The Horus Heresy: Massacre
By Aaron Dembski-Bowden

I

‘We have been summoned,’ said Malcharion. ‘Not the Army detachments with us. Not the auxilia. Not the Mechanicum. We alone.’ 
The fleetmaster had opened the council with those words, knowing there would be many warriors who wished to reply to them. ‘The highest authority demands this of us,’ he continued.
‘The Emperor?’ called one of his warriors, out of turn. As intended, the question was met with muted grunts of amusement from the ranks.
‘The highest authority that we recognise,’ Captain Malcharion amended, unsmiling. He was monumentally stern, and not a man to show his amusement even on those rare occasions he actually felt it.
Malcharion’s war councils were informal gatherings, though not without certain protocols. Much to the irritation of his subordinate officers, the Tenth Captain of the VIII Legion saw fit to change those protocols without a moment’s notice, appropriating traditions of etiquette from other cultures, and even other Legions, seemingly on random impulse.
He claimed it encouraged his kindred to consider new perspectives in the planning and prosecution of warfare. Many of his brethren simply believed he did it out of perverse eclecticism.
His current preference was a distorted mimicry of the Luna Wolves’ custom of warriors placing tokens and mementos in the centre to indicate that they wished to speak before their brethren. Aboard the Vengeful Spirit, it was common for Luna Wolf officers to place their weapons or helms upon the central table and wait to be granted permission to speak. Here, in the war councils of the VIII Legion aboard the Covenant of Blood, Malcharion had decreed that his officers could only use tokens taken from the bodies of fallen foes.
Almost fifty officers were present – shipmasters, centurions, champions, all accompanied by their oathbound honour guards and personal attendants, bringing the total close to two hundred warriors standing beneath the banners of four battle companies.
Every Night Lord present was entitled to speak no matter his rank, which meant that skulls – used as tokens – were in plentiful supply. The oversized, elongated skulls of dead aliens were piled upon the table, each one scratched or painted with the curved runic lettering of the mellifluous Nostraman language. Here and there among the tokens of skinless bone lay exotic weapons and armour fragments of fallen human cultures, from kingdoms either brought to compliance by the VIII Legion, or rendered extinct by it.
Talos looked over the mournful mess taking up most of the central table in disorganised heaps. Whatever order prevailed when the Luna Wolves practised this tradition was absent in the Night Lords’ incarnation. Without a Space Marine’s eidetic memory, recalling which warrior had placed which relic would have been impossible.
The young apothecary carried his helm beneath one arm, breathing in the warm, stale air that barely circulated through the cavernous chamber. A sweet reek nagged at his senses, something not far from spoiled food and a strangely musky spice. He found it cloying rather than unpleasant; one didn’t join the Night Lords Legion to fight their wars and train aboard their crypt-ships only to balk at the stench of decaying flesh.
Talos spared a brief glance for the hundreds of corpses hanging from the ceiling on industrial chains. Most were human or eldar, their armour cracked by bolts and rent by blades, many of them now little more than sinewy skeletons in broken carapace plate. Several were strung up by their wrists and necks; others by their ankles with their dead hands hanging down towards the gathered officers in beseeching silence. Many of the bodies were wrapped so utterly in binding chains that they hung as though cocooned by the hungry whims of some impossible metallic arachnid.
The apothecary returned his dark gaze to the briefing. A hololith of the Night Lords armada dominated the air above the relic-strewn table, showing the fifteen vessels of varying classes that escorted the Covenant of Blood. Talos watched the warship, his home since leaving Nostramo so many years before, rendered in blue light and flickering as it sailed in formation. The lesser cruisers and escort frigates turned in a slow perimeter dance around their flagship, while the other three Night Lord warships kept close to the Covenant at the armada’s heart.
Talos had watched his home world die from the Covenant’s command deck.
He’d stood there with his closest brothers over two decades ago as the VIII Legion poured fire upon their own birth-world and pulled it apart with the anger of ten thousand guns.
It had been the last great gathering of the Night Lords. A bittersweet fact, at best.
Of all the eighteen Legions, few avoided their own brothers’ company with the tactful frequency of the VIII. It was said by many Imperial commanders that they didn’t work well with others, but the truth was a little more amusingly bleak.
The Night Lords scarcely worked well with each other.
Apothecary Talos blinked once, inhumanly languid, and turned iris-less eyes upon the figures around the table. Officers from all four companies comprising the 2,901st Expeditionary Fleet had been summoned to the emergency council. The gathering was limited to the warriors of the Legion. Their Imperial Army counterparts and the auxilia officers that had served faithfully – if uncomfortably – at their sides for the last several campaigns remained aboard their own vessels.
Beyond the ever-present thrum of so many suits of active power armour, the gathered warriors were silent and voiceless. No murmurs or whispers passed their lips. They waited, unnaturally quiet, not through discipline but through cold expectation.
Something was wrong. All of them felt it.
Chained skulls rattled against Malcharion’s war plate as the fleet lord keyed a command into the central table’s hololithic projectors. The fleet display sparked out of existence and another image crackled into audio-visual resolution above the pile of grisly tokens.
First Captain Jago Sevatarion, Praetor Nox of the VIII Legion, stood rendered in jagged light. His crested helm hung at his belt, while his spear, the weapon almost as renowned among the Legions as the warrior himself, rested across one shoulder. Two of his Atramentar warriors flanked him as motionless avatars, their lightning claws silent and still in deactivation. The pale faces of the warriors around Talos looked on, their white skin turned a consumptive blue by the ethereal light.
‘Brothers of the Eighth Legion,’ said the recording of Sevatar, his voice hissing with vox corruption. ‘Wherever you are in this hypocritical empire, whatever campaigns you are prosecuting in its name, our father demands that you join the Nightfall at once.’ 
Talos noted the vital signs of his squad elevating slightly on his narthecium gauntlet as the First Captain spoke once more.
‘The time has come. Make all speed to the Isstvan System.’

II

There was no order to the fleet’s dispersal. The warship Foresworn pulled away first, its engines running hot as it veered out of formation and began to breach the barrier from the material galaxy to the realm beyond the veil.
Alarms and klaxons wailed aboard the decks of those warships still sailing in cohesion, but by the time the perimeter vessels were rolling away from the fleeing Foresworn, it was already too late. The vile machinery at her core sent warp lightning coruscating over the vessel’s metal skin, and the Foresworn ripped into the great hole she’d torn open in reality.
The two closest escort destroyers, each crewed by several thousand humans, were dragged along helplessly in her wake. Great cyclones of ectoplasmic smoke, veined by lighting and seething with shrieking faces, clawed at the labouring, juddering vessels. These tendrils from the outreaching storm pulled them – unprepared and unprotected – into the warp behind the Foresworn.
Talos watched from the Covenant of Blood’s bridge. He leaned on the guardrail that surrounded the elevated central platform, where Malcharion’s command throne oversaw the workings of the whole deck. No expression marked his face as he witnessed the helpless ships tumbling into the warp’s tides, dragged to damnation as their engines failed to pull them free. He thought, briefly, of the thousands of men and women aboard the vessels, filling the corridors with screams as the boiling acid of unreality flooded through the unshielded decks.
A swift death, perhaps, but one that condensed an infinity of agonies into a soul’s last tortured seconds.
The Covenant of Blood began its own manoeuvres. The deck shuddered beneath his boots. Servitors locked into their stations on mono-programmed instinct, while the crew braced for entry into the Sea of Souls.
Calls for confirmation and explanation rang out from the rest of the fleet, sounding over the speakers set into the command deck’s ornate gothic ceiling. They fell silent at a curt gesture from Malcharion’s hand, as he sat with statuesque patience in his command throne.
Talos sensed one of his kindred drawing near from the thrum of live armour. He knew who it was without needing to look at the vicinity trackers on his narthecium. Telling squadmates apart by familiarity and instinct became second nature: they walked in different rhythms, their sweat had different tangs, they breathed with subtly different cadences. A Space Marine’s senses bathed his brain in information at all times.
‘Brother,’ said Vandred Anrathi, drawing alongside him.
‘Sergeant,’ Talos replied. He didn’t take his black eyes from the twisting, tumbling warships, now half-swallowed by incorporeal fire.
Sergeant Anrathi was a warrior of sleek, sculpted features, with the filed teeth of the night-worshipping tribes that had lived beyond the limits of Nostramo’s crime-choked cities. Despite his barbaric origins, his composure and self-control were envied by many; few warriors handled a Xiphon Interceptor with such serenity, or could oversee an orbital battle with the same tenacious precision.
He led Captain Malcharion’s command team and advised the commander on matters of void warfare. ‘Quite a sight, is it not?’ he asked.
Talos didn’t reply. There had been a time when the extinction taking place would have threaded strains of bleak fascination through his core. Even in the process of inflicting excruciation upon the Legion’s prisoners, there was a sense of righteousness in his actions. Agony and fear were meted out for a cause, for a purpose. Not by random chance.
But watching his home world burn and break apart had cooled his capacity to feel sympathy. In truth, he neither admired nor mourned the destruction now taking place before him. He felt little, in fact, beyond a vague sense of curiosity at whether the warp would one day vomit the stricken vessels back into real space, and what ruination they might have suffered in its tempestuous grip.
The deck gave a violent shudder at the cry of distant thunder. Broadsides, thought Talos. The Covenant of Blood was firing upon its own fleet.
That, at last, made him draw breath to question what was taking place.
‘Why?’ he asked, turning to meet his sergeant’s eyes.
Anrathi grinned more than most of his brothers. He did so now, bearing his elegantly filed teeth. He didn’t need to ask what the Apothecary was questioning.
‘Because I ordered it, and Captain Malcharion sanctioned it.’
‘Why?’ Talos repeated. Irritated curiosity narrowed his eyes. He wanted answers, not another of Anrathi’s dances around semantics.
‘If we kill them now,’ the sergeant replied, ‘we don’t need to kill them later.’
The medicae wasn’t fooled. Talos snorted, looking back at the wide, vast oculus screens, now showing the burning hulls of their escort vessels, dying in the black void between worlds, crumbling apart as they futilely sought to limp away. The Covenant had been born in the skies above sacred Mars and blessed with a host of weapons capable of levelling cities. The shieldless, trusting warships of its allies had no hope at all.
‘This is spite,’ Talos said at last. An ache was beginning to form at his temples, cobwebbing its unwelcome way through the meat of his mind. ‘We could cripple those we cannot convert. We could simply run, knowing they would never be able to keep pace, even if they learned of our destination. Instead we gun them down out of spite.’
Anrathi’s token shrug could have meant either confirmation or defiance. ‘Do you pity them, Talos?’
Do I? For a moment, for the barest breath, he did wonder. The boy he had been long before he stood in midnight clad with his brethren... that child might have stared in awed horror at what he saw. Before empathy, like sympathy, had eroded from the edges of his soul.
He found himself smiling at the idea.
‘You know I do not,’ said Talos.
‘Then why do I sense disapproval in your tone?’
‘My disgust is philosophical in nature. If we destroy out of spite, not from purpose or necessity, we lend credence to what the other Legions claim we are. Slaughter enough souls without true cause, and we would be the very monsters our cousins believe us to be. A self-fulfilling prophecy.’
Anrathi rested a gauntleted hand on the younger warrior’s shoulder guard. The skulls bound to Talos’ pauldron rattled against the ceramite as if whispering to one another in some muted, bony verse.
‘I can never tell if you are as naive as you present yourself to be, as deluded as you seem, or if you are simply laughing at all of us behind your eyes, Talos.’
The Apothecary looked back to the oculus screen, watching reality being ravaged by the arcane engines at the Covenant’s heart. A wound in space opened up before them, haemorrhaging wrathful antimatter in streaks of fiery lightning, ready to swallow the ship whole.
‘Perhaps the truth is somewhere between all three,’ he said at last. The pressure at his temples flared, a true migraine ache that leaked through his skull like searing fluid, feeling like an ugly premonition.
‘Are you well?’ Anrathi asked, his tone one of cautious surprise.
He knows, Talos thought. He senses it. Something in the Apothecary’s face had betrayed his sudden pain.
‘I have never killed another Legionary,’ said Talos. ‘That is all. I cannot help but wonder what it will feel like.’ 
‘Yet I have seen you kill many, brother. Witnessed the deeds with my own eyes.’
The Apothecary inclined his head, conceding the point. ‘Yes and no. Excruciation and execution are not quite the same as murder.’

III

The gunship Blackened was a crow of dirty blue and filthy bronze. Bodies of aliens and apostates were fused to the hull with half-melted adamantium chains, the corpses burned away to husks of charred bone upon atmospheric entry. Replacing them between missions was as sacred an act as the warriors of First Claw ever performed together. If no foes presented themselves, the Night Lords of Malcharion’s squad weren’t above crucifying members of their own human crew to serve in place.
Talos and his brothers stood in the dark as the gunship rocked around them. Each of them had abandoned the rearward restraint harnesses, choosing to stand in the forward bay for rapid deployment, holding onto the overhead handrails. Only the more cautious among them mag-locked their boots to the shaking deck.
‘Five minutes,’ said Captain Malcharion. ‘Helmets on.’
Talos lifted his helm into place, staining his senses in the red of his tactical display. Target cursors flickered and ammunition counts flashed. Nostraman runes scrolled down his eye lenses as he received his squad’s life signs and datafeeds. His armour’s systems greeted his immersion with squirts of adrenal chem-fire into the implants across his torso and down his spine.
‘First Claw, soul count,’ ordered Malcharion. The captain’s stern tones were raspy with vox breakage.
‘Talos, aye,’ the Apothecary replied at once.
‘Vandred, aye,’ said Sergeant Anrathi a moment later.
‘Ruven, aye.’
‘Xarl, aye.’
‘Cyrion, aye.’ 
‘Sar Zell, aye.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Malcharion voxed over the straining network. ‘Second Claw, soul count.’ 
And on it went as the other claws aboard other landing craft reported in. Talos watched each name-rune in the Tenth Company’s ranks briefly chime across his retinal display as their vital signs uplinked to his narthecium gauntlet.
‘Ninety-two souls,’ Talos voxed at the count’s completion. He turned to the captain at the squad’s lead. Malcharion was performing the final checks upon his double-barrelled bolter. ‘Tenth Company stands ready,’ Talos told him.
‘Viris colratha dath sethicara tesh dasovallian,’ Malcharion murmured in serpentine Nostraman. ‘Solruthis veh za jasz.’
Sons of our Father, stand in midnight clad. We bring the night.
There were no cheers, no solemn oaths, no roars of adrenaline-soaked readiness so common in other Legions. The Night Lords waited in the wake of their traditional words, staring into the darkness through primed target locks – some smiling, some dead-eyed, some silently baring their teeth in cannibal emotions that no mortal could know – all behind skull-marked faceplates.
The gunship heaved, almost dropping from the sky. Talos felt a split-second’s nausea before the gene-forged changes in his inner ears compensated. It triggered the pressure in his skull which had, until then, been dissipating.
‘Atmosphere breached,’ said Malcharion. ‘Three minutes.’
No going back, Talos thought. Though in truth they’d broken past the point of no return months ago. Perhaps even years, when they had burned Nostramo under the Night Haunter’s orders, to quell the poison seeping into the Legion from its own recruitment harvests.
Xarl was at the Apothecary’s side, holding the opposite handrail. His double-handed chainsword was bound across his back, and Talos saw the high crest atop his kinsman’s helmet, tall and proud.
‘Why are you wearing that?’ Talos voxed to his brother across the squad’s intra-link. ‘It will not be a parade ground down there.’
Xarl turned his bat-winged helm towards Talos, red eye lenses gleaming in the transport bay’s gloom. ‘Legion pride,’ came the reply in his husky, deep voice. ‘It feels right, given what we’re about to do.’
Cyrion, standing behind Xarl, had affixed his bolter’s chain-bayonet, and was testing it by live-cycling it with droning whines.
‘That crest is almost as high as Sevatar’s,’ he pointed out. ‘The enemy will mistake you for a hero.’
Xarl grunted. In dismissal or disgust, it added up to the same result. He turned back to face the front.
In the hull-shaking, iron-rattling unquiet that followed, Cyrion looked over his shoulder, where Ruven was distractedly watching lightning ripple across the naked blade of his force sword. It cast watery light across the gunship’s interior, ugly and fluid – it would have been just bright enough to hurt the warriors’ sensitive Nostraman eyes, had any of them stood unhelmed.
‘Will you be keeping to the precepts of the Nikaean Edict down there, brother?’ 
Ruven, Tenth Company’s attached Librarian, gave a charmless sneer. He sheathed the sword, plunging them into true darkness again, and said nothing.
Deprived of his favoured targets for baiting, Cyrion looked across the bay to Talos. Lightning bolts ran down the warrior’s faceplate, painted as elemental tear-trails. They glowed scarlet with the light from his eye lenses.
‘So,’ Cyrion said. ‘How are you?’

IV

True to the Night Lords’ nature, the fight was anything but fair. They’d left the main battle in the Urgall Depression to the forward elements of Warmaster Horus’ forces. Malcharion had other plans, which First Captain Sevatar was only too pleased to grant his blessing.
Malcharion had led Tenth Company at the head of its battalion along the southeast ridge, holding back in favour of bringing their Thunderhawks down among the columns of fleeing, wounded Iron Hands struggling on the way to their own evacuating gunships.
Fresh from orbit, unscathed from the day’s exhausting fighting that continued to leech the strength of the massacred Legions, the Night Lords had torn into their foes with relentless, joyous abandon.
Half a long and bloody day later, the unending demands of butchery were taking their toll even on the sons of Curze. Their gunships still roamed overhead on strafing runs, gutting the loyalists with relentless volleys of heavy bolter fire and driving them forwards onto the waiting blades of the VIII Legion. But those blades moved slower in arms that were growing weary. Though wounded and scattered, the Iron Hands resisted their slaughter with the tenacity that their Nostraman cousins were learning to lament.
Talos wrenched his chainsword clear of another fallen warrior, ignoring the blood spray that flecked his eye lenses from the blade’s revving teeth. His hand was cramp-locked to the grip, his forefinger curled against the trigger and unable to bend away. His muscles were aflame with lactic burns just from the gruelling repetition of raising and swinging his blade, again and again and again.
The Iron Hand on the gore-soaked ground clawed up at the Night Lord, too brutally stubborn even to realise that he was dead. Another swing of the chainblade took off the warrior’s reaching bionic arm at the wrist in a spray of sparks, and on the backswing Talos rammed the whining, protesting weapon down into the Iron Hand’s throat. The chainsword threw several more of its remaining teeth on the way through the fibre bundle musculature of the warrior’s gorget collar. When the Apothecary pulled the blade clear for the final time, he looked with momentary irritation at the paltry few still attached, rotating loosely on the moving saw-blade.
He tried to hurl the weapon aside. It took two attempts to get his hand to unlock, such was the force of his cramp after six hours of face-to-face fighting.
Just as the sword left his straining grip, something crashed into the side of his helmet with a hammerblow of force, snapping his head back and de-tuning his eye lenses to a mess of red static for the duration of two heartbeats. Talos was hauling himself back up from the mud when another blow pounded him beneath the right arm, knifing through his ribs with a spread of sharp, thick, throbbing pressure. He tasted fyceline gunsmoke on his tongue and blood far back in his throat.
Retinal alarms flashed and flickered, demanding his attention, cataloguing his exact wounds, even charting the angles of the incoming enemy fire. Up ahead, a trackless, wrecked Rhino transport grew a flickering outline on his retinal imaging: the source angle of the bolt shells that had knocked him from his feet. For a rare moment his own lifesigns took precedence over those of his brothers. Stings lanced through his bloodstream as his armour dispensed pain nullifiers and battle stimulants.
He blind-fired back through the press of warring bodies, holding his bolter one-handed, heartened by the heavy kick of the gun in his fist. There was no cover to take out here in the naked melee. The closest shell of a tank wreck was thirty metres away.
Two of his brothers were nearby, almost close enough to touch. To his left, Xarl was reaving left and right with his immense chainsword, all sense of skill abandoned as unnecessary, carving through exposed joints in black, war-scarred Mark II plate. Cyrion was down in the mud, kneeling atop a convulsing Iron Hand, sawing his bayonet through the dying warrior’s neck.
Over the vox, Xarl – who usually waged war in cold silence – was emitting a primal grunting, doubtless feeling his own muscles burning after so many hours of battle. Cyrion was alternating between cursing in reptilian Nostraman syllables and occasionally breaking into laughter. He had a way of laughing without any cruelty, sounding somehow good-natured and generous even as he was tearing out a rival’s trachea.
Talos moved ahead, needing to fight his way forward. The ground beneath his boots was a tormented scree of broken ceramite and blood-choked mud; when he wasn’t clambering over the fallen corpses he was sloshing in the gore ejected from their bodies. He paused only to loot the slain for ammunition, firing mercy bolts down at the dying.
+Cease.+ 
The word flared in his mind, more visual than audible, written in flame upon the backs of his eyes. The Apothecary staggered, risking a glance to his side, seeking signs of the Librarian, Ruven. It took several seconds for his vision to clear from the mist of migraine fire.
+Cease executing the fallen. Mercy has no place here.+
Talos gave a bestial grunt at the pressure in his head, a compression at his temples hard enough to make the bones of his skull squeal under the strain. The sourceless pain of the last few weeks sang harsher and harder in the wake of Ruven’s telepathy.
The Librarian stood with Malcharion – As he always does, Talos thought with a sneer, guarded by the company’s best blade – adding his sorcerous lightning to the Tenth Captain’s relentless advance.
‘I see all pretence of the Edict has been cast aside,’ Cyrion murmured across the squad’s internal link.
The Apothecary ignored Cyrion’s baited observation. ‘It is not mercy,’ he voxed to the figure fighting in Malcharion’s shadow. ‘It is prudence. Should we advance too far, and the wounded reform in enough numbers...’
Ahead, Ruven didn’t spare Talos a backward glance. The skin-cloaked Librarian swung his heavy blade, rippling with psychic energy, breeding thunderclaps each time the sword fell upon scarred black ceramite.
+You have your orders, Apothecary.+
Talos was drawing breath to reply when another bolt caught him behind the knee, shattering the machine-muscles of his greave. Two more took him low in the breastplate a half-second apart, breaking the silver Aquila on his chest and sending him to the ground. He crashed into the blood-churned muck, only for one of the downed Iron Hands to ram a broken gladius blade into his wounded side, triggering a fresh panic of irritating retinal alarms.
‘Traitor,’ the wounded Medusan breathed, the word a wet crackle through his shattered vox-grille. Talos stared into the warrior’s scorched, empty eye socket through the Iron Hand’s cleaved faceplate. There was a moment of grotesque fraternal camaraderie, joined as they were by wounds and hatred and the blade gouging through the Night Lord’s fused ribs.
Talos levelled his bolter, pressing it to the warrior’s flame-ruined face.
‘Jasca,’ he replied in a hiss of Nostraman. Yes.
He never pulled the trigger. The Iron Hand’s head rolled clear, raked away by a downswing of Xarl’s immense, howling chainsword.
‘Get up, damn you,’ came his brother’s distracted command.
With a snarl against the adrenal sting of pain nullifiers, Talos offered up his hand. Taking Xarl’s place, Cyrion gripped the Apothecary’s wrist and hauled him to his feet.
The pulsing in Talos’ head was a ragged, merciless crush now. He could barely see past the blurring runes spilling down his data feeds. The surreptitious neural scans he’d performed aboard the Covenant weeks ago had revealed no brain injury, yet the pain came ever more fiercely, day after day.
‘Thank you,’ he said to his brother.
‘How apt,’ said Cyrion.
‘What?’
Talos was still struggling to clear his retinal alarms. First Claw had sustained no fatalities, but the other squads were beginning to register an infrequent stream of fallen kin. There was gene-harvesting to be done.
Cyrion banged a gauntleted fist against Talos’ smoking breastplate, where the silver-forged Aquila was reduced to cracked, blackened devastation.
‘That,’ he said. ‘How apt.’

V

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
The warrior crouched in the comforting dark, needing no light by which to carve. Scratching into ceramite wasn’t an easy task, but the edge of a Legiones Astartes combat blade did the trick sure enough.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
Each rake of the blade’s edge lanced the throbbing boil of pain in his mind. Each long scrape was a relief, though not a release. He could fight the pain, diminish it, but not banish it.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
The sound of carving was a whetstone rasp that echoed from the bare walls. The sound of crude art being born in absolute black. Human eyes couldn’t pierce the gloom, but the warrior hadn’t been human in many years. He could see, just as he could see on the sunless world, born and raised in a city where light was a sin only the wealthy could afford to indulge.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
It was a scratching percussion to the omnipresent growl of the warship’s distant engines. Other sounds intruded upon the warrior’s work, but these were easily – unconsciously – ignored. Far from his sanctum were the muted moans of men and women toiling on the black decks, and the rattling thuds of bulkheads opening and closing elsewhere on the Covenant of Blood. Here in the room with him were the rhythms of a slow-beating human heart and the wet sighing of mortal respiration. He heard these things without truly knowing them. They were sensory nothingness, input without context, not piercing the veil of his ruthless focus.
‘Master?’ came a voice.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
‘Master?’
The warrior didn’t look up from his work, even as he lost the instinctive rhythm of his etching.
‘Master? I don’t understand.’
The warrior breathed in slowly, only then realising he’d been starved of breath, murmuring to himself in a low drone that blended with the ship’s rumbling engines. That, at last, was enough to make him raise his head from his carving.
A human stood there in the dark, clad in a filthy Legion uniform, with a Nostraman coin threaded upon on a leather thong around his neck. The warrior looked at the grime-marked man for some time, feeling his parched throat constrict in an attempt to speak the slave’s name.
‘Primus,’ he said at last. The sound of his own voice horrified him. He sounded as though he’d died weeks ago, and a desiccated revenant was speaking in his place.
Stark relief passed over the slave’s bearded features. ‘I brought water.’
The warrior blinked to clear his vision, reaching for the tin canteen in Primus’ hands. He saw the dirt beneath his slave’s fingernails. He smelled the stale brackishness of the life-giving fluid in the metal container.
He drank. The pain in his head, already exorcised by his carving, faded further with each swallow.
‘How long?’ he asked. ‘How long have I been here?’ 
‘Twelve days, master.’
Twelve days. When had the massacre ended? How had the massacre ended?
He remembered little past Cyrion’s lightning-etched faceplate, as his brother hauled him to his feet...
Talos turned to the nearest wall, where a crooked scrawl of Nostraman runes ran along in ugly lines across the dark iron. The lettering crossed itself, seemingly without order. It trailed across the chamber, even onto the deck floor in places, carved by the now dulled gladius blade in the warrior’s hand.
‘Twelve days,’ he said aloud. He was genetically reforged beyond the capacity to feel fear, yet a cold, cold unease trickled through his blood at the sight of all these words he couldn’t recall writing.
‘There are things in my head,’ he said at last. ‘Memories that never happened.’
Primus had no answer. Talos expected none. He was already distracted – the runes marked his own armour as well. Much of it made no sense, though his brothers’ names were mixed in amidst the nonsense. Sergeant Anrathi’s name was brutally scratched over with the rune symbolising ‘exalted’.
One phrase rang through his senses as his black eyes passed across it. A sentence he would never forget.
Written there, in a jagged and child-like incarnation of Nostraman script, were nine words.
It is a curse, the runes read, to be a god’s son.