Aaron Aaron Dembski-Bowden: Cadian Blood

What it needed now was flesh. It could not rebuild itself without flesh; lots of flesh, blood, sinew and the other meats that made up the human form. It had woken, and the psychic pangs of its rebirth manifested as the plague, a cry for aid from its distant brethren. But now… now it needed flesh. Birthing the curse had left it weak and lingering on the edge of slumber. Finally, after weeks of regeneration, it was ready once more.

Yet its manipulations of Seth’s mind began to snap back, repressed and refused by the mortal whose skull the entity was trying to claim.

What are you doing? the mortal had asked. Seth melted back into his own thoughts, reaching for the cancerous taint taking hold behind his eyes.

What intrusion is this? Who are you?

The entity saw how the mortal manifested itself out of its meaty shell; a being of silver light with eyes of violet fire.

“I am the death of Kathur,” the entity had replied. It also took psychic form now, within the human’s psychic perception. A bulky, swollen figure with white armour that somehow writhed in a million little movements. Seth looked closer—the armour, despite being Astartes in shape and style, was formed of fat, wriggling maggots.

You are Death Guard, Seth had said.

“I was. For my loyalty to the Grandfather and the pain I inflicted upon the servants of the False Emperor, I was raised above the Legion.”

As was the Traveller. Seth was serene as he spoke, as though he were idly contemplating some matter of minor curiosity rather than the presence of a daemon within his mind. You are kin to the Traveller.

“I know no Traveller,” it said.

The Herald. Typhus.

“The First Captain. The Host. My brother in arms, Typhon. I am a prince of daemons and deservedly so. But the Herald’s blood is avataric and thrice-blessed by the Plague Lord.”

I understand nothing of what you say.

“You are human. If you understood the words, the knowledge would kill you.”

The Herald, he comes for you.

“We were friends once. Battle-brothers. We will slay Scarus together.”

I cannot let you do this. We will stop you.

“No. You are already dying. You have turned within for too long, and I am now the force animating your mortal bones.”

I will warn Thade.

“Your hive-brother sees you move and thinks you still live. He does not see the truth.”

I will fight you here, then.

“You will not win.”

Even in death, we serve Home and the Throne.

“You will not win,” the entity said again, and launched at the psyker, its writhing claws extended. The Cadian steeled himself for the assault, and for the last time in his life, Seth Roscrain went to war.

It was cripplingly intimate, fighting on a battlefield that existed only within Seth’s mind. As his flesh and blood body walked on, drooling and whispering to itself in the darkness beneath the monastery, his consciousness and power was utterly focused within, fighting the daemon inside his head.

The ethereal Astartes lashed out with bleeding claws that tore shreds from the silver light that formed Seth’s psychic projection. Where the talons fell and rent corposant psy-flesh, they left trails of ravenous maggot-things that bored into his silver skin.

Seth screamed into the depths of his mind as his eyes blasted back with violet flame in a vicious reply. The squirming mass covering the Astartes burned away in a wave of black smoke, revealing the bloated, corrupted armour beneath.

“Your defiance is laughable. I cannot feel pain,” the Astartes said, readying for another attack.

I will be glad to teach you. Seth smiled through clenched teeth as the worms burrowed into his form. With a surge of concentration, his staff flared into existence, held in his hands. He pointed the aquila motif at the Death Guard.

Pain. It feels a little like this.

Golden arcs of coruscating energy leapt the distance between the double eagle symbol and the Astartes. Seth felt a moment of heated satisfaction as the daemon shrieked and writhed in the holy fire.

The mind of the Astartes-thing was a union of daemonic and once-human perceptions, and this heady clash of conception struggled to grasp just why it was feeling agony for the first time in ten thousand years. It was strong, immortal.

But it was still disembodied, and that made it weak. Most of its true strength was in its physical form, and even that was massively depleted in the wake of calling the plague.

It had been a fool to let the mortal bait it like this, and as it glared at Seth’s ghostly form, gleaming with golden light and a halo of violet flame, it saw the psyker knew it, too. Their telepathic closeness within this internal battleground sent their thoughts flashing back and forth to one another.

Are we done? Seth sneered, the eagle atop his black staff wreathed in blinding fire. I had more.

“You die for this, human.”

I was born ready for that.

“You will greet that death now!”

True… The two wraiths met, claws against flesh and holy eagle against armour. Both souls caught fire and began to dissolve in the psychic fury of their meeting, but only one of the souls screamed. Seth managed a smile as his psychic body immolated, and he looked into the daemon’s shrieking visage. He’d never had a chance of winning. Even now his form was dissipating in the blink of an eye compared to the slow erosion of the daemon Astartes. And still the Astartes howled.

…but death is worth it, he hissed as the violet light faded from his eyes, just to see that look on your face.

“Seth,” it had said, “has been dead for some time now.”

The daemon wearing Seth turned to face the Cadians. Already, it swelled and grew, bulges of contorted muscle tearing through the oversized bad weather jacket Seth had owned for years. Blood ran in trails from the sockets in his head and neck, and the aquila atop the psyker’s staff shattered in a hail of shards that killed three men.

Tionenji fired first, blowing the insides of Seth’s head out the back of his skull. Thade and the others opened fire a moment later, shredding their psyker’s stolen flesh in a hail of las-fire. Thade’s bolters pounded once each, hammering explosive rounds into Seth’s chest and sending the psyker back against the wall in a mess of blood and bone.

It wasn’t dead. It wasn’t even annoyed. Still it grew, for now it had flesh, but it needed more for a true rebirth. Clawed hands of thickening yellow flesh reached out for the closest two men in the confines of the corridor. The manifesting daemon tore the throat from the first and pulverised the spine of the second in its vice-like grip.

Corrun’s head rolled back on his neck and he collapsed, fingers spasming as they touched the gaping wound where his throat had been. The second man stayed in the daemon’s grip, wielded like a flail to hammer more soldiers from their feet and bludgeon them to death against the decking and walls.

The 88th fell back to a wider part of the corridor, the front ranks crouched so those behind could fire. Thade’s pistols roared alongside the inquisitor’s psycannon, these heavier weapons ripping chunks from the mass of warty flesh rising before them. The daemon, hunched in the hallway, regarded the fragile Cadians with one bloodshot violet eye the size of a human hand. The air reeked of burning meat and the ozone of las-weapons discharging at close quarters. More soldiers died as the beast swung left and right with its corpse flail.

“Purge the unclean!” Caius shouted, chanting a screed of chastisements as his shoulder cannon fired. Each bolt landed like a spray of acid, biting hard and making steaming wounds in the daemon’s flesh.

The creature began to back away, retreating from the carnage it had caused. In the space of a handful of heartbeats, fifteen men lay dead. Thade’s cry to pursue broke off in his mouth as those fifteen men, in various states of dismemberment and ruin, all began to move again. As Seth had done moments before, they too started to swell and discolour.