by Ben Counter
The being that formed in the centre of the zone of destruction hovered above the tallest spire, and its body was composed of darkness. It had no fixed shape, its only definite feature the crescent of three eyes that burned in its heart. Tendrils of it, composed of torn and compacted metal, dragged it along above the spires. Hyalhi did not have to picture the geography of Borsis to know where it was headed.
What followed had to be remembered as well. Hyalhi turned his consciousness this time outside his body, riding the ripples growing in the warp from the impact of the being erupting from its prison. He could see Borsis unfolding beneath him, the endless steel canyons and metal spires rushing past. The Astral Knights had fought across much of the planet’s surface but now he saw, from his high psychic vantage point, great palaces and monuments the Astral Knights had not seen. It was the work of endless millennia, the labour of countless scarabs and worker-constructs devoted to deifying their nobles.
The entity roared up ahead, shredding the spiretops as it passed and absorbing the fragments of matter that flew up into its swirling mass. Limbs formed and reformed as it hauled itself along, and pulses of raw, alien hatred battered against the surface of Hyalhi’s mind. It was not a human emotion, for there was nothing human about this being, but it was unmistakably hatred.
The entity crossed into the Labyrinth Wastes. It passed over columns of warrior-constructs arriving to join the final stages of the battle, and those that could feel dismay felt it now as the great darkness bellowed and stormed overhead.
Smoke and flames licked up from the Cathedral of the Seven Moons. Parts of it were ablaze. A force of Astral Knights had made it inside and destroyed one of the defence gun batteries, blowing up the power coils and sending gauss fire flooding through the cathedral. But the damage, while appalling, had been barely noticeable against the scale of the building itself.
Outside the gates, hundreds of Astral Knights lay dead. They had engaged the bulk of Hyalhi’s defenders in open battle, shattering great phalanxes of warrior-constructs and bringing down dozens of triarch stalkers and enthroned nobles. There the bodies lay thickest, among them the banner of the Ninth Company that lay across the charred body of Captain Khabyar and his command squad.
The final Astral Knights alive in the battle for the Cathedral of the Seven Moons were fighting inside the main gates where they had forced their way in. The guardians from the Temple of Heretics had pursued them and even as the darkness passed over the ruination of the battlefield the Astral Knights were firing off the last of their bolter shells. They fought back to back in the forest of statues and shrines dedicated to ancient necrontyr, their blood spattered across the faces of past overlords from a dozen necron dynasties. The temple guardians closed the last few steps and laid into them with their halberds, power fields shearing through armour. The Battle for the Cathedral of the Seven Moons was over.
Silver and gold glittered as Overlord Heqiroth and his lychguard retinue arrived on the battlements. The darkness bore over them as the moon that passed closest to it was torn apart and absorbed into its body. Heqiroth took one look at the approaching entity and the silvery necrodermis swarmed over his body in a protective shroud.
An arm of compacted debris swept the lychguard off the wall. They tumbled down the side of the cathedral along with tonnes of shattered battlement. The darkness loomed closer and the necrodermis squirmed off Heqiroth’s body as if of its own accord, drawn off in ductile streamers into the swirling blackness.
The entity wove the necrodermis around it into the form of the star-god the necrons had first beseeched, then worshipped, then destroyed. Even this single shard of it was terrifying to see taking shape – it was like a deity of destruction and calamity from some long-forgotten human religion, crowned with three burning eyes, its enormous form clad in liquid metal.
Hyalhi did not know the necron language in which Heqiroth spoke to Yggra’nya the Worldmaker, the c’tan imprisoned in the heart of Borsis to power it and guide it towards Mars. It was not a tongue that even needed sound, transmitted in pure information. But Hyalhi could guess it involved pleading, perhaps bargaining, Heqiroth offering lordship of Borsis, every necron under his command, everything he could possibly give in return for being permitted to continue existing.
And Hyalhi knew the reply, too. You betrayed us, Yggra’nya would be saying. You imprisoned us. You enslaved us to this mad plan to journey to Mars.
Heqiroth held up the tesseract in which he had imprisoned and then recaptured Turakhin, no doubt trying to persuade the c’tan that its enslavement had been Turakhin’s doing. Yggra’nya snatched the tesseract and it dissolved in its hand, consumed by a purple-black fire, and with it the last glimmer of Turakhin’s existence. But it was not enough.
You, Turakhin, all that came before, you are all the same. Hyalhi could almost hear the star-god’s words and their meaning could not be in doubt. The whole necron race is our enemy. Now I am free, and you will all be punished.
It gave Hyalhi some measure of satisfaction to see Overlord Heqiroth lifted off the battlements and dissected, piece by piece, by the will of Yggra’nya. Each section peeled and lifted away, gradually reducing the overlord to a spindly metal skeleton that squirmed in pain, if necrons could feel it. That, too, was dissolved away until only a glimmering speck of consciousness sat in Yggra’nya’s palm. Then the c’tan closed its fist and Heqiroth, too, was annihilated.
Yggra’nya raised its arms as if making a sacred pronouncement. The substance of the Cathedral of the Seven Moons came apart and reformed above it, an endless torrent of shattered metal forming great rings that orbited the star-god. Then they became gigantic blades that Yggra’nya stabbed into the surface of Borsis, driving them deep down through the crust of the world it had once built in an earlier age of the galaxy.
Yggra’nya dived into the fissure it had opened up. Hyalhi could feel it ripping through the planet, dissolving everything in front of it like a blowtorch through flesh. It tore through the vast power sources that drove Borsis, through the chambers where warrior-constructs were assembled and repaired, through the necropoli of long-forgotten dynasties and the vaults full of war machines and spacecraft. It shrieked through the core of the planet and looped around again, riddling Borsis with molten destruction in its rage.
The sky changed from a grey mantle of cloud to a patchwork of light and dark as the cover was blown away. Hyalhi knew what that meant. With the destruction of the generators and reactors at Borsis’s core, the shielding around the planet was failing. Whereas before Borsis had been impervious to the torpedoes and lance batteries of the Varv Deliverance Fleet, now its surface was laid naked and open. Hyalhi realised he had been holding his breath, for now he breathed it out in relief.
The lightning rail continued to function until it reached the site of the Tempestus’s wreck. The great scar in the cityscape still burned. The bodies of the Astral Knights thrown clear in the impact still lay among the rubble as Hyalhi picked his way carefully through the destruction towards the aft portion of the ship. He felt the ground shudder beneath his feet as Yggra’nya completed its murder of Borsis, and hoped he still had time.
The aft section of the Tempestus was badly mangled, but enough remained of the service decks for Hyalhi to make his way through towards the deck he needed. His wounds were catching up with him, as if with the Astral Knights mission complete he had given his body subconscious permission to break down. By the time he reached the banks of saviour pods, unused by the ship’s crew and the Astral Knights, he was barely able to walk.
Each saviour pod could hold a dozen men, and was equipped to keep them alive for a month drifting in the void. Hyalhi did not need to be sustained that long. He did not need to be kept alive at all. What counted was the saviour pod’s shielding, designed to protect the passengers from the sudden radiation blast of an imploding plasma reactor.
Hyalhi hauled the door open, feeling more muscl
e tearing inside his chest. He glanced up to see the sky through a breach in the hull. The clouds were being burned away, replaced with constellations very close to those seen from Varvenkast.
Yggra’nya hovered there, its three eyes turned down towards Hyalhi. There was no doubt the star-god could see Hyalhi. He was the last Astral Knight left on Borsis. Perhaps Yggra’nya wanted to pay its respects, though Hyalhi doubted it.
Hyalhi looked up into those burning eyes. Men would have gone mad to see it, but Hyalhi was not afraid.
‘We will find you!’ yelled Hyalhi at the star-god. If it heard him, it gave no reply. It simply shot up into space, the silver streak of its body vanishing into the void.
Hyalhi clambered inside the saviour pod and hauled the heavy door closed. He slumped against the grav-couch and waited.
It did not take long. The saviour pod had no porthole through which Hyalhi could watch, but he felt it, shuddering through the Tempestus and showering the upper hull with avalanches of debris. The Varv Deliverance Fleet was quick about its work.
He heard the torpedoes boring deep into Borsis and the lance batteries raking at its surface. The Exterminatus, the ultimate sanction of planetary destruction, had always been the Inquisition’s only logical response to the threat posed by Borsis. In this case it took the form of the cyclonic torpedoes fired into the tears opened up by the laser batteries, where they would form chain reactions of mass-annihilating detonations, rippling through the substance of the planet back and forth until continent-sized chunks of it were ripped free and the planet flew apart with the force of its own rotation.
Hyalhi had seen it simulated via holomat, and even at such a small scale it had been breathtaking. He had seen it himself, once, from high orbit over a world deemed by the Inquisition so irretrievably riddled with corruption that even the Astral Knights strike teams, who had assassinated the rebel leaders in control of the world, could not turn it back to the path of righteousness. Hyalhi had taken care to file away that memory along with all the others his Chapter had commanded he lock up for safekeeping. Now his mind was crowded with such fragments, his own and those of his battle-brothers.
Hyalhi did not need to survive. Only his head absolutely had to. As long as the brain could be salvaged, everything else was irrelevant. He took comfort in this as the waves of radiation hammered against the saviour pod and the Tempestus was ripped clear of Borsis’s surface. His head was protected by the helmet of his power armour but his body let the radiation in through the tears opened up in the battle with Metzoi’s elites. His organs blistered and shut down. His blood became poison. Even a Space Marine’s constitution could only survive so much.
When his second heart shut down, Hyalhi closed his eyes, and remembered.
Addendum Personal
I gave Medicae Obscurum Kalliam Helvetar a quiet but dignified burial. She had been a part of my retinue for some time and she was respected by her colleagues. I am not one for ceremony. I gave no speech. We joined in prayer and watched her coffin sliding out of the station’s airlock.
We destroy what is most important to us. We have few friends, and when they come along we must be ready to watch them die. We must be ready to order them to complete an autoseance sequence, even though we know full well their hearts will not survive another prolonged contact. Many men could give the order to destroy a world, but far fewer can fulfil what are truly an inquisitor’s most testing duties.
The corpse of Chief Librarian Hyalhi has been packed ready for transport to Obsidia. Those Astral Knights who remain, an honour guard of trainees and veterans who number far too few for the Chapter to ever be rebuilt, will receive it as the sole relic of the Battle of Safehold and the destruction of Borsis. Hyalhi’s was the only corpse recovered, and the wreck of the Tempestus itself is to be towed to a forge world and used in refitting existing battleships of similar marks. When the last of those battle-brothers on Obsidia dies, the Astral Knights will cease to exist.
With the burial of my medicae obscurum my duties in the Varv system are complete and I leave within the hour. My destination shall be the Conclave of Seraphan. The memories collected by Helvetar will form the core of the intelligence I shall present to my fellow inquisitors there, concerning the threat posed by Yggra’nya the Worldmaker. There are men among them better equipped with experience and manpower than I to pursue the star-god, and to destroy it if such a thing is possible. I find myself asking if I would have made the same decision as Amhrad to free Yggra’nya. I cannot be certain what I would have decided, but I do know that Borsis is destroyed and many worlds are saved. Aside from that, I can make no judgement.
One final thought before I set sail for Seraphan and close this journal again. Chief Librarian Hyalhi was the wisest of the Astral Knights, and on one matter concerning the c’tan I know he was correct.
We will find Yggra’nya.
– Lord Inquisitor Quilven Rhaye
about the author
Ben Counter is one of Black Library’s most popular Warhammer 40,000 authors, with two Horus Heresy novels to his name – Galaxy in Flames and Battle for the Abyss. He is the author of the six-volume Soul Drinkers series and The Grey Knights Omnibus. For Space Marine Battles he has written Malodrax, and has turned his attention to the Space Wolves with the novella Arjac Rockfist: Anvil of Fenris and a number of short stories. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.
Collecting the novel Fall of Damnos and the brand new novella Spear of Macragge.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Cover illustration by Leonid Kozienko.
Internal artwork by Alex Boyd, Paul Dainton, Hardy Fowler, Bjorn Hurri,
Nuala Kinrade, Cheol Joo Lee, John Michelbach and Leos NG.
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ISBN: 978-1-78251-848-8
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