Lorgar slowed in his pace, casting a glance at the daemon. ‘We walk to the grave of a craftworld?’
Ingethel rasped another laugh from its malformed jaws. You are here to witness wonders, are you not?
AND SO THEY came to a dead city, fallen from the void to bury itself in the world’s lifeless dust.
Red-stained bone architecture reached as far as the eye could see, jutting from the fundament with all the grace of a mouth filled by shattered teeth. Lorgar and his guide stood at the crater’s lip, staring down into the grave of the alien void city.
The primarch was silent for some time, listening to the howl of the wind and the accompanying grit-rattle against his armour. When he spoke, he didn’t break his gaze from the ancient annihilation below.
‘How many died here?’
Ingethel raised itself higher, peering down with its foul eyes. Four arms spread in a grand gesture, as if laying claim to everything the daemon beheld.
This was craftworld Zu’lasa. Two hundred thousand souls burst in the moment Slaa Neth was born. Unguided, with madness rampant in its own living core, the craftworld fell.
Lorgar felt a small smile take hold. ‘Two hundred thousand. How many in the entire eldar empire?’
A whole species. Trillions. A decillion. A tredecillion. A goddess was born in the brains of every living eldar, and tore itself into the realm of cold space and warm flesh.
The daemon hunched itself, leaning with all four arms on the crater’s edge. I sense your emotions, Lorgar. Pleasure. Awe. Fear.
‘I have no love for the galaxy’s xenos breeds,’ the primarch confessed. ‘The eldar failed to grasp the truth of reality, and I feel no sorrow for them. Merely pity that any being can die in ignorance.’ He took a breath, still staring down at the buried craftworld. ‘How many of these failed to escape the goddess’s birth?’
A great many. Even now, some drift in the warp’s tides – the silent homes of memories and alien ghosts.
Lorgar ignored the wind tearing at his cloak as he took his first step on the crater’s slope.
‘I sense something, Ingethel. Something down there.’
I know.
‘Do you know what it is?’
The daemon wiped its abused eyes with careful claws. A revenant, perhaps. An echo of eldar life, breathing its last if it still breathes at all.
Lorgar drew his crozius maul, his thumb close to the activation rune. The weapon caught the tumultuous light above, reflecting the storm on its burnished spines.
‘I’m going closer.’
FIVE
ECHOES
GHOSTS WALKED THE streets, wraiths of wind and dust, forming tantalising shapes in the tempest. They lived at the edge of his vision, slaughtered by the storm each time Lorgar sought to see them more clearly. There, a fleeing figure, obliterated back into the breeze the moment Lorgar turned to see it. And there: three reaching, shrieking maidens, though there was nothing more than whirling dust when the primarch turned again.
He clutched the crozius tighter. Ahead, always ahead, there thrummed that aching sense of something barely alive – weakened, trapped, almost certainly dying. The bleak resonance reaching into his mind spoke of something like a caged, diseased animaclass="underline" something that had been dying for a long, long time.
Lorgar moved with care, stepping around dust-coated rubble, treading through the skeleton of a city. The gritty wind carried distant voices in its grip – inhuman voices, screaming in an alien tongue. Perhaps the gale played tricks of its own, for even with a grasp of the eldar language, he couldn’t make out the words being cried into the storm. Trying to comprehend individual voices merely made the others louder, eclipsing any hope of focus.
As he moved deeper through the emaciated city, Lorgar ceased turning at every half-formed image, unfocussing his eyes and letting the teasing wind shape whatever it chose. In the thrashing gusts, faint spires stood at the corners of his eyes, alien towers reaching up with impossible grace into hostile skies.
The primarch looked back, seeking Ingethel and seeing nothing.
Ingethel,he reached out with his stuttering psychic sense, unsure if the call even pierced the wind. Daemon. Where are you?
The storm howled louder in answer.
TIME SEEMED TO lose its grip. Lorgar’s thirst grew raw, though he never slowed in weariness, all the while walking for over seventy hours beneath an unending dusk. The only certain evidence of time’s passing was his retinal chrono, which degenerated into unreliable fluctuation at the tip of the seventy-first hour. The digital display began to pulse with random runes, as if finally surrendering to the unnatural laws of this warp-drowned realm.
Lorgar recalled Argel Tal’s face: gaunt, almost vampiric in its skeletal ferocity, when the warrior had claimed his vessel had sailed the warp’s tides for half a year. To Lorgar and the rest of the fleet, the Orfeo’s Lamenthad been gone no longer than a few heartbeats.
Idly, he wondered how long would pass in the material universe while he lingered here, walking along the shores of hell.
What little of the craftworld’s architecture remained above ground was a victim of erosion, worn down and scarred by the blistering winds. Lorgar stalked down yet another avenue of dust, his boots grinding down on the ancient rock. Perhaps this had once been an agricultural dome, fertile and forested with xenos flora. Perhaps it had been nothing more than a communal chamber, though. Lorgar sought to restrain his imagination, refusing to let it be stirred further by the dancing shapes in the dust storm.
Another hundred metres, scuffing through worthless soil, and the curious, queasy ache of struggling life began to throb below his boots. To his left, to his right, nothing but the fallen towers of a dead civilisation.
The primarch crouched to grip a fistful of the red soil. As before, he let it fall through his fingers, watching as it was snatched away by the wind. The presence, such as it was, waxed and waned in arrhythmia. Lorgar took a breath, aiming a thin pulse of psychic energy to trickle downward. He felt nothing in response. Not even a tremor of awareness. It could’ve been a metre below the ground, or all the way down to the world’s core. Either way, it was a weak, irregular thing; seemingly untouchable and only barely reminiscent of life.
Sentience resided in hiding, but it didn’t feel alive.
Curious.
He pushed deeper, scenting, seeking, but the same buried core of resistant nothingness met his questing touch.
In grudging defeat, Lorgar withdrew his hesitant psychic probing, curling his perception back into his skull’s senses.
That did it. Even as he was cursing his erratic talents, he felt something stir beneath, burrowing upward. The presence beneath the sand chewed its way up, an icy bloodhound sentience straining to sniff after his retreating psy-caress.
Lorgar recoiled on instinct, shuddering at the sense of desperation wrenching closer from below. With gritted teeth, he forced a blast of repellent thought back at the grasping presence – the psychic equivalent of smashing a drowning man’s fingers as he grasped for a lifeline. The presence ebbed for a moment, regrouped, and clawed upwards again.
Its crest broke the surface: raw feeling crashing against the primarch’s mind in a splash of cold ferocity, absolutely devoid of any other emotion. Lorgar staggered back from the fountain of rising awareness, deflecting its jagged intensity as best he could. When the hand burst from the sand, the primarch already stood with his crozius in his fists.