by Gav Thorpe
‘One has come who would seize the shadows,’ Sammael chanted.
Azrael felt that he should take the feather in response, but when he reached out his hand the black plume turned to smoke between his fingers.
‘One has come who would lead the shadows,’ the Master of the Ravenwing continued.
‘One has come,’ chorused the remaining members of the Inner Circle.
Ezekiel was the next to approach, his one good eye flecked with gold as it glared through Azrael. The Chief of Librarians seemed shrouded in shadows; darkness hung from his robe like a cloak. Or like wings, flowing from his shoulders, ready to bear him up like the Angel of Death so revered by the Chapter.
‘One has come who would see the unseen.’ The Librarian held out his hands and the shadow rippled along his arms to his fingertips.
By unconscious prompt, Azrael turned his back on Ezekiel and he felt the touch of his companion on his shoulders, as though setting a great weight upon them. He could feel the cold embrace of the shadow behind him, a chill that suffused his body. Even as the sensation faded, the chamber seemed to brighten around him. Like a veil lifted from his eyes he saw the many passages and doors that linked together in the chamber.
‘One has come who will guide the unseen.’
‘One has come.’
Azrael blinked. In the moment when his eyes were closed, something changed. He had been staring at an empty wall. An instant later he stood before a huge archway three times his height, its keystone embossed with the head of a roaring lion. More startling still, the arch was flanked by two Dreadnoughts, each war machine a stark white, where a split second before had been nothing.
‘They are the Wardens in White,’ said Ezekiel, his voice returned to his own. Azrael glanced back and saw that there were no others in the chamber – no others that he could see, he reminded himself.
The armoured forms of the Dreadnoughts were heavy with ornate scrollwork and paintings of the Chapter iconography, their sarcophagi decorated with stylised versions of the Angel of Death. Scores of wax and parchment seals had been attached to them, and from their weapons hung small banners of plain black cloth.
‘What are their names?’
‘None can remember and no book records them,’ answered Ezekiel. ‘They are the last guardians of the Rock. Only the Supreme Grand Masters have passed beyond the Chamber of Passageways.
‘I am Hope,’ said the Dreadnought on the left.
‘I am Despair,’ said the other.
‘If you have the strength, dare tread the path between us,’ they intoned together.
Azrael nodded and took a step forwards. Ezekiel stopped him with a hand on his arm.
‘You will need this,’ the Librarian told him. He gestured to one side to draw Azrael’s attention to a Watcher in the Dark, who bore a scabbarded sword in its gloved hands. It lifted the weapon to the Grand Master and he took it.
‘The Sword of Secrets?’ He freed the blade, the keen-edged sword in one hand, sheath in the other. ‘But I thought it lost with Naberius.’
Ezekiel’s look and silence was non-committal. Azrael wondered if Naberius had asked the same questions, made the same remarks when he had been presented with his predecessor’s weapon – the Heavenfall blade that was the badge of the highest commander of the Unforgiven.
Another question nagged at Azrael but went unvoiced as he stepped between the Wardens in White. Why would he need a sword?
Date Ident: Unknown
The corridor from the Chamber of Passageways was no more than ten paces long and ended in a plain wooden door. There was no handle or lock, but it opened as Azrael approached.
A bitter wind swept over him, numbing his face in a moment. The crack of bolters had him raising the Sword of Secrets the moment he stepped through, alert to danger. He found himself on the ramp of a Rhino transport; behind him came a squad of warriors clad in the icons of the Third Company.
Space Marines swept past him into the teeth of vicious fire from traitor war engines dug in along the snowy ridge ahead. Thunderhawks roared overhead and more Rhinos crashed to a halt on the bank of the frozen lake to disgorge other warriors of the Third Company into the assault, the fire of Predators and Land Raiders flashing past.
The ice fields of Soloo.
He lowered the sword and watched himself leading his squad, fresh to the rank of sergeant. He directed their fire towards a bunker on the hill. The squad’s lascannon spat beams of white death, while their bolters chewed at the ferrocrete pillbox. Missiles and battlecannon shells from the circling gunships crashed down, obliterating a hundred metres of razorwire, trenches and fortifications in a firestorm of plasma, shrapnel and promethium. Dark Talon aircraft swept down, their rift cannons tearing holes in reality, shredding what little remained of the defenders.
The scene slowed, explosions blossoming along the front, las-blasts and bullets searing past Sergeant Azrael and his Space Marines. It stopped, frozen in a moment of time.
‘What is this?’ Azrael demanded, stalking through the fire and fountains of snow, particles of smoke and dirt hanging on the air.
A moment, whispered a voice.
He looked around but saw nothing.
A moment of weakness, the voice continued. Azrael followed what seemed to be the direction of its source and came up beside the apparition of himself. The incarnation of his memory was blurred slightly, though everything around him was sharp and stark. The voice seemed to issue from his frozen counterpart.
‘Not weakness – assessment,’ Azrael replied, recalling the moment to which the voice referred.
The line of advance was cleared. You did not advance. Hesitation.
‘Inexperience. I took a few seconds longer than I should have to verify that the bombardment had been successful.’
See the missile.
He knew it was there, its vapour trailing from a crippled walker to the left. He had spotted it the moment the scene had frozen.
‘It will kill Brother Kasper,’ Azrael admitted. ‘Had we moved forward earlier we would have seen the walker and targeted it with the lascannon. This is not new. I have revisited this scene a dozen times over the centuries. But the past cannot be changed. And the future is not set. Kasper may have lived but another died a minute later if we had not been delayed calling for the Apothecary to extract his gene-seed.’
His surroundings boomed into life again, and two seconds later the anti-tank missile struck Kasper below the arm, punching through his armour and into the side of his chest cavity before it detonated its warhead. The explosion almost turned his thorax inside out, coating his battle-brothers with gore and splinters of bone.
But Azrael did not have to watch; he remembered it already. His gaze was fixed on himself, on the memory of himself. Sergeant Azrael was halfway out of the crater, attention fixed on the enemy in front.
The blaze of the missile engulfed Azrael, and when it faded the vignette had changed. Soloo was gone, replaced by a dark sky across which blazed a purple comet. Drop pods screamed down through the clear heavens, each a growing star of plasma.
One pod, retros firing, landed directly on top of him. He resisted the instinct to flinch, told himself it was simply a hallucination. With a crash the drop pod smashed into the ground atop his position, but he remained unharmed, the reconstructed memory unfolding around him.
He found himself, bounding from the drop alcove as the restraints fell away, bolter in hand. This was before Soloo, before Truan, the Cargenesis Ultimatum and so many other battles.
‘Athenia V, my first ever engagement as a full battle-brother. I acquitted myself well that night.’
Arrogance.
He followed the voice to himself once more, pounded across the blackened earth a few paces behind the newly ascended Brother Azrael. His marksmanship was efficient, clean, each burst of fire finding an ork amongst the green-skinned tide rousing from its camp towards the drop assault. He remembered seeing the banner of Master Tydroth amongst the fury
of battle.
History paused again.
‘Is that it?’ Azrael pointed to the red and gold standard. ‘You think it arrogant to look upon the banner of my commander and be inspired.’
Ambition, whispered the breeze.
‘Aspiration. They are not the same thing.’
You have ascended to the highest rank of the Chapter. Your aspirations have brought you as far as they can.
‘It is only the beginning of a new battle,’ Azrael replied. He gestured with the sword, encompassing the fury of the greenskins disgorging from the rough shacks and tents, sweeping it across the green-armoured Space Marines deploying from their drop pods. ‘Just like this. Becoming Supreme Grand Master does not crown my achievements – it redefines them. What came before is done, part of the journey that brought me here. It means nothing to my future conduct. The war before me is the one I must win.’
The memory played out as he recalled. He kept at the shoulder of Sergeant Raxiel as he had been told, and fired relentlessly at the oncoming xenos filth. Concentrated aggression ensured that not a single ork came within fifty metres of the squad as they pressed on, forming a tight knot with several other squads as they reached the scattered hovels that denoted the outskirts of the ork settlement.
Sergeant Raxiel sent half the squad to clear the nearest outbuilding, Azrael amongst them. The Grand Master recalled vividly that there was nothing inside, but followed after his former self as he vaulted through the window.
Rather than landing on the dirty floor of the hovel, Azrael found himself in snow again, this time almost to his knees.
The wind keened down a desolate valley, not a single tree or bush to halt its progress. On the crest ahead rough banners flapped from crooked poles. Several dozen fur-clad warriors waited there, hammers and axes and shields in hand. A drummer started a slow, steady beat and they advanced through the snow towards the valley floor.
A matching rhythm from behind caused Azrael to turn. Another group of barbaric fighters descended from the opposite slope, beneath banners of bloodstained leather.
‘I was not here. I do not remember this,’ he said, watching the two warbands approach, sliding over the snow as much as pushing through it.
You have been persuaded to forget, the wind told him.
He scoured the line of faces to each side, trying to recognise anything, but nothing came to mind. He strode forwards, snow gripping his legs, seeking something familiar – an enemy face, a shield design or weapon. There was nothing.
Behind the warbands came two more groups, smaller in number. They were youths, wiry and hard-eyed, but none more than twelve or thirteen Terran years old.
Now he saw himself. Not from conscious memory, but a vague recollection that he could not define. He held a length of wood edged with bone shards, almost as tall as he was. Thick leather protected his arms and chest, his legs free of armour. The better to move through the snow, though he could not say how he recalled such a fact.
He made a leap of judgement, based on what he had already seen.
‘You are showing me moments of transition,’ Azrael told the Watchers, for surely it was they that had engineered this memorial construct. ‘I assume this is my first battle.’
The wind said nothing.
The two warbands broke into charges with throaty bellows of hate, while the youths forged through the snows towards each other for their own separate battle. It was hard to watch with detachment as his young self squared up against a girl of similar age from the opposing tribe, a maul of fire-hardened wood in one hand, a sharpened stake in her other. He had no connection from memory, and on an intellectual level understood that he would be victorious – but in his enforced ignorance he could not help but want his young self to do well and was eager to see events unfold.
Child-Azrael swung wildly, his bone-axe missing the girl by a wide margin. The girl, a vicious grin on her face, punched him in the jaw and knocked him into the snow. The youth threw himself sideways as she swung her club, and scrambled through the snow with his enemy in pursuit, legs pumping as he struggled to find purchase in the white drifts.
He regained his feet just in time, weapon raised to block the descending club. The girl’s sharpened stick found his leg, and Grand Master Azrael winced as blood poured through the thick fur of his younger self’s leggings – his leg twinged as if in memory, though he had no conscious recollection of the event.
The wound only incensed the young warrior. Azrael felt pride as the youth launched a blistering assault, swiping his axe at the girl again and again, ducking and dodging her return swings.
His foot caught on something under the snow. A rock, perhaps. He stumbled, falling into the upswing of his foe’s club. Its tip caught his mouth, slamming his head backwards. He flailed in the snow, stunned, weapon falling from numb fingers.
The girl stood over him. He wiped a hand over his mouth, smearing blood across his cheek and arm, still dazed. She pulled back the club.
A stone hit her in the temple and she toppled, falling across his legs with eyes glazed. Another boy shouted, pointing at the unconscious girl, insistent, his meaning clear. His younger self picked himself up, still groggy, and retrieved his bone-axe.
‘No,’ whispered Azrael. He stalked towards the young version of himself. ‘The victory is yours. There is no honour in her death.’
The scene froze with boy-Azrael poised to smash in the head of the defenceless girl.
What is honour?
‘Avoiding needless slaughter.’
It is a weakness. It is indulgent mercy cloaked in ritual.
‘It is a code, the reason we fight. If not for honour, we are simply killers. Honour shapes our cause.’
Honour is false. Victory is all.
‘Did I spare her?’ he demanded, standing over the pair of young warriors. They seemed so small to him.
Does it matter?
The snow was falling fast; thick clots of white filled the air. The scene began to waver, to pale before his eyes.
‘Did I kill her?’ he growled, head turning left and right to seek the perpetrator of this torment. ‘I do not remember! Show me!’
He wanted to reach out and snatch the axe from his young hand, but he knew it was simply an apparition, not reality. He could not change what had passed. Was that the point?
‘Why do you remind me of these events? What accusations are you trying to make?’
The white was almost complete around him, the paleness an all-encompassing aura of diffused light, like being inside the shell of an egg. The light flickered and divided. His eyes focused again and the light resolved into several lights, becoming yellow and orange.
A dozen candles on sconces on the wall around him.
He was in a circular chamber of rough stone blocks. No doors. He looked up and down. No trapdoors or grates or other means of exit.
An oubliette.
In the shadow beneath each candle stood a Watcher in the Dark. Red eyes regarded him with unblinking stares.
‘These are your doubts? Hesitation, arrogance, mercy? These are my sins by which I’ll be judged.’
We do not judge. We watch.
‘Why did you choose these visions? If not accusations, what are they supposed to mean?’
We did not choose them.
‘That makes no sense.’ He turned from one Watcher to the next, but they seemed identical, even to the folds and creases of their robes. ‘Why confront me with these moments from my life if they have no meaning?’
So that you understand.
He was not sure what to do next. Had he already failed the trial? Was this prison to be the last thing he saw, slowly starving and dying of thirst? He examined the stones again, ran his hands over their surface. They were real enough, cool to the touch, with patches of lichen in places.
He approached one of the Watchers, but could get no closer than three paces from it – when he took another step it was as though the room shifted and the Watcher was another pac
e further away without moving. The chamber adjusted around him as he turned on his heel and started towards another. Watchers and candles remained just out of reach, so that it seemed as if he and they were immobile and the stones revolved around them.
He checked every surface again, but there was no crack or weakness in the stones of the walls or floor and the ceiling was out of reach. Azrael waited, staring at the figure of a Watcher, trying to see what lay beneath the hood, though not quite sure he wished to know.
The lack of action gnawed at him.
‘What do you want?’ he shouted, turning about on his heel, staring at his captors. ‘What do you want of me?’
There was no reaction, not even a flicker of recognition.
The Dark Angel examined one of the candles, as close as he could. It flickered like a flame, but the wax did not melt. After some time – time he lost track of despite his innate Space Marine temporal sense – he was sure he saw a pattern, a repetition. The candle flame looked like a hololith on a loop a few minutes long.
Was time really passing? Was he caught in some kind of stasis chamber?
This thought sent a surge of adrenaline through him and he fought against the overwhelming desire to act, to do something.
It was a test, he reminded himself. Everything was part of the trials.
‘Patience,’ he muttered even as the urge to slam his fists against the wall gripped him.
For how long would he have to wait until their intent was revealed? How long had he already been here?
Azrael returned to the centre of the oubliette and sat cross-legged on the floor. The Grand Master had forgotten he was carrying the Sword of Secrets still. He sheathed it and placed the scabbard across his lap. Fingers knitted together, he rested his hands on the sword and contemplated his surroundings, trying to remain calm.
There certainly was no way in or out, other than by the machination of the Watchers in the Dark. He turned his attention to the sword. Ezekiel had said he would need it. Was he meant to attack the Watchers? To prise or dig his way out?
