Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  He caught Gravius’s eye across the shattered corpses of the aliens.

  ‘Unto the anvil, brother.’

  Heka’tan saluted. ‘I told you he would come. Glory to the Legion.’

  ‘Glory to Vulkan,’ Gravius replied.

  The last of the eldar fled, swallowed by the jungle.

  Heka’tan watched them go. His gaze went to Vulkan. How often had the primarch saved his sons from certain destruction, turned the tide and fought on when all had seemed lost? The Salamanders were one of the smallest Legions, but they had served the Great Crusade with pride and honour. Heka’tan could not imagine a time when it would not be so. Vulkan was as stalwart and unshakeable as the earth. He would ever be their father. No feat would ever be too much for him, no war too great that he could not triumph.

  His heart swelled.

  ‘Aye, glory to Vulkan.’

  Numeon was pulling the blade of his halberd from the skull of a dying stegosaur. ‘We should pursue them, my lord. Varrun and I can ensure they do not return,’ he promised with a feral look. He’d removed his battle-helm and allowed the heat of the jungle to prick at his bare, ebon skin.

  Vulkan held up his hand without meeting his champion’s eye. ‘No. We’ll make our landing zone here and consolidate. I want to speak to Ferrus and Mortarion first. If this campaign is going to succeed, and there still be a planet left to bring back to the Imperium, we must work together. The earth here is rich and will yield much for the Crusade, but only if it isn’t tainted by the war to bring One-Five-Four Four to compliance.’

  It was a cold, methodical way of differentiating a world. It meant it was the fourth world to be brought to compliance by the 154th Expeditionary Fleet.

  ‘I do not think they see it that way.’

  They were standing apart from the rest, with only the mute Varrun within earshot. Around them, the battlefield rang with cold, sporadic barks of bolter fire as xenos survivors were executed. More distantly, the Army units were being recalled by discipline-masters and an impromptu audit taken of their numbers.

  Now Vulkan met Numeon’s gaze. ‘Speak your mind.’

  ‘The Fourteenth treat us with contempt and the Tenth as minor legionaries. I see no coalition between them and the Salamanders, at least not one that comes easily.’

  ‘We cannot isolate ourselves, Numeon. Mortarion is simply proud. In us he sees a force as implacable as his own Death Guard, that is all. Ferrus is a friend to this Legion and to me, but… well, let us just say my brother has always had a zealous streak. It sometimes clouds his mind to anything but the creed of the Iron Hands.’

  ‘Flesh is weak.’ Numeon’s lip curled as he repeated the doctrine of the X Legion. ‘They mean us. We are weak.’ The champion’s demeanour suggested he wanted to prove otherwise but the Iron Hands were far from a reckoning, off towards the eastern peninsula of One-Five-Four Four’s primary desert continent.

  Vulkan interrupted. ‘They mean anyone who is not of the Tenth. It is just pride. Are you not proud of your Legion?’

  Numeon saluted sharply across his breastplate. For a Salamander, he carried the rigidity of one of Guilliman’s own sons quite convincingly. ‘I am fireborn, my liege.’

  Smiling, Vulkan raised his hands to show he’d meant no disrespect to the veteran.

  ‘You have been in my Pyre Guard since the beginning, Numeon. You and your brothers met me on Prometheus. Do you remember?’

  Now the dutiful warrior bowed. ‘It is forever ingrained in my memory, lord. It was the greatest moment of the Legion to be reunited with our father.’

  ‘Aye, as it was for me. You of all the Firedrakes are pre-eminent, my first-captain, my equerry. Do not take the words of the Tenth to heart, brother. In truth, they only desire to prove their loyalty and worth to their father, as we all do. Despite his gruff exterior, Ferrus has a great respect for his fellow legionaries, especially the Eighteenth. You burn with the passion and fury of the Salamanders.’ Vulkan returned a feral grin, evident in the tone of his voice. ‘What is the coldness of a Medusan mind compared to that, eh?’ He clapped his hand on Numeon’s shoulder but the primarch’s bonhomie was fleeting. ‘Earth, fire and metal – we of the Eighteenth are forged strong. Never forget that.’

  ‘Your wisdom humbles me but I have never understood your temperance and compassion, my lord,’ Numeon confessed.

  Vulkan frowned, as if about to impart some hidden truth he had always harboured, then his expression changed and hardened. He broke eye contact.

  Numeon was about to question again when Vulkan raised his hand for silence. The primarch’s gaze was penetrating as he looked into the trees around them. Though Numeon could not discern what had suddenly got his father’s attention, he knew Vulkan’s sight was keener than any of his siblings. The tension in Vulkan’s posture transferred to his Pyre Guard, which quickly ebbed when he relaxed again.

  He gestured seemingly at the air. ‘Show yourselves. Have no fear, no harm will befall you.’

  Numeon cocked his head in confusion. His red eyes flared at the first of the humans emerging from the forest. He brandished his halberd in front of his primarch protectively. It was odd that he hadn’t detected them.

  ‘Be at ease, brother,’ Vulkan counselled, approaching the terrified jungle dwellers. They had come from hidden places deep within the trees, stepping out from shadowed boles or lofty nests. Some appeared from the earth itself, emerging from subterranean refuges. Tribal tattoos marked their faces and their bodies were swathed in apparel made from fire-baked bark and the stitching together of leaves. Though they had the aspect of beasts, they were definitely human. And only now the battle was over did they choose to show themselves.

  Vulkan took off his helmet, a snarling drake’s head with an immense flame-like crest. Honour scars described a long legacy of heroic deeds upon a face the colour of onyx, which also possessed a softness belied by the primarch’s fearsome appearance. ‘See?’ he said to a boy-child brave enough to stand his ground. ‘We are not monsters.’

  Confronted by the giant, diabolic primarch, the boy’s terrified expression suggested he thought otherwise.

  Behind him, the other humans of his tribe cowered.

  Though he kneeled, Vulkan was much taller than the child. The primarch stowed his forge hammer on his back and came to the boy with open palms to show he wasn’t holding a weapon. Around him, the rest of the Pyre Guard had gathered. Numeon had summoned the others with Promethean battle-cant, known only to the Firedrakes, and they all watched apprehensively.

  Sworn to protect the primarch, they were warriors apart. Terran-born, they did not always fully appreciate the earthy sentiments of the Nocturnean culture in which Vulkan was raised, but they knew their duty and felt it in their gene-enhanced blood.

  Emboldened by the curious boy, more human refugees started to appear from out of the jungle. Hundreds joined the few score that had come initially. After a brief, stunned silence, they were wailing and moaning piteously. Their words were hard to make out but one kept being repeated over and over. Ibsen.

  So this place had a name after all.

  Vulkan stood up to survey them and the liberated humans backed off instantly.

  ‘What should we do with them, my lord?’ asked Numeon.

  Vulkan regarded them a moment longer. There were many hundreds now. Some of the Army units had already begun trying to corral them, while remembrancers swarmed throughout the landing zone, documenting and interviewing now that the area was deemed safe.

  A woman, perhaps the brave boy-child’s mother, approached Numeon and began babbling and crying. The native’s language was some bastardised blend of eldar-speech and proto-human word forms. Nearby xeno-linguists within the invasion force were struggling to discern meaning but made assumptions that, while distressed, the people were pleased to have been freed from the yoke of the aliens.

  She scratched at the Pyre Guard’s battleplate and he looked as if he was about to forcibly remove her when a glance from his p
rimarch stayed Numeon’s hand.

  ‘It is only fear. We have seen it before.’ Vulkan gently pulled the hysterical woman away from his equerry. Touched by the primarch’s aura, she calmed enough for an Army trooper to take her away. A little farther away, a picter flashed as one of the remembrancers recorded the moment for posterity. ‘You.’

  The man quailed as Vulkan addressed him. ‘M-my lord?’

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Glaivarzel, sire. Imagist.’

  Vulkan nodded. ‘You will surrender your picter to the nearest discipline-master.’

  ‘S-sire?’

  ‘No one must see that we are saviours, Glaivarzel. The Emperor needs us to be warriors, to be death incarnate. To be anything less would endanger the Crusade and my Legion. Do you understand?’

  The remembrancer nodded slowly and gave his picter to one of the Phaerian discipline-masters who had overheard the exchange.

  ‘When this war is done, you have my sanction to come and speak with me. I will tell of my life and the coming of the father. Will that be sufficient recompense for the loss of your images?’

  Glaivarzel nodded then bowed. He seemed to have abruptly lost the ability to speak. When he’d been ushered away, Vulkan turned back to Numeon.

  ‘I have seen fear,’ he told him. ‘On Nocturne, when the earth split and the sky cried tears of fire. That was real fear.’ He swept his gaze across the tribespeople as they were slowly moved away. ‘I should see suffering.’ His face became hard and unyielding. ‘But how can I feel compassion for a race whose hardships do not nearly compare to those endured by my own people?’

  Nonplussed, and for want of something better to say, Numeon replied, ‘I am not from Nocturne.’

  Vulkan turned from the disappearing refugees. A sigh escaped his lips in what might have been an expression of regret. ‘I know… So show me then, Numeon, how are we to liberate this world and ensure its compliance despite the feelings of our brother Legions?’

  A gruff and belligerent voice provided narration to a sweeping hololithic image of a desert continent. Clutches of hard grassland and spiked vegetation were scattered across the sparse landscape. Overhead, the glare of a forbidding sun bleached the sand white. Monuments and domes made of baked brick rose up out of the dunes. A cluster of these structures encircled a massive menhir sunk into a natural depression. Here, the sweeping image stopped and magnified. Runes described the outer surface of the menhir, which was smooth and alien in design. Faintly glowing crystals, akin to giant oval rubies, were set at precise intervals and interlinked by swirling knot lines emanating from, and interwoven within, the core runes.

  ‘The aliens draw their psychic power from these nodes.’

  The image blinked out and a hololith of the tenth primarch replaced it.

  Ferrus Manus was a metal giant clad in jet-black power armour. His homeworld of Medusa was an icy wasteland echoed in the chilling silver of his pupil-less eyes and the glacial coldness of his knife-scraped flesh. Vulkan’s brother went unhooded, displaying – defiantly – a battle-worn face framed by black hair that was closely-cropped to his scalp. Ferrus was a furnace constantly stoked; his anger was quick to rise and slow to abate. He was also called ‘the Gorgon’, allegedly on account of his steely glare that could petrify those it fell upon. A less fanciful explanation arose from his planet’s namesake and a tie to a Terran legend of ancient Mykenaea.

  ‘Our augurs have detected three such nodes in existence across the surface of One-Five-Four Four on the desert, ice plain and jungle continents–’

  A low and hollow voice interrupted. ‘Our mission is known to us, brother. We have no need of reiteration.’

  A second primarch entered the war council and stood alongside Ferrus Manus, although the two were many leagues apart at opposite ends of the planet. It was a strange juxtaposition, one wrapped by arctic blizzards, the other bathed in the glow of a fiery sun. Mortarion of the Death Guard was tall and thin but his presence, even via hololith, was undeniable.

  ‘What I want to know is why we three are here to take this world, three Legions attached to the same expeditionary fleet – what makes it worthy of my attention?’

  The self-proclaimed Death Lord had a grim aspect. His gaunt, almost skeletal features were reminiscent of a mythic figure recalled from archaic lore. He was the reaper of souls, the harvester of the dead, the thing that all men dread as it comes to claim them in the night hours, shrouded by a funereal cloak as grey and ephemeral as life’s final breath. Mortarion was all of these things and more. While the Night Lords employed fear as a weapon, he was fear incarnate.

  Ashen, glabrous skin was suggested behind the grille that masked the lower half of his face. A cloud of vaporous gas encircled his head in a pallid miasma, the captured fumes of lethal Barbarus, and was exuded from the confines of his stark war panoply. Shining brass and naked steel clad his form. Much of the detail was obscured by the flowing grey cloak that pooled voluminously over Mortarion’s angular shoulders like smoke, but a pitiless skull was still visible upon the breastplate. Poison censers ringed his towering form like a bandolier of grenades. Like his armour, these too carried the caustic air of the primarch’s homeworld.

  Vulkan stooped to grasp a fistful of earth. Brandishing it to the other primarchs, he allowed the soft loamy soil to drain through his gauntleted fingers.

  ‘Earth,’ he uttered simply. ‘There is a seam of valuable ore, gemstones too numerous to count beneath its surface. I taste it in the air and feel it under my feet. If we force compliance of One-Five-Four Four quickly, we can preserve it. A protracted war would see any potential geological bounty significantly reduced. That is why, brother.’

  Ferrus spoke up, the irritation in his voice obvious, ‘And it is why the nodes must be tackled simultaneously and upon my order.’

  A tired sigh rasped from the Death Lord’s lips. ‘This posturing wastes valuable time. The Fourteenth must cover more ground than their fellow Legions.’ Mortarion unclasped his mouth grille to grin at the Gorgon. It was at once a mirthless and forbidding gesture, not unlike the rictus mouth of a skull. ‘And besides, Vulkan and I know who is in command. There is no need to feel threatened, Ferrus.’

  Fraternal rivalry existed between all the primarchs. It was a natural consequence of their shared genetic origins, but the Iron Hand and the Death Guard felt it more keenly than most. Each prided himself on his Legion’s endurance but while one looked to steel and machinery to overcome weakness, the other valued a more innate and biological resilience. As of yet, the virtues of both remained untested against one another.

  Ferrus folded his arms, silver like flowing mercury, but did not bite at the obvious lure. ‘Is your task over-difficult, brother? I had thought the natives of Barbarus to be of sterner stock.’

  Mortarion’s eyes narrowed and his grip on his massive scythe tightened. ‘The Legion leaves death in its wake, brother! Come to the ice fields and see for yourself how war should be conducted.’

  Unable to cool his molten core any longer, Ferrus snapped. ‘Your ravages are already known to me, Mortarion. We must leave some of this world intact if it is to be of use afterwards. You and your kind may thrive in a toxic waste, but the settlers who follow us will not.’

  ‘My kind? Your own Legion’s progress is as slow and flawed as the machines they covet. What of the desert, is it won?’

  ‘It is intact. Any warmonger with Legiones Astartes at his call can unleash destruction, but your tactics are extreme. One-Five-Four Four will not become a barren, lifeless rock under my charge.’

  ‘Brothers…’

  Both turned in mid-dispute to regard Vulkan.

  ‘Our enemy is without, not within. We should reserve our anger for them and them alone. We each occupy three very different theatres of war. Different approaches are needed and each of us must be the judge of that. Our father made us generals, and generals must be allowed to lead.’

  Mortarion smiled thinly.

  ‘Tempera
te as ever, brother.’

  Vulkan chose to take that as a compliment.

  ‘But Ferrus is also right. We are here to liberate and make this world compliant, not turn it to ash. One hell-planet lives in my nightmares – I have no desire to add another to it. Lighten your hand, Mortarion. The scythe does not need to fall so harshly.’ He turned to Ferrus Manus. ‘And you, brother, trust in us just as our father did when he charged us with bringing humanity back from the darkness of Old Night.’

  Ferrus glared, slow to concede the point, but then nodded. The embers of his anger still burned. Where Vulkan was as the earth, solid and grounded; the Gorgon was volatile like an arctic volcano on the constant verge of eruption. He calmed reluctantly.

  ‘You have a lyrical soul, Vulkan. I wonder if it should not be a little harder.’

  They were of a similar cast, the Iron Hand and the Salamander. Both were forgesmiths, but where Vulkan valued beauty and form, Ferrus Manus was chiefly concerned with function. It was a subtle but telling difference and one that left them a little divided at times, despite their close friendship.

  ‘Other than enlightenment, what else have you found in the jungle?’ asked the Gorgon.

  Vulkan gave his report. ‘My Legion has encountered the eldar. Few in number, they employ ambush tactics and have slaved saurian creatures to their will. There are also witches amongst them. Our Army cohorts have been diminished and my sons have taken minor casualties but we are closing on the node.’

  Giving only the slightest indication of displeasure at the news of legionary deaths, Ferrus added, ‘We too have fought creatures on the dunes, chitinous sand-burrowers and giant hela-lizards. The eldar ride them as we would ride a jetbike or speeder.’

  Offering his own account, Mortarion said, ‘I severed the neck of an ice-serpent abroad on the tundra, and there are shag-hided mastodons bent to the aliens’ service.’