by Gav Thorpe
Harahel was not surprised to see that the most closed thoughts of all belonged to Asmodai, the Master of Repentance. His mind was a steel shell of utter conviction. Only the tiniest glimmer of his soul shone through the defences, brutally and efficiently stifled by centuries of practice and a natural closed-mindedness that Harahel found remarkable. Had the Emperor encountered Asmodai ten thousand years ago when he was perfecting the gene-seed of the Dark Angels, it was possible that all Space Marines might have ended up with such single-minded zealotry.
That free thought was still possible for the Adeptus Astartes was evident from the roiling display of Sapphon’s emotions. They pulsed green and blue and red, almost at random, the sign of an active, creative mind at work. Sapphon’s soul was well protected, like the others, but his thoughts were quite readable. Currently the Master of Sanctity was thinking it strange that such a ceremony should be conducted in the light, when so many of the Dark Angels’ inner mysteries took place in darkened chambers.
While Harahel’s mind-sight regarded his companions, his regular senses took in other features of the room: the scent of the candles mixed with a hint of oil and a touch of rust; the heat of the other Space Marines and the flickering flames that lit them; the creak and murmur of the starship’s bulkheads and decks; the undercurrent of the plasma engines throbbing through the vessel from aft to prow.
He allowed it all to become one, merging physical and psychic as he closed his eyes. As his eyelids descended, the two worlds – the real universe and the warp-echoes – became as one in his thoughts, so that even though he no longer looked upon the chamber with his physical sight he was well aware of what transpired around him.
Harahel placed his hands in his lap and allowed the psychic power to flow. He could sense the apprehension of the others increase as they noticed flickering light from beneath his eyelids. The Librarian rested his head against the back of his chair and exhaled smoothly, pushing away the last of the trepidation he had felt when he had proposed the ceremony. Any warp-delving was risky, and in this place, so close to the Eye of Terror, the risks were greater than usual. But Harahel was strong and had trained for three hundred years. He was ready.
The Librarian was about to release his mind into the warp, but disturbances close at hand held him back. The thoughts of the others, so disparate, so at odds, made this initial navigation harder. Harahel needed to smooth their troubled emotions before he could perform the transition.
Sapphon was considering the nature of psykers and daemons, wondering if the reason they were so terrible was because they interacted directly with unconscious senses of the soul. He was not far from the truth, as Harahel saw such things, but now was not the time for such speculations. Thinking about the warp and its inhabitants stirred the stuff of the empyrean in a cyclic effect, so that it gained power even from idle speculation.
‘Do not fear for my soul, Brother Sapphon,’ Harahel said quietly. ‘Every hour you spend reciting the hymnals and catechisms of the Chapter, I spend hardening my spirit against temptation and possession.’
At the mention of such things Asmodai, standing to Sapphon’s right, shifted his weight, perturbed. The steel of his mind became a dagger, flames of righteousness flaring along its length, directed towards the Librarian. A single thought blazed so strong the psyker could not avoid it: If Harahel shows the slightest sign of possession I shall kill him.
A smile crept onto Harahel’s lips.
‘Please, Brother Asmodai, draw your pistol if it would make you feel more comfortable. I assure you, the wards are intact. The only person at risk is me.’
Regardless of the assurance offered by the Librarian, Asmodai drew his bolt pistol and aimed it at Harahel’s head.
‘Do not be too quick to use your weapon, brother, for there may be strange occurrences that are simply part of my delving into the warp.’
‘You seek to send your soul to a world upon the edge of the Eye of Terror,’ said Asmodai, his aim unwavering. ‘I will take any precaution I feel necessary.’
‘As you see fit, brother. Now I must beg silence, and to assist me it would be beneficial if you all focused on a particular thing, to stop the turbulence caused by your disparate thoughts as I enter the immaterium.’
‘The Canticles of Nazeus?’ suggested Sapphon. He received a nod in reply.
The Master of Sanctity began the invocation and the others joined in after a few seconds. Their combined voices rose and fell as they chanted, the sound shaped by the chamber, fading into the distance as Harahel prepared again to let go of his conscious thoughts. The Librarian was silent and still, withdrawing from his body, entering a trance so that his soul, or a portion of it, might lift his thoughts from their physical vessel to the turbulent eddies of the immaterium.
The chanting, the focus on the hymnal to the exclusion of other thoughts, stilled the ripples and echoes that had been disturbing Harahel’s concentration.
‘Sanctus Imperator protectorum,’ the Librarian whispered. ‘Be free.’
There was a feeling of detachment as his spirit lifted away from his mortal form. Always he was connected to the warp and the physical, a conduit for the unreal to enter the real, but with practised precision Harahel slipped away from himself like a ship departing its mooring.
Heat, light, sound, all worldly sensation dropped away from his awareness. Instead the weft and weave of the empyrean, the warp-sound and psychic thrum that he usually relegated to background noise became central to his universe. The real faded and the unreal solidified, still connected but transposed within his mind.
All around the Librarian was the tumult of the warp, but here, in the immediate space around him, was a calm pool, soothed by the devotional intoned by his brethren. They knew nothing of the effect it had, but the benefit remained.
Harahel tugged himself free of his body, loosing part of his consciousness onto the waves of the empyrean, allowing the pressure of the warp to carry him a short distance from the mortal host of his mind. He turned, not literally but in focus, to see his body sitting in the chair, surrounded by the wards and his battle-brothers. A trail like a golden cable snaked back to his body, tethering soul to flesh. It too was a construct of many years’ training, allowing him to find his way back to his mortal shell.
Pulling back, Harahel watched the starship dropping away, deck by deck, until he saw it from outside, floating like a bubble on a stream, encased within the shimmer of its Geller field. A pulsing, irregular and powerful, drew his attention away from the warship and he focused on the source.
Distance was physically meaningless in the warp, but his brain could not cope with a dimensionless state, no matter his training. It was impossible to shape thoughts without a sense of up and down, near and far, in and out.
The pulsing came from somewhere close by, in galactic terms at least. A storm swirled on the edge of Harahel’s perception, both sucking in all things like a vortex whilst simultaneously spewing forth tides and currents of warp power.
The Eye of Terror.
The greatest warp storm in the galaxy, so huge it covered dozens of light years of real space, an overlap between realms where material and immaterial were interchangeable. In the real universe it was perceived as a pulsing purple or red orb in the heavens, but from the warp the Eye of Terror looked less like an abyssal gulf and more like a deep window onto stars and planets, nebulae and comets that all glittered with energy.
The Eye of Terror fluctuated constantly, and in its heaving Harahel could see that which existed between worlds, neither warp nor real, giving glimpses of the realms of the Chaos Gods. Such sights would drive lesser men insane, unable to interpret the swirling energies and tempestuous eddies. The training of the Librarius allowed Harahel to impose order onto the disorder, in a limited fashion, contorting his senses to imagine towering iron fortresses, tides of crystal waves, gleaming mirrorscapes and rotting forests.
/> He was dimly aware of his body reacting back on the starship. Out of instinct he narrated his journey, passing on what he experienced to the others. It required no more effort of thought than to keep his hearts beating and his lungs filling, a genuine stream of consciousness.
‘Boundaries falling, walls breaking, the tumble of worlds and civilisations,’ muttered Harahel, his lips barely moving. His eyes continued to move, as though in recognition or mockery of the warp-visions conjured by his othersense.
The power of the Eye of Terror was all-consuming. The Librarian felt it drawing him, pulling him into the maelstrom at its heart with irresistible force. Harahel was nothing but a mote on a raging ocean and his golden tether spooled out behind him like a lifeline connected to a warrior ejected into the vacuum of space.
Faster and faster he was pulled towards the inevitable crushing forces that raged through the Eye of Terror, and though Harahel diverted every thought and effort to fighting the inward tide there was nothing to stop his descent to the bottom of the opening pit of darkness.
He tried to make the tether go tight, to turn it into a golden rod that would hold him in place, but the force from the Eye of Terror was too strong. He felt the attention of intelligences vaster than any living creature, save perhaps the Emperor Himself. They momentarily regarded him in the same way one might notice a fleck of dust settling nearby. Harahel feared for a moment that one of those malign consciousnesses might reach out and examine the speck in more detail, or perhaps flick it away without a thought, but the sensation passed and he remained alone and adrift on the flooding power of the warp storm.
Ulthor was located upon the very edge of this insane landscape, and to learn more Harahel knew he would have to venture into the unpredictable fronds of energy that licked about the outskirts of the Eye of Terror. His mental tether, the golden thread of his life, held firm, but he had no way to navigate. He had been turned inside-out, upside-down and back-to-front, and was so caught in the raging torrents that characterised the Eye of Terror that he was no longer sure how he could forge his way back to the others.
And then he glimpsed a solitary silver star.
He knew exactly what it was, and let his soul reach out towards it, latching on to its light as a drowning man seizes upon the lifebelt thrown to him. As he let the silver gleam fall upon him, Harahel was invigorated, filled by strength and warmth and a sense of belonging. The glow from the star melted through the raw Chaos, turning aside storm and wave, calming the warp around the Librarian even as it calmed his racing thoughts.
The beacon held true against all the buffeting of the Eye of Terror, strong and unwavering even here near the heart of the pulsing flow of energy. More than a beacon, it was a rock upon which to settle for a moment, a bridge to cross, a fortress against the madness and uncertainty.
The Astronomican.
The Guiding Light.
The Soul of the Emperor.
Harahel murmured his relief.
‘The barrier sweeps aside, revealing the light beyond, the silvery path.’
Empowered by the grace of the Emperor’s light, Harahel turned his attention to locating the world of Ulthor, hidden within the fronds of warp energy leaking from the Eye of Terror. He drew upon his psychic strength to manifest a form within the warp, as a daemon might create a false vessel in real space. Fuelled by the light of the Astronomican, Harahel appeared as a knight of silver and white fire, blazing with the cold purity of his cause. In his hands he held a blade of dark green edged with pale flames, the crosspiece fashioned with splayed wings to match the Chapter symbol emblazoned on the chest plate of his immaterial armour. A cloak of deep blue hung from his shoulders, the colour of the Librarius.
Back on the Dark Angels ship, the Librarian’s body straightened on the chair, his power armour whining with movement, limbs trembling slightly as his muscles became rigid for a moment. He relaxed again, frown softening, mouth opening with a gasp.
Fully formed, Harahel’s immaterial avatar delved into the rifts of the warp, racing for the fringes of the Eye of Terror. The silver light of the Astronomican was left glittering in his wake.
Time flowed in curves and circles, passing and not passing in relation to real space, so it might have been a fraction of a moment or a thousand years before Harahel caught sight of that which he sought. On the very edges of the Eye of Terror stood a huge edifice, part crumbling cliff face, part immense stone tower, cracked and overgrown. A palpable miasma of decay surrounded the decrepit structure, a dark cloud that stained the warp and real universe in equal measure.
As the cloud parted for an instant, split by some random eddy of the warp, Harahel saw that the crumbling, monolithic keep was itself dwarfed by a far greater expanse. It was nothing more than an outhouse to a truly dread-inspiring mansion with a thousand broken-glass windows and countless sagging, cracked roofs. The tower of Ulthor lay in the shadow of the titanic manse, enveloped whole by the darkness and corruption spilling from great rifts and blasted holes in the structure of the mightier building. Harahel flinched, taken aback by the monstrous apparition, but the vision passed, swallowed by the warp currents a moment later, leaving Ulthor standing like a bony, upthrust finger surrounded by yellowing mists.
Still the silver star of the Astronomican shone overhead.
‘On the border it stands, neither here nor there, real and yet unreal. Claimed but still free, the world of decay, a blossom in the dead garden. Upon the brink of hope and despair it stands. Death and rebirth, the spiral of decline, until nothingness…’
His words brought reaction from the mortal realm, vague and distant.
‘He is losing his mind,’ he heard Asmodai say. ‘Or something is taking it!’
‘Hold your fire and your tongue,’ said Sammael. The Chaplain laid a hand on his companion’s bolt pistol. Asmodai’s annoyance at the Grand Master flared like a plume of fire in the warp, but it was met with ice formed from the determined thoughts of Sammael. ‘Do not think your reputation and rank greater than mine, Asmodai. Lower your weapon, Brother-Chaplain.’
‘I cross the border, unseen by the many eyes, and the garden wilts around me,’ whispered Harahel, unheeded by the others.
With reluctance, his ire dimming, Asmodai dropped the bolt pistol to his side. He glared at Sammael and returned his gaze to Harahel.
Harahel could feel the filth of Ulthor trying to leech his power from him. It was simple enough to siphon the rank warp energy into the hexagrammic wards, protecting his soul from corruption. On the starship, the air began to fill with shadows outside the hemisphere created by the warding signs.
Harahel moved his warp-self closer to Ulthor. He found that he could not approach the tower directly, but was forced to alight in a vast overgrown garden that clustered about the broken rocks at the bottom of the immense cliff.
As he explored, the Librarian allowed what he encountered to filter through his thoughts, shaping the shadows and light into representations of his warpsight. He could project visual images, but these were a flat caricature of what he felt coursing through his warp-self.
The garden was grown upon a foundation of misery and hopelessness. The twisted, stunted trees delved deep into the soil of despair, drawing up sustenance from broken dreams and shattered hope. As Harahel’s feet sank into the mire he could feel the leeching effect trying to suck away his resolution, but he was able to resist the melancholy draining, the ground hardening beneath his tread as white fire burned the tainted mulch.
The air was thick with buzzing flies and the boles of the trees were rampant with many-legged creatures of all descriptions. They jumped about the sagging branches and leaves and regarded the intruder with glittering, multi-faceted eyes. Fungal growths vomited spores as Harahel passed, while microbes consumed everything with slow decay.
A fog of sadness laid droplets upon the foliage like the tears of the lost and abandoned. The s
ultry rustle of the leaves was filled with murmuring laments, of loves past and opportunities squandered. From the mulch underfoot jutted stones that would trip the unwary, jagged rocks upon which ambition was broken and pride bruised. Low-hanging vines moved like serpents, ready to catch the unwary in the grip of self-pity. Arachnids with pale and bloated bodies spun webs of self-doubt between the tree limbs, the souls of the damned writhing within, wrapped more and more with loathing and despair as they struggled against the vile threads.
But not all was dismal. There were bright fronds and blossoms of rainbow hue hiding in the gloom. Caterpillars with striking tiger stripes and neon hairs gambolled amongst ruddy petals and nestled in leopard-spot cocoons, from which burst forth bulbous moths with death’s head wings.
Here and there a chink in the canopy allowed a precious ray of light to fall upon the forest floor. In the fitful gleam of this nourishment, fragile flowers of hope pushed their way clear of the rotting carpet of insect corpses and leaves.
Yet the garish colours and joyous patterns could not hide the true nature of this place. By such phantasmal attractions were the unwary lured into despair.
The moment of freshness and clarity following recovery from a long sickness.
The joy of seeing a loved one after prolonged absence.
The swell of pride and fulfilment at the birth of a child.
These were snares of the emotions, moments of weakness to be exploited, for only those truly accepting of the eternal pain of existence and the inevitable corruption within were proofed against the heartbreak of disappointment and setback.
Not in endless drudgery, the thankless toil of everyday existence, was the Lord of Decay present, for in monotony was a base sort of comfort. It was the high notes, the tantalising promise of better, the scattered moments of elation, that were the cruellest weapons, for they set the mundane and pointless into stark contrast and plunged the soul into true despair. For every speck of light and colour, the forest and shadows seemed all the darker and more forbidding.