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Cover

Celestine: Revelation – Andy Clark

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Celestine: The Living Saint’

A Black Library Publication

Celestine: Revelation

By: Andy Clark

Machoria burned. The heat of its flames beat against her back. Blood-stink was in her nostrils, the cries of the fearful and wounded in her ears. Ash skirled around her on furnace winds. Celestine flexed her knuckles about the grip of the Ardent Blade. She planted her feet more firmly upon the roadway that led from the city gates and willed away the pain of her wounds.

‘Emperor, give me strength,’ she murmured, drawing comfort from the familiar words. The God-Emperor was always with her. In every war cry, every swing of her blade and every step she took. They had a pact, she and He.

While it endured, so too did that bond.

Still, His presence was hard to feel in this place. Warp fires swallowed the sky all the way to where the Khori Mountains rose like jagged horns on the horizon. Closer to hand, what had once been hydroponic fields had been reduced to blackened bedrock. The crops had been annihilated by the enemy’s bombardment, the waters turned to a steam that mingled with the blood-haze in the air. Corpses rose in tangled mounds before the walls. Some were the bodies of agri-labourers unfortunate enough to be caught outside the gates before they shut. Those were many days old now, barely more than bone. Others, fresher, had been soldiers of the Astra Militarum, brave men and women of the Coskan Minotaurs and the Sarmathian 86th.

All martyrs to the Emperor’s glory, she thought. All alike in death.

Their living comrades occupied trench lines that stretched along the foot of the walls to Celestine’s right and left. Others manned the Machorian battlements, doing their best to keep the city’s guns firing, even as flames licked up from the buildings below. They traded fire with the enemy’s artillery, hurling ordnance towards the foothills of the Khori range. Relentless volleys screamed back at them.

Horns brayed from within the mists. The sound was brazen, a ferocious roar that swelled until Celestine swore her bones vibrated. It droned on and on until she feared it must drive the Imperial soldiery mad.

At last, the horns faded. As they did, the panicked voices of Coskans and Sarmathians became audible from the trenches.

‘Steady, sons and daughters of Sarmathia, steady!’

‘They come again!’

‘No, please, no. Emperor preserve us.’

Gunshots rang out as regimental commissars did their duty.

Celestine wished her Sisters still stood by her side. All had fallen, every one of the Mission whose presence had anchored the Machorian garrison’s faith. Even her Geminae Superia were lost, their deaths more painful to Celestine than any physical wound. The enemy had come again and again, had focused their hate upon the Battle Sisters and spent countless lives to see them fall. Now Celestine was alone amidst the masses, a figurehead to those who remained but as separate from them as a lonely mountaintop was from the ocean floor. In divinity lay isolation.

The beasts come to finish me, and if I fall then all is lost.

She could see them now, insubstantial figures charging through the mists. Their war cries echoed as though across an impossible gulf. Yet their eyes shone fire-bright, hundreds of coals burning through the veil as the foe drew closer.

Daemons.

Celestine saw many-legged fleshmetal monsters lumbering through the enemy ranks, things whose maws blazed like furnaces. Cavalry came on like an avalanche of brass while there, in the centre of the line, strode a towering abomination clad in spiked brass armour. It bore an axe taller than Celestine in each fist. Eight horns crowned the monster’s helm. Braziers blazed atop its shoulders, skulls blackening amidst their flames.

‘Arnokh,’ Celestine growled. Then, in a calculated gesture of contempt, she turned her back upon the advancing horrors. She swept her gaze instead across the soldiers cowering in their trenches and raised her voice to a shout.

‘Soldiers of the Imperium. Men and women of the Emperor’s realm. Our enemies come to test us yet again.’

Servo-skulls hovered low, recording her address with auto-receptors and transmitting it to the thousands of Imperial soldiers still clinging to this city by their fingernails. Celestine felt their desperate need as a weight upon her soul, trying to drag her to her knees.

‘They have assailed us time and again. They have thrown at us all their hate! All their rage! But have we buckled before them? No!’

She could sense the foe getting nearer with every heartbeat, their menace swelling at her back, the ground vibrating beneath her feet.

‘We will never give way to these abominations. Why? Because they are filth, dredged from the darkness to test our faith, and that faith is strong!’

Celestine brandished the Ardent Blade high so that it gleamed like a star in the firelight. Soldiers gripped their lasguns tighter at that sight, stood taller, or so she hoped.

‘The God-Emperor is with us this day! His will is wrought in me, and I shall lead you to victory! Now fight, sons and daughters of the Imperium! Fight with me, and win!’

Celestine spun to face the foe’s onslaught. As she did so, she tried to believe her own words. Yet even as the guns of the Imperial Guard sang their hymn of death, even as daemons were struck down to tatter away in bursts of embers, she could not help but doubt.

The abominations are legion, and our soldiers so weary, she thought. Emperor, I am so weary.

Then the enemy were upon her and there was no more time for thought.

Blood-skinned daemons hissed, hacking at her in a frenzy. Celestine met their wild onslaught with controlled wrath. A parry, warp-forged darkness ringing against adamantium then a sweep that took her assailant’s head. A sidestep, a swing and a second attacker lunged past her with a howl of rage. She cut downward. Slicing the daemon in two, the Ardent Blade passed through the beast’s spine and out through its chest as easily as though Celestine had cut smoke. A third daemon fell to her blade. A fourth. With a thought, she triggered her jump pack, its outstretched wings carrying her clear of the foe.

‘For the God-Emperor!’ she yelled, surging back into the daemons and banishing two more with a mighty swing of her blade. Gore flecked their lips as they battered at her guard. Celestine’s sword sank into the eye socket of another daemon and blew it apart in a cloud of embers.

Keep fighting, she told herself. The Emperor is with you.

Celestine readied herself for a fresh onslaught.

It didn’t come.

The abominations melted back into the mists like wraiths, giving her a glimpse of las-fire blistering the air, of shells raining down upon the daemonic hordes. Wild with terror, soldiers ran from the monsters that hacked their way into the Imperial lines.

A new presence loomed before her. Arnokh the Bloodlord, master of this infernal host. Once he had been a Space Marine of the Emperor’s own Legions. What stood before her now was a charnel horror whose perfidy had burned worlds.

How far they fall…

‘The Emperor’s angel,’ he hissed.

‘The Blood God’s puppet,’ she replied, dropping into a guard stance. Arnokh was thrice her height and many times her stature, an armoured mountain driven by hate. She drowned in the stinking gloom of his shadow.

‘You have fought well for a corpse-worshipper,’ said Arnokh with a mocking chuckle. ‘I will honour your efforts by taking your head myself.’

‘Mightier than you have tried and failed,’ she spat.

‘There are none mightier than Arnokh the Bloodlord,’ he roared, hefting his axes and storming forward.

‘There is the Emperor,’ she replied with a grim smile. ‘There is me.’

Arnokh’s first swing came down like a thunderbolt. Celestine triggered her jump pack and sprang aside, leaving the axe to crater the roadway. One foot touched the ground before she fired her jump pack’s thrusters again and jetted forward, blade levelled at her enemy’s throat. Arnokh swayed aside but his sheer bulk counted against him. The Ardent Blade stabbed deep into his collarbone, giving a hiss like quenched steel as it met his blood. Celestine slammed one foot into Arnokh’s chest, ripping her blade free and firing her jump pack a third time. She twisted in the air, metal wings whirling as she spun away from his return blow. An axe passed so close to Celestine’s face that she could hear the damned souls screaming within the blade.

She landed in a fighting crouch.

Molten gore spilled from the wound in Arnokh’s shoulder. Celestine smiled without mirth, inclining her head.

‘You fight well, for daemon spawn.’

Arnokh bellowed. Celestine’s smile vanished as she felt empyric energies whirling towards her foe. The braziers on Arnokh’s shoulders flared as though someone had flung promethium on their flames. The blood-mist poured into him and his flesh glowed crimson, black veins standing out across his body as it swelled with might. His eyes blazed behind his visor, and suddenly, the blood-mist was thick enough to choke.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ Arnokh howled. He attacked with redoubled speed, a rushing avalanche of blades. Celestine ducked his first blow, leapt aside from his second and tried to strike out at one of Arnokh’s wrists. If she could sever a hand, lessen the onslaught…

His next swing was aimed not at Celestine’s body, but instead at the right wing of her jump pack. Already committed to her own swing, she could not twist away. Arnokh’s axe carved through the wing and caused the jump pack’s machine-spirit to vomit sparks. Even as shorn metal pinions hit the ground he struck again. Dragged off balance, Celestine could not avoid his axe and was instead forced to parry. It was like trying to stop a speeding tank. The shock of the impact raced up Celestine’s arms, jarred her shoulders. The shockwave jarred her thoughts and as it did, something blossomed behind her eyes.

Pain. A surge of white-hot pain unlike anything Celestine has ever felt. Is she still alive? How can she be? Something has happened to her, hasn’t it? She doesn’t know; it feels as though she is falling faster and faster.

She recalls shells raining down.

Explosions.

Screams.

She recalls the eviscerator’s grip beneath her palms, the roar of its chain teeth as they split flesh and bone. A word comes to her then: Repentia. Celestine feels a surge of shame, a desperate need to atone, and yet also the incredible release of that same weight lifting from her. The pain is a key that unlocks the shackles of her soul.

Searing light blazes, washes through her. Something is changing, something fundamental. She cannot grasp it as it slithers quicksilver through her thoughts.

Celestine feels desperate frustration, the powerlessness of mortality, of work left undone. Atonement is not the same as fulfilment. She registers disbelief as the pain grows worse still, threatening to burn her away like scourging flame, threatening to erase all that she is or has ever been. Yet what is she? What could she be? The light wheels about her then focuses before her, a star, a light leading her onward.

The pain abates.

Reborn.

She is reborn, and this light… can it be? Is this the first time she has endured this? Somehow, she knows it will not be the last. Not until her purpose is done.

Celestine reeled back from Arnokh’s blow. She tried to reconcile the flurry of images dancing behind her eyes with the desperate battle before her.

What was that? A vision? A memory?

It had been so vivid, so tangible.

What do you seek to tell me, God-Emperor?

Had she received such visions before? Celestine thought perhaps she had, but it was hard to know. The mark of divinity was upon her, the Hieromartyr of countless Imperial crusades through Throne alone knew how many lives. Yet at her core she was still mortal. She was both blessed and cursed with a mortal’s mind. Such a vessel was not meant to traverse death’s threshold as many times as she had. Celestine had to fight for every part of herself that endured the crossing, every time.

Things get lost…

All this raced through Celestine’s mind in a heartbeat, yet still the distraction was almost enough to kill her. Arnokh’s axes licked out again. Dragged off balance by her foreshortened jump pack, she smashed them away with increasingly desperate parries.

Her broken wings hung crackling from her shoulders, dead weight. Celestine reached with a shaking hand and hit the uncoupling rune, shedding her jump pack and stepping clear of its mangled remains.

An angel without her wings is an angel still, she thought, but her defiance was tinged with doubt.

No time for this, she thought as Arnokh loomed over her, sought to smash her into the ground with his sheer mass. Freed from the broken jump pack, Celestine weaved aside from his trampling hooves at the last instant. She felt the daemon prince’s axes cut the air above her as he passed.

Her blade sliced a line of white fire across his hip.

Celestine wheeled to face Arnokh again, but he was on her more swiftly than she could have believed. If the wounds she had dealt the daemon prince affected him, he didn’t show it. Axe blows fell like artillery shells. Celestine weaved, cut, stabbed and hacked. Her breath caught upon hooks. The servos of her armour howled as they sought to lend her speed to match that of her foe.

Celestine’s foot slipped in blood. She recovered her balance with preternatural speed. Still too slow. Arnokh’s axe missed her neck but hit her collarbone instead. Bone snapped. Pain rocketed through her mind again and with it came a fresh vision.

Celestine walks alone down stone steps. None may accompany her. This is the Emperor’s will. She knows it as surely as she knows her own name. Statues glower from shadowed alcoves as she passes. A soft play of coloured light falls about her shoulders, starlight filtered through stained glass. She smells incense on the air, feels the rasp of her robe against her skin. Gooseflesh prickles at the subterranean chill of the crypt. The ground is hard, furred with dust beneath every bare footfall.

She is deep within the crypt now. Sanctus Lys carries on somewhere above her, but she is not part of that backwater world. Not here. Celestine is one instead with something sacred, something ancient that exists in a space all its own. The weight of centuries presses down, stilling the air, causing sound to fall dead upon the worn flagstones. She reaches out with a trembling hand and brushes away the dust of ages.

She reads the name chiselled into marble.

Saint Katherine.

Celestine is in the presence of true divinity, and it fills her with such a complex rush of excitement, trepidation and hope that no room remains for the fear. Self-doubt accuses her of presumption. A shrill inner voice bids her flee whatever punishment the Emperor reserves for unworthy pretenders such as she. The awe is stronger, though.

Her eyes meet the stone gaze of the figure carved into the sarcophagus’ lid. Something passes between them in that instant, a feather-touch upon her senses. It feels like permission. She reaches out towards the sarcophagus.

It is the following dawn when Celestine walks the stone steps again. Yet this time she ascends from darkness into light, and she does so clad in the holiest of armoured raiment. Ancient servo-motors purr as though newly installed. Moulded armour plates sit like a second skin against her own, as though the suit had been fashioned for her alone. The Emperor has led her to this gift, and while she wears it, she knows that the spirit of Saint Katherine walks alongside her. The light from the shrine’s stained-glass windows embraces her and she feels the warmth of daylight on her skin. Its radiance haloes her brow.

One second she is ascending the steps, the next her feet leave the ground as the light swells about her. Celestine’s heart thunders. She is borne aloft within a column of radiance and in that instant, she feels the Emperor’s hand upon her soul like never before. Dimly she registers figures within the shrine turning to stare at her, falling to their knees in supplication. They are beyond the light and so in this moment they do not bear upon her reality at all. Celestine rises level with the shrine’s stained armourglass and hears the voices of an invisible choir swelling in praise. Neither means any more to her than the small figures who gaze up from below. Celestine is one with the Emperor. She is one with Saint Katherine, and in sacred trinity they spread their arms wide and throw back their head as the light pours through her.

In that moment, Celestine knows with the absolute certainty of faith that she is the Emperor’s vessel.

She is His blade.

She will be worthy.

Celestine staggered back. Sparks drizzled from the Armour of Saint Katherine where it had known the bite of the daemon prince’s blade. She couldn’t see the wound Arnokh had dealt her for it was too close to her neck, but she could feel blood welling from it like water bubbling up from a blessed spring. Her strength went with it, pattering onto the desecrated ground. She could barely move her sword arm and had to banish a mental image of it hanging from her body by strings of gristle.

Another vision, she thought, desperate to regain focus. Or another memory. Something of His, or something my own? Emperor, help me to find clarity.

Arnokh fell upon her like a storm. Celestine deflected one blow with a scream of effort, sidestepped a second. Perhaps, if she could just–

The daemon prince’s clenched fist, still wrapped around the haft of one axe, hit Celestine in the chest with bone-shattering force. Armour crumpled. Her ribs broke like a bundle of dry twigs trodden underfoot. She hit the ground on her back and her eyes filled with the fires that danced where clouds should be.

Celestine stands in the shadow of the Cathedrum Miraculous on Aspiria and knows she has come too late. Part of her knows also that she has been here before, that this haunted place is one she swore never to set foot inside again. That part can only watch helpless as the Celestine who is here in this moment raises her blade to signal the Battle Sisters at her back.

They have fought for three days and three nights to reach this place. Aspiria’s ruddy sun is even now seeping over the horizon, spreading into the polluted sky like spilled blood staining dirty cloth. Shafts of radiance fall through the cathedrum’s shattered windows and between its cracked arches. They drape Celestine and her Sisters in a molten glow, but they bear little warmth.

Even before she climbs the steps to the cathedrum’s doorway she suspects she knows what she will find. The worst of it is that she and her warriors could have done no more. They could have fought no harder, done no better. Celestine harbours no illusions. They cut a red path of ruin through the heretics, fit to fill the planet’s folklore for centuries to come.

They have brought hope. Her latter self knows they have brought victory, also, for the Word Bearers cast so much strength into her path that Celestine has torn the heart from their invasion.

Still they are too late to bring salvation. At least for those within.

Celestine knows this and yet she climbs the steps anyway. She must see. She must know, remember, for how else will she atone for those who died with prayers for salvation spilling unanswered over blistering lips?

The stench hits her first. There is the reek of promethium, the clag in her throat that speaks to vast quantities of ashes. There is another smell, fainter but inescapable. Burned flesh.

Celestine stands upon the lintel and looks upon the remains of a pyre that must have reached all the way to the cathedrum’s ceiling. She sees gibbets jutting thick as the stumps of a felled forest. They, and the remains lashed to them, are all burned black.

Thousands of Imperial faithful have died here. Priests of the Ecclesiarchy. Sisters Famulous, Dialogous, Hospitaller.

Celestine feels sorrow. She feels guilt. Yet more than either, raging as the fire must have raged, she feels hatred for all those who serve the Dark Gods.

Here beneath the blood-hue of Aspiria’s dawn, Celestine hates the servants of Chaos with a fervour she never knew she possessed. She swears to the Emperor that she will purge every last heretic from His realm if it takes her a thousand lifetimes.

Celestine tried to force her broken body to move. Shells streaked the skies above her. She heard the voice within that told her to move, to crawl if she must, to get away from the monster that was killing her and back to the soldiers in their trenches. Celestine yearned for the tribal companionship that had been a balm to her species since they had huddled together in caves and levelled spears at the darkness without.

She could not go to them. She knew that, really. To see her as human would break their belief in her as the divine avatar of the Emperor’s will. Worse, it might even break their faith in the God-Emperor Himself.

Besides, they cannot help you, not against this foe. All they could do is die.

But still she longed to be safe.

Safe from pain.

Safe from duty.

She felt the agony awaiting her within the broken remains of her mortal shell. Instinctively she shied away. Then, out of nowhere, Celestine felt a hand take hers. Its touch was faint as gossamer.

‘Stay,’ said a small voice, little more than an exhalation of breath against her ear. ‘Don’t go back. They’ll hurt you. Stay. Please.’

‘They need me,’ said Celestine. Distantly she heard the screams of dying soldiers, the gibbering of daemons, the brazen laughter of Arnokh. His shadow loomed above her, one axe raised for the decapitating strike.

‘It will be over quickly,’ said the voice. The touch upon her hand became a tug. ‘Stay.’

Celestine knew that she had met this manifestation many times. She knew also that it was some part of herself. It was the part that wanted to stop fighting, to cast aside the bargain that she had struck with the Emperor, the part desperate to at last be free of the impossible weight of others’ need for her divinity even if it meant giving in.

Giving up.

Yet there was no salvation either in flight or capitulation. She would not fail the men and women of the Imperium who looked to her to be their beacon. She would not fail the Emperor. Not while there was breath left in her body.

‘My purpose,’ said Celestine, as much to herself as to the other presence that haunted the void. ‘My gifts. My hate. My duty. Only I can do this. You know that. They all need me.’

‘I need you.’

Celestine felt something within her break as it had a thousand times before. Into how many shards could someone’s heart shatter before it could never be pieced back together?

And it was their fault, she realised with growing fury. The traitors. The heretics. Their weakness, their cowardice that had set the galaxy aflame and forced her to forever fight the fires they lit. This war would rage until the stars burned out unless the Emperor’s servants found the strength to end it.

Only she could give them that strength.

The touch upon her hand was gone. Celestine surged up through the darkness like a blazing comet and back into her body. The light of the Emperor mingled with her own righteous wrath and seared away the agony of her mortal form. It poured out of her, a starburst that sent Arnokh reeling back with a howl of shock, one arm thrown across his eyes. The daemon prince’s skin blistered black at the touch of the light. Sulphurous smoke rose from his boiling flesh.

Celestine felt herself borne aloft upon the light as she had been on that day so long ago. She looked down in judgement upon her foe. The light pulsed from her and drove the blood-mists away. Daemons went with it, their cries of hatred fading to nothingness. Celestine felt the eyes of the beleaguered defenders upon her and this time she knew with certainty that their hearts soared at the sight of her.

The light pulsed from Celestine a third time, a golden shockwave that sent Arnokh staggering back and hurled more of his daemons into the abyss. In her peripheral vision Celestine caught the shimmer of angelic pinions spreading from her shoulders, framed against the burning skies. She felt strength surge through her limbs, felt herself renewed.

She felt faith, duty, hate.

Celestine’s feet touched the ground and then she was running, the Ardent Blade held low to one side in a double-handed grip. As she pounded across the earth beneath a fiery sky, she screamed a war cry that rang like thunder.

‘For the God-Emperor!’

Blistered, half-blinded, Arnokh swept his axes towards her but Celestine was ready. She leapt. Her blade sliced up and across the daemon prince’s chest, cutting deep before ripping out through his jaw. He staggered and Celestine landed, launching into an immediate flurry of blows. Holy light shone from her, so bright Arnokh could barely look. Gore sluiced from the wounds she dealt him. The braziers upon his shoulders guttered, pouring smoke. He swung for her neck but Celestine evaded the blow and cut another deep slice through the daemon’s midriff. Arnokh bellowed and chopped downwards, seeking to bisect Celestine. She dodged with ease. Her sword licked out and took his hand off at the wrist. More blood fountained.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ Arnokh swung his axe at her head. Blazing like a star, Celestine brought the Ardent Blade up. This time when the weapons met, they did so in an explosion of sparks. She felt her feet skid across the ground, but both Celestine and her blade held firm.

‘I don’t shed your blood for him,’ she snarled. Servo-motors screaming in her armour, Saint Celestine thrust with all her might and drove Arnokh’s axe aside. Two hands firm upon her weapon’s grip, she thrust the point of the Ardent Blade deep into the daemon prince’s chest.

Arnokh stiffened. His maw yawned in a silent howl, light spilling from it. Radiance burst from his helm and erupted through every chink in his armour. The braziers on his shoulders leapt with golden flames then exploded. His axe hit the ground and shattered.

Arnokh the Bloodlord vanished within the Emperor’s light.

When it faded, all that remained of him was ashes on the wind.

At the daemon prince’s demise, the fires above died. As they flickered out, they gave way to blue skies. As the sun’s light spilled down so Celestine’s own faded, yet even as it did, she heard voices raised in battle hymns. Cheers rang from the trenches. Banners waving, priests at the fore, the Coskan and Sarmathian soldiers ploughed into what remained of the daemon horde.

The city still burns, and many more good souls will be slain before this fight is over, thought Celestine as the weight settled upon her shoulders again. Another enemy waits for me beyond the veil, and my duty is far from done.

But as she watched the cheering Imperial soldiery drive their enemies back, Celestine knew that they would be victorious, and that she had done her part in that. For today, that was enough.

Ardent Blade flashing, Saint Celestine charged in to join the last battle for Machoria.

About the Author

Andy Clark has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Fist of the Imperium, Kingsblade, Knightsblade and Shroud of Night, as well as the novella Crusade and the short story ‘Whiteout’. He has also written the novels Gloomspite and Blacktalon: First Mark for Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and the Warhammer Quest Silver Tower novella Labyrinth of the Lost. Andy works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham, UK.

An extract from Celestine: The Living Saint.

Consciousness, sudden and violent.

Her eyes snapped open and hellish light poured in. She sucked a breath down her red-raw throat, then coughed hard, doubled up, curling foetal on her side. Her eyelids flickered, and darkness threatened to swallow her again. Her mind kicked against it, fought back, surfaced. Another painful series of coughs wracked her, then subsided. She took a slow, shuddering breath, blinking quickly as her eyes adjusted to the glare.

Her surroundings resolved; her senses cleared, sight, sound, smell and touch coming slowly. She registered that she was lying on something hard and lumpy, an irregular surface that shifted beneath her as she moved. To her bleary gaze, it looked like a mound of pale stones and jagged debris, but no matter how much she blinked and frowned, she couldn’t quite focus.

She could hear a low moan. The wind, she realised. It was warm, but not pleasantly so. Its touch was like the first bloom of fever-sweats that warned of illness to come. It bore a sharp tang. It took her long moments to place the stench. Sulphur, and something worse, some underlying stink of corruption that triggered primal revulsion within her. She pushed herself into a sitting position and redoubled her efforts to see straight.

What began as a fiery haze became a sky, though a more forbidding and ominous sight she could not have imagined. Blood-hued clouds roiled through a bruised void of purples and rotted greys. Vortices of black fumes whirled across the vista, ripping the bloody clouds to tatters and trailing crackling storms of lurid green lightning in their wake. Her gaze lowered, taking in the distant horizon with its jagged line of half-seen mountains. Fume-wreathed plains marched away from their feet.

She shifted again, fighting down feelings of dislocation. Her heart thumped as she realised that she had no idea where she was, or worse, even who she was. The questions almost escaped her lips aloud, before she realised there was no one there to answer. Something crunched beneath her palm, hard and splintering. She looked down with dawning horror.

Not stones.

Bone.

She snatched her hand back through the broken, brittle brow of an ancient skull. Bones ground beneath her as she moved, and this time she did let out an involuntary moan. She scrabbled backwards on hands and heels, as though to escape the carrion mound. Osseous matter cracked beneath her weight. Shards jabbed through the grey shift she wore, scraping her bare legs and arms. The macabre clatter of bone on bone grew, skulls and femurs and finger-bones grinding with her every movement.

She felt something cold and hard beneath her palms. She dragged herself backwards with a gasp of gratitude, until she sat on a slab of black-painted metal several feet across. It was part of something larger, she realised, buried in layers of bone, rusting and studded with rivets and old bullet-holes. Dimly, she perceived the faded remnants of an insignia still clinging to the metal, but she had no more attention to spare. The slopes of bone stretched away on all sides, spilling down and down, broken by jutting metal wreckage, tatters of coloured cloth and other, more organic looking remnants that she didn’t care to identify. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.

‘Not a mound…’ she said, her voice a dry croak. ‘This is a mountain.’

Questions chased one another through her mind. She shut them into cages forged from her iron will, there to languish until she could address them rationally. Panic spread like hoarfrost in her gut, surged up through her chest. It met the fire of her determination and melted back as quickly as it had come. She took a deep, slow breath and closed her eyes, centring herself.

‘Emperor, protect me and light my way,’ she said, the words coming unbidden to her lips. They felt right there, natural, reassuring. She could not say for sure who the Emperor was, but she drew strength from His name. Feeling calmer, she opened her eyes and took mental inventory.

She could see no signs of movement beyond the occasional stirring of wind-tugged cloth. Whatever macabre carrion peak she found herself atop, wherever this wasteland was, she was alone here. She realised she had clenched her fists in readiness to defend herself.

‘A fighter, then, perhaps,’ she murmured, finding comfort in the sound of her own voice. It was deep and strong, a voice made for firm statements, stern prayers and binding oaths. But prayers to whom? Oaths of what? Seeing no immediate danger, she resolved to begin by answering as many questions as she could about herself.

She would open her mental cages one at a time and interrogate the thoughts within.

She took personal inventory. Her grey shift was unadorned, its material coarse against her skin. The body it clad was a powerful one; she could feel graceful strength in her every movement, and see wiry, chorded muscle shift beneath the skin of her arms and legs.

Her hair was shoulder length, and she could see from holding it out before her eyes that it was raven-dark. Beyond that, without a reflective surface she could tell little more about her age or appearance. What she had gathered for now would have to be enough.

She let her fingertips explore her facial features, moving down over her chin to her throat. She gasped and pulled her hands away as she felt a ragged ring of scar tissue there, bespeaking a catastrophic wound. Feeling nauseated, but needing to know, she gingerly felt around the circumference of her neck. Sure enough, the scar ran all the way around, and for a moment she felt an echo of something within her mind.

Screaming.

Flames reflected in churning waters.

Something towering and monstrous.

A light.

The strange sense was gone as suddenly as it appeared, moonlight glimpsed through tattered cloud. She frowned in puzzlement as she realised that the scar was gone too. She felt at the flesh of her neck with increasing agitation as she tried to find the horrible mark.

‘How is that possible?’ she asked the empty mountaintop. ‘How is any of this possible?’

She had no possessions, that much was clear. No weapons or armour with which to protect herself, no food, drink, any other items of clothing or gear. Nothing to suggest who she was, or to help her survive.

‘And no idea how I came here,’ she said. ‘But I have myself. That is enough.’

She knew she could not simply sit atop a mountain of bones forever. There was no telling what kinds of ferocious storms the brooding sky might disgorge, and she felt no desire to be plucked from this peak by a screaming gale or caught amidst ferocious lightning blasts. Though she felt neither hunger nor thirst, she doubted that would remain the case forever. Starving to death and adding her bones to the mountain held even less appeal.

Yet the thing that drove her to her feet was the desire for answers. Who was she? What was she doing in such a ghastly place? How had she come to be here? Who was the Emperor? She needed to know, and she would find no insights here.

She stood atop the mountain, shift and hair blowing in the hot winds. She stared down the steep slopes. They vanished ever downward on all sides into a thick crimson mist.

‘Nothing to suggest a route,’ she said. ‘No hint as to where I must go.’ Strangely, the notion held no terror for her. Instinctive as breathing, she closed her eyes and offered up a wordless prayer to the Emperor for guidance. To her surprise, she felt a faint warmth upon her cheek, as though a candle flame had been brought close to it for the briefest of moments. The sensation was there and gone, yet it was enough, its touch somehow pure, distinct from the clammy caress of the winds.

‘Are you a god, then? My protector, perhaps?’ Her questions fell dead and unanswered. Whatever the truth, she knew it would not be as easy as simply demanding answers.

She opened her eyes and turned in the direction from which she had felt the warmth. Steeling herself, she stepped carefully out, barefoot, onto the jagged carpet of bones. She began to make her slow and slithering way down the mountainside.

Click here to buy Celestine: The Living Saint.

A Black Library Publication

First published 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 Kevin Chin.

Celestine: Revelation © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Celestine: Revelation, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80026-316-1

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.