The Fallen Saint

[Lady_Canoness]

Yes, Clara is dead... dead, but not yet gone :)

 

With this the first part of Aribeth's story comes to a close... and what a close it comes to!

A warning for anyone who may be sensative to these things *This part of the chapter is VERY brutal!*

 

If that does not bother you, then please enjoy the last of the Saint Ascendant :blush:

 

Chapter 14, part 2 of 2

 

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And with that the gates of swirling hell were cast open – bathing the chamber in the violent nightmare light of howling daemons unleashed – blasting the gruesome luminance of Chaos into the room – banishing the culling blackness into the far ends of the Forge and revealing all in this hellish new glow. Standing like a black tower amongst the madness that danced around the walls, the Traitor Marine was beheld in all his dark splendour standing atop the platform barring their escape from the gaping breach of the launch tube. His armour was black like midnight, and across his breast plate could seen raucous images of madness: a tremulous sea of oozing blood wrapped around the edge’s of his ornate armour – engraved by the daemon-smiths of the Eye – in which two armies stood fighting with blades of fire as laughing daemons held above them a great piercing eye of the purest loathing. His gauntlets were like carved obsidian talons and his fingers were like claws – each cruel and menacing, waiting to rip life from the throat of the foe. On each should sat massive paudrons; the one on his right inlaid with polished human and animal skulls and jewels that glitrered and swam like liquid fire over its surface, while on this left was emblazoned the baleful eye of Horus wreathed in a golden star of eight points. From these titanic shoulders was draped a grisly cloak of ancient blood-red cloth, tattered and daubed with abhorrent icons and chilling trophies of war. Each greave that enclosed his monstrous legs was hemmed in brass and engraved with the golden faces of two leering daemons – on the one, the vicious destroyer of men that wielded howling fangs and great cleaving weapons – and on the other, the fickle temptress that held the fate of all men both living and dead clutched to her poisoned bosom while beckoning would-be heroes to her with promises of perfection and power. Lastly, there stood on the sorcerer’s head a great helm adorned with a crown of daemons’ horns, the face of which was masked by a flat golden visage into which endless damnation and deathless hatred was engraved. Two eyes – red as glowing coals – pierced through the helm and glared down at the puny Sisters below. Here was a fiend from the age of the Great Heresy itself; for ten thousand years it had grown in power as the most hated foe of all humanity; ageless evil embodied in the form of at one time was one the Imperium’s greatest defenders – a Space Marine, a creation of man to be the ultimate soldier, fallen into the grips of Chaos.

With a roar of psychic might the sorcerer hurled the two Sisters off their feet and spinning high into the air – sending them crashing back to the ground with terrific force. Yet the blessed power armour of the Adepta Sororitas did not give way, and both faithful rose quickly to their feet, shaken, but not harmed by the power of the blackened mind. Another quick motion by the sorcerer, and a storm of rioting witch fire erupted all along the decks – leaping up at the faithful and lashing against their armour bodies to incinerate them wholly.

Augusta screamed and writhed as the pink and violet flames swam up her legs and chest – tearing at her face and pulling her back into the roaring inferno of hell-spawned flame – burning her beyond all recognition into a pile of ash.

By resolve alone did Aribeth not succumb to the same fate, and, helpless to aid the one remaining Sister under her command, her eyes flahing to match the tempered steel of her golden blade, Aribeth dashed through the snaring flames with sword held high – shouting out in defiance as through sheer force of will and flooding anger she battled her way through the flames that would see her slain.

“I AM NOT AFRAID!” she screamed at the world around her as her feet carried her swiftly and safely through the fire to the stairs and up, up she went – free of the fire and coming ever closer to her hated foe even as Augusta died in the scorching flames that devoured her flesh.

The Black Legion sorcerer met her at the top of the stair and hurled her bodily back down the top landing with the might of his foul mind before blasting her with the raw energies of chaos that, ripped from the warp, he spun out in terrible bolts from his fingers and exploded off the Palatine’s armour – melting ceramite and ravaging the body beneath. Yet the powers of all hell could not slay her, and while her body buckled under the tortures of chaos, her spirit filled with bottomless loathing reared her back to her feet and hurled her headlong through the sorcerer’s assault into a charge heedless of all danger and pain. Her mind seared black with a thirst for vengeance driven by vilence and pent up frustration, Aribeth saw nothing outside of her goal as she charged heedlessly forward.

Glowing steel braved the warp-storm as its bearer drove upward towards the srcerer, lifting her sword in a great sweeping arc above her head and back down with blinding speed as she drove herself at the foe – yet with the explosion of steel meeting steel, the Palatine’s glowing power sword rebounded as the Dark Star rose in defence of its master. Aribeth lunged in again with her sword held two-handed with a blow to cut through her opponent at the waist, yet the shadow blade intercepted the sword and flung her back across the platform.

Breathing hard, the Palatine regained her feet, and gripped her sword with renewed vigour. Across the platform, not more than twenty paces away, the sorcerer looked at her sideways – whatever his impression hidden behind that terrible mask.

“Perhaps you think I can be bested through perseverance alone?” the sorcerer mocked.

Spitting blood onto the deck, Aribeth drew herself to her full height – though still she was dwarfed by the sheer size of the Chaos Marine – and assumed her dueller’s poise; here, now, she would fight to the bitter death for herself, her Emperor, and all those who had fallen before and after her: a paragon of desperate light facing off against the instrument of total darkness.

The Dark Star raised itself in the sorcerer’s hands – its blade twisting with shadowy smoke and glutted on the blood of Aribeth’s true love – as the Chaos Marine, with Millennia in which to perfect his form, readied himself for a battle of both skill and steel.

With a cry Aribeth launched into the attack – her blade weaving in and out in a flurry of blows that created a flowing tapestry of death that bore down on the enemy with pressing force, but the Dark Star matched Aribeth’s blade with every blow and pattered each aside with twisting counter-thrusts and a finesse that denied the huge bulk of its wielder.

Maelekor drove his weapon high in a reverse strike, but Aribeth caught the black sword on her blade and twisted it back before sweeping out with a low strike that the sorcerer barely dodged.

The combatants parted for sparse seconds before the swords clashed again with equal speed and ferocity fuelled by contempt and anger. Steel rang off steel, and warriors lunged and twisted with forms of swordplay at their very finest – a delicious show of skill undertoned by the severity of a duel to the death. Locked in a dance with death as their judge, the two fought with terrific speed and might – neither yielding to the other for even a moment. No rest, no respite, they fought like the mythic heroes of old in battles that would be sung for generations to come.

Aribeth ducked low as the Dark Star swept mere inches over her head, then rolled across the floor as the reverse blow rang out loudly against the worn metal of the decking. Maelekor followed through immediately and brought about a death-dealing blow that Aribeth just deflected as she rose back to her feet.

The power armour was getting heavy on her back, but she did not feel to tire and fought on regardless – remembering the hours she had spent in the duelling cages in her younger days to perfect the deadly weapon she now possessed as a part of herself.

Maelekor was growling inside his helmet – furious that a whelp such as this could dare to match him swordplay – furious that this weakling of the false Emperor was not crushed under his heel like the insect she was. Nevertheless, the twisted servant of darkness did not spare honour in his onslaught, and with a twisting fling of his taloned hands hurled a tirade of dark magics and murderous spells at his foe – a millennia’s worth of hatred unleashed in a single blow. The fell energies of raw chaos ripped around her and blasted against her armour, hurling Aribeth backwards off her feet and tumbling across the deck as the mental assault lanced ceaseless torrents of witchery against her, melting and buckling her power armour in many places and badly singeing her hair and lashes. Yet through determination and hatred alone did Aribeth persevere where lesser mortals would have crumpled into dust, and her loathing to fall before such a foe kept her from the claws of waiting death even in the face of all the Dark Gods’ fury.

Denied the awesome power of his sorcery, Maelekor glared with eyes to rend flesh at the one who withstood him, and, as Aribeth regain her fee,t unleashed his powers anew by wrapping both time and space about himself in a blanketing haze. In a single motion he darted this way and that with outstanding speed – a blur to all but the most trained of eyes – then closed in to the attack with s storm of blows so ferocious as to make the fiercest of tempests look tame. Aribeth, forced back and back by the unholy haste of her fiendish opponent, fought a desperate retreat where her sword moved purley out of instinct, not know where next the traitor’s blade would fall.

A feign – a trap to the left – but Aribeth intercepted the shadowy death of the Dark Star and forced it hissing back from her body. Maelekor moved like liquid – rolling in waves to attack and defend all places at once – then, like the tide, he struck hard and fast: might funnelled through the passage of his arms as with both fists he forced the Palatine back against the guard rail and with a single unavoidable strike knocked her over into open air. Her back arched as she tumbled through empty space, watching as the platform above her flew away and the wind of her descent whistled in her ears. Her sword slipped free from her fingers and drifted like a dark shadow away across the hell-spawned brilliance that still dazzled the room.

With a single bone jarring crunch, Aribeth’s armoured form landed hard on its back – knocking the wind out of her – and leaving the Palatine struggling to catch her breath, as three meters above her, Maelekor vaulted over the guard rail and landed mere feet from where she lay with a tremendous thundering crash that shook the floor.

Her sword beyond her reach, Aribeth levelled her bolt pistol and cracked off a pair of shots at the sorcerer’s massive form – both shots glancing uselessly from the fiend’s breastplate as a third shot from her pistol sped past his ear as the Chaos Marine coolly twitched his head aside and out of harms way.

Growling as she scrambled to her feet, Aribeth took her pistol in both hands and fired shot after shot after shot at the towering sorcerer – each being as ineffective as the last as, pulling up psychic barriers from the pits his black soul, Maelekor saw every shell reduced into wisps of dust hanging in midair – foiled by the power of the warp that was brought against her.

Wasting no time, Dark Star lunged forward in the sorcerer’s hands and tore a great rent through the deck at his feet – barely missing the Palatine by a hairs breadth as she flung herself out of the way, stumbling in her haste towards the power sword that lay just feet away.

“You cannot win,” the Chaos Marine’s cruel voice scraped through the vox grills on either side of his helm. “In ten millennia, not one so-called champion of your false god has withstood me. Why do you even think to resist me?” He watched her coldly as she staggered on wearied and pain-riddled legs over to where her weapon lay.

Aribeth, here chest rising and falling in great gasps of breath through a bloody and gaping mouth, picked up her weapon, then turned back to her opponent with eyes filled with nought but scorn. Her face was stained with layers of soot, smoke, sweat, and blood, and was marked with numerous glancing cuts and scrapes. Her hair was torn and burnt in many places, falling loosely out of her braids around her shoulders. The power armour she wore was stained beyond all recognition, and was buckled, smashed, and melted away in many places that revealed painful red wounds in the woman’s flesh beneath that oozed with leaking blood. The black livery of her order was torn and burnt, now nothing more than hanging rags that swung pathetically with her ever movement. But on her chest, hanging around her neck by a thin silver chain, the medallion of the wreathed skull imposed on the Imperial crux still hung – the medallion of the father she had never know – the one thing she had carried in with from the outside that had yet to be poisoned by this place – the one thing that still shone brightly in the nightmare light that surrounded her now… maybe, just maybe, the last thing that really told the Palatine who she was.

“You were like me once,” Aribeth spoke through cracked and bleeding lips, “you were sworn to defend the Imperium… the Emperor… but you turn your back on Him when the Imperium need you the most…” She let a string of bloody saliva trickle free from her mouth onto the metal decking. “You may be stronger than me, faster than me, more powerful than me… but you aren’t better than me. You threw away everything you ever had because you were afraid… but I’m not afraid anymore – not of you, not of anything. Kill me if you can… but you still won’t be better than me…”

For a time there was silence – the sorcerer a cold, black-armoured giant, and the Palatine, wounded and breathing hard – simply standing opposed to one another.

“Poor fool,” the sorcerer said at length, almost sounding genuinely concerned behind his hateful mask “the Emperor has abandoned you, just as he abandoned me and all mankind. He died ten thousand years ago. He is not protecting you now – nor did he ever. You’ve simply been too stubborn to realize it.”

“You’re wrong to think that…” Aribeth denied him, “The Emperor is all.”

The sorcerer chuckled cruelly, fingering the notches on his shadowy blade with his talon-like fingers. “If the Emperor is all, then he simply hates you. Why else would he let you be fooled by a corrupt Inquisitor? Why would he send you to perish on this world? Why would he let your Sisters die, Aribeth? And,” he sneered, “why would he let me defile the corpse of your friend?”

“Lies!” Aribeth spat back, “Every word that slips off your forked tongue is nothing but lies and untruths!”

The Chaos Marine held out his sword in both hands for the Palatine to clearly see, and as she watched red blood began to seep from the blade at first in a trickle, and then in a flood, until it wetted the floor with a red pool the freshly absorbed essence of life. “This belonged to your friend, Aribeth,” he sneered, “this belonged to the woman you loved.”

“LIES!” Aribeth screamed, averting her eyes from the terrible oozing weapon, “I’ll kill you for your lies!” and in fit of rage she launched herself at the Chaos Marine – blind to all but her desire to kill the fiend before her and cut his lying tongue from his head.

With speed she lashed out with frenzied blows, but Maelekor threw her back strike after strike with the Dark Star weaving before him – Clara’s blood gushing from the blade every time steel struck together in the heat of battle.

Pressing on his assault with boiling fury, the sorcerer smashed blow after blow against the Palatine’s sword – willing to break her under his brute strength for defying power that he was. He wanted to see her crushed, broken at his feet. He was tired of her petty defiance before him – let it be done with, let her be ruined.

He lunged in again with a great arcing blow, but Aribeth, crouched low to the ground, saw her opening and seized it perfectly. Intercepting the blow before it had even landed, Aribeth redirected it wide before spinning around behind her opponent and drawing her sword in a solid motion across the back of his lower legs as she passed – slicing through the dark cape that hung from his shoulders and cutting deep into the ceramite armour that covered the back of his legs – a perfect disabling blow, her opponent would topple backwards as his legs gave-way beneath him, and opening his defences for a perfect killing blow.

But chance was against her.

Astartes power armour coupled with the enhanced muscular structure of a Space Marine thwarted her victory and plunged her deep into defeat.

Cursing with pain, the sorcerer rounded on the Palatine and smashed her across the face with the back of his armoured fist – breaking her skin open in a spray of blood, and laying her out across the floor.

Stunned and reeling from the blow, Aribeth was sluggish to react as she tried to scramble back up.

Deftly parrying the first pass of the Dark Star, Aribeth was caught entirely off guard as the sorcerer’s armoured foot crunched into the side of her knee with the force of a cannon firing – snapping her joint like a twig within the confines of her armour and doubling her up with a howl of pain. Her power sword was thrown from her grip as she tumbled and both her hands pressed down against the bent armour around her splintered joint as she crumbled into a ball on the ancient deck of the End Forge.

Grabbing her by a fistful of hair, and his talons digging into her scalp, Maelekor slammed the back of her head into the floor and felt her body reel under the forceful impact. Victorious, he let her head fall limply to the ground before cannoning a balled fist into her stomach – cracking the armour – and causing spittle and blood to spurt from the woman’s mouth as she convulsed on the floor. Under his helmet, the sorcerer smiled: one more strike like that and he would burst her organs, killing her quickly but painfully – but he didn’t want her dead. No, he wanted her to suffer – he wanted her to suffer unimaginably for her husk of a god. Every blow he struck her with, every torture he exacted on her, every ounce of pain she felt – all of it – all of it would be dealt doubly against everything she stood for. He’d leave her alive – though barely. Let time be her executioner – he couldn’t be bothered.

Grabbing her ankle in one hand and placing the palm of his other hand over the knee of her unbroken leg, Maelekor took his time in applying pressure on the gasping and defenceless Palatine until he heard the cracking pop of her joint coming loose, before he gave an awful twist that sheered through her knee with a crack so profound that it almost overcame the Chaos Marine’s bellowing maniacal laughter – and the woman’s howls of unimaginable pain.

For minutes that lasted an eternity, the Chaos Marine indulged in petty acts to quench his thirst for cruelty and violence – revelling in the Sister’s screams and feeble attempts to fend him off. Yet even a being of infinite loathing cannot dwell in evil acts forever, and when he had finished his merciless torments he stood up and sheathed the Dark Star – contented with what he had done – leaving the Palatine, her body broken and bloody, like unwanted doll left strewn across the floor.

“Remember my face, wench, remember everything you have suffered here at my hands,” he commanded over her choking sobs and gasping wails, “remember that when you next see your Lord, and ask him if it was worth all that pain for the useless rewards he grants you.”

His words echoing about the confines of the Forge, the sorcerer turned and left, once more letting darkness consume the ancient ship and the broken woman who he had left on the floor.

[daboarder]

nicely done i enjoyed this alot as always. any idea on a time frame for the next part?

[Lady_Canoness]

Then next part will be a prologue for the Fallen Saint, and it shoult be here... soon ;)

 

The first chapter of the Fallen Saint, however, is still a ways away.

[Lady_Canoness]

Soon as in now!

 

It is with great pleasure that I unveil the prologue to the Fallen Saint, a work so hot off the press that I just finished writing it this morning!

 

Once again we come to the side of Inquisitor Montrose as he finds himself in a spot that everyone would rather avoid. His plan failed, Mercy is missing, and you can imagine that our friends in the Black Legion are right POed! So, what does our fearless/shamelss Inquisitor do? Well, he needs to find himself some new friends!

 

Enjoy!

 

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The Fallen Saint: Prologue

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All around, the rain season was unfolding with the greatest of fury. Down through the thick canopy of treetops liquid water fell in great sheets to the forest floor below, quickly submerging every foot of dry ground beneath waters that ran thigh deep. Low-laying night flora, dwarfed beneath the mighty trees that towered into the sky, quenched their thirst by the gallon through both root and tendril, storing away fast reserves of water beneath the surface to help survive the months of drought that would soon follow. The people of this planet, though they were few, would then harvest these plants for their water and reseed them as quickly as they removed them, keeping the cycle of water – and therefore the cycle of life – entirely intact. Fascinating really, but then again, Montrose didn’t give a damn about how these people eked out their lives nestled in their iron shelters beneath the roots of trees. He was here because of project Oberon, and because, years ago, when project Oberon had been scrapped and its control had been permanently shut down, several individuals of like minds decided amongst themselves that, even though project Oberon had not official status or backing, it was far too precious a project to be forsaken. The Thorians had disagreed of course, and, surprisingly, so had the Monodominants, yet several inquisitors – none of whom he had actually met – of the Ordos Xenos and Hereticus had felt it worthwhile to pursue the project to completion, and so they had. To avoid possible detection they had relocated the project here, and kept the number of fertilities down to the manageable number of a dozen – rather than the many multitudes they had originally planned. In good order the specimens were collected from various worlds and brought here for impregnation and incubation.

Somewhere though, there had been a leak. The Monodominants struck, and numerous of project Oberon’s backers were incarcerated. Montrose remembered that Galtman himself had been active in the investigation – back when he was still Lord Dolmeork’s favoured pupil – and many members of the Inquisition and their affiliates were taken in for questioning… several of whom were never seen or heard of again.

Fortunately for him though, Montrose had evaded the eye of the Inquisition turned against itself, and project Oberon was already near completion. In a period of three weeks, nine members of the project arrived on this world to collect their allotted yieldings of the project. The other three had been left unclaimed. That was why Montrose now returned. Project Oberon had been silent now for twenty-two years, yet the incubation chambers would still be active, and the three unclaimed specimens would still be waiting… should their owners ever arrive to claim them.

The rain was still pouring down from above and clattered noisily off the metal walkways that formed a network several feet above ground that linked all the habitation bunkers together. Shielding his eyes with a frigid hand, Montrose peered through the darkness that nestled in between the roots of these colossal trees and sought out the faint glows of lampposts that were to be his guides through this insular little community to that place he had visited over two decades ago.

Finally, his body thoroughly soaked, Montrose arrived at the rough steel door marked with a large number twelve and pressed the activation rune with trying patience. Too long, too long. He sincerely hope no one else had found the project.

With a whining hiss the door slid upwards and open, admitting Montrose into a dimly lit corridor before it closed behind him.

“Hello?” Montrose called as he removed his rain poncho and folded it over his arm. “Hello?”

He was greeted with silence by the narrow metal corridor. As he moved cautiously forward, he checked every door on both his right and his left – empty as usual; that was a good sign.

The lights hummed just inches overhead and somewhere in the bunker Montrose could hear that steady drip-drip-drip of water leaking from a loose drainage pipe. The Inquisitor, dressed in bright red waistcoat, continued down the hall at a wary pace, and descended into the vault via a short flight of steps. The vault wasn’t a very big room – no more than twelve paces wide and twenty paces deep – but on either side, both to his left and his right, stood two narrow doors that Montrose had never been through and had no inkling of what lay beyond. Directly in front of him, however, was the door to the incubation chamber – a huge double-blast door magnetically sealed behind a five-point refractor shield. Well, at least he could now rest assured that the project hadn’t been compromised, and that, one way or another, what he wanted was still here.

The first door to his left hissed open, and a tall skeletal man stepped out.

“Father,” the man nodded to him, “it is good to see you again.”

Montrose smiled and returned the nod, “Mother, I’m pleased to see that you’re well.”

The man he had addressed as Mother shrugged feebly. He was ancient looking, bald with bulbous eyes, and his skin had the texture of parchment. What he wore was something akin to a faded sleeveless dress that brushed against the floor as he walked. An odd sort, Montrose agreed, but every man had his uses.

“So, why are you back here, Father, I take it the project hasn’t been terminated, hm?” Mother asked, moving with slow, angular paces – that Montrose found unsettling to watch – towards the middle of the room. The skeletal man had never referred to project Oberon by name, always preferring to simply call it the ‘the project’.

“No, no,” Montrose assured him with a dismissing wave, “far, far from it.”

The man looked at him with empty eyes. “Why?” he asked again in a toneless voice.

“I need to collect another specimen, Mother,” Montrose state quickly, hoping that the old creature wouldn’t think to question him.

Mother simply stood there, though, impassive as usual. “Why?” he asked again.

“My specimen…” Montrose hesitated, grinding his teeth, “well, I lost her.”

“Tragic,” Mother intoned flatly, clearly not fazed by the loss of one of Oberon’s children, and about as warm as the weather outside.

“I need another one,” Montrose suggest, trying to spur the Mother into a response of more than one word.

“Impossible.” Mother simply stood there; infuriatingly bland and unreadable, and looked as if he was aging where he stood.

“Why?” Montrose asked, shifting his feet on the floor “Surely there are still specimens available?”

“Yes,” Mother admitted, “but that is still impossible. The specimens can only be claimed by those who own them through their donations to the project. You already chose yours. You cannot take another one.”

“Yes, I know,” Montrose nodded hesitantly, “but this is different,” he insisted. “I need this one for my protection – for the protection of the project.”

“Are you in danger, Father?” Mother asked blandly – his eyes never once having moved when he spoke.

Holding up a finger for patience, Montrose reached into his pocket and fished out a small metal box – no larger than a cigar case. Mother watched him with non-existent curiosity.

“Do you know what this is?” Montrose said, opening the box and holding it in a way that Mother could see its contents quite clearly.

“No,” the ancient man said, “what is it?”

“It is the Mark of the Legion,” Montrose said with gravity, as if the words themselves would bring thunder and lightning crashing down from the heavens.

“The what?” Mother questioned, clearly misunderstanding what Montrose implied.

“The Legion.”

“What legion?”

“THE Legion.”

“The Legion?”

“Yes,” Montrose nodded, “The Legion,” glad that the Mother was beginning to finally understand.

“So?”

Montrose sighed and rolled his eyes, closing the box and putting back into his coat pocket. “Mother,” he said bluntly, “do you know what would happen if the the Legion found out about this place?”

“Oh…” realization dawned on the old man, and for once a sign of distress appeared across his face. He knew what would happen if the Legion found this place: Oberon would be finished… but worse than that, all of the projects secrets would be in the hands of the Black Legion, meaning that they would become almost an unstoppable force in the galaxy. “What shall we do?”

“Give a new specimen to me, Mother, and I will take care of the rest – this place will never be found.”

“I see…” Mother nodded, and without a word turned away from the Inquisitor and moved to the incubation chamber door.

Montrose stood behind him with growing excitement – it was like his first time all over again!

Within a few seconds, the doors hissed open, and the incubation chamber as he remembered it was revealed to him. The large circular room with a squat domed ceiling was well lit from all angles by numerous fluorescent white lights, and as he stepped inside behind the Mother, he could feel the warmth of the room’s regulated temperature seep into his skin and banish the chills of the rain. Formed in a circle around the outer edges of the room sat the pods – twelve incubation pods – nine of them empty and dark – all interlinked by series of cables, tubes, and power nodes that ran between them. Montrose took his time absorbing the room and his surroundings – he had naught but good memories of this room, remember what curious joy he had felt when he first stood here beside the Mother.

On each pod was adorned with a name – a simple, personal, name. Hope, Faith, Night, Fortune, Eden, Promise, Whisper, Grace… all these names placed on small tags before the empty pods… some of them had been full the last time he was there... Montrose moved on, a thin, sad, smile across his lips. He came to the last empty pod and stood for a moment looking down at the name it bore: Mercy.

“It must be trying to lose such a fine specimen,” Mother murmured, shaking his withered head sadly; indeed, the specimens were the only things Mother cared for, and their well being meant everything to him.

Only three pods remained full – their occupants floating fully grown in the soup of amniotic fluid of their artificial womb. Montrose looked at each of them in turn. All of them were tall, lithe women of the same build as Mercy, and were curled naked into a foetal ball – asleep to the world around them – oblivious to the Mother and Father that stood watching them.

Each one had a name: Echo, Shade, and Zero. Montrose looked at each of them in turn. The woman inside Echo’s pod had fair skin, almost like fine winter snow in its whiteness, and her hair was the colour of gold. Montrose marvelled at the perfection of her being as she floated, her mouth distended around the vital tube that was fastened with a tight fit to her head, and felt his body tingle as she moved with very slight, flowing motions as she bobbed about lightly in the fluid of her pod.

With a nudge, Mother ushered him along to the next pod.

Shade’s skin was a rich auburn colour inside her pod and her hair was jet black. Even cocooned inside the suspending fluids of her pod, Montrose could perceive the taught muscle that rippled beneath her skin, and every so often she tensed as she floated through her trancelike dream.

“Her body adapted extraordinarily well to the implants,” Mother noted in quiet awe, “Shade’s strength and speed in remarkable, even by the standards of the other specimens… though I must admit that her mental capacities are somewhat reduced in comparison to what you would expect.”

“What do you mean?” Montrose asked with quiet curiosity, still marvelling at the woman inside the pod.

“Mercy was a special case in that her mind retained much of its former personality,” Mother began to explain, “yet Shade lost almost everything of her former consciousness. She can be expected to follow orders to the letter and adapt according to her environment, but I’m afraid we will never see a resurgence of any shred of her humanity.”

“I see,” Montrose noted, “tell me about Zero.”

Zero was held suspended in the pod closest next to Mercy’s empty vessel, and while the others moved in tiny motions, Zero was almost entirely still. Her skin was a tanned, and her hair was the colour of silver – indeed, like the women who floated beside her, Zero was the image of the perfect, yet powerful, feminine form.

“I cannot tell you much about Zero,” Mother explained in a hushed tone, “I don’t even know where she was found, or what her previous life was like.”

Montrose nodded. The fabled previous lives of the specimens – all of them had one, a life they lived before they were brought here in their youth to be turned into the deadly instruments that they were – but only the Mother ever knew them, where they had come from, and what their names had been before they were transformed. But Zero – Zero he did not know – she was a mystery to him.

Moving away from Zero’s pod, Montrose moved back to look at Shade once again. “I need only a protector,” the Inquisitor said, “I think that she will do well.”

Mother nodded solemnly. “If you will wait just a moment then, Father, I will see that she is born.”

[daboarder]

nice i like it. just a word of warning don't get so deep into subplot's and hidden agenda's you cant get out again, the best example i can think for of this is the wheel of time series, i mean that coulda been finnished ages ago and even once its done there will still be plots im willing to bet will never be resolved in that story.

 

as for zero would it be worth hazzarding a guess as to her identity?

[Lady_Canoness]

By all means, take a stab at who you think Zero to be - I'd love to hear it ;)

 

On the note of subplots, I am desperately trying to not get sucked into plots I can't possibly get myself out of, but some subplots will simply be mentioned and then put by the wayside like some characters (Captain Argo and Canoness Helena, for example, have pretty much run their course and will not have any great importance in the story from now on.)

Likewise, Mother and project Oberon will not feature prominently in the story. Mercy and Montrose, however, will see some more development, and as such this prologue aided in giving them some history as well as hinting at the reason as to why Mercy isn't a normal human being.

[Lady_Canoness]

Here we are at the very start of the Fallen Saint, and it is a short chapter to begin with.

 

So, should one expect anything to change between the original version and this, the updated version? In short, yes you should. The biggest change I can think of is that Aribeth's battles in the Realm of Khorne are being replaced... by what? Well, this time she'll have to run the gauntlet of ALL FOUR major Chaos Powers, meaning that there will be a chapter devoted to each and every colour of Chaos!

Also, I will not give up on Montrose, Mercy, Galtman, and Nerf; they will all feature in this story, though - due to Aribeth's 'unique' position - they will have no direct contact with her outside of what was given in the original story.

 

I hope you enjoy it!

 

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The Fallen Saint, part 1: Dreams of Darkness: Chapter 1: Of Dust and Ash

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“Where was she?”

Air scrubbers chugged and hummed with a pervasive whine up in the ceiling above, cutting into her ears like hot knives into her flesh. The fans – somewhere up above spinning continuously in their housings – were vibrating hard against their metal frame, sending shivers through the air that rattled her skull and trembled down her spine like fingers down a keyboard of brittle bone.

“In a service duct. Looked to me like someone had dragged her there.”

“Indeed…”

Air, like waves over the shore, crashed against her exposed skin and prickled around her neck and shoulders before searing into her pores like fire from the sun – burning up her skin from the inside out. Her lungs echoed within her chest, and every breath felt as if it lasted a lifetime. In… and out… In… and out.

“See that her condition does not deteriorate, and do not leave this room: I want to be certain that she can pull no tricks before I return from planet-side.”

“You got it, sir: she won’t have moved an inch before you get back.”

Light speared through the cracks in her eye-lids and stormed into her brain the with force of a hurricane, making her reel in agony as she slammed the gates to her vision shut again and hold them fast as bit by bit her mind clawed its way back into consciousness through a nigh-impenetrable sea of madness that rampaged through her senses on the heels of overpowering medications.

“Also, no one is to even see the prisoner other than yourself and Cirk before my return.”

“No problem, boss.”

Their voices, harsh and foreign in her ears, were the last things she heard before her struggling mind once again faltered, and her world went dark as she lost consciousness again.

 

* * * *

 

Leaving Nerf and the interrogation chamber behind him, Ernst Galtman, Imperial Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus, marched down the Magister’s winding corridors towards the frigate’s launch berth where his personal shuttle sat in wait to take him to the surface of the uncharted world below. He walked at a steady pace despite the stinging wound in his gut and was saluted by all members of the crew as he passed. Inquisitor Galtman, lord of the Magister, was a physically daunting man. Six and-and-a-half feet tall with broad shoulders and a boulder for a chest, the Inquisitor stood on powerfully built legs and moved with an aura of unquestioned authority. He was a man not so much born as built to command both fear and respect, and in his face – a face that was both expressionless and permanently severe – could be seen the near impossible level of discipline that this man maintained within the confines of his own mind. Almost immune to provocation, Galtman was a cold man who was used to pursuing his ends through intimidation rather than cooperation. He was fiercely independent also, and maintained strictly limited connections with other members of the Inquisition, for he found that he worked best when supreme command rested on his shoulders and his shoulders alone, and anything that conflicted with his authority was treated with almost zero tolerance from the Inquisitor. He also preferred a more direct approach to his work in the Inquisition and would rarely trust anything save the most mundane of tasks to anyone other than himself, for indeed if ever there was a capable Inquisitor, it was he. Whenever his mere presence and the mandate that went with his authority was not enough to ensure the success of his goals, however, Inquisitor Ernst Galtman had means to deliver results from even the most stubborn of opposition. Coupled with his prowess in personal combat – which was honed to his already high standards – Galtman also was gifted with the touch of psychic talent, and could manifest the powers of his hard mind in several ways. First and foremost in both skill and usefulness, the Inquisitor had trained extensively in the ability to influence the minds of others, and in some cases invade them entirely though which he could manipulate thoughts, memories, and even their bodies. It was difficult and draining however, and Galtman found that most often he was able to achieve his ends by simply brushing the very surface of an individual’s thoughts – enough to both sense their present consciousness and, if nothing else, spook them into cooperating. He also harboured the ability to sense his immediate surroundings instantly – making him almost impossible to catch unawares. In the grand scale of things, however, his powers were limited – he was not a battle psyker, and the ability to hurl energy and objects with the power of his will alone was beyond him. This though did not bother him, for more power meant more restrictions, more responsibility, and, most importantly, more attention – something he was eager to avoid.

The Magister, a Sword class Frigate on permanent loan to the Inquisitor from the Imperial Navy, was Galtman’s ship and base of operations, and in many ways it reflected the attitude of its master. A tool of intimidation, the Magister packed more fire-power than any other ship of comparable size, and while it lacked the tell-tale silhouette of a larger warship, the Magister boasted of speed and manoeuvrability equal to a ship half its size, and, at just over a kilometre and a half long, such an advantage was not to be underestimated. Crewed with the best and brightest navy personnel that her Inquisitor could find and piloted by a hardened and heroic captain by the name of Argo, the Magister was the ultimate weapon at the Inquisitor’s disposal, and unlike men of lesser resolve Galtman was very ready to use it.

However, not all was as it should be aboard the Magister, and for that Galtman was furious. A surprise attack from infiltrators aboard the Magister had almost stolen his ship from him, and had very likely crippled his efforts on the planet below. Only time would tell…

Reaching the turbo-lift that lead through the center of the ship to the hangar bays, Galtman passed the saluting armsmen on either side without sparing a moment’s notice before pushing the activation rune and watching the doors slowly clunk shut as the vibrations shaking upwards through the floor indicated that the lift was in motion.

He was not alone however.

“Captain,” the Inquisitor grunted towards the man standing silently at the other end of the lift, though he himself kept his steely gaze locked ahead of him with his hands crossed in front of him, “what is it?”

The Captain, a man in his late sixties who carried himself with pride and whose face carried the lines of experience, did not hesitate to answer; “Sir, I thought it best that I brief you myself about everything we have uncovered since the attack.”

“They were quite bold, weren’t they?” Galtman noted dispassionately, referring back to how the infiltrators had attempted to overwhelm his ship just a few hours before.

“They had balls,” Argo admitted with a stiff nod, “but it’ll take more than nerve to beat us, sir.”

“Indeed. Carry on, Captain.”

“Yessir,” Argo flicked on the data-slate he was carrying and scanned through a few notes before shutting it off and holding firmly behind his back in both hands. “Security teams have secured the entirety of the ship and have reported no more hostiles. Identification of the infiltrators is still underway, but we do know that none of them were on the original crew roster, and that all of them, including your would-be assassin, were picked up at our brief turn over at the Rienfros Nebula. We don’t know how they infiltrated the facility there, but they must have pretty powerful connections either way.”

Galtman nodded in silence – a motion for Argo to continue.

“Scans from our own sensors have picked up the wreckage of four of the five dropships – the fifth was identified as having landed successfully, though no contact has been established with any potential survivors.”

“The End Forge is still on the planet’s surface?” Galtman posed, interrupting the Captain.

“Yes sir,” Argo gulped down a reply the he knew the Inquisitor did not wish to hear, “though the Chief Astropath did report a high level of psychic energy radiating from inside it at several points over the last few hours, and our ship sensors have confirmed his reports as being accurate.”

“Sisters are incapable of manifesting any psychic abilities,” Galtman noted flatly, as if reading a statistic from a textbook. “Your readings have picked up signs of the enemy.”

“If that is the enemy, sir,” Argo said cautiously, “then as commanding officer of this ship in your absence, it is my position to strongly advise you against this course of action. You could be walking into a trap that already cost us fifty elite heavy infantry.”

The lift ground to a halt and the heavy doors parted, revealing the hangar deck beyond as Navy ratings hustled back and forth in teams under the watchful guns of security troopers. Galtman’s personal shuttle sat in the middle of the hangar as its flight crew gave it a final run-over.

“You’re concern is unnecessary,” Galtman informed the Captain, the strode out of the lift, his long, black storm coat snapping at his heels. “Sulius! Follow!” he called behind him as he left, and, to Argo’s surprise, the Inquisitor’s mouse-like ran out of the lift after his master. Argo had never even known he was there.

The Captain watched them enter the shuttle, and then activated the lift once again, losing sight of the Inquisitor and his servant as the lift’s doors ground shut.

 

* * * *

 

Over the dead red lands, and under the wind scarred skies, between the craggy peaks of rusted mountains lay a beast of broken metal – twisted, killed, waiting in an endless near-death state for the executioner’s final blow that took an infinity to fall. The End Forge, a Grande Cruiser from the mythical days of the Great Crusade and the Terrible Heresy that followed in its shadow, lay shattered on this blasted red earth under the deep crimson sky, and all around spread its anger for death and ruin. Within its hold, four score and more bodies lay crumpled and crushed in death – ripped asunder by vicious blades and cruel guns – homage paid to the cruelty of men and their thirst for violence. Torrents of blood slicked the halls where raging battles had been fought, littering the decks with burst bodies of slain fighters. Most wore little more than rags, and had been gutted furiously by weapon’s whose power could not be resisted. A few, however, had been clad in armour of the purest white – though now it was stained with blood, soot, ash, and dust, into a grimy dark grey – and bore the marks of standing against all the fury that battle could loose at them before eventually succumbing to the eventuality of death.

The End Forge was not alone in its misery, and it was with terrible glee it sunk its talons of shadow and darkness into the flesh of the fallen – hiding them away from the light of day for all time – condemning them to rot within its hold – waiting until all that remained were blackened skeletons hanging loosely in the remnants of brittle armour until once again war would return to its dark halls.

Yet in the forward torpedo bay, moving sluggishly amidst the silent machines, one spark of life resisted the End Forge’s gruesome clutches and grasped at every strand of life even as it was sucked away.

Aribeth, the Lady Palatine of the Order of the Sacred Rose, breathed still through blood smeared and cracked lips. Every gasp was a burden – a prayer for an end to suffering – as she dragged her broken body with every ounce of might she could muster over the worn steel of the ancient ship. Her legs were broken, and her armour was torn in many places. Blood leaked from many wounds, and the entirety of her body screamed out in pain so loud she was deafened by it… but she kept going, blindly pulling herself inch by tortuous inch down the long launch tube and towards the open sky. Her grey eyes stung with dust and grit, and her hair – a rich brown in its natural colour – was matted with sticky blood, ash, and dirt. The woman’s face, once remarkable in its grace and refined elegance, was bruised and bloody – her nose split and bleeding, and long gouges running down her cheeks and across her brow.

Still, she pulled herself on with clawing hands for no reason other than could, and gritted her soot stained teeth and blackened saliva against the pain that shot up through her limbs and burst into her mind.

Finally, with a final heave of strained muscle, the wounded woman flopped herself clear of the End Forge’s gaping mouth, and let herself crash into the dust. Her bloody face half buried in red dirt, she gasped with painful breath that sent clouds of dust swirling into her face and eyes. Her tongue, dry and sore, pushed against the dirt that lined itself against her gums as it fought to retain the last shred of dignity that it could for the fallen warrior.

She had been beautiful once – tall and beautiful – but woe for how she had fallen, crushed under the heel of battle, and cast aside for dead – that tragedy of all fallen warriors that in splendour they live, but in filth they die.

A dry wind passed through her hair and dragged across her exposed face – prickling her wounds, even though she was too wrought with agony to notice. Her eyes, blinded and dry by the merciless dust and dirt, closed for what should be the last time, and with a whimper of pain she twisted awkwardly onto her back – feeling the deadweight of her legs twinge and contort as her body moved.

I am dying, she told herself, a painful, slow death that will make me suffer every second for it…

How had it come to this?

Why had it come to this? Why was she to die here now? Why had all her Sisters fallen?

Questions of a defeated mind that sought for some measure of peace before rotting into the years.

That Inquisitor… he had brought them here… away from their home, and cast them like twigs into the wind… letting them scatter and be dashed upon stone.

Her lungs coughed painfully under the weight of her broken armour.

He had known about this doom, but had sent them to it willingly… For the Emperor, he had said.

He lied. What kind of a God would send the faithful here to die blanketed in dust? They had been forgotten… forsaken… cast aside as lost… All of them, pitted like fruit of blood and flesh ripe for harvest and consumption by the engines of battle.

My life… it was stolen from me… beat by a death not of my choosing – ripped from my body by an order illegitimately made.

Fifty of her Sisters – women all strong and true – had been betrayed… Clara… they had all been betrayed… and that man – that selfish man – he would escape with no one ever knowing how he had betrayed the Emperor’s trust and sent fifty good women to death. Women under her command… her Sisters… women she was responsible for…

If ever she should get the opportunity… she swore that she would be repaid for this betrayal… she would get justice for all who had died with her… in this life or the next, the betrayer would be served with justice of the sword.

 

* * * *

 

Passing low through the the red clouds, Galtman’s shuttle swooped low over the broken ground, hugging every rise and every fall as its sensors swept the ground bellow for any signs of life.

“We are nearing the target zone,” Galtman heard the pilot’s voice crackle into his headset over the roaring wail of the powerful engines that drove the shuttle onward over the rusted land.

Inquisitor Galtman, sitting in the passenger hold of the shuttle belted into a spacious bucket seat, glanced over at his scribe who was intently jotting down notes of from the scanner readout that was displayed at the opposite end of the hold. Seemingly impervious to every jolt and shudder the shuttle made in its flight, the scribe made perfect notes on his parchment for the Inquisitor’s review.

There were no windows in the hold, but Galtman didn’t need any viewports. Concentrating against the background noise, the Inquisitor sharpened his mind and stretched out with his consciousness – feeling the ground below him even as they sped over-top of it.

“We have just passed over the target site,” the pilot announced.

“Make another pass,” Galtman commanded back through his headset. There was much to be seen down there – the sensors had picked that much up – but Galtman knew that there must be more. The End Forge was still there, that much was obvious, and the scanners were picking up bodies and traces of combustible heat, the psychic backwash was also quite potent. Closing his eyes, the Inquisitor sharpened his other-worldly senses and felt his way as a blind man would along the ground. Hard, dry ground… it was rough against his touch… now, tracing forward he felt the jagged rocks, mildly warm in air… there were bodies too – tainted, split, bodies – broken by war; their flesh cool and still, leaving no spark of the life that had once powered their limbs… but that wasn’t everthing… no, not by far…

The psychic backwash was getting more powerful as he crept over the ground and sweat began to bead on his forehead and behind his neck. Through the traces of the warp it was getting difficult to see, and every beat of his heart rattled his mind up off the ground below.

Dear Damnation! What had happened down here? What being could have possibly left a mark so profound that the very atmosphere itself reeked of the warp? No wonder the Magister had picked up the psychic disturbance in orbit – the sorcerery unleashed on this place was so terrible that he feared that even with his human eyes he might perceive it seeping through the hold and eating away at the ship from within.

“Pilot!” he shouted, wiping his face with a hand that trembled wildly beyond his control, “Set us down!”

 

Planetside things appear much calmer now that he saw them with mortal eyes. The landscape was desolate and dry, and its earth red like the sky above. He could taste the metallic tinge of the warp in his mouth, and several times he felt the urge to spit large gobs of what he felt to be tainted saliva onto the ground.

The pilot had brought the shuttle down in a small clearing just over the ridge from the End Forge and had cut the engines; allowing Galtman and his lone companion, Sulius, to brave the quiet world alone.

In the flesh, the warp residue was much easier to withstand, and though he found it taxing, Inquisitor Galtman lead the way up a small incline that overlooked the grounded leviathan that stretched out before him. And what a sight it was.

A monster of rusted metal, the forged beast belied great power – even though the Inquisitor knew that its back was broken, and, impressive a sight as it was, its days of warfare amongst the stars were long over.

It should be dead, he reminded himself – that was his goal, and even though he lacked the might to finish the beast off, he knew now where it was – and such knowledge conferred great power. He would be back at the head of an entire fleet if he had to: this ship must die.

Sulius tapped lightly on his elbow, then the mute little man pointed at the ground for he master to inspect. The earth was disturbed here by heavy footprints. Power armour – it had to be; some of the Sisters had indeed made it this far.

“Come Sulius,” Galtman beckoned his scribe, and the two of the approached the waiting ship.

 

* * * *

 

Blinded by sand and dust, Aribeth struggled to blink her eyes open to the sky above. Someone was coming - she could hear the rustle of small rocks sliding against each other.

Swallowing in a vain attempt to wet her throat, Aribeth weakly flailed her arms as she tried to bring her heavy body about, though all she succeeded in doing was to push the loose earth about in pointless motions.

Her legs hurt.

Defenceless, the Palatine lay on her back and waited with growing angst as the footsteps approached. They would kill her for sure – damnable people – how could she be laid low by the likes of them? It wasn’t right! They would probably skewer her with pikes and let her die slowly, impaled on their weapons. Or maybe they would dismember her when she was still alive – cutting out her innards and defiling her body even as her heart still beat. Her legs were broken – they might hack them off, leaving the rest of her to die as she bled freely onto the earth. Or maybe they would crush her – smash her skull with a rock… it would be mercifully quick at least. Lord Emperor forbid, what if the took her own weapon… what if they killed her with that?

She struggled again in futility – her efforts drawing moaning gasps of pain from between her own cracked lips.

She wanted to cry, to yell to the sky that such should not be her end… but even that was deprived of her, for her eyes were dry and her voice was gone.

Her badly wounded face started to twitch and tremble as the stranger’s shadow fell over her, but despite her fears of death and pain, she did not end there that day, for the stranger seemed content to simply watch her with cruel curiosity.

A rasping croak passed through her mouth. The stranger didn’t answer – instead it stooped over her, and she felt a hand press against her face and close her sore eyes. She struggled, but the stranger was strong. From her side holster, the Palatine’s bolt pistol was drawn, and Aribeth heard the metal clang of the breach being cleared…

 

Lady Aribeth, the Palatine of the Sacred Rose, the tool he had chosen for this job. He thought that she would have perished by now, but Galtman found himself mistaken. Severely crippled, her body bludgeoned and bloody, and her face smear with dirt and blood, the Inquisitor looked down on her ruined form with what one might consider to be compassion – though Galtman himself knew no such sentiment for this woman. She was as good as dead, he realized, and it would only be a matter of time. Still, she had failed him, and failure was not to be tolerated. Leaning over her, Galtman pressed his hand down over her violently blinking eyes and slid them closed before reaching to the holster at her side and freeing the bolt pistol that rested there. It was empty – its duty fulfilled in sending heretics to the hells that surely awaited them – but it still had on more life to take. Into the weapon Galtman loaded a single shell, then turned to see that Sulius was taking down every detail.

“She was a jewel to her Emperor,” he began, cocking the pistol, “and she will be missed dearly for her services in His name.”

Recognizing his voice, the wounded Battle Sister tried to speak and flopped her arms from side to side. Galtman looked at her coldly – her time was up, and he had no more use for her.

“It is fitting that it should end this way,” he said at last, pressing the pistol into the Palatine’s limp hand, and, with a final look at her ruined form, he turned to go with Sulius hurrying in his wake.

And Aribeth, blind, her chest rising and falling quickly, was left alone; forgotten to all but herself.

[daboarder]

brilliant as always i love it and i must admit it gives me great bhopes for the re-write.

[Lady_Canoness]

It's been some time hasn't it? Writer's block ain't no joke folks, and when you're not feeling it, you're not feeling it, so there is no point to force it.

Anywho - after a very long break, I'm back to post the 2nd Chapter of the Fallen Saint, Red Sand, Red Blood. Writing moments of utter depression and near-death anxiety is hard to do - especially considering I've never actually felt either of those! So please follow me on my little tale down an familiar road...

 

The Fallen Saint, part 1: Dreams of Darkness: Chapter 2: Red Sand, Red Blood.

 

Neither asleep nor awake Aribeth lay still for hours on the earthen mound that ascended to the gaping maw of the End Forge. There was no wind now, no sound on the air for her ears to hear, only silence – full, damning, silence – that beckoned her to curse her very existence. So quiet it was that her ears fell numb and the throbbing of her own head sound like a freight train storming through a snow-filled valley. Her limbs… she didn’t know if she had them anymore… she couldn’t feel the weight of their bones or the twisted armour that pinched against her flesh. Everything she felt was senseless tingling… like the absence of feeling was itself some feeling that was impressed upon her. Nothingness had a quality to it… a quality that could be heard, touched, and felt.

Was this what dying felt like? There was nothing to feel… yet at the same time that nothingness was something, and it hurt more than if her bones were being crushed in a vice. If it weren’t for the sand she could feel against her gums, or the grit that scrapped against her eyeballs, Aribeth would have been certain that she was already dead and that her consciousness had drifted free from her broken body – free falling into oblivion. But it was not to be – at least, not yet; the glimmers of agony that sparked through her blinded eye sockets didn’t let her forget that she was alive and that her suffering had not yet ended.

In her ears she thought she heard voices, whispering out to her like friends who waited in anticipation just beyond her closed eyes. Sometimes they talked to her, not expecting an answer, and told her about all the things she could not see. Othertimes they talked amongst each other in hushed voices: ‘The Palatine is asleep, do not disturb her. Please, let her rest.’

They would gather around her bedside with warm hearts and glowing eyes, beaming to each other as they stood over their leader’s weary form. All of them she recognized through her shut eyes and a smile curled on her lips knowing that she would soon awake, warm, safe, and secure in her Sisters’ company. She could feel the light satin sheets so soft against her skin and the warmth that swelled so comfortably down her legs and toes. Bliss – through pure bliss could she hear them, the women so dear to her heart, and as she lay dozing gently to the sounds of their hushed voices in her ears, the Palatine felt both lonely and content at the same time. How she wanted to waken - to open her eyes and see them again – but her slumber was too deep, and she could not pry herself awake. They were talking very softly now, their voices changing; how they muttered and murmured back and forth between them over her bed. She would not wake: what could be the matter? Her face twitched in discomfort as she felt the Sisters around her sway awkwardly on their feet as they looked over her. Some were saying her name from what felt like a mile away – calling to her, begging her to awaken. The voices – she could recognize them all. Please, just let her eyes open, let her look upon her Sisters in White one more time!

They were worried now; Aribeth could hear it in their voices and how their tongues caught and breaths stammered – Emperor above! Some of them were weeping, warm tears streaking down their cheeks. What was happening?! Why would she not wake!? Aribeth’s hands tore desperately at the sheets around her as she tried to rip herself free – to prove that she was awake… but to no avail. She felt air brush against her features as the sheets were pulled up over her face – masking her entirely even as her fingers clawed at the bed. She could feel her breath tighten and her lungs seize as the blanketing fabric tightened over her mouth and nostrils, suffocating her in the comfort of the convent bed. Her lungs stung painfully within her chest and her heart slammed up against her rib cage as the Palatine thrashed inside a satin tomb – feeling the sheets grow tighter and tighter as she screamed out silently for air –

Her armoured hand banged loudly against the red earth and her eyes flashed open as pain seared upwards from her broken legs. Once again she was awake. Once again she was alone. The red sky swirled above her as scarlet clouds mixed with wisps of dark crimson as the tremulous canvas of the heavens above stormed silently. Her legs hurt. She blinked. She could hear her own breath; like wind rushing out from the hollow caverns imbedded in her chest.

She was still alive. There was no bed, there were no Sisters near her – she was still alive.

 

Where are you? I’m here… I’m here on the ground. I need your help. Aribeth? I can’t see you. I’m here… please, come closer. I need your help. Aribeth? Are you dead yet? No… I’m here… I’m alive. I need your help. Are you sure you’re not dead yet, Aribeth? I can’t see you. Where are you? Please… I’m here. Come closer. I need your help… I don’t want to die.

The fingers on her right hand started to tap up and down idly in the red sand… Up and down, up and down… They made sounds like footsteps.

Aribeth?

I’m here.

I can’t see you.

I’m here. Help me, please…

Wait for me. I’m coming.

Her fingers tapped and scratched. The footsteps drew closer. The sky was still swirling up above.

I’m coming for you.

Her fingers tapped louder and louder – soon she tapped so fast that she mashed her entire palm into the dirt repeatedly – banging it so fast against the earth like a heart beating out its last breaths.

And then it fell silent – another hand was covering hers – the footsteps had stopped.

Aribeth’s eyes studied above her. She could no longer see the sky.

“Clara… ?”

The woman’s bright blue eyes were smiling back at her as she saw the familiar face of her dearest friend between her and the heavens above. She was smiling.

“Clara? Is that really you?”

The Celestian’s tawny hair swayed gently as she looked down on her, and her face – unmarked by battle with both bright eyes shining twinkling as she remembered – warmed into a gentle smile. Aribeth could feel Clara’s fingertips brush against her cheek and along her brow. The Palatine’s cracked lips softened as the breath shivered up from her chest.

“I’m here with you,” Clara told her, still brushing a light hand delicately across the Palatine’s face, “you don’t have to be alone…”

Aribeth’s throat clenched tightly, and she tried to weep with joy even though no tears would come. Her own left hand crept into the air, and she saw it – covered in dust and stained with blood as it was – touch against Clara’s face… though in truth she felt nothing, for her fingers were numb.

“Clara…?”

The Celestian nodded slowly, her hair swaying in time with her head, and slid her Palatine's eyes closed hand. Aribeth’s left hand was released, and her eyes cried out as they opened full of dust just as her tongue was trapped behind barricades of loose sand. Pain surged back into her body. Clara was gone.

I’m going to die.

The truth hit her like a stone dropping on her stomach. She had heard about how an agonized mind would grasp at memories and hallucinations before it died, and how those who had returned from the brink of death were often haunted by waking dreams that could not be discerned from reality. Then again, what was real? Was she really lying here slowly dying? Had all of this really happened? What if it was all a dream? No, it couldn’t be… she could feel the pain in her body, she remembered receiving the wounds that stung her flesh… the sand in her eyes, the rocks beneath her head, the dull pinch of her ruined armour tugging against her skin… No, this had to be real.

Wake up, she begged herself, this isn’t happening to me – I’m not dead!

No! Damn it all! Why were these thoughts haunting her? Why was she seeing all these things in her mind? Why could she no longer tell what was real and what was fantasy?

It isn’t fair! This shouldn’t be happening! It must be dream – maybe she fell unconscious – maybe it was all a warp nightmare… Maybe she had never really existed at all… Maybe her entire life had been little more than an illusion.

No! She was real! She had to be – she had to exist! … but she wasn’t dying here! No – she couldn’t be dying!

Her head throbbed.

Why was there no light? She didn’t feel at peace with herself… she didn’t feel like she had ever been granted grace. Why wasn’t she feeling anything? Everything she had ever been told about this moment, taught to expect, was crumbling into ruin around her. Death on the battlefield… it was supposed to be the highest of honours… warriors were to relish it – strive for it – do everything in their power to achieve it! To be killed in the heat of battle against a worthy foe – that is how warriors were supposed to die! …not like this… not waiting to die of starvation or thirst… not waiting for someone to deliver the coup de grace with whatever they had at hand… like a rock… bashing her brains out all over the red dirt.

She swallowed, and felt some of the rough earth grind its way down her oesophagus.

“You have done your duty to the Emperor, Sister Aribeth,” said a voice she had not heard for some time, “there is nothing more you can ask of Him.”

The voice – how was this possible? Last she had heard it felt like years ago in a different time on a different world.

“Canoness Naomi…?” the Palatine rasped, craning her neck to better see where the voice of her late superior was coming from.

Naomi, a tall, proud warrior of experience and grace who had taught the Palatine much of what it meant to lead others, stood awkwardly at the left-most extremity of her vision – her silhouette just visible against the surrounding red. The Canoness, however, made no expression to confirm or deny her former Palatine’s query – indeed she couldn’t; her face was blown off, leaving only a gory crater in the middle of her head.

“Why are you speaking to me?” Aribeth groaned, “Why are you even here?”

“Death comes for us all,” the Canoness’ voice somehow flapped out of her exposed throat, “all we can do is meet it with open arms and a stout heart. Our duty is fulfilled in His name.”

“You’re… you’re not making any sense…” Aribeth moaned painfully as she blinked furiously to clear her vision.

“No,” the red crater turned towards her as if directing its non-existent eyes at her severely, “you just refuse to hear me.”

“You’ve got no face!” Aribeth shouted back at her angrily, her voice hoarse and cracking, “why the hell am I seeing you here! You weren’t even close to coming on this mission! You are dead! YOU ARE DEAD!”

Her chest rose and fell rapidly, hot senseless anger coursing through her consciousness at the phantom, but the vision of her late Canoness was gone, and once again she found herself alone.

“No more!” she shouted to the sky, choking on the flecks of grit that tried to nestle themselves into her lungs, “I don’t want to see any more of these damn people! I don’t want to be told that I should die quietly! I don’t want them to try and console me! I don’t – ”

Her voice came to a sputtering halt and she coughed furiously – launching saliva and dirt from her mouth and out onto her lips and face.

“Leave me alone!”

- but then she was back, inches from the Palatine’s faces; so close that Aribeth could see the crusted flaps of flesh and bone that clung to the front of Naomi’s ruined head; so close that she could smell the grisly rot of death that clung to her.

“You cannot abandon us now, Aribeth!” the ruin of the Canoness’ throat quivered in the cavity of her neck, loosing a whistling howl, “Your life and death belong to the Emperor of Man!”

“Get away from me!” The Palatine screamed back at her, her fists beating against the blood encrusted breast-plate of the dead woman, and, to her surprise, the fearsome corpse backed away.

“Petulant creature!” Naomi’s voice spat through the opened stump of her neck; “How I could have ever counted you as one of us sickens me now! Weakling – afraid of death – you are a disgrace to your title and the memory I once counted as a friend!”

“You’re DEAD!” Aribeth swore back at her. “You’re dead – you’re dead – you’re dead!” she screamed and beat her own arms and head against the earth to emphasise every last syllable, “You. Are. DEAD!”

The late Canoness ignored her, however, and even as Aribeth cursed her very existence she lashed back with stinging retorts.

“How could you turn yourself away from the Emperor, Aribeth? How could you deny your maker!? Have you no shame for your miserable life?” She paused long enough to for the wounded Palatine to spit a gob of grime onto the earth. A growl grew deep within the Canoness’ neck.

“You are no longer one of us, Aribeth. Curse you!”

A dry cackle passed between Aribeth’s parched lips. “The corpse reprimands me?” she coughed and laughed in equal measure; “I must be going mad!”

The Canoness’ faceless body stomped closer with thundering footfalls and the crater on the front of her head glared down at her one-time lieutenant. Standing stock-still, the flaps of dried flesh fluttered on her neck as rasping breaths poured in and out of her chest – the Palatine, a faint grin on her face, still chuckled manically.

“I should kill you,” Naomi’s voice pulled from her neck, “but a long, agonizing death would be better suited for the likes of you.”

The wounded woman still chuckled at her feet.

“Instead,” Naomi continued, stooping low and drawing Aribeth’s sword from its sheath, “know that I am relieving you of your rank and title – you are a Sister of Battle no longer.”

As soon as the sword passed from her possession, the Palatine abruptly ceased her chuckling and regarded the dead Canoness with a look of both longing and loathing.

“Give it back! It’s mine – you have no right to take it!” she scrambled and clawed along the ground to try and reclaim the sword that the featureless woman now held aloft.

“I am the Emperor,” the corpse announced in the Canoness’ commanding tone, ignoring the Palatine as she tried to grab at the dead woman’s legs.

Aribeth screamed in protest and loosed a tirade of abuse at her tormentor – though the towering figure ignored it.

“I am the Emperor, wretched creature,” the crater of raw flesh announced again, “and it is with every right that I remove my gifts from those who are unworthy.”

Once again Aribeth tried to argue, but was stifled by a yelp of pain from her own lips as the corpse’s armoured boot crushed into her already broken face, forcing her to recoil with gasping shrieks of agony.

Without a word the dead woman then turned on her heal, and, with the sword still held aloft with its blade angled up towards the sky, walked away with heavy footfalls over the dusty red landscape.

The Palatine, moaning pitifully in a crumpled heap on the ground, watched her go.

“Wait!” she screamed, but the figure continued to walk with her back to the crippled woman. “Come back! I – I’m sorry!”

Her cries, however, fell on dead ears.

“Come back!” Aribeth cried out after her, “come… come…” With a grunt of effort her hand stretched out to the bolt pistol that lay idly nearby. “I’ll – I’ll kill you!” she mumbled feebly, waving the pistol with its one remaining round towards the Canoness’ receding form. “Damn it… Damn you!”

With a grumbling moan, Aribeth tried to raise herself to her feet on trembling arms, but fell back down immediately with a startled cry of pain as her legs buckled beneath her wait.

No… No… ! She was getting away – away with her sword! She wanted it back. Please! Of all things, let her not die without her sword! But… but…

It was hopeless. She sunk back further onto the red ground and her body sagged. What use was it to struggle in the arms of madness? But then, if she didn’t fight, what was there? She had known it all her life… kill or be killed; victory or defeat – there is nothing else. This was death, but it was her death, and damn her now if she would slip away silently into the sea of souls. It was upon her own shoulders now that the burden fell – no friends, no gods, no saviours – no, for the first time and the last, she was beholden but to herself.

Raising her head from the sand, she looked out over the broken ground with stinging reddened eyes, and, fighting as much with her body as with her spirit, placed one hand before the other and clawed her way forward – hauling her own weight over the uncompromising earth.

Pain searing through her limbs, she lost all thought of time amidst clouds of storming agony. Any pain was worth it however, for if she were to die here on this red earth, she would die how she saw fit.

 

Onwards she went at a crawl, the walking corpse of her mistress always ahead of her.

 

* * * *

 

“This won’t hurt – I promise” the hospitaler smiled gently to comfort the little girl.

“Really?”

“Really. See, one little needle and you’re all done. You never felt a thing did you?”

*

 

It was horribly dark outside and the rain poured down into the dark alleyway in sheets of freezing water.

“I don’t want to leave,” the girl – no more than ten – whispered into the night from the shelter or a nearby doorway, “I’m cold, I’m wet, and these are the only clothes I have left…”

The boy turned around from where he peeked out into the night-filled alleyway and looked at the girl with agitation. “You heard Wings just like I did, and he said that Berrok is out for blood, and Wings never lies.”

The girl shivered, her flaming red hair catching in a flash of lighting and shining brilliantly across her forehead. “I don’t care, Tom – I’m staying here.”

The boy looked like he was going to argue, but then thought better of it: the girl had curled up under a pile of loose rags and shut her eyes. Tom did not sleep that night, but rather watched the dance of shadows in the darkness. Berrok never came, and he never saw or heard from Wings again.

*

 

“Are you insane!? What did you do that for! The arbiters where right there!”

The girl was laughing, her head of shoulder length red hair thrown back in glee as she clutched her prize to her chest. No more than fourteen now and a creature of the streets, the red haired girl danced away merrily through the jostling crowds of ashen faced labourers. Somewhere an arbiter’s whistle could be heard in the distance. Tom, his wavy blond hair matted and hanging in his eyes struggled to keep pace with the girl as he looked this way and that with a worried brow as if fearing that the world would care.

“Stop it! Please, stop it! You’re drawing too much attention!” He hissed, but the girl only laughed more, dancing in the streets with her stolen trophy as her partner.

“Tom!” she shrieked, “Isn’t the world beautiful!? Look! Look!”

Shaking his head, Tom ushered the girl into a side street and hurried her on her way.

*

 

“What will it be, Tom?” smoke wafted from the man’s mouth with every word as he lowered the lho stick from his lips and held it lightly in a heavily jewelled hand.

Tom, now sixteen, could not meet that man’s eyes and buried his face in his hands, his shoulders trembling as he leaned harder on the table that separated them.

“Tom, needn’t I remind you to whom you are speaking? Think boy… ”

“I’ve… I’m all she’s got…” Tom whimpered into his palms, his shoulders shuddering with every breath.

“She’s a criminal Tom, and so are you. There is no honour among thieves, and believe me that she would not hesitate where it you I wanted.”

“But…”

The man drew the lho stick back to his lips, blowing the bitter smoke into the youth’s face. “Don’t stall Tom; my offer won’t stand if you dither.”

“Okay okay!” Tom gave way – the man smiled – “but I go free, right? You’ll forget I ever existed?”

“You have my word,” the man reassured him.

 

*

She was curled asleep when Tom returned to their hovel they shared in the loft of an old, rundown manufactorium. She was smiling like she often did – dreaming of better places no doubt, Tom thought, she always did. Touching her bare shoulder, Tom gently nudged her awake.

“I – I brought you something…” Tom said as the red-haired girl looked at him sleepily, “Markis thought you might like it… here – ” he held out a tiny phial of golden liquid, “ – it something special he said he made just for you.”

The girl smiled and took the phial gently from between Tom’s fingers. “Just for me,” she said warmly and pressed the container to her lips and downed the liquid in a single mouthful.

Tom watched her closely, dreading what he might see – would she scream out in pain? Would she die? He didn’t know.

She licked her lips, then looked into his brown eyes with her own eyes of radiant blue. “Tastes like the honey Bent used to make. Thanks.”

Tom smiled weakly, then backed out of their home as the girl lay back into the heap of rags that was their bed.

He waited below in the streets and alleyways for an hour as he had been told, and when he returned, she was gone.

 

* * * *

 

“What was that?”

Blood trickling over her lips and from her nostrils, the assassin’s bloodshot violet eyes trembled within her skull, but through the whimpering whispers of breath Galtman could perceive no answer.

“Was that your past, mutant?”

The prisoner’s eyes rolled back in her head and her shoulders fell limp, casting her head down against her chest.

He pulled her head back by the hair with no resistance. Dead? No, not yet.

“See that you up the dosages next time,” Galtman spoke to carrion of a man who waited in the corner of the room, “I don’t want her shutting down like that next time.” He threw her head violently back against her chest, then, with a final disdainful glare at the prisoner’s unconscious form, stalked from the chamber.

[Justicar Valius]

How about somthing like that what happened to Darth Vader?

 

Say a daemon that had her [insert weapon here] next to it's head told her that her [insert cherished person here] would be slaughtered in a bloody storm of death during an attack by [insert alien race here] The daemon says it can help her, teach her, train her, tell her things that the senior sisters will not that will help her stop the devstation. She gives in and the daemon does as it said it would and she attacks the leaders of the alien race that will destroy her loved ones. However as the aliens land on the planet of her loved ones one of the commanders walks up to the sister and yells that their revenge will be taken for the attacks by killing her loved ones! She can do little to stop the devestaion and as she realises what has happened the daemon cackles behin her as she falls into despair and rage and then takes number along chaos champions.

 

Only thing is it would probably be a Tzeentch daemon...

[daboarder]

wow i was having the worst day possible but that post just made it all better i was scared that the saint had been forgotten glad its back

[Lady_Canoness]

Proud to please daboarder ;)

The Saint can be delayed, but never forgotten!

 

I really should do something about that first page since no one ever seems to get past it to the story :o

 

-L_C

[Lady_Canoness]

I've been out of the loop for a really long time, and for that I apologize. Truth of the matter is that since my local game-store closed down 40k has almost fallen off the bandwagon to be replaced by the likes of Dragon Age: Origins and Warmachine - add to that that I am finishing up my last year as an undergrad and enlisting in the Canadian Navy when I graduate, you may be able to see that I've been doing a lot other than my writing.

 

Fear not, however, for when I make a promise I uphold that promise! The Saint will never be forgotten, but only delayed!

 

So, I'm here to tell you that the next chapter will be hitting home within a week! Hopefully my long time away from it has rekindled my creative spirit - though I will leave that up to you.

 

What can you expect to see? Well, Aribeth is now taking the unfortunate trip through the sea of souls where she will meet many a strange things and trespass upon the domain's of the four gods themselves before trying to find her way back to reality. Madness follows, and you can be sure that some faces thought to be dead will return to haunt her dreams.

 

Within the week!

[Lady_Canoness]

(removed by author)

[Lady_Canoness]

(post removed)

 

I've done some serious gutting and reworking of the Fallen Saint so chapters 3 and 4 are different.

[Lady_Canoness]

Right then - the main reason you've not seen an update in some time is that I was very dissatisfied with how the story was going and how it seemed to be escaping from the original idea that was captured within the Fallen Saint - that being Aribeth's fall and search for vengeance. Before, I was dragging on far too long and putting way too much emphasis on Chaos, as it were, and not Aribeth's inner daemons. Thus I am bringing the story closer to home as a battle sister story instead of venturing out into uncharted waters and making it more about the nitty-gritty of Chaos. This focus on inner demons also means that familiar characters will be resurfacing as Aribeth can only truly be tormented by what she knows.

Chapter 4 WAS penned, but will not be released - mainly because it draws the story too far away into things too obscure that would likely put off most readers.

Chapter 3 has been altered to redirect the story in this new, preferable direction.

 

No pomp, no glamour, this piece has been a long time coming.

Assuming that readers will still want to read on in the story of Aribeth, I will do my best in the time that I have to get things back on track.

 

Writer's block has been (for the moment) overcome. Delayed, but never forgotten.

 

I give you:

 

---------------------------------------------------------

The Fallen Saint, Chapter 3: For Naught (mk.II)

---------------------------------------------------------

 

It has been long told that when the hallowed Saint Sebastian Thor first partook on his pilgrimage to Holy Terra he saw visions depicting the wills of those martyrs long dead, and that these visions forever guided him onwards to fulfil the Emperor’s sacred work.

Yet it has also been said that the insane Lord Vandire also heard voices and saw visions of those who had come before him, and that he too was guided along the path he tread by the words of those departed.

Divinity or insanity – are they truly little more than opposite edges of a sword?

 

* * * *

 

The capital city of Proctor Primus was burning, and like a horrific cancer the flames of rebellion and dissent shot through her veins.

An uprising – the very word itself fell short of describing the terrible toll millions of angry, ill, and downtrodden human beings could exact on a city. It was as if her very life blood was killing her.

Killing, looting, beating – the mob went wild in the burning city streets as all men were made equal in the struggle for life and death. The Arbites, the Guard, and even the Sisterhood rose to defend the crown jewel of Proctor Primus, but in the fires of war the drive of the maddened horde could not be stopped.

Lives would be lost, blood would be shed, and old scars would never heal.

 

The smell of corpse fires and swirling ash assailed her nostrils as she, Aribeth, the Palatine of the Sacred Rose, dismounted from her transport and tested her feet against the city street. Here on the front the gunfire could be heard clearly not more than a few blocks away through the residential district, and a shiver of longing ran over her flesh as she sensed – anticipated – the fighting to come.

To either side of her the Canoness’ honour guard of Celestian veterans stood ready with drawn weapons and dour faces; the storm would come for them, and they would meet it when it did. The leader amongst them, a scarred veteran by the name of Augusta bowed respectfully and stepped forward to greet the Palatine.

“M’Lady,” she said, ushering the Palatine off the rubble strewn street and into a fenced courtyard that surrounded a hastily abandoned chapel, “our Lady Canoness awaits you within. She requested that you see her at once.”

“You have my thanks,” Aribeth nodded to the Celestian who bowed to rejoin her Sisters, and passed through the cast iron gateway into the courtyard, closing it with a dull creak behind her. Canoness Naomi had summoned her here to this chapel away from the Imperial command at the Basilica for reasons she could only guess at, yet as her armoured feet passed over the weathered flagstones that led to the chapel’s arched wooden door Aribeth found herself at ease. The prospect of battle thrilled her, as did the chance to prove herself under the senior Canoness of the Guardian Preceptory, but even so she did not feel the knot of angst twisting in her gut. She trusted her Canoness completely and she held no doubts about her senior Sister’s ability to command. Whatever her Canoness asked of her, it would be both wise and just, and in her duty to her Emperor and the Sacred Dominion of Man Aribeth would fulfil her Canoness’ wishes.

Stretching out an armoured hand she parted the old wooden doors, and stepped within the chapel’s sanctified walls.

Naomi was an old woman. At eighty-four Terran years she was the most venerable amongst the Sisterhood on Proctor Primus, but though her hair was grey and her eyes were weary, her sword arm was strong and her back was upright. She was the one who had placed the mantle of Palatine on Aribeth’s shoulder, and she was the one who had taught the Palatine almost all she knew about being a soldier – a leader.

As Aribeth entered the chapel, the Canoness knelt before the alter in full battle dress with her head bowed in prayer. She did not look up at the sound of the doors closing.

“You summoned me, my Lady?” Aribeth said, approaching her superior and taking a knee just back from her and to the left as she waited for her Canoness to address her.

For a time the Canoness said nothing, still bowed in prayer, but Aribeth knew no impatience, and remained silently waiting at her Mistress’ command.

Outside the gunfire ceased.

“I did, Aribeth,” the Canoness said at last as she rose to her feet and turned to face her second in command. “I wanted to tell you that you are dead.”

No face did her Canoness wear – only a crater of gore and blasted flesh turned to meet her eyes where a face should have been.

Aribeth could not speak – her mouth was entombed with sand.

 

* * * *

 

Life had never been so unwelcome. Her brain pounded and throbbed painfully insider her skull, and her eyes burned with a stinging whine that through madness alone could she hear. By reason she should have died long ago – by reason she should have accepted her fate – by reason she should have embraced death at the side of her true love… but reason had long since fled this Palatine’s mind.

Hatred, anger and agony was all that she saw now. The face of the man who betrayed her was all that she felt. Forget the honour of dying: there was no glory in oblivion.

… and her sword… the corpse of her better led her ever-onwards across the scorched earth.

 

Time had lost its meaning to her long ago in either minutes or a lifetime. Pain became as real to her body as the limbs it dwelt in to the point where the Palatine felt nothing more than its presence. Even death seemed like a dot on a distant horizon, for how could she think of death when she knew not even if she were alive.

Eventually the broken woman dragged herself up onto legs that felt awkward and unlike her own, and hobbled meekly in a direction she could not control through neither mind nor movement.

Still, through the rocky hills of red sand, all that she saw before her was the mirage-like image of the bloody woman in white with her sword held high. Eventually, however, the phantom finally came to a stop upon what appeared to be an ancient stone bridge spanning the breadth a long-since dead riverbed, and there she wait in silence for the wounded Palatine to stumble closer and eventually crumple onto the crumbling flagstones of the ancient structure.

“Why have you come here, wretched creature?” Naomi’s hollow head asked, turning the red crater of her face towards the Palatine’s broken and exhausted form.

Aribeth did not answer, and sank lower onto the ancient stones until she lay in crumpled heap unable to distinguish exhaustion from pain.

“Why have you followed me?” Naomi asked again, her own bloodied for standing tall and resolute against the background of the blasted world.

“Why not?” came the Palatine’s whispered reply. Death and life were two of the same. What difference did it make?

“You are dead, Aribeth. You died the moment you left the End Forge behind. You died as soon as you forsook the Emperor in your heart.”

“I… I don’t believe you…”

The crater of flesh in the Canoness’ head was silent, as if trying to read the collapsed Palatine with eyes that no longer existed.

“I’m here now,” Aribeth breathed; “I still remember it all… I still feel the sand in my mouth… this is too horrid to be a dream.”

“No dream, fool – this is your death,” Naomi’s voice scolded her from deep within her throat. “This is your hell. This is your penance. This is what you have earned for your treason.”

The Palatine groaned. “Then would you please hold your… tongue? I suffer enough without your lies.” She extended a quaking arm towards the bloodied figure; “Just give me my sword…”

A snorting grunt erupted from the Canoness’ bared neck. “If you want it,” she said, “then claim it,” and threw the power sword down from the bridge into the dried up riverbed below where it landed with a dull *clang* - disturbing the dust and dirt to lay tantalizingly close as a unattainable prize.

There it was, just over the edge waiting – waiting for her to fall over the edge and claim it. It was so close…

Not a deceiver, the faceless spirit made no move towards the blade, but waited in unmoving silence as the broken woman at her feet slowly crawled her way towards the fallen prize.

No breath of wind spoke and the world was silent as all that could be heard was the scrape of armour of ancient stone, and even that felt far away… no sounds, not even any feeling… everything felt so far, far away. The world lost its focus in her eyes and bit by bit dripped from her mind… but the sword was so close… Not now. Where was it? The phantom beside her said something that fell sluggishly on her ears so that the Palatine could not understand the words. Where was it all going? No pain… no darkness… no light… Her hands were no longer and she felt world fall away, letting her fall down, down, and down. Was this death? No… no, it felt more like sleep… but her sword… it was so close.

 

* * * *

 

She dreamed of machines – always of machines. Machines that cut, that hummed, and traced over her flesh. Arms like those of mechanical gods came and went through her mind and carried things back and forth across the sky under the brilliance of electric stars. She never saw them clearly in her dreams – only in shadow, when a dark silhouette passed overhead and for a brief moment she could see outside the blinding light into a world that she perceived seconds at a time. The walls had be grey in the light, and she dreamed that their faces would be cool to the touch so as to sooth her body.

++I need you to tell me where this is.++

Sometimes she remembered the brush of air against her skin, and she would stretch out her fingers with the whish of maybe touching something as it passed by – maybe feeling what the world was like outside.

There were sounds too. A choir of hisses and whines would follow her everywhere she went. A high ring would wake her up; a series of thumps, bumps, and jingles would keep her company during her day; and finally a soothing rumble would kiss her goodnight where the sounds of her dreams would replay themselves over and about in her head.

++Is this how you were made? How you were changed?++

There were no smells though – nothing in her dreams of smells. Her nose was cold, but sometimes it would be warm.

++This is useless to me. Move on.++

Her eyes stung as the world twirled around her and she could recall little other than pain – dull, aching pain. Her muscles seemed to be throbbing against the envelope of her skin from the inside as her blood – like a coarse river of sand – pulled itself all through her body and into her extremities. She wanted to spill her innards out of her mouth and simply die to make the pain stop. People were speaking, but she could not hear them. She was cold, and everything slipped into blackness.

“The subject is reacting to stimuli; she’s waking up.”

She heard the voice – bland uninterested. Still she could not see.

Something brushed against her.

“Look at you…” the voice was unclear – altered – his words were clumsy and lost. “… you are beautiful… you are perfect…”

++Who is that? Why can’t you hear him?++

“… was a success … are you pleased with it…?”

++What have you forgotten? What are you hiding from me?++

The mysterious voice was back speaking again in his undistinguishable tongue; “Very pleased, Mother, very pleased indeed! She’s … could have hoped… … … real!”

++You are holding something back! I will find it! Show it to me! Show me what you are hiding!++

There was light in this memory – her eyes had opened. Still they hurt – she didn’t know why – but she felt warm, safe, cared for. A withered man in undistinguishable clothes stood somewhere beside her – she remembered the look of love on his face, his caring eyes and tender features… tender even behind all his age. She felt warm to him… like she had known him somehow all her life. She’d never seen him before.

++Who is he?++

He was her Mother – he cared for her – he held her close and warm. She’d never been touched by him before… but she could not remember.

++You gave that memory willingly. Is he dead? Where is the other person?++

The other… she didn’t know… He was standing close to her and she had to look up at him. His hand was touching her cheek – she only felt numbness. His fingers ran down her neck and touched her shoulder – stroking it, maybe. She looked into his face… no, she didn’t remember it – she didn’t remember his features or what he looked like. She could not remember anything about him.

++You are hiding him. I know you know who this man is.++

She… she couldn’t remember him. She’d never known him. He was a stranger to her. His words… they did not stir her memories or set her heart to flutter. He was still. Nothing important.

++You are lying to me. Tell me who he is, or I will rip it from you!++

The Inquisitor was broken on the floor, bleeding from his nose and sternum. She stood over him, watching her own needle-like fingers dance in front of the man’s desperate eyes. Her blood and sang and her heart raced! She…

++Enough! You will give me what I want!++

The walls of her cell were cold and grey.

Her heart leapt as two las-bolts hissed passed her shoulder.

The blue glove fit so well to her body.

Blood ran down her face as her head bit into concrete, but she quickly caught the trickle of scarlet with her tongue.

She waited alone in the shadows.

The man’s head collapsed into red gore and covered her with a beautiful mist.

She was alone with him, her sword at his throat.

The boy, Roland, he was amusing, and even more so when he was scared – which was most of the time.

++Don’t try to hide behind these pointless memories. I will find what I am looking for with or without your cooperation.++

The door softly clicked shut behind her as she stepped into his chambers. A warm shiver ran up her chest. She did not want to remember this. The room was tidy and richly decorated – she had been here many times before – but still she could not remember anything remarkable about the room.

The man was sitting on the opposite side of the bed with his back to her, but he knew she was there. He had been waiting for her.

++Yes, that is him! Take me to him!++

He said something, but it was only empty noise to her ears.

++What did he say? I know you are hiding this from me! What did he say!?++

She crossed over to the bed and quickly mounted up behind him – her legs wrapping around his and the flat of her stomach pressed up against the small of his back as her long hands swept off his shirt and caressed the muscles of his chest. She could not remember what it felt like to touch him. He said something again, his hands now playing over her thighs, yet he was nothing but noise and numbness.

++Damn you woman – you will show me this man!++

“Why so many games…?” she felt her teeth and tongue touch against his ear as her hands parted ways to work up and down along his body, “… I want you now, and nothing else.”

She tried to forget – to forget everything that she had ever seen, felt, or heard from this man – she tried to forget everything about him and what he had meant to her.

He turned to her face, though she forgot his, and his numbness touched her lips. She spread herself over the soft quilt, drinking in the sensuality of his presence and remembering the sparkle of his eyes and the touch of his hands against her skin. She couldn’t hear his words as he slid on top of her, but one word escaped her memory – one word she could not hide – one word that betrayed him to her captor.

She closed her eyes and remembered his hand slipping below her navel…

With a breath… Montrose… he was betrayed.

 

The assassin finally lost consciousness and her chin dropped back to her chest as Galtman withdrew from her mind.

A deathly silence had settled around them in the interrogation room.

Montrose.

Ernst Galtman looked at the slumping form of the assassin restrained in her chair.

Montrose.

He was not fond of the man… but a traitor? Galtman pinned his hands behind his back and paced thoughtfully around the room – circumnavigating the still assassin several times as a storm of thoughts unfurled in his head.

Too many questions and too few answers.

Regardless, he knew what must follow.

 

****

 

How long had it been?

Aribeth awoke lying face down on a stone platform that rose above a wasteland of scorched rock and swirling ash.

A stabbing pain between her shoulders and a prickling numbness in her face convinced her that she was still alive… or as alive as she could be. A hallucination? A trick of a dying mind? Perhaps, but something in her gut made her want to believe otherwise – like a subconscious feeling of one’s own existence.

Feeling her nose pushed against hard rock, the Palatine gave a dry, rasping cough and pushed her head up from the ground. The pain between her shoulder blades instantly intensified, and forced her forehead back down onto warm stone as she gulped down warm, dry air.

It made no sense she thought, absent-mindedly looking sideways at her fingers and the dirt encrusted under her trimmed nails, the dried riverbed was sandy and only a few feet away from what she remembered. Her sword had been just beyond her grasp, and she had pulled herself down to get it. Naomi… wait, Naomi was long dead, but then who had she followed? Nothing seemed clear.

Aribeth watched with mild curiosity as the hand beside her face extended its fingers flat onto the rock and then gripped at its rough surface.

She must have… lost consciousness.

The End Forge, she had fallen there with the rest of her Sisters against the servants of darkness. She remembered pain, but nothing after that was clear. Maybe she had died she mused – her fingers now sprinkling bits of dust and sand back onto the rock only to pick them up again.

But…

She watched her hand now with wider eyes – as if suddenly something alarming had been freshly revealed.

With a startled gasp and ignoring the pain of her back, she pushed herself into a hurried sitting position and flailed with bare feet to stand. With horror she realized that she was totally naked from head to foot and struggled to cover herself as she twisted on the spot to see what eyes were watching her. Where was her armour and underclothing? Who had stripped her and why had they left her here? Too many questions, she sat back down – her eyes still frantic – as her hands and legs tied themselves together to protect the Sister’s modesty.

But she was alone – completely alone – perfectly alone.

Still not moving her arms, she rose into a low crouch; turning her head from side to side. Nothing. No movement. No noise. Nothing but leagues of scorched rock and blasted dust that rose into great mountains like blackened teeth all around her.

Impossible – it had to be.

Looking upwards, the sky was filled with swirling burnt-brown storm clouds that crackled with emerald lightning and looking down to her feet she saw nothing but dirt clinging to her skin: no wounds, no pain, and only the blackened dust of this place.

How strange that she could feel so awake in what must be a dream.

The stone platform was oddly circular in shape and, keenly aware of the vulnerability of her own skin, high enough off the ground that she could not lower herself onto the rocks below without risking injury from the fall.

Hugging her arms tightly over her chest, Aribeth tiptoed around the edges of the platform. The rock was rough and caused her to wince and sometimes stumble as her toes hit the jagged edges in its surface and loose bits of stone stuck upwards into the soles of her feet. Half-way around, however, Aribeth spied a peculiar gouge carved into the stone, and as she came closer it was revealed to be a single shelf cut into the rock as if part of a stair. Creeping closer on all fours, the Palatine soon found that there was more than one, and that somebody had carved one shelf after the other into the stone as to make hand and foot holds that created a way up and down from the circular stone.

Would it have been possible for Naomi to bring her here? She wondered, but shook her head: was it possible that a long dead Canoness could appear alive on a distant planet with a hole in her head?

Taking one last glance over her shoulders to see that no-one was watching her, Aribeth turned around and lowered herself down the side of the circular stone onto the ground.

What looked like a path worn through the scorched earth broke the uniformity of her surroundings led away from the plinth and up into the mountains. Hasistating, Aribeth traced the path for as far as her eyes could see until it disappeared behind a cluster of standing stones and into the crags cut between the mountains, and felt shivering curiosity to see where it went. Inactivity would be of no use to her after all, she reasoned, and whatever lay ahead may well yield answers.

Even when following the path, however, Aribeth could not shake the feeling that she was being watched, and she would often look up over her shoulders to the rocky outcroppings high above her head half expecting to see the corpse of her long dead Canoness standing silently in the mountain heights.

The pain in her shoulders had also mysteriously vanished, and even her feet and legs felt immune to the harshness of the terrain around her. What had happened? Last she could remember, her body had been broken and her mind was reeling in its death throws to bring her to the brink of madness. Is this what happened when a heathen died, she wondered, their soul was not elevated to the Golden Halls of the Emperor, but was doomed to wander for all eternity in obscurity? Perish the thought. She was not dead – she felt certain of it – and this… this was like nothing she had ever imagined. Fire and brimstone and the screams of tortured souls… it was almost laughable; if this was what it felt like to be on the brink of death…

No, she shook her head, searching for some sort of meaning was not for her. All she could do was press on.

 

In a passage of time, the lone figure of the Palatine – her flesh a stark white against the otherwise dark world – passed beyond the sight of the circular stone resting in its valley and found herself following the worn path as it twisted through the mountains, along the edge precipices, under towering cliffs, and across sloping hillsides. Never did she see any trace of another living being in the silent rocks, and never did her fear of finding her rotting Canoness lurking around a bend or over a ridge materialise. Occasionally she would pass what looked like crumbling archways marked with weathered hieroglyphs, or the mouth of a cave flanked by two lump-like stones that may once have been statues many eons ago, yet she felt no compulsion to ever stop or examine these findings – indeed they oft slipped from her mind completely, as if the mountains themselves were telling her that they were of no importance. Though after hours of tireless travel, or perhaps even days, a kernel of angst seemed to pass through the air and worked itself, shuddering, into her gut. Something had come from nothing, and suddenly the Palatine felt all the more exposed by her nakedness and particles of a formless dread seeping into her mind. The path wound on as ever before, however, and around every turn it would show her nothing she had not seen before. The feeling made no sense to her, and the fact that it had seemingly come from nowhere and of its own volition frightened her even more. Yet the more she walked, the stronger the feeling grew until she felt as if she could take no more and was on the verge of retreating back the way she had came when the worn pathway came to an abrupt end.

In a ravine, with towering walls of stone so near on either side that it was at most ten paces across, the beaten path through the scorched rock reached its terminus at the mouth of a massive archway in which stood two gargantuan doors of flawless black.

Seeing these doors Aribeth’s heart skipped in her chest and her breath tightened inside her lungs, and she knew at once that this was the focus of her fear. Not the doors themselves, not the unknown that lay beyond, not the mystery of their remoteness, rather fear dwelt here like a palpable entity. In a way they reminded her of the End Forge – as a majesty of sorts, resonating a greatness that she could feel inside her very being.

Flanking the doors on either side, as with the crumbling ruins she had seen before, were two lumps of shapeless, weathered stone that may once have been vaguely humanoid in semblance. One had an odd stump protruding from its side that looked as if it had been longer once but had since been broken off, while the other had a large chunk missing from what may have been the statue’s head.

Aribeth approached the second of these statues with cautious, small steps and, after a moment’s pause, reached out tentatively to trace her fingers around the crater in the statue’s head. It was soft – warm even – and when she brought her fingers back before her face she saw them stained with red clay.

“Why are you here?” the voice of the dead woman came from behind her, again asking the question.

Aribeth did not turn to look and see the fallen Canoness standing behind her – she did not want to speak with the bloody hole in Naomi’s head – she did not want to believe that the spectre of a dead woman haunted her still.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she answered to the statue in barely more than a whisper, looking up into its blasted head as if it were the reason behind the dead woman walking.

“Creature of weakness and fear,” Naomi taunted her with a low rumbling from her exposed throat, “you are naked without the Sisterhood! You are nothing without the Imperium of Man! Look at you – look how you wander alone with naught but the flesh on your bones through oblivion seeking what you know not!”

“So are you,” Aribeth mumbled in response, still not looking at the armoured corpse behind her and hugging her arms tighter around herself as if to ward off the Canoness’ scalding remarks. “You are a revenant of a dead woman come back to haunt me because the Sisterhood is all I knew – all we knew – and now you have stolen even that from me.”

A chortling laugh gurgled up from the Canoness’ neck, and Aribeth shuddered at the thought of bloody phlegm being loosed from the quivering flesh that was the dead woman’s head.

“I am righteousness!” Naomi replied forcefully; “I am strength! I am the Emperor! I am all you could not be, and what you now blame for your own failing! I took nothing from you that you did not already cast aside!”

“You are a rotting carcass that does not have the good sense to die.” Aribeth interjected coldly, digging her finger nails into her arm to quench her rising fear and frustration in a twitch of pain.

“Do you think I am blind to your lust for vengeance?” Naomi continued, ignoring the woman in front of her; “Do you think your anger and confusion will redeem the petty wrongs you have suffered throughout your miserable life?”

Aribeth did not know, nor did she care to answer.

“You were made to suffer, Aribeth, as are all others. You suffer because it is demanded of you, only you were too weak to see it. You confused your duty with hurt and your foolish notions of right and wrong. Millions die a million times over in service to the Immortal Emperor of Mankind, and you – one pathetic woman – desire justice because you feel violated? There is no justice. There is only duty to Him.”

“Galtman will die for what he’s done, I promise you that,” the Palatine snarled, now staring emptily at the flawless black of the doors before.

“He is not where your vengeance begins,” the corpse sneered, “nor will he be where it ends. But you lack the strength, the conviction, to see it through. You are a weak and pitiless creature.”

“He killed my Sisters. He dies for that.”

“Say what you will, but to overcome death and claim your vengeance you must have the will to surpass any obstacle, skin that does not feel, arms that know nothing of want or weariness, and power enough to shatter your own prison – all of which you have not.”

At last Aribeth turned towards the corpse and came face to face with the broken head and blood-stained armour of her one-time superior. “Why are you saying this?” she demanded of the dead woman, “why are you tormenting me.”

“I want you to realize your death,” the corpse answered, then pointed towards the massive doors. “Through there you will find your deserved death, and you will see that your own weakness is all you have to blame for your failings.”

Aribeth glanced back at the doors, and felt the sudden urge to force them open well up insider her chest. Only oblivion awaited her if she stayed with the corpse, and, one way or another, the same fate awaited her through the portal. Life? What did she have left? True, she could still see and feel, but in her heart she knew she was empty and either riding out the last gasps of her dying mind or standing here with nothing in the company of a dead woman.

“Are you saying that I will die if I pass through these doors?” Aribeth asked the corpse, turning to look at the blood-smeared figure once again.

“All things end, though you still can choose how you will meet yours.”

The Palatine nodded and, ignoring the corpse that now stood silently behind her, placed the palm of her hand against the cool darkness and pushed.

[Lady_Canoness]

double post removed.

Thanks internets!!!!

[Lady_Canoness]

Hot off the press (and thus probably with a few typos hanging about) is Chapter 4 of the Fallen Saint!

I really feel that this is getting back to its roots and feeling how it should (i.e. not a total brain f*ck and actually something cool)

 

So, here we have it!

 

--------------------------------------

The Fallen Saint: Chapter 4: Faith's Fall

---------------------------------------------

 

The four pillars of the Emperor

The Adeptus Ministorum.

The Adeptus Administratum.

The Adeptus Mechanicus.

The Adeptus Astronomica.

All else is ash in the wind.

All else is transitory.

 

With little more time than to blink, Aribeth was pulled through the opening doors into a darkness that lasted for no more than a heartbeat before re-emerging from the other side into a totally different plane of existence. Gone were the scorched rocks and barren landscape as Aribeth set foot onto the solid pavement of an Imperial hive city teaming with noise, life, and activity. People were running furiously this way and that, and she could feel a hot wind blow against her face. No one seemed at all surprised by her sudden appearance – if indeed she was noticeable at all.

On her first instinct she looked behind her and, to her surprise, found no trace of the door or the archway through which she had just entered – just a plain, weathered concrete wall daubed with Imperial motivational slogans and other trappings. She reached out and ran her fingers the length of the wall just in case. Her hand was armoured – pure white armour; the same armour she worn all her adult life. It was real – she could feel its weight on her shoulders and how the well maintained suit mirrored her every movement just as it always had. Here hair was even tied back in tight braids to keep it out of her face in battle. The Palatine allowed herself a contented smile – she was even wearing her black satin cloak draped over her shoulders and a bolter was hanging by her hip. Amazingly everything was as she had remembered it… everything but her sword, for the weapon was notably absent from the beautifully crafted scabbard at her side.

Unimportant, she reminded herself; where was she? Across the road from her, and the only real structure of any note, was a grand Imperial church. The richly decorated outside was dominated by a massive bust of the double-headed eagle that glowered down from its perch overlooking the ornately engraved main doors that granted access to the holy place. Seeing it now, however, Aribeth found herself stung by the cold indifference radiating from the massive structure and its barred gates to the commotion around it. What she may of once found comforting in the unmoving consistency of the church she now found unsettling. She was on the opposite end now – she was the one looking in at it instead of looking out from it, and at once she was aware of how otherworldly it all seemed and how it did not move with the flow or energy of those around it.

“Sister!”

Aribeth looked up as a breathless planetary defence soldier with the stripes of a corporal came skidding to a halt in front of her with an autogun clutched in his hands and a wild look in his eyes.

“Sister!” the man said again, his breath coming in gasps; “Sister we need your help! The orks are making another push at the gatehouse and we won’t have the guns to hold them back unless we rally all the manpower we have. Please Sister, more than half of the men have already fled their posts! We can’t do this alone!”

Momentarily taken aback, Aribeth was at first confused, but then she heard it – the crashing of explosions and the chattering gunfire. The reality of her situation came into focus in one stroke: she was in the middle of a warzone.

Not waiting for a response, the corporal sprinted off towards what Aribeth guessed was the gatehouse and was soon lost in the bustling crowd that ran in the other direction.

Should she follow him? Stunned, the Palatine found herself trapped in a confused fog even as the sounds of battle grew louder around her. This was a dream, wasn’t it? She’d never been here before in her life – nor did she know where ‘here’ was. Was she supposed to fight in her dream? What was she supposed to do?

“You were a Sister of Battle. Are you one still?”

She jumped at the sound of the dead woman’s voice and spun around to see the corpse of her former Canoness standing beside her on the street. The woman was still dead, faceless and dead – Aribeth could smell the infecting stench of her rotten flesh as it hung in clumps from her wound – but not one of the passers by seemed to take notice. She recoiled, her mind reeling, and a few staggered words of gibberish pushing between her lips.

“You were a Sister of Battle, and Sister’s of Battle fight,” Naomi said matter-of-factly.

It was then that Aribeth noticed that the dead Canoness was not alone, but was accompanied by two fleshy men who bore distinctly apathetic airs as they squinted at their surroundings will bulgy, toad-like eyes. They were both well dressed in fineries that Aribeth recognized as ecclesiastical, and held small reliquaries in their bejewelled hands. Their eyes fell on Aribeth – gross, overstuffed, boring eyes – and the Palatine suddenly felt an intense hatred swell up inside her for these slothful oafs and their over-extravagant trinkets.

“This hive is being abandoned to the enemy,” Naomi stated, her words expressionless as they came out of the stump of her neck. “All peoples of importance have been evacuated. We’re leaving.”

Aribeth just looked at her. She could feel the weight of the bolter in her hands. “What do you mean?” she asked, her mouth slightly agape. “I – I thought we were supposed to be fighting?”

“We’ve evacuated all that we can,” the faceless Canoness explained, “and now it is our duty to see to their safety and guard them should they be pursued.”

“But there are still people here!” Aribeth looked around her at the still crowded streets as people ran in search of safety. “You want to leave *now*? You want to surrender ground to the enemy?”

One of the slovenly ecclesiasts gave a small cry of surprise as he was bumped by a passer by.

“These men are the last people to be evacuated,” Naomi said in reference to the creatures behind her – Aribeth did not know if she would grant them the honour of being ‘men’ – “The assets of the Imperium are being preserved, as is our duty.”

The bumped clergyman was now tending to a speck of dirt on his sleeve with a laced neckerchief.

“But these are Imperial citizens!” Aribeth protested in alarm; “We have to protect them! We have to protect the hive!”

“People can be reborn and cities rebuilt,” Naomi lectured her, “but knowledge is lost forever.”

“You can’t be serious – you’re not even real – this is a test, it has to be…” Aribeth tried to deny her, but at the same time was under siege by her own doubts and insecurities: it looked real, this place, felt real, and even smelled real. What if it was real? There is a corpse with a hole in its head talking to me – it isn’t real. There is no war, no hive on the verge of collapse, and no lives at stake. It is a dream.

“Maybe it is a dream,” the Canoness stepped towards her and interrupted her thoughts so that the bloody mash of her head was right up close the Palatine’s face, “but if it is a dream then it is very lifelike. Every day war falls upon the Imperium, and what you see here as just a dream is a reality for countless billions of souls. Think carefully before you make your next move, Aribeth, or you may find out just how life-like a dream can be.”

The faceless Naomi concluded her warning just as the scream of jets passing overhead heralded the arrival of an Aquila shuttle that slowed to a hover before coming to rest half-way down the city block from where they stood and lowering its access ramp. The toady ecclesiasts started to waddle in the space-craft’s direction the moment its struts touched pavement, but Naomi lingered for a moment more.

“The Imperial Church is leaving this place,” Naomi said in a tone that could almost be considered challenging, “I would ask that you join us.”

Aribeth glanced past the Canoness at the waiting shuttle and the men shuffling towards it through the bustle. Would she stand with them – the Church of the Imperium – and leave the war to run its course in return for the offer of redemption? Redemption from what? Sin? Of what sin was she guilty that could be forgiven through cowardice? She’d lost her Sisters and her faith in the good purpose of men – how would that be solved by running away? What could the hold of a shuttle offer her to ease that pain? If there was any peace to be found, it would be found at the unfaltering edge of a warrior’s blade, not in the confines of her own head against foes she could neither see nor name.

“Leave then,” Aribeth glowered at the dead woman defiantly, “and take the Ecclesiarchy with you. I always thought of myself as a warrior instead of a preacher.”

“As you wish,” Naomi replied without hesitation and turned her back on the Palatine to march after the ecclesiasts; “die as you should, Aribeth.”

“If the Imperium won’t stand for its own, then why should I stand for it?” Aribeth called after the retreating corpse. “I don’t care if this is a dream! I fight for me and people who need me!”

The Canoness said nothing – her back was turned against the Palatine as she continued to walk towards the waiting space-craft, the waiting escape.

“Fine! Walk away!” Aribeth shouted, banishing the woman with an emphatic wave of her arms. “Hide behind your comforting words and finery! I know who is the weak one – I know more of bravery and duty than you ever could!”

Naomi boarded the shuttle and the hatch closed behind her as the Aquila lander slowly rose from the ground and soared off into the brilliant sky with the Palatine watching it go until it disappeared behind towering the towering columns of smoke stretching up from the lower hive.

Let them run. Let them hide, cowering in fear.

Aribeth continued to fume with anger against her corpse-like tormentor until the gate house ruptured and collapsed with a colossal explosion that shook the very ground on which she stood and showered debris indiscriminately unto the heads of those still fleeing through the roads.

“The orks!” someone was screaming, “The orks have broken through!”

If chaos had not gripped the hive-block around her before, then it certainly did now, and people stampeded one another in a vain search for safety as the wave of greenskins swarmed through the still-flaming gatehouse killing as they went.

With mere blocks between her and the murderous aliens, Aribeth had no choice but to flee along with countless others in search of a safety she knew not how to find.

 

* * * *

+You are certain of this?+ the trembling head of Lord Inquisitor Jacobus Dolmoerk asked as it floated several feet from the holo-display embedded in the far wall of Galtman’s office aboard the Magister.

“Quite certain, Lord Inquisitor.”

+Most distressing,”+ the image of Dolmoerk shook its head and looked at something outside of the display that Galtman could not see.

“The information was extracted with great difficulty from an assassin that infiltrated my ship and tried to kill me,” Galtman added with noted severity, “and, given the nature of my interrogation methods as well as the methods employed on the attempt on my life, I have no doubt that Inquisitor Montrose is a traitor.”

Dolmoerk nodded in silence, though his gaze was directed elsewhere as Galtman spoke.

+I have with me here Inquisitor Ronald Wyman and Lord Inquisitor Augusto Triel,+ the head of Dolmoerk informed him, +they will look into apprehending Montrose as well as issuing a warrant for his arrest to all secure assets. This matter will be investigated, Galtman. Do you suspect that Montrose is after the End Forge?+

“It’s possible,” Galtman admitted tonelessly, “though, whatever his objectives, he has thus far only struck against me.”

+To the best of your knowledge,+ Dolmoerk corrected him. Galtman said nothing, and made no display of any displeasure.

+Regardless,+ Lord Dolmoerk continued, +what progress have you made in dealing with the End Forge?+

“Montrose’s treachery crippled my attempts to deal with it directly,” Galtman replied coldly, “but given more time and more resources I will see that it is dealt with.”

+Your report said as much,+ Dolmoerk frowned, +though I must admit that I was hoping your conclusions were purposely scant for the sake of brevity.+

“Results are tangible, Lord Inquisitor, not fancy in writing.”

At this Dolmoerk gave a snort of laughter that carried into his holographic image. +One more thing before I let you go,+ the Inquisitor Lord added as an afterthought, +the assassin you mention in your report – we’ve forwarded some files that you might find interesting…+

 

*

 

Project Oberon: a breeding program designed to utilise highly advanced genetic engineering and bio-implantation to impregnate living hosts with a synthetic geneseed, that would, in theory, the most efficient and independent killers the Imperium had ever seen. In theory, project Oberon would have provided the Inquisition with hundreds – if not thousands – of assassins for their exclusive use and under their direct governance. In theory, the project was a joint operation of all three branches of the Inquisition, and, once again in theory, it had been terminated eleven years ago after much debate.

According to the documents now in Inquisitor Galtman’s possession, Project Oberon had been aborted after the project leaders had been discovered to be using unsanctioned xeno technologies and tissues in their experimentations on living human subjects. The geneseed they had planned to use was not pure like the one of the Astartes, but was instead an amalgamation of unproven technologies and questionable gene samples taken from various mutant and xeno sources.

Preliminary testing had primarily been on immature human females ranging from eight to sixteen years of age (though it appeared that some project developers suggested that older subjects could also be used) and sustained an abysmal rate of failure in which all fifty initial subjects died within moments of impregnation.

Had the project reached fruition however, Galtman read, it was posited that it would have produced assassins that were physically and mentally superior to natural human beings. Details expounding any hypothesised results were guesswork at best, Galtman found, and many attached articles were still considered to have the top-most security encryptions, though the picture being painted by the various data sources was beginning to look more and more familiar.

Project Oberon was supposed to have been terminated, but if that was the case, then what would explain the woman he had incarcerated onboard the Magister? If Montrose had her, then he would also have connections to the real Project Oberon and any surviving subjects, and if he did he could also have many more of these lethal instruments under his control.

 

*

 

“I know what you are.”

It was statement, and one that suggested as much as it denied.

Mercy looked up at him with swollen, blood-shot eyes – the violet in them dimmed a dull greyish colour. The breath that passed through her nostrils and over her cracked lips as faint and brittle, like wind over sun-scorched wood. She had had neither food nor water for onwards of seven days, and with each day she weakened exponentially – her once sharp mind like a mental fortress had fallen into disarray. He had marvelled at how the giant woman had survived for so long, but now he understood that part of her enhancement was to make her capable of generating her own nutrition – the bare minimum to keep her alive. Self sufficient indeed. Her skin had grown pasty and grey, however, and Galtman doubted that she would be able to survive much longer if he kept her immobile and her system flooded with disabling sedatives.

Mercy dropped her eyes back to the floor, and her head hung limply from her neck. If she could speak, she wasn’t about to.

“You were created in Project Oberon,” Galtman continued, standing before her and examining the restrained woman with an unreadable gaze. “You were turned into an abomination, albeit an impressive one. Do you remember anything of your abilities?”

Memories came tumbling out of her mind - confused memories, but memories given freely all the same: every kill, every feeling, every memory that she cherished were his to examine and exploit, and given time he could know her better than she knew herself.

For some time he picked through her mind, but not once de she even look at him as he swam about freely through the passages within her head, not once did she twinge as he glimpsed her deepest secretes revealed, not once did she stir as he saw truths that she would not even admit to herself.

He enjoyed it – revelled in it, almost – and savoured the experience of complete control over his adversary. The dangerous killer had been brought to heel, and was his prisoner. He could kill her, or simply let her die, but at the same time he felt as if he possessed her entirely, and that killing her would be like destroying a trophy.

She could be used, studied, dissected, and teach him more things than anyone ever could. Her mind was open to him – like a book that taught an entire outlook on life – and through it he could experience things he never thought possible that could benefit him in innumerable ways. Through her, he could better uncover whatever Montrose guarded and could record information that only ever existed within the mind. The mind of an assassin held many secrets, and with time he would reveal them all.

At length he withdrew from her mind and noticed that she was looking at him almost pleadingly with her eyes a mixture of longing and fear. Ironic, he thought, that she should plead with him to take her life when she had been so eager to take his.

“You are of use to me yet,” he said as he turned to leave, “and for that I will keep you alive.”

 

* * * *

 

To take up arms in battle is ultimately an expression of sacrifice as one lays down everything that one is, has, or knows in the name of another. To fight is to show how far one is willing to go and how much one is willing to risk in upholding one’s convictions. True soldiers are those who understand this and are willing to make such sacrifices in the name of something other than themselves. Warriors are different. Warriors know nothing of sacrifice, for indeed their very existence is already a sacrifice in that they deprive themselves of the life they are protecting and dedicate themselves utterly to war. A warrior has nothing left to sacrifice, and death holds no fear for them just as completion or fulfilment holds no fear for anyone.

When a soldier flees it is because he is unprepared or unwilling to sacrifice all that he is in the name of duty, but when a warrior flees it is because he does not yet find completion in death and is not yet ready to welcome the end that is death.

Fleeing they call cowardice for both soldier and warrior alike, but in either way is fleeing anything other than unpreparedness? And cannot people who are unprepared become prepared in time? Who can tell?

 

The orks were coming, and their onslaught rampaged throughout the hive with total abandon. Unleashing utter destruction, the orks pillaged, burnt, and destroyed everything they came across with an almost zealous dedication. Ruin was a religion, and they were its faithful.

Aribeth continued to run as long as her legs would carry her, not because of fear, but because she could find nowhere to fight. She told herself that she would stand with whatever organized resistance she could find, but wherever she went she saw only destruction and death as many of the humans looted in advance of the orks – as is somehow the destruction they cause was more justified than that of the greenskin horde. People fought each other for shelter – literally killing one another for safety. Is this what humanity had become? Was the human race so lost that men would gladly claw each other to death even when their world was razed around them?

And yet Aribeth did not stop them or move to intervene in any way. She had spent her entire life cloistered away by the Ecclesiarchy seeing only life as the Church would have her see it. To her it had been an easy distinction between the sinner and the righteous, but, while she had seen only black and white, the lives around her were nothing but shifting shades of grey. Was this the reality she was sworn to protect? Was this the Imperium she was defending? Were these the people her Sisters had died to protect? Seeing now the empty indifference with which people viewed the suffering of others, Aribeth had to wonder if in reality wars were fought over lumps of dirt and scum, and the possession of a rotten, stagnant beast that the victor would be tasked with upholding.

“My Lady Palatine!” emerging from a side-avenue and spying the Palatine running through an abandoned street, a Battle Sister armoured in white called out to Aribeth with a wave of her arm as the Palatine ran by. “My Lady, over here!”

She was armed with a large heavy bolter and had hair of a familiar tawny colour that caught Aribeth’s attention, though as the Palatine drew closer her heart sagged as she saw that she was not the woman Aribeth had hoped she would be.

“My Lady, thank the Emperor you yet live!” she said with a smile of genuine relief as Aribeth approached her. “Several citizens, PDF troopers, and I are dug in further down the block in the center square,” she motioned behind her down a narrow road between cramped hab-blocks then hefted her heavy bolter and led the way back down the side-avenue. “The orks haven’t made it this far yet, though we have seen many citizens fleeing past us towards the higher spires. We’ve yet to reach anyone on the comm., however, so we don’t know where to regroup with other pockets of resistance at this level.”

Aribeth nodded in silence as she marched at a steady pace to keep up with the battle-ready Sister. Did she know this woman? Did the Sister know her? All the same, it came to her as a surprise that she should care more about her association to a Battle Sister of her Order than to the war raging around her.

“Don’t bother,” Aribeth said eventually, drawing a questioning look from the Sister as they neared the mouth of the side-passage and stepped into the square, “everyone of any importance or prestige has already been evacuated. Command has abandoned the hive.”

The Sister stopped short, still several dozen paces from the makeshift barricades and emplacements that had been erected in the middle of the large open area, and, when Aribeth questioned her, looked suggestively towards the barricades and the people hiding there.

“Forgive me, my Lady,” she said in a hushed voice that tersely reminded Aribeth of a woman ashamed, “but their courage wanes,” she indicated once again towards the piled up barricades made of household items and broken public property, “and I would rather spare them such disheartening news.”

“Understandable,” Aribeth agreed with a furrowed brow, “but it is as bad as it sounds. There is no-one coming to aid us.”

“What should we do, my Lady? The enemy can be only moments away…” the Sister asked, glancing again towards the faces of the people manning the barricades in such a way that Aribeth could tell that she was relieved that they could not be overheard yet panicked by the Palatine’s words all the same.

Aribeth didn’t know, and decided not to answer her directly. “How well are you armed?” she asked, trying to keep her own mind from dwelling on the rapidly increasing hopelessness of the situation.

The Sister looked at the weapon in her hand and shrugged. “I have sufficient weapons and armour, and enough ammunition to keep me in the fight for a while yet, but I should take you to those who fight with us for I doubt that I could appraise them adequately.”

The motley crew waiting for the behind the barricades was, as could be expected, a force brought together by the most desperate of times. Rather than fleeing in a vain search for safety, a mere handful of survivors had found the lone Battle Sister and rallied around her took make final, desperate stand against the ork horde that burned, looted, and murdered in their home. When they had nothing left to lose, these few clung to hope, and nurtured to will to see it brought about.

There were only two guardsmen amongst them who wore a uniform similar to the guardsmen Aribeth had seen earlier on other PDF soldiers though both were young and had a harried look in their eyes, as if the burden and responsibility for repelling the orks weight heavier on their shoulders than it did on the others. Aribeth did not truly care; they were all equally dead and each should be as prepared as the others to die fighting. Between them, the PDF soldiers had one lasgun and one recoilless RPG launcher with a half-dozen rockets. Neither of them said anything to Aribeth as she and the other Sister clambered over the barricades.

The others were all civilians, and, as Aribeth noted with contempt, not a member of the Ecclesiarchy was among them. Fortunately they were all armed to some degree with improvised close combat weapons, non-standard issue auto guns, and one – an older man with a wide handle-bar moustache and a feathered had – with an exotic looking scoped hunting rifle that measured a good four feet long. The man with the rifle acknowledged Aribeth with a stiff nod, and, unlike the rest of the civilians, looked both calm and accepting of the situation at hand.

“Who is she?” a scrawny-looking teenage girl with gang tattoos asked as soon as both Sisters cleared the barricades. “Are you here to help us?”

“This is our Lady Palatine,” the Sister replied to the survivors at large, “and yes, we are blessed to have the Lady and her skill fighting at our side.”

The teenager looked appeased by this and smiled sheepishly in Aribeth’s direction before quickly diverting her attention elsewhere.

“Does that mean you’re in charge, ma’am?” one of the PDF soldiers asked with hopeful eyes. “Do you know when the counter-attack will commence?”

The soldiers weren’t the only one’s keening to know, and Aribeth could feel every one of their eyes switching back and forth between Aribeth and the other Sister – every ear bent in their direction – every tongue held as if a single breath would steal her words away – and before travelling to the End Forge she would not have known what to tell them. Perhaps she would have made a speech; concocted a fanciful lie to steady their hearts and steel their minds. Perhaps she would have emboldened them by saying that in this hour they would hold their sacred trust to the Emperor fulfilled as they too forfeited their lives upon the altar of victory as had the legends of old. Today, however, after having felt the inglorious loss of her Sisters and their brilliant armour shatter and tarred with blood, Aribeth would not deceive them about the ways of war and how it was the faithful fought and died. They would have to find their own courage, for she could not make it for them.

“There is no counter-attack,” Aribeth said plainly, watching dispassionately as her words sunk into them like ice, “the Imperium has abandoned the hive to its fate. We are alone in this fight, and it is on our strength that this hive lives or dies.”

“Y-you mean they’re just leaving us here?” one of the civilians, a middle-aged woman with greying hair and a gaunt face, asked with shocked disbelief. “Why – why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they defend us!?”

“I don’t know,” Aribeth answered, “I’m not them.”

“Then we’re finished…”

A balding man with a bend nose carrying a heavy wooden club stood up from where he had been sitting on the pavement, and, when he noticed everyone’s eyes upon him, returned their gaze with his own forlorn look.

“What?” he said, “we might as well admit it.”

“Don’t say that!” the gaunt-faced woman snapped at him, though she averted her eyes from his own hollow look.

“Why not? It’s the truth isn’t it? Might as well throw ourselves off the hive,” he pointed to the east where a horizon of brilliant sky could be seen between the buildings as opposed to the mountain of metal that loomed around them, “it would be gentler than waiting here to be massacred.”

To Aribeth’s right, the Battle Sister – who had been listening in silence until now – finally snapped. “Is that your answer!?” she shouted, grabbing him by the front of his shirt and pulling his face right up to hers, “To take the easy way out? Do you think the people that made this hive took the easy way out? Do you think the people who colonized this world took the easy way out? Do you think that the Emperor reached for the stars by taking the easy way out!? You hear of danger and your first reaction is to flee!?”

“The others did!” he shouted back in his own defence.

“So you would copy their failing? You would emulate the weakness of Man rather than His strength? You make me sick!” she shoved him ground, and for a moment Aribeth was sure that she would dispatch the man with a single shot, though after a pause she simply turned her back on him in disgust.

“I’m not a warrior!” he protested from where he sat sprawled on the ground, “I can’t fight!”

“We’re not warriors either,” the teenage girl with the tattoos shot back at him from her perch on the barricade, “but you don’t see us running to go kill ourselves!”

The man mumbled something in return that went unheard as the moustached man with the hunting rifle – the only one would had kept a vigilant eye over the barricades – sounded the alarm.

“Orks dead ahead! And it looks like a lot of ‘em…” His hunting rifle braced against his shoulder, the moustached man sighted, and squeezed the trigger – the thunderous retort of his rifle blasting an ork backwards off its feet as it came down one of the adjoining streets.

“Well,” he said with a rough grin as he worked the bolt back on his rifle to reload while the others clambered into firing positions all along the barricade, “that’s one I bet he never saw – ” a bullet thwacked into his head, cutting him off mid-sentence and spinning him around as he dropped backwards to the ground dead as more bullets thudded and bounced off the barricades and hummed through the air over their heads. Stunned by their own mortality, the others cowered in silence behind the barricades, and it was only by the Sisters’ example that they could be roused to fighting again.

“Arise! Arise!” the Sister shouted, her heavy bolter alive and roaring in her hands as swaths of orks were cut down as they advanced up the road towards them in a green tide of guns, blades, and howling maws. “Drive these aliens back from His domain!”

Aribeth stood with her, the bolter kicking as it loosed bursts of explosive bolts into the rushing foe. There were hundreds of them – a literal green tide – all running in every direction and firing their weapons wildly at anything and everything. Many were felled, but always there were more that would leap into their place and pilfer the weapons of the fallen to add to their own destructive arsenal.

The guardsmen were the first to recover and clambered up beside the Sisters to fight with renewed vigour – the lasgun blasting bolts of energy at the oncoming orks while the dull sucking thump of the rocket launcher sent up an explosion in the midst of the greenskins and hurled many to the ground. Yet the orks continued to rush on unfazed, as if the din of explosions and crackling gunfire only excited them further.

Determined not to die cowering in fear, the greying woman with the gaunt face found her courage and brought her weapon to bear on the monstrous brutes as she fired non-stop from a small breach in the barricade. Soon the teenage girl and a few others joined her – one having even scavenged the exotic hunting rifle – though several others, still cowering from the death of the moustached man, could not bring themselves to hold the barricade.

An ork rokkit screamed overhead and arced across the square before crumpling a building a dozen yards behind them. The defenders replied with a rocket of their own and hurl more orks into the air, though many returned to their feet with only minor shrapnel wounds.

“Hey!” someone shouted over the gunfire, though Aribeth did not take time to see who it was, “I just saw an ork blow itself up with its own bomb!”

Along the line someone screamed and died as a mob or orks with primitive machine guns emerged from a flanking side-street and hunkered down behind any cover they could find.

“Ork HMG! Red building to the west! Top-right window!” one of the guardsmen shouted as more bullets sung low over their heads and bit into the pavement around the defenders as they hugged every nook of cover they could find. The Sister’s heavy bolter wasn’t angled properly to engage, but the second guardsmen with the recoilless RPG launcher pivoted on the spot and fired off his last rocket – its white contrail following it through the window and silencing the HMG from within.

With the orks flanking their position and keeping the defender’s pinned, however, the main mob piled into the square with a tremendous war cry in their brutal language before planting their feet and opening fire – every gun belching hundreds of rounds as fire erupted as if from the hive itself. Bullets ricocheted everywhere, and more than a few orks were thoughtlessly gunned down by those standing behind them, but the storm of lead thrown at the barricade was more than enough to puncture, pulp, and shatter every piece of cover that the defenders had hastily thrown together throughout the mere hours they had had to prepare before the green storm broke. Bullets invariably passed through and killed the defenders where they sheltered, and though the Sororitas’ power armour was proof to such things, their allies proved much more vulnerable. The teenage girl with the tattoos caught three rounds in the back that punctured her lungs and severed her spine, dooming her to a slow, agonizing death until a last, merciful bullet ripped through her cover and blew out the back of her skull – killing her instantly. The woman with the greying hair – pressed flat against her belly to avoid the worst of the fire – fared well until a bullet seared across her buttocks causing her to scramble for more something more solid until an ork with a better vantage point emptied the better part of twenty rounds into her as it greedily cut her down and continued to fire at her dying corpse. Outnumbered, outgunned, outflanked, and out of luck, the two guardsmen died on their feet firing their weapons over the barricade in the face of certain death. Their bodies fell draped over the very cover they had been defending as more bullets chewed into them and everything else around them.

Aribeth and the other Sister, the last defenders alive thanks to the blessed resilience of Sororitas power armour were left holding fast against the rapidly dissolving cover and firing at any target that presented itself – an ork here and an ork there as the more agitated of the greenskins made to charge the barricade itself and its last two defenders.

“I’m almost out!” The last Sister shouted, her back pressed against Aribeth’s as they ducked low under the bullets that whizzed past their exposed heads while trying to squeeze off as many shots as they could manage before they would be overwhelmed. “Make a break for the east!” she shouted again, not looking at her Palatine, “I’ll cover you as well as I can!”

Aribeth didn’t need to be persuaded, and, jumping clear of the crumbling barricade, fired off a few more shots to empty the last magazine in her bolter before making a long dash towards the unoccupied east of the clearing. Bullets screamed past and shattered the ground around her – more than once one would hit her and she would momentarily stumble to her knees as she scramble to regain her footing and continue her flight. She never looked back as she heard the thunderous retort of the heavy bolter sounding clearly above the chattering ork guns, or turned to see if the other woman was following her, but when she had reached safety the Sister was no longer with her.

Her breath coming in gasps, the Palatine drew her bolt pistol and continued to run east towards the brilliant sky over the edge of the hive and who knew what else. There were orks here too, though for the most part they were looting and burning the buildings around or riding breakneck through the streets in their ramshackle wagons and firing their guns in the air while paying little attention to anything else around them.

Aribeth did not stop to engage them. It didn’t feel like her fight anymore, or that she should kill orks for doing what many of the citizenry of the hive had already done. The war had been abandoned long before by people who had not even seen the enemy down their sights. It was over; it already had been before she had fired her first shot in anger. In truth, all she had done is embroil herself in the inevitable. Naomi had been right, damn her, but only because she and the other deserters had made themselves right. Was this what the Imperium stood for now? Purchasing victory or defeat based on which wars it thought worth pursuing? Were countless soldiers doomed to death because someone who had never set foot on a battlefield or stood in a war room decided that some things were just not worth the effort?

Aribeth kept running – running until she stood atop the high spire walls and looked out upon the miles of smouldering hive that stretched out below her. Millions, maybe even billions, of lives lost. This was not the Imperium she knew. This was not how she had been taught to fight a war. What she saw was not what her numerous mentors had described to her.

This was a world raised in the image of the likes of Galtman – this hive burned because the treacherous few who supposedly spoke in His name sold out all those who lived in His name. The Imperium had betrayed its people this day. This day, the Emperor’s name had been used for the destruction of man, not his salvation.

Behind her the hive suddenly burst into light, and she was blinded as spears of energy pierced the heavens, the earth, and everything in between. One after the other, lance-strikes pounded into the hive as a warship in low armour unleashed its devastating weapons onto the people below.

The air shook and her skin burned.

By the millions, ork and human alike were vaporised or scorched into ash without any trace of their individual existence being left behind.

Screaming in rage even as their air burned her lungs, Aribeth vented her fury against the world around her.

“I will not die for you!” she creamed, “I will not die because of you! I die because I choose – not you!”

Blinded, Aribeth flung herself from the hive wall and felt the wind rush against her burning face as she fell ever downwards.

I do not die for you! I do not die because of you! I am not going to die because you choose it!

The black cape on her back, torn down the middle and scorched by heat, fluttered out behind her and became whole, scooping her up in her decent until it carried her out across the hive like to enormous black wings. Down, down she went, deep into layers of clouds – her wings gathering moisture and strength until they became like the wings of a giant bat carrying Aribeth down through the fog and into the darkness.

[Lady_Canoness]

Chapter 5: The Fear Within

--------------------------

 

 

Where there had been nothing her world burst into a flurry of sensation as a terrible, clawing cold tore into her flesh and bones and made her lungs scream out in shock. It was all around her, weighing her down, suffocating her and deafening her simultaneously as her brain throbbed painfully within the tightening confines of her skull.

Struggling to claw her way free from the cold, Aribeth forced herself up – up and clear – as her head tore through the surface of the cold water and she quenched her tightening chest with mouthfuls of smoke-filled air. A tug from behind, however – like hands gripping her shoulders – and she was back under into the cold, wrestling to pull herself free. She felt her self slipping away – drowning under the smothering cold – but her feet caught hold of a solid surface, and, pushing furiously against her momentary brace, Aribeth threw her head free from the water again as behind her – with a roar of breaking water – two enormous black wings followed her up and set the water to swirl around her.

Shivering and coughing in the smoke, she looked back at them: she was weapon-less and without armour aside from a rough woollen robe that billowed out around her in the water like a dress in the wind, but the wings… they were real. Reaching over her shoulder she felt them with her hand – and at the same time felt her hand against the wings – all the way down to where they sprouted from her shoulder blades. A part of her. A mutation. But they saved her life… Without them she surely would have died when she fell to… to… where was she?

Looking around, Aribeth found herself standing in a pool of cold water up to her neck with walls of flame surrounding its circular edges. It was dark, very dark, and other than the fire there was no noticeable light in her surroundings.

“Glory and death in battle is beneath you?”

Aribeth spun as quickly as her wings would let her in the cold water at the sound of that dreadfully familiar voice, and saw the corpse woman, still clad in her miserable white armour, standing amidst the fire that encircled the pool – apparently unaffected by the flames.

“If you lacked the nobility to die in war,” Naomi continued, “then perhaps,” she raised her arms as if in reverence, “you would deem die in flames in a place familiar to you.”

As if by the dead woman’s command, Aribeth’s eyes suddenly recognized her surroundings and she saw its rounded walls beyond the fire, its domed ceiling depicting an ancient conclave under the midnight starts of Holy Terra, and even the stone benches that had been arranged around the pool. She was in the frigidarium; one of the many pools that made up the system of baths deep beneath the Preceptory on Proctor Primus. It was a place she had once known as her home, and, though she had only ever been in this chamber a few times during her service in the Perceptory, this chamber in particular had a special significance to her for another reason entirely.

“What am I doing here?” she asked, her mind racing. “Why have you brought me home?”

The corpse seemed to laugh in response. “Have you ever had a home, Aribeth?” her voice gurgled mockingly, “You have no home, nor do you deserve to ever have one. You were a guardian of the Faith, and as such you should always be vigilant. Never at rest.”

“Then why am I here!?” Aribeth shouted at the corpse, then looked wildly around at the flames as they consumed the chamber – searching for anything to break the hold of Naomi’s nightmare – “Why have you brought me back!?”

The fire seemed to climb up the Canoness’ armour and lick at her wound – catching the dead flesh and setting her blasted skull slowly aflame.

“A moment of laxity spawns a life-time of heresy!” Naomi’s voice whistled through the fire as it danced on her armour and chewed the crater in her head. “Stagnation begets corruption! With fire shall you judge, and with fire shall you be judged!”

Her armour blackening and her flesh falling in clumps from the bone, the corpse of Naomi swirled in roaring flames before crumbling back into the fire. For a moment Aribeth thought she was dead – truly dead – but then the fire exploded into a raging inferno that swept around the domed room in a firestorm so intense that it lashed out over the cold water and scorched her scalp. Screaming, Aribeth dove back under the surface and felt the icy cold instantly seize her tightened chest. Trapped between immolation and suffocation, Aribeth wrestled against her fear as her lungs screamed for air. Death from above – death from below. Hope and hopelessness.

Aribeth made her choice.

Bracing herself against the intense heat, Aribeth threw herself clear from the icy grasp of the water and fought her way to the pool’s edge even as the inferno overhead struggled to attach itself to her wet body. The concrete side of the pool was glowing with heat, but Aribeth grabbed it regardless – howling in complete agony even as she hauled herself clear of the water and stumbled towards the opening to the hallway with her arms and wings wrapped protectively over her head.

She fought her way clear of the frigidarium and ran as fast as she could down the long corridor leading through the baths even as the inferno followed raced ahead of her to blanket every surface in sheets of roiling flame. Through watering eyes and choking breaths, Aribeth ran on regardless of the pain past dark, writing shapes that stumbled and fell around her like beasts of flame being continuously created and destroyed in the fields of fire. Familiar faces screamed out and were consumed – the glowing orange heat bathing everything in a hellish light.

Racing into the atrium and up the main stairs that climbed upwards into the Preceptory, Aribeth’s robe disintegrated into ash that clung to her skin. Climbing up her legs, around her hips, and up to her waist over her breasts tongues of fire burnt and blistered her skin before turning it black and dead even as she kept running.

And then she heard the voices – Sisters calling out her name as the fire consumed them. She saw Augusta; covered in blood and the filth of battle and convulsing as the orange fire fiendishly clawed up her body and dragged her down into the carpet of flame. She saw Cassandra; kneeling amidst the raging firestorm as tears streaked down her face as she waited for the executioner’s bullet. She saw Rilke; trying to shake off the fuel tanks that were strapped to her armour before they ignited and blew her apart in a spectacular fireball that was lost amongst the raging flames. She saw Serinae; standing defiant before a wall of flame that brought her low and engulfed her.

There was one more – a lone figure that stood apart even from the fire with grief stricken eyes as Aribeth ran towards her – but the woman turned her back, walking slowly away down a side corridor where no fire would touch her. Aribeth knew who it must be, and went running after the one she wished to see the most – the one she would not surrender unto the clutches of death – the one who none could harm, and no fire could touch. Aribeth chased after her, even as the fire consumed her flesh, calling out a name that she would never forget.

Always she ran after her, and always she would see the other woman just ahead of her beckoning her on with sad, sorrow-filled eyes through the fire. It was almost dreamlike in that she would always be running, but never get to where she needed to be.

At last she reached the Great Hall, but even as she entered the other woman had already departed, and the mighty doors barring the portal to the outside world were closing purposefully behind her. Aribeth made to chase after her and pushed herself forward with great thrusts of her wings – her legs having been reduced to little more than blackened cinder and ash – but it seemed as if the fire was grabbing her, slowing her down, ensuring that she would never reach the woman she longed for. Beneath the glowering gargoyles and the penetrating eyes of saints aflame, the burnt Palatine struggled onwards with unfeeling pain as the doors before her finally ground shut.

It should have ended right there with her despair, but why die for nothing when she could live on for hope? Unwilling to freely give up her life until the claws of death itself snatched it away, Aribeth lurched her way to the door on the blackened trunks of her legs and heaved the mighty portal open to the outside.

And at long last she was free of the flame.

Before her the capital city of Proctor Primus shone in undiminished beauty – a sparkling jewel upon the planet’s surface. Great towers of gleaming metal and flawless stone stretched to the sun-filled heavens with graceful majesty. Blocks of beautifully sculpted buildings celebrated the artistry and skill of their makers, while richly adorned pennants of ripe scarlet and scintillating emerald flew gently from every bronze lamp post and window sill. Statues of saints and heroes with skins of polished gold stood reposed on street corners, plazas, or on rooftops where they looked down upon the city’s people like gentle guardians.

And the people themselves?

When Aribeth saw them she was cast off balance by the display of rightness and temperance the likes of which she had never seen before in Imperial citizens as they went about their daily lives.

Behind her, however, the Preceptory still burned, and a small crowd was gathering around the foot of the stairs where a lone figure in Sororitas power armour stood with her back to it. The small crowd grew with every passerby, but they did not dare approach the woman, and remained at a distance as they looked at her with prying curiosity.

The woman was not as tall as Aribeth but her shoulders were broad, and, instead of the neatly kempt tawny locks Aribeth had hoped to see, the Sister’s hair was an oily burnt brown that Aribeth did not recognize. Over he shoulder was slung an ornately decorated eviscerator, and at her hip a gleaming power sword with a pommel of finely wrought silver.

Even from behind, without having seen the woman’s face, Aribeth felt that she knew her like bile rising in her throat.

“See how easily they turn on us,” the Sister hissed between frozen lips as she turned to meet the Palatine with black eyes locked behind a silver face. Alive, unmarred and unharmed, Celestian Superior Cauline Antoinette greeted her Palatine like winter swallowing the fall.

“What do you mean?” Aribeth asked warily, keeping a distance from the Sister lest her silver face be removed to reveal a gaping, rotten hole in her head.

“We are as alien to them as their foes,” Cauline continued as though the gathered people could not hear here – and indeed it appeared they could not, for they whispered amongst themselves as if gawking at a street circus. “They don’t understand or appreciate our burdens – our sacrifices. To them, we are a necessity they would rather ignore than uphold.”

Neither accepting her nor denying her, Aribeth kept an equal distance between herself and the crowd as she did between herself and Cauline.

“I always suspected you were a woman of hate,” Aribeth said with limited discretion, “though I never guessed to its extent. Why do you revile them so?”

“Hate?” the woman fixed her in her black eyes, “I hate hardly enough. They are deserving of so much more. Just like cowardice is disparaged on the battlefield, so must these people be despised.”

“These people?”

“No,” Cauline shook her head and glared at the crowed who looked back at her with curious innocence, “all people who are unlike us. Survival of an empire, a nation, a way of life, is a constant battlefield in which every man, woman, and child is a soldier. If even one concession is made – if even one duty is shirked – then all are weakened. These people are weak: when presented with danger, their first instinct is to flee from it. They fear pain, hardship, sacrifice – everything that makes us who we are! They exist because they leach off the strong – like an entire nation standing on the shoulders of but a few – and when those few are trampled into the mire? Then they find another source of strength and feed off of it until all strong, upright people are gone and only the fat, slovenly mass remains, mewling for something to protect it from the perpetual fear in their minds. They will pledge themselves to anything to protect the illusion of their lives, all because they are not strong enough to defend it themselves.”

She turned to the Palatine; “You’ve seen it, Aribeth. You have lived through it – as I have – and seen the great costs that are exacted upon us while they - *they* - live on regardless. We are sacrificed – like grovelling servants – to permit their continued appetite. It was through fire and war that the galaxy was conquered, Aribeth, and it was through blood and steel that the dominion of Man was maintained, yet it is through weakness and lies that it is being betrayed...” she spat vehemently at the people that gathered around them, “betrayed and surrendered to an ignorant mob that will do nothing as planets burn!”

The Celestian Superior passed the eviscerator from her shoulder into hands and tossed the heavy weapon to Aribeth, who caught it with both hands but did not raise it.

“What are you going to do, Cauline?” she asked, resting the weapon on the ground as the masked woman drew the power sword from its sheath and flung the scabbard aside; “You died for these people just like the others. I’m the only one left now…” she paused, “I think.”

“Wrong!” Cauline denied her with a sweeping gesture. “I died fighting! Something only you and I can understand – these people will never know what that is like!”

As if to emphasize her point, the masked Sister lunged towards the on-looking crowd and swung her sword upwards in both hands before bringing it down in a fierce arc and felling an un-armed man with a deep rent scored across his chest. He collapsed in silence – barely a breath escaping his lips. The gaggle of passers-by seemed to yelp collectively in surprise at the sudden death of one of their number, but not a one made any motion of resistance against his killer or gave any indication towards flight – instead they stood there, eyes wide and fists un-balled, as the man’s blood drained from his wound onto the ground. Without hesitation Cauline was in their midst; her sword slashing left and right as she hacked into them like a predator amongst hapless prey. One-by-one she set upon them, and one-by-one they died with little more than a noise. Blood painted her white armour with spurts of red and dotted her silver face, and, as Aribeth watched, the last of the gathered citizens were slaughtered like sheep. None of them had fled, and not a single one had done so much as voice a cry of anger.

The deed done, Cauline shook the blood from her blade and turned to the Palatine once again. “And there is your proof,” she said as if what she had done was little more than a demonstration, “they are weak – every last one of them. They did not resist me: they simply stood and died.” She stormed over to where Aribeth had stood witnessing the massacre, and for the first time Aribeth took note of the hint of pain in the woman’s voice. “This is what we are defending, Aribeth! A flock! Not people – animals! And yet we – we the strong, the warriors, who can and will fight for what we believe in – we are the slaves, and they our masters! Tell me why this is so!?”

Aribeth’s gaze lingered on the motionless corpses cut apart by unforgiving steel then met the Celestian Superior’s dark eyes. “It is so because the Emperor demanded it,” she said, yet Cauline was shaking her head even before the words had left her mouth.

“The Emperor never told me that,” she said, turning away from her Palatine and now sounding genuinely hurt as she looked over the carnage she had created. “I was trained to kill and to venerate the Immortal Emperor and all that he stood for. I was brought up admiring strength, conviction, duty, and sacrifice, and in my Sisters I saw this. I went to war and killed in the name of those virtues. I saw Sisters die for those virtues. I lost my own face and accepted a life of agony for those virtues. But here I am now, unloved and unremembered, dead for the virtue-less mass.”

Cauline stopped, and for a time neither woman spoke: the silver faced woman staring over her shoulder at the death she had visited, while here Palatine with burnt black skin and scorched wings stood silently by.

“Our friends died…” Aribeth said in a subdued whisper.

“And for what?!” Cauline snapped furiously at the world around her, “For these thankless cowards?!”

Aribeth shook her head. She remembered Clara’s face as her best friend lay dying. She remembered how she had longed to take her with her. ‘So long as you love me, I’ll be with you in your heart,’ she had said, ‘and you will be in mine.’ Aribeth could remember her now, remember every moment they had ever shared, and every time she had ever looked upon her face. Yet all the same she felt empty – like the heart in her chest was not where her love for Clara dwelt – like the trace of her love had been torn from her hands just as Clara had been torn from her life. Clara had been killed, her body broken and her blood left to run freely from her veins. She had died to a violence that no one else had seen. She had died to an enemy too easily ignored. She had died unmourned and unremembered away from the only person who had ever truly cared for her.

Her death, Aribeth recalled with venom, was a gift from an uncaring man in the name of an uncaring people who worshiped an uncaring god.

“They died because we were lied to…” Cauline’s dark eyes were fixed upon her own, and in them Aribeth could sense a blanketing rage boiling up and over the restraints that had held the other woman in check from lashing out against the outside with vengeance. “They have corrupted our purpose and betrayed our trust! They have shackled us when we should rule over them!” The woman spun around as if searching for an invisible enemy, then turned back to her Palatine and gripped her fiercely by the arm. “Kill the weak! Kill everyone that would cage us! Let them fight us, and only through strength of arms may we be ruled!”

Aribeth felt her hands tighten instinctively around the eviscerator’s haft and her blood burned within her limbs. Something in Cauline’s meaning was true, and Aribeth could feel the surge of hot anger grab hold of her. Violence could not be denied or ignored, and the thought visiting it upon those who had betrayed her Sisters filled her with a sense of urgency. The pain and anger locked inside her head screamed out for bloodshed, and her blackened skin hardened into a peerless black armour that covered her from her ruined neck to her ghastly feet with interlocked layers of rigid plate that could feel nothing of the world outside the woman.

“Hatred is armour enough,” Cauline snarled between heaving breaths. “They will feel the cost of betrayal, and I will see them beg for mercy before the end!”

Raising the power sword two handed above her head, Cauline tore up the stairs of the Preceptory with leaping strides and slammed her shoulder into the great doors barring her access as if hatred alone would shatter them off their hinges.

Finding a new vigour in her legs, Aribeth dashed up after her and added her strength to that of her silver faced companion until the massive doors were shook loose before their combined might. Straining every muscle in their bodies, the vengeful Sisters parted the doors before them and let the light from the outside pour in – illuminating dark halls and revealing the twisted creations born of ignorance and fear.

Inside they were not greeted by the familiar sights of piousness and temperance, or by the golden virtues upon which the Imperium stood; the veil of lies had been torn free, and beneath the clean marble exterior of a sanctified Imperium lay a cancer ridden mire of debauchery, excess, and paranoid loathing.

Standing frozen in the portal’s light, the two wrathful figures stared in righteous horror and contempt. The lie had been repealed, their spirits freed from the cage of deceit, and their eyes permitted to uncover the truth of their sacrifice. There were no Sisters here, no clerics either – no pious men of noble birth – no heroes of legend or song. Justice was held as the concubine to tyranny, and the Golden Eagle was throttled by the mailed fist of oppression.

Upon a throne sat a sleeping old man in whose lap perched leprous creatures who bickered and tore at each other with claw-like hands over a bawling infant that was sickly through mal-nutrition and neglect. Around this throne was spread an ocean of desiccated bodies and twisted limbs that writhed and begged with feeble gasps at the forms of bulbous creatures of unchecked wealth and comfort that sat amongst them like islands within the sea and picked gluttonously at bodies before swallowing them alive and whole with salivating maws wetted by drool. Some of the deathly mass tried to claw away or to gouge at the heaps of flesh that fed upon them, but every time they came close to their goal bestial women with wild hair and ripened bodies would descend upon them with unremitting cruelty and vicious blows before returning to an orgiastic feast of flesh and spirit where the one became the object to satiate the many.

All of this they beheld between the once majestic pillars of the Preceptory Grand Hall, though now those very pillars were stained with rot and filth as a testament to the foulness that dwelt within the heart of mankind. Yet, even as they watched stricken in horror, a vast host of men at arms dressed in an array of fine regimental colours appeared from behind the sleeping man’s throne. Not a one of these soldiers so much as blinked as they marched in unison through the vileness of their charge to form a protective line between the interlopers and their honoured scene of depravity.

To Aribeth’s left, Cauline started to chuckle – not a chuckle of mirth, but one for the dark irony they witnessed before them. “And here come our fellows: the blinded ones,” she said, levelling an accusing finger to wards the assembling soldiers: “The prisoners who were tricked into thinking themselves wardens! I won’t spare them – this rot is too deep to be simply cut out!”

Not wasting another word, Cauline sprang towards the assembling guard with her sword drawn – meeting them head on with slaying steel and cutting men down like grass before the blade. But even as she struck down their fellows the surviving soldiers drew their weapons – swords, batons, knives, clubs, and many other instruments of death – and joined the battle in defence of their venerated nightmare.

Shaking the transfixing power of the grotesque scene, Aribeth felt the flames of her hatred rekindle and she plunged into the fray with the eviscerator roaring madly in her hands. The foe rushed to meet her but she struck them down – the huge weapon cutting a ragged swath of blood through their unprotected bodies as she threw her weight behind each swing of the unfamiliar chainblade. Battle raged around her and scores of the uniformed enemy lunged at she and her fellow Sister, but their weapons found no purchase upon the Palatine’s hardened black armour – and they were repaid as the eviscerator cleaved through their tightly packed bodies by the quarter-score. Blood was a mist upon the air and the dead littered the floor of the Grand Hall, while Aribeth had become a gore-streaked whirlwind that none could approach without being cast down dead and dismembered by her ferocious weapon.

Butchering her way clear of the melee, Aribeth fought towards the veritable sea of people that littered the floor – tearing down decorated soldier and naked harpy alike – until she felt the brittle bones of the sickly mass crack and break under her black armoured feet. Rearing the sword high over her head, she plunged the four-foot blade of the eviscerator deep into the guts of one of the fat, gurgling mountains of flesh and ripped it free with a fountain of blood, bile, and polluted flesh. The thing screamed and spat as it died, but with a twist of her blade Aribeth pulled the churning teeth of her sword through its head and silenced it forever. Its death heralded the defenders to fight even harder and rain savage blows upon Aribeth’s impregnable armour regardless of the number that fell beneath her roaring blade. Death and dismemberment were total, and all she could see was a crop of flesh and a rain of blood crowding before her.

Cauline, howling through her metal lips, hacked and slew with every stroke. Her armour was wetted with blood and she could taste its metallic tang in her mouth – each kill adding more red liquid to her form and driving her further into a killing frenzy. Murder became easier as the slaughter progressed.

After what seemed like an endless battle, the bloodbath eventually stopped, and both women found themselves without foes. Broken bodies littered the floor – carpeting even the desiccated mass with blood-soaked uniforms – and the stench of death became nigh unbearable. Every uniformed soldier as well as every maddened harpy had been killed, and, other than the awkward squirming of the mountainous bloated forms of flesh, there was not a sound to be heard aside from the subdued rattle of Aribeth’s chainblade.

The frenzy of battle that had screamed into Aribeth’s ears for minutes on end had inexplicably vanished and she found that stabbing urge to kill had finally left her.

Cauline, however, had found no such respite, and, her white armour unrecognizable and her silver face dripping with bloody spatter, made her way over to where Aribeth stood in the midst of the carnage.

“Even now the old man does not wake!” she hissed in anger, pointing her sword at the throne where the skeletal ancient slept on and the creatures in his lap continued to bicker amongst themselves. “They do not fight! They do not even resist! All they do is exist… but that will change!”

Picking her way through the coprses, Cauline approached the nearest fleshy creature and waved her gruesome sword before its sunken features – just long enough for it to tremble in fear – before skewering it between the eyes and watching its fat body convulse as her sword punctured its brain. The other bulbous creatures writhed and wriggled in fear and desperation, but Cauline showed them no mercy as she stalked and killed each as she had the last and let their bodies sag with bloody heads.

“You see!” she screamed at Aribeth, hacking her sword into one of the fat corpses for emphasis, “this is what we are! This is what we have become!” She proceeded to dismember the bloated creature until folds of rope-like entrails slithered out of its body and onto the corpses piled around it.

Aribeth, however, found herself cold and without satisfaction for the wickedness she had undone. This was not vengeance – this was not justice – this was little more than glutting over wanton bloodshed.

“So we have killed them,” her voice carried contemptuously over the massacre and past the sleeping man’s ears; “So what?”

“Don’t you see?” the blood smeared Sister began, sticking her sword into a body and wading through the knee-deep bodies to approach Aribeth.

“I see blood and death.”

The death mask emitted a soft, chuckling noise. “This is freedom!” she said, holding her arms out the room around them. “We have broken our chains and killed those who have wronged us! We are our own masters now. The strong will rule again – as it should be – and we are the strong!”

“I did this because of what they took from me, not for some vain glory!”

With a shake of her head Cauline turned away and picked her way back through the carnage to her sword. “This is about more than you and I, Aribeth,” she warned. “This is about overcoming weakness and putting down those who sap the strength of our people! Vengeance is only the beginning of a much greater cause!”

Looking around her, Aribeth was unconvinced. “And what greater cause is that?” she challenged the masked woman. “More power and domination? Or are you going to kill everything that does not kill you?”

“This isn’t about power!” Cauline shouted back over the stinking bodies. “The strong will never again be ruled by the weak – that is all. The weak must either perish or be made stronger until no foe can best humanity!”

“I don’t believe this,” Aribeth spat, “you sound just like them – throwing away what isn’t yours. People like you are the reason our Sisters died! People like you who think that might is the only thing of value!”

“This is pointless,” Cauline said with a snarl, “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

But she was wrong. Aribeth could feel a dull, drumming ache work its way back behind her ears and a tightening of muscle form in her clenched jaw. Something about this woman reminded her of him and how he had thrown away her Sisters to a death they did not deserve. He had not been a weakling though… no, he had been powerful – powerful enough to think nothing of sending fifty Sisters of Battle to their deaths, just as Cauline thought nothing of killing those who could not oppose her. Clara had died because of people like her. What had she been thinking? Cauline and those like her were the problem, not the answer.

“Yes,” Aribeth said, tightening her fists around the eviscerator’s haft and stepping after Cauline, “you do.”

The masked Sister perceived the winged woman with an icy glare, then raised her own sword in response. “I knew you wouldn’t understand,” she sneered; “All the better – you were always too faint-of-heart for my liking.”

Done with words the two women clashed amidst the corpse-littered floor before the sleeping man. Their footing was unsure and their movements difficult, but each woman fought with an incomprehensible madness in her eyes. Aribeth, stung by hurt and thirsting for revenge, wielded the eviscerator in wide sweeping arcs to keep her opponent at bay with the large weapon, while Cauline fought with a jealous hatred for her life of denial as she struggled to attack Aribeth from a distance with the shorter power sword. The eviscerator was an unfamiliar weapon, however, and far too cumbersome for any likeness of swordsmanship, and Aribeth overextended her reach; sinking the sword deep into one of the uniformed corpses. Seizing the opportunity, Cauline sidestepped her opponent drove her silver-hilted sword deep through Aribeth’s side, though the hardened plates of her armour redirected the blow to only a grazing wound that nevertheless drew a spurt of bright blood and held the blade fast. Instinctively, Aribeth twisted away – drawing a yelp of pain from her own lips at the same time as the stuck blade was yanked free from Cauline’s grasp and the pommel of the eviscerator connected fiercely with the back of the masked woman’s head – knocking her flat to the floor.

Crying out with whimpering gasps, Aribeth let the eviscerator tumbler from her hands as she staggered back from the sprawled Sister and grasped the powersword by the hilt and began the excruciating task of drawing back out of her body. The pain alone knocked her to her knees, but slowly she slid it back out and closed a black-armoured hand over her steadily bleeding wound.

Stunned but largely unharmed, Cauline regained her feet and lashed out at Aribeth with her left fist only to have it batted away by a leathery wing, then feel the sting as her own sword pierced her armour and was thrust deep inside her guts. Standing as her opponent fell, Aribeth twisted the blade with a grunt of satisfaction and dropped the other woman to her knees. Cauline, gripping the arms that killed her, looked up once in the dark woman’s face with her bloodied mask.

“He cares not from whence the blood floes…” she gasped with failing breath, “only that it does…”

“I don’t have time for your last excuses!” Aribeth snarled through gritted teeth. She pulled the sword free and within one fluid motion cut the woman’s mask in two as she cleaved the Sister’s head from her neck.

“Die and be done with it,” she tossed the weapon back onto the corpse and stalked from the Grand Hall, still clutching the wound Cauline had dealt her.

Maddened by pain and grief she passed from the darkness into the light outside. The enormity of her actions echoing behind her like a rattling last breath…

[daboarder]

nice to know this is still going on, cheers canoness