‘Ah, cousins,’ Lucius smiled, ‘it is so good to be back.’
The Wolves roared. Something snapped within them. The final barricade holding back the darkness within, eroded to gossamer from the madness of the hunt, was finally breached. Their howls deepened, becoming bestial and feral. Fangs punched out from protruding snouts as their bodies became swollen, and hooked claws burst from their fingers. Their jerkins split and tore as their bodies mutated, morphing into hulking lupine monstrosities. The transformed Space Wolves bared their fangs at Lucius, froth foaming from snapping jaws as they moved to surround him.
Wulfen. Lucius’ grin grew wider. It had been centuries since he had last seen their kind. This would be interesting.
Lucius flexed his right arm. With a wet snap of tearing sinew, a rope of barbed meat slithered down to the floor, coiling around the Chaos champion’s forearm. The lash chittered and hissed, the daemon caged within it starving for blood. He threw the whip forward, wrapping it around the handle of his sabre and hauling it back to him. He caught the sword, rolling his wrist and slicing the air.
‘Well?’ Lucius asked. ‘Who’s first?’
The Wulfen leapt at him. Lucius sidestepped one, using the beast’s momentum to cleave it in half upon the blade of his sabre. He swept the weapon up to block another’s slashing claws, severing the creature’s forearms in a fountain of hot blood.
Lucius gasped as the blood splashed over his face. The first bloodshed upon his return to the living always delivered the highest ecstasy, and he shuddered as he drank the sensation in. He almost didn’t see the roaring Space Wolf rushing him, drunkenly swaying aside as it skidded past him.
Lucius hurled his whip toward the Wulfen. The lash closed around its head, venomous barbs sinking into flesh. Lucius hauled back, tearing the creature’s head from its shoulders in a welter of gore and torn cartilage. The lash drank deep of the blood and spinal fluid pulsing from the severed head, casting aside a shriveled, shrunken lump of flesh and skull to the floor when it had had its fill.
Lucius weaved through a barrage of claws and snapping jaws, disemboweled another Wulfen with a blinding series of lightning-fast slashes, and spun to face the last of their number. He could still see cracked plates of ebon power armour beneath the thick fur of the beast, as it glared at him with blazing amber eyes.
Lucius swung his lash. The Wulfen charged, ducking beneath and clear. It rolled to the side as Lucius lunged with a thrust of his sword, the blade lacerating its flank without inflicting a mortal wound.
The Space Wolf slashed at Lucius, its claws tearing deep gouges into his armour. It drew back to strike again, but faltered as it met the visage of Hrothgir screaming from beneath the plate. It hesitated for a heartbeat; all the opening Lucius required.
Lucius snarled, pistoning a fist into the Wulfen’s jaw and tackling it to the ground. The Chaos Space Marine seized his foe’s throat in a stranglehold, and began to squeeze.
‘I would have expected barbarians to shun the perfection of the duel,’ Lucius hissed as he tightened his grip. ‘But even in your mongrel eyes I see the shock you cannot hide. I should not be. Your brother killed me.’
The Wulfen that had once been Vyght bucked, snarling as it thrashed to displace the champion of Chaos. Lucius brought his scarred head down in a savage headbutt, smashing the creature’s head against the stone floor.
‘Do not interrupt. How long was I dead to you? Hours? Days?’ Lucius leaned an inch from the stunned Wulfen’s face. ‘I fell for eternity, drowning in the dregs that flood the lands of the dead. But I am Eternal, and for my sins, the warp granted me vindication. All I needed was a single thing.’
Lucius’ lips peeled back further from black gums. ‘Pride. A moment of vanity, the merest aggrandisement by your mongrel chieftain blazed like a beacon in the aether. I followed it, to be reborn and take his flesh as my own. I wanted this ship, and all I had to do to get it was die.’
The Wulfen’s eyes refocused, its pupils sable pinpricks in molten amber. It roared from frothing jaws, freeing an arm to rake its claws across Lucius’ face. Viscous black fluid burst in gouts from the champion’s rent flesh as his head snapped back.
Lucius grappled with the Wulfen, snarling as he looped his lash around its throat. The daemonic whip constricted, strangling the life from the Space Wolf.
‘If you are no better than beasts, then I shall butcher you like beasts!’
The Wulfen’s eyes bulged, blooming crimson as capillaries ruptured. ‘More,’ it growled in a feral choke, fighting to push the words between monstrous fangs. ‘More will come.’
Lucius leaned closer, grinning as his serpentine tongue slithered between his pointed teeth. ‘Cousin, I am counting on it.’ He pried the Wulfen’s jaws open and drove his sword down through to the stone floor. Lucius wrenched the blade free and pushed himself off the beast’s twitching chest, standing as its blood emptied over his boots in a flood.
Lucius stood in the feasting hall, alone but for the crackle of fires and the whispers within his mind. The trapped souls of his armour moaned, each shackled to the Chaos Space Marine as the price for defeating him in battle. Each surrendering their flesh upon the altar of the Eternal’s rebirth.
Lucius clenched a fist, the flesh numb and twitching against his control. He frowned. Less and less of him was returning. Something cold and ancient was growing over the parts he had been forced to leave behind, coiled dormant behind his eyes. It strained at the periphery of Lucius’ mind, patient as it swelled into the gaps that oblivion had stripped away to claim for its own.
Lucius felt it taking root, tasting reality with probing gossamer fronds. He wondered how long until nothing of him remained, until he died for the last time.
What would emerge from death on the day he ceased to be Eternal?
Lucius cast the rumination aside to relish the moment. He lifted an arm of a dead Wulfen by the wrist, and swung his blade. Blood flecked the walls and floor as he set about his task, silent but for the song of steel slicing flesh and snapping bone. He looked over the feasting hall he had made into an abattoir, the stone floor strewn with butchered remains scattered in concentric circles around him.
Lucius closed his eyes, and loosened his grip over the anguished souls bound within his armour.
The faces screamed, desperate to claw themselves free. The shriek tore through reality, through the decks of the Reiodi and into the turbulent void beyond, reaching those who waited in silence.
‘Brothers, come to me.’
The severed limbs and bodies trembled, riming with frost as they quivered and shook in the freezing air. Boils bloomed from the stump of an arm, swelling and expanding like cancerous tumors. They continued to grow, darkening to the color of spoiled meat. Each section of corpse reacted the same, budding and growing. Torsos sprouted new arms and legs. Heads grew bodies, and orphaned limbs generated new flesh sheathed in frozen brackish slime.
Blood and mucus wept from the walls, and the flames within the coal pits undulated in the full spectrum of unnatural colours. Lucius smiled, his serpent’s tongue tasting the blood running from his nose as the ritual continued.
The emergent forms coalesced. Armour of sable and mauve hardened like carapace. Weapons materialized, clenched in mailed fists, and screams tore from the grilles of daemonic helms from the agony of the summoning.
With a howling gale, the fires in the feasting hall were extinguished. Twelve Chaos Space Marines, fallen angels of the Emperor’s Children bound in service to Lucius the Eternal, rose to stand around their lord.
Karonatius strode forward in twisted armour of jagged violet teeth that wept molten gold. ‘Eternal, you are whole again.’
Lucius nodded to his lieutenant. ‘Purge the ship. Kill any that resist but leave those I spoke of alive. They will be needed. Go.’
Karonatius slammed a fist against the defiled imperial eagle on hi
s breastplate, its skeletal wings seeming to twitch with anguished life. He drew a scimitar, its blade screaming as a power field enveloped it in killing light, and marched from the chamber with Lucius’ warriors. Lucius opened a vox channel on his armour, uttering a single name.
‘Clarion.’
For a moment, he heard nothing but faulty static, before he received a reply.
‘Master,’ it spoke with a child’s voice, ‘you have returned to us.’
‘Summon the fleet,’ said Lucius. ‘Do not concern yourself with the wolves’ guns, they will be silent by the time you arrive.’
‘Tell me, lord,’ Clarion hissed, her voice betraying her smile, ‘how long was it this time?’
‘Just bring the fleet,’ Lucius snarled. ‘We have what we came here for.’
Much of the Reiodi’s crew had resisted Lucius’ warband as they rampaged through the ship’s decks, songs of Fenris streaming from their lips as they defied the invaders. Their skins now covered the walls of the bridge, flayed faces gazing down upon Lucius and his warriors. He had transported mutated slaves from his armada to replace the butchered crew, keeping those who served critical roles aboard the Fenrisian warship alive. One such wretch arrived upon the command deck as the portal to the chamber rumbled open on smooth hydraulics.
Skeletally thin and frail, the astropath limped forward in chains. Karonatius dragged him onward, and threw him at Lucius’ feet. The blind psyker trembled, rising and steadying himself on the bronze staff he carried. He looked up with eyes stitched shut with silver sutures, and cried out as he beheld Lucius.
Through his mind’s eye, the astropath saw dozens of souls, howling and writhing around each other, fettered to the black diamond will of the Chaos Space Marine. The essences of ancient warriors long dead, and vicious warlords from beyond the Eye of Terror. He saw the soul of Lord Hrothgir, howling in the anguish of his eternal prison. Dozens of spirits inhabited the flesh of the fallen Space Marine simultaneously, the abominable impossibility of it driving the ailing psyker back to his knees.
‘What are you?’ the astropath faltered.
Lucius smirked. ‘I am the one who decides whether your skin stays with you or joins your comrades’ on the walls.’ He pointed at the flayed hides with his sabre as his lash slithered restlessly at his feet.
‘The Sky Warriors will not be cowed by you,’ said the astropath, the strength of his words marred by the tremors in his voice. ‘They will come and finish what my lord started.’
‘Oh?’ Lucius replied, tilting his head. ‘Well, that certainly saves me the effort of going to them, does it not? Still,’ he spread his arms, gesturing to the walls of the Space Wolves vessel around them, ‘it would seem wasteful not to make use of this ship. They are expecting the return of heroes in triumph, but how might they receive me in the halls of their mountain bastion? Your lords do so love surprises.’
The thought shivered over Lucius’ mind. An obsession that had consumed him for nearly a century. The chance to duel one who had endured the millennia he and his fallen kindred had spent in exile. A singular warrior, now their ancient Wolf King. Lucius had crossed paths with the Fell-Handed in the years of the Great Crusade, and there were no others save the false Emperor himself that still drew breath from that time.
He would strike a blow so severe that they would have no choice but to rouse Bjorn to face him. And he would use this ship to do it.
The subterfuge rankled Lucius, but a pleasure postponed made it all the more satisfying at its climax. He would spill blood over the snow of their mountain citadel. He would succeed where a primarch had failed. Lucius shuddered, savoring the cloying blasphemy of the thought.
But to do so, he would need to bleed the defenses of Fenris white. When they were isolated and desperate, with their fleets burning, Lucius would have the contest he so craved.
‘Now,’ Lucius purred. ‘Scream out into the stars, little herald of Fenris.’ The Eternal leaned forward in the throne. Cupping the man’s head in one clawed hand, Lucius grinned as he savoured the horror wracking the stricken astropath.
‘And bring me more wolves.’
About the Author
Ian St. Martin has written the short stories ‘City of Ruin’ and ‘In Wolves’ Clothing’ for Black Library. He lives and works in Washington DC, the US, caring for his cat and reading anything within reach.
The Lords of Chaos gather their forces...
The Call of Chaos echoes across across the Mortal Realms and into the grim darkness of the far future.
Two new serialised supplements, and new fiction for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Collect them all and answer the Call of Chaos.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
In Wolves’ Clothing © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. In Wolves’ Clothing, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78572-015-4
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
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