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The Mourning War - David Annandale

About the Author

A Black Library Publication

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The Mourning War

David Annandale

NOW

Out there, in the frozen darkness, monsters roamed. The world was theirs, but they were not satisfied. They were coming. Ephrael Stern could hear them, in the distance, when the wind carried the sounds of their abhorrent songs and their chanting promises of the unspeakable. She could not see them yet. Now and then, miles away, between the immobile waves of the ocean, she saw the flares of corrupted light. Red and violet, green and blue, bright flashes and slithering aurorae, hurting the air and tainting the ice, the light came and vanished. The abominations wanted their tribute of flesh and souls. They would try again, as they had over and over for a year and more. She had always stopped them. She would now too. This war was almost over. The daemons would fail. There would be no prey for them before the silence fell.

Stern stood on the top of the spire of the Cathedral of the Throne. The great temple, the largest on Lacrimor and the last refuge for its people, surmounted a granite promontory rising at the edge of the city of Stenagmos, jutting out over the ocean. Stern had kept long watches here during the endless night. This was to be her last one. She would be true to her duty, and to the people of Lacrimor, until the end.

The wind keened. It was not strong, but it cried out with the pain of cold. Stern had never known cold like this. It was the most profound of all colds. It went deeper than human feeling. It reached down and down and down, a hand of ice, claws terrible, its grasp beyond measure, its depths fathomless. It was no longer just the surface of the ocean that was frozen. The ice went all the way to the seabed.

Lacrimor was still growing colder. There was much, much worse to come. Though there would be no one left but the spawn of the warp to see its final state.

Eldritch energy shimmered up and down Stern's frame. It rippled along the length of her cloak. It kept her warm, and prevented her skin from freezing after mere seconds of exposure. No other protection was enough to permit her watch. Even then, she could feel the cold.

The door to the interior of the spire opened behind her. She turned. Kyganil was in the entrance, silhouetted by the dim, amber light of the few lumen strips that still worked.

'What is it, old friend?' Stern asked the Harlequin.

'You should come.'

'Has something happened?'

'Something will imminently. I hear the opening words of the epilogue. The curtain will fall ere long.'

'So soon,' Stern murmured.

'It has been a year,' said Kyganil.

Stern followed him into the spire. The daemons were closing in, but there were leagues they had to cross before they reached the cathedral. And for all their shrieking revelry, their attack would not be rushed. She had taught them to be cautious. There was time to attend to matters of greater, and sacred, import.

Stern closed the spire door behind her, shutting out the cries of the wind. Now she could hear the sound rising from the nave far below. It was a song, a hymn, so different from the unholy chants in the frozen waves. And so weak, so thin. So precious.

Stern sighed. 'A year,' she said. 'I wonder if it was right that I had hoped it would be longer.'

'I will not pronounce on the right or wrong,' said Kyganil. 'That is for actors other than myself. But the hope is a natural one.'

'And now the hopes must come to an end,' Stern whispered to herself. A year. So short a time, yet this had also been a war that was eternal, without surcease, an infinite plunge into the cold and dark.

Yet a short time. Too short.

Why, then, did her arrival on Lacrimor seem so long ago?

ONE YEAR AGO

A day came, if time in such a place could be measured in days, that the webway seemed riven by storms. Stern did not know if that was something that could even be said of the webway. Yet the search for the route that would take them to the Black Library had Kyganil looking uncharacteristically frustrated. The ways he tried to use to travel through the shimmering non-space were blocked again and again.

'We cannot go forward,' he said.

Forward to where? Stern wondered. Only Kyganil had any sense of whether they were progressing or not.

A portal shivered into being, an open invitation. It was bleeding at the edges.

'An incursion of ruin has the stage beyond that door,' said the Harlequin.

Stern paused. She closed her eyes, murmuring in prayer, and sought the guidance of the God-Emperor. It came. As surely as if she were a Navigator, her psychic eye fixed upon the Astronomican, she felt the gift of certainty. Pass through. No voice spoke those words, but the command was there, unmistakeable in an impulse too strong to deny.

Stern opened her eyes. 'The Emperor guides our path, old friend,' she said. 'We are called to that world.'

Kyganil nodded. He did not share Stern's faith, but he recognised the hand of fate when it appeared.

They passed through the portal. Stern experienced the familiar moment of reality's utter destruction and sudden rebirth, a timeless hesitation of non-existence bisecting the blink of an eye, and then they were on Lacrimor.

They arrived in a city. Stern would learn its name was Stenagmos. They were in the palace sector, before the imposing columned bunker of the lord-governor's domain. Across from it was what had been the Administratum's Centre of Recording Conformity. The building had been torn asunder by a rift in the materium. It had struck the core of the structure like a sword slashing through a man's abdomen.

The outer walls had collapsed outward, crushing the facades of adjoining blocks and spreading rubble across the square between it and the palace. The air burned and twisted in its centre, and from warpflames came the triumphant howl of abominations. Monsters of plague, tolling bells and dragging their viscous bulk over the fallen stones, lurched towards the screaming populace, eager to spread their gospel. Crimson daemons of wrath rushed ahead, their twisted horns almost as long as the vicious blades they wielded.

The celebration of slaughter was well underway.

At the sight of Stern and Kyganil, a stream of abominations turned their way. Kyganil rushed forward, his twin swords, The Outcast's Blades, at the ready. He attacked as though the daemons were the ones who were outnumbered. His attacks were lithe, a theatrical dance of lethal mockery. He cut through limbs and heads, each slash turning into a flourish that taunted his victim and turned into the next blow. The horrors of the Ruinous Powers shrieked in anger, but even the sinuous monsters of Slaanesh could not, in these early moments of the fight, touch him.

While Kyganil drew the attention of the abominations, Stern gathered her strength, her tainted warp strength, the heretical power that was her curse and her weapon against the enemies of the God-Emperor. She rose into the air, warp lightning crackling with the colours of madness around her, coruscating along her limbs. Her white hair billowed wide, and from it came a blinding, searing aurora of silver, a lethal halo.

She was an unclean thing. She did not think she could ever be redeemed. But she could devote her existence to turning the power that marked her on everything that was unholy.

She flew towards the rift, gathering more and more strength, honing it with righteous anger. She held her blade, Sanctity, before her, focusing the warp energy through it. 'I am the wrath of the God-Emperor!' she shouted. 'Behold His judgement, abominations! I banish you from this world!' The daemons shouted and gabbled at her. There was defiance in their voices. Stern thought she heard fear, too.

As she shot past the shell of the fallen building and into the heart of the rift, she summoned a force that was both vortex and void. She struck the rift, and the convulsing energy screamed. A maw of unreality gaped wide in the ground below, and the power of the rift turned back on itself. Stern climbed higher, hurling her force at the earth below. A hurricane wind that was felt only by the beings of the immaterium roared into existence. It circled the hungry void, the rupture in the real turned inside out, and instead of unleashing abominations into the materium, it seized them and hurled them back into their foul realm.

The daemons turned from Kyganil as the maelstrom came for them. They howled in rage and clawed for her. A storm of abominable forms rushed around her, and she flew upwards, higher, faster, slashing with Sanctity to free herself from their grasp. A cataract of ichor enveloped her, and for several moments all was darkness and a stench that stabbed her mind with visions of death in its foulest manifestations.

Then she was clear, rising higher, her purpose pure and undiminished, and the daemons fell into the maw of the void.

The storm ended only when the last of the monstrosities had been consumed. Stern descended to the square to stand beside Kyganil. The ruins were only ruins now, and sun shone over Stenagmos with a light that felt stronger, and more true.

Kyganil looked back at the wreckage where the rift had been. 'The seal is not permanent,' he said.

'I know it,' said Stern. 'The veil is weak here. I can see no immediate reason why, but I fear another incursion. If not on this spot, somewhere else on this world.' Or, she thought, perhaps anywhere. Wherever she looked, at the edge of her vision, the air seemed taut, brittle, ready to be torn.

'We are to be welcomed, it seems,' said Kyganil.

The citizens were emerging from doorways and from behind rubble. A crowd was slowly gathering, and approaching Stern and Kyganil gradually and fearfully.

'Welcomed,' Stern repeated.

'I speak in the broadest terms possible, the most open to interpretation. It may well be, in truth, that I am engaging in satire.'

On other worlds, after other battles, Stern and the Harlequin had left as soon as the struggle was over. She could not leave Lacrimor yet. The war here was not over. She was certain of that. So there would be an encounter with the people of this planet. She was a condemned heretic and psyker. He was a hated xenos. She did not expect the greetings they received to be warm. 'Let us sheathe our weapons,' Stern said, 'and try to appear harmless.'

Kyganil did as she suggested. He removed his helmet too, and the smile he gave her was thin and sardonic.

After a few minutes, the lord-governor emerged from his palace, accompanied by a cardinal of the Ecclesiarchy. They strode forward with a commendable degree of purpose, given the anxiety on their faces. They stopped a few paces away.

The noble spoke first 'I am Lord-Governor Erahm Gastion,' he said. He was a short, wide man. He was old, his fingers bent with arthritis. His face was old bark, but his eyes were young, looking eager to be surprised, even though he was clearly still in a state of shock.

'Cardinal Slezak,' the ecclesiarch said. He was taller and much thinner than Gastion. He was younger too, though his gaze was older, and hostile.

'What we have seen, today…' Gastion began, then stopped. He did not have the means to talk about what had happened in his city. He appeared to struggle with several questions, all of them too dangerous or frightening to ask. Finally, he chose the simplest. 'Have you destroyed them? Are they gone?'

'For the moment,' Stern said.

Slezak had more composure. 'And what are you, who wears the armour of the Adepta Sororitas, but keeps company with xenos?' He spat the last word.

'They have saved us, cardinal,' Gastion murmured.

'Have they?' Slezak snapped. 'Or are they damning us in a new way with every moment they stand on a world faithful to the God-Emperor?'

'I am loyal to the Emperor,' Stern said. 'With all my being, I seek only to serve His will, and the battle on your world is not over.'

'Yet you stand with this filth that stains the land of the Emperor with his presence.'

The crowd muttered angrily. Kyganil's expression did not change, though Stern caught the glint of cynical amusement in his eyes. He was so used to this form of reception that Stern was impressed he refrained from satire. He did not speak the cardinal's words at the same time as the ecclesiarch, though he could have.

Before Stern could respond to the cardinal, the sky ripped open. A crack of darkness snaked across the blue of the firmament. At first Stern thought it was the opening of another local rift, this time suspended a few miles up in the atmosphere. But then she saw the crack go behind the sun.

There was a moment of profound silence in the streets of Stenagmos. Then the rift in the sky swallowed the sun, and the screams began.

NOW

Stern walked the spiral staircase down the spire towards the nave. Though she was drawing closer to the song of praise, the voice was growing weaker. A year. A year since the coming of the rift. A year since the sun had been taken away. A year of night and of ever-intensifying cold.

The incursions had begun again within hours of the end of light, Stern had sometimes wondered why the abominations troubled themselves with the slaughter. Lacrimor was doomed. Every soul on the planet was going to die. Extinction needed no help. But the daemons came, localised rifts opening up everywhere on the globe. Stern could not close them all. She could not stop the invasion.

Nor could she do anything about the starvation. That set in early, causing more deaths than even the daemons could manage in the first part of the year of darkness. Deprived of the sun, all plant life died, and then the livestock, and the stores of food did not last long. Gastion tried to impose rationing, but the spreading ruin of the daemons made any attempts at maintaining order futile.

There was no way off Lacrimor. The huge rift was so close, and with it the immense waves of warp energy leaking into the materium. The shock waves of its creation had destroyed every vessel in orbit around the planet. Ground-based craft were all short range, and they had nowhere to go. The Astronomican had vanished. As far as anyone on Lacrimor could tell, the Imperium had ceased to exist.

Stern could not save Lacrimor. But she did what she could to keep the people safe in their faith until death took them. Starvation spread, the cold deepened, and the oceans froze. In the past few months, the last of the power supplies in the last of the cities had failed.

The Cathedral of the Throne was the ultimate refuge. It was the stronghold where the remnants of Lacrimor's people had come to seek the protection of the Emperor, and of Stern. She and Kyganil had fought off the daemons. She had preserved the cathedral's sanctity. She had created a space where the fearful could face their end in prayer.

She had had no visions from the Emperor in all this time. She had taken this as a sign that this was where she must remain, to shepherd the faithful out of this life, and keep the light of faith shining on the stricken world until there was no one left except her and the Harlequin.

Stern reached the nave. Kyganil, walking silently, kept several paces behind her. He was no longer seen as a threat on Lacrimor, but he did not intrude more than he had to on the last rites of the humans.

The hymn of praise wavered, the voice cracking. It resumed, but weaker. The singer did not have much more breath.

There were bodies laid out on all the pews and along the aisles of the nave. They were shrouded, and had had the rituals of sanctification performed before they had died. And now that he was alone, the last survivor of Lacrimor knelt before the altar, awaiting his own end.

Cardinal Slezak's voice failed again as Stern approached. He was very weak, and his decline had accelerated since Lord Gastion had died two months before. But Slezak had held on to his spark of life through sheer will, Stern thought, will driven by his duty to his people and his Emperor.

Now his duty was done. He was ready to set down his burden.

He fell forward, hands against the altar, then managed to turn and slump against the great mass of black iron. The golden skull at its centre gazed impassively over his head. He looked at Stern as she crouched beside him. The hostility with which he had first stared at her was long gone.

'I haven't forgotten anyone, have I?' he whispered. One hand wavered, as if he could find the strength for another rite if it was demanded of him.

Stern took the hand in both of hers. She held it gently. It was light and thin and fragile as parchment. 'You have forgotten no one.'

'Lacrimor dies loyal, then.'

Stern nodded. 'The abominations of the Ruinous Powers have won nothing. They claim victory over emptiness. Lacrimor ends in sanctity. You have served the Emperor well. He awaits you by His side.'

Slezak gazed at her with desperate hope. 'Can you hear Him?'

'It is by His will that I am here.'

Slezak did not respond. His eyes were wide, but they saw nothing.

Stern placed his hand down on his stilled chest. She did not know if he had heard her answer.

She straightened, bowed once to the corpse, then looked at the altar. Kyganil joined her. 'It is time for us to leave this stage, then,' he said.

'Yes.'

'You wish to resume the search for the Black Library?'

'I am not sure,' said Stern. 'The scale of the rift that took Lacrimor's sun, the vanishing of the Astronomican... Events are transpiring in the Imperium that must be confronted. I will seek the Emperor's guidance to know what I must do next.'

'I will await your decision,' Kyganil said, and withdrew.

Her eyes on the altar's skull, Stern reached out with her soul. 'What would You have me do, Father of Mankind?' she intoned. 'I am Your servant. Direct me as You will.' She closed her eyes, opening herself up for the vision that would show her what was expected of her.

There was nothing. No answer. Silence. She did not feel the gaze of the Emperor upon her. She felt instead an awful absence.

'God-Emperor,' she pleaded, 'will You not bless me with Your command?'

Nothing.

Stern dropped to her knees. The Emperor had turned His face from her. There could be no other explanation. Somehow, at some point, she had sinned, or her tainted nature had cast her beyond the pale. Grief and repentance shook her, and she moaned in pain. She had lost what had sustained her through the years of her exile.

'God-Emperor!' she cried. 'I cannot ask for Your forgiveness, for I am not worthy of it. Let me redeem myself in Your eyes!'

Redemption. She did not know how she would achieve it, but that was her path now. If the Emperor had turned His back on her with the coming of the huge rift, then perhaps the key to her redemption would be found on the worlds caught in its baleful influence.

She would search them, then. She would seek out and destroy the unholy. And she would seek out and save the sacred. Somewhere, somehow, surely there would be the key to ending this silence.

She rose, her heart grasped by a mournful cold greater than the one that had frozen Lacrimor. If she had to shatter worlds to feel the warmth of the Emperor's gaze again, then worlds would die.

About the Author

David Annandale is the author of the Warhammer Horror novel The House of Night and Chain and the novella The Faith and the Flesh, which features in the portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned. His work for the Horus Heresy series includes the novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, and several stories involving the Grey Knights, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood and Neferata: The Dominion of Bones. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

Ephrael Stern - Sister of Battle - Daemonifuge! Tainted soul or living weapon against the dark forces of Chaos?

A Black Library Publication

First published in Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Miklós Ligeti.

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ISBN 13: 978-1-78999-085-0

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