Book Two: Corruption's End
Chapter 72: Choice
"In the end, choice is all that a man has." - Captain Titus, Ultramarines
Yang entered a cozy living space, one at odds with the rest of the Black LIbrary. It was extravagantly Imperial in style, flush with gilded skulls and stark, domineering walls. The only furniture present was a few black-leather couches, the upholstery studded with gold. She blinked.
"Wait... what?" After accepting Duulamor's invitation, she'd followed him out of the Aquarium back the way she came. How'd I end up here?
"Yang?" A voice called out. Chera's voice.
"Chera!" Yang said, spying the older woman sprawled out on one of the couches. "What are you doing here?"
"Duulamor," Chera grunted.
Yang huffed a short laugh. "Yeah, same here. What is this place? It's very... Imperial." Besides the skulls that adorned every piece of Imperial architecture, there was also the distinct lack of mind-bending sculptures or annoying Harlequins.
"It's my quarters back on the Scythe of Morning," Chera said, evidently displeased about the matter.
"Down to the plushy chairs?"
"To the fucking seam," Chera said. A pause. "I hate this place," she added. Yang collapsed onto a red-cushioned couch and put her legs up on an ottoman. Thankfully the softness was not an illusion.
"It's certainly something," she said, melting into the upholstery. She closed her eyes with a weary sigh. Her earlier words to Duulamor were not entirely untrue - it had been a long day.
"How's your friend?" Chera asked, her tone barbed and poisonous.
"Better check yourself," Yang said, pointing at the Lieutenant but not deigning to open her eyes. "She might be a heretic, but she's a good person. Always has been," Yang said. "Just because she wanted to bang an alien doesn't change that."
Yang could almost hear the steam pouring out of Chera's ears. It brought a smile to her face. The kasrkin's rage was impotent - she couldn't do anything about it, even if she tried.
The fireplace split in two, revealing a sparse stage. Dimly lit and floored in aged wood, Yang half-expected the Harlequins to emerge dressed in black turtlenecks and tasteless berets - as was the wont for the artsy scarlet curtain certainly didn't help.
"And now," a voice said, one that echoed, echoed, echoed. "A vision of the past, the present, and the future. A vision of hubris, a vision of vice and virtue. A vision of indulgent death, and a vision of breathless levity."
Chera huffed, kicking her feet up on her own ottoman and crossing her arms, clearly unimpressed. Yang shrugged and sat back. It made sense that the Harlequins would put on a play. Their garish outfits suggested a flair for the dramatic.
An eldar play… wish Amat was here to see this. She chuckled to herself. Or Weiss. Some snacks would be good too.
It began dramatically. A single Harlequin descended from the ceiling, her face and body painted an uncomfortable shade of silver. Her face was contorted into a mask of cruel laughter, and the song she sung matched it perfectly. Bombastic and haughty, it filled every inch of the living space, and anchored Yang to her seat. She had no idea what the words were, but she knew what they meant - the silvered Harlequin was tragedy incarnate, come to reap the souls of her enemies.
Yang was transfixed.
Around the silver-painted eldar, dancers in elegant, beauteous costumes fell, succumbing before her encroachment. Each time one fell, the song changed, its tone or timbre shifting. They added their own voices to the song, the words mixing and clashing yet adding and surrounding. Yang had never heard anything like this before. And judging by the look on Chera's face, she hadn't either.
They sang of great regret, of paths not taken, a lament for themselves and for each other. They sang of creation and destruction, of great doom and terrible salvation.
When the final dancer lay flat, the room was engulfed in darkness. A new host of dancers took center stage, their clothes shifting colors with each step. The way they moved was mind-boggling. They were flexible beyond reason, their bones replaced with liquid.
Each one wore a gentle smile, a happy smile.
After them came plainclothed Harlequins, following the ones that came before. They danced in a circle around them, offering up songs to the mighty and the beautiful and the generous. In response, the resplendently-clad Harlequins bestowed gifts and jewels and songs of their own.
They were gods, and their lyrics spoke of great power and grave warnings.
The plain-clothed Harlequins laughed and delighted at their gifts, dancing away from the gods with gentle happy smiles. Their dancing was fluid and graceful, even more so than that of the Howling Banshees. A set of drums began an even, steady beat, one that lifted the eldars' voices even higher.
Their smiles widened.
Their dancing quickened.
Faster and faster they sped around the living space. Yang could barely track their movements. Nausea set in. The gods were invisible now, their voices suffocated under the clash of footsteps, their brilliant costumes overtaken by the swirling patterns that coated their former followers.
Their smiles spread even further until they opened their mouths, revealing row after row of sharpened teeth.
Yang wanted to look away. She couldn't.
Faster they danced, a pace that the drums matched then surpassed. The voices blended together, a ceaseless discharge of pointless noise and enraged staccato punches, a terrible chaotic chant that drove itself into Yang's skull.
Suddenly, a figure appeared, their clothes like cosmic sable, their grey-stone mask horned and stilted. A figure of passion, a figure of ultimate sin, a vision of terrible doom. Its motions were stiff and jerking, every twitch emblematic of the hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
And Yang knew it was She-Who-Thirsts, the Prince of Pleasure, the end of all eldar. And she feared this creature.
The drums died, the song devolved into screams, and death reigned triumphant. Nearly all of the eldar perished, throwing up their hands as they sunk to the floor. Their voices stopped abruptly, cut off before they could finish screaming.
Yang watched in fascination. In horror.
The actor portraying She-Who-Thirsts reveled in it all, drinking in the play-acted misery that surrounded them. It spun again and again and again, until all movement had stopped.
Laughter filled the stage. It was not hearty nor happy - it was the maddened laugh of a lunatic, and it chased away She-Who-Thirsts.
For several minutes - or perhaps it was hours, Yang couldn't tell how much time passed - the actors simply lay about in near complete blackness. Then, the actors melted away, slithering into the shadows as a new light appeared. By the way it moved, Yang knew a dancer held it. Just before the light-bearer appeared, however, it was extinguished.
And the show was over.
Yang let loose a breath she didn't know she'd been holding, sinking back into her couch. At some point during the performance, she'd leaned forwards. Her knee bounced and rattled against the floor, hammering her boot against the carpeting.
A single thought entered her mind - What the fuck was that?
But she knew. It was a warning, a cautionary tale, the Fall of the Eldar. Realizations crashed into her one after another. The soulstones... the Dark Eldar, Garnet's fear of She-Who-Thirsts, Pyrrha's gambit to save her family, her talk of universes.
Chera threw up, spattering her armored boots in vomit. She wiped at her lips with a shaking hand.
"'Light entertainment' my ass." The Lieutenant managed.
Yang thought it was funny, but she couldn't summon a laugh. Duulamor laughed for her, a cackle that filled the living space. Only it wasn't the quarters aboard the Scythe of Morning - it was an empty, featureless chamber, devoid of warmth or inhabitants. Yang and Chera sat alone on wraithbone stools.
There wasn't anything to say. Instead, the two women gathered their things and left, their minds full of colors and songs and questions.
Questions. Answers.
Amat had many of the former, none of the latter. He watched the scene play through again, watched his mother play with the child. He watched it again. The child was him. He knew that, knew it as one knows how to calculate drop and drag. Reactively. Instinctively.
But he could not accept it. How such footage came to be, how it arrived here, who brought it - all questions that he could not answer. Therefore, as Palla told him, he must reject what he saw, the impossibility of it.
But he could not do that either.
Duulamor had extended an offer. To learn. To discover who he was, who his mother was. Why the after-image of her persisted and nothing else. An offer to stay. It would mean abandoning his duty, his Lady. Abandoning Yang.
He would never take the offer. He knew that. But he still wanted to. An agonizing duality. Amat watched the footage play once more. He had memorized it after the first loop, but he wanted to watch it again.
The video played one last time before he turned on his heel and departed through a wraithbone arch. He considered what he would have done had he been Amat of four years ago, the Assassin Exemplar.
He could see it so clearly.
Duulamor would die first, an exitus round through the chest. Center mass. Then came the six Harlequins that stalked the assassin, the ones that believed themselves invisible. First the three that danced between the rafters - the lasgun would be enough for them. Melt their masks into wax. Three shots, no more, no less.
Then came the two that flanked him from afar, the ones that hid behind ten rows of towering bookshelves. Amat's pistol would be enough to penetrate the books and the Harlequins behind it. The final one, the one that lay ahead in the third hallway on the right - he would die last, the wall he hid behind exploding under the force of an exitus round. And he would burst next. It would take no more than a second and a half. Two if he got sloppy.
But he was not the Assassin Exemplar of four years ago. He was Amat now.
His watchers did not move, waiting for him to continue his march to the Emperor knew where. Amat obliged them. They would live today, for he knew the act of an Assassin Exemplar to be foolish. A shortsighted and reactionary lash when confronted with the unfamiliar, no clear mission to guide him.
Amat put one foot in front of another, a headache sitting on the edge of his perception. A sensation he hadn't felt in a long time. The Harlequins tittered as they watched him march along, believing themselves beyond his perception.
I suppose it's time to find Yang again.
He wanted to speak with her, be near her. That usually cleared his head, made him feel better. But she was with Pyrrha now. Amat sighed, a sound that died halfway through its making. Was this the first time he'd sighed, or the first time he noticed it?
Shaking the thought away, he pressed onwards. He didn't know where he was going, but somehow he knew it wouldn't matter. He would speak with Yang later. Right now she was catching up with an old friend.
A heretic, the Assassin Exemplar whispered.
"No," Amat said to no one but himself. He knew Pyrrha. She was a Champion, a powerful Huntress…
A mother.
Metallic clacking filled the halls of the Black Library as he checked the chamber of his Exitus rifle. One round, shield-breaker.
He was surrounded by targets, but he wouldn't fire it. Not until he absolutely had to. Amat didn't even want to fire it. Hour after hour spent observing the eldar aboard the Void-Whisper revealed an uncomfortable truth - they were xenos, yes. But also… not. They had to be partially human, if the Tou'Her were any indication.
They were nothing like what the Holiest Temple taught. The Vindicare saw eldar as a different type of a target, a set of slightly-adjusted vital organs, weak points, a creature that moved differently from a human, quicker, less viscous.
But that was not all they are.
I'm a heretic, he realized, the thought stopping him in his tracks. No, no that's not right. The Emperor is my God, my Guiding Light, and I am his instrument.
Eldar were far a far more complex question than he could have ever anticipated.
The wall on his right became a mirror. He approached it, watching himself get nearer. He ran a hand across his jaw, stubble scrape against his fingers. Amat didn't remember taking off his spy mask. He ran a hand along the fur collar of his bomber's jacket. A gift from Yang.
Yang.
Everything revolved around Yang. His Lady's change in temperament, the headaches. Remnant. A new world, a new universe, a place unlike any other. He had been thrust into the middle of something he never could have imagined. Into something that he did not belong.
Amat didn't want to see his mother, to know her epitaphium. That only made things more difficult. He had only ever wanted to serve the Emperor and his Temple.
He blinked, and saw the reflection upon the mirror was not his own. It was Yang, but as a child, running barefoot across a grassy knoll. She giggled and spun, twirling her floral-print sundress. An elegant city stood behind her, one that reached for the heavens itself. When she turned to face him, he saw that her eyes matched his own.
Amat blinked again, and his reflection returned.
Now his head ached once more. His fingers combed through his hair, and he marched away from the mirror, as far away as he could get.
I am not Yang. I am Amat.
A temporary name, the Assassin Exemplar said. Palla said. Why do you care so much about it?
Because I'm Amat now, he wanted to shout. I'm not who I was when I left the Temple. I'm not an Interloper like Yang or Weiss or Pyrrha. I'm…
"Something else," he said, his eyes watering from pain. But was it pain? "Amat. I'm Amat."
"That you are," Caelus said, appearing before him. Amat nearly gunned down the old eldar where he stood. How did I not sense him? Am I that absorbed in my own thoughts?
Caelus smiled warmly. His human hair lent him an uncanny, discomforting air. Clad in robes of silky black and pale-moon white, he seemed perfectly at home at the Black Library. Serene.
"I apologize," Amat said, shouldering his rifle. "I've…" he trailed off. Couldn't find the words. "I ran into Duulamor," he said.
"I see," Caelus said, before lighting a hand on the assassin's shoulder. His touch was paternal and gentle - nonthreatening and slow. Amat forced himself to remember that the eldar was older than nearly every Space Marine in service to the Imperium. "The Black Library is a wondrous place, my friend. But 'wondrous' does not mean it cannot be frightening or formidable."
"I'm not your friend," Amat said, roiling at the eldar's touch, a combination of wrongness and a spike of doubt about the wrongness therein.
"But you are friends with Yang, no?" Caelus asked. "And any friend of Yang Xiao Long is a friend to the Tou'Her."
"What do you want?" Amat asked. Caelus raised his hands defensively, still smiling.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I did not mean to agitate you. I realize this journey must not be an easy thing for a Vindicare Assassin to process."
He was not wrong. "Things were easier when my mind was blank," Amat said instead.
"There are many eldar that would agree with you," Caelus said, with a huffing laugh. A black-clad arm stretched outwards, guiding him along. "Though they will never admit it quite so readily. Why don't you follow me? We have quarters waiting for you during your stay at the Black Library."
"Okay," Amat said, a word he picked up from Yang. He fell into step with the older eldar, keeping his eye on him. Caelus carried himself with an energy that the eldar on the Void-Whisper did not possess. He was graceful, sure, but he walked with long, striding steps, ones that declared to all who watched that their opinions of him were less than dirt - yet his genial smile and welcoming body language bore no sneering edge.
Alien, yet not. Arrogant, yet not.
Who is he?
"I suppose you are wondering about Pyrrha," Caelus said, as casually as a Woadian would discuss the weather. "About why she decided to stay with me… a xenos." He chuckled, a light and cheery noise. "No doubt your Imperial blood is boiling at mere the sight of me," he added.
"Yes," Amat said. "No," he said. A few years ago he would have known his answer. "Not even the sight of your children elicit the correct reaction." He added.
"I see," Caelus said, before another laugh escaped him. "Doubt me all you wilI, but I have always held a degree of respect for Imperial citizens."
Amat's eyes narrowed. It was almost certainly a lie. But he knew a liar's face, and Caelus did not wear one. His face was simply… eldar.
"Yes, they do not possess the brute strength of the orks or the grace and psychic mastery of the eldar, yet they face this galaxy down regardless, defiant and proud to the last."
"I see that having a human wife has humbled you," Amat said. A joke. One to test the waters, prod at Caelus' meaning. The eldar laughed.
"Quite so!" Caelus said. "Though she's humbled many of Il-Kaithe alongside me. I urge you not to think ill of her, no matter what sins she has accrued in the eyes of the Emperor."
"She's not from the Imperium," Amat admitted. "Not like Yang."
"Yang, Yang, Yang," Caelus muttered, clicking his tongue. "Now she's an interesting human."
"I agree," Amat said. "She cares about the Imperium. Maybe not the institution, but the people inside it. She doesn't understand that the latter cannot survive without the former. Comes from living on Remnant, I think."
Caelus nodded. "Pyrrha is much the same way."
They walked the halls of the Black Library, two men who had tasted the sight of another universe, but had never seen it for themselves. A data stream flickered past, pink and yellow. To the assassin, its passing sounded like a child's laugh.
"Yang is naive," Amat admitted. "Remnant was one planet. The Imperium is millions."
"And it faces things that make the grimm pale in comparison. Yet she soldiers on regardless. As does Weiss. As do you."
"Me?" Amat asked. "I'm no one. An assassin." A Vindicare. "My Lady's Ace in the Hole." Yang's friend.
"Therein lies the secret, and the answer to Duulamor's question," Caelus said.
Amat stopped. "You know of what Duulamor sought?"
Caelus grinned wide and shook his head. "If I saw into that Harlequin's mind, I fear I would go mad. I only know that he enjoys tormenting newcomers with offers and chastisements. Do you mind if I ask what he offered you?"
Amat weighed his options in his mind. Caelus had spent an unknown number of years in the Black Library. Did he side with the Harlequins? Was Duulamor using the eldar patriarch as some method of torture?
His instincts said no - something he had long ago learned to trust. Something that led him to clamber off that burning apartment complex in Shao-la all those months ago.
"He offered to let me stay here. At the Black Library."
Caelus let out a low whistle. A habit he picked up from Pyrrha probably. "May I ask why?" He asked.
"A chance to…" Amat fumbled again. "A chance to find out who I am. Who I was before I was Vindicare. The Black Library is my only chance at knowing. I will not accept. I cannot."
"You want to though," Caelus said. His brusque words annoyed Amat, but he could not deny their accuracy. "But I do not think that you will listen to what I have to say on the matter. I am a xenos after all," he said with a cheery grin. "But I will say is this - a man's past means nothing to him, should he forego its binds. Only he can decide for himself what it is worth." He chuckled. "Tradition decreed I act a certain way, uphold the Tou'Her according to how its ancestral members wanted. Ancient strings meant for a whole family, but I was alone. Awfully easy for a puppet to get tangled up in all that."
"So you discarded them?"
"They were bullshit," Caelus said simply. "Useless. I cut them out, and built something new. Only time will tell if it is better."
Amat blinked. The eldar spoke the truth - or, at least, a version of it. The assassin made a fist, curled it and uncurled it, watched the synskin obey his every whim. If he wanted to, he could strip off his holy wargear and never don it again. He could stay in the Black Library for as long as he wished, make his home amidst the limitless knowledge.
He knew he would never leave the Imperium, but he knew it was his choice, and no one else's. He understood Weiss' drive to fix what was crumbling. He knew why Yang put up with Imperial service. He knew why he didn't need to see his mother again.
He smiled.
A/N: Hey everyone, I'm back! I apologize for yet another hiatus, but I couldn't resist celebrating the premiere of Volume 5! Things have been pretty busy in real life, so I haven't had that much time to write. That being said, I hope you enjoyed! Oh, and astute 40k fans will notice that the play the Harlequins did is not a 100% recreation of how it's shown in canon. This is for two reasons:
I wrote the sequence before I knew it was depicted in detail, and I like my version better
If you already knew what it was supposed to be like, recreating it 1:1 would be boring to read.
See you next time for the final chapter of the Black Library arc, and the end of AWoBE's "intermission". From then on out, it's… well… you'll see.