THE HISTORIAN: I
Vadhán asks me to write these words. He comes to this place of cold stone and candlelight, smelling of the blood he sheds in battle and the storms he sails through to come home. Each time I see him, his armour is always cracked and dented. His face shows fresh bruises, his flesh new scars.
And every time he asks if I’ve recorded what happened so long ago, when the war was still a war, when the Exilarchy was rising rather than standing over us in domination, when the Armada defended these stars.
When the Lions and the Spears held back the shadows of endless night.
Vadhán tells me they still hold, and I know it’s true for I have access to the auspices of stellar cartography. But so many of the stars on those maps seethe red with the Exilarchy’s jagged runes, and so few glimmer with the blue of the Adeptus Vaelarii. The Imperium endures here, but will it ever regain the ground it has lost? How many worlds now burn behind enemy lines, crying out for liberation that will never come?
‘You are old,’ Vadhán says, and though the words are coldly true, his tone is kind. ‘Old, and only human. You stand at death’s edge and it taints everything you see.’
And perhaps this is so. Perhaps mortality darkens my thoughts the same way that it dims my eyes and slows my hands. Time steals everything from us in the end.
I don’t need to write the words he asks for, though. I tell him that it’s all in the archives. Amadeus, my former master. Kartash. Tyberia. Brêac, the smiling god of war. Ekene, the golden lion. Serivahn, the cripple. Morcant, the murderous. Faelan, the ravaged. Ducarius, the dutiful.
The Immortals. The arrival of In Devout Abjuration. The Storm Tide. The Ashes of Elysium. The final flight of the Hex. It’s all there, in picter footage and mission reports.
‘I don’t want pict-captures and mission data,’ he says.
So he wants a saga? Aye, he wants a tale for the feasting halls and fireside storytellers. It’s my turn to mock him: does he want to be a hero? Is he seeking a legend where he shines above his brethren?
Once, he would have taken offence at my tone. Now the rains of Nemeton have seeped into his blood, and he returns a smile.
‘Just the truth,’ he says. ‘Nothing more, nothing less. And it’s not for me. It’s a chronicle for the archives.’
I tell him that I’m neither a bard nor a poet, a fact he should be well aware of after all we’ve been through, but he answers with another cold truth.
‘You’re the only one left, Anuradha. It has to be you.’
We both know these are likely to be the last words I ever commit to parchment. My human hand is a claw now, too snarled with the rumatiz to hold a stylus. My bionic hand, slowed by time and wearing down at the knuckle joints, will have to suffice. It used to purr smoothly with each movement. Now it clicks and ticks as I hold this quill.
The story Vadhán asks me to tell is a tangled one. It crosses paths with the valiant Lions of Elysium and the soulless Exilarchy. It stirs the ashes of history, rekindling memories of the lost Scorpions of Khamun-Sen and the treachery of the twin princes Kaeliserai and Nar Kezar. It is a story of war, of brotherhood, of victory and loss.
I don’t know if there are any lessons to be learned within these pages. I don’t know if that even matters. And I warn anyone reading this chronicle that if my master seems cold to you, even by the inhuman standards of the Adeptus Astartes, it is because he was. He was born to the Mentors Chapter, a fraternity that demands exacting perfection of its sons.
These were the last days of his life, before Nemeton and the Death of Lions and the breaking of oaths. Before he became what he was at the end. Before he was as I want to remember him.
This, then, is the tale of Amadeus Kaias Incarius and the Spears of the Emperor. It is a tale that has yet to end, but began many years ago, in the reign of the sword-king Arucatas, as a warship set sail for the Elara’s Veil nebula and into the Great Rift.