The primarch of the IX has fallen…

  It will become a story blurred by time into myth.

  ‘Horus slew the Angel who had been his closest kin…’

  To Gaellon, the death of his father is a physical fact.

  The link between the primarchs and their warrior sons is a mystery that will soon pass beyond living knowledge. The Blood Angels, like all the Legiones Astartes, were once human. The organs implanted into them changed them, melding their flesh with traits of the primarch from whom they were templated. The organs and process that created a warrior of the Blood Angels caused changes at the genetic level. The effect on the mind, and the soul? Those were mysteries that not even the primarchs knew the truth of. A bond was formed between primarch and Space Marine at the level of the spirit that went beyond flesh. Body and soul. For some, that link might be distant. To the Blood Angels, the depth of their bond with their father is revealed only as it is severed. For Gaellon, it is a revelation of pain.

  Black.

  White edges of pain tearing through him.

  Black.

  Copper and iron on his tongue.

  Black.

  No… No, this can’t be. This cannot be.

  Black.

  Falling, always falling, without wings to catch his descent.

  Black.

  A brush dipped into red ink…

  Black.

  A crimson smear across white…

  Black.

  He is dead…

  Black.

  I am dead…

  White.

  Gaellon is standing. In front of him the ripple in the ochre dust breaks like a wave running to the shore. Things burst from under the murk. They are daemons. They are shaped by ideas of rage and hate and fury. Their skin is red and glossed. Smoke fumes from them. They roar as they come.

  Su’lok is shouting. Nerron has braced, mace ready. Gaellon sees and hears none of this. He is feeling his heart ripped out by silver claws, and the strand holding the soul to the body snap. He is seeing red and black ink run down the face of a blank canvas in a memory that never happened.

  Calm…

  Stillness…

  The sigh of brush on parchment…

  Gaellon stood on a floor of pale stone under a wooden canopy. The floor is marble taken from the last bones of a mountain that once gave its stone to the temples of Terra’s long-dead gods. The pillars that support the canopy are not from Terra but Caliban, chosen, felled, and shipped to the Throneworld as a gift of the Lion. It was raining. Water drummed steadily on the stones beyond the canopy’s shelter. Curtains of grey shifted across a view of bridges spanning streams which ran between blossom-heavy trees. The rain was semi-artificial, of course, just as the scene it moved over was. This was one of the decorative domes of Hatay-Antakya, Spire of a Thousand Gardens, Terra’s Emerald Hive. Gaellon blinked as he looked at the gravel paths and the pink petals dancing on the grey surface of the pools.

  ‘The past…’ he said to himself. ‘I have fallen from pain into the past.’

  This was a memory of the time that he and a hundred of his brothers had been granted leave to see the gardens of Hatay-Antakya while serving as an honour guard to Sanguinius when the primarch came to Terra. It had been a rare moment. Each of the hundred had spent their time in the gardens working on pieces of art to present to the primarch. All Blood Angels were craftsmen and artists. Gaellon had turned his will and hand to several creative disciplines – sculpture in stone and wax, lacquering, and glass making – but in his heart he was the poet he had been when he first ascended to the Legion. Baeron had been a painter. Watercolour and ink had been his mediums, and with them he had seemed to reach the truth under the surface of the world. Gaellon watched the memory of his brother tapping small piles of pigment into bowls beside his palette. A stretched rectangle of parchment sat on a frame in front of the view.

  ‘I am dead,’ said Baeron, without looking around.

  Gaellon nodded reflexively.

  ‘On the line at Marmax South, three weeks ago…’

  Baeron frowned and removed the lid from a flask of ink.

  ‘Did I die well?’

  Gaellon thought of the Death Guard lumbering out of the gas-fog, of the bolt-rounds buzzing through the air, as thick as the clouds of flies swarming over the corpses. He thought of the last time he had seen Baeron alive, wading into a tide of bloated figures, rounds exploding on the remains of his armour, axes and cleavers hacking at him as he fired and struck, and kept going forwards as he was torn apart.

  ‘You died with honour,’ said Gaellon. Then closed his mouth, for a second. ‘I am sorry, my brother,’ he said at last.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I would have liked to have seen you again in life.’ Baeron’s expression did not change.

  ‘We were all made to die, brother. I was lucky to reach that end when I did.’

  ‘How so?’

  Baeron looked at the parchment, considering. Then he took a brush with a fat, tapered head. He dipped it into water then splashed it into the ochre pigment on the palette, swirled the liquid into the dust then dipped the brush back into the water flask. Yellow murk spread through the clear liquid. Baeron mixed more water into the pigment. His movements were relaxed, fluid, as though he were in tune with the spin and flow of the water in the flask.

  ‘I died in the past,’ he said, and raised the brush to the parchment. ‘I died in an age of sorrow, and betrayal, and bitterness…’ The brush swept across the white surface of the parchment. Yellow fog spread across the image. The brush moved again, dabbing, flicking, moving back between palette and parchment. ‘I died knowing that the Imperium that we believed in would never be as it was…’ The brush dipped and water swirled into a heap of red pigment. The remains of the ochre blended with the red, and now Baeron’s movements were a blur. Red ran into yellow, images formed brush stroke by brush stroke, and suddenly Gaellon was not looking at a picture, but the view from the Marmax South line as the sun rose and the enemy came.

  The Death Guard came closer, growing in smudges of black – bloated, rolling figures, haloed in flies. ‘I died as an angel of a past age,’ said Baeron’s voice. And Gaellon felt the watercolour blur of dust and poison gas roll over him. He was there again on the line, moving, driven by memory, watching the last time he had seen his brother alive.

  Baeron came around the edge of a ridge of rubble. Six figures were on the other side. They were human. All of them wore the gas-hoods issued to troops in the Anterior warzone. Some of them still had the aquila stamped on the remains of their gear. Rust pocked every buckle and plate of their uniforms. Mould speckled the inside of their eyepieces. The guns in their hands should not have been able to function, but they would fire despite the muck coating them. Baeron fired. A bolt-round hit the figure at the centre of the ragged group. It was a metal-storm round, made to create a sphere of shrapnel. It hit the trooper in the torso and blew them apart. Shards of metal and bone ripped into the two nearest troopers. They fell. The others flinched. Then Baeron was amongst them. He did not shoot the rest. Ammunition and supplies had already become scarce, and besides there was no need. He took the first at a run, the knife blow rising to slice from groin to shoulder. The trooper came apart, all physical integrity vanishing in a burst of bowel fluid and blood. Then he was into the next one and the next, red spattering the dust of his armour. Behind him, the eyes of the human troopers watching him from the gun loops and firing steps. He cut the last trooper down and held his blade high as the gore pattered on his armour… In his mind, Gaellon could hear the cheer from the lines.

  And then his memory and sight pulled back, so he saw Baeron at the centre of the painted image, a crimson angel with sword raised against a washed field of yellow and green. The shots of the soldiers firing from the lines were white dashes in the blur of ink, their shouts almost audible in the ripple of dried pigment and water.

  Stillness.

  A single moment of time inked and framed.

  ‘I died and do not have to live with the future that is to come…’

  White…

  Blinding…

  Falling…

  Heat jolts through Gaellon’s arm. The horned skull parts to the sword edge. The power field discharges with a blink of lightning. Blood jelly and red ectoplasm spatter his armour. He is screaming, shouting, roaring. The sound is pouring from inside him. He is in the middle of the daemons. They surround him. Their bodies are taut muscle and blood-slick skin. They hold swords of black iron which trail sparks as they cut. Their faces are skull grins of rage and slaughter-joy. They are of the Neverborn, bred by life’s violence: by predation, by murder, by war. Fury, hate, and the joy of killing bleeds from living minds into the warp and gives them power. Normally they cannot come from the warp into reality, but the war, this last battle of battles, has broken the barriers between worlds. The Wasteland is a daemon realm.

  Gaellon is far from the ruins of Hold Point 78 now. It lies in the distance behind him. He has waded out from that island of rubble, into the ochre dust and the tide of daemons. He is alone. If Su’lok and Nerron call to him from the shore he does not hear them. He kills.

  The daemon he has just cut collapses into smoke and skin. Another takes its place. It is laughing, and the laughter is the sound of claws shredding feathers from an angel as it dies. Gaellon cuts it down. Then another and another. Swords find him. Claws open his armour. His blood is running to mix with the dust of the ground. But he does not stop. He cuts and hacks and roars and wades deeper into the tide, further from the shore.

  His father is dead. The fact fills his mind. The pain of it reverberates through him, bouncing off the sides of the void it has opened in his soul. He is feeling the claws. He is rushing down through the last instant of existence into the maw of oblivion.

  His father is dead.

  Gaellon is dead.

  The Blood Angels are dead.

  There is nothing else. No other sound or sensation. The world is cold black and red rage.

  Except, in this red-and-black-daubed world, the memory of Baeron speaks to him. A warrior who chose to see the world in the wash of colour under a brush and the bloom of ink on a blank parchment.

  ‘It is better that I fell when I did…’ says Baeron’s voice.

  A sword strikes Gaellon in the side. The black iron breaks the ceramite, cuts through to the meat and bone beneath. The pain of the wound vanishes into the abyss inside him.

  ‘I will always be as I was. I will not live with what you must…’

  Gaellon feels the blood pouring from the wound as the iron sword rips free of his side. It is a mortal wound, a death cut, but he is already dying, and his blood has already poured out to stain white feathers red.

  He cuts the daemon’s grin in half. Black jelly and ash fall from his sword, and the blow keeps going, cutting down through spine and torso. The pieces of the daemon fall, and Gaellon is already turning his sword to cut into another.

  Red and black… Soot and blood, a bed of white feathers painted with the red of life.

  The power field on Gaellon’s sword fails. The lightning vanishes from the edge. A hound leaps at him. Its body is flayed muscle. Its mouth is a cave of splintered knives. Forge heat bleeds from the collar on its neck. Gaellon rams the tip of his sword up through the roof of its mouth. The tip punches out of the top of its skull. The hound’s momentum pushes the blade down through the back of the skull and into its neck. The cutting edge meets the brass collar with a sound like a shattering bell.

  Claws score into his shoulder through shattered ceramite. The pain of their touch is barely a note in the storm roar of pain and grief. The future is murder, here in the Wasteland where angels are corpses and rage drowns out all.

  He has cut another three daemons down. He does not know how. He strikes another. A fanged skull shatters. Ichor has lacquered his armour from head to foot. He is aware of the island of rubble that is Hold Point 78 moving further away, growing smaller. Do Nerron and Su’lok still stand there? Had it been their voices he had heard calling above the roars of the daemons? Or was it another voice calling to him as he went deeper into the tide. His father? His brothers? Baeron? All of them gone, all of them calling to him from the grave, all on the shore beyond the black sea of death. He wants to join them. He wants this moment to end, for the world to return to a place where warriors mark parchment with ink, and dream in poetry, and where there is more truth in art than slaughter. A world where there are angels still.

  Will he always be here? Will all the Blood Angels always be here? Red angels in the Wasteland, hearing the echoes of their father’s slaughter? Will they ever reach the shore, or will they be dying for all eternity even if they live?

  Cut and bleeding, Gaellon wades on. His sword has broken, but he does not stop. Daemons fall around him. His body is a ruin. The place where Baeron fell is out of sight behind him. The Wasteland has him now. Still he goes on, cutting, hacking, stamping, spilling blood into ochre dust. On and on, out of sight to where the red fades into a smudged horizon.

  Gaellon descends into the Black Rage.

  FULGURITE

  NICK KYME

  The vehicle column came into view through his scope. A chugging, fitting procession of battered Tauroxes, freight carriers and bulky Cargo-8s, fourteen in all, their fading paint abraded by the weather. Thick smoke plumed from their chimney stacks. Gunmetal shone in anaemic daylight. Or what passed for day. Even on the ridge overlooking the distant gulley, it was hard to tell precisely what hour it was. Light, dark, night, day; it had little meaning in the cyanotic pall over Terra. Even in these outer wastelands. The Palace was many kilometres distant, a muddy silhouette thronged by smoke threaded with flashes of fire. Like a world ending. And a strange aura that the scope and his Astartesian eyesight could not penetrate. He saw faces there, just the impression, and knew they knew he was watching them.

  He turned away, recognising this madness, and the ones who served it. His zealot brothers. Those who bore the Word. It was known to him, the one on the ridge. It was known to him the moment he touched the fulgurite, that innocuous piece of stone that had the power to kill gods or men that pretended to be gods. He had felt divinity then, true divinity, and in that moment of revelation known that his kin were false and unclean things. Aberrant.

  He had but one answer to that.

  The column was getting closer, the rattling cough of abused engines and starving fuel tanks patently loud. They would be passing through the canyon soon. He needed one of those vehicles, decrepit as they were. He needed to get to the war.

  And as Barthusa Narek began to climb down from his vantage point, he glanced at the distant wreckage of the drop-ship behind him. He remembered the brothers he had killed, as the siege was reaching its dreadful culmination, and thought of the one he had come here to kill, the one called Aurelian.

  They were screaming again, howling for death. For their false gods. It came from below, from the deepest part of the hold, the part usually reserved for cargo. Deeper still, behind a locked cage, the beasts had started up. Left over from the opening assaults, their reek swept through the ship’s recyclers, infecting every nook and cranny. Bovine, caprine, and some that defied definition. Bleating and braying, as they rutted and fought, and ate the weakest. True children of the Four, the beastmen carried their marks branded onto flesh.

  A guttural siren blurted. A series of lamps in the upper hold would be turning from dirty amber to red. The ship’s chief ‘muleskinner’ was using gas to spur the bestial masses into feral insanity. It had many names. ’Slaught, psyk, frenzon. A melange of psychotropics chemically crafted to instil resilience and violence. Before the next assault run, before the murdering could begin anew.

  It took effect quickly, a reddish fog swirling like churned milk. They drank it in, eager, hungry, afraid. It was pandemonium now, redoubled and compounded by thick steel and ceramite. A hotbox of uncontrolled wrath. They would blink and cry out as the light of Terran day hit their eyes. Blind, in pain and afraid, these unwashed hordes would fall upon the remnants of the terrified defenders, goring, chomping and stabbing. They would absorb the bullets, the las-bolts, the bayonets. They would storm the last redoubts, bereft of pain, of conscience, of basic humanity.

  Then came the jolt, the steel-shrieking lurch of a sudden manoeuvre, and Barthusa Narek opened his eyes.

  Battery fire. The defenders had sighted the drop-ship.

  A small room came into focus, little more than a cell. A piece of stone lay in his outstretched hand, resting on the palm of his armoured glove. It gently vibrated, a subtle etheric murmur like a compass. Both guide and tool of destruction. He was sitting, his helmet to one side, eye-lenses facing the door.

  A light was flashing, calling him to the hold. They were making ready for the attack.

  Narek took up the Brontos-pattern rifle lying on the floor in front of him as he rose to his feet. He returned the piece of stone to a pouch on his belt. The helm he mag-locked to his hip. He’d need it soon, but for now he wanted to see with his own eyes. He took his knife, too, and sheathed it. Achingly sharp, it had sat alongside the rifle, his weapons arrayed beside him as he meditated. Concentration was paramount when you were planning on killing a demigod. Flak-fire rocked the ship.

  But first he had to kill everyone else.

  They looked scared. Scared and exhausted. The ones riding in the column. Army deserters, criminals and civilians by their uniforms and attire. Narek thought he saw a Palace enforcer in their midst too. He wondered how they got here, how they had escaped the opening salvos of the war. Or thought they had. The deserters were so weary they hadn’t seen the hunters, the lupine forms capering silently behind them through the thickening sand drifts. A storm was brewing. A bad one. Narek had seen this too, in the eddies and whorls out in the desert. Farther still, he saw a half-hidden bunker entrance to some forgotten and disused silo. Perhaps it once held a stockpile of weapons or other materiel. He doubted it did any more. Terra would have been stripped for every resource, every weapon, even here in these hellish wastes. He was certain he had crashed somewhere west of the Thar. He was no expert in Terran geography, but felt confident of his reckoning. Sand-whips lashed the bunker, its badly abraded entrance like polished silver. The growing storm was obscuring sensorium and augur alike. Blind, deaf, mind-fatigued, it was little wonder the deserters had failed to see their doom approaching.