XV. SCION
The servo-skull's vidfeed is grainy, flickering badly, as if it struggles with some inner malaise, but the scene before my eyes is nevertheless the most impressing in my entire life.
Never have I seen anything of such brutality. Two demigods, one loyal and the other long turned from the Emperor's light, duel amongst the flotsam of a perishing civilisation. Discarding their guns and bolters, the two immense Astartes pummel each other with the most primitive weapon humanity ever used, their fists.
They attempt to bring each other down into the saltwater filling the large observation hall through the shattered windows, churning and frothing as it devours men and beasts alike, in the last minutes of the doom of Ardemis which I had helped exterminate. I did not see that ocean planet for myself, though I was told those waters had been the colour of emerald-blue, a view of striking beauty under the sun.
In the vidfeed, Enrique roars in fury, and the sound is so inhuman, so deafening, even via the poor recording, that for a moment it is him that I fear most – not the debased monstrosity he is trying to bring down, whose name I cannot, shall not utter.
I cast a fleeting, questioning look at the Chapter Master watching the feed with me. There are traces of that feral brawl on his broad face still: dents and scars and bruises where transhuman skullbone had almost been shattered and where long, unnatural claws had struck home. The Aquamarine commander understands that I am desirous to know the reason for such ferocity. Even taking into account the sacred millenia-long confrontation between the Emperor's Angels and their twisted, traitorous kin that the people of the Imperium are banned from knowing about, the intensity of his feeling in those last seconds is truly horrific.
'He was saying things about my father… my fathers, Inquisitor Makjali,' the warrior explains. 'Slandering them. Disparaging. Abusing. Lord Guilliman and my birth-parent.' His fists clench anew as he recalls the words, but no foe remains to be punished, so he relaxes again. 'It was the latter that enraged me so much. Because unlike my sire the Avenging Son, the man who had given me first life on the Galeonic Shores all those years ago, and who had died on a nameless mudball fighting some pointless battle, can defend his honour no more. Of course they were gross lies, those words, but they hurt worse than any wound.'
I reply with a solemn nod. Meanwhile, the vid quality deteriorates even further, and all I can pick out is the outline of Lord Enrique in his ancient cracked warplate as he overpowers the huge heretic at last, making the sea itself his ally as is his Chapter's doctrine, and the monster's body sinks under the hungry waves. And then there is nothing on the screen. The skull which had chronicled the last moments of the dying world has been tainted by the warp's proximity, and even this inadequate recording will have to be destroyed after it's over.
But even so, I have learnt more than enough.