LANTERN’S LIGHT
James Swallow
It is a time of legend.
Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.
The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.
Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.
First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.
Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.
Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.
As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.
The message had been phrased to make it sound like a request, but in truth, it was a summons.
It was a father’s demand to his son, the orders of a general to his soldier.
Make haste to my side, it said, so we may speak.
It pretended to be spoken among equals, but Mortarion knew that it was anything but. The Emperor of Mankind could not utter a single word without it becoming an inviolate command.
And who are you to defy your gene-father? The question echoed in the depths of the warrior’s clouded thoughts. It came to Mortarion in a ghostly voice he almost recognised.
His eyes rose, looking up from the depths of the hooded robe that formed a shroud about his sallow face. The great mantle was draped over a suit of artificer-wrought power armour, which in recent months Mortarion had learned to wear like a second skin, and it pooled on the deck of the shuttlecraft where he sat on a low iron bench.
The armour had been modified extensively after it was presented to him. The body-sleeve, battleplate and synthetic musculature fitted the primarch as if he had been born to it, but Mortarion had not cared for the ornate beautifications and martial décor built into the gauntlets, greaves and cuirass. To the dismay of the armorial artisans in service to the Emperor, Mortarion stripped the superfluous detailing and discarded it, leaving only the heraldry that was necessary for battlefield operations.
Instead he made them cast an icon of the Death Guard sigil and place that upon the plate. The skull-and-sun was too potent a symbol, too close to his heart to be left behind along with the rest of his old life.
The skull meant death, as it both threatened Mortarion’s life and stood as his ally, while the six-pointed sun represented the illumination of freedom he had brought to his world.
But is our world free? The voice whispered the question as the small star-craft passed beyond the pull of planetary gravity, and Mortarion allowed his attention to drift to a glassy portal in the shuttle’s hull.
Out there, framed against an endless veil of dark nebulae, he saw the arc of Barbarus’ surface. From this vantage, his home world was a churning sphere of orange-amber toxin clouds agitated by the radiation of a weak yellow sun. Only the vaguest shape of land masses beneath the cloud banks could be determined. The planet had a baleful, menacing aspect, but still it stirred a strange kind of melancholy in Mortarion’s heart.
Even as the revelations of his true roots continued to unfold, Barbarus would forever remain the place where Mortarion had been born, and it mattered little to him if he had not actually originated there. Barbarus had forged Mortarion into what he was now, and he would never forget that.
And yet… Mortarion’s gaze moved to the stormy nebula shroud, billions of spans beyond the furthest orbit of this solar system. He had long known of sister worlds to Barbarus orbiting their sun, having snatched the knowledge of such forbidden lore from the books of his adoptive father, the brutal Overlord Necare. But to know as he did now that there were trillions more stars and worlds out past that Stygian veil… The thought of it was dazzling.
A part of him wanted to see those worlds, to sink his mailed gloves in their sands and waters, to stride across new lands and alien vistas, to fight in new battles. Not since he had been a youth had Mortarion been so thirsty for knowledge. Then, the skeletal and cruel Necare had beaten him and denied any education that was not of the Overlord’s desiring, forcing Mortarion to learn through guile and subterfuge. He felt the same familiar frustration returning now.
After they had been reunited, Mortarion’s father – his true gene-father, the Emperor – had bid him to remain within the bounds of this system for more than a Barbarun solar year. It had not been easy.
Imagine, said the voice, living your whole life in one room of one house and never knowing anything more. Then the door is flung open and you see a street, a town, a nation, a world beyond. But you are told you cannot venture out. Not yet.
Such disappointment.
The Emperor had come to Barbarus with His mighty fleet, and offered the people of the poisoned world a chance to rejoin the great Imperium of Man, from which they had been lost millennia ago. They took it without hesitation.
Of course they did. They were mortals, after all, and Mortarion’s father was a being like no other. How could they have refused Him?
In the upheaval that followed, much had changed, and was still changing. Each day, Mortarion found it a struggle to hold on to the threads of the old life he had lived.
Before the coming of the Emperor, Mortarion was the rebel son of the highest of the Overlords – at first Necare’s most terrible weapon, then his most hated enemy. He had turned on his adoptive father and the court of callous beings led by the twisted fiend, fighting to liberate the beleaguered ‘lesser’ humans of Barbarus from the monstrous predations of the creatures who subjugated them.
Mortarion was an outsider, then a warrior, and finally a leader. He raised an army that took back the planet one domain at a time, and christened the best of those freedom fighters as his Death Guard. He named them as his unbroken blades.
He dwelled on thoughts of those warriors – of Rask and Murnau, Skorvall and Kargul and the others – and of course his acerbic brother-in-battle, his fellow exile Callas Typhon.
That questioning voice he heard in his thoughts always sounded like Callas. Indeed, it was his old friend’s way to challenge everything, and to ask the unaskable questions.
All of them were up here too, out in high orbit beyond the planet, aboard the ships that the Emperor had left behind after His departure. Mortarion’s elite were the first to be uplifted, and remade by the Imperium’s incredible technologies in the bio-labs aboard those craft. Even now, that process was nearing its conclusion, as his most trusted soldiers were subjected to a rigorous regime of genetic modification, biological implantation and neural programming.