What you are seeing is creation’s own shadow, where every mortal emotion and urge takes immortal form. You are sailing through seas made of psychic energy and liquefied sorrow. You are cast adrift in the heaven and hell of a million mythologies, Argel Tal.
This is where every moment of hatred, disgust, wrath, joy, grief, jealousy, indolence and decadence manifest as raw energy.
This is where the souls of the dead come to burn forever.
Orfeo’s Lament gave a horrendous shudder, and the sound of wrenching metal ran through the deck beneath them. Torgal and Xaphen went to their knees – the former with a gutter curse, the latter with an indignant grunt.
In the storm beyond, more images took shape. Hands pressed against the glass, leaving discoloured smears. Faces, warped by screams, aching in their familiarity. The shadow of something, something vast and dark and cold behind it all, sweeping past the ship like a whale passing in the deepest ocean.
For a moment, Argel Tal’s breath misted in the air. Frost beaded his skin. The shadow passed, and kept passing, disturbing the crashing energies with its immense, half-formed bulk.
A void leviathan. Fear would draw it closer, and this vessel would disintegrate in its jaws. But it passes, hunting other prey. In many of the futures I saw, it turned upon us, and your lives ended here. In three of those futures, Argel Tal, you were laughing as you died, dissolving in the energies outside the ship.
He was not laughing now.
‘This is hell.’ Argel Tal no longer struggled to see the faces shrieking in at him, nor the hands clawing at the glass. He could see nothing else. ‘This is the underworld of human imagination.’
Do not be blinded by dogma. This is the Primordial Truth. Creation’s shadow. The layer behind the stars.
The Word Bearer breathed a single word as he watched the sea of screaming souls beyond.
‘Chaos.’
The daemon’s maw twisted into a grin. Now you begin to understand.
Argel Tal sipped the water. It was brackish on his tongue, and distastefully warm. It was also the fifth such cup to sour in his hands like this, and he had the unsettling notion that it was his own body curdling the water.
‘We soon reached the first world,’ he said. ‘Melisanth. The world had no human name, but in ancient days, the eldar-breed xenos... they named it Melisanth.’
Lorgar’s flowing script recorded each word. ‘The eldar? What is their role in all this?’
‘Now? They have no role. They are the galaxy’s memory, fading night by night. But once, this region of space was their most precious dominion – the heart of their empire. Their decadence brought us forth, from our realm into this one. We watched their worlds burning in spectral fire, and we tore their souls apart in claws of spirit and flesh.’
‘Argel Tal.’
‘Every sensation was new to us. We were newborns in the material realm. Blood fed us. Pain fuelled us. You cannot know what it is like to grow stronger when a creature suffers nearby. To swell with power when parents watch their children burn. To grow in size and intellect with each sin you inflict upon mortal flesh. To know more of the universe’s secrets with each soul you swallow.’
‘My son... Please.’
‘But I was there, Lorgar. I saw these things. I did these things.’
‘You are Argel Tal. You were born on Colchis, in the village of Singh-Rukh, to a carpenter and a seamstress. Your name means “the last angel” in the dialect of the southern steppes tribes. You are the youngest warrior in the Legion ever to inherit the mantle of company captain. You once bore swords of red iron – the blades of your predecessor – which you lost in service to your primarch. You are Argel Tal, a Bearer of the Word. You are my son.’
The Word Bearer looked down at his skeletal hands. ‘Sire,’ he said softly. ‘Forgive me.’ Argel Tal managed to meet his primarch’s eyes, infinitely grateful that he saw no judgement in those grey depths.
‘There is nothing to forgive.’
‘You knew more of my life than I realised.’
Lorgar smiled. ‘All of my sons are precious to me.’
Argel Tal rubbed at his sore eyes. ‘Ingethel told us that our changes would begin at the ordained time, when the galaxy burns. But I am losing myself now. Is this the ordained moment already? Is the galaxy aflame? None of my memories are my own, father. There’s a copper taste on my tongue, like the echo of blood. Perhaps this is fear. Perhaps this taste is the fear so many poets and archivists have written about.’ The captain laughed, the sound hollow and humourless. ‘And now I speak my valediction.’
‘It need not be a valediction, Argel Tal. That cannot be decided until the tale is told.’
SEVENTEEN
A Dead Empire
Revelations
Genesis
Ingethel gestured at the planet with a crooked claw.
They called it Melisanth. It was one of the last to feel the Eye’s spreading influence.
‘Auspex confirms no life readings, even down to the bacterial level,’ Captain Sylamor’s voice rasped over the vox.
‘She really needed to scan to see that?’ Torgal asked.
Below them was the ghost of a world – a globe of black oceans and grey landscapes, inexpertly guarded by thin cloud hazes. Even in orbit above Melisanth, the ship was buffeted by the warp-winds outside, while the observation dome endured the liquid, a tidal press of human faces and figures bursting against the reinforced glass. Each one splashed over the shielding with oil-on-water incandescence, flowing back into the maelstrom as soon as it destroyed itself.
After a while, Argel Tal started to see the same faces reappear. They seemed to be reforming out there in the winds and hurling themselves at the ship over and over again.
‘Are they souls?’ he asked aloud.
It is primordial matter. In the realm of flesh and blood, it manifests as psychic energy. Your thoughts give it shape. You see human souls, but it is so much more. Eldar souls. The flesh of the neverborn, that humanity once named daemonkind. Raw psychic currents. Possibility incarnate, when the mind shapes reality.
‘I want to walk the surface of that world.’
You will die.
Argel Tal rounded on the creature, anger marring his unscarred features. ‘Then why drag us here? What is the purpose of this journey if we cannot leave the ship? To stare at dead worlds from behind our Geller Field? To listen to the shrieking of lost souls?’
Ingethel slithered closer to the gathered Word Bearers. The black-wood staff, once carried by the maiden who sacrificed herself to bring the daemon into being, tapped on the decking like an old man’s walking cane.
Such things I have to show you.
It gestured two gnarled claws at the world below. There is no lesson in Melisanth as it is. You must see Melisanth as it was.
Close your eyes. Hear the storm outside. Listen to the tide breaking against your vessel’s skin.
Melisanth is but one world floating in the Sea of Souls. One amongst millions. Let me show it to you.
And then, no more than a heartbeat later – Open your eyes, Argel Tal.
He’d always treasured sunrise.
This one, an ocherous orb painting fierce light over a city of spires and minarets, was one to remember. Even with pain tolerance and resistance to light saturation written into his genetic code, the rising sun was bright enough to make his eyes ache. And that was beautiful too, for it had never happened before.
Ingethel was nowhere to be seen. They stood on a cliff’s edge, above an alien city turned golden by the dawn. Argel Tal turned to see his brothers: Xaphen, watching the xenos colony; Malnor and Torgal with him; Dagotal, staring up into the blue sky.
This was Melisanth, came the creature’s burbling voice in his mind. See the city made of bone and gemstones. See the spires too delicate for mortal physics to support them, standing only because of eldar witchcraft.
Now see the Fall.
In the sky above, the clouds raced in a cyclical dance – day and night
flashing past in a blur of flickering grey. Tendrils of violet clawed across the heavens, thickening, linking, coiling, staining the air with red mist. Sweat broke out on Argel Tal’s face and neck in the savage heat. It warmed even the aqueous moisture that lubricated his eyes.
As he watched, the city below began to tumble, its spires and walkways falling to shatter on the ground, crushing crowds of slender alien figures and demolishing lesser buildings beneath.
Their sorceries are fading. This is on the edge of the Great Eye. The destruction took days to unfold on these lesser colonies. At the core of their empire, all life was ended in mere moments.
Argel Tal could hear the city dying, the sounds of thunder, sorrow and lamentation carried up to him on the wind.
‘Aliens,’ Xaphen smiled at the toppling towers. ‘May they all burn, soulless and forgotten.’
None of the others disagreed. ‘Why did this happen?’ asked Argel Tal.
The eldar were close to seeing the truth of the universe. Their civilisation spanned the galaxy, evolving for millennia under the guidance and worship of their gods. And then, at the last step... they faltered.
‘How?’
Look to the sky.
The storm clouds gathered in a threatening spiral, darkening the land to every horizon. From the very first raindrops – hot on the skin and rich in their metallic reek – it was clear what was in store for the city below. With a single peal of thunder, loud enough to vibrate the air itself, the blackened clouds ground together and signalled the opening of the heavens.
Sheets of scarlet rained from the sky, showering the broken city in blood so thick it stained the bone structures that still remained standing. Xaphen closed his eyes, lifting his face to the downpour.
‘This is not human blood. It’s too sweet.’
Argel Tal wiped his face clear of the raining gore. In the city below, creatures were melting from the shadows of fallen monuments, rising from the lakes of blood that were forming in the streets. They staggered and sprinted, each one uneven and unnatural in its own half-formed way. Some crawled on a multitude of boneless limbs. Others wailed as they dashed on spindly legs, reaching out with curling claws.
My kin, taking physical form. They hunt souls, and flesh, and blood and bone.
‘Why is this happening?’
The malformed beasts ran in packs, dragging down any of the slender, weeping survivors they found. The sight left him cold. Genocide should be a purification, and there was nothing of purity in this insane unleashing of unknowable powers.
‘Answer me,’ Argel Tal said softly. No answer came, beyond the blood running down his cheeks and over his lips. He could smell nothing else, taste nothing else, beyond the sanguine rain.
New towers rose from the tumbling city below – slender spires formed from pulsing walls of still-living flesh, decorated by voiceless faces and flayed arms stretching from the architecture. The rising towers reached for the panicking eldar in the streets, using their lives as raw material, their alien flesh as living mortar.
Watch them die. You would die the same way.
‘I told you to answer me,’ said the Word Bearer.
Watch and learn, Word Bearer.
‘We have records of the eldar and their histories.’ He spat the foul blood that kept running onto his tongue. ‘They speak of the Fall, when decadence and sin bred corruption throughout their culture. A spiritual cataclysm annihilated them centuries ago. That devastation is this? This... divine wrath?’
This is their judgement. In their ignorance, they see only the death of an empire as countless worlds drown in blood and fire. In this moment of ascension, the eldar choose terror over power, and damn their kingdom to ashes because the Primordial Truth frightens them all.
They have given birth to a god. A god of pleasure and promise. Yet they feel no joy.
‘Enough!’ Argel Tal threw back his head and drew breath into his three lungs. The storm intensified, its tortured skies bleeding onto the world below.
‘Answer me!’ he screamed at the sky.
This is the Fall they speak of in whispered tones. The eldar were blind. They could have lived in harmonic union with the Powers, as humanity must soon learn themselves. Instead, they are dying. Unable to accept the Primordial Truth, they are being destroyed by it.
You ask why? Can you not see why? This is not how empires die, Word Bearer. This is how gods are born. The eldar faith has given the galaxy a new deity. She Who Thirsts. Slaa Neth. It has a thousand names.
These are its first moments of life, and it wakes to find its own worshippers are abandoning it, out of ignorance and fear.
This endless storm, this Eye of Terror, is the echo of its birth-cries.
‘I have seen enough,’ Argel Tal watched the city below, now silent, flooded, reaped clean of all life. ‘Blood of the gods, I have seen enough.’
Then open your eyes.
Ingethel was watching them, its mismatched eyes unblinking as they reflected the sick light from beyond the dome. The stench of blood lingered in Argel Tal’s nostrils, despite the warriors’ pristine armour and clean skin.
‘That was unpleasant,’ said Torgal.
‘Sir,’ Dagotal reached for Argel Tal’s shoulder guard. ‘I think we should leave this place.’
It was Xaphen, not the daemon, that quelled such discussion. ‘You overstep your authority, sergeant. We will not flee from the truths we’ve travelled so far to find.’
Argel Tal ignored their bickering. His vox-network was alive with squads checking in, retinal runes flickering as each sergeant linked to him.
‘Sir, we just saw...’
‘Captain, there was a voice and... and a vision...’
‘This is Vadox Squad, reporting...’
The Word Bearer turned to the daemon. ‘Every one of my warriors on the ship saw what we saw.’
They hear my voice, the same as you. That is why they are here: to bear witness. To learn. The eldar failed, and the price paid for their sin was slow extinction. Humanity must not follow the same path. Mankind must accept the Primordial Truth.
‘We cannot carry this message back to the Imperium,’ said Argel Tal.
‘Of course we can,’ Xaphen narrowed his eyes. ‘We can and we will, because we must. This is humanity’s enlightenment.’
You came here seeking to learn if your home world’s Old Ways were true. And now you know they were.
‘This is a truth too ugly to be embraced by the Imperium.’ The captain watched the dead world below. ‘You, creature, know nothing of what you speak. But brother, do you expect us to sail into orbit around Terra and right into the Emperor’s welcoming embrace? The answers we carry home will make a lie of the Imperial Truth. All human emotion takes form as psychic force? Not only is the Emperor’s godless vision a lie, it must be crushed in favour of allying with daemons and spirits?’ Argel Tal shook his head. ‘It will be civil war, Xaphen. The Imperium will tear itself apart.’
The Chaplain gave a threatening growl. ‘This is why we came. The truth is all that matters. You speak as though you expected the primarch to be proved wrong, and panic now he was shown to be right.’
‘But the captain has a point,’ said Dagotal. ‘We will not be showered with medals for bringing home the truth that hell is a real place.’
They all turned as the daemon laughed in their minds.
You have seen nothing yet, but you already judge what is best for your species?
‘What more is there to see?’ asked Argel Tal.
Ingethel beckoned with its gnarled fingers. Close your eyes.
‘No.’ The captain took a calming breath. ‘I am finished with blind indulgence. Tell me what you wish to show us.’
I will show you how your primarch was born. I will show you why the Cadians called him the Favoured Son of the Four. The Emperor is not his only father.
Argel Tal glanced at the others, seeing their eyes already closed, the mention of their father enough to tempt them into obedience
. He spoke into the vox, alerting the other squads.
‘Be ready, all of you, for what we see may be a deception.’
You have such little faith, Argel Tal.
The Word Bearer closed his eyes again.
The air’s touch was ice against his skin, and the first thing Argel Tal’s returning vision offered was his own breath misting before him. The smell here was neither the sanguine richness of the alien world, nor the musky odour of oxygen filtered through a vessel’s recycling scrubbers. A certain sharpness hung in the air: the chemical tang of volatile machinery and burning glass.
Argel Tal looked around the laboratory, surrounded on all sides by live generators, cluttered tables and humans at work in pressurised environment suits – some white, some bright yellow and marked by radiological sigils. Frost rimed their faceplates, scuffing away as powder when brushed off by gloved hands.
The Word Bearer had been in scarce few laboratories in the many decades of his existence, so his frame of reference was limited. Still, he could form a fair estimation that a facility this size would only be required for the most vital or visionary work. The walls were lost behind dense cabling and clanking generators; the technicians at work numbered in the hundreds, spread around tables, platforms and desks.
One passed Argel Tal, the figure’s environmental hazard suit rustling as it brushed the Word Bearer’s battle armour. The suit’s faceguard stole any hope of seeing the wearer’s face; either way, the technician ignored the Astartes completely.
Argel Tal reached for the figure.
Don’t.
He hesitated, grey fingers curling back. The tiny servos in his armour’s knuckles whirred as he pulled away from the technician’s shoulder.
Be careful, Argel Tal. These souls remain blind to you as long as you do not interfere with their work.
‘And if I did?’ he asked quietly.
Then one of the most powerful psychic forces in the history of life would be alerted to you, and would kill you where you stand. You are within the Anathema’s innermost sanctum. Here, it breeds its spawn.
‘The Anathema,’ Argel Tal repeated, looking around the colossal facility. The other Word Bearers walked to his side, none of them reaching for weapons just yet.
The First Heretic Page 24