The Horus Heresy - Calum McLeod
Synopsis:
Imperial skirmishes with the forces of Chaos have a long and bloody history, dating all the way back to when mankind first ventured into the depths of space and the First Founding of the Space Marine Legions occurred. The most serious and damaging incident was the so called 'Heresy of the Warmaster Horus' during the early years of the 31st Millennium; where the entire charted galaxy was plunged into civil war and all that mankind had fought for was almost destroyed in an instant.
Part 1:
The Warmaster
Prologue
Earth.
Aeons ago, millions of years after the birth of the Universe, the skies of the young Earth were still on fire. Nature had not yet taken her stranglehold on the state of the world and so there was no form or pattern to the events that were taking place as the new planet struggled to cope with its new life.
Interstellar dust and meteorites bombarded the lands, adding alien chemicals to the already cooling surface, attracted by the intense gravitational waves expanding throughout the universe.
Below the stratosphere, there was a madness of solidifying crusted slabs as the land took shape and continents were formed amidst violently erupting volcanoes and gigantic explosions of gasses as more and more meteors struck.
Hundred of millions of years passed and gradually the Earth cooled so that an atmosphere could form.
With the new atmosphere, the sky turned blue, fires disappeared and slowly life began taking shape.
Ages passed; the Ice Age taking most of the primitive life with it when it suddenly disappeared after moulding the young planet into it's own image. The surface was continually changing, life gradually grew, surviving and evolving along with the planet's evolution.
Mankind started out as one amongst billions of species, trying to survive and evolve along with all the other life on Earth but found it couldn't. Strictly speaking, humanity should have been killed off along with other life as the planet grew up, but there was always something helping them survive. Already, humanity was defying the odds.
Over time, as the centuries past, titanic battles were fought between countries vying for the misguided trust of their peoples.
Earth was crippled and then rebuilt like clockwork.
Still the millennia wore on and planet Earth started taking a completely different shape from what it had looked like for so long.
The skies were no longer a haven for nature, mankind sought to advance themselves, to better themselves, and with new technologies they grew stronger and took command of their own air, until finally taking command of all of the heavens and above.
Interstellar space-travel was the one advancement that totally solidified humanity's hold on themselves. Humanity had successfully shown that they could control the elements with their technology and intelligence. They had grown up.
By the 28th Millennium, the Earth had released its children into the night and they were flourishing like never before.
Far-off planets had been colonised and governments had taken control so that those planets could themselves become new homes for their people. And so the Earth Empire was formed, under the guidance of the Emperor- who commanded undisputed allegiance and worship from humans all over the Empire.
But still, the poison that had gnawed at mankind over the thousands of centuries continued to eat away at them. All over the Earth Empire and on Terra itself, war was brewing between rival governments, and it was only a matter of time before interstellar civil war erupted.
Petty arguments were blown up and exaggerated beyond reason and madness once more consumed the galaxy, just like the whole of history had warned.
The gods of Chaos saw all this happening and were pleased with the insanity mankind had brought upon themselves. Extending their unclean energies, they created Warp Storms that isolated Earth from the colonies and so began centuries of seclusion and cut-off of the Emperor's influence, thus allowing their perverse minions to spread their word amongst the now leaderless Earth colonies.
Somewhat ironically, it took the death of the Eldar race to put an end to the Warp Storms and allow mankind a second chance.
When the Eldar unwittingly psychically released the Chaos God Slaanesh to the material universe, their psychic anguish and pain reverberated throughout the entire cosmos, instantly slaying any psykers who were conscious at the time. The explosion of such a mental force blew away the Warp storms that had been isolating mother Earth from her children for so many years, and thus the road was paved for man's re-conquest of the universe and what was rightfully his. The power of this foul birth was so overwhelming, that at numerous points in space, the warp literally overlapped with the material and pockets of Chaos-infested space were created throughout the universe.
On Earth, the Emperor of humanity had known for some time of the approaching climatic changes and so had spent decades preparing for the oncoming re-uniting of the Earth Federation. When the time came, the Emperor and the Primarchs he had himself created left Terra on a crusade of conquest. Many battles were fought and the Emperor and his Primarchs swept through the galaxy like a swarm, reuniting untold thousands of worlds with the Earth and rebuilding the shattered Imperium.
Still though, the taint of the Chaos gods and their new brother, Slaanesh was ever present. And they were not so easily beaten.
Chapter 1
Earth Date: 30,012
Astronomican Allignment: 0012-dx.M299
Sector: Istvaan
Location: Segmentum Obscurus
Distance from Terra: 10,002 Light Years
In the darkness the man groped for something solid.
Anything with which he could use to figure out where he was. All around him, as far as his eyes could see, was blackness. He tasted the air. And keeled over, violently sick. It was vile. The air tasted of death and decay, like it hadn't been sterilised in centuries. He tasted blood and his own sick stench in his mouth. Licking his lips to moisten them, he stood up tall, and looked around.
Pure, total blackness.
Reaching out, he touched what he determined was a wall. Under his bare hand, the wall felt strange, almost soft. Quickly removing his hand, the man strained his eyes, trying to at least make out some details about his surrounds.
Breathing heavier now, the man again touched the wall near him, to his right. It felt warm, mushy like jelly.
Gulping more of the foul air into his lungs, Horus tensed his ears in an attempt to hear anything useful.
In the distance, far from him, he heard a noise.
His breaths coming now in short rapid bursts, Horus decided to head towards the sound.
Tentatively probing through the black atmosphere, he took a step forward.
Underneath his bare feet, the ground heaved and a tremendous roar bellowed throughout the area rattling his teeth. Ahead of him, he heard the sound again, louder this time, in sequence with the roaring blast.
Eyes fixed in front of him, Horus took another step using his hand as a guide. The goo from the wall was sticking to his fingers. He tasted it. It was sour and he grimaced in distaste.
Mouth straight, Horus started walking purposefully towards the sound. Again, the ground shuddered and the howl pierced the air once more. The screaming was closer this time.
Still, he could not see more than two centimetres ahead of himself, and even that was blackness.
He cast his mind back to another situation he had experienced like this.
It had been on the Feral World of Coptis, near the Eye Of Terror. His personal bodyguard and himself had been pinned down by a mob Bloodlusted Orks. Forced to avoid capture and wait for reinforcements to arrive, his men had fought for their master's survival.
Slowly and methodically, the crazed Orks had cut down his men, until he alone stood to face them. Embarrassingly, he had been forced to crawl through an abandoned sewer system until help had arrived, spending days stuffed in the dark and surrounded go rats and other disgusting creatures.
It was a tale he had never told anyone, but it suited this situation perfectly he thought, grimacing as his hand hit onto something sharp. Stopping to investigate, he felt some more, and realised the object he had discovered, was an ornate knife of some sort. Horus's eyes widened a little as he discovered that the knife was holding something to the wall. Closing his eyes he felt around. The knife cut deep into the soft wall, as if it had been forcibly pushed in. Something was being held upright in place.
He lowered his hands some more, still with his eyes closed, supporting himself with his shoulder against the wall, and tried to picture the scene in his mind.
It was a skeleton.
Human, he was fairly sure of that. He felt armour covering its bones; Horus recognised the heavy plates of Crusade armour and smiled. He could feel the bones protruding from gashes and holes in the carapace, pointing outwards and blocking his path.
Horus crouched down on his haunches, to get a better idea of the blockage. His hands slipped over the slick body as they hit a soft object. The skeleton was still decomposing. Horus's mouth twitched at this thought, at least it explained the foul air.
Standing up straight again, he grasped the knife, tensed his muscles and pulled it out the wall. A sickening sucking noise filled the area as it slowly emerged from the wall. There was a garbled thump when the skeleton hit the ground, a jumble of rotting bones.
Clasping the weapon in his other, free hand, Horus proceeded once more through the night, stepping over the crumbling skeleton.
Underfoot, the ground was spongy like the wall, and with each step he seemed to bounce a few centimetres into the air.
He was starting to worry.
Not because of his current situation, but because he couldn't remember how he had got here. It was that which scared him, the unknown.
In the dark ahead, the screaming grew louder. It was almost on top of him. Gripping the knife, Horus tried to scrape some of the wall covering off so he could examine it later. Surprisingly, the knife worked well under his slimy and slick fingers, and he succeeded in prising off a substantial part of the substance. Smiling to himself, he continued.
It seemed like days he had spent walking, and yet he didn't think he was getting anywhere, but still he pressed ahead, using any small sound as a point of reference.
The floor rocked; the screaming howled.
Horus looked up sharply at that last noise, as he all of a sudden realised what the screaming actually was.
It wasn't screaming. It was laughter.
Like flipping a switch, the lights suddenly flared on.
Horus shrieked, his eyes watering at the sudden brightness, and stepped back banging into the wall and falling to his knees.
Cautiously opening his eyes, he looked at his surrounds.
He shrieked again, piercing the now floodlit room and mixing with the insane laughter in front of him.
At first look, it appeared he had walked into some sort of holy chamber. But as his eyes grew more accustomed to the light, Horus realised where he stood was anything but.
In holders of bone, fires burned brightly, lighting the walls of the chamber with a brilliant, luminescent white light, casting long shadows in those areas hidden from the light.
The bone that supported the torches looked to be human. Horus saw leg bones and rib-cages supporting different torches, and were interspersed randomly throughout the vast room.
Horus raised his eyes, painfully looking upwards. Staring to the heavens, the light barely made it halfway to the high ceiling, and there seemed to be some sort of mist separating the light from the fires and the darkness higher up. In the mist, Horus could just make out the vague shapes of winged creatures, hovering in the dark.
Watching him.
Taking short, now shallow breaths, Horus decided to support himself on the wall to his right. Raising his hand to it, he felt the now familiar jelly run through his fingers, coalescing in pools at his knuckles.
Glancing momentarily at the wall, Horus screamed and snapped his hand back, dragging some goo with it in a long, sticky trail. Clasping his hand to his body, he closed his eyes to shut out the horror in front of him.
He stayed like that for some minutes until curiosity finally overcame judgement and he opened one eye at the wall.
Horus shuddered at the sight and threw up again at his feet. The wall was made of human brain. The organs pulsated as if still alive, and in amongst their separate parts, blood still oozed. Looking along the wall, the brains reached far off into the misty distance and covered every corner of the room, dripping their clear-coloured protective skins onto the floor, making it soft and springy. The blood covering them mingled with the white light from the torches, making everything in the chamber have a slight red tint.
Trying to clear his mind of the insane images before him, Horus gripped his knife tighter so that blood trickled between the fingers of his left hand.
In the centre of the chamber, an altar was supported on a pillar of the same bone that held the torches. It gleamed white and appeared ghostly with the red tint, a contrast with the dark above.
Horus took a step closer to the altar, hands at his sides and face fixed.
On the sides of the altar, intricate geometric symbols were crudely carved into the bone and continued all the way around the altar, and all the way round the room. Horus' eyes widened, his breath escaped him, and he bodily recoiled as his brain finally caught up with his eyes.
He recognised the symbols.
Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch. All the foul gods of Chaos had their markers inscribed on the altar.
Horus finally understood what this place was. It wasn't a holy chamber. It was a crypt. A torture room. It was here that unholy sacrifices were made to Chaos, in exchange for a person's soul.
But this wasn't what took his breath away.
It was the symbol in the middle.
This one was larger than the others, and appeared to have had more care when carved into the bone.
It was his insignia, the Eye of Horus, set perfectly in the centre, surrounded by Chaos.
Reaching out, he moved to touch his badge, but hesitated, held back by something.
The screaming and laughing had stopped.
Slowly withdrawing his hand, some of the brain jelly fell onto the altar, running into the grooves and lines of the markings.
He shook his head again, the voices were getting louder and the images more frequent.
Horus moved half a step back from the altar and listened intently for any noise.
The air of the chamber was still and silent, as if it was completely empty and hadn't been entered for years.
It was not a normal silence, not like the kind one experiences when falling asleep, where everything becomes muted.
It was hollow, yet it had substance. Horus's eyes narrowed and he concentrated on the silence. He could feel the atmosphere grow tenser, as if building to a crescendo.
He tensed his muscles and closed his eyes.
The man felt the depth of the silence encapsulate him, he welcomed it's presence.
Horus started rocking backwards and forwards on his heels, arms outstretched and a smile playing across his lips in the silence.
He opened his mind to the voices, allowing them to see his thoughts and fears.
On the table in-front of him, blood started seeping from cracks in the bone, streaming onto the floor and running through the grooves of the symbols on the altar itself, creating rivers of red; filling out the shapes and making them more defined. It completely covered the altar, and soon it looked like a block of red. On the walls, blood was also pouring forth, turning the ground below into a sea of frothing red and mixing with the brain-tissue that had already fallen there.
Some of the larger brains began swelling up and with a loud bang, exploded, spewing skull shards and black liquid out. Some of the filth fell over Horus, covering him, but he remained oblivious to it all, and kept his eyes closed, still laughing out loud.
On other brain shells, their outer casings blew apart with muffled puffs, spraying yet more decaying blood and organs over the room. It was as if it were raining blood.
From the dead depths of the shattered brains, arms emerged. They appeared a sickly green colour, and draped from them were long, sticky trails of mucus, which clung to them and the brains themselves. Boils and postules oozed black blood, glistening in the glare of the still-burning torches.
The rotting arms waved frantically about, grappling with each other, reaching out, trying to touch the inert Horus next to them.
The entire room was bathed in a blood-red wash, which shone perversely against the moving, moaning walls.
A slow hum grew from the empty pits of the brains, shattering the silence. Juices from the decaying sea of blood stank out the room, mingling with the stench from the decaying skeleton.
Above Horus, the red mist was gradually enveloping the chamber, and the winged demons above started to screech and flap together.
All the while, Horus stood motionless, perverse voices whispering unclean promises and secrets to him flashed through his mind.
Horrific images of bloodshed and horrors, unimaginable compared to the insane hell taking place around hum, were shown to him.
Yet he still rocked on his heels and laughed aloud.
Shapes began forming in the red mist. Moving about, they seemed to be part of the mist, but had their own distinct form. They crowded round Horus who was, by now, completely covered in the muck from the brains and glistening in red blood.
As if by himself, Horus moved so he again faced the blood-covered altar.
The altar was draped in a blanket of blood, yet the distinct Chaos symbols could be clearly seen through it all. They started glowing.
Screaming filled the air and on top of the altar, a figure started forming. It was clearer to see than the demons around Horus, and as its outline took shape, details could be made out.
It was clothed in a white gown, reaching to its feet. All over the gown were markings, not unlike the Chaos symbols. They were markings of a psyker. Dotted at random intervals, to convey the sense of randomness and disorder the Warp represented, the symbols were a simple black colour, sharp against the white of the gown. Finally, the figure became whole.
It was a man.
His wrists were manacled to the top of the altar by harsh-looking chains. His wrists and hands were covered in blood, where the chains had bitten in, and nails had been hammered.
The man screamed. It was not a normal scream, more a scream of someone who had endured pain that mere mortals were not meant to experience. His voice carried through the blood-soaked chamber, drowning out Horus' insane laughter and cutting through the hum of the creatures above.
The man twisted violently, trying to escape the bonds that held him and looked up into Horus's eyes.
Horus opened his eyes and looked down at the man before him.
He saw a being he hated.
He hated the thing before of him with all his might.
Raising the knife above him, Horus stopped laughing and stared down at the man, a smile still played across his lips.
The man on the altar tried to lift his hands to block the oncoming blow, but still couldn't break the shackles.
The noise from the demons grew in intensity, filling the chamber and they started jumping madly about, hitting into each other as they watched Horus. Above, the creatures were silent as they too watched Horus. The atmosphere of the room intensified and seemed to grow heavy around Horus.
Mouth straight, Horus took one final look at the heavens.
Tendons and muscles tensing, Horus plunged the knife into his Emperor.
All around him the demons shrieked and danced about in the blood.
Horus laughed.