Rob Sanders: Legion of the Damned

‘Brother Jabez will live,’ Ezrachi assured him. ‘Just.’

Gideon didn’t seem to hear the aged Apothecary.

‘Shame begets shame,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘Our failure at the Feast is tied to the loss of our Chapter’s sacred standard. I can feel it.’

‘Your head is full of Santiarch Balshazar’s sermons. I honour the primarch, but Dorn lives on through our flesh and blood, not dusty artefacts,’ Ezrachi insisted. ‘The loss of our standard is a mighty blow, but in truth it was but a blood-speckled banner.’

‘Rogal Dorn himself entrusted his sons – our Excoriator brothers – with the standard over ten thousand years ago,’ the corpus-captain said. ‘It displays the Second Founding’s decree and is threaded with the honours of every battle fought in our long, bloody history. It carries the distinctia of the Astartes Praeses and our service in garrisoning the Ocularis Terribus. It bears the Stigmartyr – the emblem that the Chapter adopted as its own.’ Gideon turned to present his own ivory shoulder plate, adorned with the scarlet symbol to which he made reference, a gauntleted fist clenching the length of a thunderbolt-shaped scar. ‘It is much more than the blood-soaked rag to which you allude and I’ll have you mind your irreverence, Apothecary.’

‘I meant no offence, corpus-captain,’ Ezrachi replied plainly, slapping the adamantium scaffolding of his thigh. ‘As you well know, there is more than a little of my own blood splashed across that standard.’

‘Our brothers fight for a broken honour,’ the corpus-captain continued, oblivious to Ezrachi. ‘We are accursed. The Emperor’s eternal fortitude, once absent in the brother that surrendered the banner, is now absent in us all. It is our collective punishment.’

‘Is it not our way?’ Ezrachi put to him. ‘Do not the Excoriators of all Dorn’s sons feel the loss of the Emperor deepest? Do not the Excoriators alone know our primarch’s true grief, the agony of his redemption and the cold wrath of his renascence? Do we not purge his weakness and our own from this shared flesh through the Rites of Castigation and the Wearing of Dorn’s Mantle?’

‘This is beyond our inherited sin,’ Gideon said miserably. ‘The loss of the Honoured First Company. The near assassination of our Chapter Master. The failure and near decimation of the Fifth and now this – one hundred years of humiliation in the making, right underneath the disapproving noses of our Legionary kindred. All as spiritual censure for the loss of Dorn’s gift – the very embodiment of our Adeptus Astartes honour.’

‘We have lost a great symbol,’ Ezrachi admitted, ‘but not what the standard symbolised. That is alive and well in the hearts of every Excoriator who bears his blade in the Emperor’s name. As they do here, brother, at the Feast of Blades.’

‘Blades drawn in disbelief and sheathed in failure,’ the corpus-captain said grimly.

‘Is our standing in the Feast really so dire?’

‘I’m pinning our hope on Usachar and Brother Dathan. Usachar is a squad whip and a veteran. Dathan is young but fast and has a way with a blade.’

‘Some hope, then,’ Ezrachi said.

‘Usachar is chosen against Knud Hægstad of the Iron Knights and young Dathan has drawn Pugh’s champion,’ Gideon reported. ‘It’s never easy crossing blades with those chosen to wear the primarch’s plate, but with the Imperial Fists defending their title and the Feast fought on a First Company-conquered world… I don’t rate our chances. Even if they win, they’ll have to face that damned Crimson Fist in the next round. It’s fairly hopeless.’

‘So,’ Ezrachi put to the corpus-captain, ‘it’s time.’

‘I would enter the arena myself, but for the desperation it speaks to our brethren.’

‘Making your decision all the easier and more forgivable,’ the Apothecary persisted. ‘You have no choice. Give the order. Let me set free the Scourge.’

‘I would not do that for a hundred worlds,’ Gideon snarled. ‘He’s afflicted and has damned us all. Dorn has seen fit to punish him. The Scourge can rot for all I care. The Darkness is his to endure and I for one would not spare him his agonies.’

I am in a place … of darkness. I have never been here, yet I know it well. My mind – like my body – is in sensory overdrive. Something far beyond my genetic inheritance, beyond the rigours of Chapter indoctrination and the suprahormones roaring through my veins. This moment feels more acute, more vivid and keener than any I have formerly experienced. Every molecule of my being is devoted to it. Like the seconds have been honed to a razored edge.

Despite the intensity of this experience, the world about me is dark and indistinct. Everything, from the walls to the floor beneath my feet, is cloaked in a peripheral haze. I try to focus, but anything upon which I settle my eyes assumes the quality of screaming shadow. The howling gloom spreads like a stain, running into everything else and framing me in a vision of smeared charcoal.

I wander the labyrinthine nightmare of this place, weapon in hand. Searching. Splattered with blood that is not my own. Knowing that brothers both lost and true clash about me. There is gunfire. There is death. I can hear calls of distant anguish. I cannot make out the words but know that they are laced with venom and cold reason. The hot ringing of blades fills the air, punctuated by the crash of bolt-fire. I am on a smoke-stained battlefield. Boarding an enemy vessel. Reclaiming heretical dirt. Bringing sanity to a daemon world. I am in every battle that I have ever fought, one superimposed upon the other. Death and foes blurring. The colours of destruction smudging and blotting until all that is left is black.

My hearts hammer in unison. I am running. Fearful, but not for myself.

The dark nothingness about me saps my soul. Blood courses through my body. Battle beckons. I tremble not with dread but with expectation, the impending realisation of my genetic heritage. I am a warrior down to the last molecule of my being. I was engineered to kill for something greater than myself, to serve the Father-of-All with blade, bolt – even my last breath, and all those preceding.

I live the lost brothers I have ended. Their bodies fallen and terrible in the murderous ruin they have committed – one upon the other and myself upon them all. Mighty brothers lie twisted and broken. Their god-flesh is still. Fratricide over. The chime of battle hangs about their corpses. Their weapons decorate the changing floor. My own joins them.

A doom, so deep, has reached me. A pain so clear and a loss so searing to my existence that it shatters my soul. Like a dread nova, erupting through histories both galactic and personal, the Darkness finds me. For a moment, there is light in the nothingness. The Emperor of Mankind is with me – here, in this hopeless place. His presence and legacy a beacon in the blackness. Withering to look upon. Impossible not to. I approach as one might his doom. Hesitant. Uncomprehending. Child-like. The moment overwhelms me and tears cascade down my blood-flecked cheeks. Then like a nova – brief, beautiful and sad in its distant diminishing – the beacon fades. I fall to my knees and I weep uncontrollably, for there is nothing left to do. No higher power to whom I can appeal.

The star has faded. The light is gone. In its place is dead space, laced with the poisonous shockwave of the aftermath, trembling through the ages. All that is left is the bottomless grief of the orphan Angel. My hearts know his immortal sorrow. Rogal Dorn. My father’s loss. My loss through his. I feel what he felt, stood over the Emperor. I know the fear and misery he allowed himself. That moment of doubt and horror-stricken possibility becomes my eternity. It saturates me with its despair. I sink deep within myself and find a greater darkness there. An Imperium without an Emperor. A fatherless humanity. An eternity without direction. Dorn’s Darkness.