Aaron Dembski-Bowden: The First Heretic

One of the armada’s vessels – a ship mighty enough in its own right, but utterly dwarfed by the flagship at the fleet’s vanguard – was the battle-barge De Profundis. In Low Gothic, its name translated with ragged eloquence into ‘ Out of the Depths’. In the Colchisian dialect of the warship’s home world, it translated from those proto-Gothic roots as ‘ From Despair’.

The terminal shuddering through the ship’s bones lessened with realspace reasserting its hold, and temporal engines took over from the overheated warp thrusters. The captain of De Profundis rose from his ornate command throne as his ship threw off the empyrean’s lingering shackles. The throne itself was carved ivory and black steel, draped with devotional parchment scrolls and taking up the centre of a raised dais. On the tiered steps leading up to his throne stood three other figures, each clad in the same granite grey battle armour, each one with their gazes cast at the display occulus taking up the entire forward wall.

The scene unfolding on the visual screen was one of unrivalled chaos. Order was breaking down before the fleet even engaged the enemy, as if the anger of every captain bled freely into the trajectories of their vessels, breeding irrationality where focus was needed.

The Chapter Master’s armour thrummed with energy, its exposed cabling connected to the back-mounted power pack. Ornate beyond many other suits of Astartes warplate, the personal armour of Chapter Master Deumos was unashamedly brazen in its declaration of his accomplishments. Detailed in engravings etched onto his pauldrons was a recording written in Colchisian cuneiform, the runic script listing his victories and kill-counts in poetic verse. Emblazoned on his left shoulder guard and overlaying the runic poetry was an open book sculpted from bronze, with its pages aflame. Each tongue of fire was hand-carved from red iron, welded with artful craft onto the book itself. In the right light, the metal pages seemed to flicker with iron flame.

Lastly, ringing one of the slanted red eye lenses of his snarling helm, was a stylised, spiked star of brass. It was a symbol repeated across the hull and spinal buildings of the De Profundis, heralding the battle-barge as the vessel of the Chapter of the Serrated Sun. Each ship in the fleet bore its own unique sigils – the Osseous Throne, the Crescent Moon, the Coiled Lash... symbol upon symbol, a stream of signifiers. Here, in the void, they were scattered like the hieroglyphs on a shaman’s runestones.

The eyes of every warrior, officer, serf and slave were fixed upon the planet of Khur, and the capital city that had once been visible from space. In a sense, it still was: an ashen stain blackening a quarter of a continent.

Deumos’s features could easily have been hewn from the metamorphic rock of Terra’s ancient Himalayan mountain range, not far from where he’d had been born two hundred years ago. Some men laughed, and laughed often. Deumos was not one of them. His humour ran along bleaker lines.

One of his subordinates, the Seventh Captain by rank, had once told him that his scarred face was a ‘chronicle of wars no one wished to fight’. Deumos smiled at the recollection. He was fond of Argel Tal’s attempts at wit.

Breaking from the momentary indulgence of reverie, Deumos regarded the occulus, still unsure exactly what he was bearing witness to. The rest of their ships spread out in loose attack formation, many of them still accelerating. The outriders and scouts were slowing significantly, their momentum dying as the rage of their engines faded.

‘What am I watching?’ Deumos asked. His helm emitted the words as a crackling growl. ‘Auspex, report.’

‘Initial auspex reports are filtering in now.’ The officers by the three-faced scanner table were all human, their uniforms the same stark grey as the Chapter Master’s armour. Their senior rating, the Master of Auspex, had gone pale. ‘I... I...’

The Chapter Master turned his glare on the humans. ‘Speak, and speak quickly,’ he said.

‘The enemy fleet in geostationary orbit above Monarchia registers as Imperial, sir.’

‘So it’s true.’ Deumos stared hard at the Master of Auspex, an ageing officer with a strong voice, who was frantically adjusting tuning dials on a display screen three metres square. ‘Speak.’

‘They’re Imperial, confirmed. They’re not the enemy. A host of transponder codes are flooding the sensors, actively broadcast. They’re announcing themselves to the entire fleet.’

The tension still didn’t bleed from Deumos. Instead, it wormed deeper into his thoughts, dredging the memory of that maddening message to the fore. Return to us, it had pleaded. They call themselves the XIII Legion.Return to us, we beg you.

Deumos let the disquiet sink back into the calmer sediment of his mind. He needed to focus.

He watched the occulus as grey-hulled ships slowed, their wide-mouthed engines breathing diminished flares. Several vessels veered away from the rest of the fleet, breaking the elegance of the attack formation. Doubt, most definitely. No captain could know what to do.

The perfect, regimented anger of the assault run was crumbling, unsalvageable with so many vessels slowing and breaking away. All around them, the colossal fleet on the edge of open warfare collapsed, powering down their weapons. As an astral ballet, it was running through these final anticlimactic motions with clear reluctance. Again came the sense of the ships’ captains infecting their vessels with emotion.

The planet itself was close, close enough for the enemy fleet to edge into visual range. At this distance, they were little more than dark specks framed by dense cloud cover, hanging in low orbit. Deumos turned to his brothers, his subordinates, each one of them standing on the lesser steps of his raised dais.

‘Now we discover the truth in all this.’

‘Today will end in darkness,’ this from the Seventh Captain, his left eye ringed by the serrated sun. ‘We know the truth, we know what our brothers have done. No explanation will quench the primarch’s sorrow. No reasoning will quell his rage. You know this as well as I, master.’

Deumos nodded. He’d indulged a moment of concern that the Lex wouldn’t slow down, that it would drive like a grey blade into the heart of the opposing fleet, its weapon batteries aflame as they sang their lethal songs. Brother against brother, Astartes against Astartes.

Once, he would have smiled at the delicious blasphemy of an impossible idea. Not now.

‘We’re being hailed,’ one of the vox-officers called from his console.

At last. A fleet-wide message, from the only voice that mattered. The message was relayed across the bridge, ruined by vox-breakage but recognisable nonetheless.

‘My sons.’ No amount of distortion could conceal the hurt and affection in the words. ‘My sons, we have reached Khur. The last prayer from Monarchia must now be answered. Today we witness with our own eyes the ruin our brothers have made of the perfect city. ’

The four Astartes warriors around the command throne shared a glance, though their expressions remained hidden behind their Mark III helms. Each of them heard the tremor in their father’s voice.

‘My sons,’ the message continued. ‘Blood demands blood. We will have the answers we seek before the day is done. This, I swear t–’

The message didn’t end, it was cut off. An overriding signal took hold of the vox-network, powerful enough to eclipse the words of the Legion’s own primarch.

This voice was deeper, colder, and just as sincere.

‘Warriors of the Word Bearers. I am Guilliman of the XIII Legion, Lord of Macragge. You are ordered to descend to the surface immediately and muster in the heart of the razed site once known as Monarchia. Coordinates are being conveyed. There will be no defiance of this mandate. Your Legion, in its entirety, will gather as ordered. That is all.’