Familiarity

By author Redcoat777

Brother. Sisters. Family.

The words are uncomfortable ones in Ozymandias's mind, the flowing script on the parchment between his hands holding such notions in constant recurrence. Ozymandias wearily notes to himself to write a reply at some point in the day. It is simply another matter of business for him, though this insistence on kinship by some of the Primarchs wears on him. He cannot see the need for communiques that serve no purpose beyond simply making indolent conversation. The words of a Primarch are not ones to be spent lightly.

Setting the parchment down on the bench aside him, he wonders, idly, if any of the other Primarchs who so love to cherish such notions of family, have ever visited the chamber beneath the Palace. Did they see what he saw whenever the sight of the place rose to him? Memories of a fearful and sorrowful air and a command to obey? No, he thinks they never did. They never stood there, shivering and bare in the cold as a host of figures poke and prod, take samples of blood and hair none too gently and test his mind and body and soul. Make him doubt himself, make him doubt before the unbearable weight and gaze of the golden figure who judges him through and through and seems to harden in shame and anger at each moment of weakness he shows.

He recalls ere before with closed eyes the clinical and sterile taste that cloistered within his lungs and festered on his tongue. Blinking and straining beneath the glare of the light and of him. He was wrapped into armour like a newborn is into a blanket. For what had the Emperor said, that fateful hour?

"Arm him. His purpose is war. To be my loyal warrior among the stars and nothing else. Better he learns that lesson here and now rather than never at all. Better here under my hand than alone beyond my reach. I will have at least one of them learned in their duty ironclad."

Yes. He remembers now.

War. A Great Crusade. The Great Crusade. His purpose. Their purpose.

He had, and has, fought longer than any of them in service of the Emperor, in the fulfilment of his purpose as they had been designed for. Designed. Not conceived. Opening his eyes, he scans the parchment before him, then sets it down and considers. Considers the notions of family that are keenly espoused between the others and their Legions.

He permits his Space Marines to call each other brothers, though he quietly discourages such notions such as calling the other Legions cousins. That is a step too far. Such a notion as the bonds of brotherhood forged in war is an ancient one that serves to enhance unit cohesion, morale and fighting ability twofold or more. They are artificial creations, tools for a task greater than any of them could individually hope to achieve alone.

His gaze turns, looking over the marked and bloodied pond that he sits besides, beyond that at the burning skyline where his Thunder Warriors bring peace. Another world brought to heel in the eastern fringe, another fragment of mankind reunited into the greater whole of the Imperium, another xenos weed plucked and eradicated from the cosmos. The quadrangle and its columns, once a pleasure garden, are crumbling and cracked and the stench of brimstone and fetid corpses drifts in upon an uncomfortably dry breeze which signals the fire that has caught in the distance will continue unabated and eventually swallow where he sits.

It does not disgust him, or worry him. Fire is fire. It will burn over innocents and guilty, he supposes. There is no need to spare resources to quench it. From the ashes this world will be rebuilt in Imperial imagery, its past of xenos and humans as equals and interbreeding wiped clean as it should be.

"You make desolation, and have the temerity to call it peace."

A phrase echoes across his mind. A whisper from the past. Who had said that to him? Another of the Primarchs? No. Someone else. An older voice.

His mind reaches back again, recalls the dusty warrens and eyries of Venus and the covens of the war-witches he had slain and smitten from the highest crowing crone to the lowest bawling babe by the decree of the Emperor. It had been one of the den-minders who had stood before him, defied him, called out those words to him—a baseline human girl brainwashed by the Venusian psyker-abominations. She had refused to step aside to allow him to put sword to the threat posed by the young freaks that clutched and hid behind her skirt or the youngling in her arms. So he had added her to the tally. FFor if she was with them, then such was her fate, and the fate of all those who opposed the Imperial Truth. His blade had seen much bloodletting that day. The nights had been long and full of slaughter. Were not all the nights in the age of unity?

And then had come the Great Crusade, a new golden age, and the foundings. Ozymandias supposed that was where it had started.

It being?

It being the notion of kinship amongst the Primarchs. He could not think of a more childish notion than that. What kinship was there among them? They were soldiers, tools for a purpose and nothing more. He knew the truth of it. His hands had traced the room of their creation in his short childhood. By the side of the Emperor, he had been learned in what he was, to brook no doubt about his origins and purpose. An aligning of atoms, a biochemical cocktail encapsulated within a test tube and given direction by the psychic might of the lord of mankind.

There had not been, and still was not, any notion of paternity throughout the entire scheme. Numbers, not names. His number, Primus, had been his name for all intents and purposes, until he had been sent to the front. Only then had he been bestowed a name. Bestowed by the Emperor, but at the behest of another, a kinder voice—

"Director Astarte, this is an unexpected honour."

"I think we know each other well enough now, Oz, to be a little more personal."

A pause, awkward in its silence.

"Of course, Ma'am."

A small sad smile.

"Close enough."

—that did not matter now. She was long dead. Old age, so they said, but perhaps the sorrow of their parting had also eased her on her way into the long night. He could not say. His back had been turned to her face and his own forwards towards his purpose.

Her crypt lies now cold and unlit in the vaults of Terra, save for when he visits in the dead of night on the increasingly few occasions when he has the time when called to Terra. He visits alone with a single wavering azure-flamed candle, to study her ivory-carved features that capture all of her sternness and yet none of her kindness, to speak to the dead as is his right as a Keyholder of the Imperial Catacombs. She is the most visited of his morbid sojourns, but not the only. All of the Old Hundred buried therein too had heard his voice against their unresponsive death masks.

It is madness what he does, what he hides from the other Primarchs. Though perhaps it is not madness. The Emperor has joined him sometimes, as has Malcador and Constantin. They have briefly congregated altogether in the crypt exactly once—that one dark night when none of them could find another place to rest and clear their minds. That had been when she had been struck from the records. The Thirteenth. They had all had questions that only the silence of the dead and each other could answer.

The last Thunder Warrior sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose, before looking down into the stilling waters at his reflection. Peering back was a monster, human in shape, and yet inhuman as well. Scarred, burned and more, his features were cruel and patrician and not at all kind. In his youth his visage had been marblelike, a warrior, a politician, akin to a statue intended to exude the Imperial airs of glory, strength, authority and nothing else. Some of the Primarchs thought this line of thinking horrifying, they are right, but he considers it the natural path of a dutiful life in service to the Imperium. The sacrifices that they make now will ensure that the future is brighter than it otherwise would be if they stopped to weigh every pebble along the road.

For what was duty, if not sacrifice to ensure the success of a higher calling?

He leans forwards, resting elbow on knee and fist under chin as he contemplates further a number of questions that revolve around his fellow Primarchs in his mind's eye. He is in thinking repose, philosophising. He does not have any enemies among them, thus far as he can think. He holds no ill will against any of them. Certainly, there is one he favours, though he thinks he favours Yvaine more than the others because the time they have spent in each other's company is more than he has spent in any of the others'. They are his cogenitors, his peers, his fellow Primarchs. And yet all that he can think is what he saw when he awoke: sleeping forms suspended behind numbered windows, curled embryos blissfully unaware of the waking world he was walking in before any of them.

Firstborn. The weight of the title is heavy on his shoulders. Eldest. He has a responsibility to his younger peers, to all of them. To set an example that they might consider following, even if in their own way. Fealty above all else. Duty with honour for there is honour in duty. Family is for children. They are not children anymore. He never was, that much is true. There was no time for childhood with a world to unite and a galaxy to conquer.

No, no familiarity. He has his duty to uphold, no time for notions of kinship. He has never needed it before when he was alone. Why should he change that now?

So he delicately picks up the parchment beside him, holds it arm's length and replies—