He dealt with the striking Night Lord with a single swipe of his staff, wyrd lights flaring between its glaive-pommel and the robed creature's antlered helm. Watching it all, probing the Night Lord's astral self at the moment of his defeat, she felt his collapse as though struck herself.
Somewhere, in another world, the eldar gathered around Inquisitor Kaustus. Somewhere, impossibly distant, the tusked man stretched out his hands towards the warlock, the Corona Nox held firm in his grasp. Somewhere the antlered xeno reached out to receive it.
Mita regarded it all as if it were a dream, spiralling away from her at the moment of awakening, and it was only as blackness closed in upon her that she came to understand what had happened.
She had been inside the Night Lord's mind when the eldar lashed out. The Traitor Marine had been knocked down, his senses overwhelmed, his certainties pulverised. He'd been crippled by the strength of the warlock's attack, and as he crashed to the floor and lay still, as his mind shut down and entered a troubled, enforced slumber—
—Mita's mind was dragged down with it.
She found herself immersed within a world unlike any she had seen before. Purple skies raged like bruises, tormented clouds swirling and gathering together — defying the logic of what little breeze there seemed to be. Faces leered from their gaseous topography: half-seen grotes-queries that Mita neither recognised nor cared to see fully.
The ground itself seemed little more solid: a porous sheet of sand and rock that, against all sense, felt spongy to the touch. A charge filled the air, a greasy static that clicked in the ends of her ragged hair and oppressed her skull, like a coming storm.
Nothing seemed real, here. Distant mountain peaks wavered like uncertain mirages, wobbling in their foothill roots, vanishing and reappearing at the whim of...
Who?
For a fearful instant Mita wondered if she had somehow travelled to a world of daemon world. She had heard of such places: confused realms where physics held little sway, where every aspect of every molecule was inseparable from the stuff of Chaos itself. Such worlds were the dreaded rumour of the Inquisition, and as Mita stumbled across fractured landscapes, negotiating ethereal gorges and sudden rivers that oozed from nowhere, the fear that she had somehow been transported to one lay heavy in her mind.
But, no... No, this was no Chaotic realm. The more she observed its howling skies and its weird tides of light and dark, the more she studied the scenes that shimmered in the surfaces of puddles and the images borne on the crest of rocks, the more she sent feelers from her own mind tasting at the sand itself, the more she came to realise where she was. She recognised its flavour.
As if to double check, she paused and stared at her hand, concentrating, altering her perceptions, working hard to focus her psychic self.
'Sword,' she said.
A bright sabre appeared in her palm. She nodded, unsurprised, and walked on, casting the blade away. It vanished before it landed.
She found the Night Lord, as she had known she would, at the peak of a plateau, ringed by a cauldron of rocky outcrops, set upon a cross of stone. Chains bound his arms to the rock, snaking between his ankles and his wrists, pinioning him like a butterfly upon a page. His armour and helm were gone. His claws had been taken from him.
For the first time, unconcealed by shadow or night, unmoving and unresisting, she saw him clearly. His skin was so pale as to be almost translucent, revealing along arms and legs every blue vein, every inner augmentation, every limpet-like crater where some ancient injury had marked his flesh. Across his shoulders and chest the skin was concealed, hidden behind an exterior layer of black plating that, in places, dipped beneath his flesh, intermingling with muscle cords and bony outcrops.
She had never seen so many scars in her life.
Most remarkable was his face. She had expected a countenance of malevolence. Of unrestrained and unrepentant evil. She had expected snarls and burning embers for eyes, a daemonic visage that brandished its corruption openly, like a festering wound.
Instead she found herself meeting the gaze of a troubled child. Oh, his face was that of a man — sallow and gaunt, perhaps, twisted by too many years of frowns and rages — but his eyes were an infant's. Impossibly old, and yet so full of bewilderment. They were the eyes of a youth that had never been allowed to grow old, that had been plucked from its humanity at an early age and never since allowed to return.
'Where is this?' the crucified man said, and if he retained any sense of trauma from the madness of the gallery room, or the rage that had gripped him at the moment the eldar warlock had attacked, he gave no sign of it. He seemed to Mita to be in shock, his voice monotone, his eyes unblinking.
He was a pathetic thing, she thought, spread-eagled before her.
'This is your mind,' she replied, unable to bring herself to hate him. 'A dream, if you like. You're trapped here.'
'And you?'
She shrugged. 'I don't know. Perhaps I'm trapped too.'
He considered this. For all the surrealism of the situation, for all the horror of finding oneself crucified and stripped of their armour, he seemed remarkably calm.
'The eldar did this?' he asked.
'In a way, yes... They made you do it to yourself.'
He nodded as if unsurprised. 'Yes. Yes, they've done it before. Though not to my mind.'
Mita frowned. 'Oh?'
A distant look stole the Night Lord's gaze. 'At the start,' he said. 'The assassin killed my master. She took the prize, s-so I followed. You see? I took it back from her, but the eldar came.'
'The prize? You mean the Corona Nox?'
'The Corona, yes... Yes, they tried to steal it, but I prevailed. I would not let them have it, witch, you understand? So they tricked me. They trapped me. My ship. All of us, deep in the warp.'
'What is the Corona Nox?' Mita asked, giving voice to the question that had tormented her so long.
For the first time since she entered this weird realm, his face creased in a frown, eyes dipping to meet hers. He looked as if her ignorance wounded him, deep within. 'You don't know?'
She shrugged. 'It... it looked like a crown!'
'Ha! Just a crown?' He shook his head, black eyes flashing. 'No, little witch, it's more than that. Fashioned by the Night Haunter himself, forged from the adamantium core of Nostramo, his birthworld. He wore it through all his life, and when he would have screamed with insanity and terror, it calmed him. When he would have listened to the whispers of the warp, it deafened him. When he burned with vengeance for the injuries his father wrought upon him, then it tasted his anger and stored it away. It's all that remains of my master, witch. Imbued with his divine essence, sealed with a perfect bloodstone. It is no mere crown. It is the captaincy of the Night Lords. He bequeathed it to me on the day he was murdered!'
Understanding came to Mita piece by piece, and with it came disbelief.
'But... but that's... Konrad Curze was killed millennia ago...'
His frown deepened. 'Ten millennia. One hundred centuries. I have been imprisoned a long time.'
And she knew as soon as she heard it that he spoke the truth. She sagged to her knees, astonished, overwhelmed by the ancientness of the creature before her.
He had been hating for aeons.
She knew she ought to destroy him, this atavistic relic of the Great Heresy. He was, after all, vulnerable before her. Naked, defenceless. Here, in this realm of psychic material, trapped within his own brain as if sealed inside-out, here she could crush him like a worm. In her mind's eye she imagined a weapon forming within her hand, and sure enough a cold weight sagged into existence, gathering solidity.
But his eyes...
So lonely. So wounded.
'Who are you?' he said, derailing her thoughts. 'Who do you serve?'
She swallowed and hid the gun behind her back, diverting her dangerous thoughts towards his question, relieved at the distraction. 'I am Mita Ashyn. Interrogator of the Divine Emperor's Holy Inquisition.'<
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'You serve this... this Kaustus? The one who has stolen my inheritance?'
'Yes. No... I did. Once. Not any more.'
'He rejected you, yes? Cast you aside.'
'It's not that simple, I—'
'It's always that simple.' He looked away. 'For the likes of us, at least.'
'What do you mean?'
'You know what I mean, little witch. Little mutant. Little abomination.'
She shook her head, forcing herself to calm, clearing her mind. 'You won't anger me, traitor,' she said.
The Night Lord tried to shrug, chains tightening across shoulders and arms, and returned his eyes to her face. 'I don't seek your anger,' he said, voice calm. 'Only your understanding. I ask you again: who do you serve?'
'I told you. I serve the Imperium.'
'But they hate you.'
'The Emperor does not! Ave Imperator! The Emperor loves all who give him praise!'
'Ha. You believe that, do you?'
The words formed in her head as if automatic: of course she believed it! Of course the Emperor loved her! And yet even in the confines of her mind, unspoken aloud, such dogma sounded empty, thoughtless, the recitals of a simpleton who knew no better.
Frustrated, angered by her inner turmoil, she raised the gun and aimed at the Night Lord's heart.
'I don't have to listen to you, traitor,' she said.
The quaver in her voice was impossible to conceal.
And oh, oh warpspit and piss, she did need to listen to it. She did need to hear what the beast had to say.
Why? Why did she feel so obliged?
A self-appointed test of her faith, perhaps?
Or perhaps just the comfort of knowing she was not alone in feeling such doubts...
The crucified beast gave no sign of fear at the gun's wavering attention.
'So,' he nodded, brows arching, 'you have the love of one being, out of countless billions? And that is enough?'
'More than enough! You'd understand if you hadn't turned from His light.'
He smiled, genuine warmth appearing on frozen features. 'And can there be an Emperor, without an Empire?'
'No, but—'
'No. They are intertwined. One billion billion souls despise you. A single soul — so you say — loves you. You don't think this a bitter ratio?'
'Without the Emperor's love there is nothing. Vacuus Imperator diligo illic est nusquam.'
She was reduced to parroting lessons of her youth, and the Night Lord's slow smile told her that he knew it.
'I used to think the same,' he said, as if conceding a generous point. Then: 'Once.'
She racked the gun meaningfully, trying to find a reserve of conviction in her voice.
'Spare me your attempts at corruption. My faith is stronger than steel!'
He leaned down from his tall perch, eyes brimming with earnest curiosity. 'Why do you fight me,' he asked, 'when we are the same?'
'I'm nothing like you!'
A petulant rage gripped her then, the last vestiges of her tattered pride spreading wings of outrage at the very suggestion of her likeness to that... that devil... and before she could stop herself she'd squeezed the trigger of the apparated weapon.
The shot struck the crucified figure in his side, tearing a strange slash of flesh clear, to boil off into the sky, dissolving as it went, and in this curious inner-realm what flowed from the rent was not blood, but light.
He gave no sign of pain.
'Of course you are,' he hissed, and any trace of shock was gone now, any sense of childish bewilderment was lost. Now his eyes glimmered with guile. 'You are the unclean filth that serves in His name. You are the hated one. They fear you, and they loathe you, but still they use you...'
'No, no...'
'Yes. They use you up until you cease to be useful, you understand? And what then, little witch? You think they will thank you?'
'It's... you're wrong... it's not like that...'
'The only difference between us, girl, is that where you still wear your yoke of slavery, my master broke me free!'
Mita almost roared, sudden venom choking her mind, clearing the clouds of doubt that the Night Lord had sowed. 'Free?' she snarled. 'You got your freedom by turning to Chaos! You got your salvation from Heresy, warp take you! That's not freedom — that's insanity!'
Such calmness in his face. Such ancient sadness.
'You're wrong, child. We were never slaves to the Dark Powers. We fought beneath a banner of hate, not of corruption.'
'Hate? What did you have to hate? You fell from grace by choice, traitor, you were not pushed!'
For the first time real, honest emotion ignited behind his eyes. This was not a part of some elaborate game of words, she understood suddenly. This sentiment boiled from his guts and infected the air before him like a cloud of locusts, as heavy with conviction as it was with contempt.
'Hate for the accursed Emperor. Hate for your withered god.'
'I'll kill you! Speak one more word of this filth and I'll—'
'You ask what I hate? I hate a creature that speaks of pride and honour, that fosters the love of his sons, that smiles and scrapes at every obedient act, and then turns like a diseased dog and stabs his own child in the spine!'
'Shut up! Shut up, damn you!'
'I hate a being so sick, so certain of his own brilliance, so twisted by the call of glory, that he repays the greatest sacrifice of all with betrayal''
Mita seized at the flapping cords of the Night Lord's voice, struggling to pull herself free of the confusion gripping her.
'Sacrifice? Your master sacrificed nothing but his soul!'
The Night Lord's eyes bored into her.
'He sacrificed his humanity, child.'
And suddenly his voice was so melancholic, so deep and so calm, so bloated by sadness, that Mita found all her rage dissolved. The gun faltered in her grip and she lowered it, tears in her eyes.
'W-what?'
'He became a monster. He formed us, his Night Lords, in his own image: to spread terror and hate, to forge obedience through fear. He rescinded whatever purity he had, he cast off the humanity that was never intended for him... he risked insanity and damnation, and all to bring order to his father's Imperium.'
'He sacrificed his soul to the dark, and—'
'You aren't listening. You weren't there. I tell you, little witch: he sacrificed his soul at the Emperor's behest. He became the tame monster the Imperium needed. And how was he repaid? He was reined in. He was humiliated before his brothers. And then? The assassin's kiss.'
'He went too far! The histories do not lie! The excesses of the Night Lords are famed thr—'
'Excesses? We obeyed every order! We did what was asked of us! Listen to me, child! The "excesses" of the Night Haunter were sanctioned.'
'No...' her mind rebelled at the suggestion, lights flashing before her eyes. 'No, no, no... the Emperor would never countenance in—'
'He needed order, where only savagery could bring it. He sent in the Night Lords, and we gave him the order he yearned. And then he made us his scapegoats. He cried with false outrage, and the Imperium cried with him!'
'You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong...'
'My master craved nothing but pride from his father. And all that he ever received was scorn. Little wonder he threw-in his lot with the Heretic rabble. Little wonder he marched to war beside them, sensing that they might weaken his father's grip. He was wrong!'
'...no no no no no...'
'Look at me, child. Look at me.'
Mita's head snapped up at the command, the empty mumblings falling away from her mouth. It was all too much to take, too much to absorb. Too much for a single mind to contain.
'My master was killed by an assassin. You know this, yes?'
She dredged details from long-gone lessons, struggling to recall histories that had seemed so unreal, so mired in the soup of myth.
'Y-yes... yes, she was sent to kill the fiend w-when the He
resy was over... The other Legions fled in... in disarray. Not the Night Lords. The High Lords of Terra, they... they thought if Curze was slain the Legion would dissolve...'
'Half truths. Half truths and lies!'
'I... I don't understand...'
'Do you know what the Night Haunter's final words to me were? Do you know what he said, as he seated himself and awaited the assassin?'
'N-n—'
'He said "See how the mighty are fallen."'
'W-why?'
'Because he had finally realised what nobody else had ever seen. That his father, his glorious Emperor, his Divine Creator, was just as vicious, just as terrible, just as merciless, as the Night Lords themselves. See how the mighty are fallen. See how divinity lowers itself to dispose of the monster it created!'
One final pulse of rebellion — alone and drowning in a sea of doubt — struggled to be heard in Mita's heart. 'L-lowers itself? By sending an assassin? After all that Konrad Curze had done? After the horrors of the Heresy? What else could the Emperor have done?'
For an instant the doubt seemed to retract. For an instant she felt she'd somehow scored a point, landed a blow.
The Night Lord remained resolutely unphased.
'What else? Nothing, to be sure — if, as you say, the killer was sent to avenge the terrors of the Horus Heresy.' He leaned forwards again, as far as his chains would allow, and his black eyes were pools of oil, sucking her soul down into their lightless depths. 'But, child, the assassin that killed the Night Haunter was not the first to seek him out.'
'W-what?'
'She was the last of a long line. A line that he had evaded at every stroke. A line whose endless attempts had exhausted him beyond his desire to retaliate. He had endured enough, do you understand? He was the hunter! He was the first, and the mightiest! He ruled the shadows! He reigned in the Dark! And then his father rescinded his sanction, and at the end of the Great Crusade, before the Heresy had even begun, he was brought before his lord and his brothers, humiliated, and held to account. Did he betray the Emperor's honour, then? Did he excuse his actions by telling the truth? By revealing to his kin their father's duplicity? No. Loyalty gripped him still, and he endured his father's derision with boundless humility.'
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