‘You will watch your tongue when you speak the names of my mentors, and you will speak with respect when you address the lord of your own Legion. Is that understood, beast?’
Argel Tal didn’t answer. His hands clawed at the primarch’s forearm in desperate futility.
Lorgar hurled the skeletal figure against the wall. The captain crashed against the metal and tumbled to the floor.
‘Wipe that filthy grin from your lips,’ Lorgar demanded.
When the Astartes lifted his face to regard the primarch, it was Argel Tal who looked out through his own eyes once more.
‘Control yourself, captain,’ Lorgar warned. ‘Now finish your tale.’
‘I saw things.’ Argel Tal tried to rise on trembling limbs. ‘When the gold faded, there was more to see. Visions. I can’t explain it any other way, sire.’
Sensing his son’s return to the fore, Lorgar helped Argel Tal to a seating position.
‘Speak,’ he said.
One by one, the pods came down.
Alone now, Argel Tal stood on the surface of each world and watched them strike home. Not all of them; and that itself was a source of mystery. Was there some significance in the planetfalls he was entitled to witness? Why these, and not others?
The first was a blazing meteorite, ploughing into the soft soil of a temperate world. The pod didn’t punch deep; it carved a furrow in the ground and skidded to a halt in the midst of an evergreen forest so dense that the overhanging trees refused the moonlight above.
The child that emerged from the broken pod was pale of skin and fierce of eye. His hair was as black as the armour of the warriors he would grow to lead.
Twilight fell without warning–
–withering the trees to dust, their ashes scattering in the sudden wind. In place of the lush forest was bleak tundra reaching from horizon to horizon, populated by black rock and stunted, colourless flora.
The pod rained down aflame from the grey sky, crashing against the jagged slopes of a cliff side and causing an avalanche of tumbling rocks in its wake. When the dust finally cleared, Argel Tal saw a slender child rise from the wreckage of metal and stone, brushing his dusty hands through hair the white of flawless marble.
The boy looked to his surroundings, while–
–Argel Tal was alone on a mountaintop, snow clinging to his armour as it fell. On a distant peak, a fortress stood silhouetted against a clean sky, its exquisite stone battlements and towers lit by the sun shining down through a break in the clouds.
The Word Bearer stared upward, feeling the light snowfall cool his fevered skin as he watched the pod fall from the heavens. When it struck the earth, it hit with enough force to drive itself into the side of the mountain, shaking the ground with the anger of an artillery barrage.
Argel Tal waited, watching the wound in the mountainside. At last, a child emerged, climbing over the rocks with ease, his skin bronze in the high sun. For a moment, it seemed the child saw him, but–
–no world should ever be this dark.
Argel Tal’s eyes took a few seconds to pierce the deep night, and what met his gaze was no better than the preceding darkness. A lightless sky was dominated by an imposing moon that eclipsed the starlight rather than reflect the sun. A sprawling city on the horizon was barely lit, as though the eyes of its denizens would rebel against any true illumination.
Fire heralded the pod’s arrival – brightening the air over the wasteland with blazing light as it tore groundward. The impact was a spear-thrust into the metallic-smelling soil, driving the incubator deep into the ground with enough force to split the land with tectonic cracks.
The Word Bearer maintained his balance, breathing in air that tasted of iron and waiting for signs of movement from the chasm freshly-carved into the infertile earth.
The boy that rose under the night sky was corpse-pale, and unique among the progenitors Argel Tal had seen so far, for he carried a shard of his gestation pod clutched tight in his fist – a knife, crude and instinctive, made from the twisted metal of his pod.
Thunder announced itself overhead. The boy raised his face to the sky, a sudden trident of lightning illuminating the child’s gaunt, unhealthy features.
Argel Tal–
–stood atop another cliff edge, this one overlooking a valley that split a brutal mountain range.
The pod hammered down – a blur of grey metal – smashing against the rock walls without piercing the stone. Argel Tal watched as the pod span end over end, wrecking itself in its devastating fall down the mountainside. Dark metal ripped from its armoured hull, shed like peeling scabs.
It came to rest upside-down at the bottom of the valley, and Argel Tal’s visor zoomed in to compensate for the distance. He saw the pod shake once, twice, then roll aside, pushed away by the infant it had contained. Free of his burden, the boy touched trembling hands to a face awash with blood.
The scream of pain that rose from the valley had no place leaving the lips of a child so young.
When–
–everything changed again, Argel Tal watched the dusk through a haze of mist. The fog was thin, a sickly celadon jade that spoke of both chill air and toxicity. What little daylight pierced the mist was born of a pinprick sun, meagre in both size and generosity, setting below a flat horizon.
Plainsland stretched in every direction, as uninspiring and barren as any number of ignorable lifeless worlds Argel Tal had passed as part of the Great Crusade’s expeditionary fleets.
The falling pod trailed smoke and flame, burning with green fire as it ignited the virulence in the mist. Its final descent brought it hammering against the rocky ground, cracking open as it skidded over the shale.
The Word Bearer moved closer to the downed capsule, seeing tendrils of fog creeping through the rent metal, misting up the interior behind the clear viewplate. Something pale moved within, but–
–he was standing in the white stone and shining crystal heart of a city, surrounded by spires, pyramids, obelisks and towering statuary.
The pod fell from the summer sky at a meteor’s angle, shearing through a slender tower with a crash of breaking glass that could be heard across the city. A moment later, the incubator cracked the mosaic ground, sliding and burning across the white stone until it ended its fiery journey against the base of a great pyramid.
Crowds of tanned, handsome figures gathered in the afternoon sunlight, watching as the metal coffin’s rivets and bolts unscrewed and removed themselves, detached by unseen hands. Plate by plate, the pod’s armour plating lifted away, floating in the air above the crash site. At last, the final structural pieces drifted apart, while at the heart of the hovering display was a red-haired child, his eyes closed, his skin a burnished coppery red.
The boy’s feet didn’t touch the ground. He floated a metre above the burned mosaics, and at last opened his eyes. Argel Tal–
–walked the surface of a wasted world. The air held the taint of exhaust fumes, and the lifeless landscape was a grey twin to Luna, Terra’s only moon.
The pod fell from a night sky filled with stars – each of the constellations pregnant with the promise of deeper meaning. The ground rumbled in protest as the pod struck, and the Word Bearer climbed the small rise of a crater’s lip to see the incubator gouging a furrow through the silvery soil.
The pod’s door blasted open even as it was coming to rest, clanging loudly in the silent night. The boy that rose from the confines was inhumanly handsome, his fine features pale and contemplative, his grey eyes matching the earth of the world he’d landed upon.
There was no–
–chance to move closer.
He was home. Not the sterile decks of the expeditionary fleet, nor even the Spartan sanctuary of his meditation chamber aboard De Profundis. No, he was home.
The sky was a cloudless expanse of blue above the dusty desert, while a city of grey flowers and fire-hardened red bricks sat by the side of a wide river. Argel Tal regarded the Holy City from his position downriver; such was his pleasure at this curious homecoming that he forgot to look up until the last moment.
The pod – his father’s black iron womb – hit the rushing river with a great splash, throwing spray and a fine wet mist into the air. Argel Tal was already sprinting, his armour joints whirring as he ran over the arid soil. He didn’t care if this was a vision or if he was really here; he had to reach his father’s pod.
Astartes battle armour wasn’t made for this. With its immense weight, his boots sank into the sticking river mud, generating grinding protests from the inbuilt mercury-threaded stabilisers in his shins and knee-joints.