V2 Chapter 65: Become My Black Shields. I Will Take You to Your Vengeance.
Once Duvette had confirmed that every containment procedure was running without interruption, he turned and sent Evan back to the regiment's quarters with the 112th, then indicated for the thirteen tall Astartes to follow him.
He led these ancient soldiers who had crossed ten thousand years of darkness through a succession of heavy bulkhead doors, along the Ark of Omen's labyrinthine internal passageways, down toward the isolation zone deep in the vessel's lower decks.
The light in the corridors was dim. Cold plasma coils put out a faint blue glow as the only illumination. The sound of heavy boots and heavier ceramite armour striking the metal grille flooring moved through the empty space in a steady, hollow rhythm. No one spoke. Around them, the unending engine noise of the mechanical ark's lower drives pulsed through the air.
In the middle of that compressed silence, Duvette, walking at the column's front, spoke without any introduction.
"You must have known Garviel Loken."
The footsteps behind him stopped.
Markus Sevian's weathered face had gone through something in a single instant. He was staring at Duvette's back, and when he found his voice it was unsteady in a way that ten thousand years of Warp had not managed to produce.
"How do you know Captain Loken's name? Is he... is he still alive? Have you met him?"
Duvette kept walking without turning back. His answer came out in a flat, understated tone.
"That is difficult to say."
The footsteps behind him went completely silent.
All thirteen Shadow Wolves stopped moving simultaneously. A wave of suspicion erupted from them and locked onto Duvette's back with an intensity that any mortal would have felt physically.
Duvette stopped immediately and turned around.
In the dim light, he could see it: the hope that had just been on Markus Sevian's face had been replaced by something considerably more complex.
"I apologise. That was unintentional." Duvette raised both hands without any hesitation and explained himself with complete directness.
He understood exactly what he had just triggered. In the late period of the Great Crusade, within the Sons of Horus Legion, that specific phrase — that is difficult to say — had been a recognition code. A lethal one. When a member of the secret brotherhood known as the Warrior Lodge was challenged in the dark with the words tell me your name, the standard response was precisely those four words.
After the Warmaster emerged from the temple on Davin, healed of his wound and transformed, the Lodge — which had originally been intended only as a place where warriors could speak plainly without regard for rank — had been thoroughly corrupted and become the gathering place of the Heresy's core architects. The First Chaplain and his collaborators had used it to pull the entire Legion step by step into betrayal.
As Loyalist warriors of the Tenth Company, Markus and his brothers could not have been unaware of the phrase's association with treachery, conspiracy, and the heretical Lodge.
To their ears, Duvette's careless answer had sounded precisely like a Word Bearer or a Lodge operative identifying himself to them.
"I am not affiliated with the Warrior Lodge or anything connected to it. Before I encountered you, I received a vision from the Emperor, fragments of that era shown to me in the Warp. I knew the phrase had some connection to your history, but I did not know its specific meaning. The words were a mistake."
Duvette gave the explanation quickly and without deflection. Perhaps it was the sincerity of it, or perhaps the mention of the Emperor's vision called back the memory of the white light, but the tension in Markus's expression gradually released.
"I know you meant nothing by it." Markus exhaled a long breath. The tiredness in his voice had the particular quality of something that has been accumulating for ten thousand years. "But that Lodge... that cursed Lodge. It destroyed everything we were."
His head came down. In the dim corridor light of the Ark's lower decks, the old soldier's face settled into the expression of someone moving through memory that still causes pain.
"Captain Loken... after he joined the Mournival, what he witnessed was considerably more than what reached ordinary soldiers like us."
Markus's voice moved through the corridor.
"He did not share every doubt and unease with every warrior in the Tenth. But we could feel it. From the Davin incident onwards, from the moment the Warmaster walked out of that temple, the way Captain Loken looked at him changed. What had been pure admiration now carried something else underneath it. A deep unease that he could not put away."
Markus raised his head. He did not seem to know whether he was answering Duvette's question or saying something to himself.
"Captain Loken once told us something with complete seriousness. He said: a Legion cannot give its loyalty to a single man's name."
The voice that carried those words held a conviction that had not been worn down.
"He did not say plainly at that point that the Warmaster had fully fallen. Perhaps even he was still fighting his last battle with himself, unwilling to accept that reality. But he made all of us commit a single truth to memory: the Shadow Wolves are first the Emperor's warriors, and only after that the Warmaster's sons."
Duvette drew a slow breath.
"I don't know whether you'll accept my word, Markus. But I can tell you this with certainty: at Isstvan III, Garviel Loken did not die. He survived that massacre."
The grey that had been in Markus Sevian's eyes detonated into light. The enormous body stepped forward hard.
"What happened after? Where did Captain Loken go? Is he still fighting for the Emperor?"
Duvette looked at him and gave a small, quiet shake of his head.
"He completed a road that most people could not have endured. He fought to the very last moment."
He paused.
"In the end he did not escape the fate that was waiting for him. He was killed. But in the moment of his death, his loyalty was absolute. He was still the purest Shadow Wolf he had ever been."
Markus absorbed the confirmation that Loken was dead. His body made one small movement of the kind that cannot quite be stopped, but he held the grief back and kept his teeth together and waited, because he needed to know. He needed to know what kind of battlefield had taken his Captain.
Duvette's face produced something that appeared rarely on it: an undisguised revulsion, as though the words he was about to say had a taste he could not help showing.
"At the very end of the Battle of Terra. After the Emperor himself boarded the Vengeful Spirit and killed the Warmaster with his own hands."
"When the traitor forces were already in full rout, and the light of victory was already breaking."
"Garviel Loken was stabbed from behind. A coward's strike. By the Dark Apostle Erebus."
"No."
The word came out of Markus before he finished hearing it. His eyes had gone wide with a refusal that went past disbelief. The twelve brothers behind him produced sounds of raw grief simultaneously.
They could accept their Captain dying facing a great enemy on an open battlefield. What they could not accept — what their minds would not move to accommodate — was that this honourable warrior had died from a knife in the back delivered by that particular Word Bearer.
Several seconds of absolute silence.
Then Markus let out a sound that had nothing controlled left in it. He swung his armoured fist with everything he had and drove it into the metal bulkhead beside him.
The impact shook the corridor.
The solid plasteel of the Ark of Omen's inner hull caved inward under the blow. Metal piping cracked and burst around the impact point. Sparks scattered across the grille floor.
"Again him. Again him!"
Markus pulled his fist back and turned, his voice burning through the narrow space. "Everything begins with him! He corrupted the Warmaster! And now Captain Loken as well — why?! Why does someone like him get to survive to the end?! I will kill you! I will tear you apart with my own hands! Erebus!"
The fury and the grief driving through Markus Sevian at this moment had passed every limit that ten thousand years of endurance had built. He was shaking so hard that his white power armour was producing sounds of metal stress against metal.
Duvette did not step back.
He stood where he was in the corridor and watched the Astartes in the grip of this rage with a steady expression.
"You can do it."
The words were quiet enough that they might have been lost in the noise. But they reached Markus.
"What?" He stopped. He was breathing hard, his eyes red, the shaking still moving through him. He looked at Duvette as though he was not certain he had heard correctly.
"I said: you can do it."
Duvette held the giant's gaze without adjustment.
"Kill Erebus. The root cause of everything that happened to your Legion. And I can tell you something else: the survivors of the Heresy did not all die. Abaddon, your First Captain, the Mournival member — he is still alive. He is now the supreme commander of the Black Legion, the Chaos Astartes who have done more damage to the Imperium than any other force in ten thousand years. He is the greatest living traitor to humanity."
He let that settle.
"You have the opportunity to finish both of them with your own hands."
The sound of Markus's breathing in the narrow metal space was the only sound left.
Eventually his eyes closed. A long breath moved out of him, low and lost, the sound of someone asking a question they do not know the answer to, whether they are addressing the person in front of them or the soul that has been through ten thousand years of suffering.
"What should I... do?"
Duvette looked at this ancient soldier who had arrived at the edge of himself, and said what he had been moving toward.
"Become Black Shields."
In the forty-first millennium, black armour with no markings was the signifier of the Deathwatch's penitents: those who had stripped away every prior honour and sin and taken on an unmarked identity to atone.
Markus did not know the Deathwatch. But the Black Shield concept was not new to his era. During the Great Crusade and the Heresy both, it had existed: those who refused to follow their gene-father into betrayal, who had stripped away their Legion's colours and markings entirely, who wore pure black armour with only the Imperial eagle on their shoulders, alone and loyal when everything else had broken.
Markus paused at the word.
"But..." He looked down at his own armour, the white that had only just been restored to it, the white that carried everything the Shadow Wolves had ever been. His voice came out barely above a murmur. "We fought for ten thousand years in the Warp's depths. We lost our father, our Legion, everything. And now that we have returned to the physical universe — are we supposed to surrender the last name we have left?"
Duvette read the confusion and the grief with precision. Even Astartes, rebuilt and conditioned beyond every ordinary human limit, could reach a state of not knowing what to do next. He was there.
Duvette spoke quietly.
"Markus. If you insist on walking through this era openly as Shadow Wolves, the Imperium as it currently exists will have you killed within a short time. Without hesitation."
"When that happens, the only entry in the Imperial record will be a single cold line: remnant elements of Horus-lineage deeply corrupted stock successfully eliminated."
"No one will care that you spent ten thousand years in the Warp trying to get back to Terra to warn the Emperor."
"No one will remember that you followed Garviel Loken's standard and kept faith when everything around you broke."
"No one will know your loyalty or what it cost."
"And most importantly." Duvette's voice sharpened. "Your vengeance will never be completed. Erebus will continue existing somewhere in the Warp, and his opinion of you will be that you were fools."
Duvette walked forward until he was standing directly in front of Markus. He looked up. Nearly three metres of white-armoured Astartes above him. He met the eyes without any adjustment in his own.
"Becoming Black Shields is not asking you to forget who you are. It is not asking you to betray the honour you carried."
His voice moved through the narrow corridor with a quality that could reach into exhausted things and put fire back into them.
"It is asking you to wear the black armour so that you can move through this age in silence, accumulating strength in quiet fury, until the day comes when you can drive a chainsword through Erebus's chest with your own hands and tear his head from his shoulders. Use his blood to wash the black from your armour and let the Shadow Wolves' mark see light again."
"On that day, you can stand over his filthy remains and tell Loken's spirit, and tell the entire universe, that you finished it. That you did it for him, for the Warmaster you once followed, and for your Legion."
The light that came into Markus Sevian's eyes was not the desperate brightness of a man grasping at something. It was something older and more complete than that.
"If things proceed as I intend from here, I can give you my word that you will be safe at my side."
Duvette allowed something rare onto his face: a smile that had both genuine warmth and genuine ambition in it at the same time. He extended his hand toward them.
"Come with me, Markus. All of you. Become my Black Shield escort. You guard my back. And I will take you to the vengeance that has been waiting ten thousand years."