Survival. The need to stay alive. Oh, maybe surviving to one day fight again. Maybe to achieve great and noble things. Maybe to live out his days in solitude and silence, pondering upon everything and nothing. There was no “why” to it. It didn’t matter what reason he gave himself for staying alive; the need to do so was all that mattered.
So a dec, more or less, passed. The insanity went away, piece by piece. He killed and fought and struggled. He descended past drop pods tumbling away into the void with gue’la or tau (but never both) cargo. He limped on a bloody, rotten leg, shut out the whispering madness in his skull and finally, mercifully-Clarity returned to him. Words from nowhere:
No expansion without equilibrium. No conquest without control. Pursue success in serenity And service to the tau’va.
Shas’la T’au Kais took a breath and shrugged off the horror. There was an unlaunched drop pod at the base of the shaft. He took a second, closing his eyes and allowing himself to reach equilibrium. He almost, almost managed it.
He was interrupted. Someone, nearby, shrieked.
The Blademaster Tikoloshe was mad. He knew it.
He concentrated and somewhere deep in his fractured, buzzing consciousness a command was dispatched. Ancient, rust-corrupted servos growled, tangled power cords tightening brutally.
His legs moved, a creaking werewolf cackle of protesting, unoiled joints and unnatural ossified growths shattering and grinding against one another.
His mind rolled over and lost itself, briefly.
Three thousand years ago: On an unnamed desertworld claimed by the Daemonlord Tarkh’ax he roars in silence, grappling his razor-talons against the shimmering wraith sword of a fiery Eldar monstrosity, its blazing eyes roaring with endless smoke—
The links of his upper left limb locked briefly, too long out of service. He snarled without making a sound and overpowered the motors, shattering whatever desiccated impediment blocked their progress and venting a stinking serpent of purple-blue smoke.
His thirteenth birthday, on far Cthonia: The Mountain Angels in their shining armour choose him above all others and take him away to their Summit fortress. In seven years he will be a Space Marine-@@ Light caught at the blades of his limbs in a wave of flashing reflection, a thousand razor edges to slice and de-tendon any unprotected meat. They pockmarked his shell like fish scales; ancient gobbets of carved flesh crumbling away in powdery necrosis.
Six thousand years ago: He awakes from centuries of blood-dream slumber to answer the call of Gilgalash the Carnator. For a century the hiveworlds surrounding the Kreel Nebula face the Black Crusade of Sicklefell. Before it is sundered, thirty-three worlds will be systematically murdered, one by one by one—
And the claws... ahh, the claws. Unoiled, untended, untreated by cunning artifice or ridiculous machine-god acquiescence. Their razor edges were maintained by a higher power, and they slid with a sorcerous glow from his vast energy-venting forelimb, emerging with a silken rasp that curled his dead features into a skeletal smile.
Ten thousand years ago: Terra. The great betrayal. Ripping apart the palace in unquenchable fury, hacking at every horrified loyalist that dared face him. Even then, before his internment, he preferred the slow, dragging edge of a blade to the inelegant thunder of a gun—
Some of his circuitry was fused, delicate tech abused and twisted by the centuries of heresy. He flicked through optical sensors hungrily, seeking prey, ignoring the shattered or flimsy niters that rendered him blind and focusing on the glowing points of light that meant: Enemy.
Back to his youth: Techs chant and pray and push their instruments into his brain, preparing him for the final biological manipulation before his graduation as a Marine. His mind is a hypnotically sealed crypt of Dogma and Imperial worship. This will change—
The machine tomb responded to his commands with growing success. The movement of its limbs became familiar once more, insanity applied crudely to sensitive thought stimuli, manipulating and articulating its extremities. Limbs and life support filters squealed in protest and again his dead lips, locked deep in the machine’s black core, curled in a sneer.
The first change he’d made to the dreadnought Skaarflax, all those millennia ago, had been to rip out its pain centres.
Back to the crusade: He murders sixteen of the false-Emperor’s Space Marines in a single day and witnesses firsthand the fiery cataclysm that claims Forgeworld Barnassus. Mortally wounded in the bloodswamps of I’Ycklahl, his internment is ordered by the Carnator himself within the Dreadnought-hulk Skaarflax. Its previous incumbent is torn from its guts before his eyes, atrophied muscles spasming, left to shriek and ooze its fluids from ruptured connectors into the scarlet marshes—
He took stock of his situation, finally convinced of his readiness. The warp portal had delivered him onto a gunmetal deck at the base of a tall circular abyss, O-shaped gantries rising up in successive levels above him. He watched scurrying meat-things run and shout and fight in three different spectrums, the basso roar of launching drop pods a constant background growl.
There would be much killing here. Yes.
Back to Terra: The defeat. The flight. The thirst for vengeance. Ten thousand years of rage and anger and bitterness. His fury could drive a dynamo—
They came at him in a gaggle — not even watching where they were going, too absorbed in the task of finding an evacuation craft. Two were locked in a running argument, shouting inconsequential rubbish in their inconsequential patois, waving their inconsequential weapons and making inconsequential threats. If they saw him at all from the corner of their eyes, perhaps they mistook him for a heap of piled crates. Cargo. Certainly not alive.
He timed himself, just for fun. It took him 4.78 seconds to remove their legs, at the hip. By 6.34 seconds only one of them had any hands left, and both were shorn of fingers — opposable thumbs wriggling like lonely maggots. By eight seconds on the dot they were mewling, dying, shellshocked mannequins, limbs detached, heads flexing and twisting in splattershriek pain. He could have beheaded them at any moment.
He left them to roll on the deck. It was more fun that way.
Back to the desert-world: Back to the eldar avatar, roaring and hissing and spitting its ember rage. Something’s wrong and the Chaos warhost knows it. There’s something in the air: a sound, perhaps, just beyond perception. The Daemonlord Tarkh’ax roars so loud that the skies go black and the Marines nearest to its vast hostbody clutch at their heads, and everything...
Everything vanishes—
The memory made him stop and flex his claws hungrily. Three thousand years of imprisonment was a scar worn heavily on his blistered, cancerous soul.
No more reminiscing, he decided, just as someone shot him.
Bright blue droplets rattled ineffectually on his chassis, lightning storm phosphorescence giving the circular chamber a ghastly strobelit animation. There was no pain. No damage, beyond a few more sooty chrysanthemums of plasma impact to be worn proudly on the dreadnought’s plating. Medals of honour, almost.