V2 Chapter 59: I Want to See the Sky Over Terra One More Time
Every person in the temple nave, Duvette included, stopped.
It lasted only a moment. But for that moment, every soldier still firing, every Word Bearer still chanting, every living thing in the hall had its attention pulled to the mutated figures walking out of the Warp rift.
They were watching those warped Astartes charge the Word Bearers instead of the 112th. Nobody in the room had a framework for it.
"They're... fighting each other?" Stroud's voice came through the channel, stripped of everything but genuine incomprehension.
Duvette looked at those twisted backs tearing into the Word Bearers with an expression that carried a weight of its own.
"No." His voice came through the channel steadily. "All units, do not fire on the mutated Astartes. They are Loyalists."
The battle shifted in an instant.
Kobath and the Word Bearers daemonologist who had been running the ritual had not prepared for the possibility that the figures emerging from their own rift would turn against them. Several of the largest mutated Astartes drove into Kobath's defensive position with a ferocity that had nothing calculated in it, purely suicidal commitment, and smashed his footing apart.
Entropy's Song, which had been held suspended above the altar by the chains of psychic energy Kobath's concentration was maintaining, lost that support the moment his attention fractured. The sceptre dropped and struck the cold stone of the altar floor with a clean, ringing impact.
Duvette did not deliberate.
"Cover me."
The shout went into the channel and his legs drove him forward before the words had finished, a speed that had long since passed what ordinary muscles produced. He crossed the rubble-strewn floor in a black blur, the peaked cap and greatcoat cutting through the chaos of the nave, heading directly for the altar.
"Stop that mortal wretch!"
Kobath caught the movement at the edge of his vision even while he was fighting desperately to avoid the ruined chainsword swinging at his head. The Dark Apostle roared the order at his remaining warriors while throwing himself sideways from a stroke that would have ended him.
"No! You will not have it! Oathbreaking traitor! Everything that has gone wrong here began with you!"
The largest of the mutated Astartes, the one whose helmet had been entirely consumed by compound eyes, let out a sound that could tear stone.
Something had returned to them in this moment. Briefly, imperfectly, but present: as though the act of breaking free from the Warp's endless abyss and standing in realspace again had allowed their consciousness, corroded for ten thousand years, to surface into something that recognised itself.
Under the 112th's heavy fire screen, the remaining Tzeentchian daemons and Word Bearers were locked away from Duvette's path.
He hit the altar steps without slowing, took them at full stride, and when he was still several metres from the sceptre he went into a combat slide, knees grinding hard against the stone. His right hand reached forward and closed around the black draconic shaft of Entropy's Song.
The instant his palm made contact.
A dragon's roar erupted from somewhere at the centre of him. Not outside, not in the air. From inside.
Duvette steadied himself and rose from the floor, looking at what he was holding.
Something was wrong with how it felt, in the way that only something unexpectedly right can feel wrong. He had never touched this relic in his life. And yet the moment he gripped it, the fit was absolute, a recognition that ran below the level of thought, as though his hand had made this specific motion ten thousand times.
"You've accepted me?"
He said it quietly, to no one in particular. He understood clearly enough that a relic of this order, forged by a Primarch's own hands, would carry a Machine-Spirit of corresponding power and independent will. And this relic, which had resisted Chaos with every measure of force it possessed, had chosen to receive him.
"Commissar! Incoming!"
Finn's warning hit the channel with urgency.
Three Tzeentchian Flamer projectiles came from different angles simultaneously, distortion-heat and mutation energy wrapped around each one, converging on his position.
As though the sceptre had already decided the question, with no action from Duvette beyond holding it, Entropy's Song produced a low, resonant pulse from its core.
A temporal disruption field, invisible to the eye, expanded outward from the sceptre in a sphere. The incoming Warp-fire projectiles hit it and began decaying at a rate that had no natural equivalent. Their energy burned through what would have taken years in a fraction of a second, the brilliant fire contracting and dimming as though the fuel was simply gone. All three extinguished less than half a metre from Duvette's body, leaving three threads of harmless smoke dissipating in the air.
[You have recovered the Song of the Lord of Fire and Drakes, Vulkan's relic. Emperor's Wrath +1,000.]
"Good."
Duvette drew a breath, gripped the shaft, and brought the dragon skull with its pulsing crimson eye-light to bear on the main ritual dais at the temple's centre, the one that had been leaking Warp energy into the room since they arrived.
His will and the sceptre's Machine-Spirit reached the same point at the same moment.
A beam of deep crimson temporal force erupted from the dragon's eye sockets, thick as a column, and struck the centre of the dais directly.
"No!"
Kobath's voice cracked into something beyond desperation.
The stone of the dais did not crack or shatter. It simply lost ten thousand years in a second. The carved stone surface, covered in blasphemous scripture, weathered and fell away into dust at a rate that the eye could follow, the physical structure losing all cohesion as the material aged past any point of stability.
And with the dais went the Warp rift above it. Without the ritual anchor in realspace maintaining the opening, the rift lost its purchase on physical space. A violent spatial distortion, and then the tear collapsed, sealing completely.
Everything that had sustained the summoning was gone.
With the rift closed and the dais destroyed, the battlefield clarified in moments. The Tzeentchian daemons still present became unstable, their forms flickering as realspace rejected them. Their psychic output dropped sharply. They were losing cohesion.
Without any order from Duvette, the company and platoon commanders of the 112th read the opening the instant it appeared.
Every heavy weapon in the regiment opened up simultaneously. Las-beams and bolt rounds came down in sheets. Daemons without Warp support to sustain them against that weight of fire dispersed into ash in the time it took to reload.
The Word Bearers fared worse.
They had already been suffering severely in close quarters against the mutated Loyalists, who matched them physically and were operating in a state of absolute, uncontrolled fury. With the ritual's protection gone and the 112th's flanking fire added to the pressure, what remained of the Word Bearers was destroyed quickly.
At the battle's centre, only Kobath continued. The Dark Apostle fought on alone, the madness of a man whose decade of work had been unmade in minutes driving every movement, directing everything he had left at the enormous mutated Astartes that refused to stop tearing at him.
His chainsword came down on the Loyalist's warped armour repeatedly, striking deep, drawing black corrupted blood with every blow.
The Loyalist did not go down. He absorbed the strikes and held Kobath in place.
The opportunity lasted one fractional moment.
A power sword came in from the side at full velocity and drove through Kobath's chest plate, destroying two of the hearts behind it.
Kobath's enormous frame locked. Blood poured from his mouth in a torrent.
The mutated Astartes took what was given. He let out a roar that rang through the temple from floor to dome, and both corrupted hands clamped onto Kobath's helmet and neck armour. The sounds that followed were metal tearing and vertebrae separating, and Kobath's head came free of his body.
On the other side of the nave, the Word Bearers daemonologist who had broken for the exit was caught by a wave of Shadow Wolves in what was left of their strength. He was pulled apart.
The fighting was over.
The temple was quiet except for the burning braziers and the sound of laboured breathing.
The largest Shadow Wolf stood in the middle of the hall with Kobath's head in his grip, the dead eyes still open, the scripture-covered face registering nothing. The Astartes's own face, what remained of it where flesh had not entirely merged with the helmet, held an expression of grief so deep and so old that it had gone past what ordinary suffering looks like.
"We should not have trusted you." He was looking at the severed head. The voice that came out was barely a voice, more air than sound, leaking through a throat that no longer worked as it should. "We should never have believed those lies."
Then something shifted. He lifted his head suddenly, as though a thought had broken through, and turned to look at Duvette standing not far away.
He dropped Kobath's head. He walked toward Duvette with the heavy, deliberate movement of something that was expending the last of what it had. Behind him, the twelve surviving Shadow Wolves followed, dragging their ruined bodies forward in silence.
"Mortal. We need to go to Terra. You must provide..."
He reached Duvette and stopped mid-sentence.
He had just become aware of what surrounded him. Every surviving soldier of the 112th had weapons raised, barrels level, pointed at the Shadow Wolves. Every muzzle steady. Beyond them, from the scorched crater where Heinz still lay, a weak voice continued to demand their deaths with an intensity that the injuries producing it had not diminished.
"Why?"
The Shadow Wolf's remaining human eye held genuine confusion. He did not understand. He had just fought beside these mortals against the traitors. He could not reconcile the guns aimed at him with anything that made sense.
"Lower your weapons, mortal." He reached for the authority of the Great Crusade's hierarchy, the only framework he had. "We are the Sixteenth Legion. The Shadow Wolves. I am a sergeant of the Tenth Company. Listen to me. Our Warmaster, Horus, he was corrupted by Chaos. He launched a rebellion. We fought our way out. We have to bring this information to the Emperor. We need to reach Terra."
Duvette's pupils made a small involuntary movement.
The nave went completely still. No soldier of the 112th fired, because Duvette had not given that order.
He looked at this Loyalist soldier who had endured whatever the Warp had done to him for the duration of the journey, trying to carry a warning that had come ten thousand years too late. He exhaled once, slowly.
"We already know."
"You know?" The sergeant stopped. The single human eye produced one brief flash of something that might have been relief. "Then what about the Emperor? Does he already know the truth? Has he sent the other Legions to Isstvan to reinforce—"
"The Heresy is over, sergeant."
Duvette stopped him. He looked at the eye that was still carrying hope into this conversation and told him the truth of it.
"We won. Or perhaps we lost entirely, depending on how you measure it. The Warmaster is dead. The Emperor killed him. But the Emperor's wounds were catastrophic, beyond any healing. He sits on the Golden Throne on Terra now. Between life and death. Neither one nor the other."
A pause.
"All of the Emperor's sons are gone. There is no Great Crusade, sergeant. The Imperium that exists now has no reason in it, no truth in it. Only endless war. Brutal religious inquisition. And a defence that has been losing ground for ten thousand years."
"What?"
The sergeant took one step back as though the words had struck him physically. The enormous mutated body was trembling slightly.
"What time is it now? How long were we lost in the Warp? How long?" It came out close to a plea. "Tell me."
"Ten thousand years, sergeant." Duvette gave him the number he was asking for. "You were lost in the Warp's depths for nearly ten thousand years."
Ten thousand years.
For any Astartes whose identity was built from the glory of the Great Crusade, that number was not a measure of time. It was an erasure.
Duvette said nothing further. He understood that words alone could not move these men across this. He drew a slow breath and activated [Silence].
The reality-anchoring field spread outward from him in a sphere, enveloping the surviving Shadow Wolves entirely.
When the field passed through them, it stripped away something that had been layered over their senses: the false self-image constructed from ten thousand years of Warp immersion, the distortion that had prevented them from perceiving their own physical reality clearly. The psychic veil the Warp had maintained around their self-perception tore away.
Without the Warp's interference blinding them, they finally saw what they actually were.
They saw each other.
They saw the suppurating growths and the tentacles where arms should have been. They saw flesh that had rotted into power armour until the two were no longer separate things. They saw the horns, the compound eyes, the talons.
They understood, for the first time without any filter between the knowledge and themselves, what ten thousand years of Warp exposure had made of their bodies, even as their will had never broken.
They had become exactly the kind of monster they had spent ten thousand years fighting.
The sergeant looked down at himself.
A sound came from him. Small. Exhausted. The particular sound of something finally and completely spent.
The last belief that had kept him moving through the Warp's darkness had gone. And their bodies, carrying this depth of corruption, did not have the standing to set foot on holy Terra. They never would.
He could not hold himself up any longer. The enormous mutated frame went down onto the cold stone floor with the slow heaviness of something from which every force has departed. He knelt. Behind him, the remaining twelve Shadow Wolves, as though the same decision had moved through all of them at once, set their weapons down and knelt.
All of it was finished. Everything they had held onto long enough to bring them here. It was finished.
"Commissar. Do something for us."
The sergeant raised his head with difficulty and looked at Duvette, who had walked to stand in front of him. The single human eye was quiet. The madness and the fury were gone. There was only a tiredness that had been accumulating for ten thousand years.
"Give us release. We have lost everything. Let us at least... die as Shadow Wolves."
Duvette stood over him and looked down at this Great Crusade veteran who had crossed ten millennia to reach this floor.
"Is there anything you want?" His voice held nothing beyond the question.
The Shadow Wolf was not prepared for that. He paused at the plainness of it.
That enormous head, no longer fully human in its shape, lowered slowly. He was quiet for a long time. Whatever he was moving through, it was not quick.
Then, quietly:
"Astartes do not have wishes, brother. If there were one..." A pause. "Let me see the sky over Terra one more time."
"All right."
"What?" The sergeant looked up, uncertain he had understood.
"I will give you that."
Duvette stepped forward without any hesitation and placed his palm directly against the sergeant's warped skull.
In the next instant, white light, absolute and without boundary, erupted from the point of contact and consumed the entire interior of the temple.
[Purification]
[All Warp-sourced instability, corruption, and mutation forcibly expunged. Target restored to original physical baseline state. Cooldown period following use will vary according to the number of targets and the nature and depth of the corruption.]
[When the ultimate order of the soul covers the ultimate Chaos of the immaterium, is what follows truly worth the cost?]
[Deducted: 3,000 Emperor's Wrath.]