“Coming up on the target now, sir,” Mirena reported over vox. The rest of us were in the bay of the Bird, waiting to make a swift exit to eliminate our target.
“Do you have visual?” I asked.
“I do, sir,” she confirmed.
“What’s the opposition looking like?”
“It’s looking like you may have the wrong idea,” she replied. “For once, I don’t imagine you’ll need many weapons. Touching down now,” she added. That she was landing without making a strafing run on the target did have me a bit worried. I was not enthused by Mirena deciding for herself what our required payload was, but having said that, I had no reason not to trust her judgment so far. A few moments after touchdown, Mirena gave the call that the bay doors would be lowering shortly—a call which, often, followed from an onslaught of Heavy Bolter fire. No such assault was carried against our target now.
Silas and I exchanged glances as we rose from our seats, each of us unsure what we were about to face. But when the bay doors opened and he hammered forth to secure the outside area, I, instead, remained petrified within the Bird. Bewildered from the obscurity of the scene ahead, and terrified of the implications.
For ahead sat a single log cabin, and that was all—though eventually my troops did encircle the cabin, adding a sizable degree of militarization to the scene. I feared it was the cabin of my haunting dreams, but logic suggested otherwise. The one I had dreamed of sat in a grassy field, whereas this rested in a snowy tundra. They were also shaped differently—that of my dreams had a porch, this one did not. But even so, those differences did little to assuage my fears, and for a time I remained petrified still.
After a few moments, a man exited from the cabin, one hand holding a small dining plate and the other a cup by its handle, the base of the cup hovering over the plate. My small army pointed the sum of their weapons at the man, but held their fire. The man did not seem worried by the threat of their presence, and instead continued to survey the scene. He himself seemed aged from his slow, careful, but unimpressed demeanor, yet his complexion appeared quite young. Younger than myself, even. And when he spoke, which he did after surveying the scene in full, his voice was without the strain of time or stress. “Which of you is Callant Blackgar?”
The utterance of my name snapped the petrification from me, but I said nothing in response. Instead, I chose to reach out with my mind, to feel about our surroundings in search of something more, some hidden weapon or trap that we were being lured into. Such simplicity as that which rested before us could not have been the full picture, the end result of our war against the Phaenonite. And yet, I found nothing. No traps, no hidden weapons. No complex cellar beneath the cabin, hosting all manner of horrors. Nothing.
“I made tea,” the man offered, gesturing with his cup-holding hand back to the cabin. “Blackgar and I should speak.”
“And who would I be speaking to?” I called out at last, finally stepping off the Bird. I had not noticed until then, but Lucene had stood next to me during my petrification. She joined me as I exited the Bird. I so often noticed her presence, so often found her comforting. But even she was unable, then, to sway me from my stunned fears prior.
“I am Absalom. Once a Lord Inquisitor. Now…I suspect your ordos do not regard me as such,” the man answered. “Come inside. I imagine you have questions.”
“Aplenty,” I growled. “Lucene, and only Lucene. Everyone else, keep watch out here. I don’t like this.”
“What’s not to like?” Absalom shrugged. “Shame, they’ll not have tea. I’ve had a few years to get the taste right,” he added, chuckling to himself. He then looked across the horizon, where far in the distance, lance batteries began pummeling a large but nondescript structure out of existence. “Children’s toys, those. Back in the day, when we wanted something killed, we threw a moon at it. We broke worlds. Now you lot put on a light show and call it a day. Pity.” He then turned back to me, as I neared him. Lucene held my flank. “I do not imagine I have a chair that can hold a Sister’s power armor,” he admitted, a touch of bewilderment in his voice. “Especially not so for one her size.”
“I’m quite comfortable standing,” Lucene replied.
“As am I,” I agreed.
“Suit yourselves,” he shrugged again. “Come on in. Much to discuss.”
Absalom’s cabin was just that, a cabin, which infuriated me with its banal simplicity. Indeed, no great and terrible heresy could be found along its walls, no villainous displays or trophies of the loyal were installed here. It was a home, for a single man, and nothing more. He led us to a kitchen/dining room, where he took a seat at a wooden table atop a wooden stool. He kicked another such stool over to me, but I declined it for the time being. As mentioned, he had nowhere for Lucene to sit, and in fact she herself was too tall for many of his doorways—a violation of Imperial code, as doors were meant to allow Astartes through. Hardly an act of terror as befit the Phaenonites, but a criminal violation all the same. Regardless, Lucene made do, squeezing herself under door frames and making the log floor creak and crack as she moved about.
“So, where do we begin, you and I?” Absalom asked me after taking his seat. “Oh, sorry, right, tea. Kettle should still be hot.”
“I’m not thirsty,” I declined.
“I insist.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“It’s not poisoned, Blackgar!” Absalom laughed.
“That I’m less sure of.”
“If you could find an ounce of poison in this house, I’d let you feed it to me now,” Absalom scoffed. “Bah, your kind is ever so zealous in your paranoia. You’ll tire of it eventually. One cannot make enemies of all creation for eternity.”
“Is that what you did? Get tired?” I suggested.
Absalom took a sip of his tea and looked ahead, toward me but not at me, with a hint of whimsy. “Perhaps. It was so long ago, now, so very long ago. Yes, I suppose I did grow tired of inflicting pain and suffering upon those barely deserving—if at all. Forgive me, Blackgar, I have a quick question of my own, just to get the context straight between us. Have you been to Amnes Minoris?”
“So you don’t know? You weren’t warned I was coming?” I asked in reply.
“That’s a yes, then. I assume you know the truth of that world, then, of its inhabitants?”
“That they’re undying?”
“Oh, they die like everyone else. But yes, I get your meaning. Yes. I ask because I feel it’s worth clarifying now that I, unlike them, don’t. Or, rather, haven’t.”
“Haven’t what?”
“Died.”
“Me neither.”
“Ha! But you will. Or, would have, if not for today. But that brings me nearer to my point, to our victory against you,” Absalom smirked. “Immortality is…a matter of opinion. And opinions differ.”
“Thankfully there’s only One that matters,” I noted, to which Lucene nodded.
“Ha! Funny,” Absalom clapped his hands, then took another sip of his tea. “There are those who believe, perhaps like yourself, that with enough faith you will live eternal in the afterlife, hm? Then there are those like Silverman who believe immortality means not letting death get in the way of life. And then there’s us.”
“Us?”
“You really should be sitting, Blackgar,” Absalom chuckled, grin widening. “I believe immortality means never giving in to death in the first place, to live in perpetuity. I was there, you see, during the Schism on Phaenon Prime. Well, during the second one, when we threw a moon at the world and blew it asunder. I was there.”
“That was twenty-five hundred years ago,” I objected.
“Yeah, you’re catching on,” Absalom agreed. “Perpetuity. Of course, there are those more natural at this than what I accomplished. And ours is a flawed perpetuity.”
“Ours?”
Absalom’s grin widened as much as it possibly could have, then. “Welcome to heresy, my friend. You made pilgrimage to the Eternal Shroud, didn’t you? That shapeshifting pocket in the Warp of ours? How did it feel, reconnecting with your youth?”
“What did you do?” I seethed, burying an augmetic fist into his table, sending wood splinters everywhere.
“What do you think I did?” Absalom laughed. “You’re one of us now. Only, it’s important you understand the nuance. You and I can die, permanently. But we won’t if not given aid in that regard. You’ll live forever, Callant Blackgar, until your mind stops ticking on the wrong side of a gun. This, in contrast to Silverman’s approach, which was to live forever in the form of countless lives. But I was none too keen on dying. Our two approaches to immortality are incompatible, which I think will sting for you the most. If and when you die, that’s it for your soul. It will not go to the Warp. In some ways that’s a good thing, as the things that live there won’t have you. But per your faith, there is no longer a seat for you at your God’s table. You have made your pilgrimage to the damnation of my design, rather than the salvation of your beloved Throne,” he explained, and broke into laughter again.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
I had a thousand reasons to slay the bastard then and there, and I very well may have, if not for the touch of a familiar hand clad in black power armor. I looked to Lucene, whose Sabbat Helm stared back at me, emotionless, but I felt the worry and sorrow ebb off her form all the same. With a deep breath and a million questions, I turned back to Absalom, who was still laughing. “Why?”
“I had wondered if that would be your first question. That or if it will only affect you.”
“Will it?”
“No. If you set foot in there for, say, half an hour, you’re immortal now. Indiscriminately. I tracked your team to be there for an hour plus. The whole lot of you are timeless, now. Congratulations,” Absalom cackled. “As to why, two reasons. One, to break you. Not to kill you, killing you is a cheaper and easier task—albeit one Silverman very much wished to accomplish and obviously has failed at all the same; though it seems he has managed to take an arm and an eye, hm? But to break you, ah! That is how heresy begins. It starts not in a man of wholesome faith but in a broken whelp who craves immediate solutions to his problems, whose faith is insufficient in the moment. I wonder what your solution will be to the problem of your existence—and, surely, what will your ordos think?” he explained, and broke into laughter again, this time compelled to slap one of his knees.
“And your second reason?” I growled, blood still boiling and fists still clenched, one atop and one inside his table.
“I want you to kill someone. And you’ll need to be more capable than a frail old man for the task,” he answered, at last simmering down from his laughter.
“Your enemies are not mine,” I hissed.
“Oh, but they are, Callant Blackgar,” he grinned, though kept his cool, and leaned in closer to me. “In fact, you have already made a vow to slay this foe, as I understand it,” he whispered. Then he shot to his feet, patrolling around his kitchen. “Two Phaenonites, a Heretek, and a Rogue Trader walk into a bar and decide to upend known reality. How? Hm? They put a plan together, they think it’ll work, but what are the odds that they could possibly have found each other and worked so congruently, in a universe as large as ours?”
“The Fifth,” I nodded, understanding. Absalom nodded in confirmation. “You know who they are?”
“Who, or what?” he suggested.
“Both?”
“Unfortunately, I know not what, though I can guess. I have heard the name. Ouranos,” Absalom answered, and at that, any rage that once burned hot through my veins instead froze up into cold terror as word of my recent vision reared its ugly head in conscious life. “Ah, I see you’ve heard the name too.”
“Who is it?” I asked, voice faded to a cool echo of my former fury.
“That hints toward the What of his identity, to which I can only guess,” Absalom sighed. “A savant, by my wagers.”
“A savant?” I repeated.
Absalom nodded, and then, in a sudden fit of rage, shouted, “He used us! Us! An underground empire of Inquisitors that has spanned three Sectors! No mere man could accomplish that,” he shook his head, voice lowering down to its former volume. “The scale of manipulation Ouranos has managed is too vast for the mind of one such as you or me. And now he moves those Iron Idiots into conflict with Ixaniad, as I’m sure you know. What sort of man could direct traitor Astartes if not a savant? No, I am sure of this much, at least. Beyond that, I believe only that he is a daemon, for there is no other word that better describes him. And I do not mean a daemon the likes of which Malleus hunts, I mean it as an adjective, a descriptor. Ouranos is cruel, vile, abject filth that all in the galaxy would be better off without. Twenty-five hundred years, Blackgar, I have seen and culled villains I could understand. But he, the cowardly puppet master, I have neither seen nor understood. I have seen light flicker off the strings affixed to my organization’s visage, but I have not seen the hand that holds them. He holds the Iron Warriors. And now, it seems, he holds your Inquisition, as he has affixed strings to you.”
“I have made my own choices to get here, heretic,” I shook my head.
“You think so? Do you? You called him the Fifth in relation to Hestia Majoris, but I think he’s the Sixth. You’re the Fifth. You were, what, attracted to the missing tithes? An easy enough clue to disseminate the way of an Inquisitor looking to lay low. And Thantalus, before that—why, perhaps his strings were on your hands and feet even then,” Absalom replied, now also shaking his head in dismissal of my earlier objection.
“I am no Fifth to what went on in Abseradon. I ended it, destroyed it,” I reminded him.
“Ah, Blackgar, but that is what went on in Abseradon. And that is what Ouranos does, the cruel bastard. He moves opposing forces into conflict with each other and gets them to kill themselves against their foes. Self-obliteration. That is the name of this coward’s game. He moved a capable Inquisitor against the Hestian operation, and in destroying those pawns, you played his game. Now you’ve destroyed us, too, I wager. More pieces culled from the board of Ouranos’s machinations. The Iron Warriors will be next. Either you’ll kill them off or they’ll kill you off. Either way, Ouranos gets what he wants. Callant Blackgar, I have given you my curse of eternal life so you can kill this frigging bastard as I could not. I do not know how you’re meant to, for believe me I have, with my vast resources, tried. But as Silverman could not end you, I could not end Ouranos, not in twenty-five centuries. Please, I would beg of you, kill him,” Absalom insisted.
I sighed, then smiled, amused. He frowned, not understanding what amused me so. “So often is our Imperium at war with itself. Internal strife is perhaps our greatest failing, what has most kept us back from ending heresy altogether. Funny to see, then, that there is hatred between heretics too. I will kill Ouranos or die trying. But certainly not because you asked me to.”
“I care not for your motives, Blackgar. The ends will justify the means. That Ouranos dies is the only thing of import to me,” Absalom admitted, and at last took another seat atop his stool. “I confess, I have, in part, lied. By omission,” he said, reaching into one of his pockets and pulling out a vial of blue liquid, about as viscous as the Pariah extract, but inherently much more vibrant in hue. “There is more of this under the counter over there. You do not need to be immortal. This will cure you. It won’t kill you now, but it will later—it will re-tether you to time and your flesh will live out your paused years in an instant. I offer it to you and yours as incentive, as a show of goodwill. I did not originally choose immortality to kill Ouranos, but I am glad my temporal pause has allowed me to find one such as yourself who may be up to the task. But here, at the end—and I assume it is an end, and that you are not leaving this cabin while I yet live—I am tired, again. Tired of the tricks. If you believe that your faith will guide you to your God’s table after life, I have no reason to try to convince you otherwise,” he explained, setting the vial onto the table. “You may think it poison, or some other more destructive thing. You are, as ever, paranoid. But have your Techsorcist—I saw him out there—have him look it over, with the knowledge of your newfound timelessness. Then, when he identifies that this does as I describe, disseminate it amongst your ranks and return to normalcy. Or…,” he started, but drawled his further explanation out.
“Or live and fight until Ouranos is found and killed,” I finished for him. He nodded.
“Or that, yes. I cannot know the years you would need for such a task. But I do know, as I said, the youthful strength you would need. Better that time not stand in your way, in my opinion. So, the choice is yours: die as faithful servants to your Throne, or live to kill the greatest heretic I have ever known, across my many, many years. Choices…hm. Ouranos uses choice, or the illusion thereof, as a psychological weapon. Be ready for that.”
“What of the four colors?” I asked him, referring to the four lights Ouranos had walked me past in my vision.
Absalom frowned and shook his head. “I do not know of what you speak. What colors?”
“Red, purple, green, blue—Ouranos showed me these in a vision,” I explained. “He spoke of them as though they were identities.”
Absalom shook his head again. “I do not know. Those colors are often associated with the daemonic. I myself was of Hereticus, like you. Perhaps you should take the question to our ilk in Malleus,” he suggested, then chuckled. “That is, of course, you find yourself on speaking terms with the ordos after what I’ve changed in you.”
“Silverman,” I muttered to myself, then, but had not formulated the question.
“What about him?”
“Many questions. How old is he?”
“He and his project on Amnes Minoris—well, actually, it was Heirene’s project, Silverman was just on board with it—they aren’t too old. Eight centuries, maybe?”
“Silverman had taken an interest in the Astartes program,” I suggested, to which Absalom nodded knowingly.
“With Gale Ryke, yes,” Absalom added.
“Was that intended to approximate your approach to immortality, while maintaining their own?” I asked.
“I believe so, yes. At least, to some extent. My approach was intended to be shared, but I do not imagine Silverman felt that way,” he began.
“Silverman was making his Astartes for thousands, perhaps more,” I noted.
“Yes, as an army to retake the skies, as he always put it. But the problem of his rudimentary Astartes program—not unlike the issue with the Imperium’s real Astartes program—is that it is controlled and managed by a few. That gives those few a real power over those that seek such lasting life. The plan, of course, was to die a mortal and be reborn an Astartes, then capable of limitless rebirths. But Silverman could just as easily bait the unworthy into dying as mortals and then never resurrecting. The truly dead would not complain much, after all. Admittedly, I am glad you stopped his plans in Abseradon. While such an army may have been able to best Ouranos, we would have traded one monster for another,” Absalom mused. “I’ve never particularly liked Silverman or his aspirations, if you couldn’t tell,” he added in a mutter.
“It’s begun to come across,” I grinned, sharing his distaste. “If Amnes Minoris is destroyed, what will come of them?”
“I suspect they will die at last. The world is a tethering point for the soul—spacially, anyways, whereas I temporally untethered yours—and when that point is gone, their next deaths will be final. See it’s not really Perpetualism, as has occasionally occurred within our Imperium’s history, but rather a crude attempt at emulating it. We have not perfected the process, neither those on Amnes nor us on Arctoros,” he explained.
“Nor will you,” I added. “What about Calixis?”
“What about it?”
“I’ve already gathered you’re getting your troops and resources from there, from the Severan Dominate,” I explained.
“Ah. Yes. We are a Phaenonite Cell. We’re not the only one. Most of our peers are in Calixis, they set that communication up with the Dominate but have been willing to share some of their forces with those of us elsewhere. You could pursue them in Calixis, if you found authorization. Their goals are more destructive as opposed to ours which tend toward the creation of life. I’d rather you chase after Ouranos, though, wherever he may be,” Absalom reminded me. “Plus I expect you’ll have a war on your hands soon enough here in Ixaniad.”
“Right. Final question,” I started, but he asked it for me.
“Any last words?” he guessed, smiling, as I drew and aimed my Boltpistol toward him.
“Well?”
“It was a life well lived. Will you be able to say the same?”
“Lord Inquisitor Absalom, formerly of Ordo Hereticus, you are Excommunicate Traitoris, and I declare thee Extremis Diabolus. If you still have a soul after all these years, may the God-Emperor of the Imperium of Mankind have mercy on it.”