Spirit War

by Rob Sanders

  ‘Order the Continuum to withdraw to the Crescent-Kharellion,’ Orphiel told Uladhar-Thwe before sprinting after the retreating prince.

  Across the still air and the heat rising off the sun-kissed plain, came a horrible sound. A booming, metallic laughter – alien but unmistakable. The jubilant derision rolled up into the surrounding highlands and back down onto the plain. Kael Ra felt it pass through the very being of the wraith construct at his command. The colossus stopped. The ghostglaive in his gauntlet crackled back to soul-fuelled life. ‘Kael Ra–’ Orphiel began, but it was too late.

  Turning – and with the ghostglaive in hand – the Prince Ecliptic broke into a powerful run. His willowy legs took him swiftly through the demolished tanks and out onto the torched plain. He looked like a god – eager for battle – and attempting to outrun his destiny. Within moments the Continuum were with him. The wraithguard – like the time-ravaged statues of some ancient city – broke into a stately sprint also, weapons held high. The legends of the Alaitoc were with them, striding out of the grav-tank graveyard and across the plain – after the Prince Ecliptic and towards the enemy. Only Uladhar-Thwe and the spiritseer remained. The Shadow That Walks turned to Orphiel.

  ‘No…’ the seer said to her in terrible realisation.

  The Continuum ran. The yngiract laughter had stopped. At the High Slaughtekh’s order, the Destroyers of the Crimson Doom were advancing on their repulsor platforms, their heavy gauss cannons aimed at the oncoming Continuum. The Pyhrrian Eternals were holding back. The gliding serpentine monstrosity with them, carrying a glowing warscythe and surveying the battlefield from the horrid, green optics in its silver skull was Nemesor Raznaak – Emissary of Oblivion, Nomarch of Deneveh and High Slaughtekh of the Crimson Doom.

  ‘Down!’ Uladhar-Thwe shouted at Nestra Orphiel, shielding her body with the wraithbone construct of his own. A ghostly beam struck the wraithseer at once – straight through the helm. The colossus crashed to the floor – its unliving body motionless and unresponsive to the spiritseer’s calls. Retreating into the burnt out shell of an Engine of Vaul, the spiritseer realised that there were machine assassins hiding among the grav-tanks.

  Out of the plain, Kael Ra witnessed the impossible. While the Destroyers of the Crimson Doom floated out to meet him, their High Slaughtekh had become a nexus of emerald light. Nemesor Raznaak was neither being recalled nor retreating from the field of battle. The Prince Ecliptic watched as the enemy he had charged out to destroy was destroyed before him by the Pyhrrian Eternals of Anrakyr the Traveller. The Eternals had turned their gauss blasters on the Slaughtekh and made him pay their master’s price for failure. Within seconds, Nemesor Raznaak was nothing more than vaporised ash on the breeze.

  As the green blaze of the execution faded, Kael Ra could see the great floating monoliths, megaliths and the gigantic command necrotaph advancing across the plain. Proceeding from gaping green portals in the monolithic superstructures was a yngiract arkmada – arks and barges bearing machine warriors and unimaginable firepower. The dawn darkened as scythefighters poured from the necrotaph and swarmed through the Carnacian skies. Anrakyr the Traveller had come.

  The Prince Ecliptic skidded to a stop in the ash of the plain and turned to run back for the cover of the grav-tank graveyard. The wraith constructs of the Continuum were not watching their autarch. The colossi, the wraithguard and the wraithblades were staring at the oncoming apocalypse. Scythefighters swooped in low, their crescent-mounted destructors tearing up the plain like sheet lightning. Their first victims were Raznaak’s Destroyers. The Crimson Doom was lost in an anbaric blaze.

  Kael Ra ran. He willed the battle-scarred colossus on – one foot after another. He dare not look back for the seconds it would cost him. The attack was devastating. It was doom from above. The plain became a lightning storm behind him. Through the wraithscape he felt Undwyn Pythax and Phasmae Eshunesra – The Vyper’s Kiss – slip out of existence. The heroes of the Alaitoc were lost to the craftworld. Kael Ra felt the souls of his warriors from Talhennor go out like candles in a breeze, leaving him alone in the darkness. Rai-dann of the Crone Company was next. By the time the autarch reached the grav-tanks, only Ishandor Soulstrider remained at his side.

  As the pair of colossi skidded down into the dirt, the lightning storm struck the side of the Engines of Vaul behind which they had taken cover. The shadow of the scythefighter swarm passed overhead.

  ‘Orphiel!’ Kael Ra called. The autarch knew she must be alive because his construct was still functioning.

  ‘Kael Ra!’ The spiritseer called back through the wraithscape. He found her hiding in a toppled tank nearby. ‘Assassins,’ she managed.

  The colossus went down on one wraithbone knee and presented his back to the spiritseer. Leaping up into the shattered vanes of the construct, Nestra Orphiel held on tight as Kael Ra reared to his full looming height and broke into a sprint. Pounding through the ash of the plain, Kael Ra and Ishandor Soulstrider ran for their unliving existence. Nothing mattered more than reaching the world spirit and the Crescent-Kharellion. The scythefighters shrieked overhead, scouring the grav-tank graveyard of any remaining life. After the final obliterating pass the swarm banked and came in low. Kael Ra could imagine the Traveller’s glee at breaking the Continuum and taking his monoliths and arkmada through the smouldering remains of the Alaitoc tanks. The world spirit would now be his for the taking and the giving. The Prince Ecliptic remembered Uladhar-Thwe’s insistence that Anrakyr intended to pass the wonder of the world spirit onto another.

  ‘The stones!’ Kael Ra roared as the two colossi reached the outskirts of the world spirit. Taking cover behind the standing stones, the three eldar took cover once more – but the lightning storm did not come. Suddenly they were plunged into deep shadow. Something colossal was rearing up above them. From a silent, kneeling crouch to the towering heights of its monstrous frame, the wraithknight cut a silhouette into the dark sky. Bringing up their arms and priming the wraith construct’s gargantuan weaponry, the Brothers Rhespasian – the world spirit’s remaining sentries – became aware of the enemy. Scythefighters screamed through the sky, their crescent forms cutting a low course across the menhirs and stone-tops of the world spirit’s ancient architecture. Seething streams of las-fire sliced through the heavens from the scatter lasers mounted on the wraithknight’s shoulders. The blinding staccato of beams lanced through the yngiract flight formations, thinning out the scythefighters and sending the craft spinning into peeling dives.

  ‘Move!’ Kael Ra commanded, pushing Ishandor from stone to standing stone, with the spiritseer holding onto his back. Yngiract scythefighters rained from the sky as the Brothers Rhespasian visited the full fury of the wraithknight’s shoulder-mounted weaponry on the swarm of craft. Balls of green brilliance reached for the firmament as Doom Scythes crashed into the unforgiving stone of obelisks and monoliths. ‘Go for the gate!’ the Prince Ecliptic said, driving Ishandor Soulstrider’s construct on before him. Kael Ra pushed them on through the maze of stones and circles, scythefighters erupting about them.

  As the stream of scythefighters adapted their protocols and broke formation, the Brothers Rhespasian unleashed the devastation of their arm-mounted weaponry on the yngiract storm. Jabbing its colossal gauntlets with each discharge, the wraithknight blasted oncoming scythefighters from their flight paths, one after another. Hurling thick riftstreams of dimension-curdling energy from its wraithcannon and small novas of furious plasma from its suncannon, the wraithknight punched the crescent-shaped craft out of the sky. Those scythefighters that managed to bank and spin through the monstrosity’s scatter storm of las-fire were smashed into streaks of green-glowing wreckage by the construct’s arm-mounted weaponry.

  With the chaos of the colossal battle unfolding above them, Kael Ra, Ishandor Soulstrider and the spiritseer sprinted on through the stones. The wraith colossus carrying the sentience of Ishandor Soulstrider was leading the way through a stone circle when it suddenly colla
psed like a toppled statue. As the Alaitoc hero fell to the ground, Kael Ra saw the silver form of a cyclopean sniper, standing at a stone they had passed moments before. It was as though the metal menace had simply stepped out of reality behind them. The autarch watched the assassin turn its deadly rifle on his towering form. Leaning into a throw, the Prince Ecliptic launched his ghostglaive at the yngiract. The soul-searing sword flew blade-over-hilt at the ancient before slamming straight through its caged combat chassis and pinning the thing to the standing stone behind it. Kael Ra watched as the green light died from its single eye, ensuring the thing was dead before he turned his back on it.

  The air was thick with charred wraithbone. Above the battle was intensifying. A swarm of scythefighters were shrieking about the colossal form of the wraithknight. As craft routinely plummeted from their course, the victims of the construct’s scatter laser barrage, others were blasted clean out of existence by the brothers’ arm-mounted cannons. Escaping Doom Scythes had banked about the colossus and were proceeding to sear into the construct’s back with streams of living lightning. With exploratory bolts of electricity feeling its way across the wraithknight’s armoured shell and the colossus staggered by scythefighters with doom-laden protocols flying straight into its towering form, the Brothers Rhespasian were losing cooperative control of their war-machine. As the autarch and Nestra Orphiel made their way through the wraithknight’s stumbling legs and up towards the Crescent-Kharellion, the pair felt a rumbling quake pass through the architecture about them.

  ‘Do you feel that?’ Nestra Orphiel said as the Prince Ecliptic strode on through the sea of standing stones, leading with his fists and ready to shred any assassins haunting the world spirit with his shuriken cannons. As he moved past one particular stone, laying his gauntlet on it for stability, Kael Ra felt the tremors. He could feel them through his feet also. The ground had started to shake. The Prince Ecliptic did not know what it was but it could not be anything good. In the distance, over the tops of the tallest stones, he could see the Crescent-Kharellion.

  The quake had been enough to topple the colossal frame of the wraithknight. Failing to recover their balance following a succession of scythefighter impacts and the target of a lightning firestorm, the Brothers Rhespasian could not keep their colossus from falling to its knees. Blasting several incoming craft to flaming wreckage with its suncannon, the wraithknight made an attempt to get back to its feet. As it rose from the sea of standing stones, however, it was struck by a damaged scythefighter in its flank.

  ‘Castien!’ the spiritseer called. ‘Ehrendril!’

  Another – all but a meteoric ball of green flame – slammed into the construct’s chest, followed swiftly by another that span wing over crescent wing in a thunderbolt tumble aimed squarely at the war-engine. The sky lit up in a colossal explosion that scorched the standing stones and rained fragments of wraithbone down on the decimated world spirit.

  Kael Ra did not wait to watch the flaming demise of the colossus. The quakes had only grown in intensity. Everything about the autarch was shaking. Stomping his way on through the maze of stones, Kael Ra suddenly saw the crystal monolith before him disappear into the ground. The Carnacian earth rumbled about them.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Nestra Orphiel cried out. Kael Ra had no idea. Perhaps it was an earthquake. Perhaps some dread weapon of the alien invader. Entire sections of stones were falling through the dirt. The ground was moving. The wraith colossus’s forward motion turned into a drunken stumble, grabbing for the menhirs about them. A huge sinkhole opened to their left forcing the Prince Ecliptic to veer right, but several unsteady steps on the pair found another gaping hole in the ground before them. Looking down into the empty blackness below, Kael Ra found that the darkness had the quality of the grave. The hole was deep but full of dread. It seemed to have had its fill, however, and started vomiting forth something at the sky. A chittering fountain of tiny, silver constructs erupted from the pit. Similar artificial ventings proceeded from the sinkholes opening about Orphiel and the prince. Within stumbling moments, the air was thick with the swarm.

  Kael Ra fell against a tall menhir stone, only to have the thing begin to topple in the tumultuous earth. Several dazed steps more took him towards the Crescent-Kharellion, but the earth fell away from his footing – almost causing the great construct to slip down into an opening fissure. The air trembled. The ground moaned. The perfection of the world spirit disintegrated about the pair. Kael Ra pushed himself away from one standing stone to another, attempting to launch the wraith construct’s unsteady form through the quake in stages and on towards the webway portal. The air was a miasma of swirling silver as the plague spilling from the depths achieved some kind of nightmarish organisation.

  ‘What in the dread Eye is this?’ Orphiel called through the chaos. Lurching this way and that – his sole objective the great wobbling crescent of the webway portal – spoke of the impossible.

  ‘I think that the world spirit is built on top of an yngiract tomb,’ Kael Ra said. ‘I think the Traveller wants to reclaim legions thought long lost.’

  ‘Tears of Isha…’ Orphiel said. She imagined the stasis crypts below them – full of machine monstrosities, awoken from aeons’ old slumber by the battles above, and rising indomitably from the grave.

  The pair suddenly tumbled. The ground had given way, threatening to swallow the colossus whole. The Prince Ecliptic fell down into the opening pit. Orphiel screamed. Like grapnels, Kael Ra clawed his gauntlets into the earth at the pit-edge. Dangling by the precarious grip, the autarch felt gravity latch onto the willowy bulk of his colossal form.

  ‘Climb!’ the Prince Ecliptic ordered, prompting Nestra Orphiel to haul herself up through the smashed vanes of his back and up to firmer ground. Kael Ra felt the darkness of the pit desire him – like the maw of some hungry predator. Swirling clouds of tiny constructs vented from the oblivion out about his hanging form. The Prince Ecliptic could see the webway portal, but knew that he was not going to make it.

  ‘Get to the gate!’ Kael Ra roared at the spiritseer through the wraithscape.

  ‘No,’ Orphiel yelled back.

  ‘Go!’

  Tremors threw Orphiel about as she struggled to remain upright. She backed into a standing stone, tearing her sling bag and causing spirit stones to jangle to the ground. Desperately, the spiritseer was down on her knees, trying to reclaim the escaping crystals as they rattled away from her on the trembling ground.

  Kael Ra felt the tiny constructs swarming about his wraithbone form. The scarab-like drones had anchored themselves in a silver carpet across the dangling form of the colossus. The alien chittering became the Prince Ecliptic’s world as the swarm began to harvest the wraith-construct’s gigantic frame. Through the glinting clouds, Kael Ra could hear Nestra Orphiel’s screams. She had become lost in a haze of ravenous silver. With cold fury, the Prince Ecliptic willed his colossus up the pit side but it was no use. The swarming plague had already started eating away the crafted workings of the unliving machine. His legs were gone. Kael Ra found himself returning to his first death on Talhennor – lying in the mud, helpless against the enemy as he was now. He prepared himself for the end.

  Suddenly there was light in the swarm-cloaked gloom. The Crescent-Kharellion had opened and the trans-dimensional brilliance of the webway intruded on the nightmare. With the colossus failing about his soul-sentience, Kael Ra thought he saw the outline of Eldorath Starbane framed in the blinding portal-light. The farseer’s warlocks were cutting their way through the chittering air with their witchblades, their smoking swords swinging from side to side like the paddle of a canoe.

  ‘No!’ Orphiel screamed as they grabbed the seer and pulled her towards the webway gate – her arms full of spirit stones. ‘I won’t leave him.’ Starbane’s warlocks gave her little choice, however, and within moments the seer was gone.

  Kael Ra – the Prince Ecliptic – once-autarch of Alaitoc – felt his wraithsight fail him. The glory
of his colossal frame was all but gone and his guide through the eternity of the soulscape had left him. Darkness took the Prince Ecliptic. He welcomed it. It was time.

  ‘I won’t leave you!’ Nestra Orphiel shouted, bringing Kael Ra back to the swarming, quaking nightmare of the tomb exodus. She was back with the Prince Ecliptic. Kael Ra felt like he had walked back into the light and warmth of a fire from the bitter cold of darkness.

  There was no time for ritual and the honouring of ancestors. Nestra Orphiel was already honouring the Prince Ecliptic by risking her life to reclaim his soul from the precipice of oblivion. She snatched his spirit stone from what was left of the wraithbone colossus. The pit-edge gave way and the emaciated half-construct, that had served the Prince Ecliptic and the Alaitoc so well, tumbled into the deep blackness of the awakening tomb. The warlocks pulled the spiritseer back to the Crescent-Kharellion. Like everything else, the swarm had descended on the wraithbone architecture of the gate. There was little time.

  As the warlocks bundled Nestra Orphiel through the portal – her arms full of spirit stones and the souls of Alaitoc’s heroes – she paused to look up at Eldorath Starbane. The farseer was not looking at her, however. He was taking one last, lingering look at the exodite world he had failed to save from their ancient and indomitable enemy. As the farseer’s silhouette stepped back through the portal and trans-dimensional brilliance about him died, the webway was sealed off from the unfolding destruction. Tiny constructs swarmed the wraithbone elegance of the Crescent-Kharellion. Within moments they completed what the ravages of time had begun and harvested the webway portal. With that the exodite world’s link with the craftworld that had fought so desperately to save it was broken forever.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rob Sanders is a freelance writer, who spends his nights creating dark visions for regular visitors to the 41st millennium to relive in the privacy of their own nightmares, including the novels Atlas Infernal and Legion of the Damned. By contrast, as Head of English at a local secondary school, he spends his days beating (not literally) the same creativity out of the next generation in order to cripple any chance of future competition. He lives in the small city of Lincoln, UK.