EVANGELINE
The sky overhead is raining fire.
I stand beneath it with my limbs aching and my lips parted just so that I can breathe. Blood runs in rivulets down my face and into the collar of my blessed armour. I hurt from countless cutting edges and the touch of warpfire. From the scorching, whispering wind that stings my skin and tears at the oath seals affixed to my shoulder guards and weapons. But most of all, I hurt because of what lies before me. Because of what lies ahead. I tear my eyes from the nightmare sky and look at my surroundings.
At my home.
Before me, Ophelia VII burns. The grand, gothic buildings of the Convent Sanctorum and its surrounding city-state are fractured and aflame. Smoke rolls up towards me in thick plumes from the tiered city-levels, as if the world is trying to exhale. Trying to breathe, just as I am. The smoke smells of perfume and rotting flowers. It makes me want to spit. To scream. The sounds of battle roll up with the smoke. Of bolters and battle tanks and bellowing. Of other squads of Sisters, fighting to defend their own corner of our Convent Sanctorum – our home. Many-coloured bolts of lightning twist up from the ground in answer, tethering themselves to the underside of the bleeding sky. Each bolt landing makes a sound like laughter.
‘Evangeline.’
I look away from my despoiled home at the sound of my Sister Superior’s voice. Adelynn’s armour is as much a ruin as the cardinal city. The gilding has all but flaked away, and the ceramite is split. Adelynn’s face is painted with blood that settles into her old scars and the lines around her eyes. It mars the beautiful, intricate faith-brands on her part-shaved scalp. Her emerald eyes are clear, though. Clear and furious.
‘They draw near once more,’ Adelynn says, in her accented, rasping voice.
She is right. I can hear them. The vile enemy, gibbering and chattering in tongues. Heretics and fanatics and things wrought from smoke and shadow and hate. My heart burns with rage now, as well as pain. Adelynn puts her gauntleted hand on my shoulder guard and locks me with her emerald eyes.
‘Are you ready?’ she asks.
It is a question that Adelynn has asked me countless times since she made a warrior of me. A question that there is only ever one answer to.
I nod my head. ‘I am ready,’ I tell her.
Adelynn draws me close and presses her forehead to mine, eyes closed. For a moment, I cannot hear the laughter of lightning or the wicked words of the enemy. All is still, and I catch the scent of sacred oils, even over the ruination.
‘Stand until you cannot,’ Adelynn says to me softly.
‘I will,’ I reply.
‘Good,’ she says, then lets me go.
Together, we turn and walk back to where the rest of my Sisters wait under the shattered spine of a cathedral. They number just three, now. The last defenders of the eighty-fifth preceptory’s upper tier, together with myself and Adelynn. Like me, my Sisters are all hurting, their blades broken and their weapons all but spent. Their black armour is peeled back to the bare ceramite, and their crimson vestments are tattered and torn. I catch the eyes of each of them in turn. First Gytha, who bears our Simulacrum Imperialis, and who has been wounded near to death in the name of protecting it. Her shorn head is split open, and her bionic eye has long since failed, but even so, she still smiles at me. Gytha always smiles. Then I look to Ashava, as much a knight as anything. She offers me a solemn nod. Ashava’s dark brown skin is bruised, and she holds her snarling chainsword in an easy grip. Isidora is last. She does not smile, nor does she nod. She holds her meltagun at ease, her pale face bloodied and her ice-blue eyes still locked on the burning sky and on the massive shapes moving beyond the clouds. Devils, in the heavens.
When I fall in step beside her, Isidora speaks. Her voice is sing-song, and softer than you would expect, given her severity.
‘It looks to be the Last of Days, after all,’ she says.
It is a story that Isidora carries with her from the world where she was born. It says that on the Last of Days, the sky will catch fire and the Emperor will return from His seat in the heavens to take every worthy soul to His side. It is a story I have asked her to tell countless times, but one that I never believed I would witness myself.
‘It does,’ I tell her.
A tear traces from the corner of Isidora’s eye, cutting through the drying blood on her face.
‘Will you sing once more, culfre,’ she says. ‘At the end?’
It is what she has always called me. Never ‘Evangeline’, like Adelynn does, or ‘Eva’ like Gytha and Ashava, but ‘culfre’. It is a word Isidora brought with her from the world where she was born, just like her story of the Last of Days. It means dawning bird. She calls me that because I am the youngest. Because she finds comfort when I sing the praises.
‘I will,’ I promise.
We walk through the ruins until we emerge from the shattered spine of the cathedral onto a vast marble dais inlaid with gold.
‘Here,’ Adelynn says. We all nod.
The dais is one of the convent’s many Contemplations. A place usually used for reflection and meditation. For prayer. Today, though, it will be used for vengeance.
For our last stand.
Around the Contemplation stands a circle of saints wrought in stone. They are depicted holding swords and shields and wearing defiant, solemn expressions. As we walk into the centre of the dais, I catch their gilded eyes, just as I did those of my Sisters. I look upon Alicia Dominica. Silvana and Lucia, Arabella and Mina and, last of all, Saint Katherine.
Our Martyred Lady.
Adelynn looks to Saint Katherine too before she speaks again.
‘We have suffered greatly here, my Sisters,’ she says. ‘As we suffered at Okassis, and at Armageddon, and on one hundred other battlefields.’ Adelynn looks at me. Her emerald eyes are alight. ‘But suffering is not to be lamented,’ she says. ‘Suffering is to be celebrated. Where there is suffering, there is life. There is spirit and fire and all of the things for which He made us. Where there is suffering, that is where we must fight with every ounce of the strength He gave us until it is time to join Him in eternal glory.’
Gytha roars a cheer, as she always does. In the wake of it I hear the enemy, even closer now. Perfumed, reflective smoke begins to steal between the statues. Adelynn raises her sword.
‘Fight,’ she says. ‘Suffer. Stand, until you cannot.’
We all roar together then, as the enemy finally show themselves. There are dozens of the warp-spawned horrors, all wide-mawed and amorphous and ever-changing, with their ruddy skin shifting and burning.
‘In His name,’ Adelynn cries.
We echo her together, and we charge into the tide.
In. His. Name.
I raise my bolter and fire it into the swell of horrors. The holy shells impact one of the creatures and detonate with bursts of flame. Daemonflesh disintegrates with a hiss and a spray of glittering ashes. The horror comes apart at the seams, unravelling until it is extinguished altogether, like a candle flame. The laughter only seems to grow louder. I turn and fire again as another of the horrors conjures a boiling tide of warpfire. It spills across my armour, stinking and burning. For a moment, I cannot breathe. Despite that, I fire on the horrors again and again, my bolter kicking in my hands until the magazine empties with a cough. Several of the horrors unravel, torn asunder by my bolter fire. Yet more are banished by the crackling edge of Adelynn’s power sword as my Sister Superior cuts open a space around me.
‘It is not time, Evangeline,’ she says to me.
I eject my bolter’s spent magazine and replace it with the last spare that I carry.
‘No, it is not,’ I say, and plunge back into the fray.
Amid the tide, my Sisters fight and bleed with me. Isidora’s meltagun gasps with pure, cleansing heat, tearing horrors asunder. Gytha is bellowing scripture. She has one hand on the banner pole of the Simulacrum Imperialis, curled tightly around the fingerbones of martyrs. The enemy cannot touch the standard, nor can they touch Gytha. She fires her bolter one-handed, obliterating them before they get close. Ashava lays about herself with her chainsword. She uses the churning blade with deft strokes, so quick they are hard to see. Her armour is coated in that otherworldly, glittering ash. Adelynn is a light in the darkness, carving her way into the tide, banishing the horrors left and right. Every movement is exacting, and deliberate. Every blow direct and deadly. Her rasping voice echoes across the Contemplation.
‘We stand, and He stands with us,’ she shouts. ‘Do not falter, my Sisters.’
My heart lifts. It always does when Adelynn speaks. And together we keep fighting and bellowing and pushing against the horrors, no matter how they sing and chatter and burn us. We do so until the air is thick with ashes and smoke. Until the tide starts to recede.
In the quiet that follows, Isidora speaks.
‘Perhaps the Last of Days will wait, after all,’ she says between gasping breaths.
But then something large and shadowed moves in the smoke. It laughs, like the lightning does, and I feel a peculiar sort of calm fall over me like a shroud.
‘Perhaps not,’ I tell her softly.
The shadow moves closer. Silence falls.
‘Hold,’ Adelynn says, as the smoke parts.
The beast that steps onto the dais is monstrous. A creature cast not from flesh and blood, but from wickedness. From the warp itself. All of mankind’s madnesses and murders, manifested together and channelled in terrible unity. Vast wings unfold from its back with a crack, scattering smoking feathers. Its toes are clawed and feverishly tapping. In one gnarled hand it holds a hooked, mirrored sword. The other is locked around a staff topped with an ever-shifting, wicked sigil. The creature tilts its avian head, opens its beak and laughs again. Its voice is the chorus of a whole world’s suffering. Its scent is that of a charnel house. The mere presence of the creature prickles at my heart and my soul. It makes my ears ache and my nose bleed thickly down my face. But I do not look away. Instead, I stare up at this hateful, wicked creature that has taken my home from me and settle my bolter’s sights between the greater daemon’s depthless eyes.
‘No,’ I tell it simply.
I squeeze my bolter’s trigger, firing on the greater daemon as Gytha and Ashava and Adelynn charge to meet it. Isidora’s meltagun breathes heat, and the greater daemon catches fire, its iridescent feathers deforming and tearing and snapping at the quills. Where they break away, the beast bleeds thick ribbons of molten silver, droplets scattering like a handful of half-crown coins.
But it does not stop laughing.
The greater daemon crashes its staff against the dais, and everything changes. Time itself seems to slow. I see everything with absolute, painful clarity. Every coil of smoke. Every mote of idling flame cascading from the greater daemon’s hateful form. I see the teeth of Ashava’s chainsword turning slowly, and the firelight reflecting from the Simulacrum Imperialis. Then I see the greater daemon move, exempt from this slower stream of time. It raises its gnarled, feathered hand and conjures a torrent of hellfire.
Then it turns and immolates Isidora.
My scream of rage is locked inside me by the slowing of time. I cannot go to her. All I can do is watch her burn, her armour melting and running like candle-wax. She turns, slowly, and catches my eyes with her own.
‘S-sing,’ Isidora manages to say.
Time releases its hold on us, then. Isidora falls to her knees with a crash of armour plates. I want to scream rage, but I cannot. I made a promise. So instead I sing as Isidora breathes her last. It is an old hymnal. One that Isidora would ask for, again and again.
‘O God-Emperor, who is strength. I devote this life to you.’
I fire on the greater daemon, sending feathers and oil bursting into the air. The beast bellows at me in reply and kaleidoscopic colours flood my vision. My armour cracks along the seams and my vestments burn and tear. I feel my bones flex inside my skin and blood boil up my throat and I cannot help but stagger and slow. But I do not stop singing. Hurling the words at this hateful creature that has broken my home, and broken my Sisters.
‘O God-Emperor, who is grace. I devote this life to you,’ I sing as Ashava slips through the greater daemon’s guard and leaps to meet it, despite her injuries and her armour’s weight. Her chainsword cuts deep along the creature’s flank, scattering ashes. It clacks its beak and catches hold of her in a clawed hand before slamming her down against the dais. My heart breaks as her bones do. As Ashava falls still, not to rise again, Adelynn roars, all rage. Her power sword blazes as she strikes at the greater daemon, scattering blood that is black like tar.
I keep singing. Keep firing my bolter, the holy shells tearing daemonflesh. Gytha does the same beside me. Smoke rolls out from the creature like a tide. The smell of it is choking. My lungs feel as though they are trying to collapse and my bolter clicks empty a second and final time as the greater daemon turns on Gytha. Magick roils from the staff it carries and washes over her. The Simulacrum Imperialis is obliterated, turned to slag and molten bone. Gytha’s armour boils, too. She screams in pain as it runs and melts and reshapes itself.
As it changes, and her flesh changes with it.
Dread halts the song in my throat as the infernal magicks turn Gytha’s hands to claws. As her spine breaks and resets itself and her jaws open wider and wider until there is nothing left of her save for her screaming. Gytha lets the standard fall and turns to look at me with multi-faceted, hungry eyes. She lunges towards me and my limbs and mind and heart freeze. I freeze. The maw that’s left of her face opens wide. Wider. Then it tears apart with a boom and a burst of ashes that scatter over me like an anointing rite. The creature that was once Gytha crashes to the ground, and I see Adelynn, her bolter held tightly in her fist, the barrel trailing smoke.
‘Sing, Evangeline,’ Adelynn says, a tear tracking through the blood and dirt on her face. ‘Do not stop.’
I take a breath that tastes of blood and of death. Of the ashes that are all that remains of my Sister. A tear traces down my face, too. A mirror of Adelynn’s.
‘O God-Emperor, who is valour,’ I sing. ‘I devote this life to you.’
Adelynn nods, and turns away from me, levelling her sword at the devil on the dais. The creature raises its hooked, barbed sword in answer. It looms over her, sloughing crystalline feathers and molten silver. Laughing through its jagged beak. I stagger towards Adelynn on fractured legs, but I am too slow. The greater daemon’s sword comes down with a scream, and there is a flare of blinding, blue light.
‘No,’ I say, through the blood in my mouth.
But when the light fades and my vision clears, Adelynn is still standing. Her power sword is broken in her hands.
She turned the blow aside.
‘Adelynn!’
I shout her name over the clamour of the Last of Days, and my Sister Superior looks at me. Her emerald eyes are clear even now.
‘Stand,’ I somehow hear her say. ‘Until you cannot.’
And then the greater daemon’s sword descends, and Adelynn falls. Her broken blade clatters to the ground.
‘No!’ I shout the word this time. ‘No!’
I stumble forwards, half blind with agony, and take up what remains of Adelynn’s sword, before turning to face down the greater daemon. Magicks course along its staff and warpfire blooms along my limbs, coursing over my skin. The remnants of the sword melt and flow away over my gauntlets, painting them silver and gold. That peculiar calm descends over me once more as I burn, awaiting the fall of the sword. I am ready to join my Sisters in death. I want it.
‘O God-Emperor, who is light,’ I murmur through blood and smoke and agony, as a golden light blooms on the Contemplation, filling my failing vision edge to edge. Thunderclaps resound, buffeting me, and I think that perhaps Isidora is right. That this is the God-Emperor returning from the heavens to claim my soul.
Despite the agony, I smile. I finish my song.
‘I devote this death to you,’ I sing, raising my hands in the shape of the aquila.