Ahriman: Eternal

Book : Warhammer 40,000

by John French

Genres: Space Exploration; Colonization; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Ahriman returns in the captivating story as he continues to fix his past mistakes.

Doom has come upon the Thousand Sons. Born from the Rubric, a curse of fire and dust stalks them across time and space. The spirits of the Rubricae are vanishing from the prisons of their armour, while living sorcerers take their place one by one. Driven by the need to save his Legion and find redemption, Ahzek Ahriman seeks the time-altering technology of the forgotten necrons to overwrite the past. Shadowed by aeldari harlequins and with secrets and divisions spreading through his forces, he must find a new path to salvation before all becomes dust.
 

Release date: March 28, 2023

Publisher: Games Workshop

Print pages: 336

Sample

PROLOGUE

THE FALLING MOON

Draillita, Mistress of Mimes, now the Crone’s Child, staggered up the slope as explosions strobed in the twilight. Her movements were stuttering – a stride, a stumble, a twist, her head turning to the night sky in agony. A human warrior saw her. He was one of the barbarian giants, all armoured in the red of dying suns and old blood. He was death come to end her suffer­ing. He cursed and brought up his gun – a blunt-muzzled thing, its wide mouth filled with the dark promise of release in the silence its voice would soon shatter. Draillita stumbled anew, a fall, clawing at the grey ash, unable to go on, broken by suffering, undone by betrayal…

The blast of the gun passed above her as she fell.

An explosion in the dirt of the slope.

Even now, no release. The Crone’s Child had to suffer. She rose. Star-bright tears tumbled from her cheeks. Her mouth was a shriek without end. Why must she live when all her siblings were dead?

The red barbarian fired again. Her spasms of grief twisted her aside of the shells. Explosions snatched at the grey-and-white tatters of her shroud. And now she turned, for the Crone’s Child knew that she would never see the peace of oblivion. She would go on and on, walking the worlds and stars, suffering without end, a lost child, a herald of woe to all.

The red barbarian, sent by the kindness of death, fired without cease. No bullet touched Draillita. She was already next to the warrior. His eyes were crude emeralds in a face of hard edges. She howled her sorrow as her caress reached through the red armour, through the flesh and bone. She held his beating heart, just for an instant. She withdrew her hand, blood falling from the organ in her grasp. The barbarian who could not give her death lived a little longer, the second of his hearts still beating as he fell to his knees, pleading with his failing strength to allow him to fight on – and somehow, he did, red armour shivering, gun rising, and the Crone’s Child did not move, for could this be the end of the long jest of her existence? His heart was dark in her hand. The drops of blood falling onto the grey ground were red tears all. His emerald eyes were just for her. She held out his heart to him, pleading for release…

A cascade of light and laughter, a whirl of motion, sharp and silver as the Thrice Fool landed between the red barbarian and the Crone’s Child. He was twitching, shivering with amusement or pain or peace. His swords had opened the barbarian from collar to groin. The blood was now a wide cloth spread on the grey ground.

Another barbarian entered across the brow of the slope. Fast and rage-quick. The Crone’s Child thought that this might be death’s jest, that she might end here after all. Then the second barbarian fell, just like the first. His head split along a razor line that ran from one side to the other.

The Thrice Fool landed on the dead barbarian and spun. He was golden glee and red slaughter. He twisted to Draillita, trailing the silver of his sword as he beckoned for the Crone’s Child to come with him.

She lurched back, then balanced on a toe, clad in the tatters of sorrow and barbarian blood. She could go with the Thrice Fool, could dance, and laugh like the child she was. She could take the Thrice Fool’s hand and become golden and red, the Daughter of the Dawn spinning in brightness without end… She reached for his proffered hand.

Fire drove them apart, tearing the air, sending ash into the sky. The brothers of the dead barbarians entered, charging over the crest of the slope, bellowing, guns roaring. The Crone’s Child tumbled back; her head came up to see that the Thrice Fool was fleeing, explosions and mirth trailing him. She rose, hands appealing to the sky at the injustice of coming so close to joy and seeing it snatched away. She called on the spirits of those she had lost as she danced through the gunfire. And the lost came to her call. They were all the ghost faces of the Crone Child’s life of grief: the Queen of Starlight, the Crimson Muses, the Broken Seer, a chorus of the spiteful dead. They came, shrieking in silence, arrayed in white and black, like a storm breathed from the mouth of the underworld.

The barbarians were fast, and they were strong, but neither speed nor strength could save them now. Draillita watched for a moment, anguish echoing from every gesture as she staggered and fell, and rose and took more hearts in her hands. The Crone’s Child wished that it did not have to be so, that she could have laughed with joy at the bright dawn rather than shriek with vengeance at the slaughter. But she could not. She had to go on, walking the ash, dancing with death that would not come. Her role was to suffer for wrongs she had not committed and to take life from the living in revenge.

She looked at her bloody hand. Gore dripped from it. Holo-smoke and diamonds swirled through the falling droplets. The spirits of vengeance were all around her, their masks grimaces of pain. They raised their blades, and their shapes faded to black. The Crone’s Child held her red hand to the sky, then folded to the ground as twilight stole the sun…

Draillita stood. The garb of the Crone’s Child dissolved from her as her dathedi holo-suit shed the costume of the role. The shroud and tatters vanished into motes of holo-light and then nothing. The Crone’s Child faded from her being. The scream sloughed from her mask. The features that were still there were blank white, a canvas waiting for paint.

The troupe’s mimes were already turning away, their appearances similarly shifted out of their roles. There was an emptiness to their movements that echoed her own. She could see the Death Jesters, all in white, flitting amongst the dead like albino crows. Everything was a dance, a cycle of story and roles, but the part of the waiting player had a hollowness to it. That was what they were now – waiting in the gap between one tale’s ending and another’s beginning. She looked at the blood on her hands. It

was already starting to clot. It reeked of the gene-violations of the so-called Space Marines. She flicked sticky trails of the stuff into the ash. There was more of it on her. She jumped into a tumble that shook the remaining gore loose.

Iyshak was there when she landed. He had shed the mantle of the Thrice Fool. The gold and red had gone from his costume. A rictus grin had replaced the expression of glee. The diamond pattern of his coat shifted between muted blues and subtle shades of near black as he moved. He had slid into the archetype of the waning moon for this interlude of cycles. It suited his artistry.

~We exit,~ she signed. As Mistress of Mimes, she did not speak or make a sound, but communicated by a system of gestures called the lambruith. Every detail of posture, muscle and movement held meaning so that, in her silence, she could layer nuance and import more finely than the most carefully crafted tongue. There were no fixed rules or lexicon for this mimicry: it was a language of spontaneities, an art whose expression was never the same. She held out her hand to Iyshak. He took it, and they began to walk. Around them, the fires of the tragedy they had enacted swayed amongst the ash dunes and the scattered human corpses.

They were cresting a rise when Draillita felt Iyshak’s grip tense. He halted, assuming the stillness of an actor in a tableau. An instant later Draillita saw why. A figure stood in their path. It was crimson. Scarlet and carmine diamonds trailed behind it, and its shadow spread up and out into the smoke like wings. Its face was blank silver.

Draillita arched in surprise and froze. Together, she and Iyshak had become the image of the hero Ulthanesh and the song-slayer Shelwe-toc surprised by Khaine on the Sun Path. Behind them, the players of the masque came over the rise, saw the figure and the poses assumed by Iyshak and Draillita, and flowed into a crescent around them. They twisted into images of the Forest of Sorrow, their fingers twigs stirring on the smoke-filled wind, their masks images of sorrow and grief.

Within, Draillita felt unease. This was part of no cycle she had learnt. They had just completed the final act of The Red Tears of the Child and the Fool. Now it was complete they should have withdrawn, moving into the minor cycles of comic-tragedy, taking on the roles of Isha’s scattered children fleeing the wars of the gods. Yet here stood Yrlla, the Shadowseer barring their exit. They should not have been there. There was no role for fate in this last act, and so Yrlla had not taken to the stage of battle. They should not have been here…

Yet here they stood.

The Shadowseer approached, their steps slow, the black-and-red stain of their shadow spreading wider and wider. They stopped in front of the masque at last and stood still, waiting. In this moment, when fate came as the Red Guest, they had to wait for another to challenge them.

~Why have you come?~ asked Draillita at last.

‘I come with warning,’ said Yrlla.

‘What ill have you seen?’ asked Iyshak.

‘New dreams rise, and wake those that have slept long.’ The Shadowseer held out a hand. It appeared as the hand of a corpse, skin and flesh withered to a claw. Clotted blood clung to its nails. Fire rose from it, licking the smoke, forming shadows in the air around them. Draillita saw warriors with horned and crested armour. They reached out towards the sky, clutching for stars that briefly showed as the smoke parted. Then beside it, other figures lay as though asleep, tinged by holo-light so that they seemed black and gold and silver. The sleepers rose and the stars vanished. The lone figure of a monstrous humanoid with a horned staff and helm remained. The stolen light of stars burned in the figure’s eyes. Draillita shivered and the chorus of players echoed the movement and gave a murmur of pain. ‘Such shifts of players and scene demand a response. These acts and actions cannot unfold on their own.’

~What saedath cycle does this begin?~ asked Draillita.

‘There are several that it could become,’ the Shadowseer answered, and turned, sweeping the smoke and holo-light like a ragged, red cloak. ‘The Broken God’s Mirth, which sees weeping star

s and swift ends. The Pyre and the Phoenix, where all becomes ash and uncertainty, and all who dance across its acts must leave not knowing if the dawn will replace the night…’ Above and around Yrlla, shadow and light bent into images of silhouettes spinning through fire and darkness, swords of power in their hands, surging together, climbing over one another to touch a crescent moon that looked like the smile of a scythe. Then all of them falling lifeless, smearing into grey shadow, then into darkness.

‘But there is another,’ stated Iyshak, releasing Draillita’s hand and beginning to circle, his garb and face altering with each step. ‘Speak of the saedath you think we should begin.’

‘The Falling Moon,’ said the Shadowseer, and around them the chorus gave a trembling wail of sorrow. Draillita bowed her head.

~It has been many ages of mortal life since it was played. Must it be now?~

‘It is not that it must,’ said Yrlla. ‘By choosing it, we make it the tale of what will be.’

~Fate upended…~

‘A worse end for all averted.’

~But at what cost?~

‘The cost of many. The cost of joy and victory.’

‘We will play,’ said Iyshak, circling faster, tumbling, his garb now purple and black, the crest of his hair a rainbow, a red grin splitting the cruel white of his mask. ‘And so we are called to take our places. I must be the Murderer’s Jest, for I am the avatar of all that shall die by the fool’s mistake.’ His voice was loud, ringing with mockery and spite.

‘And so into this cauldron do I step as the Voice of Many Ends,’ said Yrlla, and the Shadowseer leapt high. The blood mist and shadow that had filled the air dissolved into splinters of emerald and red, yellow and violet, turquoise and flame. When Yrlla landed, their mask was a tarnished mirror beneath their cowl. Around them the troupes were spinning and whirling, assuming their first roles for the cycle. From behind them, came the Death Jesters, all clad in black, all identical, for in what was to come, death held no signal aspect.

Draillita brought her hands to her face, slumped as though overcome and then straightened. Her face was a split mask, one half twisting with pain, cracked and weeping rubies and embers. The other half danced with glee, red teeth sharp, eyes glinting with malice.

~I am the Dreamer’s Truth, for all must dream, and all must end.~

Ash grey and blood red unfolded beside white and black. She spread her arms and began to walk away from the others. She must go ahead, warning, a herald come too late to those who would have to suffer.

‘Who are the players who know not their part yet?’ she heard Iyshak call in the high voice of the Murderer’s Jest.

‘There are many,’ answered the Shadowseer. ‘But the one who first takes their place is a sorcerer, once of humankind, now a master of outcasts, son of a false king, a betrayer to all, a believer in hope. He is called Ahriman.’

 

VEIL OF GHOSTS

Hargoron, First of those Born of Iron, Breaker of Anvils, listened to his ship creak under the touch of ghosts. Ice crystals crept across the viewport frames. Gossamer shapes drifted and coiled through the dark beyond. Things that might have been faces formed and dissolved. Hands reached, grew into claws, faded and sank back into the blue-green fog. The stars were haloed pinpricks beyond the murk. As he looked, the shape of a head congealed into view. Its eyes were the stolen glow of the stars, pale cataracts in a face of tattered skin around a circle of needle teeth. Hargoron bared his own teeth back.

‘Sensor report,’ he said, his voice a dry rasp in the quiet of the bridge.

‘This eye sees, oh great lord…’ called the principal augur-slave in reply, a wasted thing with a long, metal braced neck beneath a bulbous head. Its frogspawn cluster of eyes rolled across the cracked screens of its console. ‘No returns within sensor range.’ It drooled a cord of spittle as it spoke, the phlegm gathering on the crust layer already thick on the console’s dials.

Hargoron curled a lip in disgust and turned away, scratching a clawed finger across his chin. Flakes of rust-like scabs came away from his skin. Everything had begun to fall apart since they had crossed into the Gorgon’s Shroud. Nothing in the Eye of Terror existed without adapting to living on the border between reality and the warp, but this voyage had cost Hargoron and his warriors dear. Here, the light of the stars outside the Eye was stronger than the hell-light that bled from its heart, but the tides of the warp were thick and laced with the withering touch of entropy. Wrecks rolled in the Shroud’s embrace, breaking into bits as the forces of unreality sheared against reality. Ship systems failed. Corrosion seeped into metal, static into signals, and weakness into muscle and bone. He had needed to leave one ship behind in the Shroud’s heart. Its engines had failed, and its hull had begun to crumble from its skin inwards, as though it were a fruit rotting dry in a desert wind. That had left him with just two craft to make the crossing back.

It had been worth it, though. Plunder from the worlds and wreck drifts within the Shroud filled his holds: great hauls of armour; weapon systems pulled from the bones of dead ships; ammunition and fuel, still good despite its time in the ghost tides. And then there were the true treasures, unique things that would let him barter for high prices with the Warlord and Ascending powers in the Eye. Enough wealth and riches to pay the gene-thieves and flesh-mechanists to give him newborn warriors. Not vagabond legionaries, loyal only to power or opportunity, but warriors loyal to him and him alone. And then… Then who knew? All that remained was to journey back across the Shroud’s boundary. It was a dangerous voyage, and came with its own, unique cost.

He glanced at where the Warp Ghost stood on the steersman’s platform. Its armour was pale grey, the edges dull bronze and steel. The lenses of its helm were cataract pale. It had not moved for hours now. Occasionally it had made a gesture or spoken a handful of words commanding a change of course, but otherwise it had just rotated its head as if looking out beyond the hull and viewports, watching things move in the murk that Hargoron could not see and did not want to. Its own ship held formation off the port bow, gliding in the coiling lightning and veils of gas.

The Warp Ghost’s head turned, and the pale eye-lenses touched Hargoron’s gaze. Despite himself, Hargoron had to suppress an instinct to flinch. The Warp Ghost’s attention moved on. Hargoron spat. The spittle fizzed as the acid ate into the deck plating. No one knew what Chapter or Legion had spawned the Ghosts’ brotherhood, nor what bargain or secret gifted them their skill to navigate the warp-saturated depths of the Eye. He had never seen more than a handful of them at any time, but still they disturbed him. The Warp Ghosts would take a large chunk of his haul, but he did not doubt that without their pilots, his ships would have joined the other wrecks drifting in the slow currents of the Gorgon’s Shroud. They were worth their ferryman’s coin, but that did not mean he had to like their presence. There was an air to them, as though they looked not just into you but also through you. He did not like that. If he had followed his instinct, he would have put his claws through this one’s throat and ordered his ships to fire on the craft escorting them. He had suppressed that instinct; you did not cross the Warp Ghosts if you wished to continue to cross the Eye and live.

‘All stop,’ said the Warp Ghost, suddenly.

Hargoron looked around. The bridge crew were already moving to obey. Out beyond the viewport he could see that his second ship and the Warp Ghosts craft were firing thrusters and sliding to a halt.

‘What–’ he began to growl, but the Warp Ghost held up a hand. Hargoron felt his hands flex as he bit down on his anger. The Warp Ghost turned its head slowly, then more quickly, looking up and to the side, then down. The ship creaked around them.

‘A presence on the tides around us,’ said the Warp Ghost, its voice a dull croak. ‘Shadows… waiting in the fold of the Great Ocean, hiding in deeper tides…’

‘What is it?’ growled Hargoron.

The pale murk beyond the armaglass was thickening. A fork of yellow lightning arced through it, bleaching the view for an instant, then again and again. Hargoron turned to the steersman’s platform, a demand for information on his lips.

The Warp Ghost was not there.

‘Lord,’ the principal augur-slave called. ‘Our etheric resonators are picking up intense local fluctuations.’

Hargoron opened his mouth to snarl an order for alert. The pair of warriors from his personal guard started forwards.

Lightning sheeted the murk beyond the viewports, and in the flash, he saw the shadow of a ship. A warship. Right on top of them, sudden and real, hull flanks like cliffs, towers turning the outlines of their backs into serrated blades. The lightning flared around them, 

haloing them. Strobing.

‘Shields!’ shouted Hargoron. The ship had lowered most of her voids for the passage through the Gorgon’s Shroud. Some of the crew moved to respond, but the rest just stared, dumbfounded.

It made no difference. Fire lanced from one of the warships. The thin veil of shields overloaded a second before the viewports blew in. Shards of crystal sliced through the bridge. Screams were dragged from throats as the air rushed into the void. Bodies tumbled with it, spilling blood. Hargoron clamped his hands over his head. Power fields sheathed his claws, and he was already shouting into the static-filled vox as a pillar of light blazed into being at the centre of the bridge.

He could taste bitter sorcery in the air. He moved towards the blast doors off the bridge. His two warriors flanked him, firing. He was already calling into the vox, calling his followers to face the attackers. There were gunships and bulk lifters in the launch hangars. He and his chosen warriors could run. The attackers could have the ship. He would take his greatest prizes with him and live to find vengeance.

Hargoron was at the blast doors. His two warriors were at his side, firing bolts into the pillar of light as it grew wider. A horned shadow formed in the blaze of energy, growing clearer, coming closer as though walking from an unseen distance. The pillar of light vanished.

The bolt shells halted in mid-air. Frost flashed across the deck, climbing up the limbs of thrashing crew.

A figure stood where the light had been. Crimson robes hung from sapphire armour. Horns curved up from its helm. The staff in its hand was a line cut into reality, a black wound leaking starlight.

Hargoron snarled. The power fields snapped over his claws. His warriors fired again. Hargoron began to move.

The sorcerer looked at him. Its eyes were blue stars.

Hargoron’s limbs froze. The flames around the barrels of his warriors’ guns were blossoms of orange and red. The sorcerer stepped towards them. It raised a hand. The bolt shells hanging in the air spun and slid until they were resting on the eye-lenses of his two warriors. Hargoron tried to force himself to move, to make his tongue call out one of the phrases of protection he had learnt from a priest of the Horned Darkness.

+I have no time for your spite,+ said a voice inside his skull. The sorcerer’s fingers twitched. The bolt shells slammed through the eye-lenses of Hargoron’s warriors and blew the backs of their skulls and helms out. The sorcerer was right in front of him now. +You have something you do not understand and that I need.+

Hargoron felt the force holding him motionless give for a second. He snapped forwards, claws reaching. The armour of his limbs crumpled and sheared. The claws peeled back as his limbs froze again. He watched as they bent until they were digging into his forearms. Blood glittered as it fell, turning to shards of red ice.

He found he could still move his mouth and tongue.

‘I will give you nothing!’ he spat.

The sorcerer tilted its head.

+You do not need to,+ came the voice in Hargoron’s skull. Then there was just a roar as he felt his thoughts come apart like a pillar of dust caught in a gale.

Ahzek Ahriman looked down at the crumpled heap of Hargoron, First of those Born of Iron, Breaker of Anvils. Here he was again, with another example of broken nobility and misguided dreams lying at his feet. He could read the past in the aftertaste of the thoughts he had ripped from the warrior’s mind. Warrior… Yes, Hargoron had been a warrior once, a brother of the IV Legion, raised up during the long years of the war against the Emperor. He had never known anything but conflict with the Imperium that had created him, had never known a time when war seemed an act of optimism rather than bitterness and vengeance. Yet, he had served, and survived, and tried to hold on to the tatters of nobility that he could remember. The warp had undone that in the end, turned the will to endure into a canker that ate Hargoron the warrior and left just this broken shell of base drives and cruelty. ...