‘We are not crashing,’ she says aloud. The men and women nearest to her turn and stare. She swallows her own fear in the face of theirs. ‘I think… I think we are landing.’
Eleven
Ossuary / A shattered silence / He will live
They laid the trap in the region known as the Ossuary. Only hours distant from the Impossible City and its main arterial, the Garden of Bones existed in a modest span of the webway where the tunnel walls and ceilings pressed in with vanished into the omnipresent mist. If Calastar was a fallen eldar city, the Ossuary was a ruined monument to that worthless race.
‘We only have one chance at this,’ Ra had said at a gathering of leaders in the Godspire.
Nishome Alvarek, appearing via hololith and clad in her full Ignatum wargear as she sat upon her princeps throne on the command deck of the Scion of Vigilant Light, had resisted the choice of ambush site. It was too small for her Titan to walk, and she had insisted that her Warlord’s weapons would be more than capable of destroying the creature in open battle.
‘Your zealotry is invaluable,’ Ra began. Her perspective had been gently argued down: an ambush was critical and it had to be handled with meticulous care. The larger tunnels allowed too easy an opportunity for the creature to escape or get past the Imperial line. ‘You will stay and oversee operations within the Impossible City,’ Ra had decided.
‘Do you seek to appease me with charitable morsels of honour, Endymion?’
Ra had forced a smile and said nothing. Princeps Alvarek had chuckled, letting the matter lie.
Commander Krole had signed her fervent avowal for Ra’s plan, as had her underofficers.
Zhanmadao, one of the Tharanatoi Terminator caste, had noted that the creature remained tentative, seeking easy ingress rather than a frontal siege. There would be no better time, he reasoned, than now. It had been herded far enough, by fortune if not by intent.
Ra had nodded, agreed and let fly the gunships.
The Ossuary was an aisle, a narrow tunnel path fit for alien processions back when the failed eldar empire had still enjoyed events worth celebrating. Either side of the main roadway, nothing but organic powder residue and gemstone dust remained of whatever botanical and crystalline wonders had once grown in sorcery-touched beauty. Now the misty landscape was given over to broken statuary and the wraithbone husks of unpowered eldar automata. It was as if a culture had brought its funereal artistry here to be forgotten, left in this ill-maintained route of the vast web.
The Unifiers had spent little time here, initially reporting brief and tense encounters with eldar pilgrims and that species’ kaleidoscopic high priests and priestesses, yet considering that the eldar were known to still use the webway, they had judiciously and fervently avoided almost all Imperial expansion. Many among the Ten Thousand who had ventured deeper into the web suspected the abruptly fused passageways or sealed gateways led to eldar craftworlds, and the aliens were barring human entry into their far-flung domains. What it must it cost them to seal themselves away from their own means of travelling across the galaxy, however, none could guess.
Ra had originally expected to encounter the eldar a great deal as the Imperial vanguard ventured beyond the Mechanicum’s portions of the webway. Instead he found them recalcitrant and furtive, ghosting back rather than engaging, often sealing themselves away, even to the degree of damaging the webway to enforce their isolation.
The Ossuary was one such mystery. It seemed to be some xeno-logic amalgamation of graveyard and scrapyard, almost in the form of a refuse tunnel. None knew why it existed. Did the eldar not remake and reuse their wraithbone via the sacred art of bonesinging? Was this a deliberate abandonment of tainted material, discarding resources that were flawed in a manner indecipherable to the human eye? Or was it merely a monument to loss, and thus a place the eldar were unwilling to desecrate with even their own presence?
He loathed the unknown, even as he and his Custodian kindred were trained to react and adapt to it, perhaps better than any other living beings.
Ra had studied the eldar in depth, as had all of the Ten Thousand. A wise warrior’s creed was to know your enemy, but the Custodian Guard lived their lives to an extreme beyond desiring typical insight into their foes. They pushed themselves cognitively as much as physically, learning the languages, cultures and histories of their enemies in order to attain an almost enlightened sense of understanding with every one they faced. All in order to counter and oppose them; to stand against their foes and anticipate every action, answering with commensurate, consummate reaction. It wasn’t enough to be able to stop an enemy from doing something – purity of purpose and perfection in duty lay in knowing what they would do before they did it, and what the perfect response would be. By necessity that meant knowing when and why actions would be undertaken at all.
Yet this mindset held little rigidity. Almost nothing was codified. Lore was gathered not only to predict patterns but also to create a fluid sense of potential and awareness. Perceiving potential threats didn’t mean adhering to formulaic responses.
There were civilisations in the galaxy, human and alien alike, that had known little but the savagery of Legion conquest or Imperial Army compliance, yet the warriors of the Ten Thousand could speak their local tongues and recite the virtues and pitfalls of their historical military leaders, with deep insight into the cultures’ characters. All done in service to protecting the most powerful and important soul who had ever lived.
It was what galled Ra more than anything else when facing the creatures calling themselves Neverborn. These daemons were so varied, so populous, so in flux and so utterly alien that attaining any useful comprehension of them was next to impossible.
The silence of the Ossuary was shattered with the daemon’s arrival. It was no longer alone; it led a shrieking, roaring swarm of its lessers, creatures that had started flocking to its leavings, like the carrion-feeders that trailed after predators in the wild lands of countless worlds.
Its shape defied sight even when one looked directly towards it. It appeared as a smear across the vision of everyone who sought to follow its advance. Vast wings stood proud of its back, yet it ran on all fours. Its eyes blazed; the warriors who couldn’t describe the creature’s appearance at all could still feel when it turned its attention upon them, even at great distance.
It loped from the mist at the tunnel’s far end a full kilometre distant, a catalyst for the wretches at its back, sustaining these new followers with its bloodshed. Ra watched through magnoculars, applying filter after filter to pierce the preternatural fog with little effect. Flies surrounded its swollen corpus. Tendrils rose from its back like the curved tails of aggravated scorpions.
The creature nosed, hound-like, at the carpet of broken eldar wraithbone covering the tunnel floor. The lesser daemons kept back from its inquisitions, cowed from venturing too close in case they suffered the apex beast’s rage.
Ra lowered his magnoculars and thudded the butt of his spear down against the mist-hidden ground. The sound carried, resonating through the webway’s unearthly material, and the creature’s head rose with inhuman smoothness.