"The life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul."
-Leviticus 17:11
An angel stirred, fifteen hundred years old.
Chapter Master Dante awoke, as from deep sleep. Eyes that had seen much - far too much - opened. Beneath the death mask of Sanguinius, his face twisted.
He had defended Baal from the tyranid menace. He had slain the Swarmlord; and had been slain as well. He had watched the skies cleared of Tyranid warships. He had withstood the taint of Chaos.
He had died. He learned he was not the prophesied warrior; destined to defend the Emperor at the end of time. He had earned his rest. He…
He stirred amidst darkness and corpses. No blade. No brethren. No battle.
Only death; but no rest for him yet.
Dante stood. His blood no longer swam with alien poison. His jump pack still hung on his back, fully fueled. His armor was not slick with tyranid vitae. It was as new and polished as when he had first worn it for battle, ages ago.
Dante took one hesitant breath, then another. He could say, with reasonable certainty, that this was no illusion. He was in full command of his mind and senses. His inferno pistol was pristine and full of fuel. The Axe Mortalis awaited only a button-press and it would come alive with cerulean lightning. The world outside his armor was a tangle of sensory overload as his mind adjusted to his surroundings, dark and distant.
Nothing. For now.
He had awoken inside the burl of a tree of towering proportions. The plant was sickened, inside and out. Thick red-white fungi blossomed from its skin, at once murdering it and preserving it. Dante did not need his neuroglottis to know that its consumption would not bode well for him.
In spite of the hellish environment, there were no heat signatures except for his own. No threats aside from the Red Thirst; gnawing at his mind, as it had for the last fifteen centuries.
Dante removed his helmet, inhaling the air of a new world. The olfactory senses of Space Marines were unparalleled. He could have smelled the whiff of alcohol on a man's breath ten leagues away; no matter how diluted or old.
Yet, for countless miles in every direction, he smelt nothing but rot. The only break in the miserable scenery was an enormous, towering golden tree, the size of an imperial hive.
Dante did not remain in the burl for long. He ran a brief diagnosis of armor, and then began to march towards the enormous tree. There was no other landmark to serve as a point of reference. He did not know why he was here, or how,
He squeezed the Axe Mortalis as he trudged forward. The Perdition Pistol rested dormant, mag-clamped to his waist. A space marine did not live for a millennium-and-a-half by being reckless.
It did not take long for the landscape to vomit forth abominations.
They were xenos. Tall, insectoid, chitins clutching spears as they rustled along an eroded stone road. They had four human-sized arms and two slim legs; and a forest of smaller limbs that swayed and twitched like antennae. Each grasping digit bore an eerie resemblance to human hands. In spite of a lifetime of fighting aliens, Dante felt repulsed at their appearance.
The head of the pests turned to face him.
In spite of their hideous features, for a moment, Dante considered attempting diplomacy, despite the absurdity of it. Then the head of the chitinous creatures scuttled forth, spraying forth noxious white streams of fluid at him. Where it struck, plant life steamed, bubbled and popped, shriveled to nothing; like ice in hot water. He was not anxious to test how his armor would fare against it.
The space marine evaded, drawing the Perdition Pistol. The relic weapon hummed, its fusion core heating with deadly power. One shot, and the mightiest of the pests died. Its chitin cooked, the meat beneath it exploded, the liquid in its cells evaporating in an instant. Another shot, and another, to the same effect. The gaggle of aliens halted, sensing the threat he posed. Some began to turn and scuttle in the opposite direction.
In the back of his mind, Dante realized he was as alien and repulsive to them as they were to him.
His gaze returned to the earth, sodden and mushy beneath his steps.
A road. The xenos had been marching along a road.
Dante began to march, following the path they had taken.
One week passed, and another. Then another. Dante found no end to the crimson wastes, even as he marched endlessly. As far as his eye could see, the fungus blossomed. In spots of especially pungent fungal blooms, he glimpsed butterflies. The sons of Sanguinius were artists, and admirers of beauty, but something about them was off. Nothing here was as it seemed.
With his arrival, something had changed.
Heat signatures began to blossom on his helmet display. The wildlife was not quite like the Tyranid hive mind. Not as sophisticated or coordinated. The pests had attacked him piecemeal, and some had attempted to flee. But they were natives; the land was theirs and theirs was the land. Dante was an intruder, a foreign infection. Like any complex organism, it probed at the rival bacterium that had violated it.
The land itself seemed to recognize his presence, if only dimly. Its forays against him were pensive, scoping out the strange, new creature in its midst. So far, Dante had had only a single encounter with organized resistance. It had proved no threat to him. The rest were… like fodder, only they were sent piecemeal.. None had presented a challenge, so far. His armor was impregnable and his mind honed by eons of war.
Like any bastion or rock, he could not be stricken by a single mighty blow. But he could be eroded by time; a boulder worn down to nothing by a mighty river. Dante trudged further on, finding his way through the decaying landscape.
Space Marines seldom tended to their own armor. Even the smallest frigates swarmed with teams of serfs, servitors and tech-priests. Alas, there were no serfs with Dante in this alien environment. Only himself, and the critters the landscape hurled at him continuously. He realized that the land's attacks.
He had walked over five hundred kilometers when his helmet system began to chime. Slowly the digital outline of his armor began to soften to yellow, and then to a dark orange. Then red. Dante grimaced. Fungal growths had begun to blossom on his armor. It would not have been a severe issue, unless it had started to collect on its fiber-bundles. If he did not act soon, he would be immobile.
He found shelter in a cave, barely large enough to house his bulk, and began to divest himself of his plate. In ten minutes, he had removed everything but Sanguinius' death mask. His armor was impervious to the outside environment, but the fungus had begun to crust the softer fiber bundles, restricting his movements. Dante had not noticed it at first.
Last came his helmet. Reflected in Sanguinius' wrathful mask was a face that had lived too long, and seen too much. Not even the great longevity of the Blood Angels could not stave off the crawl of time. Not forever. Even after feeding off Arafeo. Even after feeding on the eve of the Devastation, his face had not lost all its wrinkles.
Dante breathed in through his nostrils. His multi-lung filtered out the poisonous air. His neuroglottis catched the awful stench of spoilt meat from outside, and poisonous pests from within. He did not hesitate, turning the Perdition Pistol towards the darkness of the cave system and beginning to fire.
From the outside came dogs. A pack of hideous, overgrown beasts, the size of dreadnoughts, with too-big heads and awful sores. Perhaps they had tracked him ever since his arrival. Perhaps they had only just stumbled upon him. The land had grown tired of his intrusion; much the same, Dante had grown tired of the sickened land. In spite of his weariness, he was not done fighting.
A space marine, a millennium-and-a-half old; slain by overgrown mutant mutts?
He had not come here to die.
He decided to live; though he was so, so very tired.
The Perdition Pistol flashed and flashed, until they hemmed in around him. Dante counted dozens of them. When they were too close for the Perdition Pistol, the Axe Mortalis flashed, its power field vaporizing flesh, boiling blood into mist and pulverizing bone. The Perdition Pistol flashed at point-blank range, one last time, after Dante had cleared nearly half their number.
Foul blood sprayed in a hot mist. It spattered into his mouth. Dante's eyes widened.
With the taste of blood came the Thirst, and with the Thirst, the visions of the Black Rage. The land was transformed. No longer the pervasive red fungi and crimson skies. Dante was ten thousand years in the past. He was an angel, ten feet tall. Mighty wings unfurled from his back as he beheld a spectacle of unparalleled horror.
"Horus," he growled, fangs protruding. He approached the Arch-Traitor, his blade swinging.
It was the first taste in a long time. Dante had abstained from vitae since the tyranids had descended on Baal. He had abstained for a millennium until his servant Arafeo had sacrificed himself for him. That had been an act of desperation. It had been offered to Dante against his own will.
Dante fought it off, had tried to, as he had since Arafeo's passing. But it had been too long, even for him. It only took one drop. One brief lapse in his abstinence was all it had taken. He wrenched himself from the hallucination, heaving in breath. By the time Dante came to his senses, the pack of mutts were in bloody ruins around him. He had not succumbed for over a millennium. Longer than any other, he was sure. He had not indulged the Thirst one whit; until his aged servant's sacrifice. And yet….
He spat out the overgrown mutts' vitae, ashamed. It had only needed to happen once. A single, brief loss of control and he had almost lost everything.. But he recovered. Barely. Dante scowled at his failure, before his face vanished beneath the Death Mask once more. The faint image of the Archtraitor vanished, replaced with the mutant mutt's decapitated head. Dante fixed his armor and continued his journey, trying and failing to cast aside his ancestral curse.
Dante marched, waging war on a rotten, desolate landscape. His own body waged war against his mind. The taste, even of blood so spoilt and vile as the mutts had been intoxicating. Its phantom taste grew ever keener, his fangs protruding. His breathing was deep and labored. There was nothing outside to distract him from the ever-present thirst. The land seemed to have learnt its lesson, and it no longer marshaled any of its forces against him.
He focused his gaze on the road. He recited the graces. He pored over his armor's HUD. The space marine followed the road; for there was nothing else to guide him. Even the mighty golden tree faded from the horizon. Acidic rain began to pour down, steaming where it hit his armor's ceramite. He had managed to clean out the worst of the fungus from the fiber bundles, but he had no doubt the problem would arise again.
Dante's helm pinged. His mind retreated from the Thirst, focusing on a new development. There were buildings in the distance. They were abandoned, save for a single distant shack. A town. The first sign of civilization Dante had found ever since his arrival. He had been disoriented from the sudden onset of the Thirst, but his warrior's mind had honed in on the ramshackle settlement upon the first glimpse of it.
He approached the outskirts. His armor picked out a single heat signature. It was a shack. A shack, with an old man in red seated inside.
Dante halted. His weariness showed in his poise; bowed, but still defiant. He stood in the remains of what had once been a doorway. It was now a wall eroded to nothing; the interior exposed to the rotten elements outside. The old man stirred, opening rheumy eyes before coughing. He let out a croaking laugh.
"You are old. Far too old. Much like myself," the ancient sage rasped. "Forgive my observation, if it comes as an insult. I am Gowry, the sole remaining flesh-and-blood inhabitant of this town… "
Dante's hand rested on the Perdition Pistol, but he did not aim it. "Gowry… I am Dante. What is this place?"
"This?" the withered old man asked. He laughed without mirth. "This land, my dear Dante, is the lost town of Sellia, in eastern Caelid."
Dante then coughed, the sound almost identical to Gowry's earlier hacking.
"And you," Gowry said mournfully, "appear to be afflicted with the Scarlet Rot."
