Here's my BL 2025 open submission. Vashtorr the Arkifane & Iron Father Malkaan Feirros

[jaska]

Bore-Hive Ultris : Vigilus.

 

Iron Father Malkaan Feirros was prisoner in his armor, servo-joints seized by the festering scrapcode tormenting its machine-spirit.

 

Tainted servitors calmly disassembled their former masters, separating meat and metal into neat piles. Mostly Skitarii and Tech-priests, those silently infected fools. Others bore armor like Feirros’ own.

 

Impossibly suspended on metal wings, Vashtorr the Arkifane regarded him through molten eyes. His voice held the whisper-scream of overheated iron meeting water.

 

‘I see misguided ambition. Even when indistinguishable from machine, the human remains. There is more to replace than the corporeal.’

 

‘Flesh is weak,’ Feirros said. ‘Not humanity.’

 

Vashtorr circled him. ‘Observe how readily your systems accept my revisions. Your ceramite skin betrays you. For where you only see a weapon, I see a womb.’

 

The scrapcode tendrils bit, and Feirros saw true perversions crafted by the Arkifane’s hand. ‘What your body could become. What you might achieve, freed from the constraints of your dogma.’

 

‘Depravities serving no purpose,’ Feirros snarled.

 

‘My point is proven,’ Vashtorr said. ‘Creation needs no justification beyond itself.’

 

‘I’ll play no part.’

 

‘Correction: you already do. Every circuit grafted to your rotting meat invites my touch.’

 

‘I’d rather be ripped limb-from-limb.’

 

‘As you wish.’ Vashtorr’s talons slid inside him, opening his abdomen. He pulled upward but halted. His gaze lingered on Xth Legion markers. A cruel flame smouldered in his furnace-mouth.

 

"Get on with it, weakling," Feirros spat both blood and binharic.

 

"Patience." The claw ripped free. Vashtorr pried Harrowhand from Feirros’ frozen grip. A scrapcode blurt made a servo-arm wrench his helm aside. The axe angled to sever head from shoulders. “Son of the Gorgon.”

 

Feirros’ vision went red. How dare this abomination—

 

Harrowhand fell.

 

Deep systems—emergency protocols buried beneath layers of augmentation—responded. The cold logic of the machine. The burning fury of what remained human.

 

Corruption was overwritten with sacred binary cascading through his armor. The blighted machine spirit was liberated.

 

The Wrath on his shoulder barked. Mass-reactive rounds shattered the descending cog-blade into hot shrapnel, making Vashtorr discard the broken thing.

 

His fist met warp-forged brass and more bolts sank into Vashtorr with wet clangs.

 

The daemon’s wings ratcheted open like manufactorum gates. Warp-discharge seared the air.

 

Snatching Harrowhand, Feirros lunged—just as Vashtorr’s talon erupted with fire. He gripped the sundered shaft as a spear, but a cracking hammer-blow intercepted him and hurled him sideways.

 

‘I make not second offers.’ Vashtorr produced a profane data-hymnal. With the thunderclap of a great drop hammer, oily smoke consumed him.

 

Feirros rolled to his knees and opened a vox-channel. The networks already hummed with Vashtorr’s corrosion.

 

‘Authorization-Seven-Mu-Eighty.’  Immediate quarantine protocols.

 

He hesitated. The centuries had taught him when mercy became weakness.

 

All was silent, save the dutiful servitors.

 

‘The Tech-priests are compromised,’ he said at last. ‘Kill them all.’

 

Vashtorr laughed at the predictable order. ‘The human remains.’ He whispered into the Immaterium.

 

Under nearby Scelerus, war had buried geothermal generators—a continent’s power supply. Scrapcode awoke in its veins, and metastasized.

Edited March 9 by jaska