Саймон Спуриэр - Fire Warrior

Tarkh’ax turned its gaze back upon the dying little creature, perplexed by this bizarre final act of defiance.

The tau smiled.

And the dud bolter shell, buried deep inside the fio’tak of Kais’s helmet for so many exhausting decs, was heated by the play of malefic energies across the monolith.

It detonated with a sooty roar, and the swirling madness that was Tarkh’ax’s link to the butcher god died with a tug of energy. It shrieked its fury to the world, hefting high the axe that would obliterate forever the cringing morsel that had denied it even the smallest of deific patronage, and—

And there was the screaming of jet engines, and the ghostly distortion of anti-grav drives, and bulky shapes falling from the sky with weapons roaring.

Kais kept watching until the battlesuits had used up all of their ammunition and the hulking daemonlord was eradicated from physicality forever.

Then the world went grey.

Then the world went black.

And there was peace.

The thing in the warp thought of glory.

It was surrounded by a million, billion of its kind. Frothing and fizzing like spawning fish, running together in the ether, dragging their claws of nothingness against reality with scant hope of ever breaching the distance between the two.

In this place of madness a memory was difficult to hold. Thoughts were unfocused, uncontrollable things, impossible to grasp and concentrate upon.

Nonetheless, struggling against the innumerable tide of its fellows, the warp thing raced across the vastness of the empyrean and remembered — or perhaps dreamed — of the time that it had been Tarkh’ax, Changer of Ways, Devotee of Tzeentch, Daemonlord of Chaos.

A man, who was not a man, stood upon the bridge of a starship and stared at the orb of matter in space before him.

He was a superhuman, or as near to one as it was possible to be — and his skin, which was made of ceramite and plasteel, was blue.

The planet seemed serene from his vantage point: a swollen belly of earth and sand, hidden in shadow, waiting for the morning.

It would not come.

The sensation of teleportation was still uncomfortable to Ardias, and combined with the dangerously high quantities of stimmchem and pain-reductors the apothecary had administered, he was left feeling off-balance and hazy. Since regaining consciousness in the silence of the Chaos pit, he’d had little time to simply stand and stare.

The tau flotilla diminished into the void on the surveyor-screens, watched closely by Captain Brunt and his command crew.

“They’re gone,” a servitor said, quietly.

Ardias pondered briefly upon the xenogens. A young race, by human standards— and dangerous. There was no doubt of that. Their time would come.

“Load torpedoes,” he grunted, returning his attention to Dolumar IV. “Target the Chaos temple.”

The captain knew better than to argue. “With what?” he asked, uneasy at the Ultramarine’s presence. “A bombardment would, I assure you, collapse even the deepest—”

Ardias turned to him with eyes flashing.

“Cyclonic torpedoes,” He said. “Viral bombs. In the name of Emperor and Guilliman, purge the planet.”

And three tau, dressed loosely in fire caste regs, armourless and helmetless, stepped from the heat of daytime T’au into the cool shade of a domed building.

“This way,” El’Lusha said, voice barely a whisper. His clipped steps betrayed the acute discomfort he felt, and his two young companions exchanged a glance, careful to conceal their nervousness. Several fio’vre medics, squat and bright in cream lab coats, scurried between chambers quietly.

The pair followed El’Lusha along snaking corridors, curving architecture cooling their troubled minds and going some way to banishing their fears. Fio’sorral artworks, sweeping frescoes and mandala patterns, bolstered their serenity, so that when they stepped finally into a small antechamber they felt refreshed and ready for whatever was to come.

As if reading their thoughts, Lusha fixed them with a sombre gaze. “You should prepare yourselves,” he said, searching their eyes. “He is different. He was changed by his ordeal.”

He gestured towards a door and a small viewing panel yawned open silently. Shas’ui T’au Ju and Shas’ui D’yanoi Y’hol, newly promoted, swallowed and stepped forwards.

“By the path...” Y’hol hissed, tottering back on his replacement bionic leg in shock. Ju mumbled a calming litany under her breath, dragging thin fingers across her mouth.

Lusha watched them closely. “I... I thought that you deserved to see,” he said, awkwardly. “He talks about you sometimes, the fio’vres say. He says you were his friends.”

Y’hol frowned. “We are his friends, Shas’el.”

“ Were , Shas’ui,” Lusha corrected. “He thinks you’re dead. Or maybe he thinks he’s dead. Whichever it is, there are no friends in his world anymore.”

“How did he come to this?” Ju whispered, more to herself than anyone else.

Lusha chewed his lip, searching for words. “By going too far into a place that no tau should ever venture.”

“You mean that... that ‘pit’? The por’hui won’t give any details.”

Lusha laughed bitterly and tapped at his head.

“No, Ui’Y’hol. I mean into here. We all have darkness inside us. We hide it away and pretend it’s not there, but it is. And the only way to stay clear of it is the way of the tau’va. But even the One Path won’t light up every shadow. Kais went too far into the darkness.”

Ju shook her head, bewildered. “So he’s gone then? Lost forever?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. He needs time now, that’s all.”

“Why did you bring us here, Shas’el?” Y’hol didn’t take his eyes from the viewing panel as he talked. “The truth. You could have just told us.”

Lusha sighed. “Because someone needed to know, Shas’ui. La’Kais is a hero. He kept the machine grinding along so that no one else would have to admit to the... the Mont’au inside them. He gave himself up for the Greater Good, and no one will ever know.”

They stared. And time passed.

And they left.

Alone in his mind, Kais walked the path.

He walked the path and he fought the Mont’au devil.

He raged and he killed; he relaxed and he focused.

He went deep inside himself, and refused to come out until, one way or another, he knew which way along the path he was walking.

It wasn’t as lonely as it could be, because every time he dared to open his eyes — just to check that the real world was still there — he could look down at his one remaining hand, strapped carefully in place to the restraint pallet, and read the tiny fragment of display wafer that someone had placed there.

It was broken. Only a sliver of text remained, without context or meaning, but somehow... somehow it felt right.

It simply said: With pride .