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Two Metaphysical Blades – Chris Wraight

About the Author

A Black Library Publication

Two Metaphysical Blades

Chris Wraight

It is a forge, buried deep under the Earth’s tortured skin and lit, blood-like, with an upwelling and ancient flame. Chasms criss-cross the naked rock floor; narrow shafts angle down onto an old and angry heart. Engines belch, straddling the abyss on stone-cut piers, beating their iron hearts and churning the runnels of molten metal amid bounce-fountains of sparks.

Mortal souls labour amid those machines, their faces hidden, their hands shrouded in steel bands. They bear the icon of the Sigillites on robes of scorched forest-green, and say nothing, for their service and their tasking require only mute diligence. The sounds of the deep are the roar of loosed flames, the dull strike of rotating hammers, the grind of conveyers piled high with ore.

This is before the Imperium has been conceived. The void beyond Terra’s ignorant shores seethes still with living nightmares, and mankind’s dregs cower in their scratched-out fortresses, dreading the night. Only here, lost to the sight of both human and inhuman, warded by perennial ritual, does the flicker-light of rebirth catch and linger.

This is His first citadel. It has no name that any now remember, but it is the first all the same, and perhaps even now, in His agonised present dreams, He recalls its founding, its productive life and, in due time, its razing.

In the centre of that place, surrounded by a pentangle within a circle within an octagon, is a lone anvil. It is black, hewn from imperishable stone. Nothing reflects from it – light is swallowed by it, drunk up, gobble-smothered. A ring of columns rises up at the perimeter, disappearing slowly into the smog-smoked heights. There are twenty of them, and they are marked with arcane symbols, hard to pick out in the shifting light of the embers. Smoke is everywhere, hissing and sliding through the darkness, making it hard to see who is there and who is not. At times it seems as if many figures gather around that anvil, at times none at all.

A robed figure makes his way across the unfinished floor. His gait is smooth, his bearing erect, though that too will not last forever. This is Malcador in earlier days, before the many scars and the many wounds come. His cowl is thrown back, and his exposed skin is taut. Unlike the shadows in the smoke, he is distinct, hard-edged. It feels like he has been here for a long time, subterranean and patient.

He looks up to where a suspensor field glitters. Rotating within that field are two long spears, each one crusted with power mechanisms and energy lines. Both are huge items, far too big to be wielded by any unenhanced human hand, and so they are a portent of things to come. They are a promise, those spears, twin slivers of fate to be thrown onto a turbulent sea.

Malcador looks at them for a long time, studying every line and balance point. They are spiteful instruments, glimmering with a thirst for killing. Even isolated from a guiding hand, they look eager to slay and capable of it.

‘Do you have names?’ Malcador asks, in a voice that is not yet scoured by the age and cynicism that will come.

‘Two matched blades,’ comes a reply from the smoke, refracted and reflected, its origin uncertain. ‘Two principles. Intoxication and restraint, flux and stasis. The Dionysian and the Apollonian.’

Malcador snorts. ‘Old gods,’ he says, ‘for a godless world.’

‘It will not stay godless forever.’

‘Perhaps.’

The Sigillite looks more closely, raising a slender grey hand up to where the hilts twist. ‘You’ll bear them yourself,’ he says.

‘For a while. But they won’t stay with me.’

‘Who, then?’

The smoke shakes as a chuckle wavers through it. It is odd, to hear mirth from those lips. One day, they too will be silent, held rigid in an eternal howl of agony, but for now they can still laugh.

‘Opposites,’ says the figure in the smoke, lifting a hammer over the anvil, returning to His work. ‘In some ways.’

Another place, though still on Terra, and still before the Imperium has yet to be fully born. Rad-stained wastes are the haunt of bloody tyrants, and the polluted skies crackle with ill-directed, barbarian energies. Even the Thunder Warriors are new, all but untested, their armour clinging imperfectly to vat-grown muscles.

These are desperate days. An organism is most vulnerable in its infancy, and for all the long gestation of planning, this thing is still capable of being snuffed out. So few warriors stand between the chem-addled hordes and the sanctified heart of hope, each one painstakingly created to be the eternal guardians of what must come.

Was he the very first? Or merely the greatest of those who survived from the early batches? He may not know the answer himself, and is not inclined to investigate, for Constantin Valdor is not a curious man. Indeed, he is not a man at all, at least by the normal measure – he has been stretched, scraped-out, threaded-through and disembowelled before being put back together into a greater form, one that looms darkly over those half-empty lands. He has gazed over so many of them by this point, bringing vengeance with him for ancient and half-remembered defaults. His austere mien remains impassive as walls are broken and vaults uncovered. He elicits no joy as the damned are given their reward and the innocent are released into service with this new dispensation. These are not things that mean very much to him.

His armour is new. In the earliest of days he wore what could be fashioned for him, but as martial strength has grown, so has capability. He wears the Gold now, shaped around his body like a lover’s embrace, as tight to his sinews as his own skin. It is believed by those who know of the balance of powers, those of the past and the future, that no more than a handful of souls shall ever be capable of matching Constantin Valdor when wearing that armour, for in him is the past and present combined, ground down towards a singularity of perfection, though he himself can never recognise it, for he notices only flaws.

Ahead of him, dry winds skate across baking salt pans. The skies are dirty, scored with drifting contrail-smuts. An army shambles towards him, carried to war on the back of leaking half-tracks and war-trucks. Dozens of banners flare and snap in the briny winds, giving away a score of fiefs and allegiances, none of which are destined to survive the day. They are already firing, ploughing up the ground with pintle-mounted stubbers and projectile cannons.

Valdor remains static. His way of war is first to study, to gauge, to assess, and only then to act. It makes him look passive, but that is just another chimera. He is more active than the hundreds who are charging at him, just not physically.

He is accompanied by twenty of his order. Like him, they are arrayed in the new auramite shells, and their high helms flash and dazzle in the salt-glare. Like him, they do not move. A thin infantry line, a meagre slip, facing down a galloping herd of mechanical fury. They wait, and they wait, and they wait.

When they move at last, it is impossible to judge just when the shift took place. By the time you are aware that they are no longer static, they are already far into their second or third strike, and in all likelihood you are already dead.

Valdor is the forefront, leading the rest in this geometrical dance of slaughter, that, if properly understood, also has its ritual dimension. All his kills were chosen in those silent seconds before impact, and now he merely executes the pattern. A half-track is driven straight at him, blooming with exhaust gas and blazing from a rank of chain guns, and it seems briefly as if it must run him down, but then he is carving his way straight through it with broad sweeps of a weapon that has a flying corona of gold-silver. The severed axles fly apart, and the armour plates spin and spiral. When he reaches the engine unit he provokes an explosion that devours the entire reeling structure, through which he strides unharmed, the flames clinging to him like regretful caresses.

The surviving enemy leap from their mounts to fight him, drawn like hornets to sugar and made fearless by their cocktails of battle narcotics. He barely notices them as the spear swats, swipes, bats and juts. He is searching for a single soul, the master of this motley insult to the Emperor’s vision, and the quest does not take him long to complete.

There is no precise telling what this person has done to her flesh to make herself this powerful. She is taller than she ought to be, broader and swaddled with stimm-bulked muscle. Her spine is a web of nutrient tubes, her lower jaws a griddle of bloody mandibles. Scatter-fields make her boxy outline blur when she moves, and a vox scream accompanies every gesture. An inky skull has been slapped onto her rusted breastplate, which may be her own emblem, or that of her clan, or may be allegiance to some more esoteric power, but that matters little, for it is all destined to be destroyed.

She scrabbles at Valdor like some metal-pinned arachnid, the vox scream ramping to ear-bursting volume. Each of her arms terminates in a whirling circular saw, jabbing and hacking in jerky spasms.

For an instant, Valdor hesitates. This slice of time is not perceptible to the one he will kill, nor to her minions, nor even, perhaps, to his own troops. He hesitates because his spear is illuminating him. Amid the motion and the counter-motion, its point is held still, and in that second you might think that everything in creation revolves around it.

Then he moves it, lashing the blade in close, shattering the skull-plate and slicing up all that stimm-bulked gristle. As edge meets flesh, his mind floods with revelations, truths, prophecies, interpretations. He knows her name as it was given to her – Rebaka Sova Kache – and sees her birth and her childhood, and the abuse she has suffered and the choices she has made, and how she had to embrace violence else become its victim, and how her soul has slowly withered amid atrocity until she is now the monster she once feared and there is no fate left to her but extinction.

Then she is dead, the skein of her soul cut short amid a flail of blood, and the visions snap into nothing. The spear only tells the truth, and only when the strike is made and completed. Its words are those of failures and compromises, and the bearer is reminded of mortality and its endless disappointments.

More killing follows, fluent and pitiless, until the vehicles are smouldering amid blackened salt and the remaining tech-warriors are pleading for a clemency that has no place on this kind of battlefield.

Valdor walks away from the smoke, letting his companions finish their work. As he does, he senses the voice of his master in his mind, as so often occurs once a task has been completed.

+You understand the weapon now,+ the voice transmits.

+It uncovers truths,+ Valdor sends back.

+It seeks imperfection.+

+You gave it to me. It would be more powerful yet still wielded by Your hand.+

Something like a soft laugh, though already colder than it used to be. +It does not magnify your power, Constantin. It checks it. Killing has been made easy for you, so it will do you good to be reminded of the soul-stories of your victims before you end them.+

Valdor pauses, digesting this. He has never been able to contest any injunction from his master, and is perfectly aware of why that is. +You told me there were two such blades.+

+I did.+

+Where is the other one?+

But there is no answer given. Valdor feels the withdrawal of that colossal mind, and then there is just the dust-veiled sun, the acrid flame and the last cries of the dying.

Another place, unimaginably far away in space and time, though also consumed by flame. The Wheel of Fire, they will call it later, making awed reference to the inferno of its unquiet void – whole worlds lost in crimson plumes of shifting ire, the stars shimmering behind system-straddling heat sinks.

Only the greenskins could have prospered here, drawing in their nigh infinite endurance and pig-headed refusal to appreciate sensible odds. They saw the leaping flames and laughed at them. They bred, spawning in pits a hundred kilometres across and bursting from their sacs ready to wield a weapon. For years uncounted they infested the Wheel, crawling from shimmer-world to shimmer-world in a black-edged tide of unreason.

And then it became the testing ground for a new Legion, the crucible into which the VI were hurled. So this is another kind of forge, a place in which impurities can be excised by conflict. As part of the Galactic Crusade that now carries war from the old poisoned valleys of Terra and into the pristine void, the Wolves that Stalk the Stars fall upon those teeming plateaus and valleys, and for the first time the xenos know ferocity greater than their own.

Five years of grind follow, in which a third of the Legion is lost. That is a high price, even in such times, when so much is uncertain and more than one Legion will come close to total annihilation from one source or another. Such fidelity requires compensation – the exchange of gifts from king to jarl, as ancient a Fenrisian tradition as any, and understood by all who witness it.

All, that is, save one. The captain-general of the Legio Custodes has no appreciation for gifts and rewards, since his entire essence is service, unrewarded and without tradeable value. He looks out on the victory ceremony with some humility. The Lord Russ has been gifted a citadel, one greater than any his peers will get, and that seems destined to store up trouble in the future. More than that, given the losses that he has been willing to suffer to fulfil the Emperor’s command, he has been given a weapon.

Valdor watches as the Wolf King takes up the spear, and witnesses his uncertainty. Russ nearly pulls a claw-like hand back from the haft, as if stung, before grasping it too tight, out of what is, presumably, bravado.

Much later, the two of them run into one another. The sounds of carousing and brawling ring through the camp, and Russ himself has a chin glassy with spilled refreshment. He is no longer carrying the blade.

‘Constantin!’ Russ roars, clapping his hand on Valdor’s shoulder. ‘I’m guessing you won’t be having a drink.’

Valdor smiles dryly. ‘All the more for you,’ he says. ‘Have you borne it, yet? Into combat?’

Russ’s face instantly contorts into a scowl. ‘Blood and tooth,’ he mutters. ‘You’d spoil a jarl’s wedding night.’

‘Be wary of it. I say this as a friend.’

Russ looks at him, a little blearily. ‘Combat’s over. I’ve got my own sword.’ He spits on the ground. ‘He only did it to make Ferrus envious. Have you spoken much to Ferrus yet? You two might find some common ground.’

Valdor watches the primarch carefully. There is the familiar bluster there, but also something more deep-seated. The antipathy is unfeigned – Russ hates this weapon. Russ also hates Valdor, or at least what he represents, which is a pity, because Valdor, to the extent that such things make any kind of sense to him, quite likes the Wolf King.

‘They were twins, our weapons,’ Valdor says, a few final words before Russ will swagger off into the firelit dark. ‘Both impart truths. I do not know what yours are. Mine are… hard to bear.’

Russ looks at him for a moment, his open mouth glistening, his icy blue eyes red-rimmed. ‘I don’t plan on using it,’ he says, eventually. ‘I don’t even plan on keeping it. You can stow your fate-weapons and your wyrd-wound swords – I’d rather use my bare fists than that thing.’

‘But listen to what it tells you,’ Valdor warns, for Russ is already beginning to sway off, back to where the drinks are flowing.

‘I’ve got my own jarls for that,’ Russ slurs.

‘For now,’ Valdor says, this time under his breath.

And then time speeds up, as if stirred into reckless impatience, and it all begins to rush towards the greatest inferno of them all. War becomes less a matter of isolated engagements than a trundling magma curtain that sweeps across the entire galaxy. At first this is the Imperium in its pomp, driving all before it with its armies of gene-swollen super-soldiers, an unstoppable force meeting a set of eminently moveable objects.

In those days, the Apollonian Spear is wielded openly, its name spoken of with growing reverence. Valdor becomes a totem, one of the coterie who surround the Emperor like a choir of seraphim. If this is a little too close to the religion that everyone is supposed to be stamping out, then that is a small price to pay for such continual and dazzling success – let the worlds fall, one by one, and afterwards the details of dogma can be worked out.

Russ, too, does his part, though this is much less celebrated and much more feared. His Legion become a surly pack of attack dogs, taking on the dirty and the difficult and getting little praise for it. They do not mind, much. They are as self-contained as any in the service of Crusade, and have no share in the obsessive regard for recognition that, say, a Fulgrim or a Lorgar might demand. But they do not forget.

During this time, the second blade is never unfurled. Its old name is forgotten, and only in the Palace does Malcador mutter gnomically about the Dionysian Spear and its fate. It is unclear whether Russ ever knew the name. If so, he never uses it, preferring to categorise it as one of the many things that are ‘of the Emperor’, as a counterpoint to those things that are ‘of the Rout’, in which the comparison is not intended necessarily to be favourable.

Nevertheless, some weapons are not destined to remain behind the arras forever, and on the swamp-hell of Davin’s moon another fulcrum blade is unfurled, and driven into the shoulder of the greatest of mortal warriors, setting in motion the catalogue of errors and infamy that will see the Imperium turn inward on itself like a serpent eating its own tail. If the Crusade has been a blood-edged tide of destruction thus far, nothing prepares for the brutality unleashed then. It is said that the Legiones Astartes never fought so hard but against their own kind, something that countless systems come to rue as the fetters are loosed and the hounds of dislocation are set free to gnaw on the shattered bones of their brothers.

As the light bleeds from the faltering corpse of the Crusade, both spears fall into disuse. In Russ’ case, this is no change from before. He goes to war with his death world’s own frost-forged blades, reaping a path of cold destruction and taking on steadily more catastrophic encounters in what must appear to his many enemies to be either hubris or madness. Not once during this does he reach for the weapon he calls, with considerable ambivalence, ‘the Emperor’s blade’. Not once does he listen to the voices whispering around its rune-carved edge, nor find his fingers creeping closer to its leather-bound casing.

Not, that is, until the very end of his participation in the grand drama, where he goes willingly into the final confrontation he knows he can never win, and only at this point heeds Valdor’s injunction to listen to his weapon. That road will leave him half-dead and bone-crushed on the killing fields of Yarant, where the hateful shaft will once more be taken from his unfeeling fingers.

As for Valdor himself, the Apollonian Spear is also never used during the great defeat in the xenos-haunted tunnels under Terra’s besieged heart. The captain-general does not prosecute that campaign, but remains within the physical Palace with the other lords of war. Perhaps that is for the best – its prophecies would be tokens of madness in those shifting and subtle dimensions. Only when the leaguer is completed and the Throneworld seized in the throttle-grip of the Traitor does he take up the truth-telling spear once more, and know it will soon be gagging on the blood it is forced to spill.

On the night before the commencement of this final act, as he stands on the battlements of the Palace and the sky is dark with corposant-hulled landers, he feels the spirit of the witch-veined weapon stir.

+What stories will you tell me, now?+ he sends it, in a rare flight of whimsy.

It does not reply. It is the Apollonian Spear. It only speaks when killing.

And now Terra is burned again. It is all gone, all cold, the flames extinguished. The skies are smothered, the earth is black. A continent-sized fortress stands in ruins, its living occupants in psychic shock, its guns silent. Ash falls across the globe in soft-whispered rain, the last time anything will fall from Terra’s clouds.

Who can tally the loss that was incurred here? It is a task never to be performed, no matter how many adepts of a numerically obsessive Imperium attempt to catalogue the destruction. A new age has been birthed, one that will last ten thousand years before its eventual expiry, a staggering, limping age that will see the last vigour of the Crusade damped down and stamped out, an age of forgetting and smothering.

War will never cease from that point, not truly, but on Terra itself, a shocked silence descends. For a strange and short interval, like a caught breath after trauma, the world holds itself static. The surviving Titans are like haze-wreathed statues on the grey horizon. Fighting men and women stand, their arms slack by their sides, their dull eyes staring at the falling ash.

It is into this world that the Wolf King returns at last, too late to influence the outcome yet too early to escape it. It is his surviving Grey Hunters who stalk through the echoing corridors and banish the last of the ghosts from the still-hot stone. Even the primarchs are humbled by what has taken place. They no longer strut, not like they did on Ullanor seven years before. They are diminished, the ones who survive.

Valdor finds him in a place that was designed as an observatory but will become, over a thousand painful years, of all things, a chapel.

‘Your brother is looking for you,’ he says. He means the Lion, who has come back, also too late, and who now rages through the corridors, lost in a storm of grief and madness.

Russ looks up. His mane is matted, his fangs look blunt. When he smiles, it is gruesome, a wrenching of flesh once ruddy and apt to genuine mirth. ‘Still carrying that damned thing,’ he observes.

Valdor does not know if he can ever let go of it. His fingers have been clamped around the grip for so long that they are hard to prise open. The illuminations still echo in his mind, thousands of them. He has killed thousands.

I am battle-brother Skarr-Hei of the World Eaters. My imperfection is my doubt.

I am Sharro of the Open Hand cult. My imperfection is my fear.

I am the daemon Bilebringer. My imperfection is my name alone.

‘Where is yours?’ Valdor asks. His voice cracks with fatigue. Even for him, this has been like a lingering death. He cannot forget what he saw on the Vengeful Spirit, nor what was lost on those Neverborn-infused decks.

Russ snorts. ‘I told you I never used it.’

‘I gave it to you myself. Here. Before you left.’

‘And it did what you told me it would.’ Russ looks straight at Valdor. ‘Only, my blade illuminates those it strikes, not the hand that carries it. Did that achieve anything? I don’t know. I never will, now.’

Valdor lowers himself, crouching on cramp-stiff muscles. ‘Nothing He did was without purpose. A seed may flower many centuries from its planting. I have seen it myself.’

Russ looked sour. ‘You never stop,’ he muttered. ‘Even now, even here, you’re still spouting these platitudes.’

‘Do not be so hasty to write off His–’

‘He’s dead, Constantin!’ Russ roared, finally rousing himself and shaking the dust from his pelt. ‘All the plans are dead too. We’ve pissed like dogs all over them and now the galaxy stinks from our spoor. Look around you. Try to see this world as those with a soul see it. Try, just for a moment, to be angry.’

Valdor does try. He indulges the Lord of Fenris, and tries. All he hears, though, are the voices of the slain. ‘You cannot get rid of it,’ he says, quietly, knowing the danger in such words. ‘Understand this. When you took it up, on Seraphina, it claimed you as much as you claimed it. It will keep coming back. It will follow you through time, for it was made for you and no other. Some things survive. This is one of them.’

Russ’ shoulders slump. He sighs, deeply, and flecks of bloody acid stain his robes. ‘You always did accept your fate,’ he says. ‘But I never could. I thought that was why He made me the way He did. Now I just think we were all tainted, and I don’t know anything anymore.’

For some reason that triggers something in Valdor. As if from the catacombs far below, he hears the echo of a voice that will never speak out loud again.

Flux and stasis.

‘You will not change,’ Valdor says. ‘Neither will I. That cannot be random.’

Russ is no longer listening. ‘The greatest sin on Fenris,’ he murmurs. ‘To fail your jarl.’

And then, Valdor does something so out of character that even he is surprised by it. But then, this is a time of extremity, the moment when one epoch passes to another, and all but the most mechanistic soul cannot fail to be stirred by that.

He places his hand on Russ’ shoulder, and exerts a faint pressure of reassurance.

‘It is not over yet, Wolf King,’ Valdor says, in as empathetic a manner as he has ever managed. ‘There are sagas yet.’

And then, after so much acceleration, the gallop of history sloughs into the mire. A grand unravelling takes place, a retrenchment, followed by the first acts of purposeful forgetting.

War radiates out from burned-out Terra, lurching and limping all the way back to the Eye itself. During that time the allegiances of the Heresy are only solidified – the loyal become more loyal, the traitorous more traitorous, until there are no places of overlap or sympathy and there can only be a hardened hatred between those who once fought alongside one another. The surviving primarchs head back to their own ruined worlds and rebuild, though in shallow parody of what had always been intended. They mend their roofs, and patch their walls, but still the cold wind blows through open rafters.

Legions become Chapters, and the Adeptus Astartes cedes its leadership of the Imperium to mortal High Lords. Henceforth the Space Marines will be a mere sliver of their old strength, a disparate band of relentless fanatics flung wide across the lukewarm void, clinging to their rituals and oaths even as those lose their sense.

Perhaps, of them all, the Wolves stay closest to what they were. They remain shunned by all others, feared by their enemies and distrusted by their allies. The ignorant think them devils, the learned think them hypocrites, and both are wrong, and right, for the universe has become a place where instinct rubs up against the dead hand of zealotry.

The Fang, the first of the Emperor’s two gifts to Russ, is completed, and rears up amid the endless blizzards in belligerent defiance. New campaigns are launched in the name of the Allfather, and if they are now conducted with greater grimness than before, there is no less commitment. In all this, the storm-grey prows of the Rout’s fleet forever ply the void with their primarch at their head. Russ never uses the spear, just as he promised, though it is often by his side, carried by some other trusted retainer or hung silently in the halls of honour. The skjalds begin to laugh at it, and call it the beaten cur, a rib-proud dog that slinks around the fireside looking for scraps from its uncaring master. Eventually it finds its way to a backwater shrine world named after a dead Wolf Lord, and is left there as if in penance for past sins.

For a while after that, it seems as if things will never change. There will be wars, and there will be losses, but the halls of the Fang will always roar with fire, its master at the high table with his retainers.

Except, on one night, Russ halts in his laughter, and the drinking horn clatters to the tabletop. He freezes, and there is something else in the chamber with them.

He stands.

‘No more!’ he says, and his eyes alone see it, glittering, a slender spectre turning in the Fang’s frigid air even though it is, in reality, light years away on another world.

Listen to what it tells you.

‘There shall come a time, far from now, when the Chapter itself is dying,’ says Leman Russ, finding these words easily, feeling as if they are being given to him. This is the last time he will speak to his sons, and they do not know it yet. Some will even come with him, but not Bjorn, for he was the one who took the spear on Yarant, and thus tangled himself in this ancient weave, and that is something to grieve for, for the Fell-Handed cannot yet be told the truth, and that will wound him deeply.

‘At the end,’ Russ concludes, by now already half dragged away, ‘I will be there. For the final battle. For the Wolftime.’

Valdor looks up. The candles gutter in his chamber, shaken by a cold breeze that has no place in Terra’s humid atmosphere. He looks out of his window and first sees mountains, blue-black against a Fenrisian night. Then they are city spires again, still half in ruins, testament to the Throneworld’s fertile powers of reconstruction.

‘So soon,’ he murmurs. There is much more he would have liked to have done here, for the galaxy is bleeding and everything is in ruins. Rebuilding must be done aright – the surviving tenets of the old Crusade cannot all be allowed to die, and even his Custodians are forgetting so much.

But he cannot tell the Wolf King to do one thing and allow himself to do another. Valdor has always been bound by the laws, even those he made for himself. He rises, reaching for his armour. By the time he leaves, there will be nothing left of him in the chamber – no sign, no message, no cryptic clue.

He slips out unnoticed, for the path has been prepared for a long time, and unlike Russ he takes no companions with him. That, too, is as it should be – he has never been a gregarious soul.

He looks back only once, just as his lander powers up on the platform. The heart of the old Palace is still there, horribly damaged but structurally intact, and within it, buried deep, is the one who made those things in the beginning. For a moment he cannot take his eyes off that sarcophagus, trying to guess whether He knew how this would transpire from the start, or whether, as seems likely, this is a desperate chance set against unthinkable calamity. Once, Valdor half dreaded the appearance of his master’s voice within his mind, knowing that it would be there only to give orders or make demands, but now that it is silent, he misses it. There are many species of solitude, but this, for one such as he, bound inextricably to the one who made him, is among the worst.

‘Only in death,’ he whispers before leaving.

And now, time is almost fully unravelled. Two worlds, both lodged at the exhausted end of history: one at the heart of mankind’s decaying star-empire, its weakness hidden by its rotting magnificence, the other out in the wilderness, feared from primordial myth and with the scars of recent sorcery staining its melting ice floes.

Within each world lies a chamber, and within each chamber lies a blade, forgotten and in shadow. They are both silent now, unlit, unregarded, for there is much to occupy the minds of those who cleave, however imperfectly, to a vision of humanity free of enslavement to horror. One has been used many times by lesser hands, the other has never been touched.

And so, as they have done for millennia, they wait. Metaphysical blades, each the mirror of the other, instruments of illumination for bearer and victim, resting in the darkness, waiting for an owner.

Opposites, as it was once said. In some ways.

About the Author

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Scars and The Path of Heaven, the Primarchs novels Leman Russ: The Great Wolf and Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris, the novellas Brotherhood of the Storm and Wolf King, and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written The Lords of Silence, Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne, Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion, 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 War of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Warhammer Chronicles novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works in Bradford-on-Avon, in south-west England.

A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham..

Two Metaphysical Blades © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Two Metaphysical Blades, 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: 978-1-78030-949-1

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.