Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

The Pilgrimage is the oldest legend in the Covenant of Colchis, and the one most often seen in human cultures scattered across the galaxy. Humanity has a fundamental need to believe in it. The Primordial Truth: heaven, paradise... It exists somewhere, in some form – home of the gods, underworld of the daemons. The layer behind natural reality. Anything is possible within its boundaries.

The Pilgrimage is nothing less than the journey to see it with one’s own eyes. To confirm where mythology ends and faith begins.

Heaven. Hell. Gods. Daemons.

I will have the answers I seek.

He turns the fifth and final card. The Emperor, bedecked in finery, all details writ with punishing clarity except the one aspect that matters: his face. A golden lord.

I was weaned on the old scrolls – the very scrolls we cast aside in favour of worshipping the Emperor. Now, I cannot help but look back to the teachings of my youth, and think of those legends and their cores of truth.

In crude imagery, the old works showed a stain on the stars – a scar in reality, where the Primordial Truth reached out into the universe of flesh, bone, blood and breath. Each of them foretold of a golden lord, a being of godly power that would carry humanity to divine perfection. It had to be my father. It had to be the Emperor. And I believed it was, until the moment it was not.

He was not the golden lord. The Emperor will carry us to the stars, but never beyond them. My dreams will be lies, if a golden lord does not rise.

I look to the stars now, with the old scrolls burning runes across my memory. And I see my own hands as I write these words.

Erebus and Kor Phaeron speak the truth.

My hands.

They, too, are golden.

Part Two

PILGRIMAGE

Three years after the Legion’s

departure from Colchis

IV

A Child’s Dreams

I can only imagine how the primarch’s heart shattered when the Pilgrimage ended.

Three years of the Seventeenth Legion scattered across the stars. Three years of the Word Bearers sailing farther and faster than any of their brother warriors, reaching into the edges of space and pulling the boundaries of the Imperium with them.

So much of humanity’s dominion over the stars is owed to the sons of Lorgar – a bitter reality after the years of ponderous, meticulous advancement, earning them nothing but scorn.

But I know the temperament of this Legion. For every peaceful compliance – for every culture brought into the Imperium and quietly encouraged to follow the new Word – there will have been a world that now spins in space as a dead husk, fallen victim to the Word Bearers venting their wrath.

The Pilgrimage revealed many truths: the flaws written into the Legion’s precious gene-seed; the arcane gestation of Lorgar Aurelian himself; the existence of the neverborn – named as daemons, spirits and angels by a million ignorant generations of mankind. But the greatest truth revealed was also the hardest to accept, and it broke a primarch’s heart.

And of course, it changed his sons. The Word Bearers could never go back to a time before the truth.

Argel Tal and Xaphen were my closest links to a world I could no longer see, and the Pilgrimage’s destination changed them in ways far more profound than mere physical differences. The knowledge was a burden to them: that they and their brothers in the Word Bearers Legion must be the ones to return to the Imperium with this terrible truth.

I cannot conceive how they endured, being the heralds of such tidings. To be the ones chosen to enlighten an entire species that humanity would struggle from now until the day creation died. There would be no Golden Age, no era of peace and prosperity. In the darkness of the future, there would be only war.

Perhaps we are all playing the roles marked out by the gods. People who are destined for greatness will often dream great dreams as children. Fate shapes them for the years to come, offering their young minds a teasing glance at what will be.

Blessed Lorgar, Herald of the Primordial Truth, dreamed like this. His childhood was tormented by visions of his father’s arrival – a god of gold, descending from above – as well as nightmares of someone unknown, something unseen, forever calling his name.

And that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Word Bearers Legion. Their father knew he would be one of those bringing enlightenment to humanity, but he could never foresee how it would come to pass.

The primarch has spoken of his brothers and how they dreamed similar dreams. Curze, born on a world of eternal night, dreamed of his own death. Magnus, Lorgar’s closest kin, dreamed the answers to the universe’s mysteries. One was cursed with foreknowledge; the other blessed by it. Both were destined to do great things as they reached maturity. Their actions have shaped the galaxy, just as Lorgar Aurelian’s have.

As for myself, I only remember one nightmare from my youngest years.

In my dream, I sat in a blackened room, as blind in the darkness then as I am now. And in that darkness I sat in silence, listening to a monster breathe.

Where is the line between prescience and fantasy? Between prophecy and a child’s imagination?

The answer is simple. Prophecy comes true.

We just have to wait.

- Excerpted from ‘ The Pilgrimage’ ,

by Cyrene Valantion

TWELVE

Death

Final Flight of Orfeo’s Lament

Two Souls

Xaphen lay dead at the creature’s feet.

His spine twisted, his armour broken, a death that showed no peace in rest. A metre from his outstretched fingers, his black steel crozius rested on the deck, silent in deactivation. The corpse was cauled by its helm, its final face hidden, but the Chaplain’s scream still echoed across the vox-network.

The sound had been wet, strained – half-drowned by the blood filling Xaphen’s ruptured lungs.

The creature turned its head with a predator’s grace, stinking saliva trailing in gooey stalactites between too many teeth. No artificial light remained on the observation deck, but starlight, the winking of distant suns, bred silver glints in the creature’s unmatching eyes. One was amber, swollen, lidless. The other black, an obsidian pebble sunken deep into its hollow.

Now you , it said, without moving its maw. Those jaws could never form human speech. You are next.

Argel Tal’s first attempt to speak left his lips as a trickle of too-hot blood. It stung his chin as it ran down his face. The chemical-rich reek of the liquid, of Lorgar’s gene-written blood running through the veins of each of his sons, was enough to overpower the stench rising from the creature’s quivering, muscular grey flesh. For that one moment, he smelled his own death, rather than the creature’s corruption.

It was a singular reprieve.

The captain raised his bolter in a grip that trembled, but not from fear. This defiance – this was the refusal he couldn’t voice any other way.

Yes. The creature loomed closer. Its lower body was an abomination’s splicing between serpent and worm, thick-veined and leaving a viscous, clear slug-trail that stank of unearthed graves. Yes.

‘No,’ Argel Tal finally forced the words through clenched teeth. ‘Not like this.’