Argel Tal lay on the decking, shivering and whispering mantras in the language at Colchisian’s core, freed of its Terran and Gothic roots.
At one point, lost in a haze of pain, he’d drawn his combat blade. In a trembling grip, he used the sword to slice the palm of his gauntlet, seeking to release the burning from his blood. What dripped from the wound was like boiling oil, bubbling and popping, and it ate into the deck floor in hissing rivulets.
The slice closed the way a smile slowly fades. Even the cut in his armour resealed with disgustingly organic scarring.
He managed to haul himself to his feet after another hour had passed, composing himself enough to stand without trembling. Over the vox, his warriors were laughing, weeping, betraying emotion after emotion rarely heard from the throats of Astartes.
‘Xaphen.’
The Chaplain evidently needed several long seconds to reply. ‘Brother.’
‘We must... hide this from the Custodes. Spread the word. The Gal Vorbak are to be sequestered in meditation. Penance. Contemplation as we travel to Isstvan.’
‘We can just kill them.’ Xaphen barked the words over the vox-network. ‘Kill them now. The time has come.’
‘They die,’ Argel Tal swallowed a gobbet of acid, ‘when the primarch says they die. Spread the word across the ship. The Gal Vorbak is suffering penance, and refuses all outside contact.’
‘By your word.’
In the background, his brothers were screaming and howling. The sound of fists and foreheads crashing against walls transmitted over the vox in dull clangs. He couldn’t breathe. He had to get his stifling helmet off; even the ship’s warm, recycled air was better than choking in this ashes-and-ember reek.
Fingers clasped at his collar seals, but each tug jerked his whole head. The helm wouldn’t come free. Cold sweat, somehow, had cemented it to his face.
Argel Tal moved to the doorway, pressing the activation plate. Once the door was open, the Crimson Lord broke into a staggering, lurching run, moving down the corridors, seeking the one place of refuge his disoriented mind could focus upon.
‘Enter,’ she called.
The first thing she heard was the servo-snarl of armour joints with the booted thunder of Astartes tread. She opened her mouth to speak, but the smell silenced her. Aggressively strong, the potent chemical iron-reek of melting metal, with the ashen scent of burning coal.
The footsteps were uneven, leading into her chamber, and ended with a crash of ceramite on metal that shook her bed. In the wake of the crash, the door sealed again. She sat on the edge of her sleeping mattress, staring blindly where she’d heard the Astartes fall.
‘Cyrene,’ the warrior spoke. She knew him instantly, despite the strain in his voice.
Without a word, she slipped from the bed, feeling for where he’d fallen. Her hands brushed the smooth armour of his shin guard, and the tattered oath paper that hung there. With that as her frame of reference, she moved up, until she sat by the warrior’s shoulders, cradling his heavy helm in her lap.
‘Your helmet will not come off,’ she said.
This was his face now: this image of slanted eyes and snarling ceramite. He didn’t answer.
‘I... I will summon an Apothecary.’
‘Need to hide. Lock the door.’
She did so with a spoken command.
‘What is wrong?’ There was no concealing her concern, or her rising panic. ‘Is this what Xaphen spoke of? The... the ordained change?’
So the Chaplain had already told her everything. He knew he was foolish to be surprised by that fact – Xaphen had always shared all with the Blessed Lady, using her as yet another instrument in his spread of the new faith among the Legion and the serfs alike. Argel Tal blinked sweat from stinging eyes before he replied. A targeting lock outlined Cyrene’s face above him, and he voided it with gritted teeth.
‘Yes. The change. The ordained hour.’
‘What will happen?’ The unease in her voice was an aural nectar. Through a perception he didn’t quite understand, Argel Tal felt stronger when he heard the break in her breathing... the way her heart beat faster... the warmth of fear in her voice. Tears fell onto his faceplate, and even this made his muscles bunch with fresh strength.
We feed on her sorrow, the thought rose unbidden.
‘Are you dying?’ she asked through her tears.
‘Yes.’ His own answer shocked him, because he’d not expected it, and yet knew it was true the moment he spoke it. ‘I think I am.’
‘What should I do? Please, tell me.’ He could feel her fingertips stroking along the faceplate of his helm, cool to the touch, soothing some of the pain. It was as if her cold fingers rested directly against his feverish skin.
‘Cyrene,’ he growled, his voice barely his own. ‘This is the primarch’s plan.’
‘I know. You won’t die. Lorgar wouldn’t allow it.’
‘Lorgar. Does whatever. Must be done.’
He felt his voice growing fainter as he fell, drifting and slipping back from awareness as if into a sleep forced by narcotics. With ringing echoes, his thoughts split into an uncontrollable duality.
He could see her, her closed eyes that still trailed tears, her tumbling locks of chestnut hair curtaining down around her face. But he could see more: the pulse at her temple, where the vein quivered beneath her thin, too-human skin; The wet, crumpling boom of her heartbeat, pumping liquid life through her fragile body. The scent of her soul, escaping moment by moment throughout her entire life, breathed from her body until her body would breathe no more. She smelled alive, and she smelled vulnerable.
Somehow, that fired his hunger, like battle-lust, like starvation, but more potent than both – fierce enough to pain him. Her blood would tingle on his tongue, and sing through his digestive tract. Her eyes would be sweet balls of chewy, mouth-watering paste. He would break her teeth and swirl the shards around his mouth, before pulling her tongue from her bleeding lips and swallowing the severed length of flesh whole. Then she would scream, gurgling and tongueless, until she bled to death before him.
She was prey. Human. Mortal. Dying, minute by minute, and her spirit was destined to swim in the Sea of Souls until devoured by one of the Neverborn.
She was also Cyrene. The Blessed Lady. The one soul he’d come to at the nadir of his life, as his body broke and his faith broke alongside it.
She would be a joy to destroy. Her sorrow would sustain him, even enrichen him.
But he would not harm her. He could, but he would not. The wrath, born from nowhere, faded in the face of this realisation. He was not enslaved to his feral needs, despite their urgent strength.
He would never abandon his brothers, or shirk from Lorgar’s vision. Everything was a choice, and he would choose to suffer through this as the primarch had intended for him, carrying the changes so that others would never have to. Humanity would live on through the strength of the chosen few.
‘Argel Tal?’ she spoke his name as she always spoke it, with a curious gentleness.
‘Yes. We are Argel Tal.’
‘What’s happening?’
He managed a reassuring smile. It split the ceramite of his helm, and the faceplate smiled with him. She couldn’t see the daemonic visage leering up at her.
‘Nothing. Only the change. Watch over me, Cyrene. Hide me from Aquillon. I can control this. I will not harm you.’
He raised a hand, watching through swimming vision as the edges of everything grew blurry and indistinct. A bladed claw met his stare, a human hand coated in cracked crimson ceramite, the black talons stroking her hair with inhuman care. For a time, he simply watched his new claws catch what little light existed in the room’s ever-present darkness – the metal of his armour now an epidermis of ceramite, and the claws of his gauntlets now the talons of his own hand.
‘Your voice is different,’ she said.