Elysian Warp Gate
Sol System
Segmentum SolarThe stars were distant points of light in the blackness of the void. Around the ridged flanks of the silently gliding ship, around its spiny turrets and heavy ventral blocks, the darkness seemed welcoming, like the arms of a long-lost mother spreading out to embrace her wayward children after many years apart.
Yet these sons of the cold night were not returning home. Perhaps, in their nomads’ hearts, they suspected that the vast and trackless outer dark had always been their ancestral land, and only a brief and cruel jest of life had let them and their many fallen brothers be born on a blasted and hallowed rock. Perhaps their eagerness was not merely that of young conquerors rearing to wet their blades, but something deeper and less understood. Be that as it may, in that hour none of them felt that they were coming back to something, but rather foraying out, issuing forth from a too-long closed gate at the order of their master.
The Ninth Legion was riding to war.
Ahead of their small yet redoubtable expeditionary fleet, the battle barge
Mortifex swept majestically towards the ominous roil of the Elysian Gate, its flanks bearing the same numeral that marked every Reviled’s pauldron. Long and angular, it was a sword thrust out into the galaxy, not gleaming gold like the Master of Mankind’s own destrier, but dark like the dread of starless nights. At its sides came the flock of its sister-ships, cruisers and destroyers that carried reserve complements of Astartes.
Umbra Ferox,
Silent Blade,
Achaeron were their names, and many others of suchlike grim portent. In their wake, like scavengers, trailed clumsy transports, supply hulks, forge-ships, all that had been judged necessary to make war for long decades.
Poised on the edge of material space, the dark ships prepared to cross into the truly unknown.
A dense penumbra hung over the strategium of the
Mortifex, sparsely pierced by the electric shimmer of devices and the spectral haze of the central hololith. For perhaps the first time since their inception, the Reviled had a new, gleaming and polished space all to themselves, rather than rusty and cavernous landships, bloodstained transports or dirty and ragged tents, but the sight of it must have been uncongenial to them. The same murky pall that filled the halls and corridors of all their vessels covered even its best and greatest as they stood by the edge of the command podium, resting their hands on the smooth iron bar of the guardrail. No other soul breathed in the chamber, for the Legion’s command had anomalously set up in a separate place from the bridge proper, connected to them only by vox relay.
It was a risky luxury, but the warriors of the Ninth ill suffered the company of the unaugmented. They did not suffer the affliction of their lineage and were forever outsiders to the brotherhood.
Of the necessities of the Great Crusade, sharing their habitations with those not of the blood was the only one that truly galled the sons of the ice wastes. Still, they would endure.
But this sufferance was not at present demanded of the Legion Master and his two faithful hands. Time and many past battles had left their mark on them, but yet they seemed inexhaustible. Here was Osorin Skorr, ever the elder brother to all. Though his rank was the most exalted and his call of victories among the longest, he wore no trophies on his person, no ornaments save the marks of station and the eagle’s plume upon his helmet, which seemed to shine even now that it had so little light to reflect. The only plunder he allowed himself to bear was purely functional, and hung now at his belt in the stead of his old chainblade - a long power sword with a recurve tip, taken from the bloody hand of one of Kalagann’s last knez. Even the traces of execration, which insidiously sapped his forces, were hidden, with mechanical organs fashioned by the adepts of Mars to replace his failing ones invisibly beneath his plate.
Here was Tevr Nyrid, the first blade. The years had left more visible marks on him, and on his left side both the arm and the leg below the knee were skeletal black iron. Of the three, he was the most restless. The polished skull that lay over his helmet had long not been renewed, and like with all the most dedicated fighters of the legion, the wait before the beginning of the Crusade had been agony as he felt the apex of his skill slip away day by day in pointless inaction. He was old enough to even fear that he might succumb to the inner rot before he saw battle again, and the word to muster had been an immeasurable relief. He, too, had taken up a new weapon since the last days of Unity, the silvery edge of Lunar make glimmering as a remote companion to Skorr’s feather.
Here also was Tzosh Ghaal, the imperturbable healer. He alone seemed strangely rejuvenated, difficult as it was to say under his sealed armour. His prosthetic arm was gone, as if by miracle, and no other deformities had appeared in its stead. By contrast, large opaque tanks were fastened alongside his power pack, and tubes of various sizes ran from them to several custom-made ports on his warplate. The largest snaked over his shoulder and fastened to his visor, the breathing beneath it audibly heavy and dense.
The three brothers looked up at the high armaglas observation window and the unquiet, strange-coloured fabric of the Immaterium beyond. Staring at it for too long was painful even to their transhuman eyes.
“I do not like this,” Nyrid said slowly, “Giving ourselves to the mercy of the wyrd is not something that should be done. All these warlocks we have on board, astropaths and navigators and other devilry, we can kill anytime if something in them turns ill. But when we dive into this madness, our survival will be out of our hands. It troubles me.”
“It is not so unlike a flight in a Stormbird,” offered Skorr, “There too our lives depend on our enemies’ valour and not our own.”
“The formless wyrd is like no other enemy,” Nyrid shook his head, “We may as well be crushed by an avalanche as by its coils. An accident is an ignoble end.”
Ghaal said nothing as the rift in realspace steadily grew to fill the entire window view. Then there was a shudder, and though nothing had visibly changed, all of them
knew that there was nothing more to be seen anywhere around the ship. For a moment, it was as though they had many thousands of eyes, extruding at every angle from the battle barge’s hull, and witnessed the nauseating churn of unnameable colours, whose vorticous spinning was growing more restless by the moment.
But what was a moment anymore?
Ililgaak… Nukaalugaj…“Did you hear this?” Ghaal asked quietly between the heavy drafts of his respirator, cocking his tube-studded helmet to the side.
“Something, perhaps.” Skorr’s voice was careful, the quiet rasp of augmentic lungs controlled like an expectant chainsword, “You, Tevr?”
“No, I have not heard,” the blade-champion shook his deathly visor, “But some words suddenly came into my mind. I thought how it would be if someone called me
little brother in the old tongue.”
“
Nukaalugaj…” the Legion Master enunciated every sound of the word in the whistling language of their ancestors. He added, pensively, “But it is a strange thought. We are no one’s little brothers anymore.”
Uvaguk… Sagvigsuk ilaanni…This time, Nyrid’s skull-face snapped alert. He looked to his brothers for confirmation, and saw that Skorr rested a hand on the grip of his sword, while Ghaal was braced as if expecting an assault.
“An illusion of the wyrd!” he called out, his voice echoing strangely from the metal walls of the strategium, “It is stirring words in our minds. Look away from it!”
Skorr nodded and extended a hand towards the command panel on the edge of the hololith table, seeking the switch that would close the observation window. He moved with an odd, incongruous-looking wary focus, as if he were balancing on a tightrope above a yawning abyss rather than reaching for something less than a step away.
Iluitchuk… Kasungaruk ilivsik…Then the ship lurched.
There was no sound to herald it, no thunderous crash, not even a change in the nameless patterns that flowed outside the window. One moment the
Mortifex seemed unshakable in its monolithic mass, and the next it was staggering like an ancient wooden galley on a stormy sea, pitching from side to side in oppressively total silence.
The three Astartes were almost thrown from their feet, only their sheer armoured bulk holding them upright. The guardrail crumpled and deformed in their powerful grips, sheer metal taking on the appearance of wrung cloth in a matter of moments. A dizzying and unnatural weightlessness had come over them, not the lightness of zero-gravity, but a disorientation in their own nerves, almost like a sea-sickness magnified a thousandfold so that it might stagger even their superhuman constitution.
Dropping to one knee, Skorr managed to reach the panel and lower the heavy adamantium blinders over the observation window with a flick, though he knew it was pointless. The invisible perverting power of the Warp had surely penetrated the ship. He felt a sickly force coursing through his body, a contortion of muscles bending in ways they ought not to, and was obscurely aware that he should thank his already corroded frame for giving it little purchase. Even so, he felt ill, more than he ever had since his memories of his new life began. His ruined stomach was twisting into knots, his skin constricted the flesh beneath, what bones still remained intact in him vibrated agonisingly. Only his head remained clear, and he held it tall, slowly rising back to his feet with a terrible effort.
He saw that next to him, Nyrid was doubled over, both hands crushing the guardrail as he struggled with all his strength not to succumb, and could hear the sickly rasp of his breathing. To his other side, Ghaal was on his hands and knees, fighting to remain stable closer to the ground. Several of his tubes had snapped loose from their ports, and pressurised streams of a poisonously bright green vapour were escaping from them.
Exerting all his strength to master his own movements, the Spitefather reached back to the control panel and pressed the button of alarm, then that of the shipwide intercom.
“Brother Reviled,” his voice carried through hundreds of loudspeakers and vox-nodes, strained with effort but resonant and even, “The turbulence of the wyrd is confounding us. Hold fast and keep your strength! Only death can stop us!”
This was, after all, an enemy they would have to fight with their own forces.
When the alarm sirens began to ring, Captain Synor Chrol had been deep in the
Mortifex’ vehicle hangars. Even back on Terra, his Blade-Breakers had often taken on the role of the legion’s techno-shamans, gathering to themselves the brothers most dexterous in repairing engines, quelling their spirits and feeding their burning thirst. Thus, when the greater disposition of the expeditionary fleet had begun to form, it was only natural that they would be the ones chosen to liaise with their fellow tenders of machines among those not of the blood. Those were for the most part the armoured regiment of the Timaini Cragrunners, the cyborg soldiers who had fought alongside the Ninth against the monstrosities of Kalagann and traded rites of friendship after that glorious battle, as well as their new allies the magi of Mars. Spending so much time around outsiders might have irked some Reviled, but Chrol felt a kinship for those two peoples, who like him took the machine into themselves.
He stood in the dim light of distant lumens, deliberately kept at half-strength to only partially light the great vault, in the very middle of the hangar’s width, on the partition line between the bleak-green columns of Legion Rhinos and the teal ones of Cragrunner battle tanks. Both stretched to either side in scores, and the disembarkation order of such a mighty force was a fine balance he had been grappling with since they had set sail for the Elysian Gate.
At his side were a squad of his veterans, the jangling panoply of shattered enemy weapons upon their armour only a little less imposing than his own. Aiding him across the aisle were the Timaini Commander Sandar-Naiman with his own staff, in their pale blue rubbery bodysuits with tapering masks and dark visors, and Magos Inrech Ferriak, his massive form draped in the black and crimson robes of the Mondus Gamma forge temple.
“The fourth columns should be moving around the perimeter while-” Sandar-Naiman was saying, keeping a concealed eye on the bulging cyst of the integrated data-node on his left forearm, before the mournful whine of the alarm had cut him off. In a moment, angry red light lit up in the dusky space above them like distant bonfires.
Chrol heard the Spitefather say something over the vox network, but crackling interference swallowed half the words. He glanced interrogatively at Ferriak, who shrugged with three pairs of arms.
“Problematic Warp translation,” was all the magos managed to blurt out in his cavernous voice before the ship quaked.
It was not a mere shuddering vibration, nor a listing of the great vessel to one side, for such notions had little meaning in the void. Rather, it was as though the metallic floor under their feet had momentarily turned fluid and
rippled, raising them up and immediately pulling them down again. Chrol reflexively sent out a neural command to engage the magnetic clamps in the soles of his boots, but to his surprise he found that it gave him no more stability, the sensation of being tossed around by waves still coursing through his bones.
He fell to one knee with a rattle of trophies, his veteran squad collapsing after him. Astonishingly, the Cragrunners appeared far less dramatically struck, with only a few having lost their footing and the others stumbling as if dazed. Ferriak, braced on his four thick, arachnoid pistoned legs, was almost unaffected, looking at the others with confusion writ on the few organic scraps of his face.
“Captain, do you hear them?” rasped Ulgar, the youngest of his squad, “These voices…”
Chrol shook his head. He did not hear any voices, indeed he could barely hear his brother close by. He focused on the parts of himself he felt as the firmest, those melded with the power of the machine - his hands, the joints of his legs, the innards of his chest. Forcing his lips into obedience, he whispered an incantation to the spirits of iron, calling on them to lend him their might. Slowly, painstakingly, the cogs of his joints ground to renewed life. Though an impossible nausea he ought not have been feeling weighed him down, he rose, standing stiff upon hardened metal.
With another effort, he forced himself to look around. The vehicles were still aligned in their columns, and relief filled him as he saw that each of them had not budged by a millimeter from where it was fastened to the hangar floor. Then his eye fell on Ulgar, and he froze with an emotion he had not felt in a long time. Not fear, for he knew none, but the revulsion for unnatural things, known to all those who had fought in Nordyc and Ursh.
The younger legionnaire had cast off his helmet and looked up at Chrol from his knees. His face was
wasting from within, diminishing with astonishing speed. It was as though Chrol saw a time-lapsed sequence of degeneration play out, but there was no artificial acceleration in his sight. Flesh and muscle under Ulgar's skin withered and seemed to evaporate. His right eye followed suit, shrivelling like that of a dried corpse and vanishing in a wisp of greasy smoke. Scars swelled up where there had been none. Within scant seconds, the Astartes’ face was reduced to a hideous rictus mask.
“The voices… They are the malediction,” he choked out, and Chrol thought that he was looking into the face of death itself.
Maggak stumbled along the corridor, gripping the wall to steady himself. Wherever his fingers touched, oozing stains of thick dark rot were left on the metal. The pain that shot through his hand at every contact did not bother him. It was the wet, sucking sensation he felt every time he leaned on it and pushed forward, as though he were plunging his palm into a swamp, and the knowledge that this marshy filth was nothing but the decomposing fabric of his own body. He would gladly have gone without this, but his feet were so damnably unsteady. The floor beneath him jumped like an ice-crawler rolling over rocky ground, and he swore he could feel his bones slipping around his body as they were jarred out of place.
He was not alone in his obstinate crawling advance. Many warriors were forging onward ahead and behind him, a haphazard jumble of insignas and trophy patterns from many different companies. Some were Bone Walkers like him, but along the way they had been joined by legionnaires from the Excoriators, the Blood Mark, the Hecatombion and almost every other brotherhood on board the
Mortifex. He saw a few Astartes in jagged off-white armour in a design he did not recognise, and disgust filled him as he realised that it was not battle-plate at all. These were afflicted whose stigmata had been inflamed by the wyrd beyond anything he had ever seen, their misshapen growths of bone sprouting like plates over their skin and imprisoning them in a carapace of their own tissue. They staggered forward unsteadily, and Maggak winced, knowing that the pain he felt was nothing compared to the torment of his plagued brothers.
Compared to them, he was lucky, though the invisible radiation of this evil dimension was scourging his body hideously. Wounds had opened on their own all over his body, skin parting as if sliced and torn, and immediately turned necrotic, suppurating pus and the sticky sludge of decomposition. He felt the interior of his armour slick with corruption and spit out the foulness that clogged his throat. The floor of the corridor was slick and reeking, as many of the Reviled retched and vomited thick black bile, spewing it through the grilles of their helmets when they were not fast enough to remove them. Most of them were covered in putrid wounds like Maggak; others had been suddenly afflicted, spurs and spikes of bone growing through their flesh; others yet wore withered and skull-like countenances, as if they had aged by centuries in moments. Strangely, he noted, few of them had already been blighted enough to wear limbs or organs of metal.
The diseased throng was pushing into a narrow hall at the meeting point of two curving corridors, both of which were clogged with advancing Reviled. There, a third passage led into the sanctum of the Navigator. The reasoning that drove the crowd was hasty and simple: if the hoary mutant was the one who had taken them into the realm of the wyrd, killing him would return the ship to material space and end this unnatural epidemic.
Heavy reinforced doors had slid closed to bar that threshold now. With so many savage fighters before them, even unarmed, they would normally not have held for long. But each of the legionnaires was debilitated, unable to stand firmly upon a surface that shifted in defiance of every other sense.
They moved like the waves, the massed scores of them leaning first back, then pitching forward, slamming into the door like a battering ram. Maggak limped into the packed hallway and found himself swept into this oscillating rhythm. Back. Forward. Crash.
Amid the pain and delirium, he felt himself move in perfect unison with his brothers, many and multifariously wracked bodies with a single invincible will, and his ruined lips smiled.
Ymorag closed his eyes, shutting away the sight of the chamber. Its walls and corners seemed to churn and swim as if he were submerged in troubled water, and the disorientation was distracting him from his purpose. From the moment he had heard Skorr’s warning over the intercom, he had understood there was a danger on the battle barge that only he could avert, and it was a task which would take all of his focus.
Blindly, but with the ease of long practice, he removed the gauntlet from his left hand. With the right he drew the combat knife of the legion, wrought in a design peculiar to the Ninth - an elongated blade, curving in a fashion reminiscent of a falcata. In the hands of a lesser human, it could indeed have served as a veritable sword. It was a pattern useful for many things, be it killing, scraping bone, flensing skin, cutting open entrails.
The Captain of the Harrowers pressed the tip of the knife to that of his left index finger and drew it in a shallow cut.
In the days of the Unification Wars, most of the Ninth Legion’s recruits had been drawn from the Dronemaw tribe of the Antarctic ice desert, a large and prosperous willing vassal of the Emperor. Not so Ymorag. He was one of the last sons of an ancient and fading tribe, which had at one point been tributary of the Dronemaw, but whose bloodlines had vanished altogether during his own lifetime, definitively mingling with those of their overlords. The tribe’s name was forgotten, but its traditions had borne a wealth of old wisdom from the dark age, which even as a youth he had learned avidly and committed to memory.
Tevr Nyrid had been teaching him the rites and practices that would keep the spirit of the legion alive, but Ymorag knew certain things that even his mentor did not.
With the blood dripping from his finger, he began to trace a line of symbols across his spiked breastplate, renewing the cut when his Larraman cells hastened to scab it over. The iterators of the New Truth would have scowled at what he was doing, but this knowledge had protected his ancestors from the perils of sorcery through long and dark years, and he knew for certain that it would help him now.
Once the line was complete, he let his finger clot, and began to breathe deeply. There would be no immediate relief. While he was assured that the talismanic symbols would shield him from the deadly currents of the wyrd, like in all things much would also depend on his own strength of will. He inhaled, held in his breath for a precisely measured moment and exhaled, letting the rhythm of his body lull him into a meditative quiet. Nausea and the taste of rot mounted in his throat, but he paid them no mind, directing his full concentration upon the act of drawing in fresh air. Little by little, the bilious knot receded, and when he was entirely confident in his mastery over himself, he opened his eyes.
His chamber was as it ought to have been, an austere cube of metallic walls hung with grim trophies and crude tribal amulets. An extinguished brazier stood on a low stone block in the centre. Two Astartes of his company, Irayar and Tugalik, stood by the door across from him. They were still struggling through the rite he had just performed, the lines of bloody sigils across their chests incomplete. Ymorag crossed over in a few cautious steps and aided them in drawing the signs of warding, giving them a moment to focus their breath afterwards.
“Come, we must see to him,” he spoke, and without a word they followed him through the door.
Beyond was a narrower, bare room, in some eerie ways similar to a cell. There, seated cross-legged on the ground in a plain robe, was Nuvor, the Reviled twice-cursed - once with the affliction that was common to them all, and twice with the touch of the psychic.
On Terra, Nuvor had fought alongside a fellow psyker, Esargon of the Eighteenth Legion, and the advice of his cousin had done much to strengthen his fraying mind. It was plain, however, that now this tempered resolve was all that kept him from a horrifying collapse. The muscles of his ashen-pale face were painfully drawn, his skin slick with sweat, and a terrible corpse-green glow burned in his eyes.
He raised his face, and Ymorag’s hand unwillingly gripped his knife, as if expecting his brother to transform into something horrible at any moment.
“See it…” Nuvor spat out, every word a herculean struggle, “Cannot… Hold…”
His eyes rolled back in his head, their whites veined with sickly colour, and his lips twitched. He tried to clench his teeth, but his mouth seemed to move despite himself, as if raving in the grip of a fever.
“Kasangaruk…” he spat in the old tongue,
“Ilivsik..”Then epileptic shivers began to shake his body, and as bloody froth dripped from the corners of his mouth, he began to speak in a language none of them had ever heard.
“A curse!” snapped Tugalik, “If he finishes it, we are all dead!”
The two legionnaires sprang forward and heaved up Nuvor’s spasming body. Tugalik closed a gauntleted hand around his jaw, which continued to grind and shake despite the steel grip restraining it.
“The wyrd is consuming him,” Ymorag spoke in a firm voice, “There is only one way we can stop this. When a witch-child was born to the tribes, before casting it out our ancestors carried out the Silencing.”
Nuvor stiffened at the words, and the Captain laid a hand on his shoulder.
“You are not a mere witch-worm, brother. You will still fight with us.”
Despite the tremors coursing through him, the psyker managed a nod that almost looked solemn. Ymorag turned and stepped back into his own chamber, the two Harrowers half-supporting, half-dragging Nuvor along behind him.
The Captain cast a splash of prometheum into the brazier and lit it with a gout from an ornate hand flamer that rested on two iron hooks at the stone pediment's side. The fire leapt high with a crackle and immediately began a strange and hypnotic dance despite the stillness of the air. Ymorag thought he saw faces of the dead leering at him among the flames, but he looked away from them, holding the blade of his knife over their lapping tongues.
Once he felt that the metal was incandescent, he motioned for his warriors to approach with their charge. Nuvor had regained some control over his body in presence of the fire, no doubt remembering the words of his pyromancer battle-brother with new force, and stepped up almost on his own, standing fast as the red-hot knife was raised to his face.
“May your eyes be dark and the endless night your home,” Ymorag intoned, and thrust the blade into Nuvor’s eye-socket, deftly cutting away the eyeball and plucking it out. A groan rose from the psyker’s clenched lips at the terrible pain, but he did not flinch, not even when his second eye was blinded in the same manner.
“May your tongue be stilled and silence your dominion,” the Captain continued. Tugalik held the psyker’s jaw open, and Irayar stretched out his tongue. With a stroke, Ymorag severed it, the searing metal cauterising the wound even as it cut.
He cast the eyes and tongue into the fire and spoke the final formula, “May your spirit fold upon itself like strongest steel, driving all evil from you.”
The three Harrowers staggered as their own sight was suddenly snatched from the physical confines of the chamber and somewhere else, somewhere that was in no place. It seemed to them that they stood in a great cavern, dimly lit by phosphorescent growths, coarse and damp stone underfoot. Tunnels branched out in every direction, some large, some narrow, some high up out of reach. They heard Nuvor’s breathing, and knew that they saw what he now saw in his darkened mind. They felt another presence as well, lurking out of sight - something vast, dark and terrible, but which their hearts somehow knew was also benevolent and guiding. The sensation filled them with a bitter, longing ache, and the vision faded.
They stood once more in the chamber onboard the battle barge. The fire had gone out. Nuvor was kneeling before them, and despite his mutilation, his features had a firm, determined cast whose like the Captain had not seen in years. A new inner strength was building in the psyker, and even the poisonous breath of the wyrd seemed to recede before it.
Ymorag cut a long slice in his left palm with the cooled knife and rested it on Nuvor’s forehead, crimson rivulets running down his skin and dripping into his hollow sockets.
“You shall be
Tuk-Nayag, the Dream Eater,” Ymorag spoke, and his warriors smote their chests in salute, “May our enemies’ fear be your sustenance.”
???
Ultima SegmentumWhen the expeditionary fleet emerged into the Materium, it seemed to those on board that no time had passed, or rather an indefinable length of it. Chrono-pieces on the ships had been unsettled by the violent translation, but none showed that more than two weeks had elapsed. It was as though the battlegroup had collectively stepped out from a period of feverish nescience, where days and hours had blended together, and steadily found its footing in the world of the real once again.
Almost miraculously, no ships had been lost, the route through the warp gate a solid one despite the harrowing journey. Even more astonishingly, not a single one of the Ninth's Astartes had perished. Some were crippled by the stigmata that had so suddenly manifested, but not irretrievably, and indeed many saw their wounds quickly fade once they had returned to realspace, as though they had been nothing but the fruit of nightmare. There had however been a number of deaths among the naval crews and menials, some trampled by the Reviled in the disorder, others found already rigid by their fellows, masks of lethal fright frozen on their faces. It was weeks before the fleet's Navigator dared step out from his sanctum, but for the time his services were not needed.
Ahead, just within reach, a stellar system gleamed brightly against the sable cloak of the void. Already, remote auspex sweeps were returning signs of habitation, light orbital devices, trails of interplanetary traversal.
Prey.The Reviled had grappled with the perils of the Warp and come out victorious. Now, new foes awaited the bite of their blades.
