“Witch!” he called, bellowing to be heard.
She turned, looking over her shoulder. Her eyes flickered with psychic fire, and a bolt arrowed past Vulkan’s face.
“You’ll need to do better than that,” he shouted.
She angled her staff at the primarch, releasing a lightning storm that scorched his armour and burned a scar down his cheek. Vulkan grimaced, but advanced undaunted. Each punishing handhold brought him closer than the last. Underneath his body, he could sense the monster tiring, hear its laboured breathing and feel its shuddering muscles as they reached the end of their endurance.
Unable to climb any further, the pteradon pulled up and levelled out, enabling the eldar seer to leave her saddle and stand upon its vast, muscular back. She confronted the primarch, feeding power into the blade of her sword.
Vulkan was on his feet. He drew his hammer, slowly and purposefully to allow the full import of what fighting one of the Emperor’s sons meant to settle on the seer.
“Surrender now and it will be swift,” he promised.
She ran at him instead.
Vulkan charged.
The primarch’s footing was uneven across the monster’s back but he reached the seer without stumbling. The rune-blade whickered like a viper’s tongue, raking Thunderhead’s thick haft. She struck again, scoring a pectoral armour plate. Vulkan swung but she sprang away from the death blow, impossibly agile, and landed perfectly on the pteradon’s back. She lunged, aiming for Vulkan’s heart. The thrust penetrated the primarch’s guard but was turned aside by his armour. A crack presaged the breaking of her sword. The seer gasped at the psychic backlash, recoiling instinctively as the energy tore at her, clutching at a blackened arm.
Seizing her throat in his gauntleted fist, Vulkan bore the eldar witch down.
“This world belongs to the Imperium.”
She’d lost her staff, dropped over the edge of the monster, and her sword was a smoking hilt she’d also cast aside. All that remained was her defiance.
She spat over Vulkan’s armour, and there was blood mixed in with the phlegm.
“Barbarian!” The Imperial dialect sounded crude on her lyrical tongue. “You don’t know what you’ve done…” Her pale lips were flecked crimson and the vigour in her eyes was fading. “If you destroy it… you will doom this world more than you have already.”
Vulkan loosened his grip and was rewarded with treachery. A burst of psychic fire flared between them and he withdrew, letting the seer go. A second blast threw him off his feet and he was scrambling to hold on.
Panicking, the seer mounted the saddle and drove the pteradon into a suicidal dive. With a vertiginous lurch, Vulkan was falling and he reached out desperately for something to hold on to as he pitched over the pteradon’s side.
She was chanting. Her lilting refrain unleashed spear-thick barbs from the forest below. Vulkan narrowed his eyes and he dug his fingers between the plated scales. Stomach flat against the pteradon’s gelid hide, he weathered the debris storm that was suddenly bombarding him.
Descent was swift. The strain of it pressed against the primarch’s body like a gauntleted fist slowly clenching. The beast was almost done, plunging like a stone. It penetrated the broken leaf canopy as if breaching the atmosphere of a foreign world, but there was no fire, no aura of re-entry heat, just wind and the ground rushing to meet them. As the monster plummeted, Vulkan’s grip loosened. Inertia was dragging the scales he was clinging to, threatening to rip apart the sinews holding them together and tear them off.
The earth loomed, a flat and uncompromising expanse that only required gravity to pulp flesh and shatter bones. It seemed the seer was intent on killing them both. Vulkan hung on, hoping his superhuman endurance would see him through. Thirty metres from impact, the pteradon’s survival instincts took over. Emitting a plaintive yelp, it tried to pull out of the lethal dive but was too late. Twisting its massive body in vain, the monster slammed into the earth.
Darkness fell as a huge pall of dirt was thrown into the air by the impact. Ripped free from the monster’s back, Vulkan was thrown clear, but came quickly to his feet. He wasn’t far from where the pteradon had ditched. The beast had borne the brunt of the fall and cracks emanated from its broken carcass. Its wings were tattered strips. The fleshy membrane was tougher than flak armour but its shattered bones had sheared through it like blades. Thick fluid drooled down its crooked snout, and the its neck was wrenched at an unnatural angle. Vulkan ran to it, knowing the seer might also have survived the fall.
She was struggling from the wreckage, obscured by a slowly settling dust cloud. Blood painted her robes and her leg was clearly broken. She glared at the primarch as he approached her, snarling through red-rimed teeth. Summoning a nimbus of lightning, she raised her palm in a final defiant effort to kill him. Vulkan swung his hammer before the nascent psychic storm could manifest and took her head from her shoulders.
Blood was still spewing from the ragged neck cavity when the body finally caught up to the mind and the decapitated seer fell to her knees then onto her front. She was quickly surrounded by a gory pool of her own spilling vital fluids.
Ferrus Manus quietly regarded the alien head that came to rest at his feet.
“It’s over, brother,” Vulkan told him.
The Gorgon was pensive as he looked up.
“Victory.”
LEGION AND ARMY divisions patrolled the battlefield, searching for the enemy. Wounded eldar were quickly silenced, while Imperial casualties were either recovered or granted mercy if their injuries were too severe. It was dirty work, war work, but it was necessary. Small bands of natives still roamed the killing ground, lost and seemingly afraid. Efforts to herd them together for medical attention and processing were met with hostility at first but gradually the tribespeople had submitted peacefully.
The death of the seer had effectively ended the resistance. The eldar were utterly broken, and would not return. Execution squads had already been dispatched into the jungle to hunt down the last of them. Ferrus Manus had done the same before leaving the desert and there was no doubt Mortarion had expunged all hostiles from the ice plains.
Army discipline-masters had the Phaerians set fires in the rotting carcass of the pteradon. Such a mass of meat and bone would take time to burn. Vulkan frowned as he watched the bolder, more ebullient troopers make mock triumphal gestures as they posed on top of its corpse. It was undignified. Disrespectful.
“What was it like?” asked Ferrus Manus. The Primarch of the Iron Hands was standing at his shoulder, surveying the aftermath.
Vulkan turned to face him. “What was what like?”
“Riding on the back of that beast. I never expected one of the Eighteenth to be so impulsive.” He laughed to show he meant no harm.
Vulkan smiled. He still hurt too much to laugh. “Remind me never to do anything like that again.”
He winced when the Gorgon slapped his back. “Glory hound.”
With the achievement of victory, Ferrus’ mood had warmed. His strength and courage were reborn in his eyes, and his Legion had helped deliver One-Five-Four Four to compliance. It was a good day.
They were standing before the arch. The psychic shield was down. Following its destruction, the eldar witch coven had burned violently like candles over-fuelled with oxygen. They resembled little more than charred corpses crumpled in front of the encircling menhirs now.
Ferrus nudged at the ash with his boot. “Thus is the fate of all foes.”
“They hung on long enough,” said Vulkan. He focused on one, a male whose skeletal hands were curled into claws. The warlock had raged at the end. “I still can’t fathom why they defended this place so vehemently.”
“Who can guess at the mores of aliens?” Ferrus sounded dismissive. “A better question is what is to be done about that.” He gestured to the massive arch, now denuded of its psychic defences. “Unless you want to leap from a Stormbird again and shatter it?”
The Gorgon’s humour was lost on Vulkan. He was intent on the arch. A gate, Verace had supposed.