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Rebirth - Chris Wraight

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Rebirth

Chris Wraight

I have no idea how long I’ve been out. I should have; my enhanced memory and catalepsean function should have retained some trace, but everything is blank.

Presumably, that is part of the process. They want to induce doubt, to make me question whether I am up to this. If that is so, then they have succeeded. My total lack of recall preys on my mind. I do not like not knowing. It feels, certainly, like I’ve been ignorant of far too many facts for far too long.

But I am alive, and my hearts beat. That is something. Since coming round, I have had several minutes to reflect on my situation. That is useful too, though also no doubt part of some planned sequence.

I run down the basics, the physical aspects of my predicament. It helps, to force my mind into something mechanical. As I do so, I feel a degree of mental alertness returning.

I am in a chair. I am naked. My wrists, ankles, neck and chest are shackled with iron bands.

No, not iron – I’d be able to break that. Something similarly blunt and uncomfortable.

There is almost no light. I can make out the outline of my limbs dimly, but little else. My breathing is light, and there is an old pain behind my rib-fused chest. My secondary heart is still beating, indicating that I am recovering from some extensive trauma or exertion. I can feel no major wounds on my body, though there are many hundreds of bruises and abrasions, consistent with having been in action recently.

I have no mind-sight. I sense no souls nearby. For the first time since ascending into the ranks of the Legion, I remember what it is like to be alone with my own thoughts. At first, this is strangely comforting, like stumbling across a memento of a happy childhood.

But I do not take comfort for long, since my non-psychic senses are not as truncated. As my body adjusts and my faculties return, I realise that I am not alone. There is someone in the chamber with me, invisible in the dark. I cannot see him, but I can smell him and hear him. There is blood on his hands, and it makes the air of this confined chamber sharp and unsavoury. He breathes in ragged, shuddering draughts, like a panting animal held briefly at bay.

For the moment, that is all I sense. We sit in silence for a while longer, and I try to recall the events leading up to this moment. They come back to me only slowly, and in disconnected parts.

It takes a long time for him to speak. When he does, the voice takes me by surprise.

It is magnificent. There is tightly-contained savagery in that voice, a throat-wet growl that slips round the words and underpins each of them with a precise degree of mordant threat. I suspect this is no charade to make me uneasy, but simply the way my interrogator talks.

So the process begins the way these things always begin, the way a million interrogations have started since the dawn of organised violence.

‘Tell me your name and company designation,’ he says.

And for a moment, for a terrible moment, I realise that I cannot remember.

The Geometric pulled into high orbit, running silent, hull-lights extinguished. Two hundred kilometres down, the planet was almost as dark. It was void-black, laced with cracks of angry red where magma, or maybe surface fires, scored the crust.

Brother-Captain Menes Kalliston stood on the bridge of the destroyer and watched the approach through the realspace viewers. He was wearing battle-plate, but his head was bare. His dark eyes stayed fixed on the curve of the planet, now filling most of the plexiglass screens above him. His blunt, severe features were characteristically static. A slender patrician nose bisected rough-cut cheekbones. His flesh looked dry, like old parchment, and his burnt-umber hair was cropped close to the scalp. A single tattoo marked his right temple, an owl-archetype, symbol of the Athanaean cult discipline.

His armour was a deep, glossy red. His shoulder-guards were decorated in white and gold, picking out the icons and numerals of the Fourth Fellowship of the XV Legion Astartes, the Thousand Sons.

As he stood in contemplation, another figure came to join him. The new arrival had a stockier, shorter, more vigorous frame, and his features were closer to the Space Marine median – bull-necked, angular jaw, taut flesh over heavy bones. He might have been younger than the first, but the vagaries of gene-conditioning always made it so hard to tell.

‘No enemy signals?’ asked Kalliston, not turning.

‘None,’ confirmed Brother-Sergeant Revuel Arvida.

‘And you sense nothing?’

Arvida, who was Corvidae, gave a rueful smile.

‘It’s not as easy as it used to be.’

Kalliston nodded.

‘No. That it isn’t.’

To Kalliston’s left, a control column blinked with several runes. A hololith emerged above it, a rotating sphere marked with precogitated atmospheric descent routes.

‘Landers are prepared, captain,’ said Arvida. ‘We can do this whenever you want.’

‘And you’re still not sure we should.’

‘You know I’m not.’

Only then did Kalliston turn from the viewers and look his subordinate in the eye.

‘I’ll need you down there,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what the augur readings say, it’ll be dangerous. So, if your hearts aren’t in this, tell me now.’

Arvida returned the gaze steadily, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

‘So I get to choose which missions I go on?’

‘I won’t force you to come on this one.’

Arvida shook his head.

‘That’s not how it works. You’ll go, and I’ll follow, as will the rest of the squad. You’ve convinced them, at any rate.’

‘They needed little convincing.’

‘There are other mysteries to solve, and I don’t see how coming here helps with those.’

Kalliston let a flicker of exasperation escape from the edges of his severe expression.

‘We have to start somewhere.’

‘I know. And, like I said, if you’re sure about this, then I’ll be with you. Just be sure.’

Kalliston looked back up at the vision in the realspace viewers. The planet had a deathly aura to it, one that would have been evident even to the most warp-blind of mortals. The gaps between the rivers of fire were a deep sable, like shafts opening out onto nothingness. Something vast and terrible had happened there, and the residues of it were still echoing.

‘I am sure, brother,’ he said, and his voice was firm. ‘We were preserved for a reason, and that gives us responsibilities. We’ll make planetfall on the night-side of the terminator.’

His dark eyes narrowed, scrutinising the close view of the planet’s hemisphere. It looked like he was trying to conjure up a vision of something long gone, something destroyed beyond recovery.

‘Less than six months since we were ordered to leave,’ he said, talking to himself now. ‘Throne, Prospero has changed.’

‘Menes Kalliston, Captain, Fourth Fellowship, Thousand Sons.’

I remember that after a few moments, and the words come quickly to my parched lips. That is what one is meant to say, I believe – name, rank and serial number.

Perhaps I should resist saying more, though I feel strangely reluctant to stay silent. They may have injected loquazine into my bloodstream, but I doubt it. I see no reason not to talk for a while. After all, I have no idea why I’m here, or what’s going on, or how long I will be alive.

‘What are you doing on Prospero?’ he asks.

‘I could ask you the same thing.’

‘You could. And I could kill you.’

I think he wants to kill me. There’s something in the voice, some timbre of eagerness, that gives it away. He’s holding himself back. He’s a Space Marine, I guess. There’s very little else like that voice, rolling up from those enhanced lungs and that muscle-slabbed gullet and that great barrel-chest like water from a deep mill.

We are brothers then, of a sort.

‘What do you know of the destruction of this planet?’ he asks.

His voice hasn’t been raised yet. He speaks carefully, keeping the tide of violence in check. It would not take much to break that dam.

‘We were ordered to leave orbit six months ago,’ I say. The truth seems the best policy, at least for now. ‘Some questioned it, but I did not. I never doubted the orders of my primarch. It was only later, when we could not make contact, that we realised something was wrong.’

‘How much later?’

‘Weeks. We’d been in the warp.’

‘Why did you not come back at once?’

Ah, yes. I have asked myself that many times. As the questions come, I remember more of myself. I still cannot recall what led me to this place, though. The blank is complete, like a steel mask over the past. There is an art to making such a mask, and it is not easy to master. I realise the calibre of those who have me captive.

‘I wanted to. Others did not. We made enquiries through astropaths, but our battle-codes were rejected whenever we made contact. Soon after that, our ships were attacked. By you, I presume, or those in league with you.’

Does my guess hit home? Am I nearing the truth? My interrogator gives no sign. He gives nothing away but the smell of blood and the hot, repeated breathing in the dark.

‘Did many of you survive?’

‘I don’t know. Dispersal was the only option.’

‘So your ship came here alone.’

‘Yes.’

Should I be more evasive? I really don’t know. I have no strategy, no objective. None of the information I give him seems important. Perhaps it would do, if I could remember more of the circumstances of my capture.

My mind-sight remains dark. To be confined to the five senses of my birth has become crippling. I realise then that the withdrawal will only get worse. I don’t know whether it’s permanent, or some feature of the chamber I’m in, or a temporary injury. As an Athanaean, I have become used to picking up the mental images of others shimmering beyond their faces, like a candle flickering behind a cotton sheet.

I’m handling its removal badly. It’s making me want to talk, to find some way of filling the gap. And, in any case, I don’t need psychic senses to detect the extremity of my interrogator. He’s cradling some enormous capacity for rage, for physical violence, and it’s barely in check. This is either something I can use, or it places me in terrible danger.

‘Even so, it took you a long time to come back,’ he remarks.

‘Warp storms held us. They were impenetrable for months.’

My interrogator laughs then, a horrifying sound like throat-cords being pulled apart.

‘They were. Surely you know what caused them.’

I sense him leaning forwards. I can see nothing, but the breathing comes closer. I have a mental image of a long, tooth-filled mouth, with a black tongue lolling out, and have no idea how accurate it is.

‘You were either blessed, or cursed, that you made it through,’ he says, and I feel the joy he takes in the control of my fate. ‘I have yet to determine which it will be, but we will come to that soon.’

There were no Stormbirds left in the hold, and the Geometric had never carried Thunderhawks, so the descent had to be in a bulk lander. The destroyer’s crew had been whittled down to a bare skeleton – a couple of hundred mortals, some still in Spireguard livery. In times past they would have looked up at their Legiones Astartes masters in awe as they worked to prepare the lander, but the events of the last few months had shaken that hold. They had seen the ruin of Prospero for themselves, and it had crushed what spirit remained in them.

Many, perhaps, had had family still on the planet when destruction came. Those connections, Kalliston knew, were important to mortals. He himself couldn’t remember what it was like to find such things significant, but he felt the loss in other ways.

After launch, the lander fell through the thickening atmosphere clumsily, responding to the pilot’s controls like an over-enthusiastic steed. The control column had been designed for smaller hands than a Space Marine’s, and the atmosphere was still clogged with clouds of ash, blown across the charred terrain below by the angry remnants of continent-wide storms.

The lander made planetfall hard, jarring the crew against their restraint-cages as the retro-burners struggled against the inertia of the plummet. None of the squad members spoke. The cages slammed up, freeing them to take up their weapons. Kalliston, Arvida and the other battle-brothers in the load-bay mag-locked bolters and power-blades smoothly before the rear doors wheezed open.

The air of Prospero sighed into the load-bay. Kalliston could taste the afterglow of the furnace through his helm’s rebreather. The atmosphere was still warm, still bitter with floating motes of ruin.

Night had fallen. The sky was the dark red of an old scab, broken with patches of messy shadow where the smog-clouds raced. Ruined buildings broke the horizon in all directions, skeletons of libraries and treasure houses, armouries and research stations. There was no sound save the winding-down of the lander’s twin engines and the enervated brush of the hot wind.

Kalliston walked down the ramp first. His boot crunched as he came off the end of it. He looked down. The earth of Prospero glistened. A carpet of glass fragments lay there, as deep and smooth as a dusting of snow.

Everything was glass, once. The pyramids, the libraries, the galleries. Now, it is our dust.

‘Sweep pattern,’ he ordered over the vox. ‘Ranged weapons. Rendezvous point Aleph.’

The remaining Space Marines spread out slowly from the embarkation point. The two who’d piloted the ship during the descent remained to guard it, stationed at the end of the ramp under the shelter of the rear fuselage. The seven others lowered bolters and walked as stealthily as they could across the glittering glass-dust. They organised themselves into a rough semi-circle, each brother heading for a different point in the line of buildings ahead. They stayed within a hundred metres of one another, opening out into a wide net. Steadily, they began to sweep though the devastated streets ahead.

Kalliston blink-clicked a rune to enhance his night vision lens-feed. The terrain around him shimmered into false colour contours. There were no target runes, no life-signs, no proximity warnings. The sterile bones of the shattered buildings loomed up towards him from the heat-hazed dark.

There was no chatter over the comm. The battle-brothers went reverently. They were treading on the tombs of their home world.

Kalliston raised his head fractionally, watching as a tall spur of metal emerged from the dark. It was over a hundred metres tall, but as thin as a burned-out tree-trunk. It had once supported a much bigger construction, but now tottered alone, a rare survivor of the firestorms that had raged through Tizca.

The City of Light. The home of our people.

‘Are you getting anything, brother-captain?’ came Arvida’s voice over a private channel.

Arvida had moved slightly ahead of the others, and his route had taken him out of formation. On another mission, Kalliston might have rebuked him for that.

‘Negative,’ replied Kalliston, keeping any emotion out of his voice. He could sense Arvida’s scepticism even from a hundred metres distant. Back on Prospero, Kalliston’s mind-scrying abilities had returned to their peak, and the moods of his squad were transparent to him.

‘There may be nothing left to get,’ said Arvida.

‘It’s possible.’

‘So how long are we going to look?’

‘I’ll determine that. Reserve your energies for the hunt, brother.’

Kalliston cut the comm-link.

The squad pressed on, passing deeper into the shattered city. Darkness clung to the bases of the ruined walls, squatting in the eaves of plasma-charred doorways that led nowhere.

Kalliston felt his boot crunch through something fragile, and looked down. A ribcage lay there, shattered by his heavy tread, as brittle and black as coal. It wasn’t big enough to be an adult’s.

He looked further up the street. Bones were strewn everywhere ahead, all of them human-sized.

Briefly, something flickered on his helm-display. Kalliston was instantly alert, though the signal, a threat rune on the edge of his armour’s detector range, disappeared as soon as it had come.

‘Captain,’ voxed Phaeret, one of his squad members. ‘You’ll want to see this.’

Kalliston blink-clicked an acknowledgement. The threat rune didn’t make another appearance on his display. Possibly a false reading, or some malfunction in the long-range augurs in his armour.

Both those possibilities were unlikely. Kalliston kept his boltgun muzzle in firing position as he walked towards Phaeret’s location marker, and his senses remained alert. He was perfectly aware of the danger, and perfectly aware of the opportunity.

Something else was alive on Prospero.

‘So how did you feel, seeing the destruction of your home world?’

The question surprises me. What does it matter, what I feel about anything? If this is an interrogation by a member of the forces occupying the planet, I would have expected questions on the disposition of the remains of my Legion, on the lingering capabilities of the survivors – something, at least, about military matters.

But then, there is much that is strange about this interrogation. I have the overwhelming feeling that I am not just here for the information I can provide. No, this unseen questioner wants something else.

‘Uncomfortable,’ I reply. ‘But nothing more than that. We knew something of what to expect. My deputy is a seer, and he had made us aware of what had happened in its broadest outline.’

At the mention of Arvida, I wonder if he still lives. Perhaps he is being questioned in a cell like this too, or maybe he lies dead in the glass dust of the city.

‘Uncomfortable?’ he repeats.

The word seems to irritate him, and the breathing becomes more erratic.

‘You were spineless,’ he says, and the voice is harsh and accusatory. ‘You come back here, like damned reclamators, picking through the rubble of what you let be destroyed. If this had been my world I’d never have left it. I’d have killed any invader who dared come close to it, and damned be my primarch’s orders. You were weak, Captain Kalliston. Weak.’

He insists on the term, spitting it out. I sense his body coming closer. He is looming in the dark now, just beyond the ends of my chair-arms. Exhalations brush against my face, hot and caustic, like the breath of a dog.

‘If we’d known–’ I begin, starting to defend myself. I don’t know why I feel the urge to do this. It doesn’t matter what the questioner thinks of me, for my own conscience is untroubled.

‘If you’d known!’ he roars, cutting short my half-hearted response. Droplets of spittle hit my face. For a moment I think he’s flown into a rage, but then I realise he’s laughing. ‘Listen to yourself, Thousand Son. You’ve always been so proud, strutting across worlds conquered by the prowess of other Legions, glorying in your superior understanding of what we uncovered for you. Not for you the dirty work of fighting with your hands. Oh, no. There were always other fighters to do that for you, to take on the danger at close-quarters, freeing you up to spend those hours in your libraries. Did you ever guess how much we all held you in contempt?’

‘We knew well enough,’ I say.

It’s perfectly true – we knew just how much our brothers mistrusted us, and as a result worked hard not to provoke them. He’s entirely wrong that we gloried in our superior understanding. Instead, we hid it, tried to show it as little as possible. Those instincts, as it turns out, may well have been mistaken.

‘You knew? You could have fought like warriors, rather than drift into witchery. You had choices. I don’t understand you.’

Did we have choices? Prospero was a world soaked in the psychic possibility of the Great Ocean. We were all touched by it, for better or worse. I don’t think we could have turned down the opportunities that gave us, even though we knew it made the other Legions uneasy.

Ultimately, though, the question is pointless. We did what we did, and no power in the universe has ever been able to undo the past.

‘We fought,’ I reply, remembering the conquest of Shrike, when Magnus himself had led us in war. He’d been magnificent, unstoppable, just as much as Russ or Lorgar, every bit the vision of the Emperor’s most favoured son. ‘We played our part.’

‘No longer,’ comes the riposte, savage with satisfaction. ‘Your part is over. Your pyramids are destroyed, and your bastard primarch’s back broken.’

He hates us. The hatred has not diminished with the humbling of my Legion. That may be why he brought me here. To gloat. My mind-sight is beginning to return, and I sense enormous frustration boiling within him. He has been left behind while others have departed for further conquest. This is one source of his anger. Soon, he will vent it on me.

But I cannot believe that is the only motivation. I am aware still how little I know. Why was Prospero destroyed? What, exactly, brought that doom upon us? The ignorance of that is more torture than anything this interrogator has planned for me. To die without uncovering those truths would be the most shameful way to go, and one that would vindicate Arvida’s doubts about coming back.

Can I use the instability in my questioner to my advantage? Would he let slip secrets if I goaded him? A dangerous course of action – his cooped-up rage is like that of a beast, wild and indiscriminate. But then, there is little for me to lose. My Legion is scattered, my primarch missing, my home world blasted into a ball of lifeless slag. I would like some answers before he loses control of the furnace within him and ends this conversation for good.

‘Magnus is not dead,’ I say. ‘I would know if he’d died. It was in the hope of finding him that we came back here. You, though, seem to know everything about us and what happened to our planet. You hint at more, things that I can only guess at. Since you know so much, and I know so little, should it not be me asking the questions?’

In the near-complete dark, I make out only the sharpest flash of dirty-grey. A gauntlet plunges out of the shadow and grabs my neck. The fingers squeeze painfully, just below the chin and just above the metal band that holds my head in place.

‘You are prey for me, traitor,’ comes the bloody rumble of a voice. ‘Nothing more than that. Forget it, and I will end you with agony.’

The threat means little. As I struggle to breathe, though, I realise something else. My aether-drawn powers are returning. They are weak, to be sure, but they are creeping back to me in drabs. Perhaps he knows this, perhaps he doesn’t. In any case, I have a glimmer of a chance now. The longer this thing lasts, the stronger I will become. Maybe, just maybe, strong enough to break these bonds.

The Ungifted Warriors have always underestimated what can be done with the mind, no doubt because we gifted have always been reluctant to use our skills unless pressed by necessity.

He releases his fist, and I gulp in draughts of blood-tanged air. He withdraws, though I can still feel him seething. He keeps his anger on an uncertain leash, as if it were a ravening predator continually tugging at its inadequate restraint.

‘How many were in your squad?’ he asks, recovering his poise with difficulty.

That’s good. I hope he has many such questions. I will answer them all fully, all the while letting my control over the aether return.

‘Nine,’ I say, and though my speech is grudging and surly, in my mind there already kindles an eager anticipation for what is to come. ‘There were nine of us.’

By the time Kalliston arrived, Phaeret was crouched down before the base of a pillar. The shaft was broken off about two metres up and rubble littered the surroundings. There were more ruined remnants of other buildings ahead, some no more than swaying spurs hanging over the curves of blast craters.

‘What is it?’ Kalliston asked, coming down to the same level.

Phaeret gestured towards the ground, saying nothing.

There was a gauntlet lying amid the blasted stone. Kalliston picked it up, turning it over to make the most of the light. It was gunmetal-grey and ready to fall into pieces. The construction was Legiones Astartes power armour – no mortal would have been able to wear such gear. Two of the fingers were missing, and the hollow stumps were black from burning. On the back of it, where the main ceramite plate guarded the warrior’s fist, a rune had been inscribed. There was nothing clumsy about it. Even Kalliston, who was by no means an expert on artificer tech, could see the careful workmanship.

‘And which of our brothers makes use of the runes?’ he asked, speaking to himself.

His mind went back to the assault on Shrike, the name his Legion had given to Ark Reach Secundus. It was there that Magnus and Russ had first clashed over the preservation of the avenians’ libraries. That had been a terrible day. Kalliston had been there when the Wolf King had stormed across the causeway with terrible violence in his eyes, and it had seemed as if Space Marine would fight Space Marine. He remembered the sheer majesty of the Wolves of Fenris, the terrifying potency locked into their single-minded frames. True, they had been stopped by sorcery for a time, but the barrier would have broken eventually. They would have kept on coming, heedless of the casualties, spinning into contact like a shell loosed from a gun-barrel.

Remorseless. The power that, once loosed, can never be called back.

‘This is their work,’ said Phaeret, and his young voice was savage with emotion. ‘The Wolves of Fenris.’

Kalliston stood, his eyes still locked on the gauntlet.

They had always been the primary suspects. The bad blood between Magnus and Russ had been well-known, as had the capability of the Wolves for sudden and unpredictable brutality. The trial at Nikaea had been at the instigation of Russ, so it was rumoured. The Wolf King’s hatred of sorcery had given him the pretext, and it seemed that he had acted on his intolerance at last.

But how had such a thing been dared? Had Russ gone rogue, finally giving in to the barbarism that burned in his feral soul? Or had this thing been sanctioned by a higher power?

The more Kalliston gazed at the gauntlet, letting his eyes run over the single rune etched into the ceramite glove, the more questions clamoured at him. It was one thing knowing the perpetrator of an act; quite another to understand his reasons.

‘Captain,’ voxed Arvida, breaking into Kalliston’s train of thought. ‘Evidence. There are traces of Space–’

‘I know it,’ said Kalliston, a dead weariness hanging on the words. ‘Russ’s dogs.’

‘Armour fragments,’ confirmed Arvida. ‘And they’ve carved things in the walls. Some of them are... obscene.’

Kalliston felt a stab of anger then. They were brutes, the Wolves, as shallow and thuggish as greenskins. He’d never understood what place they’d had in the Great Crusade, other than to ruin the reputation of enlightened humanity and stain the achievements of Unification. Only Angron’s berserkers were worse, and at least they’d been taken under the wing of the Warmaster. There had been no such wise, restraining hand to keep the Wolves of Fenris within civilised parameters, and it looked like they’d finally lost any semblance of control.

‘We’re getting more signs, the further we go,’ replied Kalliston, speaking to the whole squad over the mission channel. ‘Head to the Pyramid of Photep, where we’ll regroup.’

Phaeret started to move off immediately, but Arvida maintained the comm link.

‘There may still be Wolves on the planet,’ he warned. ‘Is this zone clear of targets?’

‘I read nothing,’ replied Kalliston, giving away his irritation. Arvida was only doing his job, but something about the sergeant’s drip-feed of scepticism was getting under his skin. ‘Move to heading–’

Even as he spoke, Phaeret’s head and shoulders disappeared in a cloud of whirling armour, bone and blood. The booming report of heavy weapons echoed down the street, followed by the sharp clatter of bolter fire.

Kalliston threw himself behind the pillar, feeling the stone tremble as the reactive rounds thumped into it and blasted the stone open. He scrambled backward, away from the firestorm and into the lee of a more solid wall-section. As he went, more shells impacted around him, throwing up glittering waves of glass.

There were cries of alarm over the comm, and a thin recording of bolter-fire. His squad were all coming under fire. Two more life-sign runes dropped out of his helm-display.

Throne, where are they coming from?

‘Heavy incoming!’ reported Orphide, two hundred metres away. ‘Getting multiple–’

Then his signal wavered and died, leaving static on the channel.

‘Lock on to my position!’ ordered Kalliston, whirling round, trying to make the best sense of the terrain around him. There were plenty of cover-points in the ruined cityscape, but nothing much that would stand up to concerted assault. ‘Fall back to this location. Repeat, fall back to this location.’

He risked a look through a gap in the wall, keeping his helm as low as possible. There were still no target runes on his helm display, but auspexes could be jammed.

Two hundred metres distant, at the far end of the desolate street, he saw movement for the first time. Something pale grey flitted between cover, head low, moving fast. The profile was unmistakable – Space Marine power armour. Kalliston saw no others, but knew there’d be more out there. He checked the magazine was locked in place and that the ammo counter read full. His hearts had begun to beat in that steady, deep rhythm that always preceded action. He felt the familiar prickle across his skin as stimms entered his bloodstream and primed the muscle-nerve interfaces of his carapace.

‘This is my world, dogs,’ he snarled, his voice eager. ‘So you’re going to have to fight me for it.’

‘Nine of you,’ he says. ‘Nine fools. You seem to have had few plans, other than to sniff around in the ruins and look for scraps. Did it never occur to you that the destroyers of Prospero would leave troops behind?’

‘Of course it did.’

‘And you still came.’

I briefly ponder whether to try my luck again. I can make him angry so easily, but there is the question of timing. For the moment, I restrain myself.

‘Yes. Our position was in any case bleak. We were alone, separated from what remained of our fleet. In such a position of ignorance, we were vulnerable. I decided to seek survivors on Prospero, perhaps the primarch himself. We knew that there were unlikely to be any, but there were other reasons to – as you say – sniff around in the ruins.’

There was a minuscule pause then, a slight catch in the otherwise metronomic regularity of the breathing.

‘Other reasons?’

I decide to keep talking, to stick to the truth. This interrogation will be coming to an end soon in any case.

‘Prospero was the greatest seat of learning in all the worlds of men,’ I say, and make no effort to keep the pride out of my voice. ‘There were libraries here that were the envy even of the ancient races. There were secrets in our vaults, secrets that even we hadn’t fully had the time to unlock properly. While you were sailing across the sea of stars, plundering and maiming, we were learning.’

As I speak, I recall using much the same words to persuade Arvida of the wisdom of returning home. He’d listened just as intently as my questioner did now.

‘You speak of witchery,’ I say. I dare a little more. ‘You know nothing of it. There are subtleties to the Great Ocean that only we understood. We could peer into the very stuff of the warp and make sense of the patterns there. We saw glimpses of the future, of possibilities more magnificent than there are words to describe.’

I begin to enthuse myself. I remember the devices that we used for learning, for discovery, for healing – the enormous potential that they had. We were like children, stepping into a dimension of wonder, our eyes glistening from the reflected glory.

‘I thought that, if some of those things survived, then we could retrieve them. If the fates determined that we were to be cast adrift, we could at least make some use of the tools that we’d accumulated.’

‘Did you find any?’

He is still eager, hungry for information now. The scorn has left his voice, replaced by something like need. Perhaps he has no idea how transparent he is. Odd, that he should be so brittle. I’d always imagined the Wolves being more sure of themselves.

‘No,’ I say, deflating his hopes as bluntly as I can. ‘We had no time. And, in any case, I doubt anything could have survived the mess you made of this place. You have destroyed everything. If I’d known it was you behind this carnage, I’d have expected nothing less. You are butchers and psychopaths, sadists and morons, the lowest of the–’

I know what I’m doing. His psychology is increasingly open to me. I raise his hopes, then dash them. I sense the fragility of his mind, and strike where I know the pain will be greatest.

I only stop speaking as the fist crashes into my jaw. Even inured as I am to physical shock, it staggers me. He moves fast; far faster than I could have done. I feel bone breaking, my jawline fragmenting, and my head jarring back against the metal of the chair. Pain flares up, hot and bright behind my eyes. Then a secondary bloom of agony, rolling across my face.

‘You know nothing of us!’ he roars, and the voice is instantly unhinged with rage.

Groggily, I realise I have unleashed something of incredible magnitude, and my stomach tightens.

He strikes me again, using his other fist, and my head bounces painfully from its bonds. What little vision I had disappears, to be replaced by a red-black, blotchy haze. Something else – a boot? – thuds into my exposed midriff, cracking my fused ribs and driving the plates in.

‘Nothing!’ he bellows, and a whole curtain of saliva slaps across my ruined cheeks. He is screaming into my face.

I can summon nothing against this. I have moved too soon, and he will surely kill me. More hammer-blows impact, breaking my skin, tearing my muscles, shivering the bone beneath. My head rocks on my neck like a top, cracked back and forth by the casual, deadly fists. If it were not for my restraints keeping me in check, my neck would be severed clean by now.

Then he stops. Merciful Throne, he stops.

I hear him raging still, incoherent with mania. He paces back and forth, trying to rein in whatever dark forces I have unleashed. I gasp for breath, feeling my punctured lungs labour. My head feels swollen with blood. The world reels around me, thick and dizzy with pain.

His breathing is like an animal’s, ragged and laced with moisture. For a long time, he doesn’t speak. I don’t think he can. It takes time for the rage to subside.

‘You know nothing of us,’ he growls again, and the voice has resumed its terrifying, purring threat.

I cannot respond. My own lips are puffy and cracked, and I feel my blood clotting in hard nodes within my wounds.

‘So certain,’ he spits, and I feel a slug of oily phlegm hit my body. ‘You’re so damned certain. And yet, as it turns out, you know even less than you think.’

He comes close again, and I smell his sour aroma. That odour gives much away. There is a bestial quality to it, like the sodden flank of an old hunting dog, but there’s something else. Chemical, perhaps.

‘You still don’t know why I brought you here,’ he says. His contempt is needle-keen. ‘Time to shed some light.’

As he says it, wall-mounted lumens flare into life. The sudden exposure only adds more pain to the riot of it in my head, and my bruised eyes screw shut. It takes time for them to open again, gingerly, the lids trembling under flakes of dried blood.

For the first time, I can see my questioner. As I look into his face, blurry and floating amid the harsh lights, I finally make out some detail, some identity.

It is then that I realise, just as he said I would, that I know nothing at all.

Revuel Arvida ran fast, keeping his head low, watching where his boots fell carefully. He reached his destination, a tall column of semi-melted metal on the corner of what had once been an intersection between two transit corridors.

He slid down against the broken column and risked a look round the corner. The body of Orphide lay in the middle of the open street. On either side of him the hollow carcasses of buildings stretched away down the long avenue. There was no visible movement.

He glanced at the proximity readings on his helm display. No enemy signals, and three of his battle-brothers dead. Three other active signals were converging on Kalliston’s location, a few hundred metres distant. Arvida was furthest away, out of position and isolated.

The city was whisper-quiet, but Arvida’s aural amplifiers picked up a faint shuffling from a long way down the street. Something was moving towards him, sheltered by the drifting smog and the urban ruins.

He crouched down with his back against the metal. Arvida was Corvidae, a master of the shifting patterns of the future. Back on his home world and surrounded by its familiar resonance, he felt particularly powerful. He allowed his consciousness to rise quickly through the enumerations.

He saw paths stretching away from him, overlaid onto the pattern of the streets around him. There were many clear possibilities, each running amid the others like a herd of panicked, stampeding prey. Some routes were obscured, but many were clear. He saw the approach of his enemy, their movements and their tactics. They had encircled Kalliston’s position. There were dozens of them.

‘Brother-captain,’ he voxed. ‘Advise retreat to the lander. There’s too ma–’

Arvida broke off, sensing footfalls closing rapidly. The footfalls hadn’t happened yet, but they would soon. His future-sense was shadowing the world around him, exposing the immediate course of events in a ghostly superimposition on the present.

He got to his feet and retreated back the way he’d come. He went quickly, keeping his bolter held ready at chest height.

There was no reply from Kalliston over the comm. Jammed, perhaps. The enemy seemed to know all their weaknesses. How long had they lain in wait, planning for this?

He reached the end of another shattered avenue. Four roads met there, and a blackened statue of Qeras the Episteme still stood at the intersection. The charred eyes gazed east, though lines of oil ran down the stone.

Arvida saw the incoming future-trails of the enemy like hololiths, and acted accordingly. They were moving to intercept him. Several had come down the street where Orphide lay. Two others had tracked back across a block and were heading towards his current position, closing fast.

Arvida shrank back into the shadow of the statue, waiting for them to come into view. They arrived in moments, only just behind their future-trails, hunting eagerly as if they knew their own doppelgangers were almost within blade-range.

Arvida let them pass him, then whirled round and out of cover. He took aim quickly, loosing two shots from his bolter. They were locked at the heads of the enemy, one for each. The first shell impacted perfectly, exploding as it snapped into the back of a pale, bloodstained helm. The target rocked, stumbled forwards, and smashed heavily to the ground. A flurry of glass shards flew up as he crashed earthwards.

But precognition was never perfect. The second shell grazed the other Space Marine’s armour, knocking him off-balance but failing to drop him. The warrior regained his poise almost instantly, falling low and twisting round. A brace of white-hot plasma bolts flew directly at Arvida.

By then the Corvidae had already moved, darting back into the protection of the statue as the
energy-pulses hammered into the stone. It broke open on the second impact, cracking from head to foot and toppling into pieces. Arvida burst left from the tumbling remnants, squeezing off another controlled salvo from his bolter.

His enemy hadn’t stood waiting to be hit, but had closed in for the kill. He had a chainaxe in his left hand, buzzing like a furious swarm of insects. His movements were powerful and fast, aimed perfectly and backed up with crushing force. The chainaxe whirred in close, going for the chest then suddenly banking up towards Arvida’s neck.

Without precognition, he’d have been dead. His adversary was stronger, quicker and had the momentum behind him. But when the blades whistled into position, Arvida had already moved, weaving away from the preordained pattern of the cutting edges. Shifting his weight expertly in the wake of the axehead, he pivoted out of contact and fired three rounds into his enemy’s face at point-blank range. They detonated immediately, throwing both of them apart with the crack of the explosion.

Arvida checked his fall, springing back up, and prepared to fire again. He didn’t need to. His enemy’s face was ruined, a hollow shell of blood, armour-chips and skull-fragments.

For a moment, Arvida stood over the defeated warriors , feeling his pulse throb in his veins. It was the first time he’d got close to those who’d hunted his squad through the ruins.

As he looked at the livery on the shoulder-guards, his satisfaction at the kill was replaced by shock.

Then there were more sounds of pursuit, echoing in his future-sense like the memory of a dream. Other warriors were closing fast.

Arvida broke into a run, heading into cover past overhanging building-remnants and loping quickly towards the lander coordinates. There was no way he could fight to Kalliston’s position alone, and he’d help no one by getting pointlessly killed. The only option was to gain the ship, take off and attempt an airlift recovery.

It was as he went, darting between shadows like a ghoul, that he tried to make sense of his attackers’ identity.

But it made no sense. No sense whatsoever.

My questioner’s armour, which I had thought was grey in the near-total dark, is a dirty white. The shoulder-guards were once a bright blue, though every exposed surface on his battle-plate is covered by a translucent layer of brown-red filth.

So he is a War Hound. Or, as I believe they’ve started calling themselves, a World Eater. The assumed name is ludicrous, a perversion of everything the Legiones Astartes used to stand for. However, to the extent that I understand the ways of other Legions, it is perfectly accurate. They do devour planets. I have heard tales of outrages under Angron’s insane tutelage that make my stomach turn. The only Legion with a comparable reputation is the Wolves, so perhaps it’s not surprising that I found it so easy to believe I was held by one of Russ’s dogs.

In the dark, I had imagined my interrogator being something akin to a beast, slavering on the edge of madness. The reality is only a little less disconcerting. The World Eater’s head is uncovered, exposing the full distortion of his features. His flesh is bronzed and supple, though there are deep wells of shadow under his low brow. He has long cheekbones and a blunt, slabbed chin. His head is shaved bare, the scalp puckered with scars. There are regular marks on his temples and a series of iron studs further up on the smooth skin. In another Legion, those studs might have indicated long service, but I know their purpose on him. As with all his kind, there are implants under the flesh, implants long forbidden by the Emperor. The prohibition is for good reason. They accelerate the rage and stoke it, amplifying an already testosterone-charged kill-factory into a bringer of truly ludicrous levels of violence.

And there is something else. The Space Marine before me is no ordinary World Eater, if such a thing could even be said to exist. A few select members of that terror Legion have carved a name for themselves outside their closed, brooding brotherhood. This is one of them. I know, without needing to use my fractured mind-sight, that I am in the presence of Khârn, Captain of the Eighth Assault Company and equerry to the primarch. If I needed any confirmation that my death is close, I have it now.

He stares at me. His eyes are the yellow of curdled milk, rimmed with red where the lids are pulled back. Veins pulse at his temples, bulging darkly against taut skin. He has a line of drool still, glistening against his chin. If I ever wish to conjure up the image of a psychopath again, I will have this picture to bring to mind. Khârn is almost a parody of himself, the apotheosis of martial insanity, a walking furnace of unfettered bloodlust.

He was not always like this. Even in the stories I have heard, he was ferocious but not mad. Something has happened to change him. Something terrible.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ I ask.

Khârn smiles, but there is no mirth there. It is as if his facial muscles pull naturally into a leer unless continually suppressed.

‘I am here for the same reason as you,’ he says. ‘Hunting through the wreckage, looking for something to salvage.’

Even in my weakened state, that image brings a choking, bitter laugh to my lips. I cannot imagine World Eaters salvaging anything. They are the soul of destruction and nothing else.

‘And did you find what you were looking for?’

Khârn nods.

‘There is a cavern, far below the surface of Tizca. You will know of it – the Reflecting Cave. We speculated that the Wolves might have missed it, despite their reputation for thoroughness. There was something down there I was ordered to retrieve.’

He withdraws an iron pendant from his armour. It is fashioned into the shape of a wolf’s head howling against a crescent moon. The metal is black, as if placed in a fire for too long.

‘The Moon Wolf,’ says Khârn. ‘Your primarch used it to make contact with Horus. It was a part of the Warmaster’s armour once, and so has a sympathetic connection with him.’

He speaks as if those words should mean something to me, though I struggle to see the significance of them.

‘It could be used again, and Horus has no wish to be reached for further discussions. It will be destroyed, and another potential chink in our defences will be closed off. Then, thank the gods, I shall be free to undertake more fulfilling work for the cause.’

‘I do not understand,’ I say, and the passing reference to gods makes me uneasy. ‘What has Horus to do with this? What has happened here?’

Khârn doesn’t smile this time, but I can sense a vicious amusement cradling in him. I sense more than that, too. He is burning with agony, an agony that can only be discharged by murder. The Moon Wolf was not the only reason he came to Prospero.

‘You really know nothing,’ he says. ‘I had planned to torture you for your secrets, but I see that you have none. So I shall torture you another way.’

He leans forwards, and I recoil at the raw-meat stench of his breath.

‘Listen to me, Thousand Son, and I will tell you a story. I will tell you of the great movement that is taking place across the galaxy. I will tell you of the ruin of all your primarch’s hopes and the final triumph of the virtuous strong over the craven weak. And then, before I kill you, I will tell you of the final destination of this crusade, the crusade men are already beginning, in their infinite ignorance, to call the Heresy.’

The volume of fire was deafening. Bolter rounds exploded into the surrounding walls, shredding them into dust. Heavier weapons were being brought to bear, too. A missile screamed overhead, crashing into a stone balustrade less than five metres from Kalliston’s position.

The Thousand Sons captain was hunkered down in an old blast crater somewhere deep in the centre of the city. Two of his squad were with him, crouched against the lip of the torn-up earth, their shoulders juddering as they loosed streams of shells into the night. The quantity of incoming fire was far greater than anything they could match, and the warm night air was streaked with tracer fire heading in their direction. A fourth body lay, immobile, at the bottom of the crater.

‘Prepare to fall back,’ announced Kalliston, watching his magazine empty. He was running out of choices. It was difficult to make out numbers in the dark and at such range, but there must have been more than thirty Space Marines closing in on them. Those numbers made holding ground impossible.

‘Where to, brother-captain?’ asked Leot, one of the two surviving Thousand Sons. There was no fear in his deliberate voice, but there was an undertone of reproach. He knew how slim the options were.

‘To the lander,’ replied Kalliston, ejecting the magazine and slamming home a replacement. ‘But not direct. We’ll break back towards the colonnade, and then cut round.’

He gauged the likely location of the closest enemy targets by the pattern of fire, threw himself onto the edge of the crater and let fly with a controlled salvo before dropping back again. As he landed out of harm’s way, the thick crust of earth, glass and rubble exploded in a plume of fire. Then there were more bolt impacts, and the second whine of a missile launch.

‘Now,’ Kalliston ordered, beckoning his men to go ahead while he covered the retreat.

The two Space Marines fell back quickly, keeping in the lee of the crater shadow and moving to the far side of the bowl. As they reached the ridge, they broke out quickly. Kalliston stood up, releasing a final burst before racing to join them. He ran quickly up the uneven slope, feeling the thud of the incoming shells as they landed only metres short.

Then he was out, back onto the street level, running behind his battle-brothers, searching out fresh cover.

Too late, Kalliston realised that there were more attackers closing in from the very point they were heading towards.

‘Incom–’ he started, seeing the missile contrail too late.

The shoulder-launched missile slammed into the ground just ahead of him, throwing him into a roaring confusion of pain and tumbling movement. Kalliston felt several further heavy impacts, including one that exploded against his chest. His body cartwheeled through the air, buffeted by the backwash of the multiple blasts, before slamming into something unyielding. His spine compressed agonisingly, and he felt the bones of his right leg fracture. His vision went cloudy, and the world reeled around him in a blur of lurid colour.

Dimly, he heard treads rushing towards him in the dust, and the ragged bark of bolter-fire. A muzzle was pressed against his temple, clinking sharply against the smooth curve of his helm.

‘No,’ came a voice from close by, bestial in character and alive with a barely suppressed pleasure in the kill. ‘Alive.’

Then agony surged through Kalliston’s body, forking through his frame like storm-lightning. There was a numb falling away. Then there was nothing.

I had always considered it a gift to be able to peer inside the veils of a man’s mind. I had always valued my ability to tell whether my interlocutor was lying or telling the truth, just as an ungifted mortal might make imperfect use of pulse-rates, sweating, or evasive gazes. Such a capability seemed to me one of the most precious of possessions, just one more piece of evidence for the ineluctable progress of mankind towards mortal godhood.

Now I recognise the price for such perspicuity. I cannot doubt the things I have been told. I cannot reassure myself that Khârn is concealing the truth from me, because his mind is like a translucent vial and there is no concealment possible.

So I must believe. I must believe what he says about the ruin of the Great Crusade and the turning of the primarchs to darkness, and the gathering storm that even now extends its pinions towards Terra. I must believe that my gene-father, whom I had revered along with the rest of my brothers, was guilty of the most terrible miscalculation, and has passed beyond the confines of the physical universe with the remnants of our Legion. I must believe that my survival is a pointless thing, a piece of unresolved business from a war that I have been denied any meaningful part in.

As he speaks, my recovery accelerates, and my ability to make use of my powers returns more quickly. My body embarks on the astonishing process of repair that it has been able to conduct ever since the implant of my enhanced organs. I am preparing to extend my life again, to resist whatever fresh assault comes my way.

That is what I have been turned into, a vehicle for survival. Even in the face of such overwhelming trauma, my blood still clots, my sinews pull back into shape and my bones repair the cracks in their structure. By telling me these things, in such agonising detail, he has given me the space to become myself again. I have weapons. I have the ability to hurt him, perhaps even the ability to kill him. Does he know this? Is my degradation so complete that he no longer sees me as any kind of threat?

He may be right. My spirit, my certainty is gone. The actions of Magnus are either incomprehensible or evil. In either case, I cannot focus my thoughts on anything but the betrayal.

Why did he send us away? He must have known we’d seek to return, or that the vengeful forces that destroyed this world would come after us in the void. He was the mightiest of us all, the magus, the one who saw the snaking paths of the Ocean most clearly of all. So I cannot put it down to simple omission. There are patterns here to be read. There are always patterns.

‘So, Thousand Son,’ asks my tormentor. ‘What do you make of that?’

He delights in my misery. It draws his attention from his own discontent. It is a cliché as old as the universe, the bully inflicting pain in order to send it away from himself.

It won’t work. The pain will catch up with him in the end, even if he has to kill every other sentient life-form in the galaxy first.

‘You allied yourself with the traitor,’ I say, and I hear the hollow ring to my words.

‘You call him traitor. History will call him redeemer.’

‘And you tell me the Wolves of Fenris did this to punish our treachery. Then why do you hunt us?’

‘They came for you because they believed you had turned. We come for you because we know that you didn’t. Not truly. Not reliably. Our cause demands commitment.’

‘So you never did believe in Unification? It was always a sham for you?’

Khârn grimaces. He is like a child, and his emotions play across his face nakedly. My mind-sight is overkill here – the rawest practicus could read him now.

‘We believed in it completely,’ he growls, and the raw emotion rises to just below the surface. ‘None believed in it more than we did. None laid their bodies on the line to the extent that we did.’

He comes closer. His eyes stare at me, glistening in the bright light.

‘We are fighters,’ he says. ‘We are made in the image of our primarch, just as you are made in the image of yours, and he has been betrayed and cast aside, even as the rule of the galaxy passes from the warriors to the slavemasters.’

I do not understand the reference to slavemasters, but it scarcely matters, for Khârn is no longer talking to me.

‘They will use us again to fight their battles while they remain in the audience, laughing. They are the audience, who watch as we come for them in their stalls. We will do to them what Angron should have done in Desh’ea. We will fulfill the potential within us.’

I see his pupils flicker, and can only guess at what scenes he is seeing. Like a prophet trapped in his own visions, Khârn is locked in a world of unreliable memory and paranoia. The damage done to his mind is heartbreaking. All that energy, all that raw potency, has been harnessed to an engine of lunacy.

Enough. It is time to show him how much I understand.

‘You didn’t come here for the Moon Wolf,’ I say, keeping my voice quiet. ‘You came here because you knew what devices once existed on Prospero. You hoped to find a cure.’

That halts him. He glares at me, and a fleck of spittle shines on his hanging lip like a jewel.

‘There is still time,’ I say, knowing the danger it places me in. I begin to wonder if this encounter was foreseen after all. ‘The devices have all been destroyed, but I can replicate their functions. I can heal your mind. I can remove the implants and give you back your sleep. I can take away the fire that drives you onwards, the fire that goads you to the acts you abhor. Even now, I know that a part of you still abhors what you have done.’

The spittle hangs, trembling, on his unmoving flesh.

‘I can help you, brother. I can heal your mind.’

He remains locked, frozen in indecision. If I had been Corvidae, I could have seen the paths of the future bisect within him, one going left, one going right. He is at the juncture now, what the ancients called crisis. He has the power to choose, to pull back or to plough on. I cannot intervene. The slightest nudge now will unleash the inferno, one that would toss me aside like dried brush in the hurricane.

I dare to believe in him for the space of a heartbeat. He looks at me, and I see the vindication of my guesses. He is lost in a universe of pain, one that is only temporarily forgotten in the action of killing. I know that my words have reached the sliver of his old self that still endures. I know he can hear me.

And so we remain, alone, locked away somewhere in the ruins of Prospero, a tiny mirror of the battle of wills taking place all across the galaxy.

And for that single heartbeat, I dare to believe.

‘Witch!’ he roars then, and the spittle flies from his lips. ‘You cannot heal this!’

Like a prey-beast springing away from the spear, he drags up a cry of tortured rage, shaking his head from side to side, flailing sweat from the bronze skin. He balls his massive fists, and I know they will come for me soon. His face contorts into a vice of bitter anguish, the expression that it will surely wear for millennia hence if I cannot stop him now.

He has chosen.

I cry aloud words of power, words I had forgotten existed until this moment. I am weak, crippled by the rigours of my captivity, but the lessons of my long conditioning are strong.

I am Athanaean, a master of the hidden ways of the mind, and there are more weapons in the galaxy than fists and blades.

My bonds shatter, freeing me to move. I rise from the chair, wreathed in the blazing light of the unbound aether, ignoring the protests of my broken limbs.

He comes at me then, the Eater of Worlds, and there is murder in his red-rimmed eyes. I have hurt him by exposing the source of his anguish, and I know then he will not stop until I lie dead and my blood paints every wall of this cell.

But we are on my world, the wellspring of my Legion’s ancient power, and the very dust of Tizca fuels my mastery of the warp. I am more powerful than he guesses.

He howls, this ruined abomination, as he thunders into strike-range. I meet the challenge, and my conscience is clear.

I cannot cure him, so I will have to kill him.

Arvida arrived at the landing site just in time.

Just in time to see the corpses of the pilots being dragged across the ground, leaving furrows in the sharp-edged dust. Just in time to see the krak-charges being laid around the flanks of the lander. Just in time to hear the rasping laughter of victory from the berserkers who’d stormed the vehicle.

There were twenty-seven World Eaters clustered around the empty crew-bay. One of them lay in the dust, his armour punched open from bolter impacts. The only other casualties were the two Thousand Sons who’d been left to guard it. They hadn’t stood much of a chance.

Arvida ducked down, keeping hidden behind a tangled hedge of semi-melted girders thirty metres away. As he watched, the helms of his brothers were torn off. Their exposed faces were punched, over and over again. The heads lolled lifelessly, turning into raw lumps of gore and gristle under the pointless barrage. The World Eaters laughed some more, cheering as each fist hit home.

Arvida turned away. He felt angry enough, but not towards Angron’s warriors – they were just savages, and had long ago ceased to be capable of anything more than boneheaded thuggery. His real anger was directed towards Kalliston, the one who had led them here against his counsel. The captain had always had too much faith in the providence of fate. The very idea that Magnus might have been fallible, that the primarch’s leadership might have been badly misguided, was anathema to him. Clearly it had been. They should have remained in space, searching for more survivors before heading into the emptiness of the void to recover. Prospero was nothing but a graveyard.

Even so, that left much to be explained. Arvida might have understood if there had been Wolves on Prospero, but World Eaters were another matter. Had the two Legions been acting in concert? Had all the other Legions turned against the Thousand Sons? If so, then why now? And for what reason?

The World Eaters began to strip the rest of the armour from their captives, and the desecration of their bodies began in earnest. Whoops and roars filled the otherwise tranquil air as they set to work.

Arvida glanced at his helm display. His squad were all gone, their life-signs inactive. He was alone, facing an enemy he couldn’t hope to contest.

The safest course of action would be to retreat, to flee back through the silent streets and wait for something to turn up. He knew he would have to withdraw soon enough, but the senseless barbarism in front of him offended his highly-developed sense of pride in the rules of war. His Legion had never broken them.

He rose from cover and drew his bolter up in a single, flowing movement. As he took aim, he saw the path of the shell that he would fire snaking into the future, and took some solace from the certainty of the kill. He squeezed the trigger, then turned and sprinted back into the shadows.

Arvida didn’t see the captain of the World Eaters collapse to the ground, his helm carved in two by the detonation of the bolt-round, but he heard it. Then he heard the roars of anger, and the thud of four dozen boots as the warband wheeled and charged towards the source of the shot.

He ran, keeping his head low, ducking and weaving through the thickets of blasted iron. The noise of the pursuit echoed in his ears, harsh and brutal. If they caught him, he’d be lucky to suffer a quick death.

Arvida upped the pace, pushing his body into a new burst of speed, barely noticing the skeletal buildings rush past in the night. He knew it had been reckless to fire that shot. Stupid, even.

But, and just for a moment, it had felt good.

His strength is breathtaking. It is as if every aspect of the Legiones Astartes has been stripped away in favour of that single facet. His fists move in blurs of speed, backed up by the prodigious power of his massive body. He has no weapon, but that scarcely seems to matter. He is used to carving up his foes with his hands.

He is always attacking, always looking for the way in. I parry as best I can, holding him back by attacking his only vulnerable part. I see his mind now as it will become in the future – a cauldron of seething, perpetual violence. The brief window I had on another Khârn has closed, and the corrupted half is all that remains. I can hammer away at that, flexing my telepathic muscles as he flexes his unnaturally stimmed physical ones, though I fear my attacks have little bite.

He wades through warp-born attacks that would floor a lesser adversary. I know I must be hurting him, but he brushes it off. Perhaps there is no pain I could inflict that is greater than the one he inflicts on himself.

‘Witch!’ he roars again, coming at me in a barrelling, swaying charge.

I leap to the side, crashing against the metal walls of the cell, only evading his outstretched hands by finger-widths. I unleash everything I have then, a whirling torrent of memory-scorching agony capable of ripping the sanity from a man and dissolving it like magnesium in water.

But there is so little sanity to rip away, and he barely stumbles.

I make use of the gap I created, and throw a heavy punch at his exposed head. My fist connects. It is a well-aimed blow, and impacts with all the force I can deliver. His skull rocks back and blood joins the trails of saliva in the air.

Then I am moving again, evading the furious response. He is like a whirlwind, a morass of hurtling limbs. I feel a heavy thud as his boot rises, catching me on my hip. There is a jarring crack as my pelvis fractures.

I scramble away from him, sprawling face-down to the floor. Another foot connects, breaking the femur in my trailing leg. Out of my armour, I have so little defence against attacks of this quantity and magnitude. The absurdity of my defiance is laughable.

I roll over onto my back, spinning away from a floor-breaking fist-plunge.

Khârn towers over me. Froth spills from his lips, and his eyes bulge from their swollen sockets.

It is my pity that has doomed me. Pity is the only emotion he can no longer tolerate, the one that reminds him of what he once was. If I had not offered to cure him, perhaps I would have lived. Perhaps he would have persuaded me of the righteousness of his cause, and I would have joined the movement that he says will liberate the galaxy.

It is that thought that persuades me I was right to try. As I gaze up into the mask of trembling fervour above me, I see what fate would have awaited me as a part of that dark crusade. He has lost himself, and what remains is now much less than human.

His clenched gauntlet swoops down, hitting me square in the face. The bones, already weakened, crunch inwards. I feel the back of my head drive a dent into the metal floor, and the hot stickiness of the blood in the well as it rebounds out again.

The world tilts, rocking on an axis of nausea. I only dimly feel the second blow, cracking into my ribs. My body becomes a chorus of pain, resounding in discordant polyphony.

Through blood-swelled eyes I see the fist coming that will finish me. It is fitting, to witness the cause of my own death. As a loyal son of the Imperium, I never wished for more than that.

I have time for only one more thought before the end comes.

I gave you the choice, Khârn. When the murder and madness are over, you will have the leisure to reflect on that. You could have turned back.

That knowledge, I know, will haunt him. I dread to think what he will become when his rampage ends and he is forced to confront that.

I can guess. I guess that he will become uncontainable, and will turn on whatever force has sought to channel his rage for its own purposes. None shall master him, for he has lost mastery over himself.

When the fist lands, that is what I am thinking. There is no comfort in it. And, of course, there will be no comfort in anything again.

Arvida kept moving. The dead city was crawling with World Eater kill-squads, roving through the empty hab-blocks like underhive murder-gangs. For the time being, he was ahead of them. He knew Tizca better than them, and remembered the intricate pattern of its streets perfectly. What was more, his future-sense still lingered, warning him away from taking wrong turns and preventing fatal mis-steps.

It wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, he’d have to rest, to sleep, to find something to eat. His enhanced constitution could stave off that need for days, but not forever. The Wolves had burned Prospero almost completely to the ground, so there would be meagre hunting ahead.

His only chance of survival would be to stay in the city, evading the predators and searching for some kind of transport off-world. He assumed the Geometric was still in orbit, though his attempts to send a signal had failed. The ship was not without its defences, though it would struggle against a well-crewed World Eaters warship.

So. The options were limited, and the odds long.

Kalliston had been a fool. Coming back to Prospero had been a predictable error, one caused by excessive faith in the primarch. Arvida had never shared that faith, not even when the Legion had been intact. Whatever cataclysm had occurred here had been beyond Magnus’s power to prevent, so it was folly to retain faith in his stratagems. Any survivors from the sack of Prospero were alone now, a scattered band of warriors cast adrift on the rip-tide of the galaxy like the spars of a ruined galleon.

Arvida had no idea how many of his brothers still lived. Perhaps there were hundreds. Perhaps he was the only one.

He reached the end of a long, shallow climb away from the mass of the central conurbation. Arvida turned then, looking back the way he’d come. He had a view far across the centre of the city. Under the starlight, the fields of glass glittered with a pearlescent sheen. It was beautiful.

The City of Light.

He paused for a moment, lost in the vision of what had once been. Nothing moved. Even the drifting clouds of smog were still, suspended in a rare moment of calm.

Only one certainty remained. Arvida knew, as only a Corvidae could know, that death would not find him on Prospero. That was no consolation for what had been lost, but at least it lent the task of planning his next move a certain urgency.

He would survive. He would discover the true causes of his Legion’s destruction, and live to fight them. He would neither pause nor stumble until everything had been revealed to him, everything that would give him a weapon to employ.

‘Knowledge is power,’ he breathed.

Then he turned away from the scene, and stole quickly back into the occlusion of the ruins. As he went, the dim red light of the angry magma fires caught on his shoulder-guard, exposing the serpentine star set about the black raven-head of his cult discipline.

Then he was gone, a shadow among shadows.

About The Author

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Scars, the novella Brotherhood of Storm and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, and the short story collection Wolves of Fenris, as well as the Space Marine Battles novels Wrath of Iron and Battle of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Time of Legends novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works near Bristol, in south-west England.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Age of Darkness in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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