Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  Vulkan rose to his feet to declare the matter closed, taking up the hammer Dawnbringer as he did so.

  ‘Come. I’ll show you what must be done.’

  Together they crossed the smoke-thronged forge, their armour reflecting the lambent firelight, until they reached the door of the vault.

  It was immense, as was the vault itself, and Vulkan used an icon he had fashioned as part of his armour to unlock it. The small fuller slipped into a recess wrought into the door’s ornate surface. It was difficult to see, and T’kell realised he would not have found it without the primarch to show him.

  One twist and the cavernous space was filled with the dull clunk of gears, pulleys and chains – the sound of an old mechanism churning to life. After a few seconds the door began to open, slowly but inexorably. It split down the middle, each half opening outwards and into the forge.

  When the gap was wide enough, Vulkan stepped through and led T’kell into the vault after him.

  As he passed through this slender portal, T’kell marvelled at how thick the doors were, at the sheer incredible artifice of their construction. Despite their ostensible function, they were as beauteous as any of Vulkan’s creations. Had Ferrus Manus made these doors they would be cold, ugly things. Impervious, secure, but ultimately bland.

  Where the Lord of Iron was a smith, Vulkan was an artisan, or so T’kell believed.

  ‘You are the first and only one of my sons to see this vault,’ said Vulkan. ‘Held safe within its walls is every artefact I have ever forged.’

  Muttering a word of command, Vulkan ignited the braziers around the room. Flickering torchlight cast the contents of the vault in tones of umber and crimson, filling every recess with shadow. Only hints of the wonders that the primarch had fashioned were revealed.

  T’kell recognised some, and knew their names.

  Obsidian Chariot.

  Vermillion Sphere.

  Light of Unmaking.

  Some were constructed as simple blades; others were larger, more complex mechanisms. All were named.

  Names had power, as Vulkan often said. To name a thing was to give it identity, resonance. An enemy does not fear a man who wields a sword, but would give pause to one who held the Fangblade of Ignarak. Such things mattered to the Lord of Drakes and were a part of his teachings.

  ‘Such wonders…’ breathed T’kell, scarcely able to comprehend his primarch’s magnificent labours.

  Vulkan had set the hammer Dawnbringer down amongst the other treasures and was about to reach for his spear when he stopped, fingers poised to wrap around the haft. Sword and spear were his preferred weapons, Thunderhead having been destroyed earlier during the Great Crusade.

  ‘I hope your indecision represents a change of heart, primarch,’ ventured T’kell when he had recovered his composure enough to speak.

  ‘It does not. The artefacts must be destroyed. I am bound for Isstvan so cannot do it myself, which is why you must, T’kell.’

  ‘Then what is wrong, primarch?’

  Leaving the spear where it stood shackled to the rack, Vulkan took up Dawnbringer.

  ‘I believed I had chosen poorly, although this feels right,’ he said. ‘Fitting. Perhaps its epithet will see my brother illuminated after all.’

  T’kell looked on despairingly at the artefacts, desperate to preserve them and his lord’s legacy.

  ‘Primarch, I beseech you,’ he uttered, bowing to one knee. ‘Please do not ask me to do this. At least save something.’

  Vulkan looked down at his forge master, then to the inside of the vault.

  ‘There are weapons here that can destroy worlds, my son…’

  ‘Or save them from destruction,’ T’kell replied, looking up at his lord, ‘in the right hands.’

  ‘Mine?’ asked Vulkan, meeting the forge master’s pleading gaze.

  ‘Yes! Or Lord Dorn, or Guilliman. Even Russ!’

  Vulkan held T’kell’s gaze a moment longer before turning away.

  ‘Rise, forge master. I would not have one of my sons beg me on his knees.’ There was a snarl in Vulkan’s voice and for an instant T’kell thought he might have overstepped.

  ‘I am driven to it, primarch.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘My lord?’

  Vulkan faced him.

  ‘I said, very well. Something should remain. If I destroy everything, then I have given up on hope and seeing loyalty and honour endure in my brothers. I won’t do that.’

  T’kell visibly relaxed, the relief at his primarch’s words evident on his face.

  ‘You are to remain here, T’kell. You won’t come to the Isstvan System – your place is now on Nocturne and Prometheus.’

  ‘But, primarch–’

  ‘Do not defy me a second time,’ Vulkan warned. ‘I am not that tolerant.’

  T’kell bowed his head in contrition.

  ‘You shall become Forgefather, and keeper of the artefacts in this vault.’

  ‘Forgefather?’ asked T’kell, frowning. ‘Am I not your forge master, my lord?’

  ‘Of course. A legionary can be more than one thing, T’kell. I am entrusting you with this duty, just as I entrusted you with the vault.’

  ‘What duty, primarch? Name it, and it shall be done.’

  ‘To act as custodian. To swear you will protect these artefacts and should anything happen to me, ensure they are well hidden, far from those who would seek to use them poorly.’

  T’kell saluted vehemently. ‘I swear it, Lord Vulkan.’

  ‘Good. Choose seven to remain, and only seven. One for each of our realms on Nocturne.’

  ‘There are thousands in here, primarch. How can I possibly–’

  ‘Indeed there are,’ said Vulkan, tying the hammer off around his belt and reaching for his gauntlet. Kesare’s drake scale mantle was already hanging around his broad shoulders. ‘Seven, Forgefather, that is what your primarch decrees.’ Vulkan was leaving, his mind now firmly on a reckoning with Horus.

  ‘I go to join with Ferrus’s fleet,’ he called back to T’kell. ‘See it is done before I return.’

  He walked away bound for the spaceport, leaving T’kell behind.

  The Forgefather regarded the contents of the vault, trying to contemplate the impossible task before him.

  ‘Seven…’

  The mighty Vulkan is a blacksmiter without peer

  IMMORTAL DUTY

  I have erred, and so I must atone.

  I lived when I should have died, and so I must become Immortal.

  – Oath of the Immortals

  On my knees, I faced the ship’s deck. The contorted faces of my brothers stared back, frozen in their last tormented moments.

  My name is Ahrem Gallikus and I am Immortal, but this was the day that I was supposed to die.

  It was my right. My destiny, one that I alone set in motion long before the fields of our greatest ignominy. Long before Isstvan.

  A chill pricked the skin at the nape of my neck, between the black adamantium gorget and a closely shorn scalp of coal-dark hair. At first I thought it was the starship’s atmospheric recirculation lacing the air with frigidity, until I realised it was the axe blade poised in judgement.

  Mercifully, the edge remained enervated or I would surely have been dead already. But then why imbue it with an actinic sharpness when a simple heft and cleave will do the job just as well?

  Logic. Efficiency. Temperance.

  Forged together, these words were our creed. A bond of iron, I always believed. Where was this alloy in our father when he needed it most? Again, as they often did in those days of bereavement and grief, my thoughts turned to melancholy.

  ‘Ahrem,’ uttered a voice from the shadows surrounding me, as sharp as the naked blade against my flesh. ‘Tell us.’

  He used my given name, the one afforded to me by the chieftain of Clan Gaarsak, and it grated in my ears. He had no right to use that name.

  ‘I am Legionary Gallikus, Order Primii,’ I replied wit
h minimum respect. Back then I saw it as needless theatre, all of this.

  ‘Gallikus, then,’ uttered the voice a second time, the irritation in its timbre unmasked. ‘We have questions. You will answer them.’

  The axe blade descended incrementally, nicking my skin to draw a bead of blood. I saw my breath fog in the cold, stagnant air; felt the thrum of the Obstinate’s impulse engines resonating from the lower decks; heard every minute adjustment of my interrogator’s posture in the low, predatory growl of his armour.

  I was at peace, ready for my duty to end. My immortal duty. I lowered my head a fraction in gentle supplication.

  My interrogator took that as an indication to proceed, which it was. In a way.

  ‘Tell us of the Retiarius.’

  The name of that vessel put fire in my veins, banishing the cold of the hangar deck as my mind was cast back to hot halls, crimson and black. Sweat, blood, death… it all collided in a moment of searing recollection. It did nothing to warm the frozen flesh of the battle-brothers who stared back at me, dead eyes fixed wide in their decapitated heads.

  I wondered briefly if the method of execution was meant to be symbolic, ironic or inadvertently in bad taste.

  ‘Tell us what you remember.’

  I remembered fire in the upper atmosphere of Isstvan, and hell reigning across the heavens. But this was amorphous, an impression only. An emotional response.

  I considered the possibility of sanction if I had admitted that. Emoting is supposed to be anathema to the Iron Tenth. I am sometimes led to wonder if life itself is, too. Instead, the first memory hit me. It felt like a mailed fist, but sang with the thunder of a battle-barge’s opening broadside…

  ‘Blood of Medusa!’

  Mordan was seldom given to such outward expression, but our path to the Retiarius was proving volatile.

  Harnessed in the assault ram’s dual prows, my brothers were giving off the same, albeit unspoken, sentiment.

  Katus gripped his breaching shield double-fisted and held it across his chest like a totem. The bionic eye he wore in his right socket flared with nerve-induced auto-calibration.

  Sombrak ground his teeth. He was my shield-brother and did it before every battle. It was loud and discordant because his jaw was cybernetic. Most of us were patched up thusly, our broken bodies rebuilt so that we could wage war one final time.

  This was my eighth ‘final time’. Fate could be cruel like that.

  Azoth was the last brother I knew well, though in all there were ten souls armoured in Medusan black in the hold. The rate of attrition was grievous amongst our ranks, and I soon found little need to learn names.

  Of all my brothers, those known and unknown, Azoth was the most prone towards rhetoric. When we were made Immortal, our father stripped us of rank and title. Reforged, our new calling was a badge of shame to all in our Legion, and we lost our old identities. I believe that Azoth had been a Frater Ferrum – an Iron Father – before he fell from grace. He still had the gaps in his armour where they had unbolted his servo-arm. Whatever he had been before, now he was our sergeant.

  He called out to us, bellowing against the tumult within the hold. ‘Forlorn hope! Our ranks have never been breached. Be steadfast.’ I could hear the servo-grind of his gauntlet as he gripped the haft of his thunder hammer. ‘Be resolute. Our dishonour demands it of us. Death awaits. We do not fear it! For what is death…?’

  ‘To those who are dead already!’ I roared in unison with my brothers.

  He had a way with words, old Azoth. I think I will miss him the most.

  Warning klaxons sounded, coinciding with a rush of crimson light flooding the low ceiling above us. We were close, but that was no guarantee of us reaching the Retiarius intact.

  Over thirty assault rams were cast out into the void, all ridden by Medusan Immortals. I doubted that even half would make it through.

  A Caestus was a durable vessel, fashioned specifically for this purpose. It was fast too, but the sheer amount of weapons fire erupting between the two larger vessels across the gulf of space was intense.

  Great tracts of the void separated the Gorgonesque and the Retiarius, littered with silent explosions like scarred nebulae, and immense clouds of rapidly dispersing shrapnel. To us, aboard our diminutive assault ram, it was a long and perilous journey. To those two great behemoths, it would be regarded as close range.

  As our hull shuddered with every close impact, the inertial suppression clamps held us steady. I closed my eyes and imagined our destination.

  I had seen the Retiarius before, during the Great Crusade. Back then it had been an ugly, hulking vessel, well-suited to its brutish occupants. Its flanks were stained azure and dirty white, the echo of legionary war-plate. Slab-nosed and upscaled with muscular fighter bays and ablative armour plating, it was reminiscent of a pugilist in the form of a starship.

  I felt our punch resonate through the Caestus’ hull, a glass fist striking a jaw of steel. Were it not for the magna-meltas burning furiously to soften the Retiarius’ formidable hide then we would have been dashed to wreckage in an eye-blink.

  As it was, we bit deep. Our glass fist had shards, and these had cut the outer flesh of the much larger vessel.

  We broke through amidst an evaporating cloud of ferric smoke, our small assault ram having bored through the starship’s hull and clamped securely in place. Disgorged onto a dark, semi-lit hangar we had little time to get our bearings before counter-boarding troops arrived to try and repel us.

  ‘Lock shields!’

  Azoth bellowed out the command, but we had already begun to form up.

  It was an archaic tactic, reminiscent of the Romanii or Grekans of Old Earth, but it was effective. Much about war endures, fraternal conflict being foremost in my mind as we breached a vessel that we had once considered to belong to our allies.

  But it was mortal armsmen and not our erstwhile brothers in arms, the World Eaters, that we faced upon that deck.

  A strong, determined fusillade hit us first, hot las raining in from hastily erected weapon teams and broken firing lines. We held, soaking up their fire, taking everything they threw at us without flinching. Then we pushed on, moving as one, the aegis of our breacher shields impenetrable to the brave men and women who had come to stop us.

  Despite their obvious disadvantage, the Retiarius’ mortal troops went in close. Three further assault rams had struck this section of the ship and all four squads came together before the armsmen hit us. Their solid shot weapons and mauls proved fatally ineffective.

  The feeble momentum of their attack was dispersed when they shattered against our shield wall, and we absorbed the impact before returning it tenfold. Medusan war-oaths cut the air as cleanly as any blade.

  And almost as deadly.

  The mortals quailed before our seeming inviolability and fury.

  I battered my first opponent, letting the blood from his broken skull spray against my shield before I finished him. The stomp of my foot was all it took, and suddenly I was pushing forwards with my immortal brothers. I shot a second through the cheekbone, his face erupting into mist as the mass-reactive shell exploded. I barged a third, splitting ribs. A fourth fell back in front of me against our advance and I severed his neck with the edge of my breacher shield, barely noticing the blood wash against my armoured boot.

  Our purpose made us ruthless. A blockade around Isstvan’s upper atmosphere was preventing the X Legion from reaching its father, with the Retiarius just one of the vessels impeding our path. Our mission was simple. Our Iron Fathers had been clear. Destroy the ship by any means possible. If that meant our deaths, so be it.

  Inexorable, inevitable, we crushed the counter-assault forces from the Retiarius. Then we cut down the weapons teams, then the deckhands, until every crewmen in sight was slain. It was an honourless but necessary act.

  After this, we broke ranks to quickly neutralise the rest. The deck was slick with enemy blood, but it was hard to discern in the dull light.
>
  ‘Where are we?’ asked Mordan.

  ‘Aft of the enginarium, I think,’ I replied. I knew a little of the vessel’s layout, in so far as it would adhere to extant expeditionary fleet schemata. ‘In one of the smaller hangar bays, near the ship’s outer skin.’

  A relatively small chamber with a low ceiling and bare deck plate underfoot, the hangar would have been used to cloister the Retiarius’ various smaller interdiction craft. For now, it was empty of starfighters and assault craft, the World Eaters having disgorged their entire complement to duel with the Iron Hands vessels attempting to break through the blockade. Instead, ammo hoppers and riggers crowded the narrow space. Rigging chains hung down from overhead pulleys, gently swaying in the aftermath of the battle. Steam plumed from vents in the walls, and it was sweltering. A pervasive, animal heat lathered every surface in a fine veneer of sweat. It stank.

  The vox-feed in my ear crackled. Communal channel. As expected, the voice of Brother-Captain Udris of the Gorgonesque came through the void-static.

  Azoth told him that we had successfully made ingress and were moving deeper into the vessel. Resistance had been minimal.

  We all knew that would change.

  ‘The blockade?’ asked Sombrak, when Azoth had finished receiving his orders from the Gorgonesque.

  ‘Still intact,’ Azoth replied. ‘We’ll know if it isn’t. These halls will be filled with fire, the walls will shatter and we’ll be cast to the void. For now, they stand. So we must sunder them. The Avernii are dying below us, brothers.’

  ‘I would have liked to stand with the Gorgon one last time,’ said Katus, his head bowed.

  Azoth clapped a gauntleted hand on his shoulder. There was an underlying anger in the former Frater’s tone. At the betrayal unfolding on Isstvan or the stripping of his rank, it could be either or both.

  ‘Aye, Katus. So would I, but we have our lot and it is here aboard the Retiarius.’

  We moved out, leaving the dead to fester in the heat.

  As soon as our breach had been detected by the bridge crew, the Retiarius locked down its bulkheads and sealed all blast doors, seeking to contain us in a non-vital part of the ship.