by Various
He is burning with fatigue. He carries his axe in his right hand. The knapped head feels like a lead block in his trembling fingers.
Olvar knows he should move. For two winters he prepared for the forge-test and he cannot turn back. He had been unable to look into the eyes of his mother, who has already grieved for the loss of a son, expecting to see him again only in the afterworld.
Then Olvar hears it once more, closer this time. He snaps around, staring out into the dark, clutching the axe-hilt. Waters foam at the shoreline, flecked grey with cooling slag.
At first he sees nothing but low outlines of empty stone, streaked with melting snow, jagged against a bulging sky of thunderheads.
But he does hear something: a purr, a growl, a hair-lifting, skin-puckering snarl. It has been on his heels for two days, padding closer, hugging the shadows. He cannot see it, cannot smell it, only hear it. It stays downwind of him, slinking around columns of obsidian and granite, a ghoul of the boiling seas.
Olvar pauses. He should go on. He should head for higher ground, earth that does not shudder and crack as the sea drags it down and over into the abyss.
He waits, though. He shivers and he watches. In the gloom, under an overhang that scrapes into the sky like a sickle, he sees them for the first time.
Eyes, black-pinned, like golden orbs, shining in the dark.
Ragnvald strides toward the burning hab-block. Its internals are gutted and glowing, ringed by melting skeletal struts. The sky burns green, shimmering from refractive ice particles. The crump of artillery drums out a steady beat, making the earth shake.
Ahead of him a shattered highway snakes through ruins, strewn with the dead and the harrowed. His grey brothers lope ahead, streaking through shadows, heads low, bolters firing. Ragnvald moves more slowly, feeling ember-dry earth part under his boots.
The Rhino is on its side, half-buried, its smoke stacks still vomiting, its broken tracks stilled. Loer’s squad has already abandoned it, charging off towards the enemy, leaving the shell to be salvaged or scuttled.
But the spirit is intact. Ragnvald can sense it, chittering in agony, locked in the coils at the heart of the machine. He stoops and his servo-arm sweeps around, clanking as its jaws unlock. He links to the Rhino’s core, opening a service hatch. Wiring spills out like entrails.
Then he hears it – a purr, a growl, a hair-lifting, skin-puckering snarl.
Ragnvald unlocks his thunder hammer and races out from the shadow of the Rhino, but the enemy is already upon him, powering out of the roiling smoke, red-armoured, screaming in a language that makes no sense. Ragnvald sees a flash of copper-chasing, obscene bronze jaws, a chainaxe whirring in a swarm of noise.
They clash – Ragnvald’s hammer falls, cracking hard and crackling tight before sheering away. The chain-axe slews across him, digging into Ragnvald’s defensive servo-arm. Its blades bite, and he feels pain as if it were his own flesh. He falls back, stumbling as he goes, betrayed by the shifting soils.
The champion’s cracked helm-lenses blaze in triumph. He leaps, and the axe scythes down.
It leaps, coming at Olvar at last. All he sees is a barrelling wall of hair and flesh, dark as twilight.
He scrambles away, heart locking in fear. Its jaws gape wide for him, strung with yellow saliva. It is massive – the height of a man at the shoulder, hunch-limbed, long-pelted, slope-muzzled, ridge-backed. It bounds across the shifting rock, paws skidding on the ice.
Olvar stands his ground. He waits for the last moment, right until he can smell the meat-wash of the creature’s breath.
Then he swings. His axe collides with the beast’s skull, thudding against bone. He ducks and scrambles, evading the mound of muscle as it crashes over him.
He strikes again, cutting deep, working the axe hard. The beast turns on him, roaring. Its jaws sweep in low, going for his leg. He chops down even as he springs away, connecting, severing sinew.
It keeps coming, snapping, trying to pin him down. It is faster, stronger, bigger, fearless. Olvar slips on the slush and it catches him, clamping teeth on his trailing leg.
He cries out – a strangled yell – and hacks down again. Blood, his own and the creature’s, mingles in hot jets. Olvar’s movements are jerky, confined, driven by panic. His axe is slick, his fingers slippery.
Its head is over him now, leering and snarling. Golden eyes bear down on his. Slobber slaps on to his exposed chest.
Olvar screams in fury, and hurls the axe-head.
The chainaxe never connects. The champion is hit by something huge and fast. Ragnvald sees it surge past him – matted fur, metal jaws, glittering augmetics. The beast tumbles over and over with its prey, clamping it by the neck, shaking and ripping. The champion screams for as long as he has vocal cords.
Ragnvald gets to his feet, striding over to the blood-speckled scene of slaughter. He watches the creature – hunch-limbed, long-pelted, slope-muzzled, ridge-backed. Its flanks are studded with metal; one leg is a piston-mount, wrapped in cabling.
‘Enough,’ he voxes, and the beast withdraws from the kill.
Ragnvald stands over the fallen champion, twitching in a pool of black blood. He hefts his thunder hammer and brings it down, shattering the crimson helm and breaking the bronze jaws. The movement ceases.
The beast stands at his side, quivering with hunt-anger, jowls running with blood, pelt clotted with ash and armour-shards.
Ragnvald remembers when he killed it. He remembers dragging the hot, heavy corpse to the iron mountain. He had been called something else then, but that was centuries ago and names of the old ice were no longer important.
He reaches down for the wolf’s nape and tugs his fingers through its thick fur. The creature growls and nuzzles against his armour.
It took a long time to make the beast anew – years at the forges, watched by the masters behind the masks. Now its teeth are iron, its spine adamantium, its eyes red orbs of sensor-bundles.
It is better now – his first creation, his favourite.
‘Come,’ Ragnvald growls, and wolf and master lope into the dark.
On the horizon stood the greatest man there had ever been, the gilded giant that was Rogal Dorn. He had led them across this bleak wasteland, fighting through the host of cultists and degenerates thrown into their guns by the traitors of the Iron Warriors. Now the Scouring was almost done with this world, the Iron Warriors were nearly driven out and the poor fools who still believed in Horus and his heresy would be swept from another planet.
Brother Scoiven trudged through the knee-deep ash. He had seen his target fall, shot through with a round from Scoiven’s Stalker-pattern boltgun. The battle was swift and ever-moving, the fighting reduced to isolated bursts of gunfire, and clear targets were rare. Scoiven had taken the shot faster than thought, and it had hit.
The Iron Warrior’s gunmetal armour had not stopped the Stalker round punching through his throat. The ash was churned purple-black by the blood that had left him already.
‘You will pay,’ gasped the Iron Warrior, his voice metallic and strained through the faceplate of his helmet. ‘Whatever you do, wherever you go, you will pay.’
Scoiven drew his combat knife as he wrenched the helmet from the traitor’s head. ‘My debt is cleared,’ he said. ‘Your payment has already been taken.’
Scoiven plunged the blade under the Iron Warrior’s jaw and felt the heat of his enemy’s lifeblood as it flowed.
The sky above was bottle-green, the swirls of nebulae visible through the dense clouds. This world was poisoned. Its atmosphere, its water and the aliens who lived there were poisoned. The blade that had caught Scoiven in the gut as he killed the last of them had forced a venom into his veins that even a Space Marine’s constitution could not hold off.
‘In the primarch’s time,’ growled Scoiven, ‘the xenos fell to us like wheat before the scythe. No battle-brother would ever have suffered such a damned insignificant death.’
‘Dorn is long gone, brother,’
said the Apothecary as he hooked another cylinder of humours up to the needle in Scoiven’s vein. It was true. The primarch had been lost on the Sword of Sacrilege, that cursed ship, and only his bones remained in the hands of the Chapter.
Scoiven held another bone, that of the Iron Warrior he had killed on the wasteland world while Dorn still lived, lifetimes of men ago. It felt warm in his hand and strangely heavy – a shoulder blade cut from the enemy’s body after the battle, worn on a leather strip around Scoiven’s neck through the centuries that followed. It was a reminder of who he was and who the enemy were. It was in his hand now and he felt his grip weakening.
‘You are not long for this life,’ said the other battle-brother attending to Scoiven, a Techmarine in rust-red armour. ‘Decisions must be made. You have fought for over three hundred years and you are the eldest of all the Imperial Fists. There are few now that breathed while Dorn did. Such a loss is beyond counting.’
Scoiven turned to the Techmarine, Forge-Brother Malkanos, but even that movement hurt. ‘What are you saying?’
The Techmarine and the Apothecary exchanged glances. ‘Ancient Kulgatha was lost to the accursed eldar at Venomspire Ridge,’ said Malkanos. ‘His sarcophagus yet lies empty. It is ill fortune to leave a Dreadnought idle for long, especially when a battle-brother worthy of its use lies mortally wounded. But we cannot inter you without your leave, Brother Scoiven. We know you as a man of pride, a warrior who would wish to pass on to the End Time and fight alongside Dorn as a whole man instead of living on crippled within a Dreadnought. But if you choose interment and life as an Ancient, our Chapter will not lose your battle-wisdom for many centuries more.’
Scoiven clenched the Iron Warrior’s bone in his fist, and it took the last of his strength from him. There were a million of them out there, a billion, an untold horde of enemies that begged for death.
‘Do it,’ he said.
The steel of his body was cold and clad in ice. Scoiven’s right arm was a massive hammer, a siege weapon that could bring down a fortress. His left was a battery of rocket launchers. When he walked, the forges of Phalanx shook.
The chill clung to him, as if he had not quite outrun death. But the strength, the power, the sheer destructive force to be unleashed on the enemies of mankind – that was compensation. This was not an unbearable tomb, the living death that some said was the fate of those interred in a Dreadnought. Yes, he was crippled in body and would never leave the machine’s embrace, but Brother Scoiven was still a weapon in the hand of Rogal Dorn, and by the Emperor that was worth any sacrifice.
The chill grew deeper. Scoiven checked the runes of the Dreadnought’s power readout, projected onto his retina, but the power plant and life support were running normally. Icy fingers ran up what remained of his body, across the skin of his torso, now sallow and puckered inside the steel sarcophagus, and around the inputs where cables pierced his chest and skull.
A face appeared, not a projection but there, inside, with him. It was a skull, wrought from pitted and bloodstained iron, locked into a permanent grin. It was the skull that might have sat beneath a face Scoiven remembered from a lifetime ago, one lying in the bloody ash waiting for the death blow.
You could not resist taking a trophy of me, it said. I lay within that shard of bone for three hundred years. I was patient. And now I have something new to haunt.
Scoiven tried to cry out, to scream, but his vocal cords had been removed. He could not move as the cold crept over him and immersed him.
‘I told you that you would pay,’ said the Iron Warrior.
Chaplain Gerataus strides across the battlefield, combat knife drawn and primed in his hand. His crozius arcanum, his symbol of office, hangs dormant by his side. For this task a simple blade will suffice.
The ground is slick underfoot, litre upon litre of blood pooled atop earth so drenched in the stuff that it cannot absorb any more. The black greaves of his armour are stained red as he wades ankle-deep through the incarnadine lake. Piles of greenskin corpses form macabre dams, forcing Gerataus to sidestep or collapse them to reach his objective.
The ork horde made its final charge at dawn’s first light.
The Chaplain moved among the Imperial forces, Imperial Guard and Black Templars alike, steeling their resolve with his words. When the noise of the onrushing enemy drowned out his litanies and prayers, he gave the order to open fire. Within moments greenskins were scrambling over the bodies of their front ranks to reach their enemies.
On the orks came, either oblivious or uncaring to the massive casualties they had already suffered. Those few carrying firearms returned the Imperial fusillade but, outgunned, presented themselves only as targets rather than threats.
His own bolter seeking out the largest figures among the ork throng, the Chaplain continued to exalt the Emperor’s name and inspire those around him to even greater feats of heroism and sacrifice. He was about to give the order to launch the Imperial countercharge when a neophyte battling alongside him disappeared in a conflagration of blue flame.
Somewhere within the enemy ranks was a weirdboy, an abhorrence of ork genetics that could somehow bend the warp to its own will.
The Chaplain’s devotions gave way to a vow: the xenos psyker would not leave the field of battle alive.
Another figure moves amongst the dead, his white armour stark against the blanket of emerald and crimson. The Apothecary’s task complete, the two battle-brothers pass each other and exchange solemn nods. These are not gestures of pity or grief but of respect, acknowledgments of the grim labour already undertaken and about to take place. The healer takes his leave, an idling Thunderhawk awaiting his precious cargo. The preacher continues onward.
The ork bodies become more numerous, the piles higher. The Emperor’s work was done here and done well; the barbaric xenos will no longer threaten this sub-sector and its inhabitants will sleep a little easier at night in the knowledge that one of the myriad threats they face has been eliminated.
The ork psyker’s mental assaults tore through the Imperial lines. Entire squads of Guardsmen burned out of existence in a beat of their hearts, warpfire consuming them with an inexorable hunger.
The Chaplain called out to his brethren and was answered by the voices of their bolters cutting down the weirdboy’s minders. The witch-mind smiled as it watched them fall and the corona of energy washing over its body burned brighter. With fat green fingers it motioned to the Chaplain, calling him to a duel. Black Templars raised their bolters, sights trained on their sorcerous foe but the Chaplain bid them hold their fire.
Gripping his crozius tight in both hands, the Chaplain raced to meet the greenskin in personal combat.
Gerataus finds what he seeks. Offering only a simple prayer, he sets about his grisly task.
The corpse already bears three wounds, the fatal gouge through the torso and the incisions to the neck and chest performed post-mortem. Gerataus stabs down and adds a fourth. The adamantium blade parts both flesh and bone and the Black Templar tears through the skull in a sawing motion. His cuts are controlled and measured, this mutilation being no act of desecration or petty vengeance.
The front of the skull comes away, Gerataus carefully removing it with armoured fingers coated in blood. He holds the mask of bone up and studies it in the fading light of the planet’s sun before placing it over the front of his helmet. Though too small to fit in its current state, the Chapter’s serfs and artificers will stretch and reshape it before fusing it to the metal of his armour.
The crozius connected with the ork’s jaw, teeth and blood spilling from its lips as it bellowed a roar of pain. Fixing its gaze upon the Chaplain, warp energy blazed in its eyes and it roared again, this time in defiance rather than pain. Thrusting out a fist, the beast channelled its psychic might and unleashed a bolt of energy. The Black Templar dodged the blastwave, charging in low beneath the deadly beam and collapsing the ork’s chest with a single powerful blow.
Enraged, the weirdboy swung it
s massive fist in the direction of the Chaplain’s head but it connected only with the crackling head of the crozius. Power field met the raw stuff of the warp, the ensuing explosion stretching the very fabric of reality and knocking both warriors prone.
The Chaplain was the first to rise, his wrecked weapon now nothing more than a simple club. He launched himself at the xenos witch, staving in its head with wicked blows from the dead crozius. Its resistance mighty even by the standard of orks – or, not knowing it was already dead – the weirdboy drew a blade from its sheath and slashed the Chaplain across his stomach, almost bifurcating the Black Templar with a single blow. Blood gushing from the sucking wound to his midriff, Reclusiarch Deuteron hoisted his staff of office for one final blow, the last of his life expended removing the remains of the ork’s head cleanly from its shoulders.
Gerataus looks down upon the torn remains of his former mentor. The ruined crozius is still held tight in Reclusiarch Deuteron’s dead hands, the witch-mind of the ork psyker who slew him slick across the haft and shattered head. Other than the gash across the midriff, Deuteron’s armour is intact and, like his already recovered gene-seed, will be put to use again by the Chapter.
For his centuries of selfless service and his heroic sacrifice, the Black Templars will honour Deuteron in their annals and his name will forever be engraved upon the walls of the Temple of Dorn.
For his decades of training and advice, and for moulding him into the Chaplain he is today, Gerataus will honour his former mentor by wearing his death mask into battle, a visage of zeal to thrust fear into the hearts of all who would oppose the God-Emperor of Mankind.
