Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

The Word Bearer looked down at his skeletal hands. ‘Sire,’ he said softly. ‘Forgive me.’ Argel Tal managed to meet his primarch’s eyes, infinitely grateful that he saw no judgement in those grey depths.

‘There is nothing to forgive.’

‘You knew more of my life than I realised.’

Lorgar smiled. ‘All of my sons are precious to me.’

Argel Tal rubbed at his sore eyes. ‘Ingethel told us that our changes would begin at the ordained time, when the galaxy burns. But I am losing myself now. Is this the ordained moment already? Is the galaxy aflame? None of my memories are my own, father. There’s a copper taste on my tongue, like the echo of blood. Perhaps this is fear. Perhaps this taste is the fear so many poets and archivists have written about.’ The captain laughed, the sound hollow and humourless. ‘And now I speak my valediction.’

‘It need not be a valediction, Argel Tal. That cannot be decided until the tale is told.’

SEVENTEEN

A Dead Empire

Revelations

Genesis

Ingethel gestured at the planet with a crooked claw.

They called it Melisanth. It was one of the last to feel the Eye’s spreading influence.

‘Auspex confirms no life readings, even down to the bacterial level,’ Captain Sylamor’s voice rasped over the vox.

‘She really needed to scan to see that?’ Torgal asked.

Below them was the ghost of a world – a globe of black oceans and grey landscapes, inexpertly guarded by thin cloud hazes. Even in orbit above Melisanth, the ship was buffeted by the warp-winds outside, while the observation dome endured the liquid, a tidal press of human faces and figures bursting against the reinforced glass. Each one splashed over the shielding with oil-on-water incandescence, flowing back into the maelstrom as soon as it destroyed itself.

After a while, Argel Tal started to see the same faces reappear. They seemed to be reforming out there in the winds and hurling themselves at the ship over and over again.

‘Are they souls?’ he asked aloud.

It is primordial matter. In the realm of flesh and blood, it manifests as psychic energy. Your thoughts give it shape. You see human souls, but it is so much more. Eldar souls. The flesh of the neverborn, that humanity once named daemonkind. Raw psychic currents. Possibility incarnate, when the mind shapes reality.

‘I want to walk the surface of that world.’

You will die.

Argel Tal rounded on the creature, anger marring his unscarred features. ‘Then why drag us here? What is the purpose of this journey if we cannot leave the ship? To stare at dead worlds from behind our Geller Field? To listen to the shrieking of lost souls?’

Ingethel slithered closer to the gathered Word Bearers. The black-wood staff, once carried by the maiden who sacrificed herself to bring the daemon into being, tapped on the decking like an old man’s walking cane.

Such things I have to show you.

It gestured two gnarled claws at the world below. There is no lesson in Melisanth as it is. You must see Melisanth as it was.

Close your eyes. Hear the storm outside. Listen to the tide breaking against your vessel’s skin.

Melisanth is but one world floating in the Sea of Souls. One amongst millions. Let me show it to you.

And then, no more than a heartbeat later – Open your eyes, Argel Tal.

He’d always treasured sunrise.

This one, an ocherous orb painting fierce light over a city of spires and minarets, was one to remember. Even with pain tolerance and resistance to light saturation written into his genetic code, the rising sun was bright enough to make his eyes ache. And that was beautiful too, for it had never happened before.

Ingethel was nowhere to be seen. They stood on a cliff’s edge, above an alien city turned golden by the dawn. Argel Tal turned to see his brothers: Xaphen, watching the xenos colony; Malnor and Torgal with him; Dagotal, staring up into the blue sky.

This was Melisanth, came the creature’s burbling voice in his mind. See the city made of bone and gemstones. See the spires too delicate for mortal physics to support them, standing only because of eldar witchcraft.

Now see the Fall.

In the sky above, the clouds raced in a cyclical dance – day and night flashing past in a blur of flickering grey. Tendrils of violet clawed across the heavens, thickening, linking, coiling, staining the air with red mist. Sweat broke out on Argel Tal’s face and neck in the savage heat. It warmed even the aqueous moisture that lubricated his eyes.

As he watched, the city below began to tumble, its spires and walkways falling to shatter on the ground, crushing crowds of slender alien figures and demolishing lesser buildings beneath.

Their sorceries are fading. This is on the edge of the Great Eye. The destruction took days to unfold on these lesser colonies. At the core of their empire, all life was ended in mere moments.

Argel Tal could hear the city dying, the sounds of thunder, sorrow and lamentation carried up to him on the wind.

‘Aliens,’ Xaphen smiled at the toppling towers. ‘May they all burn, soulless and forgotten.’

None of the others disagreed. ‘Why did this happen?’ asked Argel Tal.

The eldar were close to seeing the truth of the universe. Their civilisation spanned the galaxy, evolving for millennia under the guidance and worship of their gods. And then, at the last step... they faltered.

‘How?’

Look to the sky.

The storm clouds gathered in a threatening spiral, darkening the land to every horizon. From the very first raindrops – hot on the skin and rich in their metallic reek – it was clear what was in store for the city below. With a single peal of thunder, loud enough to vibrate the air itself, the blackened clouds ground together and signalled the opening of the heavens.

Sheets of scarlet rained from the sky, showering the broken city in blood so thick it stained the bone structures that still remained standing. Xaphen closed his eyes, lifting his face to the downpour.

‘This is not human blood. It’s too sweet.’

Argel Tal wiped his face clear of the raining gore. In the city below, creatures were melting from the shadows of fallen monuments, rising from the lakes of blood that were forming in the streets. They staggered and sprinted, each one uneven and unnatural in its own half-formed way. Some crawled on a multitude of boneless limbs. Others wailed as they dashed on spindly legs, reaching out with curling claws.

My kin, taking physical form. They hunt souls, and flesh, and blood and bone.

‘Why is this happening?’

The malformed beasts ran in packs, dragging down any of the slender, weeping survivors they found. The sight left him cold. Genocide should be a purification, and there was nothing of purity in this insane unleashing of unknowable powers.

‘Answer me,’ Argel Tal said softly. No answer came, beyond the blood running down his cheeks and over his lips. He could smell nothing else, taste nothing else, beyond the sanguine rain.

New towers rose from the tumbling city below – slender spires formed from pulsing walls of still-living flesh, decorated by voiceless faces and flayed arms stretching from the architecture. The rising towers reached for the panicking eldar in the streets, using their lives as raw material, their alien flesh as living mortar.