Within the day I had packed my meagre possessions and was on my way north to the mountains of the Himalazia to join the rest of my hastily assembled companions. I will not attempt to describe the immense majesty of the Palace, for words alone can do it no justice. It is landmass rendered in geological architecture, a wonder of the world that will never be surpassed. The artisan guilds strove to outdo one another in their efforts to glorify the Emperor’s deeds, creating a monument worthy of the only being who could ever bear such a honorific without need of a true name.
Those early days are a blur to me now, though that may be because my brain is beginning to die from lack of oxygen. Suffice to say, I was soon travelling into the darkness of space, where shoal after shoal of starships thronged the heavens and greedily sucked fuel and supplies from the enormous continental plates locked in geostationary orbit.
At last I saw the vessel that would be my home for nearly two hundred years, a leviathan that shone in the reflected glow of the moon. It gleamed whitely as it spun gracefully to receive the flotilla of cutters and shuttles rising from the planet below. This was the Vengeful Spirit, flagship of Horus Lupercal and his Luna Wolves.
I quickly established myself on board, and though my possessions were meagre, my wealth was substantial, and my vanity only scarcely less so. All of which allowed me to extend my span and retain the appearance of youth with superlative juvenat treatments.
As I lie here on the floor of my workshop in the artisan decks of the Vengeful Spirit, I wish I had not bothered. What difference do a few less lines around the eyes and smoother skin make when every breath might be the last and a pleasing bliss enters my mind as portions of my brain begin to fade out?
I prospered on the flagship of the 63rd Expedition, creating many fine works and obtaining many commissions for embellished scabbards, honour markings, oaths of moment and the like. I made friends among the rest of my fellow remembrancers (as we came to be known after Ullanor): some good, some ill-chosen, but all interesting enough to make my time aboard ship extremely pleasurable. One fellow, Ignace Karkasy, wrote such hilariously irreverent poetry concerning the Astartes that I fear he may one day wear out his welcome.
The work of the Expeditionary fleet continued, and though many worlds were made compliant by the work of warriors and iterators, I saw little of them save in the words and images of my fellows. I created a lapis lazuli recreation of the world map found in the depths of one uninhabited planet, and embossed many helmets with icons of fallen brothers after the war on Keylek.
Yet my greatest commission was to come in the wake of the Ullanor campaign.
From the accounts of those who had fought on that muddy, flame-lit world, it was a grand war, a towering victory that could have been won by no other warrior than Horus Lupercal. Ullanor marked a turning point in the crusade, and many were the war-leaders who came to my workshop, looking to celebrate their presence on that historic battlefield with an ornamented sword or cane.
The Emperor was returning to Terra, and a great Triumph was held in the ruins of the greenskin world to forever stamp that moment on the malleable alloy of history.
In the Emperor’s absence, Horus Lupercal would lead the final stages of the crusade, and such a weighty duty required an equally weighty title.
Warmaster.
Even I, who had little taste for war or the tales of its waging, savoured the sound of that word in my mouth. It promised great things, glorious things, and my mind was awhirl with the magnificent works I might fashion to commemorate the honour the Emperor had bestowed upon Horus Lupercal.
As the Warmaster was anointed, so too were we accorded an honour. The founding of the Remembrancer Order is one of my proudest memories, one that made me weep when I heard of its ratification by the Council of Terra. I remembered the white-haired man who came to my workshop and raised many a glass to him in the liquor halls of the ship.
The day after the Triumph, a warrior came to me, a beautiful man encased in battle plate that gleamed white with lapping powder and smelled of scented oils. His name was Hastur Sejanus, and never have I been so captivated as I was by his countenance. He showed me his helm, cut with a crude marking just above the right eye. Without asking, I knew it was the crescent image of the new moon.
Sejanus bade me fashion four rings, each in silver, each set with a polished moonstone. One stone would bear the crescent moon of his own helmet, another the half moon, a third the gibbous and the fourth the full. For this work, I was to be paid handsomely, but I declined any remuneration, for I knew to whom these rings would be presented.
The Mournival.
Abaddon would bear the full moon, Aximand, called Little Horus by some, the half moon, and Torgaddon the gibbous. Sejanus would bear the final ring of the new moon.
It was honour enough to craft these things for warriors of such pedigree.
For weeks I laboured, shaping each ring with all the skill I possessed. I knew such warriors would despise frippery and over-ornamentation, so I kept my more elaborate design flourishes to a minimum until I was sure I had created rings worthy of the Warmaster’s closest lieutenants.
With my work on the rings complete, I awaited the return of Hastur Sejanus, but the demands of war kept him from my workshop, and other commissions came across my workbench in due course. One such commission, simple enough in its conception, proved to be my undoing, coming also from a warrior of the Luna Wolves.
I never knew his name, for he never volunteered it, and I never dared ask. He was a blunt-faced man with a deep scar across his brow and a belligerent demeanour. He spoke with words accented with that particular harshness of Cthonia, so typical of the older warriors of the Luna Wolves.
What he wanted was simple, so simple it was almost beneath me.
From a pouch at his waist the warrior produced a silver disc, like the blank die of a coin, and placed it upon my workbench. He slid it towards me and told me that he wanted medals made, each bearing the image of a wolf’s head and a crescent moon. Rarely do I take such specific commissions. I prefer to bring my own design sensibilities to each project, and told him so. The warrior was insistent to the point where I felt it would be dangerous to refuse. A wolf’s head and a crescent moon. No more, no less. I was to craft the mould for such a medal, which he would then take to the engineering decks to have produced in greater numbers in a hydraulic press.