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.
Beloved
999.M41 – The Sol System
Ten minutes to Light's End
For three centuries, the pleasure station Gift of Edenhad hung in orbit above Terra, a small island of peace and tranquillity amidst the intrigues of the Throneworld. For thirty decades, members of the Imperium's highest nobility had come to the Gift to relax, taking a break from the weight of their duties and responsibilities. By Terra standards, the station was a recent addition to the thousands of artificial satellites orbiting the Throneworld : indeed, many were the nobles who had seen its launch still alive to this day. Now, on the eve of the millennium's end, the station was packed almost to capacity as hundreds of nobles had come together to celebrate.
Above the crowd was a giant dome of reinforced, multi-layered plexiglass through which the light of Sol, the stars, and hundreds of other orbital stations and installations within the Sol system could be seen. But the assembled worthies paid little attention to that grandiose spectacle, instead indulging in the pleasures provided to them by the gathering's host.
The Gift's interior was an immense, circular garden, full of exotic plant life gathered from all corners of the galaxy and brought back to the Sol system at tremendous expense. Tables and seats of stone (the latter made suitably comfortable by thick layers of cushions) were spread across the collection of hedge mazes and green plains. The artificial ruins of chapels and mansions dotted the idyllic landscape – the result of a fad that had seized the Imperial aristocracy at the time of the Gift's construction.
Servitors wearing exquisitely crafted and discreet augmentations carried plates of food and drinks of a quality the billions dwelling on the planet beneath could not even dream of. Their simple white clothing marked them for all to see : none of the other guests would have been seen dead in such unrefined garments.
Even the entourages of the nobles, those few servants who were valued enough to be allowed to take part in this most elite of parties, wore clothing worth a king's ransom, provided to them by their masters lest they shame them before their peers.
"I look ridiculous," said one such servant. He was over two meters tall, and the skin-tight black suit he wore revealed a musculature that spoke of constant training and flesh-grafting. Like everyone else on the Gift of Eden, he had left his weapons in the care of the station's guardians, but no one could look at him and not immediately think that he was dangerous.
That was fine. Looking dangerous was as much a part of his job as actually being dangerous was.
"You look fine. Please try to look like you are having fun, Uther."
Uther's employer, the Lady Heiress Saphedia of House Ladak, looked much more at home in the celebration than her bodyguard and chaperone. Her dress was an elaborate construct of silk, silver and diamonds, each of which had originated from a different star system before being assembled by some of the greatest Terran tailors. She was beautiful, like every woman aboard the Gift of Eden. Unlike most of them, however, Saphedia did not owe her beauty to juvenat treatments and surgical alterations, but true, genuine youth and millennia of good breeding by ancestors that had managed to avoid falling into the pit of inbreeding that, in Uther's humble (and very much silent) opinion, far too many of the Imperium's "good and true" had fallen into.
An exemplar of that practice was currently rising in the air on a chariot carried aloft by a dozen cherubin-servitors. Endymeon, Patriarch of the great and esteemed House Malakite, was a morbidly obese man whose princely clothes and extensive makeup could not conceal the ugliness of.
"My friends !" The lord began, silence falling upon the assembly. "We are gathered tonight in celebration of the end of another millennium. For ten thousand years, our bloodlines have safeguarded the future of Humanity. For ten thousand years, we have kept ourselves pure, untainted by the vile corruptions that dwell among the stars. Now we gather, to raise our glasses and our heads proudly in the sight of our Lord, that we may continue to do His bidding for another ten thousand years !"
With a sigh, Uther raised up his own glass, mimicking every one else. Silence descended upon the assembly, not a soul within theGift of Eden daring to break the sanctity of the moment. In the distance, the great clocks, which had been synchronized with those down on Terra to the nanosecond, began to ring, heralding the turn of the millennium.
As the bells went by, Uther couldn't help but feel as if something was going to happen. He was not superstitious, though he was as devout a follower of the God-Emperor as anyone else, and he did not buy into the stories of divine resurrection upon the millennium's end that had spread across the Sol system … and yet, he could feel a shiver down his spine as the last bell approached.
Something is going to happen, he realized. Something is going to go wrong.
As the bells rang for the twelfth time, Uther's presentiment became reality – though even in his darkest nightmares, the bodyguard couldn't have imagined the scale of the calamity. It began with the sounds of hundreds of priceless crystal glasses shattering, as the nobles holding them bent over, seeming to be suddenly overcome with terrible pain. Not all of the guests were afflicted, but from a quick glance Uther could tell that most of them were – including the Lord Malakite. The obese nobleman's face was turning purple, his hands tearing at his over-complicated vest with surprising strength.
Uther moved closer to Saphedia, ready to act if whatever affliction had seized the crowd also took her. The two of them were watching the scene around them in horror when the afflicted guests rose back up – but their faces had changed almost beyond recognition. Their faces were pale, not the pale of cosmetics or even of a life spent without being exposed to the sun's rays, but the sheer whiteness of a blood-drained corpse. And yet they were very much still alive.
Their eyes were red, and their faces were twisted in snarls that revealed fanged teeth and black tongues. They were whispering and shouting something, and it took several seconds for Uther to understand what they were saying, over and over again :
"The Beloved comes."
Then the mutants – for that was the only thing Uther could think they were – fell upon the guests who hadn't become, or always been, one of them. Screams of pain and panic rose as the mutants tore through flesh and drank the blood of the Imperium's nobility.
Uther moved without thought, bashing in the head of a woman in a diamond-studded dress as she lurched for his throat and slashing the eyes of a man in a suit woven from Chemosian silk before catching Saphedia's hand and dragging her behind him as he made for the nearest exist.
"U-uther ? What's going on ?"
"I don't know," admitted Uther, glimpsing backward to look at his charge. "But do not fear. I swore an oath to your father before he died, my lady. I will see you to safety."
She smiled, but it was a trembling, frightened thing. In the fifteen years since Uther had sworn that oath to the previous Lord Ladak, before the intrigues of the Imperial Court had taken his life and that of his wife – along with most of their extended family – she had never looked that terrified.
The way to the station's dock was hard and dangerous. The mutants had spilled from the Gift's dome after the initial slaughter, seeking more prey. Fortunately, they lacked cohesion, each of them moving apart from the other – they weren't pack animals, but a whole bunch of solitary predators let loose in an environment with less and less prey. As Uther used his augmented strength and reflexes to tear a path to the exit, part of him idly wondered if the mutants would turn on each other once there was no one else left aboard the Gift of Eden.
Or perhaps they would instead try to get off the station, he thought, a shiver descending down his spine at the idea. They would need to warn someone once they were out of here – get the Gift obliterated before the creatures could escape.
In the end, Uther and Saphedia made it to the landing bay where their transport – a servitor-piloted craft that could be directed even by someone without any understanding of the Martian protocols – awaited them. Uther punched the opening rune sequence, and ushered in Saphedia. She stopped in the entrance, and turned back, smiling at Uther.
The bodyguard looked down, to where the young woman's hand was buried into his chest, grasping his heart between her delicate fingers. He blinked, unable to comprehend what had just occurred.
She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, her breath tasting of honey and blood.
"Thank you for your service, beloved," she whispered, in a voice that only distantly resembled the voice of the girl Uther had watched grow to adulthood from infancy. "Without your devoted service, the mad scions of the Dark Prince would have destroyed this vessel, and undone all the work their bloodlines spent thousands of years crafting. But now, thanks to you, it has endured long enough that, through this offering of lives and sensations, I can fulfill my holy task."
He blinked …
… and she tore his beating heart from his chest.
The bodyguard fell to the ground, twitching. Darkness closed in on him, and he felt something warm and sharp bit into a part of him he did not recognize. Saphedia – or the thing that wore her face – knelt next to him, looking him in the eyes as the last of his life faded. Her expression was hungry. As death closed in on him, it seemed to Uther that her features were changing. Her hair was turning into flowing horns, her eyes were pits of absolute blackness, her skin was growing purple, and the hand that held his bloody heart was now a claw. She was also growing, filling in all of his perceptions, all of his senses with her raw, undiluted presence.
"Here is my last gift to you," she whispered into his ear. "Know my name, Uther, and despair."
"I am Kyriss, and soon, the Beloved shall rise."
AN :
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Heed my warning, sings the clock.
For though you dance and you pray,
The Prince comes to lead you astray.
Six and six and one,
Still some time left before it's done.
All across Sol, auspex read out :
They are coming, Zahariel out.