Eidolon: The Auric Hammer, page 12
Amidst it all, brother fought brother. The air was alight, burning with potential, coiled through with acrid corpse-smoke and chems.
Everything was sharpened down to the moment, to the glorious instant. Pared back by the knives of gods and monsters, exposed to the open air so the nerves could sing. Tatricala was a pinned beast, dying around them, a single point of absolute indulgence. The world howled. It pulsed like a beacon, so potent and primal that even Lorgar’s dying storm would feel it, be drawn in and wreathed about it.
The galaxy was still wounded, the lifeblood of the warp still smeared across the canvas. Even as it waned, it could be directed and teased to their will. The world was saturated in the empyrean, drowning slowly in cosmic malice.
Before Isstvan such thoughts would have been insanity itself. Before Laeran they had inhabited a godless cosmos. Now there were patterns carved into the heavens and the destiny of the human species lay in the talons of laughing, thirsting gods.
Let the world die. Let the enemy be dashed upon the rocks of their own failings. Let them join the dead of the Choral City and the Dropsite Massacre.
Eidolon had grown weary, starved of a challenge as the Sons of Horus tried, again and again, to end him. Futility. It was all futility. Greater beings had tried and failed. Even Fulgrim’s mania had faded, replaced with the fateful orders to Fabius.
Was it your hand that shaped that fate, father? Did you spare me, or did the Dark Prince whisper with your voice? By whose hand am I kept alive?
His vigour had outstripped his fellows and they had been left behind, almost forgotten as he had pursued the foe into the ruins. He had lost count of how many had fallen by his hand, the layer of greasy ash clinging to the hammer’s haft the only indicator. The fighting was somewhere behind him and yet he knew his path lay ahead.
The fortress was a broken edifice now, a child’s toy smashed to fragments in a fit of pique. The walls had tumbled, ruined masonry littering the courtyards and grand processionals. Defensive emplacements lay shattered alongside the bodies of defenders and invaders.
Gherog waited at the centre of it. Within, the strategium tables lay broken, but it remained as it had been. The Nexus Martial of the great fortress had been a place of planning and preparation, slowly being eaten away by the Imperium’s dire logistics. Sheaves of burning parchment blanketed the floors, spread from desks and file nooks.
Vast pillars, carved with dead heroes from ages past, had toppled piecemeal, their great carcasses sprawled alongside the surviving examples, with benches and mosaic tiles crushed beneath their bulk.
Axe already in hand, Gherog surveyed the ruin with a sneer, then turned his casual disdain upon Eidolon. He snorted and smiled at the Lord Commander Primus.
‘It didn’t have to be like this,’ Gherog said as he began to advance on Eidolon, turning the axe over in his fist. ‘You forced this confrontation when there was no need for it.’
‘As though it was not on your mind the entire time?’ Eidolon laughed, and the shattered fortress rang with the manic resonances of his bemusement. ‘It was always going to be this way. In every war and battle we have ever fought, the seeds were there.’ He swept the crackling head of Glory Aeterna around and pointed it at Gherog. ‘You are not the great nor the gifted. Simply who the gods decided would be here. So here we stand, I as an exemplar of my Legion and you, the best your Legion has to offer me right now.’
‘Do you think you can shame me?’ Gherog shouted. ‘It was circumstance alone that threw us together, not the will of the gods!’
‘You deny your sins then?’ Eidolon asked.
‘My sins?’
‘You brought this squall upon us. You called down the warp, bound its minions, and set it against me. You coiled it through my ships and brought us low, here.’
‘Are you so addled that you think that even possible? We were warp-lost! Marooned! I’m no conjurer, Eidolon. I can’t and wouldn’t make the warp dance to my tune.’
‘Who else?’
‘You have enemies aplenty, without and within. Why should it be I who panders to the paranoia of a broken mind?’
Eidolon snarled and his arm snapped up, pistol readied. A beam of focused atomics spat forward, narrowly missing Gherog as he hurled himself aside. Eidolon let the pistol drop again and strode towards the praetor, hammer already swinging. Their weapons met in a flash of energy, driving the lighter-armoured Gherog back a few steps.
‘I,’ Eidolon seethed, ‘am not broken.’
Gherog spun away and swiped at Eidolon, the axe cleaving at his armoured flank. Systems whirred and screamed at the contact, forcing the lord commander almost to one knee. He rallied, strength born of pain flooding through him. His armour hissed as it pumped his bloodstream with combat stimms.
Pale skin reddened and pulsed. His teeth ground and gnashed. Moment to moment he felt he would either seize or foam at the mouth. Fabius’ gifts were barbed things. Swords that cut both ways.
Every advantage counted. Each moment was a precious thing. Blade met hammer in another burst of thunder and lightning. A shockwave of displaced air surged between them, almost bowling both of them over. Both warriors strained against the other, forcing themselves forwards, weapons locked.
Gherog kicked out and Eidolon scampered back, looking round only as the blade swung for his distended, trilling throat. Memories flashed before his eyes. The sweep of Fulgrim’s sword as it took the Gorgon’s head. The same flawless gesture as he ended Eidolon’s life for the first time. The beauty of it. The sublime and all-consuming joy of it.
Despite the dark allure of it, the memory of the revelatory blade, he would not cross that threshold again. He was the Reborn.
The thought slowed his reactions, reducing his blows and parries to a languid smear of motion.
Eidolon grinned, lips spread wide in a sudden burst of amusement. That made Gherog’s eyes flare with anger. The warrior came at him again, every iota of speed and skill forced out to try and end Eidolon.
He swung his axe two-handed and Eidolon weaved to the right, driving in at his flank. The hammer cracked the breastplate of Gherog’s armour, staggering him. He spat blood and snarled.
Eidolon looked at the broken Eye of Horus upon the other man’s chest, the cracked ruby-red seal almost weeping stone shards and molten red gold. ‘That there is the god you have put your faith in,’ Eidolon said. ‘You have faith in your Warmaster, yet what does that leave you? All I need to believe in is my skill. I know that I am superior to you, Gherog. You are a hollow thing, oathed to Horus’ shadow. Dying where your master will never know you trod.’
‘Don’t speak his name!’ Gherog hissed, breathing blood. He spat it out onto the broken tiles of the floor. ‘You were always delusional hangers-on. Too weak to honour his vision! Too mad to know when to lie down and die.’
‘Vision?’ Eidolon said mockingly. ‘We follow your empty and addled king because it will lead us to the glory of the confrontation. The day of the turn has come and passed. Ullanor lies behind us. The only true triumph lies ahead now.’ He paused and his tongue lapped at his teeth, tasting the victory to come. ‘But as our grandsire shows us – nothing is forever, least of all a reign.’
Ships were fighting and dying above them. Gunships and fighters duelled and danced through the lightning-tormented skies, while beyond them fought the monstrous vessels of the fleet.
Eidolon’s fingers tapped along the length of Glory Aeterna’s haft, picturing the frantic crews as they rushed from station to station. Joyous and ecstatic to be challenged at last. The same elation flooded through him and atrophied muscle and pitted bone sang with that same beautiful frenzy.
He swept the thunder hammer round, streaking the air with lightning, driving his enemy back, even as the Cthonian fought him with brutal desperation. Each blow was met, soaked, or parried by the barbarian’s axe work.
He was good. Eidolon had to give him that.
He fought with a compelling fire, a passion that burned and bled through his skin. When Gherog moved, it was with the furious intensity of an assault cadre. Striking swiftly before retreating. Blood was leaking from his breastplate, soiling the sea green. It misted from between his lips, forced out and aerosolised with every halting breath.
Yet he fought. He fought to defy Eidolon and the whole of the Third Millennial. A warrior who would rather die than surrender. The tip of the spear, thrust towards the heart, even if he broke in the attempt.
Eidolon took the punishment. Blow after blow. Ruined and melted gold spun from his pauldron, ceramite cracked and shattered. The air was filled with sparks and shards. He pushed into it, through it, taking each and every blow. His breastplate split. His side opened. Eidolon spat blood into Gherog’s eyes.
Defiance. Unshakeable and unbreakable defiance. Never giving the enemy the satisfaction of his fear or pain. Pain was an offering – given up to the Dark Prince and the primarch, sweet and sharp as wine.
‘Is this all you have?’ Eidolon slurred. ‘The vaunted Sons of Horus? The Warmaster’s finest? Show me that Cthonian steel. Come on, savage. Impress me!’
Gherog snarled and bounded forwards, axe raised, bringing it down in a sweeping overhead swing. Eidolon twisted to the side and hefted his hammer up, bringing it round and impacting Gherog’s side. The warrior staggered, and Eidolon followed. Another blow cracked Gherog’s left pauldron. He went to one knee, holding his axe up in vain, struggling to repel Eidolon.
The Lord Commander Primus looked down at the Son of Horus, his face twisted in beatific hatred. Eidolon twisted the hammer round and brought it down hard into the praetor’s face. Flesh atomised as it hit the power field, bursting apart in a cloud of ash, and the legionary’s smoking skull detonated, blowing apart in a cloud of bone dust and brain matter.
Around them reality quivered. The taut skin of the materium undulated and rent. Eidolon spun about, confusion writ across his face as the world began to burn and turned upside down.
He fell.
The last thing the warriors of the Third Millennial were aware of was the rush of sudden fire and the screaming of the immaterial host.
Light rose to eclipse the night, drowning even the greatest of conflagrations beneath its questing power. It clawed at the sky like the finger of an angry god, resonating with all the madness and beauty they had been promised. Like a comet, tearing its way skyward, made of an inferno beyond the world.
It screamed into the heavens, and all who looked upon it screamed with it in song and rapturous surrender.
‘I have spoken again and again about perfection and the vaunted pursuit of it. Others, my brothers amongst them, tell me that it is but a fanciful dream. That nothing, save our father, is truly perfect.
‘I say to them that anything is possible, if we fight for it with our very heart and soul. Yes, I say soul. I do not give credence to spirits or afterlives – instead, I offer only this. We are the heart and soul, the core, of both Legion and Imperium. Only by embracing that duty can we lead our species and our culture to a state of perfection. To a galaxy made whole and an empire without end.
‘Without that conviction, we are nothing. Without that shining soul, we shall not merely fail, but fall.’
– The primarch Fulgrim, recorded remarks
to the Brotherhood of the Phoenix
ACT THREE
SOUL
FIFTEEN
the pit
All had faded, stolen away by the fire of the impossible. Eidolon fell, through the physical world, out of the sight of his foes and fellows, down and into the pit of memory. Souls burned around him, writhing in their eternal agonies, all identity bled and seared away till they were merely grasping echoes. Begging for the release that would never come.
Brother!
Master!
Betrayer!
How many titles had he worn? His life was a blur of struggle and toil, war and bloodshed, rule and service. Son to uncaring fathers. Lord of ungrateful wretches, failures and madmen.
And marbled through his past, his future, whatever ends and destinies awaited him, was the pursuit of perfection. Like fat through meat. Defining his existence with strange textures and flavours. The boy from Europa, the wan ghost of the dead and frozen forests, could not have envisaged what he would become. A prince of war. A demigod of battle. A weapon in the hands of conquerors and kings.
There was only fire and shadow, smoke and madness. The warp surged and boiled around him, tearing at him with lamprey jaws made of old spite. The world melted away below him, Tatricala becoming but a distant recollection. As faded and war-worn as it had been when he had conquered it. He remembered kneeling in its dust. The fingertips upon his chin. A father’s fleeting approval.
Yet now he fell, a discarded implement, a forgotten tool.
Memory clawed at him as he plunged through the ashen grip of the warp. Through the dust and grit of a dying Terra and the black sand of Isstvan. The shards of Prismatica scored across his skin in a cleansing tide, washing away the shame of his failure and mutilation. Pain flared suddenly in his throat as though the anathame was in him once again. He could almost feel the hot blood spurting down his chest, flowing freely from the decapitation strike that had ended his first mortal existence.
Then onwards as the searing light of Fulgrim’s Apotheosis washed over him, burning through his very soul. He was falling through the fire, through the pain, through the ecstasy that had propelled his gene-father. Like passing through the heart of a star.
This was the warp’s poison and promise. The fire of annihilation that would consume the galaxy and cast all things to ashes. Power but at such a cost that to embrace it was to clasp dissolution and insanity to the breast.
The salvation of the III and its damnation, all in one. They could become bright and shining beings of limitless perfection or a base and forgotten memory. All was possible, and yet it was a doomed hope, a dream that daemons would fuel only so it could be turned back upon the dreamer.
Riven through it all was the siren song of the Maraviglia. Kynska’s epic boomed and burned through and beyond time. It was everything, the rapturous call of Slaanesh itself. It had not been created, merely conjured anew. It was the power that had dominated the Laer and had called like to like, time and again. The questing souls that sought perfection inevitably danced to its tune.
He realised, too late, that he was not alone in the darkness of his fall. Something was moving just out of sight, just at the edges of his perception. He spun about, watching it dance away, flickering like an after-image. Burning…
Great columns tumbled through the fire-slicked void. Ancient, weathered stone – the great fossilised trees of his youth. They broke apart as they fell, shattering into fragments of a dead past. The disdainful sneer of his birth father, the bemused affection of his gene-father. Graven images, hiding in the stone like the sculpture in the marble, veins of precious ore within the dead and worthless rock.
Civilisations had risen from less.
Eidolon blinked and his fingers twitched. He could move in the vacuum, he realised. He forced himself up, straightening as he struggled against the feeling of weightless helplessness that had gripped him tight.
‘Enough!’ he screamed into the void, letting his psychosonic gifts fill the empty space, obliterating the wrack and ruin of other times and places. His rage imposed a fragile sense of order upon the roiling chaos that surrounded him.
‘You do not give the orders here, Lord Commander Primus,’ tittered a voice from all around him. ‘Not now. Not any more. You have relinquished your authority. You are far beyond its reach. No primarch to shepherd you, no Legion to lead. Here you can surrender and embrace the emptiness of eternity.’
The fire coalesced into a figure, still only the suggestion of a legionary’s form. The Shattered King stalked forward, arms spread, encompassing all that was not. It laughed aloud again.
‘You thought that a worm such as Gherog could shape and direct me? You wound me.’
‘I’ll do more than that,’ Eidolon growled.
Ground formed beneath their feet, crafted from stone and sand, stolen from his memories and experiences. Bodies lay within the fabric of it, their armour blackened by sand and fire, warped by time. Isstvan seemed so long ago, and yet these corpses were clad in sea green and purple, in soiled white and green, in bloodied blue and white. Others bore the colours of the betrayed of the Dropsite.
The Shattered King placed one foot irreverently upon a dead Iron Hand, forcing the corpse further down into the patchwork reality. ‘Threats require the will to enforce them,’ the King burbled through a sunburst smile. ‘You have not been strong enough for quite some time, I fear.’
‘I am the Lord Commander Primus. A third of the Legion yielded to me and called me master.’
‘A Legion Master in spirit, perhaps, but never in truth. The moment Fulgrim’s great cry found your fractured soul, you came running. Ever a desperate creature. Always so focused upon our father’s attention. No matter the surgeries you have subjected yourself to, that was your first addiction.’
‘Be silent!’
‘Why?’ it asked. ‘Is the truth a greater wound than you’ve already received? You loved him and you hated him, and he took your head with that Kinebrach blade.’
‘I know my own history, daemon.’
‘Ah, daemon is it now?’ The King squatted down and scooped up a discarded gladius, holding it out, squinting along its length as it checked its balance. ‘Do you still think me a daemon? Some Neverborn thing come to torment you? Summoned up by some base practitioner serving Gherog or Julius Kaesoron, or any number of old rivals?’
‘You are a daemon! You are nothing! Just a toy of the gods! A thing of madness, drawing me down into the muck with you!’
