25 For 25

by Various

  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 he 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 t
hing, 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 gestured 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.

  With all his might, with every last moment of his strength, Rafen fought to utter a warning. From his mouth came a single, strangled word. A curse.

  ‘Horus–‘

  Gold shimmered in the darkness. The figure in armour was there, and Meros did not seem to see him. With infinite slowness, a gauntlet of brass and shining amber raised to place a hand over the silent lips of an unmoving mask. The message was without ambiguity, the command unmistakable.

  Silence.

  Unaware, Meros held out a hand to touch the other warrior’s shoulder. ‘Rafen? We are victorious… What troubles you?’

  But then the moment faded, and the sands became as blood, drowning them both.

  The Touch of Sanguine Dawn opened and cast crimson liquid across the flagstones of the Hall of Sarcophagi in a steaming tide.

  Wet with fluids, Rafen stumbled from the interior of the golden orb and fell to one knee. He coughed and tore the breather tubes from his nostrils, taking ragged gulps of air. ‘I… I am alive…’

  ‘Indeed.’ The dark voice drew his gaze up. He found himself looking into burning eyes that dared him to break away. The power of Lord Mephiston’s will was almost impossible to resist.

  Finally, he released Rafen and the warrior looked down at the tracks along his arms where numerous vitae guides had been implanted. ‘The… blood…’

  ‘Gone,’ Mephiston told him. ‘The measure of the Primarch’s sacred vitae has been returned to the Red Grail, to its rightful state. Balance, restored at last.’

  Rafen slowly climbed to his feet, as blood-servitors swept in to clean and reconsecrate the ancient sarcophagus. ‘Then at last my mission is complete. I feared it would destroy me.’

  The psyker-lord looked up, to the ornate stained-glass windows set in the walls over their heads. ‘You have stood at the edge of death’s abyss for weeks, Rafen. Lemartes and many others believed you would perish, and pass unto the Emperor’s right hand. But you defy the odds once again.’ He turned that baleful gaze back toward the Blood Angel. ‘One might wonder if you were blessed. Or cursed.’

  Rafen drew himself up. ‘Whatever the Emperor wills.’

  Mephiston came closer. ‘A question, Brother-Sergeant. What did you see in there?’

  ‘Nothing…’ The lie came to him before he could stop himself. He thought of red sands, a golden warrior, a kinsman millennia-dead. Now, as he stood here in this place of stone and steel, what he had experienced seemed like the fantasy of a fevered m
ind. Rafen’s hand strayed to his chest, to the place where his progenoid gene-seed implant lay dormant. ‘I… dreamed. Nothing more.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the psyker. ‘It is written that the Great Angel was possessed of a powerful psionic talent. Some say that he read the hearts and minds of his warrior sons as if they were open pages of a book. That he saw his own death at the hands of the Arch-traitor. That to him, even the veil of time was a malleable thing.’ He nodded. ‘The power of Sanguinius resonated through his very blood. Even ten thousand years on, we know this to be true.’ Rafen watched as Mephiston crossed to The Touch of Sanguine Dawn and stroked it with infinite gentleness. ‘These great sarcophagi,’ he went on, ‘they were built to his design. They are links to his will. And one might wonder if, after so many centuries of use, if they might not have absorbed some measure of his eternal power.’ He turned back to face Rafen. ‘Do you understand, Brother-Sergeant?’

  When Rafen spoke again, the truth welled up in him. ‘I saw something,’ he admitted.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘A myth,’ Rafen whispered.

  ‘Open it,’ commanded the warrior in gold. ‘Do it now.’

  ‘My lord–‘ Brother-Sergeant Cassiel tried to object, but a single sharp look was enough to silence his objections. ‘As you wish.’ He threw a nod to the legion serfs crowded around the flanks of The Touch of Sanguine Dawn, and as one they opened the petals of the sphere.

  Dark rivers of crimson flowed from the interior, running away into drain vents. Light from the Hermia’s lumeglobes revealed the figure within, a muscled form pale in flesh, breathing hard. With every passing second, the colour returned to him.

  Sarga leaned in. ‘The wound has closed. I see no signs of lingering infection.’

  ‘What about the shard itself?’ asked Cassiel.

  Sarga nodded to himself. ‘Destroyed. The sarcophagus disintegrated it, purged all trace of it from his system. He lives.’

  ‘Get him out,’ said the gold-armoured warrior.

  The serfs did as they were ordered to, and moved to carry the Blood Angel to a grav-litter. He stirred, and pushed them away, standing on his own, blinking in the light.