Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

Lorgar licked his cracked lips. They tasted of ash. ‘If that is so, why have you waited to share your worries? Hindsight is a powerful vindicator, my friend, but none of us saw this coming. Not you, not I.’

Kor Phaeron’s eyes fairly gleamed. The elder leaned forward, as if the scent of some triumphant hunt filled his senses.

‘I have something I must confess, great lord,’ he said. ‘A truth that must grace your ears now, for the time has come.’

Lorgar turned to his foster father with threatening slowness. ‘I do not like your tone,’ he said.

‘Sire, my primarch, I tell no lie when I say I have feared this day would come. I took the smallest, most humble measures against its arrival, and–’

The words died in his throat, trapped there by his master’s hand. Lorgar squeezed the older man’s thin, tiny neck, cutting off speech and air with the barest use of strength. Erebus tensed, his eyes moving between the two figures.

Lorgar pulled Kor Phaeron closer, breathing deeply as if to mock the elder’s strangled gasps.

‘No more revelations, Kor Phaeron. Have we not confessed to enough of our own flaws this night? ’

He loosened his grip enough for Kor Phaeron to rasp out the words.

‘Davin, seventeen years ago,’ the elder whispered. ‘Corossa, twenty-nine years ago. Uvander, eight years ago...’

‘ Compliant worlds,’ Lorgar hissed into his foster father’s face. ‘Worlds where you yourself remained behind to begin their education in the Imperial Truth.’

‘Compliant... with the Imperial Truth. But embers of... cultures... were allowed to... remain.’

‘What. Embers.’ Lorgar growled.

‘Beliefs... that matched... the Old Faith... of home... I could not let... potential... truths... die...’

‘Can I not control my own warriors?’ Lorgar took a shuddering breath, and something clicked quietly inside Kor Phaeron’s neck. ‘Am I my brother Curze, struggling to control a Legion of liars and deceivers?’

‘Lord, I... I...’ Kor Phaeron’s eyes were rolling back into his skull. His tongue was dark now, slapping against his thin lips.

‘Sire,’ Erebus began. ‘Sire, you’ll kill him.’

Lorgar stared at Erebus for several moments, and the Chaplain wasn’t sure his liege lord even recognised him.

‘Yes,’ Lorgar said at last. ‘Yes. I could.’ He opened his fingers, letting Kor Phaeron collapse to the chamber floor in a heap of robed limbs. ‘But I will not.’

‘My lord...’ the elder heaved in air through blue lips. ‘Much to be learned... from those cultures... They are all echoes of ancestral human faith... Like you... I am no butcher... I wished to save... the lore of the species...’

‘It is a time of many revelations,’ the primarch sighed. ‘And I am not blind to why you did this, Kor Phaeron. Would that I had showed the same forethought and mercy.’

It was Erebus who replied. ‘You have asked the question yourself, sire. What if there is truth in the cultures we destroy? Kor Phaeron saved a handful, but the Great Crusade has annihilated thousands. What if we are repeating the sin of Colchis over and over and over again?’

‘And why,’ Kor Phaeron managed a faint smile as he touched his discoloured throat, ‘do so many cultures share the same beliefs as our own home world? Surely that suggests an underlying truth...’

The Seventeenth Primarch nodded, the motion slow and sincere. Already, even before this latest confession, his mind was turning to the future, tuning in to the endless possibilities. This was his genetic gift in action: a thinker, a dreamer, where his brothers were warriors and slayers.

‘We have worshipped at the wrong altar for over a hundred years,’ said Kor Phaeron, his voice returning.

Lorgar sifted through the bowl of ash, clutching another handful and smearing it across his face.

‘Yes,’ he said, with strength returning to his voice. ‘We have. Erebus?’

‘At your command, sire.’

‘Take my words to the Chaplains, tell them all of what transpires in the days I remain sequestered here. They deserve to know their primarch’s heart. And when you return for further counsel tomorrow, please bring me parchment and a pen. I have much to write. It will take days. Weeks. But it must be written, and I will not leave my isolation until it is done. You, both of you, will help me compose this great work.’

‘What work, sire?’

Lorgar smiled, and never had he looked so much like his father.

‘The new Word.’

SIX

Kale the Servitor

Unfocused

Warrior-Priest

The girl found it difficult to sleep, with no grasp of where day ended and night began. There was never a cessation of sound; the room forever rumbled, even if only faintly, with tremors from the distant engines. With darkness and sound both constant, she wiled away the hours sitting upon her bed, doing nothing, staring at nothing, hearing nothing except for the occasional voice pass her door.

Blindness brought a hundred perceptive difficulties, but foremost among them was boredom. Cyrene had been a prolific reader and her job necessitated a fair amount of travel, seeing all of the public sights in the city. With her eyes ruined, both those paths were barred in any meaningful sense.

In her darker moments, she wondered at destiny’s cruel sense of humour. To be chosen by the Astartes, to dwell among the angels of the Emperor... To walk the hallways of their great iron warship, smelling the sweat and machine oil... but seeing nothing at all.

Oh, yes. Hilarious.

Her first hours aboard had been the hardest, but at least they’d been eventful. During a physical examination in a painfully cold chamber, with needles sticking into the wasted muscles of her legs and arms, Cyrene had listened to one of the angels explain about bleached retinal pigment, and how malnutrition affected the organs and muscles. She’d tried to focus on the angel’s words, but her mind wandered as she sought to embrace what had happened, and where she now found herself.

The last two months on the surface had not been kind to her. The wandering groups of bandits in the foothills around the city had no regard for the sacred shuhl robe, or its traditions of respect.

‘Our world has ended,’ one of them had laughed. ‘The old ways no longer matter.’

Cyrene had never seen him, but when she slept, her mind conjured faces he might have worn. Cruel, mocking faces.

During her medical examination, she couldn’t stop shivering, no matter how she tensed her muscles to resist. The angels’ solar-sailing vessel was cold enough to make her teeth clatter together when she tried to shape words, and she wondered if her breath was misting as it left her lips.

‘Do you understand?’ the angel had asked.

‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Yes, I understand.’ And then, ‘Thank you, angel.’

Soon, other humans came to assist her. They smelled of spicy incense and spoke in careful, serious voices.

They walked for some time. It could have been five minutes or thirty – without her eyes, everything felt stretched and slow. The corridors sounded busy. Occasionally she’d hear the machine-snarls of an angel’s armour joints as the warrior walked past. Much more frequently, she heard the swish of robes.

‘Who are you?’ she asked as they travelled.

‘Servants,’ one man replied.

‘We serve the Bearers of the Word,’ said the other.

On they walked. Time passed, the seconds marked by footsteps, the minutes by voices passing by.

‘This is your chamber,’ one of her guides said, and proceeded to walk her around a room, placing her shaking fingers on the bed, the walls, the door release controls. A patient tour of her new home. Her new cell.