Tales of the Amber Vipers Chapter 321

Maru Kysoto raced to reach the centre of the vault, feeling the raging battle pressing on his mind's walls. Everywhere Space Marine lives were ending, and their fleeing spirits wailed their last cries into the ether. Brave, noble warriors, heroes of mankind of all stripes, cut down in their prime. The tragedy of this conflict weighed heavily on Maru, and he swore the architects of this calamity would pay, but only if he could stop disaster unfolding.

Ahead a pulsing conflagration of swirling energies played across the roof. Shimmering sheets of gravitc distortion, unlike any grav-effect Maru had ever seen, rising from a black spike of Noctilith. Maru's optics picked it out from the rest of the vault's contents, unmistakably inhuman. The rest of the Cerberii's tainted effects were travesties, but they had been forged by human hands. The Corposant had not. Necron runes flickered on the spine, the supporting base structure was wraithbone, and strange devices were fitted in at odd angles. It was a bizarre fusion of Xenos artefacts, wrought by either a genius or a madman, or perhaps both. Belisarius Cawl hadn't built this, he'd imply co-opted it.

Standing at its base was a lone figure, Auriga, the Blood Raven Librarian standing serenely amid the washing lights and pulsing energies. He gripped his staff in one hand as the other brushed a curved strut of Wraithbone and a gleam shone in his eyes. Maru's anger spiked at the sight, the mad fool was trying to activate the Corposant, to fling the Serpens Rex across the Cicatrix Maledictum and rejoin his Chapter. Maru didn't have the slightest inkling of how the Corposant worked, but he knew this wasn't right. Auriga was going to kill them all.

Maru wasted no time on empty threats but gathered his psychic might. Energies played through the arcane mechanisms of his MIU, eldritch conduits and psy-boosters designed by a Primarch whose name was a curse upon the lips of men. Maru's power blazed and he channelled it all into a searing arc of lightning, casting it from the tip of his Katana blade to incinerate Auriga. It never touched him.

Auriga's fingers twitched about his staff and spacetime convulsed. Maru's lightning bolt was not deflected as such, more that space curved in on itself, twisting the firmament that underpinned length, height and breadth, so that no straight line remained. Maru's attack flew away and earthed itself in an ancient cogitator stack, blowing it to scrap. Whatever secrets of pre-Imperial history it contained were lost, perhaps for the best given the Cerberii deemed them dire enough to secure in their vault.

Auriga's eyes at last parted from the Corposant and settled on Maru as he spat, "You shouldn't be here!"

"I am exactly where I should be!" Maru hissed.

"I saw your weakness, your inner flaws. You should have remained in isolation, not joining with these curs!"

Maru's scorn was epic, "Your lack of vision betrays you. Your powers are entropic, destructive, and anarchic. You cannot build futures, only tear them down!"

Auriga sighed, "Alas, that was true. I peered through the cracks in destiny, able only to deconstruct fate. Until now…"

"You do not scare me whelp," Maru hissed, "Your precognition has no power over me!"

But Auriga smiled, "Incorrect."

A flare from the Corposant and Maru was flung from his mechanical feet. Gravity shifted and suddenly he was standing on a steep slope. His Dreadnought frame could not compensate for this and he crashed to the floor, skidding along like a boulder toppling down a mountain slope. He crashed into a free-standing wall and smashed it over, only for gravity to shift again and send him skidding into a rack of Fusion Blasters. Maru's frame was battered by falling debris but he drove his Katana into the floor and arrested his slide, dangling helplessly from his blade.

"You cannot have this power!" Maru yelled.

"It is not my power, but the Corposant's," Auriga cried, "I thought the Corposant a mere means of conveyance, but it is so much more. It generates negative gravity. I had no idea how it would sunder the weave of spacetime, no concept of the cracks it would rip into the fabric of the universe. I see the fault-lines spreading, the mountains of destiny collapsing into rubble. This destruction is mine to control, mine to master!"

Maru was aghast, "This power is beyond you! You will rip the Materium to shreds, a Warp Rift will tear this base apart!"

"Possibly, but perhaps I will master the rupture and convey myself to the Imperium Nihilus. In this moment there is no future to bind me."

"You cannot do this!" Maru cried.

"I must, you have destroyed all other options. I will return to my Chapter, I will cross the Cicatrix Maledictum. You cannot stop me!"

"I can kill you!" Maru snarled.

"How, when you cannot even stand?" Auriga chuckled.

Gravity snapped back to normal but that was no comfort. The waves of negative gravity shrank to pinpoint size, fixed within the joints and spars of Maru's mechanical legs. Pseudo-pain fed back through his MIU, simulating agony as he had not felt in millennia. He sensed pistons and rods shattering as they were flexed beyond tolerance, reducing his motivators to jangled pieces of shattered metal. Maru could not stand, he could not fight, but his mind remained unencumbered.

He gathered his strength and threw another lightning bolt. Auriga deflected it with ease, sending it high to explode among the devices fitted to the roof. Maru had expected this however and in the moment of distraction sunk his psychic fingers into the air around Auriga. Maru grasped air molecules with his mind and filled them with energy, making them vibrate at deadly frequencies. The air exploded into flames around Auriga, without fuel or ignition, fed only by Warp energy. Auriga erupted into spontaneous combustion, consumed by fire.

Maru's elation surged, but then was snuffed out as his flames vanished. Auriga stood inviolate, his armour not even scratched as he smiled smugly. Maru gasped, "How?!"

Auriga grinned, "Space and time are fracturing, and the faultlines are mine to exploit. I merely shifted your flames one hour into the future, where the Serpen's Rex orbit has taken it far from here."

"You grasp powers you cannot possibly master!"

"You cannot comprehend the scope of my abilities, the Corposant has made me a god!"

Their argument was interrupted as new players entered the fray. From the maze ran Coluber, Toran and the Brother-Exemplars. They charged in as Coluber roared, "Halt traitor!"

"Stop him!" Maru roared, "He has gone mad!"

The party needed no further urging and leapt for the Librarian, weapons extending. Swords and lances gleamed as the Chapter Master, Captain and bodyguards struck for the cur. Auriga however gestured and spacetime rippled. The party needed no further urging and leapt for the Librarian. The party needed no further urging and leapt for the Librarian. The party needed no further urging and leapt for the Librarian.

Maru gasped as he saw his comrades relive the same moment over and over, doomed to repeat their actions like a bad pict-record. Auriga had spun time to his will and caught his foes in a looped second, pinning them in an instant they could not escape. They were not aware of their plight, no non-psyker could perceive the trap, let alone overcome it. Nobody could stop Auriga, nobody but Maru.

Auriga returned his attention to the Corposant and the Serpens Rex began to shake. The entire starfort groaned as it began to be sucked into the nothingness below the universe. Desperately Maru launched a telepathic spear at Aurgia's mind, only for the lance to unweave before it could strike. Auriga was reaching into the past and dispelling the attempt before it could touch him. His actions reaching into moments already played out, as well as seconds yet to be. The scope of the violation horrified Maru, no mortal man could toy with causality so lightly, the Librarius would consider a Marine insane to even suggest it. Auriga had truly lost his mind.

"You forget your teachings!" Maru barked, "Never summon power you cannot master!"

"Do not bleat your insipid rules at me," Auriga snarled, "I am in full control of this power!"

"You will kill your allies!"

"Ryneon?!" Auriga laughed, "A blind fool, so wrapped in chains of pride and vanity. He is nothing to me, a flawed soul, with a mind riddled with faults. It was simplicity itself to turn him to my cause, unlike you."

Maru scrabbled for any words that could halt this nightmare, "What of your own kin? If you return like this the Blood Ravens will never accept you back. Stained with the blood of your own Brothers, you will be cursed as a traitor."

Auriga frowned, "You have a point, but that hardly matters. With the power of Corposant I can take whatever I want. I shall depose Gabriel Angelos and take his place as lord of the Blood Ravens. The offices of Chief Librarian and Chapter Master shall be recombined, as they always should have been. I thank you for this insight, but it is past time you died."

Maru's withered bones flexed as true pain shot through him. He felt rusty nails scraping along his nerves, as the mummified organs in his chest began to crumble. Auriga was reaching into the cells of his being, flexing space and time at a microscopic level. Entropy was draining vitality from Maru's being, the inexorable grind of time tearing atoms from his body one by one. Dreadnought or not Maru was subject to time, a hundred trillion years from now he would be nothing but dust, and Auriga was drawing that future through the cracks in causality, making then, now.

Maru thrashed impotently as the end of all things was brought to bear within his bones. The fate of all matter, the crushing void that awaited the universe itself. Maru had no way to fight this, the fault-lines in space and time were Auriga's to control, and they ran through Maru's essence, as they did all things. He could see them, the riddled cracks in reality connecting Auriga to Maru, fractures in destiny that coursed through them both. Running straight into Auriga's soul.

Before he even knew it Maru was acting. He threw his mind into the fractures of destiny, subsuming his being in the yawning chasm. This was not his gift, normally he could not do such a thing, but Auriga had torn the fault-lines open and left them gaping. In attacking Maru directly he had unwittingly opened a connection between them, one the Chief Librarian could trace back to its origin point.

Maru's cells were dying one atom at a time but he threw his mind against the weight of Auriga's soul. He carried with him all his power, all his pain and all his anguish. Thousands of years of aching loneliness, the torment of isolation and the soul-wrenching indecision that had nearly undone him. A spearing lance of telepathic might that encompassed the sum total of his being. The attack didn't break Auriga's mind, it went deeper than that. Maru's attack slammed into the soul of Auriga and ripped it from his bones, tearing the Librarian's essence from his being entirely.

"Yarrrgh!" Auirag's soul screamed in silence.

"You are a dead man!" Maru's mind howled, "Let the warp consume you!"

"Save me!" Aurig wailed, "Save my soul!"

"Let the Daemons of Chaos have you," Maru snarled.

But Auriga's fading essence spat, "If I am doomed, I'm taking you with me!"

The last flickers of Auriga's soul grappled at Maru's mind, trying to drag him into the warp. Maru felt the great weight pull him to the edge of those haunted depths, hearing the chittering of Daemons as they gathered to feast. Nearly he toppled, nearly he was lost but he clung on to a lifeline. Maru's spirit had an anchor in the world of the living, his comrades, his Brothers. Coluber, Reddam, Shrios, even bloody Ferrac. Maru's Brothers in spirit, if not in blood. They had accepted him as one of their own, when all others would condemn him. Maru could not leave them, not while they needed him, and they did need him. Maru clung to that truth like a drowning man does a rope and it pulled him free of Auriga's grasp.

Maru's spirit broke free, leaving Auriga's soul to fall into the warp, where hungry Daemons devoured his essence. Maru's spirit retraced its steps, limping along the fault-lines in reality till he found his bones. He sank into his body with a shudder of relief, to find less than a second had passed. The Corposant still blazed, his comrades remained trapped and reality was disintegrating.

Maru reached out with his mind. He passed his thoughts through the standing corpse of Auriga, vacant of a soul, and sundered the connections to the Corposant. Power snapped off, the device lost all energy and reality slammed back into being. A moment's pause and then causality came crashing back with a vengeance. Auriga collapsed dead, Maru's comrades were freed and the Corposant sank back into inert slumber, it's potential hidden once more.

"What happened?!" Coluber gasped.

"I… beat him," Maru groaned wearily.

"That easily?"

"You wouldn't understand," Maru wheezed, "Rest assured, Auriga is dead."

Toran stepped forward, "I know little of the Librarius, but I sense a terrible fate was averted. I thank thee."

"Give no thanks to me, I was merely correcting my mistake."

"Nevertheless you defeat another Librarian, mind to mind, a feat to be respected."

Maru accepted the accolade but Coluber hissed, "I hate to break it to you, but this fight isn't over. Ryneon is still out there and he needs to die!"