Sunlight / First of the Ten Thousand / War council
Diocletian Coros stood upon the wall of a fortress that shouldn’t exist, bathed in a halo of unwanted sunlight. While the first natural light to grace his skin in over five years should have been a blessing, he found himself pained by its unwelcome glare. His eyes were far too used to the sunless, skyless half-light of the realm below the Palace.
He wore weariness as a cloak, dulling his senses and pulling at his limbs. Exhaustion burned off him in an aura. The battle was over for now, yet still it leeched his strength. This weakness was new to him. He found that he loathed it.
Here on the high walls, Diocletian scarcely recognised his surroundings. The curving, graceful spires of the Palace’s Ennara Towers were gone, replaced by a grey bastion of rockcrete and plasteel. Its minarets, once things of such stark wonder that pilgrims had been speechless upon seeing them, were ground down into rigid, armoured gun towers with rows of turrets and laser batteries aiming up at the sky. Crews of maintenance servitors, ant-small at this distance, worked under the guidance of robed tech-priests.
It was a truth seen across the city-sized Palace. Walls had become ramparts, towers had been rendered down into battlements, and what had once been the most glorious celebration of human ingenuity now stood as a monument to the species’ capacity for betrayal.
Rogal Dorn and his stone-hearted Imperial Fists had done their work well – the Imperial Palace had been broken apart and reborn as a fortress beyond reckoning. Exalted architecture constructed in dozens of styles over several generations had been ground down under Dorn’s cold gaze, reprocessed into something blunt and crude and inviolate.
A pair of Imperial Fists sentries marched past Diocletian and Kaeria, bolters held at rest. They saluted the Custodian and the Oblivion Knight with the symbol of Unification, banging their fists to their breastplates. Kaeria returned the salute.
Diocletian did not. He watched the two soldiers march on and felt discomfort at the sight of their pristine armour, the very same unease he’d felt upon first seeing the Palace’s horizon turned into an endless ocean of grey battlements.
‘How proud they look,’ Diocletian said. The words came out as a murmur. His voice was still suffering from the blow that had almost severed his head the day before. ‘Our noble cousins.’
Cousins. It was true, if one employed a generous licence with the truth. The warriors of the Space Marine Legions were raised through a similar process to the Ten Thousand, albeit in the coldest and crudest imitation. Diocletian had been reshaped at the fundamental level, with perfection threaded through his blood and bred into his bones. In contrast, his lesser cousins among the eighteen Legions were cut open by knives and implanted with false organs, relying on surgical ingenuity and genetic rituals to mimic the end result of better, more painstaking, more complete, work.
Kaeria said nothing. She shifted slightly, meeting his eyes with her own.
‘True,’ Diocletian allowed, replying as if she’d spoken. ‘They have the right to pride. They have never failed, after all. But there’s no honour in innocence.’
She raised an eyebrow, tilting her head just so.
‘No,’ Diocletian replied at once. ‘Why would I?’
Kaeria’s expression shifted to one of patient doubt.
‘I don’t envy them for their innocence,’ Diocletian admitted, ‘but I’m beginning to hate them for it.’
Kaeria raised an eyebrow.
‘I know it’s petty,’ Diocletian snapped. ‘That’s enough of your judgement, if you please.’
With their faces bared, the Terran melange of their heritage couldn’t be denied. Diocletian was a child of the Urshan Steppes, with the dusky skin and curiously light-brown eyes of that region’s males, the latter standing as evidence to pre-Unity programmes of genetic processing. In paler contrast, Kaeria had the sun-bronzed olive flesh of the Achaemenid region, light of eye and dark of hair. The high topknot atop her shaven head showed tawny streaks in the thin Terran daylight.
Both bore the scabbed gashes and discolorations of recent battle. The walking wounded, returning to the surface with a grave tale to tell.
Diocletian held a stolen relic in his hands, dirtied by the very fact he had to touch it. Once more he fought the urge to grind it beneath his boot – an urge he’d been resisting since the trophy first came into his possession. He left it on the battlements, relieved to be rid of it even temporarily. Soon he would leave it with the Captain-General. Let Valdor add it to whatever archives were being collected by those still on the surface.
Mere years ago, it was forbidden for any to set foot here but the Ten Thousand, the Sisterhood and their mutual king. No others were permitted to walk where the Ennara Towers had risen into the polluted sky, for here the Emperor liked to contemplate the heavens, speaking to His most loyal warriors of His dreams among the stars. Now the battlements that had risen in the tower’s place were swarming with gun-servitors and Imperial Fists overseers. The stars were eclipsed by a forest of drifting searchlights, hundreds of them aimed skywards at the gently toxic clouds. Each stabbing beam of light hunted the sky for foes that couldn’t possibly be anywhere near Terra, but their readiness was unquestionable.
‘So much has changed,’ Diocletian said, looking across the vista of squat gun towers.
Kaeria started, surprised at his tone.
Diocletian fixed his companion with a neutral look. ‘Never that,’ he said. ‘I don’t mourn the loss of the Palace’s beauty. I mourn what all of this represents. Dorn and Malcador have both conceded that Horus will reach Terra no matter what stands in the Warmaster’s way. This is not precaution. This is making ready for war.’
Kaeria turned to look across the newborn battlements once more.
‘What?’ Diocletian asked.
She favoured him with a brief glance, the light of challenge in her eyes.
‘I have no time for your disapproval, Sister. The tribune is not here. I am. Let that be the end of it.’
A low purr of servos and pistons cut into the silence that followed. Kaeria nodded towards a doorway in the nearby battlement tower. An archwright stood there, cowled by the cloak of her order. Three bronze-plated artificers with metalsmith tools rising from prehensile servo-arms linked to their hunched spines flanked the priest in silent vigil.
‘Golden One,’ came the tech-priest’s greeting. ‘Honoured Sister.’
‘Archwright,’ Diocletian replied. Many souls even among the Imperium’s hierarchs would greet such a consummate artisan with no small gravitas. Kaeria bowed out of simple respect, but no warrior of the Custodian Guard would bow to anyone but his sire.
The archwright was an iron-boned elder, locked into a posture harness to keep her withered muscles upright, her cybernetics and bionics draped in a robe of Martian red and Terran gold. Whatever was left of her original face was surgically buried under reconstruction plating and an insect’s portion of ferrotic eye-lenses. She was female only insofar as her original biological template had been female. That is to say, in the mists of centuries past, she’d been born as a girl-child on Mars. The frail construct that approached both warriors now had evolved far beyond notions of gender.
‘I am Iosos,’ the decrepit genius stated. ‘I have been appointed to attend you before tomorrow’s war council.’
‘We need no attending,’ Diocletian replied at once. ‘We have artificers already deployed where we do battle.’
‘The Captain-General believes that the sight of one of the Omnissiah’s Custodians wounded and with his armour damaged will harm morale among the Palace’s pilgrims and defenders.’