The daemon serpent rears in Hydragyrum’s holo-display. His hand plucks the rune of iron from the air as the crucible spins it past him. Iron is the basest element in all those that he can wield, its control represented by a lump of raw ore. Rough lines cross the lump’s surface, forming words that have been dead to mankind for over thirty millennia.
Hydragyrum grips the iron and punches. The serpent is directly in front of Borealis Thoon, hooded in fire, flowing like a silk ribbon snapping in the wind. The Titan’s power fist lashes forward. Ghost-ice scatters from fingers the size of tank barrels as they snap shut around the serpent’s throat. Lightning sheets out. Cold fire arcs from the closed fist. The serpent writhes, spewing flame, its shape flickering and sliding between muscle, feathers, flesh and smoke. The Titan squeezes, pouring its essence into its grasp, strangling the creature, eating its essence.
Hydragyrum is sweating. Feedback is bleeding into him across the neural link in his skull. The crucible’s current alignment cannot hold for much longer. The elements are pulling apart. The universe abhors stability, and the controls of a Psi-Titan are the universe distilled and transmuted into symbols, levers and movement. He holds on, siphoning the power of the Titan into its fist. He needs to hold it just a little longer.
The daemon becomes still in the Titan’s grasp.
And then it is not a creature, but an expanding column of fire and black smoke. It reaches up, spreading across the Lychway in an anvil-headed cloud. The blast wave tears lesser daemons apart and spins them up into the embrace of a cyclone. Borealis Thoon staggers. Its right arm is a stump of shredded metal. Hydraulic fluids gush from it. Its front is burning. Ghost-light writhes across its wounds. The metal of its skin flows, trying to knit back together as it straightens.
Hydragyrum is bleeding. The shockwave has burst his eardrums and the soft tissue in his nose. Blood is staining the whites of his eyes. The taste of wet iron fills his mouth.
‘Custodian… Tual…’ he hisses into the vox.
‘Prefect,’ comes the reply, growling with static.
‘Is the incursion into the Lychway at its peak?’
Static fills his ears. The daemon is congealing from the fire and smoke before Borealis Thoon once more. Hydragyrum wonders who will bear his name and the name of his machine. For a moment – for the first moment in a life where he has never understood what it is that mundane humans feel when they say they are moved by the moment – he finds that he would have preferred not to have needed to be here at this moment, and at this place.
‘The neverborn’s force is at its greatest, prefect,’ says Tual, the words flat and echoing over the vox. ‘You may withdraw.’
But here he is.
Four cardinal elements slide into alignment around him. The obsidian globe spins to within reach of his hand one last time. At his feet, Darkness spasms, smoke fuming from her skull, and then lies still. The image of the daemon vanishes from the hololithic display.
‘Nul,’ says Hydragyrum, and Borealis Thoon roars pure blackness as the fire falls.
The sky was fading from blue to purple and black when Hydragyrum stepped from the base of the Tower of the Sickle Moon and back onto the Palace walls. He paused. The lights of starships and smaller aircraft winked across the darkening heavens. Halos ringed the brightest of the false stars as their light fell through the haze of pollution. The true stars were still emerging, their brilliance stolen by the glow rising from the Palace. His eyes moved between the ancient patterns of constellations, noting the relative positions of each.
‘What do you see in the stars?’ came the voice of Tual from behind him.
Hydragyrum did not turn. The Custodian’s armour buzzed with an electric melody as he came to stand next to the parapet. He had his helm in place. Its red plume stirred in the wind rising from beneath the wall.
‘I see…’ began Hydragyrum. ‘I see that the winds of destruction are rising. I see that the Hunter is bright in the heavens. I see that things change, and things end.’
The Custodian shifted, the red crystal of his eye-lenses turned to the darkening sky.
‘You know that the arts of astromancy and astromathics are forgotten by most, and would be considered a denial of the precepts of the Imperium by many.’
Hydragyrum shrugged.
‘Everything has its place in a greater design, a place where it belongs for a time. Just as clawed Karkinos must rise and, as it does, the Candle Bearer must fall. They are not free, or slaves, or good or evil. They just are. That does not change whether it is forgotten or agreed with.’
‘You make superstition into wisdom.’
‘I had a fine teacher,’ said Hydragyrum, and paused, his tattooed face very still as his eyes moved across the constellations above. ‘He once told me that He remembered when the stars had different names, and humans thought themselves alone in a universe that rotated around them, and them alone. Of all the lies of the past, Custodian, I think I like it best.’
He stepped away from the parapet and began to walk along the wall towards the dark vault of the sky. Tual watched him for a second – a lone man in black, stepping across the worn stones, the night swallowing his shadow – and then the Custodian turned and went his own way.
About the Author
John French has written several Horus Heresy stories including the novels Praetorian of Dorn and Tallarn: Ironclad, the novellas Tallarn: Executioner and The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Templar and Warmaster. He is the author of the Ahriman series, which includes the novels Ahriman: Exile, Ahriman: Sorcerer and Ahriman: Unchanged, plus a number of related short stories collected in Ahriman: Exodus, including ‘The Dead Oracle’ and ‘Hand of Dust’. Additionally for the Warhammer 40,000 universe he has written the Space Marine Battles novella Fateweaver, plus many short stories. He lives and works in Nottingham, UK.