Status Updates From The Death of Antagonis (Spa...

The missiles flashed inside. The explosions were funnelled out of the entrance and washed over the Thunderhawk as it angled toward the temple’s peak. ‘Message delivered,’ Keryon said. The Nightfire followed to make sure the message was understood.
Volos clapped Keryon on the shoulder guard and left the cockpit. He wasn’t even on the field yet, and he could already taste the blood of traitors in his mouth.

Volos was surrounded by killing. Hungry for vengeance, raging at the harm that was befalling his company, he gave himself up to the rhythm of violence. He let his body be fire and bone. He became what he was designed to be. He was monster and he was death, and there was no stopping him. Every movement took a life. Finger pulled trigger and blew up a head. Arm thrust to impale, pulled out and swept to sever.

Nithigg pointed. ‘The blessed, too.’
He used the word with both irony and reverence. Squad Solemnis was being led by Sergeant Lucertus to a drop pod. The abominations had been released from their holding cages. Chained and sedated, they would be unleashed on the planet’s surface to revel in the full extent of their madness, becoming furies of ceramite, teeth, and slashing bone.

In his cell, Volos said a prayer over the last of the rounds that he loaded into his bolter. Then, blades out, he crossed them over his chest, making an aquila of them, and he prayed some more. There was an anger to his prayers now. He prayed for the violent end of those who would hurt his Chapter. ‘Make me your monster,’ he begged the Emperor. ‘Make me your dragon.’

‘I am not tainted,’ he whispered. ‘I am not tainted,’ he repeated, praying now. ‘The Emperor is my light, and my arm is eternally and solely at his service, until death releases me.’ For a flashing moment, he found himself wishing Setheno were here. But her words came to him: You are the Emperor’s monsters. And you are necessary. They were a dark comfort.

The painkillers flooding his system blocked the worst of his own injuries from his consciousness, but they couldn’t block his sense of the ship’s pain. Every hull breach, every tortured system, every blown bulkhead was as real to him as his own nerve clusters. As the ship revived, it screamed. Maro whispered to it. He repeated litanies of healing, doing everything he could to soothe the wounded spirit.

Volos drew level with Toharan. He was a colossus risen from the most fevered depths of humanity’s collective unconscious. His black ceramite dripping with gore and flesh, his face contorted into that of a saurian predator, he had become something that Toharan had never wished to contemplate, but now regarded with horrified understanding. He looked at his brother, and saw a daemon.

As blood and brain matter ran down the monster’s gauntlet, he gutted Feher with a bone-blade then threw the mangled corpse at the crowd. The Dragon roared, and with a voice that was deep and hissing and loud enough to be heard without speakers, he shouted, ‘People of Aighe Mortis! We are the Adeptus Astartes! We are the Black Dragons! We have come to purge your heresy with fire and with bone!’

Toharan was on the summit when the explosions happened. Without pausing his extermination of heretics, he glanced down the east slope and saw the billow of dust rise towards the invisible heavens, glowing from the flashes of fireballs. The enemy reinforcements were blocked. The troops on the hill were outnumbered now, with no way up or down. It was time to crush them, and place the Concordat in Imperial hands.

That decision was what mattered, and so, when all was said and done, he could put up with a little wounded pride. He held the fate of a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes in his hands. That was true authority and power. He knew there would be no songs written about Werner Lettinger in the centuries to come, but his name might certainly be spoken in hushed whispers, and that would suit him very well.

Volos and his brothers welcomed them to damnation with open arms. They burned and shot and sliced and smashed: dark gods of black ceramite and white, murderous bone. They were giants, monsters of war breaking little human dolls into bloody, smoking shreds.
It almost wasn’t sporting, Volos thought, snarling as he tore into another clump of cultists.

The turret rotated his way. With a burst from his jump pack, he shot up out of the line of fire and landed on top of the vehicle. He extended a blade and, a part of him still unable to believe that he could actually do this, punched through the armour-plating of the Hellhound’s promethium reservoir. He tossed an incendiary grenade inside and blasted back. He was still in the air when the tank exploded.

Hellstrike missiles cratered the target zone. The sponson heavy bolters chewed the enemy into so much meat. The enemy attempted to respond. Disorganised return fire clanged off the armour. The momentum of the march bled off. ‘Give them a judgement of flame,’ Keryon voxed.
‘They’ll be kindling for their own pyre,’ Volos responded, and the Claws launched.

Actions had been taken. Destinies loomed. There were still many branching paths ahead, but along every one, he saw nothing but the celebration of his Great Lord. Now, he had but to wait a short while before the moment would be ripe for his next move. During that wait, he could revel in the perverse, and watch the Black Dragons make their choice of dooms.

For the first time in days, Volos found himself at one with Toharan. ‘Spreading heresy hardly seems to be their interest,’ he said.
‘All rebellion is heretical. There is no such thing as a purely political split with the Imperium.’
Lettinger was nodding as Setheno spoke, and for a moment, the universe seemed to have righted itself, with the Ecclesiarchy and the Inquisition allied and at odds with the Black Dragons.

‘They aren’t cultists,’ Bisset said. ‘They’re not even heretical.’
‘Aren’t they?’ Setheno put in. She had arrived without Volos noticing. Her question was a warning.
Bisset paled. ‘At least, they don’t think of themselves as such,’ he amended. ‘I think they still worship the God-Emperor after…’ He caught himself.
‘After their fashion?’ Setheno finished. Volos heard a world’s doom lurking in her words.

It wasn’t shame, though, that sent an unpleasant tingling down his fingers. Premonition was casting a long shadow before him. The awful conviction he had felt just before arriving at Antagonis was back. He could feel the blood of the innocents slicking his hands. There was an atrocity coming, and he would own it. His mouth was dry. He was Adeptus Astartes, and he knew no fear. But he did know horror.

‘Exterminate the sorcerers!’ Massorus yelled. His shout was drowned out by a nerve-scraping shriek. It was the cry of a hawk paralysing its prey. It was the inhuman shout of Raptors. The Chaos assault unit had been held back somewhere in the mountain slopes, Toharan realised. Now, jump packs fuelling their flight, the warriors tore into the Dragons.

Canoness Setheno strode beside Massorus. She was as silent as Rothnove, and if she felt, as Toharan thought she must, hatred for the enemy, it was visible only in the frozen scream of her helmet, and in the savage, spare precision with which she dispatched the cultists to hell. She fired her bolt pistol with her left hand, and in her right was her power sword. It sliced through bodies with the hiss of the sacred.

Now forty Space Marines slammed into thousands of the warp-corrupted, about to fight their way over a kilometre of open ground toward the entrenched position of the god-warriors of Chaos. It was, Toharan thought, as he gave himself over to the fury of war, a good day.

There were only five of them. There were a hundred times as many Guardsmen, and that was far too few. The battle was even more one-sided than the attack on the rebels had been. Within seconds, hulls had been ripped open, treads yanked from wheels and used as whips, and men scythed into shrieking meat. The Chaos Space Marines stood proudly in the carnage, gods well pleased by their allotment of blood.

The screams that reached Bisset’s ears were brief, but unspeakable in their agony. He saw skin liquefy, pouring off bones like candle wax. The screams had a gargling quality as blood boiled in veins and lungs. An entire swath of the street several yards deep was scoured of organic life. The purge was absolute.

There were times, after battle, or during long sessions in the librarium, that Volos and Nithigg tried to untangle the web of fate that bound the Black Dragons and the Swords of Epiphany. Over the course of five millennia, they had met and clashed again and again. The black and the gold, the Emperor’s night and the archenemy’s light, found and tore into each other with a regularity that smacked of destiny.

Vritras said, ‘Then I thank you for performing them as the first-sergeant of Squad Nychus, Black Dragons Second Company. Fire and bone.’ He crossed both arms in front of his chest and banged armour against armour.
Toharan returned the salute. ‘Fire and bone,’ he repeated, and began not a duty, but a mission. A sacred one.
He would save the Black Dragons from themselves.

It was the first time Volos had been brought into direct contact with the inquisitor. He looked down at the man, and though his face was shadowed, Volos could read it easily. Before him was a man determined to destroy his Chapter. Volos had expected to feel rage. Instead, he felt contempt, and something that came very close to pity. ‘Your pardon, inquisitor,’ Volos said, and stepped aside for him to pass.

‘Is she a psyker?’
‘He’s not sure. Neither he nor the Chaplain quite knows what to make of her. They agree that she is powerful.’
‘Do they think she’s a threat?’
‘They didn’t take me that far into their confidence.’
Volos grimaced. ‘So we’re no further along.’
‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ Nithigg said. ‘I think she’s dangerous, and so is the inquisitor.’
‘You just called him a worm.’
‘And we just fought one.’