by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
Karulak lunged forwards, stomping down and off the pedestal. The servitors scattered as the Dreadnought’s assault cannon swung around.
‘Brother!’ cried Desaan. ‘Ancient brother! Listen to my voice and do not let the shadows of the past overcome you! You lie now in the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought, for you were wounded unto death and brought back from the brink. Years have passed and new battle-brothers wear the colours of the Obsidian Knights, but our purpose and our foes remain the same.’
Karulak paused and turned towards Desaan. ‘Scout-brother,’ came Karulak’s voice. ‘Can this be true?’
‘Look down, ancient one,’ said Desaan. ’You bear not the bolter and chainsword, but the fist and cannon of the war machine. Yet you are still one of us, an Obsidian Glaive, a son of Guilliman and sworn warrior of the Emperor. Nothing that truly matters has changed.’
‘Yes,’ said Karulak. ‘I see now. I remember. I fell, and slumbered, but now I wake. Has a crusade been called? Am I to go to war?’
‘Alas, there is war, but no crusade. The enemy has come to us. Penumbral Spike is besieged by the ork!’
A great crash rolled through the vault. A servitor tumbled from the furthest pedestal and sprawled broken on the floor. Machinery rained down. A coolant unit was torn from the ceiling as one of the Dreadnoughts, its tarnished armour inlaid with gilded eagle’s wings and hung with spiked chains, crashed from its sleeping place into the centre of the vault. Its power fist had been modified to carry a hugely oversized power sword and its gun arm carried a heavy plasma weapon. From one shoulder hung a banner with the heraldry of twin blades crossed with a lightning bolt.
‘What heresy is this?’ bellowed the Dreadnought. ‘The ork defiles Penumbral Spike? Obstiria weeps under the tread of the alien? And yet here we stand like idiot prey! I shall leave nothing but gore and misery of the xenos horde, and when I am finished, every ork will shriek in dismay at the very mention of the Obsidian Glaives!’
The Dreadnought bore the same markings as Karulak and Molkis. Its time was short. Hours. Maybe less.
‘Thus is the fate of the xenos!’ the Dreadnought yelled. ‘Thus shall fall the rage of Fulminos!’
When he fell, it was a world of pain, a great ocean of agony into which he was immersed.
He had been here before. He had suffered. He had been broken down in body more than once. The memories of that pain lanced up at him, needling through his mind like the fire searing through his limbs.
But he had risen again. He had not died. The pain had been overcome. Brother Molkis seized on to that fact and held it tight, using it as an anchor point to drag himself up. The pain resolved into concrete memories now, the shapes and sounds that had been there when he was last struck down this low.
He remembered the Kraken. The tyranids darkened the sky with their numbers above the peninsula of Devilin Reach. Hundreds of thousands of warrior-organisms had descended from the whale-like carrier beasts in low orbit. Among them, along with the bat-winged swarm organisms, were enormous cysts of chitin and bone. Where these impacted against the rock of the peninsula, massive war-organisms tore their way out, living siege engines bristling with symbiotic weapons. Molkis’s squad found themselves in the shadow of one such beast, a quadruped with massive shovel-like tusks that could have flipped over a tank and a pair of enormous scythes attached to its forelimbs. A swarm of acidic spores belched from the quivering sacs around its throat and bony tubes along its ridged back fired clusters of spines like mortars.
Molkis had ordered the charge. He was a sergeant, a veteran, and the Obsidian Glaives around him would follow him through the warp itself if he led the way. The beast roared as bolter fire ripped into it, ichor spurting from a hundred wounds. Molkis closed to drive the point of his chainblade into its eye as it lurched under the volley fire.
But it had been faster than him. Too fast for anything of that size. Its claw had scythed at him and even as he threw himself to the ground it punched through the ceramite of his abdomen and the intense chill of its edge slithered through his torso…
No. Molkis forced the memory down. That had not been what brought him here. That had been before, the last time he fell. The Kraken had laid him low, but he had survived and fought on.
The greenskin had tried to do the same as the Kraken. And like the tyranid war-organism, the orks had failed. They had buried him in a black pit of pain and left him there to die, but they did not know what he was. He was Molkis, a blade in the Emperor’s hand, a son of Guilliman and guardian of Obstiria. He had suffered more by the hand of his own battle-brothers during his initiations than the malice of the orks could ever match. He could not die. He could not be broken. He was Molkis.
The darkness shifted. Molkis took the pain and balled it up into the hollow inside his chest, between his two hearts. He pushed against it as his feet pushed against the stones beneath him. Fragments of rubble trickled down past his face. The enormous weight above him shifted again and he took it on his shoulders, wrestling it further off him.
A crack of light opened up above him. He remembered where he was. Obstiria, his Chapter’s home world. Penumbral Spike. The orks had breached the fortress and the Cathedral of Victory had fallen.
But Molkis had not fallen. The Obsidian Glaives had not. While one of them lived, the orks would have a war to fight for every rock and flagstone.
Molkis roared. He heaved in a mighty breath, pushing aside the constricting rock. The slab on top of him slid away and he was free to reach up out of the pit. He found a handhold and dragged himself up through the shattered layers of the catacombs. Old bones and grave wrappings tumbled past. He hauled himself up out of the catacombs and into what remained of the cathedral.
Molkis almost wept. The cathedral had collapsed. Where the ceiling had been was now the raw rock of the Penumbral Spike. Only a few pieces of decorative carving and the crowns of a few false columns remained. The statue of Guilliman was gone, buried by the fallen stone that filled the chamber. At the end of the cathedral, where the statue had stood, a massive breach led to the exterior of the fortress and the cold wind whistled through.
The place stank of greenskins. The outstretched hand of an ork still poked between two fallen slabs of the ceiling. Molkis’s sorrow was overtaken by disgust. Greenskin filth had broken into the Penumbral Spike through the cathedral. Even now they were rampaging through the Spike, seeking to kill his brothers and defile the heritage of his Chapter.
But at least one Obsidian Glaive lived. No matter what they had wrought already, the orks had not succeeded yet.
The pain still ran through Brother Molkis. He felt ungainly and ill-coordinated, as if many times his weight and controlling his body from afar. But that would not stop him from fighting. In one hand he held his bolter, for though he had been buried and left for dead an Obsidian Glaive was never unarmed. His other hand he would use empty if need be, to strike down and crush any greenskin who stood in his way.
He heard gunfire from above. His hearts leapt and he forgot the pain, for he was not alone. Other battle-brothers yet lived. And then a light descended from above, like a scene from a stained glass window depicting the prophecies of the end of time. Molkis heard the singing of a thousand choirs and caught the scent of heavy incense among the dust and smoke.
‘The Time of Ending has come!’ Molkis cried. ‘The greenskins were the herald of the enemy. Obstiria shall be the battleground of eternity. And I am here to fight alongside you, my Emperor! Brother Molkis is here!’
As if in reply a voice bellowed from the heart of the Penumbral Spike, a voice that Molkis had never heard but seemed like that of his oldest friend.
‘Thus shall fall the rage of Fulminos!’
In the night, the lower generatorium fell. Flamegut’s ork pirates stormed the plasma generator chambers in their thousands. Keshuma’s Ninth Company halted their advance with massive volleys of heavy weapons fire, but at the co
st of the plasma generators themselves. Coolant ducts and containment vessels were ruptured by stray gunfire and the lower levels of the Spike, the dungeons and catacombs in the mountain’s root, were flooded with liquid plasma. Thousands of orks were incinerated, but the automated defences that covered the upper slopes fell silent.
Flamegut’s aerial corps emerged in locust-like waves from behind the mountains around the Spike. Ramshackle fighter-bombers dropped clusters of bombs on the battlements, blasting open cannon emplacements and gatehouses. Thousands more orks were dropped from carrier craft – for every one that found a foothold on the upper slopes another tumbled down to the valleys at the base of the Spike, but still an army of greenskins found purchase among the shattered defences. The airborne orks that had already taken the Obsidian Glaives’ aircraft hangars joined with this new force to lay siege to the uppermost entrances. Among the eyries of the Penumbral Spike the Obsidian Glaives rallied around Chapter Master Midnias to lead the defence.
And Midnias brought with him the final weapon to be deployed from the Chapter’s arsenal – the ancients of the vault, the Dreadnoughts, eleven of them storming onto the battlements in a tide of ruthless steel.
Brother Molkis passed through the path of chaos the orks had left. They had torn down the tapestries from the Quartermaster’s Cloisters, which had depicted the fall of the Beast of Vengor to the Obsidian Glaives. They had ripped down the sculpted panels from the duelling hall that had shown scenes from the life of Roboute Guilliman. Chapter Master Erberan’s greatsword had been cast down from its place on the altar of the Shrine of Ancestors. The ork had an instinctive sense of what was beautiful and sacred, even to another species, and an equally strong urge to destroy it.
Molkis felt the hatred stoked in his hearts. The sight of a fallen Obsidian Glaive made the fires leap. The battle-brother had been dragged down and butchered with cleaver blades. It must have taken the strength of dozens of greenskins to break open his ceramite armour. Another body lay at the foot of the staircase leading to the Dawn Bastion, this one riddled with gunfire. Dead orks lay littered around, too, but not nearly enough to avenge the death of the warrior.
The sounds of war came from above. The Dawn Bastion housed one of the anti-aircraft batteries and led to the battlements around the upper slopes. If the orks gained a foothold there, the Obsidian Glaives would be fighting them from above and below. Molkis hurried up the stairs – he was still feeling the effect of his earlier ordeals, for he felt unbalanced as if he was in danger of toppling over with each step. Even his shadow, cast by a burning tapestry on the wall, seemed huge and misshapen.
Molkis reached the bastion. The cold irradiated winds of Obstiria whipped along the sheer black wall of the Penumbral Spike. The narrow battlement was spattered with greenskin blood. The wreck of an ork fighter craft was embedded a short distance down the battlement, belching smoke, surrounded with charred corpses. Hundreds of metres below the orks swarmed in their thousands, battering away at the impenetrable gateways into the lower levels or seething towards the breach points that had opened up in the siege.
Molkis picked out the sound of a chainblade through flesh. He rounded a corner and found a sight to counter the anger burning in his chest.
‘Brother!’ cried Lord Fulminos as he decapitated another ork pirate with a swing of his black glass sword. ‘I fear we have slain the cream of the orkish filth already! But perhaps they can still spare you some sport!’
Molkis could not help but smile. ‘Thank Guilliman I gave you a head start,’ he said, ‘for I fear you cannot keep up with this Glaive’s tally!’
The heroes of the Chapter had returned.
Lord Fulminos led them, as was right, for he was the greatest warrior who had ever worn the glossy black colours of Obstiria. Fulminos was a master duellist who had sought out and faced in single combat every enemy champion who had ever stood opposite him on a battlefield. He was magnificent, his armour encrusted with ornamentation earned with hundreds of notable kills, his glassy sword a relic of the ages before the Heresy. Fulminos was handsome where a Space Marine was usually battle-scarred and ugly, with an aquiline nose, bright blue eyes and flowing hair. If a sculptor had created an icon for a fellow Space Marine to follow in battle, it would have looked like Lord Fulminos.
Brother Karulak, hero of Axian Ridge, hammered volleys from his thrice-blessed storm bolter into the orks trying to scramble over the battlements beside him. Captain Hurlikan, who had suffered the torments of eldar pirates and escaped with the rest of the Chapter to burn their flagship, swept his broadsword through a gaggle of attacking orks and sliced three of them in two with a single blow.
A grimacing ork’s face appeared over the battlement beside Molkis. He grabbed it with his free hand, and such was the fury in him that the skull cracked under his fingers. Molkis threw the body aside and blasted a volley of gunfire into another ork trying to get around Hurlikan with a demolition charge in hand. The ork was punched right through by the shot, body incinerated, the charred fragments carried away by the knifing wind.
Hurlikan saluted Molkis. Though the two had never met and their service as Obsidian Glaives were separated by two thousand years, they were battle-brothers by instinct.
Lord Vorkias, the Chapter Master crippled on board the space hulk Icon of Debauchery, speared a giant armoured ork through its chestplate with a thrust of his sword. Lukanas the Penitent, who had turned himself into a mass of scar tissue and scabs with self-inflicted punishments for every imagined sin, lay all about him with a barbed power-scourge. Molkis found himself back to back with Drekal the Martyr – Molkis himself, as a Scout newly elevated from the torments of selection, had witnessed Drekal fall single-handedly holding a mountain pass against a tribe of savage kroot. Now they fought together again.
Drekal’s chainblade sawed through an ork at waist height. Molkis followed up with a crushing backhand blow that knocked a second ork over the parapet. His bolter blasted another apart as Drekal kicked away a ladder the greenskins were using to scale the battlements.
‘Have you learned to fight yet, Molkis?’ said Drekal in false mockery. ‘Or are you still just a boy?’
Molkis saw the wounds of Drekal’s fall were still on him, arrows and spears still stuck through the tears in his armour.
‘Have you returned to your prime,’ retorted Molkis with a laugh, ‘or are you still just an old man?’
Across the battlement, Fulminos was already standing on a mound of the dead. Mangled orks were crushed beneath his feet as he thrust his sword to the sky. ‘Blessed are we,’ he cried, ‘that we witness the Time of Ending! Rejoice, for the prophecies have been fulfilled! Pity those who doubted, scorn those who fled! Now is the time to seize the joy of battle!’
The legends of the Obsidian Knights cheered. Drekal flicked the blood off his chainblade and across the fortress wall. ‘May this battle never end,’ he said with a blood-flecked grin.
Overhead, the roar of engines drowned out the sounds of combat. An enormous orkish vehicle, a carrier craft held aloft by an asymmetrical patchwork of blazing engines, flew above the battlements and crash-landed on the upper slopes. The ship’s bow crumpled, spilling wreckage and flame. Hooked chains were thrown out to arrest its slide down the mountain and from a dozen ports along its sides leapt ork pirates. Molkis recognised their kind from the battle in the cathedral – they were the piratical warlord’s own troops, deployed to turn a battle the greenskins knew they were losing.
The heroes of the Obsidian Glaives had retaken enough of the battlements for their battle-brothers to follow them out onto the slopes. Dozens of Obsidian Glaives in the livery of the Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Companies flooded out to meet the new ork attack. They looked on their Chapter’s returned heroes as if in awe.
A great war cry went up among the greenskins swarming from their landing craft. Among them was Flamegut, the warlord Molkis had seen in the cathedral below
. The orks rallied around him, for to them he was as potent a talisman to the orks as Fulminos and the other ancestors were to the Obsidian Glaives. Hundreds of orks had already amassed around the unstable upper slopes and were charging down at the Obsidian Glaives forming up on the battlements.
‘Break them on the rock that is our Chapter!’ yelled Fulminos.
‘Every moment of mankind’s suffering,’ yelled Lukanas the Penitent, ‘we now repay!’
Brother Gidnaron, his gilded armour surrounded in a blazing halo, unfurled the Standard of Obstiria for all to see. It was embroidered with threads taken from tapestries in the Imperial Palace burned during the Siege of Terra, and depicted Roboute Guilliman granting the lordship of Obstiria to the first Obsidian Glaives. Among the throng Molkis also picked out Reclusiarch Morvern the Grim, Assault-Captain Bayelor and the towering form of Dagguron the Brute, the tallest and broadest of all the Obsidian Glaives, whose oversized armour was displayed in the Chapter armoury long after his fall at Urakan. Even Silias the Cunning was there, who though laid low by a lung-destroying disease had continued to create battle plans of unprecedented complexity for decades. Silias was returned to the glory of his youth, handsome and proud, in the polished silver and black of a Chapter champion.
Eleven great heroes, all returned. Did Molkis dare count himself the twelfth?
The orkish line hurtled towards the Obsidian Glaives. The Space Marines levelled bolters and opened fire. The front rank of orks were shredded, but the density of flesh and bone protected those behind them. The battle lines clashed, and the sound was as if thunder crashed around Penumbral Spike. Molkis followed Fulminos into the fray, and with every blow he crushed a skull, broke a spine or threw another foul greenskin off the battlements. But the weight of the ork assault forced the Obsidian Glaives back and the line bowed, threatening to break.
Gidnaron held the Standard of Obstiria high and a section of the Obsidian Glaives followed in its wake. Assault-Captain Bayelor led them. They hacked with chainsword and combat blade deep into the ork mass. Molkis saw where they were headed – for Flamegut himself.