Ahriman: Undying

Book : Ahriman

by John French

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

The greatest sorcerer of the Thousand Sons has finally found the relic he's been searching for – the Key of Infinity. But is it too late for him to use it?

Ahriman languishes on the threshold of space and time, adrift in a sub-realm of unknowable dimension and aspect. He has found it at long last: the ancient device known to the necrons as the Key of Infinity. This should be his moment of triumph – but he is not the Ahriman he used to be. Betrayed and lost, he is a solitary sorcerer, bereft of allies, standing amongst the smashed and ruined ephemera of his grand designs. With his dreams as dust and his Legion consumed by the fires of the Pyrodomon, Ahriman must fight his way across the shattered remnants of his past if he is to have any hope of saving his future.

Release date: November 19, 2024

Publisher: Games Workshop

Print pages: 368

Sample

PROLOGUE

COMMEDIA IMPROVVISO

Relative chronometric position: ∞

There is no time here. Not time as a straight line from past to present. Instead there is order, placement, arrangement. Passages, shelves, tomes, pages, words, marks of ink: that is the structure of this universe. This is a place where eternity gathers as dust on the covers of lives closed and stories yet to be read. It is an un-place. A should-not-be place. The literal-minded might call it a city. The more informed might say it is a world held in a pocket of the vast sub-reality tunnels of the webway. Both are true descriptions, but like all truths, they tell you nothing real.

The same is true of what is said about this place’s creators. Here are a few choice options to consider:

Its creators were…

…the gods of dead peoples.

…the ancient aeldari in the time before the Fall.

…the Old Ones who came before and are now gone.

Or not.

Here, in this place, the literal truth does not matter. What does matter are stories.

What is the name of this place?

Must all things have a name?

Yes. They must. Names are power. Which is why this place of stories and lost truths defies naming.

When the aeldari speak of it they use a description – a statement of form and function. That description does not capture the truth of the place any more than a book can capture the truth of a life.

When humans hear that name that is not a name, they translate it as best they can. They cut its Aeldari root to fit their cruder tongues. They make it blunt so that it can sit beside other words, stripped of nuance and poetry, yet somehow also closer to the truth than anything else.

The Black Library, they call it.

That is the where of this moment. The stage waiting for its players.

Yrlla, the Voice of Many Ends, Shadowseer of The Falling Moon, enters the Library first.

Only the Children of Cegorach, the Laughing God, may come and go here as they please. It pleases them rarely. One does not enter the Black Library lightly even if one can. Here is all that is known and can be known, all that has been discovered and lost. Books, scrolls, imprints, tablets, memetigrams, records, cylinders – piled high, divided, and locked and sealed and folded in darkness. Somewhere here are the Cries of Isha, twenty thousand and one leaves of crystal etched by the goddess’ tears which tell of why all that has been had to be. Beside them lie words written by the hands of humans and species long dead. Truths too terrible to know sleep in folds of parchment. It is a dread place, a place that one should not desire to enter.

The Shadowseer turns their head. Their mask reflects a tangle of passages, walkways, bridges, and balconies of living bone. There is light too, a red-orange that evokes candlelight, but there are no flames and no candles. Yrlla pauses. The Library is different from when they last entered. The form of the Black Library is not fixed, and so the Voice of Many Ends must see it anew now.

When a few of their kind try to express what the Library is to other species, they call it a dark craftworld. As with trying to explain any of the mysteries to lesser beings, the description is a failure. The Library exists inside the labyrinth dimension of the webway. It is a craftworld in that someone crafted it – a crafted world in the true sense. But it is no more a ship or lost city than a hole in the heart is the heart itself. Just as the webway is a labyrinth of psychoactive tunnels that shift and change and deceive, so does the structure of the Library. It is a labyrinth within a labyrinth. A knot in the strands of the web.

It is also none of those things. Yet…

Now it is a stage.

The door through which the Shadowseer entered is an ovoid of mirrored light that gives no illumination. It stands in an open space around which this section of the Library curls. Yrlla waits beside the door: Fate must enter first but cannot progress alone.

Iyshak, Master of Players, playing the role of the Speaker of Spaces, steps from the door to join the Shadowseer. Faded black and blue and grey weeps from Iyshak’s form. There is little mirth to the beginning of this new act. Its deeds will be terrible, its jests grim, its smiles bloody, and so the Speaker of Spaces comes in the costume of torment.

‘And now to this cage of lost dreams do I come,’ says Iyshak. ‘Yet why am I called and to what end do I walk these halls?’

The Shadowseer gestures up at the forbidden books watching from their places. ‘The moon still falls. The fools and dreamers descend into the underworld of time. Ghosts of annihilation they hope to bring back to life.’

‘All has unfolded on this stage as the cycle demands,’ snaps Iyshak. ‘The ignorant players take their steps and speak their parts as they must.’

‘A black curtain falls,’ replies the Shadowseer, ‘and the steps of the dance are lost in night.’

The Speaker of Spaces shrugs at that, and pivots away. Melancholy shivers from his movement. Spectral

ash falls from the swirl of his coat. He folds his arms and bows his head. He already knew what the Shadow­seer would say. The lines are written, and all the players know their parts. Iyshak is the master of his troupe of Harlequins. He has danced many of the saedath, the great mythic cycles of the aeldari, and knows the acts and scenes of tragedy and slaughter as well as any of his kind. He knows that the cycle they dance must now pass into darkness and confusion. That is what the performance demands. He knows that as the Speaker of Spaces, he must be reluctant. He knows that the cycle of The Falling Moon demands that they follow the next act in ignorance. He does not need to ask any questions, but he speaks his next line anyway. He is a player, his life is performance, and what is a performance but lines spoken, expressions made, and steps taken in a dance?

‘How may we follow if we do not know the end?’ he asks.

‘That is why we tread these halls,’ replies the Shadowseer. ‘To see and know what cannot be known and so know the rhythm and the cut of our steps untaken. Look…’

The Shadowseer gestures and golden light scatters from their fingers. The light falls on a book. It sits on a pillar of bone: not the psychoactive bone that the aeldari shape into objects, but bone that grew in warm flesh. Scapula, femurs, fused together to make the pillar. The bones move, clicking and grinding over each other. The shape of the pillar never changes, though. The book lies closed and still on the pillar-top, resting in a cradle of finger bones. The aeldari did not author the book. Its form is a human design: pages bound within closed covers. It is primitive, written in a crude tongue, but horror and power radiate from it.

Iyshak recoils. His mask becomes a leer of dread. Red diamonds fall from his eyes. ‘We cannot do this,’ he says. ‘It must not be done.’

‘But it must,’ says Yrlla, and the Voice of Many Ends slides closer to the Speaker of Spaces, their gestures placating, soothing. ‘Before greater harm is done, we must read what is to come and choose the ending that brings least sorrow to our kind.’

‘But sorrow there will be?’

The Shadowseer bows their head, slow and solemn. ‘There can be no sweet close to this dance, no golden laughter spun amongst the field of stars.’

‘Then for what do we play these bloody scenes?’ asks Iyshak, his gaze on the book.

Yrlla moves next to him, raises a hand to touch and comfort. ‘For the dances yet to be,’ says the Shadowseer.

Iyshak turns ready to reply with the line that he will never speak. Yrlla’s hand snaps up, silencing, head turning as though hearing the tap of footsteps.

‘Another draws near!’ says the Shadowseer, and both turn as a figure cartwheels from the glowing door.

The timing is exact, the queue taken with perfection. The figure rises. They wear a horned mask. Their mouth is a twist of scorn and sadness. They stand, slowly. Mauve and amethyst light fumes from them. This is the Soli­taire. Her name was Draillita, but the mask she wears has swallowed that name. She is a player in The Falling Moon, but she stands apart from Yrlla and Iyshak. They both may take many roles and wear many masks, for even Fate has many faces. The Solitaire has but one role. A role they will play until they die. It is a part that costs them their soul, and dooms them to an eternity of torment in death. To them falls the dance of the Great Enemy, the Goddess Who Never Sleeps, the Dark Prince, She Who Thirsts, Slaanesh – the bloody child of the aeldari’s folly. Here, on this stage, they represent terrible necessity and dire threat.

‘You are not called,’ shouts Iyshak. ‘Go from this place!’

The Solitaire raises her head. ‘This is not your dance, child,’ she calls. ‘It is mine. I will lead and you shall follow.’

But the Speaker of Spaces answers only with laughter. The Solitaire comes forwards. Iyshak launches himself into the air. His cloak and coat billow into a storm of ice and snow. His dance now symbolises the cold night of stars and death across which the Dark Prince must roam before they steal the future.

Across the stage from the Solitaire, Yrlla is reaching for the book on its pillar of bone. The Solitaire cocks

her head. She is stillness and malevolence in this instant. She looks at Iyshak’s cascade of starlight and ice and hears the laughter on the wind. The Solitaire takes one slow step, and then begins to run.

She is not swift. Swift is too slight a word for how she moves, a word for birds beating the wind with frantic wings. She is not fast, because the heroes of the past were fast, and they died running from this doom. She is–

–across the space that separated her from the book and pillar of bone. She touches the book as Iyshak tries to catch her.

The Shadowseer recoils, and pirouettes, as Fate turns their face away.

The Solitaire opens the book.

The two other players freeze. The mirage of snow and starlight vanishes.

The pages of the book fall open. Each one is a sheet of skin. They should have become mould and rot long ago, but the Library does not let its prisoners escape through decay. The words written on them are not aeldari or human, though the Solitaire can read them without effort. She does so.

‘And Ahriman to the Well of Night and Key of Infinity came…’ she says aloud. Her voice is flat and unadorned with flourish.

The other two Harlequins watch and wait. The Solitaire turns the page… and the page splits along its edge. A single leaf of vellum is now many. The Solitaire pauses, then riffles the edges of the remaining pages. Each of the pages divides and divides again as it falls, multiplying and multiplying. The book is no thicker, even though it now holds many more leaves. The Solitaire nods and with a flick of her hand fans the pages. An infinity of words blurs across her eyes. She reads. Lifetimes pass in that time. She is reading the story she has already lived, and many more that did not happen: paths cut through tragedy like tears on the cheek of a bloody face, characters that never were, choices that were never made. New futures open in front of her, branching across the pages so that the arc of the tale tangles. She reads far beyond the present and into the future. She lives there, in the alien land of another age. Then the last page turns. The Solitaire shuts the book. She turns to Yrlla and Iyshak.

‘What…?’ begins the Speaker of Spaces with the appropriate hesitation. ‘What does it say?’

She tells them some of what she read. She tells them what this next act must be. She does not tell them the end.

‘War must stain the stars,’ she says. ‘Fire must greet the woken dynasty of the Hyksos. The Asuryani, the drukhari, and even the Exodite kin must rise to war. In this time, we must create an echo of the wars of old.’

The Speaker of Spaces bows his head. Tears of starlight fall from the eyes of his mask as he turns his head away.

Now it is the Shadowseer who approaches the Solitaire. ‘I can see only the scythe and the Bloody-Handed God scattering souls to the wind’s edge,’ they say. The shake of their head is a plea and a denial. ‘Lives taken from we who are already dying. This cannot be. There must be another way…’

‘There is not,’ says the Solitaire. She steps forwards, and as she moves she seems to grow, haloed by black-and-purple flame, her horned mask a scowl of hunger and rage. The Shadowseer cowers back, but the Solitaire presses closer, looming above the other Harlequin. ‘The blood must flow. The storm must rage and fall in silence. It is written.’

When the Shadowseer’s reply comes, it is a whisper. ‘And the price of bone and loss must be paid that this sorry play shall end.’

The Solitaire shrugs and turns away. The gesture is obscene, a fluid shiver of cruelty and indifference. The other two Harlequins recoil. This is as it must be, for the Solitaire is the player of the Great Enemy, and that enemy is all the pain of the aeldari mocked and made into profanity.

‘The price must be paid,’ says the Solitaire. ‘The war must be waged. The souls must fall like coins from a dying prince’s hand… But…’ And she turns, swaying with her words as though they are currents of warm liquid and she is floating in their embrace. ‘But it shall solve nothing, end nothing, save nothing.’

Iyshak and Yrlla both come forwards, blurring. The Solitaire vaults away from them, expression and gestures

mocking them for fools. They call after her. Their words tangle over each other and spiral in broken song. They are utterly the roles that this moment demands.

‘Then why must it be?’ pleads the Speaker of Spaces.

‘Then what shall bring this tale to a close?’ demands the Shadowseer.

The Solitaire springs back towards them, and now her face is inches from theirs. Her voice is a hiss. ‘The same who began this tale shall end it – False Fate’s chosen, the Exile, and Sorcerer of Delusion…’ She twirls and bows to the silent books that are her audience. ‘Ahriman,’ she says.

‘Dire ends wait for our kind if he triumphs,’ says the Shadowseer.

‘Worse shall be if he does not,’ snaps the Solitaire.

Silence, and mournful stillness. All three players have turned away from each other so that they face outwards in different directions.

‘No other way…’ says the Speaker of Spaces.

‘To all ends we go with tears in our eyes…’ says the Shadowseer.

‘As we walk towards the fall of the moon,’ says the Solitaire.

A long moment of utter quiet, then the three players exit. First the Speaker of Spaces, heavy with sorrow for the war he must make. His role is now no more than to paint the stage and background in blood. Iyshak knows that this act may be his last, though he cannot be sure. What is to come will be an improvisation that he may not survive. He reaches the glowing door into the webway. Its mirror surface glows.

‘All of life is but a song,’ he says, and laughs. ‘All sorrow a jest, all fates but a dance.’ He kicks high, spins, then plunges through.

The Voice of Many Ends follows, mirror mask downcast. Yrlla glances back on the portal’s threshold. The Shadowseer’s visage shows no reflection, just blackness and stars. Then they are gone.

The Solitaire waits six heartbeats. She is the last to exit this scene – or so she believes. She knows what she must do. It is a dance like no other she has envisaged. Its steps cross space and time, and span paradox. If she succeeds, then the story is no more. If she fails, if she misses one step, then…

The Solitaire nods in acceptance, and with a simple step passes through the glowing door.

There is silence in the Library.

Secrets and darkness breathe from books and pages.

Yrlla steps from the dark. There is no sign of where the Shadowseer re-entered from. It is only an instant in the time of this place since they left, but they have changed. The blue and grey have gone from their costume. Only black remains – black in a hundred subtle variations that slide across their body. Their mask is a mirror to the gloom, a hollow space under their cowl. They make no sound and they do not step as they move but glide, a spectre, a breath of night. They have one role in this moment. They are the Lamentation of Fate, silent and colourless, come to see what may be.

They come to the book. The Solitaire only shut its covers moments before. The story cycle in its pages has not had time to play out, but neither has there been time for Yrlla to leave, change and return. Yet here they are.

Yrlla touches the book and hesitates.

In this moment there is still uncertainty. Once they open the book, there will be only certainty.

Should the player of fate not hesitate in such a moment? It is appropriate to the gravity of the Shadowseer’s role, a tiny step without which their dance would be imperfect. And is not the performance everything? Even without another soul to see them, the universe is their audience.

They open the book. Leaves of story fall to the last page.

Yrlla, Shadowseer, the Lamentation of Fate, bends their head. The mirror of their mask reflects words and symbols that might tell of the future or might be just another story.

They look down and read the end. 

PART ONE

BLACK HORIZON

I

EATER OF MEMORY

Battle-barge Hekaton, the warp
Relative chronometric position: 21

Ctesias felt his daemons burn on the other side of the door. Fire boiled across his inner sight. He staggered. His fingers smeared blood down the iron of the portal. A psychic force hit the door. Wards melted and molten silver ran down the frame. Ctesias did not see it. His mind was alight, his senses shrieking with the sympathetic sensation from the daemons as they were blasted to ash and went tumbling into the warp. They were greater entities of their kind. They had broken kingdoms and armies across time. They were amongst the most lethal of their kind that he, a summoner of daemons, had encountered.

And now they were gone.

Obliterated.

Removed from reality as if they had never been.

‘No…’ he gasped. ‘No!’ His ears rang. There was blood running down his chin. He could taste the copper and iron in his breath. Pain arced up and down his limbs and through his torso. Images blurred and smeared across his sight. The walls were glowing. He could feel the pressure building in the warp outside the walls of his sanctuary. Beyond those walls the battle-barge Hekaton plunged on through the immaterium. He blinked and saw the column of fire burning across his mind’s eye. It was coming closer, howling, sucking in power.

Pyrodomon. The Rubric of Ahriman incarnated. The end and the salvation of the Thousand Sons.

Ctesias laughed, then coughed blood froth.

This was how he ended. Not ripped apart by the daemons he had enslaved, not falling under the guns of the Emperor’s deluded warriors, not undone by a mistake in a summoning, but made into nothing by the Rubric he had helped create.

‘Not much time,’ he muttered and began to draw together his remaining strength.

He had taken this sanctuary on the Hekaton and made it strong. It was a series of chambers close to the ship’s heart. He had armoured it against assault by daemon and psyker. He had done his work well. There were others… had been others amongst the Thousand Sons who had a greater theoretical understanding of abjuration and warding than Ctesias. None of them had his practical understanding and experience, though. His art had chained great princes of the warp and kept him safe from the sorcery of rivals and vengeful daemons. The sanctuary was as secure as he could make it, but it was moments from breaking open. It was inevitable. Ctesias had one thing he needed to do before it did.

‘Come on,’ he snarled at himself.

He tried to stand. His limbs would not move. Numbness was already spreading through him. He was burning from the soul outwards. Everything was slowing, blurring to calmness even as it tumbled into ruin. Last moments… Last beats of his hearts.

The bones hanging from the ceiling were rattling under the growing psychic pressure. Stone statues set in niches were weeping pus and blood. Liquid boiled in jars and vials. Smoke rose from scrolls heaped in the corners. He could hear the daemons bound into the objects screaming to be free. In his mind, the pieces of daemonic true names beat against their separate cells of thought. They could all feel the inferno coming. The wards worked into the sanctuary’s walls and doors were breaking. They would not last more than a handful of seconds. The empyric energy would overwhelm the chamber and everything in it. Then the fire of Change would pour in. The daemons held in their prisons of stone and metal and bone would be torn apart and scattered on the pyre wind. A life’s work reduced to dust…

The thought brought another cough of blood and laughter to his teeth. Many mortal lifetimes spent bartering your soul for knowledge and power, and what good has it done you? he thought.

A sound of shearing metal rang through the chamber. A crack had opened in the metal of the door. An orange furnace light reached through the gap. The daemons were screaming at Ctesias from inside his head. Frost was gathering at the centre of the floor. Flakes of ice spiralled. A glass cylinder holding a taloned hand shattered. Fluid gushed out and then flashed to steam. The hand scrabbled at the deck.

Ctesias could feel the fire kindling in his guts and thoughts. The cracked door buckled. Molten metal drooled onto the floor.

‘Move, you old fool!’ he snarled, and forced himself up. Pain exploded through him, shattering his thoughts for a second. He swayed. Another telekinetic blow hit the outside of the door. He could taste ash on his breath now. He staggered across the chamber. His hand caught on the stone shelf before he hit the ground. White spots were blooming in his sight. He raised his head and gripped the stone jar on the shelf.

‘Al’cul’narathros…’ he said, pulling the name from the dungeons of his mind. The jar shook in his grip. It was shaped like a coiled snake, its top a fanged mouth. The wax sealing its throat melted at Ctesias’ words. ‘Nu’sha’crel… I call and summon you from your cage.’

Black smoke poured from the jar’s mouth, boiling through the air as the daemon manifested. Amethyst-and-orange

eyes shone in the cloud. Shadow claws clutched and clicked, shedding frost from their tips. The daemon looked at Ctesias. Loathing fumed from it. It was a thing born from the desire to forget: the wishes of soldiers to put down the burden of what they had seen and done; the prayer of a soul at the end of their days, hoping to die with a clear conscience; the pleasure that came from only ­remembering the good and forgetting the bad. All these moments had ­created and shaped the daemon. It was an eater of memory. Ctesias had bound it long ago but had never called on its power. He had notions that he would use it as a weapon against an enemy or rival. He had not thought that he would unleash it on his own mind.

‘By the bindings that hold you, I command you now,’ said Ctesias. The daemon squirmed.

Another blow on the door, and now the crack was a wide fissure in the iron. Ctesias felt the daemon’s desire to flee. It pulled away. Ctesias lashed out with his will. The daemon snapped back to its place. Teeth of ice formed in the smoke of its form. It hissed with anger.

‘Take what I command and carry it to oblivion,’ said Ctesias. He closed his eyes and set his will. The command was silent, but the daemon heard.

The door gave way. Chunks of molten metal spun through the air. A gale tore into the space. The last wards in the chamber collapsed.

‘Now,’ Ctesias said, and opened his eyes and mouth wide.

The daemon plunged into him. The black smoke of its body poured past his teeth and down into the pit of his mind. He felt its jaws close on the memory he had commanded it to take. Pain. Pain beyond what was possible in the physical realm. He was screaming, he realised, screaming with mouth and mind. Then he felt the daemon tear free of his thoughts, the scraps of the memory it had eaten dissolving into jumbles of word and images without meaning…

Black and red… Crow beak… Falling…

An invisible wall of force picked him up. He felt his armour crack with the impact. He struck the wall, limbs splayed, pinned in place.

Figures came through the molten ruin of the door. Yellow-and-blue flame coiled over their armour. The eyes of their helms were holes. Fire roared in the void beyond those openings. He recognised them, or at least who they had been: Ignis, ...