by Gav Thorpe
The mites of decay were on his heels, scrabbling and grasping, threatening to trip him. Harahel knew he had to stay upright. If he fell he would be engulfed by the daemonic creatures, cut off from the silvery light that yet remained his guiding star.
Broken nails scratched at his armour and tugged at his cloak. Chitters and sniggers followed him, just a step behind. Harahel sensed the overwhelming nature of the foe behind him, but he could not stop himself from turning to see the extent of the threat.
The carpet of daemon-things stretched far and wide, in places forming hummocks as scores of the plague-mites scrambled over each other to get at him. He needed just a little more time to probe the secrets of Ulthor.
Drawing a silver blade, he carved a flaming furrow into the mass of daemons, bursting their bodies with concentrated waves of loathing and disgust. He formed his hatred for the creatures into bolts of fire that leapt from his eyes, and as he did so he stretched the rest of his thoughts into the tower, trying to hunt down its secrets.
‘The pods, all in a row, dangling from the tree of death like the hangman’s fruit.’ Harahel’s body was feverish now, skin ashen, limbs twitching like a palsy victim.
On the surface, gun towers and fortifications of rusted metal jutted from the ground like broken teeth. The fortress spread like a cancer, infused with the will of the Death Guard, raised by mortal servants and daemonic conjuration given form as shuffling mobs of mindless vassals. He pulsed a warning back to his companions in the only way he could.
‘Little skins of metal, peeling back, revealing the maggot within the womb. The thorns drip with blood, coiling about the city, snaring all that will enter.’
A ring of white fire exploded outwards from his knightly form, incinerating the decay-daemons by the thousands, leaving him in a charred circle, unmolested for a few moments. The curtain protecting the innards of the city parted. Harahel did not hesitate, but plunged in, throwing his soul into the breach to see what lay concealed behind the tower walls.
Something stirred in the heart of the city, swollen and monstrous, yet in its centre Harahel saw something else – a window back into the reality of the material universe. He thought he recognised the stars somehow, a vision of a system imprinted on his memory but one he had never visited in his long years of service. The shattered ruin of a world slowly orbited the star, a billion chunks of rock and vacuum-scoured ice. Now and then he glimpsed something impossible: the evidence of human artifice. The face of a statue, the broken remnants of a wall, a piece of power armour or bolter.
Harahel could not shake the feeling of familiarity as he spied the remnants of a window spinning through the ruin, the glass stained with green in the shape of a white wing.
This was the warp and he knew that what he saw was not real – not a physical place but an idea. These were symbols, not literal objects, but Harahel could not decipher their meaning. He tried to take in as much as possible, staring into the open abyss in the hope of seeing something that would decode the message.
This train of thought took him to another level of understanding. A message, perhaps? An astrotelepathic projection? If it was an astropath’s missive, it carried none of the usual markers and templates. But then, what was one to expect this close to the Eye of Terror? The message could be from ten thousand years in the past, or even the future, it was impossible to say.
Rather than trying to riddle the source, Harahel concentrated on absorbing all of the elements, so that he might deconstruct its meaning at leisure once he was back in his body.
It seemed to him that somehow the massive inhabitant of Ulthor was communicating with something else, outside the Eye of Terror. But that didn’t strike the Librarian as quite right. The hole opening up between the real and unreal was a conduit, formed of a mass, a singular entity.
The thing in Ulthor and whatever it was communicating with, or had communicated with, or would communicate with, were one and the same in some fashion.
Hidden deep amongst the asteroids was something else, a part of the beast that lurked in Ulthor. Just as the shining knight was Harahel’s presence in the warp, the daemon-thing of Ulthor had a guise in the real world. A perfect matt-grey sphere amidst a cluster of asteroids glinted against the starry void.
He saw prison bars falling away and felt a surge of release. Something longed to escape the warp. Something that had already imparted a piece of its essence into the material world but had been thwarted in the past. Was the time coming when it would escape completely? The thought filled Harahel with foreboding, a sinister sensation far deeper than simple horror. The scene foreshadowed an event of great importance, and he had been fortunate to have glimpsed this warning. His psychic sense was like a shrill alarm, telling him that great disaster was about to befall his brethren.
He knew this place but he could not bring himself to believe the truth of it. The time had come to leave, so that he could take what he had seen to the others. He had not been able to project the vision-within-a-vision, so he would have to tell them first-hand of the connection between Ulthor and the broken world.
The window closed as the city-beast sensed Harahel’s presence. Like a blast door closing, the vision disappeared, unreality slamming down into the Librarian’s psychic view. Lashing out with rage, Ulthor’s unnatural ruler summoned forth the daemons of despair and decay and within moments Harahel was surrounded by a horde of grotesque apparitions.
They fell upon him without a sound, and though he lashed out with his flaming blade, he was soon overwhelmed as more and more of the daemons piled onto him. For every cyclopean creature he cut down, two took its place. For every handful of bulbous mites he destroyed, a welter of fresh daemons surged into the breach. The ground itself, once obedient to his will, now rebelled. The mire started to bubble up around his feet again, becoming softer and softer with every passing heartbeat.
Finding himself up to his thighs in the marsh, Harahel’s movements were woefully hampered. He twisted to look at the Ulthor tower but couldn’t see it properly, as though it was somehow deliberately avoiding his gaze.
He looked up, hoping for a glimpse of the silver star, but nothing but black clouds filled the heavens. With a choked cry Harahel realised that he was cut off.
Outnumbered and engulfed, he was borne down to the ground, which opened up beneath him like a grave.
He felt maggots latching onto him, gnawing at his psychic body, burrowing and prying at his armour, peeling away his defences even as the other daemons battered and tore with their fists and claws and prised at the joints of his armour with rusted blades and broken horns.
Their touch withered him. Armour became rust and flaked away. Skin slewed from flesh, and flesh rotted to the bone. Bone became dust as the convulsing earth of the grave consumed him. Only the core of his soul remained, guarded by the precious silver light of the Emperor, an impenetrable shield of faith and determination forged over decades of inculcation into the defensive rites.
A worm slid into the remnants of a decaying eye, slipping along the optic nerve into the meat of his brain. Others followed, passing along neural pathways, slithering and sliding between synapses, seeking a route into his mind, taking control of the flesh.
They heard what he heard, saw what he saw. He had sought to spy on them, and now they looked to turn his own body against him, to wield it as a weapon against the Dark Angels.
‘The city, Harahel, what of the city?’ asked Sammael, eyes flicking between Asmodai and the Librarian. ‘Think of the city.’
Ulthor was just a memory now. It collapsed into nothing in his thoughts, flowing over him like a sandstorm, blowing away the last vestiges of his psychic construct. Yet it was also still there, impermeable, eternal, made not of brick and mortar but hopelessness and woe.
‘The majesty of decay, towering and fallen, standing solid upon the shifting sands.’
He reached out to the hidd
en silver star, a prayer in his thoughts, seeking the strength of the Emperor to free him from the grip of the foes leeching his will, tunnelling into his thoughts. Across the warp divide he could see back aboard the starship and felt something else looking through his eyes as more worms dug into his flesh.
He had to get back, but for the moment he was no longer in control.
Suddenly the Librarian stood up, knocking the chair to the ground. He noticed Sapphon feeling a moment of dread as Harahel opened his eyelids, revealing milky-white corpse eyes. A rope of saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth.
Harahel saw Asmodai raise his pistol and silently thanked the Emperor for the Chaplain’s unflinching dedication to duty. He wanted to tell Asmodai to shoot, but his lips were no longer his own, his tongue a limp slug rotting behind his teeth. He wanted to beg the Chaplain to fire, to end the life of his mortal form, to cut the golden thread that linked soul to physical body, a golden thread that was now the route of intrusion used by the daemons.
The worms were now burning at the silvery light of his last defences, etching a path like acid on metal, while their companions slinked down through sinew and vein, energising muscle and organ with warp energy. They were preparing the body for full possession, infusing it with their own power so that they could reshape it at a whim.
‘No!’ shouted Sammael, tackling Asmodai to the floor.
Harahel’s body was becoming a portal. Their control was not yet absolute. If he wanted to resist physically he had to extend his will from beyond the moat of pure energy that kept the daemons at bay. Better to die body and soul than surrender the physical and spend an eternity trapped inside his own thoughts, impotent and ashamed.
He allowed a sliver of his mind to extend back into the real universe, burning along the golden thread of his existence.
‘They are here!’ snarled Harahel.
Sapphon drew his pistol while Asmodai wrestled himself free from the grip of Sammael. The Master of Sanctity aimed at the Librarian’s left eye, knowing the shot would punch through into the pysker’s brain and slay him in an instant, cutting off the conduit for whatever was trying to use his soul as a bridge into the mortal world.
He was about to pull the trigger when Harahel collapsed with a shriek.
Harahel looked at Sapphon, trying to plead with his eyes, urging him to shoot as he had urged Asmodai to shoot,
There was nothing left. The daemons possessed his form to the innermost fibre and smallest atom. It was just a shell for their power, a puppet whose strings had been taken from the Librarian. He tried to wrest control again, opening up more of his thoughts to the psychic assault of the daemons in return for just a few seconds of corporeal influence.
Their response was instantaneous and agonising. Shards of vital pain coursed through Harahel, and he fainted, relinquishing even consciousness for a moment.
The Librarian lay still, face down. The light flowed back from his body to the candles and the strange shadows faded back to normal. The lead symbols of the floor had turned to indistinct blobs, sizzling, spitting and steaming as though on a hot plate.
Sanity and sensation returned, but it was with despair that Harahel saw what had happened. Only the most slender thread of energy connected him to his body, overwhelmed by formless slime and writhing maggots. He was a silent, inconsequential witness to his own actions.
Harahel pushed himself slowly to all fours and looked at his companions. Trickles of blood marked him from ears, nostrils and eyes, quickly drying and clotting on pallid skin. Sapphon looked into the Librarian’s eyes, dark brown with disappearing flecks of gold, and saw the warrior he knew looking back. Asmodai was not yet convinced, his pistol once again aimed at Harahel.
Harahel screamed, but the scream was voiceless. He could see the tiny flickers of warplight that were the souls of his brethren and he wanted to touch them. An instant of connection, a moment of intuition, to urge them to kill the thing that was waking before them.
He had no strength left. All that remained – his body, his thoughts, even his memories – now belonged to the daemonkin. The Librarian had no power to throw his warning into the mind of another, no energy to spark revulsion or suspicion with a glance.
‘What are the three Abjurations of Assiah?’ demanded the Chaplain.
The daemons plucked the knowledge from Harahel’s brain. His tutelage by the Chaplains, session after session in the Reclusiam alone and with the other initiates, flashed through his existence. He could not stop the words rising unbidden to his thoughts, and from there the daemons carried them to his lifeless lips.
‘Despise the mutant, abhor the heretic, loathe the alien,’ Harahel replied, voice hoarse.
Despair. It was total, enveloping Harahel with its darkness. The Lord of Decay had known this would happen from the moment Harahel had parted the veil of the warp and looked upon the entropic garden. It was folly, arrogance, to believe that anyone could escape the clutches of the immortal destroyer.
Not even a Librarian of the Adeptus Astartes, one of the most highly-trained psykers birthed by humanity, could resist the slow turning of the aeons. Naive pride had sent him into the empyrean realm, hoping to undo the plans of the Lord of Decay’s mortal followers. This had provided a gateway for the daemons, and through misguided intent Harahel had doomed his companions and the others aboard their starship. Lies would bring them into the warp and there they would be consumed.
If Harahel had possessed a body he would have convulsed with weeping, torn apart by the grief of what he had done. Total, all-devouring despair tore ribbons from his mind, casting out sanity like streamers of thought that dissipated on the waves of the empyrean.
‘And name the six principal Lords of the Keys,’ Asmodai insisted, the muzzle of his pistol following Harahel’s head as the Librarian righted the chair and, with much wincing and grunting, forced himself upright.
Again the daemons delved into his brain, bringing back the scent of freshly lacquered wood, the droning of Chaplaincy epistles, the growl of his masters prowling along the benches ready to exact retribution for one misspoken word, one heartbeat of hesitation in intonation.
Harahel lunged at a memory, frantically latching on to it, trying with all his strength to stop it surfacing but the daemons pried it from his grasp and traitorous lips spoke the words.
‘Nessiad, Direstes, Thereoux, Mannael, Dubeus and…’
With one last agonising effort Harahel reached out, blossoming like a flower, revealing everything to his core as he grasped the silver star, letting it burn through him. He could not destroy the daemons, but he could hold them at bay.
For what seemed like an eternity he drove them back, feeling their teeth and barbs tear at his soul. Every effort to purge himself inflicted more pain and misery upon body and spirit. In the real world less than a heartbeat passed, but for Harahel it was an immortal age of mind-shredding agony as he made himself a conduit for the power of the Emperor, turning his psychic-self into a pyre, the flames igniting the energy of the daemons.
They scrambled to fight him, to blot out the silver fire with their darkness, to expunge flame with grotesque slime. In the moment of conflict Harahel stopped fighting. Rather than striving to regain control, Harahel withdrew from himself, for an instant forcing the daemonic presence to reveal itself.
For a brief moment the silver fire consumed Harahel, cowing the daemons. He wrested control of his body.
The Librarian hesitated, a twitch in his eye. ‘And…’
Asmodai fired.
The bolt took off the side of Harahel’s skull, ripping through the intricate wiring of the psychic hood, spattering gore across the rune circle.
Harahel watched his body dying, the slow ebb of life from heart and lungs. He was satisfied. The daemons fled the falling corpse and the empty shell of his mortal self crashed to the deck.
For a moment m
ore his soul lingered in the warp, surrounded by the vengeful, ravenous daemons. The Librarian felt no fear. Sanctuary was close at hand, for his mind was a fortress once more, if only for an instant. Not for him a mindless eternity awash upon the tides of the warp, a mote in the whorl of greater beings.
The silver fire of the Astronomican consumed the last of him, turning the last vestiges of his soul to a flicker of fire that was absorbed by the greater light.
And then Harahel was no more.
About The Author
Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Deliverance Lost, as well as the novellas Corax: Soulforge, Ravenlord and The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs. He is particularly well-known for his Dark Angels stories, including the Legacy of Caliban series. His Warhammer 40,000 repertoire further includes the Path of the Eldar series, the Horus Heresy audio dramas Raven’s Flight, Honour to the Dead and Raptor, and a multiplicity of short stories. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Time of Legends trilogy, The Sundering, and much more besides. He lives and works in Nottingham.
An extract from Ravenwing.
How did the Lion die?
It was a simple question, innocently asked, and Brother Annael had wondered why, in over four hundred years of service to the Dark Angels Chapter, it had not occurred to him before. It was the question that had propelled him from an assault squad in the Fifth Company to the ranks of the Second Company, the lauded Ravenwing, and that was when he had found out the truth.