Brylla looked particularly dirty today, Orros thought. The wolf had been roaming, and noone quite knew where he’d been for the last few days. Some had said he’d descended to the lower floors, becoming the feral beast he was meant to be.
Orros had not known what he believed. It was clear his brother was gifted, and at the attention of fate and the gods that made it. Would they just have let him roam free?
A passing glance confirmed what he’d assumed in the half-light. Brylla’s burn scars had healed. They would stay, forever a marking, but they had healed nonetheless. A slight shiver went down his spine. He didn’t understand how Brylla could reject such a gift.
They were in the bowels of the Eternal Usurper, far beyond the trial pit, near the Sanctum of their priest. It was a common space, where mortal slaves milled about, and the Brethren spent their time talking and repairing their arms and weapons. It was also where squads were assembled if there was need. Today there was a need. There was talk that Pelagys was hiding somewhere, secluded from his brothers. There was hope for another welcome face, then. He did not dread new comrades, but he knew there would be little companionship between the newly proven and the slowly ground down.
The squads gathered, roused by the local forgemaster, Oltmin, who served as a mouthpiece of the Warsmith’s while aboard the Eternal Usurper. He presided over four squads of varying size, all only related by their use of the same space. Oltmin himself was their best artificer, and tended a small arsenal of machinery. And it was he that coordinated the squads as he saw fit.
Orros recalled the forgemaster's harsh lessons when he had been but a mortal boy.
Harsh but fair, he’d thought, knowing he was giving Oltmin far more credit than was due.
The forgemaster was a cruel bastard, in truth, but his lessons had been most useful.
“Listen up. The new meat has gone through its combat tests, and three are too little to form a squad. Karr. You get these two.” Oltmin rattled away, unchallengeable and without any pretence of care. The thickset master then focused on Orros and Brylla.
“Where’s the third of your meagre pack. I was told he was alive.”
Orros looked to Brylla, but the wolf was too focussed on staring into a nearby forgefire to even notice he was being addressed.
“Pelagys disappeared without a trace, forgemaster.” Orros answered truthfully, feeling a bit of bile on his tongue. Blood, had Oltmin gotten fat?
The forgemaster only shrugged at that, piggish, sunken eyes darting back over the others.
“There also is word from the Crucible. The Iron Mask has let show that he is in need of new men.”
His eyes wandered over the gathered warriors, smiling snidely as he noticed the glint of ambition here and there. Karr, the great Ironfoot, bore the twisted grin of a shark on his mangled features. Orros’ guts churned at the sight. His new commander already showed...promise.
The forgemaster went over other routine announcements, distributing the best of his recent work to the best warriors, announcing recent deaths and, most importantly, what repairs needed to be done on their gear. Orros’ hand rested on his own boltgun for a moment, then. Some of the parts were definitely showing their age. Had Myrk’s arms already been distributed?
***
The Crucible felt strangely empty today. The cause was very apparent. Varx had eschewed his terminator plate, instead opting to attend clad only in robes. Not even the Warsmith could hide his surprise, his usually so unreadable and cold mind betraying irritation and calculated mistrust.
He allowed himself a smile, looking over at Derrus. The veritable storm of malignancies around the dark Apostle was not as disturbing as usual, he found. Indeed, he felt considerably less impressed.
Then, he turned finally toward the reason for his being here: the fabled map Kethral had procured from the Fallen Aphrael.
At a first glance the piece of rolled up vellum seemed suspiciously insignificant, as if to hide its obvious importance.
With firm hands he rolled the thing out, immediately feeling the rush of a vision coming on.
It was more like an afterimage, only that he could, for lack of a better word, taste a glimpse of the inherent qualities of the map as well. His eyes widened. This was no mere map, not a physical representation of a location.
This was a firm, material, manifest form of the documentation of a mind, a frozen history, a static frame from the third eye of an entity meant to stare into madness itself and chart a course, to determine the physicality of the unreal hellscape of the warp.
Varx couldn’t help but admire what had been done here, undoubtedly torn from the essence of whatever daemon had consumed the soul of the Navigator who’s impressions were laid bare here.
In the real world it was an intricate web of runes and sigils, some old, some debatably new, some according to known psychic standards, others seemingly placed haphazardly.
The Sorcerer stretched out his senses toward Derrus, noting with much pleasure that the priest too seemed puzzled.
“That...is no ordinary map.” Derrus concluded, coaxing a snort of derision from the Warsmith.
“Can you read it?” Kethral demanded to know, cold flame in the amber of his eyes.
Varx nodded, smiling surely.
***
It wasn’t silent. The Crucible never was, partly because of the Eternal Usurper’s inherent noise and thrum, but also because it was home to some of the workshops and forges of the Molten Brethren. While by no means self-sufficient, they had ensured in the past that they wouldn’t run out of vehicles or warmachines, and that their best works were kept in shape.
Still, Rothus thought, there was an unusual tension in the air now, as neither he nor the Warsmith dared speak a word.
The brooch lay on the table, the grim features reflecting the orange, dingy light.
“Never thought I’d see that thing again.” Holreck finally broke the growing stillness. Rothus could only nod in agreement. This was no mere bauble; it had been a gift once, from Primarch to Primarch.
“I’d thought it was lost on that nightmare of a world.” the Warsmith finally continued, pondering, caught between open curiosity and stern repulsion. Rothus on his part couldn’t deny that he felt...touched, somehow.
“Once we would have killed each other for the chance to get this close to the Primarch.” he mused.
The Warsmith’s scowl told him he’d hit a nerve.
“Those days are long gone now, brother.” Kethral turned to leave, the weak light casting stark shadow on his scarred features. “Perturabo sits on Medrengard now, culling what’s left of the Legion.” The Warsmith left the council room. “Not that he treated us any better before.”
Rothus picked up the brooch with both hands, before nestling it in the bow of his arm. Holreck stalked away through an opening doorway, leading into a forge. Rothus followed him into the choking heat, onto a gangway above the smelting pots and hydraulic hammers.
They passed above the metallic form of some new warmachine in silence, not taking much note of the servitors and forgemasters below them.
“Why the hunt for these parts, Lord?” he finally asked the question noone else could.
“Do you really want to rouse him? A single dreadnought to take a world?”
Holreck did not even regard him, chuckling in a rather unsettling but familiar way.
“No. The bumbling fool had his chance. In fact, I could swear I had the disposal of his body arranged long ago.”
So Roinos too was gone. This was not the first time a brother interred in a sarcophagus had simply been denied his chance at redemption. He glanced down at the iron skull of the brooch, then back up at Holreck again. Rothus had never been comfortable with interment, but this still felt wrong.
“I am reconstructing the Dreadnought chassis, that much is true, but no. Noone is coming back.”
They went on through the rattle and clamour of the forge, before coming to another closed off section, where auxiliary generators hummed and thrummed.
“You know as well as I what Derrus is doing. He spreads the word of his daemon-gods. He is rust.”
The Warsmith spoke again, with unprecedented bile in his tone.
“I will not let some freak accident topple my...our Legacy into the claws of one of his puppets.”
The swordsman came to a halt. Slowly the Warsmith’s intentions dawned on him.
“You want to ensure your survival.” he probed.
A casual shoulder glance of the Warsmith’s confirmed his suspicions.
“I cannot allow Derrus to ever achieve absolute power. I will not let him squander what I’ve preserved! If it weren’t for his uses I would have disposed of him long ago, him and his puppets.”
Kethral came to a halt, turning to regard his champion with cruel, merciless eyes.
“You are my brothers. You followed me from Medrengard when our broken father called the great culling. We have remained pure, away from the sullied ways of the daemon, from the poison of the warp!” His face contorted into a mask of hatred. “I will not let him corrupt all we are. Even if it costs all of our lives.”
Rothus saw Holreck Kethral then, but he also saw something more. A shade of a scorned father.
***
Brylla snarled at his younger brother.
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“If you seriously think that Karr will view us as anything beyond meat then you’re blinder than I thought.”
Orros did not bother looking up, instead focussed on meticulously scrubbing the grime from his new bolter’s casing.
“As said, we don’t have a choice either way.”
They’d been arguing since their return to their quarters, each on his side of the room. Orros was strangely focussed ever since the announcement earlier. A sign of some expectation, maybe. Brylla didn’t quite see any marked good to be expected from this. He’d been delivered to his mortal enemy.
“Why do you think this is some great conspiracy against you, brother. You have received great blessings, and now you are placed under Karr, who, as you should know, stands good chances of getting you right where you want to be, in the thick of the fight.”
There was a tone there that set Brylla’s senses on edge. It reminded him of someone.
“Still you insist that this is all a great mistake, meant to drive you to damnation, as if that meant anything to any of us.”
Finally the younger marine looked up, genial, brown eyes showing a spark of exhuasted concern and amusement.
It brought his blood up. Everything in Brylla demanded to tear the cur’s head off. Only one thing kept him from giving in to his urges. A damnable sensation of truth.
He rose from his bed, nostrils flaring.
Orros seemed inclined to rise too, but a damning stare from Brylla seemed to convince him that he shouldn’t consider stopping him.
“Where are you going?”
“To the man that set me up all along. I have questions, and I’ll make that damn daemon-priest answer.”
***
Varx handled the map with care, leading his hand slowly along its edges, sensing reflections of places and hands it had gone through.
This was new. Ever since his encounter with the warp’s tainting touch his ability to perceive the world through his mind’s eye had grown acutely. The map was easy enough to read now, he had his course. What now interested him most was to decipher the exact way it had been created. or at least the identity of its maker. The most fascinating spoor of existential residue must’ve been that of Aphrael, a sensation of hidden rot, like a fruit, infested with worms that had already glutted themselves on its insides.
Whoever the Fallen Angel had once been, his time in the service of the Dark Gods had clearly left nothing of him apart from a body, filled with memories of a thing it had once been.
This idea gave Varx pause, his eyes opened, wandering over to his painting.
How many of his own memories were trustworthy?
The woman from his dreams, his sister, or some part of his subconscious that took her guise. How real was all of it?
The emptiness of the rotten apple.
Never before had the sorcerer felt so...conflicted.
His thoughts wandered over his long life, searching for discrepancies, finding many, many holes to poke into his own story with cold methodic cruelty. It hurt some part of him. He felt violated.
He thought back to the Dark Angels’ vessel, his brush with mad death.
Life had been long, but now, in retrospect, his near-death-experience made him question if any of it had been worth it.
He’d lived an austere life, even before turning to his own, heretical studies, that would see him hounded by his brothers, cast into the arms of the Warsmith and his cold humours.
The hours went by. He tried to recall his proudest moments, the times when he truly had felt satisfied.
Despite knowing he was growing more attuned to the stuff of madness every day, despite knowing that once this alone would have sated all his appetite in life, Varx now felt incredibly alone, incredibly deprived, yearning for the humanity that had been taken from him so long ago.
***
The so-called Sanctum of the Molten Brethren was everything Brylla had expected from Derrus. A chapel to the Emperor, twisted to the shaman’s dark purposes,the golden aquila replaced with the eight-pointed star of the Daemon-things the priest worshipped.
Brylla forced the great gate open, casting the ship’s dingy light unto the abandoned pews. Something squirmed in the dark, Brylla’s eyes made out a wretched shape hanging from a wall.
Behind the rust-coloured altar stood the figure of the one he sought.
“You are much like your father, Brylla, of the Space Wolves.” the priest’s velvety voice mused.
“The great Leman Russ too never bothered with announcing his visits.”
Brylla spat a gobbet of acidic phlegm, the thing sizzled through the cold stone floor.
“You will be silent now, witch.”
He stalked forward, through the rows of pews to either side. There was an unnatural chill about the place, creeping through the furs Brylla had clad himself in since losing his armour. His Fenrisian blood riled against the cold as he approached the altar, Derrus standing there, clad in his warplate, patrician’s features unmoved. He decided then that answers didn’t matter.
“You’ve made me your little test-subject, witch-priest. Twisted my flesh under the guise of a blessing, denied me a good death…” he was almost upon the priest now, rounding on the altar, a predator ready to strike; “...I don’t know why you put me with Karr now, but I won’t need to once I've strangled the evil from your thro-”
Before Brylla could enact his plan of falling upon the priest he was hurled aside by a shape that moved too quickly for him to react. His body was carried through the air before crashing into the old stone wall, driving the air from his lungs.
The warrior sucked in oxygen and jumped to his feet, turning with a left-handed swing to ward off his attacker, but a brutal vice-grip around his throat suddenly lifted his superhuman form, pinning him to the wall.
Finally he got a good view of his attacker. It was everything he had ever learned to loathe.
The grip around his throat belonged to a choking, great claw, gnarled hide fluidly mixing with chitin or some other, horn-like substance. The arm fused into bend and bloodied plating, the edges, where visible, constantly bled oil and grime, before disappearing under the Mark IV pauldron of a scavenged suit of power armour.
His foe’s head was a hideous thing, with acute, deadly eyes, and the overall shape of a mock-feline skull, membranous ears bent backwards, sharp fangs protruding from an open, snarling jaw.
“I had thought you wouldn’t take Oltmin’s announcement well.” Derrus lectured, heavy footsteps echoing down the nave of this heathen-temple.
Brylla struggled, pulling up his knees and delivering a stout kick at his captor’s chest, perceiving with some satisfaction the squelch and squeak of flesh and metal.
Much to his disappointment, his enemy did not seem to mind. A churning sequence of mechanical clicking brought his attention to the monster’s other arm, a hideous, twisted, melded fusion of a stalker-bolter and an armour-clad arm, cables snaking across both, pulsing like arteries. The cold, steel barrel was pressed against his sternum.
“I had thought that, maybe, seeing a familiar face would calm you down, but it seems you don’t recognise a lost brother.”
What was the madman talking about? He stared with contempt at the beast-head before him, covered in, what seemed to be, scales made from ceramite, running down the bridge of its snout.
A dramatical sigh, and he was down on his feet again, the twisted astartes training its arm-weapon at him, seemingly only too ready to kill at its master’s command.
“You disappoint me, wolf. Your kind are known to recognise the bestial nature of things, yet you so fiercely deny the visceral truths of the world.”
Brylla looked the thing up and down, armour bent into an athletic assassin’s-form, sinew turning to cable and synth-fibre, skin and metal bound together tighter than ever before. Was this one of the possessed monstrosities he had been told about?
He couldn’t imagine any other perversion allowing this degree of deviation.
“Your brothers told me of your spiritual struggle. Both Orros and Pelagys here.”
Pelagys?! Instinctively he sought the thing’s features. A ripple went through them, a wet tearing and popping belied the change he perceived, as the thing slowly, painfully, twisted its way into the form of the lost Molten Brother. Large eyes shrunk back into red, glaring lenses, snarling fangs turned into a vox-grille.
So that was where the squabbling idiot had ended up…
“I do not begrudge you your fury, Brylla. Your line is not known for the use of its wit.”
Derrus now circled on him, features stern, filled with prideful certainty.
“The Gods choose their tools without my guidance. Whatever you thought you could accomplish here, know that it wouldn’t have changed a thing, boy.”
Brylla felt dumb, so very dumb. He’d come without armour or arms, just thinking his bloodlust would see him through.
Derrus’ sure lecture only further entrenched a sense of hopelessness in his twin hearts, those damned things that should’ve ceased their function long ago.
“Their Eye is one you. Even now the pantheon watches you, seeing how you rile against their blessing like you could rid yourself of your flesh. How you thrash and kick like a petulant child.”
He cursed the priest. He cursed these gods, cursed Pelagys and these damnable traitors, above all he cursed himself. He was one of them, it stung him again.
His flesh felt unclean, tainted even more so than before.
Derrus’ cold eyes bored themselves into his skull, transfixing his gaze. A wicked smile played along thin lips.
“They gave you a chance, and so shall I, Brylla, of the VIth Legion.”
The words burned holes into his soul, Derrus’ mercy was the cruellest attack. His continued existence seemed like the greatest punishment ever met out to him.
“Go, child. Go, and see that you get yourself a suit of armour.
It would be a shame if your next attempt to understand the world ended so pitifully as this one.”
Brylla stood still as a statue, everything within him rebelled against obeying. After a long while, against his will, he turned back toward the open gate, slowly trotting away, like a scolded choir-boy.
“Remember, wolf. You cannot lose them now. They never give up what they claim once.”