Scars Episode XI Updated 16/10 (Spoilers)

[Emperor's Furor]

My recollection says in combat, but it's been a while and my copy to lightning tower isn't to hand atm :(

[Greyall]

That's pretty confident of him, but I tend to go with true combat examples, not boasting. Like when Guilliman says only five of his brothers could take on him...meh.

[Kais Klip]

I've been thinking on the Warmaster's/Alpha Legion disinformation campaign against the loyalists like we saw in Scars, and I really hope they draw that out just a little bit more, since it adds some nice, official fuel to all the "what ifs" threads that have been springing up here.

[GhostMalone]

Well I am officially disappoint seems iTunes doesn't have episode XII yet..... Really really disappointed so no official update yet

[GhostMalone]

Just finished episode XII should I proceed?

 

:D

 

Dance minions if you want more

[GhostMalone]

 

“The Khan struck first, moving faster than thought, his cloak swirling about him. Mortarion met the blow with his scythe, and a radial wave shot out from Silence, throwing up the ash in swirling clouds.

The Deathshroud lumbered into range, swinging their own scythes. Qin Xa’s warriors engaged them, charging across the cracked stone and bringing their blades to bear. Neon-blue claws clashed with heavy iron, sending dull clangs resounding across the empty square. Amidst the ruins of Tizca, the two forces slammed together, moving like choreographed dancers as the eyeless “faces of old statues gazed down at them.

‘I see your mind, brother,’ hissed the Khan, hammering home the attack. ‘You would turn me, or end me.’

Mortarion grunted as he blocked the incoming dao. He moved far more slowly than the Khan, but everything he did was solid, dense, and indomitable. ‘If you’re stubborn enough not to see the chance here, then, yes – your time is over.’

The Khan laughed. Wielding his blade again freely felt good. The psychneuein had been a trivial challenge – going up against a fellow primarch was the kind of test he had missed for too long.

He darted in close, spinning on one boot before thrusting his sword at Mortarion’s midriff. The strike was blocked, but the Death Lord stumbled.

‘So slow,’ taunted the Khan. His blade danced, flashing like the lightning above. Every strike was weighted heavily, slicing chunks from Mortarion’s thick plate as if it were corroded scrap. ‘You got everything wrong. Why exchange one master for anoth“er? And do not take me for a fool – only one soul may rule from the Throneworld.’

He heard the clash of blades around him, the soft rush of bolter-discharge and the heavy bang of the shells detonating. More cracks opened up underfoot, glowing red like molten steel. Muzzle-flashes lit up ruined, carven images on ancient stonework, starkly revealing the Prosperine occult devices engraved upon every facet.

Mortarion rallied, breathing hard. Though his reflexes were slow, his strength was impressive. He had already taken blows that would have felled a lesser warrior and yet seemed barely troubled.

‘Your Legion called out,’ he snarled, wielding Silence in deadening sweeps. ‘You have cells operating in every brotherhood, desperate to serve. All we did was answer them.’

The Khan laughed again. He felt alive, unfettered, free for the first time in months to act. ‘The lodges, eh? Secret societies? You think that’ll be enough to drag us behind the Warmaster?’

Mortarion dug in, and his heavy boots “ank into the ash. The Khan launched a series of blistering dao-blows, glancing off the Death Lord’s thick pauldrons and sending him reeling.

‘I let them meet,’ the Khan said. His blade was moving brutally, smearing with speed and clanging from the scythe. ‘I have always let them. I am not a tyrant, brother.’

Mortarion started to rally, meeting the Khan’s fury with resolute efficiency. He took a stride back in close, planting his feet widely to close down another incoming stroke. The two weapons twisted and rebounded, sending sparks flying through the gloom. The intensity of it was vicious. Every perfect movement was vindication of the Emperor’s gene-majesty, albeit exemplified in two totally different aspects. The troops battling around them, themselves titans of combat, were reduced to irrelevance, like mortal warriors straying into the quarrels of gods.

‘We are all tyrants,’ Mortarion rasped, picking up the pace of his scythe-blows. ‘Do not fool yourself. We were bred for nothing “else.’

‘Not I,’ said the Khan, whirling around him, moving with an almost unconscious balance. ‘I care nothing for dominion. Never have. You, on the other hand... You. You yearn for it.’

The Khan drove Mortarion back further, pounding and pummelling him across the square’s margins and towards the edge of the broken pyramid. They reeled together under the shadow of Photep’s Arch, the old entrance to the immense vaults within, now roofless and gaping.

The Khan felt brief flashes of warp-fire, and guessed that it was Arvida. He heard Qin Xa’s battle-cry, and gloried in it. The keshig-master was a superlative warrior, and he had no fear for him, nor any of the others.

They could fight now. They knew the enemy. They could see him, and that was enough.

‘I deserve it,’ Mortarion wheezed, gasping into his rebreather as he laboured under the assault. ‘I always deserved it. You could have “joined me.’

The Khan did not relent. His blade was like a shard of starlight, fierce and irresistible. ‘Your time will come. You tell me the warp should be forgotten, shut away. How little you know. It will come for you now. Killing you here will be a mercy. I can already see your future darkening, dragging at your very soul.’

The two of them thundered across the base level of the pyramid, followed at every step by the echoing clash of arms around them. The edifice’s open carcass rose up high above, its broken spars jutting upwards in perfect geometry towards a non-existent apex. The old internal walls, half slumped into rubble and riddled with yawning gaps, twisted away from them in a labyrinth of complexity.

‘All futures are dark, now,’ Mortarion replied, swiping savagely and backhanding his scythe into the edge of an exposed archway. The keystone smashed to rubble around him. ‘You have no idea what Horus has become, nor the Emperor. They are both “monsters, but you have chosen the wrong one. Horus is a fighter. He is one of us, not some immortal… aberration.’

The Khan laughed as he pursued him, this time from genuine pleasure. ‘Immortal aberration?’ he mused, dragging his blade down at a sharp angle and nearly severing a thicket of Mortarion’s feeder cables. ‘We all share his blood. What does that make us?’

More powdered stonework, destroyed by Mortarion’s wild scythe-blows, bloomed in a cloud around them. Bolt-trails whined and punched through the haze before cracking into what remained of the architecture. Uncaring of anything but their own contest, the two primarchs hacked their way towards the pyramid’s core, overshadowed by immense pillars and gaping roof-curves, trading blows of such heft that the earth shuddered beneath them.

‘Just what do you think will happen here?’ spat Mortarion, digging in again and halting his backward course. His armour had been hacked into a tattered parody of its former solidity. ‘Do you think you can behead me, “like Fulgrim did Ferrus?’

The Khan missed his aim then for the first time.

Was that true? Was Ferrus gone?

Mortarion surged back at him, kicking the hilt of Silence hard into the Khan’s leading leg. The ivory greave-plate cracked, fizzing with energy as the ceramite fractured.

The Khan veered away from the follow-up strike, nearly losing his footing entirely. He staggered backwards as Mortarion went onto the offensive.

‘Oh yes, he’s dead,’ Mortarion rasped. ‘The numbers are against already you. They will only get worse.’

The Khan glanced upwards, up into the immense voids of the pyramid’s heights. Tiny flecks of glass rained down from the smashed apex, sparkling bloodily from the fires kindling in the fissures below. Prospero’s landscape growled its sullen anger, as though the world itself were outraged at a second duel of primarchs upon its soil. The carbon-dark sky, starless and empty, roiled above the jagged maw of the summit. “Mortarion’s cloak spread wide, buoyed by hot updraughts from the cobweb of glowing crevasses. For a moment, he looked like some vision of the underworld, a phantom of old Chogoris – consumed by yaksha, eternal and devilish.

The Khan fell back further, holding his dao two-handed. Mortarion was strong, as strong as the roots of the Ulaav mountains, but he was slow. The two of them were perfectly matched, like two sides of a medal.

If we fought on the same side, he and I, countering our weaknesses, could anything stand before us? he thought. Even Horus? Even the Emperor?

He gazed into Mortarion’s pallid face and saw the resentment burning there, just as it did in him.

He is lost. We have all been betrayed.

The Death Lord strode closer, sweeping Silence low and hard, his expression curdling into hatred, his sclerotic breath low and rapid.

‘Come then, brother,’ said the Khan, bracing for the impact once more, holding position amidst the glass tears of Magnus’s lost “city. ‘Let us decide this, you and I. For eternity.”

 

[Augustus]

Wow. Scars sound like a singular work. Can't wait to read it. And thank you!

[Wade Garrett]

Is it just me or are neither Khan nor Mort making a lick of sense?

 

"You're still enslaved by your past, Angron. Too hateful to learn. Too spiteful to prosper."

 

VS

 

"Listen to your blue clad wretches yelling of courage and honor, courage and honor. DO YOU EVEN KNOW THE MEANING OF THOSE WORDS?"

 

this really isn't.

[HaSY]

Seems like Khan can read the warp too n foresaw Mortarion's bleak destiny.

[GhostMalone]

There's more but I really can't spoil it for anyone

[Greyall]

Thanks, Jaspy

 

But...does no one win?

[Lord Lorne Walkier]

Can you talk a bit about Arvida?  He  has not been talked about here for two episodes.

[GhostMalone]

morty pulls out as they come to a stalemate as the scars opened fire in space, but mort vows an eternity of vengence

[Verity]

 

Interesting, the little vision thing about Khan. Is it definite that it was based on his fight with Mortarion, or is it some bizarre hint at the future?

 

[Daddywarcrimes]

 

 

I really liked the bit about the White Scars not interring their wounded in dreadnoughts when Shiban wakes up in the apothecarium after his suicidal rush to get Ilya to the teleport controller.  I also liked that in the end, Torghun was defending like a White Scar, and almost won the fight for the ship when Shiban stopped fighting like one.  I am curious about how Khan is going to get back to Terra, though.

 

The high point of the story was still Khan's conversation with Magnus, with the conversation on Ullanor a close second.

 

I kind of wish that Russ and the Vlka hadn't been left in limbo, hiding from the Alpha Legion fleet in a nebula, but the book was never about them, so that's a pretty minor gripe with what was otherwise a great story.

 

 

[DuskRaider]

 

Well at least my Primarch doesn't get trounced... I was expecting disappointment.

 

[Emperor's Furor]

Well I finished it, and it was quite epic

 

 

The eternal enmity between Mortarion and Khan was something I hadn't of guessed considering nothing like it is present in 40k, at least not presented so. It explains why Henricos was with a party of White Scars when he met his end at the hands of Little Horus, however I think that short story is undeserving of him imo and perhaps he was dragged off and survived, however if not then it just adds to the grim darkness and one that I guess I can accept.

 

It raises the point of White Scars Dreadnoughts in relation to the outcome of Shiban, even in the crusade/heresy not using them. Arvida stays with the White Scars.

 

I can imagine reading this in one would be quite worth while, only a couple of episode were a little slow but it got progressively faster and more exciting.

 

 

 

[hopkins]

can't wait to read the next book with magnus in it. he knows everything

[amaze07]

 

So the khan has chosen his side!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

[depthcharge12]

Any one else participating in mustachvember in solidarity for how cool the Khan is?

[Augustus]

can't wait to read the next book with magnus in it. he knows everything

Or at least he thinks he does.

[Augustus]

That's pretty confident of him, but I tend to go with true combat examples, not boasting. Like when Guilliman says only five of his brothers could take on him...meh.

 

I thought he said he only admired 5 of his brothers while he was happy to look down on the rest. Then he said he only looked up to the Lion and Horus. Unless I am much mistaken (very likely :S )

[Ashur]

Now that we know why Mortarion joined Horus against the Emperor, I would like to see a Death Guard novel about him and his misgivings. As the Khan said, he went to war against psykers, and found himself on the Chaos side. I would like to see how he deals with that contradiction before he gets corrupted by the warp.

[Noserenda]

Id actually love for Mortarion to take the words to heart, attempt to change sides and rush to Earth only to get becalmed and beg nurgle for forgiveness. Doubt itll go exactly that way though :/

[Scribe]

Well Nurgle is about acceptance, and wallowing in depression...seems to me Mort's on the path here.