Aaron Dembski-Bowden: Helsreach

'Greetings, Astartes,' the vox-speakers built into her coffin spoke.

'Princeps Majoris,' Grimaldus nodded to the swimming husk. 'An honour to stand in your presence.'

There was a distinct pause before she replied, though her gaze never left him. 'You are keen to speak with me. Waste no time on pleasantries. Stormherald wakes, and soon I must walk. Speak.'

'I am told by one of this Titan's pilots, as an ambassador to Helsreach, that Invigilata may not walk in our defence.'

Again, the pause.

'This is so. I command one-third of this Legio. The rest already walks in defence of the Hemlock region, many with your brothers, the Salamanders. Do you come to petition me for my portion of mighty Invigilata?'

'I do not beg, princeps. I came to see you with my own eyes and ask you, face to face, to fight and die with us.'

The withered woman smiled, the expression both maternal and amused.

'But you have not yet completed your intended duty, Astartes.'

'Is that so?'

This time, the pause was longer. The old woman laughed within her bubbling tank. 'We are not face to face.'

The knight reached up to his armoured collar, disengaging the seals there.

Without my helm , the scent of sacred oils and the chemical-rich tang of her amniotic tank are much stronger. The first thing she says to me is something I am not sure how to respond to.

'You have very kind eyes.'

Her own eyes are long-removed from her skull, the sockets covered by these bulbous lenses that twist as she watches me. I cannot return the comment she made, and I do not know what else I could say.

So I say nothing.

'What is your name?'

'Grimaldus of the Black Templars.'

'Now we are face to face, Grimaldus of the Black Templars. You have been bold enough to come here, and honour me with your face. I am no fool. I know how rare it is for a Chaplain to reveal his human features to one not of his brotherhood. Ask what you came to ask, and I will answer.'

I step closer and press my palm against the casket's surface. The vibration is twinned with that of my armour. I can feel the eyes of the Mechanicus minions upon me, upon my dark ceramite, their reverent gazes showing their longing to touch the perfection of the machinesmith's craft represented by Astartes war plate.

And I look into the mechanical eyes of the princeps as she floats in the milky waters.

'Princeps Zarha. Helsreach calls for you. Will you walk?'

She smiles again, a blind grandmother with rotten teeth, as she presses her own palm against mine. Only the reinforced glass separates us.

'Invigilata will walk.'

Seven hours later , the people of the city heard a distant mechanical howl from the wastelands, eclipsing the cries of the lesser Titans. It echoed through the streets and around the spiretops, chilling the blood of every soul in the hive. Street dogs barked in response, as if sensing a larger predator nearby.

Colonel Sarren shivered, though he smiled at the others in his command meeting. Through bloodshot eyes, heavy with sleeplessness, he regarded them all.

' Stormherald has awoken,' he said.

Three days, just as promised, and the city shook with the tread of the god-machines.

Invigilata's engines walked, and the great gates in the northern wall rumbled open to welcome them.

Grimaldus and the hive's command staff watched from atop the viewing platform. The knight blink-clicked a rune on his retinal display, accessing a coded channel.

'Good morning, princeps,' he said softly. 'Welcome to Helsreach.'

In the distance, a walking cathedral-fortress pounded its slow, stately way through the first city blocks.

'Hail, Chaplain.' The crone's voice was laden with barely-contained energy. ' I was born in a hive like this, you know.'

'It is fitting then, that you'll be dying here, Zarha.'

'Do you say so, sir knight? Have you seen me today?'

Grimaldus watched the distant form of Stormherald, as tall as the towers surrounding it.

'It is impossible not to see you, princeps.'

'It's impossible to kill me, as well. Remember that, Grimaldus.'

No human had ever dared use his name so informally before. The knight smiled for the first time in days. The city was finally sealed. Helsreach was ready. And as night fell, the sky caught fire.

Its name had been, in nobler years, The Purest Intent.

A strike cruiser, constructed on the minor forge world Shevilar and granted to the Shadow Wolves Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. It had been lost with all hands, captured by xenos raiders, thirty-two years before the Third War for Armageddon.

When a huge and shapeless amalgamation of scrap and flame came burning through the cloud cover above the fortified city, warning sirens sounded once more across the hive. The squadron of fighters in the air - commanded by Korten Barasath - voxed their inability to engage. The hulk was burning up already, and far out of their capability to damage with their Lightnings' lascannons and long-barrelled autocannons.

The wing of fighters broke away as the hulk burned through the sky.

Thousands of soldiers manning the immense walls watched as the wreckage blazed its way overhead. The air itself shook with its passage, a palpable tremor from the thrum of overworked, dying engines.

Exactly eighteen seconds after it cleared the city walls, The Purest Intent ended its spaceborne life as it ploughed a new scar into Armageddon's war-torn face. All of Helsreach shook to its foundations as the massive cruiser hammered into the ground and carved a blackened canyon in its wake.

It took a further two minutes for the crippling damage inflicted by the impact to kill the immense, howling engines. Several booster rings still roared gaseous plasma and fire as they tried to propel the vessel through the stars, unaware it was half-buried in the stinging sulphuric sands that would be its grave.

But the engines failed.

The flames cooled.

At last, there was silence.

The Purest Intent was dead, its bones strewn across the wastelands of Armageddon.

'The ship registers as The Purest Intent,' Colonel Sarren read out from the data-slate to the crowded war room. 'An Astartes vessel, strike cruiser-class, belonging to the—'

'Shadow Wolves,' Grimaldus cut him off. The knight's vox-voice was harsh and mechanical, betraying no emotion. 'The Black Templars were with them at the end.'

'The end?' asked Cyria Tyro.

'They fell at the Battle of Varadon eleven years ago. Their last companies were annihilated by the tyranid-breed xenos.'

Grimaldus closed his eyes and relished the momentary drift of focus into memory. Varadon. Blood of Dorn, it had been beautiful. No purer war had ever been fought. The enemy was endless, soulless, merciless… utterly alien, utterly hated, utterly without right to exist.

The knights had tried to fight their way to join up with the last of their brother Chapter, but the enemy tide was unrelenting in its ferocity. The aliens were viciously cunning, their swarming tides of claws and flesh-hooked appendages smashing into the two Astartes forces and keeping them isolated from each other. The Wolves were there in full force. Varadon was their home world. Distress calls had been screamed into the warp by astropaths weeks before, when their fortress-monastery fell to the enemy.

Grimaldus had been there at the very end. The last handful of Wolves, their blades broken and their bolters empty, had intoned the Litanies of Hate into the vox-channel they shared with the Black Templars. Such a death! They chanted their bitter fury at the foes even as they were slain. Grimaldus would never, could never, forget the Chapter's final moment. A lone warrior, a mere battle-brother, horrendously wounded and on his knees beneath the Chapter's standard, keeping the banner proud and upright even as the xenos creatures tore into him.