Anyone who had lived in Gotham City for long enough knew that it was old and cruel. A powder keg always on the verge of ignition.
It went deeper than mundane psychopathy and insanity, however. Unbeknownst to its inhabitants, the city itself was cursed. It had been a nexus of occultism since the 18th century. Satanists, Freemasons, Nephilim worshippers. There had been dark powers at work ever since its inception.
Occultists, serial murderers and torture-addicts, madmen seeking apotheosis.
There were rumors that someone had tried opening a portal to hell, and nearly succeeded.
Now, Gotham's underbelly was inhabited by cultists of a much worse stripe.
No one really knew about them, though, or their true plans. Not even their own members.
Christina Reiss had first met the Children of Liberty in an alley on her way home. After a falling out with Father, she stormed out of St. Paul's. She couldn't bear to see his face again, then or now. She had told herself that she'd done what was best for both of them. It had been in the midst of an especially cruel, cold night. A gang had surrounded her with knives.
She had feared, but her spite came intense enough that she'd wanted it. She'd wanted to live and die at once. To put an end to the pointless suffering and misery of her life.
Then they'd saved her.
It hadn't been Superman, or Batman, or any other hero. Not an overpowered alien or someone with powers or fancy gadgets. Just regular, normal people trying to make their way in a world that didn't care about them.
Christina Reiss didn't know it yet, but she was walking to her death.
She'd been down in the defunct metro a number of times before. At first, it had been an eerie experience for her. After a year or so, she had gotten used to it.
On her first time down, they'd told her the subway station was their shelter from retribution. They weren't criminals, or revolutionaries, not even vigilantes. They were more like a charitable organization, just one kept off the books. No one knew about them; as the city government was flawed at the best of times. More often, they shut down charities for violating obsolete, century-old municipal codes.
To her, naive and bitter at the time, she hadn't questioned any of it.
She had decided then how the Children of Liberty were different.
Daniel had told her that the Children of Liberty had great plans for her. Tonight, he assured, would be the last time she'd enter the deserted subway station.
His words didn't set her nerves off until much later.
"Why are you guys letting me into the sanctum now?" Christina asked him. She breathed in through her nostrils and wrinkled her nose. Even after a year of living there, she couldn't get used to the smell. The air came redolent with the stench of urine, feces and other, worse things. She couldn't put a name on them.
"You weren't ready before, and you are now," he said cryptically. "There's a reason why we brought you here, you know. We recognized that you were a woman of great ability and potential. You can help make this world a better place."
Another soothing balm for her ego; they treated her like she was an adult. Everyone in her life, even the people who cared about her, treated her like a stupid child.
"Tearing down the whole rotten edifice, right?" Christina asked with a small smile. Even the lowliest, most ignorant Gotham citizens knew the city council had its problems. It went deeper than small-time criminals. Putting away even supervillains didn't do anything more than strike at the symptom, rather than the source.
The whole city, the whole country, in fact, was rotten. The Justice League wasn't willing to get at the source of the rot. Somebody would have to.
"That's right," Daniel beamed at her. In the pitch-black, she imagined the brightness in his dark, flinty eyes. "You always caught on quickly. That's why I like you. That's why he likes you. Idealism is all well and good, but it's not enough on its own. We need revolutionaries. People who are willing to get their hands dirty and make sacrifices. "
They walked deeper into the deserted metro. Christina knew the sanctum was close. A sense of finality, a purity of purpose washed over. Entering the sanctum was the highest honor for the Children of Liberty. She'd never seen anyone return from out of it, though. It should have given her pause, but the thought of entering into it had long been on her mind.
"Lord Drach will be very happy to meet you," Daniel went on. "He's always had a thing for optimistic souls."
Daniel had always mentioned a Lord Drach, ever since she met him. He had been elusive as to exactly who Lord Drach was. She knew it to be an abbreviation; for a much longer name that she had only heard him pronounce once. Trying to recall the full pronunciation always failed; the memory greasily slipped from her mind, for reasons that still eluded her.
"Maybe another mile left," Daniel commented.
Around thirty minutes before then, all hope of contact with the world above had passed. Nothing explicit jumped out at her as being suspicious or eerie. Her long-suppressed survival instincts began to scream at her. Christina struggled to keep sweat from breaking out on her skin as she glanced around.
It felt like the night that she was in the alley. Like when she was in her old foster home and when her stepfather walked into her room. Her nails dug into her palm and she
Nothing still, but the anxiety persisted. Like a maddening itch that got worse the more she tried to ignore it. Christina refused to let her inner turmoil show on her face.
To her befuddlement, Daniel seemed disappointed. "Something wrong?" Christina asked him. She was impressed by the steadiness of her voice.
"Not really," he said with his wry smile. "Just thought you'd be more uneasy. Most people are shaking in their boots when they're about to enter the sanctum. I'm impressed. You're made of sterner stuff than most."
Something about his smile seemed forced.
It was only as she proceeded further that she began to have tangible doubts. Christina stumbled over something. "Is that a skull?" she asked in mild disbelief.
Daniel didn't answer her. He placed a hand on her upper back and pressed her forward. "Don't worry about it," he muttered. His veneer of polite camaraderie vanished. "Just keep moving forward."
The air took on a peculiar, heavy greasiness. She was no stranger to being in dark places. Gotham was a hotbed of smog and grease even in its wealthier areas. The metro had a different quality to it though.
Christina realized it wasn't the air. Something about time and space itself felt off. Her watch had wound backwards by a half hour.
Christina stopped and held her stomach. She did her best not to hurl. Something hard and pointy, metallic, slammed into her back. She gasped in pain and shock, stumbling forward. She shot a glance behind her.
Soldiers. She hadn't noticed them before. She wanted to think of them as gangsters, or thugs, but something about their bearing stood out. They marched in lockstep, carrying weapons of a marque she didn't recognize. Whatever they were, it wasn't anything the GCPD's rank-and-file had access to.
"Almost there, Chris," Daniel assured her.
After a mile or more of winding tunnels and apparent dead ends, they were there. The nauseating sensation of real, genuine evil grew worse.
Daniel had talked about the Sanctum in the most glowing language. His words had made her imagine some kind of holy place. A church with an altar behind a veil.
Christina remembered the homeless in Coventry that the Children of Liberty had encountered. They had been comforted and helped, but she had never seen them again.
She recognized the old woman with the beanie and the cat. They had ended up down here, and they were all dead. From the expressions on their frozen, rictus-rigid faces, their deaths written on their faces. It hadn't been quick or painless.
Christina stopped walking. The door beckoned her forward. Doom and damnation in equal order. The soldiers shoved her inside, and her senses were drowned in unspeakable evil. Christina had been warned about people like them. She hadn't listened, and was paying the price.
In the cold, blood-thick air, she prepared to die.
She had realized she had chosen the forces of evil, and she had realized too late.
"Take em' off," Daniel spat down at her. He looked at her, not with lust but with an intent far more terrible. She refused to, standing stock-still and could not move. He scowled and pulled out a dagger. It was small, black and flinty. The odd-looking dagger was a primitive eyesore, outdated and out-of-place. It belonged in a backwoods, savage tribesman, not with trained soldiers.
Christina didn't move. He slashed at her clothes with the knife. She felt no resistance, no tearing of fabric. Her hoodie came apart, along with the shirt underneath it. The material seemed to tear without the faintest sound of shredding. The molecules had parted of their own accord, dividing with no sound or effort.
She stared at the vile-looking black rock. Maybe it was all some terrible dream. If she just closed her eyes for long enough and screamed at the top of her lungs, maybe she'd wake up to the priest that she'd abandoned out of spite.
"Remember when you said you were ready to give up everything?" Daniel asked her. His eyes shined with the mad idealism of well-intentioned tyrants. "This is the moment of truth, friend."
"You don't have to do this," she muttered. Her voice was louder than she had expected it to be. If she was going to die, what was the point of being timid and afraid of him?
"We didn't have to save you in the alley, either, now did we?" Daniel retorted. "The old man didn't have to take you in either. For what little good that did you, I mean."
'How long has he been watching me?' she wondered.
Looking around, Christina saw that there were others who had come before her. Their clothing was varied; some of them were rags and others pricy and well-tailored. Whether they started in wealth or poverty, they were equal in the awful death they had suffered. Mud, blood and worse things stained their apparel.
"I thought you were revolutionaries."
"We are revolutionaries, Chris, I wasn't lying to you!" Daniel sounded genuinely offended. The sincerity of his voice made her sick to her stomach. "We're changing this world, tearing down the old powers that got us into this mess. One step at a time."
Christina thrashed against the bonds. The chains were rusted and dug into her naked skin. There had been other people before her. The altar swam with their blood and guts. From the looks of it, the Children of Liberty had taken their time in killing them. She wondered if they'd been seduced step-by-step, or forcibly abducted.
"Fuck you!" she spat.
It was the first time she'd cursed in her life, to someone else's face.
"The things done in this world reflect in the place beyond. The more virtuous the good, a shadow is cast. A permanent one." Daniel held the blade up so that its edge faced his eyes. The light melted into its surface like it was an event horizon. The air and fabric of space-time seemed to warp around the weapon. "Like the death of innocence."
Her eyes hurt looking at the knife, and she averted her gaze.
Had all of it just been some sort of psyop? With a mixture of dread and hate, Christina began to realize that it had been. A government honeypot to draw her into an abominable sacrifice. "Rot in hell, you piece of shit."
"That's what I'm looking for!" Daniel called out to her with a wide grin. "That slow descent from naive idealism into hate, and despair. The taste of murdered dreams and hopes. Hate me Christina! Hate the foul injustice of it!"
Her hope wasn't gone quite yet. Christina looked up at the ceiling. The chains, rough and rusted, drew blood from her skin. The altar swallowed up the precious little droplets that the metal squeezed from her. She bit her lip, looking up at the ceiling and trying to ignore the knife inching closer towards her.
"Help me Batman," she murmured. Her voice was almost silent. Most of the cultists didn't notice. Those who did, nodded approvingly. She guessed that unwilling sacrifices seemed to please them more than if they were voluntary. They were especially slow in killing her, for some reason.
Batman, of course, didn't hear her. If he did, he couldn't help her.
Finally, she prayed. It had been a long time since she'd done so. They'd told her about powers who cared, and intervened in the world. Not like her own distant, uncaring Lord. Christina knew now how stupid she'd been. She had deserved to be forsaken, with how easily she had become an apostate.
A distant, rational part of Christina accepted her fate, and waited for the blade to come down.
That larger, desperate side of her didn't stop pleading. For human beings, it was as natural as breathing to cry out against fate.
"Someone help me," she begged, tears streaming down her face. Daniel hadn't brought the knife down yet. He waited for her anguish and despair to reach a fever pitch before plunging it into her naked flesh.
The rest of the sacrifices were still on the point between life and death as they bled out. The air bent and shuddered like the metro endured some terrible heat wave.
A sound from the other end. She made out the tinny sound of a panicked voice, coming from Daniel's earpiece.
"No," Daniel's eyes widened. "A corpse-watcher is here? Now?!" A ripple of fear ran through the assembled soldiery. Their attention shifted from Christina towards the sanctum's entrance. The long-winding path towards the altar had been mile after mile after mile. Police teams would have floundered, even the best-equipped and most well-experienced. It hadn't just been the scent-erasures, the covering of their steps and the sanitizing. Something supernatural had been going on. Mortal eyes just weren't able to find them.
It would be virtually impossible to get to the Sanctum, if they had thought to look in the first place.
Almost impossible, but not quite.
They weren't dealing with mortal eyes, or ears, or noses.
The men who had been about to murder her were afraid. Christina didn't know who or what exactly it was that they were afraid of. She relished seeing their horror and despair.
"It is not time!" He turned and muttered, "Lord Dra-" he turned away - "is not prepared to enter this plane yet," He said his lord's full and terrible name this time, but she couldn't parse it. Everything was happening too quickly for her to register it. Her heart filled with delight upon seeing his look of dread and terror. She considered mouthing off, but decided against it. Her gloating could wait for when the monsters were already dealt with.
"The break is sealing," one of the soldiers gibbered. "Finish it now!"
One last murder had come before her. Daniel drove the knife towards her naked chest. She should have died, but vengeance came in black and gold. She saw it for a split-second; glowing crimson eyes and a mane of black horse hair. The thing smashed into the altar, pulverizing the blood-slick stone. The impact sent Christina flying into the wall, the breath driven from her lungs. Her skin stung from the wounds the chain had made, but the pain was worthwhile.
She had the privilege of watching it wreak annihilation on her captors.
Christina guessed that about a hundred armed men occupied the room. A hundred more had guarded the approach to the Sanctum. They flooded into the unholy of unholies. With contemptuous ease, he unmade them. Bones crunched as they flew into the wall. Grunts and cries of pain and fear.
The air sizzled and crackled with weapons discharge. None of them hit, but even if they had, she suspected it would have been ineffectual. She saw a man flying across the room, slamming against a wall and not getting up again.
She should have been horrified.
Instead, she wept tears of joy.
The golden giant halted in place. The whole ordeal could have taken a second, a minute, longer; she couldn't tell. His glowing, blood-red visor focused on the vile pulpit. There was no sign of hate, or satiated bloodlust or passion. At best, a muted sense of satisfaction at a duty fulfilled.
She wiped the wetness from her face. "Why didn't you kill them?" Christina rasped out. To her disappointment, he turned from them. She stumbled towards him with no thought given towards her nakedness. Confusion and irritation swept through her. She wanted to see Daniel and his goons be crushed under the giant's golden heel. Annihilated, and painfully.
It faced the altar still. "It seems like a simple solution, does it not?" he responded. Her savior's voice was soft, gentle, quiet, but masculine. His speartip ignited, dancing with thunder that hurt to look at. "To match blood with blood, steel with steel, killing with killing." His enormous gold armor was a gilded cage, to contain something marvelous and terrible.
Its whole body seemed to be built for murder. Yet so at odds with the way it spoke. "So many of the plagues of the human condition would seem to vanish at a blade's edge. If only it were so easy."
She could not hear what he said next. Something quiet and breathy. Almost exasperated.
"If only the daemons of the human psyche could be killed with the edge of a blade," he breathed. "There is only one way of dealing with these ones, however," Valerian said. He raised his spear and advanced.
Christina watched the ruined altar. Above its apex the air still rippled and bulged, like a hand pressing from behind a curtain. Not quite a face, but the suggestion of one. That slight shadow of a glimpse was the most awful thing she'd seen in her entire life. Nausea rose in her stomach once more. Every time she shut her eyes she saw it more clearly.
The golden giant stepped forward, tensing himself. Letters glowed; runes on his armor swam with strange light; written in tongues that had gone unspoken for millennia. It seemed as though the awful apparition spoke something to him. Christina didn't know what the words meant, and she didn't want to know.
"She is not yours to take," he said, his cloak rippling as he drew closer. The swirl of gold and black blotted out her view of it.
The spear came down, and the nightmare ended. A horrible scream.
He turned to face her, and a small part of Christina wished she had died on the altar. The scrutiny was fixed on her.
Valerian observed the young woman. Her clothes were torn apart, and she looked up at him with naked fear. She had been about to be sacrificed. Against her will, he assumed, but he could not be completely sure. He had not gleaned enough information on her whereabouts over the last year.
Had she joined them with the full knowledge of what that had entailed?
He had seen the grisly pictures firsthand, but he doubted it. There were many more paths from light to darkness than darkness to light. The Milky Way was a tempestuous place. The truly debauched of spiritual traitors, who had embarked on every step into darkness knowingly, never bore their necks to his blade. When the Throneworld had been falling apart, he had been confronted with men and women who had fallen through simple starvation and desperation; more than any sense of great, inherent moral decay.
For a split-second, Valerian pondered the unthinkable.
What if the Throne had fallen to the Great Enemy?
The blasphemous thought sank beneath his psychospiritual conditioning. He returned his full attention to his target.
The girl looked at the corpses and the unconscious bodies. Her face twisted into something almost bestial. With a distant sense of curiosity, he wondered what it would be like to be mortal. He imagined he would feel some sense of kindred sorrow. A sense of camaraderie and sympathy. Or, seeing her nudity, a dark, primal urge; the rush of dopamine. The ravenous hunger that reduced men to beasts.
He felt nothing at all, besides the He took hold of her chin and tilted it upwards.
"Why did you do this?" he asked.
The girl stared up at him. She didn't respond.
"Surely even you understand the gravity of what you have done?"
Still nothing.
"According to the Lex Imperialis, and your own faith, you are a traitor," Valerian said. "Why should I spare you?"
It was a rhetorical question, but she didn't know that.
The girl averted her gaze. "I… you shouldn't spare me. Not after what I've done." She shut her eyes. "Just make it quick, ok?"
Valerian scrutinized her. That she hadn't voided her bladder or fainted In her weakness and idiocy, she had found the courage and strength not to beg for mercy. Mortals would never cease to both irritate and intrigue him. Their duality; the human soul's capacity for endless valor and bottomless cowardice.
He released his grip. She blinked.
"I am not fond of killing fools and weaklings," he said, scrutinizing her. "Not even traitorous ones." Valerian could have shattered her spine with the slightest twist. He thought of the crowd of rioters he had cowed on Terra. "You are coming with me."
"Why?"
"You were in their midst for quite some time," Valerian said. "A year, no? These are my enemies and my prey. I need information."
"And I thought you were an altruist, here to save a helpless girl," Christina smiled. She then crossed her arms around her chest.
"The two are not mutually exclusive," Valerian said. He handed her his cloak. Putting it on would be like wearing a car cover. He did not
"Thanks," she mumbled, drawing the cloth about herself. Despite the destitute state of the underbelly of Gotham, he somehow seemed immaculate.
"Atoning for your treason will not be painless," Valerian said. "In time, you may have preferred for me to end you here. Healing the damage done to your soul will be even worse. You may never fully recover."
"I know," she murmured.
In truth, Valerian never planned to kill any of them. Not yet, at least. Their bodies had already been shattered beyond any hope of true recovery. The altar was slick with already-spilt blood. He imagined, behind the veil, the Neverborn howling in frustration.
He was young for a Custodian, barely two centuries old. He still had a great deal of experience with the Great Enemy. Khornate daemons were empowered by any kind of carnage and slaughter. He was no psyker. He could not feel the weft of the Empyrean as they did. He could not feel how the powers inside it whispered into the minds of men. Stoking their fears, exaggerating their faults, corrupting their virtues.
Then again, he didn't need to be a psyker to see they'd been about to wreak something awful.
He cast a brief glance at the destruction he had wrought.
A small number of the more martially-minded of his brethren considered him a fool. Too soft. Mortal inquisitors and commissars would likely view him as a heretic, if not for his status. The galaxy, many said, was a festering, backwards place. If there had ever been a time for restraint, it had passed millennia ago.
Valerian disagreed, and had done so for the last century. Yet, even to his more genteel, antique sensibilities; borne from a bygone age, the Justice League seemed peculiar. Their stubborn refusal to put their enemies down once seemed to be a great hindrance to him. He understood they didn't consider themselves, as an organization, to be a legal judge, jury and executioner.
Naive they might have been, but he had seen them fight. He did not have any delusions of grandeur as to his martial prowess. In a straight fight, he would not win. The last thing he wanted was to end up in their crosshairs.
If the encounter with Batman was any indication, he already was. He supposed they had their own troubles and crises to deal with, and he had fallen beneath their radar.
"You haven't killed them," Christina observed.
Valerian strode further from the horrid sanctum. The sense of space-time being stretched, on the verge of being rent, began to fade. He nodded, drawing the knife. The place was almost right. A little further and the immaterial bulge into realspace would not be so severe. Enough for him to utilize the athame safely.
He had been forced to use one in the Dark Cells, once. He knew the old history that was otherwise lost to the Imperium writ large. Apart from that one knife secured deep in Terra's crust, he knew of no others besides the ones utilized by a handful of traitors.
"They are already dead in spirit," he said.
When dealing with the Great Enemy, there came a certain urge to stab and slay; to rip and tear without restraint. Dealing with the cosmic embodiment of evil, he found the reaction to be understandable. But daemons cared not where the blood flowed, or how; only that it did. The great tragedy, as he had learned a long time ago, was that the daemons would always accompany mankind.
For now, though, their obscene ritual would remain incomplete.
Valerian suspected that the man who had abducted Christina was not the leader. The question remained. Who was the great overseer behind it all?
He looked down at the mortal again. There were no visible brands or tattoos that one might find on a Chaos cultist. No sigils of Khorne, or Slaanesh, or Nurgle or Tzeentch. She trembled beneath his scrutiny with a mixture of fear, rage and intrigue.
Barring Titan's knights and the Anathema Psykana, his own kind were their worst enemies. With emotions dulled and cauterized, the passions replaced with slavish devotion to duty; they were not quite anathema to the Neverborn, still a forerunner to what mankind was meant to be. Master of their emotions, and not the slaves of their passions.
"Most are far less subtle than this," Valerian commented. "Though my world's peoples tend to be more downtrodden. When evil spits in your face from birth to grave, order and chaos don't seem terribly different."
"You aren't killing them?" she demanded furiously.
He stopped. "I will, but not now. Think of a pustule or bubo, filled with diseased fluids. The foulness within the pustule seeks to burst through the barrier of the skin, and infect the healthy body beneath. That is essentially what these traitors have attempted to do. That thing you saw beyond the veil, it is attracted by death. Murder, in particular. They will receive their just recompense for their treason against mankind, but not here." He paused. "Besides, they are never going to walk again, or move their limbs. And paramedics will take far, far too long to get here in time. Even if they live, they will wish they had not. And they will not live."
"You'll kill them somewhere else?"
Valerian raised the black knife he had taken from Daniel, scrutinizing it. "Yes. Somewhere far from here."
"Are you gonna make it hurt?"
"No more than is necessary," he looked down at her again. She felt like an amoeba under a microscope. "That blade," he held up the foul black knife to her, "where did he get it from?"
"He told me that he found it while he was on the streets," she said. "That was what led him to start the Children of Liberty. I don't know how much of that is real and how much is made up, though."
"It would not surprise me," he said. He stowed the athame in a module of his armor. "This is a terrible weapon. And a rare one." It could not have been
"I think you should put them out of their misery," she muttered.
"You are naive," Valerian said. "You think that death is the end of all things. Or, at least, that it is the worst fate that one can suffer. I assure you that is not the case. Something much worse awaits your captors on the other side of the veil."
The golden giant walked in near-perfect silence, his stride measured and graceful.
"Intentionally or not, you have committed high treason against the human race," Valerian went on. "The closest spiritual analogue would be your blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Where I come from, you would have been executed, slowly and painfully. Preceded by a session of torture lasting many days, worse than anything you can imagine."
His voice soothed her, despite the gravity of his words. "So why aren't you doing that right now?"
"There comes a certain zeal when dealing with the Enemy. An urge to rip and tear, until everything is done."
Christina took a closer look at his armor. Bereft of the cloak, she saw the odd blemishes that had begun to pile up. She tripped over a jutting piece of rubble she was unable to see. Her legs collapsed beneath her. The voluminous black cloak was soiled with dust and filth. "Sorry," she mumbled.
He knelt, picking her up. "You are weak, and you have endured much. It is to be expected."
"Are we out now?" she asked softly, her eyes closed.
"In a few steps, we will be. I am not fluent in the use of this blade," he scrutinized the Athame again. Horrid voices whispered at the edges of his mind. He ignored them, but they persisted still. It was no wonder the man had fallen so quickly.
"Did you enjoy it?"
"Make no mistake, I do not enjoy this work. I despise it." In as much as he was capable of the emotion. Some of the splinter cults were composed of the mentally ill and the starving. Veterans who had been spat upon by their government. Minds destroyed by the horrors of war, psyches shattered by abusive childhoods.
Over his life, Valerian had learned a great deal about mortal man. He'd had to. Bolter and spear only went so far. Behind it all, he suspected, was some great overmind; a more calculating and cynical soul than all the rest. One who had fostered the discontent that lurked in the underbelly of every society.
That was how it had been on Terra. Even when the Imperium cared about its lowly masses, it was not all-powerful. The Month of Blindness had slackened the myth of Imperial omnipotence; and with it, many of its citizens' loyalty. It was not hard to see how the same could occur here; bitterness and despondency mixed with idealism into a terrible brew.
"I despite it, for it carries the reek of failure, weakness, vanquished potential," Valerian went on.
Even psychic ascension would not be enough for mankind. It had not been enough for the Aeldari Empire, who had lived like gods at their apex.
Humanity would have to master the darkness inside their own souls. Valerian did not hate mortals as he once had, but he knew that it would take a long, harrowing time, if it happened at all.
"Why didn't you kill them?"
"They are broken, and will die without medical attention," Valerian said. "Their death warrants are sealed, remember that. I will be going back for them, and it will be to administer a mercy that they do not deserve."
"Where are you taking me?"
"To your forsaken priest," Valerian said. "He and I have come to… an agreement. No one else will know what has happened here." The cloak he had given her fluttered in the midnight breeze. "My hunt for the traitors will not involve this world's authorities more than absolutely necessary. No one shall know I was here."
Christina almost asked him what he would be without them. She thought better of it.
Christina kissed the golden laurel engraved on the front of his breastplate.
"The Justice League might not consider you a hero. But I do."
He stiffened.
"And if there's any way that I can repay you…"
The tone of her voice took on a tone that was deeper, more confident, sultry. It was not an offer he had ever received before. He was used to fear and terror mixed with piety; or spite and hatred. Not this.
"It is not necessary," he said. Mortals would never cease to astonish him. "We are here." The rectory was now in front of them both.
"I remember the name now," Christina said before he left. The horrible name swelled up on her lips, like its owner desperately wanted to be heard. She didn't want to say it, but her lips began to move of their own accord, like something was controlling her. Her eyes were wide, and she feared to speak the name. "The Echo of the First Murder, the End of Empires. The Emperor's End…"
"Drach'nyen."
REALLY Long AN:
My writing has an unfortunate tendency to be overly opaque. Concepts that seem to be clearly expressed when I read what I've written sometimes just don't really shine through the way I want, as a result of my limitations I'm unfortunately quite a thin-skinned and egotistical fellow, even towards constructive criticism, and people who are just giving their honest opinion, even if they're 100% correct.
Like with everything in a franchise as canon-agnostic as Warhammer, there is basically a spectrum on which Custodes characters rest. On one side is a biological machine with little to no humanity; on the other is a character who is fairly humane.
These two quotes from the pov of a Custodian in Valdor: Birth of the Imperium basically sum up the subhuman/flesh automaton view that I'm trying to aim for:
"If he had been capable of arrogance, he might have revelled in the results. As it was, he had not had a single arrogant thought since the dawn of his new life-state. He had never taken pleasure in his capability, nor his equipment, only a kind of blunt satisfaction when an obstacle was removed, or an order followed, or a threat despatched. And yet, there were half-memories – dim ones, like snuffed candles – of the time before. He almost remembered what it was like to dream his own dreams, or to feel the hot spikes of jealousy, rage or avarice. They had become intellectual constructs, those emotions, but still they were far from unintelligible. In rare moments of introspection, he found himself wondering how much he had lost in order to gain the powers he had, and whether the bargain was one he would ever have made himself, given the choice. Such thoughts did not last long. Every fibre of his being was set against them. Within moments, the obsessions would crowd in again, and he would attend to his fine armour, and attend to the mastery of his superb weapons, and attend to the condition of his already superlative body."
"'I lived, captain-general,' Ushotan rasped, 'It was short, and it was painful, but by the nine hells, I lived. I'd rather have it this way than yours - no joy, no hate, no fear. Unbreakable without growth, immortal without passion.'
…
'What is left for you, Constantin?' Ushotan breathed, blood bubbling up between his burned lips. 'What more can He take from you that He hasn't already?'
Valdor drew in a long breath, then plunged the knife in, ending the primarch's agony. For a moment he did nothing else, his head bowed, the storm exhausting itself around him and coating the land in a film of pale, drifting grey.
Then, slowly, he withdrew the blade.
'Nothing,' he said, very softly.
'Nothing at all.'"
And this excerpt from Magisterium by Chris Wraight:
"'Both of them invoked Magisterium, Dorn and Russ,' Valdor said. 'They think of that as the exercise of power. I do not blame them - they are creatures of power, built to dominate. But they are wrong. The term is older than that. It is the interpretation of the truth, discovered through the communion with the source. We are interpreters of it, not masters. We are slaves to it.'"
I do apologize for some rather ambiguous wording on my part; in my headcanon the Adeptus Custodes don't consider their service to the Emperor slavery. This is because slavery implies the subjugation of an autonomous agent that possesses free will, and the Custodes are not autonomous agents with free will, and they recognize this. The Custodes are also not "followers of religion" any more than an atheist or agnostic or deist, or what have you, studying paleo-Christianity or early Islam is a Christian or a Muslim.
In my unflattering view, they are essentially high-functioning servitors. To be a Custodes is to be no longer a man, but to become a machine in post human skin. Really post human molecules. They're so thoroughly remade that they can't meaningfully be called human.
There is, of course, something of the man left over. I'll try to expand on this idea later on, though I can't guarantee that it will be done well.
In the Horus Heresy short story Unmarked, by Dan Abnett (collected in the Mark of Calth anthology), we have the perpetual Ollanius Persson, a Catheric (Catholic in the far future? Some sort of generic Christian? We don't really know for sure, but probably a Catholic) describes how he had belief in a higher power all the way from his youth. And that in 'the age of Faith' (aka before the great Crusade), faith was what kept the daemons out.
Isha, Khaine, Asurmen, etc. protected the Eldar for tens of millions of years before the modern setting.
And we have another example in War of Secrets where the faith of the Gue'Vesa creates a warp god that helps the 4th Sphere Fleet escape the Warp.
Und so weiter, und so weiter.
Since the Custodes in M.41 do know a good bit more about Chaos than their M.31 counterparts, I do think that they would recognize this as well. They would certainly view it as distasteful, but be pragmatic enough to understand that religion has been a weapon against Chaos from the beginning of humanity (though it has also been subverted by them a lot). It is possible (though this is just my headcanon) that they would have some sort of written confirmation of this somewhere in their archives. This is of course, just my headcanon; and the Eldar's own religion(s) were able to protect them from the depredations of Chaos for tens of millions of years.
I reiterate, the Custodes are not followers of any religion and never will be, because that would be a betrayal of the Imperial Truth. The inner monologue saying that even if the priest convinced him that his religion was true, wouldn't stop the Custodian from hewing him down if the Emperor so ordered, isn't to show that the Custodian would be willing to convert. It's to show that truth doesn't ultimately matter, nor is its discovery the purpose of the Custodian's existence. It's the Emperor's will that is his purpose.
I was trying for the dynamic to be a more respectful version of that between Empz and Uriah. One that's also less juvenile and more nuanced. Whether I succeeded, I don't know. I may have bitten off more than I can chew.
No Custodian would ever join the Imperial Cult, or become a Christian, or Muslim, whatever. Even if they somehow became intellectually convinced that that religion was true. Even if the parousia happened before their eyes and heaven was opening above and hell below. That doesn't mean that they are opposed to studying it from a non-theistic, academic standpoint.
To reiterate my previous statement, the Custodes, while finding philosophy an interesting pastime, don't consider it their ultimate purpose. Finding out what truth is, doesn't matter, love of wisdom doesn't matter. It's serving the Emperor, all the way to a fault and into the pits of hell. If he tells them that truth is falsehood and falsehood is truth, truth is falsehood and falsehood is truth. If he tells them he is divine and deserves their unceasing worship, they will give him unceasing worship. If he tells them to eat newborn babies alive while laughing at the top of their lungs, they'll do it, and enjoy it if he tells them to.
Slave isn't really an adequate word to describe that sort of condition. Slavery is coercive and involuntary. The state of being a Custodian is something below even that.
Which is why I like to have the DC characters being horrified at his existence. Because despite being beautiful and pleasant on the outside, and generally quite nice for a 40k character, he is in a sense an abomination worse than any Doomsday, or vat-grown Ultiman. At the heart of his being is an infant that never even had the chance to be human. Not a zealous Inquisitor or Kriegsman who goes 'fuck you xenos!' every chance he gets, but grisly in his own right.
Also, as one guest reviewer noted, the story title is 'Broken Shield'. I do plan on having the MC pretty much getting psychologically crushed/devastated, forever losing what/who he truly cares about and what/who gives him purpose.
As always, the attention this fic has gotten really blows my mind. I appreciate the following, faves and especially the reviews, even the critical and negative ones. Because I know you guys care about good characterization, and faithfulness to canon, even though GW itself doesn't give two shits about it.
Until next time.