I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.
Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex.
Diomedes didn't know how many times he had died.
In truth, he wasn't sure any of those deaths were real. They certainly felt real, but he refused to accept that his captors had the power to keep resurrecting him, over and over again. One of the first things he had learned where the Warp was concerned was that nothing could be trusted, and though the Laers seemed to be material, he had seen the infernal fire in their reptilian eyes.
Whether they were or not, however, he feared those moments between apparent deaths and resurrections far more than the torments waiting for him in the world of flesh. He saw things then, things that he remembered all too clearly when he returned. His tormentors delighted in showing him the consequences of his failure. In that state, he walked the corridors of the fortress-monastery on Chemos, seeing the corpses of his brothers. There were so many of them – hundreds, thousands, their bodies broken and defiled. The pain of his body was as nothing compared to the grief he felt when he saw so many of his brothers fallen.
He had tried to estimate how many Emperor's Children had died in battle against the Black Legion, his warrior's training refusing to let grief completely drown his tactical analysis. His calculations were imprecise, owing to the dream-like nature of his visions and the constant fog of pain and sorrow afflicting him, but he thought somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousands had perished in the fortress alone. Half the Third Legion at least, lost to the Arch-Renegade's evil. Their relics and treasures, plundered by the greedy hands of the bastard Legion. Their stores of gene-seed, emptied by the Consortium. They had taken the past and future of the Emperor's Children, even as they butchered their present.
At least the people had survived. He knew they had, because surely his tormentors would have showed them to him if the Black Legion had got to them. His brothers had sacrificed themselves to save them, as was their duty, their oath. And they had reapt a heavy toll on the enemy : the bodies of tens of thousands of Black Legion thralls laid in the corridors, abandoned where they had fallen by their callous comrades once they had been stripped of anything of value.
Diomedes tried to take comfort in that. He did not succeed.
He still had hope, though. His enemies didn't understand what it meant to be a son of Fulgrim. The Third Legion had been broken before, brought to the very brink of extinction, but they had returned. Diomedes didn't know how many Legionaries the Emperor's Children had had in their ranks before the disaster, but he knew that there had been more than those he saw dead on Chemos. And though the loss of the gene-labs and progenoids in the fortress-monastery was a devastating blow, the Emperor's Children had long since taken measures against precisely such an event, keeping small caches of gene-seed aboard individual ships, just in case the shadow of extinction should threaten them again. Those aboard the Pride of the Emperor were probably lost, but the others would be enough to rebuild the Legion, in time.
Those were the thoughts Diomedes clung to whenever despair threatened to overwhelm him in the moments immediately after he woke back in his cell, before his tormentor reappeared to continue his torture. Every time, they gave him the strength to pull at his restraints, ignoring the pain in his muscles and the chaffing where the metal met his flesh, now skinless from all the friction.
And finally, this time, it was the metal that broke. The circle around Diomedes' left wrist broke, the chain connected to it clanging to the wall. For a moment, it was all Diomedes could do to blink, his pain-addled brain unsure what to do next. Then his training kicked in, and he used his free hand to give himself leverage and free the other, falling to the ground. Ignoring the pain of the fall and that of his many, many wounds, he freed his feet as well, and slowly began to walk forward, past the circle of candles (picking one up in passing) and in the direction where his tormentor always came from.
He did not know how long he walked through the darkness, with only the flickering candle to illuminate his surroundings, but eventually he saw a light in the distance – an archway, an exit to his prison. He passed through, and found himself on a platform, about five meters wide and clinging to the side of a deep, hexagonal hole. He could see entrances to other cells, six on each side of the hexagon, all surrounded by runes that glowed with the power this place extracted from the suffering of the imprisoned Emperor's Children. Diomedes didn't know how he knew that was what the runes were for. The knowledge was simply there in his mind, and he knew it had to be true, if only because the runes in front of his own cell no longer glowed.
There were dozens of levels, above and beneath the one where he stood, and his mind reeled as he realized that there must be thousands of captive sons of Fulgrim to fill all those cells. Upward, the structure was open to a smoke-filled sky – too far away to tell whether this was the actual skies of this world, or just a fog layer atop a pit dug into the earth. And below ...
Diomedes saw the vile thing that lurked at the bottom of the pit, and knew then and there that this was what the Laers were feeding their captives' suffering to. It was enormous, filling the entire space at its disposal. It was pink, and ivory, and gold, and other colors that had no name in any mortal language.
It sensed Diomedes' anguish, his fury and his hatred, and it pulsed in contentment, feeding upon the son of Fulgrim's psychological torment just as easily as it had when he had still been in his cell. And he understood then that he had been given hope that his Legion might survive only so that it may be taken away at the sight of so many cells, and with that realization, despair turned to anger. He heard the sound of armored boots on the ground behind him, and he turned, his face a mask of cold hatred, to face his tormentor, his other self. In its right hand, it held a long spear, made from an alien material.
It came at him sneering, confident in its superiority. But Diomedes' rage was a stronger weapon than any tool of the Laers, and his resolve armor greater than ceramite. He moved, faster than he had ever moved, and caught the doppelganger off-guard, his left fist smashing into its unarmored head. The creature had been created bareheaded so that its appearance might torment Diomedes : it seemed only fair that it would also be the weak spot through which he would destroy it.
Diomedes poured all of his strength into the punch, and the skull of the abomination shattered, pieces of bones buried deep into the grey matter underneath. Diomedes felt the bones in his hand break at the impact, but he ground his teeth and endured the pain, refusing to give the nightmare at the bottom of the pit the satisfaction of hearing him cry out. He caught the spear as it fell from the doppelganger's grasp, and nearly dropped it when he felt the scales on its surface and realized that it was actually one of the Laers, monstrously reshaped into a living weapon. Part of him screamed at him to throw it away, but more guards were closing in on him, seemingly emerging from the very angles of the structure. Three dozen Laers, all of different shapes and colors, all carrying strange weapons.
'You didn't get us all,' proclaimed Diomedes defiantly, standing over the corpse of his doppelganger as it faded into mist, the sorcery that allowed it to exist dissolving with its defeat. 'I know you didn't. There are still Emperor's Children out there that escaped you, and no matter what you do to us, they will come for you. Fulgrim lives, and he will bring down the wrath of the Phoenix upon your abominable race. You will die, again, and this time we will make sure you never come back !'
'Your defiance means nothing,' said one of the aliens in a hissing voice that came from its three different mouths at the same time. 'You will kneel to the Goddess eventually.'
'I will never kneel to your false god, xenos,' Diomedes spat back.
'Yes you will. All will kneel to the Goddess. Her hour has come around at last, and She will not be denied. Not by you, or by anyone. Light's end is coming, and the time of darkness has come.'
And then they came at him, their weapons dripping awful poisons. Diomedes had only one weapon, and not one he trusted, no armor, and his body was exhausted and wracked with pain from his torture at the hands of his darker self, but he was still a Space Marine. He killed five of the xenos before taking a wound, and three more before he began to feel the last of his strength wane, and his legs start to buckle under his weight. But he would not return to his cell. He may have failed in his goal of freeing his brothers, but at the very least, he would deny his captors the joy of his torment.
'For the Emperor !' roared Diomedes, before turning and leaping into the pit. Behind him, the Laers hissed and screamed, and the son of Fulgrim laughed breathlessly at that small victory.
He fell, and fell, and the thing at the bottom of the pit, that was to daemons what the Emperor was to men, opened its maw to catch him. He stabbed down with the stolen spear, even as the fangs closed in on his exposed skin ...
And Diomedes of Chemos was no more.
AN : Will anyone reading this recognize and know the meaning of that last line, I wonder ...
And so we reach the end of the 2018 Halloween specials. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and the last three as well. If you think I should do more of these bit-sized stories, please let me know, and I will take that into consideration for the future.
I also hope that this chapter answers some of the questions that were left hanging after The Fall of Chemos. I know, I know : it also raises even more. Again, all I can say is that I have all the answers, and you will get them in due time ... though after that, you may wish you had not. Now that all of you are properly terrified of the Raven Guard, I want to remind you that the Dark Gods are still pretty nightmarish themselves. I have plans for each of the Four - great and terrible plans. So much to write, and so little time ...
IMPORTANT : I made a typo in the last chapter. When Vincente Sixx says :
"Our misguided cousins, working together, have almost succeeded in bringing about their new godling, uncaring that the only thing that would allow it to reach its full power is the extinction of our race."
what I intended was :
"Our misguided cousins, working together, have almost succeeded in bringing about their new godling, uncaring that the only thing that would allow it to reach its full power is the extinction of your race."
That small typo led to some implications that some of you were very quick to explore, and I apologize for ruining your fun like this. But, no, it really was a typo. Unless, of course, Vincente knows something I don't. Wouldn't be the first time one of my characters did. Also, there was a Raven Guard Apothecary named Vincente Sixx during the Roboutian Heresy : check the Index, Corax makes him Chief Apothecary after his Legion returns from the Eye of Terror. So, no, Vincente probably isn't an Eldar under his armor either. Though mortal names mean very little to the sons of the Ravenlord ...
Anyway, the typo has been corrected now. Sorry about it.
I am going to focus on The Fifteenth Ascendant for a while now, once I am done with my current short story. I want to finish the Drol Kheir arc, and perhaps write another chapter of Warband of the Forsaken Sons after that, while I prepare my notes for The Hunt for Cypher, the first part of The Terran Crucible. I really don't want to make any missteps with that book, for ... reasons.
Zahariel out.