The sound of a tumbling rock made Gabriel look up, snatching his bolter out of its holster. He scanned the perimeter of fire with the barrel of his gun, looking for signs of the movement that he had heard. But there was nothing.
“Gabriel!” called a familiar voice, making the captain look up. Prathios bowed slightly from the ridge. “We need to talk about Ptolemea.”
Gabriel nodded briskly, still uncertain that the noise he had heard had come from such a high elevation. He pointed to his eyes and then gestured to the circumference of the pit, indicating to Prathios that he thought there was a threat nearby.
Spotting the fallen form of Jonas behind his captain, Prathios nodded in understanding and drew his weapon, springing down into the pit to join Gabriel. As soon as he hit the ground, all hell broke loose.
A sleet of projectiles hissed out from behind a molten cascade of lava, slicing easily through the heavy, sulphurous air like burning shards through flesh. The two Marines saw the rampaging cloud just in time, and they dived for the ground, rolling neatly before coming back up into a crouch, their bolters levelled and coughing towards the source of the attack.
The explosive shells detonated as they penetrated the screen of lava, spluttering the cascades into bubbling partitions of fire, but Gabriel couldn’t tell whether they were having any impact on the assailants beyond.
After a couple of seconds, the two Marines stopped firing and there was silence in the underground pit, broken only by the distant echoes of their shots as the sound bounced and ricocheted through the maze of tunnels that fed into the wider cavern. They glanced at each other and then stood to their feet next to the bizarre alien pyramid, turning back to back as they swept their weapons around the perimeter of the pit.
The silence was compromised by the grating of sand and gravel under the weight of their heavy boots, and by the spluttering hiss of molten rock falling into the burning pools on the ground.
Gabriel paused, concentrating his gaze into the sheets of lava that pulsed down the walls of the pit. They were not uniform or even, and there were occasional gaps in the flow, as though the volume of lava was not quite enough to cover the walls properly. The captain focussed carefully, holding his eyes on the slits of clarity torn into the molten flows, watching the red and orange light from the cascades spark and reflect off the slick surface of the rock beyond.
There! Gabriel squeezed a couple of shells out of his bolter and watched the little contrails that poured out behind them, as though in slow motion. They spun through the thick, gaseous air and then slipped through a gap in the lava flow, punching into the kaleidoscope of reflections beyond. There was a dull thud, but no explosion against the rock.
He had hit something.
Pulling his chainsword from its holster, Gabriel stalked forward, keeping his eyes fixed on the little slit of clarity in the wall of fire and molten rock. The quality of the reflected light next to the floor was slightly different from that in the middle of the wall, as though the surface was bulging or uneven. Gabriel held his chainsword out in front of him as he advanced, pointing it at the misshapen reflections, while he held his bolter in his other hand, pointing out at right angles to his side.
It looked like a camouflaged body. A cloaked eldar ranger, thought Gabriel.
Just as he reached the wall of lava, a series of explosions and a cry made Gabriel spin on his heel. He left the tip of his chainsword pointing down at the prone body of the eldar warrior behind the screen of molten rock, but he turned his head and snapped his bolter around.
Behind him, in the middle of the pit, stood Prathios, his glittering Crozius held high in one hand while his bolter barked repeatedly in the other. In front of the chaplain were three eldar warriors, each brandishing long, elegant blades that seemed to coruscate with suggestions of purple flames. They were prowling around the chaplain in a complicated pattern that meant he could only ever see two of them clearly—the third was always at least partly hidden behind one or both of the other two. With rhythmic but syncopated regularity, the eldar lurched forward at Prathios, sometimes one by one, sometimes two at a time, and sometimes all at once.
The Blood Ravens chaplain parried and hacked with the sizzling power of his Crozius, meeting the coruscating blades of the aliens with thunderous strikes of his own. Meanwhile, he rattled off shots with his bolter, spraying shells almost randomly as he had no time to take even the most casual aim. The eldar seemed to slip around his shots without concern, and without breaking the rhythm of their dance.
Immediately, Gabriel’s bolter spat a volley of shells towards the alien assailants, but the hail of bullets didn’t even seem to break the pattern of their movements, as though their dance-like performance had somehow pre-empted his shots. They continued to lurch and swipe at Prathios, their blades flashing radiantly in the dim light of the subterranean pit as the chaplain swept his Crozius in powerful arcs, somehow managing to parry every strike.
Checking back towards the slumped body at the tip of his own blade, Gabriel made up his mind at once. Firing off a constant tirade of shells, he charged back across the pit, spinning his chainsword in eager preparation for combat.
After only a couple of strides, a strip of explosions ripped up the ground in front of him, making him slide to a halt and dive to the side. As he hit the ground he rolled, angling his bolter up towards the ledge around the top of the pit and sending off a salvo of fire. Chunks of rock and spurts of lava erupted as the bolter shells punched into the lip of the ledge. The four eldar marksmen who had taken up the elevated position scattered away from the fire, rolling away from the suddenly unstable ledge. As he skidded along the ground, Gabriel yanked a frag grenade off the clip on his belt and instinctively thumbed the timer down to two seconds. From the prone position on the floor, he lobbed the grenade up towards the eldar snipers. It arced steeply, reaching its peak just over the heads of the aliens when the timer blipped and the grenade detonated into a brilliant, shrapnel-filled fireball.
Three of the aliens dived flat against the ledge, disappearing from view, but the fourth staggered back in the sudden blast of pressure and heat, losing his footing in a flail of limbs and falling head over heels off the ledge. Gabriel watched the hapless creature, ripped through by the shrapnel from the frag grenade, as it splashed down into one of the pools of magma, sending up a thick, viscous fountain of molten rock and then a cloud of steam as the body vaporised in the intense heat.
By the time the other eldar on the ledge had regained their firing solutions, Gabriel was already back on his feet and pounding over towards his embattled chaplain.
Images of death cycled through Laeresh’s mind: war is my master, death my mistress. The chant filled his soul with power and longing as the Dark Reapers swept through the desert towards the Blood Ravens’ monastery. The jet-black Wave Serpents were flanked by the greens and whites of the Biel-Tan vehicles that had accompanied the exarch, deferring to his authority in the theatre of battle. He was an Exarch of Khaine, the Bloody-Handed God, and war flowed through his veins, rendering him into the best and the worst of his kind. In a time of war, there was no figure more inspirational for the warriors of Biel-Tan than an exarch at the head of a battle-force. Besides, Macha had made no attempt to stop Laeresh mustering his army. She had not interfered when he had clambered up on top of his Wave Serpent with his reaper launcher held into the air like a standard and led the eldar force out of the rangers’ camp and into the wind-racked desert. She had simply sat silently in her gazebo, flanked by her retinue of warlocks, waiting for Aldryan to muster the rangers for her own more stealthy purpose.
As the convoy crested a high dune, the heavy black of the mon-keigh monastery loomed into view, breaking the dull, rusty monotony of the desert and marking the beginning of the mountain range beyond.
Laeresh stamped his foot against the roof of the transporter and his vehicle slowed to a halt. The bone-white plumes around his death mask fluttered and whirled in the dusty wind. The other Wave Serpen
ts spread out into a line next to him, running along the apex of the dune with their gun barrels bristling out towards the enemy. The red sun glinted against their armoured plates in little bursts of colour.
Staring out across the desert towards the heavy and ugly edifice that had been constructed by the clumsy, dirty humans, Laeresh rolled his top lip back into a snarl of disgust. He couldn’t believe that Macha had been willing to retreat from the pathetic mon-keigh. The cry of the banshees may have pierced her confidence, but it would not shake his own resolve. The vile aliens had to be removed from the surface of this once pure and verdant world—Lsathranil’s Shield must be made clean again.
War is my master, bellowed the exarch, forcing his thoughts out through the desert wind, running them through the armoured sides of the Wave Serpent transports and into the minds of the eldar warriors within. His words dripped with hatred and disgust, filling his warriors with an unspeakable, primal passion for death.
Death is my mistress, came the response, as though shouted out from a thousand voices all at once. Laeresh felt the resolve of his Aspect Warriors and the Guardians of Biel-Tan buoy his soul, lifting his resolve and fixing his spirit on the battle to come. He stared across at the solid blackness of the monastery walls, and he visualised them cracking and crumbling under the furious assault of the eldar. Even he could see the end of the mon-keigh there; he didn’t need Macha to foresee his victory. It was clear and obvious. The bumbling humans were no match for the timeless wrath of the exarch of the Dark Reapers.
He stamped down once more, this time triggering a stream of light from the gun-turret next to him on the Wave Serpent’s roof. The lance of brightness seared out across the desert, flashing in perfect straightness until it smashed against the huge walls of the monastery in the distance. Following the lead of their exarch, the other Dark Reaper Wave Serpent also unleashed strips of lightning through the desert air, crunching its beams into the massive shape of the mon-keigh structure. From a distance, there were few forces in the galaxy that could match the Dark Reapers.
As the pulses of lance fire streaked out of the line that ran along the crest of the dune, the green and white Wave Serpents of the Biel-Tan Guardians lurched forward, skating down the face of the dune and racing forward towards the monastery, leaving clouds of sand in their wake as they accelerated to attack speed. After a few seconds, the flashing reports of weapons fire could be seen around the base of the monastery, and ordnance started to rain down on the speeding eldar vehicles. Shells punched into the desert on all sides of the Wave Serpents, exploding into huge craters and sending great plumes of sand billowing up into the air.
The explosions shook the cavern, breaking stalactites from the high ceiling and sending them darting down towards the ground like stone spears. They splashed and sizzled into the pools of lava around the edge of the pit, or crashed into splinters as they struck the hard rocky ground. Concussive clouds of smoke, fire and shrapnel billowed out around the ledge, blasting heat and pressure waves out through the tributary tunnels, chasing in the wake of the fleeing eldar rangers.
Gabriel had launched the grenade cluster into the air on a tight timer and then thrown himself flat over the top of the prone figure of Father Jonas, shielding the unconscious librarian from the force of the blast and absorbing the impacts of the falling masonry against the thick armour on his own back. As the rain of debris lightened, Gabriel sprang back to his feet and ran over to where Prathios had fallen.
The chaplain was collapsed on the ground between the corpses of three eldar rangers; their blades, shattered and broken, lay in ruins across the floor. Prathios had confronted their force-swords with his Crozius and wrecked them all, ploughing through the alien technology with the power of his faith. His bolter had punched holes through the psycho-plastic armour of the eldar warriors, leaving seeping wounds in their limbs and abdomens, from which hissing, toxic blood poured into little pools around the dead.
But he had suffered terrible wounds. The snipers on the ledge had almost ignored Gabriel, seeking merely to prevent the captain from assisting his chaplain, while raining gouts of shuriken down at the embattled Prathios.
He had fought valiantly and with passion, but the odds had been stacked impossibly against him. He had parried and struck with his Crozius, snapping off shots with his bolter, fighting three eldar warriors at close range and trying to contend with four more at distance. Not even the magisterial might of a Blood Ravens chaplain could stand against such terrible force.
At the last, as his body was ripped through by streams of tiny projectiles from the rifles of the snipers, Prathios had let out a great roar of defiance that echoed powerfully around the cavern and out into the surrounding tunnels. He had lashed out with his Crozius for a final time, smashing through the lancing blades of his attackers and splintering them into shards. Even as his ruined legs collapsed under his weight and he started to fall, he had tracked his bolter around the cavern, placing his last shells precisely into the flesh of the aliens around him. By the time he hit the ground, his three assailants were broken, wretched, and dying.
“Prathios,” said Gabriel, kneeling at the side of his old friend. “Prathios, can you hear me?”
There was no reply. The chaplain lay face down on the ground with his powerful legs buckled underneath him; the thick armour around his knees had been perforated by shuriken fire and his lower legs almost severed. His ornate and ancient death mask was twisted around to one side, suggesting that his neck may have broken, and his arms were stretched out in front of him, as though reaching for the weapons that were still clutched in his hands. His arms were riddled with tiny holes where the monomolecular projectiles of the eldar snipers had ripped through his armour, flesh and bones.
“Prathios,” repeated Gabriel, refusing to believe that even such egregious wounds could bring an end to such a great warrior. He released the clasps on his own helmet and pulled it off, dropping it onto the ground next to the chaplain. Then he carefully removed Prathios’ revered death mask, lifting it gently and placing it next to the fallen Marine. It was clear that the chaplain’s neck was twisted at an unnatural angle, but his eyes were half open and Gabriel could see the irises jittering. He was still alive.
With anger rising in his body, Gabriel stood up and looked around the cavern, absorbing the turmoil of the scene—the ruined cavern, the smashed stalactites, the eldar corpses, the rains of lava, the unconscious figure of Jonas and the ruined body of Prathios. And there, in the middle of it all, still glinting with a distant and ineffable darkness, was the shimmering black pyramid, sparkling with pristine silver hieroglyphs.
Throwing his head back and his arms out to his side, Gabriel let out a cry, drawing it up from the pit of his stomach and yelling it out into the subterranean world as a threat, a promise, and an impassioned defiance. The sound was amplified and echoed around the cavern and out into the labyrinth of tunnels.
After a few seconds, silence fell and Gabriel stood motionless, his arms still held out, as though beseeching the Emperor himself for some sign. Then, so quiet as to be almost inaudible, a single voice seemed to reply. It was a soprano, high and clear like crystal, singing directly into Gabriel’s mind. The note soared into heaven, and then was joined by others, more and more of them until there was a silvering chorus of voices. They seemed to be singing into his soul, drawing his purpose towards the Astronomican itself. He had heard these voices before, but never had they been as clear, as pristine or as beautiful as now.
“On the horizon!” called Corallis as he stared out across the sand. He was standing up on the roof of one of the Land Raiders, keeping watch for the return of the eldar forces while Tanthius organised the Blood Ravens’ defences.
The huge Terminator Marine stopped what he was doing and turned to follow Corallis’ line of sight. Arrayed along the crest of a dune on the horizon, he could clearly see a line of eldar vehicles glinting in the red sun as clouds of sand gusted past them. They appeared to have stopped movin
g, as though they were waiting to be seen before they launched their attack. On the roof of one of the Wave Serpents, Tanthius could just about make out the distinctively tall form of the crested, ornate warrior-leader. He had heard that such magnificent figures were known as exarchs, and he thrilled in anticipation of the battle to come.
“Prepare for battle,” said Tanthius calmly, his vox bead hissing and crackling with interference from all the heavy machinery. The rest of the Blood Ravens sounded in around him, confirming their readiness to defend the monastery-outpost from the xenos assault. “Our guests have returned,” he murmured under his breath, inspecting the distant prospect of the exarch.
“For the Great Father and the Emperor!” The voices rang out in the desert air, unassisted by the vox units and amplifier arrays, as the Blood Ravens shouted their resolve all along the defensive line. Tanthius nodded with satisfaction.
A burst of brightness flashed on the horizon and a strip of brilliance lanced over Corallis’ head, punching into the walls of the monastery behind him. After a second, another beam of energy followed the first, burning through the dusty air and smashing into the towering edifice at the backs of the Marines. In rapid succession, another flurry of beams pulsed into the wall, this time launched from multiple locations on the horizon. The walls shook under the onslaught and rains of debris fell, but the structure was sound—the Blood Ravens knew how to construct fortifications.
Under cover of the lance fire that lashed out of a few of the Wave Serpents on the horizon, Corallis and Tanthius could see the rest of the eldar convoy lurch forward, rushing down the face of the dune as it began the charge across the open desert towards the glassy and rocky ground in front of the Blood Ravens’ defences.
[Dawn of War 02] - Ascension Page 21