The immense Word Bearer statues began to move, stepping off their plinths with stonework crumbling away from their forms to reveal blood-red armour beneath. They strode through the crowd, moving toward Burias in step with the pealing of the distant bells, giant bolters clasped across their chests.
‘This cannot be real,’ he whispered, dragging himself to his feet.
The crowd turned, as if seeing him for the first time. In a rush they surged forwards, babbling and speaking in tongues. They crowded around him, their eyes burning hot with faith and fever, reaching out to touch him.
‘Bless us, great one,’ a scrawny proselyte begged, clutching at his leg. Burias kicked the wretch away, snapping the man’s bones.
‘This cannot be real!’ he said again, pushing away from the crowd, making his way to the edge of the bridge.
This is all that is real, Burias. Everything else is Torment.
The giant Word Bearers were closing, making the bridge shudder with every footfall, crushing any who did not get out of their way quick enough.
Run. Fight. Kill. Do this, and you can live on here, forever.
Burias laughed at the absurdity of it all, and climbed up onto the edge of the soaring bridge’s low wall and glanced down. The sickly cloud bank below was impenetrable even to his daemon-sight.
‘To hell with this,’ snarled Burias.
‘Burias-Drak’shal,’ said every proselyte in unison, speaking with the Dark Apostle Marduk’s voice. ‘Come to me.’
The immense statues hefted their bolters, closing in all around him. The voice cut through Burias’s mind, tinged with desperation.
Do not do this!
‘And to hell with both of you,’ said Burias, speaking to both the spirit-voice and the voice of his master. He turned away from the crowd of believers.
With his head held high, he extended his arms out to either side. He closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply.
The thunderous fire of gigantic bolters echoed all around, but Burias had already let himself topple forwards.
The proselytes screamed as one. ‘No!’
No!
Burias pushed off hard, and holding his cruciform pose, he plummeted down into the fog. The air rushed past him, yet he kept his eyes shut, giving himself over to the Ruinous Powers.
It felt as though he were flying, soaring the ether with the kathartes. Not the foul, skinless harpies that filled the skies of Sicarus and frequented the Infidus Diabolus, but the beauteous angelic beings of pure light that those daemons became in the deep flow of the warp.
He was drowning.
Thick, viscous fluid filled his lungs, lukewarm and repulsive. He coughed and spluttered, crying out in shock and anger. The sound was muffled by the thick bundles of tubes and pipes that filled his throat and nostrils. All he achieved was to expel what little air he-
‘No!’ roared Burias, kicking and thrashing against his confinement, and then he was falling through the void once more.
Abruptly, the cloud bank parted and he smashed through a great dome of coloured glass. Coming down fast, he rolled and skidded along the length of a flying buttress to rob the fall of its impact, tumbling to the floor and ending the movement on one knee. Shards of coloured glass studded his flesh, and more showered down around him, filling the air with its tinkling music.
He found himself in a tiny chapel. It was a humble, ascetic space, a simple shrine to the dark gods that lacked the grandeur and ceremony that infested the rest of Sicarus. A plain altar was carved into one wall, atop which sat a skull with a simple eight-pointed star of Chaos burnt into its forehead.
Beneath a shadowed arch stood the lifeless, immense form of the Warmonger. Burias’s skin began to itch as he looked upon the Dreadnought, his arms and legs tingling.
‘You should not be here,’ said a woman’s voice, and Burias-Drak’shal snarled, turning sharply. He had not sensed a presence in the room.
He could tell by her manner of garb and bearing that she was a seer. She stood in the shadows, bedecked in robes the colour of congealed blood. Her hood was down, revealing an angular, pale face. Gaping, empty hollows were located where her eyes should have been, yet she seemed to stare at him unerringly. ‘You have gone too deep.’
Drak’shal was raging within him, urging him to attack, to brutalise this witch and be away, but he resisted. He forced the daemon back. It struggled, attempting to gain ascendancy, but it was an old battle, and one that Burias had won long ago. Resentfully, Drak’shal receded, sinking within.
The daemon’s presence had ensured that the wounds of his torture had now healed. All that remained was his dried blood upon his skin.No scars marred his flesh.
For a moment he thought he heard a distant voice speaking his name. He shook his head, clearing it of these errant distractions.
‘There is someone waiting here for me,’ he said. ‘Who is it?’
‘You do not need me to answer that question,’ said the seer. ‘You already know the answer.’
‘I do not have time for riddles,’ muttered Burias, turning to leave.
‘Time is meaningless here,’ she replied. ‘You know this.’
‘Speak plainly, witch, or do not speak at all.’
‘It was he who released you from your bondage,’ she said, her words giving him pause. ‘It was he who brought you here.’
‘Released me?’ Burias snarled over his shoulder. ‘I released myself!’
‘No,’ said the seer, shaking her head. ‘He burnt away the wards holding you, opening the door for you to come here, to come to him. But I see that your mind refuses to accept what your heart already knows is true. You need to see in order to believe.’
The seer stepped away from a simple wooden door, and gestured towards it.
Burias frowned, his anger piquing, but he stepped past her and placed a hand upon the door’s rough hewn panels. It swung inwards easily, revealing a narrow passage. Lowering his head, he stepped within.
He moved up the narrow passage until he came to a circular, windowless prayer-room lit by a single candle in an arched alcove. It was small, the kind of room used by fasting penitents or hermetic recluses. The walls were covered in tiny neat script-work. He recognised the hand-writing. He had seen its like before.
‘Burias. Burias-Drak’shal.’ That voice again...
Burias’s twin hearts began to pound. He could not breathe. He heard metallic pounding in the distance, beating in time to his hearts.
His gaze fell upon a figure kneeling in the centre of the room. Its back was turned to him, and it wore a plain robe of undyed, coarse fabric. Its head was smooth and hairless, the bare scalp glinting like gold in the candlelight.
The figure rose to its feet. It seemed to expand to fill the circular room, as if it were magnifying in volume to gigantic proportions. Then the illusion passed, and Burias realised that the figure stood no taller than he.
As the figure turned, Burias looked upon the golden face of a demi-god.
His eyes began to bleed and his mind rebelled. His soul lurched, and he was driven to his knees, breathless and suffocating.
A veil seemed to be ripped aside, and the walls of the shrine disappeared, replaced with roaring flames and darkness. A maddening cacophony of screams and roars assaulted him from all sides.
‘Urizen? Lord?’ he breathed.
The flames seared his lungs, but he did not care. His mind was reeling. He did not understand. The primarch of the XVIIth had been locked in self-imposed isolation within the Templum Inficio since long before Burias’s creation. How could he be here? Where, in fact, were they?
Burias’s hearts were thundering, beating erratically and dangerously fast. He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning. He was blind.
Look.
The voice was velveteen and smooth, once again calm and measured. It was the same voice that had guided him to freedom, yet it seemed more potent, more vital. There was a controlled intensity to it that was almost painful.
LOOK
.
He opened his eyes. The figure that stood before him was not the holy primarch of the XVII Legion. He was staring at himself.
He jolted, and the vision was gone. He was alone in the cold darkness.
‘Burias.’
That voice was not welcome here. It was an intrusion. He tried to ignore it, but its power was impossible to resist. He rebelled against it, but it dragged him back towards consciousness.
‘Burias-Drak’shal.’
He was drowning.
Thick, viscous fluid filled his lungs, lukewarm and repulsive. He coughed and spluttered, crying out in shock and anger. The sound was muffled by the thick bundles of tubes and pipes that filled his throat and nostrils. All he achieved was to expel what little air he had left.
In panic, he registered that he was completely submerged, and as he struggled to rise he struck a hard, unyielding metal surface. He thrashed wildly, smashing against the sides of his containment, desperately seeking escape. There was none to be had. He was sealed in and drowning.
His hands refused to respond to his commands, and he could not move his arms. He could see nothing but darkness. He tasted oil and blood, battery acid and bile. He vomited violently, but the acidic foulness had nowhere to go.
His strength was fading, along with his consciousness. Metallic clangs, hammering and the whine of engines echoed loudly around him. Behind it, he heard the muffled murmur of voices, but could make no sense of the words.
The end was close now, and his struggles weakened. His lungs rebelled against him, causing him to reflexively suck in a deep breath of liquid and his own vomit. He began to convulse, shuddering and jerking violently.
Oblivion came for him then. But it was not to last.
He awoke to darkness. There was no pain. There was nothing at all, and he knew then that he was in hell.
He roared in a voice that was not his voice. He heard that mechanical, grinding, anguished bellow with ears that were not his ears; external sensors translated what they heard into electrical impulses and were transmitted directly into his cortex.
He clenched a hand that was not his hand into a fist, and an immense, blade-fingered power talon clenched. He pounded this great fist into the stone walls of his prison once again. It made a dull sound, metal on stone. That sound...
‘Burias,’ said a voice. ‘Burias-Drak’shal.’
It was the voice that had called him back. It was the voice that had brought him into this hell. He swung towards it, servos whining.
‘Back in the land of the living, finally. In a manner of speaking, at least.’
Optic sensors interpreted what they saw. A figure stood nearby, one that he recognised.
‘You were in deep this time,’ said the figure. ‘I was not sure you were coming out. You resisted my call for the longest time yet. I am impressed.’
Burias lunged at the figure, pneumatic piston-driven legs driving him forward and giant claws reaching out to crush it, but immense chains bound with burning runes held him fast, restraining his mechanical strength.
Dark Apostle Marduk laughed. ‘Now, now, Burias. Mind that temper.’
Hatred surged through what was left of Burias’s body – amputated, rotten and curled foetus-like in the amniotic fluid sloshing within the sarcophagus implanted at the heart of the machine.
Hatred. That was something he was still capable of feeling. His mighty fists were clenching and unclenching unconsciously. With every last remaining fibre of his being he wanted to smash the author of his torment to paste.
‘How long this time?’ Burias managed, his voice deep and sepulchral, the sound of immense rocks grinding together.
‘Not long. Ninety-seven years, unadjusted.’
To Burias it had felt like an eternity. He wondered how he could possibly endure.
‘Why do you rouse me now?’ he growled. ‘There is no torment that you can unleash upon me that would make my suffering any more complete.’
‘Torment, old friend? No, you mistake my purpose,’ said Marduk. ‘I come to you because the Host marshals for war. I am, for now, releasing you from torment. It is time you killed again for the Legion.’
Death was nothing to be feared. Death he would have welcomed. But denied that, the next best thing was the chance to kill once more. Burias ceased his struggles.
‘War?’ he boomed, unable to keep the eagerness from his grating, mechanical voice.
‘War,’ agreed the Dark Apostle.
A silken voice spoke in Burias’s mind.
None of this is real.
The Pact
Sarah Cawkwell
‘And the stolen voices of his venerable kin will welcome him, embrace him and bear him to the heart of our scarred past, the first home of the Argent Order. There, the ashes of the great destroyer lie mingled with the fading embers of our birth, two banners falling as one to call him back. Back to the beginning. Then will the past be revealed.’
– From The Orthodoxy of Varsavia, Author Unknown, 221.M37
Nothing had survived.
Once, according to the records, the planet Lyria had boasted fertile and verdant grassland which generated seemingly endless supplies of food for the people of the Imperium. Agri-habs had dotted the landscape in the south of the single large continental mass and people had worked the soil diligently. The mountains and rockier terrain in the north had been far less hospitable. But as the saying went, where there was a will there was a way and the indigenous tribal people of the world settled wherever they could find flat ground. Thus they had lived and thus they had prospered as was humanity’s way.
Now it was all gone. The combined might of the Silver Skulls fleet as they had unleashed the full wrath of the Emperor’s fury on the surface had made certain of that. Rendered essentially sterile with a hostile, barely breathable atmosphere by the missiles and guns of the fleet, Lyria fell into decay and became a forbidden place; an unsightly mark on the exceptional record of those who consider themselves amongst the Emperor’s most loyal.
Lyria, a world of beginnings; the former home of the Silver Skulls Chapter had become a tomb world, rendered to ashes and dust.
The air was acrid and stifling from the heat that bubbled up through rifts in the ground. Volcanoes that had lain long dormant had been awakened by the orbital onslaught and seismic activity rocked the planet almost continually. It was a world that would have been better left dead.
Six figures picked their way across the broken landscape, ascending a mountain path that would take them to the long-deserted fortress-monastery. For eight thousand years, no Silver Skulls battle-brother had laid eyes on their ancestral home. Now they did so in silence, each absorbing the impact of this horrific sight in their own way.
Five of the figures were massive, clad in ancient Terminator armour. The other was wearing the blue battle plate of a Prognosticator, a psychic hood rising about his bare head and a force axe slung comfortably across his back. It was this warrior who crossed into the entrance first.
By Adeptus Astartes standards, Prognosticator Bhehan was young. Barely thirty solar years old, he had nonetheless acquitted himself admirably upon the field of battle. His ability to divine the skeins of fate had proven itself over and over again. He had served with both Eighth and Fifth Companies with distinction, but had never once imagined that he would end up deployed with the Talriktug; the First Company’s elite squad. Especially following his vision; a vision that had led to Chapter Command agreeing that the time was right for them to return. A vision that had married up unfailingly with words penned in the Orthodoxy millennia before. The two war banners.
He should be honoured to be amongst them, he knew. Led by the courageous, plain-speaking and stalwart First Captain Kerelan, they were heroes of the Chapter. They had been heroes of the Chapter for hundreds of years before Bhehan had even been born. Perhaps it was this last fact which made him uncomfortable and which had led to much of the silence that had accompanied their journey here. Whenever he had spoken,
their respect for him seemed disproportionate given their standing and experience.
Such was the way of the Silver Skulls. They valued their psychic battle-brothers highly, no matter their age or seniority.
As the rest of the warriors lumbered into the vestibule behind him, he allowed his senses to roam freely amongst the rubble. A smashed stained glass window stood several metres above his head, admitting the only light that the interior of the place had seen for years. Closing his eyes, he tried to picture it as it had once been. A thousand ghostly echoes rippled through him, clamouring for his notice. Voices that had been desperate to be heard for millennia. It was a near-overwhelming din and Bhehan employed every ounce of his training to keep his calm. The filigree-fine crystal mesh of his psychic hood glowed softly as he walked. The First Captain glanced at him.
‘What are your senses telling you, Brother-Prognosticator?’ The ruby lenses in Kerelan’s helm gave away nothing.
‘No less than I anticipated. This place swarms with memories, First Captain,’ Bhehan replied in his soft voice. ‘So many voices crying out at the horrors wrought upon this world.’ His youthful face creased in a frown. ‘There is more, too. Something… I cannot quite place. I may be able to concentrate more if I make direct contact with the stone.’
‘Do what you must, brother. We will ensure there are no interruptions. Our primary duty is to defend and protect you on this mission.’
‘Aye, First Captain. I warn you, however. This process is not likely to be swift. The echoes here are old and worn by time.’
The warrior glanced from side to side, then shrugged. ‘I see no other pressing engagements demanding my time and resources, brother. Proceed as you see fit.’
A smile flickered over Bhehan’s lips. He had learned that for all his stoic reticence and unshakable pragmatism, Kerelan possessed a dry wit that was frequently startling. He reached down and unsnapped the fastenings of his gauntlet, sliding his hand free. He turned his body sideways to the wall and set his bare palm against the stone.
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