text stringlengths 6.16k 10k |
|---|
PART ONE. THE DECEIVED
ONE
Blood from misunderstanding
Our brethren in ignorance
The Emperor dies
'I WAS THERE.' he would say afterwards, until afterwards became a time quite devoid of laughter. 'I was there, the day Horus slew the Emperor.' It was a delicious conceit, and his comrades would chuckle at the sheer t... |
s of moment they had taken just hours before.
Ullanor had been glorious, a hard, unstinting slog to dislodge and overthrow a bestial empire. The greenskin had been a pernicious and resilient foe, but they had broken his back and kicked over the embers of his revel fires.
The commander had won the field through the e... |
the units in his company, Third Squad - Locasta Tactical Squad - was his favourite and his favoured. Its commander, Brother-sergeant Nero Vipus, was his oldest and truest friend.
'How's your humour, captain?' Vipus asked. His pearl-white plate was smudged with soot and streaked with blood.
'Phlegmatic, Nero. You?'
'... |
rother Edrius fell to his knees, then folded onto his side. He had been struck in the face by some form of energy weapon. The white plasteel.'ceramite alloy of his visor and breastplate had actually deformed into a rippled crater, like heated wax that had flowed and then set again. A second bang, a quick concussive vib... |
sts.
The throne was empty.
Loken lowered his weapons. He saw that the tower top turned so that the throne was always facing the light. Disappointed, Loken took a step towards the throne, and then halted when he realised he wasn't alone after all.
A solitary figure stood away to his left, hands clasped behind its bac... |
grimacing, perfect in every dimension and detail, suffused in radiance. So beautiful. So very beautiful.
For a moment, the god stood there, unflinching, beset by the gale of force, but unmoving, facing it down. Then he raised the storm bolter in his right hand and fired into the tumult.
One shot.
The echo of the det... |
that Old Night must have seemed much longer here than it actually was.'
Euphrati Keeler shook her head and turned back to her work, cleaning and refitting a hand-held picter unit of very high quality.
'And then there's the matter of sweat.' Karkasy said. He sat down on a lounger and put his feet up, settling the gla... |
of the down lighters aimed on the canvas.
He halted suddenly, and aimed the head of the axe at Loken. 'Don't you want this, Garviel? Terra, I put you up for this myself.'
'I'm honoured, sir. I thank you for that.'
'And it was seconded by Ekaddon.'
Loken raised his eyebrows.
'All right, no it wasn't. Ekaddon hates ... |
e have quashed an entire culture. Make no mistake... we haven't brought them to heel or rendered them compliant. We have quashed them. Broken their backs. Set them to flame. I know this, because I know the Warmaster unleashed his Astartes in this action. Don't be coy about what they do. They are killers, but sanctioned... |
t of dust.
They stepped into the vault of Archive Chamber Three. Scholars, sphragists and metaphrasts worked in silence at the reading desks, summoning servitors to select volumes from the sealed stacks.
"What interests me about your concerns.' Sindermann said, keeping his voice precisely low so that only Loken's enh... |
dn't want to tangle with an Astartes. Especially not one of the Luna Wolves, the mightiest of the mighty, the deadliest of all Legions.
'You too.' she said to the iterator.
'Oh, right.' Memed said, coming to a halt.
The summons was personal.'
'I understand.' he said.
Mersadie walked up to the Luna Wolves captain. ... |
Horus'. It was a mark of honour, and it often seemed the case that 'Sons' rose faster and found better favour than the rest. Certainly, Loken knew for a fact, all the previous members of the Mournival had been 'Sons of Horus'. In this respect, he was unique. Loken owed his looks to an inheritance of the pale, craggy b... |
'
'And in war, kill for the living and kill for the dead?'
'Kill for the living! Kill for the dead!' Abaddon and Aximand echoed.
1 swear.'
'As the moon lights us.' Abaddon said, 'will you be a true brother to your brother Astartes?'
'I will.'
'No matter the cost?'
'No matter the cost.'
'Your oath is taken, Garv... |
of the podium behind Momus. Two giants in yellow plate. Two noble Astartes from the VII Legion, the Imperial Fists, the Emperor's Praetorians. They were presumably in attendance to lend Momus an appropriate air of authority. Karkasy guessed the VII had been chosen over the Luna Wolves because of their noted genius in t... |
rce woman.
Karkasy favoured notebooks of thick, cream cartridge paper, and at the start of his long, feted career, had sourced a supplier in one of Terra's arctic hives, who specialised in antique methods of paper manufacture. The firm was called Bondsman, and it offered a particularly pleasing quarto chapbook of fift... |
med a little like animals, man-shaped creatures trained to ape human behaviour, yet not quite accomplished in that art.
'Is that what five thousand years of separation does to a species?' he asked aloud. No one answered, and some of his watchers turned away.
Was that what five thousand years did to the divided branch... |
y sat down at one of the tables and poured another drink.
He had been sitting there for an indefinite amount of time when a voice asked him if he was all right.
Ignace Karkasy blinked and looked up. The gang of Imperial army troops who had been burning clean the walls of the city had entered the hostelry, and the old... |
body encased in a superb silver-and-steel exoskeleton, further draped in robes of deep, rich, selpic blue. Neady machined ocular lenses whirred and exchanged in the augmetic frame that supplanted his long-dead eyes.
Ing Mae Sing, the expedition's Mistress of Astropathy, stood to the master's left, a gaunt, blind spec... |
mpliance?' Horus asked, looking around.
Varvaras replied. 'True compliance, lord? Decades, as my good friend Rakris says. Functional compliance? Well, that is different. There is a seed of dissidence in the southern hemisphere that we cannot quench. Until that is brought into line, this world cannot be certified.'
Ho... |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
Manually cleaned version of Warhammer 40k novels that contains rows of text that are 10000 characters long, with the last 500 characters being an overlap with the first 500 characters in the next row. Does not include contents page (and dramatis personae) or afterword.
- Downloads last month
- 12