The Divine Rite: A Warhammer 40,000 Fanfiction

Part 13

And so I did. I walked to the north pillar, and back to the rock, repeating my lengthy descent. This time I stepped out onto a sandy beach of nothing but bone. Pieces of skull, lengths of femur, entire ribs, strewn among scatterings of broken fragments, all of which nestled in powdered white grains. A red tide lapped at the morbid beach, and the brass sun overhead burned with a fire I knew was pure emotion. I was no longer in a temple, I was in a vast world of blood and bone, and no matter how far I wandered along that beach, there was nothing else.

And when I turned, and crested the dunes that followed the coastline, I looked down once more upon that sanguine shore, and when I turned to look back, behind me were the dunes. I wandered there, and as I bathed in the furnace heat of that brass star, my blood slowly came to a boil. It was not sudden fury, or a burst of anger, it was simmering hatred. The kind that built up over years, decades, and only relented when a life was taken, when blood was shed.

It was then that I found the sword wrought of bronze sticking up from the sternum of a skeleton. I drew it, my teeth bared, and the first of my foes rose up before me.

The waves lapped, and left behind strands of muscle clinging to one of the dead. Again they came, and now the body possessed vestigial organs. Each time the tide came, it left more and more behind, until at last I saw who it was.

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High Priest Horvald.

He who had doubted me. He who had encouraged the most uncouth of rumors to spread. He’d held the clergy of my tribe in a vice, one that did not permit women to flourish. It had been my desire to rise, to be among the chosen of the Emperor, that had set him against me. It had been the longest battle of my life to be accepted, and his fellows only relented upon his own death.

Here, I was being given a gift.

I cannot recall every blow, or every wound I inflicted. I only remember the ruining of flesh, the shredding of organs. I recall how chipped and dented my sword was by the time he lay in pieces. And once he lay dead, my heart was light with the relief of finally slaying my hated foe.

Except that I hadn’t.

As the waves erased his corpse, a new one began to form. It was how this place worked. It was pure, unrestrained, catharsis. Every twinge of anger, all the hatred, each frustration, all of it could be exercised, and exorcised, here. But there were more. So many more. And this time it was not with reluctance, but with urgency, that I quite the shrine.

The Chapel of Sundered Chains.

My breath came in gasps as I sprang up those stairs, the deep seated fury fading from my heart. The motes were nothing more than blurs, tears streaming from my eyes. It had been release, more pure and relieving than anything I’d ever experienced. But in that shrine lay knowledge, which was true of them all. But there lay a truth that I was warned away from. One I was not yet ready for. The weight of that warning alone was crushing.