Chapter 11.
The Cronium Gulf.
Mephiston was filled with revulsion. He had faced heretics and Chaos worshippers countless times, but this was the greatest sacrilege: the glorious form of a Space Marine perverted by Chaos.
He cursed and fired, his hand jolting as the pistol spat plasma into the bristling ranks. Behind him Rhacelus, Mariah and Antros howled rushing to join him, their pistols barking.
The traitors marched calmly into the plasma storm. As one, they raised their guns and returned fire, whipping up a tornado of splintered stone the noise was deafening.
The first Traitor Marine stumbled and dropped to one knee, still firing as his armour imploded and blood jetted from his back. Even as his helmet shattered, he kept up a stream of fire, sending shots uselessly up at the sky as he fell back, kicked across the floor by the force of the rounds slamming into him.
Mephiston leapt over the seats, channelling aether-fire into the blade of his sword. Vitarus flashed in his grip, eager for blood, and by the time he reached the stage Mephiston was sprinting.
A snarling face rushed out of the darkness towards him. For a second, Mephiston thought it was a grotesque helmet, but the bull-like features were the Space Marine's face.
Mephiston fired repeatedly, incinerating one side of the traitor's head, but the warrior barrelled into him as though nothing had happened, laughing as he drove Mephiston back the way he had come. The sheer weight of him was enough to stagger Mephiston. He was as tall as Mephiston but even broader and his war plate was a canker of tusk-like spurs.
Mephiston recited a litany of banishment and brought Vitarus round in a backhanded slash, slicing through the traitor's gorget, sending his head clanging across the stage.
Mephiston backed away in a shower of blood, then raise his sword as another traitor charged towards him with a roaring chainsword. The weapon was forged to resemble a leering dragon and the heretic grinned as he swung it, two-handed, at Mephiston's head. Mephiston parried and kicked, sending him spawling through the scrum.
It was a brutal, messy fight. Blood Angels and traitor Marines whirled back and forth across the stage, fighting with blade, chains, and fists.
Mephiston's mind raced. He had been tricked. None of his auguries mentioned these traitors. How could they have ambushed his so easily?
Vitarus left trails as he killed, cutting through corrupted battleplate and mutant skulls. The sounds of fighting changed from gunfire to grinding metal, grunts, and curses, leaving the rumbling engine noise to rise up and dominate the scene.
Mariah fought through the carnage, past bolter-scarred bulkheads and down a companion way towards a pair of blast doors. She could see in the next chamber, more Blood Angels battling with the traitors on a burning observation deck, their armoured forms silhouetted by the flames.
Mariah hesitated and shook her head companionways? Observation decks? What was this? She was on a xenos ruin, not a battleship.
Pain erupted in the side of her chest and she fell sideways, crashing through a section of wall and landing, gasping, and covered in rubble, at the back of the stage.
A traitor Marine loomed over her, a growling chainaxe in his fists and his brutal face framed by shards of helmet. His face bore no signs of mutations but his eyes were blank with kill fever, like the eyes of a feeding shark.
"For Horus!" He bellowed, rolling back on his heels, and swinging the chainaxe at Mariah's face.
Mephiston Brought Vitarus across just in time. The axe's teeth rattled uselessly against the sacred blade, scattering sparks and smoke. The heretic tried to wrench the weapon free but Mephiston channelled more power through Vitarus, locking the chainaxe in place.
The traitor roared, leaning back, trying again to free his weapon, but he only succeeded in hauling Mephiston over Mariah. Mephiston leant close, glaring into the warrior's face as he increased the flux of power, channelling fire through his veins.
The heretic was about to cry another oath when he frowned, confused, looking down at his armour. Smoke poured from the seams, filling the air with the smell of charred meat. He tried one last time to free his weapon, then dropped to his knees, convulsing as his blood boiled, cooking his hearts.
Mephiston unlocked the blades, grabbed Mariah, and stepped back letting the traitor crash to the floor.
Another traitor lunged at them but Mephiston and Mariah side stepped the blow, Mephiston gripped Vitarus and Mariah gripped Vitarni with both hands and they both rammed their swords into the traitor's back, ripping through the battleplate and hurling the Chaos Marine into the crowd of struggling figures.
Claxons rang out and both Mephiston and Mariah raced towards the blast doors they had spotted earlier. They burst on to the observation deck and teetered to a halt. There was a gaping hole in the deck plating that looked down over a fifty-foot drop crowded with spitting pipes and fumes. They both summoned shadow winds and dived across the gap, raising Vitarus and Vitarni as they dropped down into the line of heretics waiting on the other side and hacking through them, scattering limbs and armour as Vitarus and Vitarni blazed with the force of their anger. Everywhere he looked the green of the XVI Legion clashed with the Crimson of the IX. The Vengeful Spirit's hull had been breached in countless places and his sons were driving back Horus' traitors with a storm of chainswords and bolter-fire.
"For the Emperor!" he roared, raising up over the scrum, his golden armour flashing, immune to the gore and filth that covered all the other warriors on the observation deck.
"Mephiston!" cried a familiar voice and he looked back to see Mariah striding towards him, cutting a path through the traitors, lights flashing across the lenses of her helmet. Her words were unusually hoarse. "I'm falling!"
Mephiston staggered back across the stage. "So am I," he muttered dealing out sword strikes as the dreadful truth jolted through him. For a moment, he had believed he was Sanguinius. Just as he had all those long years ago, in the ruins of Hades Hive. "No!" he gasped. It could not be possible. He was cured. Cured of the curse, cured of the madness. How could he be falling into the past?
He shoved his was back to Mariah and the two Librarians fought side by side, swinging their force swords in perfect unison, weaving a lethal web.
"I was there," said Mariah, glancing briefly at Mephiston. "I was my father. I was on the command deck." Her tone was bleak. "I am lost."
"No!" cried Mephiston. He hacked savagely at the traitors, cutting through their massive chests, and drenching the stage in blood. The thought of Mariah falling to madness again was somehow more dreadful than the thought that he was damned. "It cannot be!"
He looked around. Squad Turiossa was all around them, hacking furiously. Then he looked at Mariah who was hunched over holding her head.
+Mariah,+ thought Mephiston.
+Yes, Lord Mephiston.+ Mephiston could hear Mariah's pain. +I saw a vision. But it was… It cannot be…+
Mephiston shook his head. How had the Emphemeris hidden this from him? How had he failed to see? If he was destined to end here, on a drifting ruin, defeated by his own lunacy, surly he would have seen it?
Squad Turiossa were fighting with unnatural savagery, howling unfamiliar battle cries, spitting phrases not uttered since the dawn of the Imperium. They were losing themselves to the curse. They pictured themselves as Primarchs, racing to save the Emperor of Mankind, doomed to relive Sanguinius' death.
Mephiston threw his head back and howled a curse. How could he and Mariah have endured so much, achieved so much, only to die here, needlessly, and uselessly on a forgotten slab of ruins?
As his rage grew, the ruins fell away and he saw only Horus' ship, the Vengeful Spirit. The ship that had ruined an empire and replaced it with the desperate, raptured mess that as the Imperium. He knew, now, that it was madness, but that only fuelled his fury. The warp boiled in him, filling his veins, and knifing through his eyes, ripping through the ship, and igniting the battle like oil on flames. Warriors and walls exploded and joined together in columns of crimson heat. All he could do was burn and destroy. The galaxy had betrayed him. This was not meant to be his and Mariah's fate. The Maelstrom in his head burned white, obliterating everything.
+Calistarius!+
The reminder of his former name dragged Mephiston back to the stage.
Mariah was still at his side, but almost everyone else had been hurled back into the rows of stone seats. Traitors and Blood Angels were lying in smouldering heaps, covered in rubble and wisps of blue flame. Most were trying to scramble clear but some, including Blood Angels had been rent apart, their innards visible, charred and twisted in the ruins of their ceremite armour.
Mariah pointed her pistol at Mephiston +Fight it! As you did before. I am lost, but you must not be. Think of the consequences! You are too powerful!+
Mephiston shook his head, dazed. It was true he had escaped it before, but he had no idea how. Sanguinius was behind it, he was sure. He could still recall the dazzling vision that led him through the madness. But how could he escape madness twice? He could feel the delusion straining to break through reality – the Vengeful spirit that had always signified the death for all of his chapter.
He felt a point of cold logic trying to break through the din and passion. He grasped at it, trying to give it air. A word. Something he had just said to himself. Something significant. Hallucination.
"Hallucination?" he muttered, staggering away through the dust and whirling embers, trying to understand why that should be significant. Of course, this was a hallucination. His Brothers and Fiancée were not truly fighting in the wars of the Horus Heresy. They had not really passed back through the centuries and taken on the god-like form of their gene-sire or father. Then a second truth hit him. The Blood Angels flaw was a gene curse – a false vision, a factor of their souls. Not a simple hallucination. A hallucination was more akin to the tricks he had just witnessed outside the Blood Oath – the tricks of the Aeldari.
"The Xenos!" he cried, looking triumphantly back at Mariah.
Mariah was on her need in the rubble, her pistol laying next to her. As the traitors stumbled through the ruined stage, dazed by Mephiston's psychic blast. Mariah was clawing at her helmet and howling. She managed to look up at Mephiston's cry but showed no sign of understanding.
Mephiston could not rely on his mind so he relied on his battle-plate. He adjusted the auto-senses with a thought and runes scrolled across the retinal display, detailing every aspect of his surroundings. He read at a furious rate, processing information faster than the suit's in-built cogitators could display it.
He magnified a cluster of runes, reconfiguring the data screed with a blink of his eyes, revealing a detailed breakdown of the atmosphere's mass and composition. In amongst the cocktail of gases there was a chemical he recognised, recalling it from his studies In the Librarium. In a fraction of a second, he cast his mind back to Baal and summoned a memory of treatises on Aeldari hallucinogens. "Psychochemical weapons," he muttered, picturing the data scroll in absolute clarity.
"Adjust your respirators!" he cried into the vox. "Atropa binaria! Masked as water vapour! Filter it out."
As he gave the order he adjusted his suit's environmental systems for a dreadful moment, nothing happened. If anything, the battle for the Vengeful Spirit seemed to grow more vivid. But then the gloom lifted. It was like watching a sunrise. Harsh light flooded the ruins, washing away the mirage of battle-ravaged corridors and bulkheads. Mephiston climbed onto a pile of rubble to survey the scene with un-tainted eyes. What he had taken for lumbering, heavily armoured Chaos Marines were actually lithe, nimble xenos leaping through the battle with incredible agility. They were absurdly colourful like motley-coated jesters in leering, theatrical masks. They seemed to be acting out a performance. Every time they fired a gun or flicked a blade, they pirouetted away with a dramatic flourish, calling out lines of doggered, their voices lifting and full of mirth. As they jumped and rolled, Mephiston found it hard to see them clearly. Their coats trailed prismatic petals as though shredding pieces of confetti. They were shrouded in a rainbow that banked and weaves as they danced.
The Blood Angels were already starting to recover, looking around at the xenos with surprise and losing the manic fury of their earlier attacks, Mephiston felt a rush of relief as his suspicions were proved correct. The hallucinations were chemically induced.
As the Blood Angels fought with more precision and control, the xenos grew more frenzied, hurling explosive devices that filled the ruins with colour. But not that the Blood Angels understood what they were facing, they easily filtered out the hallucinogens with the re-breathers in their mouth grills.
Brother-Lieutenant Turiossa regrouped his squad. They backed across the stage, raised their bolt rifles, dropped to one knee, and fired on the Aeldari with breathtaking precision.
The xenos flipped and spun again, but they were now dancing to the rhythm of bolt rounds. Robbed of their power to create delusions, the lightly armoured xenos had no chance. It was a brutally efficient massacre. In just a few seconds the Blood Angels covered the stage with a heap of twisted, smoke-shrouded corpses.
Mephiston nodded in satisfaction. Mariah, Rhacelus and Antros had recovered and crossed the stage towards him, picking their way through the carnage and cleaning blood from their weapons. Rhacelus stared at Mephiston unsure what to say.
Mephiston shook his head. "You might never have to face that trial for real, brother. Cast it from your mind."
"We all face it eventually." Rhacelus' voice was brittle and loud.
He grabbed Rhacelus' shoulder. "Why do you think Mariah and I are doing all of this?" He spoke quietly, so that only the three librarians could here.
"To prevent the disaster your Emphemeris predicted," replied Antros.
"To stop those Tzeentchian cults you saw on Sabassus."
Mephiston and Mariah looked at him in silence.
Antros shook his head. "Isn't that right? You mean to halt them before they create the entropy you showed us on Baal."
"Commander Dante trust me and Mariah," replied Mephiston. "I could have convinced him the situation in the Prospero System is as important as the defence of the Baal System. I could have convinced him to re-deploy some of his forces." He looked at the small group of Blood Angels on the stage silencing the few xenos who had survived their onslaught. "But I chose not to. We have come alone."
"For speed," said Antros.
"Because it is important that me and Mariah are the saviours of this chapter. We must prove that by escaping our curse we have come to embody all that we are capable of."
"Have you escaped the curse?" Asked Rhacelus, looking closely at them through the lenses of his helmet.
"We have harnessed it. I know what you have seen in the past, Rhacelus, but we are changes. Reborn in ways that we cannot even explain to you. But you must trust-"
Gunshots rang out as a figure bolted from the back of the stage, sprinting off into the ruins. Stonework collapsed under the barrage, but the only sign of the xenos was a quickly fading blur of colour.
"After him!" cried Mephiston, leaping from the rubble and pursuing the vanishing shape.