Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  Ferrus Manus levelled his hammer at them.

  ‘Scything rain!’

  The Morlocks released a bolter storm. Whirling and shrieking, the pterosaurs were torn apart. Several stray bursts exploded against the thorny hide of the giant pteradon, which only maddened the beast further. It was gnarled and old, like some monster of myth made flesh. Myriad scars stitched its leathery torso and a vast horn, dark with age and blood stains, jutted from its bony snout. Talons, as long as the primarch was tall, curved from rough-hided toes. Umber-coloured scales, thicker than any battleplate ever forged, scalloped its back and limbs, while its long prehensile tail ended in an axe-headed barb.

  Impressive as the monster was, Vulkan’s attention was drawn by its rider.

  ‘There you are…’

  The female seer had bound this creature to her will and saddled it. Incredibly, she needed no hands to ride the monster and carried an eldritch staff in one and a glittering rune-blade in the other. Garbed for war, her intent was obvious as she glared at the two primarchs.

  Vulkan removed his drake-helm, wanting to meet the monster eye to eye, and his face curled into a snarl. ‘We must kill this thing, you and I.’

  A primordial roar drowned out the Gorgon’s reply, showering its enemies with hot saliva and reptile stink. Men quailed. Some soiled themselves and fled. The legionaries opened fire. Brass bolter shells erupted like fiery blooms across its ribbed belly. The beast rose to its haunches, wings splayed like some saurian angel, and then slammed the membranous tissue together in a thunderous collision. A deep throb raked the air, carried by the dull boom resonating from the point of impact. A tempest was unleashed upon the Imperial forces. Phaerians and officers alike were flung back screaming, their innards pulped by the massive shock wave. They spun, doll-like, limbs flailing brokenly in the hurricane. Trees bowed, bent and ripped apart. Severed trunks and clumps of scattered foliage impaled tanks and flattened entire cohorts in the savage welter of debris. They resisted determinedly, but even the legionaries were sent sprawling, a thick and dirty cloud spilling after them.

  Ferrus grit his teeth, standing his ground with Vulkan. His rage was written loudly upon his face.

  ‘I have no quarrel with that, brother.’

  An arena lay before them, of ragged tree stumps and flattened jungle flora.

  A gritty patina washed over their armour and surrounded the beast like a lowlying, earthy fog. It glared at them, expressing its ancient hate and malice, dwarfing the primarchs utterly.

  ‘Try again, monster,’ said Vulkan, dropping his voice to a predatory rumble.

  He heard a low whomp of displaced air and registered a blur of sudden movement in time to slam into Ferrus Manus and bear him down. A scaled, gnarled mass whipped overhead as the pteradon’s axe-bladed tail narrowly missed the Gorgon’s exposed neck.

  Vulkan was quickly up on his feet and moving. ‘Don’t lose your head, brother.’

  Ferrus scowled. ‘Worry about your own. It’ll take more than that to cut my flesh.’ He was moving too, making for the pteradon’s blindside to flank it.

  Its monstrous size and strength were formidable advantages, but with its enemies splitting up it couldn’t bring them to bear against both. Emitting a reverberant screech, it went after Vulkan.

  Hunting monsters was second nature to the primarch of the Salamanders. Nocturne was lair to many scaled and chitinous horrors. As a boy, Vulkan had slain them all. Even the drake he wore as his mantle was huge, but this… this was a behemoth.

  He lost sight of Ferrus behind the pteradon’s bulk, but stayed near to the beast to deny it its greater reach. The brackish reptile stench was potent close up. Mortal men would have gagged on its foul aroma but Vulkan had ranged the steppes of Mount Deathfire and endured its sulphurous vapours. This was nothing to him.

  A hot chain of sparks flew off the primarch’s armour as the monster caught him with its talons, before he turned and smashed Thunderhead into its flank. Its scales buckled and snapped. The cracks in the monster’s natural armour filled with blood, and a shriek of pain tore from its throat. A heady coppery scent dirtied the air further, and Vulkan knew he’d hurt it.

  Keep moving. It was a mantra in the primarch’s head as he chased along the pteradon’s flank. Stop and we die.

  No man could hope to face such a monster, let alone fight it. Primarchs were more than men, more than Space Marines. They were like unto gods but even gods could fall.

  As if hearing his thoughts, the monster came again. It lunged, and Vulkan narrowly avoided the razor teeth. He came up for a retaliatory strike, but the beast snapped at him again and he dropped his shoulder to dodge. It used its bulk to slam into him and Vulkan staggered before edging back.

  Teeth as long as chainblades and drooling with saliva loomed in the primarch’s eye line.

  He swung Thunderhead in a narrow arc to loosen his wrist, readying to crush the monster’s neck, when a clutch of roots spewed from the earth to trap him.

  Vulkan snarled.

  The witch was trying to even the odds with sorcery.

  He tore his arm free but further serpentine bonds coiled around it, pinning him. Vulkan roared and the beast roared with him, sensing its meal was close. Widening its chasmal jaw, the pteradon was about to bite off Vulkan’s head when it reared up in sudden agony. Swinging its leathery neck to peer over its shoulder, it screeched at a second assailant.

  ‘Like I said, worry about yourself, brother…’

  Ferrus Manus appeared from behind the monster, seen through the gaps between its massive limbs. He’d shattered a bone framing its wing membrane and leapt clear as it slashed at him belatedly with its tail. Shedding the root bonds, Vulkan punched Thunderhead into the beast’s unprotected belly. Muscles ruptured and bones cracked, eliciting another shrill of bestial agony. A swipe of the pteradon’s bladed wing claw prevented his follow up attack and forced him to retreat, while Ferrus Manus was kept at bay with stabbing thrusts of the monster’s barbed tail.

  Venturing in close again, Vulkan took a chunk of scale from its back. The two-handed blow left gore drooling between the knots and scars of its body like before, and he knew its formidable strength was ebbing.

  ‘We’re close!’ he yelled.

  Ferrus charged in to shatter the monster’s standing leg. It screeched, stumbling in pain. A line of blood jetted across Vulkan’s plastron as he caved in a portion of the pteradon’s snout. It reeled before Ferrus sheared through one of its wings, leaving the membranous tissue ragged. Between them, the savage primarchs were tearing the monster apart. A bleat of panic escaped its throat, gurgling with the blood in its nasal cavity and mouth. The pteradon suddenly realised who was predator and who was prey.

  It tried to flee but the primarchs were relentless, battering its wings with continuous blows and pounding its body like it was a carcass for tenderising. A flash from above presaged a jolt of lightning that struck Ferrus in the chest, winding him. He staggered and the monster was allowed to rise. Even though it was wounded, the hard beats of its wings were achieving loft. Another psychic bolt jagged down at Vulkan, but he evaded it and seized the pteradon’s flank.

  ‘There’s no escape,’ he muttered, gripping the edges of the monster’s scales and using them like handholds as the ground steadily fell away and he was borne upwards.

  ‘Vulkan!’

  Ferrus’s shout was devoured by the wind rushing into Vulkan’s ears. It whipped around him, whistling and screeching with the speed of the monster’s ascent. Battered by the rigours of the elements, Vulkan gritted his teeth and clung on. Amidst the tempest engulfing him, he heard the tolling of metal on metal. The anvil beckoned.

  Crushed against the beast’s coarse flank, the world around him devolving into a shrieking blur, he knew he had to rise. When he pulled his hand free, the fingers of his gauntlet were rimed with gore from where he’d been digging in. Grabbing another armoured scale, Vulkan climbed. It was slow. Every moment held the threat of him losing his grip and
being cast into arboreal oblivion below. Split branches fell like rain as they reached the forest canopy and surged through it. They scraped like claws across his face and for a few seconds he was blinded, his vision filled by parting foliage. Vulkan held on.

  The striking of the anvil tolled in his ears.

  After they’d breached the jungle roof, he was able to claw a little further up the pteradon’s body and reached the bony nub of its foreleg. He fought the pressing sense of disorientation as all visual and auditory markers disappeared in the maddened ascent. Heavy wing beats throbbed painfully in his ears as direction lost all meaning. There was only the need to hang on and the will to climb. The beast flew higher.

  The sun still burned the sky, but it was wreathed in cloud as the monster rose, ever further into the heavens. It couldn’t shake him. It barely had the strength to climb, so Vulkan only needed to bear the raging wind that pulled at his body and tugged at his fingers.

  He dug in and ate up the slow metres to his prey. His mind retreated back to the lava chasm all those many long years ago.

  It was another life.

  Reaching the muscular join between the monster’s wings, he found his enemy.

  ‘Witch!’ he called, bellowing to be heard.

  She turned, looking over her shoulder. Her eyes flickered with psychic fire, and a bolt arrowed past Vulkan’s face.

  ‘You’ll need to do better than that,’ he shouted.

  She angled her staff at the primarch, releasing a lightning storm that scorched his armour and burned a scar down his cheek. Vulkan grimaced, but advanced undaunted. Each punishing handhold brought him closer than the last. Underneath his body, he could sense the monster tiring, hear its laboured breathing and feel its shuddering muscles as they reached the end of their endurance.

  Unable to climb any further, the pteradon pulled up and levelled out, enabling the eldar seer to leave her saddle and stand upon its vast, muscular back. She confronted the primarch, feeding power into the blade of her sword.

  Vulkan was on his feet. He drew his hammer, slowly and purposefully to allow the full import of what fighting one of the Emperor’s sons meant to settle on the seer.

  ‘Surrender now and it will be swift,’ he promised.

  She ran at him instead.

  Vulkan charged.

  The primarch’s footing was uneven across the monster’s back but he reached the seer without stumbling. The rune-blade whickered like a viper’s tongue, raking Thunderhead’s thick haft. She struck again, scoring a pectoral armour plate. Vulkan swung but she sprang away from the death blow, impossibly agile, and landed perfectly on the pteradon’s back. She lunged, aiming for Vulkan’s heart. The thrust penetrated the primarch’s guard but was turned aside by his armour. A crack presaged the breaking of her sword. The seer gasped at the psychic backlash, recoiling instinctively as the energy tore at her, clutching at a blackened arm.

  Seizing her throat in his gauntleted fist, Vulkan bore the eldar witch down.

  ‘This world belongs to the Imperium.’

  She’d lost her staff, dropped over the edge of the monster, and her sword was a smoking hilt she’d also cast aside. All that remained was her defiance.

  She spat over Vulkan’s armour, and there was blood mixed in with the phlegm.

  ‘Barbarian!’ The Imperial dialect sounded crude on her lyrical tongue. ‘You don’t know what you’ve done…’ Her pale lips were flecked crimson and the vigour in her eyes was fading. ‘If you destroy it, you will doom this world more than you have already.’

  Vulkan loosened his grip and was rewarded with treachery. A burst of psychic fire flared between them and he withdrew, letting the seer go. A second blast threw him off his feet and he was scrambling to hold on.

  Panicking, the seer mounted the saddle and drove the pteradon into a suicidal dive. With a vertiginous lurch, Vulkan was falling and he reached out desperately for something to hold on to as he pitched over the pteradon’s side.

  She was chanting. Her lilting refrain unleashed spear-thick barbs from the forest below. Vulkan narrowed his eyes and he dug his fingers between the plated scales. Stomach flat against the pteradon’s gelid hide, he weathered the debris storm that was suddenly bombarding him.

  Descent was swift. The strain of it pressed against the primarch’s body like an armoured fist slowly clenching. The beast was almost done, plunging like a stone. It penetrated the broken leaf canopy as if breaching the atmosphere of a foreign world, but there was no fire, no aura of re-entry heat, just wind and the ground rushing to meet them. As the monster plummeted, Vulkan’s grip loosened. Inertia was dragging the scales he was clinging to, threatening to rip apart the sinews holding them together and tear them off.

  The earth loomed, a flat and uncompromising expanse that only required gravity to pulp flesh and shatter bones. It seemed the seer was intent on killing them both. Vulkan hung on, hoping his superhuman endurance would see him through. Thirty metres from impact, the pteradon’s survival instincts took over. Emitting a plaintive yelp, it tried to pull out of the lethal dive but was too late. Twisting its massive body in vain, the monster slammed into the earth.

  Darkness fell as a huge pall of dirt was thrown into the air by the impact. Ripped free from the monster’s back, Vulkan was thrown clear, but came quickly to his feet. He wasn’t far from where the pteradon had ditched. The beast had borne the brunt of the fall and cracks emanated from its broken carcass. Its wings were tattered strips. The fleshy membrane was tougher than flak armour but its shattered bones had sheared through it like blades. Thick fluid drooled down its crooked snout, and its neck was wrenched at an unnatural angle. Vulkan ran to it, knowing the seer might also have survived the fall.

  She was struggling from the wreckage, obscured by a slowly settling dust cloud. Blood painted her robes and her leg was clearly broken. She glared at the primarch as he approached her, snarling through red-rimed teeth. Summoning a nimbus of lightning, she raised her palm in a final defiant effort to kill him. Vulkan swung his hammer before the nascent psychic storm could manifest and took her head from her shoulders.

  Blood was still spewing from the ragged neck cavity when the body finally caught up to the mind and the decapitated seer fell to her knees, then onto her front. She was quickly surrounded by a gory pool of her own spilling vital fluids.

  Ferrus Manus quietly regarded the alien head that came to rest at his feet.

  ‘It’s over, brother,’ Vulkan told him.

  The Gorgon was pensive as he looked up.

  ‘Victory.’

  Legion and Army divisions patrolled the battlefield, searching for the enemy. Wounded eldar were quickly silenced, while Imperial casualties were either recovered or granted mercy if their injuries were too severe. It was dirty work, war work, but it was necessary. Small bands of natives still roamed the killing ground, lost and seemingly afraid. Efforts to herd them together for medical attention and processing were met with hostility at first but gradually the tribespeople had submitted peacefully.

  The death of the seer had effectively ended the resistance. The eldar were utterly broken, and would not return. Execution squads had already been dispatched into the jungle to hunt down the last of them. Ferrus Manus had done the same before leaving the desert and there was no doubt Mortarion had expunged all hostiles from the ice plains.

  Army discipline-masters had the Phaerians set fires in the rotting carcass of the pteradon. Such a mass of meat and bone would take time to burn. Vulkan frowned as he watched the bolder, more ebullient troopers make mock triumphal gestures as they posed on top of its corpse. It was undignified. Disrespectful.

  ‘What was it like?’ asked Ferrus Manus. The primarch of the Iron Hands was standing at his shoulder, surveying the aftermath.

  Vulkan turned to face him. ‘What was what like?’

  ‘Riding on the back of that beast. I never expected one of the Eighteenth to be so impulsive.’ He laughed to show he meant no harm.

  Vulkan smi
led. He still hurt too much to laugh. ‘Remind me never to do anything like that again.’

  He winced when the Gorgon slapped his back. ‘Glory hound.’

  With the achievement of victory, Ferrus’s mood had warmed. His strength and courage were reborn in his eyes, and his Legion had helped deliver One-Five-Four Four to compliance. It was a good day.

  They were standing before the arch. The psychic shield was down. Following its destruction, the eldar witch coven had burned violently like candles over-fuelled with oxygen. They resembled little more than charred corpses crumpled in front of the encircling menhirs now.

  Ferrus nudged at the ash with his boot. ‘Thus is the fate of all foes.’

  ‘They hung on long enough,’ said Vulkan. He focused on one, a male whose skeletal hands were curled into claws. The warlock had raged at the end. ‘I still can’t fathom why they defended this place so vehemently.’

  ‘Who can guess at the mores of aliens?’ Ferrus sounded dismissive. ‘A better question is what is to be done about that.’ He gestured to the massive arch, now denuded of its psychic defences. ‘Unless you want to leap from a Stormbird again and shatter it?’

  The Gorgon’s humour was lost on Vulkan. He was intent on the arch. A gate, Verace had supposed.

  But leading to where?

  ‘I think destroying it out of hand would be a mistake. At least until we know its purpose.’

  Ferrus’s levity frosted over and he grew serious. ‘It has to be destroyed.’

  Vulkan was stern. ‘We may unleash a greater evil.’

  ‘What has got into you, brother?’ asked Ferrus, his eyes narrowing.