Shadowbreaker - Steve Parker

by Warhammer 40K

  All he had was thought, and at first his awareness hung in a void of utter nothingness, waiting.

  Lost.

  Eventually, the colour and landscape of memory slowly drifted into focus around him. He saw the skull-and-scythes iconography of his Chapter engraved on a thousand mausoleum doors. He saw votive candles winking in the orange gloom of a corner of the Reclusiam. He saw broad-backed figures bowed in prayer before an altar on which lay weapons of war once wielded by legends.

  There were other memories, too, things he struggled to recognise or reconcile with, fragments of another life. These were memories of a past his Space Marine conditioning had long suppressed but had never truly erased.

  A forest filled with the sounds of battle.

  So real.

  Gunshots echoed off the black trunks. A woman screamed his name, begged him to run.

  His mother.

  He ran, but his legs were short, his lungs small, those of the child he had been. Thorny branches and the frigid air stabbed at him as he sped between the trees.

  A great roar sounded from ahead and to the left. Something vast and black ripped through the sky so close that dead branches rained down around him.

  There was a boom that shook the earth. A wall of flame reared up right before him. He swung right and ran harder, putting everything he had into pumping his arms and legs. He didn’t turn to look behind. He could feel the heat on his calves and the back of his neck. Fire wanted to engulf him, to wrap itself around him and greedily consume his flesh.

  Behind him, burning trees cracked and collapsed. Their fall made the flames surge, rearing up like bright dragons tossing their mighty heads, all violence and rage. But they wouldn’t catch Lyandro Karras.

  He was the son of the hunt leader, fleetest of foot and strongest of sinew among the children of the Okosha. No mere fire would take him. Not if he just kept running.

  Up ahead, there was a break in the trees. He sprinted for it.

  In his focus on the chaos behind him, however, he had neglected to keep note of precisely where he was. On any other day, he would have known that the eastern edge of the forest marked the lip of the great chasm. They called it Talan’s Fate, though many more than the mythological Talan had found their end at the bottom. In all the fear, panic and confusion, Karras didn’t have time to think of where he was running to, only of getting away.

  He burst from the trees at full tilt. There was no way he could have stopped himself. His eyes went wide the moment he knew what he’d done. Time slowed to a crawl. He watched his right foot thrust out ahead of him to step down on nothing but empty air.

  Momentum carried him straight over the edge. Dark death yawned up at him. His eyes stared down into the black abyss that was about to claim his life. No death by fire, then. Nor by the growling blades of the grotesque red giants which had just stormed his village.

  Gravity.

  Gravity would kill him.

  At least it would be quick.

  Just as his heart leapt into his throat and his body began its descent, something swept out across the edge of his peripheral vision – something a deep, dark blue, cold and hard as stone.

  It hit him across the midsection and encircled his waist.

  Karras’ fall was suddenly and violently arrested. Breath exploded from him. He hung in mid-air, looking down at the deep black bottom of the chasm’s vast, hungry throat. His heart was pounding like a hammer beneath his ribs.

  The thing that held him drew him back over the lip of the abyss. He saw the deadly void slide away to be replaced by beloved brown earth, pine needles and patches of unmelted snow.

  He was breathing hard, his nine-year-old lungs still aflame with the effort of the escape and the adrenal blitz of imminent death. He felt something grip his upper arm. With absolute ease, as if he weighed nothing, he was turned around in mid-air and found himself staring straight into the terrible visage of his saviour.

  How well he remembered that moment. The bravest, most reckless boy of the tribe had frozen in abject fear. Never had he seen such a face – skin the white of sun-bleached bone with beard and eyebrows to match. Eyes like pools of fresh-spilled blood. No whites. It was a face straight from the haunting tales old Sheddac would tell by the light of the cooking fires.

  Khadit.

  The word rang loud in his mind – an old word from a language he’d never heard, and yet, looking into that wise and terrible face, its meaning had been as clear as a mountain stream.

  Visions came attached to it, visions of gloomy places where bodies were shaped by pain and ancient knowledge, of dark chambers where impossible things were taught and mastered.

  ‘We must get you away from here,’ said the giant, and his voice was so deep that Karras could feel the words shaking his ribs. ‘We must get you out while they are still distracted.’

  As Karras recalled this, relived it, he realised he had never learned who they were. Space Marines, of course, as he knew now. Heretics from one of the accursed Traitor Legions. But in all the years since – over a hundred of them – his giant saviour had never spoken of that day. All too soon, psycho-conditioning and the demands of Space Marine selection had programmed Karras to neither ask nor care.

  Why, as he hung in an unknowable void, was it all bubbling up within him now?

  Memories of childhood run deep. Suppressed, yes, but never truly erased. What has happened to me? Why is this coming back to me now? Where am I?

  He let the memory continue to play out. Still holding the child he had just snatched from the air, the albino giant had angled his head and spoken into a transmitter on his gorget, a string of sharp words Karras hadn’t understood. There was no mistaking the tone of command, though.

  Moments later, thunder filled the sky, echoing along the canyon walls. A great ship the colour of charcoal swung into view, its rear ramp already lowered. It hung there in the air above Talan’s Fate, jets growling, spewing fire.

  The giant had slung Karras over one massive armoured shoulder and leapt.

  Karras saw the ground fall away and the abyss yawn beneath him once again. His stomach flipped with resurging fear. His saviour’s boots clanged loudly as he landed on the outstretched ramp. The aircraft dipped an inch with the impact, then nosed left and thrust upward. With his left hand, the giant grabbed the edge of the craft’s fuselage and pulled himself and Karras further inside. Still carrying the child over one shoulder, he strode further into the compartment. Behind them, the ramp began to rise towards the shut position. Karras looked out on a sight he had only ever seen from the nearby mountainsides.

  There below him was the forest, vast and ancient, the home of the tribe, provider of all they had ever needed, all he had ever known. The ship swung south. The ground wheeled below him, and Karras saw great clouds of black smoke and the glow of vast fires raging out of control in the place where his people had lived since the tribe’s first tale began.

  The ramp was half closed now. It was the last he ever saw of his birth world. In the seconds before it closed completely, in the last slice of sky visible, Karras saw movement to the south-west – three slender, elegant ships shaped like arrowheads. They streaked off into the distance.

  The ramp slid home. Locking bolts rammed into place.

  The white-faced giant placed him gently down on a seat far too large and, without either of them speaking a single word, they began to talk.

  It was the first time anyone had addressed Karras mind to mind.

  In that moment, he learned of the Imperium and of the Emperor on Terra.

  On that day, he discovered purpose.

  Vivid as it had been – the reliving of that day, the details, the sensations – it dissipated like smoke from a bolter barrel now. Karras found himself back in the unknowable void, just a disembodied spark of identity and experience.

  This is not death. I
t cannot be. I remember Chiaro. I remember all of it. Voss and the others… They dug me out.

  A feeling of great dread swept over him. Memory muttered a fell name, and his emotions surged. He shrank back from it, but it insisted on his memory, and soon he was remembering in detail, whether he wanted to or not, the encounter with the daemon on the ethereal waters of the Black River.

  Hepaxammon. Prince of Sorrows.

  The entity’s presence had sullied the river, made the raging waters stink with foul decay. It had broken through the boundaries of its own realm to issue Karras a dark ultimatum – pass a message to the Exorcist Darrion Rauth or face dire consequences.

  Karras had almost died that day, his armour shattered, his body speared and pulverised by rocks both sharp and heavy. But he had not. The Saint Nevarre had returned for him. Hepaxammon claimed agency in bringing it back.

  But the lips of all daemons are black with lies, thought Karras.

  A psychic construct placed at that point on the primary timeline by Athio Cordatus had bought Karras his escape, pulling him out of the Black River and the daemon’s torment.

  You knew, my khadit. And yet… Could you not have prepared me?

  There was shame and a certain bitterness at the thought. Had Athio Cordatus known ahead of time, he would surely have prepared his protégé. The Death Spectres Librarius must have divined the daemon’s intrusion only after Karras had left Occludus, his Chapter’s crypt-world home.

  Had they seen this, too? This… this what?

  Where was he? Why was he here, trapped in this bodiless state?

  Answers would not come. The absence of any sense of time and space threatened to madden him. Nothing to grasp. Nothing to ground him. All he had here were memories of the past, and those that came to him were not of his choosing. He was being forced to relive things he did not invoke.

  He saw again the three deaths he had endured as rites of passage.

  He remembered the slaughter he and his brothers had unleashed on a dozen alien-held worlds in the Ghoul Stars, saw good friends die and others raised to great glory by their deeds. He recalled ceremonies celebrating great victories and remembered others less joyous, honouring the heroic sacrifice of brothers lost in desperate battle.

  And then, after all this, there came again his flight through the winter woods of his birth world.

  Only this time, it did not play out quite the same.

  The memory started as before – the screams from behind him, the sounds of gunfire, the roar of hungry flames and the stabbing winter air in his young lungs. This time, however, at the moment his body angled right towards the eastern edge of the trees, everything around him abruptly froze. It was as if he were in a sensorium feed suddenly paused.

  He ran on for a few steps, but the stark absence of noise and blazing heat struck him so hard that he stopped, turned and looked back. The only sound now was his ragged breathing. It slowed as he stood there in total confusion.

  The trees glowed with fire, but the flames didn’t move. Nothing did. They had no hunger, no heat, nothing but shape.

  And then a voice, soft and strangely accented. Feminine.

  ‘We knew they were coming for you.’

  Karras spun, turning towards the source of the sound.

  There was no one there.

  ‘It was we who stalled them while your warrior brethren got you out. Ignorant as ever, you mon-keigh did not even detect us.’

  The voice sounded so close now that Karras felt hairs prickle on the back of his neck and arms.

  ‘I gave the orders myself,’ it continued. ‘We could not allow you to fall into the hands of the Great Enemy. What terrors you would have wrought had your fate been to ravage the stars as one of the Foul. Such an abomination you would have become.’

  Karras spun again, angry now, scowling fiercely.

  Finally, he found himself facing the source. There before him stood another child, apparently of an age close to his own. She was a pale, slender thing with long blonde hair, fine-boned and elegant, dressed in richly jewelled robes of shimmering white silk.

  This is no memory, he thought. This is an intrusion!

  The girl regarded him without smiling, her face unreadable.

  Karras spoke, and found to his surprise that it was his adult voice, his Space Marine voice, that issued forth from his child lips.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Aranye,’ answered the girl. ‘It is a contraction, but it will suffice.’

  Taking her eyes from him, she crossed to a tree and stared at the detail of the bark, stroking it with one delicate hand. ‘Your memories are richly detailed. You had a fine mind, even before the implants and the training. I was not mistaken about your potential, nor about the threat you represented.’ She glanced over at him. ‘May still represent.’

  She turned back to the tree. ‘We shall soon know if I am to regret my part in your journey.’

  ‘And what journey is that?’ Karras growled.

  A flicker of a smile crossed her small, perfect mouth. She looked him up and down. ‘I see a nine-year-old boy running for his life while his people die behind him. Die because of him. Let no guilt assail you, however. Their lives meant little. In truth, you were something of a bargain, as you mon-keigh might say.’

  She continued to study the bark of the tree, apparently fascinated by the folds and tiny cracks and bumps, by how some parts were smooth and others were rough.

  Karras was about to explode at her, to deny her words, but he could not. She had not spoken falsely. Part of him had always known. His people had been killed – all of them – and he was the reason. The murderous red giants had come solely for him.

  ‘How did–’

  She cut him off mid-question. ‘Countless tribes on countless worlds are watched. You know this. The most promising have always been marked and tested. The darkest, foulest foes of your bloated, cancer-riddled Imperium are ever in a race to deny your ranks and swell their own.’

  ‘You talk of the Traitor Legions.’

  She turned, eyes suddenly intense. ‘How narrow the path you walk, Death Spectre. Such storms surround you. An abyss on either side, and such a narrow path between. Be thankful you were never trained to read the future. Were you able, you might not dare another step towards it.’

  Karras closed on her, fists clenched at his sides. ‘What nature of thing are you? You didn’t invade my mind just to taunt me.’

  ‘I am here to help prepare you,’ she said. She raised a hand and brushed her hair over one ear. ‘And you already know what I am.’

  Karras’ reaction was immediate and powerful. He saw the ear, how pointed it was. It was the final marker that gave her nature away.

  ‘Xenos,’ he growled. ‘Damnable eldar!’

  He tried to rush her, but his body would no longer obey him. Young muscles strained against invisible bonds.

  He snarled and raged, fighting desperately to push forward.

  She remained icy calm as she stepped straight towards him. When they were standing eye to eye, barely half a metre apart, she placed a cool hand to the side of his head and said, ‘It is time to see for yourself, Space Marine. It costs me much to be here inside your mind. Heed these warnings or risk bringing destruction down on all you love.’

  At that, the forest vanished, and she with it.

  All was utter darkness, and Karras was falling.

  Aranye’s voice sounded in his head, this time different, mature, aged by centuries, or perhaps even millennia. ‘I will be watching,’ she said. ‘Act with care in the times ahead. Do what is right, or I will do what I must to stop you.’

  The darkness receded. Red light trickled into his vision. He was still falling, but the sensation changed. He felt his adult body encasing his consciousness again, felt gravity pulling on his muscles and joints. He was hea
vy, grown far beyond the genetic limits of normal men. He felt the comforting weight and warmth of power armour around thick, gene-enhanced muscles. He tried to move and found himself restrained. Lights winked before his eyes.

  Alert runes on a tactical display.

  He was in a drop pod. It was thundering through planetary atmosphere, the heat inside rising. This was an assault drop. Everything about it was familiar and clear. He could hear the roar and feel the deep shudder as the armoured pod smashed through the sound barrier.

  Seconds later, his stomach heaved violently and the pull of gravity shifted. His organs lurched inside him. The braking jets had fired. The pod landed with a great, juddering crunch. The hatches, like five titanium petals, blew their locking bolts and burst open.

  Karras looked out upon a mountain range of black crags covered in crisp white snow. Overhead hung a heavy, graphite-coloured sky.

  The impact clamp which had been holding him in place clicked free. He stepped out of the pod.

  He knew the place all too well, but no assault drop had ever happened here.

  He could name all of the high peaks before him. There, the tallest and sharpest – that was Yurien’s Claw. He had been tested there as a neophyte, forced to navigate the pass in deep winter, hunted by rock leopards, armed only with a knife. Six aspirants had ventured out. Four had died.

  Why Occludus? What game is this?

  It all seemed so real, so tangible. Even the bitter chill of the air nipped at the tip of his nose and stung his eyes. He looked down at his feet and took another step. The snow crunched under ceramite and plasteel.

  Home.

  He turned, knowing what he would find, and was not surprised. There, high on the mountainside behind him, was the towering Western Gate of Logopol, fortress-monastery of the Chapter.

  It was as glorious as ever – exquisitely carved, shining white and gold against the dark grey sky. At first, his hearts soared to see it, but the joy swiftly fell away. Not a soul moved on the mighty watchtowers. No Thunderhawk gunships or Stormtalon fighters cut across the skies. He looked around. No more drop pods, either. Only his.