Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  Like a voice cut off abruptly at the source, the shrieking ceased.

  Silence persisted for a moment, haunted by the distant mewling of mauled sauroch cattle or the pleas of dying drovers fallen just short of sanctuary.

  It wasn’t long before their tormentors appeared.

  Clad in shadows, they moved with a perverted grace, scaling Hesiod’s border like slivers of night. Drenched in almost palpable cruelty, the dusk-wraiths crouched on the summit of the wall, cackling to one another, baring their teeth and flashing the silver of their savage blades in torturous promise. Leather-clad witches, their long hair festooned with razor edges, carrying serrated spears, wicked falchions and other sharp instruments Vulkan could only guess at the purpose of, were the first to cross the threshold.

  With feline surety they landed on all fours, rolling up on two legs in a sinuous swaggering motion that suggested their incredible arrogance and sense of superiority. Their eyes were alive with lustful anticipation of the kill, and just the smallest mote of amusement at the defiance of the human cattle in front of them.

  Their slow advance into the square was intended to make their prey quail. Beside him, Vulkan could feel the other warriors’ tension. He also saw the pack mentality in the dusk-wraiths’ formation. It put him in mind of the leonid, the alpha-hunters that stalked the Arridian plain. These creatures, these pale-skinned, androgynous things, possessed none of the majesty of those great maned beasts.

  Vulkan’s lips curled into a sneer, ‘Soul-shrived ghost-walkers; that is all you are.’

  He stepped forwards.

  ‘Return,’ he bellowed. ‘Return to your ships and be gone. You will only find steel and death waiting for you here, and no longer cattle for your culling knives.’

  One of the witches laughed. It was a chilling, evil sound. She said something to one of her kin in the barbed dialect of the dusk-wraiths and a lesser male snarled obediently. His eyes were tarry pits that narrowed as they settled on Vulkan. With a shrilling cry, he raced at the Nocturnean who had dared to defy the slavers. He was fast, like a lightning-adder.

  Vulkan told the others, ‘Stay back,’ and rushed to meet the dusk-wraith. The creature held his jagged knives behind him, leading with the angular point of his jutting chin. He wore no battle-helm or mask, but a serpent tattoo was painted on the left side of his face.

  The distance between the combatants closed in moments, and just before the clash the dusk-wraith shifted his line of attack and blurred around Vulkan’s flank, intending to gut him from his blind side. But Vulkan had seen the feint coming. Unclouded by fear, his battle instincts were honed to a monomolecular edge that the slaver could not possibly have accounted for.

  He blocked the blow meant to cripple him with the haft of his hammer and brought the other one down on the witch’s skull. A stunned silence fell over the crowd, both Nocturnean and dusk-wraith, as Vulkan pulled his weapon from the gory smear he had left behind.

  He spat on the corpse and glared at the female witch.

  ‘Not wraiths at all, just flesh and blood.’

  The witch smiled, her interest and her ardour suddenly piqued. ‘Mon’keigh…’

  She licked her lips, then blended back into the shadows. Before Vulkan could come after her, the gate to the town of Hesiod exploded in a storm of splinters and fire.

  Vulkan was engulfed, reduced to a dark and hazy silhouette as the fire rolled over him. Shielding his eyes, he knew he would not die and stepped from the conflagration unharmed. That alone gave the dusk-wraiths aboard the skiff pause as it confronted him through the ragged gap in the wall.

  Warriors, the ones in night-black armour, spilled around the edges of the skiff, eagerly brandishing hooks and blades. Vulkan snapped a dusk-wraith in half as it swung at him then crushed another with a blow from his fist.

  Behind him, he heard his kinsmen attack as the people of Hesiod fought back against the slavers that had plagued them for centuries.

  Vaulting over a horde of warriors, their blades cutting harmlessly through air, Vulkan landed in front of the skiff. Fingers like iron bolts dug into the lamellar nose of the machine as the Nocturnean turned it over. Screeching slavers fell from the tipped vessel before Vulkan tossed it aside like an unwanted spear. The battered skiff rolled over the ground before erupting in a ball of fiery shrapnel.

  Two more came in its wake, the first harbouring a cohort of warriors. At the orders of its driver, the skiff accelerated to ramming speed, intending to impale Vulkan on the spiked prow. Timing his jump to perfection, he leapt onto the floating barge at full pelt and raced up the vehicle’s plated snout like it was the shallow flank of a mountain crag.

  The warriors came at him, spitting hell-shards from their rifles or lunging with jagged blades. Vulkan smashed their attacks aside and was amongst them, hewing with his hammers.

  Hatred fuelled his every swing, together with a determination that the cycle of torture and fear would end here at this very dawn. He tore loose the command throne of the skiff’s driver, the warriors a broken mess behind him, and threw it at the third vehicle.

  An energy blossom flashed as the improvised missile struck a protective field surrounding the last skiff, but Vulkan hadn’t slowed and was charging through it. Skin burned as he punctured the energy shield, he landed on the deck of the vehicle and faced off against a cadre of warriors. They looked brawnier than the others and toted bladed glaives that crackled with unnatural power. Each wore a faceplate as white as alabaster in stark contrast to the visceral red of their ornate armour. The ghosts glared at the interloper imperiously. Behind them, the slaver-lord looked through the jagged eye-slits of his horned helm. A rasped utterance from his fanged mouth grille unleashed his warriors.

  One of the ghosts advanced silently and swung his glaive, but Vulkan dipped from the blow, which left a blazing trail in the air behind it. A second glaive jabbed at him and this time Vulkan swatted it down into the skiff’s deck plating, but was left with a smoking haft in his hand. Another blow reduced his other hammer to ash as he was forced to parry again.

  Rising from his seat, the slaver-lord snarled his displeasure at the Nocturnean’s continued existence.

  With their enemy disarmed, the ghosts’ arrogance overflowed and they prepared to finish him.

  Vulkan growled with contempt. ‘I need no weapons to kill the likes of you.’

  In a devastating display of speed and brutality, he took the bodyguards apart. Impaled and beheaded by their very own blades, Vulkan threw their shattered remains over the side of the skiff and into the melee below.

  Levelling a finger at the slaver-lord, he promised, ‘This terror ends with your life.’

  The dusk-wraith pulled a glittering sword from the scabbard nestled next to his throne. A dark mist coiled from the blade and pricked at Vulkan’s nose. A hollow, hacking sound escaped from the slaver-lord’s lips. It resonated through the mouth of his monstrous fright mask. It was laughter.

  Vulkan then noticed a needle-like gauntlet on the dusk-wraith’s other hand. He pointed it at the Nocturnean in mocking symmetry of the threat he’d just received.

  ‘Paaaiin…’ he hissed.

  Even with superhuman speed, Vulkan couldn’t reach the slaver-lord before he unleashed the gauntlet weapon.

  ‘Son!’

  N’bel’s voice rang out above the clash around him. Instinct told Vulkan to reach out with his open hand. A subtle change in the breeze suggested something moving through it. His senses alive to everything, Vulkan’s fingers closed around the worn haft of a smiting hammer and plucked it blindly from the air. It left his grip a split second later, spinning towards the slaver-lord then splitting his ugly mask before the thought had even entered his mind that he was doomed. His face cloven in two, the slaver-lord dropped his sword and toppled off the end of the skiff.

  Vaulting down to the square, Vulkan set about the other dusk-wraiths without slowing. He was of the killing mind, a warrior spirit flaring within that both terrified and exci
ted him. Seizing a passing dusk-wraith, he crushed its head to paste within its helm. Another, he broke apart upon his knee. A third, fourth, fifth… Vulkan battered them with his bare fists as all the terrors the slavers had committed against Nocturne over the centuries were repaid in violent and bloody retribution.

  The battle was over swiftly.

  Unprepared for such stern resistance, the remnants of the dusk-wraith raiding party withdrew before they were utterly destroyed. Frenzied with battle-lust, only the witches lingered. There was one amongst them who had a last knife to stab and twist before she was done.

  She was at the opposite end of the square, dancing around the spears and swords of the Nocturneans, leaving decapitated bodies with every turn and pirouette. Vulkan’s eyes became hate-filled slits when he found the laughing witch.

  That anger turned into panic when he saw who rushed next into her killing arc.

  ‘Father!’

  Vulkan was much more than human. He possessed strength, speed and intelligence greater than any man, it was how he knew he was different to his kith and kin, but even he could not reach N’bel before those murderous knives.

  Cursing his earlier wrathful abandon for losing the hammer with which he’d killed the slaver-lord, Vulkan clenched his empty fists. The only man he had known as father was about to be butchered while he looked on. Every step across the blood-soaked square felt like ten leagues as the witch’s blade circled and flashed… carving… hypnotising… deadly.

  Tears of fire blurred the Nocturnean’s sight, the scene unfolding before him framed by a crimson haze. It would be forever scarred into his memory.

  N’bel lifted his spear…

  …the witch would cut him open and spill his guts…

  Her eyes flashed and her gaze met Vulkan’s across the carnage. Even in the act of murder, she exuded arrogance. He would remember those eyes, dagger-thin and filled with a sickening ennui. They would haunt him, though not in the way he thought…

  N’bel was hopelessly outmatched. His spear thrust was already travelling wide even as the shimmering falchions sought out his vital organs… but the blows never fell. With a roar, Breughar threw himself in harm’s way. To the metal-shaper’s immense credit, he parried one of the blades and it carved a heavy wound along his forearm that drew a scream from the burly tribesman. With the second blade his fortune faded; it sank deep into his belly, ripping free with a terrible sluurch of rent skin. Breughar’s innards slopped onto the ground in a steaming pile of offal. For a moment he stood transfixed by the realisation of his own death, then he fell and was still. Blood pooled beneath the body, expanding in a ruddy mire that touched N’bel’s feet. Dazed and prone from when the metal-shaper had thrown him aside, he could barely lift his arms to defend himself.

  Amused at the human’s pointless heroism, the witch closed on N’bel but Breughar’s sacrifice had bought Vulkan the time he needed. Mountainous and filled with righteous anger, the Nocturnean was upon his enemy.

  ‘Face me!’

  She recoiled like a snake as Vulkan came at her, fists swinging. The witch was hard-pressed to avoid the blows and could fashion no riposte. She back-flipped and wove and twisted until there was enough distance between them to taunt him and then flee. The rest of the witches were dead or dying. She alone escaped the massacre.

  Outside the shattered walls of Hesiod, a tear opened in the fabric of reality. Endless darkness beckoned from inside the tear and the screams of the damned echoed in the breeze, promising hell and torment for all who entered. It swallowed the witch last of all before shuddering closed behind her, leaving only the scent of blood and the chill of near-death.

  It was over.

  Hell-dawn ended and the Nocturnean sun rose to its zenith.

  N’bel met Vulkan at the gates. The blacksmiter was still shaking but he lived.

  ‘Breughar is dead.’

  An unnecessary fact. Vulkan had seen the man die.

  ‘But you live, father, and for that I will be eternally grateful.’

  His voice still trembled with an undercurrent of the rage that had consumed him during the fight. His chest heaved like a bellows, drenched in alien blood.

  ‘We live, son.’ He put his hand on Vulkan’s arm and something about the feel of those old and calloused fingers calmed the Nocturnean, siphoning the tension away.

  ‘Such hate. I felt it, father. It touched me as sure as I can feel your hand upon me now.’

  He turned to face the old man, his eyes ablaze like balefires.

  ‘I am a monster…’

  N’bel didn’t recoil, but held Vulkan’s cheek.

  ‘You are a true Promethean son.’

  ‘But the fury…’ He looked down. ‘The way I killed them with my bare hands…’ Before meeting his father’s gaze again, he said, ‘I am not a blacksmiter, am I?’

  The people of the town were gathering. Despite all the death that muddied their streets, the mood was exultant. Vulkan was being hailed as a hero.

  N’bel sighed and in it, all of his latent fears about losing his only son were borne away.

  ‘You are not. You are from up there.’

  Vulkan followed his father’s outstretched hand to the hot sky above.

  The sun burned down like a single glowering eye, wreathed in smoky cloud. Vulkan closed his eyes and allowed the heat to warm him, N’bel’s voice distant in his mind.

  ‘You came from the stars…’

  The edifice resembled a stone menhir Vulkan had seen worshipped by debased and primitive cultures. Such backward religions were beyond compliance, and the Salamanders had burned entire worlds corrupted by graven beliefs. Here, on One-Five-Four Four, it represented a nexus of the enemy’s power, but would be torn down just the same. Something about its presence unsettled the Phaerians, who were lashed into obedience by the discipline-masters and driven on into the cracking guns of the eldar.

  On the orders of the primarch, the Legion had burned the jungle all the way to the psychic node. Like wildlife facing a natural forest fire, the eldar and their beasts had fled before the blaze. Vulkan’s edict was absolute, his advance pitiless. Even when confronted by the human refugees caught between the hammer and anvil of the war, he didn’t relent. All he saw were pale echoes of the noble people of his own beloved world, the hardships of the jungle-dwellers as nothing compared to the harsh plight of Nocturne. In his darker moments, he wondered if he actually despised these sorry humans for allowing themselves to be conquered and wondered if his supposed compassion had evaporated. As the land burned and the sky choked with smoke, he acknowledged it was the presence of the aliens that had affected his mood. That and the remembrances of their ravages from his old life before the starships had come.

  War was unmaking; it went against everything his old father had taught him in the forge. Vulkan valued craft, the sense of transition beforehand and permanence afterwards. It brought quietude to his troubled and lonely soul. His true father, he who had crafted Vulkan to be a general, needed a warrior, not a blacksmiter. A warrior was what Vulkan would be.

  Standing on a vast ridge that jutted clear of the jungle expanse, Vulkan took consolation from the fact that with the destruction of the node, the need to linger on One-Five-Four Four would pass, and he could put thoughts of his homeworld behind him more easily.

  Ibsen. That was its name. If it had a name and not a number, it had a heart. Did that also mean it was worth saving? Vulkan pushed the question aside as if it were a piece of clinker from the furnace.

  Though he was surrounded by his Pyre Guard and the two Legion companies looking down on the unfolding battle, Vulkan was very much alone in his troubled mind.

  Numeon spoke up, interrupting the primarch’s thoughts. ‘They breach the outer threshold of the aliens’ domain. I expected a more concerted defence, I must admit.’

  Several of the Pyre Guard muttered in agreement. Varrun nodded, the servo-grinding of his armour joints articulating his response.

  There were other
Salamanders captains nearby, and they too felt as the Pyre Guard did. Either the eldar were a spent force or they were holding out for another reason.

  Pensively, Vulkan watched.

  Unlike the ambush in the jungle, here the aliens were arrayed in number. Beneath their verdant cloaks that blended with the foliage around them, they carried fierce repeating bow-casters and long rifles. Vulkan watched as a discipline-master was shot through the eye and a reddish plume of brain matter vacated the back of his skull. Another quickly took his place and the Phaerians’ heavy-handed push continued.

  The eldar used heavy weapon batteries too, more manoeuvrable than those employed by the Army cohorts on account of their anti-gravity platforms. Stuttering las-beams and incandescent plasma bursts reduced the men rushing from the jungle fringes into a grimy red paste. Two-man Rapier turrets and tracked Tarantula guns replied with a harsh staccato of solid shells as the heavy weapons exchange continued.

  The overseers and discipline-masters had formed the feral Phaerians into their Army cohorts. Thick blocks of muscular and tattooed men advanced in formation, scatter-locks and auto-carbines tearing up the gloom with their combined muzzle flare.

  On the opposite side, crouched behind clumps of ruined alabaster, the eldar unleashed an equally fierce response and the air was stitched with further las-beams and solid shot. Bodies fell on both sides, spun by heavy impacts or simply dropped by kill-shots only to be crushed underfoot by the troops behind them, and the death rate increased as the firing lines closed.

  A temple surrounded the menhir. It was an aberrant thing, engraved with alien sigils that mimicked the one Ferrus Manus had shown Vulkan via the hololith. The desert node was the only one the Imperium had managed to get a look at before their augurs were permanently disabled. But this one varied slightly. The runic elements on the flat sides of the menhir were in different configurations. It was language in some form. With time and proximity to the sigils, a dedicated study would unlock its secrets. Vulkan harboured no such desires. He only wanted to destroy it.