V2 Chapter 58: We Are Not the Sons of Horus. We Are the Shadow Wolves of Luna!
Unlike the murk outside, the interior of the main temple blazed with the light of the enormous braziers, their eerie green fire throwing every column and archway into sharp relief. In here, the real battle had only just begun.
By that sickly green light, Duvette saw that the Word Bearers who had pulled back earlier had reformed. Using the thick load-bearing columns and the altar structures as cover, they had rejoined the fight alongside the Tzeentchian daemons. This time, with the daemon mass filling the space ahead of them as both shield and assault element, the hundred-odd Word Bearers with their bolters had steadied completely.
Inside the open nave of the temple, the 112th no longer had the terrain advantage that had let them encircle and dismantle the enemy piecemeal outside.
A Word Bearer's bolter fired at point-blank range and scythed down three soldiers who were still looking for cover, the mass-reactive rounds hitting like a reaper's stroke.
"Suppressing fire! Don't let them establish crossing fields!" Elias roared from behind a column.
Duvette's expression went cold and vicious.
"Plasma gunners, melta gunners." His voice came out with the flat precision of a targeting system issuing coordinates. "Third load-bearing column on the left. Side of the altar on the right. I don't care whether they've exposed themselves. Burn straight through the cover."
A dozen blinding plasma bursts and white-hot melta beams cut through the temple's darkness in the same instant.
The solid black stone columns liquefied under the sustained heat before they could cool. Two Word Bearers caught behind them had no time to move. The superheated stream punched directly through their power armour's chest plating, incinerated the biological organs behind it, and the enormous bodies dropped.
The Word Bearers appeared to recognise that this mortal unit possessed some capability to locate them through shadow and cover with precision that should not have been possible. They stopped playing the positional game.
With roars from several of their number, the remaining Word Bearers abandoned concealment entirely. Under cover of the psychic shields and sorcerous fire the surrounding Horrors were projecting outward, they came forward with chainswords and bolters, driving directly at the 112th's line in a killing charge, committed to using the transhuman close-quarters advantage to destroy this Astra Militarum force in the temple nave before it could continue extracting them at range.
"Hold the line! Fix bayonets!" Anderson's roar overrode the noise of everything around it.
Duvette stood at the centre of the line and watched the enormous figures come, and his mouth opened into something that was not quite a smile. A sound came out of him: low, compressed, carrying a killing intent that had been pressed down for several hours and had found an outlet.
He drew the power sword. The blue disintegration field blazed to life along the blade with a scream of displaced air.
One of the charging Word Bearers noticed the commissar in the black greatcoat and peaked cap at the centre of the line.
To a Chaos Astartes, a commander's head is always the finest sacrifice available.
The traitor roared and swung the blood-soaked chainsword in his hand, crossing the defensive line at a speed that mortal eyes could not fully track, bringing the blade down at Duvette's skull in a stroke intended to end him in two pieces.
"Commissar! Watch yourself!" The veteran bodyguard beside him shouted and multiple hellguns fired simultaneously.
The Word Bearer's charge stuttered for one fractional instant under the impact, a single hitch in the momentum.
That was all Duvette needed.
Under [Flesh Engine]'s extreme reaction speed, he moved into the strike rather than away from it. His body dropped low as the chainsword came down. The power sword came up in a single arc of blue light, driving through the gap that the stumble had opened in the neck armour joint, bottom to top.
The disintegration field cut through enhanced bone and the thick vessels beneath it without slowing.
The horned helmet and everything inside it went straight up. Dark arterial blood fountained from the clean neck stump and spread across the temple floor tiles.
The headless body in its warped power armour fell.
Duvette flicked the blood from the blade and straightened.
It was only at that moment, in the chaos of the close-quarters fighting, that he became aware of how far they had pushed. Grinding forward without pause, they had crossed the temple's entrance hall entirely without his fully registering it. They were close to the ritual construction at the centre of the eight-pointed star.
His gaze crossed the fighting crowd and locked immediately onto the altar at the back of the hall, elevated above the floor.
Above the altar, suspended in the air, was the sceptre.
Savage Warp energy coiled around it like a nest of serpents, pressing in from every direction. And the sceptre itself was pushing back: a torrent of disordered temporal force radiating outward from its core, fighting the Chaos energy trying to enter it with an intensity that had not slackened.
Duvette's pupils snapped tight.
He recognised it. That black draconic shaft. That closed dragon's skull.
One of the nine relics of the Eighteenth Legion. Forged by Vulkan himself, Primarch of the Salamanders.
Entropy's Song.
Something vast moved through him for a moment. How in the Emperor's name had these Word Bearers lunatics dug this out of whatever lost dead star it had been sitting on?
He could read exactly what they were attempting: using the enormous Warp energy of the ritual to force corruption into the relic, to overwrite its resistance and unmake the mark it carried.
He was going to take that thing.
He tightened his grip on the power sword, assessed the distance to the altar through the press of the close-quarters fighting, and was beginning to identify which of his veterans he needed to cut a path through to reach it, when the situation changed without warning.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
A sound that had no place on this battlefield: slow, deliberate, carrying a heavy echo that travelled through the gunfire and the screaming and reached every ear in the temple as though the noise of battle was simply not a factor.
A figure stepped out of the deep shadow behind the altar. Exceptionally tall. Ancient power armour hung with human-skin scripture scrolls. Unhurried.
Kobath Anaslo. Word Bearers Dark Apostle.
In the distance, Finn's las-fire reached for him and was stopped by a psychic barrier without disturbing a single scripture scroll.
The rune-covered face showed nothing resembling anger. What it showed was something that looked, with genuine unsettling precision, like admiration. Kobath stopped walking and looked down at the 112th fighting without retreat in his temple, and spoke as a man sharing an honest assessment.
"Remarkable. Truly remarkable."
The voice carried a resonance that had something of the Warp woven through it. "I have fought across this universe for ten thousand years. You are the most tenacious, the most capable mortal soldiers I have ever witnessed."
Kobath spread his arms wide. His gaze crossed the battlefield and settled directly on Duvette, who had just personally killed one of his warriors. The tone he used was one of genuine, arrogant incomprehension.
"I do not understand. You possess potential that I find extraordinary. Why do you waste your lives in service to that rotting corpse on the Throne? Why do you give your loyalty to a false god who does nothing but drink your blood?"
The Apostle's voice climbed, saturated with fervour. "I offer you a choice, here, in the name of the truth of the highest heaven. Join us. Serve the great gods. I will give you what that corpse-emperor never can: power beyond the short, forgettable arc of mortal life. Immortality. Eternity."
Kobath studied Duvette's face for a response and appeared to find the offer insufficient.
His mutated eyes narrowed slightly. His gaze shifted with sudden precision toward the rear of the 112th's line, settling on an area that to every normal eye appeared to contain nothing at all.
"As a demonstration of my sincerity." The scarred mouth curved into a cruel line. "Consider this: I can remove, right now, the parasite that has been feeding off your blood since the moment you arrived. The one hiding behind you."
No pause between the words and the act.
Kobath raised his right hand. From the darkness behind him, a column of psychic energy assembled in an instant. A bolt as thick as a barrel drove into the apparently empty space behind the 112th's line.
The explosion that followed was felt before it was heard. The refractor field generator, struck by that concentrated Warp energy, overloaded instantly, its collapse sounding like glass breaking under pressure.
A scream went up.
When the energy discharge dispersed, Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner was exposed to the full view of everyone present.
The pleasant composure he had worn for months was entirely gone. The refractor field generator he had trusted with his life was a block of burnt metal. One arm and half his body were carbonised to the bone on the side that had taken the direct discharge, the smell of charred meat rising from it. He lay at the bottom of a scorched crater in the temple floor.
That he retained any life at all was the product of his Storm Trooper escort. Fourteen soldiers with rigorous training and no hesitation had thrown themselves across him in the second before the bolt arrived, absorbing the majority of the impact with their bodies and their armour. Most of them were gone.
Kobath stared at the figure still breathing at the bottom of the crater with something approaching genuine surprise.
He had underestimated the protection rating of Inquisitorial-grade equipment, and the particular kind of stupidity that compels mortal guards to die for the person they protect.
He was raising his hand to deliver a second strike when a voice cut across the entire space.
"Give me the dragon-skull relic from that altar. And I will accept your terms."
Duvette's voice. Without any hesitation.
In the scorched crater behind the line, Heinz Werner's eyes opened as wide as his injuries permitted. He used what he had left to cough blood and fragments up from somewhere internal and directed what remained of his voice at Duvette's back.
"You would betray us?!" The words tore out of him with the last of his strength. "Duvette! You heretic! The Inquisition will have you—"
Heinz's voice echoed through the temple nave. In the silence after it, it sounded exactly as diminished as it was.
Because at that moment, neither the Word Bearers Dark Apostle on his altar nor the Colonel-Commissar at the front of the line gave the dying Lord Inquisitor a single glance between them. They treated him with the same consideration one gives a stray dog barking in a ditch.
Kobath looked down at Duvette from the height of the altar. The intelligence in those mutated eyes rested on Duvette's face for a long moment, searching for any sign of theatre or deception. What he found was something else: a cold, absolute, entirely unsentimental calculation of advantage.
He shook his head slowly.
"I am afraid that is not possible." The rune-carved face produced something that looked, with remarkable accuracy, like genuine regret. "Your price is too high, mortal. That relic is consecrated to the gods. I had some appreciation for your talent. What a waste."
With those words, Kobath stopped concealing anything.
The main temple shook.
The enormous Warp energy that had been directed at corrupting Entropy's Song was redirected in an instant, pouring outward from Kobath as its centre like something unleashed from a cage. The fabric of realspace tore audibly in the air around him.
"Since you will not become comrades, offer your worthless souls to the great gods of darkness." Kobath raised both arms with the movements of a conductor entering madness. "Every last one of them."
A Warp rift opened behind him, vast and ragged, splitting the altar wall apart as it formed.
Duvette's attention snapped to it immediately. At this scale, his first read was the same as it had been since he entered the building: the Greater Daemon was finally coming through.
His hand was already on [Silence] in the System panel. The moment anything large enough pushed its head through that rift, he would sever its Warp-tether entirely and the regiment would reduce it to dispersed matter with everything they had left.
What actually came through was not what anyone in the temple had prepared for.
The sound from inside the rift was heavy footsteps. Not the vast, grinding movement of a Greater Daemon.
From the darkness of that Chaos portal, several dozen tall figures walked out, stumbling, their gait wrong in ways that the eye tried to correct and could not.
When the green firelight of the braziers reached them, even the veterans of the 112th drew breath sharply.
These were Space Marines.
Or they had been.
The power armour on their bodies had fused completely with the biological matter it contained, the boundary between ceramite plating and mutated flesh long since dissolved into something that was neither and both. Where helmets had been, horns had grown, and compound eyes had replaced the optical lenses. The chainswords and bolters in their hands had merged with the arms themselves, becoming extensions of the bodies rather than weapons they carried.
These Astartes moved with the mechanical steps of something operating on instinct alone, their bodies barely answering whatever command moved them. From their ruined vocal organs, in voices that leaked air from places voices should not come from, they murmured the same words continuously. The sound carried through the gunfire and the screaming and filled the nave with something worse than either.
"Where is Terra..."
The words went around the walls and came back.
"Where is Terra..."
On the altar above, Kobath's expression crossed through surprise and settled into something far uglier. He had not summoned these mutated Astartes. They were not a product of the ritual he had constructed. Something else had delivered them.
But the surprise resolved quickly into a diseased, hungry calculation. Because Kobath could see, through the blood and the corruption and the swollen mutant tissue covering the left pauldrons of those figures, the ghost of a badge that time had almost entirely erased.
The mark of the Sons of Horus.
He contained his elation. Some warband lost in the Warp during the Horus Heresy, driven mad by ten thousand years of psychic erosion and Chaos corruption, disgorged here by whatever the rift had touched. It did not matter which one. These things with nothing left but the instinct to kill were precisely what he needed to destroy what the 112th had so far refused to be destroyed by.
Kobath pointed toward Duvette's position and sent his voice into the rift-darkness, saturated with Warp-whisper, reaching for whatever remained in those ruined minds.
"Kill these mortals standing in your path! Kill them! My brothers!" His voice carried the edge of something deliberately inflamed. "Great Sons of Horus! Avenge your gene-father with their blood!"
The words "Sons of Horus" and "father" reached the largest figure at the group's front: the most heavily mutated of them, half his skull already consumed by something inhuman. He stopped walking.
The compound eyes in that ruined head turned with rigid, mechanical slowness, following Kobath's pointing finger until they found Duvette's position.
In the next second.
Through the ruin of that mutated vision, through ten thousand years of corruption and madness, those compound eyes resolved a single image with perfect clarity.
The peaked commissar's cap. The double-headed eagle cast in brass, catching the green firelight.
The mark of Terra. The mark of the Emperor.
The enormous figure began to shake. The fused body of armour and mutated flesh trembled with a violence that had nothing mechanical in it.
Something that had been suppressed for ten millennia, corroded by Chaos for ten millennia, buried beneath everything that had been done to what this being had once been, ignited in the instant it saw that eagle. Something in the deepest part of a soul that had not been entirely consumed.
He did not move toward Duvette.
He turned. The ruined head rotated with the grinding slowness of something that had almost forgotten how to perform the action. In the single eye that still belonged to a human face, dark red tears ran.
He stared up at Kobath on the altar above him, fixed and absolute, and the expression on what remained of his face held nothing but a fury ten thousand years in the making.
Kobath stared back with the shock of a man who has just watched a piece of his machinery refuse its instructions, and could not construct a framework in which that made sense.
The Space Marine let out a sound that tore through the temple from its foundations to its dome. It was grief and fury and something that had refused, despite everything, to stop being what it was. He raised the fused remnant of the chainsword above his head with both arms.
And then, with the irreversible commitment of something that knows exactly what it is doing and has made its peace with what comes next, he charged directly at Kobath.
The roar that preceded him was the loudest thing in the building.
"You oath-breaking traitors! KILL!"
It shook the walls. It crossed everything else in the nave and arrived in every ear without diminution.
"We are not... the Sons of Horus!"
"We are the Shadow Wolves of Luna!"
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