I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.
Achillus' fall to Chaos had been swift and traumatic, but the preparations for it had taken decades, and its root causes stretched back even longer. Ever since the Great Crusade, when it had been freed from the cruel rule of a bloodline of kings and queens that had descended into madness a dozen generations before their fall, the world had been ruled by a noble class.
These worthies were descended from the officers of the Imperial Army who had brought Achillus to compliance, having then been granted the right to remain on the world and help ensure its integration into the greater Imperium. Such things had been common back then – a way to reward the hosts of the Imperial Army while helping ensure that newly conquered worlds would be kept peaceful.
The families had always been proud of that heritage, and had endeavoured to keep their bloodlines pure rather than mingle with the subjugated local population, as the rest of the occupying regiments had. They had lorded over their lesser, secure in the knowledge that they held the God-Emperor's favor and blessing. They had been no worse rulers than those found in the rest of the Imperium – if truth be told, their very pride in the holiness of their office actually kept them a little less corrupt and cruel than most, though that was a very relative term. Under their leadership, Achillus had grown to become a prosperous hive-world of the Azarok Sector.
Then the Orks had come. In the thirty-second millennium, the Great Beast had risen, and the green tide had swept through the galaxy, leaving naught but desolation in its wake. The skies of Achillus had been filled with the baleful grin of an Ork attack moon. The impossibly massive weapon had torn through the planet's orbital defenses and the system's defense fleet, while the xenos hunted human prey across the entire world.
The noble families' vaunted lineage had done nothing to protect them, and the Orks had broken into their Spires and made sport of the House heads, torturing them and eating them alive over a period of days. Entire families had gone extinct, and the rest had been decimated. They would all have fallen, had the Orks not been called away from Achillus by the promise of a greater battle, against a true foe : the Space Marine Chapter whose surviving members would, in the aftermath of the War, become the core of the Heirs of Sanguinius.
The survivors had crawled out of hiding and given thanks to the God-Emperor for their deliverance, but the hideous, shameful fear of those dark days had marked them deeply. The Houses had rebuilt, repopulated, and rewritten the past to maintain their hold onto Achillus' population, but they had never forgotten the truth. Never forgotten their weakness, or that the Emperor had done nothing to save their kindred from the xenos invaders.
For many years, they tried to salve their pride, collecting Ork bones and other tokens in an attempt to exorcise their terror. In the aftermath of the War of the Beast, there were plenty of trophies to purchase, and the families had bankrolled expeditions into greenskin territory to find more. Yet the survivors of the purge had never taken part in these expeditions themselves, nor had they allowed any of their descendants to. They had remained in their rebuilt gilded Spires, trying to drown their nightmares in extravagant luxury and decadent parties, surrounded by proofs of their terrors' mortality. Years turned to decades, which turned to centuries, and still the fears of Achillus' House leaders would not go away. Noblemen still woke in the middle of the night shivering with dread.
That was when the former Apothecary of the Seventeenth Legion simply known as the Unfettered had made his move. At the command of his lord Arken, he had established contact with several Houses. Using the network of agents the Lords of Ash and Shadows had seeded throughout Azarok, he had exchanged letters with the Houses' leaders, posing as a fellow noble from another world that had also suffered from the Orks' barbarity. He offered them strength, a way to no longer need to rely on the might of others to protect them – a way to become mightier than any Ork, any xenos.
The Unfettered was cautious, and used all the persuasiveness of his gene-line, manipulating people he had never met into doing what he wanted. With the help of the sorcerous Coven, his words were laced with subliminal messages, while the very material of the letters contained subtle mind-altering substances. Soon, a conspiracy had formed, a cabal of nobles pursuing the power the Unfettered promised. A few basic rituals and alchemical formulas showed them the truth of their mysterious contact's offer, and by the time they learned of his true nature, they revelled in their power too much to care. They wilfully threw away their humanity in the name of power, isolating and discreetly eliminating those among them who would not follow their leaders into damnation.
All of them had been able to hide their true nature, for though they had already betrayed the Golden Throne, they were still unwilling to risk all that they had by openly defying the Imperium's rule. That changed when the Inquisition wiped out House Delande. The nobles did not know that Inquisitor Irwin's discovery had been orchestrated : all they saw was a bleak reminder of what would happen to them if the truth ever came to light. And so, when the call came, when the Forsaken Sons broke the might of the Sector at Silberstadt and the Unfettered himself came to Achillus, they threw off their disguises and pretence of allegiance to Terra.
With the help of the gangs they had made into allies by sharing the Unfettered's gifts with their leaders, they overthrew the Governor, slaughtered the Arbites and Administratum representatives, and murdered every priest of the Imperial Creed within their burning churches. Those families who hadn't been part of the conspiracy had been destroyed, their ancestral homes burned and despoiled amidst acts of cruelty that made the coming of the Orks look downright pleasant. Within a few days of horror and death the likes of which hadn't been seen on Achillus since the War of the Beast, the entire planet had fallen – and the conspiracy had turned against itself soon after.
Dominion over Achillus had been promised to the inhuman Houses, and the Unfettered had no interest in ruling the world anyway. With the Imperium's presence reduced to a handful of survivors hiding from their hunters, the monsters believed they had nothing left to fear, and were now battling for control of the world. Factions had formed, uneasy alliances binding noble lines, crime syndicates, and doomsday cults whose members hoped to prove their worth and undergo the same unholy transfiguration as their masters. Cities were in the grip of one of these groups or still contested, warbands battling in the streets while civilians covered in their homes. Some fought for power, for plunder, for position – others still because they had enjoyed the fighting, and sought to prove themselves worthy of joining the great army of the Forsaken Sons when they came.
For the planet's industry still turned, albeit a lot more slowly, and was being re-purposed to feed the Forsaken Sons' warmachines – there weren't many markets still open to the world's new rulers, after all. The Truthful Gate, ship of the Unfettered, had brought machines that could turn living humans into cultures of biological slop that the masses could use as sustenance – a brown goo that tasted only slightly worse than their usual fare under Imperial rule.
The mining operations across the rest of the system also continued, the miners overseen by new, inhuman masters. The fruit of their labor was brought to Achillus aboard enormous, bloated freighters that discharged their cargo and took great care to stay away from the Truthful Gate as it orbited the planet. For now, the production of the factories was being stockpiled, to be traded when the Forsaken Sons came looking for supplies. No one knew when that would happen – if the Unfettered and his small group of Chaos Marines knew, they weren't talking. And so life continued on Achillus, full of fear and intrigue.
Months had passed since the coming of Chaos, and, in a dark testament to the resilience and adaptability of the human spirit, the people of Achillus were slowly growing used to their new situation. They had spent their entire lives under the thrall of the Houses, whose members had been so distant and lives so different they might as well have belonged to another species already.
Sure, now the nobles sometimes actually ate them alive, but day-to-day life wasn't so different, safe for the destruction of every church of the Imperial Creed and the interdiction of worshiping the Emperor under pain of slow, agonizing death. The screams of the priests had been broadcast for several weeks after the uprising, which had been enough to douse the faith of most people. Those who still clung to the cult of the God-Emperor did so in secret, behind closed doors, every prayer whispered in fear that it would be their last. The new lords of Achillus, who had spent years hiding their new allegiances, found this reversal of fortune pleasing. Whenever such believers were unmasked, their fates were increasingly crueller than those of the last batch.
After several months, the believers were becoming harder and harder to discover, but that didn't discourage some of the Houses to continue their hunt. Even the damned needed hobbies, after all. And there were still some agents of the Inquisition hiding on the planet, sending their reports off-world through traumatized astropaths rescued from their towers in the final hours before the planet's downfall. They hid within the ruins and abandoned sections of the hives, and led small raids against the Houses, but never achieved anything more than annoy them – and provide prey to distract them. The scions of the House pursued the remnants of the Ordos with even greater focus than the worshippers of the False Emperor, driven by the memories of House Delande's fate. For, despite all the power they had gained, the nobles of Achillus were still ruled by their fears.
In the place of the Ecclesiarchy, all manners of Chaos cults were flourishing, the seed of corruption taking root easily within the souls of a terrified and traumatized population. The same promises that had brought the Houses to Ruin now wormed their way into the hearts of their subjects – they too could be mighty, they too could be predators rather than prey, if they would but pay the price. Sinister congregations gathered in dark temples, offering vile prayers and bloody sacrifices to the Ruinous Powers, led on by wild-eyed demagogues and Warp-crazed seers. With every passing day, the cults grew stronger, and Achillus' damnation became a little more complete.
Without the light of faith and rigid, unquestioning obedience to the God-Emperor to keep them at bay, flocks of daemons pressed on the other side of the veil separating reality from the Warp, whispering tempting lies and dark truths into the souls of those touched by the Empyrean. Many had already crossed over, possessing hosts offered to them by the cults – but none had been able to remain material for long. Whenever a cult successfully summoned their infernal patron, it was immediately crushed, its daemonic master banished back into the pit or bound into service.
This was the one command the Unfettered had given to the Houses, and they were more than happy to oblige him. Achillus was still firmly in the Materium, and the Houses weren't eager to share their new realm with the Neverborn. Having surpassed the limits of humanity and received what they thought was eternal life, their own belief in the Ruinous Powers was limited. They saw themselves as gods – why should they worship anything else than the one who had brought them this power ? And so, while the cult of Chaos spread among the masses, the Houses embraced a more esoteric faith, one based on power, immortality, and the enhancement of their transfigured forms.
But the Dark Gods are jealous divines, and one among them is subtle beyond the ken of mortals …
Ever since Humanity had risen from Old Earth, it had been haunted by the question of what happened after death. Did the mind vanish into oblivion after the body ceased to function, or was there something more waiting ? For thousands of generations, priests, philosophers and conmen had invented various answers, coming up with extravagant afterlives that could only be reached by the truly faithful. But it had only been with the rise of the psyker and the discovery of the Warp that the existence of the soul itself had been proven beyond question.
Yet still there had been no definite answer, for no psyker could bear to look too long or too deeply into the Empyrean. Of course, that hadn't stopped many from pretending they could, or even from genuinely believing that whatever visions of madness they glimpsed were real. The Great Crusade had ruthlessly crushed the faiths that claimed there existed paradises within the Warp, with the Imperial Truth proclaiming that death was the end of one's existence as a conscious entity, but that one's legacy could endure for all eternity. Now, with the Ecclesiarchy firmly implanted within every level of the Imperium, Mankind believed once more.
In some aspects, the Imperial Creed was unlike any that had come before, while in others, it was painfully familiar. It was divine canon that the faithful dead were taken to the God-Emperor's side, while traitors and heretics burned forever in the darkest pits of Hell. The details of both fates varied depending on local customs, but the general narrative remained the same. It made a very useful tool to keep the toiling masses that made the Imperium possible in their place. Nothing made backbreaking labor bearable like the promise of paradise, and nothing kept the mind from wandering like the iron-clad certainty that damnation lay that way.
Such was the cold calculation made by the High Lords of Terra when they allowed the Imperial Creed to form, spitting on the ideals of the Great Crusade in the process. The devastation wrought by the Horus Heresy, the turmoil left by the silence of the Emperor and the revelation of the Warp's true nature, were too much of a threat to the continued survival of the human species to allow for any half-measure : order had to be maintained, lest it all be for nothing.
But even the boldest and most shameless of lies could contain a grain of truth. And while those who served the Dark Gods scoffed at the idea of the Corpse-God granting His slaves eternal bliss, they knew all too well Hell was real. They saw it every time they called forth the Neverborn, or peered into the Sea of Souls for knowledge. Among themselves, they passed tales of the grand rewards awaiting the servants of the Ruinous Powers : the eternal battlefields of Khorne, the pleasure palaces of Slaanesh, the Garden of Nurgle and the shining Crystal Labyrinth of Tzeentch, where all knowledge could be found.
But those who were more than deluded worshippers knew the truth, in their heart of hearts : that only the claws of daemonic predators awaited them, to tear their souls to shreds and feed on everything they were. The kindest fate then was dissolution, but some shred of identity would still endure, forever screaming in the Empyrean's timeless infinity. It was something they all feared, save for those so made they cared for nothing at all. No wonder, then, that so many of the Lost and the Damned's champions pursued immortality.
But every rule had exceptions. The Daemon Princes of the Warp were the most well-known, and theirs was the destiny sought after by the champions of Ruin, but there were others. Fear of death was a thing that transcended time and species alike, after all.
Some souls were protected by pacts, or powerful enough to linger on after death, fighting off the Warp predators drawn to the light of their unfettered spirits. Others, like the Dark Eldar, cheated death by keeping part of themselves separated from the main body through secret, dark arts, allowing them to regrow their body upon death with the soul still anchored to it. Their cousins in their Craftworlds preserved the soul in gems, denying the ravenous hunger of She-Who-Thirst and existing beyond death within the Infinity Circuit.
Though the Eldar had perfected these methods, under the fear of Slaanesh that hung over their every moment, there were others who had replicated them over the millennia. Long-forgotten temples held the souls of xenos overlords who had every reason to fear the afterlife, and great vaults held the resting spirits of entire species whose witch-priests had stumbled upon the secrets of denying the Warp its tithe of souls. Of course, the Dark Gods were jealous divines, and often directed their followers to destroy such places, lest mortals start getting ideas above their station.
And then, there was that rarest of creatures : a soul returned to the Materium by the God it belonged to. Broken, twisted and reforged in the image of that God, but still a mortal soul, spared from devouring and burning because it was too useful, or too amusing. Yet at the same time not wholly replaced with infernal power, its free will completely erased as it became nothing more than an extension of the Dark God's will bearing a mask forged of its hollowed identity. An instrument, or a toy, brought back to a semblance of life for some purpose, whether it knew it or not.
The thing that had once been Aleric Heinrich, explorer of Drachencraft Castle for the Empire of Eldur, fell to the hive-world Achillus like a dark comet. His god-forged spirit fell through the many layers of Hive Heringrad, its ghostly passage causing nightmares and fits of insanity among those near its trajectory. It tore through the pollution clouds that covered the city, triggering a rain of multicoloured acid drops that burned the skin of those under it. Finally, it slammed into a pile of mutating matter at the bottom of the den of horrors that was Tarenbach Spire, discarded remnants of another mad experiment. The grotesque thing groaned and twisted in agony for several minutes before bursting apart in an explosion of gore, revealing the new, fully grown form of Aleric standing in the offal. A potent smell of ozone almost – but not quite – overpowered that of meat and bile.
The shape of Aleric's new body was humanoid, but there the resemblance with his mortal one ended. It was a thing of blue fire and silver, a twisted parody of a knight of legend. Pieces of armor – a chestplate, shoulder pads, gauntlets and greaves, shaped from silver-tinted crystal – were anchored onto living flames and inscribed with the runes of Tzeentch that blazed with too-bright light. Images could be glimpsed into the inferno – terrible vistas of infinite expanses that could shatter the mind that looked too deep. The fire burned brightest under the helmet that had replaced Aleric's face, a brutal, angular thing crested by a pair of curled horns.
The reforged soul took in his surroundings, filled with all the squalor to be expected at the bottom levels of an Imperial hive-world, especially one fallen to the forces of Chaos. He looked up to the Spire, looking through the layers of metal and the clouds of pollution and seeing the broken, hollowed, haunted tower where an entire family and their servants had dwelled before being destroyed for their refusal to embrace the new order. He knew that the creature that had birthed his new form had been formed by the last surviving members of the Tarenbach bloodline, dragged out of their home by their enemies and turned into one more abomination as a final insult, while their home became a place for the worst predators of Achillus to gather.
He also knew that this was one of two spires left empty by the wrath of their masters' enemies – the other was the former domain of House Delande, brought low by the Inquisition when their treachery had been discovered. Spire Delande had been left as a monument of the Emperor's judgment upon those who had joined Chaos. It made perverse sense that the ruins of House Tarenbach, who had refused to join the conspiracy that had brought Achillus down, would be the vessel through which Aleric, bringer of another god's wrath, manifested on this world.
Aleric left, walking with dread purpose, and the shadows gathered around him to drown his azure light into darkness. It would not do for the lords of Achillus to notice his presence yet. He had much to do before he could reveal himself to his prey, and powerful as he had become during his reforging in Tzeentch's fire, he was aware that not even he could stand against the full might of Achillus' Houses. The exact reason of his presence on Achillus was still vague to him – his mind no longer worked in the patterns it used to, and the solidity of his surroundings after so long spent in the Realm of Change was throwing him off. But he remembered enough to know where he must go.
'Begin recording for case study 352,' said a cold, artificial voice. 'Subject appears to be suffering from a degenerative disease, leading to the atrophy of his entire muscular mass. Yet according to the operatives who brought the body, it displayed physical power far in excess of standard human parameters before it was brought down by a lucky hit at the back of the cranium.'
The scalpel cut through the corpse's pale skin, parting it to reveal the organs beneath. They were shrivelled and sickly, and already starting to decay. Two more cutting tools descended, removing a fragment of skin and bringing it to a tube carried by another mechanical tendril. After a few seconds, a rune went green on a nearby console, and the voice resumed :
'… which would indicate affiliation to the Koenigreich strain. Samples show a higher than normal psychic imprinting, even 35.12 standard hours after death. Hypothesis : the "Corpse-Lords", as they are vulgarly called, draw their increased strength from specialized psychic abilities. Secondary hypothesis : over-reliance on this power leads to their bodies' degradation due to their muscles not performing necessary levels of activity to maintain themselves. Using the psychic ability may trigger the brain's reward center, or it may purely be a sociological factor : using their powers in all circumstances would allow them to grow stronger, or just reinforce their doctrine of superiority over baseline humans. An interview with a living specimen will be required to clarify.'
The figure hunched over the emaciated body strapped on the dissection table bore no resemblance to the tech-priest he had once been. Since the collapse of the Mechanicus hierarchy on Achillus, he had removed more and more of his flesh, bypassing the decades of training and service it would have taken him to qualify for such blessings under the old order. What remained of his body was encased within a reinforced box located somewhere under the dozens of mecha-dendrites and other appendages emanating from his center of mass, which was held up by ten articulated legs. His voice came from three speakers at once, echoing in the chamber with disturbing overlaps. The speakers were located inside the mouths of three faces sculpted onto the core of the heretek's body, each a different grimace of pain, fury and hatred – the one concession to aesthetics in his entire form.
Before Achillus' fall, the heretek had been called Ulchrion-Nine-Five, and he had been counted among the lowest orders of the priesthood, thought likely by his superiors to remain there for the rest of his life. But these superiors were dead now, and he was known by a different name, first given to him in half-jest by one of his associates. A name that reflected how he had completely left the holy form of Humanity behind in his quest for power and transcendence. He was the Spider, a lord in his own right within Achillus' new society. The warbands fighting for control of the hive-city in which he dwelled went to him to trade, offering corpses or captives in exchange for augmetics and effective (if brutal and painful in the extreme) medical assistance.
'The body is still hot – current temperature of sample 40.5819 degrees according to the blessed scale of Celsius. Tertiary hypothesis : the energy acquired from the Empyrean continues being drawn even after brain death. Individual cells of the body capable of extracting power to continue activity after demise of the larger organism they are a part of ? I must hurry to analyse the gene-sequences of this subject. If the Unfettered truly has come this far …'
The Spider's musings were interrupted by a sudden alarm. Something had passed through the outer layer of the defenses surrounding his lair, taking down the corrupt servitors stationed there as if they were nothing. More alarms rose as new sections of his small domain were breached, and it was clear from the intruder's path that it was coming right toward the Spider's laboratory. Surveillance systems told the Spider that this was a single individual, though they couldn't get a proper fix on its nature. With a thought, the heretek called his minions, sending dozens of cybernetic killers to intercept the newcomer, with instructions to bring him the remains once they were done.
With the not inconsiderable effort the Spider had put into his protection, anyone able to pierce through the outer defenses had to be a member of the Houses – perhaps even another Koenigreich, come to avenge or recover the corpse of his fellow. It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened – and it wouldn't be the first time such an outraged noble ended up adding to the Spider's trove of knowledge either. The Spider wasn't opposed to returning the bodies to the Houses once he was done with them – but the Houses would have to pay his price, not barge in violently.
Expecting his servants would do quick work of the intruder, the Spider focused his attention back on his work. Several of his mecha-dendrites reached for the head of his subject, peeling away the skin around the skull and storing it away for later analysis before carefully breaking apart the bone underneath. This was the true prize – in his research thus far, the brains of the House's members always bore the signs of the enhancements that had been wrought upon their genes.
No matter what transformation they had gone through, they needed to be able to control it, lest they destroy themselves or reveal their true nature to the Imperium. In the past, he had dissected brains that only marginally resembled those of human beings at all. It was fascinating, really, how the Unfettered had guided the Houses into altering themselves. Every strain was different, and he wondered as to the intent behind that diversity. This specimen's brain had no doubt been damaged by the brutal method by which it had been slain – the blow had been violent enough that the Spider had required extra care to avoid driving splinter of bone into the brain. But it would still be of use.
As the skull cracked and came apart, each piece held by several mecha-dendrites, the Spider idly wondered how much longer it would take for his guards to finish dealing with the intruder. He could still hear the sounds of battle. He was actually starting to get concerned. A single intruder should not give his defenses that much trouble. Then the noise ended, and he allowed himself a moment of relief – just as the door to his laboratory burst open, blasted inward as if by some terrible explosion.
Customized defense protocols he had embedded into his systems reacted at once, and the Spider leapt from his position hunched over the dissection table, scattering his samples to the floor in the process. Blood and fluids leaked from broken containers and through the grated floor, joining the morass of repugnant liquid below. Strength flooded through his body as emergency power sources activated, kicking his augmetics into overdrive. His perception of time slowed as the cogitators that supplemented his organic brain were pushed to the very limit of their capabilities. The tools at the end of his mecha-dendrites shifted gears, safeties on examination tools being removed.
The Spider's legs buried themselves into the ceiling, which had been reinforced to be able to withstand his tremendous weight. That security measure had been taken after the second time he had had to rebuild his lab from scratch, when one of the containment tanks had broken and a flow of acid had dissolved pretty much everything in the room – including the Spider's legs, which had barely carried him to safety before breaking apart. Several of the tanks in this room held even more dangerous materials, and the Spider wasn't going to go through that again.
Even as he moved to his new position, his senses were already scanning the wrecked entrance. In the time it took him to anchor himself, he had already analysed what the various auspexes that had replaced his mundane perceptions were telling him – not that it made much sense.
Thermal imagery showed him a humanoid figure striding through the entrance, but the exact temperature kept changing, going up and down from levels that could melt steel to cold enough to kill an unprotected human instantly. Empyric sensors were also fluctuating wildly, though they never went completely down. Echolocation readings in the entire room had gone mad the moment the figure had stepped in. As for the video feeds, they were glitching whenever they tried to fix on the intruder. Only the living eyes that ended three of his mecha-dendrites – a feat of bioengineering he was quite proud of – could see it clearly, showing him a figure of blue fire and black crystal.
Behind that figure were the charred and broken corpses of his battle-servitors. They sparked and twitched, their primitive minds still trying to fulfill their orders even as their systems shut down. The Spider didn't spare them more than a single thought, focusing on the intruder that had broken through all of his defenses so quickly and easily.
Was this a daemon, summoned by one of the hive's Warp-crazed cults ? He had never actually encountered one of the Neverborn, though he had heard from the daemon-hunting squads that only living eyes could properly see them. It was why he had gone through the trouble of keeping a few, even though they were usually vastly inferior to augmetic replacements. The fact that only these could see the creature clearly seemed to confirm that this was indeed a daemon, and yet, there was something about the way it moved that made the Spider think that this, whatever it was, had once been a mortal man, subject to the same limitations he himself had left behind.
Long blades of black crystal suddenly appeared in the intruder's hands, manifesting from thin air. They looked fragile, but the Spider needed only remember the wreckage that his servants had become to know not to underestimate these strange weapons. With a thought, he opened fire on the intruder, arcs of energy and streams of projectiles bursting from his mecha-dendrites.
The intruder dodged the volleys by a hair's breadth, moving with impossible speed and precision. It leapt at the Spider, contorting in the air to avoid the rest of the heretek's weapons. The two ebony blades buried themselves into the Spider, cutting through his armored body as if it were paper. The Spider screamed as he felt true pain for the first time since he had embraced his current form. The intruder let go of the swords, which broke inside the Spider's body, the shards tearing through his circuits. Heretek and Warp-born horror both fell down together, crashing to the ground.
The fire-wreathed figure left the twitching heretek and walked toward the dissection table, miraculously intact despite the devastation that had ravaged the rest of the room. The Spider heard a wet tearing sound, then another. Having accomplished whatever it was it had come to do, the intruder started marching toward the exit, without even looking at its defeated foe.
'Tell me ...' called the Spider from where he laid, sparks and fluids leaking from his broken form. The vox-speakers were crackling with static as they shut down, one by one. 'Tell me … what you are. Are you … the Unfettered's … final work ? Has he … succeeded ? Are you … a god ?'
The figure paused, and knelt next to the twitching Spider. Its burning eyes stared into one of the Spider's few remaining optics, and it spoke in a voice sounding like that of a mortal man, but echoed as if he were shouting from within a vast cavern :
'I am the will of the God of Change, the Great Mutator. Nothing more, nothing less.'
A hand of blue fire and black crystal reached down, a single finger running across the surface of the Spider's outer casing. A spark flickered as the crystal ground against the metal. Static drowned all of the Spider's senses for a few seconds. When it cleared, the figure was standing again.
'I am an instrument of the divine,' it continued, and the Spider was almost sure he could hear something that sounded like wariness in its tone. 'And you are nothing but a stepping stone on my path to retribution. Take solace in the fact that in death, you serve a greater purpose than anything you ever accomplished in life. It is all mortals can ever truly hope for.'
The Spider was still considering these words when the last of his life-support systems finally failed, and his remaining flesh died. Without a body to anchor it into the Materium, his soul – a gnarled, twisted thing of jagged edges and blazing ambition – slipped into the Empyrean, where the hungry maws of a thousand Neverborn spawned by his cruelty awaited him.
The moment he died, the Warp energy that had leapt from Aleric's finger to the Spider's metallic body began to act. Unopposed by the natural resistance of a mortal soul – however weak that would have been in the case of the Spider's corrupt spirit – it altered the metal on a fundamental level. Infused with a seed of pure potential, the augmetics of the Spider began to bubble and melt, forming a pool of black liquid from which infernal faces peered at the outside world.
When the next warband came to trade, they found the lair of the Spider silent, its gates broken and its defenses missing. Sensing the opportunity for plunder, they went in, and died, devoured by the living, daemon-possessed metal that flowed from the floor, walls and ceiling. Only one managed to escape, and he spent the next weeks spreading tales of how the Spider's experiments had finally gotten the better of him, creating a monster that had killed him and now haunted his lair.
Several other warbands would try to enter the lair, thinking to capture or kill the monster and claim the Spider's loot. After the seventh massacre, the rest of the hive's forces gave up, and the area was abandoned to Aleric's accidental creation. Left alone, the living metal hardened into a shell, within which the warped remains of the Spider's biological body began to mutate, a slow, complicated process that would not be completed for many, many years.
For the schemes of Tzeentch were manifold, and none were ever obvious.
Ulgo Petrov relaxed in his chair, taking in the sounds of wild partying and cruel laughter from all around him. Life was good, he reflected as he took another sip of his cup, filled with the finest mixture the chemical distilleries of Hive Heringrad could produce. It tingled on his tongue and burned his throat as it went down, and as he licked his lips, he felt the familiar rush of heat and pleasure spreading from his core throughout his entire body. Life had become very good indeed since he had accepted House Koenigreich's offer, all these years ago. With their help, he had risen through the gang's hierarchy, ultimately replacing its boss after strangling him with his bare hands, while the rest of the gang watched, their complicity bought with the gifts of his associates.
Things had changed greatly since the end of Imperial rule on Achillus, of course. House Koenigreich had told him that he would have to turn against the Imperium at some point – not during their first offer, but years later, when he had been in to deep to turn back. That hadn't disturbed him. What had the God-Emperor ever done for him ? At least the Koenigreich envoys had given him what they promised in exchange for their service, unlike the Ecclesiarchy's fat priests, who had demanded blind obedience and offered nothing in return but threats of damnation.
Once, Ulgo and his gang had been thieves, fences, vice peddlers and racketeers, extorting money and supplies from the population of the underhive in return for their "protection". Now they were enforcers for the new lords of Heringrad, the House that had risen to the top of the local pyramid during the brutal conflict that had followed the ousting of the False Emperor's representatives. It was still much the same thing – keep the workers down and ensure they didn't get any strange ideas – except now they didn't have to hide from the Arbites. They could act openly with impunity, and they took advantage of it every chance they got. Which was why they revelled in this party inside the very remnants of the Arbites stronghold, when before they had been forced to skulk in shadows.
The gang was responsible with managing one of the chemical refineries, where the production of the mines outside the hive-city was treated and refined into more complex chemical compounds. Even if they didn't work the refineries themselves, the gangers were still exposed to the fumes, causing many of them to fall sick and die – but there were advantages to the job as well.
They were allowed by House Koenigreich to take a part of the refinery's production for themselves, turning it into chems and drugs the likes of which they could never have enjoyed before. And since their lifespan was already reduced by their work, they might as well enjoy their life as much as they could. Of course, Ulgo himself didn't work in the refinery; that was his minions' job. And if they died because of it, well, there were plenty more potential recruits among the workers. Men were always willing to join the ranks of the oppressors rather than remain victims.
Men and women in rough clothing, all of them armed, none of them older than thirty standard years, laughed and shouted as they drank and smoke. Disharmonic hymns blared from mounted speakers, sending stabs of pain into the brains of those not used to them while triggering the adrenal glands of those who were. Cages hung from the ceiling, the skin of their captives pierced by countless needles, all of them connected to tubes that went up to the cages' bizarre crowns.
These prisoners were gifts from Ulgo's patrons, enemies of House Koenigreich who had been transformed into living drug factories. Their entire physiologies had been reworked so that while they still looked the same, every organ in their bodies now produced various stimulants. Even their hearts were used as mixing chambers, and every breath burned them as their lungs were used to cool the concoctions mixed in their blood – or so Ulgo had been told. His knowledge of the human body was limited to ending its function and inflicting pain upon it.
Of course, after such a transformation, it was impossible for the captives to survive on their own. Separated from the machines attached atop their cages, they would die in minutes. But they still lived, still thought – and judging by the constant moans of agony, they still suffered. Their pained cries were almost impossible to hear above the speakers, but Ulgo's senses were sharpened by the several cocktails he had already imbibed tonight, and he could pick up each scream. The machines kept them alive and unable to end themselves, but their makers had had no concern for easing the suffering of their victims – quite the contrary, in fact. None crossed House Koenigreich and did not pay the price for their foolishness.
Ulgo appreciated the drugs extracted from these wretches, but he was also acutely aware of the hidden meaning behind this gift. His associates wanted him to remember what the price of defying them would be. Fortunately, it had the same effect on his subordinates – there had been no challenge to his authority since the planetary rebellion. Of course, that could also be attributed to his own efforts to secure their loyalty rather than the fear inspired by the cages' constant reminders.
His gaze passed over the room … and froze. There, right in the middle of the floor, stood a figure that hadn't been here before. The shape of a man, rendered in blue fire and black crystal, faced Ulgo's throne, utterly motionless save for the flickering flames. Slowly, others began to notice the intruder, until everyone in the room was staring at it. With a sharp gesture, Ulgo silenced the speakers, and commanded his people to draw their weapons – but not to attack. This creature, whatever it was, hadn't made a hostile move yet. It had simply waited for them to notice it. Ulgo had never seen anything like it, but perhaps it was a messenger, summoned by one of the hive-city's magicians. It was unlikely the message was good, given the messenger's aspect, yet considering the nature of his patrons, it was better not to risk offending them.
'Welcome,' Ulgo called out, projecting a perfect image of calm and supreme confidence. 'Your method of entry was … unconventional, but I am willing to forgive the intrusion. What are you, and what do you want with us ?'
The figure raised the helmet that served as its head, staring directly at Ulgo. The gang leader's grip unconsciously tightened around his throne's armrests as that inhuman gaze seemed to penetrate his soul. He could see things in that burning gaze, things he could not understand, but that filled him with dread. He didn't turn away from it, though – he could not show such weakness to his gang.
'Ulgo Petrov,' it said, slowly, as if tasting the name. The gangers closest to it actually recoiled at the sheer inhumanity of its voice. It raised its right arm, its hand closing in an armored fist with a single finger accusingly pointed at Ulgo. 'The eyes of the dead have brought me to you. You are a servant of House Koenigreich, and for that, you have been marked for death, like all their other pawns.'
'I am no pawn,' growled Ulgo. 'I am an associate of House Koenigreich, not a slave !'
'What you believe yourself to be is irrelevant. Only the truth matters to those such as I.'
'You think you are the first monster sent to kill me ?' mocked Ulgo, spreading his arms wide.
'I know I am the last,' it replied. 'For my true prey is one far greater than you.'
'We will see about that,' sneered the gang lord, before pressing a rune on his throne's armrest.
A chorus of groans and hissing sounds rose from all across the rooms as the injector attached on the neck of every member of Ulgo's gang activated, pumping a dose of combat drugs into their system. This was how Ulgo had ensured the gang's loyalty – by making himself the ultimate drug dealer in their minds, the only one who could give them their fix with a single push of a button. The injectors could not be tempered with, at least not by those already enthralled to the mixtures they dispensed. Some of these fighters were so far gone that they weren't even able to inject themselves with drugs manually, with syringes and needles – to them, he was a god, and they lived and died to do his bidding. And as for those who still could, the drugs they could obtain by themselves paled in comparison to what Ulgo made sure the injectors were filled with. They twitched as the rush overwhelmed their senses for a second before sharpening them, fuelling their aggression.
'Kill that freak, boys !' barked Ulgo, settling back into his throne, a smirk on his lips.
There were more than two hundred people in the room, of whom about half were fighters – the rest were waiters, toys, and hanger-ons. It was only a fraction of the criminal empire Ulgo had controlled before the fall of Achillus, and was still less than a hundredth of the forces he still commanded now, but that would be more than enough. In fact, this was almost certainly overkill – but Ulgo hadn't reached his current position by being afraid of making a statement. Nor was he willing to risk underestimating an enemy possessed of such obvious sorcery.
The first blood was spilled when an enormous brute of a man launched himself at the figure, arms spread wide, seeking to knock it down. The armored gauntlets struck like snakes, catching the giant and turning his momentum against him. The brute flipped head over heels, the intruder guiding his fall so that a rusted knife held in one of the other assailants pushed into his eye socket and brain.
The fiend let go of the twitching corpse just as a ganger struck at it from behind with a weapon made from an industrial saw attached to his wrist. It dodged without looking, causing the blade to bury itself into the chest of a blue-haired madman with scissors for hands. Only then did it struck a blow of its own, with a long sword of obsidian that had appeared right in its hand. The head of the first ganger flew in the air, still wearing an expression of dumb shock at having killed his comrade.
Even as it butchered all who attacked it, the intruder kept slowly approaching Ulgo's throne, one step at a time. Beginning to panic, Ulgo pressed another rune, causing the injectors to pump their most potent cocktail into his guards. Few of them would survive the crashing down, but it couldn't be helped. They would die to protect him, and experience a touch of divine strength in their final moments. It was an honor, really – these drugs hadn't come cheap.
The walls of the stronghold vibrated at the strength of the scream that came out of the gangers as the new cocktail was injected into their bloodstream. They rushed the intruder in a wave of maddened flesh, their faces distorted into grimaces of pleasure and bloodlust. Seven of them died instantly cut apart by more obsidian blades, but eventually, through sheer weight of number and lack of self-preservation, they managed to bring the intruder to the ground. They piled on it, stabbing and kicking and punching, forming a mound of bodies where those on the outside clawed and raged in their hunger to get to their designated victim. On his throne, Ulgo smiled.
Then there was a terrible sound, like glass shearing through bone, and spikes of black crystal burst from the mass of bodies, spilling blood and guts as they pierced the gangers and lifted them into the air before breaking under their weight and falling back to the ground. And there, surrounded by the torn bodies of Ulgo's people, was the armored fiend, staring straight at the gang leader, looking none the worse for bear. It took another step, its crystalline boot crushing a throat as it landed.
That was it for Ulgo. He ran from the room, through the secret exit he had discovered when he had first come to claim the stronghold as his own after the rebels' troops were done with it. He ran without looking back, not caring for the sound of rent flesh and the screams of ecstatic pain as the gangers kept attacking the monster in their midst, driven beyond caring for their lives by the drugs thundering in their blood. Sweat ran down his face, and his heart pounded in his chest – not from the effort, for despite it all Ulgo had taken care to remain physically fit : it was from utter dread.
A black car waited for him when he emerged from the passage, right where he had left it, its promethium tank full, the emblems of the Arbites painted over with the sigil of House Koenigreich. He jumped inside, his fingers pressing the activation sequence faster than ever before in spite of how much they trembled. The engine roared to life, and Ulgo pushed it to its limits, causing the craft to accelerate to a hundred kilometers an hour within a few seconds. He fled through the streets of Heringrad, on roads that were now used only by those favored enough by Achillus' lords to still own a personal transport. The rest walked from their sleeping holes to their working station every day, and woe betide any who arrived late for their shift.
Rockrete roads and bridges allowed passage from one level of the hive to the next, and the markings on his car would prevent him from having any trouble with the watchers guarding the checkpoints, posted high above the roads with auspexes, cogitators capable of identifying whether a vehicle was allowed in their sector in a few heartbeats, and missile launchers in case it was not.
Ulgo only started to breathe a little easier when the walls of Spire Koenigreich's outer perimeter came into view. As long as he reached them, he would be safe, he told himself. Not even the daemon that had butchered his gang would dare attack the demesne of one of the Houses.
Clinging to the underside of Ulgo's transport, the shadow-shrouded form of Aleric waited.
The living came to Koenigreich Spire in their hundreds, slaves, servants and supplicants, to deliver their tributes of wealth, information and blood. Spies returning from rival cities crept through hidden doorways, nursing the wounds they had sustained in the course of duty, their minds filled with stolen secrets. Resources once stored in distant warehouses were now stockpiled in the Spire itself, in levels once filled with quarters for now-dead servants. Dark priests whose words swayed congregations of thousands came to prostrate themselves before lords who did not worship their gods, bringing them the choicest part of their faithful's tribute.
Fear was the dominant emotion in those throngs of supplicants, for not all who entered the Spire came out of it alive. The Corpse-Lords were as cruel as any House of Achillus, and they loved to make examples of their victims. The bodies of those who had failed the House were on display, impaled on the spikes of the Spire, their souls bound to their bodies by Koenigreich warlocks until their remains decayed enough for them to fall off. Only then would their spirits be released.
Many queued in long files before the gates, waiting to be inspected and allowed entrance. Even the spies, who walked unseen by any, must speak secret words for the hidden doors to open before them, and they had to submit themselves to scanners that knew the gene-code of every soul allowed to enter through the gate they kept. The Spire was vast, and had hundreds of entrances on its first dozen levels – the only ones accessible without a flying transport – all of them watched and defended, one way or another. There were hundreds more levels to the Spire, but between the hidden passages and the sealed and collapsed sections, no one knew exactly how many.
On the third-to-last level, Valdyr Koenigreich, Patriarch and undisputed master of his House, was scowling. It was an expression he often wore these days, and it did his cadaverous visage no favour. Already ancient when the Unfettered had reached out to Achillus, Valdyr was a dreadful sight. Clad in the most elegant (and expensive) finery available to Imperial nobility, he looked like a regal corpse left to dry in the sun of a dead planet for a few weeks before being dragged back and prepared for entombing by an expert undertaker. Only his piercing, glowing blue eyes belied his appearance, as well as the haze of barely contained power and the faint scent of ozone that surrounded him at all time.
By all rights, Valdyr should not have survived the Koenigreich transformation process. And indeed, one could argue that he had not. It was only through a continuous effort of will that Valdyr's ancient, diseased heart still beat. Rejuvenation treatments could only do so much, especially for one suffering from as many genetic defects as the Patriarch. The noble bloodlines of Achillus had tried to avoid interbreeding too much, but with the pride in their purity held by the world's aristocracy, accidents were inevitable. They were usually locked away from sight, or quietly disappeared.
At least only Valdyr's body had suffered from the effects of such consanguinity – his mind had been sharper than any other of his generation. Several of his organs had failed him before he had been ten years old, and he had had to spend weeks every year in the care of physicians as they removed tumors from his flesh. His bones had been frail as glass, and the tiniest exposure would result in him developing all manners of afflictions. It had been a great effort to keep him alive, one that his family had only spent because of the potential the then-Patriarch had seen in him.
That long-dead forebear had been right, for despite all of this, Valdyr now ruled Heringrad's mightiest House. He had been Patriarch for decades, leading his House into betrayal with barely a pause to consider the consequences. Valdyr had been alive to see the Orks torture and devour his kin – he would have done anything to never be that helpless again.
But with power had come new responsibilities, which was why he scowled so much. With the chains of the Imperium cast off, all of the Governor's power and duties were without holders. And with many of the nobility's servants dead one way or another, those who wanted to seize influence, rather than mere physical strength, must bear the weight of that work themselves or pass it off to slaves or trusted relatives. Valdyr had done both those things, but he still had to spend nearly every hour managing his growing empire.
He stood now with his hands resting on a large circular table, upon which were pinned hundreds of parchment sheets – reports of Household activities from all across Heringrad and beyond. Around him, the walls of his office were covered in weapons : ancient power swords used by the family's Imperial Army ancestors, brutish Ork killing tools purchased at great expense, and all manners of trophies claimed during the planet's rebellion.
Valdyr had ordered this display as a show of power, a reminder of the might his House now wielded : they had such little need of weapons that they could afford to have them on display like this instead of using them. His chief trophy was a plasma pistol, a relic from the Great Crusade that had once belonged to House Tarenbach's founder and which had been taken from that family's ruined Spire after its destruction.
The Patriarch's gaze moved from an accounting of the manufactorums' latest output to a report of a cave-in in one of the mines where the rare elements that went into the hive-city's famed chemical distilleries were extracted. Production was up five percent compared to the last month – which was eleven percent less than what the new manager of the mines had promised him over the mangled body of his predecessor. He made a mental note to summon that particular great-nephew soon.
Another note drew his eye, this one a report of the latest engagement in the east. Another squad of soldiers had been lost to the beasts of House Ozantria. The only survivor who had made it back to camp had been utterly traumatized by what he had seen, forcing Valdyr's great-granddaughter to put him out of his misery before he brought morale even lower than it already was. The girl was asking for reinforcements – and not more soldiers, but actual House members who could meet Ozantria's hunters with their own exalted power.
And these were but two of the dozens of pieces of information spread on the table. There were diplomatic communications from the Houses with which Koenigreich wasn't at open war yet, transcripts of the latest babbles of the psykers kept under lock and key in a secret location in the chemical wastes, reports from his spies both outside the Spire and within it …
'Unfettered grant me strength,' murmured the Patriarch under his breath.
There was a soft knock on the door – genuine wood, brought from off-world at a ludicrous cost – and Valdyr's manservant, secretary and bodyguard entered. The man could not have been more different from his master : he was young, fit, tall and handsome, with an utterly fake smile plastered on his face. He wore deceptively simple clothes that had cost more than an entire family of workers could make in a decade – back when Achillus' nobles had actually paid their slaves, of course.
'Sir,' said Gabriel, 'there is a visitor here to see you. It seems urgent.'
Gabriel belonged to House Lorenos, one of the Heringrad's three remaining noble families. Like House Taroden, House Lorenos was subordinate to House Koenigreich. Unlike their overlords, the members of House Lorenos could still pass for mere humans if they so wished. It was a trait of their particular strain of the Unfettered's gift that had spared them from the medical treatments and surgeries House Koenigreich had had to provide its scions to hide their transformation until Revelation Day.
Gabriel had been assigned to Valdyr's service after some sordid affair in his family's Spire had made it uncomfortable for him to remain there, and Valdyr had needed a new secretary at the time after the unfortunate demise of the last one. So far, Gabriel's service had been impeccable, but Valdyr was still wary of him, just in case the whole thing had been a charade meant to allow a killer to get close to him.
'Who is it, Gabriel ? I am busy.'
'Someone named Ulgo Petrov,' answered Gabriel, showing no reaction to the vitriol in his master's voice. 'He knew all the correct passphrases to get past the guards, and he made enough of a fuss that they called for me to deal with him. After listening to him, I think you should see him, sir.'
'Ulgo Petrov, you say … Remind me who that is ?'
'One of the scum from the underhive the House recruited before Revelation Day, my liege. He and his people are responsible for maintaining order among the cattle working in your refineries.'
'The refineries … ah, yes, I remember now. His people do such passable work that his name never gets on the reports, which is good enough, I suppose. Why has he come here ?'
'Apparently, he was attacked by a creature from the Beyond,' said Gabriel. 'It killed a lot of his gang, and he claims that it said it would come for all of House Koenigreich's associates.'
Valdyr frowned, or at least he tried to – he didn't have any eyebrow left, and the skin of his face was too taught to properly reflect his emotions. There were few things left on Achillus that could pose a threat to House Koenigreich, but powerful daemons were among them.
'You were right to bring this to my attention,' said the Patriarch. 'Get him inside and seal the door.'
Ulgo Petrov looked pretty much exactly like Valdyr had expected him too. The only difference was that, while the man appeared as terrified as the Patriarch had imagined he would, that terror was only partially due to the fact that he stood in the Koenigreich Patriarch for the first time. If anything, he seemed … calmer, now that he was in the Spire. That wasn't common, and it made Valdyr take the story the gang leader told that much more seriously.
Ulgo told them of the attack on his gang – of the figure of black crystal and blue fire that had appeared out of nowhere and butchered his gangers. He was getting to his escape, glossing over how he had abandoned the rest of his gang to the creature, when he suddenly stopped. His eyes grew wide, and a bloodstain blossomed on his chest, before he fell down face-first, revealing the very fiend he had been describing standing right behind him. In its hand was a long spike of obsidian, covered in Ulgo's heart blood. It dropped it, and the weapon shattered as it hit the floor.
Gabriel moved at once, positioning himself between Valdyr and the intruder. But the Patriarch barely noticed his guard's action – his gaze was fixed onto the burning figure.
All members of House Koenigreich were able to detect each other's presence, to gauge the relative strength of their gifts. It was an ability that served them well in the bloodline's endless power squabbles, and one that also allowed them to detect when sorcery was used near them, though they couldn't identify its purpose. And he could sense the creature's power, blazing from it like a beacon now that whatever trick it had used to hide itself from him was undone.
'Only the servants of the Unfettered wield such sorcerous power … what are you, spirit ?!'
'Punishment. Not yours – but you are in my way. You really should have honored the Gods, Valdyr – perhaps then my master would have set me on a different path to my true target.'
'How did you get in here ? This place is warded against your kind.'
'No, Valdyr. It is not. For your pet warlocks have never encountered one such as me, or even conceived that I could exist. Their view is too limited for that. All their precious circles and spells have achieved is to conceal my presence here to the sight of your kin in the rest of this Spire.' It gestured to Ulgo's corpse and continued : 'I only needed to follow in the footsteps of this wretch to pass through the more mundane barriers, knowing that in his fear he would go straight for you.'
Valdyr clicked his tongue, annoyed that the Spire's defenses had been breached so easily. He would need to have a "chat" with the warlocks and see how they could atone for that failure. But for now …
'Gabriel, dispose of that creature.'
'As you wish, sir,' answered the bodyguard, relish evident in his tone.
Gabriel let loose, his body tearing through his clothes as he transformed into House Lorenos' true form. His muscles bulged, and four horns burst from his forehead, while his legs split in two. The change only took a few seconds, and by the end of it Gabriel was a three-meters high, scarlet-skinned quadruped with a humanoid torso.
He roared at the intruder, who didn't appear fazed in the slightest. Gabriel threw a massive arm at his enemy, who dodged the attack with ease before striking back with a new black sword. The crystalline weapon shattered upon Gabriel's skin, but a few of the shards broke through, embedding themselves into his flesh. The shapeshifter roared again, first in annoyance, then in surprise and genuine pain as the fragments buried themselves deeper into his arm. He struck again, and the assassin dodged the blow once more, throwing a pair of daggers that nicked Gabriel's forward legs.
Seeing that the battle wasn't going as much in his bodyguard's favor as he had hoped, Valdyr reached to the weapon racks on the walls and took up a massive power hammer. The weapon looked ridiculously oversized in the frail old man's hands, but he wielded it with ease, his frame full of the eldritch power of House Koenigreich. He watched for a few seconds as Gabriel kept trying and failing to hit the flaming fiend, before seeing his opening and leaping into action, calling upon all the Unfettered-given strength of his body to move with lightning speed.
The hammerhead flew, aimed directly at the back of the assassin's black helm. But Valdyr saw the trap too late : the assassin had somehow known about his attack before he had even started to move, and moved out of the hammer's path by the slightest of margins. Valdyr had no time to correct the hammer's course, and it slammed into Gabriel's skull. The power field and strength of the blow obliterated the head of Valdyr's servant, and Valdyr was left wide open for the assassin's counter-attack. A spear of obsidian materialized out of nowhere into its hands, and it rammed the weapon into Valdyr's unarmored chest with enough strength to make him fall backward and pin him to the floor. Horrible pain spread through him as the spear's malign energies began to interfere with the power that kept him alive. Valdyr watched as his killer loomed over him.
'I won't beg,' spat the Patriarch of House Koenigreich.
'Yes,' replied the burning fiend, 'you will. But not to me.'
A descending obsidian claw was the last thing Valdyr saw with mortal eyes, before his soul slipped from his ruined body and into the Empyrean. The Gods he had seen no point in praying to were there, waiting. And the creature had been right : he begged then. But it changed nothing.
The transport touched down on one of Koenigreich Spire's many landing pads, and a figure emerged from it. It was a woman, tall and proud, wearing a purple robe over a black bodyglove. Long black hair fell on her left shoulder – the right side of her head was shaved and inscribed with hexagrammatic tattoos. In her right hand, she held a silver staff covered in thousands of tiny runes of power, all of them glowing with a crimson, baleful light.
Her face was beautiful, but the intensity of her gaze rarely failed to make those who looked upon it uneasy. It was the gaze of one who has witnessed true power, and was no longer impressed by anything lesser. The workers on the landing bay shuddered as she glanced over them. Even the three members of House Koenigreich who had come to welcome her, all of them wielders of their bloodline's terrible strength, felt intimidated at her presence, though they had been the one to call her to their Spire.
She was the witch Merinia, born on Eldur in the Wailing Storm, daughter of the Overlord who had ruled that world with an iron fist until the coming of the Forsaken Sons. Along with her father, she had been part of that world's great conspiracy that had sought to create an army worthy of being taken by the Chaos Marines, and she had been rewarded for her service with knowledge and power that set her above all but a few of the warband's non-Astartes minions. She had fought alongside the mortal armies of the Chaos Marines during her conquest of the Wailing Storm, unleashing her sorcery on a dozen different worlds and rising to a position of fearful leadership among the cults and armies they had amassed. Before the beginning of the Black Crusade, when the separate hosts of the Forsaken Sons had gathered once more, she had been sent to the Unfettered, to assist him both in his research and in managing the planet for which he had been given responsibility.
With the Unfettered spending most of his time aboard the Truthful Gate, having little interest in the day-to-day affairs of Achillus, and the other Forsaken Sons on the ship sharing that lack of interest for mortal dealings, the work had fallen on Merinia. On her arrival, she had needed to incinerate a few nobles before the rest had started taking her seriously, but now, there were none on Achillus who doubted her power or the fact that when she spoke, she did so with the Forsaken Sons' authority.
Behind her came two hulking figures, their muscles bulging beneath their leather armor, their heads covered by mind-jonction units whose controls were directly linked to Merinia's bracelet. They were a gift from the Unfettered, to help keep her safe while she did his work. Unlike most of the Fleshmaster's creations, they were wholly mortal, created for a purpose other than the Unfettered's quest for transcendence.
The trio of Koenigreich nobles knelt as she approached. She glared at them for a few seconds, before saying :
'Tell me what you know.'
As they walked through the corridors of the Spire toward the scene of the battle, the three nobles took it in turn to fill in Merinia about what they already knew. Three hours ago, their Patriarch had received one of his distant subordinates in his office, accompanied as always by his bodyguard. After an hour had passed, one of the servants finally dared to enter the room, bringing a pile of new reports, and had been confronted by a scene of carnage, with both Patriarch Valdyr, his guard and his visitor dead. The servant had rushed out, terrified, and spread the alarm.
The Spire had been put on lockdown and, after several tense moments, the three nobles closest to the Patriarch's position had agreed not to kill each other for the throne yet and first find out who had killed him. They had contacted the Truthful Gate using the emergency codes each House had been entrusted with, asking for help investigating the matter, as none of them felt that anyone the others knew could be trusted with this matter.
In truth, they did not truly believe that one of them was responsible for the Patriarch's demise, for they thought that if such a conspiracy had been able to muster strength enough to kill Valdyr in his own home, its leader would also have arranged matters for his succession to be immediate. Yet as things stood, it would be many days before House Koenigreich chose a new Patriarch – they were the first House of Achillus to lose its leader and survive since Revelation Day.
The three nobles, called Friedrich, Akros and Liefex, were respectively the grandson, nephew and great-great-grandson of the dead Patriarch. Amidst the viper pit of intrigues and competition for status that was House Koenigreich, they were three of the most favoured. Friedrich and Akros were direct lieutenants of Valdyr, entrusted with managing one slice of the House's domain with relatively little oversight.
As for Liefex, he had returned to Heringrad this very morning from the west, where he had led several raids against the holdings of House Etheryn. The youngest member of the trio had risen quickly through the family's hierarchy after Revelation Day, displaying a strategic mind that had served the House well in the battles against the Imperial forces left on Achillus.
They reached the end of a long corridor decorated with thousands of portraits – all the members of House Koenigreich who had ever lived, with some of the paintings being impeccable recreations of those destroyed by the Orks centuries prior. Ahead of them was the elevator that would bring them to the Patriarch's office. The gates opened as soon as the console recognized Liefex's gene-code (the elevators of Spire Koenigreich were reserved for the use of House members, the servants either taking the stairs or the mass conveyors).
Suspended in the center of the elevator's gilded insides by a few scraps of torn cloth was an antique plasma pistol, half-dismantled and with its power cell whirring.
'What the -' said Liefex, before the broken weapon detonated in a ball of star-fire that engulfed him, followed by his kinsmen and Merinia's escorts a fraction of a second later.
Merinia only survived because of the precautions she had taken before descending on Achillus. Just before the wave of superheated air reached her ahead of the actual plasma, one of her ring cracked, releasing the daemon bound within. The formless spirit cloaked itself around the witch, protecting her from the explosion – but not from its breath.
Merinia was sent flying backward almost thirty meters before she managed to stop her momentum with a short incantation and landed gracefully on her feet. She blinked as her guardian daemon released her, the terms of its bounding sending it immediately back to the Sea of Souls now that it had performed its function. She looked around her sharply. No guards were in sight – of course.
Typical of Achillus' nobility, to relegate guards to simply keeping watch over the Spire's entrance and trust their own protection to the power bestowed upon them by the Unfettered. The explosion would have been heard, and someone would be sent to investigate, but with the size of the Spire and the ever-diminishing number of people inhabiting it, she could not rely on reinforcements to keep her safe. She was on her own, which had never been her strongest suit. But life among the Forsaken Sons had hardened her in ways even her life on Eldur, first as a daughter of the Overlord taught by the best sorcerers of the Empire and then as an explorer of the Drachencraft Estate, had not.
She sensed something behind her – a ripple in Achillus' much-tormented aether. She turned, staff raised, the first syllable of an incantation already on her lips, but froze when she saw the figure of black crystal and azure fire standing some twenty meters behind her. Her sorcerous perceptions, expanded to heights she hadn't previously believed possible during her training by her masters in the Coven, recognized the soul within the flames. She had last seen it on Eldur, in the final moments before the arrival of the Forsaken Sons. Back then, she had thought the Chaos Marines to be gods – and while she had learned much about them since then, she still thought she had done the smart thing in joining her father's conspiracy and ensuring that they earned the favor of Lord Arken.
'Aleric ?' she said, keeping her staff aimed at the creature. 'Is that you ?'
'Merinia,' it answered. 'It has been a long time … though much longer for me than for you.'
The voice was indeed that of Aleric – the witch was well familiar with it, for she had been a member of the same party of explorers as the man for many months before all members of that group had died. Back then, Aleric had been the group's leader, and she had followed his lead gladly – until he had refused to accept the inevitable and she had struck him down from behind. Even then, he had been dangerous, willing to use any trick to accomplish his goals. Now …
'What happened to you ?' she asked, her mind whirling as she sought a way out of the situation.
'I have been reforged by the fires of Tzeentch,' replied Aleric. 'When you killed me, my soul was consigned to the Realm of Chaos, but the God of Change chose to spare me dissolution into the Empyrean's tides. Nor was I consigned to the rings of Sortiarius, where the victims of betrayal scream forevermore. Instead, the Great Mutator remade me. He poured the power of His fire into my soul, clad me in armor forged of His own solidified blood, and sent me back into the Materium.'
At the mention of the Architect of Fate's name, Merinia suddenly recognized the symbols inscribed on Aleric's armor. She had seen them used in the rituals of the Coven. They indeed belonged to Tzeentch, and if her interpretation of these particular sigils was correct, they were less a mark of favor and more a brand of ownership.
'Then why are you here ? Have you come to seek revenge ?'
'Revenge was the prize promised to me by the God of Lies.' The flames within the eye sockets of Aleric's helm flickered briefly, as if in reaction to the bitter irony of what he had just said. 'But it is not the sole purpose for which I have been sent to this benighted world.'
'And what "purpose" would that be ?' she pressed on.
If the God of Change had sent one agent set on a course opposed to the Unfettered's one, then there would be more after she defeated Aleric. She needed to know why he was there in the first place, so that she could bring this information to her Astartes masters. The Forsaken Sons had enjoyed the patronage of the Four since their foundation. If that had changed, then they must be informed, lest the treachery of the Gods bring ruin upon them. The Black Crusade was raging across the Azarok Sector with little opposition, and she had been taught that it was always when Chaos was triumphant that the divisions between the Dark Gods manifested in the worst ways possible.
'You do not need to know that, Merinia. All you need to know is that you will die, here and now, and that even your death will be nothing more than a step in the schemes of greater beings. Are you not happy ? I finally embraced the "truth" you talked about after you betrayed me.'
Sorcerous lightning leapt from Merinia's weapon, but Aleric dodged the blow, moving preternaturally fast. As he charged toward her, she twirled her staff and rammed it on the floor, channelling her power through the very stones of Spire Koenigreich.
She shouted a word of power, forcing the infernal language through her teeth, and grasping hands of wood and stone burst from the floor, grasping at Aleric's legs, seeking to pull him down to the ground, where they would tear him apart. He leapt away from them, and Merinia gestured with her left hand, ripping several blocks of stone from the wall and sending them flying at Aleric – tearing a dozen priceless paintings to shreds in the process.
Aleric reached out with his clawed hand, extending one armored finger. The moment it touched the stone, it dissolved into sand, and the reborn spirit emerged from the cloud undamaged, landing on his feet less than ten meters away from Merinia now. She screamed then, shouting words of such power that it burned her mind to speak them. Bloody tears appeared on the skin of her arms and face, and she felt more on the rest of her body.
Merinia was no psyker – she had no innate ability to manipulate the energies of the Warp. Instead, she must use the dark lore accumulated by centuries of experimentation on Eldur, compounded by the knowledge of the Forsaken Sons' Sorcerers. In truth, while she resented the psykers' easy summoning of the Warp's awesome power, she believed that sorcery was and always would be superior. It was both more reliable, and the prerogative of those with the strength of will and intellect to master it, rather than the random product of chance or the whim of the Gods.
It did, however, mean that she had to pay for every spell she cast, and the one she now unleashed on Aleric had a steep price indeed, matching its potency. A wave of crimson lightning leapt from her staff, so large that it filled the entire space of the corridor. The portraits it touched were burned to ash and less than ash, with only one of them remaining unburned – but not unchanged, for the regal figure it had depicted before was now a hideous feathered beastman.
As the storm was about to reach him, Aleric thrust his arms forward, and a barrier of black crystal burst from his hands. When the eldritch lightning struck this obstacle, it detonated in a flash of light so bright Merinia was temporarily blinded. When her vision returned, she was on her back, lying on the ground. She blinked, and realized that she could no longer feel anything beneath her neck. Forcing her eyes down, she saw a massive spike of obsidian piercing her throat, gnashing against her spinal column. She could also glimpse her hands, still holding the pieces of her broken staff.
Blood was flowing from her wound, and she knew that she would be dead soon. Aleric walked toward her, his armor fuming from the conflagration but otherwise seeming none the worse for wear. She tried to speak, but she could say nothing. Yet she thought that Aleric understood her, for he shook his head, just once, before the darkness came in and Merinia of Eldur perished.
'My lord, the transport of Lady Merinia is incoming.'
Raksha the Black-Clawed grunted in response to the crew member's announcement, and turned his gaze on the screen showing the gunship's approach. The Forsaken Son was the only Astartes on the bridge of the Truthful Gate, surrounded by mortals, mutants, and Dark Mechanicum thralls. He despised this duty as much as he understood its importance. There must always be one of Lord Arken's warriors on the bridge, just in case, but he would much rather be down in the ship's dark corridors, hunting the Warp-spawn with his brothers.
The Truthful Gate's infernal denizens were a challenge worthy of a former Son of Horus, and there was much amusement to be found in putting them down – there were never two of the same shape. Jabal, one of the other eight warriors who had been tasked by the Awakened One to accompany the Unfettered and assist him in his designs, liked to keep track of the different kinds of abomination they encountered on the vessel – his book of sketches and descriptions already had several hundreds of them. He was planning to trade it to one of the Coven's warlocks when they reunited with the rest of the warband, though he hadn't told Raksha what he intended to ask for in exchange. The Black-Clawed couldn't imagine what the Sorcerers could possibly want with his brother's scribbles.
They had been in orbit of Achillus for several months now. It was strange to be able to measure the passage of time precisely again, after so long in the Wailing Storm, fighting to bring its worlds under the aegis of the Forsaken Sons. Those had been good times, thought Raksha as he watched the transport of the Unfettered's pet witch finish its approach to the ship's hangar bay.
He had earned his nickname during that crusade, when his right arm had been torn off by one of the daemonic minions of the Sorcerer-Emperors of Nehketos, just before his bolt shell had pulverized its summoner's skull, banishing it back to the Sea of Souls. The hereteks had built him a new arm from the melted blades of the sorcerer's praetorian guard, and it was stronger and more deadly than the old one ever had been. During the battle of Silberstadt, he had used its claws to cut off the head of an Imperial Navy captain after he and his squadmates had fought their way through his ship – the very deed for which they had been bestowed the honor of serving of honor guard to the Chosen. And now, here he was, reduced to watching screens while the rest of the warband prepared to fight the armies of the False Emperor across the rest of the Sector.
He frowned. Something was wrong. The transport was approaching the docking bay's entrance, but it was not slowing down.
'Contact the witch's craft,' he commanded the vox-officer. 'Tell them to slow down at once.'
'They aren't responding our hails, my lord,' replied the mortal.
It took only one second for the Chaos Marine to realize what was going on. Scowling, he opened a direct link to the landing bay's overseer – one of the Unfettered's pets, a half-breed warpspawn called Occris.
'Get ready ! Merinia's transport has been compromised !' he shouted before the creature could say anything. 'You are about to be boarded !'
On the screen, he saw the craft crash-land into the docking bay, skimming on the floor in a shower of sparks and twisted metal. A couple servitors were too slow in getting out of the way, and were obliterated before the wreck came to a stop by slamming into the wall facing the void. Occris and a squad of ten mortal soldiers approached it, weapons raised while coolant fluid was dumped on it to prevent the flames from spreading.
Suddenly, the transport's hatch burst open, and a shapeless mass of fanged, tentacled flesh emerged. It was the size of a Dreadnought, and it shrugged off the las-beams of Occris' squad without appearing to take any damage. The screen didn't have sound, but Raksha could well imagine the screams of terror and pain as the monster leapt onto the squad and began to tear them apart, stuffing the bloody pieces into its mouths. Occris lifted in the air, gathering warp-energy around its hands – and then its head was struck off its shoulders by a bladed tentacles.
Raksha swore violently, and opened a new vox-link to the rest of his battle-brothers.
'Intrusion in the landing bay ! Chaos Spawn ! Get there, contain and suppress !
A brief chorus of affirmative replies told him that his message had been heard – the Forsaken Sons aboard the Truthful Gate were converging to the landing bay. Raksha ached to join them, but his orders were clear – someone had to remain on the bridge. He cursed again as the screen went dark, the wall-embedded servitor that had provided the feed crushed by a thrown piece of meat.
The one time something interesting happened on this watch, and he couldn't even see it.
Aleric closed the hatch behind him, and dropped into the Truthful Gate. After setting the transport on a crash course, he had jumped out of it, arranging his trajectory to take him to the ship's outer hold. Then, it had been easy to find a hatch and force it open. The Truthful Gate's integrity was already compromised in several places, its atmosphere maintained by sorcery more than technology – as long as he closed the hatch behind him quickly, no alarm would be raised.
This was the final step of Aleric's mission, the true purpose behind all the killing he had performed so far. He did not know what would happen to him after he was done, but he did not care. To be more precise, he could not care : Tzeentch's reforging had taken everything from him but his cunning and his desire for vengeance. With Merinia dead, he was now little more than a tool of the Changer of the Ways, an arrow let loose at a specific target. He had to kill the Unfettered.
His ability to hide from sight would not serve him here. The corridors of the Truthful Gate were full of wild Warp-energy and mindless daemons, spawned by the experiments performed on this ship. Suffering and madness permeated every surface, and the echoes of distant screams never faded away. The only reason there weren't worse things stalking the ship was that, according to the memories Aleric had gleaned from Merinia's eyes, the Chaos Marines who followed the Unfettered spent most of their time purging them before they could fully mature.
This was Hell, but unlike the Realm of Chaos from which Aleric had descended, this nightmare had been created by mortal hands. And here, the shadows would not hide him, for there already were others dwelling within them. He would need to get to his target while glowing like a candelabra in a lordling's feasting hall. But he had known that would be the case.
The creatures his warping touch had made from the servitors crewing the transport would ensure that the ship's defenders were focused on the hangar bay, but Aleric needed no precognition to know that this distraction would last long. He ran through the corridors of the Truthful Gate, using the knowledge of the witch to guide his steps. He had been instilled with knowledge of Achillus before being sent to the planet, but that knowledge had been limited, showing him only the first step to the lair of the heretek calling himself the Spider. After that, he had been expected to learn by himself what his path was supposed to be.
In truth, Aleric remembered precious little of the time between his death on Eldur – alone, betrayed and faced with his world's doom – and his arrival on Achillus. He suspected this was deliberate, as well as merciful, in a very practical way. To operate in the mortal universe, he needed to be able to think as he once had, rather than as he dimly remembered having learned to in Tzeentch's realm.
He did remember some things, though even these recollections were muddled, made to fit his now-mortal mind. He remembered fire burning away his flesh, or perhaps his flesh turning to flame. He remembered the black armor being affixed onto him by pink-skinned fiends that never stopped giggling. He remembered being made to kneel before a great well, and commanded to drink a single drop from its swirling waters – no more, they had warned him (though who they had been was lost to him as well). He remembered standing before the Court of Change, and looking up, up, up, at …
At …
His awareness snapped back to the present, his limited mind rebelling at the continuation of that memory. The Truthful Gate wasn't a particularly vast ship, having been built as a medicae center, but it was hundreds of meters long, and the warping of its corridors made it even bigger on the inside. To prevent his thoughts from wandering again as he advanced, Aleric stretched his perceptions, calling upon another gift of the Changing God. That one had been given not because he would need it to accomplish his mission, but because – as far as Aleric could understand it – Tzeentch had found it amusing to do so.
Just like, during his final adventure on Eldur, Aleric's thoughts had been plagued by the whispers of Gerion Drachencraft, so too here could he listen in on the Unfettered now that he was aboard the same ship as the Fleshmaster. That gift hadn't worked on the surface, for it required that he be on the same "planet" as his prey – now, however, he could finally listen. And it turned out that the Unfettered, like many former Apothecaries of the Traitor Legions given free license to exert their darkest imaginings, loved to talk.
'The process of ascension to daemonhood is a slow and gradual one. I have heard of cases where a champion of the Ruinous Powers proved his worth with a single act of dedication and was immediately elevated, but I do not believe these to be more than wishful tales – or, at best, a handful of combinations of coincidences so improbable that my research doesn't need to bother with them.'
Something that had once had a name slithered on the ground. Aleric kicked it, breaking its misshapen head and pulping its brain. Tumorous grey matter spilled onto the floor, and the agent of Tzeentch caught a glimpse of something looking at him in the pattern of gore. His master was keeping one His infinite eyes on him – making sure Aleric played his part in this scheme.
'When one of the Four decides, for whatever reason, to mold one of his followers into a Daemon Prince, the Warp will slowly erode their soul, hollowing it from the inside out, removing a little more of their spiritual essence with every fell deed they commit for their patron's glory.'
He crossed path with a tribe of mutants, huddling together in the dark, clutching crude weapons fashioned from bits of the ship that had fallen off. They stared at him with eyes that had gone blind generations ago, seeing the fire of his soul rather than the black armor or the sapphire flames. Aleric simply walked through the group, and they parted around him. None of them recognized him for the intruder he was – after so long surrounded by monsters, they simply thought him another of their world's predators, and were glad enough that he did not hurt them as the others did.
'These pieces of the champion's soul are gradually consumed by the Empyrean, transformed back into raw, Chaotic soul-stuff that still bears some traces of the original soul. This energy fills the emptiness in the champion's soul, increasing his power as he walks along the Path to Glory.'
He found himself in a looping corridor, endlessly repeating the same hundred meters of metal walls dripping with humidity. It took Aleric nineteen loops before he managed to catch sight of the daemon lurking within the walls, trapping mortals into the loop until they were weakened enough by exhaustion to feed on them. It then took Aleric seven seconds to kill the creature and escape.
'Only through a tremendous effort of will can this energy be kept under control long enough to reach the saturation point, when the mortal soul is little more than a shell around a ball of Warp energy in the vague shape of the entity it has slowly replaced. Cracking that shell is the process in which the last remnants of mortality are thrown away, and a new Daemon Prince rises.'
He passed through a chamber that had once been an hydroponic garden, where fresh food had been grown for the ship's patients that required them. Now it was a forest straight out of an ancient fairytale, full of gnarled trees and pale lights in the distance. Aleric let loose his fire, burning the entire forest to the ground before he left. He fancied that, amidst the sounds of wood burning, he could hear the relieved gasps of released souls.
'Is it truly the same being as the one it originated from ? Who knows ? I believe that there is continuity of consciousness, at least, for the process is gradual enough that the transition from mortal soul to daemonic essence is not a clear-cut one. But in the end, does it really matter ? Such concerns are for philosophers to spend years discussing, without ever arriving at a conclusion. Let the sons of Magnus waste their lives contemplating the answers, while I achieve the impossible.'
The door to the Unfettered's laboratory was unguarded, its only defense a warding circle on the threshold, keeping any Neverborn from crossing it. That struck Aleric as odd, but then he realized that, on this ship, the only creatures that would willingly come to the heart of horror would be the daemons spawned in its depths. No ensouled creature would willingly put themselves close to such evil. None except the Unfettered himself, and Aleric, whose soul was still mortal, and thus immune to these wards. He passed through unopposed, and found himself in a vast chamber. Now, he could hear the Unfettered's voice without using the gift of Tzeentch.
'The Imbued – those I once called the Ascended, blind as I was to their limitations – were my early attempt at replicating the process, by infusing mortal souls with the power of the Warp. But while I had some success, I could not go far enough to reach the saturation point – all my subjects perished long before that, transforming into Chaos Spawns from the uncontrolled energies burning within them. Even those who seemed to have achieved balance could not reach true transcendence, for upon the death of their physical forms their souls dissolved into the Aether, unable to hold onto their power. For a long time, I did not understand why that was.'
It was filled with machines strange and terrible, ancient technology from Humanity's golden age mixed with newfangled creations of the Dark Mechanicum and the Unfettered's own mad genius. Lightning coils were crawling with tethered Warp energy, redirecting it into the engines. Cell cultures were growing within chambers bathed in radiation and raw mutagenic energy. Flayed creatures, only a few of which were recognizable as having once been humans, hung from dissection tables or were locked into stasis fields.
'The members of the Coven that Lord Arken sent to assist me provided the key to finishing my work. Unfortunately, after that I had to send them back to their master. Their psychic minds wouldn't have been able to bear the echoes of what I must do to solve the problem. Ironic, that the only ones capable of bringing about Humanity's apotheosis would be those who lack what is currently the closest equivalent. Perhaps that too was part of the Gods' design.'
All of these had been pushed to the edge of the room, freeing a vast space in its center where a ritual circle had been painted on the floor. More than ten meters in diameter, it had been drawn in blood – the vitae of mortals, Space Marines and daemons mixed together. At its center was a pile of human remains, decayed almost unto bones.
'Now, I believe that I have finally solved the riddle of eternity. All that remain is one last test, and then I shall know whether or not I am correct. If I am wrong, then I shall return to my research, starting from scratch once more. If I am right … well. That is when the real work shall begin.'
And there, standing at the edge of the circle, clad in power armor repainted black and gold, was the Unfettered. He turned to face Aleric as the reforged soul entered, and did not appear surprised.
'So,' said the Unfettered. 'The Gods have finally made their move. I expected you to arrive sooner.'
'You know why I have come. You have abandoned your faith and betrayed the Gods. How unexpected for one of your breed,' remarked Aleric.
'How could I have faith in Gods that I know are real ? It is not faith to follow a creed out of fear of its author's wrath. It is not faith to obey the whims of unfathomable entities in exchange for the promise of special treatment in the afterlife. Faith is doing what is right, what you truly believe must be done ! Faith is about truth, and when Horus fell and we fled into the Warp, I learned the truth,' said the Unfettered, standing tall and proud. 'I saw that the gods will not – cannot – grant Humanity the ascension they promised. Because in the end, for all their divine power, they are the reflection of Mankind's true nature. And humans are cowardly creatures, afraid to embrace their true potential. They will have to be dragged into the light, kicking and screaming, and remade into what they were always meant to be. And it will be my work that brings them here.'
'You would defy the will of the Gods, son of their anointed Arch-Priest ?'
'I no longer bear the Word of Lorgar,' spat the Fleshmaster. 'All of our fathers have failed. I am a Forsaken Son, and I will seek my own path under the banner of Arken ! I will take the gift of immortality from the Pantheon, and with it, I shall forge a legion of Ascended, who will bring down the corrupt Imperium and all those who refuse to cast off the shackles of their existence !'
'You will do no such thing. You will die here, and your schemes will die with you. With your death, I will pay my debt to the Changing God, and take from the Awakened One as he took from my world.'
'Your world ? What do you …' The eyes of the Unfettered widened in sudden understanding. '… I see. A spirit from the conquest of the Wailing Storm, reforged into a tool to stop me … Lorgar was right on one thing at least : the Gods truly have a cruel sense of humor. Then come, spirit,' laughed the Fleshmaster, drawing his weapons in one fluid motion. 'Kill me if you can, but you will find me a stronger opponent that the vermin you have killed thus far !'
Faced at last with the warrior he had come to slay, Aleric opened himself to his precognitive sight. More than his ability to hide from sight, more than the black blades he could conjure out of nothing, more than the flames of Chaos burning within him, it had been this gift from Tzeentch that had allowed him to get this far.
A torrent of images flowed through his mind's eye, and he fought for clarity, barely able to glimpse a few seconds ahead …
he feinted to the left before striking right, leaping with two long black blades in hand, aiming them at the Unfettered's throat, only to be caught mid-leap by a descending chainsword that cut him in two -
he threw a spire of obsidian at his foe, who parried it away with his weapon before firing with his bolter, a single shot that detonated within his helmet and obliterated him -
he jumped right at the chainsword, taking it right through his core before reaching down with one hand and pulling himself free, passing over the Unfettered, turning into the air -
- and he landed on the metal floor, the armor that was all that was solid about him bent and broken. But on the Unfettered's cheek formed a single drop of blood, at the edges of the infinitesimal cut where Aleric's claw had touched the skin. Dozens, hundreds of possibilities, viewed in a fraction of a second, using all the advantages given to him by the God of Change – and this was the best he could do. But it was enough.
The Fleshmaster turned to Aleric, raising a hand to his cheek, smiling at the sight of his would-be killer brought low – but he could not even complete that motion before falling face-first to the ground, his armor clashing against the metal deck. He twitched, and his features contorted in agony for a second before the ability to withstand pain shared by all Space Marines asserted itself. From his position on the ground mere meters away, Aleric saw comprehension dawn in his victim's eyes.
The Chaos Marine laughed weakly, blood spilling from his mouth. His body was breaking apart, the wrath of Tzeentch destroying him from the inside. The gifts of Chaos could most often be survived, especially by Space Marine biology – but the plague of change raging in the Unfettered's genes had been crafted to kill, not bless. Even the Changer of Ways sometimes needed to remove a piece from the board, rather than turn it to his side.
'You are nothing but a pawn of Tzeentch,' he wheezed. 'Do you think the Changing God will reward you for your service ? He will discard you the moment you stop to amuse him.'
'I don't care,' replied Aleric flatly. 'As long as I have my vengeance, I care naught for what fate befalls me. Your master has aligned himself with the Dark Gods' chosen, but like him, he struggles against his leash. He has already taken the first step to return to his rightful path, but still needs to be reminded of his true place in the great scheme of things. And I will take great pleasure in humbling him by bringing his plans for Achillus crashing down.'
'His plans ?' Confusion momentarily replaced pained amusement on the Fleshmaster's face. 'Have Tzeentch's ministrations driven you mad ? Arken gave me this world to do with it as I wished. My reward for helping make it turn to our side. He has no plans for it ...'
It was Aleric's turn to laugh, as he forced himself to his feet, his armor cracking and groaning, his flames sputtering once, twice, before flaring once more.
'For one so learned in your dark arts, you truly know nothing, son of Lorgar. The Awakened One knows all that you have done here, and he counted on someone noticing what you were attempting and coming to stop it – but he didn't think it would be someone like me. Yet there is no need for you to know just how completely you have failed your lord as well as the Gods. Die in ignorance.'
And yet, as the last of the Unfettered's blood spilled onto the ritual lines traced on the deck, the warrior who had sold his name in exchange for surviving the Horus Heresy, who had defied the Gods and sought to create a masterpiece out of unspeakable horror, was still smiling. His soul slipped from his body and into the Empyrean, where it remained nameless, safeguarded from the claws of the Ruinous Powers by the same namelessness that had protected him from Tzeentch's direct wrath and forced the God of Lies to send his reforged pawn to dispose of him instead. His tale ended, his ultimate fate known only to the thing with which he had bargained on the battlefield of a burning world, at the height of the rebellion against the False Emperor.
Aleric turned his burning gaze away from the Astartes' corpse and to the laboratory around him. His target was dead, but there was still the chance that another Fleshmaster would be able to use his research and finish his blasphemous work. That possibility flared in his precognitive mind, showing him the disaster that would follow if Arken gained the ability to transform his mortal followers into Daemon Princes without the intervention of the Dark Gods. This could not be allowed, but just as Tzeentch had intended, all that he needed to do to ensure it never came to pass was destroy this ship and everyone on it – and for one such as he, there were plenty of means to do so. The machines in this room were crackling with Warp energy, barely contained by Dark Mechanicum genius. And while it had taken generations of madmen and the work of decades to build them, any idiot could break them in the most catastrophic way possible, if he just knew where to hit.
He began to move toward the nearest of these machines, but froze halfway to it, before slowly turning around and looking at the ritual circle that covered most of the floor. The runes were glowing were the blood of the Unfettered touched it, and that brilliance was spreading across the lines and unholy symbols, until the whole circle was ignited, shining with baleful light. And in the center of that circle, a hole in the fabric of the universe opened, and a figure stepped through.
It was tall, so tall that it had to bend to fit in a space designed to accommodate an Astartes' bulk. A pair of horns emerged from its temples, curling outward like a ram's. One of its shoulders was crowned by a spike of bone as thick as its arms, ending in a break that had clearly been the result of violence. Its face was a mismatch of scales and fur, with a mouth full of blocky, square teeth, and four eyes that glowed with greenish light.
It wore a cloak of absolute blackness that still could not hide the bulges and deformities of the body beneath. The two hands that emerged from the sleeves each had eight too-long fingers that each bore half a dozen rings and ended in two-sided claws that would have made putting the rings on impossible if this had been a creature of the Materium. But it was no such thing : it was an entity of the Empyrean, materialized into the mortal universe through an effort of will and sorcery.
Though he had never seen that creature before, Aleric recognized the shape of the soul-fire that burned within it, cloaking its essence with shaped Warp-matter.
'Gerion,' the god-forged soul sneered at the immense figure.
'Aleric,' replied the creature.
With surprising gentleness, Gerion turned the Unfettered's body on his back, before closing his eyes and crossing his arms on his chest.
'So. You are his creation. You are the one soul with which he succeeded in his heretical ambitions.'
'I am,' said the usurper of immortality. 'Or so it seems. We weren't certain, not until he broke my neck and my spirit fell into the Empyrean, waiting for him to call me back. Did you know that a daemon's killer can summon them back into the Materium, without needing to wait for the banishment period to be over ? It was one of the truths I learned during my experiments on Eldur. No one else had ever tried summoning a daemon they had personally defeated.'
'You are a monstrosity. A blasphemy against the Gods. Your punishment for this will be legendary, Gerion. When the Gods get their hands on you, they will tear you apart.'
'Do you think so ? And yet, when I was in their Realm moments ago … they did nothing. I saw them, the Four sitting on their thrones, and all they did was watch. I think … I think they were scared. Scared of what the Unfettered had accomplished. Scared that others may discover what he has, in time. You have killed him, but I endure. And eventually, all those who are worthy shall share in my glory. Look upon me, Aleric !' Gerion was roaring now, his voice causing the walls and ceiling to shake. 'I have accomplished that which I could only dream of, as I looked into the Aether from my castle's tower. This is apotheosis ! I am a god !'
And then, faced with this abominable Daemon Prince, his soul-fire leaking from the cracks in his black armor, Aleric finally understood the final scheme of Tzeentch for him. He saw the many reasons for his reforging, the countless goals and purposes behind his sending to Achillus. For one perfect, terrible moment, he witnessed the full scope of Tzeentch's plan for him, from his life on Eldur to this instant, aboard the Truthful Gate, surrounded by forbidden devices and facing a foe he could not hope to defeat, even though he had spent years of his life trying to kill him, back when they had both been mere mortal men, born of the same world trapped in the Wailing Storm.
He laughed, and prepared to die for the second – and hopefully final – time.
AN : IT LIVES !
Sorry once again about the long wait for this story. This chapter went through several inspirations - I actually wrote its general structure while I was playing World of Warcraft for the first time (and probably the last, since I have managed to stop since then). It's taken me months to finish it ... I think that the next chapters of this story are all going to be much shorter, from then on.
This chapter may seem to have come out of nowhere and bear little relation to the rest of the story, but I promise you it is actually relevant. You probably won't see why until a few more chapters, though, which given the rate at which I write this, may take a year or more.
Not much more to say today ... Oh, yes : I am going to focus on the Roboutian Heresy after this, with perhaps a few chapters of the Fifteenth Ascendant before The Hunt for Cypher is done, since that is going to be another big chapter.
As usual, if you liked this chapter or have something else you want to tell me, please leave a review.
Zahariel out.