She was venting now, Mount Deathfire, in all her fiery glory. Pyroclastic cloud obscured most of my view, scudding across the invisible void shield suspended above me. The generators, one for each major city, were another gift from the Imperium. The one above me shimmered violently as pieces of debris flung from the volcano struck it. Fire was raining from the sky, cascading in waves and exploding into sparks as it met the resistance of the void shield.
It was beautiful to behold, nature’s fury viewed in panorama like this. When I finally lowered my gaze from the heavens, that sense of awe and beauty left me. In its place was the coldness I had felt in the forge.
‘You.’ I uttered like a curse as I saw the lone figure with his back to me. He was sitting down, shoulders hunched over something. Dark hair cascaded over his back. He wore a smock of sackcloth. In one hand he carried a knife. Its edge was serrated and in the darkness I thought it had a blacker sheen around its toothed blade.
He was at odds with this place. I knew it in my heart, but also saw it in his anachronistic clothing.
He hadn’t heard me, so I stepped closer, my grip tightening around the branding iron.
The dark figure was sawing, I could hear the rasp of his knife shearing through something. At first I thought it was wood, fuel for the furnace, but then I remembered the blade and the black sheen around the edge. A basket lay off to one side within easy reach. Every time he finished making a cut, he threw something into it.
‘What are you doing?’ Even as I asked the question, I knew the answer. ‘ What are you doing?’ I asked again. Rage took hold of me, and I raised the branding iron above my head like a spear.
The black sheen around the blade… It was blood.
No lights, no forge fires – the city was dead, and he had killed it.
‘Turn, curse you!’
He stopped at the sound of his name. Sat up straight, knife held out casually to one side.
‘Murdering scum!’
I pulled back my spear, aiming for his back, where I knew the iron would punch through into his heart. Even primarchs can die. Ferrus had died. He was the first of us, the first I was certain of, anyway. Even primarchs can die…
‘Vulkan, no.’
The voice came from behind me, compelling me to obey.
At first I thought it was N’bel, venturing out of the forge to see what was going on, but I was wrong. I turned, and standing before me, in the same robes he had been wearing on Ibsen, was the remembrancer Verace.
‘Vulkan, he is your brother and I forbid it.’
My grip tightened on the spear. ‘But he murdered them.’
‘Do not kill him, Vulkan.’
Who was this human to tell me my business, to give me orders? He was nothing to me, a memory from the Great Crusade, a– No, that wasn’t right. I shook my head, trying to banish the fog, but it wasn’t out here with me, it was within.
Verace was no remembrancer. He was a cloak, a mask to hide something greater.
Very few mortals could behold the Emperor’s true form and live. Even his voice was lethal. So he wore masks, erected facades that he might move around the galaxy without leaving deathly awe in his wake. I was his son, and as such able to withstand much more than any mortal man ever could, but even I had not seen my father’s true face. He was at once a warrior, a poet, a scientist and a vagabond, and yet he was also none of these things. They were, all of them, merely camouflage to conceal his true nature. And the costume my father chose to wear now was that of an ageing remembrancer.
‘My son, you must not kill him.’
‘He has earned his fate,’ I spat belligerently, not wishing to defy my father but at the same time unable to let the murderer go unpunished.
‘Vulkan, please do not kill him.’
‘Father!’
I felt a hand grip my shoulder, cold and vice-like. The spear was no longer clenched in my fist, its absence like smoke escaping through my grasping fingers.
‘Brother…’ said Curze as he rammed the spear into my back and I saw it punch through my chest a second later.
The world was fading again. I clutched at the iron impaling me, slumping to my knees as Curze let me go.
Verace was gone and left no trace of his parting; so, too, was my brother, though it was the lack of his presence rather than his actual disappearance that I noticed.
Above me, the void shield flickered once and died. Fire rained down, the skies were burning with it. Powerless, dying, I closed my eyes and let the conflagration take me.
The reek of smoke and ash greeted me as I came round. For a moment I believed I was still on Nocturne, trapped in some infernal cycle from which there was no escape, destined to relive my imagined death at the hands of Curze, my brother, and now my captor, again and again.
But when the cell and not N’bel’s forge came into focus around me, I realised I was truly awake and that my return home had just been a nightmare. Feverish sweat lathered my body; it was the first thing I noticed after the smell of the forge dissipated. Darkness reigned, as ever, and steam coiled from my oil-black skin as the heat of my body reacted to the cold. Honour scars stood out, my oaths of moment, etched into flesh and thrown into relief by a harsh light emanating from above. For a moment I thought I saw a marking I didn’t recognise, but lost it in the shadows.
The second thing I noticed was that I was not alone, and this took my mind off the mark. Though the nightmare had left me, my ghastly cellmate had not.
Ferrus was watching from the shadows, his dead eyes twinkling like opals.
‘You are dead, brother,’ I said to him, rising. ‘And I am truly sorry for that.’
‘Why?’ asked Ferrus, the gruesome neck wound adding more gravel to an already rasping cadence. ‘Do you blame yourself, brother?’
It sounded almost like an accusation, so much so that it made me turn to regard him. He was truly a spectre, a shade, a withered version of what Ferrus Manus had once been, clad in my dead brother’s armour.
‘Where are we?’ I asked, ignoring my dead brother’s question.
‘Where do you think we are?’
‘Isstvan.’
Ferrus nodded. ‘We never left, either of us.’
‘Do not pretend to be him,’ I said.
Ferrus opened his arms, looked around as if searching for answers, ‘Am I not? Is it easy to assuage your guilt if you make yourself believe I am not some aspect of him? Do you know where my body is now? It lies headless on a desert of black sand, slowly putrefying in its bloodstained armour. I don’t recall any of the statues erected in my honour bearing such an image.’
I was tiring of this cajoling. It was beneath me, it was beneath Ferrus, and I felt like I was besmirching his memory by the very act of listening to it.
‘What are you, creature? For you are not Ferrus Manus.’
He laughed. It was an unpleasant sound, like the cawing of a crow. ‘I thought I was your brother. Is that not how you addressed me? Am I so easily forgotten, now I am dead?’
Ferrus, or the thing that wore his skin and armour like a man wears a cloak, feigned disappointment.
I was unconvinced.
‘Ferrus was a noble warrior, a good and honest man. He was steel and he was iron, and I will never forget him. Ever.’
‘Yet you let me die.’
Guilt was more painful than any blade, and as it pierced my weary heart I staggered at first, but then righted myself.
‘There was nothing I could do. Nothing either of us could do.’