Lit By the End of All
He wanted to scream, but he could not scream. Everything was a single moment, stretched out and pinned out, and set to burning. The ship shook and shuddered and bellowed its machine-rage, and all he could do was watch. Egeria’s vox-link was stuck open and she would not stop screaming, screaming, and the percussive banging as she slammed her head against the Navigator’s throne. He had not looked at the bridge in so many long minutes, minutes so long they had stretched into hours, metastasised into years. Lifetimes, lived and died in the chrysalis of the bridge – bound only by the fear of what they might have become.
Erastus opened his eyes.
The hololith was dead, replaced by a whorl of tortured, bruised light. He could see, as surely as though he stood at the observation decks and gazed out into the void. He could see the immensity and the absoluteness of the warp, pressing in, before wheeling out. The light was laughing, thick burbling laughter that flowed through the turgid air.
He blinked.
The image had changed. It was the ship, so small a thing. Frail and mortal, and so very small. Things swam in these seas, born of the condensed minutiae of human thought – dredged from the limitless failings of the spirit – and they thought that they could sail a vessel through such tides?
He had realised, or perhaps would realise, that he was adrift in an ocean of madness and revelation, and the very ship he thought his inviolate defender had been nothing more than a holed-through life raft.
Erastus vomited, heaving his guts onto the decking of the bridge. Blood had already flowed there, and less identifiable fluids. He gasped, hunched over the arm of the throne. He could hear the laughter of the daemonic and the weeping of his crew. His eyes slid off the crew, unable to truly see them.
He felt the tendrils of some great animal, as though they already slid through the corridors of the ship. Hewing it apart without firing a shot. It was despair, a pall-beast, feeding on them. He heard its voice, its slithering whisper. If they would only give in…
‘The light is gone, the light, the light, the light,’ Egeria whispered over and over again.
Erastus reached for his sidearm, not caring that it would not make a difference. Sometimes, to defy was enough.
A howl cut through all that was.
Something swept across the perverted hololith in a flash of bronze and grey. The Shield of Wolves tore through the panorama, thrust like a blade, like a spear through flesh. It cut into the undulating sea of cloying black flesh, the rainbow smear of eternity’s blood clinging to it. A voice howled, distorted, over the vox. Astrid’s voice. She cursed the warp with all the hateful defiance of Fenris. She implored the God-Emperor of Mankind and all the spirits of her sacred home world to gird them, and bear them across the threshold.
The spell broke. He was himself again. The bridge was crowded with crew, all of them with their eyes downcast. The hololith guttered like a dying brazier, and was still. They had silenced it early, when the nonsense readings had threatened to overwhelm them.
‘Forward,’ he croaked. ‘Keep us moving!’
He reached up and wiped the sweat and blood from his forehead, and prayed. For deliverance. For safe harbour.
For a miracle.
They plunged through the fire and the madness of the Storm of Storms.
The Rift clawed at them with febrile, demented longing. It sought to trap them in puzzles of broken time and twisted knots of memory. They watched friends and family die, a hundred times, and yet still fought on. With Lamertine determination, Helvintr fury, or the cold light of Astraneus prayers. They carved their way out of the darkness, they silenced their own screaming. Ancient sailors had lashed themselves to the wheel and stopped their ears with wax, to keep their course true when unreality clawed at them.
Each ship lashed itself to its duty.
Hundreds died. Madness took them, and the failures of Geller fields. Food curdled, water caught alight and danced its way into nothingness. It became impossible to trust, but the only alternative was to die. And they were not ready to die.
When they limped back into realspace, they were a fragment and a shadow of the might that had crossed into the fire of the Rift. The flagship barely endured, but the lesser ships were all but depleted. All that remained of some were the echoes of astropaths and the tortured repetition of vox-transmissions which would never reach home.
Help us.
Save us.
Betrayers.
Erastus looked at the transcripts, the printouts that sought to enforce logic upon the ravings of the insane, and ordered them burned. He could not look upon them, his mind could not hold them. To dwell on their losses and the realities would be to go mad. He looked at his reflection in a blank, dead screen. Lines etched his skin, worn there by the impossible passage of time. His dark hair had silvered in places.
Whatever the cost. Whatever the sacrifice, they had made it.
‘As soon as possible, I want Astrid here,’ he stated.
His officer of communications stared for a moment, the man’s eyes looking through him, before he shook himself and nodded. As he adjusted the communications feed, the Navigator’s sanctum began to whisper again. Like the echo of a nightmare.
‘No light, no light, no light.’
They met in his sanctum. Astrid could barely look at him, busying herself with the relics upon the shelves within the chamber. Erastus rose from behind the desk, looking at her.
‘I simply wanted to say how sorry I am,’ he began. She waved away his concern.
‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘What has come to pass is our wyrd. It is the hand of fate. It raises some up, and it casts others down. We do not question what has come to pass. We only ask, what comes after?’
‘What indeed…’ He reached across the desk and scooped up the missive, cradling it like a talisman.
‘Your father’s dead hope?’ she asked, scoffing. She picked up the lithe, golden length of a blade, stabbing idly at the air. ‘You truly think that it has any worth, beyond what he gave it?’
‘I do,’ Erastus said.
She looked at him, weary and confused. ‘I do not have time for games, Erastus. We have lost everything. We are lost, ourselves. Our astropaths scream into the dark, and our Navigators see nothing but shadows and fire. We have been led to a fool’s end.’
‘When our astropaths scream, I imagine that they sound very much like this missive.’ His eyes were alight. ‘You asked me before if I believed as my father believed. I do. I have to. We have crossed into the very mouth of hell. Into the lost holdings of the Imperium. We are far from home, and we have only our wits, and our will, and our desire for revenge.’
‘And you think these things are enough?’
‘More than enough.’ He held out his hand. ‘I believe. I believe in the bonds of the Compact. In the strength of our fellowship. I believe that a new Arch-Lecter will rise, and that together – together we have a chance. All I am asking, is that you stand with me.’ He smiled, caught in the golden light of the lumens. ‘Will you stand with me?’
Astrid put the blade down. She looked at Erastus’ hand. She reached out and took it. There was strength there. Both of them, for the first time in so long, felt strong.
‘Where do we begin?’