Ten thousand stand against the living shadow. Ten thousand, where before there had been twice that number, and even more the time before. How many fewer will there be, when this failure forces him to rally again?
He puts the thought from his mind, knowing his focus is fragile enough, and that the storm before him savours the taste of doubt.
He is one mind, manifest across ten thousand projected forms. Many, yet alone. His will shall make them charge into the crucible together, again. He will feel every one of their deaths, as they fall to black crystal fangs and claws made from final mortal thoughts, as clearly as if it is his own. In a way, it very much will be.
Ten thousand of him stand upon the airless plain, beneath a sky the colour of blood. The shadow of the adversary rears up, an undulating wall that reaches upwards into infinity. His many forms gather, a host of candles lost at sea amidst a storm-tossed night.
The immaterial world functions on senses that are wholly alien to those of the flesh. The sights before him are not truly there, merely a framework that his sanity enforces to conform to the limits of his understanding. He feels without feeling as the storm resists his advance, flensing apart the foremost multitudes that wrack him with an agony not of his body of skin, nerves and blood, but of his very soul.
There is no sound, no real sound, yet his ears can hear the lowest of chants scrape at the edge of his perception, echoing throughout his host.
The message. The message. The message.
One by one the projections of him fall, struggling to fight their way through the darkness. Primordial malevolence obliterates swathes of them with half-formed savageries. As each body of light vanishes, those that remain grow brighter, strong enough to force a wedge into the centre of the storm.
He refuses to feel pride at the apparent sense of progress. He will not allow himself to dwell upon the staggering rate of loss upon the astral field, and the psychostigmatic pain it is inflicting. More than anything else, he refuses to acknowledge that everything is happening just as it had before.
In the blink of an eye, for time passes so strangely there, ten thousand become one hundred. He fights the animal urge to look away, as he watches his own face swallowed by sentient ink, again and again. Laughter begins to drown out the message, he can hold it back from his mind no longer.
Fifty.
He is drowning now. Drowning again as he had the last time, and the time before that. His lungs that are not lungs fill with water that is a slurry of lost souls bent to an unliving will.
Ten.
He has failed again. He cannot break through. The storm is too strong. He has to get out. He has to get out. He has to get–
‘My Lord Hesiod?’
The Librarian’s eyes slowly opened. A film of bloody tears gave way, yielding to allow the bloodshot orbs to witness the wan light of the chamber. The polished stone floor was cool, the silence only softly disturbed by the sounds of the surface above. His serf appeared at his side, the concern on his face tempered by fatigue. The psyker looked little better, gaunt and drained beyond any conceivable exhaustion, the sole reason he yet lived being his elevation into post-humanity.
‘Did you succeed, master?’ asked the serf, daring to allow the barest edge of hope to his words. ‘Did the message get through?’
Hesiod squeezed his eyes shut, cracking the crust of blood that had trickled from his eyes to dry upon his face and mat his beard. ‘No. The warp is too strong.’ The Librarian spoke with a dead man’s rasp. ‘I must rest, before the next attempt.’
‘Is there no other way?’ asked the serf. His weathered crimson robes marked him as a Chapter servant, the icon of the Genesis Chapter branded on the flesh of his face.
‘There is no other way,’ answered Hesiod. ‘My brothers die, the people under our protection die, or languish in chains. Without aid, all here is lost. The message must be sent. I must keep trying.’
‘Even at the cost of your life?’
Hesiod leaned his brow against the silver haft of his staff. ‘Even then.’ He looked back at his thrall, the dim light turning the blue of his armour black. ‘There is no other fate for us.’
The capital hive of Quradim loomed before Helios in all its forsaken grandeur. Or rather, what was left of it.
Half of the monolithic city was gone. It had been shorn in two, one part lost to the breathtaking sinkhole that spanned clear to the horizon, the other canted at a precarious angle over the precipice. Cut away, the cross-section of the hive was revealed, and it was a fitting term. Millions of tiny chambers and arteries crushed atop one another in a maddening honeycomb, where countless billions had lived and died without ever seeing the world that existed beyond its walls.
Helios could not help but think of the skeleton of some titanic beast, its husk too grand to move and thus left to bleach as a monument to some apocalyptic struggle of the forgotten past.
‘I feel as though we embark to rob a grave,’ said Nicanor. ‘What could we possibly hope to find here?’
The sprawl around the base of the hive was even more devastated. Those unable to find space in even the most decrepit of the vast city’s subterranean depths dwelt outside its walls. These districts spilled outwards, forming an increasingly dense slum the limited resources of the hive could never hope to control. Tenements were built from improper materials, and without the means to safeguard their integrity in the event of any seismic event. When the surface of Quradim revolted, these places had been nearly wiped from existence.
The Ultramarines moved through narrow streets cast into perpetual twilight by the shadow of the hive. Its scale was incomprehensible so close, the tips of the foremost remaining spires lost in the ochre clouds. Dust swept over them in whipping curtains, dulling the rich cobalt of their armour until it was reduced to a chalky cerulean.
‘It is quiet,’ said Ariston from his position a few paces ahead of the rest of the squad.
‘This is likely among the targets the enemy struck first,’ said Caprico. ‘Kill any resistance, take the population into bondage. They were scavenging aboard the Excelsior, and their warship appeared to be damaged. Perhaps they were driven here, having taken flight from somewhere else.’
‘Careful, brother,’ warned Helios. ‘Do not risk placing yourself within the mind of the heretic. That is a path that leads only to corruption. They have turned their backs upon the Imperium, and pledge their oaths to our extinction. Such foes are not to be understood, only destroyed.’
Caprico racked his bolter. ‘I can do that.’
The Chaplain smiled behind his skull mask. ‘Aye, brother. We all will.’
After a handful of hours, which saw the gloom of Quradim’s night pass into another weakly lit day, the Ultramarines reached the walls of the hive. Vast sheets of ruined architecture reared over them, discoloured by rust and erosion. Helios’ vision of an ancient beast felt all the more suitable, as they stepped within its carcass.
The silence of the hive was monumental. There was not a total absence of sound, but those few that there were seemed only to enhance the quiet’s disturbing weight. Wind rattled through abandoned districts, stirring dust and chemical fog. Acid rain plinked from some unknown height, crackling weakly against decaying metal. Rent segments of iron plating snapped and tumbled away in a disjointed crash that echoed across the city’s bones.
‘Where do we go?’ asked Nicanor.
‘What we seek lies deep beneath the city’s foundation,’ said Helios. He spread his arms wide. ‘This was once Litsob, the planetary capital. Its vast hive was built atop a more ancient structure, and that is where we must go.’
‘Are we certain our objective is still here?’ asked Caprico. ‘That it was not lost in the hive’s collapse?’
‘That we will have to learn first-hand,’ answered the Chaplain. ‘To do so, we must descend.’