25 For 25

by Various

  Through blurred vision, he glimpsed flashes of stark light off gold armour; or was that some kind of mirage?

  No. The figure was still there, remaining beyond his reach, taunting him with its silence. Daring him to come closer.

  Rafen looked away, trying to take stock of his circumstances. He had no recollection of arriving in this blighted, lifeless place, no concept of where he was or what purpose had brought him here. He came to a halt, for a moment losing sight of the golden figure as curtains of red dust whirled around him. He dug deep, pushing into his own thoughts, trying to dredge up the truth.

  What is the last thing I can remember? He worked at the question, his sweat-filmed brow furrowing.

  He remembered the journey back from the Dynikas system aboard the starship Tycho, the days passing in the wilderness of warp space. He remembered the battle on the planet before that, the dispatch of the enemy and the recovery…

  He remembered the vial and the blood. Rafen’s hand instinctively reached up and traced the place on his breast where he had stabbed the injector needle home.

  He remembered–

  –the vial, the holy blood from the Red Grail itself, unfiltered and potent, kept alive for millennia by generations of clerics, coursing through his veins–

  –gold and fire, lightning and sun; like nothing he had ever experienced before–

  –fear that he would be destroyed by the brilliance–

  –what a perfect death–

  Rafen gasped and shuddered. The blood of Sanguinius coursed through him, the psychic power within it churning like nuclear flame. It had been too much for his body to contain; it was too much for him. He was like the ancient Terran legend of Ikarus, voyaging too close to the sun, burning and burning.

  ‘Is… is this place death?’ he shouted, his words ripped from him by the howling winds. ‘Am I to be… punished for my… hubris?’ Rafen found it hard to breathe.

  And in answer to his question, the sand became monsters.

  The red dust coalesced into things that bore the shape and colour of Space Marines, but they were hazy, nebulous forms that could not hold fine detail for more than a moment. Still, they were coherent enough that Rafen saw them for what they were supposed to be.

  They were Blood Angels, after a fashion, but no stripe of that noble Chapter that had ever walked beneath the Imperium’s light. These twisted phantoms were part parody, part monstrosity, hulking and lumbering things that mimicked the majesty of the Sons of Sanguinius through the lens of horror. Inverted, screaming aquilas decorated their armour, blood oozed from joints, and laughing, fanged masks showed eyes of glowing red. Books of blank verse and babbling skulls dangled from the ends of barbed honour chains. The ghost-Astartes were abstracts, sketches made of sand by an insane artist.

  They attacked him, laughing in shrill voices.

  Rafen fired the old bolter and it croaked, spitting out shells in puffs of flaking rust; but while the tumbling rounds found their mark, they did no damage. The point of each hit became a concave spattering of powder and the phantoms lost solidity, the crumbling mass-reactive bullets passing straight through without detonation.

  Snarling, dizzy with pain and the leeching heat, the Blood Angel went to the broken-tipped sword and met the charge of the ghost-Astartes, swinging high-low for a lethal cut that would have opened any foe to the air. The sword bit, he felt it, but the sand-forms gave along the line of the rusted blade and let it fall harmlessly through them. Rafen might as well have been using a rapier made of smoke.

  But, to his dismay, the return of blows was by no means equal. The phantoms shifted their mass, compacting the sands almost to the density of rock, a split-second before landing a swinging punch on Rafen’s jaw. As he was knocked back, a second and then a third granite-hard impact landed on his chest and sternum.

  He fell back against the rise of the red dunes, light-headed, as they came at him again; and now the phantoms had no helmets to hide their faces. This time, he saw a twisted mirror of his own features snarling back at him, the image shivering and flickering like a poorly-tuned vid-pict.

  Rafen threw himself forward and into the mass of one of the ghost-Astartes. It exploded apart in a torrent of grit before he could close his hands around its throat. The sand ripped at the bare skin of his face and neck, clogging his nostrils and mouth, trying to suffocate him. He flailed around, like a man fighting off a swarm of hornets.

  Then he heard gunfire, the hard snapping crashes of a bolter, heard the sizzle of shots passing close to him. The dust ebbed away, retreating in a tide, re-forming, as a new figure crested the closest dune and came scrambling down the rise.

  Rafen saw another Blood Angel – solid and well defined, caught in the haze of heat but certainly not one of his phantoms.

  The new arrival let his weapon swing away on its tether and unlimbered a break-tooth chainaxe. The axe sputtered and choked, but the teeth still spun, and with quick motions he carved into the ghost-Astartes. Where Rafen’s blade had passed through them like air, the other warrior’s weapon hit firmly and shrieked through the mass of clogged dust and sand.

  In moments, the grotesques were dissipating on the constant wind, discorporating until at last there was nothing left of them.

  Rafen nodded warily to the other man. ‘My… thanks, brother.’ He saw more clearly now: the other Blood Angel wore the white and the crimson of an Apothecary, although the company colours and unit symbology were strange – not wrong, but somehow unfamiliar. The warrior’s wargear was of an elderly design, the old Mark IV Maximus pattern that few Chapters still deployed. He met the Apothecary’s gaze and saw that the other man was measuring him with a similarly questioning stare.

  ‘Are you injured?’ he asked, holstering the chainaxe. He walked with a limp, Rafen noted, favouring his side, and for the first time he noted the scarring of a deep wound in the Apothecary’s belly. The warrior hid his pain well, though; he had a strong face and eyes that seemed too young for it.

  ‘No…’ Rafen began. ‘Yes. Perhaps.’ He shook his head, and the world swam around him. ‘The heat…’

  ‘Aye, the heat,’ agreed the Apothecary, and that was answer enough. He looked around, eyeing the shifting sands suspiciously. ‘Those… things. What were they?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rafen admitted. ‘My weapons were useless against them.’

  ‘Fortunate that mine were not, then,’ came the reply. The other man managed a wan smile. ‘I’m cheered to find you, brother. When I awoke in this place, for a while I feared I had gone mad.’

  ‘We may yet, both of us,’ said Rafen grimly. ‘Tell me, how did you come to be here?’

  ‘I…’ The Apothecary’s face froze as cold understanding gripped him. ‘I… Do not know.’

  ‘What is the last thing you can recall?’

  ‘The battle…’ He spoke in hushed, tense tones. ‘The xenos.’ His hand slipped to the wound on his gut. ‘They gave me this…The rest is darkness.’

  Before Rafen could speak again, the other warrior caught sight of something over his shoulder and pointed. Even as he turned to see it, Rafen knew it would be the figure in the gold, watching them.

  It stood sentinel, seemingly closer without having moved, briefly more defined in the gaps between the veils of dust that flashed past. Gold armour, an unmoving mask, furled silver wings. Watching.

  ‘Do you see him?’ Rafen asked.

  ‘Aye. What is it?’ The Apothecary’s words were hushed.

  The sands howled and clawed at their faces, forcing them to look away; when the torrent of dust abated, the figure was gone.

  Far beyond where it had stood, in the distance a shape rose out of the shimmer. A pinnacle mountain, impossibly tall and wind-carved from stone as red as spilled blood.

  ‘An omen,’ said Rafen. ‘An objective.’

  They walked on together, side by side through the howling cascade of the sandstorm, the distant tower of stone their only guiding marker in the featureless desert.
Whatever the nature of this place, Meros’s pragmatism did not waver in the face of it. The mountain was the only landmark in sight, so they would go to it. There was a certainty in that, a logic that the Apothecary could only feel as right. But quite how he could know that was something Brother Meros would not have been able to articulate.

  It was strange: everything about him seemed unreal, detached from truth – and yet Meros felt the sure slip of the baking sands under each footfall, he felt his occulobe tighten to tune his eyes against the hard radiation of the great red sun overhead, he felt the relentless heat upon his face. These things seemed very real.

  If only I still dreamed, Meros thought. Then perhaps I would know if this was true or some trick of the mind. But Space Marines did not dream, because they did not slumber – not in any manner that common men would understand. The catalepsean nodes implanted in his brain allowed Meros and his kindred to sleep without sleep, ever waking and watchful even as their minds rested. And so, he had no mark against which to measure his current circumstance.

  He glanced at the Blood Angel trudging alongside him. An omen, he had said. The words seemed peculiar coming from the mouth of an Astartes, resonant of old idolatry and superstition. And other things were subtly amiss: the other warrior’s wargear was ornate and oddly proportioned, chased with much detailing, and tapers of parchment dense with lines of text that Meros could not read. All this, and his face was unknown to the Apothecary.

  That in itself was not unusual – the IX Legiones Astartes numbered over one hundred thousand men under arms in service to Great Sanguinius, and Meros could not know every single one of them – but there was something about the dark-haired warrior that rang a wrong note in his mind. It was as if he did not fit.

  Then again, Meros was just as displaced, stranded in this trackless no-man’s-land with no understanding of how he had come to be here. His hand slipped to the place where he had been wounded. The memory of the shard burying itself in his gut was still fresh and he flinched as he recalled it. A sickening throb rang through him and he swallowed a gulp of dry air.

  Meros glanced at the other warrior once more, trying to put the echo of the pain aside. ‘I… never asked you your name,’ he said.

  ‘I am Rafen,’ came the reply. ‘Of the Fifth Company, under Brother-Captain Sendini.’

  ‘Wh-who?’ Meros forced the word out, his legs turning to lead, stumbling to a halt. The name meant nothing to him. And the commander of the fifth… He was…

  ‘Are you all right, brother?’ said Rafen, watching him warily.

  Meros began to shiver, his skin crawling beneath his armour. ‘I… I…’ A painful, prickling sensation washed up his arms, burning his skin like the touch of acid. With a trembling hand, the Apothecary pulled at his gauntlet and vambrace, disengaging the armour locks, letting them fall to the sand.

  His bare arm was a livid red, veins bulging, flesh twitching. Unable to stop himself, Meros clawed at the exposed flesh and ribbons of epidermis came free, fluttering into the wind. He cried out even as the diseased tissue fell, scattering across the sands. Impossibly, the more he scratched away, the more there was.

  The decayed skin-threads danced in the air, and then to his horror, they began to unfold. Clever puzzles of discarded flesh split and divided, weaving into thread-thin lines that knit back into obscene forms; spindly humanoid outlines with elongated limbs and narrow, elfin skulls.

  ‘The reavers!’ Meros shouted. ‘This is… their poison!’

  The meshed threads of skin flitted and danced, and then turned back on the Apothecary, lashing out at him like a torrent of barbed whips.

  Rafen recoiled at what he saw, his hand snatching up the rusted bolt pistol from his belt, falling back to gain a span of distance from the motions of the strange flesh-forms. He knew the shape and the dance of them – somehow, these apparitions were dark eldar in origin, flashes of their cruel xenos hate appearing and disappearing in the ghosts of their faces. They looked like animated streamers of cloth, perhaps bandages or garlands, coiling and turning to give the impression of a body beneath when in fact there was nothing there.

  Whatever animated these forms, it was abhorrent to the Blood Angel. His erstwhile comrade was right on that matter, at the very least – even through the heavy dust of the air, Rafen could taste the sour tang of poison billowing about the lithe monsters. They were toxic horrors, spinning in a grotesque ballet.

  The eldar-things rained down blows on the apothecary, lightning-fast and unrelenting. He tried to fight back with the rust-clogged chainaxe, but each sweep of the buzzing blade-head met only air as the threads parted to let it pass.

  Rafen forgot the bolt pistol and drew the broken sword. He did not know the origin of the other warrior, but he could not simply stand by and do nothing.

  ‘Away, daemon!’ he shouted, wading into the whirling cyclone of whipping threads. ‘Begone from here, or face your end!’

  The rusted sword rose and fell, and in each place where the chainaxe’s blunt edge had failed to score a hit, Rafen’s blows cut the skin-matter into shreds. He fancied he heard screaming on the wind, coming from some far distant place.

  Angry and vicious in their retreat, the tears of discarded flesh fluttered high into the air, coiling upon one another as if caught in the funnel of a whirlwind, and then vanishing into the unceasing murmur of the sandstorm.

  The Apothecary was down on one knee, panting. His face was a maze of shallow scratches, and his bare arm a bloody ruin. He looked up. ‘Rafen,’ he rasped. ‘Thank you, brother.’

  ‘Brother?’ Now the moment of the attack had passed as swiftly as it had begun, Rafen’s confusion turned to ready distrust. He aimed the damaged tip of the sword at the other warrior’s face. ‘Are you really such a thing, or do you only pretend at it?’ He took a step closer, bearing his teeth. ‘Did you bring me here?’ he demanded. ‘I have fought warpspawn before, and won! I will do so again!’

  ‘I do not… understand…’ said the white-armoured Blood Angel, holding up his hands. ‘You raise a blade to me? Why?’

  ‘What breed of daemon tainted you?’ Rafen snapped. ‘Answer me!’

  The Apothecary shook his head. ‘These things you say, you speak in riddles!’ He staggered to his feet, glaring at Rafen, his strength returning. ‘You accuse me of complicity…’ He shook his head. ‘Those… those creatures… I have never seen the like. They are the avatars of the poison…’ The warrior broke off, becoming pale. ‘Primarch… It still runs in me.’

  Rafen’s broken blade was suddenly at his neck. ‘Then perhaps I should end you.’

  ‘You would do such a thing?’ An expression of utter disgust crossed the other man’s face. ‘An Astartes, killing an Astartes? Brother against a brother?’ He shook his head. ‘Perhaps it is you that is tainted and false!’ The Apothecary drew the chainaxe, his voice rising. ‘When I came to your aid against the ghosts in the sand, I did not question your honour! Those phantoms had your face, Rafen! But I did not kill you because of it!’

  For a long moment, Rafen wavered on the cusp of drawing back the weapon to strike, but then he relaxed his stance and stepped away.

  ‘I do not know what you are,’ he said. Rafen turned his back and walked on.

  Meros followed him; there was little else he could do.

  Once, in the time before he had been raised up to join the Blood Angels, when he had still been a child, still human, Meros had heard a mad old seer speak of darker powers and places beyond the understanding of men. The recall of that moment was so far distant that it was barely even a memory anymore. His past life had been smoothed away by the monumental changes that had made him one of the Emperor’s finest warriors, so now all that remained were impressions.

  But clear enough to return to him now, enough to remember the fear in the old seer’s eyes. The warp is the sea of souls, he had said. In it, all things can be made and unmade. Everything is mutable, blood and time like sand…

  Like sand…


  Meros walked behind Rafen, following him up the lee of a steep dune, the constant buzzing dust plucking at him, ripping what moisture there was from his lips and nostrils. Even the nictating membranes over his eyes were gummed with deposits of blown sand, forcing him to blink and brush at his face. His hand came away red with the powdery deposits. Meros lumbered after the other Blood Angel, the only other sound the labouring of the myoma muscle-quads in their power armour.

  He reached the top of the ridge and found Rafen standing still. Meros halted and followed the other warrior’s gaze, up and up.

  They stood at the foot of the pinnacle mountain, the spire of red rock reaching away into the clouds of dust–

  But it was not a mountain. It had never been one. From a distance, the eye had been tricked to believe that was so, the scraps of the shape and image parsed to form what one expected to see.

  Laying his gaze upon it all, however, was a revelation.

  Rafen and Meros stood at the foot of a great statue, a carving taller than the highest Titan, the base buried in the red sand, the top visible against the shadow of the crimson sun.

  ‘My liege,’ breathed Rafen, sinking to one knee. Meros did the same, but unlike the other warrior, he did not turn his face away.

  Meros looked up. He saw how the rocky crags formed the shape of voluminous robes that ended in a hood, and the carved planes of an infinitely noble face framed there. The patrician, shining majesty of Sanguinius’s aspect looked down on them in judgement, his hands clasped before him, his mighty wings gathered in around his shoulders like a cloak.

  ‘How can this be here?’ he breathed.

  ‘Where is here?’ Rafen replied. ‘I fear this is the answer. This place is death.’

  Then Meros saw a glitter of gold and raised his arm to point at it. ‘Who is that?’