Lost Son

[Angelos Dante]

Just a piece i'm putting together, i'll be as surprised as everyone else with how this goes let me know your thoughts as we go!

The sky rippled with a migraine inducing watercolour effect of colours that had no right in the material universe.

A dust choked breeze of cold air swept over him. For thousands of miles there was nothing but bones and debris littering the ground He was standing in the grounds of an extinction of a world. This wasn't merely a genocide of a species, this was planet-murder. Eradication of everything living and considered alive for as far as the eye could see.

The complete absence of sound was deafening. He felt as if he were lost in the void, almost maddening in its absolute.

Turning slowly, his eyes watered in the ash choked air. He could smell nothing. Taste nothing on the breeze.

His eyes alighted on one figure, so out of place in this scene of annihilation that he started forward, reaching out to touch the figure, was it some mirage? an illusion brought on by the insanity of the moment?

A figure stood amongst the rubble and death, clothed in the simplest of emerald robes, his mind rebelled at the figure who stood with his back to him, they shouldn't be here. No one should.

The tip of his finger brushed the robe before the figure turned, with all the slow and subtle grace of a predator who had a particularly unwitting meal walk into its den.

The slow turn revealed the first of surprises, it was not a male, from his judgement it was a young female, sun kissed skin,

eyes of violet met his, flickering with a ferocity a...passion that he only dimly recognised, a shadow of a memory from a time now thought myth.

pale lips opened to speak, in the same moment he recoiled. A deep, primordial level he felt the need to get away from her. The sensation brought physical disgust, the only thing keeping him in place.

Her emerald dress gave way to the dark olive skin of her arms and back to sleeves of equally shimmering green, reminding him of an untouched forest far from this place; her own hand reached out in the same moment, her fingertip touched his. A word

whispered with all the severity of a eulogy, yet as passionate as a lover's kiss with the gleam of...something unrecognisable in her eye.

The touch gave birth to a storm of thoughts and sensations, he felt as if he were drowning, his mind tearing open, filling up with images and sights that were not his own, yet as familiar as if he had experienced them. This was what the descent into insanity

must feel like. He laughed at the thought, blood seeped from his nose like a crimson river, a cough of laughter spilled the precious fluid over his chin, creating a second coat of red over his battleplate.

Collapsing to one knee he grinned up at the girl, between their fingers a white light grew, still unable to draw his attention, even as, in the distance several cyclones of flame reaped the earth of even the dust that stained its skin.

It was a race now which would consume him first, the firestorm or the white energy crackling between them. His eyes still didn't leave hers as she mouthed that word over and over, more urgent as everything crackled and turned white.

A grunt drew his attention back, a cold sweat coating his body standing taut, mouth tingling with acidic spittle

"-Eh? Prime meat for later, Magus?"

Amsu looked down at the clutch of shivering mortals. Huddled upon the uneven earth, cratered and fissured, as if some unseen god had laid waste to the earth, reducing the planet to some fractured mess of tectonic plates, lava spewed forth amidst the crags, further despoiling the already harsh landscape.

"Magus, did you not hear me?"

Amsu turned his head slowly to regard his brother in arms, yet not by blood

"We don't have time for this. We need to be done with this place and leave, they will come for us soon"

The astartes laughed, clapping the sorcerer on the shoulder as he thrust his chest out, his riotous mix of coloured battle plate was always a point of pride for him, yellows, bronze, black and the odd catch of purple from a time past, each piece taken from an enemy defeated, all of them apparently a champion of their respective chapters if the warrior was to be believed

"Let them come, I hunger to add some black to my arms, I have several of their cousins decorating my plate"

Amsu smiled grimly, though he never knew how to smile in any other way, the Emperors Children warrior was a devastating combatant, and he would rue the day he would be called to fight him, his confidence, as with all of his Legion though, would no doubt be his undoing.

"Nadis, brother, we still have a fortress to lay siege to. We lack the surprise element to the assault, giving them the full opportunity to prepare their forces and make this the most arduous assault you have seen since Terra"

The Emperors Children warrior grinned his manic, mouth too wide grin, carved open, though not only by battle's kiss, his serrated edged maquahuitl gleamed its gold and purple savagery in the dawn of the planet's last light, unimaginatively he had named the weapon smile no doubt for the boyish smile of his he had disfigured in his unending desire to please his dark deity,

"We are the Carnivale, magus, we will dance to death's tune until she plays another. People like us don't live forever brother, you walk the same path as us, and will share in the final act, I have no doubt"

Amsu smiled beneath his helm, the crimson plate unadorned and undecorated, his former allegiance bleached from the surface, but for a single hanging trinket from the corner of his shoulder pad, a bronze, open hand within a starburst.

Shaking his head he surveyed the circus of murder and madness, long since desensitising himself to it, he felt a momentary twinge of regret, a man should never become bedmates with madness, though in the millennia since the War's end he had committed acts as horrendous as this in the name of survival, obliterating his pretty principles and the solid foundations that had moulded him as a noble being within a decade, he had explained it all away in the name of survival, locking away the doubter in his mind behind bars of sheer will.

The carnage unleashed by the Carnivale was something systematic in its chaos. They had terrorised the local savages on this

backwater, slaughtering the weakest, stealing entire tribes away, leaving the fighting men to come for the daemons that they saw n their own superstitious minds, though the reason for their defiance stood as a black anchor in the dying rays of the last light, a bastion of onyx, as foreign and unwelcome to this world as the warband that had come to steal it's children.

The butchery had swept the super continent for the last five nights, tribe by tribe they had murdered their way through the local inhabitants, baiting the planet's defenders to take action.

An inhuman ululating howl caught Amsu's attention as, perched upon a peak was the master of the warband. Crouched like some obscene gargoyle in the sunset, a human dangling from one over-sized fist, legs kicking for purchase in mid-air, hissing out a scream at the sight of the mutated commander, from his temple a pair of curved horns stretched round to crown his head, matching the same smooth pink flesh of a newborn, whilst his eyes glowed the yellow of warp-touched, a glowing red halberd to the sky, as if declaring this new murder to his uncaring god.

Clad in the barest of body protection, Amsu was sure it was more for theatrics than actual preservation, with giant pads of spiked iron and the royal purple lower body plating familiar to an astartes of the Children, the rest of his body was bare to the elements, his midriff protected by a leather wrap, wound round his waist with several open mouthed heads attached by

iron chains, not all were human.

As if sensing Amsu's attention the warlord turned his eyes from many hundreds of metres away on the crag top

"Thousand Son!"

Discarding the mortal like refuse, the warlord turned away in dramatic pose. With a sigh Amsu stepped past the huddled mortals, almost recoiling as he felt a hand upon his shoulder

"Show respect magus. For your own good, he doesn't like to be baited, you are holding your leash that is currently tied in a noose around your neck"

Nadis looked almost hesitant, hand lifted slightly from the Thousand Son's crimson plate, a nod from the sorcerer before he began his hike to the top of the crag, passing through the slaughter and debauchery like a wraith upon the aftermath of a battle.