by Various
The monstrous Astennu, held captive by Ahriman’s sorcery
Ahriman had learned much from the bodies of the flesh-changed that he had captured, marrying his own visionary talents to the bio-transformative empathy of Hathor Maat. Together they had examined the hybrid architecture of forty-five of their former brothers, each time learning something more of the mutations wracking the Legion’s warriors.
Ahriman circled the seething fire-creature that Astennu had become, letting his senses push through to the raging cauldron of energy within.
Astennu’s voice echoed in his head.
+Again, Ahzek? Why do you persist in this foolishness?+
Ahriman made no attempts to justify what he was doing – this warrior was already lost. Those who benefited from his labours would hear any justifications, and by then it would not matter how he had affected their salvation.
If Ahriman felt any hubris at such presumption, it did not show.
+You are doomed to fail, Ahzek. You know that, of course. Shall I tell you why?+
‘You are going to tell me anyway, so why bother asking?’
Astennu’s burning grin spread wider. +You will fail because you think the flesh change is to be feared. You think it’s a curse, but you can’t see it for the boon it is.+
Ahriman let his Corvidae sight penetrate the outer layers of the warrior’s burning flesh.
‘A boon? Is it a boon to have all that you once were stripped away? To stand on the precipice of enlightenment only to be dashed down to mutant ignorance? These are boons? No, you were once glorious, but now you are a monster.’
+A monster?+ Astennu chuckled. +The flesh change has shown me that there are few monsters that warrant the fear we have of them. You dread what I and others like me are becoming, but everyone carries around their own monsters. Especially you, Ahzek.+
Ahriman knew that Astennu’s every word was calculated to slip through the cracks in his psyche, and the best barbs were those that came loaded with the truth. He forced Astennu’s words from his mind and traced the myriad paths into the future that followed the degeneration of Astennu’s flesh.
While the fiery creature remonstrated and taunted him, he watched a thousand iterations of Astennu’s hyper-evolution. In some, the fire eventually consumed him; in others it waxed and waned, but in none of them did it reverse. Without intervention, Astennu’s body would only ever devolve further into its warped state.
Ahriman pulled his power back into himself, feeling the cold of the lunar caustic in his bones as he withdrew into his own mind. His armour felt heavy upon his frame, every plate of ivory-trimmed ceramite shimmering in reflected flame-light.
He should have killed Astennu a long time ago, but the things he was learning were enabling him to understand the progress of the flesh change.
And what could be understood could be mastered.
Such was the suddenness and violence of Astennu’s change that Ahriman had discovered in him with relative ease. The Thousand Sons Chief Librarian’s consciousness lay across this planet like a web, and a warrior’s degeneration plucked at its threads like nothing else.
+You can’t stop it, Ahzek. It will come to us all. In time, it will come to you. The ninefold gift is already in you, I see it already.+
Anger touched Ahriman, and he stepped closer to the edge of the circle as the gleaming light at his feet diminished. ‘The flesh change will not take me, Astennu. I will not let it.’
Astennu paused for a long moment.
+Whoever said it was up to you?+
Too late, Ahriman realised that the last of the wards around Astennu had burned down to black. The fire-creature hurled itself at him, the shimmering veins of its body flaring with retina-burning brightness.
Fiery claws gouged at his plastron.
Ahriman swatted Astennu aside with a hurried kine blow, but his former brother sprang to his feet like a cat, his body wreathed in a rippling corona of white flames.
The air blurred with heat haze and a wordless babble of un-syllables dripped from Astennu’s lips like curses.
Ahriman’s senses flickered into the immediate future, and he swayed aside as Astennu leapt across the chamber. Flames sprang up in his wake, each afterimage of his presence imprinting its shrieking echo onto the world.
Ahriman extended his arm and summoned his heqa staff to his hand. He swung it like a broadsword, the curved crook catching Astennu in his midriff and doubling him up. Ghostly flames rippled along the length of the staff, but Ahriman snuffed them out with a thought. Astennu lunged again, and a burst of flaming breath went ahead of him.
Before it struck Ahriman, a glittering sphere of freezing air surrounded Astennu – he screamed as his fires were extinguished and the light burning in his veins dimmed to the faintest glow.
Held immobile by an orb of purest chill, Astennu raged impotently in his barbarous daemonic tongue. Ahriman felt restless ambition in his biology that spoke of powerful biomancy.
A voice came from behind him. ‘A creature of fire and you don’t think to use the Pavoni arts against it? You’re forgetting how to use your powers, brother.’
Ahriman turned to see Hathor Maat with his hands extended before him, a frost-white radiance blazing at his fingertips. Sobek and Amon stood behind him, their auras alight with channelled power. Although his subtle body had been within the protective circle, he had not sensed their approach.
The venerable Amon approached the hissing, defiant form of Astennu, studying the warrior’s disfigured physiology with an expression of horror.
‘Astennu…’ he murmured, sadly. ‘Astennu, what has become of you?’
‘What will become of us all, if we fail,’ Ahriman replied.
Amon nodded, accepting his words, but unwilling to say so.
‘Not to sound petulant,’ Hathor Maat strained, ‘but there’s only so long I can hold this cryo-sphere. So hurry up and kill him.’
Ahriman drew his power back into himself, rising into the Enumerations to focus his thoughts. He nodded to Hathor Maat, who dropped his hands. Astennu flew at them, but he was halted mid-leap as Sobek trapped him in a kine web.
Ahriman’s will was a physical thing, an extension of his force and strength, multiplied many times over. It took hold of Astennu and broke him in two.
A hideous crack of splitting bone filled the chamber and the firelight in Astennu’s body faded like a snuffed lumen.
His aetheric aura dispersed like wind-blown smoke, and a sliver of Ahriman’s heart turned to stone at the loss of another of the Thousand Sons.
Hathor Maat saw his anguish. ‘Don’t waste your sorrow on degenerates like him.’
Ahriman rounded on the Pavoni, angrily.
‘The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.’
Amon turned the dead body’s head from side to side, as if to find something to explain its degeneration. Sobek knelt, and ran a finger through the powdered lines of lunar caustic.
‘You take too many risks delving into the flesh of the Changed Ones,’ he said.
‘I risk more by not delving,’ Ahriman replied. ‘We all do.’
‘And did you learn anything of use from him?’ asked Amon.
Ahriman hesitated. ‘I now see how the corruption spreads.’
‘But not how to reverse it?’
‘No, not yet.’
Amon shrugged. ‘We should take this to the Crimson King.’
‘You know we cannot,’ Ahriman snapped.
‘Why? Tell me. He stopped this once before. He can do it again.’
‘He did nothing but postpone our degeneration. In his arrogance, he thought he had mastered what the powers of the Great Ocean started.’
Amon laughed derisively. ‘And you think we can stop it? Now who’s being arrogant?’
‘You have been away from the Legion too long, Amon,’ Ahriman growled. ‘Your wanderings take you to the farthest corners of the world, but what have you learned? Nothing
.’
Amon stepped close to him.
‘Then I have learned as much as you, Ahzek.’
Sobek was quick to step between Amon and Ahriman. ‘The primarch could help.’
Ahriman shook his head, and flipped the Book of Magnus to a page of half-completed formulae and esoteric calculations.
‘We have been down this road before, brothers. When the Rubric is ready, we will bring it to our father. If he should learn of the Great Work while it is incomplete and untested, he will stop it.’
Hathor Maat touched the yellowed pages of the Book of Magnus as though it were a holy relic. ‘You presume he cares enough to stop it. When was the last time any of us saw Magnus, or felt his presence abroad in the world?’
Their silence spurred Maat to loquaciousness, never a difficult task, and his features subtly shifted to assume a more stately look.
‘Magnus broods alone in the Obsidian Tower. Who knows what thoughts fill his head? Certainly not the fate of his few remaining sons.’
‘You presume too much, Hathor Maat,’ said Amon. Once the equerry of the primarch, he was always first to rise to his master’s defence when words became heated.
‘Do I? Then what do you suggest we do? Meekly await what the tides of the warp decree for us? Damn that, and damn you.’ Hathor Maat strode to where Astennu’s twisted corpse lay, the nobility and awesome majesty it had once possessed now ruined and corrupted. ‘This will not be me. And if I have to go against the primarch’s wishes, then so be it.’
Amon’s cheeks flushed with colour and his aura shifted into the higher Enumerations of combat. But Sobek amplified his Corvidae powers to project futures of broken bones, burned flesh and their own ruination into each warrior’s mind. ‘Enough.’
Amon and Hathor Maat flinched at images of their own deaths. Both adepts earthed their power and the dissipating energies flared from the psycho-conductive spire of the tower in a burst of aetheric fire.
Ahriman stepped to the chamber’s centre.
‘We are embarked on this course and our purpose is set. To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.’
‘And to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect different results is the very definition of insanity,’ said Amon.
‘Then what do you suggest?’
‘You know what I suggest.’
Ahriman sighed. ‘Very well. I will speak with the Crimson King.’
The Obsidian Tower was well named, a crooked spike of black rock that towered above all else. Its impossible construction had been achieved in moments, a passing fancy of the Crimson King made real. Its substance was angular and glassy, like napped volcanic rock, and striated with darting lights. No windows or openings marred its surface, save those willed into being by the primarch.
At its peak hung a pellucid radiance; part illumination, part eater of light. It was impossible to look and not feel the gaze of the Crimson King, an all-seeing, all-knowing presence that left no shadows in which to hide secrets.
Ahriman kept his gaze averted.
On a world saturated with warp energy it was a matter of supreme ease to travel from one place to the next in the blink of an eye, yet Ahriman still chose to travel via Thunderhawk. Like everything on this world, the aircraft had not escaped the transformative energies of their new home. Its structure had become altogether more avian in plan, more raptor-like in profile. The power in its name had wrought a transformation all of its own.
Ahriman brought the craft around in a slow turn, circling the tower for a place to put it down. Vivid electrical storms raged like the afterimages of titanic battles in the heavens, and the jagged peaks on every horizon were limned with electrical fire that spat traceries of lightning into the sky.
Sentient zephyrs chased the Thunderhawk, scraps of febrile consciousness that flocked to men of power like acolytes to a high priest. Millions of them attended upon Magnus’s tower like the accretion rings of planets or bloodsharks with the scent of prey in the water.
Ahriman angled the Thunderhawk around as an opening shaped itself in the upper reaches of the spire and a shelf of glassy rock extruded from its substance. He feathered the engines and raised the craft’s hooked nose as he brought it down with a gentle pressure of thought. He allowed the engines a moment to cool before making his way to the assault ramp and descending to the tower.
As always, he felt the charge in the air, the sense of potentiality that existed in every moment. Here breath had power, and his was seized upon by the invisible zephyrs that flocked to him.
Ahriman ignored them and strode into the tower through an elliptical archway with edges that curved like a dancing flame. The space within was enormous, too vast to exist within the circumference of the tower, and lit in the soft glow of a librarium.
Spiralling stacks and shelves groaned under the weight of myriad forms of knowledge: parchments, scrolls, data-crystals, hide-bound tomes, psy-songs and haptic-memes, each bearing a fragment of priceless knowledge borne from the sacking of Prospero.
To an outsider, such a collection would appear extensive, a repository of knowledge unmatched by any beyond the great vaults of Terra. But to the Thousand Sons these were scraps, a fraction of the accumulated wisdom gathered from the corners of the galaxy over the last two centuries.
It made Ahriman weep to know that such irreplaceable wisdom had been lost for the sake of spite and jealousy.
‘Was it worth it, Russ?’ he muttered.
A voice came from above, resonating with the sorrow of the ages. It was a voice that knew neither surprise nor joy, and was all the sadder for having once basked in such wonder.
‘Don’t speak his name.’
‘Father.’
‘Why do you disturb me?’
Ahriman could see no sign of his gene-sire. The voice emanated from everywhere and nowhere, a disembodied spirit that could have been whispering in his ear or shouting from deep inside the librarium.
‘I wish to ask you something.’
‘You did not need to travel to the Obsidian Tower for that.’
‘No, but some things are best spoken face to face. Father to son.’
There was a pause, then a sudden swelling of presence; a fundamental change in the secret physics of the world. The librarium vanished, and Ahriman found himself at the very summit of Magnus’s tower, raised above it as a god above his domain. The world curved away, as though he were a giant stood upon a globe, and he saw the fiefdoms of the warrior-sorcerers who had escaped the final slaughter at the Pyramid of Photep.
From a Legion of thousands, these paltry few remained.
‘We would like to live as we once lived,’ Ahriman said. ‘But history will not permit it.’
There was a crack of lightning and a sudden surge of power, and then the primarch was simply there. He looked down at Ahriman.
‘But a small body of determined warriors fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.’
The Crimson King, he was called. The Red Cyclops. Magnus of the One Eye. All these epithets and more had been heaped upon him – some in praise, most in fear.
The Magnus that towered above Ahriman was clad as he last remembered him, going out to battle the Wolf King in a howling storm of black rain. A blood-red breastplate, sheathed in twin horns of bone and draped in a mantle of amber mail. A kilt of sun-baked leather, edged in gold and stamped with an ivory representation of the Legion’s serpentine symbol.
His crimson hair was wild, the mane of a visionary or madman. The primarch’s features were bronzed and ruddy, yet beneath it all was a fiery light, the sun at the core of his being simultaneously filling his fictive body with its radiance and reflecting it. That light shone strongest through his eye, a singular orb of gold, flecked with undreamed colours and hardened by the sorrow of one who rued the day he saw further than he ought.
This was Magnus as he wished to appear: a demigod wrought in the image of a lost past by the memories and emotion
s of his favoured son. Magnus was a being on the cusp of some great transformation, but where that would take him was a mystery that not even he could answer.
Ahriman fought the urge to drop to his knees. Since coming to the Planet of the Sorcerers, Magnus had demanded that none of his sons bend the knee to him, but some habits die hard.
Contrary to outward appearances, the top of Magnus’s tower was open to the elements, and the kaleidoscopic storms raging overhead were close enough to touch. Blistering energies of unimaginable power danced overhead, their potency an elixir in Ahriman’s blood.
‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ asked the primarch, speaking with the pleasure of a shared secret.
‘It’s incredible.’
Magnus walked a slow circuit of the tower, and capricious arcs of lightning slithered around him as though he were a lodestone. ‘Like attracts like. The power in me is that of the Great Ocean. Distilled through my reborn flesh into something purer, but still… chaotic.’
In the presence of Magnus, it was impossible not to feel like a helpless student at the feet of an omnipotent master. There was so much Ahriman wanted to ask, but he forced his tumultuous thoughts into the placid Enumerations to focus himself.
‘I have been working on something I think you should see.’
‘Yes, I know. You have been working tirelessly upon the flesh-changed of late.’
Ahriman fought to conceal his shock. ‘You… You know?’
Magnus turned and gave him a skewed look.
‘Did you really think I wouldn’t?’
Ahriman realised he had been naïve to believe the Crimson King would be ignorant of his Great Work, but was still surprised at how transparent he must have been.
‘This is why you intrude on my labours?’ Magnus asked.
‘Yes, my lord. I have read everything in the grimoire you entrusted to my care, and there is a spell that I believe will–’
‘Why have you really come here, Ahzek?’
Ahriman walked to the edge of the tower, his cloak flowing around him in the winds from the volcanic plains below. Jagged rocks reared up from the base of the tower like black fangs in the mouth of a predator.