It had been foolish to come here, but honour would not allow him to abandon a warrior who had given his own life to save his. The last time he had come to the Grey Vaults, he had his father and an army of Unberogen at his back. How arrogant to assume he could save Gorseth on his own!
The boy cried out as a pair of wraith-wolves bore him to the ground, their gleaming fangs tearing for his throat. Sigmar threw himself at the wolves, but a taloned hand plunged into his chest and Ghal-maraz fell from his grasp as his last reserve of strength was harvested. Gorseth held out his hand, but Sigmar couldn’t reach it. He fell to his knees as their spectral attackers closed in, knowing that he was now condemned to walk the Grey Vaults as one of them.
A wraith-wolf reared over Sigmar, fangs bared to swallow his spirit, but before it could end him, a shimmering axe blade of the purest silver light clove through its black body. The axe swept out, faster than Sigmar would have believed possible, and its light was blinding. The shade creatures fell away from its dazzling radiance, and those that had been driven to frenzy by their insatiable hunger for the living were cut down like grain stalks. Sigmar saw a powerfully built dwarf clad in armour that shone as brightly as his axe, and a vivid red cloak with golden runes worked into its every warp and weft. A horned helm of ancient design sat upon a troubled brow, and his lustrous beard was a brilliant white, pure as the first snows of winter.
He slew with calm, economical strokes of his incredible axe, hewing the dead things with contemptuous ease. His white beard swung about him as his axe wove a killing dance among the shades, and the forest was bathed in its light. The shadows fled from the blinding fury of its power, and black trees crumbled like ashes in the wind until Sigmar saw the entire forest had been levelled by the power of the light pouring out of the weapon.
The dwarf walked a slow circuit around them, as though making sure that none of the dead things remained. He grunted and turned to face Sigmar. The dwarf’s stern eyes glittered with the coldest blue light, and Sigmar felt the awesome power he represented.
The dwarf sheathed his axe over his shoulder and bent to retrieve Sigmar’s fallen weapon.
“You dropped your warhammer,” said the dwarf. “That was careless of you.”
He turned Ghal-maraz over in his hands, nodding appreciatively at the craftsmanship of its forging. His gauntleted fingers traced the runes on the killing face. They shone brightly at his touch, as though greeting an old friend.
“Good to see that some standards are being maintained,” grunted the dwarf, holding the weapon out to Sigmar.
“Alaric will be happy to hear that.”
“That he will,” agreed the dwarf. “Always was a proud one.”
Sigmar gratefully took back his hammer, feeling the awesome strength bound to the warrior’s very bones as he was hauled to his feet.
“You saved our lives,” he said, as Gorseth appeared at his side. “We are eternally grateful.”
The dwarf shrugged off his thanks and said, “The wraiths might have fled for now, but they’ll be back. They won’t be able to help themselves. And you don’t have the strength to fight them again. Even with that fancy hammer.”
Sigmar squared his shoulders. “We’ll fight,” he said.
“No,” said the dwarf. “You won’t. You’re going back to the world of flesh and blood. You still have things to do, and there’s no use in you getting stuck here.”
“I owe you a life-debt,” said Sigmar.
“And you’ll repay it before your time’s done,” said the dwarf.
“I’m not leaving you here on your own.”
“You’re not,” said the dwarf sadly. “The boy is staying with me.”
Sigmar turned to face Gorseth, dismayed to see that his body was becoming as insubstantial as mist, as ghostly as the creatures they had fought moments before.
“No!” cried Sigmar. “Not now, not like this!”
Gorseth ignored him, as though he hadn’t even heard him, and Sigmar knew no words of his could reach him now.
“His body’s dead, but his spirit’s strong,” said the dwarf, as the shade-wraiths gathered at the edge of the light pouring from the dwarf’s white beard and glimmering axe. “I’ll make sure he gets where he needs to go. You have my word on that.”
Sigmar felt a tugging pull at his spirit as the dwarf spoke, the irresistible claim of flesh upon spirit. He knew he could not fight it, and he let the growing sound of Bransùil’s voice guide him out of this place of darkness and torment. The barren plains of the Grey Vaults diminished like a forgotten nightmare, leaving only a lingering touch of ice in his heart.
“Wait!” cried Sigmar as the shades closed in once again. “I don’t even know your name.”
“You will, Sigmar Heldenhammer,” said the white dwarf. “You will...”
“We die, though our war is eternal,
We are doomed, but we walk into darkness,
We are forgotten, yet the future is our gift to humanity.”
– Oath of the Seventh Brotherhood,
attributed to its first Grand Master.
Crucible Rift – time determination not possible/
non sequitur
I cut the visual display from my helm. Blackness fills my mundane eyes. There is a second when I am aware of nothing but the breath easing from my lungs, and the cold ache of wounds numbed but not healed. I know the left-hand side of my body is torn and blackened. My mind can sense the dance of heat in the cooling gouges of my armour. The halberd in my hands is trembling, resonating to the rising pulse of the warp.
The darkness stares back at me. Then the forest begins to form in my sight. At first it is flat, like paint applied to a black wall. I see grey trees hunched and leafless, their twigs and branches stroking a rising fog. The branches begin to move, and the trunks sway like shadows thrown by a guttering lamp. A wet iron smell fills my mouth and nose. I turn my head slowly. The servos click in concert with the movement, and I feel an electric tingle of sympathy with my damaged armour. The forest around me expands into the distance as I look at it. My ears hear silence, but my mind feels the gale that is rising with the fog.
None of this is real, at least not in the sense that anyone sane would consider real. I am not walking through a forest. There is no fog, and the wind I hear in my ears is a lie. If I am walking through anything it is along the corridors and passages of the Crucible, but that is a failing truth. The physical reality of the voidship is crumbling as the rift opens at its heart: its angles are broken, its existence spiralling around its doom like draining water. The warp reigns here now, and so I have closed my eyes to reality, and allowed my soul to see what my flesh cannot. The warp is a mirror; its form is the light and shadow we cast on it. So it is that I see the death of the Crucible as a winter forest.
I glimpse the rift point as a cave-like darkness beyond the trees. It is growing, ripping wider. Something waits within that darkness, building the strength to birth itself into this world. I begin to walk forwards.
The darkness shifts and the perspective of the forest changes. Distances expand and contract. Shadows solidify and objects break into splinters and haze. I see eyes amongst the trees, glittering, moonlight cold. Snow crunches beneath my foot; it was not there when I began my step. Snowflakes rise on the wind. A shape moves on the edge of sight, slithering and padding, night black against powder white.
I kindle an image of flame in my mind. I hold the image, allowing it to form a pattern in my thoughts. I begin to burn. Flames rise from the silver of my armour. A sphere of light now walks with me. The shadows recoil and beneath me the snow melts. Riveted metal gleams under the slush. The forest twists around me as I walk through it. Corridors of tree trunks and bent branches form and vanish. The ground rises and falls like ocean waves. I turn my mind’s eye and meet the eyes amongst the trees; they are closer. Coal-black shapes slide against the silhouettes of tree trunks. The haft of my halberd begins to vibrate in my hands. Its blade is a frozen sheet of
flame in my sight. Howls crack the cold air.
They are coming.
A daemon breaks from the trees. Its shape forms as it crosses into the circle of light. It has the body of a hound. Shadow peels back from scale-clad skin. A mouth opens in its snout like a crack splitting wide in fire-blackened clay. Its hate and hunger snarls across my thoughts as its jaws hinge wide. I can smell grave rot and blood. It bounds forwards. I drop into a half-crouch, and ram my halberd forwards. The blade tip punches into the wolf’s neck. The shaft of the halberd rams back into the ground, takes the weight of the hound for a second then jerks upwards. I stand and turn, flipping the daemon over my head. I send a splinter of anger through the halberd’s core and the hound dissolves into ash and frost.
I begin to spin my halberd, weaving it between my hands as power flows through its core. They come to meet me out of the dark. They have the shapes that millennia of nightmare have given them: skinless bodies of blood-slick sinew, spheres of reaching hands, horned heads that grin with iron fangs. I rise and pivot, spraying bolt-shells in a wide arc. Explosions rip through the fog, parting it with blessed fire. Seen by my mind the detonations are pure white, like the burning of magnesium. My storm bolter clatters silent.
The daemons howl as one. The snow melts and then freezes harder. The ground twists and rolls as my mind burns into the warp. The trees retreat, their branches lacing through the fog to close off paths. Others reach upwards, growing like spreading thunderclouds.
A lance of rainbow fire strikes me, its tongues crawl across my armour. I shiver as the warp scratches against the sigil-laced silver. The daemons scream and the circle closes. I cut, muscles and will unwinding into a bright crescent around me. The blade parts flesh and bone. The wind catches the blood as it sprays out and lifts it into the fog in a spreading pink stain. My cut reaches its end. Light stirs in the cavernous darkness of the rift beyond the trees.
A waking roar echoes through the trees. I hear the call of carrion birds and the crack of bones in that cry. My enemy is almost here, it is almost awake in our world. I have to end this now. Every heartbeat spent here is strength lost to my enemy.
I call the fire. I speak its name and it answers. I feel the inferno roar in my ears and my skin feels colder than the void. I am glowing, my armour changing from silver-grey to coal-orange. A flayed lupine skull roars as its jaws close on my wrist and its teeth touch my armour. Ice spreads across the daemon’s muzzle, its jaw and teeth shattering like struck pottery. The fire unfolds from me like wings, like a cloak spilling in the wind, like the breath of a dying god.
Warp transit to Crucible Rift – 8883313.M41
The ship that brought me to the Crucible was named the Blade’s Peace. It could have carried a handful of my brotherhood, but I was the only one aboard. Her captain and the crimson-clad crew did not speak to me except to relay details of our progress through the warp. The Blade’s Peace was as fast as a ship could be, but still I stood two nights’ vigil before we arrived. Of those two nights the silence is what I remember now. Not just of a ship under power, but the silence that only those with our gifts and our brotherhood understand: the silence of a mind walking into darkness alone. I spent those silent hours in the candle-filled armoury.
The serfs disassembled my wargear down to the smallest rivet. I held each component, feeling the traces of its past, my past, in every touch. I saw the fires of Locara dancing against a black sky. I felt the death of the Revelator of Velt in the heartbeat before the daemon took his sight. I smelled the cold air of Hynal thick with the ozone of our teleportation. A thousand fragments caught like threads on the thorns of time. These moments are my life. They are the marks I made by the passage of my life. Eventually they will be forgotten.
I had no life before I became a son of Titan. A child was born, grew and lived, but he is not me. He is a ghost of a boy that died long ago. Not even I remember his name.
I had rebuilt my armour and weapons three times before the captain told me that we had arrived. Her voice was cold. She addressed me only as ‘lord’ while I was aboard her ship. Her name is Lydia, and I wonder if she realises that she is my ferryman to the underworld. Perhaps she does. She has served the Grey Knights for almost a century, and carried many to battles that will see them dead. Perhaps that is why she spoke with machine-like formality. Some say that it is our kind that lack humanity. I don’t believe this. Everything I have seen tells me that mankind holds infinitely greater inhumanity in its soul. Space Marines are not inhuman, we are focused.
I remade my armour for the last time, and the serfs clad my flesh with its second skin. There were dozens of figures around me, Chapter serfs in red and white robes with mirror eyes, tech-priests that clicked and muttered in static over every wire and fastening. The air was thick with incense smoke. I was surrounded but all I could hear was my mind echoing in the void. Finally my helmet closed over my head and a web of projected data filled my eyes. I became a hunched figure of silvered plate. The tapers of seven hundred and seventy-seven purity seals hung from me like dry leaves. They rustled as I moved to take my halberd from its iron coffer.
I did not go to the bridge. Instead I walked the kilometre-long passages to the launch bay. I asked the captain to channel the data from the ship’s sensors to the left eye of my helmet display as I walked. I watched the Crucible draw closer. It looked like a crenulated slab of dulled metal. The space around it still bore bruises of its panicked attempt to return to safety. That desperate hope was false. The Crucible was doomed, its part now only to serve as the stage for my final battle. A rift was forming like a cyst in the ship’s guts, gorging on reality, swelling in size.
I did not know why the rift had formed. Perhaps it had been a Navigator following a route through the warp that resonated like a ringing glass. Perhaps some amongst the crew had dreamed the same dream by chance, and that dream had grown. Perhaps it was a thousand factors spread across hundreds of years, aligning slowly like the cog teeth of a great clock. There were countless possibilities and none of them mattered.
I reached the launch chamber. The boarding torpedo waited for me, lying in its cradle like a dissected bullet. I felt the deck tremble under my feet as the Blade’s Peace fired its thrusters, clipping its momentum until it was at a dead halt three thousand kilometres from the stricken ship. I climbed into the cramped cave of the boarding torpedo. My armour mag-locked to the torpedo’s inner surfaces and the hatches closed around me. In the darkness I cut the feed from the Blade’s Peace and let my thoughts settle. At that moment I realised I had one regret: I would have liked to speak to my brothers.
Crucible Rift – time determination not possible/
non sequitur
The only sound is the wind stirring snow through the trees. I stop and turn in a slow circle. The trees have moved, and I cannot see the rift point any more. Snow becomes a halo of vapour as it tries to touch my cooling armour. Quiet surrounds me like a tide waiting at the edge of the shore. The trees seem to press close, their black trunks creaking in the wind. I shift my grip on my halberd. The snow swirls thicker, settling in a silent blanket.
A sharp crack splits the quiet. I turn, looking for its source. Another crack, then another, each like a bone splintering. I see it then. A tree is splitting, and something is pulling itself from the trunk. Scabs of black bark cover its back. Its limbs and torso are soft and pale, like drowned skin. Yellow sap oozes from lesions and sores in its flesh, rolling down its body in a sticky sheen. It steps away from the tree, leaving an impression in the trunk. The ground shakes as it turns. Its head is set low on its shoulders, a flat wedge split by a wide mouth and slit nostrils. It straightens to twice my height. Its eyes are the dead white of cataracts.
It lunges at me, its hands and arms growing as it moves. I bring my halberd around as I step back, and cleave through its arms at the wrists. The daemon shrinks back, yellow blood showering from the stumps of its arms. It roars, and vomits a stream of thick sap over me. My armour begins to ring with w
arnings. Acid is eating into the joints and cracks between the silvered plates. Maggots and grubs begin to chew into the softening metal. The warding runes etched into each plate are burning with heat. For an instant my focus falters. The daemon strikes me then. Its hands have regrown, and a blade-like finger punches into my gut and spins me through the air. Damage warnings shriek in my ears. It strikes me again as I fall. I hit the ground in a tangle of limbs and buckled armour.
I start to rise, snow and blood falling from me. The daemon is walking towards me, the slowness of victory in its stride. Weeping burns mark its flesh where it touched my armour. It grunts, and opens its toad mouth to show a black tongue rolling behind hooked teeth. I come to one knee. Pain reaches into my chest as I move. My halberd shakes as it takes my weight. I look weak, as if my strength is failing. It is not a complete lie.
The daemon bellows and charges, its mouth wide. I stand at the last instant. The point of my halberd meets the daemon’s descending mouth. The force of the daemon’s charge punches the blade through the top of its skull. Its bulk rams into me, and its arms rake the air. It is still alive. It shakes its head, forcing its bulk down my halberd. Its eyes are level with me, black blood oozes from its nostrils. The halberd twists in my grip. My hands are slick with pus and blood. I step back, twisting the halberd with all my strength. My armour screeches. The halberd turns in the daemon’s skull. I push down and the blade saws out of the bottom of the daemon’s head, splitting its jaw and cutting down through its torso. I pull the blade free and spin the tainted blood from its edge. The daemon collapses, and begins to burn.
I look up. I can see the waiting cave of the rift. It has grown wider, and suddenly I can feel the wind howling towards its black mouth. A shriek rolls through the forest. It is the sound of a monstrous birth, of triumph, of a nightmare waking. I run to meet it.
Warhammer 40,000 - [Weekender 01] Page 6