V2 Chapter 56: The Dragon-Fire Relic: Entropy's Song
"How is this possible?"
Kobath Anaslo murmured the words, his expression darkening as he stood in the shadows deep within the temple. Through the command channel, the dying roars and screams of his subordinates kept coming through in an unbroken stream.
As a Dark Apostle who had fought across a hundred campaigns, he had never once imagined that his most seasoned Word Bearers veterans, the ritual guard blessed by the gods themselves, and thousands of fanatical worshippers would be driven back step by step by a mere three thousand mortal soldiers.
And just moments ago, his most capable subordinate had failed to stop the advance and died at the hands of those corpse-emperor's lackeys.
This was not right. Kobath ran the logic rapidly through his mind. Unless the rotting corpse on the Golden Throne had personally intervened and granted these mortals a fighting capability beyond all reckoning, no tactical explanation could account for what was happening. The defeat defied everything he knew.
He pulled his attention back and turned to look at the sceptre at the altar's centre, the one wrapped in the coiling energy of the Warp. It was a relic of the Lord of Fire and Drakes, unearthed from a remote dead star: Entropy's Song.
Kobath's original purpose here had not been this. He had come to this daemon world under the orders of Dark Apostle Erebus himself, to expand and consecrate a grand temple to all four gods, establishing it as a ritual node to drive the Warp rift of the Hadex Anomaly further into realspace.
But during the temple's construction, he had found the relic by chance.
It was a weapon forged by the Primarch of the Eighteenth Legion with his own hands.
Through methods of extraordinary cruelty, Kobath had extracted a secret from the souls of several forcibly resurrected Salamanders, wrested from them piece by piece. Those lackeys of the corpse-emperor had believed absolutely that when all nine Primarch relics were gathered, the Lord of Fire and Drakes would return to his sons.
When Kobath learned of that prophecy, he changed his plans.
He had resolved to corrupt this relic completely in this place, to scour away the false emperor's mark from its surface, and then offer it to the gods of the highest heaven. That honour, beyond anything else available to him, would be sufficient to elevate his standing within the Word Bearers considerably.
Then these uninvited lackeys of the corpse-emperor had arrived and destroyed his entire arrangement.
His original intention had been to use the souls of these mortals in their despair as sacrificial fuel to accelerate the corruption of the relic that was resisting the Warp's embrace. But the situation had not developed as he had foreseen. Those mortals were killing his followers in the other direction entirely.
Kobath's face went to something utterly cold and twisted. Without a moment's hesitation, he turned and spoke in a low, hard voice to a Word Bearers daemonologist standing in the shadows behind him.
If their own strength was insufficient to destroy or corrupt the relic, then other forces would accomplish what they could not. The highest heaven was capable of anything.
On the ruined battlefield surrounding the temple's outer perimeter.
Duvette stood behind a section of cover and registered the change in the situation with sharp attention.
The veterans of the 112th had already noticed it too. The enemy they were engaged with had begun to withdraw.
The Word Bearers in their power armour abandoned the frenzied cultists without hesitation, leaving them as a rearguard to bleed for them, while they covered each other in alternating pairs and pulled back rapidly toward the great main temple in the distance.
Duvette was reading their intent when his personal encrypted channel carried the flat, affectless synthetic voice of Belisarius Cawl.
"Commissar Duvette." Cawl's voice carried the absolute rationality of a man consulting an instrument reading. "Based on a preliminary assessment of the data gathered from this area, this temple complex is not the location of the primary spatial anchor point I am searching for. I am authorising you to withdraw from the current engagement zone, return your forces to the landing point, and redirect to the next coordinate."
Hearing that order, the weight Duvette had been carrying somewhere in his chest settled and released. He had no desire whatsoever to take his people into that main temple.
"Received. 112th preparing to execute a bounding withdrawal—"
He pressed the vox-bead and was in the middle of issuing the regiment-wide withdrawal order when a voice of extraordinary unpleasantness cut directly into his all-units broadcast and overrode it.
"No withdrawal."
Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner's voice detonated across the 112th's full communications channel. Every trace of the pleasant manner that had served as his public face was gone.
He announced it to every channel at once, his voice sharpened by an excitement that had long since passed the edge of anything controlled. "The nature of this mission has changed. This is not an exploration operation. Open your eyes. This is the sacred rite of a miracle's birth. This is the moment a Living Saint is called into being. This is the beginning of all salvation."
Heinz strode forward and planted himself directly in front of Duvette, his body trembling with a fervour he had entirely stopped managing. His voice grew wilder with every word. His eyes, locked onto Duvette's, had gone to something frightening: the whites threaded with burst blood vessels, the gaze of a man who had arrived at the destination he had spent his life walking toward.
"Come! Come now! Prove it to me!" Heinz pointed directly at the main temple and all but screamed at Duvette. "Prove that you are the Emperor's will made flesh!"
Duvette's expression went entirely cold.
He was forming his reply when the sky above the great main temple changed without warning. The storm that had already been pressing down on the complex became something categorically worse. The lightning that had been striking in threads now fell in dense, overlapping curtains of white fire, as though the sky above were being torn open from the other side.
A sensation spread through the air around the temple: a weight, a pressure, a malice without origin or direction that pressed into the chest and refused to leave.
Duvette looked at what was happening in the distance and, internally, said something extremely foul.
He knew this feeling down to its bones. That energy signature, that particular quality of dread building in the atmosphere, was an exact match for what had preceded the daemonic summoning ritual at the top of the Formal Prime hive tower.
The Word Bearers inside the temple were calling something through.
Apparently reading Duvette's intent to withdraw with uncanny precision, Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner let out a peal of wild laughter.
"You must go! You must go, Commissar Duvette!" Heinz spread both arms wide and physically interposed himself in Duvette's path. "I will witness your miracle with my own eyes!"
"He is my—"
Cawl's cold synthetic voice broke into the channel, half a sentence in, attempting to use his authority to override the Inquisition's order.
"Silence!" Heinz spun toward the vox transmitter and roared, every pretence finally gone. "Archmagos! You have challenged the authority of the Inquisition once too many times! Do not imagine you can hide in your corner of the Imperium doing what you will without anyone knowing. We will not hesitate to bring every resource available to bear and uncover every secret you have ever kept!"
On the other side of the channel, Cawl fell into a silence like a sealed chamber.
With Cawl suppressed, Heinz turned back. The wind rolling across the open ground picked up the ash from the ruins and scattered it through his thinning hair, leaving him dishevelled in a way that should have looked ridiculous. It did not. The fanaticism and the viciousness in his eyes as he fixed them on Duvette left no room for ridicule.
"I know what you are thinking, Commissar." Heinz smiled and stepped forward. "You want something to happen to me here. You want this daemon world to solve your problem for you. You believe that if I die on a planet with no entry in any Imperial star chart, no one will know and no one will come asking."
The heavyset face arranged itself into an expression that was fully unhinged and entirely deliberate. He spoke each word separately, with the precise spacing of someone making absolutely certain every syllable lands.
"Duvette Erdmann. Before I came here, I made arrangements. The moment I die, you and every soldier under your command will be formally declared unrepentant heretics. You will become enemies of the entire Imperium."
Heinz extended one finger and pressed it against Duvette's chest.
"Prove it to me, Duvette. It is the only choice left to you."
Duvette stood where he was and let the wind come at him, the black greatcoat pulling and snapping in the gusts. He looked at the storm raging above the main temple's dome. He looked at the Lord Inquisitor standing in front of him, a man who had been entirely consumed by his own fervour. The hand that held the plasma pistol tightened until the tendons along the back of it stood out hard against the skin.
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