by Nick Kyme
‘Fourteenth Fireborn, on my lead… To the anvil, brothers!’
A farinaceous dust settled on the clearing, created in the wake of the barrage that preceded the Imperial attack. Churned earth, loosened and sent skywards by the continuous explosive impacts from grenades and heavy cannon, had formed a grimy emulsion with the natural heady atmosphere of the jungle. Tips of columns loomed in the fog like broken islands floating on a dirty sea. Enemies and allies alike became spectral silhouettes in the mud-haze. Smoke from countless missile expulsions and venting rocket tubes drifted in lazy clouds, whilst lances of sunlight broke the leaf canopy above and turned grainy in the thickened atmosphere, only adding to the confusion.
It was no barrier to Vulkan. He advanced through the gritty miasma keenly, despatching foes with his hammer as they presented themselves. His Pyre Guard were arrayed around him and together they’d cut a bloody trail to reach the halfway marker. A tactical map overlaying one corner of his retinal display told him the precise distance remaining to the arch. So vast and sprawling was the alien edifice that it dominated the short horizon constantly, seen through an iridescent kine-shield. Icons identifying the rest of his Legion suggested they were making solid progress too, but the primarch and his praetorians had a definite lead. The Army divisions were faring less well.
Sustained auto-fire had mulched much of the jungle foliage into a mist that got into the lungs of the Phaerians and any of their leaders who weren’t wearing rebreather masks. Between the screams of those brought down by the eldar’s salvoes or assassinated by sniper shot, Vulkan heard men choking on the vaporised vegetation as they were pushed into the breach by their eager overseers.
With the cessation of the initial Army bombardment, the air was thinning again. A section of broken column resolved through the slow dispersal of settling earth particles. Architecturally, it was not unlike the node temple they’d encountered earlier and suggested a civilisation that predated human colonisation had once dominated this world. Likely it had been the eldar, but in more halcyon times. Vulkan saw the bodies of the aliens strewn around its circular plinth. It was a grim reminder of just how much they’d lost in the dark millennia before the Great Crusade and man’s pre-eminence in the galaxy.
That the eldar had lasted this long was testament to their persistence and courage. Any foe willing to try to resist the strength and power of two primarchs was worthy of respect, however grudgingly given.
What bothered Vulkan, as he’d torn into the aliens’ ranks, was why they were so dogged when they faced certain annihilation. Flee and they would live. What did it matter if this world was lost to them? It was little more than a wild frontier world cluttered with broken remnants of stone that no longer mattered. Why would the eldar cling to it with such fatal determination? As before, the sense of something unknown sprang to the fore of Vulkan’s mind, but he was unable to give his suspicions form or cause. For now, combat focused his mind, gave him a purpose that supplanted all other concerns.
From the initial weapons exchange, the battle had devolved into a series of closer skirmishes.
Revealed through the clearing fog, Army divisions were assaulting in force on several fronts with bayonets, knives and close-quarters gunfire. Sheer weight of numbers and the single-minded drive of their overseers and discipline-masters provided the men with small but increasingly significant victories. The eldar outmatched them one-on-one but their numbers were dwindling.
Divisions from both the Salamanders and Iron Hands were making punishing inroads, and the air was rank with the stink of reptilian carcasses. Both Legions were stolid and determined. Vulkan’s sons attacked with a cleansing flame, burning the eldar back and crushing any survivors with a combined push, whereas the warriors of Ferrus Manus engaged the enemy with the same molten anger as their primarch, breaking the aliens with shock and awe. The Morlocks in particular were singular fighters, the equal of the Firedrakes, and Vulkan was glad to be fighting alongside his brother and his praetorians. Even so, he would not be outdone lightly.
Such was the ferocity of Vulkan and his Pyre Guard, a widening gyre of dead and broken eldar had formed around them. It presented a rare moment to pause, and in the brief respite, Vulkan looked for Ferrus. He wasn’t hard to find.
The Gorgon fought without his battle-helm and was bludgeoning his way into the enemy’s flank. Forgebreaker rose and fell like a metronome in his silver hands, crushing skulls and smashing eldar into the air with the hammer’s every formidable swing. Zeal and fury radiated from his granite face as he drove the Morlocks relentlessly. Blistering fire flared between both sides but none of the Iron Hands slowed, let alone fell. The kindred of eldar fighting them was soon overwhelmed and lethally despatched, but more enemies were coming.
Encouraged by the bloodletting, a pack of crimson-scaled carnodons snorted a throaty challenge. Their riders bellowed for the monsters to charge. The Iron Hands were still cutting down a few defiant stragglers from the eldar kindred when Ferrus Manus bellowed at them. Vulkan could read his lips and imagine his wrath.
‘Finish them now!’
In his eagerness to end the fight quickly, a wayward blow from the primarch’s hammer crunched through the side of a nearby column and sent it tumbling. Vulkan balked when he saw who was in its path.
Like a ghost materialising corporeally in the fog, the boy-child appeared from nowhere. His naked torso was drenched in sweat and someone else’s blood, and he wailed blindly as he fled. As if sensing the sudden danger, the boy-child froze abruptly in the shadow of the falling column and could only watch his impending death approaching. He raised his arms feebly over his eyes.
Don’t look, child…
Vulkan was running, leaving his praetorians behind him. It would not be enough. Without intervention, the column would crush the boy-child. He cried out, knowing that to even witness the death of such an innocent would forever stain his immortal soul.
Arrested from his battle frenzy by his brother’s anguish, Ferrus turned and saw the danger.
‘First-Captain!’ he bellowed, and Gabriel Santar was there.
At his urging, the Morlocks drove on ahead of him to meet the carnodons with bolters flaring. Santar lagged behind and threw himself against the collapsing column. Using both hands, he caught the chunk of broken stone and held it. Servos in his bionic arm and legs whined in protest at the sudden strain they were put under.
He had enough strength spare to turn his head towards the terrified infant. His grey eyes churned with the turmoil of a captured storm as he glowered down at him. ‘Flee now!’
Screaming, the boy-child ran.
And as if heralding a flood, there were suddenly hundreds of the fleeing humans. Like leaves blown about on an eddying breeze, the frightened flock scurried in all directions and from everywhere at once.
‘Terra and the Emperor,’ breathed Ferrus Manus, unable to comprehend the insane exodus.
‘My lord…’
In spite of his cybernetics, Gabriel Santar’s legs buckled to the knee and his elbows bent with the sheer immense weight of the column. The Gorgon was quick to relieve him, stowing Forgebreaker and hoisting the broken chunk of rock from his equerry as though it were little more than a bolter.
He roared to the Morlocks, who were seconds from hand-to-hand combat, ‘Down!’ and hurled the shattered pillar like a spear. The front carnodon took the brunt of the improvised missile, howling in agony as its forelegs were broken. It hit the ground muzzle first, trammelling the other beasts that tripped and blundered, losing the impetus of their attack. The Morlocks were quickly amongst them, Santar having rejoined their ranks.
Ferrus Manus glowered at Vulkan, his gimlet gaze singling out the other primarch easily in the throng.
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me to try not to kill them?’ he declared through the feed.
It was easier said than done. Though the boy-child had reached relative safety, Vulkan saw hundreds fleeing in his wake. The natives were running loose a
ll over the killing fields, heedless of the danger. Emerging from their nests and hidden places in a panicked mass, it was as if the humans had been displaced from a major settlement by the eldar war host. Either that or it was some desperate gambit on the aliens’ part to try to disrupt the Imperium’s inevitable victory.
Vulkan felt his wrath for the eldar renewed. Painful reminders of Nocturne during the Time of Trial, when fire rained from the sky and the earth cracked, flickered in his mind. He remembered their fear and the grim resignation, all they had striven for, that everything they had created was about to end. Perhaps the tribes of Ibsen were not so different after all.
Ibsen again. He saw this world through a fresh lens, but why?
Ferrus was right: flesh was weak, but because he was strong, Vulkan was duty bound to protect them.
Whatever the cause of the frantic flight, the humans were at terrible risk. Entire families raced madly through the fading fog, screaming and wailing as a pervasive hysteria overtook them. Some even attacked the Army divisions in their desperation to escape, throwing rocks or beating them with their fists. None dared approach the legionaries for fear of the consequences.
And if they’d carried carbines and rifles instead of sticks and rocks?
The tribal tattoos, the apparent ease with which they’d been conquered, coupled with the eldar’s total infiltration – in spite of his empathy, Vulkan began to wonder just how far from the Emperor’s light the natives had fallen.
Through the smoky bloom of a grenade detonation, a mother and daughter emerged unscathed. Vulkan saw them running; they were just a few metres from the primarch’s position, then he noticed the unexploded shell in their path. The girl-child was already screaming when a second grenade, fallen from a dead trooper’s grasp, rolled up to the shell.
‘Pyre Guard,’ Vulkan roared. ‘Shield them!’
The praetorians were catching up to the primarch but had reacted to the danger. Hot frag pierced the shell’s casing and it erupted in a firestorm. Numeon and Varrun put their bodies between it and the cowering humans, crouching over them and wrapping their drake cloaks around them. The rain of fire and shrapnel vented to nothing without causing harm.
Numeon was shaking the dust from his helmet lenses when a tiny infant hand pressed against his plastron. He met the girl-child’s curious gaze and was abruptly stunned.
Then they were gone, lost to the madness. The mother wasn’t about to wait for another stray bullet or lurking shell to claim them. For Numeon, the moment of connection passed as swiftly as it had materialised.
Vulkan reached them quickly. ‘Thank you, my sons.’
Both nodded, but Numeon’s eyes went briefly to the fog the girl-child had vanished into.
‘Protect them,’ said Vulkan softly, following his equerry’s gaze.
‘With our breath and blood, my primarch,’ Numeon replied. ‘With our breath and blood.’
Vulkan opened the comm-feed. ‘Ferrus, despite their agitation, these are innocents. Be mindful.’
‘Concern yourself with killing the enemy, not saving the natives, Vulkan.’ The Gorgon scowled, but his face softened before engaging the carnodons. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
A band of iron was tightening around the eldar’s defensive strongpoint. Vulkan knew if he continued to advance through the centre and Ferrus maintained his pace into the flank, their paths would meet. Together they would destroy the arch and end the eldar’s occupation of Ibsen. He only hoped it would not take an unconscionable loss of human life to achieve it.
As of yet, nothing had penetrated the psychic shield emanating from the coven of eldar witches surrounding the arch. Vulkan had also yet to see the female seer who’d almost defeated his Legion back in the jungle. She was the one the eldar looked to for leadership. Despatch her, and the aliens would be all but defeated. Victory was near. But something still gave the primarch pause. Above him, the jungle canopy was vast, dark and labyrinthine. Like his brothers, Vulkan had good instincts and harboured the sense that something watched him from those lofty arbours; something predatory. But his hesitation was not merely on account of that. Monsters he could kill easily enough. He’d been unsettled ever since speaking to Verace. The feeling was not one he was accustomed to, nor was the way the human had spoken to him, and yet the primarch had allowed it unchallenged. Verace was hiding something. It was only now, his thoughts purified by the anvil of war, that he realised it. Stern of face, Vulkan resolved to get answers from the remembrancer.
For now, such truths would have to wait.
Through the haze, a small band of eldar emerged to attack the primarch. Their armour was different from the others, azure plated and more martial in aspect. Crested helms, more ornate in design than those of their ranger brethren, concealed their faces and from within the folds of vermillion capes they drew long angular swords. A low hum presaged a crackle of energy fed down the blades.
Vulkan signalled to his praetorians.
Several eldar kindreds had been drawn to the primarch to try and slow or even stop the obvious threat, but his retinue were killing everything around them.
‘Pyre Guard… Make it swift.’
Despatching the last of their enemies, they rushed ahead of Vulkan and into the eldar blademasters.
They weren’t alone. An ululating war cry announced a vast herd of raptors, powering through the dissipating fog. Energy lances dipping, they thundered towards Vulkan from the side. The blademasters, trading flashing blows with the Pyre Guard, had deliberately drawn off the praetorians.
‘Cunning,’ Vulkan muttered.
Facing off against the raptors, he hefted Thunderhead. ‘Those tiny spears cannot scratch me!’ he roared, and smashed the weapon into the ground.
The earth… splintered under the incredible hammer blow, cracking and fragmenting outwards in an ever-widening crater. Through sheer strength, Vulkan projected the bone-shattering force into a massive earth tremor that radiated lethally towards the charging raptors. Chunks of dispersing rock spewed up from the ground in a brittle spume of grit and shards. The raptors screeched and faltered, rearing madly as the quake hit. Riders toppled or were swept from their saddles by the earthy deluge. Staggered, all but annihilated, the front rankers disappeared in the mud storm and were crushed by the momentum of the stampede behind them.
Hindered by the dead and dying, the survivors could only cry out as Vulkan rose to his haunches and sprang into them.
The eldar and their saurians didn’t last long. By the time Vulkan was done with the grisly work, the Pyre Guard had slain the last of the blademasters. Ganne had a savage dent in his battleplate and Igataron had lost his helmet during the fight but otherwise the praetorians were intact.
‘We are losing ground,’ said Vulkan, seeing that Ferrus had killed the last of the giant carnodons.
Numeon gestured with his bloody halberd blade. ‘Scattered remnants are all that stand in our way, primarch.’
The equerry was right. The eldar were almost done. They’d fought tooth and nail against the Imperium, but with the destruction of the carnodons their resistance was at an end.
Only one feat remained before total victory was assured.
The monolithic arch stood unharmed behind the psychic shield, the coven of witches in place around it, their chanting uninterrupted since the battle began. Vulkan scoured their ranks, peering through the psychic energy veil, but he could find no sign of the female seer. Yet, the sensation of being watched from overhead persisted.
‘She is here somewhere,’ he muttered, turning his gaze from the enshrouding jungle canopy to the battlefield. ‘The aliens have one last card to play before this is over.’
By now the other Salamanders were close at hand. Even the Army divisions were nearing the outer boundaries of the arch. Ferrus Manus wasn’t about to wait for reinforcement; he was advancing on the coven. Vulkan turned to his retinue. ‘Come on.’
Though spirited, the last of the eldar defenders broke against the brutal det
ermination of Vulkan and his praetorians. Maimed and mangled aliens lay cold behind them. Memories of Breughar’s death at the cruel blades of the eldar witch surfaced inexplicably in the primarch’s mind, stoking the flames of his violence further. He barely saw his enemies any more. Their identities were lost to him, subsumed collectively into the face of the female slaver.
‘Primarch.’ It was Numeon who brought him back again, loyal, steadfast Numeon.
Vulkan gripped his armoured shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, my son, the fires of battle overcame me for a time.’
Numeon needed no explanation. ‘We are here.’
Luminous blossoms of energy flashed along the shield as the Iron Hands tried to crack it open. Bolter shells exploded impotently against the inviolable surface, whilst flamer bursts and heavier fire had similar effect.
Ferrus Manus swung Forgebreaker and the weapon rebounded harmlessly. Seeing Vulkan in his peripheral vision, he turned.
‘Any idea how we bring this thing down?’
Vulkan looked through the transparent psychic membrane. Despite the continuous chanting, the eldar witches were beginning to show signs of fatigue. Sweat veined their pale, eldritch faces and they grimaced with extreme concentration. Their strength was fading.
He hefted Thunderhead, enjoying the feel of the grip and the sense of its power. ‘I was going to try hitting it over and over again until it cracks.’
Ferrus grinned, a rare sight on one so serious and taciturn. ‘It’ll be like breaking in a new anvil.’
He was about to swing again when a deafening screech radiated from above, shaking the entire jungle canopy for kilometres around. The earth trembled as the screech became a throaty, bestial roar. In that moment, the light died as if a cloud had obscured the sun. At the threshold to the arch, a dappled light had fallen on the shield, lending it a brilliant sheen – it disappeared in an instant as something vast and terrible eclipsed it.
A noisome stench had filled the air, making it heavy and thick. Looking up into the benighted sky, Vulkan wrinkled his nose. It emanated from a monster. The massive shadow descending towards them was shaped like a pterosaur only much, much bigger. Though it barely moved its membranous wings, the downdraft pushed the advancing Phaerians to their knees. Some stayed like that or sank further, huddling in foetal terror. The legionaries stood their ground with the primarchs, appraising the beast coldly through their helmet lenses. A bleat of reptilian voices snapped at the air as a flock of smaller pterosaurs appeared from behind the pteradon’s incredible wingspan.
