Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

This was how battles must have looked when only gods and their demigod offspring walked upon Terra. Humanoid giants in regal armour, some dark and pelt-clad like sky deities of boreal Aesir, some golden and haughty like scholar gods of Faeronik Aegypt. Immense blows were landed by warriors of either side: men were smashed off their feet, or cut apart, bodies were rotated hard, heads snapped around. Fenrisian blades hammered into Prosperine armour, Prosperine force burned back into Fenrisian plate. The line faltered in both directions as it compensated for the force of collision. Then it seemed as though the carnivorous lust of the Vlka Fenryka would entirely overwhelm the warriors of the Fifteenth.

That was the moment we started to die, my brothers. That is the moment we started to die in any significant numbers. The Thousand Sons unleashed their maleficarum, the poison in their veins.

Electrical discharge leapt from staffs and fingertips. Radiant filth, like the unlight of the warp, spilled out of eye slits and speared from warding palms. Wolves were torn apart by the touch of their battle magic, or thrown back, mangled and scorched. Some were petrified into smouldering attitudes of excruciation. Their weapons charged with sorcerous power, fuming with helsmoke and sick light, the accursed traitors launched into our assaulting ranks.

Threads were cut in swathes, like scythed corn. Threads were more than cut. Some were torched back along their lengths, so that men did not merely die; the lives they had led before their deaths burned away into forgetfulness. Some were left as smears of blood, or haphazardly butchered carcasses. Some were pulled limb from limb by invisible wights and the sprites of the air. Some were left as nothing but heaped white bones and scads of blackened armour.

Oje died there, turned inside out by a warlock’s gesture. I saw Svessl too, split in two by an invisible blade. His blood came out of him with great, explosive force, like liquid from a pressurised cask. Hekken: cooked inside his armour. Orm Ormssen: exsanguinated. Vossul: blinded and pulped. Lycas Snowpelt: gutted and decapitated. Bane Fel: engulfed in a cold blue fire that consumed him but would not go out. Sfen Saarl: withered to a vile powder. Aerdor: transmogrified into a twisted, steaming, inhuman stump.

Too many. Too many! The accounts needed for all their sendings off would last for months. The kindling needed for all their funeral pyres would exhaust an entire great year’s supply.

I felt vindication, for the maleficarum of the Thousand Sons was everything it had been accused of being. Our prosecution was legitimised. But I felt fear, for I did not believe we would win or even live. For all our fury, for all our might as warriors, we would be exterminated, proving that the Thousand Sons of Prospero were monsters and warlocks.

I did the one thing a skjald should not do. I looked away. I averted my gaze so that I did not have to witness the fall of the Rout.

I missed, therefore, the beginning of salvation. I missed the first glimpse of the Null Maidens pouring down the black heaps of burning rubble into the fight. Their blades were bright. Pulsing beads and beams of energy spat from their weapons. They uttered no war cry or challenge.

The blankness of them washed across the line. The rank clouds of maleficarum burned away, or blew aside like fog in a night wind. The warlocks of the Fifteenth choked on the abominable words of their conjurations. They gagged on the pestilential utterance of their spells. I saw them stagger back, clutching at their throats, pawing at the neck seals of their helms. I saw blood spurting and leaking through visor slits in stringy ropes. I saw arcane gestures and motions seize up and cripple hands into palsied, arthritic claws.

Seconds after they had stunned and disempowered the traitors of the Fifteenth with their insidious silence, the sister-warriors struck. They surged through the recoiled mass of Wolves and began to hack and slice with their longswords. Their assault was an odd mixture of frenzy and elegance. Every stroke, every cut, every turn was the skilled action of an elite swordfighter, yet it was driven along by a berserk mania, a hysterical orgy of wounding and killing.

The Wolves did not hold back either. Released from the hammerblow onslaught of magic, they set in beside the Sisters, matching them blow for blow and kill for kill. The war was physical again. It was kinetic, concussive, visceral and explosive. Blood lay like dew upon what was left of the grass, and hung in the air like a mist.

Custodes had appeared with the Null Maidens. Their golden forms gleamed amid the swirling scrum of fighting bodies. Released into battle from their normal, solemn duties, they were as unrestrained as any Wolf. The blades of their halberds were thirsty for blood–

*

Put drink in my lanx. I am thirsty too. My throat is dry from the urgency of this account. I want you to hear all of this. I want you to see it in your minds.

See? Do you see? Prospero burns.

*

We were driving them back towards the great glass pyramids of Tizca. Drop-pods rained down through the stained sky like meteor showers. The light was bad: not insufficient, I mean. The daylight had gone bad, like meat goes bad.

Tizca had been violated and deformed. Most of its street plan had been erased, and its buildings and monuments demolished. The landscape was a tangle of black rubble and debris, some of it heaped into steep mountains and ridges, some of it cratered by vast munition strikes. There were corpses everywhere, and in the craters and the gullies, blood had pooled. In places, it ran in gurgling brooks between broken pipes and shattered masonry. Pulped organic matter spattered amongst the debris was the only residue of some fallen souls.

Each phase of assault was another climb up another hill that had not been there an hour earlier. The rubble slopes were sooty and treacherous. The air was full of beams and pulsed lasers, of hard rounds and rockets and squealing missiles. There was an almost constant downpour of micro debris, and, with that, oily rain as the boiled oceans began to condense and fall back onto the persecuted land. War machines, soiled by smoke-wash, streaked by rainfall, rolled and clanked and strode through the rubble-wastes, their weapons banks flashing and spitting. Pneumatic cannons recoiled pugnaciously into their mounts as they discharged. Main turret weapons boomed like the voice of the Allfather. Flocks of whooping rockets flew together in search of roosts.

I was with Godsmote and Orcir. We scrambled up another ridge of jumbled wreckage. I was trying to keep up with their fierce rate of advance.

To the west of us, as we arrived at the summit, one of the great glass pyramids began to collapse, devoured by a languorously slow bloom of fiery light that swelled and expanded, and allowed the monumental structure to fall into its incandescent embrace.

There was howling in the air once more, the growing chorus of Wolves. Over the din of war and even the tumult of material collapse, the sacking of Prospero was dominated by that sound: part wail, part wet leopard-growl. We know ourselves, my brothers, as Astartes warriors, but I tell you this as an outsider. It is the most chilling sound in the cosmos. It is the primal noise that accompanies death. Nobody who hears it ever forgets it, and few who hear it ever survive. It heralds the approaching destruction, and gives notice that the time for any parlay or mercy is long gone. It is the sound of the sanction of the Sixth, the hunting call of the Space Wolves. It is the dread-sound of wyrdmakers. It turns the blood to ice and the gut to water. I do not believe, and I speak in all honesty, that the Thousand Sons, even though they were Astartes and therefore engineered to be free of fear, were not inspired to terror when they heard it.