The daemon prince will not give me that chance. He pursues me with fire and thought. He is advancing up from the amphitheatre, laying claim to all of Vekaira. The city bleeds as he tears open the roadways, transforming them into arteries of incandescent rock. The city burns as the intense heat ignites combustibles, fanning the fire wide and high. The city twists as the flood of unreality spreads. In the distance, I see towers waver and crackle, while flame suddenly becomes rigid. And snaking through the growing holocaust is Doombreed’s voice, travelling the paths of warp energy, pounding at me as if it were the grinding call of the planet itself. I cannot escape it, and it leaves no room for thought.
‘Do you flee, Chief Librarian?’ The words are mocking, probing, seeking. ‘How unworthy. I thought better of the one for whom I have waited five thousand years. Yes, Mephiston, I have foreseen your coming. When your kin used the very power of my fortress to imprison me, held in the warp but staked to this miserable planet, they yet could not keep my mind in this cage. I have journeyed far along the threads of fate. I have seen you. I know what you are. Do you not wish to know also?’
I do not answer. I try to think strategically, to plan how to ambush and destroy him. And though I know words are a weapon in the daemon’s arsenal, and that he will say anything, I am cursed in this moment by my own insight. I know when I hear the truth, and I am hearing it now. My foe’s questions will not be denied, and I think, I do know what I am. My actions are what I am. That answer does not satisfy me, and Doombreed catches the scent.
‘Oh, the nobility of the Blood Angels. See how they bear up under the tragedy of their fate by aspiring to be the most perfect heroes of the Imperium. What a waste. See how they diminish themselves for the glory of their corpse-god. They resist their true nature. They resist their potential and their destiny. You have seen what it could be.’ The words are pythons. Doombreed is using truth to give his lies more suffocating power. ‘The Blood Angels who trapped me here, they learned to see things differently. Wouldn’t you agree?’
Click. Click. Click.
The final pieces of the black mosaic are falling to their places. ‘Yes,’ says that voice, a tectonic whisper, ‘they trapped me here, at the price of their own freedom. They left their empty ship for me to play with, and their souls for me to enlighten. They saw the truth, in the end. They became your Chapter’s destiny. And do you not see it? Do we not, in the end, wear the same armour? Blood for blood, Mephiston. Blood with blood.’
And with that, he thinks he has found me. The rockcrete of the avenue vanishes as a glowing crevasse opens up in the road before me, an arrow pointing at my feet. Doombreed rounds the corner a moment later. Once again, he pauses, and I have time to wonder why he does not attack at once. ‘Kneel, Blood Angel,’ he says. ‘Kneel and be victorious.’
Is my conversion really so important, I wonder, that he will refrain from killing me? The goal of his campaign has been my surrender far more than it has been my death. And now another possibility occurs to me. Perhaps it is not that he does not wish to destroy me. Perhaps it is that he does not think he can.
If so, then he is correct. He stands framed by the stone canyons of Vekaira. He has not found me: he has walked into my ambush. ‘I do not kneel,’ I tell him, ‘and yet I am victorious.’ I launch my attack. I tear open the materium on either side of the daemon prince, at the bases of the towers closest to him. Miniature storms of murdered reality spring into being, whirling vortices of uncreation. They destroy the foundations of the towers. The buildings fall, kneeling in my place. They slide forward off their ground floors, remaining vertical for the first seconds of their doom. Then structural integrity is lost. The majestic Gothic vaults of the windows close like blinded eyes. Flying buttresses fall, arms suddenly limp. All shape is lost, and Doombreed is buried under falling mountains.
I do not imagine that my foe is destroyed. I start pulling the two vortices in through the mountain of rubble. I will pass them back and forth, devouring all until they have feasted on the body of the monster. His voice has fallen still. I will silence it forever.
The front slope explodes outward. I stagger back, battered by the hail of wreckage. Doombreed bursts from the rubble. He roars once more, and now his roar is never ending, his anger unleashed until he devours the flesh of his enemy. He fires his bolter. I try to deflect the rounds, but it is like fending off a meteor storm. I do enough to avoid being reduced to a biological slurry, but I am punched through the wall behind me. Chunks the size of fists have been torn out of my armour.
I rise, shaking off the stun, but Doombreed is already here. He bursts through the wall and grabs me. He hurls me to the ground, hard enough to gouge a crater in the marble floor. He picks me up again and smashes me against the exterior wall, creating yet another hole. Outside, the warp plague has arrived, and the city is echoing the daemon prince’s snarls of rage. Fire and architecture become indistinguishable. The crevasses are maws. The lava has hands. The air is burning and bleeding. Colours smear and wash from object to object, and everything that pretends to exist is turning into the howl of blind rage. Doombreed lifts me high, holding me up as a sacrifice to a sky of roiling black. In answer, the black opens a roaring maw. Inside it, existence and oblivion are locked in combat. Creation and destruction are one and the same, an endless dragonfire outpouring of all-consuming energy.
‘He will not yield!’ Doombreed shouts to his dark god. ‘He and his fellow vermin are unworthy of your blessings. So let him be devoured!’ The sky draws near. No. We are rising. A column of lava is lifting us toward the zenith maw. I will meet my end hurled into the jaws of raging Chaos.
Only I will not. The warp is mine. Darkness is mine. Destruction is mine. I am the Lord of Death, and I hold illimitable dominion. Doombreed’s claws are crushing my body within my armour, but they do not hold my will. I reach out into the chaos. I see something that is not the formless, polymorphous abyss of anger into which Pallevon is falling. It is directed rage. It is hard enough to shatter adamantium. It is pure. It is sacred. It is the rage of the Blood Angels. As they make war on the bloodletters, they are the source of a tremendous, perfectly shaped energy of anger. It is so strong, so consistent in its nature, that it is holding the battlefield’s reality stable. Doombreed used it against us, his sculpted memory of Sanguinius absorbing the power like a battery until it destroyed the barrier between warp and materium. But that rage did not belong to him. He did not know it as I do. It is mine by birthright, yet I am distanced from it. I understand its nature. I have wrestled with its most devastating incarnation. But I stand apart. The thing that I am, that holds me separate from my brothers, lets me see the rage from the outside. I can see the shape of the collective fury of the Blood Angels. I grasp it.
I wield it.
Doombreed shrieks with pain and disbelief. He releases me. I fall, then rise again on wings whose light of glory is so intense they make the daemon prince shield his eyes. Smoke rises from his right hand. There are fires that will burn even the likes of him.
On his column of lava, he makes for me, reaching with claws to tear me apart, an aura of unspeakable energy gathering around him. But between my hands is my answer. Fuelled by the rage of Blood Angels at war, the gift of our tragic inheritance, it is a sphere of coruscating blood, and it is the manifestation of my infinite will.
‘For Sanguinius!’ I roar. These are the wages of Doombreed’s game. This is his repayment for the blasphemies that he has wreaked. This is my most perfect act in the service of my primarch. I unleash the orb, and all of creation vanishes in the holocaust of my power. All is blood, boiling blood, the blood that is summoned by the death of all things.
Summoned by the Lord of Death.
EPILOGUE
THE ABYSSAL GIFT
Dawn bleeds over the bones of Vekaira. Day comes, after a fashion. The dome of night has not been dispelled. Rather, it is now ragged. The flaming wounds in the air have been joined by the rips in the darkness. It is a shredded curtain. Th
rough the flaps of night comes the light of an ageing star. The city is stable once more, but is frozen in the configuration of its madness. The towers of Vekaira became solid matter while they danced with Chaos, and their new shapes were structurally unsound. They have collapsed, all of them, leaving behind the twisted skeletons of malformed giants.
These details are irrelevant. Soon even those traces will be gone, because Pallevon is to be subject to an Exterminatus bombardment. The rift is no longer virulent, but it is still there, slowly pulsing the poison of the warp. There is only one solution. The Crimson Exhortation will smash Pallevon with cyclonic torpedoes until the planet cracks apart. Nothing must remain. Doombreed will never have a base here again.
The bloodletters are destroyed. Of the daemon prince, there is no sign. I no longer feel his presence. I heard, at the last, in the blood apocalypse, a bellow of pain, one that did not fade. It was cut short. Still, I will not entertain the illusion that I have done more than banish him from the materium.
For now.
The battered company begins the process of embarking on Thunderhawks and Stormravens sent down from the Exhortation to return us to orbit. The pilots of the gunships will not have to make many trips. Almost half the company is lost to death or the Flaw.
I watch Albinus accompany the bearers of the sedated Quirinus into the Stormraven Bloodthorn. He has fallen to what I resisted. In the end, he chose to fall, declaring my strength the greater curse. He is wrong. He was misled. I was not. I
I freed Doombreed. He is banished, but no longer imprisoned.
The thought is toxic. So are the words of kinship that the monster spoke to me. The doubts coil and twist. There is no escaping them. There is no quieting them. Nor will I quiet that other hunger, the one that exults in my terrible strength, and longs to unleash it again.
I follow Quirinus’s cortege, for that is what this procession has become. Induction into the Death Company will let him die with honour, but in truth my brothers are already mourning the loss of a great hero of our Chapter. Let that be so, and let the destruction of Pallevon be his pyre.
Quirinus walked in the light, and burned. For all that he embraced our Flaw, he could not truly see how it might lead to a greater strength.
I do not know what lives within me. I do not know how this hunger might grow. This I know: I hold darkness in my hands. It is mine. And this is my vow: it is, and shall always be, the darkness of holy extermination. For the glory of the Blood Angels. For the Emperor.
For Sanguinius.
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