(Disclaimer: I don't claim to own Warhammer 40k, Space Marines, or any such thing. Those strictly fall under the purview of Games Workshop and all their affiliates. This is just a passion project and fanwork. 'The Roboutian Heresy' and that whole AU is the work of Zahariel)
- Tales of the Roboutian Heresy: Hlæja -
In darkest night they come, they prowl... These Wolves that would devour the stars...
With blade and thunder they sever, they take...The sons they steal be ours...
Remember this well, my words, their spite...Old promises severed by lies...
On wings of fire, our screams, their howls...These Wolves that would come for their prize...
- Feudal world bardic verse, barred by word of His Majesty's Holy Ordos. Cultural Status [REDACTED]
-I-
A blade of forge-blackened crude-iron drifts leisurely through the mottled blackness of the void; engines cold, formidable arsenal silenced for this rare moment with no small amount of effort.
It's cruel guiding sentience held in rigid check by crueler masters and the actions of robed attendants that might have once been human. Some feral consciousness nestled within its bones chained and half-aware, driven by an innate hunger yet to be satisfied despite the passage of millennia since its first quivering breaths under the caress of a distant star.
In its path lies the carcass of a world, known simply by its designate 'Forty Twenty-Two', turns amidst a pall of stellar gloom. What brackish landmasses and polluted oceans lay visible beneath choked storm-layers of stone grit and dust particulates, scared and battered by near-constant rainfalls of sub-atmospheric detritus.
Ancient cataclysm long since lost to the annals of history and involving the use of older era atomics, having devastated whatever human-held colony had at one time subsisted on the planet itself.
This, along with tearing several immense fissures across the surface of the world's natural satellite. By Mechanicus audit, almost an estimated tenth of the moon had been splayed throughout the planetary system in some form or fashion. The percentage rising steadily with each passing decade under the strain of mounting gravitic pressures and actinic fallout. A mineral soup of nickel, platinum, iridium and other materials that turned the surrounding space into a wicked nebula of jagged shrapnel.
Despite these hazards; almost in defiance of them, humanity's presence itself still stubbornly persisted regardless of hardship as is their inclination. Evidenced by the squat mass of tarnished iron composites and thoroughly dented plasteel orbiting at the outermost edges of Forty Twenty-Two's gravity well; lettering scrawled in a loose approximation of the Imperial standard dialect along its hull declaring the station 'MOORING'.
Mooring...Safe harbor, paradise, and beacon shining with the light of Imperium in wild space. Or such as it stands in theory by virtue of the name alone.
In gross reality, multi-faceted sensor arrays struggle for space alongside kilometer wide docking gibbets scattered between broad-scale spalling and mineral refinery operations. All about which thousands of gossamer lights buzzed and maneuvered in staggering complexity. Short-range vessels, aged shuttle-craft, and limping bulk-landers operated in most cases by slaved servitor-drones or the rarer trusted human pilot. Their task to ferry manpower and materiel throughout a bustling network of more than a dozen asteroid dig sites positioned in range of the station at any given time.
Dangerous endeavors to be sure, more than oft fatal to the rotating contingent of menials and elected volunteers dispatched with limited equipment and meager training. Of course, when much of the system's projected wealth and value lay contingent on such things as tithe quotas, trade obligations, and the eventual arrival of a naval bulk freighter and the inevitably irritable representative or functionary of Martian priesthood aboard therein, such trivialities almost always had a manner of falling into place.
Paradise, transient as it was set meandering amid hostile waters...
Hostile for more reasons than those dwelling aboard might well have suspected, let alone feared. What meager defensive threat systems aimed outwards and their position baffled or redirected by quivering disruption engines whipped into silent function along a rune-etched hull, any notion of warning or cry for aid quashed. Absent as the warship was to all but the naked eye, and many of those refusing to believe what it was they beheld.
For those that did, who realized the danger, it was already far too late. Bright flickers of light streaking from its flanks, falling like bad stars upon a station none the wiser.
Deep within the bowels of the approaching predator vessel, underneath war-scarred layers of ablative pseudo-plating threaded thickly with bastardized amalgamations of xenos bio-sorcery vat-grown, the blighted soul of the strike-cruiser Kamphundr began to slip its leash uncaring. Beasts nestled in iron holds echoing this insipid madness with a raucous chorus of animal howls all their own...
-II-
...The boy was crying, again.
"Nngh...Void take me, what is it now?"
No reply was forthcoming, none but the shrieking and the nonsense. As was what he had expected. As was what always was.
Anatole Kaas blinks open bleary bloodshot eyes, spending several long moments simply listening to shrieking high-pitched wails without truly hearing. An advantage of mid-stage tinnitus. Numbly content to stave off the inevitable atop his stiff pallet, enjoying just those few more precious seconds of selfish comfort before a parent's responsibilities inevitably won out.
Or perhaps it was simply the fervent desire not to have to endure the silent pity of hapless neighbors too conscientious to issue disruption complaints regarding a man in mourning.
The former surely, he lies to himself, running a hand through disheveled hair of thinning straw. Rising half-clothed in a drab-coluored jerkin sweat-damp from hours curled in a pilot's cradle, and a single untied work boot stained with the acrid crude oils and mining slurry that inevitably got everywhere despite one's best efforts. His head describing a fierce pounding tattoo as he went to comfort the boy...again. Feet clattering over discarded spare tools or bits of crumpled detritus with nary enough legroom to stumble through sees him towards the crudely fashioned cot of soiled blankets and fabric leavings eschewed to the far corner.
To open the room, or so he told himself each occasion his attentions were forced that way...reluctantly, of late.
"There there...quiet now. Quiet please, just stop..."
The boy was restless. Proving such since the moment the haggard-looking caretaker had all but thrust the lad back into his arms as he'd walked across the threshold, the young woman offering some half-felt overly apologetic farewell and not even a second glance.
His son was always restless of late, but worse now in this instance. Small eyes of a startling blue squeezed tight from light that shone through golden strands, tiny fists striking haplessly at the air above. Not hungry, his father had been forced to swallow a mouthful of supposedly organic slurry before finally accepting he'd not force anything through tight lips. No smell or dampness in his clothes either, so he'd not soiled himself though it could be difficult to tell given the humid fugue environment at times.
A lot of things regarding the boy were overly difficult so he'd found, much of this stemming from the fact the child simply refused to speak. Not a single word since the moment he had first opened reflections of his mother's eyes, nothing intelligible at any rate.
No irritating gurgles or burbling laughter. Just shrill wails, mumbling grunts, and a haunting silence that hung like a shroud...even more so than the wails.
His wife had tried to reassure him that their child was simply shy, normal but more reserved than most. 'Precocious' she had declared after his third year of silent idleness. Anatole wasn't certain of that any longer. A handful of years without any proper utterance literally to speak of. It wasn't right. It certainly wasn't anything approaching normal.
Much like tonight.
Was it fear then? The boy did appear scared? No, more than that. He seemed terrified...
Of what, then? The dark, some shadow on the wall? Maybe sudden bout of claustrophobia, a new understanding of the limited world in which he inhabited? Throne of Terra, his father certainly prayed not.
Space considered a precious commodity aboard a station of Mooring's tonnage, every available span devoted to the function of something or at the very least to the storage of more somethings to aid in the continued profit of something. Somethings, not someones, or if so then not comfortably by any means. This single-roomed habitation alone containing within it a cot sized for a pair alongside the hand-fashioned cot, a kitchenette containing a simplistic electrical stove and dented table with a too-short leg that rattled incessantly with the judder of mass ore conveyors rattling through the hull, one too small synth-hide couch as well a simple wall-mounted viewscreen left constantly active these days. A low-lit chronometer ticking across its surface alongside the labour-cycle's latest axiom regarding faithful observance and proper diligence.
Everything considered essential to aid in keeping a moderately productive crew-menial moderately productive in their day-to-day life and little else. Priorities not precisely advertised in those propagandizing Administratum vid-leafs and their painted visage of wealth and opportunity, extolling the virtues of honest labour coupled with remunerative reward fit to match.
As a younger man, Anatole had admittedly been desperate for anything that would get his boots off Caldium short of a death sentence with the Guard. Walking that upward path to the star-sea, away from over-populated communal slum-districts choked by soot-tinted air so thick with petrocarbonate pollutants that a handful of careless breaths could oft see a grown man bedridden for an entire week, that is if they were blessed with particularly good fortune and a fine constitution. A slow death sentence at any rate in most cases, what with personal quotas in the manufactoria missed due to illness or creditors who would eventually come seeking their pound of flesh often literally as they had his own father.
Comparatively, position aboard an Imperial mining complex had seemed a providential opportunity he could ill afford to waste. At the time, Anatole had expected maybe a handful years of potentially taxing conditions. Much of that time to be spent picking up one serviceable trade or another that suited, before he would use his newfound fortune accrued to secure safe passage aboard one of the outgoing shuttles sailing off to some imagined paradise.
That had to have been more than ten years ago non-adjusted, now.
Ten prolonged suffocating years of compulsory sixteen-hour minimum labour shifts first as a simple mine-rat chipping in the void-spare cavities and then valuable bulk-flyer after showing a bit more brain than the rest, hauling the ever-increasing yield quotas expected each standard cycle. This and other sordid miscellany which had seen to the bitter death of that all too distant naive fantasy long hence.
Exactly when he could not be wholly certain, and dwelling upon such only served to make him irritable which would in turn lead to an overwhelming desire to drink. A vice he'd expressly denied himself in consideration of the of whimpering life he held in his hands. Denial which in turn would eventually breed only resentment one day, of this he was all but certain.
Sae would have doubtless told him as much herself. Chiding with that wry scowl of hers before managing to do something utterly innocuous that would nevertheless somehow make everything in his life seem just that little bit more bearable. Sae with her eyes canted above high cheekbones and a rough-hewn curls, her snorting giggles and her odd little habit of hiding her face as she chewed...
Nearly a month by his reckoning give or take since she'd passed to the Emperor's side. Nearly a month since he'd found a rat-faced foreman in haggard duty robes waiting on his threshold. A data-slate held in a white-knuckled grasp and wearing the look of a man who wished nothing more than to execute this unpleasant duty and move on swiftly to the next, of which there had been several. The grav-quake having been a sudden occurrence, in so as far as he'd been led to understand just standing there dumbly while pinched lips attempted to provide an explanation. Some quirk or another along the orbital radius had upset the delicate balance between two competing fault planes. Detected as all such things were, but deemed inconsequential during initial geological surveys of the planetoid.
Regrettable oversight that had cost dozens of lives and more importantly a host of hard to replace equipment and materiel. A disaster all around that had set the station's margins back a full cycle, and one that had earned him a week's bereavement and a pittance in hazard wages and life-bonds. Much of that long since vanished into a morass of wanton debts accrued and commiserations enjoyed, what remained stubbornly saved for the boy's sake if not his own.
He'd mind enough presence in his misery to ensure that much at the least, owed out of love for his wife if not wholly for his son.
Not that he hated the boy per say, but as constant reminders stood he was among the last he'd been bothered to keep even if he couldn't rightly bear the use of his name...
"Your mother would've known what to do, of course." He whispered through his child's tantrum, slumping back against the couch to the staccato of popping joints with the burden squirming fitfully in his lap. Mood souring all the more, he could tell that much about himself.
Not yet to the point of breaking, where a saner man might call on somebody for support as many had offered so awkwardly, but damned close...
"She'd know exactly how to shut you up, I'd wager the Throne. But no. No no no, she had to go get herself swallowed by some fething rock. Left you here too, with me." He tensed, the boy's wails, moans, and flailing growing louder and worse by the second, splitting his skull in twain. He needed to breathe, he needed space, he needed...he needed silence. "Tch...Sorry pair we are. Emperor preserve, speak proper you little...!?"
The floor rattled, the subtlest of jolts he could feel travel up from the scuffed floor to palpitate guts still sensitive from long hours in null-gravity. Common enough occurrence, some drifting piece of micro-debris that had evaded faltering defense batteries to clatter against the hull. Nothing of consequence or worry, a few miserable days shift-reassignments as void-capable volunteers worked to repair any damages sustained.
An annoyance, but life would go on...
His screen flickered and dissolved into a wash of broken screed, signal disarray caused by radioactive particulates baffling delicate systems. Or perhaps whatever had collided with the station, little bugger that it was. A piece of the moon that had taken out one of the section arrays, or had otherwise fugged the positioning ever so.
He wasn't entirely certain which would be the worst-case scenario?
Anything broken meant days spent tearing out, piecing together, and more than likely replacing delicate machinery in a hostile environment, ritual observances be damned. Misalignment would mean days of delicate painstaking attempts to salvage what possibly could be salvaged. Exorbitantly difficult at the best of times, and the slightest mistake more than likely to see one voided by one of the Station Overseers for inefficiency's sake alone if not for violation of some Martian edict. The loss of a failed crew serf more than compensated by the renewed efforts of the survivors.
Inconvenient and detrimental to a small few, but was to be expected and weathered or so the red-robed clankers would attest...
It was with that annoying realization set aside that power failed across the length of the station seemingly all at once, plunging the pair into total abject darkness as ambient lumen strips guttered and died. No perspective by which to work by, the dingy hab-unit now little more than a fully enclosed creaking tomb of inky blackness. A fumbling hand reaching out to grasp the arm of the couch as though for purchase, the other clutching the quailing boy to his chest in some instinctive bid of protection that he hadn't realized himself still capable of.
The sounds were the worst part by far, life support units and ore-processors given snarling audial aspect by his own instinctive terrors and confusion. The boy's fresh screams and fist in his eye doing little to help matters, a fetid miracle that such little lungs could expel so much noise.
Emergency generators joined in the haunting orchestral racket, great chugging things barely put to use and trusted even less for much the same reason. But serve they would to his relief, lest the station be forced to perform their labours to the guiding pall of torchlight. Dangerous, extremely so, but it would be done. The masters of Mooring could not let the great machines rest or tarry, lest their failing in production echo through the sub-sector in a cascade of missed shipments and light manifests. Rare and unpleasant, but normal...
One minute. Five. Ten in total before illumination returned to overhead lumen strips without warning, setting heart thundering in chest with its suddenness. Their illumination red and raw with the humming gossamer whine of abused circuitry levered to activity at low power. But still, it was light all the same.
Distant joyous cheers chorused from all sides as the crew sighed out in almost simultaneous relief, the joy lost beneath the boy's gurgling whines. Even the return of the lights failing to quiet him. Perhaps that was why Anatole hadn't been lost in his own exhausted glee. Still lost in the background noise of Mooring and feeling something...wrong. An occasion for merriment was rare on the station, of course, that was strange and unfamiliar to hear. A slight shuddering and stutter-flicker of abused bulbs signaling that the hasty return of power hadn't been born without some cost...but no, not these.
Not the noises in the absence of normalcy but the distinct lack of noise expected in such circumstance. No official canned response to what was clearly some greater issue at hand, offering a hurried explanation. No popping thrum of a mounted vox-hailer stirring itself to function, or halfhearted reassurances cast from those on high trying to mollify an irritable workforce already short on proper sleep. No pounding footsteps to signal flak-armoured work-bosses rapping on doors to still undue racket...
The Overseers were silent? They were never silent...
It was then he realized everything had gone quiet aboard the echoing battered old workhorse of a station. No creak of grinding industry, not cheers further cheers of relief, no more crying from the bundle half-forgotten in his lab still squirming with mouth open but breathing no further shrieks. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Just blissful, eerie silence for the first time in over ten long years...
Wrong...It felt so very wrong...
Anatole felt his eardrums pop painfully, eliciting a startled curse he didn't bother to hide this time not that he expected the boy would listen. Not over the cacophonous undulating caterwaul booming throughout the space from the vox-hailers; throughout everything. Consuming all other noise before rushing back in like a sump-lord's fists to batter and rail against mortal eardrums. Fingers or claws worming their ways into the soft meat of his aural cavities. Concussive agony, such that it had buried hearing almost entirely as his perceptions tried in some vain attempt to block it out.
For his mind's foolishness, he was punished. Severely. Painfully...
Hollering to the point his lungs ached under the strain, but never heard the exhalation leave his throat. All he wished for was to cover his ears with his hands and block out the madness of several hundred decibels shredding the inside of his mind, but could not for they were fastened securely with a pilot's dexterity about his son's smaller head. Sparing the youngling a fraction of what he endured, and finding remarkably he regretted it only slightly.
Such a strange instinct, fatherhood. Striking at the most inconvenient of times.
He didn't know for how long he suffered under the shriek...no that was wrong, not a shriek but a bestial howl. A guttural throat-call, pained, and somehow...laughing despite everything?
It could have been minutes or hours though probably could have only lasted seconds at most, however long it would have taken for the noise to shred the internal workings of the vox system to sparking pieces behind its coming. A full minute more shivering under its ringing aftereffects before he realized he'd smothered the boy in his chest, the absence of the wails another cold cut on fraying strands of sanity still maintained.
"N-No...Blessed stars, no...!"
His worry was for naught. The boy was alive and still somehow breathing on his own, coughing and stuttering. Staring up at a haggard father with his mother's eyes wide and shining in the dim bloody glow spilling from above. Anatole loosed a gasp of ragged air that the child blinked to as if taken aback by the relief, not deafened then. This last piece of his wife still mercifully intact, but far from safe.
Working himself shakily to his feet with the boy pulled plodding in his wake yanked by the arm, Anatole stumbled in attempt to escape the confines of the hab-space that at present felt somehow tainted by the noise's stain.
Ridiculous certainly, but the shiver down his spine at the notion of himself or even his burden of a child spending even another moment in that hole was motivating enough on its own. He wrenched the rusted door panel open with a trio of sharp jerks, spilling into the communal passage and realizing with a start that he wasn't alone.
Dozens of wan faces, some young some old and all stained red from ruptured eardrums, peered back at and around him with wide tear-streaked eyes. Milling about all confused, frightened as he was. Some shouted for order, others shouted for answers, most were simply shouting to try and make themselves heard above the bedlam. That's what most people did when they were scared wasn't it? Try to assert themselves...or cower?
Anatole and the boy alone were together in silence, letting the stink of fright sweep over them like some sour malaise. Both man's and boy's heads cocked as if trying to parse some sense from the mania. Or listening to something distant beyond the edges of hearing still sensitive, still keened for the danger they knew by some prey instinct was coming.
All went quiet then after a few rapid heartbeats as others heard it too and shushed others, that base bellow of a horn sounding clearly throughout the halls. A thing not entirely unlike those crudely fashioned by gutter rats back on Caldium that the father remembered idly. Of a sort used to flush avian blight-vermin from bloc rooftops in great clouds of withered feathers, both for the purposes of disease prevention and the occasional desperate sustenance. Tools of signal and warning, of communication and intent.
This one's to signal the beginning of the hunt. To set the prey to flight before the baying of predator-beasts. Monsters in the shape of men spilling from boarding pods blinking gold pinned eyes and baring glistening fangs, howling all the while...
-III-
Traggat Kyner had oft considered himself of a more insightful, pragmatic soul. At least in so compared to those around him.
Never a man prone to flights of fancy, only ever trusting in the cold facts of what he could experience firsthand and focusing on the minutia of such. An attitude that had seen him rise slowly but steadily through the ranks of the Administratum's sprawling hierarchy and earned him his relatively comfortable if provincial posting as an Officiant stationed aboard the near-derelict Mooring complex.
Some of his fellows had teased, some even half-jokingly, that the machine men of Holy Mars would secret any man foolish enough to take the remote offering away for processing. Rendering down flesh and brain-meat until they had a lump of efficiency little better than a servitor, a slave to their needs.
He'd been the only one not to give credence to such base rumour. Fact over fiction, the key to lasting success...
Far more preferable to blubbering over the hogwash some of the more sadistic older boys in the scholam used to bully and terrify their ignorant juniors out of some misguided bid at hiding their own deep-seated insecurities.
Terror-tales regaling the lurid exploits of Boggards, Guttersnipes, and other soul-swiping Bestia, carried down from generation to generation of schola-yard oppressor and grown each instance with the telling. Most if not all probably capable of tracing their source details to one of the many rambling teaching sermons offered by those more overzealous itinerant priests the institution would occasionally employ for cheap, then subsequently regret for one sordid reason or another.
Faith should be heeded, but never at the expense of progress...but even with this in mind he'd never truly forgotten the nagging geist-fables and half-myths no matter how hard he tried. Descriptors of sinuous tendrils and fluted fronds to snag at idle notions of heresy, or jagged fangs and burning gold pinned eyes that could freeze one's soul in place for the sleep-daemons to feast upon at their leisure...
Proper monsters did exist at the Imperium's fringes, of course, and dangerous ones besides as he had come to learn. Xenoform aberrations like the foul Orkoid brute-killers or the or the Sting-Winged Vespidae employed by the Blueskins, but these were known and well-documented both in the public record and the accounts of trusted witnesses like his Ónkel; bless his troubled soul to the Emperor's side.
A front-liner with his home system's Imperialis Militia, deployed to engage the raiding fleets that would on occasion plague the outer worlds for months or years at a time and always return with firsthand accounts. The sort his harried Mater had always admonished, told with a haunted stare and a sober mien rather than the over-exaggerated flailing the ones who would shove Kyner's head into the lavatorial chem-slurries were fond of. A sordid experience to which he attributed his rapidly diminishing eyesight and...no, such was negligible.
'...Focus on the now, dwell not upon the foolishly imagined...' He'd chided himself, worrying at his sweating brow with a stained sleeve.
Something foreign and fast-moving had struck the station sixteen standard minutes ago. Several somethings according to the contact alerts chiming away across a datum screen, all seemingly having blossomed from nowhere at all and resulting in multiple hull breaches thankfully quickly sealed and devoted to mostly non-critical centres.
More troubling was their arrival at all, riding unremarked upon in the wake of whatever high-frequency interference had baffled Mooring's outward-facing augur suite and point defense systems. 'Interference' the preferred official designation to describe whatever damnable howling mayhem that had ravaged the senses of seemingly all on board for approximately fifty-one standard seconds. He knew this for certain, having counted them out himself in an attempt to be useful while others writhed in their seats screaming curses.
'...The noise of it...a shriek beast's baying call to its fellows...'
Foolishness, childish inanity, of course. He was a calm and rational man, a creature given to logic and reason.
Such was what had earned him his new left eye, an augmetic fashioned of curved steel and tempered glass occuli that apparently had been certified and blessed personally by a proper Magos, proof of his persisting value to his new business associates.
Monsters, those sorts of monsters whispered or imagined, simply weren't real. Such was what he would tell himself before his three-hundred and forty-five minute mandated rest each day cycle. They couldn't be real, they just couldn't.
This whole debacle was simply a rogue radiation storm once confirmation and corroboration from other teams arrived. Simply a freak accident of fate that had resulted in half a dozen planetoid fragments grazing the hull. Troublesome, likely to see months' worth of clerical and backroom backlog across his aged desk as he sought to see to damages and work out assessments of the issue in the event of future iterations as according to the sanctified procedures. The problem faced typically, efficiently, and succinctly as he and his crew had done everything correctly according to protocol.
Barely even a problem at all, compared to what could have occurred had they not acted swiftly to cordon off the afflicted areas.
Such certitude was by in large the primary reason a man like Traggat Kyner couldn't quite come to believe his own failing eyes in those first moments, felt before the end of a life of mundane normalcy. Still reeling from lingering after-echos of the howling scrap-code interference still jarring in his ears such that he didn't register the first thunderous knock against the sealed bulkhead of the Command centre.
He also didn't quite hear the second that left a dent in the thick plasteel, though the brutality of the hit did send a tremor bouncing down along the suspension arm keeping his control-throne aloft a good three feet off the deck. His stomach squirming in his gut, the gruel of a previous meal settling poorly...
What he did comprehend was the third hit that saw the barrier buckle and part in a flood of hydraulic steam vents and humanoid figures baying madly as though to match the initial call. Men, some hunched and others straight-backed. All carrying with them weapons of some variety, crude axes and clubs, chain-toothed swords and serrated cutting blades alongside the rarer firearms. All dressed in what to his frayed perceptions quantified as stained rags hung limply across frames encased wholly in body-suits of intricately fashioned leathers.
His machine eye more adept, picking out smaller details mercifully missed by its organic partner. Each suit shaped, decorated, woven into an artful fascia of stitched knotwork or metal piercing. Each meant to evoke a facsimile of the human body flayed open to expose the musculature beneath; all sculpted tendons and crafted sinews. Each glistening with sodden strangeness in the half-lit lumen glow of the command centre cast.
Such was the appreciation of mortal heartbeats cast in anxiety, descending into abject horror at as eyes traveled to take in the visage of the mob. These men...if men they truly were, some bearing too few limbs and other too many, or possessed faces consumed by masks fashioned from inhuman skulls. Curling antlers or stub-ridged horns rising from ridged brows canid or equine, others bearing tusks at the corners of frothing mouths or the remnants of needle-tipped xenos fangs scrimshawed with marks that made Kyner's bowels loosen and empty simply to witness...or perhaps that was simply the eyes.
Inhuman animal eyes peering back at him, black-pinned and yellow glowing with an inner luminescence driven by needs too terrible to contemplate.
Oneida his sensorium officer, nestled in her augur trench and still twitchy from the backwash of intra-sensory overload fragging her augmetics, sought to turn about and rise with service-pistol in hand. A brave act, one that saw two of the onrushing Skulls crash to the deck braying as they were crushed under the pounding of the mob. A moment's triumph before her upper torso and lower half of a handsome face blossomed in a spray of bone fragments and red tassels. What was left of a woman he had worked alongside quite amicably over the length of a decade reduced to mush wetness, spread like fruit-stuffs across a shattered console savaged by jagged flechettes.
A handful of others die in as many seconds, he even witnesses some himself through one eye of flesh and another of gleaming amber-glass.
Meyek his Chief Security Officer weeping like a small child. The once intimidating man's arms and legs restrained by tusked devils while questing knives dig about his intestines as though seeking some curious half-truth known only to the searcher.
Hyun, a youthful functionary with an irritating habit of yawning at her post, having not the time to scream before an axe of serrated scrap and rattling charms catches her across the pox-ridden face in a lateral knock that severs much of her lower jaw. Her killer leaving her cruelly to drown in her own vitae, her last yawn a horrid retching gurgle stymied by hands trying to stem the outflow.
Transmechanic Albinus-Nu-05, delegate of the Martian Priesthood and one of if not the most powerful political beings on Mooring, cursing vehemently in canted binaric. Decrying such blasphemies against the sacred engines before being subsequently buried under a horde of turbulent howling flesh. Torn robes and fleshy gristle joined shortly by orphaned mechanical additions and brackish oils less familiar.
All this while still restrained and hanging in his cushioned seat of imagined power, white-knuckled hands prying for the release catches at his sodden waist guilty of always jamming up. He knows they are aware of him, hearing mocking laughter from guttural throats as he struggles, but they do not come for him. Seconds pass without the hot bite of weapon's edge or bullet's kiss, even when he finally manages to free himself. Tumbling to the deck in a flailing heap, yet still, the Skulls do not come for him. Even alone now, vulnerable as he is.
There is little need, his thread already claimed by one who stands head and shoulders above...
Though he had never had occasion to witness one in the flesh, the creature vaguely resembled painted imagery of the God-Emperor's Legiones Astartes. An Angel of Death, a Space Marine. The same sorts of things he imagined as they depicted in some form or fashion across the Imperium, be they crude caricatures smeared across cave walls or arrayed out in serried frescoes along temple avenues.
'...Heroic warriors all...clad in the finest armours and bearing the most potent of arms in defense of Mankind. Handsome, dignified, noble...'
This thing...it stood a mockery of such ideals.
A bestia. A canine jackal wrought in the shape of a Space Marine, much like the image scrawled across a timeworn field of amber. His face long and leathery with scars, possessed of a long nose and a prominent mouth. A snout almost, no...more a canine muzzle distended and bristling with long fangs thickly framed by vibrantly red fur styled as hair that hangs about his shoulders and coats a jutting prominent chin. A feral world chieftain or war-leader, as savage as those he'd studied in the schola.
It...He...grins at him easily, an ugly thing. A canid's smile, if such creatures could be said to smirk...it sends a trickle of renewed warmth down one leg.
The smells hit the Chief Overseer next, a reek of sweat-dampened hair and animal musk mixed liberally with the copper tang of blood and rotting machine lubricants. There is something else as well, thinner and less distinct yet unmistakable to the senses. An ephemeral aroma that burns the nostrils. Spun sugar on a warm sunlit morning, or the heady odor of cooking meat about a primitive cook fire in the dead of night. A smell present yet not, caught between two differing extremes.
Then the sounds, remote but at the same time far more present than the abject butchery playing out in the background.
The tectonic grating of immense grey slabs of armour and the growling internal servo-musculature beneath, ridged plate gleaming with the blue of hoarfrost and etched with runic sigils far more ornate than the Skulls bear. A slit eye opened and staring, a serpent consuming its own tail. These amid dozens of others he couldn't bear to witness hidden beneath strung beads, knotwork, and hung teeth human and otherwise. The pelt draped across massive shoulder guards, that is the worst thing despite these other horrors. It is difficult to focus upon, even harder to understand when he does so.
Its outline, profile, and proper length distorted somehow. appearing as tanned quivering flesh one instant, and then a serpent's scales the next and colorless matted fur after that. Shifting the longer one looked and from what angle viewed, unfettered by sense or reason.
A thing unreal, much like he who wears it. Kyner knows logically he must try and run, to attempt escape despite how impossible it might seem...
A brass lupine-barking throaty and wet that he at first takes as renewed threat echos across the enclosed chamber, a challenge he is ill fit to match. Apprehension slaying instinctive flight and holding muscles rigid in their sheath of pallid skin and withered sinew. Then he realizes the lupine creature making the noise is not growling, but chuckling. Raucous, manic, a jackal unchained by such fleeting concepts as concern or worry.
"Mmm...You." A face of gene-wrought proportions bends to examine him, nostrils flaring as he scents the air...scents him. "You are the one who commands this fine castle, yes? This...'Mooring', is it? A good name, with just a hint of irony."
The jackalwolf's voice is a ragged leopard's purr, shockingly genial despite this as it grapples around the nuances of Low Gothic. A thick tongue lapping at ragged lips as if to taste the flavor of the language, finding it only somewhat offensive.
"And more flesh on you than I was expecting, especially for one of Mars' puppets. That is good! And what is it they call you, my little Lord?"
The Officiant's first instinct was to answer, a notion that surprises and shames him. His response prompted along by some unspoken pressure and authority exuded, but Kyner found he simply could not. Not by some hidden well of willful defiance, but sheer physiological inability. His eyes stuck wide, mouth opening and closing like some suffocating fish in the open air district-markets of a distant half-forgotten homeworld. Unable to draw in a breath, let alone speak.
It was an oddly terrifying thing, a man of logic staring into the hirsute face of a demigod. But then the creature had to insist.
"Your name, little mortal. What is your name?"
"T-Tra...Tr-Traggat." His utterance thin and reedy, strained by fear and shame. Shame at himself, shame he could not be stronger... "Tr-Traggat K-Kyner."
"Hello, Tr-Traggat K-Kyner. I am Lukas." The astartes-thing named Lukas say brightly, the introduction vibrant and merry. Made all the more jarring by how utterly at odds with the steaming horror of the moment. "Blooded gene-son of Russ, the Wolf King, and herald of the Rout. You've heard tales of us, yes?" He cocked his head like a dog awaiting a slab of bone, this creature that appeared one of the Emperor's legions. But there were only ever the nine legions as everyone knew and only nine true sons of His majesty, and none the Officiant knew went by such names or titles as these.
His pause was noticed, a flaring of the nostrils and an unruly snort of derision that saw a gobbet of something foul and hissing across the plasteel flooring.
"Hnngh...No matter, it seems you've already met my handsome friends here regardless."
A tilt of the head indicates the Skulls, their number shrinking back even at that brief acknowledgment.
"And a dreadful mess they've made of your throne room too. Spoiling and hungry, this is how jarl Drakonsbane prefers his thralls. No manners, I tell him this again and again. No proper tribute for such fine personage as yourself, your lordship."
It is mocking him, even affecting something akin to a bow. All the while gauging his reactions to stimuli in the way a juve might note an insect amid the sumps and gutters. That is all he is to this creature, Kyner realizes. A curiosity to one that has torn out the heart of all he has worked for and led the slaughter of his compatriots.
But not him, not yet...
And so he asks a simple instinctive question, one unknowingly echoed across the millennia by thousands of souls trapped by similar circumstances on hundreds of worlds.
"W-W-Why?"
Lukas actually laughed at that, a bass leopard's snarl rising in stepped pitch to almost hysterical degrees.
"Why...Why? Is that not obvious?"
Taken aback, the Officiant can do little more than flinch and gape as the astartes-wolf bestia gestures once more to the throng of onlooking Skulls, their postures both those human-standard and utterly misshapen alike uniformly lowered in deference. Animals kneeling in primal acknowledgment to an alpha predator-king.
"These little ones, they are afraid. That is why."
He bends in closer, as if to share some sordid confidence between friends. The smell of him blurring the eyes, tinging the throat with sour bile...
"But in truth, I've come a far way to visit this reeking place on the hunt for something valuable, you see? Something forced on me."
Was that a touch of annoyance in its...his voice? An irritation seeps through the facade of smiles to further unmask the beast beneath. Kyner's heartbeat quickening even more so if that were possible, a reaction that banished the glimpse with a fresh grin that was all incisors and glee.
"And I will find it, yes. But to hasten matters, these friends and I must do terrible things. Things that would draw attention best left distracted for our purposes, things that follow us. Maleficarum."
With that word, a sensation of frostbitten chill that should have been impossible in the coppery warmth of the newly-made abattoir. Was it some trick of the light? A quirk that sent shadows lengthening alongside pools of congealing offal and blood, tinted wet with fresh ice. and melt-water What was that noiseless purring? One with no relation to the station's straining ventilation fans or the warrior's strange armour.
"Troublesome, very troublesome indeed and not in the fun way, mind you. So we must be sure to chase them from this verse, before this. Hurt them so badly they do not think to come back to bother us again, at least for a time. Teaching pain through means even they can understand, but you...you will not understand, I think. And I am sorry for that too."
Kyner had been mistaken. The cloak was a terrible thing for true, unnatural and cruel to mortal perceptions, but it was not the worst thing. Those gold-pinned eyes, Lukas' eyes as they bored so cheerfully into his own to pick apart the pieces of him. There was no pity there, no compassion, no humanity...or what little there was that remained strangled by something more?
"But know this, you will have a part still to play. It will be a painful one and aid woefully little. These things that roam the Underverse so often do as they will do regardless of wyrd, and I should know that better than most."
The warrior known as 'Lukas' smiled even wider, a feat that shouldn't have been possible even for a mouth so large. An armoured claw rise purposefully with a feral machined-whine, serrated plasteel tips sharp as sin tapping at the point of his chest where a mortal's heart might beat.
A crude sigil stood out embossed across the ceramite sheath, raw and brutal, carved in the shape of a leering eye turned inwards. A markedly horrific thing wrought in layered aspects that defied known geometries, one that left dribbles coppery warmth trailing from the corners of his mouth and snapped the last lingering shreds of logic and reason remaining to his favoured victim of the moment.
"But then again it may help, and that is reason enough to see it done."
With this, the Skulls sprang into frenetic motion, loosed and ravening by some unseen signal. Falling upon the piteous offering and dragging him kicking and screaming into the hungering dark with yellowed claws and iron hoods, his shrill wails playing out a keening chorus on iron walls. And all the while those animal eyes simply watch from a gregarious face, burning with an inner light that spoke of gleeful insipid curiosities...
"Ah, of course! How could I forget!?" The monster calling itself 'Lukas' calls out after them, the genuine smile clear in his words. "Do try to laugh if you are able, Tr-Traggat K-Kyner! The best marks of aversion, you see, they are always laughing!"
- Log Terminated -
A/N: Wrote this to honor an inspiring AU, and for hours spent enjoying the ideas of what could have been being explored in such detail. - Mojo