THE HISTORIAN: II
My hand keeps locking.
It doesn’t stop the words, but it slows them. Sometimes as I write, I have to manipulate the knuckles, massaging my metallic fingers to restore flexion. It’s apt, that the scratches and dents that mark my machine hand are scars from the very past I’m committing to parchment.
Vadhán has gone again. Back to war, back to face the Exilarchy. He fights as a Spear fights, without the opposing burden and blessing of humans at his side and in his helmet-vox, the way my master once fought. According to the stellar cartography, the enemy masses for an assault on Arikeus, one of the final bastions of resistance before Nemeton is laid bare. The Exilarchy, once grievously weakened by the blood we reaped from its mongrel flesh, now rises to eclipse everything in its path. Will I live to see Archenemy drop-ships plunge through Nemeton’s stormy sky, laying siege to the world I’ve come to love?
An eidetic recollection of events can still deceive. I’ve never forgotten anything that happened, but it’s only in writing it all down now that I remember the emotions of those bygone moments, the sensations that burned at the time. They whisper like echoes, half-mocking memories, and when I look at my hands I can almost feel the weight of the Engager in my grip again. Information I haven’t tracked for years returns to me, melancholically spectral. When I close my remaining eye, the ghosts of hololithic data-feeds scroll down in the blackness. When my quill no longer scratches across the papyrus, I hear the elemental beat of Amadeus’ heart in the silence between sentences.
The truth is that my knuckles have loosened enough to continue, and yet I find myself hesitating because of what comes next.
The Exilarchy.
Our great foe. The hordes of heretics and mutants serving those that call themselves the Pure. The face of the Archenemy in Elara’s Veil.
By the time we joined the war, the Adeptus Vaelarii had been fighting the Exilarchy for almost a century. When the Eye of Terror burst open and the Great Rift ripped the Imperium in half, that alone would have savaged humanity’s empire beyond repair and reconquest. But there was worse yet to come. Foes lurked in that seething wound. Enemies and monsters poured forth from that coruscating galactic scar. Less than a decade after losing contact with the Imperium, this new war came to Elara’s Veil.
The Rift isn’t constant. It ebbs and flows, going in and out like the tide, sometimes seeming to heal, freeing whole worlds from its vile embrace, at other times reaching out far enough to threaten stars previously immune to its foul touch. In those earliest years, it disgorged a host that swept across Elara’s Veil, burning and destroying.
Yet what began as a flood soon broke, individual armies settling on the worlds they’d taken, entrenching themselves not simply as raiders, but conquerors. They didn’t just want blood and souls as sacrifices to their impossible gods. They wanted territory. They wanted the entire subsector, and they would claim it through fire and rage.
I learned all of this from the databanks of the Hex, after Brêac gave us permission to board. I was no stranger to war. I’d fought the Archenemy before, serving other masters on other deployments. But no dry recitations in the archives prepared me for the nature of the Exilarchy, or their brutal lords, the Pure.
The Hex encountered an Exilarchy force on the planet Kouris, two months after sailing from Nemeton.
Back then, we were hunting them.
On Kouris, I first heard the words that would reshape my future. The first time I heard the tribal cry of the Emperor’s Spears, dread-laced, drenched with guttural threat, in a tongue that owed as much to hatred as it did to its Gothic roots.
I don’t need to write this chronicle to recapture the feeling of hearing that chant. The tremors I felt, the fear, the savage joy. I hear it still, in the quiet moments of what remains of my life. I hear it in dreams better described as nightmares.
The warcry of the Emperor’s Spears, backed by the roar of golden lions.
Skovakarah uhl zarûn.