Aaron Dembski-Bowden - Blood Reaver (Night Lords)

For Vince Rospond, with sincerest thanks, from Aaron andKatie.

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuriesthe Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance.Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in his name onuncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutantsand worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to livein the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

The warrior turned his helm over in his hands. Gauntleted fingertips strokedalong the dents and scratches marring the midnight ceramite. The faceplate was painted white with an artisans care, in stylised mimicry of a human skull. Onescarlet eye lens was ruined, cobwebbed by cracks. The other stared, dispassionate in deactivation, reflecting the darkening sky above.

He told himself that this wasnt symbolic. His helms ruination didntreflect the damage done to his Legion. Even as he quenched the notion, he wondered from whence it came. The war had a proven and profane habit of fanning the embers of melancholy, but still. There were limits.

The warrior took a breath, seeing inhuman creatures dance and bleed behind his closed eyes. Hed been dreaming of the eldar lately, for months beforesetting foot on this desolate world. Thousands of them: spindly things with gaunt faces and hollow eyes, aboard a burning ship of black sails and false bone.

Soul Hunter, someone called. His brothers voice, making the name somewherebetween a joke and a title of respect.

The warrior replaced his helm. One eye lens flickered live, bathing the vista in the killing-red of his targeting vision. The other showed angry grey static and the distracting after-images of visual input lag. It still echoed with a grainy and colourless view of the setting sun a few moments after hed turnedaway from it.

What? the warrior asked.

The Angel is breaking.

The warrior smiled as he drew the gladius sheathed at his shin. Fading sunlight flashed off the blades edge as the steel met cold air.

Glorious.

Crucifying one of the Imperial Astartes had been a delicious conceit, andserved well as a means to an end. The warrior hung slack from his bonds, bathed in pain but surrendering no sound from his split lips. The Emperors Angelsof Death, the warrior smiled. Stoic to the last.

With no iron spikes to hand, getting him up there required a degree of improvisation. Ultimately, the leader ordered his men to bind the Angel to the hull of their tank by impaling the prisoners limbs with their gladii.

Blood still dripped to the decking in liquid percussion, but had long since ceased to trickle with rainwater eagerness. The Adeptus Astartes physiology, despite its gene-written immortality, only held so much blood.

Beneath the crucified captive, a helm rested in repose. The warrior dismissed another unwelcome tide of reflection at the sight of a helm so like his own but for the colours of allegiance and the bonds of a bloodline. With no real venom, he crushed it beneath his boot. How keen and insipid, the tendrils of melancholy lately.

The warrior looked up, baring features destroyed by mutilating knives. His armour was ceramitehalved with rich blue and pure whitepitted and crackedaround the impaling short swords. His face, once so grim and proud, was a skinless display of bare veins and bloody, layered musculature. Even his eyelids had been cut away.

Hail, brother, the warrior greeted the captive. Do you know who we are?

With the angel broken, a confession took no time at all. To speak the words,he came up close, the purred question rasping through his helms vocabulatorinto the air between them. The warriors faceplate was almost pressed to theAngels flayed featurestwo skulls staring at one another as the sun wentdown.

Where is Ganges?

As his brothers prepared, the warrior watched the distant fortress burning onthe horizon, paying heed to how it devoured the world around it. A sprawl of towers and landing platformsits dark mass ate the land while its smokingbreath choked the sky. And yet it offered so little of worth when laid bare to plundering hands. Why attack a world if the one node of resources was already drained dry? Piracy without profit was nothing more than begging.

Undignified. Oh, yes. And embarrassing.

The warrior stared at its distant battlementsa meagre stronghold on alifeless world, claimed by a thin-blooded Chapter calling itself the Marines Errant. A raid for weapons, for supplies, for precious, precious ammunitionwasted. The Chapters own crusades bled their reserves to nothing, leavingnaught but scraps for the Eighth Legions grasping hands.

The fortress fell within a day, offering as little sport as plunder. Servitors and robed Mechanicum acolytes tore through the databanks in the nigh-abandoned stronghold, but discovered only what every warrior already knew: the raid was a waste of their diminishing ammunition reserves. The Marines Errant no longer stored their secondary armoury here.

Things have changed since we last sailed these reaches of the void, theExalted growled to his command crew. The confession pained him, pained them all. We have hurled our last spears to conquer a husk.

Amidst the bitterness of desperation and disappointment, the embers of possibility still burned. One word cycled through the streams of data, over and over again. Ganges. Representing the ties in this sector of space between the Marines Errant and the Martian Mechanicus, a deep-void outpost was responsible for a significant supply of raw material for the Chapters armoury.The Marines Errant, so proud in their armour of oceanic blue and marble white, maintained order within the subsector by vigilant destruction of human and alien pirates. In protecting Mechanicus interests, they earned the allegiance of Mars. In earning such unity, they garnered a share in the Mechanicus significantmunitions production. A circle of symbiosis, fuelled by mutual interest.

The warrior admired that.

What mattered most was this deep-space refinerys location, and that eludedall who sought to find it. Sealed behind unbreakable encryptions, the only answer that mattered remained known to none.