Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > Ashes of the Imperium > Status Update

Russ chuckled – a low, grating rumble from that huge chest. ‘I never much liked you before, brother,’ he said. ‘I find that I do now. What a world of wonder and strangeness.’
Dorn didn’t smile. ‘I need you,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’
‘Then I will come,’ said Russ. ‘I will come to cut their throats and heap the bodies – it will be a warm-up for the work on Mars.’

Still they came. Still they loped and scampered and limped into contact, gurning and mewling like animals.
‘I already hate this place,’ Abidemi spat, grappling with his own gang of gene-racked monsters.
‘No argument,’ Prayto snarled, selecting his next victim. ‘Burn it all. Burn it until nothing remains.’

In the distance, another scream rang out, sustained and strangled. Somewhere in this building, agony was being inflicted regularly. It was like the chime of a chrono.
‘I’ll look,’ Theokon growled. ‘I’ll see what you’ve scraped together. But this is a small place. What you plan is insane.’
‘Colchis was a small world, and yet it lit the flame that devoured the galaxy.’

Now, looking at the stars again, a part of him remembered how it had been before, when the galaxy was laid out before them, largely unknown, a haunt of xenos and the forgotten treasures of the past. That was where he belonged. That was where they, the Astartes, had always belonged. To be confined was to slowly kill them, and so much of the withering of his soul, he realised suddenly, was down to that alone.

Guilliman spoke once more, detailing more of his long-gestated plans. There would be no delay now – the ships were already waiting, and as soon as they were provisioned the assault would begin. For the first time since the days of the Crusade itself, the Imperium would be launching a true offensive. The long retreat was over, and the reconquest would soon begin.

Prayto had been at Ullanor. That already felt like more than a lifetime ago, in a galaxy that had now become foreign and unknowable. The grandeur of it had been entirely deliberate, a show of force to inspire the Imperium to even greater heights and to daunt the xenos dregs who still lurked on the margins of a dominated galaxy.

‘Lied to? Of course you were. Though no more so than the Imperium did.’ He tried to shift, to move what remained of his body, but the effort merely brought new rivulets of blood coursing over that shattered armour-bulk. ‘The Warmaster is dead. His soul is annihilated. Those who marched with him are scattered. You should run. Just keep going. Perhaps the tide of vengeance will not reach you.’

A Legion was a fractious, violent thing – a horde of gene-bred monsters, only disciplined and moulded by the superhuman presence at its head. Dark stories abounded of the Revenant Legion, the predecessor to the Blood Angels. Maybe they would revert to that. If so, it would be a poor reward for their loyalty. That fate had to be prevented, if it could be.

Thus was the curse transmitted from the Palace to all the realms below it, like some hex placed on generations to come. That mortal slurry carried every foulness the gods had devised. It was their legacy. Their noxious libation, poured over mortal lands to stew and bubble and cultivate fresh misery until the end of days.

Sometimes, just for short moments, the sky would fall back into its natural darkness. Those were the hours that they ran, breaking out of whatever miserable hole they’d buried themselves in, sprinting towards the next potential sanctuary, expecting at any moment to hear the whine of a lascannon powering up or a gunship roaring after them.