ORDO SINISTER
John French
It is a time of legend.
The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.
His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.
Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.
Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.
Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.
The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.
The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended. The Age of Darkness has begun.
‘There are monsters, and then there are the monsters we make to fight them.
Both are the same. The difference is simply a choice of how we see ourselves.’
Borealis Thoon stands alone. Silence clings to the black and bronze of its skin. Its gun arm hangs at its side, its head still between its shoulders. Had it stood in a city, it would have made avenues seem as alleys, and tall buildings as low houses. Here, though – in the labyrinth dimension of the webway beyond the Emperor’s dungeon – it seems a metal giant pausing before walking further. A half-informed observer might see it and name it a Titan, and they would be correct in part. But this is not one of the god-machines of Mars.
It is not a creature commanded by priests and raised in the image of the machine-god.
It is a Psi-Titan, and it stands apart.
The Lychway spirals away into the distance before Borealis Thoon. Through the eyes of the silent giant, the landscape resembles the inside of a conch shell. The walls are spun from twilight. Gravity follows a simple paradox here: every part of any wall is down. Every other direction is up. The humans who assign names to the webway call this the Lychway because of the pillars that line the inside of the spiral. Each of the pillars is a sharp tooth of smooth, grey ceramic. Crystal threads their substance. Voices whisper in the thoughts of those who have walked amongst them.
There are ghosts, too. Some amongst the tech-priest orders have pict-captures of willow-thin figures standing in the shadow of their servitors. Standing and watching.
Hydragyrum, master of Borealis Thoon, Fourth Initiate of the Fourth House, has seen the phantom images, but he feels nothing when he passes the pillars, and no whispers touch his thoughts. To him, the Lychway is just a place. Its pillars are silent, its ghosts absent. From his cold, iron throne, he watches and waits, just as he has for the last nine hours.
‘Surge approaching,’ says the voice of Tual over the vox, the Custodian’s words echoing inside Borealis Thoon’s skull. ‘Tide edge visible in six minutes.’
‘We hear, and awaken,’ replies Hydragyrum.
Nine hours. He has been waiting for this moment for nine hours. The time of vigil is within the value that he had derived.
He closes his eyes and draws three long breaths. He performs the action because it is ordained that he does so. He opens his eyes. In the distance, the twilight of the Lychway is curdling to crimson and black.
‘Argentis, saturnis, martias,’ he intones, and begins to slide the controls into the first set of alignments. The controls are unlike any other in any of the mundane machines of the Titan Legions. Hydragyrum’s throne sits at the centre of a sphere of steel rods. Pyramids, circles and pentagrams of gold, silver, lead, jade and bone hang from them. Apart from the cables clamped into the sockets at the base of Hydragyrum’s skull, the sphere is the sole means of controlling Borealis Thoon.
It is called the crucible.
‘Numina, kadeth, ki,’ he says, and slides the control sphere into the next order of alignments.
Beneath his throne, the three human system-governors are jerked into wakefulness. Each of them is almost a servitor, their brains cut so that alone they are just one third of a consciousness. Each of them bears the name of their function. Darkness is the first to wake. He shivers and hisses air from between his chrome teeth. The tubes burrowing into his eye sockets twitch. Hololithic projections unfold before the throne, meshing with the symbols of the crucible. Flowing runes and images cast new shadows across Hydragyrum’s face.
‘Tide visible in one minute,’ says Tual. ‘I hope you are ready.’
Hydragyrum does not reply.
‘Tau, mementes, aurumina.’ His hands spin the elements around him. In the heart of the machine, power conduits open. Fire and coolant flood the larger systems. Borealis Thoon shivers. Chains rattle against its armour. On its back, the twin sets of tri-mounted turbo lasers pivot in their mounts. Sparks run over their barrels. The metal fist of its right hand flexes with a melody like the snapping of girders.
Hydragyrum feels the sensations of his machine waking, and keys the vox link to Tual.
‘We wake, Custodian,’ he says.
Beyond Borealis Thoon’s eye ports, the Lychway boils with light. Red clouds swirl out of the distance. Blue and pink lightning threads the air. The alien pillars are glowing with a cold blue. The stained cloud arcs above the Titan, crackling with darkness, breathing shadow.
Hydragyrum watches it, knowing that a human would have felt terror, or confusion. He feels nothing, though. He is an empty vessel shaped like a living creature, but that is as it should be. He was the lodestone at the centre of the tree of death, the absence at the heart of annihilation, the null to the aleph of life.
Daemons form in the red cloud, blurring with ragged shapes as they bound over the pillars and buzz through the air. Every shape of nightmare rolls in the murk: flayed hounds, spinning masses of limbs and light, rotting insects as large as battle tanks.
The Lychway shakes. Pillars shatter.
The governor called Silence whimpers from her place beneath his throne. Her mouth is sewn shut, her tongue taken. The whimper pulses through the Psi-Titan’s body instead, and Borealis Thoon roars into the oncoming storm.
‘Animus,’ says Hydragyrum, and turns the crucible into the first of its greater alignments.
Deep in Borealis Thoon’s body, the sleepers wake. They have lain in their crystal coffins, dreamless, their bodies wrapped in amnion. Each of them is a psyker, and as each of them wakes, they scream. Psychic power lashes through the Titan’s frame. Lightning and frost rolls across its skin. Unnatural energies rush though aetheric conduits and meet the blackness at the Titan’s heart. In his throne, Hydragyrum watches as the symbols of the four cardinal elements shift into alignment and begin to orbit him. Warp power is spinning around the darkness of his presence like a cyclone, accelerating and growing.