Confrontation Part 5

They flew high, and they chased the sun. They kept themselves visible, traceable, and in the tumbled skeleton of a nameless city they put down and waited.

And prepared.

The dropships of the Lions Castellant streaked in beneath the bare sun; they overshot their marks, dipped, looped and retraced their flight paths, boarding ramps lowered all the while. They grazed the earth at the height of a marine and the Ravenwing spilled from their bellies, engines screaming into the wind, wheels kicking up clouds of dust and dirt as they tore into the ground. Their formations were arrow straight, parade-ground perfect, and they gunned their bikes towards the city as the dropships peeled away from it, into the haze of noon.

Sunlight and sand; bleached bright above, as below. Heat-haze and dust devils, sun-flare on polished metal, and motion blur as the city’s bones approached, surrounded, and swallowed them. Ancient boulevards, collapsed administrata; vaulting scattered columns in the time-choked avenues. Hand signals to attack vectors; figures in the ruins ahead.

The sun, a reactor furnace with the doors hanging off. All colours drained out, the world a corpse with its throat long since slit. Incoming fire.

Figures in the ruins ahead.

Squad Belisarius peeled away to the right, tore across shattered rockrete slabs, up and up into the open frame of a two-storey municipal ruin. Euphrayn triggered his twin-linked plasma guns and his squad followed suit. Superheated tracer fire scattered out ahead, bursting within the sun-blazed ranks of the cowering enemy.

Time slowed, the world stretched; seconds into minutes, into lifetimes.

Lilac jump-troops sailed through the air towards Belisarius, bolt pistols spitting fury. They came down short, and Belisarius gunned his squad’s bikes straight into them. Charge and counter-charge. Chainsword on armour, on flesh, blood sizzling where it sprayed on plasteel and stone.

His plasma was tearing through chestplate and pauldron and helm; the enemy fell with their fingers on their triggers. Bolts ripped the air beside his face, ricocheted from his armour, his force-shields.

The golden Librarian was approaching, lightning leaping from his fingers, sunlight erupting into a daemonic halo about his gilded livery. Euphrayn could still see the dent his maul had left in the breastplate. The Interrogator-Chaplain triggered an augur switch and signalled for reinforcements, springing the trap, outflanking and surrounding the heretics.

Ahead to the north a drop pod screamed from the blinding sky and slammed like a piledriver into the ground, at the Librarian’s back. The earth shook and coughed clods of stone high into the air. Door catches blew and ceramite petals slapped down. Growling, the dreadnought – ancient war walker, armoured giant with an undying battle-brother wired into its enormous shell – stomped forth.

To the east, ethereal beads of teleportarium tracers erupted into storm-lit reality rents, and the Deathwing flickered into place. Sand and static swirled about bone-white boots as their sudden materialisation forced a cascade of air out across the burning streets. Veterans all, killers all, they bore the chapter’s finest relics into battle, and were unmatched among their brethren.

Librarian Epistolary Tormont was at their head. Unhelmed he blinked into the stark sunlight, brow creased, trouble settling across his fine features. Euphrayn saw it, saw Tormont’s eyes widen, his hands began to weave sigils of protection.

A blink, bright white, like a sunburst; was there a shift there, a displacement? Euphrayn was sweating inside his helm, roasting in his armour. Too hot.

Panic on Tormont’s face, then pain. He doubled back and howled at the sky, as the air behind him boiled, and seethed and tore. A shadow patch blossomed, spreading panic amongst the Deathwing. Impossible black, clawed tendrils snaked out of the nightmare void and snared Tormont and one of his brothers.

Euphrayn watched in that long, drawn out second, as his brother-in-arms, his confidente and companion, his friend, was dragged backwards out of the world and deep into hell. The air sealed over, a bubble shrinking into itself, and they were gone.

Great were the perils faced by those who sought to control the warp, awful the consequences for those who failed. The very idea that a warrior mage of Tormont’s standing could lose his grip on his abilities so easily though… The shock to Euphrayn was physical.

The second ticked over.

“Kill them all!!” he screamed.

The dreadnought thundered forward on piston driven legs, the twin lascannons borne upon its central sarcophagus tracking towards the heretic librarian. The psyker raised his hand, intent upon some malefic sorcery; the lascannons flashed, bright as the sun.

Zarathustra was torn in two.

Euphrayn roared in jubilation. At his side Brother Jo’ast, the Ravenwing Epistollery, screamed psychic ruination at a squad of lurking scouts, liquefying their brains inside their skulls. Then the fool Auguste descended towards them on blazing wings, firing plasma as his assault squad loosed a volley of bolts. The barrage availed them nothing.

As the jump troops touched down, Euphrayn led his brothers into a speeding circle around them, shrinking, hemming them in, lashing at them with power sword, and maul, and his crackling Crozius Arcanum. The Hawk Lords fell beneath them, fell under their wheels, until only the Captain remained standing, glowing lightning claws driving straight for Euphrayn. With a cry the Interrogator-Chaplain whirled his Crozius overhead, and landed it square upon Auguste’s faceplate – there was a crack as the Chaplain’s maul-of-office unleashed a blast of iridescent energies, and the beaked helm crumpled in; blood glittered in the sunlight.

Auguste dropped.

The lumbering dreadnought overran the Seraphim Devastators, weathering their heavy fire until they were within reach of its immense, club-like assault fist. Piston-driven ceramite claws punched into, and through, the golden marines, crumpling armour and bursting crimson blooms into the noon-tide sun.

Belisarius circled from the north, a pincer claw that met Euphrayn’s own column, trapping the remaining heretics between them. Rapid fire bursts of plasma knitted into and through the enemy from both sides. They span, and fell, and smoked upon the baking ground.

Heat haze and dust devils, sun-flare on polished metal; the Ravenwing prowled about the battleground, around the piles of the dead. The Deathwing watched the shadows and horizon, poised against any further attack. None came.

Grief like he’d never known crowded Euphrayn’s mind. Such loss, and for what? He signalled for the extraction of his forces – best to leave the corpses of these heretics to rot on this dead, forgotten world.

They sped through the bleached wilderness, towards their rendezvous. Euphrayn established a vox-link with their orbiting vessels. Tormont’s final report weighed heavy upon him, like a shroud of utter defeat.

“My lord Euphrayn?”

“It is time,” Euphrayn said grimly, “Target the abomination. End it.”

Interlude III

The thing that had once included Brother Gabriad knew peace, for a while. It radiated from the Master and filled all its servants with bliss and light. Truly, they knew heaven.

Brother Gabriad (though he would not have known the name, nor the concept of a name at this stage) had not been aware of himself for some time. He had been part of the web that existed both physically, where his seething muscle and fur dominated, and ethereally, where his compound mind reigned, all in thrall to the Master. To find himself small, singular, apart, came as a staggering shock. His nerves lit up with panic.

He realised the Master was speaking, there in his mind - his mind alone - for he bore the Master at the heart of the throng. The Master spoke of new stars in the sky, and the doom and downfall of all who heard the Call. It was a war on heaven that the Master foretold, and the end of all joy.

“Hold me,” the Master whispered, “hold me and keep me safe. And I shall protect you always.”

Gabriad looked up through his paltry twin eyes and saw the new stars, a daytime constellation directly overhead, begin to grow brighter. Distant memory tugged at him, and filled him with dread. Down he went, below the fur and muscle, curling down embryonically, wrapping his body around the Master, keeping it from harm.

He felt the Master pierce through him, not unpleasantly, and his mind was filled with imagery; of an impossibly vast crystalline structure against a kaleidoscopic, nebulous sky; of unnervingly strange beings of light, wholly alien to his mind, the architects of that staggering complex, that giddying palace.

He knew of the darkness contained within, an ancient darkness that the alien creatures could imprison but not destroy. The palace was a mind-shatteringly complex labyrinth, through which the evil could pace out eternity.

He saw them fashion the key with which to seal the palace, until such time as they could devise an end for the evil. They imbued the key with life and arcane knowledge, that it could protect itself from those who would use it for ill; then they cast it unto the stars, to conceal itself until they called it home.

He felt the passage of time, unimaginable in its scope. He watched as impossibly distant gas clouds formed into spiral galaxies, that span and twirled through infinity, before colliding with others of their kind and unleashing energies seldom seen in the universe since before even the gods were born.

He saw new galaxies birthed from the aftermath.

All these things and more the key had seen, before bringing itself to this world and having the inhabitants murder each other for its protection - to lose itself should any ever hunt it. And now the hunt was finally done.

The Master knew only despair and terror. Gabriad knew only what the Master knew.

Then he knew no more.

Guyyl’s scout craft and skimmers had located and identified their missing brethren; there were no wolves on Fenris, it was said, and the huge loping beasts native to that world were as kin to the wolf-lord and his grey-clad warriors. The Canis-Helix, the genetic imprint that made the Space Wolf chapter who they were, produced a feral and bestial mutation in those who carried it – transforming them over time into something beyond a man, something ferocious, lupine. Who could say how the mutation would progress in the fullness of time..?

There were no wolves on Fenris…

The wolf-riders had barrelled from the bellies of their troop-carriers, eager to locate their missing kin. They would cross the last miles upon their hulking Thunderwolves, hoping to calm them, herd them, guide them - escort them home to Fenris.

A short way out they saw the lights in the sky; underhanging a ghost ship, chalk-white against the blue, paled by the atmosphere. The lights grew in intensity; garbled vox-casts vied for attention in Guyyl’s ears – the Lions Castellant had moved their vessel to make an orbital strike. Was his own cruiser to intervene?

Yes, he screamed, stop them, stop them. Then searing pillars of fire fell from the skies, touching the earth beyond the crest of the hill and rolling the plains with seismic quakes and shockwaves of superheated air.

Tears in his eyes as he fell from his mount. The howling of wolves all about.

And he shrieked a curse to the sky.