V2 Chapter 54: The Word Bearers
In the vast central hall of the temple, there was only darkness.
In the depths of that dead silence, a single enormous figure knelt on one knee.
He held a bell in both hands.
It was cast from bone, black iron, and something that was still faintly moving. Its surface was covered in dense Colchisian scripture. It had no tongue. It had no structure capable of producing sound.
But when the kneeling figure gave it a slow, gentle shake, a piercing wail of lamentation erupted through the surrounding space: the screaming despair of hundreds of millions of lives at the moment of their destruction, compressed and forced directly into the minds of every living thing within reach.
"Praise the Grandfather. Praise the Lord of Plague."
He spoke through the wailing, chanting the desecrated hymn. As his voice rose, a deep chorus answered from the darkness around him, as though a great congregation of the faithful were responding in kind.
With the chanting, the first flame ignited in the temple's southwest corner with a deep concussive sound. In its light, the floor of the hall began to reveal itself: an enormous eight-pointed star of Chaos, large enough to cover every floor tile in the temple, slowly emerging as though being drawn up from beneath the stone.
The bell's second cry followed.
"Praise the Architect. Praise the Lord of Fate."
The hymn climbed higher. In the northeast, the second flame took hold.
The third cry.
"Praise the Prince. Praise the Lord of Pleasure."
In the southeast, the third flame began to move.
The final cry rang through the hall.
"Praise the Blood God. Praise the Lord of Skulls."
The northwest corner produced the last flame.
"All is transient. Only Chaos is eternal. In the name of Lorgar, praise the truth of the highest heaven."
The chorus reached its peak. Every flame was burning. In the light of the braziers, the enormous kneeling figure became visible.
A fallen Space Marine. Seventeenth Legion. A Dark Apostle of the Word Bearers: Kobath Anaslo.
His armour was of an extremely ancient mark, its edges mutated into jagged bone spurs, the dark-red paintwork hung with scrolls of blasphemous scripture made from human skin.
He wore no helmet. His face was completely white, every surface covered in dense Colchisian runes, the scar tissue shifting faintly as Warp energy moved through it.
Kobath rose to his feet and fixed his gaze on the centre of the eight-pointed star.
There, held suspended in mid-air by several thick chains of Warp energy, was a sceptre, somewhat longer than a standard Astartes short-sword.
Its shaft was constructed from an extremely ancient black metal of draconic origin. The base was a sharpened claw-form ferrule. The head was a perfectly rendered dragon's skull, rendered with complete and vivid detail. In the skull's eye sockets, no fire burned; only a thread of crimson light, barely visible, pulsed with slow regularity.
The corrupted Warp energy generated by the ritual moved along the chains like serpents, pressing toward the relic.
Then the crimson light in the eye sockets detonated.
A surge of disordered and savage temporal force erupted outward in all directions like a wave. The Warp energy attempting to enter the relic was shattered and dispersed instantly. The stone floor tiles surrounding the altar, caught in the temporal torrent, experienced centuries of erosion in a single moment and crumbled to fine dust.
The expression on Kobath's rune-covered face contracted sharply. He stared at the sceptre, still resisting.
From among the Word Bearers Space Marines kneeling around him, one rose. His armour bore the same dense carved profanity. He moved to Kobath's side in silence.
"Dark Apostle Kobath, we..."
"No, brother." Kobath cut him off. The suppressed anger in his voice was controlled but present. "We have not succeeded. It still resists. But this is only a matter of time. We will guide it to embrace the truth."
"My lord, perhaps we should simply..." The Word Bearer began to suggest something more direct.
"No."
Kobath's voice cracked with sudden fury. He turned sharply, his bloodshot eyes fixing on the subordinate who had already lowered his head.
"Remember the scrolls of Lord Erebus. Remember the holy teachings written by the First Chaplain. We must bring it to fully embrace the truth."
His voice returned to something level.
"We do not destroy what can be reinterpreted. We do not discard miracles that the gods can still use. We are not thieves, brother."
He turned back to look at the sceptre.
"We are preachers."
"Yes, Dark Apostle." The Word Bearer said nothing further, stepped back into the formation behind him, and knelt again.
Kobath turned back to the sceptre at the star's centre. Then his head came up. His mutated eyes seemed to pass through the temple's heavy dome and into the cloud-covered sky above. The scarred mouth pulled into a cruel smile.
"Perhaps what we require is simply a suitably high-quality sacrifice."
The heavy transport's landing struts struck the ground with a solid impact.
Duvette pushed the hatch open and stepped down. His boots touched an unnamed black stone. The plaza was enormous, stretching all the way to the distant complex of grand and distorted temple buildings.
He checked the tactical map and looked at the immediate environment.
The silence was complete. Nothing moved except the wind cutting through the open space. Above, a storm flickered intermittently in the cloud cover, brief tears of lightning in the darkness.
Either whatever had built this temple was sheltering somewhere deep in the complex, which was effectively the size of a large city, or they had left entirely, leaving behind nothing but this space dedicated to the four Chaos powers.
A second transport descended behind him. Duvette turned in time to see Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner step down with approximately a dozen attendants from a black-painted vessel.
Heinz appeared to register Duvette's attention. He turned his head and met it.
The somewhat round face produced a smile that managed to be deeply unsettling without using any of the facial elements that should have made it so. The eyes behind it had the quality of a devoted collector looking at a very expensive and very much-loved object that was about to be put into a fire to test its heat resistance.
"Colonel-Commissar." Heinz said pleasantly. "The Emperor appears to have prepared us an appropriate setting."
Duvette looked at him for a moment.
"I would have preferred the Emperor to prepare me a heavy artillery piece."
Heinz did not take offence. If anything, the smile deepened.
Duvette turned away without further comment.
The 112th was formed up and ready. He surveyed them briefly. Anderson worked one hand around the grip of the thunder hammer. Stroud looked at the black spires in the distance and produced a low, concise remark about the setting that covered his actual opinion precisely.
"Stay in formation." Duvette pressed the comms. "All squads confirm status with each other. Anyone who hears a voice that doesn't belong to their own squad reports it immediately. No one breaks formation."
"Understood."
"Also: your instruments are for reference only. Do not trust the readings here. Go by..." He paused, aware that Heinz was almost certainly monitoring the channel, and substituted the word. "Go by instinct."
Everyone on the channel understood what he meant.
"Already apparent, Commissar." Finn's voice came through the channel. "The augury scanner just informed me there are over three hundred life-sign contacts directly behind us."
Duvette looked back at the empty plaza.
Nothing there.
"Ignore it."
Cawl had given him no specific route. The Archmagos's instructions were vague to the point of uselessness: proceed to the assigned coordinate and locate "anything suspicious."
How in the Emperor's name am I supposed to know what counts as suspicious in a place like this, Duvette thought, without letting any of it show.
He drew the plasma pistol and the master-crafted power sword. The blue disintegration field came to life with its familiar hum. He levelled the pistol at the temple's main structure ahead, where the eerie green flames burned in the darkness.
"Full alert. Search formation." He brought his hand forward. "We are going inside. Let's hope our hosts don't make themselves too welcoming."