Vigil

James Swallow

I am dead.

The vigil must go on. It must not end, for a single instance of laxity or distraction could prove fatal to my battle-brothers. So here I stand, a dead man clad in silver-grey ceramite and fortified with fathomless will, watching and waiting atop this poisoned hill.

My jump pack weighs upon my back; I do not consider it. My bolter, crimson-lined and marked with honour-signs, is forever in my hand; I do not think of it. My Chapter’s grave sigil, a bleak skull against the wings of an angry raptor, is the heaviest thing I carry this day; I do not begrudge it.

I am Brother-Sergeant Suhr Tarikus, born of the desolate crags of Gathis, a warrior of the Doom Eagles, sworn son of great Aquila and remade in his image… And as I have said, I am dead.

I was dead the moment my boots touched the blighted dirt of this ashen wasteland of a world, the instant I stepped off the deck of the Thunderhawk and took my first mask-filtered breath of alien air. My squad, my brothers too, all standing with me. All dead.

I was dead when we battled to rescue the Order of Our Martyred Lady at the fall of Zhodon Orbital. I was dead in the Battle for Soule and the boarding action that took the star cruiser Burned Figure from the Thousand Sons. Dead on Merron, Aerius and Serek. Almost so in the void and again when I was imprisoned for a time on the fourth world of the Dynikas System. Aye, I am indeed dead, but by the grace of fate and the Emperor’s will, I have yet to be killed.

And this is what I think upon as I wait out the vigil. It has been thirty-three days now, Terran standard calendar. On this world, time runs a little faster, sunrise and nightfall speeding past me as I allow myself the respite of half-sleep, my brain partitioning itself to rest one lobe while the other remains alert.

I will stand sentinel for as long as it takes. An eon, if I endure so. Out there, across the fog-soaked plains and in among the gnarled stonetrees, the enemy is lurking. They cannot hold their fire forever. It is not in their nature. Eventually they will come, they will show their faces and I will be here. I will see them. I will kill them, and this world will become thick with the ghost of death, thick enough that those with eyes to see will read it in the clouds and the tracks of glassy sand.

I have undertaken many pilgrimages to war-worlds and places of great tragedy. It is the way of the Doom Eagles, and others never understand. Our cousin Chapters, even those of our parent Legion, the Ultramarines, do not see as clearly as we do. They think us morbid souls to a man, obsessed with death. I have been asked why the Doom Eagles grub in the dirt of failed wars and brutal betrayals, why it is we each seek out a relic of those atrocities and covet it as if it is precious. I say that it is precious, as life is precious, as death is eternal and inescapable. For only in the knowledge of how wars are lost and how treachery rises can we ever know how to defeat such things when they come again, as perpetual as sunrise and nightfall.

I know this, because the gift my Chapter gave to me when I joined the Adeptus Astartes was clarity. I understand. I am dead. I have always been so, from the moment I first slipped from my long-passed mother’s womb. All life is born dying, trapped in the teeth of entropy. This is not fatalism or ennui that colours my thoughts. It is certainty. It is truth.

I am dead, and so are my enemies. The question only remains as to which of us will succumb first. I am a spectre sheathed in meat and bone and metal, already fading, the moment of true oblivion always within reach.

This is what makes me free of doubt. It is what means that I know no fear. A dead man has nothing to lose, so he strides into battle to claim not just victory over his foes, but the one thing for which he forever strives. I am dead and I go to war to take back my life.

I have yet to find it, and perhaps I never will. Perhaps this is the dawn that will be my last, thirty-three days of vigil and silence ending in fire and blood. If I am to be killed, then let it come. I will not pass without sounding the echo of my ending for all to hear. And when the moment is upon me, the relic I will leave shall be the bright and shining brass of spent shells from my bolter, or the jagged splinters of my blade in the heart of the foe, catching light of alien suns. Gathis will remember my name, even if it is called a hundred light-years from the shores of black sand, where I took my first steps toward this day.

I see movement.

And at last they come, the enemy. I see them emerging from the treeline in fell rows, the dull glitter of their weapons in the mist. They are many, and they are fuelled by the desire for our deaths. But they are fools, and the trap laid for them by the Doom Eagles is now sprung; the hills they thought to be barren and devoid of threat are not.

My vigil ends thus; muscles that moments before were frozen solid by chem-shunts and blood control now flash back into life and I burst into motion. The camo-cloak that shrouded me from their gaze snaps away and catches in the wind, freeing me to fight. My bolter rises, and I have so many targets to choose from.

The air fills my lungs and I speak for what seems like the first time in an age. Only two words, the battle cry of my Chapter. Two words that promise all the fury and fire that only the Emperor’s angels of death can provide.

The shout echoes down the hillside. ‘Woe betide!’

And with it, my brothers rise to join me. Hundreds of foxholes and hide-pits explode into sight, Doom Eagle upon Doom Eagle breaking out of their concealment, swords and bolters and missiles at the ready.

My jump pack burns and now I am in the foggy sky, my bolter crashing as shot after shot screams down into the enemy lines, ending their paths wherever they stand.

Gravity takes me at the apex of the powered leap, and I fall toward the war.

My enemy is dead, and so am I. But I will make them take that fatal embrace a thousand times over before it claims me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Swallow is a New York Times bestselling author whose stories include the Horus Heresy novels Nemesis, Fear to Tread and The Flight of the Eisenstein, along with Faith & Fire, the Blood Angels books Deus Encarmine, Deus Sanguinius, Red Fury and Black Tide. His short fiction has appeared in Legends of the Space Marines and Tales of Heresy, along with the audio dramas Heart of Rage, Oath of Moment and Legion of One.

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