Cassandron was in turmoil.
Across the planet, the Brood of Nergal had risen. In every Hive, they had come from the depths where they had laid hidden for centuries, quietly building up their strength, occasionally sacrificing a nest or two to their enemies, so that they would continue thinking them contained.
Now, the time for secrecy had passed. Their lord, Hash'ak'gik, had called to them from beyond the veil, commanding them to rise up and pave the way for his return. His will flowed down the Brood's hideously warped ties of blood and into the shattered psyches of the Broodspawns, and they could do naught else but obey, whether they had dwelled in darkness for centuries, growing in strength and corruption, or been Turned only a few hours ago and were still new to their damnation.
Thousands of souls were hurled into Nergal's clutches as the bodies hosting them were transformed. Their suffering threw the Immaterium into a frenzy, drawing the eye of the Gods and allowing for lesser daemons of Rot and Decay to manifest alongside the hordes of the Brood. With every footsoldier of Ruin which made it to Cassandron, the veil grew thinner, making it easier for the next one to come through.
Amidst this nightmare, the Vampire lords of the Covens were leading their forces to purge the Broodspawns and their infernal cohorts from their territories. Whether due to the demands of honor, or the risk of appearing weak in front of their kin, the Regents and their courts led from the front, wielding their mighty Talents in open battle against the Nergalite hordes. The masquerade of the Covens had been temporarily cast aside : the Vampires fought openly in front of the PDF and household troops, who regarded them as legends come to life.
Blood flowed in torrents, the tainted ichor of the Brood and the vitae of Human and Vampire alike mixing together on the streets. But for Hive Primus, which had already been cleansed, all of Cassandron was as a single body fighting against a virulent sickness, the Hive-cities its organs, their labyrinthine alleys and avenues its veins. Win or lose, the symbolism of the struggle was by itself pleasant to the God of Decay, a ritual that was as grandiose as it was monstrous.
Whether it would succeed or not remained to be seen, however. For despite all of its now revealed strength, the Brood had powerful enemies, including ones come from beyond Cassandron in the Hive-world's hour of need.
When the war council reconvened in the spires of Hive Primus, it became clear that the situation was even worse than I had expected from Hash'ak'gik's parting words. Our trip back up the hive had gone smoothly : we'd even been able to recover the Liberator Armor we'd left behind. To my vague surprise, it had been completely untouched, presumably because the scavvies had wisely run as far as they could when the Brood had risen up and hadn't yet come back.
After a thorough decontamination process, we'd met up with Krystabel and Areelu. The two of them had been schmoozing with the elite of the Volkihar Coven while I was fighting the Brood in the underhive (and, looking back at it now, I still thought I'd gotten the better option), and promptly shared the most relevant items of intelligence they'd gleaned. Harold had come down from the Fist of the Liberator in person, looking more worried than I had ever seen him before.
Information about what was happening had been sent back to the Protectorate through the ansible network. I had made it clear that the existence of the Covens was to be kept out of the news reports : doing otherwise would have been an egregious breach of trust, and we really couldn't afford division at the moment. As far as the civvies on Slawkenberg and Adumbria knew, we had come to Cassandron to deliver food supplies, only to find a Nurglite cult, and had joined forces with a surprisingly competent noble caste to fight them.
Based on Jafar's response, the very idea of competent nobles was something the masses of Slawkenberg had difficulties wrapping their heads around. The same would've been true of the USA troopers, but they knew about the Vampires (and had been told to keep their mouths shut about it until it became public knowledge, which I wasn't feeling very confident about).
The fact that the Khornates found the notion of blood-drinking immortals being better rulers than Imperial human nobles perfectly understandable said something. I didn't know what exactly, but it definitely said something.
I sighed internally (I couldn't show any sign of weakness, not in front of that crowd), and returned my full attention to the room. I could already tell this was going to end with me being forced to risk my life once again, so I might as well get all the intel I could get beforehand.
Vlad was here with his wife (and despite having seen the Regent fight in the underhive, I was still not quite sure which of the pair was the more dangerous) and a group of Vampire and Human hanger-ons, and Akivasha sat on her chair in a way that made the mundane piece of furniture (by the standards of the aristos, at least) look like it was just one step removed from the Golden Throne itself.
Skellan, standing with his back to the wall, looked like he clearly had no idea what he was doing here, and was pinching the clothes Vlad had asked a servant to procure for him like he was estimating how much he could get by pawning them off. So, at least there was one other sane person in the room with me, even if he was also a blood-drinking mutant with a history of violent underhive vigilantism.
We started with a quick recap of the situation planet-side. As it turned out, coordination between the hives was fragmented : it had been millennia since they had faced a common enemy, and the power plays and schemes of the Covens' shadow wars had long eroded the protocols put in place during the first rise of the Thrice-Damned.
Despite how annoying it was at the moment, I still found the fact the Vampires' politics were as fractious as those of the Imperium vaguely reassuring.
Even with such limited information as was available, it was clear that the ritual we'd disturbed in the depths of Hive Primus was far from being the only problem Cassandron faced. Every hive-city was subject to its own Brood uprising, and while none of them had to deal with another traitor like Mannfred smuggling Nergalites up the spires, their military forces weren't doing nearly as well as the collective might of the Volkihar PDF and USA troopers had managed.
And, of course, the rise of tens of thousands of Nurgle-corrupted mutants was only a sign of greater trouble to come.
"It's all part of a giant, planet-wide ritual," Harold said once the PDF officer who'd lost the office politics and been selected to do deliver the bad news was done and had retreated to the back of the room, visibly relieved nobody had torn his head off in a fit of rage. "The aetheric currents around Cassandron are in uproar, and they are all gathering in the ruins of Hive Septimus."
"That wretch Hash'ak'gik seeks to manifest in full," growled Hektor. Despite not being any kind of sorcerer himself, he was the one among us with the most experience fighting the Neverborn thanks to his time in the Eye of Terror – except maybe for Suture, but he wasn't talking. "And if he does, then preventing this world from being utterly consumed by the Warp will be … difficult."
"Are Daemon Princes truly this powerful ?" asked Vlad. The Vampires had little experience with daemons, which was another point in favor of their sanity.
Hektor glanced at me, but I waved him on. My own experiences with Emeli weren't something I wanted to talk about in present company (or ever, if I was being honest), and in any case, I was fairly certain she was too much of an edge case to serve as a useful point of comparison in this instance.
"There is no such thing as a 'typical' Daemon Prince," the World Eater warned. "But every one of them achieved that status by earning their patron's approval, and that is no small feat. The hierarchy of the Realms of Chaos is incomprehensible to us mortals," nevermind the fact that both Astartes and Vampires were present : compared to the Neverborn, they were indeed as mortal as the rest of us, "but even the weakest of them is a terrible foe. If the situation escalates to the point Hash'ak'gik can manifest on Cassandron, then his mere presence will damage the veil between the Materium and the Warp even more. I have seen it happen before : past a certain threshold, it's impossible to turn back the tide."
"Furthermore, there are additional factors at play," said Harold. "The Plague God's influence in the Damocles Gulf has diminished in recent years. That is not something the Rotten One will let pass."
"So he'll cheat and put his hand on the scales," I ventured a guess. "Granting greater boons and more power to his slaves than usual."
"We believe so," the magus nodded.
"Defeating the Thrice-Damned was difficult enough the first time," said Akivasha, speaking up for the first time since her arrival – and immediately and effortlessly drawing everyone's attention to her. "It took the combined efforts of several of my peers to slay him, and if I understand things correctly, then he'll be even more powerful now."
"There are other Volkihar Ancients currently slumbering in Hive Primus, aren't there ?" I asked. "Could we awaken them to ask for their assistance ?"
I was reaching for a solution that didn't have high chances of ending up with me facing off against a Daemon Prince of Nurgle. But I knew I was clutching at straws, and Akivasha's answer crushed those frail hopes :
"If you were willing to bleed over their coffins, my brethren would no doubt rise as swiftly as I did," she admitted, licking her lips hungrily at the recollection, a sight that sent a shiver down my spine – and not the pleasant kind. "But despite what it might have looked like, it took me some time to properly awaken and regain the fullness of my powers. No, I do not believe this to be the correct course of action."
I was really hoping she was being truthful and not lying out of some desire to keep my blood all to herself. Given that her entire planet was at risk, I was reasonably sure this was just my paranoia talking.
"How much time do we have before Hash'ak'gik manifests ?" I asked.
"It is difficult to say," replied Harold, "but based on the Aetheric currents, mere hours at best."
"Flying to Hive Septimus will take several hours, and finding the summoning location in the ruins could take days," said Vlad with consternation.
"I don't suppose orbital bombardment from the Worldwounder and every other ship in orbit is a viable option ?" I hazarded, phrasing it as a joke.
"I'm afraid not, my lord," replied Harold with a thin smile. "Based on our divinations, the ritual site is deep below the surface, buried under the ruins of an entire hive-city. We don't have anything that can penetrate through such a thick layer of rubble, not in the time we've got or without setting off catastrophic climate changes across the planet in the process. Well, maybe apart from the Fist of the Liberator's main gun –"
"We are not firing a superweapon we still don't understand at a friendly planet," I immediately cut that line of thought down, ignoring the surprised and worried looks my words drew from the locals and Areelu. "Apart from that, what do you suggest we do, Harold ?" I asked, hoping that the magus hadn't come to this meeting without a solution.
"A repeat of what was done years ago, when the Imperium sent its dogs to burn Slawkenberg." Harold glanced at our recent allies, who had no idea what he was talking about, and explained : "When Inquisitor Karamazov decided to subject our world to Exterminatus for the crime of daring to defend itself, Lord Cain and a party of USA troopers were teleported aboard his ship through a sorcerous ritual. It was then that the Liberator fought and slew the mad Inquisitor, while the rest of the team sabotaged the vessel."
The Rogue Trader and Vampires looked at me with renewed awe, but much as I enjoyed people overestimating me (since it kept the chances of them trying to kill me low), I found it hard to enjoy it at the moment. I was too busy trying to think of a way to get out of this suicidal mission, but couldn't find any which wouldn't ruin the image I'd cultivated since being forced to assume the mask of the Liberator.
"It seems to be our only option. General Mahlone, you will lead the USA troops in a surface assault on Hive Septimus : either you'll distract the Brood and keep them from overwhelming us with sheer numbers, or you might provide assistance if we require it."
"I would appreciate if we all stayed together this time," I said in a half-joking tone.
"Our mastery of the arcane has grown considerably since then, my lord," Krystabel assured me, smiling at my 'joke'. "I swear to you that will not be an issue."
Knowing that Hash'ak'gik was sure to have arranged for the same kind of barrier which had guarded the Broodspawn lair in Hive Primus to be erected around his most important stronghold, I doubted it would be that easy. But showing doubt in my subordinates' capabilities was a good way of making them perform less well, and since my life and soul would depend on the magi doing their job properly, that was best avoided at the moment.
"Will you still require Jurgen's assistance to power the ritual ?" I asked.
"No, my lord. However, we'll be restricted to sending nine souls across."
I briefly considered having them use Jurgen's help to power up the ritual anyway, so I could bring more meat shields to hide behind, but discarded the notion. The USA troopers had done well against the Brood, but against a Daemon Prince, they would be worse than useless. As a psyker, Jurgen's presence would be an additional risk, yes, but I had a feeling that my odds of surviving this mess would be even lower if I didn't take it and bring him along.
Instead, I looked at Krystabel. "Has there been any contact from Emeli ?"
She shook her head. "The Warp around Cassandron is contested, but the Rotten One has the advantage at the moment. Our lady cannot reach out to us, though she is fighting to help."
Frak. Teleporting aboard the Pyroclast Retribution had already been more than risky enough with Emeli's assistance, and we wouldn't even have that now, even as the Warp would be far more agitated than it had been back then.
But there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't even pray for help : the God-Emperor was unlikely to answer any plea for aid with anything other than a laugh at best and a righteous smiting at worst, and despite everything that had happened over the last two decades, I still wasn't so lost I would ask the Dark Powers for succour.
All I could do was play along with everyone's expectations and hope that Krystabel and Harold were as good as they thought themselves to be.
"If we stop whatever ritual the Broodspawns are planning to summon Hash'ak'gik, will that be enough to prevent the threat ?"
"The Nergalites will still be there," answered Harold with a small shrug. "Depending on when you strike, Hash'ak'gik might be able to make another attempt somewhere else. But, well …"
"Doing nothing isn't an option," I finished. "Very well. Then let's decide who will be part of this little adventure."
"I will go with you," said Areelu, drawing every eye in the room to herself.
"Are you sure ?" I asked.
I was glad she'd volunteered : in my opinion, you could never have too many witches with you when confronting a Daemon Prince, and the additional Astartes (for surely Suture would follow) wasn't anything to scoff at either. But I had to look reluctant, and, judging by the small smile on her face, I managed it well enough.
"I owe you for saving my daughter," the Rogue Trader replied. "And I owe the Rotting One a lot for hurting her in the first place."
Well, vengeance was as good a motivation as any as far as I was concerned. Although, given that Areelu's daughter was waiting for her aboard the Worldwounder, I had no doubt she'd put her own survival ahead of anyone else's, but I could hardly blame her for that.
"Alright," I said. "Who else ?"
I then had to spend several minutes rejecting volunteers and trimming down the numbers to the allowed nine. It was moments like these that reminded me that, for all that they might appear reasonable from time to time, I had truly surrounded myself with lunatics.
Teleportation was unlike anything Areelu Van Yastobaal had ever experienced in her decades of life. For all her wealth and power, for all the technological wonders the Van Yastobaal Dynasty had amassed over the centuries, such a thing had been beyond her, whether by technology or sorcery – although she suspected there was less difference between the two than the Adeptus Mechanicus would ever admit.
As the assault team gathered inside the ritual space, she took a long look at the circle, memorizing as much of it as possible. It was an impressive piece of spell-work, and the fact the Slawkenberg rebels had been able to perform something similar to it mere months after their uprising was another sign of the favor the Chaos Gods held for them.
She recognized maybe two out of every three words of the magi's chant, and then they were cast across the Sea of Souls. In that timeless moment of incorporeality, Areelu felt the gaze of innumerable entities looking down upon her. Her closest point of comparison was these brief instants of transition when Worldwounder entered or exited the Warp, except now there was no Geller Field between her soul and the denizens of the Empyrean.
One of those watching denizens, she knew, was Emeli, the Daemon Princess of Slaanesh whose ascension had come thanks to Cain. That gaze was distant, for the Daemon Princess of Slaanesh was engaged in a struggle with the legions of Nurgle gathered around Cassandron, waiting for their mortal puppets to open the way for them. She saw, then, that it was due to that struggle that only a few Plaguebearers had yet managed to make it through. But the Rogue Trader could still feel the amusement in Emeli's scrutiny, which she found vaguely reassuring : at least it wasn't jealousy, unlike Krystabel's thoughts whenever she saw Areelu close to Cain.
The passage through the Warp ended as abruptly as it had begun, and Areelu stumbled as her feet were suddenly on solid ground once more, nearly falling to her knees. The Rogue Trader had come in her full panoply of war : she was wearing a suit of crimson and purple armor made of articulated ceramite plates, whose servos purred softly as she moved, perfectly maintained by the tech-priests aboard Worldwounder.
On its own, it wasn't as good as the power armor of the USA, but the forcefield generator and wards added to it made it all but impossible to penetrate, and the rebreather she wore should be proof against Nurglite poisons. And even should she be affected by anything, or hurt in any way, she was carrying a batch of Panacea injector on her person, as was every member of their group – including the Vampires, at Cain's insistence that there was no such thing as over-preparation when dealing with the slaves of the Plague God.
In her right hand, Areelu was holding a staff that had once rested in the deepest chamber of an ancient temple on a jungle planet whose human colonists had mysteriously disappeared centuries before the Imperium had even come into existence. The staff was a length of cerulean metal two meters long, topped with a symbol which had served as the religious focus of that long-extinct human civilization, and which Areelu knew to be their best efforts at giving form to one of the innumerable names of Tzeentch.
Breaking the artefact to her will had been the work of several weeks, but she'd managed it eventually. It was a potent focus for her sorcery, allowing her to cast spells which would normally take several minutes of preparation in mere seconds.
There was Cain, towering over them all in the Liberator Armor. His bloodward stood next to him, the Drukhari looking almost comically small in comparison. Hektor and Suture had both recovered from the teleportation faster than the rest of the group, and were keeping watch on their surroundings, wary of an ambush (which, given the sorcerous capabilities of their foe, was a very real threat).
Akivasha, Vlad Volkihar and Jon Skellan had all made the journey unscathed as well. The last one's addition to the party had been a last-moment thing : that Vlad had asked for Skellan to accompany them instead of selecting a higher-ranking member of the Volkihar Coven had been a surprise, but one Areelu had welcomed. She could sense the weight of fate around the underhive-born Vampire, for it had been no coincidence that he'd fought side by side with Cain before.
The Volkihar Paragon was wearing a black, skin-tight bodysuit made of a material Areelu couldn't identify, which reached up the Ancient's throat and clung to her figure in a very flattering manner. Based on the various devices attached to it, she believed it to be some priceless piece of archeotech, and she filed that detail into her growing collection of facts about the Vampire Covens and their suspected origins. Since Isabella had admitted the Covens themselves didn't know the origins of their kind, the Rogue Trader had been determined to figure that particular mystery out, if only to ensure there weren't any unpleasant surprises further down the line now that the Cainite Protectorate had allied itself with the Vampires.
The Ancient wasn't carrying any weapons, but then she didn't need them. Areelu remembered how easily Akivasha had dispatched the Broodspawns ambushers, mere moments after awakening from a centuries-long sleep. The fact that any living creature could wield such power while not using the Warp in any way, as far as Areelu could tell, was another reason she was so interested in the Covens' origins. For now, all she had were theories, each of which was more exciting than the last.
Together, the nine of them were a considerable fighting force. Still, the Rogue Trader knew better than to get overconfident or underestimate their foe. The Brood of Nergal had managed to survive for thousands of years on a planet dedicated to its destruction, and now that they had the favor of their Dark God once more, there was no telling what horrors awaited them further in.
The depths of Hive Septimus were even worse than she'd imagined. The stink of death and decay was omnipresent even through her rebreather, for it was a spiritual taint as well as a physical one. The death of billions during the Thrice-Damned's first rise had marked the Warp in ways that even the fires of the Purge and the passing of thousands of years hadn't been able to scrub clean.
Really, that the corruption had been contained to the ruined hive-city was a point in favor of the Covens' rule over Cassandron : on most Imperial worlds, the Inquisition would have had no choice but to sentence the planet to Exterminatus to keep the Brood of Nergal from spreading once it had gotten to the point of claiming Hive Septimus.
Bracing herself against the corruption of her surroundings with a whispered prayer to Tzeentch, Areelu cast a spell of divination. Even through the fog of ancient Decay, it didn't take her long to find the information she'd been looking for.
"We are very close to our destination," she announced, looking at the rest of their party. "And the Aether is vibrating in anticipation, so I'd say we have very little time."
"Yes," said Jurgen, his voice tense. As a psyker, and one who had history with the servants of Nurgle to boot, Areelu could only imagine how much worse being here was for Cain's aide, yet he bore any discomfort he might be feeling stoically. "I can sense it too."
They immediately set off. The group stayed close to each other as they advanced through the ruined, half-collapsed tunnels, Areelu using her spells to guide them through the maze. On more than one occasion, Cain had to carve a path for his large armor, but his strange black blade cut through all obstacles without issue. Areelu could sense no sorcerous component to the weapon, but she didn't know enough about tech to identify whether it was from the same source as the Liberator Armor (presumably the cache of archeotech technology that the Panacea had come from) or from an even more exotic source.
"I know it's been millennia, but I'd expect to see some trace of the billions of people who died when the Hive fell," remarked Cain as they advanced.
He was right, Areelu realized. Despite the psychic stink of decay, they'd yet to encounter a single human remain. They might be deep in what would have been the underhive before the Purge, but there should still be plenty, especially since the human survivors would have sought refuge here when the Brood had started propagating from the spires – and then the Nergalites would've done the same as the other Covens cleansed Hive Septimus with fire and blade.
She could think of several reasons why there was no trace of their corpses, and none of them were good.
"Well," said Suture drily twenty minutes later, as the tunnel they had been following finally ended. "I suppose that answers the question of where all the bodies went."
A dozen meters below them, down a sheer cliff, was spread an immense open space paved with human bones – thousands, millions of them, carefully assembled in what must have been the work of centuries. Rows of skulls looked down upon the arena from their perch at the top of the surrounding walls, each and every single one of them marked with the tripartite rune of Nurgle engraved on its forehead.
Areelu tentatively extended a tendril of her perceptions toward the skulls, and promptly recoiled in disgusted horror. They weren't haunted by the souls of their former owners, not really – that would have been a nightmare that would truly have warranted an Exterminatus – but whatever the Nergalites had done had trapped an … echo, an imprint, a simulacrum, upon them all. All of the people whose mortal remains had been used in building this structure had died due to the Thrice-Damned's heresy, whether at the fangs of the Brood or in the purge that had followed.
The whole thing was an amplifier for the energies of the Warp, a grand temple dedicated to the Rotten One. And, in the light of hundreds of torches, it was clear that its congregation was plentiful, for thousands of Broodspawns were in attendance, standing on the ground below, all of them turned to face something at the center, and chanting the name of their master over and over again. Areelu couldn't use her mask's built-in binoculars, not without the Broodspawns becoming invisible to her, but she could boost her natural vision with another incantation.
It was an altar, constructed of the same ivory material as the rest of this place. And on the altar, bound with the type of chains used to keep tanks in place during transport, was …
"Mannfred ?" she heard Vlad whispering in shock.
Hmm. She might have underestimated how sharp a Vampire's perceptions could become.
This wasn't what Mannfred had in mind when he'd decided to go to Hive Septimus.
The trip to the ruins had been uneventful. Air traffic across Cassandron had been suspended in order to deny the Brood another avenue of propagation, and his flyer had the best stealth systems influence and money could obtain, so he'd been able to go in a straight line to Hive Septimus.
Passing through the quarantine cordon had been more difficult. The PDF regiments stationed around the ruined hive took their job seriously, even more so today – they could tell that something was going to happen here, even if they had no idea what exactly. But they were still mortals, and so Mannfred had slipped into the ruins with only a couple of murders (whose fresh blood had made for a nice meal – waste not, want not, after all).
From there, he had scouted the ruins, searching for signs of Nergalite activity. Instead, within a few moments of his arrival, he had been ambushed – a perfect trap, sprung by only a handful of Broodspawns, and which had caught him completely by surprise through the use of sorcery to befuddle his senses.
They had pressed something foul to his face, and all strength had deserted him. He hadn't fallen unconscious, exactly. A strange sensation, which he only now realized had been nausea – something he hadn't felt in centuries – had overcome him, his every sense drowned in wild, painful flashes as his Vampire biology fought off whatever poison the Nergalites had used on him.
When his perceptions had cleared, he'd found himself in his current predicament : chained atop an altar, with a gag in his mouth, Broodspawns moving all around him, and a figure standing over him.
The creature was even more hideous than the other Broodspawns : Mannfred assumed it was an elder of the fallen Coven, whose body had spent centuries slowly rotting away under the influence of their tainted blood. Trinkets of bone hung around its stick-thin arms on loops woven of human hair, and despite its apparent frailty, it radiated an air of confidence and strength.
In one hand, it held a staff of rusted metal which doubled as a walking stick. In the other, it carried a short piece of sharpened metal that didn't have a handle : its blade was buried into its fingers, to the point that the injury had scabbed over the object, making the hand useless for anything other than wielding it.
"My kindred !" It spoke, and the words echoed across the large chamber, carried by some frankly impressive acoustic work. "Long have we dwelled in the shadows, biding our time and spreading the sacred word and gifts of Nergal to those few souls we could reach. But our time of tribulation is at an end ! Our lord has called upon us to rise, and we have answered !"
"Already, the eternal servants of Nergal have come to stand at the side of our brave warriors as they battle the unbelievers," the priest continued. "Now Hash'ak'gik himself rises, to deliver us onto Nergal's glorious kingdom !"
"Hash'ak'gik ! Hash'ak'gik ! Hash'ak'gik !" the crowd of Broodspawns chanted, over and over again, with eerie synchronicity.
Mannfred had seen the Nergalites act in unison before, driven by the curse which had consumed their bodies and minds, but this was something else entirely. Moving his head around as much as his bindings allowed him, he saw that they moved like a single organism with many bodies, like the appendages of some extra-dimension creature – which, he realized, was exactly what was going on.
There was a growing sensation of pressure on his skull, which reminded Mannfred of what he had felt in the lair beneath Hive Primus. This was a sign that sorcery was happening, and, based on what he'd just heard, it wasn't difficult to imagine its purpose. Mannfred strained against his bonds, calling upon the Talent of Puissance to boost his physical strength as much as he could, but either he was still drugged, or the chains had been reinforced somehow, for they barely creaked.
Then the Nergalite priest looked down at him. He saw that its eyes were glowing under its mask, and when it spoke, its voice echoed with a familiar tone.
"You're finally awake," chuckled the priest standing near the alter. "Good. You've served me well, Mannfred Volkihar, and it is only right that you be aware of it before the end."
Mannfred growled through the gag. Amused, the Broodspawn removed the obstruction, and Mannfred spat, trying in vain to get the tissue's foul taste out of his mouth.
"You manipulated me," he cursed. "You arranged things so I'd bring your servants to the spire, so that I'd be forced into exile, and eventually come here."
It was the only thing that made sense. Mannfred's knowledge of the Warp was limited : even the Progeny of a Regent could only find so much restricted lore on Cassandron. But he knew that time worked very differently in the Immaterium, allowing its infernal denizens to weave plots that would be impossible to conceive of for those trapped in the Materium.
Again, the priest chuckled, and there was no ignoring the mockery in the sound.
"You give me too much credit, dear Mannfred," the possessed prelate of putrescence replied. "I had no need to manipulate you. You came to the Nergalites in Hive Primus out of your own will, without me needing to so much as whisper the notion into your heart. You betrayed your duties, your Maker, your Coven, out of your own selfish desires."
"I knew you would come to this place. Your nature would allow for no other course of action."
No. No, the Thrice-Damned had to be lying. Mannfred refused to believe he was so simple, so predictable.
"In another life," the vessel gloated, "your selfishness, arrogance, ambition and total lack of scruples would have made you a powerful champion of Tzeentch. That makes this all the sweeter."
Before Mannfred could say anything – a curse, a plea, a wordless roar of horror and rage – the priest of Nergal plunged the shard of metal embedded into its hand into Mannfred's chest. The frail-looking blade cut through his armor as if it weren't there, and when he instinctively called upon all his mastery of the Defiance Talent to harden his flesh it still pierced through his skin, between his ribs, and into his heart.
There was a brief flash of pain – and then the real agony started, and despite his best efforts, Mannfred screamed.
And, just before the darkness consumed him and dragged him into an entirely new realm of torment, he heard a thudding sound, as if something heavy had fallen from a great height.
Jon Skellan wasn't sure what exactly he was doing here. He was willing to do his part to help save the world, obviously, since Cassandron was where he and everyone he cared about lived, and from what he'd understood there would be nowhere to hide if the Thrice-Damned managed to return.
But he couldn't help but think this whole mess was way over his pay grade. Fighting gangers ? He could do that all day. Fighting other Vampires ? He'd spent years hunting down the bastards who'd ruined his wedding and Turned him. Killing Broodspawns ? That was a new one, but he demonstrably could do that, too.
Using some magic ritual to go straight into the heart of the Nergalites' ruined domain and fight their not-so-legendary leader, returned from the dead thanks to the unholy blessings of his Dark God ? Now that was another story. But, well, what was he supposed to do ? Stand up in the middle of the meeting and say 'good luck with that, could I please get a ride back to the underhive' ?
Yeah, right. That would have gone well. The bloody Regent of the Volkihar Coven himself had asked him to accompany him, because apparently he'd 'proven his mettle' in the underhive, and he might have only known Vlad Volkihar for less than a day, but he already knew the elder Vampire wasn't the kind of man you refused.
The other Vampires hadn't exactly been happy about it. They'd already been glaring at him, except for Vlad's wife, who'd looked at him the same way Lizbet had looked at him when he'd brought home a half-starved canid he'd found wandering the underhive. But Lady Akivasha had taken a look at him and declared that he had 'a warrior's heart', whatever that meant, and they had all stopped protesting real quick.
(Jon was pretty sure that was partly because him being recruited into the teleporting group meant none of them had to volunteer, though.)
The Lady Akivasha was another reason he felt so out of place. He'd heard of the Ancients before, but hive-rats like him could never hope to meet one of the Coven's elusive leaders. He had no idea how he was supposed to act around Akivasha, so he'd tried to do whatever he thought Stefan would do at the time, and so far, he hadn't been killed on the spot for showing disrespect.
At least the gear was good. Before the ritual had started, he had been handed a suit of armor from the Volkihar armories exactly his size, along with a power hammer and several tall glasses of blood that tasted better than anything he'd ever drunk in his life.
And it looked like he was going to have the chance to test it, because holy Throne, there were a lot of Broodspawns down there. Jon could only assume they didn't really need to drink blood to survive somehow, otherwise he couldn't imagine how they'd survived down here.
Then, only a few seconds after their group had reached the ledge giving onto the temple, the Vampire chained on the altar – the traitor Mannfred, based on Vlad's reaction – started screaming.
"Frak," cursed Cain. "Move in, everyone !"
Then the Warmaster was leaping over the edge of the cliff, his armor crashing onto the temple's floor and causing a cloud of bone dust to rise. His xenos bloodward was right behind him, followed by the two Space Marines.
Before his good sense could reassert itself and stop him, Jon jumped, reinforcing his legs to absorb the impact – the armor was good, but gravity was gravity regardless of what you were wearing. The rest of the party came behind him, the Rogue Trader landing last, her fall slowed down by a spell.
By then, the vanguard was already in motion, led by Cain himself. They were charging straight at the altar, but no matter how fast they were, the temple was simply too vast, and they had arrived just too late.
A part of Jon, the part of him that was still human, still mortal, felt the fell energies gathering in the air reach their peak, and all of a sudden, the Broodspawns … melted. There was no other word for it. Only those who stood at the very edge of the crowd – those who, Jon realized, must have stood lowest in whatever passed for Nergalite society – were spared. The flesh of the large majority sloughed off their bones, which fell to join those of the ancient dead on the ground, and ran like a river of refuse across the cavern and up the altar, toward the now levitating form of Mannfred Volkihar.
There, they formed an immense sphere of gore, which reminded Jon of the lizard eggs he'd scrapped off the underside of metal plates to eat back when needed food other than blood. The comparison was apter than he thought, because just as Cain's crimson armor reached the mid-point between their landing and the altar, the sphere hatched to reveal a vision out of the darkest nightmare.
It resembled the ghostly figure which had appeared when the ritual underneath Hive Primus had been stopped, but this one was horribly solid. It was huge, even bigger than the projection had been – twice, perhaps thrice as high as the Liberator Armor, Jon judged. Four great bony wings erupted from its back, tearing through flesh in a shower of gore as they grew. Its body was covered in a set of robes made of rotting skin, and Jon had to fight back the unfamiliar urge to puke as he realized the skin was that of the faces of every Broodspawn which had been sacrificed to bring the creature into being, smiling in religious ecstasy.
"I am Hash'ak'gik," the monstrosity bellowed, and the sound of its voice made Jon stumble, and nearly brought him to his knees. "I am Nergal's Prophet, Herald of the Glorious Decay. I …"
Suddenly, it stopped talking, and turned its head down. Jon followed its gaze, and saw that, somehow, Cain hadn't stopped running toward the manifested Daemon Prince.
Hash'ak'gik snarled, the sound like a dozen underhive levels collapsing, and moved to meet the Warmaster's charge. Drawing strength from Cain's example, Jon forced himself to move, and he saw in the corner of his eye that the rest of the group were doing the same. Despite everything, the Vampire smiled.
He had never thought he would end up being a hero, and yet here he was, alongside figures of legend and champions from other worlds.
Lizbet, he silently swore, I will win, and I will come back to you.
And if Hash'ak'gik thought it could stop him, then to the Warp with it.
AN : And with that, all three of my main ongoing stories (CCWC, DCRSL, and AYGWM) are at a point where the next chapter will be a big epic battle sequence. I didn't plan this, it just happened on its own.
Hmm. It might be time to finish that chapter of A Blade Recast that's been waiting for me to really focus on it for several months ... Nah, I'm frakking with you. I think DCRSL will be next, but we'll see what the Muse decides, as always.
If you're reading this on FFnet or AO3, I remind you that there are a great many Omakes written by the readers on the SB thread, and I recommend you check them out. For instance, someone started a List of Things Anakin Is No Longer Allowed To Do on the DCRSL thread, and it is really funny. And if you have an idea for an Omake of your own, then please don't hesitate to write it !
As always, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Zahariel out.
