Black Oculus

John French

‘Beyond the edge of the sky there is always another horizon,
Always a step further to take, always a new sun to see.’

– from Verses of the High Age of the Great Crusade (Canto XIX)
by Calus Quintus

I know you are there. I see you in the dark of your sleep. We have not met, and we will not meet yet. You cannot even hear me, but that does not matter. You don’t need to hear to listen to the truth. So I am going to explain this to you. I am going to explain it because I can’t show you. And you must understand, because if you don’t then I will be alone with this gift. And that I cannot bear.

It began with three words spoken by the primarch.

‘We go in.’

We.

Go.

In.

‘This is my order. Carry it out. Now.’

I have to obey. It is my function. It is my life. I am the ship and its course. I go where I am ordered. The metal of the navigation throne was warm against my skin as I took my place. Sweat was running from my pores, pink with blood.

I was not alone. My cousins took their thrones beside me. They were slick and clammy to look at, like fish growing skins of slime under the sun. It took three of us, you see, three of us to pilot the Iron Blood as it threaded the warp’s needle – one to watch, and the others to watch what the first could not watch. I was the first. I was the Navigator Prime, and in the warp that great ship belonged to me as much as it did the Lord of Iron. So, as much as it was he that spoke the command, it was I who gave the ship to the black star.

I sat in my throne, and the shutters pulled back from the viewing portal.

I saw the sun.

White sheet.

The sound. Glass edges ringing against each other.

Disc of night.

I was shrinking in my throne, and the black sun was swelling. I could feel sound buzzing up my throat. The edges of my mundane eyes stung. Acid tears were upon my cheeks.

We go in.

I open my true sight.

The un-light of the sun touches the black of my third eye.

And I see.

We were made to see. I am a navigator of the House of Thal, and our house is but one of many. We are not human, though we may seem human. We are an offshoot, a creation – a deliberate reaction to necessity, if you like. Navigators can look into the warp and read its currents, and so guide ships over distances that would take millennia to cross while keeping to the laws of time and space. For this we are set apart, our genes protected, and our houses given privilege. The third eye in my skull is a portal between the madness of the warp, and human thought. My mind can look upon the impossible and not break.

I have looked upon horrors, and worse, and remained alive. I have remained myself.

That was, until my service to the IV Legiones Astartes led me to the black star at the heart of a wound left by the birth of a god.

Yes, I say ‘god’.

What else should I call them? There is a limit to our consciousness, a limit to our understanding, a limit to our words. So I say ‘god’ knowing that it exists, that they exist, and still I know that the word cannot fully encompass what they are. They are the truth beyond the veil. They are the pattern in the warp that I could never see. They are what waits beyond the gateways.

And I saw them. I saw the heart of all.

The black star took us.

The Iron Blood slid into the throat of the darkness. Existence stretched, became a line drawn upon a black sheet. I heard the silence, and the silence screamed. Light became solid. The solid became sculptures of light and reflection. Numbers and dimensions, tumbling down from reality into the pit. A single instant, thinner than thought and longer than time, stretching on, and on, and on, until it became a sound that had always been there but that no one could hear.

Until it became laughter. An eternity of laughter.

And then it ended, and I was screaming in my throne of steel, and a world of sick sensation and cruel edges tumbled over and over and over. There were alarms sounding, and the walls were bleeding red. The crew were running. The ship was spinning – thoughts, stars – without direction. The medicae’s eyes shouted – shouted in fear – as they rushed me and held me down and I heard words – say ‘alchemical formulae’ – and the words were puffs of red vapour in my sight. And then I felt the first needle in my flesh.

Red light. Machine screaming. Needles…

…and then silence.

I dream now. I dream beneath the waves of sedatives in a pit at the bottom of a murdered world called Tallarn. The sons of Perturabo keep me here. They keep us all here, all those who went into the black star with their eyes open. They wake us to see for them, to guide them to the end of the circle they wish to complete.

They think they understand.

They cannot, and do not, and never will understand.

To understand you have to see.

I see the shadows beneath the world. I spent my whole life as a creature moving through an unreal realm with the eyes of a mortal. Now I am a creature moving through the mortal realm with the eyes of a god.

And I always see.

I see now. Even as I hang here, silent and asleep, I see. I see you, son of iron, hiding in the distant dark beyond layers of earth and stone. I see you and I tell you secrets that you will never hear. And this last secret is my gift to you, a gift from the heart of a black star burning at the point where the mundane and the eternal meet.

Seen from here – from the other side of the skin-thin membrane of reality – you are not strong or weak, noble or cruel.

You are not heroes.

You are blind.

And the universe sees you.

And it laughs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John French has written several Horus Heresy stories including the novellas Tallarn: Executioner and The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Templar and Warmaster. He is the author of the Ahriman series, which includes the novels Ahriman: Exile and Ahriman: Sorcerer, plus short stories including ‘The Dead Oracle’ and ‘Hand of Dust’. Additionally for the Warhammer 40,000 universe he has written the Space Marine Battles novella ‘Fateweaver’, plus a number of short stories. He lives and works in Nottingham, UK.

After the virus bombing that reduced their staging ground to a toxic wasteland, the tanks of the Jurnian 701st emerge from their shelters and the infamous Battle of Tallarn begins.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN 978-1-78251-818-1

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