Status Updates From Zardu Layak: The Crimson Ap...

‘It would be a blessing,’ Kulnar continued, ‘to be a warrior without such a desperate need for purpose – one of Russ’ slavering wolves, or Horus’ mindless gangers. Even to be one of Guilliman’s numberless drones – a simpler existence.’ The Chaplain touched his chest. ‘Another flaw.’ He smiled. ‘Our father’s original sin.’

His thermal sensors whirred, trying and failing to find red heat in the white cold. Layak snarled and pulled his helmet from his head, throwing it to the ground, where it buried itself in the snow. Cold hit his face like a backhand slap, already starting to freeze the spittle on his lips. He tasted the cold on a forked tongue, and searched in its thousand flavours for one.

‘Listen to me,’ Barnhart said. ‘If he dies, we die. We need to keep him alive.’ Shaav nodded, and Barnhart took the sucking noises he made as an acknowledgement of the plan. The remaining Children of the Blessed Moon joined them, and together, they turned their weapons against the blizzard, defending the slumbering giant in grey lying across the altar.

The bones lay across words and inscriptions in a myriad of languages and scripts, the books of Lorgar and the gospels of Erebus, and older texts, written in hieroglyphs and cuneiform. They gave him the answer. Hebek watched silently, the first Anakatis blade in hand, as Layak stood. ‘I have found him.’ His brother. His next quarry.

When he stepped from the circle some time later, the rain had stopped. Two suns were rising over the ruined port, illuminating a sea thick with corpses. Kulnar offered a tight smile to the sunrise, and made his way back to the Thunderhawk. He had to welcome the man who would become Zardu Layak to the ranks of the Ashen Circle.

The Space Marine sloughed off the smaller man like a crustacean shedding its carapace, the discarded remnants sliding to the stone floor in a pool of blood and fluids. Layak stood in front of his brother, his grey armour washed crimson in Shaav’s viscera. ‘Hebek,’ he said. ‘I have come.’

The towers that rose into the sky were cracked and broken teeth in the skull of the city, profane monuments to a dead god who rejected their glory. The sky, once a perfect blue, writhed with storm clouds, thunder calling out its roars of anguish. Its people, once pious and devoted, were flakes of black ash, greasy, burnt motes of humanity left to drift in the wind. A future denied. A dream destroyed. A heart broken.

But what the Word Bearers did was beyond war. On battlefields she had shared with the XVII Legion, Barnhart had seen pyres of the still-living put to the torch in the name of Horus and his righteous rebellion, their screams loud enough to tear the very sky apart.

‘And me?’ the priest asked. ‘You were right. You cannot escape agony.’ The warrior raised his flamer and squeezed the trigger. A gout of flame roared from under his armoured wrist, and the priest – and the view of the underhive behind him – was consumed by fire. ‘My purge is complete,’ the warrior lied to his brothers. He felt the book throbbing gently against his chest. ‘All is ash. Nothing remains.’

Layak was strong and quick, a living weapon created in Terra’s genetic forges. He had fought a thousand battles for his Legion. He was a captain, a leader of the great Ashen Circle, and he had burned hundreds of worlds. But he was a child once more in the figure’s presence. Small and weak, pathetic against such majesty. ‘Father,’ he said, a quaver in his voice.