Chapter 8

Why did you come here? To question, or to accuse?

Sensation crept back to her in bits and pieces, nerves straining in protest all the while, weeping for respite from their already overloaded and exhausted networks. It took far too long to blink, to even begin to hear anything beyond the maddening throb of her own blood and the ragged sob of her lungs, and even then it was an affront to both her vision and her very psyche.

She found herself suspended upside down from a girder by chain that wrapped all the way down her legs and pinning her arms to her torso – her wings were stretched out and shackled to the adjoining crossbeam with similar lengths of chain, each corrugated link of all three chains grotesquely sheathed in fresh length of intestine, a straitjacket of metal-sausages. Worse still, as the makeshift altar roughly hewn from odd trash and pulsating rot came into focus, she was certain it was Malister's viscera restraining her. Her power armour had been stripped off and tossed into the piles of other junk; her bodysuit had likewise been torn off and lay in a pile under her head, leaving Malister's intestines and the frigid metal of the chains as her only covering.

The Sanguinary Priest had been vivisected and left splayed out on the altar, the sickly glowing Warp bomb loving planted in his chest cavity seeming to blossom and spread like a tree, entwining roots of pale fire with his every bodily system and shading the burgeoning rot bubbling up and around the altar with great boughs of pestilence. The place smelled of rotten fruit; it stank of an abattoir in mid-summer heat, and reeked of overturned seaweed mouldering in the midday sun. Sabina felt her throat tightening and a now all-too familiar tingle running the length of her spine as her omophagea awakened to the scent of blood in the air. She licked her split lip, tasting the copper tones of her own vitality, but it only seemed to encourage her salivary glands to open further.

"Well?"

She turned as little as she was able, her sore eyes finding the blurred form of the noise marine that had taken her captive. He had stripped nude, twisted pink armour laying in pieces about the room, some even making up the plague altar along with his blastmaster. Targanon sat atop Virgil's ruptured amniotic pod, dragged out from the dreadnought's wreckage wholesale and filled with the progenoid glands of the slain Blood Angels. He dipped his toes in the steamy slurry like a man idling his feet in the bath, sharpening her power sword with a whetstone as he observed her. It seemed like a child's knife in his enormous hands. An obscene, bulbous organ hung, pendulous and many-eyed, between his thighs, each one winking and glittering in the semi-dark at her, leering.

Sabina tried to lick her split lip, but only managed to sputter a trail of blood down her face onto the tainted ground.

"To accuse, clearly. You Brides were fanatics then and you're fanatics still. However ..." Targanon pursed his lips, "I am curious. I watched you in the hab-block. If you did not question, deep down, you would have never picked up the leaflet to begin with."

He shrugged, turning back to his blade. A bracelet of unspeakable origins adorned his wrist, glittering black as starlight and seeming to twist and distort space around itself as it spiked and rippled like some ferromagnetic psyko-alloy.

Sabina sputtered, managed a cough, and croaked:

"B-brides?"

There was an odd poetry to being awoken in bloody restraints and weakened states twice in so short a time period, to both loyal Angels and traitor Angels. To be held at their mercy and questioned. Disquieting poetry, that gnawed at her despite the fervent litany of prayers to the Emperor that flowed on autopilot through her mind.

Targanon looked at her again.

"Would you be my bride, instead of being wedded to a Corpse-God?"

If she had the strength to retch she would have. The noise marine almost sounded sincerely hopeful.

"Burn in Hell ... w-with your Dark Prince, he-her-" the rest of her curse was cut off by more bloody sputtering, and Targanon's eyes darkened.

"And what do you know of Hell, Accuser-Bride?" He spat back, deftly hopping off his throne bath and marching toward her, his every footfall squelching in the desecrated ground.

Liberate tuteme, ex inferis.

"Well?" He breathed into her face, yanking a fistful of her blonde bob. The sudden proximity to the thing on her wrist suddenly invigorated her, broadening her pain threshold and swelling her with a sudden perspective: she could feel the individual motes in the air about her, suddenly comprehended their spin trajectory and a billion other variables stretching forth in both directions as her endochrine system surged with adrenaline.

Her reply was a glob of blood and mucus launched into the noise marine's surgically scarred face. Targanon recoiled with the speed of a striking serpent, releasing his hold of her and quickly slurped her insult into his mouth before it could drip down his chin. And just like that, time resumed it's heart-thudding pace, the adrenaline focusing her and forcing her to renew the litanies in her head to keep the pressure of the overwhelming decay all about her at bay.

"I supposed not," he said, regaining his composure. The bulbous organ between his legs twitched: a quiver that set the multitude of eyes blinking anew, each looking wildly in a different direction. It was all she could to to keep from retching.

"Do you know why I was chosen by the Grandfather? Among all of us?" He sighed, turning his back to her and picking his way around the junk piles to the growing rot-tree at its centre. "The truth is – and I don't mind telling you this, of all people, bride – that I am tired."

The pestilent, worming branches now spiralled out in an uncontrollable tangle, dripping maggots and gobs of fruiting pus. Flies buzzed about its branches and roaches burrowed around the roots that had covered over and fed upon Malister's remains. Targanon reached out and plucked a throbbing pustule from the branches with a sopping squelch, rolling it over in his hand like a fresh apple.

"We have been here for millennia now," he went on. "The same hundred years played out again and again, for four millennia. Do you have any notion of how ... boring that is?

"Morias is different. The Lord of Huntsmen is used to the long game, to lying in wait for the perfect killing stroke. Decellis finds the pursuit of tactical perfection a game worth playing: every iteration to him is a chance to better himself and his precision by nanoseconds. Ptar'nek lives for schemes by the grace of Tzeentch, and Phaltrix has only further surgeries to perform on himself.

"But there is nothing for me. Nothing but the same old stale pleasures, the same events over and over and over until there is naught but a desperate need. I thought the Prince of Pleasure could offer me all what I needed and more, but now I see. Being here, being in this place ... I finally see it for what it is."

He turned to her then, tossing the rotten pimple in an underhand swing to come rolling a few feet from her. It ruptured as it struck the fallow earth, oozing it's off-white contents into the dust and deflating.

"Boredom and rot are not the enemy. There is no new life without decay, and trapped in this temporal loop there is nothing but the inexorable march toward entropy. And that means something new, and that is good. The Grandfather provides not what we want, but we all need. That is the true gift. The greatest one. Certainly a greater gift than your Corpse-Husband ever promised you."

Targanon raised an eyebrow. Likewise, one of the eyes of his bulbous organ swivelled and winked at her. "You will never feel his warmth the way you could another person's. You will never be able to lay with him, or have him hold you tight. He will never kiss you, whisper in your ear that you are safe when the dark threatens to close around you. He will never reach out to wipe your tears, or shield you from the horrors. You are his shield. His 'love' is only ever a distant abstraction – little more than a fiction. Morias was there from the beginning: he told me the Corpse-Emperor did not even love his own sons, the Primarchs."

He studied her for a moment as she struggled in vain against her gory chains, brow furiously creased and simmering in her ever-blossoming rage. Sighing once more and turned away from her, idly tossing her sword away to sail away and land, point-down in the ground. Sabina followed its arc and rested her gaze upon it – anything to keep her focus away from the maddening decay all around her – just a few meters from her. Targanon had begun pruning the branches with his bare hands, snapping off limbs and letting them fall about the altar. Fruiting bodies plopped to the ground with each shudder of the rot tree, spilling their contents and immediately sprouting into patches of blight from which spawned all manner of crawling beings. Fungal spores puffed and swirled in the air about him, mingling with the flies that crowded and hugged at him.

"Fulgrim is not my father, did you know that?" He said suddenly, as he worked. "I was a son of Ultramar once, a very long time ago. I thought I was a true believer, back then. Did you know that among us, only myself and Morias have ever met out gene fathers?"

She ceased struggling at that, simply allowing the shock to wash over her as she stared at the former Ultramarine.

"Yes, I met Roboute Guilliman, briefly. Even then I could sense the weight bearing down on his shoulders. How it tried and tested him, and when Fulgrim defeated him ... well, after that, I could no longer follow him. I had thought following the path of my father's defeater would be the right one, but I know now that I was wrong. It is a path of ruin and shame, to greater and greater excess so that nothing can ever satisfy you. All I ever wanted was satisfaction." He smiled at her again: that lecherous yet hopeful look leering with a thousand promises of agony.

"Would you give me that satisfaction? Would you be my bride?"

Save yourself, from Hell.

Targanon shook his head sadly and turned back to pruning the tree. "Even after I open my hearts to you and tell you my innermost desires, you still refuse my olive branch. Refuse to step onto common ground. I should not have expected differently from a fanatic.

"You are a child soldier, bride, just as I was. Brainwashed and made to fight His wars for him: a tool to be discarded when you break down and fail, and rest assured, you will. I saw it happen to the very best of us, my own father. And who are you? An insect. Less than that. The Grandfather would welcome a creature like you, but you reject his embrace as you reject me. Even now, a lesser being would have succumbed to the gifts in the air around us."

Sabina began to struggle again, quieter this time, attempting to flex and shift to wriggle her arms out of their folded-over position. And all the while, her eyes stayed fixed to the hilt of her power sword.

"I meant to ask you about the wings," Targanon continued, "but I thought it rude to ask before at least sharing something of myself first. An olive branch, you understand. I have only seen images of Sanguinius in relief, but I must say ... you, my dear, are almost as beautiful as he was. Almost. Did the Blood Angels let you live because they missed their dearly departed father so? Because you remind them of him? It must not have been easy. I saw the way they act distant from you.

"You are not the only Blood Angel to sprout wings, you know. There was another like you once, long ago, but his existence caused a schism and now he is no more. Perhaps they will discard you once you have served your purpose as a symbol for them to rally around. You keep company with the Eaters of the Dead, bride. You sleep and sup beside true monsters. And still you reject my every offer on behalf of the Grandfather."

"Y-you ask me to be s-s-something I'm not," she managed. "They only ask of me ... w-what I give freely. I'm going to give them your death."

"Ah, yes," he said with a slow nod of understanding, back still turned to her, "I see now. This is not your path, just as neither Guilliman's nor Fulgrim's was mine. But the day will come when you will be offered the right path for you, and for your sake, bride, I do hope that you take it. But now? The time for talk is done."

He stepped back from the tree, extricating himself from the winding roots of blight with a shake of each foot, and picking his way toward Virgil's ruined sarcophagus. Sabina struggled harder, straining against the chain so hard she could feel the flesh covering it begin to stretch and give way. The metal bit into her flesh, mingling her quickly congealing blood with the crust of Malister's. The hilt of her sword never left her gaze.

The air around Targanon seemed to swell and distend like an overripe fruit as he raised his arms wide, throwing back his head to inhale the putrefaction. As though caught in a vortex he miasma of flies began surging into his open mouth with furious abandon, and things began to crawl toward him through the blight, dragging fragments of his now-filth-encrusted armour to him.

She saw his blastmaster puffing and bubbling as it was dragged by a team of dung beetles, cracking along the seams like a moulting crustacean. As the metal plates began rapidly rusting and falling away, the new skin beneath shuddered and belched a noxious stew from its sucking barrel, dribbling a toxic slurry in its wake. The new plague spewer lurched itself free from its former hedonist shell and came to a rest at Targanon's side. Its master had begun to change too. His belly swelled and moved with the presence of a trillion parasites. His putrid armour began to slide up his body and clamp down around him, fusing and growing with him as his transhuman body opened scores of weeping sores, outgrowths of bone, and malignant cysts.

Sabina gulped down a breath despite the noxious air reaching a fever pitch as she tried to put the ritual out of her mind and focus her third eye on loosening her bonds. Focusing on her sword that was just out of reach. The rage boiling inside at her helplessness only made her struggle harder, which in turn only made it boil hotter. Her sword twitched.

Ave Imperator,

Her prayer had become a desperate, furious one as she wriggled and strained. Tendons stretched to their limits, and her second heart thrummed in her ears.

morituri te salutant.

Targanon picked up his plague spewer as the last fragments of armour fused to his body. The rot tree had become more than that: it had become a swirl of cosmic proportions, its boughs and roots digging cracks in the very fabric of reality. The noise of buzzing flies had taken on unreal decibel levels, as Nurgle's children began to answer the call.

Virgil's sarcophagus exploded without warning, sending chunks of rotting progenoid glands and sour amniotic sludge in all directions. A piece of one hit her face, sliding off her cheek and leaving a streak of foulness. Yet somehow, miraculously, her bonds loosened. The intestines covering the chains had begun to slurry off; deep in the throes of the ritual, Targanon had forgotten that Sabina's chains were also rapidly oxidizing and rusting away like everything else.

With a great heave she wrenched one wing free and the momentum swung her hard against the crossbeam, stunning her momentarily. The fire in her blood kept her going, kept her conscious against the impact and the madness all about her as she struggled and finally slipped her hands free.

Plague spewer in one hand, Targanon reached into the foul dirt and retrieved his helm, now marked with the symbol of the Grandfather, all trace of his former allegiance to Slannesh erased, just as the Prince of Pleasure had erased all trace of the Ultramarine he had once been. He eased it onto his rotting head, allowing the new outgrowths to seal him into it, and with that his transcendence was complete. A noise marine had become a plague marine.

He turned to her just as she had fully extricated herself and fell to the ground. Targanon laughed: a deep, husky belly laugh conjoined with the buzzing of flies inside of him. He had been right about one thing, certainly. The time for talk was done.

Sabina pushed herself to her feet as the plague marine took his first steps toward her, tensing her muscles and exploding into action with every fire her gene-enhanced body could offer. She flashed through the air, screaming in fury, sweeping aside clouds of disease and toxins in her wake. Her sword leapt into her hand, finally answering the call of her third eye, now fully open, as she tucked her wings and dove right, narrowly dodging the belching of his plague spewer. She tucked and rolled, sweeping up behind him and driving her sword in a downward swing as he reacted to turn – the blade missed his helm and shoulder, instead cleaving straight through his forearm and severing it in one fell stroke.

Targanon blinked at the twitching arm on the ground as if surprised, and Sabina took her opening.

With a furious growl she drove the point of the sword straight through his chest where she knew his hearts to be, burying it to the hilt and coming face to face with the plague marine in their death embrace.

"For the Emperor," she said through gritted teeth. "For Malister, and for me. Now die!"

Sabina twisted the blade, the power field cooking his organs from the inside, and Targanon let out a wheezing laugh.

"Y-you thought this ritual w-was all for me, bride?" He chortled, already coagulating blood seeping through the grille in his helm. He edged his face closer to hers, breathing his stink all over her. "It was for them," he whispered with unholy strength, and pushed her with his remaining hand, sliding backwards off her blade and falling ...

... and kept falling, straight through a crack in reality torn by the roots of the tree and slipping away into the Immaterium, to the garden of his new patron. She fell to her knees, exhausted and gasping for breath. Before her the rot tree swelled, no longer able to maintain its own structure, and all she could manage was to scream "NO!" as the Grandfather's gift exploded, tearing the entire Hive City Gamma-Secundus apart in the space of a blink from foundation to ruined spires and sending wave after wave of plague cascading out to blanket the entire moon in pestilent decay. Hundreds of thousands died in the blast in an instant, and as the clouds of miasma settled over the lower atmosphere, Ido's remaining billions would soon follow: a new garden for the Grandfather.