by Various
‘It is over two hundred degrees below the point water would freeze,’ he said to the monster. ‘Almost as cold as naked space.’
‘Another reason I wonder why you chose to walk upon this world.’
Lorgar bared his teeth behind the granite-grey faceplate. ‘I am armoured to survive such extremes. What are you, to stand here and ignore an atmosphere cold enough to turn blood to ice in the time it takes the human heart to beat a single pulse?’
‘This is where the realm of flesh and spirit meet. Physical laws mean nothing here. There is no limit on what might be. That is Chaos. Endless possibility.’
Lorgar took a deep breath of the clean, recyc-scrubbed air of his war plate. It tasted of ritual cleansing oils, coppery in his sinuses. ‘So I could breathe here? I would not freeze?’
‘You are unique among the Anathema’s sons. All of your brothers are whole, Lorgar. You alone are lost. They have mastered their gifts since birth. Your own mastery will come with understanding. When it does, you will have the strength to reshape entire worlds on a whim.’
Lorgar shook his head. ‘I am bred from the best of humanity, but I am still human. You may stand unarmoured in this storm. It would destroy me in a moment. We are too different.’
The creature faced the primarch, its swollen eye cataracted by a film of red grit. ‘Only one difference exists between the warp and the flesh. In the realm of flesh, sentient life is born ensouled. In the realm of raw thought, all life is soulless. But both are alive. The Born and the Neverborn, on both sides of reality. Destined for symbiosis. Destined for union.’
The primarch crouched, letting dust fall through his gauntleted fingers. ‘Neverborn. I have studied the history of my species, Ingethel. That is no more than a poetic word for “daemon”.’
The creature turned its back to the wind again, but said nothing.
‘What is this world called?’ Lorgar looked up, but did not rise. The dust hissed away in the racing wind, leaving his fingers in a gritty stream.
‘The eldar called it “Ycressa” before the Fall. After the birth of Slaa Neth, She Who Thirsts, it was named “Shanriatha”.’
The primarch gave a soft laugh.
‘You know the meaning of this word?’
‘I learned the eldar tongue when my Legion first met them. Yes, I know the meaning of the word. It means “never forgotten”.’
The daemon flicked a slit tongue over its maw, heedless of the bloody scratches it inflicted upon itself. ‘You have met the soulbroken?’
‘The soulbroken?’
‘The eldar.’
Lorgar rose to his feet, brushing the last of the dust away. ‘The Imperium has encountered them many times. Some expeditionary fleets have clashed with them, to drive them from Imperial space. Others have passed in peace. My brother Magnus was always one of the more lenient when encountering them.’ He hesitated for a moment, turning to the creature. ‘Your kind know of my brother Magnus, do they not?’
‘The gods themselves know Magnus, Lorgar. His name is threaded through destiny’s web as often as your own.’
The Word Bearer looked back to the horizon. ‘That gives me little comfort.’
‘It will, in time. Speak of the soulbroken.’
He continued, slower now. ‘My Legion encountered them not long after we sailed from Colchis the very first time. A fleet of eldar, their vessels built of bone, drifting through the void powered by immense solar sails. I met with their farseers, to determine their place in mankind’s galaxy. During those weeks, I mastered their tongue.’
Lorgar took another breath, thinking back to that time. ‘It was easy to despise them. Their inhumanity made them cold – their skin stank of bitter oil and alien sweat, and their vaunted wisdom came at the cost of sneering condescension. What right did a dying breed have to judge us inferior? I asked them this, and they had no answer.’
He laughed again, the same gentle sound. ‘They named us mon-keigh, their term for so-called “lesser races”. And yet, while they were easy to hate, there was much to admire in them, as well. Their existence is a tragic one.’
‘And what of your Legion?’
‘We destroyed them,’ the primarch admitted. ‘At great cost, in both warships and loyal lives. They care for nothing but survival – the ferocious need to continue their existence saturates their whole culture. None of them ever die easily, nor do they fall cleanly.’
He paused for a moment. ‘Why do you name them “soulbroken”?’
If such a thing as Ingethel could be said to smile, it did so now. ‘You know what this place is. Not this world, but this whole region of space, where gods and mortals meet. A goddess was born here. Slaa Neth. She Who Thirsts.’
Lorgar looked to the sky, watching the cosmic afterbirth raging above. He knew without being told that this storm would rage forever. And it would spread, over the coming centuries, engulfing ever more solar systems. It would spread far and wide, opening to peer into the galaxy’s core like a god’s staring eye.
‘I am listening,’ he said quietly.
‘In her genesis, brought about by the eldar’s worship, she claimed the spirits of the entire race. They are the soulbroken. When any mortal dies, its spirit drifts into the warp. It is the way of things. But when the eldar die, they are pulled right into the maw of the goddess they betrayed. She thirsts for them, for they are her children. She drinks them as they die.’
Together, the daemon and the Emperor’s son began to move west. Lorgar moved against the wind, his helmed head lowered as he listened to the creature’s psychic speech. Ingethel closed its eyes as best as its deformed face allowed, its slithering passage leaving a sidewinder trail in the dust.
The marks they left didn’t last long, for the storm soon obliterated all evidence of their passing.
‘Something you said, it matches the Old Ways of Colchis.’ He quoted verbatim from the texts of the very religion he’d once overthrown in the name of Emperor-worship. ‘It is said that “upon death, the unshackled soul drifts into the infinite, to be judged by thirsting gods”.’
Ingethel made a choking, coughing gargle. It took Lorgar a moment to realise the creature was laughing.
‘It is the core of a million human faiths throughout your species’ lifespan. The Primordial Truth is in humanity’s blood. You all reach for it. You all know that something awaits after death. The faithful, the loyal, will be judged kindly and reside in their gods’ domains. The faithless, the unbelievers, will drift through the aether, serving as prey for the Neverborn. The warp is the end of all spirits. It is the destination of every soul.’
‘That is hardly the heaven promised in most human faiths.’ Lorgar felt his lip curling.
‘No. But it is the same hell your species has always feared.’
The primarch couldn’t argue with that.
‘You wish to see the ruins of this world.’ Ingethel weaved as it slithered alongside him.
‘This was once a grand city.’ Lorgar could make out the first fallen towers on the horizon, shrouded in generations of carmine dust. Whatever tectonic devastation had claimed this world long ago had dragged the city into a crater, spilling its spires to the ground. What protruded from the earth now resembled the ribcage of some long-dead beast.
‘These ruins were never a true city. When the soulbroken fled the goddess’ birth, the survivors boarded vast domed platforms of living bone, carrying the remnants of their species into the stars on a final exodus.’
‘Craftworlds. I have seen one.’ Lorgar kept trudging forward, into the wind. ‘It was magnificent, in its own alien, chilling way.’
Ingethel’s chittery laugh wasn’t quite stolen by the wind. ‘Many of the fledgling craftworlds failed to escape Slaa Neth’s birth scream. They dissolved in the void, or fell to die on the faces of these abandoned worlds.’
Lorgar slowed in his
pace, casting a glance at the daemon. ‘We walk to the grave of a craftworld?’
Ingethel rasped another laugh from its malformed jaws. ‘You are here to witness wonders, are you not?’
And so they came to a dead city, fallen from the void to bury itself in the world’s lifeless dust.
Red-stained bone architecture reached as far as the eye could see, jutting from the fundament with all the grace of a mouth filled by shattered teeth. Lorgar and his guide stood at the crater’s lip, staring down into the grave of the alien void city.
The primarch was silent for some time, listening to the howl of the wind and the accompanying grit-rattle against his armour. When he spoke, he didn’t break his gaze from the ancient annihilation below.
‘How many died here?’
Ingethel raised itself higher, peering down with its foul eyes. Four arms spread in a grand gesture, as if laying claim to everything the daemon beheld.
‘This was Craftworld Zu’lasa. Two hundred thousand souls burst in the moment Slaa Neth was born. Unguided, with madness rampant in its own living core, the craftworld fell.’
Lorgar felt a small smile take hold. ‘Two hundred thousand. How many in the entire eldar empire?’
‘A whole species. Trillions. A decillion. A tredecillion. A goddess was born in the brains of every living eldar, and tore itself into the realm of cold space and warm flesh.’
The daemon hunched itself, leaning with all four arms on the crater’s edge. ‘I sense your emotions, Lorgar. Pleasure. Awe. Fear.’
‘I have no love for the galaxy’s xenos breeds,’ the primarch confessed. ‘The eldar failed to grasp the truth of reality, and I feel no sorrow for them. Merely pity that any being can die in ignorance.’ He took a breath, still staring down at the buried craftworld. ‘How many of these failed to escape the goddess’ birth?’
‘A great many. Even now, some drift in the warp’s tides – the silent homes of memories and alien ghosts.’
Lorgar ignored the wind tearing at his cloak as he took his first step on the crater’s slope.
‘I sense something, Ingethel. Something down there.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you know what it is?’
The daemon wiped its abused eyes with careful claws. ‘A revenant, perhaps. An echo of eldar life, breathing its last, if it still breathes at all.’
Lorgar drew his crozius maul, his thumb close to the activation rune. The weapon caught the tumultuous light above, reflecting the storm on its burnished spines.
‘I’m going closer.’
FIVE
ECHOES
Ghosts walked the streets, wraiths of wind and dust, forming tantalising shapes in the tempest. They lived at the edge of his vision, slaughtered by the storm each time Lorgar sought to see them more clearly. There, a fleeing figure, obliterated back into the breeze the moment Lorgar turned to see it. And there: three reaching, shrieking maidens, though there was nothing more than whirling dust when the primarch turned again.
He clutched the crozius tighter. Ahead, always ahead, there thrummed that aching sense of something barely alive – weakened, trapped, almost certainly dying. The bleak resonance reaching into his mind spoke of something like a caged, diseased animal: something that had been dying for a long, long time.
Lorgar moved with care, stepping around dust-coated rubble, treading through the skeleton of a city. The gritty wind carried distant voices in its grip – inhuman voices, screaming in an alien tongue. Perhaps the gale played tricks of its own, for even with a grasp of the eldar language, he couldn’t make out the words being cried into the storm. Trying to comprehend individual voices merely made the others louder, eclipsing any hope of focus.
As he moved deeper through the emaciated city, Lorgar ceased turning at every half-formed image, unfocusing his eyes and letting the teasing wind shape whatever it chose. In the thrashing gusts, faint spires stood at the corners of his eyes, alien towers reaching up with impossible grace into hostile skies.
The primarch looked back, seeking Ingethel and seeing nothing.
Ingethel,+ he reached out with his stuttering psychic sense, unsure if the call even pierced the wind. +Daemon. Where are you?+
The storm howled louder in answer.
Time seemed to lose its grip. Lorgar’s thirst grew raw, though he never slowed in weariness, all the while walking for over seventy hours beneath an unending dusk. The only certain evidence of time’s passing was his retinal chrono, which degenerated into unreliable fluctuation at the tip of the seventy-first hour. The digital display began to pulse with random runes, as if finally surrendering to the unnatural laws of this warp-drowned realm.
Lorgar recalled Argel Tal’s face: gaunt, almost vampiric in its skeletal ferocity, when the warrior had claimed his vessel had sailed the warp’s tides for half a year. To Lorgar and the rest of the fleet, the Orfeo’s Lament had been gone no longer than a few heartbeats.
Idly, he wondered how long would pass in the material universe while he lingered here, walking along the shores of hell.
What little of the craftworld’s architecture remained above ground was a victim of erosion, worn down and scarred by the blistering winds. Lorgar stalked down yet another avenue of dust, his boots grinding down on the ancient rock. Perhaps this had once been an agricultural dome, fertile and forested with xenos flora. Perhaps it had been nothing more than a communal chamber, though. Lorgar sought to restrain his imagination, refusing to let it be stirred further by the dancing shapes in the dust storm.
Another hundred metres, scuffing through worthless soil, and the curious, queasy ache of struggling life began to throb below his boots. To his left, to his right, nothing but the fallen towers of a dead civilisation.
The primarch crouched to grip a fistful of the red soil. As before, he let it fall through his fingers, watching as it was snatched away by the wind. The presence, such as it was, waxed and waned in arrhythmia. Lorgar took a breath, aiming a thin pulse of psychic energy to trickle downward. He felt nothing in response. Not even a tremor of awareness. It could’ve been a metre below the ground, or all the way down to the world’s core. Either way, it was a weak, irregular thing; seemingly untouchable and only barely reminiscent of life.
Sentience resided in hiding, but it didn’t feel alive.
Curious.
He pushed deeper, scenting, seeking, but the same buried core of resistant nothingness met his questing touch.
In grudging defeat, Lorgar withdrew his hesitant psychic probing, curling his perception back into his skull’s senses.
That did it. Even as he was cursing his erratic talents, he felt something stir beneath, burrowing upward. The presence beneath the sand chewed its way up, an icy bloodhound sentience straining to sniff after his retreating psy-caress.
Lorgar recoiled on instinct, shuddering at the sense of desperation wrenching closer from below. With gritted teeth, he forced a blast of repellent thought back at the grasping presence – the psychic equivalent of smashing a drowning man’s fingers as he grasped for a lifeline. The presence ebbed for a moment, regrouped, and clawed upwards again.
Its crest broke the surface: raw feeling crashing against the primarch’s mind in a splash of cold ferocity, absolutely devoid of any other emotion. Lorgar staggered back from the fountain of rising awareness, deflecting its jagged intensity as best he could. When the hand burst from the sand, the primarch already stood with his crozius in his fists.
He watched, shielding his mind from a spit-spray of formless psychic hate, as the statue of a dying god dragged itself from a grave of scarlet soil.
It couldn’t stand. In its struggles to rise, the creature crawled closer, hands digging into the earth to find loose purchase. But it couldn’t seem to stand. The primarch watched it crawl, unable to see any distinct spinal injury along its cracked armour plating. The long mane of hair falling to
either side of its snarling death-mask face looked to be composed of smoke. It streamed out, captured by the wind, a slave to the storm’s breath.
Lorgar backed away with slow care, boots crunching the dust, his own features bare of anything beyond curiosity. Whatever the crippled thing was, its wrath poured from it in an aura of physical pressure. Lorgar took another retreating step, still watching closely.
For all the god-statue’s majesty, it was plainly ruined by supernatural decay. A husk crawled where once a great entity would be striding over the land. Lorgar saw its banished glory when he narrowed his eyes, peering at the flickering after-images through his lashes. A being of tectonic armour plating: with eyes of white flame; a heart that beat magma over bones of unburnable black stone; a towering manifestation of incarnate rage and holy fire. Lorgar saw all of this through the swirling sand, and even smiled as the wind formed a false heat haze around the creature – another weak echo of what should have been truly majestic.
Had it been able to stand, it would have risen taller than a Legiones Astartes dreadnought. Even prone and destroyed, it was an immense thing, leaving a wretched trail in the dust.
He almost pitied it, in this devastated incarnation. Its black skin was faded to a greyish charcoal, split in old cracks that bled smoke into the storm. Lava-blood had dried to a sluggish flow of ember sludge; scabby crusts spoke of its own blood cooling, drying as it left its body. Where eyes of witchfire had once blazed, hollow eye sockets twisted in sightless, feral expressions.
‘I am Lorgar,’ he told the crawling god. ‘The seventeenth son of the Emperor of Man.’
The god bared black teeth and grey gums, seeking to shout. Nothing but ash left its snarling lips, spilling onto the sand beneath its chin, while the psychic aftershock of the denied scream battered uselessly against Lorgar’s guarded mind.
It crawled closer. Two of its fingers broke against the ground. Congealing magma oozed from the stumps, blackening as it dried.
‘I know you can hear me.’ The primarch kept his voice calm. His crozius hammer flared with energy, lightning sparking in a mad dance over its spiked head. ‘But you cannot answer, can you?’