ANGELS OF ANOTHER AGE
JOHN FRENCH
‘Pity the dead. Pity that they will not see the ages to come, and all the wonders that their acts have wrought.’
– Words etched on the Stones of Remembrance,
Dome of Unity, the Imperial Palace, Terra
Kystos Gaellon is on the remains of Marmax South, Section 52, Hold Point 78, when his father dies. He’s been there for thirty-five minutes. That time is an estimate. Everything in the Wasteland is an estimate. He has started to think of the Wasteland as a state rather than a description: a land wasted, burnt, and starved, and cut, and beaten down to the root. A place where dead souls walked.
Gaellon came to Hold Point 78 with two other warriors. Neither of them is of his Legion. There is… There is Su’lok of the White Scars, and Nerron of the Imperial Fists. Gaellon must repeat their names under his breath to remember them. The Wasteland takes names, just like it takes everything else. None of them have any ammunition left. Gaellon is a Blood Angel. He has been killing with his sword alone for… a length of time that he cannot estimate. Su’lok has a chainglaive, but the teeth have broken and the mechanism that turns them has jammed. Nerron has a mace that hangs in his one arm. The other side of the son of Dorn’s body is a ruin. Every armour plate from thigh to shoulder is shattered. Burnt flesh is visible in the gaps, and bits of bone through the flesh. He has no arm from the shoulder down – the Wasteland took it. Soon it will come for the rest of him.
Hold Point 78 was one of the many emplacements built during Rogal Dorn’s fortification of the Palace. It was part of the line of battlements called Marmax South. It had been a district of habs and institutes for the mortals who studied the Great Crusade. The war masons kept the shells of the buildings and filled them with rockcrete to make a string of artificial cliffs. On top of those they set crenellations and gun emplacements. Now the whole line is rubble, and Hold Point 78 is a tor of smashed rockcrete and girders rising from the cratered ground. The only reason Gaellon knows where they are is because one of the remaining wall sections still has its line-location code stencilled on it.
‘You know this place?’ asks Su’lok. The White Scar has come to stand beside Gaellon.
‘I was here before,’ says Gaellon without looking around. ‘It’s part of the Southern Marmax line.’
Su’lok grunts at that. In the recent past he would have asked how it was possible that they had found themselves on the edge of the Anterior defences that were several hundred kilometres from where they had been fighting. Now all of them know there is no point asking the question. This is the Wasteland. Time, space and distance no longer mean what they once did here.
‘I was on this section of the line,’ says Gaellon, quietly, half to himself. For a second he thinks of Baeron. If this really is Hold Point 78, then his brother died near here. The thought should not surprise him; Gaellon is rarer now for being amongst the living. The Imperial Palace that was, and the Wasteland it has become are a land of dead angels. To be alive here and now is the aberration.
The land around them is rippled ochre as though a soft blanket of dust has been laid over the devastation. The sky is a rust haze which blends with the land at the point where there should be a horizon. Gaellon lifts a finger and slides it across the distance. In his mind he sees a brush dip into ink and then drag across parchment.
‘What are you doing?’ asks Su’lok. The White Scar is looking hard at Gaellon. He’s watching to see if the Blood Angel is still on the right side of sanity. That’s what the Wasteland does – it eats reality and then it eats trust.
‘A brother died close to here,’ says Gaellon. ‘I was thinking how he would have looked at this.’
In his mind the brush dips in another shade of ink.
‘Kinder to have died already than to see things come to this,’ says Su’lok, and spits. The White Scar has not had a helm since they broke out of Hasgard Fort. Tracks of dried blood mark his scalp and cheeks.
‘Something is coming!’ It’s Nerron, who is looking out from next to a slumped firing lip. The son of Dorn is standing straight, refusing the offer of the tumbled wall as a support. Blood is slowly oozing from his wounded side. Gaellon and Su’lok go to stand beside him.
‘I don’t see anything,’ says Su’lok.
does not mean it was not there, or that it’s not there now. All it means is that the Wasteland won’t let them see it yet.
The world has been empty and still for Gaellon for the last three hours. Both the emptiness and time are subjective, he knows. They could have walked past battle and slaughter and not realised it. Similarly, it is not actually quiet. It just seems that way to them. These are the last moments of the greatest battle ever fought by humanity. The Eternity Gate has closed. The Legions and allies of Horus are in ascendancy. Bombs are falling in a deluge. Titans are roaming the maze of ruins that were once cities. Billions remain alive outside the last defences, waiting to die or fighting on in defiance. All that slaughter comes with noise: the screams of the dying, the shriek of weapons inhaling to fire, the thunder of falling towers. That sound is not here. Not in this part of the Wasteland.
Gaellon squints at the distance, and murmurs to himself.
‘A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives not shelter…’
‘What?’ snaps Su’lok.
Gaellon shakes his head but does not look around.
‘A fragment of ancient poetry,’ he said. ‘It came to mind. I am not sure why.’
Su’lok grunts.
‘The sons of Sanguinius are a strange breed.’
‘I recall many poets of great worth amongst the Fifth Legion,’ says Gaellon.
‘There are, but this war demands laughter and scorn and nothing else.’
‘There must always be art and beauty, even when all seems broken.’
‘Are all of your kind high-minded poets then?’
‘No,’ says Gaellon dryly. ‘Some of us are painters.’
Su’lok laughs then. The sound cracks through the quiet like the fall of a lightning bolt.
Gaellon is about to speak again when he sees movement in the distance. Su’lok sees it at the same time and points.
‘There!’ says the White Scar.
Six hundred and forty metres out, a ripple rises in the ochre-dust softness of the landscape. Gaellon activates the power field on his sword. The lightning crackles down the tongue of steel. Nerron and Su’lok do not move. Their weapons have no power. None of them posture or seek cover. They are here to sell their lives.
The ripple in the dust is gathering pace, broadening, curling into a crest of powdered red.
Gaellon feels the need to say something, to add a frayed piece of poetry to the moment. He is a poet as well as a warrior. All the Blood Angels are masters of a craft or art. Words are his, and to give them voice now, in the face of the slow murder of this world, seems as great an act of defiance as drawing a sword.
He opens his mouth…
Then he feels his father die.
Black fills his sight. Pain steals his words.
There is blood falling in the dark somewhere far away. Blood and feathers.
‘May I confess something?’ Baeron asked. The vox crackled with static. It had been doing that more and more in the last few days. The cheers for the victory at Saturnine were only a few hours old, but there had already been an assault on the lines since then. The fresh dead lay in steaming heaps on the maze of obstacles and wire at the base of the Marmax South fortifications. Two kilometres of crenellated wall separated the two Blood Angels, but the vox let them talk and their helm sight let them pick each other out across the distance. Two figures in scuffed and scratched crimson amid the grey rockcrete and clusters of drab human troopers.
‘Confess what?’ Gaellon asked. Baeron cocked his head and looked away. It was a gesture that he had made when they were both youths scrabbling for survival in the dust of Baal. It meant the same now as it had then. ‘You are thinking of the future again,’ Gaellon said. Baeron did not answer and kept his gaze on the horizon.
It was dawn. The clouds and dust had peeled back from the fresh blue of the sky. The towers and buildings of the Anterior stood out against the gold of the new day. Plumes of smoke rose to smudge the sun, as if someone had trailed black ink into orange. It was as though the skies of Terra were gilding the victories of the day before. Even the smell had changed. A fresh wind had diluted the reek of spilled fuel, corpses and burning plastek. For this small slice of time, one could almost dream of peace. It would be a brief moment, Gaellon knew. Another attack would come soon. As line adjutants both Baeron and Gaellon were linked into the main command interface. They knew that the analysts for this section had said that it was likely to suffer persistent main-force attacks in perpetuity. In perpetuity – the battle had given the phrase a new meaning: for the duration of conflict, until the enemy broke through, or were defeated. The war had redefined eternity just as it had everything else.
There were not enough Legion warriors to hold this line. That was a fact. So, Sanguinius had placed hundreds of his veterans amongst the human units. One angel to ten thousand humans, sometimes more. They were there to ensure smooth execution of commands, but more than anything else they were there to fight and be seen. The soldiers in their trenches and gun emplacements would hear the war cries of Baal, and see that angels fought beside them. The moments where the line adjutants would see each other were rare. The dawn of that morning was one such moment.
‘I am still waiting for a confession,’ said Gaellon.
struggle to match. Even the Imperium is a work of art crafted from the trauma of Old Night.’
‘And you are wondering what will come from these times?’
‘Attack incoming.’ The voice from the command bastion came from the vox. The human officer’s voice was calm, but the signal squawked with static. ‘All line sections. Marmax South. Attack incoming. Main force, infantry, armour, full air-support element. Expect contact imminent.’
The only answer that Baeron would give to the last question Gaellon asked him was an echo of the shout he bellowed to the human soldiers around him.
‘Rise! Weapons ready! Rise!’
Can a death echo across the sky? Can it fill an instant, and an eternity? An absence that collapses the world around it. An implosion in being.
To others, the death of Sanguinius, primarch of the IX Legion, the Archangel of Baal, is not yet a fact. It will become real to them soon. Rogal Dorn and the Emperor will see the broken Angel, and the blood that flows from the wounds. For others, it will never be a physical truth. It will be words coming from a mouth struggling to speak…
‘Sanguinius is dead…’
It will become a fact printed on a signal scroll…
The primarch of the IX has fallen…
It will become a story blurred by time into myth.
‘Horus slew the Angel who had been his closest kin…’
To Gaellon, the death of his father is a physical fact.
The link between the primarchs and their warrior sons is a mystery that will soon pass beyond living knowledge. The Blood Angels, like all the Legiones Astartes, were once human. The organs implanted into them changed them, melding their flesh with traits of the primarch from whom they were templated. The organs and process that created a warrior of the Blood Angels caused changes at the genetic level. The effect on the mind, and the soul? Those were mysteries that not even the primarchs knew the truth of. A bond was formed between primarch and Space Marine at the level of the spirit that went beyond flesh. Body and soul. For some, that link might be distant. To the Blood Angels, the depth of their bond with their father is revealed only as it is severed. For Gaellon, it is a revelation of pain.
Black.
White edges of pain tearing through him.
Black.
Copper and iron on his tongue.
Black.
No… No, this can’t be. This cannot be.
Black.
Falling, always falling, without wings to catch his descent.
Black.
A brush dipped into red ink…
Black.
A crimson smear across white…
Black.
He is dead…
Black.
I am dead…
White.
Gaellon is standing. In front of him the ripple in the ochre dust breaks like a wave running to the shore. Things burst from under the murk. They are daemons. They are shaped by ideas of rage and hate and fury. Their skin is red and glossed. Smoke fumes from them. They roar as they come.
Su’lok is shouting. Nerron has braced, mace ready. Gaellon sees and hears none of this. He is feeling his heart ripped out by silver claws, and the strand holding the soul to the body snap. He is seeing red and black ink run down the face of a blank canvas in a memory that never happened.
Calm…
Stillness…
The sigh of brush on parchment…
Gaellon stood on a floor of pale stone under a wooden canopy. The floor is marble taken from the last bones of a mountain that once gave its stone to the temples of Terra’s long-dead gods. The pillars that support the canopy are not from Terra but Caliban, chosen, felled, and shipped to the Throneworld as a gift of the Lion. It was raining. Water drummed steadily on the stones beyond the canopy’s shelter. Curtains of grey shifted across a view of bridges spanning streams which ran between blossom-heavy trees. The rain was semi-artificial, of course, just as the scene it moved over was. This was one of the decorative domes of Hatay-Antakya, Spire of a Thousand Gardens, Terra’s Emerald Hive. Gaellon blinked as he looked at the gravel paths and the pink petals dancing on the grey surface of the pools.
‘The past…’ he said to himself. ‘I have fallen from pain into the past.’
This was a memory of the time that he and a hundred of his brothers had been granted leave to see the gardens of Hatay-Antakya while serving as an honour guard to Sanguinius when the primarch came to Terra. ...
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