Eidolon: The Auric Hammer, page 5
‘Some weakling brother who yearned to follow the primarch, I imagine. There are countless of them. Lotus-eating fools who would have followed Julius into yet deeper madnesses. No use at all, unless you required someone to run at the enemy screaming of their own apotheosis. You were meat, once. Now you are just a figment.’
It paused, halfway down the stairs, and let its hand close around a hovering orb of light. It looked down on Eidolon with a pose of bemused disdain, poised and ready to strike, to leap from its metres-high perch. ‘You insult me, lord commander,’ it said. ‘I shall no longer simply be the Shattered King. No. No longer. I shall be the mirror of the Dark Prince in their ascendancy, eternal and yet newborn. I am inevitable, unceasing. We share a common destiny.’
‘Spare me,’ Eidolon sighed. ‘If I have to listen to another dull idiot who believes himself to be Slaanesh caged in flesh then I might as well end myself.’
The King threw back its head and laughed. ‘Perhaps you should, lord commander. Simply give in to the oblivion that you crave and–’
Eidolon squeezed the trigger.
A beam of exotic unlight flashed out, impaling the advancing figure. The Shattered King paused but did not flinch back. Black lightning crackled across the fire of its being, before being absorbed. Darkness flickered and danced within it as it was swallowed down.
Eidolon snarled and stalked forward, holstering the pistol and bringing his hammer up with both hands. He swung it down, aiming directly for the thing’s skull.
The hammer’s progress stopped. Eidolon looked at the daemonic apparition, the warped reflection of what it meant to be Astartes. The Shattered King held the hammer in its precise grip, like a child holding a toy with exceptional care.
It pushed.
Eidolon flew back, almost barrelling his fellows over. He kept his footing, bracing his left leg against the glossy black stone. Light clung to him, pouring up from the scraped ground. Voices hissed in his ears, surging into his mind, seeking to overwhelm him.
Traitor.
Brother.
Murderer.
Liar.
Ghost-light after-images pulled themselves from the ground and coiled about him, weeping fire, their faces contorted in absolute agony. Eidolon pushed through them, weapon raised, Glory Aeterna’s light dispelling the illusory attackers. The faces of men and women snarled with animal rage and then faded away, broken by Eidolon’s superior wrath.
‘You are unworthy of such a gift,’ the King hissed. Hands reached out, grasping for the weapon with desperate need. ‘Give it to me. Lay down your burden. Surrender to the inevitable. The Dark Prince has made and remade you as a folly. A farce. You are mocked beyond the veil, mere sport for the warp’s tides.’
Eidolon’s neck was thick with veins. It was not merely his gift that swelled within him now, but a true and righteous fury. That this thing should dare. Not a man any longer and not yet a true child of the warp. A bastard, half-breed thing. Its broken soul burning like a beacon, calling the daemonic to it, marshalling them as some unclean champion. A commander in its own right. A shadow. An echo.
He did not loose the scream.
‘You talk too much,’ he hissed. ‘Too much for so meagre a thing.’
‘I am not some little pet,’ the King protested, almost petulantly gesturing with talons of fire to the gathered warriors. ‘Not like them. Such pretty things, bright little souls. Perhaps they shall have a place in my court when I sit upon my throne. When I am as I should be.’
‘They are not for you,’ Eidolon said. He stepped forwards again. Each step was agony. Not with the chaotic response of his broken form, but with the pressure the creature exerted simply by existing. He was fighting through curdled gravity, a wall of crushing fire that coiled about him, seeking entrance. Systems began to sing in his armour as it struggled to repel the flame.
He pushed onwards.
The Shattered King moved with a languid grace, almost careless as it sauntered towards Eidolon. His anger flared again. ‘This is my ship. My Millennial. My–’
Eidolon’s voice faltered then, choking on the words he had almost dared to utter.
My Legion.
Eidolon did not move. At his nod, the subtlest motion of his head, his warriors responded in his stead. Vocipheron advanced first, eschewing Malakris’ right of rank. Instead, he stepped forth with the surety of the duellist and the oath of his blade. A fine blade, Eidolon reflected. Like Glory Aeterna, it was an exquisite weapon, one that had kept its keenness and its beauty even as it followed its master into betrayal. A charnabal sabre. So sharp, even now.
Eidolon watched as the swordsman raised it, pushing himself forward, swinging for the Shattered King. It growled. A blade, shadowy and indistinct, utterly at odds with the figure’s burning menace, conjured to its hand. The blades met with a ringing clatter that filled the impossible space, resonating off the distant walls in ways that made Eidolon’s blood sing.
Malakris, never one to be outdone, hurled himself forward, claws glittering as he swiped them down towards the spectre’s head. It turned them aside, weaving between the warriors. Von Kalda fired into the melee, bolt pistol barking, uncaring whether he hit his comrades or not. They burst amidst the tumult like blooming flowers, casting fire and shrapnel about the chamber.
The room shuddered in immaterial sympathy. Eidolon finally strode back into the fray, hammer raised. Malakris’ claws caught the King in the chest, while Vocipheron held its blade locked with his own. The daemonic thing hissed and spat. In the same moment as Eidolon raised his hammer, Plegua stepped out from behind him. His sonic weapon unleashed, singing its ruinous song as Eidolon brought the thunder hammer down, its crackling arc finally striking the King.
The flaming figure stiffened and cracked, more black lightning rippling across its torso as its hisses became screams. The warp earthed through it, searing lines of light moving through the black stone. It hurled its arms up and the world responded in kind.
The warriors staggered back, stumbling through the sudden rush of wind and blows of some invisible force. Malakris hurtled back, armour cracking as he impacted a glowing pillar. Vocipheron was thrown upwards, cursing as the darkness took him. Plegua and Eidolon both tumbled backwards, but at the last moment a hand snapped out and caught Eidolon about the wrist.
‘Oh, my brother,’ the King hissed. ‘You do not escape me that easily!’ It pulled him backwards, into its burning embrace, as the flames surged higher and enveloped them both.
Black lightning crawled along Eidolon’s armour, scouring cracks and lines of fire into the lacquer. One of the Shattered King’s hands slipped down and seized for Glory Aeterna’s haft.
Eidolon fought. Every part of his body struggled and recoiled, and he drove a knee up and into the thing’s gut. The flames rippled and surged up again. A peculiar absence of pain had begun to spread along Eidolon’s arm, a numbness that crawled from where the King had reached for his hammer.
Eidolon butted his head hard against the daemonic thing and watched as it merely laughed.
Then it was gone. Eidolon whirled about. He was alone. The other warriors under his command, the great throne room… All had faded. There was only darkness and the smoky residue, the drifting, lingering mist of a dead inferno.
He staggered through the fog, swinging wildly like some inelegant berserker, cutting through the half-imagined vistas of the immaterial. Laughter chased him. Walls rose about him, indistinct as gun smoke, questing for the heavens in imitation of some distant palace.
Things moved just out of sight, darting here and there with a graceful ease, trailing iridescence through the mist. Fractals danced beyond his reach, following the revellers of the shadow hall that had ensnared him.
Eidolon could feel the thrum of the figmented reality around him, pulsing like breathing. It was as though he were trapped within the lungs of a slumbering god, his entire being encapsulated by this non-space.
Light broke the gloom in a sudden rush, and he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the power of it. Two figures gazed down at him, their silhouettes hazy in the blinding glare. One was a seated figure of golden light, radiating a cold clarity that threatened to strip away whatever pretensions he held about himself. Eidolon felt it worming into his soul, pawing at the core of his being.
The other burned with a majestic warmth, alive with the power that came only from dying to be reborn once more. Behind them the shadows moved and danced, writhing with the form of something vaster than worlds. Black fire and violet light pushed through the undulating shadow, and, for a moment, he was almost certain he could grasp what it was.
He reached out one trembling hand, but another grasped his wrist and pulled him back. Eidolon whirled, hammer striking out, hewing the empty air.
‘There is always a choice,’ the Shattered King whispered from all around him. Eidolon spun about again.
‘Show yourself, coward!’
‘Always a choice,’ it repeated. ‘Loyalty or treachery. Obedient son or warlord in your own right. I can show you the way, liberate you from the chains that bind you to petty notions. Why stand alone in service when you could rise, ascend to your true primacy?’
‘I will not be a vessel for a deluded failure who lost himself to the warp.’
‘Of course not,’ the King whispered, almost sadly. Fingertips brushed against Eidolon’s chin and the Lord Commander Primus moved, acting upon pure instinct. He shook free of the King’s cloying embrace and swung the hammer around. The phantasm slid away, cloaked in smoke.
The King lunged from the opposite direction, a master of this conjured place, as one with its haunting environs. Claws thrust out like lances of fire, gouging into Eidolon’s chestplate, pinning him in place.
His hearts convulsed. He could feel the vitality flowing from him, bled away by the thing’s relentless and maddening assault. Colour flared behind it, as though given new strength and form from Eidolon’s suffering.
He pushed back, driving his shoulder into the King’s tormented corpus, forcing it back and away from him. New strength rose in his limbs, and he hefted the hammer up.
‘You will never have my submission, figment,’ he snarled, and swung Glory Aeterna.
The King flowed away and then surged in, pinning Eidolon against one of the walls. The talons bit his flank, hammering into his side again and again, till the plate rent and blood flowed down his side. Eidolon bit down hard as the pain flared bright and then faded away, siphoned and stolen by the monster’s embrace.
‘You,’ he snarled through his gritted teeth, ‘are nothing!’
He pulled the hammer round and slammed the haft into the King’s chest, thrusting it back and away from him. The daemon’s features split into a blazing smile again. It hurled itself forwards, desperate and puling, rabid with hunger. Eidolon hurled himself to one side, letting it rush, maddened, into the very wall it had slammed him against. The hammer came round, fully ignited, all his strength behind it.
He felt it strike something solid at last.
Reality broke around them, the black stone suddenly rushing in, a fractal nest of competing reflections, each one like a universe unto itself. The images of Eidolon cursed and howled, tearing at their own ruined flesh with taloned fingers, raking bloody lines down their skin.
He ignored them. He struck again.
The world snapped back into place around them. The other warriors looked around suddenly as their master and his opponent materialised from the roiling sea of shadow and flame. Fire gouted from a great wound in the King’s flank, whipping madly as the daemonic being tried to maintain its piteous cohesion.
The King fell to its knees, flames dying upon its body. A second wave of pressure bellowed from it, driving the others back. Eidolon held firm. His grip tightened and he hefted the hammer once more. He brought it down again and again, hammering it into his foe. The fateful lightning caged within its fiery skin discharged. The reflections died – some merely going dark, where others flickered to reveal the grinning death mask of a skull.
‘Pretender prince…’ the King hissed through shattered teeth, its form reduced to a dying abstraction. The flames froze, shattered apart, ran like wax. Its features coalesced into a gurning hole in imitation of a mouth, staring with empty sockets. ‘These are but the beginnings of your agonies.’
‘I have suffered longer than you can know,’ Eidolon snarled. The King grinned, forcing itself up one last time. It pulled its blade free of Vocipheron’s lock, as though it had merely been biding its time.
The blade lashed out, a tongue of liquid darkness. There was something familiar in its motion, in the fluid arc of it as it swung out towards him. Eidolon tried to flinch back but felt it taste blood. Armour split beneath its caress.
Instead of pulling away, Eidolon pushed forward and let it bite deeper. He savoured the agony as it pulsed through him, the gentle flow of blood down his skin.
He drove the hammer down and the King shattered. The daemon cracked into a thousand pieces, each shard of fire and madness tumbling to the decking. And it was decking again. No longer the unnatural black stone, but iron and adamantine.
Malakris laughed, the sound low and lyrical in the sudden silence of reality, mimicking the dead King’s broken joy. Plegua was trilling behind them, head tilted. Listening. ‘The reactors have kindled once more and the Geller field burns,’ he said.
Eidolon looked at him. ‘You’re sure?’
Plegua nodded. ‘Aye, lord. The storm abates. Soon we shall be free once more.’
The Lord Commander Primus turned his gaze to the head of his hammer. Burnt-black blood clung to it, defying the power field. The patterns it had left seemed to writhe with primal malice, a hateful intelligence lingering about the weapon like a moral stain.
‘Then let us find out where we are and right our course again.’
SIX
reflections
Eidolon did not spend much time within his chambers.
The idea of rest had, at some point, become anathema to him, and the constant pain that had haunted him put paid to any fantasies of sleep.
He maintained the chambers as an affectation – a space amidst the constant madness of the ship where he could be alone and bask in that solitude. It was not enough to be a figure of awe upon the command throne. No, a true ruler maintained a distance between himself and his men.
Even upon Terra it had been the same. His family had held fortified estates, protected by myriad defence systems and men-at-arms. Their retainers had fought and died for something greater than themselves, so that some fragment of nobility could endure in that fastness which had once been a mountain.
That had been the way of Europa. Survival at any cost. Dying was for others to do. For armies and slaves. The warlords who had fought Unification and failed had done so because they thought they were the last vanguards of their way of life. In a way they had been correct. Eidolon’s family, the other pretender-nobles of a dead world, had chosen a different path – yet he realised now, it had been the same.
Their children had passed beyond life and death so that they could live on. He, a second son, had been given to the flesh-smiths of the Emperor’s new armies. Not to be one of the base Thunder Warriors who had smashed all resistance, not a butcher of Gaduare.
You will be an angel.
A voice brushed his mind from out of memory, and he scowled at its emergence. Too many memories, these nights. Intruding in the manner of dreams or hallucinations. A sign of weakness, if ever there was one. Perhaps when the warp’s brazen excesses were banished they would cease. It was some lingering game of the Dark Prince, or of his father. Some curse of the self-proclaimed Shattered King.
You will be an angel. Who had said those words to him, so long ago? Not his father. His mother, perhaps? Some pitying sibling? One of the Emperor’s agents themselves? He had been part of a golden tithe, the noble sons of Europa prostituted for the Emperor’s ambitions, less than slaves, simply raw materials for the wars to come. The iron that might one day be Imperial steel. He had taken pride in that, once, long ago. Before Laeran. Before Isstvan. The parade of beautiful horrors that had led them, inexorably, to this moment.
Sons returning to murder their father. An empire on its knees. He wondered whether the Emperor had foreseen this end? Had he known, on some level, that you could not raise up a generation and turn them into weapons, into killers, into monsters, without them one day returning home to slake their appetites upon him?
Where was your foresight then? This long game, played out at last. Fate’s threads come to strangle you for your hubris.
Eidolon looked up. Of all the things within his chambers, of all the trophies of war and instruments of violence, there was only one thing here that had not been utterly ruined by the gifts of the gods.
On the wall above the space where a bed would have rested, a piece of art was mounted. It had been a rendition of Chemos from the hand of Keland Roget. Beautiful, in its own way. Eidolon had savoured such things once. Mortal art had possessed an allure for him, though not in the way that it had for others amongst his Legion brothers.
He did not truly wish to create it. To possess it was enough. To know that this thing, this object, was his. Ownership, the desire to rule, had always been in his blood, wedded to his soul. Perhaps that was why his time with the Death Lord had been so illuminating. They were cut from the same rough cloth.
Commanders. Rulers. Conquerors.
He let his eyes trace over the curdled landscape, finding new details.
Eidolon had destroyed the piece many times since the Maraviglia had enlivened his soul. More times again since he had passed beyond life and death. Each time, whether he ended it by fire or blade, the piece returned. Unharmed and whole, yet changed. Sometimes a tower in the background would suddenly be made of flesh and bone. Other times there would be crucified loyalists in the foreground, close enough that the details of their fidelity could still be made out. Aquilas nailed to their chests. Turncloak or Parasite carved into their skulls.
