Behind the golden warriors came their arming thralls, bearing fresh ammunition and armour sealant; warriors in their own right but sheltered from harm by their masters’ spinning blades.
It didn’t matter that all these years of secret war had depleted the Legio Custodes to a ghost of itself. It didn’t matter that they had fought and bled and died for the last half-decade in this sunless, merciless realm populated only by the dead and the damned. Their king had come, the sun had risen and they charged with a cry that far eclipsed the wails of the daemons dying on their blades.
The beasts that survived the Emperor’s onslaught staggered and lurched towards the Custodians, raising brittle blades in dissolving hands, uselessly staring through bleeding, blinded eyes. Something dead – a creature hunched and bloated, still bearing within its flesh the plague that had slain it – lunged at Ra. His spear thrust burst its eye and cracked through the malformed skull. Hissing and bubbling blood sluiced across Ra’s gauntlets, steaming as it burned away in the Emperor’s aura.
He loosed his last explosive bolts, sensing the weapon was empty before the warning sigil flashed on his visor. ‘Reload!’ Ra cried as he hurled the weapon back towards the armoury thralls, already drawing his meridian swords in its place. The curved blades ripped through diseased flesh, spilling rotten organs to the misty ground. The swords’ energy fields spat kinetic aggravation at every impact.
A rune chimed on his retinal display, flickering white. He sheathed the twin sabres in a smooth turn and caught his guardian spear as the ammunition thrall threw it back to him. The moment he had a fist around its haft, he was killing again. This was the way of his kind.
For Ra, time ceased to exist. There was nothing but the beat of his heart and the lactic burn of his muscles. All he saw were the blades and claws flashing towards his face. The ash of dying, dissipating Neverborn coated his armour.
‘Reload!’ Solon called from behind him. Ra heard the snap-crack of Solon’s meridian swords activating, and the rumbled murmur of compliance as the armoury thrall gathered the guardian spear left thrust into the ground.
Ra parried a cut from a heavy brass blade, returning a blast from his digital lasers that blew the creature’s face out the back of its sloped head. Daemonic slop from the burst skull rained across the Emperor’s back, turning to ash before it touched the monarch’s armour.
Torrents of chemical fire marked Zhanmadao’s position to Ra’s left. Ra could hear the draconic roar of incendium pikes, burning the still-thrashing creatures that had fallen beneath the blades of the Custodians’ first rank. The Ten Thousand and their golden king were shin-deep in ash, the smoky spectres of daemonic entities flailing as they were swallowed by the Emperor’s fire.
The daemons that managed to reach the Emperor suffered worst of all. The strongest, most savage of their kind, they swung weapons at a man who was no longer there, cleaving through the golden mist that swirled in His place. With thunder-cracks of psychic force, the golden warlord would appear at the beasts’ backs, His flaming sword already buried in their spines. Fire erupted behind their eyes, boiling and bursting them from within. Their sizzling gore soaked Ra and the Custodians closest to their sire.
Exaltation quickened Ra’s blood, the cure to the weariness that had slowed him. He was tired beyond belief, yet that had never mattered so little. Each beat of his still-living heart was vengeance, vindication.
We’re winning. He could feel it in the renewed curses and oaths across the vox as the Ten Thousand advanced. They weren’t just holding their ground. Whatever genius the Emperor had worked in order to stand with them in this final hour had worked. Nothing could stand before them.
The Emperor turned to Ra, hurling His sword as a spear. It lanced over the Custodian’s shoulder, driving to the hilt in the skull of a creature Ra barely even saw before it was reduced to burning sludge. In a flare of sun-enriched mist, the blade was back in the Emperor’s hand, spinning, falling, killing.
And still the Emperor advanced. A reptilian canine leapt at him only to rip through the air where he had been standing. It gurgled molten blood as the Emperor’s sword manifested within its throat. The warlord clutched it in place a second longer before ripping it free and moving on.
Still the enemy came – a tide, a flood. Ra stole glances back to the wraithbone gateway, so incongruous against the Mechanicum’s machinery, watching robed Unifiers passing into the blue mist, escorted by packs of the last surviving Silent Sisters.
Soon enough only the Ten Thousand remained at their master’s side.
+Be ready, Ra.+
‘My liege?’
The Custodian launched himself over the slumping form of the vulturish creature that had fallen to his final six bolts, hurling his spear back behind the front line and drawing his meridian swords while still in the air. He landed by the Emperor, back to back with his master. Their blades wove a lattice of silver light, eviscerating everything that approached their edged web.
+Be ready.+
‘For what, sire?’
Ra’s retinal display flashed its white sigil. He caught the returned weapon, spinning it with the force and speed of a rotor blade. The tunnel around them cracked and sparked with the strain of overworked generators.
+There, Ra. It draws near.+
The Emperor moved on, cutting, carving. He led His guardians into the very hordes of a mythological hell, and like the paladins of yore, they followed their king.
Rare emotion spiced the Emperor’s silent words. +I sense such purity of being. Such pure, unadulterated malice.+
Ra weaved back from a swinging axe blade, returning a spear thrust that punched through the creature’s scaled throat. He dared a glance left to Diocletian, seeing his kinsman hauling his own spear from the innards of a pot-bellied, horned grotesque, impaling a prize of rotted entrails. Flies droned around the decayed tangle, swarming at the loss of their hive.
Even immortals could tire. Ra’s breath sawed between his closed teeth. Inside his helmet, sweat drew lines of wet fire down his face. His retinal display kept auto-dimming to compensate for the fire and light bursting into being with each fall of the Emperor’s blade.
‘I see only the horde, sire.’ He didn’t like the rapt fascination in his lord’s tone.
+Reveal thyself…+
The Emperor raised His blade, bringing it down in a crescent of fire. A tide of flame bellowed forth in an incinerating arc, bathing the ranks of the Neverborn before him. Mortis-ash blasted back in the windless air, coating the closest Custodians in the dust of dead daemons.
A shadow. A shape in the ash.
A man. Just a man. Long of hair, dark of skin, tribally bearded, wearing jewellery of shaped bone and bearing a spear of knapped flint vine-lashed to fire-hardened wood. A man wearing wounds almost as grievous as those he had inflicted upon so many others. Hundreds of spear slashes and sword cuts marked his flesh. The freshest and bloodiest showed on his chest, the legacy of Jaya’s last blow.
One man, leading the ranks of howling madness behind him.
+The Echo of the First Murder.+ The Emperor’s words broke into Ra’s skull with crushing gentleness.
‘The Anathema,’ was its sick, slick reply.
Predators always revealed themselves in the seconds before they struck. Wolves howled as they chased; sharks cut the ocean’s surface with their fins as they hunted. Here the ashen silhouette moved through the Neverborn’s ranks, lesser creatures parting before its too-human tread. Whatever the creature’s true form, it wasn’t this muscled Stone Epoch war-chief. It merely aped the form of the first humans.
For the first, terrifying time, Ra saw doubt flicker within his master’s eyes. The sight flooded him with the unfamiliar taint of dread.