Plainsong: An Emperor's Children Novel

[Pavement Artist]

Hi guys.

 

Been a while since i've attempted some 40k fan fic. Been pottering away at this during work and thought i should pop the prologue up. The following will be an ongoing novel set in the current timeline, featuring a Slaaneshi warband. I wanted to explore the nature of Slaanesh worship, particularly the consequences of being steeped in it's practices for so long. How one's soul becomes hollowed out, all that jazz.

 

Anyway, i've decided to split the prologue into two parts as it ended up fairly sizeable. I hope you enjoy, comments and criticisms as always are more than welcome.

 

 

Plainsong

 

The Warrior threaded his way through the bones of the dying city and death followed after him.

 

His kin were long gone, lost to their own obsessions, tenuous links of fraternity shucked away as easily as a husk of corn as soon as they had made planet fall. Sometimes, the warrior could remember an older time-somewhere before the rabid twilight existence he and his brothers were condemned to- a time before all the existence they knew was rendered down into nothing but horror and frenzied need. If the warrior thought hard enough, he was certain he could remember a time when the skies above him were anything other than a deep russet, like a blood soaked backdrop for the benefit of watching gods.

 

He was built like all of his kind- bull strong and broad to an almost comical degree. A legacy of his lineage lent him a grace seldom seen among many of his ilk and certainly never among those of his cousins who shared his exile's life. That grace was robbed of him now, his gait reduced to a leper's shamble as he clambered among the mounds of rubble that fetched up against the city limits like the slumped bones of some great pachyderm.

 

He was dying. His frame- gene-forged in a time of myth though it was, could only bear so much. The thought served to curl his mouth upwards in a grim parody of amusement. He had tested the limits of a god's form and now he could feel the fevered heat of his physiology unravelling within him. He had fought centuries of war- Millennia by the reckoning of those who had cast him and his brethren into hell. Lesser ages would have reckoned him a god and yet despite this, he could still feel a cold despair seeping into the marrow of his bones. He clung to life like a child clutching at a blanket. He had lived a thousand lives of atrocity and yet he wished to live still. The desire gave energy to his dying form and so he continued on: one foot in front of the other, steadily outpacing death.

 

His armour shuddered convulsively as he staggered through the dead city. Nominally the burnt umber of tanned flesh, the hulking plate was a mess of plasma scoured black and holed through gunmetal. The ragged strips of truer, pink flesh that had adorned his pauldrons like votive scripts, were now sizzling in the heat of the blazing hab-blocks. The fitful breeze caught the ashes of the smouldering flesh and sent them upwards into false twilight.

Sense memories assaulted his fevered brain. He remembered the time before. He and his brothers had stood in serried ranks, their plate a wine dark purple, the aquila on their breast chased with gold. They had been the best of their kind- a paragon for the others to aspire to. A vanguard of an age of enlightenment, their bearing had been of the noblest deport. They had been immortalised in Verse and pict and song. Now he was reduced to some carrion thing; his soul stretched thin and taut. Broad as he was, he felt as though he was shrinking, receding back into the hulking shadows of his war plate.

 

In all his years, he had never felt the need to make excuses for his fall. Even now, at the end of his life, he felt no shame for how he and his brothers had been so miserably reduced. As for the kin legions with which his ilk had been exiled, he had always viewed the shrieking delusion of their dogma with no small amount of contempt. His master had demanded nothing from him, only that the Warrior gave himself over utterly and completely in the pursuit of his lordly gifts.

 

The sensations, the fundamental power of the experiences he had faced in the time after his fall. The other legions wore their shame like mourning garb, screaming their failure into the void. The Warrior had never felt anything approaching regret for his fall. The scale of epicurean experiences he had been offered would have sundered the mind of a lesser being. He challenged anyone to experience what he had and still maintain their universal view.

 

A sudden, spasmodic fibrillation fluttered through his frame and he crashed down to one knee, his gauntlet pressing against his breastplate as though he could seize and crush the agony within his fist. He fought against the blackness that swam at the edge of his vision. He fought against toppling over. His war plate was monstrously heavy and he wasn't entirely certain he would be able to right himself in his weakened condition. He coughed and a thick stream of blood welled up from between his lips like oil from a borehole. He wiped his mouth clean with the back of his gauntlet and looked down at the viscera streaking the plate- dark red, the near black of arterial blood. No good at all.

 

The sound of his collapse had been echoed obscenely loud among the ruins of the city. To that end, it was no surprise that he had attracted unwanted attention. Human troopers- Militarum or PDF, he hardly cared either way. Half a dozen of them crested the top of a rubble mound, sheltered within the hollowed out framework of one of Triaros' famed glass domes. During planet fall, his helmet feed had supplied him with a near constant stream of irrelevant data bursts, promoting the planet's status as one the Imperium's most pre eminent archival centres, those once proud domes housing rows upon rows of data stacks like grave markers. He had sundered the data feed to his optics, amused that it thought in anyway that information was relevant or indeed a justification as to why he and his brothers had set upon the planet.

 

The lead figure among the soldiers pointed at the warrior's prostrate form, shouting encouragement at his comrades as he gingerly descended down the sprawl of fallen masonry. The others followed suit, dislodging the stone underfoot, sending them scrambling down madly in a cloud of dust. At the foot of the slumped building, they fanned out into a loose circle, evidently reluctant to approach the fallen demigod, weakened though he was. They were a sorry lot, dirty and dishevelled creatures clad in grubby, torn fatigues. Their flak armour was long gone-presumably cast off to save weight once the weapons of the enemy had found their ablative properties to be miserably wanting. Their manufactorum pressed lasguns were equally redundant when set against the Warrior's war plate and yet their trauma shattered minds wouldn't permit them to cast the weapons aside. He reckoned that was either a unique sort of courage or a madness more fundamental than any he had ever experienced.

 

Either way, it was a grim kind of providence that had brought the fallen warrior to them. Their world was sundered unto death, victory in the military sense was a madman's dream and yet, here was one of the hated enemy, a murderer of their world on bended knee in front of them. Nevermind the inviolable nature of his armour, the Warrior had cast his helmet aside long ago and there was still softer meat to be found at the collar seal and at the limb joints- Soft enough for a lasgun.

 

The leader found his courage and stepped ahead of the group, shouldering his lasgun with shaking arms and drawing a bead on the fallen Warrior. The Warrior looked up at him through pain fogged eyes, his mouth leaking black blood as he gave the mortal his most winning smile. Spurred on by this disrespect, the others found their courage, picking up their weapons and stepping forward. As close as they were, the Warrior could smell the rank odour of sweat and ruin coming off them in waves. The dust of collapsed masonry covered them all like natron scattered over a corpse to preserve it. They had found their resolve for the moment, but the wide set of their eyes spoke of the terror that threatened to boil over within them all. The warrior had thought them broken things, ruined unto uselessness. Now he saw the truth of it. They padded towards him like starving dogs circling a dying fire.

The leader shook his head wildly, as though clearing a fog of intoxication from his mind. His shock of wild, dust choked hair fanned out madly, his stubble covered face setting in a sickened grimace as he tightened his grip on his lasgun, pressing the muzzle hard against the Warrior's temple. Shaking fingers found the trigger, struggling for the biting point. There was a crackle of static in the air as his comrade's disengaged the safety lock on their own rifles.

 

The Warrior closed his eyes, exhaling slowly, desperately willing that the tremors running through his frame would stop. His right hand moved with imperceptible slowness, his armoured fingertips running slowly up the gold chased pommel, moving lasciviously up to the hilt guard-ornately wrought into a mass of pressing, screaming faces. The fingertips hooked under the hilt guard, sliding the blade barely an inch from the scabbard. The steel was near black with oil-the mortals heard nothing. The Warrior let out a final breath, feeling the spasming of his dying body calm for a moment. He felt a shadow pass over his hearts-something like the flutter of dark wings over a grave. Something not quite like strength returned to him. It would serve for now.

[Pavement Artist]

He struck out with an elbow, cannoning it into sternum of the troop leader. He staggered backwards , like a marionette who's strings had been yanked violently. The man's chest was instantly transformed into a concave ruin. He was almost certainly dead- the impact trauma enough to pulp his organs utterly. Nevertheless, the Warrior's sword whispered from the scabbard like a promise, wheeling around in one fluid motion, cutting the troop leader cleanly through the midsection.

The man swayed slightly on his feet, just before the bisected halves of his body fell away like a split tuber, the ruined trunk of his upper body landing heavily on the ground, spilling his intestines like lengths of heavy steel cable. The legs followed shortly after, crashing to their knees in a grim parody of a supplicant's prayers.

 

The troop leader's demise had happened in the span of a couple of seconds. His comrades stepped back, appalled by the swiftness of the act and dismayed at the generous quantity of blood that was now seeping towards them from the man's sectioned remains. What discipline they had was now obliterated. Their rifles were held slack in their arms, they looked comically relaxed, as though they were on stand down between parade drills.

 

The Warrior rose on unsteady legs, turning towards the remaining men. With a flick of his wrist, the sword wheeled round towards them, a fan of blood flying from the edge. The blade was a wicked thing, as tall as any of the mortals in front of him: a slender, monstrous thing of folded steel, a huge tulwar in shape, with a hooked recurve at it's leading edge. It was a weapon of duality: the exceptionally crafted duelist's edge marred by the butcher's hook meant to snag and tear entrails. The blade's true name only revealed itself to the Warrior during moment's of divine influence, spilling from his mouth in a tide of sibilant echoes that even his transhuman biology could not replicate. Shorn as he was from the influence of that Dark prince, the hollow thing he had become had resorted to an orphan name for the blade: Suspiria de desperandum, the Sighs from despair.

 

The mortals had noted well the wicked edge of the sword and the capability of the one who wielded it. They edged backwards towards the slopes of rubble, not one of them willing to take their eyes from the hulking presence stalking towards them. The core of their primate heritage had taken over now. They recognised him as an apex predator and primordial biological impulses told them they had no hope of outrunning the monstrous thing before them. Their rifles still hung in their arms, the Warrior doubted the men even remembered they had them. Their eyes darted continuously toward the hooked blade. That pleased him, it meant their eyes weren't on the true weapon.

 

He stalked towards them, a predator's instinct pulsing through his armour. Above his armour's backpack generator, a forest of organ pipes swayed fitfully. Brass speakers fashioned into screaming faces, gurgled into life, jaws hung open impossibly wide. A sudden sigh sounded in the still air, like a receding tide. The soldiers halted, wary and terrified.

 

The Warrior hunched low, bracing himself on shaking legs. His lips peeled back from blood stained teeth. Another of those winning smiles. Eagerly, he threaded another impulse up through his war plate.

The pipes rattled and stirred, the air seeming to curdle around them as the speaker grills vibrated incessantly. Stepping forwards, the Warrior unleashed the building power.

 

A horrific shriek split the air, boiling out of of the screaming organ pipes in a wave of kinetic energy. Sound waves spilled out in a cone, striking the mortals like buckshot from a hunter's rifle. The sheer appalling volume served to burst their eardrums in the split second before the wave of energy struck them, snapping their bodies like bundles of firewood.

Those in the leading edge of the blast were obliterated, the sound wave peeling the flesh from their frames and flinging them backwards, doll-like and broken. Bones became brittle, cracking and bursting like pine-cones tossed onto a bonfire.

 

The warrior staggered as the sound ebbed away. Tapping into the gifts of the kakophoni had always drained him and no more than in his depleted state. Hollowed out and deprived of his Prince's influence, reaching a portion of that power felt akin to swimming for a distant headland in a turbulent ocean. He could feel the strength fleeing his body and he cursed as he collapsed once more.

 

He sprawled on his hands and knees, retching violently, blood spattering the ground like ink blots. His body shook as though with a fever. It felt as if the shriek was still sounding, sundering and unmaking him from within. Suspiria fell from his hand and he dug into the earth will palsied fingers, fighting against the blackness that once again threatened to consume him.

 

He fell forward, his awareness fading swiftly as he fought against the weight of his war plate that seemed to have increased a hundredfold. As consciousness stole away from him, he was barely aware of the mortal soldier shambling through the dust towards him.

The Warrior raised his head from the ground, grimacing with the effort. The soldier had been lucky, caught at the trailing edge of the sonic force, he had avoided the murderous ruination that had befell his comrades. The Warrior watched him make his way unsteadily over, the butt of his rifle being used as a make shift crutch. His left leg was gone below the knee, a fan of shattered bone and musculature fanning out like a Burch switch. Blood pulsed from the wound at a steady rate. Not so lucky then, thought the Warrior, merely opting for the slower path.

 

“You're nothing like I imagined.” rasped the soldier, his voice ravaged by thirst and the chem burn that pervaded the air. Biological trivialities that the Warrior had long cast aside. The soldier hefted his lasgun, hopping unsteadily on his one good leg as he pointed the muzzle downwards.

 

“They teach us about your kind, do you know that? In the Scholams, in Church, Throne! Even my old Ma has about a hundred stories about the legions that fell. Monsters to hear her tell it, the boogeymen from the Great Eye.”

 

He swallowed, snapping off the lock on his lasgun, the weapon thrumming with power.

 

“We were all so afraid when we heard who was making planet fall. The enemy. THE enemy. All of the monsters we had ever been warned about, every single shadow we were ever told had been hiding under the bed. We finally knew you were real.”

 

His finger found the biting point.

 

“Look at you. You're pathetic. Coughing out your life into the dirt like some dying animal. We were so scared and for what? You're not the monsters they warned us about. Whatever :cuss got into your brains to twist you like this.....I'm not afraid of you. Whatever made you great and terrible, that died long ago I think.”

 

The lasgun spooled up to a keening wail as the soldier tightened his finger on the trigger.

 

The Warrior closed his eyes, smiling ruefully. He couldn't quite find it within himself to disagree. He waited for the whine to build to a crescendo, just before sharp crack that would end his existence.

 

It never came.

 

A low bass note sounded. A low, diaphragm churning growl of an apex predator. The soldier paused, turning towards the source of the sound.

 

A reverberating blast of sound struck the warrior, removing him bodily from the Warrior's field of vision. It was instantaneous and brutal, as though a localised hurricane had just snatched the man from his feet.

The Warrior pushed himself to his knees, turning to look where the man had landed. The soldier lay at the foot of a collapsed commercia unit. The man was a miserable sight- a shapeless ruin of burst flesh, his body folded in a way that suggested none of his bones remained intact.

 

“Hmm” The Warrior said.

 

“Eudaimon?” The voice was a rolling baritone, kin to the blast that had destroyed the soldier. The Warrior turned his head towards the newcomer.

 

The monster approaching was a flawed mirror of the Warrior. Elective transformative processes had served to render all of his kind alike,mortal eyes had a tendency to focus on the elephantine exaggerations wrought to the human form. It was part of the mythology of their kind, it contributed to the legend of the space marine: Hulking, brutish stamp pressed gene warriors. The subtleties were there, though difficult to perceive.

Where the Warrior had the spare frame of the consumptive, functional power hidden within a lean build, the newcomer was a true brute: a hulking mass of armour plate and flesh. By virtue of their physiology, none of his kin could achieve anything approaching overweight; even so, the approaching monster's frame possessed a mass that spoke of some sort of chemical retardation of his transhuman biology.

 

His plate was the same tanned hide as the Warrior, his pauldrons finished in lurid neon pink, showing through in garish patches beneath a taut layer stretched human flesh. Shredded and stretched beyond recognition, the Warrior could still discern the facial features of these adornments. The monster's weapon was a distant cousin of the organ pipe arrangements on the Warrior's back: a hulking long barrrelled weapon, ending in a howling brass maw. It throbbed with power as the newcomer approached. Open channels flanked the side of the weapon and the monster played his fingertips across these, eliciting nauseating, glottal tones from the oversized muzzle. He halted in front of the warrior, spitting down at his feet.

 

“Up Eudaimon, you wretch.”

 

The Warrior, Eudaimon, reached out with a trembling hand, gripping Suspiria's hilt, he pushed the knuckles of his free hand into the earth, attempting to lift himself up. His shuddering limbs gave way and he crashed back down with a peal not unlike a collapsing church bell. His face coated with the grave dust of the fallen city, he began to laugh madly.

 

“Hello Lucretius, I'm afraid I'm unable to oblige.”

 

The hulking warrior tilted his head, looking down at Eudaimon as though he were a curiosity in some lord's menagerie. After some consideration, he powered a ceramite shod boot into his ribcage, lifting Eudaimon off the ground a respectable distance.

 

“Doesn't seem so hard to me.” Lucretius observed.

 

Eudaimon rolled on the ground, coughing up gobbets of thick, arterial blood. He snapped his head up to the monster, a petulant fury writ on his face.

 

“I'm dying you cretin! Now piss off back to whatever hole you crawled out from.”

 

Lucretius' eyes scanned to the spatter of blood on the ground, back to Eudaimon and then back again to the blood.

 

“You don't have permission to die.” He stated simply.

 

Eudaimon spat out a gobbet of crimson phlegm, forcing his sword arm up in a farce of a guard stance.

 

“Listen to me you overgrown arsehole, leave m-”

 

Tiring of his brother's outbursts, Lucretius lashed out once more with his boot, connecting square with Eudaimon's face, the warrior's nose exploding like a wineskin, sending him reeling back, senseless.

 

Chuckling, Lucretius mag-locked his monstrous sonic weapon and stooped down, hefting Eudaimon over one shoulder like a burlap sack.

 

“Once more for the hard of hearing. You can't die yet wretch, the Magister would have a word with you.”

 

Turning towards the city, the hulking warrior carried his brother off. A few steps later and the dust had already fallen around them like a shroud.

[Pavement Artist]

Bumping for feedback :)

[Brother Lunkhead]

Well brother, I'm enjoying this tale even more than The Triptych I already see improvement in your prose and the subject is quite compelling. I must confess, I've never been a Emperor's Children fan...… until now

[Shinros]

As another fan and fan-fiction writer for the emperor's children. (It's my longest running story on dakka and my first one.) I just have to say I am eager to see more! Also it's easy to read as well. 

[Pavement Artist]

As another fan and fan-fiction writer for the emperor's children. (It's my longest running story on dakka and my first one.) I just have to say I am eager to see more! Also it's easy to read as well. 

 

Thank you kindly. I've been enjoying your genestealer cult story :)

[Shinros]

 

As another fan and fan-fiction writer for the emperor's children. (It's my longest running story on dakka and my first one.) I just have to say I am eager to see more! Also it's easy to read as well. 

 

Thank you kindly. I've been enjoying your genestealer cult story

 

Thanks glad you enjoy it! I do have to stress can't wait to see what you cook up next.