The Crimson Path

[Wade Garrett]

 

On a world of fire and ash, a sleeper dreams.

 

He is a child, looking up at the stars. Or at least, at the glimpses of them he can snatch through the black snow clouds and crumbling hive towers obscuring the sky. He can vaguely remember a man and woman-his parents?-holding him close as their clan huddles around one of the few functioning heating grates, its sulfurous reek a small price to pay compared to the biting chill. But the grates hold their own perils, as the dream/memory soon proves. His child’s world of warmth and closeness is seared away forever by blazing searchlights and rumbling machine noses as a spire lord capture team descends from the heights in search of more flesh to feed into their industrial machine.

 

In a foundry of black steel and white steam, a slave bears his burdens.

The boy’s name is Nineteen-Twelve-Two, and his days are an endless grind of backbreaking labor. Every resource this world had was used up long ago, and now its rulers sustain themselves by tearing down the abandoned buildings that cover it from pole to pole and feeding the scavenged rubble into their furnaces and fabricators. Normally, this kind of drudge work would be done by lobotomized servitors, but the cognitor-savants and bureadepts that serve the nobility have determined that is more efficient to simply snatch up succeeding generations from the ragged underhive clans below and work them until they drop.

 

The slaves are “encouraged” by armed men and women who move among them, chainmesh cloaks clinking over their leather hauberks as they deal out fearful beatings and worse to those who fall behind in their quotas or dare to commit any act that might be construed as dissent. They are proud, these armored folk. They call themselves Knight Wardens, and their exalted positions have been handed down from parent to child for millennia. Some of them are children, no older than Twelve-Two although larger and more heavily fleshed from regular meals, striding arrogantly among the very young and the very old just as their elders do among the adults. These youngsters are often the cruelest of all. One of them is beating an old man. The sleeper cannot remember the old man’s name, nor what his offense was, but even centuries later he can still clearly hear fragile bones breaking beneath iron shod boots. And he can remember the response of one of the adult knights, a broad shouldered man with a red beard braided into three trident like tines, when one of his fellows suggests reining in the furious child.

 

“They’re just underhive dregs, Thibor…we do them a favor by enslaving them, really. No great loss if he dies.”

 

Something snaps inside Twelve-Two. He is allowed to work with nothing but his scraped and blistered hands, but around his wrists he wears several pounds of stainless steel shackles that flash whenever they catch the light. He is painfully lean, but endless hours of toil have built a sinewy, rangy strength into his form. He only needs three palms clasped together hammerblows to splatter brains on the foundry floor, chainmesh hood be damned.

 

His actions are a spark that lights the inferno. Every one of the slaves knows what comes now-their entire shift will be dragged to the outside of the spire tower and strung up by barbed chains run through their elbows and knees, a lingering demise from cold and blood loss that will be a deterrent to any other thralls who would even dream of raising a hand to their Emperor ordained superiors.

So with nothing left to lose, they hurl themselves at the knights…and then they die. The knights are armored, trained to fight almost from birth, equipped with shock whips, chainswords, and autoguns, their disciplined formation bolstered by packs of gene bolstered and cybernetically enhanced attack dogs. They carve through the ragged mob like a sword blade
through slave’s sleeping blanket. Twelve-Two knows he has killed himself by his actions, that he has killed everyone he knows…and he does not care.

 

He is laughing as he tries to shoulder his way through the press of bodies towards the front ranks of the knights, the dead boy’s rapier blade clutched in his hands. He is free. This is his death, that he chose. The only thing that could make it sweeter is if he could plunge his stolen blade into the grim face of another Knight Warden before the end.

 

And then, from the unlikeliest of quarters, salvation. At first, it goes unnoticed amidst the general carnage of the melee, but an
intervention as violent as this cannot be ignored for long. Battling slaves and knights are simply obliterated, their entire bodies vanishing into red mist as giants in armor as red as blood carve through the melee without a care as to who they butcher. The Knight Wardens and their dogs try to fall back, to reorganize, to come up with some defense or strategy to counter this new threat. It is a futile effort. Slaves scatter and flee as the knights tight ranks go down like wheat before a scythe, the giants roaring at one another in voices like that would shame an ice gale.

 

Twelve-Two does not flee. He runs towards the giant forms, still clutching his rapier and screaming his own battle cry, a feeble, cracked thing compared to theirs. One of them swats out with a blow that should have split him in two, but because of his reckless charge he is only struck by the handle of the giant’s weapon as his needle thin blade snaps on the warrior’s battle armor. It is still send him senseless to the floor, the crack of his own skull sounding strangely like the old man’s ribs breaking as darkness closes over him.

 

In the guts of a prowling beast, a youth becomes a warrior.

 

Twelve Two looks at his weapon with grim satisfaction. With the pieces of sharpened stone and whetted steel he has added to it, the jagged club will do red work in the close quarters madness of a forlorn hope or a boarding action. He is bigger, stronger than he ever was when he worked in the foundry…the Twelfth Legion may do and be many things, but at least they ensure their levies are regularly fed. That the meal is very often the bodies of their fallen fellows bothers him not at all. It certainly doesn't bother the dead.

He was offered a choice when he first awoke aboard the Scylla, his head still pounding from the crude augmatics the servitor chirugeons had implanted to rebuild his skull…they all were. They could walk the Crimson Path, earn power and revenge by fighting alongside the red giants…the Eaters of Worlds, they call themselves, they could serve in some support capacity, or they could have their heads severed by chainaxes then and there. It is no choice at all. He is going to kill every until he has thrown the last head of the last slaver into a pyre made from the burning corpse of their False Emperor. The fact that he will very likely die before he realizes this grand ambition…well. Death comes for all, sooner or later.

In a howling storm, a warrior transcends humanity.

He is Twelve-Two no longer. He has earned a new name, a better name, given to him by the skull faced Houndmasters that oversee their training. To the World Eaters and the other fighters, he is known as “Helvetes”, a name he earned by climbing up on the wreckage of a burning Chimera to man its heavy bolter as the Templars in Black stormed the shell gouged crater that was the communal grave of the rest of his force. His actions stopped a potential breakthrough by the raging swordsmen, admirable in their fury even if their devotion is misplaced, and slew several of them, the last by wrenching the now empty weapon free from its pintle mount and beating the wounded foe’s black helm in with it. He still bears the scars from that warrior’s chainsword, and still bitterly regrets that he was forced to destroy the skull of so worthy a foe instead of being able to honor the his enemy's memory with a trophy.

 

It is not something he could have ever done before…but as he proved himself, in Scylla’s arena and on the battlefield, the Houndmasters and Chirugeons favored him, filled his blood with injections of muscle enhancers and combat drugs, altered his body with torturous surgeries, made him something much deadly than a mere man. And now, on the surface of this storm wracked world within the Great Maelstrom, he will take the final step on his journey. He will be a World Eater, with all that entails.

 

“You have heard a great deal about the Nails.” The Old Wolf tells him, and he leans his head to one side in assent, a lesser president baring its throat to the alpha. None of them are sure just how old the Marine really is…his mustache and shaved strip Mohawk are white (well, white splattered with blood now) and some whisper that he was fighting even before the Legion found its Primarch, when they were still the Hounds of War. Helvetes does not know, and does not care. What he does know is that on the rare occasions the Wolf emerges from his rages and speaks with clarity, it pays to listen.

“Yes, sir.” He says.

“I can imagine what they told you…that they steal thought, steal clarity, make you less than a man, a beast. But listen to me, young one. Nothing lasts in this world. Everything dies. You know that well as I do. So, then, what counts is how we live. And the Nails…ahhhh. Nothing is so sweet in life as those moments when death is a but a hairs breadth away, kept at bay only by your right arm and your luck. When fear is gone, and there’s only the battle mist and the blood smell, trading angry blow for angry blow…that’s when a man is ALIVE. That’s their gift to us, that we can put aside all fear of dying and live for nothing but putting blade in flesh. That’s LIFE, boy. Everything else is just marking time.”

Helvetes nods in agreement, and the clanking cybersurgeons come forward to begin his final transformation.

 

His mind is alive with endless, ceaseless fire, like a living thing forever clawing at the walls of his brain.

His face is hidden behind a grinning daemon mask, its mirth barely less than his own whenever a blade or a bullet shatters ceramite and exposes his own forever changed features, screaming and laughing at whatever is trying to slay him.

In his hands he holds a roaring pistol and a screaming axe, both of them chained to his wrists that he might not cast them aside with the Nails pain becomes too great, and they shed the blood of hundreds. Thousands. Men, women, greenskins, things like walking steel skeletons and monstrous insects as large as he is.

Remembered Nails pain bleeds into the real thing as he awakens, slumped amidst the volcanic ash of his current battlefield. Whatever felled him almost made a clean job of it, but in the case of a World Eater, almost simply is not good enough. He hears power armor nearby…not Astartes issue, but the smaller kind, modified to fit a mortal form, most likely that worn by the Brides of the Corpse God. Black iron fangs from a killing smile, his own amusement melding with the broken glee of his ruined helm, as he rises from the ruin of his own near unmaking. This is his path, he has chosen it, and even if he could somehow do it all again he cannot even imagine picking another.

His axe roars to life in his hands, the machine spirit as eager for the carnage to come as he is. It is every likely the Corpse Brides will end him. He does not care. Great Kharnath will sate himself momentarily on his blood, and lay his skull on the Throne to memorialize his courage. His choices will have had meaning, and his death will be remembered. It is all he has ever wanted. And so he speaks his final words, a valediction that will define everything he was up to this point.

“BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!”

 

[Vesper]

I had a pleasant time reading it. Good stuff.

[Wade Garrett]

Glad you liked it, Vesper. I admit it's largely a rip off of ADB's "Shadow Knight" short story about Talos getting recruited into the Night Lords, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone, then I wrote it out, and then I decided  "Well, after I've gone to all this trouble I might as well put it on the B & C".

 

The Old Wolf's speech...that needs some rewriting, I think. When I was thinking about it, I imagined Druss the Legend's speech on the walls of Dros Delnoch, plus several documentary's I've watched about old boxers, kickboxers, etc., where they talk about how it feels to be out there under the lights, trading punches and such, and you get the feeling if someone offered them a fight with the reigning champ in whatever their sport is right now they'd take it in a hearbeat.

 

But I don't think I put what was in my head into words very well.

[Conn Eremon]

I imagined Druss the Legend's speech on the walls of Dros Delnoch

Ha! I knew it reminded me of something.

 

Also DRUSSSSS!

[Dosjetka]

You've made me understand the World Eaters and provided me with an enjoyable read. And for that, you have my thanks :)

[Wade Garrett]

The following has nothing to do with the first piece, rather, it was brought on by repeated readings of "Betrayer" and some of the posts in the Heresy forum about the two Legions most ill suited to defend Terra with the Imperial Fists:

 

"Lord Dorn is going to invent new means of torture and execution just so he can use them on us." Skane rasps in his augmetic voice, the grenades and vials on his bandolier clinking against his black Destroyer armor as the mismatched band of World Eaters makes their way through the bowels of the Imperial Palace.

 

"Tell you what." Kargos answers, the Apocethary's smile evident in his voice over the vox. "If we're all still alive tomorrow, I'll be happy to help him come up with something suitably horrible. How about that?"

 

"Both of you, enough." Khârn snaps. "We've all seen the feeds. Eternity Gate will fall in minutes unless we take appropriate measures."

 

"What a wonderfully circumspect way of putting it." This from Vorias, as he leads the last eight of members of the Twelfth Legion's Librarius at a measured distance from the rest of them. "You could also say, unless we defy the express orders of the Emperor's anointed representative and undertake a course of action likely to end with all of us dead. He was locked away for a REASON, Khârn. You saw what happened, we all did! He killed more of our Legion in the Petitioner's Quarter than the damned traitors did! The Nails...Angron's mind is gone, and..."

 

"He is our father." the Eighth Captain answers wearily, the sounds of distant battle and the presence of so many psykers causing his own Nails to snap and snarl inside his skull. "It isn't right that he dies like this, like a rat in a trap. You it as well as I do, or you wouldn't have come with us. So spare me the caterwauling."

 

"Die on the walls or die down here with you fools." Vorias mutters softly. "Does it really matter which end we choose?"

 

Normally, the cell block they are entering would be heavily guarded by the Custodes themselves, but stands empty now, the Imperial tactical staff having thrown everything they can into the desperate struggle on the Palace walls. The only living thing in this wing is the prisoner forced into the most heavily secured cell in the opening days of the Siege, when it became obvious he was completely out of control. Opening the cell door usually requires a complex array of gene coded verification markers and electronic clearance signifiers, but Khârn makes do with a plasma pistol, his power armor groaning in protest as he pries at the armored door while the glowing metal that was once a lock dribbles down onto the stone floor.

 

"Angron? Sire? We..."

 

It is on him before he can get the door all the way open, before he can speak another word, a gibbering, slavering thing that bears him to the ground with a predator's leap, tearing away chunks of war plate and Astartes meat and bone with equal ease as it sobs and laughs to itself.

 

DO NOT DRAW YOUR WEAPONS.

 

The thundering chorus of the Communion, the union of the remaining Twelfth Legion psykers into a single gesalt being, booms in the minds of the remaining World Eaters as hands instinctively shoot towards the butts of pistols and the hilts of blades in reaction to Khârn's hideous demise. Their Nails howl in protest, biting back against the violation with wild red hate, but the entity will not be denied. They remain frozen as unseen energies wrap themselves around the creature that continues to rip apart Khârn's corpse, killing him five, ten times over.

 

Whatever the united will of the coven is doing, it is clearly not without cost. One by one, the slumping forms of the psychic World Eaters succumb to a variety of agonizing demises, helms splitting open to reveal cracked skulls and boiling brain matter, red flames igniting from nowhere to devour ceramite and flesh with equal hunger. When Angron finally rises from his feral crouch, the only one left alive is Vorias himself, although not for long if the blood streaming from his helm's seals and the gurgling sounds he is making into the vox are any indication.

 

"Brothers! Sisters!" Angron's eyes are glazed, unfocused, and he seems completely oblivious to the gore splattered all over him. "I can hear the thunder...the high riders! They come for us at last! It all ends today, eh?"

 

Kargos realizes, then, just what the coven has done, what bait they found to draw the Eater of Worlds out of his Butcher's Nail induced madness, playing on the one thing Angron desires more than any other. In his mind, Angron isn't fighting his treacherous brothers at Terra...he's standing with his gladiator army in the mountains of De'Shea, watching the assembled armies of the world draw near to crush his doomed rebellion. It takes all the Apocethary's self control not to rip his helmet off and spit on Vorias's corpse, but what does it matter now? At least this way his father can achieve something useful with his death.

 

"Yes, the high riders." Kargos mutters, when it becomes clear none of the others intend to take the iniative in speaking to their insane Primarch. "You'll need your armor and weapons first, sire." Angron's playful cuff lands on his shoulder plates like the impace of a power fist as the maimed giant laughs at him.

 

"Sire? Sire? 'Sire', indeed. Am I a paperskin now, that you should speak to me so? HA! You'll be making them laught when they finally cut your head off, won't you, Klesti?"

 

Lhorke, the first Lord of the Legio XII War Hounds, is the last living defender of Eternity Gate, even though his current condition stretches the definition a bit. The Dreadnaught has killed with his combi bolters until they ran dry of ammo, killed with his lightning claws until a lucky melta blast severed the neural connectors that let him maneuver his deadly ironform, and even then he continued to snarl curses at the attackers, damning them in Low Gothic and Nagrakali until one of the whoreson Iron Warriors shattered his speakers with a spiteful hail of bolter fire.

 

Now he can only watch as the last of the defenders falls under before the press of traitor bodies, as Legionaries in the eye searing purple of the Emperor's Children and the sea green of the bastard Warmaster's own charge past his prone position in disorganized packs. What a glorious end for the Twelfth, herded into a breach in the walls like fodder to buy time for more reliable warriors to organize a true defense elsewhere.

 

He doesn't blame Rogal Dorn for using them so. He blames ANGRON, for ruining the host he once led, turning disciplined phalanxes into screaming mobs of who hurled themselves out of their fortifications at every opportunity, throwing their lives away before the superior numbers of the traitors in useless, worthless counter attacks. True sons of their pathetic father, every one of them, blood mad berserkers heeding nothing except the implants mutilating their minds.

 

Even though he can't move or speak, Lhorke can still "see" and "hear" inside his amniotic coffin, enough of the audiovisual links between his machine shell and his decrepit corpse remaining intact to provide him with a wonderful view of Eternity Gate's last moments. It has been well and truly breached this time, and the howled Nagrakali battle cries and gunning chainblades he hears approaching will not do a damn thing to change these simple facts. He has no idea what the defenders are thinking throwing a few more World Eaters into this disaster, unless Dorn is simply taking the opportunity to purge a little more unreliable chaff from his ranks.

 

The Dreadnaught is forced to revise his initial assessment when the first of the Traitor vanguard are hurled back past his position. This is not mere hyperbole...bodies and pieces of bodies in the armor of the III and XVI Legion are literally thrown through the air to rain down around his paralyzed machine body. Lhorke is the only surviving Imperial to bear witness to what follows, and he will only speak of it once, when the Praetorian himself kneels before his sarcophagas and softly whispers "How did my brother die?" Even then, he will recount his story with a barely disguised contempt. "My brother" indeed. Such a change from "the beast" and "that lunatic" that Dorn spat around the strategia table when Horus's fleet first broke out of the Warp. Truly, nothing improves a reputation like dying.

 

Lhorke has seen his gene father fight many times before, and even he will admit that for all his MANY faults on the battlefield Angron is an unrivaled force of destruction. But he has never seen him fight like this. The Twelfth Primarch is transfigured, leading his white armored sons through the Traitor ranks with no concern for the numbers arrayed against him, the bolt rounds biting into his flesh, or anything else. How do you fight something like that? How do you battle a thunderstorm, an earthquake, a wildfire? You don't. You get out of its way, or you die.

 

The traitors are certainly managing the latter well enough, Astartes in the livery of Perturabo, Lorgar, and Alpharius joining in the fight only to be mowed down as easily as the rest. More and more enemies pour through the shattered gate, dropping out of the sky on jetpacks, setting up heavy weapons behind their dying brethren, Word Bearers calling up nightmare beasts of unreality and directing them towards the raging Primarch. It suddenly seems to the old War Hound that he is watching two battles. He is never certain, to his dying day, whether this is some trick of shared blood that flows even in his corpse's veins, or a merely a mechanical malfunction caused by the injuries his iron coffin has sustained, but he sees what he sees nonetheless.

 

In one battle, Angron and an ever shrinking pack of World Eaters reap a jaw dropping harvest of life from other Legionaries, and in the other....in the other Angron fights beside the emaciated, filthy forms of mortals, clad in rags. The stone beneath his feet is not the marble floor of the palace, but the uneven grey of a mountain ridge, covered in white snow. His enemies are armored not in burnished iron or blood red, but gold, polished so bright it hurts the eyes to look at them directly. He is laughing as they shoot and stab and burn him, laughing as the figures fighting at his side fall one by one.

 

"COME ON! COME ON, THEN! COME SEE ME FIGHT ONE LAST TIME, YOU SONS OF DOGS! I DEFY YOU! WE ALL DEFY YOU! WE WILL WEAR YOUR CHAINS NO MORE! COME AND DIE, YOU GUTLESS BASTARDS!"

 

He is fighting alone now, still fighting, blood of the Emperor, how he fights. Lhorke has not thought there was anything left in the universe that could still freeze his blood with awe, but he was wrong. It should be impossible for any one warrior to stand against so many, even a Primarch. It is a simple truth, grounded in basic arithmetic. Angron meets that truth and defies it, denies it with his own, even simpler truth. He will not surrender. He will NOT be conquered. He will NOT lay down his life. The high riders, the paper skins, the sneering, arrogant slavers of De'Shea...they're going to have to take it.

 

The end is sudden when it comes. One minute, the Warmaster's followers are still throwing themselves at the mad Primarch to die beneath his blades. The next they are falling back, Emperor's Children fleeing in a mad sprint, Iron Warriors quickstepping backwards in good order, bolters still barking defiantly in spite of their cowardice. Angron ROARS after them, throwing his head back and lifting his axes to the sky, then allows his head to slump forward, chin leaning on his armored chest in repose.

 

He is still in that same position, still standing, dead muscles locked in place by rigor mortis and lactic acid, when warriors in the battered and grimy yellow of Dorn's Legion reverently remove Gorefather and Gorechild from his corpse's hands.

 

It is later, much later. So much has been lost, and so many have died, but a select few have been judged worthy of commemoration in stone and metal, a measure of immortality to inspire all who gaze at them. Ostian Delacour is one of those judged worthy of this vital task, charged by Dorn himself with memorializing the Twelfth Primarch at the site of his final battle at eternity gate. He studies his sketches, prepared with the aid of the VII Primarch, thoughtfully. A beatific form, gazing benevolently down at all who pass through the Gate, its features wracked with just the hint of a martyr's pain.

 

The reverberating thud of metal on marble makes him look up, to the the towering Contemptor Dreadnaught in bronze and pale blue stomping down the entranceway towards him.

 

"You're the sculptor, then?" it asks.

 

"Ye-yes?" he ventures after a moment, his voice momentarily stolen by the fear evoked by the enormous war machine's towering presence.

 

"And that, that is the....no."

 

"No?"

 

"No. No, no, and no. I've kept silent while idiots turn that lunatic into a thricebedamned saint, but this...no. No. He ruined the Twelfth, butchered more innocents that I can count, but the son of a whore held Eternity Gate all by himself. That counts for something. I owe him that much, you understand?"

 

"You...you do not care for the statue?"

 

"You won't be carving it. At least, not that monstrosity. You'll shape it like I tell you to shape it, you understand?"

 

"But...but Lord Dorn..."

 

"Is not standing here, ready to blow you off these walls and take his chances that the next artist they send will be more amendable to reason." The Dreadnaught finishes, its internal mechanisms loudly cycling more ammo into the enormous guns mounted on its arms.

 

"I..I...what changes would you like made, my lord?"

 

Throughout the Imperium, there are many wonderful works of art created in remembrance of Angron, the Red Angel of Nuceria, who laid down his life at the Siege of Terra. Paintings of his noble countenance can be found in almost every Ecclesiarchy structure of note, and his regal, knightly image is a popular subject for friezes and murals depicting great military triumphs.

 

But the most well known one (if not the most popular) is at Terra herself, viewable only by those with the wealth or influence to journey to the throneworld itself. Cast in jagged granite, this statue has none of the grandeur or divine beauty most other representations of the Twelfth Primarch seek to capture...it is a ragged, ruined thing, face twisted by wounds new and old and by a fury that seems more akin to that the more lurid brand of noveau artists portray upon the daemons of the Warp than one of the heroic sons of the Emperor. It is said that to meet that raging gaze, sightless stone though it is, has caused strong men, powerful men, Lord Militant Generals and Warmasters to tremble. A few simple words are inscribed on the plinth it stands on, the only accolades a cantankerous dreadnaught would allow.

 

ANGRON OF DE'SHELIKA RIDGE

HE DIED FREE