by Gav Thorpe
His pace quickens as he nears the source of the gold-shadow aura – a natural cavern that swiftly expands from a branch of the tunnel to his right.
The cave is not large, no more than thirty metres across, and half that in height. The darkness here is almost total, yet shot through with golden sparks that hover on the edge of vision. His breath comes in chill clouds, though until he entered the cave the temperature had slowly increased with each level descended.
He activates the lamp of his war-plate and reveals a circle of eight pillars that rise from floor to ceiling, veins of crystal through them that reflect the yellow beam.
Within the ring of columns, something stirs.
It is the shadow incarnate, an auric gleam at its heart that briefly shines and then dims again as its bulk moves. It does not turn like a living thing but shifts its presence, coiling about itself until a cluster of amber-gem eyes regard him with their inhuman stare.
The soulsong has become a mewling, pleading entreaty full of sorrow and loneliness.
‘Pathetic,’ he growls as he circles the pillars, his bolter levelled at the creature, his combat knife in the other hand. Spare ammunition and grenades salvaged from the others clank and scrape as he paces. ‘You make yourself pitiable? I am a Space Marine of the Dark Angels. I have no pity.’
The thing lashes out at him, materialising a tentacle of darkness about a golden thread that whips between the columns and strikes him on the shoulder. Its touch passes through his armour, leaving a burning welt inside the flesh and bone, a gnawing pain that is as much psychic as physical.
He staggers backwards, the agony in his hearts as much as his shoulder, as though his body is suffused with the manifested disappointment and hurt of a spurned child. Swallowing hard, he ducks the next lashing blow, but is not swift enough to avoid a third, which coils about his leg for an instant before evaporating, sending the chill of abandonment and scything wasp stings coursing through his mind and body.
A glancing touch from another tendril caresses his throat, robbing him of his voice. He spits and coughs even as anxiety and an overwhelming need for approval swamp his thoughts. He thinks of his superiors, of the Lion and the Emperor, and knows shame at the thought that he will fail them. The pressure is almost too much, the weight of expectation of ten millennia of Dark Angels ranged upon his shoulders. He is unworthy of the title, dishonouring the name of the Chapter.
But it is surrender to the xenos that would be failure – all other fates, even death, are acceptable.
That shame hardens into anger; the warp-induced despair becomes hatred. The creature has been luring him closer, herding him nearer and nearer to the columns with its lashing blows as though steering a yoked beast with flicks of a whip.
He looks around the chamber and sees the pillars pulsing, flaring into life each time a shadowy appendage passes between them. The floor and ceiling are marked with more crystalline shapes, half-seen but faintly gleaming.
‘This is not your lair,’ he snarls through a fresh surge of pain when another questing tendril slides through his gut. ‘It is your prison! Someone brought you here, wanted to use you, and you killed them. You want to be free? Not here, not in my world. You’ll feed on no more of the Emperor’s servants.’
He opens fire and bolts blaze into the shadow-beast. It reels and squirms, throws more flailing tentacles towards him. He meets them with the edge of the knife, slashing through insubstantial limbs.
The voice of Master Batheus roars in his thoughts, commanding him to lay down his weapons. He hesitates for an instant on instinct, a moment in which the creature renews its assault, leaving lacerations across his cheek and temple with another whip-crack blow.
Having emptied his bolter, he thrusts home another magazine. He fires again, knowing that his shots have little effect. He continues to shoot; the act of fighting invigorates him, gives him purpose and muscle-memory focus even as the warp-beast’s lamentations and urgings drag at his thoughts and try to force his surrender.
Rolling beneath a pair of lashing whips of darkness, his attention is again drawn to the pillars. Where his gaze passes close to one of the stone columns it seems he can see the creature more substantially. The stone is imbued with some peculiar quality, an aura that extends a distance from the surface through which he is looking at the creature’s real form.
He rolls again and fires, testing a theory. The bolt passes close to the pillar and disappears. A moment later a surge of anger and pain rolls out from the inner cave, slapping him aside like a fly, his armour cracking and clattering as he slams into the wall. Something in his leg snaps on landing. Even with the support of his armour and the pain-killing elixirs that flood his veins, he can barely stand.
A rapid succession of tentacles explode between the nearest two columns, striking him across the chest and face. It feels as though his hearts are being ripped out, his brain turning to hot embers at their touch.
‘Not enough,’ he says through gritted teeth. He limps through the next attack, thoughts fixed on the apparition within the pillars. ‘Not nearly enough!’
He reaches the closest column and half falls into it. Resting on one shoulder, shuddering as a tendril slides up and down and through the back of his leg, he pulls an explosive charge from his belt and drives it into the stone.
The assault stops.
In the discombobulating silence that follows, he almost forgets himself. So hard has he been concentrating on forcing back the creature’s thoughts, he almost opens himself up, like a pugilist that overextends and becomes unbalanced. Fresh whimpering and pleading course into his mind, seeking some image, some thought to latch onto that will stir his empathy and compassion.
He laughs and staggers to the next pillar with a fresh explosive in hand.
‘Find only my hate!’
Around the circle he continues, alternately assaulted and cajoled and tempted and caressed by the shadow monster. His leg feels shattered in a thousand places, his ribs a solid mass of pain, his hearts thundering lumps of solid stone in his chest.
He thrusts in the final explosive just as a new sensation sweeps into him, of brotherly concern, of a father’s stern admonishment.
The song becomes a bombastic insistence demanding that he stop, cursing his existence. A moment later warnings and worries assail him. The song is one of fraternal bond again, but it is a lament for both of their deaths and he understands what the creature intends. He looks again at the ceiling and sees the cracks in the rock, the whole chamber held up only by the pillars.
He knows then that he has won. He detonates the charges.
The whole world falls. As the rocks tumble, two pillars form an angle as more and more debris crashes down, spilling to either side in drifts of crushing rock. He throws himself between the toppling columns and slides to a halt beneath the furthest as it falls into its neighbour.
Amongst the tempest of tumbling mine workings he hears a drawn out roar of rage and frustration that eventually diminishes into the rumble of falling rocks.
Crouched between the crumbling pillars, he waits for the assault on his senses to end. For several minutes the ground shakes and the tumult continues, to the point that he wonders if it is not perhaps some fresh attack from the creature, that he has failed to despatch it back to the warp.
The space left is barely large enough for him to spread his elbows and he cannot stand. The throb from his leg is insistent. He welcomes it, the clarity of the pain, as he welcomes the silence in his thoughts.
He is alone.
There is no way out and the rest of the force from the Third Company has been killed by the miners or each other. He is the last and will probably die here, unremarked. It does not matter. He has done his duty, and if he is to perish in this lonely sarcophagus he is content with that.
He has no regrets.
Date Ident: 935939.M41
Many times before, Azrael had met Chief Librarian Ezekiel, either on the field of battle or across the table of
the council chamber. Always the Holder of the Keys had seemed aloof, concerned with matters beyond the immediate and mundane.
Now Ezekiel was entirely fixated upon Azrael, and it was not a pleasant sensation. In the half-light of the catacombs beneath the Tower of Angels the Librarian’s bionic eye was a glimmering ruby that regarded Azrael with unblinking intensity. Like the Grand Master, the commander of the Librarius had removed his armour and was dressed in a ceremonial robe – in Ezekiel’s case in the blue of the Librarians, for Azrael the bone white used by the Deathwing – with a black tabard marked with the sigils of the Inner Circle.
‘Are you ready, Azrael?’ The Librarian’s soft, informal tone took Azrael aback.
‘I don’t know,’ he confessed with a glance at the forbidding shadows that lay beyond the rune-marked archway behind Ezekiel. ‘I have no idea what to expect, so how can I be prepared?’
Ezekiel nodded in acceptance of this answer, head slightly to one side.
‘It is not necessary to undertake this ritual yet,’ said the Librarian. ‘The council have backed your temporary elevation to Supreme Grand Master. The campaign on Rhamiel continues.’
‘I need to know,’ Azrael replied, a little too quickly, eliciting a frown from Ezekiel. The Librarian said nothing, but his expression made it clear he expected Azrael to explain himself. ‘At the end, when we fought the Night Lords and... When I killed Naberius, I had a moment of doubt. Was I doing it for him, for the Chapter, or myself? If I understand it correctly, this trial will provide the truth.’
‘That it will, Azrael.’ The Librarian became solemn. ‘Every Supreme Grand Master must undertake the Passing of the Gates, as proof of their commitment to the Dark Angels and the Inner Circle.’
‘Have any failed? Did they forfeit their honour? Their lives?’
‘I would not tell you if they had.’
Azrael absorbed this without comment.
‘I have seen two previous Grand Masters through this ceremony. Your predecessor, and his. Both proved themselves worthy. You knew both – do you judge yourself a lesser warrior, a lesser leader, a lesser man than they?’
Azrael took a breath and looked the Librarian in his good eye.
‘I have the correct qualities. I would court false modesty to say otherwise. But I do not claim anything else.’ Azrael squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. ‘When does the trial start?’
Ezekiel shifted his weight, moving slightly so that Azrael could see past him and into the darkness beyond the archway. Two pairs of lights hovered a metre or so above the ground, pinpricks of bright red.
Eyes, Azrael realised. Watchers in the Dark.
‘It’s already begun?’
Ezekiel nodded and turned away.
‘Follow me, Azrael.’
The Grand Master fell into step behind Ezekiel and matched his slow, ceremonial pace. He could see nothing of the Watchers. The Librarian paused at the archway, one foot inside the shadows, the rest of him still in the flickering light of the torches in the sconces upon the walls of the entrance chamber. Azrael could feel the heat from the flames on his hands and face, and equally the chill draught that emanated from the corridor ahead. The breeze brought with it a musty smell of long centuries, though Ezekiel had just admitted he had passed this way with Naberius less than half a century earlier.
‘We step into the Corridors of Shadows,’ Ezekiel intoned. He started forwards again and in a moment was lost in the darkness, all sight and sound of him vanished.
Azrael followed without hesitation. He quickly read the inscription on the keystone of the arch as he passed beneath.
‘Walk the shadows. Bring the light.’
He found it heartening, the thought that he might be the beacon, the bringer of hope to the despairing, the incarnation of justice and truth.
As the darkness swallowed him he realised how naive that might seem to others. His skin prickled as the last heat of the brands evaporated and he was left in total blackness. He resisted the urge to look back, to check the flames still burned behind him.
‘I am the light,’ he whispered and continued on, blinded but not blind.
The darkness reminded him of the blanketing effect of the shadowcaster used by the Rhamiel rebels. It was all-concealing, so that three strides in he saw not a glimmer from behind nor any light ahead, and there was no sound but for the thud of his hearts and the whisper of his own breath.
Was it a similar technology at work here? He had wondered at the mysteries that surrounded much of the Inner Circle’s workings, of the labyrinthine catacombs that existed below the Tower of Angels, beyond the cells where the Interrogator-Chaplains did their bloody work. How much was simply the archeotech of the lost generations, shrouded in ritual? There were treasures and perils in equal measure in the deepest levels, in the dungeons where forays by the Techmarines still occasionally ventured to glean secrets from buried chambers, risking life and sanity to bring them back.
As if a switch had been flicked, he stepped into light again. Blinking, he focused on Ezekiel, standing to his right in front of a narrow hanging. The banner depicted the Angel of Death, as did so many of the Chapter’s standards. Yet instead of a sword held in gauntleted hands, the hooded figure clasped a chain on the end of which hung a red rose. He remembered his tutelage as a novice, that the red rose signified blood, the sacrifice of the Lion and the Emperor.
He was about to speak, but chose to keep his silence, aware that the occasion required a certain degree of solemnity. To speak seemed a violation of the proceedings.
‘This is the Portal of Penumbral Sorrow,’ Ezekiel said quietly, motioning towards a heavy wooden door opposite Azrael. ‘The light becomes darkness. It is the boundary between what was and what shall be. To step through is a declaration of your intent, a move from the past to the future, a remoulding of the man you are into the man you must be.’
As before, the lintel was carved with old letters, so worn now that Azrael took a few seconds to decipher them.
‘Bring the light. Cast the shadow.’
It was not such an encouraging thought. A duality. A summation of the role of the Supreme Grand Master, to be both the bearer of the Chapter’s great burden but also its greatest hope of absolution.
He nodded his understanding. Ezekiel stepped forwards and clasped the iron ring of the door. He looked intently at Azrael, eye never leaving the Grand Master as the Librarian silently pulled the door open.
There were more shadows beyond, but of a conventional nature – a gloom rather than utter darkness. Azrael stepped through the door with a swift stride and felt Ezekiel follow him a few paces behind. With the softest of clicks the door shut and the darkness increased.
A faint warmth came off the stones to either side, the passage little wider than his shoulders.
He sought no explanation beyond the mundane – they had to be close to the heat exchangers of the Rock’s plasma cores. The depths of the massive asteroid-fortress were riddled with energy conduits, coolant pipes and thermal vents, more than enough to conjure strange changes in temperature from one place to the next.
He felt rather than saw a larger space opening up around them. His footfalls disappeared into the distance. His eyes grew accustomed to the dark and he realised that there was a massive window above the passage by which he had entered, the light of the stars filtered through the ancient panes of coloured plasglass. By the twilight he could just make out the symbol of the Chapter on the floor – a winged sword against a circle of red.
From every direction an amber glow suffused the chamber, emanating from more than a dozen different archways and open doors. Corridors ran away from the hall at uneven intervals like spokes from a hub. He turned his head left and right, trying to count the entrances, but it was hard to focus; there seemed more or less each time he looked.
One moment the light was ambient, an ochre gleam; the next it was present, a circle of small lanterns, each born by a Watcher in the Dark. The light spilled acros
s the flagstones but did not reach far, serving only to accentuate the shadows more than dispel them.
He heard footsteps before he saw the others. Each arrived behind a Watcher. Cowls hid their faces but he knew them immediately all the same – their tabards bore their company colours and the icons of their specialities: Masters, Chaplains and Librarians.
One of the robed warriors stepped closer, a large censer swinging from a chain in his hands. The burner was crafted from red-lacquered metal in the shape of a rose. He recognised the voice of Dagonet – the sigils on his tabard confirmed the identity of the Master of Sanctity.
‘One has come who would be master of all,’ Dagonet intoned with a swing of the burner. Acrid smoke swept over Azrael, stinging his eyes, thick in his nostrils. ‘One has come who would be servant to all.’
A chance movement gave him a look at Dagonet’s face beneath his cowl. Just a glimpse, but it was enough for Azrael to see that the Master of Sanctity’s eyes were glassy, their stare fixed at some point beyond the would-be Supreme Grand Master.
‘One has come,’ the others chanted in unison as Dagonet withdrew to the circle in a billowing white cloud of incense. Their voices were flat, their timing perfect.
‘Are they asleep?’ Azrael looked to Ezekiel for an answer but the Chief of the Librarius had moved to the circle, one among the many for the moment.
‘They fulfil their roles.’
Azrael turned at the sound of Sapphon’s voice, one of the Interrogator-Chaplains. He located him by the sigils on his tabard, but there was no sign he was any more aware of what was going on than Dagonet or Ezekiel.
Seeking explanation, his eye moved across the hall again. With an effort, he focused on one of the Watchers, and realised he had almost forgotten their presence. Even as he thought of them his mind slipped away, forgetting the question for which he sought answers.
A master in jet black took three strides forward – Sammael, commander of the Ravenwing. In his hand he held a black feather as long as a man’s arm. He stretched out his hand, the feather balanced on its tip in his palm, unstirred by the breeze Azrael could feel coming from over his shoulder.