Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  Vulkan asked, ‘Do you think the beasts are all native to the planet or did some arrive with the xenos?’

  ‘It hardly matters,’ said Mortarion. ‘They may have been created through the means of some aberrant alien technology.’ His amber eyes glared. ‘All I need to know is where they are.’

  The primarch of the Iron Hands considered all of this as he tried to build an accurate picture of the war zone. ‘These eldar are not as technologically advanced as some I have fought.’ He scowled. ‘It makes me wonder how the indigenous population was so easily enslaved.’

  ‘We found some humans living within the jungle continent,’ said Vulkan. ‘A few thousand so far, but I believe there are more. I did not see warriors in their tribes. I suspect they are a simple people in need of our protection.’

  ‘Regardless, it is the eldar we must concern ourselves with.’ Mortarion’s tone became dismissive. ‘There are natives on the ice plains too, but my attention is fixed elsewhere.’

  Contempt for the weakness of the humans exuded from the Death Lord’s every pore. Vulkan felt ashamed that his own feelings towards the jungle dwellers were not so dissimilar.

  ‘For once, I am in agreement with my brother,’ said Ferrus. He turned to Vulkan. ‘This world has been infiltrated utterly. No corner of it, however remote, is clean of the aliens’ taint. Until that is no longer the case, we cannot afford to have our purpose divided. Be mindful, brother, but let the humans look to their own protection. That is all.’

  The hololith faded, indicating that was the end to their conversation. Vulkan bowed his head to Ferrus’s order and found himself inside an Army command tent with Numeon waiting patiently at the threshold.

  ‘What news?’ Vulkan’s mood was sour.

  The equerry saluted with all the starched formality he was known for and took three steps into the tent. ‘Advance Army scouts have found the node, my lord. They are transmitting coordinates as we speak.’

  Vulkan was already walking from the tent and into the open. Phaerian troopers at guard outside hurried out of the primarch’s path. ‘Ready the Legion. We march at once.’

  Numeon followed in lockstep. ‘Shall I summon the Stormbirds?’

  ‘No. We go on foot.’

  Outside, some of the Army cohorts were building pyres stacked with the alien dead. Curiously, small groups of natives ringed the edges of the vast fires, sobbing into one another’s arms. They had lost everything, their lives and their homes, and were caught up in a war they didn’t understand.

  Numeon had said he was compassionate. All Vulkan felt was alone. Even amongst his brothers he felt isolated, save for Horus. A close kinship existed between them. There was something very noble and selfless about the Warmaster. He fostered loyalty in those around him like no other. Charisma bled off him in an almost palpable aura. Perhaps that was why the Emperor had chosen him and not Sanguinius to be Warmaster. Vulkan saw him as an older sibling, one whom he looked up to and could confide in. He wished dearly that he could speak with him now. Vulkan felt his humours out of balance and he longed for Nocturne again. Perhaps the long war had changed him. His expression hardened.

  ‘We will burn the eldar out.’

  As he watched the twisting smoke tendrils rise into the sky, Vulkan was taken back to a time before he knew of stars and planets, and of the warriors in thunder armour who were destined to become his sons.

  Strong hands worked the fuller, drawing out the glowing orange metal and shaping it to the blacksmiter’s will. There were calluses on those hands, testimony to the long hours spent toiling before the flame. Rough fingers gripped the hammer’s worn haft as it rose and fell, beating the fire-scaled iron until it made a taper. The blacksmiter added a second taper to the first and the metal became a point.

  ‘Pass me the tongs…’

  As tough as cured leather, the blacksmiter held out a bare hand. Beneath the soot, it had a healthy tan from time spent tracking the Arridian plain for gemstones. He took the proffered tool and clamped it around the spear-point. Steam erupted in a hissing cloud as the hot metal touched the surface of the water in the drum. It reminded the son of Mount Deathfire, snoring loudly in her sleep and choking the sky with her smoky breath.

  ‘She is the heart blood,’ his father had told him once. He remembered he was barely a year old and already taller and stronger than most of the men in the town. Standing upon the mountain’s flanks, they had watched her vent and spew her wrath. At first the boy had wanted to flee, not out of fear for himself – his will was as iron in that regard – but because he was scared for his father. N’bel had quietened the boy with a gesture. Holding his palm flat against his chest, he bade his son do the same. ‘Respect the fire. Respect her. She is life and death, my boy,’ he had said to him. ‘Our salvation and our doom.’

  Our salvation and our doom…

  Such was the way of things on Nocturne.

  In the old tongue it meant ‘darkness’ or ‘night’, and it was every inch the benighted world, but it was the only home he had ever known.

  After a few moments, the billowing steam from the sundered metal ebbed and N’bel lifted it out of the water drum and presented it to his son.

  It was still incredibly hot, the glow of the forge not yet faded.

  ‘See? A new tip for your spear.’ He smiled and the old smiter’s face creased like leather. There was a rime of soot around his soft eyes and his thinning cheeks were powdered with ash. His scalp was shaved and there were branding scars on the bald pate. ‘You’ll kill plenty of sauroch on the Arridian plain with it.’

  The son returned the old man’s smile. ‘I could have done it myself, father.’

  N’bel was cleaning his tools, smacking off the fire-scale and brushing away the soot. It was dark in the forge, all the better to see the temperature of the metal and gauge its readiness. The air was thick with the scent of burning and thickened by the heat. Far from oppressive, the son found the conditions invigorating. He liked it here. He felt safe, a measure of solace he couldn’t emulate anywhere else on Nocturne. His father’s tools hung in racks upon the walls, only hinted at in the gloom, and lay upon benches and anvils of all sizes and shapes. The son had strong hands, and here in the forge and workshop was where he could put them to best use.

  N’bel kept his eyes on his work and didn’t notice the son’s brief reverie. ‘I am a humble blacksmiter. I don’t possess the skills of the metal-shapers, nor do I have the wisdom of an earth shaman, but I am still your father and a father likes to do things for a beloved son.’

  The son frowned and approached the old man tentatively. ‘What’s wrong?’

  N’bel kept cleaning the tools for a short while longer before his arms sagged to his sides and he sighed. He set the hammer down atop the anvil and looked his son in the eye.

  ‘I know what you have come here to ask me, lad.’

  ‘I…’

  ‘You don’t need to deny it.’

  The pain at his father’s discomfort was etched on the son’s face. ‘I’m not trying to hurt you, father.’

  ‘I know that, but you deserve the truth. I am just afraid of what it will mean when you have it.’

  The son held N’bel’s shoulder and cupped the older man’s chin. It was like a child’s in his immense hand and he towered over the blacksmiter.

  ‘You raised me and gave me a home. You will always be my father.’

  Tears welled in N’bel’s eye and he wiped them away as he broke from his son’s embrace.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said, and they walked to the back of the stone forge. For as long as the son could remember, there had been an old anvil sat in the gloom there. It was shrouded in a leather tarp that N’bel ripped away and cast to the floor. Rust colonised the surface of the massive anvil and it shocked the son to see such disrepair. N’bel barely noticed as he braced his shoulder against the ruddy metal side. He strained and the anvil scraped forwards a fraction. ‘I didn’t raise a giant of a son just so I could still do all o
f my own heavy lifting,’ he said wryly. ‘A little help for your old man?’

  Ashamed he’d just been looking on, the son joined him at once and together they moved the great anvil aside. He barely felt the weight: the strength in his arms was incredible and extended to every muscle and sinew in his body, but the simple act of working together with his father was soul-enriching.

  N’bel was sweating when it was done and wiped a hand across his brow. ‘I’m sure I used to be stronger,’ he gasped. The levity was short-lived as he pointed to a square recess sunken into the floor. ‘There…’ It was thick with soot and dust, but the son realised at once that it was some kind of trap-door.

  ‘Has this been here all the time?’

  ‘I bless the day you came to us,’ said N’bel. ‘You were, and still are, a miracle.’

  The son looked at his father but he gave nothing away. He knelt down and felt around the edges of the square depression in the floor. His fingers found purchase and in a feat of strength that no other man in the township could have managed, the son lifted the great stone slab into the air. Despite its weight, he set it down carefully and then stared into the dark passageway it revealed retreating back into the earth.

  ‘What’s down there?’

  ‘Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve never shown fear. Not even the drakes below the mountain gave you pause.’

  ‘I fear this,’ he admitted openly. ‘Now I’m faced with it, I’m not sure I want the truth.’

  N’bel placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘You will always be my son… always.’

  He took his first steps into the darkness and found a stone stairway underfoot that clacked loudly with his every footfall. As the son went deeper, the edge of something hard and metallic began to resolve out of the blackness.

  ‘I see something…’

  ‘Do not fear it, lad.’

  ‘I see…’

  Echoing through the walls of the forge, a low reverberant bellow stopped the son’s next faltering step. It was a warning. Up in one of the town’s watchtowers, a horn was being blown. Even deep within the forge, N’bel and his son heard it.

  Relief swept through the son as he abandoned the darkened hollow and returned to the forge’s gloomy light above.

  ‘Truth will have to wait,’ he said.

  N’bel was scowling, reaching for his spear, his favoured hammer already tucked into his tool belt. ‘Dusk-wraiths.’

  Every tribe on Nocturne had its legends about them. They were the night-fiends, the stealers of flesh, the dark spectres, a waking nightmare brought to life when the skies became as crimson and the clouds boiled overhead. Few who’d seen them had lived, and even those rare individuals were forever broken by the experience. Horror stories given form, they were alien slavers who stole people from their homes and carried them away on their ships into the endless dark. None who entered that place ever returned.

  The son snarled. ‘Are we to be forever hunted?’

  ‘It is the anvil, that is all,’ said N’bel. ‘Endure it, be tempered by it and become stronger.’

  ‘I am already strong, father.’

  N’bel gripped his son’s shoulder. ‘You are, Vulkan. Stronger than you know.’

  Together, they ran from the forge and out into the town.

  A sanguine sky reigned over Hesiod and rust-rimed clouds billowed and crashed in the bloody heavens. Ash and smoke laced the breeze and a pregnant heat lay heavy on the air like a mantle of invisible chain.

  ‘Hell-dawn, when the ash banks break and the sun burns,’ cried N’bel, pointing to the sky. ‘It heralds the blood. Every time at this inauspicious hour they come.’

  In the town square there was a panic. The people hurried from their homes, clutching what meagre belongings they could to their chests, clinging to their loved ones. Some were screaming, afraid of what they knew was coming and terrified that this time they would be dragged into the endless dark.

  Breughar, the metal-shaper, had emerged out of the throng and was trying to restore calm. He and several of the other men were shouting for the rest of the people to take refuge. The horn bayed on, driving the fearful to an ever greater frenzy.

  ‘This madness must end,’ breathed Vulkan, appalled at the terror now seizing his tribe. These were a strong people who endured the ravages of the earth when the ground split and the volcanoes cast fire and darkness into the sky. But the dusk-wraiths, the fear they evoked was beyond reason.

  As his father went to help Breughar and the others, Vulkan ran across the square to a vast pillar of rock. It was the burning stone, where the earth-shaman went to meditate when the sun was at its zenith. It was unoccupied at that moment and Vulkan scaled the sides of the monolithic stone without slowing to reach the peak in seconds. Crouching on the flat plateau, he had a good view of the lands beyond Hesiod.

  Dark, orange-flecked smudges marred the horizon line where distant villages blazed. Oily smoke cascaded into the sky from where they’d been put to the torch and their inhabitants burned alive. Nomadic sauroch drovers fled as their herds were butchered. Dactylid carrion-eaters turned lazy circles, black against the blood-red sky, waiting for any morsels the dusk-wraiths might leave them.

  The drovers were oblivious to the creatures. They were running for Hesiod’s walls but Vulkan realised grimly that they’d never make it.

  Behind them the dusk-wraiths taunted and shrieked. Their bladed skiffs hovered above the plain, jagged silhouettes against the red of Hell-dawn. Though he was too far away to hear it, Vulkan saw one of the drovers cry out as he was pinioned by barbed nets before a half-naked warrior-witch impaled him on her spear. Others, tall, lithe creatures wearing segmented armour the colour of night, cast javelins from the backs of their machines as they revelled in the hunt.

  When they were finished with the nomads and the villages, they would come to Hesiod.

  Vulkan clenched his fists. Every Hell-dawn was the same. When the sky was shot red with blood, the shrieking would begin and the dusk-wraiths would come. No man should be hunted, not like that. No son or daughter of Nocturne should be made to suffer as the drovers would. Life was hard enough. Survival was hard enough.

  ‘No more.’

  Vulkan had seen what he needed to.

  He leapt off the rock, landing in a crouch. N’bel ran to him, breathless with his efforts of rushing the weak and the vulnerable to safety.

  ‘Come on. We must hide too.’

  Vulkan’s face was stern as he rose to his feet and looked down on his father. ‘While we hide, others suffer.’

  N’bel gasped a reply. ‘What choice do we have? We stay and we all die.’

  ‘We can always fight.’

  ‘What?’ N’bel was nonplussed. ‘Against the dusk-wraiths?’ He shook his head. ‘No, son, we would be butchered like those herds out on the plain. Come!’ He seized Vulkan’s arm but was shrugged off.

  ‘I will fight.’

  All around them, the people of Hesiod were disappearing into secret alcoves and subterranean caves below the town. It would be the same across all of Nocturne. At Themis, Heliosa, Aethonian and the rest – the seven chief settlements of the planet would flee to their hollows in the earth and close their eyes to the nightmare. There they would stay while the dusk-wraiths ransacked and slaughtered, destroying everything they had fought and died to create.

  ‘No. I’m pleading with you now. Hide like the rest of us.’

  Vulkan walked away, headed for the forge.

  N’bel called after him, ‘Where are you going? Vulkan!’

  He went inside the forge without answering. When he emerged he had two stout smiting hammers slung over either shoulder.

  ‘The blood of these people may not flow in my veins but I am still one of them, I am still of Nocturne. And I will see it tortured no more.’

  Faced with the fury of his son’s righteous anger, N’bel’s despair turned to resolution. He hefted his spear.

  ‘Then I won’t let you stand alone.’
>
  To object or deny him would be to insult his father and Vulkan was not about to do that. Instead, he nodded and an unspoken understanding passed between them. Though they might not share the same blood, they would always be kin. Whatever waited below the trap-door in the forge, it would not change that.

  Together they walked to the middle of the square and stood facing Hesiod’s gates.

  Beyond, the shrieking of the dusk-wraiths grew louder.

  ‘I have never been prouder of you than I am right now, Vulkan.’

  ‘When this is over, I want you to seal the trap-door shut. I never want to know what is down there.’

  ‘I do not think we will get the chance, son,’ N’bel turned to him, ‘but if we live through this, what about your origins? Don’t you want to know where you came from?’

  Vulkan glanced down at the cracked, volcanic earth. ‘These are my origins. This is where I was born. It is all I need to know, father.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Vulkan saw Breughar. He carried his two-handed hammer across his brawny chest and the torcs knotted in his thick beard clanked as he moved. Until Vulkan had arrived in Hesiod, Breughar had been the largest and strongest man of the town. He’d accepted the change in status with a grace and nobility that Vulkan had never forgotten. The metal-shaper nodded to N’bel as he took up his place alongside them.

  ‘You are the best of us,’ he said to Vulkan. ‘I will set my shoulder to yours, kinsman.’

  Breughar was not alone. Others were coming from their hiding places to stand in the square too.

  ‘My shoulder to yours,’ said Gorve, the plainskeeper.

  ‘And mine,’ added Rek’tar, hornmaster.

  Soon there were over a hundred Nocturneans, men and women both, clutching spears, swords, their forge hammers and anything else that could be used as a weapon. They were a people united, and Vulkan was their foundation rock.

  ‘We hide no more,’ said Vulkan, and drew his hammers across his body. His gaze narrowed to a point fixed upon the gate. Like a blade held against the forge flame, he fashioned his anger into a weapon he could wield. Too long had they been prey. Now they would rise…