother screams his rage through helm-amplifiers.
The sound is always the same. Bolters always roar. Chainblades always howl. Space Marines always cry their fury. When the VIII Legion wages war, the sound is that of lions and wolves slaying each other while vultures shriek above.
He cries words that he will one day never shout again – words that will soon become ash on his tongue. Already he cries the words without thinking about them, without feel
ing them.
For the Emperor.
He is a young man, awash in the blood of humans.
He shouts words without the heart to feel them, declaring concepts of Imperial justice and deserved vengeance. A man claws at his armour, begging and pleading.
‘We are loyal! We have surrendered!’
The young man breaks the human’s face with the butt of his bolter. Surrendering so late was a meaningless gesture. Their blood must run as an example, and the rest of the system’s worlds would fall into line.
Around him, the riot continues unabated. Soon, his bolter is silenced, voiceless with no shells to fire. Soon after that, his chainsword dies, clogged with meat.
The Night Lords resort to killing the humans with their bare hands, dark gauntlets punching and strangling and crushing.
At a timeless point in the melee, the voice of an ally comes over the vox. It is an Imperial Fist. Their Legion watches from the bored security of their landing site.
‘What are you doing?’ the Imperial Fist demands. ‘Brothers, are you insane?’
Talos does not answer. They do not deserve an answer. If the Fists had brought this world into compliance themselves, the Night Lords would never have needed to come here.
He is a young man, watching his home world burn.
He is a young man, mourning a father soon to die.
He is a traitor to everything he once held sacred.
Stabbing lights lanced through the gloom.
The salvage team moved slowly, neither patient nor impatient, but with the confident care of men with an arduous job to do and no deadline to meet. The team spread out across the chamber, overturning debris, examining the markings of weapons fire on the walls, their internal vox clicking as they spoke to one another.
With the ship open to the void, each of the salvage team wore atmosphere suits against the airless cold. They communicated as often by sign language as they did by words.
This interested the hunter that watched them, because he too was fluent in Adeptus Astartes battle sign. Curious, to see his enemies betray themselves so easily.
The hunter watched in silence as the spears of illumination cut this way and that, revealing the wreckage of the battles that had taken place on this deck of the abandoned vessel. The salvage team – who were clearly genhanced, but too small and unarmoured to be full Space Marines – were crippled by the atmosphere suits they wore. Such confinement limited their senses, while the hunter’s ancient Mark IV war plate only enhanced his. They could not hear as he heard, nor see as he saw. That reduced their chances of survival from incredibly unlikely to absolutely none.
Smiling at the thought, the hunter whispered to the machine-spirit of his armour, a single word that enticed the war plate’s soul with the knowledge that the hunt was beginning in earnest.
‘Preysight.’
His vision blurred to the blue of the deepest oceans, decorated by supernova heat smears of moving, living beings. The hunter watched the team move on, separating into two teams, each of two men.
This was going to be entertaining.
Talos followed the first team, shadowing them through the corridors, knowing the grating purr of his power armour and the snarling of its servo-joints were unheard by the sense-dimmed salvagers.
Salvagers was perhaps the wrong word, of course. Disrespectful to the foe.
While they were not full Space Marines, their gene-enhancement was obvious in the bulk of their bodies and the lethal grace of their motions. They, too, were hunters – just weaker examples of the breed.
Initiates.
Their icon, mounted on each shoulder plate, displayed a drop of ruby blood framed by proud angelic wings.
The hunter’s pale lips curled into another crooked smile. This was unexpected. The Blood Angels had sent in a team of Scouts…
The Night Lord had little time for notions of coincidence. If the Angels were here, then they were here on the hunt. Perhaps the Covenant of Blood had been detected on the long-range sensors of a Blood Angel battlefleet. Such a discovery would certainly have been enough to bring them here.
Hunting for their precious sword, no doubt. And not for the first time.
Perhaps this was their initiation ceremony? A test of prowess? Bring back the blade and earn passage into the Chapter…
Oh, how unfortunate.
The stolen blade hung at the hunter’s hip, as it had for years now. Tonight would not be the night it found its way back into the desperate reach of the Angels. But, as always, they were welcome to sell their lives in the attempt at reclamation.
Talos monitored the readout of his retinal displays. The temptation to blink-click certain runes was strong, but he resisted the urge. This hunt would be easy enough without combat narcotics flooding his blood. Purity lay in abstaining from such things until they became necessary.
The location runes of his brothers in First Claw flickered on his visor display. Taking note of their positions elsewhere in the ship, the hunter moved forward to shed the blood of those enslaved to the Throne of Lies.
A true hunter did not avoid being seen by his prey. Such stalking was the act of cowards and carrion-eaters, revealing themselves only when the prey was slain. Where was the skill in that? Where was the thrill?
A Night Lord was raised to hunt by other, truer principles.
Talos ghosted through the shadows, judging the strength of the Scouts’ suits’ audio-receptors. Just how much could they hear…
He followed them down a corridor, his gauntleted knuckles scraping along the metal walls.
The Blood Angels turned instantly, stabbing his face with their beam-lighting.
That almost worked, the hunter had to give it to them. These lesser hunters knew their prey – they knew they hunted Night Lords. For half a heartbeat, sunfire would have blazed across his vision, blinding him.
Talos ignored the beams completely. He tracked by preysight. Their tactics were meaningless.
He was already gone when they opened fire, melting into the shadows of a side corridor.
He caught them again nine minutes later.
This time, he lay in wait after baiting a beautiful trap. The sword they came for was right in their path.
It was called Aurum. Words barely did its craftsmanship justice. Forged when the Emperor’s Great Crusade took its first steps into the stars, the blade was forged for one of the Blood Angel Legion’s first heroes. It had come into Talos’s possession centuries later, when he’d murdered Aurum’s heir.
It was almost amusing, how often the sons of Sanguinius tried to reclaim the sword from him. It was much less amusing how often he had to kill his own brothers when they sought to take the blade from his dead hands. Avarice shattered all unity, even among Legion brothers.
The Scouts saw their Chapter relic now, so long denied their grasp. The golden blade was embedded into the dark metal decking, its angel-winged crosspiece turned to ivory under the harsh glare of their stabbing lights.
An invitation to simply advance into the chamber and take it, but it was so obviously a trap. Yet… how could they resist?
They did not resist.
The initiates were alert, bolters high and panning fast, senses keen. The hunter saw their mouths moving as they voxed continuous updates to each other.
Talos let go of the ceiling.
He thudded to the deck behind one of the initiates, gauntlets snapping forward to clutch the Scout.
The other Angel turned and fired. Talos laughed at the zeal in his eyes, at the tightness of his clenched teeth, as the initiate fired three bolts into the body of his brother.
The Night Lord gripped the convulsing human shield against him, seeing the temperature gauge on his retinal display flicker as the dying initiate’s blood hit sections of his war plate. In his grip, the shuddering Angel was little more than a burst sack of freezing meat. The bolt shells had detonated, coming close to killing him and opening the suit to the void.
‘Good shooting, A
ngel,’ Talos spoke through his helm’s crackling vox-speakers. He threw his bleeding shield aside and leapt for the other initiate, fingers splayed like talons.
The fight was mercilessly brief. The Night Lord’s full gene-enhancements coupled with the heightened strength of his armour’s engineered muscle fibre-cables meant there was only one possible outcome. Talos backhanded the bolter from the Angel’s grip and clawed at the initiate.
As the weaker warrior writhed, Talos stroked his gauntleted fingertips across the clear face-visor of the initiate’s atmosphere suit.
‘This looks fragile,’ he said.
The Scout shouted something unheard. Hate burned in his eyes. Talos wasted several seconds just enjoying that expression. That passion.
He crashed his fist against the visor, smashing it to shards.
As one corpse froze and another swelled and ruptured on its way to asphyxiation, the Night Lord retrieved his blade, the sword he claimed by right of conquest, and moved back into the darkest parts of the ship.
‘Talos,’ the voice came over the vox in a sibilant hiss.
‘Speak, Uzas.’
‘They have sent initiates to hunt us, brother. I had to cancel my preysight to make sure my eyes were seeing clearly. Initiates. Against us.’
‘Spare me your indignation. What do you want?’
Uzas’s reply was a low growl and a crackle of dead vox. Talos put it from his mind. He had long grown bored of Uzas forever lamenting each time they met with insignificant prey.
‘Cyrion,’ he voxed.
‘Aye. Talos?’
‘Of course.’
‘Forgive me. I thought it would be Uzas with another rant. I hear your decks are crawling with Angels. Epic glories to be earned in slaughtering their infants, eh?’
Talos didn’t quite sigh. ‘Are you almost done?’
‘This hulk is as hollow as Uzas’s head, brother. Negative on anything of worth. Not even a servitor to steal. I’m returning to the boarding pod now. Unless you need help shooting the Angels’ children?’
Talos killed the vox-link as he stalked through the black corridor. This was fruitless. Time to leave – empty-handed and still desperately short on supplies. This… this piracy offended him now, as it always did, and as it always had since they’d been cut off from the Legion decades ago. A plague upon the long-dead Warmaster and his failures which still echoed today. A curse upon the night the VIII Legion was shattered and scattered across the stars.
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