Ptolemea didn’t feel tainted, just confused.
As she sat feverishly against the wall of her cell, muttering to herself and struggling to find order in her thoughts, the door creaked and then crashed open, smashing back against the interior wall. In the flood of light that suddenly poured into the dark, little cell, Ptolemea saw the outline of a Marine. He was carrying a large block under one arm and clutched an elegant, slender, struggling figure in the other.
With a brisk movement, Gabriel tossed the eldar ranger into the cell. The alien smashed into the wall above Ptolemea’s head and then slumped down into a heap next to her. She recoiled instinctively, scrambling away from the creature and pressing herself up against the sidewalk.
“You will translate this, now,” asserted Gabriel, ignoring Ptolemea’s panic and holding forward the tablet that he had brought with him.
Ptolemea’s face twitched back and forth between Gabriel and the eldar that still lay crumpled on the floor of the cell. She had no idea how to respond. Although she had been expecting to see Gabriel soon, she had thought that he would have arrived to tell her his judgement on her confession. She had assumed that his arrival would have meant her death. Instead, she found herself confined in a cell with an alien creature, with her only way out blocked by a Space Marine captain wielding an alien artefact. A sudden revulsion gripped her soul as she realised that Gabriel was demanding that she should co-operate with the alien.
“But, Captain Angelos—”
“No buts, Sister Ptolemea. There is no time for buts. Just do it, now,” said Gabriel, turning his back and striding out of the cell, letting the door slam closed behind him, leaving Ptolemea alone with the alien and the tablet in the dim, half-light of the cramped chamber.
Vartak poked his head out of the sand, surveying the scene around the submerged exit of the tunnel. His people had known about these tunnels for decades; they often used them to spring ambushes on neighbouring warbands that strayed too close to his village. He had been part of such killing parties more than once already, despite his youth.
In the sand and the dull, yellowing sun, Varjak’s dirty blond braids acted as a kind of camouflage. As he pushed his head up into the desert, he was confident that nobody would be able to see him, unless they were right above him at exactly the wrong moment.
Looking over towards the massive, black structure of the Sky Angels’ fortress, Varjak could see the battle unfolding. The huge, red and gold forms of the Sky Angels themselves were meeting the sinister, slippery aliens one to one in mortal combat. It was a breathtaking and glorious sight, and Varjak’s brilliant green eyes flashed with excitement as he pulled himself out of the mouth of the tunnel and lay flat against the sandy ground.
He had never seen the magnificent, godly warriors fight before. He had heard the legends, of course. As a small boy his father had recounted the legends of the Sky Angels to him, telling him that one day he might become strong enough to join their ranks if only he trained hard enough, and lived long enough.
In one of the very oldest stories of his people, it was reputed that the heavenly warriors had actually brought light into the darkness of the world. In the form of huge, winged birds, they had stolen the light from the gods of night and returned the sun to Rahe’s Paradise. But that was long ago.
The eldest members of his village could remember the Sky Angels in combat, or so they claimed. They told of them meeting an invasion of grotesque green-skinned beasts with massive and undeniable force, crushing them like the galactic vermin that they were. But Varjak had always suspected that these stories were exaggerated by the decrepitude of old age. There were inconsistencies in the stories—sometimes the accounts even described the Sky Angels wearing armour of different colours. In any case, he did not believe that even the Sky Angels, who had built the massive fortress on the edge of the desert and who dropped down out of the heavens once or twice in every generation, could command such power as was attributed to them in the stories.
Had he believed the stories, he may not have charged in to attack one of them during the Trials a couple of days earlier. He had simply assumed that the huge, warrior-god’s presence in the arena was another part of the test, and he had launched himself at the glorious figure without a second thought. In truth, he couldn’t really remember what happened after that. He could recall seeing a clear line of attack—the god’s back was to him and it was preoccupied with something else. He remembered diving forward with his blade drawn. And then he remembered waking up again on the floor of the arena, surrounded by dead and bleeding bodies. The Trials appeared to be over; the other surviving aspirants and the Sky Angels themselves had all vanished.
The side of his face was still raw and bruised, and he suspected that his cheek-bone was cracked, so he assumed that he had been struck unconscious by the warrior-god. This was Varjak’s first hint that the legends may be rooted in fact.
His second hint was taking shape right in front of his eyes. Over towards the edge of the desert, in the shadow of the immense fortress, the Sky Angels were a blaze of power, charging out to meet the advancing alien threat and loosing innumerable volleys of fire from their thunderous weapons. The air itself seemed to burn, as though their combat unleashed fragments of the volcanic wrath that Varjak had seen so many times before in the mountains of Rahe’s Paradise. It was as though the gods themselves had descended onto the surface of the planet to unleash an inferno on the world.
Leaning back into the mouth of the tunnel behind him, Varjak beckoned to the others to come out. Slowly and hesitantly, a small band of fellow aspirants from the Blood Trials clambered out of the tunnel into the fading desert sun. They were the warriors that had grouped around Varjak during the trials, recognising his skills and his power on an intuitive level, knowing that he would be on the victorious side. Although they were not all from his village, they had returned to the arena after it had been evacuated and had recovered the semi-conscious form of Varjak, not wanting his prone body to be mistaken for a corpse and fed into the flames of Krax-7. For his part, Varjak had accused them of stupidity: had their positions been reversed, he assured them, then he would have left them to burn, knowing that they would no longer be competition in the Blood Trials.
The ad hoc band of warriors lay pressed against the sand, letting the gusts of wind sprinkle them with desert dust and blur them into the landscape. They had been fighting in the desert all their lives, and they knew how to pass unseen.
After watching the spectacular battle for a while, a horrifying realisation began to dawn on Varjak: the Sky Angels were not winning this fight.
Despite the awesome firepower of the warrior-gods and their inspiring valour in combat, the Sky Angels had not managed to break the back of the alien advance. The bizarrely elongated and strangely elegant aliens seemed to dance and flash around the battlefield, slipping around and through assaults that should have devastated them. Whilst their odd-looking weapons made very little noise in comparison with the great war engines of the Sky Angels, they more than compensated in terms of accuracy and efficiency of fire.
In a moment of clarity, Varjak realised that the battle was a stalemate. And in that moment, his impressions about the warrior-gods that had made a home on his planet since before the time of memories came full circle. He had disbelieved the stories of their divine infallibility and incredible power, and then he had seemed to witness it firsthand. Now, he realised, it didn’t matter how powerful a warrior might be, there would always be a foe worthy of him. It seemed that these extraordinary aliens could neutralise the advantage of the Sky Angels’ firepower.
The battle unfolding before him was of proportions of which Varjak had never before dreamed. It was awe-inspiring, thunderous, and titanic in its scope and drama. And yet, watching the once-invincible Sky Angels struggling against the beautiful, deceitful and devious aliens, he saw them simply as warriors once again—heroic warriors like those from his own village, pitting themselves against a foe that was at lea
st their equal, fighting with passion, faith, and desperation.
“We have to help them,” hissed Varjak, letting his whispered voice carry on the desert wind. “We can use the tunnels.”
There was not even a murmur of dissent from his comrades and, as Varjak turned to observe their faces, he saw that they too had realised that there was more at stake in this battle than a spectacular show. The unspoken bond of a shared destiny seemed to tie Varjak and the other aspirants to the fate of the Sky Angels. As they watched their gods do battle against the foul and incomprehensible forces of the treacherous and breathtaking aliens, they began to identify them as brothers in arms, as battle-brothers of Rahe’s Paradise.
The mon-keigh woman stunk of fear and stupidity as she cowered in the corner of the little cell. He could smell her and it repulsed him. It was insulting enough to have been captured by one of the cumbersome humans and to have been thrown into one of their primitive cells, but to have been dumped in with a feeble mon-keigh female was the utmost humiliation. It was as though the humans were taunting him, daring him to take her life, throwing him easy prey in the hope that he would bite. Did they really think so little of him? Could they really be so conceited that they believed he would find this pathetic specimen worth his time?
He twisted his body and brought himself upright, propping his back against the wall. Staring at the female, he spat, watching the viscous globule of saliva splatter against the woman’s cheek, hissing with delicate toxicity.
Her eyes darted to his, meeting them with an intensity that surprised him. She hated him. He could see it clearly in her dark eyes—a hidden and concentrated fire of hatred. But it was not just hatred, he realised slowly, gazing into those surprisingly interesting eyes. There was something else, something more subtle than hate. Contempt? No, it was something else: pity.
With a slow and deliberate movement, the human female wiped his saliva from her face, leaving a raw blemish of red on her otherwise porcelain skin. She had pressed her body against the other wall, keeping it as far away from Flaetriu as she could manage. But it was not out of fear, he realised, or at least not just out of fear. She did fear him—he could smell it. He could feel the fear oozing out of her thoughts. And he had been led to expect fear from the mon-keigh, fear and hate. But he had not expected to be an object of disgust—how could these stinking, festering mon-keigh be disgusted by him? It was absurd. And he had certainly not expected pity. Of all the emotions that he had expected to sense from a degenerate primitive, pity was the very last one on the list. On what grounds could she possibly pity a superior species of life?
The woman held his gaze for a few seconds, and then he was struck by the notion that she might actually be able to see something of his own confusion in his eyes and he looked away. He regretted it immediately, cursing himself for the apparent show of weakness—he was sure that the primitive female animal would see the aversion of his eyes as a capitulation. Animals have simple and direct minds. However, when he snapped his eyes back up to confront hers again, she had already looked away. He had lost his chance to impose himself and he was angered by it. He had been tricked by the relatively interesting eyes of the human woman—they were not as ugly or as crude as he had been expecting—and he had read too much insight into them.
And what did she think she was doing now? The stupid woman was staring down at Lsathranil’s tablet, which the Blood Ravens captain had dropped so disrespectfully onto the floor. She was gazing at it and prodding it with her fingers, as though pretending to be following along with the flow of the runes—like a baby learning to read. Her face was contorted and ugly with concentration.
Flaetriu laughed, amused by the pathetic scene and the ridiculousness of the female’s pretence. It was his turn to feel pity, and this time it was entirely justified.
“What?” demanded Ptolemea, snapping her round and glowering at him. “What’s so funny, outcast?” Her voice dripped with aggression and contempt, as though lashing him with torrential rain.
Flaetriu’s eyes flashed and narrowed. The mon-keigh had struck out at him in his own tongue. Of course, the language was slightly confused, the grammar was bad and the pronunciation was appalling, but the sense of it was clear enough. He had never heard of such a thing in his entire life. He stopped laughing.
“You know my tongue, human?” he asked, redundantly.
“It hurts my head, but I know enough,” she replied, having already turned her face back down to the tablet. It was as though she didn’t care that he was there. Or, perhaps, she simply wished that he wasn’t there at all.
Flaetriu’s mind flickered between abject revulsion at this living monstrosity before him and utter fascination that he seemed to have found a human female of such unusual depth. How typical, he reasoned, that the other mon-keigh had thrown this creature into their dungeons. He was sure that they would have no hope of understanding her.
“What are you hoping to do with that?” asked Flaetriu, pointing at the tablet in front of Ptolemea.
“I am hoping to translate it,” she replied, mimicking his sentence structure like a student.
Flaetriu laughed again. Did she really think that Lsathranil’s tablet could be captured in the dull, clumsy, blunt language of the mon-keigh? Had she no idea what it meant to write using the ancient and unspeakable powers of the runes?
“It is not easy,” she conceded, apparently choosing not to be offended by his scepticism. “But our need is great.”
“Yes, the need is great,” concurred Flaetriu, nodding his assent. She was right. He wondered whether her mind could really comprehend how great the need really was. Perhaps if she knew what the tablet said, then she would be on the right path?
He suddenly remembered that Macha had once counselled him to take the mon-keigh seriously. She had even suggested that they might serve as useful allies in times of great need or terrible crisis. She had cautioned him that “their motives can be pure, but their souls are full of shadows that none can recognise. They are haunted by themselves, and not one of them will ever face up to himself.” But she had insisted that their motives could be pure, and that they could be guided towards the light. She had even claimed that the light might rid them of the shadows in their hearts.
“Let me help you,” said Flaetriu, the words grating even as he spoke them. This was not something that he had ever expected to say to a human and it caused him real physical pain to utter the request. Pride was not something that the eldar swallowed easily, but Flaetriu was certain that Macha would approve of his choice, even if the exarch Laeresh would not; there are some things more important than pride and more important than scouring the human stench off the planet, and Lsathranil’s Shield was certainly one of those things.
The woman looked over at him, her upper lip curled into a snarl of repugnance and disbelief. If he was expecting her to say thank you, he had another thing coming.
The banshee’s call shall wake the dead when dark portents wax nigh, Heed them as the counsel of a seer, or a father. The Yngir, who have slept since the very birth of Chaos, Shall crawl once more from their tombs, thirsting for warmth. The war in heaven shall be as nothing to their vengeance, For the sons of Asuryan, few in number, cannot stand against them.
And the Eye of Isha shall dim, closing for all eternity; Such a gentle goddess cannot witness the atrocities they will wreak. The soulless ones shall be the harbingers of the dark fate, And then shall come the living dead, the progeny, The thirsting ones, the forever damned, And the galaxy shall run red as the blood of Eldanesh.
Ishandruir, pages 1-2 of 3, Farseer Lsathranil, Ulthwe
“There is more,” explained Ptolemea, her exhausted features running with perspiration as she looked up at Gabriel, framed in the cell’s doorway once again. “We have not yet had time to tackle the last page.”
“This is more than enough, Sister Ptolemea,” said Gabriel, nodding gravely. “We must take this information to Father Jonas, and see what he makes of it.”
Weakened and dazed by her spell of detention and intense concentration, Ptolemea was unsteady on her feet in the flood of light, and Gabriel supported much of her weight against his arm. As they stood uneasily in the doorway, Flaetriu jumped up and dashed towards the exit. In stark contrast to the gingerly, fragile motion of Ptolemea, his sudden movements were smooth and fleet, and he took them both by surprise.
Gabriel was his match. In a flash of glittering red, the captain’s powerful arm shot out to the side, punching his fist into the stone doorframe and blocking the eldar’s escape route. His other arm still supported the swaying figure of Ptolemea.
Flaetriu slid, changing his pace and ducking down, trying to slide his slim figure under the sudden barrier, but Gabriel dropped his fist, bringing his arm crashing down on the eldar’s head as the ranger tried to slip underneath it.
“I don’t think so,” he said, as Flaetriu slumped to the ground under the blow.
With his other arm still holding Ptolemea, Gabriel reached down and wrapped his hand in the dazed creature’s long, thick hair. He tugged the ranger into the air, holding it suspended from its scalp. Then, without regard or effort, he flung the creature back into the cell, watching it smack into the back wall and bounce off onto the floor, where it lay motionless and dejected.
[Dawn of War 02] - Ascension Page 23