Then came the artistry of the Dark Age, of Old Night, and the Unification Wars that ravaged Terra. Wars of unrivalled savagery wracked cities that couldn’t possibly exist. Men of flesh fought men of stone and men of steel. Zephon swallowed at the sight of Baal among the painted heavens, far too high on a ceiling mural for him to touch. He held his knuckles to his heart in solemn salute and walked on, passing yet more scenes of devastation on a scale never again to be matched, followed in turn by scenes showing the salvation of a species brought together after Old Night by the guiding golden hand of the species’ master.
Then came the monsters. Devilish forms conjured from human nightmare waged war in realms of fire and ice and smoke and flood. Horned beasts, red-fleshed and armoured in brass. Carrion-eating skeletal dancers with the faces and features of ancient birds. Zephon saw creatures from his own childhood dreams, monsters conjured by his own youthful, slumbering imagination.
How can they be here?
No answer presented itself.
Soon enough, Zephon noted another change. A shift in the surroundings.
Machines – engines – became far more numerous, set into the ground or half projecting out from unfinished murals and incomplete mosaics. The crash and bang of industry’s metallic song grew louder and louder with each twist and turn. Where the artistry of ages had marked the walls, soon space was given over to the primacy of cables and pipes to feed the machines, seemingly pushed into place and bolted to the Palace’s stone foundations out of rushed necessity.
Some of the engines spun chemicals the way a centrifuge spins blood. Others juddered as they sucked power, or generated it, or acted as junctions to spit it elsewhere. Towers of crates lined the walls of each chamber, eclipsing the incomplete architecture. Workers, robed or coated or suited, were everywhere.
Zephon removed his helmet to wipe silent tears from his eyes. The agony of the journey, of this entire labyrinth, burned at his core in place of the doubts he’d previously held.
This journey would have been the first step of humanity’s life without the warp. This was the route to the webway… Mankind should have walked through this labyrinth as a journey of understanding, bathing in the symbolism, preparing to step into the stars anew. A species reborn, saved from damnation by one man’s vision.
Yet it stood darkened and unfinished, so much stone yet undressed, the passageways that were supposed to lead to enlightenment now blighted and defaced by archeotech machines bolted into place in the wake of Magnus’ Folly. War had touched this place of last hope.
Suddenly it was all too easy to see this place defiled in the months to come, suffering at the rabid, iconoclastic hands of Horus’ rebels when they reached Terra. Would they care for the promise of this unfinished labyrinth, or would they desecrate it with the wrath of the ignorant?
Zephon’s smile was a weak, dark little thing. Mere days before, he’d not been sure what to believe. Now he mourned the incompleteness of the Emperor’s vision of salvation. He had walked the labyrinth and learned all he needed to know.
He closed his pale eyes.
‘Why do you weep, Blood Angel?’
Zephon turned to see Jaya’s Sacristan Apex. He’d believed only servitors were nearby in this section of the processional. Torolec, that was the priest-artisan’s name. Zephon had only met the man once before, on the battlements weeks ago.
‘Loss,’ he said, and added nothing more.
‘Are we close?’ Baroness Jaya voxed across the general channel.
‘Close to what?’ Diocletian’s reply was blithe.
‘To the Imperial Dungeon. To the Emperor’s laboratory.’
The Custodian’s reply was immediate. ‘They are the same thing,’ he said. ‘We have been in the Imperial Dungeon since passing the final seal. This is the Emperor’s laboratory. All of it.’
Zephon replaced his helm, sealing his collar lock with a snap-hiss of air pressure. He breathed the recycled air of his battleplate and walked on.
Less than an hour later, they reached the Eternity Gate.
The procession stopped at the heart of the labyrinth.
Zephon stood in the final promenade, surrounded by a multitude of banners standing in honoured rows. A cavalcade of colours stretched out on both sides of the downward-staired marble avenue, each woven standard showing the names, numbers, sigils, worlds or proud avataric beasts that embodied one of the Imperium’s regiments. Every regiment that had ever worn the Imperial eagle and fought under the Emperor’s aegis was represented by a flag, banner, trophy or pennant. A field of markers stretching in their tens of thousands, all leading ever-downwards toward the door of the Emperor’s throne room.
The great doors of the Gate stood open at the end of the descending avenue, their two-hundred metre height reaching up to the cavern’s arched roof. Moisture wept from the sedimentary rock sky, painting a thousand shining trickle-rivers down the surface of the metal doors. An image of the Emperor was bisected by their parting: a great embossed mural of the Master of Mankind wielding a spear against the draconic beasts and machine horrors of Old Night.
And between those wide doors, only darkness.
For the first time in several hours, no machinery was bolted to the walls and floor, and no workstations or storage crates obscured the beauty of what lay before him. Yet Zephon sensed the subsonic thrum of power cables beneath his boots, as energy cobwebbed throughout the labyrinth. Ostentation may have eclipsed pragmatism here at the Eternity Gate, but it hadn’t replaced it.
Shadows and spectres stood at the edges of Zephon’s sight, overlaying the truth of his senses with stories not yet told. Each time he shifted his gaze he witnessed some other echoing ghost, some other suggestion of what might yet be.
The great doors were unguarded, yet there stood two towering Reaver Titans either side of the arch, their armour plating cast in the aggressive blazonry of Mars’ own Legio Ignatum.
The ocean of banners stood in windless silence, yet there walked a host of hunchbacked priests dressed in the flayed skin of their forefathers, swinging incense braziers and chanting prayers to the souls of those men and women who fought beneath the icons across the galaxy.
The air above the avenue was empty, yet there circled the ungainly anti-gravitic forms of cherub-like drones, seemingly cloned child-angels wheeling through the air. They trailed banners from their ankles and rang hand-held bells, tolling who knew what.
The doors were wide open, yet they stood closed in their ethereal echo, and the rendition of the Emperor showed Him surrounded by a wheeling cosmos of daemons and mythological beasts. He was haloed by the sun, triumphant above the impaled body of something horned and serpentine.
Each baroque ghost glimpse told a tale from a time when the Imperial Dungeon seemed more of a cathedral than a laboratory, a time when the Emperor Himself was worshipped rather than revered.
And there, last of all, out of tune with the other echoes… An Angel stood before the gate, armoured in bleeding gold, bearing a sword of silver fire. Its great white wings spread wide in defiance, the swan feathers ragged and bloody red.
‘Father,’ said Zephon through numb lips, but the Angel was gone and the words were fading behind him as he stepped forwards. The gate yawned wide before him.
Alongside rumbling tank-treaded servitors unable to acknowledge their surroundings beyond track/kill subroutines, Zephon entered the Emperor’s throne room.